path: root/veryold/very old writings/orbit submitted to prism 1_28.txt

I am lying back supported by pillows on a small couch in the back corner of an underground bar.  It is near dawn, in Paris, 1999, I am listening to the radio and staring at walls not yet written by Celine, Miller, and all the dead poets.  There is peace back here in corner where I watch all time pass tranquily by with a freedom indigenous to those who are familiar with the ancient art of noncompliance.  Static chirps of French corporate radio interrupt my musings on art’s finer abstracts.  
Step aside and let the man go through.  I feel like a featherweight-lead-train, heavy from hash, muscles detached from their control centers, inoperable, trying to struggle out the words for another espresso to wake the gray cells that hang like storm clouds on the edge of my brain.  But my mind floats far out of the monkey body and glides in effortless circles, endlessly, a buzzard soaring on thermals and returning only to rest.  
I am watching Nina who in her lovable French fashion is totally ignoring me.  Such a sweet girl Nina, my cherub cheeked waitress —she puts up with me long after closing time.  I dream she loves me but I know she merely wants to go home; she certainly doesn't need me here.  I tried to sleep with her once, but her heart wasn't in it.  As a kind off consolation prize she lets me stay late until she is done closing up.
	Every night I used to slouch my way here for my fix of caffeine and hash, it's a full time job, shoveling coal in the engine —a tired Cartesian metaphor for a duality that is a not duality at all.  Every comparison of two is wrong which is why metaphors and poetry are much closer to the truth of immediate experience than psychology and economics. The mindbody always knows more than either one on it's own.  In a roundabout way I came to know my body by spending too much time in my mind, so much time that the body became automatic and atrophied, and my mind tumbled down off the great vistas.  I learned that there is no body and no mind only mindbody, where one goes so must the other.
Outside is Paris, in the rain it can be dark and ugly, a city of dreams gone wrong, but it can also be place to hole up take refuge and walk the mindbody through strange and wonderful loops.  Parisians, like New Yorkers, reflect the kind of omniscience of those cities —the experience of them gets lost in words.  It has to be felt, it has to be lived; in that way I start to get the taste of it, that sweet aromatic quality that radiates from a beautiful woman when she catches the eye is here in Paris every bit as real flesh.  Concrete flesh. 
	Strange French lounge music tumbles in from the French corporate station; it descends from speakers hanging behind the bar, rolling across the room.  French music is an ancient reminder of an inadequacy that has been building up since the last ice age.  Music ripped the fur from the ape body and made up man/woman, gave the creature a sense of wonder and beauty that demanded self-inspection.  Why? Art thou not a self-reflexive monkey?  Back in America we have much dead static signal to occupy the mind, here in Europe, at least for me, the questions of ancient origin retain the primal importance that has been buried so well by the trappings and excrement of Politics, Economy, and Morality. Europe has outgrown such infantile human obsessions; Parisians seem to care only for the herenow.  In a roundabout logic this is why they have better coffee—they have time, as I do, to care about coffee. 
Lest anyone have a different experience bear in mind that this is but a subjective opinion, a slanted impression like saying a puddle of water reflecting red light has the same appeal as a Picasso.  In America too one can find such places where the primacy of existence has sidestepped the concerns of individual ego and learned to live in the gutters, in the alleys, and in mud puddles of western desert roads.  It can be found anywhere by anyone who is looking for it.  This is why junkies understand better the nature of economy than stock market analysts in sickly air-conditioned rooms, because they need to.  So it is with philosophy, reason, and morality, if you need them they are there if you don’t then they fade into the eyes of beautiful women, the swirl of espresso, the thick rings of hash smoke, or the cubist reflections on an oily puddle of rainwater. 
This is my nightmare at the end of the century and like some forgotten, wayward evolutionary glitch lying in languid rooms of far off dream cities —Paris, Prague, Peking, Peoria, or St Petersburg— if I stop for instant I might miss something.  That something haunts the empty spaces of my sleep keeps me balanced on thin wires.  I prefer to live herenow and if I must die then I will do it later. There at the final moment you will start to get the real digs. I could worry about a thousand inventions of the primate mind, about the politics of Alpha Primates, about the logic and reason of the rational scientists, about the moral rights and wrongs of thousand man-made gods, but why?
