THERE ARE NO SECRETS

198. THERE ARE NO SECRETS:

Don't let anyone tell you there are any secrets - there are none - and the winds blow in public ways wherever they wish to blow and the waters flow in their own way no matter the ways of man and the treetops bend and twist when they must and their branches in turn sway and crack and fall where they may while geese swoon and herons stand and the great floating hawks and vultures of the air make use of the very breeze we miss and the high air vaults the heavens in silence as we down below only surmise that which may be - there are NO secrets there nor in the words of mankind and the deeds of men : just the broken-air gloss of the finish of each act and the endless reprecussions of everything we do - the very warp and weft of people who come and go and are never seen again : citizens of graveyards ghost-stories of old men and their places in the hills - barns and sheds and cabins along the waterways now abandoned - and in every memory of every little boy or girl who ever passed the old ruins by : secret messages these never are and instead they are ever-present and everywhere but undeciphered and left to die.
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And I'm sitting on a train watching the land go by me with every hillock and rivulet passing in the light as the vague sun comes up over the horizon in oranges and yellows and reds and the entire scene is crushed by a certain vulnerability which seems to come from the heart and a sadness too which permeates the light and the awakening fields which seem forsaken and forlorn and ripped and neglected as the old industrial foundations now ruined and abandoned too are overgrown with broken weeds and choppy sumacs and twisty winter vines with wiry shrubs of a wild nature and all this while distant houses - set in a row - in whites and greens and yellows and reds can be seen in lines and formations where once these old woods had extended but now are gone : small waterways and sudden pockets of marsh and water in pools are all that are left and only then because they couldn't be drained so as to be built on and it's a sorry world to see so much gone so much removed and taken away like that but this same world runs by me at speed as the train I sit in whizzes over whatever once may have been and cuts through trees which once were and old paths and lanes too now gone and different overlays enact different scenes to the lands and places we pass : once here an armaments factory for WWI and over there an old automobile plant now long gone while to the right the landscape and garden sheds of some hardware emporium coat the land with limes and nitrogens in bags not yet broken apart as the train whistle howls for something and we approach another stop - where distant people wait and hunch with their bodies tribal and overwhelmed with everything they live - three men in suits and newspapers on their arms a woman carrying a basket and a girl pulling luggage and a bag while the conductor surveys his scene and waves his arms in the quiet morning light only now just awakening into some figment of real life - some imagined leap into an imagined reality we all seem so sure of as we walk and settle upon : this Earth - it is thought - knows us enough forever to continually invite us in and back and we fall for the invitation so willingly each time - to what should we owe the honor ? this rumination this new cycle of thought ?

RANDOM THOUGHTS OF MARTIN CALABRE (nyc, 1975)

