19. GIVE ME PAUSE:
“A mentally challenged man named Sam strolled right in said ‘strike up the band’ and the crowd went wild or so it seemed as stagelights flickered and the piano man preened” but that was all I heard of the story because they were passing the hat and I hadn’t any unnecessary money to give them so I moved on but kept wondering on the rest of that story or at least what it could have been and it MUST GIVE ME PAUSE to even stop to think what I might have missed but oh well anyway now it’s over and done so when I saw the stone roses on that churchyard wall I stopped just a moment to stare and my mind RUMINATING upon itself said to me wordlessly ‘I could have lied but who would save the world?’
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Saturday, July 17, 2010
A NEW AND DIFFERENT WORLD
18. A NEW AND DIFFERENT WORLD:
If there were ever a brain-spot for tracing delusions I’d have been covered with them - easy to see and simple to find - as after a few years I was simply dog-crazed with the usual battery of events and situations but all compounded by my intense desire to keep going and the ephemeral sensation of success and achievement that kept passing through me like a cloud-mist over and over and I was sometimes elated and other times just drawn and quartered to death but I remained with it at whatever cost : painting gallery walls for twenty-five dollar days when I could – the same crisp but flat white paint almost gesso-like which went into the cover-up of anything beneath it the same scant but totally distant skinny girls behind the front desks of a hundred galleries one alike to the other so that anyone coming in immediately felt as if they were already in an alien place where they didn’t belong or that they’d entered the central headquarters of some bizarre cult of ‘we’re certainly too good for you’ aliens and these girls remained that way forever - most exquisite in their designer tight outfits and blossoming-beautiful too but seditiously dangerous in their manners (always making me think some ‘I wouldn’t want to be the one to fuck her’ but knowing I ‘would’ if I had to) and in these places I always seemed incorrect in whatever assumption I made – because they weren’t certainly about ART at all even though that’s what supposedly hung on the walls – they were instead about money and valuation and profit and gain and insider status and all the rest be damned - these people inhabited a small little club of coterie of wealth which had spread its dastardly and sticky fingers all over the ‘art-world’ as they declaimed it for their purposes of lucre and if they’d not imprimatured it yet well then it didn’t exist - but if it suddenly did and they had why then it could soon be worth a cool million so ‘stand by’ and all that - ‘but first please repaint these white walls white again’ and that sort of thing rang like a Sousaphone inside my head because I knew THAT wasn’t the New York City I’d sought to inhabit even though it probably had always been like that too - even in the gay 1890’s and all that gilded age stuff with pearls and jewels pouring off wealthy people in their gardens and drawing rooms of facetious value while an entirely NEW and DIFFERENT world – unbeknownst to them – was about to come crashing down on them and NO ONE knew a thing (as an aside for partially that reason I always got a kick out of an old film called ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ precisely because it sets up an old world still bumbling in the face of its own creation of the new world about to subsume and smother it - all grace and gentility soon to be gone) so while I stayed there and walked all those incredible streets just looking for rhymes in the cast-offs and magic in the misery I found it was actually always there – just had to be located – and it all became my sole reason of staying and doing : study work art paint structure light form texture density photography storyline and all the rest : I was always able to love it and stay atop it so that MISERY and squalor meant nothing SEX and sensuality meant nothing and DEATH and venom too could simply be passed over and as to invite my fear away I took on roles all my own and played them well : in that I dwarfed the midgets (at least some form of achievement) and I towered over the giants too (a more stunning achievement to be sure).
