12,263. RUDIMENTS, pt. 860

RUDIMENTS, pt. 860
(I hope there's a new plague)
What does a wise man use

to tend to his hair? A sage

brush, why of course! Yes,

I was always at work on

words. Curse the Gods

again. Everything is humor

or it's nothing at all. One

day I was thinking about

time, the kind of time I

was running out of, like

getting old, and then I

figured again it was all

illusion and who cared

anyway. So, I was thinking

instead about Edmund

Wilson. He's a grand old

American writer, dead

long-time now, of the sort

they used to call, on the

continent, a 'man of letters.'

Which meant like writer,

critic, 'conosewer' of Art

and all that, and always at

the ready with a new book

or essay, or lecture or some

dicey fiction, some arty

'experimental' monkey-shine.

Like the late Harold Bloom,

but not. In America there have

only been maybe four or five

of these real characters, six

if you wish to count Susan

Sontag (debatable). He

lived his waning years in

Talcotttville. New York

State that is, up the river

some. It's pretty far up, and

inland, by Leyden, north west

of Saratoga. So I went there.

Nice place -  he had a real

good-looking early 1800's

home. It was a good place

for him to be hanging out.

I guess he had a vehicle,

or maybe there was train

service or something,

because he came  and

went often enough to

NYC too, so he had to

have transportation. It

was curious  -  he wrote

lots of  and I always found

them interesting, erudite, and

wise (like that sage brush thing

again, except he was mostly

bald), but his peculiar claim

to fame, from 1929, was a

novel or whatever called 'I

Thought of Daisy.' In 1929's

version of risque, I put it

gently, the book was, and

is still, famed for perhaps

the most perfect, in a literary

way, description of what the

scribes in those days called

'the female genitalia.' Imagine

that! One of America's finest

scribes, after all that work,

living on for that one description

of some very fine subject matter.

So, you don't need me to tell

you; check it out. No, stupid,

I mean the book.

-

At least he thought of something.

I had the hardest time realizing 

that most people were thinking

of nothing. Bigelow's Pharmacy,

over there on Sixth Ave., by

Eight Street, right down from

where I was, it was filled,

always, with what appeared to

be people thinking of nothing. 

I can't say for sure, of course,

but empty-headed is a good a

start as any. Or anywhere else;

people in line for yet another

bagel, or hot dog, papaya juice,

crumpets, doughnuts, some

sort of phylo-dough stuff or

whatever it was, and knishes.

Good old knishes. When I first

arrived there, they were new to

me. I'd get them, just down the

street, west, from the Studio

School, at this little walk-up 

place that overlooked the street.

25 cents! These things were 

big and stuffed too, not all

cheaped out. Coffee was ten 

cents. A potato knish of that

magnitude was almost like

a meal. A real quiet meal too.

I didn't have to talk, or move

on. Life right then was too

good to me. Pronouncing the

k's, I'd go up to the guy at

the register to order, and

usually, after he got to see

me enough, 'You k-now I

want a k-nish, right? And a

soffee.' Ha. Funny stuff,

those c's and k's. He'd laugh,

and we'd start talking about

Lebanon. Where he was from,

back when Beirut was a nice,

fancy, cosmopolitan city famed

for the way all its divergent

races and religion (the big three,

Christian, Jewish, and Muslim)

co-existed peacefully, to make

a thriving, positive city. That was

then, and soon after, but the mid

70's, it all blew apart. Maronite

Christians, regular Christians,

Jews and Muslims all fighting

at each other, blowing the city

up to smithereens (down, I guess,

actually) and no one ever talked

about that graceful era of peaceful

living ever again. But, I suppose,

that's the Middle East for you.

That knish place was really cool;

it's long-gone now, like the rest

of everything in that area. The

place has since gone through

probably four new layers of

destitution. Bookstores, gone.

Shoe stores, gone. Art supplies,

gone. Photo shops, gone. 

Records and tapes, fashions,

etc. All gone, until what's left

now is a ghosted Eighth Street

strip of jumbled memories (The

Jumple Shop, gone. Rienzi's,

gone), mostly resembling a

post-apocalyptic storybook

with the covers blown off it

and pages missing. The parts

you don't get to read are the

parts you never end up knowing 

about. Like Life. Like living.

Like me. A salt-water fish

in a fresh-water pool of junk.
-
Have you noticed the scattershot,
staccato manner I wrote this in;
I chose it by design, mainly because,
as I write this, there are a few more
Mexicans in a tree within my vision,
cutting down that large, tall tree. The
house is vacant and the real estate
bastards who do these things decide,
always, that the 'fixed up' house (what
they call it, which usually means tacky,
tan cheap siding, a stupid-looking fake,
plastic banister at the front (required
now by law) and moronic, bare
gardening, will sell better. Day after
day, this white truckload of Mexicans,
who talk scattershot, loud, and perversely
idiotically (I know know base Spanish
to catch their rapid-fire, giggly talk), go
on and on, loudly. I'm busy here painting
my large ICE sign, and their staccato
talk has caught me up. The local fake
political dudes, they love all this stuff.
All one-dimensional men, seeing 
one-dimensional things, in a
three-dimensional world they then
ignore. (Hope there's a new plague
they all can catch). I remember,
in NYC, how surprised I was in
1967 to meet and see and realize
that Native Americans  -  actual
American Indians  -  lived in NYC.
I knew two of them, and it was,
back then, startling. They were
distant, and lanky, and strange.'
Something there was that was
other-worldly about them. It's 
not like that with today's rather
childlike, by contrast, Mexicans.
They seem, instead of reverent to
Nature and the Great Spirit and their
willingness to preserve our world,
intent on hiring out to cut and pillage
it; defoliate it as tree-trimmers and
gardeners by the hordes, babbling
away in what seems like a mad
and illegitimate tongue. Sagebrush?
Isn't that from the Southwest?