CHANGES AND MORE CHANGES

john cage

I see a brown thrasher has taken to perching on the wire fence where I give the donkeys carrots in the mornings. The ground the other side of the fence is trampled to dirt with donkey droppings mixed with the dirt, returned to dirt. It must be rich with bugs. I see birds lighting in the meadow going through the piles of donkey droppings for the bugs. Crows scour the meadow in early morning. The meadow has become rich in life forms. I see mushrooms I've never seen before, toadstools. Jack dug out a large circle of dust, tore up all the grass with his front hooves. I was looking at hiring somebody to trim his hooves, but now that the meadow has been his territory long enough it's home, he keeps his hooves trimmed himself. I've seen two of his dust circles he created before on the other side of the creek. All are on a place where the ground is sloped just a little bit. Perhaps it makes the rolling on his back easier to get up. Maybe if the ground were flat a donkey might fall into a turtle on its back situation, all four feet in the air and can't roll either way. Every move a donkey makes is fast, even when it looks like they're moving slow; these donkeys are fully attentive to every moment. They miss nothing. I'm imagining, since a donkey never likes to be vulnerable, the slope helps the donkey get up on its feet fast if need be. They process what they see in patterns of donkey thought, another world to me. I like all their experience with me to be benign, never a gesture that could be interpreted a threat. I don't kick them. They don't kick me. I like that Jack has made the necessary place for a donkey to roll in the dirt. Keeps the flies down, the parasites down. I'd like to do something for them to eliminate their parasites, but their role as bug magnets goes all the way back in their evolution, like fleas and dogs. I see the donkeys have their own bug-control knowledge by instinct from hundreds of thousands of years. Their swinging tails that look like windmills shoo the flies from their rear ends continually.

 

john cage

 

Flopping ears keep flying bugs in the air. I see flies now on Jack's and Jenny's faces and think of documentaries of African children in refugee camps with extended bellies and flies walking around on them. Of course it's a drag having flies walking around on your face, but we're spoiled humans who seal ourselves into air-tight houses and vehicles. We don't spend enough time in the world of insects to get used to them crawling on us. Farmers did. Farmers spent much of their time in silence. They lived in their minds, largely. The farmers I have known were deep thinkers. Their patterns of thinking were pre-Copernican, the Bible their intellectual and spiritual foundation. They don't seem intellectual to us, whose educations include knowledge of the solar system and galaxy, at least to some degree. We understand we are a part of the night sky, not separate from it. It's not because they're ignorant. William Blake was of the same cosmology and he was not ignorant. Because evolution was not covered in their education does not make them stupid. I knew incredibly intelligent men and women who did not believe the round earth theory. It didn't matter to me, or to them, that two cosmologies separated us, major generation gaps. Though I believed the earth to be a ball in orbit around another ball, I couldn't give evidence of it to somebody who didn't get it. Their way is right before your eyes, the obvious; the sun comes up, the sun goes down. The sun is in motion, not earth. I have a difficult time refuting the obvious. I don't know what to say after, It's really not like that. It's something quite different from the obvious. It's the opposite of the obvious. The difference I saw between us was that I saw myself included in the cosmos, the universe. They saw the universe, the cosmos separate from them. It's a big difference. It didn't matter that they watched television shows from satellites.

 

john cage

 

Much is yet unknown to the most advanced among us, cosmologies yet to be unveiled in passing time. Does that make us ignorant now? No more than it makes William Blake or Shakespeare ignorant. Our cosmologies characterize the time we live in. In 1614 there were brilliant minds all the way around the globe. They thought much the same as we do, though different because they had different experience. In my early years in the mountains, I saw the tail end of the people from the old-time ways. Grandpa wore bib overalls and a hat. Grandma wore a long dress and had long hair she kept twisted and pinned up out of the way. She was busy physically with a garden, the cooking, the cleaning up, taking care of everybody. They listened to square dance music. Next generation was the Hank Williams generation, blue jeans and white tshirts with a pack of Lucky Strikes or Camels rolled up in one or both of the sleeves. Skirts up to the knees and hairdos by permanent. Then the heavy metal, Southern rock country, and boys in cowboy boots and long hair. The babes in tight jeans and all lengths of hair. And the California surfer look, the kids in school. Since then, the last generation of bib overalls and long dresses is gone. The Hank Williams generation is on its way out. The surfer look-alike style faded away, replaced by the hip-hop rap style, gangsta, which, by now, has faded into the past. The cell phone generation now is dominant. Just before the cell phone was the Britney Spears look awfully common among teenage girls. These are the changes I have seen in microcosm in these hills. It's the end of the world as we know it every decade, it seems like, or even more frequently. Nascar is now the most watched sport on tv, according to surveys. That's a big change. The television network that purveys fake news as policy is now the most believed news source, as is Jon Stewart's Comedy Central news satire.