197. THE RANDOM THOUGHTS OF ONE MARTIN CALABRE (nyc, 1975):

"And with a nose too big for Mona Lisa the girl alongside me was digging for something in her purse (that little word girls used for the trundle bag they carried) and it was filled with everything else but - lipstick paperback book spare slippers a small scissors a small prayerbook (the kind they hand out on streets) a flashlight a pair of leather gloves a mirror and a small notebook for names and numbers and as I watched her I remembered Mona Lisa herself - that sordid painting I'd looked at a hundred times decrying its tepid color and too-hasty countryside background in its strange greens and blues the too-big nose and all those dark umber features with what they call 'that enigmatic smile' but all she ever looked like to me was some overweight Italian complainer just young enough to be maybe attractive for an instant before she turned into another version of her fat Italian mother screeching and complaining about everything - but that's another matter - and I remembered as well another time when I overhead a big fat black girl say to her friend (they were both walking alongside each other on the sidewalk) what sounded exactly like 'riding the stubble into the warm' and then that black girl stopped in her tracks and suddenly looked skyward and began to sing aloud with the most beautiful and sustained soprano voice (a sustainable clear sound of warbling pitch) a simple hymn to Jesus as if she was in some baptist preacher's hollow of a chapel in some deep piney southern woods and it was amazing at that moment to see and hear it all transpire - quickly suddenly and in a way that transformed everything else in that small moment and then they both (the two girls) went on their way again down the sidewalk and towards wherever their paths were taking them (someone once said of such moments 'all plans are kaput' when something like that occurs) : my father was a racist if that means being concerned first by race - he'd always make that first initial judgment about a person by judging the race of that person and like people say 'it runs in the family' whether heartburn or heart disease or cancer or thrombosis of the fucking liver whatever it is and if it does then I guess maybe I'm a racist too because sadly I judge by the evidence at hand and if anyone wants to counter that then they anytime can - and I've found 'you can't eat in the fast lane' is as good a way as any to determine something about a person (it sure beats race) because if anyone can get the funny part of that statement then to me it shows a good discernment DISCERNMENT like an artist's grandeur or discernment as in 'you can't tell me how to be' or watch or think either...and all you have to do to succeed is throw caution to the winds and take a stand and be not afraid to say it consequences be damned and all it takes is a little fine bit of conversation and innuendo and even double entendre if you want it to make the line-up smart and powerful : I watched two men fighting one Tuesday afternoon and they were both tediously beating the crap out of one another bare-fisted and angry and it all was right outside on the sidewalk near old Coenties Slip and no matter the whatever of what issue brought them to blows (turns out it was a woman whose charms they'd both been enjoying) at that vicious moment they were both TOTALLY committed and ideologically pure in their intense motivation right then to make right the essence of their emotion and their force and subliminal to it all and an undercurrent beneath their actions was the proud sense of righteousness (or rightness) which comes forth from the committed whether its a political revolutionary or some redneck flagellant outpunching anyone anywhere these two fellows meant every extension of their strength and arms and their endlessly-seemingly-stupid fight had coated each of their faces and hands and knuckles with blood and probably taken out some teeth too by they went on oblivious to any of that - massive steeds of stupidity in an enforced fixation on small violence - and until a horse-mounted cop showed up and swaggered them both with his billy club while he simply waded on horseback right into them (the incredible aplomb of the horse just as amazing) it went on : frenzied attention to detail probably as they'd never before done : but what else is life and manner but commitment and attention to detail or to something made detailistic whether attitude or belief or value - each and all of those things do occasionally make a country but more often just timidly go about making and delineating the fractures of everyday life (in the most simple fashion in the smallest way in the most inconsequential moment of ever at all) EVER AT ALL and alongside that all else pales and the problems that come to be are simply that - small obstacles to be handled and the small crowd watching this display in turn bore witness through itself to the fixated anxiety with which most people live their own lives : caught up and bespoken by others and OTHERS who keep their attention which is sort of the key and the reason for entertainment games comedy and amusement in and of itself : windswept cinder-block plazas and chalked up rivers of glass with taped over fissures and cracked outposts of all living to oblivion together and overhead on that dismal roadway the simple traffic roars as it sweeps along its way cars honking horns wipers clapping at the dead-end light and the dedicated swish of car tires running through the rain and pigeons flock in swaying groups and swoop on each intention as the hospital courtyard is hollow and gray where the old squeaky gate sets squeaking away."

THE WALTER DEMICK STORY (nyc, 1968)

