RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,166
(the voice there of a multitude)
The other day I made mention
of Delmore Schwartz and a quote
of his. It's something I that often
do, but Schwartz has a personal
history with me, almost as if I'd
met him and known him. There
are connections, and things I revere.
I think writers do that; they grasp
certain particular things and never
let go - turning them instead into
icons of self, things by which to
further build one's own universe,
as the writer. Thus, with me,
Schwartz. His old apartment at
91 Bedford Street, near to the now
defunct 'Chumley's' was a spot
I often went to, just to stand
outside of it a bit, and stare.
[And, by the way, the New York
of today has become so brittle,
stupidly sacrosanct and embroiled,
that even Chumley's couldn't make,
literacy having probably left town
on a 2800-dollar bicycle pedaled
by a muffin-moron; the latest
breed]. Saul Bellow had a great
book all about the personage, in
the guise of fine fiction, called
'Humboldt's Gift.' Anyway, one
time, in my dense duty to the
personal history of Delmore, I
tracked his gravesite down , to
Emerson NJ or whatever that
town there is called. He died, by
the way, crazed and insane enough,
abandoned, unclaimed and forgotten,
in midtown, sometime in 1966, [7/11]
and the body laid unclaimed for a
time until an uncle of his located
and claimed it, and had him buried
and duly taken mind of, in a vast,
Jewish cemetery. (Isaac Bashevis
Singer is also buried there). It
took me a long time, much walking,
and numerous false ends to finally
locate his grave - I finally gave up
and walked my way to the office.
Asking at the desk, of the Hasidic
guys there, where I might find the
grave of Delmore Schwartz (they
knew nothing of him, nor the
name), they looked at me quizzically
and asked 'What tribe was he?' I
was floored, and almost, for comedy
wanted to say 'Pawnee? Cherokee?'
But, I later learned they meant, by
tribe, the very-important connotation
for Jews, like 'Cohen' or Levy' (Levi?).
That all means something important.
I did get a grave number, and a row
number and all that, and was able to
find it. Rather mundane, plain and
ordinary too. But the impulse was
there. I felt it. I guess we all, in our
ways, have our own funny stories
and endings, of things way past
our control and ordering.
-
It's the same way, funny enough,
for my big-deal, renegade, California
rebel brother-in-law, who blew his
brains out in his yard, at age 57, in
Vallejo. Back about 2004, I think it
was. For all his bravado and bluster,
everyone was so aghast at the suicide
that he was flown back, remnants anyway,
to NJ in a box, then as ashes buried,
to what have been his pure chagrin, in
some leftover gravesite the family had,
next to a grandmother, in a forlorn and
flat (no stones) Paramus NJ graveyard
abutting a vast suburban golf course.
The few times I've gone there I've
found errant golf balls that had been
shot over the high hedge and rolled
(the their momentum's death too) at
or near his spot. Pretty funny, and
he'd have been outraged. Eternity.
Next to a golf course!
-
Well no matter - goes to show how
nothing remains true, by its ending,
to its beginnings and origins. Every
thought about a future I ever had
when I was 15 or 18 or 20 has come
nowhere near to the fruition I once
envisioned. A cartful of marbles or
a shipment of cracked mirrors would
closer to the mark. None of it bears
any tangible relationship to the
muck of my life, all these dwindling
years later. It's not even the sort of
thing one can talk big about. It
just is. It's all circumstance. I think
life is layers: in fact layer over layer
of time and reality, each with their
own veneer of occurrence and
reaction, and that is what existence
becomes made of - a stack of layers,
so different for each of us that it's
a wonder we can even talk to each
other. (Which, by the way, has
now become more and more
impossible. I notice that people,
the young anyway, now speak
totally differently than anything
I've ever heard or been able to
understand. I can't really any
longer, I just mostly bluff. The
ways by which words are uttered
now - swiftly and with weird
rises and turns at the ends of
sentences - sound more like
an accent, of old, of distant place.
The way foreigners from far-off
used to come across - very
differently and quite nearly
unintelligible unless one knew
the language. That's in real-voice.
Phone messages and voices are
far worse.
-
So, to bring this to its illogical
conclusion, as I stand next to these
old graves now - all those Melville
and Singer, Ginsberg and Schwartz,
locations, I try very deeply and hard
to imagine the sound of THAT old
voice, were it to come to me, from
the grave - the timbre, the sound,
the pace, and the words. I vouchsafe
that it too would be so different as
to be unintelligible. Though I, of
course, would hope not. (I once
went to Walt Whitman's tomb, in
Camden, NJ, and swear to you
that the voice there was of
a multitude)
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