Rough draft of rough thought
Of course, we are to learn lessons from holy and wise people, the Buddha... Jesus Christ, Abraham, Moses...
But our first awareness of Jesus the teacher includes his death, a harsh one. As soon as we know of Christmas morning, we must know of the Cross. The great teacher, who knows the workings of the entire universe, and then his suffering death... Who would want to follow that as an example, in this world of living and societies we cannot always control...
Why cannot the story come to a happy human end, a wife, a family... safe peace and recognition... friends...
The disciples, the holy Last Supper, tokens of the range, the variety of individual human beings, as you'll find in almost any barroom. Judas? There's one in every crowd, thinking himself the smartest, the best.
And Jesus is the nicest of guys, as far as caring about us and all of humanity. Sure, he might come off as a little passive, a little removed. Why hate him for that?
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
Sunday, January 20, 2019
Unfortunately,
the particles within us
do not wish to be defined.
By their nature
they prefer to remain
as clouds,
clouds of probability,
clouds of possibility.
These particles do not wish to be captured.
And if one is, a sympathetic ones comes
from far away, to share defining.
Particles are shy.
And this is the battle we face our whole lives,
to remain, the cloud of possibility, elusive,
undefined, free, invisible, not singled out,
that or to step toward the definition,
all the filters that say in polite society,
who are you, what are you, what is it that you do.
The monk is a realist, obeys, accepts
the nature of particles as they are,
sitting in meditation, not causing any harm,
true to the nature of deep reality.
the particles within us
do not wish to be defined.
By their nature
they prefer to remain
as clouds,
clouds of probability,
clouds of possibility.
These particles do not wish to be captured.
And if one is, a sympathetic ones comes
from far away, to share defining.
Particles are shy.
And this is the battle we face our whole lives,
to remain, the cloud of possibility, elusive,
undefined, free, invisible, not singled out,
that or to step toward the definition,
all the filters that say in polite society,
who are you, what are you, what is it that you do.
The monk is a realist, obeys, accepts
the nature of particles as they are,
sitting in meditation, not causing any harm,
true to the nature of deep reality.
Monday, January 14, 2019
And so, I'm up again, at a reasonable hour, no hangover to speak of, awake, classical music on the Bose, a moderate light through a covering cloud. I had a grocery list, but had no energy once completing my medieval doctor barman Sunday night with the regulars rounds, than after looking the door, having made simple syrup on the bar's stove, wearing vinyl gloves to take the pimentos out of olives with a drink garnish sword, filling each one by one from the plastic pastry bag with roquefort with anchovy paste... My feet hurt. Cold. Wanting to walk, but getting an Uber from the Gaul down past the cemetery and then Q, up to the foot of the old quiet street. Exhausted. Another round of shoveling anyway.
I start out with a few clarifying edits, a few missed memories to embellish recent accounts of the old barman lost in space. The writer's day starts.
I find myself taking care of things, one by one. Bills paid, a birthday card off to Vermont for my father's Patricia, a renewal of Nat Geo Kids for niece and nephew, forgotten during the holiday rush and the sore back from 1700 miles driving...
A slow panic is constantly brewing on the stove, but still, one must deal with necessary evils sufficient to the day thereof, and Restaurant Week is coming to the old town, snowed-in Washington, DC. What should I do now, for the barman entering the week of his birthday, armed with good horoscopes, generally... But wondering, as the poor must, how will this end, what job or profession can I find to keep my stuff off the street's piles of junk... The problem of attempting a spiritual life, looking for insights we as human are unable to do much more than grasp for... A fresh uncertainty arising over my living circumstances, and in such a frame of mind, one can only blame himself for not working hard enough, not helping out humanity enough, just being an idiot.
On-line shopping, to ease the nerves, Take care of things, one at a time...A fender to keep the mud and trail spray for the yellow mountain bike. Vacuum cleaner bags, another recent order from the inevitable mass company from which we all buy from, having not expected, foreseen as much, when they just seemed like a bookseller...
Again, a tea of lemon or lime muddled, with a dash of sea salt...
A balm of mentholatum applied to the yearly January crack at the tip of my right thumb, from wiping the glassware as it comes hot out of the washer with a bar linen napkin... covered with a band-aid.
"Americans like technology. That is there solution. They don't actually teach anyone anything. Look at TSA..." a line remembered from the night before... a perspective from the U.K.
Easier to bash people than to feel their pain.
January. With new energies, trying to keep on top of clean, cleaning, dusting.
