It Must Be the Vapors…: aging

Showing posts with label aging. Show all posts

Sunday, December 25, 2011

TO BE A CHILD …

That first gasp of air … what did I feel? Was it the sudden chill on my damp naked body no longer sheltered by the womb? Was it a startled flash bulb consciousness of everything at once and therefore aware of no thing?

I have looked into the just-opened eyes of a newborn and recognized the ancient observer behind them calmly unwrapping this new instrument to begin sampling the experiment of life this time around.

With all functions set at default, sensitive components begin reporting changes registered as pixels in the hologram it forms of where it is. As reports accumulate, similarities adjust settings to better collate them to estimate the probability of permanence in this constantly changing time and space; the framework of reality upon which existence learns to gamble its future.

These are automatic, involuntarily unfolding functions evolved genetically into increasingly more varied, complex beings with no other detectible purpose than to continue, nor limit but infinity. This body, this instrument, in terms of the individual psyche, is what I think of as the Id: the genetic memory of instincts to eat and not be eaten for survival of the individual, instincts to mate and co-create for thrival of the species, intuition of the purest sense of right and wrong.

It’s all hunky-dory, suckling and pooping along, until it’s just not enough to satisfy the sated survival instinct; no lack of food or fear of predators, but … what’s that over there? The emergence of curiosity, the instinct to grow beyond the givens, discovers a difference between reports of changes within (hunger, heartbeat, breathing) and of finding limits to careless freedom without (bumping into crib, mother’s weaning and scolding for pooping off limits).

My most vivid recollection of self/other awareness was of the change the echoes of my crying returned from the walls when someone came to check on me. This primitive echolocation gave quality to my depth perception as my eyes learned to focus at different distances before it dawned on me they might be approached. Such preverbal understandings form the avatar, the ego, a hologram the instrument builds of itself in relationship to the now exterior reality within which it appears to act.

Early on I recall imagining a game being played between myself and the world where I had a cardboard replica of what I wanted to be perceived as being (the ego), which I held before me as I walked about. In turn the world erected cardboard facades like movie sets ahead of me and struck them when I passed, ala The Truman Show. This personal myth was reified whenever adults tested the validity of my mask with their questions and obviously invented most of their answers to mine when they couldn’t remember what they were told back when they still had questions. Observing my parents perpetuate the Santa Claus myth long after I’d observed the reality taught me to be a life long skeptic.

Ego develops when curiosity is called on to explain the avatar’s place in the causal myth of whatever culture is asking. There aren’t enough whys, wheres, whens, hows or whos to conclude a purpose to the living universe without first inventing a timeline whose direction is determined by assigning cause and effect to the constant change life always is, no matter what we think of it. As the child seeks to achieve validity within its sphere of activity, the responsibility for being able to account for itself to a perceived social environment often takes priority over the id by claiming and basking in praise it does receive, and denying by masking from scorn it might, from an audience that rarely cares as much as it does about itself.

In seeking validity from ones culture the ego can actually lose consciousness of the unique, natural gifts of the id leading to fear of being left alone bereft of anyone to obey and unable to entertain oneself with creative, original thinking since abandoning it somewhere in childhood in the process of converting curiosity’s question marks into culture’s periods.

In this Freudian drama, the superego would be the unifying curve between them attempting to maintain the yang of the ego-avatar’s artificial doing in beneficial, dynamic harmony with the id-body’s instinctual being throughout a life of cultural training to exploit the difference for advantage over others in a competitive ethic.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is usually understood to mean giving others treatment you want, precluding the reality that two unique beings rarely want the same treatment. The benefit of the dynamic the superego maintains depends on the ego’s symbiotic attitude towards perceived otherness by realizing that beneath the cultural, exterior doing lies the common guidance system of the id’s instinctual being.

It is impossible to come to a conclusion about an infinite, living universe without completely extinguishing curiosity — customarily associated with death or belief.

Saturday, March 05, 2011

WHO ARE YOU? Part II

In response to the curiosity expressed in her comment on the previous post, this post is for my maverick Grand-niece Racheal Kellie Cooley, the only of my kinfolk other than L'ilwave to respond to this blog.

"Faith is being sure of what we hope for

and certain of what we do not see."

I couldn’t agree more with the quote, it describes exactly what I take each of those words to mean and the meaning of their being next to one another as they are arranged.

But I sense there’s a world of difference between what you feel about those words and how I read them. The fulcrum of faith in each phrase: “sure of” and “certain of”, are like tombstones marking the death of curiosity, just like the quote several posts back about, “children begin school as question marks and graduate as periods”.

Using “question mark” for newborns is as close to spirituality as I ever get when I examine my own motivations, the rest is just logical metaphors as a way of making sense of all my curiosity has revealed to me for myself. When I say we are all eyes on the same potato, the potato is as close as I get to describing what I hear others refer to as god.

It all begins with the definition of THE universe as being all there is. Imagining an intelligent being made of all there is leads me to realize it has nothing to observe but itself — talk about self-aware! But who is the universe gonna ask, you might ask? What do I ask when I want to know what’s going on? My primary source of information is the perception of my individual cells keeping data about the physical world hologram I call my mind updated every instant. I can ask the world what’s going on if I want the opinion of others to supplement my perceptions, but by the time they begin to answer they are no longer talking about what’s going on, but what is no longer going on, and since now is the only time existence ever occurs it takes all my attention to my perceptions just to keep up observing reality.

My metaphor is that the entire universe is alive and every part of it is reporting what it sees just as my every cell reports to me, I pass it on to the silent observer I know sees through my eyes, the potato, god.

