EVERYTHING FIRST HAS TO BE SORTED

300. EVERYTHING FIRST HAS TO BE SORTED:

You must first make order out of the dilemma separating everything as it need be separated - realizing firstly that all things are not alike and they each bear different burdens of their own in carrying the load of the greater will and without language you must learn to speak and within bounds you must un-learn boundaries - for there are none past that point at which things become impossible without solution BUT the main thing is study : study and observation where there is nothing else except the absolute dedication to that alone and that allows you to see and to proclaim the world as YOU see it - untarnished and without anyone else's burdens put upon it AND you must get beyond definitions and beyond categories and past the point where simple arguments keep everything bounded sour and small ('Man gave names to the animals and by their type and form he separated all things only after he was introduced initially to all that is by the God who presented it all to him') and my own order right there and then was in walking along 44th Street and watching what I thought was the distant surge of barge and river but only later turned out to be some huge piece of dredging equipment which was pounding the East River floor (which equipment I only understood as I got up to it) and walking then uptown and out towards the land's edge I was able to sit and observe what was before me and I spent some good ten minutes or more simply cataloging in my mind all that I saw - thinking such an exercise would clear up my head and facilitate something else for me - and it became more and more obvious as I did so that the world is itself filled at every instant with such a myriad of things which are constantly undergoing change and movement and alteration that the utter futility of keeping up with all of it is very soon apparent ('evening came and the morning followed') but what most interested me there (as usual) were the comings and goings of the people who frequented the small eastside park - the elderly gents in their white socks and polished shoes the women whose slow arms were held by maids or nurses or people hired for the specific purposes of tending and accompanying them and the occasional child whether silent or screeching finding joy or delight in something and the driver the courier the walker the chef any and all of them out and about taking their minutes of calm to rest on themselves and absorb the world around them - whatever it be - and amidst all this there remained such a quiet solace and a quiet sadness and the two somehow conjoined for me to acknowledge nothing but the futility and the eventual passing of all things ALL things except the stories they are graced with and the tales we graft upon the stories and then the personal witness we each give to the entirety of all that - and that is the LIFE which we eventually pass from and bury and leave traces along behind - perhaps traces of the what or the who we once were but most certainly (if we've had any) our works and that I supposed is what I was seeking in all that I did THE WORKS of man and the works of mankind where they ever may have worked together - but I found it hard to think of pleasantries and beauty as I thought of these words instead : 'cursed be the ground because of you and in toil shall you eat its yield all the days of your life and thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to you as you eat the plants of the field and by the sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat until you return to the ground from which you were taken FOR you are dirt and to dirt you shall return' but I thought too that most people must have generally lived their lives putting all that out of mind and finding instead the small pleasantries which make living bearable between people for by any other means (certainly if we stayed mindful of that) life itself would perhaps be unbearable but no one listened and no one answered anyway and as I watched even I knew then that those around me had lived out their time and had passed their meaningful years in some subservience to something perhaps which they now reflected upon lonesome savaged sad or solid and in their last years I knew they'd want completion - and I watched their transparent skin turning again to white bones and their staggered shaking hands grasping air and hope and lung and I noticed their frail bodies with the addresses of (already) some other place being imprinted and I understood again that all life is but translation unto ourselves of the unutterable and the nefarious untranslatable form we carry within and the completion of life is the completion of that form which then bears its own markings and meanings and instructions which soon supersede us by far and we are gone leaving but the faded imprint of that newer form behind as memory and image and magical thought in the minds of everyone left - and like clay ('the Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life and so man became a living being') we build with all that is left of others malleable pliant yet stern and strong too - and I looked about me too and saw a hundred other places and the steamboats and the factories and the asylum halls and the parkside trees smokestacks and statues and realized again that all this was mute and but a testament to the workings of man beneath the blue sky above and as hard as I sought meaning - perhaps it could be found everywhere or perhaps I'd find it nowhere - as long as I sought it I was still alive and the power which powers time to pass was rolling by as I sat there and witness to nothing I was witness to all and I began humming or singing or reciting back to myself a something I once had known - a mad jumble of words from somewhere - : 'the whole thing might not in the end be the only solution - but at this time of life whatever being there is is doing a lot of listening as though to the feeling of the wind before it starts and it slides down this anticipation of itself already full-fledged a lightning existence that has come into our own' but I could no longer meditate just as I could no longer dance for all the pangs of belief and expectation had left me and I was utterly barren and alone worth nothing at that moment except the stretching life of regret absence and nothing more with which to suit myself but I remembered instead the old red brick doorways wherein I once huddled confined to the night and fighting cold air and seeking comfort and shelter without again words and the only respite from the worlds of hunger and cold were the momentary delights of someone anyone giving something away - be it a nickel a penny a bowl of cheap soup or some thrown-over coffee without even a name - but those days long past seemed rejected as well in memory and now camouflaged in some jacket of fog and made denser by anguish and sorrow and want all over again as I looked out on some other stingy world - one made of nothing now but the meager modern day and one moving along without even the thought of any of what once may have been AS WE ALL each and one died singly alone and together making no matter of the act or no matter of the destination and the old river roiled and rolled spinning past me like some decided jackpot of some decided winner who'd taken it all and I knew that such it would be and so never stop - and I sat there DEJECTED and most decidedly in shock just thinking of what may have been.