I DODGE WOOLYWORMS

ernest trova

 

You believe God forgives. Yeah. God is done with it, already forgiven the guilts eating you up. If you believe forgiveness is important, learn to forgive yourself. It's only you holding yourself in the bog of self-blame. God is done with it. It's the same as nothing at all. Karma is done with it. Whatever your return would be for all you blame yourself for, you've already had the returns and didn't recognize them. Let it rest. Self talk. This is how I talk to myself when I'm feeling blue from memories in childhood, the neighbor's cat I killed not meaning to. I continue to feel sorrow from the memory. It brings to mind a scene from a Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor movie, the Sandpiper, 1965. There was a young boy under ten, or so I suppose from poor memory over half a century. Daddy gave him a .22 rifle for maybe a birthday present. They went outside with it, a young deer stepped into range, paused for a Hollywood Bambi pose, the kid pulled the trigger. The deer fell down dead. Miracle shot. The kid was mortified. He preferred the deer alive, didn't know he was putting an end to its life. The kid was me.

 

 

 

It is surely something I came into this lifetime with. All the way back to first memories I never wanted to kill anything. I have killed, and every time, mostly roadkill, it tormented me. I appeal to the Higher whatever to take care of the soul of the cat, dog, coon, squirrel, possum that ran under my tires. If there is a chance to avoid one, I will, but there are times, like day before yesterday, a rabbit darted from the side of the road between my front wheel and back wheel. A casualty of the modern world. By end of next day the crows and buzzards will have had a snack, only a spot left on the road until the rain washes it away. In an unavoidable situation, I remind myself it was a quick dying and the bunny will feed several crows and a possum or two. I killed a coon with intent once, and swore to self I'll never do it again. Killed a dog once with intent and swore off of killing anything ever again with intent. I must accept it when a cat darts under a tire, but I have control over intent. 

 

 

 

My own belief that the living beings around me are supremely precious made me feel like I came from outer space through the years of growing up. I grew up into a world where killing is the ideal. Disasters are measured by body count. Killing is continuous on television, the most intense drama. The man that can kill and feel nothing is American superman. I came of age in the time of the draft, mandatory training to kill for God and country. By that time I'd had it with God and didn't believe my country anymore. I didn't want to kill anybody and didn't see any reason behind the military's desire to make me kill except proof of evolution. I, personally, suspect it has to do with gross misinterpretations of the Hebrew Wars in the Old Testament preached to army boys during the Indian Wars, which they fought as though they were reenacting holy script. I believe a case can be made for the Hebrew Wars the mythology of the white man's approach to killing Indians, genocide. God's will. King David, a middle-eastern war lord, was the Genghis Khan of his place and time. David was God's favorite and it was important that Jesus be a descendant of David by bloodline.

 

 

jean arp

 

I can't help but take from the Hebrew Wars that God says genocide is the way to go, kill em all, even the dogs and camels, don't leave anything living. God works in mysterious ways. I can't help but rethink Genghis Khan in light of David's story. I was reading a history of China in one volume where Genghis Khan of Mongolia, was given a couple of paragraphs. Those paragraphs told me very little, but made me curious to know more about the Great Khan, someone I only knew as a name. The biography was an unforgettable story. I cherish the book as one of my lifetime favorites. I found him to be a truly great man in Mongolia's history. It was not a country then. The Mongols were different tribes that warred with each other, renewed revenge every generation. Genghis Khan brought them together into a nation of Mongols. They stopped fighting each other and became the Mongol hordes, the Tartars that terrorized cities along the Silk Road they created to carry the treasures  of pillage back to Mongolia on yaks. Fleas on yaks carried the plague from China to Europe over the Silk Road. Genghis Khan is surely another one of God's favorites. European Christians glorified God with genocide in the Americas. It's kinda hard to reconcile all this with God is love.   

 

 

 

 

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LETTING GO OF EXPECTATION

 