There’s a whole other part of my cosmology about scale & mobius loops and the evaporation cycle of ideas, but I want to get back to my view of faith, hope, and certainty just to narrow a conversation about the universe down to the unarguable truth that each religion in history has claimed it alone possesses access to (all lebentybillion of ‘em).

In my cosmology, certainty is like what civilization does to our awareness of nature. It puts on shades, sticks in earplugs, turns up the air conditioner, steps on the gas and in every way possible makes the natural occurrences of the day helpless to update the mind of the hopefully, faithfully certain that certainty lets us be sure that whatever we want we’ll get no matter what shitstorms such hopeful certainty plows up in the natural world it contradicts at every turn.

The reason peace on earth exist at all is that from the core of every being the observer looks out, curious about itself. Although the world it observes is the immensity of itself it has become so absorbed in the observing, it must be reminded that the world is not out there by pairs of pairs of eyes recognizing who it is that’s looking out of both — cosmic love and the reason we are conscious of and curious about existence, if there must be a reason.

Yeah, I don’t have a certain bone in my body but I have accumulated enough experience to understand I have been up to any now in which I find myself without steeling myself against contradiction, in fact I welcome it. New varieties of contradiction only tend to broaden my cosmological theory. I don’t consider religion to be a part of or a contradiction to my theory because it is based on the very non-existence of wishful thinking that requires faith in the unarguable certainty “about what we do not know” for hopeful wannbes to declare the only permissible truth is theirs, end of story, period. Signed, sealed, delivered zombie ant.

That’s why I loved your exchange recognizing how mankind could be as our heavenly father intended, curious about the world they still consider to be themselves and are not yet aware of the otherness civilization makes of nature.

Nature reminds civilization of the stage upon which it plays at being God.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

… from the asylum of my natural mind

Commenting on the end of Countdown a friend lamented, “I don’t trust CNN these days.”

I couldn’t help but reply, “Trust?”

“Any of them?”

“These days?”

“Read Peoples History of the United States, check out Democracy Now! But don't lay trust on anyone but yourself, and don't do anything until you can.

Sorry Steve, those weren't really orders from me to you, just a brain fart about how trusting externals is the source of all misery and the company it keeps. It was the things that helped me realize why love is a source of pain when gratitude for feeling it at all is not enough reward and requital is demanded, like a whore taking payment — burdening loved ones with trust breaks better bonds.

I’ll go blog now.”

I guess I get a bit worked up around words like trust, faith, hope, prayer, wishes because I have seen through Maya’s veil to behold her natural beauty and realize it was all a vale of tears over such illusions woven so finely the world appears against us when we don’t get our way, as if it’s supposed to care because we wish it. The veil covers up the beauty of the present with the clothing of the past tailored to ellicit obedience from the future. What a fine tuned grinder the innocence of now is put through to accomplish tomorrow’s menu. We never see life as it is as we focus on the parts that fit our purpose and get blindsided by hopes become wishes become faith become trust become assumption become expectation become fact until — wham, a contradiction become powerful on the momentum of a life of denial.

All these ephemeral illusions to the power of just wanting something, from a dolly to a place in heaven when one’s done with making Hell of Eden, weave the world within which civilization believes nature is chaos to be conquered and put to work. Being warm and dry with food on the table is never enough for people believing in gods who create worlds by merely willing it so.

I am learning to love life more by freeing it from the fragmenting duality of expectation and let the story unfold as it will, despite my running narrative. I’ve learned the truth about trust is that the external object of our faith is not the determiner of our satisfaction, but the scapegoat for our own judgment of how reality can be made to work for us as opposed to learning how it behaves with or without us to better work with it.

The confusion introduced by my education delayed a realization of how the idea that existence has a master plan, a preexisting purpose, limits the comprehension of the universe and behavior by a far larger population than merely the creationists who swear by it, as mankind destroys the only specimen we’ll ever have on the assumption of knowing why it exists before having a clue as to how it exists. Getting clues from purposeless observation seems to lead me into endless fascination. Purpose observes through a pinhole in a cell wall gleaning anything that might be construed to be fact in the ongoing fairytale of mankind’s godlike “conquering” of nature.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

FOUND

“… children guessed, but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew”.
——e. e. cummings

This morning my friend, Nikki, posted just the right thought to trigger my return to this blog after a month of Scrooge-like stinginess in expressing the wealth of inspiration I’ve experienced.

The people and property adjacent to my stomping grounds within the Dawgranch have changed, and with these changes a more communal atmosphere seems to be brewing among folks who had seemed to be content minding their own business over the six years I’ve thrived here.

I had to comment on Nikki’s post, …”adulthood is a phase of forgetfulness, enhancing our appreciation of nature when we re-emerge into children’s guesses with such wisdom.”

Fences were torn down, abandoned gardens were weeded, the sounds of hammers’ banging home nails on Homer’s recording studio remodel of Donna’s bedroom and back porch rang out in random overlay of the bird song and dog bark spontaneous symphony of nature, all the dogs and cats and chickens and people mixing like never before. My inner child sees the realization of utopian dreams more possible in the offing than any time since the games I’d played with other pre-school children living along the deep, verdant ravine we made our world - away from adults and world war two. We’re back to gentle guessing, with the acquired wisdom of experiencing the fallacy in the certainty required to make of this same nature a soulless commodity for the machine that shaped us to be eager cogs from the first day of public education.

Who Knows? Time will tell and there’s more of that than anyone here seems to need to know what to do with. Maybe (RIP RAW).

Sunday, July 18, 2010

HERE

It's coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
—Democracy, by Leonard Cohen

I arrived here when nature rained me out of my home in the heart of the city.