If there were ever a brain-spot for tracing delusions I’d have been covered with them - easy to see and simple to find - as after a few years I was simply dog-crazed with the usual battery of events and situations but all compounded by my intense desire to keep going and the ephemeral sensation of success and achievement that kept passing through me like a cloud-mist over and over and I was sometimes elated and other times just drawn and quartered to death but I remained with it at whatever cost : painting gallery walls for twenty-five dollar days when I could – the same crisp but flat white paint almost gesso-like which went into the cover-up of anything beneath it the same scant but totally distant skinny girls behind the front desks of a hundred galleries one alike to the other so that anyone coming in immediately felt as if they were already in an alien place where they didn’t belong or that they’d entered the central headquarters of some bizarre cult of ‘we’re certainly too good for you’ aliens and these girls remained that way forever - most exquisite in their designer tight outfits and blossoming-beautiful too but seditiously dangerous in their manners (always making me think some ‘I wouldn’t want to be the one to fuck her’ but knowing I ‘would’ if I had to) and in these places I always seemed incorrect in whatever assumption I made – because they weren’t certainly about ART at all even though that’s what supposedly hung on the walls – they were instead about money and valuation and profit and gain and insider status and all the rest be damned - these people inhabited a small little club of coterie of wealth which had spread its dastardly and sticky fingers all over the ‘art-world’ as they declaimed it for their purposes of lucre and if they’d not imprimatured it yet well then it didn’t exist - but if it suddenly did and they had why then it could soon be worth a cool million so ‘stand by’ and all that - ‘but first please repaint these white walls white again’ and that sort of thing rang like a Sousaphone inside my head because I knew THAT wasn’t the New York City I’d sought to inhabit even though it probably had always been like that too - even in the gay 1890’s and all that gilded age stuff with pearls and jewels pouring off wealthy people in their gardens and drawing rooms of facetious value while an entirely NEW and DIFFERENT world – unbeknownst to them – was about to come crashing down on them and NO ONE knew a thing (as an aside for partially that reason I always got a kick out of an old film called ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ precisely because it sets up an old world still bumbling in the face of its own creation of the new world about to subsume and smother it - all grace and gentility soon to be gone) so while I stayed there and walked all those incredible streets just looking for rhymes in the cast-offs and magic in the misery I found it was actually always there – just had to be located – and it all became my sole reason of staying and doing : study work art paint structure light form texture density photography storyline and all the rest : I was always able to love it and stay atop it so that MISERY and squalor meant nothing SEX and sensuality meant nothing and DEATH and venom too could simply be passed over and as to invite my fear away I took on roles all my own and played them well : in that I dwarfed the midgets (at least some form of achievement) and I towered over the giants too (a more stunning achievement to be sure).
Sunday, June 27, 2010
AS LARGE AS IT IS
17. -AS LARGE AS IT IS-
INCIDENTAL MUSICS:
_______________
Sadness Comes in Three Sizes:
‘Wind in the pines.
Tears on my sleeve.
Spaghetti.’
_________________
The Buddha’s body cannot be measured. This is truly miraculous.
_______
The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life or of the work and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion instead raging in the dark and morality is made by humans - not found in the world - and a man must have an intellectual temperment with a delight in muscular language and the power to shock and the idea although a bit banal is that a person is responsible for his own life and external forces and events are just the raw materials out of which we make a life and we therefore have no right to blame anyone else for the result because it was ours to make or muff and this is a philosophy or psychology which is basically optimistic cheerful and a forward looking one of self-assertion of liberation from oppressive frameworks such as that created by religions or other dogmas.
Esta buchiamento elanastero tria
enomble telerado myanaro dustimistus
aeroda mueya riligant et yatdo
bosta bosta tiriamis trex no ! no
ah dey waymo lagdo tipes
ayvama ayvama norta !
