RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,265
(way alone on my other side)
It's difficult, sometimes, to
go backwards or to understand
the value of coming from the
rear, a retrospective view,
of where you have been. I
do it often enough, but many
times all I get are guns in the
east, 1959 Caravelles in the
sky, and dual-headlights on
Rococo styled cars. Not a
wickedly well-put set of
examples, but, you know.
-
When I was young, a lot
of words confused me, and
caught my attention. I was in
a store recently - one of those
'today' stores where now the
messages on the shopping carts
are in two languages, English
and Spanish. The word used
for 'basket,' in the Spanish-use,
was canasta. As a kid, my mother
often said that word, but back then
all she meant was some sort of
card game she'd occasionally
play - ladies were always having
'card parties.' That was another
mystery to me - they'd alternate
the houses, maybe monthly or
every two weeks - I forget -
and the same people would
go to each other's houses for
'card parties.' Canasta was
played some, Maybe there's a
word connection with 'basket'
meaning a specific grouping
of cards? In the same way, all
these weird ladies were always
having 'Demonstrations' in each
other's homes (no, not the 1960's
kinds of 'demonstrations,' which
came later and took to the streets,
not homes) - nights out when
some faux-actress saleslady nobody
would shill for junk jewelry or
makeup kits, blankets and towels
and beddings. The crazed ladies
would fall for it all.
-
Perhaps I just missed a lot; never
knowing much of what was going
on with the loosey-goosey aspects
of newly arrived suburbanites along
their tic-tac-toe rows of new homes
as the 1940's were ending. With all
that came cocktails and fences, cars
and paved driveways. I just never
caught up. And glad for the miss.
-
I was adrift pretty much from the
first days I began to think. The world
made no sense. Period, and that was
all. All those forced polemics about
God and Country just made me ill.
My own pet theory, spoken to me in
a long, post-coma diatribe, was how
all things were just ONE, and Creation
had not been Creation of the 'many'
but instead a sort of founding of 'One
Mind' which could envision all things.
There was no 'checklist' of one thing
after the other that 'God' made, like
that Bible version of a progression
of creation, etc. The only thing 'Made'
was the one essence by which, formed
as Humanity, would accept all things
and allow the possibilities for all other
things to exist. This there was very
little delineation between thought and
matter. All the 'Creator' as Prime Mover
had needed to do was create the 'One'
and thereby allow it to be capable of
acceptance of all conditionals and
peripherals and possibles, and just
set it spinning, all. In other words,
the only thing God had to do was
create something that would accept
everything else - like creation tales,
iron, steel, water, Earth and planets,
mountains, hills, time, experience,
life, sad and happy, regrets, and
death too. The tragic and the flawed.
the happy and the joyous, categories
of 'Good' and 'Bad' - and all would
go on and all would be accepted.
Even the ideas of start and finish,
birth and death. A tree, with a
zillion branches. All things.
-
That was miles, nay, light years,
away from what I was seeing at
age 10. All my other ages too, and
it still is that way. There's a great
divide, and I sometimes seem way
alone on my other side. It was a
wonder to me that I even understood
what people were saying. The didn't
seem to 'mean' anything; they just
talked within categories and rambled
on about eminently useless stuff.
I apparently was expected to buy
into some piece of all that and then
structure my very same life as theirs
around my portion of it. It was all
unspoken too, and it came across
instead as some dark, erroneous
cloud of expectation that somehow
was always crowding me out of
whatever space I was trying to be
in. There truly was no other way
to go but out.
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