RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,296
(hope you can stay with me)
It's 50+ years plus now since
I first walked into this wall :
Now they call everything 'fresh'
and 'natural' and 'market' and all
that folderal, fey, factless drivel
that the soldiers of the left adhere
to, but in 1967, arriving like a new
teardrop on a young girl's heartbroken
face, I slammed - face first - into
new realities. One thing after the other,
in a place I'd never been before; like a
displaced Hungarian or Pole, I just
wondered around, usually until I
crashed into something. Tompkins
Square Park was full of that : Euro
Jews mostly, still in shock; post
WWII glimmerings of all the most
horrid things one could be put
through and, if, survived and picked
up for refuge, thrown by the Allies
into further camps, displaced people,
and heaved somehow freely, onto
American soil. If possible, among
kin. They'd sit on the benches, staring
out as if into nothing, or perhaps to a
film of their own creating echoing
their personal horrors. It was all as of
something I'd never seen before. Back
in Avenel, parks were for kids, mostly.
There was none of this horror there, nor
ghostliness, and I had to quickly translate
what that all meant. The threat of immanence
was everywhere. The shambles of my
life had become - by 'growing up' suburban -
a simple and apparent farce . I had been kept
away from - inured from - all these
urban things which were, in reality, far
more vital to life's well-springs and being.
My frivolous Howdy-Doody upbringing,
by contrast, had been a stupid and farcical
shadow dance behind a curtain of horror
I never had to face. How I pitied those
poor people.
-
There has never been anything narrow about
the ways of Humans and events. When they
work in tandem, any lie can be created. The
mass of men lead lives of quiet? Perspiration?
Inspiration? Conflagration, Desperation?
Infestation? Take your pick, for it's all the
same and all amounts to a lie. In one month
'Taney Maganberry'; the next month it's
'Myra Schutz.' The next month its Hiram
Jensen Hughes. A facetious story of some
sort with be woven around such a person,
both indicting them for a societal violation
(in the WOKE A'hole' manner). The person's
situation and 'personality'[all fragmented
anyway] is destroyed in the equivalency
of murder. There' is no defense]. This runs
the virtue-gamut, and it most probably
began with Anne Frank (all false and all
manufactured) and Dr. Albert Schweitzer,
of Lambarene. If you know nothing of those
two, you've obviously missed the bullshit
boat. They are falsely delineated, proto-historic
characters forced on us by virtue-hacks.
-
If there was ever a blackness on the world, it
was then, certainly not now. All that gets lived
now are pretentious little bundles of time by
twisted eunuchs with no sense or brain. All
factotums of a moratorium on wisdom and
thought, those who can do everything, wrongly.
And hold opinions too, wrongly, about things
they know nothing about, yet call it truth. My
first times in NYC - my initial days and
'visuals' were all stunning to me, and I'll only
try here to get across how different August
'67 really was, for the 'new kid in town.'
Hope you can stay with me.
-
It, perhaps can be fun for you too; sort of re-living
vicariously all the dumb crap I ended up going through:
1. the MIASMA ARMS HOTEL
1. CLOTHES MADE IN CHINA:
I was wearing a coat which didn't really fit - the sleeves seemed too short and the chest area too large making it all feel awkward and as if I was somehow lost in two different coats fighting to both keep me in and let me out at the same time - and the label bore some sort of griffin or flying creature which was marked within a yellow/gold circle with sunbeams and the lettering beneath spelled out something like 'Harum' although I could never really tell by the mis-stitching which marred the lettering and although none of it really mattered yet I bundled it up as tightly as I could and I came close to the edge of the water where the night sky was glittering on its surface reflected in a congeries of lights very little of which was stars but which had been at least entered by the filmy light of a now full moon (which I welcomed with a grin) and behind me traffic went by with that wheezing sound of rubber on stone and it all seemed echoed and amplified by the narrowness of the thin street along the water and the continued steady passage of cars - all of which in addition was harmonized with the slapping sound of the river water crawling along the sides of the few ships docked there and the wavy ripple of the soundings and wakes made by the passing tugs and the smaller craft using the night-waters ALL IN ALL it was an amazing sight for me ALONE as I was and huddled low in 16 degree cold and ready to bear anything for I had decided once again to make an all-night traipse out of this night - one that would involve walking and finding heat and late-night all-night city diners and coffee-stops and occasional forays into alcoves and sheltered areas where PERHAPS the cold would not be so intense and so I started to do what I intended and only wondered how long I could keep it up - this catalogued propensity for punishment and exposure was something I never could shake - and as I right then looked up I saw three men unloading a van and they were working feverishly passing crates and boxes back and forth from the rear of one van into the side-opening of another larger truck which was still running in place next to it and on the side of the larger truck it said simple 'Shimey & Son Trucking Bensonhurst New York' and the small van read nothing and did not ever have commercial plates - so its presence meant nothing to me - and although I wondered what they were shifting as cargo I let it pass until suddenly one of them turned and sharply said to me "what do you want ? you lose something?" and I muttered back "no nothing I'm just here walking" and he said "well keep walking OK?" which of course had I taken as a challenge or an affront would only have whipped up my appetite for investigation even more but which I let pass without further comment figuring I'd be better off that way YET they had already confirmed my ideas of their complicity in something criminal by that very action and needless to say I really didn't care but wished to say something back just to even the score - and thoughts passed through my head of things I could have said 'just here waiting for the detectives I called to arrive' or 'no actually I'm on my way to meet your daughter and fuck her brains out' - stupid stuff like that - which would have served the guy right but done me no good and then right at that moment the thought hit me that I owed these guys NOTHING at all and they had absolutely no right or reason to stop me from being there staying there or passing on and that was enough to have me take a left turn towards the water's edge and just stay there - back to them - almost in spite - and the same guy comes over to me and says "well maybe you didn't understand me but I asked you to keep going" and I turned back and said discreetly "I'm really not doing anything at all and it's not up to you what I do and I'm not interfering with you anyway" and then his hands were on my back and I felt him pressing me to the ground and soon enough I was there and found him to be kicking me while saying "I'll say it again now get the fuck out of here" and while curled up like that I couldn't understand how I was supposed to be able to leave at the same time but eventually I did get up and just looked at him with disdain as if to say 'go fuck yourself asshole' and started moving away and then I figured what the hell it was all nothing to me so I kept walking along towards the end of the next few streets from there and fortunately that was enough to keep them from bothering me and it was another 15 or 20 minutes before I saw them pulling away - done with their task I figured - but then the small van circled back around and I figured they'd known my whereabouts the entire time and that maybe it was soon to be trouble-time again for me but instead the van pulled up to me and stopped and the window rolled down and the guy stuck his arm out the window with a twenty dollar bill and said "here - you didn't see a thing OK?" and I took the money as they drove off with their lights dimmed (maybe so I couldn't 'read' a license plate) until they were much farther away and the lights came back on - now all this might not seem like much but back then twenty bucks was a lot of money (to me especially) and it represented a big bonus for doing nothing or at least for taking a few swift kicks in the gut - which I easily withstood - so I was glad of the entire scene and never went back to investigate anything of the scene nor the cargo and whether it was mink coats or gold bullion or dead babies I couldn't really have cared and whatever transpired there that night the dark water still beckoned and the dancing moonlight still shone on the surface both oily and black and it wasn't until that moment that I realized his kicking had torn the sleeve of one side of my coat and that I'd lost a button at the center too and as it was already a needy situation with the cast-off coat I figured to bundle up even more if I could and then as I turned a corner I saw two barrels filled with flames and a few guys standing around them for warmth so I headed over to them figuring they'd let me share the flames - which they did with a nod and as I stood there watching them in the silence of the flickering flames I realized they all were older versions of what I myself may have already started on my way to becoming - the kind of guys who stuff gloves with newspaper tear-offs to keep their wrists warm and who put newspaper clumps in their coats and shoes and as they stood there I could see cigarettes dangling and frozen faces loving the warmth and the warm red glow as it flickered off their imagistic faces and forms and they hadn't much to say - and probably wouldn't want to talk anyway - but I was just the same captivated and taken by the company I was with - grizzled nocturnal veterans of the deep-night cold along the old westside piers and docks and these were men who wanted nothing and took nothing from no one and I knew whatever their stories were or their destinations or whatever it was all singular solitary and totally personal and only by accident had they ended up on these malfeasant New York City streets and if it was anywhere else or any other simple turn of fate each one of them could be a Daniel Boone or a Johnny Appleseed of their very own traipsing off in single-endeavor through the primal wilderness of a great new continent BUT INSTEAD somehow this entire wretch of an island and landmass local had ended up as the cul de sac of cul de sacs the dead end of all dead ends for men who have reached their limits and dreams which have achieved their failures but as no words were spoken and nothing was said I took them for what they were and wished I was something else myself - but gracious for their help I appreciated the warmth of their fires and flames and savored each moment I spent in their circle.
--
Some men die of blunt trauma on the highest of hills or while tied to poles of execution while other men slowly wither and rot by comparison yet in the end the death of one is as good as the other - and other men try and do all they can do to continue to live and by dint of their strength and their steel they succeed - outside of odds and percentages - and it was amidst such men that I was then huddled around the fire and I stayed there for perhaps an hour just listening to their occasional talk and banter and stories and all their words together were mixed with possibilities and productions and things which failed and valiant efforts at their own redemptions and second and third chances for this or that endeavor and while whatever it was which may have brought any of them to this passage they each knew the value of their repeated efforts towards succeeding and getting past hurdles and all disillusioned together they yet bemoaned the fates which brought them to these losses - and what they had left behind and who and the sadness was never as bleak as the predictions of what still was to come for one and for all spoke together in a massive writhing sorrow mixed with a sarcasm and foulness of their own and all of this was brought forth with a secretive language of short words and slogans I'd not really heard before and much of this conspired right then too in my young head (seeing much of this for the first time as 'real' experience) to make vivid the strangely exciting American mix of characters all mixed up together in some haphazard soup thrown out upon the streets of New York for I knew for sure that my previous 17 years had never really included mixing or running across these sorts of people - drifters vagrants and the like being one thing YET these men were another step and far beyond that and they were noble veterans they were the unmixed fruit of 30 years of post-war endeavor in a way that was soon-to-be extinct and a faded rabid glory of a early twentieth-century American mankind so soon to be extinguished.
--
Sometimes it is given to us to be witness at events and other times we are given active roles in making the events we take part in but one way or the other we are never truly just 'bystanders' in the adventure of living and from the night of the fire-barrel (which I realized much later I was brutally reminded of when watching Halloween night revelries which I witnessed beneath a three-quarter moon on the same west-side area of the waterfront but this was thirty years later believe it or not and the participants in this revel were Wiccans and New Agers of the most pretentious sort yet as I stayed there along Washington Street and watched their writhing and chanting and dancing next to a fire and beneath the night-sky and moonlight I saw the difference between so many things - between culture and attitude between sadness and stupidity between frothsome youth-revel and core-dissidence based on the life-struggle but MOSTLY I saw the huge differences between the two slabs of time my own life has so far book-ended : the dark dour post-war time of struggle and depression and hard work as loss and this newer contemporary time of devil-may-care hedonism scripted by foul deeds and the illegible comportment of far larger powers of evil which have corrupted mankind's mind eye and spiritual base - twisted all things into a cruel parody of whatever once was and whatever once true Grace could have been - for now simply no one cares and all are fools).
