MONEY GONE WEIRD

elizabeth murray

Fourthajuly everywhere, fireworks, explosions, talking heads remind us of wars and rumors of wars, freedom thanks to continuous war. Cheap talk about freedom runs year round like American elections, so much flag consciousness, narcissist nationalism, it makes me uncomfortable. The rest of the world leaves us to it the way a group of people allows the most self-centered among them, the one needing to be the center of attention at all times, allows him to rule. His time will pass. He'll self-destruct. Everybody bears with it and says, "Well, that's just how he is." He rules because his ego demands it, he has more money than anyone else. In America, money is the only measure of an individual's power. I have no money; therefore, I have no power. I have white privilege, though it's only good for a better chance than somebody black not to be killed by a cop. And I don't want the power that goes with money. I don't want to be looked up to for money. I want money to have no role in my life but legal tender for exchange, a form of energy---this energy for that energy. Beyond an exchange of energy, money gets weird. 

elizabeth murray

Social status in America has to do with money and money only. I imagine it's the same other places, so it appears in films from around the earth. Success is measured by money. Respect has to do with money, too. Among the mountain people, the working class, everyone rates basic human respect for mere existence. The middle class people moving into the mountains only respect people up the money-status ladder from themselves. This makes them obnoxious to the mountain people for their snooty arrogance toward people down the ladder. Of course, mountain people who climb the ladder never look down the ladder, either. It's the nature of the money-status hierarchy to want more, not less. Corny as the Beverly Hillbillies tv show was, it plays on the comedy of what hillbillies do when they tap into big money. They do, indeed, become comical, like Texans draped in gold, driving a Cadillac pickup. I never enter the lottery from fear of winning. I know a shit-load of money would make a mess of me. I'd have to give it away immediately, get it out of my mind and out of my hands.  

elizabeth murray

The system of money, status and power is American from all the way back to inspiration to cross the ocean. Making money overran a continent, drained it of its resources, squandered its profits and is left like a working-poor man who won the lottery and a year later is that much in debt. Something interesting is in the works. It's not yet on the surface visible. I'm thinking of an example of the process in the art world, like while abstract expressionism was having its moment, taught all over the country in university art departments as pure art, young artists were doing what was to become Pop and some others to become minimalism in the background, unknown, unanticipated. The artworks were being made over a period of years, shown in small galleries nobody outside New York ever heard of. Eventually, a few of the artists are heard of beyond New York, and a very, very few everybody knows, like Andy Warhol. In this time when the rich have taken all to themselves in off-shore, tax-free, numbered accounts, something unknown to outsiders is stirring. 

elizabeth murray

I can't help but think Bernie Sanders is coming from what's next. Greece, Spain and Puerto Rico are putting a strain on the old way. Something new is yet to come forward, though I doubt it is far away. Finally, the Pope, a Christian who appears to speak and make papal (infallible) decisions with attention to the true spirit of the Christ. The people who identify Christian, yet are quietly embarrassed by the Fundamentalist misuse of the identity, they must be feeling good to see the Pope Francis example take Christian back to where it has dimension beyond cartoon. Sanders, a politician talking straight, finds overwhelming support every appearance. Whether an honest man can make it all the way through the corridors of corruption to a win will be seen in its time. He gives me the appearance that he represents a rising wave of a population of people becoming aware they want their democracy and their economy back. I don't mean  to pretend to be a prophet. Sanders and the pope seem like two public figures speaking honestly in a time of deception, just when we needed them most. I wonder if they could be a sign more individuals of good faith are finding a forum.   

elizabeth murray herself

*

TALK ABOUT THE CONFEDERATE FLAG

milton avery

Media interest in pointing the finger of blame at the South over racism has become uber-tiresome. The southwestern quadrant of USA is at least as racist as the southeastern; so is the northwestern and the northeastern. To solve a deep-running issue, NY and LA media want to rid-a-flag they've defined racist. Suppress one, another pops up. In the Soviet time, religion was suppressed. As soon as the Soviet system went away, religion came back. American media is engaged in another frenzy of make-a-law-against. We're so overrun with laws against, we're about painted into a corner. Already, any one of us can be arrested at any moment for something we're doing or have done or conspiracy. Example: the word nigger has been suppressed for the last half century. The working class uses it freely, as does the ruling class. It is only the white middle class that says, "the enword," or uses asterisks between obvious letters. F*t is the same as spelling fat. Saying enword and using asterisks is an act of denial that denies nothing. It's being nice, denying it while saying it. Like it was ok to say shit in front of mommy if I quoted somebody else saying it.

milton avery

I don't mean to be going on like I'm serious about the matter. The flag is too complicated an issue to limit to right or wrong, true or false. Like everything in this phenomenal world we call living, too much is interwoven, experience, thought, beliefs, to call anything or anybody one thing or another. I don't like the way somebody who got drunk and did something stupid that lasted maybe three seconds is called a criminal. I also don't like the way people who have served their time are treated and watched as criminals after their time is served. This is getting into things I have a problem with that I can't do anything about, but I don't have to be that way in my own behavior. Ex-cons I've met along the way, I regard with the same respect as anyone else, with a bit more respect for what they have been through in what I consider an unjust legal system, especially if you're black or any version of non-white, colored, or poor white. Again, nothing I can do about it. I fall back on my boycott of one. Today, I set out to buy a watermelon, wanting to paint one again. I chose to buy it at a roadside stand instead of Food Lion. I can't see giving my five dollars to a corporation that underpays its employees and treats them like shit when I can give somebody an assist who goes into the field early in the morning and selects the produce herself. 