That strange foreign man he is measuring the sky he is lighting rages of fire and distorting the horizon far awkward already by refraction and stealth he walks without limbs and covets whatever he wishes and in strictures so defined he widely carries forth along and over as people listen and so I wonder from what is gathering strength and why them as at that moment something flutters along past me and I see it is merely old newsprint the same old print which is covering the park with debris as papers flown around lose meaning so too I cannot hardly now read anything ands the hour though late is still enough for watching the morning light take far away the fading moon so fat still fat and settling as it sinks in whatever horizon is left for we are all different now so far from any place we’ve lived before OH DELICATE FLOWER wither not now but stay until the Spring and let me known you are there once more ‘I love the laughing vale I love the echoing hill I love the oaken seat beneath the oaken tree where all the villagers meet and laugh our sports to see’ and sitting here myself I am awed too by age and its distance of soldiers in a field schooners on the water whale masters trodding the old waterfront the sheds and shanty rank and filled with all the debris of watery ages the spars and ropes and hooks and containers and the seaman’s salty cry for food and drink that knife slammed flat or thrown hard down into a tabletop and the people straining to see out far to the watery horizon what sails approach and whose flag whose endeavor what journey closes for AS LARGE AS IT IS IT’S A SMALLER WORLD and one marked by the craft and the line the maps of men and maiden and calendars are scrawled : “Father my father you have brought forth a northern God to protect us yet he will do not good here for there are not enough vessels to contain him and ‘ere long enough we must go anayway to places his hand can protect us from the evils and travails of wicked men with messengers of gold and iron and tongues of magical weaving ad flames of light and falshood flaming and they too shall bow down before that as quickly as you have gone from sight and your words will be forgotten even less heard and it shall be as if you never appeared never lived or never brought Him here!’ and so they built three churches on the hills around so as the landed people traveled wherever they went there would be someplace for them to enter and think of that God or at the least consider His ways as they passed on their earthly missions and these churches yet stand if only their gravelly foundations and the holes they once covered for on this earth the light is as darkness and the shadows are dense and the winged butterfly alighting stays not long or withers in the heat and fire and windward yonder blows sea breezes where all men pine to go each and every seeks to leave but those who stay by force remain unhappy in their lot but steady THUS THUS THAT IS OUR LAND TODAY for even as we have conquered the moon we stumble over space…even as we have conquered the moon we stumble over space.
_____________
- THE DIVINE IMAGE -
by William Blake
To Mercy Pity Peace and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy Pity Peace and Love
Is God our father dear:
And mercy pity peace and love
Is Man his child dear.
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine
Love Mercy Pity Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen turk or jew.
Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.
___________
INCIDENTAL MUSICS:
_______________
Sadness Comes in Three Sizes:
‘Wind in the pines.
Tears on my sleeve.
Spaghetti.’
_________________
The Buddha’s body cannot be measured. This is truly miraculous.
_______
The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life or of the work and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion instead raging in the dark and morality is made by humans - not found in the world - and a man must have an intellectual temperment with a delight in muscular language and the power to shock and the idea although a bit banal is that a person is responsible for his own life and external forces and events are just the raw materials out of which we make a life and we therefore have no right to blame anyone else for the result because it was ours to make or muff and this is a philosophy or psychology which is basically optimistic cheerful and a forward looking one of self-assertion of liberation from oppressive frameworks such as that created by religions or other dogmas.
Esta buchiamento elanastero tria
enomble telerado myanaro dustimistus
aeroda mueya riligant et yatdo
bosta bosta tiriamis trex no ! no
ah dey waymo lagdo tipes
ayvama ayvama norta !
