Wagner
I can’t believe that
he is not in
the other
room
or around the
corner
or alive
someplace
tonight
and he is
of course
as I am taken
by the sound of
him
and little goosebumps
run along
both of my
arms
then a
chill
he’s here
now.
happy birthday
when Wagner was an
old man
a birthday party was given
in his
honor
and a couple of
youthful
incidental compositions
were played.
afterwards
he asked,
“who wrote those?”
“you did,” he was
told.
“ah,” he responded,
“it’s as I have always
suspected: death
then
does have some
virtue.”
the telephone
will bring you people
with its ring,
people who do not know what to do with
their time
and they will ache to
infect you with
this
from a distance
(although they would prefer
to actually be in the same room
to better project their nullity upon
you).
the telephone is needed for
emergency purposes only.
these people are not
emergencies, they are
calamities.
I have never welcomed the ring of a
telephone.
“hello,” I will answer
guardedly.
“this is Dwight.”
already you can feel their imbecile
yearning to invade.
they are the people-fleas that
crawl the
psyche.
“yes, what is it?”
“well, I’m in town tonight and
I thought…”
“listen, Dwight, I’m tied up, I
can’t…”
“well, maybe another
time?”
“maybe not…”
each person is only given so many
evenings
and each wasted evening is
a gross violation against the
natural course of
your only
life;
besides, it leaves an aftertaste
which often lasts two or three days
depending upon the
visitor.
the telephone is only for
emergency purposes.
it has taken me
decades
but I have finally found out
how to say
“no.”
now
don’t be concerned for them,
please:
they will simply dial another
number.
it could be
yours.
“hello,” you will
say.
and they will say,
“this is Dwight.”
and then
you
be
the kind
understanding
soul.
begging
like most of you, I’ve had so many jobs that
I feel as if I were gutted and my insides
thrown to the winds.
I’ve met some good people along the
way and also the
other kind.
yet when I think of all those
I have worked with—
even though decades have passed—
Karl
comes to mind
first.
I remember Karl: our jobs required we
both wear aprons
tied from behind and around
the neck with string.
I was Karl’s underling.
“we got an easy job,” he
told me.
each day as one by one our superiors arrived
Karl would make a slight bend at the waist,
smile, and with a nod of the head
greet each: “good morning Dr. Stein,”
or, “good morning Mr. Day” or
Mrs. Knight or if the lady was unattached
“good morning, Lilly” or Betty or Fran.
I never
spoke.
Karl seemed concerned at this and
one day he took me aside: “hey,
where the fuck else you going to get a
two hour lunch like we
do?”
“nowhere, I guess…”
“well, o.k., look, for guys like you and me,
this is as good as it can get, this is all
there is.”
I waited.
“so look, it’s hard to suck up to them at first, it
didn’t come easy for me
but after a while I realized that it
didn’t matter.
I just grew a shell.
now I’ve got my shell, got
it?”
I looked at him and sure enough he did look like he had
a shell, there was a mask-like look to his
face and the eyes were null, void and
undisturbed; I was looking at a weathered and
beaten conch.
some weeks went by.
nothing changed: Karl bowed and scraped and smiled
undaunted, perfect in his
role.
that we were perishable, perhaps didn’t occur to
him
or
that greater gods might be
watching.
I did my
work.
then, one day, Karl took me
aside again.
“listen, Dr. Morely spoke to me
about you.”
“yes?”
“he asked me what was wrong with
you.”
“what did you tell
him?”
“I told him that you were
young.”
“thanks.”
upon receiving my next check, I
quit
but
still
had to
eventually settle for another similar
job
and
viewing the
new Karls
I finally forgave them all
but not myself:
being perishable sometimes makes a
man
strange
almost
unemployable
most
obnoxious—
no servant of
free
enterprise.
the feel of it
A. Huxley died at 69,
much too early for such a
fierce talent,
and I read all his
works
but actually
Point Counter Point
did help a bit
in carrying me through
the factories and the
drunk tanks and the
unsavory
ladies.
that
book
along with Hamsun’s
Hunger
they helped a
bit.
great books are
the ones we
need.
I was astonished at
myself for liking the
Huxley book
but it did come from
such a rabid
beautiful
pessimistic
intellectualism,
and when I first
read P.C.P.
I was living in a
hotel room
with a wild and
crazy
alcoholic woman
who once threw
Pound’s Cantos
at me
and missed,
as they did
with me.
I was working
as a packer
in a light fixture
plant
and once
during a drinking
bout
I told the lady,
“here, read this!”
(referring to
Point Counter
Point.)
