DON'T TAKE ANYTHING SERIOUSLY

jenny

Ground cover snow fell night before last, a dry snow with enough wet to stick where it fell. Years ago I saw somewhere the Lakota language has twenty-eight, or so, words for snow, differentiating the many textures. Possibly laplanders have more. I've lived intimately with snow in the mountains, noting such a variety of snows that I no longer see it just snow. I feel like when I mention snow it requires enough description to give a sense of the kind of snow it is. The Lakota people lived far more intimately with snow than I do. Some snow is so dry, tiny ice crystals, it can be kicked like sand, doesn't stick to tree limbs. Some snow is so wet it sticks to everything, will stand an inch or two high on a wire fence, will stick to limbs and weigh so heavily the snow breaks limbs and electrical lines. Wet and dry are the parentheses all other snows fall between. Since I've learned to pay attention to the various snows, I don't recall any two the same. It happens, the variety is limited, but seldom. No two winters in my experience have been the same. Our language having one word for snow suggests civilization has been moving away from the physical world inward toward mind. For multiple thousands of years humans lived outdoors. Now we live indoors. With the age of reason, we are moving inward, emphasis shifting from body to mind. How we value body and mind shows in the pay scale. Physical work pays the least. The harder the work, the less the pay. Mental work pays more by degrees, until the highest paid work is entirely mental, accomplished in a golf cart. The snow melted through the course of the day until snow remained only in places shaded from the sun. I carried this morning's donkey hay into the meadow to a place the sun lights up first. Cold mornings I'll see the donkeys standing still at the far end of the meadow, the place they know is warmed by morning sunlight first.

jenny at the mineral block

Early humans worshiped the sun as God, life giving, sustaining, destroying. I prefer to call them early instead of primitive. Primitive means first, but popularly is taken for backward. Winter mornings the donkeys stand quietly soaking up the sun's rays in a stillness easily taken for reverence by human interpretation. It is a kind of reverence; it feels extra good. We humans exhibit reverence for whatever makes us feel good, inebriants, money, sex, on one level, and the spirit on another. People new to the mountains know nothing about mountain culture and don't want to, but mention the word, moonshine, and they're all ears, laughing and talking, "Can you get me some?" No. I avoid the word with someone new to the mountains. With hillbillies, we never use the word, moonshine. We call it "white," "shine," and several other names. I bring this up as an example of reverence. I've seen people, both men and women, wax embarrassingly foolish over the idea of moonshine. I'm reminded of a Southern Baptist in New York City without supervision. A reverence for feel-good unto foolishness, similar to a reverence for God in some religions unto foolishness. Killing somebody who shames your feel-good is the ultimate foolishness. All it got the Charlie Hebdo assassins was dead same day or next, whichever it was. They certainly had no peace of mind from the moment of the event onward until flying lead found them too. No matter how many virgins (feel-good) await them, there comes a time none of the virgins are virgin anymore. Even in their heaven, feel-good amounts to a limited time in eternity. Two months or less for seventy however many feel-goods. Honeymoon over, back to the same-o, same-o. Some of the most valuable advice of my life came from Meher Baba, "Don't take anything seriously, not even God." I take it to have something to do with being conscious about reverence. Remember reverence is about feel-good. Don't get stuck in it. The sun moves. The spot that feels good early on a cold morning will shift by midday to a spread of insulating hay someplace else to lie down on, soak up the rays and eat later.

snowbird tracks

It's a tall order to take nothing, not even God, seriously. As a remedy to quiet monkey mind, I can't think of a better way. Taking things seriously charges the mind, makes it race. The more I take seriously, the more I engage runaway mind. For someone not on the path, it doesn't matter. To open self to spirit, mind needs quieting, not swept away, but still as a lake with no wind. The Charlie Hebdo assassinations came out of taking God (Allah), by way of the Prophet, way too seriously. There, again, like freedom of speech, all things in conscious moderation. I learned early to take the candy of good liquor in moderation from the examples of people around me who did not. I wanted to be able to taste good liquor all my life, not have to quit by age 40 or die. I have some easily within reach, but haven't touched it in probably two weeks, and then only a sip for the taste. I've forgotten the last three times in town to stop at the liquor store for some Wild Turkey Rye 101. It's the only bonded liquor I've found to satisfy my palate. Haitian rum is almost equal satisfaction, but I have to go to a city to get it. I can't drink socially anymore for the need to drive home, and hangover avoidance. I like the George Thorogood song, I Drink Alone. I don't like to get out of control and let my inner stupid act out. Not many people can handle riding the bull named Stupid. I know I don't even qualify to sit on him, and him penned up. I sit in the grandstands and learn, watch other people, who thought they were up to the challenge, get trampled. Some people say, Ya gotta have some fun. Trampled by a bull is not my idea of fun. Fun involves feel-good in my dictionary. Like what kind of fun can wrecking a motorcycle be? For masculine credibility it's the ultimate feel-good. I've never been one to need every day of my life to prove I'm not a girl. Can't help but take it for obvious, what of it?

