POWER IN THE NAME

the road ahead

 

A lifetime of habit patterns around looking back on Dec 31 at the year gone by, I woke this morning thinking about what has come to me in the year and what has gone away. I don't remember a time I did not think New Year's Eve anything but another night before another day. Every day is New Year's day. It's like naming a dog. I feel like dog is best without a name, a name being something imposed on dog from outside by the human mind. Yet I don't know if the animals have names for each other. They're not telling. I've seen a gathering of about twenty raccoons in a picture taken by trail camera. I imagine they all knew each other, an extended family. Crows live in extended families unto tribes. They know each other as people in a small community. Surely they know one another by position in the hierarchy, by relationship, and subtleties humans don't see. I'd guess Mama has a crow equivalent. Brother, sister, seems like these relationships being known, they would have an identifying sound or thought for each one. I find behavior in the animal and bird world similar to ours, as it would be, considering evolution.

 

 

 

I've no problem with the word evolution. First, I'm not selling anything and am not a missionary for any agenda. People who have an issue with the word, evolution, don't read. There's the long and the short of it. Somebody who doesn't like a word I use can either tell me about it or not. I've seen contention over word usage all my life. In childhood, black people were known to white people only by nigger and colored, sometimes darkie. Of course, it's all demeaning, coming from a subconscious belief among white people that we're superior in every way, therefore privileged. In the late Fifties, a cry went up for white people to call black people Negroes, while Negroes went on calling each other nigger unto this day. But it's not ok to say it and be white. A white man is outright forbidden to refer to a woman a bitch or a cunt. It's totally ok for women to call men assholes or dicks in coffee shops, in print, on tv and radio.

 

 

Somebody black calls me a white motherfucker and it's ok, but not ok for me to call him a motherfucking nigger. For myself, I approach it with understanding that white man is, historically and present tense, the oppressor of black people, women, etc. White man has traditionally been the privileged demographic. That there are no restrictions on names minorities and women can call white men tells me political correctness is aimed at the white man, to bring white man under control. It's ok because arrogant white man believes himself superior from birth onward, thereby goes along oblivious to names he's called. White man is on a fast downhill run in this time on greased skis and he knows it. White man mind, not all white men, but the mind, has come together in one political party that represents half the population. We have devolved politically, from 1980 unto this year soon completed, 2015, to the clown bus of a dozen white man pretend candidates with a token black man and a token woman spewing white man unreason, strategically appealing to ignorance in the American people with the propaganda of fascism.

 

 

The shocking part is how well it works. The most cynical minds of all thought up this strategy and set it in motion. The republican party today is an illustration of the white male belief system, a branch of the patriarchal belief system, crumbling before our eyes, reduced to denying reason, intelligence, knowledge to maintain power. We're learning upfront that democracy has become a threat to white man. We've already learned through Southern history the white man will happily throw off democracy to hang onto power. I have stopped paying attention to anything to do with the clown bus. They've taught me what they're about, which is of no interest. Curiously, Trump has turned out to be the trump card in the political/media bridge game going on. Throughout my life I have attempted to understand people not me, from foreigners to everyone I know. I am my own political correctness cop open to understanding others the best I'm able, receiving every individual in my life as he or she is within themselves. Another way of saying I go in peace. I don't use any of the disrespectful names, except for the humor of irony with close friends who understand where I'm coming from. Like you. And this comes from a basic ethic to regard others with respect if I want respect in turn. Respect boomerangs. Disrespect boomerangs. It's my choice in every moment of every day. Happy New Year.

 

 

photos by tj worthington

 

 

*

 

 



YES TO DIVERSITY

helen frankenthaler

A few minutes ago I found the saying from Madeleine Albright concerning women, about a special hell for women who don't help other women. I grew up in the generation before women's liberation. I've enjoyed in my lifetime seeing the liberation of women. Government lets women down every step of the way, but outside the reach of government, out here in the world where we live, I've seen a change sweep through women's culture in the younger generations and it took with the older women too. It is a new self-confidence. In childhood I remember thinking a lot of the women that lived in the neighborhood were really neat people, who turned inward to be a housewife to raise kids and stay married, clean house and cook. I see women now asserting themselves creatively in each one's own way. I see women having girl's night out parties. I see women being friends and not slicing each other to ribbons behind one another's backs. Of course, it goes on. It goes on among men too. It's a human thang. No blame. All the way through school I knew a lot of brilliant girls I felt needed a chance to be their human self and deserved the chance the same as men. I never found girls and women less intelligent than boys and men. Our society needs the influence of the feminine in a bad way. And the feminine is coming in. Joan Jett opened the door to women as rock stars. Then there was Heart, then Patti Smith and Nina Hagen, then L7, Courtney Love and the whole spectrum of rock women are doing now. It's not been so much a "movement" as a shift in belief systems in how women see themselves in relation to their own humanity.  

helen frankenthaler

This word humanity doesn't have the meaning it one time had, either. Or maybe I had a youthful stereotype of humanity from nineteenth century salons. I am not disheartened by humanity seeing the greedy doing what they do, seeing what power does to people who have had a taste of it. We do it all, have done it all, always. It's in us each one, individually. Some of us learn to control our automatic desires, and most watch tv learning daily to satisfy desires whatever the cost. Learning to control the automatic desires is the spiritual path I focus on for myself. I don't believe I have a right to hold anyone else to such attention. Meaningful to me does not mean necessarily meaningful for someone else. Like I can read Wallace Stevens' Idea of Order At Key West and have my mind blown every time. Somebody else would say, It's all right. And somebody else wouldn't be able to make heads nor tails of it. And somebody else would tell me I only see it superficially and maybe give me an in-depth lecture on what's really going on with it. And I'd listen with full attention. I feel like this is a benefit of being a reader in a world of people who don't read. You learn definitively that not everybody is interested in the same thing you are. A good learning. Somebody else is interested in making fiddles. It makes an interesting world that we all have our own likes and dislikes. One does not cancel another. All the different interests weave together into humanity. I'm all for a world that allows everyone their own potential at something besides making money. That too, for the people that need it, but not to have it a necessity for everybody. I have a feeling this is the world we are moving toward in our social evolution as humanity. 