agnes martin

A doctor's appointment yesterday. Arriving home, I went straight to bed. Woke up later, watched a film of New York artist Matthew Barney, Matthew Barney: No Restraint. I have to confess to not liking it at all. In five or ten years I may find it the most fascinating thing that ever happened. I'll allow for that, because I change. But for this moment, it failed to trip my trigger. The film was about his process of making his art objects, sculptures. Several years ago I saw some of his work at the Whitney in a Biennial, and didn't care for it then. Didn't care for anything in that show but a couple of Agnes Martins and a Cy Twombly. They were so fine, they seemed out of place in the show. I remember leaving the show, out on the sidewalk, back in the world of cars and noise, I saw at the corner a post for the walk-don't-walk signal, next to it a post with a fire alarm box, and beside it a steel wicker-like wastebasket painted black, a black plastic bag inside with trash in it. I saw this and assessed it the best in show. I don't mean to play like Tom Wolfe and come down on contemporary art in New York. Not at all. I'm going by my own personal taste. It felt like a majority of the artists in the show were commenting on living in a trash society. I go outside the museum and find the best sculpture in show is actually a trash bin, a black circle with multiple colors inside making a composition particular to the moment. Next time somebody drops something in it, everything changes. Interactive sculpture. If I'd been stoned, I'd have said, Wow. I am in tune with art as comment on society, a mirror, but after seeing a show of the trash all around us, I'd rather make my own art a reminder of the world we live in that is not trash. In like reasoning, I'd rather shop locally than give my energy to Walmrat.

 

agnes martin

 

A doctor's office visit is as trying for me as taking a driver's license test. After taking the test I see highway patrol lurking everywhere. After a doctor visit, I feel like I'll be dead in a day or two, can't possibly live another week. Come home, lie down on the bed and get a vision of waking up in my coffin and it in the grave. I have confidence in my doctor that is total. He kept my old preacher friend, Millard Pruitt, going through years of heart attacks, living until the body couldn't hold out another minute. My friend Jr Maxwell he kept going until the body couldn't draw another breath. I've witnessed other people he has kept going with his knowledge until there was nothing left to cure. I don't want to hang on as long as they did. It's not that I'm more in a hurry to get to the other side than they were. I think I've come to a place where this side of the veil, the other side of the veil, it's the same; it's my consciousness, my mind, there, the same as here. Different stimulus maybe. Like everything that's around a corner, it's the unknown. I don't like to think about the other side, because I don't want expectations. Misinterpretations make false expectations. Expecting one thing, I miss another. I know I have expectations, but prefer not to entertain them. Dread is a form of expectation and I have plenty of dreads. For example: a meeting. Friday I'm having lunch with my friend Cynthia, for which I have no dread, only look forward to, expectation. This expectation is from experience; I always enjoy Cynthia. The mind I'm in, after a doctor's visit, identification with the body again, reminds me of how poorly I take care of myself, yet continue to get up in the morning to feed my donkey friends. I can't go to a gym. I hated gym in school. Hated lab too. Any class that had a lab, I hated. Had to take a couple of them again, making it all the worse.

 

agnes martin

 

One thing this crazy mind of seeing myself dead the next minute has brought to the front of the mind is a focus I see in myself and others around me on what is wrong. I'm tired of dwelling on what's wrong. Political involvement focuses on what's wrong that we have to change. It's interesting, because it denotes an evolving society on its collective spiritual path. It is something tempting to do on the spiritual path, to come down on oneself for not being good or not doing right or not meditating. It's part of it, possibly a phase. The social fixation on what is wrong in society is the macrocosm of our individual concerns about doing right, being acceptable, being good, wanting to be a better person. I can't help but call it a good thing. At the same time, there is the balance. King David is the best example I know of balance. He was a genocidal warlord, bi-sexual wild man who fed his passions liberally as a king, and in his heart was a love for God so intense that the prophesied Messiah must be in David's blood line. King David shatters for me the notion that good (godly)behavior is the path. I see atheism a place on one's spiritual path. In my case, it was the beginning point. I had to unlearn all the nonsense I'd been taught as religion. Only then was I able to be open to the spirit. The spirit came so convincingly that I had no choice but to go with it. And so clearly that I could re-enter the old belief-system I came up in and appreciate what is real in it. And so certainly that I could worship with any religion on earth in full accord with the people around me. I've chosen no religion, just my own pilgrim way through everyday life.

 

agnes martin

 

I take carrots to the donkeys in the morning, talk to them while they chew donkey hors d'oeuvres. I carry hay through the gate easier while they're chewing on carrots. Without the carrots, they crowd me wanting to get the first chew. It's ok. I stop long enough for them both to tear off something to chew on while they wait for me to put it down. I feel an upwelling of love talking to them and feeding them, watching them eat, walking among them in the meadow. It's a tremendous love feeling when I'm in the meadow. I look out the window at them and feel an upwelling of love. In my house I feel a love embrace. I've found a good balance of battery charging time at home and only the kind of social that doesn't exhaust me, with friends, people I care about who care about me. It's a sight how much love I feel with the donkeys. Caterpillar too, indoors. This is my religion. Baby Vada is my religion. Lunch with a friend is my religion. The car is my religion. Living in the heart is it. King David slaughtered a large part of the Middle-East, broke every rule there ever was, though in his heart he lived his love for God. I remind myself that dying is not the issue. The time between now and then is the issue. When something like a doctor visit throws my head into looking at my death date, I have to spend some time with self, educate self again to understand that when I focus on the end moment, I miss everything happening between now and then.  

