AND Little Boy, grown up after an endless series of confusions transplantations transformations instigations fornications confessions prognostications hallucinations consternations confabulations collaborations revelations recognitions restitutions reverberations misconceptions clarifications elucidations simplifications idealizations aspirations circumnavigations realizations radicalizations and liberations, as Grown Boy came into his own voice and let loose his word-hoard pent up within him:
IN this existential café on the left coast of this country, watching reality pass by with a wild eye to inscribe on my brainpan a tale of sound and fury signifying everything beginning with Mahler’s Sixth Symphony and our world lost in the last movement before the final thundering crash of creation the last thunderous gasp and our civilization passed down from the Greeks really all gone now down the drain And shall we tally it up now and see what’s left after capitalism hits the fan But in any case now it’s time it’s high tide time to try to make some sense or cents of our little life on earth and is it not all a dumb show a mummery a blindman’s bluff a buffoon’s antic asininities with clowns in masks jumping over the moon as in a Chagall painting or as if we each were dropped out of a womb onto this earth so naked and alone we come into this world and blind in our courses, where do we wander and know not where we go nor what we do, with no assigned destinies except to transmit our elements into other forms, yes just put our parts back into the pot and stir to keep the old pot-au-feu going on the back of the stove of the sun…
LIKE that pot I kept going in that two-room cave I had as a student in Paris 89 rue de Vaugirard in Montparnasse where I painted on the wall a line from Edgar Allan Poe Thy naiad airs thy hyacinth hair hath brought me home and that was my first place all to myself and never mind it was a cave for twenty-nine dollars a month or was it a year with a stand-up john up a winding stair halfway to the first floor with footprints in the concrete where you squatted and pulled the chain and leaped out into the stairway before the water came rushing down to flood the floor, and my front room had one tiny window like a slot in the wall of the Bastille looking out to a stone courtyard and I had a single cold-water spigot over an ancient hollowed-out brown stone probably there since the Middle Ages, and there did I meet myself as if I were some sort of stranger just come in off the still street lonesome traveler with no naiad at all to keep me company oh what a romantic illusion all that was but I loved it I flung out into the grey light of Paris every day with a hunger in my step down along the quays thinking I was some sort of wild poet or artist, and I was Apollinaire and I was Rimbaud and I was Baudelaire and all the damned poets, the mad ones with the rage to live, my collar turned up in the fall wind that swept along the quays, I swept along too in the hordes of brown brittle leaves (pestilence-stricken multitudes!) as winter came down
BORN into that generation that came of age during World War Two and fought it, the “greatest generation,” as it came to be dubbed, as it came to be remembered, creating its own new world, and memory an hourglass when you turn it over and all the sands of past life flow down through it mixing recent grains of time with earlier grains all haphazard together in the mix And it’s Rockabye Baby all the way down and on and on Yes the “greatest generation” coming of age with the absolute freedom and exhilaration of youth before life’s entanglements free to be a free spirit or a drudge an angel or a demon a conformist or rebel
AND I was never much of a rebel back then or now but I was a part of that war generation born in 1919 just in time to join the navy just before Pearl Harbor happened yes that was its birthing day December 7 1941 the “greatest generation” indeed born, they told us, to make the world safe for democracy ha-ha but that was no cynical slogan back then because we actually believed it believed we were fighting the Good War for an America that was full of hope full of amiable optimism in a wide-open land still not all bought-and-sold the last frontier still full of promiscuous promise where the pursuit of happiness had not yet turned into a rat race to corner the gelt of the world yes and in 1945 when the war ended it was as if the whole continent tilted westward and the whole population of men and women who had been uprooted by the war slid westward and the cry was still “Go West, young man” as millions heeded the blind siren call unlimited in a new age in which America and Americans were triumphant so that so many people thought life was so good in these States that there was no need for anyone to rebel against anything which today would seem impossible as when I asked a lefty radio host “Can you imagine a time in this country when you would no longer have to be a dissident?” and got no answer but a wise smile
AND so where do we go from here, we of the greatest genesis and wherein lies our greatness today and are we all ingested by our omnivorous consumer society our dominant TV military-industrial perplex sometimes tending toward corporate fascism and devil take the hind half of the world even though even though the People (as in Carl Sandburg’s The People, Yes) still have not lost all of their hopefulness, even though lost Jack Kerouac returning dissolute or disillusioned from Mexico at the end of his Road lost heart, and all the sociologists saying his tale was the end of American innocence
