MODICUMS OF PROP AND SCENERY

280. MODICUMS OF PROP AND SCENERY / adventures in the slave trade - (NYC, aug. '67):

‘If I had anything to offer I’d invite you in’ – I’d never heard such a lethargic comment before in my life especially as it was now coming from a person I’d known for about a year in various comings and goings - she was dressed in black yet again and carrying a bag filled with fruit – so you see none of it made any sense already : her boyfriend’s name was Lucas and together they’d been seen a few places or at least enough so as to cause some talk - he was some up and coming folksinger on a lousy circuit and she wanted desperately to act - working as she was in the here-and-there of distant off-Broadway small-scale productions which mostly just ended up being readings or dramatizations of things in either large and very dark rooms or in small and very cramped rooms with but the smallest modicum of prop and scenery – costume never mentioned – she went around like this in an off-handedly beggar-like fashion and I knew that – sincerely – if I’d really wanted to go on she’d have taken me right in but I brushed it off and said ‘yeah OK and I guess Luke will be home soon anyway’ not meaning anything by not meaning but it came out anyway that they were seeing each other and she really just wanted to be alone – way alone – and anyway soon after that she was gone away so I never did get up there with her and we parted - it was nearing 8pm and I was once again slinking back towards the west side piers so as to watch the roiling river pass me by and let me think - as I passed the edge of the park and started my way over I was brought back to some sort of life by the idea that I didn’t really HAVE to do any of this and so I went instead down to the basement of the building I was living in – the Studio School main structure which had once been many things – a mansion and then a museum – and it enabled me to spend away another night scrunched up in a form of comfort I’d come to enjoy - reading a book and looking at some art-book portfolios I’d collected down there - it was all by fact simple and sweet and just perfect for me and without any expense whatsoever too and all of these things made it a picture-perfect fit so to speak for the life I was leading : what I called a ‘2X4 life in a 2X4 shed’ and in the grand old tradition of any (stupidly self-serving) starving artist I found myself thriving on the situation - great art whatever it is doesn’t really come from nothing and I figured one had to get hurt be bent be broken and finally and with disgust surrender to all things to make anything worthwhile happen – which is basically and pretty much where I was just then and the smog of alcohol or hemp and dreaming and disaster none of them had overtaken me I was free as a bird but tethered nonetheless yet to some form of too-Earthly lifeline that was still keeping me down and I knew I wanted – if not out – something by which to be lifted and I knew I had to make my own marvels and work at my own work regardless of anything and what else there was going on around me : which is what made it feel OK to leave that girl just where she was and forget about it : no regrets there and if she did have anything to offer me I’d not have wanted it anyway (go figure) – but soon enough the mid-Summer nightfall came and the same streets I just left were throbbing and filled again with packs of young people just meandering around as if every minute was and should be the adventure of a lifetime and it was about this time that one by one it seemed the entire young population of some foiled and aimless country was ending up here – the streets were filled with thousands of lost and abandoned Summer kids - some of privilege and some not so - and all they did was hang around smoke sing dally and love one another in some awkward and strange mist of in-between time wherein no one really knew the fit nor the meaning of anything and amid it was some sort of mass-growing-up ritual happening all at once and the only problem I had with it was how quickly and in what great volume it had rolled in and left behind everything that had once been there before it - tradition and heritage and all of that had simply been forgotten and no one knew a thing and it was all as if it were Year One from the very start and all this something new was beginning just right now and at this moment all the past could simply be forgotten and it was most apparent in the infantile and childish doodlings (let’s say) of the street-graphics that were seemingly hanging everywhere : wavy high-school type posters for this or that show concert gathering reading rally or orgy (for that matter) that any of these over-stimulated street-circus types looking to make yet another dime off of anything falsehood and blemish could come up with and it all just went on : food wagons down at Tompkins Park turning into patchy lines of maniacs figuring the world owned them everything and they had to do absolutely nothing to get it and long-haired prophets of nothing along the sidelines peddling dope or speed or heavenly weed – all that was just the way things were right then and the deep Summer air was heavy with something portentous but no one knew what – it had taken a long time to get to this 1967 point and it seemed more and more to be a point of departure than merely a destination and out there ahead no one was sure what was situated : some bizarre string of unknown Magellan islands or some indeterminate squall that would – instead – wreck and bring to an end the entire mission before it had really started.
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So anyway she was gone and I never went back to check on her and whether Brecht or Artaud or any of those other theater guys did finally have their way with her it was beyond my comprehension how or why it was to be done and all I had instead to do was keep plodding along running off straight ahead and I became dazed and as deranged as anyone else before long : lock-key smithy thievery along the wharves sleeping in gutters and penny-ante hovels after meeting people I’d never see again and whose names I never did get straight making arrangements and jumping in cars to run up to Beacon or Poughkeepsie or Ossining for pickups and for still further meetings with people holding contraband money or stolen goods – ferrying one or two people running north up along the Hudson straight to Kingston and points after that unknown – distribution of runaways through Niagara Falls into Canada considered then as yet a harbor for any anti-military type seeking shelter – and then myself coming back down into the city with whomever was driving and oftentimes not having a clue as to what was in the cargo we were carrying – and in another direction out along the Bruckner there were strings of 'junkyards' which took anything in or other times we’d have to go to garages and small buildings along the eastside waters where intense fat men and swarthy business-types would look us over look over what we brought dole out some cash and say ‘get lost and don’t come back’ and we’d go knowing nonetheless that whatever happened we were under the protection of the varied crime lords running these operations from a spot just one-level higher than there bizarre moronic idiot types we’d have to deal with - a sort of silent and sedentary code of conduct and business was run in a hoodlum-style by unknown and invisible levels of people and I often wondered if ever and when these people ever met one another – and if when they did only some one or another came back out alive to tell of it all - and so for my part too it was ‘I’d invite you in if I had anything to offer.'

