AND are we really following some great unconscious dictation a hidden force a life force driving us all and not just us but all being sentient or not and just what is it then this life force that drives everything that leads everything and everyone and if it leads then we must follow so that this leader is a kind of tour director a dictator then but then who or what’s directing Him or Her and we’re left looking through the wrong end of the telescope with one leader pointing to another leader diminishing in the distance into infinity like the figure on the Quaker Oats box showing a figure holding up a box upon which is a figure holding up a box and so on over the horizon with stick figures gesturing in the dusk and us still back here on earth wondering what’s driving us if not this life force making every creature propagate and propagate and reproduce himself or herself so that so that we’re back with me-me-me and are we free or aren’t we to fuck or not to fuck aye that’s the rub the eternal conundrum with or without a condom aye that’s the rubba-dub-dub and two in a tub floating out to sea and yet and yet it’s more than sex leading the tune leading the dance it’s not just ants-in-his-pants because there’s plants and other living things without sex-toys who also all have the blind urge our blind urge even when sex’s saxophone is not playing there’s an urge to reach to grow to some light the light that is the voice of the fourth person singular the voice that light raises to express itself through the darkest ages shining transcendent
AND so into the crystal night of time, and the most advanced astronomy, the most advanced science is the most poetic, the very burning heart of poetry as in Olbers’ Paradox claiming that there might be a place where all is light for with the naked eye we all can see a few stars close up and the further away and the deeper we look the more of them there are So that in the deepest distances we see clusters and clusters and whirling nebulae each one made of millions or billions of stars so that in the infinite distances there must be a place where all is light and the reason why we still have night is that the light from that far place where all is light simply hasn’t got here yet and when it does we’ll have white nights with little black holes where once were stars So that so that we ourselves will be transformed into pure creatures of light whom darkness could kill even as now I see a face that darkness could kill in an instant a face as easily hurt by laughter or light each a separate consciousness a separate body whirling through air as the earth whirls around and around each an isolate identity an isolate inconsolable spirit body made of sea salt and water and a beating heart and beating brain in each in every body in our infinite courses stick figures on the horizon a massed humanity of loneliness Oh I would not want to dissect anyone as Flaubert did Madame Bovary baring the very bones of her oh no I’d rather keep the whole of her the pure person the pure unbroken being oh such romanticism such romantic illusion in an age of steel and smog and plastic and what could I know of her in her bottega oscura oh the dark workshops the bottega oscura in each of us where poetry of self is born where heart’s poetry first generates in the hidden caves the dark bodegas of self of me-me-me and you might remember the Roman street named Botteghe Oscure where the Italian Commie Party had its headquarters in Rome and a famous lit mag was named after the street but not the Party a great great mag financed by one Contessa Caetani publishing far-out texts in many languages a true international or supranational project And that via was also the place where humpty-dumpty Commie fell apart and destroyed the Revolution of the Sixties not so long ago in Paris too where the CP barred the gates of the car factory to the students writers anarchists dope smokers psychedelic dreamers with love and flowers oh yeah that was a laugh to the old Commies we’ll have none of that none of these sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie looking for a new world ha-ha and it’s good night sweet prince all over again where all is confusing and no one knows the answer to anything or anyone for god’s sake don’t give me that again the same old story of Adam biting Eve and down down fall the apples of joy and no more amore pane e vino and so begin again the broken sentences the stillborn words the labyrinths and labyrêves of daily existence and the parturition of the senses So sic transit over the transom what-ho me hearties and where away now to the four winds cast and a nor’easter blowing that time in Gloucester in an imperfect storm So go below lay down below batten down the hatches and let ’er blow we’ll be in Snug Harbor tight and dry and the mainsail stowed we’ll be in the firelit Amen Corner by the great potbellied stove or in the swaying sack with me lady ah laddie that’s the way to lay low with language a medium for communicating thought