--
I arrived at the 12th Street diner and as I sat down at the counter the girl behind that counter came right over to me and said "what happened to you you're face is all bloody?" and of course in the cold and excitement of the night I'd not realized that I'd been bruised and cut and in addition to that as I looked down now I could see that the front of my coat was all soiled and trashed with having been kicked - this aside from the loss of a button - and the general dishevelment of my appearance probably alarmed the counter-waitress as she quickly began saying "my God look at you you're a mess what happened are you OK?" and with that she put before me a welcome cup of coffee and a bowl of some brown soup - also welcomed - and I replied "no nothing really I've been out walking along the westside and fell on some ice and really rolled around a bit but I wasn't sure I'd gotten hurt or cut until just now - I'll wash it up and I'll be fine" and she smiled back saying "well no matter - you're still a mess but if you need a rag or something let me know" and her name was Theresa DePelletra and I'd gotten to know her a bit over that Fall and Winter - she called herself 'Tre' and I'd heard other call her various things from 'Terri D' to 'Rhea' - from just stopping in pretty often and we'd become friendly enough to just talk late-nights away - she'd always told me she'd run away from home two years before because her father was brutal and she hated him and her brothers were no better but now one of them had moved over to Perry Street so she was again running scared but so far he'd done nothing but stopped in a few times to check on her and say hello and he was somehow hooked up with the mob operating out of Sullivan Street and she had no idea what he was being put up to but knew it couldn't be good and hoped he'd really just keep going and not come back and I commiserated some when I could and actually always wanted to get closer to her but the entire family/brother thing kept me away and I knew the less I had to do with that the better and this particular night I was more than happy she'd not volunteered any information like he was 'last seen driving a van towards the docks for some kind of drop-off' because that would have just made my midnight and I was hoping she'd not connect any events to me or to the blood she saw or anything like that but I stayed there smiling back and talking mainly because I knew she liked it and so did I and anyway I was getting sweet on her even if she was three or four years older but so what and this night she didn't even ask for money so I never did show her my twenty as much as I almost wanted too (as if it was some mob-gifted pay-off to me for 'services') because as I'd learned big-shots are made not born and it's all bullshit in the end so I might as well have started getting good at it but I never did and this particular night anyway I ended up feeling like just staying there for a long time and warming up and she was apparently more than happy to oblige that - and all around me were the usual types coming and going donuts coffee sandwiches and all that and the trade they brought in amounted to money enough I guess and it was truckers delivery guys college kids girls together and girls and guys on late dates and a few cops and then the regular sloppy demented crazies the usual sort who frequented all-nighters like this - the woman in the netted kerchief the lady with the tiny dog the fat guy with two cigars the thick-glassed philosopher with his fourteen books and pens the dancer in leotards and a few whores or whatever they called themselves - and there I sat together with all the world just trying to figure out myself and my own place and time in the ice-frost freezing cold night and I was alone as always but never lonely I was dumb as the street but never stupid and eyes wide open observing everything like a cop and noting differences and habits and similarities and schedules and what came and what went and between that and my art school lodgings ALL of it was my new education my new pedestal my greater-than-ever-claim-to-fame and I found it all quite wonderful and Tre herself only added to the charm and mystique as I watched her brush past me each time - breasts just right and a great look in her aproned waitress dress and her smile glittered enough for daylight and no matter what else I was sure to set my sights right there as often as I could and if only I thought if only SEX was on the menu I'd have a big helping of her and right then some jowly guy comes in - some late middle-aged swamp creature - and starts asking for the whereabouts of "Jimmy Califano and I want to know NOW and I want to know RIGHT" and with that he slammed a fist on the counter and Harry O comes out from behind the kitchen doors with a cleaver bigger than Iowa and walks up to the guy and says "look buster we said it before we don't know nothing and this is a place of business and no Jimmy's been here and no Jimmy's coming here so get the fuck out and get out now!" and he pushed the guy backwards and the guy's ass hit a table and some stuff went flying but he started cursing or something in Italian and went storming out the door swiping as he passed everything at the cash-counter and glasses and mints and toothpicks and papers and everything went smashing to the floor as he left and just then I started worrying for sure that he was one of the guys I'd seen at the waterfront but NOT the one with whom I'd made contact but right about then I was starting to get really tired of the sport and people pushing each other and demanding stuff and all so I stood up and said to Harry O "Harry what's going on why do you have to put up with stuff like this and who are these people that can do this?" and he said "Shut up kid it's part of business; they pretty much own the joint and I gotta' buy from them too so I'm stuck in the fucking middle of nothing and getting tired of it myself too and next time I'll bring out a gun and really show that fat bastard what's up" and he retired to the kitchen as I watched Theresa DePelletra pretty herself up so she too could worry and then I started thinking about her and what they could do to her if they I guess chose to and I wondered what she'd do if trouble came but then just like the rest I started picturing her naked anyway and it all went to Hell around me and she said "that flunky hires people like my brother to get other people in trouble and then he blames everybody else when something goes wrong and I just wish he'd drop dead and the whole bunch of them get deported" and then she smiled at me and said "bet you wish you was with them eh?" and I said "nah I don't care about that it seems like too much trouble about nothing" and she said "you'll be like the rest someday and if they come asking for you you'll go with them too - it never fails - guys love that kind of stuff" and I said "not me I don't think I'd ever have an interest in anything I couldn't touch" and she laughed and said "Oh ! so that's your game?" and walked away smiling at my idea of contact sports (but if she only knew).
Some men die of blunt trauma on the highest of hills or while tied to poles of execution while other men slowly wither and rot by comparison yet in the end the death of one is as good as the other - and other men try and do all they can do to continue to live and by dint of their strength and their steel they succeed - outside of odds and percentages - and it was amidst such men that I was then huddled around the fire and I stayed there for perhaps an hour just listening to their occasional talk and banter and stories and all their words together were mixed with possibilities and productions and things which failed and valiant efforts at their own redemptions and second and third chances for this or that endeavor and while whatever it was which may have brought any of them to this passage they each knew the value of their repeated efforts towards succeeding and getting past hurdles and all disillusioned together they yet bemoaned the fates which brought them to these losses - and what they had left behind and who and the sadness was never as bleak as the predictions of what still was to come for one and for all spoke together in a massive writhing sorrow mixed with a sarcasm and foulness of their own and all of this was brought forth with a secretive language of short words and slogans I'd not really heard before and much of this conspired right then too in my young head (seeing much of this for the first time as 'real' experience) to make vivid the strangely exciting American mix of characters all mixed up together in some haphazard soup thrown out upon the streets of New York for I knew for sure that my previous 17 years had never really included mixing or running across these sorts of people - drifters vagrants and the like being one thing YET these men were another step and far beyond that and they were noble veterans they were the unmixed fruit of 30 years of post-war endeavor in a way that was soon-to-be extinct and a faded rabid glory of a early twentieth-century American mankind so soon to be extinguished.
--
Sometimes it is given to us to be witness at events and other times we are given active roles in making the events we take part in but one way or the other we are never truly just 'bystanders' in the adventure of living and from the night of the fire-barrel (which I realized much later I was brutally reminded of when watching Halloween night revelries which I witnessed beneath a three-quarter moon on the same west-side area of the waterfront but this was thirty years later believe it or not and the participants in this revel were Wiccans and New Agers of the most pretentious sort yet as I stayed there along Washington Street and watched their writhing and chanting and dancing next to a fire and beneath the night-sky and moonlight I saw the difference between so many things - between culture and attitude between sadness and stupidity between frothsome youth-revel and core-dissidence based on the life-struggle but MOSTLY I saw the huge differences between the two slabs of time my own life has so far book-ended : the dark dour post-war time of struggle and depression and hard work as loss and this newer contemporary time of devil-may-care hedonism scripted by foul deeds and the illegible comportment of far larger powers of evil which have corrupted mankind's mind eye and spiritual base - twisted all things into a cruel parody of whatever once was and whatever once true Grace could have been - for now simply no one cares and all are fools).
--
I arrived at the 12th Street diner and as I sat down at the counter the girl behind that counter came right over to me and said "what happened to you you're face is all bloody?" and of course in the cold and excitement of the night I'd not realized that I'd been bruised and cut and in addition to that as I looked down now I could see that the front of my coat was all soiled and trashed with having been kicked - this aside from the loss of a button - and the general dishevelment of my appearance probably alarmed the counter-waitress as she quickly began saying "my God look at you you're a mess what happened are you OK?" and with that she put before me a welcome cup of coffee and a bowl of some brown soup - also welcomed - and I replied "no nothing really I've been out walking along the westside and fell on some ice and really rolled around a bit but I wasn't sure I'd gotten hurt or cut until just now - I'll wash it up and I'll be fine" and she smiled back saying "well no matter - you're still a mess but if you need a rag or something let me know" and her name was Theresa DePelletra and I'd gotten to know her a bit over that Fall and Winter - she called herself 'Tre' and I'd heard other call her various things from 'Terri D' to 'Rhea' - from just stopping in pretty often and we'd become friendly enough to just talk late-nights away - she'd always told me she'd run away from home two years before because her father was brutal and she hated him and her brothers were no better but now one of them had moved over to Perry Street so she was again running scared but so far he'd done nothing but stopped in a few times to check on her and say hello and he was somehow hooked up with the mob operating out of Sullivan Street and she had no idea what he was being put up to but knew it couldn't be good and hoped he'd really just keep going and not come back and I commiserated some when I could and actually always wanted to get closer to her but the entire family/brother thing kept me away and I knew the less I had to do with that the better and this particular night I was more than happy she'd not volunteered any information like he was 'last seen driving a van towards the docks for some kind of drop-off' because that would have just made my midnight and I was hoping she'd not connect any events to me or to the blood she saw or anything like that but I stayed there smiling back and talking mainly because I knew she liked it and so did I and anyway I was getting sweet on her even if she was three or four years older but so what and this night she didn't even ask for money so I never did show her my twenty as much as I almost wanted too (as if it was some mob-gifted pay-off to me for 'services') because as I'd learned big-shots are made not born and it's all bullshit in the end so I might as well have started getting good at it but I never did and this particular night anyway I ended up feeling like just staying there for a long time and warming up and she was apparently more than happy to oblige that - and all around me were the usual types coming and going donuts coffee sandwiches and all that and the trade they brought in amounted to money enough I guess and it was truckers delivery guys college kids girls together and girls and guys on late dates and a few cops and then the regular sloppy demented crazies the usual sort who frequented all-nighters like this - the woman in the netted kerchief the lady with the tiny dog the fat guy with two cigars the thick-glassed philosopher with his fourteen books and pens the dancer in leotards and a few whores or whatever they called themselves - and there I sat together with all the world just trying to figure out myself and my own place and time in the ice-frost freezing cold night and I was alone as always but never lonely I was dumb as the street but never stupid and eyes wide open observing everything like a cop and noting differences and habits and similarities and schedules and what came and what went and between that and my art school lodgings ALL of it was my new education my new pedestal my greater-than-ever-claim-to-fame and I found it all quite wonderful and Tre herself only added to the charm and mystique as I watched her brush past me each time - breasts just right and a great look in her aproned waitress dress and her smile glittered enough for daylight and no matter what else I was sure to set my sights right there as often as I could and if only I thought if only SEX was on the menu I'd have a big helping of her and right then some jowly guy comes in - some late middle-aged swamp creature - and starts asking for the whereabouts of "Jimmy Califano and I want to know NOW and I want to know RIGHT" and with that he slammed a fist on the counter and Harry O comes out from behind the kitchen doors with a cleaver bigger than Iowa and walks up to the guy and says "look buster we said it before we don't know nothing and this is a place of business and no Jimmy's been here and no Jimmy's coming here so get the fuck out and get out now!" and he pushed the guy backwards and the guy's ass hit a table and some stuff went flying but he started cursing or something in Italian and went storming out the door swiping as he passed everything at the cash-counter and glasses and mints and toothpicks and papers and everything went smashing to the floor as he left and just then I started worrying for sure that he was one of the guys I'd seen at the waterfront but NOT the one with whom I'd made contact but right about then I was starting to get really tired of the sport and people pushing each other and demanding stuff and all so I stood up and said to Harry O "Harry what's going on why do you have to put up with stuff like this and who are these people that can do this?" and he said "Shut up kid it's part of business; they pretty much own the joint and I gotta' buy from them too so I'm stuck in the fucking middle of nothing and getting tired of it myself too and next time I'll bring out a gun and really show that fat bastard what's up" and he retired to the kitchen as I watched Theresa DePelletra pretty herself up so she too could worry and then I started thinking about her and what they could do to her if they I guess chose to and I wondered what she'd do if trouble came but then just like the rest I started picturing her naked anyway and it all went to Hell around me and she said "that flunky hires people like my brother to get other people in trouble and then he blames everybody else when something goes wrong and I just wish he'd drop dead and the whole bunch of them get deported" and then she smiled at me and said "bet you wish you was with them eh?" and I said "nah I don't care about that it seems like too much trouble about nothing" and she said "you'll be like the rest someday and if they come asking for you you'll go with them too - it never fails - guys love that kind of stuff" and I said "not me I don't think I'd ever have an interest in anything I couldn't touch" and she laughed and said "Oh ! so that's your game?" and walked away smiling at my idea of contact sports (but if she only knew).
