LOVE IS ALL THERE IS

barnett newman

I want to write all night. I also want to be able to function at least by noon. I want to write to you so bad it makes me want to stay up. The clock has just passed Cinderella's curfew. That's no concern to me. I'm not waiting for a pumpkin on wheels to save me from myself. Not my story. In the time when I was young, inexperienced, stupid and lonely, I hoped to fall in love with somebody who would save me from myself. It never happened. Fell in love a few times against all signs that said: don't go there. Only found turmoil of the mind and disappointment. My pumpkin on wheels turned up empty; it wasn't really love, but fantasy. I didn't know anything about love. Finally, in 1975, Meher Baba tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention and taught me over several years how to save myself from my ignorant mind and befuddled heart. He set me in the direction of finding I don't need somebody to save me from myself. If I can't find how to get in line with myself on my own, assigning the task to someone else isn't going to work. It's only real when I can find by my own searching why I think I need saved from myself. I can't trust myself? Experience tells me my mind can make up a lot of ridiculous fantasies. It's only real when I can find in self how to transcend my ignorant self by tuning in to intuition, allowing higher self to have a say in my decisions, become acquainted with higher self that seemed dormant before I saw to rational and emotional satisfaction that God Is. That was all I needed to know. I'd always been told, but never had any conscious experience of God that I was aware of. The God I grew up with was Fear. It took Meher Baba to point to the words of Jesus, God is love. By way of intuition, I already knew it, though it had been buried under a mountain of dogma, the diamond in a coal mine. 

barnett newman

I could not have found it on my own. In my years of searching for whether or not there is God, I could not see past religion. Religions convinced me a real God would not allow religionists to do to fellow human beings and the living creatures of the earth as has been done continually in multiples, like the German Christians embracing fascism in the 1930s, like American Christians, today, embracing fascism. I've never been able to reconcile God supporting fascism. It doesn't compute. Fascism is about hate. God is not in it. I could not see, before, that God is not in religion. Religion is of the human mind, not God. I missed it before Meher Baba convinced me God Is, and God Is Love. Simple as that. The preachers start qualifying: Yes, except for...Yes, except for.... God hates the sin and loves the sinner. The only thing I can say to that is bullshit. Love does not hate. The so-called sin gets balanced by karma. It takes care of itself. God doesn't need to be concerned with it. Karma automatically keeps us in balance. As for God as judge, love does not judge. I see no reason to explain. It's simple language. Love is not about controlling. Love is about allowing. There is no except. Love allows us to find our own way, make our own mistakes, learn from our own experience. Control does not allow the individual to learn from ones own experience. It's called doubting. Doubting is a sin. God doesn't approve. Really? Love can't stand up to questioning? I found God by doubting the mountain of bullshit that had accumulated in the barn of my mind. I was led to believe the same nonsense the television hypocrite evangelists dress up God in to fit the confines of their own limited intelligence and knowledge. Like old man Tom Pruitt said of them, they're just makin a racket.

barnett newman

who's afraid of red, yellow and blue?

In my own personal vision, if it's not about love, it's not about God. What's so frightening about love? I think of abstract expressionist, Barnett Newman's painting title, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? Alas, it was slashed in the modern art museum, the Stedelijk, in Amsterdam, by an art reactionary. He was evidently the one afraid of red, yellow and blue. Destroyed it. I'm grateful I had a chance to see it when it was living, about three years after it was painted. My response to it was to stand back and look at it for a long time. I walked up to it on the left side and walked the length of it, almost but not touching it, feeling it, walking the length of red from the vertical blue line, feeling the expanse of red all the way to the vertical yellow line. I wasn't aware that I felt anything special, though there is a memory of experience sensing Barnett Newman, himself, in his two-dimensional environment up close to it applying the paint. His presence was the only notable feeling, presence in so intangible a feeling as to make me wonder if I felt it or thought it. I take it that feeling it made me think it. My feeling about the slasher is he could not handle such an expanse of one color being called art. It was a gesture of control. Perhaps the painting became for him a symbol of modern art being out of control; modernism, itself, was destroying art. Perhaps he felt vulnerable in the face of Newman's effrontery. Perhaps, too, among religionists the word love has a great deal of vulnerability associated with it. We can't let down our guard in this world. The devil's watching you in his cross-hairs. You needta be afraid, braced against, just braced against. I recall William Blake, Damn braces, bless relaxes. He, too, had issues with preachers who skirted around the subject of love, a word too charged with carnal associations for comfort in the control department. Control does not allow. Control is about zero tolerance. Jesus or Hell. 

barnett newman

According to my mother's preacher, I'm not afraid enough of Satan. I couldn't say anything to that one. I knew there was nothing I could do or say. I don't care if they think I should be very afraid and live in fear because God wants me to be afraid. In my way of seeing, God wants for me that I not worry, thus be happy. I can't talk with anybody who demands I believe and think their way. This mind is what spit me out of Kansas as far as land allowed. They can have their Satan all they want. I confess to concern they want Satan a little too much for my comfort. Makes me uncomfortable talking with my mother, who always brings up Satan and dwells on Satan, talking to me like a preacher wanting to convince me, for my own good, to be like them. Been there, done that, not going back. Didn't buy the tshirt. When she told me I'm not afraid enough of Satan, stressing it with, "You better think about it," all I could say was, "I'll leave Satan to you." I feel sad for her. I'm not looking to control her, so I allow her to adore a preacher who tells her to be afraid. She dragged me through that mud all the way through my school years. I'm free of it. She wants it, she's got it. I don't want it. It's why I'm a thousand miles away. On the telephone, when it gets crazy, I can say, "We're not going there." She's learned that I think independently from Fundamentalist dogma, and she will never let it rest. She bred one as relentless in not hearing it as she is relentless in needing to say it; it's her duty to keep in the front of my mind that I am wrong and headed for an eternity of hell fire. Lord have mercy, how did I get here? Remembering the coal mine of fundamentalist hymn book theology I ran for my life from. Literally ran for my life. We talk on the phone across a divide much greater than a thousand land miles. Love is never an issue, except, the great except, at the end, the duty I-love-you. We have very different meanings for love. Hers is to control; mine is to allow. I learned young never to browbeat anybody for any reason. It's just ego talking. I reject control; she rejects allowing. We're stuck. I feel sad for her that she alienated her first born, but all I know to do is allow it to be what it is. An old hillbilly saying comes to mind, it is what it is.

