CONNECTING AND DECONNECTING THE DOTS

pontormo

 

I've decided today to call my desk my corporate office. If corporations are people, it works the other way, too, people are corporations. I call it my corporate office meaning it is my own personal space. A buffalo is a chicken: buffalo wings.  I refuse to concern myself about the Supremes driving a stake through Democracy's heart in the coffin. But being aware of what it means, and how predictable it was, I see nothing left but to lower the coffin and throw in the dirt. I don't even like to think anymore about American "foreign policy" in Latin America, such that the Spanish and Portuguese speaking people have divorced themselves from the OAS controlled by the USA, and created their own organization leaving out USA. A cancer has spread through America that has a possibility of proving fatal. Too many people jump up and down for my comfort, won't it be great without government. Yeah, about like New Orleans in the first week after Hurricane Katrina, but without end. Gangs become militias, become armies and we have a land of warlords and armies terrorizing the poor, killing the homeless. It will be real great. Military is already poised and training. It won't be to serve and protect, unless you mean Wall Street. I don't want to pay attention to the systematic erasing of democracy by  corporate police state. I have paid too much attention in the past.

 

pontormo

 

I believed it important to know what's going on. It is not. My friends who don't even know the name Cheney are free of the agitation machine filling their minds with visions of a totally false world created by propaganda. They live in the world of each other, families and friends, have no idea what's going on with the news. I'm glad for them they pay it no mind. I don't say I'm glad because I don't want them to. I don't care if they do or don't. They choose to give the fake news no attention, which makes me glad for them, happy for their lives that they are living directly face to face with everyone in their lives. Their responses and reactions are directly related to what is happening immediately in their lives; husbands, kids, wives, parents, grandma, grandpa, people at work. I inhibit interest in what's-wrong thinking by not talking about it. It makes them refreshing people to be around. They work on cars, shoot arrows, hunt, go to tournaments, keep a studio photography business going, take kids to school and daycare, full-time jobs, interact with the kids and pay attention to what they say, enjoy their kids, and they do, indeed, enjoy their kids. They're good people. I'm glad for the sake of the quality of their lives they have not connected their minds to that sewage pipe of corporate news. The Reagan Revolution has succeeded. That's all I care to know. I know what's next, don't want to see it, and suppose I will. I am happy for my friends oblivious to what I see of this time in the flow of history. The only times I ever talk to them about "current events," this week's propaganda, is when I see something that will directly change their lives in a few years and they won't know where it's coming from, or to anticipate it.

pontormo

I have talked to Justin enough to say the economy is not going to get better. It's only getting worse for the working people and will go on getting worse. A year or so ago he expressed regret he did not get to go to college, and would like to go to college yet, wanting to work in forestry as a ranger who protects the natural world. I told him this is not the time for college. It is a time for knowing how to do things. I said, You know how to do things. You know what happens when water goes down a drain, and you know how to fix whatever goes wrong in the system from the well to the septic tank. I told him people of the middle class all around us will be needing help, because they went to college, they don't do fix-it, with exceptions. Their toolbox amounts to a hammer and a screwdriver in a kitchen drawer. College makes you lazy. You will be taking care of the people around you who can't take care of themselves in practical matters that matter, old people, even teaching young people how to get by. You know how to work a garden. You're good at hunting. You have skills. You'll be teaching your skills to your kids, nieces and nephews like you do anyway. You'll be helping plow gardens. Even when economy goes bust, you'll be able to trade services. If we can't afford gas anymore, you know how to work horses and how to take care of them. You're going to be all right. May not be able to drive a new truck. I made it clear that this is just projection from the way things look now. The unexpected  is around every corner.

pontormo

The way things look right now, Western Civ is about to implode, self-destruct by its own ignorance the cancer. That's how it's been all my life. The propaganda of fear. I added I didn't want him to get a pessimistic attitude, because it will be then just like now. Your neighbors are your neighbors, the people you care about will be here. Circumstances will not be as they are now, but you'll be closer together, because you'll be working together and assisting each other, pulling together. People making their own music may take up again, guitars come out from under beds, fiddles come down from closet shelves, people start knowing each other again. There will be big social problems in cities, but the country people take care of one another. It may be the happiest period of your life. And it probably won't be that way at all, just a possibility going by an interpretation of the way things look now. Next week it may be entirely different. Maybe aliens will arrive and teach us how to live with ourselves. Don't hold your breath for that one. Most likely is that some time in your lifetime "The Lord Will Come Again," however that manifests. Nobody will get what it is when it happens but a few. The manifestation may take a couple centuries to fully manifest. Don't worry ~ Be happy. Hard times always come to an end. Ralph Stanley has a great banjo tune called Hard Times. My guess is we have about six more years of this cycle. May not be much left at the end of it. Next cycle may have to spend its first energy cleaning up the mess of the last cycle. A cartoon I saw at the beginning of Obama's term, him in the doorway of the Whitehouse, a black man with a push broom sweeping beer cans and assorted party trash out the front door.