milton avery

I stopped by the welding shop on the way home to visit with Ross and Harry. Milly, Ross's sister, stopped by for a bit and we had a good time sitting and standing in a circle, smoking cigarettes, laughing like the bunch of rednecks we are. These are people I feel at-home free with. We're so close in the heart, I'm about the same as a Richardson. I'm natured a lot like one. Milly and I have been at each other's throats almost with knives, Ross and I have too, and they're my friends I can count on for backup if needed unto the grave. It runs both ways. The subject of the flag came up and we had different thoughts and passions on the matter. Harry most of all. Harry is a retired Army lifer. He said the Confederate flag is treasonous, they fought against the American Army. He called it "you-guys' flag." I said the Civil War was a Yankee invasion. The South defended homeland. Ross said he knows what the flag means. It don't make no differ'nce to him. Milly, the Civil War buff, went off on Yankees and we laughed quite a lot. Except Harry, who identifies Southern, but not with any glorification of the Civil War. It was the Richardson in the rest of us that got us wound up about the South the homeland. 

milton avery

Yesterday, watching the race, Justin told me he was out of sorts with Dale Earnhardt Jr, his favorite driver, for coming out and making a statement that Nascar shouldn't have anything to do with the Confederate flag. I hated to see him so disappointed by a guy he looks up to so personally, like an older brother. He likes Jr's character. I told him Jr is not his own man. I said every time you see him in a commercial, he gets at least hundreds of dollars per showing. He was told by Nascar and corporate sponsors this is what he will do. To say no would cost him hundreds of thousands, millions, maybe his career. I pointed out that television is about money not ethics. Jr is in that world of high-paid celebrities. Once you cross the line into celebrity, your life is no longer your own, you're a product, your name a logo. I wanted to remind him this is a show, this is not real. I knew he knew, just forgot it in a moment of passion. This just a pie-slice of my friends. Very few of them would repeat any other. One can give a hundred reasons for, and another a hundred reasons against, every one of the two hundred reasons valid from some point of view. 

milton avery

The only thing I can see coming of this banning of the flag is a new item in the inventory of underground collectables, flea markets loaded with inflated Confederate flag items, if you know who to ask. Suppression never works and the ones doing the suppressing never get it. We'll have roadside stands selling velvet wall hangings of the flag, tshirts, belt buckles, an infinity of possibilities, just like now. My solution: deal with racism up front and let interest in the flag fade away as it will when nobody cares anymore. I feel like it is healthy for collective American culture to face up to racism as our way of life. Everyone knows it, everyone lives it. We act like we never heard of it. Our racism is rooted deep in our American denial. Which came first, denial or racism? Something like this needs to be brought into awareness collectively, as it does individually, before any real work can be done toward untying the knots of habit patterns that go all the way back to the beginning. It's looking like the Charleston church slayings have brought awareness of pervasive racism in white rule to the surface. If we don't get past blaming the flag, it will have been for naught. I can't imagine television allowing awareness of racism in the white American heart to go beyond blame and punishment, especially not unto self-awareness. 

milton avery

*

A SEEKER'S DESTINY

kate shepherd

I must have come into this lifetime with something that put me at odds with the world of people I live among, wherever I live. I don't mean by any means I was a clairvoyant child, would that I were, though seeing what GM corporation did with my daddy, layoff every other year, union strikes, I made an agreement with self that I would never work for a corporation or government. Senior year in college, corporations sent representatives to set up at folding card tables to take applications and talk about the corporation. I saw the young guys in suits at the tables parasites, avoided them like I avoid bears. I liked that the small Southern school lacked sports emphasis and the science department was too basic to attract government money. The school did not depend on government control, though was willing and would have, nor did it depend on sports arenas. No jock gangs on campus, the privileged guys exempt from study or attending class, given passing grades for raping the girls and terrorizing nerds. Good at playing with a ball. The school had no prestige, which made me like it all the more. I'm seeing in my nature my destiny in action all the way along. Today, it is my philosophy I live by to have no status and want no status. At the college thirtieth reunion I saw as clearly as on a graph that I'm a success. I have no status. Lawyers, judges, doctors and their dressed-up wives. I was a hillbilly house painter with a hillbilly accent, gone native. 

kate shepherd

A childhood recollection surfaces, when I realized it to be true what I'd heard in movies, heard in church, from my grandmother, when you have money, you don't know who your friends are. It's the money they're drawn to. The fake friends are more convincing than the real friends. The real friends turn up when you're down and out. This is perhaps the beginning, or an affirmation of what was already within. Or maybe came from taking something seriously in church I wasn't old enough to know I'm expected to ignore. The reasoning rang the bell of truth such that I decided pre-ten never to pursue money. I went to college wanting education. The people around me were there for vocational school, the degree essential for a good-paying job. A year after school, I ran into someone from my Shakespeare class. In our brief conversation, I mentioned something about Shakespeare, him being our connection. She said, "I forgot everything about Shakespeare when I turned in the final exam." My inner balloon went flat. Our conversation was over. I didn't know what to say and she didn't either. All I could think was, what a waste. Unable to say it, I couldn't think of anything else. I saw her indifference the equivalent of saving to buy a Robert Rauschenberg print and throwing it away when it arrived in the mail. 

kate shepherd

One thing I suspect had strong influence was the emphasis in church on being in the world, not of it. I had no idea what it meant. It became something like a Zen koan trying to figure out what is the world and what is not. The obvious for the world would be Las Vegas, vice city. But that's kind of limited. Over years and years of considering the question, I came to see, eventually, that the church, itself, was the world, as much as a bar is the world, though the earth, the globe was not. I came to see the world aspects of the human mind. To be in the world, in mind, not of it, not identifying mind as self. Use mind, guide it to work for me instead of against me, the guide being my true self that directs mind by deeper self's attitude toward life. Having run through the major part of the life, I've come to allowing mind, using mind, valuing mind, without mind identifying who I am. Identifying self with mind, knowledge, beliefs, what have you, is equal to identifying self with money or new car smell. Mind is one of many aspects of self, a tool. A young dog checking out a snake is more cautious the second time.  I lost interest in paying taxes when I learned that two-thirds of American tax dollars go to military to kill, impoverish and afflict with misery the people of poor, defenseless countries, Vietnam then, destabilize defenseless countries, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Latin America, and around the globe. American boots-on-the-ground are marching into Africa now, quicksand to American military. Remember Mogadishu. They want endless war. They've found it. The largest continent on earth full of poor people.  

