Psychic. The realization that within events, meaning... a pattern, the opportunity for reflection...
Rejection, reconciliation. Joseph, sold by his brothers... If the pattern is embraced, it is liberating, freeing... The Mass of March the Second, this year, 2018, EWTN. Fr. John Paul, the homilies, (available YouTube.)
Old Testament read with eyes illumined by faith in the New. Typology.
Jesus Christ comes to fulfill every prophecy, every last encounter and figure...
God's vineyard... (especially Isiah.) bountiful blessings sent to the people of Israel, the image....
Vineyards all around Galilee. The owner not necessarily the tender, tenants entrusted to take care of that vineyard...
God, the vineyard owner, is patient; justice with his mercy...
And the prophecy, now by Jesus saying these words, is fulfilled, the story complete, reconciled, a just ending.
Free us from preoccupation with our needs in this Lenten time. Jesus sustains us.
How could you not be sad in this world, in this life, in this broken state of physics. Physical existence, such that one day must somehow come to an incomprehensible end, each and all of us.
What did he not say yesterday, he wondered. Another blizzard up in New York State. Where people are nice. Not concerned with style, not with the presentation of their own selfish identity, look at me, look at me, childish music played loud...
An expiation of our sins, did God send us his son. Then what are we? We too participate in that,
When I was immature, I dated an older woman, pleasant, giving, a good sense of humor. We drank French wine, travelled once to Maine, put together dinner from time to time. She was a professional explicator of Old World culture, and I felt pleased by her knowledge, and wished to learn more. Wine, food, perfume, art, old customs, history (focussed on France), her interpretation in the editorial introduction to each issue was good and excellent writing.
But on the dark side, and who can blame her, she would raise her doubts about my future, such as it was, or would be. Go to law school, get a Ph.D. Who can blame her for her maternal concern, as she had aging parents to cope with and aid, and was not a mother, nor now a wife, as she had been once married. Once in the video store in the old neighborhood I wished to break free from, she quipped to me that I looked like someone they'd just let out of a home, a home for certain types of people ill in the head, or going through something. And I did not take it as any particular insult, because, yes, I get broken people, I get Christ's people. Blockbuster Video did not offer any recessional hymn, after you'd picked out your entertainment for the evening.
Eventually, the rejection aspects mounted, and one grew tired, simply, worn out. She began to take issue with my manner of speaking, as when I would use the phrase "cooking up," which she did not like, a phrase for the unsophisticated, but which the good Father Leo Patalinghug uses, here cooking and sharing in Ohio, on EWTN television, Savoring Our Faith.
And now, yes, one does look for reconciliation, and, as with people by and large, really, one looks toward marriage as a form of that, redemption, a coming back to home and family.
And if one were to reach maturity, what would one look for, in a spouse, a comely woman with good heart and a sense of the spiritual, a sense of how we all are not perfect, no, not really at all, but broken and in need of love and forgiveness. She would accept you as you were, a poor man, stepped over by the rich man, by people with good haircuts and nice shoes, people with hands not roughed by manual labors, sophisticates with excellent taste beyond the simple function of things that are nutritional and good for us and easing of our burdens and our own little disasters.
She would radiate to you a kindness, a forgiveness, a gentle touch, and she would take you in the way ... in the way the women of note in the Gospels take Jesus Christ. Not telling you, "you're an asshole, grow up," like a big brother might, rejecting you, but kind, very much so, kind to the body of your soul in the way rest is, sustaining you in your work, such as it, misinterpreted often enough, the easy case to make, the degenerate bartender stooping to the crass level, harassment, ribald joking, the lowest common denominator.
No, you are a prince, a prophet, for who you are in your real form of existence, as you were baptized, somewhat reluctantly by a certain Father Lane, who was not perfectly pleased with my parent's Catholic attendance record, as the story goes...
It started out as a long day ahead of me, and as a detail, to get down to my therapist, Dr. H.W., down at 19th and L, I had to make it out the front door and across the freshly laid concrete of the sidewalk there before me. The men, with reflective yellow vests, hard hats, thick work pants, boots, knee pads, were just then smoothing it out and putting the final groves into the wet concrete. The hour was such that I needed my bicycle to get there in time, and the only bike handy was the red one, the top end road bike, and the fellow who helped me by reaching out for it to take it the curb, commented in Spanish English that it was nice (and light.) And then they laid out a dark grey two by four and I Wallenda-ed over it to the other side, thanking them all. And then I was on the bike.
There were something to go over with my professional friend and listener, after she explained that her office policies had changed slightly to insure she would be recouped should anyone be more than ten minutes late, and I was not an offender, a just so you know sort of thing.
So I had somethings to talk over, feeling the clock ticking, and so I got to work, laying it out, quickly and efficiently. Feeling better, a lot better, actually, now that I'm drinking electrolyte water, taking magnesium... A death in the family, a bridge to lost histories of Irish arrivals upon this land, in Lynn, of third floor walk-ups, and grandmothers who did what they had to do, with wisdom of home cures and such and such, unable to afford the doctor... An attempt on my part to sort out an old issue within the community of my Facebook friends from the old days of my restaurant work... My sense that there is a home cure for everything, and that I didn't need the Lexapro, indeed had quit it cold turkey without any brain flashes of the unpleasant kind they warn you of... Mom's vulnerability up there by her lonesome self... There was lots to talk about.
She looked at me, "sounds pretty chaotic." We'd skipped the last session two weeks before on account of my having to go in early for goddamn Valentine's Day, a good call actually. She looks at me and mentions, as I'm reeling all this off, that I seem a bit more keyed up than usual. The word she used, I forget, something that implied... Hmm, well, I'm just trying to get my money's worth, this stuff going on, and I'm trying to have the energy to get it out there, after this running the modern city gauntlet, construction, traffic lights, more construction, pedestrians crossing against the light, the weather cold again, in an unpredictable way, and then there will be Jazz Night to cope with before the week is over and we are already pretty tired, but hanging in there...
But you wonder it yourself, "how could anybody like me," given the way I am, given the way things are...sort of as the logical and practical and wise elder side of the family is telling me.
The days of one's firing, we talk about that, the same old embarrassing thing, but of how really it was just rejection. Rejection as people will simply do, who knows why, out of a wish to protect some business interest, some law of legality less than real morality overseeing our situations...
One brings up such things, because there is a point, a typology to them, and unto us. The stone is rejected. That's the way it goes. Even the cornerstone, even the best one, as Jesus himself is, will be, rejected, quite severely.
And rejection preys upon our minds, doesn't it. Good material. And rejection simply and finally is not the case, not the whole story. Or, how to see it? If rejection comes, there will be its better counterpart, lovely, not painful, accepting, valuing, nurturing...
And perhaps I do not need my kind therapist anymore, but, as they say, have Moses and the Prophets to listen to, even when I am Job, even when I am Jonah, even when I am Lazarus, covered with ulcering sores, untouchable, despicable to human eyes...
It's a funny thing. Finding your own salvation, or at least the hopes thereof, sinner that I am, through act and through inaction, all of that, in finding your own salvation you are doing that good thing, which is finding the light, the way, for others to follow and do the same. And you are even yourself not at all original in all this, how could you be? You are merely a reader, therefore a scholar, of much of what needs truly to be known.
How does the media, by the way, how does big data track you when you write about such things as salvation? Will an ad pop up somewhere on a device, partially disguised, 'get thee down to Mass at 12:05 at Saint Matthew's Cathedral,' 'Peter, father of the church, the real story... get it here.' Someone's probably willing to sell you a picture of Jesus, and I hope, that if I were to spend money so, it would go to a good cause anyway...
Prophecy, typology... where do you fit in?
Perhaps one cannot be "psychic"/able to foresee future events and circumstances without looking backward, without having read what comes before...
Earlier on, earlier on... there was the princess. Who wouldn't want a pretty girl, a sophisticate, a New York City actress type... My footing remained in the country, at the stage of life, God's country, rolling hills, Central New York, the forests and the streams, the small college, the fields with dairy cattle, my parents... (My brother had gone off to make his fortune in the city.)
But about such people, advanced, assured, extremely intelligent, well schooled, verbally precocious, argumentative, a lover of issues and sides, there was a put-down side, a side with its hatred of natural things, of male ways. I wanted to, I suppose, awaken her from all that, the kind of selfish spiritual deadness... These are not the days of the heights of your powers, though, when you're receiving your rejections from the powers that be, the scribes, the Pharisee system of meritocracy, such that you come to expect rejections on all fronts, not just one, as if they too were written in stone, the rejections.
The bird, the tree, the blade of grass, the water in the stream, they would never reject you though, so as long as they all seemed reasonably healthy and steady, well, you could deal with things.
I could not awaken her. I failed, as I deserved to, being full of sin, not so certain I would ever amount to much, the way forward highly obscure and scary, unhappy, disheartening. I tried. But by the inner Jesus nature of the spiritual being inside, you're a meek sort, not one to push people. You have your parables, waiting for you somewhere, but they are not quite there yet. Parables come when there is rejection in the air, and this was secretly, without you even knowing, where you future would lie.
In that odd old thing called the Parable.
The Parable teller seems to know certain things. He will be familiar with phrases such as "and then it came to pass..." That sort of not-quite-mastery of time and the things that will come, that even a fool can see coming, almost a fool.
Parables are fun, a good literary exercise. Gentle little proofs; you're not beating people over the head with anything. People will taste the correctness within them, without having a negative psychological reaction (for the most part), without getting huffy because they didn't come up it with themselves. And there's a secret quality to them, like an old Zen saying, of correcting people, guiding them, without them seeing it but that they came to the conclusion themselves under their very own powers of thought. And the parables also have a way of showing, of bringing out, the goodness of things, things we might put-down and dismiss, as if we blew life back into them, as if we accepted again the beauty of their real presence in life in this world, the sparrow, the poor man, the lily... the wheat and the chaff.
The modern publishing industry would not even wish to bother with the parables. They are too self-evident, too self-realizing, too powerful, too subtle. Can't really make a buck off of such things. Which again leaves the teller of the parables safe and sound, no one really wanting to come and steal something from him. Want my job here in the vineyard tending the vines? Here, take it... Try it out and tell me you want to keep at it.
At the beginning of March a cough had gotten somewhere established within. There was a sort of cold tiredness hanging over you each day. You felt hungry. Not enough energy to go out food shopping though. A strong wind came. Your reserves were low. You knew again the work week of four nights was sufficient to put you down for at least two days, a third day necessary just to care of yourself...
But one day, perhaps the teller of the parables would see something that no one else had. Hear something fresh. Remarkable. The seeming idiot speaks, and with a sense of what might even be called prophecy, or something rather interesting, at least. Powers of sight opened by eliminating a sort of inner resistance, inner interference, such that seeing out further, clearer, whatever it is that is to be seen would come closer, less obscure, as if for its own part to match... The light shining out now, no longer hidden, then the light shining back.
