A STONE CALLED BALANCE

brer rabbit and tar baby

Drove to town today for prescriptions, primarily. Attempted to take the trip for a leisurely drive like the day last week driving to town relaxed the entire circuit of the drive. It worked pretty well. Drug store, speak with Bonnie at the register; gas station, speak with Doris at the register; grocery store, speak with Consuelo at the register. Made an impulse purchase at the drug store. A new box on the counter of impulse sales items next to a display of glass beads for homemade jewelry, beside a display of foil-wrapped chocolates, cheap, I saw this box of smooth stones. The stones among all the packaging of items stood out for me, called me home: oh boy, a rock. It was like seeing a red-tail fly in front of my windshield. The stones had been rolled in a rock tumbler to smooth as glass. Each had a word sandblasted into the stone and painted gold, words like wisdom, joy, happiness. I was thinking they're pretty, a bit too cliche for my liking. What do you do with a rock with a word on it? I saw BALANCE. Yes. That one connected. A reminder, a beautiful rock with a word that's important to me. A moment to pick a word that connects now, today. A tarot card for the day. Bonnie, when she read it said, "Balance." I said, "It's been my key word lately." The word has relevance emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually. Balance matters in all those worlds. I seek balance in my temperament, in conversations with others, in joy and sorrow, aware of the ebb and flow of experience. Some days I need activity, some days stillness. Some days I want to be around others, talking, interacting, and some days I want quiet, alone. I find my balance in this flow, ride the waves that come and go, see others when I'm feeling like it and staying alone when feeling like it. Like Saturday, I'd have done better to honor my feeling of wanting to stay home. This moment, now, I am where I want to be, fingertips dancing on keyboard writing to you. Seems like this is where I want to be all the time. 

brer rabbit and tar baby

I went to youtube at the beginning of the paragraph above, found a video of a full concert by John Fahey. listened enough to fall into it far enough I was unable to turn it off. I switched to another window to get here, leaving Fahey's guitar playing. I like to write with music going on, but it has to be just right for the moment. Hearing  Fahey's first notes, I was thinking this is a good sound for this moment. Thought I'd see how far I could go with it playing. It feels different looking at the monitor of gray horizontal lines, the music coming from the space behind the page, playing through the page as through a window screen. I like it. It is Fahey's concert at the Horizon Theater in Atlanta, 1997. Abstract guitar picking. I think of the composers who have sought the abstract in music, Harry Partch, the first to come to mind. He would be a good one to listen to while engaged in writing. Partch made his own instruments, instruments unlike any before, and composed for them. Fahey's picking plays like holographic wallpaper in my head and the thoughts, the words float in that space like the words on the monitor float on a background of twanging guitar strings  The music has a way of quieting my mind, overriding thought. There it is. This is the appeal of music. It overrides the never-ending, continuous mind. I feel like this has something to do with why I only see happy faces at the end of a good concert. It overshadows the mind, mind slows down, gets out of the way, enjoys the vacation, enjoys the music. Words play in the left brain and music plays in the right brain. Both brains occupied. Only problem I find with hearing this music while writing, I can only think about the music, can only write about the experience of hearing Fahey's internalized, non-aggressive sound ring in the arena of my head. I take long pauses, tell self to get back to it, ask self, why? I listen some more, return to the video to see his fingers working the strings. I like it better not seeing him. The visual distracts from the sound. Thought distracts from the sound, too. 

tar baby

The concert is over, the appreciative audience is clapping. Silence. I like the silence too. The silence has its own beauty. I think of Tibetan monks meditating and praying throughout their hours awake. To quiet the mind, and, ultimately, transcend the mind.They may be in the fast lane, but I'm in no hurry on my spiritual path. Mine is a footpath, not the Autobahn. I'm enjoying my earth experience since I've settled self-esteem issues, neurosis issues, not completely, though enough to have them out from  under foot. Learned how to live with them, accept them and go on. I'm one who likes to see and experience the scenery along the way, whatever the scenery may be, except in some places, like West Virginia coal mines. Several years ago, when I was new in the hills, my parents drove here to visit. They chose to drive over the mountains on hwy 58, "the crooked road," and it comes by its name honest. I asked mother how she liked the scenery. She didn't see anything. Nothing? "I watched the road." It must be from her I get living in my head so much. I can't imagine how someone can ride shotgun in a car crossing the southwestern Virginia mountains and see nothing. She wasn't lying. That's what she saw. The road. At the same time, I can see using the boring time to review her Sunday school class, the church, the people at church, her work, the people at work. It was perhaps a good vacation for her mind, to think everything out, nothing to do but sit and gaze at the wavering ribbon of highway ahead and worry about her errant firstborn who won't never do right, stays outta control. Like the Van Halen song, UNCHAINED. The dog ran and did his wild thing, went to the mountains and laid down on somebody's porch, been there ever since. Having them here for three days and nights felt like every year in school K-6, parents night, kids have examples of writing and drawing on every desk, parents talk with teacher and teacher tells everything I did wrong. Before the judge. Up for judgment. Guilty as charged. With a smile. It's for your own good. You need punished. It's time for you to go home now.