kate shepherd

In my early years of working, I learned that when I earn below a certain amount, I pay no or very little taxes. Some people like to go to prison for not paying taxes. I decided to do it the legal way, learn to live well with a poverty income. This way, I'm not complicit in the American military's spread of misery. I pay state and local tax with sales tax. I like to pay taxes when the money goes to the needs of the community or the country. I could not sanction paying with my labor to support my government's passion for killing the poor. I am one with the American people, at odds with the corporate takeover of my country's government and the racist police state that pushed out democracy when the Patriot Act nullified the constitution. What can I do? Complain? Write to a republican congressman? I chose to live in poverty, live empathetic with the poor, at once curious what it was about the poor that made God so partial to them. I prefer the ground to climbing the ladder to money and status. I prefer friends whose loyalty I have no occasion to question. It's not that I look forward to a pink Cadillac convertible in heaven for being good. I can't change any of it. If I'm aggravated all the time, I develop stomach cancer from everything eating at my guts. I choose nonparticipation in my government's war crimes. I'm happy to be one of the American people, so I live among people already suspicious of the law from their own experience. I can say with heartfelt meaning, God bless America, meaning help us get through this transition from Capitalist fascism to whatever is next peaceably, gently as possible.

kate shepherd

*

A MOSH PIT OF THE MIND

wooden rocking chair

It feels like I had an insight yesterday into what I meant the day before, writing about feeling like the passenger instead of the driver in my vehicle through life. I questioned if my apparent detachment was indifference or true letting go. The difference is great, though subtle. I had been invited to a big outdoor "party" of white middle-class people from Away. I knew a few of them. My car's battery was dead from a brake light that stayed on all night and half the next day. Somewhat down-hearted, I decided not to go to the party. Next door neighbor called and asked if I'm going to the party. They're going too, if I'd like to ride with them. Ok. Friend in passenger seat went to the back seat and left the passenger seat to me. I was sure he had not read what I had written the day before. Thought it odd he should do that when the subject of passenger seat was in the front of my mind. I decided to go, because suddenly it was so easy. Plus, I told myself I do need to get out into the world of others a few times a week to keep in touch with others. I could stay home all the time, but do need social interaction with others for the mental/emotional exercise, and possibly the comfort of feeling acceptable among others. I get terribly bored of myself. I sat in the passenger seat thinking this is odd, so odd it's like a cosmic set-up. It told me, if I want to believe my intuitions, the day is going to be a passenger seat experience. I received it as such, something to pay attention to at the party to find examples of the feeling, if they're there. I also could be misinterpreting and fooling myself to please self. I allow plenty of room for fooling self while interpreting self's thoughts and actions. It's easier to fool self than anybody else. 

tunnel in the woods

Riding down the road, I was thinking of the difference between sitting, looking out the front and side windows, how more relaxed it is not to be driving with focus on keeping the car on the road. I feel like driving is a good focus of attention. Even when we're doing it unconsciously, we are constantly in process of keeping the car on the road. Good mental exercise. I can't help but think the focus of driving, a kind of meditation, is necessary for everyone on earth in this time, as learning to drive is essential for living anywhere in the world. Within a half mile I'd settled into my new role of riding instead of driving, observing my feeling, the views out the windows beside the road. I've learned with a front wheel drive car, the front wheels follow where my eyes go. If I look off to the right at a remaining old wooden barn, the front wheels veer to the right. Same to the left. Front wheel drive has taught me to keep my eyes on the road at all times. It's a strange phenomenon that has something to do with gyroscopic effect difference from pushing and pulling the weight mass. I didn't like taking science courses in school, though I see often the benefit of learning at least the scientific method in everyday life. Those who don't have it don't miss it, but having it, I am grateful. I came out of a church that preached evolution was a communist lie. I'd never looked into it. Freshman biology in college brought the subject up. I wondered how an educated woman, like the professor, could believe both God and evolution. I knew she went to church. I asked her, person to person one day after class, how she can believe in both God and evolution. Her answer: Its easy. She dismissed me as a dumb shit, not knowing how deeply her two words resonated throughout my consciousness. It was the moment I started getting it. 

jenny

There is not a separation of God and evolution, like I don't anymore see a divide between science and art. I can see a divide between science and some kinds of religion. Religion is a fiction of the human mind. I feel it's credible to say science and what we call spirituality would be in accord. In my way of seeing it, true spirituality questions. Questioning is inhibited in religion, a sign of little faith. Reading a spiritual principle in scripture, instead of just saying, That's right, and going on, I believe the spiritual principle wants to be questioned and explored until I understand its meaning and its application in everyday life, by experience. Initiate an action, put it out in the world, and wait to see how it comes back. Make it something you want back. Every scripture that's ever been written includes something to do with karma: you get what you give, everything comes back. To a lot of preachers I've heard, this tends to be about winning souls to the Lord like it's an Amway pyramid scheme. If you browbeat and alienate enough people, some will come to the Lord. Your harvest will be acceptable. In my view, that is so not what it's about, the best example I know of. It means if you treat somebody like shit, you will be treated like shit immediately, soon or eventually. You'll have your own moment. Everything has its return. When I'm generous with others, others tend to be generous with me. When I'm mean-spirited with somebody, soon the same one or somebody else will be mean-spirited toward me. The evidence we all know this principle unconsciously is when something objectionable happens to somebody and the individual says, "What'd I do? I didn't do nothin to deserve this!" Maybe and maybe not. Sometimes, as far as I can tell, shit happens. Sometimes it is the other one sowing and I'm on the receiving end. I didn't do something to start it, then it falls to me to send the return. Like my friends who have been in prison tell somebody on their way in, first time somebody disrespects you in any way, knock him on his ass. You will get your ass kicked severely gang-style, but word goes around you'll fight and you will be left alone. 

