IT'S ALL ILLUSION ANYWAY

john sloan

 

It has been with me all day today that I have lived my life poor by choice. Went to further education with ambition to make more money, have a nice car, a few really nice suits, a nice place with a good sound system. The Fifties American teenage dream. By the time I'd finished schooling, I didn't want any of it, mostly on moral grounds. Those were the years of developing my morality to live by. Continuous church from age six to eighteen, I was in flight from religion through the college years, wanted no more to do with it. I'd learned no  morality to live by, only No, Don't, and You Better Not. I wanted to break the rules, commit taboo, and, at the same time, look for a real morality to live by. The morality of you-better-not was a coffin. For somebody growing up into his unknown life, I did not want to live my life in the grave. Much as I resent, still, the overkill browbeating of a dead religion throughout my early years, I see in retrospect it set me on my spiritual path as a natural consequence of recognizing what I had was fake, inspiring a search for what is real. Then the question, what makes something real and something else fake?

 

john sloan

 

I looked for a lot of years at that one. In illusion, what's the difference? Start over with collectively agreed upon reality, the reality of the scientific method, physical reality. Kick a table leg barefoot, it hurts. Duality: pain and pleasure, right and wrong, high and low, in and out, to and from, the wedding of heaven and hell. In this reality I attempt to distinguish real from fake with no guidelines or rule book or discourses to go by. I have to go by intuition, by feeling. I recall my friend John, whose bookstore I worked in through the college years, who grew up Catholic, and had the same allergic reaction I had to Fundamentalism, threw the baby out with the bathwater. He called himself an atheist and I understood his reasoning. He was, at once, the most moral human being I have known, along with a few others I've known in the mountains. He kept a quotation from Shakespeare on the wall in the store that I saw a hundred times a day, To thine own self be true and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. I found it to be so in John, and over the years found it to be true in myself. In a real sense, this is the foundation of the morality I live by. More has grown on top of this, though more or less subtle versions of same. The morality I've come into on my own is not restrictive. It expands.

 

john sloan

 

 

In the dark is the seed of the light---in the light is the seed of the dark. In my time of agnostic thinking and atheist thinking, this quotation from Shakespeare of being true to self was an everyday point in the life, the core of my moral thinking. I didn't need any more verses to memorize of God sez. I needed something to live with that had practical application, something that was not a s'posed-to, but made sense, something I could see applying it in everyday life would, indeed, improve the quality of one's life. I believed God in the early part of the life, but such a twisted version I could not live with it as a rational, or even semi-rational human being, but in denial of my humanity. In the time I was seeking my humanity. Early part of the life, God was Fear. Later part of the life, God is Love. The seeking part in between had in it the seed, To thine own self be true. It is the mountain ethic, be who you are. John has been true to himself all the way along, is now 103, still has a clear mind. When it comes to truly honest people I've known, I'd say more than you'd think, because sometimes I think of a liar as true, true to who he is. Sometimes the lies are self-defense by vulnerable people, and there are an awful lot of different vulnerabilities going around.

 

john sloan

 

What does this have to do with why I live poor? It has everything to do with it. I live below the poverty level and the taxes due from my labor is no support to American military rule of the world and the American people. I do not support it morally, and I do not support it with the fruits of my labor. It's not about politics. It's about morality. Like a conscientious objector. I live simply in order not to pay into the military machine that kills poor people all around the globe and at home. I don't support it morally, and cannot contribute to it with my labor. Patti Smith sings in my head, Outside of society, that's where I wanna be. I live in a self-titled Christian society that hates the poor, the vulnerable, the down and out. How can I live with a moral conscience  in this society and not be one of the poor? I live simply by choice, and in one way of looking at it, by empathy. It's different from being put out of your work and your home. Thanks to Social Security, it bypasses the desolation. I can look the truly poor people I know and come in contact with straight in the eye with understanding, them not feeling like I think I'm coming from a higher place than they are. A few weeks ago I saw someone I know who is the poorest of the poor in every way, we talked awhile and my heart glowed with love for this guy I've known since he was a child, who was born with everything against him, keeps on going with another woman taking care of him, and all I could think was, There but for the grace of God go I. It was a powerful moment. I made myself leave before falling into weeping. I don't want to pay taxes to my government that will not help people unable to help themselves. It's that simple.  

