THE VIEW FROM THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING

I see the past going away and the future an open void the ongoing present assigns to the past like shredded grass in a lawnmower's wake. It's a time of the future looking dim, but no dimmer than it has looked all my life. In first grade we crawled under the desk pretending an A-bomb was expected to go off nearby. Even then, age 6, I was thinking, this puny desk isn't going to save me from anything, maybe a flying eraser, but that's it. The school building was made of big granite stones. I thought the building would fly apart like a house of cards. Why make a big deal of hiding from something you can't hide from? And who would want to survive? This was the McCarthy time and J Edgar Hoover time, John Birch time, fear of communism, like today's fear of terrorism. It hasn't changed. It's ongoing fear-of, fill in the blank. It's been about controlling the masses by the propaganda of fear since Pearl Harbor. I can't attest for before. From what I've seen in American history, it goes all the way back. Mark Twain's comments on his time are the same as are said of this time. What's the point of paying my attention to the blatantly fake? Yet, seen in a certain light, the politicians, themselves, are funnier than the cartoons. Journalists, like the politicians, have become like fast food workers, the cash register buttons have pictures instead of words. It doesn't matter who writes the McNews. Investigative journalists don't work for the press anymore. The news has become so bizarre that people I never thought would notice are talking about it.  

I can't attach myself to a sinking ship like Japanese sailors did in WW2 when their ships went down. I have too much American in me to do something like that. I can't reverse the momentum, nor would I. We have used fire for heat and light since prehistoric times. Collectively, the Age of Fire brought us into Reason, self-awareness. The Greek god of foresight, reason, is Prometheus, who Godfather Zeus condemned to be chained to a rock, etc, for giving fire to the humans. His problem was the humans would learn reason from fire and no longer need the gods. Prometheus was patient, knowing Zeus would let him go when he needed to know who was plotting to overthrow his power. Electricity is the the second fire Prometheus gave us, to raise us from reason into intuition. He was cut loose not long before electricity was discovered. Mary Shelley's popular novel became Frankenstein, the sympathetic monster no one understood but a little girl as innocent as he was, newborn into an awkward body by the new electricity. We're in the early phase of learning uses for electricity and ways to generate it. Rapid advances open doors to new, even more rapid advances, until, by now our heads are swimming. The entire civilization that went before in the Age of Fire is going away from us, including democracy. Religion and politics are the last to concede to change, and they will, one way or another. Like Karl Marx wrote, if not by legislation, then by revolution. I feel like what we're seeing in our legislators and religionists is the tail end of something that has already changed, the ones ranting hysterically the last ones to get it. 

It is a universal problem, not just American. It is a problem in that we're learning how to do old things in new ways. Like writing. I  used to write with pencil or ink on paper. Then the typewriter came into my life, then the computer. This is the new world we're moving into. I see it in films from all around the globe, and reading around the globe too. The great drama of our time is adjusting to the new world electricity has opened to us. In a Chinese film, a girl with frizzy hair dyed in psychedelic colors, tattoos, piercings, punk makeup, skimpy outfit, passed out drunk. Her grandmother did not know what to make of her. Both are expressions of the confusion. Our old props are going away with the barns. Old belief systems have to go. It doesn't mean the spirit is gone. Only the calcified belief system around the spirit that immobilized the spirit, corralled it, is fading away, its emphasis on mind lacking the self-sustaining quality of spirit. The new keeps on coming in, pushing the old out. Collectively, we have shaken off the old and are living in the new world carrying moving vans of baggage from the Age of Fire, antiques like books, philosophies, art. We older people are appalled to see the new generation uninterested in anything that went before, attached to everyone they know by cell phone. It appears we need to wipe the slate clean, ultimately, of all that went before, attention held by distractions from one to the next while the changes occur around us. I like what I see of the new social attitudes in the young. I've come to believe the young have an intelligence we of older generations cannot understand. I like that and find it promising for the future.