I'd let a considerable pile of hard copy of writings go, and probably several wine case cardboard boxes of my old scribbled in legal pads with blue cover and yellow paper. The latter I regret most. The truth was I was too tired and hungover from spending time with Chef Bruno's pal, the chef of the bistrot of the corner...
But maybe there is something about a writer's life where at some point he has to lose a good pile of his writings... Or it as Satan taking something away from a good effort of the soul, finding you in a moment of cowardice and spiritual depression....
I start out with a few clarifying edits, a few missed memories to embellish recent accounts of the old barman lost in space. The writer's day starts.
I find myself taking care of things, one by one. Bills paid, a birthday card off to Vermont for my father's Patricia, a renewal of Nat Geo Kids for niece and nephew, forgotten during the holiday rush and the sore back from 1700 miles driving...
A slow panic is constantly brewing on the stove, but still, one must deal with necessary evils sufficient to the day thereof, and Restaurant Week is coming to the old town, snowed-in Washington, DC. What should I do now, for the barman entering the week of his birthday, armed with good horoscopes, generally... But wondering, as the poor must, how will this end, what job or profession can I find to keep my stuff off the street's piles of junk... The problem of attempting a spiritual life, looking for insights we as human are unable to do much more than grasp for... A fresh uncertainty arising over my living circumstances, and in such a frame of mind, one can only blame himself for not working hard enough, not helping out humanity enough, just being an idiot.
On-line shopping, to ease the nerves, Take care of things, one at a time...A fender to keep the mud and trail spray for the yellow mountain bike. Vacuum cleaner bags, another recent order from the inevitable mass company from which we all buy from, having not expected, foreseen as much, when they just seemed like a bookseller...
Again, a tea of lemon or lime muddled, with a dash of sea salt...
A balm of mentholatum applied to the yearly January crack at the tip of my right thumb, from wiping the glassware as it comes hot out of the washer with a bar linen napkin... covered with a band-aid.
"Americans like technology. That is there solution. They don't actually teach anyone anything. Look at TSA..." a line remembered from the night before... a perspective from the U.K.
Easier to bash people than to feel their pain.
January. With new energies, trying to keep on top of clean, cleaning, dusting.
I'd let a considerable pile of hard copy of writings go, and probably several wine case cardboard boxes of my old scribbled in legal pads with blue cover and yellow paper. The latter I regret most. The truth was I was too tired and hungover from spending time with Chef Bruno's pal, the chef of the bistrot of the corner...
But maybe there is something about a writer's life where at some point he has to lose a good pile of his writings... Or it as Satan taking something away from a good effort of the soul, finding you in a moment of cowardice and spiritual depression....
Sunday, January 13, 2019
It is always awkward, getting up to make an effort at writing. Hard to find a purpose, as with all athletic exercises. You have to start slowly, without knowing what you direction you're going. You have to warm up. The only riches to begin with, the embarrassment of being a human who somehow found writing worth doing...
Fictional Self:
In his fictional self, he had grown tired of serving wine. Tired of cocktails. Tired of drinking it even, were he not in pain by the end of the day. He was tired of getting into it, walking the edge, the whole mess of seeking the right kind of buzz, as if it opened his writing mind up somehow to reach his own truths. He was tired of wondering what would happen, where creativity would take him. And more tired of waking up completely without energy, without any sense of what he was doing with himself, this writer thing, all of it. Life had become a matter of administering to hangovers and dehydration, aches from the physicality of work, hunger... A matter of work and sleep.
At this point, now about the only things sustaining him were indeed the crucial ones, family, love, the fact that at least he had treated a lot of people, and strangers, with kindness, respect and hospitality. But now, now there had to be some meaning, deeper, deeper than the sustaining ones of old.
He had always hoped meaning would show up at his doorstep, in a way. He knew directions in which to look, but he had not taken the self-confident stride of finding that which he was looking for, within. As if expecting someone to come along and tell him the story and meanings of his own life, rather than stepping up and doing it himself.
He had wanted to go off into a deep skeptical rest away from people.
The devil comes to prey, trying to distract you from the thing that will save you. The battle between Satan and Jesus Christ is over the education of humanity. You can take the cynical route, or the magnificent and rewarding one...
And somehow he knew, that if he sat down diligently, and sought out a few words at first, he stood the probability, as of quantum physics, of finding something to write.
Today is the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord on the Roman Catholic calendar. Which means that the Forty Days of being out in the desert must be on the way.
Real Self:
There had only been a half a bottle of Madiran, in the night, as the snow fell in the cold night. He made a Texas hot sauce out of ground buffalo, an onion, achieving the proper texture after browning in the green ceramic dutch oven, pulsed in a white Cuisinart, after using the food processor to cut up parsley. Spices, allspice, cinnamon, dry mustard, chili powder, clove, paprika, celery seed, ginger...
