AND so then into the void in our Ark or Crystal Palace whose foundations founder in water yes the great construct of our electronic civilization built of crystal chips invulnerable except to the slightest drop of water striking it dead in the coming floods And the kid in the basement not the underground man but the underwater man babbling incoherent imbecilities ha-ha don’t you believe it for he wasn’t born a mindless rebel and didn’t become one by joining some bomb-throwing idiots in some sweet act of violence no sir it was no doubt all because of a lack of love at a tender age yes sir let me tell you it had nothing to do with a fanatical urge to fight injustice everywhere and change the world oh no none of that it was rather that this kid started out deprived of a mother or father and had no family of his own and if he had had a real one he wouldn’t have turned out the way he is today no sir a life among strangers at an early age is a life without love and the kid grows up unfeeling yes that’s it the kid who never got an embrace or a kiss until he grew up and met a warm woman his age this little kid’s youth was a trauma of loneliness and unfeeling yes he was a stranger among strangers and a stranger to himself full of longing for he knew not For what could he know since there was no one to tell him anything and he could not even know that what he was longing for was love Oh how would he know that who knew only kind strangers or not-so-kind strangers and so whom does he turn to when he grows up and shakes his trauma or tries to find some feeling with others and to whom does he naturally fall in with if not with other lost souls or alienated bodies and thereby hangs the tale of alienation from all the Others the regular people of normal life and normal society yes the tale of the haves and have-nots those who had love or had it not And so life groped on in darkness and light oh it’s an old story isn’t it and you can read about it in endless novels and endless poems of alienation and despair and who the hell wants to hear about it again except if the poor author can come up with some new exciting twist worthy of a production on reality TV and people who have real families are incapable of understanding the loneliness on earth felt by orphans from birth especially at holiday times when families gather as he remembered one snowy Christmas in that suburban village where there was a hotel on a hill all covered with snow and there was a Christmas pageant scene going on with a baby in a manger and the Wise Men approaching the manger bearing gifts from Saks Fifth Avenue and Mary in the manger and all that while the snow is falling on everything on the village main street where he was standing looking up and the air oozing with Christmas carols like “Joy to the World the Lord has come” and everyone hurrying by with presents or packages of things for home and “Joy to the World” ringing out and maybe kids going by on sleds pulled by their fathers etc etc you get the scene like you’ve seen it a million times reenacted over and over the Babe in the manger because they claim there was no room in the inn yeah yeah Oh happy day with this little kid standing there on the frozen corner Oh man Look homeward angel now and melt with wrath
AS “In sorrow I gaze upon my generation” wrote Lermontov in a poem a couple of hundred years ago way off over there in Russia while here and now someone has discovered a new alkaloid in the brain called idiotine presumably the ingredient that makes idiots and there’s a lot of it to go around oh these are wintry thoughts and there are terrible nights of lightning and thunder and rain as if the sun or moon would never come back again as one night when I could not feel my heartbeat and could not find my pulse on my wrist but found it in my watch on my other wrist tick-tick the tolling of eternity oh what unending nights but summer comes and life changes and I still can enjoy a laugh that sounds like an accordion yes after all there still are things that make life worth living or wasting yes plenty of them in fact yes oh white nights and mouths of desire and what of the hidden call of the morning dove mourning his love what of the sun streaming down in meshes of morning high tide and the heron’s call and figures on the beach running into the sea laughing heads thrown back long hair streaming forever young ah life goes on with the cries of boat-tailed grackles in the tops of jacaranda trees in the setting sun at San Miguel de Allende but still in sorrow I gaze upon our twenty-first-century civilization with its casino culture its electronic pulse its stone heart its brain dumbed-down and let the bad times roll But now a dead silence rings in my ears and life seems to have come to a standstill and I don’t know which way to go from here as if there were only one way to go as if all were ordained ahead of time the first step of the baby out of the crib determining his whole itinerary but what am I to do just sit here dribbling words on a page as if that were the most important thing in life as if it could amount to anything or give anyone an inspiration on how to live or die or whatever indeed let us spray said one skunk to another in the church So here we go and keep going on and on with our crazy thoughts round and round in the squirrel’s cage in the mandala maze in the endless