It would require a special sort of person, yes and no, to be able to see so clearly. First, a very front row seat on sinful behavior. He could not be, say, a college professor, nor a banker. A recognized pillar of society, He would not be of the professionally high ranks, so that he could not really be taken down and disgraced with much to lose. He would be an oddity. A puzzle of an educated young man but without the seemingly appropriate profession. Seeing with perfect clarity the faults, the hiccups, the marginal, the not quite shameful, the whole range of gluttony, idle laziness, envy, passion... And calm would he be, more or less, in the midst of all that, those storms of human nature. A sense of humor.
A princess, upwardly mobile, educated, for her you'd be just about the last thing she'd want to have anything to do with. Even your own patience with yourself would be pretty much worn out by the time you really started gaining on understanding. So it is.
Friday, March 2, 2018
Thursday, March 1, 2018
When one waits on all the people of all the nationalities, you have an idea of how the world works. Some peoples come early and talk incessantly when you would rather have a moment to collect your thoughts. Some are so efficient at being waited on, such professionals, that one fears being impolite or slow or slightly off. Some take their time, and speak in shrouded mystery as to what they might like. Some are quite used to being waited upon.
One could have, if one had wanted to, understood the entire history of the world, economically, politically, as the seeds of everything were there before you, all acts, all behaviors, all the things within and about the clever creature of will. It really was a great job, a great biological study, observations, little judgment, an Audubon gallery of portraits if one had been patient and tireless enough. Inexplicable primates, eyes bright and wide eyed, the habits from ancestors who lived in trees... wanting to get in their words in... much as birds.
And indeed you might develop your own little theories. One bearing upon blood types. What makes conversation more seamless in certain situations, interactions. An O can talk anyone, I suppose, but find the other blood types a bit tedious, hard to reach. A people, for him they were difficult. Often quite humorless. Distracted? They always put things in their own terms, that of the successful farmer, striving away, storing grain. They were always right. And then there were the type B people, masters of manipulation, skilled at turning any subject into a conversation completely to suit their own sophisticated urban survivalist understandings, too formidable to tangle with, impossible to talk to if you were an O. The Bs want to intrude into your creative process, to storm its walls, burn them, kill its women and children, in order to, as they see it get to you, and thus, themselves. If they can't kill you and burn down your village, they will use techniques of embarrassment. ABs are rarer. An oddity of evolution, not enough research, to judge or see where they are when they are honestly themselves.
It all left you with the impression that the higher blood types of evolution got you as much as you might get a cat that brought you gifts, little animals half alive, collected from nature and brought to your doorstep. The best they could offer you was a sort of "hmm, thank you... (I guess.)" And you have brought them something holy and beautiful, and for all your efforts it can only seem that they do not get the offering.
Looking at it, I think it always seemed to me that there was a real sort of psychic understanding of The Old Testament. Jesus could bring out the deeper references, incorporate them in parable form. And I have the impression that his parables are themselves a psychic quality in the old light that they shine into our lives, the deepest meanings of our own little events and interactions.
I woke today, with a headache, and the Mass' homily was about the tale of Lazarus the beggar and the wealthy man who end up dying at the same time, finding themselves at the opposite ends of the chasm between heaven and hell. The man who had just about every material comfort is suffering in anguish in hell, and above the poor man who suffered, comforted by dogs who licked his wounds in life and little more, is sitting with Abraham. As the father of the homily, a Dominican, Father Peter Cameron, explains it, one man offered comfort, a servant, while the other, well... , was more concerned with other things than being kind to his fellows.
There is no shame in being the poor man...
The things you tune into, as if by chance... Not that they are perfectly and directly and concretely applicable, made for any sort of perfect comparison, but just that these thoughts generate other thoughts, and ones which are comforting.
Being rejected, the homilist points out, is a great gift, an opportunity, a freedom, a means to see the light... Being rejected, one is more broken, and when we acknowledge our own brokenness, the more people will listen. And I can see that. And it matters not how one is rejected, becoming just a detail, insignificant, but for the lesson and the brokenness.
It was something the boy wondered about as he listened to father telling him about the symbolism of Brother Ass, Christ's journey to Jerusalem, that Jesus knew reality so well that he knew future events. Being so cool as to see the future, to know there was an ass waiting to bring him, this had its impression on a youthful boy from years ago, remembered. Dad and his own rare Jesus-like parables, gentle, kind, understanding, learning, no judgment...
The Gospels seem to have that awareness, of looking back at the old stories, now with a consciousness as to what had been created with such accomplishment, all the old tales of Moses and Abraham and the prophets. What did it all mean? And now suddenly, not only were we capable in our own homage and reverence, able to see the old stories with vivid life and fresh very direct applicability to our own affairs and souls... Now we could see the present almost itself the fulfillment of prophecy, as Jesus says about his own day. And he does so, primarily to teach us a lesson, the way to see the important over the unimportant. And then, by doing so, almost as an afterthought, there could be a prescient way to see events coming, which you could do so because you understood deeply and intimately the reality of those events of long ago important and written down...
The old stories are very real to us, a distillation of all that is now before us. The stories help us seeing, getting, grasping, the larger point.
Having such a father, an accomplished instructor of plant biology, a teacher in every sense, the point of life was deeper, a reality behind reality, a way to look at all things. And so do you try to interpret, to find out the greater lessons that might be offered you, say, rejection, rejection when you like a girl but she doesn't seem to like you back so much, rejection in the form of the termination of a situation such as one's gainful employment in the business which is ostensibly your career, your livelihood.
The old saying, wist ye not I was at my father's business, that always seemed to apply to life.
I never even looked at myself as a writer. Writing was just a way to record thought, to work on them, to workshop thoughts before the intellect and the soul, to see if they worked or held water.
I never really even looked at myself as a barman. It was something beyond that. I was very conscientious about it even, the details, the particulars, the restocking, the knowledge, all that pertained to the service end of delivering in timely fashion to people. I quite outdid myself at it. I worked hard. I'd get home exhausted. But there was a reality beneath all that. It did not show up on the bottom line, or in any specific spreadsheet calculations from the numbers people, except that it was obvious the business wasn't so bad, and that people who came tended to return. Whether or not I got any particular specific special reward or security beyond that shared with everyone...
By interpolation, then, do we sometimes project forward, to conclude that life is such. You never really look at it as life, conventionally, the make yourself happy kind of a thing. No, it's more about the spiritual journey, as they say. About those things which you accidentally encounter, run into randomly, sometimes through 'mistake,' and then find meaning in, water to walk in, and then on. A certain kind of detachment for the spiritual to shine through in spiritual time...
Would it even be, anymore, once you had opened thine eyes and seen more truly (ever a process), about the profession, about making the living... Would it be about that directly, in light of the tale Jesus tells the fretting Pharisees about Lazarus the beggar and the man of wealth, and all those old stories retold...
People might have told me, "you have so many talents, why do such a job?" Made you wonder, yes it did. But perhaps you looked beyond the unnerving specifics, and you saw, at least, the human dignity in the task, in keeping it alive. Old school.
The old barman was a man who spent a day off alone with his thoughts. If there was something that caught his eye, a show on public television, he sometimes teared up, inexplicably. Each week had been full of hard effort, and offered the fruit of many tales. Little tales, not with any particular point, more the capture of a little mystery, or a question that one could not easily answer, or easily take a side on, a stance, right or wrong, good or bad. Things in general and on the whole were far too confused and confusing. And you knew you only had your gut reaction, and even that could never quite explain, as no one can ever really explain himself. There were a few guitars around, but things to do, and an aging mother to worry about, and anyway, there was tasks to complete in this simple unostentatious life. Trash, recycling, cooking, wine to drink, sleeping and forms of rest. No time for much else. And if the weather wasn't great, he tended to stay in.
Good taste... what does it mean?
It took the frailty of his one surviving parent, a mother loved deeply with no question, no choice in the matter, for him to be able to listen fully to the simplicity of his own opinions... It could have, on the one hand, driven him mad, this last vulnerability of the distant thunder of glimmers of anguish, an anguish that itself was immediately transmuted into beauty of love, life, its particular personal memories. No longer did the old barman's mind tend to run toward all the things of regret, or of other people and their opinions, as much of all that was only imaginary anyway, shifting sands. All one could accept was the final peace. Not all the fears, horrible, lonesome, fears of the worst sort of failures there could be, homelessness, addiction, the loss of everything, the great inability to be able to actually protect yourself, your life, your history, your health, in the long run. The great futility sense that came down upon you with thoughts of no pension, no way to ever retire, no way to provide an aging self any security whatsoever... Shit, why not take a glass of wine, the sweet potato in the oven now, an unexpired steak waiting for season in the refrigerator when ready...
Cooking, so basic, so easy, so beautiful, on the very top end of a human body's needs, like sleep, going to the bathroom. Ingredients from the earth, blessed by God's covenant. A grass fed steak, onion, greens...
And yet, in his own thoughts, a bum. A let down. Failure at the great body of things that most people in the great metropolis survive upon... resume, technical skills, software murmurers, specialists, all of their successes squeezing out the little guy not willing to sell out his brethren by facilitating the great computer chipping, the ultimate surveillance already come upon us irrevocably, such that each of us will be tracked with droves, our movements recorded by face recognizing cameras...
What does one do... when one's values have grown off in their own separate tribal direction out away from the others.... what does one do, when the oldest of Bible stories speak to you, find a new land, having a hearing for the word of God, as it were... a wish to go to a new land, Abrahamic. And the old voice, "too late for me." Who even remembers the values I have... Indeed, I have to tell them to my therapist, who is quiet and mystified, or simply a passive listener, but with the bias of the times, he who cannot belong is crazy, a medical case.
You must return, return to the old land, to the oldest of stories....
The man cooked, in his own fashion. Two of the four grass fed beef patties from the Safeway to cook or waste, the sweet potato with a rub of olive oil and sea salt, the iron lodge grill pan skillet... And wine, indeed, is in the vessel, first the left over Beaujolais, chilled from the cooler, and then, the Chinon. Jesus liked wine with his feasts, part of salon, his intellectual muse when he supped and served the fishermen of man... The wine reminds you of the vintage, brought to proper season.
So many deep resonances in all the stories old. He who serves, and he who is merely a barman in some town real, pouring his little tastings to entertain the people who come in, particularly the ladies, but really all people.
Abraham's sacrifice, the death of a dog long ago, Spring break from college... put to sleep, and we buried her... up there on Ernst Road above the old property.
One could have, if one had wanted to, understood the entire history of the world, economically, politically, as the seeds of everything were there before you, all acts, all behaviors, all the things within and about the clever creature of will. It really was a great job, a great biological study, observations, little judgment, an Audubon gallery of portraits if one had been patient and tireless enough. Inexplicable primates, eyes bright and wide eyed, the habits from ancestors who lived in trees... wanting to get in their words in... much as birds.
