Edelman Sculpture

WHY DOES THE AUTHOR CONCERN HIMSELF WITH MEL?

2012-01-10T06:30:00.001-08:00

For all that has been revealed about Mel, we remain uninterested in her. Our concern, the concern of History, is with Rifkind for the simple reason that it is his name which is attached inextricably to our Age. But the sum total of the facts of Mel's life, once told, elevate her to a kind of Agency status. While she had little to do with the evolution of Rifkind's ideas, and even less involvement in their execution, her opposition to him -her articulated suspicions spread among his closest followers- created a certain space, a cleared field, a golden space beneath lintels of marble, where his Story could grow in and of itself.

The author is compelled as archivist to speak of Mel. Once Rifkind was incarcerated in Bellerica, and necessarily ceded all that was outside its walls to forces there resident, it was inevitable that one such as Mel would arise. Someone had to take advantage of Rifkind's imprisonment. Someone had to raise heretical questions. Rifkind himself made an error in assuming his authority and influence over all of those in his circle -let's name the poet, Maria, Sam for starters- would grow the longer he was behind bars. It has been suggested that he began his Prison Diary as a celebration of this victory over time, space, and more particularly over his adherents. But Rifkind hadn't counted on Mel and her embodiment of a certain cynical doubt that was growing outside the prison Walls, but not within the Diary: Why the Hell was Rifkind really going to Nam?

And Mel was willing to use her new found Poetic voice and sexual license to convince any and all that Rifkind was a Prick.

IS MEL OUTSIDE OF HISTORY?

2011-12-28T18:06:00.000-08:00

What, then, do we really know of Mel? Is Mel outside of History, or central
to one of the greatest stories ever recorded or overlooked –the History
of Rifkind himself and of the Rifkindomorphic World in which we find
ourselves, commonly referred to as the Post Hiroshimaic Age that has come
to signify our troubled Times. This much is known:

1. That Mel came from humble origins in Massachusetts somewhere,
though her grandmother was said to hail from New Holstein,
Wisconsin.
2. Mel lived in an apartment of many homely women near Beacon Street
and Mass Ave in Back Bay, Boston.
3. Rifkind had made love to each of these homely women, a fact known
to them singly and severally.
4. Mel was Rifkind’s principle contact in said apartment,
5. The apartment was rank with the smell of cat fur, cat spew, rotten
food, and with the electric air of old fuses.
6. Mel hid Rifkind’s footlocker with its unknown contents and later
delivered it unopened to Michael at Columbia Street when Rifkind
was in Bellerica.
7. Michael abandoned the footlocker when he fled the underground
at Columbia Street with Sue Katz and Kathy and a few others still
unnamed.
8. Mel had other connections with Sue Katz and Kathy the photographer
of Rifkind through Bread and Roses Women’s Organization and the
Our Bodies Ourselves writing collective. Mel was viewed by these
organizations as a “community person” meaning that she did not
attend an elite area college or university. This made and makes Mel
more objectively Real and thus she was and is a stand in for “The
People” to whom all power was Due. To this extent according to to
Howard Zinn Mel stands for “The People” in this Romance and even
for History Itself, at least in the environs of Boston University.
9. Mel was also the lover of the Poet and taught him a thing or two
during his quest to follow the conquests of Rifkind, quite consciously
but without jealousy or rancor.
10. Mel was with Maria at the Blue Parrot on the fateful night that
resulted in the trip to Cambridge City Hospital where Maria lost
her ovaries without being first consulted –and thus Mel was near to
History or rather to the End of History.

11. Mel intimated to Denise that she had knowledge of the Poet’s dreams.
12. Mel was Ronnie’s cousin.
13. Thus we see that Mel stood at the crossroads of History, humbly and
as an innocent bisexual with the wings of a blessed angel, incapable of
deceit, and larger than life at five foot eleven, and 229 pounds. (She
wore a Combat jacket in all seasons.)
14. As with Christ and Mary Magdalene so with Rifkind and Mel; the
least and the lowest defines the Age.
15. What is unique about Mel is that she chose, at a late date, to ignore
fate and enter History actively by contacting Denise, commencing
to write her own poems, and with an undefined passion to destroy
Rifkind. But why? This is not given us to treat of in this Romance:
we only observe and report. But Mel most certainly was out to get
Rifkind’s ass and thus entered History in ways not anticipated at the
time.
16. It is to be remembered that the most serious charges to date (prior
to his draft induction physical when he was taken into custody by
the FBI, not the Military Police) against the Poet were a result of his
discovery and apprehension by Dominic Scalese of the Cambridge
Red Squad in the presence of the weapon bearing footlocker
belonging to Rifkind.
17. Thus Mel might be called the center of a web of intrigue. Even at the
time under consideration there was a growing respect, even mystique,
that had grown around the persona of Mel due to her insistence,
within the Our Bodies Ourselves collective, on the inclusion of a
chapter on vaginal self-examination utilizing closet mirrors as a key
psychological confrontation between a woman and her body.

MEL-DENISE MEETING AND THE ERRATA AND MINUTIA OF RIFKINDOMORPHIC HISTORY

2011-11-17T11:48:00.000-08:00

Of all the misunderstood, much discussed, yet unsubstantiated events of the Post Hiroshimaic Age bearing on the early history of Rifkind, none so perplexes us today as the meeting of Mel and Denise in the spring of 1970, not long after the founding of Hovey Street Press. The only evidence we have for this encounter is what Mel apparently related to Ronnie who repeated what he heard to Rifkind who referred to it in the second Volume of the Prison Diary: "Mel now thinks of herself as a poet, and has turned to Denise for advice; undoubtedly Denise will help her in any way she can, because Mel self-reports herself as a revolutionary; but the time has now arrived when events, not individuals, commend themselves to the revolution; when there will be no advantage in love or life for an association with our movement; when silence and secrecy will be foremost for all who would further the cause; when poems themselves will be silences whispered through gags and muzzles; when those in the prisons...will be exiled to the jungles to fight for their comrades or die; when the kingdom of arrogance will vanish from the earth".

Mel had confessed, according to Ronnie, that she had met with Denise to specifically let Denise know that she considered Rifkind a fraud. Why? The days when Rifkind was jealous of the poet's relationship with Denise were long past. Rifkind's role as a man of action was now more set than ever before. There would be no moments of poesy along the road. Rifkind was now a busy man, preparing himself for Nam and jungle. But why was Mel busy undermining him?

MEL VISITS HOVEY STREET PRESS

2011-11-16T06:33:00.001-08:00

Mel often stopped into Hovey Street.

On her first visit, she lit up a cigarette in the press room, which was full of flammable solvents and printing inks on steel shelves over a wooden floor littered with misprinted paper. The poet asked her not to smoke. She headed into the darkroom where Christopher was screening some half tones of Gene and Audrey Jones and developing 3M plates. She finished her Marlboro in there.

Mel wanted to know about the Prison Diaries, to see the proofs. The poet turned her down. The poet was now a publisher.

2011-11-16T06:32:00.001-08:00

HOVEY STREET PRESS

2011-11-08T03:13:00.000-08:00

Denise gave a few readings and raised $5000. With that, the poet founded Hovey Street Press, along with Christopher, Bab's younger brother, just out of The Bronx High School of Science. Their first project would be the publishing of Rifkind's Prison Diaries, Volume I and II. Rifkind had only been in Bellerica for fifty eight days, more of the thoughts of Rifkind were sure to follow. The second week in business the poet heard a clunk while Christopher was operating the ATF Chief 20. It was the ring finger of Christopher's left hand. Half of it was gone in the drive chain.

MEL AND THE UNDERGROUND

2011-11-07T11:38:00.000-08:00

Mel knew that Michael and Sue and Kathy could never visit Rifkind in Bellerica. Though they had effective aliases, they would never risk it. And so they were cut off from Rifkind. Mel sensed this weakness in Rifkind's posture. Much of his support was already underground. Though Maria was not disinterested in Rifkind, she was too exhausted to put much attention in him. The poet was angry with Rifkind, did not trust his decision to enlist... and the faculty radicals at the Institute were studying his decision: what did it mean, strategically, to the movement that a former campus anti-war leader would enlist? Though they wanted to keep their analysis on a strictly political basis, the question was asked: exactly who is Rifkind?

Rifkind was vulnerable to possible criticism, though he had taken on new allies in Ronnie and his friends in the study circle. These were men of greater gravitas than anyone on the outside, with the exception possibly of Michael. These were the lumpen proletariat. They far outweighed Chomsky, Kampff, Morrison, and all the rest.

But Mel, Mel was probing his defenses. She would keep working on Ronnie. Mel wanted answers. After all, Mel loved Maria.

THE INSURGENCY OF MEL

2011-11-07T10:57:00.000-08:00

Mel knew her moment instinctively. Quietly. She was on the attack. Rifkind was in Bellerica silently earning renown from the poet, from Kathy, from Sue, from Babs, from Sam and all the rest. Who could question Rifkind's authority now that he was in Bellerica...and passing his writings to the outside through Homans -the publishing of which was now being arranged by Denise and Mitch. And then the news of his decision to go to Nam. Where he would organize. Who knows, maybe he would shoot his Captain. Or organize a strike. Who knew what would happen, with Rifkind there. He was ready to rise beyond the circle of the Institute and of the Citywide coalition, in the world of action beyond Chomsky and Boston Common. Beyond Mitch. Beyond the streets. Into the jungle. This was Rifkind. Many hopes were placed in Rifkind. Rifkind, to the New International.

But Mel wasn't buying in. She didn't want Rifkind messing with her cousin Ronnie. Ronnie was in enough trouble already. Mel was on a mission. She spoke to Maria about it, this much we know from her letter to Rifkind. But we don't know exactly what was Maria's reaction. This was a period of great shock and distance for Maria. We don't know what she thought. The poet was not seeing her much. We have little in the way of hard facts, facts which might bear on the thinking of the incipient anti-Rifkind movement, which as we know now was finally crushed. Mel could not convince Ronnie to free himself of Rifkind. Ronnie, having discovered greatness, would not be deterred.

But Mel did succeed in this: she put doubt into the mind of Rifkind. And it was this doubt that Rifkind treated of in the the Prison Diary. He wondered about what life in the jungle would hold for Ronnie. But he accepted historic necessity. What he Rifkind would do was what must be done. In retrospect, at least in this, we can find no fault. Here we are over forty years later, living in the Rifkindomophic world; we are the living proof of his "correctness". But then we must ask ourselves, what is "correctness"?

RIFKIND ON MEL

2011-11-03T10:54:00.001-07:00

We shouldn't be surprised that Rifkind wrote extensively on Mel in his prison diaries or that the author paid particular attention to these passages ... though the passages had no bearing on the author's decision to destroy the diaries by casting them into the smoking mouth of Kilauea.

Rifkind often fretted over Mel and was particularly concerned about her attitude. The poet more than once mentioned to Sue Katz that Rifkind saw Mel almost a conscience which held him to some sort of standard. But what standard? Mel was famously inarticulate, and Rifkind once grumbled to the poet under his breath that "Mel is built like a brick shithouse and thinks like one too. " But it had nothing to do with her thinking; Mel just got under his skin, everyone knew that.

The poet concluded that in Rifkind's world Mel represented some kind of Moral force. But this was a contradiction in terms: Rifkind recognized no Moral force of any kind. As Rifkind explained in his Prison Diary, the acceptance of a Moral force implies either Moral progress or Moral deterioration, neither of which Rifkind had observed in the world. The problem was not Rifkind's materialism; in his view material conditions no more predicted events than did moral ones. Rather, Rifkind took refuge in perception, in the flavor of reality and it was in perception that he placed his faith, or at least his focused attention. Rifkind replaced the question "what do you think?" with "what do you see?" in probing his followers. When he knew the answer, he could speak to each in their way.

But Rifkind hadn't counted on Mel interfering. Mel had a bad habit of breaking Rifkind's spells over people. And then here was Rifkind, in Bellerica, the King on his throne. No one could touch Rifkind there. Rifkind was the annointed one, having ascended on high. There was an even greater purity to Rifkind's thought once he was out of circulation, but still getting three square and a shower every day. And plenty of exercise. Rifkind like Ho in his Bellerica. If only he could write poetry like Ho! And there was Ronnie, believing in him, Ronnie a raw man, two years for Breaking and Entering in Newton. Ronnie believed in him. And started a study circle. Brought his friends in. Now Rifkind was the preacher. And writing his diary. Rifkind liked what he wrote...liked it alot. He would do the same in Nam. There would be study circles.

But then Mel came to visit Ronnie at Bellerica. Bullshit!

LOOKING BACK ON THE FROG'S EYE

2011-10-30T07:59:00.000-07:00

So after all these years what did we learn from the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers 1959 volume 47 pages 1940-1951? Is it just that the output of our sensory nerves have much more the flavor of perception than sensation? What we see is what we need to see, what we hear is what we need to hear? How do we sort language from sound? What are our predispositions which are delivered to cognition? In short, we are wired.

Why then did Mel go to visit her crazy cousin Ronnie in Bellerica? What did she want to talk about? What Ronnie reported to his Prophet, the Old Hoary Rifkind of Yore, was reported by Rifkind in the second book of his Prison Diary. But one cannot rely on Rifkind in such things. Rifkind was full of suspicion when it came to Mel. First, she might undermine him with Ronnie, and Ronnie was his right hand man at Bellerica. Without Ronnie, who would come to Rifkind's study sessions where the Red Book, Fermat, Fannon, Marcuse, and Lettvin, McCulloch, Doc Draper, Chomsky all held sway. No, Rifkind would have no man or woman confusing Ronnie, he would have that to himself, Rifkind left nothing up to hope, for hope was no strategy.

And Mel was close to Maria. In Rifkind's world, there were worse places to park Maria than with Mel. There in Mel's arms, Maria could wait for him, in a kind of suspended animation. He could not teach Maria while she was with Mel, but what she would learn from Mel could not harm him.It would strengthen her. It would distance her from him, but there she could wait for him, in that distanced world, without perturbing herself or him. She could kept on ice. However Mel would love her, was no concern of his, of Rifkind's. Rifkind was off hunting bigger game. He would bring about an armed insurrection in the jungle, an excavation at Hamburger Hill. Maria could wait. Or maybe he would extricate himself from some several sentences of medium unpleasant duration, each with different jurisdictions. He would fight his way out of the sentences and he would fight his way out of the jungle and then he would reclaim his old flock, or he would have a new flock of the jungle fighters. That was his plan. As to Maria, she was worthy. But could Mel change Maria? Would Maria escape him?

Why had Mel come to Bellerica? She sensed something was wrong. Rather she perceived it...perceived something was wrong. She embodied, she herself, a predisposition to understanding Rifkind. Rifkind knew that when he slept with her. Mel was strong, but she couldn't read and she couldn't speak. She was mute where Rifkind was not mute. But then his words hadn't the same power over women. Women didn't listen all that much. Mel was to be considered. But what was he to do? He had several years effort ahead. For now he would write in his Prison Diary. He would treat of Mel. He would tell a tale of Mel. This is what the world would know, the truth he wrote of her, her story, the story of a mute told by one such as Rifkind.

But then the diaries are lost to us.

THE SHORT TALE OF THE USED BOOKSELLER

2011-10-30T04:37:00.000-07:00

There was a man who loved books. He dreamed of them, he read them, gulped them down, half digesting them. He wolfed them down. His teeth were polished by the white pages he chewed. He espoused ideas. On street corners. Everywhere. Half baked ideas maybe, but he got some attention, he knew a lot, it seemed.

Later, the war was over, and no one listened, not even him. Maybe he went to the war himself, or maybe he just knew all about it, and it was like he'd been there. There are some who know which is which, but two thirds or more of them are gone now. Time has passed after all, and this is a little story and a short tale.

He sold many of his books and then he bought some more and sold those. He came to love discarded books. He bought the books they would discard. Finally, he opened a store. A used book store. He sorted books by the box, by the case, by the trunk load, by the pick up truck load. He made a living at it, a musty living.

Someone said that this must be Rifkind, a red man of Edom, red with reddish mold, a broken hard cover.

Someone else has said no, this cannot be Rifkind. Who knows? Many reports come to Authors. They hear things, because they take the time to listen. They watch leaves blow around but they pay others to rake. The collection of leaves is much advanced, these days. There are blowers that blow the leaves to the curb. There are suckers which suck them up from the curb. No one burns leaves any more. The smoke does not go to the sky. The leaves are composted somewhere. This is better, that they are properly composted in the designated areas.

EDOM AND MARIA'S REDWINGS

2011-10-30T04:04:00.000-07:00

That Rifkind, like Esau, was an Edomite has been established beyond a doubt. In fact, no doubt has been entertained on the subject, because the Author, using his privilege as creator, has declared Rifkind to be a later Esau and thus by definition an Edomite. And Edom means Red. Edom is a land of red sandstone, and the children of Edom have ruddy complexions and reddish hair. Esua gave up birthright to Jacob in exchange for a bowl of red lentils. Edom is infused with redness.

We learned long ago that Maria, loving of Rifkind, and much beloved by him, wore Redwing shoes. Why were they Redwing shoes? Because she would walk upon the red sandstone of Edom and take on its color? Was Maria of Edom? Was Maria infused with red? There is a wildness there in Edom, the wildness of red, the dustiness of sandstone, the carved stone temples of Petra, the redness of those who eat red lentils. This is a red rocky land, where reddish people could care less for our cities.

We all must know, we on the self-selected jury, we who are here, was Maria in her Redwings of Edom and of Rifkind, or will she aspire to better? Does Maria escape Rifkind? A girl like Maria, we sense, must escape from one such as Rifkind, a man with little to offer except his green book sack full of wild game and writhing ideas. A girl goes off to Cambridge, with brilliant hopes, she deserves better. She gets caught up in things. She gets caught up with an Esau. She could have found a lawyer, wasn't she a Cliffy? And a poet loves her, probably a bad poet, but a poet in any case. Let's say this poet steals her away. Between an Esau and a poet, is there all that much difference? She is a beautiful girl, an interesting girl, a girl with big ideas. She got mixed up with these people, and they got mixed up with her. She is part of the general mixing. But this mixing, it seems to be tinged with the red of Edom. Maybe this Red is not of the here and now, but is some old red dust, some old dried lentils, some old carotene. We know that Maria is old, because she lost her ovaries. There is no chance now or then that she can be renewed. She is the mother of no man, of no woman. This much we know. To that extent, she is of Edom, which is no more. Maybe she is the mother of Edom.

Will the poet win her? Does the poet deserve Maria? Is Maria now damaged goods? Would we have Rifkind himself abandon her? Rifkind has shown no kindness. Rifkind is not that kind of prophet. Though an age is named after Rifkind, he would not stoop to help a poor girl. He is busy about the business of time, he is wandering and stops nowhere to count the victims or attend to them. He would return to Edom, where there is no census. Rifkind is no census reader, he hasn't so much as a local draft board. They don't know where to find him. His last address is Bellerica, and he has already escaped that address, traded that bowl of lentils for a trip to Edom.

Maria's Redwings are a bad sign, we would not see her captive of Rifkind, not after his failures. He has not agonized over her fate. He hasn't lifted a finger. Maybe he is a cold man, the cold white heat of Prophecy is his. We would not see this lovely girl wandering Edom. We would have her return. But is the poet any better for her? Is Mel? What would we have Maria return to? To which world. Write me a world and we will put Maria there, in it. Tell me where that world is? Or forever hold your peace. Is Maria wedded to this world she both invented and inhabited? Can we save Maria, from ourselves, from all who would love her in their beds? Would we deny her a bed? Is every bed inadequate to Maria? Are we, then, her persecutors?

IN PRAISE OF SAM

2011-09-07T00:32:00.000-07:00

Sam was an inventor. Sam invented security questions. Sam did not question in an arbitrary way. Sam’s questions were structured, as he sought to destroy the heuristic aspect of the author’s presumed stochastic reality. Imagine Sam as a great icebreaker proceeding toward the north pole, seeking a northwest passage. He spies abandoned dog sleds: these are the old ways of thinking. The cracks that emanate at the speed of sound from Sam’s prodigious steel reinforced bow are the paths to the future, the decision trees he propagates. He seeks nothing less than the open sea where islands of doubt are destroyed left behind.

Including query’s like:

What is your mother’s maiden name. No simple answer to this in the case of Rifkind. But we are unafraid here of complexity in fact, it adds interest to our Romance. There are those who claim that the difficulty in answering this interrogatory is linked with Rifkind’s apparent but unconfirmed lack of a local draft board. A man without a local draft board is a man certainly with a mother but very possibly a mother without a maiden name. Did Sarah have a maiden name? Did Hagar? Did Isaac register for the draft? Did his sons Jacob and Esau? This much we know: where Esau wandered, in Edom, no one cared much for last names. People were just people, everyday folks. There weren’t many of them, but they lived a long time and there names were written down.

Thus we have the first published work by the Poet:

Oh maiden name of Rifkind’s mother…

And this name led Sam years later to create an important security question, the ubiquitous: What is Rifkind's mother's maiden name?

What is the name of your high school girl friend. Rifkind, for one, would have to think long and hard on this one. More than one name came to mind.

Who is your hairdresser. Rifkind did not have one. He had a barber. Why would anyone think Rifkind had a hairdresser. Sam had not intended to offend anyone with his security questions. He had only wanted to be reasonable, very reasonable, almost Kantian. Beyond Kantian into Boolean.

In what city were you married?

What was your grandmothers first name?

Sam went on to great things after the Pre Induction Physical.

In Praise of Sam:

Livy the historian wrote of Cicero: “One would need a Cicero to sing his praises.”

And so it was with Sam, who ended rhetoric through his incessant questioning, through his ordered interrogatories which replaced intelligent speech with an investigation into the states of mind (choices) of an human organism, leading to our current existence within the flight reservation system.

“One would need a Sam to question Sam.”

SAM AND CICERO

2011-08-11T22:34:00.000-07:00

Sam asked questions just like Lettvin immobilized that poor frog and put probes in its eye and then flashed lights. Sam wanted to know the answers. Input and Output. Cicero is no more. Where are the great rhetoriticians. Where are the great ones for whom language is used to convince, to argue. Sam learned that it is easier to ask questions than to answer them, that eloquence has no place once mind is embodied. When do you wish to fly to St. Louis. morning or afternoon. what date. when do you wish to return. just tell us what you, what your body, wants.

But now it is time to get back to the main thrust, for the author to take stock of his thesis and to proceed forward with his non-essay, this Romance of Rifkind in Heuristic and Stochastic Terms in the Hiroshimaic Age.

To Review:

1. This is an investigation of fraud on the part of Rifkind. The readers are part of a self-selected jury that stands in judgment not only of Rifkind but of a generation of fellow travelers.

2. Rifkind stands accused of selling out his professed beliefs and enlisting for a tour of duty in Vietnam in exchange for a release from Billerica and the dropping of other pending charges against him.

3. In his prison diary Rifkind indirectly defended himself by proclaiming his enlistment an opportunity to agitate against the war directly among the GI’s, at great risk to himself.

4. Rifkind’s prison diary has been destroyed by the author by tossing it into the crater at Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The author was on the Big Island en route to Hiroshima where it had been his plan to murder Rifkind, presumably for his crime of fraud and possibly its results. However, an earthquake and tsunami, apparently not arranged by Rifkind, prevented the author and TMBWW from pursuing Rifkind to Hiroshima. Certain events in Hawaii seem to indicate that Rifkind is in Hawaii.

5. The author is no Conrad and has not cast the dilemma of Rifkind in the moral terms of a Lord Jim; the author is more pissed off with Rifkind than outraged; the author sees Rifkind as an exemplar of the brilliance and uselessness of his generation; the author is concerned with the inutility of Rifkind, his lack of influence as measured against his once vast ambitions, while at the same recognizing that his name has been leant to the era in that it is observed that the world is Rifkindomorphic as has been shown.

6. All of the men appearing in the non-essay are seen in half-screened grays alongside the bright figures of Kathy, of Maria, of Sue Katz of Mel; the women make clear though difficult choices, experience love, and abandon men precisely because of general male inutility in that the men proclaim great purposes but seem to accomplish little while fleeing after feeble bouts with the law. Maria has lost her reproductive organs possibly to poor doctoring and this seems not to have impressed itself on Rifkind her lover. Kathy and Babs see the poet as a boy. Mel rises as an unsung tower of strength in this barren landscape.

7. The author presents this non-essay to a large self-selected jury in an attempt to render judgment on a generation.

8. The author has attempted a rigorous analysis of his data in order to present his evidence in a scientific manner, despite the acknowledged self-selected nature of the jury. So, for example, he has not dealt in absolutes, but has used statistical methods in the Gibbsian sense, that is, his method presumes a stochastic reality yielding its truths through heuristically determined laws and conclusions. The author hopes thereby to gain his juries sympathy and understanding by insisting on his fairness, in the modern sense, in that he makes no statement of firm opinion of right or wrong but only of probability and defends this weakness by pointing out that inaccuracy is in the very essence of quantum reality.

9. The author has gone so far as to consider whether or not the present reality is the most likely alternative world and whether or not other worlds might exist which are not Rifkindomorphic and if his present conclusions might not be based on an improbable world. The author, again with a sense of fairness, has risked great ridicule by considering whether or not the events under consideration, and the actors, might not be divinely ordered, possibly violating the laws of physics, and therefore not fully subject to the very scientific laws by which he is sworn.

10. In all of this revelation of methodology, the author has attempted to draw primarily on sources most available to, and investigated by Rifkind, the poet, Sam, Diogo and the rest at the time and place now under judgment at the revered Institute such as Lettvin, Chomsky, Kampff, Morrison, McCollough, Minksy, Pappert, Dreyfus and the rest especially the visiting Professor Denise and also Mallick …and to the extent he has turned to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, has explained that there are links from STC to Chomsky …or in mentioning Cicero has tied him to lines of thought exhibited by Sam and his fascination with Boolean decision trees and other epistemological approaches which in fact run counter to author’s heuristic approaches, all to the end of defending his (the author’s) fairness, even-handedness, sobriety (ironically much as Cicero established his own reasonableness before the great juries of Rome).

11. The author has even defended himself against accusations of the appearance of coincidence in the work (for example the identical birthdates of Rifkind and the poet) by pointing out that coincidence is often not as coincidental as it appears to be and demonstrating (the proof exists in a footnote to this work) that only 19 persons need be present in a room before there is a greater than 50% probability that two will have the same birthday. All of this has great implications in the Draft Lottery that approaches for the poet and Sam and Diogo and other representatives of the generation under judgment. Fate, in short, has been rendered by the author into a statistical study, with a magnanimous but unnecessary tip of the hat to Sam’s belief in decision trees, logic, and epistemological studies as a kind of vast behavioral research into reality through the examination of states of minds of organisms by the ubiquitous questionnaire. The author wonders, on behalf of the jury, could we know Rifkind’s mind, and therefore the Rifkindomorphic world, more accurately still, were we to turn Rifkind over to a long question and answer period with Sam? For reasons pointed out by Godel, the author would argue no, though a Minsky might inveigh for a rough equivalence between Rifkind the man and Rifkind the answerer of an arbitrary number of questions; but it is for a more fundamental reason than these exemplars that the author has rejected this approach, which is that there is no one around who can find Rifkind or sit him down for such a session. Therefore, again, the author is left only with the evidence of the world as it is in order to understand the man who has leant it his name…Rifkind. The author here points out that his study of Rifkind in the world of Rifkind is not dissimilar to the problems faced by Chomsky in his study of natural language in the natural world: what he observes in grammar, and his heuristic construction of generative rules, are only echoes of the realities he records, not proven (though they are falsifiable) propositions. The author might therefore argue, though he will not do so now, that Rifkind is every bit as real as the language we speak.

12. To those who would claim that the author seeks only to titillate, in that he gives us men and women caught up like swarming organisms in an indeterminate reality devoid of coincidence and imbued with the hot blood of probability – kind of vast hotel room in a Mickey Spillane novel filled with hard-headed last-chance salesmen and bar girls- we are reminded that even Pipp and that nice old guy who looks after him toward the end and who turns out to be a relative are to be found in that room, that all which is possible, no matter how remotely, accompanies us on our journey to the middle and then to the outer reaches all at once.

13. At the very end, there is the Rhetoric of the author, his argument before you the jury, his flattery, charm, his reviling of his heroes for personal gain, his use of the forum to gain the Consulship, his natural language, his humility, his ambition among the crowded crowing tents of Jacob. All that lives, all that remains, is the offspring of Maria.

SHIT EATING GRIN

2011-08-05T09:18:00.000-07:00

Sam usually wore a shit eating grin. What was he smiling about? Women didn't like the smile particularly. Men kind of liked it. The poet, however, didn't like it. What did Sam have up his sleeve, apparently? But Sam, if you bothered to ask him, didn't think he knew more than anybody else. It's just that he knew that life was one great decision tree and that all he had to do was to ask the right questions (or even the wrong questions as long as he finally got to the right questions) and he would arrive at the end. The world for Sam was one gigantic wrinkled shirt and he had the ironing board and the iron that would iron out all the wrinkles. His shit eating grin was just his take on all those wrinkles and with restraint Sam would take all those wrinkles out. Sam would set all things right. With patience. With magnanimity. With kindness. Quietly. Almost lovingly.

Sam's starting point, his moral philosophy, began with McCulloch's words: "Lest you be misled, kindly remember that on questions of good and evil, science has nothing to say. But whether or not man can conceive a tautological theory of the good, like mathematics and logic, I mean a normative science of values, he can construct an observational science of evaluation. He must watch the choices of the organisms or machines to discover the causes of such conduct."

The poet understood that Sam saw HIMSELF as the evaluator, a watcher of the choices of organisms. And what better way to observe choice, to evaluate them, than to ask questions and record answers. Structured questions, structured by Sam.

THE QUESTION OF A GOOD QUESTION

2011-07-22T05:54:00.001-07:00

Sam was the type to always ask questions. Too many. Once he asked so many of questions of Lettvin during his lecture class Biological Basis of Perception of Knowledge (six hours a week for twenty weeks reviewing his paper What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's brain) that Lettvin finally exploded: "What, do you think we are running a goddamn school around here for Christ's sake?"

