THERE WAS A MADMAN IN THAT TOWEL

188. THERE WAS A MADMAN IN THAT TOWEL (Princeton Cemetery, 2007):

This much is true and has always been true - even before it occurred - inasmuch as everything exists for itself first in that half-world of possibility and expectation before it becomes manifest on this Earth (to us) which we know as perception or perceiving ( I always connected that idea to the title phrase of Delmore Schwartz - 'In Dreams Begin Responsibilities') and whatever the merits of any situation NO MATTER there it is ! - I was standing at the grave of Aaron Burr looking down and just wondering to myself how it had come to this and I saw that someone had placed flowers and a newly-minted floral wreath atop the site hung with a ribbon and a declaration too - something about the 'merits and memory of' and signed by the Aaron Burr Society and it startled me to see the distance of time take its place within the present as if none of it bore any differentiation and with that I began musing about the merits and values of carrying over whichever momentary fights men involved themselves with and it seemed from that moment that the eternal validity of anything was nothing more than the 'eternal validity of the soul in space and time' which made sense to me and mattered as much and as I looked down I realized in the early morning light that I wished to squander nothing and lose nothing from this moment on but it already had been lost PERHAPS and that I'd never know : I looked up at the song sparrow fleeting by and watched the tempestuous approach of new weather and darkening sky and right above my head the night was changing to morning as the Sun rose to my left along the east and I looked out and saw nothing but more gravestones all arrayed just like this and each with their own infusion of merit and place and time Grover Cleveland Kurt Godel Sylvia Beach Jonathan Edwards John O'Hara and the funny funny man too whose gravestone read 'See - I told you I was sick' and I figured that whatever intensity there was to any of this the levity had to work just as well and Paul Tulane was there too atop a twelve foot pedestal with his back turned to Princeton University in some form of ritual spite lost on me and one after the other in marble box sarcophagi were the old and elderly Presidents of Princeton University through the years the grand the pompous the obstinate and the obese and it all settled in in the self-same way NO ONE talked and NO ONE replied and silence wrote the ending to that book for sure and it was in Ecclesiastes (12:12) that I'd read 'of many many books there is no end' so that satisfied me and beneath that signaled sky I felt right - forget the past and all that once was for THIS is the now or at least IT once was - and no matter the whats and the hows of that which brought me here I KNEW just knew that for me this was the end and the final the place and the site of whatever more was to come (of that I was sure or WISHED to be sure) and I looked down again and realized that these EACH AND ALL had read from the Bible in the selfsame way - hard and stern serious and studied - and whatever message they took was with them now to wherever they'd taken it and William Blake as I realized it was who said (about differing people) 'both read the Bible day and night / but thou read'st black where I read white' but as such that was only a part of the powerful witnessing and the conundrum among us - to wit : WHAT is it we say it is when we say it is real and how is it we go about that which we undertake? : lamely there are no answers so I came up with none but I stayed put walking in that cemetery of light (I found no gloom) and the wrought iron fence around me was enough to keep me in as I thought and kept walking around : 'by day the heat consumed me' (Genesis 31:40) / 'forgive and you will be forgiven' (Luke 6:37) / 'fear God and keep his commandments - for this is the whole duty of man' (Ecclesiastes 12:13) / 'the end of all things is at hand' (1 Peter 4:7).

NOTHING MATTERED IN THE END

187 . 'NOTHING MATTERED IN THE END' - (nyc, 1969, Vietnam War):