I LET IT BE

279. I LET IT BE - ('we must reinterpret the world'):

In all of creation (he says) 'has not a square always been a square and a cube a cube?' and of course that is not the question at all but I listen nonetheless and find myself fearsomely fixated (the more and more) about the one hundred names of dread wherein I dwell and I watch from afar in silence as the squaring crowd regulates itself and the strange rhythm of society takes its place over the meshed coil of the matter and the swordsman holding high his sword remains in place as we count the rings on the tree-stump he's just cut - realizing how incorrect they really can be - reaching forty-five before stopping to talk (about what it was when the tree must have been planted and how young forty-five really is) and we differentiate from the rings the good years from the bad years and the rich years from the poor and the wet from the dry COMMENSURATE with some experience of something - and now walking by in two's and three's are people themselves - ringed by circumstance and want in the same way as the trees around us are (we befuddle every step while walking deep in the black dense woods ascertaining but in no way certain where it is we really are and to where it is that we are going) and as it all seems the same to me no matter what anyway I decide that none of it matters and I step back and I LET IT BE and leave it all at the windowsill of chance and the makers of science (those willing to look at the stars) and anyone else like that who lingers and professes to believe BUT I KNOW BETTER 'the natural world's a lie and appearances are never what they seem and sometimes they're less and old iron crumbles like rust and the railroads break down and the bridges crumble and the roadways and tracks shudder and die along the meadows and swamps and everywhere a presumed army of things disappear and WE MUST REINTERPRET THE WORLD at every single other step.'