elder rhododendron

At the party I found a place to sit on a step with a paper plate of food and beer in a freezing glass, fork and napkin. Spoke with a few people I knew. Every time I spoke with anybody for no matter how brief a span of time, here came somebody fulfilling their duty to interrupt any two people they see talking. This is why I don't like to go anyplace anymore. Coffee shop, too. I never had a conversation with anyone I talked with. We'd start talking about something; here came the interruption, like a cell phone ringing, totally unconscious of their rudeness. It's the American way. It's what Americans do. It is a duty to every living American to interrupt any two people you see talking. The duty is absolute. I knew this going into the gathering, was put off the first time it happened, reminded self this is America. It is not rudeness. It is someone fulfilling their duty. I settled into it and fell to my own code of behavior. I've made it a point with self when interrupted I consciously forget the subject we were talking about. Will not go through, "What were we talking about?" What the hell? It doesn't matter. This is America. It's against the rules to talk about anything with focus of attention that's about something, anyway. I was visiting another interruption fest. I said to self, Ok, this is what we're doing now. I found that through the time there, I was interrupted every time I talked with somebody. It was a mosh pit. Every interruption had nothing to do with our focus. Change focus. Change focus again. I found that when the interrupter engaged the other in conversation, I went back to sitting quietly, paying them no mind. Our conversation was over. It used to aggravate the hell out of me. I noticed yesterday I gently bounced from one interruption to the next, all by surprise, each from a different direction, keeping me reeling, upright, flowing with the momentum. Now, I allow. Why get aggravated when interruption is more American than apple pie? Not everybody likes apple pie. I say to self, This is what we do. Allowing puts me in the passenger seat. Like, don't sweat it, dude. 

hillbilly graveyard

photos by tj worthington

*

THE VIEW IN A DARK TIME

Just off the telephone with my friend Kathryn. We always have lively conversation. She's taking care of her mother with dementia. I saw Kathryn was on facebook, telling me mama was asleep and Kathryn was free. Time to call. We tend to talk about funny occurrences or news that's hilarious. Of course, hilarious news is tragic news we laugh at because we have no say in anything beyond our own immediate decisions. We pay attention to the news like watching the Howdy Doody Show with Mr Bluster, Dilly-Dally, Princes Summer Fall Winter Spring, Clarabel the clown. For Mr Bluster we have Mitch McConnell, for Dilly-Dally Ted Cruz, for Princess Summer Fall Winter Spring Michelle Bachmann, and W Bush continues as Clarabel the clown. In the past I'd get excited about having such as we have for "representatives" and leaders who neither represent nor lead. A lifetime of seeing moronic people in government satisfies my questioning of how legislation in DC and state capitals got the way it has become. I used to wonder where a nation that only concerned itself with money could go, up or down or stay the same. Right and wrong are of no significance now. Truth and honesty are laughed at as naïve. Respect isn't even a word anymore. Now people ask why trust is important. I saw an article last week of W Bush painting. He is taking lessons with somebody who is teaching him well. He has begun including in pictures of himself the dead Iraqi child who is with him day and night wherever he goes. He has a specter living with him, attached to his soul. He talks about it like it's the latest clever thing. I don't like to think about him, don't like his image in my head. I've been an anti-fascist since childhood, so I'm automatically not disposed toward him. It actually warmed my heart to see he had drawn the ghost of a dead Iraqi child to himself. After all the agony and death he has directly caused to so many million people at home and abroad, I like seeing karmic justice has not failed him.

 

 

The justice of the law has failed us in Dubya's case. But karmic justice is with him. Sometimes it feels good to see karmic justice take place, like in the case of Roy Cohn, who destroyed so many lives with Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon. All three of them self-destructed. Cohn came down with AIDS and died in infamy. McCarthy drank himself to death. Nixon self-destructed and went out in mortal shame. Johnson went out broken. Bush 1 set the stage to see Bush 2 destroy the family name. I used to wonder about karma concerning the people who make decisions to turn the military-industrial-complex to the task of giving the American economy a boost. A war that is not a war, torture that is not torture, to annihilate a small defenseless nation of poor people for the benefit of American corporations, stockholders and billionaires. And jobs. Shit jobs that undermine your humanity and don't pay near enough for it, but jobs. I've lived long enough to have witnessed by keeping up with current events as history much that even my most jaundiced mind could not have anticipated. Attitude today seems like police state is a surprise. Even Rachel Maddow acts like it's a surprise. It has been coming on at least since the Fifties. Vietnam was never a surprise. Iraq was no surprise. They are true to pattern. The big one for me has  been the popular repeal of Democracy followed by popular police state, accomplished by propaganda. My friend John who is 101 said the most significant change he saw in his lifetime was the emergence of the salad. It doesn't seem like much, but give it a five second thought and it becomes an enormous change. It wasn't very long ago Americans didn't drink wine except Mad Dog 20/20, Wild Irish Rose and Thunderbird. Suddenly Americans are drinking so much wine the vineyards of the world are stressed, can't make it fast enough. Both grocery stores in Sparta have big wine sections. The coffee shop sells wine. It wasn't very many years ago coffee was Maxwell House, Folger or JFG. You can even find Sumatran coffee at the grocery store in Sparta now. People used to go to bars to drink beer. Now we go to bars to drink coffee.

