TURN THE RADIO OFF

anselm kiefer

It's been something of a day of rest. So beat down and worn out by a never-ending project I foolishly got myself into, yesterday drained my energy like pulling the plug in a sink. Today, I performed the next step like an automaton and got it in the mail. I've settled into this project going on forever and have quit looking forward to it ending some day in the far distant future. Today I have slept until I can't sleep and had to get up. Up is back in that mind drained of energy. Watched an Australian film from 1976, Picnic at Hanging Rock, story made from something that happened in 1900. Girl school summer picnic at a beautiful outcropping of rock called Hanging Rock. Four girls disappear, vanish. One was found four or five days later barely alive. She can't remember what happened. It falls into an unsolved mystery and the survivors are changed. Directed by Peter Weir. Well made film and well conceived. Read some in the van Gogh biography. And slept. Brought three bales of hay from the barn to the donkey lot in the trunk of the car. I've heard talk of snow in the next few days, but didn't pay it any mind, the source not credible. The weather report predicts rain tomorrow and rain Saturday, mild temperature all week. We could use some rain. The ground is dry. It was mud for so long, dry is good. Couldn't work on any art projects today. Paralyzed by weariness of mind. I know not to involve myself in the world of human busyness. I jumped in, knowing better, it went up over the top of my head. I've become so indifferent to this project I don't even pray for it to end. If this project ever has an end date, I will take a quart of liquor out into the donkey meadow, sit on the ground and drink. Sounds awfully romantic. Even too corny for a movie. And presumptuous to think it may someday end. 

anselm kiefer

I've caught myself being presumptuous so many times, I tend to articulate meaning so specifically there is no place for presumption. I don't like to presume. I do, but don't like to. Pulling away from presumption, it seems like it brings me closer to the moment, the now, seeing what is, not what I suppose. This one clue toward finding the now, not supposing, allows the moment to be as it is, instead of wanting it to be some other way. I feel like this endless project is teaching me something about supposing, presuming. Each time we have a communication, I presume this is the time it will be fixed, and I'm always wrong. From here on, I accept it as it is and project no hopes it will ever end, let it do what it does. I still can't believe how complex this project has become. I don't even remember everything that went wrong. Everything. Nothing has gone right after two months. Rather than groan and moan about it, I must accept it as what is happening now. Allow it to be what it is. Can't turn on the radio without hearing about the 100+ kids killed in Pakistan by the Taliban. I don't like to hear it, and turn the radio off. Internet news is full of cops killing unarmed black men someplace in the country every day. Police have become the kkk. Afraid for their lives. This is obvious acting out of John the Revelator's prophecy of the end time. In youth I hoped to live long enough to see what the end time will be like. Now I see what it is like and I don't like being in it. A good time not to be of it.

anselm kiefer

I followed the prophecy years ago, interpreting by the best interpretations I could find, though have not paid much attention to it in the last several years. In my reading of it, I see that everything is done, the vials all poured, all of it, but Armageddon. Small wars in defenseless countries, annihilating them, the US military takes on the people of destroyed countries and calls them insurgents. USA has brought so much misery into the world, at home and abroad, surely some kind of karmic return is happening in US. Tighten up the borders to keep terrorists out, and they break out in school shootings anywhere at any time, inside the border. We don't need them coming at us from outside. Our society has become so dysfunctional, we don't need to worry over doom coming from outside. The depersonalization of the human being has created a terrorist war inside our borders. We have police state now, so it's only going to get worse. Fascism always self-destructs and it takes the whole country down with it. I hope to be in my next lifetime somewhere in Asia when USA self-destructs. I see the whole world coming down on USA like was done in Germany after WW2. The rest off the world will stop USA, after it self-destructs, from ever again having a military. This is the murder capital of the world, incarceration capital of the world, the mood enhancing prescription drugs capital of the world, the cocaine and heroin capital of the world, the homeless capital of the world, the deception capital of the world. It's shocking to me, as one not tapped into television, to see how central television is to the people of the world I live in. Separate from it, I can see it a propaganda device, in ways few everyday viewers would see as such, even if they self-examined. It's subtle, hyper-advanced propaganda. A century and a half of the science of psychology, police state is where it's applied. 

anselm kiefer

All the more reason for me to stay at home, stay off the roads, stay out of town, stay out of involvement in anything. One thing about living with myself, I always have somebody who agrees with me. That can be a setback too, but I look for balance. I stay in touch with my friend Carole, we talk every day at the beginning of the day. It's kind of like morning meditation with the feminine. Many days I feel like the day is complete once we've talked, the rest of it is what's left of the day. A couple of art projects are growing. I must give more attention to my everyday life and less attention to the fascist takeover of the American government. At the same time, it is so interesting to be witnessing the most significant time in American history since the founding, I can't stop paying attention, something more horrific happens every day, here and everywhere. I've had to resign myself to allowing it. It's bigger than me by so much I don't even figure. I have no say in any of it. All I can do is the boycott of one with television and Walmart, a game where I am the only player and the only one to care. I can't take an interest in social causes in a time when everything is about money. America is the new Babylon. I think of Burning Spear's reggae song, Babylon Will Fall. I'm seeing it now in the news every day, the crumbling, the breaking down from a cancer within, the fall of Capitalism. I have a hard time not paying attention to current events for what I see happening. I like seeing it from a mountain glen in a place where a little bit of wildlife is left, a place where hawks and buzzards circle in the sky, a cellphone dead zone.