196. THE WALTER DEMICK STORY (nyc, 1968):

I used to think about things just crazy things as I walked these streets I used to find places to stay whenever I could if it was warm out and I'd not have to go back to any other place - many were the warm nights I spent on the piers or in alleys or little alcoves which could be found between buildings and there were untold numbers of curious unoccupied spots where no one ever bothered me - the crazy-quilt overlay and the very pastiche of what makes up all the buildings and streets of Manhattan (especially older Manhattan) never fit very well together and because of that left many odd places : corners and alleys (as I said) and small units where things didn't quite fit together correctly and I'd see how everything offered opportunity : the crazy-quilt of ancient bookstores which once lined the areas around old Stuyvesant Square and the avenues thereabouts - enormous dark places with century old bathrooms and sagging wooden shelves and supports and columns and with lamps and desks with the only people present being old proprietors who simply went about their business and (besides the occasional browser) nothing but eccentric drifters ideological 'searchers' and intense students of 'the book' and literature fiends of all sorts and it was TO BE SURE an amazing array of fringe characters and a Runyonesque panoply of old and dark New York and Manhattanites of the sort not since seen (at least publicly) and these are the sorts of people who eventually probably died off in their small studio apartments or rooms and hovels - the sort you read about when they're found by neighbors five days later because of the 'odd odor coming from Mr. Santaliage's room' when the landlord checks in on him - nothing ever public nothing ever in the light and yet LIKE ME they lived these lives quietly and obscurely but filled with a strange sense of riches hard to describe or locate - it was all other-worldly and distant in essence and really not much of this Earth at all for we lived in mental categories of our own devising with concepts and values completely unknown to others or at least seldom heard - these are the types too who'd regale you on a dime's notice with elaborate theories and strategies of life based on their eccentric knowledge of CONCEPTS more than things - if you could get them to talk - like some DeLillo reverie out of Great Jones Street itself (again) : 'a runaway contingent whose specialty is violence MINDLESS violence ! they talk about it all the time and when they're not talking about it they're doing it....they need money to keep going and their dope needs money and their search for whatever drives them into MINDLESSNESS needs it too - it's all expensive and at the expense of their soul and I wonder how they keep doing it and what keeps them going MINDLESS violence look at it it's all over these streets now ! it defines itself and mindless violence is the only true philosophical violence and they're scrupulous about avoiding any other philosophical implications political and otherwise and they have no program nor rationale beyond that beyond just the doing and the continuing of it all and in fact in some odd way it's how they maintain their privacy' and that was the sort of conversation you'd get from these people if you'd call that conversation at all instead of a crazed crusty monologue of conclusion and rant amidst words made for other uses but there they were and I'd find them always - the staggering men the men with fired eyes who sleepwalking merely pretended at life the wet men the crooked and the sloppy the ones with chin drool and whisker-spots they'd forgotten about the warts and carbuncles of mis-shapen faces the lean-to bodies favoring one side or the other as they walked the shots and the twisted legs of the lame the ones who lived in newspapers and pencils with bags of paper at their side the scribblers and those who sang the nearly blind the deaf men with hearing aids the size of transistor radios strapped to their chests and each of these men meant something they ALWAYS meant something but had never correctly articulated the WHAT of what it was they meant - and I hadn't yet even reached the Bowery (for this was 1967 remember and things were so greatly different that definitions in existence today had not yet been even developed) BUT I'D LISTEN and I'd hear from Fred Chess and Dr. Pepper and Eddie Montaldo and a guy who called himself merely Dunner and Turner Bakey and Ross Holroyd too 'look at post-card manufacturers they take a sleazy tourist trap lake and try to make it into the canoeing grounds of the gods but they do such a slick glossy job that you glance at the post-card and you know at once this is a shit-filled lake and all the tourists here are either war criminals or people who spit when they laugh - not that there isn't beauty in such places and that's just it the whole world is turning into Lafayette Street the most ugly-beautiful street in New York City and in a way it's nice to get what you expect as though places as though places could be passive like people - they just sprawl out with their cathedrals and deserts and such passivity is beautiful too and you take what they give you these days and if everything's getting ugly the only thing you can do is try to teach yourself it's beautiful' and it all went on EVERYWHERE it went in a reverie of sound and real thought and idea that I'd learned to love living with and I wanted to be nowhere else back then just there and nowhere else.
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One time one of these fellows a guy named Walter Demick told me he could explain consciousness and then he proceeded to try without stopping or missing a beat (too much pathos makes my hands go numb) by dismissing the abysmal intellectual standards by which an idea of consciousness conceptual thought and the self that no one can deny without raising questions about their sanity is in fact denied but he said that the only plausible explanation for the existence of these concepts is a 'Transcendent Mind' - the very concept of something higher that all these people would deny - and if it is brought up it is merely for them to say that it is never satisfactory how or why the existence of such a mind constitutes an explanation - which these people do not deny - and then Demick said that one of these 'new atheists' he'd heard driven to explain the origin of consciousness by just saying everything once was 'and then a miracle happened' - to which he laughed and scoffed and ridiculed - pointing out that 'if we are centers of consciousness and thought who are able to know and love intend and execute (which we are) and which these people do not deny - then it is inconceivable that such centers could emerge from something that is itself incapable of all these activities' and the 'world of living conscious thinking beings has to originate in a living Source a Mind that is itself creative and conscious.' - which was okay enough as a mirror-image explanation for a concept of a Superior and at the same time a Working God but one who - to my mind - had stopped working some time ago and that was what bothered me the most : this idea of a start/stop God who would seemingly of a long sudden abscond with his responsibilities and leave a sullen mess such as all this behind THAT is where I always got hung up.

