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).