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Piri Thomas, the Man and his Book

Nano Bauta

Predestined beings come to this world to endure certain experiences, which are not always their own. The artist's vision is formed with real, invisible particles or monads that correspond to the spirit of every being--the vital energy of a small telescope that captures everything and a microscope that magnifies everything.
The spirit sees all there is, measures it, analyzes it, and brings into view that which is distant, and enlarges the invisible with its magical lens. This active equipment is not enjoyed by everyone to the same degree, thus the classification of either genius or imbecile. The external world influences us and the internal one agitates it, and in those inner and outer dimensions it constructs the artistic vision then calibrated by the spirit, which travels through the sidereal mansions the Christ told us about.
From the negative, the positive is reached. From the positive, the negative cannot be reached, it is unmasked and ridiculed by the former.
In such esoteric fashion Piri Thomas' humanity was forged. Within himself, his artistic vision grew, and he projected his true personality like in the magic of a film, where the inverted image is projected straight up on the screen. That screen is the world. All is projected upon it. In the dramatic theater of life, the world is a great stage. The view of the world depends on the observer's trade.
The painter sees it through his chiaroscuro. The sculptor, depending on the stone and its contour. The architect, in three-dimensional geometrical figures. The choreographer, through muscular movements. The actor, through facial movements. The playwright, through emotions produced by the events. The poet and the writer through the convulsions caused by events. The theologian, through sulfur and fire, like the chemist and the blacksmith. The one who suffers does not know whether this life and this world are a comedy, a tragedy, or both.
Piri Thomas is a mythology of everything mentioned above. Piri is a synopsis of all the emotions, and a synthesis of the thesis and the anti-thesis.
That is why he stands out from among those who dared to create their own grammatical syntax, like Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Rabelais, the Expressionists, the Dadaists and Symbolists like Rimbaud and Verlaine.
The vulgar is a cultural form because the being can express its self with more fervor, more fidelity and more freedom since there is no longer need to defer to the academy, or glamorize the shocking, or embellish the ugly; instead things are called by their names.
That is Piri Thomas. All his work oscillates in that creative labyrinth, and is projected like the sun at dawn, or like the sun at dusk. He is daybreak and nightfall of everything and in everything he is engaged.
His work "Down these Mean Streets," distills the poor class he comes from. The despair, contusion, racism, prejudice, and the intolerance in which his life as a new yorker evolved is reflected in every sentence, every paragraph, every page, every chapter, from beginning to end.
>From childhood he noticed the classification of social classes, and the household's thermometer registered those classifications, at breakfast, at lunch and at dinner time. There was scarcity but it was not total. Every home was a mirror where the specialist was represented without being there, for he made his diagnostic from the university, far from the truth about why the poor is poor. The rich has always been entitled to be rich, but the poor has not been entitled even to be poor.
Piri noticed these differences in class, ancestry, race, and rights, and like Dostoyevski, he thought that Christ was an idiot for indirectly or directly pardoning the one who repented of being rich. But between dialectics and reality there is an aesthetic abyss which in due time Piri also detected.
The author of "Down these Damned Streets," or mean-streets, like the Florentine Italians said in the times of the condottieres, leaders of bands or mercenaries, watched the reenactment of the old play of "I'm stronger that you." Mr. Money buying souls and the dignity of individuals who by nature had to be free, but the grip of men forced them to degrade, to sell themselves in order to get bread for their families.
Piri Thomas comes from such a family. Guinea pigs, from the social laboratory, or instruments to be used by industrialists or as tools, not as human beings, because the poor seems to be denied his human portion.
The boy turned into a man, but he was not free yet, because the son has no self-identity until the father dies. There is a time for everything and Piri arrived like the night; with its black mantle to make more visible the distant star and the lampposts of those damned, mean, indolent streets; and under the warm light of the seven-steps staircases, the youngster and future social anthropologist dreamed his nightmare dream. No, Piri was not free yet and it would cost him a few more years to achieve it. That is why years later the thinker inside his heart would say "the cruelest prison is the prison of the mind."
The youngster thought but still there was no substance in his thoughts, they were just mental reviews, rebuilding his first impressions in a natural manner, without concepts, propositions or assumptions. No syllogisms or conclusions. It was simply a young man who examined life without analyzing it, but who enjoyed it because those images were so vivid they seemed to have a theater for a mind; and thus he withdrew from the day dreaming into the night dreams but never stopped dreaming.
Thus he continued to garner impressions like the kid who collects baseball cards to have his heroes close at hand always. But destiny, that gentlemen who dresses up in green with yellow shoes and red tie, harassed, seduced and incited him until he dated him and from there on, what had been like a curse became a blessing because the artist, the visionary, was born. He was born from mildew, from thousands of experiences and impressions. He was formed through a mutation or metamorphosis, from caterpillar to butterfly and from boy to genius. Something awakened inside him, exploded like the Santorini volcano and a whole sickly civilization became ruins. And from those ruins the spiritual archeologist in him dissected the corpse, and as a good taxidermist he also embalmed it for posterity in a book, "Down These Mean Streets," "Down These Degraded Streets."
Flaubert said that the style is the individual, a sort of skin, or like the brush strokes of a painter in oil, one different from the other; here too Piri Thomas is the likeness of himself. He likes to surprise the reader with sudden spurts of ingenuity, like Shakespeare who used to utilize this technique in his plays, as well as playing on words. Piri will not let out any of those he has been curdling in his mind. His mind cannot be imprisoned but free, ready to come out at the speed of the genius' tempest. He knows how to blend laughter with tears and scrutinize all the emotions, like a good ghetto philosopher. His irony, his satire, is as spontaneous as it is studied, everything comes out of him already concocted. And at times he uses "flash-back"--that is, he recedes into the past as swiftly as Well's time machine. His easy style fascinates and one can hardly put the book down or postpone its reading. He plays with you, he entertains, he mesmerizes and takes us by the hand into his world, so that when you recover you don't recall if what you read happened to you or to Piri. One slides into his world, into his experiences, and mentally transform like a traveling theater that sets up plays about real life and fictions with their corresponding morals or messages, with the clarity of the transparent eye of his vision, of his experiences and of his art.
When Piri Thomas surveys what has been written or lived, he does it with such magic that even material particles become invisible for he travels with the spirit and recounts how the author, as if from behind a thin gauze, observes everything and digests it for us economically into a psalm or a synthesis of a synthesis.
Piri Thomas is like a cat that moves with silken paws among the sentences that make up a paragraph and, in such quandary, like the cat he can step on a Lilly and not wither it. His, a suffering writer's smooth quill follows with equanimity every flow, and had he been a painter his brush would have traced for us, not the flower but the shadow, like a space for the imagination, for the dear reader to enlighten and to become enlightened.