13. THE PASTICHE OF DESUETUDE:
James Wright said 'if I stepped out of my body I would break into blossom' - well maybe so but I doubt it and the further indenture of that statement is its strangeness by which I mean whatever he means has to be accepted because there are NO alternatives : in other words 'YES, I suppose that would be so but ONLY because you said it' as if I were to say 'had I ever slept on Mars I would turn to a reddish stupor' : just as silly NO? and then we've got the broken datum of handwriting - letters swiftly hauled from pen to paper and back all the while a decaying time lapses over the entire idea of information being transferred in such a way and no one reading NOR understanding it any now : and furthermore I have ALWAYS been enamored of the random sound bite the overheard conversation the run of words without meaning the COME FROM BEHIND win the surprise the jumble - none of these BY THE WAY very 'American' concepts anymore:
['Mountain on the edge of eyesight. On its highest peak snow yet unmelted was gleaming pale. So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending! said Bilbo, and he turned his back on his adventure. The Tookish part was getting very tired, and the Baggins was daily getting stronger. I wish now only to be in my own arm-chair! he said.' Chapter 19
'The challenge of our lifetime is a religious totalitarian death cult. We MUST tear it down. We WILL tear it down.'
'Narcissism all to often goes hand in hand with a disturbing coldness, bereft of compassion.'
'That redheads are untrustworthy fiery unstable hot-tempered highly-sexed rare creatures is what passes for a truism and common knowledge today and while we no longer BURN them at the stake we still carry potent inflammatory beliefs about their power - and GREEN is what people have been offering to redheads for years in clothing jewelry and eye shadow but RED is really our color our perfect backdrop accesory and highlight and to a redhead the PERFECT way to shade our color is to deepen it by adding more red.'
'If I tear you apart in this life, will I put you back together in another?']
-----
There was a time when I studied music - American jazz music - for many many months and days and my absolute favorite tune to the point of fixation was 'Doxy' - a piece by Miles Davis and others *( dox·y (dks) n. pl. dox·ies Slang 1. A female lover; a mistress. 2. A sexually promiscuous woman) which I listened to endlessly over and over constantly without cease until it was actually PART of my brain and I could understand and clearly see every nuance and coloration and break in the action - almost as if the entire piece was a large moving scrim of picture sight and sound for me and it just went on from there as I was able to assimilate many parts of the America I was coming to know (at that time) into this music - the steel-swarm of black be-bop slavery-infested southern lines the swagger the dance to bravado of the street the loose-lipped strength of those who DID and went ahead of others and KNEW and understood and it became all as theme music for me trying and winning and finding a place for myself in a new land - one where I tried and must had to find a new identity and a new persona for the ME of me who was NO LONGER there the dead one the other one the OTHER (and oh how many of us are NOT haunted by that specter that haunt that OTHER which dwells always within us confusing and breaking the mark) ? and the answer to that for me like a magic language was Doxy always Doxy.
['A librarian was a nun without God.']
What is America today as compared to then - then being my first exposure to it - it is NOTHING and the comparison of it is the difference between the small lightbulb atop the lightpost illuinating the street (or trying to) and the vapor-lamp bulb flooding the street with a different sort of light altogether and no one noticung the difference nor objecting nor saying a word about their night becoming a horrid swamp of glowing blue-green in a never-darkening atmosphere of chicanery profit and greed and fear it is the difference between the first year of horse to auto dissemination - that final time when the turnover was made and the ruins of a place were turned over to the marvel and crass stupidity of the new - when trees came down haphazardly and roads were pushed through at will when railroads past their own nasty luster became immaterial to the pronouncements of the up-boldening and later arrivals of transort people travel and cargo - when of a sudden NOTHING meant anything any longer and all became expendable as these NEWER sorts took over : grifters circus freaks millionaires phantom menaces flagons fake G-men madmen bootleggers swamp-dogs killers swindlers murderers cheats salesmen twisted preachers bankers sex-maniacs travelers drayers truckers and thieves.
['That Miss Hush is a cupcake and she never says 'NO' and I've had my way ten times with her already and it's better each time and we really should extend her contract as school-master and really too the kids do love her - no time for tears sister - no matter what the wives may think and if we say 'NO' she'll just move on next year and where's that gonna leave us'?
'You lament the monotony of ass - there's a simple remedy for that. Don't avail yourself of it - too many whores! Too much canoodling! Get on with the work and the race, and put the gamepiece away!'
'She asked me in a whisper (everyone whispers in that prison atmosphere) : 'Can you describe this?' and I said 'I can'. Something like a smile passed fleetingly over what once had been her face.']