even on the high seas of love Oh the world lies about us late and soon like an endless ocean upon which ships flit like fireflies and kingfishers dive and die and him with a stiff prick all the time O lord teach us to sit still cried the Buddha who had sat still on a mountaintop for a thousand years holding a Vajra Lotus the very pulsing heart of life And do I not hear the endless singing the music of the spheres as some Greek poet heard it by the Aegean long ago the high music of being the ecstatic music of being and fuck the shrinks with their endless nattering of malaise their endless digging up of buried bones man do I need it do I have to exist side by side with all these sickies telling me I am really sick etc etc I’ll call on those jerks when I need them maybe tomorrow and in the meantime it’s amore pane e vino back in the Old Country where joy still lived and even ecstasy maybe yes ecstasy and the sensual phosphorescence of youth
DID I say sensual or sexual no matter Aren’t the two the same only a difference of degree depending on the temperature centigrade or Fahrenheit baby baby keep your pecker in your pants stop panting and you’ll live longer and outlive your peenie-weenie that’s what the clap-doctor told Adam after a big night with Eve back where they’d have us believe it all began ha-ha I’m telling you it all began much earlier and Adam and Eve were really bleached-out blacks where it all began down there around the equator or below and so heave away me hearties we’re heading back to the tropics the Tropics of Cancer or Capricorn or below so let her blow we’ll scud before the wind into our origins into our destiny in the Third World War that is the War with the Third World oh baby think that over and let out your spinnaker and many the lad blown overboard in the winds of sex and ecstasy into salt seas of tears the wine-dark incarnadined seas as in that Turner painting of the burning Temeraire and the world turning noiseless on and on forever into eternity
BUT that old awful dream keeps haunting me and coming back with me in the city streets walking and walking with my collar turned up, except I have no collar and no coat, as the winter dusk always keeps falling in the cold cement city where lighted houses whirl away over skyscrapers and disappear in Siberia to the sound of sirens and it’s like I’m that lone woodblock figure in that black-and-white picture-novel by Frans Masereel with its stark figure in blackest city night, limbs lost among skyscrapers…
HUNG up on the cross the poor bastid just hanging there on some rusty nails through the centuries an orphan more or less his Father nowhere in sight and his Mother a Virgin or an Extra Virgin as they say on the olive oil labels a single mother for sure and the sundown kid born in a manger rock-a-bye-baby and how He happened to be born by Immaculate Conception a tall tale if I ever hoid one oh Mary Mother of God living in a convent somewhere or maybe a serving maid in some monastery and when she somehow got knocked up the monks or ordinary guys or camel drivers one after another sed “Don’t blame me” and so then since no one would own up to it the chief of the clan says Well then it musta been some kinda immaculate conception or deception Yeah man that musta been it And so it went into the books into the holy books that is into the scriptures and scrolls you betta believe it read it and weep and there ain’t no paintings or sculptures of a woman strung up on a cross in the whole history of art there ain’t none except in the background of one hellish scene by HerAnonymous Bosch and everyone knows he was the leader of that secret sect of the cult of the Virgin and a sex nut at that probably a whips-and-chains cocksman who liked his women or men hung up
if not well hung And so maybe it shoulda been Mary hung up instead of J.C. and Mary Magdalene in the wings also catching hell from the sacred fathers for daring to dream of being a liberated woman and so why not hang her up too with the rest of the uppity dames but never mind all that and we end up instead with the Son of God on the Cross and so good night, sweet prince, into the dark night of the soul climbing Mount Carmel with Saint John of the Cross telling T. S. Eliot that in order to arrive where you are you must go by a way you have never been and arrive at last where you started and recognize yourself for the first time And so with goofy Vico we circle back to arrive at our own beginnings and each of us not recognizing ourselves as a fourth person singular or is it just another Protestant or fish-eater mouthing the same old worn-out myths the happy delusions with a made-up God who will save us from total obliteration from absolute death on earth the final annihilation of our little egos the total end of our consciousness as we know it and consciousness itself the only real god for all of us Yeah just think of it isn’t consciousness itself the ultimate god of all of us for as long as consciousness lives we live and the only