MEMOIR OF THE NEXT MOMENT
(My Collage Education)
a novel memoir
a work in regress
(coming up from behind)
Phil Demise Smith
BEFORE THOUGHT
“That felicity, when reflected on it, has induced me sometimes to say, that were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults of the first. So I might, besides correcting the faults, change some sinister accidents and events of it for others more favorable. But though this was denied, I should still accept the offer. Since such a repetition is not to be expected, the next thing most like living one’s life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing,” said Ben Franklin.
yeah but…
I have nowhere left to go but to the next moment. This is where my future lies. It is buried in the prose and the cons of thought. It is of, by and for the moment that the thought takes place. It often veers off into amateurish prose and oblique poetry. It is a forest of co-incidents, each multiplying the borderline definition of rehearsed spontaneity.
Chaos with a boundary. A scribble of coherent ideas. The gurgling dishwasher chanting like a monk. A sudden intrusion of the angular inner circle. All things happening all at once!
sometime somewhere I said
“circumstance has a mind of its own”
(I am now my own parrot)
I am now my own parrot
an echo of a green shadow
an echo of a shadow
“Oh, grassy glades! Oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye, though long perched by the dead drought of the earthly life, -- in ye, men may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: -- through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence, doubt (the common doom), then skepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But, once gone through, we trace the round again: and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbour, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them; the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it,” said Ishmael.
“Yeah, but…,”.
“The Way that can be experienced is not true; the world that can be constructed is not true. The Way manifests all that happens and may happen; the world represents all that exists and may exist. To experience without intention is to sense the world; to experience with intention is to anticipate the world. These two experiences are indistinguishable; their construction differs but their effect is the same. Beyond the gate of experience flows the Way, which is ever greater and more subtle than the world,” replied Lao Zi.
“Yeah, but…,”.
The germ of an idea, a viral thought, a disease of the mind, the body of language
eating its own words, suffering a feverish ill effect defined by bed written
poems of the survival of the unfit…small mediums that build themselves up
by the foretelling of misfortune.
“Yeah but…”
THE SAME OLD STORY
Try oomph for a change.
In the meantime the average falls somewhere in the center of the middle. Poetry fondles the bewildered and befuddled remembrance. Perhaps because it hasn’t happened yet, the present dictates the sadness at being depressed. Unencumbered by loss, a prisoner of endings. From where I sit, I can’t stand it because privacy closes in on loneliness as it has all along.
Now where was I? Oh yeah, try oomph for a change – huff and puff and try oomph for a change and live a small life: (8:18:12)
no in betweens no extremes no perhaps no mishaps no denying no complying
no intentions no dissentions no understanding no demanding
no illusions no intrusions no decisions no collisions no perfection no rejection
no crying no lying no confusions no delusions no perceptions no deceptions
no saving no having no possessions no obsessions no excuses no misuses
no forward no backward no stillness no willingness no inclination no destination
no point no line no thing defined
no foreseeable past no thing that lasts
(9:12:14:17:12)
NO RHYME OR REASON
JUST ARRIVING IN TIME
THROUGH A CRACK IN THE UNI VERSE
AND OFF AND ON GOING ON AND ON
FROM THERE
05271947121510202012935
(I) AM
A hollow weaning off the solid mass destruction
CANCELLED
S AND Y
After the math, the difference between right and wrong is negative, too. Also, I’m positive that’s wrong: “It’s less than you think, more than you know and the same as it has been such as in “This has been has been so depressed though blessed. Opposing himself at every turn.”
The 5 agents knock on my invisible door
WATER WOOD FIRE EARTH METAL
KNOCK KNOCK
The deep green mountains are damaged by the diseased thorns
The red and black wind blossoms
Heaven and earth is secretly spreading stars into the pulverized darkness
The hazy sunset and wild beasts are stampeding into the sun’s illusions
Existence is a trembling maple leaf of golden dust
Lies about the spring startle the birds flying into street lights
The white and black jungle rivers flow through the heart of boundless time
said Du Fu, Li Bai, Duo Duo and Bai Dao
Life is off track railing at the groove that failed. Broken symmetry breaks in half mirroring its uniform differences. Here is where things begin and end. Life hangs
in the abeyance.
Life is
still life
moving
Destiny has reached its destination. A composite destined to be what it ends up being. To be or not to be questions the answer and begs to differ. Two opposites rush into each other’s arms and create a wind that carries debris and crumbling structures – a disheveled subtraction takes our breath away and reminds us that all is subject to removal. Don’t feel too confident, transitory permanence is the shadow of existence.
CHAPTER 1
Art begins at conception. My life begins right now. Each moment is a birth and the accumulation attaches its life to its next birth creating a long tail, a story that drags along the concrete, the abstractions, the attractions and the gravity, causing the sparking of imaginations, nations of imaginings, remembrance and re-cognition.
IS THIS A NEVERENDING SHORT STORY?
(my life is not over, but it’s getting there)
It always begins here – there is nowhere else to begin.
Silence is the answer to the question that cannot be heard. It is the action that follows withdrawal. It is the reverse of verse, the unwritten poem read by a blind audience and performed by an absent poet. It is being not there that is present in the memorable, forgotten sleep. It is the piece at the end of a torn fabric – the peace at the end of a war – a threadbare posture withstanding the curvature of the earth’s spine, bent on disappearance, unable to jump to the conclusions that no longer exist. (8:10:11)
“Correspondence of birds to things of the intellect and of how the creatures of the air have their knowledge and know their times and seasons because they, unlike man, are in the order of their life and have not perverted that order by reason,” said Swedenberg to James Joyce. (6:16:11)
Crosshatched from eccentricities, I was born from between the shell game of then and now; not cracked up to be anything but a shard of cutting edge creation. I hear the smooth talkers having rough conversations with their silent partners using unheard of words that break the silence and exit through a window of opportunity. Once outside the realm of speech, grunts of gasping air and exasperating efforts whip up a wind that carries the music of stillness in rhythmic gusts that whirl around the corners of the circumlocution of square deals. Honestly, the lies resonate and make the truth stand for deception and allow it to ring true! That signals the birth of non-communication and its counterpoint of reference, a reflection of opacity and the audacity of not being there. (7:24:11)
Yeah but, what about the Bronx?
No need to go there. It is there and I was there. Dropped in like a raindrop in a small puddle. I remember nothing other than what I was told. Infancy and fancy embellish the speck of becoming me. All I know is that my brother shot my sister with a rubber arrow. Then I was moved into my childhood on a snowy day in April.
At the same time, “I’m” is born, I am me, also.
Dear Me,
On the outside looking out for myself. I spy I, trying to find the one thing I have in
common with myself.
In the interim the outer rim of the boundary of chaos scribbles a message to clean up the inner sanctum.
It should rock with works of art-iculation. Suddenly I am here where I am. Here, right here, deep inside the inner ear where I am everywhere receiving direction from the chaos of silent sounds.
Placing myself inside the magnetic field attracting the traction of gravity, holding me in place with a hand that moves across the universe and paints my pain to a “T”.
In the corner sits an exact opposite of my duplicate, another appendage of old age and wisdom. Added to this subtraction is an approximate truth.
This is seen separately from the attachment to the whole truth and nothing. But the truth persists and swims in the river on the periphery of the outer rim.
I catch its drift and float upstream of consciousness. Burning the candle at both ends, I am half awake, half awake, sleeping in the conjunction of the caboose of the train of thought, a crazy reason to be reasonable, a loco motive.
I think I can. I think I can.
Both ideas skywrite their impression of this identical indentation with an attention to
detail. Each finger points to a choice. Each choice points to love’s suspended animation and disbelief.
In this tunnel of delight mishaps ricochet off the dark particles of transition bouncing off the walls until the onslaught offers a compromise - light with heavy consequence.
It is a sequence of black ands and yellow commas that hook each sentence to its
counterpoint conjoining the punishment with the future release. And in the counterpart the map of interplay zig-zags back and forth crossing the tracks and playing the role of hobo.
Way off track, the wonderer wanders into the tunnel inside the tunnel, a deep depression that is at the root of all totality – birth. Why do I always end up at the beginning?
There there.
I start over, stopping under the bridge, understanding the umbrella’s black arc that diverts the compounding downfall into a puddle at my feet.
My reflection mirrors this deflection, askew, awkward and slanted toward my next step.
When it splashes, I awaken to my sleepy cover-up. My eyes water expressing the excess sorrow with a flowing stoppage, choking movement by clutching the stiff neck of disappointment with fingers that refuse to move. Yet in the natural flow of things, things move in spite of stillness. They naturally change places with the moment before the next move.
The choice is no choice or no choice. It just is. As unjust as is, is or might be.
Events eventually explode on the scene like the next breath of autonomy. Breathe in,
breathe out. Give in, give out. Collapse, relapse and then lapse into a comma along with my periodic double, a look alike who looks nothing like me and likes being someone else, elsewhere.
A mirror image with a life of its own.
He wakes up much later than me without guilt and walks into a documentary of the imaginary struggle between a picture and the picture that it projects.
“I keep killing myself at the same time that I’m dying to be alive.”
YEAH BUT…
CHAPTER 2
And then suddenly I find myself in Queens.
109-27 204th Street, Hollis Avenue, Francis Lewis Boulevard, PS 134, The Island Movie Theater, Schmidt’s, Davis’, White Castle, Wally Weigert, Evan Hecht, Alan Leventhal, Lenny Scwartz, hit the penny, stoop ball, Jack Hedden, Mrs. Waterson, Virginia Zimmer, leaner’s, slap ball, steam, pennsy pinkies, 5ft League, knock hockey, West Point Club, pin boys, duck pins, Manhasset, Make Believe Ballroom, winky dink, King Kong, million dollar movie, the world series, July 18, Jamaica Savings, Q2, Little League, Tiny Tim, Bubba, Harriet’s legs, a straight jacket, a drunken sailor, The Lone Ranger, The N.Y. Yankees, egg foo young, Miss Lurin, Mr. Vogt, AAA crossing guard, punch ball, the sun parlor, Dr. Schmatolla, Archie and Veronica and Nancy and Sluggo, “no promotion in sight”….
“I was born in the Bronx a long time ago. I was born in Switzerland also. My dada and mama watched me grow. I edited a magazine called Ego. Published only my own work
which is all that I knew. I had to flee the Swiss because I was too neutral. In 1982 I had my first two-man show. It was held in the infamous Black Gallery. It will be reported that when I die I will be semi conscious. I will be buried under the epitaph I myself will write some time before I die….
What’s up? What’s up? What’s up?”
Stuart PP Tomatoz
December 25, 2012….Christ, More Christ…Christ Más….familiar but somehow in the distant future of the distant past….a family that exists only as an extension of the tense Christmas presence….that lost supper where fantasy is in the back seat overlooking the front that we all put up in order to shield us against the wind….I’m alone in the sleep that protects me from awakening to the god awful truth that I am awake….and I have a part in this playground of interpretation …monkey bars and sliding scales call a spade a heart and dispel the correctness of misspelled witchcraft that hovers above the chance that anything can happen….and when it does we have our unjust desserts…..
1955,
My ‘First Book of Pomes”: God, The Fall and “I won’t make a fuss if I had just one bus”, goose bumps in front of the dinosaurs, flying over the trees on 204th Street, a nostalgic connection to the mystery that had recently expelled me into this familiar foreign land inhabited by a strange relativity that set my life in motion, bowel movements, clock movements spinning on an axis of perpetual change, and the daily differences, differences you can measure (height, weight, etc) and those that scratch their dimensions into the cloud formations that float above the future, those whose impact appears as invisible dots above the “i” that pretends to be me, like something I used to know well and have to pull forward from time to time,
TIME IS LOOPY
re:turning forward
eyes in the back of ahead
My partner, who is me, is alone, dancing on the wooden flaws in my character – a box step encircling the absence of room to move
in between a soft place and a rock lies the sicklical nature of cyclical Nature (5•23•11)
Where the sky meets the ocean; the missing links that connect the lost journey to its
destination (which is right here where I am) as the movement of stillness surges…
and up pops this:
“we never live long enough
to know what today is like”
John Ashbery
(12•8•12)
I’m resisting arrested development, continuing the battle for truth and specificity, I’m a good listener because I have nothing to say and I use double meaning to say exactly what I mean.
“Oddly, New Year’s is an evening out of the rough days gone by…The time before the next time…and, of course, next time it will all be different…this moment is married to the past, for better or for worse, ‘til death do we part…then for time in memoriam it continues without us as we really are…so, where does the time go?...we’re dying to know…” (12•31•12)
Where am I going?
nowhere
When will I get there?
in no time
What will I do when I arrive?
nothing
Who am I?
no one
When will I become someone?
when you’re not here
Yeah But…
CHAPTER 3
“Hands, do what you're bid:
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed,” said Yeats.
“Then close the door
no strings attached
and get out of bed,”
said I.
1952:
Back then the mystery lived next door and hugged my awakenings with open arms. Trees understood and stood above my meanderings, shading the differences and close calls. Insects asked me questions about my own nature. I was only a few steps away from my first few steps and answering their questions felt like a connection to my own vastness that covered me with the warm coat of enlightenment. Then language tipped the scales and knowing something closed my eyes to all the other possibilities. Back then, like now I felt alone. Then ‘it is’ was warm and now it is cold and warm only now and then. Back then my dumbfounded, silent ignorance made me feel omni-potent and now I fall asleep early and dream about then. Back then I jumped at the chance and now I give up easily. Back then answering the door felt like a revelation and now I am closing it. Back then there was a forthcoming coming and now there is just a memoir of the next moment.
2001:
"all of a sudden nothing stands for everything, absence stands for presence, next stands for before and right now cannot stand it and quietly sits in the corner
waiting for the past…”
…when all is clear the light blinds the window so we shade our mirrors and make shadows…we distance the close calls with stuttering pre-dictions, words before language, explosions before bombshells…doors burn shut as we enter the future…ceilings expose their flaws…walking forward is an exercise in futility...muscles contract weakness and withdraw…we can feel the standstills in our bones…a photograph of the only moment that still is…the odor of smoldering temples
throb in the heads of state …the people are left behind in the dust to inhale particles of the endgame…
"nothing has changed…everything has changed…all else remains
the same…as the universe awaits our small issues with open black holes…the whole emptiness is filled with a space that is full of objects and subjects…”
all saints mask our indifference which is the difference between trick or treat and yes or no…and in between we sit trembling in the wake of a sleepy whisper…the words spread to the mailroom where all the messages are uneasy and this disease shakes the foundation of every motto and cliché…the hard cold taste of our own words
curdle in a scream of overripe nightmares… they fall up from the sky’s limit
and break down all our traditions…
pieces of aimless wanderings fly off into the sunset…motionless, they go through the
motions undetected and they continue like there’s no tomorrow…
YEAH BUT….
CHAPTER 4
Climbing Lenox Hill: 1987
He started the climb 3 or 4 years earlier. It was his own adventure and departure. He kept it to himself. He kept most things (if not all things) to himself. He sat in his chair, hands pressed together (almost like a prayer) placed across his mouth, under his nose, holding back the stress of being while staring out into the space between what was possible and what is. The pain and inconvenience was kept secret along with his financial health. But I’m sure he was, in some way, prepared for all this and knew exactly who he needed to be. He went to the Yankee game on his 70th birthday, in the throes of being on deck…Unlike me with all my ‘romantic distress”, making sure my children know why I am what I am… he made sure we didn’t…which kept my childhood in tact… He gave up poetry for accounting and family while I gave up accounting for poetry for my self. He was an unsung hero in my life…who I eventually did sing about…
WAS/IS (for Pop)
night time comes in pieces
then the day falls into place
the blank slate then deceases
and we fly off into space
then we take all our skin off
and we lay it in the ground
we hear the closing window
as we make our closing sounds
was/is
then he comes into my room
and he whispers in my ear
"I've touched the light inside you son
and you'll always find me near"
then he puts his arms around me
and he kisses me hello
his strength and love surrounds me
with a brightly lit shadow
taking it all, taking it all in
giving it up, giving it to him
shaking the fall, shaking it senseless
living it down, living defenseless
taking it off, taking it all off
spinning around, spinning a web
making it soft, making it so soft
neutral ground, neutral bed
taking it all, taking it all in
giving it up, giving it to him
was/is
“my life as me has been quite familiar,” he said. “No time to change my mind no time to reform my tendencies or reform the shape I’m in, in no time. Just as is, quite unjust and quiet but pleasantly surprised by expectation.”
“Just as I expected – unjust! Fairness is an intense carnival complete with clowns and big tops with midget ideas at the bottom of it all pouring out of a vehicle, that is me, one by one by one by one …….forever (10•9•10)
(And nothing has changed, it’s the only thing that has. )
Everything happens in a moment. The momentum adds infinitum to the future. Fiction hits the walled in pond with a pinpointed splash…a flash in the panacea that quickly becomes infinite and in the next moment it begins again.