SO did I come upon this earth with the astonished eye of an awakened owl to speak my piece, while a destiny that led the Italian and Portuguese to the Americas is strange enough but one that leads from Portugal to the Virgin Islands to Westchester County New York and finally to San Francisco is touched by the dark miracle of chance And let the dice fall where they may as the seed of my mother’s family blew away from the rocky Monsanto mountains of Portugal in some dark century out of the Inquisition and landed in Saint Thomas, and all went down into the twentieth century with some of the family migrating to Providence Rhode Island a main Portuguese port where my mother’s parents put down roots and then she herself Albertine later born in Bath Beach by Coney Island New York toward the end of the nineteenth century
O can you imagine Bath Beach way back then on that sandy spot or island of American land before Irish Coney Island became Coney Island with its Ferris wheels and vaudeville hawkers and painted dames astride tigers and other unrealities O say can you see by the dawn’s early blight And is our antihero to be a luckless fellow and a superfluous man in the New World or is he to lead a revolution indeed the revolution of the downtrodden of the world against his own country which was on the wrong side of the people’s demotic revolution or will he end with a lovely wife with almond-butter smile and be beloved by all or will he end in dark prisons despised by all who hate revolution that might interrupt their hot pursuits of happiness while we go on flittering away our lives in our city existence on pavements far from the earth beneath us and we on it oblivious of its turning
AND the small boy knows nothing, he is just a part of it, unconscious in his little existence on the turning earth in some town or city or yes and so he’s later handed off to a distant relative by an exhausted bereaved mother who could not take on one more child with her growing brood just after their father my father had died And so was he bundled off in swaddling clothes to a rural small town in northern France and so did he see the great plough horses in the rutted fields the hidden crickets singing and the birds crying in the gathering dusk calling to each other or to the unknown and the huge cows coming home late from the fields herded by ancient warders with wooden crooks the huge ancient cows lowing in some medieval time with huge old cowbells each echoing their hollow sound as distinctive as a brand upon them and the ancient gnarled herders prodding the ancient beasts with bestial cries as the red sun set withering among the treetops and just before the light of the sky winked out guardian angels spreading their wings from horizon to horizon and night fell as if forever and stars lit up one by one in the deep distances And so now where away little American boy growing up speaking French and what would he ever say to the world in what language and to whom would he say it if indeed he had anything to say or would he just sing it out to the great unknown o
r might Little Boy be like a match struck across a night sky lighting up the universe with his laughter and genius or he could just be an echo chamber an echo of everything that was ever writ or said or sung still hanging in the eternal air the eternal dialogue of philosophers fools and lovers and losers the very tongue of the soul sounding through time And is every newborn creature born pure and innocent or a carrier of everything including all evil and so will my little man be a born sinner or a radiant innocent happy from birth an ecstatic singing creature oh will he be the morning sun slanting through the trees or just a new moon over Coney Island where his mother met his Italian immigrant father driving a cardboard automobile without a license in a bumper car on a fun ride when their bumper cars ran into each other long time ago oh yes it was a crash of at least two…civilizations his mother a Sephardic-Portuguese-French-American and his father a Lombard Italian immigrant looking for a lady to have five sons oh Clemence Albertine Mendes-Monsanto purely appeared in a vision before him by Bath Beach Coney Island in the French boardinghouse where she lived with relatives The seabirds cried and cawed under cirrus skies wild in the gloaming And then years later baby cries like mantras in unknown languages in South Yonkers a mile north of Van Cortlandt Park yes there in a small back bedroom his brother heard his first cry like a seabird maybe or a wailing, an ecstatic sound of surprise to awake upon the bright earth in New York, and what a scene it must have been indeed this beginning in 1919 America as in Dos Passos’ 1919 or some other deconstruction or reconstruction of history and kids in the dusk playing baseball in the still country fields before the Manhattan skyline grew up and the far shouts in the still air still echoing in his ear when he was handed off in swaddling clothes to Tante Emilie and carried off by her over the sea to Normandie and then on into the heart of France saved from the Krauts as they were called back then over there over there and the Yanks coming and all that But in the backward mirror he remembered Strasbourg in the autumn of that year with the brittle leaves falling from the chestnut trees along the boulevard with the white mountains of Alsace in the far distance and a military parade going by below the fifth-floor running balcony of their apartment and someone holding him in her arms and waving his hand for him at the passing parade yes that was the snapshot he remembered and then the shutter went off and there