helen frankenthaler

We're in a white man backlash now that the people with black hair and women are becoming self-aware. It's unsettling the white man belief system that has been dominant for 6,000 years. We are seeing the tail end of that era and men are freaking out. Their support systems have abandoned them. Hate radio and hate television rub salt in the white man's wound. I tend to see that a good thing, considering wars are about burning off hate. This hate spewing up among white men has been there all long. It's not new because of Limbaugh. The hate created Limbaugh. The hate has to come to the surface where it can be dealt with. I see these trends among the people, not in government. Government being a white man mafia, government will change last, if religion doesn't come in last. I see us moving toward that overused word diversity. I'm glad it's going that way. I found girls smarter than the guys all the way through school. In adult life, I find women, as a rule of thumb, to be far more intelligent than men. Earlier today driving to town, I heard on NPR somebody had made a study that found women are far better workers than men, concluding women deserve more pay than men. It accorded with what I've observed in my experience along the way. I felt it was a shame when Lois Sheets lost the election some years ago running for sheriff. She would have been a good one, and there would not have been any scandals. Donna Shumate, lawyer in Sparta, is among the most brilliant minds I know. Not saying I'm a collector of brilliant minds, but one stands out from time to time. I worked for Donna for six years and came out of the experience respecting her more than I did going into it, and my respect was considerable then. Men don't have to perform in court pregnant. There are some men I know whose minds I respect, but it's mostly in women I find the minds I respect in the deepest way. I don't mean to be going off into generalizations, but can't help it. 

helen frankenthaler

All my life, from childhood to now, I have observed women to be so much more intelligent than men that the difference is remarkable. American boys tradition has been all the way along to stop learning after puberty. Boys are not taught to be sensitive to the feminine, only to conquer. Rape goes so deep in the male psyche, it's good to see rape coming to the surface as a social concern, where it can be dealt with--more evidence white man is losing the reins of power. The ERA not passing failed to slow down the women's movement. Its time was now, whether government noticed or not. Evidently, now is the time for gay rights to surface. It's one of those things I say, Why hasn't it always been thus? It's as self-evident as women deserving at least equal pay with men, as well as equal opportunity. It's something I don't feel is political. I knew black people all the way through school. I did not find them ignorant. I found them intimidated. Girls had to ditch their intelligence when they started wanting to get married. The black kids knew that doing well in school wasn't going to serve them in any kind of way. They were taken for dumb, came to see themselves dumb, and gave up before they could start. I remember a guy in high school. His name was Leon. We were the same weight and had to wrestle in gym class. He always smelled of liquor. Always wanted me to win because he didn't really want to bother. He kept a pint bottle in his locker. He was a good guy, intelligent guy, didn't do shit in school, didn't finish, and I'd guess either crashed and burned or went into the Army or anything except upwardly mobile. He knew as a black man he had no chance but to be a low-paid laborer, working for the man, would never have any respect outside the bar, never honored for being a man. It rendered him without hope from the beginning. I did not feel right being white around him. I didn't want to hold him down, render him without a chance. I didn't want him thinking I was his superior because my skin was white. This at the time in a teenager's mind when the injustices of the world we're on the verge of diving into loom large.   

helen frankenthaler herself

*

TURNING FROM OUT THERE TO IN HERE

nancy graves

Again, I feel lonesome on the day after an election. Lonesome because the ones I vote for win very seldom, and lonesome because I've seen ignorance used successfully for political marketing. This could be a transition time from appealing to our intelligence to appealing to our ignorance. It's been a long transition time, thirty-four years, that the master propagandists have appealed to below average intelligence. Easy targets. White Man is in crisis in democracy when Others have begun to outnumber White. This is where police state comes in. The South gives historical evidence that White Man outnumbered by Others will retain power by force and throw away democracy for racial control. All over the nation in this time White Man is facing the threat of being outnumbered by Others, emphasis on black Others. I was alarmed when I learned white people hate black people so much, to the point they're official targets to kill or imprison. A black president has threatened White Man more than population statistics are able. The white John Birch Society billionaires are saying, Aint no GDN gonna tell me what to do. It seemed ridiculous to me today that I made the decision to participate in the great American delusion, pretend democracy, again. Historically, police states are predictably popular in the early years. The more resistance grows, the more the black people are targeted, to keep the police popular, just like on tv. I see police brutality videos on facebook and mourn to see the videos as cop commercials saying to White Man, We got em under control. It makes great corporate tv and keeps the news exciting, hopeful. 

nancy graves

It makes me turn further inward, turn away from the world Out There. I feel like the range of mountains where the Blue Ridge Parkway runs along the ridge is my Great Wall of Air Bellows, a half mile from home, beyond which is Out There, This side of that line people live with space between each other and enough forest to allow habitat to some wildlife. It seems like there is some balance this side of that great wall between me and the world of the false. Going inward to dream images of Home Sweet Home, like guided imagery. I have yet to do something I learned some years ago, though have only done it once. Put on some kind of music you resonate with, emphasis on relaxing music, classical, whatever. Sit quietly and imagine the most peaceful spot on earth you'd like to be. Start there, self in that place. I chose what I call the donkey meadow beside the house, when in that time the donkey shed was a chicken house. I feel good energy in that meadow. Now the meadow has donkey love energy added to it. This meadow is the place I would go to again, if I ever do a guided imagery again. The purpose is to allow the music to be the movie soundtrack to visuals that occur in the mind's eye, follow them as a story and see where it goes, follow it to the end of the music. Then write down the experience as something like a dream, which it is. If I remember correctly, it's supposed to have some woo-woo connected with it, like manifesting what you really want, something like that. I wasn't interested in it as something to do toward wanting. I was curious to see what it was. I found it gave me a beautiful story to follow, and by the time the music ended, I felt good about the story my subconscious mind made up spontaneously. I came away from it feeling like my interior self, the subconscious, or another way of naming it, the super-conscious, was in good balance and beaming with light. Perhaps my super-conscious mind would visualize a very different story if I'd put on the Murderdolls. 

