RUDIMENTS, pt. 20
(Making Cars)
I had a friend once - that same
one who used to laugh at everything -
who one time took his watch, a large
watch-face it was, with a silver, metal
watch band, and covered the watch-face
with silver metallic tape. Very carefully,
very fastidiously - a perfectly straight
alignment where the rows of tape met
and overlapped. It made for an odd,
clunky sight on his wrist, and that is
how he wore it, for a long time. No
concern for time itself (I don't know
if it worked or not, nor if he kept
winding it). People had the strangest
reactions to it, and all he did was laugh.
The irony to him was the irony of time
and no-time, utility and uselessness,
signification and meaning. Alas, poor
fellow is dead now and I guess he took
his non-watch with him into the void.
-
It made me think anyway - of what we are
signifying, or attempting to signify, by the
things we do. What little usefulness is our
time here, and what do we do it with it?
I guess we add the meaning ourselves, and
when that runs out we are dead. We face
death when its alternative becomes life
without meaning. Like a watch-face no
longer see-able. Unlucky losers. Yes.
I'd always considered myself one of them.
The signification of time in, say, music, is
an important part of the notation. By the
book, there are strict meters and timing
phrases for each bit of music. Once you
'lose' that time, that particular piece of
music too is gone. That's the way for
unlucky losers - but then you get
someone like Dave Brubeck, a jazz guy
whose entire career was made up of
jagged and broken time, meters out of
sync, and he's a huge, worldwide success.
Figure that one out on your metronome.
-
If luck has any part in life, I'd never known
it. To me timing and luck have seemed very
important, though I think both of them have
reverse realities behind the fabric of things
- what we think we see. That's a bit of what
gets called 'charisma'. Perfect attunement.
(Being attuned to the secret moments of
time and space). I think that's how people
become famous, renowned, rich and all.
And I also think it has very little to do with
anything except a sort of karmic or destined
birth - I think all that is taken care of way
ahead of time, behind the 'fabric' I mentioned.
Really, we are pretty hopeless creatures.
-
Evil has its sceptre, and rules with it.
It's a constant struggle. An Australian
aborigine will never speak to you; rather,
they communicate telepathically, in a silence
that goes Being to Being. Your body recognizes
it, and understands the message. That doesn't
only work for Aborigines. Again it's an
attunement (I find it works quite well, for
instance, for me). On the streets of NYC,
and in the meeting and mingling with people,
I use it a lot - reading and speaking very well,
as it were. To a surprising degree I've always
been able to hit it off very well with people, any
people, in all ways of life and self-hood. I prepare
first, of course, and only use it when I feel the
receptivity first. It's a bit like timing; you just
have to stay with it. But you don't want to waste
a beat either; so you have to know that first.
Of all the things, I've always had it figured out
ahead of me - what's happening now that's so
weird is something that the younger me never
dealt with - and I can feel it and read it going
on. It's the mind and body rolling over, just
slowly preparing for death. I never gave any
of that so much thought as now - the wherewithal
to both keep it going and end it too. It's a very
slow dissolve and it's troubling to me because it's
nothing I've ever had to deal with before. In these
earlier days I've here been telling about, all was
new and everything was wide open; now it's
getting closed up, confined. It's mysterious,
and, wow, I never thought I'd be facing that -
and I wonder how these millions and millions
of others who've died before me went about
it and handled all that.
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