Things fall together
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Olfactory terrorism? Round about nine a.m. Gas attack or leaky line or what? – epicenter Chelsea. Get the story from a guy waiting for his car to go legal, just like you. Evacuations, sirens bleep-blooping. Hyperventilating populace. You’ve been cooping in the Gray Ghost with Leslie. Looking up through the rain-dropped windshield to the peaked brick tower tops of the seminary. Roll down windows all the way down. Deep breath. The usual.
Home and elevator up. A neighbor on the 15th floor didn’t smell anything out of the ordinary either – no one did where you were at: 21st and Ninth and then home via 22nd and up Eighth. She keeps parakeets too, fairly close to a window open this morning and they haven’t turned color none.
Ask Gwen when she gets home and she reports a scent not unlike “when you’re riding behind a funky car” permeating her school’s hallways early in the day and dissipating gradually. In her description it’s nothing like the mecaptain lots of others smelled or imagined they did. Quoth
one Times blogger, “I hate it when the Mayor tells us that he does not know what the problem is, but he does know it’s not dangerous…” Yes, Bloomie was all over the airways, calmly stirring up fears, looking like a billion dollars. He’s a fine go-figure of a man. Another blogger advises that “methane outgassing from the earth’s crust often carries a biosmell with it.” Mmm, biosmell, that’s a keeper.
Meanwhile, sixty-three – at last count – grackles, sparrows and pigeons discovered lying stone cold dead in the streets of downtown Austin, TX.
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involve digging another “reverse” bathtub, smaller, but, from an engineering standpoint, very like its way famous cousin a couple of blocks west. And this, sayeth the Times blandly, must be done since “there is a high water table in this part of Lower Manhattan.” Tide’s icumen in. Lawd sing all you cuckoos. Sing while you steal some other birds’ nest.
How to open up your eyes and not stop listening? Can I get a witness?
How to witness, without overbearing?
This dawn was supposed to be the Manhattan solstice. But when you raised your head at six, the rain was beating so hard on the plastic windowsills it sounded like the cats clawing your rug. Total overcast to the east. No rosy-fingered nothin’. Not in this latitude. So back to Land of Nod.
Some other day you’ll catch it – Gotham Stonehenge – the sun streaming directly down the cross-streets amidst the dwellings made for people who imagine they are gods. New York City, you know, where the vapors come up and play. Oracle of Omphalia. Got motive. Opportunity knocks. Given time, you want to visit all her sacred sites.
up through the subway gratings: “Ladies and Gentlemen: After an earlier incident, Queensbound E as in echo trains are running normally.” But are the N for Narcissus trains still stalled, spooked by their own reflections?
Once upon a time is as good a way as any to end.
It is said that when flowing water meets an obstacle, it builds up until its volume and strength permit it to spill around or over or under the impediment in its path. Sometimes the blockage gets washed away, sometimes not, and the process begins again. The obstacles the rushing water encounters do not leap up before it, but exist in
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the nature of the path itself. Once upon a time, a painter named Li Yin lived under an emperor who excelled at accomodating the strange and exciting ways of foreigners, who – depending on where one sat – might or might not be called invaders. Li Yin painted a mountain range in autumn and you have to look closely at the landscape to see there are little people in there, nearly blending with the rocky forms and undergrowth. His inscription says that he has depicted both northern and southern cliff routes by which travelers can negotiate the obstacles in their path. He further says that never having visited these mountains did not deter him from painting them since he had seen them in a dream and given the enormity of the universe, they might very well exist.
You saw this painting a long time ago in Boston, where it lives at the Museum of Fine Arts. When you lived in Boston, briefly and unhappily, as a college freshman, a group called the Standells had a big local, meaning New England hit. Each verse finished with a great couplet: Because I love that dirty water / Oh, Boston, you’re my home.
Will Manhattan rise up one day – a new wrinkle on the Appalachian front? Or will its great buildings serve as so many grottoes for marine life to swim through and around?
The Indians of New York harbor saw Henry Hudson’s ship, Halve Maen, appear over the horizon. Some thought, though this is apocryphal, that it was the Manitou for the ship resembled in some ways the Creator. One native witness saw, as the ship drew closer, “a house of various colors… crowded with living creatures.”
Navigating the waterways of the bay, Robert Juet, Hudson’s navigator recorded “a very good land to fall with, and a pleasant land to see…” Off the south coast of Staten Island, he spied “many salmons, mullets and rayes, very great.” Off Coney Island, the Halve Maen’s crew caught ten mullet “of a foote and a halfe long apeece and a raye as great as four men could haule into the ship…”
Crossing into Bergen Neck from Staten Island they found “lands…pleasant with grasse and flowers and goodly trees as ever we had seene, and very sweet smells came from them.”
Era y non era. Kan ya makan.
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How long would it take a squadron of C-130 gunships ranged along Seventh Avenue to reduce Penn South, and the Elliot Houses to rubble? Minutes or an hour? And when?
would pass over my shadow I might be imposed forever on the maps of this city.