 

 

 I like to back away from the social scene and see it from afar for what we call the big picture. I like both the big picture and the little picture, both the forest and the trees. Since paying attention to the last half a century as it was happening, seeing it as history, the big picture, I have a fair understanding of patterns in American government behavior, such that new events fall into place. Joe Biden made me laugh when he went to Ukraine to tell Putin, Don't do as I do, do as I say. That is so an American attitude and so blatantly naïve to think it would have meaning outside USA, I couldn't help but laugh. He's a politician, he says what his handlers tell him to say, following script. The news has become slap-stick comedy. It is fitting Comedy Central has the most insightful news programs on tv or radio. It's refreshing to see Limbaugh on the wane, and even more refreshing to see a pope who talks about love, compassion, empathy, caring. Did that ever come as a voice in the wilderness. Yes, we are in a dark time. Democracy in America did not survive it. There is the principle that it is darkest before dawn that gives me confidence this cycle is about to turn to the light. But I'm not going to hold my breath. I won't see it in this lifetime. Seeing the cycle of what we're going through collectively as Americans and as world, it tells me the democracy we had, which was not really democracy, had to go. It was an oligarchy before the latest university study made headlines saying it is. Perhaps in this time of traditions falling away, American oligarchic democracy needed to change. To make way for the new. After a cycle of assault on what we had of democracy by the Reagan Junta, maybe the next cycle will erect  a new building on the site of the old one that was torn down. This democracy didn't work, so tear it down and start a new one. When I look at it from afar, I see the patterns and the cycles. It ceases to be aggravating. In close, seeing only the short term, it turns frightening in a hurry. 

 

 

This guy, Cliven Bundy, he's just an American white man. He's not extreme racist or any of what he's being accused of in prosecutorial terms only. He's a white man. He's no surprise. He's just ego-centric enough to say publicly what white men tend to say privately. He's been listening to Rush Limbaugh for so many years, he's just spewing what he was taught in the name of God and country. Hilarious, him carrying a big American flag riding a horse and saying he does not recognize the United States Government. White man. It's perfectly logical to him. He's not being outrageous. White man is in crisis at the moment when Others and Blacks are tipping the scale, inching toward 51%. I look at this Limbaugh hate phenomenon from the inside, up close, and it makes my blood pressure go up, makes me want to write outrageous sentences like I think they would matter. Then I look at someone I know who thinks outrage matters, and laugh at myself. I pull back to my home, to the world of people I live among, my neighbors, people I know, people I care about, Caterpillar napping in the other room, the donkeys in their meadow, my relationship with God, the people and pets I have loved who are gone. I return to Now, in the chair I'm sitting on like a drummer pounding the keyboard. This is where I belong. This is where I am. People in the news like Bundy I have come to see as cartoons of themselves. Cartoons are funny. I laugh when I think about them or talk about them. People I know who are sensible never show on the news. It seems like the sensible people have faded away. But I maintain the sensible people are alive and well. By sensible, I mean something like they don't let their opinions rule their lives. Opinions do rule our lives to some degree, but a sensible person does not take a rifle to a synagogue parking lot and start shooting people because he doesn't like Jews. I believe I could guess with a fair degree of accuracy that he's never known a Jew. He evidently thinks drag queens are special, having been arrested for having sex with one in the back seat of his car. This is what I mean by not sensible. Nobody in my world is that kind of crazy. We're crazy because we have a sense of humor and like to laugh and cut up. I prefer the world of fun crazy.

 

 

 

*

 

 

THE PATRIARCHY IS OVER

 

the red squirrel outside my window

Lying in bed this morning after waking, I felt like I had a penetrating insight into the nature of God, and by now it's gone. I did not write it down and it went away. I've seen a news report recently saying brain science is discovering the brain is a microcosm of the universe. It sounds outrageous, but how could it be otherwise? A galaxy is a moving spiral. Planets go around one of the galaxy's stars, all of them spinning like cosmic tops. Though we're unconscious of the spiral motion going on all the time, we see it in cigarette smoke rising from an ashtray. It is in water swirling down the drain. North of the equator it turns to the right. South of the equator it turns to the left. Water flows in spirals in rivers, creeks, pipes, wherever it flows. An old tree in the forest dead for a very long time is a vertical column that is a spiral. Our bones have spiral grain. It is water flow that creates our bodies, meaning to me that we are the same as water running in a river, composed of spirals to the tips of our hair. Since everything in the universe is in motion, this tells me the universe is in motion too. A spiral motion the way galaxies flow in spirals, like planets twirl through space in spirals around a moving star, itself in a spiral. I suspect this explains, too, why spirals figure so much in ancient art. We live in spirals and we are spirals, though at our mentally developed level it is too subtle for us to notice. There was a time I was reading in a self-help art book, finding myself totally uninterested. One thing I found in the early part of the book, the only part I read, an exercise to make a spontaneous drawing every day for a period of time. I used colored markers. All I ever drew were spirals. I said, Why only spirals? Because spirals happened. I tried to go against it and drew some rectangles and squares by intent. Next day a spiral. I told myself to draw a profile of a face. I drew a spiral. I stopped doing it after more than a month because I only drew spirals. I wondered if it was telling me I was passing into a new stage in inner growth, like grow into this. I tried to find psychological or spiritual meaning in making spirals every day, not interested in drawing anything else. I found none. Learned not to question so much.

In the last several days or few weeks I've been focusing on the silliness of drawing conclusions. Everything is in motion and every non-thing is in motion. A momentum carries us through time and keeps everything in the flow. Sometimes it seems futile to me to paint still images. A stopped moment, like a photograph, a thousandth of a second in ongoing time. Continuous motion is the nature of life. How does a still image deal with that? Or even how does a moving picture do it? Dance and music perhaps honor the continuous motion that is time. It's by earth's motion in the solar system that we measure time. Time is a measuring tape we use attempting with a finger to outline a square on the surface of a river. That's about how well our minds are able to "grasp" reality, the reality that is in motion, that, like water, when the flow is stopped it makes a powerful lake that will break  violently through the force holding it back. Like in Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, building a wall to suppress the feminine, the feminine goes insane, breaks down the wall and the whole house. This continent and the South American continent had a lot of people living on them for 13,000 years. White man came with white man's insane belief system of superiority over all living beings and in a few hundred years has destroyed both continents. The Amazon rain forest will be desert probably before the end of this century, as most likely the western half of USA will be desert, too, if not the whole continent. This was done in attempts to stop the perpetual motion of life itself. The "primitive" (meaning first, not stupid) people who lived tribally lived in continual presence of the spirit of life, honored its laws, observed its subtle energies. White man comes along like a legion of army ants and destroys everything, even unto self. It has been the nature of civilization all along to deny the feminine, Grandmother Earth.

