But the kids were all playing laughing running in the front yard in warm spring sunshine, and then everyone ran to the backyard. I was the youngest and couldn't run, couldn't keep up, so I got left behind.
Some years later, sitting at the big folding table at Uncle Orrie's house, in the big open room at the end of the hall, the play room just for the kids. My older cousins talking about life and Bob Dylan and what it all means. Us younger kids sitting there listening, imagining someday we'd be like that - have opinions that matter, and others would listen to us and learn the meanings of life.
Like Baby Face Nelson or Dillinger, gangsters from the Depression - is something just to get your name in the papers so that people know who you are. Doesn't even matter if it's good or bad; just that you're known, so you're not a nobody. Not a wallflower at school, or in life. Someone who doesn't count, whose existence has no meaning. Dylan says "let's go see that guy" at some club in the Village "I hear he's got something to say."
That's what matters, and what makes us matter, or so we think. So we've been schooled to believe - our worth is measured by what others think of us. So we desperately want them to hear us, to be charmed by our amazing wit and brilliant insight. Not only that, all our being, our existenz, has been an effort to see and do it all. To experience and learn it all, like Hegel, and to tell others. Not just so they know the right path to follow, but so they know who pointed the way.
John Kennedy dies and the whole nation mourns cuz he was an important man, a great man. Other folks die and no one cares or even notices. Their life was meaningless, a nothingness. And they're well-aware of it. At 16, 17, or even younger, they know their life doesn't matter and never will. And try to self-destruct that what God made so comically and tragically pathetic.Thousands die in wars that are won by the great men like Eisenhower, who maybe never fired a shot at the enemy in his whole life. Some people count and others don't.
And today in the here and now - nobody posts on Twitter or Facebook anonymously. Cuz how'd you know if thousands or millions of people saw that clever remark or brilliant insight. We might say something so profound - it influences 8 billion other people (per Sartre's ripple effect ). Which is like the whole point, of talking anyway.
Listening
another day in the march toward death
I rage this silent war
with all the vanishing traces of my being.
in the ceaseless stomp of the soundless parade
and the sounding celebration of the disappearing crowd.
it is too clear.
it is too sharp.
the silence screams the loudest scream of all.
the silence tolls the muteness of it all.
the quiet clarifies the shape
to be.
to obfuscate,
obdurate in high-sounding phrases
of a scaling of Olympus
to abjure the decision,
to procrastinate the sentence,
to confiscate the word
to be.
I do not hear them.
to be dead.
no, do not say that.
to be blind amid the struggle to be insensate of pain:
inanimate surrender to the obsequies,
the daily eulogies that pass for common speech,
the sittings and the watchings not to feel.
to be removed...
feet first, go slowly,
not to run, not to touch;
hear sounds, see acts, feel moods
and never make them,
never make them,
make them objects
make objections.
make a sound
like a whisper in a cave.
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