That strange foreign man he is measuring the sky he is lighting rages of fire and distorting the horizon far awkward already by refraction and stealth he walks without limbs and covets whatever he wishes and in strictures so defined he widely carries forth along and over as people listen and so I wonder from what is gathering strength and why them as at that moment something flutters along past me and I see it is merely old newsprint the same old print which is covering the park with debris as papers flown around lose meaning so too I cannot hardly now read anything ands the hour though late is still enough for watching the morning light take far away the fading moon so fat still fat and settling as it sinks in whatever horizon is left for we are all different now so far from any place we’ve lived before OH DELICATE FLOWER wither not now but stay until the Spring and let me known you are there once more ‘I love the laughing vale I love the echoing hill I love the oaken seat beneath the oaken tree where all the villagers meet and laugh our sports to see’ and sitting here myself I am awed too by age and its distance of soldiers in a field schooners on the water whale masters trodding the old waterfront the sheds and shanty rank and filled with all the debris of watery ages the spars and ropes and hooks and containers and the seaman’s salty cry for food and drink that knife slammed flat or thrown hard down into a tabletop and the people straining to see out far to the watery horizon what sails approach and whose flag whose endeavor what journey closes for AS LARGE AS IT IS IT’S A SMALLER WORLD and one marked by the craft and the line the maps of men and maiden and calendars are scrawled : “Father my father you have brought forth a northern God to protect us yet he will do not good here for there are not enough vessels to contain him and ‘ere long enough we must go anayway to places his hand can protect us from the evils and travails of wicked men with messengers of gold and iron and tongues of magical weaving ad flames of light and falshood flaming and they too shall bow down before that as quickly as you have gone from sight and your words will be forgotten even less heard and it shall be as if you never appeared never lived or never brought Him here!’ and so they built three churches on the hills around so as the landed people traveled wherever they went there would be someplace for them to enter and think of that God or at the least consider His ways as they passed on their earthly missions and these churches yet stand if only their gravelly foundations and the holes they once covered for on this earth the light is as darkness and the shadows are dense and the winged butterfly alighting stays not long or withers in the heat and fire and windward yonder blows sea breezes where all men pine to go each and every seeks to leave but those who stay by force remain unhappy in their lot but steady THUS THUS THAT IS OUR LAND TODAY for even as we have conquered the moon we stumble over space…even as we have conquered the moon we stumble over space.
_____________
- THE DIVINE IMAGE -
by William Blake
To Mercy Pity Peace and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy Pity Peace and Love
Is God our father dear:
And mercy pity peace and love
Is Man his child dear.
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine
Love Mercy Pity Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen turk or jew.
Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.
___________
Sunday, May 2, 2010
THE BIG MEXICAN SCENE
16. THE BIG MEXICAN SCENE:
"My son is in Mexico City and he would welcome you too if he were here but his job is with a bank there" said the dark-skinned lady with pearly teeth and I thanked her for that but said I was only here to catch a glimpse of the city - 'here' being the central overlook on the 21st floor balcony of some crazy red building I'd entered on 23rd and I'd seen her there too smoking with a marble-finish cigarette holder held lightly between her fingers but I figured she was just some crazy woman waiting for a drink (there was a bar off in the corner and some dumb-looking white-hatted attendant walking around) and perhaps even at that I was correct anyway but I never found out as I didn't stay that very long but she had on one or two wonderful shawls and scarves and things and I'd gotten the sense she really was something although probably just as daffy as she sounded and I didn't know anything about her son to be sure and not even what she was talking about nor why she'd have known I was coming to be 'welcomed' since the whole visit was a surprise even to myself but apparently there was something going on and I grabbed a pastry or two and sat there to see what went on and others too were milling about looking at things on the wall and admiring the view - which really wasn't much anyway - but it was all strange and felt like an appearance at any moment by Andy Warhol or Jackie Onassis or someone like that wouldn't be far-fetched even if they were both dead but probably no one here would notice anyway and they had stretched some western paintings - something like Frederick Remington would have done - over the walls and the hangings looked as if they'd been there some time but lights behind them kept moving about and I got the feel that something here was being filmed too or about to be but I never got to the bottom of any of that and in fact never read about it either in any society-feature page blowing about but some little guy did come up to me and asked "what do you think of the marriage of heaven and hell?" and I smiled and simply said back "oh like so many others it won't last a year" and he laughed and walked off but later as I got to thinking of it I decided perhaps that was name of some film they were immersed in doing maybe and maybe these were each characters from some weirder-than-I playbook they were running through and I knew that the 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell' was a Blake title and that lots of these arty types were lately keen on dramatizing William Blake but even I never thought it would happen with pastries and a Mexican but if that was what was going on I never figured it out nor heard of it again (as I said) so I figured I'd just enjoy the time and the surroundings and let happen what may and some other guy all pomaded up and wearing some really odd jacket (red black pearl-studded and cow-hide) came out and started reciting : "look ! there is the square we just came from with the promenaders and there are fewer of them now and now that the heat of the day has increased the girls are hanging closer and the sweat it is soaked through their blouses yet they are still so fine and beautiful everywhere they go and look ! look at the young boys in the shadow of the bandstand and LOOK what it is they are doing ! and there is the home of the little old lady and she is still there fanning herself on the patio and that I see now is where all the young girls are going!"