Beliefs ebb and flow through history and there has been enough chattering insanity of theory upon theory and religion upon religion to explain it all down to the minutest detail.  I wanted to learn it all to make sense of it but somehow for some reason I woke up one day trying to eat the menu, forgetting altogether that it is not really the meal.  I am weary of the acrid taste of paper corroding my mouth, these days I prefer to notice the delicate wisp of hair that hangs off Nina’s ear as she wipes clean the finely polished mahogany tables. Or to watch the curious flickers of shadows from the candle that is the only light in my back corner; to marvel at the designs of the silken pillows supporting my head; to admire the wonderfully chaotic patterns of cigarette smoke that mysteriously dissolve into thin air. I don’t want to know how or why I just want to watch.  For me Paris brings home the guttural realities that are right herenow, whether they are inventions of my mind or another’s has no consequence on their existence.
 Nowadays, reclined on Persian pillows and swimming in sweet perfumed hash dreams, I do not come here often.  I am due to leave tonight in fact and I am spending this last night with Nina to say goodbye and thank her for her kindness.  Nina with her drooping doe eyes lies down next to me and rests her cheek against mine, tearing me from the wandering peace of inner reflections.  She smiles and whispers, “all done,” her French accent tickling my ear.  We lie like that for a few moments and then with some effort draw ourselves off the couch and up the stairs. Outside on the street I am blinded by the morning sun finally breaking it’s way through the sullen clouds; I light a cigarette and do the same for Nina, we both draw deeply and say our final good-byes.  She heads up rue de Seine; and I strike out for a wandering sort of day, the hash makes me energized and in the mood for a last day of sauntering.
The streets of Paris, for those that have never had the good fortune to walk them, seem to have been built by someone with a sense of humor; someone who sat back and asked themselves: what would travel be like if we made it deliberately difficult instead of deliberately easy?  The answer is here somewhere in the meandering alleys, bridges, tunnels, and streets that seem designed to get one lost, confused, and disoriented.  Only in such a state do you begin to discover the real Paris. Or to keep the Quantum Psychologists happy, only in such a state will you begin to discover my Paris.  But of course not even then will you find the Paris I see, it is too colored by my own private experiences and intrinsically locked in the patterns of memories that links rivers and buildings from other human outposts.  You have your own filtered lenses through which you color your own worlds beautiful or ugly in their own right.
My own memories may have filters on them that were shaded and toned by what I brought to them when they happened mixed like oil and water with what I bring to them now.  Take for instance Mexico City: I remember Mexico City in hazy brown discolored way, but it’s not the smog, it’s the nature of memory —the nature of my memory.  The images overlay each other like a photomontage.  I see it in moving pictures: cut to a shot of the subway, sad brown faces and I want to know why they aren't on vacation like me… lay on top of it an image of pyramid excavation digging up and trying to solve the Mayan Caper.  Years ago you would. Understand she was standing right next to me and then...Warm sweet smelling cab and my father says “hey, look a Kentucky fried Chicken” and sure enough I see one.  Americana right in the middle of foreign chaos it threw me into a different world, a sudden realization that life is not ordered like the clockwork metaphors I learned in grade school.  It became in that instant a chaotic kaleidoscope of astonishment and splendor tied forever to an obscure memory of fried chicken.
I've had quite a time ever since then trying to pick up the pieces of a world that exists in only my subjective phantasmal experience.  I focused up into the sun, and it burned in fantastical visions that existed only for me, leaving me alone and for a long time afraid.  Not fear in the sense that you feel threatened, it is much worse, not conscious, it just lingers in the back of the mind occasionally eliciting a paralysis that would haunt me for a while and then fade again in the face of day to day activities.  
It’s a fear that leaves you like a woman I saw once stone still and shell shocked, stuck right in the middle of this enormous arch in Canyonlands National Park, Utah.  She just stood there unable to move, feeling the digging hooks of unbridled terror burning into her brain and creating an endless and spellbinding feedback loop that forbids you to move.  It anchors your mind right back in the primate body because you feel it and yet rips you right out of the very fabric of collective reality and propels you into strange land where there is no you.  I watched her sit there unable to help herself, doubtless staring at the two thousand-foot drop off on both sides of her and the meager four foot wide sandstone arch that was holding her there.  She was suspended in mid air, seeing herself for the first time the way we are: naked cold and deathly afraid.