Sam had made no such implication. He only had a question about net convexity detection versus moving edge detection, at what level were the myelinated fibers integrated and what were the distorting effects of the photomultipliers used to measure the circuit responses. Sam liked to poke holes. Maybe the results were inherent to the circuits in the photomultipliers, not in the frog's eye and could the detection circuits be diagrammed, with actual voltage potentials? He got the point, Sam always did get the point. He knew that Lettvin and the rest knew better than anyone that the frog's eye was very good at identifying moving black dots in all lighting and contrast conditions (flies to eat) and that the frog's eye carried that knowledge to the frog's brain before the frog's brain was even engaged. Sam didn't want to shoot down the fly. But Sam loved the logic itself. Sam followed things to their logical conclusions. If there were conclusions. But he liked to knock holes in things if the logical trail failed. Like Warren McCulloch he was essentially an epistemologist. But whereas McCulloch wanted to reduce epistomology to an experimental science (to embody the mental process as did Lettvin and they were coauthors of the Frog's Eye paper) Sam sought to reduce epistemology to a series of questions with discrete answers so that Sam might be seen as the father of all those phone answering systems and on line medical questionaires posing as living physicians. Put it this way: for Sam the Tree of Life was the Decision Tree, starting with the Question put to Eve Did you eat the apple, yes or no? And ultimately leading to the questions such as: What day are you flying and what is your airport of origin and what is your destination and when will you be returning? Are you flying alone?

No, Sam was decidedly NOT heuristic in his approach, nor did he view fate or reality as a stochastic process. A logical set of questions created a response tree which led...to everything. Sam left no room for error. So that it was no surprise when Sam asked: "Did you see that in the Selective Service code that at Pre-induction Physicals the officer in charge of administration must hold a question and answer session before the examinations begins and must answer all questions fully." The clause caught Sam's attention and he thought about it few days, and talked about it aimlessly, like Keats talked about a Grecian Urn.

Finally, Sam called for a meeting with Homan's and the poet and Diogo, too. All of them had a May 5 date for Preinduction Physicals.

A POPULAR RESPONSE TO A SCIENTIFIC PROPOSITION

2011-07-14T19:39:00.000-07:00

One of the author's readers has made the following response to the author's rudimentary treatment of question of Miracles and the difficulty of judging an event to be Miraculous in a Romance in Heuristic terms due to the limits of a Rifkindometric analysis of events within alternative histories. Specifically, the anonymous reader quotes Joshua 10:13 (King James):

"And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day."

And then the reader points out that it is a well known fact that the Christian calendar is off by one day due to Leap Year. These two facts taken together suggest to this reader that the Miraculous has indeed been validated at least in this case; that the calendar is one day off due to the day lost while the sun stood still and two days became one. Clearly, the argument goes, there can be no other explanation for the lost day added to the calendar, other than that the day had previously gone uncounted due to the sun not having gone down until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Thus, a day had to be added to bring the real number of 24 hour days in concordance with the number of calendar days.

CALL FROM DENISE

2011-07-12T09:06:00.000-07:00

Denise called the poet on the telephone.

"Let's not be fools," she declared in an English schoolmarmish way.

By that she meant, "Let's not you be a fool."

"How so?" asked the poet.

"I ran into Homan's. Your pre-induction physical is coming up. You aren't ready with any letters from Doctors. You aren't ready to head for Canada. What do you plan on doing? On top of that, you aren't helping organize your own defense for your trial. Are you waiting till they set a date?"

"I dunno."

"You don't know? What kind of answer is that?"

"I dunno."

SIDE ALLEYS AND GIFTS SENT AHEAD

2011-07-05T13:17:00.000-07:00

We have ventured down a side alley. We have reasoned that we most probably live in a highly probable alternative history; however, we have allowed that we may live in a Divinely ordered world and that therefore our alternative history may in fact be the only History; we have further sought half-heartedly to consider how we might know whether our alternative history is indeed a Divine one and considered the possibility that such a world would contain observations at odds with the laws of physics and played with the notion of looking for verifiable miracles; but immediately many objections come to mind, not the least of which is that the Rifkindometric limits to our measured observations may be greater that what might be termed by some Miraculous, so that, for example, in certain cases (due to the heuristic/stochastic methods we have chosen) it might be possible to find a case within Rifkindometric constraints in which the Sun does Stop in the Sky or the Walls of Jericho do fall given certain frequencies of certain possible horns, etc, etc. Such a numerical analysis is outside the range of current work, and not of great interest to us in any case; who wants to become involved in development of a metric for the Miraculous, etc.?

Therefore suffice it to say that Rifkind was one such as Esau without considering whether such a reality is simply part of our alternative history or was Divinely determined. But then what is left to us in our interpretation of Jacob's travels back through Edom, the land of his brother Esau?Since we are descendants of Jacob, city dwellers and desirous of surviving all possible outcomes, and since we already divide ourselves, our families and our possessions into two groups to survive attack, then it is left to us to determine (not knowing who our enemy is) what gifts we must send ahead. We desperately want to appease those we have buried, we know that we are, like Jacob, usurpers, thieves, absconders of the birthrights of others and therefore we need to send forward gifts as sureties.

For example, the author writes this Romance in Heuristic and Stochastic terms in order to appease Rifkind, Esau, and whoever else of Edom might be about. This is the surety against Rifkind rising up unseen and murdering me in my sleep. I will send forth this story as a gift. Full confession is made, by the author, a person of the universal House of Jacob. The author is a liberal man, allowing openly that the alternative history he wishes to bring about is a selfish one, and wishing to making amends expeditiously. The author acknowledges that the world must belong to Esau, the disenfranchised, the brave hunter and man of the fields who has never entered our debates.

And so we live in cities and we think of gifts. We destroy, and we make offerings. The difficulty we face, the job of the philosopher, is to decide which of our actions are destructions and which offerings. But we individuals, we know when we are giving, we know when our overarching work of appeasement is underway.

Therefore, as we turn from this subject of the Divine in the life of Rifkind, and of our self-acknowledged theft of birthrights, let the author declare that this Romance, this non-essay, is his gift to Rifkind with the understanding that though the author likely will murder Rifkind in Hiroshima and thus bring to an end the Early period of the Post Hiroshimaic Age, he (the author) would nonetheless grant Rifkind his due, this gift, as a surety against his (the author's) own demise.

Peripherally it may be noted that the author has herein indirectly clarified his continuous identification of this work as a non-essay despite the utilization of epigrams that ring of Emerson: and that is that no one in their right mind would present an Essay as a Gift, especially a gift of expiation. While this work reflects the heuristic reduction of chaotic stochastic reality that is common to Romance, and similarly the ignorance of the whole of any good Essay, we have chosen to include the work within the former literary category, rather than the later, for the simple reason (again) that this work is presented as a Gift to Rifkind, which in no ways can be (within what we term common sense) an Essay. No one with common sense presents their own framed and enlarged photograph (an Essay after all) as a Gift of Appeasement but rather a good cheap Romance for a vacation Beach Read.

JACOB'S HEDGE

2011-06-27T15:26:00.001-07:00

Esau seeks no proof of the divine. Esau is not so concerned but lives directly in an unconsidered (though possibly divine) light, as does Rifkind, at least up until the time currently considered -before his transport to Vietnam. Rifkind did not pray, but he lived as if prayer might be useful. He was in a colloquial sense soulful and like some agitated men he was in a larger sense at peace.

But Jacob was different in this. Jacob understood there were two possible outcomes for his journey back to Israel through Edom: that his brother Esau would attack him and his family and flock, or that he would not. And so Jacob divided his family and flock into two groups so that if one were attacked the other might survive.

And so Jacob understood alternative histories. Jacob wanted to survive in either case. And he also sent gifts ahead as a further surety.

So remember, it is we, the inheritors of Jacob, who try to account for all outcomes. Esau had no such concern. And neither did Rifkind. We cannot assume that Rifkind's decision to go overseas was a hedge against a negative outcome of a long prison sentence. As one of the few remaining descendants of Esau, Rifkind had no such concerns about varying alternative histories. Rifkind lived in the light. And for that very reason we now live in the Rifkindomorphic world. The outcome that we live is the one unhedged outcome, because it is what has become. Any hedge must come later and be executed by those of the house of Jacob. Jacob will divide us into two camps, that one may survive. The city is based on such divisions.

But more specifically, do you of the jury need to know if you happen to live on the face of the selected white marble or if a Divine put you here in this Rifkindomorphic world? It doesn't change much. We only want to know the way of this world and we ignore all fictions. The playwright tells us that if a Bengal tiger were to bite off our right hand, and the tiger were to go to heaven, that wouldn't change a thing, the world would still be the world.

THE MIRACULOUS IN THE LIFE OF RIFKIND

2011-06-27T09:30:00.000-07:00

You have observed the life of Rifkind, we have studied it to date as members of a jury, albeit a self-selected jury. The jury pool is a limited subset of the set of English speaking readers further limited by those who are interested in Literary Fiction and have inadvertently stumbled upon this work of scientific history interpreted as the study of observed phenomena analyzed heuristically and assumed to be, with good authority, stochastic. The author is excepted from this limited subset because he reads this work, and has read it over and again, because it is his own and he is proud and egotistical. No other character in this work has read it, or any part of it. That the author reads it time and again is no accident, and for that reason for the purposes of this study the author stands outside of history, not as impartial historian, but as a fascinated fool. That author is transfixed and entangled, but not a member of your jury.

The question has been put to you: Is Rifkind of Yore, a spokesman of the Post Hiroshimaic Age, a Prophet? And we have answered in the negative. Rifkind, as Esau, lived and fathered Edom, and as a man of nature required no inter-mediation with the Divine. In other words, Rifkind was live and let live a hunter away from camp, wandering new river beds and discovering there new lands apart from what would become the Tents of Jacob, his ever acquisitive brother. As a man of nature, Rifkind walked with the Divine, if indeed there were a Divine. He was a good natured man after all. Esau welcomed Jacob in Edom when Jacob returned through Edom on his way home to Israel with his wives and flocks. Jacob was afraid of Esau and sent gifts ahead. But Esau was nice to his brother and embraced him. He refused the gifts. Esau was that kind of guy. He was a hunter, but he was no gun nut.

But did Rifkind believe? Did Esau? This is the same as asking, even declaring, that this alternative history is different from all other alternative histories and that even, for the very orthodox, that THIS IS THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE HISTORY. The author, for his part, has only maintained that this alternative history, the Rifkindomorphic history in which we find ourselves, is merely a very likely alternative history in that the chances of our finding ourselves in an improbable alternative history is improbable. Imagine all the alternative histories as marbles, either black or white in a dark pocket. Imagine only one white marble in a pocket among five dozen black ones, this proportion being unknown to you dear reader. You reach in and remove a marble. It is white. While this is an unlikely outcome, it is far from impossible. So it is with our alternative history. We have found ourselves living the alternative history of a white marble. We guess that it is a likely world and we are most likely correct. But if there is a Divine, we are most certainly and definitely correct.

But if the Divine were overruling the laws of Physics, then as scientific historians our impulse would be to go looking for miracles or for the absence of miracles. As STC wrote: "If it be objected, that in nature, as distinguished from man, this intervention of particular laws is, or with the increase of science will be, resolvable into the universal laws which they had appeared to counterbalance, we will reply: Even so it may be in the case of miracles; but wisdom forbids her children to antedate their knowledge, or to act and feel otherwise or further than they know. But should that time arrive, the sole difference, that could result from such an an enlargement of our view, would be this; -that what we now consider as miracles in opposition to ordinary experience, we should then reverence with a yet higher devotion as harmonious parts of one great complex miracle, when the antithesis between experience and belief would itself be taken up into the unity of intuitive reason."

Let us allow for the moment as an untested proposition, that Rifkind in Vietnam was in a sort of Edom, and that the light was strong there so that Rifkind in that Edom could see a certain truth, to live a certain truth, without the intervention of priest or prophet. That Rifkind was to risk life and limb in order to live the life of the sufferers. That Rifkind would kill with the others because this was his task, his truth. That Rifkind had no local draft board, that he was a universal figure born in an unnamed and unnumbered manger, as it were. That his birthright was stolen. That he wandered. That he ended up in Bellerica, with or without divine intervention. That there he wrote his words (much later burned by the author in the crater of Kilauea who received it from the poet who received it from Homans who received it from Rifkind who received it from himself as direct revelation poorly written and sycophantic) of his prison diary. That Rifkind had charges pending at federal and local levels and accepted a deal offered him (brokered partly by Homans but not suggested by him) that he Rifkind enlist for duty in Vietnam with the understanding that all charges against him be dropped and that Rifkind accepted out of a sense of self-sacrifice and a need to bind with the oppressed and a pledge to knowingly kill no one.

The poet thought all of this was bullshit. And in his next meeting with Homans he told Homans as much. What we don't know is, what had Rifkind, up until that time, told the poet about his relationship -if any- with the Divine. The poet did have a strong sense that Rifkind was a man possessed: but by whom? But the poet would not in turn be possessed by Rifkind; if it weren't for Rifkind, Maria would not belong to Mel, she would belong to him, to the poet, the one who loved her truly. The poet had been there at the Blue Parrot when Maria had been rushed off. He had given his place in the ambulance to Mel. He had made love to Maria and lost her. She had sung a song, the Shenandoah for him. They had gone to Ma Bartley's. All of this meant, somehow, that Rifkind was a fraud. Rifkind must be a fraud. How else to explain Ronnie Brazao, a small time thief, now ready to enlist with Rifkind. Why was there always someone next to Rifkind? Why was the poet still next to Rifkind? Wasn't Rifkind the best of his generation? Maybe this was a know-nothing generation. Maybe there was no revolution. Maybe everyone was as small as they seemed. Maybe this was the best there was to offer, this Rifkind.

Or maybe Rifkind was worthy of Maria. No one knew then. If some new fact arose to explain it all, to answer all the poets questions, would that eliminate the miraculous nature of it all? Or would that explanation only be part of a greater miracle of cohesion and meaning in the universe. The poet longed to be cynical, to doubt. The author is unconvinced one way or the other. But what of Rifkind, what has he to say on this subject? His great prison diary, the record of that time, has gone up in smoke. His later writings must be meaningless for our purposes, "wisdom forbids her children to antedate their knowledge".

Maybe we should ask Maria, she is a woman.

TAKIS

2011-06-18T19:18:00.000-07:00

Regarding Rifkind’s possible involvement with, or belief in, the Divine, the author has made certain inquiries to the poet, who has long remained silent on this issue. (By virtue of the author having affirmed this contact with the poet it can be safely and factually assumed that the poet, indeed, lives until this time.) The poet, in his long written response, opaque and evasive, did admit to the following:

There was an art Gallery on the Institute Campus, the Hayden Gallery. Hayden was managed at the time by the Architecture Department which was headed by Wayne Anderson. It should be recalled that Rifkind had considered an additional major in Architecture, besides all the others (under consideration and/or partially completed). There were several books in Rifkind’s green book sack on the problem of the modern city with housing as their focus and concrete, lots of concrete, as the solution. But Rifkind frequented Hayden, perhaps because of Anne at the desk. As Sam would say Oh my God Anne. Anne was Swedish, which said everything then. Anne Christiensen. Anne was very tall, she could look Rifkind in the eye. But Rifkind knew no fear. Diogo was afraid to visit Hayden, the poet stood in awe of it ….because of Anne. Rifkind alone could talk to Anne, as if Anne weren’t Anne, but she was. And so was Rifkind Rifkind. That was the beauty of it.

But as the poet recalled at that time the Greek Sculptor, the kinetic sculptor Takis, was in residence at the Institute. And in the winter there was a show at Hayden, an opening. Wayne Andersen wrote an introduction to the catalog. Takis knew how to capture the magnetic, radiational, and gravitational forces of nature in his work and there were dials and needles and supernatural acts of levitation and collapse. Needles also struck strings and gave off other worldly sounds out of a science fiction movie. And the poet has quoted Rifkind as saying at the opening to Anne Christiensen: “This is the work of Shaddai!”

In the early years (1796) when STC was a Unitarian radical he preached a sermon in Nottingham on Peter 2:21, maintaining that men in a state of nature could see the light directly, while city dwellers were in need of revelation. And so it was with Esau and with Rifkind, men of the fields, hunters, hairy men of nature who lived in the divine light without mediation. But Jacob, Jacob is in need of revelation, Jacob is blinded by the city, angels descend to save Jacob, to open his eyes, Jacob wrestled so that he might see. When you steal a man’s birthright, you are in need of an agent.

ALL IS NOT LOST

2011-06-16T09:10:00.000-07:00

That Rifkind might be more than we have let on to until this time is not cause for great alarm. Think of this as summer reading in the eternal winter \\that is in the post-Hiroshimaic Age. Don’t worry: just because Rifkind has not explicitly rejected Israel in so many words, is no reason to conclude that he has embraced it. Certainly his silence on the subject has entangled him. And the poet, who often walked with Rifkind the full length of the Esplanade from the Harvard Bridge to the Salt and Pepper, and then up Charles Street to Beacon and back around to Back Bay, all the way talking, and receiving something akin to a revelation, having heard much and forgotten little, and having said little himself, should have been in a position (the poet that is) to enlighten us on the subject of Rifkind and the Divine. And the silence of the poet is concerning.

But on this much we can agree: Rifkind is no poet and Rifkind is no Prophet. This, as we know and as we OBSERVE is NOT the Age of Rifkind it is the familiar Post Hiroshimaic Age and Rifkind is not its Prophet. Like Rifkind, we live in the Post Hiroshimaic afterglow, as does all of humanity and the age and its strange light is not the possession of any race or people, it is rather an electromagnetic effect that permeates the world with a certain natural language of its own, heard by all, understood by most, but spoken by none. We have, as yet, no response. In such a world, there can be no Prophets, for they lack words responsive to the Age. And we do not here suggest that if only Rifkind would speak or could speak again that he would have the words we need, because somewhere most assuredly Rifkind does speak, as we have not yet done away with him with extreme prejudice, nor have we made any attempt to silence him, other than by destroying his Prison Diaries which were a childish work of Youth, lacking the necessary venom of prophecy and providing no punishment or redemption, only exclamatory celebration of the brotherhood of Bellerica and of whatever texts Rifkind was then perusing, mostly profoundly misunderstood and misinterpreted. So fear not: nothing was lost at Kilauea and even if the author were to succeed in murdering Rifkind, either on the Big Island on in the immediate environs of Hiroshima, no Prophet would be lost and no Prophecy thereby go unheard.

Again, we live in the Post Hiroshimaic Age, and the fact that these days are observed to be Rifkindomorphic, at least in Alternative History in which we live, is best explained heuristically and stochastically as a question of probability: that on the one hand the alternative history in which we find ourselves is observed to be Rifkindomorphic and that on the other the probability that we happen to be in an improbable alternative history is itself highly unlikely, that is to say that it is unlikely that we live in an unlikely world. So let us use common sense and conclude that, very simply, our world happens to be a Rifkindomorphic World, and let us study it as such, to reach our conclusions whatever they may be.

After all, this work is a Romance, in that worlds are reduced, characters are left undeveloped, and our details, unavoidably are meant to evoke eternals in the sense that we are modeling and not reenacting our histories, and we do not seek to create the new fictional beings of the Novel. We are modest Historians here, albeit with courage in search of the truth. What is used and is old, the ancient histories the old notes and contracts, must be thrown into the Geniza, it would be wrong to defile them, we must bury them. But remember that in the Geniza are also found the false documents that should not see the light of day. Perhaps this Romance is one of those. Imagine, to even breathe the word Prophet in relation to one such as Rifkind. No, Esau was no Prophet. Esau was a character in a Romance, we know so little of him, he could not live on in our fictions. He went the way of Edom, of Vietnam, he was a much reduced figure, a Romantic one, and so we understand him with a certain tolerance, and he stands for the times. So what do we know of Esau, of this hairy man of the fields. He either sold his birthright for a bowl (or cup) of red lentils or else it was stolen from him or both. Esau is no fiction because we still do not know what motivated him, so that the story would not let him live on, to murder or to die. Esau fathered Edom and then went the way of Edom, but Esau is no Prophet, Esau did not speak, he was silent, the Age spoke to Him in a language, a natural language he did not understand, and then he died and so did his nation, though there was a time Edom broke from Judah and therefore Esau was not forever under his younger brother Jacob. It is a fact that Esau was before Jacob and that Rifkind was after Jacob, but that Rifkind was Esau.

We cannot look to Rifkind for answers, he is silent, despite all his long walks, despite the Prison Diaries, despite the love letters of Maria, despite the memories of Mel, despite the photographic memory of the poet who listened endlessly to him for Smoots and Smoots and miles and miles. And let us not forget the letters from Overseas, or the reports of Ronnie Brazao, all to follow. But as I say, Rifkind is no Prophet.

But did Rifkind believe? This is the cold dagger of a question that has been put to the poet, a hider of truths, a concealer of fact. I ask you: did Rifkind play badminton? did Rifkind smoke a lot of pot? did he use peyote? Did he complete his class in Fourriere analysis? All these are questions of some import, and they have answers and indeed the answers are known to the author. But what of Rifkind’s faith? The poet knows. But the poet does not speak. We must know what forces are a work here, natural and supernatural. The reader must know upon what he can rely, and on upon what he cannot rely.

WHAT WAS LOST AT KILAUEA

2011-06-16T09:09:00.000-07:00

What was lost at Kilauea?

When the author tossed the Prison Diaries of Rifkind into the Crater of Kilauea, you had little interest. Who cares for political diatribes written by a hack who imagined himself to be a Ho Chi Minh or a Thoreau? But now that you consider the Divine question, you do wonder what was lost? Such losses are not to be taken lightly, and the more we reject the Divine, the more we seek revelatory writing -much as we reject war but seek its history.

And now further answers are sought. How did the prison diaries, passed from Rifkind to Homans to the poet, make themselves into the hands of the author? Provenance is now important, now that the diaries are no more, and now that we seek the spectacle of the revelation they may contain. Does God lurk in Rifkind, darkly, skulking, hiding in the old haunts? For that matter, does Rifkind lurk in Rifkind, darkly, skulking, hiding in the old haunts? In this new light, what is meant by the lost hound, the lost horse, the lost dove? Does the reader seek them still on the road, where the author calls to them? What is lost? And why do we call out to what is lost? Why don’t we move on to the tent cities of Jacob, to the eternal future, to the Golden Jerusalem? We should not look over our shoulders …to Rifkind, to the Eternal, to the Gone World. We do not wish to pick up the lost pieces, because we find them to be whole beings and they stand up to dance, to frighten us, to dance the Tarantula and rid themselves of our poison which poisoned them to death. Gander and Gunger murder the same men and women again and again …one and the same mothers and fathers and children slaughtered, only to go on living.

The reader has been misled. A holy work has been foisted on the reader. I told you: Rifkind is Esau but you did not believe. It was too absurd. But what if the Holy were not so bad as we think? Then we would have nothing to fear. You are afraid of a bad Holy, we all are. But Rifkind was not afraid. Rifkind went off into Edom, into Vietnam, and he was not afraid. The poet thought him a cheat, and the author will not bear testimony to such things. What Maria and Mel thought, we will learn soon enough. But Rifkind was OK with the Lord. Rifkind was better than Ahab, and probably better even than Queequig, probably a lot like Ishmael. But Rifkind was not Ishmael, Rifkind was Edom, a hairy man and the father of a red country. Eventually, Edom thew off the yoke of Jacob, of Judah. But where is Edom? Where is Rifkind? Look around. Jacob is everywhere. Esau would not have wrestled with Yahweh. He would have said: “Hello Yahweh” and then he would have gone off hunting. Jacob didn’t like having his soul read by the almighty, there was a lot of dirt there. But he buried his heart in a sea of tents where it throbs and complains. Esau has come to visit, but Esau does not stay long. He looks for fields that are not Posted. Jacob’s encampments are eternal. Where else would anybody go? The subdivisions cling together with their claws.

RIFKIND AND BELIEF

2011-06-15T08:35:00.000-07:00

Did Rifkind believe?

The author himself rushes to the attack: after all, belief may be a Mental State, which, while phenomenologically permissible is beyond the technical competence of this recorder. But then we do have the words, the prayers, the hopes, the writings, the curses of Rifkind and there are those who divine therein a certain transcendence and reliance on a knowledge not historical, yet reckoned true and most certainly not resident in the self of Rifkind, in fact antagonistic to what might otherwise be described as his Personhood (personality) but at the same time in no way mythical. That is to say, that Rifkind not only rejected Myth as overblown fiction, but moreover actively sought facticity in all things observed and accepted all phenomena presented to him (as he stated in Mallick's class and somewhat more violently before Hubert Dreyfus and bitterly in Minsky's lectures) as things-in-themselves with reality only attaching to them in the Kierkegaardian sense of the leap of faith; no Myth could absorb or sum existence, much less explain it; facts were facts and conjecture bound them in a broth of examined history; but in rejecting Myth, in denying it, Rifkind left himself open to the ultimate attack that his belief must reside, if not in the well-studied forms and norms of Myth, then in the Eternal.

Of course, the reader may have long suspected such an arrangement between Rifkind and a Thou, simply because Rifkind is a Jew. It is hard to get to the bottom of Rifkind, because we have not heard him renounce Israel. We would have Rifkind enter our history as a person outside the power of the operative known as the Divine, not because the Divine is a Mental State projected as or masquerading as an historical Operative, but because we would understand the Rifkindomorphic world as Rifkindometrically meaurable (even if undecidable in some of its terms and even if limited by stochastic constraints and subject to linked observer/observed joined states) and that the divine in its infinite power may confound the perceived laws of physics (past and future) held true in all universes and alternative histories. That is to say: though we don't require that our Rifkindomorphic world be "proved up" metrically (by measured observations with all the appropriate quantum constraints as to accuracy) but we assume and demand that it could be proved up to whatever limit science itself subsumes. In short, we believe in the science of history, and believe that had we the time we could relate it, set it down in the notation of science, logic, and mathematical notation. Our summaries are just that: summations, reductions, models, simulations, stand-ins, relative markers. But they are good enough, these heuristic tales with their stochastic approximations, ASSUMING THAT RIFKIND DOES NOT BELIEVE AND THAT THE DIVINE IS NOT ACTIVE IN HIS LIFE OR IN THE LIFE OF HISTORY AT LARGE.

It is late in the day to raise such questions, especially after the author has portrayed Rifkind as in no way cleaving to the Divine, but rather in a state of seeming eternal exile. Remember that RIFKIND HAD NO LOCAL DRAFT BOARD and Rifkind therefore was outside of the very world we are describing. Yet we have seen that in Bellerica somehow the Feds did attach Rifkind to the system of Selective Service. Either Rifkind, in conditionally accepting induction in exchange for a dropping of Federal and State charges against him, was a betrayer of all that he had proclaimed to be the Truth, or he was to become an even more deeply and courageously committed revolutionary in the jungles of the entangled troops, Rifkind risking death to organize rebellion. But nowhere in this have we perceived the presence of the Divine at work. We cannot imagine Rifkind so entangled.

Yet, the Poet knew better.

ESAU REVISITED IN THE PERSON OF RIFKIND

2011-06-14T16:18:00.000-07:00

At the end of the day …and assuredly this day is not the last day, to a high degree of probability… Rifkind is Esau. This we have known for some time, the exact amount of some time not precisely defined as of yet because the author in his infinite wisdom has created here a timeless space where events are relatively time ordered within the event horizons related but not quantified in any time frame, so that, for example, we know that Esau precedes Rifkind but we are uncertain by how many hours Esau proceeds Rifkind. Similarly, we know that Esau precedes Jacob but we are uncertain by how many minutes or hours or days. We are relatively certain that Esau did precede Jacob, simply because this is the story of Esau and of Jacob, that what distinguished Esau, in the first place, was that his birth preceded Jacob’s. The birthright belonged to Esau. To know Esau, is to know Jacob. Without Esau, there is no Jacob. But it is Jacob we remember. Esau lumbered off to Edom, to the hinter lands, while Jacob spread his tents and became all that we have today. Jacob is Shanghai. Jacob is Mexico City. Jacob is all those great cities that have sprung up that we have not heard of but are bigger than Chicago, dozens of them. Jacob, his beautiful tents, has become the world in our eyes. The tents have crowded together, with or without modern sewerage systems.

Jacob knew how to take. The fruit was low, the fruit of Esau’s birthright, it was there for the taking. And who would not have reached for it? Jacob is Eve. Jacob could not resist the temptation. All of the world, all of history was there for the taking. The apple as good as fell into his lap. As Father said, you cannot not make yourself successful, you can only put yourself in the position to be successful. We wander cold deserts in search of this power to make history. We want to write our own story, but the story does not belong to us. We cannot see ourselves; we are undecidable propositions in a logically consistent mathematics. We cannot step outside. We must first admit, those of us who live, that we are not Edomites but are of the tents of Jacob, all of us. The survivors. The fittest. The recombinant ones. We have done away with Esau, and we have done away with Rifkind.

Rifkind wanders Edom and Rifkind wanders our innards. Our first dreams are exiled to Edom, but they reverberate in our bellies. We are old men and old women, since that day. We have suffered every curse, but those curses have been discarded, their writing has been burnt. We call out like Jeremiah, we are muzzled, this because we are of Jacob. There is no going back.

What is the truth of this alternative history of the Birthright of Esau and of Jacob. Esau came back from the field. Esau was hungry, he had a belly ache he was so hungry. Jacob happened to be making red lentil stew right then. It smelled pretty good. Who knows, maybe he seasoned it to drive Esau crazy. But Jacob wouldn’t give any of the stew to Esau unless Esau renounced his birthright. So Esau renounced his birthright. Maybe it was no big deal to Esau. If it was a big deal, that shows just how hungry he was. Maybe he was starving. If it was no big deal, then maybe Jacob should have looked out for his brother, advised him otherwise. Or maybe Esau knew better, maybe Esau didn’t care about birthrights. Maybe Esau, a hairy man, wanted to go hunting more than he wanted to inherit the world. Esau was no builder of cities, Esau was of the field. So that Esau was the father of the Edomites, of that land of red lentils. Edom means red.

Later, when Isaac was on his death bed and about to give his blessing and his birthright to Esau, Esau wasn’t around, he was late, he was probably out in the fields. Jacob dressed as Esau, and Jacob put goat skins on his arms, so that he seemed hairy to the sightless Isaac, so that Isaac would think Jacob was Esau. And Isaac blessed Jacob the younger with the birthright, and Esau was left Edom. It was too late then. You can’t rewrite actual histories. Sure, there might be an alternative history in which Esau inherited his birthright. But this is not the world in which we and Rifkind live, we live the actual history of Jacob, and we will not speculate on the rest.

