AND a coracle upon the sea a fisherman in it drawing his nets and a high voice calling as dusk falls and the light drops suddenly into night oh is that then all there is to life a little light and then night again over and over Oh I had my hour my one fat fierce sweet hour There was a shout about my ears There was something in the air that night the stars were bright but then the day came which made absolutely no sense at all but if you don’t stir up your mind all the time it will become clear like a pool of water, said the Buddha, even as the past recedes at an ever-increasing pace and civilization as we know it going down the drain faster and faster as “Man with his burning soul has but an hour of breath to build a ship of Truth in which his soul may sail—sail on the sea of death for death takes toll of beauty, courage, youth, of all but Truth” and it’s three strikes and you’re out at the Old Ball Game as a red ant walks with its many legs along an ochre wall above the sea its round eye seeing everything including Odysseus passing by in the Strait of Messina at Scylla far off a voice is calling in the dawn wind and the swart ship with rowers at the locks the pilot casting his plumb line sounding the depths of the straits with its rocky shoals its treacherous shallows its rude winds gusting and Odysseus the chief pirate hovering over the helmsman the battered hull thumping against the running sea but Odysseus steers apart he knows the sound he knows the apparition when in a dense fog strange alluring shapes loom of a sudden before him and it’s La Lupa the Wolf the fog that eats ships and men far from home far from home with Scylla and Charybdis to sail through and the sirens calling And it’s the portrait of the artist as an old man and it’s still the same old story of the young buck who leaves his home and his mother and father and brothers and sisters to find his own solitary way in a world of his own imagining which is not necessarily the real world as it exists and so off into the wild blue yonder to find oneself with pants down at the Folies Bergère or by the door of a church whose name he’d rather not remember Ah yes and my mind my constant companion through the archipelagos and uplands of thinking where I love to roam and stumble or swim with or against any current as wild winds blow our arks made of thoughts Blimey me if it ain’t the usual illusions when in dead of night we hear the far sounds that only night can produce hark hark the field mice stir and birds in the bush converse before dawn as we turn and turn in bed our eyes still fed with darkness and it is the time of final reckoning of the never-ending end of night the time to get real after a lifetime of illusion and evasion yes now is the hour to let it all loose and let it come down to the real to the way life really is the bones of reality of the here and now I hear the muezzin calling from his tower Brother observe the time and repent! brother brother and where now in the dense fog that drifts along pavements and wraps around lampposts and tin figures lost in it fleeing and Big Ben sounds through it all as if all empires had not already crumbled Night night and where is my lover mother sister mister and who shall show us the way show me the way oh brother oh sister let’s go down down to the river to pray if not to prey upon each other the end is just beginning and we’ll to the woods no more to snore upon others’ dreams and hear the ladies gossiping about who slept with whom and what the parrot said and thereafter never spoke again and ain’t it a sin the way men and women carry on thru the centuries on and on demoiselles and handymen hunkered down in their hovels or palazzos peasants all! whites bleached out from blacks out of Africa in the beginning before it all began oh shall we cruise awhile with Odysseus through the strait once more or cast ashore in some sunny isle for good and forever and hark hark the lark at heaven’s gate sings? Oh is that any way to come at the Real and my mind still stuck in its own mire of desire and giving my body its misdirections nude erections rude exorcisms ejaculations epiphanies and revelations and aperçus all masturbations of the mind and the boat never beaches in the reaches of night night But I must arise and go now to the Isle of Manisfree where there are no beds with memory-mattresses that remember and record everyone who ever slept there and with whom or without whom they slept man or woman or a third sex of which there are many yes but do I have to go via the Rome airport Fiumicino named after some crooked river and thousands of joyless travelers laden with huge bags all on the life journeys or already passed through Dante’s gates that tell you to “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” and you’re now in one of The Divine Comedy’s crude nude circles descending toward Hell or ascending to Paradiso the light at the end of the tunnel mamma mia well it’s evident that I am not capable of seeing the world for Real since I keep drifting off into these fantasies or pipe dreams or other evasions etc etc and where’s the reality of it all ha-ha well if you think for one moment that I’m going to reveal to you any unvarnished unadorned naked truth If you think you’re going to learn from me any secrets of the universe or of the human heart well then you’re a bigger idiot than I supposed so you might as well stop reading this drivel in the middle of the night so bye-bye baby just leave me to my mutterings because I can’t go on but I go on with the bleached-out memoirs torn poems fished out of wastebaskets full of ordinary platitudes and all the brilliant things I was going to say at lunch mixed with secrets of the universe gone down the drain or misplaced in psychedelic hallucinations but what’s below the drain may turn out to be the most interesting to keep you awake in the general slaughter of life as she is lived today when it is dawn and the world goes forth to murder dreams And is not life in general a great battle eternal between optimism and pessimism between yea-sayers and nay-sayers between the naïve and the cynical between joy and joy-killers between lovers and weepers between joie de vivre and nausea in the Sartrean sense or between light and dark between blinding light and deep darkness and all existence a struggle between the bearable lightness of Good and dark dark Evil even here in Paris in the spring with pure light filtering through the marronniers and the sunlight flooding my mind with the lyricism that kills all laments even as a huge black crow flies across my path in the park of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre And close by I hear twelve slow strokes of an iron bell
AND a young stud at the next table typing on his laptop, both ears stopped with earphones. A flock of birds wheels by in the sky. One of them falls to the pavement right in front of us. A black car, a farting bus, a bicycle go by. So does a blond with a baby and a dog barking furiously. I’m just five feet from the guy. Finally I say in a friendly voice, “You from around here? Haven’t seen you before in the neighborhood.” No answer. He continues typing, staring at the laptop. He heard nothing? Is this body alive? I’m alarmed. I call 911. After some time a cop car arrives and he’s arrested for “nonparticipation in humanity.” They haul the corpse away.
