THE VIEW FROM THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING

I see the past going away and the future an open void the ongoing present assigns to the past like shredded grass in a lawnmower's wake. It's a time of the future looking dim, but no dimmer than it has looked all my life. In first grade we crawled under the desk pretending an A-bomb was expected to go off nearby. Even then, age 6, I was thinking, this puny desk isn't going to save me from anything, maybe a flying eraser, but that's it. The school building was made of big granite stones. I thought the building would fly apart like a house of cards. Why make a big deal of hiding from something you can't hide from? And who would want to survive? This was the McCarthy time and J Edgar Hoover time, John Birch time, fear of communism, like today's fear of terrorism. It hasn't changed. It's ongoing fear-of, fill in the blank. It's been about controlling the masses by the propaganda of fear since Pearl Harbor. I can't attest for before. From what I've seen in American history, it goes all the way back. Mark Twain's comments on his time are the same as are said of this time. What's the point of paying my attention to the blatantly fake? Yet, seen in a certain light, the politicians, themselves, are funnier than the cartoons. Journalists, like the politicians, have become like fast food workers, the cash register buttons have pictures instead of words. It doesn't matter who writes the McNews. Investigative journalists don't work for the press anymore. The news has become so bizarre that people I never thought would notice are talking about it.  

I can't attach myself to a sinking ship like Japanese sailors did in WW2 when their ships went down. I have too much American in me to do something like that. I can't reverse the momentum, nor would I. We have used fire for heat and light since prehistoric times. Collectively, the Age of Fire brought us into Reason, self-awareness. The Greek god of foresight, reason, is Prometheus, who Godfather Zeus condemned to be chained to a rock, etc, for giving fire to the humans. His problem was the humans would learn reason from fire and no longer need the gods. Prometheus was patient, knowing Zeus would let him go when he needed to know who was plotting to overthrow his power. Electricity is the the second fire Prometheus gave us, to raise us from reason into intuition. He was cut loose not long before electricity was discovered. Mary Shelley's popular novel became Frankenstein, the sympathetic monster no one understood but a little girl as innocent as he was, newborn into an awkward body by the new electricity. We're in the early phase of learning uses for electricity and ways to generate it. Rapid advances open doors to new, even more rapid advances, until, by now our heads are swimming. The entire civilization that went before in the Age of Fire is going away from us, including democracy. Religion and politics are the last to concede to change, and they will, one way or another. Like Karl Marx wrote, if not by legislation, then by revolution. I feel like what we're seeing in our legislators and religionists is the tail end of something that has already changed, the ones ranting hysterically the last ones to get it. 

It is a universal problem, not just American. It is a problem in that we're learning how to do old things in new ways. Like writing. I  used to write with pencil or ink on paper. Then the typewriter came into my life, then the computer. This is the new world we're moving into. I see it in films from all around the globe, and reading around the globe too. The great drama of our time is adjusting to the new world electricity has opened to us. In a Chinese film, a girl with frizzy hair dyed in psychedelic colors, tattoos, piercings, punk makeup, skimpy outfit, passed out drunk. Her grandmother did not know what to make of her. Both are expressions of the confusion. Our old props are going away with the barns. Old belief systems have to go. It doesn't mean the spirit is gone. Only the calcified belief system around the spirit that immobilized the spirit, corralled it, is fading away, its emphasis on mind lacking the self-sustaining quality of spirit. The new keeps on coming in, pushing the old out. Collectively, we have shaken off the old and are living in the new world carrying moving vans of baggage from the Age of Fire, antiques like books, philosophies, art. We older people are appalled to see the new generation uninterested in anything that went before, attached to everyone they know by cell phone. It appears we need to wipe the slate clean, ultimately, of all that went before, attention held by distractions from one to the next while the changes occur around us. I like what I see of the new social attitudes in the young. I've come to believe the young have an intelligence we of older generations cannot understand. I like that and find it promising for the future.

It doesn't mean the future is Utopian. It means the future will be based in new belief systems. Old belief systems have served for so long they have become unwritten laws. One such unwritten law dominates self-editing. From a lifetime of living in a surveillance nation I know has computers set to lock onto key words, I avoid using such words as b-o-m-b and p-r-o-t-e-s-t, among many others. Right of assembly is not a right anymore, if it ever was. Republicans have been systematically dismantling democracy since the coup in 1963. By 2015, it's a done deal. The fascist constitution, the Patriot Act of 2001, voided the original constitution, making the citizen, already shrunk to consumer and taxpayer, enemy of the state. We can be arrested, beaten, killed without recourse by a cop's whim or mistake. Last year the Supremes made it legal for cops to break down a door, enter somebody's house guns blazing, kill a dog and a seven year old, a mistake, wrong address. Fix your own damn door--tough shit about the kid and the dog. Rights? This is the phase we're in, between democracy and whatever follows. Police state always self-destructs, so I assess the self-destruction of police state is in the very nature of fascism, based in hate. Hate has no staying power, only destructive power. The so-called Christians allying themselves with fascism have already committed their own undoing. What I'm looking at for the future is getting through the destruction of our country like the Germans lived through their own destruction and reconstructed a new world. The new world of reconstructed America, no longer Number One, probably will not use two-thirds of our tax dollars toward killing poor people of small, defenseless countries around the globe. No more the entire UN rising to censure the Land of the Free for police brutality and the penal system. We still have in the future collective humanity rising and saying, No More War, meaning it. It's been said a trillion times, though not yet with the meaning it will take to break through the most resistant stain of the old belief systems.