 

 

 

We've just completed 6,000 years of patriarchy, before which was 6,000 years of matriarchy. My feeling sees the Adam and Eve story a mythological (I don't mean false) story of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. As we humans have done all along when a new belief system takes hold, genocide breaks loose against the people living in the old way. I'd guess about everything from the matriarchy was destroyed with the genocide. Goddess figurines have been found in Turkey among Neolithic ruins. The Old Testament genocides were over the change from the Age of Taurus, Baal the Bull, to the Age of Aries, the sacrifice of sheep. Next, Pisces the fish, the symbol of the Christ. The Christians did their very best to eliminate the Hebrews of the Age of Aries. We are moving now into the Age of Aquarius. Our belief systems are changing fast going into this new Age. How did the song go? Peace, love and understanding. It's about time. Aquarius is taking us into the time of masculine and feminine in balance. This is what women's liberation is about, bringing us collectively into balance. In my personal assessment, women will be actively engaged in everything. The wrinkles are not yet ironed out. We have a large number of women artists at least the equal of the men. Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Agnes Martin in visual art. Adrienne Rich, Louise Gluck, Denise Levertov, all three with recently released collected poems. And they're not the only ones. It was a gradual change from the time of George Eliot writing under a man's name to Jane Austin to Gertrude Stein to Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, to now when there are as many successful women writers as men. This is the balance of Aquarius. Like white men are freaking all over the country around an enword president, hate boiling to the surface again. Boys are taught from birth to dismiss women. It is male culture from the core outward to dismiss women. Patriarchy. It has only been a little over a century that women have been allowed educations and careers. In times when men were largely educated, at least to some degree, the women were not educated at all. It follows that educated men as well as uneducated men would feel superior to women, add to it white man's need to be superior to all else and justification by the great patriarchal text, the Bible, women didn't stand a chance in white man world. It's the same in Asian, African, Middle Eastern.

 

 

 

The whole world is going through at least a century-long upheaval brought on by new cosmologies, belief systems, the old ones disproven, disregarded, done. Elizabeth Warren has the best mind of anyone in our government. I don't want her for president. Republicans would nail her to the cross. They have only contempt for intelligence and they hate it in a woman even worse than they hate it in an enword. USA is the cutting edge of the ship of civilization in this time of putting aside discriminations based in collective judgment for a very long time. The wars over the last century have been burning off the hate generated by traditions all over the earth breaking down and changing, traditional cultures everywhere fading away as the old people die out. Hate radio and tv in America is bringing the hate among us to the surface, alas, very dangerously. But hate is by nature dangerous. I heard Laurens van der Post say in an interview, "Evil is always in a hurry." It resonated when I heard it. Over the last few years I feel like I have found my flow and am happily flowing with it. Somebody comes along in a hurry and it rattles me. I get in a hurry and it feels like I jumped my track. I'd come to distrust hurry in others and self by the time I heard van der Post's interview. I felt like he was someone who had found his own flow. The prophecies say that after this time of war we're in, a thousand years of peace is next, after which comes another period of burning off hate, then hate will be gone from the earth and it will be peace ever after. This is why I call myself an apocaloptimist, meaning I see everything going to shit, then by surprise everything turns out all right. Makes a good story. A thousand years ahead we'll look back at this time as something like the medieval period seems to us now. And the history of this time won't be anywhere near accurate. The issue I had with history all the way through school was it gave no importance to the everyday lives of people living in the time who were not very well off. Possibly, this is the role of art as history, to cover the life spirit history bypasses.

 

 

 

 

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JUST SAYING

 

lucio fontana

Looking at facebook this morning not long after waking, I found a video of a news broadcast in Russia from probably Moscow. It pointed out straight-forwardly as could be presented in a brief time that the Whitehouse and CIA were the aggressors in 9/11, not 19 Arabs with cell phones and box cutters. In about 15 minutes, the Russian news presentation made a case using the most convincing evidence available. The tv production spelled out that it was indeed an "inside job." None of it is new to me. It's new seeing it used in an international propaganda war. First thought: Obama recently disrespected Putin in public internationally. Putin's op-ed in the NY Times was no more than a statement that he fails to see the humor in being disrespected. Putin is a KGB martial artist. Martial arts is about avoidance, KGB martial arts is kill you in three seconds. Martial arts is a mental discipline as well as physical. Obama is a basketball player. Watching the video, I saw in my mind's eye Obama dribbling a basketball trying to get around Putin and Putin kills him. Vladimir Putin is one of the men on earth I would not challenge to a duel of any sort, physical or mental. I see Putin with superior physical and mental control and the soul of a bear. To hit him would be the same as hitting a tree. Except he'd deck you and the tree would just stand there. Whoever you are, Putin could take you out faster than Anderson Silva. Vladimir Putin is for me the image of a Bad Mutha.

 

lucio fontana

 

 

I remember my thought when I saw in the news Obama disrespect Putin like he did. I thought: do not challenge that man. You're a basketball player. He's a killer. W Bush disrespected Putin calling him Pootie-poot. That was Bush, with Cheney and Rummy for backup, saying fuck you, like at a fraternity beer party. Putin knew it. It was Bush Whitehouse/CIA behind 9/11, and Putin knows it. He knows Obama knows it too. Obama's silence on the matter and saying Bush "wasn't such a bad president," makes him complicit, same as the one driving the car in a drive-by.  I'm seeing Putin bring this lump under the rug out in the open. This Russian broadcast went all the way around the world. In a fighting match, I'd score Putin a direct hit, one that would send Obama staggering to catch his balance. Putin solved the Syria problem by convincing al-Assad to comply with turning over chemical agents they bought from USA to the UN. End of story. Then Obama starts publicly taking credit for it and making it into a conflict he won. It must have bent Putin over laughing, might have even spilled his vodka. I'm getting the impression nobody is counseling Obama that Putin has a whole lot more power than the American president. His house is not divided, or anyway not divided like Obama's. Putin has the power to clean Obama's clock, and he'd better start paying attention. To say we have The Bomb, they have it too. Our side pushes the button; while the missiles are in the air the other side pushes the button. End of History.