 

 

john sloan by john sloan

 

 

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THE AMERICAN MALAISE

eva hesse

I can't help but laugh every day when the thought comes to me about the brothers in Boston setting off the bombs, then going home to watch it on tv. Somewhere I read that the older brother, evidently the "master-mind," who had lived in USA ten years since he was 17, said he never understood Americans. Seems to me he understands Americans very well. What more American thing to do than to jump into something without any foresight. Jump in and see what happens. That's not just American. Gotta be spontaneous. Why let something that might happen next be an inhibitor? What if it doesn't happen? About twelve years ago I had a falling out with a friend of many years when he told me he was going to do something to his 18 year old boy when he saw him next, and if I see him first don't tell him. I saw him first and told him. Daddy got in my face a few days later wanting to know why I told him when I was told not to. I said, "I saw what was coming next and wanted to save you from it." If I had it to do a thousand times, I'd do it a thousand times the same. He and his boy were on the verge of killing each other, actually, very high tension between them at the time. He gave me an ultimatum, I can't go on being his friend if I continue to be his boy's friend. It was one or the other. That was not even a decision. I've not seen him since.

christo

The day those Boston bozos set off bombs in a crowd and went home to watch it on tv, the word foresight was injected into my thoughts through the course of a day. These guys truly rate the Darwin Award, at least so far for 2013. The Darwin Award events are almost always results of absence of  foresight. Google Darwin Awards and you will laugh for days. One that stays with me was a guy who went into a gun shop with a cop car parked in front of the door, cop inside and several customers. He shot at the ceiling and announced this was a stickup. Everybody in the place shot him. In another one a guy who worked someplace that had to do with the big transport planes stole a booster rocket and fixed it to the back of his car on a long, straight desert highway. He burned the tires off the rims pushing the brake pedal to the floor, the car left the road, bounced 150 feet through the air straight into the side of a cliff. Boom. These people are given the Darwin Award for taking themselves out of the gene pool. That's how I feel about the Chechen bozos in Boston, saving future generations from their particular ignorance.

carl andre

I sometimes think the American experience with universal public education has failed. For one obvious example, our political representatives. They've been to college, many of them ivy league schools where you have to work really hard to make it; give them responsibility, they go for the money and throw responsibility to the dogs. I don't believe we have any true idealists of democracy anywhere in our government. If there are any, they don't show up. Obama affects the appearance of one who holds democracy up high, but he does not. I looked up in the dictionary the definitions of republic and democracy. Both elect people to public office. In a democracy, the ones elected "represent" the voters. In a republic, the ones voted into office do not represent the voters. Therein is the difference between democrat party and republican party. The democrats give at least the illusion of attention to "the people," enough to get a star by their names from time to time for a photo op showing they care. Republicans blatantly represent no one but money for themselves from corporate lobby. They don't even pretend to represent "constituents." The democrats are the same; they're just
not so upfront about it. The problem is, the behavior of our elected representatives represents our beliefs. Constituents believe money is the only thing important, the representatives act it out. Politicians are like preachers motivated by free money.