And indeed you might develop your own little theories. One bearing upon blood types. What makes conversation more seamless in certain situations, interactions. An O can talk anyone, I suppose, but find the other blood types a bit tedious, hard to reach. A people, for him they were difficult. Often quite humorless. Distracted? They always put things in their own terms, that of the successful farmer, striving away, storing grain. They were always right. And then there were the type B people, masters of manipulation, skilled at turning any subject into a conversation completely to suit their own sophisticated urban survivalist understandings, too formidable to tangle with, impossible to talk to if you were an O. The Bs want to intrude into your creative process, to storm its walls, burn them, kill its women and children, in order to, as they see it get to you, and thus, themselves. If they can't kill you and burn down your village, they will use techniques of embarrassment. ABs are rarer. An oddity of evolution, not enough research, to judge or see where they are when they are honestly themselves.
It all left you with the impression that the higher blood types of evolution got you as much as you might get a cat that brought you gifts, little animals half alive, collected from nature and brought to your doorstep. The best they could offer you was a sort of "hmm, thank you... (I guess.)" And you have brought them something holy and beautiful, and for all your efforts it can only seem that they do not get the offering.
Looking at it, I think it always seemed to me that there was a real sort of psychic understanding of The Old Testament. Jesus could bring out the deeper references, incorporate them in parable form. And I have the impression that his parables are themselves a psychic quality in the old light that they shine into our lives, the deepest meanings of our own little events and interactions.
I woke today, with a headache, and the Mass' homily was about the tale of Lazarus the beggar and the wealthy man who end up dying at the same time, finding themselves at the opposite ends of the chasm between heaven and hell. The man who had just about every material comfort is suffering in anguish in hell, and above the poor man who suffered, comforted by dogs who licked his wounds in life and little more, is sitting with Abraham. As the father of the homily, a Dominican, Father Peter Cameron, explains it, one man offered comfort, a servant, while the other, well... , was more concerned with other things than being kind to his fellows.
There is no shame in being the poor man...
The things you tune into, as if by chance... Not that they are perfectly and directly and concretely applicable, made for any sort of perfect comparison, but just that these thoughts generate other thoughts, and ones which are comforting.
Being rejected, the homilist points out, is a great gift, an opportunity, a freedom, a means to see the light... Being rejected, one is more broken, and when we acknowledge our own brokenness, the more people will listen. And I can see that. And it matters not how one is rejected, becoming just a detail, insignificant, but for the lesson and the brokenness.
It was something the boy wondered about as he listened to father telling him about the symbolism of Brother Ass, Christ's journey to Jerusalem, that Jesus knew reality so well that he knew future events. Being so cool as to see the future, to know there was an ass waiting to bring him, this had its impression on a youthful boy from years ago, remembered. Dad and his own rare Jesus-like parables, gentle, kind, understanding, learning, no judgment...
The Gospels seem to have that awareness, of looking back at the old stories, now with a consciousness as to what had been created with such accomplishment, all the old tales of Moses and Abraham and the prophets. What did it all mean? And now suddenly, not only were we capable in our own homage and reverence, able to see the old stories with vivid life and fresh very direct applicability to our own affairs and souls... Now we could see the present almost itself the fulfillment of prophecy, as Jesus says about his own day. And he does so, primarily to teach us a lesson, the way to see the important over the unimportant. And then, by doing so, almost as an afterthought, there could be a prescient way to see events coming, which you could do so because you understood deeply and intimately the reality of those events of long ago important and written down...
The old stories are very real to us, a distillation of all that is now before us. The stories help us seeing, getting, grasping, the larger point.
Having such a father, an accomplished instructor of plant biology, a teacher in every sense, the point of life was deeper, a reality behind reality, a way to look at all things. And so do you try to interpret, to find out the greater lessons that might be offered you, say, rejection, rejection when you like a girl but she doesn't seem to like you back so much, rejection in the form of the termination of a situation such as one's gainful employment in the business which is ostensibly your career, your livelihood.
The old saying, wist ye not I was at my father's business, that always seemed to apply to life.
I never even looked at myself as a writer. Writing was just a way to record thought, to work on them, to workshop thoughts before the intellect and the soul, to see if they worked or held water.
I never really even looked at myself as a barman. It was something beyond that. I was very conscientious about it even, the details, the particulars, the restocking, the knowledge, all that pertained to the service end of delivering in timely fashion to people. I quite outdid myself at it. I worked hard. I'd get home exhausted. But there was a reality beneath all that. It did not show up on the bottom line, or in any specific spreadsheet calculations from the numbers people, except that it was obvious the business wasn't so bad, and that people who came tended to return. Whether or not I got any particular specific special reward or security beyond that shared with everyone...
By interpolation, then, do we sometimes project forward, to conclude that life is such. You never really look at it as life, conventionally, the make yourself happy kind of a thing. No, it's more about the spiritual journey, as they say. About those things which you accidentally encounter, run into randomly, sometimes through 'mistake,' and then find meaning in, water to walk in, and then on. A certain kind of detachment for the spiritual to shine through in spiritual time...
Would it even be, anymore, once you had opened thine eyes and seen more truly (ever a process), about the profession, about making the living... Would it be about that directly, in light of the tale Jesus tells the fretting Pharisees about Lazarus the beggar and the man of wealth, and all those old stories retold...
People might have told me, "you have so many talents, why do such a job?" Made you wonder, yes it did. But perhaps you looked beyond the unnerving specifics, and you saw, at least, the human dignity in the task, in keeping it alive. Old school.
The old barman was a man who spent a day off alone with his thoughts. If there was something that caught his eye, a show on public television, he sometimes teared up, inexplicably. Each week had been full of hard effort, and offered the fruit of many tales. Little tales, not with any particular point, more the capture of a little mystery, or a question that one could not easily answer, or easily take a side on, a stance, right or wrong, good or bad. Things in general and on the whole were far too confused and confusing. And you knew you only had your gut reaction, and even that could never quite explain, as no one can ever really explain himself. There were a few guitars around, but things to do, and an aging mother to worry about, and anyway, there was tasks to complete in this simple unostentatious life. Trash, recycling, cooking, wine to drink, sleeping and forms of rest. No time for much else. And if the weather wasn't great, he tended to stay in.
Good taste... what does it mean?
It took the frailty of his one surviving parent, a mother loved deeply with no question, no choice in the matter, for him to be able to listen fully to the simplicity of his own opinions... It could have, on the one hand, driven him mad, this last vulnerability of the distant thunder of glimmers of anguish, an anguish that itself was immediately transmuted into beauty of love, life, its particular personal memories. No longer did the old barman's mind tend to run toward all the things of regret, or of other people and their opinions, as much of all that was only imaginary anyway, shifting sands. All one could accept was the final peace. Not all the fears, horrible, lonesome, fears of the worst sort of failures there could be, homelessness, addiction, the loss of everything, the great inability to be able to actually protect yourself, your life, your history, your health, in the long run. The great futility sense that came down upon you with thoughts of no pension, no way to ever retire, no way to provide an aging self any security whatsoever... Shit, why not take a glass of wine, the sweet potato in the oven now, an unexpired steak waiting for season in the refrigerator when ready...
Cooking, so basic, so easy, so beautiful, on the very top end of a human body's needs, like sleep, going to the bathroom. Ingredients from the earth, blessed by God's covenant. A grass fed steak, onion, greens...
And yet, in his own thoughts, a bum. A let down. Failure at the great body of things that most people in the great metropolis survive upon... resume, technical skills, software murmurers, specialists, all of their successes squeezing out the little guy not willing to sell out his brethren by facilitating the great computer chipping, the ultimate surveillance already come upon us irrevocably, such that each of us will be tracked with droves, our movements recorded by face recognizing cameras...
What does one do... when one's values have grown off in their own separate tribal direction out away from the others.... what does one do, when the oldest of Bible stories speak to you, find a new land, having a hearing for the word of God, as it were... a wish to go to a new land, Abrahamic. And the old voice, "too late for me." Who even remembers the values I have... Indeed, I have to tell them to my therapist, who is quiet and mystified, or simply a passive listener, but with the bias of the times, he who cannot belong is crazy, a medical case.
You must return, return to the old land, to the oldest of stories....
The man cooked, in his own fashion. Two of the four grass fed beef patties from the Safeway to cook or waste, the sweet potato with a rub of olive oil and sea salt, the iron lodge grill pan skillet... And wine, indeed, is in the vessel, first the left over Beaujolais, chilled from the cooler, and then, the Chinon. Jesus liked wine with his feasts, part of salon, his intellectual muse when he supped and served the fishermen of man... The wine reminds you of the vintage, brought to proper season.
So many deep resonances in all the stories old. He who serves, and he who is merely a barman in some town real, pouring his little tastings to entertain the people who come in, particularly the ladies, but really all people.
Abraham's sacrifice, the death of a dog long ago, Spring break from college... put to sleep, and we buried her... up there on Ernst Road above the old property.
Sunday, February 25, 2018
Okay, cheer up a bit. It's not sunny out, but you'll be going to work soon enough, and you worked a full five shifts last week, so that's good, in fact it wasn't that bad, now that you're staying hydrated.
Writing is multi-tasking. On the one hand the tea is being prepared, and a little chicken broth warming up on the stove. There's mom to call, to check in on. And while you didn't go out, and even ran out of wine, but didn't open the saved bottles, the Beaucastel from 2012, the 2008 Caymus Cabernet, the last of the wines your father sent you.. You got some good stuff done around the house, not in bad shape for the week ahead, knock wood.
Blood Type. I put in a small bit of astragalus powder into my green tea, steeped last night. I like the taste of it, and its effect, placebo or not, helps with the aches and pains of waking.
A Mass on tv in the background, at noon, instead of the Gregorian.
And lo, the priest is talking about the Transfiguration. Jesus takes Peter and John and James up the hill, 3 disciples, and prepare for Elijah and Moses. There up on the mountain. (What does rising from the dead, mean, the apostles wondered, after J told them, keep it quiet until I do...)
But the Mass is just one part of the morning's multi-tasking.
DIY electrolyte water to brew up out of filtered water, baking soda, salt from the marsh... 1 liter to half a teaspoon of baking soda, half a tablespoon of salt...
And Jesus restrained himself, hid his divinity in his humanity...
Arch Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, manifestation of glory, but not a full manifestation of his divinity...
"The glory that shown around Jesus as the temple of God,... a natural expression of the inherent loveliness of... Christ veiled his divinity with humanity..." The Lord is pulling aside this thin veil... The divinity within is not so hidden in him that we have to dig...
Fr. Anthony Mary, MFVA... I like him, this guy, his gentle bedside manner in our lives. His voice is pleasant, and his singing is seamless with the Mass and its spirit. A friend, accepting you.
Talk of Origin's thoughts on the matter... The six days of creation, the seventh day of rest. Lent, a season of retreat... Entering into full communion...