AND HERE WE ARE
(12•4•00)
(here, nothing matters except the size, shape and weight of that moment)
…and in that moment he asked me to come in and help him stand up (for what he now was forced to believe in) and then walk him to his resting place and under the same conditions he asked my sister to help feed him….like a child, he again was beginning his journey…while we were still full of our make believe future…which is now staring us in the face….drip, drip by drip the pain of his consciousness began to fade away until the time the end could be pronounced…and when it finally was, I whispered in his inner ear how much I loved him and will miss him and then I walked back into the hallway of my own life…dangling by a thread that connects my origins to its shadow…
“I’m a wound without any pain
I’m a conductor without any train
I’m just a little boy
without his dada daddy
now that I’ve been stripped of half my origins
all that’s left is life
and it’s so pure and simple”
YEAH BUT…
CHAPTER 5
My sentence began in Bronx Hospital on May 27th, 1947 a little after midnight. It was handed out by the conjunction of Miriam K. Smith and Irwin J. Smith and a lower case decision by Harry and Bessie Smith and Celia and Phillip Kadushin. Lots of conjunctions expelled me from my eternal resting place which was somewhere in the nowhere and then cast me into here where I am…to live this life sentence confined to a vast cell which to begin with had no apparent end but now has an end which did become apparent as time went on and on….whether in very good times or in god awful times I ask the same questions: “What did I do to deserve this?” “Why me? Why not me?”… the sentence begins within an infinite confinement…a cell that splits and leaves itself for another self and locks the door as it enters a vast microcosm that imprisons time… The following sentence, in sequence, illustrates this consequential nature of the birth of an individual from the egg and the ego and of a being that is in the center of that being, being…
MY LIFE SENTENCE
“I don't know where it begins or where it ends but it is certain that I am here for the duration and can only interpolate the forgone conclusions that drop out of the overcast production of fictitious rain, whetting my appetite for darkness, locking my visions in a room full of blindness but I see this denial as a way out, an opening out onto a dislocation that connects me to the blank stairs of departing, climbing into the sky like a mirror, like a Miro, like a ladder, piercing the punctuation of stars that hang out in the darkness, pulsating commas, pausing in the unknown with a burning desire for morning, for the silver lining of the next moment to wrap its weightless light around the present imperfection, with wishes pulling me out of the deep, incomplete wholeness that imprisons my youth in a convulsive orbit around its own shadow, swallowing its tongue in a silence that cries out for more silence, understood only by the gibberish of alienation, blocked by a lack of enclosure, a cell whose membrane has forgotten its function and oozes with the liquidity of directionless freedom and stains the edges of infinity with a bloodless bath of light and unlocks my broken bones from their futile search for the flesh that fits their jagged configurations and pulls together the identical disparateness of me and the future me if I ever escape these consecutive terms that my own judgments have sentenced me to, here where the four walls stare at me, a box of 'I's', night and day they dream of tomorrow and square off for the next round, switching gears in mid-stream of consciousness as if the concrete has broken the fall, a half empty bottle of proof cutting through a red muscle that lies on ground zero in a puddle of questions pumping the air for answers to everything in particular, to nothing specific except gravity, holding down the grave situation, the six feet under the blanket, an answer resurrecting the foundation and rising above the emotion of stationary movement until death do I depart, until life joins the opposition to the quiet dissipation, until evaporation clears the air of broken glass, transparent dreams that cut out all this nonsense about perfection, surgically removing the stillness, bleeding like a lamb, innocence overflowing, experiencing the over abundance of emptiness, pulling its wool over the bedlam until I can find the rest in a single yawn, in a sleepy awakening, springing forward into an open ended imprisonment, jumping from the black roller coaster onto a horse of a different color, a white merry-go-round that rocks back and forth, side to side in a youthful buoyancy of ignorance that is tied to the earth, constantly switching allegiance and floating in place, in place of floating which is perhaps the closest we ever get to being close, which is the closest we ever get to being and like similes when compared that take metaphoric leaps into approximation, the unknown rests in these pieces and the known distorts its certainty, certainly knowing that the anger of knowing what I don't know anchors consistency to its big bang and constantly begins over and over for the last time but it is this last attempt, this last temptation to remove the nails from my handiwork that has me stuck in the repetition of an historical context, one that gives hope to the hopeless struggle for freedom, that opens the trap door that closes from the inside and bolts itself open making escape a two way street traveling along the creases of a topographic map of convolutions, of folds in the imaginary thoughts of someone else's brain thinking of me imagining someone else being me somewhere other than here inside my room, inside the enveloped infinity that squeezes its vastness into a single point, a point that sticks to the point, a point that is the point, the point of departure, the point of balance between two lines of thought, one real, the other, The Other and in this corner where these two walls meet I sit and dream of awakening, dream of real happiness that is open to this enclosure and finds a way out by staying put, holding my ground in this electric battle of neutrality, rooted in floatation like the trees and clouds, meeting dreams head on and in the aftermath of these uncommon fractions, in the result of this division, this separation, and in addition to this memory, the subtraction, leaving the earth by digging further into it, escaping the clutches of gravity by NOT flying, by opposing the impossibilities and going deeper into its principle where the colors blast the landscape's breast and mad dashes in the distance form people, people formulating dreams of walking along the purple river where wild beasts sleep on their cold feet and an offspring's fingers pull the earth toward it and shade the opening from the coming heat where the residue of burning desires feeds the future and lights the way back, unlocking the gates and letting me in on a secret, a secret that love tells in its sleep, in its wake, in the dust of its arrival, speaking in tongues, in the cracks and crevices of the peeling wall, the wailing gate, the kneeling tongues in transition with language, movements swaying in the stillness, time alternating its current and on the floor which is the ceiling which is the wall which is definitely the floor, a speck of myself spins like a coin, never committing to this way or that, heads or tails, questioning the answers, turning the corner until the corner rounds the bend and softens the perpendicular that holds my escape in its embrace, holding me up, holding me back, holding me in, holding my tongue, my hands, as it lifts me under and covers me up in a tired shackle that goes limp and lets me go, nowhere, and once I'm there, inside my cell, my self, I circulate the seasons of this body of water, disappearing into the sky and falling back to my knees, my connections to bending, drop by drop wet lips utter the secretions of a single moment and breaks its word in the brittle context of resolution and hurls its splinters against the reentry of comfort and settles on the rainbow of aftermath, the calm of seclusive miscalculation, the frenzy of lying still, arms frozen in the afterglow of torment, folded across my chest, holding sleep captive against its will, against the wall, against my will to remember, to awaken and move on totally incomplete, walking the thin line, tiptoeing through my sentence like a young punctuation mark, marking the time it takes to pause and move on, growing into the spaces left by a breath, the infrequent moments of truth, the silence that speaks louder than words and in the cellular block that fits my skull like a glove, the fingers flex their gripping pain and cover the loneliness with an array of light, colors that spell the nuance of escape and open a multitude of small doors, each a tunnel that amazes my departures, shocks the synapse and leads the following life, like a shadow that walks behind me one moment and pulls me forward in the next, depending on the time of day, the time of night when it disappears into the dark descent of sleep where reflections go inside the silence and dance to an unheard of rhythm, a flip flop that breaks into a cold sweat and cracks its liquid knuckles against an invisible door, crying, "let me out!" "let me in!" and on the opposite wall a clock hangs onto its opening line, "there is no escaping freedom," and so the oxymoron throws this mechanism out the window and watches it return in a split second, a minute, split second generation of timelessness passing itself as it comes to its senses, ticking off the future with its presence of mind, with its past lives that hang out on the circumference and recur each time the big and little hands play with their erection of counter-clockwise ignorance, their fingerless stumps pushing the next moment to its limit, punching the clock, its shadow on the wall, aging my cell until it crumbles, sheds its iron membrane and opens its nucleus to the fluidity of a frictionless world where opposites slide into each other unopposed and objectives never stop cropping up and are never subjected to the screeching halt of boundaries but this fiction has its own reality, its own unnatural laws, its own negative capabilities, its own prism, its own dizzy spectrum of unharnessed freedom, its own body of blood without vessels, without a wall, without the embrace of containment to limit and stop the flow of misguided movement, to put an end to these beginnings that repeat endlessly, going nowhere but somewhere else, without an inkling as to where it began and I'm in there somewhere, in the wide open space of an idea, locked into the infinite confinement of my dreams, a prisoner of freedom, lying on my back, looking up at the sky, the ceiling, a wall in my cubist room, a slab of concrete floating in a misty abstraction, unable to tell if I'm outside or inside, untrained, derailed, misguided, floating up an extreme, my arms flung skyward like a prayer torn from its words with flamboyant strokes of ignorance splashing against the warped edges of the brush, painting myself, painting myself into a corner, painting my room in blue moments that swim in the wing of a flightless bird, hovering underground, skimming the precious stones cast aside by a circle of inconsequence so I swallow my own mishaps and as they are driven into my fingers I make conversation from the broken lines of abandon and plant them upside-down in the sky and later when all is misconstrued I drink a sub-culture of evaporation and two by two my judgment is impaired so while I can't see my way clear to execute the sentence, I do while away the time by scribbling my name on the wall, scratching a misnomer into the stone, the maybe, the might have been, the decor of my next step, the context of my text, the surroundings of a square root, an origin buried in calculation, a mirror, a self portrait, a thoughtful reflection of the future of what has just happened, hung by the clock, a canvas shouting colors and spewing figuration, large black swoops and spirals and loops, my glass face staring out at the inside, the outside of my room staring in through the intermittent solidity of the membrane's bars, the parallel grid too small for me to fit through, but big enough for light, for air, for music, for noise, for conversation, for intercourse, for insects, for fingers, for liquids and all thin dimensions to slip through the boundary, an osmosis of information and food and stimulus licking its way to the nucleus, the center of my gravity, the top of the line, the head of my class, the ceo of my functions, the box within the box, the cell inside the cell, the ceiling of the floor, the wall behind the wall, the me inside of me, the reason behind the dream, the absolute truth, the doubts, the Thomas, the Hill, the inclination to accuse and deny, the absolution and the problem of its solvency all encompassed in the four directions, each in turn, facing the walls and, turning into each other, becoming unbecoming, inch by inch, the true false perspective, a point of view, the view outside an opaque window reflecting the blind spots of an upside down vision, a brainless prediction, the language formed in the mouth a moment before the voice, a dumb forecast, an addiction to the future, of keys to the future, to the escape from my cells, scaling the wall and jumping head first into a lack of color, free to be lifeless, without conviction, an ex-conviction, an excavation, a digging out into the mysterious past, in memory of myself, lying here in the truth, in my room, along side the table that is turning, turning to the familiar, the cells of my wife, my children, my siblings, my parents, locked into the familiar embrace of genetic proximity, of cohorts, of similarity to oneself, running on at the mouth, the sentence, the one track mind running the gamut into the ground, rounding out the extremes, a circumlocution where stillness and movement, freedom and confinement, black and white, right and wrong and left and life and death live happily after life, beside the point, near the end and on top of the situation, fucking me over and over until I beg to differ, to pardon me for living and let me out into the widely closed space of chaos
where I float endlessly in the beginning…”
“So, I re-read chapter 5 in one fell swoop as you suggested, wading through and sometimes sinking in the not-so-free (because payment of attention was required) associations, ultimately washing up on the muddy shore of quasi-understanding and breathless respect for the world of words and feelings you have created,” Harriet said.
YEAH BUT…
CHAPTER SIX
1954-1957
My most elementary recollection was just across the street – PS 134 – the place where words spoke to me for the first time and I was reading for the first time…in fact (and fiction) it was the beginning of a long line of first times … lightheaded comprehension titillated the convolutions, making them go oo and ah with self satisfaction… I could do anything because I could make believe…and I could make believe because I knew better than to know better…Dick and Jane did lots of simple cosmic jumps and skips…arithmetic was magic…things were equal to each other and it did my heart good to figure that out…oh, and did I mention that I could fly?...and I often died from war wounds and uttered my last words…I drove a two wheel bus and made many stops to pick up my tangible invisibility and wish them all a good day as I drove around the block…I smoked punks and flipped cards….I wrestled with Paul Paulsen over the love of Virginia Zimmer while making a point about spin the bottle…I was the super star of the five foot league and a master slap ball pitcher…I folded myself under my school desk for protection…I was big in little league…I played by and with myself …and in a league by myself during the Yankee stoop ball world series… language and music were made in my mouth…a two way communication…each connected to the core, to the foundation of the future and to the conjunction of the past and present…
why do we go on
when we can’t function
what drives us on
and the conjunction
what drives us on
when the juice is gone
and it aint no more fun
and the conjunction
and the conjunction
and the conjunction
and
and
and
and
ego ergo egg
ego ergo egg
ego ergo egg
ego ergo egg
and
and
and
and
why do we go on
when we can’t function
what drives us on
and the conjunction
and the conjunction
“My music began in the basement of my childhood in Hollis, Queens. It was there I DJ'd my own personal Make Believe Ballroom and played all the hits - Beethoven's 5th, The William Tell Overture and the Ballad of Davy Crocket. Slowly I added Plain Jane, Queen of the Hop, Stagger Lee, So Tough and Yakity Yak to the playlist. There were 78 revolutions per minute back in those days. And Victrolas. And a clear sense of an imaginary privacy that allowed for an uninhibited make believe. In about 1957 I began writing my first songs. I wrote them in my head with the noises made in my mouth and enhanced by a kind of reverberation that was created by filling my ears with air, like the moment before a yawn. I used to walk the mile (at least it felt like a mile) to Hebrew School in the dead of Winter jamming my own airwaves with these percussive sounds of
self.”
SOMEWHERE IN THIS TIMEFRAME
IS WHEN MY BOOK OF POMES APPEARED
not out of nowhere but from the tingling sensations that arose whenever a moment revealed its connection to
THE MOMENT
(This Moment)
Poetry is in my blood and vice verses. It supports the body of time with a delicate skeleton of iron phrases joined by the conjunction of truth and fiction. It makes the heart beat. It’s the and between yes and no. It’s a blanket answer that’s a comfortable cover-up. Poetry is the fireplace filled with pillows burning light and heat that is as cool as an epiphany.
(I’m really alive in those moments and in between I muddle through the mud, slowly being the same as I am only slightly different.)
Back then, whenever I felt the need to write a poem it came on as a sudden burst, a shower of earth shattering enlightenment that created shadows of unearthly possibilities…particles colliding in a desperate search for symmetry…transposed from the key of gravity to a stoop of weightless insights percolating in a stereo trance…dark and light dancing…surrounded by a momentous composition, alive inside its essence…and I was caught in the middle of this delight of momentary proportions as the poem revealed itself…
RIGHT NOW 2/2/13 7:13PM:
“I’m a poet
at a loss for words
I’m an artist
without any vision”
I’m deteriorating, dilapidating, losing my substance, moment by moment, inch by inch, muscle by muscle
I’m disappearing into the tangible vagueness
of a cloud that expands as it dissipates
I’m holding on to a rope of smoke
dangling from a definitely precarious certainty
grasping for the last straws
stacked in the corner of a future gasp
(this is how I feel which is not
necessarily the Truth}
“I’m just a little boy
without his mama mommy
and now that I’ve lost
all my origins
all that’s left is life
and it’s so pure and simple”
YEAH BUT…
Chapter 7
1953-1959
In My Basement
Beneath the surface of my childhood, underneath the familiar, the make believe believes…and I’m there to share its belief and partake in its believable task…through the door to the left of the side door, down the thin rickety staircase to the cement womb…a cave with windows level with the earth’s surface, slightly below the vision of the outside world…its own dim world of lonely, damp comfort…beneath the universe, inside the earth….where life begins and ends…I invent my word, create my world, one moment at a time….
in the basement
as metaphor, as time, as underworld, as yin yang, as coal, as oil, as ping pong, as table, as lionel, as rubber army, as bowling ally, as old couch, as make believe ballroom, as west point club, as world within a word, as end all to be all…in that moment
playing
playing trains, playing ping pong, playing records, playing army, playing cadet, playing pin boy, playing alone….suddenly the book case tipped over, the pipe burst and the make believe came tumbling down and time stopped being stopped and once upon a time once again began to tick and tock…moving in circles…
circles
circles of memories, spinning like dead leaves in an autumn wind, circles of cycles that spin their wheels and move nowhere: seasons, life and death, beginnings and ends, each returning to their childhood as they move forward in a circular way…
The world of make believe is the forced belief in your own way of life if you had your own way…then it disappears and the world of believe takes over…and “so it goes,” says Kurt… But this repetition of sameness is different because what is hidden is different.
That’s the way things are in the basement: emptiness, filled with the imagery of a cavernous, gray inner space, bordering on possibility. Here, I could talk out loud unencumbered by drawn conclusions from next door. King of the castle… and when I needed the familiar, I could escape this dungeon of play…up the rickety stairs and through the door to the visible…back home….in plain sight…on a surface of gravity and concrete… above the world that is hidden away…. growing up….
(Things hidden away, self-contained, do not threaten my vision. What I can’t see won’t hurt me unless I imagine seeing it. It’s there, not there, not all there each time it crosses my staggering path.
Whose falter is it when I stumble? Who breaks my rhythm when it mingles with the counterpoint? Who rides the moment at that moment and reigns in the shadows from a pool of light?
I’m there, a part of the magic, a second point of view in the vast clock that returns the favor and circles the right answer. But every now and then, on second thought, I ride the moment up Mt. Childhood and I pull the punches and decide to return. In fact we all take turns, returning.
The question is – when does the narrative begin and the poetry get absorbed? Unconscious efforts document the moment and as they collect on the window they approximate truth. ) (6•3•00)
YEAH BUT…
CHAPTER 8
This existence wasn’t there in my life as a child. It wasn’t in me. But it was around me, hidden beneath my cloak of innocence. Hidden beneath the basement. Hidden from my short sightedness. Hidden in the future.
Which is where I am is now.
(this moment)
REMEMBERING TO REMEMBER
I was born between the legs of two wars. It was a struggle to enter this garden of delight and darkness. There was a lot of pushing and pulling and then a great wind as I popped out of the sea in 1947. Learning how to manage on land took a lot of practice. There was a lot of falling down; a lot of bleeding; a lot of intakes and outcries. There still is.
Walking the time line is quite a balancing act. So I have learned to remain on the edge, in the place I call The Middles. Not here, not there. Sometimes turning right and sometimes turning wrong. Allowing the and between opposites function as my bridge to sanity.
And that’s where I always am when the bridge collapses and I fall back into the watery primacy of not knowing.
That’s where I was when I was 7 years old and I saw my neighbor Jack being taken away in a straight jacket after he had tried to hang himself. That’s where I was when my dog Tiny Tim ran full speed around the dining room table and had a heart attack and died. That’s where I was when that old lady was hit by a bus and flew into the air. That’s where I was when I heard that my friend’s father had been on that plane that crashed into Jamaica Bay while landing at LaGuardia Airport.
That’s where I am almost every day that I breathe in and breathe out. And each time I fall I have to find a way to climb back up into The Middles. I sometimes build a wall around the disbelief and make believe everything is all right. I sometimes write a poem to lift my spirit and carry me back. I sometimes have a drink and blur the lines until they disappear. I sometimes go to sleep and rise with the sun, new and very much the same. I sometimes almost understand what I don’t know for sure.
What is it like to be out in the deep space between two or more, without?
It’s something like being alive. Living is a different story. Being alive is the moment but living is the process, the ongoing going on and on. That’s where memory comes in. It’s the shadow of this process; the light at the beginning of the future. Remembering is the re-collecting of the pins in the map. The gathering of the bread crumbs that lead back home to the original expulsion from the sea. It can take your breath away. It can bring you back to life. It can help you rise to the occasion. It can drown you.
So when I remember my son’s illness, I remember how I had given up the right to ask why. How I had lain down on the couch at 1AM and watched a ministry preach to sleepwalkers like myself. Offering a timeline that did not require balance, just faith. I remember how I was punch drunk from disbelief, how I had fallen from The Middles and was drowning in the sea.
But remembering these feelings are far from having these feelings, which is a good feeling because it is something that is over. It is something that is complete - like history -
like the moment before this one.
I remember my leg shaking on the gas pedal as I drove away. I couldn’t keep it down. It was like my teeth chattering at the opposite end of me. My wife sat beside me in real time but I had already fallen, heart first, into the imaginary sea below. The shaking became gasping. I couldn’t catch my breath because it was flying so fast. How could she have betrayed me?
Then, somewhere in that past I metamorphosed from betrayed to betrayer. In a delusion I made believe that it was make believe and I proceeded into the fantasy without my compass. Every part of me that usually speaks up was smothered under a river of denial. When that unavoidable moment finally came and the bridge collapsed, I was beside myself, drowning.
Looking back over my recollections, it is clear that I am a whole number in an imaginary equation. I am always in the mix, not separate like I think I am. I am part of each memory. I am there, equally creating the atmosphere that eventually bursts and leaves me speechless and shaking. It’s an equation with two equal sides.
So why is it that I always have to remember and relearn each time? Is it because I’m too busy being present to remember. Is it that I need a lot of time before I can comfortably sit back and recollect from the deck of a different consciousness.
Eventually, event by event, rung by rung, I drag my dripping self esteem up the down ladder to a timeline that now sags in the middle from all the stretch marks of its resiliency. The Middles has now become a narrow escape, almost scraping along the ground. And the edge is barely defined. Balancing is still a life force but now includes remembering what has happened.
With that in mind, I keep trying to remember how to remember. Though I often forget, I do remember what I’m forgetting about. When I remember, it’s not the memory that remains, it’s the glow that surrounds it. It’s the enlightenment and the darkness. It’s the gust of wind that inflates transformation. It’s the ups and downs of in and out. It’s the rise and Fall of simultaneity. It’s the frag-mental illness of accumulation. It’s a momentary peace of an eternal wholeness. It’s growing backwards. It’s becoming what became of what is. It’s the poem.
There were many pages ripped from this memoir in order to make room for the memoir to begin.
Oh, now I remember
I Remember Joe Brainard’s I Remember, a novel, innocent form of memoir.
I sort of remember in 1975 meeting Joe Brainard at his loft to discuss the publishing of a selection of his notebook drawings.
I sort of remember Joe being very nice and me feeling like part of the art world.
I sort of remember writing to John Ashbery to ask if he would write an intro to Joe Brainard’s part of the Brainard/Freeman notebooks, Gegenschein 1112, a double issue of Gegenschein.
I sort of remember asking him to hand write the intro because at that time that was my “trademark” as editor - getting work from poets that show their process or their hand.
I sort of remember receiving John Ashbery’s introduction.
I sort of remember deciding with Herm Freeman my “best friend” since Junior High School, which of his notebook drawings we would use for his section.
I sort of remember writing his introduction and using my new pseudonym, Phil Demeyes.
I sort of remember bringing the finished manuscript to a printer in NYC.
I sort of remember that after I dropped off the manuscript to the printer that I “ran away” to Paris to make believe I was a Dadaist and to get away from the middle of my highly emotional separation from Robin.
I sort of remember borrowing $400 from my sister Harriet and her husband Dick, so that I could afford to go.
I sort of remember that when I returned from Paris I expected the Brainard/Freeman Notebooks would be finished and waiting for me to pick up but instead I found the manuscript had been returned because the printer refused to print Brainard’s and Freeman’s “pornographic” drawings of penis’s and I had to find a new printer.
I sort of remember that when I received the finished printed edition I discovered that the first two pages of Herm’s section was actually supposed to be the last two pages of Joe’s section.
I sort of remember printing an erratum.
I sort of remember deciding that the price was to be $3.01 instead of $2.99.
I remember Joe Brainard died of AIDS almost 20 years ago a few days before my birthday
Life
When I stop and think about what it's all about I do come up with some answers, but they don’t help very much.
I think it is safe to say that life is pretty mysterious. And hard.
Life is short. I know that much. That life is short. And that it's important to keep reminding oneself of it. That life is short. Just because it is. I suspect that each of us is going to wake up some morning to suddenly find ourselves old men (or women) without knowing how we got that way. Wondering where it all went. Regretting all the things we didn't do. So I think that the sooner we realize that life is short the better off we are.
Now, to get down to the basics. There are 24 hours a day. There is you and there are other people. The idea is to fill these 24 hours as best one can. With love and fun. Or things that are interesting. Or what have you. Other people are most important. Art is rewarding. Books and movies are good fillers, and the most reliable.
Now you know that life is not so simple as I am making it sound. We are all a bit fucked up, and here lies the problem. To try and get rid of the fucked up parts, so we can just relax and be ourselves. For what time we have left,
Joe said very quietly.
WHICH REMINDS ME…
Chapter 9
It was 1975 ….
I was living in an apartment at 350 East 9th Street. It was post collapse of my childhood dream of family and love. I was living with Robin at 132A MacDougal St after a tumultuous exit from Bowling Green, Ohio and suddenly I had to run away from home…
YEAH BUT…
He lived in a three-room apartment, which was passed on to him by Ralph Simon, an old schoolmate. The rent was $135/mo. He was 28 years old and it was the first time he would be living by himself. Alone, really alone. Of course, he did have his ever-faithful companion/sidekick, Ezra the Chihuahua. He decorated their apartment with an interior design - his own interior - which took the form of an intricate web of string woven across the ceiling…painted red….and he read and read the explosive rhetoric of Dada and Futurism….trying desperately to be “new” (neo)….he found a new name – DemEyes (Demise) – “DemEyes gonna rise again!” – NeoNeo! …lost in the thickness of loss…he made art….he made art as a way of breathing…he wrote manifestoes as a way of being heard…he wrote poems in order to explain the disorder…he drove a taxicab which personified the machine and exemplified the yin yang of sitting in place while moving and being inside and outside simultaneously…he went to Connecticut every weekend to explore and create a music that mirrored the percussive rhythm of his “new” life….he bounced and banged on guitars with a tennis ball while Herm played keyboards as they formed an unlistenable, self indulgent musical expression they called NOYES.