I've always worried about everything - sometimes because of that blowing all things out of proportion or at least seeming too until it was often too late to prevent the occurance of what was (mercifully) a 'disaster' of much lesser proportions than I'd been preparing myself for and as good as this may seem it also bore the attributes of the other extreme - some sort of boorish and stupid disappointment in realizing that I'd squandered time preparing for what now appeared to be something I'd not have needed to worry so much about - BUT part of the penalty was time and energy not being returned (for simply you cannot get that stuff back after it's been wasted) and once it's gone it's gone AND it's like that with life too for I now see that any preparation and justification for the fear and dread of death and God and afterlife and all that is not nearly as useful as it seems later on (to us and to others too) for - as Philip Larkin put it in 'Aubade' - which similarly writes off the consolations of religion - 'that vast moth-eaten brocade / created to pretend we never die' and another Philip (Philip Roth in 'Everyman') also puts it thusly : 'Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life and he found all religions offensive and considered their superstitious folderol meaningless childish and he couldn't stand the complete unadultness....No hocus-pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him - there was only our bodies born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us' - NOW too bad for him I say but if that's the way he really sees it (and I really believe he does) then that's the way he'll deal with it and I CAN understand that but I let it go too - for there will be no seeking out such a flagrant mono-themist Jew for further salvation on my part in this life or the next (any next) but his form of stacking the deck with dread and foreboding seems to be by genetically encoding the enforced means of eventual death upon each of us by what has gone into us from those who've lived before us - who knows perhaps all that IS true yet I still prefer the reality-altering force of creative thinking and the push which goes into my thinking that I can alter the very fabric of my own existence by altering the interpretation and understanding of that which goes into me ("I can change my life' a la Rilke) and misery loves company it's said so there's plenty of folk in the foul room sharing the odor and the sensation of demise fate and predtermined endings and if that's what they perceive as their happiness OK too but it seems very much like an old-people's game to me and I'd much prefer (as I do) to keep my 9-year old wonder intact : the wonder of knocking over a gentleman's coffee cup at an adjoining table in some ancient 1959 Horn and Hardart Automat or watching the jellybeans fall all over the floor as the glass case they are held in for guessing and estimating-the-count for a prize-drawing is knocked down and smashes on the lower countertop nearby - to everyone's horrid dismay and astonishment (while I laugh and watch in wonder).
-
I haven't often cared about much : as I see it the world and all the people in it can go to Hell postehaste for they're all idiots and fools and just watching them and their concerns now makes me sick and I often tell others that I live my life 'as if I was already dead and have come back for a while just to see how things are' no more no less - for that entails no interaction no 'reactions' either to the judgements and observations I make no anxieties and certainly no real concerns about categories events values undertakings and repercussions and it allows me still to then keep the single-focus and dedication to other-worldly concerns and developments necessary to succesfully get by and through this meager place and this more meager life SO I wish for nothing treasure nothing expect nothing and rue nothing - all at the same time - and I have no concerns about telling you or you or you off or the truth as I think you should see it about most any matter and the truth that I HAVE about things is perfect truth and perfect understanding and my logic would congeal your logic in an instant anyway (and all this is what I'd be saying to anyone to whom I was speaking) and it also allows me humor whimsey irony sarcasm rudeness bite and cutting as needed HA!!
['Sentimentality is a form of extremity - and a great weakness too']
All of this can I suppose seem to come across as arch superiority haughtiness and all that but on the other hand it is exactly the opposite of that - which quality for some reason people refuse to see - in that I come with NOTHING and I act that way through valuing nothing and having nothing - materialsim is a rank reptilian quality anyway : and HUME it was - the philosopher - who touched on (I believe) the 'qualities' of phenomena in such a way that if he'd smashed his leg on an obstacle or something he doubted the reality of the pain and the collision because he had found that he could not quite be sure of the 'existence' of the phenomena involved - he could not be totally sure of that object he'd just crashed into nor the existence of his leg his SELF and anything other than those items around the occurence (now - it can be said - wincing pain is wincing pain but I suppose that was another story and no one ever said philosophy per se was rational and clear).