agnes martin herself

 

 

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THOUGHTS ON KING DAVID

 

king david by moretto

King David of the Old Testament has been in my mind quite a lot recently. He's a puzzlement and an excellent example of balance. I think of him as the Genghis Khan of the Middle East in his time. Genocide was what his army did. They represented the new cosmology, Aries the ram, on a mission to exterminate the previous belief system, Baal, Taurus the bull. God told him to kill em all. Don't even leave a dog standing. Their parties after a battle of up close and personal killing with knives, hatchets and spears amounted to Dionysian excesses to make the Romans look like beginners. I've thought that to be sent back in time to one of those parties as I am now, a squeamish American, it would be like jumping into a mosh pit at a punk concert, one that smells so bad it makes me want to puke. Old King David had a liking for a good party. These were people who let blood when they fought. Swords slashing arteries open, people on the ground bleeding out, screaming in agony, piss, shit, no time for the living to concern themselves with anything but slinging swords and dodging other swords. Their battles were blood baths, killing by blood-letting. Later, at the party with the babes and the booze, smelling of blood and sweat, charged with an extended adrenaline rush, the original Israelis, they commit every "ungodly" act there is, dancing and drinking, belly dancers on the tables.

king david

This is David the shepherd boy, slayer of Goliath with a rock, teenage lover of King Saul's boy, prince Jonathan, unto scandal, fearless warrior, desert warlord, sweeping genocide over the land they came to take over. USA cleared the North American continent by way of genocide, inspired by King David's genocide. Kill em all. Sermons at the forts in Indian Country used King David's genocidal wars to inspire the boys to go out there and kill every last one of them redskin heathens. It don't make no difference, they aint got no souls, they don't know Jesus Christ as their personal savior. They're already damned to hell, let's advance them to their fiery destiny and get them out of our way. Genghis Khan blazed a trail from Mongolia across the -Stans, then only one country, Kazakhstan, by now divided up into all the different -Stans, and up into the Ukraine. A beautiful film, ANDREI RUBLEV, by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, a four hour b&w story of a monk, an icon painter, who witnessed a Tartar (Mongol) take-over of a walled city in the Ukraine where they killed everybody. A hard film to watch. No guns or explosions. More up close and personal slashing swords and blood flying. Though it was four hours, it seemed like no more than two, and it was not an action movie. The scene of the Mongol raid was no more than a minute or two. It was the Mongols, but it was the sort of thing King David and the Israeli Rams did to the same degree.

king david

From my way of seeing as a lover of God, somebody who looks to "do right" in the light of God, or higher self, what-have-you, genocidal warlord does not qualify as somebody God could have much affection for. It makes no more sense to me to say King David was loved by and watched over by God personally, than to say the same of Genghis Khan. Of course, it can be said of everyone, but it is made a point of with David. If it can be said of David, it can be said of Khan, and it can be said of the USA. God must think genocide is wonderful entertainment. Does it mean the genocides going on in North Africa in our time, committed by warlords in Nissan pickups, are God's favorite warriors working for the glory of God? Paul of the New Testament was a Jewish executioner who killed early Christians, a Jew Nazi. Questioning such as this does not make me think less of God, but helps adjust the perspective I see God through. I've been of the belief from Sunday school onward that God prefers meek school nerds who carry their bible on top of their books to show everybody they are Christians, the bible a reference to back up the witness winning souls to the Lord. Throughout my adult life I thought God preferred sweet to sour. Now I'm thinking he likes both. It's leading me to believe that God gets a kick out of the entire human experience, all the way from sitting cross-legged in an abandoned Hindu temple for thirty years to chopping heads off left and right, raping virgin harem girls, pleasing God any way the cards fall.