SO then “dancing on the edge of the world” sang some Indian on the far shore of San Francisco before it became a Pale Face city and Indians danced on Alcatraz before Pale Face made Alcatraz into a prison to jail all the outcasts and halfcasts on a stolen continent where Pale Face taught us to drink hot brown water in the morning and cold brown water at night firewater in bottles on street corners on lost reservations in indigenous chaos And ain’t that the long and the short of it the life and death of the Indian Nation while the rest of us were spooning along hot on the trail of instant gratification or not so instant maybe but get your own and devil take the rear quarters of the beast of life but the old Indian myth of San Francisco once being an island still persisted among the Pale Face who took over several centuries ago and the myth persisted as late as the middle of the twentieth century when still on the streets of San Francisco you could encounter citizens who thought of San Francisco as a kind of offshore republic not really a part of the greater United States yes indeed San Franciscans then still had a kind of insular island mentality and all descended from the first nonbourgeois settlers of San Francisco wildcat gold seekers layabouts gamblers whores drifters con men card sharks and rogue cowboys from the open range before the West was fenced and Civil War draft evaders and ladies of easy virtue as they was called yeah man the first settlers of San Franci
sco a veritable rogues gallery with sailors and seafarers from all over the world and robber barons and well you name it It was a fine scurvy crew ready for anything including the earthquake and fire of 1906 yeah yeah and that the beginning for a whole new ball game a whole new city rising from the ashes “like a phoenix” they said and it was true that is if you had hit gold or a rich widow or a jackpot somewhere And our hero almost al verde as they say in italiano walking up Market Street after crossing Oakland ferry like Whitman Crossing Brooklyn Ferry or so he thought with his seabag still with him slung over his shoulder but no albatross still in it since he had shuffled it off in Paris and so into the new world and the last frontier as if it still existed in the Wild West of our imagination where the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco later performed Waiting for Godot before the waiting inmates in San Quentin Prison those specialists in waiting who do nothing but wait for some unimaginable liberator and so left it up to us the inmates of the world all of us spinning through space on the surface of this turning place from which we cannot escape at least not most of us except for those privileged to catch a seat in some future spacecraft heading for some other star ha-ha as if they could actually live on it once they got there disembarked into the ultimate unimaginable oh man Do you dig? the days spin past and we are but birds upon some divine vine the grapes of some ecstatic vino we hope to drink and why not just press the grapes of wrath rather than all the other varietals of grapes and other psychedelics oh peel me a grape Cleopatra and turn me on yes the days are endless on this drifting barge on the Nile of our dreams oh what an illusion but what’s wrong with illusions for if you take away a man’s illusions he will die as in some play like The Iceman Cometh or The Time of Your Life waiting in a bar for illusions to materialize or in San Quentin or in other places where everybody’s waiting for something or someone and so make up your own illusion by looking at yourself in any mirror on the wall of your dreams or in any still pool where fireflies wink And our hero having read Saroyan’s My Name Is Aram when he was fifteen 1930s with crazy Indian chiefs riding around in limousines “feet up and smoking wild cigars” or like Jack London’s Frisco long ago when “Don’t Call It Frisco” became the cry of the nabobs living on Nob Hill who didn’t like drunken riffraff sailors down on the waterfront singing “Frisco”
AND the mind winging away on its own even before it sees the light of day or even after its body can no longer function tick-tick the brain mumbles on or sings on according to its predilections tragic or lyric comic or curioso on and on into the night and every thought I think is my last thought and my first thought just born into the sentient world oh if I could find and think my first thought again what a revelation what a sense-ation what a watta in first light upon earth O Paradiso or disheveled landscape Dante be damned we’re out in the dear daylight winging away and our life on earth a rave a raving in pure light shining in all things and creations and so on and so forth or dreaming away like gents old and full of sleep yeah yeah that’s another way to go when I have nothing more to say but keep on saying it over and over Shall I say it again Well then say something new for a change instead of same old tired mythologies of the past as time with its feather still strolls lines in everybody’s faces while sometimes in darkness and thunder miracles light up the land like the beauty of human figures male and female in all those cheesecake magazines at checkout counters all across America yes those checkout counters the very concrete gates of reality through which we all have passed into the very panorama of America where every bush burns when the TV lights are turned up and life still stirs in the underbrush while everything is recorded by Google in a Recorded Future in which Peak Empire the peak of American Empire has been passed and said Empire has indeed collapsed while its successor the American Republic (based strictly upon the boundaries of North America) is flourishing and a happy breed