I’d only one reason to leave my comfortable cave after sixteen years of settling in and it didn’t stand a chance of my acting on it, what with my proximity to the headquarters of Whole Foods a block away.

When my wife left, I realized I had never fed myself — from mother’s mammon to military mess to campus cafeteria to married meals I’d always been served. Since rejoining the single way of life thirty-three years ago I’ve evolved an organic understanding of my body’s urge for and reaction to what I feed it. I learned to enjoy preparing healthy food from its life reaffirming spirit to the very physical benefits of satisfying my urges in the most beneficial way.

I began cooking for my friends out of a kitchen in our favorite hangout, the Hole in the Wall. The bean counter practicality of quantity over quality eventually reined me in and drove me out by requiring that I serve industrial food. I left with valuable experience of life in the service lane from both the server and the served perspectives as a metaphor for what keeps mankind on the treadmill of this ruinously ravenous experiment that is western civilization.

An unusual spate of rain softened soil around the roots and soaked the leaves of the hackberry that had grown out from under my house beyond the tipping point of its angled trunk. The roots popped the wall and floor beams next door as it crept to final rest across the street over several cars of patrons dining at the restaurant up the block. When the city came out to clear the road they also noticed how out of code the turn of the century building was and notified the owner to comply. The business from patron parking outweighed the rent the restaurant collected on the space, and once again, the bean counters disrupted a groovy gig.

Here is where I have learned to complete that cycle of feeding myself by inserting myself into the natural chain of life as a planter and feeder of the food I eat and pass on. My broccoli is built of the compost of last year’s garden and leaf fall and my eggs are built of the insect protein literally littering this eight-acre spot on the bank of the Colorado. I have yet to do well enough to avoid trips to the grocery store but I have learned enough to know I could with more incentive. My carbon footprint is a bus trip to town and back, pollution of processing and transporting what products I buy and my electricity bill. I have worked out plans for a solar driven tipi and will be working on that for the rest of the foreseeable future.

The only other axe I was grinding, my disastrous relationship with the daughter who’d not been in any of my homes since she was four, disappeared like a bad dream when we hugged each other standing by Ella Falls and Piddle Pond last month.

Here I am, as vulnerable as I have ever been. Hit me if you can find an opening.

Turns out that this is my 500th post.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

HOW DARE I?

How dare I not only desire to maintain my life but to enjoy it? Maintaining life entails protecting it against predators, diseases, competitors and fatal acts of nature; those things that would end it. Enjoying life entails consciously evolving the experiential wisdom to better assess events as they exist, irrelevant to any purpose with which one might intend to access them.

When I first began my graphics business I gave it the slogan “dare to be happy” when I realized what a challenge it was to remain happy in the public face of gloom painted in pixels of individual faces drained of brighter possibilities as they wrestled with the daily demands of a past traded in for a promise.

This “happy” I dare to be can be thought of as the intrinsic energy of the being I always am, from birth to my inevitable death. Daring the happy being to manifest itself in events is a matter of realizing benefit results only from the generosity of a happy being — all else entails new debt.

The challenge is in remaining aware of this ample energy while daily dealing within a society constantly being conditioned to atone for multiple inadequacies from original sin to acne by authorities damning the naturally happy individual variation of the human genome we cannot help but be at our deepest core, no matter how buried under guilt and almost forgotten our own energy may be.

The belief that happiness is a carrot on a stick, to be earned to be deserved, is the western civilization version of the middle-eastern, “Man is riding a camel in search of a camel.”

Photos by Heather Knight, my daughter

Sunday, June 20, 2010

FINALLY, FATHER'S DAY

It feels as though my life has always had a direction based on overcoming the friction opposing my curiosity’s free will. Like the tail orients a kite, my concentration has been on reconciling a rift between my daughter and me by both working on myself and attempting to communicate with her at different stages throughout the 38 years of separation. Each failure was like tying another bow on the tail threatening to drag the kite down unless the wind of my desire strengthened.

Sometimes physical metaphors don’t do justice to spiritual phenomena. For the past three days Heather has sat beside me as we hung out in my little Dawgranch haven as if the past was a figment of both our imaginations. Any idea of forgiveness or atonement or injury or righteousness dissolved upon our initial embrace and we were as we were when she was a child.

I’m not sure if there is anything left for me “to do” in this life. I have only the will, but not the capacity to move western civilization toward a more symbiotic relationship with nature. So I think I’ll just let experience wash over me without filtering it for clues to my imaginary discomforts for a while and see how that works out.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

LIVE LIKE THERE'S NO TOMORROW

Alone on Preikestolen

Whenever someone advises me to, “live like there’s no tomorrow,” they might as well say, “Walk like you were born unable to fly.” Both are true, neither are choices; there IS no tomorrow and I CAN'T fly

Though we may speak of making big plans for future events, and as often as the idea may occur to us in different states of change during its development, the event itself is merely another such state happening in the same here and now from which the plan arose and within which memories will recall its having occurred. Experience can be had only here now. Time is an invention by which we speak of things not now, mañana, but we can only speak of and experience thinking about the concept in the eternal here and now.

We all live within a culture that practices the creation of artifacts representing our perceptions and conceptions of reality, and promptly forgets such symbols aren’t what they represent; worshipping golden idols. The only reality to such creations are the experiences of conception and manifestation on the part of the maker and of perception and belief by witnesses. It is fairly simple to perceive that a painting of a flower is not the flower in the vase sitting next to it, while it is literally impossible for believers to distinguish between religious dogma and wishful thinking — especially tenacious where scriptures are full of contradictions to one’s actual experience of the natural environment and prohibitions of one’s own natural behavior. It is as if culture pushes the idea that the more one must deny reality to live in accordance with the conceived artifacts, the purer the merit for reward in a fantasy afterlife. “If you want to get ahead, you gotta stick it out. My country, right or wrong.”