 

john cage

 

It is a very different culture we live in from when Little Richard was banging his piano singing Lu-ci-lle, you ran off and married but I-I love you sti-ll. I've kept up to a point. It's become dizzying. I've already been through nuclear threat. I'm not going to do it again. I don't even want to know what's pop anymore. I have my own music in the house from years of listening and buying, I don't need any more in my mind. There's no room. My music file is full. On facebook different people put up music videos. I see James Brown, Night Train, I don't need to play it. I hear it in my head as soon as I see the title. One that just now came to mind, The Jamies, Summertime. I was fifteen the summer it was new. It was in the time of Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On and El Ranch Rock, Splish-Splash, Peggy Sue. I didn't identify the song with summer time. I liked it the way I liked Rockin Pneumonia, The Jamies were a straight-up Fifties Lawrence Welk acceptable family singing group. I about fell over backwards when I looked them up on YouTube. The song had the zip of Gene Vincent's Be Bop a Lula and Carl Perkins' All Mama's Children. Year after year it was the summer song radio stations played for so long the music changed so much it just didn't work anymore except on oldies stations. The vitality the song had then, it has now. Little Richard's Lucille is still beautiful, as is Chuck Berry's Maybelline, as is Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here. Coming in at the very beginnings of rock & roll, I've had the great good fortune to follow the music through several periods of its evolution as a music. Music is coming in from all over the world, everything changing so fast that what we call rock is now one of many genres. I like my Blue Ridge Mountain home. It's time to hunker down a notch further, take a step inward, allow even the thrill of seeing Eric Cantor unseated in DC pass on by as nothing worth notice. The seasons are far more interesting than the dis- and mis-information we're fed through the media, even NPR. I've come to like silence about the best of any form of auditory experience. I like face to face and facebook communication with others. But in between, I like the silence with a wind chime tinging in a light breeze, tree frogs and katydids, the katydids in my ears, all singing together such that I don't know what's in here or out there.      

 

john cage himself

 

 

*

 

A WORLD OF BOXES

kazimir malevich

Talking with different friends yesterday, three, I brought up the subject of the box for some thoughts on the matter. Everyone I talked with said something to the effect of, Who needs a box? These were people who don't have an art expression, though take an interest. It continues in the front of my head that since 1970 we've been in the Post-Modern time, a time in which anything goes. I personally see the Post-Modern period a composite of what was learned through the Modern Period, a kind of universal Dada period. In 1915 a small group of draft-dodging artists from around Europe met in Zurich, Switzerland. They set out to discover art as if none had ever been made before. They acted as something of a cleaver on a chopping block, severed everything that went before and started fresh without reference to the past. They experimented with chance, with nonsense, with the new machine age.  Everything they did was then outside the box. Happening then was Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism. The dozen or so Dadaists in Zurich created a new -ism, totally outside the box, Dadaism. In a period of about 6 months they deconstructed art down to conceptualism. By the end of WW1, they had practiced their art vision outside the boxes, and introduced a new box to Europe and the rest of the world, the box that is not a box, the anti-box. From the end of WW1 to 1969 the world of front-runner artists all over the earth repeated the Dada process of deconstructing art, peeling away superficial layers a step at a time by way of a series of -isms. Surrealism started up in Paris post-Dada, explored interior territory until WW2, after which abstract expressionism in New York came forward. Then minimalism, and Pop, which became an -ism too, and a quick run of new -isms every year unto conceptualism, which revealed the core of what we call art, conception.

 

kazimir malevich

 

One of the better known conceptualist moments was a postcard a "conceptualist" sent around to art dealers in NY and patrons announcing a show at a particular address, a particular time. When the people arrived, it was a locked empty space with nothing going on. The postcard, itself, was the art. I've seen what the Dadaists did in Zurich in half a year repeated universally in half a century, the Modern period. This Post-Modern time started its first cycle in a Dadaist manner where anything goes; realism, abstraction, projection, video, exploring everything. The Post-Modern is a new time of thinking outside the box, but this time with reference to the past, the Modern period. Everybody was too busy watching television and fighting wars to notice that the Modern period, Dada to conceptualism, was the greatest renascence the world has ever seen. Preceding it were the renascence of the classical period of Greece and Rome, and the Renaissance, renascence with an Italian name. The next renascence the Modern period. It was the beginning of a new expansion of mind for collective humanity. Renascences past brought us into Reason. The renascence that was the modern period is bringing us into Intuition. It shows in the evolution of art. It's a long slow process. We still have a world of people who have not caught up with the cosmology of evolution, and even what would be a surprising number, if known, of people who have not yet caught up with the cosmology of round earth. We humans come in all levels of development. I've never argued with someone who believes flat earth. I figure that's their place and their vision. I don't know how to convince someone who does not understand planets and orbits that the earth is indeed round, and I don't believe it matters in everyday life whether someone believes the earth is flat or round. It matters for launching satellites. I believe round earth initially because I was told as a little kid in school it's a fact, like it's fact that George Washington was first president. Get it right for the test. My neighbor Tom would say of the moon-landing propaganda that no man can walk on the moon. The Bible sez the moon is just a light. No man can stand on a light.