isamu noguchi

In the time we're in, we have no collective morality anymore we hold ourselves to. Parents leave it to the church to teach morality, the church leaves it to the schools and the schools leave it to the parents. Morality as a subject of interest is dead in America. Morality is about living in a world of others in peace. When morality becomes rules and regulations, it's dead. It has been rules and regulations so long in Western Civ that there is nothing to morality anymore. Each individual is expected to figure it out for him or herself. It's the forbidden subject like sex education or anything else that's practical about living in the world. We're taught details to memorize in school. In church we're taught we're not OK. At home we're taught by television to indulge our desires. American individualism evolved into the particular American egoism called narcissism, total focus on self as body, as desire. Television, itself, is the end of morality. I'm not talking about pious morality. I mean the basic morality of treating others right, of an understanding attitude, empathy, compassion. Going around saying things like, "That ain't right! They hadn't oughta be doin like that. God loves the sinner but he hates the sin," is not morality. It has nothing to do with morality. It has only to do with the egoism of the one talking. From my own way of seeing, I'd say compassion is the foundation of morality. Compassion among Americans is sissy. It makes you a wuss, the politically correct sanitizing of pussy. In other words, it makes you a woman, a shameful thing to be in a patriarchal warrior culture.

dan flavin

Seeing that our American, in particular, society is in need of feminizing (compassion), I'm seeing at the same time the men coming into incompetence from absence of compassion. There is absence of compassion just like there is absence of foresight running loose in the world. In all my years of church in Christendom, compassion was never an issue. I'm recalling a Regular Baptist preacher I heard some 25 years ago who preached once on the Sermon On The Mount, a subject I'd never heard one of the preachers address--a little too feminine. He was a preacher I had no respect for, as a preacher or as a man. He took off on the Sermon On The Mount and I thought, What do you know about the Sermon on the Mount? He was one of the most obvious frauds of a preacher I'd ever listened to or known. It turned out he was using it to justify himself for some jackass thing he'd done that set people at odds with each other in a church he had to do with. He was known as the church wrecker. He used his sermon to identify himself as the peace maker. It was all I could do not to get up and walk out the door. I had to control my interior laughter so I wouldn't shake the bench. The only time I'd heard a preacher touch that hot potato was the fraud of frauds justifying himself for some fraudulent behavior in the recent past. Christendom without compassion flies in the face of the Sermon On The Mount. We look around and ask why everything is falling apart. For one way of looking at it, the norm is to take all for self, no leftovers for anybody else, to walk by somebody homeless and think, too inhibited to say it, Get a job.

julian opie

 

Guns are certainly not expressions of compassion. The day after a school massacre on the news, gun stores sell out all over the country. It's driven by propaganda fear, but you look at it from afar and it's sick. I mean sick like undiagnosed collective insanity. It's equally insane to be that subject to propaganda and not even see it. Now we're getting into self-unawareness, another American epidemic after television became reality. Several years ago an aunt went off in my face on a day I had not listened to the news and didn't know Conway Twitty had died. I need to get out of those mountains and get back in the real (television) world. I thought: we have television in the mountains too. I don't have to leave the mountains to see television. I don't see television by choice, and I have reasons behind the choice that I have thought about. I don't want that mind in my head. I told her I don't care that I didn't know Conway Twitty died. That caused another explosion, that I didn't care Conway Twitty died. Sigh. It was like my mother telling me I'm not afraid enough of Satan. I better think about it. I was thinking, get real, and laughing because that's what she was telling me to do. She meant real with television; I meant real without television. I see plenty of television at other people's houses, enough to know I could not live with that going on in my house. I'm glad I don't have a problem with silence.   

constantin Brancusi

 

 

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DAMN BRACES / BLESS RELAXES

     romare bearden

It's been a curiosity since it came to me that the first half of my life and the second half have been like two sides of the same coin. Unto the age 33, parents and church had made an atheist of me for so many reasons it's too many to list. As soon as I stepped out onto the plank with a sword poking me in the rear and jumped, I fell into a world of people that were quite different from the blind sheep following the blind ram. I become acquainted with people who read books and thought about something besides the usual. All I wanted to do was read. I saw more and more I'd been beyond sheltered, even going to public school. Sequestered is more the word, sequestered in a belief system that was absolute, no two ways about it. Breaking free of that belief system required that I turn my back to all of it. The next 15 years I sifted through all I'd been taught to believe, throwing off everything I could decipher that came from the human mind, concluding eventually that religion was a bureaucracy set up for the few to control the many. That's not reason enough for me to take it for inspired by anything but money. I've come to believe I was led to look through the unreality to find the reality. I had to find my way through what I take for a false belief system.