MAN DOES NOT LIVE BY DREAD ALONE

195. MAN DOES NOT LIVE BY DREAD ALONE:

Ishmael Nothing you can call me : the ART of serenity befits me - ('amidst an outsize ego in a town of superegos' but I think they meant super egos (two words) as a (one word) superego means conscience which is somehow from the Latin combination of con (meaning 'with') and science (meaning 'knowledge') and if that goes together than most anything else does too) - furthermore they say 'sex between old people / ick' and if that's the case I hope they either never get old or never again have sex when they do...but that'll all be their problem thanks...I've got my hands full : - in 1939 Pepsi's 12-ounce bottle was twice the size of Coca-Cola's and was being marketed exclusively to Negros mostly the poor who clambered for the opportunity to get twice as much product for the same nickel and 'Pepsi survived the Depression by appealing to Negro consumers' and maybe that's true but it no longer matters and there are fifteen other sorts of people these days and we no longer have 'Negroes' and NO ONE resembles a poet as much as another poet which means (I think) that the competition among poets is fierce and fast and furious too and even Robert Frost had written about 'the exception I like to think I am to everything' : 'SEEK first in poetry concrete images of sound/ REALITY is the cold feeling on the end of the trout's nose from the stream that just runs away' and 'an artist delights in roughness for what he can do to it' (monarch of a desert land I could devote and dedicate forever to the truths we keep coming back and back to) - 'don't you know he's just bustin' your balls talking big and stupid like this as if he really KNEW all this shit and what it meant but actually he's a crafty little urchin trying out tricks and I know for a fact that he once went up to a woman on the street and started spouting Verlaine 'here are some fruits some flowers some leaves and some branches and here is my heart which beats only for you' at which point he unzipped his pants and presented her with an organ quite different than his heart...and she screamed and ran off and he was quickly arrested for indecent exposure - to which he said 'well I don't know - I always thought it was pretty decent' which didn't add to his reputation either' - but in Paris the truth is that Notre Dame stands on a place of Druidic sacrifices and pagan worship and long into the 16th century was the site of an orgiastic four-day saturnalia often ending in murder and group sex so so much for history and what we THINK we've seen - and as in Bellow Herzog says 'if I am out of my mind it's all right with me' and then goes on a five day flight from his disintegrating life and on a spree writing letters to everyone - newspapers friends relatives people in public life and at last to the dead to his own obscure dead and finally the famous dead : Randall Jarrell on Walt Whitman (which I oh so much want you to hear) - 'an author who is a world and a waste with here and there systems blazing at random out of the darkness as beautifully and astonishingly organized as the rings and satellites of Saturn and we cannot help seeing that there is something absurd about any judgment we make of its whole - for there is no 'point of view' at which we can stand to make the judgment and the moral categories that mean the most to us seem no more to apply to its whole than our spatial or temporal or causal categories seem to apply to its beginning or its end' and 'what the hell you talking about you gimcrackery piece of garbage?' (some guy said that to me at the train station while I watched the prisoners get walked by in chains - three prisoners all connected to each at the wrists and ankles by some weirdly expensive seeming length of chain and in addition some over-sized white wire ties at their wrists and the whole thing made me think of an automobile - with chains on the tires and wire ties holding clumps of wire like on some tired old rust-bucket just trying to run at a trickle down the street) and I turned back and said 'ain't saying nothing just thinking of things' and hoped that was that with nothing more to be said : but I sensed that the conditionality of the human situation would bring me nothing but shame pain and grief no matter what for in any direction as I looked there was nothing but annoyance - three paltry nuns the Sisters of This or That in procession and childlike passing and one with a small suitcase intending to board a train to somewhere trying to look angelic but their concerns could never be mine nor the innocent emphasis they made on goodness and prayer and all good intentions but I knew their worldview was as twisted and wicked and evil as any other and if they could not time-travel and only needed a train then I washed my hands of them too and the short round fat Pakistani woman whose skin was so dark as to the color of brown leather but in no way black she looked surly and soiled trying to sell candy newspapers cigarettes and trinkets and her insane newsstand was fitted out like some housetrailer of the mad leaning sideways with an elevated platform from which she dispensed her change and kept a wayward Paki eye on the shit-head Americans passing her by BUT IT WAS like that everywhere amidst the stench of commerce and pain as each day darkened and broke to night and re-opened again in caravan dawns where no birds would alight - travel and structure and food pain and hurt - collapsible men pissing before urinals like altars with mop-wielding acolytes passing around and the genuflecting ladies keeping their own doubled time before their holy mirrors too but no one could speak a sensible tongue for all language had been debased and nothing worthwhile was found to say and the whole dark human race was dwindled to its desperation seeking rain or wind or snow SOMETHING to enliven their days (and all I heard were odd cliches) : 'I am escaped with the skin of my teeth' /'in skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed' and most amazingly 'my decision to go by train today is confirmed by the crash they had last week which will make them more careful in the immediate future'...and then of course my own reply to all of that (somehow from Robert Frost again) : "I HAVE BEEN ONE ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT.
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'The winter evening settles down / with smell of steaks in passageways / six o'clock / the burnt-out ends of smoky days.'
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Anglefire was a crazed streetguy I knew through the years he walked the streets - almost savage and always ridiculous he was edging constantly towards a state of total insanity - mixed as a concoction through the use of alcohol bad food the occasional whatever and an anger which sometimes cropped up unexpectedly and weirdly too and he would reiterate it's 'Anglefire not Angelfire just remember that you asshole and throw something my way a'fore I steal your dreams and rip your daughters head off!' - undoubtedly a real way to gain sympathy money and comfort I always thought - and he was taken away so many times that it became ludicrous to think of them even trying but they kept it on and every little assorted stupid thing he did along the Bowery or MacDougal or 8th or wherever usually got him into some form of stupid problem and then released just as quickly because no one can understand a stupid homeless idiot and no one wishes to expend time or money trying and one day along Waverly Place some drunk kids turned on him after he started annoying them and they beat the living daylights out of him which is how I came upon him crumpled on the sidewalk and with his face bleeding from a few cuts but he was still cogent and I was able to get him up and he stared talking again "dem dem bastard kids I could kill 'em if I got 'em they ain't woirth the piddle they piss in and this is what I mean y'see why I can't go nowhere it's always something coming up like some frigged class warfare against the lonely single ones and I jes' want to be left alone but they won't so this is what you get now take me somewhere I gotta' shit and my stomach's killing me too" and with that he sort of just collapsed and became lifeless and propped up against me for the instant I could hold him up but that wasn't long and I let him down gently onto the cold sidewalk where he just stayed and I noticed his color and it wasn't good and I thought to myself Jesus Christ he looks like the Civil War a blue turning to gray and I kind of knew he was dead just then like it dawned on me I had to do something but luckily too other people had come out from their places and they were standing around watching and all I could do was say "somebody call somebody this man I think is dead" and a few minutes later there was a cop car and then an ambulance later after that and they'd already covered him when I got back from answering questions with the cops whose main concern was what I was doing there and why and who I was and all