anselm kiefer

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SUBCONSCIOUS POP-UP

anselm kiefer

The experience of the couple days after Fourthajuly when I alienated a friend has been with me ever since. Mixed feelings. I ask myself why I did it. Answer comes back because every time he visits, he has to pick a fight before he leaves. It is a habit pattern he got with mother's milk. When his mother was visiting the farm in the summers, she picked a fight with her mother before she left. Left in a huff, mad, driving home mad. Next time you see her or him, it's like nothing ever happened. All is sweet and lovely. I've seen the pattern for years, half my life. A few days ago he had a terminal blowout with his uncle, read what I wrote about his missionary zeal, and that was it for me too. "Total closure." This is somebody who talks in absolutes you're not to take literally. In other words, never take what he says literally, because if you go by his words and sentences, he undoes everything he says, makes no sense whatsoever. I'm expected to go by what he means, not what he says. He insists I visit Portland, wants to show me Portland, and Oakland. Some years ago he gave me a tour of Baltimore, the bars. There comes a time I see his neurotic patterns of behavior affect my emotional life, make me question my behavior when he's the only one of people I know who inspires nervous breakdown by having one in front of my face and spewing its energy onto me. It took the buzz in my head three days to go away that he'd given me in two.

anselm kiefer

I don't like the feeling of breaking off with a friend, but I do like the freedom of knowing he'll never be in my face again emphasizing full volume that I must watch some tv show about a serial killer, "the good kind, he only kills bad guys." He was going to send me a box set of the tv show. No thanks. But you'll love it. And Downton Abbey. Another tv show I would love. He's going to send me disks of it. No thanks. But you'll love it. No I won't. How do you know? Instead of cordially rolling my eyes, I explained I don't like English upstairs/downstairs drama. I do not care about 19th century London wealth, nor do I care about 19th century London servants. I care nothing for the period, the genre, that it was made for television. If I wanted to watch television I would. It's very easy. I have thought about this. This is not the first moment it has entered my awareness. I know what I am saying. I do not want to watch Downton Abbey or whatever the hell it is. If you have to send me disks, ok, but don't count on me watching it. This is the nature of our conversations. This is what I go through from the time he arrives to the time he leaves, every time. When I call him a friend, it's despite this and the habit pattern of always ending a visit with a fight. In a way, I've been missing him; it's a bit like he died suddenly. But I do like the prospect of him staying out of my face and no more of the ongoing insult that I don't know myself. This is the only way it's going to happen. He's the one made the decision. I accept.  

anselm kiefer

As it is said in these hills, he can get on your last nerve. A day or two ago I was looking at consciously shedding the bullshitters in my life, while at the same time not quite certain it can be called conscious. I feel like the subconscious did it. It's not something I consciously set out to do. I believe it came from the subconscious, because the urge overwhelmed my conscious mind, took it over, said get out of the way, I'm coming through. Starting to get a little bit of understanding of my subconscious, feeling like I see it sometimes, not like "see," but almost. One day I saw the subconscious as a beach ball, for illustration, and the conscious mind electrical currents dancing around on the surface. When I see that image in the mind's eye, I get it. Finding that image seems like it has been a doorway to the subconscious. It feels like I'm paying attention to what it is thinking. Instead of overriding it with conscious mind, I tend now to let conscious mind go and allow the subconscious come through. When I feel like I've found a flow, this is where I'm now thinking it is, the subconscious. It is slower than the conscious mind. It's flow is slower. The conscious mind can go at whatever speed we want it to. Mine goes slower in the mountains than it did living in the city. By now, shifting to the slower lane I'm finding in the subconscious how I really feel about one thing and another. It appears I'm at a place now where the subconscious can pop up, take over and direct the show by its own will.

anselm kiefer

I believe writing these everyday entries helps access the subconscious too. All the time writing I am looking within for how I feel, feeling it, assessing what I feel, wanting to be true to my honest feelings. Sometimes I leave decisions to the subconscious to chew on. It's that place I call the back of my mind where I can let something float for years and then one day see it. My feeling is that my subconscious came through and told my conscious mind enough's enough. It's the same thing every time. When there is nothing going on but one telling the other what to do, the one being told what to do isn't getting much out of the conversation, already knowing I'm not doing any of it. After hours of being told I don't know what's good for myself, that since I won't watch tv, he's going to make dvds of tv and send them to me. Assault is what I've called it, and the word still fits. The assault is in the repetition. After we get through one thing I haveta, needta, gotta do, that I'm not gonna do, then it's another and another and another. Takes me back to his childhood. ::Boing:: Just had an insight. Both his mother and his grandmother were adults who insisted on being taken for children. He'll never get over it. It's mother's milk that he'll need to be taken for a child all his life. Now I understand why my subconscious knew when to say enough's enough. Seeing him watch television is the same as seeing a plug in a wall socket.

anselm kiefer

I've always "been there for him," willing to go through what it takes to be told what to do without end, dealing with an adult who talks and acts like a child. A review of knowing him shows me a child that never grows, living in an adult body. This behavior of having to inform everyone around him of what they need to do goes all the way back in him. And then I see one of my mother's characteristics in me, reaching out to somebody she feels sorry for, like she can help them. That's what I was doing. I've only seen it work against her. I thought I'd learned long ago to let go of that in myself. Here it is. Maybe this one was grandfathered in. And one of his mother's characteristics in him is getting in your face arguing and soapboxing, forcing a man to hit her to shut her up. Then, YOU HIT ME. And a new kind of hell breaks loose. I can't live with people like this doing a hatchet job to my head. One day I love you, next day I hate you, I forgot I love you, I hate you, I forgot I hate you, I love you. One thing I like about getting old is the freedom to say, Cut that shit out. It is one of many freedoms I have found in growing old that makes me wish I'd seen it all along. It's like these things have to be learned by experience.

anselm kiefer

 

 

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