That, however, was the religion I had argument with. I hadn't yet seen that the religion was not of God. The religion was a bureaucracy like the school system, a creation of the human mind. I wasn't yet able to see through it to the real thing, God, God that religion stood in front of like a shield blocking the light. I had to get through religion, like through a tunnel, to the light on the other side. Religion is a good first step, but, either fortunately or unfortunately, I was unable to drown myself in denial. I take it for fortunate. One of my big questions was, how can all the rest of the world be wrong? If you don't go to this church and believe this preacher in particular, you're wrong, you've failed, by God. It does a number on a kid's head to sift through obvious nonsense presented as Truth. Even in these latter years of the life I deal with there being no Truth. All the way along through religion and school I was trained to believe there is Truth. Now I don't believe it. I've even come to see that what we call morality is self-serving self-preservation. Act "morally" and what comes back will be moral, as well, leaving me in peace--no turmoils with other people, no turmoils within. Morality basically amounts to not stepping on other people's toes, not provoking. Like the saying, If you don't want it started, don't start it.

I do want the return on my actions to be to my liking, so I treat people around me to their liking. There are some who call that kissing ass or being a chameleon, but I'm not seeing it a means to an end, but a way of being. I'm not a chameleon to pay attention to somebody besides myself. Nor am I kissing ass treating somebody right. I see in my baby friends my own memory of that time, how good it felt to be fussed over, talked to in baby talk, served unconditionally, held as center of attention. We still are like that, though we get it in different ways grown up swimming about in the world of others. This is where morality comes in. Bump into somebody and it starts a fight. Morality is about not bumping into others or guidelines for how to get out of it when it happens. Asian martial arts is about not fighting. I'm finding that regarding others more gently than I have been in the past has a subtler but similar affect to petting a cat. We tend to calm down when somebody is gentle with us. I think of Suzanne (Mellow) Irwin. She's a calm, quiet soul. I feel it when I'm around her. I like being talked to by her, because her gentle demeanor relaxes. Like William Blake wrote, Damn braces; Bless relaxes.

Caterpillar has her song I've sung to her since she was a kitten. It is her song and it's around her name. As she grew I continued to sing the song to her. It relaxed her every time. It set her to purring right away. I felt like it took her back to her inner kitten. I continued to sing the song to her throughout her life. She's fifteen and the song relaxes her as quickly today and as thoroughly as it has all the way back to kitten. I rub her lightly on top of the head between her ears where mother licked her in her first two weeks. I find that relaxes her as quickly as the song. Going by my belief that a cat's consciousness is along the lines of a young child, a simple song a one year old could distinguish its own name in would be understood by a cat. A cat that understands, Want some catfood? Want out? understands the sounds in relation to experience that these sounds mean food and door. A kitten can understand its name in a brief song same as a baby can. Her name calms her. She knew it was her name when she was a month old. They understand their names, and their names are important to them.

In the first half of my life I didn't understand any of that. I didn't understand anything, actually. I'd learned a lot of answers to test questions, but couldn't put together the why of anything. My adult education has been about why, seeking principles and patterns, learning to see, for one thing, history repeat itself. And to see prophecies work out enough to learn they can only be recognized after they've manifested. Cannot be predicted exactly. Like all the guessing now about who is the red dragon. What if red dragon has been here and gone? Came, did his work, and gone by way of Alzheimer's back to the dark side with the lizard people. The funny part to me from what I've seen of prophecies is the people most afraid of worshippers of the supreme demon turn out to be the ones worshipping that which the supreme demon symbolizes. And I've seen that when you give an evangelist enough time, you'll find him involved in what he preaches most vociferously against. It doesn't really do to make a fuss against something, because it then turns out it came from within self, projected like a movie on a screen, giving the illusion it is out there, not in here.


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