The quiet of a Saturday night alone after the grocery store turning eventually into rising at an early hour. He went out to shovel the front stoop, the steps down to the basement. The sidewalk. A heavy wet snow, an effort. He called his mom. He watched the Weather Channel. He muddled half a lime, a dash of ginger, turmeric, Malden sea salt, hot water. A tablespoon of hummus. A shower, and then, for the first time since the holidays, yoga, Sore and slow.
Then slicing the cold duck breast, also from the night before, green tea, and out the door, early, and now the snow had picked up again, heavy. The walk down to the avenue, independent contractor crews with outfitted pick-up trucks to spread salt, to plow side streets, a heavy wet snow driving at him, the minaret of the mosque rising.
Sore, walking up the long slippery road out of the woods of Dumbarton Oaks, families sledding up on the hill by old enormous tulip poplar.. Getting to work finally.
When the door opened, he had a small time to get set-up, as the old busboy chatted down in the kitchen, was gathering the sheet with the specials written on them, when he heard from the downstairs dining room, sets of footsteps up the stairs... Jesus Christ.
Regulars. A birthday. We brought you an orange tort. Goddamn... Later: what are you going to drink? Me: Nothing!
And then the British couple showed up, the Henry Mancini Pandora station seemed to please the crowd with hits of Bacharach, I struggled with the first cocktails...
And all night, I avoided wine. Until the end, a glass of cheap pinot noir just to numb the pain...
Fictional Self:
In his fictional self, he had grown tired of serving wine. Tired of cocktails. Tired of drinking it even, were he not in pain by the end of the day. He was tired of getting into it, walking the edge, the whole mess of seeking the right kind of buzz, as if it opened his writing mind up somehow to reach his own truths. He was tired of wondering what would happen, where creativity would take him. And more tired of waking up completely without energy, without any sense of what he was doing with himself, this writer thing, all of it. Life had become a matter of administering to hangovers and dehydration, aches from the physicality of work, hunger... A matter of work and sleep.
At this point, now about the only things sustaining him were indeed the crucial ones, family, love, the fact that at least he had treated a lot of people, and strangers, with kindness, respect and hospitality. But now, now there had to be some meaning, deeper, deeper than the sustaining ones of old.
He had always hoped meaning would show up at his doorstep, in a way. He knew directions in which to look, but he had not taken the self-confident stride of finding that which he was looking for, within. As if expecting someone to come along and tell him the story and meanings of his own life, rather than stepping up and doing it himself.
He had wanted to go off into a deep skeptical rest away from people.
The devil comes to prey, trying to distract you from the thing that will save you. The battle between Satan and Jesus Christ is over the education of humanity. You can take the cynical route, or the magnificent and rewarding one...
And somehow he knew, that if he sat down diligently, and sought out a few words at first, he stood the probability, as of quantum physics, of finding something to write.
Today is the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord on the Roman Catholic calendar. Which means that the Forty Days of being out in the desert must be on the way.
Real Self:
There had only been a half a bottle of Madiran, in the night, as the snow fell in the cold night. He made a Texas hot sauce out of ground buffalo, an onion, achieving the proper texture after browning in the green ceramic dutch oven, pulsed in a white Cuisinart, after using the food processor to cut up parsley. Spices, allspice, cinnamon, dry mustard, chili powder, clove, paprika, celery seed, ginger...
The quiet of a Saturday night alone after the grocery store turning eventually into rising at an early hour. He went out to shovel the front stoop, the steps down to the basement. The sidewalk. A heavy wet snow, an effort. He called his mom. He watched the Weather Channel. He muddled half a lime, a dash of ginger, turmeric, Malden sea salt, hot water. A tablespoon of hummus. A shower, and then, for the first time since the holidays, yoga, Sore and slow.
Then slicing the cold duck breast, also from the night before, green tea, and out the door, early, and now the snow had picked up again, heavy. The walk down to the avenue, independent contractor crews with outfitted pick-up trucks to spread salt, to plow side streets, a heavy wet snow driving at him, the minaret of the mosque rising.
Sore, walking up the long slippery road out of the woods of Dumbarton Oaks, families sledding up on the hill by old enormous tulip poplar.. Getting to work finally.
When the door opened, he had a small time to get set-up, as the old busboy chatted down in the kitchen, was gathering the sheet with the specials written on them, when he heard from the downstairs dining room, sets of footsteps up the stairs... Jesus Christ.