jack

It's a sight how freeing it can be to let go of serious thinking. I don't mean to imply I'm there. I've been conscious of letting go of being serious about one thing or another, especially art making, just enough to have something like a peephole experience. I've seen the good sense in it enough to check myself when taken over by serious mind, to back off and say, this isn't going anywhere, it isn't working, it's not in alignment with the flow. Here again, I see other people acting out serious and it makes me want no more to do with it. It's all about peace of mind. It's unimportant to someone who does not value peace of mind. I confess to some reservation about not taking God seriously at first. Whatever it is we call God isn't even close. If we can imagine it, it's not God. If we can name it, it's not God. Mind is not able to comprehend God. Serious has to do with mind. Mind is limited. The spirit is famous for lightness. Serious is famous for heaviness. We are well trained in the serious, especially in the realms of religion and politics. We leave God out of it, the great unknown we can't even put a handle on, even quicker to run between our fingers than water. I take it for sound counsel to avoid being serious about something I know nothing about, am unable to know about. I believe it is so, if someone were to see God as God really is, it would take one out of the body. While I'm involved with a body on earth, the best I know to do is enjoy being in God's dream. To take it seriously would be like Peter who walked on the water til he thought about it. He took it seriously and got wet. It gives me insight into Jesus mind. He was in the mind of not taking it seriously all the time, not just when he walked on water. He walked on land the same. Remembering when he saw Moses and Elijah on the mountain, I think it was Peter who wanted to build a shrine on the site, take it seriously. Jesus said to let it rest, it was for the moment only. 

sky

*

KNOW THYSELF IN EVERYDAY LIFE

sigmar polke

The verse from the Tao te ching I put here a few days ago, #33, has been floating in my mind. Knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering yourself is true power. My journey of self-knowledge included about six years of psychotherapy. A time came I felt self-examination with a therapist was the next step, guided, putting aside self-pity. So it was. My main concern at the time, the enigma I could not unravel, was why was I drawn to controlling women? The answer is obvious, but I needed to find why it was obvious. This was just the starting point. Much came up and everything that rose to the surface was dealt with and allowed its place. It wasn't about learning how to be normal, but for peace of mind. Much was brought up for examination, brought into the light of awareness where it can be seen both objectively and subjectively. The purpose was to find my own truth, not a truth outside self. I took it for the path of "Know thyself," first noted by Socrates, then by Jesus the Christ affirming Socrates. I took it to heart as a part of my path. I chose for self the path of love instead of the path of knowledge. I started from no understanding at all to, by now, a heart that can cry with a donkey when she loses her baby. It has taken forty years. By now, I feel I understand love to some degree and live it to some degree. By living love, I don't mean missionarizing about something I don't understand, or getting married or raising kids, or having a relationship. I meant to find love in everyday life, practical love that can flow freely, wherever and whatever the circumstances. I feel like I know the people I know with a loving heart. I train my pets by love and love only. They love me in turn, want to please me because they love me, and perform better when it comes to "minding" than scolding or hitting inspires. I'm told I spoil my pets. So what. 

sigmar polke

People I know who raised kids without hitting them, without talking down to them, raised kids who went through PhD on scholarship all the way. People I know who hit and berated their kids brought up kids full of anger, resentment, low self-esteem, and spikes of guilt in their heads making education difficult to focus on. This online journal is a project in knowing self. It functions in self-knowledge by bringing up particulars of my individual point of view, articulates them, gives me perspective of self in the world out there and the world within. It brings up issues I carry in mind that pop to the surface from time to time and sink back down out of sight to rise again and sink again. They seldom get articulated or examined to see what they're about, what they're telling me. I follow an issue here like talking with a therapist, the one who is now my friend, one of my favorite people in my life, a valuable soul. I'm not even sure talking to a therapist is more important than talking to a friend. I suspect people who talk to friends don't need therapists. By talk to, I mean cry with, empathize with. Writing in this daily journal becomes a meditation, a focus, searching for words, phrases, sentences, bringing up ideas, thoughts, feelings, exploring them, seeing what they have to tell me. It takes about an hour to write one of these paragraphs. Sometimes a little less and sometimes a little more. It is four to five hours of sitting here searching for sentences, one at a time. I think of it at the same time a yoga,  a meditation. I will not start with an agenda and follow it through. Avoiding agendas is number one guideline for self in this journal, except when I want to write about an agenda. Missionary is not my style. I start with no idea where I aim to go, just write a sentence or two, whatever I have on my mind, then the next sentence and the next. A time comes soon when I see where it is headed, open up and flow with it, see where it goes. One thing leads to another, and another. 

sigmar polke

I feel like I have a far better understanding of self than I did five years ago when this exercise was in its first months. Driving on the round trip to town yesterday, I was questioning the meaning in the lines of the Tao te ching verse, and embrace death with your whole heart, you will endure forever. I cannot find it to say I embrace death with my whole heart. Initially, it seems kind of morbid, kind of Goth, fingernails painted black. It's not about wanting to die or suggesting suicide. Death, in my imaginings, here has to do with living without attachments to this life, this body, emotions and mind. The self that activates this body is the self that lives on after the body falls away. If you stay in your center, the center one's innermost self, may be the higher self, or consciousness, what have you. I like to call it consciousness, though it gets confused with consciousness associated with the fore-brain  that we like to think separates us from the animals. I think of it a word with two distinctly different definitions. like tear and tear. Somebody with a PhD in psychology would more than likely tell me I've got it all wrong. No doubt I do. I'm not giving instruction in absolute truth. I'm telling it as I understand it. At this moment, here is how I understand it. Maybe a year from now I'll see it another way. Maybe if I read some books on the matter, I'd see it an entirely different way. I don't care enough to study it academically. I have enough of a sense of it to have my own names for my own understanding. I'm not spreading it as truth, just admitting my limitations. In this illusion that is not even a vapor or a hologram, but a dream in each one of our minds, each dream is radically different from any of the other dreams in this world of more than seven billion embodied souls. A majority of us dream staggering poverty. 