So, did Esau renounce his birthright for a cup of red lentil soup? If so, why did Jacob need to trick him at the deathbed of Isaac? Why not just tell Isaac how things stood? It seems that both incidents were written by the same J writer. The E writer had no alternative version of events. Was Esau unmindful of the value of his birthright? Not worthy of his birthright? Or was Esau tricked? Maybe Esau wasn’t smart enough to care. Or maybe Esau was too smart, maybe Esau was dumb like a fox, and so maybe is Rifkind.

Rifkind was no dummy. Rifkind knew a lot about a lot of things. His green book sack was full of weighty books and scrolls and he took a double course load, all for credit, and audited still other classes. He was around the Institute for many years; he wandered the hallways hunting wild game and knowledge. Rifkind was a hairy man, but Rifkind was no dummy. Yes, Rifkind was a bit meshugana. Rifkind wanted to know the land, the whole land. Rifkind wandered: in linguistics, in the biological basis of perception, in Kant and Husserl, and in Boolean algebra. This was Rifkind’s field, and more. But he wandered the land, taking game where he could. Rifkind killed wild beasts, not always taking them back to camp. Rifkind could divine from the entrails, he was no thorough student. Rifkind was not consistent. Rifkind had no focus. Rifkind was a revolutionary, but one who would build no new nation. If Rifkind had been an architect, and he did consider it, his buildings would never have been built but would win awards from associations of architects, had he the gumption to make application. Rifkind would be a cult architect, with many students, had they found him, known him. Rifkind was no dreamer. Dreamers are not so rapacious of knowledge. Rifkind came and went, Rifkind shot game as he saw it, Rifkind as a boy wandered with the likes of Ganger and Gunger, killing frogs and then opening their skulls with rocks, overturning robins nests, dropping bricks from tree houses. Rifkind would know by taking things apart, without finesse. Rifkind had no finesse; Rifkind would play the drums but no stringed instrument. Rifkind left the building of nations to Jacob.

Rifkind wandered off to Edom, the red land, the lesser nation. There is no trace of Rifkind, only the nations of Jacob remain. Rifkind can only be Rifkind, Rifkind does not pass on his seed. Maybe Maria is his sister, someone should research this point, but the author has no patience for investigation. The author can only report what he has seen and known. The author knows that most knowledge, most doing, has gone the way of Rifkind and of Esau. Most of what has been known is gone. Knowledge is contained in the cities, in the tents of Jacob. The priests have closed all the high places in the countryside, and all the slaughter and sacrifice is in Jerusalem. The vast expanse of wandering has gone the way of Esau, of Edom, of Rifkind. Rifkind is all that is forgotten, Rifkind is youth. Jacob is our world, is our cunning, our success, our future. How beautiful those tents!

But Rifkind of old,

We would not forget you.

Rifkind of yore,

you old hairy one,

what did your silence, your

renunciation,

tell us.

Where is your Patterson?

Your ode to the Middle,

Where do the wise ones reside,

Now that all is knowledge?

Rifkind,

Inform us

From the place of silence,

Speak Oh Rifkind!

MARIA'S COMEBACK

2011-06-04T21:16:00.000-07:00

The poet saw a poster at the Mole: for the first time since that night she'd ended up in the emergency room at Cambridge City Hospital, Maria was performing at Blue Parrot.

Five hours later the poet was there in the front row, Mel was two tables over in the wings. Maria lit her Marboro and stuck it between the strings at the top of her big twelve string so the smoky end was pointed at the crowd. She sang old time bluesy stuff like St. James Infirmary strummed like a dirge, but not at all sentimental. And then she played Shenandoah and sang it very high and pretty and she had sung that for him a long time before when she'd wanted to be sweet to him for growing up along the Mississippi in the Middle, even though the Shenandoah was not the Mississippi, it was a river in Virginia and in the song the rover was bound away across the wide Missouri. But no matter, it had been the only time Maria had sung a song for him, and he never forgot that and he'd built up hopes. And it was true, he'd never been out of the country, and really from home had only gone up north to Eagle River for vacations, and he hadn't known that Boston was on the ocean till he got to the Institute to start classes freshman year. The only seafood he'd ever eaten was Lobster Cantonese at Toy's restaurant. Hearing Shenandoah sung so pure and pretty and knowing it was for him made the poet kind of misty.

So after the show, while Mel was waiting in the wings, the poet went straight up to Maria whose ribs were pushed against her tight black sweater and asked her if she would go out with him to Ma Bartley's Burger Cottage and she said yes she would, Mel could find her way home to Symphony. That got up the poet's courage.

So the poet said to her straight away, when they settled into their booth:

"I love you."

Maria didn't say anything but her hands crossed the table and her long white cool fingers were over his hands. She looked into his eyes. She'd never had a problem looking into his eyes, but maybe that was just a trick of hers, maybe someone had told her: just look into someone's eyes fearlessly and you will master them. Maria did master him. But he loved her and he was still after almost four years a long way from home.

"I'm not a boy," he said. Right away he wished that he'd waited after he said "I love you" just in case she had something to tell him. But he couldn't wait. She lifted her right hand and touched him on the left cheek.

"Why did you play Shenandoah?" he asked and now he'd spoken three times before she had said a word.

There wasn't a lot of light in her eyes, and she wasn't going to say anything. But at least she'd gone out with him. Probably that was charity. But maybe not.

LIFE IN THE NORTHLAND

2011-06-04T05:22:00.000-07:00

Oh, Rifkind of Old, have we lost our way?

...in this Heuristic Romance of Stochastic Times,

...in our lives?

Did you ever escape the chains, the bounds of Bellerica?

And Ronnie, long dead, shot by a dealer when he went

for his money. Or was it that he never came home? Or both?

All those years, old Dear Rifkind, the intervening years, the years between then and now, all washed out by repeated revolutions of the heart and body.

Sing this rune, Old Dear Rifkind,

you stand alone among the failures,

you dreamed big as they say, but maybe you didn't do your homework.

Once upon a time there was a boy named Rifkind.

We should have learned from him.

He could not learn from us

He was a hard headed kid.

He set out to make an example of himself, for all the living.

You couldn't call Rifkind a fool.

You couldn't call Rifkind a brilliant King.

Rifkind buried a lot of dog bones, in places we should find them,

but who cares about old dog bones.

Rifkind should not be forgotten,

his story should be sung.

But are we adequate to the task.

Our tools so limited, heuristic simulations

of stochastic processes correlated but not understood,

all told to a jury that is self-selected.

There is not much of a spring up north.

Not to say that the prairie flowers don't come,

they always do.

But it rains till June and is gray and cool.

But Rifkind has not known even these gray springs.

Rifkind is fighting the old battles, and wouldn't

come in out of the cold.

Rifkind chases old victories in Kilauea,

he brings down tsunamis, he trudges on

through the post Hiroshimaic period and has

eons to go.

But for him, for Rifkind of Old,

there are no eons left,

no one gets an eon anymore.

Rifkind only gets the time allotted to Rifkind.

The reader knows this, has always known this.

But Rifkind does not.

Rifkind believes there is still time,

still time to add to his book sack, the big green book sack,

with the hang man's choker around its neck,

the noose he tosses over his big rounded shoulder.

Rifkind is too dumb to know the end is nigh.

He keeps studying, after his own manner.

Rifkind is maybe in need of God,

to tell him it is not possible,

the post Hiroshimaic age is longer than

the Age of Rifkind, Rifkind must go first.

This Rifkind does not appreciate.

But we do.

And so we pity Rifkind,

and we fear for ourselves.

We want Rifkind to rise up again,

to stand before the fence at the I-labs,

to chain himself there,

to cry out against helicopter platforms

and missiles,

to make a fool of himself,

a young man with less possibilities than the rest of us,

probably because of his odd family i suppose,

or maybe he didn't focus his interests,

focus is very important, it is difficult today to make general contributions to knowledge.

M and M

2011-06-02T13:28:00.000-07:00

Not long after Sam's forethoughtful query, Mel and Maria appeared at the local laundromat near Bab's place and cornered the poet at the folding table. How they tracked him down, he didn't know but the poet did notice immediately that Mel was loaded for bear. He knew when she had a finger on a hot trigger. She had a way of raising her eyebrows and baring her front teeth, behaviors which made it easy to make an educated hunch at her Mental State; and Maria was just in front of her skinny and sharp as a javelin, shifting back and forth like Mel was a huntress and Maria was her weapon being shifted from left hand to right and back. It was right then that for some reason the poet had a thought, a reflection: that all the men he knew were in black and white and the women were in living Technicolor. And that he preferred by far black and white especially because he was black and white and it was much easier on the eyes and on (remember he was a poet) the soul. Color was a jarring thing and interfered with normal signal processing. Oh, color might be all right as a designator, some element in a Lettvin circuit that, when integrated with other inputs, might help identify objects in the visual field. But of course the economical eye of the frog could identify a moving BLACK dot (a fly!) without a drop of color; the point being that for the poet there was not much more functionality to color than in it's utility in possibly identifying objects; color was for the poet information and nothing else, and he preferred his information in black and white, the poet was a Boolean kind of guy, though he would work in the grays certainly,that's where a lot of the poetry was, in the gray areas. But god forbid those reds and blues and greens! This was informational content. Bergman had it right in black and white. Dylan was better in acoustic before he went electric. Pot was better than Acid.

But most women were in living color, it was maddening. He wanted a Bergman woman. He wanted a grey French existentialist like one of Sartre's girlfriends in a black beret, one with a Pontiac station wagon load of words and no color. The poet didn't want to drain the color out of the world, he wanted to drain the black and white in.

"Doin' laundry?" Mel asked colorfully.

"What kind of question is that?"

"It's the freakin' question that you are being asked, that's the kind of question it is!"

"Yes, i'm doing laundry."

"Bab's laundry too?"

The poet held up a smallish bra. Babs had high hard ones. Denise thought she was beautiful and said so all the time, almost too much. Babs had good posture and you could almost see that in the bra somehow. And in all her clothes, they just all were a little stiff and business like. When you went to crawl into her bed, you took your life in your hands, whether she pulled you in or threw you out. Mel knew all this, or suspected it, and she looked respectfully at Bab's laundry, like they belonged to a Goddess or a forest nymph with a bow and arrow.

"I like that you do her laundry," said Mel.

Maria agreed, but she yawned. Maria was bored. The confrontational part of life had gone down the drain with her ovaries. She was angry, but she wasn't righteous angry anymore and she wasn't cutting edge anymore. Maria had kind of become following edge instead of cutting edge, and had ceded cutting edge to Mel, but really Mel wasn't up to it. For one thing, most men didn't give a shit about Mel. Whereas Maria had had an infinite following.

"I'm glad to do her laundry," said the poet.

"Is that right?" asked Maria.

But she didn't ask the question aggressively. She just wanted to know. Almost like she was building a bridge to the poet, that he could be content with doing laundry, though he was one of the great poets of our time, just like she Maria could be content being tossed from hand to hand like an iron javelin, though she was one of the great cutting edges of her generation. Suddenly the poet realized that Maria pitied him as much as she pitied herself, and that her current job was to get rid of pitying herself as quickly as possible so that she could get on with her life, and the best way was to become very pitiable by being subsumed by Mel, who both understood her and ravaged her with unrequited love. But the poet guessed that Maria might not ever get over being pitiable and might get more and more that way, and that he then would never be able to conquer her once and for all. He loved her, but he wanted her to get up and shake it off, not because it was expected, but because it was unexpected and that was her job: to do the unexpected at all times. Broken was not a word you wanted to hear anywhere in the vicinity of Maria. Not that she was expected to be a big fighter. She was never in the front lines for that matter. But she was to be above it all, above the fighters and the un-fighters. Maria was in a class of her own, and he wanted her to stay there. He needed to pen her in. He wanted to apply words like turniquettes.

"Why are you here?" asked the poet.

"To track you down. For Homan's. He's ready to toss in the towel. He needs to talk to you, if you want him to defend you. You've seen him twice."

"What am i supposed to tell him?'

"you are such an idiot. The FBI stopped by his office. They want to find you. They want to know if you know anything about Greenwich Village, about Teddy Gold. And where is Kathy and where is Cathlyln?"

"What do i know about that?"

"That's not the point. The point is, you have to answer some questions. The less they know, the more they worry."

"Is that what the Columbia Street bust was about? They wanted to ask me questions?"

"Homan's thinks so. They want to bend you over, so you fill in some of the blanks."

"But i don't know any blanks. Fuck 'em. I don't feel like talking not to Homan's, not to the Feds."

"You're all boys," said Maria.

"All boys," said Mel, "all of you. Rifkind is a boy playing around at Bellerica and ready to trade all his charges for a ticket to Nam, some crazy glory ride or some cop out or whatever it is, it doesn't matter, he's just a bad boy. And Chomsky. He's a boy too. For all his high talk, did he join you in the President's office? Or at the I-labs? Where was he? Sure he tried to get O'Connor out early. But is his ass kicked out of the Institute? No, he'll be there for the next forty years, if he doesn't die first. And Michael. Underground. What's that about? But you may be the worst. You're just a bullshit artist."

"Thanks for all the love and attention," said dthe poet.

Maria was busy folding the clothes and putting them in the plastic basket.

"Come with me," said Mel, "we're going to see Homan's and then he is going to write it all down and call the Feds and say you had nothing to do with it, and Columbia Street is no bomb factory and it isn't going to blow sky high so they loose their jobs. We wouldn't want those boys to lose their jobs with J. Egar, would we? They're nice boys, lot's of Irish boys too."

"What about Ronnie?"

"He was a man. Rifkind turned him into a boy."

FORETHOUGHTFUL QUERY

2011-05-27T10:45:00.000-07:00

Sam was a thinking man. Sam had a lot of Forethoughtful Queries. After all, it was Sam who first perceived that the Draft Induction Lottery was not random. Too many last half of the year birth dates were drawn toward the end. The idiots hadn't turned the beer barrel enough times, the schmucks. And years later it was Sam who invented the computerized airline reservation system through the dazzling insight that all the seats in the sky today tomorrow and even out a year from now could be considered unique auction items, resulting in the airborne reality we live today. Sam was, as they say, a visionary. He had a ton of Forethoughtful Queries, a shit house of them.

And so it is no surprise that one night in April at the Plough and Stars pub Sam, with Diogo and the poet present, and Iglefeldt too, good old Sam had the following Forethoughtful Query:

What the fuck are we going to do about our Pre Induction Physical on May One?

ON METHOD

2011-05-27T09:03:00.000-07:00

Before we plunge too deeply into the trials of the poet, and they are more than one, we must ask ourselves once more about the Methods of the Author, because we would not have our proposed result -a simulation of the Rifkindomorphic world evocative of the Alternative History here under examination- contaminated by Method itself. As has been explained repeatedly, the Author declares his techniques to be Heuristic and his world view Stochastic. That is, he sets for himself a low standard in his Heuristic approach, insisting that his approach is pragmatic, ad hoc, and only a reasonable stab at the truth, a best guess approximation with no demand placed on himself that the inner workings of the Romance be functionally parallel to the actual Alternative History, that the Romance may look like a duck and quack like a duck, but makes no claim to actually BE the duck. And furthermore, the authors presumption of a Stochastic Universe (History seen as a probabilistic Process) also allows the author a certain margin of error in his simulation in that the very world he models or simulates is a fluxious one either in fact or as perceived.

But beyond this, the author has even tried to account for his own entanglement with the observed objects and of certain other entanglements (in Dirac's sense) such as Hiccup's entanglement with Sue Katz) in an effort to render this Romance undisturbed and intact. Such an effort might hark back to the ancient purifications and absolutions of Hebrew Priests before entering the Holy of Holies. But in our quantum view, we cannot in fact discard our entanglements, as the authors relations with his viewed objects became permanently entangled from the moment he observed the same; but we have attempted to quantify the effect of these interventions with at least the suggestion of the Rifkindometric analysis -though we have admittedly not employed it wishing to create here a kind of popular Romance rather than a technical tour de force.

So that all the above shows that our Method is in some sense an objective one in the primitive sense. But now that certain crisis are to be related, a further question must be asked of the Author: "Granted that your method is a best guess attempt at a Romance of Rifkind, but yet explain how, given all the universe of phenomena that might be described in the Hiroshimaic Age (that epoch in which Rifkind lived and understood himself to live along with all the rest of us) why select the facts selected? Thank you dear Author for avoiding the description of Mental States which might be inaccurately reported, but among all the observable phenomena, why these? Now that certain crisis are to appear, the stakes are higher, errors are multiplied in Rifkindometric terms, and the consequences of what might be called falsehood are more grave. Justify yourself, Author!"

The Authors first defense on this question is that, in the first place, The Author is a Not a Malevolent Man, and that secondly with STC he holds that "For truth, says the wise man, will not enter a malevolent spirit". Dear Reader, what has entered here is the Truth. But still you ask, "Why THESE truths of the Rifkindomorphic world, why not Other Truths?" And again with STC I will demand that "what I have ventured to call the intellectual or mental initiative, as the motive and guide of every philosophical experiment; some well-grounded purpose, some distinct impression of the probable results, some self-consistent anticipation, as the ground of the prudens queastio, the forethoughful query, which he affirms to be the prior half of the knowledge sought ......an idea is an experiment proposed, an experiment is an idea realized..."

In other words, yes, the Author admits that he has proceeded by hunches. The author had an idea to create a Romance of Rifkind in Heuristic terms with a Stochastic view. The Romance you read is the experiment realized. But then too, in a realm where Heuristic approaches rule (and this Romance is such a realm) perhaps the hunch itself is contained in the Method, that idea and experiment and author are highly merged, though admittedly distinct and therefore suspect. It would seem that no further attempts at understanding Method will appreciably elucidate the Rifkindomorphic world, that the Author can to no greater extent than already defined rid his mind of profane thoughts before entering the Holy of Holies, and that he indeed risks the destruction of the world (at least of the Rifkindomorphic world) for this reason. Yet all is saved when it is remembered to mind that the Author is Not a Malevolent Man.

Finally with STC we must agree that "our understanding not only reflects the objects subjectively, that is, substitutes for the inherent laws and properties of the objects the relations which the objects bear to its particular constitution; but that in all its conscious presentations and reflexes, it is itself only a phaenomenon of the inner sense, and requires the same corrections as the appearances transmitted by the outward senses. But that there is potentially, if not actually, in every rational being, a somewhat, call it what you will, the pure reason, the spirit ...intellectual intuition, or the like -and that in this are to be found the indispensable conditions of all science, and scientific research, whether meditative, contemplative, or experimental...."

A last word: much as this brief and limited inquiry into Method has raised questions outside the immediate "movement" of the Romance, so the Author's earlier limited ventures into Childhood Memory (the imaginary playmates Ganger and Gunger and their warlike nature) and into Allegory (the questions of the lost Hound, Horse, and Turtle Dove and the possible undefined longings of Thoreau) also very surprisingly seem to wander outside the scope of this non-Dissertation. The student might ask: are these other musings somehow tied together more deeply than solely in their exceptionality itself. Are they specific to the Author, rather than to the Romance? Does the Author have longings? Did the Author have a Turtle Dove? Who was she? Does the soul of the Author war since childhood, does the Author set ambushes through the triangulation of the enemy in coordinated firefights? Is Allegory simple a Method? Is Childhood Memory a Method, not a reality of Alternative History? What is this "other half of knowledge" that STC speaks of, this suspect Intuition?

DOWNTOWN OFFICE

2011-05-25T09:15:00.000-07:00

Homan's office was cushy and wainscoted with dark wood. The whole place smelled like English Leather cologne. Maybe he was the age of the poet's father. He'd been through the war too.

"Before i forget," said Homans -and he handed the poet an inch and a half thick stack of darkly scrawled pages...the latest installment of Rifkind's prison diary.

"Quite a responsibility," said Homan's raising his eyebrows like two black and white skunk tails.

"I'll have to read them someday," said the poet.

"It would be a good idea, since you're to be editor-in-chief. Rifkind has asked me to write a last will and testament. You're his literary executor. Sign here."

And Homans handed the poet several neatly typed legal documents, double-spaced and numbered, and with lots of open space and numbers in parentheses wasting half the onion skin they were printed on. The poet signed everything. In the course of scribbling he seemed to see the names of some other Rifkinds but he hadn't time to look closely.

"Of course, you have read the diaries," said Homans with a shrug.

He lit his third cigarette and pointed it toward the ceiling ...his hands were clasped behind his large head. He started to put his feet on the desk but he thought better of it, sat forward, flapped his elbows like a pterodactyl in a tailored blue suit. His upper body came to rest awkward as a bat on the cluttered desk top.

"I have."

"So why deny it?"

"I don't like to admit to reading drivel. Who the hell does he think he is?" asked the poet.

"Maybe he thinks he is you," said Homans.

"How so?"

"He talks about you. Thinks you know something. That you are a real writer. A poet. Denise says so, according to him. That bothers him."

"Maybe it should bother him. But what about all this crap about being a painter?"

"Got me," said Homans, "I thought you might have some answers. I can't square the circle. He's decided the arts are the answer ...maybe."

"There is no square and there is no circle."

"Right. Well, we'll see where it all ends. I think he's going to enlist. And his buddy Ronnie Brazao. It's almost a done deal. He figures he'll explain it all in his diary."

"I'll be sure not to read it. I hate to read assholes, even smart assholes with interesting lives. I like honest assholes, who don't lie to themselves. So much easier to take."

"You sound bitter. Why not take him at his word. He's the hero. He's going into the service to organize the troops. At great risk to himself. And Ronnie with him."

"Sure. It makes perfect sense," said the poet.

"Tell me about the guns. The shotgun especially. What's that all about. Were you expecting a shootout at Columbia Street?"

"I told you I haven't lived there for months. And I don't think they belong to anybody else either. It was a set up."

"But you say you are no one. Why a setup then? Why would Scalese bother?"

"Maybe he thinks I am someone. He has to have known that O'Connor and the others were long gone."

"Your name is on the lease. That means you live there as far as they are concerned."

"But i don't live there."

"Get used to the idea you did live there. Or find someone respectable who says you lived somewhere else. And will swear to it. That's your job for right now."

"Right."

"Crown Royal anyone?"

"Absolutely," said the poet and Homans top drawer right opened wide and deep.

After a few silent moments Homans went on:

"Tell me, are the diaries any good?"

"Awful."

"Is that right?"

"Worse than awful. Now, if he could write like he talks, if he could just close his eyes and let flow it would be...pure Rifkind..."

"Yes, I see," said Homans.

"What about the money?" asked the poet.

"You mean the diaries? You can't imagine anyone would want to read them?"

"No. I mean for you. For defending me?"

Homans looked askance, a Endicott and a Peabody the offspring of rebel Brahmans from the beginning, anti-slavery and anti all the rest too.

"Don't be tiresome now, and do as you're told" he said.

THE BLACK FORD STATION WAGON

2011-05-25T08:43:00.001-07:00

One afternoon the phone rang and the poet answered it. It was frustrating to be interrupted. Great domes of thoughts, greater than the Pleasure Domes of Kublai Khan, suddenly collapsed. These were not simple day dreams, these were mountainous clouds steeped with dark rain.

It was Sue -Sue Katz.

"I'm calling from the gas station down the street. Hey, i just pulled up in the cab but i kept going cause there is a big black ford wagon parked outside, good luck. Some old guy inside. Check it out."

The poet looked down from the big bay window. It was true.

"Yer right Sue," he said.

"Good luck," she said, "I gotta stay away from there. And don't call me."

"How could i call you, i don't have yer number."

"Well, I won't be calling you."

"OK, understood."

"Yer not as dumb as O'Connor says," said Sue.

"Thanks," said the poet.

"and yer not even as dumb as Kathy says," said Sue.

"Thanks," said the poet.

"But you are as deep as Kathy says, in a counter-revolutionary sort of way."

"Somebody has to be deep," said the poet.

But now the poet was mad at the guy in the black wagon. It had ruined everything. Whenever his epic got underway, it would be in no small part due to Sue's influence. And now the influence was gone. He needed her. He couldn't call her a muse exactly; more like a cattle prod. So the poet put on his shirt and pants and went down the front stairs and down the stoop stairs and to the curb and rapped on the passenger's window of the big black Ford wagon.

A very long arm in a trench coat reached over, and a big Frankenstein hand grabbed the window crank and cranked away fast. The window came down pretty fast too. Then there was a big craggy face half Frankenstein, one quarter Mary Shelly, and one quarter Boston Brahman.

It was just William P. Homan's Jr., all six foot four of him behind the wheel, a little red shit faced like he'd had a rough night.

"Get in, my friend," said Homan's "we're going to have a little talk about the birds and the bees."

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SUE

2011-05-25T07:28:00.000-07:00

In a moment of intimacy, or rather after a moment of intimacy, the poet blurted out:

"So, how are you Sue?"

He had never called her Sue before, it had always been the more militant "Katz". After all, the poet was a member of the above ground so that Sue Katz, as a member of the underground, was strictly speaking a kind of superior officer. Deference was expected. She presumably was linked directly, or through coded messages, with other members of the underground from around the land, some of them legendary exiles from Columbia University or even from Berkeley. They could never again wear Che T-shirts. That would have been a dead giveaway. But maybe Sue would give him a glimpse into the inner workings of the underground. After all, the poet had given O'Connor a bed when he needed one when he came out of the brig; and it was the poet who had found Kathy and brought her into the Movement. So that what must have been Sue Katz's cell was two thirds owing to the poet. Therefore it would be no exaggeration to say that the poet felt himself to have played an historic role in the evolution of the Revolution from a democratic radical student movement to a force for change in the Belly of Beast, poised to strike violently and decisively.

How the poet, alone in a rented flat in Charlestown tapping away at a Royal typewriter and composing the great Epic of the Middle, while fighting off the aggressive advances of an ugly orange tom cat, could have been so close to the absolute center of real power, making love with Sue Katz and but a bus trip away from a visit with the formidable and yes, appochryphal Rifkind himself, was a great mystery to the poet. Such things were to be wondered at, and the wonder as it presented itself, was to be buried in his works of art, it must be made to infuse the Epic of the Middle, so that its influence might give the work a certain glow of authenticity. He wasn't writing from the trenches, but with an eye on the trench, in sight of the mud, the grime, the stench of combat. Maybe the poet was the last dreamer in a world in upheaval, or at least pre-upheaval, or pre-pre-heaval. The poet almost consciously wanted to steal the revolutionary thunder, not to promote his own name, but to give life to his great proposed work, which would begin any day, under the impetus of this high tide of expectations emanating -and about to explode- from the underground.

"I'm OK," Sue said in a moment of great sentimentality. She even appeared to tear up, as all great revolutionaries are apt to tear up when they compare their very difficult conditions which, though freely chosen, are burdensome for young persons who prefer to haunt the libraries of better Universities.

Sue Katz had answered him. This in itself was a transcendent event. He, the poet, in such close personal contact with one who was sacrificing all for the cause of the Third World (at least mostly the Third World) and secondarily for the First World (the working class of the Beast itself) and perhaps also for the Second World, if anybody knew what that was. Of course, it might be that Sue had her own selfish reasons for talking to the poet -the poet was part of the evolving and emerging intelligentsia of the new order; perhaps Sue saw him as the Mayakovsky of the new world! But even so, here was Sue Katz, risking all yet taking the time to understand, even appreciate, the essential importance to have within the movement interpreters of the new forces at work in the world, the new historians, critics and even the innovators of the new period of history which was arising. The very fact that Sue tolerated him, from the intolerable realm of her own self-imposed exile in the Underground, was proof of the importance the task that he had set for himself -and a justification for his dispensing with Hiccup should it ever come to that.

The poet now ventured:

"How's life treating you?"

"Life doesn't treat me. I treat life. If you see an Institution, kick it. If it doesn't get out of the way, blow it up," said Sue in a study group tone of voice.

" I hope i'm not an Institution," said the poet.

"Quit personalizing your experience," said Sue, "it's of no concern to me."

"Me either. I'm just around in the picture to help make the cameras role. Just an observer."

"There are no spectators to the Revolution," said Sue.

"No, not a single one. Besides, if there were one, they wouldn't see anything anyway. Most of it's hidden away. Like an iceberg right? Two thirds under water?"

"more like 99%," said Sue, "and all of it's shit. You can write that down."

"Is that right? 99 % shit?"

"At least."

"You're speaking like a seasoned veteran, right?" asked the poet.

"You are such an idiot. I don't know why I screw you. Can you guess?"

"Because O'Connor lays around smoking all afternoon and it drives you nuts?"

"How would i know where O'Connor was?" asked Sue.

"No way. No way you would," said the poet, winking at the woman he now called "Sue".

THE O'CONNOR QUESTION

2011-05-21T02:57:00.000-07:00

About a week later Sue Katz stopped by in what seemed to the poet a melancholic mood (a mental state) and Hiccup jumped up on her shoulder like a monkey and playfully swiped at her right eye. Taking advantage of this momentary distraction, the poet asked her:

"How is my old friend doing?"

A Chomsky X bar analysis of this sentence "How is my old friend doing?" would not yield an iota of significance from this interrogatory. Syntactic analysis has this distinct shortcoming. And as was pointed out by the author in his short discussion of Allegory: entanglement itself presents enough complications in this Romance without venturing into the realm of meaning and semantics.

But a more simple minded contemporary ternary analysis parsing might include the following expressions:

The poet has a friend.

The friendship is of long duration.

The poet does not have current information about the friend.

The poet has not directly named the friend.

The poet has not directly named the friend for reasons of security.

Sue Katz knows this friend.

Sue Katz knows the general status of the friend.

Sue Katz knows to which old friend the poet refers.

The poet has not directly named the friend for reasons of security.

The poet knows that Sue Katz knows the general status of the friend.

The friend must be underground.

Sue Katz is underground.

The friend must be Michael O'Connor.

We could go on and on with more and more overlaying inferences depending on the speculative range of our heuristic approach and on the specific Rifkindometric constraints placed on the set of all random stochastic variables. We could go on and on in ever widening circles of hunches, all relationally tied or linked and certainly statistically corelated. At some point we begin to understand how Hemingway suggests an entire room by mentioning a door and a couch.