(no/yes)
At this time, the feeling of being was ripe with the images of Paris circa (circus) 1915-23 and CBGB’s became the Cabaret Voltaire…he, along with Ed Kulkowski, ran poetry readings at CBGB’s on Tuesday evenings while the weekends became performance showcases for Patti Smith, Television, Talking Heads, Ramones etc…art, music, poetry, performance merged into a new wave that washed upon the shore of consciousness….and he was there….he exclaimed the Neo Neo Manifesto on the front page of the CBGB Poetry Showcase newsletter but eventually the emotion overtook the motion and after an hysterical outburst in his taxicab…he decided to once again run away from home and visit his fantasy face to face….off to Paris…the third room he occupied in his life on East 9th Street.
PS: I was younger then, than now…
CHAPTER 10
PINS IN THE MAP
an anthology of short memories
These are moments etched into the convolutions of my life. Events that have been stuck to my accumulation forever… these are thin recollections of very substantial occurrences…events that stick out on the trail back….those sharp thick leaves of remembrance that never leave that line of thought that takes you back home…they create the dots, the stars that you connect, a constellation of the image of who you are….. a list of moments that eventually, event by event, become
RIGHT NOW….
(sitting where I usually sit, 10:52pm, 3/2/13)
indelibly invisible,
“MEMORY,
WHAT CAN I MAKE OF IT NOW
THAT MIGHT PLEASE YOU,
THIS LIFE, ALREADY WASTED
AND STILL STREWN WITH
MIRACLES?” Mary said.
aside: I read your memoir straight through yesterday and I was amazed (but of course, I knew it!) by your extraordinarily facile use of language.
That said, several times I was confused by what was happening or where I was in the chronology of our
life. I think this may be because you seem to jump
around in time -- especially at the start. Is all this
new material or did you put in some older stuff too? I'm just wondering. I guess I expected a more
conventional memoir which might take much more
discipline to write. You know I love your writing
and I love this - but I guess my expectation was for
a memoir-memoir.
My Side:
Thanks so much for taking the time to move
through this....it is of course not a "memoir memoir"
....it is, as I wrote on the title page a collage,
an anthology of memories entangled in present thoughts
(thus "a memoir of the next moment")....
I am trying to gather my thoughts
(which is often corroborated by other people's thoughts,
which in some way means I am not alone
and accounts for the quotes from books etc)....
I am looking back in order to move forward...
it is a writing about the "ongoing present"....
you know me too well to expect any "disciplined" writing....
time shifts and jumps, and is collaged with what I was,
what I am in the present, and what I am becoming....
it really is not about what is happening or what has happened
but how what has happened and what is happening
and what will happen are all becoming what is,
which is confusing.....I am placing things I wrote
with things that I am writing because it is
as I have always contended a "uni verse",
my one poem that I have been writing
since 12:10 AM on May 27, 1947
and will end when I do.....right now
it is a way for me to keep going on and on....
3/17/13 - St. Partick’s Day 5:01PM
Today is the day after. Yesterday, his forgettable memoir rose to his occasional occasion
and led to the expected aftermath of additives. Things that don’t add up but make a BIG difference. Silence. His most trusted, oldest acquaintance, MOS (mit out sound). Even now he must couch his overreaching ego and control its impulse to overstate or misconstrue the fantasy. Of course his common sense for moments at a time overrides this charged pursuit and leaves a faint ghost surrounding the true chemistry (usually by adding some chemicals to his own makeup). What difference does it make? It makes all the difference between continuing and abandoning…between then and now…between
yin and yang
and
the knee jerk disconnect from all other possibilities, one of which is
the truth!
which chemicals are responsible for this misspelling
why do they chase me in constant pursuit of my ability
making my day to day havoc crack its surface open
baring my thoughts to the screams of my missing cognition
my loss of words and my dissolving definition
the boundaries that kept my madness confined
are prisoners of the pro and con that balanced the twitch
and kept the jerky movements in their own cells
I was saved by my own complexity
but now in the simple light of no illumination
I cast my shadow and my self as two goners looking for rest
I pursue my self with a vengeance as if I were not me
I break my own laws against the curb
smashing their soft skins into a million zeros
I am nowhere to be seen except in my children
electrons with big eyes piercing my blind nucleus
their own quick elliptical path to the next moment
charges into the future with the velocity of hope
I try to keep the devastation a secret but it leaks out
the aftermath of a sexual equation
a definition breaks out of its prison and it means nothing
a particle leaves the gravity of its center
a chemical excretes a compound that confuses the tissue
I am lost in this myriad of found objectives
I cry out in the silence of my own deaf mutations
in short I am no longer myself
07•30•02
(the inner course of intersection)
Pin 1:
1955, Jack Hedden: tried to hang himself next door to my childhood (how rude)…my daddy had to help cut him down and then the ambulance came as I watched from the sun parlor window and saw him being escorted to the ambulance in a backwards jacket that was tied behind his back….he looked like James Dean to me, exiting one scene to enter another… I tried to pull my childhood over my eyes but this time I couldn’t block the view…I was sick to my stomach and very scared…that night I tossed and turned under my green and white cowboy and Indian blanket…scared to life by a real moment of make believe…
Pin 2:
1954-58, Big Black Ants vs. Little Red Ants vs. spalding or pennsy pinky: I chose the Big Black Ants as my personal responsibility because there were fewer Big Black Ants which gave them the aura of being solitary which is what I was…so my spalding or pennsy pinkie were “atomic bombs” when dropped on the masses of small red ants. I somehow was able to disconnect from the fact that they were living things…they were just toys, props for make believe…and props for my “power”…as one of the members of the all-powerful human race – I am now disgraced by that thoughtless make believe but then I thought nothing of it…innocence was my defense….
The Battle of the Ants
by Henry David Thoreau
One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed
two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black,
fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but
struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was sur-
prised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a
duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against
the black, and frequently two red ones to one black.
The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my woodyard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecinewar; the red republicans on the one hand, the black imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked in each other’s embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noon- day prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out. The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vise to his adversary’s front, and through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as I saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members. They fought with more pertinacity than bulldogs. Neither manifested the least disposition to retreat. It was evident that their battle-cry was “Conquer or die.” In the meanwhile there came along a single red ant on the hillside of this valley, evidently full of excitement, who either had dispatched his foe, or had not yet taken part in the battle; probably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs; whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it.
Or perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, and had
now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus.
He saw this unequal combat from afar,— for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red,—he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants; then, watching his opportunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, and commenced his operations near the root of his right fore leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members; and so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attraction had been invented which put all other locks and cements to shame. I should not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden.
Concord fight! Two killed on the patriot’s side, and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why here every ant was a Buttrick,—“Fire, for God’s sake fire!”—and thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer.
There was not one hireling there. I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at least.
I took up the chip on which the three I have particularly described were strug-
gling, carried it into my house, and placed it under a tumbler on my window-sill, in
order to see the issue. Holding a microscope to the first-mentioned red ant, I saw that,
though he was assiduously gnawing at the near fore leg of his enemy, having severed
his remaining feeler, his own breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had
there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose breastplate was apparently too thick for
him to pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer’s eyes shone with ferocity
such as war only could excite. They struggled half an hour longer under the tumbler,
and when I looked again the black soldier had severed the heads of his foes from their
bodies, and the still living heads were hanging on either side of him like ghastly
trophies at his saddle-bow, still apparently as firmly fastened as ever, and he was
endeavoring with feeble struggles, being without feelers and with only the remnant
of a leg, and I know not how many other wounds, to divest himself of them; which
at length, after half an hour more, he accomplished. I raised the glass, and he went
off over the window-sill in that crippled state. Whether he finally survived that com-
bat, and spent the remainder of his days in some Hôtel des Invalides, I do not know;
but I thought that his industry would not be worth much thereafter. I never learned
which party was victorious, nor the cause of the war; but I felt for the rest of that day
as if I had had my feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage of a human battle before my door…
(the world is falling apart at the seams
or
does it just seem like it’s falling apart?)
Chapter 11
“This new place is recognizably foreign. It is a new world that fits perfectly over the old one. I am very young at being old. I am very new at being older. I am me in another time and all my understanding is leading me nowhere in particular. This particular place, nowhere, is very different than the nowhere of my youth. This one is full of endings and disbeliefs and finalities that go on forever,” he said looking straight into the mirror. (07•08•03)
Pin#3:
1963 and beyond, The Beatles took me by surprise and held me there for ever after… First laid eyes on them in a newsreel on Channel 2 News with Walter Cronkite…A fantastic fantasy of giant proportions x 4… Irreverent, respectful, super teens injecting clever possibilities and daring misadventures in the name of exploration and growth… Music to my teenage ears!...There, by myself, at Shea Stadium, toy-sized figurines doing no wrong under an umbrella of screams and adoration…for me, each record was the next thing….the 4 personalities combined was who I was…but the one was John…so when I awoke 12•08•80 and he had disappeared, I cried. I still cry…someone comes, someone goes…that’s how time marches on, on and on John, on and on…Those days of being dazed by the possibilities, gone…my immortal youth, dying to know….
Oh we constantly wonder why
nobody knows
where or when we must die
and where do we go
it just goes to show
that we’re so tired of that
we just want to know
what’s what and if we must leave
please tell us when we must go
we constantly bemoan our loss
so why can’t we stay
why must we pay
why can’t we just stay on the course
and if we must go
please tell us what day
cause we’re so sick of this
we just want to know
when our time is up
please tell us when we must go
when must we leave?
where do we go?
what should we believe?
we’re just dying to know
“But, tocks the clock, that the backside of the face contains the works. I looked at my watch. “Watch this,” I said to the second hand. The Time was now! I pulled the timepiece from my wrist and smashed it against the concrete. Time was finally released from its pieces. It was now free from the convoluted brain that had conceived of the machinery. Time could now roam the relative calm of a timeless, ongoing present, free from the confines of gears, faces, hands and tick tocks,” the mirror reflected.
“continuity was never my strong suit, it’s too much work because it is artificial and doesn’t reflect the actual sequence and consequence of real life…at least my real life”
YEAH BUT….
Mt. Childhood, before its disappearance, was immortal. It offered timeless revelations and peaks of joy and despair. Every now and then I would climb to the top, my heart in my throat trying to emerge from the dull percussion that would inconstantly beat it down. There, in that moment, I was not only alone, I was all there was.
I am at my best when I, alone, in the expectation of someone’s arrival, feel safe. I sit in the middle of this puddle of diction, contrary to my silence, and wait for my revelations to break tradition and embrace my ideas. This holds my inevitable dissipation in abeyance and comforts my snoring conscience. It ignores my earthly complaints and rises above the cloudy pressure of atmosphere. It gives this gnawing, insubstantial substance a meaning beyond definition, and for the moment, immortality exists.
These singular epiphanies mount up as does Mt. Childhood and these thick, invisible manifestations of dreams, support the very foundation of the future collapse.
Problems are not about power but duration. Magic does tip its hat but its greetings are short and virtually to the point of no return. The itch has another foothold and rarely disappears. It tends to vibrate and glow in the heat of an argument and shows its tendency for discomfort in the blink of an eye.
There is nowhere to turn except to the return of timidity, importance and reverence. To reach back for these things the sky gets in the way and the stoop is too high to rest on. After all, bending is not always a sign of flexibility, it sometimes means you’re broken.
So, in this condition, with no name but mine, I pointedly sit on the corner of a market waiting for the training period to end. I have come to recognize that comfort hinges on closed doors. Things hidden away, self-contained, don’t threaten my vision. What I can’t see can’t scare me unless I can imagine seeing it contained in my self. This gives each moment an edge that cuts through the wholeness. It is there, not there, not all there each time it comes up in conversation.
Who breaks this rhythm when it commingles with counterpoint? Who rides the moment at the moment of inception? Who reigns in the shadows from this pool of light? I am the answer. It is my particular presence as a particle of the magic, as a witness to the multiple choice. I am, for the moment, a second point of view in the vast clock that returns favors and circles the right answer.
(On second thought) Every now and then I ride the moment up Mt. Childhood and make a conscious effort to return. Unconscious efforts then document these moments and as they collect on the window, they approximate truth. In fact, we all take returns leading the chaos back into an orderly stream of consciousness.
The real questions lie in the black river where the poetry is imbedded, tucked in and absorbed. That’s where the narrative begins to take shape.
and
“Enough paraphrasing,” I say to myself as I walk through a closed door.
“But that is what makes my narrow point of view so expansive,” I answer myself as I continue going through the motions. “Reflection. Light jumping off shards of memory. Facets of opposition criss-crossing the boundaries of reason. Here is where I tell your story along side my own…the whole story. “
When you were born, I was born. There are no two ways about it, there are two ways about it. We are all each other, a bouquet of inklings that blossom into massive waterways of electricity and chemistry. We are alive because of others and the dead are eaten by our food. My mother is the Mother and so is yours. Everything that happens is incidental and beside the point. We travel next to each other and behind the times. We are historically personified and our present to each other is the future!
Breathe in, breathe out, breathless or gasping we are terminally eternal with second chances ticking off our primary concerns. The clock returns to its circumlocution without our presence and time goes by without a hitch. We are forever in debt to circumstance, that round faced youth who jumps out from each corner we paint ourselves into.
Our lives run parallel to a perpendicular wall. When we hit it we fall down and crawl back home. Eventually, in retrospect, our ancestors eat our chemicals and we are suddenly back in the picture.
Of course this is poetry not narration. Knowing that my I really cannot comprehend this causes tremors in Mt. Childhood’s stature. It literally makes mountains out of molehills and volcanoes out of thin air. This collapse of discernment allows for forgone conclusions to penetrate my spiritual armor and I become frightened of all shadows including my own. You are always next to me every now and then at different times.
What kind of time frame is this? What kind of narrative talks you into hugging the present imperfect before you can even catch your breath? The answer always lies in the next moment and that’s what keeps us going….
CHAPTER 12
huh?
huh is an old soul
a remnant of grunt
used to bide your time
“the sky is broken
and the blue is oozing out”
“huh?”
a question
of not paying attention
hearing only the distant
whisper of words
and the sword
of preoccupation
a response
that begs to differ
and questions
the need to answer
huh?
I said
“and questions
the need to answer”
PIN #4:
1956 Little League, I was brought up from the minors. Playing with Hank on Jamaica Savings…small but saavy….last of the 6th, losing 3-2 against King Kullen, 2 out and bases loaded…I was asked to pinch hit, crouch and face Stepanic , the fastest pitcher in the league….when I crouched, the strike zone was very small…so I was sent up to walk in a run….first pitch…BALL!...next pitch STEERIKE!....next pitch BALL!...next pitch BALL!...next pitch STEERIKE!...3 and 2….the windup and the pitch….it was going to be a Strike, so I had to swing to protect the plate…there was a crack of the bat…I swung so late the ball veered off towards right field…my dad was umpiring the first base line…the ball landed and my Dad signaled: FAIR!...I ran and ended up on 2nd base…two runs scored…I had won the game for Jamaica Savings and more important, I won it for Hank, my brother, who was the pitcher of record…the team ran towards me on second base…I was scared….but soon realized that the impossible had happened…and my Dad showed me the ball with the white dust of the foul line marked on the ball which proved that it really was fair (not unfairly called by my own flesh and blood)…that year Hank won the MVP of the league and two years later I received the same…I lived a charmed childhood…the best years of my life!....
PIN#5:
1954 Evan Hecht’s Birthday Party, we were playing “cowboy” outside. Running around the periphery of the house…I reached the back and slowly inched up to look around the corner…I saw Evan at the front of the house, gun drawn…he lifted it to pull the trigger, hammer the cap and shoot me dead…but before he could pull the trigger I lifted my lasso, circled it around my head and threw the circle toward Evan’s gun…a miracle!...the lasso circled his gun hand… I pulled it tight and he was forced to drop the gun…just like all the movies I had seen…only this was real life!...a true Miracle!...which is why I have always believed in God*…
*I still have a mixed up concept of God that is based in make believe…a collective spirit that can influence the outcome of a personal conflict just because you believe/make believe it has that power and then it does…then along comes a form like the Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial….larger than life and as tangible as stone…becoming my inner vision of God as a child after having walked into the presence of that work of art which penetrated my 10 year old convolutions and became my go to as an image of something more than what is, something greater than being human…and I still believe in this make believe…like in 1954, lying in bed beneath Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra, with a small transistor radio under my pillow tuned to 1010 Wins, playing We Belong Together by Robert and Johnny …
I pulled back my thumb, cocked it, and I declared that if I “fired” it, the world would come to an end…I was never sure if it was an end to the world or just an end to my world…I’m 65 years old and I still cannot fire a cocked thumb…and never will until, perhaps that moment just before my last breath…and then…only God knows!
Chapter 13
The present tenseness is my world surrounded by a dense fog of condensation dripping down the windshield of memory, breaking the impact with a whisper of comfort, making the collision reverse the indentation with a poem filled with air. No one but you understands. No one but you can pull me from the wreckage of old age and the wind of fire that wreaks havoc on the structure that I imagine will protect me. Who are you?
The despicable world glows in its own darkness, spotlighting the emptiness like a star outlining its dark glasses with black lines – cloisonné without the church, stained glass without the stain – a clear view of nothing and a fear of running out of time, burning out at both ends. The moon waxing and waning, coming and going, again and again, two ends meeting in the shadows, hiding from the truth, making deals to continue to end and begin once upon a time……
The day begins like every day begins – slightly different – so slight, in fact, that for the past 5 years it seems like one long day – which it really is – because the segmentality that caused the human psyche to divide the one long day into moments arose on the back of sleep’s mysterious darkness.
So when I awoke on Tuesday, it was really any day and what happened could have happened to anyone and nothing much happened. The temperature changed and the wind changed direction. The sky turned gray and the sun closed its eye. The world proceeded to self destruct and the future gagged on its memories…..(12•12•07)
As I awoke I saw the smoke, the remnants of what was and what will occur. I am in them, making them, mine. I draw the boundaries around the events and (if I can handle it) I pick them up and carry them home on my aching back. When I bend a little, they slide off and present themselves as petit memories – small enough to fit into my pocket – a corner formed by the intersection of circles and the missing links of circumlocution…(10•17•10)
AM I THAT INSIGNIFICANT?
AABEZ AND GRANDO
(there’s a lot of in between here!)
Where do I stand as I sit here – wandering? So much has dissolved right behind my eyes. Dreams have awoken, spent some time, received some change and then went back to sleep in a bed of rosy moments, some of which have arisen to occasions and have returned to the earthly delights of nocturnal hope. They have all become vague seeds of missed and flowering possibilities. As I dig up the underground, inklings of what could have been still tickle my ordinary fancy and depress my inclination to climb this mounting endgame in good spirit.
What is next is what is. That’s how sequence established its reputation. One thing after another – not necessarily in that order. In fact the order of the day is happenstance, circumstance and substance…thoughts, events and memories that take turns being next… they keep time with the zig-zag rhythm that dances along the lines of a cyclical nature…
IS THERE ANY SUCH TIME AS RIGHT NOW?
(NOW!..oops too late – always a moment too late)
THE STORY OF WAS, IS AND WILL BE
Once upon a time, time met its matches and struck up a conversation sometime in the future of the present that just passed and lit the fire of doubt…
Who am I?
Who I was.
Who was I?
Who I will become.
At any given moment I am almost me.
and rest assured
I don’t rest assured
CHAPTER 14
One sided conversation between me, myself and I
and fragments of Eugene Ionesco
“How about you, Eugene?” I asked.
“All that I know now, I have known since the age of six or seven, the ‘age of reason’…There is a golden age: the age of childhood, of ignorance; as soon as one knows one is going to die, childhood is over. Then I believe most human beings forget what they have understood, recover another sort of childhood that, for some of them, for a very few, can last all their lives. It is not a true childhood but a kind of forgetting. Desires and anxieties are there, preventing you from having access to the essential truth,” he replied.
“But even without this essential truth you have managed to accomplish so much that skirts the truth, enhances the nothingness and touches so much of the human condition!”
“ Yes, because if I tell these private thoughts of mine, it is because I know they are not mine alone, and practically everyone is trying to say the same things and that the writer is only a man who says out loud what other people think or whisper.”
“What I secretly believe I believe every one secretly believes,” I said quoting myself.
“Even if I thought that what I am confessing is not a universal confession but the expression of an individual experience, I should confess it all the same in the hope of being cured or of finding relief,” Eugene said and then continued. “ Ever since I was fifteen, that’s to say from that moment when I lost all that was left me of my childhood, from the moment when I ceased to be aware of the present and knew only the past hurrying into the future, that’s to say into the abyss, ever since I became fully conscious of time I have felt old and I have wanted to live,” he said, pouring himself a drink.
I poured a drink as well. “Perhaps the way to play this endgame is to continually begin again,” I mused. “Let’s start from the beginning.”
Eugene took a sip of his drink and said, “The thought of the end fills me with anguish and fury. I have never been really happy except when drunk. Unfortunately alcohol destroys memory and I have only retained blurred recollections of my moments of euphoria. Life is unhappiness. That does not prevent me from preferring life to death, existence to non-existence, because I am not sure of being once I have ceased to exist. Existence being the only mode of being I know, I cling to this existence, for I cannot, alas, imagine any mode of being apart from existence.”