king david

Then there is the other hand. Didn't Jesus say something about don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Kinda sounds like playing a banjo. On the other hand, King David composed some extraordinarily beautiful Psalms, hymns, every one of them the equal of Amazing Grace in it's spiritual beauty. They dwarf Shakespeare's sonnets. King David, the bad mutha, could believably have had a tattoo on the back of his neck, MONSTER, spelled in Hebrew, as a title. Amazing Grace was written by a slave trader. God even likes the experience of a slave. The bible is loaded with slaves in both testaments. Slavery is an African institution, not an American institution. Slavery is happening all over Africa today, yesterday and all the way back. King David's people came out of Africa. They were Africans who migrated to the Mesopotamian (Iraq) and Persian (Iran) world the other side of Suez. Evidently they originally came to Egypt from south of Egypt, Nubia, and below that, Ethiopia. Ethiopia continues to have a community of Jews down through time, perhaps descendants of the ones left behind when the others were rounded up to go north to Egypt for massive labor projects. Something like the Cherokees remaining in western NC after the Trail of Tears to relocation in Oklahoma. The Hebrew wars cut a swath through the Arab world by way of genocide and took the land as their own. They conquered it. Brings to mind the Emperor of Qin (Chin) uniting the six warring provinces that made up China by conquering them one at a time.

king david

I used to be taught God wanted us to be good, sweet examples of looking our best as Madison Avenue advertising men for Jesus. And I was taught he wanted us to behave certain ways that are "good" and avoid behavior called "bad." Then you get to looking and it aint such a well defined line between good and bad. What can be terrible in one context can be the best there ever was in another context. I kind of took it for granted that God wanted us to be good. Maybe half a year ago a friend who is 30 asked me in conversation, What does God want us to do? I have puzzled over that one in the past and pretty much came to I don't know. I didn't want to give an off-hand answer, a fill in the blank answer. I wanted to go with it 100% because I knew he meant his question, and evidently suspected I could answer it. I went inside for a moment, closed eyes, looking inward at the dark, looking for what God wants us to do. In my mind I saw several billion people, all of them with different activities, different purposes, different motivations, all of them valid in God's eye. Death is the same as taking a nap in God's eye. God forgives everything. God loves us unconditionally. We don't even have to deserve it. Why not God love a warlord the same as a nun working as a nurse? They're both part of the tapestry of humanity, "made in God's image."

king david

I wanted to say something straight, something he could think about that maybe could inspire his own thinking. I said, "God wants us to live our lives." That seems to me to tell it. Whatever place we have in the world is our part of the whole. I'm not so sure good and bad apply. Balance, I think, is what we're after. Balance includes both sides of the coin. I feel like King David had the wild man covered, and the spirit man covered just as well. He must have been a well-rounded man, a man with understanding. Who can say anything about anybody? Genghis Khan, when he became the Great Khan, was an inspired leader and a man of profound understanding. As I look at my own lifetime, it has not been so dramatic and extreme. I find the fist half of my life was lived in darkness with some light shining through, and the second half in light with a little darkness peeping through. I don't think I'm afraid of the dark side any more, anyway not like I used to be.

king david

I'm thinking the story of King David is telling me to look at the whole, not just the half of it we call the good. Neither one side nor the other is the coin. The coin consists of both sides. Rotating light and dark on earth make life possible. It's only for other people we expect ourselves to be sweet and pretty all the time. Some people very advanced spiritually are ill natured and hateful to be around. I like to have a balance in the people I know, some who come under the heading, good, and some who come under bad. I like both and never attempt to turn bad to good. Because I really don't believe what we call bad is necessarily bad and what we call good is good either. They are totally subjective assessments, different from individual to individual, circumstance to circumstance. I saw the film of King David, I think with Richard Gere. It was about the next thing to nothing. I'd hoped to find some insight into David, but don't recall getting anything but disappointment. USA, a so-called Christian nation has something like 30,000 deaths a year by gun and the biggest prison population on earth. I can't help but see this is what has come to us for slaughtering our way across the continent. At the same time, God seems to have an affection for USA, despite all. We have a screwed up government, but the American people are an awfully interesting bunch of people. We are the people of the world.

 king david

 

 

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EAST AND WEST

 

brice marden, couplet IV



When the white page appeared to be written upon, these lines came to me from Louise Gluck's poem, THE WINGED HORSE,

     Here is my horse Abstraction,
     silver-white, color of the page,
     of the unwritten.


Yes, I'm getting on the horse Abstraction and heading into the unknown, going with the horse to see where we go. The flow. I like starting on the white page with nothing in mind. In my early years in the mountains I knew a Regular Baptist preacher well enough that over a period of several years he told me his life, one of my great experiences in the mountains. He told me that in his way of preaching, he approaches the pulpit with nothing in mind. He doesn't study for a given topic to preach on, nothing. It's all about being a vessel for the spirit, keeping mind out of it. It's a gift to be able to speak from the heart without interference from the mind. They say it is the Holy Spirit speaking through them. I watched it for years trying to figure out where the "in the spirit" talk came from. Everything I thought about was not it, until I finally saw that it was exactly as they say, from the Holy Spirit. In the case of Millard Pruitt, his only subject in the pulpit was love. Outside the pulpit it was a word he seldom used; it was a four-letter word, making love. Old country beliefs. But outside his mind, love was all that came through. It was ok when the Spirit talked about love, because then it is only one kind of love the Spirit means. Out here in the world, things are carnal. It's different.