nancy graves

I feel so inward, I want to sleep. I want to close my eyes and flow with some music. Just happen to have a cd in the player by Malian guitar picker and singer, Carcar, accompanied by Ali Farka Toure. Yes, beautiful music is what my super-conscious wants. This is good music to flow with. The vocals flow beautifully. I closed my eyes and followed the music. I saw the musicians, saw their fingers picking their acoustic guitar strings, heard the vocals like sinuous colored silk flowing upward into the air above the trees into the sky, dancing to a subtle rhythm. A good change of mental imagery after seeing the Babylon the rest of the world wants to see fall, breaking down. I tell myself to listen to more music. In the classical realm, in this time of the life, I want to hear quartets of Brahms and Schubert, and quartets of Dvorak by the Alban Berg Quartet. I will listen to more music, keep in the cd player something I'm wanting to hear, like this one by Carcar of northern Africa. Want to hear the news, turn on the cd player and let it play. Turn all the more inward. I've taken to driving the back roads when I go anyplace. They have few other cars on them. They are the roads people live on, not the traffic roads. The veins, not the arteries. The back roads have better scenery. I have found that the world the way I like it is all around me, the reason I settled in my Blue Ridge Mountain home for the duration. I have the world as I am happy with it all around, this side of the great wall. Why look Out There at the horror show when I can look In Here at a community of people who think something of one another? The changes from generation to generation are happening here as they are happening there, all guided by television, 

nancy graves

I must teach myself not to hope against the flow of history. Must allow historical destiny to run its course; first, because I have no choice. Next, it will run its course no matter what I think about it. Any wishing I could do something about it goes only toward making me a grumpy old bastard. I like my life this side of the wall. So why do I pay attention to the deception coming in from Out There. I have control. I can turn it off as easily as turn it on. Before the corporate takeover of our government, I believed it important to keep up with current events to stay educated in a democracy, bogus then as bogus now. I don't have a need to stay educated anymore. Indifference is setting in. The indifference that follows disappointment. I hear in my head Perry Ferrell of Jane's Addiction wail, Idiots Rule. The song had meaning then, even more meaning now. I will read more and listen to news less. I will listen to more music. I will focus on art projects more. The hard part is realizing that Out There is also In Here. It's all In Here. It only exists for me in my head. I have a choice about what goes into my head. I don't need to hear about Ebola til the next big Fear comes in to replace it. I like being out of touch with the corporate pop world in this time of the life. I like staying at home all the more. I could give the donkeys more attention. I could give the people of my world, my friends, more attention. Caterpillar would like more attention. I could have more naps. The best part will be less of that energy in my mind. In Here is the squirrels at the bird feeders, the donkeys, Caterpillar, good music, writing in this blog journal, which has turned out to be a meditation, even a prayer. It has become a mediation I want to do daily, zooming the mind in on whatever comes forward. 

nancy graves herself

*

THE PATRIARCHY IS OVER

 

the red squirrel outside my window

Lying in bed this morning after waking, I felt like I had a penetrating insight into the nature of God, and by now it's gone. I did not write it down and it went away. I've seen a news report recently saying brain science is discovering the brain is a microcosm of the universe. It sounds outrageous, but how could it be otherwise? A galaxy is a moving spiral. Planets go around one of the galaxy's stars, all of them spinning like cosmic tops. Though we're unconscious of the spiral motion going on all the time, we see it in cigarette smoke rising from an ashtray. It is in water swirling down the drain. North of the equator it turns to the right. South of the equator it turns to the left. Water flows in spirals in rivers, creeks, pipes, wherever it flows. An old tree in the forest dead for a very long time is a vertical column that is a spiral. Our bones have spiral grain. It is water flow that creates our bodies, meaning to me that we are the same as water running in a river, composed of spirals to the tips of our hair. Since everything in the universe is in motion, this tells me the universe is in motion too. A spiral motion the way galaxies flow in spirals, like planets twirl through space in spirals around a moving star, itself in a spiral. I suspect this explains, too, why spirals figure so much in ancient art. We live in spirals and we are spirals, though at our mentally developed level it is too subtle for us to notice. There was a time I was reading in a self-help art book, finding myself totally uninterested. One thing I found in the early part of the book, the only part I read, an exercise to make a spontaneous drawing every day for a period of time. I used colored markers. All I ever drew were spirals. I said, Why only spirals? Because spirals happened. I tried to go against it and drew some rectangles and squares by intent. Next day a spiral. I told myself to draw a profile of a face. I drew a spiral. I stopped doing it after more than a month because I only drew spirals. I wondered if it was telling me I was passing into a new stage in inner growth, like grow into this. I tried to find psychological or spiritual meaning in making spirals every day, not interested in drawing anything else. I found none. Learned not to question so much.

In the last several days or few weeks I've been focusing on the silliness of drawing conclusions. Everything is in motion and every non-thing is in motion. A momentum carries us through time and keeps everything in the flow. Sometimes it seems futile to me to paint still images. A stopped moment, like a photograph, a thousandth of a second in ongoing time. Continuous motion is the nature of life. How does a still image deal with that? Or even how does a moving picture do it? Dance and music perhaps honor the continuous motion that is time. It's by earth's motion in the solar system that we measure time. Time is a measuring tape we use attempting with a finger to outline a square on the surface of a river. That's about how well our minds are able to "grasp" reality, the reality that is in motion, that, like water, when the flow is stopped it makes a powerful lake that will break  violently through the force holding it back. Like in Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, building a wall to suppress the feminine, the feminine goes insane, breaks down the wall and the whole house. This continent and the South American continent had a lot of people living on them for 13,000 years. White man came with white man's insane belief system of superiority over all living beings and in a few hundred years has destroyed both continents. The Amazon rain forest will be desert probably before the end of this century, as most likely the western half of USA will be desert, too, if not the whole continent. This was done in attempts to stop the perpetual motion of life itself. The "primitive" (meaning first, not stupid) people who lived tribally lived in continual presence of the spirit of life, honored its laws, observed its subtle energies. White man comes along like a legion of army ants and destroys everything, even unto self. It has been the nature of civilization all along to deny the feminine, Grandmother Earth.

