NEVER YOU MIND THE REASONS
33. NEVER YOU MIND THE REASONS (I Write This From Memory):
When I was in second grade a teacher wrote on my report card - in the comments section - that I had 'trouble with question marks' which was and still is a comment I never can fully understand - I found it only many many years later in an old box of childhood things my mother had put aside and to be honest I really don't remember it from the time when it was done and neither do I remember any reaction to it or comment on it by my parents - so I guess mostly it went un-noticed but I still chuckle a bit as I think back on that second grade teacher writing that comment about me and I'm not sure if she was referring to my grammar or my writing or comprehension or whatever but the curious way it was phrased and the mere fact of it being noticed must have meant something - so I guess I've ALWAYS had a hard time with question marks whatever that may mean - but I've survived and I still question lots of things but I'm not sure if that's what she meant and everyone who could have possibly known or had an answer for me is long gone and passed from this scene (I hope they've at least attained THEIR answers) so it will just have to be but I often think could she have instead written 'never achieves satisfaction' or 'can not ever come to comfortable conclusions' or even 'has constant trouble with reality' - would any of those things have been applicable ? and would they have been accepted as report card comment material and anyway isn't it said that the great philosophers have always had a 'time' with questions so maybe I'm in good company anyway but I MUST ASK is there a difference between questions and a question mark ?
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Someone once killed a man and was running from it forever or so it seemed and everything he said referred back to that occurrence but everyone always thought he was making stuff up and so ignored it - funny thing that was - because I knew that man and spent lots of time with him and never figured one way or the other anything about his past because I really didn't care and wasn't one to be in a position of listening carefully and tracing clues to truth or falsity about any of it - and then he was gone and I don't know where he went or how but I never saw him again SO if you ever see him he looks like this - 35 years old long black hair very dark Mexican-featured face stocky about 5 feet 10 inches broad and muscular with dark eyes : if you ever meet someone like that watch our because he's a killer - SO NOW I ask you does it make any difference to you ? no of course not so why should it have ever mattered to me and besides by now he's about 70 and certainly no longer 35 so the whole thing is moot so I'm out and about myself walking in the rain and the water is soaking me - right through my clothes - and the rain in droplets is just dropping off my head and rolling down my face and I feel I really know what those old songs meant about 'walking in the rain' so as to conceal the fact of your own crying - tears and rain all mixing together so know one knows and as cliched and quaint as that tired old reference is it makes a little sense when you see it in operation except that I'm not blue and not crying over anything but instead just walking along and someone once told me (just recently) that the difference between a million and a billion (as if I needed to know) was - if measured in seconds - that a million seconds would be something like a year and a half and a billion seconds would be like 32 years or something like that I really do forget but the very concept of a great gulf of time and nomenclature difference stayed with me anyway and put into me some fear and awareness of time-passage as it occurred and since that time rather than waste anything I try to just put each moment to use some sort of use even if it's just walking about thinking of something and I feel too that such a thing is what I see in people's eyes as I see them - every moment - people seemed always vaguely distant and vaguely distracted as if they are 'here' in presence but their mind is actually going onto somewhere else and other places - which of course it always actually is - one of the crazier attributes of human life is how many layers and facets of experience we each experience at once - the physical here the place the sense the location the tangible and the eyes and the mind doing both the realization and the focus of the instantaneous here and now while at the same time in a multi-layered format racing to other places through thought and image connecting things to memory realizing connections and bringing forth other things holding at the same time tunes and sounds and light and movement being registered each of which in turn clicks a daydream or a thought or a memory forward while we at the same time think of tomorrow and a future tense to things and review at the same time a history of things as we leave them behind - it's all wonderfully bizarre and affords no speech (which when we do (the speaking) allows us another entire level of operation AS we speak too while doing all these other things) - and this entire mighty and forceful mental edifice becomes our make-up and our presence and tonal reality the WE of US the who we are the vast and great DISSOLVE of all our moments so that we SIMPLY MUST REALIZE that in reality in the instant NOTHING really exists at all and it's all made-up on the run and figured into each new equation of time and moment as they are happening and as quickly as they happen they grow out of happening and disappear and dissolve forever into the complete illogic of all the rest of reality : SO THAT'S WHY today when I saw that 1952 Cadillac parked in that old Pennsylvania driveway - the beautiful perfect shiny and bright Cadillac I wanted to touch it and lay hand on it just to prove the existence of presence and some profusion of time and reality too.