The interesting point is that such ternary analysis made a significant contribution to the computer Watson winning at the game Jeopardy. The author, feeling much at Jeopardy himself, and unable to provide intelligent questions to any given variety of answers, turns to Watson and to Ternary analysis for comfort. After all, Watson knowing absolutely nothing was able to ask all the right questions (though Watson did identify Toronto as a city in the United States of America where the President still is the President) and win at Jeopardy. But in some sense then Watson was responding to meaningful answers: if the answers had had no semantic meaning, then presumably Watson could not have provided the correct question. Therefore Ternary analysis (used in part in the creation of Watson) has allowed us to stumble into a world if not meaningful then at least modeling or simulating the meaningful utterance. Ternary analysis is only one part of the shit thrown against the wall by Watson. Certainly Watson teaches us great lessons relevant to this Romance, most importantly that the Heuristic approach to Stochastic analysis will lead us to a machine which is highly intelligent (in Minsky's view). Watson at a minimum simulates intelligence and in some sense DERIVES meaning from answers to which it can then supply questions. So that while Watson is messy (heuristic and stochastic) she certainly takes us far beyond X bar analysis as measured by utility, rushing to add that Chomsky's analysis has the important function of establishing the universality of syntax as relates to Categories of the Mind, ontology, etc.

But as is Watson, so is this Romance. We are modeling the world with Ternary Statements observed as facts, and then deriving the most likely questions. Our Romance works backwards from answers (observations) to appropriate questions (probably the right questions). And all of this achieved without delving into states of mind. The Rifkindometric world is simulated just as Watson runs her simulations. You have no reason to doubt that this Romance is the world, unless you pull back the curtain and witness it as so many words, rather than a living Alternative History.

When the poet asked "How is my old friend doing?" Sue Katz answered:

"He's all right I guess."

This in turn created a whole new set of Ternary Expressions in the mind of the poet.

Sue Katz says he is alright.

Sue Katz did not say he is great.

Sue Katz did not say he is lousy.

Sue Katz is only guessing that he is all right.

Sue Katz might not know how he is.

Sue Katz might mean that he is not really all right.

Sue Katz might be fighting with OConnor.

Sue Katz might not be sleeping with OConnor any longer.

Sue Katz might be dissembling because she is underground with OConnor.

Sue Katz might be dissembling because she is no longer underground with OConnor.

And so on. And so on. And so on.

It was hard to know what was going on when someone was underground.

THE LIKELIHOOD OF THE RIFKINDOMORPHIC WORLD

2011-05-20T07:48:00.000-07:00

There are those who consider all of this unlikely. After all, what are the chances that we are living in a truly Rifkindomorphic world. But yet, we look around, and we indeed seem to find ourselves in a Rifkindomorphic world. At least, the author has so argued; in fact, the author has tried to portray the world only as it is presented to him and as it was presented to the poet.

And following the Copenhagen interpretation, let us consider that the Many World Interpretation holds true, and that every possible alternative history has existed and that the Rifkindomorphic Alternative History is but one of these. If the Rifkindomorphic Alternative History were highly improbable, then there would be little chance that we would indeed find ourselves alive and inhabiting it. But we do find ourselves alive and inhabiting it. Therefore in the set of all possible alternative histories, it would seem very likely that the Rifkindomorphic Alternative History was (and is) a very probable one.

As they say, it is important in life to know when to worry and when not to worry. It would seem wise not to worry about whether this Rifkindomorphic world exists or not. And we should not be surprised at this conclusion because, after all, our methodology has been heuristic (we might say ad hoc) and based on our stochastic views of history and reality. We might allow that we are taking a pragmatic view here with it in mind that the world is unpredictable but that events are statistically correlated; more primitively we might say that while we have not determined the cause of all things, we have shown how things seem to be linked within Rifkindometric limits.

Even now, we might make educated guesses about future entanglements with Sue Katz, and to that extent the author and even the speculative readers are now entangled with her. The author pledges to accurately report what indeed he knows of the future states of Sue Katz, despite his entanglement via his having taken her measure. As to whether Hiccup is a dead cat or a live cat in the Rifkindomorphic world, the author has affirmed that Hiccup does indeed live, but that the poet is entangled with the Cat and has considered murdering him, much as the author has considered dispensing with Rifkind. These details about the Rifkindomorphic world can be argued, but we are in general agreement that the world being described is, to a high degree of probability, the world in which we live. If Hiccup is both dead and alive, we have opened the door of the box in which he lives, indeed that door is the door of our world.

The entanglement of Hiccup and Sue Katz is more interesting. The poet soon noticed that whenever Sue Katz appeared for a visit and immediately threw the poet on the bed (it was more than a mattress, Babs owned an iron bed frame and a maple headboard, though the poet was generally relegated to the broken futon from whence he was regularly summoned to the Sealy Posturepedic throne) that hiccup would hide his eyes with his white front paws or would scratch his right eye with his right paw. It was quite obviously a very new and a very irritating behavior which, once noticed, greatly offended the poet. The poet thought he was being taunted. But then there were times when Sue Katz was not present and Hiccup, sometimes in plain sight of Babs, would first look at the poet and then cover his eyes with his white paws or scratch his right eye with his right paw.

At first the poet thought that Hiccup was trying to out him, to somehow signal Babs as to the poet's entanglement with Sue Katz. But then the poet began to appreciate this behavior not as an action indicative of a mental state of Hiccup (hatred and suspicion mixed with loyalty to Babs) but rather as an example of spooky action at a distance. That is, somewhere in this universe Sue Katz was in a particular state defined by an arbitrary number of variables, and that that state provoked a certain near instantaneous action in Hiccup, because they had become entangled and now formed a single interactive entity by virtue of the fact that Hiccup in some sense was measuring Sue Katz. Hiccup and Sue Katz were now one from a theoretic standpoint. The coordination of the Cat-Sue Katz system, the spooky action at a distance, occurred at a velocity exceeding the speed of light.

Certainly the poet was measuring Sue Katz. And he wanted to measure Sue Katz more and more. But there was the problem of the entangled Hiccup. And as the poet thought more and more about measuring Sue Katz and of a greater entanglement, he was ignoring various messages left by his attorney, William P. Homans Jr. who wished to meet with him about the Columbia Street charges, since a hearing was scheduled. The poet did not want this entanglement and was not eager for the County of Middlesex to measure him or in any way entangle him as it had entangled Rifkind and Ronnie Brazao. Despite the poets ignoring Homan's summonses to meetings in his downtown law office, Homans did manage to pass to him via Maria various installments of the Rifkind Prison Diaries.

ENTANGLEMENT WITH SUE KATZ

2011-05-16T07:52:00.000-07:00

In the observable Universe, the poet did not consider entanglement with Sue Katz to be a true quantum entanglement. The poet knew that he would interact periodically now with Sue Katz during certain hours when Babs would presumably not be there (somehow Sue Katz would see to that because it would be her assumed job to treat him as a slut and whore) and then when Sue Katz went back to her job driving Cab and her life in disguise with an assumed identity in the Underground their behaviors would be non-correlated...so that for example it would not be true that each time his heart went bump that Sue's Katz's heart would go thump.

They would only be entangled in the sheets when they were entangled in the sheets, and his only job would be to wash the sheets, but that might be more of a giveaway than not washing the sheets. So, the poet decided to think about if for a few weeks, and maybe look to Hiccup for a sign.

SUE KATZ SIGHTING

2011-05-16T07:16:00.000-07:00

One early April morning the poet was at his usual place before the Royale in his gym shorts when Hiccup uncurled from his place on the shelf where he liked to perch inscrutably on a prone edition of the Cantos in honey orange yellow wrapper that matched Hiccup himself. Hiccup dove noiselessly to the hardwood floor and headed down the hall toward the front door. Five minutes later there was knock and the poet opened to Sue Katz as brassy as ever but with her cap pulled down over one eye in deep disguise.

"I'm double parked," she said, "but I had a fare in the neighborhood."

The poet looked down out of the bay window. There was a yellow cab, motor running. Sue Katz chewed her gum hard for emphasis with her jaw out like James Cagney.

"How's Babs?"

"You know, how bad can it be, to be Babs?"

"Right. She is the great Babs of Babylonia," said Sue Katz.

"Babs the bibliophile."

"Babs the barbarous."

"Babs the Barbary pirate."

"Babs the Burberry Bitch," sang Sue.

"Babs of Burbank."

"I hear you're her kept man," said Sue Katz.

"What's that supposed to mean?" asked the poet.

"Like just what it says. What do you think it means?"

"It means you came here to blow my mind for some goddam reason, i got stuff to do."

"How do ya know i didn't come here looking for Babs."

"Probably you did."

"Why would I? Why would I come here looking for Babs?"

"How would i know?"

"You think i came here to sleep with Babs, yer such a little pig," said Sue Katz.

"You really do wanna pick a fight."

"Why would i pick a fight with Babs?" asked Sue Katz, folding her arms across her Red Sox sweatshirt.

"You wanna pick a fight with me. I got stuff to do."

"Like what?"

"Like aren't you scared somebodies gonna steal your cab?"

"No."

"Well, what do ya want? This is nuts."

"I'm bored and i'm high. So i thought i stopped in and see if you were around. I thought i'd screw you while my car was running. We could do one joint."

"You're nuts."

"Babs should pass you around. You're such a slut, a real whore," said Sue.

FLUP ON OBSERVED DEATH OF EVIL

2011-05-14T11:19:00.000-07:00

The controversy continues on the Death of Evil, because the White House will not release the photographs of the Dead OBL. A compromise has been struck, and United States Senators are now allowed, at their leisure, to come over and look at the photographs of the Dead OBL. One Republican came over and looked right away. He then stepped before the microphone to address the American People and stated that it looked to him like OBL was really really dead, in the yuck sense, and that part of his brains were coming through his left eye socket.

Now, who could make this up?

And it should be pointed out also, that this Senator is not stating that the Long Form Birth Certificate of the President is a counterfeit, implying that he is a sober minded man who can be trusted to to certify that OBL looked damned dead to him in the photographs the Senator viewed.

ALLEGORY

2011-05-14T09:59:00.000-07:00

Readers have inquired whether the author's ruminations on Thoreau's search for the lost hound, the lost horse, and the lost turtle-dove might have allegorical meaning not only in their relation to the life of Hiccup in the world of the poet (as distinct from the world of Rifkind himself) but also in relation to the women observed in the world of the poet. The author has been asked, as a result of his having swerved into the world of meaning via the introduction of an apparently allegoric tale (thus devoid of specific phenomenological content) whether the yearnings (a type of mental state) of the poet might be in some way linked to the yearnings of Thoreau, and whether those yearnings (for the lost hound, horse, and turtle-dove) might not reveal more about the women in the poets life than about the Cat named Hiccup in his lap. The reader wants to know whether in relational semantic terms, the reader is to link Hiccup to the animals referred to by Thoreau, or to link the animals referred to by Thoreau to women in the poets' life, remembering that in either case these allegorical suggestions are provided by the Author, not by the poet. Needless to say, any such investigation is a deviation from our specifically phenomenological investigation in an observable (in Dirac's sense) universe; in other words, meaning was to have no meaning here, only observed states of nature. We were dedicated here to the shadows on the cave and only the shadows on the cave with no inquiry into causes or origins. As far as we are concerned, there is no interest in anything but the shadows dancing on the wall, in reenacting them heuristically ignoring the why, and assuming their observed states to be probabilistically indeterminate and entangled with the poet in quantum mechanical terms.

Emerson perhaps was most far reaching in his statement regarding Thoreau in relation to the lost hound, horse, and turtle-dove: "His riddles are worth the reading, and I confide that if at any time I do not understand the expression, it is yet just. Such was the wealth of his truth that it was not worth his while to use words in vain." Thus, Thoreau must be taken at his word because he would not speak foolishness.

The poet, as we have pointed out, is quantum entangled with Hiccup. Hiccup observed the poet, the poet observed the Cat, and their observations were entangled in Dirac's sense. In all likelihood, as related in this Romance, the poet's observation of Hiccup and Hiccup's observation of the poet caused the poet to not write a great Epic of the Middle. Thus, the poet, aware of this loss, exhibited a certain animus toward Hiccup, on more than one occasion striking him with a soft cover copy of the New Directions edition of the ABC of Reading by Pound, on another occasion wrapping him in a pair of dirty jockey undershorts and threatening to drown Hiccup at Walden Pond. Entanglement itself presents enough complications in this Romance without venturing into the realm of meaning and semantics. But let us assume that since the poet exhibited animus toward Hiccup, then Hiccup would not be the object of his longing (a mental state). It should be pointed out that Thoreau did not speak specifically of longings (a mental state) but of specific losses observable in nature, namely the physical loss (absence) of a hound, of a horse, and of a turtle-dove.

We suspect that Thoreau was exploring the nature of losses, most probably his own; for example, Raynor believed that the turtle-dove was a reference to a love, Ellen Sewell. But such are the uncertainties, the ravages, of allegory, metaphor and of relational meaning and indeed semantics.

With all of the above disclaimers, the author would like to state the consensus of letters from readers which generally relate the following beliefs:

That the author is suggesting that for the poet

1. The hound is Kathy, because Kathy followed the scent of the times, but then became lost in the woods, though perhaps like a hound will find her way home, but that unfortunately there would be no home left to find because Columbia Street was busted and evacuated.

2. That the horse is Mel because she is big and lumbering and does all the work of the world.

3. That the turtle-dove is Maria, who has flown beyond the clouds.

The author now asks of you, of his neighbors in this non-dissertation,

Has he heard the hound, the tramp of the horse, and ever seen the dove disappear behind a cloud?

And my dear neighbors, will you profess an interest in this hound, in this horse, in this turtle-dove, as if it were your own? And may i then call you neighbor? After all, the author has traveled a good deal here; and every where in shops, in offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.

THE DETECTIVE NOVEL DISTINCT FROM AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY

2011-05-10T14:30:00.000-07:00

The author has spoken of evidence destroyed at the Witch's House, of evidence destroyed in the crater of Kilauea, of insufficient evidence according to Prof. Chomsky for determination of OBL's complicity in the attacks of 911 ... and even, to cite one more example... of the undergrounds' concern that Hiccup might, in answering to her name Hiccup, compromise any false identities or covers taken on by members of the underground. The question must arise: "is this work not a Romance at all, but a detective novel?", which is equivalent to the question "is the reader deceived by an elaborate fiction, is each fact of the purported Alternative History really nothing more than a planted clue in an elaborate murder mystery/detective novel.

Are we caught up, all of us, in an elaborate web of our own making (author and reader)? There is the further philosophical issue, which might tease a paper out of a Hubert Drefus: does it matter if we are deceived or not? In the short term it might be argued that we cannot falsify the statement "This Alternative History is nothing but a baloney Detective Novel." In the intermediate and certainly in the long term we have a simple test which does allow for falsification of the proposition, namely that detective novels end (which we can experience by turning a last page) and true Alternative Histories do not. However, it must be allowed that there is possibly a Detective Novel that is so long that it cannot be experienced fully in a life time and therefore the proposition that "this is nothing but a bad detective novel" might not be theoretically falsifiable, should the detective novel be so long that no human being can know if it ends (to say nothing of how it ends). In this we might have to allow for multiple authors succeeding each other and pledged not to reveal the nature of their eternal deception, etc., etc.

As regards the persons of this asserted Alternative History, no one was more concerned about such an eventuality than Mel. Mel is the person (assuredly NOT a literary personage like the poet) who most often exclaimed "This can't be happening" or "This is a dime store novel" or "You go and try to figure". Mel would drape her arm around Maria and walk her down the street, through Hay Market or down Commonwealth or to the Turtle Cafe in Inman Square and rail against this Alternative History, shouting almost as she rambled on in word and in heavy walk with her red bandanna while Maria, ever thinner, her hair cut butch and licking her upper lip with a dry tongue again and again, the two of them wondering about whether there was a script to the action and who had written it. Maria had submitted to this Alternative History, and saw no way to undo it's effects, unless she could discover that it were a detective Novel; while Mel just wanted to kick this world in the shins on the theory that eventually it would corner her and do away with her anyway. Babs simply didn't worry about such things. She was square shouldered and could stand up to anything thrown her way without concerning herself in the least about fate, secret plots or otherwise, or the place of the suffering hero; Babs more than any other person knew that the world could damn well get on without her, and would never, ever, consider herself worthy of the attention of fiction writers or gods, and that her short affair with Rifkind in the period just after the Draft Lottery would be as near to center of any story as she would ever obtain. Ultimately all three of these women ...Mel, Maria, and Babs ...would accept the Alternative History into which they were pulled as an authentically described herein...with very little attention put to the proposition that it may a poor fiction. They were all three adaptive women, and perhaps no greater proof can be offered as to the existence of these women, than how they have adapted to the circumstances herein as if they were real.

POSSIBILITY THAT PRESIDENT DID NOT DEFEAT EVIL

2011-05-10T09:18:00.000-07:00

Prof. Chomsky has asserted that there is no evidence presented to date which would falsify the statement "Osama Bin Laden is innocent of the attacks of 911". However, Prof. Chomsky has asserted his belief in the demise of OBL. Prof. Chomsky has asserted that the statement "OBL was responsible for the attacks on the world trade center on 9/11/2001" is no more established than the statement "I (Chomsky) have won the Boston Marathon". However, the latter statement has been falsified by an examination of the record, while the former statement has not been falsified.

Both statements are falsifiable and both are scientific propositions. Certain evidence does point toward the falsification of the former statement, including a videotaped confession.

If OBL were not responsible for the attack of 911, then the President, who is still the President thanks to the evidential presentation of a Long Form Birth Certificate, has destroyed less evil than he would have had OBL been responsible for the attack of 911. The question might have measurable implications for our Alternative History. In other words we must ask ourselves the question: if, in our Alternative History, OBL were not responsible for the 911 attacks, would that reality result in an alternative history appreciably different from the Alternative History which we have assumed to include the facticity of the statement: "OBL was responsible for the attacks of 911". But such an inquiry would incline us toward the difficult task of a Rifkindometric analysis, that is a statistical analysis of the likely degree of deviation from the path of our Alternative History that a particular disputed but not falsified proposition may cause. In other words, would such a non-falsified proposition significantly change our story.

To clarify: we have asserted that our Romance of Rifkind, in many parts, is Rifkindomorphic, in that it expounds on the Alternative History unique to the world in which Rifkind exists and existed, the world as we know it from the perspective of one who has studied Rifkind and his thought (though not his Mental States). But we have avoided the statistical burdens of Rifkindometric analysis: the tiresome microanalysis of limits dedicated to understanding how changed facts evidentially established might change outcomes in already described alternative histories and determining, in certain cases, that Alternative Histories must be substantially revised or even discarded, and sent not to the trash heap of history but to the universal library of Alternative Histories (clearly infinite in number) which in ontological terms are NOT the accepted Rifkindomorphic Alternative History.

But the author's work here is popular and not essentially numerical. Let us remember that he is accepting the stochastic nature of reality, in which there is some finite probability (if not in fact then in analytical terms) that OBL was not responsible for the attacks off 911 and so that this possibility is, to use a popular phrase "already in the market" of our Romance. Furthermore, the author's approach to this Romance is Heuristic: he speaks catch as catch can and tries to connect what has been with what is and what will be in a cohesive evolutionary sequence (simulation) that runs, more or less, reasonably close to what might be called, should we recognize it, the truth.

The reader is reminded that the author has remained true to his heuristic analysis of the essentially stochastic processes with which he is phenomenologically presented; so that, for example, he has made no attempt to establish the facticity of the non-falsifiable proposition "The President has destroyed evil" (in killing OBL). So that for the purposes of this Romance, Essay, and non-Dissertation, the author need not (basis of Prof. Chomsky's assertion of the possible falsifiability of the scientific proposition "OBL was responsible for the 911 attacks") withdraw any statement.

It bears repeating that the absence of evidence, the withholding of evidence, even the destruction of evidence does not in itself change our Alternative History. For example, the burning of Rifkind's Prison Diary does not change the portion of the Alternative History which predates this violent act. If today the author were to torch the Witch's House (and he has made several such attempts) this would not change this Alternative History up until the time of such an act of arson. Even the actual physical destruction of evidence within the Witch's House (you will remember the chicken bones, the Grecian Grey, etc) would not change the actual history to the extent that Rifkind, in Heuristic and Stochastic terms, was either actually there or not there, whatever the evidence. And so on with our Alternative History which evolves with or without evidence for its existence. From another viewpoint: what Hegel viewed as thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis is from our viewpoint a continuous feedback loop in which outputs are inputs; and if History is not so, then our simulation of it is.

So that we will grant Prof. Chomsky this: that President Obama (confirmed to be the President recently) may not have defeated evil. But President Obama did not win the Boston Marathon.

Similarly we might ask Prof. Chomsky, who after all lives (or at least did in the days of Michael O'Connor) in Lexington not far from Walden, if he has seen Thoreau's lost hound, lost bay horse, and lost turtle-dove, and whether he has he seen their tracks, and if he knows what calls they answer to? Has he heard the hound, the tramp of the horse, and ever seen the dove disappear behind a cloud?

Or perhaps with Lettvin we might better ask: What does the Professor's Eye tell the Professor's brain?

THE PRESIDENT'S DEFEAT OF EVIL

2011-05-09T16:13:00.000-07:00

The President has had a good run lately. Not only has the President proved that in this Alternative History that he indeed is the President by releasing his long form Hawaiian birth certificate, additionally he has successfully ordered and consummated the killing of OSB. It is not clear however if indeed the proposition "OSB is alive" is falsifiable. A dead body would help, but the navy has dumped it overboard in complete compliance with religious strictures which if violated could result in untold deaths. Furthermore, photographs were taken of the body with a bullet hole either between the eyes, or through the left eye and with a very dead expression on the face; but this photo has not been released, though a copy has appeared in the Grolier Book Shop in Harvard Square next to a very old curled photo of Robert Creeley with a now very creepy eye patch, given the juxtaposition of the OSB photo. The real killer evidence is the DNA, with is a 99.5% percent certain match with lots of OSB's closest relatives. So, not to worry, especially since a lot of OSB's closest colleagues have acknowledged that OSB is dead. Why would they say that and try to falsify the proposition that "OSB is alive"? Of course major media analysts have concluded that Donald Trump will no longer say that the President is not the President, for the simple reason that OSB is dead. Were OSB not dead, Donald Trump would still probably be trumpeting that the President is not the President; but since Trump is not so-trumpeting, this is further evidence of a sort for that very likely true proposition that OSB is dead.

The statement that "Evil had Died" is not a falsifiable statement and therefor not part of this investigation. Ontologically such a statement is a mystical or religious statement, because it is criticizable but not falsifiable, according to Popper.

BABYLON REVISITED AGAIN

2011-05-09T07:05:00.000-07:00

The Kansan Kenyan has unveiled his Long Form Birth Certificate in the Great State of Hawaii. It can now be assumed that our Alternative History, the one in which Rifkind still exists, not having yet been dispensed with by the poet, and in which the President also exists, can proceed safely along the path outlined by the author at his desk, without veering off in a new direction. For the President not to have existed would have further complicated our non-dissertation, our essay, our Romance of Rifkind in several parts, but not invalidated it. The statement that "The President has no Valid Birth Certificate from the State of Hawaii"was a falsifiable statement, and also a legitimate scientific proposition. But until now, it was only theoretically falsifiable, in that there was no telling how long the world would have to wait for evidence...perhaps forever. But there are forevers, and then there are forevers. The statement "All Men are Mortal" is not falsifiable, because we would have to wait out the lifetimes of all men to verify it; or else all lives of all men would have to end though a nuclear or other event but then there would be no one to record the result and falsify the proposition. But fortunately the proposition at issue was falsifiable, and indeed was falsified. This will greatly simplify our Alternative History, because we can rest assured that in the foreseeable Rifkindomorphic world, the President is the President, rather than not. Were the President not the President, then the public might demand of the author that he treat of the issue of why, in the Rifkindomorphic Alternative History, the President were not the President.

What would the implications have been about the nature of Rifkindomorphic, and for that matter of Rifkindometric, reality had the President not been the President? What would it have indicated about the intrinsic Rifkindomophic geist? But the need to face these issues has fortunately evaporated. The President is the President, and other cornerstones of our Alternative History remain in place, for example the killing of Oswald by Jack Ruby, the burning of Rifkind's Prison Diaries in the crater of Kiloeau on the Big Island by the Poet, and the destruction of both of Maria's ovaries. All these propositions can be formulated as falsifiable statements and have been tested, with the possible exception of the destruction of Maria's ovaries as these were not treated as physical evidence from removal until disposal in a hazardous biological waste container and therefore we have relied on the report of her surgeon as made to Mel in the family waiting room at Cambridge City where Mel, hysterical at the time, was posing as a blood relation to Maria and was uncertain of the spelling of Maria's last name. Therefore, we have relied, in this case, on the self-reporting of a possible quack or worse. Of course, we could wait out the span of Maria's reproductive life to see if she became pregnant, which event would falsify a statement that "Both of Maria's Ovaries were Summarily Removed", however were Maria to live without a pregnancy this would not falsify the statement.

But in this quandary, we must remember that our Alternative History is Heuristic and assumes a Stochastic world; the author is making his best effort to approximate the actual Alternative History, to give his Alternative History the simulative feel of what did, to the best of our knowledge, take place ...with the caveat that the author takes no responsibility for the rendering of a particular ontological class of phenomena, namely the class of Mental States experienced consciously or unconsciously by the human objects and Hiccup in the Rifkindomorphic world, and their attached feelings, lymphatic-ally based or otherwise. In any case, we know that Maria, were she willing to submit to a physical examination could receive confirmation that indeed her ovaries had been removed. This on the assumption, of course, that Maria exists, which the author confirms in the positive.

So that just as the President has falsified a certain proposition regarding his place of birth, so may Maria, should she so choose, refute the proposition "Maria has ovaries". But for the last forty odd years, Maria has refused all medical attentions.

GENTLEMAN WITH A LAP CAT

2011-05-06T11:57:00.000-07:00

One afternoon on a teetering hillside in Charlestown (the magnolias were in bloom) the poet was again drawn up in front of his Royal typewriter, his soul full of duende and of complex Gongoresque flights of language though determined to carefully sidestep Ginsberg's hip pulp and Pound's obtuseness; let the Epic begin, this must be the day, only Seize the Hour Goethe would say Courage is its own genius. But just as he was to begin pecking away, as he hovered over the green keys with their white letters, like Horowitz over a keyboard, Hiccup jumped up off the floor and, landing on the poet's lap, curled up for a long stay.

Shit!

The poet looked down at the warm foreign ball radiating the poet's sex with fur, danger, and self-satisfied contempt. This was a latent heat that could anesthetize him before destroying him. This was no pussy, this was a tom cat. What was in his lap was every bit as powerful as his Epic, and he was rendered silent. He remembered physics Prof. Philip Morrison, introduced by Rifkind, speaking out against MIRV at Kresge, arguing from his experience in the Manhattan Project first with Fermi at the University of Chicago in determining the critical mass of Plutonium, later building the core for the first Trinity Test, and carrying the two hemispheres in his lap in the back seat of an old Dodge out to the tower at Alamogordo. Warning from the lectern at Kresge, hunch backed and short legged with childhood polio, he wagged his sage finger. Morrison had assembled the Nagasaki device at Tinian Island and flown over both Hiroshima and Nagasaki afterwards, in the early days of the Hiroshimaic Age in the Hiroshimaic Afterglow...and still been persecuted by HUAC after the war.

What must Morrison have felt with the two glowing hemispheres in his lap? What did the poet feel with Hiccup in his lap? But the poet must not day dream. The poet must write poems, a great Epic. Only Begin It and the Work Is Done Goethe would say.

Damned Cat! The poet would drowned Hiccup, but Hiccup scratched. How could a revolutionary fear a cat scratch? The poet would head out to Walden, that's what he would do, he would go tramping and build a cabin in his heart, and plant a bean field, and watch the ice melt and note the date. He would learn the names of wild things, like Denise. Denise could not drive a car or balance a check book, but she knew the names of every flower, tree, bird, mushroom, just like Henry, only more so.

The poet had long puzzled over Thoreau's paragraph: I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. Were these elusive lost beings his own fleeting unrealized creations, as much a loss to the world as to himself?

The author doubts that Henry did own a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove. The author believes Henry to be a writer deeply concerned with the actual Alternative History he lived at Walden. Why suggest such apparently allegorical terms in an essay more concerned with purchased lumber and crooked salvage nails? But the poet, unlike the author, was a dreamer. He imagined taking Hiccup out to Walden and there drowning him in a knotted pillowcase, two of Bab's pillowcases, so he would not scratch through and escape. Then, he would wander Charlestown, looking for Hiccup, even while Babs was out. Babs would find him calling out HICCUP! HICCUP! COME HOME! Hiccup would not come, would not come, would not come!

And the poet would tell Babs that he had spoken with neighbors who seemed as anxious to recover Hiccup as if they had lost him themselves. This might not convince her. She might suspect him. It might not ring true. Like the name Eric Starvo Galt was obviously an alias.

Maybe I am an alias, thought the poet. I am a fraud. I will never write my epic. I would murder Hiccup if I could.

The poet remembered how Thoreau had bought the boards from James the out-of-work Irish railroad worker, the very walls of his shack. And then Henry David had seen them, he saw the family on the road at six. One large bundle held their all -bed, coffee mill, looking-glass, hens, -all but the cat, she took to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as I learned afterward, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last.

Why couldn't Hiccup trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so become a dead cat at last?

FALSIFIABILITY AND THE DREAMS OF THE POET

2011-05-05T09:40:00.000-07:00

The author, in the execution of this work, has endeavored to describe an actual Alternative History and to do so in heuristic terms with a world view that assumes reality to be tautologically historical and that history to be fundamentally a stochastic process. To that extent, as has been discussed, the work of the author is in some sense a simulation of the past that unfolds by the operation of an algorithm which ignores any first principles (which may or may not exist) or any so-called laws of history or of being or time that would model the past by virtue of a strictly logical series of transformations of any set of symbolic sequences be they expressed in a generative grammar, a Postal language, a finite state Turing machine, a Boolean operator, etc.

In short, the author does not give a damn if this work unfolds according to the same principles that were operative in the Actual Alternative History under examination; the author only wants the work to look like the original. "If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck then it is a duck" as the saying goes; the author would amend this epigram to say "then it is a duck for the purposes here. Similarly Prof. Marvin Minsky defined artificial intelligence as follows: put the machine and the man behind a screen, ask any questions you will, and if you can't tell the man from the machine, then the machine exhibits artificial intelligence. We don't care if the machine is fundamentally different from the man. We care about the what, not about the how. Do machines think? Do airplanes fly? Do submarines swim? The how is beyond the scope of this work. The author wants you to know the what of the Rifkindomorphic world. The author has ignored certain aspects of this Alternative History as too difficult to simulate, especially mental states which are difficult to ascertain or describe, then or now.