sigmar polke

This is where I get my joy reading accounts of how others than myself see this world we live in, how other people experience this world, multiple points of view. This is where I find the benefit of reading. I can read Wendy Salinger's LISTEN and feel as another feels in a beautifully written memoir that is a joy to read for the writing in itself. A biography, SITTING BULL, by Robert Utley, is an entirely different experience from my own. Thanks to someone who took on the research and writing what he found looking for Sitting Bull's central core, Sitting Bull the man as he lived, I can see into the mind of someone who has something to say to me. Sitting Bull, the man, opened a new dimension in my life. I found that his values are my values. He seemed like somebody I already knew, somebody I knew well, whose values I shared, or they came from association with him I don't understand. I painted a simple portrait of him that hangs on the wall to the right of where I sit. For me, it seems to have touched his spirit somehow. I doubt any Lakota who saw it would say that. Doesn't matter. It's for me, not anybody else. I painted it because I wanted him on the wall the way some people keep a picture of Martin Luther King on the wall. A reminder, memory, of the values this individual represents. I'd never have known of Sitting Bull's life if I didn't take an interest in points of view other than my own. Knowing someone like Sitting Bull through learning his story adds a very great deal to my well being as a human being. I have refused to give my mind over to corporate brain-drain. I can be aware of the world I live in, but don't have to be of it, don't have to give it my power. I don't give over my power because somebody wants it. My power is for mastering myself, according to this verse in the Tao te ching, knowing yourself is true wisdom, mastering yourself is true power. These are my conundrums the last few days.   

sigmar polke

*

A RHYTHM OF PEACE

I've fallen into a continuum of being awake, being asleep, days go by and from time to time I need to know the date. This is what calendars are for. I keep one with big numbers on the kitchen wall to consult when I suddenly need to know the date. It becomes a nuisance to look up the date and a bigger nuisance to keep up with it. It seems like there comes a place where alternating states of awake and asleep make a rhythm of their own and it's all one nameless stretch. Awake and asleep become like waves on the beach; water advances, water recedes. I like this rhythm. It feels like the rhythm of the old-time days, working on the farm, working by seasons and daylight. The calendar has its place on the wall, a document that keeps us in sync with everyone around us by way of agreed upon time. The Atomic Clock is civilization's official time keeper, gives us divisions of the earth's rotation so we can coordinate time in a way that is agreed upon all the way around the globe. The clock is the closest device we have to being able to see time, as far as I know. Like gravity, time is invisible. Gravity is measured in weights. Time is the spinning of the earth spiraling around the sun, the moon going around the earth, and the bigger transit of the sun spiraling in the Milky Way galaxy. Hence, astrology, given that cosmic arrangements of planets are in a continuum of change, never two nanoseconds the same. As in our lives where change is the nature of the continuum. Like cigarette smoke rising into spirals, the spirals in turbulence, the spirals in water flow. Another vision of as-above-so-below. 

My friend Carole and I have come into a place of living by light, dark, weather. When things are going my way and I have no appointments in town, I like the rhythm of awake awhile, asleep awhile. I sleep when I feel like it, night or day, am awake night or day as I feel like it. It's not very ambitious living. It separates me from the rhythms in everybody I know. Add to the list television that separates me conceptually from everyone around me, given exceptions. I can go with the core of the religion around me, but not the trappings. That I have to swear to believe immaculate conception, I cannot. I don't care. I don't care if Jesus was born biologically or mythologically. His life is more important to me than his death. His message of love is the only reason to know about Jesus. That he walked on both land and water is cool, but love was his only reason for being. The trappings make the followers into a herd of sheep. Love frees one from the herd and sets the seeker on one's own pilgrimage, whatever form or path it takes. Each one is unique, leaving no room for s'posed-to, and no being held back by a committee. I see a headline about Joe the Plumber saying Obama girls are promoting gangs. It doesn't annoy me anymore that ignorance is front and center. When I look at the progression of American public education and the progression of American politics, I'm surprised by no extreme degree of ignorance. Our politicians are corporate stooges. They are not put in place for any reason but their ignorance, they truly do not know right from wrong, people easily told what to do and eager to go along, fame and money, glitz and glamour, face-lifts, looking like a mummy in old age. 

My purpose leaving the world of commerce and committing to rural life on a remote road in the mountains was to find a way to live "in the world, not of it." First thing, I had to define for self what is meant by "the world," which took some years. Finding the place to draw the line between world and not-world gets subtle and at once obvious. I gradually came to The World is the world created by human mind, the not-natural world. This includes everything from architecture to music to religion to spiritualism to art to getting up in the morning. Everything. Duality. Ok, this is the world I want to live in, but not of. I can see I'm in it, the playing field. Then I had to figure out what OF meant. Attachment comes to me first. Ego. It's ego that wants to attach to things, ideas, agendas, purposes, and again, everything. I took it that letting go of attachments is a way to not be of the world. I didn't know why it was important to me, but that it is universally said to be the way, the path. I had no idea of why, except figuring there must be something to it. By now after years of mentating on the issue and allowing the super-conscious to search on its own while mind is distracted by the world of commerce, getting basic bills paid, I feel like I have some insight, a little bit. It's about inner peace. Attachments of my past have fallen away due to waning interest. Turns out attachments worry the mind. 

