At 17 I was in a bookstore in Greenwich Village with my friend, Stan Edelman. It was 1957.
In my hands I held a thick volume by a James Joyce (Finnegan’s Wake). I opened the book and I could not understand the first sentence much less the whole paragraph. It was the second great book after Ulysses. I put the book down, bothered by its incoherence. I remember how off-putting its language was.
I had met a great unknown, a prometheus, the great white whale. I was ill-equipped to understand it. I had no sense of either its import or lack of it. I was unknown to myself. I could not palpate its meaning.
I am better known to myself now, having worn out the shoe leather of my existence.
I still don’t get, Mt. Lemmon. I don’t get you.
Something is happening on Mt. lemmon and I can’t hold on to it. It feels like a parallel universe to the one I am in now. We can’t even bump asses with one another. Like two trains passing one another from opposing directions, we ride alongside one another, windows shuttling, and all we see are our own reflections in the glass. Subway riders of the stage, shuttle, shuttle.
When I was in Ennis, Ireland, in a local card shop, I bought an inexpensive picture of Jimmy Joyce. Other notions praised him as a creation of the Irish people. He hated the Catholic church and now it was co-opting him. Now he was a native son. Curious, after all these years to take home to the USA a picture of Jimmy. He rattled my cage at 17, didn’t he? And now I took him to my heart. (Fuck the system. Fuck the other self. Fuck awareness. I’ll do what I have to do for me.) And above all, fuck religion, the monolithic conditioner of all history. And why is religion the great poisonous puke of history? Simple. It keeps us away from whatever awareness we can obtain and feeds us a gruel of illusion and idiocies as an alternative “life” style.
All religions keep us away from ourselves. Gene Simmons of Kiss, he of the lengthy serpentine tongue; oh, ladies, to have that slopping against your pundy, like a sloshing wave against weathered piling, once shared this anecdote. He was studying the Torah as a young boy when he saw through the window of his apartment a young Latina skipping rope, her long black hair flowing with the breeze and he realized, Simmons opined, that she was life and he wanted that, not playing with his yomica. A very nice Jewish boy and how sensical!
