THE SOUND OF THE NEW JERUSALEM

283. THE SOUND OF THE NEW JERUSALEM:

Death as a way of life (see under: ‘Love’) …noise gunshots and shouts incendiary words and mournful laments amidst explosions and demonstrations and heaps of clichés and special broadcasts from the scenes of terrorist attacks and calls for revenge…right there we’ve ‘pupae’d the larvae’ so to speak we’ve fled to the outer limits we’ve reached new boundaries of Hell from Albuquerque to Ataturk and Antioch to Amsterdam (and Athens to Alexandria Antwerp to Alsace Austin to Avenel) AND ‘within the whirlwind spinning and turning in the eye of the storm THERE IS SILENCE and it can be heard ! AND it is felt in every cell of the body writhing within each dilemma encoded with anyone there – Essene to Embryonic – a deepening silence such as one feels in the brief moment between receiving bad news and comprehending it between the blow and the pain THE EMPTY SPACE in which every person knows with piercing certainty all that he or she does not want or does not dare to know’ and then some parking lot tyrant comes by exposing himself (to ridicule to abuse to anything) and stands by the entrance to the hardware store near the pizza place waving two wands ONE the frieze from Wednesday night and the other the fifteen pounds of leftover palms he swiped from St. Matthew’s Holy Name Trade Fair and Exposition held at the Demolay Hall and hosted by Father John Rutabaga SJ who’s just back from Rahway where he administered to the flock all of the murders shootings and beatings he could manage BUT NOTHING NEW TRANSPIRED it had all been done before ‘well done Brethren – for we have entered the halls of God with bold new ideas in mind so let us sing as we pray for deliverance and bring forth the multitudes we need from but ONE lonely acolyte HIM who stands here freezing all alone’ and I hear them applaud as the lights go out and the movie fiction starts again (some Finnish guy in a yellow Ferrari racing towards the catacombs just outside the city) and nothing beats success except more success and its double DEATH so we all move on and soon enter Darkside or Navesink or Asbury or NETHERWOOD ! that’s what it’s called ! where the old servant quarters of Plainfield aspire to rise from their graves and retire to WHERE MY Son ‘Flower’ wishes to go (he’d changed his name from Rufus J. right after he had the operation) HE’S A GIRL NOW we have to call him something different but I lift the chair above my head only to see the ladder’s broken again and all the stairs are turned inside out and anything old is new again and two things always happen together ONE THE REFUTATION OF THE OTHER and like the Bible says ‘save now for a rainy day’ and ‘it’s only a paper moon ripping over the madman’s tomb’ but what I say I can’t decide and if ever there was HAPPY it was Mary’s womb but leg o’lamb and rack of pinion WHO LORDS OVER THE LORD’S DOMINION! and all of a sudden there came such a rush and I ran to the window to see what was the matter but all I received was one lethal blow and Charles Foster Kane all ready to go and he sat down beside me and started to sing and just then the whippoorwill cried and SOMEONE HAS DIED! was all that was said [Kane piped up: “you just give me the prose-poem and I’ll supply the WAR!’] and I noticed he laughed to his fat heart’s content and rolled towards the door until OUT THE DOOR HE WENT!!

PERSHING PLAZA AND LINCOLN PABST

282. PERSHING PLAZA AND LINCOLN PABST:

"Well now that that’s over and done with we really should move on'"those were the words Lincoln Pabst used on me as we were walking along the edge of Grand Central Station right after I commented to him how it was that I remembered these very storefronts there as nothing but cheap ruins and crappy bargain sports stores thirty years ago when the entire place should probably have been boarded up and moved away and he laughed back and then said that which I just told you he said while right before that we’d just passed the side streets along Pershing Plaza which he said wasn’t really a ‘Plaza’ just a conjunction of some streets and a restaurant and the entrance to both a tunnel and a ramp and I said "yeah yeah that makes some sense and they probably had to name it after someone historical anyway because they wouldn’t name it after the restaurant or some other commercial venture which probably changes every five years anyway and for ponderous places you do need a right and historical name something people could ‘relate’ to if they ever still relate" and he nodded and said ‘well yeah but most people don’t relate anymore to anything and the kids they say can’t even find places on the map anymore and so even geography’s taken a rare bump on the long road to neglect but what’s to be expected anyway when you look around you today what do you see but a bunch of essential wise-asses strutting their stuff chasing timetables and teams and games and electronics and all the rest of the crap that flows in and out of a culture like this like some black running water of shit through the population and it’s everywhere now in huge horrid globs of overload and these people right here the ones who come into New York from places like Pennsylvania and Idaho and West Virginia what do you think they come here for but to get their own fatal dose of this stuff and take it back to their home towns and implant the same disease in their own friends and neighbors just maybe a little bit behind the times by then but ripe anyway for anything they can get their hands on and don’t let anyone fool you into thinking otherwise - there’s nothing out there anymore the old crap about right and religion and goodness and all that’s been swallowed up and busted over people’s heads a million times by now I tell you it’s itself a fearful shame that we’ve got to live with it all here ourselves" and I was listening and watching at both the same time as he talked and figuring much of the same stuff and how he was probably right I started differentiating between the people I saw the - staid and monied New York types going by me were easy to pick out the women with nice faces and proper coats and the detritus of money dripping from them and the little groups of kids and young adults still beautiful to watch and see but another step away distant and then (right outside the ‘Dylan’ Hotel as it’s properly called and named on the windows) I saw the other New York the visitor’s one with the classy out-of-towners hanging out and exiting cars and taxis and stretching themselves over the lobby and the bar and the doorman oozing attitude and all the rest and just outside that along the streetcorners the lower breeds of street types meandering and walking and talking within their own concerns all of that mixed up together in one some fatal brew and that was right then the make-up of some place I saw just like this all of this and it really no longer mattered whatever one ‘Lincoln Pabst’ said to me because (as in so much else and every other thing) I only saw things my way and he his and everyone apart is just like that we’re all separate all living distinctly in different little worlds and only where they overlap are we able to come to some kind of agreement about what IS and what EXISTS and after that point of convergence is passed - be it one hundred or one hundred million times in one lifetime - we again are still separate and alone in our thoughts and reality and we agree that the ‘make-up’ of the world as we see it is what we see all that and nothing more and it’s like the last final dream of our lives (each of us apart) when we dream of those two hands on our shoulders gently waking us from some strange and deep sleep that we slowly and gradually slip out of a trance-state dream-like and fall back gently and softly into once again yet another reality one of long duration and distorted minutes all and even moreso than any dream of life we may each have just had and with that the billowing slow clouds come over and enclose us and cover our thoughts and break us from whatever training we may have had and reduce us anew to something wise and bright and fresh and somehow together and yet alone all alone as one all over again and that’s the dream of life the rigged rugged ribald and raw dream of the New York or wherever streets born and shouldered in reality like this but traveling allover and ever-present everywhere on and within the globe and a million moments together some NEVER equal one simple minute alone with our thoughts YET never-ceasing the ever opening door continues its movement and just never seems to close NO MATTER HOW WE TRY to close it or have it close around us - and that is the struggle that is the work and THAT is the achievement of time and all its workings.