The preceding has been discussed more than once and probably has gained little through repetition. But recently the author has suggested certain alternative histories which are outside of this Alternative History, the one in which we live, the Rifkindomorphic history in the Post Hiroshimaic Age in the Hiroshimaic Afterglow (all Rifkinds terms accepted by most but existent whether or not properly nominated); this is the suggested alternative history in which Hiccup did not exist, or at least did not irritate the poet, and therefore in which the poet would have written his Epic of the Middle. A discussion of this departure into a suggested alternative history outside the scope of our Alternative History would seem therefore warranted. What is the meaning of such a departure from Rifkindomorphic reality? What does it mean to speak of things which did not come to pass in our Alternative History? Why would the author make so radical a departure in his methodology and what are the implications? Why talk about what might have been? Not only is such a discussion outside the realm of science, it is distinctly un-American.

Forgetting the un-American implications, what is mean by the statement that conjecture about the Epic Poem never written is outside the realm of science? The poet himself, interestingly enough, had been an occasional student of the Philosophy of Science, and had attended the lectures of the then young Philosophy instructor (and Princeton Physics Phd) John Graves. Graves was deeply interested in induction and inductive reasoning in scientific theory (not to include pre-induction physicals) and also in Popper's work on the principle of falsifiability. Generally speaking, in Popper's view, any statement which cannot at least in theory be subject to being shown false (refuted) is not a proper scientific statement. Thus the statement "Hiccup is a cat" is falsifiable; so is the statement "All cats are named Hiccup". The statement "The poet wrote an Epic" is falsifiable as is the statement "The poet did not write an Epic". But the statement "The poet might have written an epic had it not been for the annoying Hiccup bothering him in Bab's apartment when the poet was hard at work after leaving school barely with a diploma and before his pre-induction physical all while Babs was hard at work at Mass General or possibly screwing medical interns from Harvard Med School" is not falsifiable. It very well MIGHT be a true state, possibly IS a true statement in the opinion of the author; but the statement is NOT falsifiable in Popper's view and therefore the statement is non-scientific ontologically. It should be pointed out that falsifiability is a necessary condition for a scientific proposition, but not a sufficient one.

Why does the author here address the issue of the dreams of the poet and of falsifiability? Firstly, the author wishes to advise when leading the reader onto thin ice. While we know there must be an alternative history in which the poet does write an epic, this in no way distinguishes him because there exits clearly an alternative history in which each reader and indeed every human being writes an epic poem, and that which is clearly NOT distinguishing is without merit in a critical essay such as this. But also the author wishes to reassure the reader that he will hew to the task and not forsake his purpose. The author continues to pursue this Alternative History much within the scientific method at least as heuristic analysis of stochastic processes is allowed under the great tent of that hallowed discipline. If the author is to argue that his stab in the dark at an indeterminate reality is science, then he must with his other hand hold the tiller firm or lose his way.

We will leave these conjectures behind therefore, knowing that the Dreams of Poets are not falsifiable. With Popper the author agrees that such statements have meaning, but are not scientific. Neither Popper nor the author are positivists; neither believes that statements regarding the dreams of poets are senseless.

FURTHER TECHNICAL QUESTIONS REGARDING HICCUP

2011-05-03T11:02:00.000-07:00

The question has been asked, does it really matter if Hiccup is male or female? After all, it is well known that Hiccup was neutered by Kathy so that he would not spray. And had he been female, she would have met a similar fate. But the author rushes to point out that this is an Alternative History, the Rifkindomorphic Alternative History, and the author is confined to events as they occurred. Hiccup was a boy and that's it. We have enough trouble recounting this Alternative History, without venturing into speculation, goodness sakes alive.

When James Earl Ray was living as Eric Starvo Galt, and when the FBI announced they were seeking an Eric Starvo Galt in the assassination of Martin Luther King and asked the public for help, there was much speculation as to the significance of the name (Eric Starvo Galt) which the public sensed to be an alias. How did they sense this name was an alias? And was the name related to Ayn Rand's hero John Galt? What was the message being conveyed by the assassin? What is the significance of the name, beyond it's identification with a man.?Similarly, all of the authors memories are fleeing, perhaps under assumed names. But call them what you may, the memories are there, put any name to them. Finally we will know them, capture them, imprison them as Eric Starvo Galt or James Earl Ray.

Hiccup is no alias. Hiccup is Hiccup is that famous (or soon to be famous) cat. It is the cat of this Alternative History. Hiccup killed a great Epic, but Hiccup lives unpunished. Hiccup is a boy cat, as we have said, and that helped him escape punishment. But we are treating here not of justice, of criminality, but of facts. Hiccup was no experiment, but an outcome of an experiment.

Lastly, there is the question of why Hiccup was living with Babs and the poet. You have been told that Kathy gave Hiccup to Babs when she began pondering the great Underground. Kathy would not take Hiccup into the Underground. First, Hiccup would have been difficult to care for in the Underground. Secondly, the Feds might be able to trace Kathy with her alias through Hiccup, who could not changer her name in the Underground, and would have continued to answer to the name Hiccup. If the Feds had seen Hiccup, and called out hiccup, hiccup! she would have come to them, being a trusting soul. And that would have spelled big trouble for O'Connor and Kathy and Sue Katz. So, Babs took on Hiccup.

Babs was impartial, and pragmatic and didn't worry too much. She would take on a cat, an intern, or a poet, all the same. Babs took care of business without worrying too much, and she worked alot of overtime at Mass General on top of it all. Babs was a good soul, and if Kathy wanted to go Underground, into all that darkness and fear, well that was her business. Babs would care for the cat. Babs was a nurse. Hiccup was as good as anybody else. The poet, understanding all of this, felt himself a cat. He was well cared for, fed, talked to, understood in a straightforward way. Babs had no angst. Babs did not fret. Babs laughed, Babs cried. Babs opened tin cans and fed Hiccup. The poet never did, he couldn't understand the smell. The author wishes you to know how Hiccup survived, not because it will enlighten the reader, but because the reader has a right to know something of the practice of history, of these times. Put another way, though this is decidedly not a novel of manners, the reader has a right to know something of the life and times of Hiccup, though such niceties not be the business here. We regard the social history of Hiccup as of little importance in this Alternative History; we care even less for Hiccup's mental states though they are just as relevant here as human mental states (not relevant at all); but we have a technical purpose in explaining the transference of Hiccup from the custody of Kathy to Babs and that is simply in identifying the identity of the Hiccup of Kathy with the Hiccup of Charleston and Babs, so that the reader knows that in fact they are indeed one cat in one alternative history and not two cats coincidentally named Hiccup.

On the other hand, for example, though the poet and Rifkind share the same birthdate, their legal names are identifiers of different (human) objects, with different (presumably) local draft boards but tautologically the same draft lottery outcome.

LIFE WITH HICCUP

2011-05-03T09:50:00.000-07:00

There were long gray days now when the poet's greatest wish was fulfilled: he was free to write organic verse in the spirit of Denise and William Carlos Williams. Didn't he have his own Patterson inside? After all, he came from a miserable small town, though from the middle. His youth fairly shuddered with the meaning of both sameness (non-differentiation) and differentiating texture in Pound's sense. His lines flowed noiselessly like Denise's along quiet branches and rough river banks, organically, exploring meaning ever forward, leaving life lines behind, with order imposed in the minute of lived reality, as if all Alternative Histories lived side by side in one universe, whose junctures branched and the line was posed always at histories juncture, at the branching point of possibilities, lived quietly like a Basho in the north country of the Here and Now. All this was at his finger tips as he sat down on long empty days ready to drop pen to paper. All the mentors waited breathlessly; the ABC of reading set aside on a corner of the maple desk top; fears of restless medical interns set aside; all in readiness for greatness with a turn of a phrase; reality down sloping ahead of him, he only needing to slalom ahead; knowing he had grown up with Ganger and Gunger first along the great River, which he would possess in new language.

All this was the poet's. Full days to himself. A time to write, finally. A window of time before his Pre-Induction Physical.

Only the poet was not alone. There was Hiccup. Hiccup of time itself. Maybe Hiccup was that Quantum Cat, the one who both lived and died in one startling lab experiment. The question was asked: can there be one alternative history in which a subject Cat both lives and dies? Can this be an outcome? The life and death of Hiccup is an outcome of an experiment. Can both outcomes, life and death coexist? Could the poet kill Hiccup and sustain Hiccup at the same time? If only the poet could have done so, he would have. Because Hiccup stalked, and stretched, and bristled, and rubbed against his leg. Hiccup curled up on the desk, and shed dander. Hiccup was curious. Hiccup was full of silent furry, of white hate beyond simple anger, beyond even rage, beyond time...Hiccup was all that the poet was not...Hiccup was patience itself. Hiccup could afford to wait, no one expected poems of Hiccup. The poet would make magic in a small room, enough magic to launch a new movement, a new way of thinking. And so would Hiccup, most certainly Hiccup would. But no one expected actual scratchings from Hiccup. Hiccup was free to stretch and yawn before the great universe, content with his discoveries. While the poet was expected to...write.

Hiccup knew all of this. Hiccup did not taunt the writer. Hiccup did not make one meow. Hiccup did not practice self-pity, nor was Hiccup a martyr. Hiccup new when to move to a distant perch, to a shelf. And Hiccup knew when to come near, when the poet needed to feel disgust. Hiccup could have played a part in Death In Venice. Hiccup was a miasma, a quiet plague, an ether, a visible ghost. Hiccup was neither a mental state, nor an expression of a mental state. Hiccup did not live in the mind of the poet. Hiccup did not give expression to the brooding thoughts of the poet. In fact, the poets mind did not brood, the poets mind was not a brooding mare or a brooding bitch or a brooding anything; the author cannot report on such matters because his field work was poor at the time and having made no observations since can make no improvements, there being no spontaneous generation of memories in his experience.

So that Hiccup remains untouched for all these decades. Hiccup is presumed dead. Hiccup is both dead and alive in this experiment. Hiccup lived then, and distracted the poet so that he did not write the great Patterson, the Cantos along the great river Mississippi, the epic departing from the juncture of Here and Now and from the senses of Oh Taste and See. Because of Hiccup, we will never know the epilogue of the Tree Following Orpheus. All these failures are laid at the paws of Hiccup. The mildly orange being with the green eyes.

Should we care about the disruptions of Hiccup, of the poems he took from us? We can't be angry with Hiccup, this is what men do to one another, they try to make friends in order to distract other men, to disrupt their thoughts and dreams, to undermine and corrupt. Women sustain in friendship, men disdain. No, Hiccup is a moral man, extraordinary in no way. Hiccup would be a mench, if only Hiccup would speak. But Hiccup would not speak. The cat had Hiccup's tongue.

Hiccup's life and Hiccup's death are outcomes of a vast history, at that juncture when the poet of this alternative history, in his youth, sat down to write his Epic, and had time and enough money to do so. That moment of the alternative history we are exploring was inhabited also by Hiccup. And that is the whole of the story. The question remains: can Hiccup, as an outcome, both live and die in our Alternative History, and can the poet both fail and succeed, can the poet both blame Hiccup and defeat Hiccup (the poet did not kill Hiccup in this alternative history). Will our alternative history allow for what we believe to be a contradiction: the simultaneous demise and persistence of Hiccup. If only Hiccup could both live and die, there would be hope for the poet. The poet could return to his Epic and Hiccup would be free to live and die or both simultaneously and all would be well for the poet, the poet would be free then to recapture his youth be writing his great Epic. Even Twain and the river would be contained there, in the youthful Epic by the poet, conjoined perhaps later by Twains writings in Hawaii which might have relevance to the poets pursuit there of Rifkind. All of time and of life could be conjoined then joint life-death of Hiccup.

Which begs the eternal question of the Essayist-Author. Is Hiccup just a Hiccup, or is Hiccup the Real Thing? Because of Hiccup and his behaviors, we have lost a great Epic, at least in this Alternative History. But if Hiccup were the famous Quantum cat, that lives and dies in one narrow alternative history, if a living Hiccup can be fit in here to this narrative of this Alternative History, perhaps some good can come of all this, perhaps the Epic still lives as a possibility. So that before we rush out to blame Hiccup, let us observe him, and let us have hope, not in a trans-formative sense, but as an acceptance of that which comes to us. Let us not trust the frog's eye. Let us doubt what it has told the frog's brain.

THICKENING PLOTS IN ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES

2011-04-28T10:57:00.001-07:00

There is an apparent thickening plot in our non-dissertation, in our essay, in our Romance of Rifkind in Hueristic and Stochastic Terms. But of course in a work such as this, which is the report of an actual Alternative History, to wit the Alternative History which we live, the Rifkindomorphic history, there can be no plot only ... a report of things in themselves as the present themselves to us in phenomenological terms.

So then why this illusion of plot? Of events overcoming themselves, ordering themselves and unfolding in a manner such as to suggest causality? We know that in a heuristic presentation of essentially stochastic events the author has no concern whatsoever with causality. Determinism and causality are quite outside the scope of this essay. If the author is successful in running this simulation of the Rifkindomorphic Hiroshimaic age and of the Post Hiroshimaic Afterglow, then perhaps the simulation itself takes own its own logic and in its evolution takes on the inevitability of deterministic events causally ordered. So, perhaps the author is to be congratulated for a successful simulation. Case closed.

Remember, the author seeks to explain nothing, that is, he does not seek first causes or rules; he has no generative grammar or natural language to cloak the events on display; his is a cheap shot at reality, a half-assed simulation, a stand in with no internal logic whatsoever. This work works if you are fooled. The author does not even seek truth as underlying principle, nor is he an encyclopedist or cataloger like Mitch Goodman in the Movement Book. This work is messy and Semiotic, it attempts to lend meaning to events, while representing an actual Alternative History.

So that that author, seeking to simulate truth and to lend meaning through associative means, and lacking a coherent grammar, must ask the following of himself: has he grown lazy and rewritten this Alternative History so that it stumbles like a derelict to its resting place in the night, far from any semblance of the truth. Or has the truth taken over, with apparent but simulated causality, and is it steering events from its vantage point in the future of the deep past?

THE FELON

2011-04-28T10:00:00.000-07:00

Now that he was charged with a felony, the poet could not visit Rifkind. The rest of the Rifkind Prison Diaries, and there were many pages yet to be written, came to him through Babs or through Bill Homans, attorney for both the poet and for Rifkind.

It was Babs who drove out to Bellerica to deliver to Rifkind the news about Maria. Babs brought him some new articles he had requested by Huston Smith, and also Letvin's seminal piece "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain". The poet met Babs at Dunkin' Donuts in Central Square to get the full report.

"He's kind of cute in that orange jump suit," said Babs.

"You think everyone's cute," said the poet.

"Everyone is kinda cute i guess."

"How about me?"

"Kinda cute."

"Brando?"

"Kinda."

"Newman?"

"Very kinda."

"So how did he react, to Maria and all."

"OK. Like a nurse i guess."

"How's a nurse react?"

"You know, like a doctor, but with more heart," said Babs.

"How does a doctor react?"

"Like a heartless SOB."

"So a nurse reacts likes a heartless SOB with a heart?"

"Right, exactly, that's just how Rifkind reacted."

"I hoped he might feel bad. Worse than that."

"Who knows how bad he feels? We all feel bad about everything. We all feel bad about nothing. My mother died. I felt bad. But here i am, talking complete shit with you."

"Why complete shit. I thought you were a woman, that i could learn stuff from you, about feelings and what to do and all that."

"I don't get you sometimes. Men are shit shower and shave. Why can't women be shit shower and shave. We really are. Only we shave our legs."

"That's my point. Why do you shave your legs? Explain that to me," said the poet.

"I thought we were talking about Rifkind. And about Maria. Let's talk about something easy. Like being in Bellerica or loosing your ovaries. I'm a nurse. I can talk about that. Or I can take you home and bust your balls."

"Between you and Mel and Kathy you could start a ball busting society of america."

"How about Maria? Can't she bust balls too? Are you afraid to say her name cuz some asshole ripped out her ovaries? Maybe i ought to tell you about Maria, instead of Rifkind. I think Rifkind gets it. He stone cold hard gets it. That that guy killed her womb. Shot her between the legs and between the eyes. The end. Nothing to talk about. Maybe you don't get it, cause you are such a poet. Maybe you need a sonnet read out to you. Or you go write one. We can have a memorial."

"Tell me more about Rifkind."

"Seems like he loves it in there. Playing it up big time. Big con smart ass and all that. If there were a cross he'd climb it with his fingernails and nail himself in. You could be the Roman with the spear."

"Why the hell a spear? I wouldn't stick anybody with a spear. Jesus Christ. You'd think i'd done something wrong."

"You kinda lay around. Like a bum."

"Christ. Is that what Rifkind said?"

"Don't worry about Rifkind. Rifkind can take care of Rifkind, don't you know that? Anyway, they offered him a deal."

"What kinda deal."

"Well, his draft board finally caught up with him in there."

"What draft board? What's his local. I gotta know," asked the poet.

"How the hell would i know what local? Who cares what local? Does it matter? You can be a real knucklehead, you know that?"

"So what's the deal."

"So his draft board is after him. Time for his pre-induction physical. And nowhere to run is there? And besides, he faces the trespassing charges from the first I-lab action."

"That's a lousy misdemeanor."

"But not the resisting arrest from the November Actions. That could be up to two years."

"Forget that. Nobody gets that."

"That's not the point. They could try him while he's still in Bellerica and then run that sentence consecutively. And the misdemeanor. And a few other things. And then he's drafted."

"So...?"

"So they offered him to leave Bellerica right now, drop the other charges, but he goes to Nam. Like now."

"That's nuts. He would never take that deal. He burned his goddam draft card for chrissake."

"Right. He's got that charge too. That's a federal charge."

"Rifkind would never go to Nam! Impossible!"

"Yeah? Well he's thinking it over. He says it's a chance to organize. To live the life of the masses. To join the real peoples struggle not as outside agitator, but from the inside."

"That's crazy. He's full of shit," said the poet.

"Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. Maybe you're full of shit. When is your physical? I know you got a low number. They must know you graduated in January."

"May first," said the poet.

"Why didn't you say something?"

"I don't know. I wanted to think it over for a few days."

"How many days, what a jerk!"

"As many days as it takes," said the poet.

"But it takes you too many days. There's never a day that isn't your day to think it over. And when it is that day, you spend it writing a poem."

"That sounds like a poem."

"So how do expect to own me?"

"Who says i want to own you. I'm not sure what that means," said the poet.

"See what I mean? You're so dense. I will bust your balls tonight. I'll bust them so hard i'll knock some sense into you."

"You think so?" asked the poet, "but one thing, you're wrong about Rifkind."

"You don't know the first thing about Rifkind. You couldn't"

"So why live with me?"

"I don't really. You're more like a live in."

"Why do you have my photo from the reading on the wall? The one from the Grolier?"

"Cause your famous, only no one knows it. Only I know it. I always wanted to bust some famous balls."

"What about Rifkind? Isn't he famous?"

"No. Rifkind's just important. You're famous."

SCALESE

2011-04-28T09:16:00.000-07:00

After he left Tweed's the poet wandered down Columbia Street to the swaying decked stoop at 323/325. He still had a key and he tromped up to the second floor and let himself in.

"Hello...?"

He shuffled down the long railroad tunnel.

"Hello...?"

The place was empty, mostly, vacated, a few broken chairs, the sheets from Lechemere still hung up on thumb tacks for curtains, a box spring in the living room, an old arm chair balanced on three feet and a dictionary. In the poet's old room some cinder blocks and what must have been Rifkind's empty black footlocker from Mel's place. An empty tampons box in the bathroom.

"What the fuck?" the poet said to himself and he sat on the window ledge in O'Conner's room. "Why didn't Kathy say anything? This is nut's. What, does she think i'm the freakin' FBI?"

Then the poet heard the sound of leather, probably boots or else big feet lots of them coming up the bare oak stairs. He ran through the kitchen and out the door and down the back stairs. When he came to back door and began to pull it open he saw four or five uniformed officers in the yard. So he headed back up the steps and arrived breathless in the living room where Det. Dominic Scalese in black trench coat and five or six of Cambridge's finest handcuffed him and searched him.

"What's up?" the poet asked struggling with his breath like a kid on the playground.

"Possession of unregistered firearms."

"Like what?"

An officer stepped forward with a shotgun in his right hand, held by the barrel, and an automatic weapon of some sort in his left.

"Where did you find those?"

"In your possession. Not concealed. We won't charge you with concealment," said Scalese.

"I never saw those in my life. You had to have been waiting for me. You watched me come in. Why? Cause you missed the rest of them? If you've been watching this place, you know i haven't lived here for over a month."

"But your name's on the lease. You're the owner of all that we see. Including those," and he pointed at the guns, "it just makes for a cleaner case."

"I want my attorney."

"You wanna tell us where your friends went? Sue? Mike? Kathy? we need to talk to them. Everybody wants to meet Sue and Kathy. Which one is the black belt?"

SHIT IN YOUR BLOOD

2011-04-28T02:26:00.000-07:00

Somehow the poet got in touch with Kathy. They met at Tweeds Chicken Inn on Columbia Street just off Central Square.

"I'm worried about you," he said as soon as she came in and sat down.

There was only one table. It was a take out place, really. Tweed handed them two clean plates through the window, one had a red circle around the edge, the other was a scratchy plastic with bleached out yellow daffodils. Kathy switched the plates around, she didn't want daffodils right then.

"Give me a Coke," she called through the window.

The poet shook his head "no".

"I ain't got no damned Coke," Tweed shouted back, "I got Pepsi."

"I hate Pepsi," said Kathy, "tastes like syrup."

A second later a coffee appeared on the ledge at the window, some of the coffee spilled into the saucer. Tweed wasn't happy. The poet reached over the cash register to retrieve the coffee and brought it to Kathy. There were a couple of long brown napkins too, like the ones in public restrooms. Tweed took them where he could find them: cups, glasses, plates, forks, napkins.

"You're nuts," said the poet.

"What's that supposed to mean?" said Kathy lifting the cup to her little thin Polish Catholic lips.

"It doesn't mean anything, it's just the way things are. You're nuts," said the poet.

"You just lost your nerve," she said.

"I never had any to begin with."

"That's cause you're so deep. Deep people don't have nerve," said Kathy.

"It doesn't matter right now if you're deep. What good does it do anybody?"

"Not much. I suppose you can be deep like Christ was, you know, just understanding the way things really are, in the world," she said "maybe O'Connor is a little that way, if you know what i mean."

"I don't know what you mean. What are you up to? Mel said something to me. I don't see you at any meetings."

"You won't see me that much. I mean anymore you won't."

"This is nut's. You mean you just disappear. That's crazy."

"My grandfather in Buffalo used to say, Don't get shit in your blood now, he'd say that to my father, not to me."

"Like what is that supposed to mean?"

"Like you're in too far now, too late to turn back, just keep goin. Don't get shit in your blood now."

"Like what?"

"Like breaking a few windows isn't getting any attention. You don't want ROTC on campus, there's a way to get rid of it. Just do it. Or anything. Like in the Ghetto."

A VISIT TO BELLERICA (phantom purposes)

2011-04-27T10:32:00.000-07:00

If dead, we cease to be; if total gloom

Swallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fare

As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom,

Whose sound and motion not alone declare,

But are their whole of being! If the breath

Be Life itself, and not its task and tent,

If even a soul like Milton's can know death;

O Man! thou vessel purposeless, unmeant,

Yet drone-hive strange of phantom purposes!

STC

I asked Mel and she agreed that I should tell Rifkind about Maria and Cambridge City and all.

"You should," said Mel.

"Or maybe I should send Babs, she's a woman. She knows him."

"How so?"

"She gave him an enema and they talked," said the poet.

"I forgot. The night of the lottery, right?"

"Right. But what'll I tell him?"

"That you've got bad news."

"Funny. Very funny. Besides, it's not news. It's a crime that's what it is. It's a crying shame. To yank somebody's ovaries without a thought."

"Crimes are news. Tell him you've got a crime to report. You want his goddam opinion, I don't give a shit, it all amounts to the same thing, it won't change anything," said Mel.

"Don't blame me," said the poet.

"I wouldn't, except you have a dick swinging between your legs, otherwise you're completely fucking blameless."

"Look, i feel as bad as you do. Nearly anyway."

"How do i know what you feel?"

"I tell you. Did you read my poem Motherless Child in the Mole? About her last song at the Parrot?"

"You are such a piece of shit, you know that? I don't know why i tolerate you, why i let you fucking live. Really. I have friends. Of both sexes. They would listen to your shit for five seconds and just pound the crap outa you. They really would. I'm your protector. You know that?"

"But I don't know them. What i don't know can't hurt me."

"Maria knows my friends. Even Rifkind knows my friends."

"Why don't i?"

"I just told you. They don't think too clearly. They're very impulsive. They strike out mindlessly against what they don't like, against what makes them puke."

"Why doesn't Rifkind make them Puke?"

"Because he is big and hairy. And he doesn't shut up long enough to take a fist in his mouth. They don't like to slam people while they're talking. Only when they're done talking. That's when people's shit hits you, when they finish up. Like that doctor. He yanks out some ovaries and tosses them in the biologic waste can. A couple of sacks of eggs. Maria's eggs. Then he comes out and talks. That's what your poetry is. Somebody else's egg sacks. Rifkind just borrows stuff nobody else cares about. You mess with stuff ain't your business. But don't worry. I love you. I even strapped you on a few times. Danced with you. Cause i was lonely and I still am and i still might fuck you again. So not to worry, sonny. You'll be just fine as long as Mel's around. Only shut up with your poetry around me and figure out what you want to say to Rifkind all on your lonesome."

The poet looked away.

"Now don't be crying around me either. Go write a poem for the Old Mole. You can really make me sick. I don't know why i let you hang around like a hang dog. I really don't."

Mel reached out and held his chin in her big clammy right hand and wiped away a tear with a crumpled kleenex.

"Come on, it's gonna be alright. Maybe you should go home to Babs. I think you're outa your league. I think maybe all poets are outa their leagues, that's why they're poets, they couldn't be in any league so they join any ol' fuckin' league around. The only one they could get in was the Poet's League."

"Babs is a bitch."

"Babs is no bitch honey. Babs is a whore. Just a slut, like you. You're a slut don't you think, only she's a more attractive slut don't you think? If you were an intern, you'd want to fuck her too. On a gurney. In a recovery room. In a broom closet."

"Is that what she told you? She did it in the recovery room?"

"don't you two love birds talk?" asked Mel.

"I ask. Only she doesn't talk that much."

"I told you she was a slut. Like you. Only she has boobs and an ass, something you're missing. Why don't you shut up and quit thinking so much. Just screw Babs as much as you can till she throws you out. Or else sweep and mop and be a good roomate. And don't ask questions. You don't wanna live with O'Conner and that crazy crew do you? They stopped by my old place and picked up that footlocker Rifkind left behind. Rifkind OK'ed it. You don't want any part of what's in the footlocker do you?"

The poet didn't say anything.

"See. I knew it. You're smart. Be a smart little slut and listen to me. Don't be a part of what's in that footlocker. You don't want to know O'Conner and you don't want to know Sue Katz and you don't want to know Kathy."

"I feel responsible. For Kathy I mean. I got her into all this shit."

"You really are a sweet little slut, aren't you? Come here."

And Mel pulled the poet close and wrapped him up in her bear arms and kissed him. And she took off her red bandanna and wiped his face with it.

"Let me give you a warning. About Rifkind. I talked with my cousin, Ronnie Brazao. He's says that Rifkind has become a real big shot out there. A guru. He has a study group. They read Huey P. Newton, Chairman Mao, all that bullshit. Ronnie is in the group. You'd think Rifkind was Mao himself. He does think big, doesn't he? Ronnie sucks it right up."

"That's nuts."

"Is it?"

"What are they reading now?"

" That old professor of his from the Institute. Houston Smith."

"Religions of Man?"

"That's it, something about religion."

"That's nuts."

"You gotta be nuts. Now, scoot along little man."

A POSSIBLE EXCEPTION REGARDING NON PRESENCE OF A MANTLE OF DEATH

2011-04-23T01:54:00.001-07:00

The author, in the interest of interpretative history, and to convince you of his earnestness and seriousness in this undertaking, wishes to qualify his earlier statement regarding the non-application of death to existing characters at this time, this time being all events simultaneous with (or shortly thereafter) the author's tossing Rifkind's prison diary manuscript into the crater of the volcano Kilauea. We speak here only of those events within the present event horizon and within our alternative history.

A short digression: there are some who argue that life begins at conception. If that is allowed, then if the author were to report an abortion occurring at any time prior to his throwing of the Rifkind Prison Diary manuscript into the crater of Kilauea, he would be in violation of his promise. But the author does not believe that life begins at conception. The author believes life begins much later, only he hasn't determined exactly when, if indeed it ever does begin. The author rejects the idea of reincarnation: its occurrence being so rare as to eliminate it from a stochastic Romance.

However, in the interest of accuracy the author wishes to submit the following facts to preserve his good name before those whose definition of life may different from his own.

One night in early March the poet and Babs attended a performance by Maria at the Blue Parrot. Mel was in the front row in a red bandanna -the bandanna was over her hair not around her neck. When Mel turned around to look at the poet, to acknowledge him, after every song on the 12 string, the poet noticed how almost pretty she looked with her hair pulled back from her face by the bandanna, like some fair skinned milk maid in an early renaissance painting. She was big, but she was clean, well-scrubbed and glowed with pride and love. The stage spot light on Maria also illuminated one side of Mel's face as it glanced off the small stage. Maria played Motherless Child on the 12 String and repeated it's two verses twice and invented no new ones. The poet wondered why Maria did not give the song new verses. Often, she would do just that.

And then Maria fainted. The poet wondered if it was all the smoke and as he ran forward he asked everyone to make room and let her breathe. Mel was kneeling at her side. But when the paramedic took her pulse he'd looked concerned and told the poet he better come along in the ambulance. The poet stood up and pointed at Mel. She must go with the girl lying there. The paramedic studied Mel. Mel could not be this girls' sister. Mel climbed into the back of the ambulance and the poet ran all the way out of Harvard Square and down Broadway to Cambridge City emergency. Babs ran as fast, if not faster than he.

Hours later Mel came out. She said something about a tubal pregnancy. The egg fertilized in the tube. The tube burst. A surgeon had been brought in. He saw a lot of of scaring. He had removed both of Maria's ovaries. Mel fell upon Babs and reached beyond her to the poet and sandwiched both of them and they all wept like that. Maria was in recovery.

