I THOUGHT I HEARD SOME LAST WORDS - I THOUGHT I WAS MOVING OUT

202. 'I THOUGHT I HEARD SOME LAST WORDS - I THOUGHT I WAS MOVING OUT':

Poets in their youth begin in gladness Wordsworth said and as if on some cosmological couch where there's maybe much ado about something and a gender holocaust and all the laws of nature and Mozart's happy minerals too I found myself discovering new forms of constitution which became unconsciously unconvincing if studied too harshly - the curse of the unknown God (or the 'course of an unknown God' I forget which) magic flute or magic by the lake (forget that too) all and every of that kept me busy for days as I lived in an abstraction of mirth and desire and went about my ways with an unbending hostility to routine and schedules 'I will NOT live any other way!' I said to myself over and over and more : one day I was sitting down at the Battery wistfully looking out towards the broad harbor and the sea I knew was out there - watching varied craft come slowly rolling in tankers and cargo ships from places I'd not known before Dubai and Arabia Scotland and Liverpool strange ships with German names and oriental signs on their sides and things I did not know and I was reading Moby Dick too for perhaps the fourth time when I got to that small chapter again about the pipe the pipe scene or whatever name is used and thought to myself again how unconvincing that scene was for some reason it always rang false in my mind and I didn't know why nor why it was included but the small detail always jumped out at me when the pipe is thrown overboard and the writer gives details of the sound and the sizzle of the lit pipe hitting the water and I couldn't ever truly realize that as right - on some broad wild sea which even if calm was overwhelming and far below the deck of the mighty whaling ship why would one 'hear' the sizzle of the lit tobacco going out as it hit the water and it was as if in defiance of all logic Melville was perhaps trying to show the mighty attempt the futile flame-out of one meager man against the great fates of nature and the world some allegorical reference some anomaly of time and occurrence but I never knew and it wasn't me and looking out the waters before me I wanted more but could never get it I wanted to walk those waters and carry the seas and lift up the world and find my voice and find my words but instead from Enoch all I could say was : 'blessed is the judgment of righteousness and blessed are you oh Lord of majesty and righteousness who are Lord of eternity' and that was always enough for me and I never wanted for more - I thought of Dante and tried to figure his words : 'in the middle of the road of my life I recovered and found myself in a dark wood with the right road being lost and it's so hard to describe that wood so savage so dense and harsh and just thinking of it renews my fear' and the words somehow rang right so that (just as) every time I read Dante in old stilted translations in order to make them work for me I changed them to my own diction (which would have been his wont) and it all made an easy and even sense to me that way alone - and I knew I either had not yet reached that woods or had put it behind me way too early already and then I feared perhaps for that or for what was yet ahead of me for somehow I felt again that wood still out in front of me somewhere and not yet met but I went on and divulged nothing of what I felt unto others : 'if you write well God-damn you must have fun doing it and enjoy yourself writing it' that was an old pearl someone once told me and I went on from that often playfully adding things into my words (the unto's and the whilst's) and like Dante's grand opening of the Inferno mine too was all stage-set and bluster and a darkness of shined and polished wood and I knew there was music still playing somewhere and so as to be able to do something I decided I ALONE would sing my Passion Sayonara and move along my way - and just like long ago on the Tuscan plain the turbid ebb and flow of life and of an especial midlife misery ends up with nothing to say but 'life is to die' and we then leave it alone : 'I don't relish having to make plans to die - and I don't look forward to experiencing death either' I said that (unbelievably) to myself forty years later forty years past the point of this writing and it stunned me to have the recall and the essential monstrosity of time and all its continuance and cleavage by which to keep me going I'd done everything and I'd done nothing - T. S. Eliot put it best when he wrote 'we shall not cease from exploring and the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.' and I found that was it in a nutshell Amen.