spinning of the skein of living and the river rushes forward with us on it as on a tossing raft floating down the great flood with Jim and Huck into the heartland oh brother can you spare your cornball comments on my way of life and where I came from and where I’m going and what’s it to anybody if I’m an Okie who fled the dust bowl to Californiay in the 1930s or a sexy French-Swiss hosiery salesman pushing silk stockings on Barbary Coast ladies of the night Man oh man if I could enumerate all the men and women and dogs and cats of the world and describe each of them in great detail with all their tails and tics and passions Well then would I have given you even the slightest inkling of what makes life tick what makes the world clock go round It’s a hopeless task and even Shakespeare or Chekhov couldn’t begin to articulate what Sophocles heard by the Aegean long ago or what Shiva heard dancing on many legs in the dawn of time and if one man cries out then another hears it and he cries out and his woman cries out and their dog picks it up and starts howling and when one dog barks the whole pack picks it up and starts howling their muzzles to the sky but all it takes is for one big hyena to start laughing and then the whole world rocks with laughter the laughter of the mock Absurd the whole world a Theatre of the Absurd—oh so that’s your way out of the big dilemma You think that’s some kind of solution man that’s just another evasion don’t give me that Absurd bullshit and don’t give me all those other Absurd answers to fathom our fate on earth even as the curtain comes down on the last act Wow did I say our last act and après nous le déluge? and there’s an ex–Lutheran minister telling me “We ain’t coming back We believe in resurrection not in reincarnation like the Buddhists” which explains why he was stretched out on a lounge chair in the lobby outside of where his Jewish-Buddhist girlfriend was meditating with her Tibetan guru and “Yeah” he sed “she’s a Ju-Bu” and so then when they were all thru meditating for the day I’m introduced to the big chief guru who says “You from around here?” like I was from Squaw Valley or Tahoe where the retreat was happening and I says “Yes I’m from the universe” thinking I was being real clever and real mystic at the same time only he just gives me a funny look thinking Who is this creep? and shakes my hand hard and smiles his love at me, saying “I’ll see ya again” “Yes yes” I say as he turns away and I’m thinking Does he mean he’ll see me on earth or someplace else and so off we went on our own separate paths around the universe and that’s the-he-and-the-she of it bye-bye blackbird and may the good Lord save us if He really exists with all the odds against Him yeah yeah put that in your sebsi and smoke it and thus deprive yourselves of the comfort of great religions dreamed up by the wisest men and women thru thousands of years and giving you something to live by yes some gods to live by for every great people needs them and what great myths do we have today to live by (go read Joseph Campbell and weep) and who are our idols except football or baseball or rock stars or military heroes yeah tell me tell me why not instead wake up each morning with a great Hooray! leading of course to a Last Hurrah! and each day a new invention a new form of living just like picking up a new pen every morning and reinventing an alphabet and inventing a new genre neither a novel nor a memo
ir nor a form of documentary but an unnamable piece of day and night spoken or sung by the voice of the fourth person singular and what is that voice if it is not the very voice that is doing the thinking when we meditate yes just ask yourself who is thinking when you are meditating or just ruminating half awake at four in the morning when that dark dove with flickering tongue passes below the horizon of our living—or fully awake at midday yes whose is that voice whispering to your mind when you are silent and alone Oh is it not the voice of consciousness itself and consciousness itself a single ludic voice inside each of us the voice for magical thinking
AS if I had such a voice or verse sitting in some café where you’d think nothing never happens but let me tell you plenty goes down in the back rooms of the mind and heart at the back tables while some hairy dude is playing a mandolin with its sweet sad sound the very soul of old Italy as at the beginning of Godfather II but then this dame comes prancing up to me and Oh, she sez, I’m only trying to keep in shape, and I say Right on but when do I get to see your shape Yeah yeah, she says, so come up and see me some other time, but somehow it never happens, one of those dopey dreams if you know what I mean And so is sex still driving everything or isn’t it Oh samsara is good for you and to deprive us of all the pleasures of our sensorium may be to die Oh I was zaptized by the fish-eaters when I was a helpless babe but somehow escaped thank you very much so don’t attempt to dip me again in that holy puddle man oh man the direct or alternating current of my consciousness does not desire to be short-circuited with any kind of liquid except the ilk of human kindness a different kind of liquid whose genetic code has still to be cracked and how lonely is Christ these days like this noon as I was passing the church of Saint Peter and Paul and