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Sunday, July 5, 2009
GREEN IMPERIALISM
12. GREEN IMPERIALISM (or the death of good intentions):
‘Green Imperialism’ – it’s a colonial enterprise wherein people are under the authority of a biology professor who has been given absolute power over their lives and did you know that actually the very word ‘nature’ doesn’t exist in Malagasy a fact which shows what is to be the conceit involved by western man’s attempt at achieving perfection in two important aspects of living : the complete and utter use and destruction of the world and its natural attributes and at the same time the fierce over-achieving ambition to ‘save the globe’ and preserve and force others to preserve the natural environment as first defined by western consumer-man and it’s all a very sickening and maddening endeavor quite nonsensical by very many standards normally in use but that right there is the genesis of every Earth Day faddish factoid you ever see and the hordes my God the hordes come out in rushes to see it but nothing can stop them or make them cease with their ludicrous chatter and the only opportunity to come forth is the one for more and more debate harangue intolerant talk and I can remember how adverse it all gets I can remember the huge meadows by Peapack and Gladstone where we stood together in the high grasses alongside the waterwell and watched the distant horses slowly saunter up and over towards the higher ground with fewer trees as they sought more sunlight we supposed to avoid the growing chill and the surface wind rippled the low grasses and occasional flashes of lightning could be seen away and we took refuge then in the old broken down house or cabin that was nearby and scrawled onto the walls inside there were numerous messages many of them the ‘I love Bob’ variety the ‘Rita and Jim’ stuff with dates and hearts crossed hands and arrows and even the old hippy-style sunburst of exploding colors and then the rain did come as we heard it pattering the top of the roofline as we clutched each other and the thunder around us roared and soon enough the rain started coming in in little rivulets of its own as we made love like mad tyrants alone in some broken and silent kingdom rippled only by the roars of the Gods above us and then the rain passed as we did too and the filtering of new sunlight broke through the old wood and cracked surfaces and the shining brought the meadows back to life and we guessed even the distant animals smiled but that now that all is but a memory but maybe that’s all Nature is anyway and like Love a memory lasts forever or does it and I find myself thinking back forty years to that time and I shudder at the shock of what time does to us and what in turn we try doing to it changing what we cannot but trying anyway so in my way I remain quiet about everything and Gladstone and Peapack too pass from mind - as sure as Jackie Kennedy is dead and all her horses – like something little from the history books and I sit down again in Union Square just to watch and to look over at the trees and the traffic and wonder why wonder why as the clusters of people pass and I listen to what they say but without caring about what I hear and the children’s noises are no worse than dog noises for now I can take them all as I arise to walk 14th and I read the plaque on the old building site ‘On this site stood the original Academy of Music’ and I turn to you still with me and say “back then where exactly was the shoreline along the east-side here by the river was it quite up close this far?” and sure only of what we don’t know we agree it probably was “pretty much just like on the west-side on Spring Street at the Ear Inn where the water was once right at the doorway” but that only shows us how things change how they can be changed how they alter the sum of what we are or how we think of things but anyway we decide “nothing ever is what they really say it is” and we both know that and laugh it off still walking along so anyway what is the ‘Green Imperialism’ which so dominates us and as we think that through we realize it’s nothing but fear fear of insecurity and fear of change which is always there and always happening anyway so what’s to fear but there are those granted who want the world to stop who wish things to remain as they are and it is for them at that moment that gain or loss is measured for they have held hostage to themselves a world of sorry reason and cloistered happiness and where there is no intellectual stimulus or excited experimentation THEN THERE IS NOTHING and the world green or not grows slow so serious and so dull so little left to go on for so little left.
‘Green Imperialism’ – it’s a colonial enterprise wherein people are under the authority of a biology professor who has been given absolute power over their lives and did you know that actually the very word ‘nature’ doesn’t exist in Malagasy a fact which shows what is to be the conceit involved by western man’s attempt at achieving perfection in two important aspects of living : the complete and utter use and destruction of the world and its natural attributes and at the same time the fierce over-achieving ambition to ‘save the globe’ and preserve and force others to preserve the natural environment as first defined by western consumer-man and it’s all a very sickening and maddening endeavor quite nonsensical by very many standards normally in use but that right there is the genesis of every Earth Day faddish factoid you ever see and the hordes my God the hordes come out in rushes to see it but nothing can stop them or make them cease with their ludicrous chatter and the only opportunity to come forth is the one for more and more debate harangue intolerant talk and I can remember how adverse it all gets I can remember the huge meadows by Peapack and Gladstone where we stood together in the high grasses alongside the waterwell and watched the distant horses slowly saunter up and over towards the higher ground with fewer trees as they sought more sunlight we supposed to avoid the growing chill and the surface wind rippled the low grasses and occasional flashes of lightning could be seen away and we took refuge then in the old broken down house or cabin that was nearby and scrawled onto the walls inside there were numerous messages many of them the ‘I love Bob’ variety the ‘Rita and Jim’ stuff with dates and hearts crossed hands and arrows and even the old hippy-style sunburst of exploding colors and then the rain did come as we heard it pattering the top of the roofline as we clutched each other and the thunder around us roared and soon enough the rain started coming in in little rivulets of its own as we made love like mad tyrants alone in some broken and silent kingdom rippled only by the roars of the Gods above us and then the rain passed as we did too and the filtering of new sunlight broke through the old wood and cracked surfaces and the shining brought the meadows back to life and we guessed even the distant animals smiled but that now that all is but a memory but maybe that’s all Nature is anyway and like Love a memory lasts forever or does it and I find myself thinking back forty years to that time and I shudder