 

kazimir malevich

 

Remembering the time he told me his teacher in school said the world was round like a baseball. Little man Tom said, "I aint never seen no mountains on narry baseball." This house used to be the Air Bellows School, it happened in the space I live in, in the space where this is being written. These walls were there. Tom believed he understood baseball, played it when he was a kid. I had to respect his integrity as himself and not let it show that I was tickled. Immediately I saw a baseball magnified to the size of the earth. The mountains would be a hundred miles high. Even the smooth part would be a plain of great high mountains and deep, deep valleys. A ball bearing the size of a baseball magnified to the size of the earth would have huge mountains and vast valleys. His mind really was from another cosmology. He did not need to be converted and I didn't need to be telling him he was wrong, when he was going by experience and I was going by believing what I was taught. He would be disappointed that I was so ignorant to take what somebody else told me without questioning it by way of my own experience. The sun goes across the sky, caint y'see? College boy thinks he knows all about it and didn't even know what a chainsaw was, except for a movie that warped my mind so bad it probably changed my DNA. Jesus brought a new cosmology, love is all there is, summary of the gospels by John Lennon. This cosmology was a little slow taking hold. Finally, all these millennia later, a pope is reintroducing the old cosmology that never went anywhere, as if it were new in a world that never heard of it. This cosmology goes back before gravity. A couple thousand years later, it's outside the box. I continue to wonder what the box is. It comes to me over and over that Western Civ is the box. It is the box that civilization is transcending now. In Asia, Africa and the Middle East, they are transcending their own boxes. My new piece, BIG SUR, is only outside the box pre-Dada. From 1915 on, it's very much inside the box.

 

kazimir malevich

 

Again, I see the box so vast as not to be a box. In conversation with Tom's preacher brother, Millard, who was hard-shell unto stasis, after years of knowing him, I said one day, "If everything is a sin, then I'm free, it doesn't matter what I do when I can only sin." "No, it's not like that." It was quite a time knowing those men from two cosmologies back. I had a difficult time where talking was concerned, because I'm from round earth and understand evolution is the ongoing process of creation. Never use the E-word, it's as bad as the C-word, Communism, the A-word, Atheism, and the F-word. These language restrictions were pre-political correctness. I might make a case for the old restrictions due to limited education, but political correctness is adhered to with the same vehemence in the "educated" middle class. Who needs censorship when we have a population so eager to self-edit? Concerning my own interior boxes, television has so minimal a place in my world as to have no place at all. To go outside my box I could start watching television. That's not even worth an experiment for laughs. I like to tap in periodically for a review of what the people around me are believing this moment and to see what it is they're smiling about all the time. This could be outside my box too, smiling all the time. I could sit in front of a tv with a Bud, a bag of barbeque flavored potato chips and a big smile on my face. Good time for a selfie. Click. Self as Ken doll in environment. Call it art. Instead of doing it, I write it and that is my art expression outside the box. But it's not really. Just sparkles flickering in the universe of the image-ination. Lenny Kaye on the guitar. Keith Jarrett on the keyboard. Go Rimbaud and go Johnny go and do the Watusi. How was that sentence for outside the box? You didn't see it coming. What did it have to do with anything? An outside the box joke, a game I learned from the donkeys, I get a kick outta you.  

