UP FROM THE MIRE

sophie taeuber-arp

I have a feeling I've found a core issue in how I "believe" now in relation to how I was brought up to believe in the Kansas version of American Fundamentalism. The adults in my world throughout childhood, even unto adulthood, then peers, believe going to church and believing in Jesus you'll go to heaven when you die. I never found in my child's investigative mind any confidence that anything was worth a "reward" after I die. Only after dying is important to my mother's way of thinking, taught repeatedly, relentlessly, that it's all going to be gold and angels when we die. No more sorrows, no more pain. Going up to heaven to be with Jesus when I die. Well, maybe so. What about from now until I die? I have a life to live. I abandoned scriptures as soon as I escaped parents' church that taught the words of Jesus as commandments: you better not or you'll go to hell, Jesus sez. I asked preacher about love your neighbor. Love, he said, has a spiritual meaning. It's about life in heaven, not here on earth. My questions I didn't bother to ask after a certain point when I learned the answer to all my questions was it has a spiritual meaning that we're not meant to understand. Everything to do with love had a spiritual meaning that we're not to understand til we get to heaven where we'll live in idle luxury at #1 Gold Brick Rd, evidently an apartment complex. There, I can love my neighbor, because my neighbor is with Jesus too. Fear is all I ever heard about God and Jesus. God is meant to be worshipped in fear, fear the Lord thy God, forever on alert to be afraid of God. He'll come like a thief in the night, so you better look out. He's gonna getcha and you won't even see it coming. He'll catch you in a sin and condemn you to hell, eternal damnation, so dramatic, burning up in fire for eternity, Eeeek. And it's not even certain I'd go to heaven though I did get saved under duress at age 7. Say no and you go to hell when you die. Ok.  Just say yes that you believe that Jesus is the son of God. Ok. Yes. You're saved. At the time, I felt it awfully hollow. Just say I believe something I don't know anything about and I go to heaven. Logic wasn't really accessible to the 7 year old. It didn't seem to inhibit the preacher, either.

sophie taeuber-arp

And there was God the judge who kept track of every sin I ever thought, let alone did. There was no living without ongoing guilt. God sez NO. Mommy sez You better NOT. Preacher sez You'll go to HELL. All of them saying, You'll be SORRY. Through the time in that belief system, I believed it because adults told me to. It really didn't add up at school. The kids from my church always carried their bible on top of their books they carried between classes. Ever to be alert to win a soul to the Lord. I refused. At school was where I had my life as myself. I was a shy, inward kid, living in total uncertainty about everything. I always had to figure everything out for myself. I'd catch on by watching the other kids. About my senior year I started catching on a little bit. I took up reading novels. Actually read Dr Zhivago senior year on my own; it was new in paperback. I don't think I retained any of it, but got through it. Read Ben Hur senior year on my own after seeing the Charlton Heston movie. Oh I thought it such a great movie. Big Hollywood spectacle with cool chariot race. In the late 1980s I met a granddaughter of Lew Wallace, who had lived her life in the family wealth provided by Ben Hur royalties. She was a wonderful human being. She had a severely retarded son she raised herself, never institutionalized him. He came along very well with a sense of self as valid. In school I saw that most of the other kids were not as repressed by churches. I had a cousin who went to a Congregationalist church and wondered what was wrong with my parents for going to that nutcase cinderblock box church with folding chairs and honky tonk piano and a dramatic preacher. I never figured it out either. I was envious of cousin for getting to go to a sane church. The luck of the draw. When I started reading, my horizon grew until in 1988 I saw the curve of the earth from a plane at sunrise over Germany. It's no big deal visually, the same as a photograph in a book, but mentally it's a gigantic deal. Reading opened up history to me. School history was dates of wars and names of generals. I wanted to find out what happened, how the people lived in those times. I cared nothing for the military mind as history. 