I wonder how much politics are effected by blood type... How we might naturally argue with eau other...
Jesus is the source of love, faith, and joy...
Incorporated into his dying and his rise, that's what we encounter in Baptism...
Straight ahead through the cross, the only direction.
We get scandalized by the resurrection... To Peter, you must not get in my way... Don't tell anyone until after I rise from the dead... It strengthened their faith.
"As the cross came nearer, his glory became nearer, and burst through..." Father F..J Sheen...
We get scandalized by Jesus upon the Cross...
Kerouac wrote he sees the Cross in moments toward the end of Big Sur, horrible story of his descent, alcoholic...
Writing has to be multi-tasking, to realize work and aging parents, to realize the Cross, and its beauty in our lives, which we are asked to go to, and through, to find direction, the only way...
And so I sketch, and roughly sketch, from the man's sermon, on this the second Sunday of Lent... Misquoting, not attributing with any proper scholarship here.
Blood Type, perhaps that is why I have certain caveman views in life, ones that you have to keep close to the chest sometimes... So do I not exactly engage when those of Type A blood, the farmers, go on with their own farmer point of view; they can be vegetarians quite happily... Nor do I engage with the omnivore Mongol herd blood of the B people, because while I can get them, they don't always get me. JFK was type O. He could speak to a lot of people, without managing to offend them. The ministers down in Houston, Texas, even though he was so nervous that he shook, they got him, as a kind of universal donor in his understandings of things, and they had to agree with him. ABs are friendly, more or less, from what I can tell...
Faith to the A is in the town and the fields, and the grain storage house. Faith to the B is mastering and conquering city walls and taking what you can... Faith to the O is the meat of the hunt, a life of action.
And so the O understands the blood of the Cross, deep down, the small aches the barman feels from taking up his own Cross, serving the bread and wine...
Now the Cross, that's up there with the deepest, the highest form of understandings we will ever upon this Earth attain. One doesn't dismiss it, either.
Like you or I, people will say petty things about us, perhaps, sometimes, as people will speak good and bad of all things, depending, but, you cannot say that much bad about anyone who thinks, at least, of the Cross sometimes, thinks of it as a thing of direction in life, so that one might gain passing through it, metaphorically.
Do we need to nitpick at the details of how we are placed upon our own Crosses to then bear? Are those even sins if they bring us to the Cross...
I think, as long as we get that state of affairs, of the Cross in this life, we are doing alright, as students of life and the spirit.
Probably not a very good thing for us, going up on the Cross, upon the daily uncertainty, the mystery of the future shrouded before us in the form of death...
Indeed, writing is multi-tasking. A full room to work, as if you were indeed a waiter, and you never know where the resolution of wisdom's full meal might come from, from what direction... In one ear, the dishes for the most part have been tackled with soap and hot water in a tub in the sink, drying now, in the other year, you call your mom. See if she's seen any of the Olympics, or if she got her New York Times for this Sunday, gas in her car from the easiest mini-mart gas station, the Stewart Shop at Utica and 5th... And in other ears, unexpected things, unpredictable thoughts, voices from the community...
Thousand layers of geological thoughts in the relative moment, feelings of almost wanting to cry, but somewhere also knowing that this is what saves you, makes you comparable with all life and humanity. Finding writing, finding that process, that will always make you a bit happy in some way, as will motion, the clock ticking down to that time you'll brave walking out the door, getting to work, on foot, call a cab, the bicycle left at work out of cold weather and laziness... And it's only Sunday night, can't be all that bad...
Writing is multi-tasking. On the one hand the tea is being prepared, and a little chicken broth warming up on the stove. There's mom to call, to check in on. And while you didn't go out, and even ran out of wine, but didn't open the saved bottles, the Beaucastel from 2012, the 2008 Caymus Cabernet, the last of the wines your father sent you.. You got some good stuff done around the house, not in bad shape for the week ahead, knock wood.
Blood Type. I put in a small bit of astragalus powder into my green tea, steeped last night. I like the taste of it, and its effect, placebo or not, helps with the aches and pains of waking.
A Mass on tv in the background, at noon, instead of the Gregorian.
And lo, the priest is talking about the Transfiguration. Jesus takes Peter and John and James up the hill, 3 disciples, and prepare for Elijah and Moses. There up on the mountain. (What does rising from the dead, mean, the apostles wondered, after J told them, keep it quiet until I do...)
But the Mass is just one part of the morning's multi-tasking.
DIY electrolyte water to brew up out of filtered water, baking soda, salt from the marsh... 1 liter to half a teaspoon of baking soda, half a tablespoon of salt...
And Jesus restrained himself, hid his divinity in his humanity...
Arch Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, manifestation of glory, but not a full manifestation of his divinity...
"The glory that shown around Jesus as the temple of God,... a natural expression of the inherent loveliness of... Christ veiled his divinity with humanity..." The Lord is pulling aside this thin veil... The divinity within is not so hidden in him that we have to dig...
Fr. Anthony Mary, MFVA... I like him, this guy, his gentle bedside manner in our lives. His voice is pleasant, and his singing is seamless with the Mass and its spirit. A friend, accepting you.
Talk of Origin's thoughts on the matter... The six days of creation, the seventh day of rest. Lent, a season of retreat... Entering into full communion...
I wonder how much politics are effected by blood type... How we might naturally argue with eau other...
Jesus is the source of love, faith, and joy...
Incorporated into his dying and his rise, that's what we encounter in Baptism...
Straight ahead through the cross, the only direction.
We get scandalized by the resurrection... To Peter, you must not get in my way... Don't tell anyone until after I rise from the dead... It strengthened their faith.
"As the cross came nearer, his glory became nearer, and burst through..." Father F..J Sheen...
We get scandalized by Jesus upon the Cross...
Kerouac wrote he sees the Cross in moments toward the end of Big Sur, horrible story of his descent, alcoholic...
Writing has to be multi-tasking, to realize work and aging parents, to realize the Cross, and its beauty in our lives, which we are asked to go to, and through, to find direction, the only way...
And so I sketch, and roughly sketch, from the man's sermon, on this the second Sunday of Lent... Misquoting, not attributing with any proper scholarship here.
Blood Type, perhaps that is why I have certain caveman views in life, ones that you have to keep close to the chest sometimes... So do I not exactly engage when those of Type A blood, the farmers, go on with their own farmer point of view; they can be vegetarians quite happily... Nor do I engage with the omnivore Mongol herd blood of the B people, because while I can get them, they don't always get me. JFK was type O. He could speak to a lot of people, without managing to offend them. The ministers down in Houston, Texas, even though he was so nervous that he shook, they got him, as a kind of universal donor in his understandings of things, and they had to agree with him. ABs are friendly, more or less, from what I can tell...
Faith to the A is in the town and the fields, and the grain storage house. Faith to the B is mastering and conquering city walls and taking what you can... Faith to the O is the meat of the hunt, a life of action.
And so the O understands the blood of the Cross, deep down, the small aches the barman feels from taking up his own Cross, serving the bread and wine...
Now the Cross, that's up there with the deepest, the highest form of understandings we will ever upon this Earth attain. One doesn't dismiss it, either.
Like you or I, people will say petty things about us, perhaps, sometimes, as people will speak good and bad of all things, depending, but, you cannot say that much bad about anyone who thinks, at least, of the Cross sometimes, thinks of it as a thing of direction in life, so that one might gain passing through it, metaphorically.
Do we need to nitpick at the details of how we are placed upon our own Crosses to then bear? Are those even sins if they bring us to the Cross...
I think, as long as we get that state of affairs, of the Cross in this life, we are doing alright, as students of life and the spirit.
Probably not a very good thing for us, going up on the Cross, upon the daily uncertainty, the mystery of the future shrouded before us in the form of death...
Indeed, writing is multi-tasking. A full room to work, as if you were indeed a waiter, and you never know where the resolution of wisdom's full meal might come from, from what direction... In one ear, the dishes for the most part have been tackled with soap and hot water in a tub in the sink, drying now, in the other year, you call your mom. See if she's seen any of the Olympics, or if she got her New York Times for this Sunday, gas in her car from the easiest mini-mart gas station, the Stewart Shop at Utica and 5th... And in other ears, unexpected things, unpredictable thoughts, voices from the community...
Thousand layers of geological thoughts in the relative moment, feelings of almost wanting to cry, but somewhere also knowing that this is what saves you, makes you comparable with all life and humanity. Finding writing, finding that process, that will always make you a bit happy in some way, as will motion, the clock ticking down to that time you'll brave walking out the door, getting to work, on foot, call a cab, the bicycle left at work out of cold weather and laziness... And it's only Sunday night, can't be all that bad...
Saturday, February 24, 2018
The Soviets, they were always good at swaying people negatively, sowing discord, having vast political agreements far too shifting in shape and in practice and in every other direction know to man but the most obvious and most done frequently and to our comfort; That is their global import to us, the global trade agreement accomplice found.
I wake up feeling stupid, as I often do. Mom is calling, and I should be up anyway. Even though I cooked, made certain I ate reasonably well, the wine of last night leaves me feeling dehydrated, so it goes. Talking with a friend who leaves near Wilmington, NC over the phone, maybe that threw me off, as talking on cell phones does. So I'm sitting now in my father's old brown chair, laptop before me, drinking my green tea as the old guts gurgle.
But the Gregorian chants are back on the sound system, carrying the ambience of church space echoes to the monks singing, and I am calm again, because I know I am writing again. I am writing again to keep in shape, to keep the exercise going, and I know that somewhere within there are things to say. And I have succeeded in being quiet so far, pulling myself away from my iPhone 5, Google News, Tinder, Facebook, the usual emails, mostly political in nature. It's a day off, and for reassurance sake I will be back to work tomorrow, with a grocery list today, and the slightest twinge of a distant headache. It is overcast, about fifty here, and the rain is coming in from the west soon and it will be a lasting rain shower.
But we all, I suppose, wake up with the awkwardness. Being responsible, most have work to think about, family things to do, and groceries and other activities of entertainment to see to. But I am single, as I have, I suppose, always been, to match the solitary pursuit of explicating the mind's juices, the inspirations of its decent good health. (Unless I am crazy and no one is directly telling me so, and actually the therapist seems to think I'm pretty sane, and if anything, might let my moral compass guard down from time to time, but honey I don't know about that, because I am a sinful man. Thus it be a comfort that early on in the great story of the Testaments Noah, having reached the ark's destination lands, has much wine and has to be put to bed, a little rowdy, maybe, by his sons.) If I were responsible and prepared for this adulthood better I would be closer to mom up there in Oswego, so it would not have to be a major project of an eight hour drive, renting a car, getting at least one of two extra days off from work...