 

kazimir malevich himself

 

 

*

 

   

THE WAIST OF THE HOURGLASS

 

van gogh

 

Why do we concern ourselves with deniers of global warming, deniers of evolution, deniers of the scientific method? Way too much attention is given to these people. So a fundamentalist republican in Kansas says evolution is evil, then somebody has to respond to it. I'd like to see no more response to these people. Too many articles are written about them, too much talk time given to them. Somebody wants to say God made a clay doll, blew it up like a balloon and named it Adam, go ahead. I've known people who hadn't even caught up with the round earth cosmology. Cosmologies take a long time to be believed by everybody on earth. And so what if somebody doesn't see it the way I see it. It's 500+ years western civilization has been going by the round earth cosmology. Evolution has been around a century and a half as a cosmology, and just like the round earth "theory," it's the Christian religion that is having a fit again. I weary of making a big deal of people who want creationism. Let them have it. Scientific findings are not a matter of popular acceptance. The earth was always round when it was believed to be flat. Evolution has been the case all the time it was not understood. Evolution and global warming are not dependent on polls, nor are they theories. Gravity is invisible, but it works. Air is invisible, but the air we breathe is our life. Consciousness is invisible, but consciousness is our most intimate self, the part of self that sees our dreams.

van gogh

Unfortunately with global warming, the deniers are the corporate bosses creating global warming. And we can't stop them. They rule absolutely. They make the laws to their benefit paying the legislators who have no interest in we the people except as the elephant to be manipulated at election time. Fundamentalists and republicans have made a very big deal of denying evolution, and they get taken seriously every time, like they have a right to their opinion. Ok, so let them say it. Why respond? When somebody starts talking that nonsense, I'm done. I don't waste my time arguing. I'm just gone. It's the same with Teabaggers. They are cement-heads parroting party-line like good Soviet Communists. They have nothing to say to me on the matter and I have nothing to say to them. At the same time that I want nothing to do with that mind, I have to back up the investigative opposition that stands up to the nonsense of Faux news fiction with fact checkers, pointing out the bullshit as it drops. As strategy, this is necessary. I do see the deniers need controlling. I'm glad we have these people watching them closely to cry foul, stop their momentum with a fiction before it starts. I don't see how somebody can pay such close attention to them to ferret out the deceptions and make them public. These people are a valuable service to the rest of us. When misinformation is repeated enough, it becomes reality to the people who fall for it.

van gogh

Looking back on this time from the future will be about consumerism and greed, decadence to make Roman decadence look respectable. When I look at our place in the continuum of time I see the whole of humanity passing through the waist in the hourglass from the civilization that went before, horses, wagons, candlelight, to machines, technology, electricity. It is a time of old belief systems that have been nurtured so long they became traditions, breaking them down, taking everything down to the zero point between plus and minus, cleaning the slate. I'm wondering if the demise of the economy as we know it could be its conclusion in self-consumption, clearing itself out of the way to make an opening for whatever economic system it will evolve into. This time of population explosion will last as long as oil lasts. The culture oil created will change into what's next as radically as we changed into oil culture. My feeling is the cultures that follow oil abundance will be what is left after a major die-off. Then the new ways will emerge that possibly will characterize the nature of human civilization as it will be from there on, until the next big change. I don't mean any of this like prophecy. It's just the flow I see from my own place in this world.

van gogh

*

SLOW GROWING

jean's african violet



Years and years ago I made an attempt to grow an African violet and it didn't work, right away. Overwatering rotted the roots and that was it. I was apprehensive of the one above when Jean left it with Jr not long before she died, something for him to remember her by. He kept it on the kitchen table and I looked to the watering. It baked in the sun, which I didn't know worked against it. I thought it had to acclimatize. I've been told it was a desert plant, so I figured sun was good for it. It is, but not that good. After watering it looked good. The day of Jr's funeral I asked his niece to take it home with her. She'd professed to have several. She's good with African violets. Like everything she says, I neither believe it nor disbelieve it. I wait and see. A few weeks later when I went to the house to get some water when my pipes were frozen, I saw she'd left the violet, meaning, I suspected, she didn't know the first thing about violets and was not the violet gifted one she professed for herself. I brought it home. It lived good here in quite a lot less direct sun. I didn't quite trust myself with an African violet, but I'd kept this one living for 2 years. I must have the rhythm of watering it about right. I decided to repot it and maybe improve its health. I believe Jr would have wanted me to take it. It's my memory of Jr too.



Hope wiggled its hind end in my face this morning. Nextdoor neighbor, Allan, stopped by this morning on his way in one direction or another. He said he had come in the back road last night at 11:30. Approaching Tom Pruitt's empty house, he saw cat eyes on the porch. He pulled his car into Tom's parking place shining the headlights onto the porch. It was a black cat, a black skinny cat, that ran under the porch out of sight. I walked up to Tom's house at 9 this morning, walked around the house calling TarBaby. Perhaps, goes my new thinking, TarBaby got away from Jolene and went as far as Tom's house to go hang out, stay away from the dogs. It sounded like TarBaby, esp the skinny part. He does know how to keep himself in fresh meat.