 

lucio fontana

 

 

That's calling for sensible thinking, which American government does not do. If it ever did, I don't know, but it has not demonstrated sensible thinking in my lifetime. Like in the last weeks Sen John McCain of Arizona is being heard to make a little bit of sense, leading me to believe dementia has taken away his mind, going so far off message. In his right mind, he was a parrot of Reaganism. Now he's saying, "It's not rational." Rational? When did rational become a concern to a republican? His mind is gone. It was bad before Johnson, bad before Nixon, bad before Reagan, then the Reagan Revolution took the American people on the present downhill run to the bottom. To quote Chris Hedges, "Brace yourself. The American Empire is over and the descent is going to be horrifying." I used to hope the Obama presidency might be the beginning of a turnaround from Reaganism, but it's not. Obama, I have seen, is a booster rocket for the downward run to police state. The flush occurred when the republicans stole the 2000 election out in the open, publicly, and said to we who don't like it: fuck you if you don't like it. Police state is here. Police state is now. Get it. Barak Obama gets it. He's using his power as president to assist the republican systematic lockstep dismantling of democracy in front of everybody's face on the evening news, followed by several commercials. Obviously, the American people want police state.

 

lucio fontana

 

 

Police state means white power in a time when democracy favors minorities. Shut down democracy, white man retains control. Obama cares nothing for the black people in America, same as he cares nothing for the white people. He just happens to be very good at passing tests and has a natural charisma that took him far. I'm wondering if he might not be an example of the Peter Principle: advanced to the level of his incompetence and there he stays. On the one hand, I see the republicans acting out racism on him. On the other hand, I see him challenging Putin publicly with disrespect as not an intelligent move. Of course, it's a strategy. He wouldn't do anything if it didn't have strategy behind it. He doesn't appear to have much respect for the Russian Bear is what I'm getting at. I'm curious to see the ripples that arise from this pebble thrown in the water. I would not want to be in the same room with Putin's energy. Nor would I want to be in the same room with Obama's energy. These are high energy egomaniacs whose souls are filling roles I don't want to be anywhere near. If Obama's staff has a video game idea of a Battle of the Titans, this American citizen would recommend not going there. Obama is way too vulnerable and gives me the impression he has not yet noticed. An American basketball player is no contest for a Russian KGB trained killer.

 

lucio fontana

 

 

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MOSQUITO COAST: YOU BECOME WHAT YOU HATE

Last night I saw the Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren, River Phoenix, Andre Gregory movie, Mosquito Coast, the second time. It was made from a novel by Paul Theroux. I'd seen it several years ago, took it for a simplistic Hollywood allegory and dismissed it. Seeing it last night was by chance more than choice. From the very first scenes it caught my attention, had me thinking I totally missed it first time around. It is self that has changed, not the film. I got the allegory first time, but missed the subtleties that fleshed out the allegory. Ford's character was an American man, a liberal democrat in the time of the novel's writing, in our time today a Teabagger republican. They're both the same at the off-the-deep-end Xtreme. Ever-thang's wrong, aint nothin right. Ford's character had a brilliant mind; he was an obsessive inventor with a passion for fixing things. At the time of the story, he had become obsessive over all that doesn't work in America. He saw dark clouds on the political horizon. He decided to leave the country where nothing works very well anymore, where tv has zombified the population, unable to accept or allow circumstances and others to be what they are. He wanted to be in control, because he knew the right way. His wife, Helen Mirren, became an enabler standing by her man, bearing with his never-ending projects. River Phoenix, his boy, looked up to his dad and became his partner in the projects. The whole family went with him when he decided to leave the country and start over someplace else where he could do it his way.

river phoenix and harrison ford

Their boat took them to the Atlantic coast of Central America, presumably following the chance of water currents to guide them. They found a river and went upriver. It's tropical jungle. The film's theme is going upriver. Ford's character is a thinking man, who, alas, thinks too much. Throughout the story, the hearts of wife and kids want to let go and flow downstream to the ocean and go back home to northern Georgia. He wants to be going upstream. He is a man operating a bulldozer instead of a canoe. His life is an ongoing struggle, which the people around him suffer from, because he never lets up. He is the kind of character who gets in your face when he talks, attempting to convince you he knows more than you do. He sees everything that's wrong with the world. When he left America, he became America. I thought of a spiritual truth I'd learned many years ago, you become what you hate. He left America, hating it, went out to the unimproved world and became America. He called the black people there savages. He wore his family out, and everybody around him. Then the real world of Central American rebels appeared, and from there on his creation self-destructed. He set fire to Andre Gregory's church, and Andre Gregory shot him down, allowing wife and kids to enter the flow and go with it downstream to the sea and to home.

the kids

I saw myself in the story and several particular people I know. Theroux caught the American mind using the fingers of both hands. He caught it like one of those great pass receptions we see about once a year on tv football where the runner leaps into the air as high as he can go, arms extended all the way, hands snatch the ball out of the air. In the microcosm of one man, Ford acted out American history in allegory, thus became America created by his particularly American self-unaware temperament with control issues. An unselfconscious ego and a brilliant mind with little room for heart gives a pretty good description of the American personality in the world of nations. It's testosterone mind that has ruled our government and culture from the beginning that evolved to the War on Drugs (war on the American people), excess border patrol, Faux news and police state. According to Theroux's vision, the self-centered domination of all around Ford's character, by this time America itself, constructs a skyscraper of cards. A breeze of popular rebellion blows through; the attempt to shut down the rebellion sets off a chain-reaction imploding the skyscraper of cards, and shutting down that old testosterone domination, the patriarchy. Wife and kids, the people who live by heart, the greater portion of the population, can now go with their flow and return home to Georgia.

