BAD DRIVES OUT GOOD

14. IF BAD DRIVES OUT GOOD (Like It Always Does):

And if bad drives out good which it surely does than we’re really in trouble deep (‘do not move let the wind speak THAT is Paradise’) or as Hemingway his’self said : “Posterity can take care of herself or FUCK Herself” but why the little plane overhead was dragging that along as a banner in flight was beyond me low flying plane in beleaguered airspace and all that and then I remembered again something Meaning had said to me that night after we ran from the pier where there had been a killing he’d turned to me I remembered out of breath and all as we had just sat down on a park bench along the Hudson River there somewhere towards downtown sweating and nervous and all and he simply turned and said (and I remember it reminded me of Nick Tosches a kid from Blair Road out by the Jersey junkyards I used to know he said : “I was six years old the first time I killed somebody and I remember it like yesterday and it’s never left me little fucking dumb bastard that I was and the kid was maybe two years older than me and on a rainy and overcast afternoon I was walking near the glass factory on a deserted street but the old factory was more like a glass dump with high rusted corrugated tin fences swelling and sagging from the big heaps of shattered glass that had long ago burst and overflowed from them and no one ever seemed to work there and there no no signs of industry just the endless slag heaps of waste and abandonment and the windy and driven junk that got blown around and twisted and left wherever it ended up until that next time it was blown around or twisted even tighter onto poles and objects and everything had lost its color and shape as I guess sunlight fades even glass over time amberyellowbluegreen like some apothecary nightmare of the mind but we always called it like everybody else still ‘the Glass Factory’ and those were the good old days too when you could look downtown to the farthest ends and see nothing but open sky and the grand old buildings of another age when urban blight was as romantic and magical as any enchanted woods in a picture-book and that blight consisted happily of abandoned or bustling warehouses with trucks coming or going or left there leaning on broken chassis and flattened tires and decrepit looking busted-out windshields and broken doors and vacant lots and decaying piers and alleys and the endless treasure-trove of everything but now that whole downtown vista idea has been destroyed and dominated by immense structures and buildings and spires of absolute corporate ugliness or bureaucratic blandness and that mediocrity rises upon landfills and the abandoned or bustling warehouses and factories either way have become luxury properties with “living spaces” and the vacant lots have been filled with more of the same and the alleys have been blocked off and the piers and waterfront decay have vanished and been replaced by “friendly recreational spaces” and dismal “esplanades” and even the children are no longer children but blobs of New York Times “Living” section papier-mâché cut-outs a mush-product of “parenting” amidst “living spaces” all leashed and tethered for “quality time” in “correctly structured activities” and there’s nowhere to prowl nowhere to run no imagination to do any of it with anyway and no freedom certainly a lifeless sterility straight from a fit and proper womb so anyway this kid came up to me and took out a knife and put it towards my face as he said “hey kid wanna’ die?” and I could tell he meant it so in my own way answering that taunt I’d decided maybe NO I didn’t right then care to and only having memories of uncles and brothers with stories of thuggery and pay-backs in the family-way of doing business as such I lunged at the kid knocking him over and grabbed the knife from him and plunged it deep twice into his chest and as he fell screaming and bleeding to die I ran like the Devil myself and threw the knife into a nearby sewer and ran home to my uncle’s butcher shop and never said a word again even after hearing of the dead kid they found down along Walston Street by the big gate and I’ve found over time these many years now that you really can bury things deep inside and put them out of mind and even though they’re always there as a ghost of memory or some engrained reference the rest of your life CAN go on all around it silent and strong and aware” and that’s what he told me as I remember it all and it didn’t make much sense to me then and makes only a little more now and I really didn’t know whether to believe him or not but it reminds me of something else I myself did.

‘I think I am therefore I am’ it was something close to what Descartes said but it wasn’t for sure exact however it made good sense and I’d always wanted to DO a mercy killing that is a KILLING with a better reason or a killing wherein like in old Hebrew law a man was allowed to take vengeance upon anyone under his own roof and that included killing the ‘other’ in your own house which is the point of view I’d taken with Aryundhati Roy who was an Indian writer of some note with very pronounced left-wing leanings who went about spouting various anti-American vocal sanitations and intonations and prevarications and whatever else you want to call them NOW none of that stuff normally bothers me since as I am already being one of those who harbors vast and varied suspicions myself about the treacly tendentiousness of this vaguely myopic Amerikan experiment founded as it is on the THREE L’s they being lucre lies and deceit and I know that’s not three L’s but I can’t very well use something that doesn’t make any sense merely because it begins with an L for it would have to have some bearing and meaning on the concept and I ASK YOU NOW of the following do any ? longevity latitude lamenting lounging lugubriousness lying (of course a repeat) lamentations liberty (which doesn’t here fit) and anyway if I looked upon this entire thing as a nation and viewed it as my ‘roof’ then I was entitled to take action in my way against someone who offends or defames or declaims against it RIGHT so I did but the story is much longer than that and has to do with the United Nations and the headquarters building at east 42nd Street and a conference at which she was speaking and the comments which she there spoke and the walkway I got her at and the ‘Swords into Plowshares’ sculpture across the street at Dag Hammersjkold Plaza and the elevated stairway right there and the open expanse of sight which I utilized etc. and let us not forget my fleet and swift escape running carefully along and through the area along Tudor City to make my getaway and the means by which I re-integrated myself into the crowds in midtown and slowly and gently made my way back towards Union Square along its upper end and the way in which I found the empty loft to be still empty and which thereby allowed me entry into it and a place to lay low and hide out right afterwards BUT I’LL GET INTO ALL THAT soon enough if you just listen up and let me first do my open-air homework for if all of this is a confession than I might as well confess and liberally apply quotations and stories along the way so as to keep this interesting and intelligent and uplifting at the same time RIGHT! and if as I said before the BAD DRIVES OUT THE GOOD as it always does than it is all the more certain that I must tell you and share with you all these activities and imaginings which have made up my latter life and another thing about that bad driving out good is that like the least common denominator of anything it always happens that way and it does most certainly destroy the life we lead or try to and the certainty of a ruined and fallen culture with but so little time left is and can be seen at every juncture we go for there is nothing left of any value and even the good is no longer good but soured by rage and I attest hereto that had Mr. George Washington ever lately returned he’d most probably fight for the other side and had Mr. Abraham Lincoln ever returned he’d restore some form of the Indian Nation instead of ripping it up and over in his native Kentucky thought of even though he is as an Illinoisan which only came later WOODSMAN INDIAN SLAYER and everything else (but not against Aryundhati Roy for that’s another kind of Indian you see) and I stand up whenever I can for Amerika for this is the land where it all happens and even the land of the free gets the KGB when they flee (poetic license).

And in such situations as these I would expect to hear things and read things read headlines like “Thousands Starve as Lightning Strikes” or “Mr. Walon Takes Predominant Motives” but instead all there are are noises various noises and not all interesting and they just go on and on around me as I sit negotiating entryways or looking at mirrors or revolving doors and in an insane simulacrum of fortitude and interest I find lonely variations on information and knowledge - things which I find should take precedence over listening to the guy with the race cars talk about his restorations or the girl with horses writing notes about her barn and gazebo and it all grates it grates on me like the sound of an afternoon’s circular saw cutting through wood at an annoying pace of some ten or fifteen seconds per cut followed by silence followed by another cut of seven or ten seconds followed by more silence (the kind of silence that isn’t really silence because it is continually broken and one’s learned expectations of it therefore include further noise) and far lost north within all of that are the people and issues which go with it all of them things making me nervous - the hallowed power light about to go out or the ring-necked pheasant landing on a run or the ancient sickening old joke of Zero Mostel serving ‘peasant under glass’ to startled restaurant guests at The Russian Tea Room with Mostel wearing an apron as if that made all the difference in his stupid flim-flam of a joke or how it is we all read history wrongly even as the light quickly goes down around us and diminishes in our faces as we talk until of a sudden we are facing complete darkness between us and find ourselves talking back to only a dark and shadowed hole from where a voice just came (blind ineptitude two strangers in the dark) and a sickening feeling deep in he stomach which never leaves or the stupid-looking kid in the ice-cream store the kind of kid who appears to be fifteen but in reality is a 35 year old man slightly retarded in loose denim shorts and glasses that enlarge his eyes grotesquely and just to hear his voice is nauseating because he talks like a trumpet swan or like a brain that should have no voice and he’s out on the fringes of Morristown New Jersey somewhere in the richlands of horse-country where people sit about at leisure enjoying their time off and endless white fences are painted and repainted almost constantly so that the wood density and coloration remains perfect slat after slat as the fences perfectly follow the wooded and pastured landscape and cars and carriages are still thrown about and it’s right here where this manchild is let loose and he’s on his own alone in the world and ending up famished at an ice cream store rattling off the flavor combinations he wants to try all piled up on one cone and the guy behind the counter is laughing and building a five-stacked ice cream cone just for the kid every scoop something different and the kid-man-child becomes delirious with joy and expectation immediately ripping into the topmost scoop with his large and over-active teeth and he’s off to see the world ‘Moon River I’m off to see the world there’s such a lot of world to see I taking that last rainbow’s bend my Huckleberry friend Moon River and me…’ and I remember the tall thin man the other one who walked into the corner coffee shop in Denville after parking his new motorcycle outside parking it perfectly just so first and then turning back from a short distance to again stare at it before entering the store and then getting in the line to order and never looking back or out again through the plate glass window instead standing archly straight and stiff and looking only forward and next to him the young staff-girl chatters away on a telephone while she’s on her break in a Starbucks shirt and she’s got her feet up on the table like it was her very own home and no one cares or says a word for the whole world right then is one delicious morsel he waiting and she sitting and the roadway running with cars and shoppers and the police car idling and nothing it seems could go wrong and YES! perfectly relaxed feet belong up on a table I can see the point and there’s something on the wall some quiz-question of the day about Vincent Price in the movie The Tingler and three choices are written for the answer but I knew not any of them so passed on that (I hate movie questions anyway) never having seen any of what it is they’re ever asking about anyway and so out of the loop then I go on and start reading “Ahmedabad India here in the adopted hometown of Mohandas K. Gandhi the great apostle of non-violence Hindu mobs committed acts of unspeakable savagery against Muslims this spring as mothers were skewered on swords as their children watched and young women were stripped and raped in broad daylight then doused with kerosene and set on fire and a pregnant woman’s belly was slit open and her fetus was raised skyward on the tip of a sword and then tossed onto one of the fires that blazed across the city and the violence raged for days and persisted for more than two months and claimed almost one thousand lives and it was driven by hatred and sparked by a terrible crime : a Muslim mob stoned a train car loaded with activists from the World Hindu Council on Feb. 27 and then set it afire killing 59 people mostly women and children” so that’s the carnage that ends the world that’s the ulterior motive of all religions which is JUSTICE and EQUALITY for all our kind and it engenders so much pride and wonder and fierce nobility that things done in the NAME OF THE LORD whatever Lord it is take on a greater reality than the reality itself it serves so for these reasons and outside of these constraints we must go on.

Well you can’t make these things up for they carry a reality of their own as in how odd it is that remnants of all that was left of the destroyed Trade Center towers including whatever pulverized remains of people winds up in a place called ‘Fresh Kills’ or that with all the resultant airport security concern over things the airline abbreviation for Los Angeles Airport is the three-letter symbol LAX or that signs painted by hand along rudimentary roads in Afghanistan where locals are trying to make some money fixing and maintaining broken vehicles now that some of the outlying roads are being opened back up read like : ‘Punctur Repair Fix Foraging Engine’ and ‘The Golden Lotos Hotel & Restaurant Is Ready Again To Serve You Each Kind Of Internal and External Delicious Foods’ meaning I guess imported and local cuisine and Mayor Bloomberg of New York City has three favorite maxims and they are : ‘Always be building’ and ‘Do what you love’ and ‘Bring a gun to a knife fight’ and while these maxims retain some of their pithy character they more than amply portray a guy at ease with himself and with others and with the work he and they should be doing which is quite a shift I’d have to say from the regular medley of bland ‘fraidy-cat’ wimps that pass for politicians today and it’s good to see someone blowing his pithy horn like that and the more things I read about his comments the more I like what I see and back a few years ago he published for the internal distribution within his company and business contacts something called “The Portable Bloomberg” which had in it these gems : collected wit and wisdom of Michael Bloomberg ALL ACTUAL QUOTES nothing embellished or exaggerated and some things too outrageous to include off-color jokes and more ‘There’s only one queen in Buckingham Palace the rest are in Trafalgar Square’ ‘If women wanted to be appreciated for their brains they’d go to the library instead of Bloomingdale’s’ and on marriage ‘Sex with someone you love…is sex with someone you love and the plusses are you don’t have to buy dinner and the only thing you catch is calluses’ and a note about one of the Bloomberg Terminal installations in the offices says ‘it will do everything including giving you a blowjob…which I guess puts a lot of you girls out of business’ ‘what’s the difference between pussy and parsley? Variety’.

Just like the cobra that was coming from Paris to New Zealand the outlandish ideas of eccentric men tumbled (over the years) through nearly all of Manhattan’s weird streets accumulating myth and legend one over the other with personalities and activities arrayed from the likes of Barnum to Lincoln and everything in between dramatists artists scribblers writers builders charlatans thieves liars and cheats explorers and men of science in every walk of life and in every other walk whether an amble trot or run they came and stayed and because of them the city as it is (was) grew to be what it is (was) - and although perhaps now in some decline it stays - and we read the past with its glories and stories FOR THAT IS SIMPLY ALL WE GET from it one at a time the individual basis of what we are each doing ‘I make my reality you make yours and I make mine again’ as multi-layered and cantilevered as a ziggurat from some biblical fantasy rolling at a trot over the bounding landscape and WE inhabit it ? do we ? at a risk to ourselves : “I don’t know any of that for you see I was born here and really don’t know anything else unlike many other people I talk with who it seems are always from somewhere else and far-flung journeys bring them here whether it’s business or education or theater or whatever and then they never seem to leave and I often wonder the multi-layered effect of this city is composed how much of original people born and raised here and how much by outsiders who adopt in and where do these natives go I wonder when they leave the parents’ nest how do they find places is it easy or difficult expensive or not and do they take the parents’ places over as death and illness wear them down and how much of old bedrock New York is flavored by the constant and ongoing old blood of people who’ve been here over family generations and who have influenced the sense of place that comes with all that for you know an outsider can only bring with them whatever they’ve taken from the ‘outside’ which eventually changes the flavor of New York as New Yorkers seem to have only their own hard way of doing things certain and peculiar to themselves.