Regulars. A birthday. We brought you an orange tort. Goddamn... Later: what are you going to drink? Me: Nothing!
And then the British couple showed up, the Henry Mancini Pandora station seemed to please the crowd with hits of Bacharach, I struggled with the first cocktails...
And all night, I avoided wine. Until the end, a glass of cheap pinot noir just to numb the pain...
Saturday, January 12, 2019
My father, who is in heaven, was a scientist. He was a botanist. He had a good background in theosophy. He was an educator. He loved teaching. The thoughts he conveyed had truth and eloquence. He could back up the things of knowledge he had to share. There was not a selfish bone in his teachings.
If one is pure, by the laws, he has nothing to worry about. If he, or she, is a good person, striving to do the good, to be right and honest and not overstepping his bounds, the Universes will find a place and keep him.
For a while, he might serve wine. For a while he might be looked down upon. He might be taken as a child, or belonging somewhere on the idiot band.
I was required to eat shit for a long time. It was a strenuous hard life. No ease of having an office, a chair at the great academy. Like a doctor, you were on your feet all day. That's what you have to do. You aren't in the front aisle of the church, you're in the back. You grasp that you do not need to put on any kind of a show. Why not? Because the father who is in heaven, the great describer of things, the great understanding, the great definer of reality, is taking care of you, describing your own probability, that of where you will by prediction be found.
All the prophets and thinkers have grasped that. They know the principle of finding the undefined space, the space between the particle of light from its source to the screen that might catch it. They knew that any time they would be asked to fall into a particular sort of an occupation. They grasp that because of the general laws of respect and economic judgments upon the importance, gravity and usefulness of professions, people of society will place assessment upon a person, at least until they know, until they come into close contact with the person. As one person can never judge another...
Who should gain and continue to deserve our respect?
An educator leads by knowing what questions to present...
If one is pure, by the laws, he has nothing to worry about. If he, or she, is a good person, striving to do the good, to be right and honest and not overstepping his bounds, the Universes will find a place and keep him.
For a while, he might serve wine. For a while he might be looked down upon. He might be taken as a child, or belonging somewhere on the idiot band.
I was required to eat shit for a long time. It was a strenuous hard life. No ease of having an office, a chair at the great academy. Like a doctor, you were on your feet all day. That's what you have to do. You aren't in the front aisle of the church, you're in the back. You grasp that you do not need to put on any kind of a show. Why not? Because the father who is in heaven, the great describer of things, the great understanding, the great definer of reality, is taking care of you, describing your own probability, that of where you will by prediction be found.
All the prophets and thinkers have grasped that. They know the principle of finding the undefined space, the space between the particle of light from its source to the screen that might catch it. They knew that any time they would be asked to fall into a particular sort of an occupation. They grasp that because of the general laws of respect and economic judgments upon the importance, gravity and usefulness of professions, people of society will place assessment upon a person, at least until they know, until they come into close contact with the person. As one person can never judge another...
Who should gain and continue to deserve our respect?
An educator leads by knowing what questions to present...
Sketch from Early December...
So, I have failed.
I have a glass of wine. Another day alone. Can't afford to go out. Don't want to tire myself out anyway.
There's a cooked turkey in the fridge. I burned the gravy taking a nap, getting into the wine a little early, keeping a lonely mom company over the phone.
I am a failure. I should just quit my job. It's too late to do anything else already. Not many left in my corner. Time for a change.
I dream of visiting a mythical Amherst town of my childhood. There are playing fields of my youth, streams, hills that rise to small beautiful wooded mountains. To see the old places is emotional and comforting, and I see that I should have never left, that such a town is more my speed, more than the city with its wide busy impersonal roads. I should have known it.
Ingrained in mythology as much as the Flood, the sad tale of leaving the forest for the agrarian settlement, and it only gets worse after that for the nomadic hunter gatherer.
I came to the city, and in my state, everything went wrong, everything a lie, out of one foolish decision, which was to go into the restaurant business.
The wine is a crutch to my moods these days. And I am in the wrong business for a Buddhist.
For the Buddhist, failure is to single and limited a term. Failure could be, in a way, understood as a successful grasp of reality, but it does not feel that way in America....
Round about early Saturday evening, I start to feel normal again. A huge effort to go out into the rain for tea, groceries, Rite Aid. Pouring rain. Sidewalks are slippery wet, the cars speeding by kick up great sprays of water along the curbs, I almost slip on dog fecees on the street, lugging four bags full.
The ancient wild man retreats.
I have a glass of wine. Another day alone. Can't afford to go out. Don't want to tire myself out anyway.