I use that principle when I jump on the horse Abstraction, not because I believe the Holy Spirit will speak through me, because I don't. I won't even go so far as to say my Higher Self comes through, because I don't believe it does. Yet, sometimes I have seen it peep through, though not with my intent. I'm not channeling. I'm having fun. Writing these almost daily entries is the ongoing project I started when I wanted to find a way to stimulate me to write something every day that might be worth reading. The ones I feel like are the best are the ones where one sentence comes at a time and I don't know where it's going, what it's about, the why of it, and when it comes to its end I click the orange publish rectangle and am done with it. It was like walking through squishy mud. A couple weeks later I go back and look at it and it is one of the more interesting ones. To my way of seeing. All this is about my way of seeing because I believe the only reality is subjective. There is no real objective that we live with. Objective needs a lab with set conditions that can be repeated and give the same results. We don't live like that. We live as a self swimming in a sea of other selves, each one the center of the universe. The trick is learning how to live with each other.

In the West, Europe and the 2 American continents, we are born bad and learn to become good. In Asia we're born good and learn to become bad. In the West, self is first, all others last. In Asia, others are first and self is last. The difference between Buddhism and Christendom. In myself, in my adult life I have consciously sought how to become in myself a blend of East and West. First, I have the Western way as my own, because it's the world I was born into and have all my experience in. I wanted to ease that off a bit. When I fell in with Meher Baba and began to be able to understand scriptures of the East, Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim, I came to see that Jesus was Eastern too. He didn't ever talk about me-first-everybody-else-last. I'm not a Paulist, but one thing he said I like, Run the race with patience. Hurry slowly. I see Paul pulling the teachings of Jesus back into codes of restrictions and privilege. Anyway, I wanted to become a blend of East and West. My only access to the East was through reading, also my only access to the West. I spent several years reading discourses of Masters from India, Buddhist writings, Buddhist poetry, scriptures, until I felt I had a fair enough understanding that it was familiar as the Western vision.

First reading Meher Baba's discourses and writings about him I discovered he was saying the same things Jesus said. In fact, when I found myself checking Meher Baba's sayings with the sayings of Jesus, I found them the same. Jesus spoke in parables and Shakespearean English, Meher Baba spoke(or signed) in prose. I like about Meher Baba's prose that he explains what certain spiritual principles mean in practical everyday life ways. The part that brought me out of my slumber was when I saw I was reading Baba in relation to Jesus in my mind when I believed I didn't believe Jesus was the God Man. I saw then I had successfully discarded all the unnecessary belief systems built around the words of Jesus by centuries of theologians thinking up as much nonsense as can be thought up, and kept the words of Jesus. Soon afterward, a year later, when I came to the mountains, my nearest neighbor Tom Pruitt turned out to be a Regular Baptist who had left the church several years before. His Bible was a New Testament and he only read the red letters. That was the only part of interest to him. The red letters are also the content of the Thomas Jefferson Bible, which he reduced to the red letter words. I thought it very interesting I had fallen in with someone who saw it as I saw it, each in our own ways, which were very different, though the same. Jesus was every bit as Eastern as Krishna and the Buddha. They all say the same things, just in different words, languages and images for different cultures.

A Jesus who looks like James Brown is no more inconceivable to me than a Jesus who looks like Willem Dafoe. My guessing of how Jesus looked was a dark Middle-Eastern or North African look. The Hebrew slaves in Egypt in Pharoah times came from South of Egypt. Nubia is South of Egypt. Ethiopia is South of Egypt. Isaac Hayes was right: Moses was black. Five thousand years ago, there weren't many white people in that part of Africa. I feel like Andre Gregory's portrayal of John the Baptist in The Last Temptation of Christ was a good portrayal of a fair likelihood. That part of the world in Bible times was very different from portrayed in Bible movies. The parties in King David's time after a battle, I don't even know if they've been attempted on film. Three thousand years ago everything was so different from us conceptually we can't even imagine what those people were like in the part of the world that is now Iraq and around there, and North Africa. They weren't like Americans is all I can start with. Though my guess is to sit in a coffee shop in Cairo today would not be a great deal different from three millennia ago. Conversation would be the same; names would be different. They still use donkeys in parts of the city.

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