I met Sergeant Schroeder at Ben Berkle’s High Five a nightspot on 5th Street one night way after the moon had gone down way before sunlight arrives and kind of right in the middle of the two spaces that night fills up and we sat there exchanging tales and comments he looking over at each and every female that walked in or by and for sure commenting precisely and discreetly on each of their attributes most of which I heartily agreed with for unlike me this guy was or seemed completely comfortable with sex and could undress a woman verbally in ten seconds while all I could do was sort of look or stare and imagine or something far more inconsequential than he did and for him so many times the opening exchange whatever it was took him with ease to the next step past pleasantries which was often a sequence of more and more intense exchanges ribald riotous and raw shall we say and it always amazed me the way - no matter what kind of stuff you hear about women being diffident or awkward and shy or easily embarrassed - these females always went whole hog into it with him no holds barred jokes and asides and comments about everything from sexual positions to swallowing cum to fucking up the ass finger licking dick sucking there was no limit to the happiness and fun he brought out and it always seemed not only he but everyone was amazingly and completely comfortable talking about sex pecker size tits fucking you name it a completely easy and joyous way with all of that (something I never had for sure something I always ran from afraid of or whatever but something lost and frozen deep inside me which this guy seemed to have thawed out by the time he was 3) and it went that way all the time except now if you want an example I can’t really give one because it was all the same nothing precise just the usual filth and I guess for sure he got laid a lot because he seemed to always leave with someone someone of the ‘female persuasion’ let’s say and we never really talked about what went on we just went on the next time we saw each other kind of right where we left off and this day he had something to say : “You know what you know what I can’t stand it’s the beaver-assed pussies who come waddling in here and these are guys mind you they come waddling in here all sensitive and nervous-like over things over wildlife and the atmosphere or the environment or cruelty to animals and all that shit and I do not want to hear about it and these guys are always the same head up their ass face in a book theory and literal and usually queer as all get-out too and they just burn me up so I sit here in a fog getting angry and having encounters and ideas that jog my memory (which ain’t always good to jog) and then I get all worked up and start getting loud and mean but whatever then they go away and the ladies come over and sometimes there’s girls here that I can’t exactly place but know I’ve seen before and liked and it’s from that point I start working for what the hell else I got to do – you follow me? – so it just becomes fun sleaze and wry jokes at their expense or at least at the expense of their tits or asses you know and then late at night you get the big girls in here the really crazy ones with names like Tyfanee or Bambee strippers or night-club girls and they really have no limits let me tell you no limits and by that time of night they don’t even care about the money although let me tell you if they were really any good by that time of night they’d be bedded down with some millionaire sugar-daddy already playing his cards for all they were worth however NOT these girls these are a different type but they start telling me their stories and problems and we just play it off like a joke or something and hey the next thing you know I’m their taster for the night I’m their social-worker cause and the next day what the hell I buy ‘em a breakfast and they’re happy can’t beat that can you?” so anyway he finally stopped talking and we had another drink and I bought him a bag of pretzels if you can call what they put in there for a buck fifty a bag of pretzels for it’s more like crumbs but you know New York prices and all and we’re sitting there across from the old Merchant’s Exchange building and there’s a few old pictures in older frames in the window that have been slowly water-stained and curled over the years but they bring back a great portrait of the old days barrel-fires bricked streets square old cars and lonely old men and everything and I realized that probably at one time this barroom was packed each moment with traders and banana merchants and auction contractors and foodstuffs brokers and all that and in the real heyday of the 1920’s for that stuff this was probably quite the booming joint and it sadly but proudly had apparently lived on its own all past that for even now Chanterelle or something was the name of the restaurant high-assed-end eating establishment now closed up which once last graced the ground floor of the beautiful merchant’s building and those people there who had to look out at this place here across the narrow street as they ate probably lost the entire picture missed the whole point and wound up just disliking this place as a leftover nasty and dirty shot and drink joint for wasted dirty old tired drinkers and if that’s the truth than fuck’em all as I would say because the grand tradition here is still somehow present in the high ceiling with its visual and proud demeanor and the wonderful back of the bar area and the little ante-room off the end and the tables and glass and stuff pretty much left as it was from some 1945 idealized version of movie alcoholism BE THAT FINE BY ME and then he said to me “you know I once heard of a guy and this was a true story who was 70 years old and living in Paterson New Jersey on the fading tail-end of an old music career in orchestral music that seemed to have gone nowhere and this was a long time ago mind you and the poverty and depression finally got to him so he wrote a farewell note to his wife “why should or how can a man exist and be powerless to earn means for his family?” and then he gave his daughter a last music lesson and swallowed a lethal dose of morphine now ain’t that a sad story?”

Alton Breathnacht was his name and he was walking from one building to another just outside the Nanticon-Feldspar Institute where he held an office position and I saw him quite by surprise on a hot afternoon at the very end of July when I caught up to him not having seen him in a number of years and after only the fleetest of hello’s I asked him how he was faring and what he was up to it being a far cry from the last time I saw him and we together were in a ‘class’ of sorts at a ‘Reckoning Institute’ just the other side of Bowery and Prince in an old building since torn down but back then people’d by people I suppose like us on the verge of breaking out from severe hardship yet that wasn’t always the most perfect of environments for sometimes that very issue became the issue which led people to extreme studies or involvement in what are called still ‘fringe’ activities and such and Breathnacht himself when I asked what his ‘Institute’ did replied that it was an informational force which worked to counter the interests of the Catholic Church and the Papacy and yeah I found that pretty interesting but wasn’t sure what it meant it having by all means to be better than the flaccid prayer breakfasts and homily-heavy cheap meals we’d grown used to back then so I wasn’t in the least bit surprised as it often happens that people subject to one form of horror or tyranny react to it by adapting to the precise and opposite extreme of the same form of oppression they’d left behind which is how the dialectic is maintained or what they call the ‘dialectic’ in these parts anyway and as we got to talking (sitting on a bench under two strangely dilapidated trees overhanging a courtyard behind the building where he worked which at first I thought was a bland and meager office-building but which later turned out quite charming with a quaint and folksy backyard beneath the trees and shrubbery we sat in and walled by nearly ancient old stone walls the genesis of which I could not place for they seemed to be there forever although the spot itself seemed new enough) and we discussed lots of things as people came and went for it appeared in this place there were many sorts of ‘movement’ types people with leftist and communitarian leanings who seemed to want some universalism passed by which all their ideas and their ideas only would be deemed right and correct and thereby the world would be harmonized but in any case as I thought of it ‘you don’t miss your water ‘till your well runs dry’ meaning I quite liked the ordinary strife and dishonesty of the filthy old world around me [as I thought of it] and Breathnacht started saying that the Pope was a true anti-Christ and really should have been killed not wounded by Atta or Ahmed or however shot him back in the eighties because he represented the Vatican intrigue which was a truly Godless power intent on harboring vast secrets and taking over the minds of people and passing off slave religions and various guilts onto people whose only other means of self-affirmation was to break out and to coalesce into a revolutionary movement of peasant and rifle-wielding agents of reform but what’s the Pope do in his most feeble head-bobbing state he goes from Canada where he’d ambushed many young children in a faked World Youth Congress with the intent of stealing hearts and minds and blood and actually killing children to Guatemala and then Mexico intent on the blindly savage and ages-old mission of ripping out any primitive or native psycho-religious urges the people may still have by presenting them with idiotic homilies about ‘faith and the modern day’ and ‘holy mother the church’ cock-fighting bullshit and given them outrageously in this modern day giving them distorted and false made-up lives of people to beatify and turn towards sainthood and it was unbelievable he said how people still fell for this bamboozling garbage pushed by the Pope and his mass-army of perverted and mind-enslaved priests and missionaries and nuns and other officers people brazenly intent on corrupting the world and the Institute’s mission was to counteract all of this with its own messianic conversion units and pastoral replies in the deepest and most nativistic of clans and pagans and primitives in all the places they could and I’d heard some of this stuff before and had to agree that the Pope was looking reptilian and vaguely evil to me too and that I was frankly nauseated and set-aback by the likes of entertainment figures and statesmen and such kissing ass to the Pope and undercutting anything else they may have done by bowing down to the likes of this strangely passive-aggressive Authority figure and I thought too of Dylan and Clinton and Nixon and any of those old first-level types doing their obsequies at the Vatican and the Sindona killings and the banking scandals and hangings and intrigue and then Breathnacht started telling me things they’d found out about the many multi-tiered layers beneath the Vatican and the ruined libraries with only remnants left and secreted under Vatican control and the lies and distortions between religion and the world everywhere as it’s all controlled by a slaggard and soon-to-be-dying Vatican and maybe he was right I didn’t know by the was looking really intense and he started going on about how they kidnap and kill children and take the spirit and hearts from people and send them back into the world as mere replacements artificial mind-controlled zombies Madonna Dylan Springsteen Tony Blair Prince Philip Prince Charles all those people at the top end and all the millions of little people at the bottom and the only good we could do was to eliminate this movement this false and acrid smell of religion wherever it wafts and all that (he was going on) and I sat back and said “Alton now listen I ain’t one to faint for no saint but what do I care at the same time about all this crap and even if it’s true no one’s ever contacted me and I for sure can fight this shit if I’ve a mind to at the most personal level” and he smiled and said he was at least glad of that and then he asked how I was doing asked about Thea and Romberto and some of the others we once knew and he knew some of what I told him and some he didn’t (being so caught up as he was in this miasmic fog I wasn’t really sure what he was conscious of) and we sat there for a long time just talking and in my own way all this really did for me was move me off the spot a bit so as I sat there I started remembering what I remembered and really the first thing I remember AS I RECALL IT was of living in a tree inside a tree deeply dimensional with a large cut-out entryway and the people I met half-human or some part human anyway seemed small maybe elfish dwarfish gnomish whatever and they took me in as I was one of them or considered one and I remember this entryway leading down into varied subterranean chambers deep within the earth which we got to in some fashion I guess walking I don’t know and these chambers were somehow provided with everything which is another paradox to me one never answered and leading me perhaps to think of it all as projection for I do recall light and hallways and furnishings and stuff and although everything was small and cramped and such I must say I question now how any of this would have gotten there were it not mere projection for anyone’s form of chambered underground living [although remembered quite vividly by me and carrying that curtain of reality as strong and memorable as anything else] but anyway to Breathnacht I mentioned this and asked what he thought of ‘other’ realities and saying that maybe this entire ‘Pope’ thing was missing the point based as strongly as it was in someone else’s reality and all and he nearly gasped and gurgled with intimidation at that saying I was so far removed from the good that had to be done that I couldn’t see the evil that it had to be done to (‘or with’ I thought) but I FIGURED since he was so very caught up in all this I’d let it go and so I said “well so long it’s been good to see you” and we shook hands and I walked off wondering if I’d ever see him again or if I’d have to call him at some future date some secular equivalent of Che Guevara of the Anti-Church Force Revolutionary Mountain Army and I figured for every Pope there’s an Anti-Pope for ever Christ an Anti-Christ and that satisfied me well enough and without further ado I moved along passing places and palaces with their own signs and sounds sallying solemnly on I cut a dashing and SOLITARY figure if I say so myself.

POPE : restaurant names Springsteen and Dylan and entertainment Guatemala Egypt old sky religions living memory in a tree ‘coffee cup’s on the counter jacket’s on the chair paper’s on the doorstep but you’re not there’ [Crap] and everything else whatever’s better than a prayer I said to myself and I noticed too it was raining like the first rain in three or four weeks and the ground and the streets and everything were just eating up the rain gobbling it up in huge draughts and the street was throwing off steam a thin white steam that floated (probably like coffee in that stupid song’s cup) and I said to myself ‘what a fucking monumental waste all this insipid mourning and expressionistic warbling over the dead whether it’s one person or two thousand eight hundred some it doesn’t matter for it’s all the same the dark cloud of death passes and by God let it go” (Poe takes a ‘P’ and becomes Pope - there’s a joke) and Hugo Black did you know was a Ku Klux Klansman before he was a Supreme Court justice and as a nativist he favored separationism a curious doctrine meaning get rid of other inferior races and keep America for ‘Americans’ whatever they were (are) supposed to be or have been and LIBERAL Protestants (I love that root ‘protest’ in there) were convinced that there public schools were neutral with respect to religion (hey Alton you listening?) and as a result they unwittingly ‘imposed a nondenominational Protestanism on New York’s schoolchildren and today such ideas as school vouchers (for instance) may be considered neutral because the vast majority of them are put to use in Protestant Catholic or Jewish schools but what will happen to this fabric when applications start to flood in from religious traditions outside America’s ‘current sacred canopy’ ? will the states willingly cut the checks for tuition at Scientology Hare Krishna or Nation of Islam schools ?’ CHAIR = Cahiers du cinema and ISLAM = I slam.

And yeah that was that but there’s a lot more too and I’m simply going to beat you all over the head with it ‘Message in a bottle that’s got to come out’ and I’m looking at myself in a mirror not liking what I see but seeing nonetheless what’s there in total and I realize as I age that there’s a lot happening to this old face growing tired and sunken perhaps lined and beat but more importantly it seems bumps and bulges are rising up little marks upon deadening skin blemishes and things I’ve never had before and they make me sad they beat me down they make me know I’m passing like a frightened flight of frenzy running out of time and out of steam but here I stay walking piecemeal between things ‘Pillar to Post and all in between at most it’s the natural order of things’ writing like the sky like that comes out of the sky ‘I felt like a part of me was being ignored’ and underneath the changeable sky we watched the wispy clouds reflect the updraft of evening so that it looked as if some great eddy in the air was drawing everything upwards towards Heaven as a concept and the slowly evolving orange from blue on the evening made contact then with the later depth of night and it opened up the sky to things like stars and the moon and I gazed upward in the middle of mountains ringing me and thought back some years to when I would watch the comet day after day in almost the same location as it swept across the early nighttime sky Hale-Bopp Kahoutek any of those names I’ve already forgotten but all I remembered was the sense of diminishment instead of largesse and feeling not how small WE were stranded on this earth but instead how puny the passing comet was and how little it ennobled or uplifted and how overblown all the astronomical hype had become and it was essentially just a passing slow light in an ordinary sky and I watched it nightly for near a month and only later on realized what it represented more than anything was the immense difference of DISTANCE between our ‘now’ and the present ‘now’ of whatever that comet was for it was so distant that even with its movement it essentially appeared in the same location each night for THERE WAS NO coming or no going based upon its presence and only a trifling vague feeling of something passed me by ‘under the elm trees along with the linden trees under the archway coated in green the fir trees caused silence the winter’s nights idled in bliss dark and open and oh so serene’ but what is it that makes these things happen ? “I don’t know and why you ask that is beyond me I am a songwriter and nothing more and I don’t think it’s easier for me because when I write I usually have to be very drawn or moved to express myself and it’s quite a deep process for me but I feel like I’m learning how to engage with another or writing in a way that’s more accessible to people instead of going off on my own trip” well I don’t know about any of that but the girl who spouted it I’d met in a Starbucks on Astor Place as I was scribbling between walks and she came over to pretend interest and then started talking responding to my question as my way of making small talk mainly since I was tired of listening to her free music and she was sitting there between things with her stupid guitar and she said her name was Beth Hirsch and I figured ‘oh good another Jew genuine folk-fucking singer out on her own like all the rest him her or whatever and that’s probably not even her real name it’s probably Heidi Menklwersch or something I get so sick of these tired-eye Jews pretending their persona makes them what they are and instead I felt like saying yeah I know Dylan and Leonard Cohen too and they both suck dick and make shit up two faggy-assed whiners like all the rest so go on run around with your authentic folk-song queries and hats and shawls and pretend to be what you’re not you know the entertainment industry is filled with you bastards and always has been’ YOU HAS BEEN but I said nothing and she said “I’ve had a lot of time constraints and things that are just now passing away and I feel like I can get better here at what I’m doing and songwriting is something I want very much to advance with and it’s a new part of my life I’m not yet secure with and the last few years have given me a lot of feed for the songs I want to write because inevitably an artist is whatever he or she lives or fantasizes about but it has to be a part of what the artist lives to really touch the heart - can you understand that?” and I nodded and said “yeah okay” and she stayed there drinking her coffee as I turned silent just about ready to spit something back at her but as I realized what was going on I gave up and again started to get really sick over these endless ‘everybody’s got a true song in their heart’ show-business types whether they make it big or not and they get all stuck and caught up in the little shit they construct around themselves and it all turns out to be nothing later on but a bunch of silly and dumb words strung together things of the moment and anyway I always think that once you get it made for yourself there’s nothing you can do wrong any more anyway there’ll always be some other jerk probably another Jew too who’ll be willing to write you up as a ground-breaker genius and read into every other utterance you ever made your connections to the deity and all the world’s wisdom big fucking crap deal and the next thing you know they’re running movements or testifying before Congress or having foundations named for themselves or hanging around Asbury Fucking Woodstock Park New Jersey watching ponies be born on some billion-dollar farm they own from which they get all their small-town earth-bound wisdom COUNT ME OUT because nobody will ever say ‘you’re wrong that’s junk’ and if they could bottle your farts and sell them for money they would but here she went again vain stupid bitch that she was “I got a publishing contract from Polygram/Universal and one of my tunes ‘All You Need’ was used for a German bank commercial which has been running for a while now and so there are royalties and other stuff here and there and although I’m not supporting myself because of these sales I can get with the scene better and just start performing and smiling and maybe making it happen” yeah right I think to myself yeah right.