There's a cooked turkey in the fridge. I burned the gravy taking a nap, getting into the wine a little early, keeping a lonely mom company over the phone.
I am a failure. I should just quit my job. It's too late to do anything else already. Not many left in my corner. Time for a change.
I dream of visiting a mythical Amherst town of my childhood. There are playing fields of my youth, streams, hills that rise to small beautiful wooded mountains. To see the old places is emotional and comforting, and I see that I should have never left, that such a town is more my speed, more than the city with its wide busy impersonal roads. I should have known it.
Ingrained in mythology as much as the Flood, the sad tale of leaving the forest for the agrarian settlement, and it only gets worse after that for the nomadic hunter gatherer.
I came to the city, and in my state, everything went wrong, everything a lie, out of one foolish decision, which was to go into the restaurant business.
The wine is a crutch to my moods these days. And I am in the wrong business for a Buddhist.
For the Buddhist, failure is to single and limited a term. Failure could be, in a way, understood as a successful grasp of reality, but it does not feel that way in America....
Round about early Saturday evening, I start to feel normal again. A huge effort to go out into the rain for tea, groceries, Rite Aid. Pouring rain. Sidewalks are slippery wet, the cars speeding by kick up great sprays of water along the curbs, I almost slip on dog fecees on the street, lugging four bags full.
The ancient wild man retreats.
I have not written in a long time.
We live somewhere between fear and self-confidence.
The staff party, I slid away, with a quick wave to the young woman behind the bar, and one staff member from the other restaurant, as the party picked up, dancing, the music loud. I'd gotten away with a watered down glass of wine, some calamari, a small portion of marsala, a meatball and a half. I'd not slept well the night before, even after my work shift, and I suspected the night with the chef at Russian Home and then the Golden Palace with my chef friend, as innocently as it had begun was having its usual toll on my mental and physical health and energies, even as the solar eclipse reigned in my sign, signifying impetus for changes...
I got back after taking the metro--part of me wanted to walk all the way back from 7th Street, as Lincoln might have, if it were night mabye--got in and took a nap and the nap grew heavier and heavier in the cold under a blanket. Four hours later, I woke, and it was dark out and I wasn't even hungry, groggily putting in a load of laundry. And then I lazed around, after the sense from the luncheon of being in a foreign place, not knowing what I was even doing there. They are your friends, your co-workers, they keep you out of trouble. I watched the beers go down around me, smiled awkwardly, avoided the dancing, called my mom amidst the noise in the adjacent large empty dining room, looked at the vintage pictures of immigrants from Italy and so forth, the old country, used the john, and departed into the January air alone, as I always do, not partaking in the continuation.... The Chef wasn't drinking, tolerating it all on a day off, a few people had left already... I didn't have it in my to want to stay...
So, the new year, and what direction to take... I'd ordered incense, frankincense and myrrh, but it hadn't come yet, and I had an on-line chat with a woman I'd not met yet, but who seemed cool, and then later, after a cold walk on the avenue around ten at night, messaged a woman out in the Bay Area, a poet, who'd gone to school with me. Our messaging coincided with my viewing of adult pleasure, vintage German, a man at play with two women, BBW in the parlance of porn. And guiltily I enjoyed myself, who knows why I was in such a mood, but that I'd been under some stress-- while messaging her, and she made a joke observing multi-tasking, when I mentioned that yes it is too cold in DC, and that we have to keep warm somehow in this low winter months... One can be open with a poet. The sun rises and the sun sets, and we are who we are... Having a voice on the other end of the line allowed me to prolong my enjoyment.
My horoscopes seemed rife with positive changes, forward steps, and maybe one is to be open with people, even when it is frightening, even when your old self-confidence has been stomped upon repeatedly, even when you are feeling quite guilty about what you are doing, but for the physical pleasure of it. Baby steps...
The staff party happened to be on Orthodox Christmas, and our friend had been to the church up Massachusetts Avenue, and we had all talked about how Orthodox priests not only tend to be married, or can marry, but have to be married. The reminder prompted me to check in on the system.
The conversation had been really wonderful with the woman I'd chatted with before, touching on exercise, depression, spirituality, Catholicism, and it felt like I was on a roll by the time I got a ping from Messenger from my San Fran poet friend.
And I knew, somehow, I needed to change, to move on, forward, to not be called to be involved with the usual entanglement, all the illusions of the tangible and observable world. So tired, sick even, of having to go through with it all, even as much as I, in the words of a friend, did my work with a tangible love...I wanted to go off, away, into a desert of some sort, a place of reckoning.
