Robert’s Chametzky’s thoughts on Adorno’s famous line (here) reminded your editor that it was past time to post Baraka’s unassimilable story (first published in the 60s), which seems more punctual than ever…B.D.
My concerns are not centered on people. But in reflection, people cause the ironic tone they take. If I think through theories of government or prose, the words are sound, the feelings real, but useless unless people can carry them. Attack them, or celebrate them. Useless in the world, at least. Though to my own way of moving, it makes no ultimate difference. I’ll do pretty much what I would have done. Even though people change me: sometimes bring me out of myself, to confront them, or embrace them. I spit in a man’s face once in a bar who had just taught me something very significant about the socio-cultural structure of America, and the West. But the act of teaching is usually casual. That is, you can pick up God knows what from God knows who.
Sitting in a hospital bed on First Avenue trying to read, and being fanned by stifling breezes off the dirty river. Ford Madox Ford was telling me something, and this a formal act of· teaching. The didactic tone of No More Parades. Teaching. Telling. Pointing out. And very fine and real in its delineations, but causing finally a kind of super-sophisticated hero worship. So we move from Tarzan to Christopher Tietjens, but the concerns are still heroism.
And what to do to make the wildest, brightest, dispersal of our energies. In our not really brief flight into darkness. Either it is done against the heavens, sky flyers, or against the earth. And the story of man is divided brusquely between those who know the sky, and those who know only the earth. And the various dictators, artists, murderers and ministers, can come from either side. Each Left and Right, go right up to the sky, and the division is within their own territory. Lindberghs and Hemingways, Nat Turners and Robespierres. What they do is gold, and skyward, from whatever angle, they fly and return to an earth of mistakes. So Christopher Tietjens being made a cuckold, and trying vainly to see through mist and shadows down to Sylvia’s earth. She called so furiously for him to fall. My friend, Johnny Morris, fighting off the Ku Klux Klan only to return from those heights to the silent hallway of some very real shack and watch some fool wrestle with his wife. Various scenes complete each other with desperate precision.
Sitting there being talked to by an old Tory, fixed and diseased by my only life. And surrounded, fortunately enough, by men like myself, who are not even able to think. Wood alcohol drinkers, dragged in from the Bowery, with their lungs and bellies on fire. Raving logicians who know empirically that Christianity can only take its place among the other less publicized concerns of men.
Sixty-year-old niggers who sit on their beds scratching their knees. Polacks who have to gurgle for the rest of their lives. Completely anonymous (Scotch-Irish?) Americans with dark ratty hair, and red scars on their stomachs. They might be homosexuals watching me read Thomas Me-an, and smelling the mystery woman’s flowers. Puerto Ricans with shiny hair and old-fashioned underwear shirts, eating their dinner out of Mason jars.
………………………………………………………………………….And we are all alive at the same time. Contemporaries in that sense. (Though I still think myself a young man, and am still in love with things I can do.) Of the same time and source. Inheritors of so many things we will never understand. But weighted with very different allegiances, though if I am silent for a long time I hope we all believe in a similar reality. That I am not merely writing poems for Joel Oppenheimer or Paul Blackburn . . . but everything alive. Which is not true. Which is simply not true. Our heroisms and their claims are fictitious. But if we are not serious, if we do not make up a body of philosophy out of which to work we are simply hedonists, and l am stretching the word so that it includes even martyrs. Flame freaks.
In the bed next to mine was a man, Kowalski, a very tall Polish man with a bony hairless skull, covered with welts and scratches. He had drunk paint remover and orange juice. He was the man who gurgled now, though he kept trying to curl his lips and smile. But I was hoping he would find out soon what a hopeless gesture that was, and stop it. I wanted to say to him, “Why don’t you quit fucking around like that? It’s certainly too late to be anybody else’s man now. Just cut that shit out.” With his weird colored teeth hanging below his lip, cutting the smile into strips of anguish.
He would eat my fruit when I offered it, or the nuts a rich lady gave me. Since I was not merely a “poor man” or a derelict, but a writer. That is, there was a glamorous reason I was in this derelict’s ward. Look at my beard, and all the books on the table; I’m not-like the rest of these guys. They’re just tramps. But I’m a tramp with connections.
He would talk too, if I didn’t watch him. He would gurgle these wild things he found in the. tabloids. And point out murders and rapes to me, or robberies where everybody got away clean. He described the Bowery to me like it was a college, or the Village, or an artist’s colony. An identical reality, with the same used up references … the same dishonesties and misplaced loyalties. The same ambition, naturally. Usually petty and ravaging. Another cold segment of American enterprise, and for this reason having nothing at all to do with their European counterparts, beggars … whom I suppose are academic and stuffy in comparison. Bums have the same qualifications as any of us to run for president, and it is the measure of a society that they refuse to. And this is not romanticism, but simple cultural observation. Bums know at least as much about the world as Senator Fulbright. You better believe it.