We all wake up with this awkwardness, wondering about ourselves. I've tuned in earlier to the Weather Channel--mom talks about a lot of rain across the country--and notice that television programming makes you wait for it, slips in a good share of commercials, ones you've seen before, each mesmerizing and hypnotic in its own way, like the red Range Rover climbing the impossible steps of some great foggy Chinese Wall like a ski jump. And that's how were are inside ourselves, having to wait, and all the sort of commercial like things in our own minds come bumbling up, distractions to persuade you against getting too deep, or in too deep.
Like the chants, the spiritual voice comes through. It's a reality of the mind, stated in familiar questions, that is there, and it will come again and again, a bit louder, each time, and then it becomes the voice of reason to you, more or less. It takes faith to listen to it. The still small voice in the desert of life...
And can one hear it, can you hear it, can I hear it. Like the commercial, worries of great impractical ventures oppose it. Be responsible. Or go do something. Buy something. See something. Take care of something practical. (Chores can actually be good for the mind attempting its tuning in on a voice.)
Easier for the camel to venture through the eye of the needle, then for the man distracted by his own wealth, to enter into the thought processes of Heaven, it is said, and Jesus, the great teacher, said it, and there it is. And there are other lines of his, telling us not to focus on worries so much, look rather to the lilies of the field or the raiments of the sparrow, of those things that neither reap nor do they sow.
Perhaps the most responsible and wisest thing is to tune in, to listen to the voice, still and small, there for you on a day off, rich company, as you find your footing again to live the day.
But what does this all tell us? It tells us of the distractions, the distracting things, and you begin to wonder if your old brother sort of nailed down security, all the focus and energy that goes into that, is really, for you personally, transmuted into something else, quite different perhaps. Maybe even no less responsible when taking into account one's own attempt at doing that which is of good health.
Of course there is even craziness that bears. Those closest to Jesus take him for quite out of his mind, such that they really feel they must come and restrain him, for he's already quite out of hand. Already, and Jesus is here in what sounds like the early parts of his career, the way the account of the Gospels present it... Villagers of his own home town take him as a blasphemer, and move to toss him off the precipice of the hill the town sits on, protected, as if to throw him the barbarian forces that might try to mount their very hill to desecrate all that they hold sacred...
So, that's how you start your day, eh, knowing that, more or less you have to be "crazy" in some sense. Not looking at art in a museum, but strangely, going about making your own, hmm.
Strangely at home are these thoughts of the road, picaresque as they are, those of a wandering teacher who has no set home, no real set career. Jesus is not a dental technician, nor is he certified to be in public school education. He is doing something that people have a hard time finding a label for. Wait, he's the carpenter, right? The carpenter's son... He's not a rabbi, as such are recognized officially.
What's he even saying?
Seems like he's trying to find himself. Which any artist would find recognizable, most of them, having to work at it. Perhaps he's spent those years trying to marshall various unknown talents, practice applicable skills of some sort. Maybe he's trying to gather his own self-confidence, even, even he, to do what he has this instinct, this noncommercial drive for....
Maybe it's a bit too late for him. To late for him to do something other, something practical, that something else he seemed like he always wanted to do, had the potential for, but either too lazy or distracted from.
And now he's trying something very mighty and impossible, really.... What is he thinking...
You kinda gotta feel for him, at least if you're of the American mindset. Poor guy. What's he going to do with himself, now. Now. Truly, his left hand doesn't know what his right hand is doing, he says as much, directly. But somehow, he seems okay with that, as if it were a necessary state of being...
It might even seem that he doesn't get a lot of help in it, either. There's of course the disciples... Maybe he picks them up largely just for company. But it's not like he's getting direct recommendations or directions from above. There is only that instance, in the garden up on the hill, the Transfiguration, when two mighty holy beings, prophets, appear, as angels seem to appear.. Other than that it's more or less intuition, on his part. Backed up by a careful remembering of his own story, so that it matches up with the prophetic texts, poetic accounts that seem to harbor potential for the future that is now, in synch with the very things going on, today, a week ago, or when he was a boy, the important moments in life.
He has doubts too, somewhere. Fears. But this is precisely where he needs to be.
It always feel like you fail when you attempt to write. You're left with a sad feeling, almost. You've accomplished nothing. The Buddha failed to convince at his first sermon. Hemingway called it "the artist's reward." You feel like eating something and taking a nap. You feel shy and stupid, and feel like retreating rather than sharing...
I go out to gather the things of my grocery list. First, to the Rite Aid, then the little market. When my father was dying there was a wine tasting given by a professional, Pascal, who showed us how the professionals do a tasting, the things they look for, the marks they make on a sheet of paper. I called the hospital, spoke to a nurse, and they were putting in a IV for antibiotics. Afterward I went across the street, in a kind of a fog. I went to the new Safeway there. I remember I bought a piece of fish to cook for dinner. He died about four or five hours later.
I feel the same sort of awkwardness, as I shop, remembering. Mom is faraway, and when I call her she asks me I she will be seeing me soon or even later today, and I explain, well, no, mom, I have to work tomorrow, it's the start of my work week.
I've gathered the things of my list, made reasonable choices at the grocery store, not forgetting toilet paper and the purple pill, the pedialyte, the soda water, V8 in little cans, and a little box of baking soda. Food, you have to have all that to back you up when the workweek comes, you don't have much of a choice in that. Fresh eggs, another steak, some ground bison, leafy greens in a plastic little box, and there's a cute girl behind the counter who smiles at me as I look over the counter, figuring I'll just grab a roasted half chicken so I don't get caught out should I not feel like cooking tonight, immediately. The lonesomeness sinks in, and the sort of wall that grows up, that limits you, almost by something like politeness. You'd want to go say hi to her after missing the initial reaction, shy. And now it seems the old feeling, not wanting to be a creep, not be creepy, like that old charge that hovers over you, when really you've been as quiet as Clint Eastwood, independent, strong, silent.
"Farmer Ted," they used to call me back in college. How did they know? Friends closer to me dubbed me the Feral Ted Beast, and also, Medieval Doctor Theodorik. But there he is again, the person unsure of himself, easygoing when it's his own chance to serve people, but now, wanting to get back and write down a few more things. And that you carry the groceries back home alone, well, that's just how it goes. What is Saturday night anyway...
Hammond Street, mom remembered earlier today, the third-floor walk-up in Lynn, where she lived when she was little. There was an icebox, with the big block of ice the man would bring up the stairs. Her father had run into some situation making it necessary for the small family to move back in with his mother-in-law. My mom's maternal grandmother, there is lore about her home cures, which started us on this conversation when I asked my mother if she was drinking hot water with lemon to loosen up the congestion. One of Nana Hill's cures, mom tells me, sautéed onions, placed on the chest of the sick, makes sense, the onion fumes, the warmth... They were Irish, could not afford the doctor...
I have wine back home. I have hydration. There's laundry to do, and it doesn't feel like there would be much point in going out anyway, having already spent enough, and some of it probably, stuff I don't really need, but that balances out the other things I don't really need.
It was a stressful week anyway, mom sounding awful, but finally getting to a doctor, first time in twenty years probably. She sounds better now.
But the Gregorian chants are back on the sound system, carrying the ambience of church space echoes to the monks singing, and I am calm again, because I know I am writing again. I am writing again to keep in shape, to keep the exercise going, and I know that somewhere within there are things to say. And I have succeeded in being quiet so far, pulling myself away from my iPhone 5, Google News, Tinder, Facebook, the usual emails, mostly political in nature. It's a day off, and for reassurance sake I will be back to work tomorrow, with a grocery list today, and the slightest twinge of a distant headache. It is overcast, about fifty here, and the rain is coming in from the west soon and it will be a lasting rain shower.
But we all, I suppose, wake up with the awkwardness. Being responsible, most have work to think about, family things to do, and groceries and other activities of entertainment to see to. But I am single, as I have, I suppose, always been, to match the solitary pursuit of explicating the mind's juices, the inspirations of its decent good health. (Unless I am crazy and no one is directly telling me so, and actually the therapist seems to think I'm pretty sane, and if anything, might let my moral compass guard down from time to time, but honey I don't know about that, because I am a sinful man. Thus it be a comfort that early on in the great story of the Testaments Noah, having reached the ark's destination lands, has much wine and has to be put to bed, a little rowdy, maybe, by his sons.) If I were responsible and prepared for this adulthood better I would be closer to mom up there in Oswego, so it would not have to be a major project of an eight hour drive, renting a car, getting at least one of two extra days off from work...
We all wake up with this awkwardness, wondering about ourselves. I've tuned in earlier to the Weather Channel--mom talks about a lot of rain across the country--and notice that television programming makes you wait for it, slips in a good share of commercials, ones you've seen before, each mesmerizing and hypnotic in its own way, like the red Range Rover climbing the impossible steps of some great foggy Chinese Wall like a ski jump. And that's how were are inside ourselves, having to wait, and all the sort of commercial like things in our own minds come bumbling up, distractions to persuade you against getting too deep, or in too deep.
Like the chants, the spiritual voice comes through. It's a reality of the mind, stated in familiar questions, that is there, and it will come again and again, a bit louder, each time, and then it becomes the voice of reason to you, more or less. It takes faith to listen to it. The still small voice in the desert of life...
And can one hear it, can you hear it, can I hear it. Like the commercial, worries of great impractical ventures oppose it. Be responsible. Or go do something. Buy something. See something. Take care of something practical. (Chores can actually be good for the mind attempting its tuning in on a voice.)
Easier for the camel to venture through the eye of the needle, then for the man distracted by his own wealth, to enter into the thought processes of Heaven, it is said, and Jesus, the great teacher, said it, and there it is. And there are other lines of his, telling us not to focus on worries so much, look rather to the lilies of the field or the raiments of the sparrow, of those things that neither reap nor do they sow.
Perhaps the most responsible and wisest thing is to tune in, to listen to the voice, still and small, there for you on a day off, rich company, as you find your footing again to live the day.
But what does this all tell us? It tells us of the distractions, the distracting things, and you begin to wonder if your old brother sort of nailed down security, all the focus and energy that goes into that, is really, for you personally, transmuted into something else, quite different perhaps. Maybe even no less responsible when taking into account one's own attempt at doing that which is of good health.
Of course there is even craziness that bears. Those closest to Jesus take him for quite out of his mind, such that they really feel they must come and restrain him, for he's already quite out of hand. Already, and Jesus is here in what sounds like the early parts of his career, the way the account of the Gospels present it... Villagers of his own home town take him as a blasphemer, and move to toss him off the precipice of the hill the town sits on, protected, as if to throw him the barbarian forces that might try to mount their very hill to desecrate all that they hold sacred...
So, that's how you start your day, eh, knowing that, more or less you have to be "crazy" in some sense. Not looking at art in a museum, but strangely, going about making your own, hmm.
Strangely at home are these thoughts of the road, picaresque as they are, those of a wandering teacher who has no set home, no real set career. Jesus is not a dental technician, nor is he certified to be in public school education. He is doing something that people have a hard time finding a label for. Wait, he's the carpenter, right? The carpenter's son... He's not a rabbi, as such are recognized officially.