—Grace Paley, “At the Battery”
Memory’s a camel. Bactrian. It’s humpy ride carries you back two summers to Sisteron, in Provence, sixty-odd miles northwest of the Côte d’Azur. There, at the mountain-pass fortress that served as the only possible bottleneck to Napoleon’s return, a rain squall forced the three of you to take shelter. When the tempest cleared, you found your vehicle in the carpark looking as if it had been painted in camouflage, covered in great splashes of mud. Sand, windborne, mixed with water at some great altitude. Origin Africa. I who am south will move north. Sahra.
You actually buy the New York Times. The headlines don’t matter. A three column-wide pic of Condoleezza Rice, tight close up, mouth open as if in song, right hand raised before her in a blur. She either has been or soon will be weeping. Testifying, she is, before the Senate, three representatives of which are pictured immediately beneath her, more or less photo-kiosk size. Two white guys in ties and a black man in the middle. All captured with mouths open, hands raised. The three men still wear the masks of Senators, but Condoleezza’s mask has dropped. Only yesterday, the paper showed her, wearing her armored suit, a warrior before the podium, bronze helmeted, such face as showed rigid enough to bounce quarters off. But today, something’s snapped. One straw too many. The hero’s mask fallen away. A mortal. Who realizes she’s played the game of gods and they have used and abandoned her. Tragic. She could be a Trojan woman. Or Iphegeneia. She’s bearing witness now. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 983
American gunships shredding Somalis. C-130s. Condoleezza know how many thousand rounds it can fire in a second. But instead you ask her: How much more terrible does it get? She may not tell. But she sees it, just as those without imagination are condemned one day to meet, if only for an instant, the real. Just like us.
Rockets hit the American embassy in Athens. Pythia no longer speaks, but vomits. A prophesy in every stomach.
Eventually the concept fails, holes spring in it and the stuff leaks out.
All that is modern buries itself in the sands of Sumer. Of Persia. Enough sand to bury any machine. Soak up any torrent of blood. Long before the crescent fluttered on a flag, or took the form of a Viennese pastry now identified with France, rivers made that semi-arid land now called Near East a fertile zone. Fecundation. By any and every means. The cycle of flood and drought. And the birthplace of beliefs that travel in far longer timewaves than any so-called strategy.
It’s raining in New York. Wets your coat, your deforested head, your bicycle tires, your little bell, the thousand cars around you, the delivery man’s thermal bag, the umbrellas of the passing folk. Through the grates over the subway coffers the liquid falls to furnish the Ailanthus trees with a bit of nourishment, or just make muck. And in every drop that hits, you feel it: A tiny grain of sand.
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BOOK OF MANITOU January 13 – March 3, 2007
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Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news. —Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 986
Green is the new gold.
…If one is only able to advance and does not know how to retreat, or vice versa, he is unlikely to be successful in battle and will most likely be defeated… warns Li Zi Ming in Liang Zhen Pu, Eight Diagram Palm, 2nd Method.
creatures or things.
Red’s the new pink.
In the situation of waiting at ease for a fatigued enemy, a small force is usually very effective, observes Li, further on in the above annotation.
Apo = a prefix from a Gk. Preposition. It usually signifies from, away from, off, asunder, separate, as in apocope (a cutting off), apostate, apostle (one sent away). Apocarpous (of ovaries of flowering plants – consisting of carpals [wrist, joint] that are free from one another in buttercups or roses). Antonym = Syncarpous.
chorus while turning from the right to the left of the orchestra; hence, the strain, or part of the choral ode, sung during this movement. Also, one section of a lyric poem or choral ode in classical Greek drama. Sometimes used to denote a stanza of modern verse. C.f.
Antistrophe.
If you want to apply the tip, first apply the root. Li Zi Ming recommends this in his, 3rd Method, Stepping.
ERIC is EPIC, with augmentation. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 987
for peace.
You are indispensable to yourself.
Via email, Louella Mercer offers: A cure for your problem. Pitchstone Aquinas writes on the subject of Tear He authorized. From Quarrel railway: making Years informed. Someone or thing writing under the nom d’algorithm National Enzyme suggests moving Woodruff Dupe. Translate Emery finds: offensive Those drying. And Harrison Bacon’s epistle comes titled: yellow decision hospital system.
refractions of their own selves.
One might think, given their identically colored scales that the milk snake and the coral snake were one in the same. Yet the former is quite harmless and the latter, deadly. The trick to telling them apart lies in the order of their bands. Hence the Texas rhyme: Red touch black friend of Jack, red touch yellow kill a fellow. Jump, me sons and daughters!
Conspiration.
Three days ago, January 16, 2007, China announced it possesses foreign reserves valued at $1 trillion. They begin testing a thermal fusion reactor nicknamed “the artificial sun.”
The problem with Israel is that it is real. Better to have remained a dream.
