A NEW INTRODUCTION TO A MAGNIFICENT AMBIGUITY

177. A NEW INTRODUCTION TO A MAGNIFICENT AMBIGUITY (nyc, 1967):

As if a fiery broth or a seething conflagration was about to tip over into something really horrid the city turned and began falling apart upon itself and its people became maddened and seemed incautious and furious about what was all around them : yet they walked on and made it matter not - the taller towers grew and the workers panicked the higher buildings surpassed and the inhabitants shrugged neighborhoods were broken by cranes and demolition and blasting and only the stalwarts fought and a hundred Jane Jacobs seemed everywhere loud and vocal and right and rude : something like Moses this time Robert was parting the waters with a staff made of greed and would have too until he was stopped in his own way and brought out by death and the truants he raised stayed on as Mohawks climbing bridges wild Indians climbing steel and driving back home for weekends at breakneck speed alcohol-livered and ready to explode they built the bridges and erected girders and steel and buildings and all that together pushed ever higher and made more brittle the swaggering city WHICH from my own perspective never changed from anything but what I saw at ground level - the gray and the brown the colors of dirt and steel and frenzy and grime traffic and crowd - all things I loved and stayed within and amidst as this maelstrom raged - nightly news reports soldiers dead issues fudged people shouting marchers maddened and all of this for nothing went I stayed at Eighth Street and I stayed at Eleventh Street and knew them both to be places of a pliant refuge and a secret rest a hideout within my physical world and my inner self too - as if both I'd made from scratch by dreaming - and there was nothing to stop me (I felt) from becoming that which I wanted to be and it was down along lower Broadway then that I'd make my way on those frenzied busy industrial days when the dark smokey mist hung low in the air and traffic crawled greased and steady through busy clogged streets with deliverymen on every curb and cars piled next to cars each awaiting something and the steady arrivals way downtown of massive beams on flatbed trucks and piles of rubble sky high as streets were cut and broken and just moved away as lines of Turks and Armenians gaped back as their small community was taken from them with no place left to go : the highly-vaunted industrial might once more of state and country had stepped in with its hungry maw taking everything in its path and no one could respond and there was no place to respond to and the dawns of many a morning then dawned on nothing but grief and all its noise : I turned away from the rubble aghast at what I'd seen and speechless too for this once had BEEN a place and a section a folk and a people and these once-favored myths of tribe and connection - in the end - I saw all meant nothing and were but story-lines grafted onto intentions so as to make things seem right and I learned that in this life things never were right and were infused with the lies of state and nation and the hideous romp of money and might lucre and greed force and its industry was allied with and backed by an insatiable government which from every level waged unseen wars on its people and this invisible class warfare went on all the time and consumed the world and any learning or sense given out was utilized first to attract and then to entrap the unknowing and the naive - the local schools and colleges hereabouts were filled with them - dupes who accepted all they were given - soldiers salesmen agents and scribes - making some Father's house a den of thieves - over and over again in a world and a place festooned with lies.