A SLAVISH DEVOTION TO NOTHING AT ALL

297. A SLAVISH DEVOTION TO NOTHING AT ALL - (a streetside cinema, nyc, 1967, pt.1):

It's not the same when the wheel comes around again and everything has changed : anyone is able see that : lyceum sticky-tape on the borders of very old books and the Fourth Avenue book guys all withered and lowdown lurked in the crevices wherever they could - cigar chomping longcoats with tophats to match the guys with the book covers under their coats - picture books of rare dalliances and of girls and women at play - some bucolic yet ribald reflection onto an older America now long gone when the country-skirts and the farmgirl nymphettes could play amidst innocence on the swings and fences of countryside houses and only the leer of the stranger understood what was coming but that was Jacksonian and back in those days it wasn't really that far off (time changes perspectives change what once seemed far away now looms up close) and I look down myself to see the ground just making sure where it is I am and reinforcing that black-shoot of my own existence I stand up willingly just to watch the black police car come slowly along the curb and stop right across from that guy holding the signpost and without really anything I could see first they just whacked him up the side of the head and then they bundled him into the back of the car and rode off - quiet and without much ado and certainly without any police noise - and whoever that person was or what had just occurred it never did seem to matter and what was to become of that representation I never got to know (movie-time movie-myth pretense) for it was the slavish devotion ever-present to cinema fantasy anyway which ran so much of the streetlife around me : if I really knew where I was at that time I would have had a far greater grasp of situation and possibility but accidental matter usually rules things and most of life by those means is a question of timing of one big lucky moment where sometimes for no reason except being prepared the world breaks your way (never happened here but the preparation was widespread) and I recall once seeing Charley Chaplin walking silently past the nicely spired Renwick church (Grace Episcopal) at Broadway and 10th Street but back when that intersection was famed and vital and a heart of the beating city around it - the water trough built into the fence at the corner and its small trickle of water and Chaplin as it were cinematically too I remember stopped for a moment put his hands into that small water spray filled his cup hands with water and slowly in a moment out of time rubbed lightly his own face with a perhaps refreshing dash of water or anyway one would have to think and then resumed his idle walk : I watched as if I was the director of all that streetcorner motion - megaphone in hand shouting directions pointing the scene directing the next move - for I knew it was my movie and all these actions were my actions and then (by that) I stopped and thought suddenly 'well then if that is so what really IS this life anyway?' for if we are pushed and moved around by out-seen forces and invisible directions than what really is our fault of judgment in any of it to be and how by those means can a person ever be found to be at fault and ! EGADS MOST! what is this bastard thing called free-will to which we so ascribe the pride and penalty of all Mankind ? is not that only nothing but our own Pride (one of the Seven Sins too) running wild on a field of its own imagining? had not that police action just witnessed been but a scene out of some pantomimed film being undertaken for the (unseen) benefit or pleasure of someone or something or at least some already-written and undiscovered script to which by our actions we each attest our fealty ? a morbid and dire Predestination of means by that old American fashion ? a quaintly religious moment doing homage to the oldest ideas extant - what is it the young want I found it to be communitarian - any collectivist impulse suits them and all the labor-movement 'solidarity; stuff all those political movements of socialism and feel-good together turn out in the end to be nothing ore than the youthful ideal of collectivist thought all oneness togetherness let's unite ! all that crap that seeps from the pores in reality it's nothing but the normal bullshit of youth and innocence a bad badge that fades with age and at least in his way this Chaplin guise never fell for any of that and at least this 'Little Tramp' character was always lonely and aspiring and on his own and my water-spout image of the single face washing but itself stands stronger for me internally than any of that collectivist impulse crap which usually then gets usurped by powers that take it over and run with it and make it all into systems that harm and hinder - control faction rules and regulations - witness that solitary Chaplinesqe man I just saw getting smacked on the side of the head and taken away : police may not need motives but I do or perhaps whatever 'motives' a policeman seeks are the sort easy enough to simply make up on the spur of the moment as needed to apprehend and the rest be damned ('we'll worry about all that later Mulcahey - just get the bastard in here round his ass up and bring him down to precinct - the only rights he'll get is the right to use the cell door or the right of my right hand un'nerstand now?') and thus it runs - narratives pile upon narratives in this land everywhere and this skinny little notebooks of antics just gets fatter and fatter : Predestination killed the cat ! forget curiosity.