I fly with ease in my dreams. It is so enjoyable that I am a bit fearful of heights without a handhold when I’m awake. The concept of my flying is so temptingly real I can envision feeling that special organic intuition that signals my ability to levitate in my dreams, walking off into space to finally break through my own shreds of disbelief and fly away. I know the difference between reality and dream fantasy, I fell thirty feet from a trapeze when I was thirteen — straight down, no gliding. I am just as acutely aware of the difference between experiencing reality directly and experiencing the mere second hand information, at best, to be found in symbols created by other’s perceptions.

I have always walked like I couldn’t fly. I’m in the process of learning the benefits of living like there’s no tomorrow, in the here and now, and discovering the debilitation of living like there is some other when or where experience can be had by sacrificing awareness of being here now.

•

Tangential to the forgoing essay is the matter of gaining enough life experience of the conflicts between one’s direct experience of nature and civilization’s antagonistic exploitation of it to begin questioning the authority under whose aegis one’s own nature is trained to obey and whose favor one’s reputation is designed to curry. Without such doubt in external authority’s righteousness in defining proprietary behavior, one must abandon any reliance on the intrinsic value of oneself to consider one’s own existence valid. Such people can never be alone because they cease to exist.

A real horror story would be to be unable to love myself unless I felt loved by another; as scary as meeting city folk who have never walked on the grass or were unaware Big Macs come from cows. Civilization breeds such zombies more or less successfully.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

TIME MASTER

His people called him Cronot, the time master. Little did they know he had nothing to do with time — absolutely nothing. His vocabulary contained no temporal terms of either the chronological or spiritual variety, which he considered the same thing. Nor did he refer to the material world in terms less lively than event or being; there existed no mere things.

Off the track of time, that clothesline from which the spectacle airs its latest developed film, he became like the camera left in a field throughout spring whose film when played back at an accelerated rate reveals the interrelated lives of its plant and animal denizens. Knowing he was the accumulation of all the events of his life experience he could observe the any period in the same way by enveloping the succession of events in the event of recollection at any time he chose.

So too could he serve as a fair witness to the minutest changes in what those distracted by time’s impatience would consider a rigid thing. Knowing that the eternal present is the only instant of existence he maintains stability unachievable within the spectacle.

While all around him his people pursued promises of a carrot just like they eat in the penthouse in the tallest building in the world through a maze of multiple multiple choices and tricks to be performed, he reached down and pulled a fresh one from the fertile loam in his garden.

As his people schemed on capturing the golden goose for the perpetual something-for-nothing golden eggs promised to be out there somewhere he collected his breakfast daily from his hens.

Knowing all too well the race as intimately as any of his people still nipping at each other’s heels on the stairway to the penthouse, he laughed heartily at his dogs frolicking in the open field while he massaged his healing heels.

Having worked from dark to dark to earn a brighter future that never came, as most of his people yet feel compelled to do, he took profound delight in watching the Earth expose and hide the sun any now it was a good idea.

Once the willing maker of better traps for gawking mice along the spectacle midway, he sympathizes from the distance afforded by the internet and the wisdom to realize it is still the midway, gaining more variations and seeming more real every day.

To his people it seemed like he could disappear — at times.

Saturday, May 01, 2010

BETWEEN THE SHEETS

She found it while leafing through her leather bound edition of Leaves of Grass. It was a shade leaf of cannabis indicus the size of her palm. She’d placed it there at a different time in a different world.

Looking up from the page on her pagan promontory perch, the vast expanse of the sea to the western horizon became dearly desiccated by the visceral, visual recollection of overlooking a desert; so endlessly featureless from afar, so constantly alive wherever one looked down at one’s feet. A sort of reverse twist on “the grass is always greener.”

They were camping on the east rim anticipating a lunar eclipse soon after sundown, which announced its advance by gradually saturating the entire vista in the golden orange hues of grain, pebble, rock, boulder pixel remnant shards of this shedding mountain perch with the prism of the western atmosphere casting a glow around their elongating silhouette creeping eastward into the illuminated scene.

He passed her the freshly rolled joint she’d awaited since he’d proposed this entire weekend a month ago. She’d always been curious about the stuff but found no reason compelling enough to risk jail just for kicks. She found Zeke to be more than enough. She knew a lot of people who abandoned the club during music breaks to “get high” out back with the band while she stayed behind and worried for them. She knew Zeke went out with them most of the time, but she didn’t know him until the night he picked up her empty glass on his return, went to the bar and brought her a fresh one.

“Nothin’ like another cool one after goin’ out there with those folks and dryin’ your whistle,” he said, standing there watching the band get reorganized.

"I don’t go out there, but thanks for the drink anyway. I haven’t wet mine enough yet.” She immediately tried to inhale the variety of possible nuances those words conveyed and didn’t exhale until she realized none of them were wrong; she’d long admired him from afar and was loath to pass up a chance for friendlier proximity now.

When her kissed her at her doorstep and left she realized a friendlier approximation was far from adequate. The next time she saw him the mutual beam connecting them was visible to anyone who cared. Like love struck zombies they got their drinks, moved to the back and sat together at an empty table without looking at anything but each other.

Although she’d always taken rejection as “their loss”, she couldn’t help but clarify something that had bothered her for the two weeks since he’d walked her home. “You were welcome to stay the night, you know?’

