THE DREAM OF THE KICKING HORSE AGAIN

cy twombly

On the phone this morning with my friend Carole, I brought up the dream of the kicking horse, the reading of it I'd done so far, concluding with self as irrefutable horse's ass. We laughed at the comedy of it, but she didn't think that was the conclusion, and I didn't either, because I'd continued to search after making the conclusion. I don't mean to deny self as horse's ass. I just don't feel like that's the end of it, that there is more, turn the page. She brought up the mailbox, which I'd left out. It's also the ground where I feed the crows. Crow energy there. The mailbox is an extension of self where communications arrive and depart. In a way, the mailbox is a door to the rest of the world. If friends are traveling in India, they can send a postcard and it turns up in my doorway to the rest of the world. I had not seen a mailbox in those words. Of course, we know that's what they do, but without thinking of it in words. Where crow energy is concerned, crow is my totem. I didn't go to a workshop for finding your totem, it finally came to me after noticing the degree of attention I pay to them when I see them. Out driving, a crow flies across the road somewhere out ahead of me, I often speak out loud, and always think, "Hey, friend." I throw seeds to them there every day. It is my way of getting acquainted with my crow neighbors that live in this area. They fly away the moment I open the door, but that's ok. I call to them when I throw the seeds out of the cup. I don't want to tame them or even try to stop them from flying away when I go out. I don't want to give them the error in judgment to think that if one human treats them well, the others will too. I don't work like that.

cy twombly

Looking at the exact spot of the horse kick in this light, it is a high energy spot for my own energy. Therefore, Carole suggested, the horse is a vision of my being, the whole being, who I am. We'd already talked over the chestnut horse back end and the black and white neck and head. We were not satisfied I'd gone far enough in the examination. She suggested it is self looking at self, a mirror image. We were talking about the balance of tame mind and wild hind quarters. I've been writing over the last few weeks about different kinds of knowledge, or knowing, like first hand information from experience and second hand information from somebody else's experience. Say the head and neck are the civilized man, tame, educated to whatever degree, while the rear end is the natural horse, what my old preacher friend Millard Pruitt used to call "the natural man." In his cosmology, the natural man is bound straight for hell without getting saved and going to church the rest of his life. In my cosmology, the natural man is the seat of common sense, intuition. He is not wicked or evil or even a "sinner." Natural man is the body, or the gross world, which I don't see the same way as preacher Pruitt, though I appreciate his understanding. I don't judge it bad. I see it requires self-control and guidance. Carole said she saw a balance. She noted that in my spiritual quest I have not denied inner natural man, but include him as valid and necessary for balance, that balance is foremost in my thinking for my own life.  She said it is important to me that I be a balance of my whole self, all parts working together for balance, denial and suppression unacceptable. We came to experiences of the last few days with my wild friends, not my only friends, just the wild ones. They are the back half of the horse that I am.

cy twombly

The front part of the horse that is self can be seen in my tame friends, in my lifetime of self-education, interest in art of all facets, interior quests. Seeing what I saw last night addressing the dream, the judgment assessed the front part of the horse pretend spiritual and the rest all ass. Seen through judgment, it's discouraging. Interpreted without judgment it became a vision of balance that I value in self. The back part, the natural part of the horse, is kicking, though not aggressively, flexing, alive, like my friends I call wild. The dream might be saying my natural man is alive and well. That's how I want him to be. Friends do the heedless active wildness for me, like I sublimate through them. They do it and tell me about it and my belly hurts from laughing. I really don't want to get in a gunfight with sheriff deputies, nor do I want to drive 140 on mountain highways at night racing, nor do I want to fight somebody who looks at me wrong. My friends who do these things, and much, much more, help me live the experience in their telling, something I really, deep down want to do, but fail to get my thrills from adrenaline rushes looking over the edge. My spotted head and neck don't like adrenaline rushes. I didn't want to die young this time around, wanted a complete lifetime to experience growing old and see what it's about. By now, I'm on the verge of satisfied. This evening I'll be watching the Superbowl with Justin and Melvin, Crystal and kids. We'll tell wild stories and laugh in the mancave through the second quarter and halftime. For somebody who loves at home the poetry of Louise Gluck and John Berryman, the films of Ingmar Bergman and Zhang Yimou, contemporary Chinese fiction, the Journals of Andre Gide, watching the Superbowl and talking shit in the mancave give balance. Might take a look at my horoscope chart. It is surely in there someplace, the need for balance.

 

cy twombly

 

This dream expression of natural man kicking up his heels brought Pinocchio to mind again in relation to identity with donkeys. I've meant to read the story again, the original Carlo Collodi in translation. Having a problem because it's a little too much a children's story. It's that morality is explained to boys every step of the way. Also, dealing in the obvious all the time gets a bit old in a hurry, like tv. Pinocchio goes through an adventure with seven realizations that take him, step by step, plane by plane, through his spiritual quest to become a "real boy," which I interpret for myself, a true human being. Pinocchio goes through the process from what I called earlier the natural man, the gross plane in another way of looking at it, where we start our quest for enlightenment, or what I call becoming a true human being. The part I'm most curious about is his last adventure when he turns into a donkey. This is what happens to self-willed, self-indulgent boys, they grow donkey ears first and then turn into donkeys. They can't talk anymore; they can only bray. They will live the rest of their lives as dumb beasts of burden, jackasses, and nobody will ever know they were once little boys. It makes me wonder if I'm in my jackass, my African Wild Ass, time of my lifetime quest to become a real boy, a true human being. I want to see how Collodi addresses that period of Pinocchio's inner growth, see what the jackass time is about. I'm curious to see what it is about jackass that brought Pinocchio through the final adventure before his realization. Calling it realization is high-sounding, but I don't mean it like that. Realization suggests too much going out in a ball of light. I prefer to think of realization as finally getting it, palm of hand hits forehead: Duh! What took you so long? The Cars are in my head: O Jackie, I thought you knew the way. I like looking at the dream as my inner African Wild Ass kicking its heels saying he's healthy and alive. I looked out the window just now and saw the black and white calf with Jack and Jenny. A whole new way to look at it.

cy twombly himself

 

 

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DEALING WITH FEELING

dodging the cow pies

I talked with Justin at 4 this afternoon. He said the calf made it through the night, but it had not yet stood up. He said, "It'll be ok if it doesn't make it. Jesse will take it to Welter and have him butcher it." I thought I would croak. I, who have a fit when a possum runs under my wheel, or a cat, and don't want to kill any living thing or hurt any living thing, fall into complexity of feeling over taking killing so casually, to talk about my little calf friend like it amounts to meat. Of course it does, the reason I can't name the two calves, their role in this lifetime is meat for humans. I have a hard time getting to know them, because it tears me up to think about their lives and what they go through. Again, it is the Persian carpet that covers the globe, its pattern constantly changing. It's all interwoven, and my part is just a thread. To go against meat production is the same as going against the American passion for punishment. As soon as I catch myself tightening up inside over the innocent little calf's fate, I have to let it go. It is too big a belief system to challenge with any intent to change it. I remind myself it is not my business. My business is to be kind to the calves in this time of their lives, probably the best time in their lives with a meadow of their own, disregarding the loneliness of being taken away from mother too soon and being alone for the first months, living in a meadow as a herd animal with one other calf and two donkeys that kick. Number 21 has been close to the donkeys all day today, munching hay beside Jack sometimes and sometimes Jenny. I've been watching them through the window. It gives the appearance that Jack and Jenny are taking care of the calf in its grief losing its friend. More than likely, Jack and Jenny feel the loss too.

 

21

 

Yesterday, hell day, the calf emergency was just part one. Had to go to town, temperature around 20. Completely out of food and cat food. Needed carrots too. Drug store for prescription. Went to coffee shop first to pick up a pound of Ethiopian coffee for home, visited with Tom Guy quite awhile. Drove to the grocery store and parked in the parking lot. Door would not open. I tried running the window down and the outside handle would not work either. I tried everything I could think of. It wasn't happening. My friend Cindy was parked nearby and saw some crazy old man in a car kicking the door from the inside. She recognized that crazy old man was TJ. She tried the door and nothing worked. She tried the passenger side door and it eventually opened. I scooted across the seat to get out. Tried the back doors and they would not open. I bought about twice the amount of groceries as intended, considering the difficulty with the car doors. I tied the handles on the plastic bags to secure items from falling out and threw them over the seat into the back seat region. I've always driven pickups before this car, explaining why the back seat is where I haul things, even five-gallon buckets of donkey manure. Put the buggy in its parking lot rack, crawled across the seat to the pilot's seat. Frustrated. Went to drugstore, crawled across the seat both ways. Drove home. At home, I pried the back doors open very carefully with a big screwdriver. The rubber was frozen to the door all the way around. Having the back doors made it easier to unload the groceries. By the time all of it was in the house, on the table in the kitchen, I took off jacket, hat and shoes, fell onto the bed wanting to be still, not move, empty head of frustrated thinking, allow the nervous system time to settle down.

 

jenny and jack

 

Something is not right in the car's electrical system. When temperature drops below twenty, the interior light that's on a minute or so delay when I close the door never goes off. I have to take the bulbs out or they'll run the battery down. The fasten seat belt light never went out when I started driving. A mile this side of town the seat belt went off and I heard all the door locks click. The fasten seat belt light came on and did not go off when I pulled away from the coffee shop. I expected it to eventually go off, but it did not. I wondered if the doors were connected with the light by fuse maybe. The light never went off all the way home. Maybe it is time to go through the owner's manual to check out the electrical system and the connection between the doors and the seat belt connection. The problem might be a fuse. It could not possibly be that simple. Fuse is wishful thinking, though a good place to start the process of trouble-shooting. I parked the car at home with the intention of not driving it until the temperature is above freezing, if possible, to see if it fixes itself. I've thought about calling Car Talk just for the fun of doing it, figuring the chances of getting through are slim to none. Sure, some get through. And some win the lottery. Online will be better. I might walk up to neighbor's house with a book tomorrow, have a hot bath and read for a few hours in warm air, then turn the heat down and come home before dark. I ordered a paperback copy of Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio that arrived in today's mail. I want to see the meaning of Pinocchio becoming a donkey, to see if there is some symbolism that might apply to my own journey by way of donkeys.  

jenny and jack

 

 The donkeys and the calf seemed to be all right with the cold this morning. It was -2F when I went out to take them some hay. They appeared like usual, no special mood. Both Jenny and Jack were quiet this morning, gave no sign of being uncomfortable. It wasn't a bad below zero, actually. The house protected their shed and its corner of the meadow from wind, what wind there was that came out of the west. The flow of the big wind did not come through here. The wind in this little valley changes direction constantly. The sun was bright all day making it somewhat more comfortable for the four-leggeds. I've not been able to take pictures of these events around the calf. It feels to me that taking pictures of a friend in a hard time is colder than the coldest day of the year. I could never be a press photographer for the coldness required. I could never take a picture in Iraq of a man holding his dead child. A Pulitzer Prize could not tempt me. Maybe. I don't really know. I've seen a few press photographers and they're gritty people. I'm not like that. Somebody else could have made a series of fascinating photographs of the calf adventure. I thought about it afterwards, glad I chose not to. On the way out the door to go to the calf when Jesse arrived, I passed the camera and decided not to pick it up. Some life experiences I feel are sacred and cameras ought not be allowed. The calf on the verge of passing over was too sacred a moment to look at objectively. Matters of the sacred are subjective. I wouldn't even want pictures of the experience. I see the images very well in my head. That's where they belong.

 

jenny and jack

 

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LIFE OF PI THE MOVIE

The movie THE LIFE OF PI stays with me in the front of my mind. Saw it a second time yesterday and thought about keeping it to watch again today, but felt like I have enough of it for now. It will be easy to see again whenever I feel like it. I don't know if I've ever seen a film that hit me so deeply and so broadly. Stories in movies tend toward the emotional, sometimes they dip into the mental, and almost never go with the spiritual. The spiritual is a tough call in story telling without seeming coercive, as religionists tend to be. This story transcended religion. The boy learned the way of the heart in different religions that he found to be the same, and his father taught him the way of the mind, reason. The boy, Pi, was taken against his will from his home life in Pondicherry, southeastern India, by ship with his parents and his dad's zoo animals, across the Pacific to Canada. The ship's course went through the southeastern Asia archipelago where it sank into the Mariana Trench. From there, Pi drifted I think it was 227 days and nights to where he ran aground on the coast of Mexico. The tiger, an orangutan, a hyena and a zebra started the journey with him. All but the boy were eventually eaten by the tiger. He would have been eaten too had he not used his mind rationally to figure out how to survive being lost at sea on a "life" boat with a tiger.

The story is the life of Pi in that it amounts to him coming into his own life, into who he is, coming into consciousness, waking up. Like in the story of Pinocchio, becoming a real boy. Both stories concern a boy waking up to his own reality, coming into consciousness, becoming real. Both go through a series of adventures that lead to their opening up within. The boy Pi comes into balance as a human being. He said the tiger kept him alive. The tiger did that by being a threat, by needing to be fed, by giving Pi something besides himself to think about, by being a companion, albeit a companion wanting to consume him. Looking at the tiger as his mind, or as he tells it in the second version of the story, the tiger is himself. His ego. Their communication most often amounted to the tiger roaring in his face. He needed the tiger to keep himself going. He could not have made it without the tiger like we cannot make it without the ego, until we're ready to let it go. This is the vision story of one man's adventures in dis-illusionment, illusions falling away, being torn away, ripped away, cut away, whatever it takes, told subjectively in the utterly alone tense of a rudderless boat adrift in the infinite sea.

An interior experience as intense as disillusionment (enlightenment) is gone through entirely alone. I recall during the first viewing saying to myself, this is an enlightenment story. It could be a variation of a vision Shirdi Sai Baba might have seen hanging upside down by his feet in a well, put there by his master, Zar zari zar Baksh, left to hang until his enlightenment. I thought of the American Indian vision pits where young warriors went for a vision. And I thought of the Great Pyramid with its sarcophagus for apparently the same purpose. Napoleon spent the night in it and was so shaken by what he saw he never told it. Evidently he was not ready. Our boy, Pi, thought he was not ready, but found he was by the time it was over. That's the hard part of getting through our tough interior struggles dislodging attachments and desires. It is so true that our mental wranglings are the equivalent of a roaring tiger keeping us off our center, the boat. The tiger claims the boat by bombast alone, and the boy Pi spends his days on a raft he'd made. Where these rafts and different things that turned up as he needed them are concerned, I caught on right away that the story is a subjective vision, not an objective documentary. Allow suspension of disbelief, I told myself from the beginning.

 

 

 

 

I wondered all the way through the film what would have happened if Pi's dad and the rescue bunch had failed to appear on time when he was attempting to hand a morsel of meat to the tiger. I've an idea papa was right. "The tiger is your ENEMY! Do you understand?" Though my woo-woo side would like to think the boy and the tiger could click on some level, I know better. The tiger doing the performing was tame. It would not take his arm off, but the tiger in the story just might. Better chance that it would than not. I was thinking wouldn't it be cool if the boy and the tiger became friends like a boy and a dog. It wouldn't be cool. It would be a stupid movie. One of the many tensions I had going on inside myself was hoping the tiger would settle down and they could be peaceful with each other. This happened when they were both starved nearly unto death. I look at the picture of the boy and the tiger and feel a longing to see the film again. I went through the adventure with them, grateful to be able to enjoy the drama of their situation without being harassed by the physical ocean that is wet and sometimes fierce. In Nascar races some of the cars have internal cameras that can see what is happening behind the car and in front, get the viewer down there on the track seeing what it is like from inside one of the cars. Ang Lee's brilliant film gave us a camera up close to see this story unfold in a place beyond noman's land, adrift in the infinite ocean of love.

 

 

 

 

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DAY OF REST

another accidental image



This picture is the countertop at Selma's coffee shop, Backwoods Bean. Camera accidentally went off and this happened. Saturday was choose-n-cut weekend. The coffee shop filled up with people such that I couldn't even go in the door. I went to Food Lion to give some people time to vacate. When I returned, the place was down to the regulars. Selma said she was swamped both Friday and Saturday. Saturday she had help from a Cuban woman named Yvonne. She was small, even tiny, like a miniature. And exquisitely beautiful.



I found at Food Lion a dvd of PINOCCHIO with Pee Wee Herman (Paul Rubens) playing Pinocchio. Had to see it. Pinocchio is one of my favorite stories. I read the original story by Carlo Collodi in paperback 35 years ago. Found a copy of it for a dime at Arnold's Variety Store next to where Teapot Museum was. Also found King Solomon's Mines for a dime. Never really expected to read King Solomon's Mines, but once it started, I was with it all the way. Strangely, I found that both stories had the same foundation. Both stories were adventure tales based in going through the 7 planes to enlightenment.



Pinocchio had 7 adventures that transformed him from a block of wood to "a real boy." King Solomon's Mines had 7 adventures, ending in a cave where the men of the story anticipated they'd be buried alive until they found an opening, and in it they saw the stars in the night sky. Symbolic. Stories happening in this world that are symbolic of the world of the spirit. I've never seen a visual representation of the Pinocchio story that came anywhere near the original in telling the story. Pee Wee was funny and did the character Pinocchio the best I'd seen him, but the rest of it was a bit dreary. They did it like it was on a stage with all the over-acting that goes with the stage. Nonetheless, I was glad to see it. They had the whole story to tell in an hour.



I stayed in bed all day today. Up around 5. Got up for an hour this morning, and went back to sleep. I tend to stay up pretty late during the week and don't get enough sleep. Then on the weekend, sleep and catch up. Listened to the news a bit and it was about credit cards use over the weekend shopping. Turned it off. Maybe I'm taking after Caterpillar who lays about and sleeps all the time. Can't go outside for the dogs, so she stays inside and naps. No Tapo or TarBaby to intimidate into a corner. Her role as Top Cat is over. Nobody left to bully. With the dog that killed TarBaby still coming around, I won't let her outside either unless I watch her closely. By now I regret not killing the dog back when I wanted to.



Having a hell of a time with Microsoft. Microsoft word in this computer will not start up. I have copied the 25 letter-numbers an infinite number of times, and it never takes. I called Microsoft, a girl from India helped me through the process. It worked when she walked me through it, but it didn't take. Next time I wanted to use it, it wouldn't accept the code. I'm looking for a place to email with Microsoft. I can't understand Indian accents very well. I felt like a dog asking her to repeat so often. Couldn't help it. I needed to understand what she was saying.



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