2. DOCUMENTS OF THE DIRECTORATE
(The Lettuce Train):
The little hotel was on the corner of 8th Street and 6th Ave a small walkup a warren of tiny rooms a little junk-shop of odd people fronting 8th Street and mixed within a mess of shoe-stores jewelry and junk shops and nearby was Bigelow's the famed drugstore with its fountain service and upstairs there somewhere was some guy's studio - a guy who billed himself the 'fastest painter in the world' and who's claim to fame was ten-minute portraits or somesuch and his broad and wide studio windows fronted the avenues and could be easily seen from most any angle - Jefferson Market Courthouse with its bell tower or the old Women's House of Detention or the little French bakeries on the nearby corner and there were small nightclubs and grocers and everything else - a ribald and wild corner of activity mixed with sleaze - and the Miami Arms Hotel took them all in - the drifters losers sickies druggies cripples down-and-outs and whoever else could pay like seven dollars a night to crash there - a cheap sleep and a closet and bathroom to boot - but the hallways stank and the cretins at the desk were either killers or perverts and either one of those choices could get you what you wanted and the cold bare walls of the lobby were a joke - a vending machine or two and a picture or two of some naked stiletto-heel type you'd rather not meet - and I always called it the Miasma Arms Hotel because the air stunk and it seemed like a death palace for jumpers too frightened to jump and who instead merely had decided to await death in this condition - if it could be called a 'condition' - and kids hung around and various runaways and young girls looking to make five dollars or find a sponsor or work all night until they were raw - nothing mattered and no one cared and the streets along the way were each as merciless as night when the darkness took over and it was only lately on weekends that all of a sudden there were new bands of marauding white teenagers from other boroughs and New Jersey stalking around in awe or running as if they owned the place and buying cheap drugs or selling their own drugs or bodies and heroin and marijuana were rampant as was the walk-up noise of each little nearby stairway (and just before this time too one fellow or the other later named Jimi Hendrix or Sam Shepard or Patti Smith or whoever lived quite nearby in a mostly meaningless and anonymous fashion) and police tried to do nothing while everyone else tried to do too much yet the Miasma Arms Hotel was often one of the other places I'd gravitate to just to watch and see what was going on and nearby to it also was enough cheap food so that fifty cents was almost always enough to feel well-fed and there was always music or some sort of noise and activity taking place so one could figure a passage to somewhere just by hanging out and pretending or at least dreaming and no one bothered me ever there as I came to recognize many of the same old faces - the junkies and the skinny frightened kids without any recourse to help or any outlet to relief and eventually they each just dwindled away or died or it seemed just disappeared and it always did seem to me that guys would never move on never change but instead they'd just get stalled and slowly degrade but girls on the other hand it seemed always managed to find a way to move on or hitch their star to someone or something else and get away - so that there were always new girls coming in as the older ones moved on and the new girls were always sought after and taken as soon as they could be convinced of some gain or good logic to be had in the taking - and I'd probably figured that more young girls from other places were deflowered there than probably most anywhere else in the city because it just always seemed to work that way and there were guys who were totally talented and skilled in breaking down a girl's resistance and initiating her into the grand guignol of sex as soon as it became feasible but I figured at least that was something and nobody seemed really to mind - marijuana and other drugs along with alcohol did their work on a steady basis and many was the morning when some listless sleeping body was found half-strewn and near naked on the floor paying the consequences of what had gone on the night before but no one ever said anything and nothing much ever came of it - like I said no cops no parents no medical emergencies and everyone seemed happy - and most of the time it was the girls anyway who invariably delighted in fucking and then telling about it too but I always figured that's the 'human trade' and it was as old as - at the least - Sodom and Gomorrah if not Eden itself.
-
It was like that so many times - amazingly multifarious and stern and new and threatening and comforting all at the same time and towards the end of this little era the place was again changing - the Peppermint Lounge or what was left of it had somehow moved into the corner space which was mostly a below-ground mysterium never entered and the old Electric Circus nee the Dom had degenerated into some pulchritude of stupid hippieness and was made over in electric lights and dark colors and whatever existed there stayed private and the rest of St. Mark's too had fallen into shreds of dumb anarchy and gay hippy bliss and between west 8th and its eastside continuation as St. Mark's Place there existed a sort of no man's land of truck terminals and District 65 Union Offices around Astor Place and Cooper Union - everything conspired towards abstract ineptitude and unfocused surrealism all mixed together with memory and frolic and anything of the 'old' times was quickly forgotten as if no past had ever existed anyway or anywhere - and along Saint Marks dazed Polish people still huddled in fright on their old walkups and stairways just gazing out in wonder - LITTLE WONDER they hadn't a clue - for all of this was nothing but bad remnant poor imitation claptrap rattling image and a latent anarchy bleeding through every pore in the skin of stupidity - the Old Village after all had been the original template once - dominated by The Masses magazine and a deeply cynical and socialist perspective and then in the 1920's it had become dominated by the KEY institution - Provincetown Theater Company - from which it moved eventually from cynicism to irony to absurdism from politics to theater to eventually - in the1930's - nothing at all and by that time the old Italian ghetto was long gone dispersed by reality and foolishness so that the once-ratty Italian immigrant neighborhood became a lame worldwide cue for 'bohemianism' and artistic ambition and intellectual swagger and the 'seat' of America's new imperial intellectual capital YET probably not so much of that was ever true anyway and here I was - as I found myself - smack in the middle of its destruction and fall being witness to the embarkations of sly stupid youth and drug-addled hipsters crooked-faced ingrates and wild-eyed straight-staring know-nothings prancing on their own stage YES YES I was there but somehow knew I hated it too and the tired damp dark dirty mornings when I found myself staring down a bleak empty street or looking at fourteen pizza and soda joints closed and shuttered past the business day's own night with pack-hordes of lingerers still massing in cramped clubs and broken down dance halls meant little to me and it seemed truly there was no 'there' there as Stein once said about Oakland CA but which meant much more right here and I realized that everything in this Village this plain hope of badness this Miasma Arms Hotel of the heart was nothing but the flaccid inputs of people from everywhere else and that NOTHING much naive ever amounted to much here anyway and the resultant flavor was all false and wrong and made of lies and media stunts and media whores and starlets of rank and utter disgust for EVERYTHING ELSE WAS GONE every political belief of any reality had shriveled up every philosophy had turned in its cards and had begun faking its own existence like false electric candle lighting in fuzzy-assed cheap restaurants along the way and if I had asked any of these falsetto-types if they knew who Max Eastman was or Theodore Dreiser or Hart Crane or Djuna Barnes Philip Rahv Willem DeKooning Edna St. Vincent Millay or Eugene O'Neil or the White Swan or any of that I'd have gotten a blank stare (which is what the masses always and ever were anyway) for the pot that once held the piss had by that time become the very piss itself and I remember someone once telling me (in fact it was back at the 12th Street location with Tre once) of his old days of Village living and some of the things he knew and had seen and I remember him saying : "have you ever heard about the Great American Lettuce Train ? well ask any brakemen on the railroads if you know any of them - each day at dawn a locomotive sets out from Stockton California bound for New York City with dozens of cars - several reserved for lettuce some for tomatoes one or two for carrots - the whole range of American produce - and this train has near-mythic powers of right-of-way and every signalman from Grand Island Nebraska and Reading Pennsylvania knows that unless it's an army train it's got to get out of the way for the lettuce - every railroad along the way every right-of-way there is - and every train no matter has got to pull over for turnips and lettuce and thirty-six hours after departure - about dinner time the next day - the lettuce train arrives in the grimy freight sections of Pennsylvania Station where fourth-tier assistant chefs from all New York's finest restaurants cluster to buy the best and the freshest of America's vegetables" and he went on to say how the old Village - the one of myth - was like that too in its day and that whatever had come out of it had never acknowledged its cultural dependence actually on the REST of the country and New York had simply usurped it all - Dreiser Williams Crane - all of them had come from other places and their art had less to do with New York and their Village experiences than with the wherever-they-came-from and that housing artists isn't the same as creating them and IDEAS travel by lettuce train too except that no one ever would admit to that and that's where all the false pride and bohemian bullshit got started and why it was now just beginning to crash-land all around us - and I thought that was right on the money for some reason - and his name as I recall it I think was Benjamin Wallace or maybe Benjamin Wells - I just do forget.
-
I always loved stories like that and it used to amaze me to realize the sorts of knowledge and experience and things I could pick up by just hanging about and 'EXPERIENCING the divide' as I called it and I sometimes called it 'experiencing the divine' too because it was like that - and it seemed at every turn there was something or someone that could put it together for me - the taxi guy the food-cart man the guy tending police horses the old store-owner asleep on his front table the drunk along the Bowery the fey old actor trying to pick me up the twisted old woman covered in bad make-up the sorry old man staring forlornly at some old building through the stone wall or fence - they'd each and all fall all over themselves in eagerness to tell me SOMETHING about where they came or of themselves or about what they'd done in their long and saddening life of torment (no no I never met too many happy people I guess) and it always seemed that - no matter what - youth always betrayed the old or at least OFFENDED them in some way.
