RUDIMENTS, PT. 1,051
(great matters, born)
Real simple. I was not looking
for anything really; just intent
on making my own way along
the scaffolding I'd been erecting,
upon which to pin the later
structure of my own life. I
didn't really know where any
of it was headed. It was maybe
1966, Winter, maybe December.
I'm not sure. As I said, I didn't
have a sure feed on what was
going on around me. Like it was
said by DeNiro - 'I hear things.'
There were oddball reports about
society, coming out of strange
places. Dylan was in Australia,
talking about American baseball?
A transit strike in NYC, led by
some bizarre Irish guy, Michael
Quill? It was all brash effrontery.
-
And then, one day, sometime I
think in 1966, the first chink fell
into place. I had never been a
TV guy, hit and miss at most, I
was somewhere, and I saw on a
TV a very striking, white horse
mini-movie or something I didn't
know of. In some way was enough
to knock me out of a stupor I'd
been in. Something I couldn't place.
In those days, if you 'saw' something
broadcast you couldn't just hit a
'repeat' button, or tape or save it
for another look. Everything was
much more ephemeral. I had no
real clue what I'd just seen, and I
felt a little suckered and flabbergasted
too by the dumb simplicity of it all.
But, it was enough to have notched
me over, one section closer to my
newer reality.
-
I hesitate to admit what it was; in reality
a very pedestrian Beatles early video,
or whatever it was to be called. Some
things about it, right off, that keeled
me : the use of the white horses in
such a setting, the strange 'destructive'
ending scene, out of the blue and, I
thought, rather nihilistic and missing
the point of the entire earlier part of
the clip. Anyone, after all, can destroy.
There was a certain paltry beauty to it
up until that point. In any case, I did
recognize everything, but it sang to
the rest of my mind somehow about
breaking out, seeing past the obvious,
realizing thought, grasping a greater
world - history and place. A past
legacy, with the old bricks, the
quizzical Beatle faces (quite the
ordinary turned somehow unordinary),
and the quickly-driven narrative with
strange place-words. A scene conjured
from nowhere. I realized anew that
'something' had me - I did not know
what it was, what it would be called,
nor to what it would take me, but I
immediately wanted to answer it.
-
Not to get carried away...it was, after
all, at another level no more than any
other entertainment industry rousting
brought forth to traduce the interested
public and drag them into yet another
buy of 'Product.' The Pop Industry at
work. In any case, there was something
other afoot here - multiple layers of
odd meaning that were calling to me,
I don't know where it came from, nor
whether it was of the pleasures and
details of ordinary life, or not; but
these guys had here done something:
like a bank safe, with the large
combination lock very near to clicking
open. Not there yet, but a few short
clicks away, those safe-lock clicks
the old mechanical doors used to
make. Inside? Untold riches about
to be opened?
-
What did any of this teach me? A year
later, a'slumming on the streets of
New York, this stuff was still in my head
and I'd joined the Revolution. I was intent
on the artistic idea that within the most
ordinary of objects and situations there
was great gold to be found. No one need
ever get all righteous or pouty over the
fixation of 'Art.' That 'Art' is nothing
but money-value placed upon it by
the usual tribal merchants and parasitic
traders who only 'call' it such for their
own filthy purposes of prestige and
profit, as if dealing dominoes or slaves.
No one ever addresses this, and the
fools in the street now sing instead about
manufactured media issues of rapacious
and acquisitory 'things.' If there was any
fortitude to this, or a felicity of purpose,
the tribal hens behind all of this would
be taken down first, and shot. But, alas,
street ignorance knows no bounds.
-
The connection then of creative fantasy
to everyday life was immediately
apparent to me in the streets that I
walked and the people I met. Everyone
was claiming, in their soulful and silent
way, to be something other than what
they were. Had they only kept their own
fingers on their own steady pulses, and
caught the wave of constantly-streaming
importance and material, so much could
be so different. We would not, I realized,
need to live as a society in the tired,
feebly-managed manner we did. A
Golden Age loomed anew! Yet that stupid
little video had touched the nerve, lit
the wire, infused the corridor of all
my later imaginings. From such small
and trivial things are great matters born.
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