These are all just my little things here what I call ‘The Gyriades’ whatever but there’s always so much to do which means so little gets done and it’s all the recollection like you do when something’s running fast past you and you realize it’s the train or something that you were just supposed to be on but by the time you realize you’ve missed it the entire constellation of events has changed and been altered around you and it’s instead like being born on the wrong day but never being told so in some fortune-cooking free-form astrology of error and facile smiles you manage to walk away and you’ll never catch that train again you know that for sure ! and that there’s a Gyriade I suppose an Aesop’s fable of depression a brokered deal of death with sadness as the cashier and two men holding carbines at the end-of-the-hall guards in the hall you’ve still got to walk through SO WHAT TO DO ? collect the stories understand the lessons and re-write the minute you write about for it’s all there you just have to find it READY-MADE chance book CUT-UPS journals Tangiers Paris Amsterdam London New York Brussels La Paz and all the way back again to Rome SUCH is the itinerary of today’s holy wanderers all different all dredged from the past but free from it and not without honor in their own land “what a pretty coat don’t touch the fucking brooch it belonged to my grandmother Eileen OK it’s a tiny ladybug with a inset jewel if you look close” and I saw at that moment that the ‘fucking brooch’ was all that kept closed the coat it was on and the lady wasn’t wearing much underneath clavicle to sternum I just about could see it all and being as perplexed as the next guy I wandered off ‘musing on that Gyriade’ let’s say and I came across a bus-booth that had been covered with a large publicity poster one I’d never seen before and at first I thought it was a very large poodle both black and brown which YES it appeared to be and then as I looked closer I realized it was only a poodle in shape but made by ‘Seventh Heaven’ shoes an entire dog imaged by leather shoes ‘John Fluevog’s Shoes - Doggy Style Brand’ bostonchicagomelbournenewyorksan franciscoseattletorontovancouver WHAT A WORLD as this is and ‘in SUCH A FAIR GEOGRAPHY we should all Chris Columbus be’ and as I heard a saxophone playing from some second-story window somewhere I stopped to listen for a bit as it reminded me of any of those street-corner musicians you hear along the avenues in the 30’s Seventh or Sixth Ave these kind of lonesome guys playing incredible music on these beat-up instruments and maybe it’s only the same three songs over and over ‘cause I never stay too long to listen but they’re good and people pass by and then stop and comment or clap and drop a dollar or fifty cents or two bucks and go on their way which is of course the key ‘keep that crowd moving’ just in case they do stay around for hours and you run out of good stuff to play and it’s like a long afternoon of concert FREE ‘Live At The Holiday Sin’ if you don’t mind every note a mimic of something else and maybe even every line a steal.

The knee-jerk corpse an idea whose time has come Grand Canyon geological research finding bones beneath the Colorado River which is I wonder connected perhaps to the Eldorado River a legendary north-rim canyon ending in a pool of pure gold so heavy that the Colorado Indians were able to walk upon it by means of perfectly displaced weight and thought “we walked for what seemed like miles each day day after day but wound up having gone nowhere having traveled no distance at all after all that time and that perplexed us all very much but the holy-man guide with us just smiled and said nothing just smiled and said nothing at all.” Grand Canyon Gyriade

‘Cultural disenfranchisement’ that’s what I call it when the people around you mean nothing and you very seldom know what anyone is talking about and most importantly no one seems to be reacting to anything you’ve just said so in that vein I find myself alone at most every midnight slaving away writing words in closets like a closeted queen afraid of the dark but generating darkness nonetheless but ‘darkness visible’ as has been said Milton or Golding or somebody said that and instead I’m relaxing on air thinking of Saroyan and trying to understand the snippets of integrity his cultural bias means but what do you use to look up key phrases that would identify things WHATEVER am I talking about I’ll not know but brave the coming fierce storm I will and ready for anything I am circumvent the obvious obsolete the nefarious don’t mess with Mr. In B. Tween in the wine-hot summer at the white hot summer in the wine-dark sea ‘once you’ve been beaten what will remain ? hunger and sleet and driving rain’ and you know (it’s already been said) how trees drop their leafs in the dryness and effect by that a recoup of their losses through the lack of moisture - it’s a kind of retrenchment that turns out in the end to be successful because in the long run the rains return and no matter what else the tree blossoms again and makes up for lost time - and so I think of that as I walk the edges of this colorful old town the stink of the fish market the cry of the bodega’s the insufferable lines of people at every attraction and the foreign tourists hanging on the rope line wherever they go - SO EARNEST - their faces so intent on experiencing themselves all that is and I think ‘what the hell will I recoup?’ for what can I ever get back with so much being gone and if I live in the past in the days of yore then what good am I anyway missing as I am everything new (the nurses the lawyers the students) everything passing thru and out of Pace University and the noisy but sadly derelict harbor streets below and alongside the Brooklyn Bridge once the center of oh so much activity and beauty and anger and movement and yet now a pale sadly undone ghost of itself and ‘I WALK below arches I look beneath shells’ and there’s nothing there valued ‘but a collection of Hells’ and that’s where everyman’s memory comes in and I watch them again over and over the family of dentists just in from Queens to eat at the Harbor Café and the daughters they’ve married and the sons they’ve brought in and gray fathers and mothers dressed for business in the tropical heat and the children ready to boast and ready to burst prideful with energy and excitement but do they see the sad and lonely men walking past hunched and broken solid and lost beaten and finished at the very ends of a long New York life and
I bet if they do it’s only in passing for ‘Nothing Lives Where Nothing Is
And there’s no refutation of that on these streets.

So ideas mean for something and the ending potential of every life I see has meaning for itself even the blind guy sitting with a dog along the side of the old mission with his shoes off and a rag wrapped around his head and no matter what vision he’s seeing the world defines him blind and they throw him their measly pennies yet the fact of the mission-bench being right nearby to a bank doorway active with people coming and going to the three money-machines on the side of the bank just for a second makes me wonder about the choice of that spot for the ‘blind’ man and the factor of his blindness becomes a consideration instead of mere strategy to pick up coins for what is card-carrying blindness but a doctor’s note attesting to it and a pair of dark glasses - grab a dog get a walking stick dress down for the occasion and things happen - especially if you select the right spot to sit and I guess no one can accuse you of stealing but it’s just a hunch anyway and I remember the old Mark Twain story about his ratty umbrella broken and bent which he couldn’t get rid of no matter what he did threw it in the ash can threw it with the garbage threw it down a well but someone always recognized it as his own and returned it to him and finally FINALLY he said “I lent it to a friend and never saw it again” and there’s a lesson in there besides the obvious one of lending or not lending things to friends the other lesson would have to be said to have to do with distinction or singularity the fact that this ‘umbrella’ in some way had become so particular as to be identified with Twain so that even friends were returning it upon identification and that’s certainly one facet of things that blindness gets rid of the ‘differentiation’ visually of things for we really see nothing no matter what but we IDENTIFY everything with ease and those are the same kind of alarm bells that go off in the head as I hear when I see the other guy walking by me a short black man of ‘indiscriminate’ age bent and sweaty and greasy and just looking terrible especially seeing as it was 100 degrees out surely and this guy is covered literally covered in a filthy green ripped and stained heavy winter garment buttoned haphazardly it seems by one or two buttons which I’m sure he never even saw and he’s clutching in one hand some form of stick and in the other a green-glass booze bottle and bent as he was I could still see his mouth muttering five miles a minute about something and then the usual dance - the sudden quick stop the stare the turnaround and the neck twisting and then the resumption of the walk - all takes place as if choreographed by some demon from the dark world of presentiment and I just clutch at my own life and wonder in turn about his (‘as you slide down the banister of life may all the splinters be pointed in the right direction’) and any of 50 others as I know there’s more where that came from and I’m remembering the old house on the hill I knew as a kid when it used to stand up there all by itself completely left alone and foreboding looking even though it was painted some shade of white all those years it had the manner and bearing and presence of a house alone a sentinel something harboring something else (and I learned years so many later that we each have those same qualities and we make from them the quirks of society and go on from there) and then one day I remember being there and of a sudden there were a few bulldozers and contractors staring up at it from the lower lands along the riverside woods which was really in some places just marsh and in other open meadows with a few burial mounds from the old Indian days (and no matter the legends or the lore the stories that were recited around campfires of Injun Ghosts and Injun Retribution for the disturbances of these lands no one gave a damn least of all the asshole skunk contractors looking to flatten everything they could and build homes) and one day sure enough there they were gazing and surveying and talking about in their pompous dollar-for-hire ways and the next thing I knew the bulldozers had found a way to leave the house (forlorn and although otherwise completely isolated) standing on its little mound (just like a burial mound too) while around it all the land was scraped and pummeled and cut and drained and everything put at the ready for the twenty-five or so new homes which were unceremoniously dropped in there like they’d always been there [defining UGLY defining GROSS for yet another new lame generation of fools] and that was River Road Metlars Lane Landing Lane and that whole fucked-over area on the outer-farm fringes of old New Brunswick New Jersey the county seat of Middlesex when it was all agrarian and fading fast and the farm-trucks pulled out daily Eddie Aetoff himself peddling fresh produce by truck house to house on every one of these newly-cut streets (“your honor I present to you the following: this man has no pride has no honor seeks mere lucre ‘midst material greed and he should be BANISHED FROM OUR KINGDOM FOREVER!”)


The one thing I notice moving away from me the most (beside money of course) is TIME ‘time time time look what’s become of me and my possibilities’ and thinking through that I realize I used the think it was a subjective point of view but now I understand it’s actual truth as the universe unfolds it speeds up we are “falling” ever denser through ever lighter and further expanded space and as that expansion continues to unwind on a ‘physical’ plane so too does our free-fall through time and all of what we know of it increases so - NO OLD WIVE’S TALE this - ‘the longer you live the quicker things seem to go’ it’s all quite literal and true and also NOTE THIS : there is not one time but many (Gyriade #3) and all these variable times become woven into interpretations of events and that weave becomes the fabric of what we live and the intermingling of stories and impressions is all wrong and all right each different and each subject to a different interpretation too (‘try as I might I just can’t get these witnesses to agree on anything ! they all seem to have witnessed something different”).

I have been moved from here to there have seen the hide-side of Atlantic City Athens and Greece and nothing has given as much pleasure as just sitting here thinking of ways to confound the audience of starlings dreaming by me on a hot summer’s day the kind you’ll remember in December’s chilly light wishing for more day and watching the sinking hours pass far and away the best thing that ever happened to me by far was the time the train hit me BUT DIDN’T KILL ME and let me saddle in for one long recovery which is (hey) when they came for me and took me long and distant far months and months later earth-time confluences awoke me up again and I had I HAD traveled so far and so wide away awake and shake I simply knew everything and had come back a master of this world FOR SURE and even Atlantis never showed it so good sunken island and sunken treasure alike and there I was with all my formalities at the Library in Alexandria ready and willing and able to go [‘come back my little far one into this modern day and give us back all that you have learned’] that was what they were saying to me wailing and gnashing of teeth as there was and I looked around and said “Hmmm this library sure looks a lot smaller to me and there’s a lot fewer books than I remember” but apparently no one had heard me and I saw the two oriental guys from the EAST sitting together at the small plug-in table looking at something and over at the other seat sitting alone by herself was the little oriental girl from the EAST with glasses on and a confused face intently reading something and it was all FOR A LONG AND MIGHTY MOMENT I realized something I’d done and lived and seen before this place the seats the whole entire setting and I had to remember my own velocity as slow as it was and I was sure since there was NO TIME BUT THIS TIME that I would never die but if I did it wouldn’t really be death just movement and BECAUSE OF THAT I know I’d seen all this before you know how certain things ring memories and bells in you head ‘the place the position the very tilt of that girl’s body’ and I knew again I’d done this here before but it wasn’t Alexandria mind you nice library and all but right where I live today hitting me back in the face of excess and loss but oh what a feeling it was and FINALLY that American girl came by the mother the one with the two kids and she was chattering away to them and somehow had her glasses way low down on her nose so from where I sat I thought at first they were some sort of tooth-brace of some fixture on the mouth and I watched and stared to see what it could be and then seeing her unending mouth in unending movement I realized FOR SURE this thing wasn’t connected to her mouth and I saw what it was perk perty pretty glasses perched on her nose and it all somehow made better sense for I was in a setting of household Gods and children running around for something but there was no end “world without end amen” means time will go on - what a meditation - ‘the muffled bleating of the doomed the stifled sound of all that’s heard how much of it unmeant and accidental haphazard and unsure the censored duel of time and place the impulse styling of manner the unused signs the bellpops and sensitivity all around us flying’ and the place I was sitting was called ‘Saberhagen’ a coffee and pastry shop alongside the avenue and I looked out at the expansiveness before me mumbling Greenwich Spring betting parlor firehouse print company warehouse furniture store bank meat-packing plant parking garage UPS Bond Street Theo Republic Asiata Noodle Café Mercer Kitchen Indochine Ear Inn Portuguese Taverna Follonico on and on “TAKE IT ALL IN breath deep the world you live amongst”.

