RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,122
(shot through the hands)
It's funny, in looking back
now, with all today's modern
and perverse excuses and
demands for it, how it was
that I've worn a mask all
my life. It's only now that
everyone else has to go
about doing the same, that
I realize the presence. No,
maybe it wasn't a real mask;
those were the kinds I'd see
in Chinatown, or on Japanese
tourists; perhaps when they had
a cold. I never could understand..
and all that Asian 'nittiness', the
picking away at ordered details,
did use to really annoy me. It
never seemed right, or seemed
un-natural anyway, especially
for a race of people as they
were. All those people, along
the streets, selling fish and
mushrooms in the open-air
stalls, handling all that stuff,
with masks on. It really did
used to give me the creeps, for
especially how, in Chinatown,
everything else was such a
weird, filthy mess. Alleys, the
reek of garbage and fish cuttings,
all those oddball smells wafting
around; bugs, flies, cockroaches.
I'd think to myself 'here's all
this, everywhere around them,
and they worry about some
invisible bacteria they can't see
but can spread? Or catch?'
-
The Japanese went about it -
Koreans too, it seemed - in a
much more neat and tidy fashion.
They seemed fastidious. One
camera per person. If masked,
they almost seemed polite
about it, seeking forgiveness.
I used to walk around, seeing
the Japanese, and I had this
entire scenario I'd made up
for them - after Hiroshima
and Nagasaki - walking around
in a type of fear and trembling
about all the world around them
(but of course, then, why were
they here, in NYC; flying JAP
or Air Japan, to these distant
places)? That went unanswered;
but I called my theory of them
the 'Terror Imagination.' As if the
world around them, they felt, or
sensed - after the two big bombs -
could, or might, or would, be
suddenly dissolved or evaporated
or de-materialized at any moment.
There; right where they were.
In my mind it had become
engrained into the Japanese psyche.
It was but a theory, but so what?
Maybe it really was t-r-u-e. Besides,
it was fun, owning certain ideas.
-
What other nation would, willingly,
totally disarm? What overwhelming
jacket of fear would take an entire
island-nation of people, vulnerable
from all sides, and have them, in
some form of abject negation of the
usual nation-state format, throw down
their arms, acquiesce in some form
of a protectorate instead, and put
their energies into building bullet
trains and oddball autos? Let alone
early forms of tech? All of those
Vietnam War years, what did they
do? I never heard of a Japanese
contingent fighting in Vietnam? And,
if the perverse American logic of
that pathetic war was to be believed,
they had a lot more to worry about,
with China standing right nearby.
Horror-Imagination? They were
frozen in place; with an antiquated,
strict and bizarre notion too of King,
Queen, and rulers. They were ruled
by passivity. But they all had cameras?
-
Pretty strange, those Asian tourists
along the streets of New York. By
the 1980's, the complexion the
'Japanese' presence within American
society had changed totally. Most
of it had rolled over into cuteness.
China soon followed: toys, panda
bears, strange little robots, colorful
toys, sashes, clothing and hats. The
most outrageous of it all was, at
the base of the Flatiron Building, a
store called China Books and Periodicals.
I was there often : it was a propaganda
front for Chairman Mao's Little Red
Book, openly sold in all sorts of variations;
with red-sash bookmark or not, with
Red Star pins and buttons, Mao hats,
Chinese language publications, etc.
The Japanese presence had never really
taken that effect. They remained, as
I said, somehow more elegant and
understated. Even in their cuisine.
-
I started here to say how I had always
worn a mask : Metaphorical, of course.
My mask was a step back, a detachment,
or a sort of disconnect, from all that was
around me. The 'people' I saw made me
sick; perhaps that was the disease I then
needed insulation from. I ended up
feeling that every person had a second
skin, a second man or woman, within
them - to whom they addressed their
concerns, personal motivations, sense
of being, and observation. America
has (or had anyway) always been a
very weird place. Here's D.H. Lawrence:
"The land of the free! The old, American
art-speech, a speech that contains an
alien quality, which belongs to the
American continent and nowhere else.
A stranger's speech - This is the land
of the free! Why, if I say anything that
displeases them, the free mob will
lynch me, and that's my freedom. Free?
Why, I have never been in any country
where the individual has such an
abject fear of his fellow countrymen.
Because, as I say, they are free to lynch
him the moment he shows he is not
one of them."
-
He'd been shot through the hands. The
bullets went through his hands....
[Metaphorically, of course.]
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