I used to want stuff for myself, paintings on the walls, books, music. Now I have more than I want. I want to get rid of stuff, wants of the past. Like I want to keep a copy of Pinocchio in the house, knowing I'll never read it again, but love it so much as a story I like seeing the spine of the book on the shelf. It's a reminder of the story within. I like seeing the spines of books on shelves, titles I've read and remember in a nanosecond my feeling about the content. I see the poetry of WB Yeats and feel a soft glow in the heart. Three months in London in 1972, I carried a paperback of Yeats poetry in a pocket, reading in it every day on "the tube." In that way, a book is, indeed, a friend. I want now to keep the donkeys comfortable, Caterpillar comfortable, and want the well-being of my friends, want them all to have a good life on their own terms. I have to pull back from wanting a reasonable government. That hope is over. Learning from the nature of the world to step back and let it go by, the world of treachery and me-first, I let the people that want to partake of it have at it. I see news about police brutality, killings and mayhem in general, and look out the windows at the green world, the birds, the squirrels, the donkeys, the meadow, thinking, this is peace. I see the occasional car go by on Waterfall Road out the windows, the road of peace. I tell myself none of the nonsense in DC applies here, nor do the Koch brothers, except in destructive ways that apply to the future. As long as they're not bombing Waterfall Road and a SWAT team isn't breaking down my door with guns blazing, the wrong address for a meth lab, I live in peace. Waterfall Road can exist in a condition of peace because the road, like the country Costa Rica, has nothing of value to corporate mind.  

*

   

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

*

ODE TO AMERICAN BLACK PEOPLE

scenes from the movie a screaming man

Saw a beautiful African film today from Chad. It was called A Screaming Man. The film had nothing to do with screaming. It was a screaming inside story, but it's the story of a man who cried because screaming would not matter. Screaming is outward. The man in the story was inward. He lived in a city in Chad, worked as a pool attendant at a foreign hotel that catered to white people vacationing from Europe. The hotel was evidently bought by the Chinese; the new owners changed the staff, firing people who had worked there all their working lives. The man we follow, and I say follow because it's like a camera is watching him go about his daily life, he's a quiet man with a good cook for his wife and a 20 year old son. The hotel fires him and hires his son to be the pool attendant. The government army conscripts the son against his will. The rebels are closing in on the city and people frantic, walking in a hurry to Cameroon. I'm guessing it might have been N'Djamena, Chad, a city on the Cameroon border. A finger of Chad extends to Lake Tchad where the borders of four countries meet, Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria and Niger. It's another African story of rebels vs government troops, both armies brutal to the civilians in between. No military action is shown. Only the everyday life of a man whose life is changing with uncontrollable circumstances rolling over him. Our man's son is mortally wounded in battle. His dad finds him in the battlefield hospital, takes him away on his moped with a sidecar, the boy dies in transit home. His dad sat with the body beside the river til sunset, then set it afloat down the river and watched it ride the flow. It's a deeply emotional story of minimal action, minimal language. It's people living their lives; the viewer of the film sees them like through a peephole. It's very much like a Harold Pinter screenplay in this way. 

Good, simple people living their lives the best they're able in post-colonial Africa caught between two armies indifferent to the lives of everyone concerned. We look at Africans in refugee camps on the news and it's just another case of black people starving to death in a world of sorrow. This film shows the lives of the people in the camps before they left home to survive. They're people like us reduced to nothing left but prayer. I was a little disappointed when I saw today's mail and the movie was A Screaming Man. I wasn't in the mood for gunfights. I'd forgotten what the blurb said about it several months ago. A flash of Sylvester Stallone with a flame thrower strapped to his back scorching gooks right and left. I'd seen something in the netflix blurb about A Screaming Man that made me think it would be a good one. The title put me off. It sounds like one of those films I wouldn't watch for any reason. The original French title: Un homme qui crie, a screaming man. I feel like the word crying defines the man better than screaming. His entire inner being was indeed screaming, but it manifested crying. His crying was hopeless screaming. His screaming was repressed and wrung into crying. Sure, he was screaming inside, though it seemed to me the story concerned how the screaming was repressed inward into sobbing. The character of the man was brought to the surface in the course of the story. The people around him showed him respect, a man who doesn't make karmic waves that come back on him. Everybody who knew him called him Champ and Champion. He quietly flows along his day's routine with a happy family, good relationship with his son and wife, who reflect his inner stillness in their own characters. They are people living their lives, being unextraordinary, like us.

