SELF AND OTHERS

Awake in the night, unable to fall back into asleep right away, I turned on the radio for BBC all night news. The talking at low volume has a way of putting me back to sleep, which it did. Just before losing consciousness I was hearing some people in Athens, Greece, talk about the difficulties of living in an economy without resources going under. I've spent time in Athens and was able to see the city and the people in memory, wondering what it is like there now. I suspect Athens is very much the same today as it was forty-plus year ago. People still drink retsina, the buildings are the same, the streets the same, the museums and antiquities in place, the people Greek. Looking around Athens in my mind's eye, I was thinking I like the idea of Athens more than the city itself. Western Civilization crossed the Suez from Egypt, went through Mesopotamia into Greece, Rome and Europe. In that time of the life, I hesitated to go into countries with an alphabet I could not understand at all, like Arabic, Hindi, Chinese. In Greece, or any other country using our alphabet and variations thereof, I could make out words on signs to look up in dictionaries. In Arabic I was totally lost. It kept me from crossing the Bosporus into Istanbul. I tend to like to walk long distances through foreign cities to get the feel of the place, what it's like from the inside. I need signs and a map in a city to help get around. I didn't have a lot of money to spend, so I explored by observation. I don't like to just see a place, but to get inside and roam around seeing what it's like to live there. I found Athens to be a twin, though not identical, with Charleston, SC: not much going on, tourism a great part of the economy, community fading away, famous historically. Listening to Greeks talk in English, I was remembering the Greek accent speaking English, feeling familiar with the visuals all around. I thought, a good place to live. Would living there would be a pleasant life? Yes, but for being "the American." Nationalism, a bigger form of tribalism, another form of racism, came to mind as the question's dead end. At home, I am not "the American," just an outsider, which I am anywhere on earth. 

I fell into thinking about racism as another form of tribalism and nationalism, over differences that come down to: not-me. All others in this world are not-me. Anyone of another language is definitely not-me. Another nation is not-me. Another color of hair or skin or eyes, another body, another fashion, another belief system, another level of education, another socio-economic status, not-me. We ally ourselves with others similar to self in varieties of ways. Birds of a feather flock together is one of the natural laws like you get what you give. Same language, same skin color, same country, same county, same family. Seeing it thus, racism ceases to be about skin color as much as it is about not-me. Hence, Jesus sez: love your neighbor (the other, not-you) as yourself. Giving importance to not-me is ego. I put before such statements by Jesus, "If you want a good life...." If you want a good life, love your neighbor as yourself. If you don't want a good life, forget about it, do what you gotta do. It only applies to anyone who wants a good life. By good I mean an attitude toward life with returns to your liking. Abiding by not-me is ego. We need ego in this world, though it has a way of wrecking our lives with uncritical self-interest. Ego is not something to do away with, but to educate, to control. Ego is a baby saying, "mine." Basic self-awareness  is the beginning of taking control of the ego. Gaining control of the ego is the nature of the spiritual path, an individual path, not a collective path, except in the great big picture, so big it's invisible, like the universe beyond the pie slice we're able to observe. Seeing it like this, it came to me that it's a waste of mental energy to attempt to wipe out racism by passing new, more restrictive laws. Civil Rights laws didn't change racism. Civil rights legislation would have gone the way of the ERA, lost in capitalist limbo, were it not for the corporate coup of the Kennedy assassination. The legislation gave black people a chance where government employment was concerned and a ray of false hope. The hand that gave the hope turned and took it away without resistance, the most advanced and subtle propaganda hand ever experienced on earth.    

I woke later, after falling asleep again, continuing the thought, racism is an aspect of ego and will be with us as long as there is ego. We need ego in this world. The spiritual path is about educating the ego to the place it does it's job holding us upright, but doesn't rule our intelligence quite so much. It looks like the obvious, racism is with us. How to live with it, flow with it, seems a better way to approach the problem, which is an actual problem; educate self in relation to one's own racism. Pointing the finger and calling somebody a racist is a nice way of saying son-of-a-bitch (not-me). Egoism with a different name: intolerance. I have a problem with the present white middle class approach to racism exhibiting the same degree of fake as Ann Coulter: racism is bad, it's not nice to be a racist, racists are evil, if you're a racist I don't want anything to do with you. Nigger is now the unspeakable word for white people, except in certain circles like the working poor and the rich. Making taboo of words and propensities only gives them power that grows with time until the lake is too big for the dam to hold. I went through a period of time a die-hard anti-racist, which turned out to be just another ego identity, exclusivity. There came a time I learned from experience the black people are every bit as racist as the white people, except they're not the privileged race. I'm not saying black people need to go back to Africa. I'm saying we need to examine our own racism, individually of any race, for some self-awareness on the matter. Self-awareness is the starting line. Not everyone is willing or capable of self-awareness. It's not my place to command them. It's my place to understand them and not judge them, allow them. We do not all have the same latitude of consciousness. One small group of people exercise diligence to ban one word for everybody else by calling people who use it the nice word for son-of-a-bitch, or the more contemporary motherfucker, acceptable on tv: racist. It goes in circles and gets crazy like Little Black Sambo and the tiger running around and around the palm tree. 