And then just like that it was all over and a few days had passed when thinking about things simply wasn’t any longer as important and I sat around instead with a few pens and a notebook trying in a slower vein to consider the journey and not so much the destination (having seen that on the side of - incongruously - a transit bus a Fifth Avenue bus to be exact filled with heads and sullen faces some peering out sadly some just looking straight ahead in the vaguely dangerous manner of New Yorkers with their rubber glare) which was the current slogan of some fast-assed car corporation’s offering but in these cases when it was seen it acted more as a brazen slap in the face to enraptured entrapped envious maybe Manhattanites clumped together like anthracite pieces on a no-win chessboard of dreariness so I ALMOST felt sorry for them but nonetheless they all show up and instead I thought about the guy I once knew from Colorado who was on the lam hiding out here after throwing his wife from a moving automobile while rounding a curve and that story - having been told time and time again - did not bear re-telling once more but I was sure I’d seen the guy recently walking along 2nd Street which wouldn’t make any sense thirty years having passed and him looking the same as I knew him then but stranger things have happened but even I wasn’t to bite at that one and then I saw the Pope (Ahhh! The Pope again) had just proclaimed to the Mexicans ‘I am here I came but I am not here’ which made no fucking sense to me but which I noticed people were playing up as a very holy and bizarre thing for him to say but something relevant to his sanctity and the great seep of ‘popularity’ he was experiencing YET yet it seemed for sure maybe the third or fourth world loved this guy but certainly no one here in the USA would give him the time of day there being some certain Great Divide at play here and so I went instead to the little corner shop where I knew there was always something to sit and do or talk about and for a dollar or less I’d be able to wile away time there with whoever strolled by and as usual one of the first I saw was my own Emmett Kelly of the Streets Bob O’Hartigan one time drifter now just grifter and first thing he did was sit down and start in about the stock market and all the people he’d seen over by the Collect Pond site now a simple loser’s park and how they’d sometimes just sit there and stare out as stunned and silent as any of the bums and everyday day they were losing millions and I said “O’Bob” (I called him that) “O’Bob you’re wrong you mean Hanover Square maybe because the Collect is too far away from Wall Street’s play to take the lunch crowd and if it’s someone who works there they’re NOT losing millions it’s not their money they’re making commissions up and down on sales but if they work for a salary it don’t matter anyway and the kinds that take outdoor ‘lunches’ aren’t career traders they’re clerks and brokers and staff simple market-floor people maybe overworked and tired but certainly not crazed by loss and they’ll probably wait to after-hours and grab a beer somewhere right near there they’re not walking for lunch way over to the Collect to sit with bums courthouse guards and family court clerks don’t ‘cha think?’ and I looked at him awaiting a reply but he was rolling too fast to catch me and he began again saying how desperate he was finding things and what people were telling him he was fearing for their lives “fear for your own” I said and he kept nodding very fast and didn’t stop and the owner guy Ali came over and asked if everything was OK and I shrugged and said “the usual” meaning O’Bob was overdoing it again and Ali Mehta Guptas slowly shook his head and said “ah yes so much in this country I do not understand all the good fortune seems to have faded away and everyone is angry and sorrowful and in point of the fact right now there are so few people who even come here as before it is very sorrowful scene you know ? but what could be the man’s problem ? do I wonder” and even though I didn’t always understand what he meant to say this time I did and I said in return “nothing particular it’s just his way of being wanted and making sure we pay him mind and his truth comes from telling the tale NOT from the truth of the tale he’s telling” Guptas nodded “as you say I understand the ‘tale’ wagging the dog eh eh no ?” and I remembered another time he’d told me stories of his homeland and of the many Japanese people he’d see here who all seemed to have lost that fear of themselves at least the older ones who I suppose were all now quite old or already dead the ones who’d gone thru World War II and remembered well the atomic bombings and Guptas would say they lived in a constant psychological fear what he called the “Horror Imagination” which to him meant that when you saw them in his old South Asia homeland they always acted meek and scared and reserved as they were known to be but whenever he saw them here in America whether as tourists or business travelers they were all different and had suddenly acquired a brazen pushiness a power attitude which he found disconcerting but had to accept to make his money even from them yet he hoped someday in his homeland to be able to pay them back for the affronts and insults and he said he found us regular street-people much more pleasant to deal with even if we did not “big time the buy with your monies you know.”

You have found sugar and you have found salt and only NOW will you know the other qualities in between AS I LIST THEM as you listen : the swell of the sea where the mariner watched on the sand and stared out across the widening ocean for ALL HE COULD SEE was wide and open from horizon to horizon and more and the old woman using the fence for support as she too stood out and watched along the water from the front of her old cottage by the sea three ships were sailing by in silence the odd white sails unfurled and fat with breeze and far behind them distant the enormous tankers slowly crawled the horizon also with pure silence a pure silence which made the sea grave both foreground and distant a distant GRAVE and even the old woman knew her time was short (for that’s the type of thought the wide sea brings) and the old sailor tired and trumped he too knew what was ending and the marsh grass and the terns and the nesting areas of the piping plovers and the shore-breeze which whipped up the sand along the old bunkers and the piles of old ammo car-sized balls of steel chains balls buoys and planks everything in glorious broken array scattered like fires along the opening beachfront and the slow night approached and smothered everything and the great darkened gray of evening snuck in and tinted the waves with August’s great orange orb slow sinking the ancient and age-old fiery sun which dropped to its knees on the sand and dissolved and faded and finally disappeared.

Somehow that bright Mennonite gaze broke upon me and I realized that the implements of all the modern day achieved nothing but instead made ghostly images where photos once appeared whitened out and blanked enormous sums on checks and contracts broke both barns and houses with harsh disclaimers about summons and intent and every mistake ever made (for HIE! This is the Modern Age!) and as I passed I looked up into the ever-higher sky where distant sunlight hid behind dark clouds and the sideways movement of moisture and air so elevated in a broken sky made mesh and tint which splashed across the heavens yet did nothing to the day beneath it (for the same old weather broiled on the likened hot air to hell made so much sense) and I thought of the words of that person who used to tell me he could determine the sense of a day or the impending omen of an action by the portent and shape of the sky which I still think is complete bullshit totally overtly self-absorbed overindulgence but anyway he would often say things like how when he got off the plane and onto the tarmac the sun suddenly scuttled out from behind clouds and flooded the area with sunlight which then was supposed to be a wonderful omen of impending good and all that stuff as I see it is used by anybody to underscore their own evil intent too no matter what you must go around thinking the sky does its dance for you and so would any General think just after having 50 dissidents executed by a firing squad and then the sun came out “what a wonderful omen for my continued good rule” meaningless in the same way that the previous was meaningless and all I ever noticed at at airport where I never flew anyway was the enormous and fast and impending shadow of aircraft sweeping over the parking lot this swiftly moving shape of a plane or jet representing dark matter sweeping across the world and startling the eyes in the actual speed with which it moved for by that speed we sweep too across the heavens and make thus such meaningless no-sense out of the world we live in as people overhead pass and chatter and gossip and sleep training and re-training themselves between worlds and customs and semblances of place until nothing no longer has any meaning nor matter least of all for them and all we become are names and places on a map or globe and all the while at the spectrum’s other end are the Mennonites and the primitives and the worshippers and very Shakers of the world living with candlelight and churning their own butter and drinking warm raw milk from lazy old cows fed by hand with hand-thrown feed and bedded with hand-thrown bedding and everything else like that just rotates around the old and even the Shakers have moved on to die out (‘Movers and Shakers’ as ever they were).

“What Deutsch says about quantum theory is that it can be applied to everything to all life - he says that atoms aren’t so hard and fast just sitting there like fake fruit or something touchable and solid they’re instead ‘mercurial’ they come and go they appear and disappear and they occupy different places at once they can be teleported and scientists have actually done that” and the guy next to him said “they’ve teleported atoms?” and the reply was “yeah and they’ve also slowed down the speed of light slowed it to a Sunday crawl - so if these atoms can exist in different places at once (and no one any longer argues credibly over that) - this guy Deutsch argues that everything can exist in a bunch of places at once for we’re all made of the same electrons and protons so if they exist in many places at once and can be teleported then there must be multiple us’s and multiple worlds” I heard “Jesus!” and then I heard “yep! that’s the multiverse forget the old days forget the universe man that’s so far over it’s unimportant and anyone still stuck in that mind-pattern and fixed time frame is so out of it as to be deemed useless at best but what I look for is when the time comes that people who still harbor those thoughts - like people who used to still use crank or dial phones - will be done away with removed finished ! we simply don’t need them around us dragging everything else down and have you ever had to contend with like say grandparents or parents or someone you know who’s still so behind things that there’s very little you can really relate to with them and eventually they just become enfeebled and slow down and phase out of the relativity that’s actually happening until they just become say excess and leftover pieces of an old body that’s not yet rotted away WELL that’s the equivalent of this old thought this slowed down and broken and non-creative thought and reality which can still trip us up and slow all this process down like people still fighting over borders or national concepts or singing one-word songs and stuff like scaly barnacles on the bottom of some old leaky boat and I say WHY should we slow down the procedural and conceptual movement of society for those who are too slow to keep up ? instead we should do away with them or at least remove them to their own place some time-deadened reservation where they can slobber and wander around in old-post inns and huts and stuff until they’re gone” and of course this sounded a bit shocking to me but understandable perhaps and I looked these two over and saw that they were some form of science or mathematics students or post-grads or something and they’d obviously been entertained by someone named Deutsch in their summer class or something as they now sat back coolly discussing the situation in Washington Square Park amidst the cops on patrol and the drunks and drug-sellers mumbling ‘smoke ? smoke’ to anyone passing near them and unless they were blind too they’d see the ulterior motive of the hobby or habit of ‘park wandering’ which here is usually the perusal of the passing girls in any varied state of summer near-undress the runners and joggers and fast-walkers the serious girls with bookbags and packs the happy ones with boys and the seedy girl by girl ambles which too occasionally passed by and stopped at the stupid array of acoustic guitar dudes yelping or the electrified gumbo of mambo groups and steel drums and all the rest every one trying in some way to steal summer quarters both money and rooms too and many a passing flirtation ended up shackled ‘neath the nearby sheets talking back face to face for if not for that what else is undergrad New York for or so they say at every corner and festive parade bar-town potter’s field low grave brookside tete ‘a tete or tit for tat or whatever is appropriate here but needless I ramble these two guys were apparently talking quite seriously over so certain new level of quantum living would you not say ? and I continued the listen getting only a little more for you have to say at least if this kind of talk is going on and the future years are most apt to fall into the reliquary lap of these people any of this may come to be and what’s the difference or is it just degree of labor camp concentration camp or tired reservation for the worn-out and enfeebled thinker who cannot transport and who does not understand and I’d have to say WHERE would we be today if any of this had started back when but I can’t put my finger on any of this not knowing what I wish to say and it reminded me (again) of something I’d learned about the Library at Alexandria and the destruction of same ABSOLUTE CRITERIA FOR DELIRIA ‘the Muslim conqueror of the city of Alexander Amr Ibn al-As sends word to Caliph Omar in A.D. 642 to ask if the books might be spared and the caliph’s word comes back thus : “If the books accord with what is in the Koran they are not required; if they do not accord with it they are not desired so therefore destroy them” AND BY SUCH COMMAND are the half-million scrolls consigned to the fires that heat the city baths and it took six months to burn them all in the very city Alexander the Great had founded in 332 B. C. having chosen the location based on a reference in Homer’s Odyssey where the well-defended harbor fostered vigorous trade and cultural exchange and the Great Library arose there with the aspirations of collecting all the written knowledge of every known country and at its height it probably contained between 500,000 and 700,000 scrolls and near to it arose the Mouseion - temple of the Muses - which came as close as anything to a university research facility and for the Mouseion scholars had translated the Hebrew bible into Greek (later source of all Christian biblical construction and foundings of ‘modern’ western civilizations Holy Roman Empires and all else) and had determined the circumference of the Earth (as they saw it scientifically) to within a few miles as well as developed a science of textual criticism that allowed them to produce an authoritative text of Homer and they also developed and established ideas such as those of the seat of human thought being the brain rather than the heart and invented the practice of alphabetization for book cataloguing and the library also had a shelf list the famed Pinakes of Callimachus which was an annotated bibliography of all of Greek writing that ran to 120 volumes ALL LOST AND DON’T FORGET ALEXANDRIA was the seat of the Ptolomies the home of geniuses such as Euclid Eratosthenes and Archimedes and of Callimachus who marshaled the forces of the open and culturally voracious Hellenistic Empire to build the library’s collection and as Thomasina was heard to have said to Septimus “Oh Septimus think what has been lost ! can you bear it ? all the lost plays of the Athenians two hundred at least by Aeschylus Sophocles Euripedes thousand of poems Aristotle’s own library ! how can we sleep for grief?” and it was E. M Forster who called Alexandria the capital of memory (and as I recall I believed him)….
____

“You must forget Athens and Rome.
For here in Alexandria there are NO
temples standing no Parthenon no
antique monuments integrated into
modern architecture nothing of the royal
palace the library or the Mouseion no
famous Soma the tomb of Alexander
all ghostly it is and all gone.”

I am Ozymandias.
Look upon my works
all of mankind
and despair”
________

So did you ever notice how some shits are better than others and the sort of people you get to talk with cannot always be chosen and how the streets of a city run on and on into each other and into different happenings and thereby causing a great confluence of operations and attitudes and occurrences which cannot be controlled and the only ones who try to control them or seek control are visitors or businesspeople or others using the city for mere temporary and passing advantage but the ones who are really there for the duration the ones who depend on the limpid spirit and actual flow of the place to sustain them they are the ones who accept and thrive on the entire accidental discovery process and overhead dripping pipes sagging wires and old broken buildings and windows end up meaning something for them and it’s a shame isn’t it when you begin to realize that entire blocks are being torn apart and coming down and ripped asunder from the center out and there’s not really to be much left of the place before long for it seems that the urban operation underway is spreading out right now towards the very western environs of the old moldy midtown that’s left and only derelict whatever-can-be-seen remnants may still exist which is of course where I walk and spend time watching things from awkward broken doorways still there and still sporting the old peeling painted numbers now long gone and there’s nothing to be said for nobody notices and the ones who do pass by if they’re not fags or queers on the way to someplace then they’re art gallery seekers and bent over slugs heavy with theory and burden or Washington State apples here for a contentious visit website internet dotcom industrialists awaiting their own rising day and as I think about it my mind races backwards only backwards (hey ! no matter what those two park benchers said) and in that backwards race I finally catch up again to the whimsical fashions of old cars ‘neath darkening gray skies awaiting a pick-up along the westside wharf or the two a couple in long coats walking slowly along the river’s edge both with cigarettes and talking intense problems in their intense fabrics in their intense times and days and now it’s all over they’re probably long dead gone over and I think what of it what’s become of their final words and works whatever it all became where’d it go ? and the beat cop (the beat cop the one with the beret and the cigarette who walks around writing beat-hip poetry instead of catching 1955 crooks) walks the planks and peers carefully down into the murky water looking for something and he carries a flashlight and a billy club as the old round buses pass lit from within and small people peering out nod to nothing and listlessly continue to stare and along one edge of the platform two stevedores are standing by awaiting something they too smoking cigarettes and moving about to beat the cold and the buildings begin again along the last avenue in the teens and their red brick façades throw back the river’s oily lights tugboats and barges passing by lit by bulbs on a string and reflecting themselves like that back into the surface shine of the always running water below and as I listen too I hear the slow echo of running traffic running water and the priest’s car pulls over and he gets out to talk to the cop and together their two heads dip and move in agreement and the flashlight is used to point at something and then the priest gets back into the car and slowly drives away as the cop stands there doing nothing but just for a while looking out at the river traffic and then gazing over towards the two men standing nearby but he never makes a move and even if he wished to ask them something he never did and then that whole scene is over that quick even though it took a long time in the night’s own air getting cooler by the minute but what are times and memories for if not passing so the more I remember the less I do just instead thinking back on all the people now gone and finished caput - ‘inner tradition tells how awareness of the dying process paradoxically adds to the measure of a life and when a living soul is mindful of being finite and mortal of how everything must come to an end CONSCIENCE begins to speak (and I think of that guy Meaning a few days back telling of that Latin lesson with the word ‘con’ meaning ‘with’ and I suddenly somehow get ‘with science’ for conscience) and the language of the heart asks for our presence to these twinned processes of living and dying and dying and living a presence that we usually ignore but APOPTOSIS is the dynamism in which certain cells die in order to preserve the integrity of the tissue which means that even at a cellular level dying as a process mingles with the process of living’ but anyway I think how far anyway do the lessons of the living carry into the VOID of the crossing ? and that great unanswered question is answered by Ikkyu ancient zen-master in the traditional verse-form yuige written as he lay dying:

‘I shan’t die. I shan’t go anywhere.
I’ll be here.
But don’t ask anything.
I shan’t answer.’