It appeared at times to be an allegory of living under circumstances way beyond our individual or even collective control. I see it in people I know, two people working full-time to maintain a place barely on the outskirts of poverty to raise their kids. Military takes the only child and returns him a corpse. Just a few months from homeless when the company you had a good job with down-sizes again. Rebels on a killing spree heading toward town to take over the radio and television stations. Get across the border as fast as you can go with whatever you're able to carry on foot. This is continuous everyday news several places in the world. I saw the mothers and fathers of Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, Amadou Diallo, an immigrant from Guinea, and an almost endless list of other black people in America sent home dead without recourse. In town today, I saw by chance a black woman I've known to speak with a little bit. We spoke for a few minutes. She has kids. My heart wept for her. I saw another black woman I did not know and my heart wept for her. The statistics coming forward since the Mike Brown murder are sending a shock wave through my being to the toes and fingertips. I feel such incredible sorrow for the black people of America. I had not realized before that the black people I know and all the others live their lives on alert that the color of the skin they happened to be born with is a target. Champ in A Screaming Man setting his son afloat down the river brought the fathers and mothers to mind of all the young black men killed without recourse dealing with the corpse of their son. They can't scream, because nobody outside the family cares; they can only sob inwardly all the way to the soul. 

The image of Mike Brown asleep on the street in a puddle of his blood for four hours, yellow and black police tape keeping mother and father and everyone concerned waiting four hours to get an ambulance or something there to take him where they take dead niggers. I've seen these events on the news all the way along, but didn't put them together into an overwhelming question, how can I live without oppressive guilt for being white and male in America? I have felt this before. It's not a legitimate feeling for a white man to have, from either side of the fence. Black people know better than to trust any white man. And white people don't trust a nigger-lover. Lord have mercy, and everybody is calling themselves Christian. It really can't be said simpler than love thy neighbor, the core of the Master's teaching. Thy is old English for your own. Why is not practicing the counsel of the Master, at least to try it out and see what it's about, a part of Christendom? We have black Baptists on one side of the tear gas barricade and white Baptists the other side. The white Baptists see rabid monkeys and the black Baptists see Storm Troopers with themselves in the crosshairs, and no concerns about love thy neighbor inhibiting the fingers on the triggers. The cop that shot down a kid on his knees, hands up saying don't shoot, is a hero among white people of certain political and religious persuasions. I knew this in the white people I grew up among and have lived my entire life among, chose to let it be; I don't have to do it. I left that mind when I left the church I grew up in. I could not live in that mind and believe it had anything to do with the Christ, no matter how it's justified. I feel cornered in that my heart weeps for individuals I have found all my life to be incredible people, true human beings. I don't mean black people as seen on tv and in movies, but person to person as people in my world wherever I am, neighbors. I feel sorrow finding my white skin an automatic authority like a cop uniform to the black people I know and have known. I had not realized it was this bad. I am changed. I don't know how, but it will show down the line.   

*

FINDING LEO TOLSTOY

 

henry miller

 

Driving home from seeing the race Sunday, the history of my life as an employee came forward and I followed a thread that runs through all the work life that started a long time before I started working for pay. It started in childhood seeing daddy laid off during Eisenhower recessions, and during union strikes. He worked for GM in Kansas City as a "ding man," he smoothed the bumps on car bodies in the assembly line. Every recession, every strike he found whatever work he could, driving a milk truck, this and that, awful jobs that paid little and frustrated him along with everybody in the house. The guy he worked for driving the milk truck loaned him money to buy a used 51 Oldsmobile, a beautiful car, yellow and white, and repoed it when daddy couldn't keep up with the payments. That really was a frustration. Next was a big Nash tank that had a similar "modernistic" body style. It was parked in the street in front of the house one night during a storm, an electric wire fell onto the car and toasted it. I swore to myself for the rest of my life that I will never work for a big corporation. I set as my life purpose to only work for individuals or very small businesses. This meant a lifetime of minimum wage inspiring me to determine that I will always live on very little. I must learn frugality. It's not that frugal is in my nature, so I taught self over a long period of years. A guideline I carry in my head from artist Marcel Duchamp, "It's not what you earn ; it's what you spend." I've learned along the way that desires are expensive, wanting is expensive. I've trimmed my desire for a new black Ferrari down to wanting what I have, a 93 Buick Century that runs perfectly with a classic motor that doesn't even burn oil 21 years later. Things go wrong, I take it to the mechanic over something rusted away almost regularly. That's ok. It's better than payments. It helps keep a man working for a living in his own business at home where he wants to live, and each repair improves the car. Win-win. I drive on the interstate and see thousands of new cars with the unconscious thought: everybody has a  new car but me, weep weep. Next thought: everybody is making payments but me, tee hee.

 

alberto giacometti

 