brer bear, brer fox and tar baby

The rock that says Balance has landed to the right of the laptop, the side of the toy race car with Caterpillar written down its side, and the pocket knife. The left side is where I stack rocks. The new rock is not yet ready to mix with the others. Its purpose is different. It's the only one of the rocks that was bought. Does that make it privileged or a slave? It would be a curious find for an archaeologist in another round of civilization a million years in the future. Earth experience is so very weird. The ones who know the secrets of life and death say the world around us is what we make it. The trick is to figure out how to create what we want consciously, instead of letting our neuroses create the world around us unconsciously. I've found that when I treat everybody and everything around me right, everybody and everything around me treats me right. It's like with Donkey Jenny. I've only treated Jenny right. She has only treated me right. Everything we "put out into the world" comes back like boomerangs. The air is full of boomerangs spinning toward me. Thoughts and attitudes go "out there" as much as words and actions do. They're constantly coming back, as I'm constantly putting thoughts, attitudes, actions and words "out there." This is how I see we create the world around us. I've an idea it's just a peephole view of the beginning. It surely involves the world of spirit, where, it seems, everything happens first. It is said that art precedes life by fifty years. I've been aware of art for fifty years, can see it in history and in our collective development. First example to come to mind, it was in the Sixties that I discovered the theater of the Absurd that had been going on since the Fifties and Forties. Half a century later, take a look around. Absurd is the nature of our society. Like WB Yeats wrote a century ago, The center does not hold. May not be the exact words, but it's the meaning as I understand it. Balance I want to find for myself. While it looks like mayhem all around, I keep my center, the place just below the navel, the center of balance, and stay upright. It's all I know to do. 

uncle remus

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MY SOUTHERN BRIER PATCH

tony smith

New Year's day I spent mostly in the bed. Didn't want to do anything. Didn't want to be awake. Read some between naps in a new biography of Vincent Van Gogh. Today I passed the half way point. It's 900 pages.Woke a few minutes to seven, thinking it morning. The weather report on the radio for Friday was "tomorrow." I thought, you mean today. Today is Friday. I remembered I was waking from a nap--oh no, it's not tomorrow yet--it's evening. Friday morning I need to get with mechanic, tie the car door closed with baling twine and drive to his shop, taking back roads, to see if he can fix it. I hope it doesn't involve two hundred dollars in parts, or more. Happy New Year. This morning I found the owner's manual, looked up the fuses and pulled the fuse that works the interior lights to avoid running down the battery. I tried everything someone with no experience in such matters could think of. New Years. Things like this tend to happen to me on Friday evening after five o'clock. I have to wait til Monday to make an appointment for help. If mechanic cannot get to it tomorrow, the highest likelihood, I'll have to wait through the weekend til next week. Here again, when frustration reaches the point I can't stand it, I pull back into indifference. It only means I can't go anyplace for almost a week. Good. Like getting snowed in. Plenty of catfood, birdseed and carrots to last a week. Don't need a prescription filled for another week. Turns out it was a good time to be immobilized. Nothing to do but accept. As long as I'm staying at home, I'm not spending money. Money goes a lot further when I stay home. Staying home consumes no gasoline. And it's where I want to be anyway. Don't throw me in the brier patch. 

tony smith

I think of Brer Rabbit from the Disney film, Song of the South, tales of Uncle Remus, that I saw age 6. My only memory was Brer Rabbit (me) caught by some characters that wanted to hurt him. They were talking of what they could do to him. Brer Rabbit said, "You can do anything, but please don't throw me in the brier patch." It struck his captors a good idea. They threw him in. He hopped among the briers, tapping a bunny dance, singing, "I was born in a brier patch." More than likely, this was my first acquaintance with the South. I loved the movie, loved the Southern accent, loved the characters. This is age 6. I've been searching for my first discovery of the South as a place and hadn't been able to trace it past a biography read in third grade of Robert E Lee. Looking for why the interest in Lee, the South. The Uncle Remus stories must have been my very first introduction to the South. I do remember identifying so fully with Brer Rabbit that his plea, don't throw me in the brier patch, has stayed with me all my life. I think it taught me that cleverness of mind trumps brawn. I had the metaphor of brawn sitting beside me. I already knew he had no brains. I'm hearing Chuck Berry sing in my head, "You can't catch me, oh no, you can't catch me." As soon as I had my freedom, I headed for the South. You'll never catch me in the South. Maybe the South is my brier patch. I've found that people outside the South are largely afraid of the South. My brier patch. To say I loved a movie at age six has no bearing on if I might like it now. Age 11, I saw Demetrius and the Gladiators, starring Victor Mature. It was so sentimental, I loved it, cried at the end. Mid-twenties, I was in somebody's house while it was playing on the tv. I watched a scene and gagged. Victor Mature made me puke. How could I have ever liked such a thing? Eleven. I liked Mighty Mouse too. 