	But the cab driver just laughed and said, “here in Mexico City there is no Kentucky Fried Chicken, maybe Kentucky Fried Cat, Kentucky Fried Dog, But definitely no Kentucky Fried Chicken.”  He smiled this crooked smile revealing gold caps and over moist gum structure that was so large it seemed to be slowly crawling right down over his teeth.  He then sternly advised in all seriousness against eating there, of course I wouldn't have anyway; he merely gave me a rational reason for that.  And all this was years before I would ever get to India to learn that, first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.
	But alas I did not have my Mexico City cabby advise to help that woman frozen there on the Arch, in fact I went all the way to the end of the trail (funny I don't remember were it went) and came back and she was still there, frozen for time.  Occasionally I wonder if maybe it would have help to walk by here real quietly and whisper...don't worry there is no Kentucky Fried Chicken, maybe Kentucky Fried Cat or Kentucky Fried Dog, but certainly no Kentucky Fried Chicken.  
I realize my legs are moving as fast as the random associations of the mind and I am at the Seine without even realizing that that was where I was headed.  I slow a bit and notice the cold again, a glance at the sky reveals the story —gray again—afternoon clouds—another storm.  The winters seem to be getting worse every year, this last storm tore apart Versailles made a mockery of French architecture from what I saw on the headlines.  In fact it seems that weather everywhere is getting more severe, mudslides, floods, droughts, tornadoes.  It’s as if something really big were building up to vent on us.  The Ancients placed great stock in weather and saw storms as harbingers that something was wrong within the tribe. Many of them associated the outside as intimately connected to the inside of the tribe. Educated people (historically that reads white) first scoffed at such notions, but now two thousand years of theories later we have elaborate sciences which are beginning to prove the Gaian Mind hypothesis.  In the end it seems that while the causality may not be as direct as the Shaman once thought; nevertheless all systems of life are interconnected and indeed weather getting worse might be a sign that something else is out of whack.  The question for the philosophers and thinkers is, what?   
I pause in the middle of a bridge overlooking the Seine.  The bark of the trees which line the streets on either side of the quay are wet from the snow last night —it has already melted in the comparative warmth of the day.  I smoke a cigarette to consider this idea of interconnectedness.  
Smoking is very bad for you I am told, but I enjoy it nonetheless, I have decided that I smoke because there is something wrong with me.  It’s just that I consider smoking the symptom not the disease itself —in my mind that causes me to enjoy smoking and is equally bad for my mental health.  Until I solve the mind riddle it is no good to try and force the body to do something it doesn’t want to do.  The weather might well be our cigarette the question is what is it on our collective mind that needs fixing? I get up shivering from inactivity and pace the banks watching the river pull at the ice that is slowly beginning to take it over. I wonder if it ever does; I’ve never spent the whole winter in Paris I have no idea if it can freeze solid or not.
Staring at the Seine brings back tapeloops of Boston -Harvard square- fall; the Charles River slips by without a sound, the streets corral throngs of people— onlookers drunk beyond comprehension of what they were there to look at— they stumble out of bars and lurch through doorways like grenades rolled out on the street.  Inside the Radcliffe boathouse a reserve of surplus energy is released in muscular spasms that pulse in orgasm.  Her breasts pool salt onto my tongue.  And in walks Truman Copote, he looks it over for a minute and then, having taken stock of the affair, proceeds to hand me the rosette stone of Knowledge.  He lit a cigarette, took the stone back, and walked out the boathouse doors.  I taste salt in my mouth every time I call up the memory —endless tape, looping across eons.  
Icy waters remind me of what the man said —you see the game for what it was —something cold-blooded, reptile, slinking across the room. You think you know the end of it and still you’re sitting on the curb hungry, apathetic, waiting for the gutter water to splash and wake you from the nightmare of history.  You're thinking this isn't me, this can't be me….  
	Everyone walks with unshakable self-confidence, but not slow enough to remember that they are walking and when they laugh they pretend to be unafraid.  Usually I only realize that I am walking when I trip and stumble and am suddenly reminded that I am walking.  
I find myself in front a café and remember that I am hungry, cold and tired of walking.  I go in and make my way to the back; it’s an older café the kind Doisneau was always taking pictures of, the kind that belongs to an older Paris, a Paris I don’t know.  The walls look as if they were once whitewashed, but over the years the yellow stain of nicotine has rendered them the color of sun-faded newspapers.  This is a busy café off Rue F Sauton near Notre Dame and it has the hustle and bustle of nothingness that is Paris —millions of people making noise and scurrying about doing, from what I can tell, absolutely nothing.  I order coffee and pastries for a late lunch and sit back smoking with my eyes closed bathed in the swirling sounds of French conversation. I don’t speak much French, enough to order what I want and get directions that I don’t understand. I rely on broken English and the kindness of Parisians most of the time. 
