10,016. RUDIMENTS, pt. 91

RUDIMENTS, pt. 91

Making Cars

I guess I'd have to say most of my

time was spent finding place. There

were some hundred 'different' ones,

and after a while it just became a

form of role-playing. I felt like any

stupid rock-star or personality would

feel, making it all up as I went along,

 to different audiences; seeking and

finding something to cling to while

yet keeping and holding to my own,

sorely-won, personal precepts. I was

adrift in a new and different world.

Most men of assumptions speak 

first, think only later. It's not as

difficult as it may seem  -  in fact 

it's easier for the herd, at most a 

moment's displeasure. I have tried 

in a million ways to go over and 

over the things of all my days, 

and what's left is a startling mass 

of moments  -  things piled up 

which only now I sift through 

and find many of those working

'assumptions' which went with 

them still fighting to get out. 

But I've overcome a lot of that  

-  believe me, truly overcome. 

As I turn my mind inward it 

seems that each particularity of 

what I'd been brought up with 

had been false or at least false 

to the effect that it first demanded 

the adoption of false premises by 

which it was undergirded. And 

none of that has ever stopped, only 

gotten worse. Because of it, I have 

a million enemies, not people, but

demons, spectres which still haunt. 

I admit to that  -  but I also own 

up to the fact that  my own life has 

been a constant re-alignment of these

things. All the usual psychological 

components of clinical behavior, 

perhaps, but one of 'those' people, 

I'm not (psychology types [see 

'How I Began Writing Drama']).  I

was brought up  -  rather distastefully  

-  in a home with an atmosphere where 

there was not much of anything except 

sentiment. It was an 'Italian Catholic' 

milieu, if those nettlesome words 

need be applied. But it was way 

more than that. It was two people 

(my parents) yet embroiled in their 

own overwhelming adventures and 

personal sometimes almost horrific 

scenes, trying to get through all of 

that but having to ignore most of 

the 'real' aspects of that as they 

pressed in. There was never any 

self-reflection or rejection  -  they 

bought into and went along with 

all of what they'd been somehow 

presented with as the right way 

and the correct route. There are 

millions of ways to interpret a 

rejectionist's life. They had both 

been rejected, for sure. A rejectionist

is someone trying to fight their way 

out of the middle of vast confusion, 

but having or allowing no other 

means to do so except by reaction. 

They sought after no learning, they 

delved after no deeper threads. They 

accepted the life they'd been handed 

as being of a part and parcel with 

'tradition'  -  a tradition of racial 

characteristics, old European 

geography. They considered it 

all valid. What a 'rejectionist' never 

realizes is that the 'society' they're 

so set after achieving does not want

them  -  spews them out like dirt, 

in turn only rejects them again  -  

messes with their heads, takes 

their money hand over foot, 

breaks up their time with rules 

and regulations, sessions of this 

and that, calendar blocks of time, 

scheduled plans, boilerplate formats 

of social and political belief; all while

convincing them that this is not so. 

-

Society aims to make a bureaucrat

out of each and every person. They 

are always confused, not knowing 

where to turn. Not realizing there 

is nowhere to turn except within. 

And within equals the Kierkegaardian 

sense of dread and fury and might : 

the decisiveness of singularity. 

Singularity must be achieved first.

ahead of and before anything else  

- because it invalidates any and all

of the previous characteristics I've

just mentioned, which are merely

the characteristics of control and

duplicitous autocracy. A Dictatorship 

of the Ridiculous Folly. Politics is 

certainly not the answer  -  though 

those who profit from politics try 

with all their might to drag you in 

and think that it is. Consumerism 

is not the answer  -  that's more 

control and more uselessness. 

Having a good time, being 

entertained, is not the answer  -  

though that's mostly all of what's 

thrown at you : inanity, idiocy, 

stupidity, race, sex, perversion, 

acceptance. You are given no 

choice except the societal choice of

going along. My parents, helpless 

as they were  -  nay, primitive as 

they were  -  were more like 

cave-people in a diorama within 

some deep and dank museum 

somewhere, wondering what 

that distant thing called 'fire' 

was that they'd glimpsed; still 

painting their own frail pictures 

on dark cave walls, they were 

yet set adrift, lost and functioning 

slightly on the tundra and the 

plains and steppes of a brave new 

world, to them. But, like so, so 

many others, even today, they 

never made the leap, found the 

manner by which to surpass, 

to best and overcome, all that 

was holding them down. The one, 

vast myth of empowerment and 

overcoming, which was presented 

to them and which they readily 

accepted, was more control and 

regulation and stipulation in the 

mega-guise of 'Absolutes'. The 

bifurcation of their lives had 

been broken down into the two 

absolutes  -  the sacred or the 

profane, the secular and the 

religious  -  as if there was to 

be any difference at all. They 

bought into all of this, each 

delicious but foul and poisonous 

morsel. Somewhere in the midst 

of this, came I. It's been said in 

magical circles that we only know 

a minute portion of reality, that 

we are greater and grander than 

anything we can imagine, and 

that we 'choose' our family and 

situation for the psychic-adventure 

values they will bring us  -  all known 

about beforehand, all readied for, 

and all accepted previously. No 

undue surprises, just what I've 

always termed, in my years of writing, 

'Lesson Learning Catching Up With 

Itself.' That's worked for me. Perhaps 

then, if we choose it, I had chosen this 

thin branch on which to try a stand. 