-
And whether I made it all the way up to the Cloisters in a daze gazing backwards at the big gray bridge trailing its metal with light or hunkered down again to the crazy astronomers at the Battery - wherever I went it was always the same - the mechanizations of Mankind in some kind of heap.
-
It was like that so many times - amazingly multifarious and stern and new and threatening and comforting all at the same time and towards the end of this little era the place was again changing - the Peppermint Lounge or what was left of it had somehow moved into the corner space which was mostly a below-ground mysterium never entered and the old Electric Circus nee the Dom had degenerated into some pulchritude of stupid hippieness and was made over in electric lights and dark colors and whatever existed there stayed private and the rest of St. Mark's too had fallen into shreds of dumb anarchy and gay hippy bliss and between west 8th and its eastside continuation as St. Mark's Place there existed a sort of no man's land of truck terminals and District 65 Union Offices around Astor Place and Cooper Union - everything conspired towards abstract ineptitude and unfocused surrealism all mixed together with memory and frolic and anything of the 'old' times was quickly forgotten as if no past had ever existed anyway or anywhere - and along Saint Marks dazed Polish people still huddled in fright on their old walkups and stairways just gazing out in wonder - LITTLE WONDER they hadn't a clue - for all of this was nothing but bad remnant poor imitation claptrap rattling image and a latent anarchy bleeding through every pore in the skin of stupidity - the Old Village after all had been the original template once - dominated by The Masses magazine and a deeply cynical and socialist perspective and then in the 1920's it had become dominated by the KEY institution - Provincetown Theater Company - from which it moved eventually from cynicism to irony to absurdism from politics to theater to eventually - in the1930's - nothing at all and by that time the old Italian ghetto was long gone dispersed by reality and foolishness so that the once-ratty Italian immigrant neighborhood became a lame worldwide cue for 'bohemianism' and artistic ambition and intellectual swagger and the 'seat' of America's new imperial intellectual capital YET probably not so much of that was ever true anyway and here I was - as I found myself - smack in the middle of its destruction and fall being witness to the embarkations of sly stupid youth and drug-addled hipsters crooked-faced ingrates and wild-eyed straight-staring know-nothings prancing on their own stage YES YES I was there but somehow knew I hated it too and the tired damp dark dirty mornings when I found myself staring down a bleak empty street or looking at fourteen pizza and soda joints closed and shuttered past the business day's own night with pack-hordes of lingerers still massing in cramped clubs and broken down dance halls meant little to me and it seemed truly there was no 'there' there as Stein once said about Oakland CA but which meant much more right here and I realized that everything in this Village this plain hope of badness this Miasma Arms Hotel of the heart was nothing but the flaccid inputs of people from everywhere else and that NOTHING much naive ever amounted to much here anyway and the resultant flavor was all false and wrong and made of lies and media stunts and media whores and starlets of rank and utter disgust for EVERYTHING ELSE WAS GONE every political belief of any reality had shriveled up every philosophy had turned in its cards and had begun faking its own existence like false electric candle lighting in fuzzy-assed cheap restaurants along the way and if I had asked any of these falsetto-types if they knew who Max Eastman was or Theodore Dreiser or Hart Crane or Djuna Barnes Philip Rahv Willem DeKooning Edna St. Vincent Millay or Eugene O'Neil or the White Swan or any of that I'd have gotten a blank stare (which is what the masses always and ever were anyway) for the pot that once held the piss had by that time become the very piss itself and I remember someone once telling me (in fact it was back at the 12th Street location with Tre once) of his old days of Village living and some of the things he knew and had seen and I remember him saying : "have you ever heard about the Great American Lettuce Train ? well ask any brakemen on the railroads if you know any of them - each day at dawn a locomotive sets out from Stockton California bound for New York City with dozens of cars - several reserved for lettuce some for tomatoes one or two for carrots - the whole range of American produce - and this train has near-mythic powers of right-of-way and every signalman from Grand Island Nebraska and Reading Pennsylvania knows that unless it's an army train it's got to get out of the way for the lettuce - every railroad along the way every right-of-way there is - and every train no matter has got to pull over for turnips and lettuce and thirty-six hours after departure - about dinner time the next day - the lettuce train arrives in the grimy freight sections of Pennsylvania Station where fourth-tier assistant chefs from all New York's finest restaurants cluster to buy the best and the freshest of America's vegetables" and he went on to say how the old Village - the one of myth - was like that too in its day and that whatever had come out of it had never acknowledged its cultural dependence actually on the REST of the country and New York had simply usurped it all - Dreiser Williams Crane - all of them had come from other places and their art had less to do with New York and their Village experiences than with the wherever-they-came-from and that housing artists isn't the same as creating them and IDEAS travel by lettuce train too except that no one ever would admit to that and that's where all the false pride and bohemian bullshit got started and why it was now just beginning to crash-land all around us - and I thought that was right on the money for some reason - and his name as I recall it I think was Benjamin Wallace or maybe Benjamin Wells - I just do forget.
-
I always loved stories like that and it used to amaze me to realize the sorts of knowledge and experience and things I could pick up by just hanging about and 'EXPERIENCING the divide' as I called it and I sometimes called it 'experiencing the divine' too because it was like that - and it seemed at every turn there was something or someone that could put it together for me - the taxi guy the food-cart man the guy tending police horses the old store-owner asleep on his front table the drunk along the Bowery the fey old actor trying to pick me up the twisted old woman covered in bad make-up the sorry old man staring forlornly at some old building through the stone wall or fence - they'd each and all fall all over themselves in eagerness to tell me SOMETHING about where they came or of themselves or about what they'd done in their long and saddening life of torment (no no I never met too many happy people I guess) and it always seemed that - no matter what - youth always betrayed the old or at least OFFENDED them in some way.
-
And whether I made it all the way up to the Cloisters in a daze gazing backwards at the big gray bridge trailing its metal with light or hunkered down again to the crazy astronomers at the Battery - wherever I went it was always the same - the mechanizations of Mankind in some kind of heap.
-
3. HOW I MANAGED TO SAVE THE MIDWAY:
I went back to the docks some days later - again - this time in evening as I watched the comings and goings of cars and people beneath the old elevated highway and I saw (probably for the last time) the usual beehive of activity which the place once was - not long after all that began to dissemble and break apart as many of the boats just stopped coming and that lessened the needs for handling and cartage people and personnel which in turn ended the need for pushcarts and food vendors and parking areas and attendants and fix-it shops and repair centers with the connected hauling and shipping firms counting houses and vast cargo holds and the like and it wasn't long after this that the old bridges came down at the end of Canal Street - which itself was once long long ago a rail hub all now vacated too and forgotten about as the overlays of roadways and tunnel ramps and broader avenues for cars took over - and the last bastions of 'real' things like gas stations and tire shops and frame menders and car barns and all that it too disappeared as the world itself began talking on its latest blush of newer styles needs and things and with that too went many of the old timers who once had frequented there and of course as people age and dwindle and slow down their needs and awarenesses change and whatever I could once take away from the old westside piers is long long over and barely even a memory - gas puddles oil leaks hose clamps broken glass and leaning sheds and huge locks on great cart doors and entryways to secret locations lit from within by bare bulbs and gas lamps and there were still some horses there with wagons and carts and any assortment of things that then were still vivid and real and functioning still as it were much closer to the end of WWII which was the practical dividing point for what was and what was-to-be-no-longer all along that area and I spent hours and hours there just thinking of what I'd missed and the very spot where those chumps were exchanging cargo from van to truck was - in daylight - not near as foreboding yet I still envisioned what occurred and always shuddered to think what I'd barely missed - because of the stories I'd heard and things others had told me I learned that it was not that far-fetched for people AND things there to simply DISAPPEAR or be once and then be no more - so for myself if I'd managed to eke out a way from danger it was all probably for the good and every time after that I'd see Theresa at the diner she'd always ask about me and my activities and I'd manage gingerly to put in a question or two about her brother but never learning much because it was all almost in code every time and I never knew enough to break the code - there was the Sullivan Street boys the Perry Street Gang the Christopher Street Fellows the Rosary Chain the Bleeckers the Thompson Street Enforcers - and on it went and she'd never quite mention everything I needed to know but it did seem her brother had eventually been whacked by someone and was for a while hospitalized and then in jail and later in Albany and then here and there but never anywhere I saw and I never really was sure it wasn't him who was an operative that night (because often I'd see one or two recognizable faces and they'd always sneer as if they knew me) and Theresa herself once got bungled up and was hurt for a while but I wasn't sure what that was either although I heard it had to do with man-favors she never reciprocated for and everyone had funny names too like Johnny Duke Freddy Ringo Tony O and I couldn't keep track (one time right across the street there at the movie house which once was present some guy collared me and said he 'knew who I was' and offered me a knife/dagger which looked like a pen which opened into a really thin knife-shaft and very sharp blade but said he couldn't just 'give it to me' because it had to be a 'transaction' for 'honor' to be involved and so he made me give him a token nickel for it to preserve the 'honor' between men and he showed me and told me how to kill a man with it - which as he explained it meant pushing it deep into a man's ear canal - full depth of the thin serrated blade about two and a half inches and twisting it as it was pulled out - he said it would kill a man in a few minutes if done right and if done wrong it would ruin him for life anyway and make a vegetable out of him and vegetables couldn't talk as far as he knew and then he said that the next time and every time he saw me I was to have the pen/blade in my possession to show him and that was part of the 'honor' of the deal too and I said OK and took it but eventually couldn't find it nowhere and I did see him once or twice but the knife was never mentioned again so maybe I got lucky and later on anyway I found out that this guy always stopped by at the next to the last day of the month to pick up 'the payment' from Michelle - one of the managers - and I figured it was payoff or protection money or something because he certainly wasn't buying hot dogs and beans and he always came by and stayed awhile and had something to eat and managed to find people to talk with and he was well-dressed and always had a companion sidekick with him and the two of them just looked like two old business guys out on the town but for all I knew there was an arsenal under their jackets and they always remained a mystery to me - and in addition to that as I watched these two guys I just knew that there went with them a history of murder and crime which still rang its echo through the corridors of the recent past and that many of the washed up bodies and dead crumpled corpses on either side of the island and in walk-ups alleys and tenement stairways citywide would - if traced - in the end wind up on their own doorstep SOMEHOW I FELT I just knew that and knew these guys and understood their connections to the old underworld now getting ready to die with them as age-old evil and the beast of death itself snickered just outside the waiting room and these two routine-maintenance collection-men chumps wouldn't be able to figure any of it out someday soon but THAT was the unspoken gospel of these local NY city streets - that death and destruction and the injury and hurt which go with it are at some weird level acted upon as strictly business for a certain type of corporate underworld mentality that prizes efficiency in both bluster and execution of taunts and threats almost as much as the money to be gained from the extortion and theft which go with it and TO THAT I was almost privy almost a witness almost present at the creation AND its execution - and I often counted my lucky stars that I didn't go forward and I eventually said one last goodbye to Theresa too and forgot all of that.
