Paterson (Revised Edition)
Page 7
lurking schismatists?
Where is beauty among
these trees?
Is it the dogs the owners
bring here to dry their coats?
These women are not
beautiful and reflect
no beauty but gross . .
Unless it is beauty
to be, anywhere,
so flagrant in desire .
The beauty of holiness,
if this it be,
is the only beauty
visible in this place
other than the view
and a fresh budding tree.
So I started to get rid of my money. It didn’t take
me long I can tell you! I threw it away with both
hands. And I began to feel better . . . .
—and leaned on the parapet, thinking
From here, one could see him—that
tied man, that cold blooded
murderer . April! in the distance
being hanged. Groups at various
vantages along the cliff . having
gathered since before daybreak
to witness it.
One kills
for money but doesn’t always get it.
Leans on the parapet thinking, while
the preacher, outnumbered, addresses
the leaves in the patient trees :
The gentle Christ
child of Pericles
and femina practa
Split between
Athens and
the amphioxus
The gentle Christ—
weed and worth
wistfully forthright
Weeps and is
remembered as of
the open tomb
—threw it away with both hands. . until
it was gone
—he made a wide motion with both
hands as of scattering money to the winds—
—but the riches that had been given me are
beyond all counting. You can throw them
carelessly about you on all sides—and still
you will have more. For God Almighty has
boundless resources and never fails. There is no
end to the treasures of our Blessed Lord who
died on the Cross for us that we may be saved.
Amen.
The Federal Reserve System is a private enterprise … a private monopoly … (with power) … given to it by a spineless Congress … to issue and regulate all our money.
They create money from nothing and lend it to private business (the same money over and over again at a high rate of interest), and also to the Government whenever it needs money in war and peace; for which we, the people, representing the Government (in this instance at any rate) must pay interest to the banks in the form of high taxes.
The bird, the eagle, made himself
small—to creep into the hinged egg
until therein he disappeared, all
but one leg upon which a claw opened
and closed wretchedly gripping
the air, and would not—for all
the effort of the struggle, remain
inside .
Witnessing the Falls Hamilton was impressed by this show of what in those times was overwhelming power … planned a stone aqueduct following a proposed boulevard, as the crow flies, to Newark with outlets every mile or two along the river for groups of factories: The Society for Useful Manufactures: SUM, they called it.
The newspapers of the day spoke in enthusiastic terms of the fine prospects of the “National Manufactory” where they fondly believed would be produced all cotton, cassimeres, wall papers, books, felt and straw hats, shoes, carriages, pottery, bricks, pots, pans and buttons needed in the United States. But L’Enfant’s plans were more magnificent than practical and Peter Colt, Treasurer of the State of Connecticut, was chosen in his place.
. . . . . The prominent purpose of the Society was the manufacture of cotton goods.
Washington at his first inaugural
. . . . . . wore
a coat of Crow-black homespun woven
in Paterson . . . . . .
In other words, the Federal Reserve Banks constitute a Legalized National Usury System, whose Customer No. 1 is our Government, the richest country in the world. Every one of us is paying tribute to the money racketeers on every dollar we earn through hard work.
. . . . In all our great bond issues the interest is always greater than the principle. All of the great public works cost more than twice the actual cost, on that account. Under the present system of doing business we SIMPLY ADD 120 to 150 per cent to the stated cost.
The people must pay anyway; why should they be compelled to pay twice? THE WHOLE NATIONAL DEBT IS MADE UP ON INTEREST CHARGES. If the people ever get to thinking of bonds and bills at the same time, the game is up.
If there is subtlety,
you are subtle. I beg your indulgence:
no prayer should cause you anything
but tears. I had a friend . . .
let it pass. I remember when as a child
I stopped praying and shook with fear
until sleep—your sleep calmed me —
You also, I am sure, have read
Frazer’s Golden Bough. It does you
justice—a prayer such as might be made
by a lover who
appraises every feature of his bride’s
comeliness, and terror—
terror to him such as one, a man
married, feels toward his bride—
You are the eternal bride and
father—quid pro quo,
a simple miracle that knows
the branching sea, to which the oak
is coral, the coral oak.
