Sunday, October 1, 2017

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.


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