NO ONE LOOKS ANYWAY

278. NO ONE LOOKS ANYWAY (nyc/philadelphia, '91):

I was sure of myself enough at least to continue deciding to go forward and I found myself from the high plains of Newark to the low swamps of Jersey in nearly one subtle plane together and alone and traveling with a crowd and watching thin ferryboats maneuver the waters glassed with evening’s light and the sheen of yellow being thrown by wind and water and there were never-ending runs of children and people gathering in places to watch across both land and water and it all was like a dream again to me as distant and far-off in both body and mind as the sand was hardening on the paltry waterfronts as ancient tides rippled out and passed and it all seemed as of some methodical enviro-postulate that the people lived and walked and worked - erecting massive homes along the shore places to which they returned each time and leaving boats of their own invention they lived in new wood and crowded the shores and ruined all that was once there just so in order for them to live the land first was surrendered to a new and uncertain kind of battering ram evil which took over sand and sea and all before it as I realized that so much of what had been erased was due to the erasure by powers of state and everything in a swath had been determined to no longer be Spy House Looking Glass Harbor all the names and every bluff and hillock above the once-used harbor had been stretched and thinned and taken over by ‘Government’ and signs thereof attesting to use and ownership and stipulation and YES YES it’s really hard to bring oneself to be incensed about such matters but I was and for the millionth time found myself repeating within anger and hatred and sadness and want everything at once AS ALL BEFORE ME the pounded sands had been manipulated and moved and all I saw was Evil walking and robots of its own devise and I vouched ‘that step is not mine’ but where can I go for now it seemed EVERYTHING had been taken over and it all lived by the State and pleasant by that thousands of others at each moment did so too but no one cared either – weaving and forgetting what they experienced and talking layers of lies on high and happy for it and along the narrow street the harbor kids were standing in some honky-tonk collection of pride and bravado and the life they led was all the life they knew and poorer for it than they ever knew they stood there idle amidst ruin and for every child there I saw I knew three more were hiding as small harbor towns like this breed nothing amidst themselves except more of the strange and the cheap-nickel lives of the people within them and they live these out squandered and dead and IF SADNESS TAKES OVER NO ONE EVER SEES IT living in ignorance is bliss and blissful ignorance is all of this ‘we’ll remove more sands as we keep this going and remove all signs of the distant past too WE WILL as no one sees what we try to erase for the reality can be forgotten as we cover over what was and breeding claptrap and roller-coasters with high-lights and bar-room fights we’ll call it a place and make them forget and we can walk all over THEN whatever we want’ and I see for them what ‘history’ is a moving template for monument and sign a place to hang a reference for some few years and then remove later for something else and everything out of favor is gone as that ovoid lens changes shape and the shape of what it shows and it’s sad again it’s sad THE EGGMAN IS GONE and all of his house and land and the Spy House become a routine and every other harbor-front mansion household landed home facing water boat-slip landing GONE until all they leave is scraps and then they’re gone made jokes of or complained about like the Fishermens' Co-op not long for this world - but the red sun bleats as it falls straight down and creases the horizon with its light it passes and hands over this world to the thin blue sky of darkness highlighted by the rising moon which too then hangs like a lantern in otherwise distended skies where no one looks anyway and NO ONE really cares.

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“No one looks in this microphone” I said to myself and then pretending to speak to beachfront crowds I rambled errantly on “no one even tries to listen let alone investigate and whatever goes past us is that quickly ended and finished and gone but let me reiterate the nothingness I feel and I’ve spent too many years right now to let it all pass me by without saying a word about what’s dying and I don’t care a whistle that you can’t understand me or don’t like my form or can’t find the space between all the words to make the sense for you I just don’t care it’s all your own rambling problem not mine and you do so much else so admirably that you should take a moment and try this too” and realizing I was getting nowhere I found myself amused enough to continue and it was just me and Walt Whitman and the other guy from Camden pouting shouting spouting to the sky – about the time the trains came through and took the lower fields away and the day when John Bartram came over to show us the real course of the river right there – not the industrial puss-heap they’d made of it but the one the natives once knew : bucolic and powerful and startling and real : and it all led to another land entire – one where angels played and one where vice was not a gamble but as quickly as I managed to speak more came and the jumble of words was growing and my mind changed to other matters and I moved along and we all just kept on going - past three shanties two big garages a boathouse and a den.