tony smith

Live oak trees, Spanish moss, the Southern accent, the Solid South at election times, my symbols of the South. I knew about slavery and the Civil War from school. I was partial to the South in history class. Didn't know the politics of the South until after school when the Civil Rights movement was cranking up. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee, Bo Diddley, Elvis Presley, Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, later to become The Band, were from the South. The South is where rock n roll was conceived and born. The Carter Family were Southern Appalachian hillbillies in the time before electricity and plumbing arrived in the mountains. Mountain people listened to them on radios that worked from Model T batteries. I had never listened to the Carter Family until I'd been in the mountains a quarter century. The church I went to had Carter Family gospel songs in the hymnal. Hearing Carter Family the first time, I recognized several of their songs. Being able to understand and feel the Carter Family is one of the great blessings of my life. The Carter Family songbook, over 500 songs they recorded, is the songbook for Southern Appalachian old-time and bluegrass, songs AP Carter found traveling up and down the mountains looking for songs. For me, The Carter Family makes a greater icon for the South than any general or politician. The Carter Family are the Southern people, the white people, the culture I live in. I love to hear Sara Carter sing like I love to hear Lucinda Williams sing. 

tony smith

Going by Southern politicians, the rest of the country takes all of us for racist bigots. That's ok. Keeps em away. It's never 100% of the vote that goes to the politician appealing to racism. They most often win an election, though not by much more than 50%. I am here to learn the South and the mountains, not to judge the South or want to change it. I would like to see less racism, but that time will come. It's an historical progression involving belief systems with religion woven in, a mythology. It's slow to change. Like all healing, it takes time. Racism comes from ignorance, and willful ignorance is the slowest to change. This form of ignorance is all over the country. Michelle Bachmann is from Massachusetts. Ted Cruz is from Texas-Canada-Cuba, went to Harvard Law school. He aint Suthun. Bobby Jindal is from India and went to Oxford. Evidently, ignorance has nothing to do with education. It's like the meme that reappears on facebook, You can't fix stupid. Those people are avoidable anywhere, except maybe in an elevator. I stay away from them. They know I'm a liberal and they stay away from me first. Works out just right. As I like to be received for who I am, I like to receive others for who they are. I don't care that some of the people I know are racists. It weakens my respect for them, but that's all. Each one has his and her own history, same as I have mine. I like to know individuals for who they are, not a pretense made up for show. If I judge them, they don't let me know who they are. If I were to judge them for being racist, I'd be a racist about white rednecks. Individually, person to person, I prefer to stay out of their politics and mine. I'm of the old-time way of sitting around the wood-stove, spitting in tin cans, talking about anything but politics and religion. I save these subjects for the blog.  

tony smith

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HANGING ON TO POWER

 

 

arshile gorky

This has been a good day for laughing at myself. The emotional and mental turmoil of this week past has disturbed my inner peace, my quiet, like jumping off a diving board and doing a cannonball to make water rumble to the other end of the pool and splash on everybody around the pool. This is days later, half a week, and I'm still charged to the nerve endings. It's like I can feel the lines of nerves in the body. The experience with law enforcement leaves me feeling powerless, and that causes in turn the reaction: I'm not giving my power away. It's the Brer Rabbit in me. Some time ago in childhood I saw the Disney feature-length cartoon, Song of the South. The story of Brer Rabbit became my childhood identity. "You can do anything, but please don't throw me in the briar patch." The characters being mean to him took it to be a good idea of what to do with Brer Rabbit. They threw him in the briar patch and he hopped about dancing and singing, "I was born in a briar patch," happy to be home. Even in the Navy where I was never what they called "squared away," my theme song was, I was born in a briar patch. Squared away was an identity I could not accept for myself. In that time, the time between Korean War and Vietnam War, the term "Gung Ho" was relatively new from the Korean War era. Gung Ho meant squared away and inspired to be the best you can be. I was never gung ho either. It was an insult to tell somebody he was gung ho.