---

I make my dwelling in the hearts of all

----


This ends a certain story and begins another one ‘President Says Tax Must Go’ headlines like that scare people ‘President Says Hats Must Go’ headlines like that confuse people ‘President Says Facts Must Know’ which probably really means ‘President Says Facts Must Go’ people are much more comfortable with that last one knowing full well that now they are getting to familiar territory with such utterances (‘as August winnows away all pride’) on the day Marilyn Monroe died and Elvis one two three so many icons passed and wasted and so many people hung on them as if they never died but the cumulative effect is of putrid defacement something like listening to Della Reese sing ‘You Make Me feel So Young’ in that big-band faux-happiness mode of fifties radio which is the same radio I remember hearing that crazy Sunday morning news and everything stopped for the moment of retribution James Dean Ernie Kovacs and all the rest ONE false world with one FALSE move involved but until tomorrow let me be but it’s so very obvious too how everything filters down to the crap it can be as thousands upon thousands of mouths apply their logic twisting things around wrong assumptions and then forgetting even more and they unwittingly make jokes of distorted proverbs and bible words: “A wise guy is given this piece of advice by a good friend - ‘It’s better to remain silent and be thought stupid than to open your mouth and forever remove all doubt’ which is really the biblical message ‘even a fool when he remains quiet is thought to be wise’ or close to that anyway [“The Sorrowing Soul Between Doubt and Faith”]” and I have nothing to say have heard nothing either it’s instead the crazy way of talking which is taken up based on books and bindings and papers and more and every volume from under the sea perplexes but try as one will to remember a name NOTHING comes forth but the crazed and insane renderings of every loaf of life along the way and thinking about the old armor days of enticing witch-women with their equally false exteriors brings me back to Little Red Riding Hood that tale of tales homemade reference point for any and all of the crazy Hollywood foppery which was based egregiously upon nothing but the sub-conscious urges of perverted and repressed little jew-men interested in covering up their faults so listen : “Charles Dickens said ‘I feel that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood I should have known perfect bliss’ and the originally formatted Red Riding Hood we know today was developed by the Grimm Brothers (forerunners of the rabid Hollywood entertainment division engine moguls unaware of course of what they were doing by taking ages-old woodland and forest lore and portraying it invitingly for Europe’s emerging dark youth) was an obedience lesson for 19th-century children in which the heroine is punished for her curiosity but rescued by a father-figure woodsman once she has learned her lesson BUT when Charles Perrault first penned “Le Petit Chaperone Rouge” in 1697 it was a sexual morality tale for adults the purpose of which was to warn demoiselles at Versailles not to ‘go with the wolf’ – i.e. squander their virginity (and with it their father’s opportunity to turn a profit with a favorable marriage contract) wherein the wolf seduces Little Red into stripping and climbing into bed with him where he eats her up and the moral was supposed to be “As you’re pretty so be wise/wolves may lurk in every guise…sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth” and even the Sun King’s decadent court had ideas in which the unwed must remain chaste but adultery was nonetheless celebrated and where the sleeping chambers of husbands and wives were built with hidden passages leading to the street for ‘private’ visitors and the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm held that the red cap symbolized menstruation and the bottle of wine Little Red carried in her basket was the heroine’s virginity while Bruno Bettelheim’s “Uses of Enchantment” from 1976 focuses on the red cap as a symbol of a sexuality prematurely transferred to the protagonist by her grandmother and eliciting a sexual hunger that she is too ‘little’ to handle” and this goes on and over-accumulates of course into the garbage we’re later brought up with DISTORTED TALES AND BROKEN FACTS and anyway we’ve certainly lost any of that northern European of Black Forest mysteriousness with which earlier life was once ruled the deep-white hoarfrosts the urchins and denizens of the deep forests the high-frozen horridness of deepest wood and highest mountain passage huge think trees ghostly apparitions and haunting tales such vast subconscious underpinnings to later mankind and the creepy miserable rats who feed off this stuff engendered fantasy industries of film and sight and sound all trash which diluted and broke down language and fact until so many years later all they could come up with for satisfaction were the lurid and lascivious tales and portrayals of inner realities even when broke and rotted and distorted and through them the whole world suffered but good they had movies in camp and if they didn’t there’s an opportunity missed too and understand then I have no truck with them and their ilk and I forswear the splendor of their creepy creation and cannot even bear to hear any more of their stories upon stories upon stories all useless so.

“There now I’ve finished that book and put it aside (stories in the glen and Mad Markham in the feeder) and we’ve seen the gnomes across the lawn and across the field in the midnight sky as they scurry and run and scurry and run some more late night small things lit silvery white by a liquid moon (“I tell you that’s exactly what I saw I swear it”) and yes for sure it’s true and “then I retired and I tell you I’d never realized it before but I had nothing really had nothing to my name and it reduced me to walking the streets usually cold and sorrowfully alone and all I did was look at things and look some more and I’d often go to places where there were open exhibitions things like flower shows or craft exhibits or huge flea market sites and at these places it became pretty easy to pick up a few bucks or find a few or steal a few either way I’d survive and also was able to usually get more than enough to eat or drink simply by taking from people as they put things down and once you get over the silly idea of thinking of ‘other’ people’s mouths and stuff as deadly after that it doesn’t matter what you put your lips on soda or beer cans or bottles half sandwiches unfinished pastries forks and spoons in half-eaten food no matter it won’t kill you and I’d get around to a lot of these many purely by accident especially street fairs and churchyard carnivals and things where there were many people milling around and kids and rides and things and you notice soon enough how often people drop quarters and dollars and never pick anything up and on the whole it’s a messy world you know but anyway as I learned soon enough it doesn’t last and when the cold weather sets in that’s when things really change and I wasn’t getting any younger and started to hurt and started to become bent over and slower and slower and then one day they simply took me away after I’d fallen or passed out or something and I awoke in some blue-lit room smelling of coolness and stayed there a few days eating and getting back to normal and then I was out again with a promise of recovery and return for follow-up but the hell with all that I stared doing the same thing again but this time with intelligence taking bags at Grand Central or helping people with bags for a buck or two and acting the gentleman in thrift-store clothes and just a bit better-heeled in appearance for it makes a difference you’d be surprised and people were more pleasant talking to me and everything and it became a regular routine getting coffee for certain regulars who’d come through at the approximate same times each weekday or meeting the new arrivals in all their excitement and stepping in to ingratiate myself to them for small money they’d get information and guidance and help and it all worked out for no one begrudges an elderly gentleman you know… and I guess that’s correct but anyway it’s not nearly as persuasive as the old times I remember when along E42nd Street I can remember the old automat which used to be there on Third Ave or nearby and there was an old Woolworth’s across from it too and the old guys would sit around there like hulking wrecks staring into mashed potatoes and milky coffee and pie and there’d hardly be any noise at all except the clunk and clatter of the heavy ceramic plates and spoons and forks banging and clicking and the heavyset old women would be sitting around too in cheap housedresses and shawls and a ring of elderly compassion would form amidst ancient tweed coats and fedoras and old style shoes wherein gentlemen always needed a shave and they were always skinny just barely surviving but the place was like a morgue with people just sitting back nervously relaxing and bright young black dudes in funny patterns and loud clothing would bustle around or stand alongside the complicated checkout counters and trays would slide and people with big glasses pushed trays with food and counted change and looked for newspapers and rags and the whole place seemed like a tawdry bus station with food but THAT”S where the elderly moribund really hung out and that was 1975 1978 and where are they all now if not harkened to perdition if not dead and sorry and the Horn & Hardart Automat is long ago gone closed and over and Woolworth’s too long ago chiseled its name to death and closed every door it once may have had and with it went the dead and the living and the living who’d already died for there are no more meals at the Automat just like there are no more REAL World’s Fairs replaced as they are all by Real World Fears for the world’s dumbed down and is now a truly CRUMMY place. Signed, Joe.”

So from you far I went to strange oh lively city of lights and glimmer with sidewalks and alleys running with folk and scurrying eddies of fiction and feeling as the less than distant river’s light reflected and shown again on watery top like some urban frost is passing by me slow one drip of a ship after another as NOW the hour the liners depart is here and I look down the east/west street to see a broad bright marshmallow passing and only then later - there here - amidst a gas station rumble four cop cars arrive screaming and lit and scurrying forth cop bodies emerge holding frantic flashlights and guns and clubs and only one lonely soul hurt on the ground writhes in some sub-lunar pain while they hold him down searching his car ripped innards and padding and clothing askew as gawkers watch talking and pointing as one swift justice of words amidst jeers for what’s happened AND although NO ONE quite knows they’re all sure they have seen and alongside such carnage of intention and deed the dire waitress seeds each diner plate with gravies and sauces galore as she watches from the Tunnel Diner window at what’s been transpiring “Thank God for MAYHEM! she exclaims aloud as her way I suppose of gaining from the crowd and in her mind she hears ‘let it keep coming and let them eat’ for those who enter stay and slow like slumber the cops depart and the excitement fades and the darkening fall of parking lot black advances again and all we’re left with is ten-pm lights shining back onto pavement with few cars as witness and mute and I’m thinking back to the daylight ships passing ‘a broad bright marshmallow’ and turning it back to ‘ABOARD! bright marshmallow’ instead and what turns for turning is passing and gone and I look back at the waitress carving ham and realize she’s as angry as I am and listening only begrudgingly to Frank the cook who scours the grease off the griddle while talking of ‘later’ whatever that is and I think of them as a couple and wonder if they are or perhaps their lives together as lonely as this intersect only here but matters not it does so I move on watching mis-spelled graves as grave and broken epitaphs and menu words all spoiled and stupid on a broadly errant wall where the wall says I swear ! ‘Repent Ye for the KINGDOM of God is at hand!’ and someone has scribbled ‘Jesus is coming - will you swallow?’ and I want to laugh but don’t instead noting the phone number written below 201 whatever ‘NO joke - loves Cock’ and sauntering on I put that one away and leave past a fat family happy with food and the eyes of one youngster agape and watching what diners are about just watching to learn and learning to watch and I look back at the city and remember so many others watching and think what has changed ? has everything changed or nothing changed and I decide nothing has changed and that everything I see is what I would have seen anyway and the only change is the constant of movement and growth and gravity (‘like endless pylons and seeded housing groaning with growth and taking up their energies solemn alive’) and then I think then why bother with anything for it is all on its own course anyway and all we can do is watch and needle the world for its being NOTHING MORE than that and echoes conspire to resound echoes like ‘THANK GOD FOR MAYHEM’ for that is what keeps us going…

[‘I must only ask AM I AMONGST WHAT I KNOW? and that should be the only question and we must all answer it for ourselves as if it were never before asked of us for if we are not amongst what we know then we must get there and quick for ‘THEY are killing the world’ around us and they stop at nothing until it is maimed in concept and in deed and what they spray lands upon us and what they cut and channel and kill all lands upon us for the burden of all life is the burden of interpretation and LONG LOST LIVING there is nothing else but the trust of doubt and the doubt of trust amongst all men everywhere “let me tell you this my Cyclomatic Mutant Nuant they have taken any goodness there ever was and perverted to a death of meaning and yeah maybe this is society post-interpretation but so what and who cares and what’s that supposed to mean anyway so instead look down any of Orange’s streets THEY ARE DEAD and the rubble is piled up and the re-zoned houses without meaning are places without truth and the back-alley rambles of every broken brick in old Newark lead nowhere any longer for we too are post-time and post-meaning and if there is nothing for saving then WHY do we save and like some huge atom bubble hypnotic mushroom cloud of science and fact we stumble on through the densest smoke but…ah whatever it don’t make any sense anyway” and funny as it was to hear Mr. Meaning talk about meaning I listened without listening much as he sat in one place with two pencils and a notebook (‘writing leaden prose?’) and constant pages of light scribble which even I couldn’t read interested me but I didn’t press thinking of grand lost notebooks everywhere that had been lost and then retrieved and then found and ‘what evil lurks in the hearts of men’ I thought Meaning knows I guessed or I guessed I thought actually “and I’m reading this book that’s written with puns just full of wordplay and twisted meanings it’s written by a guy named Plumb or Peach or some fruit I can’t remember and he writes these books like water but like water with too many words and too much matter and if I read them I laugh but I don’t want to I never read anything you know except my own stuff for anything else is just an interference” (and on this melancholy note the extract ended) I STOLE THAT from somewhere else myself but it doesn’t matter I was visiting Denmark COPENHAGEN to be exact ‘who’s the Dane who’s the Swede and what’s the difference between ‘em?’ BEFORE I DIE BE SURE TO LET ME TELL YOU this one thing anyway.]’