I gulped my drink and poured myself another and said, “I, too, look to inebriation as an entry point. And in that dim light of memory we all see the soft edge of age flicker and our vision round off the numbers to the nearest wish. We are our own children growing back into a womb of images. We emerge in a touching photograph retouched by the fingers of our isolation. We find our selves scattered like a giddy scribble playing with the idea of playing, drawing conclusions on an etch a sketch, a tabula rasa filled with lines of poetry, a full house inside a house of cards, a silken connection to a web of proximity. Others who remember almost the same things embrace this fragility and give it strength. In the end we go home adding something to our subtraction.”
Eugene smiled. “No, no, I want to go on living. To keep on living. I want the company of living men. In a word, I want both to live and to die. To be dead, and yet alive, like everyone else. I live like a dead man,” he said quite naturally and then he burst out laughing as he realized the paradox.
“You know why so many people are ready to die?...because they’re not prepared to live, and I am one of them,” I said. “But who is this “I am” I always refer to? Am I who I am? Am I an integral part of me? Or am I a multitude of me’s and I’s? Sometimes me and sometimes them…can I ever really be myself?”
“I ask similar questions. Are my desires myself, am I made up of them , or have they been superimposed on me from elsewhere, and in that case what is the ‘I’ that receives them? I am what I think, what I desire, what I feel. But in that case are epidemics part of the people they attack, does my sickness create me or do I create my sickness, and what is this ‘I’ that thinks it thinks, that may perhaps be nothing at all and yet, being nothing, thinks it thinks? ‘I’ am at a crossroads, a meeting place for universal forces and wills of whose essential nature I shall forever remain ignorant. But let us accept empirical awareness. I assume that ‘I’ exist and that I am myself.”
“Eugene, at this point as ‘myself’ I must tell you that you’ve never met me before but ‘I’ did meet you…in a long distance memory. It was 1978 and my friend Herm and ‘I’ were eating dinner at the Spring Street Bar in Soho, NYC. I looked out the window and saw a figure that looked like Allen Ginsberg (he was universally recognizable because he was often in the public eye) and he was talking to a small man wearing what looked like a beret. I asked the waiter if it was, in fact, Allen Ginsberg and he said yes and then I asked if he knew who it was that he was talking to…and he said he was talking to Eugene Ionesco…Imagine that! He said he was talking to you!...you, just being you…right before my eyes…”
IT BEGINS AND ENDS AND BEGINS AGAIN TO END
WITH LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT
THAT IS MADE IN THE MOUTH
(“Is poetry necessary? I know that those who shout loudest against it are actually preparing a comfortable perfection for it; they call it the Future Hygienic.
People envisage the (ever-impending) annihilation of art. Here they are looking for a more art-like art. Hygiene becomes mygod mygod purity.
Must we no longer believe in words? Since when do they express the contrary of what the organ that utters them thinks and wants?* Herein lies the great secret:
Thought is made in the mouth,”
wrote Tristan Tzara/Sami Rosenstock)
CHAPTER 15
PIN #6:
Drowning in my own sorrow as my life withdrew from the main stream and R and I separated….I couldn’t tread water which accounts for my aquaphobic love of land which can be can be traced back directly to 1957, Zach’s Bay, a body of water directly across from Jones Beach… I went with a friend and his mother. Then without using my head to think ahead I swam out to the ropes. When I arrived at the ropes I was so tired that I had to grasp those ropes for a tangible, secure rest stop, like the side of a pool. But I soon discovered that this tangibility was flexible, not firm and I began to go down. I was drowning and had to let go and turn and to try to swim back to the shore…to life. I was halfway back when I physically couldn’t go on…but without being able to tread water and nothing to hold on, there was nothing (exactly nothing) to hold me up so I went down again, but not without a fight….I flailed and screamed, screamed for help, went down, gasped, came up for air and screamed again. A lifeguard (now guarding my life) swam out to me, grabbed me around my shoulders and swam me back to shore. He snatched me from death’s liquid door…This drowning and near death experience became my baptism into life’s fragility and its reliance on chance for continuance.
*******
RIGHT NOW…NO, NOW…NO, NOW etc
(04•09•13•10:45-11:06 PM
That’s how it is now…I tend to feel the ups and downs very deeply….I’ve settled on a basic rhythm that bounces back and flip flops…a back beat to the front I put on…a broken record that skips to my lunacy…every now and then I remember what I believe and for a moment I feel very good…so occasionally I have a conviction and I act like I mean it…perhaps
(perhaps because of the nature of the word perhaps, I am definitely unsure about the constant variations I encounter moment to moment, time after time and so, presently I have a hard time believing in what I make believe…but back then I was willing to suspend disbelief and act as if there was no time like the present!
PIN#7
When there was no time like the present, it wasn’t now, but it was back then. Now and again I felt like the universe whispered secrets to me. It was now and then that I spoke out loud to the passengers on my 2-wheel Q2 bus route and they listened and responded in my head as my script had directed. I had many voices then, one for each character who had a part. I stopped at the traffic light post on Hollis Avenue and 204th Street (“tfffff tchhhh” sound of the air brakes) and held on as my passengers got on and off. I would greet them all and wish them all a good day as I made the “ch ch ch ch” sound of the coin machine counter that accepted their 15 cent fare. As I continued along Hollis Avenue to the second stop at the corner of 205th Street and Hollis Ave, I was traveling along the inroads of my own imagined world, stopping to pick up real imaginings that were traveling through my personal universe of fact and fiction…
CHAPTER 16
PIN# 8-12
My girfriends and wives tickled my fantasies beginning in 2nd grade (1955) when I was 8 years old and living in Hollis where my childhood lived. I was already holding my own and dreaming of a certain femme fatal with short blond hair who smelled deliciously sweet, a smell that my olefactories had remembered from a Valentine card I had received. In this dream she was to become my wife and lo and behold, in real life just a few rows away from me, sat a reasonable facsimile (or just simile) of this dream in Miss Lurin’s class. Her name was Virginia Zimmer. And I longed for her in ways that I could only imagine. We wrote notes to each other and passed them along the underground deskway. “I like you. Do you like me?” I also dreamed of Miss Lurin, our young first year teacher who wore skirts that showed her rather thick calves on legs that stood for and supported a thin curvaceous body. In the yard during recess I showed off my punch ball prowess in order to win them both over. I won over Virginia and to celebrate we went to a matinee at the Island Theatre one Sunday afternoon -my first date- but in the purview of elderly matrons with flashlights. We had Bon Bons and JuJuBees. Needless to say Miss Lurin thought I was adorable but couldn’t commit to anything more. Then there was the test if I was a lover or fighter and I proved that I was both (at least for a moment). It was at a party and a friendly game of spin the bottle. Virginia spun the bottle and it stopped at a point between Clark Paulson and me. Clark tried to claim the prize and I had to stop him. We wrestled with our desires and ourselves and I resorted to my trademark move – a headlock that always made everyone give when asked, “give?” It was a moment of chivalry, which has stuck to my nostalgia.
My next romantic period was in a different neighborhood and three different lifetimes (1960-1975) and included three distinct and very important romances – Sherry, Greta and Robin. This romantic education coincided with my academic education that included VanWyck Junior High School (Sherry), Jamaica High School (Greta) and Queens College (Robin).
PIN # 9
In 1961 Sherry was in 9th grade, a year ahead of me (my first “older woman”). She was non-academic but quite experienced and knowledgeable in the mysterious chemistry between boys and girls. I learned a lot from just being in her presence and she added a lot to my reputation, which was already quite reputable. I was, in those days, quite a good student, a respected athlete and the president of the school. This was what I brought to the relationship in exchange for learning the movements necessary to satisfy the needs of young romance. The most memorable and representative moments include my tossing and turning on July 4th 1962, sweating and green with jealousy because I was too young to be out celebrating and somehow Sherry wasn’t too young. I stayed awake listening through my open window for some sounds of her return. I never did hear them before my pounding heart and I fell sleep. Then there was voluptuous Sherry in Bermuda shorts lying on top of me; rubbing me the right way as my hands, like a conductor, directed the music to its climax! Ahhh Sherry, Sherry baby! She was the definition of voluptuous if such a thing has definition. Then she left for High School and I was left back in my own life….
songs of myself
Dream lover
come softly to me
I’m just a lonely teenager
and you’re the queen of the hop
Don’t be cruel
just turn me loose
because it’s so tough
to only make believe
The endless sleep
is pushing too hard
maybe baby
all I have to do is dream
but will you love me tomorrow?
…I interrupt this memorable reflection
for what is happening right now…
Mayhem in April
(04•15•13)
the ides of April
taxation with little
or no representation
but it’s my time
and time’s up
give or take a memory
one captured one dead
bleeding in a boat
unearthed in a terra plot
wrapped in a plastic lock down
hidden from certainty
curled up in nightmares
dying for closure
open to miracles
but it’s not just him
or unjust him
it’s the glitch
in natural law
(thinking you know)
at the finish line
where mayhem begins
“the time is always now
this time is so confused
the bombs are always there
it’s to be time to be diffused
I know that time is short
we think it takes more than thought
“action” just say the word
this time is so absurd”
(“The Time is Always Now”)
CHAPTER 17
THE BOUNDARY HUNTER
on the outside looking out for me, I spy I, trying to find the one thing I have in common with myself
in the interim the outer rim of the boundary of chaos scribbles a message to clean up the inner sanctum
it should rock with works of articulation but today they sleep tucked into the bedrock of a dreamy bedlam
suddenly I am here where I am here right here deep inside the inner ear where I am
everywhere receiving direction from the chaos of silent sounds
placing myself inside the magnetic field that attracts the traction of gravity that holds me in place with a hand that moves across the universe and paints my pain to a “T”
in the corner of my eye sits an inexact opposite of my duplicate another appendage of old age and wisdom
added to this subtraction is an approximate truth that declares itself independent from the attachment to the whole truth and nothing
but the truth insists and persists and swims in the river on the periphery of the outer rim
I catch its drift every now and then I float upstream of consciousness
burning at both ends half awake, half awake sleeping in the conjunction of the caboose and the loco motive of the train of thought a crazy reason to be reasonable
I think I can
I think I can
I think therefore I can
both ideas skywrite their impression of this identical indentation
each finger points to a choice each choice points to love’s suspended animation and belief
in this tunnel of delight mishaps ricochet off the dark particles of the misshapen transition bouncing off the walls until the onslaught offers a compromise
light with a heavy consequence
it is a sequence of black ands and yellow commas that hook each sentence to its counterpoint
joining the punishment to my future release
and in the map of interplay I zig-zag back and forth crossing the tracks and playing the role of hobo
I am way off track a wonderer who wanders into the tunnel that is inside the tunnel
finding a deep depression that is at the root of all totality - birth
(why do I always end up at the beginning?)
I start over stopping under the bridge understanding the umbrella’s black arc angel
that diverts the compounding downfall into a puddle at my feet
my reflection mirrors this deflection
I am askew awkward and slanted toward my next step
when it splashes I awaken to my sleepy cover-up
my eyes water expressing the excess sorrow with a flowing stoppage choking movement by clutching
the stiff neck of disappointment with fingers that refuse to move
yet in the natural flow things move in spite of stillness
they naturally change places with the moment before the next move
the choice is no choice or no choice
it just is as unjust as is is, or can be
events eventually explode on the scene like the short breath of autonomy
breathe in breathe out give in give out give up
collapse, relapse and then lapse into a comma
a pause between me and the next me my periodic double a look alike who likes looking like me but being someone else elsewhere
a mirror image with a life of its own
he wakes up much later than me, without guilt, without the unfamiliar dreams that cloud my skin, without the need for baptism each morning to wash away the film
starring in a picture that projects another picture another star that shoots through another vast darkness that shines in the theatre of my absurdity
in the end it is curtains for me
backstage I undress my grievances and return to my place an older man in a new costume
he (by the way he is also me) disappears into the future and waits in the wings for my next return
at that speck of equilibrium one here one there
life and death appears in the mouth of the hunter
as the hunter announces his prize
there is movement at the edges of death
life hangs in the balance of teeth and jaw
it opens as I stand between these precursors of memories
the clouds with silver linings tremble and reflect the cyclone, the earthquake, the wars, the poverty
I count my lucky stars and then subtract the inevitable
the aftermath is empty space where choices once frolicked and possibilities were once possible
the human dereliction of higher purpose shakes hands and makes friends with this tragedy it sends messages into the future in a secret remorse code that floats inside each movement of air, breath, wind and whispers quietly weaving the last boundary on earth
I criss-cross this pause into another closed field that is bound on one side by disappearance and on the other by my double’s eventual re-appearance
and I wait in me for me, myself and I
(05•27•2008)
YEAH BUT…
CHAPTER 18
“Honestly – no, not honestly but deep down - I’m just a good person who is afraid of not being good…”
PIN# 13 connected to PIN#14
In 1955 on one of our “few and far between” family trips in the light green Dodge Coronet we stopped at a motel in Maine, on our way to Quebec Canada…right behind the motel was a little brook. In the early morning I awoke very early (maybe 5 am), got dressed and walked out into what felt like history…it was a very cool, quiet New England morning of maybe 45 degrees and my warm and solitary world of make believe took hold and chilled me with excitement…I was alone in colonial times…I talked to the rest of my platoon who were camped along the brook and assured them that we would come out of this alive and sure enough in a few hours we were back on our way to Quebec…(even Right Now when I find myself in this particular temperature in the early morning hours as the sun begins to yawn (like when I walk Kandinsky) I find myself once again standing beside that brook in Maine while my parents, brother and sister sleep and I, alone, bravely lift the curtain on dawn….) ….
2 days later in a park in Quebec I was witness to, and participant in, a magic show of sorts, a show of non-verbal communication. It began as I spoke in gestures to a little French boy I met in the park. The boy had a 12” silver spike, which we both took turns tossing into the soft ground. In the end I asked him in our universal language of “humanness”, to trade me the spike for a few baseball cards…he agreed without saying a word and we parted, both basking in the aura of that mystery of human connectedness that is universal and not separated by words. I kept that spike throughout my childhood, a solid memory of human nature’s familial connections in spite of our selves…
then that evening after our super-natural boat trip under the Falls we again saw the majesty of Niagara Falls all lit up at night in its delightful negligee of color lights and spirits, as the restaurant at the Chateau Frontenac spun around and around…
Pin #14: and as time’s circumlocution often exemplifies, in 1970 I found myself once again in the Chateau Frontenac on my honeymoon looking for Robin who was hiding from me and our marriage behind the curtains in our room. This was an ominous portent of the larger game of hide and seek that we played for the next 5 years until we couldn’t find each other at all….Right Now Robin just revealed to me that she never wanted to be married and had locked herself in the bathroom on the day of our Big Jewish wedding. Her mother told her through the bathroom door that “everyone goes through these feelings”. But Robin didn’t go through them, she stood behind them like the curtains and hid herself from me. More later……
“I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Walt hopefully declared.
(I guess we all feel that way, when writing all alone for no one and everyone in the make believe ballroom)
Back and forth, back and forth
inclined to climb the mountain of infinite inclinations
over and over again and again retracing the image
back and forth, back and forth
between the imaginary beginnings
and the real make believe
as if all the changes repeat after me
exchanging glances in the mirror
now and then
05•12•13: I laid in bed this morning and just before the sun rose – it dawned on me – how I’ve been a pretender all my life pretending to be tender and afraid not to be….this is part of the art of admittance (letting me in to the other side) which has appeared throughout my life…turning my attention to the other me of who I am - the black sun in a solarized system of black and white…the dark, enlightened thoughts of a good bad boy…
Wolf Larson entered the picture. “We were talking about this yesterday,” he said. “I held that life was a ferment, a yeasty something which devoured life that it might live, and that living was merely successful piggishness.”
The Platters replied:
Oh-oh, yes I'm the great pretender
Pretending that I'm doing well
My need is such I pretend too much
I'm lonely but no one can tell
Oh-oh, yes I'm the great pretender
Adrift in a world of my own
I've played the game but to my real shame
You've left me to grieve all alone
Too real is this feeling of make-believe
Too real when I feel what my heart can't conceal
Yes, I'm the great pretender
Just laughin' and gay like a clown
I seem to be what I'm not, you see
I'm wearing my heart like a crown
Pretending that you're still around
Too real is this feeling of make-believe
Too real when I feel what my heart can't conceal
Yes, I'm the great pretender
Just laughin' and gay like a clown
I seem to be what I'm not, you see
I'm wearing my heart like a crown
Pretending that you're still around
YEAH BUT…..
I am still around. Still pre-tending what needs to be tended to. Making headway towards reconciliation between me, myself and I but still a distance from the shoreline between liquids and solids…still neither here or there….this or that…still still and moving on….toward the end of the line…period….punktuation:
to begin with not a thing bothers me no
punktuation running on at the mouth the
river babbles hiding behind the synergy
oxidizes and releases the sentence with
periodic mad dashes
that is the language that pieces together
the splinters the broken features the broken
if it begins to clear up the debris stick
close to the pack protect your neck from
direct inuendos that refer to specifics
in general
but never before this insistent headache
breaks through its petty thumping and lies
with the best of them trying to outdo the
punch line
I have become the object and the subject
is not me nor am I to be subjected to this
again
I can tell you that being me is not being me
and certainly not you the way you treat me
and its reflection on you on our shoulders
the way we are to each other
don't panic I am talking to my voice not you
no I am not I am talking to you no not exactly
talking
it is more like separating the continuity
breaking down the excess into a sex act
of a kind thought I'd introduce that to wake up
the river sleeping in its own bed and lying
in it to itself as a way of being current
like me my friend without a child outside
of me to insist at 4 A.M. I am a live act
of more of more to come in time more will
will come much more than this
now this is more like it the way it rests
and goes on and on until period that's it
period until after words when the imaginary
pictures the real thing imagines the next
and so on down
the line ends…,
CHAPTER 19
05 • 23 • 13
He just can’t be trusted to judge the whole world RIGHT NOW because, at the moment, he doesn’t even like himself. But of course that can change in a split second and that change can capture his present life like a wild animal and put it in a vast cage that is so vast that it reminds him of freedom. When captured he’s always hoping that something he believes in will last his lifetime and not just disappear only later to reappear as the very same belief…but it is in that in between time, between the yin and yang, in that being in the mean time, that his spirit suffocates in the slow circuitous suffering and muddy logic of viscous cycles…then, as he begins to waste away, he suddenly remembers what he believes and for a brief moment he is back where he belongs…this usually occurs when he is writing or imagining he is writing…The fact is that he always seems to be waiting for the bus and at the same time, he’s driving it…
Pin # 10: My high school was a high point in Queens and my life. From 1961-1965 I walked up the hill to its Gothic Drive and structure. Each day I took the subway ride (E or F) from Van Wyck Blvd to 168th Street and took the long walk up and down the hill each way. (On cold, late winter afternoons I rewarded myself on my return with a Chow Chow Cup egg roll just as I climbed out of the underground and into the Briarwood twilight.) Once inside the gothic structure (Jamaica High School), I continued to continue my campaign of make believe – in all areas – social, athletic and academic. But in reality I maintained a solid mediocrity which revealed itself on real tests such as SAT’s and Regents. So underneath all my pseudo success, which was real, I remained scared and my remains shuddered at the responsibility of such imaginary proportions – Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh yes, I’m the Great Pretender!
“He appeared so self assured but surely he was uncertain. He was invisibly vulnerable because he lacked the protective armor of self- confidence….
“oversized, insufficient fat balloon, are you ever satisfied with your fill?”
“…He was a performer who acted the part of being good at being good. It was under these circumstances and false impressions that he was introduced to Greta. He instantly fell in love with her dark, mysterious, foreign, Greek aura and the photo of her in a blue two piece bathing suit.”
Σ ‘αγαπώ
S ‘agapó̱
LONG DAY’S JOURNAL
11/27/07
I ALMOST KNOW SOMETHING
12/12/07
The present tenseness is my world surrounded by a dense fog of condensation dripping down the windshield of memory, breaking the impact with a whisper of comfort, making the collision reverse the indentation with a poem filled with air. No one but you understands. No one but you can pull me from the wreckage of old age and the wind of fire that wreaks havoc on the structure that I imagine will protect me. Who are you?
The despicable world glows in its own darkness, spotlighting the emptiness like a star outlining its dark glasses with black lines – cloisonné without the church, stained glass without the stain – a clear view of nothing and a fear of running out of time, burning out at both ends. The moon waxing and waning, coming and going, again and again, two ends meeting in the shadows, hiding from the truth, making deals to continue to end and begin once upon a time……
7/1/08
The day begins like every day begins – slightly different – so slight, in fact, that for the past 5 years it seems like one long day – which it really is – because the segmentality that caused the human psyche to divide the one long day into moments arose on the back of sleep’s mysterious darkness.
So when I awoke on Tuesday, it was really any day and what happened could have happened to anyone and nothing much happened. The temperature changed and the wind changed direction. The sky turned gray and the sun closed its eye. The world proceeded to self destruct and the future gagged on its memories…..
10/17/10
As I awoke I saw the smoke, the remnants of what was and what will occur. I am in them, making them, mine. I draw the boundaries around the events and (if I can handle it) I pick them up and carry them home on my aching back. When I bend a little, they slide off and present themselves as petit memories – small enough to fit into my pocket – a corner formed by the intersection of circles and the missing links of circumlocution…
9/22/09
Here I am in Washington Square
enclosed by the absence of a circle
of friends
pinpointing,
painting, permitting
the essence of loneliness
to geometrically trigger
the progression
of the mathematics of zero
multiplying the echo the echo
the non repetitive echo
that reverberates in
the empty space
left inside my future
I hear the silence
like it was tomorrow
it is warm
full of the emptiness
of neon existence
the opposite reflection of life’s presence
born out of nothing
in particular
the nothing inside
an empty cell
full of prisoners
escaping the inevitable
blood bath of
contrary synonyms
“I sit like a broken circle
inside an open ended square”
11/15/08
either
aw
some
or ful
?