I felt a fresh need to be free.
We live somewhere between fear and self-confidence.
The staff party, I slid away, with a quick wave to the young woman behind the bar, and one staff member from the other restaurant, as the party picked up, dancing, the music loud. I'd gotten away with a watered down glass of wine, some calamari, a small portion of marsala, a meatball and a half. I'd not slept well the night before, even after my work shift, and I suspected the night with the chef at Russian Home and then the Golden Palace with my chef friend, as innocently as it had begun was having its usual toll on my mental and physical health and energies, even as the solar eclipse reigned in my sign, signifying impetus for changes...
I got back after taking the metro--part of me wanted to walk all the way back from 7th Street, as Lincoln might have, if it were night mabye--got in and took a nap and the nap grew heavier and heavier in the cold under a blanket. Four hours later, I woke, and it was dark out and I wasn't even hungry, groggily putting in a load of laundry. And then I lazed around, after the sense from the luncheon of being in a foreign place, not knowing what I was even doing there. They are your friends, your co-workers, they keep you out of trouble. I watched the beers go down around me, smiled awkwardly, avoided the dancing, called my mom amidst the noise in the adjacent large empty dining room, looked at the vintage pictures of immigrants from Italy and so forth, the old country, used the john, and departed into the January air alone, as I always do, not partaking in the continuation.... The Chef wasn't drinking, tolerating it all on a day off, a few people had left already... I didn't have it in my to want to stay...
So, the new year, and what direction to take... I'd ordered incense, frankincense and myrrh, but it hadn't come yet, and I had an on-line chat with a woman I'd not met yet, but who seemed cool, and then later, after a cold walk on the avenue around ten at night, messaged a woman out in the Bay Area, a poet, who'd gone to school with me. Our messaging coincided with my viewing of adult pleasure, vintage German, a man at play with two women, BBW in the parlance of porn. And guiltily I enjoyed myself, who knows why I was in such a mood, but that I'd been under some stress-- while messaging her, and she made a joke observing multi-tasking, when I mentioned that yes it is too cold in DC, and that we have to keep warm somehow in this low winter months... One can be open with a poet. The sun rises and the sun sets, and we are who we are... Having a voice on the other end of the line allowed me to prolong my enjoyment.
My horoscopes seemed rife with positive changes, forward steps, and maybe one is to be open with people, even when it is frightening, even when your old self-confidence has been stomped upon repeatedly, even when you are feeling quite guilty about what you are doing, but for the physical pleasure of it. Baby steps...
The staff party happened to be on Orthodox Christmas, and our friend had been to the church up Massachusetts Avenue, and we had all talked about how Orthodox priests not only tend to be married, or can marry, but have to be married. The reminder prompted me to check in on the system.
The conversation had been really wonderful with the woman I'd chatted with before, touching on exercise, depression, spirituality, Catholicism, and it felt like I was on a roll by the time I got a ping from Messenger from my San Fran poet friend.
And I knew, somehow, I needed to change, to move on, forward, to not be called to be involved with the usual entanglement, all the illusions of the tangible and observable world. So tired, sick even, of having to go through with it all, even as much as I, in the words of a friend, did my work with a tangible love...I wanted to go off, away, into a desert of some sort, a place of reckoning.
I felt a fresh need to be free.
Spooky Action at a Distance
There is something in the Houseman poem, the athlete dying young... a recognition, an intimacy with death.
The artist has the ability to use the creature's native imagination, innate self-knowledge of an owner's manual of sentient beings.
I remember not wanting to leave my father's side, after he had passed. He seemed to me in a form of deep sleep. It was night at the funeral home on the west end of Utica, a cold clear starry night in early April. I went out in the parking lot to look up at the sky while my brother warmed up his Range Rover. We were still, my father and I, near each other, speaking to each other, as always, silently, things we could not say, but understood.
The conjecture of a recent scientific discovery, that the brain has some self-knowledge of death. So there is indeed the lingering presence of the human essence... something that the sensitive intuitively gather... The brain, in some form, in some effect, is still at work, even after clinical death. A person's nervous system can still report to some sense of its own being that it is in that somewhere in between.
Hamlet's father's ghost.
Looking back at the deepest source and record, The Bible, from the Book of Genesis, on to the Book of John... there is a sense of some science there.
Each chapter will tell a story... The artist, the poet, the intuitive creative person is left with the job of interpretation,of recreation, re-inspiring, retelling.. Each story is a metaphor, a statement in poetic form of human truth. Science, always, and forever, can only go so far. It takes the imagination for the facts of science to form into meaningful food for thought.
