AND am I some ape sitting under a spare tree waiting for the end or the beginning of the world in some café still inscribing the amiable history of self with mumblings and mouthings of various personal assininities irrelevancies obscenities and obsessions on and on to find the fucking universal in the particular as they say as if the universe cared a damn what any one atom thought or felt or spouted out of its mouth or aperture front end or rear end like Paddy in a corner in a pub babbling to himself or a fellow tippler in the west of Ireland where Yeats is buried with his outworn heart Under Ben Bulben and Maud Gonne gone long ago after the Easter Rebellion alas poor Yeats whose antique speech brash Ezra Pound tried to make over much to the detriment of the Irisher’s lovely cadences as if all that had anything to do with us that is you and me-me-me as we go on living and breathing as if we would live forever as if time would not kill us all in the end including our little ego which we absolutely will not let die before us even though Buddhists say we must let go of it if we are to reach any sort of enlightenment oh sure Let it go Let it go you don’t need it and if everyone could kill their egos there would be no need to kill each other and there would be universal peace on earth yes indeed brother blessed be the peacemakers and let us all chant om om om instead of me-me-me if only we could if only we would Let Go Let Go but I ain’t going to let go with Buddha and I ain’t going to let go with no god either even though the pope himself speaking Romano with a German accent comes out on his high balcony and urges me to Go with God since I ain’t going no place but right here on earth or in earth’s sea and not floating around on a cloud by the gates of some heaven the exact location of which is ever more difficult to find and the ultimate mysteries can never be discovered or dissected or subjected to reason or to computer Twitter which would ruin all the divine arguments and leave only me to face only myself and look into the abyss and hear in death the lyric voice of the fourth person singular the voice of the lyric escape in which spring every year travels north at fifteen miles per day and wildflowers spring up in a wave across the landscape at the same speed silently sending their crocus calls for us passing in cars trains or buses at a much faster speed in the wrong direction a blind life force driving all of us animals and flowers reaching for the light and birds calling in the chilly air a lyric escape the air is bright with their calling as crimson sun cracks the night and all is not lost though tempest-tossed and the birds telling it over and over singing it to us as if the world still belonged to them not us and there is always and forever nothing but Now and past and future but fantasies and the past a foreign country where they did things differently but we are not sailors anymore not able-bodied seamen anymore as we zoom across the land enclosed in painted metal cans or fly through the air in winged metal tubes totally disconnected from nature as she used to be called but time that reviews all things will certainly bring all down to earth again for no one has yet been able to repeal the law of gravity and even time must be subject to it as it is sucked down the final funnel black hole even as earth the spinning world itself in some not-so-distant future will be sucked into the yawning maw of the universe even as the pluriverse will be sucked down or up into some infinite oblivion and so let us sing and dance on our tick of eternity and its surreal narrative in which is embedded the biography of bad boy me the would-be antihero the virtual bullyboy born full of desire the omnivorous hunger for life when he sprang up out of sperm into endless adventures in that wilderness of being on earth where there is only me-me-me in spite of billions of other sentient beings four-legged or wingéd flying or walking or swimming or crawling in sun or shadow and prairie dogs sitting up and putting their paws together facing the setting sun every day tomorrow and tomorrow And there are no birds in yesterday’s nests and life goes on in that orphan’s home at age six and so began life with the dispossessed but still how did Little Boy become so alienated in this endless tale of endless thought and he always taking the outsider’s view when he grew up like he was Eugene Debs saying while there is a soul in prison I am not free whereas the straight me was like Little Lord Fauntleroy living a straight life in luxurious settings etc etc with nary a thought for his own unknown mother lost in transit such a mixed-up story as is everybody’s life And so it was Little Lord Fauntleroy adopted out of that orphan’s home and no one throwing rose petals on him oh does not everyone see life through a scrim a screen between oneself and reality so that for instance being an orphan boy still at ten years old our little hero sees a Christmas pageant reenacted in a little town square in suburban New York with Christmas carols oozing through the snowy air and the Wise Guys coming onto the scene in the make-believe manger and everyone singing Christmas tunes and Baby Jesus in the manger crying and wondering what is going on while all he wants is his Mama and a warm tit and all he feels is an immense lonesomeness on earth where he has just arrived and which of us shall know his brother etc etc and he alone in the empty universe empty of love and warmth so that so that forever after he hated the sound of Christmas carols “Joy to the World” and all that Oh lonesome is a bad place to be crowded into with only yourself And later he would wander in a wooded park with his little band of school buddies seeing themselves as Robin Hood’s Merry Men and what he wanted more than anything was a buckskin suit like Robin Hood oh he would have robbed a traveler to get it yes and that’s how rebels are fomented.
