RUDIMENTS, pt. 276
Making Cars
As far as I know, stockpiling
dreams has never been a
rewarding venture - though
in point of fact I'd been doing
it for years. It's a funny thing,
this life, the way we postpone
reckonings and go on creating
our own moments of fantasy, and
then calling it reality. I did that
too. Until I realized the quite
ephemeral nature of anything
that one 'desires.' If it can be
desired, it's false. The only
reality that has to be dealt with
is the one that hits you in the
face - which remains, never
the less, the one that you've
created. Really. That's all
-
In New York City a person
could - and still can, to this
day - walk Park Avenue,
from the 60's right up through
the 90's (streets, not years,
although that too is pretty
curious), and see nothing but
nameplates on the ground
floors of building after building,
20/30 per block, of psychiatrists,
psychologists, and therapists of
one sort or another. I found that
amazing. I used to walk those
streets just for the seeing of the
fancy people who'd come out of
these apartment buildings. They'd
always be perfectly attired, nothing
cheap, some sort of major clothing
and fashion presence, with 50
desirable middle-aged women
on each block. There was a lot
behind all of this. First off, as
mostly Jewish folk, I knew
already that they were a talkative
people. Italians are talkative too,
as I knew from growing up, but
they mostly are just talkative
idiots. Talking trifles, emotions,
foodstuffs, lineage. A good, solid,
Jew, on the other hand, can talk
intellectual matters, philosophy.
history, and the rest right down
one side of you and up the other.
Most every premise about things
eventually. I would try to balance
somehow their poise and preferences
against the obvious surfeit of the
varied types of 'counselors' along
the way. Something had to be
amiss. I'd remembered all those
pithy, referential scenes that went
with places like this : the hokey
cowboy gigolo scene in Midnight
Cowboy, where Jon Voight bags
one of these hot ladies; any of
those nebbish Woody Allen
movies, the early ones, that
seemed always to take place in
a country called Jewish Guilt,
or Jewish Unease. One republic
or another of some nervous-talking,
dweeby guy in the presence of
a bombshell female. J.D Salinger,
he of Holden Caulfield fame, had
grown up right along there. This
was Ground Zero for the nestlings
of psychosis, neurosis, and nervous
twaddle. I figured there had to be
some deeper, underlying format
for the outward glamour and
richness I kept seeing. This was
back in the day when a decent
bowl of soup, good soup, was
considered expensive at fully
seventy-five cents, yet up here,
along Madison, they had actual
soup restaurants and these same
outlandish people were paying
three-fifty for a bowl and coffee.
A place to sit. Endless conversation -
therapy session when not even in
therapy! Amazing.
-
It appeared to me that everyone
was uncertain, and unsure. The
world was all 'appearances' and
all these appearances here were
surely deceiving. There had to be
something behind all this unease.
-
The great Russian writer, Isaac
Babel, in 1939, was rounded up
in a Stalin-purge, along with 345
other 'prominent' people. All were
shot : Stalin himself was nothing
but a seminarian-turned-bastard,
and I hope in turn all his future
dreams turned to shit on his face
in his own version of an afterlife;
but - that's beside this point.
Babel had been arrested in the
middle of the night, on May 15,
1939. Wondrously droll, his
remark to the arresting NKVD
(secret police) officer was, 'So,
I guess you don't get much sleep,
do you?' Lovely story. Grim wit
like that always makes my day.
It's got an equivalancy (use of that
word has not yet been outlawed)
to the idea of stockpiling dreams,
as I made mention of in the opening.
These are all variants on the of the
idea that life can be what you make
it, if you will it. Babel didn't seem
to care that, through his writing,
activities, and words, he'd cast
his lot with the doomed. I think
that was what he wanted anyway.
-
He mostly wrote this great and
always expansive, portrait of old
Odessa - the large Jewish community:
Rabbis, sensitive schoolboys, and
even his stories of Jewish gangsters
with adventures of epic heroism
and trickster's ingenuity. This is
what I really loved - his description
of himself as 'a young man with
spectacles on his nose and autumn
in his heart.' That's a bit of what
I felt like, walking the broad avenue,
that very unique and weird place,
called Park Avenue. I always felt
I too should have been a small,
hunched-over, Jewish outsider in
a land full of fury. But, I wasn't.
He was crazy about writing, and
crazy about Maupasant too. He
mastered four languages. He'd
written an autobiographical tale
call 'My First Honorarium' in
which he recalled his conclusion
that 'it was pointless to write worse
than Leo Tolstoy' - meaning,
in its way, that if the work you
were about to produce wasn't to
be as good as anything by Tolstoy,
why bother? That's a tough limit.
He said, of Tolstoy, 'The electric
charge went from the earth,
through the hands, straight to
the paper, with no insulation,
quite mercilessly stripping off
any and all outer layers
with a sense of truth....both
transparent and beautiful.'
-
So, anyway, as I walked around
I was also sort of twinkle-eyed
and mesmerized by everything
around me. My father had always
worked with his hands - everything
about him was push and brawn, pull
and heave, make it larger, stronger.
None of this had much to so with
thought or reflection. The problem
was (and it wasn't for me a 'problem,'
rather what I'm meaning to say is
that to the people like my father
it presented TO THEM a problem,
that of my not being what they'd
sought me to be) that I was already
far gone; I lived in a world of
thought, and the premise everywhere
within me was that at any point, first,
lightning could strike and it was
imperative that I remain prepared for
it (which in my best-dream case meant
to be prepared always with some seven
or eight hundred pages of writing), and,
second, that whatever I was doing was
always better than what others were
doing - with or without their hands.
All around me, outside of my artst
and writer bubble, were the usual
fools walking : the accountants and
plumbers and lawyers and stockbrokers
and carpenters and tradesmen and
store-keeps, all making a bundle of
money but doing absolutely nothing.
I was always ready for the anything,
which never happened anyway.
Lots of people go around barking
about being 'writers' or 'poets' or
even 'artists' - but with nothing
to show to prove it. That wasn't me.
I always kept the work at the ready
to produce and prove it, if ever and
when needed. I felt that shrinks,
head-doctors and psychologists
would kill all that running impulse
anyway - they operate in the realm
of making everyone normal. I was not
about to begin stockpiling 'normal.'
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