Tuesday, December 31, 2019

12,428. INTERBURDENED RAPID TRANSIT

INTERBURDENED 
RAPID TRANSIT
'Call now!' The sign said; 'There is no
obligation, and operators are always
standing by to hep you!' I wondered
about the literalness of all that  - are
really 'standing' by? Hmmm? And
anyway, I'd never heard of that new
formula they'd discovered for their
'Scientific proof that Mayonnaise
Mask Facial Penetration Rub-on
Hemorrhoidal Cream' cures all
modern medical personal woes.
Had it ever worked for anyone 
before.? And why can't those
operators 'standing' by sit down?
Are their hind-ends sore?
-
The train kept rolling along
and I'd already missed my stop. 

12,427. A MEAN, SLINKING, SOUL?

A MEAN, SLINKING, SOUL?
'Eternally grateful to the doctors
and nurses who kept me alive in
intensive care. I would not have
come back alive if not for them.
A doctor's outlook  -  if you prefer,
his 'idealogy'  -  is humane, but a
doctor's training is in science, and 
science does not see  nature as 
having a soul. My doctor, in my
good fortune, had a soul! He was
capable of compassion. He was
capable of understanding my
situation in the widest sense.
Beyond blood, and blood
pressure, beyond charts. I do
not know what it was he saw 
about me, but he'd gotten right,
and correctly diagnosed the pain.'