barnett newman

*

CONTROL ISSUES

william blake

Today is race day. I'd like to see it, but this weekend my friends from Georgia are here and I feel like I'd rather spend time with them than the television this weekend. This will be the best race there ever was. Whenever I miss something, it was the best ever.  In my church going time of my own volition, every time I'd miss a meeting, I'd be told later I should a-been there, it was the best meeting there ever was. It was so consistent, it wasn't but the second time that I realized the statement was more about me not being there than the thrill of the preaching. The preaching was the same as usual. It's just an opportunity to make me feel guilt, a control device. Preacher told me it was my duty to go to church every meeting. I told him it was not my duty, clarifying, "I don't do duty." I'm s'posed to. No I'm not. It was the same as with my mother and with a three-year old: Is-is not-is-is not-is-is not, until somebody hollers, Stop it! I was a little too old and a little to independent-minded to be treated like I was ten. I finally had to leave the church over control. The preacher had a belief that the church house, itself, was God, and he, himself, was God's law enforcement officer. Another preacher had come in to replace Preacher Pruitt, and this old boy couldn't even "try to talk." The preaching was graded such that a preacher who really preached in the old-time way gasping for breath; preaching from the spirit was said to be "preaching." The ones who don't connect with the spirit and act like they do, it's said they're "trying to preach." When it's just talking and there's no spirit or "preaching" in it, it's called "talking." It was said of the ones like this old boy who replaced Millard Pruitt, he "tried to talk." I couldn't listen to it. I'd heard he said of his wife years before from the pulpit that she needed about ten inches cut off the end of her tongue. It meant she was a "long-tongued" woman, a gossiper, a woman who talked too much in his estimation. She divorced him. I looked at him as somebody who mistook big ego for the call to preach.

 

william blake

 

I felt I needed to be straight-forward and not hide my reasonings. I had to tell Preacher Pruitt I couldn't go to the church anymore for being unable to go out the door, drive for 25 minutes, listen to nonsense, turn around and drive for 25 minutes, walk in the door exhausted, day shot. I was told I could not stop going. I was bound by my duty to go every time because I'm a member. I was not given a choice or a consideration. Left to myself, I chose to withdraw my membership. I was told point blank that it is his responsibility to control me because I'm a member of his church. Easily solved. It tore everybody up, all half dozen of them, that I left. They asked if I was mad. No, I wasn't mad. Nobody takes control of my life without my permission. He knew that. I'd told him. But, my point of view meant nothing. Only his word had conviction, because God was behind him, not me. Whatever. God commanded you.... No he didn't. It's your duty. No it's not. He'd never known anybody who would stand up to a preacher like I did. I didn't want to, but he left me no options. I'd made it clear over several years of knowing him that nobody controls me without my permission. He had never asked permission and I'd never volunteered it. As I saw it, he was out of order. He saw me out of order; I said no to God's authority. I did not take him for authority. That's where our differences lay. His ego had him sitting on the right hand of God. His pronouncements were God's. I'm not exaggerating. It wasn't just him. It was the tradition. He liked his role for the authority in it. I have a fair idea of the difference between ego and the spirit. It's a big difference, not at all subtle. He'd never been around anybody who took him for just a man, instead of an authority, as he saw himself. He made it clear I could not leave the church and continue to know him. Ok.

 

william blake

 

He didn't want me around so I didn't go around. A couple years later he called me one day and asked me to come see him. I went, we had a good visit like usual, but he used it to drive home to me his authority is not something I can say no to. It's the same as a commandment from God. Its God's will. Ok. Whatever. Never went back. Nobody from the church would have anything to do with me. I'd see some in the grocery store and they'd look the other way. I'd think: Great, judgmental Christian, if that's how you are, I don't want to talk to you either; thanks for saving me the bother. I heard he was in the hospital and went to see him a few times. His wife and daughter in the hospital room made it clear without saying it I was not welcome, so I didn't go back. I saw daughter in post office and her nose went straight up. Saw wife in grocery store and her nose went straight up. He died and nobody let me know. The obituary always shows up in the paper after the funeral, and I didn't even see the obituary. I've never been to his grave. I've been to his brother Tom's in the same cemetery, but never took the few steps to stand at Millard's grave for a short spell. It wasn't a matter of purpose. I just didn't realize it until several years later when I noticed I'd never been to Millard's grave. And still have not. I don't feel compelled in any way to go. I go to Jr Maxwell's grave once a year, not because I believe the corpse has any meaning. It's more to be with the headstone, all that's left, a record of a memory. Fifty years from now, no one will remember who that was. It will be like when I walk through the cemetery seeing names of people on tombstones I never heard of. Junior periodically had a need to visit his mother and dad's graves. In his last years when he was unable to drive, he asked me to drive him around to the two cemeteries that would be in sight of each other but for trees. First we went to his dad's grave in Liberty Church's graveyard. I went with him to see the grave. The old man's tombstone was a rectangular block of polished black marble with no words, no numbers, nothing but the beauty in the stone. It stood on a small foundation, and in the foundation was Maxwell spelled in raised letters covered by the grass. I thought: there is the tombstone of a man of constant sorrow. His oldest boy had killed himself in middle fifties and made a terrible mess of things in the process, un crime passionnel. He wrecked the family name in the county.