It doesn't mean the future is Utopian. It means the future will be based in new belief systems. Old belief systems have served for so long they have become unwritten laws. One such unwritten law dominates self-editing. From a lifetime of living in a surveillance nation I know has computers set to lock onto key words, I avoid using such words as b-o-m-b and p-r-o-t-e-s-t, among many others. Right of assembly is not a right anymore, if it ever was. Republicans have been systematically dismantling democracy since the coup in 1963. By 2015, it's a done deal. The fascist constitution, the Patriot Act of 2001, voided the original constitution, making the citizen, already shrunk to consumer and taxpayer, enemy of the state. We can be arrested, beaten, killed without recourse by a cop's whim or mistake. Last year the Supremes made it legal for cops to break down a door, enter somebody's house guns blazing, kill a dog and a seven year old, a mistake, wrong address. Fix your own damn door--tough shit about the kid and the dog. Rights? This is the phase we're in, between democracy and whatever follows. Police state always self-destructs, so I assess the self-destruction of police state is in the very nature of fascism, based in hate. Hate has no staying power, only destructive power. The so-called Christians allying themselves with fascism have already committed their own undoing. What I'm looking at for the future is getting through the destruction of our country like the Germans lived through their own destruction and reconstructed a new world. The new world of reconstructed America, no longer Number One, probably will not use two-thirds of our tax dollars toward killing poor people of small, defenseless countries around the globe. No more the entire UN rising to censure the Land of the Free for police brutality and the penal system. We still have in the future collective humanity rising and saying, No More War, meaning it. It's been said a trillion times, though not yet with the meaning it will take to break through the most resistant stain of the old belief systems.

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I HEAR THE WIND CHIMES TINGING

Another week has flown along, day by day, night by night, then it's Friday the 13th followed by Valentine's Day. I never was spooked by Friday the 13th. It made no sense to the kid, one day bad things are to be expected. Someplace? Everywhere? Where? I and other kids at school experienced it as just another day, though many of them were superstitious about it, a folk belief with nothing behind it. My experience with Friday the 13th has been good days. Facebook is full of warnings and pictures of the ugly guy in the movies. My last of those kinds of movies was the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I swore off scary movies. I liked one from time to time before. Texas Chainsaw took hold of me and did not let go until it spit me out at the end. I said I'll never subject myself to any such thing again. Over. Done. Several years later and maybe ten years ago, I had a crazy experience around the movie. A woman from Pennsylvania took a shine to me and I thought she was weird. She asked me to dinner one evening. We were friendly. She was in the kitchen looking over the stove and I looked at her video collection. It was all silly comedies and children's movies. I wasn't surprised, but thought how can somebody watch all those terrible movies. I couldn't find one I believed I could sit all the way though. Then, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, right in the middle. I freaked out. I saw myself in the trailer of a psycho. I didn't want to eat. Already there, I decided to be nice and not run out the door. The meal was the worst ever. Everything tasted like cardboard. I suspected she'd put cardboard flavored poison in all my food. It was a spooky moment. At one point I asked how she got a copy of Texas Chainsaw Massacre in her video collection. She likes the movie. I exclaimed, Really? She said it's not so bad and was curious why I didn't like it. The first moment I could get out the door and into my truck became a precious goal, get there as fast as I could go. I said I didn't want to eat and run but had to go, fled, in imagination running for my life, possibly already poisoned. 

There was a time in my early years I believed other people's energies had no affect on me, until learning I'm perhaps a little too receptive of other people's energies and need to take caution. I've learned there are different kinds of energies, some aggressive, some not. I know this one old boy, a few years older than me, who radiates energy like nobody I've ever known. It's anger in him. He's angry all the way to the core, or more accurately, from the core outward. But I don't feel threatened in any way by his angry vibes. He thinks I'm a twirp, but likes me a little bit, dumb as I am. Compared to him, I could only call myself dumb. He has a brilliant mind, has skills, experience and knowledge I'm wide-eyed impressed by. I respect him. Anger is his aura. It's an aura you feel instead of see. Intense life. Not someone I would say has peace of mind. He thinks I don't respect him, thinks I judge him. Somebody so different from me it makes me glad to see I'm able to have a friendly association with somebody so radically different from myself, the other end of the spectrum, or so I assess it. I like knowing people different from myself. I live a passive life, largely not engaged with the world around me. I stay at home and wrestle with my own ignorance day by day. I feel the spirit of God all around me on the mountain. The donkeys, Caterpillar, the birds, the crows, the squirrels, possums, coons, the trees, all are in the Garden. But me. They let me live in the Garden with them as long as I don't hurt anybody. The world before the forebrain. A world of peace. I'm grateful to have a home in the Garden. I feel like it makes me whole. My connections with other humans are of the mind, mental, largely, heart too. Connection with the mountain is my whole being. The mountain is my battery charger. Off the mountain, I'm running on battery. On the mountain, I'm plugged in. 