Cats do have a way of going away for several weeks and turning up. I've given up hope so much I don't know how I'd handle it when he walks in the door. Yes I do. I'll pick him up, if he'll let me--he might be in his wild mind that could take a little time, a few hours to settle back into domestic mind. He might have been under the house, at least in hearing distance of my calls to him. I've seen many times in the past that when a cat is in wild mind, it doesn't recognize its name, not even the voice or the sight of the most familiar human. If that's what TarBaby is doing, I'll have to leave him to it. He might have gone to hide wounded too, to heal himself before he came home. I can't know. One thing I learned from living with cats is I do not understand cat mind. Don't understand dog mind either. Don't understand human mind. I'll just say I don't understand mind.



There are a few things I can recognize a cat's thinking when it's close to mine. We're not very far apart, except we have the forebrain, they don't. The forebrain is what got us put out of the Garden. We tend to think about ourselves all the time. Cats and dogs seldom or never think about themselves. I know they're aware of themselves by name, by wanting, by reflection in a mirror. I put a mirror on the floor, leaning against the wall, for them to become aware of what they look like. It' isn't long before they figure out it's themselves. They take an interest in it as themselves once, then never again. They see it, recognize it's self, but don't look. Yet, they're aware it's them. They don't have to look again because they've seen it. I've held one of the cats up to see self in the bathroom mirror I use for shaving. Each one gave their own eyes a split-second glance and never looked at self again. I felt like it made them a little nervous not wanting to see self.



They are tremendously unlike us in this way. When they see something once, they've seen it. Don't need to keep on looking at it. Once they see it, they know it's there, and that's all. If it's something to eat, they'll take a little time to deal with that, but when it's done, it's done. They don't fix their attention for long periods of time like we do, and they don't dwell on the past or the future, their own status, their self-esteem, or worry. They don't have the forebrain to focus their attention on themselves first and all else through that filtering lens, which distorts such that what we call reality is, indeed, the same as a dream. Each individual's reality is her/his own dream. It wasn't very long ago that Western mind believed the earth was flat like a table and the heavens revolved around it, which time lapse photography of the night sky illustrates. All the stars, planets, moon, sun, go around us. It kept shipping lanes close to the coastline. Now, anyone who believes the earth is flat is considered completely out of touch, dismissed. It will be like that with evolution in another hundred years or more. Before Newton named it gravity that kept everything on the ground doesn't mean gravity started that day. Planet Earth went round the sun when people believed it didn't. I'm amused by the present day Christian response to evolution, like it's something you can vote on. Vote NO on the evolution amendment. Unacceptable. Therefore, we don't have to believe it. It's not like gun laws you can say, "my cold, dead hand," about. In the 1920s, an artist in Paris, a Surrealist, exhibited a framed mirror in a show, across the bottom of the frame written, MONKEY.



My first weeks in the mountains, I was in conversation with 2 NC forestry men, about Christmas trees on the Stern land. One of them was a mountain boy and the other a city boy. While we walked from one place to another, they were talking about hunting. The mountain boy said the Bible said God gave us dominion over the animals, meaning we can kill them. My head swum a little bit over that one. I took dominion to mean responsibility to take care of, like a king's dominion over his people. They're his responsibility to look to their good. It didn't always work out that way. Some kings were benevolent and some were tyrants. There it is, dominion means one thing in theory and another in practice. Why not just call it tradition? It's tradition we kill deer and everything else. It's human tradition. This was some of my very first encounters with country people, and I found it a bit inexplicable he had the need to justify killing deer to eat by the Bible. We justified genocide on the Indians by the Bible. It was used to justify slavery.



After 2000+ years, I wonder when we will start living by the New Testament. Back then, He said the Old Testament time was over, done, accomplished, fulfilled, finished. The new time is here. It's about loving the people around us, taking care of the people who can't help themselves, basically just getting along with others as the secret to a good life. Over 2000 years ago. It didn't take that long for the humans to catch on to the earth being a ball spinning around a ball of fire. From the way things are in Christendom in this time, it's like the message of Love never took. It looks to me like it translated down through time as tell-other-people-what-to-do. I don't know what that says about humans unless it's a slow process to transcend our animal nature after so much time in animal form killing to eat, and all the territorial mind that dogs make good examples of. Evolution is a slow process. It has all the time in the world. It's ongoing. I think of it as the equivalent of the growing process, like they're linked as one. And it also doesn't matter what I think about it, like it doesn't matter what I think about gravity, or anything, really. When a big wind comes through that blows down a large number of trees, it doesn't matter that I understand the wind. It only matters that I know how to use a chainsaw. But if I'm going to fly a plane, or work on a sailing ship, I'll need to understand the wind. I guess it's whatever my reality requires at the time.