BUOYED ON THE DENSE MARINE

anselm kiefer, the red sea

Day 8 of blogathon calls for thinking about a red ocean and thinking about a blue ocean. First thing that came to mind for red ocean was this painting by Anslem Kiefer, which I have laid eyes upon. It is disturbing. It's huge. A bathtub of blood. It takes my mind to writer, Jerzy Kosinski, who sliced his wrists in a bathtub when he felt like he had nothing more to say. As we say round here, More power to ya, feller. This is where an ocean of blood takes my mind. Kiefer's paintings had a great deal to say about post-Nazi Germany with the Nazi period looming enormous in the national consciousness. I see in a sea of blood the earth wounded by international corporate indifferent excess, earth's wrists cut, waiting for spirit to rise and go on. I see what the Reagan revolution did to American democracy. I see red ocean an ending. The ocean fished out by corporate fisheries all around the globe. With sonar as advanced as it is now, the last fish will be found. I see the international economic system indifferent to humanity and all other life forms. They are a bloody danger to us. We sit back in the recliner and watch the water turn red, thinking, Cool. Punctuated by commercials. I see a society so deeply and vigorously dedicated to the false in just about everything, I'm reminded of the 1981 quotation from CIA director Wm Casey, appointed first thing by Reagan, "We'll know our disinformation campaign is complete when everything the American people believe is false." The disinformation campaign was successful. Thirty-two years later, I see an ocean of blood. Y'all hadn't oughta sent me down this path. I can go to some dark places and not bat an eye.

 

 

I have a very powerful feeling I don't talk about, because I can't prove anything. I'm going by feeling, that I went out last time by way of a German concentration camp. First, a psychic told me; second I did a regression on my own and saw it. I suspect it has something to do with why I've spent a large part of my life with a major grudge against Germany, never even wanted to fly over the country. In 1954 I was in the 6th grade when Life magazine published the first photographs of the mounds of skeletal corpses, their lives wrecked and them killed by arrogant Christians. Those Christians were about like what has come forward in USA as Christian in our time. It's the reason church attendance in Europe is down to 10 percent, and in USA is shrinking fast. I have strong feelings about that time, shared by nobody around me, ever, except Jews I've known. In that time when the pictures were coming forward from the concentration camps, I became obsessed with the pictures. I remember a poem by Anthony Hecht, powerful poem, powerful as the bathtub of blood, of people digging their graves and being shot. I read that poem over and over, wallowed in it. I used free time on the destroyer in the Navy to read. I found the series of novels that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone deBeauvoir wrote, each their own series of several long, intense, novels of the French Resistance during WW2. I was in resistance too, involuntarily incarcerated by a fascist government for being born male. I don't do well with authority. It's called ODD, Oppositional Defiance Disorder, a scientific way of saying Taurus. And then to be born and raised up in that very same Christian mind. We become what we hate. I had to experience Christendom from the inside because I hated it so much last time around. Of course I would reject it and run for my life. The red ocean.

 

     

 

Time now to think of a blue ocean. I recall the summer of 1960 with Navy Reserve taking a two week ride on a destroyer with missiles out of San Diego. It was my first time on the ocean. I love riding the ocean. I felt the ocean under me then as I feel the ground under my feet now. I love what Walt Whitman called, the dense marine, and Homer called, the wine dark sea. Seasickness never overtook my belly. In the very worst storms, bad storms, I loved it. I loved it. When belly would start to feel queasy, I'd say to myself, I'd pay for this! I have stood on the top level of the ship where the guys that waved flags operated, hanging onto the rail, watching the front of the ship dive underwater and the whole front end rise up completely out of the water and splash back under, sending a huge wave over the top of the whole ship each time. It gave the sensation the ship went underwater. I held onto that railing taking it in the face like a cowboy in a water rodeo. I loved it. In those two weeks out of San Diego, I saw the Pacific was a gorgeous blue as I would imagine a blue diamond to look. I loved the blue of the Pacific Ocean. I ignored the rules against gawking. Was spoken to a few times about it, but so what. Speaking of blue ocean, I have an unfinished project in the house I've been looking at getting to in the next few days. It is a chunk of cement I picked up at a building site that had somehow fallen to the ground. The print of the grass it landed on is the underside. If its mass were liquid, it might fill two coffee mugs. As it landed it did a slow splash, and folded into itself. I see ocean splashing on a rock. I soaked it in a bucket of aqua blue latex paint, half and half with water, for a week or so. It sits on the square pedestal of half a very old brick so black it looks like it had been in a fire. I'm wanting to take some white oil paint thin on a brush and touch the edges of places that look like spray, give it the suggestion of surf. A still splash.