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SUBJECTIVE UNIVERSE

joel shapiro

Just now had a brief flash of a concern in childhood I've carried all the way along. I had a hard time talking like other kids. They seemed to flow freely when they talked. I didn't know what to talk about. Subjects that interested me were of no interest to anybody else. I wanted to talk about "deep" stuff, "heavy" stuff, which I took for life. I'm remembering a woman I've known awhile, at a cocktail party talking about every detail of what her children did that day. I had to walk away. I thought, Shit, is this what people talk about? I reminded self, this is why I stay at home. Two-thirds of a century of television. And now we have killer cops as a rule. I'm paranoid about driving on a public road anymore. I stay out of group scenes because I never know what to talk about, and when I do talk, I ask self, why are you talking? You're focusing all your attention on saying the least in the most words. Only way you can be acceptable at a group gathering where everybody stands around in small circles of four or five and talk as fast as they can go getting nothing at all said. I can't exist like that. Since childhood I've been speechless in a group of more than half a dozen people. I'd rather listen, then I get called out for judging everybody. What? Whatever. So I stay home where I belong. It's even tiresome in cocktail parties where everybody reads. It's even more difficult to be in a room of people where nobody reads. That's where I'm really lost. I've taught self how to be comfortable in a world of people that don't read. I'm as comfortable now with people who don't read as well as people who read. It's a major gulf, a grand canyon between the two. Totally different ways of thinking and interpreting. 

joel shapiro

In the city, I worked in a bookstore and my social world was all people who read. Also, nearly everybody I knew was a Democrat. I came to the mountains and know precious few people who read and almost everybody I know is a Republican. The other side of the coin. I meet somebody who reads and it's Tom Clancy. Last year I thought about reading a Clancy novel to see if it would pull me through it, feeling in need of a page-turner. I opened a copy and saw in the front "dedicated to Ronald Reagan." I put the book down like it spontaneously combusted. Somebody that much a Reaganista I don't need in my head. I don't mean to imply I believe readers are more intelligent than nonreaders. I've not found that to be so. I include people who read only the Bible among readers. I feel like when I'm reading somebody's writing, I'm tapping into another perspective of the world I live in as a human being. This can be done, too, just knowing somebody. Knowing somebody is much better than reading what somebody has to say. Knowing somebody, I'm in touch with another perspective, somebody with valuable insights, whoever it is. Reading what somebody has to say is another way of knowing somebody. Reading Henry Miller, I am in touch with someone who has become my friend through reading. It's something like a facebook friend I've never met, though have come to know over a few years that if we were to meet, we'd be friends in the way our minds resonate. I have several facebook friends I'd love a chance to meet, or even better have them in my community, in my immediate world. And people I already know who are facebook friends, the facebook interactions add to our friendship. 

joel shapiro

This blog has become my friend. It's my journal. This is the place where I can open up and flow freely as myself in self-exploration. It's something on the order of the psychotherapist's couch where I look for perspective. I don't concern myself with opening up publicly. It's not "the public" seeing it. I feel like anyone reading any of these journal entries is my friend. It's easy to open up with friends. This journal is also an exercise that started as a discipline and became so much fun that the word discipline has no relevance. I associate discipline with marching, standing at attention, doing something I don't want to do under duress. I wanted to write every day, make myself write every day, even when I don't want to. I allow missing a day or two a week for recharging the battery. To do it every day without a break would be punishment. I don't believe discipline equals punishment. Earlier, I was thinking about skipping today and having a good sleep. I've learned that when I'd rather not write is when I write my best. I like writing in the midnight hour. It's midnight now. A good time to start. I like best writing while most of the people in my time zone are sleeping. It is this journal I go to for meditation. These writings read like I wrote them out in the time it would take to copy one. Each one is a meditation. I approach first sentence with empty mind, no idea of where I want to go, put down a first sentence and see what follows. Something happens. Right away I'm in a groove, one sentence follows another. I go with the wind like a butterfly to see where it takes me. I like flying through the interior landscape. Some of it I like to look at, some of it I don't. Both have equal value. Balance is what I look for, a Taoist balance. 