sophie taeuber-arp

The deal about winning souls for the Lord is it will go better for you in heaven, something like the Mary K Cadillac. That's for if you're really zealous and win souls one after the other and never slack. It really broke for me when I discovered the beatniks and Alan Watts. The beatniks were a thumb to the nose at religion and politics. Henry Miller planted seeds and set saplings asprout. It wasn't the sex part about Miller that appealed to me---there is plenty of sex writing to go around---but his attitude toward life. He taught me that the people of my everyday life are every bit as important as celebrities and the famous, even more important. He taught me to pay attention to the people around me and to value them as themselves. This was wholly new to me. The only thing that mattered about somebody else from the church perspective was what kinds of sins they're committing, how best they can be judged. Punishment was the thing. Couldn't let anybody get away with anything without being punished. The French Existentialists gave me a philosophy I resonated with as my own. By the time I started college, five years after high school, I was well educated in Existentialism. There was a time I'd longed to go someplace like Chapel Hill where I could take courses in Existentialism. The existentialist writers got me through my life under martial law by duress, took my mind to another world where it seemed like sane people lived. I learned a great deal about the French Underground during German occupation. I learned about several European writers I read then and later. Those two years I have come to think of as pre-school where I taught myself how to read and thereby how to start thinking for myself. Reading opened me to a world of sanity, knowledge, intelligence, living without fear of God's damnation. I'd been fed so much nonsense about God, especially the guilt, it took fifteen years, two seven-year cycles, attempting to find out what's really the case where God was concerned. I already knew that what I came from was not it. That was the starting point of my search for what really is the case. Something new happened when I discovered writings from the East, Buddhism the most attractive for its clear explanations of matters of the inner self. 

sophie taeuber-arp

Learning to conform to a Japanese, for example, school of Buddhism, it seemed like the religion and the culture were so interwoven that the religion outside the culture would be pretentious. It's the same with Western culture and Christendom, interwoven unto inseparable. I don't mean disciple of Christ Christendom, but religion. It still bothered me that Buddhism was a religion. I thought meditation might be an interesting path, but didn't know how. Thought it had to be taught. There wasn't even a yoga class in Charleston in the 1960s. It was in the Charleston years that I pondered away the nonsense I'd been taught in the earlier years. It was in those years I chopped off all that went before. It was my own inner Dada period, where I chopped off the past and began at a new starting place that had never been attempted before. Looking back from now I can see the Divine hand was with me in that time, putting self in touch with several people who became major influences, not as teachers. The influence of their integrity as intelligent, compassionate human beings without religion freed me even further from religion I knew by then to be a shell found on the beach, the life long gone from it. I came to see that living in this world is what the scriptures are about. The scriptures all around the world, all down through time. They're about living with inner peace in this world. It's done by regarding everyone we come in contact with in the course of a day with an open compassionate heart, a child the same as one's own, a man the same as a brother, a woman the same as a sister. Respect for the self in others. I overlook things I do that aren't quite right and things I don't do that I say I will. I feel like allowing others by overlooking expectation, just allowing the other to be self, is all it's about. Allowing. When I found the self in others, it became automatic for me to feel compassion and understanding. The day I finally broke through to love that had been high hurdle for me came from reading in Meher Baba's discourses that understanding is the same as love. I said, Lo! I can do that. I did have a spirit of understanding. Then love was easy. The simplest thing Jesus said, no parables to mull over, but a straight-forward simple sentence, God is love. 

sophie taeuber-arp herself, 1889-1943

*

A QUIET PLACE TO GO

The cold is moving in. This year I must find some fleece-lined indoor slip-on boots to wear in the house on the cold floor. And some heavy socks. This floor is so frigid in winter I want to stay in bed all the time or sit with feet up. I don't mind, however. Humans have lived with cold floors in winter as long as we've had houses. I don't care to spoil myself to central heat, air conditioning and the other luxuries. I like living with the elements, like living in a house that is not air tight. I like to feel summer and feel winter and all the weather in between. I like intimate association with the weather the same as with the world of the living, such endangered species as trees, rhododendron, ferns, running water, the animals that come out at night. I like having them around. I like it that coyotes and bears roam freely around my house. The only marauder I have is a coon that is throwing the roof off the birdfeeder in the night to eat leftover sunflower seeds. It's easy enough to replace the roof in the morning. Three possums lived under the house for awhile, until coyotes ate them. Hawks get the birds that come to the birdfeeder. They can't maneuver in among the trees; they wait outside the trees for birds flying out of the tree zone. I dreamed a few nights ago of a big pileated woodpecker pecking on the side of a dead tree, the standing trunk all that was left, the bird clinging to the trunk like they do, that red hammer-head digging for snacks.

 

 

One summer afternoon some years ago I was in the woods across the road, standing on a moss-covered rock beside the creek that runs to the waterfalls. I heard yip-yip-yip-yip, looked in the direction of the sound and saw a pileated woodpecker flying between the trees straight at me with another one close behind it. Both flew about two or three feet above my head, both yipping, like two jets flying through the trees. It was a thrilling experience. Another year in winter I was walking on the old back road along a ridge that dropped off rather steep on both sides. A crow flying low in the trees flew up over the ridge just a foot or two above my head. I heard the sound of wings and thought of the old hymn, Come Angel Band. Once, driving down my road from Air Bellows Gap Road , a crow flew a couple feet above the hood of my Toyota pickup, about where a hood ornament would be. It flew there looking back at me on either side as it flew. It went about a tenth of a mile with me. Twice I've had a redtail hawk do the same in the same stretch of road. The hawk, too, would turn its head sideways and look at me. I don't know if they were telling me they recognize me and my truck as a friendly who doesn't use a smoke-pole, or having a look at the human inside the moving shell. I've had this affection for the living beings I share my world with as long as I remember. My grandmother taught me appreciation for the world of the beings that can't talk. She taught me to transplant flowers so they don't die. She was the best teacher of my childhood.