"My son is in Mexico City and he would welcome you too if he were here but his job is with a bank there" said the dark-skinned lady with pearly teeth and I thanked her for that but said I was only here to catch a glimpse of the city - 'here' being the central overlook on the 21st floor balcony of some crazy red building I'd entered on 23rd and I'd seen her there too smoking with a marble-finish cigarette holder held lightly between her fingers but I figured she was just some crazy woman waiting for a drink (there was a bar off in the corner and some dumb-looking white-hatted attendant walking around) and perhaps even at that I was correct anyway but I never found out as I didn't stay that very long but she had on one or two wonderful shawls and scarves and things and I'd gotten the sense she really was something although probably just as daffy as she sounded and I didn't know anything about her son to be sure and not even what she was talking about nor why she'd have known I was coming to be 'welcomed' since the whole visit was a surprise even to myself but apparently there was something going on and I grabbed a pastry or two and sat there to see what went on and others too were milling about looking at things on the wall and admiring the view - which really wasn't much anyway - but it was all strange and felt like an appearance at any moment by Andy Warhol or Jackie Onassis or someone like that wouldn't be far-fetched even if they were both dead but probably no one here would notice anyway and they had stretched some western paintings - something like Frederick Remington would have done - over the walls and the hangings looked as if they'd been there some time but lights behind them kept moving about and I got the feel that something here was being filmed too or about to be but I never got to the bottom of any of that and in fact never read about it either in any society-feature page blowing about but some little guy did come up to me and asked "what do you think of the marriage of heaven and hell?" and I smiled and simply said back "oh like so many others it won't last a year" and he laughed and walked off but later as I got to thinking of it I decided perhaps that was name of some film they were immersed in doing maybe and maybe these were each characters from some weirder-than-I playbook they were running through and I knew that the 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell' was a Blake title and that lots of these arty types were lately keen on dramatizing William Blake but even I never thought it would happen with pastries and a Mexican but if that was what was going on I never figured it out nor heard of it again (as I said) so I figured I'd just enjoy the time and the surroundings and let happen what may and some other guy all pomaded up and wearing some really odd jacket (red black pearl-studded and cow-hide) came out and started reciting : "look ! there is the square we just came from with the promenaders and there are fewer of them now and now that the heat of the day has increased the girls are hanging closer and the sweat it is soaked through their blouses yet they are still so fine and beautiful everywhere they go and look ! look at the young boys in the shadow of the bandstand and LOOK what it is they are doing ! and there is the home of the little old lady and she is still there fanning herself on the patio and that I see now is where all the young girls are going!"