pontormo

I said I believe you will see at least the beginning of the turn-around after the tide tears down the sand castle, clearing the way for a new sand castle to live until next tide from the ocean of love. I emphasized my reservation that I have learned from a lifetime of experience that my projections of the future never turn out to be the case. I never count on my interpretations of anything to be the case. I do interpret because that's how the mind works, filling in the space between the dots to solve the Rorschach puzzle of the week. That's all I'm doing. I mean for what I say to have no more credibility than something a republican in Congress says. It's just one person's point of view who lives in one place in one time with one set of experiences. Limited. Just saying this is how I interpret the dots I see. Another planet with any other star in our galaxy would have different constellations from the ones we see. It's the same from individual to individual. And it's all the same galaxy. I like to think of us in the surf at the beach, drops of the ocean of love flying through the air individuated for a time, to return to the ocean of love and remember: Oh, I really was not separate, just believed I was. We are 7 billion drops of the ocean of love flying through the air along an extended beach, believing our own individuation module is separate from all the others. I have sat all day on a rock in Waterfalls Creek and watched the continuous dance of constantly changing bubbles where the water flows over a rock to the next level. I saw that dance of the bubbles the mind, constantly changing, constantly in motion, bubbles pop as soon as they form. It became as restful to watch as flames in a fireplace. I'd think of how many multiple millions of years water has run through this creekbed between two ridges. The thousandth-of-a-second arrangement of the bubbles in a photograph has never happened before and will never happen again. I sat on the rock and watched, reminding myself this is how every moment is, the ongoing Now, the dance of Shiva.  

 

pontormo

 

 

*

HERE COME COWBOYS

australian aboriginal paintings

I heard a sentence on the radio news this afternoon that started, "How can the richest country in the world...?" I was so struck by that opening I missed the subject. It struck me so naïve I wondered where it came from. The richest country in the world? I've heard that all my life. In London a few different people referred to me a rich American. I said I'm not rich. I could afford to fly to London; they can't afford to fly to Disneyworld. Therefore, I'm rich. Therefore, Americans are rich. I saw on the telly one evening a commercial that pictured a boat and its big V wake on a lake in England. The visual zoomed onto the boat to Mrs So&So, "a rich American" who appreciates the English lake country, refinement, taste and so on. Being a rich American, she uses butter. No oleo margarine for the rich American. None of the people I was watching the telly with understood why I was laughing. It was too much to explain. Besides, it had to do with irony, and I really didn't dare attempt explaining irony. I'd been there long enough to have good understanding that my status as an American was way far below the lowest British subjects. I was regarded with an arrogance similar to what American black people get from white Americans. I realized that racism is only one of many varieties of outsider. Nationalism is about another kind of outsider us-them thinking. Be-true-to-your-school is another group for identity where outsiders go to another school.

Americans have been spoiled for a century or so by the people of the rest of the world looking at us in awe because we're rich. American tourists go anywhere in the world and we're welcomed happily, open-handed, Americans have money. I wondered how welcome I would be if I were black, or Malaysian, or from Pakistan. That was in the last years of America being held in respect. Nixon was the president lying to us at the time. Riding the Orient Express, the train, I went through what was then Yugoslavia, now Croatia and Serbia. It was a very different world from the part of Europe we think of as Europe. This southeastern extension of Europe was part of the Ottoman Empire until about half a century before I passed through it. The air smelled of Turkish tobacco. In this time, it was "behind the Iron Curtain," part of the Soviet Union. Signs were in probably Serbo-Croation and Russian. I saw how people lived in police state. Quietly. On the train I passed a group of people of my age, mid to late 20s, and they knew on sight I was American. They seemed slightly threatening. One of them said, "President Nixon," in a derisive tone of voice. They all laughed. I thought: I dislike him more than you do. This was the time of Brezhnev. They probably disliked Brezhnev more than I did. Americans were less appreciated internationally. Young Americans backpacking different places in the world would often fix a Canadian red maple leaf emblem onto the backpack. Less chance of trouble that way. They don't have to answer to American issues we have nothing to do with and can do nothing about.

In Athens, staying in a pension, having meals there, good Greek cooking, several college students from Chile appeared at the table one day. Most of them spoke English. I mentioned Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who was given the Nobel Prize that year. His picture was on the cover of Time the week before. One said, "He's a communist," and they all shut me out at that moment. From then on, I did not exist. It had not entered my mind to note that going to college in Chile with parents able to fly you to Athens could only be of politically right wing families. The communists were the working people. I had no experience with a Latin American country where communism was legal and politically active. Communism has been so eliminated in USA there's not a trace of it that can be taken seriously. In Chile, they keep the local Indians down. One of the odd aspects of racism is white Brits invade the new world colonies, kill out the Indian people, bring in black people for slaves. In the Spanish colonies, they swept away the civilizations, Mayan, Aztec, Toltec, Olmec, etc, an extended civilization, for gold. Too bad for the Indians that they were naïve about the value of gold. A song by the Psychedelic Furs plays in my head, "It gets so hard sometimes, to take it serious. It really gets to be a drag when, all we really need is love. Here come cowboys, here to save the world, here come cowboys, they're so inside the law, here come cowboys, they're no fun at all."

It's bizarre to me how white people took over the lands they discovered, killed the population and moved in. The survivors and descendants of the aboriginal people are regarded by the occupier as the lowest of the social order. In Australia, the white people are even more arrogant to the Aborigines of the continent than white Americans are to the Indians here. We name cities, rivers, mountains and so on after them, but they don't even figure. To the racist mind that looks down on them, the Indians are lower than black. It's the same in New Zealand with the Maoris. The Chinese occupied Tibet, and moved in a new population that regards the native Tibetans as low as Australians regard the Aboriginal people. Israel and the Palestinians. Somebody I knew years ago told me Indians are not human. I said, What? Right, they're not human. That was the first time I'd heard that one. I was maybe 22. From my first memories I identified with the Indian people that lived on this land originally. They were the people of my heart. I didn't know why. I'd never met one. They had a good way of life that kept the water and air clean for quite a number of centuries. Superior white man has turned the rivers to muck, and the air too, with superior knowledge. It's all ego. As long as we have ego, we'll have racism, nationalism, religionism and the other exclusive clubs to differentiate us from them, ultimately self from others.

 

 

 

*