 

 

 

We've just completed 6,000 years of patriarchy, before which was 6,000 years of matriarchy. My feeling sees the Adam and Eve story a mythological (I don't mean false) story of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. As we humans have done all along when a new belief system takes hold, genocide breaks loose against the people living in the old way. I'd guess about everything from the matriarchy was destroyed with the genocide. Goddess figurines have been found in Turkey among Neolithic ruins. The Old Testament genocides were over the change from the Age of Taurus, Baal the Bull, to the Age of Aries, the sacrifice of sheep. Next, Pisces the fish, the symbol of the Christ. The Christians did their very best to eliminate the Hebrews of the Age of Aries. We are moving now into the Age of Aquarius. Our belief systems are changing fast going into this new Age. How did the song go? Peace, love and understanding. It's about time. Aquarius is taking us into the time of masculine and feminine in balance. This is what women's liberation is about, bringing us collectively into balance. In my personal assessment, women will be actively engaged in everything. The wrinkles are not yet ironed out. We have a large number of women artists at least the equal of the men. Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Agnes Martin in visual art. Adrienne Rich, Louise Gluck, Denise Levertov, all three with recently released collected poems. And they're not the only ones. It was a gradual change from the time of George Eliot writing under a man's name to Jane Austin to Gertrude Stein to Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, to now when there are as many successful women writers as men. This is the balance of Aquarius. Like white men are freaking all over the country around an enword president, hate boiling to the surface again. Boys are taught from birth to dismiss women. It is male culture from the core outward to dismiss women. Patriarchy. It has only been a little over a century that women have been allowed educations and careers. In times when men were largely educated, at least to some degree, the women were not educated at all. It follows that educated men as well as uneducated men would feel superior to women, add to it white man's need to be superior to all else and justification by the great patriarchal text, the Bible, women didn't stand a chance in white man world. It's the same in Asian, African, Middle Eastern.

 

 

 

The whole world is going through at least a century-long upheaval brought on by new cosmologies, belief systems, the old ones disproven, disregarded, done. Elizabeth Warren has the best mind of anyone in our government. I don't want her for president. Republicans would nail her to the cross. They have only contempt for intelligence and they hate it in a woman even worse than they hate it in an enword. USA is the cutting edge of the ship of civilization in this time of putting aside discriminations based in collective judgment for a very long time. The wars over the last century have been burning off the hate generated by traditions all over the earth breaking down and changing, traditional cultures everywhere fading away as the old people die out. Hate radio and tv in America is bringing the hate among us to the surface, alas, very dangerously. But hate is by nature dangerous. I heard Laurens van der Post say in an interview, "Evil is always in a hurry." It resonated when I heard it. Over the last few years I feel like I have found my flow and am happily flowing with it. Somebody comes along in a hurry and it rattles me. I get in a hurry and it feels like I jumped my track. I'd come to distrust hurry in others and self by the time I heard van der Post's interview. I felt like he was someone who had found his own flow. The prophecies say that after this time of war we're in, a thousand years of peace is next, after which comes another period of burning off hate, then hate will be gone from the earth and it will be peace ever after. This is why I call myself an apocaloptimist, meaning I see everything going to shit, then by surprise everything turns out all right. Makes a good story. A thousand years ahead we'll look back at this time as something like the medieval period seems to us now. And the history of this time won't be anywhere near accurate. The issue I had with history all the way through school was it gave no importance to the everyday lives of people living in the time who were not very well off. Possibly, this is the role of art as history, to cover the life spirit history bypasses.

 

 

 

 

*

 

DOMINION OVER

rhododendron

The snow continues with us. The sun came out today and took the temperature up to forty for awhile, melting the top of the snow just enough for it to freeze after dark to make a coat of ice on top. It's not a bad thing; it will inhibit drifting. I'd heard it was drifting in different places where the roads had been scraped. This ice coating will keep it in place. I'm not even going to try to dig out the car. It's too much. The road grader came by in the night and piled the snow from the road into a wall a couple feet high where my driveway joins the road. I could get out if I wanted to, but I don't want to. The mail won't run for several days. Wind-rain-sleet-or-snow has fallen as far into the forgotten past as to-serve-and-protect, only good now for test questions in high school history class. It is days like yesterday and today that I miss a dog the most. Good days for a walk through the woods along the creek at its most beautiful, the waterfalls covered over with ice and the snow on the ice, water flowing behind the ice mask. A good time to walk down there to get pictures. The snow is easy walking and deep enough to cushion a fall. I went down to the waterfalls on a full moon night with about this much snow in my early years when everything was new. The shadows of the tree branches on the snow make one of the wonders of this world. Moon shadows are black. Walking in such a wonderland with a dog is a sublime experience. Alone, it is boring as watching tv football by myself. I can't go walking without a dog. 

 

maple

 

I feel like old man Tom Pruitt at close to the same age I am now the day I went to his door after a gorgeous snow I'd not seen the like of since, told him to come outside and see it. He said, "I seen better." This day was in early October, all the leaves in full color, a few inches of snow so wet it stuck to everything, and no wind. It looked like Candyland. Tom asked me to come in and he told me what he'd seen that was better. A fog settled in the winter night with temperature below freezing. In the morning it was blue sky clear, the sun came up and all the tree branches and twigs were covered in ice and glistening in the early morning sunlight. Everywhere. It was moments like this when I realized that this old hillbilly who appeared to be devoid of an aesthetic sense had one well developed. It was the beginning of my learning the mountain aesthetic. They didn't care about drawings or representations. They had the real, living thing in abundance all around them. I was surprised in the beginning to see how many couples from the area go riding on the Blue Ridge Parkway and around the back roads in the county just to enjoy the scenery. It's something of a tradition here for a couple to go out when the mountains are especially beautiful and ride around on the back roads in a 4-wheel drive pickup. They call it God's country and appreciate it as such. It's a living beauty. They don't talk about it---there's nothing to say. The old-time mountain people lived solitary lives working the farm and hunting. They didn't talk much. I knew one old boy who never said anything standing around with some of the other men before and after church. They'd talk and he'd say, "Aw heck." It's all he ever said, Aw heck. He punctuated everything they said with, Aw heck. In spare time, he made frames for wall clocks with popsicle sticks. Popsicle stick art was his aesthetic. He raised bees, he also trapped coons, tanned the hides and sold them in Wilkesboro. Aw heck used to be a common thing to say, still is among a few people.       