Even though the Kansas Fundamentalist church I lived in throughout childhood filled the child's mind with so much contradiction and general obvious falsehood called dogma, I did get a spiritual education. It took fifteen years to reason it all out of my head. I had to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It took fifteen years to find the baby. I've spent my life reasoning away the nonsense. What I found fifteen years later was I had actually exempted the words of Jesus from everything else I'd thrown out, because they bore out. As was said of him in his day, he spoke with authority. He knew what he was saying. It wasn't just that he was smart; he was way beyond smart, in another league. I didn't know I was testing what he'd said, holding it up to the light of experience, but the whole process ran its course and left me with the words of Jesus. I don't' recall a time I did not question in child's mind why the preacher was always talking about Jesus and love, but nobody in the church liked anybody else in the church. And they sure didn't like anybody outside the church. I asked somebody once about love your neighbor and was told it has a spiritual meaning that doesn't apply to this earth. I thought: What? And left it there. All the kid's real questions were passed off with equally vacant knee-jerk nothingisms to the point I quit asking adults anything that mattered. The people in the church didn't get it. The people outside the church didn't get it. Teachers didn't get it. Parents of friends didn't get it. Parents didn't get it. If we're bowing down to Jesus to pray, and avoid each other, and control each other, what's the use of going to church or bowing down to Jesus if you aren't going to get your heads and hearts out of the Old Testament? The moment I left parents' house I ran as fast as Usain Bolt from church mind. It was slow in receding. I find that in the subconscious I carry a moral code for my life: always do work that benefits humanity, not takes away. I saw GM and the other mass corporations taking from us, depleting us, spoiling our planet of its minerals and gold so a few can live in uber-luxury and the many can work for the very least allowable by law, and that struggled for by labor unions. 

 

alberto giacometti

 

A friend told me about a job opening at a shoe store. He got the name of the store wrong, but I didn't know it. I went where he told me and they, too, had an opening. I felt like shoes are a necessary item for us in civilization. Selling shoes gives rather than takes away. I wanted to experience face-to-face with strangers, people I'd never seen before all day every day. I was the shyest kid in school all the way along. I was shy of everything and everybody. I wanted to learn to speak freely with people I did not know as with people I knew. It made a difference; I look back in gratitude to the man who gave me the job in good faith that a kid just out of high school could do the job. It was a great learning at the beginning of my life. From there on, I could enter the world "out there," anywhere, a passport. The high school graduate was in a state of confusion that could have broke-out of a straightjacket like the Hulk. All kinds of shit that happens to the ignorant jumped on me like fleas on a stray dog. I jumped in a bucket of shit way up over the top of my head and did like the frog dropped into boiling water, got outta that shit right now. Thank you, God, for the US Navy. It rescued the clueless kid of my tailspin life for two years. I hated it for that. But, it took me out of my life at a time an escape hatch was necessary. I went into it knowing I needed an education. The reason I wasn't able to get going with advanced education was I could not read with comprehension. I used every minute of free time reading, remembered the titles of the books taught in Senior English, a class I didn't dare take. It involved a lot of reading I couldn't handle. The day before leaving for the airport to go away for two years, a few years after high school, a kid, a senior in high school, a friend of somebody I knew, handed me a copy of Albert Camus' The Stranger to read on the plane. By this time in the life I can see that kid as an angel unawares. One of many I suddenly see, now that I've noticed the pattern. I don't know his name, couldn't pick him out in a lineup.

 

alberto giacometti

 

The Navy was good practice in doing what I did not want to do. Going by my anti-authoritarian interpretation, it was not to the good of humanity. It was to the worst. I had a hard time committing to a role in a death machine. Couldn't do it; never advanced, never took it seriously, only wanted to read. Every port we stopped, up and down the East Coast and the southern Europe, northern side of the Mediterranean, the others looked for bars, I looked for bookstores. The very last thing in the world I wanted was to be carried back onto the ship. I wanted peace, not mayhem. Found Henry Miller's Colossus of Maroussi in Athens, Greece, 1963, so glad now I wrote the place and date in it. Colossus, like The Stranger, was one of the great books of my life, great in that they spoke to my soul like Ralph Stanley's music. Like Camus, Miller woke me up a step further. I'd read a fair amount in those two years, mostly French Existentialists, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone deBeauvoir, Camus, French underground resistance fiction and plays I felt at home in, resistance the key word. Even crawled my way through Heidegger, even getting some of it, a spot here and there, but followed it. His appearance was toward the end, a kind of graduation test given self upon entering the college phase of  my new life making my own decisions. Again, an angel unawares had confidence I could work in his bookstore. The years in the bookstore, side-by-side, interwoven with the years in school educated a major dummkopf to satisfaction of what I wanted from college, a further understanding of how to get along in this world. Every summer I dove into a stack of books. In the summer I read way beyond what we were reading in school. Like Great Gatsby didn't impress me at all, still doesn't. Even movies of it don't. It was good writing. There is a lot of good writing. A whole lot that I Iike better, like Patrick White, Tolstoy and a great long list. I read War and Peace while school was going on. Couldn't stop. He held me like Stephen King holds his readers. Once I found Tolstoy, this was what I was looking for. Have read several biographies, one by a daughter, one by a son. In this house I can actually put my hands on two volumes of his letters. Henri Troyat's biography brought Leo to life. Why am I not reading Tolstoy now? I'm reading Henry Miller now. Like when reading Tolstoy or Patrick White, Naguib Mahfouz, I don't want to read anything else until I feel like a change. These four are people who illustrate an interpretation of great minds. They were benefits to humanity in their time, and in all time, like Sophocles and Harold Pinter. Nelson Mandela comes to mind.