at the shock of what time does to us and what in turn we try doing to it changing what we cannot but trying anyway so in my way I remain quiet about everything and Gladstone and Peapack too pass from mind - as sure as Jackie Kennedy is dead and all her horses – like something little from the history books and I sit down again in Union Square just to watch and to look over at the trees and the traffic and wonder why wonder why as the clusters of people pass and I listen to what they say but without caring about what I hear and the children’s noises are no worse than dog noises for now I can take them all as I arise to walk 14th and I read the plaque on the old building site ‘On this site stood the original Academy of Music’ and I turn to you still with me and say “back then where exactly was the shoreline along the east-side here by the river was it quite up close this far?” and sure only of what we don’t know we agree it probably was “pretty much just like on the west-side on Spring Street at the Ear Inn where the water was once right at the doorway” but that only shows us how things change how they can be changed how they alter the sum of what we are or how we think of things but anyway we decide “nothing ever is what they really say it is” and we both know that and laugh it off still walking along so anyway what is the ‘Green Imperialism’ which so dominates us and as we think that through we realize it’s nothing but fear fear of insecurity and fear of change which is always there and always happening anyway so what’s to fear but there are those granted who want the world to stop who wish things to remain as they are and it is for them at that moment that gain or loss is measured for they have held hostage to themselves a world of sorry reason and cloistered happiness and where there is no intellectual stimulus or excited experimentation THEN THERE IS NOTHING and the world green or not grows slow so serious and so dull so little left to go on for so little left.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
PRAY FOR ME MY LADIES
11. PRAY FOR ME MY LADIES:
I wasn’t going to be here or do this but I’m here nonetheless as some accident of place and time and fate together and thick trees brim now with green leaves running wild and blue-air-breezes touch the land and as I look out I see three Spanish guys sitting on a curb-side seating area and they’ve got some form of televised portable baseball game going – a free shot at the All-Star Game – and the baseball they watch is the same as any other being watched anywhere else just then and they laugh and chatter and they’re drinking their beers and seemingly enjoying themselves as across from them the big steps of the two apartment houses jut out and ten or more other people sit about over there making noise too and having their own share of fun while around them as a background the wide harbor is seen in reflected lights and passing traffic and little kids here and there scamper about running with blankets or in pajamas and everything seems like a festival on high Kearney Cottage Proprietary House and all the rest ANOTHER PLACE FROM ANOTHER TIME and lest they kid you it was NEVER not like this always was and history is bunk (as has been said) they fabricate their stories to fit the line they wish you to have SO ‘better accept it all little people for it’s being foisted on you’ and I’ve grown tired too tired to see and watch and care anymore and anything I hear is just trash and anything I watch is wrong and whatever’s said has FIRST a reason behind it a real-solid propaganda value that must come first and everyone’s lost everyone’s wasted but somehow I’m the only one tired the only one living a different time the only one beat and rashed and worn and communicating nothing to people who won’t listen anyway so PRAY FOR ME my ladies before I go away and remember me to anything else you wish for miserable to an ending I remain yours and as forever more forgotten lame-limbed simple and GONE (I enter another realm I visit anew the Gypsy graveyard and manage somehow happily to get lost among the crazy faces and distant lands and places the strange ideas of eighty years back the glimmering glitterati of the fortune-telling leaves and the ever-burning incense fires on temporary bounties and artificial mantles with pictures of the dead hung fresh from every corner and the gypsy woman swabbing herself with the damp rag looks over and FINALLY says : “welcome to my home it’s nice to have you here” and I know then and only then that I have entered the land of the living dead the one with the hearses and Cadillacs the open-bodied cars and the garish yellow trucks).
I wasn’t going to be here or do this but I’m here nonetheless as some accident of place and time and fate together and thick trees brim now with green leaves running wild and blue-air-breezes touch the land and as I look out I see three Spanish guys sitting on a curb-side seating area and they’ve got some form of televised portable baseball game going – a free shot at the All-Star Game – and the baseball they watch is the same as any other being watched anywhere else just then and they laugh and chatter and they’re drinking their beers and seemingly enjoying themselves as across from them the big steps of the two apartment houses jut out and ten or more other people sit about over there making noise too and having their own share of fun while around them as a background the wide harbor is seen in reflected lights and passing traffic and little kids here and there scamper about running with blankets or in pajamas and everything seems like a festival on high Kearney Cottage Proprietary House and all the rest ANOTHER PLACE FROM ANOTHER TIME and lest they kid you it was NEVER not like this always was and history is bunk (as has been said) they fabricate their stories to fit the line they wish you to have SO ‘better accept it all little people for it’s being foisted on you’ and I’ve grown tired too tired to see and watch and care anymore and anything I hear is just trash and anything I watch is wrong and whatever’s said has FIRST a reason behind it a real-solid propaganda value that must come first and everyone’s lost everyone’s wasted but somehow I’m the only one tired the only one living a different time the only one beat and rashed and worn and communicating nothing to people who won’t listen anyway so PRAY FOR ME my ladies before I go away and remember me to anything else you wish for miserable to an ending I remain yours and as forever more forgotten lame-limbed simple and GONE (I enter another realm I visit anew the Gypsy graveyard and manage somehow happily to get lost among the crazy faces and distant lands and places the strange ideas of eighty years back the glimmering glitterati of the fortune-telling leaves and the ever-burning incense fires on temporary bounties and artificial mantles with pictures of the dead hung fresh from every corner and the gypsy woman swabbing herself with the damp rag looks over and FINALLY says : “welcome to my home it’s nice to have you here” and I know then and only then that I have entered the land of the living dead the one with the hearses and Cadillacs the open-bodied cars and the garish yellow trucks).