The time I'm writing about here was the time of some short golden era of American predominance which in the 1960's was both beginning its glory-phase and at the same time winding it all down with a large crashing noise of despair and misdeed and it was the time of people like this Taylee fellow I mentioned previously hopping on jet planes to cross the Atlantic or visit France and such places on whims it was the time of BOAC American TWA Pan Am United Delta and Eastern Airlines - carriers which boasted of air-prowess and swift efficiency - when vacation travel and seeing the world became easy and was still cheap and guilt-free and without oil-crisis scares and terrorist echoes and all the rest and yet at the same time during these years there was a jagged and horrific scare of firepower and violence beneath everything America did - unusual war in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and Thailand too and the entire Southeast Asian subcontinent convulsed with death and anguish prodded by the sequestering and drafting of endless streams of American soldiers setting out to kill and be killed and it all eventually ended up into a crazy-insane-bizarre absurdist spectacle of madness and lies from the very top down from the hideous Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon spectacular of mad insanity to pot-smoking irreverent grunts in the rice paddies shooting at anything which moved : by the mid-1970's it had become pure madness with every utterance in reference being crazier and more absurd than the one before it to the point where IT COULD BE SAID and philosophers did say it 'there was no longer any Good nor any Bad - just insanity and spectacle on riot' and the streets were becoming slowly filled with anger (at least in NYC anyway) as most of the rest of the nation seemed able to simply IGNORE what was happening or even support it all without saying and without knowledge of what they were supporting and it became an idiot's-time of war movies and cheer-leading for war by such mighty fools as John Wayne and those sorts who just went on over and over pushing the nobility and valor and glory of the war they fronted for - planeloads of skittish Bob Hope entertainment types boorishly singing for troops giving scantily-clad burlesque shows of lascivious intent to sex-crazed and over-charged soldiers wheedling on the edge of death - cheering lustily and savagely applauding the sex-kitten Ann-Margarets of that world - it was TRULY insane maddening and offensively senseless on its face - but WAR was somehow given a cast of nobility and rightness and patriotic bullshit once more and it all just continued and then simply began to rot from the inside out SLOWLY at first and then more and more swiftly as it took hold and the nation itself fragmented and children went crazy in the streets : 'nonetheless I digress' (my very first rhyming couplet) : the seeming insipid and mind-numbing stupidities by which the 'War' was advanced were unending and always in control - even the rioting and screeching of hundreds of thousands past a point remained ineffectual and - face it - that 'war' didn't end nor wind down until the very moment that 'THEY' decided it should and the billions of dollars which were meant to be made on that war were made - contracts payoffs money laundering money transfers money being hid and vast amounts of taxation squandered (ABOUT ALL THAT there was NO mystery) - and at the same moment that things were getting most dismal the voices in consort were raised to pretend to a more solemn nobility about the 'cause' the war the fighting- men's generosity and spirit the high aspirations and the dedications to Freedom and Liberty : ALL absolute BULLSHIT HORSECRAP lies and mischaracterizations and no matter WHAT else is said one must never overlook the following -- a true war story is never moral it does not instruct nor encourage virtue nor suggest proper models of human behavior nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done - if a story seems moral do not believe it and if at the end of a war story you feel uplifted or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie and in the historical rhythm of that dynamic the great English war poetry of Isaac Rosenberg Siegfried Sassoon Wilfred Owen responded to the Great War by exposing their culture's delusory poetic idea of war as chivalric noble or glamorous (an American substream of this for the modern day has become to invent a surreal dark and comedic strain for the same outlooks - thus Joseph Heller's Catch-22 for example - which rectified the heroic tight-lipped efficiency and unreal upstanding know-how of WWII movies) and in either case some form of illogic and delusion was being pierced for the over-riding concern of both of these genres was to show the true assault of war for what it is and has always been - a grievous and age-old fusillade of sickness violence and twisted perversion in the service of the usual lies and false motivations of propaganda and falsities of rulers and kings of whichever sort and that's what I was thinking about as I painted the white walls too just thinking back over my own life in front of a great wall of human noise in the streets outside - some thousands with signs and bullhorns assembled outside from St. Mark's in the Bouwerie church yard all cobble-stoned and crumbly to Washington Square Park a the bottom of Fifth Avenue and the entire ensuing area of designated 'Free Space' between - thousands of placard-carrying yelling waving and bullhorn carrying activists at once refusing and rejecting any 1968 war machine effort then underway (huge growing violent and effective effort that it was) but to NO avail as Humphrey replaced Johnson to McCarthy to Kennedy and than (alas) back to Nixon and it went all over again and nothing changed and I watched and waited without a second thought nor a wondering of what to do and what it was about - Martin Luther King dead and then another Kennedy too - and nothing mattered in the end and we all went on our way.