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Sometimes I just said to myself 'what the fuck are you doing?' or I looked deep into some mirror somewhere just to see what I really looked like and if it was me but all that was long ago and now I'm old enough not to care and never look and even that old soft and smooth face itself has turned perhaps harsh and old and coarser and wrinkled but who knows - I don't and I never try - as I co-exist now amidst everything else anywhere and there are myriads of faces and forms and types and qualities everywhere around me know of which I partake them all : bathing beauties and ribald queenies fat and robust pigs with spirit and dark wiry doubters too girls with hair under their arms and smooth girls all perfect and shorn and made-up girls and plain girls and coiffed and dressed girls or the sluggos in khaki and cammo - I've seen them all and everyday too - outside of the Strand looking like thugs or looking like dancers and it's never really mattered to me and it's the same with guys too - disheveled or broken violent or coarse they all look like something else something other than what they are and without any lineage except the modern day and between them and all that I see there's nothing left to do or say and now they all hang around Union Square without a care n the world and once right where there used to be ideology cause faction and venom now there's nothing but stylists and posers and people hawking vegetables and bread - the usual allotment of idiotic causes and trends and it just all makes me sick to heart to see the play-gyms for kids armed to the teeth with mothers and fathers on the margins of dread and with a certain vague pulchritude of the moment which makes them like all the rest - it's a sad and sorry spectacle which is supposed to comfort and maybe to some it does but I see it really as the END to meaning but life goes on and long-time-no-see it's all done without me.
When I was in second grade a teacher wrote on my report card - in the comments section - that I had 'trouble with question marks' which was and still is a comment I never can fully understand - I found it only many many years later in an old box of childhood things my mother had put aside and to be honest I really don't remember it from the time when it was done and neither do I remember any reaction to it or comment on it by my parents - so I guess mostly it went un-noticed but I still chuckle a bit as I think back on that second grade teacher writing that comment about me and I'm not sure if she was referring to my grammar or my writing or comprehension or whatever but the curious way it was phrased and the mere fact of it being noticed must have meant something - so I guess I've ALWAYS had a hard time with question marks whatever that may mean - but I've survived and I still question lots of things but I'm not sure if that's what she meant and everyone who could have possibly known or had an answer for me is long gone and passed from this scene (I hope they've at least attained THEIR answers) so it will just have to be but I often think could she have instead written 'never achieves satisfaction' or 'can not ever come to comfortable conclusions' or even 'has constant trouble with reality' - would any of those things have been applicable ? and would they have been accepted as report card comment material and anyway isn't it said that the great philosophers have always had a 'time' with questions so maybe I'm in good company anyway but I MUST ASK is there a difference between questions and a question mark ?