Friday, March 6, 2009
SOCRATES/PLATO
10. SOCRATES/PLATO:
‘You too - men of the jury - must not be apprehensive about death for you must regard one thing at least as certain - that no harm can come to a good man either in his life or after his death’ and if that was what I heard in the wind then I figured as much as OK to that and the barge I was watching was trailing swiftly through the Kill Van Kull – some bestial waterway separating Bayonne from Staten Island with a silence I’d not expected a silence almost lethargic in its toning and the undercurrent at least I was sure I’d have been hearing as it slapped at hulls whether that of the barge or of the tug alongside it but instead there was a dreary silence between things and the sun had risen high and bright above the nearby Bayonne Bridge and though sunny it was still the air was cold and I remembered how Winter again only reluctantly loosens its grip on things no matter what the calendar or the days may say or wish to say to whomever it was who’d listen BUT if silence is brave then sometimes MEN are braver or at least have to be to survive and I wondered about all of that as I watched out ahead - water traffic barges smokestacks and the bridge - I wondered of how everything here had gotten started and why and what a mess we'd all somehow over time made of it but I wondered where to fix blame and decided PERHAPS it wasn't just 'everyone' who was to blame for long before this there had been another world and another before that - reeds marshgrass oyster beds fishers natives who lived and dwelt here and who knew every rise and squeak of the land and how to live it and then another force which beckoned came in and stepped over all that had been before it and they laid down too their remnant of everything and these were builders and cutters and they built therefore and cut and they slayed whomever was in the way - any and all notwithstanding caste or place or color or reason - and that land had been filled with blood by blood and it was ruled over by the same logic and reason which somehow still rules today - and all that was cut was replaced by structure and value and work ALL new concepts onto a newer land and I remembered the photos I'd seen of exactly what had been here before an exact 120 years before - the vast mansion and later resort of the LaTourette family the huge house lording over the waterfront the schooners and pleasure boats and excursions and ferries which had frequented these grounds and the old mansion which stood for many many years through its many many designations it too was gone and yeas before (1940's) replaced with housing projects and dirty wharfs and an amusement park and car lots and everything else and like a soiled sediment thrown down another overlay of both time and purpose had stepped in and taken over and mankind's rulings too had changed and all assumptions and ideas and configurations were new and different and over time all that had changed again and then again and what was left was ONLY THE NOW and that was it so what is it that LIVES behind after death ? certainly if the MAN was good so his works too must have been ? but yet I wondered and I doubted all that too.-And then I just got sick and tired of everything else - the sports angle the ball players the rappers the geeks the business types who sport new facial hair and a profit the priests in long black cars with nowhere to go the prisoners with flaps on their taxpayer wallets the flim-flam soldiers of fortune being taken for a ride the monastery types riding side-saddle on the hoof the out-of-work waitresses pretending to see and the people who listen to them PRETENDING not to see and see-through shirts and basket skirts and little girls bending over at five PM to pick up a paper for daddy and then writing their stories so everyone reads and the maniac dousing the fires the homeowner losing his keys while cutting some grass that doesn't belong to him and the appraiser who stops by to appraise while he tells stories of rack and ruination the bikers the killers the tavern-owners fighting hard to stay clean the cop on the beat staying mean the hostess the pieman the lawyer and the cheat EVERY last one of them useless and stupid as anything else - I got sick and tired of it all together and decided then and there to retire to bedlam with everything I owned and that took five minutes and I'm back already building bonfires of constricted hay and the padding from the dowager's sofa : 'but lemme' in but lemme' in please please before Sparky comes home' : and if I cared to explain what I'm saying I'd say it but I don't so I'll forget about that one : and then I heard some guy going on 'and they cut the bad flesh from the open wound and that allowed them to sew it up and you know the cleaner the edges when you get stitched up the better the heal and the mend and if it's straight it'll all grow back together again' and I wasn't sure if that was bullshit or the Thomas Gospel truth and I really didn't care either but I wished whoever it was well and good healing too and I'd gotten my first serious stitches at seven and more at eleven and everything had healed up right well so I had NO dog in that race or whatever those political idiots say when they say it and you know the word 'idiot' in ancient Greece used to mean precisely 'one who did not take part in social affairs or community life' and nowadays it seems it's precisely the opposite wouldn't you say and just yesterday this guy said to me (we were talking about the Greeks and all their old ideas - beat that) he said 'Greece! a people who haven't had a new idea in 2000 years' and I suppose that was his way of summing up lost potential or for the least a certainly shut-down idea-generation since the Golden Age when ideas ran like water through the streets of that ancient land and I suppose it did make some sense but who knows (and who cares) now and like those old guys said 'no harm comes to a good man after his death' and yeah I guess all right to that I second that promotion or whatever advertising lingo covers all that today and if another person ever says 'it's Greek to me' I guess I'll just have to murder his ass and you know how today a large penis is all the rage ? well back in the day of Greece it was the opposite and