MOMENTS WITHOUT PROPER NAMES

186. MOMENTS WITHOUT PROPER NAMES:

Leo Tolstoy was just here and he left without charging a dime or saying a word and it was almost as if he'd seen something spooky something which accelerated his departure and all I can think it was was Greta cutting carrots with her teeth but no matter because in her purple bathrobe she'd have scared most anyone anyway and just about at the same time I received a note from Carlyle saying I'd not be welcomed at his dramatic production but if I wanted to watch here's a free pass-for-one enclosed - and I figured that had to be worth at least twelve dollars but I declined the offer and went on my way or stayed my course (since I wasn't really going anywhere anyway) determined more than ever to be singular solitary and alone and united to nothing but me : and there were a few things people were talking about and stuff I overheard at the exact same time (befuddled as I was by trying to read philosophy between the lines and to learn the ways of all mankind) : be sure to put everything away and do not stay up past some pre-determined hour be neat with your possessions and quiet about your losses and gains both use only a sharpened pencil when you write out lists be sure the lightbulb you are using to read by is adequate for proper illumination and don't leave things behind you'd not want others to see - - and by God that was it and nothing more and then I muttered something to myself about how 'nice it is to arrive somewhere with nothing in hand and just walk out later on - again with nothing in hand' a seemingly perfectly innocuous statement but one fraught - as I saw it - with all truth and possibility too but moments of clarity are far too few and often only come to the uninitiated anyway.
-
'Prove you are alive - prove it!'
-
"That warehouse is not burning it's only painted that way to look as if it's burning because flames are the logo of the motorcycle master-builder hot-rodders who work in there - pretty good trick huh" and I thought to myself 'no not really and I never for a moment thought the place was burning - what sort of shithead would go around thinking a 'good' paintjob would confuse such an issue?' and I let it go figuring that's the exact sort of stupid talk that these neanderthals thrive on and their small coterie of rocket-scientists and race-car builders probably really do think it's cool as all get out - this paint-job - but for me it's a big nothing and there really are so many other things to dwell on : ('blurring the boundaries between food and sex - in 1921 Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle was accused of using a Coke bottle to rape a virgin - oddly named Virginia Rappe - and Fatty Arbuckle's 'manly equipment' it was said would not do his bidding so he searched the 'fridge for a tool and finally came up with a soda container and whether or not the charges were true the public was more than happy to see him as a perverted over-eater so much so that 'Fatso Funster' became 'Blubber-Thighed Anti-Christ' very quickly') but the more I reason this out I find that that story has so many holes in it as to be suspect - the 1920's idea of a 'fridge' is all wrong to me as they'd not really yet become accepted appliances and were actually referred to as iceboxes since actual ICE was put into them in blocks - only much later did the more automated and efficiently electrically-cooled 'refrigerator' become the 'fridge' from 'Frigidaire' a brand name and was this the first use of a 'Coke' bottle as a sexual 'tool' ? or was the shape of it so derived from its use already (any bottle with a thin and graduated neck perhaps) and was that particular folk-use part of the reason such a shape was developed for the popular beverage (which wasn't totally popular yet back then) and does any of this actually make sense ? could it have been true ? were there public testimonies and the like or perhaps has all this arisen as folk-tales often do as part of mere popular lore at the expense of someone or something - fat people in general or Fatty Arbuckle in particular - who as I recall reading was in those days of evolving talk-pictures and comedy sketches considered as extra-baggage and old talent leftover and necessary to be gotten out of the way - comedy or sex whichever worked better - and perhaps this instance of local entertainment politics was all the more than meets the eye even back in that day BUT such is sleight of hand such is the ribald rhythm of comedy and solace that we'll never really know.

