Little Boy

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  WHILE I’m now sitting near this guy who keeps taking off his sweatshirt or sweater and turning it inside out and putting it on again and then after a while he takes it off again and turns it inside out and puts it on again and what else have I got to do but watch this guy doing the same thing for a couple of hours while all the clean guys and dames on computers are totally absorbed in their little handheld gadgets and never a one casting even a glance at the guy changing his sweater inside out as if he actually didn’t exist in their world at all and I am imagining maybe several hundred thousand computer persons all over the city totally entranced by the moving words and images on their little gadgets can you imagine millions of them a whole new zombie generation on earth computing their lives in pixels or whatever they are and the guy changing sweaters all the time like he’s trying to change his identity maybe and become like the nice guys all around him but, no matter how many times he does his act, he never changes and will always be the outsider trying to get in even though he can plainly see that all these guys and dames are obviously not very happy doing what they’re doing because of a huge void in their lives when they are constantly trying to fill by constant contact online with others trying to fill their own vast void of loneliness on earth in their own brave worlds and so they’re meeting all kinds of strangers online and even actually meeting some of them in person and now and then actually marrying one or two of them and the café fills anew with them every day and every day there are the outsiders changing their sweaters or their pants or suits or sexes to become one of the Happy Many and where will it all end with a nation of this new unnamed twenty-first-century breed of humans oh boy am I so totally demented in my later years that I see the whole of existence with a totally jaundiced eye in which everything is turning into the worst possible world in the worst possible universe and when you are up to your neck in merde is there truly nothing to do but sing? Or laugh as I did when I read that Flaubert’s wife or Stendhal’s wife complained in a letter to a bosom friend that her husband’s penis was too small or was too large I forget but in any case you can imagine the embarrassment of her bosom friend upon receiving this complaint for as it happens she too etc etc And all café sitters waiting for who knows what like Lady Godiva to ride by on a white horse shedding her underwear as she passes and causing universal joy and the stock market zooming up up up while the poor get poorer and the rich get filthy richer while I’m still waiting with Godot and a little guy goes by in a sampan hat pushing a stroller and here comes a small band of Indios playing their bamboo flutes and beating small drums as if they as if we were in the Andes and I am wondering what’s happening to my fair city It’s a flat earth now and we’re all in the new electronic Flat Earth Society and on a clear day you can see almost forever.