--
I could go on but it seems all of it has already been surpassed in my own reality by the present day - which in so many ways has become nothing but the supreme embodiment of every wrong and nascently wrong tendency that I began seeing back then - already things were disappearing one by one the slow disparagement of the good and the worthy which had started creeping in to the everyday world of things and efforts : self-destructive tendencies by those in control of society the media promoting negative and nihilistic things endlessly the gross escarpment of broken-down culture casting itself even more downward and being promoted in that direction by the slanderous Jews (among others but barely) who controlled such tendencies and the slow arising of the vaudevillian trait of gross defilement and mockery of all that was 'outside' of the speaker's or actor's sphere at that time - most of it is the incredible sourcing towards greed and money which seems embodied by the leading promoters of the drivel around us - as I see it MONEY has secured its firm foothold on the great rock of EVIL and upon that rock THEY have built their own church - a swanky edifice and one of lies and deceit without anything but an absolute disregard for the goodness or sensitivity of others or towards any promoting of the benevolent good needed by a 'society' so encumbered by their infatuations LAVISH infatuations and these are corrupted even further as they are force-fed into the minds of little people empty and void of everything else cultural around them THERE IS NO LONGER ANY PAST for the past has been obliterated and that PAST was already around me as I watched and walked the streets in the sorry dissembling universe that was my Manhattan then - I could really find very little of the premised glory and grandeur of the old - places had been destroyed and rebuilt dispersed and obliterated in the most unseemly fashions as the entire focus of society began changing and I knew I was amidst something but was not sure what it was to be and instead all I was able to see was the faulting and the destructiveness of what was coming to replace it all - a statism of weaklings and malcontents intent on making deals with the powers who were taking it over and THERE WAS NO SHAME no second-thought no meditation upon what was being drained - and soon enough LIKE the old Collect or old Five Points it was simply selected for destruction and repaving and revamping and entire new sections of the city were constructed right over the ghosted ruins of the old AND THAT TOO I was amidst - lost and unknowingly sometimes - but amidst nonetheless and to me IT WAS A SAD SIGHT to watch.
--
I've always heard that teachers teach only that which they know and maybe that's true - although I really don't think so - because it seems usually that they're screwed up and so what they teach must be too but in reality what they teach or offer to teach is a basic societal propaganda and nothing more than that and they take directives and instructions too from powers unseen but no one seems to care (and even the other saying is true - 'those who can DO while those who can't TEACH' - maybe even to a better extent) but talking about teaching is - I've noticed - a lot like bringing up Jews or anti-Semitism or an anti-Catholic bias - you simply CANNOT do it or get away with it because before the argument is even broached you are accused and slandered by the entrenched powers as being 'one of them' - whether anti-Jew Semite or Education - and that pretty much stops the argument dead and it's like that right now with most everything so that even as the basic core fabric of society is shot and ruined one can't start declaiming the how's or why's of that nor can one begin pointing fingers because they'll kill you like a gnat they'll talk you down they'll swarm you until you're over AND that's how things remain the same or less than the same - that's how they never move upward - because PEOPLE are dumb stupid fearless and brave.
--
And it was Mark Twain who said : "first God made fools - then he made Boards of Education".
--
I could go on but it seems all of it has already been surpassed in my own reality by the present day - which in so many ways has become nothing but the supreme embodiment of every wrong and nascently wrong tendency that I began seeing back then - already things were disappearing one by one the slow disparagement of the good and the worthy which had started creeping in to the everyday world of things and efforts : self-destructive tendencies by those in control of society the media promoting negative and nihilistic things endlessly the gross escarpment of broken-down culture casting itself even more downward and being promoted in that direction by the slanderous Jews (among others but barely) who controlled such tendencies and the slow arising of the vaudevillian trait of gross defilement and mockery of all that was 'outside' of the speaker's or actor's sphere at that time - most of it is the incredible sourcing towards greed and money which seems embodied by the leading promoters of the drivel around us - as I see it MONEY has secured its firm foothold on the great rock of EVIL and upon that rock THEY have built their own church - a swanky edifice and one of lies and deceit without anything but an absolute disregard for the goodness or sensitivity of others or towards any promoting of the benevolent good needed by a 'society' so encumbered by their infatuations LAVISH infatuations and these are corrupted even further as they are force-fed into the minds of little people empty and void of everything else cultural around them THERE IS NO LONGER ANY PAST for the past has been obliterated and that PAST was already around me as I watched and walked the streets in the sorry dissembling universe that was my Manhattan then - I could really find very little of the premised glory and grandeur of the old - places had been destroyed and rebuilt dispersed and obliterated in the most unseemly fashions as the entire focus of society began changing and I knew I was amidst something but was not sure what it was to be and instead all I was able to see was the faulting and the destructiveness of what was coming to replace it all - a statism of weaklings and malcontents intent on making deals with the powers who were taking it over and THERE WAS NO SHAME no second-thought no meditation upon what was being drained - and soon enough LIKE the old Collect or old Five Points it was simply selected for destruction and repaving and revamping and entire new sections of the city were constructed right over the ghosted ruins of the old AND THAT TOO I was amidst - lost and unknowingly sometimes - but amidst nonetheless and to me IT WAS A SAD SIGHT to watch.
--
I've always heard that teachers teach only that which they know and maybe that's true - although I really don't think so - because it seems usually that they're screwed up and so what they teach must be too but in reality what they teach or offer to teach is a basic societal propaganda and nothing more than that and they take directives and instructions too from powers unseen but no one seems to care (and even the other saying is true - 'those who can DO while those who can't TEACH' - maybe even to a better extent) but talking about teaching is - I've noticed - a lot like bringing up Jews or anti-Semitism or an anti-Catholic bias - you simply CANNOT do it or get away with it because before the argument is even broached you are accused and slandered by the entrenched powers as being 'one of them' - whether anti-Jew Semite or Education - and that pretty much stops the argument dead and it's like that right now with most everything so that even as the basic core fabric of society is shot and ruined one can't start declaiming the how's or why's of that nor can one begin pointing fingers because they'll kill you like a gnat they'll talk you down they'll swarm you until you're over AND that's how things remain the same or less than the same - that's how they never move upward - because PEOPLE are dumb stupid fearless and brave.
--
And it was Mark Twain who said : "first God made fools - then he made Boards of Education".
--
4. INTO THE OPEN DOORWAY:
I thought that I would always have liked to get back to that guy who was talking about Wittgenstein one day just to be able to have a conversation with him over what his take was on what he'd learned - for in so many ways I was never able fully to understand the premise or direction of which Wittgenstein was going with his work - here was a guy who early on had written a fully-versed and reputable philosophy piece (Tractatus or something) and then after some 36 years after having sworn off further philosophy and having considered having reached the 'end' of philosophical work mainly by saying it was 'unspeakable' and that the only answer was silence - after all that time he returns again to philosophy and writes a long rambling totally confusing and dense piece of work anew which again ends up at the same conclusion even after revising much of the earlier thought and that conclusion being again that there was nothing to say and that the essential element of these philosophies was that he had reached the 'end' of philosophy and again 'silence' was the only answer and then he died (1951) - he was a 'logical positivist' as it's called and he had taken Bertrand Russell's mathematical logicism past the steps of logic and then turned it to language itself which he did by disassembling what it was people 'meant' to say when they said something (and this was all very arcane and completely unmagical stuff to me but I stuck with it as best I could) and being a type of total rationalist he discounted completely metaphysics and mysticism and the overall mix of realism and magic we often find in other philosophies willing to consider the unearthly realms so that to him it was all very clear and open in the means of breaking down what people were saying (in many respects there I too could agree) because quite often he would simply turn on people and ask them to consider what it was they had just uttered and - of course - under examination everything would be found to be cluttered with assumptions and misrepresentations and things untrue and not fully meant (but so what ! I always thought ! if the world is left to its own purposes and if every representation must be exactly of what it represents then we all are doomed to a life of pernicious boredom and constraints and total non-creativity and one of sameness and reticence) but once I began to look into his personality and being I realized that his entire life was a representation of poor humanity too - a stilted and overbearing person with little regard to soul or spirit or grace SO THAT I felt I would really have liked to talk to the guy who was going on about Wittgenstein in order to find out by what means academically he found this philosopher so stimulating - maybe I had missed something or maybe I'd just been unable to get into the proper ways and means of the philosopher's work BUT of course I never could find the guy again (within reason) and so instead I ferreted out as much information on Wittgenstein as I could and perhaps therefore came up with only a jumbled assertation of who and what he was...to wit : an autocratic Austrian who gave away all his money until his sister stopped him a philosopher who organized a philosophical scheme and then turned his back on it giving up philosophy for 26 years while he tried to teach life hermetically and at one point work assiduously on designing and constructing a particularly-designed home for his sister meanwhile driving workers and craftsmen wild with his demands and seeking of perfection in design and hardware then he returns to philosophy to attempt to rewrite and undo his previous work and reaches again the limits of its perfection and gives it too up declaring the 'end' of philosophy and taking on the mantle of silence and then he dies three years later in 1951 feeling his lifework incompletely but complete - a view of the world as language and symbol and seeing the inadequacy of humankind's quest and attempts at articulating that quest and seeking through logic and the perfection which mathematics embodies the utmost representation of the world through its language as symbol and entity : ONE PARTICULARLY PERVERSE character of all lines and angles and (perhaps) no magic or certainly no metaphysics (more like the 'prisoner' precisely measuring his quarters and judging the rest of creation by those limitations) - Ludwig Wittgenstein enigma conundrum mystery and problem all rolled into one.
-
5. GREEN ROOM TALK SHOW HOST ANTI-WAR BIG MOUTH:
"A desperate man in desperate times does desperate things in desperate ways" were the opening lines of the talk this fellow was giving one afternoon at the Syllabus Society - in the 'Green Room' of the stately social hall at the rear of the old NYU campus area - and I'd stopped in (mainly because of the extreme cold and wind) thinking to spend an hour or two listening and checking things out and having a bit of their coffee too and as the afternoon rolled on it became apparent that the windy speaker would (if I continued listening) only add to my gloom yet I stayed there nonetheless so as to watch other people in their comings and goings and to afford myself at the same time some haven for thought - which thought was still settling on things of Wittgenstein - and all of that thought was centered upon the ideas and proclivities of his philosophy and his conclusion of 'silence' (which silence I was hearing none of from the blowsy speaker before me) and all of the researching I'd done had brought me to a succinct appraisal in my own words of Wittgenstein's thought and which appraisal I was so cocksure proud of as to be ready to actually call it my 'own' philosophy as in all practical sense I had put it together by myself and without real assistance having somehow cobbled it from an anti-germ of faux Wittgensteinism - "LIFE is 'lesson learning catching up with itself' and we live amidst structures and structural ideas made to show that process AND past that NOTHING can be said - WE cannot KNOW the real world we can only RECOGNIZE (know) the world we have created - a 'secondary' world which we then [poorly] attempt to describe by LANGUAGE and the structures it represents and those structures in their continued and entangled attempts to clarify our world only muddy its clarity (which 'clarity' can only be found by NOT seeking it and - in a way - by simply 'accepting') and become our redundancy of 'structures' - concepts traps ideas dead-ends assumptions value judgments and the like - which eventually deaden and blinds us to all creative life and which become our final and self-created snare ... and our belief in things is the precondition of our belief in logic and rationality which eventually betrays life itself (on the altar of things like efficiency ideology profit good-sense etc.) on the stranglehold which prevents us from thinking about matters or the prejudice that 'sensations' tell us the truth about the world - and this conceptual ban on contradiction stems from our belief that we CAN form concepts and that these concepts not only can specify the essence of a thing but also understand it and this is a base fallacy and the mis-representation of all living and LOGIC is the attempt (our attempt) to understand the actual world by using a scheme which we ourselves have made up" - and as you can see all of this is somewhat difficult and echo-like in its reverberation and perhaps (in fact) clear to none but myself its maker and I won't bore you with more BUT suffice it to say that man speaking up front at this point was almost in the same fuzzy-bucket of words as I was as I still listened to him with (perhaps) one vague ear - "and these desperate times become the defining moments of our work towards delineating a new era of right-think and good-thought by which to enliven and lift the succor of the fellow humans we see around us and if the good can abound and overcome the bad - and if the evils right now of guns and warfare and fire and fame - can be sought out and destroyed WELL then and only then shall warfare and crusade be called right and just and necessary and HOPEFUL well done and final" and the entire stinking room stood up and began clapping (just as I left).
