Page 83 - The Myth and the Moment

Evening

you’ve become a real capitalist, a dealer in human wealth of all types.
He’d like to invest in me, harness my mind to a plow turning over the
clods in an already well-turned-over field. If I won’t take the bit, then
it’s just plain robbery: steal the cream and kick out the cow. Oh, such
blandishments, Philip Kolpak! Glory enough for both of us is at my
fingertips. Yes, join the throng of well-heeled scribblers and chanters:
the good life awaits you!
Hmmph. Maybe something’s wrong with me; I don’t respond to
normal temptations. Don’t do well with the usual threats and
innuendoes, either. Been too long out of the mainstream, just a
voyeur in this culture. Couldn’t build a city with a million Nate
Evangelinos as inhabitants. Nor a single house with two of me
residing. But don’t you validate your objectivity by this alienation?
True believers can’t write the history of their own religion—nor of
anyone else’s. Never mind cause and effect; you’ll have C. Wright
Mills laughing at you again from the ethereal plane. And Durkheim:
society generates deviants to know its own rectitude. Here I am, you
saintly sociologists, unflinching at the mirror I must hold up to my
own era. How can I not be a product of the zeitgeist? Why even care,
or chop logic to deny it? Destiny? Now I must leave the soft sciences
and take refuge in philosophy: Wittgenstein went whacko but
dropped enough pearls to make me a necklace/neckless wonder why
he did it—what was the world like between the two world wars
anyway? Seeing the worst in the trenches, and then watching bombs
fall on poor Spanish peasants? Why did the Forties seem so
optimistic? People must have been riding the crest of all that wartime
propaganda: save the free world, free the saved world. Words and
music by Alan Dulles. Soon to be released on Congressional Records
by Ricardo Neexon and his All-Playboy Orchestra.
Ah, Montague Street. Almost there. What will I tell her? Got to get
my story straight—amorally, of course; the whole thing is as crooked
as a politician’s hind leg. Think, think, think, Nate! Pointless
rumination. Chewing, splashing the acids of analysis on the same old
fibrous data. Such wry folk wisdom embalmed in etymology: no
academic psychologist would dare compare the workings of that
exalted organ, the human brain, to the digestive process of a cow.
And so prescient, too! Three stomachs, three minds: at least, Freud
couldn’t find more than that magic number. So, regurgitant memory:

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