Monday, December 30, 2019

12,426. RUDIMENTS, pt. 918

RUDIMENTS, pt. 918
(god helps those....that ain't fair!)
'The animal that is to be
trained, must be caught
young.' Boy and how. That
always made good sense
to me, in light of feral
Man roaming the Earth.
One who goes un-lauded
often times ends up angry.
That usually causes trouble.
I think the Govt. caught onto
the idea early of corralling
the kids into 'schools' early.
That frees up parents for
their other purposes of
makers, and consumers.
All that adds to the flooding
and growth of what's called
a Gross National Product,
by which a lot of other things
are measured. Putting a child
early into school, and then
disguising it as mandatory
rigor, covers lots of sins;
and a lot is lost. You'd be
amazed at what youngsters
can learn and get good at
by just learning at home and
not, instead, having the entire
societal structure forced onto
them like a crown of thorns.
They end up thinking the only
to learn, ever, is within that
enforced structure.
-
Henry Adams once wrote, 'One
sees whatever one brings.' I got
to liking that phrase, and I sort of
instantly realized what he meant,
because I'd noticed it a hundred
times. At the Studio School, as a
for-instance, if one did a painting
with whatever number of things
in it, randomly, I'm just saying:
color, line, a tree, a house, a jet
plane, and a Brillo Pad, all mixed
together as some Pop Art thing
(again, only an example) - no
matter what my own, as artist,
concentration or meaning on it
was meant to be, if someone
taking a look at the piece finds,
instead, that the Brillo Pad
or the jet plane resonates with
them, that's what the entire
painting is going to be about,
for them. It secures, within them,
the place of echo, where all the
personal memories or touchpoints
for them are. Like a madeleine
of Proust, it gets right to work.
['The madeleine is a symbol of the
past that arises unintentionally.
Proust traces the contours of a
subjectivity that accumulates
memories without realizing it
(madeleine, as each act, is lived
naively), a subjectivity marked
by the world passively.']. So, I
also wondered, does that lock
an artist in to only ever painting
from the past? Never from a
future where these 'touchpoints'
and madeleines are not? If
so, how does one ever forge
forward?
-
In my travels and the varied
places I stayed, I was never
attracted to the tedious types  - 
which was good - for the people
of Pennsylvania, in the smoked
out sections I lived, were ablaze
with a form of anarchy I'd not
faced before. A lot of them, at
the same time, faced off this
bare and rudimentary Christianity
that went around in those places
but they faced it off with no
complications or interferences.
it was more like an occasional, 
part-time, local joke one had to
deal with. Sort of like waking up
on a Saturday and seeing the
new Jehovah's recruits going
door to door for the hundredth
time and you trying to make up
something new to say back. It
was easy and complicated all
at once. Mostly it was just the
ladyfolk who were hardcore.
That may sound sexist and rude
by whatever flea-bitten standards
people run things these days, but
it as true as a Depends on great
grandma. The women were always
all fired up about Sundays and
church socials and mixers and
their pot-luck dinners and all that.
Men mostly could not have
cared less, but if old Rev.
McKnight wanted to pray over
that old, sick cow no one was
about to stop him. I never
spoke religion to any farmhand.
Up in the places  -  as I saw it  -
the whole unencumbered world 
was a church. Free. For the taking :
Wind, air, bloom and blossom too.
All quite lovely, and it seemed
to me that shoving it all back
into a box of church rules and
regulations and outlooks and 
attitudes was about as stupid as
screwing a lightbulb into
Cassie the horse's butt.
-
Elmira had different rules, a
different feel, and a slightly
heavier attitude about everything;
sadder, more sodden, bereft and
broken. Outside of the college,
it was much more like a penal
colony on the skids. Old, dead
cities up along that New York
State corridor were like that.
My friend, Rod, up there, used
to tell me that the place his
father worked  -  IBM or some
such, out along the wood
sections of Rt. 17, in Waverly,
was SO important to the USA
missile and strategic-weapons
defense and offense capabilities,
that (workers there were told)
it was on the Soviet's priority
list of the first 20 or so places
to be nuked if intercontinental
war ever broke out. That was a
real chiller, especially up and
out there, along the long corridor
to nothing at all. I never did
believe that story, but who 
knows? Anyway my UFO story
about that landing I witnessed had
that one beat. (Previous chapter
here somewhere, maybe 30 or 
so back).
-
That was  -  sort of  -  the mid 70's
there for me. Kids in school, taken
early, fed all this crap about sides
and enemies and advantage, etc.,
when all they needed really was
a good grounding in the ABC's,
some decent stuff to read, and,
along the way maybe, some real, 
solid, plain reflection spoken
back to them about real things
and the solid world they were
(supposedly) in for the next 
 60 or 70 years, by teachers with
a sensible handle on Reality. If
ever there was one. (Handle and
teacher both).
-
When I lived up there it was
like I was talking to the past. 
There was this one spot where 
some river or a stream that
flowed into river waters just
outside of Elmira  -  it's a famed
spot for amateur, and 'pro' fossil
people  -  flowed at ground level,
off into the woods some, by some 
old RR tracks, and just off a bit
from the shoulder of what was
then a part of old Rt. 17. The waters
uncovered, and ground heaved up,
fossil rocks. I mean really nice
ones. You had to search, walk 
the waters slowly, or just next
to the waters anyway. We turned
up any number of amazing things
in our times  -  small-scale and
all, but chiseled and finely-detailed
fossils, often in fist-sized rocks or
just bigger. Easy to walk back
with. There was one time I stumbled
on this rock, maybe half the size
of a microwave oven, lets say,
that was, and I called it such for
years, a 'Rosetta Stone' of fossils,
a tenement, apartment house. It
was the neatest thing I ever had.
Yep. When we left Elmira, in
the rush of moving, I left it on
the porch, where I'd always kept
it for decoration and conversation.
When I did go back for it, in the
finishing of the house-move and
the closing up of the house for
final sale, it was gone. God
helps those who help themselves;
but to other's rocks? After half
a millennia? That ain't fair.


12,425. GIFFORD AND GARRISON

GIFFORD AND GARRISON
Much like a random sheeting of
rain on a map-glass for places
that did not exist, intentions
covered everything fully; to
leave blurs and runnings on
a simple-viewing pane. One
thousand steps I'd climbed
to be here  :  high above a
distant landscape falling all
around me. Caravan?  Wagon
train? Or just an image of
the world's delight in being?
-
You'd held out your hand as
we were climbing, and I took
it. I was hooked, and probably
by stair five hundred too. Why
go halfway to Paradise, when 
only Heaven will do?

12,424. SOMEONE ONCE WANTED

SOMEONE ONCE WANTED
Someone once wanted a formal
picture of me. I said 'It ain't
gonna' happen, believe you me.'
And then I said, 'Would you want
scratch n' sniff?' (as if they'd ever
get enough of it)... So anyway, the
day arrives when they get me caught
slumming. Sitting at a table in a 
place I never go : a waterfront
wedding. Ho. Ho. Ho.

