RESTING THE CASE

170. RESTING THE CASE:

If I’d ever had a dream like this before I figure I would have known it so I keep on walking and thinking about different things – odd things – things of no import things like ‘Catcher In the Rye’ stories and ideas about books and scenes and funny thoughts about living and the clumps of words which come up rise and pass as quickly and if they’re not recorded and built upon they’re just as quickly lost forever and DIGRESSIONS or as it’s said in Catcher ‘Digressions’ and that whole entire slim book is – it seems – a much simpler book about its own opposites as it claims to be about hating digressions but is actually one huge digression and it claims to be against movies but it’s in really a big reference to movies and the people and scenes which go with movies and it claims to abhor phoniness but it’s about one particular phony – in this case a kid phony – trying to be singular and wise and tough but who is in the end nothing more than a weakened sympathetic and comforting character who seeks the comfort and culture of a smothering home as much as he claims to abhor it and so that particular book is one big twist around its own subject matter but it seems – living on its own massive reputation of know-nothings who are continually forced to read it – to be something else and millions of stupid kids and teachers apparently adopt it yearly as their own particular ‘coming of age’ novel by which to rule and line-out their upcoming feeble lives (well whatever) and it’s written by a hideaway eccentric who seems to fear everything and lives alone away by himself afar in the noxious anti-city weeds of New Hampshire while living of the proceeds and fat of his famous urban book – so like they say in comedy school ‘go figure’ – but whatever I WENT ON and continued the ample reverie with Pinkerton and anyone else who happened along and it became quickly one of those days when you wind up talking to anybody willing to listen and you find yourself happily sitting about anywhere in a public space where you can find a seat and there are lots of other people doing their same things whether routine or not the people with lunches in bags eating mindlessly away and the others drinking water from bottles or smoking cigarettes or talking or exchanging notes and pictures with the person next to them and outside along the river the slow boats pass either filled with people looking for something or filled with something looking for people - any odd cargo of goods and material bound for port - but unlike the very old days there aren’t any of the rugged or drunk or nasty sailors and ship-hands staggering around momentarily on land looking for a squeeze or some brew or some action (for all that inconsequential stuff has passed long ago from our scene and what we live with now instead is a completely ordered and far more meager paradise of deportment and niceness) and spitting itself has become an offense so those who walk along do so in orderly fascination and children in tow are happy and the grandmother out for the day seems less bemused than burdened by the sunlight and the open air and all meanings have subsided into something else but a something else of which no one cares any longer no one even swaps an opinion because they’re all the same both the opinions and the people and we’ve reached a rigidized format of frame and reference wherein anything out of that frame is immediately de-recognized and left out and no longer identified and because of that all life has become bland and far sadder for no harmony no grace-note no lightness no happiness no funniness is all that’s left and if a man has no meaning does that then make him meaningless ? if he becomes immaterial to everything around him does he still exist ? if there remain no portions of him which are engaged in what’s around him is he still in existence or instead completely foreign and alienated and no longer part of his world ? and the passing bum singing to himself while all grizzled and sour is he no better or worse than that man in the suit reading to himself ? and so tired and by myself I did as a lawyer does – I rested my case.