THE OPPOSITE OF FATE

185. THE OPPOSITE OF FATE:

All I can say is don't go racing for conclusions before all the information is in - you'll be fooled like a fool and look like one too - and there's a supple movement within the mind which knows just what's about to come and come it does - one way or the other down up or over sideways or frontal silent or loud : step aside or it shall run you down : and in his book entitled Social Contract it was Rousseau who stated 'man is born free but everywhere he is in chains' and so is his language and all his deeds and words too for the reflection of one thing strong is in everything else and what is it that keeps MANKIND shouldered with the yoke of burden and responsibility THESE CHAINS so beforehand mentioned ? one is not fit to know but the soul sacred within the place would attest and know distinctly 'these chains are the heart and the heart of toil and sweat as we strain beyond compare in attempting to see all of that which we cannot see' - such a quandary within a paradox of time and material energy perhaps it is THAT which keeps men working - pouring the concrete for bridges and roadways building schools and enforcing their rules erecting to the sky the structured heights of room and office where others so glibly fit in and take their place nodding beneath the lights of some broken-spaced and artificial nonetheless GLOOM - "but this can't last can it? - it all must he dissolved away" (some guy said that falling forward from the roof nearby) and the tin-can collector man alongside me too had just uttered this exchange : "Mister whatever can ya' spare me some change?" and he said that with a nodding head to me of course unknown to him and I whipped out a twenty and put it at his nose and said "see what this is it's yours if you just tell me you believe in something" and he smiled like a slave right back to me and said "yes sir well right now I do believe in you quite well" and I gave him the note and said "be careful with this it might be your last" and he smiled and sauntered away and I figured why not what else should I tell him who wants to hear my fraggy story of woe? - no mother no father a life like a horse two trips 'round the world and a passel of learning of this and of that - why begrudge the man his simple pleasures and don't I know I've got the money to expend so IF I DO what of it now and then? (but a part of me wants to say right back 'then why not die while the living's good why just stay and waste it away?' but I shrug and find a stairway to hide in).

