LET'S TRY THAT SONG AGAIN
1. Until that mountain rises from the sea,
most things around here will remain
about the same: same headaches, same
rum-raisin ice cream after dinner, same
20 books in their recurring-read pile.
-
I'd swear the doorbell rang - but I have
none and no one would come up the hill
either. I can see the cars below me, as
they do pass by here : home repair guys,
the logger truck, some pick-up guys in
their wild array, working out the day.
-
It has no other tang to it: no church bells,
or school bells, or any of that stuff they
have in 'towns' where people live. The
rows of things, historic districts, town
hall, and the hospital near the old hotel.
-
I was reading today about Elizabeth
Hardwick - some of the things she
wrote about the people she saw, outside
her, in NYC. Interesting, for sure, how
her idea of 'concepts stayed the same:
'Displaced things and old people, rigid,
with their tired veins and clogged arteries,
with their bunions and aching arches,
their sparse hair and wavering thoughts,
over the Carpathian Mountains, out of
the bayous - that is what it is like here
in that holy city.'
-
Though I too used to feel that way,
today I'd disagree. It is, after all, a long
and giant step from 1946. Grime speaks
no louder in its ways than ignorance does,
about a place that no longer really exists
at all: 'Many are flung down carelessly at
birth and they experience diminishment of
their random misplacement. For me the
highway, the asphalt paths, the thieves,
contaminated skies like a suffocating
cloak of mangy fur, the millions in
their boroughs - that is truly home.'
-----
I'd guess that anyplace I was ever at was
home enough for me. A section of years
in placard-placed book? A diary of both
memories and jeers? Someplace from
where I was from, to be redundant? I
think I mostly took my joy from bringing
certain joys to others. Showing friends
what Red Hook, Brooklyn was like. Or
driving up to Zelda's Nuthouse (what I
called the sanitorium in Beacon NY,
where Zelda Fitzgerald put up for a
while). One thing I've not yet done is
bring my friend to the Old Nothern
Dispensary. Worth a look, for sure.
-
One need not fear the marginal people.
They always get by. Take heed, and
Absorb: 'A midtown, fleabag hotel filled
with down-at-heel itinerants - people living
as if in a house recently burglarized, wires
cut, their world vandalized, their memory
a lament to peculiar losses. They were
lifted by insolence against their forgotten
loans, their surly arrears, their misspent
matrimonies, their many debts which
seemed to fall with relief into those
wastebaskets where they would be
picked up by the night men.....Most of
them were failures but lived elated by
unreal hopes. They drank. They fought,
They fornicated. They ran up bills. They
were not poverty-stricken, just always a
little 'behind.' And all this happened just
steps from The Harvard Club, The New
York Time, the old Hotel Astor, the
Algonquin.'
-
A brilliant light outside in New York City.
It is Saturday and people with debts are
going to restaurants, jumping in taxicabs,
careening from east to west by way of
the underpass through the Park. What
difference does it make to be here alone?
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