RUDIMENTS, pt. 375
(tendentious totterings in avenel)
One thing that always
fascinated me was a title
by Nathaniel Hawthorne,
from 1831. 'My Kinsman,
Major Molyneaux.' As I
sit here now, lo, these years
later, I realize I've still never
read it. But the title yet grabs.
The references say it's a short
story, which I knew; then they
say it's a coming-of-age tale,
fraught with symbolism, of a
young nation. By the tag end
of a life, like mine now, one
goes through mental lists of
things, things to forget about,
and things to get done. I think
I'll track that one down.
-
There's a certain simplicity
that coats simple people. I
see it often enough, and, in
fact, grew up with it deeply
in Avenel. Was guilty of it
some myself. Of course, it's
a small-town trait - made of
the central-square churches, the
sort of manifest 'benevolence'
preached about god and family
and country. They just leave out
all the bad things, that's all. It
was OK 200 years ago, but is
certainly not OK now. What
we're left with, thereby, is a
million out-of-place little
churches with graveyards
attached - old and weathered
and leaning with stones and
the forgotten - and mystery.
Which only compounds
what we can't cope with.
These dead are always with
us, but we don't know why.
The dead farmer killed by a
collapsing beam, or kicked
in the head by an animal; the
suicide; those killed in their
massive house fire; the three
family members killed in
a wagon-wreck; the two
brothers smashed by a train
newly placed through their
acreage. Stuff you just never
think about now, in this day
and age with our much
different and proclivious
lives and deaths. (I just made
that up, 'proclivious,' based
on the word proclivity - 'having
tendencies for habitual this or
that'). All good living, sure.
It seems to me, as well, that
the simpler a person is, the
more easily are they taken
in. Believing in miracles.
Believing in only what they
are told. The way it goes
now, individuality and
circumspection have about
disappeared. Instead of
'Ones,' we find ourselves
living in a kind of nationwide
room. We look around it and
see only our own creations.
We go through life believing
we are experiencing the world
when actually our experiences
are confined within entirely
human conceptions (thus
the crying need for miracles
and myths). Our world
has been thought up. In fact,
our environment itself now is
the manifestation of the mental
processes of other humans.
It's all accepted and kept
quite simple. Parents willingly
pass it on to their children;
schools teach it - in point of
fact, schools dedicate now
entire rooms, wings, and
curricula to its furtherance,
and daringly (laughingly)
call it learning. Everything
has been lost, the bean is off
the beanstalk and Jack stares
only at the bean.
-
I find this very prevalent, and
useful as an example, with the
local 'town' sites, here, for
instance, in Avenel, on social
media. Not just Avenel; Metuchen
has the same thing, in another
economic-scale-version, that's
all - the education and awareness
levels are different, and it's
apparent between the two.
People willingly believe anything.
The local council geeks or whoever
will step in, pander with their
gobbledygook, and manage to
either falsify a truth or detour
it out of troubled waters and onto
the shoals of their own manageable
subversion. The truth is supplanted,
and the stories installed, and those
who read this stuff lap it up.
Lies and distortion are the fine
crop harvested from these overly
fertilized fields.
-
My aunt used to be always engaged
willingly in believing miracles.
It baffled me because in all other
respects she respected intelligence
and learning, even her own quest. I
could never understand it myself -
the sort of willing suspension of
belief and logic in how things
are. Our Lady of Medjugorje,
or whatever it is - another one
of those foolish cases of weird
little kids, out in a field or a cave
somewhere, having a talking and
living apparition of the 'Virgin Mary,'
who apparently has nothing much
of substance or usefulness to say,
in spite of the trip, but still manages
to speak riddles and obfuscate in
passages of dubious worth. But, it's
all eaten up, digested, poured over.
Ghouls make their movies of it.
Fatima. All of them, and there are
numerous ones. I remember, in the
1990's right here in Perth Amboy,
a clutch of Hispanics, and the
resultant media, entertained the
world for a few weeks anyway -
until all got bored or the window
was washed - proclaiming the
living appearance of another
Virgin sighting (rare enough in
Perth Amboy anyway) in the
second floor window of some
faulty house or rooming house.
People flocked. The same
mountain people, it seemed,
who back home would be
watering their burros under
the open skies.
-
There's that valued simplicity
to things, which I've mentioned,
that, really, no longer has a place
in our world. That's why the only
thing now holding up (paradoxically)
religions and the great organized
churches, etc., are the third-tier
countries of places like the
Philippines and Indonesia, Central
and South America, where this
more primitive and without-true-
reference stuff still holds sway.
Yet, here, in all our Godless
foolishness and perversion, so
many still do so as well. It's too
bad, really. We live in a kind
of maelstrom, going ever deeper
into our own thought processes,
into subterranean caverns -
(Yes, yes, like those idiot kids
and their fabled scoutmaster
who walked themselves deeply
into a cave and were only,
'miraculously' it is claimed now,
saved - as the entire world was
force-fed the stupid story -
because of prayer and miracle.
What a crock. They walked
themselves in there, dry, quite
easily enough. They should
have brought themselves
right back out, and through
shallow water, with ease. But
- no - the drama department
of the world had to take it
all over, as to claim the
prevalence and the distraction
of ignorant people and kids
making 'V' signs as if it was
advanced communication.
-
So, see, things never change;
appearances change, that's all.
We, Americans first, and than
all humans, have become the
first species to live predominantly
inside the projections of our own
minds. We allow, as in Avenel and
all the small-town places and faces,
that forced and artificial structure
built around us (by Municipal and
Governmental forces) to become
the editor and the filter and the
medium between 'oursleves and
an alternative, non-human, unedited,
organic planetary reality. Living
within artificial, reconstructed,
arbitrary environments that are
strictly the products of human
conception, we have no way to
be sure that we know what is true
and what is not. We have lost
context and perspective. We
wander, aimlessly now, in that
old graveyard of mind. Willing
for everything but willing for
nothing. When the only taboo is
to make taboos. What we know
is (now) only what other humans
tell us. Therefore, whoever controls
the process of re-creation, effectively
redefines reality for everyone else,
and creates the entire word of
human experience, our field of
knowledge. We become subject to
to them. The confinement of out
experience becomes the basis of
their control of us. ('Look, look,
Councilman Airy! Look on your
phone screen as you are driving
your firemobile; isn't that a moving
version of Our Lady of Mount Oros?'*
My kinsman! My kinsman,
Major Molyneaux!)...
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