the big sad synthetic bell was tolling twelve strokes very slow and no one inside at all not a soul in sight not even a priest oy vey…while in spring the earth sings as if it knew love songs by heart while a sense of loss still pervades poetry past and present oh what is it in us that prefers singing of loss instead of present ecstasies and why are we always trying to stamp out the burning fires of samsara whereas we could just be lying back to hear the primordial sound of the universe the subdued murmur of the sea-tide setting inward as Rinpoche wrote while living and dying while chanting the great mantra om mani padme hum that transforms pride jealousy desire ignorance greed and anger into something nude and strange while our consumer machine goes on brilliantly selling “samsara and its barren distractions” yeah oh modern industrial society is a fanatical religion all the while killing everywhere the natural bardo of life so do I instead go not with the Poets of Loss but with the great yea-sayers the great yes-sayers like Whitman and Henry Miller yes why lie down with the dead ahead of time Life can turn on a dime and the next thing you know you’re king or married to a Queen of Hearts or playing darts with death on some foreign battlefield like Ulysses or lost in a labyrinth of your own making with only a Minotaur for a friend And so and so be sure to meditate with your eyes open yes your eyes the jewels of your head while I unlock my word-hoard of ruminations meditations exhortations celebrations condemnations excitations lamentations liberations and ecstasies plotless as a life that is to say like a life whose plot is only discovered after it is lived oh blimey ain’t that a mouthful but speaking of yea-sayers there’s a species of ape who never make war and spend all their time making love with whoever comes to hand and there are no social prohibitions restricting their lovemaking with whoever suits their fancy and they never make war with foreign tribes but peacefully join them and make love with them too so that they are always sexually satisfied and are drained of all primordial bestial bloodlust or imperatives to kill even as human hunters came after them for their meat in the deep African forests which are now being cut down and thus pass the glories of the world the bestial kingdom destroyed And what are you going to do about it my dear friend just what’s to be done is the whole world population a dysfunctional family on a boat heading for the falls and how steep the drop into oblivion and what does American Legion Post 101 have to say about it You’re on Nickelodeon TV so say something intelligent tell us who we are and where we’re going and if you’re an artist well then say something important in your art Man oh man speak up and tell us something true and how are we to proceed to find the lost city and stop mumbling and enlighten us and just don’t sit there rocking on your wooden horse Daddy Daddy I am looking for my father whom I never knew I am looking for the Lost Leader with whom I flew but perhaps we should suffer a real cultural revolution and transform our society into that of the apes who make love all the time with anyone and everyone yes what if we just abolished all the prohibitions and inhibitions in our religious and moral codes and just let loose all our suppressed desires and hungers oh what then with our sexual lava flowing freely and no longer seething under the surface of polite society yes what then if not paradiso? yes yes except except what of the resulting surge of population on an earth already groaning with overpopulation to the extent that all of our most fatal world problems are directly traceable back to it? Enough! Enough! Lower your penis, you rapacious dog, down, Rover, down! Sing hallelujah and life goes on and it’s poids net nowhere and the jury is still out at the World Court trying the case of the Lord and is He/She guilty of crimes against humanity? what an obscene question what a blasphemous idea to be bringing God to judgment as if He/She or It could be tried and found guilty or innocent but in fact the case before the court is still in the discovery stage trying to uncover the facts so that both the prosecutor representing the Establishment and the Defender of the People will know all the facts of the case which so far has proved impossible since all have bathed in the River of Forgetfulness and the River of Hypnos yet still the future is always with us as is the present and the past but when the future becomes the present does it lose its lustre if not its mystery yet we still recapture that lustre by involuntary memory or would you just call it nostalgia the past revisited as if by a ghost of ourselves and my mind a labyrinth trying to find the way out speaking with all the voices of l’homme moyen sensuel telling all his stories sounding all his cries and laughter and Everyman’s mind and tongue are mine my consciousness my unbound tongue let loose wandering through all our lives thinking together in the night of magical thinking to find the Sibyl with arms upraised and holding up that Golden Bough in a painting by Turner as the sun rises hidden in mists of morning with our collective consciousness a butterfly flittering over the landscape of living and all that sexual lava seething beneath the surface of polite society
Little Boy Page 9