was dark again in his memory and nothing more could he remember of France and that far time except the sound of tu and a woman’s voice calling him Lu-lu-Lulu où est-tu? and he was playing hide-and-seek under a chair and he was Baby Lulu in a patch of sunlight under a table with the wind outside blowing the leaves swept along the street each a dead life in the autumn of that year And the years like receding figures disappearing down a long tunnel far ago and birds of memory cawing and cawing against the coming night And then much later along Riverside Drive with the Palisades across the broad river in another year returned to New York with Tante Emilie who had returned to her man with Little Boy now speaking French but in America again and her man was tall and dark and had a prickly beard and was a professor of Hispanic languages somewhere a shadowy figure who came and went and then disappeared again for good from that big flat with the high ceilings and the view of Riverside Drive and the river with tugboats pushing barges and couples strolling along a riverbank and a slow ship hooting its horn in the channel below the Palisades and it seemed to be always autumn although he and Tante Emilie didn’t stay there long after her man left for good Oh the crying and the sobbing and the bathetic fallen handkerchiefs and night coming then alone with Tante Emilie and in the night every cat was black and he was afraid of ants in the cupboard and ants grew wings and flew in his face And there are ants even under the Bodhi Tree with Siddhartha seeking light in which he discovers the radiant spark at the center of Nothingness
BUT I keep having the same dream over and over always the same with a disembodied me wandering around some huge city which after a few dreams I recognize as Manhattan, yes, it’s always Lower Manhattan and I’m always trying to get back to somewhere uptown or just north of the city like Van Cortlandt Park over toward the Hudson and it’s getting later all the time and there seem to be fewer and fewer buses or taxis or people on the streets as I keep walking uptown through the gathering dusk hoping to come across some subway station or bus stop or taxi stand but I don’t seem to be advancing anywhere as if I’m on a moving treadmill always carrying me away as the night keeps closing in on me far from some home place
WHILE that swart Bard of Avon summoned up remembrance of things past and was echoed by Marcel Proust in a triumph of backward thinking yes yes the think-pad makes cowards of us all and time a river we swim in freestyle and the past all mirage and the future still to be dreamed up yes and longtemps, je me suis couché à la bonne heure and yes I still go to bed early and think think think mostly of myself the center of my universe around which all constellations wing and so am I just an old guy singing “Auld Lang Syne” in a high drunken voice and reliving all his lives on earth like Krapp in his Last Tape recording everything he remembers or in the end Nothing because the older he gets the more he forgets until in the end it’s all amnesia and he can remember nothing at all of vast spaces of time and he’s left only with his present moment or everybody’s present moment the great terrible moving moment of Now alone with himself and his lonely consciousness alone on his own little island of me, and so is that it? Oh no not at all I’m no old geezer with a squeaky voice I’m still a kid with his memory intact projecting into the bright infinite future growing up in the darkest and lightest of times on his little island of Me yes Me-Me-Me that’s all it is on and on the consciousness of me of man on earth and it’s the Great Memory no end to it the silent dead march the live march of time in consciousness Oh yes je me souviens of course I remember I remember everything about me-me-me and the rest of the world does not exist Oh it’s time it’s time and time again And do we have a plot does anyone does someone or everyone have a plot if not a plot then a story line yes that’s it everybody every body has a line of me-me-me on and on but this singular somebody is special yes most special But anyway this is her story his story history in a single individual a microcosm a solo being solo shot one-of-a-kind here today gone tamale oh how the mind raves on in its sensorium Scratch out not a line Once it’s said or thought it echoes in the air forever in eternal limbo echoing on and on whatever Plato said whatever Dante said whatever the guy-in-the-catbird-seat said I heard it I hear it echoing down through time corridors of time the eternal dialogue Yes Hello hello Here we are again mamma mia the past still with us still echoing and the future not futureless but ordained by the wheeling Vico cycle of time and free will nothing but a pollywog willing to lose its tail and so with the arrival of the future each day each moment newborn and not on a cycle yeah let me tell you Time marches on in magazines and movies and you are swept along in everybody’s consciousness and I am trying to put it to you straight in this precious moment which is now the only now we know and as soon as we know it it is gone into the great void past all things and beings yes and is it paradise on earth or is hell other people or does it matter what you call it Yes indeed it does Your consciousness of it of him of her is all that counts and you always wanting to feel your way into her consciousness or his consciousness so that the two shall be one the two consciousnesses merged together and I am you oh yes that’s it except what’s this loneliness that in the end always creeps in as if it was indeed impossible to merge with another person impossible to ever know that person from the inside or to fulfill the other half of that person Plato’s half absurdly searching for its Other oh no It cannot be done say the shrinks and yet and yet Do I not love thee as myself phantom voyageur errant wanderer flâneur des deux rives…mon semblable, —mon frère…but still let us proceed as if we were still aboveground and I am not Samuel Beckett nor was meant to be headed always underground and his voice getting smaller and smaller and more and more inaudible from Murphy to Malone to the Unnamable gone mute gone deaf underground Only one syllab
