Thursday, December 7, 2017

10,265. RUDIMENTS, pt. 158

RUDIMENTS, pt. 158
Making Cars
I was never able to understand 
how man's workmanship was 
able to change things and just 
let it be left like that. I would 
look out over a piece of land, 
even the parcels down the end 
of my (new) street, and think 
of what I portrayed as 'ancient 
locals,' -  which of course weren't 
that at all  -  and the way they must 
have walked along and lived on 
these lands. It was all imaginary, 
I suppose. Yet, what did become 
our 'roads' like Rt. One and St. George 
Ave, (Rts. 35 and 27), were old 
traverse paths and trails of Indians. 
And down the bottom of what was 
called 'Chain 'O Hills Road' and 
'Merrill Park' was historically the 
spot at the waterway and large gully 
where an important set of Indian 
paths once converged, but it was 
all unrecognizable if you went at it
point by point. At the park waterway, 
yes the old red-slated rocks made 
cliffs, and the water teemed, and 
the roads that the white man made 
were all named by their location
  -  East Cliff Road, West Cliff, 
South Cliff, etc. By that sense, it 
must all have once been as clear 
to the newcomers as the nose on 
their faces what they were destroying. 
I could see it all but it was more by 
sense, or by spirit. What I could never 
get over was how we'd  -  meaning 
settlers and 'we' white people interlopers  
-  managed to just cavalierly destroy 
everything ever once good. The 
waterways to begin with. There were 
sections of water in my area that 
were good for nothing  -  black slime, 
fetid, tires and lumber. The water 
looked dead and sick. It hardly flowed, 
and there were pipes and conduits 
everywhere for it to flow through 
when it did. There were a few auto
junkyards in a row, from which oils
and waters, mixing, flowed like a
thin grease, right into streams. Piles
 of cars, metal and glass everywhere. 
Horrid. How we'd ever gotten to 
that point, I couldn't understand  
-  factories and jobs, runoff and 
junk, all for what? So people like 
everyone's Dad could have some 
scummy job by which to just 
continue and advance the whole 
mess. As kids, what were we supposed 
to do when everything that worsened 
this was considered good and progress 
and better? No one ever piped up 
about a thing. Mothers and fathers
of the world, unite!
-
One thing I ascertained over 
time was that wherever one 
'started out' or began, that 
became that person's own
number-one-point, the place 
from which they begin all their 
references, and anything behind 
them can be ignored as 'historically' 
unimportant or hard to grasp. 
Which is why, for example, we 
have such a difficult time 
understanding the 1920's, 1930's. 
Just reading Gatsby is a chore. 
I should say 'we' meaning my 
generation anyway, which still 
makes those references. The new 
people, for them I guess looking 
back to 1985 is about the same 
thing. So, as a child, when I'd see
old Mr. Withers in his '51 Chevy
tooling down the street to get to
 Route One, all he ever knows and
knew, then  -  are roads and byways 
and the accessibility of cars and 
paving. The world before that to 
him was myth. His father's stories 
may have been to to him, yes, 
about crank-starts and small-town 
dusty roads and all, but old Withers 
himself now only knows this. The 
'the' of his life. And it's a sliding 
scale for everyone. I wanted back, 
I wanted out and somehow quickly. 
But I never got it and all it ever did 
was complicate everything for me. 
I ended up in the absolute most 
diametrically-opposed place to 
all that that there could have been 
(NYC, 1960's) but at least there 
I was able to find and commune 
with certain varieties of the 
ghostly past that still lived on. 
People buildings, waterways, 
habits and forms. It suited me 
fine. Scary, but fine.
-
In NYC I got to meet a few 
Indians too  -  real tribal 
people who surprised the 
Hell out of me when I first 
met them and realized what 
they were. I'd never given 
any thought to their being a 
real carryover from those old 
peoples and days. But here 
and there were lingering patches, 
groups of Native Americans  - 
they'd held out and professed 
old ways. I'd read of old patches 
of people in what later became 
Central Park  -  an entire Negro 
Village by the w70's that had 
gotten wiped away, church and 
all, patches of Irish squatter 
encampments too. And, yes, 
there were evidences of Indian 
tribal people deep within the 
wooded area of what became 
the park who'd been displaced 
too. But no one ever really said 
what happened to them, where 
they'd ended up, and how it all 
went down. I never really found 
out. They mostly all lived  -  those 
I'd meet  -  in squalor along the 
lower east side, with all the other 
squalor of immigrants, lost people, 
those who didn't know the 
language, etc  -  all those who'd 
just gotten stalled somewhere in 
about the 1940's and just stayed 
that way. It was weird. Like being 
George Jetson and going to visit 
Fred Flinstone. It wasn't as if they 
lit fires with flint, or cooked over 
open flames and such. That's not 
what I mean. It was more that, 
without complaining, they 
somehow had taken in the 
low-position given to them, 
and lived with it and moved along 
in that manner. One didn't 
necessarily HAVE to modernize. 
The world still allowed for old 
patches and places, the distinguished 
tipple of another way of being. 
That was extremely hard to grasp 
in the middle of a huge steel island 
of concrete and glass, of people 
scrambling over each other to 
death, stressing out to gain an inch 
of whatever they thought important. 
So different. No wonder the air and 
the waters were screwed up. I never
did get to ask any one of those natives
what they thought of what we'd made
of everything  -  NYC and all  -  but to
be truthful, they never seemed phased,
bothered, or concerned about any part
of it. They just went about their ways.
I guessed they just had their own
numbers and their own understandings.

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