----
I once thought that the most typical of the American mistakes ever to be heard - but one most characteristic of Americans themselves - was to be found in the listening to any Americanized version of any Edith Piaf version of a song - for it never fails that the American version takes every possible liberty with the understated non-emotive monotone-like quality of Edith Piaf's singing and transforms it with bombast and emotion with wily crescendo and bombast - each quality very different from the Europeanized sophisticated and detached sadness as it comes through in her voice and by listening to some American contortion of her songs you can see or hear how it is all 'Broadway'd up' made noisy and pointed made rife with dramatic pause and rising volume and all the rest - almost as if any American trying for one of these songs is at first too put off and alarmed by its proclivity to seriousness and so much instead put the stamp on it of loud and almost obnoxious and anthem-like dramatization of nothing (for nothing) and by doing that almost all the sense or value of the Edith Piaf version is ruined (and they themselves are not always THAT very good) but it seems at the least to be a painterly and wall-covering coating of any distortion which would be found to detract from America's quite noisy and annoying traits about itself - loudness brashness and a certain non-refinement - as if the American way is to become and remain as boorish as possible and if I may take this moment to connect this back to 'Philosophy' I'd like to say that this weakened Austrian or Continental philosophy and its view of the world (in its way) would be cancelled out FOR SURE in this land by the outstretched and widespread vista of pure cultural monolingualism and the resultant disgust for anything refined or high-strung and would be ridiculed or rendered obsolete by the American guise of reasoning - where bigger is better and the less thought put into anything the more valued it is - but what this has to do actually with the 'what' of what philosophy is about seems beyond me right now anyway and I only wanted to make a digressionary point so as to let the word out about conjectural cross-values and comparative literature in the rational/logistical sense - none of which has any bearing on anything really (except as part of the normal background noise of everyday living replete as it is now with degraded pulchritudes and gross and gauche values and tastes in fact a complete VOID of class or worthiness which has instead been covered over as I'd just said with the most plebian of tastes and the real absence of anything crafty) BUT in a country where even the Supreme Court panders to something what else can you expect ? trains and mail to run on and arrive on time ? actually that's the simplest part of the whole thing and it does happen.
I once thought that the most typical of the American mistakes ever to be heard - but one most characteristic of Americans themselves - was to be found in the listening to any Americanized version of any Edith Piaf version of a song - for it never fails that the American version takes every possible liberty with the understated non-emotive monotone-like quality of Edith Piaf's singing and transforms it with bombast and emotion with wily crescendo and bombast - each quality very different from the Europeanized sophisticated and detached sadness as it comes through in her voice and by listening to some American contortion of her songs you can see or hear how it is all 'Broadway'd up' made noisy and pointed made rife with dramatic pause and rising volume and all the rest - almost as if any American trying for one of these songs is at first too put off and alarmed by its proclivity to seriousness and so much instead put the stamp on it of loud and almost obnoxious and anthem-like dramatization of nothing (for nothing) and by doing that almost all the sense or value of the Edith Piaf version is ruined (and they themselves are not always THAT very good) but it seems at the least to be a painterly and wall-covering coating of any distortion which would be found to detract from America's quite noisy and annoying traits about itself - loudness brashness and a certain non-refinement - as if the American way is to become and remain as boorish as possible and if I may take this moment to connect this back to 'Philosophy' I'd like to say that this weakened Austrian or Continental philosophy and its view of the world (in its way) would be cancelled out FOR SURE in this land by the outstretched and widespread vista of pure cultural monolingualism and the resultant disgust for anything refined or high-strung and would be ridiculed or rendered obsolete by the American guise of reasoning - where bigger is better and the less thought put into anything the more valued it is - but what this has to do actually with the 'what' of what philosophy is about seems beyond me right now anyway and I only wanted to make a digressionary point so as to let the word out about conjectural cross-values and comparative literature in the rational/logistical sense - none of which has any bearing on anything really (except as part of the normal background noise of everyday living replete as it is now with degraded pulchritudes and gross and gauche values and tastes in fact a complete VOID of class or worthiness which has instead been covered over as I'd just said with the most plebian of tastes and the real absence of anything crafty) BUT in a country where even the Supreme Court panders to something what else can you expect ? trains and mail to run on and arrive on time ? actually that's the simplest part of the whole thing and it does happen.
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6. THE QUANDARY OF THE IMAGINARY MAN:
"I slept it off and went to school" was how the man next to me was telling his partner about something (I did not know what) but from the tone of his voice I was able to tell it was NOT certainly a comment about a hangover or something like that - he rather seemed to mean it as a philosophy of his life or something - meaning maybe that like so many others he felt he'd sleep-walked through a certain portion of his life and then entertained the remainder of his days with the endless schooling by which so many people become steadied - as if it were nothing more than another trip to some tropical clime or something like that but I'd always (by contrast) felt that one should NOT undertake an endeavor of any sort unless you were quite willing to allow it to change your life and alter it in some life-transforming way - which is perhaps why in so many instances I've been completely turned around every ten or so years (it would seem) and YET (I can respond by attesting) I've always been the very same deep within myself IF THERE IS SUCH a number to be called 'myself' - which comments lead me to another swipe into the Wittgenstein forest - but first I want to cover these two gay guys who were sitting together on a bench nearby and one of whom I'd heard make that comment about 'sleeping' it off - I can for sure say that they were homosexuals because it was apparent (no consideration there needed) and because they were possessed of that certain smarminess which these gentlemen do always seem to possess - a rather precise New Yorkish pose of fey communalism combined with wittiful and sharp flirtatiousness around the eyes of the sort that only men-to-men could engender (it's actually rather pathetic to watch) for between both you and me I'd rather see a cat take a shower than catch one or more of these sorts dickering over their inter-personal relationships YET apparently the 'world' now allows this and accepts and even welcomes it so I'm not the one to carp or cite dismay but I must and feel I can make note of my own revulsion and reaction of decrepitude towards it when I see it for they ALL strike me as purple-hued members of some grotesque set whose mannerisms and ethos are put to use in setting about the swear-assed perversion of the rest of the human race NOT ALONE in their feminine qualities of falseness and fakeness - quite like something even thirteen-year-old girls themselves do quickly outgrow BUT NOT THESE headed as they are for pandemonium and the back door (for what else is afforded them lest their mouths always be full) and like a mansion of cardboard sails the places they inhabit are sickened and apt to fail at the very first soaking - NOW ON TO PERCUSSION ! - and taken on the whole I do also now come to realize that in the longer run of things (of the sort which I wrote about previous) many of the hippie/beat/anti-social drop-out types whose mannerism and new habits once altered the very ways along old Eighth Street and the Miasma Arms Hotel itself so now too the crescendo of the newer homosexual rant about society has proved prone to alter things as all that older stuff once did (and as before that the even older stuff did too) for Gay Culture breeding has seemingly now overtaken the rest of society and stepped up to a primary position of influence and cultural eminence - in fact we are BATTERED with it at every turn and apparently through our society are apt to now ALLOW and ACCEPT that very thing as it happens ! again for myself astonishment alone reigns : I have always counted myself among the mass of failures whose passing lives are seen almost in a retrospect of inaction after and even AS they occur - or the negative pulses of them occur - yet here I see something far more failing and it is in the ascendancy without even so much as a whimper from the people around it all (or as they might now say of the 'old' church - 'too little altar too much boy' or 'no Ave no Maria'.
--
The 'quandary' of the imaginary man - which I've already introduced only as a title - will now be elucidated as follows : "Imagine if you will a painting of a landscape and a farm house upon the landscape and you are looking at it and a companion next to you is also looking at it and says 'whose house is that?' and you say 'see that farmer sitting in the chair out on the fine lawn of that house? it might be HIS house' and then you laughingly add 'but he can't go into it' - well that is the crux essentially of everything - and Wittgenstein related it all in the fashion of a discussion of the 'self' the 'I' or better 'on the ways we use the word 'I'' and the gist of the discussion was that there is no self to which the 'I' might refer - and how does this jocular story fit in? - does it suggest that it is not I who imagines the landscape house and farmer or does the farmer stand for the self even though there is no such thing ? what does it mean that he can own but not enter the imagined house ? what does the story tell us about the I and/or the 'I' ? for when he talks about the mind (Wittgenstein) he announces unexpectedly "there really is only one world soul which I for preference call my soul...but it is still false to say I is a different person from me (Wittgenstein) for the I the I is what is deeply mysterious"and one thing to keep mindful throughout all of his writings is his enduring hostility to the idea of an individuated substantive self - (insofar as the belief in such a self is most easily associated with Descartes we can call Wittgenstein's position and anti-Cartesianism) for as Wittgenstein says "there is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas for our language creates the ILLUSION that the word 'I' refers to something bodiless which however has its seat in our body and in fact this SEEMS to be the real ego the one of which it was said 'Cogito ergo sum' ["'I' is not the name of a person nor 'here' of a place and 'this' is not a name but they are connected with names and names are explained by means of them and it is ALSO true that it is characteristic of physics NOT to use these words"] and when he said that the house in that imaginary landscape 'might be' said to belong to the farmer in the picture he is FIRST OF ALL reaffirming his commitment to the idea that there is no such thing as the self and I may of course say that I imagine the landscape the house and the farmer but I cannot take this to imply that there is a real self that owns these things and if I want to speak of someone owning the imaginary house or anything else in that imaginary landscape I can only talk of an imaginary object - the farmer - sitting in front of an imaginary house BUT I then am only adding an item to the contents of my imagination - an item that I invest with a symbolic relation of ownership of the others - and this imaginary self is not a real object but rather a self-conception (care of the self) and because it is merely imaginary then it has NO causal powers - which is suggested by Wittgenstein's comment that the 'imaginary farmer cannot enter his imaginary house' and although WE CAN IMAGINE him doing such things he cannot do them in reality and as such the remark is 'one more nail in the coffin' of objectivism for Wittgenstein is trying to show us here that the belief in a real self results from confusing this self-conception with a objectively real thing.....and what I (myself) took then and take now from that is that there is no personal base reality of anything except the perception of there being such and that - at the base of all things - is a LIE a misnomer a mis-representation a curved figment of untruth - and this LIE is the basis of perception the confusion of I with THAT the ideology undergirding all argument the poorly represented supposed factuality behind things and MOST ASSUREDLY the unreality behind ALL reality - to wit we are alive by the fact of our constant pulsing creative self inhabited by ONE self-soul shared by interpretation and moments and that is all there is and all there ever was - one large changing irreducible collective creative moment one space one event one liquid vast driving and overwhelming miracle of moment/interpretation/cause and evidence and THERE ARE NO limits no essences no configurations that cannot be entertained and yet produce in and of themselves no certain reality except in excessive interpretation and existential production TO WIT : we are the we are : and all we can do is enjoy that moment of being.