 

 snoopy and Charlie brown contemplate blue ocean

 

Blue ocean. In those first two weeks on the ocean I was 18. The blue Pacific in my memory has the translucence of wine. Later, I rode the Atlantic, a green ocean. The Pacific Ocean I felt was a majestic unknown. Those first days of my life on the sea, I thought of whalers from before electricity, sailing ships crossing the ocean carrying passengers. pirates. A friend who had some psychic about her told me I was a pirate in the Thirteenth Century along the northern African coast, meaning Mediterranean and open sea. It may have something to do with why I only wanted to dress up as a pirate for Halloween, or an Indian for the same reason. May have had several seafaring lifetimes. I did have a need all through my early years to be on the ocean. I needed to ride the ocean. Not always, at least once. For old times sake. Lord have mercy, it's a sight how I love the ocean. I think of the Pacific and see Gauguin paintings of Tahiti, those beautiful things that look like the light is shining through them from behind. I see Japanese paintings of the Pacific in its beautiful blue. Mount Fuji in the distance. California surfers hanging ten with a great white under them in the wave they're riding. The way I see it, everything in the ocean is looking for something to eat, and my meaty substance amounts to fish bait. I'm a worm with bones instead of a hook. I stay out of the ocean. My mortal frame has evolved for land. When I used to wonder where was my place on earth, I'd start with land. The ocean is so vast, so immensely indifferent to ego. The infinite ocean of love. It's equally immense in its beauty, in its deep translucence. Like in a blue diamond, there is no accounting for where the blue comes from. It's the mysterious blue of distance. Earth, the blue pearl, glows blue seen from out in space. This is our home in the universe, the Blue Pearl.      

the dark spot is the shadow of a moon eclipse

 

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AN ANGEL UNAWARES

ai weiwei

 

Earlier this evening, my friend Lizz Jones asked me on facebook to list ten of the more significant books of my reading life. Wow, I thought. How do you do that? I looked at her list to get an idea of what she meant. Books that inspire a new way of seeing, such as that. One that radically changed my life was Albert Camus' The Stranger (l'etranger). It took hold of me from page one. It was a story told for me to read. He didn't know who or where I was, so he had to publish it in book form and leave it to chance for me to find it. It woke me up to something within. It told me I was not alone in my thinking. Somebody else in the world sees what I see. He showed me that thinking the way I thought then, half a century ago, was a philosophy with a name, existentialism. He turned me on to other existentialist writers and other French writers. Camus wrote some plays and turned me on to some other contemporary French plays. Less than ten years later I had the opportunity to see Genet's play, The Balcony, in London at the Royal Shakespeare Company, opening night. Not that it was a big deal, just an accident of timing. It was see it that night or not at all. But I still thought it was cool. Camus kicked off my interest in 20th century theater, taught me an interest in reading plays, starting with his, Sartre's and Genet's, and ones Camus wrote about in his essays I found in paperback.

 

 

ai weiwei

 

 

It was a time of my life when the whirlwind of fate was blowing a hurricane all around me and I existed in the still space in the middle. The storm was my mind. I was sucked into the storm and carried away to sea in the US Navy, involuntary servitude for two years. The day before I was to leave on the plane for Norfolk, Virginia, to begin my life behind bars, a high school senior I'd only met once before, and then for a short time, handed me a paperback copy of The Stranger. He suggested I read it on the plane. I don't even remember his name. That was the last I ever saw or heard of him. I've often wondered if he might have come to me, an angel unawares, to hand me something that would wake me up at a time I needed help. I'd made a weak attempt at college and wasn't ready for that level of serious homework. I thought I was going to Kingston Trio Disney World, or something. I couldn't take the big anonymous school. Factory school. I was not prepared in any way for that. Church had less than twenty. Classes at school had less than twenty. All the way along, it was like that, then jump into auditorium classes and classes with professors talking way over my head and the text indecipherable for this average high school student. I never learned the art of homework. It was always a drag for me. I couldn't read with much comprehension and read very slowly, still do. By the time the Navy pulled me out of my life for two years, I understood my key issue was inability to read with comprehension. I spent those two years reading as much as possible. Reading some incredible contemporary French writers, much of it the French Resistance in WW2 against the German occupation. I was in my own interior resistance.