                                                                                  and



alberto giacometti

 

 

*

 

 

   

GRUMPY OLD BASTARD HURRYING SLOWLY

bluets

In a minor swivet today, attempting to make some progress on some art projects I have around the house in different phases of development, waiting for paint to dry that will take weeks. I like oil paint, and don't care that it takes a long time to dry. It's part of my hurry slowly ethic. I don't want to allow myself to fall into needing everything to be right now. It hasn't been many years, if it can be measured in years, that I've found my flow and fell in tune with it. The reason I never saw it before is my flow is slow. I only feel engaged with my flow when my body and mind are in slow gear. It took slowing way, way down to find it. I couldn't believe how slow it seemed. Mind in this time is set on racing speed. It was called the rat race in the Fifties. Today, it's expected. I went from being something of a fishing boat with an outboard motor to a sailboat. I like it much better. I prefer the sound of water slapping the hull to a gasoline motor spewing pollution. It was a surprise to find my flow is so slow. It was also not a surprise. I hadn't thought of the rate of the flow, how fast or slow it goes. A moment's thought tells me the flow is slow. The money flow is fast. When I separate myself from the money flow, I slow way down, slow down so much that I meet my flow like using sails instead of the internal combustion engine with the gas, the oil, the breakdowns, the noise, the unreliability, the indifference to the flow of air or water. I want to be in tune with the flow of the weather, the air, the flow of the donkeys, ants, of the trees. When my flow is slow I feel a rapport with the natural world around me, with the crows, the donkeys, the trees, the ground, the air, the ferns that are uncurled to full leaf, the water flowing over and around rocks in the creek.

woody allen

It was a day of the phone ringing over and over. Nielsen tv ratings, 800 service, mostly. And people I knew called. I don't recall a day of the phone ringing so many times. With Caller ID it's easy to just let the phone ring. It's been happening so much lately, I click TALK, then click END immediately to stop the phone from ringing. I don't care what it does at the other end. I'm thinking about picking it up next time and telling whatever college student is working a shit job for next to no pay to stop calling this number. Haven't done it yet because I doubt it will do any good. It's nothing personal at their end. It's only personal at my end. I'm on the no-call list, like it matters. I despise these invasions of my life at home so much that I look for ways to be a nuisance in return. I can't blow a whistle into the phone or cuss whoever it is at the other end. It's a sucker college student taking the last job he or she can find that pays anything. They're not my problem. Management is my problem, the decision-makers who find disturbing me in my home at meal times is good marketing. When corporate junk mail sends a return envelope pre-paid, I'll put some paper I'd otherwise throw away, junk mail from another source, back to them on their own cut-rate first class postage. I don't make them nasty because the only person who will ever see the contents is the one assigned to opening the mail from the corporation's own envelopes, somebody being paid nearly nothing. I do it to add a few cents to their operating expenses. It's nothing to the corporate accountants, but it's personal to me. The international corporations buy legislation to make it legal to trample my individual freedoms and I have no recourse. Sending junk mail back to them is my recourse. It is little in cost with negligible nuisance factor at their end, but it satisfies me, junk mail for junk mail. You trample my right to a peaceable life at home engaged in my own flow, I trample yours. A rule of thumb I live by is to never buy anything advertised on television, except by necessity. I stay out of Walmart, except for necessity, which is rare.

the restaurant at the edge of the universe

I've never felt right supporting the Death Star with my taxes. Two-thirds of what I pay in taxes goes to the Pentagon. I cannot, in conscience, have so much income I pay multiple thousands a year into the machine to kill and destroy the lives of poor people in defenseless countries and put black people in prison at home. I cannot support the war on the poor around the globe and at home. It's been my philosophy since as far back as I can remember in my working life, to live on the least income possible and pay the least into that which I am coerced against my will to support. I laugh at the teabaggers waving AKs in the air, snorting about not wanting to pay taxes. I think: Dude, you're taxed for what you want. Want less, you pay less taxes. Want nothing, you pay no taxes. You rant about being a Christian. Didn't Jesus say, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. It doesn't take much stretch of the imagination to get it that he's talking about paying your taxes. You want peace of mind, pay your taxes. You don't want peace of mind, do what you gotta do. I wouldn't hold them to Jesus' teaching if they didn't make a public issue of supposed adherence to Southern Baptistism. They holler Bible and Constitution and don't know either one, nor American History. They embarrass themselves and everyone else in Christendom by wrapping themselves in the word Christian. Maybe ten years ago I was talking with some people from Pennsylvania, pleasantly, and then, Are you a Christian? I thought: Ruin a good conversation. My right front tire went flat, pulled me into the wall; had to get out of this conversation now. I said, Christian is a political party and I'm not a member. Of course, that's not what they meant. Was I saved? I felt even more distant from them. I could only think, It's none of your damn business. Do you have your underwear on today? All I said was yes. From then on my air was leave me alone. We didn't waste each other's time much longer. I'm too easily bored by robots and parrots to have a successful social life.

fencepost ruin

 

 