12,423. RUDIMENTS, pt. 917

RUDIMENTS, pt. 917
(lucre, moloch, money, greed)
One time I read James Joyce's
Poems Penyeach. I was
pretty unimpressed. And then
later I read, very carefully and
studiously, and with two or three
reading-guides too, (Harry
Levin), 'Ulysses.' I was very
impressed. I had read that
Ezra Pound had rejected these
poems for publication. In
light of all else that went on
with Pound, Joyce, Eliot, and
that entire group, it all worked
out well enough. For myself,
they remained, and still too,
a bit too obtuse for my taste,
offering little either real or
tangible to grab onto, or take
from, as the reader. That could
very well just be me, my own
secured taste  -  to this day
anything that adheres so closely
to the obvious idea of being
'poetry,' doesn't actually hold
my attention.
-
If I were writing poetry about
the Great Lakes, let's say, I'd
not even mention the lakes
themselves. There are a hundred
other ways of getting around that
trap, but I think what the ordinary
'self-conscious' poet does ('the
obvious idea of being poetry') is
to to nothing but dwell on the
lakes, their facts and figures,
their apparent meanings, etc.,
in order to write about them  -
and whether in a poetic or nicely
lyrical way not mattering. There
are numerous ways of getting
to 'The Great Lakes' without
telling a reader about the great
lakes. I think that's mostly what's
lost with most of this 'teaching'
and workshopping stuff that runs
it nose along as poetry now. To
be frank, it's mostly vacuous and
emotions; love stuff. The diatonic
broken heart stuff of an endless
childhood; like those 70 yer old
rock guys still singing three chord
crap about this or that babe and
leftover hurt. That's nothing, and
neither is it anything to be believed
in nor anything by which to waste
your time. It's certainly not writing.
It's a literal elephant-herding into
a blinding maelstrom of nothing. So,
if you're going to write about those
Great Lakes, don't mention the
Great Lakes, and find some other
means of getting to them.
-
Like that Hungarian girl at Twin
Donuts speaking just in an instant,
there was a lot to be taken from that,
and nothing importunely direct
was discussed. She got across tons
of material to me in about 40 words.
Stuff I couldn't even relay back to
her, it all passed so quickly. As a
kid, in Boy Scouts, we used to camp
and stay at Camp Kilmer  -  various
Scout functions, Jamborees, and
even as I recall, once or twice, week
long stayovers in the old barracks.
I always enjoyed it  -  not for anything
but the old aspects  -  I could not
have cared less for all that crazy
Scout crap. I can't even remember
what we were doing there, and the
more I try the more it fades off; but,
it had a military feel, was fairly
regimented, and we used all the
old, previously active, things that
were now inactive, as was the entire
camp. BUT, in 1956, it had been
in active, steady use, for just the
situation she'd mentioned : housing
the hordes of Hungarian refugees
who had fled the breakdown of
their country. It was little noticed
to us, in fact never mentioned. As
it stands now, in the intervening
years since, first they had put up
and now it's again long gone, a
little history-note and notification,
on a column and signpost, about
that era. No one any longer cares
about anything like that, and the
current uses of the place have no
reason to present such information.
It now houses job-training sites,
work-camps and such, for the
local lower classes. To wit, it acts
as a Governmental re-education
and indoctrination camp for the
New Brunswick and environs
loss-leaders and troublemakers.
Why should the Government wish
to proclaim that old, hoary story of
Freedom and the flight to Liberty?
It all -  sadly  -  makes way too
much sense. Netter left unsaid.
-
I could have told her, 'Yeah, yeah!
I know the pace, it's right near where
live; we used to camp there, march
and bivouac. Boy, I bet she'd have
had a lot to say about that. I'd also
have liked to tell her to be more
careful and not fall for everything
she's told, that America betrays its
own premises, and that we probably
see it, as 'natives here' much differently
that does (did) she.
-
Capitalism itself can only degenerate.
