Monday, November 05, 2007
THINGS I FOUND OUT (a Hart Crane Story):Hart Crane was a big old pop-eyed gay beast and every move he made towards getting any sensible work out was somehow thwarted by other events around him - wordiness flamboyance showiness and a hundred images no one ever understood - and real men can live with that and just continue working on but in his case it was all too much and it was combined with alcohol and man-sex and sailors along the wharf and he was beaten-up one night aboard ship and dazed and confused in his usual depressed alcoholic spin he jumped from ship in the Caribbean and was consumed by the water as an ensign from heaven would be taken by wild horses and never heard from again - and that same subject of horses brought me to the bas-relief on Schermerhorn Row which depicted Apollo or someone standing straight and erect and leaning on the back of a horse grazing wild in the field - the horse had a rein around his neck and Apollo was holding with one arm onto that rein while standing there with a piece of straw in his mouth and wearing some strange sort of coveralls or something certainly not classical in style and I never understood the meaning nor reason of that relief and it's gone now but I always remember it and the light blue tiles built into the wall which surrounded it - maybe it had something to do with the lonesome life of sailors just back from the sea and wishing for land and probably five thousand sailors a year would see the image as they came back onto lower Manhattan for their shore leave before taking off again - Liverpool or Calais or wherever - loaded fresh with cargo and packed with food and supplies their ships would again forgo land and take them away and I wondered always if any part of that strange image stayed with them and if so what did it represent ? the new world the wonders of America the oddity of New York ? or just another whistle stop along their tired and jagged way ? but I never found out on that item anything more : and the Statue of Liberty in fact was initially conceived by her French sculptor as an Egyptian peasant girl intended to adorn the entrance to the Suez Canal and the first Zionists to settle in Palestine were in fact American Protestants who planted successive ill-fated colonies aimed at restoring the Holy Land to Jews so that their subsequent conversion to Christianity would speed the Second Coming and Civil War veterans often became officers in Egyptian campaigns in Sudan and Abyssinia and that before landing in North Africa during World War II the United States Army dropped leaflets advertising the arrival of 'Holy Warriors to fight the great jihad of freedom' - these are just a few and there's plenty more and I'll drop them in as I go along but I never really developed a 'voice' of my own as I'd seen others doing : even ersatz stalwart actor types like John Guerassio who at the same time as me was living somewhere in these places although he still homed with his family in Brooklyn and he studiously undertook acting so as to develop a self-format through which to be made and it did eventually all work out for him as I watched him progress to parts here and there and then finally to the Lion Theater Company at that little Theater Row along west 42nd Street way out by the river and he had a few defining roles for himself - while living along (later) the Bowery amidst what seemed like a million lamp stores and over some of those years - 'K' a strange Kafka story and 'Sananda Sez' another odd play about what's now called New Age and esoteric information - and I watched as he rode the glamor pretty good and then after leaving that stage just went to Hollywood and even then made a few roles for himself (after Jane Austen In Manhattan on film) parts into which I became afraid he was pouring the wrong side of himself and then he became a big deal a leading player a 'superstar' even with the Peterborough Players in Peterborough New Hampshire summer after summer (I received postcards each season) and it too then just went away and the next I knew he'd started a pretty good career narrating travel documentaries and selling a video series based on the same and that I suppose was OK by him and for him and I once received a postcard from him from what he called 'LaLa land' in which he reported his newest 'job' making ends meet - a night watchmen in a funeral home - and I figured 'Hey! the role of a lifetime for someone!' and I always kept one ear cocked for something - listening and watching as I could for the breaks which took others away and how they made it and how they got them but time always passed me by and that was fine by me for I much more valued the selfhood I was then able to develop in a more solitary and hothouse fashion and (as I just said) I never 'developed' a voice and never wanted too because it became more important to me to be able to become aware of and understand and retrieve that message and those words which were coming to me - but over time that makes a difference because no matter what else one does HAVE to live and long after the days of Mr. Irvington Munching I certainly had no patron who would support me and I knew that so I therefore had to make the conscious decision of just going about the work that came to me and leave it at that : abstract thinking is the best kind anyway.