william blake

Junior's mother's grave is in her family cemetery, the Whitehead Joineses. At both graves, Junior walked up to the grave, looked at the headstone, turned and walked back to the car. He saw no need to linger. Seeing the tombstone was his reason for going, paying his respects. Once he saw it, that was it. His brevity caught my attention. Twice I took him around to the graves; saw him do the same both times. I thought: this fits Junior's character like a latex glove. I see no importance in visiting a grave but for self, a memory. I find I'd rather remember my friends some other way besides a tombstone. I tend to see a mummified corpse just a couple feet below the grass. I don't like to walk on graves for its creepiness factor. My mind's eye sees rows and rows of mummified corpses, and their relatives believing something is important about it, leaving plastic flowers. I don't want to end up a mummy in a vault beneath a lawn people walk on and nobody puts plastic flowers on. I want to do better than that for my mortal frame. Not that it matters to me, one way or the other, except it's just plain gross to have my bag of shit mummified in a vault for however many centuries until even the steel casket and vault have returned to dust. I want cremation and the ashes (ground bone) strewn on the forest floor. Talking with Junior one day about such matters, I said, "I want to be fertilizer." He said, "Y'already are." I don't want a tombstone. The death record in the Register of Deeds tells everything a tombstone can. I don't have anything cool to put on a tombstone. Yeats did it the best. On his, it's carved in stone, Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman pass by. I've seen a few clever quips on tombstones, clever the first time you see them. What Yeats had to say has some power in it with meaning every time I see it or think it. I feel like it's of relative importance to leave a record for genealogists of the future, which is taken care of by the county. I want soul completely free from body, nothing left for soul to cling to if it turns sentimental and wants to stay with a corpse and be a ghost suspended between above and below. I don't want to do that. I want to see what's next too much to risk lingering over wanting to see my baby friend Vada grow up. If I want to badly enough, I might return as her baby brother for the opportunity to sit with her in the back seat of the car, be picked on and adored by older sisters.

william blake

 

 

*

 

MAKING MY OWN DECISIONS

bradley walker tomlin

Talking with my friend Kathryn, the subject of the feminine came up. I noted that I had a thought a few days ago about next lifetime. Would I want a female lifetime? Answer came back: NO. Why? The vulnerability. I'm perhaps over-sensitive to being vulnerable. The degree of my sensitivity to the vulnerable equals how much I don't like it. In one sense, it means I embrace being grounded. I like the ground. When somebody tells me about a new discovery that we can leave our bodies by way of certain meditations or medications, I'm not interested. I may be interested to hear about it, but I'm not willing to attempt it. Leaving the body strikes me as dangerous as swimming after eating. My first apprehension is what if I can't find my way back to the body? For such a trip, I would need the guidance of an experienced shaman. I would not do it as a parlor game because it is too vulnerable a situation. A major reason I don't ride motorcycles. An emergency room nurse convinced me that apprehension about motorcycles is good sense. Everyone I know who rides motorcycles has wipe-out stories. I don't want to wreck in a car, certainly not a motorcycle. I don't like to do anything that has a risk factor. Even starting a new painting with a blank canvas feels like risk, but it does not have emergency room potential. It's like stage fright. I've learned long ago I have no luck gambling. None. I realize my luck factor is less than 50-50. I don't ever take a chance anymore that has luck involved. I'm like the country song, if it wasn't for bad luck I wouldn't have any luck at all. I'm not one who can shake dice in my hand, blow a mojo on them, and roll the number I want. Say four people are playing a board game that involves dice, any four people, any game. I lose. I can go into it with positive thinking, right intent, a lucky charm, a prayer. I lose. I know by this time in the life to stay away from anything involving chance where life decisions are concerned. I like chance aesthetically, but not for practical matters that require decisions. Even then, I don't like to shut it out, would rather be open to it.

 

bradley walker tomlin

 

In my childhood I was not allowed to make decisions for myself. Leaving parents, decision making was new and I made some really ignorant decisions that followed me for several years. Parents were not decision makers either. They went to a church that made decisions for them. First thing I did, cut loose in the world, was look for somebody to make decisions for me. That was the biggest disaster of all. It took several years to bear down on it and, first, recognize I was unable to make an intelligent decision. By parent and church example I only knew how to react, not how to respond. I had the Billy Budd disease. Assaulted verbally, I could not defend myself or stand up for myself. I could only be silent and churn like a whirlwind of fire inside. What I wanted to say would have got me killed. I suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for several years. Still have it pretty bad. It's more mental now. Before, it controlled my movements, everything. I left their influence seething so deeply in hatred that one day age 27 I got with myself, told myself from conscious mind to subconscious mind, it's time to let go of the hatred. The source of the hatred was over a thousand miles away. I'd seethed with that hatred in my heart until I couldn't stand it anymore. One day I threw it off, said I'm not living in hate anymore. I've found forgiveness difficult unto impossible, such that I don't care anymore. Wanting "to be a better person," I looked for ways to set forgiveness in motion, but couldn't do it. Finally, I said, Live with it---to hell with trying to deal with it any more---let it rest, accept it---I really don't want to forgive, so let that be the end of it. And it was the end of it. I let it go. It continues with me in a box in a closet, and that's ok by me. I can't deal with it, so in the box is the best place for it. I've never had a worse enemy. This one I had no defenses against, and no recourse, making the kid hate it all the more. It made the kid determined that in adult life no individual will take charge of my decision making. Nobody but me will make my decisions.

bradley walker tomlin

I've kept it that way ever since. Somebody wants to take over my decision making for myself, it ends in a squabble of some sort, because I don't allow it, the other gets mad, I get mad, and inside myself I make my definitive decision and that's it, it's over. When somebody makes the first bid to take over my decision making, telling me what I must do, it goes no further than that. The one thing I hold to jealously is making my own decisions. I've been called independent and arrogant. Lines from an early song Bob Dylan composed would come to mind, "Call me anything you like, I will never deny it... Farewell Angelina, I must go where it's quiet." The funny part was when I finally caught on how to stop others from telling me what decisions to make for myself, the whole phenomenon ended. It was the end of people getting in my face telling me what to do. It was like until I made the decision within, something in me invited being told what to do. I was sending out invitations to tell me what to do, then rejecting the counsel for telling me what to do. I think that's called something like a double-bind. In a hell-if-you-do-hell-if-you-don't situation, I go with what I want to do. In conversation with an old-time preacher years ago, I said to him, "If everything is a sin, I'm free. I can do anything." He said, "No, you're not." I said, "If everything is a sin, then nothing is a sin." He said, "No, it's not." I didn't take it any further. We were coming from different cosmologies. He was pre-Copernicus, I was post-Darwin. He couldn't accept round earth, and sure as hell couldn't accept evolution, a word equivalent to atheist, the same thing as a communist. It made no difference to me that he didn't get an understanding of heavenly bodies in school, nor did it matter that he didn't believe he came from a monkey.