other god that rules everything is great god Sun who governs all life on earth so give great god Sun his due and worship him as so many civilizations before us did yes Sun is God and enough of that so let’s forge on through the night-mazes singing or coughing but at the same time the ghost of the Holy Ghost still remains the mystery the Holy Ghost that woozy dreamy third leg of the tripartite government set up in the Kingdom of God the Holy Ghost a weird mystical even non-Christian member of that holy gang yeah that Holy Ghost what is he or she doing in there with those old Christies and where did he or she come from anyway well look it up in your wicked wikipedias and you’ll get all sort of learned lunacies of where that mystic ghost came from He or she comes out of the very roots of existence He/She existed even before light yeah yeah for in the beginning was the Holy Ghost and He/She or It gave birth to our first light and so the Holy Ghost is rather a nameless disembodied spirit an epiphany upon the face of darkness and what is that or who is that if it ain’t none other than the Other that famous Other that people like Antonin Artaud in Rodez madhouses have been known to conceive shouting to their jailors “I am the Other” and not just meaning the other person in their cell considering themselves the sane ones and everyone outside the asylum the really crazy crazies and was it not Jean-Paul Sartre hisself who had an epiphany and saw hisself as the Other and started mumbling Je est l’autre or was it Rimbaud the original true madman and some kind of junkie telling us all we were the crazy ones and he the King of Hearts so everybody else is the Other and all those foreigners who don’t speak our language all become the Other and since they are totally different from us and therefore unknowable they become the incarnate enemy since the fear of the unknown creates enemies everywhere and whole religions become enemies not to mention nations or other nationalistic chimeras dreamed up by nineteenth-century imperialists to divide the world against itself for the profit of me-me-me and the population of every tribe is swept by a universal paranoia of fear of the Other man o man you have it there in a nutshell or nuthouse and so on and on and the good Knight of the Sad Face becomes your enemy if not your enema to flush out evil or to flush out good and so it’s one two three what are we fighting for? Lord save us and throw us a lifesaver from the sinking ship of love
AND it’s our Last Hurrah and keep your pecker up for if you outlive your pecker where does that leave you like Henry from Brooklyn with the great gift of gab who all his life kept it up and wrote great books with it but then kept writing when his pecker couldn’t write anymore like an old fountain pen run dry oh daddy call me a cab the dusk is yawning and field mice squawk and run and hide from the rising tide the icecaps melting and me-me-me in my kayak trying to paddle over the horizon or maybe sailing into the wind and blow blow thy winter wind mankind is so unkind and manunkind populating the world while the kingdom of beasts may or may not be different with Rousseau painting The Dream a jungle scene with no computers and no monkeys on cell phones typing like mad and press the Save button to save us all on the last frontier or the last island like Gauguin on Tahiti having escaped civilization still trying to find the final island because so far there had always been an island further out in the archipelago as in Tahiti today you’re staying in the Tahiti Hilton and studying the charts and thinking there must be an island further out and so you go to Moorea which is further out but there’s a Club Med with golfing and tennis and fatsos putting their balls even as you remember Mark Twain or Mencken or someone said Anyone caught playing golf should be banned from government yack-yack-yack and there ain’t no Jack in the Cracker Jackbox anymore with Dylan singing the Jack of Hearts oh happy days happy daze indeed so jump on your steed and fly over the horizon And whatever you first see over the horizon when at last you get there will be what you want and long to love like Don Quixote yes he of La Mancha on his faithful steed Rocinante as he saw a highborn lady damsel who was in fact a whore in the door of a hovel and not a fair lady in a great castle yes Don Quixote saw a host of armed knights marching toward him when in reality they were a herd of sheep So you will see a splendorous Tree before thee yes the very Tree of Laugh I mean the Tree of Life as it is called in holy scriptures yes the very tree at the heart of that famous garden where Adam and Eve did eat much to their mutual indigestion yes the famous tree whose leaves are tears or pearls depending on how you look at them and the leaves dropping on you like tears or tiny bursts of laughter while birds cry out oh yes Let us prey or pray let us sing and dance about that tree or lie down and lament beneath it as the tears or pearls fall where you must watch out for the serpent that snakes around the tree and whose scales are separate sins and this snake none other than your own sly pecker who hides his head most of the time but sometimes when you least expect it rises up with his one blind eye and straightens up and becomes like an arrow ready to shoot into any flesh it sights oh yes and off it shoots at whomever or whatever into the unknown great darkness with the Knight of the Sad Face and The Divine Comedy ain’t no comedy even though the soundtrack of the show has both a laugh-track and a cry-track in the background and the volume control in the hands of the producer but who knows who he or she or it is or where hiding
