Sunday, October 8, 2017

10,037. RUDIMENTS, pt. 98

RUDIMENTS, pt. 98
Making Cars
I was always a walking wounded, of 
my own wars, slugging through some
sick 1960's and '70's minefield of all
that assorted mortars of crap I'd been
lobbed and force-fed. Truth wins out.
Sometimes I would get tired of the 
same old thing  -  it still happens. It 
seems like each year very many of the 
same stupidities get unearthed and 
brought back out to the light of day. 
By lazy reporters and feature writers, 
or whatever. Everything of the mundane 
and  ordinary world seemed always to
be on replay. For instance, how many 
times, approaching Nov. 11, has 'that' 
article again been dragged out in which 
a mention is made of the atrocious quality 
of WWI, (and they're always about 5 wars
behind, too), poison gas, mustard gas, 
trench warfare, earthen bunkers, the 
dead littering the field, etc.? And of 
course the annual and ever-present 
(somehow always emblematic) mention 
of 'western front' farmers, even today, 
working those the now-peaceful fields, 
and unearthing the bones of soldiers
killed whose bodies were hurriedly 
'buried where they fell.' And,of course, 
the 'ghostly armies of the missing, whose 
bodies were shredded or vaporized.' And
then they pile on with today's version, 
except now they're called 'warriors', and 
like some video-game extension they're
supposed to be applauded for their valor
and sacrifice. Yeah, sure. They should
put an end to that crap, once and for all.
And oh dear  -  all that. Appearances try 
to make some lineal peak from the 
Civil War to WWI, where it is topped, 
and then a slower, downward curve 
(of what would we call it, better-quality 
warfare?) to WWII, Korea and Vietnam. 
Such tarnished crap. On Inman Avenue, 
as a young boy, let me say that a 
proportion of the fathers there were 
wounded veterans  -  the shrapnel, 
the limp, the scar. Nothing much was 
ever mentioned, and I don't know 
what these guys took to bed with 
them each night nor if there terrors 
or unfinished arguments with self 
underway.  The Centopath in London, 
of which I saw pictures in about 
4th grade, was a memorial built to, 
as it says 'The Glorious Dead.' After 
WWI, the 'quality' of that glory was 
altered. Apparently, no one ever 
died so nobly again. War movies were 
another joke. There were many of 
them made as the 50's went by  -  
most of them rather sleazy re-tellings 
of fanciful versions of stories in the 
'Favor-America' light : big brash forceful, 
strong men, innocent perhaps but just 
as tough, fighting the ridiculously sloppy 
and stupid enemy. German or Japanese, 
to be belittled and hacked. I couldn't 
see this stuff, even then, without gagging, 
wondering 'do people really fall for this?' 
It combined so many aspects of a ruthless 
righteousness, stars, directors, film moguls, 
actors and actresses, all walking the same 
line. A party line to be sure. Just like the 
old phones, everyone babbling at once, 
aloud and over one another, about 
nothing at all.
-
On Clark Place, around the corner, I 
had a friend, in about 1957 or 58, Jan 
Teppert, whose house burned. It was a 
novel experience, something I'd never 
seen before. The next morning, after 
the blaze, their stuff was all over the 
street, things strewn about, just thrown, 
some soggy and wet, with the gaping, 
burned wreck of the house and its open, 
black holes in the roof. It was quite the 
fire. By a year later, the house was rebuilt, 
fixed over, changed slightly, and they'd 
moved back in. Not much was said, but 
it was startling for me to see the quick 
destruction, the surprise destruction, 
that could take place so quickly. And 
then, just as surprising, the way things 
all were returned quickly enough, to 
order. I don't know where they stayed 
or what happened, but Jan Teppert 
stayed around during the entire time  -  
remaining in school. It was only years 
later, in 1978 to be exact, in the midst 
of a huge snowstorm (by our standards; 
10 or 12 inches) that we were tooling 
around in my father's big Plymouth Satellite 
station wagon (few cars were braving the
roadways), taking someone somewhere, 
with my father in the car, that we chanced 
on picking up, of all people, this Jan Teppert.
She was trying her best for a walk, about 
about three miles, through the storm, to a 
nearby pharmacy to pick up medicine 
for someone or something, badly needed. 
I gave her the ride, and return ride. She 
was, at that time, living somewhere else 
but not really far off from her old, 
burned-house location. There were 
few cars out, as I said, and I was slowly 
braving new car paths through slightly 
drifted streets  -  really no big deal, 
but people panic. We talked, compared 
notes while passing the drive-time, 
and she's never been heard from 
again. So do things pass. It's funny,
too, how those treacherous, strange and
slow car rides trough deep snows, freshly
fallen, with so few about and roads snow-
clogged, remind me of those bombed-out
cities in movie wartime scenes.
Sometimes it all just felt like a drag-line, 
with me trying to tell others about 
something they just didn't share. This 
place. Look around you. This place. 
In the mid-50's there were such things
as 'candy stores'. Open arrays of penny 
and nickel candies, a soda 'fountain' 
where, for a nickel or as dime, you 
could get a cherry Coke, or a regular 
