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.