-
It never amounted to anything really anything - the dark shadows and lamps of night which seemingly littered the loftways and alleys all along the streets I walked were as yet haunted by artists - artists of today and artists of the past - in the same way puddles are haunted by water : men crazy men and women too wielding theory and paint and brush and learning and doctrine so as to and in order to recreate a 'new' world in the very place of the old which had crumbled and I myself immersed in all of this was just what I was - young outside newcomer still awed by those I saw Philip Guston Mercedes Matter Esteban Vicente David Hare Gandy Brody artists each and my friends now and companion-acquaintances and on the music front in the same way Morton Feldman became my twice-weekly lecturer talking face to face and unquestionably so to ten or maybe twenty of us at one time and alone and that was it - we learned and imbibed all that we could and the strangeness of conversation and discourse went back and forth over and under each comment - things about Art as concept and as what we were doing/learning/living - each of us enthralled and we'd look and listen and wait and the overnight-dark windows saddled with clumps of people going on at length over hue or shape or the reason for any of it the TALK it very much just went on - beer cocktail coffee smoke in endless array and those same people had people and together everyone coming and going - Coenties Slip 17th Street lofts lower Broadway 8th Street 10th Street it all broke together and it was the world world world of ART as I saw it and lived within it - some fanatical and embroidered force of non-declension without grammar and words without any shape or form - girls on the mating happy to give and love and companionize with whatever came their way and the streets - purloined as ever - would be out ballroom our court our home all together - biscuit wagons bread shops pretzel men and all the rest of the real real world around us but we knew inside WE KNEW exactly what we were doing and why and how and weird short talk of self-critism and the criticism of others : works booklets drawings most especially 'attention' - someone with an entry in a show a gallery presentation or whatever would of a sudden be held to a different caliber of achievement and brutally ripped or coarsely praised - whichever the current went - but all good-naturdely and with the utmost of forced seriousness (as if as if this NEW world depended on US solely and lone on US ! together) : to wit : 'Caleb Caleb is this now the cover of your most noble venture ? A bevy of distracted elves, swinging away looking like nothing so much as more junk ? how far has your thinking come ? this resembles a fawn's faint fantasy, much more than it does fun of any sort - I want you - oh please - to think again a drunken bear on a blind spree could have worked this better CALEB CALEB what code were you breaking here ? and why!!' that sort of thing was always there : Judy Tenenbaum Charles O'Connell Caleb Frizzel Steven Sloman : each of them with advantage and each over the bar - already showing paintings at their mid-twenties ages brutal and sour and savage and rough as they may be : such quick license meant for all of us driving without brakes jumping without nets a crapshoot and a dazed progression of seemingly endless days and nights wherein we'd cavort and fight to wrestle with our truths and factor down (through countless filthy windows broken loft beds bad elevators and worse coffee) in order to find an end and reach that ending all at the same time : the streetlife of the center of this eruption - the brave fugue of the Miasma Arms Hotel and the rest of the delirious battlegrounds of all art and culture mixed right then as it was with the seething and brittle and hard hatred of the Vietnam War itself settled for us ALL accounts : this ART was LIFE and LIFE was a Warfare (of our very own making)...but the farmer couldn't get in his house (I always tried to remember that).
The 'quandary' of the imaginary man - which I've already introduced only as a title - will now be elucidated as follows : "Imagine if you will a painting of a landscape and a farm house upon the landscape and you are looking at it and a companion next to you is also looking at it and says 'whose house is that?' and you say 'see that farmer sitting in the chair out on the fine lawn of that house? it might be HIS house' and then you laughingly add 'but he can't go into it' - well that is the crux essentially of everything - and Wittgenstein related it all in the fashion of a discussion of the 'self' the 'I' or better 'on the ways we use the word 'I'' and the gist of the discussion was that there is no self to which the 'I' might refer - and how does this jocular story fit in? - does it suggest that it is not I who imagines the landscape house and farmer or does the farmer stand for the self even though there is no such thing ? what does it mean that he can own but not enter the imagined house ? what does the story tell us about the I and/or the 'I' ? for when he talks about the mind (Wittgenstein) he announces unexpectedly "there really is only one world soul which I for preference call my soul...but it is still false to say I is a different person from me (Wittgenstein) for the I the I is what is deeply mysterious"and one thing to keep mindful throughout all of his writings is his enduring hostility to the idea of an individuated substantive self - (insofar as the belief in such a self is most easily associated with Descartes we can call Wittgenstein's position and anti-Cartesianism) for as Wittgenstein says "there is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas for our language creates the ILLUSION that the word 'I' refers to something bodiless which however has its seat in our body and in fact this SEEMS to be the real ego the one of which it was said 'Cogito ergo sum' ["'I' is not the name of a person nor 'here' of a place and 'this' is not a name but they are connected with names and names are explained by means of them and it is ALSO true that it is characteristic of physics NOT to use these words"] and when he said that the house in that imaginary landscape 'might be' said to belong to the farmer in the picture he is FIRST OF ALL reaffirming his commitment to the idea that there is no such thing as the self and I may of course say that I imagine the landscape the house and the farmer but I cannot take this to imply that there is a real self that owns these things and if I want to speak of someone owning the imaginary house or anything else in that imaginary landscape I can only talk of an imaginary object - the farmer - sitting in front of an imaginary house BUT I then am only adding an item to the contents of my imagination - an item that I invest with a symbolic relation of ownership of the others - and this imaginary self is not a real object but rather a self-conception (care of the self) and because it is merely imaginary then it has NO causal powers - which is suggested by Wittgenstein's comment that the 'imaginary farmer cannot enter his imaginary house' and although WE CAN IMAGINE him doing such things he cannot do them in reality and as such the remark is 'one more nail in the coffin' of objectivism for Wittgenstein is trying to show us here that the belief in a real self results from confusing this self-conception with a objectively real thing.....and what I (myself) took then and take now from that is that there is no personal base reality of anything except the perception of there being such and that - at the base of all things - is a LIE a misnomer a mis-representation a curved figment of untruth - and this LIE is the basis of perception the confusion of I with THAT the ideology undergirding all argument the poorly represented supposed factuality behind things and MOST ASSUREDLY the unreality behind ALL reality - to wit we are alive by the fact of our constant pulsing creative self inhabited by ONE self-soul shared by interpretation and moments and that is all there is and all there ever was - one large changing irreducible collective creative moment one space one event one liquid vast driving and overwhelming miracle of moment/interpretation/cause and evidence and THERE ARE NO limits no essences no configurations that cannot be entertained and yet produce in and of themselves no certain reality except in excessive interpretation and existential production TO WIT : we are the we are : and all we can do is enjoy that moment of being.
-
It never amounted to anything really anything - the dark shadows and lamps of night which seemingly littered the loftways and alleys all along the streets I walked were as yet haunted by artists - artists of today and artists of the past - in the same way puddles are haunted by water : men crazy men and women too wielding theory and paint and brush and learning and doctrine so as to and in order to recreate a 'new' world in the very place of the old which had crumbled and I myself immersed in all of this was just what I was - young outside newcomer still awed by those I saw Philip Guston Mercedes Matter Esteban Vicente David Hare Gandy Brody artists each and my friends now and companion-acquaintances and on the music front in the same way Morton Feldman became my twice-weekly lecturer talking face to face and unquestionably so to ten or maybe twenty of us at one time and alone and that was it - we learned and imbibed all that we could and the strangeness of conversation and discourse went back and forth over and under each comment - things about Art as concept and as what we were doing/learning/living - each of us enthralled and we'd look and listen and wait and the overnight-dark windows saddled with clumps of people going on at length over hue or shape or the reason for any of it the TALK it very much just went on - beer cocktail coffee smoke in endless array and those same people had people and together everyone coming and going - Coenties Slip 17th Street lofts lower Broadway 8th Street 10th Street it all broke together and it was the world world world of ART as I saw it and lived within it - some fanatical and embroidered force of non-declension without grammar and words without any shape or form - girls on the mating happy to give and love and companionize with whatever came their way and the streets - purloined as ever - would be out ballroom our court our home all together - biscuit wagons bread shops pretzel men and all the rest of the real real world around us but we knew inside WE KNEW exactly what we were doing and why and how and weird short talk of self-critism and the criticism of others : works booklets drawings most especially 'attention' - someone with an entry in a show a gallery presentation or whatever would of a sudden be held to a different caliber of achievement and brutally ripped or coarsely praised - whichever the current went - but all good-naturdely and with the utmost of forced seriousness (as if as if this NEW world depended on US solely and lone on US ! together) : to wit : 'Caleb Caleb is this now the cover of your most noble venture ? A bevy of distracted elves, swinging away looking like nothing so much as more junk ? how far has your thinking come ? this resembles a fawn's faint fantasy, much more than it does fun of any sort - I want you - oh please - to think again a drunken bear on a blind spree could have worked this better CALEB CALEB what code were you breaking here ? and why!!' that sort of thing was always there : Judy Tenenbaum Charles O'Connell Caleb Frizzel Steven Sloman : each of them with advantage and each over the bar - already showing paintings at their mid-twenties ages brutal and sour and savage and rough as they may be : such quick license meant for all of us driving without brakes jumping without nets a crapshoot and a dazed progression of seemingly endless days and nights wherein we'd cavort and fight to wrestle with our truths and factor down (through countless filthy windows broken loft beds bad elevators and worse coffee) in order to find an end and reach that ending all at the same time : the streetlife of the center of this eruption - the brave fugue of the Miasma Arms Hotel and the rest of the delirious battlegrounds of all art and culture mixed right then as it was with the seething and brittle and hard hatred of the Vietnam War itself settled for us ALL accounts : this ART was LIFE and LIFE was a Warfare (of our very own making)...but the farmer couldn't get in his house (I always tried to remember that).