………………………………………………………………..But one day two men came into our ward. A tall red-faced man, like from his neck up he had been painted by Soutine, or some other nut. The other man, was lost in his gabardine suit, like somebody who was not even smart enough to be rich. When I looked up from ,my book at them, I thought immediately what a stupid thing to think about people that they were cops. Although, of course, that is just what they were: cops. Or detectives, since they were in “plain” clothes, which is as hip as putting an alligator in a tuxedo. Very· few people would make a mistake, except say those who would say it was a crocodile. That is, zoology majors.
The alligators came right down the aisle to Kowalski’s bed; the little baggy one carrying a yellow pad on a writing board. They had been talking to each other very calmly and happily about something. Probably about man-eating tigers or the possibility of whores on Mars. But their faces quickly changed and reset when they got to the end of the row, and stood before my derelict’s bed. “Hey,” the red-faced man said, “Hey,” at Kowalski who was sleeping or by now pretending to sleep, “Hey, you Kowalski?” He shook the old man’s shoulder, getting him to tum over. Kowalski shook his head in imitation of sleep, frowned and tried to yawn. But he was still frightened. Probably confused too, since I’m sure he’d never expected to see cops in a place the Geneva Convention states very specifically is cool. In fact he wiped his eyes convinced, I’m certain, that the two police officers were only bad fairies, or at worst, products of a very casual case of delirium tremens. But, for sure, the two men persisted, past any idea of giggling fantasy.
“Hey. You Kowalski?”
The old man finally shook his head slowly yes, very very slowly, yes. Pulling his sheets up around his neck like a woman or an inventive fag, in a fit of badly feigned modesty. The cops looked on their list and back at Kowalski, the tall one already talking. ”Where’d you get the stuff, Kowalski? Huh?” The derelict shrugged his shoulders and looked cautiously toward the window. “We wanna know where you got the stuff, Kowalski, huh?” Finally, it must have dawned on the derelict that his voice was gone. That he really couldn’t answer the questions, whether he wanted to or not, and he gurgled for the men, and touched his throat apologetically. The red cop said, “Where’d you get the stuff, Kowalski, huh? Come on speak up.” And he put his head closer to the bum’s, at the same time shaking his shoulder and finally, confronted by more gurgles, took the derelict’s pajama shirt in his fingers and lifted the man a few inches off the bed. The little toady man was alternately watching and listening, and making checks on his yellow pad. He said, “Come on,” once, but not very viciously; he looked at me and rubbed his eyes. “Come on, fella.”
The large cop raised his voice as he raised Kowalski off the bed, and shook him awkwardly from side to side, now only repeating the last part of the question, “Huh? Huh? Huh?” And the old bum gurgled, and began to slobber on himself, his face turning as red as the policeman’s, and his eyes wide and full of a domesticated terror. He kept trying to touch his throat, but his arms were bent under his body, or maybe it was that he was too weak to raise them from where they hung uselessly at his side. But he gurgled and turned redder.
And here is the essay part of the story. Like they say, my point of view. I had the book, No More Parades, all about the pursuit of heroism. About the death and execution of a skyman, or at least the execution, and the airless social compromise. that keeps us alive past any use to ourselves. Chewing on some rich lady’s candy, holding on to my ego, there among the elves, for dear god given sanctified life. Big Man In The Derelict Ward. The book held up in front of my eyes, to shield what was going on from slopping over into my life. Though, goddamn, it was there already. The response. The image. The total hold I had, and made. Crisscrossed and redirected for my own use (which now sits between the covers of a book to be misunderstood as literature. Like neon crosses should only be used to advertise pain. Which is total and final, and never really brief. It was all I had. Like Joe Friday, or Cesar Vallejo, in a hopeless confusion of wills and intents. To be judged like Tietjens was or my friend in the hallway watching his wife or breaking his fingers against an automobile window. There is no reasonable attitude behind anything. Nuns, passion killers, poets, we should all go out and get falling down drunk, and forget all the rules that make our lives so hopeless. Fuck you Kowalski! Really, I really mean it. St. Peter doing his crossword puzzle while they wasted another hopeless fanatic. It fits, and is more logical than any other act. Ugly Polish tramp).
……………………………………………………………………………………………….Till finally I said, “That man can’t speak. His voice is gone.”
……………………………………………………………………………………………….And the tall man, without even looking, wheezed, “And who the fuck asked you?”
……….It is the measure of my dwindling life that I returned to the book to rub out their image, and studied very closely another doomed man’s life.