  AND every day in this grand little café of life I sit waiting to see how our little civilization develops, not to mention how our little consciousness might develop (Oh what ecstasies, what despair!), and there’s a sign outside the café that says HAPPY HOUR EVERY DAY 4–7 It’s only 10 a.m. and no one is Happy yet A thin young mother enters pushing a stroller in which sits a little fucker and you can tell he’s plotting something. She goes over to the cold drink cabinet and picks out a diet soda and then of a sudden the little feller starts laughing for no apparent reason. It’s already Happy Hour for him, if laughter is a sign of it. I decide to join him and then someone in the back breaks a laugh and then pretty soon everyone in the café is infected with laughing happiness and they’re all laughing their heads off like as if a day of universal happiness had just been declared but now just as suddenly the little brat starts crying and the party is all over and no one feels like joining him in his lament and the mother wheels him out of the café in a hurry as if she had forgotten what laughing happiness is, while in front of my local post office three mailmen are talking Cantonese and laughing and after I mail some stuff I join in laughing my head off and of course they are totally surprised since white White Ghosts don’t usually know Chinese and they have no idea who I am, but I am the universal man and I know Cantonese the way I know which way is Up the way I know all languages spoken or silent and as such I know everything and nothing I am your universal wise man and your universal fool I am your wise guy from Brooklyn and I am your Buddhist guru in a saffron robe with supreme knowledge as to how to exist on earth and elsewhere even as I stand laughing with the Cantonese postmen and a dog walks by leading his master on a leash and the dog lets out one loud bark as he passes the postmen who continue talking and laughing as if the dog didn’t exist and the dog is of course baffled by the Cantonese speech but also by the speech in English by other humans who sound all the same to him They just sound like other dogs going woof-woof or bow-wow which is all very baffling since he and other dogs, and perhaps all other animals except humans, have no memory of their own individual pasts, not really “remembering” anything such as when and where they were born, and isn’t that strange that maybe we humanoids are the only animals who have historical memory of their existence on earth or elsewhere and not one animal expert has any memory of when for instance the ancient Egyptians existed except perhaps cats, those sphinxes, those mysterious anachronisms who may or may not remember when they were deities to the ancient Egyptians, for who can tell what’s going on in any cat’s mind or psyche when they don’t give us any sign that they know or remember anything about everything much less the sacred rituals of deified cats by the River Nile a long time ago And we with all our Prousts remembering everything and every little thing with our omnivorous memories retrouving the past in sessions of sweet silent thought, while I see faces in the leaves of trees embedded in the masses of leaves, and often I discern a face a profile a pair of eyes or a protruding nose and those are never faces I know never familiar faces family faces or anything like that These are strangers’ faces some as ancient as days But who are they and where do they come from in most any tree I come upon are they all mementos of all the people who have ever lived on earth Are they Mother Earth’s memory set forth here to remind the living of all who have passed this way or any way oh boy they are always all silent though they shake with any wind shake their heads so to speak but all remains silent except for a certain rustling a certain light breathing as if about to speak but never do although they may grimace or seem to laugh or weep or cry out yet never do as if all the secrets of earth are hoarded in those faces those heads shaking or still and awaiting the next good or ill wind to agitate them again to set them trembling with some new news of earth and womban. As when for instance when Him shows up more than thirty years before his own death on a cross and when he grows up and Mary Magdalene becomes his wife and bears his children then the apostles and other Wise Guys get very upset because it was supposed to be some sort of celibate bad boys’ club with no begetting of children and they forthwith ran off with Mary’s babes and nowhere were they to be found in the Holy Land and so it went down thru the centuries that Jesus was celibate and Mary merely a camp follower or a prostitute as pictured fifteen hundred years later in Renaissance paintings with Mary Magdalene hanging onto Jesus’s hand like a cast-off fan of Jesus Christ Superstar whereas the truth was that she was hanging onto Jesus and beseeching him to give her back their children to bring back the very fruits of her womb and hung-up Jesus paying her no nevermind, ah men, Amen.