I reap
what I rip
not what I sew
1/16/09
be here then
looking at what happened
is a way of being present
behind every moment
lies the truth
what then?
Then Buddhists
turn their backs on
what is coming
they look to the space
behind the space
where the universe began
a reflection on an opaque mirror
9/21/10-10/17/10
much of this landslide comes from the end of the line
each piece of soil, half asleep, bundled in mud
slides into the whole and disappears
beneath the obvious loss
flowers still percolate
and punch their way out
in the wake of this inconclusive dream
a yawning mixture of catastrophe and strophe
produces the bare bones of fleshy splinters
a barrage of undeniable miscarriages of just ice
and under the scrutiny of the brightest star
the third dimension melts
into a mutiny of flat puddles
filled with a dry sense of humor
and juicy misconceptions
sleep, perchance to wake up
in between then and now
in the cracks and crevices of holistic yearnings
doubt, like serious clouds, floods the blues
with puffy intrusions of malpractice
a vision seriously blurred by age and intoxication
right before our eyes
the path becomes a scribbled contingency
a wobbling short future in between now and then
occasionally seeing I to I, but often lying
down
to sleep, perchance to wake up
Today is later. And I am still sleeping. Last night dreaming of blood pouring out from a hole in my fortitude. Uneasy, I tossed and laid flat against my spine. With every vision, every concocted scenario, my wounds throbbed and my broken heart beat me down. The noise of uneasiness made my eyes jump open and my legs spin to the floor. I then began my daily sleep walk.
waiting for the next block of time
to drop from the sky of the ground
spit out by the earthly sun
like a bolt of split seconds
dirty little perhapses
march into my daze
like needles in a haystack
pricking the full blown balloons
of conversation
letters fall to the earth like leaves
the rake of progression
piles up the language on the front lawn
dawn breaks and lights
a fire under the executed sentence
of a life of sleep
perchance to wake up
in the mean time
the average clock
has no time to stop
the day is dark
as if the crack of dawn
allowed an inky black dusk
to leak through
the break of day
and the nighttime sun
shot out shadows of dark light
I can hardly see my way
through it all
a sleepwalk
of unseen proportions….
8/9/10
it’s obvious
that I haven’t
met the woman
of my dreams
because if I had
she’d be here
beside me
right now
10/9/10
“my life as me
has been quite familiar,”
he said
“no time to change my mind
no time to reform my tendencies
or reform the shape I’m in
in no time”
just as is, quite unjust and quiet
but pleasantly surprised
by expectation
“just as I expected – unjust!”
fairness is an intense carnival
complete with
clowns and big tops
with midget ideas
at the bottom of it all
pouring out of a vehicle
(that is me)
one by one by one by one –
…….forever
CHAPTER 20
My Best Friends
Each “period” of my growing up (down, sideways, around) which is still growing ((not still but still moving) ) by leaps and boundless regression, has had its best friends. What is a best friend? In my unfriendly opinion, it is a co-whore…did I say co-whore?....I meant cohort…no, I did mean co-whore and so on…someone who sometimes supports your movements which is many more times than anyone else….and sometimes questions those movements to assert an individuality which is still paying attention while everyone else just ignores them….but other wise ( one of many wise possibilities), it is just a smooth transition from one movement to another…like a dancer caught in an imaginary purview of the choreographer….but there are those who go beyond and behind the present and make their presence oddly, even more present….each in their own time….these are the Ones for me:
Alan, Evan, Lenny and Wally
and Geoffrey, Stevie,
Billy and Herm
and Herm
and Gérard, Hab, Richard, Harriet, Paul, Gary, Davey and Herm
ASIDE:
RECIPE FOR A GREAT MOMENT
1. I’m all alone
2. I’m expecting someone to arrive who I am looking forward to seeing
3. The kids are quiet (in the very best imagined moment- they are reading)
4. I am altered in some way (out of my mind and inspired)
5. It’s 5 O’clock on a Spring-like Sunday, summer afternoon just like it is at this moment, except that it’s Saturday, 12:35…6•22•13
6. The cars are whooshing by making the sound of ocean waves
7. Good food is in the near future
8. I’m writing poetry
9. the lawn is mowed
(7•3•01)
yeah but…now
those moments are few and far between
the momentous tomorrows that
I am to be
me, myself and I…
and become the third person
A Gemini with a narrator…
A pair with one of a kind otherness…
a singular double vision…
a multiplicity of one…
the shadow of two mirrors…
and
What does the shadow’s mouth say?
Victor Hugo sings:
"You must know that everything has its law, its goal, its
road;
That from the star to the atom, immensity listens
to itself;
That everything has a consciousness inside the
creation;
. . .
Everything speaks;
The air which passes, the seabird which sails;
Each blade of grass, flower, germ and element.
Did you imagine the universe differently?
...
Everything in the universe says something to someone;
One thought fills with superb tumult.
God didn't make any sound without mixing a verb in it;
Everything speaks.
And now, man, do you know why everything speaks?
Listen.
It is because wind, waves, flames, trees, reeds, rocks ---
Everything is alive."
as I am…..waiting…..
“…you must have a little patience. I have undertaken, you see, to write not only my life, but my opinions also; hoping and expecting that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of mortal I am, by the one, would give you a better relish for the other: As you proceed farther with me, the slight acquaintance, which is now beginning betwixt us, will grow familiarity; and that, unless one of us in fault, will terminate in friendship. –O diem praeclarum! – Oh, what a beautiful day! - then nothing which has touched me will be thought trifling in its nature, or tedious in its telling. Therefore my dear friend and companion, if you should think me somewhat sparing of my narrative on my first setting out – bear with me- and let me go on and tell my story in my own way: - if I should seem now and then to trifle upon the road, - or should sometimes put on a fool’s cap with a bell in it, for a moment or two as we pass along, - don’t fly off, - but rather courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside; - and as we jog along, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short do anything, - only keep your temper,” said Tristram.
“I have been bearing the brunt of your birth since 1964 when Mr Asnis assigned the impossible task of reading your account and then writing our response. But Herm and I couldn’t find the way in or out of your fantastic opinions, so we just created our own tongue in cheek parody complete with empty black pages. We hoped that our clever display would override our ignorance. It was our first experience with outrageous expression and I must say it has stuck with me ever since. I have never forgotten to wind the clock before insertion. But I never could quite be patient enough to finish the job. Even though, oddly, I have always held it in the greatest esteem, a model of great unreadable literature which I often return to, to see if I am now wise enough and/or patient enough to actually finish it…but it has occurred to me that possibly your life parallels my own and we are living along side each other which is why I can’t seem to get far enough ahead to be able to look back on it and read your mind…then again, maybe it just means that your story ends when mine ends,” I said. “How avant-garde of you!” I continued.
“It was a hard thing to undo this knot.
The rainbow shines, but only in the thought
Of him that looks. Yet not in that alone,
For who makes rainbows by invention?
And many standing round a waterfall
See one bow each, yet not the same to all,
But each a hand's breadth further than the next.
The sun on falling waters writes the text
Which yet is in the eye or in the thought.
It was a hard thing to undo this knot,” Gerard said
(born 169 years ago today) 07•28•13
CHAPTER 21
(This piece first appeared in PERIODS, selected writings 1972-1987 and was written within and around a very intense long moment (still, ongoing, alternately), which had attacked my childish faith in sitcom reality. It was a moment where mystery and mishap were simultaneously born within a miracle. The Package is about the miracle and the mishap. It’s a story that is about itself. It took its shape from me, a being in Stuyvesant Park, in the shadow of the Friends Seminary and School. I sat on a bench while Tristan slept in his stroller. We were part of the circular pathway. The old man with a sailor cap was in the park. The sparrows were ever present. I was wrapped in a reverie of romantic expectation. Here I was being a father. Something I had dreamed of since 1960. Of course the dream did not include circumstance and so Tristan’s poetic injustice was unexpected and painful but it was accepted as part of my story. I am the father of Tristan’s life no matter what matter takes shape. Being a father was, like poetry, part of the messages that were scrawled on my tabula rasa. And now the two, poetry and fatherhood, were meeting for the first time in the light of day. For the moment I was complete and that’s when The Package appeared.
“All of his writings are about his life because they are each a snapshot of the moment in which he is writing and includes all the preceding moments plus the momentous future, the and. Like a long tail, this accumulation, this string of incidents and coincidence, help to balance the imbalances, and even the score so that the now seems just and the then just a pin in the map.”
YEAH BUT….
PERIOD,
CHAPTER 22
I’m so far gone, I’ve gone too far. So I needn’t turn around because the arc of my dismay is solidly displaying itself in an august way and a new arc is being built for all my accumulated twos: up and down, in and out, good and bad, yes and no, top and bottom, positive and negative and not to forget the old “one two punch” – around and around, the one two that adheres to the question of one or the other and pulls them into the same orbit, the same circumlocution, the one that makes the world go round and the opposition positively give in to up and out. The two arcs will join to become the circumference of my life!
My memoir must turn this corner because RIGHT NOW I don’t really want to remember anything. Like the pseudo wrestler who can’t quite get physical.…like all these fragmental totalities connecting for the time being, just in time to march along the two arcs carrying bits and pieces of the complete story, climbing up the gang plank of constant variations entering the bon voyage of forgetfulness and remembrance…
…and believe you me you don’t want to be in the middle of the two that is being severed by punctuating the balloon of separate issues and popping all the questions that parachute from the dis-integration…
RIGHT NOW (7:50 PM, 08:25:13)
I am staying on the sidelines
beside the point
on the periphery that circumvents the arc angels’
intentions to undermine my undercoat of armor.
Circumstance is now unraveling the union, the ionization of adherence to vows which very simply began in 1979 at the NYC Justice of the Peace at City Hall witnessed by Herm and Phyllis and followed by dinner at Pete’s Tavern (where O’Henry used to write his short stories) and then a short visit to a porn film which quickly sent Bitty and I home to 111 3rd Avenue, Apt 12C to consume the matrimony and consummate the very union which is now dissolving right before our eyes….
The time line jiggles and drifts… tomorrow is yesterday and today is between yesterday and tomorrow. This ping pong aura surrounds the present and makes me dizzy.
I’m on the forefront of being… (behind the times)….
I think I’m losing it which actually means I might be gaining something….the divine cut, the divorce court, divorce cuts right into the romantic contraption that I built on my dreamy genetic makeup that makes me up to be who I think I am – and RIGHT NOW (6:34 pm 9 • 08 • 13) as it collapses, I ooze between the cracks into a puddle of disbelief – on my own like I’ve always been…
a broken heart is living inside of me
it’s ticking like a broken clock
broken dreams are trying to hide in me
between a soft place and a rock
the cracked mirror
reflects my consciousness
the sharp pieces pierce my eyes
the clock ticks
and strikes a midnight chord in me
the end result is that I’m barely alive
what it says is never what it means
how it feels is never how it seems
what it does is never what it did
who it is is never who will be
a broken heart is beating inside of me
it lies so much it’s hard to believe
a broken heart is living inside of me
this broken heart makes it hard to breathe
what it says is never what it means
how it feels is never how it seems
what it does is never what was done
who it is is never who it was
my broken heart is never delightful
it’s always there glowing in the dark
the wisdom aches but it’s always insightful
that in the dark there is still a spark
what it says is never what it means
how it feels is never how it seems
what it does is never what it did
what it was is never what will be
a broken heart is living inside of me
a broken heart is living inside of me
a broken heart is living inside of me
a broken heart is living inside of me
CHAPTER 23
It’s about time (that) I become delusional…If things were different, things would be different…
PIN#15: It all began in 1978 when I had convinced my father to support my vision of a performance loft at 291-93 7th avenue, 10th floor, between 27-28th streets, across from FIT, in Chelsea. I was driving a taxi cab for Ann Service and in an extreme state of inspiration, following in the footsteps of the past avant-garde, back to my future vision….The space was 3000 square feet of art brut with a skylight and a fur vault. It had to be created from scratch, itching to make a difference in time. (in 1975 I had returned from an academise with an MFA in poetry and with Robin who had already broken into my romantic vision and broke my heart but still remained my wife. Don’t get me wrong, we both were wrong and too young to boot. Anyway that was in 1975 and this is 3 years later in a brand new PERIOD, - 1975-1978 is another PIN entirely which I will stick to later…)
In the 1970’s, performance lofts were the oceanic engine of the new wave and were percolating with a multiplex of art disciplines that morphed and coalesced into a uni verse of creation. Robin and I had already gotten a divorce. I had lived on
East 9th Street for a year. I had my breakdown, I created my new persona (Phil Demeyes (Demise)). I went to Paris, visited my DADA and returned in search of a stage to perform my newfound religion – neo neo do do – My search ended with this raw, 3000 square foot space which became my sin-a-gogue, my chapel of quiet ambition and loud desperation. My dad allowed me to have this head-in-the-clouds’ dream, which was antithetical to his real life style but right in line with his hidden desires. Robin (who was just becoming a friend) introduced me to Jeffrey Lohn, an amazing, eccentric artist who made his living constructing and plumbing and deconstructing art. This raw space needed everything: a bathroom, a kitchen, heat, walls and a bedroom. Jeffrey was a master of very bare essentials and created the skeleton of a living space within a vast space of possibilities and the GEGENSCHEIN VAUDEVILLE PLACENTER was born.
MY LIFE INSIDE THE PLACENTER WAS A WOMB OF IMAGINED POSSIBILITY
AND
LOUD DESPERATION
I SHARED THE SPACE WITH GRACE, KNOWN TO ALL AS TCHOUKI,
a minister’s daughter with a highly evolved, singular spirit dotted with pure, dreamy pauses of consciousness. She stood naked in front of the “space” heater each morning after her baptizing shower, moving rhythmically from side to side in a state of warm meditation. She worked as an artist’s model and made beautiful Sumi-E paintings at the KoHo School of Sumi-E on MacDougal Street. We met at CBGB’s at a reading I was giving entitled “Minimal Tone Poems” (yell out “OH” then hit the G note, yell out “O”, then hit the D note (Oh God!) ). At the time I was living on E.9th Street and transitioning to the Placenter. I eventually asked Tchouki to join me at the Placenter and for 2 years we lived happily ever before – in a literal and figurative theatre of
the absurd….
Living a life of loud desperation
Giving it out while I’m holding it in
Living up to their expectations
Looking real fat but I feel real thin
But you know if you don’t cry out
No one will ever find out what’s different
But you know if you don’t cry out
No one will ever fly out of indifference
Living a life of configurations
Drawing in conclusions in my head
Leaving lots of indentations
Can’t figure out if I’m alive or dead
But you know if you don’t cry out
No one will ever find out what’s different
But you know if you don’t cry out
No one will ever fly out of indifference
Living a life of permutations
Everything changes the moment I think
I can still get some inspiration
But it don’t float long before it sinks
But you know if you don’t cry out
No one will ever find out what’s different
But you know if you don’t cry out
No one will ever fly out of indifference
Living a life of exasperation
Trying real hard to make it real soft
Giving that all of my attention
But you can’t get in on if you can’t get it off
But you know if you don’t cry out
No one will ever find out what’s different
But you know if you don’t cry out
No one will ever fly out of indifference
CHAPTER 24
AHHHKAFKAAAH
seeing different things or seeing the same things differently
“…Only in the rarest of cases have I forsaken this borderland between solitude and community, indeed it's there that I have settled, even more than in solitude itself.
Franz Kafka (born 3 July, 1883; died 3 June, 1924), pictured above in a 1906 photograph
The man in the short black jacket was “K”. He was drinking a glass of milk. I had a glass of scotch and a chip on my shoulder. He wants to not talk in a talkative way…through private moments…me too…
“…In the three months of Gregor’s life as an insect, his door is for him the emblem of the borderland between solitude and community which is where I also reside” K said in almost a whisper.
“Then, we’re neighbors, K. I live on the borderline but mine is of opposites, between the truth and the truth. All my life I’ve sat precariously in between, balancing my act and pre-tending to my garden of earthly delights and darkness. It’s where the Humpty Dumpty in me long sat before he gave in to cracking up (and down). It’s the “and” between yes and no, the moment between night and day, between me, myself and I, between their life and my death. It’s the door that separates guilt from innocence. It’s being alone and part of a family. It’s where the edge of meaning lies and tells the truth. But this edge still has the stress of falling this way or that. It’s painful to split the difference. Un happiness is always hovering, like an and, between each conclusion. It’s the inhale to the exhale, the ebb to the flow, the complete illusion of balance on the wobbly path to imbalance…”
“I have never understood how it is possible for almost everyone who writes to objectify his sufferings in the very midst of undergoing them; thus I, for example, in the midst of my unhappiness, in all likelihood with my head still smarting from unhappiness, sit down and write to someone: I am unhappy. Yes, I can even go beyond that and with as many flourishes as I have the talent for, all of which seem to have nothing to do with my unhappiness, ring simple, or contrapuntal, or a whole orchestration of changes on my theme. And it is not a lie, and it does not still my pain; it is simply a merciful surplus of strength at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being and plainly exhausted all my strength,” K said and then coughed..
I took a sip of my drink and then a deep breath.
“And I often walk (write) through my unhappiness by reaching into my Yang and pulling out the sunshine that is hidden in the dark. And I, too, know that it’s not a lie, it’s just not true for me in that moment and I’m using its possibility as a way out. The strength I use actually emanates from the unhappiness itself. The unhappiness seems to be my driving force, driving me crazy, these days. In a way it also encompasses (gives direction to) the leftover clarity that is buried in a fog of reminiscence that helps lift me out from the blur and into an alternative to suffering…in other words I often use my darkness as a way into enlightenment….”
K looked directly into my eyes, attaching his vision to mine.
“The infinite feeling continues to be as infinite in words as it was in the heart. What is clear within is bound to become so in words as well. This is why one need never worry about language, but at sight of words may often worry about oneself. After all, who knows within himself how things really are with him?
This tempestuous or floundering or morass-like inner self is what we really are,
but by the secret process by which words are forced out of us, our self-knowledge is brought to light, and though it may still be veiled, yet it is there before us, wonderful or terrible to behold,” K said.
“It is both,” I said. “Words are the plural of swords. Mightier than both. Sharp points of order chiseled by definition that approximate the meaning of what we feel. Some in chaos and some in order to organize the dispersion. It becomes only possible to know both sides of how things really are when we are inside ourselves. It usually boils down to one thing and its opposite. These secrets are illustrated by the figures of speech that language provides as pictures, which in turn are worth a thousand words. Though we may not recognize all the darkness that has been brought to light, it is still a sight for sore eyes as well as for the vision that is soaring through the whole morass….these blocks, these stones, these defined and worthless abstractions embody the intangible, invisible bodies that are the only means to describe the things that we can’t express…..”
K and I looked at each other and smiled. We were both almost Jewish, almost happy, almost in despair, almost wise, almost feeble, almost awake, almost asleep, almost alive….almost almost…but most of all, almost ourselves….
“Ok, K, I’ve concluded your unfinished trial that is now finished. Your character has been stabbed in the heart of all that matters. Of course my trial continues and although the door to natural law remains open to me, poetic justice is blinded by the scaly skin of my teeth, and I sit and wait for the verdict. The unfinished, raw would of “I would have lived differently” leaves my foundation prone to chipping away, stains and decay. I never properly covered up and protected my incapacities and just left them exposed to the elements – to the ele-mental inabilities that have always stalked my shadowy confidence and informed my ignorance. I’m feeling these things more acutely now and not sure that I can go on.” (11•2•13)
“Poor, poor dearest;… once the load (the ardor I write with! How the inkspots fly!) is on the cart, I am all right; I delight in cracking the whip and am a man of importance; but once it falls off the cart (which cannot be foreseen, prevented, or concealed), as it did yesterday and today, then it feels excessively heavy for my pitiful shoulders; all I want to do then is abandon everything and dig my grave on the spot. After all, there can be no more beautiful spot to die in, no spot more worthy of total despair, than one's own novel ‘memoir’.”
CHAPTER 25
(tidbit): In 1956 while riding on my Raleigh two wheeler, along the thin path between two points (our house and Mrs. Waterson’s) my recently found balance gave way and my right hand scraped along the shingles, opening a small, bloody canyon along the inner wall of my pinky. That canyon became a scar, an indelible memory that has lived within me (with me and in me) for almost 60 years. It is a tangible something that I have added to my inherited presence, proof that I did exist and still do, I think.
now where was I?
I was just beginning my self-annihilation at SUNY Buffalo New York. It was the Fall 1965 and my first time away from my established persona…a foreigner in a very foreign place where no one knew Phil Smith (especially me) …I was beside myself, a scared, lonely performer beside an ex-master of pseudo success …I was blinded by my own high expectations that were sticking their needles into my ego’s eye (I)…
I lived in the Allenhurst garden apartments sharing two rooms with 3 strangers. We were located more than a mile from the center of UB’s universe….
it seemed like every day
it was Buffalo cold and Buffalo gray…
Life became abstracted. I wasn’t myself or I was one of my other selves but either way, my usual performance was pulled out from inside me and I was left twitching in a foreign land. I hardly went to classes and I hardly made my bed or did my laundry. I was homeless. But because of expectations, I had to pretend and act like “I meant to do this”. Slowly I did what I always do when afraid of being caught for who I really am, I began to attack myself. Slowly eating away the walls of my resistance, I began to bleed…
But before that fully took shape and in the meantime, I began a new performance partially created by a consciousness suffering from a loss of blood. Part of my punishment was that I was broken in half by love and jealousy about having to leave Greta in New York. “There’s no way she will continue to love me if I’m not there,” I thought to myselves.