The Himalayas and prairies
of your features amaze and delight—
Why should I move from this place
where I was born? knowing
how futile would be the search
for you in the multiplicity
of your debacle. The world spreads
for me like a flower opening—and
will close for me as might a rose—
wither and fall to the ground
and rot and be drawn up
into a flower again. But you
never wither—but blossom
all about me. In that I forget
myself perpetually—in your
composition and decomposition
I find my . .
despair!
. . . . . . . . .
Whatever your reasons were for that note of yours and for your indifferent evasion of my letters just previous to that note—the one thing that I still wish more than any other is that I could see you. It’s tied up with even more than I’ve said here. And more importantly, it is the one impulse I have that breaks through that film, that crust, which has gathered there so fatally between my true self and that which can make only mechanical gestures of living. But even if you should grant it, I wouldn’t want to see you unless with some little warmth of friendliness and friendship on your part…. Nor should I want to see you at your office under any circumstances. That is not what I mean (because I have no specific matter to see you about now as I had when I first called upon you as a complete stranger, nor as I could have had, just before your last note when I wanted so badly to have you go over some of my most faulty poems with me), I have been feeling (with that feeling increasingly stronger) that I shall never again be able to recapture any sense of my own personal identity (without which I cannot write, of course—but in itself far more important than the writing) until I can recapture some faith in the reality of my own thoughts and ideas and problems which were turned into dry sand by your attitude toward those letters and by that note of yours later. That is why I cannot throw off my desire to see you—not impersonally, but in the most personal ways, since I could never have written you at all in a completely imper
sonal fashion.
III.
Look for the nul
defeats it all
the N of all
equations .
that rock, the blank
that holds them up
which pulled away—
the rock’s
their fall. Look
for that nul
that’s past all
seeing
the death of all
that’s past
all being .
But Spring shall come and flowers will bloom
and man must chatter of his doom . .
The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned
Memory is a kind
of accomplishment
a sort of renewal
even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new
places
inhabited by hordes
heretofore unrealized,
of new kinds—
since their movements
are towards new objectives
(even though formerly they were abandoned)
No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since
the world it opens is always a place
formerly
unsuspected. A
world lost,
a world unsuspected
beckons to new places
and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory
of whiteness .
With evening, love wakens
though its shadows
which are alive by reason
of the sun shining—
grow sleepy now and drop away
from desire .
Love without shadows stirs now
beginning to waken
as night
advances.
The descent
made up of despairs
and without accomplishment
realizes a new awakening :
which is a reversal
of despair.
For what we cannot accomplish, what
is denied to love,
what we have lost in the anticipation—
a descent follows,
endless and indestructible .
Listen! —
the pouring water!
The dogs and trees
conspire to invent
a world—gone!
Bow, wow! A
departing car scatters gravel as it
picks up speed!
Outworn! le pauvre petit ministre
did his best, they cry,
but though he sweat for all his worth
no poet has come .
Bow, wow! Bow, wow!
Variously the dogs barked, the trees
stuck their fingers to their noses. No
poet has come, no poet has come.
—soon no one in the park but
guilty lovers and stray dogs .
Unleashed!
Alone, watching the May moon above the
trees .
At nine o’clock the park closes. You
must be out of the lake, dressed, in
your cars and going: they change into
their street clothes in the back seats
and move out among the trees .
The “great beast” all removed
before the plunging night, the crickets’
black wings and hylas wake .
Missing was the thing Jim had found in Marx and Veblen and Adam Smith and Darwin—the dignified sound of a great, calm bell tolling the morning of a new age . . instead, the slow complaining of a door loose on its hinges.
Faitoute, conscious by moments,
rouses by moments, rejects him finally
and strolls off .
That the poem,
the most perfect rock and temple, the highest
falls, in clouds of gauzy spray, should be
so rivaled . that the poet,
in disgrace, should borrow from erudition (to
unslave the mind): railing at the vocabulary
(borrowing from those he hates, to his own
disfranchisement) .