 

spring lizard creek

 

I don't need to go walking in the snow anymore. I've done it. I have memories. An older woman I knew in the latter half of the 1980s, Dewitt Hanes, told me, "To have done something in the past is the same as doing it now." I can look into the woods, see what it's like and be satisfied. Driving up Mt Rogers and Whitetop in SW Virginia, I look into the forest on both sides of the road and know what it is like walking in there. It's the same trees, rhododendron and ferns that grow at my place. A creek runs through it with big rocks good for sitting on. I'm not comfortable in the woods anymore without a handgun that has stopping power. We have red wolves, gray wolves, coywolves, coyotes and big black bears. The dogs run in packs and the bears are solitary. I'm happy they are here. I like having them in this beautiful land that is theirs. But I don't see they have a future in the mountains. Oceans rising will send the coastal people to the mountains. The Appalachian chain could be like the Japanese islands in the not too distant future. It would be gradual, several generations of people moving to the mountains. The towns will become cities and the space between them farms again, maybe. The wild animals have that much time left. Americans tend to have little sensitivity to wildlife. But that's not my concern. I am being a conscientious steward of the acreage I have legal control over. I'm not poisoning it. I'm supplying it with nutrients in donkey droppings, keeping it grazed and fertilized at once. In my time, no chemicals have been on it but for blow-over  and run-off from the Christmas tree fields on three sides. I have in my dominion a few acres of meadow and forest, and the old schoolhouse of Air Bellows, my home. It is my graduate school, the most avant-garde advanced education; no faculty, no administration, no curriculum, just follow my own light. I don't need or want more than this.

 

forsythia

 

In my first weeks in the mountains, having no idea where I was except on a map, the owner of the farm I was caretaking asked the county agent from the NC forest service to come and give us some advice on the Christmas trees that had been planted before my arrival. My only memory of the experience was the forestry man telling my employer about killing deer. He justified it by Bible, "God give us dominion over the animals," and he quoted the verse. To his mind, dominion meant the right to kill. To my mind it meant responsibility to take care of. I realized at that moment the entire western world's interpretation of this scripture is and has been the right to kill. To me, that's tyrannical dominion. Columbus's first voyage landed him on the island of Hispaniola (Haiti and Dominican Republic) southeast of Cuba. Before he left, he and his men had killed so many of the local Indians that had befriended them the tribe could not recover and faded into extinction soon after the white men left. That was step one in the genocide of an entire continent, now with fracking killing the continent itself. White man thinking: dominion is right to kill. White man steps ashore and says, I take dominion. When I was little, a neighbor spoke to my mother about letting up on the kid, and mother replied, "He's my kid! I'll kill him if I want to!" Dominion. The last time she told me of the exchange, I almost said, but stopped myself, "You're my mommy. I'll kill you if I want to." She'd have taken it for a smart-mouth thing to say. They talk about what's wrong with me because I've not had to do with family throughout my adult life, moved as far away as land allows. He's a reader. By the time I left parents, they had lost all rights of dominion over me. I took dominion unto myself interpreting it as the responsibility to take care of. I have nurtured myself through adult life to balance the anti-nurturing dominion that twisted my inner being into such knots I've spent my adult life untying them, one at a time, healing. I hang onto dominion over myself jealously. In this lifetime, it's not available to anyone. About the time somebody starts believing they have dominion over me, I'm gone, long gone. No second chance. I get told I'm just sensitive. I answer, You're right. Don't feel sympathy reading this, please. I long ago turned the lemon into lemonade and by now am grateful for the lemon.  

 

 

openings to squirrel tunnels in the snow

 

*

 

AS THE SNOW DEEPENS

night snow

Snow is falling steadily in small flakes, has been for several hours. I'd venture four inches by now. Not going outside to measure it. Going by how it looks out the window, how high the snow is piled on top of the bird feeders. I feel for my donkey friends and the calf. The snow is coming out of the east, or anyway the wind carrying it is coming out of the east, flowing into the donkey shelter. It looks like the temperature is somewhere between fifteen and twenty. I'd like to be able to give my friends a place out of the cold, the wind and the snow, but it can't be done. They have to take it like a beast. Jenny has been in moods lately, makes me wonder what she'll be like in the morning going out into the snow. I'll give them hay close to the fence where they are not so exposed. It's a cove of three trees along there and the wind current that runs through the meadow doesn't include this corner of the meadow. The three of them are doing whatever they are doing. They might be taking turns through the night to be the one with the back to the cold. Yesterday I saw the calf licking Jack behind an ear and then licked Jack's neck. Jack stood and let the calf do its licking. I saw the calf and Jenny eating from the same small mound of hay, their noses a few inches apart. I've seen the calf munching like that with Jack, too. They have become friends to the calf. Jenny has brought the calf to life. Now that it is lively she has to teach it to stay out of her space. The calf is catching on. It stays back at carrot time. Jenny won't let it approach me for a carrot, so I toss a piece to the calf. When the calf became conscious, it had to start learning the rules. It is in learning process now. I see every day its uncertainty about the rules in a given situation. When it's caught on to the donkey rules, it will be at home and comfortable. I'm catching on that the calf has learned to kick backwards from the donkeys and I stay away from the calf's backside.

 

shadow on snow

 

The birds will be anxious for seeds in the morning. The squirrels and chipmunks will hole up and maybe snack from a midden somewhere close to where they nest. If the snow continues all night, we will have appreciable accumulation by morning. Snowed in. One thing I love about being snowed in is my mind relaxes its ongoing mantra, I GOTTA. I don't gotta nothin. If it can't be done inside the house or within easy walking of the house, it's not getting done. It is a fine powdery snow. I've been told it was really a slick snow. Justin was driving on Glade Valley Road when it was maybe a quarter inch on the road. He said when he was at a place where he had some room, he stomped it to see what would happen, a big pickup. It spun in a 360 and he kept on down the road to home. He loves driving in ice and snow. For him, that spin was the hillbilly equivalent of doing a 360 in the air on a snowboard. On a snowboard would be cool, but he thinks it's a whole lot cooler in a truck. He likes to go out after a good snow before the back roads have been cleared and nobody is out driving. He practices high speed driving at slow speeds in the snow, drifting slowly around a tight curve. It's driving practice for him. He is in full control when he is spinning in the road. He is in full control at all times behind the wheel. I feel safe when he is driving, safer than when I'm driving. Going by what he said about the snow being especially slick, I see these tiny flakes ice crystals showering down. The state's present remote-control republican government has cut funding for everything having to do with the people, and giving tax breaks to big corporations. Snow plows have not been by and won't be for a few days. Budget for the state road crews has been slashed to give the major corporations what they want, which trickles down into the politician's bank account.

