EYES (nyc, 8th Street at Broadway, 1967)

199. EYES (nyc, 8th Street at Broadway, 1967):

...But all that was then and long ago and this is the now and no one ever talks to me or seeks me out so all of this life is an intense monkish study for me still to this day but tough as it sometimes is I get by and get by with my own thinking too and just as Andre Breton used to say that surrealism would someday abolish the barriers between sleeping and being awake I think I've at least achieved that for myself and if my life sometimes approaches a 'watercolor in tones of gray' it's always more than that too as it's been always about displacement and observation and Walter Benjamin-like discoveries of detail but I'd always harbored a need to delve deeper and deeper into everything and that over-the-top frenzy of excess was always my undoing too because I always went too far and never knew to stop and maybe something like that after time really does twist up your head and make you something else and IF that was the case and I say IF as a conditional than I was able nevertheless to get by and find my way : but anyway at this particular time the snow was piling up and I could see it from below as I peered from the low sidewalk window in my basement Studio School room and watched once more feet pass by as they each left their own little pigeon-like markings in the falling snow upon the whitened sidewalk - Eighth Street in all its glory back then somehow took hundreds of people to and fro somewhere and back each day - briefcases and boots scarves and hats everything all at once - and I noticed the cars which had slowed down to a crawl beeping and honking in a certain impatience as the new snow held them up a minute or so at the intersection : District 65 delivery trucks and union-labor warehouse workers in their ghostly garb and whited-out jackets and hats (I'd gone outside by this time to watch the real-world proceedings) and the girl came up to me just like that and said 'can you help me cross?' so I did and we walked slowly across the avenue past the little piles of scraped snow which already had been dumped and she said 'thank you' as I let go of her arm and replied 'no problem Ok again my pleasure' feeling stupid but complete and knowing I'd never see her again but feeling princely - she had on a magnificent long tweed coat in black and white squares and her hair was perfect and crested with new snow around a small hat of some sort and mostly but MOSTLY it was her eyes that did it that did me in and it's said when asked what drives people to people that some say face some say personality some say body some say hands and all that but I say 'eyes' point-of-fact and simply 'eyes' - corridors to something transferers to another place communicators of transcendance and understanding unifiers and that-which-draws-one-in and so it was here that we said single goodbyes and inconsequentially walked away from each other in the newly fallen snow.