 

arshile gorky

 

It is in my horoscope and I see it throughout my life that I react when expected to adhere to false values. I've been careful not to make too much of an issue about hypocrisy in others, it's such a subtle expression it runs through everybody at one time or another. I cannot say I've never been hypocritical. I don't recall, because I never noticed. It's not something we notice in ourselves so easily. I've been careful about the use of the word, because it is so overused by the self-righteous of religious or political belief systems, which are about the same thing anymore. Often hypocrisy a word used to point blame without much attention to the word's meaning. The only way I've found I can live without entertaining false values in the way we are now is to stay at home, certainly never get involved in money dealings. I was told once not many years ago I was a fool for not paying attention to the stock market. I laughed within. I've known too many people who let the stock market rule their mental and emotional life each day. The only time Wall Street matters to me is when they rip off the entire middle class of their retirement savings. What happens then? Wall Street stripped the middle class of its resources and got a pat on the back, well done. I refuse to partake of that world. I saw too many Recessions in the Eisenhower years to endear me to corporations. I vowed to myself in teenage years never to work for a corporation or a factory of any sort.

arshile gorky

 

In the last year of college several corporations sent recruiters to offer jobs to graduates. I didn't go anywhere near them, didn't want them to see me. This was late 1960s. I'd already been through my military obligation (the draft) for being born male in a warrior society. I was ten times the rebel I was before going into the very core of fascism, military. As I see fascism push American democracy aside, it flares my flame of rage deep within. When I feel it clutching my heart and squeezing down on it, I pull back telling myself it's not worth an emotional reaction. I'm powerless against it. It is what the corporate takeover of our government and legal system has given us in the name of freedom and liberty. The best I can do about it is ignore it and live my life.

Not any of those people care anything about me but what money they can get out of me. So why do I care about them? I can't care about them. They work for corporate power that has destroyed the democracy of my country and it's legal system. I can't prevent it, because it's already done. Therefore, I make so little money, and have all my life, that none can be taken away. I have no problem of people hanging onto me because they think my money will rub off. No one rubs up against me for my influence. I have none. That's how I designed it from the beginning. Here, in the time of looking back, I see it has served me well all the way along. It has kept superficial people away. I don't have to avoid them.

 

arshile gorky

 

Just before I started this writing, I was looking for a song by Nina Hagen on YouTube, clicked and the cursor was on a trailer for a movie, Twelve Years a Slave. Early in it, one slave said to a new slave to the plantation, "If you want to survive, do and say as little as possible." That rang my bell. Sound counsel. The recent NSA findings released by whistleblower Snowden confirm it just like in slavery days, we have to watch what we do and say. Some pigs are more equal than others. People who have perceived power are jealous of that power. It can slip away too easily. The power they have is the power of people who give them their own power. I will not give a politician or a corporate exec my power. This brought up a funny memory. One day some people were standing around my mailbox waiting for another car of people to arrive toward a walk to the waterfalls. A man maybe ten years my junior, expensive car, expensive casual clothes, country club sticker on the car. He spoke. We talked briefly. He told me he had once played football for the KC Chiefs. He looked for that excitement in my eyes of being impressed that he had actually been on television and played football. Hot dang. I wished he hadn't said it; I could not summon even a fake version of being impressed. I saw that's what I was called upon to do, to stroke him and give him my power. I had to fess up and tell him I don't watch tv. He would not have been impressed if I had told him I used to paint houses.

 

arshile gorky

 

It cannot be said that I'm becoming an intractable old turd, because I have been for many a year. It's my nature. I like it. I shop locally as much as possible, trying not to need or want anything that can't be found locally. By giving my power, I mean when I feel my heart get involved, that clutching feeling in the heart of commitment. It also means giving someone else authority over my decisions by influence. Sending money to a cause is one way of giving our power. When it comes to giving charity money, I prefer local again. There was a time I sent a little bit of money from time to time to some animal saving outfit based in DC. I got to thinking about the expense of their offices, paying all their employees, my little bit maybe pays for a hundred stamps on fundraising envelopes. That's spread too thin for me. I'd rather give to the local food closet. None of it is skimmed off by bureaucracy. And Alleghany BROC, where every cent given works toward the intended purpose. Because of distaste for corporate chicanery, I keep my power at home as much as possible. I like to save it for my life. I cannot give what little money power I have to politicians or religionists. It has to be something practical that works in the world of people in my home county. Everyplace in the world has people who need help. Why would I send money to help Ugandan orphans when plenty of people in my home county need help? I'm so sympathetic with the Ugandan orphans I realize how helpless I am to help. The same in Sudan, Namibia, Indonesia; every place in the world has heart-wrenching issues people are dealing with. I can't go over there. But I can do a little bit at home for the people of my world. This way I'm not frivolous with my power, in my way of seeing.

self portrait

arshile gorky

 

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