 

 

I've come to see that this forested mountain I live on, and the culture of the mountain people, as well as the house, all come from the places I found comfort in childhood. A large acreage of woods was beyond the back yard, giving me a great area to play Indian in. The woods were my playground where the tension I carried from home relaxed. It was a safe zone where I was not being punished or berated. My grandmother lived in a room over the garage. She was my comfort in that she knew what I was going through and she allowed me to spend as much time with her as allowed. We worked jigsaw puzzles, listened to Grand Ole Opry, and talked about whatever came up. She always had a male canary singer. She borrowed a hen from a neighbor and her beautiful yellow singer produced little ones. She gave me one of the babies, which I kept until it eventually died of old age. She taught me to love canary song. She taught me how to catch a bird in a cage without hurting its wings. When I was new in the mountains I noticed everybody talked country talk like she did, using words like aint, them and other colloquialisms my parents corrected me for using. They didn't like grandma. Grandma was my lifeline. None of her kids liked her. I heard from different sources that she was a difficult woman not many people liked. She was the one I loved in the family. She was my mother hen. We kept a family of Cochin bantie chickens, a half dozen, started with a hen and rooster. They were black with feathers on their feet. She was particular about her chickens like she was with canaries. The four chicks became my pets.

 

 

I did not learn until I'd been in the mountains about thirty years that her mother and dad went to Kansas from East Kentucky, Pulaski County. It explained why mountain culture was so comfortable to me at the beginning, because familiar. It was my culture as I picked it up from grandmother, who was the same as a mountain woman, though she lived in Kansas. I've heard that two of her brothers were fiddlers. She played a guitar. And I learned her husband, my grandpa who died seven years before I was born, came from East Tennessee, Bledsoe County. Both places are in the Cumberland Plateau. I now live among the woods that were my childhood refuge and grandmother's culture. It's the world I live in. Also, my house used to be the Air Bellows School, where they held revival meetings in the evenings during summer. In the house I have school, another refuge in childhood. I loved going to school, hated going home. It was so very good to be someplace where the teachers that also served as guardians were affectionate in their attention. They were sensible, never flew off into an egomaniacal fit. They were intelligent, even rational. They were the guardians of my world that was safe. Punishment was not the purpose. The schoolhouse is the other part of my world that came from the places I went to for shelter from the storm of undiagnosed mental illness. To a great degree the church was important in childhood for refuge. The preacher was a man I could respect, a man who read books and studied the Bible deeply. The church was a comfort zone. Daddy was on good behavior in church.

 

 

I had no idea what lay ahead in 1976 when I settled the plan to move to the mountains and work manual labor on a cattle farm. It was  the same for me as throwing a dart at a map. I stepped into the future with no idea where I was, except on a map. I'd never heard of anything around here. All I knew was Blue Ridge Mountains, gravel road, lots of woods, lots of meadow, a couple of cemeteries, some old homeplaces, remains of family farms. It seemed to somebody who had never been out of a city, but on the road between cities, like the edge of the universe, land's end, the boonies to the max. That was all I knew. Of course, I'd heard of Appalachian poverty by way of photographers Walker Evans and Doris Ullman, who made Appalachian poverty beautiful. I never saw any of that Appalachian poverty. I saw old farming people. The poverty pictures come from coal mining regions, and there's no coal mining here. We have plenty who have gone to West Virginia or Kentucky to work .in the mines and retired back home. The hands of every coal miner I have shaken are hard as stone. The old time hillbilly farmers had hands of stone too. No matter what the man's character, a man with hands of stone I respect for all the really hard work in those hands. In a way, they intimidate me, because I have some insight into their commitment to a lifetime of hard labor every day, getting drunk on weekends. It's what you do until you die. I could not live a routine that goes on without end, never anything different or new, no curiosity, bent to the plow, a human mule paid the same as slave wages, not quite enough to get by on.