Sunday, March 14, 2010
BILLY GROSBARD, Pt. 3 - IVERS AND JOHNSON AND ME
15. BILLY GROSBARD, Part 3 - IVERS AND JOHNSON AND ME (nyc, 1967):
The light was like a figment and I tired of the pretense so I stayed in the dark as much as I could - running amok at night mostly - through the darkened dead street loft-to loft making contacts and friends talking to this or that accomplice-in-art some performance geek making naked movies with blue sheets as backdrop in cheapened loft stage-sets hammered together with blood and sex and nails and there'd be a sandwich or two and a sink with a nozzle and a bunch of crap clothes lying around and if Noah - I used to think - if Noah saved the world for this and this alone he was sadly fucking mistaken by ever making that boat and God too should have kept his head in the clouds where it belonged for there weren't nothing alive left yet worth saving and now this was nothing but fornication for pay just like the rest of the world all those suit and tie bastards we'd see running to Wall Street and their finance-district whorehouses fucking with fingers pumping with dicks every deal and angle they could find - funding murders and wars and armaments of chemicals and bombs and death and destruction and the constabulary on their side did nothing just gave pretense and obsequies to the power and the right proclaimed by the sleazy and nasty military slowly taking things over - Fort This and Fort That filled with ass-lickers liars and killers all mixed together with a faked ideology of bravado and shame and I was for one sick of it all and I swore to myself that if I saw one more soldier-boy baby-face talking at me in favor of his war his land his country at any diner all-night eatery in front of me I swore to myself I'd kill him and I did when it had to be - my trusty Ivers and Johnson .22 never leaving my inside undershirt belt-strap just in case - it was a funny time and place to be and one you had to think about all the time - the angles had to stay fresh and stay sharp this active resistance this law-breaking fight-back to break the power and the strength of the force that was holding down and destroying society - so I was on a double-mission just like this : living on the streets alone and single but with a force behind me and a place to be and go not really lost but lost as any nonetheless and I fought back and mostly won resistance activism turnabout-is-fair-play and all that stuff and if I ever had the pawnshop blues I never felt them for a minute and I kept ALL my contacts alive and often thought often 'Billy Grosbard where are you now?'
The light was like a figment and I tired of the pretense so I stayed in the dark as much as I could - running amok at night mostly - through the darkened dead street loft-to loft making contacts and friends talking to this or that accomplice-in-art some performance geek making naked movies with blue sheets as backdrop in cheapened loft stage-sets hammered together with blood and sex and nails and there'd be a sandwich or two and a sink with a nozzle and a bunch of crap clothes lying around and if Noah - I used to think - if Noah saved the world for this and this alone he was sadly fucking mistaken by ever making that boat and God too should have kept his head in the clouds where it belonged for there weren't nothing alive left yet worth saving and now this was nothing but fornication for pay just like the rest of the world all those suit and tie bastards we'd see running to Wall Street and their finance-district whorehouses fucking with fingers pumping with dicks every deal and angle they could find - funding murders and wars and armaments of chemicals and bombs and death and destruction and the constabulary on their side did nothing just gave pretense and obsequies to the power and the right proclaimed by the sleazy and nasty military slowly taking things over - Fort This and Fort That filled with ass-lickers liars and killers all mixed together with a faked ideology of bravado and shame and I was for one sick of it all and I swore to myself that if I saw one more soldier-boy baby-face talking at me in favor of his war his land his country at any diner all-night eatery in front of me I swore to myself I'd kill him and I did when it had to be - my trusty Ivers and Johnson .22 never leaving my inside undershirt belt-strap just in case - it was a funny time and place to be and one you had to think about all the time - the angles had to stay fresh and stay sharp this active resistance this law-breaking fight-back to break the power and the strength of the force that was holding down and destroying society - so I was on a double-mission just like this : living on the streets alone and single but with a force behind me and a place to be and go not really lost but lost as any nonetheless and I fought back and mostly won resistance activism turnabout-is-fair-play and all that stuff and if I ever had the pawnshop blues I never felt them for a minute and I kept ALL my contacts alive and often thought often 'Billy Grosbard where are you now?'
Saturday, January 9, 2010
"...WILSON GOT HIS WAR..."