 

ai weiwei

 

 

Camus was a guide for me in that time, turning me on to writing tuned to my view of the world. This was my own college-prep course, two years of reading inspired by Albert Camus. Also listening to early Bob Dylan in that time. Kennedy, Johnson, Viet Nam, early 60s, civil rights, protests, Communist listening devices in every bush, the importance of dying for your country. H Bombs. A head full of Hi-Ho-America on one side and resistance on the other. My Oppositional Defiance Disorder was young and raw then, unconscious, not self-aware. An American working class dumbass with an ego the size of two football stadiums. Unskilled. Unlettered. Unanything. An ego in a body looking for a job, fantasizing unaffordable car, unaffordable babe, unaffordable pool, Playboy magazines by the stool. It makes my head swim to go back to that time. It's so far away it's like somebody else, something from a movie with a title I forgot. My confusion in that time was enormous, incomprehensible to me now. Incomprehensible to me how I got through it. The Navy snatched me up at the moment I needed rescue. I resisted it like a fish on a hook, but I had to wait out my time. I just now spoke of myself out loud, "What a fool.' That was spontaneous outburst from observation. Some years ago I got up by internet with a friend from that time. It didn't work for me. He was a constant reminder of that time, He liked to talk about that time and the people. It wore on my nerves until I couldn't stand it anymore. I may, at the end of this lifetime, look back over it and exclaim simultaneous with thinking it, What a fool. It's actually about the highest praise I can give this lifetime.

 

ai weiwei

 

 

Better to be a tarot card than a slave to a false god. I'm recalling Jr Maxwell telling of his life, summing himself up a fool. He made a very convincing case for himself a fool. I was seeing him a man of real wisdom and could make a good case for it. He mad a better case for himself a fool. I thought of him as the wise fool. What else could a wise man be in this world but a fool? Though he was calling himself a fool for having more than one of those whirlwinds of confusion in his life, looking at times of making self-defeating decisions. I couldn't stand any more of those times that bring out my own fool. Yet there is something comforting about seeing my own self a fool knowing Jr Maxwell thought himself a fool, too. Starts getting kind of Taoist. There were times, sitting on Jr's cement slab porch in plastic patio chairs, the kind you see stacked in front of the Dollar store, watching the cars and trucks go by on the highway, talking and not taking, being, I wondered if we might have had lifetimes together in the past. Surely we did. We knew each other right away when we met my first year in the mountains.  I wondered if the lifetimes might have been in shamanic cultures and he my teacher. It felt like a spiritual connection. I felt like I was sent to him to learn from him and in return assist him in his vulnerable time to make it possible for him to die in his own bed. It was important to him and important to me for him. In one way, I was doing it "for the least of these," the hopeless and helpless who wanted to die in his bed, not in a nursing home or hospital.

 

ai weiwei

 

 

In another way, I was serving the Master, exactly as the Master himself, the same. The opportunity was that precious to me. That leads me to suspect the shamanic lifetimes, one the other's teacher possibly several times. It may have something to do with why both of us were fools in entirely different ways this lifetime. Id like for Jr to be my older brother next time around, but won't ask for it. I've known so many friends in this lifetime I want to know again. I hope the old belief bears out that we'll meet our loved ones over yonder on the far away shore in the beautiful home of the soul. I want to see my grandmother I listened to Grand Ole Opry with when I was a kid and preferred Elvis and Shake, Rattle and Roll. I want to tell her first thing I finally got it. I came to love the music we listened to, but I didn't yet have an ear for it. I want to see all my dogs and cats there. I want to hold them all. I've been thinking a lot recently about what carries over from lifetime to lifetime. I'm thinking it's more than I'd let myself imagine before. I'm inclined to see it that only the body is different. What does it matter to us to change bodies? We don't see ourselves as others see us. I need a mirror to see my face. I who am seeing out from my eyes is the same I from lifetime to lifetime. It's just that all the parts around the eyes change, the body, experience, place, time, horoscope. I, who see through my eyes, think my thoughts, the same me, the same I, from one life to the next. There is only one thing I can say for certain about what's on the other side, anything I have ever imagined about it is not the case. I was about to say the best thing to do is stop thinking, but that's an unrealistic anti-solution. Just flow with it is all I know to do.       

 

ai weiwei himself

 

 

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VIVE LA RESISTANCE

composition in gray #21

Today's netflix film was ARMY OF SHADOWS, the French Resistance during WW2, 1942 and 43. The film was released in 1969, though not in America until 2006. Serious film. The only humor in it was the people engaged in the Resistance, Patriots according to the French, were called Terrorists by the Nazis. It made me think that in 25 years, thereabouts, historical accounts of the Iraqi Resistance (Terrorists to the foreign invader), novels, films, poetry, painting, every art form, will hold up the Iraqi Resistance fighters as patriot heroes. Their stories will be told. The same in Afghanistan. Down the road of history their Resistance fighters will be held up high as the greatest patriots. We call them terrorists.