Who knows? And I'll never know, 

because it's part and parcel of the 

doing, the not-knowing. I came, 

I somehow survived, and I got 

here. All of my steps were put 

before me  -  of which you've been 

reading some here. Infancy as a 

blur, a muddle, a story-line repeated 

back to me. I know nothing of it. 

 small, internalized memories I 

may have of things, start well after 

that  -  the scrapbooked reality of 

infancy and toddler years somehow 

muddied or yet blurred, if ever there 

at all. Maybe it's waiting to pounce 

back at me and all recur in those 

famed 'reviews' of the last moments 

of Life  -  on the way out, a distant 

movie for the final flight. Language 

becomes the gift the never stops giving, 

though devilish as it is it can destroy 

as well. In my parents' household, in 

Avenel, in fact, language was a stepchild 

of nothing at all. No care was taken, 

nor given, to words, nor to the structure 

of things to which words can lead  -  

the articulation of ideas and internality, 

the revocation of the 'rejectionism' 

fabric so easily accepted. My house, 

the place in which I was raised, only 

had language as utility and message  

-  the to-do's and whens and hows of 

things. Many people commented upon 

my father's brawn, his muscularity  -  

back then  -  and how he got things 

done; throwing spadefuls of dirt 

around, cutting wood, building things, 

altering the 'scape, as it were. That 

was, for his time, his own communion 

with the world  -  though unknown 

to him. His physicality was his 

response somehow to the void. 

The nagging void of the absence 

of language. There was nothing 

finer than base. Hammers, saws, 

dirt, chisels, concrete and lumber. 

It was all of one contingent. When 

he was up against the opposite of 

that  -  as I mentioned long ago, 

those neighbors who walked home 

from the trains, with their overcoats 

and briefcases and tophats (few those 

these neighbors were) he harbored 

anxiety, professed a hatred, swore 

off them and their effete ways. It was 

instant, the response didn't even take

a minute to boil before brimming over.

I always thought of it as his reaction

to language, or against language.  

Stupid on my part, yes, but as a 

ten year old, or whatever, what else 

was I to condition my response as? 

He wanted me to be like him? In his 

revolt and festering anger at the 

scenes around him, he sought to 

duplicate me into another version 

of him  -  shouting down or 

belaboring points of distinction 

between 'world' and 'theory'. To 

him, the world was this harsh 

terrain he dealt in. To him, the 

'others' represented theory  -  

those who did not dig and cut 

and struggle and fight. You may 

not understand or agree with 

what I'm stating here, but through 

the eyes of 'me', the representative 

atom in this quest of self, that's what 

it always appeared as. To fight back, 

my father would build  -  massively 

overbuilt things, yes, but he built. 

Piles of lumber turned into cornices 

and shevles and alcoves. Sheds and 

doorways. Cellar entrances and 

overhangs and eaves and shelters. 

Fences. In somewhat a fury, he 

built single-handidly back-room 

extensions, six-room attics, complete 

hallways and cedar closets. It just 

went on. He simply translated the 

world into 'things'. I was speechless, 

mostly, never knowing what to say  

-  certainly not to offer an object-lesson 

in alternatives. By age eleven or twelve, 

there was no real alternative for me 

but to leave. I had to get out of the 

stifling atmosphere which had put 

me here, showing no alternatives, 

allowing nothing else. I did not want 

that form of life.  Simply knew I did 

not. My reality I'd already encrypted, 

and it included (already, early on) 

words and books and booklets and 

information and writing, colors and 

forms, finesse and gradation. I was 

up against a solid wall, totally, and 

I knew it. A writer named Mary Jo 

Bang put it like this once : 'It's like 

sleep if sleep were a film that didn't 

include you, but no, whatever is 

happening, you are always in it, 

the indispensible point of view.'

-

I think it all has to do with what 

you care to believe; from top to 

bottom, that's the essential point. 

It just goes on from there. Here's 

a for-instance in, even, the present 

day : start of Autumn, ten million 

morons, in the name of their 

'ecology' awareness and drive, 

raking leaves, endlessly blowing 

them, noisily piling them with 

enormous leaf-blowers, hiring 

endless landscape companies 

with marginal employees slaving 

away to keep yards cleared and

looking perfectly serene. It's a 

mad-person's paradise, of course, 

totally off the wall, and un-natural 

as all get out. The leaves are meant 

to fall, decompose, become the 

composted and enriched soil for 

the future,  the loam of Nature's 

own love. Yet, having been 

propagandized into believing 

they only do what they must do  

-  these people expend more energy, 

at every level, in order to 'supposedly' 

reach their end-results of a clean 

ecology  -  it's asinine. Leaf bags, 

replete with company names printed 

on them, corporate monster hardware 

names and not, are left at curbside 

for municipal pick-up. The leaf 

bags themselves are an entire 

other industry, complete with 

the processes of the printing 

and gluing which goes on to make

them  -  an industry which uses

endless resources, mechanical and

fuel, transport trucks, distribution, 

etc. Then the municipal trucks and 

fuel, and wages, which go into the 

pick-up and  drop-off collection 

places. The endless fuel and travel 

exploits of the huge landscape 

trucks, the noise and energy use 

of the mechanical blowers  -  etc., 

etc. I'll stop there. Suffice it to say, 

without even a thought, this 

endeavor is everywhere undertaken 

in the name of 'ecology' and 'green' 

recycling, etc., etc. No one thinks. 

They all accept, and just go on 

about their merry, stinking ways. 

It's all a belief system adopted, 

and never thought about again.