small penises were seen as the ideal and the reason for that was that (I was being told this) 'they were far easier to slip into the ass' and maybe that was a joke but I never knew and by that token what the Hell Jesus was gay too - get this - out in the desert with 12 men all the time with nothing under their robes sleeping and hanging together and one of his favorite sayings (same guy was telling me this) was 'get thee BEHIND me Satan' which certainly proves the point doesn't it (lucky he didn't just say 'Stan' instead of 'Satan') and when you look at it anyway the only Christianity we know now is the Christianity which was taken over and rewritten and filtered through the Greeks anyway and Aramaic be damned (that was the original language of which all this Jesus stuff was really spoken) and the Greeks it was who extrapolated it all and digested it and put it into the form we have today anyway so what the Hell it was probably all toyed with and tinkered around with by a once-great but now PETERED-out culture that back then didn't any longer know what it was doing and had no energy to do it with anyway - SO - be careful with that religion stuff you never know where it's been and if Jesus was a guy than there could have been a sin and it wasn't really original because I'm sure it had been done before - if not by the Greeks than somebody.-So that's my line in the sand my NORAD my early-alert system and whatever else I leave behind I'll leave you some notes about Armageddon or the Apocalypse or whichever you'd like and if I pen them correctly you'll never understand a thing and you'll have an excuse to plead ignorance but if I miss the mark (as I usually do) you're in trouble deep in shit up to your neck and your proverbial balls are most certainly in the frying pan a'sizzle so take your choice my gain will be your loss and all that backwards bullshit folderol let the Devil take the hindmost (that's another gay biblical Greek reference as well and there's a million more of them too) peccatore peccatum stevedore stromboli and build a better mousetrap and even I'll but that.
‘You too - men of the jury - must not be apprehensive about death for you must regard one thing at least as certain - that no harm can come to a good man either in his life or after his death’ and if that was what I heard in the wind then I figured as much as OK to that and the barge I was watching was trailing swiftly through the Kill Van Kull – some bestial waterway separating Bayonne from Staten Island with a silence I’d not expected a silence almost lethargic in its toning and the undercurrent at least I was sure I’d have been hearing as it slapped at hulls whether that of the barge or of the tug alongside it but instead there was a dreary silence between things and the sun had risen high and bright above the nearby Bayonne Bridge and though sunny it was still the air was cold and I remembered how Winter again only reluctantly loosens its grip on things no matter what the calendar or the days may say or wish to say to whomever it was who’d listen BUT if silence is brave then sometimes MEN are braver or at least have to be to survive and I wondered about all of that as I watched out ahead - water traffic barges smokestacks and the bridge - I wondered of how everything here had gotten started and why and what a mess we'd all somehow over time made of it but I wondered where to fix blame and decided PERHAPS it wasn't just 'everyone' who was to blame for long before this there had been another world and another before that - reeds marshgrass oyster beds fishers natives who lived and dwelt here and who knew every rise and squeak of the land and how to live it and then another force which beckoned came in and stepped over all that had been before it and they laid down too their remnant of everything and these were builders and cutters and they built therefore and cut and they slayed whomever was in the way - any and all notwithstanding caste or place or color or reason - and that land had been filled with blood by blood and it was ruled over by the same logic and reason which somehow still rules today - and all that was cut was replaced by structure and value and work ALL new concepts onto a newer land and I remembered the photos I'd seen of exactly what had been here before an exact 120 years before - the vast mansion and later resort of the LaTourette family the huge house lording over the waterfront the schooners and pleasure boats and excursions and ferries which had frequented these grounds and the old mansion which stood for many many years through its many many designations it too was gone and yeas before (1940's) replaced with housing projects and dirty wharfs and an amusement park and car lots and everything else and like a soiled sediment thrown down another overlay of both time and purpose had stepped in and taken over and mankind's rulings too had changed and all assumptions and ideas and configurations were new and different and over time all that had changed again and then again and what was left was ONLY THE NOW and that was it so what is it that LIVES behind after death ? certainly if the MAN was good so his works too must have been ? but yet I wondered and I doubted all that too.-And then I just got sick and tired of everything else - the sports angle the ball players the rappers the geeks the business types who sport new facial hair and a profit the priests in long black cars with nowhere to go the prisoners with flaps on their taxpayer wallets the flim-flam soldiers of fortune being taken for a ride the monastery types riding side-saddle on the hoof the out-of-work waitresses pretending to see and the people who listen to them PRETENDING not to see and see-through shirts and basket skirts and little girls bending over at five PM to pick up a paper for daddy and then writing their stories so everyone reads and the maniac dousing the fires the homeowner losing his keys while cutting some grass that doesn't belong to him and the appraiser who stops by to appraise while he tells stories of rack and ruination the bikers the killers the tavern-owners fighting hard to stay clean the cop on the beat staying mean the hostess the pieman the lawyer and the cheat EVERY last one of them useless and stupid as anything else - I got sick and