What's he even saying?
Seems like he's trying to find himself. Which any artist would find recognizable, most of them, having to work at it. Perhaps he's spent those years trying to marshall various unknown talents, practice applicable skills of some sort. Maybe he's trying to gather his own self-confidence, even, even he, to do what he has this instinct, this noncommercial drive for....
Maybe it's a bit too late for him. To late for him to do something other, something practical, that something else he seemed like he always wanted to do, had the potential for, but either too lazy or distracted from.
And now he's trying something very mighty and impossible, really.... What is he thinking...
You kinda gotta feel for him, at least if you're of the American mindset. Poor guy. What's he going to do with himself, now. Now. Truly, his left hand doesn't know what his right hand is doing, he says as much, directly. But somehow, he seems okay with that, as if it were a necessary state of being...
It might even seem that he doesn't get a lot of help in it, either. There's of course the disciples... Maybe he picks them up largely just for company. But it's not like he's getting direct recommendations or directions from above. There is only that instance, in the garden up on the hill, the Transfiguration, when two mighty holy beings, prophets, appear, as angels seem to appear.. Other than that it's more or less intuition, on his part. Backed up by a careful remembering of his own story, so that it matches up with the prophetic texts, poetic accounts that seem to harbor potential for the future that is now, in synch with the very things going on, today, a week ago, or when he was a boy, the important moments in life.
He has doubts too, somewhere. Fears. But this is precisely where he needs to be.
It always feel like you fail when you attempt to write. You're left with a sad feeling, almost. You've accomplished nothing. The Buddha failed to convince at his first sermon. Hemingway called it "the artist's reward." You feel like eating something and taking a nap. You feel shy and stupid, and feel like retreating rather than sharing...
I go out to gather the things of my grocery list. First, to the Rite Aid, then the little market. When my father was dying there was a wine tasting given by a professional, Pascal, who showed us how the professionals do a tasting, the things they look for, the marks they make on a sheet of paper. I called the hospital, spoke to a nurse, and they were putting in a IV for antibiotics. Afterward I went across the street, in a kind of a fog. I went to the new Safeway there. I remember I bought a piece of fish to cook for dinner. He died about four or five hours later.
I feel the same sort of awkwardness, as I shop, remembering. Mom is faraway, and when I call her she asks me I she will be seeing me soon or even later today, and I explain, well, no, mom, I have to work tomorrow, it's the start of my work week.
I've gathered the things of my list, made reasonable choices at the grocery store, not forgetting toilet paper and the purple pill, the pedialyte, the soda water, V8 in little cans, and a little box of baking soda. Food, you have to have all that to back you up when the workweek comes, you don't have much of a choice in that. Fresh eggs, another steak, some ground bison, leafy greens in a plastic little box, and there's a cute girl behind the counter who smiles at me as I look over the counter, figuring I'll just grab a roasted half chicken so I don't get caught out should I not feel like cooking tonight, immediately. The lonesomeness sinks in, and the sort of wall that grows up, that limits you, almost by something like politeness. You'd want to go say hi to her after missing the initial reaction, shy. And now it seems the old feeling, not wanting to be a creep, not be creepy, like that old charge that hovers over you, when really you've been as quiet as Clint Eastwood, independent, strong, silent.
"Farmer Ted," they used to call me back in college. How did they know? Friends closer to me dubbed me the Feral Ted Beast, and also, Medieval Doctor Theodorik. But there he is again, the person unsure of himself, easygoing when it's his own chance to serve people, but now, wanting to get back and write down a few more things. And that you carry the groceries back home alone, well, that's just how it goes. What is Saturday night anyway...
Hammond Street, mom remembered earlier today, the third-floor walk-up in Lynn, where she lived when she was little. There was an icebox, with the big block of ice the man would bring up the stairs. Her father had run into some situation making it necessary for the small family to move back in with his mother-in-law. My mom's maternal grandmother, there is lore about her home cures, which started us on this conversation when I asked my mother if she was drinking hot water with lemon to loosen up the congestion. One of Nana Hill's cures, mom tells me, sautéed onions, placed on the chest of the sick, makes sense, the onion fumes, the warmth... They were Irish, could not afford the doctor...
I have wine back home. I have hydration. There's laundry to do, and it doesn't feel like there would be much point in going out anyway, having already spent enough, and some of it probably, stuff I don't really need, but that balances out the other things I don't really need.
It was a stressful week anyway, mom sounding awful, but finally getting to a doctor, first time in twenty years probably. She sounds better now.
Friday, February 23, 2018
In pondering my own state of mental affairs... I find myself oddly content in spirit. What in particular has helped, beyond a fresh attempt to stay hydrated with electrolyte water and magnesium, I/he wondered.... But definitely, no longer a need for the pill, and feeling a lot better without it, and better spiritually and psychologically not to have to think the ability to have a good mood and spirits is dependent upon on outside source.
Writing is a natural human state. It never surprises me that people who like the natural world like to write, to take care of their own inner menagerie, to let the beauty of the forest, seemingly random but not, reflect into their own deepest personal life. Particularly amongst the pioneers of the various forms and epochs of writing. Hemingway liked fishing and anything else to get himself outdoors, any excuse. A hand deft at depicting a tree and sheep, like Giotto, is an important artist. Jesus out in the desert, he will always have an eye for the natural world and the richness of its metaphorical possibilities in his little parable tales, indirect, a teacher hunting that which will soothe all our pains...
The monks sing Gregorian Chants, calm canticles of inner work being done, the most natural way at going about keeping calm... Like a chef knows how to cook, a master of the basic elements of heat and technique... Practicality emerges, the things that work come out and are repeated. These are the things a barman knows, intuitively.
And then, that winter, the prisoner started feeling better. He had more energy. His shifts of labor were easier, less draining, less exhausting. It wasn't food so much, as water. Beyond that, I don't know if there was anything in particular, he just took the choice of beginning to feel relaxed about things. No point to deep anxiety, drive it away, like Satan, get thee behind me... Enjoy the present. Do practical things. Open the wine, pour it, offer them sustenance, serve it, the bread and wine, that's all there was to it.
How did Jesus become Jesus? He took it upon himself. He did it, quite practically. A healer because he knew what sickness was. Just do the thing the easiest way, as God The Father gives you and me powers to do so. What is easier to say to the man with the withered hand, he asks the professionals, who are necessarily skeptical and controlling, bullies really, leaning in on the good busy work of the teacher they were envying and accusing of their own worst worst sins... Psychologically sick sick people, the Pharisees and the Sadducees...
How to cure the sick and angry wolf within,
how to turn it into a bird,
Francis asked of himself.
Think less Crime & Punishment. Think of Alyosha, Alyosha Karamazov,
and the old Russian monk...
The prosperous, he could not help feeling, the ambitious, he could sometime feel their judgment upon him. "A barman, for God's sake, what a wasting of life... Frivolous and low, full of bar floozies and busboy talk of tits and ass and such crudeness... Not high and elevated and pertinent in conversation to this our modern world which we here in the city have striven to attain as a place of obtaining and building power so thus we might control the policies of the land over our chosen people..."
Who is this chump upstart, the power bullies ask, failing to even so much as remember the prophecy (the medicine) of he who would come and heal, the Once and Future King... We will not even acknowledge his work, but regard him as an Idiot.
Jesus the barman, feeling better, more relaxed, accepted the medicine. The medicine was only offered to him, in such a town, through that which the ages have called pornography. In such an age, now offered up and thousand thousand "sinful women" and Mary Magdelene. He enjoyed being anointed by them, and to their virtual hands and breasts and beautiful feminine faces, he reached the climax, the metaphorical parable of spiritual enlightenment and thousand insights building, cooperating, all tugging together, relaxing that manly part of himself through which was reached the depths of his energy being and all the million thoughts of his mind. Taking a few Chinese herbs, he could allow such relaxation to happen on a daily basis, twice, even more. And strange to himself, he did not feel completely out of it and with no energy to even talk to anyone let alone wait on them, no longer was he feeling drained, but rather, much energized, relaxed, his blood pressures down...
President Kennedy, a good Catholic with rosary beads, told us he needed it, at least, once a day, otherwise he would have a headache.... Jesus Christ and Mary the sinful woman...
But the bullies and the power greedy would always try to hit you right there were you lived, and call you unholy, a low-life sexual harasser of women young and old, inappropriate. The whole bullying culture, a claustrophobic den of spying upon the thoughts and wishes of the real people with human heart and soul, trying, really, seriously, to take you down, at any cost really.
Funny how that was viewed as one way of Empire to crucify you. How they loved that potential and possibility always at, as they perceived it, their side, the weapons of sanctimony...
In so doing, revealing, if you only opened your eyes in the simplest of fashion, revealing their own Achilles Heal, their own great weakness, the weapon of their accusations, the source of their power, to deny you any right at all to think, to act, to be true.
And thus their creepy fetishes, and their fetishes about who gets how much money for how much pandering and how much complete sell-out of the human spirit. Their form of Soviet Gestapo Communist secret police power and detention, no way to slip around their long black cars spying on those still real enough to not wish to be tagged and microchipped and set into their great system of rewards handed down. Render Unto Caesar.
Yes, delusional, they called you. That was the word they used when you had the temerity to deny the charge of your harassing, your professing of your good spirit, your good intention, your wisdom, your circumspection, and all those polite gentlemanly things. Guess what, the accusers are not such good sports of gentlemanly kind. Indeed, they hate the true gentleman, regarding him as a pointless completely ineffective person...
And those simple conversations, plain, down to earth, incredibly revealing of the shared glory of God's spirit in us, like that from the other night, the Roman, whose grandfather made wine and encouraged him to enjoy it, which he did, as a five year old, one finger. And when you became ten, you were poured two fingers in the glass, and by fifteen, the full glass, and he enjoyed it. The Chinon has a metallic taste to him... Such conversations... what point did they have in this world for grown up people...
Sad, yes, the poor young man had been very saddened by the whole thing, by the priests giving him the shoulder, by the girl who felt it her stake to be aligned with the bullies and was one herself just for the sake of being so self-important as to find herself able of bullying and even finding it humorous and pleasurable in a way, until she could go back unto herself and her womanhood, her nature as God The Father created her and women.
But here he was now, not at thirty three, but fifty three, twenty years later, and finally saying unto himself, you know, I don't need this awful burden to be carried around anymore. And then, there he was, standing there ready to go in his bar with its well-rubbed and cleaned slate pub bar top, with little more than a wine key (a sturdy one) and his pen (a Parker jotter ready to go with a click of the thumb at a second's notice, and suddenly he felt like the happiest man, the most in tune with the true powers that be, like those not of this shat upon empire with its top shithead, not those goons, but the power of God, Universe, That Which Is, the entire created thing of perfect wholeness and physical and spiritual incontrovertible law...