  AND so one day it’s the song of the sad café all around me with everyone on their portable universes their handheld computers and nobody talking to anyone else and after a while I can’t stand the deafening silence any longer and so I up and speak to the solemn guy at the next table like I say “I can’t resist asking what book you are reading” and he hands me the book and it’s Advanced Astrology and we exchange looks and I blurt out “Ya know the Greeks made it all up you know it’s all their fantasy spun out in the stars” etc etc and the guy gives me a strange look and grabs the book back, not that I was trying to hold on to it or anything since I gave up astrology about the same time I wet my pants for
the first time and anyway the café returned to its total silence with everyone screwed to their little computers as if life depended on them which in truth is the case if they sit there long enough glued to the little robots directing their lives etc etc yessir you don’t need to know anything anymore all you have to do is turn on your robot machine and it will tell you anything you didn’t know like when was Troy destroyed and whose face was it that sank a thousand ships etc etc anything that you want to know at your fingertips ain’t it the truth and me just sitting there looking around at all the closed silent faces none of whom could sink a thousand ships like Helen of Troy who could have sunk the whole fleet but all that was then and this is now and how shall I escape this boatload of somnolent café sailors on a cruise? Let me tell you a thing or two about the spinning world before it spins off its axis. The world’s an ice cream melting down and we are tiny animals sprinkled on it, little animals with brains yeah the only animalcules that recognize themselves in mirrors and go wow! And Pope Francis a pope with a brain, can you imagine a pope with a brain mamma mia ain’t it so but even he with his direct connection to Heaven can’t tell us why we are here and what is it we are supposed to be doing here on earth, oh we weren’t set down here to play tennis and kill each other on pro-football fields or in kickboxing rings, we weren’t set down here or set up here to be bowled over by the roller-balls of world wars oh no we must have some higher or lower purpose than that but what could it be except 23andMe yes me and all my progenitors for I have weathered the storm all the storms I have beaten them all I am the man I was there when Rome was built I was with Noah in the Ark I was in the manger with an ass I am the man and I was there I have seen the mass mess but I am the victor of my own life I am the conqueror of it my own mock hero yes and am the captain of my soul ha-ha yes indeed and everything is just fine everything is wonderful except our little tribe is headed for the big falls, our little world is coming to the end of the wick woe woe woe Yes right now is the beginning of the end and you ain’t seen the half of it yet no sir the final crystal night is approaching and what are you going to do about it except sit upon the ground and weep and gnash your teeth and cry but don’t do that yet don’t leave the theatre yet there’s still a lot to come still a lot to see as for instance Holy Smoke! As we used to say Holy Smoke is arising around us descending on us and all comes down to Holy Smoke and all our life dissolved in it and you and me with it Holy Holy Holy “tongue and teeth and asshole holy” in the Amen Corner with us backed into it woe woe alack so let us pray to each other finding ourselves up shit creek without a paddle with the latest scientific evidence proving we are all in the Sixth Extinction yes there having been five other extinctions of life on earth before our own and ours only a few hundred thousand years old and already we are on the way out what a story woe woe all is lost the ship is sinking although nobody even notices a tale of sound and furry animals about to perish feet first into the final zero oblivion and Love and Hate the viruses that eat us up like cannibals insatiable woe woe and we are the tragic heroes of the Sixth Extinction and our fatal flaws are Love and Hate and so Ainsi soit-il so be it baby baby roll me over in the clover roll me over on the grill I’m done on this side turn me over to eternity O father Our father whose art’s in heaven Hollow be thy name Thy Kingdom come and gone Thy will will be undone on earth as it isn’t heaven in the throes of ecosystem collapse or relapse don’t call me I’ll call you Be lazy Go crazy Join the movement Don’t take medicine Eat the garden Ignore government Disband the military Join the pacifists Discover anarchism Resist and Disobey!

  AND so then what am I doing in Saint Stupid’s Parade? Would you call the First Church of the Last Laugh to be an act of disobedience or just plain inflammatory insults to the status quo and praising instead the Stations of Stupidity and the Tomb of Saint Stupid and the Statue of the Bare Butt and God’s Cock?! Oh you contribute to the martyrdom of the bishop, make your own bare-ass parade? But Saint Stupid is so stupid that he/she continues to have his parades on April Fool’s Day every year and who’s to say it doesn’t change the world at all as it goes on spinning around mindlessly or mindfully? Am I so stupid that I don’t recognize a true prophet when I see one? So why should I want to go on living if the whole world is so stupid? But Saint Stupid no doubt has an answer to all my doubts as for instance “we have nothing to fear except fear ourselves!” And is this April Fool’s Day going to go on forever even after the last parade has passed and we are forever the Fool in the Tarot pack or are we all the Hanged Man in the pack forever lost dangling in space? Or should we all join the newest school of Buddhism in America in which instead of Hinayana Buddhism we have the “cosmic oneness” of all phenomena expressed in the new Hahayana Buddhism which aims “to transcend the inexplicable nonsense of human existence” as articulated by Hahayana’s chief guru Scoopa-do Nisker who hopes to die laughing after persuading us all to laugh our heads off too while all the while thinking of dying and every third thought is Death.