joel shapiro

The writing is first person subjective experience. I've come to believe the subjective is is where "truth" is to be found better than in the objective. I take objective for scientific method. It works good for documentaries. I'm not writing a documentary. I am limited to my own point of view. I have access to no other, but in reading or knowing somebody. I observe and interpret by way of my own point of view. I look at the variety of comments that come up on various political issues and it makes me glad I don't know any of those people. What I'm getting at is the radical difference of perspective from one to the next. The comments are so adamant they make me distrust my own opinions. I distrust them anyway. I don't recall ever being comfortable having opinions. Of course I have them, even when I don't call them opinions. It boils down to point of view, each of us having our own. I'm writing here as one person in one place in one time. A subjective historical document, a collection of letters. Gore Vidal gave good reason why we have no history. History is written from diaries, journals, autobiography and letters, all of which are self-serving, and newspaper articles we all know are not accurate. He points out for me that what we have for history is subjective. We have access to no other way of seeing, but by data. Then we make sense of the data subjectively. Reason introduces some objective, a good balance for the subjective. I like to weave reason into my subjective point of view for balance. I know I can never be right about anything. I'm in the world of illusion where what I think is going on aint it, whatever it is. I float along the best I can like staying upright in a kayak through white water and calm.

joel shapiro himself

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THE AGE OF OIL

the fiddler


It seems like my mind stays on about one subject over the last few days, the end of the Age of Oil and the transition to living without oil, which will probably take as long as it did to get this far into the Age of Oil. Oil is not forever. It is a limited resource. Oil has been beneficial in having something to do with the collective raising of human consciousness. It has taken us from a horseback army to fighter jet army, to space exploration, to electric razors, to everything electric. It takes coal and natural gas to make electricity. In hydroelectric dams, oil lubricates the machines. No more plastic. No more cars, even electric, as each tire is 7 gallons of oil. Lubrication? The age of the machine that came up with oil will fade as oil fades. The age of gadgets will go away as oil goes away.



In the 50s when machines and gadgets were getting going, "Better living electrically," it also meant better living with oil. Westinghouse washer and dryer. Kelvinator. Convenience the key word. The convenience of garbage disposals, shove it down the drain, flip the switch and into the sewer it goes. Never wash a dish again. Can openers. In the midst of it all, the voice of Ronald Reagan, Death Valley Days. There came a time when conveniences were taken care of. From then on, it became a matter of manufacturing gadgets and a cultural fascination with gadgets that is really odd when you pay attention to it, created entirely by advertising. Baseball is not our national pass-time. Shopping is. Again, made by advertising. Therein is the dumbing down of America, submitting to mind manipulation techniques all the time, told over and over it's right to want things you can't afford.



The cult of the New in this time of rapidly evolving hi-tech gadgets insists that the latest is necessary for a host of convincing reasons thought up by very well paid advertising gurus versed in manipulating the human mind.  All before, obsolete, dinosaurs. Government has learned from business, and by now our government is corporate business using what has been learned from advertising for mind control by propaganda. As oil goes away and electricity goes away, government using the trickery of business on us will go away too. It will have to find a new kind of trickery. Economy is based in oil too. As oil goes, economy goes. As economy goes, big problems arise. Civil unrest. Crime. Political turmoil. Military called on to kill its own people, a la Libya. It will be a frightful time. Like up to recently has been living on more is best, and will next do the reverse of that, more is less.



I don't like to follow my thinking into what it might be like. It will be different from place to place, and like now, everyone will be in his/her own life dealing with what's most pressingly important. It means what the Bible calls the Harvest is coming up. As oil and everything else is priced out of range of all but the rich, there will likely be an ongoing die-off for a lot of decades. It looks like this "economic downturn" is the direction of the future. That is, economic. We will be gardening more. And we will be learning gardening after a renascence in science that can teach us to grow things without oil based fertilizer, and actually be able to live from what we grow more effeciently than ever. In that way, it could create among the people who gather into groups or communities, everyone working toward the good of all, which includes oneself, better physical health, better mental health, better emotional health.



That's idealistic seeming, but after this time of nearly everyone on some kind of relaxation drug, people frantic with worries, the collective anger that I believe has to do with there being no place for the individual any more, when there's no money to worry over, just enough to get by on, I'm seeing it a highly spiritual time where not having money is the real wealth. Undoubtedly, there will be much attention given to healing the earth from all the sickness and toxicity brought to us by oil. I look at the snowbirds at the bird feeder and reflect on how few birds we have. I've seen the bird population decrease quite a lot in my time in the mountains. Tom Pruitt told me there was a multitude of birds in the old days, big swarming flocks of them like clouds in the sky. Farmers everywhere grew oats and other grains. The birds had a feast and no doubt multiplied like crazy. Now they're being killed off by pesticides, oil based.



Much healing will be needed. The end of manufacturing, the end of a way of life we've evolved over the last 150 years, will be a shock. We'll learn how to deal with it. Again, I think it will be a highly spiritual time, not a fundamentalist time--now is fundamentalist time, the peak of the age of oil. This time of prosperity we're in has little place for the spirit. Art appears to me to be the place the spirit dwelled in the time when the spirit took not just back seat, but the trunk. A spiritual awakening for all humanity is forecast in the near future. We'll go back to horses and donkeys and wells, growing our own food, no more agri-business of one crop growing in straight lines to the horizon in all directions. Frankenfood I've heard it called. We'll hear roosters crow again. When the archaeologists of the future go through the mountains of trash that are our city's landfills, they will have a grand time recreating the Age of Oil in their minds. It will be read about as we read about the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, taught in universities, the story of every civilization, rise and fall.



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