Each Bible story, the recorded intuitions, all of us have an ability to grasp. The stories come as metaphor of what we all will know, one way or another, sooner or later, a conscious realization of things science cannot tell us. Dim sometimes, but steady, as a communal myth of the original cataclysmic Flood found throughout the myths of early humanity.
That we even tell the story, of, say, Noah, is to invite us to see the world and the stories we make of it as emblematic. The Flood is a story told, and we are ones who must tell stories. We tell the stories and they become significant, indicators of the deep reality, the way we are able to perceive. The stories have purpose, the stories have truth. The Book of Genesis tells us so, from the very beginning of the great work of science and scholarship and poetry.
What does the story of Abraham tell us? The artist has to, in essence, leave, leave his family, in effect offer to kill the equivalent of a dearest one, a son, a mother's fondest dreams and hopes... to follow the biddings of the voice of God.
This is the problem with being an artist, with being a recorder of the deepest innate sense of the impersonally described human being....
The realization of a need to be free from the usual contemporary entanglements, all the things one should go, but then goes to and finds wearily drab and the same even at the height of whatever supposed pleasure might be offered (as stores of suffering always emerge, secret notes, louder and louder, that come through the fine happy tune..)
The quantum entanglement of our own lives with those lives, teachings, observations, of the spiritual being, the thinker innate in the human being... our own atoms, now noticed, now clear, now set forth, now captured in the realm of imaginative tale and measurement, we tell our stories...
And the great thing is that there is now suddenly no distance between ourselves and the great participants of the Bible, Moses, Jesus in the desert, forty days...
Every relationship you've ever had, you and your dad, you and your mom, you and your grandparents, you and your friends... your sibling... your teacher, your neighbor... all of it goes back to be in tune with the entanglement, the simultaneous presence of all that can be simultaneous, intertwined, related somehow...
The odd thing is, that one feels such a thing almost best while being, as traditionally considered, alone. Alone, then you see the odd watery ocean fibers, the sea continuum, that connects your mind with the loved one's own mind and being...
The writer scribbler is tired as he edits this, the day after the night of imagination and the rambling sentences that need to be made clearer. He has just had his afternoon breakfast, of black-eyed peas with hummus. His immune system is telling him to rest, and, perhaps more importantly, to find company at the spooky distance, where even a schoolboy can take a nap and be there with Jesus taking a nap in curl of ropes on a Galilee boat.
It is the need to be directly social, or sociable, that can derail him, tire him out, expend his energies in conversations, come as a misdirection of the holy creative spirit, as if he were and had to dumb himself down to the level of those who do not have the connection to the greater world, Hamlet's connection to his father, Abraham's connection to God, the whole band of people who have come and walked through this world always connected to something beyond, things of deeper truth, even compelling us to act.
The highly unlikely patriarch or prophet will not be grasped according to the understanding of common logic and conventional believability. His mind cannot even be described. Being of a mind that those absorbed in daily practical affairs do not readily grasp, the greater part of his intelligence and his active brain power cannot be appreciated. Kind of sloughed off to the side. "Fresco paint a halo around his head," is the best most can do, unless they too pick up the work of going into the holy hard-to-comprehend.
The writer is now a dumb-downed person in order to make his living. There seems no conventional path for him to present his research. But, one supposes, once he realizes this, he is as free as, say, a Kurt Vonnegut to explore the outer edges of his own constrained imagination. Where a lot of us go looking for such is in Jesus and Buddha, places from which to stand upon to reach a bit further...
And without them, where could one even begin...
The artist has the ability to use the creature's native imagination, innate self-knowledge of an owner's manual of sentient beings.
I remember not wanting to leave my father's side, after he had passed. He seemed to me in a form of deep sleep. It was night at the funeral home on the west end of Utica, a cold clear starry night in early April. I went out in the parking lot to look up at the sky while my brother warmed up his Range Rover. We were still, my father and I, near each other, speaking to each other, as always, silently, things we could not say, but understood.
The conjecture of a recent scientific discovery, that the brain has some self-knowledge of death. So there is indeed the lingering presence of the human essence... something that the sensitive intuitively gather... The brain, in some form, in some effect, is still at work, even after clinical death. A person's nervous system can still report to some sense of its own being that it is in that somewhere in between.
Hamlet's father's ghost.
Looking back at the deepest source and record, The Bible, from the Book of Genesis, on to the Book of John... there is a sense of some science there.