bradley walker tomlin

I couldn't explain round earth or evolution in ways he could understand, because I didn't understand either well enough to articulate it simply without going off into conceptual mind. An attempt to convince somebody that what they believe is not the case only drives them deeper into believing it is the case. I remind myself that anything outside myself is no concern of mine. It is not my place to correct somebody else's vision to make it conform to mine, which I'm not sure of anyway, and have a hard time articulating. Different consciousness, different experience, different information make a canyon between some people. I believe there was such a canyon between the old preacher and me. We were of different cultures, different cosmologies, different visions of God. We got along good over a lot of years until the time he started telling me I was going to do what I was not going to do, telling it with the authority of a man who makes my decisions. He made it clear that I did not have the right to my own decisions. I said I did and he never saw me again for several years. I was given the blame. I took the blame and shrugged it off. He'd crossed the line and there was no going back. He would never accept he did not have the right to control me, and I would never accept that he did. I think it's called a Mexican Standoff, two men with guns drawn on each other, hammers cocked. He would not accept my right as an independent individual and I would not accept his belief he had the right to make my decisions. Of course it's my fault. Call me anything you like, I will never deny it. We both regretted we couldn't get back together after that, but he was not relenting his belief he had the right to make my decisions and gave me no choice but to show him I don't see it that way.

bradley walker tomlin himself  

BROWNIE POINTS IN HEAVEN

      ida kohlmeyer


The word allow continues with me as the first consideration for about everything that comes up. If it is something concerning somebody else and me thinking about them, this isn't right or that isn't right, I remind myself it's none of my business, and the only thing I can really do is allow. Let it be. Lying down to take a nap earlier today, the word allow was swimming in my mind when my mother popped up, one unfamiliar with allowing, except with resignation. I am not allowed to be who I am when I'm around her. Too many sentences start, "I wish you would...." It always has to do with church or something she believes is a duty that I don't take for such. Even when she's not telling me she's disappointed in my disobedience to her wishes, she carries the long-suffering attitude that speaks without words. She prays. God will make me do it or punish me. I don't have to be away from her to live my own life. However, too nearby, her uncontrollable need to control would keep us in conflict that neither of us wants. As it is, she can use it to ruin every phone conversation before she gets off the phone. Last thing, after a pause just before goodbye, "I wish you would...." She knows I'm not ever going to do her biddings that have only to do with what she wants, no consideration of what I want in my own circumstances. I'm wrong. Whatever it is, I'm wrong. That's all there is to it. That's why the relentless repetition that never ends, the belief that browbeating will eventually take. It may be fifty years, but it's her duty never to stop trying. I call it beating her head against a brick wall, but it's her choice. I allow her to beat her head against the wall over not accepting my own decisions for myself that have nothing to do with her. Like me not going to church. It will only end the day one of us dies.

I don't see myself as one who wills the control of others. I know it has been in my unconscious past, but since I've become more or less conscious, since my life among country people of the Blue Ridge, I feel no need that I'm aware of to control anybody. I don't mean to imply the people in the mountains are free of human frailty. They would be the first to make it perfectly clear they are not examples of anything but just a man or just a woman. An urban friend visiting not long ago could not stop starting sentences with You would love... or You gotta see... or You needta get... to where my head was swimming from all his unconscious commands. I about felt like I needed to take notes to remember all that I needta, should, oughta, gotta do right now, not tomorrow. A few times I complained, "Stop telling me what to do. I'm not going to do any of it." Then I get lectured that I'm not willing to try something new that somebody who cares about me knows I will love. The only reply I had was, "That is a generalization from your mind that has nothing to do with me." I meant it too; it was something of an announcement that I'd heard enough unconscious commandments. There is nothing on television I want to see but the Sunday afternoon Nascar races. Even television news is of no interest to me. It's the entire mind of television I'm repelled by. Not to say the race is different. It's just that I like to watch cars race.

Also, he gave me lectures about being overly resistant to getting told what to do. I added that his unconscious talking just happens to be telling me what I'm to do in every other sentence. I'm expected to find somebody to let me come to their house to watch a tv show once a week they would never otherwise watch, a show I've never heard of. Because it's GREAT, I gotta see it! What if I don't want to see it? Not an option. I don't know what I like. Before he left, we had to have an argument about my super-sensitivity to being told what to do and his inability to talk without giving unconscious commandments. Yesterday in the coffee shop, sitting in peace working the word jumble puzzle in the Winston-Salem paper, I hear, "You're just the one I'm looking for." I said, "Oh good," a variant of Oh God! Seeing who it was, I knew it would be a long list of what I must do, oughta do, am expected to do and she'll be disappointed if I don't. What can I do? I sit and listen and we talk pleasantly. I'm not going to do any of it. It's in another town I don't care anything about driving to, especially for something I don't want to do anyway. I've tried being upfront, saying, in effect, I'm not going to follow your orders. A few months ago I told somebody who is an ongoing commercial after she'd told me about a place I MUST go and see, I wasn't interested, which pushed a button for in-my-face commandments. I think of that an unsuccessful experience. This is America---it doesn't matter what I say. So I listen, let them talk, enjoy the conversation and go my own way. I know their attention is not on me, but on their own agendas, patting themselves on the back for doing their duty as good missionaries. A Brownie point in Heaven toward the pink Cadillac convertible to drive around on the streets paved with gold.


*

ALLOWING THE FLOW

It's been several months that the word, or rather the spirit of the word, allowing, has stuck with me and grown into a word as powerful in my own personal lexicon as understanding, another word for love. I'm seeing allowing as a word for love. It seems to have the spirit of love about it. I think what got me looking at this word was seeing that when I accept somebody for who that individual is, I allow him and her their own characteristics as human beings, their belief systems, their ways of doing anything, the tv shows they watch, their political opinions, their status, everything. When I allow, expectation is silent, unasked-for advice not even a consideration, control never an issue, acceptance is complete. This word, allowing, came up from wondering how love can be shown authentically, such that to speak it is redundant. One of the characteristics of the college educated middle class from the suburbs is to unconsciously start sentences, You know what you should/ oughta/ needta/ better, gotta do? Or, You would really love (fill in the blank). This one always stops me, because it is never something I would really love, and I know it before it's spoken. Consistently the one directing what will suit my taste to-a-T has no idea. I was told in Walmart by a friend I see once every few years that I would really love the videos of the Tolkien trilogy movies displayed in a big bin at $5 apiece. It's like throwing darts, missing every time, never giving up.