—discounting his failures .
seeks to induce his bones to rise into a scene,
his dry bones, above the scene, (they will not)
illuminating it within itself, out of itself
to form the colors, in the terms of some
back street, so that the history may escape
the panders
. . accomplish the inevitable
poor, the invisible, thrashing, breeding
. debased city
Love is no comforter, rather a nail in the
skull
. reversed in the mirror of its
own squalor, debased by the divorce from learning,
its garbage on the curbs, its legislators
under the garbage, uninstructed, incapable of
self instruction .
a thwarting, an avulsion :
—flowers uprooted, columbine, yellow and red,
strewn upon the path; dogwoods in full flower,
the trees dismembered; its women
shallow, its men steadfastly refusing—at
the best .
The language . words
without style! whose scholars (there are none)
. or dangling, about whom
the water weaves its strands encasing them
in a sort of thick lacquer, lodged
under its flow .
Caught (in mind)
beside the water he looks down, listens!
But discovers, still, no syllable in the confused
uproar: missing the sense (though he tries)
untaught but listening, shakes with the intensity
of his listening .
Only the thought of the stream comforts him,
its terrifying plunge, inviting marriage—and
a wreath of fur .
And She —
Stones invent nothing, only a man invents.
What answer the waterfall? filling
the basin by the snag-toothed stones?
And He —
Clearly, it is the new, uninterpreted, that
remoulds the old, pouring down .
And She —
It has not been enacted in our day!
Le
pauvre petit ministre, swinging his arms, drowns
under the indifferent fragrance of the bass-wood
trees .
My feelings about you now are those of anger and indignation; and they enable me to tell you a lot of things straight from the shoulder, without my usual tongue tied round-aboutness.
You might as well take all your own literature and everyone else’s and toss it into one of those big garbage trucks of the Sanitation Department, so long as the people with the top-cream minds and the “finer” sensibilities use those minds and sensibilities not to make themselves more humane human beings than the average person, but merely as means of ducking responsibility toward a better understanding of their fellow men, except theoretically—which doesn’t mean a God damned thing.
. and there go the Evangels! (their organ
loaded into the rear of a light truck) scooting
down-hill . the children
are at least getting a kick out of this!
His anger mounts. He is chilled to the bone.
As there appears a dwarf, hideously deformed—
he sees squirming roots trampled
under the foliage of his mind by the holiday
crowds as by the feet of the straining
minister. From his eyes sparrows start and
sing. His ears are toadstools, his fingers have
begun to sprout leaves (his voice is drowned
under the falls) .
Poet, poet! sing your song, quickly! or
not insects but pulpy weeds will blot out
your kind.
And She —
Marry us! Marry us!
Or! be dragged down, dragged
under and lost
She was married with empty words:
better to
stumble at
the edge
to fall
fall
and be
—divorced
from the insistence of place—
from knowledge,
from learning—the terms
foreign, conveying no immediacy, pouring down.
—divorced
from time (no invention more), bald as an
egg .
and leaped (or fell) without a
language, tongue-tied
the language worn out .
The dwarf lived there, close to the waterfall—
saved by his protective coloring.
Go home. Write. Compose .
Ha!
Be reconciled, poet, with your world, it is
the only truth!
Ha!
—the language is worn out.
And She —
You have abandoned me!
—at the magic sound of the stream
she threw herself upon the bed—
a pitiful gesture! lost among the words:
Invent (if you can) discover or
nothing is clear—will surmount
the drumming in your head. There will be
nothing clear, nothing clear .
He fled pursued by the roar.
Seventy-five of the world’s leading scholars, poets and philosophers gathered at Princeton last week . . .
Faitoute ground his heel
hard down on the stone:
Sunny today, with the highest temperature near 80 degrees; moderate southerly winds. Partly cloudy and continued warm tomorrow, with moderate southerly winds.
Her belly . her belly is like
a cloud . a cloud
at evening .
His mind would reawaken:
HeMe with my pants, coat and vest still on!
SheAnd me still in my galoshes!
—the descent follows the ascent—to wisdom
as to despair.
A man is under the crassest necessity
to break down the pinnacles of his moods
fearlessly —
to the bases; base! to the screaming dregs,
to have known the clean air .
From that base, unabashed, to regain
the sun kissed summits of love!
—obscurely
in to scribble . and a war won!
—saying over to himself a song written
previously . inclines to believe
he sees, in the structure, something
of interest:
On this most voluptuous night of the year
the term of the moon is yellow with no light