 

the new round bale

 

A freak out is coursing through facebook dreading the snow. Mark the calendar, nIne months from today, a baby boom will occur in the South. Mid November. Thousands of kids with the same birthdays. The lumps on the ground out the windows are levelling out. It's like a sandstorm passed through and left sand everywhere, white sand. In the morning it will be big white desert everywhere with trees and fence posts sticking up. I can't help but think the fracking that is fracturing the crust of the North American continent is making desert. Texas will be the first place to go to desert as it's so close anyway. China advanced desert into the grasslands of Inner Mongolia by destroying the grasslands, attempting mass agriculture. Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas will turn to desert next . The Appalachian chain will no longer be the water source it once was. Springs have been drying up steadily over a period of several years. Fracking is fracturing all the Appalachian chain. If you'll look at maps, you'll see rivers start in the mountains all over the world. America's rivers are being dried up at their source. Another century and the Mississippi river basin could be an arroyo. The damage has already been done and there is no reversing it. White man came through, superior to all other races in his own mind, and turned a continent that was a cornucopia of plenty into desert in just a few hundred years. White man is not a good steward. American individualism degenerated in a hurry to self-serving narcissism. Altruism isn't even an alternative. It went poof, like irony.  

 

more snow

 

The snow outside is piling up. It is almost level with just a few humps that a few more inches will level. I'm recalling a year with sixteen inches of snow, electrical and telephone lines out. Neighbor Tom Pruitt walked down the road with a cane in snow up to his knees. He came to the door and asked me to walk up to the barn and put some hay out for the cows. In the meadow I found a newborn calf, born on the snow. I knew I had to do something, but did not know what to do. I decided to pick the calf up off the snow and carry it to the barn, put it down on some hay and let mama take care of it in the barn. Mama would not follow me. I carried the calf to the barn. I carried it back to mama to give her a sniff of it and asked her to follow. She didn't. I put the calf down in the barn, took hay out for the cows and made a nest of hay on the place where the calf was born, carried it back from the barn to the hay nest. The calf was light picking it up at first, but carrying it back and forth it grew heavier and heavier until I was glad to be done with it. I did not feel that anything I did was sufficient to the need of the moment. At the same time, I could not find anything else I could do. Couldn't get there with the truck. Roads not even graded yet. The calf made it. That done, I walked up to Tom's to tell him what I'd found and how I took care of it. I wanted him to know right away in case he could tell me something I could do that I had not thought of. Nothing to do. I sat down by his fire and we talked awhile, him telling me something from his experience that the calf born in the snow brought to mind. I went to the door to look outside to see if snow was falling. It had stopped, but wind was blowing snow off the roof suggesting it was snowing. I saw how easily that snow blew and my mind's eye saw big drifts all over the roads as soon as a wind comes along. It's a beautiful snow. It will be easy to walk in, powdery and dry. Maybe it won't be so hateful for the donkeys, a fluffy snow that offers little to no resistance to the feet.    

 

jack and jenny before the snow

 

*

 

 

 

DONKEY SENSE AND A CAT'S ATTENTION SPAN

jack

 

In the afternoon, I looked out to see where the donkeys were in the meadow. Jack and Jenny were playing chase. They took turns. Jenny chased Jack, then Jack chased Jenny. Eventually, the game of chase got Jack charged up and he jumped onto Jenny's back. She stood still and allowed it. He stepped down and they both went back to grazing. Playing chase and the game turning to serious business, Jenny put her head down and her ears back anticipating Jack biting down on her neck. He followed close by her side, but never made a gesture toward biting her. I am leaving them to work out their relationship without human interference. Every day it is a new feeling between them. I took some sweet grain and some carrots to them a little later. Jack came to me first, braying, wanting to smell my hand to check sight and sound with scent. Jenny walked up for a treat. Jack grunted his growl sound and turned his back end to her. Jenny stopped and stood still. Every time she would attempt to approach me for a bite of carrot, Jack growled at her and she backed off. He kept his rear end pointed at her. His ears were laid back. All the time he was eating carrot and grain, his eye was on Jenny. His muscles were taut. He did not like her approaching me. I threw half a carrot to her and she picked it up off the ground. She couldn't get close enough for me to give her a handful of grain. I poured some grain on the ground for her and some for Jack. Tight tension between them today, mostly coming from Jack. He was wound up, grunting his growl at Jenny every time she came too close to him. He wanted the human to himself today.

 

jenny

 

I was looking at a couple of big books of color photographs by Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher, African Ceremonies. I found some donkeys in a photograph somewhere in Mali. The donkeys were Bethlehem Cross donkeys like Jack and Jenny. I made the mistake of mentioning to a fundamentalist I know that I'd seen someplace they say Jesus rode into Jerusalem on one of these donkeys and forever after, this breed of donkey had a cross on its back. She said it is so, that Jesus riding it put the cross there. All I could say was, "Genetics doesn't work like that." Of course, it didn't mean anything to her, Jesus performed miracles. She told me about the dogwood flower with the petals that have red around the hole at the end of each petal representing holes in his hands. She said he was crucified on a dogwood tree. I couldn't pursue the subject any further. Explaining anything would have glazed her eyes and she'd have balked mentally. I didn't want to go with this, so I changed the subject. That's easy to do in today's America. Span of attention is nonexistent after more than half a century of television, and now cell phone computers. I've found it impossible to keep a conversation going on a given subject for more than a few sentences before an interruption of some sort breaks what little concentration there is. It's become so bad I have lost interest in conversation. Mid-sentence, somebody says, "Hi! How are you!" Jabber, jabber. Gone. Back to the conversation. Forget it. Neither one of us has any recollection.

 

 

I've come to the place that when I'm interrupted I do not allow myself to remember what I was saying that was interrupted. I will not waste mentation trying to hold a conversation together once it has been broken. I refuse to go back to the subject before. Everything has changed. Start talking again, then here comes somebody else. In America it is Rule #1 that we are duty bound to interrupt any two people seen talking. The only way a conversation can be carried on in America is for two people to be isolated from everyone else, no cell phone, relaxed conversation. I despise it in restaurants when I'm in conversation with the other at the table when the waiter says, "Is everything all right?" We have to stop what we're talking about and answer. Every time, I want to pull a Chris Rock on the waiter and say, "Shut the fuck up!" But this is America. We interrupt anecdotes with anecdotes unconsciously. We operate in unconsciousness. The waiters know the etiquette: see two people talking, interrupt them. I go into a restaurant with a friend to have a face-to-face visit, talk about what's important to us at the moment, not to be interrupted repeatedly during conversation. Though it annoys me every time, I'm used to it. Interrupted, I let the last sentence go without any attempt to hang onto it. I refuse to struggle against this cultural trend of unconsciousness. It's the nature of my place and time in the world, so I let it have its way. When the other says, What were we talking about? I answer, I don't remember. Even if I do. Why bother? A new subject of conversation gets started and it will soon be interrupted by the first person to see us talking.