That was merely the beginning of an oasis (thin wavering floaty air in the hazy distance) and everything I saw seemed to be moving or seemed to be seen through a haze or at least through something I couldn’t fathom and then the big voice began telling me “you will be going back through the stars you will be traveling back to the ephemeral into situations of previous existence before existence where you will be broken up and gone through as essential material to be returned or reformulated and this will give to you another dimensional grasp another view of ‘reality’ as it is processed another elemental step along the way to both diversity and solidity until an eventual unbroken oneness is achieved as it eventually will be for everything and everyone but what will come to you most importantly is at the least another level of understanding towards the full understanding all seek to acquire and you will be ground into ‘life’ again by whatever means and whatever name or nomenclature for you is determined so despair not both nothing is ending and all is and all things are beginning anew” and that big voice as I knew it spoke to me without speaking in the vague sense of ‘other’ knowledge that brought along with itself a certain pleasing comfort and almost to a fault I was at that moment at peace and ready to move on though for that moment too it did not occur and I suddenly knew more than I’d ever known before and moved forward in my thinking in order to improve and take on newer work I felt finally that I was ‘on the right track’ and determined to myself to go on so I thought of the great black open sky of night and how as a child I would stare upwards at the darkness and among certain trees and locations I’d gotten used to I could see certainly the same stars nightly over and over and the dippers and the constellations as they high hung overhead yet as I stared up at them I always remained separate and in that staring there was some untold yearning for passage and movement and a hope of lessening the distance I’d seen and in those minor imaginings of a young mind I now realize were the initiations of truer awarenesses and allied suppositions of a life that was (then) to be lived and a life (now) which had been lived and had fairly much become exhausted or at least to the point where the losses far outweighed the gains and I at the end of some work or sermon sensed to feel the ending of a life approaching (and I wondered alone whether or not one accedes to this whether one hunkers down to accept and facilitate this ending or if it is to be fought “do not go gentle into that good night” and all that “fight fight against the dying of the light” stuff) and sitting as I was amongst trees and things settled deeply within a city a city context which bespoke the urbanity of experience I knew too that it was an experience so far different from any older more pastoral experience out of which earlier concepts of life had come but the great words within me still reverberated and told me it mattered nothing the where or when for all was illusion and stupor all was a chimerical appearance held to be outside of a chimerical body held to be outside yet within a chimerical existence which was to fade and to by directive be re-entered in another way into time and experience again and the Director was elsewhere but the material was finite as ‘He’ directed it (using the term He loosely only because it was deemed that we must need appearance of a sex in a being where sex is unneeded) and history and industry and energy and all of Man’s Works are seen to be now as small and futile except for those still working within the harbor of all these illusions and it all SIMPLY ASTOUNDS the more and more I learn of it the less and less I know but the less and less I need to know and that is the distancing of the awareness the detachment that is always needed and has been so always.

“Alone He stretches out the Heavens
and treads upon the farthest Deep.
He arrives at the Great Bear, Orion and Sirius
and the constellations of the south…
He smiles his face upon Taurus and Aries;
from Taurus to Sagittarius He shall go.”

---------

So then I never had an age or a place and I never therefore really left anything and the cloak of materiality which I was wearing became a strange and meaningless tangle as walking towards Union Square I realized I cared nothing for anything there the entire edifice of the place the leaning old buildings once wooden and now supplanted by banks and insurance places with names written in the skylights and rooflines above the eerie and unending clock faces and rolling numbers never stopping and the clumps of people the students and drifters sitting stoned and silent on benches facing trees and walkways wherein some documented sharing of time and experience was to take place the girl nearby as it ever seemed chattering away the pensive one the lame artist coloring a plainly bad drawing the religious know-it-all bestride his scripture proclaiming the rightness of interpretation and the deliverance of righteousness too and the old woman thin and mobile in a cloth dress and a handbag and the stout old man jolly with a hat and a pipe and walking stick thrusting his way amongst the leaves and grasses as if eiderdown and alpine air were all of his alone the quaint Asian hordes the farmers collected from upstate hiding and holding both plums potatoes parsnips lettuce and pears all things they’ve brought along and the bakers in three’s set up alongside the monuments and sheds of old their wares discounted by hand-written signs and the candle makers the jewelry buffs and buffers the lighting people the fabric sellers the incense and snack people grains and peanuts and cookies and juice everything it seems in one place someplace along Summer’s fading edge and indistinct but there in everyone’s head right now the slow arrival of an anniversary THE CARNAGE THAT SHOOK US the paper proclaims come CELEBRATE THE LOVE and remember the dead with us VIGIL FOR PEACE AND UNDERSTANDING march for life sing-in for goodness prayer-in for PEACE TRUE PEACE exorcise the DEMONS Saturday September nine and all this veneer this covering over of things had I realized had ruined the setting for now for ever for anything new for people alive in memory alone bring forth nothing fresh nor bold only the same old ritual only the same old song and right there as I watched I saw the small dialogue underway between questioners and some expert or authority of some sort and so I moved in closer to hear : “you each say you want to understand Islam well as a religious idea Islam goes back to seventh century Arabia and to the Prophet Muhammad God’s messenger as he is called therein and his book of divine revelations is collected in the prose-poetic ‘suras’ of the Koran yet having said that one is only at the bare beginnings of what Islam is for on the purely scriptural level along with the Koran there is first of all a vast collection of ‘ahadith’ or prophetic sayings and deeds of Mohammad and a massive library of interpretations of those sayings and together these constitute the Islamic gospel which is expressly grafted on with due respect I add and with veneration as a kind of completion of the Judaic and Christian monotheistic traditions for Muhammad is seen as the last of the prophets and to most Muslims in effect closes the prophetic succession forever and as the religion grew enormously in the century after Muhammad’s preaching and career the faith spread into hundreds of different regions and cultures from China and India in the east to Morocco in the west to Europe in the north and to Africa in the south and each region and people who came under its sway developed its own kind of Islam so thus is Islam a world of many histories many peoples many languages traditions schools of interpretation and proliferating developments disputations cultures and countries so you see there is not and it is quite difficult to show ‘ONE’ Islam for in a vast world of more than 1.2 billion people stretched out over every continent north and south and now including the Americas it cannot be adequately apprehended or understood simply as ‘Islam’ and as difficult as that is for you Americans to understand such a concept must remain in the forefront somehow of your thinking as you try to react or attempt even annihilation of something you do not quite simply understand one which you cannot just ‘clump’ together as one foreign concept which oddly enough is not now very foreign to you anymore anyway and it is at the least ‘difficult’ for anyone to say anything intelligible useful or accurate about Islam for one should begin by speaking about ‘Islams’ instead of ‘Islam’ for they are legion and then you should go on to specify which kind during what particular time one is speaking about - ‘multifarious’ Islam as it is - for far from there being a simple one-to-one correspondence between ‘Islam’ (whatever construction you use) and every believing or faithful Muslim there is on the contrary a whole set of profound conflicts at the very heart of one and the other – conflicts between absolutism and tolerance between the doctrinaire and the liberal between commitment and skepticism to mention but a few and once we add all manners of language culture history politics community and school of interpretation in all the various parts of the world the question of Islam and Muslims becomes virtually unapproachable from any simple point of view do you see?” and I noticed as he paused a veritable sigh arise from the small group of people around him people of whom I wasn’t sure to whom to connect were they perhaps students all or a nearby church group Friends Meeting House people political travelers experts in their own fields or simply those bereft or wounded by what had happened and seeking some solace in information and then I heard “well all right I hear all of that but what I need to know is who did this to us?” and almost as if I knew that question would be coming I accepted it risibly and listened some more “perhaps ‘who’ is the wrong word for it demands a singular activating force and I’m really afraid there is none for as deeply different and complex is Islam so too is your own society perhaps more so with its intense levels of secularism and disdain – something Islam does not have does not perhaps tolerate – it is quite hard to mix concepts and thereby select and point for truly I do not know who did what to you for this gets worse too than say peeling an onion an onion of meaning and history for on intellectual and historical grounds Islam is not properly a subject at all but at best a series of interpretations that are so divergent in nearly every case as to make a mockery of the enterprise conceived of by the interpreter as one monolithic whole called ‘Islam’ again as I’ve told you all we can maybe agree on is the single ‘object’ we are discussing as weirdly different and divergent as even our views are we both call this somehow the ‘same’ thing Islam so you see it is difficult to answer and to say and so again it is much more sensible to try to talk about the different kinds of Islam and all their complexities within the human experience the different kinds within their different times for different people in different fields 13th century Arab-Muslim philosophers of history or 11th century Islamic-Andalusian architecture or 18th century Yemeni religious controversy or any of the political social religious economic or cultural developments in any one or another Islamic country though specifying how ‘Islamic’ a country or group is requires laborious labor to begin with so you see although you are all wounded and psychically torn and bereft and you adhere to tenets of your own which lead you towards the revenge and the hatred for ‘people’ who may have done this to you you are but compounding and confounding the situation by falling into the trap set the trap of singular-religious and national-chauvinistic madness and anger which all solves nothing you will only advance your own pain and hatred instead for even then you must face the core beliefs inherent in getting even one step into the Koran another astoundingly complicated world with an enormous collective history much of which even has yet to be written” and he was sweating that I could see but he then said “why do you Americans demand such certainty ? why must you have an answer to something which presents no answer only more questions?” and a small fellow piped up “I only want as much certainty as they had in being certain to smash into the buildings I only want the definite answers their definite acts call for and whatever else your saying is of no matter to me for these people have done their deed and they do in turn should die” and a girl spoke “that may be going a little farther than I want I only want to learn and hear more I don’t care to advance the murder and killing that’s for sick boys and sicker old men” and the small guy spit out a guffaw and took on a steeled hard look as the girl herself red and flustered advanced that condition by talking as she did in the heat publicly for it was clear her outburst was not normal to her more shy ways and the main speaker again spoke “no no you all want too much all you can do is listen for this was these are merely historical developments in the turning of events which have and present to us their own logic and results and you young lady are right in only wanting to learn for that is all there is to do and any handbook summary of Islam or Muslims or this situation itself is conflicted and errant in using the entirely fictional premise that there is an ‘Islam’ that can be discussed as if it is all hung together solidly and squarely coherently like the Hapsburg Empire or music from Bach to Beethoven or say the history of Philadelphia BUT what is important to notice is that within Islam’s diversity however there has been a constant effort on the part of Muslims from the Prophet’s immediate successors the caliphs to Osama Bin Laden to try to speak on behalf of the true faith – now we know that all religions contain this babble of competitive claims – but the clamor of rival interpretations dynasties and cultures within the Islamic domain has I think vacillated between providing the various Islamic communities with heat or light or a combination of both it all depends on how one reads the Koran and interprets what is read as a ‘true’ tradition in which aspects of the Islamic past are important or which aspects are left out reclaimed or reinterpreted and so on and in that respect too Islam is like any other religion especially Christianity and Judaism – all in a state of flux and recombination and contested turbulence and so therefore Islam should not be treated in any way different from the way those other two religions are treated as vast complexities that are neither all-inclusive nor completely deterministic in how they affect their adherents” and someone else opined “well to hell with that I say the only ‘effect’ that’s been had around here is the effect of a functioning American system and city being smashed to smithereens by primitive idiots as I see it they can take their Islam interpretations and stick them wherever they want ‘cuz we owe them big time and I can’t believe you’re sitting here in the middle of New York fucking City a year later spouting this crap!” he wrestled with himself almost as he spoke and the other guy (an ‘Edward Said’ professor from Columbia University I later found out) said (and of course I couldn’t help but chuckling at ‘Said said’ every time I thought back to it) said aloud “I never understand why people think I’m the enemy or somehow end up being ‘seen’ as representing the other side you people have got to understand what I am doing here is ‘intellectualizing’ an issue” and he was interrupted “that won’t bring back the dead will it?” and Said said “well I guess it won’t although in some ways it might” and even I at this point having listened for near half an hour was getting kind of restless and maybe even confused by the same old issues I was hearing (a lot of the same precarious crap I thought that had been running through the airways and stuff for ten months) and it’s one of those issues that can only be worked out in isolation on a personal level usually involving much bigger things than you’d want to talk about but yet which gets bandied around endlessly usually by people getting paid for talking and I was also by this time pretty damn tired of the whiners and weepers who’d not yet shut down after all the thousands and thousands of dollars and stuff that had filtered around and the endless stupid political and otherwise immature crap that was said and planned and observed and all that until the entire issue was nothing but a big fat crap circus for people with vested interests in it of one way or another so as you see I was kinda’ sick of the whole thing but listen to this as Said said it: “you question then why go on with this interest in Islam at all especially after Sept. 11 as millions of words have been spilled trying to ‘characterize’ Islam in the aftermath of the terror attacks and American public discourse I see has been grappling most energetically with ‘enemies’ and fundamentalists and terrorism evil and all that but not with any useful results that I know of HOWEVER an apparent American trait is that reflexive disinterested research on delicate matters of faith or history appear to be out of the question because the ‘market’ for context and discussion is apparently when it comes to Islam too inflamed too urgent and too locked up on questions of defense wars and the clash of civilizations and other fractious issues like ‘American’ values freedom and righteousness and the crusade on behalf of the ‘West’ for anything adequate or useful towards Islam to occur” and the crowd here seemed a bit restless and I could tell this jerk was in his own academic way ‘baiting’ the audience yet at the same time forgetting that this was a group of jerky young students somewhere willing to listen these were apparently annoyed and nervous people living in the ‘aftermath’ of their own shadows of death and mortality and to hear this imported dice-player going on like this certainly reminded me once more of how Arundhati Roy that bitch anti-American Indian writer had met her dastardly end a while back outside of the United Nations building as that fellow was describing it all to us back that day with Meaning and after he let me read that long quotation of anti-American anti-western consumerism drivel all about the evils of exported American consumerism all the while she was collecting every royalty and speaking fee possible from her crummy stupid story books about Indian bullshit life I was surely able to understand anger and seething so this was all nothing new and that guy as I remember it all described the shooting scene perfectly the ‘coming down the stairs at the ‘Swords Into Plowshares’ granite wall inscription using Isaiah’s words and the view from there down across the roadway towards the Secretariat building or whatever it was and the slow deliberate walk of Roy with her bevy of goons and the reporters scribbling down every word she spoke about the ascendant righteousness of destroying the American nightmare blight on the globe as it was and if I could ever find that quotation again it would buttress any feelings I might have while sitting right here but it’s funny I’m thinking to myself it’s funny I’m sitting here recalling someone else’s story of assassination and murder and how he slowly pulled the long trigger of his rifle as she passed the flat concrete wall and the retort echoed the sending of that bullet seemingly in slow motion towards her cranium and took her down with a shock a few seemingly light steps backward pulverized brain matter and blood splattering all over the wall as she spun around and then took another hit which he said lifted her up slightly ripping her shoulder area open and she crumpled just like that and the guys around her rather than doing anything they just stared icily out and in a rushed frenzy he’d rehearsed so many times he spun around vaulted the steps upward and while running towards the very quiet Tudor City area dismantled the rifle quickly and disposed of it piecemeal as he ran across the isolated park area there around the Tudor Restaurant with its faux lanterns and decorations he said of Merry Olde England and thrashed through some bushes and continued swiftly out to mingle very generally with whatever street life he’d come across and without apprehension of being apprehended (a difference?) he managed to elude all options and get to midtown along 42nd that quickly deed done “America” he said “redeemed of that anti-social interloping non-American bitch” which kind of made me glad right then to be a guy let’s say…but let me get back to that later for Said was still saying: “any determination of Islam we’re going to get now is going to be determined by the embattled context we all find ourselves in and this pseudo-understanding is going to be all wrong and half-baked because it’s put together of a timely anger and anxiety and therefore all the errors that go with it” and I realized this guy was saying we stupid jerks will never get Islam right because we’re still angry about it and I realized again ‘he’s pissing these people off’ and I figured in this context it’s his funeral but whatever “crisis and conflict has always marked the history of trying to come to terms with Islam in Europe and the United States and now to add to that we have the current ‘commerce’ in crisis and grief which in these last months has only exacerbated the misinterpretation of Islam still more and Islam has ALWAYS been considered a threat to Christendom here and in Europe and so therefore had to be fixed ideologically the way Dante fixes Muhammad in one of the lower circles of hell and the Islamic sense of control coercion and power was always negatively portrayed yet in an obscure way the same nasty attributes in western civilization have always been overlooked” yeah well good luck I thought to myself and I just kept watching.