Coke or even a chocolate soda, from 
'fountain service'  -  which meant, 
much like as tavern bar is, there was 
a soda guy behind the counter and 
he'd make these drinks from syrups 
and seltzer water, serve them to you, 
seated at the counter, in a glass with 
a straw and a napkin. We'd play 
stickball for a few hours, get all 
sweated up, and then cross the street 
at the school, near the ballfields, and 
get a fountain soda with a nickel or 
dime we had, whether purloined from 
Mom's money or not. To us kids it 
was living in Heaven. There was a 
wall rack of comics and magazines, 
a long shelf with all the newspapers 
arrayed upon it, the candy displays, 
and, towards the side/back, glass 
cases of school supplies, pens and 
pencils, crayons and erasers, notebooks, 
etc. A veritable office supply store as 
well; greeting cards, office items, 
paper clips, rubber bands. There 
were three or four of these places 
I knew of, within a fifteen minute 
simple walk down one road or another. 
The one we frequented the most was the
nearest  -  Murray and Martha's, as I've
back previously explained somewhere.
-
Over the years now it's become apparent 
to me that if one cannot measure 
achievements by the things associated 
with success and such  -  big cars, big 
and multiple houses, large bank accounts  
-  then the least to be done is to claim 
every little thing as an achievement; in 
a way to 'testify' for oneself. I know I do 
it. I can't measure anything by the terms 
of success that are tangible and normal, 
so I can only goad myself along by saying 
that I've done well today in the writing 
of those fifteen paragraphs, those seven 
poems and the answering of some 
correspondence and comments and 
notes, the paying of a few bills, the 
reading and noting of this or that. 
It's an incremental system of simple 
self-analysis or self-realization, 
acknowledging to myself, at least, 
that I've done something, no matter 
what others would say or think. A way
to continue bucking oneself up. Small, 
quiet, details. Incremental, deliberate, 
tidy. It's sort of the way I always 
noticed the people to whom I looked 
up, the literate perfectionists, the 
ones whose lives always seemed in 
right order  -  thinkers, writers. These 
were never noisy or active people, just 
more sideliners, watchers, people 
stand-offish who always were just 
out of the boundaries of whatever 
activity was underway.  There were 
always a few of them along the way. 
Considered loners, not very normal 
people, they'd somehow nonetheless 
got mixed into the flavor of people 
who'd ended up in odd-mix places 
like Avenel. More dark city-dwellers 
they were, I always thought, the sort 
I'd like to be  -  the 1920's stalwarts, 
the dark ones in the shadows, walking 
between buildings, stopped over a bit, 
holding their hat onto their heads in a 
brisk wind between buildings. In my 
head, the soundtrack for that would 
always be Borodin's 'In the Steppes 
of Central Asia.' Wonderful piece. 
I may have read, somewhere along 
the way, some items about darkness 
and doubt   -   as they reflected the 
bleak and barren post-war world, 
the angst and the tropes of existentialism 
and nihilistic ruination. The world 
did seem, in a few ways, to have just 
fallen apart without any of the energy 
to put itself back together. No one 
seemed to have any light ideas; 
everything was dark and heavy. 
But that was just the way I liked it  
-  walking at night, seeing things 
under the cover of dusk or darkness, 
the barren Winter trees everywhere, 
the sad girls in their dark, long coats, 
the lines of headlights, stumbling 
through traffic, along their ways 
in the night. I didn't care much 
about anything else : bromides and 
Gershwins, talk show hosts and 
bakeries. How many stories could 
I contain within myself? I never 
knew, but I tried staying up on 
things. As I've said, deliberation 
became the game, and the provocation  
-  I made it my way to stay steady 
with what I was doing. One point 
at a time, my small notebooks were
filled, my books were read. I never 
knew when to stop.
-
As Philip Roth once put it, about 
being human, how we know we're 
alive, I post this : 'It's getting them 
wrong that is living, getting them
wrong and wrong and wrong and then, 
on careful reconsideration, getting 
them wrong again. That's how we 
know we're alive : we're wrong.' I may 
have gotten plenty of things wrong 
in my time, but I've never regretted 
that. The instant an interpretation 
comes back to haunt you, it's over. 
Borodin's music, that 'Central Asia' 
piece, for instance, it's always reminded 
me of 1924. Just like that 1924, the 
mid-1920's, when my grandmother
was 24, when the world was still dark 
and serious, Henry Miller lurking 
around lower Manhattan, Hart Crane 
running along Bedford and Barrow, 
all those people of Chumley's and of 
the White Horse, writers, artists, 
argumentatives, brooders. I could 
close my eyes and be there; envisioning 
perfectly all the smoke and smokestacks, 
the truck-paths and workbays, the 
docks and the wharfside sheds; 
sound sense, feel, smell. It was 
solitary, lone, sacred, special. 
Nothing like now  -  lurid and 
well-lit. All. As Mary Oliver once 
said of the forest  -  'Nothing in the 
forest is charming, and nothing in 
the forest is cute.' This old world 
within the new world was my forest; 
where I tried to dwell.

No comments: