CIVILIZATION

You join civilization straight out of the womb. They name you and plug you into the symbol system and begin installing the software. Depending on the location of this event you are henceforth either a citizen or a stranger, estranged or privileged at birth. Your soul’s true home is far away in the future, beyond your lifetime, but you can crash here for a while. 

Your soul’s true home is far away and buried in the past, in unwritten histories fading from memories. Your footprints are buried under 20,000 years of sand. “We’ve all heard your dirty stories.”

 

But tell us your stories. 

You were installed in civilization and it doesn’t let go. Stranger or citizen, civilization categorizes you and puts you on a career path.

You have been chosen to be an apocalyptic poet. 

You are most welcome, but it wasn’t my call. I am merely a messenger. Get off your knees.

Your soul’s true home is right here in front of you, behind that veil.

In a few moments the Archetype will be in to see you. Have a seat. Look at a magazine. We have a good selection of Ladies Home Journal from three years ago. The coffee machine is broken. Sorry.

I’m too edgy to sit down and I want to get a close look at that veil, or rather layers of veils. I see they are woven out of ink lines drawn on very thin paper. The lines are horizontal and vertical and form a very fine grid. The lines were clearly not machine made but hand drawn. Barely perceptible but unmistakable signs of human irregularity were plain in variations of thickness and density in the lines. 

Then my mind was blown. The lines were ink but the ink wasn’t dry and there was no paper. They were woven into empty Light. I don’t know how to put this coherently, but at the moment I understood that emptiness held the lines together. 

I was drawn into the veils, as one is drawn into the pages of a book. Now I don’t know if I can say much that you will find useful and these notes I made are only conceptual fabrications of a hypothetical enlightenment.  The Absolute can not be put truly into words but only shown to oneself or others through altruistic practice, compassion, as you’ve always known, and it sounds trivial to say. You cannot say but can only be shown the power of the ultimate whose name I can’t say. I wish I could provide a link to the mode of reality I encountered within the veils. As I said, these notes are worthless.

Yes, the Archetype was there and we recognized each other immediately and I pray that will be the case for you as well.

Afterwards I guess I left the office. I stepped into the dark night, which is where you need to go, into the emptiness, finding the emptiness between the fibers of words and the on off electronic realm of binary technology, the meaning system of civilization in which our hero is subjected as a self fabricated from codes, an artificial intelligence in search of humanity — a metaphor of course of our own estrangement and search for or escape from ourselves, and these selves we thought we were, drawn into the veils like the exotic art of a forgotten civilization whose stories are still told and whose afterimages linger on the retinas of the children of the children of the children of the children back an infinite series of generations, if such is possible, generations of people and all life and material, the stories of cosmos after cosmos after cosmos, an infinite series if such is possible.

Or do you believe in the Last Day? To be honest, I find both the idea of the beginning and end of time as unthinkable as the idea of endless time and I know I’m not the first to say that.

We were in the back of my van passing a joint. The van was parked on a street near the club. I didn’t know the city at all back then and I don’t know exactly where we were but it was like around the corner off Bowery. I remember that it is my birthday and I’m 34. The rain wasn’t too bad. We were going on in fifteen minutes and I had to go to that infamous bathroom from hell and piss in the trough.The soap dispenser was busted but I had hand sanitizer in my gig bag. 

I rubbed it into my hands and slaughtered bacterial multitudes.

X Ray Retro Spex

 With this amazing pair of X-Ray Retro-Spex I can see into the center of things that are no longer there. I can spend hours watching empty space.

I did my pilgrimage.

I took the East River Ferry to Wall Street and walked to Church and Vesey. This is where our store was. Right now there is something that looks like a funhouse there.

The proposed new 2WTC will be where the old 5WTC was. 2WTC will be a second tower. You Are Here, says the map.

Stage Door Deli is still around the corner and I got breakfast to go — eggs and bacon all the way — and took it to Zuccotti Park. Sam’s Falafel is still there. This is where Occupy Wall Street started ten years ago.

I took pictures of these places and then I walked home, following the route I took when the towers were burning and I fled with the cosmopolitan multitude. We would turn our heads to see the burning skyline and then look at each other, thousands of strangers on the streets of Manhattan, looking into each other’s eyes, something never known to have happened in New York

Up Church until the second plane and then ran to West Broadway through Tribeca to Soho and Grand to Chinatown and Lower East Side and Clinton to Delancey and over the Williamsburg Bridge where I first saw that only one tower still stood and didn’t know why. By the time I got to Metropolitan the second tower was also gone.

Absent buildings and absent people continue to cast long shadows.

Maybe you really become a New Yorker when the New York you’ve come to know is no longer there.

The day after my pilgrimage I felt beat down, like one of those towers left its monster footprint on my back.

This spot where I am sitting now, a futon sofa, was where the hospital bed was when she died and where I look out the window and see the two beams of light that stream upward through empty sky. 

September 16, oh yeah, is our anniversary, and I feel beat down. 

professional survivor

To all my co-workers at 142,

I’m afraid I am going to write about what we went through 20 years ago, but I’m not going to recount the moment to moment sequence in detail. You may recall I was the manager on duty and I had 372. I was on the Plaza level in the periodicals section when we heard and felt it. The sonic impact was followed by screaming and commotion on the street and all the stuff, mainly paper, falling like a snow storm. What the fuck was I supposed to do? I wanted to run away but if I did I could never face the other assistant managers again, let alone Melissa, so I held on to the phone. Herman came in the door, the Church Street entrance, and said a jet had hit the North Tower.

I said I wasn’t going to do a moment to moment recount. Sorry. 

Eugene called 372. I didn’t know he was in the store, but he’d arrived early. He said he’d clear people out of the bottom level and I’d do the third floor. It was a little bit like a frantic closing shift except for my being on the brink of panic. After making sure all the customers were gone I cleared the offices. Fatima had been praying and was holding a Quran. I fixed that image in my mind forever. The store was empty except for a few of us near the Church Street entrance. I was eager to get the hell out of there. Eugene wanted to get his bag out of the office and a couple of others went with him and we waited. A fireman came to the door and told us to evacuate the building. This was the first order I’d heard. Up to then, I wasn’t sure if we were safer staying in the store or leaving the store.

I said I wasn’t going to give a moment to moment.

Eugene and the others were upstairs so I got on 372 and yelled over the speakers the infamous everybody get the fuck out of the store page. They ran down the escalator. No bag check. Eugene and Herman were struggling with the rusty lock. My patience had run out so I said adios and crossed Vesey and stood at the corner near the Post Office and saw the North Tower and felt a change in my neurochemistry, an altered state. It didn’t look real but it was real. I needed to call my parents and tell them I was fine, so I hurried up Church with the throng of evacuees. I had gone about two blocks when the second plane hit.

I don’t know why I have to write this. The experience changed the way I felt about co-workers, including past and future co-workers. I was the least competent of the assistant managers at that store, I felt. Evacuating the place was the least I could do. The managers meeting we had two days later was celebratory.

I didn’t want to recount that sequence of moments, but I felt the effects of that sequence of moments in my face when I woke up this morning. We carry a record of trauma in our body, I’m told. I’m sure you do too. 

Love to all of you. 

Lars 9/11/2021

 

Psalm 2021

NOW when we die, others celebrate our life.

Don’t you need to celebrate your life and all life every day?

Why would anyone celebrate your life if you didn’t find it worth celebrating when you were alive?

To Life!

I raise my half full mug of room temperature Cafe Bustelo and toast the Williamsburg Bridge and the World Trade Center beyond.

A shadow falls on the sky, the low ceiling of a menacing 

storm —

There isn’t time to celebrate life, says the cloud. 

There is work to do. You need to pay off your debts.

Debts? What debts? I’m all paid up, I say to the cloud.

You were born in debt, son of man, the cloud replies. You live in debt and sell your time to pay your debts.

And when you cease to live someone will pay to deal with your remains and all the paperwork of dying. We have a system here that is powered by debt. You are all paid up, are you? You’ve mailed the rent check and Con Ed has automatically extracted your monthly payment from your bank account. You know Social Security won’t cover what you spend much longer and that you will be in debt and now you are in debt because you don’t think about it as much as you are supposed to. Our economic system — Free Enterprise — demands that you fear debt as well as be in debt — fear of debt and guilt about debt and all you owe or think you owe — guilt which is fear that you will be punished and that you are already being punished for unknown crimes. You are afraid because you are following the rules, and the Rule is Debt, and the Rule is You Must Be Afraid. Because debt is a vacuum that sucks the celebration out of life. Rule of the System of Debt is that kind of parasite, the money parasite that sucks the life out of the earth and out of the sky and leaves behind a toxic dump.

We are given life-giving breath.

Life breathes into us every day.

Breathe in life and celebrate the gift of consciousness and experience and growth.

Welcome to life. Life is free. They want you to follow so many rules — but life is free. The human childhood is so long because it takes so long to learn all the rules and they keep changing them so you can’t learn them all.

As you grow you might learn to question the rule givers and rule enforcers and if you get to the heart of the matter you might challenge the systems that rule us all and lose the fear of the Kingdom of Debt and learn to breathe in a community of Love with a gospel of prosperity for all. There is more than enough for all.

Revolutionary lovers, you are given transformative power, and your names are holy.

Here comes the rule of love, and here comes the will to love, and imagination to cultivate paradise now.

You who are life, who give life, give us the means to live and be alive.

Free us from the rule of debt, forgive our debts, and give us the will to share what we have.

Guide us away from deception,

and liberate us from evil.