Like all Americans I am too lazy or arrogant or something to learn much of the language, which is part of the reason they hate us so much.  Of course I understand, after all I am an American and I generally see Americans as primitive beasts, so I can imagine how hideously grotesque we must be to the rest of the world.  I would likely see us as junkyard dogs hoarding the freshest land on the planet and snarling insolently at the global neighborhood behind the façade is only confusion and misunderstanding. When I engage strangers in cafés or on the street I learned to fake a decent Australian accent and pass off the lapses as a result of ‘ beean too long from the riff, mate!”
One thing I deeply wish the French would reconsider is their pastries, if I had the money I would fly to new York now get a jelly-filled donut and come back for the coffee, but I don’t so I munch on the crusty hard bread and try to pretend the jelly is filling.  Lighting a cigarette I wonder if I'm lost again.  I wonder if I made some horrible mistake?  I wonder if I should have been baptized?  As if being born was a sin?  What kind of pessimist life is that?  Welcome to hell, I guess.  If you want to live in hell be my guest, but no baptism here, I want you to be naked always; I want you to be wild like a gnarled bristlecone pine tree high in the White Mountains.  They have been up there for centuries —living near immortality.  
I watch a beautiful French girl sitting in front by the door with a motorcycle helmet on her table.  She is wearing a black leather jacket and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes in long measured drags which she exhales in thick rings of smoke that hint at the presence of hash in the tobacco.  She taps her thumb idly on the table as if waiting for someone.  Her hair has the matted look of helmet-head, but the free windblown ends drape over her shoulders and dissolve into the black of her jacket like ravens hopping on the inky black ice of city streets.  She has the mannerisms of a bird, flitting between her cigarette and the espresso, constantly looking out the window behind her.  
I try to follow her eyes and in trying I am reminded that seeing is far more involved than the lens of the eye. What we see is as dependent on our state of mind as the scene that is before us.  Walking in I was hungry and wanted to eat in peace; I never saw this girl, but now that I am full and relaxed I “see” her —subject becomes subjective.  It makes you wonder what is real and what is not real.  If you study that subject for any length of time you realize that nothing is real, at least in the sense that what you perceive as real is wholly limited to you as an individual.  There is no collective reality; there is no mountain.  But there is.  
It makes me laugh to notice that a man off to the side near the bar is also staring at the girl by the door, in fact he is going a step further in his observation, he is taking her picture with an enormous cumbersome looking camera.  It’s a large format camera; one of the ones that takes sheets of film which must be changed after each picture; it’s a camera for those with patience.  He must have just taken a picture because he is removing the film and just as he is loading another he catches me staring at him; he smiles and I smile back.  He says something in French that I can’t catch and then, seeing my puzzled look, makes smoking gestures with his hands and points to his camera. I guess he wants my picture so I nod and look away trying not to pose and trying not to look like I am trying not to pose.  I never quite know what to do when cameras a pointed at me, so I act natural (as if that meant something) and smoke a touch more dramatically.  After a while I glance back and he smiles and waves I think I hear a “merci” float over the other voices and I call back “s’il vous plait”
Other afternoon cafes all distant and cloudy hang on a recall-line to dry like that black and white photograph —maybe Stieglitz, maybe Wesson, maybe Man Ray.  I remember a New York photograph.  Same Dark bruised clouds hanging low on bloody red brick world and yet even in the middle of Manhattan ivy is growing two stories up the wall and blows in the wind making the buildings appear fluid and serpentine.  I recollect sitting outside the café Dante one nearly identical day, although slightly warmer it was still too cold to be outside, but there I am sitting watching the college kids of the East Village smile absently at each other still snug in surrogate wombs.  I was watching one couple in particular they sat a table down from me and I listened to their conversation for a while. It was the last thing I remember about the United States.
They were both attractive he was probably six three or four with a water polo player’s body, all chest and no legs but no one looks at men’s legs so he could pass for attractive.  I never saw his face but you can imagine it framed by lightly gelled hair that was combed straight back and one of those overly square jaws that probably comes from excessive inbreeding way back in patriarchal old England.  She was beautiful with shiny perfectly straight hair —could have been a Pantene model.  Her eyes were flawless blue diamonds, so clear I avoided them and her skin was ivory smooth and fit her features with a smug certitude that made me wonder if DNA has an ego and occasionally likes to strut its successes.
