RUDIMENTS, pt. 43
Making Cars
Science is mostly about naming things.
At one level anyway. Philosophy is a bit
like that too, except that in Philosophy
there is supposed to be a conceptual
meaning behind things. Good luck with
that one. The good thing about Philosophy,
on the other hand, is that it does allow you
to step, or walk, backwards and talk your
way out of most anything. Once you put
a name on something in the 'real' world,
you're stuck. Like the planet. 'Pluto.'
-
As I was out, walking through that real
world, everything around me was getting
filtered into me. Not in a narcissistic way
- I'm not meaning that - but in away
that afforded me both shelter and progress.
I had never had that before; more than likely
I'd had one or the other but never the two
together. All through my early years I
never much understood why things were
as they were. Furniture that was kept
covered, let's say - to me that was like
having the Book of Revelation but never
opening it. Who wants to sit on clear plastic?
The concept behind that is that the owner
of this junk is able to show off their
finely-made and proud possession of
fabric and furniture BUT, apparently, not
well-off enough, behind their facade, to
replace it as and when it wears out. But,
the purpose of furniture, I'd think, is use.
You name it, call it what you will - sofa,
couch, settee - and by naming it you own
the concept, yet you falsify that concept by
obscuring the factor of 'use,' which is really
the only factor and reason why these
things exist. That was the sort of thinking
adults always seemed to do - a bit of
denial and insistence. I never was able to
understand that, and never did much want
to. Like, all our fathers had gone to war;
only slightly talked about it, but the world
was not really changed in any way because
of it, and that was never talked about.
Whatever they had done, by ten simple
years later they'd all allowed themselves
to be led by the nose into the roles of
consumer, dupe, fool, and know-nothing.
That too baffled me. What had any of
it been worth? To come home to a little
house, with a room you 'named' a 'den,'
say, and put a 'television' in? Those were
all words, chosen and selected to represent
something. But useless somethings.
They simply threw everything else away.
Except maybe for a small, dark stream of
beat, angry, existential-type non-conformists,
their 'America' had been fought over, the
world around it salvaged, and then, betrayed.
Mama got her kitchen; Dad got his den.
-
In Avenel, all of life was continuity. It was
a really simple place, new houses, only really
a street at all of a few of the most simple,
displaced kinds of businesses, and then the
highway, where you could maybe find
something if you needed. Before the advent
of 'today' there was none of the centered,
parking-strip, clustered small business
fronts as there are today, every 2000 feet.
Today there's junk everywhere, and everyone
brings a car to the junk. 60 years ago, no
way; there was little semblance of that and
places like 'Avenel,' if they did exist off
a map, were simple pass-throughs not
worth a darn. I truly came from nowhere.
-
I got fascinated, and quickly, by places that
had a past - even the most rudimentary of
a past. As a Boy Scout, kid-jerk, we'd camp
in Edison at 'Raritan Arsenal.' And also at
Camp Kilmer. I was maybe 9 years old and
what attracted me to those places was their
'space' and the way they'd managed it. It was
military stuff, yes, so that it was in its way
regimented. Not regimented like plastic
furniture coverings regiment a room, but
rather just plainly and mathematically lined
out in a quaint military-fashion of thinking.
Barracks, mess hall, parade ground, path,
barracks, path to parade ground, path to
mess hall. You had to think in those terms;
terms wherein artificial words took on real
meaning by what they did. Utility. There
was rank and unity and protocol and - guess
what - things were made of wood! Yes,
all these buildings - nothing large, all
human scale - were just repeated one
after the other and the layouts were the same.
But inside, you got the feel of space, totally
different from the feel I'd learned to live with.
It's difficult to explain, and here I am 60 years
later trying to tell of it, but it telegraphed, to
me another sort of living, a different view of
life. If you could live (forget the military aspect)
with that peculiar sort of reflective quality, and
think about it all as you did, it seemed to me
you'd have a much better grasp on life and
possibility. Today, as I go to places what
somehow maybe still retain some idea of that,
although everything is ninety percent gone, I
can still in my head run it all backwards and
return to that place. Cars on gravel, wooden
buildings centered on a grassy plot, genteel
shadings of overhangs and decorated eaves, a
sort of silence, a short-form of solitude, a
reservation for place and patience. That's
where most parts of me still live, or strive
to, or want to get to. I think that's why I
write, and why I create. It's like naming, but
it's making - in a philosophical way I own
the concept by inhabiting it. No plastic on
my reality at all. It's all just there.
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