Up at two, at the end of the work week, feeling foggy. Walked home from work, singing On a Rainy Night in Soho to a mockingbird up in a tree going through his repertoire, and he keeps singing, as I gently persist with Shane MacGowan's lyric....Closer to home hearing an owl up in a tree above the schoolyard, swigging from a bottle of wine the whole 1 AM way for my troubles and no bus..  All I had for dinner was salmon tartar appetizer, followed by leftover family meal rice and potato with the curry chicken gravy cold now and unappetizing.  Four nights straight, Saturday, after driving back, through Tuesday Wine Tasting night, closing each night, of course, a server helping out with Monday jazz...  Excellent hospitality provided, and I come home alone and live alone.   Back from the visit with mom.

Thoughts on Kerouac, amorphous, deeper level, as I close down the bar at the end of the night, exploration of YouTube's offerings on the man, his own story, his times.  His truth.  First thought, best thought.  Enough of Hemingway's rules, thoughtful and considerate as they may have been...

Is there such a thing as spiritual gift, spiritual talent..  I wonder, about old Kerouac...

Each of us has to figure it out by ourselves, truly, how to write, what to write, the way to write.  I admire much more those who nakedly grasp with that aspect of writing in their works...  More so than the ones who imagine their way to a narrative arch with characters neat and story lined.

I prefer the writers who do not write so well, but by instinct and happenstance, telling their own stories rather than made-up ones...

You're trying to express what cannot be expressed, at least in an easy fashion.  You are seeing the difference between your true self and the nomenclature placed upon the individual by all things like city life, jobs, socioeconomic positions, all those perceptions and standards, all of which are inadequate and poorly fitting.  Who are you?  That's what the artist is up to, and it's never easy, a work in foggy circumstances.

The rewards are never very good.  People and readers and minds have to return to their jobs, their making a livings, their set relationships.  Where the writer is an outsider, more or less, in his strength something like a forest dweller, making no assumptions, not buying the terms he has himself been named by.  The writer is barely employable.

And even the strength of Kerouac is worn down to his sad later states, the scotch drinking alcoholic slowly killing himself with booze.  He cannot win the battle against the power of the societal control over terms, the put-downs, the labelling, "Beatnik..."

And after four nights at work, I wake up hollow too, feeling in a jam, but having had my glimpse of open country and night sky, before returning to the parts of the city my psyche can endure...

Even as a Buddhist, in a modern society, defined from the top down by Empire rather more than, say, democratic ideals and the protection of freedoms abstract, you get the Christian situation, the persecution, the things of Caesar weighing down upon you, the individual, the fisherman capable of being a full human being, a spiritual being...  The truer a mind open to Christian spirituality or any other spirituality, the stronger your tendency will be to walk on your own road, freeing yourself from all the terms a government or a society might address the individual you by.  Which is, potentially, a set-up for things which potentially are not so happy and of the normal "happy life."

But gaze into any other human being, any other animal, any other form of sentient life, and you want to know, and be known, as an individual, to really "get" the other, as a saint would, being able to talk beyond language norms.

But face it, try talking to tree, people will take you as weird, an idiot, an outcast.


Life becomes as the yoga pose.  Hospitality, the serving of wine and bread and dinner, is a yoga pose, for the chakras, for the mind, for the words which come out of a man.  And in the poses, these meditations, these acts and motions which seem simple and humble purpose and good health, we find what is real about ourselves.  And the stronger you become, the more familiar, in other words, knowing them inside and out with the body and sentient mind, which is all you have, truly, the more you're able to pull away from society's heavy terms and actions and oppressions.   You find yourself leaning toward the quiet saint, Jerome, Francis...  Quiet reflections going on in a simple life.


Writers have to remember that they are mortal, that they cannot write perfectly, getting the whole narrative down...



I take to the patio, laying my yoga mat down on the flat stones.  There strikes me in yoga poses something related to the Christian imagination, the Christian view of the body, the fresco panels of halo, Vitruvian man...