tired of it all together and decided then and there to retire to bedlam with everything I owned and that took five minutes and I'm back already building bonfires of constricted hay and the padding from the dowager's sofa : 'but lemme' in but lemme' in please please before Sparky comes home' : and if I cared to explain what I'm saying I'd say it but I don't so I'll forget about that one : and then I heard some guy going on 'and they cut the bad flesh from the open wound and that allowed them to sew it up and you know the cleaner the edges when you get stitched up the better the heal and the mend and if it's straight it'll all grow back together again' and I wasn't sure if that was bullshit or the Thomas Gospel truth and I really didn't care either but I wished whoever it was well and good healing too and I'd gotten my first serious stitches at seven and more at eleven and everything had healed up right well so I had NO dog in that race or whatever those political idiots say when they say it and you know the word 'idiot' in ancient Greece used to mean precisely 'one who did not take part in social affairs or community life' and nowadays it seems it's precisely the opposite wouldn't you say and just yesterday this guy said to me (we were talking about the Greeks and all their old ideas - beat that) he said 'Greece! a people who haven't had a new idea in 2000 years' and I suppose that was his way of summing up lost potential or for the least a certainly shut-down idea-generation since the Golden Age when ideas ran like water through the streets of that ancient land and I suppose it did make some sense but who knows (and who cares) now and like those old guys said 'no harm comes to a good man after his death' and yeah I guess all right to that I second that promotion or whatever advertising lingo covers all that today and if another person ever says 'it's Greek to me' I guess I'll just have to murder his ass and you know how today a large penis is all the rage ? well back in the day of Greece it was the opposite and small penises were seen as the ideal and the reason for that was that (I was being told this) 'they were far easier to slip into the ass' and maybe that was a joke but I never knew and by that token what the Hell Jesus was gay too - get this - out in the desert with 12 men all the time with nothing under their robes sleeping and hanging together and one of his favorite sayings (same guy was telling me this) was 'get thee BEHIND me Satan' which certainly proves the point doesn't it (lucky he didn't just say 'Stan' instead of 'Satan') and when you look at it anyway the only Christianity we know now is the Christianity which was taken over and rewritten and filtered through the Greeks anyway and Aramaic be damned (that was the original language of which all this Jesus stuff was really spoken) and the Greeks it was who extrapolated it all and digested it and put it into the form we have today anyway so what the Hell it was probably all toyed with and tinkered around with by a once-great but now PETERED-out culture that back then didn't any longer know what it was doing and had no energy to do it with anyway - SO - be careful with that religion stuff you never know where it's been and if Jesus was a guy than there could have been a sin and it wasn't really original because I'm sure it had been done before - if not by the Greeks than somebody.-So that's my line in the sand my NORAD my early-alert system and whatever else I leave behind I'll leave you some notes about Armageddon or the Apocalypse or whichever you'd like and if I pen them correctly you'll never understand a thing and you'll have an excuse to plead ignorance but if I miss the mark (as I usually do) you're in trouble deep in shit up to your neck and your proverbial balls are most certainly in the frying pan a'sizzle so take your choice my gain will be your loss and all that backwards bullshit folderol let the Devil take the hindmost (that's another gay biblical Greek reference as well and there's a million more of them too) peccatore peccatum stevedore stromboli and build a better mousetrap and even I'll but that.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
LOFT-LIVING 1960'S STYLE
9. LOFT-LIVING 1960'S STYLE:
I sat around far too long reading 'The Day of the Locust' one too many times and that old 1939 hoary story had by now grown a beard for me like 'It Can't Happen Here' and 'Only Yesterday' did too - but actually my favorite of that early era's works are all that Dos Passos stuff which I really like and Sister Carrie too which I can't really get enough of An American Tragedy and what follows - it's like all that other-era stuff still holds a lot of weight for me because you can see in it a'borning much of what was to come later - endless screeds of personal guilts and betrayals and realizations and those unique early-twentieth-century forms of self-development we've come to see as passe already - irony and self-awareness and everything since the war(s) having displaced the more staid points-of-view from those days : everything's a mess now of winks and sex and irony and humor all meshed into some puree'd bullshit of fake gravitas and abnormal abstraction so that in the end the quality of fiction is somehow supposed to match the abstraction of everyday life - or perhaps at least that's the premise - but it never works because everyday life is made up of subconscious motivations and dreams and memories and some little twit-faced grad-school novelist coming straight out of Accepted Writing 101 is never going to know any of that and put together with all the rest it's but a glum picture of what we all must live today : hyacinths around the throat spikes in the heart torn remnants of high-minded ideas : but there's no place for putting these ideas into action - no percentage as it is - and that's pretty much the only thing people seek today - all that high-minded corporate parochialism scratching out profit and eking out growth and lucre from the simplest supposed motivations USA Trilogy notwithstanding Dos Passos had it right when he portrayed the old and lethal metal culture being put together and all his vignettes and profiles and newsreel stuff seems just right to me all these years later - but why should I look back at anything