It runs downhill until, as now, one
is left with the most faulty dregs
tipping the scales badly in favor
of the exploitative class. Can't be
helped. Maybe for the first 2 or 3
generations are the ideals held.
After that, the degeneration sets
in, as the population, in turn,
exponentially expands, gobbling
up lands and resources which
otherwise should be being
preserved. No one cares, from
that angle. Here's what happens:
Since the operative premise is
'Profit' and material gain, at the
expense of others, the first few
generations work in earnest.
Their mills and factories and
tanneries and shops run fine.
Then, profit being the motif,
as expansion sets in, someone
decides there's more to be made,
gained, better profit, if this or
that ingredient of item is replaced
or skipped  -  cheaper material,
faster manufacture, a skipped
step, a different and more callous
approach  -  making more product,
quality be damned. Tanneries
flood the rivers with their gunk and
acids, dyes and pollutants. Metal
shops pile and dump their scraps
at the fringe-woods around them.
All in the name of profit. Shoddy
material and workmanship, then,
slowly degenerate into junk, crap,
and disorder, all while the premise
of the start  -  continued growth
and profit  -  must be continued.
In Capitalism there never can be
any turning back. It destroys itself.
It eventually destroys others. But
only after its own greed and corruption
has covered itself, as well   - with
political shenanigans and pay-offs.
liquid and shady laws and lobbyists;
shortcuts of process and procedures,
environment skips, fake bookkeeping,
no-show paper jobs, money-laundering,
etc. By the time it's all done, the
entire show is death; a dance of death,
in fact. Distant countries of low-level
indigents pick through your piles
of cast-off electronics, toys, gimmicks,
clothes, sneakers and shoes, etc., to
salvage what they can, before they
too dump it all into the waters.
Choking the oceans with the same
filth that decimates the fish they try
to eat, and once had in abundance.
-
Lucre. Moloch. Money. Call it what
you will. Here's Allen Ginsberg:
"What sphinx of cement and 
aluminum bashed open their 
skulls and ate up their brains 
and imagination? Moloch! 
Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans 
and unobtainable dollars! Children 
screaming under the stairways! 
Boys sobbing in armies! Old men 
weeping in the parks! Moloch! 
Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! 
Moloch the loveless! Mental 
Moloch! Moloch the heavy 
judger of men! Moloch the 
incomprehensible prison! 
Moloch the crossbone soulless 
jailhouse and Congress of 
sorrows! Moloch whose 
buildings are judgment! 
Moloch the vast stone of 
war! Moloch the stunned 
governments! Moloch whose 
mind is pure machinery! 
Moloch whose blood is 
running money! Moloch 
whose fingers are ten armies! 
Moloch whose breast is a 
cannibal dynamo! Moloch 
whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a 
thousand blind windows! 
Moloch whose skyscrapers 
stand in the long streets like 
endless Jehovahs! Moloch 
whose factories dream and 
croak in the fog! Moloch 
whose smoke-stacks and 
antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless 
oil and stone! Moloch whose 
soul is electricity and banks! 
Moloch whose poverty is the 
specter of genius! Moloch whose 
fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! 
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! 
Moloch in whom I dream Angels! 
Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in 
Moloch! Lacklove and manless 
in Moloch! Moloch who entered 
soul early! Moloch in whom I 
am a consciousness without a 
body! Moloch who frightened 
me out of my natural ecstasy! 
Moloch whom I abandon! 
Wake up in Moloch! Light 
streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot 
apartments! invisible suburbs! 
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! 
demonic industries! spectral 
nations! invincible madhouses! 
granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting 
Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, 
trees, radios, tons! lifting the 
city to Heaven which exists 
and is everywhere about us!"