 

 

When my parachute put me down in a remote spot I'd never heard of, it seemed random in the doing. It seemed like chance and circumstance, like letting go and floating free to see where I land. In that time of the life, I was paying close attention to chance, playing with chance, even attempting to flow with chance and see what happens. I let go and gave chance the rein to see where it might go. I'd made nothing of my life using mind. Thought I'd give not-mind a chance. I wrote mind off as a failure---my mind, anyway. Been through a lot of school, read a lot of really good books, known some interesting people, and still didn't know anything. I continued adrift at sea within. I'd thrown everything to do with God out of my life. I gave no attention to the supernatural. I became an existentialist, not the intellectual writing books kind, but the everyday life kind, the kind that sees this physical lifetime is it, same as the church I grew up in. The preacher was a Swede from Minnesota. It was the same religious belief system in childhood that made Ingmar Bergman the existentialist he was. It did the same to me. It seems like I feel Bergman films from the inside, because we were created by the same belief system that both of us rejected as a dreadful fairy tale. I first discovered reading by way of fiction by Camus, deBeauvoir and Sartre, for two years. I had found writers who saw it as I saw it. DeBeauvoir and Sartre, each had a series of novels of the French Resistance during the German occupation. I read all their novels through the course of time in the Navy and some of their philosophy, plus plays by Sartre and Genet. I was using this time in the Navy to learn how to read with comprehension. These are the people who taught me to read. They prepared me for Freshman English.

 

 

By the time I came to the extremity of needing a major change, giving chance a chance, the Divine hand started guiding me in seemingly supernatural ways, like messages in everyday events, things people say. It seemed kind of eerie, like a consciousness was watching me. It also felt interesting. I'd been reading some Hindu and Buddhist writings. These chance occurrences began to have an order and pointed me to Meher Baba's center between Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach, a hundred miles north on highway 17. I wanted nothing to do with anything like that. I was bored with rock stars and gurus. I wanted a quiet place where I could be entirely alone and not be bothered. My initial plan was to take a bus to some unknown small town in South Carolina, rent a cheap motel room until I ran out of money or got it, whatever it was. During three days and nights there, I got it. The direction I called Forward turned 180 degrees. I think of it as the turning point. Shoot an arrow straight up, the farther it gets away from the source, the slower it goes until it finally stops, turns and falls back toward the source. I'd spent my adult life, theretofore, running away from a stifling belief system's interpretation of God. In just a few days at the Center, all my questions were answered by picking up books of Meher Baba's words from a communal bookshelf, opening one randomly and reading the first paragraph my eye fell on. Each time I did that, it was a direct answer to a question that was in the front of my mind. Looking back from now, I can see those three days were the where and when my light was turned on. All my questions were answered and I came away with a whole new set of questions. Mountains seemed like a good place to go.

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

ON THE ROAD TO THE WILLIE NELSON CONCERT

 

 

It's been a string of lazy days here. I let good days go by that I could have been doing some necessary outdoor chores, and let the time slip away. Got a Willie Nelson show coming up tomorrow night in Roanoke. I'm resting toward the drive. I'll be driving total of six hours probably. I'm not taking the interstate, but the highway from Galax to Woodlawn to Hillsville to Floyd, where I'd like to stop for dinner, then on to Roanoke. It's a beautiful drive. Beautiful country through there. It's the region where the events of the movie LAWLESS took place. None of that will be there, but the landscape. Southwest Virginia is beautiful mountain scenery, mountains you can roll with on the highway, flow this way and that, up and down, fenceposts, cattle, horses, old farmhouses with gingerbread along the edge of the roof. I want to leave in plenty of time to relax in the drive and enjoy the ride. Kathryn, who will be with me, loves this part of the world too. I've driven the highway to Roanoke in the mid 1980s many times, know it well. The road will not have changed much except for through the towns that grow more every year. Thought I'd take the Parkway to 52, 52 to 221, 221 to Roanoke. Interstate would be faster but on interstate we could be anyplace in USA. Interstates and malls are the same all over the country. Might take interstate on the way back when it's dark.

 

 

 