14. " …WILSON GOT HIS WAR…"
(from 'The Edison Papers'):
"Now time goes on has gone on passes me by after the fire we rebuilt and were up again in less than a year" he said to me still walking as we looked past the low brick wall which covered what now was a bleak yet quiet parking lot across from the Black Maria site "everything stayed pretty much the same along to the end in 1931 Wilson got his war and the creepy bastards flew into it with the rage and greed of all the world and then just as I was preparing to get out they moved again towards war footing seeking rubber and glass and radios and communications and technology like all of that could win the crafty minds of bad people that's all it was at that point bad people doing bad things to make bad money and because of that my labs went on to be legendary and Bell and Westinghouse and Edison became names to reckon with and the whole nation was lighted and people saw and heard but there I was going daff in the back of Llewellyn alone and Mina and the great piano and the room for socials and the receptions and the President came and Newark and New York and Cleveland and Boston and the whole world over came to see me and in my later dotage I mumbled and grunted and pointed and the dogs ran and I strolled quietly and I tried and tried - you know they attempted to get me to work on the electric chair and I refused simply said no you'd be better off with George Westinghouse’s system for that one and it's overlooked but I did refuse and wouldn't put my electric hand to slaughter to running currents through people and frying and cooking and burning oh I'd seen carnage in my day don't get me wrong but by then I couldn't hear and hardly see so I grunted and passed on lots of things and now as I recall even the smell of grazing and new-cut grass had turned from the natural smell to a smell of gasoline and noise and roar the roar of industry and engine and fuel and motor and I guess I started a lot of that and then by the end Ford had me old Henry took me over dismantled everything I did moved my stuff around and got strange with nostalgia and strange with situations and fakery so I stayed in Florida and withered there for a while and we moved about and Burroughs and Ford and me and others we sought refuges among ourselves but now it's gone and so am I" and with that he turned and looked back towards the old rambling factory set so strangely right on the street as if the street had always been there and no responsibility was his for anything but the sounds wafted from him as new musics to ears that had never heard before and the people flocked and visitors were seeking autographs and he did grunt and nod and sign and shake those hands proffered and the city buses rumbled right past him and the cars lined up and we crossed the deadly gasping traffic to go up to the main door at front and past the book stall and the early exhibit with the movie and the dolls that talked and the lights and the chemicals and the labs and the mills and the goldenrod plants for rubber and we stumbled eventually into the industrial entrance for workers where the big wooden time clock still stood on the wall and the vast office doors and the high office lobby and the books and the library but first he stood and stopped and punched his worker's card and we entered and then walked to what was left - the tinfoil phonograph from 1877 the strip kinetograph and electric light the power equipment and below us far below was the posthumous 1940 vault filled with and protecting Edison papers and rare examples of early works Edison Terrace and Alden Street Lakeside Avenue and Main Street Building 5 Main Laboratory machine shops stock rooms offices library and office Building 4 Metallurgical Laboratories to the Gatehouse and to the Water Tower still all extant still there all from trying trying and succeeding to produce a source of light by sending electric current through a material inside a vacuum causing it to glow and only Edison - in his words - "resisted the accepted use of high current and a low-resistance material I saw instead quite clearly that a very small filament of a highly-resistant material would glow with a lower current and last longer my first platinum wire lamp burned an hour or two but I had to improve on that and I did so by improving the vacuum inside the globe and turning to carbonized filaments one lamp right off burned for 13 and 1/2 hours that was really the beginnings as I consider of electric light but even then the bulb was useless outside the laboratory I knew that for people to benefit I would have to incorporate a new system of electric power distribution into established urban areas and that was I really feel a greater achievement than the electric lamp itself for I had to fight the endless gaslight interests and indifferent politicians and to do so I developed a system which I put in the financial district of New York City my Pearl Street Station where I developed a more powerful dynamo than ever before and combined it with a steam engine into one unit which combined worked to produce but only after I also had to design specifically for it a whole array of original devices insulated conduits mains underground junction boxes relay circuits switchboards meters fuses fuse boxes sockets and of course lamps not an easy task mind you but one that I did gladly in order to bring forth the new world as I really saw it as a new world of promise and trembling with light by 1887 I was set Menlo became merely prologue to West Orange's present now past and this is us here now all around us present with light."