Where in the pluriverse or in any other great verse in which the where and why of the heart is in question the location and state of the heart at the heart of every other question the light that shines into the dark abyss amen and awomen and ain’t that the limit I’ll do a mudra to the Sun God the fourth person singular personified in pure light and the Sun Word is light itself as set forth by Sri Aurobindo himself or herself if you believe in the transmigration of sexes for ain’t we all one as rabbits run and Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are all one and the same person but in order to arrive where you started you must still go by a way you have never been So I’m a broken record or a human tape-loop returning and returning with the same yearning to be one with the Mother so sit still and receive Her full in the face or in your tummy tucked in and back straight in the full lotus position ha-ha as if I’d ever waste my time like a leisure-class kid sitting all day facing a wall and trying not to think and who has the time or money to do that day after day and your mantra is Let go Let go Let go of your ego Let go Let go of desire Let go of your most precious possessions or your dear sex organs nested together ready for the next sex-drive an endless voyage to the lighthouse every night
AND so sitting in the Caffe Trieste San Francisco where nothing ever changes decade after decade, the faces change but it’s the same characters drawn from the population of the world, and where am I with my constant companion my lonely self and the only plot of this book of my life being my constant aging, even as Pirate Jenny keeps singing I tell you I tell you you must die you must die, and it’s like waiting for the other shoe to drop It’s like waiting for God or Godot who will never come but is bound to come don’t yawn I know you’re still young and easy under the apple boughs and it’s a fine su
nny day on earth so why worry about who’s making it spin and what do I need a God for anyway when I’ve got me-me-me who’ll never die or like Beckett am I entering my monologue stage like George Whitman in Paris aged almost a hundred and the Last Time I Saw Paris I was with Giacometti who made all those skinny anonymous sculptures everyone called Universal when they were really only anonymous and why didn’t he do squishy figures like Gert-rude Stein for aren’t there just as many fat men as skinny women etc etc but the fact is most artists do figures most resembling their own and you can imagine Giacometti never ate he was too busy recreating himself in stick figures and Beckett had a skinny consciousness too just like his writing very skinny and shorn of accoutrements like flesh of words writing just the bare bones as I saw him once in the back of the Café Select 1948 bundled up in a thin topcoat shivering in the Montparnasse winter and himself looking like he hadn’t eaten in a week like he was still in the Resistance since this was before he started Waiting for Godot and before it got famous at the Théâtre de Poche or somewhere like that and Beckett always like a shadow of himself like Giacometti and T. S. Eliot in his wasted land as thin as Prufrock with his trousers rolled and come to think of it like William Seward Burroughs another Thin Man el hombre invisible as he was called the old hip hustler always ready to disappear should the fuzz show up He was there but not there even when signing his books in City Lights bookstore the original genius con-man even later when he didn’t need to be and was Clean if you know what I mean He’d cleaned up as they say and leading a straight life in Lawrence Kansas except for what he might have been growing on “the back forty” yeah he was clean as a shotgun barrel if you know what I mean and you might say he wrote all of Naked Lunch years before without ever eating it or breakfast on the grass for that matter while shooting up in a narrow room in that fleabag hotel in the Latin Quarter and skinny Dr. Benway somewhere else also cooking it up Sabbah Sabbah Sabbah Latah and that’s the skinny of it, the syllabus of the Skinny Lit tradition for professors to micturate over with Don Quixote skinny as his horse lost in the Sierra Morena lit up in a flash of lightning in black of night
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