of that stuff and I said I really really didn't know much except what he'd muttered to me and then someone else piped up they'd seen the beating and the kids from their window (they pointed up nearby) and they said he was getting hit and kicked pretty hard for a minute or so by three guys who then ran off but that wasn't any help except to me when he said I wasn't around for that so the cops let it go and the ambulance took his body away and I later figured he'd been processed as dead homeless without anybody and probably taken out to Randall's Island or wherever they take the Potter's Field dead people who get buried by work crews from Rikers Island prison and that was it for me and him and it was a hard lesson to understand - some unmarked dead guy who you just occasionally run across but never get to know and the simple fact was even after he was dead I knew nothing absolutely nothing of him - not if he had effects or where he stayed or where anything might be NOTHING except the fact of his presence and now its lack and I wondered how many unmarked people like that just die in doorways or are taken to shelters and stuff to languish and die and they never speak of connections nor want anybody to know anything about them either and it's the best way they can see to live a life unseen and still never get happy but so what I guess it's always like that for everybody else too and maybe only the dead know the dead.
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['Death is the great leveller / There is a remedy for everything except death / young men may die but old men must die.']
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'Immolient amostacia cartana mesia' meaning (I was told) something like 'if I ever get your head I'm going to burn it in acid' was pretty much the feeling on the streets back then for the landed gentry and the rich and ruling classes (as they were called) and there was envy everywhere and the people who had nothing seemed filled with hatred for those who had something anything and everyone wanted place and attribute literally WANTED what others had but thought it to be theirs somehow by birthright - which of course it never is and never can be - but there's no solution for envy or bad taste either and the two of them together make for some powerful medicine : here I remembered a little rhyming thing I'd heard about the average life of the average man and started smiling to myself because it was still funny and still fitting so well 'first you get puking and mewling / then very pissed off with your schooling / then fucks and then fights / then judging chaps' rights / then sitting in slippers - then drooling' that was by Robert Conquest and it was like a new riddle of the Sphinx or something even though we didn't need it of course but when your head's filled with words most anything's liable to pop out and the storehouse of memory has many strange pillows stuffed into it and the rabbi says 'God isn't redundant' which I guess I can understand and they use it as a reason to read a text and then come up with a totally different interpretation of it - which was always somehow puzzling to me but much of it was based on the old magical rites of an old religion and these rabbi's of course were always trying to burnish their credentials for wisdom and religious knowledge and I guess that was OK too but sometimes it makes a person weary after a while - how much of all this stuff can a person take anyway ? and after a while every little bit of this was getting to be contentious and annoying to me the rabble in streets shouting for 'rights' the soldiers unhappy with the war they had to fight the parents and voters at home protesting in the streets the atrocity of their own war the daily body counts the foolish newscasters mouthing the lines they thought they really meant and everywhere it was the same the bewailings of stupid lost folk - without reference past any point except an immediate and dead culture right there at the ends of their noses and what were called 'limousine liberals' walking through poor neighborhoods to show their 'solidarity' (yeah that made me laugh) and the unfettered tongues of a hundred Jew leftists bellowing about this or that about a holocaust and an old dead war while their little NY ghettos were stripped of everything else INCLUDING them and like Wittgenstein said 'what is your aim in philosophy? - to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle' but I can never remember if that was a question or a statement as he said it.

