AND AT MOST I STAYED ALONE

162. AND AT MOST I STAYED ALONE (nyc 1968):

My big yawp of a mouth could have led me in either direction - towards trouble or silence - and that choice was really not very difficult considering the fact that I felt myself greatly humbled by knowing nothing - as I realized quite quickly upon arrival - so I spent my time pretty much in silence and a silence which was always OK with me : I really missed nothing and found that getting involved verbally was most often just too much trouble anyway but there's a certain line of life which bisects awareness with silence and that line is different from the one that interacts with noise - just look around yourself sometime - whatever you see going on is usually a cacophony of bad voices and guttural grunts and any 'conversation' which takes place has to cede from itself right away any depth or reason that comes with thought and there are anyway a hundred chances for things to occur but really only one or two absolute alternatives of that which will really occur - the key is finding those few and throwing out all the rest - which cannot be done by the normal drivel of inattention which conversation brings and I had to face it I was NOT really ever happy (and you need to be happy to talk with others) and I was NOT ever really 'sociable' either (and you have to be sociable to get along or to care) so because of that BOTH of those things were already gone from me and I didn't mind nor miss them (I remembered too that I'd once read that 'if there is no God then anything is possible' and such a statement was to me more engaging than any stupid banter with an ulterior and/or lesser soul would have been and I liked to just think about things and that called for silence - I often wondered too whether the next step to that statement was to turn it over and say (or realize) that 'if God does exist then nothing is possible' for that was the sort of boxed dead-end canyon most people sought for anyway and they just filled their idle time with chatter hoping that there was NOTHING possible for them to do anyway) - THOSE then were my merits and so much COULD have been done that the really paltry amount of which actually DID get done saddened me if I really thought about it at all but I was hamstrung in my way by ignorance poverty and circumstance too - I was new upon the scene pretty much unschooled very young and poor without resources - ALL I had was imagination and image and the 'idea' of myself which I had to constantly push forward and actualize into some better realization of itself at bay in the world : I learned to live with crumbs and subsist on the minimal but no one else around me did and all I saw were people having lunch or eating or going and because of that I was locked out of much - I followed no thing or no creed but examined them plentifully (and there was a time too when the only 'ism' I was after was 'jism') and I'd say quickly 'you have beautiful lips' just before I'd kiss them running or I'd awake in the same frenzied daze I went to sleep in - my personal quandary had no open solution.