-
Someone once killed a man and was running from it forever or so it seemed and everything he said referred back to that occurrence but everyone always thought he was making stuff up and so ignored it - funny thing that was - because I knew that man and spent lots of time with him and never figured one way or the other anything about his past because I really didn't care and wasn't one to be in a position of listening carefully and tracing clues to truth or falsity about any of it - and then he was gone and I don't know where he went or how but I never saw him again SO if you ever see him he looks like this - 35 years old long black hair very dark Mexican-featured face stocky about 5 feet 10 inches broad and muscular with dark eyes : if you ever meet someone like that watch our because he's a killer - SO NOW I ask you does it make any difference to you ? no of course not so why should it have ever mattered to me and besides by now he's about 70 and certainly no longer 35 so the whole thing is moot so I'm out and about myself walking in the rain and the water is soaking me - right through my clothes - and the rain in droplets is just dropping off my head and rolling down my face and I feel I really know what those old songs meant about 'walking in the rain' so as to conceal the fact of your own crying - tears and rain all mixing together so know one knows and as cliched and quaint as that tired old reference is it makes a little sense when you see it in operation except that I'm not blue and not crying over anything but instead just walking along and someone once told me (just recently) that the difference between a million and a billion (as if I needed to know) was - if measured in seconds - that a million seconds would be something like a year and a half and a billion seconds would be like 32 years or something like that I really do forget but the very concept of a great gulf of time and nomenclature difference stayed with me anyway and put into me some fear and awareness of time-passage as it occurred and since that time rather than waste anything I try to just put each moment to use some sort of use even if it's just walking about thinking of something and I feel too that such a thing is what I see in people's eyes as I see them - every moment - people seemed always vaguely distant and vaguely distracted as if they are 'here' in presence but their mind is actually going onto somewhere else and other places - which of course it always actually is - one of the crazier attributes of human life is how many layers and facets of experience we each experience at once - the physical here the place the sense the location the tangible and the eyes and the mind doing both the realization and the focus of the instantaneous here and now while at the same time in a multi-layered format racing to other places through thought and image connecting things to memory realizing connections and bringing forth other things holding at the same time tunes and sounds and light and movement being registered each of which in turn clicks a daydream or a thought or a memory forward while we at the same time think of tomorrow and a future tense to things and review at the same time a history of things as we leave them behind - it's all wonderfully bizarre and affords no speech (which when we do (the speaking) allows us another entire level of operation AS we speak too while doing all these other things) - and this entire mighty and forceful mental edifice becomes our make-up and our presence and tonal reality the WE of US the who we are the vast and great DISSOLVE of all our moments so that we SIMPLY MUST REALIZE that in reality in the instant NOTHING really exists at all and it's all made-up on the run and figured into each new equation of time and moment as they are happening and as quickly as they happen they grow out of happening and disappear and dissolve forever into the complete illogic of all the rest of reality : SO THAT'S WHY today when I saw that 1952 Cadillac parked in that old Pennsylvania driveway - the beautiful perfect shiny and bright Cadillac I wanted to touch it and lay hand on it just to prove the existence of presence and some profusion of time and reality too.
-
Sometimes I just said to myself 'what the fuck are you doing?' or I looked deep into some mirror somewhere just to see what I really looked like and if it was me but all that was long ago and now I'm old enough not to care and never look and even that old soft and smooth face itself has turned perhaps harsh and old and coarser and wrinkled but who knows - I don't and I never try - as I co-exist now amidst everything else anywhere and there are myriads of faces and forms and types and qualities everywhere around me know of which I partake them all : bathing beauties and ribald queenies fat and robust pigs with spirit and dark wiry doubters too girls with hair under their arms and smooth girls all perfect and shorn and made-up girls and plain girls and coiffed and dressed girls or the sluggos in khaki and cammo - I've seen them all and everyday too - outside of the Strand looking like thugs or looking like dancers and it's never really mattered to me and it's the same with guys too - disheveled or broken violent or coarse they all look like something else something other than what they are and without any lineage except the modern day and between them and all that I see there's nothing left to do or say and now they all hang around Union Square without a care n the world and once right where there used to be ideology cause faction and venom now there's nothing but stylists and posers and people hawking vegetables and bread - the usual allotment of idiotic causes and trends and it just all makes me sick to heart to see the play-gyms for kids armed to the teeth with mothers and fathers on the margins of dread and with a certain vague pulchritude of the moment which makes them like all the rest - it's a sad and sorry spectacle which is supposed to comfort and maybe to some it does but I see it really as the END to meaning but life goes on and long-time-no-see it's all done without me.
posted by gary j. introne at 2:19 PM
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