NOW ! I’m not done with any of this yet and I know that it’s going on a bit and perhaps running tediously afoul of its own laws and procedures but there is really just so very much I intend to get in regarding intent and information and point of view that I must here ask your indulgence (watch that word too for we’ll be getting back to it shortly) as I move it all along [‘for what is the purpose of any of this if I myself cannot be the one to expound and to add to it through the diversity and layerings of all my own interests with which too to bring forth some new information and experience and what then if not this is the reason for reading anyway ? certainly not to be pleasured by me !] so as I sat here witnessing and sit here still just thinking this all back and garnering resources stories facts and dialogue from the time and place recollected I am reminded of an apt quote that takes us back [momentarily] to the scribblers mentioned following Arundhati Roy around [now don’t get me wrong I’m quite a scribbler myself] but my reference used here refers to the grand Library at Alexandria constructed and mastered by Ptolemy in the capital city that Alexander (the Great) had founded there in 331 B.C. and named after himself in the age now called ‘Hellenistic’ and Alexandria then was a brand-new city with a population consisting mostly of soldiers and sailors of the Ptolemies’ armed forces bureaucrats and clerks along with the mixed bag of traders businessmen craftsmen swindlers and whatnot (the usual ‘company’ town) and these in turn brought in the usual assortment of opportunists and others - including scholars and intellectuals who were baited and sealed by the promise of such a grand library - anyway the quote from the day goes : “the scribbling bookworms who are found/in Egypt’s populous nation/in endless debate as they flock around/the muses’ feeding station” and that’s the quote I thought of as I sat there thinking in quite intense heat this being perhaps the longest and strongest stretch of 100 degree days in a row without any moisture to speak of that I was ever able to recall and no relief no respite not even a breeze did two things at least – it made the very difficult task of getting through a hot steamy summer New York City day far worse and that in turn and sometimes happily enticed females of every persuasion style and bearing to essentially disrobe or at least prance around in the slimmest sheerest least-covering thinnest of garments and non-garments which afforded proper and fine visual expanses of the Palatine Hills as they passed BUT I digress for we are here still sitting sticky and gummy and glum REMEMBER listening to Said and the little crowd of acolytes he’s acquired none of which I’m sorry to say bore any sexual spark to bring a pleasant tension to the endeavor and I only mention these things because as is said “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a Summer for!” to which I heartily agree even with a wished-for and occasional grasp…and lest I be OSTRACIZED (“the Greeks’ use in Mycenaean times of clay tablets to write upon was exceptional and in the centuries that followed they preferred other materials and their scratch paper was almost literally that – discarded chunks of broken pottery which they inscribed by scratching with a sharp object and they also wrote upon them with pen and ink AND THE GREEK WORD for such chunks was ‘ostraka’ so that ‘ostracism’ was the institution devised by the Athenians whereby the citizens took a vote on whom in their midst they most wanted to get rid of and sent the winner of this negative popularity contest into exile so called because the voters scratched their candidate’s name on ‘ostraka’) I’d better go on because in my playbook anyway there are very many more things which I am to bring out in this long boring abstracted expressionistic and quite colorful retelling of a tale a story an actual life experience NOW you will recall the killing of Arundhati Roy which I keep mentioning and even in a way adapting as my own BUT IT WAS NOT it was related to me by Araman Kensch as he gave me his name aka ‘Tizzer’ a fellow I once knew long ago and who had recently become an enraptured follower of ‘Babi Dolar’ a local assembly hall preacher in these parts whose outlook had to do with turning one’s back on what he called ‘origins’ and becoming what he himself instead called the ‘effeasion of extra-potentiality’ basically an America-first school of thought based on the idea that money and riches should come your way as you simply DO things especially the things God wishes you to do - and I will here digress and write the following in order to allow you to share this point of view: from ‘The Confessions of a Justified Sinner’ by James Hogg a Scottish sheep farmer in 1824 which examines the psychopathology of a holy warrior and is a ‘useful’ reminder that faith-based fanaticism is neither a new phenomenon nor an exclusively Islamic one and involved in this presentation is the dogma of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination used here as “since God knows all He has foreseen the fate of all human beings long before they were born therefore He knows whether they will be damned or saved and whether they are destined for the joys of heaven or the fires of hell and since God cannot be wrong nothing these people can do can alter their destiny and the ‘Elect’ will be saved even if they sin even as the ‘Damned’ will be burned even if they are good and on these impeccable theological grounds the character concludes that since he himself is among the elect the sin of murder can have no consequence for him and he concludes even more for example why not he reasons madly and dogmatically why not give God’s plan a little nudge in the right direction by sending the damned to hell a little sooner [seeing that God had from all eternity decided the fate of every individual that was to be born of woman how vain was it in man to endeavor to save those to whom their Maker had by an unchangeable decree doomed to destruction….how much more wise would it be to begin to cut sinners off with the sword ! for until that is effected the saints can never inherit the earth in peace] of course this idiom is chillingly familiar to our contemporary ears ESPECIALLY these ears sitting around Mr. Said right now and listening raptly for the repeated self-justification that ‘the elect of God would be happier and purer were the wicked and unbelievers all cut off from troubling and misleading them’ for that is the justification of all those who kill in the name of religion and in this book this crusade of death is called “reformation by blood” and any glance at history will take in many versions of the holy war and many crusades in which the faithful have slaughtered the infidel for the KNOWLEDGE that one is among the elect calms the voice of conscience and the knowledge that the victim is going to burn for all eternity anyway makes the murderer simply an accomplice to the divine plan yet the question then arises that if religion justifies cruelty and slaughter does it also cause them ? is religious difference an inevitable cause of conflict ? is ‘civilization’ a polite euphemism for ‘religion’ as it is used in the much-vaunted ‘clash of civilizations’ ? or is it just one excuse for violence among the many excuses that are possible for if religion itself is the cause of conflict then we are indeed doomed to an endless series of holy wars and on the other hand if it is an excuse or a way of making ordinary struggles seem less squalid and more epic then is not the source of conflicts to be found in the failure of politics ? SO ANYWAY Tizzer killed Arundhati Roy in a self-justified fit of righteousness reacting mainly to a piece of post-911 drivel he’d been presented with for indoctrination against her and he went out craftily and did the deed which at the time then became a cause celebre though now nearly forgotten and seen as it was as perhaps a continuing portion of the terror/anti-terror dichotomy of operations going on (I only wished he could be here now listening to Said saying) but curiously enough as he told the story after splattering her brains on the side of the secretariat building or whatever he high-tailed it successfully and eluded detection and apprehension and right about here is where he ended up in a vacant 2nd floor ‘for rent’ loft just off Union Square a place that had had a large paper sign in its window all last summer and fall saying ‘Loft For Rent’ and giving a phone number of a realty place and knowing it was empty and having watched and slept in its spaces before Tizzy had a way of entrance from an adjoining rooftop and again without detection he laid low there for some week or ten days and watched all the hoopla and news reports buzz around of conspiracy retribution plot murder and mayhem all the while realizing that he had in fact done a major deed in slaying her (although perhaps then raising her posthumous profile and aggravating thereby the spread of her views) and as the short time passed he told me the story too of how one day he realized the empty loft was being used for a reception or party into which many people had filed and into which he then did the same attired properly and able to pass for whatever group of people were mingling there and he listened carefully and spoke to various people and much of the talk he said revolved around the terrors and bombings and trade center disaster and deaths which had then recently taken place and one overheard conversation as he recalled to me was about Roy herself and her murder and a woman spoke: “I’m so greatly scared and confused right now I just don’t know how much of anything more we can take the stories come and go people are in shock no one wants to go anywhere and even if you do you can’t and now so many things seem to be coming together and they all seem to have something to do with these awful religious leaders of the Arabs I tell you I’m afraid for my own life and work we’ve just cancelled about everything” and another person spoke “yes I understand that it’s all just ghastly even that interesting Indian writer of the God of Small things was so viciously killed for reasons I can only think having to do with her giving Muslim or Arab secrets away to westerners and gaining a fame here even though I hear she was essentially English and Hindu but whatever it’s a shame the way she was brutally shot down like that I ask do you think it was part of all this where even our writers are not safe and I always think of Salman Rushdie too this all began with him and oh I just have so much to learn” and Tizzy said he could remember a certain fascination with shooting A. Roy but in a way too he said he regretted not using a pistol with silencer and just getting her at close range maybe after approaching her for comments or autograph he says it would have meant more done that way but as he stayed at the reception (in what he liked to call ‘my place’) he realized he’d at least done what should have been done ‘silencing’ a bastardized critic of America when allover the world those same critics were gaining strength and as far as I know he’s still out there somewhere probably somewhere between Tudor City and its fine waxworks of restaurants and laundries and dry cleaners (ersatz English perhaps like Rushdie and Roy too) and this still empty loft across from Union Square where I verily sit right now recalling all this and writing down whatever I can of the mind of the matter of the man
at the time and across from me Said is still sitting and time is going awfully slow in this caterwauling horrible heat a heat without water without rain with nothing but rivers of sweat and if that can be considered water well then we’re in the midst of a flood for sure.

And this Mr. Said I noted directly was still talking and we were still essentially in the same seating area where I recalled endless vigils and huge packs of people at the time of the immediate aftermath of the event congregating and milling about with candles memorials statuary missing people posters (perhaps one of the strangest and most memorable and moving of the New York sites I can recall when it seemed on nearly every pole or blank wall or storefront or neighborhood station and armory there had been set up a large collection of missing people posters with color photos lively descriptions pet phrases and sayings favorite things and ‘have you seen my sister?’ notes all with the varied hope of having the ‘missing’ be found or turn up or anything other than incinerated and as time and Fall and Winter moved on along with Hope these pasted papers and posters slowly dwindled or were in sadder fact neglected and weathered to their own death and thusly faded away but in my mind they hang there still) but Said was saying: “Islam over time had become to be viewed as alien distinctive rebellious and utterly different in the midst of the heart of expanding American and British empires an alien presence so to speak even where it was more indigenous and common than the other ‘outside’ religions even then it was never understood and during the American-Soviet ‘cold’ war Islam was vied for by each power and it became a national-security concern even though until the Iranian revolution the US actually ‘supported’ Islam as at the least a counterweight to Godless Communism and it was used too whenever found useful to oppose any Soviet supports of local pro-communist cultures and movements but once the cold war ended and the US became the world’s only Superpower the search for new world-class enemies led it to Islam as a prime candidate which viewpoint then revived all the old religiously based clichés about violent antimodernist and monolithic Islam and these clichés were then found useful to Israel and its political and academic supporters in the US particularly because of the emergence of Islamic resistance movements to Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian territories and Lebanon (which had suddenly smoldered and collapsed of year of multi-cultural amity) and reams of papers were written about Islam as an absurd throwback to antimodernism anti-Americanism antirationalism violence and terror and whatever these qualities were and even where not understood by the lumpen nodding for them the great and past history of everything from Toledo to Vincennes was completely forgotten and overlooked and people simply gaped in awe when told they used Arabic numbers and many other common things which represented the high culture of Islam which had once saved theirs and it was all forgotten as the evil was painted wide and broad and magically false” and he was at once interrupted “by the way you put it we should all be glad to be Muslims but on the subject of this matter of war and destruction I can’t accept nor accede to your cavalier disregard of what’s occurred and Mr. Said that’s the only reason I came here and I’m getting nothing” and I felt inclined to go along with some of that for what confused me was the endless prattle about the ‘right’ side and all that and anyway what difference does it make except to really small minds to have to determine one’s place in reference to God by qualification as if only certain or particular or ‘elect’ Gods were correct or valid for the entire point is so moot so funny and ‘mature’ that it’s a joke and any kid would tell you just that simple like ‘God is the Sun’ or ‘God is everywhere’ and then they’d move on without a second thought simply move on to whatever next occupied them but unlike human adults who must vouchsafe to utilize this ‘God’ stuff for territories and premises and rulings and decrees and silly temporal hair-splitting all the while each and every moment of their life is slipping away from them they BEG THE ARGUMENT or whatever that sidewinder phrase is whatever is meant by making such argument so obviously stupid as to be foolish and yet they go on and in each and every pore they’ll fight to the finish for bald senseless validity while their brother or sister in mankind starves to death or thirsts or pains and suffers or withers whatever because FACE IT nobody’s got any balls to do anything anymore not Said not the dweebers sitting around listening to him not the jerks wasting time in search and study or search and destroy or search and muddy in the park not them not the passers-by who lend one eye nothing FOR IT’S ALL maple-syrup-lemonade-pure CRAP end of that and all I can say at least for this Tizzy fellow is he stood up and did something and fuck the rest whatever value judgments you’re going to put on things will have to wait and I realized right about then I no longer cared nor understood the language being used the premises of the questions or the assumptions of the ideas and what reason then did I have any longer to even listen UNLESS unless that is I had something to say the kind of something that gets you all riled up when you read an article or letter to the editor or commentary about something and you just want to get up and get that person’s attention and twist their neck or refute every tid-bit God-awful morsel of the crap they just said and EVEN SOMETIMES not for the facts of what they said but instead just for the SAYING OF IT just like that plain brown-paper-wrapper simple and stupid oh so much therefore while I looked away my attention drifted unwittingly to a couple of kids waiting for ice cream from some curbside vendor whose silly-looking truck was coated and plastered with kids’ faces and assorted versions of cheap ice-cream stuffed into sugar cones or wrappers or onto sticks and these kids would have bliss and excitement for about three minutes either eating this stuff or having it melt right down their hands but they didn’t care they were living in the moment and at the moment I’D ALMOST FORGOT ice cream was God ! oh yeah ! thank the lord for cold and ice….