THE MANTLE

2011-04-23T00:17:00.000-07:00

It is not author's the intention at this time to drape any of the historical characters herein with the mantle of death, neither with cloak of death nor with any other such ghostly garment. The author has not attached even the idea of death with any of these actual personages, other than with Denise who is admittedly deceased. You will ask, consciously or not, why doesn't the author say "Denise who is sadly deceased" but then perhaps you will remember that I am attempting to complete this True Romance in Heuristic and Stochastic terms and with a phenomenological stance without reference to mental states; not that mental states are to be disparaged for they are the equivalent under our methodology with other facts such as sunrises and sunsets and atomic attacks and scores in completed March Madness Collegiate Basketball games, but that they are difficult to observe and verify in the field and therefor to render accurately in the written word within the bounds of natural languages with generative grammars. Perhaps with music or painting this problem would be overcome, but this is not the business of the author and more importantly such disciplines would be inadequate to rendering for example the scene of the poet seeing Maria with Guttermouth in the Chinese restaurant; this would require an enormous canvass or an act of an opera unto itself and there are a thousand such episodes and reflections on episodes. The author is a sculptor as has been mentioned and now admits to a work in progress entitled "Rifkind" which will contain and exceed all of these words, both individually and collectively in both syntactic structure and semiotic content; this can be explained not through a claim that sculpture is a higher art than music or painting but because the author's sculpture has been allowed to experience all of the details of this non-dissertation through the medium of the author/sculptor himself. To better explain: Hemingway has said (you will remember that our Romance is also an Essay) that though he only mentions one or two observed details of a room in a story he has imagined it all in detail, which is what causes its great reality. Similarly, our sculpture has seen all the details of this Romance of Rifkind and somehow expresses them all in a certain piece of metal bent and hammered a certain way. It is all there, or will all be there, in the gesture. Of course, the author has had an easier time of it than Hemingway because the author recites to his sculpture facts of history, while Hemingway invents fictional histories.

So that at this time, the author has disavowed placing the mantle of death upon any of these historical characters, other than Denise. You may point out that the author has qualified this statement by the adjective "historical" in referring to the characters, wondering if he has current intent to kill any of them off and then pointing out that they were not historical figures. But you will have forgotten that this is no fiction and that all of these characters are historical. You will possibly also ask: what about Rifkind, the author admittedly has every intention of murdering him or otherwise dispensing with him? But in this act in the real world (that is in that segment of alternative history not yet unfolded) the author is caught up as character, not as agent and is hopeless to guarantee his ends which must for now remain only that: ends. Had Rifkind already been murdered or otherwise terminated with extreme prejudice, then the mantle of death could be conveniently unfolded at any time and laid upon Rifkind's shoulder, but as of this time there is no such mantle or cloak or similar garment. Not even a fog or mist. Or air. Or aire. Or breath. Or figure walking the ramparts and frightening the guard with hoary appearance. Not even, in twentieth century terms, a death wish. Rifkind is no Richard or Henry. Rifkind is contemporary. Rifkind lives, at least for now. He has not gone that way, yet.

Such things as death have their origins in our childhoods; after all, had we not been born we could not die. All the more so, had our mothers not been nice to us and our neighborhoods rough. It would not be unreasonable therefore to ask the author about his concept of death in his childhood to better understand how he would use and report it in the execution of this work. The author will not dwell on this question longer than this paragraph, because while the author did witness death he did not do so in any remarkable way. The author witnessed death in a rather mundane, everyday sort of way, a few automobile accidents and cancers, mostly of the colon, etc but nothing powerful enough to build a great story on, and in any case we are not building a story, we are enacting a Romance which simulates an actual alternative history, the one which we live, the Rifkindomorphic one. Lacking gruesome personal experiences to color this Romance, the childhood death experiences of the author can only interest us to the extent that they relate to his early childhood methodology of enacting death. For example from an early age Lorca enacted puppet plays for family and there were murders and deaths in these. (Here, i would make a paragraph break but i have promised to complete this in the bounds of one paragraph.) As for this author, he had two imaginary playmates Ganger and Gunger. These fellows were comrades in arms in all the author's battles. "Come Ganger! Go Gunger! Kill them Ganger! Shoot them!" The author, Ganger and Gunger laid many a man down with rifle, machine gun and grenade. Triangulation was often used as a fighting strategy, with appropriate cover and ambush. Armies were thus wiped out, enemies flattened. But those figures eliminated were true enemies, that is phantasms. The author did not, nor did Ganger or Gunger, ever enact the murder of any living person, relative, friend or foe. And so it will be in this Romance: the author may eliminate phantasms but not living flesh and blood, not these characters which do not belong to him but to this alternative history. Trust the author, he is kind and will extend his loving-kindness to all here assembled. If there is death, it will not be of his doing or even the doing of far off Ganger and Gunger.

THE EARLY FUTON

2011-04-22T13:16:00.000-07:00

When the poet moved out of Columbia Street and into Charlestown with Babs, he didn't get alot of help with the furniture. O'Connor had bigger things on his mind, and so did Sam, Diogo, Fish, Igelfeldt, Dean, and etc. That decided the matter: the poet left his mattress behind; it stunk anyway; he had turned it over twice; it would have been too difficult to get it down the stairs himself; and besides, he would be sleeping with Babs.

He did sleep with her, for three nights. But she did snore. And her elbows, especially her right elbow, were very sharp. But for the poet, this did not matter. He was committed to Babs, and to sleeping with her every night, probably for the rest of his life. It was time to find out what it meant to be One with her, snoring and sharp elbows included.

But on the fourth night, after they had watched some television in bed (the poet felt so domestic and mature) Babs had a go at him in her sudden, dramatic and straightforward way, and then she went into the living room and dropped the futon couch into a platform bed and then hauled the poet out.

"I need a good nights sleep she said. I gotta go to work in the morning."

"I always thought we would always sleep together!" protested the poet.

"Why would you think that? That's nuts. We're roommates. You're cute. Let's leave it at that."

"Leave it at what?"

"I don't know. Just screw when we want to. Sleep when we want to, where we want to. This is goddam 1970 for chrissake."

"You wanna do it again?"

"Sure."

ORDER IN ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES

2011-04-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

The question is inevitably asked: in the recitation of an alternative history (in general) and particularly in the specific case of what we have come to call the Rifkindomorphic world (in the Hiroshimaic Age) is the non-dissertation, the essay, the Romance to be written straight out, "beginning to end", or is it permissible that the author write down the facts as they present themselves and later to arrange them in the proper order, whatever that might be. Does the rearranging of episodes and thoughts and experiences (all of them phenomena of equal weight, as long as reports of mental states are excluded for lack of verifiability) change the alternative history itself. Put differently: does the history of the alternative history have any relevance to our study. Alternatively we might ask: are there more than one versions of the Rifkindomorphic history that the author is constructing and are they equivalent?

There is the Gospel according to Mark, to John, etc. In this case different authors reported on the same events. But now we ask the deeper question: did John revise as he wrote? Did he make notes? And do we care? Are there alternative histories of the Gospel according to Mark, executed by Mark, imagined by him, rejected by him, or even not considered by him for lack of imagination or insight. Are there rules for the writing of proper alternative histories, or are the apparently failed versions which we encounter simply alternative histories of alternative histories. What, in short, is meant by "versions of the truth"?

Clearly, our only solution is to take the heuristic approach recognizing the stochastic processes at work not only in history, but in our own efforts to record it. That is why the author cries out that our best approach is to approximate the truth, every more closely, being willing even to work backwards from the present to the past, to make guesses within reason, to institute an iterative approach so that we ever circle and more closely approach the truth, admitting that the rules which generate our written history may have no actual connection with the processes at work in history itself. We are modeling the Rifkindomorphic world, as closely as possible, and letting it live and breath again, to reenact itself, to simulate the Rifkindomophic world, vigorously seeking the surface of things, acknowledging our failure to recreate mental states or to re-experience them. We are seeking in history itself the equivalent of a generative grammar, a natural language with rules of syntax and grammar, without tackling the sticky issues off Semiotics. We don't know what it means, we just want to be able to generate it again and again, faithful to rules that may exist a priori within the mind.

Two lovely children run an endless race,

A sister and a brother!

This far outstripp'd the other;

Yet ever runs she with reverted face,

And looks and listens for the boy behind:

For he, alas! is blind!

O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed,

And knows not whether he be first or last.

STC

THE AGE OF MEL

2011-04-21T09:48:00.000-07:00

This begins after 300 intervening pages, all hand written. The author does not feel like typing them and is looking for an unpaid intern. A lot of people owe the author big time, maybe he can call in some markers and get a free typing job done. Theauthor doesn't like to look at things twice. He starts to revise and the author doesn't believe in revision or retyping. The author believes that this alternative history should only be lived once. The author doesn't believe in revisionism. The author is no revisionist. The author believes this alternative history, first time through, is good enough. The author does not believe in quality control of history. The author is no rejectionist. The author is an acceptionist. The author believes that this is the best of all possible worlds, not because it is any good, but because it is Rifkindomorphic, the world in which Rifkind can and must exist as we know and love and revile him, and this is a pretty good alternative history because it is the best one to discover and ask ourselves the eternal questions: like what is the freakin world like that holds Rifkind in its bosom? The Rifkindomophic world. In the Hiroshimaic Age and in the Hiroshomaic Afterglow, whose half-life is over one hundred thousand years and we have barely gotten underway. In geologic time, we aren't far removed from Rifkind. What is forty one years?

The three hundred pages you have not read, but which exist in written manuscript form, the author promises to be full of passion and pain. Lets remember that Easter Sunday is only days off. The author will publish the 300 pages when the world is ready. And lo, the world IS ready. Almost anyway. Only the author lacks an unpaid intern. A gorgeous unpaid intern. An intern who reminds the author of Maria, of eternal Maria of Then and of Now. It is wrong for the author to fantasize. That is why (and the only reason why, the necessary and sufficient reason) that the author has chosen to write the truth. The author is the enemy of fantasy and therefore the enemy of justice. But the author can not render the truth with perfect exactitude. He struggles with memory, with the art of rendering, with translation, with murder, sex, and intrigue. He deposes before a jury with whom he has had multiple sexual relations.

Suffice it to say that this non-dissertation, this essay has reached a critical stage, a juncture, a new phase: this is the Age of Mel. Mel is now ready to take her place among the great ones: to take her seat next to Rifkind, to Maria, to Michael, certainly at a higher seat than the poet or kathy or babs or sam or fish or the other bums. We speak here of Mel. One for the ages.

There are those who say that Mel taught Rifkind everything he knew. But this cannot be. After all, Rikfind was already Rifkind when he met Mel and made love to her and all of her brood, sequentially, in that apartment above the drug store at Beacon and Mass Ave. They were all obsessively in love with him except for Bunny who who was cute and British and funny looking but pretty in a British sort of way. Mel's sister was uglier than Mel. None of them dressed right, though Bunny dresses the way British punkers do now, forty years later. Rifkind bedded them all, and they were proud of him for it. For they resisted. More than mildly resisted. Once they had a sense of his program, they endorsed it as willing actresses. The challenged him as a method actor. They did not entice him. They screwed him, more or less. They even disparaged him, playfully. This was the beginning of the Age of Mel. When what Mel was, was becoming known to a few select persons. Mel was not at University. Or college. Mel did take one accounting class at Northeastern and then went to work in a bakery, with the spirit and filth of a young Gorky. She screwed among the flour sacks and fought with the head baker and joined the union and cursed. Like a young Gorky. She spoiled for a fight back then and made a name for herself before the poet ever knew her. She came to a few rallies on the Common on her Harley. She had a chain from her wallet to her belt and a Marlon Brando motorcycle cap, but she outgrew all that soon enough.

On the Common is where Rifkind first met her. Rather, she came to Rifkind's attention and sensing her indominable will, he decided to dominate her with a random visit where she immediately screwed him. Mel was like a man like that, she liked to screw and forget. She forgot even before she screwed. Mel didn't respect men very much, and certainly not Rifkind, though she did love him in a certain way, like she loved a Harley or breakfast. She knew what Rifkind was up to, that he wanted to immerse himself in that filthy apartment above the pharmacy. That he wanted to stop in the pharmacy and buy Nestle crunch, a dozen, and a Batman comic, and deodorant, and peanut butter crackers, and take a night off with her, with Mel. He wanted something different. After a while, after a couple of months, she found out that what she was different from was Maria. Rifkind talked about Maria. And maybe, to jump ahead, that is when Mel began to fall in love with Maria. Rifkind was quite a story teller when he was stoned and drank Sam Adams. Rifkind would dance to the Four Tops with Mel above the pharmacy and talk about Maria, but it was hard to hear him because the music was loud.

So Rifkind would say: turn down the music, i can't think and i can't talk. And Mel would tell him, "too bad, speak up Junior" and so Rifkind would yell about Maria at the top of his lungs above the Four Tops and Mel got it all perfectly, every word. You would love Maria too, if Rifkind yelled her story to you. Like some possessed Homer crossed with Keats.

Mel had a lot of one night stands with men. And half night stands. And one hour stands. But no five minute stands. She wouldn't be used, Mel had to use her men for herself. She had to wring the sweat out of them. She liked to purify them. Let them get rid of their poison. It wasn't their fault, that they were full of poison. Get rid of it, was her attitude and she observed it all, from an anthropological viewpoint. It was the study of a naturalist. Her body was a laboratory. Today they might call it performance art. She had tried to read the kinsey report, but she couldn't get through it. She liked the Readers Digest, especially the pieces about the unforgettable characters. And she liked the Diary of Samuel Pepys. She liked that he couldn't really spell, or rather that nobody spelled like anybody else back then. She liked how Samuel felt up the maids, really felt them up good. And kept counting his pounds and shillings. And running the Navy. And just progressing even though he was so randy. Because Mel was randy and felt up maids and counted her money, and her father was in the navy too. Mel could have run the navy.

Mel loved her men and left them, every day she could. It was lovely. But when Mel loved a woman it was forever. There had been four and a half forevers. Before Maria. So that when Rifkind went to Bellerica, sentenced to two years for Disrupting a Class Or Church Lesson, Mel was already wise, even wissened.

We might date the Age of Mell, which began in late February (Rifkind had already been in Bellerica for a couple months) from when Mel moved out of her place and moved in with Maria, and began to accompany Maria everywhere, and to carry her big twelve string in its black case to all her performances, and sat in the front row at the Blue Parrot and ruined the view for everyone, and accepted with a big heart and long drags on her Pall Malls the dedications of songs to her person.

Maybe the poet finally ceased to dream when Mel moved in with Maria. When he learned of this. Or maybe his dream did not end, but the place for the dream became occupied. And then the poet became occupied. But the poet had to hand it to Mel: she earned it. Mel had done it in the old fashioned American Way. She had been direct. She had gone for her dreams. She had let nothing stand in her way. She had screwed who she wanted. She had stabbed her buddy in the back. She had lied. She had loved. She had embraced all of life. She had ridden her Harley in the front door. She had disparaged poets and Frenchmen. She had thought the Brits charming and our friends. She had trusted Irish men and women and slept and drank with them all. She rode her Harley through Southie on Saint Pats. She liked the Celtics. She had sold pop at Fenway. She made fun of Harvies. And now, she had won, apparently, Maria, and she was vindicated.

This was the Age of Mel. They would all listen now. And even the poet would listen, more than ever. Because Maria loved Mel. The world had changed. The world had rotated a quarter turn. Or shifted on its axis. Maybe the dinosaurs would come back, maybe the equator would run now through Dedham. The Age of Mel.

UNLIKELY EVENT ANNOUNCED WHICH MAY CAUSE A SUSPENSION OF SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF

2011-03-23T22:17:00.000-07:00

What was the likelihood of Rifkind’s birthdate being the first drawn in the December 1^st lottery? Somewhat Remote: one out 365 and a quarter (leap year). However remember that these characters self-selected and so Rifkind may have migrated to this story with the intention of having been born on the first date selected, of having a July 12^thbirthday. Perhaps the author dismissed from this narrative all men except Rifkind -or all birthdays other than Rifkind’s- in order to bring about the observed result.

Have we or have we not undermined the believability of our narrative and our faith in the actual existence of Rifkind by this relatively improbably result? Is the result a literary device? A poor fiction?

There are several ways to see this question. It might be that there are many alternative histories, every possible alternative history in fact, and that in most Rifkind’s birthday was not selected first and was only selected first in the world we happen to live in. Or, this event could be a fiction arranged by the author. If the work is a fiction, it still might be the case in the history we currently live that Rifkind’s birthday was selected first and in any case, despite the fiction, Rifkind’s date was chosen first in some alternative history unfolding out there somewhere.

Why are we so worried about coincidence, and believability, and the purity of stochastic processes? Were we shocked when it turned out that Oliver Twist was really the true grandson of that kind man who took him in at the end?

We must accept that this is a Rifkindomorphic world. Put differently, we live in the history that precisely allows for the existence of Rifkind. That Rifkind is here, explains everything. But what kind off world is that, other than it contains the Rifkind we know and love? That question constitutes our inquiry. What does it say about us that Rifkind is among us?

We could choose to reject Rifkind, to disclaim him and disown him, to deny his existence in our history -as a pure fiction. But we do not doubt him because of his weightiness, because he is Esau. You don’t write off Esau so quickly. Jacob, the builder of nations, the man with a thousand tents, him we can deny. But not the man who goes off on his own, and only returns to preach to us, that we might return. He asks us to reject what we would reject: war, violence, exploitation. He has no motive to be false. He has sold his birthright already. Rifkind lives.

CAVEAT TO THE PROBLEM OF SELF SELECTION IN OUR POOL OF CHARACTERS

2011-03-22T12:41:00.000-07:00

There is a possible solution to our problem of the self selection of characters in our jury. However, this solution relies on the insertion of the author into the narrative, which in turn inserts certain undecidable propositions into our logical system.

But let us propose the following solution:

assume that all characters alive in the world at the time of this story were included in the possible pool of jurors.

and that all of the population of the world came to court as prospective jurors.

and that the author was the defense attorney and could challenge and excuse as many jurors as required.

and that the author in exercise of this right excused the entire population of the world with the exception of those characters herein included.

and that Rifkind was jury foreman.

In this case we can state that due process was served legally and sworn before God.

This leaves us then only with the problem of the author, of the defense attorney, and of course his position, his truth or falsehood, can not be determined within this logical system, as proved by Godel.

More precisely, the proposition:

"The author tells true stories" cannot be proved either true or false, yet it can be shown that the statement is logically consistent within the logical system of the story.

The poet, by the way, would have agreed with this, having taken Dubinsky's course in Godel's Proof at Harvard, it not being offered at the Institute.

SELF SELECTION AND THE MODERN HEURISTIC AND STOCHASTIC STORY AS RELATES TO THE UPCOMING LOTTERY SCENE

2011-03-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

Self selection is a problem in any survey, greatly affecting observed outcomes. If we wanted to conduct an opinion poll on the next presidential election we wouldn’t conduct it on an airplane. The persons on board might not be representative of the electorate. Consider the more important case of a criminal jury: even if the juror pool is chosen randomly from a list of registered voters, it excludes a significant number of candidates. This brings us to our story or essay, to our non-dissertation. We know that our characters once sat in judgment over the conflict in Southeast Asia. And perhaps they still do sit in judgment over the conflict in Southeast Asia. Noting that no verdict has yet been reached on the conflict in Southeast Asia and no punishments or vindications recorded, we must assume that the jury is still out and that therefore Rifkind, the poet, Maria, Kathy, Sam, Fish, Diogo, Iglefeldt, Sue Katz and Babs and many more remain under court orders not to discuss the case among themselves. That they remain impaneled (except for those deceased, a status of which you will not be apprised until the proper moment) no reasonable person can doubt.

But we doubt these characters, we doubt the jury. We are skeptical certainly about Rifkind. We know these characters have self-selected to a greater or lesser extent. The persons who populate this work actively found their way into it; it was no accident that Rifkind and the rest traveled together to the time and place we have chosen to examine; we know therefore that if we wish to survey truthfully the times in question then we have conducted a deeply flawed survey. As we have waited and time has passed, we have cared less and less about their judgment of history and their verdict on the Conflict in Southeast Asia, and to that extent we have turned our attention more and more to our characters themselves until now we seek to judge the jurors; the Conflict in Southeast Asia is an old unresolved case and its significance has been largely lost for the present generation. If we were to read out the depositions, for example one of Rifkind’s impassioned rally speeches or a fact filled indisputably reasoned paper of Chomsky’s or even a modest statement in favor of a democratic classroom by Louis Kampf you would be bored to death.

All of these structural matters would not be of any great importance if the author had not claimed to approximate the truth here and to do so heuristically and stochastically. The author has allowed approximation and probability into the story, striving for a new kind of fairer and less tainted process, choosing to survey the population of characters and to thereby approximate the truth as closely as possible. This work is therefore a simulation, but not an algorithmic one, not deterministic. The author wanted to approximate, perhaps simulate, the times, but you have turned the tables and are only interested in Rifkind himself, and all the others, and you don’t give a damn for the times. You want the characters to violate the rules, to discuss the case amongst them; you want them, God as my Witness, to have sex in the jury room, to love and to hate each other. Take Maria: you wish you were there that day at Kresge when she joined cause with the Living Theater. Is this how we get at the truth of our characters and of the Conflict in Southeast Asia? Is this work reduced to some kind of mad update of the Scarlet Letter with Maria as Hester? Who would then be Dimsdale? Rifkind? Good God this is bad stuff.

The point is this: Nixon also realized that these judges needed to be judged. Their love of equality and democracy needed to be judged and then there is the morality play: Nixon had to know if the characters were good or bad persons in the context of the times. And so Nixon devised the Draft Lottery. By means of the Lottery, democracy and equality would be inflicted on the judges of the conflict in Southeast Asia, on the protestors who were all draft dodgers. And then perhaps also we would find out, then and now, if they conducted themselves with honor in relation to the Lottery.

TEMPLE

2011-03-20T14:49:00.000-07:00

The poet and Denise went back through the woods the same way they had gone before. It had snowed, there were deer paths they followed in the snow, but the snow was not deep and there were mounds of brown leaves showing through and lots of fallen branches that showed not yet snowed over. It was white, very white, and black of trees, and pine needles somehow dusted over that.

But it was hard to find the white deer skull, the poet wanted it, he wanted it on his board and cinder block shelves at Columbia Street, but so far he was settling for some interesting pine cones in his army Pea coat pocket and a gnarly black stone that looked like it belonged in a Chinese Garden, only it was from Maine. The poet wore a wool billed Greek Captains cap he bought in a store in Portland when they’d stopped for gas. Denise was in a long red wool cape-coat in the woods and stood out against the snow when the sun started to shine through.

“Will Rifkind appeal his expulsion to the Disciplinary Committee?” she asked.

“It would put him in a hard spot. Here he is calling for revolution and for overturning the Institute. And then he begs to be let back in?”

“We could have a petition. I would sign of course. We could get others.”

“I think it’s past all that. They’ve made an outside agitator out of him, so that’s how it will be.”

“It’s hard to imagine those hallways without him.”

“Oh, I think they will have a hard time keeping him out. What will they do, post gaurds at all entrances? No, they will have their own private Golem now. I think he will just ignore them and keep going to class. I can’t think of a professor who would bar him. I think they bought themselves an even bigger headache. Everyone understands throwing war research off campus, but not throwing Rifkind off campus.”

Denise stopped to examine a read leaf with white spoors dotting it. She smelled it out loud. And then she smelled it again. The air was dry and sharp.

“I read your long poem in sections about your sister’s wedding.”

She drew herself up tall and in her red cloak and beneath her fur hat she looked like some winter soldier from eighteenth century Europe, maybe Russia or France.

“Oh.”

“It’s very good. Very good. It should be published. I would write an introduction.”

“You mean like a book by itself?”

“I mean exactly like a book by itself. You write about the midwest almost mystically."

"Is that bad?"

Tell me what it's like. Mitch has been offered a teaching job in Mankato, Minnesota for next fall."

"That's up there."

"How up there?"

"Up there."

"So, what holds all that flatness together?"

The poet thought it over.

"The Big Ten."

"What's that?"

"Well there are ten states and they all fight each other. And then, when one wins, that one gets to fight California and it's all ten for one rooting for the Big Ten. You have to root for the Big Ten in the Rose Bowl. I guess it is sort of mystical. We all acknowledge a higher state of being and purpose."

"What's the Rose Bowl?"

"It's where the Parade of Roses ends up."

"Have you been?"

"No, but I hope too one day."

"My current teaching contract is for only one year. They'll never renew it after the I Labs. Maybe I'll just stay and do readings here. Do you think Mitch would miss me terribly?""

"It's I Lab. Singular."

Then she was on to something new:

“Look at this!” She’d found an edible mushroom in the snow beneath some frozen leaves. Then three more.

She was animated in the woods in red, like a marionette, maybe something wonderful and childlike out of Nutcracker. They walked back round across a just frozen shallow stream bed crunchy with air in the ice and beneath low pine bows with feathery snow and deer droppings, but no deer skull, until they got back to the clapboard house. Nik had built a fire. Mitch had everything out in the kitchen with knives sharpened and plenty of ceramic mixing bowls from Oaxaca where they’d lived when Nik was a baby and he’d had the brainstorm of supporting them by writing travel articles. He’d worried then -and still did- about money but Denise didn’t worry the readings and visiting professorships kept coming she had to turn most down.

Then there were cranberries to puree and walnuts to chop and a pumpkin for the pie and dough to roll out on a warped board and wine and a stuffing with the mushrooms just picked and garlic croutons from a toasted French bread and green beans to snap and yellow onions to peel, all with several bottles of wine poured into green and black coffee mugs from Oaxaca and for all the cutting boards and tables and counters it was hard to know whose mug was whose. There were trilling notes from Mozart on the record player and trilling high British notes too of Denise’s laugh. Nik was very serious about what he did, he did everything very well, it was easy to see why he could do multicolor lithos on his stone and keep everything in register. Rifkind was right, he did look like Omar Sharif and Mitch had some Omar in him too, only gray and balding but trim, even gaunt –and the poet knew the gauntness was from wanting a breakthrough on his novel; it had been a long long time since the first one. And now, since the Spock trial, all his writing and speaking was for the cause. But Denise could do both at once…and more. The whole world came to her, and the world was around her like that kitchen of sounds and smells and mushrooms and cutting boards.

When it was time to put in the stuffed bird Denise called for a toast all around for the bird even as she rubbed it with the dry rub again with paprika. She opened the oven door and then she said:

“Shit, I was sure I lit it before. The pilot must be out again.”

And she took out a wooden kitchen match to light it and she crouched down and reached in and that’s when the gas exploded in a loud yellow flash and she screamed. Her eyebrows were gone and for a moment she held hands to her mouth and screamed again and then she throw herself into the poets arms not Mitch’s and not Nik’s and held on for dear life for what seemed to the poet a long time.

BUFFALO

2011-03-20T14:41:00.001-07:00

On the Tuesday night before Thanksgiving, the poet stayed on Beacon Hill and they were up a long time in bed talking about her family by candlelight.

Kathy came from a big family in Buffalo.

“How many will you have for Thanksgiving?” the poet asked without much interest in the answer.

“Oh, at least 16. Mother always invites soldiers from the base. I started dating one of them in high school but dad thought I was too young. He went to Nam. He’s on his second tour.”

“Was he deep?” asked the poet.

“Shouldn’t you be asking me how he is? Isn’t that what you’re worried about, how everyone is doing over there?”

“Why are you so damned good?” he asked.

“Maybe I want to teach you a lesson."

“Which lesson?”

“Oh, you’ll have to find out,” she said.

“That’s so corny…”

“…and corny isn’t good for poets or photographers is it?” she asked.

“Too straight to the point."

“Well, maybe you can teach me to be complicated.”

“Maybe Rifkind can teach you that. He is very complex.”

“I’ve noticed. We’ve been talking about the Bunker Hill shoot. He’s not sure he can associate himself with Sue Katz. I couldn’t follow why.”

“Don't try.”

“He told me he was going to Memphis for some wedding. A younger brother.”

“He told you that?”

“Why shouldn’t he?”

“It’s complicated,” said the poet.

“And I’m not?” she raised an eyebrow and pressed against him.

“No, you are very complicated.”

“Only not my ideas, right?”

“I want you to tell me more about Rifkind. Who is this brother in Memphis?”

“I said there was a wedding in Memphis. That’s the first thing I need to teach you: don’t jump to conclusions. Maybe the bride is from Memphis. I don’t know. Rifkind did tell me that his father is some kind of art dealer from somewhere. And that he sent this brother, maybe his name is Billy, an oil canvas for a wedding present, a big one, davenport size, and told Billy it was by someone important, someone named something like Musseldorf or Musselman, it was signed and there was even a certificate of authenticity.”

“Never heard of him, not that I would.”

“Neither did Billy. So he checked it out. Turns out there's no such painter.”

“And I thought I was Rifkind’s best friend. He doesn't tell me anything.”

“He told me you are his best friend.”

“Christ this is crazy. Let’s screw again,” said the poet.

“Ok, but then I have to go to sleep. I work the day before Thanksgiving. You sure do like to talk when you want to talk.”

“Who said I wanted to talk?”

“There you go again,” said Kathy.

“Tell me one other thing, just anything.”

“OK. I sold some prints.”

“Which?”

“To Gordon. I went over to the Grolier to show him my Creeley in three quarter view from the side with the eye patch. He loved it and bought two outright. Said it was better than the Black Mountain picture everybody loves.”

“Very nice. Historic. I mean the photo is of historic value. Maybe it will be that way with Rifkind and Sue Katz -or not Sue Katz- and O’Connor.”

“Maybe.”

“While I was there Gordon gave me a note. It was from a woman named Babs. She wanted a print of that photo of you. We met for coffee at Brighams. I sold her a print for ten bucks.”

“How nice of her.”

“It wasn’t her fault. I like her. Don’t worry about anything that isn’t worth worrying about.”

“What’s worth worrying about?”

“That’s what I have to teach you, if I choose to keep you around.”

“Can I come to Buffalo with you?”

“No.”

He wondered what he would have done if she had said yes.

“Let’s screw,” he said.

“It’s late. You have to learn when you’re ahead.”

“Is that another lesson?” he asked.

“SSSHHHHHHHH”

“You get people talking, maybe by hushing them. You even get goddam Rifkind talking.”

And she'd got Babs talking too, but he wasn’t going to talk about that, not with either of them, he was just going to think about it for a while.

"Who gets married over Thanksgiving, that's nuts!" he said.