le left to utter and that one unnamable unutterable final syllable the final secret of existence of why we are here on earth or in space in interspace lost afloat in the Internet or wherever Only the music of the spheres in the end and the rest is silence as Ham said over and over I am not Prince Ham nor was meant to be Am an attendant lord of the flies and I fly in the face of fate and why did she cut the crotch off of all his underwears if not to de-ball him It wasn’t pretty that story in all the papers and the helicopter flying over the scene of the crime along the riverbank in the dark dusk by the Seine in another century or early twentieth century when the Pathé News cameraman caught the man in tails wearing wings with a champagne glass in hand on the Tour Eiffel and all his invited guests watching he had to go they were all waiting for him to do it and he plummeted straight down his wings catching no air and plunk there he was a blotch on the sere ground Lord save me I have only one life to live save me from such vanity pull down pull down thy vanity old man young man Let it all hang out but there are medieval battlements in the way guarding the ramparts of self yeah yeah loneliness where is thy sting I love to be alone with my own thoughts my own filter that is my own strainer to filter so-called reality that is what’s passing by the window as Creeley said about poetry you should report more than what’s passing by the window said he meaning don’t be so superficial dear poet you’ve got eternity to dig among other profundities or irrelevancies so I’ll put another filter on my camera-eye another lens for cinema verité up close and penetrate the surface the surface nothing but ephemera froth on the waves the sea’s lips kissing the shore the sea’s tongues licking the shore panic ephemera and people part of it and she let it all hang out and elle avait des tout petits tétons sang collaborator Maurice Chevalier during the Nazi occupation or was it someone singing “Abie’s Irish Rose” it’s time gentlemen please hurry up please it’s time cyclical time on a bicycle or a velocipede Let me not impede the cross-word traffic of consciousness echoing around the world in a thousand tongues and English the Latin of our days le Latin de nos jours baby baby the language of the conquerors just call it Globish and the World Bank running the whole show into the ground Third World countries beat down by loans by vulture capitalism masquerading as democracy babybaby put your faith in us stick with U.S. you’ll be wearing diamonds six feet underground De Beers on top of you in the deep shit mamma mia and Thorstein Veblen drank the bitter drink alright and have I not seen it all the long and the short and the tall the dead and the beautiful over and over Oh the mind of man and womban is a marvelous thing and spring is like a perhaps hand stroking the landscape of flesh and fowl and fauna funicular oh yeah and everyman out for hisself and sal si puedes everyman in his own auto everyman in his castle on wheels autodidact who knows everything and his name is Barney Google yeah lock him up Google him or her or it and don’t tell me all I read isn’t true I saw it on Facebook and the World Wide Web I saw it in the paper I saw it on TV it must be true Don’t call me Wiki Wikipedia or Wikileakia I’m not wicked I’m innocent I only want what I want so give me a good five-cent cigar give me my sex-toy oh boy on and on will it ever end endless the mad pursuit ah yes mad indeed of me-me-me turtle-head turning every way and blinking while the marble maidens on the Grecian urn pursue each other still night and day my Anna Livia twinkle toes But now we come to the broken sentences the plot thickens and thins on earth or in the seventh ward in Kearson Street or wherever she lies in bed with no one or anyone Here is your plot your story line and I knew her when she was Extra Virgin so the story goes Gaudeamus igitur pull my daisy and I’ll be born again a new beginning sinning and singing trailing clouds of glory do we come and paradise lies about us in our infancy infantile as it may seem to Sartre and sister Simone ask Algren what he sed about her a dirty thing to say And I am obliged to lie down with fools said another French dame giving head over heart and not at all like you know who Miss Round Heels they called her before she lost her looks and drowned in Gloucester Harbor a long way from Beacon Hill but she was fast on the uptake not for her to be ground down by life no sir mister shrink she’d laugh you off the stage this ain’t vaudeville anymore we’re into real life and like with that other skittish Scottish-Irish lass with the big eyes did I not stroke her hair one night and much later she telling me I didn’t know what was real always looking over my shoulder for the greener fields and the longer hair and the bigger tits my god it’s true every word of it in my auto in my Autogeddon speeding headlong into the final endgame call it chaos
Little Boy Page 2