THE YARDARM HE HUNG FROM...
11. THE YARDARM HE HUNG FROM WAS BUT A BAD REPUTATION CONFUSED AND MISTAKEN BY EVERYONE ELSE:
And another thing I had heard of a long time ago - something which had stayed with me - was the name Lamont Bernadine Clarkson who as it turned out much later after I'd researched the name was the very same person who had laid out much of the area I was now walking through - a very physical person - who had served his town well and at the same time managed to allow thousands of scholars to use his university plan and resources to further their learning and who had amassed in his own way a large fortune with which he aided the citizens of the poorer section of Princeton Boro - while the person with the statues and the renown apparently was this 'Witherspoon' fellow who had somehow then managed instead to walk away with the 250 years of accolades I'd always thought were due Clarkson as well - but in any case each time I was in Princeton (which was one of the two places I frequented - the other being of course Manhattan) I tried to imagine it all through his eyes and not those of Witherspoon and I found that to be the very same dichotomy which I was undergoing here in first observing the church services in what were once the poorer quarters of the old Witherspoon district (oddly enough) and then the upper grounds of the university and Nassau Street with its great hulking edifices of fame and glory and money - churches cathedrals seminaries and grand halls of worship - where intellectual worship was taking place and between the two I thought how strange it was to hear in both places the inconsiderate preachments of men leaders and elders who insisted on describing issues to the flock of ideas and forms which - while certainly not narrow - bespoke a familiarity with concerns of small-fitting issues and I tried in my way to fit things together too (and thought no better of any of it - for the smallness of Princeton and all of its issues was in contrast to the broad weird and universal pastiche of Manhattan old and new which somehow subsumed every other issue into its collegial maw in ways Princeton could never) and the singular product of all of this was the education and production of MAN in pure capital letters - meaning everyone and everywhere - MAN who creates and builds MAN the bricklayer who compounds the fortresses of both mind and reality by erecting through his concepts the very world he imagines he sees and as I scurried along I realized that the lanes and streets of Princeton were in their way more of a stage set of what a small New York would never aspire to be - gentility finesses and class - for in order to attain that there would have to be filtered realities and highlights with genres of people and class (as there was in Princeton but as there never really could be in Manhattan - with its huge mix of race and culture education and ignorance learning and deceit) and BESIDES that it was in Manhattan where I could go to visit the grave of Alexander Hamilton the urban bank-master of a citified manufacture society and it was - by contrast - in Princeton where I could go to visit the grave of Aaron Burr the confused mercurial and daring genius of another type of reality altogether (and I've often visited both gravesites for the telling difference it makes) - and in fact having visited the once grand 'City of Industry' at the Paterson Falls where Alexander Hamilton's statue itself graces the facing vista of the now-diminished falls which by dint of the expiration and exhaustion of his vaunted industrial base have been much re-routed and changed in flow to have become no more now than a sad sideshow to the once-bustling silk mills and water-powered manufactures which once there thrived through dint of channels and canals of pumping stations and rail-yards but that too is another story - one told at the expense of Hamilton and therefore saved to another time : but here (as I was) in Princeton I hear instead the tuned singing of grateful minions of Lord and Saviour this and that bellowing circumspectly of rightness and grace and all other hallowed things while the children of the rich and the reedy go about their patterns of furtherance to promote the riches and the politics and the ideas of their wealth-philosophy (which is pretty much all they ever end up doing with their 'educations') while the lower-classes themselves would know NOTHING about the differences between Hamilton and Burr between the state-of-power and the state-of-grace between the history of their terrain and the present of their domain and if IGNORANCE wields the baton of its own stupidity than such it is and will be but Nassau Street like some fevered dance of commerce trickles on with its passing faces of trade commerce style and fashion and with the same aplomb as all things have -- the Old is decimated for the NEW and the NEW has all the wrong delineations and the commentary of nothing is repeated over and over anew as alongside Burr in his confused grave - sharing the same acres - one can find Grover Cleveland - some old ex-President and one can find John O'Hara the writer and Sylvia Beach the literata and every other Princeton president in President's Row pretty surely including Witherspoon himself and it all goes to show how everything gets commingled like mud into cow-turds in some horrid farm field of some great and vast nothingness just waiting for its development but what good is development or as I always wondered - why do they call it 'construction'? - and if I gave any of it a thought I'd almost say that to my mind Burr and Hamilton are each in the wrong gravesites and should switch if they could and if there really was some form of divine justice they probably would and WATER POWER is over INDUSTRY is over MANUFACTURE is over KNOWLEDGE is over and most everything else - if not already over - will be over soon enough anyway.