(from 'The Edison Papers'):
"Now time goes on has gone on passes me by after the fire we rebuilt and were up again in less than a year" he said to me still walking as we looked past the low brick wall which covered what now was a bleak yet quiet parking lot across from the Black Maria site "everything stayed pretty much the same along to the end in 1931 Wilson got his war and the creepy bastards flew into it with the rage and greed of all the world and then just as I was preparing to get out they moved again towards war footing seeking rubber and glass and radios and communications and technology like all of that could win the crafty minds of bad people that's all it was at that point bad people doing bad things to make bad money and because of that my labs went on to be legendary and Bell and Westinghouse and Edison became names to reckon with and the whole nation was lighted and people saw and heard but there I was going daff in the back of Llewellyn alone and Mina and the great piano and the room for socials and the receptions and the President came and Newark and New York and Cleveland and Boston and the whole world over came to see me and in my later dotage I mumbled and grunted and pointed and the dogs ran and I strolled quietly and I tried and tried - you know they attempted to get me to work on the electric chair and I refused simply said no you'd be better off with George Westinghouse’s system for that one and it's overlooked but I did refuse and wouldn't put my electric hand to slaughter to running currents through people and frying and cooking and burning oh I'd seen carnage in my day don't get me wrong but by then I couldn't hear and hardly see so I grunted and passed on lots of things and now as I recall even the smell of grazing and new-cut grass had turned from the natural smell to a smell of gasoline and noise and roar the roar of industry and engine and fuel and motor and I guess I started a lot of that and then by the end Ford had me old Henry took me over dismantled everything I did moved my stuff around and got strange with nostalgia and strange with situations and fakery so I stayed in Florida and withered there for a while and we moved about and Burroughs and Ford and me and others we sought refuges among ourselves but now it's gone and so am I" and with that he turned and looked back towards the old rambling factory set so strangely right on the street as if the street had always been there and no responsibility was his for anything but the sounds wafted from him as new musics to ears that had never heard before and the people flocked and visitors were seeking autographs and he did grunt and nod and sign and shake those hands proffered and the city buses rumbled right past him and the cars lined up and we crossed the deadly gasping traffic to go up to the main door at front and past the book stall and the early exhibit with the movie and the dolls that talked and the lights and the chemicals and the labs and the mills and the goldenrod plants for rubber and we stumbled eventually into the industrial entrance for workers where the big wooden time clock still stood on the wall and the vast office doors and the high office lobby and the books and the library but first he stood and stopped and punched his worker's card and we entered and then walked to what was left - the tinfoil phonograph from 1877 the strip kinetograph and electric light the power equipment and below us far below was the posthumous 1940 vault filled with and protecting Edison papers and rare examples of early works Edison Terrace and Alden Street Lakeside Avenue and Main Street Building 5 Main Laboratory machine shops stock rooms offices library and office Building 4 Metallurgical Laboratories to the Gatehouse and to the Water Tower still all extant still there all from trying trying and succeeding to produce a source of light by sending electric current through a material inside a vacuum causing it to glow and only Edison - in his words - "resisted the accepted use of high current and a low-resistance material I saw instead quite clearly that a very small filament of a highly-resistant material would glow with a lower current and last longer my first platinum wire lamp burned an hour or two but I had to improve on that and I did so by improving the vacuum inside the globe and turning to carbonized filaments one lamp right off burned for 13 and 1/2 hours that was really the beginnings as I consider of electric light but even then the bulb was useless outside the laboratory I knew that for people to benefit I would have to incorporate a new system of electric power distribution into established urban areas and that was I really feel a greater achievement than the electric lamp itself for I had to fight the endless gaslight interests and indifferent politicians and to do so I developed a system which I put in the financial district of New York City my Pearl Street Station where I developed a more powerful dynamo than ever before and combined it with a steam engine into one unit which combined worked to produce but only after I also had to design specifically for it a whole array of original devices insulated conduits mains underground junction boxes relay circuits switchboards meters fuses fuse boxes sockets and of course lamps not an easy task mind you but one that I did gladly in order to bring forth the new world as I really saw it as a new world of promise and trembling with light by 1887 I was set Menlo became merely prologue to West Orange's present now past and this is us here now all around us present with light."
Sunday, November 15, 2009
THE PASTICHE OF DESUETUDE
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).
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).
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