Anne Carter Pinkerton in her day

EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL TREATS

169. EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL TREATS (a word with Anne Carter Pinkerton):

"These are people who understand nothing and as I watch them I tremble myself at the thought of the future of time or the concept of making a future of time and place with these people for as they walk so they do and believe me they are stupid so stupid in fact that as I make my way through this new wilderness (which has unfolded and then flapped back over itself these many years now) I am aghast at the thought of being given over to their future - these people who are dependent on everything for everything who run the cities like crapshoots while things decay and fall who saunter with largesse through countryside vistas now of longing only for all that once was but is now lost who build twisted palaces in places they never should be who light candles to Virgin of Guadalupe and sing chancel songs to myth and who recognize nothing and demand the same and run with families of children all askew through open places now degraded and degraded places now open and it’s a long and sorrowful sight this trepidation of longing death destruction peace calm and quiet with every sidetrack towards something else taking us back to the formative nothing of our own young years and the land we walk on here YEAH though it is hard to believe every street and lane and alley and park space was once a wilderness for someone a place bereft of definition yet without time and direction and space and place AND ALL OF THIS was enforced upon it by mankind and mankind's gigantic unholy writ and microcosm of nothingness written in a singsong hand of stars and starlets and personages and forces unrecognizable and now like a swarm we have let the dead in we have allowed the sick and strange to walk all over we have given up our guard to the long-lost longing of the extra-terrestrial realities of all and every which was AND misunderstanding as such every thing and every concept they diverge badly from the life they should be leading but because of that too are all erroneous and false concepts perpetuated and formed into actualizations of images and thereby the physical limitations and structures we see around us constructed and maintained of course by Earth-bound sibling idiots over-weened with bad pride and convoluted treacheries which are then used one hundred and fifty percent for the effect of perpetuating all which is wrong and of course one of those things being the attributes of claim and possession and the warfare and debilitations that go with it for only in the closed and shuttered minds of someone already dead can death and destruction mean anything or divide any distinction between absolutes of false rightness and false wrongness BUT SO BE IT and if there was anything more to say I’d say it precisely (or even loosely) but language pales fails and falters here it’s dead as a doormouse or doorknob or whatever and rather than any of this I’d really rather flee and just re-enter the vast and benevolent Blakean macrocosm of the self-created world with all its own Gods and Goddesses and declamations and demons and rankings and apparitions for at least there I am in all rightness and am in control of my creative senses wild and beautiful as they may be for only with the use of that lens is the real focus brought to be and as Blake once said too ‘the road to excess leads to glory’ or maybe that was Robert E. Lee who knows I certainly don’t ! and by that encounter I want to close this book now tell me something about yourself" and with that I was startled again and stepped back to reassess or take a second look at something but then decided to myself that this was probably a woman who had money and I had none and she probably had the kind of tastes that run to reading architecture magazines and worrying over what fixtures are put in a bathroom and I cared nothing and again I had nothing but perhaps the once-contempt I could muster for someone such as her but no matter because listening as I was to her overview of things I decided I’d better throw her a crumb no matter what it was : "well you know between us to be honest I’ve reached the point where I feel really that I can without too much difficulty argue successfully both or either sides of any argument" and she said "called ‘cowardice’ yes go on" and I continued "so for me to continue listening to you gets tiresome because even though I do understand what you’re saying I do feel that I should have or have probably said it all first and then at the same time I figure that I could successfully refute anything you’re saying without too much of a material problem and even though maybe I like you you are too in many respects an enemy to me and if I haven’t got that much difficulty seeing you in that light then it’s pretty easy on a larger scale to see why people would have decided to go to war or fight and here we are walking through these grounds and I want to say I’m also probably pretty happy that endless waves of young guys got themselves battered and killed three hundred plus years ago for all this shit it’s a pretty nice deal and fairly cost-free too for me as I see it and yeah I understand what you’re saying – we have given over our land and space to a greatly-lessened stage of intellect but so what it gives US somehow a higher and more rarefied position from which to scoff at the bastards beneath us it FACILITATES DETACHMENT for the likes of us and I see that as a good thing – we need to do nothing except to stay outside the mess and we can go on with our personal callings and because of that I want to say maybe I don’t really care one whit about how many dead bones I’m walking over to get anywhere for as I see it that was their problem and they solved it all in the way they say fit - as pygmy minds are wont to do - so I allow myself a pretty rich life because of them" and she said "typical bastard point of view – not worrying an iota over whose dead corpse you’re crawling on order to get your way it’s called EXPLOITATION" and I turned and said "bullshit it is I haven’t exploited anything and I can barely stay here and listen to you mouth such cant for the matter at hand is having nothing to do with the base politics of what you’re saying (and then saying you don’t say) except for the endless quandary of your crap dialectic and my concerns are and always have been spiritual and literary and groundbreaking and otherworldly while it seems your skinny rich ass is somehow sunk in the morass of your own guilt and doubt but what is it you’re trying to prove anyway ? you apparently spend your days pouting while you spout an endless disarray of something to funked-out college kids who soon develop attitudes but what are you anyway?" and right then a really nice looking girl had stopped with a dog – some big hairy specimen – which she was allowing to frolic in wade and drink from the small part of the running brook nearby and as I watched I really was taken aback momentarily by her beauty as that she possessed right then (‘in golden sunlight yellow hair and the fairest of figures which ever stood there’) and being distracted I actually did not hear the start of the Pinkerton lady’s reply but caught on as I could "vouchsafe to listen but you won’t I am about the complete opposite of what you just said for I am trying to develop a race of super-beings in their thought and attainment and to do that I teach them that there are no limitations to what they wish to do or think of doing and it all comes together in some form of graded progress slowly along on the way to a newer form of paradise for them and for us" and so yeah yeah I figured all that and more was coming for it always seemed these ‘academic’ types or whatever they are always like to get all hazy and doctrinal with theory and stuff you’re supposed to not know anything about so that they can baffle you with it all and thereby win the day but however you see it I saw it as yet another bad habit and it reminded me of the guy I’d recently talked to when I noticed as he sat next to me that the watch on his wrist was about two and a half hours different from the time as I showed it and it was well enough within a margin of error that I thought perhaps my clock had died or whatever and so I asked him if his watch was showing the right time JUST LIKE THAT and he laughed back and said "no it’s broken the hands are wrong they don’t work but the digital is still good so I keep using it and just refer to that" and then I realized he had an embedded digital readout in the face too which kept correct time and the watch itself since it was a metal and fancy one and probably worth a few bucks to him and was seen as too valuable to give up on so he kept it and as I said that reminded me very much of her points of view or attitude in that unless you first understood her valuations and reasonings you’d not have a clue as to why or what she was saying about something which seemed so different from what you had expected to hear (much like an apparent difference in time) but regardless right then she jumped right back in "that reminds me too of what I was saying just before about how it was the British who always revered their lands and made these great strides towards preserving the magic realism of their lands and properties and in an old piece from the 1660’s there’s mention made of the necessary removal from England of the smoky workshops which so dotted and darkened London and that the environs of that city should be planted with ‘such shrubs as yield the most fragrant and odoriferous flowers to sweeten the stench’ and it was called I believe ‘Sylva’ by a John Evelyn I believe too and it then lovingly describes how to plant tend and harvest all sorts of tree – from the solid English oak to the Frenchified acacia with roots which ‘insinuate and run under the ground’ and he admired the fact that trees could ‘generate their like without violation of virginity’ and his ultimate purpose behind this amazingly enough was that these giant plantations of trees once propagated and matured were to be felled to provide the raw material for ships or a cleaner fuel for manufacturing than the sulphurous Newcastle coal which befouled the London air throughout the 17th century and as I look back on that as but one peculiar instance I am again struck at the amazing gentility of the English touch upon the lands wherein they live and I find all that like nothing here – where without a thought things are cut or dredged or leveled and who cares for it seems the one thing lacking in America for sure is the grace of place and presence which would give a form of holiness to the spaces where we live - this fine park notwithstanding - but back to what started all this WHO would defend this place really ? who would defend and fight to preserve right here this park or even this city – do you REALLY THINK that people would come forth and fight battlement to battlement and doorstep to doorstep in a combat to the finish to defend and save this city I DON’T THINK it would happen in that manner for one thing there’s far far too many different and low-grade mixes of people to even really care – and they don’t – about preserving or saving the place they live in as long as they remain sated and satisfied by whatever they’re GIVEN and that’s the problem too with all this gross anti-intellectualism which is so rampant for it teaches people merely to be stupid and moreso to develop their stupidity and be happy about it so you see there are simply NO treasures here which most people would feel inclined towards saving or fighting for or dying for and so that’s what I testify here to you if you understand that or see what I say."