harrison ford, river phoenix, helen mirren

I hear Ray Charles singing "Georgia on my mind." Georgia, the place in the heart they left and returned to, patriarchal ego mind lost along the journey, defeated by itself. He was so obsessed with what was wrong that by the end what was wrong in himself brought him down, setting everybody around him free to return to living by the heart after a bad experience with mind in control. Theroux showed the progression from thought to action, from hating to becoming what you hate. I am glad I learned about becoming what I hate. That shut down hate in me. I used to laugh inside when I'd hear somebody truly racist on a rant, picturing him a black baby in a black teenage girl's arms living with her mama, had to quit school. I don't want to hate a right-wing Teabagger republican, despite seeing what they're doing to my country, because I don't want to be like them. I don't want to hate Rush Limbaugh's mind, because I don't want to become like his mind. I can't hate somebody for being a snitch emeffer, because I don't want to become a snitch emeffer. I don't want to hate Ted Nugent because I don't want to be Ted Nugent, for the same reasons I can't hate Dick Cheney, W Bush, Reagan, because I don't want to be like them. I don't want that mind, so I don't hate it. I can't hate somebody I know to be a low down slime ball. I can't hate somebody who has sex with a child. I don't want any of that kind of thinking for myself. Because I can't hate a racist, for example, the feeling changes to sorrow for the person with a particular affliction I don't want. I figure they don't want it either, but it's stuck to them and they can't help it. I don't want that, so I don't hate it. Accept and allow seems to be the way to go with the flow and not worry about the mind stuff.

river phoenix and Martha Plimpton

 

 

 

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JUST SAY NO TO OBEDIENCE

 

 

This silly cartoon struck me funny. At the same time I laugh, sorrow is mixed in with the mirth. First thing I thought was my weariness of cartoon references to Jesus healing the sick for free, as if a medical profession is measured by religion. I'm tired of political chicanery making comparisons to Jesus, like what-would-Jesus-do? How can I guess what Jesus would do? He wasn't always sweet and politically correct. There is the ancient saying that God works in strange ways. Like I wouldn't presume what God might "do," I wouldn't presume what Jesus might do. Jesus was simply open to the flow of the Spirit, and I would never presume to guess what "the Spirit" might do in any circumstance. My most recent obvious answer to a prayer came the next day and in a very surprise form that reminded me, God works in strange (unpredictable) ways. This is why I would rather pray for help on a difficult decision where I cannot see what is the best way to go for all concerned. I may not pray as much as I'm "supposed to," though I prefer to take responsibility for my own decisions and learn how to make better decisions for myself as I go along. It's when I'm stumped that I go to prayer. And when I see things unfold, I think: I would never have seen that solution.

 

magritte

 

 

Maybe if I prayed more the Spirit would flow through me too. Then I'd get crucified. I don't want that, so I don't push it. Like I was thinking of my friend Jr Maxwell I took for a man of wisdom, a wise man. He saw himself a fool and laughed off any suggestion of wisdom. But the way I saw it, a wise man in this world could only be a fool. Living in this world goes so counter to wisdom that someone with wisdom could only be dismissed a fool. I see babies come into this world straight from the spirit world where love IS. I see their eyes wide open loving everything they see, the spirit of love beaming in their eyes. Then I see, a step at a time, the light in the eyes shaded over a little bit at a time as the child is taught how we live in this world, until by the time a kid is ready for school, the light in the eyes is long gone, further in some than in others, and I watch that process all through life until we get to men in their 70s and 80s locked down in mental compartments, a lifetime of conclusions hardened into cement in the man's head until the thinking process has hardened unto reaction. When a man gets there, he shuts out understanding as pussy (feminine--weak) and can't take anything seriously spoken by a feminine voice, even on evening news.

 

 

 

Having lunch today with a woman friend I would freely call intellectual, a brilliant woman, a brilliant human being, and, in my way of seeing, very much a true human being, I told her that in this phase of my life I have seen men really deficient in their own humanity. I know very few who are what I would call a true human being. That doesn't mean there are none. I'm wondering if it has to do with several thousand years in our evolution of consciousness, boys growing up to be warriors, obedience the rule among warriors. It's the rank that matters, not the man. Do as you're told, not what you think is right. I see the men of the right wing in America today, about half the male population, the cement-heads who believe killing solves problems. Short of killing, hitting solves problems. Isn't that the great American truth. At the rate of 30,000 a year we Americans kill one another with guns. How many by other means? We're the killingest people on earth. All my life I have seen the passion for killing in especially working class men, the warrior class. Pop entertainment knows that killing is guaranteed box-office, so we grow up watching movies and tv where killing is hip, no consequences, no funerals, no life, faceless, a mushroom. 

 

robert longo, bodyhammers

 

 

A man I have known for a lot of years has wanted to kill somebody all the time I've known him. The passion must have its beginning in his childhood. My guess is he'd discover on the psychiatric couch after about five years that it was his daddy he wanted to kill. He likes to threaten that he will kill somebody, from time to time, but he'll never get it done. He's a bully and bullies are chicken. Bullies only pick on smaller, weaker, dependent. They never do anything that requires courage. Having no courage makes them bullies. I don't know any women with this kind of affliction. Surely there are some, maybe several. They might be playing roller derby. The movie BONNIE AND CLYDE comes to mind, Clyde showing Bonnie his gun and Bonnie running her fingers along the barrel made me think of two young people I knew who were once lovers not long out of high school. Seeing them as Bonnie and Clyde gave me a better understanding than I had before of what Bonnie and Clyde were like as people. Kids not long out of high school, or that age anyway, "look at my gun, baby," and she's so impressed. I have an underlying feeling that the rate of murder in America may be the karmic return on how the early white people on this continent took it. They killed an entire continent of people with guns, killed in the wild wastefully, unto extinctions that are ongoing, wiping out the natural world that sustains us. It seems a karmic debt that is being paid by people killing people in the world of the conqueror at such an alarming rate, and nobody is alarmed. It's no more than an eye-popping statistic the first time you see it. The second and third time it's familiar, no longer interesting.  

 

 

robert longo, legacy

 

 

 

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