NOTHING STOOD STILL IN THIS KINGDOM

178. NOTHING STOOD STILL IN THIS KINGDOM (nyc, 1967):

It's always been too much for me to catch up with everything and because of that there are a lot of things which just accumulated and stayed there - half the time I wasn't sure so much as what I 'had' as what it was I remembered 'doing' - meaning the act and not the result intended or not was what stayed memorable - and that was pretty much the way it went and by which I learned things : the Collier Brothers in their way had nothing on me (they were two brothers who died in their apartment in Brooklyn or somewhere amidst an accumulated assault of bundled and piled newspapers magazines clippings books and everything else too - so I knew what that was about for sure) and I accumulated just as much although it was not often tangible 'stuff' as to be identifiable by description but that of course made it more mine and more singular by far and as it was I kept myself bounded by both the streets and their luck each in their own way : talking with Chinese people down along Baxter and Mott and Oliver and Cherry I was able to learn to fend in a unique way - eat on the cheap as needed get tea and oranges and learn where to find them and just as much visit the old dairy bars around Rutgers Square and Grand Street where an all-night vigil was never interfered with : endless and fascinating the leftover Hebrew scholars and philosophers and all-night eccentrics or the maniac madmen huddled over a cup of tea or coffee next to the Jewish Daily Forward building or Yarmolinsky's Bank where people would read Hegel Kant or Nietzsche all night and try to make some liquid sense of enlightenment's own tenets and existentialism's rebels - both fools sometimes akin to nothing but endlessly fascinating the hunt - and of course the Seward Branch library (a once-magnificent building that was and curiously American-styled too) or I would pace down to the river and its odd corners and currents as they wended along the old eastern streets - tug and barge traffic small boats and police craft wagons and fish and schooners and the slow and steady lap-lapping of the saddening river's flow as it crossed over and under a mostly-everything silence bounded both by mystery and all that was possible too and I KNEW THAT but my task was to learn the difference and I knew nerves wouldn't do it nor taunting or bombast nor the bravery of the stupid or the silence of the wise - yet somewhere between those two poles I sensed would be me and kept there finely-hewn by all I knew and whatever I'd decided : the memory of time was racing ahead of time itself and I gripped mightily that downing tree and greening park or ANYWHERE my feet could take me until I realized one day sensibly that I covered the actual length and breadth of that city numerous times knowing every nook and cranny as I paced and before me then it all changed again (for nothing stood still in this kingdom) and I'd have to learn new parts again or just let it go and I'd swear too that on some streets to be sure the elevated railroad - though by then some years gone - still cast its shadows upon the street and still buzzed around within people's heads and I'd think 'why did castles have moats?' and I'd answer that back to myself in the same way as if to say 'they did so to keep pillage away and conquest and mayhem and they ringed themselves with water for security on at least 3 sides with hopefully a rock wall of an elevated height behind to build into' and I'd match that with the little island kingdom itself I inhabited and question again 'was it what was kept out or what was kept in that was more important?'