Sunday, December 29, 2019

12,422. RUDIMENTS, pt. 916

RUDIMENTS, pt. 916
(hello 1870! how the hell are you!)
At the turn of another year,
calendar-wise, I don't even
feel like continuing. As far
as feelings go. I'll continue,
because I have to. The pace
of all the things around me
turns fairly disgusting, but
my value to myself keeps it
all together. I've got no mice.
I keep no fish. I decompose
nonetheless.
-
If craziness was ever contagious,
I may have caught it when; and
it seems that all you have to do
to live an interesting life is be
a damn fool. I've done that too.
I used to wonder, about that
Hungarian girl  - whom I'd
never ever seen again, sadly,
because I would have had
some questions for her (the
good questions seem to always
come later) about how she
learned that cool fractured
English  -  for instance, was
it ever certain to her the difference
between a doctor who has a line
of enormous patients  -  or one
who has enormous patience?
Seems to make a difference.
We could'a talked. Any of
those intense Euro-types I've
ever met had always gotten on
my nerves. I can think of two
that didn't I suppose. One girl
was from Hamburg, and when
I asked what she did there,
she said I probably wouldn't
understand, but she bartended
in a 'dive bar'. Thinking we
didn't have dive bars here? I
told her I knew all about dive
bars, believe you me. She was
fun. Not Euro-intense. And the
other one who was also fun was
some girl named Anna. I Think
she was Russian. Her family
was harboring the Soviet outcast
and exiled writer  writer Josef
Brodsky, back then. In Nutley,
or Montclair, NJ. We were up
in the west 80's that Winter,
and she was the girlfriend,
then, of that guy Paul I've
already mentioned. I have so
many good memories, they're
bad. This Paul guy was always
a trip : One night it was about
4 degrees out, rare even for NYC.
We'd all been waking, a long trek,
were hungry, and cold too, real
cold. There was a guy ahead of
us, walking his dog, and Paul
exclaimed, 'I'm so cold I could
eat that dog.' Huh? I had to ask.
What's the connection? Are you
hungry enough to eat the dog?
Cold enough?' He replied, in
an utterly logical fashion   -  all
of which hit me like a bolt  -  that
when you're cold, if you eat, then
the body can transform the food
just eaten into the warmth you
need. It was so weirdly logical
that it almost sounded like something
the Government would say about
some 'Minimum Daily Requirements'
stuff.he got all cantankerous over
my saying that, and I said 'Good.
Get worked up. It generates heat.'
All we had to look forward to anyway
was his 86th street hotplate. A real
bore. No wonder we frequented
Twin Donuts.
-
Euro-people were always so glum;
I think it was all that Existentialism
and post-war stuff. They all wanted
to be dark, and blank, Like Hannah
Arendt. Susan Sontag too, even
though she was later. That works for
a while, but it wears thin, and after
about 5,000 Gauloise cigarettes
and a briefcase full of Sartre, Camus,
and  -  maybe  -  de Beauvoir, all
your left with around the existential
dinner table are big talkers with
deep, raspy voices. The females
too. no way to run a philosophy.
-
It was like wearing a beret. I wore
one for a while, yes. Back in the
1970's at the base of the Flatiron
Building, there was a bookstore of
sorts, called China Books. It was
essentially Mao and Cultural
Revolution and Chinese Communist
propaganda stuff, not often that
much in English. But they were
nice books, done well, printed
in old letterpress ways, with all
those Chinese characters. They
also sold a lot of other things  -
lie pins and buttons and posters,
etc. It was weird, how they got
away with all that, selling Commie
stuff and all  -  but I guess it just
proved, at some level, the truth
of the American 'openness' to
freedom and expression. They
sold these really beautiful, red
enameled Maoist stars, with
pin backs, and various sizes.
I proudly displayed one at
the front of my beret for a
long time, until I retired the
beret and the rest  -  mainly
because it began to look
really silly  -  I had at that time
grown big, mutton-chop, punk,
sideburns. It was a bad visual.
I also had my own copy of
Mao's Little Red Book. It
was all pretty useless.
-
Now, as it is, for stuff like that,
you don't need a Flatiron Building,
a storefront, sales space, or even
a clerk (Maoist or not). I can
look up 'China Books and
Periodicals Co.' online here and
get their entire corporate history,
current location, offerings and
books, home offices and all that
I wished for, in like an instant.
Just like anything else. That's
how the world has changed, 
and if all that doesn't make you 
wonder about 'design,' I don't 
know whatever will. Let's go back
a chapter : God's got defenders
on both sides, but what sort of
a God  -  truthfully  -  would have
selected and arranged  - this is what
they say anyway  -  a peacefully (?)
growing and prospering new country
(don't ask any Injuns about that one),
based on enlightened premises,
Promised Land kind of stuff  -  City
on a Hill, John Winthrop, etc.  -  
and then break and sunder it, in
the process of killing or maiming 
a million men and boys over the
issue, more or less (and yeah, you
can argue all day. You go ahead;
I've got things to do) of owning and
enslaving, and brutally disciplining
and/or raping generations of stolen
black people, AND THEN as soon
as that carnage is all over, unleashing
upon the world new sciences and new
theories of HUMANKIND descended
linearly and orderly, from apes, fish,
lizards and pond scum. In pretty
much that order? Hello 1870! How
the hell are you?