 

 

 

I tend not to talk much of the time, because I dislike being interrupted so much. I've learned to ride the wave of interruptions and take it as the American form of conversation. To an outsider, a television non viewer, I have seen over years the dwindling of the American attention span. It is down to nothing by now. In the 1970s I was seeing the attention span around me about that of a cat's. By now, a cat is a deep thinker compared to an American. It's no wonder our politics has gone off the deep end into unconsciousness to all but money, the American mind. What we have now for government is the result of money being the only. Nothing matters but money. Recalling a statement from a man I know of that mind, "If you're not making money, you're going backwards." The Reagan Revolution created a couple of generations of college graduates unable to make money. Revolutions start in the middle class. We evidently have a revolution of some sort on the horizon. There is so much talk about it, just the talk itself may make it happen. White man is backed into a corner. Democracy was ok as long as white men were the majority. Though still controlling the military, white men are anxious seeing the hold on democracy slipping away. Hence the trend in red states to make laws restricting voting by college students, women, Latins, black people. Doing it out in the open on the evening news and nobody says anything about it of substance. It's like a good idea. The republican collective mind has become so moronic, I've lost respect for everyone I know who is republican. I used to give them the benefit of the doubt. I've learned, give them the benefit of the doubt and watch out.  

 

 

 

I came to the mountains to live a solitary life, though not necessarily solitude. I need the presence of others, friends, people I can count on who can count on me. I need social interactions. I need to talk about subjects of interest with others. I need to hear what others are thinking. I'm drawn to people who like to talk, because I like to listen, though am bored by chatter and can't take much of it. When I'm in conversation with somebody and a chatterer interrupts, taking the stage, I tune out and have even gone so far as to turn my back and start talking with someone else. I understand the impulse to curmudgeon. It's a word that defines me fairly accurately. I don't see any hope for humans to solve any problems created by humans. It's getting close to time for Divine intervention if we are going to make it through this time. I'm curious to see how Divine intervention manifests. It will pass unnoticed by the ones waiting for Jesus to come down from the clouds to wave his magic wand and fix us, heal us of our minds focused on nothingness in the form of numbers, driven by greed for more. We are seeing now that greed built into Capitalism turns out to be the cancer within that grows and destroys the living form. What's next? We will wait and see. Now that Capitalism is challenging Democracy, it might be that a hornet's nest has been disturbed. A whole generation of college graduates with student loan debt and slim resources, seeing their basic American rights eroded unto gone, will not be so easy to dismiss as the working class.  

 

 

 

*

 

LOCKSTEP ROBOTS IN REVOLT

I'm awfully tired of news talking heads questioning what the republicans are up to in their efforts to destroy our government. Listen to the republicans. They, themselves, have been saying since the time of Boss Reagan that their purpose is to destroy the democrat party and put it out of government. Absolute destruction of the democrat party is their stated purpose, over and over. Yet I never hear any commentator or pundit or talking head, even a democrat take note. Questions of what they are doing with the sequester and now shutting down the government go around in circles. The ongoing question is why did they do this or that? Why do they lie all the time? Their stated purpose is to destroy the democrat party. Throw in a black president who is a democrat and we get the racist party in a kamikaze dive, like they think one more lie will do it. I see questions on facebook, What are they doing? They have already given the answer, years ago and have repeated it multiple times. They make their meaning perfectly clear. Harry Reid acts like he's clueless. The comedy I see is their strategies, all of it strategy, working against them. They are wrecking the lives of working Americans in their zeal to destroy democracy, the two-party system, to set up the corporate police state. Their robotic hypocrisy and actions have worked to strengthen the democrat party and is undoing the republican party in this time. Or so it appears.

It would be just as well to be done with republican smokescreens. They follow the definition of republic as far as they can take it. In a republic the people in elected office to not represent the voters. In a democracy they do. Republicans never call what we have a democracy. It is a republic. This justifies that they do not represent constituents. I hear Rachel Maddow moaning that the republicans are undermining and destroying their own party. Where is something to regret? The only problem I have is that they will not self-destruct. In the first years of Boss Reagan they talked about the end of the democrat party because the Gypper got 51% of the vote. They called it a "mandate." Allying itself exclusively with white men, the party even has to dumb itself down. Last election they showed they had dumbed themselves down so far they didn't even see their substantial loss to (don't say it) the enword coming. I've found it interesting all my life that democrat politicians running in a state republicans want have a way of dying in a private plane crash with no indication in the black box of what went wrong. A professional hit. Much as I'd like to see the republican party go under, I also know something just like it or worse would replace them. The republican party serves a venal attitude running through the American people. Evidently, venality is the nature of half the American people. That's an awful lot. Enough to call it epidemic. When I see an expression of venality in somebody I know automatically it's a republican.

 

 

I don't even have to ask somebody their politics anymore. People of a venal nature, people who have a gripe with the world and everybody in it, people who stress the importance of punishment, people who are intolerant of everything not themselves, people who simply don't like other people, tend  to be predictable republicans. Even if they're registered democrat they vote republican. I laugh when a talking head says the problem is both parties. It is not. The problem is only the republican party, the party of stupid, of ignorance, of hypocrisy, of corporate fascism. If you're a republican and have read this far, please stop now. I only write against republicans. I don't want republicans reading what I write. It is not in my nature to embrace the false. Nor will I give the false the benefit of the doubt. I've tried it in the past and it never worked. The republican adherence to the false has pushed the democrats into the realm of the true, not by the will of democrats by any means, but for self-defense against the continuing broadside of lies. The democrats have been cornered into using fact-checker and keeping track of republican lies, exposing them, like defusing landmines. On facebook I saw a fun cartoon on the republican strategy, tell a lie enough times it becomes truth. It said, Tell a lie enough times, you're a republican. We thought Nixon was the greatest liar ever on earth, then the Reagan Junta happened. Then Bush the Second out-lied Reagan.