EYES ONLY HEAVENWARD LOCKED

281. EYES ONLY HEAVENWARD LOCKED ('to win by ignoring your foe'), nyc, 1998:

Walking like fierce fire from Barrow and Bedford Streets down Hudson to No. Moore past the old industrial rail and fire pit of Ericsson Place where everything old had been replaced and the only sight to be seen was the wide-open entrance of new place after new place calling for tenant and buyer the concrete expanse of for lease square footage tenants the hand-painted target of convenience on the new blank walls newly poured concrete where the watchman sits biding his time the target in black and red paint on the wall behind his head and I’m in the pouring rain as he’s looking out with a nod and a smile and as I passed the newly constructed corner scene I could see the blank space within and I realized again how often over and over the same things are done and how and why I’d never know and that in the daylight and dark there’s an entire other world of activity not known to us or shown yet it goes on and even as I walked determinedly in the pouring rain I alone sought the deference of others in their outward presence perhaps gone but shown by memory and image no matter – and if I vouch to you that words are more than sure things to do so all I need here write is that I consider ‘relying on a lust and a piracy on a murder of time and thought to subsidize a play for beauty and in every brick and mortar the ‘platinum’ pallor of blood suited the illusory world’ with all objects drenched in lunar light and near exact to that is a light of day not here now (but instead in the rainy pallor as I rush along) and I see rows and rows of heads dining and they are backlit by the glow of soft yellow light and with spots of such candlelight on each table’s glow that are talking softly back and forth to one another as I realize I am silent only as alienation and distance are silent and so that would be for in what better warfare than this is there a place to greet the enemy alone with no voice TO WIN BY IGNORING YOUR FOE – and as I walk the endless and blazing night I am addressed by the storefronts and windows too of the wild wind off the nearby river the Spring Street song of all hearts and it makes some scoff at truth while others cringe at the hideous lapse of sensibility therein [“so I have heard and do in part believe it”] and in my mental state still wandering aimless in the rain the water is rolling off my face and beads of it hang from my nose with wet head hair ears cold clothing soaked everything wet shoes and outlook and again I begin VOICES same voices hearing tearing into me at once like mesmerizing old quotes from battle-stations and workplaces old and now long gone: “there’s just one street and they can shut it off but I’d have felt safer there than here and the worst fantasies I guess of the organizers would be marchers rolling primitive devices of fire and terror down the street as they walked and I for one have this very relieved sense that I am not in charge” and with that I look up and remember the old Ericsson place that was here the crazed inventor who’d look down upon these oily streets way back when and see only woods and land and fence and until later when the rail yards came and supplanted all that he had his EYES ONLY HEAVENWARD LOCKED and peering through the rain to the streets below I hear him say “glassed in all day like this I keep toweling the windows dry Eamon trying to wipe this fog away that keeps me blind behind glass and unable to see the outside world for what it is and the way things become shadows and blunted silhouettes of themselves and birds only become blurs as they shake a branch when they land or leave or just dash past as a flash of cloud snatching at crumbs and I know too Eamon this will all soon be gone and I find myself like those birds wet and weathered each time as I get up to the big window to clear it again and try to take in what colors are left and all the shapes out there all the living bits of matter that stand in their own ordinary uncanny light until the blurring begins again and I see my own breathing as it does it but Eamon I am not the man to record all this just watch it the distant observer of another sky for I am an inventor and here alone I research the heavens OBSERVATORY LIMIT GRAND ASTROLABE of all my heart alone and silent what can I do and what is visible to me really alas instead I shall remain here until time for me ends its own delight and you know I DO NOT KNOW THESE PEOPLE I DO NOT” and with that the night seemed to lessen its darkness and I heard the distant low growl of tugboat and ship something rolling by me and then by Beach Street I’m taken by something some wild wicked feeling of timeless cold age taking me up and the ghosts of the past wrap around me as it grows totally silent and still and only the one light across the horizon seen becomes the tear the great rip in consciousness and it all opens to other worlds and the time and space of other places those which exist concurrent and just beyond the membrane of this place and this experience and into that we I we all are pushed slowly like thick liquid oozing and time bleeds into time and other things dissolve and the clanging howl of the buttery bell ringing resounds and echoes down the February quarters of the night and around the all this all this city coalesces and comes back and returns and I am silent reading time or silent smoking water or silent I am just silent watching it all unfold.