“Yeah, I got it that might be the case, but I have to get an overt invitation to begin assuming anything. I am too familiar with the influence of alcohol to make me perceive everything going my way until my face hits the floor and the morning after trying to recall from whence come vague memories of something too intimate to be so forgotten.”

“I’ve never made the first move, men seem to begin the groping and I either grope back or back off. I was out of my element with you. Would you get me high far away from police so I can enjoy it?”

His face lit up. “Oh, wow! This is perfect. I am going to harvest the first buds of this year’s yield next month and was planning to take some to the wilderness to celebrate the lunar eclipse. Would you come with me?”

She watched him separate the glistening purple-green bundles from their stem and expertly gather them between the sheets of zig-zag paper into the perfect cylinder he licked, sealed and declared to be the lunar fatty. He lit her first toke with much pagan fanfare but said not a word thereafter, just watched.

Their slowblime lovemaking fell in pace with the nature of their surroundings as the sun disappeared leaving the glow of the roach the only light for light years until half the eastern horizon became engulfed in the maw of a gigantic moon reflecting the sun in silver light upon them snuggled between the sheets. As the fullness of the moon grew perfect the earth interrupted the sun with a shadow on a further desert as it began to eat the moon in turn. The wolves, who’d been harmonizing to the lunar tune as their pitch rose with it, slowly became a random cacophony as it disappeared and revealed stars once obscured by its brilliance. Their shared orgasm occurred at the peak of the howling at the dark of the moon in the middle of the milky way and they remained in afterglow until the moon and vulpine harmony returned in full.

She returned the leaf to its place between the sheets of onion skin vellum pages, closed the book, scrambled off her perch, grabbed her cane he'd carved for her from the stalk and made her way home to the ferryman’s house.

Monday, February 01, 2010

CONVERSATION ACROSS TIME

It seems it’s that part of a cycle that seems to swing my way every six or seven years which, after at least ten such occurrences, I’ve come to call the Big Sad. The phrase “sadder, but wiser” describes the accumulation of experience for one dedicated to understanding the condition of the civilized human that seems to rob individuals of their genetic potential. In such a funk, I cannot seem to articulate my thoughts with the intention of “selling yeast” when I feel like a rolling pin flattening the most pneumatic of wishful thinking, so I here construct a conversation across the history of western thought with a dash of eastern insight for flavor to describe my thoughts in the words of others who have influenced me:

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government.”

“The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out,” replied the proverbial zen master.

“If moral behavior were simply following rules, we could program a computer to be moral.” Samual P. Ginder, Capt. USN

“As the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.”

“Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.“

“If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to almost anything.”

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

“It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.”

“Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt.”

“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.”

“One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.”

“It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties which make the defense of our nation worthwhile.”

‘Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.”

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

“If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.”

“What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men — each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature — are shot down wholesale.”

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

“A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.”

“For men tied fast to the absolute, bled of their differences, drained of their dreams by authoritarian leeches until nothing but pulp is left, become a massive, sick Thing whose sheer weight is used ruthlessly by ambitious men. Here is the real enemy of the people: our own selves dehumanized into "the masses." And where is the David who can slay this giant?”

“Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.”

“When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?“

“Nothing produces such odd results as trying to get even.”

“If you devote your life to seeking revenge, first dig two graves.”

“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life
when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”

“I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town.
A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.”

“Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't want, to impress people they don't like.“

“Future generations may regard the people of the First World nations as bona fide idiots—blithely driving SUVs and watering golf courses—and regard the people of Third World nations as aspiring idiots. I doubt future generations would understand. It is not that we are idiots; we understand. However, in the end we seem to have as much control over the current social trends as lemmings do over their fate.”

“Follow the money.”

“Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything -- anything -- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.”

"If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst."

“Life cannot be classified in terms of a simple neurological ladder, with human beings at the top; it is more accurate to talk of different forms of intelligence, each with its strengths and weaknesses. This point was well demonstrated in the minutes before last December's tsunami, when tourists grabbed their digital cameras and ran after the ebbing surf, and all the 'dumb' animals made for the hills.”

“Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.”

“…the television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.”

“I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.”

“War is God’s way of teaching American’s geography.”

“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.”

“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”

“Nature's laws affirm instead of prohibit. If you violate her laws, you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman.”

“How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!

“The plastic virtues: purity, unity, and truth, keep nature in subjection.”

“Nature can provide for the needs of people; [she] can't provide for the greed of people.

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”

“Humans -- who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals -- have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and "animals" is essential if we are to bend them to our will, wear them, eat them -- without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret.”

“Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives.”

“A human being is part of the whole, called by us "universe," limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons close to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from our prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all humanity and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

“An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.”

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”

“It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.”

“The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member,
but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.

“Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.”

“What's done to children, they will do to society.”

“Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.”

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule”

“Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"

“To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less
important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.”

“It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would

occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts.”

“You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image
when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.”

“In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”

“By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong.”

“If you don't find God in the next person you meet,
it is a waste of time looking for him further.”

“My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast.”

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”

When I can look Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
And taken in exchange---my youth.
-Sara Teasdale, poet (1884-1933

The first several quotes are linked to their authors through the terminal punctuation. I will be linking the rest as the will permits but that's it for the month of February. I invite your comments as always and will reply to those I get. See you in March?

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

IN PRAISE OF "AVATAR"

While the status quotients take pot shots from specialized perches, an entire generation of still absorbent intellects “get” the big picture being painted in glorious praise of symbiosis with that without which we cannot live. In making his latest, greatest attempt to effect the paradigm of man’s meaning in the scheme of things, John Cameron has synthesized so many disparate fields into this movie, Avatar, that it represents the epitome of the term gestalt: the total that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Like the beautifully depicted symbiosis of the Na'vi with the other beings native to Pandora by the twining of opened nerve endings in a gesture of surrendering individuality for the benefit of both, the fields of technical expertise brought together for this production and the very real problems caused by civilization’s attitude toward the body from which it arises encompassed by the story is an entwining resulting in the benefit of all.