My mind went to work looking at the driving in a time when my energy isn't what it one time was, then walking no guessing how far from parking space to door, then from door to seat no guessing how far. The sciatic nerve in left leg is acting up. It will be as far to walk back to the car as from car to seat. I decided to take a cane, in case my energy gives out inconveniently. I have Jr Maxwell's cane I bought him to replace one he ran over with the car. It is one of those lightweight shiny aluminum canes, adjustable in length with a good rubber tip for grip, and a foam rubber handle. It will look like I just left the hospital. With Kathryn's white hair and my white hair with Farm Bureau ballcap and the hospital cane, we'll get every senior privilege there is. I'll hear "Sir" a dozen times. This is, after all, the South where older people tend to be regarded with respect. That's changing, of course. It's all right. We won't be the oldest ones there. Willie is ten years my senior. I won't be the only one with a cane. A cane makes a good martial arts weapon too. It tears me up that Steve Lewis will be playing in Woodlawn that night. When it comes to my preferences, I'd rather go to a Steve Lewis show than a Willie Nelson show, but the tickets are in hand and it's basically a gift to Kathryn, who has loved Willie Nelson's music about all her grownup life. I never paid any attention to him until I heard an interview with him on NPR about his 80th birthday, and took an interest in him. This show will pump me full of appreciation for Willie Nelson. Gonna see a lotta Jack Daniels and Harley Davidson tshirts. Maybe I'll get Kathryn a Willie Nelson tshirt if she'd like, you know, for been there, done that, bought the tshirt.

 

 

 

It's the kind of place they might ask Vets to stand up and be honored. I'd hate it, but I'd stand and be embarrassed seeing people nearby gaping at me in admiration and clapping like it's participation tv, a white-haired Vet, Lord Have Mercy, and I'd be thinking, Don't ask how much I hated it. At the time. Since, I've come to see it as one of the most valuable times in my life, perhaps it. The draft took me out of my life and provided time to look at my life, look at it with distance and a cold eye. I came out of it very different from when I went in. Looked and acted the same, but something major had changed inside. A change of direction. A change from unconscious to barely conscious.  It was a time of making some major life decisions I've not regretted since. Came out of it a little bit educated in Existentialism after reading so many novels, plays and essays by French Existentialist writers. Their books were like feedbags for me. I had found the philosophy that accorded with who I am. It started with Camus, who pointed me to deBeauvoir, and Sartre. They turned me on to Jean Genet, who could only write in prison. They turned me on to some pretty heady writing. By the end of those two years of reading every spare moment, I was able to read with comprehension, had learned a great deal about WW2 in France, the French Underground, had developed an interest in French writing. From there I started college. Came out of high school a moron, not by IQ test score, but certainly by lack of understanding how to live in this world. I felt like I was in prison the whole time. But I needed it. It was better than land prison. They let me ride the ocean and paid me to do it. The intimacy with the ocean was worth everything that got me there, like intimacy with the mountains in this time of the life is worth every experience that made my path to these beautiful hills that Ralph Stanley calls the hills of home.  

 

 

 

I don't believe they'll ask Vets to stand, but wouldn't bet against it. Don't expect it. But know better than to expect anything. I know better than to expect the concert will even happen. I know better than to think I'll wake in the morning. There are so many hundreds of thousands of variables between here and there, I don't even attempt to think about it. One thing living in this world has taught me, do not expect. Just don't. Expectation never works out. It's always something else. And then I'm so disappointed I miss what's happening. Kathryn has raised four girls, two husbands, and is now taking care of her mother. She's not overrun with expectations either. We're both in a good place in that way. We're free enough of expectation to allow the show to be what it is. It's a legitimate expectation that it will be a really good concert, but it's not certain. No worries. We'll both go open to the moment and receive what it has to offer. For me, it's about being with Kathryn, who I don't see often enough and haven't seen in awhile. I'm looking at, for myself, six hours with Kathryn, Willie Nelson the turn around point. I want to give Kathryn a break from the caregiving responsibility that after awhile becomes something like dragging a cinderblock tied to one ankle. It feels good to let go of that cinderblock for awhile. No problem putting it back on, but it feels so good to simply have a break. Mama will be watched over by granddaughter and great granddaughter. It will be a fun time for all concerned, I expect.

 

 

 

 

 

*



 

GROWING INTO LOVE

 

There it is. American so-called Christians don't want to help the poor and will not do it, no matter what. There are exceptions, like the Sparta Methodist church. My early years were spent having the Old Testament rules and regulations repeated unto belief system that what Jesus did had a spiritual meaning that doesn't apply to living in this world; you're to love the brothers and sisters in your church. Love your neighbor means to me the people around us, next door neighbor, people in the same restaurant, essentially everybody we come in contact with in the course of a day. Not killing my neighbor does not equal loving my neighbor as I love myself. That's a little much for a fundamentalist whose idea of religion is I'm-right-you're-wrong. Introspection? Assessing self is never a priority in fundamentalism; only assessing what somebody else is doing wrong. "That's not how it is in my church." How come your church isn't doing anything to benefit poor people? Some people are poor because of crystal meth, varieties of drugs, inebriation generally; they're sinners, that's why they're poor. The wages of sin: Christians won't help you. If you're in prison, it's because of sin; Christians don't approve of sin. That's the big deal I grew up under: don't-approve-of. I say shit someplace and somebody says, "I don't approve of that kind of language." I say, "Then don't use that kind of language."