Anarchist is fine so far as it goes. You’ll answer to it as well as any other epithet. But it literally means no ruler, or without a ruler, whereas for you, sovereignty inheres EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 988
at a whole ‘nother level. A different relationship of man and master, lord and vassal, within and amongst the selves.
Bacon ex-machina.
What if the condition we call strife or conflict is seen as a discordancy of emotional or cultural energy – a kind of atmospherics, an engine of weather in all its changes? Les temps.
In the film Ridicule, the petitioner-hero awaits his opportunity with extraordinary perseverance. Finally, a chance encounter in the gardens of Versailles with the King and his retinue. “Make a witticism,” demands the King, “I’ve heard you are most amusing.” Silence. “Go ahead, say something witty.” His patience wears thin.
“About what, your majesty?” Pause. “About
me!”
Laughter from the courtiers. The poor fellow has cooked his goose now. The petitioner takes a breath and replies:
“But the King is no subject.” A beat, then explosions of mirth, from all except the petitioner and the King, to whom this consummate play on words must be explained. Whereupon he laughs too.
It’s way better in French. So much so that it is almost a crime to write it here in translation.
Rene Riffaud, one of France’s last surviving WWI veterans dies at the age of 108. In an interview a few months ago, he described the close of the war:
“We were guarding a bridge. An officer arrived and told us that the armistice had just been signed. We went to town to celebrate, to eat bread that wasn’t blackened, and we amused ourselves by watching the flights of geese taking off to go and bathe in the Rhine.”
Riffaud, born in Tunisia, never applied for veteran’s benefits. When he was 107, his granddaughter filled out the form for him. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 989
never engaged in military discussions. I was more worried with living than looking back to the past.
“I expect no reward from anyone. My son had the veteran card, but I never felt the need for it. I am a ‘poilu’ because I was forced to see and do certain things. I have nothing of a volunteer.
heartbreak for everyone. It must not happen again.”
Change Gotham’s name to Nu Dubai. Where, in any Starbux, you can order a Cathay olé!
Bizarro world is up to you.
Global war. Ming. Who is that anyway?
All round the world, a chorus of querulous voices lamenting: Oh no, the Chinese shot down my cellphone! Return with us now to those thrilling days of jester jeer…
Take the materials of the night. Add sunlight. Wait.
Lots of hoarfrost this a.m. White on the macadam. How not to hit the little but nonetheless actual man who’s crossing the street in front of you . Too much brake and the bike’ll slide and there’s a car coming up on your right.
Black ice everywhere too, slick as oil. Eric B. comes off his bike on Greenwich Street heading uptown, jams his calf in the frame. A car, driven by a Punjabi, slides helplessly toward him. He holds up an arm to stop it. From the sidewalk a woman calls out, “Stop! Stop!” Eric’s bag ends up underneath the car, one corner of it heat-
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fused to the engine block. Once upon a time, you saw someone hold up a handful of crude oil. It’s a disgusting thing. Anyone who would refine and burn that stuff – the deadest, deadliest energy harbored by the earth – deserves the ugly black and chrome Denali that devolves from oil’s processing, deserves the inner death that results from colluding with such a machine.
Eric B. picks himself up, considers returning home, but presses on uptown to the café. Through the window, you watch him chain his bike to a parking meter, notice that the milk crate on the rack’s askew, half on, half off. That’s where we are. On until off, and some and everywhere in between.
He sits down, shows you his injured leg. His coffee appears, and with it, milk. Oil discovered in Ugaska. No, I mean Alaganda. No Conganda. The Democratic Republic of – no, Condugango. Where ever. Beneath the lake, the Nile headwaterish lake, another lakeful of Texas tea. Beneath Denaili. Expedient Denaili. Who owns it, the sub-lake? The oil companies of course! We’re rich, rich! Providing we can stomach it.
Eric’s basically OK, only reinjured an old football bash from five years ago – the outside edge of a Yugoslav’s boot shearing against the bone. Your family’s got to stop getting hit by cars you tell him, remembering the period ten years ago or so when you and Katie couldn’t stop falling down. Both of you. Every week another fall. It was ridiculous. And worse.
Back in August, the U.S. announced we had the right to shoot down any satellite we wanted to. We said Checkmate! But the Chinese play a game without squares.
And once, long ago, your father used to dance you around singing: Joshua fit the battle of Erico.
What’s the difference between Eric B. and Eric D.?
Denaili is a river in Africa. White Nile, Blue Nile. Black. Sahra move south.
A friend emails you a poem. In it, the lines: EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 991
(Now, remember the sheep from the goats. The old notion of the elect: Heaven’s reward only for the chosen.)
What comes to you is the image of Poor Mad Georgie W., sitting among the schoolchildren, doing his worst to read them a book about a goat. Now how perfect is the universe that could produce that?
From she to shining she.
Said Seneca, not too long after the earthly coming and going of a certain Essene prophet: “This is the difference between us Romans and the Etruscans. We believe that lightning is caused by clouds colliding, whereas they believe that clouds collide in order to create lightning. Since they attribute everything to gods, they are led to believe not Download 7.05 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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