The grumblers remind me of the railroad fireman’s lament, diesel putting their stoking shovel out of work, as each of their fields are being drug kicking and screaming into the next generation. Another reenactment of Robert Persig’s Metaphysics of Quality explaining the mechanistic ratcheting effect civilization’s artificial establishmentarianism puts on the otherwise natural evolution of man’s understanding of the living universe in which we are a dependent part.

My love for movies is of a piece with my love of all expressions intended to be of benefit. I am interested in expressions of what I perceive to be intended harm as an opportunity to examine my desire to protect the oxen I’ve made so sacred I fear their goring in the alternative light of as yet considered viewpoints. Movies are a way to put a subject on the table.

When asked his take on Avatar, an author whose book I praised for his insight into the ecstasy of symbiosis with nature replied, exemplifying the blindness of pride in his initialed authority, “I have no answer, because I do not watch movies of this ilk.”

I called him on it with, “Wow, Kultur, you really are a snob aren't you? Or do all of your ilk go around calling out others' ilk just to fit in? How do you maintain ecstasy so far removed from its source — the oneness of us all? “

Confirming his condescending hubris he answered, “BTW. Ilk means type, sort, kind. Sorry about your hypersensitivity.”

An acquaintance asked with whom I’d gone to the movie I mentioned just having seen. When I said I’d gone alone, he replied. “That’s the saddest thing I ever heard.” Hyperbole aside, was this guy implying friendlessness being the only reason for solitude? Or perhaps movies were, for him, just part and parcel of the more tedious dining, dancing, drinking ploy for which rohypnol is the latest keystroke shortcut means to an end? Who knows? In this day when dating means fucking and fucking means something being destroyed, who knows?

Well, I certainly got off on a tangent there, but it may emphasize how deeply I feel the movie, Avatar, can and may effect our possibilities of becoming symbiotic with the body upon which we now act like cancer cells. As all cures for rigid resistance to change in the aged, the natural regeneration of new know-nothing cells keep the possibilities for such a return perpetually open.

Friday, January 01, 2010

"DIRTY"

… was one of those words that never entered his vocabulary for the same reason “fabulous”, “incredible” and “awesome” dropped out. Words that were, or had fashionably become, so ubiquitous as to cease modifying the nouns or verbs with which they were linked in any meaningful way, became mirrors of the speaker by their opaqueness.

“Dirty” was one of his first introductions to how a freeborn boy could be wrong around people who had traded their freedom to choose for lip service allegiance to pop righteousness. The poop in his pants, the soil on his knees and the words he heard daddy say couldn’t all be dirty. People that found dirt always smelled like soap. So how come mother called aunt Donna, who took more baths than anyone in the world, a dirty minded woman?

These questions and observations led him to see that using the word dirty was a kind of unconscious code with which the righteous could recognize each other as allies in finding wrong with actions outside what one must assume they consider their unnaturally sanitary soap box. It no longer mattered whether the modified noun was excrement, soil, reputation, sanitation, sex, ethics, money, job, habit, thought or language in comparison to how clearly it defined the accusing speakers, who were, ironically enough, always describing other than them selves. Imagine that.

His own meaning for “dirty” formulated when he began to feel dirty himself. Finding himself attending class with students who bragged on the obituaries of murdered residents of Carver Village and powerless to find anyone to believe it, or if they knew, to join him in opposing it, he dropped out of his new Mississippi high school and joined the Marines, both to get away and to learn to be more effective in opposing such lynchings. But he felt dirty, leaving such a mess.

Experience over four years of direct contact with and obedience to the military code of justice did nothing to expiate this stain of helpless cowardice he felt. Indeed, it only showed him the immensity of institutionalized enactment of the same kinds of atrocities against people of color in neighborhoods called nations. He talked to veterans returning from the Korean conflict who were just as shot loose from consensus reality as returnees from any of the admitted wars his country wages. If they were fit enough to retain in the service they were often recognizable by fresh material in the shape of rank chevrons removed from otherwise salty uniform sleeves. Chevrons awarded for ferocity in combat granted on the spot in the field. Chevrons taken away for inability to fold up their prize winning talents like the weapons they used by courts-marshal at home. He felt even more helpless to reconcile the increasing examples of other such duplicity dressed in the same flag. Dirty war is a term used by his country to describe resistance to its clean ones.

Over the fifty years since he left the service he tried joining only one more group he thought actually wanted to make the world better. When the company finally announced the product he’d helped engineer to fruition over nine years, he expected he’d begin work on a new project. Instead he was given the task of taking the material, design and performance capacity of his reliable new product to the point that it would break down as soon after warranty as possible to reduce the cost of making something for which the price remained the same, need expensive repairs earlier and increase product turnover. The duplicitous facade was everywhere.

He made a choice between wallowing in the dirty for dominating profit, like oil refinery towns love that smell of money in the air, or feeling the healthy remove from the trough of filthy lucre in the wilderness where the dirtiest he gets forking compost, cleaning chicken roosts and planting seeds feels like the epitome of clean. The word dirty never comes to mind.