When she arrived in Buffalo for homecoming weekend we stayed in a motel. I remember very little of that weekend but I do remember borrowing one of my roommates’ car to drive us all to a club somewhere on the outskirts of Buffalo. It was snowing. I didn’t know where I was going and I had never driven a car before (except for those antique cars at Freedom Land when I was 10 years old). I was so scared that I could almost feel my self, eating away at my self. The cold gray of Buffalo became my aura, surrounding my new life of dying to go home…
When Greta left I was beside myself and neither one of me could stop the bleeding that had begun for real…
I finally had to give in, cave in…drink barium…light up inside…show my true colors (bright red)…be diagnosed….drink paregoric acid
(The principal active ingredient in Paregoric is powdered opium. In the United States the formula for Paregoric, U.S.P. is tincture of opium 40 ml, anise oil 4 ml, benzoic acid 4 g, camphor 4 g, glycerin 40 ml, alcohol 450 ml, purified water 450 ml, diluted alcohol to 1000 ml, and contains the equivalent of 0.4 mg/ml of anhydrous morphine; one ounce of paregoric contains 129.6 mg (2 grains) of powdered opium, or the equivalent of 13 mg of anhydrous morphine. The average adult dose is 4 ml by mouth which corresponds to 16 mg of opium, or 1.6 mg of anhydrous morphine.)…
Then I called home, admitted that I was wasting away and then prepared myself for a failure’s home coming….
YEAH BUT
WHO CARES?
(and why should they?)
CHAPTER 26
PIN #16: Two pins stick in my vague memory of Buffalo. The first was my mime performance in the student union. …For some unknown reason (none I can remember, except Paregoric Acid and blood loss)) I found myself in the student union wearing a ski mask that both hid and exposed my disturbing expression of pain and disillusion. Music was playing…(perhaps even “We Can Work It Out” which I remember was my favorite song of that time and comes to mind whenever I think of my few months in Buffalo)…I moved from couch to couch miming a dance of diminishing returns. It was not me being me. My audience acknowledged and reacted to the performance and allowed me to play out my ongoing disappearance. I left the building as an anonymous presence and returned to my life.
Dodes Ka-Den… Dodes Ka-Den… Dodes KaDen…Dodes Ka-Den Dodes Ka-Des Dodes Ka-Den Ka-Den Dodes Ka-Des Dodes Ka-Den Ka-Den Dodes Ka-Des Dodes Ka-Den Ka-Den Dodes Ka-Des Dodes Ka-Den Ka-Den………
(the train of connection between the billions of simultaneous lives struggling for balance within the yin yang universe of separation and disparate similarity ….)
PIN #17: And the second was my friendship with a University librarian who was my first “gay” friend. I don’t remember how we met or his name but he adopted me and my crisis and took us into his life. He probably loved me and though, very scared of the oddity of our relationship, I consciously blocked its reality and just blindly followed its path. He invited me to his apartment for some chicken soup and though his interest in a 19 year old boy (he was probably 35) felt very odd to me, I accepted. He was, in fact, very kind and never made any attempt to take advantage of my weakened state. He truly cared that I was wasting away and did what he could to help keep me from disappearing. And on that final day that I was to return home, he drove me to the airport and helped me onto the plane. We embraced and said goodbye. Just another memory (for both of us) that has faded but still sticks to my being like a stitch in my shroud of my continuance…
CHAPTER 27
ALMOST THE NEW YEAR, THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS 12/26/13
looking back on 7 years of itching to move forward and how I feel RIGHT NOW!
“So since I find myself in the Garden of Enchantment and Disenchantment, of Earthly Delights and Darkness, the windows of opportunity open and close simultaneously and the story begins (again):
Once upon a time eternity was a seed planted in space.
The earth fertilized that moment and gave birth to now…
(transition is next to Godliness – and what follows is what comes next)…
When all is said and done, silence speaks,
and Nature listens with all its heart to the circumstance of beginnings….
THE TRUE NATURE OF NATURE IS A PEACEFUL BATTLEFIELD, one scream of pain for each scream of joy
There is never a moment where this tension loses its snap
where the silence is long enough for the sound of tenderness to vibrate
We are constantly at odds trying to get even
There is no space to close the gap
and yet
the closest we ever get to being close is the closest we ever get to being
The mountains that grow in the wake of our sleep are highly charged
insurmountable depths
You never give me the time to be timeless
You never give me the space to be close
and yet
the closest we ever get to being close is the closest we ever get to being
We always find time on our hands to be away from each other
and we like it
Yet something draws us back into the picture
Some frame of mind taking a deep breath and accepting
that
the closest we ever get to being close is the closest we ever get to being
p
h
o
t
o
s
b
y
z
a
n
e
CHAPTER 28
THE TRUE STORY OF EB AND FLO
part 1
Eb was a reflux of the tide toward the sea, a low point in a pointless lifetime. Flo was his feminine counterpart, a condition or rhythm of forward movement and renewed advance. They completed each other as they opposed each other. Cause and effect causing the affectation of subtraction and/or addition.
Eb pulled on his attachment to movement and Flo frolicked and licked his strength until it snapped forward. One idea acting, causing another idea to oppose it by reacting with equal opposition.
Eb and Flo lived on the edge of the next things. They made love by separating. They each had soft spots that they touched, spoke of and then retracted. Their relationship was buoyant with a girlish intuition afloat between the falling and rising up, precariously situated on the cusp of cause and effect, waiting for the next attraction to repel them and hold them at bay.
When Eb was a young verb his actions spoke louder than his dreams. Flo’s recurring nightmare of returning to the shoreline’s demarcation kept her tears moist while being dragged into an ocean of general relativity. She survived the push and pull with aplomb. Eb, on the other hand, kept clawing at the past where next things of little consequence gave him hope. He was comfortable lying in wait for Flo’s coaxing tug. They each held tightly to the comforting notion that they will always end up where they began, waiting for the cause to move them into action.
(Anything that affects (causes) an effect is, effectively, and affectionately, a factor of that effect.)
Eb and Flo are factors in each other’s lives.
PART 2
“Who Am I Who I Am.” Eb asked and answered. “And I retract that statement at the same time.”
“Where do you think you’re going?”
I’m not thinking of going, I’m going,” Eb replied as he went.
Back and forth. Back and forth. Going in circles. Moving through amazing puzzles. Always returning to ground zero. Rock bottom. Never entering sometime because the moment moves on the moment it appears.
Eb is dizzy. Flo takes back everything she said about him. She cries a river that goes up and down stream keeping pace with the alternative universes that keep things in balance. Nothing is exact because the moment it becomes something, it becomes something else and that becomes what exactitude means – momentarily precise…precisely in the changing moment…neither here nor there
both places at once:
Eb is in the moment and at the moment, he is in the next moment with Flo.
“ We deserve each other like an overlap. We cover for each other with our own forms of energy. We tug at each other’s heart strings, plucking an arrhythmic dance choreographed by our inter-actions and skipping beats,” Flo spoke into the mirror.
Eb only heard the echo returning from its source.
to be or not to be
(continued)
huh?
CHAPTER 29
to be…
continued…
When I returned home from my cold absence, Dr. Rappaport observed that I was bleeding to death and immediately prescribed a cortisone drip to coat the open sores and put the fire out. Greta visited me in the hospital and I tore my heart out. I was not myself. Ever again.
01•20•12
Dear Phil,
When we were so young and so vulnerable, we met. I believe that you loved me with a purity of heart. I was a mere 15 years old with so many hopes and dreams, but also with many wounds from an upbringing that carried many tragedies. I was searching for the healing of those wounds without understanding it all. I could not function in a committed relationship with a man, even one who loved me with a pure heart. I was carrying too much baggage.
It has been said that wounded people wound people. I have found that to be true. I have been wounded by other wounded people and I have wounded others. I sense in my heart that while we were still so young, so fragile and so vulnerable, I wounded you. It was first love. You had so many hopes and dreams for us to be together. I was about to embark on a long journey of healing that could not have included anyone else. I sense that I brought you pain and confusion.
I want to ask you to forgive me for hurting your young soul....perhaps leaving some scars. I could have been much kinder, even if I was setting out on a journey that would not include you. I could have treated you better, and been more grateful for the good you had invested into my life, but I was unable to. I was too sick in my soul to return good for good.
It is also true that healed people heal people. It is in this spirit that I write to you. When I sought you out and visited you in 1983 or thereabouts, I was at the beginning of an amazingly wonderful turning in my life. A powerful encounter with our Creator and His perfect love cast out all my fears and pain. He brought the healing, the joy, the peace and everything that I had been seeking for so long. It was supernatural, not religious. Powerful, not passive. Transcendent, not temporal. I was completely transformed. You said that it sounds like I am at peace. Yes, truly I have made peace with my Maker and am resting in His Eternal Shalom.
We don't always have the opportunity to make things right that were done wrong through our own human ignorance and failings. After so many long years, I want to be able to take this opportunity to do that. I want to say that I am very sorry for every unkind word I may have spoken to you, for every action that may have caused you pain. I was so insensitive. I want to bless you, your wife and family and believe with you for the very best in your lives, for destiny to unfold.
Thank you for reading these words from my heart, Phil. May He provide all that you need to be healed in body, soul and spirit, in Yeshua's Name.
In His Love,
Greta
Dear Greta,
I read your beautiful words and understood even without being able to clearly remember that long ago....some things began to re-form in my mind's eye (I) and I did feel what you were saying....life is little more than a string of moments....my short time with you was a very meaningful experience on my journey....you and I were who we were within the confusing transition of who we were dreaming of becoming...and we were each trying to "grow"....we acted and reacted.....I did love you....and when you disappeared it had a great effect on me at the time....but the "fault" was in me, not you...my over-sized insufficient ego....so I did what I tend to do, I attacked myself.....
Greta, I really do appreciate your sensitivity and your feelings after all these years...you have certainly become enlightened and I accept your need for a kind of absolution....If I have the power to do that, I absolutely, without equivocation, and with the warmest of feeling, give it....as for me, I would not change any of the events in my life...they have all added up to my uni-verse, my one poem that I have lived and continue to live...you will always be a part of it....
Thank you for your blessings....I am a strong believer in faith and goodness, though the world constantly tests that faith....your blessings will make a difference.....and I send you mine......
with my love and respect,
Phil
Eventually the drip worked and would continue to work if I was a “good boy” and stayed away from adolescent rites of passage…but I was not a good boy….I was a weak and scared little boy trying to return to my past life….which only existed in memory…
I was, in essence, swimming in raw essence. I was essentially reborn.
“life is a zig zag not linear…
it goes back and forth not straight ahead….
it goes back and forth at the same speed
which keeps the present at the center…
an ongoing present that includes then
and now and then, now….
there seems to be
or not to be
any logical sequence
because time is circular
and con-sequences
often impose their illogical sequence
by popping up for no reason,”
he tried to get in edgewise.
yeah but….
“Sometimes a wide abyss separates Tuesday from Wednesday, but twenty-six years may pass in a moment. Time is no straight line, but rather a labyrinth, and if you press yourself against the wall, at the right spot, you
can hear the hurrying steps and the voices. You can hear yourself walking
past on the other side,” Tomas said from inside his blue house.
Friedrich’s mustache twitched.
“There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, (that is who the two are on either side of the wall)
the one fearful of intuition, the other scornful of abstraction;
the latter as irrational as the former is inartistic. Both desire to rule over life: the former knowing how to meet the most pressing needs with foresight, intelligence, and regularity, the latter, as an “over-joyous hero,” by not seeing those needs and regarding life as real only when it feigns semblance and beauty,”
he said.
EBB AND FLO WEIGHED IN. “WHAT IS TOMORROW BUT A BRIEF MOMENT BEYOND THIS ONE? THEN AGAIN ITS JUST A MEMORY WATCHING THE FUTURE WALK ON BY AS YESTERDAY STANDS STILL WRAPPED UP IN THE ARMS OF ITS OWN SHADOW, COMFORTED BY THE SOFT EMBRACE OF NON- EXISTENCE….AND IN THE PRESENT, THE GIFT OF REAL CIRCUMSTANCE POSES QUESTIONS AS ANSWERS AND KEEPS TRACK OF THE TRAIN OF INTERVALS THAT TIME WRETCHES FROM ITS INNER SANCTUM THAT TICKS AND TOCKS IN A CONSTANT VARIATION …AS A MATTER OF FACT AND FICTION, THE BIPOLAR NATURE OF SINGULARITY SINGS A DIFFERENT TUNE WITH TWO MELODIES THAT ARE CONTRAPUNTAL TO THE POINT OF “YES” RETURN!”
HOWEVER,
DOING DOES NOT NECESSARILY LEAD TO DONE
AND DOES NOT REALLY MATTER
WHAT’S DONE IS DONE
AND HOW IT IS, IS DOING WELL
NO MATTER WHAT
(To be Continued…)
(1967) Then my risings and failings began their ebb and flow….adolescence and intravenous cortisone…adolescence and intravenous cortison…and then the final insult to my colon: (and even less than the semi colon;….and then the end of my end, period!)
Direct intervention: cortisone directly on the raw wound…drip by drip, drip by drip….I said to myself: “I can’t do this! I can’t do this! I CAN’T DO THIS!...and then I did….until…the fever …104-105…and then a bed of ice and then the ambulance and then the new hospital…and then given a choice: more of this or remove the problem…in my smart stupor I opted for removal…
(Intestinal Fortitude)
AND THAT HAS MADE ALL THE DIFFERENCE…
CHAPTER 30
Back then I was certainly unsure of myself.
RIGHT NOW (3:01, 3/7/14) my past is peeling away, revealing my present, which is not very appealing…but none the less…it is at least more time to not be myself (which is really who I am)…trying to make something out of nothing, make something of my self in these trying times of trying…
Back then, real life was ahead of me…my childhood had been practicing all the me’s of being who I am…all of which has always ended in divorce and renewal…so after I divorced my illness, I began the long journey back…beginning at 98 lbs...toasting the future, shaking like a nervous leaf about to fall for the wind….rebirth at ZBT house where I had been pronounced “gone forever”…and then to Queens College, accounting for my next divorce...and renewal…
PIN #18: I rose from my desk. Bag full. And suddenly I felt a thick, warm ooze running down my leg and onto the floor where I was standing. “I looked down to see my present life flash before me. I bolted out of the classroom. I ran down the stairs, hysterical, as if being chased by the shadow of what had just occurred… Out the building and off the campus onto Kissena Boulevard where I virtually ran the 3 miles back home… Horrified, broken, scared and permanently scarred…. Eventually I divorced myself from that present… but never the less and always the more, time ticked between then and now and the closer I came to renewal…
Night school, balance sheets, profit and loss statements, goodwill and the cafeteria…and a beautiful Robin…wearing boots and short skirts…lots of looks back and forth and then something (I can’t remember what) and then US and my first “admittance” - letting her in on my secret stoma…
Miraculously it was acceptable and I flew back into a new life of uncertainty. My newly formed “oversized, insufficient fat balloon” floated happily in the sky above my complicated disposition…
e go!
do you know what you want to do next?
give yourself the benefit of doubt
what choice do you really think is left?
can you go and do without?
without up up up up up
without down down down
without within
without
ego
moversized insufficient fat balloon
are you ever satisfied with your fill?
will you fall upon your knees very soon?
let me know what it is you're gonna kill?
kill them
kill those
kill these
your killing
your killing me
ego
e go!
(There’s been nothing from the far right lately)
Life is a straight line that goes berserk
every now and then
and becomes its altered ego,
which accepts its thinly disguised depth
as a mere shadow
of what it used to be
sleeping with its potential
and bearing the brunt of unheard of creation
CHAPTER 31
The Multiple City
(Circa 1989)
Chapter 32
In the midst of being there and being here at the same time
Pierre Reverdy
Had left the right idea
It all goes on and on
Left and Right next to each other
Far apart
Simultaneously
which is what defines
what is really happening:
“For instance,” Pierre intervened,
SILENCE
They were still talking there behind
Men were passing in pairs
Perhaps it was a prayer
That rose from the hearts in between
The walls around the clearing
A voice that chimes on the water
The bird goes another way
And awakened by the morning
The leaden head
No one can say
How many pass
Between the garden and the wall
When evening grows hard and falls
Far away
We hear the whistle of a train.”
“And I contend that all this is happening as you speak and I listen and read. I think you do mean to tell me that I could hear talking coming from elsewhere, behind the wall, as men were passing us two by two, between our hearts, perhaps saying a prayer while in a walled in clearing, a leaden head, where a voice ricocheted off the crystal clear water just as a bird from somewhere else went somewhere else which somehow corresponded directly to how many people passed through the walled in garden at exactly the same time as the universe heard a train whistle from far away? Is that what you meant to say? Because if it is, I totally possibly agree with your cubist view of “noting not just what you see and hear, but what you know you could see and hear if you were somewhere else listening and watching,” I said with a large modicum of uncertainty.
“It is the conscious, deliberate dissociation and recombination of elements into a new artistic entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture. This is quite different from the free association of the Surrealists and the combination of unconscious utterance and political nihilism of Dada,” Kenneth noted with an air of air…
“For me it’s simply trying to mirror a true totality of each moment as an ongoing present (past, present and future all at once), a view of all perspectives simultaneously, revealing at least 13 million ways of looking at anything,” I said.
“For me I just endeavored to find the sublime simplicity of true reality. The poems do not represent reality; they present themselves in its place. Poems should be crystals precipitated from the effervescent contact of the mind and reality, trying to cross the threshold between experience and art, the first ray of light under the door. The poet is both concealed and revealed by his poem and a reader who responds to the poem will find that it gives an impression of coherence " Pierre said through his own and the many voices of his admirers.
“ On the edge of meaning,” I thought.
Jacques Dupin through Mary Ann as medium continued this edgy discourse. “WHEN ONE REFUSES THE TEMPTATIONS OF AN ELSEWHERE, THE ILLUSIONS OF A BEYOND, THE MIRAGES OF A FUTURE. AND WHEN ONE STANDS ON EARTH, AS NEAR AS POSSIBLE TO THINGS, LISTENING TO ONESELF, WITH ONE’S EYES OPEN, STUBBORNLY.AND WHEN, ACROSS FROM YOU, REALITY AT ITS FULLEST REPULSES YOU (‘that is, gives you a pulse again’) LIKE A SMOOTH WALL WITH NO ESCAPE…AND WHEN EVEN THE SOLIDITY OF THE WALL THAT YOU SEEM TO RUN INTO AND WHICH YOUR HEAD COULD AT LEAST BE SHATTERED BY, IS ONLY A FOG LIFTING…”
YEAH,
LIKE ME
( IS THE OPPOSITE OF ‘YOU’ – ‘ME’ ?)
13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT MY MIND
inside a cave
a black out
scratches the walls
boxed in
the treetops bow
to a memory of the wind
the sunset rises
to a quick dream
of daylight
the anticipation
of the next remembrance
a bird singing backwards
two impossibilities kiss
the forehead
of a blank look
wrestling with the distance
a headlock opens
the eyes of foreseeing
asleep in the dream
I rest my case
against a pillow of indecisions
as the legs move
the blood whispers directions
to their destination
fusion links with sequence
conforming the confusion
to the consequence
the motion of stillness
brings tears
to the eyes of the storm
in the forest
darkness travels
at the speed of light
a thought wags its tale
until the convolution unfolds
and jumps from its mouth
the fertile mystery
grows futility
like forbidden fruit
YEAH BUT…
(WHAT ABOUT
THE OTHER SIDE?)
Chapter 33
NOW WHERE WAS I?
“Back home
certain that I’ll commit a sex act
I look forward to my past resurrections”
A SIDE:
(So how did I jump to all these in conclusions?
It’s just me remembering my unjust me.
A string of unrelated events lassoing the conjunctions
that connected them to my stream of consciousness.
Those are the pins and the routes
on and in the map of accumulation
that is still (very becoming).)
HERE’S TO THE PAST, MAY IT BE BRIGHT AND CHEERY!
“Qué materias en vida no son qué le sucede pero qué usted recuerda y cómo usted lo recuerda,” dijo a Gabriel. (“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it,” said Gabriel d. 4/17/14.)
Well this is how I remember life after the honeymoon with Robin. We lived at 219 East 88th Street for a year (around the corner from Elaine’s). We played house. Robin worked for her cousin Sandra and at a dress shop on E. 88th street. I worked at an advertising agency (Coordinated Communications Inc/Creamer Colarossi) as a proofreader. My desk was outside the office of an old art director, maybe 50 years old. In advertising life span he was ancient. He maintained that the only reason he had any security from being replaced by cheaper, younger talent was that a very prestigious client was his and if he left, they would leave as well. He liked me and gave me a chance to write some copy for LaRosa spaghetti for the NY Mets on radio and for CN Disinfectant (a local challenge to Lysol). The radio spot for CN was recorded with actors. I wrote the script, a “soap opera” scene entitled “Home Clean Home”. My only problem was that as I was focusing on copywriting I was often missing “typos” in my real job as proofreader and eventually I was let go.