 

I came out from that kind of thinking when I left the home of my parents. I did not know in my late teens that there was an alternative to Fundamentalist thought. I went to a Unitarian church for awhile to appease mother that I'm in church. I figured Unitarian was as far away from Fundamentalism as it can be in the same religion. I really didn't take to it. It too concerned preachers and disapproval. I was still such a dependent that I asked the preacher to talk to my parents to appease their fear that I'd gone to worshiping Satan. I was still subject to mother's control issues that never let up. In my early years on my own, I was learning to make my own decisions, anathema in fundamentalism. The fundamentalism I was subject to drove me to atheism, mainly to get it out of my mind as a force of inhibition. You-better-not. It had me twisted up in such tight knots that I had to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so desperate to get rid of the filthy bathwater the baby had to go too. Deep within, I knew there was something to Jesus, but all the rest of it was so interwoven with the gospel that I couldn't have one without the other. So I chose none of it. An entire childhood of prayers not answered turned me against "God." I pleaded and begged God in sobbing tears every night in bed to free me from the shackles of my parents, and it never happened. It only got worse. I stopped crying at age 14, told myself one night in bed with face in the pillow that I will never wet my pillow with another tear over them. I'd cried and screamed into the pillow so they couldn't hear me every night before I went to sleep. I'd get the shit beat out of me if they heard what I was screaming. That was the final end point of the parent-child bond. Answer to prayer. Our relationship had been of them keeping me crying. When I refused to cry, our bond was broken.

 

In myself I saw it as liberation. I had to do as they said, but only in the same way I had to do what cops said. Rule of Law. Nothing personal. It felt like liberation to me to distance them to the objective. Answer to prayer? Yet on the psychotherapist's couch it looks neurotic. Very neurotic. This diving within for liberation is the beginning of schizophrenia. While it's happening, it's quite comfortable. It's next best thing to walking out the door and never seeing them again. I was afraid to walk out the door because I knew I wouldn't get very far, cops would bring me back, and then there would be hell to pay in super-abundance. I wondered for a lot of years why I was living in such hate, and it was indeed hate, over people who went to church every minute the church door was unlocked, and took me along. Out and about they were so sweet like good little Christians who obey the preacher like they're supposed to. Behind closed doors: look out, yer on yer own. From the way it looked to a teenager, God was the problem. The Old Testament God of YOU BETTER NOT mixed with God's son who died because I was a sinner, all of it was too confusing. I threw it all away. Good riddance. By the time I was in my mid twenties, I laughed at religionists. 

 

I also found by my mid twenties I was unable to love. Love was not even available to me. I believed an unknown someone in the future was waiting around a corner for me to fall in love with. Never anyone I knew. It had to be somebody I didn't know. If "the one" ever showed up, I'd never have noticed. Love was shut down in me. Hate was easy. Angry inside. It was a boiling rage. When I see a man with a really red face, I know what he's feeling inside. And I know where it came from. By the time I fell in with Baba at age 33, I was still unable to love. It was some years with Baba applying WD-40 to my heart before I was able to get it. The key was the day I was reading some of Baba's words and he said that understanding was a form of love. I thought: I can do that. I did have understanding. I understood that black people are people too. I felt empathy for their situation. I knew how oppression felt. Yes, I could understand. That one word was the turn of the key that opened my heart. I'd been pursuing the development of my ego. It came to a place where ego gets out of control and becomes self-destructive. Then one's life goes to shit. It might look good on the outside, but it doesn't feel so good on the inside. Then the outside becomes a mask of what's missing inside. Round and round it goes spinning webs of illusion so thick there's no way out.  

 

The chance opened up to move to the Blue Ridge Mountains, live on a remote gravel road at 3,000+ feet on a mountain with waterfalls a short walk into the woods on an old cow trail. I'd longed subconsciously for mountains all my life. In Kansas there weren't even any hills. All highways went in a grid of straight lines. Kansas fundamentalism was the dirty bathwater I threw the baby out with, the state where they have a problem with teaching evolution in the educational system, unto legislation popular with a majority of the population. From Kansas, Southern Baptist looked liberal. The preacher from our church made a bid every year to be received by the Southern Baptist Association in Atlanta, and was rejected every time as too unrepentantly hard shell. Really. He was a Swede from Minnesota, whose parents came over from Sweden. Ingmar Bergman and I had the same religious upbringing, Swedish Protestantism. It made us both into existentialists. Perhaps for Camus, Sartre and deBeauvior, French Catholicism had that hard core a hold on their childhoods. I've not read their biographies, so I don't know. My friends who are ex-Catholics had the same issues in childhood as my friends who are ex-Baptists and ex-Jews. It's not the whole, but particular families in the whole that spit their kids out unable to love after defeating their spirit with church.