168. FOR THE END OF TIME:

I heard this comment by one Jurgen Moltmann - an 80 year old theologian from Germany - who was addressing someone who had evidently just asked him something about the 'end of the world' or the coming 'rapture' or whatever (they were exiting a Christian seminar on these matters) : 'I dismiss the current anxieties about environmental apocalypse you see - one should not speak about the end of the world if what one means is the end of our culture - even after the dinosaurs were extinguished life on earth went on - if you are mankind-centered it's a catastrophe but if you are life-centered it is to be seen that as one life ends another life begins - so you see it really is not a question of the end of 'life' merely of this beleaguered plague of our human civilization do you understand that?' and I started thinking to myself too that this kind of end-of-the-world talk seems to always come from disadvantaged people - both socially and culturally - people who have nothing to lose really or very little and who seem somehow to think that that fact allows them to view the end-of-things somehow as a possible gain or reclamation to themselves of what they have missed the first time around - very confusing thought - but also that psychologically they merely use this approach as their means of envy or of getting back at those who already "have' or have achieved the station and presence and possession and place they may have always wanted but never achieved and it's rather strange that whole thing especially as how it all comes together usually in opposition to what these folk should be thinking or claim to be thinking - to wit grace and humility and love and outwardness - while actually what is all seething within them is spite and revenge and envy again : a very odd chain of events and a very oddly-rooted basis for what is cavalierly known to us as 'religious' tenets and Revelation be damned.