Almost naked, as far as being armed. And part of him could say to himself, as such expressions are always applicable, Gospel words, Behold The Man. The man, gentle and thoughtful and poetic and peaceful and artistically mined, within....
Here he was with his wine key, and his humorous wine prattle, his deeper knowledge of the heart of people, neighbors, regulars, familiar faces from a year ago and an engagement party, coming back to him, his way of speaking with them, not of himself, but of them, enjoying the humor of the job, even when impossibly in the weeds... And he was now, as if all of a sudden, like a young man again. And behold, he might have said to himself, from having climbed out of a darkness, deep, one familiar to us, look at my contentment, my satisfaction, my sense of being in the right place, the right time, the right timing, and all of this powerful stuff of recognition of all the processes that are working now, right now, and forever, in the world, I am whole again. And real.
And no Satan of whatever form, serpentine or not, can come along and bully us with his bullying thoughts, putting you down, telling you to grow up, be a man.
It was all perfect. And how goddamn almost funny to realize it now, the true meaning of the acts of all those years attending to people, their self-perceived beverage needs... That took the sting out of being suddenly old and with a grey beard. That took the sting out of the countless acts of bullying subtle and not. The bully is never really the primary reality of any human being, for man is fundamentally good, just needs to be reminded of it sometimes, preach forgiveness, judge not, as all of it here upon this earth is a lesson, a place of learning the true father and the true spirit of love aimed at us and precise, miraculous, really, a miracle of miracles....
If the salt has not the savor, what's the point then? And the salt has not lost its savor, has it now.
Holy Magdelene, Holy Mary, holy Zoey Holloway, holy Mother Angelica of EWTN... Non prosecutorial, willing to let their womanly hands perform good works upon you and receive them in turn. Was it all before a sort of pissing match, juvenile tit for tat, "you go first, then I'll follow..." Youths not allowing themselves to match up at an agreed time to give and share, to take holy communion of the bread and wine....
By-gone era, years and years ago, ancient trade route history...
"Hail Mary Magdelene, full of grace, of a thousand hand jobs and cum shots on tits and face, smiling, the Lord is with thee..." (But for the commercial corporate inauthenticity that hangs about most of it, porn...) No, that's not exactly in the literature. Better not say that, as they'll come again for you in their self-righteousness... Maybe the good Slavic church has spirit more conducive to God's ways and in such intimate matters... Rustic, earthy, more a hayride than the recent pope's red slippers...
That's the problem, women blank to their womanhood, losing their feminine souls to act in accordance with the shallow riches and materialism of the bully culture preaching at you all the time, from which a kind of pub really is the best form of escape, a kind of private house, a safe lodge for the Resistance, the infant Church which must always be brought to life, to life in the present, made real, true, meaningful, caring and carrying...
Later on:
Surprises me not, the Buddha had his parable of the string. Sitar, guitar, fiddle, makes no difference... Speaks of the practicality of playing a musical instrument, which is of course something you do with your own two hands... And this speaks of everything, of being able to understand each individual human being immediately. Of human nature. Needs no words, no scholarship of note, no higher degree... The string, in tune, which is when the vibration of one thing matches the waves of others...
And every human being within, a Buddha, able to understand everything about another person's soul, if we left ourselves to be so direct about learning.
I think somehow of Lincoln having be snuck through Baltimore... to get to DC... Even Lincoln who would never shy away from a wrestling match, a fight, even, once, a duel. And he had to put up with that news bit, like he was a sneak, hiding out... weak and afraid. And that just wasn't fair. People were only doing that, FOX News bit, to make money and sell scandal rags, and I mean, come on, was he not... he didn't deserve that, in any way, all his goddamn life. And then he knew he would have to die publicly, with his back turned, vulnerable with his wife, some little shit sneaking up behind him and one little ball shot into the back of his head, defenseless. And if the shot had not gone of, if the little jerk's derringer had misfired, boy, that would be another chapter of history, having six four dignant Lincoln suddenly indignant, not afraid of swords either, would have thrown him over the railing...
Makes you think Good Old Jesus had the same DIY spirit of The Beatles...
And Big Boy Donald.... the very opposite of the DIY prairie boy...
Writing is a natural human state. It never surprises me that people who like the natural world like to write, to take care of their own inner menagerie, to let the beauty of the forest, seemingly random but not, reflect into their own deepest personal life. Particularly amongst the pioneers of the various forms and epochs of writing. Hemingway liked fishing and anything else to get himself outdoors, any excuse. A hand deft at depicting a tree and sheep, like Giotto, is an important artist. Jesus out in the desert, he will always have an eye for the natural world and the richness of its metaphorical possibilities in his little parable tales, indirect, a teacher hunting that which will soothe all our pains...
The monks sing Gregorian Chants, calm canticles of inner work being done, the most natural way at going about keeping calm... Like a chef knows how to cook, a master of the basic elements of heat and technique... Practicality emerges, the things that work come out and are repeated. These are the things a barman knows, intuitively.
And then, that winter, the prisoner started feeling better. He had more energy. His shifts of labor were easier, less draining, less exhausting. It wasn't food so much, as water. Beyond that, I don't know if there was anything in particular, he just took the choice of beginning to feel relaxed about things. No point to deep anxiety, drive it away, like Satan, get thee behind me... Enjoy the present. Do practical things. Open the wine, pour it, offer them sustenance, serve it, the bread and wine, that's all there was to it.
How did Jesus become Jesus? He took it upon himself. He did it, quite practically. A healer because he knew what sickness was. Just do the thing the easiest way, as God The Father gives you and me powers to do so. What is easier to say to the man with the withered hand, he asks the professionals, who are necessarily skeptical and controlling, bullies really, leaning in on the good busy work of the teacher they were envying and accusing of their own worst worst sins... Psychologically sick sick people, the Pharisees and the Sadducees...
How to cure the sick and angry wolf within,
how to turn it into a bird,
Francis asked of himself.
Think less Crime & Punishment. Think of Alyosha, Alyosha Karamazov,
and the old Russian monk...
The prosperous, he could not help feeling, the ambitious, he could sometime feel their judgment upon him. "A barman, for God's sake, what a wasting of life... Frivolous and low, full of bar floozies and busboy talk of tits and ass and such crudeness... Not high and elevated and pertinent in conversation to this our modern world which we here in the city have striven to attain as a place of obtaining and building power so thus we might control the policies of the land over our chosen people..."
Who is this chump upstart, the power bullies ask, failing to even so much as remember the prophecy (the medicine) of he who would come and heal, the Once and Future King... We will not even acknowledge his work, but regard him as an Idiot.
Jesus the barman, feeling better, more relaxed, accepted the medicine. The medicine was only offered to him, in such a town, through that which the ages have called pornography. In such an age, now offered up and thousand thousand "sinful women" and Mary Magdelene. He enjoyed being anointed by them, and to their virtual hands and breasts and beautiful feminine faces, he reached the climax, the metaphorical parable of spiritual enlightenment and thousand insights building, cooperating, all tugging together, relaxing that manly part of himself through which was reached the depths of his energy being and all the million thoughts of his mind. Taking a few Chinese herbs, he could allow such relaxation to happen on a daily basis, twice, even more. And strange to himself, he did not feel completely out of it and with no energy to even talk to anyone let alone wait on them, no longer was he feeling drained, but rather, much energized, relaxed, his blood pressures down...
President Kennedy, a good Catholic with rosary beads, told us he needed it, at least, once a day, otherwise he would have a headache.... Jesus Christ and Mary the sinful woman...
But the bullies and the power greedy would always try to hit you right there were you lived, and call you unholy, a low-life sexual harasser of women young and old, inappropriate. The whole bullying culture, a claustrophobic den of spying upon the thoughts and wishes of the real people with human heart and soul, trying, really, seriously, to take you down, at any cost really.
Funny how that was viewed as one way of Empire to crucify you. How they loved that potential and possibility always at, as they perceived it, their side, the weapons of sanctimony...
In so doing, revealing, if you only opened your eyes in the simplest of fashion, revealing their own Achilles Heal, their own great weakness, the weapon of their accusations, the source of their power, to deny you any right at all to think, to act, to be true.
And thus their creepy fetishes, and their fetishes about who gets how much money for how much pandering and how much complete sell-out of the human spirit. Their form of Soviet Gestapo Communist secret police power and detention, no way to slip around their long black cars spying on those still real enough to not wish to be tagged and microchipped and set into their great system of rewards handed down. Render Unto Caesar.
Yes, delusional, they called you. That was the word they used when you had the temerity to deny the charge of your harassing, your professing of your good spirit, your good intention, your wisdom, your circumspection, and all those polite gentlemanly things. Guess what, the accusers are not such good sports of gentlemanly kind. Indeed, they hate the true gentleman, regarding him as a pointless completely ineffective person...
And those simple conversations, plain, down to earth, incredibly revealing of the shared glory of God's spirit in us, like that from the other night, the Roman, whose grandfather made wine and encouraged him to enjoy it, which he did, as a five year old, one finger. And when you became ten, you were poured two fingers in the glass, and by fifteen, the full glass, and he enjoyed it. The Chinon has a metallic taste to him... Such conversations... what point did they have in this world for grown up people...
Sad, yes, the poor young man had been very saddened by the whole thing, by the priests giving him the shoulder, by the girl who felt it her stake to be aligned with the bullies and was one herself just for the sake of being so self-important as to find herself able of bullying and even finding it humorous and pleasurable in a way, until she could go back unto herself and her womanhood, her nature as God The Father created her and women.
But here he was now, not at thirty three, but fifty three, twenty years later, and finally saying unto himself, you know, I don't need this awful burden to be carried around anymore. And then, there he was, standing there ready to go in his bar with its well-rubbed and cleaned slate pub bar top, with little more than a wine key (a sturdy one) and his pen (a Parker jotter ready to go with a click of the thumb at a second's notice, and suddenly he felt like the happiest man, the most in tune with the true powers that be, like those not of this shat upon empire with its top shithead, not those goons, but the power of God, Universe, That Which Is, the entire created thing of perfect wholeness and physical and spiritual incontrovertible law...
Almost naked, as far as being armed. And part of him could say to himself, as such expressions are always applicable, Gospel words, Behold The Man. The man, gentle and thoughtful and poetic and peaceful and artistically mined, within....
Here he was with his wine key, and his humorous wine prattle, his deeper knowledge of the heart of people, neighbors, regulars, familiar faces from a year ago and an engagement party, coming back to him, his way of speaking with them, not of himself, but of them, enjoying the humor of the job, even when impossibly in the weeds... And he was now, as if all of a sudden, like a young man again. And behold, he might have said to himself, from having climbed out of a darkness, deep, one familiar to us, look at my contentment, my satisfaction, my sense of being in the right place, the right time, the right timing, and all of this powerful stuff of recognition of all the processes that are working now, right now, and forever, in the world, I am whole again. And real.