 

I believed moving to the mountains that manual labor on a working farm every day would gradually work off my anger that was still loud and clear. The anger didn't go *poof* when Baba took hold of me. Year after year I kept the anger. It boiled in me when I was out stretching barbed wire, putting fence posts in the ground, cutting firewood, digging with shovels, hitting nails with hammers, mowing hay and putting it up. It seemed like the harder I worked the angrier I got. Inside, I was growling and questioning what was going on. I'm supposed to be learning something about love and I go about angry all the time. After seven years working the farm, it was time to move on. I took up house painting. It was easy, I liked it, I could work alone. Curiously, the day I left the farm all my anger went away. It was like my lifetime of anger was packed into a helium balloon and released. It all went away in one package. It really did go *poof.* I don't understand the process, but it taught me that the way of the spirit, the way of love, the path I have chosen, albeit against my own wishes at the beginning, the Way takes time, requires experience, understanding, reflection, evolution; it's truly a process of inner evolving. It's the Tao. It might be about becoming a better person or it might not. That's not what it's about in my way of seeing. Becoming a better person is a side-effect to establishing a love relationship with God. It's not the purpose. Once caught up in God's love, Divine love itself, becomes the purpose. A love relationship with God really does make for a beautiful life. It keeps me in touch with simple, honest (or dishonest) people doing what it takes to get by.

 

Friday evening in Galax Lowes, I spoke with a guy who was dirty and poor and a little bit slow. He was carrying a rolled up rug and we were waiting for the sales clerk at the register to return from wherever she went off to for whatever it was. I asked if that was a rug rolled up he was carrying. He said he was getting it for his grandmother whose rug was dark and she wanted a lighter rug. I asked how old his grandmother was and he said after thinking about it up in her 80s. We talked like people who knew each other. I saw in his countenance he was a lover of God. He was somebody on the social ladder who was bottom out of sight. His boy was with him who looked about 11 or 12. I could see in their connection that the boy watched out for his daddy who wasn't too good at getting around in the world. I saw in him the boy that led the blind wise man Tireseus. Clerk comes back, we go off in our different directions. I felt like I'd had a God moment, made contact with an angel unawares kind of moment. I don't have any money to give the poor, so I work with BROC in the county taking care of the poor immediately in our world, our neighbors. Putting on the Hillbilly Show once a year is our fundraiser. We don't get government money and we don't play religion. Everybody involved, about a dozen, are church going believers, individuals who paid attention to Jesus advocating for the poor. This is how I do my part for the poor. I can't join some refugee outfit and distribute rice to people in refugee camps in northern Africa and bury the dead. I can extend myself in a heartful way to someone "poor in spirit" and listen when somebody is having a hard time, needing to talk to somebody. I don't have to be doing it all the time. Only when the moment presents itself, the only times it's real. Forcing it just makes a mess of things.

 

 

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DISCOVERING BELA TARR

clyfford still, pastorale

 

 

 

Today I've been in a state of awe most of the day. A few days ago I came upon by chance an interview with Hungarian director Bela Tarr. It was a ten minute or so interview that held my attention every word he said. By the time it was over, I needed to see his films. Found I already had his film Damnation in my netflix Q. I ran it to the top of the Q and a couple days later it was in the mailbox. That would be today. I was fired up with the beginnings of a new painting, Edwin Lacy banjo, Scott Freeman mandolin, from waist up, focus on faces, instruments and fingers. This one is to be like they're standing in front of a yellow Barnett Newman painting. When I'd had enough of painting, I put the disk in the player and sat back to see what was next. In the first scene I knew for a certainty I was in the presence of art unfolding before my face. Severe black and white, high contrast, bringing David Lynch's Eraserhead to mind, though only for the stark white and black.

 

 

It wasn't long before I was seeing Eastern European Existentialism in the raw. I am no stranger to existentialism in that I first read Camus' The Stranger at age 21, in awe that I was reading a novel that seemed like I might have written it. I identified with it so much, the writing indeed felt like I wrote it. I knew nothing about Camus or existentialism at the time. Somebody I'd recently met handed the paperback copy to me the day before I set out by plane for Norfolk, Virginia, to start my two years of involuntary servitude. Camus' writing resonated with me like nothing I'd read. At the base library I found several paperbacks by Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, essays, plays. I devoured them, every one. It all resonated with me like it came from my mind, though a far more intelligent mind than mine, but he carried my own thinking that much. He articulated for me elements that were floating around in the stew inside my head and ordered my own thinking, at least a good start. All through the time in the Navy I read novels by Simone deBeauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre on the French resistance  in WW2, identifying with my resistance to military mind, a continuation of daddy mind. In that time of my life I felt like a black teenage boy in the back seat of a patrol car, hands cuffed behind my back.

