BACKGROUND NOISE (nyc, 1968)

257. BACKGROUND NOISE (nyc, 1968):

Just as would someone painting the black night black be seen as insane so too was I at times adduced to be off-the-mark as it were commingled in the brain brought over from some other situation but none of that ever mattered to me and anything I did entailed no choice at all but instead just the doing - and reading 'Tradition and Individual Talent' for instance I read it not once not twice but ten times and each time more carefully than the times before and then some guy seeing me reading it starts telling me about how in his art-class in some San Francisco school that piece had been a mandatory read a part of the curriculum which could not be avoided and everyone hated it and T. S. Eliot because of it was considered anathema and but a brittle representative of old stodgy ways and old stuffed-shirt traditionalism that 'wasn't worth anything these days' because it was pompous elitist and completely conservative and rather than argue with the guy I high-tailed it once again to my basement sleeping room and read it with an even more dense satisfaction - read it to myself alone and over and aloud so as not to miss a point and although now as I look back I can see the guy's intention (it was after-all a broad and very busily active time of turmoil and dissent and experimentation and the rest - at a period when every yapper with a mouth seemed to have something to say) I still by contrast to him revere the points made and feel that I understand them reasonably well enough to make the points right back if I had to - but the rest of the people chattering weren't the sorts who'd take the extra minute needed to consider the 'finer' points of reading or writing - tough luck I always said - and that's why so many of the emoters and raging screamers just went on their way - all those people at the front of the room in the open-read and read-aloud story-time crap that was going around : ideology and venom mostly and not much else : but that was always their intention anyway so maybe they got it across and it succeeded but I was quickly overly tired of the girl-faces all twisted and grimacing about their misspent foul youth their 'fucking fathers' and their measly 'take this pussy you Uncle Sam!' tribute poetry towards the anti-war malice and spit which was everywhere - nothing worse I always thought than torrid loud irate poetry in which the writer/reader bemoans their own youth in vile terms of the finest sort they can find - but that sort of stuff still goes around so no matter about that and it was the enervating aspects of the Vietnam situation that had everyone all riled up but I always took no cover in and anyway that wasn't real art - word-art anyway - and the interesting facets of Eliot's perspective were all but overlooked by these idiots - tradition awareness of the body of all the past the acknowledgement of contribution being added to alter the body of what it was and based on an authentic voice and not just a 'wild' voice - an authentic voice based upon and within the living vehicle of all that which already was : just a great sense of promise and premise in a writing based upon a respect for the past in its uses of the past and the continuing need to learn and read and feed from that past to make the live-fabric of the new which would alter that past even as it included it and was included in turn by it - if done well and in a detached enough fashion to leave out of it the raw emotive power of shout - so much of what I was hearing - but I couldn't be bothered to tell that guy anything nor to try and change that guy's mind and I just let it go on and I watched his often alcohol-fueled 'intrusions in the enchanter's domain' - which is what I called all his work if it had to be called anything - no figment of imagination there all just reality alone and making it be : like glass on a fish-shop's window - allowing one to view the assembled fish in their dead-on-ice finery and select to choose but BY and because of the glass not really sense or smell the truth of what you were to purchase versus the assault and reality of Chinatown fish-mongers with the smells sights and sounds and often LIVE fish too still poking about right there in front of you - the difference was that real -'you pick the fish NOW we chop the head and clean for you you take home NOW!' - that was in a manner exactly the way it was.