SOME DIE OF HEARTBREAK

203. SOME DIE OF HEARTBREAK:

"Many people die from uninspiring locations and like some Sambo with a flexo-knee they are always crouched down in obeisance to something or someone else : moviemakers are always taught to work on capturing the sheer flux of life the interactions of many motions large and small as they go into the makeup of a situation - you've got the overlapping attentions to small detail the conversations the words and thoughts the inner thinkings of the people involved (which oddly in movies can only really be shown facially or by scene and object angle and light) and the craft of moviemaking is somehow to put all of these together to both advance a plot and move the action while 'developing' a sense of continuation and progress towards the overlap of all these things coming together as an eventual resolution (always foreshadowed perhaps BY something unusual but leading : as when in Macbeth Shakespeare has Banquo ask Macbeth - of whom the witches have just spoken as 'King-to-be' which has stopped Macbeth in his tracks and he recoils at the thought of his future [which too is thus foreshadowed craftily] 'Good Sir why do you start and seem to fear things that do sound so fair?' by which words then the reader or viewer is enticed in for the remainder of the plot so as to see what it is which is to occur by this odd foreshadow) : Belle the Busker said "in Tarangire National Park I broke off a spike of yucca plant and drizzled the sticky iodine-colored sap onto my rash (which I called my 'leprosy')" : In Princeton one morning the police car pulled up to the Dillon Gym and by the doorway two policemen got out and while adjusting their caps they both entered the lobby through the side doorway and went within : a old day's couplet would read 'it should come as no surprise to you/that Karl Shapiro was a Jew - and he once said of Ezra Pound 'his anti-Semitism vitiates his poetry too' BUT others said even worse things (of Pound) - 'he's so unbalanced he wouldn't even hang straight - he went from bad to to verse - he started out to be a bard and ended up barred' but I always loved the guy go figure : someone came and took the leavings from the garbage - old peels of potato broken heads of wilting lettuce some cast-off pieces of fruit and pastry and others things too and people noticed and began to wonder who was doing this and where it was going 'I hope they're at least eating it for themselves and not giving it to animals - you don't want cows eating cows or pigs eating pigs - slop like that tends to all get mixed together and mashed for cattle feed' and whoever said that I figured must have known what they were talking about - must have been a farm lad or had grown up on a farm or something because who else would know any of that and no one challenged what was said anyway because they knew no better : I'd actually grown up for a few years on a farm doing exactly that - transporting wagon loads of refectory leftovers to the pig yard where we'd simply slop it over the fence and into the feed troughs for the hungry and vital pigs we kept - I'm not sure where they ended up because we didn't ourselves slaughter (as far as I knew) but we did get a lot of pork so maybe they were taken to a meat man or butchered somewhere else - I never knew that nor cared - and there were some 250 of us boys in the age range of 11 to 17 on that farmstead but this stuff was never mentioned (we'd talk instead about infinity and if two lines perfectly straight would ever intersect on an infinite scale inclusive of cosmic curvature and stuff like that) : crazy table-talk for crazy growing boys - Mike Bartholomew Joe Vouglas Leo Benjamin and the rest and we'd have the fields of peppers and string beans rented out to Campbell Soup Company and Campbell would send flatbed trucks crowded with black migrant seasonal workers who'd come to pick the crops and followed the harvest time north and on each truck there'd be maybe fifteen migrants and a large amount of straw baskets which they'd walk through the rows and fill them up PIECE BY PIECE with whichever crop they were picking - I don't know how they were paid or anything but they never hurried and always seemed distant and caught up in their work and ways : odd strummings of small guitars and people singing and hymns and talk and such but they always worked and never lingered and any evening each day they'd be gone again as all the trucks would drive away for another day and return the next with another batch - same people or not I really never noticed much and whatever it was back then it was small small world or me 1961 thru 1966 maybe (hard for me to remember that too) but I'd never leave that memory behind."