YET even with such a fucked-up beginning, it was still “Welcome oh Life and let the dice fall where they may” as the seed of my mother’s family blew away from the rocky mountains of Portugal in some dark century And I always dreaming a wanderer in some city an exile in my own land always struggling to get somewhere else to meet someone some shadowy nurturing being and always awakening without finding whoever yes this curious Little Boy who didn’t know who he was or where he came from a kind of tabula rasa in a way and Tante Emilie had no money for milk and the Health Department came and took him away to the orphanage but after a very long year Tante Emilie came back for him for she had gotten a job as a French governess in a mansion in the suburbs on a hill in Lawrence Park west of Bronxville and they began living in a little room two floors up under the eaves of the grey stone house covered in ivy and surrounded by formal gardens and ate dinner in the formal dining room served by a Dutch butler who was also the chauffeur and Tante Emilie spoke only French to the eighteen-year-old daughter and this was in the 1920s before the Big Crash and in the summer of that year up under the eaves they slept side by side where a great oak tree leaned its branches over the gable of their room and the wind swept the leaves against the window at night but they were cozy inside and happy then for a time a too-short time perhaps a half a year but then the landscape grew darker the picture darkened the film of her life went dark when Tante Emilie disappeared overnight and just wasn’t there anymore and they told him she had gone out on her day off and just never returned and must have been (they said) a victim of amnesia and what else was he to think or know the poor kid you’d say but ain’t there been plenty of other poor kids abandoned by mothers or otherwise cast up alone someplace like Little Lord Fauntleroy for instance which was indeed a book that his Aunt Emily left with him in which a little American boy inherits a fortune and a grand estate in England and is spirited away by a “solicitor” for his Lordship who wants the boy as his heir but doesn’t want the non-English mother whom his son had married against his Lordship’s will and so after the son’s untimely death the Lord sort of kidnapped Little Lord Fauntleroy and the mother was not allowed to come along and so the little tyke lonely by himself in a great mansion like little me then proceeded to grow up bereft of his dear aunt and how is it then that this lonely lad grew up to be a part-time rebel Aye that’s the question for some shrink to explore or some behavioral psychologist or barroom philosopher and it’s two steps forward and one step back to recover the past of anyone as if anything could be recovered at all once the moment of living is gone into the ravenous maw of eternity even if you misspend a lifetime doing it like poor Proust
in search of lost time and what good did it do him in the end in his cork-lined room in old Paris breathing his last breath with a slight frown on his face as if he had just missed recapturing his earliest moment of waking life love lost and forlorn in the end having never quite captured the love he’d imagined and so into the great dark dark dark the interstellar spaces where our dust blows we all go into it and who’s to say if we’ll come out on the other side hardly the Christians with their big book of fairy tales and is a whole society to be founded on such fantasies such visions but then why not? A vision is not to be disregarded for without a vision to live by where are we after all and so and so by all means let us have visions and you have a vision and I have a vision and even though all visions are myopic let us praise visions like visions of a desert isle where there is absolutely no hate or sin or violence and everyone’s a lover male or female and nobody has to work ’cause all the food is hanging from the trees ready to eat or sprouting out of the ground and all they have to do is make love all the time if they can find it and there’s the rub because it doesn’t grow on every bush like fruit no sirree you don’t find love just anywhere even in a perfect society which is so perfect that dissidents don’t any longer have to be dissident and what are they all to do then to occupy their lives and the consumer demand for love is so great the consumption of love is so great that there develops a great scarcity of it and what then what then what with the