I hated the upper eastside and decided with Robin to apply for graduate school to get a masters in poetry. In those days (1971) there was really only one school offering an MFA in poetry – the infamous Iowa Workshop. I was accepted into the MA in creative writing program at Washington State University in Pullman Washington, where a poet named Howard McCord was teaching and with whom I wanted to study. It was an MA, which made the coursework more academic but I accepted the invite anyway, which also included a teaching assistantship. It meant traveling to the other side of the world – the wheat fields of Pullman Washington, situated on the Snake River and down river from Moscow, Idaho.
We traveled cross-country in a converted US Mail Truck step van. It was converted into a make shift “camper”
with a makeshift bed in the back. As a matter of fact the only thing that was hard to make shift was the van itself going up and over the Rockies (we eventually blew a piston in Bakersfield, CA). We bought the van from Jeff a “hippie” who made the conversion to NYC from Indiana. In retrospect, I don’t know how I had convinced my father to give me the money to buy this contraption which, eventually and mysteriously tried to take my life…
PIN#19: I left my house on the hill overlooking some railroad tracks where I was living with Robin, Annie, her Siberian Husky and Ezra my first Chihuahua. I got into the mail truck with a handful of my poetry and started to drive to the Washington State University campus in Pullman Washington where I was in the creative writing MA program. Coming down the hill where there is a road running perpendicular to it and straight ahead a small cliff that has a drop of about 500 feet, smoking a joint, I stepped on the brake to begin the slow up to the stop sign at the end of the hill. The brake pedal went to the floor. The truck began to pick up speed and all I could remember was screaming “OH MY GOD!” and turning the steering wheel to the right as fast as I could. The truck turned sharply to the right and tipped over onto the driver’s side and teetered on the edge of the cliff. My poetry flew everywhere. I was pressed against the driver side window but I was apparently not unconscious or even hurt. In my utter amazement I reached for the sliding passenger side door that was now the top of the truck, slid it open, climbed out, jumped off the truck and began to dance the joyous dance of miracles…and rebirth…
CHAPTER 34
“ I can see clearly that the water is murky”, Davey revealed at 6pm, 4/27/14.
“Right now I’m between acts. An inter mission. An inside job, foreseeing the final act as a distant relative…relative to my immortality and vulnerability…a second cousin to my shadow…yes, it is murky, but the clarity of seeing those cloudy conclusions, perks up the sagging confidence of doubt…”
and God said let there be darkness
and so there is…
Dreams Awaken
moist doors lubricate the exit
and it
perhaps lingers
and chimes in
thin fingers poke the air
the sky writes villainelles
syllables form sign language
form adds expectation to the mix
outside the night bows its head
drops of black
droops and fondles the candle’s wick
light emits pillows of darkness
sleep inside a shadow
Ce que dir la bouche d'ombre? Victor Hugo sings:
"You must know that everything has its law, its goal, its
road;
That from the star to the atom, immensity listens
to itself;
That everything has a consciousness inside the
creation;
Everything speaks;
The air which passes, the seabird which sails;
Each blade of grass, flower, germ and element.
Did you imagine the universe differently?
...
Everything in the universe says something to someone;
One thought fills with superb tumult.
God didn't make any sound without mixing a verb in it;
Everything speaks.
And now, man, do you know why everything speaks?
Listen.
It is because wind, waves, flames, trees, reeds, rocks ---
Everything is alive."
PIN#20: Calling up (the memory of) 911: The watch. Like my cocked thumb from my childhood power of having to make the choice between relaxing or firing and destroying the world…like that thumb, this watch is the time piece that must be kept ticking and it’s my self delegated, personal responsibility to keep time alive and keep in time with the tick and the tock and make time with the future…the watch began in the living room…Tristan and I watching TV suddenly interrupted by a report of a plane that crashed into the world trade center…just about a mile downtown from where we sat…conjecture by the reporter included an accident…then just as suddenly as the interruption came, the second “missile” from the south to north crashing live into the south tower…this was no accident, this was an attack…Panic…oxymoron…it was on television and it was really happening… our windows shook…the newscasters thought the second plane was just a “replay”…we knew it wasn’t….it was the first surreal, reality show…
I rushed to think what I should pack and take. My final decision was my poetry and Dubuffet (my Chihuahua). Tristan went to put air in the tires of our bikes, our only means of escape from New York…we quickly turned to “rescuing” Zane who was quarantined in the cafeteria of his middle school…we left the Printing House and began our walk uptown…stopping at the bank to get some cash for our escape…we reached Zane, passing the slow procession of downtown survivors, like “living dead”, marching uptown in an aftermath blackface…and it was such a beautiful Fall day…sun shining, crisp, perfect…things like what just happened happens on damp, rainy, dark, foggy days…until now, in real time…
On our way back Tristan suggested we walk to St. Vincent’s Hospital and try to donate blood. We got there and waited on a line as long as the lines to get into a major sale. We waited and waited. In the meantime, Bitty was walking downtown from midtown. We waited some more until the announcement came that no more blood was needed…there were only a very few patients…it seemed that either you escaped and survived or you didn’t.
We walked back to our apartment to listen to the news…to find out what was happening down the block…like we had private security cameras showing us our destiny as well as showing the world its destiny…when Bitty came home she brought cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery…we ate them…and the rest was History….
September 11, 2001: "Today: Less humid. Sunshine. High 79."
6:00 a.m. Polls open in New York City for primary elections.
7:59 a.m. American Airlines Flight 11 takes off from Boston’s Logan International Airport for Los Angeles.
8:00 a.m. New York City public schools open for the fourth day of the new school year.
8:14 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175 takes off from Boston’s Logan International Airport for Los Angeles.
8:20 a.m. American Airlines Flight 77 takes off from Washington, DC’s Dulles International Airport for Los Angeles.
8:42 a.m. United Airlines Flight 93 departs 42 minutes late from Newark International Airport for San Francisco.
8:46 a.m. After receiving a call from the Federal Aviation Administration’s Boston control center that Flight 11 has been hijacked, the Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) scrambles two military jets to the New York area from Otis Air National Guard Base, Cape Cod.
8:46 a.m. Hijackers crash American Airlines Flight 11 into floors 94 to 98 of 1 World Trade Center, the North Tower.
8:46 a.m. The Fire Department of New York (FDNY) receives the first report of a plane crash into the North Tower. Evacuation in the North and South
Towers begins.
9:00 a.m. FDNY, the New York Police Department (NYPD) and the Port Authority Police Department (PAPD) are at their highest mobilization levels. Port Authority civilian staff and all on-duty WTC response staff have mobilized.
9:03 a.m. Hijackers crash United Airlines Flight 175 into floors 78 to 84 of 2 World Trade Center, the South Tower.
9:15 a.m. Officials begin closing New York City bridges and tunnels to all but emergency vehicles and pedestrians.
9:25 a.m. The Federal Aviation Administration orders the first-ever nationwide ground-stop, prohibiting the take-off of flights. Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) jets establish combat air patrol over Manhattan.
9:30 a.m. The New York Stock Exchange does not open at its scheduled time; its employees evacuate.
9:37 a.m. Hijackers crash American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.
9:40 a.m. The Federal Aviation Administration orders all 4,546 planes in North American airspace to land at the nearest airport.
By 9:45 a.m. Evacuations are under way at the United States Capitol, the White House, the Empire State Building, the United Nations, the Kennedy Space Center, Disney World and major sites across the United States.
9:59 a.m. 2 WTC, the South Tower, collapses in 9 seconds.
10:03 a.m. Hijackers crash United Airlines Flight 93 in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers launch a counterattack to seize control of the aircraft.
10:28 a.m. 1 WTC, the North Tower, collapses in 11 seconds. All 16 acres of the World Trade Center site are in ruins. A rescue and recovery effort begins immediately at the WTC Site.
10:30 a.m. New York Governor George E. Pataki declares a state of emergency in New York State.
11:02 a.m. New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani orders the evacuation of all of Lower Manhattan below Canal Street, including workers, residents, tourists,
and schoolchildren.
1:27 p.m. A state of emergency is declared in Washington, DC.
2:35 p.m. Mayor Giuliani holds a press conference at the New York City Police Academy, estimating that "the number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear."
5:20 p.m. 7 World Trade Center collapses.
8:30 p.m. President George W. Bush addresses the nation, saying: "Today, our nation saw … the very worst of human nature. And we responded with the best of America—with the daring of our rescue workers, with the caring for strangers and neighbors who came to give blood and help in any way
they could."
In a few days the city made believe that all was under control and normalcy could once again rear its status quo…we walked Zane and his friend Gabriel back uptown to school… on Bedford street Gabriel picked up The Watch and handed it to me…”someone must have dropped this.” To me, in my fragile state of mind, this Watch was the symbol of continuation…the hard evidence that the world, though ticked off, still ticked on…the Watch, itself, was a shadow of itself…A make believe Taghauer..a perfect representative of things unreal pretending to be real…
The Watch has stopped many times and I’ve had it repaired many times (against the advice of David, of David’s Watch and Shoe Repair on Hudson Street, who said “it really isn’t worth it”…but I explained that “I had to keep it ticking because I have a personal responsibility to keep it alive”)…he often just puts in new batteries but last December, 2013 it was more serious – the entire “works” needed to be replaced… David once again needed to confirm that I still felt that responsibility…I said I understood his concern, but yes I still felt the responsibility and he asked no more questions and put in the new “works”…as of this moment in time (Mother’s Day, 11:32 am, Sunday, May 11, 2014), it is still ticking and the world is temporarily safe from total destruction (though it continues to thoughtlessly chip away at its future)…
CHAPTER 35
RIGHT NOW 5 • 17 • 14
Right!
5•27•14
(“my birthday”)
This is how it all began. March 3rd, 1981. Bitty had an Ob/Gyn appointment and Dr. Panter jokingly said he could “predict exactly when the baby was going to be born”
“Oh really, when?”
”This afternoon.”
Bitty rushed to New York Hospital on her lunch hour and had Tristan, That evening I was in the studio with Didus and the Fabulous Mascarenes recording Deep Love, a song written about our pregnancy and the immanent unknown it would produce…we were recording at Right Track Studio with Engineer Frank Fiippetti …we used an early sequencer (courtesy of Kelly Watts our bass player) as the heart beat…I was beside myself with my new self…I was now in the dream I had as a child…I was a father…closer to being…close….
DEEP LOVE
It goes tick tock inside your head
Then you wake up, jump out of bed
You get down on the cold wooden floor
You get down begging for more
It goes knock knock against your eyes
You wash up, roll up the blinds
You find out the dream isn't done
You don't mind, it can happen to any
One time one at a time
and then the second time
and right down the line
Oh babe, you gotta believe it
Open up so you can receive it
Inside where it all begins
And at this time
The clock never wins
Oh babe, you gotta believe it
Open up so you can receive it
Deep love
And let deep love get inside
You slip it in and out you slide
Deep down you know you can feel it
Deep down and no one can steal it
Deep love can't be denied
A piece of sleep along a bumpy ride
Down below you know you can hear it
Ticking away our gentle spirit
it's one time one at a time
and then the second time
and right down the line
Oh babe, you gotta believe it
Open up so you can receive it
Inside where it all begins
And at this time
The clock never wins
Oh babe, you gotta believe it
Open up so you can receive it
Deep love
CHAPTER 36
Pro and Con Sequence
(quick synopsis of a long day’s journey)
simultaneous exit and entrance…not taking to breast…distension…incubated in pediatric ICU with bilirubin (who’s he?): newborn jaundice that is cured by light, a phototherapy – a special light treatment …under the lights….still distended…still not eating….still unsettled…hold his tiny hand in mine through the opening in his small glass womb…intravenous through a vein in his soft head….a little half cup adorned the entry point…other worldly….we continued in that other world with a private consultation in Dr. Redo’s (re-do) office…he breaks the news…cracks like a whip against the raw skin of our dream…
what?
Hirschsprung…
He has what?
He needs what?
Are you kidding?
Really?
Why?
…so he can eat….just the unjust beginnings….8 days old first surgery…colostomy….in five weeks we all go home…insides out…like father like son…poetic injustice….next surgery at one year old…test for ganglion function…testing tissue from bottom up….nerve cell dysfunction…UNDERDEVELOPMENT…misfiring…5 inches functioning…quick exchange… big for small…intestinal fortitude…removal of all but the five good inches…ileostomy….2 years later, back to the cutting board…where mayhem began…..again…for real…
YEAH BUT….
Here I am Right Now (2014) watching your life. Whereas, not too long ago, your life was my life. Now our lives are separate (non)entities, links in a chain reaction. We’re both free to make mistakes and suffer our own mishaps. (Co-incidentally we both wear our intestines on our sleeve.) Our self esteem engines sputter, slowly moving through the fertile landscapes that surround our cracked continuity…a physical click clack clack (dodeskadenden) that breaks the imagined rhythm and stumbles upon our marriage of dreamy outcomes that derails and hobbles into the station.
What’s happening in your life RIGHT NOW is happening in my life, too…parallel equations that add up to a subtraction from the real dream…on one hand, her fantasy is apparently next door while you are delegated to a particle of that fantasy…on the other hand, your fantasy is vast and fills your inner space with a universe of infinite locales, each one full of your all encompassing compass that points in all directions…while the wish for what a relationship should be, hovers above the conclusion, the physicality of your presence adds another dimension to the three that already conspire to be the truth…you have, in essence, traded places with your scars, allowing them to mirror your self image.
Since who I am, at any given point, is a product of that point, and your life, along with your brother’s, is the point, your discontinuous continuity gives me another reason to falter and find fault, not in my scars, but in myself….
Rrrrrrrrring!
“Hello” etc etc….
In the shadow of your glorified idea of an honesty that unravels the truth and then use my weakness to somehow confirm your limp assumptions, just makes my essence weep and my already disappearing path zig-zag its unparalleled borders until I can’t see whether I’m coming or going or whether I’m here or there…the walls of my structure are unhinged and float off into an unenclosed room where vastness sleeps…here the naked truth stares at my body of knowledge and taunts me with my own mishaps….
CHAPTER 37
OUT OF THE BLUE
“I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn’t fight. He hadn’t fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen —the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly— I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes, which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. —It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip —if you could call it a lip— grim, wet, and weapon-like, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels—until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go,” Elizabeth exclaimed.
“I’m hooked Elizabeth. Your fish story where the fish not only got away from your murderous hunger for catching life but you decided to let it go to continue its battle with its own life…this coincidentally reflects my mirror image and the cumulative reflection is who is writing this memoir. All my trails and trials and verdicts are written on the ancient wallpaper that covers the internal walls of my room where my machinery churns, combusts and tends to keep me going on and on and on and off, on and on, and, oddly, even off”
This is the "next moment" and right now that's what I'm trying to remember
“I will not make 'excuses' for any observations on my word play and the couching I hide under because after all these years of expressing my inner most feelings I have come to accept it as my personal 'style' that emanates directly from my poetry (as all my expression does)...I don't hide behind my "clever" language but I do hide in it...I have always used language to express some very deeply personal and emotional feelings but I also use language to establish multiple levels that allows for the Truth with a capital T to be revealed which includes all the truths, even the opposites to what I personally feel, but it always also includes my own. I don't take a strong stance around my personal 'certainties' that do touch me deeply because I have always had doubts about what I feel and I take these doubts seriously and with the language translate them into other possibilities. In fact I am also, in some way, keeping my real being private and anonymous known only to those who really know me. I am in a sense Mr. Wishy Washy and these multi-levels reflect that my work has always leaned toward the philosophical and I'm too old to want to lean another way....my work is difficult to read but one sentence at a time, easy to understand…the photographs and paintings are the concrete, the facial expression, while the words are the abstract expression...in fact this writing is like a huge mural of representational abstractions that tell a story....Again, this is not a memoir, it is an ongoing reflection that appears in the next moment and includes what has happened, what is happening and what will happen, but not in any specific order...so
..nobody knows what you really do”
D
so you’re makin’ this
and you’re makin’ that
and you’re makin’ love
and you’re makin’ art
and you’re tryin’ hard
to play the part
but nobody really
D+ (G)
knows
what you really
D
do
D
so you make it up
and you’re makin’ out
and you fool around
without a doubt
and you’re tryin’ hard to not be down
but nobody really
D+ (G)
knows
what you really
D
feel
G D
so you make believe who you’re gonna be today
and you kinda feel like you’re gonna be leaving soon anyway
Em A
but you might change your mind
Em A
and you might decide to stay
Em
and just be
G D A
who you think you are
who you just might be
D
so you’re fakin’ this
and you’re takin’ that
and you’re tryin’ hard
to figure out
what it is
without a doubt
but nobody really
D+ (G)
knows
what you’re talkin’
D
about
D
so you close your eyes
and you close the door
and you stay inside
forevermore
and you take your time
then lock the door
so nobody really
D+ (G)
knows
what you really
D
think
G D
so you make believe who you’re gonna be today
and you kinda feel like you’re gonna be leaving soon anyway
Em A
but you might change your mind
Em A
and you might decide to stay
Em
and just be
G D A
who you think you are
who you just might be
Yeah but…
CHAPTER 38
ART - HIS STORY
(WARES THE NEWS Vol 4 no. 1)
A GALLERY @ WARES FOR ART
TRAVELS TO BALTIMORE
On May 15-May 17 1998 A Gallery @ Wares For Art becomes A Gallery @ the First Annual Baltimore Folk and Visionary Art Show which is being held in conjunction with the long awaited opening of the American Visionary Art Museum's exhibition ERROR AND EROS curated by our good friends John and Maggie Maizels. Since A Gallery's last successful exhibit THE DOOR TO THE INVISIBLE in January 1998 during the NYC Outsider Art Fair where we exhibited the works of over 40 self taught artists ("Folk Art of the 21st Century"), we have had to focus our attentions on a smaller but still extensive group of artists so that we can physically fit into the booth space at the festival ("space-the final frontier"). The artists we will be showing in Baltimore include: from Europe, Gérard Sendrey, Carol Bailly, Ody Saban, Evelyne Postic, Jacques Wakeford, Maggie Daems, Patrick Guallino, Danielle Le Briquir, Jacinta Heijmans, artists of the Mimer Foundation, Ad Maas, Hans Verschoor, Jan Sierts Wierenga, Appie, Willem Vugteveen, artists from the Atelier Herenplaats, Jaco Kranendonk, Paulus de Groot, Ben Augustus, Hans Hartman, Monique van Os, Hein Dingemans, from Canada artists from the collection of Dr. Christian Shriqui and from America, Charles Keeling Lassiter, Ross Brodar, Guy Beining, John Sheldon, Phil Demise Smith, Daniel Belardinelli, Donald Pierce, Carl Benedetto, Paul Humphrey, Jim Prez and Tommy. The festival will take place across from the AVAM along the beautiful Baltimore inner harbor at 801 Key Highway.
from Art Brut to Création Franche
Though it is often considered as a generic name covering all forms of art which stand apart from the overwelming conformism, Art Brut is instead a precise term which applies only to this part of art creation whose criteria of essential being and origin have been precisely defined by Jean Dubuffet in 1945. The concept of Art Brut covers limited types of works. It does not pretend at all, in its objectives, to cover all the works created as a breach with the academic presecriptions prevailing at the time. For those works Jean Dubuffet used the term of art singulier, with indeed a generic bent, even if he assigned also boundaries to them when he set up the Collection Neuve Invention, separate from the Collection de l'Art Brut.
In 1978, with a wider vision, and taking into account (to go beyond them) of the limits already defined, Roger Cardinal proposed the term Outsider Art. This term has been definitely adopted by all English speaking countries and is now superseding all labels spread out in micro-quarters claiming an implicit association with Art Brut. Until then, and in order to make a clear distinction between Art Brut proper and a conglomerate of which it was the core, people referred to "Art Brut and its acquaintances", a vague formula which was allowing all kinds of distortions. The notion of Outsider Art opens right away to a wider field of applications and is more precise regarding the artists involved. The only criticism it could call for is a kind of disparaging view of the works which would definitely appear as subordinated to others that would stand in a relative position of strength. It is in view of this complex situation that the concept of Création Franche was born in Bégles in 1989.
There is a wide consensus today to stress the meaning of the word "creation" which immediately calls to mind a process less imbued with culture than the word "art" which is only remotely synonymous. Nevertheless, in "Création Franche", the true meaning of this word lies in the adjective which complements it. The first meaning of "franche" in French is: free, boundless, without constraints, without obligations..." In fact, it is appropriate to consider that this word conveys the situation of the artists following the war lead during forty years by Art Brut in order to break apart the tight frame of the agreed art. They are free because they have been freed from the heavy laws that governed art making as an exercise in the interplay of references required for social success. Free, as a result of this war which allowed artists to recover the primary condition of their existence, outside the history of art and the parameters it superimposed on artists. Freed by these soldiers of the shadows, their elders of Art Brut.
Thus, Création Franche, instead of being at the margin of the artistic flow, is consciously at the heart of human activity in terms of its interest in the creative act. Jean Dubuffet used to say that cultural art was a mishap of creation. In this respect, the Création Franche stands as a true, tangible and longlasting value of art which claims its modest and magnificent origins, in the name of freedom and truth without which there is no true creation. Here one should pay tribute to Roger Cardinal's fair play who noted in a recent article, "the luminous flexibility of a formula such as Création Franche, which, nevertheless, aims pertinently at what is truly at stake, with, in addition, an assurance of authenticity and of excitation."