Yes, this is my comfort zone and I like it. It feels like snow outside, like snow is not far behind. Heavy overcast, mid twenties, just enough wind to make the wind chimes ting a time or two. If the temperature rises above freezing, which it may, we'll have cold rain. Or nothing. Weather forecasts have become so dramatic, I seldom pay attention. I saw a weather-related article yesterday saying North Carolina will get ten inches of snow this coming week. All of NC? Part of NC? By the end of the paragraph it was down to maybe one or two inches or none, and no indication of where. It was presented in high drama like the Bush-Cheney color-coded levels of anxiety we're expected to conform to or die. Snow has been a winter phenomenon all my life; now I'm expected to hype myself into a state of high anxiety over a forecast warning two inches of snow. It has become annoying to hear such exaggerated weather forecasts. Brings to mind a friend who tells the temperature five to ten degrees colder than it is in winter, and warmer than it is in summer. Two inches of snow equals at least eight. Called on the exaggeration, he'll say, "In some places." We live with our heads in media mind, ready to do what we're told: be afraid. The song, Leader of the Pack, comes to mind; Lookout! Lookout! Lookout! Lookout! I felt so helpless, what could I do? followed by another great pop nonsense line, after all the things we been through. Allowing the weather to be what it is, I feel no anxiety about the forecast. Receiving it as it happens is relaxing. Earlier, the sky suggested snow ahead, and now, a few hours later, the sun is out, temperature above freezing. The donkeys stand with one side full to the sun, feels so good after a cold night. It comes under one-day-at-a-time thinking. The day, itself, when it  rains or snows, is beautiful in itself. Dreading rain tomorrow ruins today.

A gust of wind passed through, making a brief song with the wind chimes. The chimes bring Japanese composer, Toru Takemitsu, or Takemitsu Toru, into my mind. I discovered him as composer in the soundtrack of a video I was given at least twenty years ago, Japanese gardens. Faulty memory recollects it a National Geographic film. Takemitsu composes with Japanese gardens in the way Leonard Bernstein incorporated American pop into his compositions, and Bartok wove Hungarian and Romanian folk music through his. I've inspired myself to put on one of my favorite of Takemitsu's compositions, I Hear The Water Dreaming. Flute, viola, harp, guitar, with BBC Symphony Orchestra. His music flows through my mind like wind chimes in varying wind. Somehow, it does not distract. The flute and the strings flow into my ears so in tune with my inner space in this moment, outer becomes inner and inner, outer. The wind chimes interject a ting, adding an abstract note now and then, like the drone string on a banjo. I don't like to listen to music while writing or reading. Whatever  it is, it pulls me into it. Takemitsu's music flows with my mind continually searching for how to complete each sentence, word by word, waiting for and finding the next sentence, seeing where it goes, word by word, playing with words fluid as air. I think of words being fluid, easy to change, move around, hear the rhythms. Wind chimes don't distract, perhaps having to do with their seeming random notes. Takemitsu's notes happen with the random quality of wind chimes, though held into a seeming order making music. He has listened closely to wind chimes. They are the only music I want in the course of writing. Takemitsu's music enters my mind as flow patterns the mental meanderings ride as freely as with wind chimes.

photos by tj worthington

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VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE IN THE NEWS

The news has become so objectionable with Ebola as something to fear, another in the never-ending list of fears we cannot live without, I can't listen anymore. It's either proving Obama is the cause of Ebola or proving he is not. Cops kill unarmed people across USA daily, yet we're expected to trust the police state and fear a disease that killed one. Fear Isel or Isis, whichever. Fear immigration of poor people of color. It's kind of Old Testament, fear the Lord thy God. I was raised in that paradigm, fear the Father, fear God, fear the Law, fear Church, fear parents, and be hysterically afraid of Satan, cause he's gonna getcha if ya don't be afraid enough. Love was never an issue. Of course we love, cause we're s'posed to. That's understood. But fear comes first in the s'posed-to list and love is last, down there with no consideration at all. The fundamentalism I grew up in, the same as is purported to be Christian now, was all about fear and nothing about love. Love might be misunderstood by the "common" people to be carnal, and that aint it. So we don't go there, while the preacher is screwing this one and that one, saying, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God. The nonsense quoted from fundamentalist politicians is so ridiculous, I can't believe he or she is so free of embarrassment. My estimation of politicians has hit rock bottom and is furiously drilling a hole to take it deeper. Confidence in a politician, a fundamentalist, a cop, is not possible in me anymore. These three have shown themselves incapable of rational thought, which I already knew, but denied, looking to allow for exceptions. Never found any. 