MEMPHIS

2011-03-18T06:19:00.000-07:00

The poet ran into Maria in Central Square. She was headed to the Greyhound Station and then to Jersey; she was leaving a few days early for Thanksgiving; she had just been with Rifkind at the Mole office on Magazine Street; she was in a hurry and was taking her fare money out of her pocket and then she disappeared down the steps in front of Dunkin Donuts.

The poet tracked down Rifkind at the Mole office, pecking away on a clattery mad-ball Selectric with his left hand with his right arm in a sling. He didn't pick up his head.

"Mitch and Denise want you to come for Thanksgiving up to Temple. We leave on Wednesday. Nik will be there too."

"You mean Omar?"

Nik was very handsome dark and handsome like Omar Sharif in Dr. Zhivago and Rifkind called him Omar. This might have been preparatory to Rifkind having a difference with Denise or Mitch or both suspected the poet, though none was officially brewing.

"You gotta go somewhere," said the poet.

Rifkind shook his big woolly mammoth head. It had snowed a little and he had added a long red scarf to his mangy blue blazer. He looked at home in winter, like he was ready to face into a blizzard, maybe already leaning a little, but it hadn't come yet.

"Naw, I'm headed to Memphis," he said.

The poet knew there was no point in asking a woolly mammoth why it is going to Memphis for Thanksgiving, so he didn't give the woolly mammoth the satisfaction.

PERSISTANCE IN MATTERS NOT REVOLUTIONARY

2011-03-18T03:07:00.001-07:00

“Why not do that joint chapbook?” asked the poet, “I even have a title: Beacon Hills Blues.”

Kathy wasn’t impressed.

“I didn’t know this side of you,” she said.

“I didn’t know I had sides.”

“You have sides.”

“Like what?”

“Like a persistent side.”

“That sounds pretty good, if you ask me.”

“Hmm…El Capitan Persistente!” saluted Kathy.

“Well what of it?”

“El Capitan del Chap Book!”

For the week or so since all the rock throwing at the Instrumentation Lab and since running the gauntlet from the paddy wagon to the holding tank with Maria right behind him along with Sam and Fish and the rest (Rifkind then on his way to Cambridge City celebrating a broken right forearm), the poet had been wondering what it would be like to have a real difference with Kathy, a loud difference, like the one he had nearly walked in on between Maria and Rifkind. He would have a loud disagreement. Maybe word would get around about it. After all, he had introduced Kathy to O’Connor who was the current designated Sue Katz approved companion to Sue Katz and so Sue might catch wind of the poet's bad behavior and that would suit the poet right about then. It might get Sue Katz out of Columbia Street. She had recently hung a manifesto of sorts, a kitchen-wall-hung weekly cooking and cleaning schedule in angry black flair pen that designated Sundays as free days, even though Sue was only at Columbia Streets on Tuesdays and Thursdays for a kind of cross cultural pollination of -or with- O’Connor. Sue Katz approved of Michael not because his consciousness was particularly advanced, it wasn’t, and not because he went to Chomsky’s in Lexington for dinner or to Lettvin’s frog lab for remedial counseling, but because O’Connor was able to openly discuss his shortcomings, not with the kind of upper middle class obsequiousness so well defined in Mao’s Redbook essay On Liberalism and exemplified by Diogo her previous consort, but with the tobacco road slam, bam thank you mam of a North Carolina two squares and a bed enlisted man. O’Connor was real.

The poet wanted to be real too, but he didn’t know how to pick a fight with Kathy until he first knew more about the guy from before who was deeper than he was, so that the poet could understand where he had gone wrong for the last two weeks, and how he could get it right before the lottery when he might need a woman. And he couldn't count on Babs. Any girl who could be the way she was with him could be that way with an intern or three, with greater accessibility.

But Kathy was right: he was persistent, and for no good reason. Maybe he just didn’t like to be told no, that's all. And it was a bother to be understood by a Polish girl with a moon face and corn silk hair which only took about two seconds to wash and put up in what looked more like a dishrag than a Marilyn Monroe towel.

“I have a plan for a shoot, probably better than spending time on some chapbook,” said Kathy.

“What’s that?” asked the poet.

“O’Connor and his golden curls in black and white. And Sue Katz. And Rifkind. What faces. I like faces. On Bunker Hill. You know, a photo essay, a study really.”

“What kind of bullshit is that?”

But Kathy wouldn't take notice; there wasn’t going to be any disagreement, loud or otherwise.

“Huh…?” she asked and she poked him in the ribs with her lens cap.

“Well, good luck, Rifkind likes his privacy. I’ll give you his address, ask him.”

“It was his idea. But you decide. We could work on the chapbook. But I need someone to hold lights.”

A CLARIFICATION AMOUNTING TO A RUMINATION ON A GREAT MAN WITH WHOM RIFKIND DID NOT HAVE A DISAGREEMENT

2011-03-17T08:22:00.000-07:00

PREFACE TO THE CLARIFICATION (you can skip this)

Footnotes and clarifications should be unnecessary. After all no one remembers much of what they read or hear anyway, as the tour guide on the battleship Missouri reminded me in Pearl Harbor a couple of days ago. So then why sweat the details, like they mattered. This is not a dissertation. It's a regurgitation and no one is checking details.

But still qualifications and shades of meaning might mean something some day, even if they don't to the author. The author tends to crash ahead, come what may, not all that different from the poet, who Denise labeled a Taurus, breaking things. The author is not big on shades of meaning, let it be said for the record and has no commitment to accuracy. And he despises depictions of mental states, even though they be phenomenologically equivalent to the destruction of entire nations -though morally irrelevant. Yet this is a profoundly moral book. It's all about the difference between right and wrong, about who is an asshole and who isn't while maintaining ethical distance. That is, the author does not deal with the right and wrong of right and wrong. He has opinions, nto justifications. Justice is far from the domain of this non-dissertation.

Justice is the domain of Rifkind, as you will know by the presence of the great sack of wriggling books under which Rifkind labors, thoughts that struggle for his attention and compete for his soul. Rifkind comes from the forest, from the lawless lands, to give us laws, he is a law giver, not a law codifier, he does not write he speaks. And you have heard him speak of justice with just words, although we have not provided the actual words, because we cannot without providing the context of the times but we have provided him with gestures of the arms for example which have invested the words with justice. We have given you Rifkind preaching into the whirlwind to obscure his actual words that you may provide them so that we do not disappoint you, as that would not serve justice to the times or to Rifkind.

Our presentation is an heuristic device. If this image of Rifkind is not perfect, then it is close enough. And if his justice was not justice, it was close enough to justice to be honestly confused with it. We can not close the gap any more, between Rifkind and Rifkind and between justice and justice. We create these characters, true to life, and let them live and hope that they are what they claim to be, to be Rifkind, to be the poet, to be Maria, to be justice. We want to do them justice and we want them to do justly or to die, or at least to go quietly if they do not. We want them to be good kings, that is we want them to rule if they are deserving and to otherwise to be banished and die. And so we make the attempt, heuristically. We have no algorithm that informs them and makes them live here in the world with us; we approximate them, we model them in an odd way and hope that serves, that it stands for them. For we would not lose them for all time, we would not leave you with a false impression, unless that falsehood better served the truth than truth itself. We refuse to follow Rifkind to Hiroshima if we cannot travel to Tokyo, which we cannot. And we will create no illusions, we will not imagine Hiroshima from here in Honolulu. That would be long, and you would find us out. No, we must discover Rifkind, we must murder him if we will, face to face. We will make distinctions, even as we crash ahead. We will be cool in battle, with names and homes, like the Argives we will be remembered individually and collectively. We serve justice here.

CLARIFICATION (possibly unnecessary to the work)

The preceding serves as a preface to our planned clarification. (And isn’t all history a preface to a clarification, namely that today is, and always must be, the only possible day of light unto the nations?) But more specifically and finally to come to the point: when earlier the author spoke of Rifkind’s disagreements with great men, Louis Kampf had been included in their number. But let the record show that Rifkind had no Disagreements with Louis Kampf. Rifkind had a special place in his affections for Louis Kampf. Why this was, no one can be sure today. Rifkind had few affections, and he didn’t squander those. Perhaps Rifkind appreciated Louis’ attendance at RL SDS meetings and at NAC meetings and his taking to the streets at the I Labs. It was one thing to go to a peace rally on the Common, to march down Commonwealth Avenue, to speak like Chomsky before 10,000 or 50,000 and to call for an End to the War, even at the beginning when everyone thought you were crazy. But to fight in the streets, that was something else. Louis was the only professor who had come into the streets for the November Actions. There was Denise of course with Mitch, but she was a visiting professor.

And then maybe Louis was more modest than the others: Chomsky reinventing the idea of cognition and the categories of the mind; Lettvin re-characterizing perception itself; Denise reforming the poetic line with a new organic punctuation of the human breath; Morrison at Kresge delving into the meaning of Hiroshima after having carried a nuclear core in his lap in the back seat of a Chevy on the way to the Alamagordo test; Zinn writing a new American History; Minsky and Pappert creating Artificial Intelligence; Drefus fighting for the role of human intuition in all of this. These were thinkers of historical proportion to be reckoned with, visionaries like Rifkind himself. Rifkind had no choice but to view them critically, to test their ideas against his, to subject their propositions to his cruel analysis in the white heat of his laboratory.

And then there was Louis Kampf. He had stood up for a new kind of teaching of everyday students at the Modern Language Association. He wanted peace taught in the schools, and a different perspective conveyed of history. And Louis had been arrested at national meeting of the MLA and it was written up in Time Magazine. In TIME! Louis was of the common man, with a common touch and this Rifkind appreciated greatly.

As the years had gone on, not too many years, though Rifkind was in his fifth or maybe sixth undergraduate year, without his exactly meeting graduation requirements for any particular discipline, Rifkind had inevitably found errors, sometimes fundamental ones, in the approaches of Chomsky, of Lettvin, of each of them individually and severally, and had been forced to retreat and take up new lines of inquiry, while carrying on his back an ever greater burden of text books until, the previous summer, Rifkind had taken a footlocker of books to Cambridge Common and sold more than 200 of the less critical tomes. But the most important he held on to for dear life, even if they contained grave errors, like Pappert’s diatribe against Dreyfus, which among other criticisms ridiculed Dreyfus for believing there would never be a true chess playing machine. But as far as the poet’s understanding could penetrate, Rifkind was enamored with Pappert’s attack more than his argument for the intelligent machine, or so Rifkind would explain in confidence to the poet on the long walks along the esplanade when time permitted and the barricades safely left unmanned.

At the time of the November Actions Rifkind was formally installed in Course 10, Mathematics, since Rifkind had decided that in the last analysis discipline best expressed the core of his thinking and was most general in approach approach; yet when the poet asked he learned that the mathematicians closest to Rifkind’s heart were Des Cartes, Kant, and Bertrand Russell, since they embraced both philosophy and mathematics, making great discoveries in both realms, which were, as Rifkind pointed out, really ONE. The weight of books like Principia Matematica greatly added to Rifkind’s burden, but when asked he was quick to point out that, at least that fall, the thin volume of Claude Shannon’s written at Bell Labs on Information Theory, perhaps shed more light on our condition than any other in his possession, that he would take to a desert isle along with a basic chemistry text in order to there restart civilization –and oh yes a transcript of his course history at the Institute, most from his sophomore year on graduate courses taken by special permission of the Professor, that he might recall from whence he had come.

CORN SILK

2011-03-15T09:48:00.000-07:00

When the poet was arrested at the November Actions and even struck a few times with a night stick when he ran the gauntlet from the paddy wagon to the jail holding tank, it didn't impress Kathy much, at least she didn't have a lot to say about it. His overnight stay in jail didn't seem to add to his gravitas in her mind. The poet wondered who it was from the past that he was battling, and why he was bothering to battle in the first place.

He spent a whole Saturday with her, accompanied her to the laundromat, to shop for groceries at Haymarket and then he sat at her yellow Formica kitchen table with Hiccup rubbing against his leg and purring while she cleaned the bedroom; but Kathy was unconvinced, even when he handed her a poem dedicated to her.

The poet proposed a collaborative work of her photos, the ones not of poets but of Beacon Hill windows and doors that looked like gray and white New Directions Books covers (he told her), along with some of his latest work written on Beacon Hill. As Kathy mulled it over, the poet considered the risks: such a publication might have raised questions with Babs, who was on 12 hour rolling shifts at Mass General. She would call him when she was off, at whatever hour, as needed when she wanted. She lived in Charlestown, not easy to get to. But he was kind of on call ... from time to time. She complained that the interns were all sex fiends, most of them were Harvies. That bothered the poet somewhat.

“Why did you sign this?” asked Kathy, “do you think you'll be famous one day? I'll bet Denise doesn't do that with poems she gives people.”

It dawned on the poet that maybe Kathy actually kind of believed in him and wanted to straighten him out, even if he wasn’t that deep. Her moon face was Polish, not at all sharp, no angles at all, very plalin. But maybe she did know stuff. Her blond hair was so fine, you almost couldn’t get a hold of it, like corn silk, when she put it in a pony tail there was nothing to it, just her moon face.

Maria’s thick black hair –he had tousled it more than once like she was a tomboy, and she never objected, she even laughed. The poet hadn't tousled her hair since he ran down the stairs that day and she had called after him thinking he was Guttermouth. The poet had often seen her after that day with Rifkind. But she didn't look like she wanted her hair tousled anymore by anyone and anyway he was afraid if he tousled her hair it might burn his hand and he would kiss her hard on the mouth.

THE REVOLUTIONARY YOUTH MOVEMENT II (RYM II)

2011-03-15T09:14:00.001-07:00

A couple of days later the poet went to a meeting of the November Action Committee. The Helicopter Project revealed by Rifkind had gotten the Institute and whole city coalition into an uproar and Rifkind was in his prime, speaking from the front, the side, the back and the middle of the meeting in great blasts with working man’s intonations in an all purpose accent. That accent had everything including New York and Jersey in it, he threw in everything but the kitchen sink with more toppings, more onions peppers lettuce tomatoes mozzarella than an Italian Sub from the North End. He blew from Fenway and Jamaica plains with a touch of Roxbury picked up at the Welfare Mothers takeover –and by then he had met Gene and Audrey Jones from the Black Panther Party, unofficially.

Rifkind articulated the latest position RYM II grown out of SDS (but not the PL Progressive Labor faction): that the Days of Resist, of going to jail (Mitch Goodman was there at the meeting who had been with Dr. Spock in the Boston trial of Resist conspirators who had counseled avoidance of the draft laws) were over, that we weren’t here to protest the war by refusing the draft, we were here, in the first place, to make a revolutionary end to the war, but finding that impossible we would lead a movement of direct action against the war machine and would disrupt it directly, not symbolically, and that we would be joined by everyone facing the lottery on December 1 and we would make the country unmanageable for Nixon and he would then have no choice but to cut his losses and end the war.

“We aren’t going to the I-labs to protest, were are going there to shut it down, and if they come after us, we will fight back!”

When the meeting broke up four or five hours later, Sue Katz stood up in her flak jacket and requested a women’s only caucus of Bread and Roses. The poet noticed that Maria drifted in the direction of the doors of the lecture hall commandeered for that purpose, guarded by Sue Katz herself and a couple of others.

PLYING THE DEPTHS

2011-03-15T08:45:00.001-07:00

In the morning the poet was in no hurry to leave; he would have stayed all morning, only he assumed Kathy would leave for work, and he could then think things through alone, stare down Hiccup and them maybe eat something on the corner. But Kathy had the day off. She wanted to do a photo shoot of the poet, with the Poet in his understhirt and some sheets, how he was, like a goddam pinup. She handed the poet her cigarette for a prop and that was the last straw.

“What’s the matter,” she asked.

“Forget it, just not in the mood for a picture.”

She got very quiet. She was really quiet to begin with, and she now wrapped the leather strap from her camera case around her wrist and fingers till they looked like phylacteries.

“Sometimes I wonder if you are really deep,” she said.

Now it was the poet’s turn to be quiet.

“How so?”

“You know, just not that deep.”

He forced a laughed and asked:

“You see all that in your camera?”

“Oh no, I meant your poems.”

That was a tough thing for a mass-saying Polish girl to say to the poet’s face. She wasn’t angry or even afraid of his walking out. She was very neutral, and when the poet thought about it she was always kind of neutral, in a dispassionate fair sort of way. That made it worse. He wanted to mount a defense, but how? How do you convince someone you really are deep?

“Why did you put up that 8” by 10” at the Grolier?” he asked.

“It was good, don’t you think? Gordon thought so.”

“Yes,” he considered.

“Well?”

“It was deep, I thought,” he said.

“It was kind of deep,” she said, “and the deep part was mine.”

The poet reached over and patted her hand and pulled at it a little but she held on to the leather strap tight like they were reigns and he was a horse.

So, he certainly hadn’t been the first poet or the first whatever to come down the Mass Pike. Of course there had been other ones, but what got him was that at least one of those other ones was deeper, maybe much deeper than he was, at least in her opinion. Now that was something to think about for a while. To be less deep than someone she had loved. That wasn’t most likely very deep. Or maybe Kathy was the deep one. He decided to think about that for as long as it took.

He stayed for a while, he talked louder than usual while he made her eggs, those brown ones they had out east that seemed small as pigeon eggs but good for those small eastern refrigerators. Then he went away as soon as he could and maybe even less deep than Hiccup who saw him out.

POSSIBLE SHORTCOMINGS OF WALDEN TWO (or, SKINNER WAS A HARVY)

2011-03-15T08:10:00.000-07:00

Hemingway would have ended this story here, or written the whole thing from Gutter’s point of view, or, to overcome Gutter’s two dimensionality (physics and abrasive crudeness) converted him into a wild but free African beast roaming the outskirts of the poet's weak consciousness and under exercised soul, relying on the poet's ultimate sacrifice to the beast to give the poet meaningful content. The poet to date has been sort of wimpy after all.

But the author is condemned to write of the poet and to reveal his substance despite his cuckolding by a woman who had never loved him or slept with him. Alternatively, we could breathe hopE into the poet’s heart. But these things are not up to us; we are not writing the script for Shake and Bake, we are writing of what was, in the world of today, of the earthquake and tsunami of March 10^th. We are impelled in this essay to give equal weight to the mental processes of the poet and to that city in Japan half of whose souls today are found missing, likely carried off to sea, one thousand washed up this morning.

And so, we have the immediacy of fact and we have no living Newman, McQueen, or Heston to play the poet; further complicated by the fact that at the time the poet flung himself down the stairs near Symphony Hall the term “mental processes” had a greater significance than today in that it could be understood in Freudian and phenomenological terms (the equivalence in principle of the phenomenon of the disappeared Japanese Village and the mental process of the poet) but that today we are behaviorists and thus the victims ultimately of Walden Two, though we deny it … and so that it may not be possible to convey to the reader the so called feelings of the poet being condemned to observe his behaviors only.

But we can report the words and actions of the poet immediately following the incident near Symphony Hall. Emerging from the front door and charging down the front steps he did not encounter either Guttermouth or a white lion. Relieved at this, the oet ran all the way to the Symphony Orange Line stop, ran down the wooden treadle escalator and through the wooden turnstile broad and heavy as any baluster aboard Pequod; and there seated on a bench he there wept, did our poet. And while we cannot know his mental processes (even Dreyfus and Minsky and Pappert could agree on that much) and while we have no specific behavior (at least at that time) to associate with Hope we do have the evidence of the poet’s words spoken out loud:

“Maybe she’ll call me.”

But such hopes are vague and evaporate in an instant, often in less than forty years. We have limited ourselves to what the poet could have known, could have experienced as of that time, and attempted to report our facts in context, refusing all anachronistic contamination, all conceit, and all dependence on input from you, the reader.

So for example today we might present the poet with a chart with ten faces, little smiling faces, starting with a happy face on the far left and a very sad one on the far right and ask him to self-report and circle the face most closely resembling the amount of pain being experienced by him there on the bench at Symphony. But this would not be to our standard. We can only report the facts: that the poet proceeded on the Orange line to Park Station, purchased there underground a pastrami sandwich and Record American and then changed for the Red Line to Charles Station, and walked down the elevated platform stairs past Charles Street Jail ancient as the Bastille and ran to Kathy and his tears dried and he began to sneeze violently when she opened the door and took him in.

TURETTES AND GARGOYLES

2011-03-15T08:06:00.000-07:00

In early November the poet headed over to Rifkind’s turreted building near Symphony Hall, the one with the rust stained gargoyle rain gutters and tiles in the foyer from the same batch as the half inch to the side hexagonals in Rifkin’s drain clogged bath. The gargoyles, the turrets, and the four heavily carved flights of banisters always reminded the poet of the lair of the wicked witch of the west in the scene where she hovered over her crystal ball with the winged monkeys and put Dorothy to sleep in a great meadow.

The poet was thinking about Maine. Denise had invited him to join her and Mitch and Nik there for Thanksgiving. The poet was happy about that; and he wanted to retrieve the deer skull that Denise had held up like Banquo and bring it home to Columbia Street and put it on his cinder block and board book shelf. He thought Babs would like that. Babs was a nurse and liked physical stuff, like bodies and pulses and blood in bags and probably skulls.

On the fourth landing the poet hesitated. There were loud voices, a racket. Not a banging racket, but voices, on the loud side. The voices came through the thick oak door distorted like under water and then subsided and then came back. There was a male voice, like under water and then nothing and then the same submerged male voice. In between, the poet decided there must have been a female voice that didn’t penetrate through the gloom, the gloom of a weedy bottom green lake from back home, one you didn’t want to touch the bottom of with your feet. But judging how his voice got louder the other unheard voice must have disagreed. But one thing was for sure, there was no confederation going on there and then someone came running down the hall with the sound of plastic laces on hard wood and the poet stepped back expecting the door to swing open and then he turned tail and flung himself down the stairs and then he heard her when she hung over the railing and shouted down but he was against the wall and plunging like a mad circus horse from a platform into a pool.

“Gutter?” she called

“Gutter is that you?”

APOLOGIA

2011-03-14T13:20:00.000-07:00

As the author watches the news here in Honolulu and learns more about the disaster in Japan, about the quake, the tsunami and the possible nuclear meltdowns he regrets some his earlier writings, particular the recitation of the old joke about Shake and Bake. The movie Earthquake was a 1974 thriller and Towering Inferno starred Steve McQueen and Paul Newman the same year. We did always associate these big screen disasters with the conflict in Southeast Asia.

But i must issue this apology because it is important that the moral stance of the author in these matters not be undermined; after all the author didn't create these natural disasters, or set about cynically to use them in this work; and the author had nothing to gain thereby, plainly needing Hiroshima as a scene for this work, as a stage and having invested a significant number of frequent flier miles in traveling to the set; if anyone were responsible, it would be Rifkind, but we will never know. It might be that Rifkind is lost. He could be washed out to see. An eighty year old man was saved ten miles out to see today clinging to the roof of his home.

But the moral stance of the author, as perceived by the reader whether fairly or not is all important; because if the author is taken to be morally bankrupt this will reflect negatively on the poet and on Rifkind, since they were past associates of the author and could be diminished thereby. This in the time before Shake and Bake. Before Charlton Heston walked the wrecked streets of LA in 1974. These were no grade B movies, not when McQueen and Newman and Heston put their names on them and remember Newman was against the war. So, the author would not be the first to capitalize on disasters, his problem primarily arising from the need to exploit real ones, like Hiroshima (in the planning stages) and then the recent events.

You will ask, why not go back and edit out your childish foolery. The author has considered exactly this possibility and rejected it; the author wishes to set down this case before you at it emerged, then and now. To lay the human condition before you. To be a reporter on the scene, though the scene shifts violently in time and space like the bottom of the sea recently shifted off Japan resulting in all that we now behold, to our horror. We don't believe it. It's like a movie.

I could make excuses, after all, we are survivors of the Tsunami here in Wakiki Hilton. They asked us to go above the fourth floor, and we did. There are consequences: we must find a new set and use our existing footage. We will not edit out a word that we have written. This is a documentary of sorts.

But the author is concerned about his moral authority. He would not be confused with the poet. He would not be confused with Rifkind. He wants them to live and die on their own, clinging to their own roofs ten miles out to sea. He will not reach out to save them. That is not his job, to that extent he is immoral. The author cannot effect outcomes, he can only tell us what he sees, though in the telling he may gives windows into his soul, like the windows in the window fuses in the apartment above the drug store, where the silver wire can be seen intact or burned through.

Yet the author is concerned about perception. The author has now entered the record himself, the lawyer who has been deposing the poet, Rifkind, Maria (she refuses to cooperate), Guttermouth (that slime ball) and there rest has now been, if only for a moment, deposed. And he has been revealed, not as a Director or Producer of a Shake and Bake epic, a work of thrilling fiction, but as a meddler and a cynic in the truest sense. And even this he does not regret, if only you will promise to judge the poet and Rifkind on their own terms. In other words, it is OK for you to shoot the messenger, but please don't shoot the message. Wait until you here the whole story.

And now we must offer one additional defense of the author. Since Whitman's introduction to Leaves of Grass, the Bard imposed upon all of us, all of his children, a certain obligation to celebrate this great nation and continent, and to love it for its people. We were commanded to speak with a democratic voice. I am sorry dear reader to invoke the Gods in my defense, but i have no choice.

To carry on the heave of impulse and pierce intellectual depths and give all subjects their articulations are powers neither common nor very uncommon. But to speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insousiance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art.

That is to say that we are commanded by the Bard not to be cynics but to love our subjects like the out of doors love our subjects. Yet, the author has allowed a certain cynicism to creep in to his own voice, as distinct from the voices of his subjects. As a reporter this is inexcusable.

Except, a last defense, a final trench in an age when trench warfare has been made obsolete by air power. And that is the Salinger defense, kind of like a formal defensive maneuver in chess that has been named. Like, the Abromovich Defense. The Salinger Defense is when you are an author with a very honest, disarmingly honest almost child like voice, that says real cynical things but in a very forgivable way because the things said are true and also because the author has fought in a terrible war, survived normandy, and the hurtgen woods, and also liberated Dachau and arrested SS guys. Then, the author can let a little good nature cynicism creep into his voice and speak offhandedly about really terrible crisis.

Now, once the Salinger Defense was offered, many have used it since, without having been at normandy, the hurtgen woods, or dachau.

Ok, it's not a strong argument. But i am desperate that you read on.

A CHANGE IN PLANS

2011-03-13T08:04:00.001-07:00

No sooner has your attention been claimed by the intimations of imminent sex by inexperienced insensitive post adolescent beings, but that our plot line must be radically altered. Because our trip to Japan to seek Rifkind in Hiroshima and there to murder him has been cancelled.

The state department has warned against all nonessential travel to the nation of Japan. As if the earthquake and tsunami were not enough, we have three nuclear reactors in possible meltdown.

Reminds us of that old joke, how did they play the double feature TOWERING INFERNO and EARTHQUAKE on the movie marquis? answer: shake and bake!

It is inconceivable that Rifkind would bring about these calamitous events, just to throw us off course, to prevent us from carrying out this homicidal enactment; but that doesn't make it unlikely.

After all, Rifkind is spoken of not because of the logic of his behavior, but for the deception of his speech that has its foundations many layers below the surfaces we have found so impenetrable as of yet. That Rifkind were capable morally of awakening sleeping gods, of calling upon the tempest, of invoking the rumbling earth and sea, of loosing the flames of Vulcan's forge is no impossibility to those who have bothered to follow this story; in fact, his intentions to do precisely this to achieve his ends, specifically the end of the conflict in Southeast Asia is much the subject of this essay; the only remaining question then is if he were actually capable of such machinations in the physical universe as we know it, and if so would he use such enormous powers just avoid me in Hiroshima.

What kind of human being, putting aside his possible depravity for a moment, is Rifkind? And, stranded in Hawaii en route to my rondevous with him and with destiny, how shall i pursue him next? And this in the context that the earthquake, tsunami, and possible nuclear meltdown are not literary devises but actual events independently verifiable by various United Nations Inspectors, including nuclear regulatory agencies; and furthermore enhancing our story is the verifiable fact that this trip to Japan to murder our anti-hero was physically undertaken in the real world by the author before the actual earthquake in the sea off Japan, and is therefore is not an after the fact enactment, as has been discussed.

ANNOUNCEMENT OF COMING SEX SCENE AND WARNING OF SAME

2011-03-13T06:34:00.000-07:00

I know what you are thinking or will be as soon as you think about it: enough of the poet, of Rifkind, enough of their developing characters, enough of the murderous thought of the poet. Now it is time for a sex scene, with lovers who are now or will be soon fallen.

and if it helps, if it matters, I agree with you, and management is working on it. But before it comes, and even as we create your anticipation of it while simultaneously fulfilling our obligation to warn you of its explicit nature, we must give shape to its nature. And so it is with this heuristic and stochastic work: we first observe the outcome, in this case Sex Scene, and then work backwards from this observed inevitability to its causes in the remote recesses of our subconscious, appreciating that in reality all sexual encounters may be largely random, especially in the case of such as, for example, Rifkind.

And appreciate also the problems inherent to such an undertaking as is proposed: for the author must reveal what has not been seen, an hysterical, nonobjective, and cynical devise. As Denise once said, if you must write fiction walk through your story as if you had a film camera on your shoulder and stick to that. and who wants to carry a movie camera into Rifkind's filthy bedroom near Symphony Hall. I have already reported to you what i heard there that night we were gassed on the common and i spent the night on the floor with my mind racing like Ishmael listening to Queequig snore. But then we also saw with Ishmael Queequig praying to his strange idol, prostrating himself on the floor, and much the same i might provide to you, revealing more specifically how Rifkind prayed idolatrously to his goddess Maria. and then there is the problem of the privacy of persons not named, women for example who lived over the drug store in an apartment with exposed BX cable and see-through window fuses screwed into the wall near the misshapen bathroom door. How were they to know that the man who haunted their door on hungry nights was either Rifkind, or Rifkind to be and that he was in a modern relationship with Maria, a Confederation of two persons talking like dynastic cousins. Why should they be dragged into this history, naked as it were.