RAZOR BURN IS HEATING MY FACE

194. RAZOR BURN IS HEATING MY FACE:

I can't absolve you of anything else than this reading so I'll just have to go on and just as surely I'm betting you'll stay with me through thick and thin kith and kin from the highlands to the mylands and everything in between : it's fun to run like this with a joyousness between words on a very unlevel field and some foreign guy (so let me tell you a story) with a huge cigar just today came up to me on the majestic rock bluffs above the Hudson River at Allison Overlook Park above Fort Lee and high atop the Hudson and he began telling me all about the eagle he'd seen a little while back just perched there staring out - as he said - "conserving energy because eagles you know don't waste any they don't lunge until it's absolutely time" and he said that as he watched the eagle it stayed in place for almost two hours on that pleasant overlook afternoon and only finally when ready or when something in the water far down below caught its eye did that eagle thrust itself off from that rocky perch and dive to the waters below "very keen eyesight you know and an absolute resolve about what they do" at which point I nodded and agreed and he said "none of this does anything good of course for getting me to light this cigar" (the matches kept being blown out by the updraft) and he walked away some distance to get behind an outcropping and the last I saw he was hunched over lighting that large cigar - he had an odd head somewhat balding yet with two very pronounced flattened and reddened spots on either side of the temple - as if somehow his head had been squeezed in a vice - very odd I thought and with an equally odd squat chin and small pointy teeth his dark fleshy face made for a striking six-foot resemblance in a way to some overlook monster of midnight dreaming perhaps or a terror from a nightmare to come - I couldn't tell - but nonetheless a very pleasant man perhaps Lebanese or something who said he "worked in Saddle River" but came up here nearly every weekend to take the air have a smoke and relax a while ('a veritable regular' thought I) and so it was that I met a fellow with something noticeable to say and who said it too - unrequested - and it awakened in me something of an idea of importance in a way about certain little things which normally go un-noticed or at least without comment : the swaying myriad of items we see each day and the things we notice and take note of or file away individually within us and walk around with in a sort of encyclopedic and personal reference-font by which we figure and put together the rest of our world and attitudes too and there's some exercise I remember from somewhere some game or something where people are given a glimpse of something for a moment or two and then are asked to relay back all the incidentals or details and attributes of it that they can recall - and the game is in seeing how many things are mentioned and how accurately too and yes it's sort of like that always but we miss so much too that what we miss is as much often un-remarked as what we see is taken in a very complacent fashion - as if nothing of it could really matter anyway - but it does and it's more than a game though the game itself like that is a good indication of our own awareness and the guilt maybe we feel is in just knowing that so much of what we live goes right by us missed or forgotten or without real purpose : we do not want a blow-up in place of course for we'd much rather it be somewhere else so we manage that movement of reality and of the 'things' of our lives to somewhere else some distance from us so that some outside realm of activity can be said to contain it all - we move about therefor stealthily in a sort of way creeping sneakily through our own lives and that's what most struck me by the conversation with this eagle fellow - we'd connected if only for those moments on terms that were somehow real and had a fixed structure in relation to the world we stood in - he mentioned DDT and its once-toxic effects on some fifty years of animal reproduction and the near extinction of what once was the ONE eagle left in New Jersey now well over thirty or forty-five eagles at least and neither of us in this long discussion APOLOGIZED for DDT - as if it had been our decision or cause to use it - but in our wider awareness of its place and what it had done we made a simple recognition of the fact of its fallacy and pernicious effect now seen to be receding and making its own natural recovery somehow outside of us in this world we inhabit : hard all this to say and put to words but I am hoping you as reader can make the leap to understanding : a commanding reach a generous agreement and a commingling of idea and thought and intellectual conclusions based on evidence : that is what went on between me and this other fellow under blue sky clear sky and with wide and much cleaner waters far below us years after the fact.