of men in this little New World is free in our beautiful land in which the past remains eternally unchangeable and real while the present is always changeable and surreal and you should still never play cards with a man called Doc while the world spins on and it ain’t never oveh until it’s oveh…And so out here on the late last frontier, it turns out I am no fucking genius but just another version of the Middle Mind of America and so don’t expect any great breakthroughs from me as to the nature of consciousness or any great aperçus of any kind or any Unified Theory of Relative Reality for our little consciousness is just a candle between two eternal darknesses yes our little conscious moment is just a little searchlight trying to pierce the great dark And I am just waking in the vortex of past time, as if it were a kind of Nocturama, a structure for animals that are awake only at night, or this vortex of time thus becomes a poem with an invisible subject like a novel that has no plot but wanders around, in which its characters wander around through life in what would appear to be an aimless fashion, or at least with no steady intention or aim, and in the end even the author has no idea where his back is headed or will end up, just like life itself, and if art is really supposed to imitate life we are left with a masterpiece the past a heap of broken images and the future an infinite no-man’s-land where virgin visions are born out of pure anarchy while the Buddhists hold that suffering is the grand end of all being and they devote themselves to getting through the night of suffering by attaining enlightenment, that is, the attainment of light, whereas whereas may not we begin with light as the grand end of all being and then proceed at last into blue death? Yes it was the Greeks who said death is blue and I’ll go with that which is much better than considering death as total darkness made of the Sirocco of Madness and this my Underground Oratorio But the author goes right on talking with a kind of insane loquacity no matter what is happening to the world around him which is a sure sign of his looniness as can be seen in mental wards where men sit mumbling to themselves carrying on serious conversations with themselves as if everything were sane and rational Oh perhaps you have seen them as you passed by with firm tread and it’s all like that old film The King of Hearts in which the inmates of an asylum consider themselves the only sane people in the world while the people outside go forth every day to murder their dreams and ecstasies in the general conflagration of everyday life in the twenty-first century even here on the late frontier San Francisco which is still an island in the eyes of the natives indeed indeed when I arrived in time to witness the end of civilization as we know it in the final eco-catastrophe and the riven seas come in to cover us And so is this your AHA moment and am I the consciousness of a generation or just some old fool sounding off and trying to escape the dominant materialist avaricious consciousness of America today yes escaping into mysticism or enlightenment or escaping into dope or psychedelics or into pure lyricism in paint or words yes the lyric escape I am always indulging in whether in writing or painting or pure sex as the world turns on driven by testosterone even in women yes it’s still the raised pecker the joystick that drives the hot car of life O man as I was pondering our unrelenting destinies as I was thinking on the good old ways Oh brother let’s go down down to the river to pray Oh yes by god or whoever all you trans-Americans such as myself Let’s go down to the river to pray Yes trans-Americans indeed for are we not all from Someplace Else and does it still matter where we came from and our children not caring where we came from like passengers on some subway all from everywhere and all going different places yet all going where the train is taking them No way to get off between stops if there are any yes all of us still in transit so that we must constantly change the idea of who we are as we go on living in the end-times the end-times of man on earth while newspapers are reporting not only that the glaciers are melting and earth warming but also that the past is receding faster and faster, like the track behind a speeding-up train Yes and the train of my life rocking along on these fictional documentary tracks with no way of telling what’s truly fiction or what’s truly documentary (as in films by Werner Herzog like Lessons of Darkness in which false fantasies and truths are interchangeable) so that so that
who can tell if this tale is a tragicomedy or a comi-tragedy but in the end I don’t go for fatal endings especially not my own and so and so let’s just say I’ve summarized my past by theft and allusion and all I know is that I’ll be taking an escalator soon to the next level of existence or nonexistence and will it be the down-escalator or the up-escalator and thereby hangs the tail of this mutt and he still wagging it And how did he go from a youthful anarchism to humanitarian socialism as a creed to live by And how did he end up a painter and a poet always alienated in one way or another and still claiming that he was never ingested by the dominant culture that ingests so many rebels before they croak and he still living in his own illusion that he’s never been ingested as a poet oh yeah Ah poetry Ain’t it all just a lyric escape from rocky reality but him claiming all the time that poetry is in fact reality itself the very bedrock essence which should always be presented without introductions or prefaces yes just hit them full in the face with the piths of reality and let there be a sharp intake of air.
Little Boy Page 10