LOOK OUT DOG - SLOW DOWN TRAIN

181. LOOK OUT DOG -- SLOW DOWN TRAIN (nyc, 1967):

I asked her what color she painted with and she replied 'post-partum blue' and I laughed at that just for the sake of doing something and she looked again and said "I worked on saying that for a long time and really never had a reason for saying it before but just then it fit right in - actually it's cerulean blue and it comes from a tube and I've never had post-partum blues" to which I replied "it's all the same to me but a good joke nevertheless" and the canvas before her was spread with blue and rather indistinct but that was her aim anyway and it was supposed to convey one of those light and cosmic feelings about the airiness of the universe and the splendor of illumination and perfection and all that (she painted that way - always some low-grade message) and it really did nothing for me - the swirls and curlicues or even the color - but I said little about it because there'd have been no point for me to start expounding about line and form and distinct areas of design and the flow of the eye over shape and form because these were all things I'd picked up and developed for myself in my own art-education and development process and if it wasn't for someone else then that was OK by me but it always did seem that a lot of the newest people who came to painting or using brushes usually went in the same direction she'd followed - indistinct swirls and large fields of color without reference to shape or area and with no underlying direction of the movement of color they'd get lost in to the thrust or urge of segment or form : you end up with merely a blob : and then because of that they'd have to settle and compromise and with a resultant vague design of hue and stroke they'd come off giving it all some great new-age sort of title about inner urges or dreamy cosmic-mind connections and because of that it always turned out muddled and wide and without parameters and - again because of that - just totally random color-craft and not really 'art' at all but it was always enough to satisfy the vague aspersions they cast towards 'art' and all that by these people who would just as glibly have accepted Tarot card readings as 'philosophy' - that's as as simple as they kept things and they'd most certainly never spend any time studying the subject matter of what it as they were attempting to do : too much work that : so what I saw before me is essentially 'hobby' as a habit and not much more but I gamely proceeded on (her name was Lara Myers from Brewster) and said "why don't you do a few of them in varied hues and connect them all together - maybe four - as one larger painting so they could hang as one and then maybe take a broad line of some dark color and trail it somehow across all of them - tying them together visually with the stroke of that line and unifying the whole - that could maybe work you know" and she looked over and said "hmmm not a bad idea really but I'm not sure I want to go like that I was thinking more that the idea here of color was enough - a big burst like an enormous floral hue" and I said "yeah but I don't see that - it just looks like a swirl of same-color activity all over the canvas - maybe 'nice' but unnecessary" to which she replied "oh what's 'necessary' anyway and who'd care about that?" and I shrugged "yeah OK" - I'd gotten tired real quick of the routine and figuring I had to share studio space with her I probably should just keep quiet and just let it go and I'd been through this all before and it was never fun if it was made to be uncomfortable - like that other guy who was once here and who painted 'Vietnam Portraits' as a series - one after the other of people in field uniforms or khakis and clutching rifles and other firearms while looking off into some distance - even a few Vietnamese guerrillas were painted too and it was all pretty sinister but striking at the same time and it certainly stopped a person short and even the technique and the skill both were pretty good - facial shades and shadows and colors all worked nicely while overall everything always had a hue of some strange 'Army Green' behind it - it all came together very nicely and although I really saw it as valueless in terms of 'ART' and tradition and development and such it was done nicely and stayed around with some quality but then one weekend it was all gone as was the painter himself and I never knew to where he'd gone or what had happened - which is where Lara came in she was his replacement in this large half of the studio we'd been given to share and I immediately liked her enough to sense an interest and a perhaps kinship in things but I never took too well to her 'art' per se but nonetheless I kept out of it and decided just to like her for herself and leave it at that - she was bit tall but carried herself quite nicely with dark hair of medium length which hung casually to her shoulders and stayed nicely put her eyes were a decent brown and her face suggested depth and lightness at the same time with each expression in turn suggesting something else - as if two or more things were going on simultaneously at each moment and overall I found her quite pleasing and easy to be with until at some point the other precipice was reached : the point at which our ideas diverged - things like caution and precision (both of which I lacked) and finesse and style (things apparently important to her) so that although we never 'clashed' we always were of somewhat divergent ideas about what we each were doing - a gentle verbal patter became our form of sparing and talking but it was genial and manageable at the same time and since for the most part she was there a lot more than I was I let it go - I came and went a lot (as these tales convey) and whenever I was there I was usually diligent in working silently and artfully alone so that I eventually came to consign the space over to her singly - more or less - and we never really discussed my art or what I was doing and that was fine with me and the more I thought about it I often thought (based on what I witnessed there are the school) that girls were just different when it came to art - this sounds tired and stilted today - but it seemed they had and kept to a single-minded dedication to its prettiness and gracefulness and sensibility as if they were making decoration or something else and it kept them right there 'with' it and to it and nothing very much outside of it ever entered - no weird walks or collecting things or striking out in other directions of form or material - it always stayed calm and gentle or at least that was my feeling about it then - it all had to do with so much more than that and so many other things which only later evolved into the world we have today where much of this has been dis-proved by society or negated by reality and anyway the 'practice' of things is much different and greatly altered now.