The day before I boarded the plane for Norfolk, VA, to turn myself in for 2 years of involuntary servitude with the Navy, somebody I had just recently met, like a day or 2 before, gave me a copy of Albert Camus' The Stranger. I read it on the plane and later in the barracks when I was put in the transient barracks waiting for the next class for radio school to start. I didn't have a lot to do, so I went to the base library and looked up some more novels, essays and plays by Camus. He spoke my mind. The Stranger was the first book I'd read that spoke. I imagined that with a degree from the Sorbonne in Philosophy I could have written it too. It's such a deceptively simple story that a beginning reader gets it. Looking back, after an entire adult life approaching 70, knowing what I know now and didn't know then, I see that when someone turns up in the life for a moment, gives me a book to read on the plane and it turns out to have a major impact in my life, there's something more going on than meets the eye. This work of fiction by a French philosopher changed the direction of my reading overnight from whatever I could find that looked good on a drug store paperback rack to the French Existentialists.

The hilarity is that I couldn't read with comprehension so soon after high school. Attempted short bursts of advanced education at the University in Wichita, but didn't get it, couldn't read with comprehension, befuddled, realizing I needed to learn how to read. Textbooks are so horribly written they discourage reading, and when one comes in contact with non-textbook writing, there's no comprehension. Anyway, that's how it worked out for me. Senior year in high school I attempted some grownup reading, like Ben Hur, Dr. Zhivago, both novels movies of the day were made from and none of it sunk in. I was reading pages of words. The library at the Navy base had probably everything by Camus. Having plenty of time on my hands, I read Camus all the time. In radio school, I continued to read Camus at the same base. I'd never read anything before that seemed like it came out of me the way Camus did. After I'd exhausted the writings of Albert Camus, I started reading novels by writers he wrote about, Jean Paul Sartre, and Simone deBeauvoir. They each wrote several novels of the French Resistance during WW2. They, themselves, were involved in the Resistance.

I was teaching myself how to read. I used the 2 years of incarceration to read until I caught on. DeBeauvoir and Sartre were way out of my league as writers, and that was what I wanted, something to pull me along. I thought if I could read these people with comprehension, I could read anything. The goal was to get back into college after the 2 years of what I took for prison, using the time I could not take seriously to learn how to read. I also went through the reading list, what I remembered of it, from the senior English class I'd not taken, because it was all reading and I couldn't read well enough. Catcher In The Rye, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and others. I read Kafka's The Trial and didn't get it at all. A few years later, I read the Castle and got it, that is, if Kafka can be got.

The French Resistance was right for me at the time. I'd come from a lifetime of resistance at home. In the Navy I felt like I was in resistance. I was in resistance to about everything, all my life to that point, including that point. It was a period of intense resistance. The Navy didn't give a damn if I lived or died, but I was expected to care about the Navy. It didn't work like that for me. I didn't like being forced into military for being born male in America. I was one of the examples of why a volunteer military is best. The only resistance I could get away with was being a slacker. Also the only resistance I could get away with at home. I waited for the day I'd be free to make my own decisions. That day was awaited with much anticipation. I'm not one to celebrate such moments, but I certainly made note of it within. The day I walked away from the ship the last time was the beginning of living by my own decisions. I waited so long and sometimes hopelessly for the moment of transition that when I had my freedom, I guarded it jealously. I realized I'd married daddy in a woman's body, which freaked me out into outer space. Been there, done that, not going back.

It was in this time of the life when I was in process of breaking free from the bondage of the past that the French Resistance was so important. Patriots called terrorists. I was interested in the black resistance of the early 60s until Stokley Carmichael, the voice of Black Power at the time, put out the word that white people in the black movement were not welcome. It was a black issue and black people needed to take care of it themselves. I saw the truth in it and pulled back my interest. I continued to pull for the black people, but kept my nose out of their business. In childhood I identified with the Indian Resistance. All the way along, my heart was with every resistance movement there was.

In 1968 I took a bus overnight from Charleston to be a digit in the mass demonstration in DC against the VietNam war. It was there I realized the resistance is locked in with that which is resisted. The resistance there was creating television news in a premeditated way. It was all television.

I saw the next day the corporate press all told the same lie about the event, the lie Johnson told them to tell at a press conference before the event. Next day when I saw NY Times, Washington Post, AP, Time and Newsweek, they all told the same lie. It was disconcerting. It was like a movie of a time in Fascism. The Village Voice, a weekly, had an article that told it exactly like it was, and reported on the press conference beforehand and what Johnson told the press to say. That day I lost any confidence in the press I had, and all confidence in the presidency. It was that day I realized resistance doesn't matter. I've fairly well let go of all that kind of thinking. However, if a power like China defeated us and occupied us, I'd be in the resistance. I'd be a terrorist fighting the foreign occupier.