population exploding as a result of all that fertilization of love and it’s an inborn instinct to propagate the species it’s a primal urge and every one and every animal has this urge to do it over and over and over with babies tumbling out of wombs or pouches everywhere to satisfy that blind urge with or without love and so there we are again with all the others hunting love all the hunter-gatherers turned into consumer-gatherers in a consumer society consumed with consuming yeah turn on the TV and git more out of it yeah git the baby outa the wombat and plunk him/her in front of it in front of the big TV and hook him/her into it for life so he/she will buy buy buy and the boy growing up in such a society with nothing to do but consume and be consumed by it wow is that the end of it is that all there is to living on earth but then again don’t we run into that scarcity of love in a world fighting for it and killing each other for it over and over in endless wars oh ain’t it about time to put an end to it and find some other way to live on earth yeah yeah some way between fascism and anarchism oh man I’m tired of thinking about it so let’s go out into the fair fields and smell the flowers like Ferdinand the Bull refusing to fight yes Ferdinand the true pacifist the sacred bull with Buddha on his back and everyone chanting om om om even with fear and trembling and we can’t go on but we do go on waiting for some savior or destroyer or propagator or supreme fucker beyond imagination and every sentence the last sentence I’ll ever write but then there’s always another thought to be spoken or written and we can’t go on but I do and I see I see cries the blind man who couldn’t see at all because he is seeing with his mind oh the mind and its fascinations endless in its lonely imagining and then also the fear and trembling yes back to that every time between the laughter and the high jinks and the singing into the night in drunken taverns Oh we are poor little lambs who have lost our way Bah-bah-bah Gentleman songsters off on a spree gone from here to eterniteee and so on into the dark night of the so-called soul with Saint John of the Cross or whoever And Everyman I will go with thee and be thy guide In thy most need to go by thy side to search to find thine own true self and as Jorge Borges said Whatever the destiny of man it in reality consists of a single moment the solitary moment when man wakes up to know forever who he is Ha-ha as if that were ever possible for are we not each like an onion to be peeled down to nothingness and what’s to be found in anyone’s nothingness except Nothing like an empty paper lantern hung in a leafless tree and all of nothingness a big empty mirror capable of drawing everything into itself like a vacuum and thus capturing and containing everything that stands before it an infinitely empty mirror this nothingness that takes fleeting photos of everyone and everything passing by so that so that we are all mirrors standing or hanging around full of the echoes of each other reflected in each other with distortions And so is not everything that he writes here just scribblings on our own mirror the mirror that each of us is and we cannot dictate who will confront us and be absorbed into the mirror of ourselves but what could a wandering lad on the landscape of America know of all that as the many yesterdays of history each a mirror lying horizontal in graveyards, the Recoleta of race memory with marble inscriptions in the certainties of dust and all our mirror images withering away in a wind full of birds in a lost El Dorado up an Amazon beyond which there is no alphabet as still we go on searching like René Daumal for a Mount Analogue not on any map and no man is an Atlantis entire unto himself but today here and now are we not farther from any paradise on earth than ever before and has not the soul gone out of our civilization with its electronic heart its very soul lost in its electric pulse lost in the trash of its computer and not a search engine that can find it and should we not now rejoice over the coming end of industrial civilization which is bad for earth and man yes indeed the bad breath of machines is killing us even as we speak and yes industrial civilization must go with all its junk poisoning the earth and the Futurists were so wrong imagining a paradiso on earth as a result of wondrous machines early in the twentieth century when they all began to hum almost as it were in unison
Little Boy Page 6