And now it has been said: naked. and you know that this could mean that naked truth was coming, but you suspect that it means naked bodies coming. You wonder, will this mean an egalitarian exercise scripted by Bread and Roses personelle, employing mirrors for self-examination imported from the wildly successful Our Bodies our Selves? Will there be homo-erotic aspects, early gropings given the time period of our work of art, of our history. Will these or other gropings be wooden or will the language of the author heighten and his rhythms alter in harmonic resonance with the breathing of the actors standing before the movie camera on the author's shoulder, so that the authors very voyeuristic breathing becomes part of the scene.

and now we have uttered the other word: scene. we have heard sex and we have heard scene. where will the movie camera turn its single eye? on O' Conner still brooding after his release and looking for a new stage to walk on? on the poet and his nurse? we know that she may provide the antidote to Kathy's cat, perhaps at home Babs will open the door for the poet and reveal their a friendly dog. Who knows? For the sake of argument, but not speculatively and with the scientific burden of accuracy in observation, let us take Babs. She has white stockings and white shoes, she is a young nurse. How do you get the damn things off on camera? and then what, buttons? and which button first. It is a tawdry affair. and not at all sensitive, since none of our characters are in the least sensitive. From what you already know they are as far from sensitive as a laboratory rat was from being an experienced lover.

and now we have heard the most important word of all: lover. you demand to know if the poet, if Rifkind, if O'Connor brooding after his release will become sensitive lovers, ever escape their stalking boyhoods, their failed clutchings and survive and grow from the experience of a chance meeting into self realized personages and if, for example, one of the chance meetings already reported will be possibly THE chance meeting of a lifetime. Remember, the author has already reported having children in his current existence, and we all know what that takes.

And all this under the watchful eye of Maria who waits, who tends to us, who understands us and our yearnings even as she bestows kisses kisses on Rifkind and we suspect on Guttermouth though we have no evidence. It is unlikely that she has gone that far, that she has fallen into that abyss.

slowly the camera swings away from Babs and onto Maria. remember her. remember her trembling ever so slightly in the purple light of the Living Theater. Think of her so. Imagine her selecting you, out of the night, like a local draft board, stochastically but with such implications as can resonate through a lifetime. Imagine her, putting her hand in the bowl while General Hersey retired look on to make sure there was no cheating, and that sweet Maria reached in and pulled your time capsule from the bowl.

You have been warned. Such a future is imminent. And if not that one, then another.

CAN ONE SEEK AND REJECT FAME AT THE SAME TIME, WHILE ONE IS STILL AN UNKNOWN (SO FAR) AUTHOR OF GREAT PROMISE.

2011-03-11T10:21:00.001-08:00

Oh Author of Life and Death, fear not for the ways of your child named ME though he knows not what he does, or at least not what he says, and most certainly not what people think he says.

You dear souls will think, now that i speak of that Author of Life and Death, that i herein address Melville and that i am making a radical turn to the left, to the freedom of the sea, where man is small and so is our young democracy and our little ship of state called Pequod steered by an exotic Kenyan Kansan Hawaiian named Barak. In fact, this mulatto captain was NOT born here in Hawaii, this launching ground for our foray against Rifkind, he was born elsewhere and therefore in constitutional terms must give up the helm. Every preacher knows this, and if he does not say it out loud, says it to his Lord. In turning our young democracy over to this mulatto king, we have come closer to the Lord because native peoples are closer to the Lord, just listen to how they and he speak without notes as if driven on by HIS words which HE would only Supply to them if he didn't trust them to speak on their own like an independent American would when he had the fear of God in him. Got it? Well, you should and if you do you know everything, sonny.

But let us remember, that we have not yet set sail, left land, that all that is to come in a few pages. For now, we are safe in Nantucket even if it is a long way from Kansas. And there remember Ishmael must go to church and pray. In a little white seamans church. This is the most overlooked church in America. Think about it. And the most underated.

Think about it, damn you. Think with breadth of mind. The argument is thus: you are about to sail on a small ship and cross the face of God, fighting him and his creation, and daring to leave behind that closet full of bastards in Salem. You are to have the adventure of a lifetime, you are to resolve your destiny, and that of your nation and of your people white and native both with various skills in scary unrecorded situations but that there will be two powerful devices:

first, it is all being taken down so that the screw ups of the white guys and the successes of the colored will be fairly noted, more or less, within proper limits. even those of Barak, if he isn't killed off constitutionally or otherwise, it doesn't matter out there, cause God rules there not some democratic union of absurd republics.

second, before anyone leaves for the great broad sea of God and his atlantic and pacific breaching universe, it must be blessed in a little church in nantucket. by a whole other preacher. Now, how can that be fair? It seems like its just a place where a white guy can cheat a colored guy. How can you have a great big atlantic and pacific God, a democracy that piles continent on top of continent, and then stroll into a little church like that and install some seaman's preacher. What is the real story here?

And that brings us back to our original question in Christ Jesus.

CAN ONE SEEK AND REJECT FAME AT THE SAME TIME, WHILE ONE IS STILL AN UNKNOWN (SO FAR) AUTHOR OF GREAT PROMISE. I would preach that one can not. Either you sail the sea alone and brave or you apply to the preacherman.

On Honesty

2011-03-11T09:42:00.000-08:00

It has occurred to me that it would be improper to proceed too deeply into this undertaking without invoking our Puritanical and Calvinist origins that infuse everything which we are. And in fact I have recently touched on these themes, picked up the hymnal so to speak. I have introduced the argument of right and wrong, for example, and of the work ethic in the image of the selling of cloth diligently and ruthlessly, and also perhaps of Predestination in the earthquake that was launched NOT BY THE AUTHOR but by God. Let us be clear. This earthquake is independently verifiable. You might argue that i wrote of these matters after the fact, after the fact of the earthquake, and that all of this is a sting, that the horse race was run and that i knew that outcome before betting on it. But not so. You know that i will be able to produce dated notes and other records which will prove that i really was in Hawaii enroute to Japan when the big 8.9 earthquake struck. So let us put aside the detective work for now. Let us say, that the discovery work could and would be performed should this work ever see the light of day and be awarded the deserved (well deserved) Pulitzer which it richly deserves, should Rifkind be beautifully and painlessly killed off in a sensible way without excessive violence. Assume that a two week or longer deposition would wear down a lier such as myself if i were a lier. Remember, I am lazy so that you would find me out. I bear the very weaknesses that our Calvinist fathers would eradicate so fear not, i can not stand up to you or yours.

So that: if i have spoken true, and i have, and if it is then so verified by a United Nations Inspection Team including Moslems, then the quake did happen and therefore Predestination has entered this work and therefore we have indeed introduced some of the oldest most faithful to life aspects of the fathers of our founding fathers, and of their hardworking wives as well.

But the author can not leave these hinted at histories to lie mouldering, he must let them work their will with clutching fingers from the pulpit of the the page; there must be Sunday sermon, and hopefully without any of the restless humanism with which Hawthorne corrupted his pilgrim tales. At this point we should stay nearer to Emerson and ask ourselves grand questions, eternal epigrams in process, without allowing Hawthorne to romance us with old demons, witches, and lying preachers. We must first stake out the high moral ground, there will be plenty of time for Hawthorne to remind us that we are descended from murderous judges. For now, it is given to us to judge, never mind our personal or family histories.

So then, we need a question to address this Sunday. And i have selected it for you and published in the glass case outside church in the outrageous belief that it will draw you in to a dark wooden building with a pointed steeple on it that is stuck ruthlessly in the eye of God like a primitive surgical instrument in that time before anesthetics.

Here Goes (sunday sermon):

CAN ONE SEEK AND REJECT FAME AT THE SAME TIME, WHILE ONE IS STILL AN UNKNOWN (SO FAR) AUTHOR OF GREAT PROMISE.

ps: the author will not be subsumed in the sermon by the proof (uncontested of course) of the existence of that much much better Author, our Father who Art in Heaven

Another Convenient but Verifiable Fact Revealed

2011-03-11T09:11:00.000-08:00

You know that i am in Hawaii (Honolulu at the Hilton Village) resting before the trip to Japan where I plan, among other things including but not limited to the purchase of Japanese traditional textiles, to murder Rifkind or otherwise do away with him; and that i wish to perform this ritual cleansing in great Mikva of Hiroshima.

But now there arises a convenient fact, one which is no fiction, and can be independently verified by witnesses to history, a new surprising event as big as an earthquake and as powerful as a tsunami.

And that fact is (draw back the curtain, oh author of life and death) that last night there was a big earthquake followed by a tsunami in Japan. I wouldn't be surprised if our trip is cancelled to Japan, but i believe our American Automobile Association Travel Insurance Policy will cover. In fact, knowing what i paid for it, and what was promised, i believe that i will be able to rebuild Japan under the terms of the policy. But not right away.

It may be that Rifkind has escaped me.

All night the Pacific Tsunami Emergency Response Agency warned all of us on Wakiki Beach to either rush up to diamond head, or if we were in hotels to evacuate to at a minimum the fourth floor. We were on the ninth. So we put on our bathing suits and waited in the dark. There were predictions as to the height of the coming tsunami. It didn't happen that way. Here i was, out of my locale, and the first thing that happens, there's a goddamn earthquake. I should have stayed home. But now that I have ventured out, i must kill him.

There is a danger here, and that is that while i may have won your hearts and minds to the task of killing Rifkind on my trip to Japan, that my developing argument is near to winning you over to a quick hatchet job, a trimming of the payroll born by the treasury of my soul, you may not want to see me as a bloody stalker roaming far and wide. You want this to be about Rifkind, not about me and if i go far afield seeking Rifkind's death it may say more about me than Rifkind, which is not immoral or anything, but may be boring because...because I am...boring as proven by my residency in the middle in the precinct inhabited by my ancient draft board.

But perhaps the Japan thing will still happen. I am waiting to hear from the tour guide. About whether the various hotels still exist. I am not a cynical bastard. I care deeply about what has happened and i am outraged that the Pacific Tsunami Alert Team babbled on all night on TV and then only produced a two foot speed bump on Wakiki beach and that i am looking out now on that precious strip as raked and picked clean as can be, until the seagulls have given up hope of finding even the crumb of a soda cracker therein. In short, i want to share in the suffering to a certain limited extent that will remind me i am blessed to be an American. In the great state of Hawaii.

That said, how will we find Rifkind without seeming tawdry, keeping this all reasonable, maintaining my role as a Sheriff who is forced to put on the badge and clean up the town, the small town, a certain town, at a certain time, probably High Noon, and most assuredly not a homicidal maniac who seeks his prey on seven seas and in a dozen ports of call.

Fortunately, i do not need to decide yet. I will find out shortly if Tokyo still stands, and Kyoto. They are saying already that those Japanese know how to build buildings, but that we don't. Of course we don't, we want ours to fall even without earthquakes. We want them to fall apart because we abandon them, and we want writers who will huff and will puff and will blow the house down. But not the Japs. We burned the whole place down and they brought it back even better. And this country of reinforced concrete and uncrackable bridges will be the backdrop of my universal plot. Not that kind of plot, i mean plot like story not conspiracy.

A CENTRAL, OUTSTANDING FACT NEWLY REVEALED

2011-03-11T08:16:00.001-08:00

There is a central, outstanding fact of this story which is not a story which is a story in itself which the author (and the poet too) wish to newly reveal: and that is that the author and by no coincidence the poet too now reside in the same city which was once and is now called home by both the author and the poet. To be perfectly clear: the author now resides and has for sometime resided in the same town as his local draft board back then.

This is a central and outstanding fact, as well as an improbable and incredible happening. No one who was from the middle back then who has and had a brain now lives, or attempts to live, in the same town in the middle in which their local draft board reigned. And in the very act of writing this story, i am making a claim to having both had a brain and currently possessing one as well.

Unless perhaps that town were Chicago.

Some say that real estate depends on location, location, location and that story telling depends on the local, the local, and the local. But the local in this sense concerns the supplying of facts, of details, of indicators and determinants that show the story tellers knowledge of a particular locale and through such fabricated factuality recreating the locales texture in its text and confounding the two with skill.

But never, ever is the writer to go back home, to a place in the middle, a mindless place, a place of smallness, a place lacking fate other than the inevitable fate of departure from home. It is our place in the world, as Americans, to leave home and not return, unless our homes are cool places to be from. And the author is not from a cool place.

And so this argument, this heuristic masterpiece, this stochastic noise, this white invariability and relentless congruity of the old and new, this simultaneity of then and now and all that was in between is conclusively determined in the cultural sense to be not only the tale of a failed life, but to have been set down by its author in the midst of that very condition: of failure according to the American epic dream.

Let us put it differently. Let us assume i once bought a piece of clothe in a wholesale market for a penny. That i then tore it in half and sold each for a penny. And did so ruthlessly and forcefully time and again. And bought my way out of hell, which was the little shit assed town where i was born and stuck. And i fought and i brawled. Now that would be a story, that would be programmed algorithmically from the bottom up, that begin with first principles and go forth from there, adding conspirators, lovers, buddies and fall guys and perhaps a bit of homegrown philosophy that would make a grown man cry, ultimately. But to live heuristically, that is to say based on unfounded experience, making do as one goes, getting by, bungling, and then having the nerve to tell the story all over again once having arrived at the beginning and to actually LIVE in the place of that beginning, is shameful and unacceptable and not a story at all.

One must be South of Houston or North of Houston but almost no where else. There are other such locals that are known as words but not in their specifics, place words out of the Bible that ring with importance but without scent or taste, places like Midian or Samara, places that speak of worlds to be outlived, places like Canaan or Soho. But never names from the middle that need to be eradicated and to undergo urban renewal, other than those zones required for the building of tales by ever-departed sons and daughters who only turn to them for the same reason that i turn to you now:

to beg your forgiveness, and to beg our collective forgiveness, for abandoning our country and our birthrights to wander strange lands and streets conceived of by immigrants. to write out of a sense of shame is not impossible, though it is unlikely to produce the desired result, namely at least five hours of pleasure on an airplane.

So, let us add nary one more paragraph here, rip no more yards of cloth in half, seek no more profit from our work. Let us leave this as a Calvinist tome, let us praise Godliness and prudence and faith and name our children accordingly and insist that they leave us, abandon us, in the middle from whence we departed and to which we unaccountable returned.

FOR EVERY ACTION THERE IS AN EQUAL AND OPPOSITE REACTION

2011-03-10T06:14:00.000-08:00

That would be Physics which everyone knows in Course 8. You never said "i'm a physics major" they said "i'm course 8". 6 was electrical engineering, 5 chemistry, and so on. This is to say that Guttermouth was Course 8 and to pick up some extra cash he was teaching a tutorial if you were a freshman and you needed help. The poet was getting two bachelors one in Philosophy and one in Electrical Engineering, so the poet was 21 and 6. The poet would say, when asked, which was not infrequently, "I'm 21 and 6." and so he was. Rifkind was undecided. And so he was. Rifkind was from the fields, but from no field in particular, he was from The Fields not from A Field. He could no more have a Course Number than he could have a Local Draft Board. Rifkind disdained such things. Rifkind could have no Home per se, otherwise why would he be bothering me today, devouring chickens in my studio against my desires, invading thoughts, dropping in on me on my private vacations with the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. You might say, Rifkind was one of those persons you just can't pin down and you wouldn't be wrong. But that would be understating the case. We all of us would go home from time to time, back to the middle, back to the west, back to Long Island, back to the Bronx, especially at holidays for the Institute celebrated them too, the national holidays, we not only presented the nation with her rockets but celebrated with her her national moments. Yes, the Institute would close her classroom doors but never the entrance at 77 Mass Ave that was always open 365 days 24 hours so that you could walk down spooky halls beneath domes to your lab at all hours everyday of the year where discoveries were made. Or you might walk down such a midnight infinite hall of granite and find there Maria with her plastic tipped shoe laces clinking on the granite and sparkling through all of hollow time like champagne at the end of the party in the empty ballroom.

But there remained then the interesting question. Where did Rifkind go when we all went home? Sometimes, it was reported, he went no where. But other times, it seemed to us, he did go somewhere. He would say "i'm going to the Village" meaning, we assumed Greenwich Village. Not that we ever asked or ever accompanied him. And there were times when he would disappear. Where did he go? And why did he go there? A few times i asked him and he would look at me like i was an unwashed thing, which i was. It was not difficult to imagine Rifkind traveling, but it was impossible to imagine him traveling to any particular place. He was no real hero, no wandering Odysseus working his way back home, hosteling for the summer. This was a stateless man, a man without bounds, an escapee, a fugitive from justice with a poor cover story. He was here to accompany us on the way to our future but never to arrive with us.

I pushed him once: "where are you going for Thanksgiving?".

He answered "Dallas". But this must have been a lie, for such a man to be from Dallas was an impossibility. Dallas, indeed. Perhaps he lived there on a grassy knoll. Shit, Rifkind was an impossible beast.

And here is an even more puzzling fact. Apparently Rifkind did not go to Europe in the summer. And he did not go to the summer of love in San Francisco. Rifkind was not at Woodstock. No one could track him. No one could identify his whereabouts.

Guttermouth, as i have reported, was Course 8.

Guttermouth was teaching a tutorial and the student who came asked him how to figure out a problem on the physics problem set. There was one problem set for physics, one for chemistry, and one for calculus for each student in the freshman class each week. You had to figure them out each week. The problem was in Newtonian Mechanics and it was about a mother monkey jumping from tree to tree, swinging from tree to tree, and picking bananas and throwing them to her baby monkey on the ground, and what were her equations of motion and how could she more accurately throw her bananas to her children. But Guttermouth thought it was a strange problem and he knew that the Teaching Assistant who wrote the problem worked in the I lab and it didn't take him long to figure out what was what.

And when he figured it out he told Rifkind. That there was a new project at the I lab and it was the Helicopter Stabilization Project. There was a problem. The helicopter gun ships were mounted with lots of gun too spray the ground with but it was hard to aim with all that ammunition spraying and if they could be stabilized they would be better gunships. It wasn't all that different from MIRV really.

At the next committee meeting of the November Action Committee Rifkind talked about the helicopter project. That would get everybody in the streets.

BETRAYAL

2011-03-09T12:40:00.000-08:00

So then let us speculate together on the future of Rifkind and of our world as we know it, of our democracy. We must ask the question, finally, one day, so we may as well ask today.

Will Rifkind betray us?

You want to know, or you will want to know, or you should want to know, if you have half a brain, is this Rifkind one of those characters who betray his movement? Is he some coward out of Conrad? Or is he just a tragic bum out of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade? Will he stumble to the finish line? Or will he cower? Can his life ultimately be seen through the use of a football analogy: does he play his life like its fourth and one and you go for it? Does he take the hard hits? Or he enigmatic to the end.

Yes I believe you are impatient to know, does Rifkind betray us? These things should only be hinted at in a good narrative, they should not be discussed. But this is not a narrative. It is a celebration of our young democracy. It is an argument against Chomsky, who insists on bringing up facts, one fact for each unproven celebratory clause of Whitman, one syntactical flight of fancy for each semantic swoon; but Whitman must win because he makes it up quickly, while Chomsky is tiresome in his erudition.

The job here is to renew our democracy by going beyond the facts. Rifkind could disappoint us by staying true to himself or Rifkind could disappoint us by betraying himself and us. Either way, Rifkind cannot win. But I cannot put it to a vote, only beginnings can be voted on, not endings. Yet, you know I want to kill the poor man, the Rifkind of Old. What did he do, where did he go wrong?

Once you were told that Rifkind did not follow Maria onto the stage with Julian Beck, you may have begun to suspect Rifkind. You did not want Rifkind to be a stiff and neither did I. Having witnessed his intransigence and pride and hesitancy, you have doubts about Rifkind. You worry that he will betray us. And that is why I rewrote the piece on the Living Theater. So that Rifkind did follow Maria onto the stage and he did drop trou’. And you saw and we were all vindicated in our belief that Rifkind was Esau, was a man of the fields, was an original, was indeed a hairy-hided beast and worthy of the name Rifkind. But then why kill him off? Why chase him like we were all the demons of Kenneth Patchen and this the Journal of Albion Moonlight. No, Rifkind is a true anti-hero, he is strong, he is hairy, he pursued Maria onto the cold and naked stage and thereby garnered our respect. He belongs therefore to all of us. He has no local draft board; he belongs to the draft board in the sky. And in the post modern world of the all volunteer army all of his struggles and his failures mean nothing. They don’t need Rifkind to fight and die. They go about it without his help, and without your or his hindrance.

THE LEGION OF HONOR

2011-03-09T08:16:00.000-08:00

We are now in San Francisco en route to Hawaii and Japan, where i have sworn to murder or otherwise do away with Rifkind. I am traveling with the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. Seriously. And we are in San Francisco also to see our son before we had to Hawaii and then Japan. I intend to do it in Hiroshima. Why do i tell you this? Why are poets so ill versed in the ways of the narrative, except for Basho? I tell you, not because i am a poet or a story teller, but i tell you sort of like Babe Ruth told you when he called his shot. He pointed at center field and then...and then the rest is history. What is history is not the long home run but that he called, and so it will be with Rifkind: what will be history will be my telling you that i will murder him or otherwise do away with him in Hiroshima, in the Hiroshimaic Age, before i do so, not the actual doing of it, because no one could care less about that anyway. But i am calling my shot. But we have miles to go before that day, miles to go before we rest.

David was at work and couldn't see us for lunch so we took the 38 Geary from Japan Town down Geary to 33rd Street where we go out and walked up the hill past Lincoln Golf Course and into the Legion of Honor. Joan of Arc and El Cid stood guard outside on bronze horses. Inside were Rodin's The Thinker and 80 other Rodins but there were special shows. A woman from Belgium had made a hundred historical dresses out of paper. It reminded me of Kathy's photograph of me that had become so important historically and in this narrative and i wondered if that Belgian woman could reproduce the photograph also in paper.

There was also a show of Japanese Woodblock Prints from the Edo period and one was entitled Foraging for Mushrooms, and indeed they were foraging for mushrooms and their faces were puffy like mushrooms but their outfits were colorful in the forest. Which reminded me: that beautiful fall, in October, before the November Actions and before my sisters wedding, Denise had asked me to come with Mitch and her for the weekend to their place in Temple, Maine. And i went, we went in the old beater, maybe it was a Saab, and i went to Webster Street in East Boston and then we went up to Temple, Nik wasn't there that weekend. the italic here means that this is a story within a story etc etc. and then just Denise and i went for a walk in the woods to forage for mushrooms.

I have now dropped the italics because we have been in that time, in that cool and wonderful fall forest long enough now and you have been transported to that time and neither you nor i nor the poet nor denise (she is deceased) need the devise of the italics because you have forgotten about the legion of honor and the japanese woodblock print from the edo period and you are with us in the birch and ash woods in Maine then. and Denise knew mushrooms. all about them and how to use them on tenderloin and in soups. but she could find them there in Temple, Maine and she would prance and stoop and stalk and stoop and swoop and then she would pick them from beneath leaves and stones and in hollows find them hidden or not hidden; and when she picked them she knew how to look at their gills and to smell them and to bruise them to see how they bruised and to break them and now how they broke and to smell them and know how they smell and all the ways to know the poisonous ones from the not.

We also came across a very white deer skull and she held it up like Banquo. She did that in a funny way and like an actor with her left hand on her waist and her right holding up Banquo to the sky. She laughed that way she laughed. And she picked more mushrooms that we had with dinner which she cooked on the stove top. She used the stove top more than the oven. She made stews which she stirred with long wooden spoons.

She told us about the time she had poisoned herself, but that was only once and she told us which mushroom and how. She knew what the mistake had been. She had suspected it all along. And she laughed that way again.

COMING OF AGE AT THE GROLIER

2011-03-08T09:03:00.001-08:00

The poet was coming out of the Grolier book shop off Harvard Square when she approached him on the street.

But before that he must have been inside the Grolier you will have guessed correctly. And the poet had been inside the Grolier fishing through that great sea of poetry books which swarmed in the middle of the room on a wide wide square square table with fishers on all four sides. On the other side of the sea was a pretty girl with an oval face and dark hair and a small lovely mouth. She looked at the back of the books more than the cover. She had painted finger nails but she was boyish. Over her shoulder, on the wall Pound and Elliot stared contemplatively from the wall in black and white on the wall. This was serious business all this fishing for books at the Grolier with Gordon sitting in the corner.

And then the poet left, went back out onto the red brick sidewalk that was buckled. And then she was there, the girl with the oval face but now she had on a beige trench coat cinched against the cold and epaulettes on her squared shoulders.

"You are the one in the photograph," she said.

"Which?"

She took him back to the Grollier. And there near the door was one of Kathy's black and whites. The one from the reading for Medical Aide to Indochina at the Charles Street Meeting House, Denise had invited him. The girl wanted to know all about him.

And so the power of photography. At the Blue Parrot she asked him if he liked cats. He said no. That was the right answer. And so the power of photography to recreate the real. She was a nurse. She did not have on a nurses uniform, but she did show him that she was wearing nurses white shoes and nurses white stockings. My God, like Kathy she was a working girl. She was a nurse with white shoe laces.

The future suddenly turned brilliant with a multiplication of photographs and women. His image. This was something to which Rifkind could not aspire. Rifkind swarmed with ideas, the poet swarmed with images of himself provided by others. And perhaps Maria would catch wind of all this, perhaps Maria would come to know this man, this poet who had come to be. This man of the Grolier. This man of the Charles Street Meeting House, this man of the Blue Parrot.

...And that Explains Something.

2011-03-06T14:24:00.000-08:00

This recent confession, of prayer by Kathy, without a full explanation of how that prayer relates to the confession of prayer by the poet, calls to mind what happened that afternoon.

The poet wished to bed her that fall afternoon, if he was to miss class he may as well do something other than think about Stochastic Processes and Heuristic Programming, he may as well.... well, have fun. And he turned to her, suggesting a trip back toward Charles Street and Beacon Hill, with the revelation that rain was expected, that it would be fun to be inside with the world's most filthy cat which liked to spray on her pillow, etc, with a cup of hot potato soup, and a scratchy Motown album which had become their album, etc, etc, etc and that is when she said (and this was maybe an hour after they had left church)

"I was a holy terror."

The poet looked at her. He knew that this statement went all the way back to the church, to her lighting candles, to her being a Pole, etc and that in this there were four important words and important in the following order: I, was, holy, terror.

Holy and Terror really stood out for the poet. These were words spoken not by Kathy but by important authorities: probably her parents, certainly a nun and more than one priest, perhaps by the Pope, perhaps by a Pope long dead, from another time. That is how ancient the words were. They belonged to a Pope of long ago.

And for this, the poet slept with cats, argued with cats, fought with them and missed out on the derivation of formulas that began with conclusions and worked backwards, impossibly backwards to origins, miraculously and brilliantly. This the poet gave up. For experience. All for experience. For to be a poet met risking the punishment of old Popes, and worse.

And so the poet brought fresh insight to the question of Rifkind and Maria. In the Papacy, in Poland, in cats, in all the holy terrors he would find the truth of Rifkind, and in doing so he would have Maria, or he would discard her, but it would be one or the other, but he would be a man of experience who would stand up to her, he would make himself stand and she, Maria, would see him stand.

CONFESSION

2011-03-06T14:11:00.001-08:00

I set this down now, only to remember it, after you my readers have gone on to better detective novels, with better characters, who defeat bad persons time and time again. So, this one is for me.

The poet was one day walking with Kathy, the Polish girl with the 35mm Leica, when she ducked into a Catholic Church. The poet followed her. She made a donation. She lit a candle. She knelt. She did all of that. She even covered her head with a scarf like a Polish grandmother.

When she came out, back onto the steps, the poet followed her and she photographed him. It was the first time she had photographed him when he was really looking at her. He looked at her quizzically wondering why she had ducked into the church, whether she did that all the time, or if she had something on her mind, like him, like the poet, if she had him on her mind; in that expression of quizzicallity we have the famed photograph that has come down to us today, the one of the poet that has come to identify the poet, and that is the answer to the question: why is that damned Polish peasant girl in this work of art, anyway. So now you know. But take no pleasure: now that she is in the story, this lover of filthy cats and potato soup and ducks blood and enemy of nuns, this photographer of poets, now that she is in the story she is here for the duration, she is the past perfect tense of this declination of verb "to remember".

"The Undevout Poet is Mad"

2011-03-06T13:21:00.000-08:00

...or so said STC. Similarly, STC said, or said of those who said "The undevout Astronomer is Mad".

This brings us to the question of prayer and the poet, a subject i have avoided.

You suspect me, you tell me that prayer has no place here. But we are not yet done building this place, you and I. This tent over Rifkind.

Now, you suspect me. You suspect that the tent over Rifkind is in actuality some sort of Hebrew tent, some tent of the desert, some place for monotheistic religions to be born on clear mooned dry blue nights. And furthermore, by association, you begin to wonder about my using the word Church as in Arlington Street Church. And then again, you remember that the lottery has been posited and that it was coming on December 1st, and you know, as a careful reader, that the November Actions were also being planned and so therefore you know the lottery is not all that far off which is, or is likely to be, or to provide an entry point into the question of prayer in this work of art, and furthermore the question of prayer in the modern world and in the post modern world and in the pre modern world and also in the modern post-world (should we decide to destroy the world in modern times and thereby create it (the modern post-world) but let us leave that question to Hiroshima which we shall see soon enough.

So lets come to the point. The poet did pray, even before the Lottery was announced. And the poet does still pray. When the poet prays, he speaks to someone; maybe someone like Buber's Thou. The poet is rebellious in his prayer, secretive, almost crass in his aloofness as he goes about it, like an elderly museum docent explaining a piece of David Smith sculpture to the skeptical clutch of viewers. The poet prays away, he does, he prays for Rifkind of Old and for Rifkind of today, hoping to coax him back into the fold so that he (rifkind) will lead him (the poet) off again, off to those fair pastures upcountry, to the grassy sumptuous meadow beyond the local draft boards sprinkled across the continent of eternal precincts that do not necessarily correspond to counties. These are muscular American prayers the poet prays, he prays for upheaval and healing, for democracy and revolution, for muscle, stone, flint, and bone.

The poet is not out of date, he is merely ancient, he is beyond out of date, the poet is from that old time before the advent of uniform time zones, when time flowed not only in the dimension of time but in the dimensions of north south east west too.

So let us be clear. The poet does pray. And he does not pray just because of the coming lottery. And that prayer has entered this work of art, but not because of Arlington Street Church and not because we are building a tent, all of us together, over Rifkind in order to contain and study him and most definitely not because such a tent introduces an argument framed by any particular religion which may or may not have been originated in a desert.

With that out of the way, we will acknowledge then that the poet had no worldy ambition in his prayer, that the poet accepts his lack of faith in the modern by the very act of prayer, and that his epitaph will share with STC a request to be "forgiven for fame" this he begs of the Christian passer by! but that first the poet must find fame, and so he prays.