 

 

 

 

Every day I ask in my head, Why can't these people dead set on destroying democracy in America, the democrat party, the working class and the middle class, the American people, the world economy, be charged with treason, with sedition and sentenced to prison? Nine tenths of the people in prison are less harm to American people than the republican politicians all over the country. I see people I know to be republican and feel sorry for them. Willful robots. I see kids on American Idol with their emotional well being on the line, desperate to become a product, so desperate their emotional self is defeated when they lose. Have we become so tuned by commercials that we want to be commodities, obedient do-what-you're-told automatons? An entire political party of politicians and constituents have been talking in lock step the same lies that are so transparent it is obvious they don't believe them. It continues obvious that they are lying to fool the rest of us. It is a matter of intent, of collectively agreed upon intent. The people of the republican party have committed to ignorance, to stupid, to assassination, and most especially to the root of their value system: hate. It is not an exaggeration to call the republican party the American Taliban. They are the same. Their hatred is turned on their neighbors in the name of Jesus instead of Allah. The white man party is not going away. It will turn the military on the rest of us before it goes under. You may be sure of that.

 

 

 

*

 

  

I, WHITE MAN

Last Wednesday at 12, I went by the Head Start office in Sparta for our BROC lunch there. BROC gives Head Start a certain amount of money and buys books for the library, and they give us a lunch once a year and show us what the kids are doing. Our lunch there was scheduled for this coming Wednesday, not last Wednesday. I walked in, no one in sight. I thought that odd. Went to the men's room, came back out into the hallway and there was a woman I recognized associated with the place, but don't know her name. She was looking at me with alarm, not recognizing me. Suddenly, I realized I fit a racial profile, white man. It is white men breaking into schools and shooting up kids and teachers. Seeing her alarm, I identified myself immediately. I had made a mistake. It's next Wednesday. Seeing that I was not there to kill her and the kids, she relaxed, we laughed.




*

INDIA AND THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE

the green chair by tj worthington

Every day the news tells about the girl in India tossed aside after multiple rapes. We in the west used to think of India as the place of spirituality, land of gurus and spiritual advancement. Indians came to America for money; Americans went to India for spirituality. Now India is a high-tech capital of the world; computers, multi-millionaires, phone centers. It's been a joke for a long time that our robo-corporate phone calls have an Indian accent at the other end. It's really bad calling for a walk-through on a computer problem with the other end barely speaking English. I ask them how to spell what they're saying often. The shrinking world. All the time the world outside the immediate world of my life shrinks, the further I shrink into my own world of the people I live among to interact with. The more we're told what's real is outside ourselves (on tv), anyplace but where we are, the more I find what's real closer to home in my immediate surroundings and inside myself. In my earlier years, I believed what was real was "out there," and by now have come to find it "in here," within. India's status as a holy land seems like it would be a gentle, nice place where everybody was happy. Not so. It seems the higher a place is in the spiritual scale, the more inclusive the place is of human behavior from the best to the worst and all in between.

While India is the home of Mahatma Gandhi, every religion in the world, holy men galore, it has frauds galore too, even worse than our television evangelists. A place that has several super holy men, masters of the way of the spirit, will have the balance of the same degree of unholy people. We only want to hear about India the land of painted elephants, quaint and old-fashioned by centuries and millennia, instead of years and decades, not a gang of street thugs raping and killing young women. This isn't the first. Poverty is out of this world in India. Poverty is what India is known for before the computer age, and the Ganges, the holiest river in the world, and the nastiest. It's water is healing to the faithful. I'd hesitate to step into the Ganges as I'd hesitate to walk on hot coals. I'd say it would be less unhealthy than stepping into the Mississippi, opaque brown and full of chemical runoff from America's farm land, Monsanto, a name as dreadful as Halliburton. Lots of American sweatshops in India. Poverty is the home of crime. Professional thieves that would make Americans quake at the thought of their skills. Our thieves are straight-forward with guns. In India, they slip around and creep up on their target. I heard the thugs that raped and killed the girl used a 4 foot steel rod to hit her with.

You think American prisons are bad? Don't even think about an Indian prison. Those guys they arrested are suffering. If they're not executed, they'll suffer the rest of their lives, every day. Indian warriors can be among the fiercest in the world. Bernie Madoff died and went to heaven compared to what he'd be enduring in an Indian prison. Mountain roads in India have old-timey bandits that would slit your throat with no more tug on a conscience than peeling an orange. India is also having a breakdown in civility like we in the west are having. Too much change too fast, overwhelming poverty, the introduction of a belief system that money as an end in itself. From traditional life in India, Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim, to the modern world is an even greater leap than the leap from traditional American country ways to the modern world. It's looking like India is on the rise in the turning of the wheel of fortune at the same time USA is on the downward slope. In India's case, it looks like the momentum of building a nation is behind the upward movement. In our case, it's American ignorance that created our artificial downward turn. I say artificial, because it was created. It did not occur naturally. We've been on the downward side since the corporate coup in 1963.

In India it takes a woman to be violated unto death, in Afghanistan a woman shot in the head, both of them women wanting education and working on their educations, to draw attention to an attitude of men toward women that is dangerous to women. Misogyny is commonplace around the world of men. Anger at mother and fear of sexuality, religion and false morality, inability to see it in self, project it onto whore, bitch, deserves it, nothing but a whore. Take that bitch! I don't know how women survive men. Some don't. If I were a woman in this world, I'd have to be a lesbian martial artist with a permit to carry a concealed weapon. White man didn't come out of this last election cycle looking too good. And women don't have it any better here when it comes to morality at the hands of twisted men. It goes on here so much it's boring to the news. Also, bullies only pick on defenseless targets. Bullies are the terrorists of school, sanctioned by teachers and administration by not stopping them. Bullies in society pick on the weak because they're easy. Bullies tend to confine their madness for dominance to home. A guy I know lived with his mother's second husband who beat his mama bad and often, until one day at age fifteen, son told mama's husband, "You hit my mama one more time, I'll kill you with my bare hands." No more covering bruises with makeup for mama.


*