and even more than that why should I care ? forever and a day isn't long enough to erase the crap that's unfolded and all these myriads of people stumbling around completely enamored of nothing and insane over it within and amongst themselves - negativity rules the world and all things are running backwards and it doesn't include me thank you please : outside the third-floor window the icicles are mounting at the broken drain and whenever that happens we all know the water backs up and starts coming in through the corner of the ceiling along the edge of the big window-gratings there - industrial lofts from 75 years ago or more have a tendency to leak and malfunction in numerous ways - which is part of their charm and the reason that people used to flock to them outside of the expansiveness of the space when no longer used for industry - all those mushroom pedestals holding up ceilings and half-floors with the little glassed-in boxes from which management used to peer down at production or something like that - rows and rows of sewing machines or lathes or workbenches and chain-driven assembly lines running steadily through the plant with rows of people aligned methodically while doing their tasks and the little flame-pots at each station providing some early-days powering for torch or tool or heater or whatever - the noise was grueling and the temperature levels extreme but it all went on like a huge era which eventually - spent out - just sputtered and died just like all those people now dead and gone as well and all that's left are these great loft-spaces and the 1960's artists and performers and all the rest are trying to take them over in their vacancies - I like that and I can see the point of it all too but somehow landlords and property-holders balk and municipal codes forbid residency and you can't stay there you can't work there blah blah it's all a bunch of crap and we did it anyway allover and wherever we chose and that was half the artistry and half the fun back then BUT as with everything else now it's a totally different world and everything's been taken.
I sat around far too long reading 'The Day of the Locust' one too many times and that old 1939 hoary story had by now grown a beard for me like 'It Can't Happen Here' and 'Only Yesterday' did too - but actually my favorite of that early era's works are all that Dos Passos stuff which I really like and Sister Carrie too which I can't really get enough of An American Tragedy and what follows - it's like all that other-era stuff still holds a lot of weight for me because you can see in it a'borning much of what was to come later - endless screeds of personal guilts and betrayals and realizations and those unique early-twentieth-century forms of self-development we've come to see as passe already - irony and self-awareness and everything since the war(s) having displaced the more staid points-of-view from those days : everything's a mess now of winks and sex and irony and humor all meshed into some puree'd bullshit of fake gravitas and abnormal abstraction so that in the end the quality of fiction is somehow supposed to match the abstraction of everyday life - or perhaps at least that's the premise - but it never works because everyday life is made up of subconscious motivations and dreams and memories and some little twit-faced grad-school novelist coming straight out of Accepted Writing 101 is never going to know any of that and put together with all the rest it's but a glum picture of what we all must live today : hyacinths around the throat spikes in the heart torn remnants of high-minded ideas : but there's no place for putting these ideas into action - no percentage as it is - and that's pretty much the only thing people seek today - all that high-minded corporate parochialism scratching out profit and eking out growth and lucre from the simplest supposed motivations USA Trilogy notwithstanding Dos Passos had it right when he portrayed the old and lethal metal culture being put together and all his vignettes and profiles and newsreel stuff seems just right to me all these years later - but why should I look back at anything and even more than that why should I care ? forever and a day isn't long enough to erase the crap that's unfolded and all these myriads of people stumbling around completely enamored of nothing and insane over it within and amongst themselves - negativity rules the world and all things are running backwards and it doesn't include me thank you please : outside the third-floor window the icicles are mounting at the broken drain and whenever that happens we all know the water backs up and starts coming in through the corner of the ceiling along the edge of the big window-gratings there - industrial lofts from 75 years ago or more have a tendency to leak and malfunction in numerous ways - which is part of their charm and the reason that people used to flock to them outside of the expansiveness of the space when no longer used for industry - all those mushroom pedestals holding up ceilings and half-floors with the little glassed-in boxes from which management used to peer down at production or something like that - rows and rows of sewing machines or lathes or workbenches and chain-driven assembly lines running steadily through the plant with rows of people aligned methodically while doing their tasks and the little flame-pots at each station providing some early-days powering for torch or tool or heater or whatever - the noise was grueling and the temperature levels extreme but it all went on like a huge era which eventually - spent out - just sputtered and died just like all those people now dead and gone as well and all that's left are these great loft-spaces and the 1960's artists and performers and all the rest are trying to take them over in their vacancies - I like that and I can see the point of it all too but somehow landlords and property-holders balk and municipal codes forbid residency and you can't stay there you can't work there blah blah it's all a bunch of crap and we did it anyway allover and wherever we chose and that was half the artistry and half the fun back then BUT as with everything else now it's a totally different world and everything's been taken.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