“ah, jam it up
your ass!” she
screamed at
me.
anyhow, 69 seemed
too early for Aldous
Huxley to
die.
but I guess it’s
just as fair
as the death of a
scrubwoman
at the same
age.
it’s just that
with those who
help us
get on through,
then
all that light
dying, it works the
gut a bit—
scrubwomen, cab drivers,
cops, nurses, bank
robbers, priests,
fishermen, fry cooks,
jockeys and the
like
be
damned.
the greatest actor of our day
he’s getting fatter and fatter,
almost bald
he has a wisp of hair
in the back
which he twists
and holds
with a rubber band.
he’s got a place in the hills
and he’s got a place in the
islands
and few people ever see
him.
some consider him the greatest
actor of our
day.
he has few friends, a
very few.
with them, his favorite
pastime is
eating.
at rare times he is reached
by telephone
usually
with an offer to act
in an exceptional (he’s
told)
motion picture.
he answers in a very soft
voice:
“oh, no, I don’t want to
make any more movies…”
“can we send you the
screenplay?”
“all right…”
then
he’s not heard from
again.
usually
what he and his few friends
do
after eating
(if the night is cold)
is to have a few drinks
and watch the screenplays
burn
in the fireplace.
or
after eating (on
warm evenings)
after a few
drinks
the screenplays
are taken
frozen
out of cold
storage.
he hands some
to his friends
keeps some
then
together
from the veranda
they toss them
like flying saucers
far out
into the spacious
canyon
below.
then
they all go
back in
knowing
instinctively
that the screenplays
were
bad. (at least,
he senses it and
they
accept
that.)
it’s a real good
world
up there:
well-earned, self-sufficient
and
hardly
dependent
upon the
variables.
there’s
all that time
to eat
drink
and
wait on death
like
everybody
else.
days like razors, nights full of rats
as a very young man I divided an equal amount of time between
the bars and the libraries; how I managed to provide for
my other ordinary needs is the puzzle; well, I simply didn’t
bother too much with that—
if I had a book or a drink then I didn’t think too much of
other things—fools create their own
paradise.
in the bars, I thought I was a tough, I broke things, fought
other men, etc.
in the libraries it was another matter: I was quiet, went
from room to room, didn’t so much read entire books
as parts of them: medicine, geology, literature and
philosophy. psychology, math, history, other things, put me
off. with music I was more interested in the music and in the
lives of the composers than in the technical aspects…
however, it was with the philosophers that I felt a brotherhood:
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, even old hard-to-read Kant;
I found Santayana, who was very popular at the time, to be
limp and a bore; Hegel you really had to dig for, especially
with a hangover; there are many I read who I have forgotten,
perhaps properly so, but I remember one fellow who wrote an
entire book in which he proved that the moon was not there
and he did it so well that afterwards you thought, he’s
absolutely right, the moon is not there.
how the hell is a young man going to deign to work an
8 hour day when the moon isn’t even there?
what else
might be missing?
and
I didn’t like literature so much as I did the literary
critics; they were real pricks, those guys; they used
fine language, beautiful in its way, to call other
critics, other writers, assholes. they
perked me up.
but it was the philosophers who satisfied
that need
that lurked somewhere within my confused skull: wading
through their excesses and their
clotted vocabulary
they still often
stunned
leaped out
with a flaming gambling statement that appeared to be
absolute truth or damned near
absolute truth,
and this certainty was what I was searching for in a daily
life that seemed more like a piece of
cardboard.
what great fellows those old dogs were, they got me past
days like razors and nights full of rats; and women
bargaining like auctioneers from hell.
my brothers, the philosophers, they spoke to me unlike
anybody on the streets or anywhere else; they
filled an immense void.
such good boys, ah, such good
boys!
yes, the libraries helped; in my other temple, the
bars, it was another matter, more simplistic, the
language and the way was
different…
library days, bar nights.
the nights were alike,
there’s some fellow sitting nearby, maybe not a
bad sort, but for me he doesn’t shine right,
>
there’s a gruesome deadness there—I think of my father,
of schoolteachers, of faces on coins and bills, of dreams
about murderers with dull eyes; well,
somehow this fellow and I get to exchanging glances,
a fury slowly begins to gather: we are enemies, cat and
dog, priest and atheist, fire and water; tension builds,
block piled upon block, waiting for the crash; our hands
fold and unfold, we drink, now, finally with a
purpose:
his face turns to me:
“sumpin’ ya don’t like, buddy?”
“yeah. you.”
“wanna do sumpin’ about it?”
“certainly.”
we finish our drinks, rise, move to the back of the
bar, out into the alley; we
turn, face each other.