I see the Polish football fans calling an African football team monkeys. Racism cannot be defeated collectively is what it looks like. Again, making it a bad word pumps steroids into its power. Making racism an evil polarizes it to one extreme of the spectrum of life, gives it no room for understanding. Zero tolerance. Like the way cops treat black people. Racist. The word fuck was held down, unprintable, unspeakable in certain circles, until a year in the mid-Sixties when it became a required word in a work of fiction and in film. It was in the time of Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid and Antonioni's Zabriski Point. The word became so overused in its liberation it became tiresome and wore itself out. Now it's free. We can say it or or not. It lost its power. It's no longer taboo. Its balloon went flat. It's just another word. I feel like suppressing the word nigger gives power to racism by way of denial, the white American way of life, the illusion of privilege way of life. Political correctness amounts to a style, like how you wear your hair, long or short, like what car you buy, American or Japanese. Making a word taboo, it becomes subject to denial in one society and a password in another. Where is the gain in social evolution if ending racism has been a goal? Dealing with racism, itself, as an issue is only realistic inside oneself. Missionarism and making your life a commercial to make the world a better place is egoism just like racism. Maybe the world is already a better place, exactly on target, on schedule, and we're so self-involved we're missing everything. As long as we divide ourselves into us and them, me and other, there is not going to be any collective progress on the issue of racism. I don't see us dividing ourselves into self-identity groups going away any time soon in centuries or millennia. The way I chose to work with racism in myself, which I grew up in pre-1954, when I became aware of it. For a long time I denied it, buried it. Seeing it didn't go away after awhile, I decided to allow it, pay attention to it, get acquainted with it, educate it, understand it, transcend it. It's about living in a world of others, how well we do it, not in what we oppose or promote.      

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REMEMBERING MY FRIEND HENRY MILLER

acropolis, athens, greece

Back into reading Henry Miller again. Finished the Colossus of Maroussi, which turned out to be one of my top favorite reads and influences on my life. The first hundred pages into The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, the book Miller wrote after Colossus. It is his story of returning to USA after living in Paris where he wrote the novels that made his name. A case was made against Tropic of Cancer all the way to the Supremes for bad language, 1961. It was the Warren Court then, an intelligent Supreme Court without so many corporate plants in that time. Miller used the efword and Grove Press was taken to court. It seems strange in this time the Supreme Court can make an intelligent decision. It amounted to the art book of its time. Originally published in Paris in 1934, it was republished in New York and charged with obscenity. Went to the Court in 1961. Immediately, it became the book of the year, Grove Press box sets, paperback edition everywhere. Until the trial, Miller got by on money borrowed from friends, largely. James Joyce's Ulysses, if I recall correctly, needed a Supreme Court trial before it could be published this side of the Atlantic. It became well known as a result, but not so widely read. In Charleston, South Carolina, was a small bookstore across the street from the College of Charleston, The Book Basement, where I worked through my college years. One of the customers before I came to the store, a generation older than me would vacation in Europe and brought back in his luggage half a dozen copies of Ulysses for the bookstore when it did not yet have an American edition. The distinction of a Court case before the Supremes distinguishes Miller with Joyce. Very different writers in about every way the differences can be noted. They both had very large minds.

book cover

Air-Conditioned Nightmare starts in New York upon Miller's return from a year in Greece where he stayed mostly with English writer Lawrence Durrell and his wife Nancy on the island Corfu. Colossus is written around his trip to Athens and Crete. From New York he teamed up with artist friend Abe Rattner he knew in Paris, and they drove down South through Charleston, then across the deep South to New Orleans, Rattner's destination. Miller drove on to the middle California coast, Big Sur, this the early 1940s, war in Europe, France overtaken, Italy overtaken, and Greece in fear of German invasion. Miller was getting out of Europe with the wolves snapping at his heels. In a three year journey across USA by car, Miller, who left Brooklyn not long out of high school and lived in Paris, wanted to acquaint himself with America. I'd guess after all the years of being "the American," expected to explain and being blamed for American idiocies and to take the praise for American greatness, none of which he had anything to do with. I had a lot of problem with that part of being in another country. I got so sick of "you Americans," I turned mean spirited. In a London pub a man beside me at the bar where I was having a Worthington E, ordered a drink with minute instructions for amount of this and that, temperature. I'd seen that before. Out of curiosity, I asked what it was about. I was thinking, I wouldn't dare expect a waiter or bartender or waitress in America even to listen to a list of instructions that long. In the man's huffy, hear-hear, arrogant way he said it was "for the taste. Why do you Americans drink?" I'd had it up to over my eyebrows hearing you-Americans, like I'm responsible for everybody else, so I said with much inner mirth and a straight face, having fun at the thought of affirming his boring clichés, "To get drunk," like, why else? It's the same with all minorities in America worn out from hearing, "your people." I don't even remember what he looked like, but do remember he turned his back to me and I about busted out laughing. Later, at home a few years, some friends were going to London and asked what it's like. I said you will get an understanding of what it's like to be black in America.