Thursday, December 31, 2009

LAST WEEK OF THE YEAR

late rising at eight

to a morning dark as seven

guided by the light

like the chickens

who greet him

meet him at coop door

run between his feet

for feed mix in the yard

‘til chill chases him back to his pod,

his yellow and sunset orange submarine,

too toasty ‘til he acclimates

then not warm enough.

from the bridge above it all

he surveys her immediate position

along the never dry river of time

outside her surround-around port holes

blocked only to the south:

imac portal back

to the man-made world

saying news he fears to hear

paying dues left by his career

playing diversions still held dear

posting thoughts finally come clear

touching minds far and near

quality beyond the hit counter

variety of insight incited

tethers to the myth examined

patter on soft skin drum heads

looses rhythm in complexity

gains rain’s tapping attention

another frosty foray for feed

for the dry beneath the roost

to their cackle bitching delight

three more dashes during the day

through rain drops

to catch egg drops

beckoned by loud hen cops

today’s done deeds

entered as 169-171 in his egg book

times, dates and mom’s took

along with omelets eaten

friends who got treated

running cost of the feed

being happy where he is

friends know where to seek him

season of return

spontaneous reunion

catching up the years

yarns of daring do

sympathies of aging

venture wiser view

future all too new.

Friday, December 25, 2009

2009 in Review: END OF AN ERROR

The sanity defined by civilization seemed to find ways to reinterpret my maybe musings about the human condition to be personal attacks in most imaginative ways throughout the year. I was all too often lured into personal responses, as if their demonizing party line stereotypes or quoting the bible represented willingness, much less the ability of the offended to carry on a rational discussion

Coupled with my having stumbled onto the 10^th Daughter of Memory writing exercise, the foregoing dilemma suggested I change the direction of this blog from philosophical ponderings about my observations of the living universe, so easily taken offense to by faith’s delicate certainties, to one of strictly fiction based on such observations. I am beginning to see the rationale for originating fables and fiction throughout the ages as a way to get a message across indirectly to those able to apply Mary’s Little Lamb’s problems to their own life, thereby avoiding the more direct identification with the real population referred to as mindless, faithful sheep.

•

For those more willing and able to discuss opposing views with the understanding that the essence of the duality is the win-win objective rather than a lose-lose contest of righteousness, I have moved my ponderings to a new blog available to all who find it in plain sight. You are welcome until offended — at which juncture I would hope you’d be so kind as to throw yourself out into the street. Watch out for cars … headed for the cliff.

I came across three new examples of folks who get the whole idea of a living universe: Sandy Krolic’s The Recovery of Ecstasy: Notebooks from Siberia, Richard Grossinger’s, Embryos, Galaxies and Sentient Beings: How the Universe Makes Life and James Cameron’s Avatar. It is gratifying to find others describing the same ongoing event so well as to bridge the differences of viewpoint while enhancing the scope of all.

This year found me a keeper of chickens and an eater of their delicious free-range eggs to supplement my less than desirable progress in growing my food in the garden through Texas summers. This year was a disaster, with only Serrano peppers coming back after the drought — watering every day cannot beat 100°+ for several months — trees began shedding leaves in mid June!

Having a quasi roomie and companion for stimulating conversation through six months of the worst heat was a more than compensatory distraction from discomfort though it left me missing her quite more than I expected and a never before indulged chocolate addiction – acne at seventy-one?

The UN climate summit succeeded in only resolving that people in suits consider people otherwise dressed or from below the equator to be unworthy of protecting from the ecological disaster by supplying them money to achieve the same standard of living that is causing it in the first place. Rather than dragging people out of the rain forest and selling them an air conditioner we should be planting trees and naturally ventilating our houses in their shade with the fresh air they regenerate symbiotically. Don’tcha jus’ love politics?

As 9/11/01 fades, 12/21/12 looms … “ these are the times” … "this is a record of the times" … “we’re all going down” … “together.”

Stragedy plots a way to side step inevitability.

Only carbon based life could generate so much irony.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

STARRING: HERSELF

Pilar had wanted to be in the movies ever since padre Ignacio had set up the projector in the community lodge. She was one of the few among her tribe who realized the story unreeling before them on the big white blanket was more wondrous than telling it with pictures that could move, stranger than the cloth covering all but the faces and hands of the people, odder than the sounds they made, or where they were, or what was going on. It wasn’t happening anywhere in time or space. Not on the wall. Not in anyone’s memory. It didn’t happen, it was done.

She remembered several years earlier when the huge boat without sails or oars came up the river with those wet crystals that shocked her fingers when she touched them and turned to water when she watched them. That happened; the only thing that happened at the movie was watching the movie that was done.

It was ninety-three years later, rolling tortillas in her booth at the reopened zocalo one morning, when she realized her dream had come true. The process of becoming one of those people who did their life was a long process of absorbing the changes that began with that movie about a world that didn’t happen, but was done with planning for a purpose.

When people dressed as those in the movie began to come up the river to clear the bank where they landed to build huge buildings with the great trees they felled, she watched her people fall for the ice machine over and over again — or disappear into the disappearing forest. When her clan ceased relocating, it became surrounded by other uprooted clans in an area dense enough to make the big buildings go around it.

Last year the people in the big buildings decided to celebrate the wonderful life they carved out of the wilderness by thanking her people with an urban renewal project that turned their east side village square and its neighborhood for several blocks into a stylized reproduction of the native village when she was thirty — a sort of ethnic cleansing. Many homes were purchased and converted into shops selling mass produced copies of clan items. She was paid a commission to sit in a booth in the zocalo rolling tortillas in addition to whatever she made selling them.

And there was the Director of Photography now. In his flip-flops, black socks and garters, Banana Republic shorts, Hawaiian shirt, gimme cap and shades-on-a-rope he was directing the rest of the cast into position around her. When Pilar stopped to watch as his children and wife gathered behind her and leaned their chins on her shoulders with big smiles on their faces, the DP said, “No, no. Keep on doing whatever was happening when we showed up. I want this to be a real documentary. Okay, everyone. Action.”