 

 

As my reading progressed, I went beyond existentialism to the place that I look back and see that line of thinking limited to the human mind. Eventually, I transcended and don't identify with the philosophy like I used to. It is a word I never liked to use, because it was so pretentiously used on the whole. It almost always sounded pretentious when somebody used the word. Yet, in Europe it was taken seriously. It meant the same as intellectual used to mean. This may be why wherever I go in Europe I'm told by somebody, "You're not like other Americans." I don't know many existentialists among people I've known along the way in America. It's a foreign way of thinking. America is about smiling a lot and making a good impression, selling self with attractive personality. Hopelessness? Deny it. Prozac, Zoloft and a host of other aids help make life more like television where actions are devoid of consequences.

 

 

Bela Tarr's film Damnation put me into a trance of Awe. I didn't realize I was actually in a kind of trance overwhelmed by awe. Directly after finishing it I drove to town to go to the wine-tasting at the coffee shop. I was not there. I walked into a big place jammed with the suburban middle class that I came to the mountains to get away from. I stood there, in effect frozen in place, unable to enter the crowd and start talking politically correct suburban-speak, smile like I'm on tv, a commercial for myself. Why? What am I selling? Nothing. Then why put on the dog? Why be there? After visiting with a couple of friends, I exited and came home. The only thing I wanted to do was watch Tarr's film again. I was in a place inside my head that didn't have room for anything else. I put on my house clothes and settled for another couple hours in Bela Tarr's mind, a fascinating place to go, the mind of a pure artist. The man is a serious thinker. I heard him say in an interview that he makes a film as he sees life. I've an idea he and I see life very similarly. I have my own that is not his and he has his that is not mine. In this film he was dealing with hopelessness. I think I've transcended my own hopelessness. In this world, living by mind, hopeless is the only way there is. It's all in how we adapt to it. In America we tend to deal with hopelessness by denial. I'd guess that's fairly universal.

 

 

The visuals in Tarr's film are there with Fellini visuals, von Trier visuals, Kurosawa visuals. I see it with Fellini's 8 1/2, Pasolini's Oedipus, Kurosawa's Rashomon, von Trier's Medea, Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman In The Dunes, in Tarr's own way, as each of these films is made uniquely in the director's own way. Tarr will hold a scene for a long time. Somebody walks through a still scene from one end to the other until out of sight. This was how he ended it too, the man just walked into the frame from the right and walked through the scene and out the left side. A point was made during the film that characters in a story disintegrate when the story is over. The man going through the story has problems with egomaniac mind, his need to destroy women, eventually ends up in the slag heap of his self. A couple times people told him he would come to no good end. In his debasement, he left the people he was among and walked into the netherworld of slag heaps where he came face to face with a dog. He went down to all fours and barked back at the dog. They barked and danced around each other until the man eventually cowed the dog that went away whimpering. He'd told a woman, another man's wife, that he would do debased things for her. She still wasn't interested. He explained how and why he had murdered his previous girlfriend. Seduction was not his talent. 

 

 

He walked away in hopelessness after learning he had no support from anyone who knew him. In his world he was a self-centered waste of fresh air. I felt like what story there was watched this self-absorbed man, who couldn't connect with anyone authentically, walk out of the story into disintegration. And the visuals were jaw-droppingly incredible. It was a visual abstraction from start to finish. Vertical lines, horizontal lines, squares, rectangles, angles, light and dark. His scenes were long and still, with a little bit of motion, like steam rising from something on a stove, fog outside. He'll have a scene with nothing moving except all the way to the right in the background a small fan turning slowly. In an interview he said that he puts light on the part of a given scene that is the focus of attention. The rest is context. I went to youtube to see trailers to some of his other films. Went to netflix and put them all at the top of my Q. A Bela Tarr film festival will be happening here next week. It's kind of like falling in love to discover an artist whose work satisfies me all the way and leaves me in a trance of awe. It was something like when I first discovered Steve Reich's music. I hear Music For Eighteen Musicians in awe every time I've heard it over the last thirty-five years. It's music I listen to like watching a movie, sit back and let if flow by.     

 

  

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