 

henry miller

Miller went to France young, uninterested in living in USA, though when he returned twenty or so years later, America the people, the landscape, held his attention and became the focus of his attention. Reading in Air-Conditioned Nightmare the third time, I'm seeing Miller's influence on my own understanding and interest in the variety of American cultures. Marketing trains us to believe it's one big happy classless society where everybody loves money. Of course, it's not anywhere near that simple, same as your-people is not. I used to think it was obvious and everybody got it because it's right there in our faces. Used to think. In the past. Repeated experience throughout a lifetime has shown me the obvious is a mystery for many more adults than I am comfortable admitting to myself. I have to remind myself we humans are all on different levels of consciousness, all of us mixed together in one boiling, swirling stew. In this time of international wars and population explosion our souls are exploring unfamiliar territory at all times. Perhaps this has something to do with why we cling to the familiar, others of our own race and nationality. I believe, with no backup to support it, there are souls actually born in the wrong place to the wrong people. I'd say this situation would make a very confused individual, or not. One might think the child of a Jew and a Catholic would be confused, but it's not the case. We're so involved in the rapid change of everything around us and inside ourselves we embrace the change in adoration of the New, the latest, such that we've become a culture of the New. I stopped painting when I saw my babies going into the world of see-my-new. It's put on the wall in its place, "see my new...." I have a difficult time letting paintings go. Selling them makes them products. I don't like my babies becoming products, same as I don't like raising calves toward the burger market.

 

book cover

 

I believe I can trace the evolution of my curiosity about the varieties of American people, the different cultures here from region to region, national background, race, level of income, class, to Henry Miller's Air-Conditioned Nightmare. His book reads as contemporary today as it did in its first year of publication, 1945. He wrote it in my infancy a few hundred miles north of my birthplace. I read it first time in the late 1970s. It was contemporary then. This is evidence of one of my favorite aspects of Miller's writing, the immediacy. He pulls me into his mind and takes me on a mind journey that is here, now. Brings to mind Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, prose poems of invisible cities written in an Italian Surrealist manner by a Marco Polo of the mind. Miller makes you feel where he is in the telling such that I see in my mind's eye where he is, the café, the boat ride to Crete, the streets in Heraklion, the landscape by road across the island to the Minoan ruins. I made the trip seven years after reading Miller's account of his visit in 1939, thereabouts. At the time it seemed like a kind of subconscious pilgrimage to the first known places Greek civilization evolved from, even to the Om point, the omphalos at Delphi, the center of the universe according to early Greek civilization. I did not remember that I was guided to those places by Henry Miller. He too, had taken the road from Athens to Delphi, one of the many beautiful drives on earth. He too, felt the powerful energy of the place. When I felt the energy of the place, and I wasn't even tuned to "energies" then, I understood why the oracle chose Delphi. I reviewed my own tour of Greece in Colossus of Maroussi after forgetting Miller's tour of Greece was the model for my own. I wanted to see the places he wrote about, that I saw in my mind's eye reading his account. I've been looking for something to read that I really want to read, that I want to pick up a second time. I'd pick up something, look at the first few sentences and none of them made me want to finish the page. Didn't know what I was looking for to read. Nothing took hold of me. Then I picked up Colossus. Now I only want to read Miller next, Nightmare. It's an unwitting, subconscious review of Henry Miller's substantial influence on my manner of thinking, the scope of my ethical foundation. I feel awed reading these two books at this time in the life. In a way it's like reading my astrological chart. These two books have influenced me more deeply than I knew or even might have imagined. Another strong influence comes to mind, Leo Tolstoy. Very powerful influence, especially through his biography by Henri Troyat. And Sitting Bull's biography. These are the people I've discovered through reading that my soul connects with, like it connects with Ralph Stanley's and the Carter Family's singing, the voices the soul of these mountains chose to sing through.

omphalos

delphi

 

 

 

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