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Octubre "I could not shake off the impression of having been submerged in someone's delirium" Kaighn at Broadway in Camden. Out to Kaighn Point to stare at South Philly across the river, self-destruct urban desolation North Philadelphia two-story nineteenth-century row houses, most dilapidated now, built for people who worked in the riverfront factories Immediately to the west three-story houses for managers, farther west the factory owners' mansions on Broad Street It had been our Osaka Its present cityscape of prisons, beer distributors, bars, abandoned row houses, muscle cars, crack and cat houses, aluminum siding, take-out food containers and trash-pile empty lots Would rather be watching a family of energetic Tibetan ground-jays Hopping around on grassy plains and foothill slopes, scattered boulders and sparse bushes above the tree-line, in breeding season up to 5,300 meters They favor yak-grazed pastures and cultivated ground near monasteries and small settlements Here in Burgerking strip-mall land we have sabotage by terrorists in 767s, anthrax and venal careerists in Washington And starkly, Beuys' Blitzschlag mit Lichtschein auf Hirsch at MASS MoCA As on the Indus a skinny white horse moves at a trot in Dera Ghazi Khan harnessed between a cart's shafts Eyes rolling, lips lifted, it rears back in terror trapped in a rolling bank of teargas laid down by the Pakistani police against pro-Taliban rioters Guernica The Indus, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Jordan The Dresden stench of smoldering hydrocarbons, masonry dust and putrid flesh hung for months on windless days south of Canal Street And Columbia according to Alma Guillermoprieto is a chronic, large-scale guerilla conflict commanded by people who are sunk in delirium, funded in the hundreds of millions a year by North American drug addicts, recruiting the hopeless from poverty-ridden jungle villages, at war against brutal right-wingers who are crazed by a spirit of vengeance A clear world consensus following 1945 that bombing civilians was in the league of using poison gas Nevertheless the US has bombed civilians repeatedly in the years since Heavily, relentlessly, often in lieu of any other means to its machtpolitik ends E grusigi Weltlag Eine grausige Weltlage All strangely apropos of Mahler's Titan "The main obstacle was his Jewish origins, so he accepted Catholic baptism in February 1897 and was appointed Kapellmeister at Vienna two months later" Scored for two piccolos, four flutes, four oboes, English horn, four clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, three bassoons, contrabassoon, seven horns, five trumpets, four trombones, tuba, kettledrums, bass drum, tam-tam, cymbals, triangle, harp, and the traditional strings Marvelous Mahler Young Atlantic green turtle way out in the saltmarsh tidal pond sunning on a snag Eerie, wonderful, its front paddle feet hanging at the ready, a frisbee-sized Chelonia mydas mydas glowing green They grow to well over a meter, up to 450 pounds Come back with the scope to watch it but it is gone So often that just-missed quotient of exceptional events Not only just-missing in real-time, but missing in time-negative overlays of awareness As realizing that missing being there random-time anytime deep into the past is simply an accident of birth and locale In chilled night river fog in light from a square with chestnut trees above the Rhine where a provincial Roman forum stood Outside the Basel Munster's Romanesque apse fingering the seam of fourteenth-century temblor cracks After that great 1356 earthquake, deep-tongued fillers and shims from matching sandstone were cut to fit the cracks and tied in with iron jams In the improvising manner of their delicately contrived liernes Gothic world So distinct from our present techno-standardized numbing noisy lives Where historical epiphanies are mostly either intellectually-enhanced insights or cheap commercially-induced thrills Which for which maybe depending on whether or not such neurological scintillae are mechanistically explicable Desencanto But profound experience is to be had in history on-site, those glimpsing-the-past disclosures, at a Roman ruin, Romanesque or Gothic cathedral, Chinese or Greek temple, or a Polynesian lava boulder wall, a pre-Columbian plaza or pyramid site Awareness of the air two thousand years ago within a Roman arena Trudging up the tunnel's ramp to approach the sand Glimpsing the sun, staring at the high clouds in the zenith, just as the sky looked during the games, above Arles or Pula or N”mes Past in imagined time or time present Watching a Tour de France appear over a crest to run the sinus of a turn so fast that when they're gone it's hard to be sure you saw them because you remember no specifics of any rider, only the hissing sizzle of their passing The motion of the air The streamlined rush of air when rounding second going for a triple That reality The moving air As all the while sedentaries with their Roz Chast eyes live locally, circumscribed in place Coexistent with the blasˇ insouciance of tens of thousands at any instant aloft in muttering jets, blinds down, oblivious to the verities of landscape scrolling out below "I was taught to feel, perhaps too much // The self-sufficing power of solitude" Bruegel passed across the Alps in the 1560s within months of Thomas Platter's last trans-Alpine journey and they could well have met in Basel or while on the track across the Jura "Attitudes toward mountains were beginning to shift in Europe, a sign of the medieval world slowly yielding to the modern one.... Bruegel's landscape drawings, part fantasy, part faithful, seem on the cusp of history" Like Saul Bellow's appointment with Trotsky on the day of the assassination. When arriving at the house after the event, being mistaken for a journalist and allowed to view the body As though it could have been written ahead even of our times, in Haydn reached far into the future with the Finale: Fuga a 2 soggetti of his early F-Minor Quartet, Opus 20, No. 5 Plaintive, straining, very directly moving into the remote key of A-flat minor Ahead like the explosive second section of Schuman's Fantasy in C Major, Opus 17, whose pianistic flares jump generations like fire shadows A piece that Schuman wrote in his twenties The time of imagination is in no manner absolute Back, forward, or in continuous cartwheeling loops "It is good that I did not let myself be influenced" To get a seat when traveling rough on the Indian National Railways, eat meat before boarding and the smell will assure plenty of elbow room And to get through airport security, smile copiously and hold eye contact +++++++++++++++ Sampling credits to Alma Guillermoprieto; Steve Madge and Hilary Burn, Crows and Jays; The Norton/Grove Concise (1988); Wordsworth; Michael Kimmelman; Wittgenstein.

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