I've come to see that after half a century and a few decades, I wonder if civilization can survive a full century of television. Americans watch television like it's reality, and how I see this manifesting in our collective behavior is scatter-brained empty-headedness based in unconsciousness. Kinda like our parrot representatives of the lock-step republican party. GOP means no more than gop anymore. In the corporate media, Mac-journalist verbiage pretending to search for motivations behind the surprise American Surrealist killers engaged daily in terrorist civil war, television is again the off-limits word nobody dares use. If you do use it, you are dismissed. You're told you don't know what you're talking about, told with the arrogance of a junkie. I don't see civilization making it to a full century with television. The same madness is all over the country. The republicans have been stirring up hate for the last 30+ years until by now the divisive hatred has us in a condition of terrorist civil war that corporate media buries not even in the back pages. I see praises of the internet as the metaphorical barbed wire fence between democracy and fascism they make me laugh. When the corporate "deciders" turn the key, internet will be controlled. Chinese internet will look "free" compared to ours. Democracy is over, meaning I see myself squirming inside, having a difficult time letting even lower-case democracy go, knowing I have absolutely no say in the matter, whatsoever, never have and never will. If I push it, they have places where people that push it vanish. It's not even a game anymore.

We've become commercials. Our chit-chat conversations, the kind that dare not have any meaning, have become in my lifetime commercials. Oh you MUST SEE the latest whatever it is, somebody's new house, civic edification, a world of people advertising whatever they're talking about. It's so bad that every now and then I hear somebody apologizing to somebody for not seeing something the same way. I think: what? In my mind's eye I see a Coca-Cola bottling machine moving the red cans along in big robotic sweeps of several at a time getting filled and moving on with the next one moving in, a dozen every few seconds. I'm not fit for this earth anymore. Maybe it's because I quit trying so long ago I forgot the motivation. Maybe I quit trying because I never found the motivation. Who knows? It doesn't matter. Visuals from Pink Floyd's film The Wall dance in my head as examples of what I see television creating. Even the people who know what it is doing are going with it because it's all wrapped up in mind control creating a world that does not exist for all the people to believe. And LO! They do. It's entertaining. Who can live without it? So many channels. "We only watch nature channels." Lions ripping the guts out of zebras and eating them in the living room, all the bedrooms, the kitchen, bathrooms when they're big enough. Don' wanna miss nothin. The world might end and we'll miss it if....

I've been wondering why Obana has been so inert delivering on the promise he holds up in JFK type quips that sound big and mean little, except JFK's seem to have a veneer of meaning that Obama's don't have for me. Maybe they have meaning for the twitter and ipad or whatever those things are called, and cell phones. It's kind of getting for me like *Stop the world I want to get off* except it was a terrible movie and I wouldn't want to do anything to remind myself of it. And I really don't want to get off. Like the old man Lorne Campbell said, "It's time to move higher up the mountain." I want to move higher up the mountain in my own way. I can't interpret what he meant, because we thought very differently from two lifetimes of radically different experiences in different places. That's how I feel with everybody I know. Each one of us is a lifetime of radically different experiences from any others, like fingerprints. Some years ago I moved higher up the mountain. By now what I left to go up the mountain is following me. Summer homes and four wheel drives. Retire here and die watching tv with a sunset in your picture window. They're just more houses in the landscapes than there were in the recent past. I am concerning myself with allowing. I'm kind of blocked up, it seems like, over not allowing democracy to go away when I know it is already gone, so gone I wonder if we ever had it.

I am seeing, now that I'm looking, that in regions of the life where I do the "allowing," all flows smoothly without any rough edges. In places where I don't allow, like watching the systematic dismantling of American democracy gobbled up by corporate takeover, I brace within. It's looking like Obama is stepping aside and making slogans, twitter quips, sound bites, clever speech phrases that say nothing, following orders, making it look good. It's very spooky looking. It's another step in the process of the dismantling of constitutional law by popular (NRA) demand. Lord have mercy. Corporate lobby is pushing we the people out of our government into a peasant class, something like in China, but it won't be so benevolent. This is the stuff where I get blocked up, where I don't want to allow. But I must. It is a done deal. It is over. I need to get on with it, allow what is to happen. It's going to anyway. Holding back my allowing just makes a dam inside me where I block up. No telling what it does to me psychically to be blocked all the time not allowing the flow of what is going to happen anyway. Like worry. Worry doesn't allow. I will look further into allowing and see what turns up. It feels like scratching the surface of something with interesting reverberations. Maybe it's an insight into the flow.


  

Martinsville 2013

 

*

INDEPENDENT AS A HOG ON ICE

A couple days ago leaving the grocery store I fell in with someone I knew from the days of the music store, we talked walking out the door, into the parking lot and stopped when we reached my car, stood there and talked quite a long time in increasingly cold wind. Increasingly, because the longer I stood in it, the colder the wind became. He was somebody who is wound up inside and rants when he cuts loose. I don't mean to say I found him objectionable. My first encounter with him years ago was a very much in-yer-face commandment of what I need to do to make a million dollars. Rather than say I don't want a million dollars, I let him talk. It amounted to another city-mind you needa, you gotta, you oughta, you should. He had a good mind and spelled it out for me convincingly. Like I said, the only problem I had with what he was saying was that I did not want a million dollars. I know somebody who came into multiple millions overnight. He lived high, big house, a Mercedes convertible of a different color for every day of the week. His life went to shit. He lost his wife, lost his money, lost his ego. It wasn't but a few years later he landed in prison for habitual drunkenness. One woman I know said, "I believe I could make a million dollars last." My thought: I'd be just like the guy that lost it all and ended up in prison a drunk.

The man in the parking lot who had previously mapped out my path to a million dollars was telling me in the increasingly cold wind that he's not really a Republican (the "not really" perked my ears up wondering what that could be leading to), he's "more of a Teapartyer." I didn't see that coming, but it was the natural next thing. On my instant double-take I saw: of course he's a Teapartyer. His talking amounted to continuous rant, meaning he takes seriously Faux News, Limbaugh and the rest of the white voices stirring up divisive hatred. He was a good guy, though I found his critical mind a bit slack, led by the self-centered corporate notion of all for me, nothing for anybody else, the post-Reagan slant on American individualism. I tend to look at him as the issue itself, not the solution he purported himself to be. Individualism is not the same as egoism. Individualism allows humility and an interest in the well-being of others besides self. I can't help but see it's a better life for the individual to live among people who are getting paid well enough for their work they can live on what they make, than to live underground with prison walls and towers housing men with guns guarding the entrance while everybody else is living in poverty and fighting each other, manipulated by the people living underground.

We were talking as people friendly with each other. I, a liberal, was listening to a teapartyer saying what he had to say. I was thinking, if I told him I am more liberal than he is conservative, that would have been the end of it. This is something I learned from parents. Go along with what they tell me to believe, let them believe I'm with them if they want to, and just let them talk. I knew with parents as with this guy, if I were to bring up my own point of view, which amounts to allowing others their own points of view, I'd be dismissed as stupid and that would be the end of it. I know better than to argue with that mind. I grew up in the Baptist religion where all is absolute black or white with no middle ground for the spectrum that is the fullness of life. They're right. I'm wrong. Simple as that. I don't argue with that mind. The rational does not convince anyone of anything. And why do I want to convince somebody to think like I think? In my way of seeing, that is not allowing the other to be self too. I am not the only self in this world. Every one of us is a center of the universe, and I'm ok with that. It's the nature of existence. I can't tell somebody besides myself what they oughta, needta, should do if they knew what was right. That's saying I know more about your life than you do. And I don't. I'm up front about it. I never start a sentence, "You know what you oughta do?" It's a statement, not a question. It's an intro to I-know-more-than-you-do. My only answer when told that question is, Yes. Then I get accused of being a smart-mouth. So what.

Oddly, the encounter with this man whose name I don't know, though friendly, I knew the whole time could turn to hate the very moment I identified myself a liberal, meaning I don't believe what you believe. I'm totally ok with that. I live in a world of people who don't believe what I believe and I don't believe what they believe. No two of us believe alike, even in the same church. This teapublican mind that has been influenced a bit too much by baptist mind of the absolute, that I am right and you are wrong, allows only stasis. There is no stasis in this changing world. Attempts to enforce stasis of one sort or another are like they say in business--if you stay where you are, you go backwards. We need to be in process of change, ourselves, or we go backwards. Locking down in the apparent culture of the Fifties, I Love Lucy forever, gets nowhere. Though it's easy to say things have become only worse since the Fifties, I maintain there hasn't been anything as bad as I Love Lucy since the Fifties. The cultural delusion that Father Knows Best, having to do with white fathers only, is simply not how it is. It's a belief system, but it's not reality. In today's time, white men are showing themselves to be the biggest bunch of racially demographic fools, not only in this country, but in the world, and blaming everybody else for being the fools. This is evidently the time of the breakdown of white man ruling the world. Coming from inside the world ruled by white men, I'm glad to see it breaking down. Let's give Asians a chance. Let's see if Asians can be more despotic with power than white men have shown themselves to be. We already know that nobody learns from history, but maybe a few scholars.

I was hearing this teapartyer in the parking lot with thoughts like this running through my mind. I was amusing myself seeing him in my mind's eye flipping out that he'd spent so much time talking to an idiot. The odd part for me in encounters such as this, and I have so many they're more the rule than not, is that I am enjoying the individual I'm in conversation with. I care not at all that we disagree politically. I consider politically the least important aspect of our lives when it comes to the individuals we are. I know people I love an awful lot who want police state. It says something about their states of mind in everyday life wanting to control others. People I know are aware that it's pointless to attempt to control me, and they know I don't ever attempt to control them. For me, it's a trade-off. I don't control you; you don't control me. Then we have no issues between us, unless the other is somebody who can't stand to know somebody without being in control. They get real frustrated with me and tend to leave me alone. And that's a good thing. For both of us. Some will hold the frustration in a pressure-cooker situation and then one day they blow. When that happens, we never speak again. I hate it when that happens, but have found that the longer it takes for the explosion to occur, the bigger it is. I've learned to see this propensity in others early on, and have taught myself to absent self from a situation evolving in that direction before it becomes a problem. When it's dealt to me that I obey or else, I pick or else.


*  

OUT OF REACH

     eva hesse, fishing nets

It's been wearing me out thinking about my mother's adamantine opinion system in relation to me. In relation to everybody else, I don't care about. I've known all the way along what would happen if she ever found out I don't see religion like she does. I've always let her believe I see it just like she does, because that's the only way to peace with her. I wish you'd find a church to go to. I know you do. It doesn't matter what I say. I will hear that remark every time I talk with her until I get with her and tell her to stop bringing it up, because I'm not ever doing it. Like the instant I'm out of high school, When you gonna get married? When you gonna get married? When you gonna get married? Ok, so I get married and shut her up. Next: When you gonna have a baby? When you gonna buy a house? Later, after the divorce, When you gonna get married again? When you gonna get married again? Finally, a couple years ago I got her off of, I wish you'd find a church to go to, and now I've started it up again. Now she's wanting me to believe in Satan. I don't believe in Satan enough.


Sorry, mommy, that's the tipping point. Years of relentless, focused interrogation that never ends was over and I got it going again. Now it's worst of all. I don't believe in Satan enough. Controlling others comes from the mind, not the heart. All my life, she's believed she has controlled me, because I allowed it. This comes under teaching me to lie. You agree with all the nonsense preachers put in her head and she leaves you in peace. To stand up for self even the least little bit is reprehensible, subject to punishment. In this couple weeks of articulating the patterns of her control, I've learned quite a lot and liberated myself somewhat. Back in the 1990s when I went to a psychotherapist, the primary purpose was to find out what it was within that attracted me to controlling women. Time after time I'd get in with a controlling woman. I felt like I knew how to handle it; agree and go my own way. It doesn't always work out that way. I found that when I allowed a controlling woman to believe she controlled me, there always came a day she would push me further than I was willing to go. When I balked, all hell broke loose. The mule. End of relationship or friendship or acquaintance. I've learned now to let it be known up front upon getting acquainted; if you're looking for somebody to control, don't stop here.