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7. EVERYTHING IS EVERYTHING (Seek Godhead Wherever I May Find It):
So say what you will and re-record anything you want and describe in tendentious detail any moment you wish and engorge yourself with everything for in all of that alone is the enjoyment of living and its reason and its creativity and its moment - so GO ON and tell me more as I tell you...BUT FIRST...In the 14th century William of Ockham (the first 'nominalist') argued that universal concepts (such as 'justice' or 'freedom' and qualities such as 'white' or 'good') do NOT exist in the abstract but are merely words that denote instances of what they describe and since that time - due to these ideas - a current of thought has been set into motion which has pulled man away from transcendent truths and ONE casualty was a fixed idea of human nature - which idea is now seen as cramped quaint and out-of-date - but if there is no such thing as human nature then there are NO universal moral principles that can be read from human nature and if there are no universal moral truths then religion - positing them - is merely a form of oppression or myth and something from which the 'elites' see themselves as liberated and a long time ago someone named Richard Weaver as I recall wrote something called 'Ideas Have Consequences' in which he stated 'the issue ultimately involved is whether there is a course of truth higher than and independent of man and the answer to that one question is decisive for one's view of nature and the destiny of humankind' and while to me all of that makes sense enough and I have my own answers and responses it is TO YOU that I first turn this argument over before moving and further along in whatever narrative silliness of description I'll be taking you and perhaps you should consider IN LIGHT OF both this last bit of information and all of Wittgenstein's work first PERHAPS you should consider for yourself what it is that is real and omnipresent and operative first in your own lives and than in the world around you - and think of all that every time a tree falls or nature is once more altered or its work is destroyed and things are changed for the worse and negatives impact the world around us THINK THEN as to how you will consider the idea that NOTHING EXISTS except concepts of things and our reactions to those concepts which in turn are concepts in furtherance of the premises underpinning all that we are living by and consider the reality of anything and what you believe or believe you see or understand - and then and only then perhaps will any of it make some sense in a small way ALTHOUGH not that it should or shouldn't for the reality of whatever is is anything but reality in this case and the personal relationship of each person (you must also ask) is defined by WHAT? the relationship of each with their own self or the relationship of that self with others - which is after all (others) what makes up the world for each of us - yet are all those 'others' truly others or all us and are all those 'others' the same others for each of us or do we all have different 'others' to deal with - so as you can see what underlies the basic premise of reality in both the personal and interpersonal and material and non-material realms is some idea of the who or the what we have to deal with - yet nonetheless it all reminds me churlishly of the old gentleman I see each day in good weather walking along - alone - with his curved metal cane - at the slowest imaginable pace along the street on a street with no sidewalk and as he walks he is quite nearly in the path of traffic (which right there is sparse) as he walks perhaps 6 or 8 feet off the curbing and well into the street and stops every so often for whichever purpose - catching his breath musing thinking or almost giving up and then after looking around him (also slowly) he begins again until he reaches one end of the street whereupon he turns around and starts anew into the other direction - all very dreary all quite dumb and all routine unfortunately for him - but nevertheless it APPEARS to be for him a living reality and one he is comfortable enough with to do over and over no further questions asked.
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OK OK that's enough of all that for I myself am tired of it and I am the one who has fallen out and relinquished my post who has given up on stacking things in piles and realizing order and my entire past life now before me for review is in retrospect one great hole filled with whatever observational debris has gone into my occluded remonstrance towards myself in bringing to fruition one life of whatever nature and relating all of this to YOU is I realize just as futile for it is all so long ago (it was so long ago) and it is all as current as now and any endings I may have seen come or go have already told their consequences and it's all very long and overdue and tired and lame and what's left of a life is essentially leftover items and leftover time and plenty of opportunity to either think about it all or simply bury it all and always on the outside edges of everything there is one form or another of some crowd overhanging the low fencing and shouting things or reaching out to try and interfere or take things and it's all and always everywhere the same - we each deal with it in our own ways (all different all the same) and for me it's always been like that and I never really have faced off anything about it to anyone who really matters about it - both parents are dead siblings are mute relatives are dying off all around me reasons are confused and misunderstood or mistaken and so for anything I may do the reverse consequences are always the greater so ALL I CAN DO NOW is move between places and keep quiet or outside the range of noise and (of course) and far better a course SEEK GODHEAD wherever I may find it.
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OK OK that's enough of all that for I myself am tired of it and I am the one who has fallen out and relinquished my post who has given up on stacking things in piles and realizing order and my entire past life now before me for review is in retrospect one great hole filled with whatever observational debris has gone into my occluded remonstrance towards myself in bringing to fruition one life of whatever nature and relating all of this to YOU is I realize just as futile for it is all so long ago (it was so long ago) and it is all as current as now and any endings I may have seen come or go have already told their consequences and it's all very long and overdue and tired and lame and what's left of a life is essentially leftover items and leftover time and plenty of opportunity to either think about it all or simply bury it all and always on the outside edges of everything there is one form or another of some crowd overhanging the low fencing and shouting things or reaching out to try and interfere or take things and it's all and always everywhere the same - we each deal with it in our own ways (all different all the same) and for me it's always been like that and I never really have faced off anything about it to anyone who really matters about it - both parents are dead siblings are mute relatives are dying off all around me reasons are confused and misunderstood or mistaken and so for anything I may do the reverse consequences are always the greater so ALL I CAN DO NOW is move between places and keep quiet or outside the range of noise and (of course) and far better a course SEEK GODHEAD wherever I may find it.
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8. THE BROTHER OF A MARSH DEMON:
The guy was a singer in a lackluster band and they called themselves the 'Fallen Angels' and played at some greasy club up in the east 60's where I stopped by one night really late (I can't remember why) and there were only maybe 15 people there and maybe half were really listening to anything and this raggy band was pontificating badly by guitar upon the upraised little lip which acted as a stage and the bright lights shone down and the place right where they played was intensely white and warm and really really illuminated but the rest of the place was really just a makeshift dump and someone walked around table to table with drinks and others just sat there drifters complete people on dates or whatever and the music was horrible but the pose was important and the club was owned by someone named Scot Muni who was a NYC disc jockey on an early FM station whose real name was Scott Munoz but he'd taken care of that and he was just the getting into real money and a little fame and personality stuff and he'd named the club the 'Rolling Stone' and tried as much as he could to get publicity everywhere and people did come but once they got there they'd see all the acts were crap and they'd end up doing nothing but buying costly drunks and get bad entertainment but it went on a long time like that and the acts eventually dwindled to nothing and the place was closed and the one night I was there some guy I knew a little bit in the band - from the apartment house I cleaned at once a week - he let me play in on drums but really all I did was add a mess to the noise already prevalent and it wasn't anything really special but it was fun for a while - except that no one talked to me or nodded or even noticed I was there and even the other players hadn't a clue that I was on drums and who was I they didn't even ask and I figured later that the drug-induced intoxification had just zoned everybody far away and far out and they weren’t even present and no one cared anyway - let alone me - and it all just went down and it was over and some people stared and then clapped a de rigueur clap - which means I think like they had to or it was expected or normal to do so and my one big night of nothing-fame was that night and later on I did see one or two late 1960's albums by that band called Fallen Angels but I don't remember their names or anything else and I'm just as well glad it was all over that soon because I was more than happy to get my ass out of there without any further complications and there was one time when I told Theresa about it and she laughed too and asked "how did it feel to be a big-shot star?" and I said back "it was OK but then mostly the emphasis was on 'shot'" but we always had these funny little conversations about things between us - stuff of no meaning or import but rather things which would just pass time - and she'd a lot of times tell me things people in the restaurant had said and we'd laugh - like the time some writer guy came in and started telling her (she said) how he was once a 'great writer and a genius of his craft - able to write Moby Dick if he had to but now the best he'd be able to do after so many years of hard work was try to pen Mopey Dick and be glad of it if he could' and she said that was supposed to be funny and was his way of telling her he wanted sex but couldn't 'get it up no more' and she had this way of reading between lines and getting the messages people really meant to say - as for myself I'd probably have overlooked that whole thing and figured the guy to be a waning down and out writer but she said that "no no it wasn't never like that" and that when people have something they want to tell you without telling you they "fix up millions of ways to get the messages across" and that's what a counter-girl did - she got really good at picking up the subliminals and responding accordingly and then she said "a lot of times if you listen good and act like you get it the tips are much better and anyway that's what people want" and then we just sat there waiting for the next person to talk or walk in or whatever and it was often difficult for me because personally I could never stand the smell of food and the odors of cooking and places like the restaurant or diner a lot of time just made me feel crummy except for the coffee - which smell I could take forever - even the crummy crap of diner coffee which is oftentimes quite rank but at least it smells good enough (and then I started chuckling as I thought of what she'd make of that statement '...oftentimes quite rank but at least smells good enough' in light of all the late-night whores who eventually traipsed in) and I remembered too that that was the same night which had me going up the avenue and running across the man I'd known as Jimmy Big for a little while and he pulled me inside some stupid bar or something and began a long story about his 'Uncle Rad' who as it turned out a lot of the other guys in this bar had known and Uncle Rad had just died and this was the remains of his funeral party or something and they all started on with tales of Uncle Rad and things he'd done - and a bagpiper was stationed in the corner of the bar-room over by the two dartboards and the movie posters (way outdated) and every so often upon command of one or another of the increasingly drunk patrons he'd play once more and whether it was Amazing Grace or some amazing Irish funeral song or dirge or whatever it was was up to then the most startling music I'd ever heard and of course they'd go on and it would all start again and then there were tears and stories and more stories and before long I'd felt too as if Uncle Rad was one of mine and he was at some point an organizer of Irish dockworkers or something in the 1950's and all these guys were pals of his and owed their livings to him and all of this gushed out in a truly overwhelming piece of glory like none I'd ever seen before and it was surpassed by nothing ever again and the Irish Pavilion or whatever it was called simply ran with good blood and liquor all night and no one at all ever tried to stop it and then a few folksingers who were friends of the owner came in and they too started playing their guitars and things and the whole place heated up as it turned out they all knew Uncle Rad who basically spent most of his time at this place and the folksingers too were interesting to me Irish types and others and heavy smoking sweatered types and bearded guys who all seemed ancient to me although now as I look back they were probably maybe ten years older then me and not much more (and in fact many of them did go on to produce careers of fame and money and song too although it was all unknown to me at the time even who it was I was watching) but no matter which direction I turned it seemed there was hope and friendship and a certain joy in the sadness and I looked for a long time at the things on the wall - posters for poetry readings and songfests and organizing parties and other things and it was all very interesting and kept me engaged nearly until morning's light started peeking through when I realized this had been going on all night and a few of the guys were passed out and asleep or whatever and music still played and there wasn't an Irish cop or any other in all of midtown who'd ever stepped in to stop this or try to close it up and it was for me right then one of the more joyous occasions I'd ever attended or been witness too and until this day I can recall vividly almost every moment and years later too when I once attended an Irish Society picnic in a park somewhere with Dave McGrath and the entire family of Mike Malone and maybe fifty other people it wasn't until then really that I ever saw that sort of atmosphere take place again and it was at the same time - in broad daylight and outdoors that time - that I realized perhaps that some people are just born to happiness and stay that way even in their sadness and sadness a'plenty there always is in this life what with death being a constant companion whose tambourine it seems is always playing somewhere in the background BUT those were the sorts of memories all of this time and place brought to me always and all of 8th Street and anywhere else was to me in that fabled time of late 1967 and beyond one huge vast playground of human blood and proclivity for me to learn in and walk amidst - everything else be damned.
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