And another thing I had heard of a long time ago - something which had stayed with me - was the name Lamont Bernadine Clarkson who as it turned out much later after I'd researched the name was the very same person who had laid out much of the area I was now walking through - a very physical person - who had served his town well and at the same time managed to allow thousands of scholars to use his university plan and resources to further their learning and who had amassed in his own way a large fortune with which he aided the citizens of the poorer section of Princeton Boro - while the person with the statues and the renown apparently was this 'Witherspoon' fellow who had somehow then managed instead to walk away with the 250 years of accolades I'd always thought were due Clarkson as well - but in any case each time I was in Princeton (which was one of the two places I frequented - the other being of course Manhattan) I tried to imagine it all through his eyes and not those of Witherspoon and I found that to be the very same dichotomy which I was undergoing here in first observing the church services in what were once the poorer quarters of the old Witherspoon district (oddly enough) and then the upper grounds of the university and Nassau Street with its great hulking edifices of fame and glory and money - churches cathedrals seminaries and grand halls of worship - where intellectual worship was taking place and between the two I thought how strange it was to hear in both places the inconsiderate preachments of men leaders and elders who insisted on describing issues to the flock of ideas and forms which - while certainly not narrow - bespoke a familiarity with concerns of small-fitting issues and I tried in my way to fit things together too (and thought no better of any of it - for the smallness of Princeton and all of its issues was in contrast to the broad weird and universal pastiche of Manhattan old and new which somehow subsumed every other issue into its collegial maw in ways Princeton could never) and the singular product of all of this was the education and production of MAN in pure capital letters - meaning everyone and everywhere - MAN who creates and builds MAN the bricklayer who compounds the fortresses of both mind and reality by erecting through his concepts the very world he imagines he sees and as I scurried along I realized that the lanes and streets of Princeton were in their way more of a stage set of what a small New York would never aspire to be - gentility finesses and class - for in order to attain that there would have to be filtered realities and highlights with genres of people and class (as there was in Princeton but as there never really could be in Manhattan - with its huge mix of race and culture education and ignorance learning and deceit) and BESIDES that it was in Manhattan where I could go to visit the grave of Alexander Hamilton the urban bank-master of a citified manufacture society and it was - by contrast - in Princeton where I could go to visit the grave of Aaron Burr the confused mercurial and daring genius of another type of reality altogether (and I've often visited both gravesites for the telling difference it makes) - and in fact having visited the once grand 'City of Industry' at the Paterson Falls where Alexander Hamilton's statue itself graces the facing vista of the now-diminished falls which by dint of the expiration and exhaustion of his vaunted industrial base have been much re-routed and changed in flow to have become no more now than a sad sideshow to the once-bustling silk mills and water-powered manufactures which once there thrived through dint of channels and canals of pumping stations and rail-yards but that too is another story - one told at the expense of Hamilton and therefore saved to another time : but here (as I was) in Princeton I hear instead the tuned singing of grateful minions of Lord and Saviour this and that bellowing circumspectly of rightness and grace and all other hallowed things while the children of the rich and the reedy go about their patterns of furtherance to promote the riches and the politics and the ideas of their wealth-philosophy (which is pretty much all they ever end up doing with their 'educations') while the lower-classes themselves would know NOTHING about the differences between Hamilton and Burr between the state-of-power and the state-of-grace between the history of their terrain and the present of their domain and if IGNORANCE wields the baton of its own stupidity than such it is and will be but Nassau Street like some fevered dance of commerce trickles on with its passing faces of trade commerce style and fashion and with the same aplomb as all things have -- the Old is decimated for the NEW and the NEW has all the wrong delineations and the commentary of nothing is repeated over and over anew as alongside Burr in his confused grave - sharing the same acres - one can find Grover Cleveland - some old ex-President and one can find John O'Hara the writer and Sylvia Beach the literata and every other Princeton president in President's Row pretty surely including Witherspoon himself and it all goes to show how everything gets commingled like mud into cow-turds in some horrid farm field of some great and vast nothingness just waiting for its development but what good is development or as I always wondered - why do they call it 'construction'? - and if I gave any of it a thought I'd almost say that to my mind Burr and Hamilton are each in the wrong gravesites and should switch if they could and if there really was some form of divine justice they probably would and WATER POWER is over INDUSTRY is over MANUFACTURE is over KNOWLEDGE is over and most everything else - if not already over - will be over soon enough anyway.
posted by gary j. introne at 6:08 AM
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