I learned that it really does work when I note first evidence of intent to control, to put a stop to it at the start. No, I am not available for control. That's it, cat shit. No more problem. The deal then was that I found myself attracted to a particular woman for whatever the reason, I'd see she needed to take control and would let her think she was in charge of me, until one day the mule sits down. Not taking your orders anymore. Had enough. Then it's, you're this, you're that, the blame game. Since I've learned how to steer controlling women away from me, I live in much greater peace than before. When one signals that she wants me under her control, I let her know in one way or another suitable to the circumstance, I'm not a subject suitable for control. I've got my own ways, I'm a stubborn taurus ass, I don't do what I'm told, don't perform PC, don't follow the crowd, never fulfill other people's expectations, don't give a shit about appearances. I follow my own light, and that's it. I let her know if she wants to control me, she's in for more than she's up to. I've been through so much punishment that threat of punishment makes me laugh. I'm so alienated from mother, who has spent her life pushing me away, threat of alienation means nothing.


In that way, I feel liberated. Threat of punishment means nothing. This must be why I was brave enough to let it be known I don't see it her way. Now that I see the problem is not that I don't believe in Jesus enough, but that I don't believe in Satan enough, I am really out of control. Like I told her in my reply, I'll leave the devil to you. She also confirmed what I've known without fully believing it, that her control issues don't come from above, but from below. Her emphasis on Satan is shining through. It confirms what I've known about the Baptist belief system, that it is more about the dark side than the light side. It's about division, not unity. They look at people the same way black urban gangstas do, as mushrooms. If they're not saved, they're the same as already dead. If they are saved and they don't go to your church, they're about the same as not saved. If they're of another religion, they're the same as dead. "A dead substance." Like the silly preacher from Louisiana saying he went to heaven and didn't see any Asians except for Asian babies from abortions. That is the ignoramus level of the Baptist belief system I cannot go with. I can take much more, but that degree of ignorance is insulting to anyone who hears it.


It feels odd at 70 to be fussing over mother issues like on the psychiatric couch. I've an idea it came up because I needed it to come up, to clear it out, be done with it, tie up loose ends inside myself. I feel that aspect of it working. It is articulating a lot for me. I've realized in the last couple weeks that I've been afraid of mother's reaction to being disagreed with. That would, of course, spread beyond her into a pattern inside me that would cringe from the reaction of disagreement. I pretended to agree. Now she's found out I don't revere Satan as much as I'm supposed to to be acceptable to her preacher, somebody I don't even want to meet. Last time I met one of her preachers I didn't even talk with him. He didn't show me anything as a human being. He was like a salesman or somebody working in a corporate funeral home. He already knew from my mother I was intractable.


I let myself be the elephant in the room, the son that lived someplace else and doesn't go to church enough. I found right away my presence made him uncomfortable, so I let him soak in it. He symbolized so much for me that I dislike intensely, about all I did was sit and glare at him, not in the obvious redneck way, but the way that said I'm looking at you, but not seeing you. Now I'm not only damned from above, but damned from below too. I hear D-generation wailing NO WAY OUT. Well, there is a way out. Walk away. Blame and punishment, bring it on. I know where it's coming from, that it's egoic nonsense projected onto the blank screen called God. What ever.



*

CONDITIONAL LOVE

     emil nolde, sea red sun

The last 24 hours in my mind have taken me back to the time of Baptist indoctrination in a pre-teen and teenage boy in one. I don't like to think about that time. It bothers me that when people reach a place where memory falls away, memories of childhood come forward. I've dreaded that part about the advance of dementia. I don't want to remember my childhood times. I was vulnerable, without recourse, ruled by absolute fascist control. Grandmother Worthington, who had a little house behind the house in Kansas City, was my contact with compassion, with love, with growing things, with talking about things, with ethical behavior, with knowing people. Parents knew the people they worked with and went to church with. What friends they had early on, they ditched before very long. Their absence of friends is possibly what motivated me in my adult life to hold my friends uppermost in my life. Oh it was lonesome living in their house where the tension in the air was so thick it took a cheese knife to get through it. Stepping in the door, it hit like opening a car door in FtLauderdale after driving from Toronto in air conditioning.


Mother's email brought back what I had forgotten after 50 years of being out from under her direct influence, her absolute control. There was good reason I had always allowed her to believe I believed the dogma she believes. When I went to a psychotherapist in my 40s I learned that I had been trained by both parents that it's my responsibility to keep them happy by never telling them anything they didn't want to hear. That was easy. They didn't want to hear anything. "Nobody wants to hear anything you have to say!" How many times did I hear that? What saved me was talking back in my head where I could say anything and get away with it. Anything. Even things to make God blush. Once, I was told, "I oughta hit you for what you're thinking." I thought: If you really knew what I was thinking, you'd kill me. That was not an idle thought. Twice, mommy dearest told me proudly of the time some woman she knew somewhere said something to her about the way they were treating the kid. She said, "He's my kid, and if I want to kill him, I will." Kinda chilling to be told that by mommy. Does that translate: she's my mommy, I can kill her if I want to? Oh no, honor thy father and mother, saith the Bible. You can do any old shit to your kids. The only deal is, paybacks are hell.


I recall a day in the vault at the Register of Deeds researching deeds, a man walked in who saw the other man in the room, somebody he knew, and they talked. He said in a kind of hang-dog way that he'd lost his boy. Whatever his name was left home and won't have no more to do with him, the boy that never retruned for more of same. I felt a moment of satisfaction for the boy. He did the only thing he could do. I thought toward the daddy: If you'd a-thought for half a minute while you were alienating him, but you didn't. Treat him like a stray dog and he will go away as ill-treated stray dogs do. I recall in the 5th grade learning the word dictator, 1953, or so. It blew my circuits. I definitely knew what that word meant. Hitler was the dictator example of the post-WW2 reconstruction time, Mr Evil. I lived under the dictator's boot without recourse, the aggressive dictator controlled by passive-aggressive frigid mommy. I had to shut down feeling affection. There was none to be had. Love was shut down at about age 6. No place for compassion chez nous. It was martial law 24/365. Hit him and make him cry. Shit fire, they didn't have to make me cry. I was crying all the time inside. The hitting just broke my hold on keeping it hidden.