Best place for me is at home. I've become paranoid about driving on the highway. The new generation of highway patrol is zero tolerance zealous as per training. In the state of North Carolina, to see the flashing blue light in the rearview mirror costs $200 on sight. Like it costs at least a hundred dollars to step across a doctor's threshold. They're pulling people for everything now. I take the parkway and back roads, going on the highways only when necessary and five miles under the speed limit. Now I know why old people drive so slow. It's been a give-a-shit last couple days. I told Carole on the phone this morning that today I say to the universe I am ready to go, any time is ok from here on. I will not ask for a stay. I'm down to there is nothing I want but to get by. The expenses of just getting by are outrageous. Getting by isn't even fun anymore. So much anger and hate swirl about in the air between people now. Sunday in the car with Nevlim and Nitsuj, two Parsi guys visiting from Mumbai, Nitsuj driving, Nitsuj had to pull off the road in a hurry. A guy in a black pickup went by and shot him the bird. I thought: Wrong thing to do, Mr Big. You better be careful about doing that to people you don't know. Nitsuj went after him, went right up to his bumper, then turned onto the road we were to turn onto. He told me, If you and Nivlem had not been with me, I'd have run him off the road. I can do it. Easy. I don't care. I just didn't want to scare you and Nivlem. He wasn't talking big, either. Might have been a little exaggeration in there for drama, but he would have done something. One of those things I don't do that could lead to a gunfight really fast. A lot of other people would jump at the chance. I'm content to stay at home and let other people fight out their frustrations from feeling helpless in a low-bid world that honors only privilege. I want to stay home and look out the windows at donkeys, squirrels, birds, rhododendron, ferns, wild violets, jewelweed. I have my own library for reading and music. For art projects, I have given myself a control: no buying anything but the minimum necessary, like tubes of white paint. I won't use any paint I don't already have. Canvases, boards, surfaces to paint on, brushes, objects to make things from, will be found in my inventory of found things I've picked up over time; wood, rock, metal, plastic, paper. It's time to collage all the found objects I've picked up over time.

deceased black pine

 

 

*

 

COME ON SECOND COMING

north carolina

I see varieties of crazy news events being uncovered by internet news so fast it's kind of alarming, the quickness. A black man in Florida picking up a pack of cigarettes in his own car that was parked in front of his own house, two cops shot seven rounds, hit his car three times, the house once, his leg once and two more no telling where. Jimi Hendrix echoes in my head, They shot him down to the ground. He survived it with time in the hospital. Evidently they got him pretty good. I thought cops shot to kill, but these being Florida cops, maybe they do like LA gangbangers, bang-bang-bang, hoping maybe one will connect with target. We get crazy news like this from towns all over the country. It gives the impression these events are new and happening more. I think the case is that this sort of goof-ball police behavior has been going on everyplace. The kind of news that makes the local evening news shows, but doesn't have enough blood to make the multi-national corporate news. News that is not making the news is making the internet, bringing forward much that has been overlooked for many years. In this way the internet has become so beneficial for the gum-chewing masses, Murka Inc may find probable cause to put an end to the internet, or, more likely manipulate it the way they manipulate the news to make the victim look like the criminal and the criminal the victim.

Internet is the people's power, ideally, but I can't imagine it going very far before it is labeled terrorist. I see Limbaugh and Hannity have lost so many sponsors the radio station is now running them at a serious loss until end of year when evidently their contract runs out. That is heartening, unless the only thing it means is they have tilled their soil, planted their seeds until they're not needed any more. They sure as hell moronified the white men of Murka Inc over the last twenty or more years. I know a couple of twenty-somethings whose daddy (a preacher) made them listen to Rush (some pigs are more equal than others) Limbaugh every morning before they went to school. I feel sorry for his kids, now parrots of the Reagan Revolution. I feel a longing hope democracy is really not dead in Murka Inc, but that's like standing over somebody's grave wishing them back. What's gone is gone. From here on, it's going to be hell to pay. Corporate Bank has absolute control and will not let it go. That's square one, the starting place. It troubles me that the home of the brave, the land of the free, is now just an old-timey song of another Age, like it's as far away as the Roman Empire.

 

It seems like all that went before, all the progression to make America the Great over about four centuries of nation building, killing the continent's population, putting survivors into concentration camps called reservations for over a hundred years, poverty enforced by FBI. We have a great karmic debt to the people whose land we call our home. At the same time I look at the white tsunami that swept the native peoples off their homes, I recall among the Plains Indians the story of White Buffalo Calf Woman, who came to I think it was the Lakota people and introduced the peace pipe, taught them about living in peace amongst themselves. She said if they took to warring with each other, a force would come from outside and wipe them all away. It came true. Now the Indians wait for her return. The Jews continue to wait for Jesus. The Christians still wait for the return of Jesus from the clouds. Maybe the passing of the planet Nibiru could inspire some astrological force that would raise the consciousness of all life on earth to where we humans might say, Lets' really live in peace, and mean it. Could it be that easy?

 

I'm all for the Lord coming again, though I don't know what it means. I have a fair certainty it is not going to be the body of Jesus from 2000 years ago drifting down from a cloud ever so slowly and dramatically like Mary Poppins for the tv cameras with rainbows all around and angels singing Hallelujah, dropping in on Pat Robertson's 700 Club, first stop. Hallelujah Praise the Lord. Ever thought about how cold it is up above the clouds? He would have to descend slowly to thaw gradually. It's my understanding that when this whatever it is that's called the Second Coming occurs, it will be at a time when the situation humanity is in looks like a no way out corner. When we're all freaking out because there's nothing left to do but fill the air with nukes programmed to specific destinations, that's the kind of time it takes. One of the nuttiest aspects of humanity I've seen in my lifetime is the apparent dependence on believing something or somebody is going to come along from outside, from some yet-unknown place and save us from ourselves. If some sort of Divine intervention occurs, I'd like to be living to see it, to see how it manifests. We need some intelligent help. The intelligence of humans has been eaten by television.

      

 

 

 

*

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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