Each chapter will tell a story... The artist, the poet, the intuitive creative person is left with the job of interpretation,of recreation, re-inspiring, retelling.. Each story is a metaphor, a statement in poetic form of human truth. Science, always, and forever, can only go so far. It takes the imagination for the facts of science to form into meaningful food for thought.
Each Bible story, the recorded intuitions, all of us have an ability to grasp. The stories come as metaphor of what we all will know, one way or another, sooner or later, a conscious realization of things science cannot tell us. Dim sometimes, but steady, as a communal myth of the original cataclysmic Flood found throughout the myths of early humanity.
That we even tell the story, of, say, Noah, is to invite us to see the world and the stories we make of it as emblematic. The Flood is a story told, and we are ones who must tell stories. We tell the stories and they become significant, indicators of the deep reality, the way we are able to perceive. The stories have purpose, the stories have truth. The Book of Genesis tells us so, from the very beginning of the great work of science and scholarship and poetry.
What does the story of Abraham tell us? The artist has to, in essence, leave, leave his family, in effect offer to kill the equivalent of a dearest one, a son, a mother's fondest dreams and hopes... to follow the biddings of the voice of God.
This is the problem with being an artist, with being a recorder of the deepest innate sense of the impersonally described human being....
The realization of a need to be free from the usual contemporary entanglements, all the things one should go, but then goes to and finds wearily drab and the same even at the height of whatever supposed pleasure might be offered (as stores of suffering always emerge, secret notes, louder and louder, that come through the fine happy tune..)
The quantum entanglement of our own lives with those lives, teachings, observations, of the spiritual being, the thinker innate in the human being... our own atoms, now noticed, now clear, now set forth, now captured in the realm of imaginative tale and measurement, we tell our stories...
And the great thing is that there is now suddenly no distance between ourselves and the great participants of the Bible, Moses, Jesus in the desert, forty days...
Every relationship you've ever had, you and your dad, you and your mom, you and your grandparents, you and your friends... your sibling... your teacher, your neighbor... all of it goes back to be in tune with the entanglement, the simultaneous presence of all that can be simultaneous, intertwined, related somehow...
The odd thing is, that one feels such a thing almost best while being, as traditionally considered, alone. Alone, then you see the odd watery ocean fibers, the sea continuum, that connects your mind with the loved one's own mind and being...
The writer scribbler is tired as he edits this, the day after the night of imagination and the rambling sentences that need to be made clearer. He has just had his afternoon breakfast, of black-eyed peas with hummus. His immune system is telling him to rest, and, perhaps more importantly, to find company at the spooky distance, where even a schoolboy can take a nap and be there with Jesus taking a nap in curl of ropes on a Galilee boat.
It is the need to be directly social, or sociable, that can derail him, tire him out, expend his energies in conversations, come as a misdirection of the holy creative spirit, as if he were and had to dumb himself down to the level of those who do not have the connection to the greater world, Hamlet's connection to his father, Abraham's connection to God, the whole band of people who have come and walked through this world always connected to something beyond, things of deeper truth, even compelling us to act.
The highly unlikely patriarch or prophet will not be grasped according to the understanding of common logic and conventional believability. His mind cannot even be described. Being of a mind that those absorbed in daily practical affairs do not readily grasp, the greater part of his intelligence and his active brain power cannot be appreciated. Kind of sloughed off to the side. "Fresco paint a halo around his head," is the best most can do, unless they too pick up the work of going into the holy hard-to-comprehend.
The writer is now a dumb-downed person in order to make his living. There seems no conventional path for him to present his research. But, one supposes, once he realizes this, he is as free as, say, a Kurt Vonnegut to explore the outer edges of his own constrained imagination. Where a lot of us go looking for such is in Jesus and Buddha, places from which to stand upon to reach a bit further...
And without them, where could one even begin...
Saturday, January 5, 2019
We drove. We stopped at Gettysburg.
Lincoln. He was a loner, in my book. Lots going on in his head. Including the dreary stuff. The dark stuff.
And so, in my book, he could talk to just about everyone. He might have been taken as a bit off, as he reached out to people. Said what was on him mind. The ability to bridge, from himself to the stranger. Hey, I get you, he could've said. I get myself.
Thus the extraordinary juxtaposition. The lonesome loner, friend to everyone.
Lincoln. He was a loner, in my book. Lots going on in his head. Including the dreary stuff. The dark stuff.
And so, in my book, he could talk to just about everyone. He might have been taken as a bit off, as he reached out to people. Said what was on him mind. The ability to bridge, from himself to the stranger. Hey, I get you, he could've said. I get myself.
Thus the extraordinary juxtaposition. The lonesome loner, friend to everyone.
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