And no Satan of whatever form, serpentine or not, can come along and bully us with his bullying thoughts, putting you down, telling you to grow up, be a man.
It was all perfect. And how goddamn almost funny to realize it now, the true meaning of the acts of all those years attending to people, their self-perceived beverage needs... That took the sting out of being suddenly old and with a grey beard. That took the sting out of the countless acts of bullying subtle and not. The bully is never really the primary reality of any human being, for man is fundamentally good, just needs to be reminded of it sometimes, preach forgiveness, judge not, as all of it here upon this earth is a lesson, a place of learning the true father and the true spirit of love aimed at us and precise, miraculous, really, a miracle of miracles....
If the salt has not the savor, what's the point then? And the salt has not lost its savor, has it now.
Holy Magdelene, Holy Mary, holy Zoey Holloway, holy Mother Angelica of EWTN... Non prosecutorial, willing to let their womanly hands perform good works upon you and receive them in turn. Was it all before a sort of pissing match, juvenile tit for tat, "you go first, then I'll follow..." Youths not allowing themselves to match up at an agreed time to give and share, to take holy communion of the bread and wine....
By-gone era, years and years ago, ancient trade route history...
"Hail Mary Magdelene, full of grace, of a thousand hand jobs and cum shots on tits and face, smiling, the Lord is with thee..." (But for the commercial corporate inauthenticity that hangs about most of it, porn...) No, that's not exactly in the literature. Better not say that, as they'll come again for you in their self-righteousness... Maybe the good Slavic church has spirit more conducive to God's ways and in such intimate matters... Rustic, earthy, more a hayride than the recent pope's red slippers...
That's the problem, women blank to their womanhood, losing their feminine souls to act in accordance with the shallow riches and materialism of the bully culture preaching at you all the time, from which a kind of pub really is the best form of escape, a kind of private house, a safe lodge for the Resistance, the infant Church which must always be brought to life, to life in the present, made real, true, meaningful, caring and carrying...
Later on:
Surprises me not, the Buddha had his parable of the string. Sitar, guitar, fiddle, makes no difference... Speaks of the practicality of playing a musical instrument, which is of course something you do with your own two hands... And this speaks of everything, of being able to understand each individual human being immediately. Of human nature. Needs no words, no scholarship of note, no higher degree... The string, in tune, which is when the vibration of one thing matches the waves of others...
And every human being within, a Buddha, able to understand everything about another person's soul, if we left ourselves to be so direct about learning.
I think somehow of Lincoln having be snuck through Baltimore... to get to DC... Even Lincoln who would never shy away from a wrestling match, a fight, even, once, a duel. And he had to put up with that news bit, like he was a sneak, hiding out... weak and afraid. And that just wasn't fair. People were only doing that, FOX News bit, to make money and sell scandal rags, and I mean, come on, was he not... he didn't deserve that, in any way, all his goddamn life. And then he knew he would have to die publicly, with his back turned, vulnerable with his wife, some little shit sneaking up behind him and one little ball shot into the back of his head, defenseless. And if the shot had not gone of, if the little jerk's derringer had misfired, boy, that would be another chapter of history, having six four dignant Lincoln suddenly indignant, not afraid of swords either, would have thrown him over the railing...
Makes you think Good Old Jesus had the same DIY spirit of The Beatles...
And Big Boy Donald.... the very opposite of the DIY prairie boy...
Thursday, February 22, 2018
The weather here was warm for a couple of days, into the seventies, the first one sunny. Today will be in the fifties and raining steadily by the time I get myself ready for work. Mom is feeling better, taking her antibiotics. She is sounding better, and has enough energy to consider going out to Bame's to get some wine and to the Big M. I hope she can find some bone stock, as even the carton-kind seems to help.
I find some happiness in all this. I find within myself a contentment, a happiness I never would have expected, and had not remembered really having since I was a kid. Those who wanted me to follow their rules, well, I just couldn't do that very well. And the artist does not like that imposition, much as one might have wished for different outcomes here and there... Could I have put my stubborn quality aside? I might have wished to, but particularly when you are a student, learning, exploring, it doesn't seem to work that way. And so, to be effective, you humbly take up your arts, and you endeavor to in some way put them out on display, even as they make little sense at the time, beyond deep down.
The Robin Said
Is it what we fight against
that defines us just as much,
as the things we like to remember and
hold dear and think about,
things maybe you would not necessarily
bring yourself to understand.
Your blood is defined by the city, Mongol, cheekboned,
and mine is by the countryside, Irish,
of mistakes you would never bring
yourself to have made.
Constraint is not the country boy's thing.
The excesses of nature are his to taste,
yielding prairie goodness,
the medicinals we knew and used long ago,
before the the forest was cut and paved.
You have your rules, and your own forms of art,
and dreams, and I shall not trespass
nor impose.
This beautiful love for life
and happiness so sweet
can hardly be borne, but that it must,
it is me, who I am.
Writers are independent kind of people. They do not like being told what to do. Lawless peoples, like the Irish, make for good ones, stubborn enough, independent, fixed upon the passion of an idea and the meanings of it. They understand how their craft, their process works. Turning on the television, even that, even the Weather Channel, even the seemingly minor is an imposition upon the free mind, blocking the thoughts to gather enough to be rendered out of the inner silence.
I see my mother this way now, her wild spirit, her independence, her impatience, her feistiness, the fact that she does not travel well, is too nervous to be driven on highways, her inabilities to stay focussed in a grocery store for an extended period of time... all of this, put together, points to a certain kind of spirit that enabled, that pushed her, to be an excellent writer of an excellent book, that which came out of her Ph.D thesis, Reading and Writing Ourselves Into Being.
Writing still, even in this day and age, the modern time, the coming of the Holocene, is an organic process, the inspirations for which cannot be reduced into commercial viability and the profit motive or anything else so logical, so bound to rule. Even my father, a great scientist, yielded to the fact that that there is no ultimate non-creative explanation of the creature, and considered that there has to be poetry to the human understanding of the world and its phenomena. Genies, he used to say, you might was well say it is all genies at work when your science entered microbiology and the world of things atomic and conceptual things like DNA. What did Goethe ask, something like is chemistry physics, or is physics chemistry (I don't have it right.) Ponder that. Is biology a matter of physics, or is physics a matter of biology...
By miracles of nature, by miracles of the peculiar circumstances that arise when human personalities and realities get together, my mother, holy, a writer, arose, just so. And the tale of her experience is an interesting one, a story of the human spirit, of redemption and all such good things like that, the outsider who came out and shined. Lovely. And you cannot tell her what to do, and that remains, a healthy thing.
By the same math, the same opposition and rubs of the human character and personality, of offending things and relationships agreeable and sometimes now, so did my form come into some form of wise being.
The human being lies, wittingly or not, at the center of all the art forms and forms of spiritual life and forms of social life. It is hard for him or her to naturally distinguish between them, to not view the wide field of human talents for such a myriad of ventures as a totality. Inspiration is what matters, the good feeling, the feeling of participating in creativity, culinary, visual, musical, worded, athletic, tribal, political, choreographed, cave-painted, rune-ed, conversational, personal, private, public, communal. This is why it must be nice to live in New York City, but also why it is nice to find a community organically, a collection of specimens as one might come across by a river bank or a stream with its bed, the agreement of nature that allows trees to share and balance in the light, as if dancing in slow form beyond human observation.
And in this comedy of us trying to feed, cloth, and take care of ourselves, where it is the taste of some to take their own work as of greater monetary value to society out of some urge not quite democratic, approving less of those who take it upon themselves to display the natural homegrown down-to-earth generosity of deep spirit, who are willing to create what they will create by, basically, their own rules, does indeed yield beauty worth telling about, and things useful to us.
Such is life that the stakes are always raised. (The cradle of humanity has escalated into modern-day Syria, etc., etc.) The rule-makers impose. And the artist, naturally, will rebel from rules. There are even some who apply art to rules, seeking justice, equality and words befitting our condition. The artist has his own sort of science, the acknowledgment of structure, rules, applicability, pattern, natural organism. No scoff-law he, but one in search of the ultimate peace that brings life together.
After all the crazy years, with the understandings that hydration and electrolytes, proper rest and nutrition, can bring, I saw my job as rather perfect and praiseworthy, and I understood with some appreciations as to my unexpected bravery toward it, how I never shied away from it, but went and took it, knowing somewhere down deep inside, that I was doing the right thing. And I could only hope for the help and the will, the good health and endurance to keep on at it.
I am not one who will ever pooh-pooh the magic of writing. I am not one to turn away from the incredible plasticity of the ever-changing mind. The river of it constantly brings down new things within it, upon its currents, and who are we to turn away...
Such is life that the stakes are always raised. (The cradle of humanity has escalated into modern-day Syria, etc., etc.) The rule-makers impose. And the artist, naturally, will rebel from rules. There are even some who apply art to rules, seeking justice, equality and words befitting our condition. The artist has his own sort of science, the acknowledgment of structure, rules, applicability, pattern, natural organism. No scoff-law he, but one in search of the ultimate peace that brings life together.
After all the crazy years, with the understandings that hydration and electrolytes, proper rest and nutrition, can bring, I saw my job as rather perfect and praiseworthy, and I understood with some appreciations as to my unexpected bravery toward it, how I never shied away from it, but went and took it, knowing somewhere down deep inside, that I was doing the right thing. And I could only hope for the help and the will, the good health and endurance to keep on at it.
I am not one who will ever pooh-pooh the magic of writing. I am not one to turn away from the incredible plasticity of the ever-changing mind. The river of it constantly brings down new things within it, upon its currents, and who are we to turn away...
I find some happiness in all this. I find within myself a contentment, a happiness I never would have expected, and had not remembered really having since I was a kid. Those who wanted me to follow their rules, well, I just couldn't do that very well. And the artist does not like that imposition, much as one might have wished for different outcomes here and there... Could I have put my stubborn quality aside? I might have wished to, but particularly when you are a student, learning, exploring, it doesn't seem to work that way. And so, to be effective, you humbly take up your arts, and you endeavor to in some way put them out on display, even as they make little sense at the time, beyond deep down.
The Robin Said
Is it what we fight against
that defines us just as much,
as the things we like to remember and
hold dear and think about,
things maybe you would not necessarily
bring yourself to understand.
Your blood is defined by the city, Mongol, cheekboned,
and mine is by the countryside, Irish,
of mistakes you would never bring
yourself to have made.
Constraint is not the country boy's thing.
The excesses of nature are his to taste,
yielding prairie goodness,
the medicinals we knew and used long ago,
before the the forest was cut and paved.
You have your rules, and your own forms of art,
and dreams, and I shall not trespass
nor impose.
This beautiful love for life
and happiness so sweet
can hardly be borne, but that it must,
it is me, who I am.
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