It is 2 o'clock Sunday afternoon in Wichita. Church is over. Mother has informed everyone in the church to pray for her disobedient 70 year old son who made a decision for himself independent of her approval. And yes, I believe evolution is the ongoing process of creation. Kansas is where the state voted to make teaching evolution in school illegal. I laugh out loud. It was the joy of my life leaving Kansas, where the buffalo once roamed until their genocide. When I crossed the state line on the way out, I celebrated within. Many times I've returned in body, but never in spirit. Like when I was a kid, I had to keep my spirit protected. The way I protected my spirit was to talk back in my mind. My mind was never subdued. I wanted to write down the things I thought about, even a brief diary, but knew whatever I wrote would be found and read, not out of interest, but to find something to punish me for, and to take it away from me. I kept my thoughts secret from them. I talked superficially, the only talk that didn't cause a reaction, and talked less and less as time went by, trained that nobody wanted to hear anything I had to say. Mother's reaction to reading about my spiritual path tells me #1 she did not understand a single word of what I wrote. Only that it disagrees with her; therefore, it's evil, of the devil's influence.


Telling my friend Carole about mother's reaction, she said, that's good, now it's out in the open and settled. I laughed. No, no, no. This is just the first crack in the side of the mountain before the volcano blows shit everywhere. There will be hell to pay, but I'm not paying admission. I'm way too far down the long slope of indifference. I'm totally out of control and there's no going back. I will not adopt the dogmas of somebody else's religion to please anyone. 17th Century heretic. She's only telling me that who I am is not acceptable according to her check list of qualifications. I've known this all my life. How well I know it. It's no surprise to be told when I'm 70. Karmically, for balance, I have come to live the second half of my life in a culture where WHO you are has value. I found it refreshing coming out of a belief system where who I am is only wrong, into a society where only who I am has value. I've lived in this belief system the second half of my life, and will not go back for any reason, no matter how passive-aggressive.


*      

OUT OF CONTROL

     stop

The last few days have been a time of remembering my motivation 35 years ago to leave the world by moving to the mountains and working a labor job. I didn't know what "the world" meant, attempting to distinguish between the world and the earth. A meaning of the world is the globe, the earth. Another meaning of the world is the way of human desire. It took a long time to nail that distinction. There is the way of the Tao (or God's Way) and the way of desire, wanting, that is the way of the world. Once I saw that "the world" is the interior world of desire characterized by men-with-guns thriller movies, greed, pride, the list of the 7 deadly sins. I take "the world" to be everything on television, too, especially the evangelists. The world within amounts to the my own wanting, my own desires. If those magnets are not operating inside me, I'll not be drawn to satisfy a desire's craving. If I don't want anything, then I cannot be manipulated. I have somebody in my life right now getting frustrated after finding I am not available for control, on the verge of saying something I'm indifferent to hearing.



I've been through it so many times. I used to be drawn to controlling women. Right off, to be nice, I'd do as told. Then there comes the day control is established and I balk like a mule. When I have to clarify that I'm not looking to be controlled, all kinds of hell breaks loose and I'm hated from that day onward. It became so frustrating to me that I saw a psychotherapist over that question. Of course, it turned out to be Mommie Dearest. What I learned was to keep it up front that I'm out of control, by nature and by will. It has kept me free of having to figure out how to get free of control without too much hard feeling. It can't be done. Once the control starts, that's it. My alternatives are to choose to be controlled the rest of my life or have this woman hate me to her dying day. I pick being hated forever. Being hated isn't all that bad, and it's inevitable in this world. I go with the attitude that half the people I know like me and half do not. I take that for the nature of the social playing field.



It's a good insight into oneself, considering know thyself, the shortest verse in the Bible, to make a list of the people you know hate your guts, and the people you know that like you and are loyal. Just looking at the two lists tells a very great deal about self in the birds-of-a-feather way. When I look at the people I know despise me, then look at the people I think of as my friends, I'm happy with both lists. The ones that dislike me stay away of their own accord and I never have to deal with them. There's no name on the list of ones that despise me I would want to see on the list that likes me. I especially dislike being smiled at and sucked up to by one from the list that I know despises me. There is a mountain saying that when somebody doesn't like you, Be nice to them. It will drive them crazy. I do this sometimes for that reason, just to see it happen. It's not really hypocrisy, just being a bitch, giving the other something new to talk about. Another good old mountain saying, when somebody is talking about you, they're giving somebody else a break from being talked about.



People that talk about you behind your back never say anything good about you. It's to the negative and largely made up. That's the nature of our human existence. I know people who worry over these issues; hear that somebody said something unkind about them and fall into the pit of despair for days. It's the same as the wind blowing. Somebody said you're a real asshole, somebody who knows, and one more person sees you an asshole. Ok. So what. It's an aggressive act to smear somebody's name that invites aggressive action. Several months ago, someone I know who has nothing but contempt for me, called on the telephone from nearby needing jumper cables to get his car going. For the amusement of the asshole within, I went and helped him out. Shook hands, "How you doin, man? Haven't seen you in awhile. You doin all right?" I was all smiles, happy to help him out, a friend I hadn't seen in several years. I think that an aggressive act on my part. I'm sure as hell not going to be timid around him like I have nothing to say.



I found not too long ago somebody I thought of as a friend, given episodes of fickle behavior, has turned on me again. This was the last time. My attitude toward him is he's fucked me over so many times I don't miss a thing. I see him today as someone I used to know. He has a tactlessness that is based in indifference to anything outside his head. Words such as friend and loyalty have no meaning. He could pass a test defining them, but doesn't understand practical application. I find myself in a time of backing away from all but a few I think of as my friends. Again. The names in that circle seldom change, only when somebody new comes in and somebody dies out. It's not like a club. It's just particular individuals I know, most of them a long number of years, all of them people I respect. Respect has been an issue of mine all my life. People I don't respect bore me. Perhaps it goes back to, "I want some respect outta you!" My thought, unspoken, Show me something to respect. The respect I mean is more about character than accomplishments.

*