To sum up,without forgetting the increasing importance, especially in the U.S. of Folk Art whose roots are in the American ethnic traditions and influences, and because it would be quite difficult to explain what would be made of an art which would not be singular, one can say that the artistic parallel movement today includes two forms which will over time merge into a synonymous entity: Art Outsider and Création Franche.
The Holland Tunnel
A Gallery @ Wares For Art represents two groups of outsider artists from Holland. The first is the Mimer Foundation.
THE MIMER FOUNDATION came into existence after Willem Vugteveen's visit to a psychiatric hospital in the South of France in 1990. In this hospital two expressive artists had been helping the patients develop their creativity - not as creative therapy but simply supporting their artistic and creative initiatives. Since that time, The MIMER FOUNDATION has supported artists that have a psychiatric history and have helped them to return to the art world.
Mimer Foundation artists represented by A Gallery include Hans Verschoor, Ad Maas, Jan Sierts Wierenga, Appie, RJM Heijmans and many more. All works are on paper and the prices range from $200-$1200.
The second of these groups is the Atelier Herenplaats in Rotterdam. Erected in 1991, it is the one and only 'art institute for the mentally handicapped' in the Netherlands. The Herenplaats Studio is an independent work project of the Pameijer Foundation, and has been set up by two artists: Frits Gronert and Richard Bennaars. They supervise and teach eight artists who work in the studio.
Their goals are to develop expressive capacity and while doing so, start the individual, independent expressive process. They try to help the aptitude and talent to blossom.
They do this by teaching them to look around more carefully and by asking them the question: 'How do I see everything around me?' During the lessons the following subject matter is handled: theoretical knowledge about materials and techniques, art viewing and learning to talk about their own work (development).
A Gallery @ Wares For Art represents all the artists who partake in the Herenplaats' program including Jaco Kranendonk, Paulus de Groot, Ben Augustus, Hein Dingemans, Hans Hartman and Monique Van Os. The works are all on paper and the prices range from $200-$800.
The works of both Mimer Foundation and Atelier Herenplaats' artists can be found in the collections of the Museum De Stadshof and the Musée de l 'Art Brut.
GÉRARD SENDREY: At The Heart of Art
Gérard Sendrey is 69 years old and lives in Bégles, a small suburb of Bordeaux, France. He is a self taught artist, who at the age of 39 began to paint. From 1967-1977 Gérard Sendrey was involved in a world full of what he calls "creative lonliness."" After this period he devoted himself more completely to his art and began to draw.
In 1988 he quit his full time executive job and devoted himself completely to his art. He had his first exhibition in 1979 in the cellars of The Galerie du Fleuve. He has since been welcomed into many major museums and collections. Michel Thévoz, the curator of the Musée de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, describes Gérard Sendrey as "surely one of those who choose adventure, uncomfortableness, risk and who prefer the shattering surprise that can be given by a dream of a line to the art lover's approval." His work is part of many major museum collections including Musée de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, Aracine, Museum of Art Brut in Villeneuve d'Ascq, the Fabuloserie in Dicy, De Stadshof Museum in Zwolle and the Museum of American Folk Art.
A Gallery @ Wares For Art has extensive holdings of Gérard's work (over 60 works) all small works on paper in ink, acrylic and "flashe". Prices range from $250-$800.
A GALLERY
Is Exclusive Representative of Early Works of
CHARLES KEELING LASSITER
Charles Keeling Lassiter, born in 1926, in New York. His work has been compared to Jean Dubuffet. His early works which date from the early 1950's , are mostly oils on paper and are very striking expressions which reverberate classical figures and faces in a very 'raw' state. It is a destruction of form as a reflection of our era's cultural crisis but with a strong rhythmic feeling and a rebel's satirical view. His works have been shown at the Création Franche and he is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Musée de L'Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland.
There are a little over 40 pieces available, most are 15"x20" and some 20"x30" with the present prices in the range of $900-$2000. A Gallery also has a selection of his more recognizable works from the 1960's and 1970's.
A Gallery @ Wares For Art
Represents Navajo Folk Art
A Gallery @ Wares For Art is very happy to announce that we now represent the Navajo Folk Art Collections of Jan Thiede-Smith and Rebecca Herbert. These examples of contemporary Navajo Folk Art come from artists from Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. The wood carvings, clay and sandstone toys and cardboard cutouts represent the work of Native Americans featured in the 1997 Autumn issue of American Indian Art Magazine and the Rosenak's Folk Art Book The People Speak. From the humor of young Delbert Buck,
the storytelling legends of the Willetos to the dressed, collage figures of the "Grandma Moses" of Navajo art, Mamie Deschillie, the creations mix selected elements from other societies, infusing each new ingredient with a unique Navajo flavor. The collections concentrate on a group of artists who are experimenting with imaginative genres, tangibly expressed in their media. Private collectors and museum curators such as those of the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Sante Fe, began buying these pieces in the 1980's and today they are recognized as the fastest growing art form on the Navajo reservation and are valued as prime examples of American Folk Art. Other artists represented include the many generations of the Herbert Family, Dan Hot, Mathew Yellowman, Robin Willetto, Lulu Yazzie and more. Prices range from $25 - $1400.
UFO's Identified in
A Gallery Exhibitions
A Gallery was one of the first galleries to recognize and exhibit the works of artists working in the genre of "UFO/Abduction" art. Our first exhibit, Spacial Relationships, took place at both Wares For Art and the Hudson Grill in NYC showing the sculptural works and paintings of John Sheldon, John Spears, Rosemary Osnato, the early works of Ionel Talpazan and many others. The show also featured works depicting 'actual abductions'. It included an opening night of performance, poetry and lectures. The exhibition took place in September of 1996. The show was featured on CNN, Strange Universe and Sightings. It was also featured in an article in the NY Times entitled Alien Beings Abduct Pop Culture: "Anyone stopping in for a game of pool and a Rolling Rock at the Hudson Grill in Soho is greeted by an E.T.-like figure waving from the window. Three feet tall, formed of latex over cotton, he (she?) is the work of John Sheldon...who says he has been fascinated by unidentified flying objects since he sighted a UFO on a fishing trip in Massachusetts with his father in the 1950's. In obscurity, he has made E.T. sculptures for more than a decade."
Then in July and August 1997 A Gallery had it's second show of "Spacial Art" entitled Art From Mars celebrating the first pictures sent back from Mars. It featured over 20 artists' and was the subject of a feature story on Showtime.
At present we represent a group of 'alien-centric' works of art by Ionel Talpazan, John Sheldon, Rosemary Osnato, John Spears and many other individual works. Prices range from $200-$1000
Works Of A Gallery Artists
Ross Brodar & Ad Maas
Chosen For Museum Show
Congratulations to A Gallery artists' Ross Brodar (New York) and Ad Maas (Mimer Foundation-Holland) for having works chosen by John and Maggie Maizels to be included in the American Visionary Art Museum's exhibition ERROR AND EROS:LOVE PROFANE AND DIVINE opening May 15, 1998 in Baltimore.
Ad Maas will have two drawings from his series "The Human Nature of God" in the show. They express, visually and in poetry, a very personal love for the embodiment of the spirit. There are 15 drawings in the complete series all having been made for an A Gallery "Portraits of God" exhibition in 1996. We have put together a book of all the drawings in the series (available for $25). 13 drawings of the series will be exhibited and for sale at the A Gallery booth at the Baltimore Folk and Visionary Art show ($400ea.). All of the drawings can be seen on our website.
Ross Brodar will have a painting on wood exhibited in the show. It is a raw, expressionistic depiction of the anguish of a confrontational love. We will also be featuring a large selection of Ross' mixed media paintings and works on paper at our booth in Baltimore (prices range from $100-$3000).
A Gallery @ Wares For Art
Is Caught In The Net
Of An Intriguing Web
A Gallery @ Wares For Art has finally made the plunge into the Net and onto the world wide web. We established our presence in our new domain in January 1998 with our documentation of the Door to the Invisible show, our catalog of art jewelry and excerpts from our philosophical meanderings. It is just the beginning. Our plans include an online gallery of A Gallery artists with all works available for purchase, a store of selected crafts (jewelry, sculpture, ceramics, glass) related to this type of primitive expression, a selection of related books for purchase, a catalog of our very own popular line of art jewelry and objects, free classifieds for the sale/exchange of art, a forum for discussions on Outsider/Self Taught Art and of course, the WARES THE NEWS newsletter (which you might be reading at our website right now). Eventually we hope to have 'streaming' videos of artists at work and interviews etc. We have been caught in the Net! We hope you enjoy and use our site. Our world wide web address is:
www.waresforart.com
Excerpts from WARES THE NEWS newsletters 1995-1997
Welcome to the ever expanding universe of A Gallery artists. We are always in the process of discovering and uncovering established and emerging artists who have not yet been recognized but have, in their own solitude, been able to reach a 'playful, whimsical, individual and serious' maturity in their work.
The actual pieces themselves vary in all categories: size, medium, style and price. Sizes range from 2"x 3" to 3' x 5'; mediums include markers, pencils, oil pastels, crayons watercolors, gouache, acrylics, oils, etchings, dry points, lithographs, etc on paper, canvas, canvas board, cardboard, foamcore, wood, metal, styrofoam, objects etc.; styles range from landscape to figuration to abstraction to primitive to folk to self taught/outsider to very individual styles; prices range from $50 - $5000 with a majority of the pieces under $1000.
In short, we offer 'high end' art at 'low end' prices.
We hope you enjoy your travels through A Gallery.
This is a personal letter about the state of the art and the state of the business at Wares For Art. I am an artist trying to make my art and make a living, a feat of simultaneous proportions. My vision for the store/gallery has been more than realized. We have, I think, a very unique group of artists who are producing 'genuine' art and have a certain spirit of community as well as very individual styles. I have tried to remain true to my humanist tendencies to applaud and show the efforts of honest expression whether or not it fits perfectly within my limited taste and never for its 'salability'. Thus, I think we have accumulated an eclectic and varied art that is connected by sheer context and vision. In fact, it all seems so connected that I have been often asked by new customers "Did you make all this work?" An interesting question for a place that has work representing over 150 artists and crafts people. The store/gallery has also been true to its vision for 'affordable art', trying to keep the prices at a comfortable point on that long spectrum 'between worthless and priceless" - comfortable for the artist, for the customer and for the 'business.' We have entertained poetry, art, music and the human spirit of making. Our integrity is still in tact.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - OUT AND ABOUT
This show is part of trio of shows that A Gallery is presenting in the month of January to run concurrently with The NYC Outsider Art Fair. The other shows are THE DOOR TO THE INVISIBLE folk art of the 21st century at A Gallery @ the Chuck Levitan Gallery Space and THE HUMAN NATURE OF GOD, drawings by Ad Maas at A Gallery @ Wares For Art.
Out and About is a very special group show curated by Jim Prez whose unique talent as a curator comes from being an artist himself and being an avid discoverer of new, innovative artists who work on the periphery. In this grouping Tim has chosen a wide variety of artists who are both geographically and stylistically varied. The artists come from Florida, Puerto Rico, Vermont, Georgia, New York City, Oklahoma and the mountains of Colorado. The medium of their works range from wood to pillow cases to canvas to cardboard to paper and their subjects include, the Bible, T.V personalities, animals and flowers, doctors in the operating room, the Titanic, Hollywood stars and memory paintings all a kind of Outsider Pop Art. Jim is including works by V. Hecht, an artist whose work he found in a Thrift Shop. Very little is known about her. Her works include paintings of TV Personalities such as Mary Tyler Moore, Archie Bunker, Marcus Welby, Johnny Carson and Sonny and Cher and Chastity. Also being shown are works on wood by Roy Finster, the son of the 'Outsider legend' Howard Finster. We are also showing Paul Humphrey whose hand colored drawings of "Sleeping Beauties" are also being shown at The Door to the Invisible show. Paul started out by painting sleeping faces on pillow cases and eventually, in 1992, after suffering a stroke which affected his entire left side, he began his extensive series of drawings which he "Xeroxes and then colors the copies."
Jim Prez describes the artists this way: "Zoa has two children and lives in the Colorado Rockies. Kate lives in Oklahoma and studies the Bible. Tino and Carol live upstate New York, outside of Syracuse. Roy lives in Sommerville, Georgia. Howard is his dad. V. Hecht was from Florida. She is no longer among the living. Paul lives in Vermont where he was a house painter until he had a stroke. Carol does not like the cold. She never comes up north of St. Petersburg, Florida. Max lives in the East Village but spends a lot of time in Vermont."
WHAT:
OUT AND ABOUT
paintings on canvas - cardboard - paper - pillow cases - wood
by
Zoa Ace - Kate Bluejacket - Tino and Carol Ferro - Roy Finster- V. Hecht - Paul Humphrey - Carol Morrison - Hiram Santiago - Max Schuman (curated by Jim Prez)
WHERE:
A GALLERY @ THE HUDSON GRILL
350 Hudson Street (corner King Street)
New York City 212-691-9060
WHEN:
JANUARY 7 - JANUARY 30 1998
opening reception Wednesday January 21, 1998 8PM
DODESKADENDODESKADENDODESKADENDODESKADEN
It all began in 1995 with a personal investment in me by Mikka (Mickey, my mom) who gave me $10,000 to find and open a gallery/store that mirrored my personal visions of Outsider art in the light and shadows of my own aesthetic even though my multiplex-visions were never tested and thought out through the singular vision of business – it was always ‘make believe’…and this (ad)venture was no exception…
I found an upstairs space above Avignone Pharmacy on the southwest corner of Bleecker and 6th Avenue…281 sixth avenue. It was a medium sized odd shaped room (last used by Guiliani’s mayoral campaign) with an overhanging, long thin “atrium-like” back room that overhung Carmine Street playground (I used to take Zane there)…I designed the space to have two small walls coming off a long wall which acted as a small Gallery…lots of shelves, jewelry cases etc…a gallery within a store: Wares For Art- the art of craft/the craft of art…I had no idea how to create a store, so I did…
I had a flag made, a billboard sign along the wall of the building and a neon sign in the front room, second floor window. I also made a sandwich sign comprised of two paintings on canvas to stand outside the front door along with a sculpted Mr. Clear bust which sat on a pedestal which was knocked over and damaged a few times both purposely and accidentally. My partially plagiarized character MR. CLEAR was clearly the spokesman, seen on each and every attempt to be seen and noticed in a city of ten million visions….I stood with Herm across Father Demo Square, by Joe’s Pizza, looking back at the flag and the neon Mr. Clear and declared that that space was “our corner of the world”…
But I must grow this story backwards to get to the other beginning.
“It all began (again) in 1987, after the publication of Periods,…this was my first form of memoir up to then. 378 pages of poetry and ideas representing the accumulation of moments from 1971-1987, some of which are included here and now. It’s also when I began to draw and then paint. I decided that my talent was that I had no drawing skill and a natural talent for color and composition. Mr. Clear was born during this period while sitting at the Three of Us Studios where Tristan was auditioning for a commercial. On the wall was a poster for a show entitled Mr. and Mrs. Boo and while waiting for Tristan I drew a line sketch of those characters. They became Mr. and Mrs. Clear, changing their names to protect my guilt (though they don’t seem to exist on Google so maybe they’re just ‘pigments’ of my imagination).
From that moment on I began to make visual contact with my written and musical nerves…I had a lot of nerve for a primitive….my first paintings were made at the Placenter under the influence of Dada, Gertrude Stein, John Cage and drugs…my altered egos, FW Foolworth, Lydia Mellos and Stuart PP Tomatoz were born…by 1987, Kandinsky’s early works took hold of my fancy…”
WAY AFTER KANDINSKY/1987/111 Third Avenue
“JESUS CHRIST WHERE ARE YOU?”
F.W. Foolworth, The Pacenter, 1977
(overpainted Woolworth painting)
A John Cage, Stuart P.P. Tomatoz, Placenter, 1976
(piano keys, toilet and wire screen)
“Doing Does Not Necessarily Lead to Done…”
F.W. Foolworth, 1976, Placenter
In 1989, at the Printing House where he and Bitty and Tristan had miraculously ended up (thanks to his brother Hank), he began feeding his visual temperament and vision with an Apple IIe computer and a children’s art software and a dot matrix image writer printer. He had the resulting images blown up as stats and then using “design art markers” he colored them in. He also created his own, unique drawings that he then colored in with the art markers. Everything was seamlessly filled with immediacy and no mess, just like writing poetry.
“Fancy Meeting Me Here”
“Beside Myself (who else is there?)”
“I created the “art” the same way I wrote my poems and made my songs – spontaneously, recording the moment it was made which expressed what I was feeling at the time I was making it, which included, in some form, every moment since the beginning of my time, that has accumulated into the whole ball of waxing and waning that has become me at this very moment…”
“…I then began painting myself out of the corner and into the wide open space of expression. My medium was acrylic, gouache, marshall oils and any medium that was at hand (pencil, pastel, china marker, language etc). My technique was created out of a very full cloth of accumulation. Nothing was done with any foreknowledge or according to any learned process. Everything was of the moment and was comprised of the colors and shapes of immediate notation and emotion. It was a concoction of NOW and THEN. I gave myself permission to do it.”
Then it all began again in the 1990’s when Bitty had a vision that Phil’s paintings might make interesting jewelry (decorations) because of their primitive/colorful presence. They then proceeded to form their concept and their process, which they named Wear For Art (and later was expanded to Wares For Art). They began by making boxed sets of notecards with laser prints of his paintings and given as Christmas gifts. Then they expanded and took original paintings he had made and made earrings and pins out of them. Suddenly they were in “business”. Bitty created her own process of hand manufacture, which included color laser prints, art boards, lamination and jewelry findings. They began to do craft shows and it proved successful (though really not profitable). This continued for many years and reached many milestones. Their work ended up in museum shops and in prestigious art stores, galleries and catalogs. They were both good at “making” things. He made paintings and prints and Bitty transformed them into earrings, pins, necklaces, cuff links, button covers, clocks, light switch plates, magnets and rugs. But neither of them was very good at doing business. Yin Yang goes the trolley!
Chapter 39
And now back to NOW and the next beginning (7•14•14, 2pm) ….
“The now is a delicate plant. Almost everything in society forbids or denies the climate and conditions in which it may flourish,” John begins his loxodromic voyage.
“There are two cultures. One is that science tries always to dismiss and discount feeling and the other is that marrying feeling and knowing is the problem. Of course it is preeminently the problem because feeling is for individuals, between a you and a me,” John continued.
“Between a yin and a yang,” I interjected.
“Yes, but each of us is always, at heart, however apparently similar, inalienably not anyone else.”
“Absolutely. Both the same and very different. My simple belief that what ‘I secretly believe I believe everyone secretly believes’ is nothing more than a ‘I’m the center of the universe’ egocentricity whose traces can be found in aspects of the human dna sequence, but spiraling out from that center of our ego, we are each bound by individual, unique peripheries. This I feel to be true but I actually don’t know for a fact.”
“It seems only too obvious, in this world, that in general, knowing is cock of the roost. Feeling is the runt of the litter. And yet, my feeling about human existence on this uncontrollably sprouting planet is that its perceptible reality, and its destiny, waver and zigzag amid a triangle of opposing yet counterbalancing factors. Physically and mentally we individuals bounce, carom, and ricochet like pinballs,” John, in his wisdom, feels.
“I also feel that I know that to be true. It’s interesting that you make your point using a triangle to describe this phenomenon. I’ve always seen it as a circle but I like the triangle…three sides to every question and answer…mine, yours and everyone else…the relationship between two things and then the third person narrator…like the rack in pool forming a boundary around all the possibilities and then there’s you, the cue ball directing the answers in partnership with chance; ‘8 ball in the side pocket’…”
YEAH BUT….
ASIDE (pocket):
07•24•14
“I’M NO LONGER FIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION” 07•29•14
CHAPTER 40
Yesterday, Professor Irwin Corey, “the foremost authority”, celebrated his 100th birthday with these observations (some his some mine):
“A guy just got married and he says to his new wife, ‘Tell me, love, am I the first one?’ ” “She says, ‘Why does everybody ask that question?’ ”
“Marriage is a three ring circus. The engagement ring, the wedding ring and the suffering. It’s like a bank account. You put it in. You take it out. You lose interest.”
His wife died three years ago.
HOWEVER
I met him as a grandfather of students at PS 41. I met him 35 years ago when he introduced my band (N.DoDo) at SNAFU and I saw him often on Ed Sullivan and Joe Franklin.
“10 years ago we had Johnny Cash. 10 Years ago we had Bob Hope. 10 years ago we had Steve Jobs. And NOW we don’t have cash, we don’t have hope and we don’t have jobs.”
HOWEVER
NOW and THEN
we have the foremost authority
HOWEVER ... we all know that protocol takes precedence over procedures. This Paul Lindsey point of order based on the state of inertia of developing a centrifugal force issued as a catalyst rather than as a catalytic agent, and hastens a change reaction and remains an indigenous brier to its inception. This is a focal point used as a tangent so
the bile is excreted through the panaceas.
however,
“If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we are going”
(AND WE’RE GOING GOING GONE)
as far as I can see
(which is inside me)
the opposite of distance
closer than you think
at the heart of a smattering
of dance and orchestration
that matters
and beats like a drum of blood
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment