CATERPILLAR'S REVERSE MOHAWK

air bellows drive-thru art museum

 

 

Recent news is full of abuse, all kinds of abuse. Haven't had elder-abuse yet, so it's probably next. The nuttiest is the three "black" brothers who kept three white sweet-things locked up and chained in slavery conditions. What's crazy is recognizing that these are just the ones caught. I don't even want to ask how many uncaught. The black man credited with rescuing the three girls by helping one get out, his interviews went "viral" and fun to listen to. He talks straight. He talks so straight the home town tv station interviewer backed away from him and got off air fast when black man said he'd seen a young white girl run into the arms of a black man. He said that told him something wasn't right. The local tv interviewer panicked and started pulling the mic away from him and signed off in a hurry. The taboo subject for tv correctness, the origin and same as "political" correctness, is race. Or maybe it is one step further than that, bypassing denial. A white man with mic from the white world of denial with a black man from the black world where the people can't afford to live their lives in denial. Then MSNBC had the talking head Anderson Cooper interview him again. This time they let him roll. They could edit out whatever they don't want, reduce it to a few sentences the program director approves. I feel like his pop appeal is the truth he speaks. He is not bound by PC, spoke it clear and colorfully. Give the reward money to the girls, he has a regular paycheck, and don't call him a hero.

air bellows drive-thru art museum

Just off the phone with a friend who talks in terms of they, them, people, everybody, nobody, sweeping generalizations, abstractions and slang, punctuating with the occasional, "y'know what I mean?" to which I most often reply, "No." He can change subjects mid sentence and it takes a few more sentences for me to realize he'd switched tracks. Then I say, "Who is they?" Or, "You're not going to get EVERYBODY to do anything but ingest and evacuate. Of course not everybody understands what you understand." In our conversations I ask him at some point why it is necessary for everybody to think like he thinks. I tell him that if everybody did whatever his mass conformity wish may be at any moment, there would be nothing special about it. If everybody smoked reefer, there would be nothing cool about it. Then not smoking reefer would be cool. Missionary zeal about everything that comes up wears me out. One rage was that SCIENCE used to say one thing, now it says another. He wants an apology from SCIENCE for the backward science he got from Jr Hi. I, of fleeting rational mind, felt compelled to point out that SCIENCE, a word misused unto abstraction where it has no meaning but as a word on a spelling test, is a one-step-at-a-time progression. It took the step that was disproven by the next step to get to the present finding, itself another step. I even felt compelled to add that science does not "foresee" anything. The discipline of science is to counter the presumption of foresight. 

air bellows drive-thru art museum

 

 

His social life has been bars since he was old enough to lie about his age to get in. When we talk, I feel like we have a pitcher of beer on the table between us, soakin up the suds and him on a soapbox. It's all right. He is someone I took an interest in when he was a kid, bouncing off the walls, watching television every awake minute possible, mom's luggage carried from husband to husband, then boyfriend to boyfriend, then her own house her mother provided, the basement the teenage boy's room. I paid attention to him when he was a kid, which no one else did. When he spoke to me or wanted to tell me something, I didn't go on doing what I was doing as if not even a gnat flew by. I heard what he had to say. For me, that's just what I do. I've never known how not to listen when somebody talks to me. Now he's in his forties and among my closest friends. Again, just for being good to a kid. I understood the world of his grief and was able to give him some perspective, his situation seen third person, from afar, outside self. I have a feeling it is a past-life association that draws on us, different circumstances this time around, different horoscopes than before, different personalities, different everything, souls the same as before, after a period of cosmic rest for mind and soul.

 

caterpillar lioness behind bars

 

 

Looked at the clock and it was almost 2. I'd wanted to take Caterpillar to the vet to get the knots on her back shaved. This meant getting her in the cat cage to carry her in the car to the vet. She  sang to me all the way, one note, MIAO, over and over all the way to the vet, punctuated by a loud angry yelling it. I sang along with her, using my voice to comfort her, knowing she hates confinement that is not by choice. She can curl up in a small box looking like a nautilus shell and sleep, but when I put her in a big box with a cage door on it, carry her outside the house to the car, put her on the seat, she knows she aint gonna like whatever is next. She knew where we were going, the only place she'd ever been put in the cage and car to be taken to. Erin shaved her back. It's a reverse Mohawk. I wanted her to have her unmatted hair along her sides, legs, belly, neck and tail, allowing her the fur she can get to for grooming. She's not a cat that can twist into a knot to groom her back. Another Maine Coon I once knew had been shaved all over. She hated it, was in a perpetual foul mood until it was about an inch long.

 

the road home

 

 

Caterpillar has not let on like she has any problem with her back shaved. She knows the clippers cut off that old matted hair she really did not like. She acts like she feels better. She's been outside looking at the birds since our return home, happy for a sunny day. She's no longer a bird killer, so they are free and she is free to look at the flying candy bars with memories, knowing the flavor of each one. She twitches her lip, her whiskers wiggle, she squeaks. In her non-violent years she stretches out on the ground like a gray rock and watches. She's too lazy now that she's just turned 16 this week. Her eyes don't look old and she doesn't have any disabilities. She sleeps nearly all the time, which old cats do. I like to keep her fed as much as she likes to eat. At end of day I put leftovers out for the first possum to find it. I like my "peaceable kingdom" with the birds flying free, squirrels running up and down the tree trunks and the lion lying picturesque among the ferns and wild violets, looking to hurt no one, feeling good with that burden of knots lifted from her back.

 

spring in the mountains

   

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PROJECT NIM THE MOVIE

        nim

All my life I've been able to handle sad movies and stories. Never been one to require happy endings to every story; a sad story doesn't bring me down. Sad is as much a part of our wholeness as happy. It's much more common and familiar. Maybe the rarity of happiness motivates a need for happy endings. Whatever. Today I saw a movie so sad I could hardly stand it. It took me way down into gloom and despair. It was the story of taking a baby chimp from its caged mother after two weeks, major trauma for both of them, the baby given to a human family for a 'sceintific" experiment. The family raised the baby chimp like a human child, and worked with teaching it language by sign language. It was a happy, beautiful story, the chimp growing up with a couple of kids, a dog and a cat and the woman the chimp took for its mother. All was wonderful until the chimp began to mature and become much stronger than a strong human. When it became a problem to keep Nim with the family is when the hell began.



I'm fairly in touch with pre-human consciousness by way of dogs and cats, primarily. I started out with pets according to the cultural belief system about them. It's just a cat. It's just a dog. It's just a horse. Along my way with dogs and cats, I slowly learned throughout my lifetime that the cultural (Christian) belief about pre-human life forms is ignorance itself. It's the same with Muslim and Jewish beliefs about the pre-human life forms, except they don't seem so fascinated with killing everything living as the Christians are. Recalling an old preacher I used to know, whose solution to the Arab world problems was "nuke em." Once, for the fun of it, knowing I couldn't change his thinking and not wanting to, I mentioned that if he nukes everybody that displeases him, he'll end up the only one left. His immediate answer, "That'd be all right." I knew him well enough to know he meant it. I came to a place eventually where I realized that kind of mind is not one I need to pay serious, or any attention to. By the time he died of old age, very few people would have to do with him. He was a good man, just intolerant with an ego he equated with God. His God was intolerant of all around him. His brother told me once that all women are whores but one, his mother. Both believed the earth flat as a table top. If a ball can't float in space, neither can a square flat surface. 



The film today was PROJECT NIM, raising the baby chimp as an experiment to find likenesses between humans and chimps, and differences. The woman who raised him, Stephanie, said when he was taken away from her to pursue language studies, "He was less with language than he was with his unique self." Saying he was less with language, she was meaning his personality, his spirit, his play was less after he was learning a vocabulary of sign language. His "unique self" was who she came to know in raising the new baby. He was taken away from the family to pursue language studies like a kid at school. His spirit of life was trained out of him, no more jumping, rolling, playing, running, swinging in trees. Eventually, after some time with teachers and trainers, Nim started biting. He bit a trainer's face. He was then put in a cage in a room with several other chimps in cages, all of them screaming their distress, crying, the spirit of life draining from them. Conditions went worse and worse for Nim, until he was taken by a rescue operation, taken to a big ranch for horses and kept in solitary confinement in a cage. Finally, someone thought to at least bring him a friend to live with after a year and more in solitary. By this time, the life spirit in Nim was about out. He'd fallen so deep into despair without hope, he couldn't come out of it.



Tears ran down my face for this charming, charming little chimp twisted emotionally and mentally into knots by humans thinking it's just an ape. Finally, Nim was brought a male friend and a female friend. The three of them lived a long number of years together on the horse ranch with next to no human communication. Toward the end of the film, in the time when Nim was in solitary at the horse ranch, the initial family that raised him wanted to visit him. He was mature, and he was big. Stephanie, after several years, stepped into the room-sized cage with him. Nim went into a storm of rage, took her by the leg dragging and slinging her around on the concrete floor. He never hurt her, though he could have easily killed her. They realized that he was acting out his rage toward her for giving him a happy life then giving him away to the misery he's known ever sense, deep, anguishing misery. Once he had explained to her through fully physical sign language that he was really mad at her, he forgave her. A guy who was with Nim enough to become his friend, who was also taken away from Nim, said Nim and other chimpanzees were always forgiving. Like dogs in that way



Still, hours later, I continue to feel the grief in my heart for that poor soul. Humans are so good at killing, they'd have done best to kill him and be done with it. He wasn't fit to let loose in the wild. Raised as a human, then the life of a laboratory ape. It would be exactly like a human child put in among the chimpanzees and regarded as an object without a soul or personality or even a sentient life, not only for a year or two, but all the rest of your life. This is one of how many million such sad stories. In my very early years I developed a distrust of science. Much of it came from the fundamentlist preacher who preached against science and Communism. I grew up wary of science without even knowing what it was. In the 4th or 5th grade a girl I knew at school and church killed a wasp, tore its wings and legs off, and head, taped them to a 3x5 inch note card, and labeled them; leg, wing, head. She said it was science. Teacher at school told the class to do this to start learning about science. It seemed totally stupid to me to kill a thing to study it. I was far more interested in the living wasp, not at all in the dead wasp. It never occurred to me that I knew a leg from a wing better when they were torn off and taped to a piece of paper and labelled. It didn't compute. I tried it later, on my own, to see if there was something to it I was missing. No.



In my early years seeing tv about Sputnik, dogs in space, monkeys in space, monkeys used for research. I saw video on tv of labs with a monkey whose top half of his skull was cut away, brain exposed and wires sticking in different places that make his arm jerk when activated here, a leg jerk activated there. I could not tolerate such as that. I didn't have very clear thinking in that time, but couldn't stand thinking and seeing pictures of what they did in laboratories. I hated biology class, dissecting frogs, etc. Therefore, I failed it over and over, having to take it 3 times to pass. It was three years of torment having to do biology lab. I hated it more than anything. My problem was irrational mental wranglings believing preacher that science is evil, and the (then) recent example of Nazis. I equated science with Nazis in my subconscious and had no intent to become a Nazi by learning science. That thinking was with me all the way through college. It wasn't until some years later that I came to understand what science was and its value. I'd never been taught any of that in school. Possibly, first day of class a teacher will talk about the importance of science. But I don't ever remember any. I only remember looking at essay test questions with no idea what the questions meant. Even when I'd figured out what the question meant, or maybe close, I still couldn't answer it. First semester of biology, the final exam was 5 essay questions. I didn't even attempt a first sentence on any of them. Anything I might write would be evidence I don't know the answer. Blank paper told it best.



I've known my cats and dogs well enough to see they are not only sentient beings, but also capable of thought to a certain level, and their capacity for love is far greater than ours. It's love that we lost when we got the forebrain. Because we have mind, we need God to take human form to help us, to guide us, to tell us the secrets of living and dying, to raise our consciousness. Love and foregiveness don't come automatically to us like they do in the pre-human forms. I think of my dog and cat friends of the past and sometimes weep for them, because I didn't understand what I see now, that they loved me so much more than I loved them, they surely must have felt frustrated all the time. I know dogs that are madly in love with their humans, who give them food and shelter and figure that's a good life for a dog. They want to know us. They want us to notice they can think and understand too, and for sure that they can feel. They have hearts, they have love so huge it dwarfs what we have for love. We have heads full of language, words, worries, fears; our hearts are so clouded in such a fog we don't notice that the dog that has lived with us for its lifetime loves us so much it would lose its spirit just like Nim did if abandoned. This chimpanzee has had me weeping within all afternoon into the evening for all my cat and dog friends along my lifetime, how long it took me to realize their love. Now I'm ashamed it took so long. I still have time to show Caterpillar that my love for her is perhaps near equal her love for me. I have to tell myself, at least I got it.

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SCIENCE AND NONSCIENCE

the door to everywhere


Summer is here. Upper 80s the last several days. Kinda sweltering in town among the paved parking lots, roads and flat rooftops. Out here among the trees it's not nearly so hot. Temperature is close to the same, but it's not sweltering. I don't know if it's me or them, but some of the people I know have been acting very peculiar lately. Unconscious is how I can only name it, doing things that work totally against themselves and just as totally unaware of it. I know I have done similarly, so I understand how easy it is. It appears so epidemic right now it makes me think about staying home all the time. Gas prices make staying home all the time look better and better. I have my gas usage trimmed down to the very least I can do and go on living in this world. Last week I paid $40 for half a tank of gas.



Earlier in the day, talking with a woman of 93, she told me she saw a revolution coming. This is someone whose mind is not jaundiced like mine, who isn't always looking for the worst. I've noticed the older people I know are all talking like this, like the American people can't take much more being pushed down into poverty. From my own perspective, I can't see revolution, because American government surveillance of citizens is as perfect as government surveillance has ever been. Not only do we have agents infiltrating every kind of opposition group there is, we have agents getting groups started, teaching and training some terrorist activity, then having everybody arrested and sent off with life sentences for nothing. It's not right. But what is? The American legal system is as due reform as the British legal system was when our all too human forefathers rewrote it. FBI could really clean up here, with all the old people talking revolution. Round them up and put them in prison where they belong for terrorist thinking. People are arrested for much much less.



One of the things I think is happening that makes me aware of unconsciousness going on around me is that I'm coming into a place within where I see a little bit into what is meant by illusion, how it is that illusion is the nature of everything we call real. It's like I'm coming to see that all is without substance. I was alerted to this when friend Jim Winfield let me have it for thinking morality is relative---there is only good and bad, no in between. My next thing to say, which I keep to myself because I don't want to hear what comes next, is good and bad are, alas, interpreted, therefore relative, therefore illusion. I see there is no good and there is no bad. All is neutral like a camera. The consciousness that works the camera is the one that determines what the camera photographs. Considering that everything we do or say comes back to us, what hurts when it comes back we call bad, and what puffs up our ego when it comes back we call good. Good and Evil are totally subjective, handles to make holding a concept easier.



We call something that causes death evil. But is it really? God evidently sees death as no more than the blink of an eye, changing shirts, nothing to consider any worse than a nap. From our self-centered points of view, shutting down the ego is the worst of all possible evils. It hurts like hell to think about the ego shut down, fear of non-existence, fear of the unknown. How can something be evil that shuts down the body and ego, releasing the soul to Gloryland? Death is thought to be bad because nobody really believes Gloryland, Heaven, Yonder is waiting. Like the Peter Tosh song, everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. Of course, the ones that know better know there is nothing the other side of death and feel smug toward people who believe God is. IT CAN'T BE PROVEN. That's horse shit. The joke is that you have to have the faith first before you can start finding out that prayer works consistently, therefore can be proven. It is faith that gets God's attention. It's hilarious that way. It's also just right.



I have found with other people's dogs that if I pay them no mind, they pay me no mind. They might come around and want attention, but if I don't give them attention, they quit trying and I become the same as invisible. If I look the dog in the eyes, speak to it, let it know I recognize consciousness in there, I am present for the dog. It is aware of me, pays attention to me, comes to me when I call it, takes me in as a friend. What I'm getting at is when we ignore God, God will in turn ignore us. God can't work with us if we don't pay attention. If we don't believe there is God, then there is nothing to pay attention to, and it's our attention that gets God's attention. I've had so many with superior knowledge tell me there is nothing to it. I know so well, FROM EXPERIENCE, that when I pay attention to God, God pays attention to me, that when I'm told I'm a fool to believe nonsense, it only makes me laugh. Same as a scientist laughs from certainty if I tell him I've had experiences with God, not hoo-doo experiences, but everyday life, out in the open sorts of things.



I tend to laugh at people who call themselves scientists and take science for a word that means they're informed and have the last word: IT CAN'T BE PROVEN, I know more than you do. Great. I'm glad for you. You'd be in (relatively) bad shape if you knew less than I do. Funny, working class testosterone expressions are about I can kick your ass. Middle class testosterone expressions are I know more than you do. Ruling class testosterone expressions are I have more assets than you have. When somebody comes at me with I-know-more-than-you-do, I recognize them as middle class, which is already visible by everything in their appearance. When somebody comes at me a threatening tough guy, it's obvious he's working class. You say there are no class distinctions in America. I differ. This place is class structured almost as set in concrete as India. Again, it's only denial that says otherwise.



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