Monday, November 02, 2009

HEALTH: Mental Concrete part 3

Beginning with the dictionary definition as a starting point…

Health: n, the state of being free from illness or injury.

… which apparently the medical/insurance industry’s indebted toadies, squirming under the contradictory desires to serve their masters while milking the fools who naively vote their servants into the public trough, would rather see as a point of departure, busier than all the all the airfields, harbors, train and bus stations in the world combined, the way all sides obfuscate the very simple humanitarian question of, “who is responsible for health in the land of the free.”

I’ve been pretty good about keeping the actual machinations of politics out of my rants about the deeper problem of how individuals can be so eager to be served and so loath to actually be of service that we leave the care and maintenance of our most personal responsibilities and mutually beneficial welfare of our neighbors to mercenaries from afar and bitch about paying them. Oh, Yodood, you’re so extreme! Okay, I admit it. We aren’t that irresponsibly dependent or stingily selfish by our nature, but we certainly let the government convince us it’s the right way to live.

Dropping out of the grasp of western culture’s mythology has been more than a physical shedding of its stuff and the 24/7 pursuit thereof, more than discovering a more timeless, naturally spontaneous lifestyle, more than learning that what I have always called my “will” has been obeying the prime directives of my cell’s collective consciousness as they manipulate a natural path through the artificial hoops and cul de sacs of civilization. For me it has also been a growing extension of the realization that, at the age of thirty-four, I had never fed my body or considered its nutrition to be more than satisfying my taste buds.

I’ve gotten to know my body pretty well over the years since feeding myself became my most primal responsibility as a being who desires to remain alive and able to follow the interests of my curiosity. A large part of the nature I am learning to observe, if not all, is the machinations of perception flavoring every experience with memories of other instances in an ongoing internal dialogue ready to report who, where and when I am; a practice so well instilled by public education and four years of marines. Beneath that dialogue are the the tangs of taste buds and the pangs of pained cells signaling more than need of habitual soothing; they’re hints at a remedy to be applied. All metabolisms are different, there are no panaceas to replace familiarity with the territory to which we all have as intimate an access as we wish. All too many leave such care and feeding to people in white aprons behind masks and fast serve counters of pharmacists and fry cooks.

When my wife, a hypochondriac registered nurse, took her sanitized world elsewhere, I was faced with an empty plate and no thermometer. Over the past thirty-six years I have learned to feed myself the foods my body tells me it needs to remain healthy without the crutch of the “health care industry.” Mid-2004, I went beyond feeding myself to growing the food to complete the life cycle of symbiotic responsibility as my waste feeds my food through composting.

My interest in Buddhism led me to the eastern philosophy of health and its profound sanity in considering prevention of disease far more fundamental than the forensic pathology of the west, that sends you home until you’re are sick enough to treat or afraid enough to gouge. The chi or kundalini system of the body, through which an immaterial regulatory energy flows, maintains its healthy balance just as the more material nervous system maintains its communications. Until the East met the West it did not know the intrusion of surgery. Acupuncture, Tai Chi and massage all treat the chakras and their networking as indispensible to health but are in turn treated by the AMA as fundamentalist Christians do other gods; as pseudoscience. In eastern health traditions doctors were forbade charging fees for their gift of compassionate understanding of the health of the body, but their willingness to share it made them the most revered and wealthy in their communities from the donations by the grateful.

I am not saying that because I haven’t seen a doctor in almost four decades I think everyone should boycott them. I just think it is worth considering retaking personal responsibility for our health far beyond taking antacid tabs while waiting in an exhaust choked waiting line at one of the millions of fast-food industry anuses that keep this great fat country going — coughing to hell. It is the same responsibility one must assume for daily behavior should one forego the ritualized accident, home, theft, health insurance guaranteeing that: no matter how irresponsibly we behave in the present (the only place we ever are), if we pay someone enough money in the past, our future recovery or death will make someone undeservedly rich off our carelessness — and perhaps our health will be covered — just like Zantacs at Jack in the Box. Taking drugs to ward off the results of ignorance is not the kind of prevention I’m talking about. Focus in the present needs or can benefit from no other insurance.

I realize there are wide variations in individual beings' ability to survive life on earth to the extent that, save the compassion of loved ones and/or the Hippocratic oath, they would live a life of pain or die. The whole while mankind has been building and clunking into the walls of western civilization, it has evolved a sense of empathy for fellow, clueless victims of the unfathomably ridiculous myth that nature is to be conquered, driven from the wilderness and sold on the block. It is what civilized people do to themselves, as they train their offspring out of their natural curiosity into a life of labor maintaining the walls, and force on others, as they replace natives’ jungle encampments with malls and move them to the brand new slums at the fringes of the brand new city. We are sicker from the system’s poisons and machines to isolate us from it than nature has ever made us.

As my body ages and my daily routine becomes more meditative than spontaneous I feel the feebles creep into my balance, strength, hearing and sight and I think to perhaps not throw away the mailer from Medicare next time. I pay for it. Or so it says on my annual statements from Social Security. They tell me I could opt out; and I would but for the idea that my unused portion goes to benefit the common medical access; the kindest gesture I’ve found in government anywhere. That we limit such efficient altruistic concerns to the aged while the general population pumps enough money into private industry’s pre-existing bean counters to pay for free, unqualified health care for everyone within our borders several times over is hand in glove with legislation protecting the polluting industries that cause ill health to begin with.

But the western health industry isn’t too much into prevention when the wreck, the war, the expedience is so much more profitable.