And another thing - September 29 is my birth date not ever that it matters ALTHOUGH how many people do you know whose birth date has the same last digit three times - like 9/29/49 – so I call that the hidden ‘power’ of numbers or my own personal numerology but anyway I found this September 29 2001 piece by Arundhati Roy deceased author of the God of Small Things and let’s let it serve as an indication of what so much pissed Tizzy off :



The algebra of infinite justice
“As the US prepares to wage a new kind of war, Arundhati Roy challenges the instinct for vengeance
Arundhati Roy Saturday September 29, 2001The Guardian
In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11 suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, an American newscaster said: "Good and evil rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they did last Tuesday. People who we don't know massacred people who we do. And they did so with contemptuous glee." Then he broke down and wept.
Here's the rub: America is at war against people it doesn't know, because they don't appear much on TV. Before it has properly identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an "international coalition against terror", mobilised its army, its air force, its navy and its media, and committed them to battle.
The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place.
What we're witnessing here is the spectacle of the world's most powerful country reaching reflexively, angrily, for an old instinct to fight a new kind of war. Suddenly, when it comes to defending itself, America's streamlined warships, cruise missiles and F-16 jets look like obsolete, lumbering things. As deterrence, its arsenal of nuclear bombs is no longer worth its weight in scrap. Box-cutters, penknives, and cold anger are the weapons with which the wars of the new century will be waged. Anger is the lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn't show up in baggage checks.
Who is America fighting? On September 20, the FBI said that it had doubts about the identities of some of the hijackers. On the same day President George Bush said, "We know exactly who these people are and which governments are supporting them." It sounds as though the president knows something that the FBI and the American public don't.
In his September 20 address to the US Congress, President Bush called the enemies of America "enemies of freedom". "Americans are asking, 'Why do they hate us?' " he said. "They hate our freedoms - our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." People are being asked to make two leaps of faith here. First, to assume that The Enemy is who the US government says it is, even though it has no substantial evidence to support that claim. And second, to assume that The Enemy's motives are what the US government says they are, and there's nothing to support that either.
For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is vital for the US government to persuade its public that their commitment to freedom and democracy and the American Way of Life is under attack. In the current atmosphere of grief, outrage and anger, it's an easy notion to peddle. However, if that were true, it's reasonable to wonder why the symbols of America's economic and military dominance - the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon - were chosen as the targets of the attacks. Why not the Statue of Liberty? Could it be that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government's record of commitment and support to exactly the opposite things - to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside America)? It must be hard for ordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference. It isn't indifference. It's just augury. An absence of surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes around. American people ought to know that it is not them but their government's policies that are so hated. They can't possibly doubt that they themselves, their extraordinary musicians, their writers, their actors, their spectacular sportsmen and their cinema, are universally welcomed. All of us have been moved by the courage and grace shown by firefighters, rescue workers and ordinary office staff in the days since the attacks.
America's grief at what happened has been immense and immensely public. It would be grotesque to expect it to calibrate or modulate its anguish. However, it will be a pity if, instead of using this as an opportunity to try to understand why September 11 happened, Americans use it as an opportunity to usurp the whole world's sorrow to mourn and avenge only their own. Because then it falls to the rest of us to ask the hard questions and say the harsh things. And for our pains, for our bad timing, we will be disliked, ignored and perhaps eventually silenced.
The world will probably never know what motivated those particular hijackers who flew planes into those particular American buildings. They were not glory boys. They left no suicide notes, no political messages; no organisation has claimed credit for the attacks. All we know is that their belief in what they were doing outstripped the natural human instinct for survival, or any desire to be remembered. It's almost as though they could not scale down the enormity of their rage to anything smaller than their deeds. And what they did has blown a hole in the world as we knew it. In the absence of information, politicians, political commentators and writers (like myself) will invest the act with their own politics, with their own interpretations. This speculation, this analysis of the political climate in which the attacks took place, can only be a good thing.
But war is looming large. Whatever remains to be said must be said quickly. Before America places itself at the helm of the "international coalition against terror", before it invites (and coerces) countries to actively participate in its almost godlike mission - called Operation Infinite Justice until it was pointed out that this could be seen as an insult to Muslims, who believe that only Allah can mete out infinite justice, and was renamed Operation Enduring Freedom- it would help if some small clarifications are made. For example, Infinite Justice/Enduring Freedom for whom? Is this America's war against terror in America or against terror in general? What exactly is being avenged here? Is it the tragic loss of almost 7,000 lives, the gutting of five million square feet of office space in Manhattan, the destruction of a section of the Pentagon, the loss of several hundreds of thousands of jobs, the bankruptcy of some airline companies and the dip in the New York Stock Exchange? Or is it more than that? In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then the US secretary of state, was asked on national television what she felt about the fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions. She replied that it was "a very hard choice", but that, all things considered, "we think the price is worth it". Albright never lost her job for saying this. She continued to travel the world representing the views and aspirations of the US government. More pertinently, the sanctions against Iraq remain in place. Children continue to die.
So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the "massacre of innocent people" or, if you like, "a clash of civilisations" and "collateral damage". The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice. How many dead Iraqis will it take to make the world a better place? How many dead Afghans for every dead American? How many dead women and children for every dead man? How many dead mojahedin for each dead investment banker? As we watch mesmerised, Operation Enduring Freedom unfolds on TV monitors across the world. A coalition of the world's superpowers is closing in on Afghanistan, one of the poorest, most ravaged, war-torn countries in the world, whose ruling Taliban government is sheltering Osama bin Laden, the man being held responsible for the September 11 attacks.
The only thing in Afghanistan that could possibly count as collateral value is its citizenry. (Among them, half a million maimed orphans.There are accounts of hobbling stampedes that occur when artificial limbs are airdropped into remote, inaccessible villages.) Afghanistan's economy is in a shambles. In fact, the problem for an invading army is that Afghanistan has no conventional coordinates or signposts to plot on a military map - no big cities, no highways, no industrial complexes, no water treatment plants. Farms have been turned into mass graves. The countryside is littered with land mines - 10 million is the most recent estimate. The American army would first have to clear the mines and build roads in order to take its soldiers in.
Fearing an attack from America, one million citizens have fled from their homes and arrived at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The UN estimates that there are eight million Afghan citizens who need emergency aid. As supplies run out - food and aid agencies have been asked to leave - the BBC reports that one of the worst humanitarian disasters of recent times has begun to unfold. Witness the infinite justice of the new century. Civilians starving to death while they're waiting to be killed.
In America there has been rough talk of "bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age". Someone please break the news that Afghanistan is already there. And if it's any consolation, America played no small part in helping it on its way. The American people may be a little fuzzy about where exactly Afghanistan is (we hear reports that there's a run on maps of the country), but the US government and Afghanistan are old friends.
In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA and Pakistan's ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) launched the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. Their purpose was to harness the energy of Afghan resistance to the Soviets and expand it into a holy war, an Islamic jihad, which would turn Muslim countries within the Soviet Union against the communist regime and eventually destabilise it. When it began, it was meant to be the Soviet Union's Vietnam. It turned out to be much more than that. Over the years, through the ISI, the CIA funded and recruited almost 100,000 radical mojahedin from 40 Islamic countries as soldiers for America's proxy war. The rank and file of the mojahedin were unaware that their jihad was actually being fought on behalf of Uncle Sam. (The irony is that America was equally unaware that it was financing a future war against itself.)
In 1989, after being bloodied by 10 years of relentless conflict, the Russians withdrew, leaving behind a civilisation reduced to rubble.
Civil war in Afghanistan raged on. The jihad spread to Chechnya, Kosovo and eventually to Kashmir. The CIA continued to pour in money and military equipment, but the overheads had become immense, and more money was needed. The mojahedin ordered farmers to plant opium as a "revolutionary tax". The ISI set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA's arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland had become the biggest producer of heroin in the world, and the single biggest source of the heroin on American streets. The annual profits, said to be between $100bn and $200bn, were ploughed back into training and arming militants.
In 1995, the Taliban - then a marginal sect of dangerous, hardline fundamentalists - fought its way to power in Afghanistan. It was funded by the ISI, that old cohort of the CIA, and supported by many political parties in Pakistan. The Taliban unleashed a regime of terror. Its first victims were its own people, particularly women. It closed down girls' schools, dismissed women from government jobs, and enforced sharia laws under which women deemed to be "immoral" are stoned to death, and widows guilty of being adulterous are buried alive. Given the Taliban government's human rights track record, it seems unlikely that it will in any way be intimidated or swerved from its purpose by the prospect of war, or the threat to the lives of its civilians.
After all that has happened, can there be anything more ironic than Russia and America joining hands to re-destroy Afghanistan? The question is, can you destroy destruction? Dropping more bombs on Afghanistan will only shuffle the rubble, scramble some old graves and disturb the dead.
The desolate landscape of Afghanistan was the burial ground of Soviet communism and the springboard of a unipolar world dominated by America. It made the space for neocapitalism and corporate globalisation, again dominated by America. And now Afghanistan is poised to become the graveyard for the unlikely soldiers who fought and won this war for America.
And what of America's trusted ally? Pakistan too has suffered enormously. The US government has not been shy of supporting military dictators who have blocked the idea of democracy from taking root in the country. Before the CIA arrived, there was a small rural market for opium in Pakistan. Between 1979 and 1985, the number of heroin addicts grew from zero to one-and-a-half million. Even before September 11, there were three million Afghan refugees living in tented camps along the border. Pakistan's economy is crumbling. Sectarian violence, globalisation's structural adjustment programmes and drug lords are tearing the country to pieces. Set up to fight the Soviets, the terrorist training centres and madrasahs, sown like dragon's teeth across the country, produced fundamentalists with tremendous popular appeal within Pakistan itself. The Taliban, which the Pakistan government has sup ported, funded and propped up for years, has material and strategic alliances with Pakistan's own political parties.
Now the US government is asking (asking?) Pakistan to garotte the pet it has hand-reared in its backyard for so many years. President Musharraf, having pledged his support to the US, could well find he has something resembling civil war on his hands.
India, thanks in part to its geography, and in part to the vision of its former leaders, has so far been fortunate enough to be left out of this Great Game. Had it been drawn in, it's more than likely that our democracy, such as it is, would not have survived. Today, as some of us watch in horror, the Indian government is furiously gyrating its hips, begging the US to set up its base in India rather than Pakistan. Having had this ringside view of Pakistan's sordid fate, it isn't just odd, it's unthinkable, that India should want to do this. Any third world country with a fragile economy and a complex social base should know by now that to invite a superpower such as America in (whether it says it's staying or just passing through) would be like inviting a brick to drop through your windscreen.
Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being fought to uphold the American Way of Life. It'll probably end up undermining it completely. It will spawn more anger and more terror across the world. For ordinary people in America, it will mean lives lived in a climate of sickening uncertainty: will my child be safe in school? Will there be nerve gas in the subway? A bomb in the cinema hall? Will my love come home tonight? There have been warnings about the possibility of biological warfare - smallpox, bubonic plague, anthrax - the deadly payload of innocuous crop-duster aircraft. Being picked off a few at a time may end up being worse than being annihilated all at once by a nuclear bomb.
The US government, and no doubt governments all over the world, will use the climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off workers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public spending and divert huge amounts of money to the defence industry. To what purpose? President Bush can no more "rid the world of evil-doers" than he can stock it with saints. It's absurd for the US government to even toy with the notion that it can stamp out terrorism with more violence and oppression. Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease. Terrorism has no country. It's transnational, as global an enterprise as Coke or Pepsi or Nike. At the first sign of trouble, terrorists can pull up stakes and move their "factories" from country to country in search of a better deal. Just like the multi-nationals.
Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But if it is to be contained, the first step is for America to at least acknowledge that it shares the planet with other nations, with other human beings who, even if they are not on TV, have loves and griefs and stories and songs and sorrows and, for heaven's sake, rights. Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, was asked what he would call a victory in America's new war, he said that if he could convince the world that Americans must be allowed to continue with their way of life, he would consider it a victory.
The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have been written by Bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America's old wars. The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel - backed by the US - invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel's occupation of the West Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists whom the American government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms. And this is far from being a comprehensive list.
For a country involved in so much warfare and conflict, the American people have been extremely fortunate. The strikes on September 11 were only the second on American soil in over a century. The first was Pearl Harbour. The reprisal for this took a long route, but ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This time the world waits with bated breath for the horrors to come.
Someone recently said that if Osama bin Laden didn't exist, America would have had to invent him. But, in a way, America did invent him. He was among the jihadis who moved to Afghanistan in 1979 when the CIA commenced its operations there. Bin Laden has the distinction of being created by the CIA and wanted by the FBI. In the course of a fortnight he has been promoted from suspect to prime suspect and then, despite the lack of any real evidence, straight up the charts to being "wanted dead or alive".
From all accounts, it will be impossible to produce evidence (of the sort that would stand scrutiny in a court of law) to link Bin Laden to the September 11 attacks. So far, it appears that the most incriminating piece of evidence against him is the fact that he has not condemned them.
From what is known about the location of Bin Laden and the living conditions in which he operates, it's entirely possible that he did not personally plan and carry out the attacks - that he is the inspirational figure, "the CEO of the holding company". The Taliban's response to US demands for the extradition of Bin Laden has been uncharacteristically reasonable: produce the evidence, then we'll hand him over. President Bush's response is that the demand is "non-negotiable".
(While talks are on for the extradition of CEOs - can India put in a side request for the extradition of Warren Anderson of the US? He was the chairman of Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal gas leak that killed 16,000 people in 1984. We have collated the necessary evidence. It's all in the files. Could we have him, please?)
But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He's America's family secret. He is the American president's dark doppelgänger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilised. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of "full-spectrum dominance", its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts. Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think. Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable. Their guns, bombs, money and drugs have been going around in the loop for a while. (The Stinger missiles that will greet US helicopters were supplied by the CIA. The heroin used by America's drug addicts comes from Afghanistan. The Bush administration recently gave Afghanistan a $43m subsidy for a "war on drugs"....)
Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other's rhetoric. Each refers to the other as "the head of the snake". Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed - one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless. The fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe. The important thing to keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative to the other.
President Bush's ultimatum to the people of the world - "If you're not with us, you're against us" - is a piece of presumptuous arrogance. It's not a choice that people want to, need to, or should have to make.
© Arundhati Roy 2001
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001”

So having read that and having considered what I’m talking about and hearing and listening to I realize again that I’m too many more than a few steps away from being part OR parcel of any of this supposed discourse and regarding A. Roy’s death if that’s the case and the cause so be it I DIDN’T DO IT (I didn’t get in a Tizzy over it either) and I really can’t find a quarrel with any of that either way and as I see it let me go about my business while you others ALL OF YOU others still in the hold YOU all can argue over the size strength dimensionality and permanence of the walls keeping you there thanks just the same.

(And finally on this whole silly mess I went back and found this useful reference to on ‘Orientalism’ as it was once called - an interesting and odd notion which we no longer hear or entertain - “The Roots of Muslim Rage” – Orientalist learning itself was premised on the silence of the native who was to be represented by an Occidental expert speaking ex cathedra on the native’s behalf and presenting that unfortunate creature as an undeveloped deficient and uncivilized being who couldn’t represent himself but just as it has now become inappropriate for white scholars to speak on behalf of “Negroes” it has since the end of classical European colonialism stopped being fashionable or even acceptable to pontificate about the Oriental’s (the Muslim’s or the Indian’s or the Japanese’s) mentality except for those still running on somehow about Arab Islam predilection for revolutionary violence and camel uprising oil terror and wild Bedouins or its close-mindedness its tendency to violence anger slavery and the inability to be concerned with anything but themselves (all amazing things to hear or read especially in today’s world and especially by Americans suited as they are to harbor grudges and vain judgments about everything from the Pope to soccer) but ANYWAY that’s the terrible condition we’ve gotten ourselves into and the ‘Islamic Experience’ has for good or bad now branded itself with its own self-defining actions…).
I would say.