That was what I saw at first glance but as they spoke their personalities came into view and their appearance changed until they took on the sickly blanched look of East Coast money, infused with age, death and decay.  Now money is a heavy hand; heavy when you got it, heavier when you don't and these two seemed to have a lot judging by the designer leather jackets and the well groom hair and I could tell from their hands that they hand never held jobs.  Naturally I envied them because I was starving and had only the money for a coffee.  Then I hated them because it's as easy to hate as it is to do anything else.  They ignored me and I hated them even more for it, feeling myself pass through their brains as irrelevant, another domesticated primate sitting at a table, then in New York and now in Paris.  It is also easy to ignore them and hide behind intellectual superiority, experiential superiority, but just as easy for them to hide behind religion, morals, laws, customs, ceremonies, prejudices, and most fatally —truth. Ignore is the root of ignorance and that afternoon I was ready to partake of the great waters of I-don’t-give-a-shit.
And I did indeed ignore them for the better part of an hour until I over heard her bemoaning the boredom that comes from being rich and having nothing to do.  It was then that I started to want to kill them, but even as the rage built I was struck by another less hostile feeling —pity.  In the end I forgave them, not because their lives were hard in ways different from yours and mine; no I forgave them because they were stupid.  I knew then as I still know now that stupidity is self imposed and I feel sorry for all the strange creatures that spend their youth building mental prisons and then after a set period of learning (sixteen years generally) climb inside their own prisons and throw away the key.  The only thing that makes anyone stupid is the refusal to be free.  Intelligence is not the accumulation of useless trivia in stale universities nor is it the constant theorizing of the abstract intellectuals who know a thousand problems and no solutions.  Intelligence is the ability to adapt the ability to know when to move and when to sit still.  Freedom is a matter of will.  Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.  I read that as weighted on the wilt, not the do.  Of course it’s a matter of opinion.
I wanted to write a letter to these two, to the whole world that created them, to all the stale beliefs of a thousand man-made gods who have poisoned and imprisoned human life with the banal constructs of right/wrong, true/false, black/white, to destroy people —monogamy, monotony, and pagemeny.   A letter they would hear it in their dreamscapes; one that would seep into them like a virus and start to duplicate itself cell by cell until it broke them down, pulled out their stubborn beliefs and washed them in the veritable light of hope.  And they would be able to see their pain and suffering for what it was —a prison built by themselves.  Perhaps they will see it in the white light of nova ovens. Hassan Sabbah the old man of the mountain is at the metaphoric doorstep to take back your ugliness and show it to all the universe until it is gone in the nothingness, the void of no thought…
But I learned from that cabby in Mexico City you can’t force your reality on people, you can give them the tools —tell them a thousand stories— but if they want to be unhappy they will always find a way.  That is my working definition of stupidity. Intelligence is the will to live; to live is to love.  In this café I don’t see the French equivalent of that college couple; I don’t know why, I don’t care why so long as they are not here.  I came here because the world was speeding up and I needed time to think about that, to figure out how to fit myself into it.  I feel that there are others out their like me I have read books and talked to people around the world who are done with the human game, done with restrictions, self imposed limitations, and death.  We don’t need these things anymore.  I also have read enough to know that people have said these sorts of ideas before in the 1960’s and all the sad dinosaurs of human thought believe that failure will be my end as well.  But perhaps the sixties were for a reason; perhaps we learned something.  Perhaps there is something still going on underground —outside of Time and Newsweek and the rest of the sad primate report sheets.
 Perhaps we are working in secret; we no longer advertise and compete, we are biding our time, waiting.  Waiting in cafes, underground bars, rave clubs, movie houses, punk bands, and small gatherings; waiting in New York, Paris, Mexico City, Peking, Tokyo, Moscow and a thousand other cities you will never know.  Perhaps we have new metaphors and new tools; perhaps we have a whole new language.  Perhaps those walls of belief you are pounding your head against aren’t really there.

I finished my smoke and headed out the door to catch a taxi.  I have a meeting with a friend in Prague —we’re starting a revolution.  From the cab I watched Notre Dame through the rear window until it disappeared around a corner and I turned and stared ahead momentarily blinded by the headlights of oncoming cars.  First there is Paris, then there is no Paris.  Then there is.