  BUT I am not the Hanged Man in the Tarot pack hung out to dry and twisting in the wind, for I still feel like an all-seeing all-hearing observer of everything going on down here on this earth, and here’s a couple with knapsacks near me, and he’s reading a mag and she’s got her head down on the table, seeming to sleep. What’s happening in this moment of their lives? He goes to the counter and comes back with a glass of red wine. Silence descends in the café, Sunday mid-afternoon. She raises her head for a moment to face the world then puts it down again. She’s Asian, he’s white and probably American. He’s reading The New Yorker. He must have a brain or is just pretending. Perhaps they are just a happy couple, and she exhausted from making love all night or all day, and so Now what? Will the skies open and a golden horse appear to carry them away to some undiscovered paradiso? Is their destiny written in the dregs of their wine, here where life once-upon-a-time went on so unterribly that we could not write the Great Russian Novel? I think of greeting the guy cheerfully and striking up a bright conversation. But what is there to say to passing strangers lost in their own worlds and looking at you as if you came from Mars or were a character in Star Wars or some other escape fiction? Oh who knows who knows and who cares, and in the end I get up and go, leaving them to their inscrutable destinies, for the witching hour is upon us, and it is high time to save this world from itself, high time to transform the world into democratic open-society socialism, to share all the world’s wealth with all the Wretched of the Earth, while still the only God for all beings is consciousness itself.

  WHILE in my homely little neighborhood café, a homely little neighborhood fly lights on my table. This fly was once on the wall in a position to hear everything said in the café. But he was totally bored by the chatter and decided to fly down and light upon bare heads and hear the murmuring of their minds. But I could not hear what the fly heard with his inner ear—our unspoken stream of consciousness.

  WHILE dreams too are part of our consciousness, our shadow consciousness, our first life, dreamt before leaving the womb, and it continues on after birth, absorbed in our consciousness, so that it’s my old dream of always trying to reach back, to find that place where I was born but then in actual life going there and finding it…The birth certificate says 106 Saratoga Avenue Yonkers…I take the A train to 168th Street, transfer to the number 1, and continue on the Elevated to Van Cortlandt Park, then catch a bus north to South Yonkers. It’s only a mile or more along the west edge of the park to Carroll Avenue. I get off here on the vague advice of the old black bus driver who waves in the direction he thinks Saratoga Avenue might be…And so uphill half a mile on foot past blocks of dark brick apartment houses their better days behind them. And there’s the end of Saratoga Avenue with a mom-and-pop grocery. An old white man comes out carrying a quart in a paper sack. He looks through me as if I were part of the street and had been there forever (Perhaps I have)…I have no memory of the house or its location. It is as if I am looking for someone else’s birthplace (Perhaps I am)
. I pick up my pace, hurrying along maybe three short blocks to 106 where in a small back bedroom my brother heard my first cry (it echoes now as if I myself had heard it). The little house almost to the crest of the low hill, a gabled wood-frame house, two stories with an attic, detached from close-by houses, a yard with old cars on one side, and a steep drop in back to a gully with a few tall trees, great old barren oaks and elms—bare ruined choirs! The house itself run down now. Asbestos siding over the old wood. And a small screened-in front porch. Inside the flimsy screen door there’s a once-handsome oak door with worn brass doorknob and bevelled glass upon which gold-leaf numerals still show 106 (with half the 1 missing). Three doorbells (three apartments now?). I ring them all with no answer. No one in sight anywhere inside. No sign of life in nearby houses. A kind of country slum but still a quiet family neighborhood. Across the little street some Latinos with boom box turned down are hanging out. I walk around back by the old cars and the bare trees and look up at the silent house, looking for that small back bedroom. Kikiriki goes a bird, just once, like an echo of light. All at once, an incredible overflowing feeling of happiness surges up from nowhere. Born here!…some three hundred yards north of the northwest corner of Van Cortlandt Park. It must have been all country back then. The kids must have played ball in this green park with its worn diamond and its ancient rusted screen behind the batter’s box. I can hear the bat hit the ball (perhaps pitched by Pop). And my brother running for first base ended up in Baltimore forty years later…Shouts and laughter tears and whispers fill the air.