Remember a short time ago the preacher in Kansas screwing a teenage boy to cure him of his homosexuality? Remember the tv evangelist, Jerry Lee Lewis's first cousin, Jimmy Swaggart, he of crocodile tears on tv, who went to whores to peruse and sniff? Talk dirty to me, baby. To touch makes it a sin. Making the people two-fold more children for hell than they, themselves, is not a sin. Nor is hypocrisy. It's tradition. And to complicate the news further, it's election time. The Supremes recently ruled, predictably, lying in a political campaign legal. News? Really? Insurance against lawsuits for republicans. Now white man militias in cammo, carrying assault rifles, are talking of intimidating democrat voters at the polling places, black and tan people, women, profiles, anybody that looks like a Ay-Rab, or appears to be of an IQ above ten. Of course, white men would be free to pass, How y'doin, Bro? In my very most jaundiced thinking pre-1980, I'd have never guessed this would be the nature of the fix we're in during the course of time when everything that never worked became policy. Only thing the news is telling me: This world is not my home, I'm just a-passin through. I had no idea back in 1961 when I turned my attention away from television, how just that separation would separate me so definitively and so distantly from the world I live in. We who read books are the tiniest minority of all, unworthy of notice politically, unfit for consideration socially. I tell myself the absurdity "out there," in DC and Raleigh, is not my world. I don't believe in the entire system anymore. I have no confidence in Capitalism, no confidence in religion, no confidence in police state, no confidence in voting. The Supremes nipped what little confidence I had in voting. That the republican party goes to such ridiculous extremes to inhibit anti-republicans from voting, it makes me think there might be something to it.   

Before 1980, I voted against the worst of the candidates. Only found one to be for in my long history of voting, and he was crucified. Carter. Since 1980, I vote to be one digit that says, I want democracy. Voting has been my act of protest in police state. I know my vote  has no value outside myself. One party or the other, like Ralph Nader said of his direct role in turning the election over to Bush-Cheney, the losers, "the republicans will get us there first." Both parties are marionettes of the billionaires club. The democrat politicians like to pretend they're not in it for the money, we're here for you, while the republican campaign approach is fuck-all-y'all, and it works for them. The entire American political/economic system needs to break down entirely to restructure. As in construction, you want to put up a new building in the place of an old building, the old one must be taken down. Democracy wasn't real democracy before the word was used tongue-in-cheek, anyway. Considering the absence of value in my voting to the point that I fool myself in the act of voting, whatever the justification, I must vote. It is too important to the republican party that I not vote. Like I told the country club woman who said, I bet you voted for o-BA-ma, He's a sharp stick in the republican eye. When I take a moment to vote, it will be motivated only by an opportunity to be a sharp stick in the republican eye, albeit a minuscule grain of beach sand. I doubt the militias will actually appear at the polling sites, taking it for a propaganda sound-bite using the news to inhibit black people from making the effort. I don't even care anymore. I care about like I care who wins a football game. The game was amusing to see, but the outcome is the same, whoever wins, another game tomorrow night. Even though I see it for this is how an Empire crumbles, like reading the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, witnessing history in action, it continues to be distressing. Better to stop listening to the news than to start a Zoloft addiction.  

I wonder how republican politicians think up the stupid things they're saying, and it doesn't take long to find the answer. The Heritage Foundation. The politicians are scripted to appeal to the ignorant. Considering half the population is below average, they have 50% at the start. Strategy. I cannot participate in this belief system, can't listen to it anymore, don't even want to see pictures of the cast members. I've come to a place where I feel envy toward my friends who pay no attention to the news, don't vote, have never heard of Ted Cruz or Ann Coulter, unaware that democracy is over. At the same time, I'm grateful that I've followed our political system unto my own disillusionment. Disillusionment equals enlightenment. In my enlightenment, I look out the window and see my world, the world I live in. I look around this room and see the world I live in. The donkey meadow, the trees of autumn, a nice day with door open, recent paintings drying, Caterpillar outside lying in a patch of sunlight, the ground drying a little bit after five days and nights of rain. The fog that accompanied the rain made my world into a wonderland. Today, the sunlight makes my world into a wonderland, too. I can't see wasting my attention on the intentionally false when a fly just now flew into a spider web in the window's corner, the spider tying it up using Wonder Woman ropes, and the fly broke free. I am that fly. I broke free of the paralyzing power of the false. It has been amusing along the way, but amusing in a dark way. I am pulling my attention inward to my friends I care about who care about me. I will read in the life of van Gogh, paint when I feel it, write in my journal as blog, watch films from around the globe, read the columns of Chris Cox in his new book, The Way We Say Goodbye. The vacancy left by extraction of the false will fill up immediately like the hole left by my hand when I pull it from a bucket of water. I will vote because I believe it is important to vote as an American citizen, whether I believe in the political system or not, just to be a sharp stick in the republican eye.  

