FROM PARADISE'S OWN BLASTED HOLE

229. FROM PARADISE'S OWN BLASTED HOLE:

I was a bomb-thrower for a week : someone intermittently setting off flashes and fires which burned quickly but then one minute I just got up and said to myself 'that's it it's over screw him may he drop dead in his tracks if he ever says my name again' and that was it for the telling of the Aleck story that was it at the stupid doctor's place and his stupid couch and that was also it for the enforced enrollment I'd been given for 'psychological counseling' by the draft authorities who'd chased me down : and all those years back now seem meaningless and unaffected of anything : isn't it like when you want to say 'do you have any belief systems at all? are there things you really believe in? do you have any contradictions you want to talk about? are things as sure as you're saying they are?' - anyway that's the sort of notion which went through my mind as I lingered (perhaps too long) at the waterfront on the old side of the harbor - across actually from the New York City waterfront - all of which you can see clearly and strikingly from the piers along the old Black Tom coast from what is I guess Jersey City - but no matter I was was standing there with just a few people about watching the boats glide by what few there were and the occasional yacht and Circle Line boat plod along the water - I was thinking of Robert Fulton and all that mess too - steam power Whitman the Erie Canal and the slave boats too (this all was once the sight of the Morris Canal which was used to navigate the small craft used to pick up runaway slaves on their ways north - but all that was long ago and now everything was different : Jersey City's crazy-junk Financial District has patterned itself on the Wall Street district right across the water (I could touch it I felt and knew) and after all it really was 'right there' and the gaping nothingness where once the Twin Towers stood was yet quite visible as well as all the construction and swarming of the people laboring to rebuild (something whatever whenever - a vast philosophical void left by the cratered destruction and filled now with vague and lost/homeless nothings of everything BUT any substance of philosophy) and I missed it all - missed those stupid old towers with their canyon'd stupidities and awful notions of height and linearity and steel and bulk - the swarthy streets around which were littered at one time with the newspapers and coffee stalls of a million commuters and the fabricated necessities of everyday living - business and clothing and the patterns of banter and booze and noise - now but rubble and memory everywhere and the lingering shadows of the 'destruction' though gone in reality had never left in essence : a strange differential bearing upon itself the weltering marks of punishment and guile and retreat and salvation EVERYTHING all mixed up as one : and people it seemed lived with that - boats glided by as I said and onlookers gawked - eyes and faces staring out wondering about something looking at the harbor watching the waters and trying trying to imagine to think to recreate to reconstruct some essential and now lost material of life as it was - of course as it never could be too - but the memory of Mankind stays for too long at the fair and the beliefs and contradictions and wonderings I was thinking about I wanted to mention to anyone around me : stop the parade and ask say something aloud find someone willing to talk - but I was sullen and lone and lost and did nothing - and I knew that around me were people of no substance and with no real mind to speak of these matters the commingled glue of the doing and the getting of their times and lives alone but nothing of that mattered for I was living internally - some better sort of bath which produced the things of another world one with the depth and presences of the very sea before me and like some Ishmael facing Ahab of old I adduced from those twin sensations the third one of acceptance and knew that to go on meant just to go on - to be deliberate with proper speed and all due respect for the things of the world but no more and to rule possessed as a man with many things would rule his kingdom possessed of rightness and candor and care and the privileged matter of the mind at hand - the vast ancient world of spirit and philosophy stretched before me in each direction the past being that as it became anew a future sublime and resting upon a properly maintained present : a summit of leisure and thought and wisdom and knowledge - finding the ancient mariners of the hearts and the minds of all Mankind as the myriad days of old would reconsider and re-group before me : I watched the far waters just as I watched the people from my Melville soul seeking the source from the bleak November of my own soul to the upended hands and the pleas and supplications of fifteens of millions of others - I knew these land and waters to be both old and ancient AND new and bold - either way I was their 'catch' of the moment and - stepping from some entirely other place as I did - I understood only some of all what before me transpired but sought to uplift the many by my mere presence : writing a scripture coming forth from even Paradise's own blasted hole.