photos by tj worthington

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MIND OVERRULED

caterpillar birdwatching

Today's foreign film was English. PINK FLOYD: The Making of the Dark Side of the Moon. I had no idea what to expect, and didn't even dare expect. Turned out, it was better than I'd hoped it would be. It amounted to extended interviews with the different musicians and technicians involved in the album, Dark Side of the Moon. My biggest surprise was to see so much time given to Roger Waters, the bass player who left the band that kept on going without him. I don't know anything about his relationship with the others in the band and don't want to know. I don't care. Their music is the only reason I pay attention to them. I've always thought of Pink Floyd as music for space ships.



I enjoyed listening to Roger Waters talk the most of any of them. He had a great deal on his mind and spoke it well. Wrote it well in some awfully good songs too. Also Richard Wright, keyboard, had some very interesting things to say about the music and moments that gave the album some musical peaks, like the chord he borrowed from listening to Miles Davis. Roger Waters played acoustic guitar and sang a few songs. David Gilmore, lead guitar, played acoustic guitar and electric, playing and singing entire songs low fidelity. It had the same kind of feel as the Stones' album STRIPPED, recorded in very small clubs in Amsterdam and Paris. It's lo-fi with Keith Richards playing acoustic guitar, and when he plays electric, it's not the big auditorium sound, but the small blues club sound. It's more like a Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker album than rock.



The lightning, thunder and rain have been going on a couple hours. Bad lightning for the first hour of it. Second hour the lightning is in the distance. First hour, it was all around here, lighting up the night over and over. Still, every once in awhile the sky cracks and thunder rolls. Caterpillar is under the house. She was outside lying on the stone walkway watching the birds dine at the feeder when the rain started. She doesn't bother them anymore, just likes to watch. She's like an old man looking at pornography. It makes her whiskers twitch and draws involuntary squeaks out her. She'll be under the house until the middle of the night when I wake up and go to the door to open it. She'll be there and step into the house with a barely audible voice in her throat that says, Thank you, in cat language. She'll curl up in her bed in the bedroom and stay there all day tomorrow.



I've been trying to think if I recall a time of this much lightning and rain. In the late 70s and early 80s it rained an awful lot. July and August were wet. June was dry. May was wet. But never lightning every night for weeks, vicious, big bang lightning that keeps on keeping on. Two hours of it tonight. It's gone, but an occasional crash of lightning strikes by surprise from time to time. This year, I made it a point to remember that it thundered the 27th of February. We had our last frost then in May. The old lore is that the day it thunders in February is the last frost in May. People with gardens could plan ahead when to plant the garden after the 28th of May. This much lightning is unprecedented in my memory. It has surely happened before, but not in the last 35 years. I welcome all the rain. Bring it on. The ground water has been receding for several years and this year is being replenished. I dug a hole with a posthole digger about 4' deep the other day and the clay was damp all the way down. No danger of my spring drying up this year.



The lightning has become something I dread every night. When it starts, I get anxious inside. This evening I told myself to get in tune with it. As long as I see it and hear it, it hasn't hit me. I unplugged computer and telephone line, sat down, turned out the light with a cup of hot chocolate, listened to the thunder and watched the lightning flashes light up the landscape out the window. I told myself this is nothing to fear. I'll be like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, stand without fear during an artillery invasion and never get hit. There is only a guarantee of making it like that in a movie. I couldn't really rationalize the fear away. When I'd get myself almost convinced it's nothing but a cosmic event, one would bang not very far away to remind me I never know when or where the next one will hit, or the next one, or the next one. Like a horde of zombies walking through a mine field at night, one goes off here, one goes off there, random explosions from any direction.



I like to fantasize myself fearless, like I'm beyond fear. It's not so. A bolt of lightning within a hundred feet of the house can challenge any belief in a hurry. I don't curl up in the corner of a closet physically, but I do emotionally. It doesn't help to remind myself that if I hear it, it hasn't hit me. The one that hits me will give no warning, I won't feel it, just a blink of the eye and it's heavenward bound or getting onboard the boat to cross the river Styx. The funny part for me is that I really deep down believe I'm not afraid of dying. What I'm finding, however, are exceptions to what I take for the rule. What it gets down to is my mind is settled with dying. But the subconscious below or beyond the mind has its own way of seeing things. The body automatically thinks in its interconnected nervous system way of self-preservation, whatever my mind has come to believe.



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