PLAYING WITH KARMA

lawrence ferlinghetti

Suddenly a sentence popped into my mind, seemingly out of nowhere, We're as distinguished by the people that dislike us as we are by the ones that like us. I was told this about twenty years ago. For reasons I don't recall, it came up when I'd mentioned someone who really despised me for good reason, a result of a brief exchange. I was accused falsely and made my stand. I sometimes like to take karma into my hands and be the source of the karmic return. I realize I don't ever have to do anything to give a karmic return, it happens automatically and will come from anywhere. There are moments I decide to give the return, because I want to see what happens, and want the other to understand it's me giving the return.. Most of the time when somebody has done me dirty, I'll let it pass and go on, knowing a return will occur. There have been times I felt a return was called for, one I don't want to be sent to prison for, and let it be, aware the return is already set in motion by the deed itself and I'd do best to get out of the way and let karma handle it. Even though I like to think I'm spiritual every once in awhile, I still like revenge. It's a major subject in Hong Kong men-with-guns movies and samurai tales. It's not good policy; revenge has it's karmic return too. Revenge can go back and forth endlessly when it gets started. Somebody ends up dead sometimes and somebody in prison. I'm not that dedicated to revenge. When it's the kind of revenge that makes me want to be able to contemplate murder, I back off and give it over to karma. When somebody pulls a stunt on me that I think of as being hit in the back of the head with a baseball bat, then I will return same for the fun of showing other: this is what it's like. It's fun, too, to back away and wait to see what the return will be. A good karmic return is better justice than I can think up using mind, more balanced.

lawrence ferlinghetti

Recalling the time a man I worked for flew in my face over his own doings, none of it mine. He lost a little control in the thrill of telling somebody off. By the time he'd finished, he went on to tell me what I'm to do. I thought without saying it, already I knew my surprise for him. I stood listening to him, thinking, I don't work for you anymore. I waited til next morning to deliver the message by not showing up for work. He did me the redneck way, I did him the redneck way. Questioned for why, I say nobody ever gets a chance to talk to me like that a second time--I have control. A woman who took it upon herself to be my agent sold a couple of my paintings and decided it was time to take charge of me. I was told to paint "nigger kids playing around an old school house. That's what people want." That was it. She never had another chance to tell me how to paint. I said to self, I can't even be associated with ignorance such as that. The point was that she had more money than I did so she automatically assumed rights over me. It didn't work out like that, however. She got the message that I am strange, meaning unpredictable and not for sale. She is part of why I don't want the rich owning my paintings. She would think it a self-defeating attitude. She thinks in terms of money. I stopped painting for about ten years. Couldn't do it anymore from absence of interest. If this is what painting leads to, I don't want it. Business kills my art spirit. Money kills my art spirit. Something I put heart and soul into, and a good amount of time, suddenly becomes a commodity when I sign it. If I go for the money, I become a factory of one. I never wanted to work in a factory. 

lawrence ferlinghetti 

There's the guy I wanted to allow myself to contemplate murder with intent to get away with it. This is the point where I stop thinking I'd like the murder option, imagining what it would take to get away with it, and then living with getting away with it. I decide prison would be better, don't want to go to prision, so forget the murder option. I back away from involvement and turn revenge over to karma. And forget about it. It's the same as done. I metaphorically sit back and wait for the return and laugh when it happens. For unknown reasons karma gives a better balanced return than a will for revenge. I've seen returns that are more severe than I had assessed, and sometimes less. I've learned to just step back and wait. Patience. It usually doesn't take long. Somebody shot three holes in some windows with an air rifle. I knew exactly where he shot it from and who did it. I let it go by. Didn't want to set the revenge cycle in motion. I was asked by a friend, What did you do? I said, Put clear tape over the holes. I want to remember the moment. He said he meant, what am I going to do about it? I said, Nothing. Why not? It will take care of itself. He'll get his return. It's better when my hand is not in it. I said something similar will happen to him, he'll get mad, won't make the association of where it came from, and I'm out of the picture. Asked, How did you know it was him? I answered, It's a chickenshit thing to do and chickenshit is his signature. He was saying he wanted to shoot me, but not enough to go to prison, a symbolic gesture. I already knew he wanted me dead. He'd done the same thing at his mother's house. This moment showed me he wasn't mad enough to do it, just enough to say, You piss me off. The story that went before is a lesson in why it's not a good idea to pet rattlesnakes. He threatens me to other people, though I know he doesn't have what it takes. And if he does, can heaven be worse than this?

lawrence ferlinghetti

The other incident, where I wished I could contemplate murder, went on for a few years. I stayed out of the back-and-forth, let the boomerangs he threw at me return to him, which happened over and over. It was to the point it became my entertainment. Suddenly, one day, he got it that he had misread my motivations out of jealousy and pleaded for forgiveness. What could I do? I forgave. It just fell away. Now he's one of my best friends, the kind you can depend on treat you right and watch your back. It runs both ways. Before, we wanted to kill each other. Now, we defend each other. He's somebody I could say all kinds of negative shit about, but never do. When he comes up in conversation, I plead his case, a way of getting the word around, too, I've got his back. You mess with him, you mess with me. This is somebody I could not tolerate before. Now we can sit by the wood stove and laugh for hours. It was a two-way forgiveness that was real, from the heart in both cases. The most curious part for me was how easy forgiveness was. Like I say, the problem just fell away, like dropping junk mail into the waste basket. Allowing karma appears to be a kind of forgiveness. Once I decide not to pursue revenge and let karma handle it, it's over. I feel like the debt is paid, so to speak. It's over. I can let it go, knowing it will return in kind. It also does not feel like forgiveness, yet somehow it is. Perhaps forgiveness comes with an understanding of karma, which can be counted on for revenge. The revenge is in the deed itself. No need to even get involved by getting upset. Let it handle itself. Just say, Que sera, sera. What will be, will be. Because it will. 

lawrence ferlinghetti himself

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BETRAYAL AND READING HENRY MILLER

wassily kandinsky

Today I've been filled up with a loving feeling for my four-legged friends and the winged friends. With that inner joy comes its balance, sorrow that the world I live in has so little use for anything living, even human life. After more than six thousand years of religion, the humans of the world still get their greatest kick out of killing. In the time I was new in the mountains, in awe of the natural world, I saw a blue heron in the lake one day. A lake here is a glorified pond made by a bulldozer, or bull-noser as they're known by the men who drive them. Later in the day, I told old man Tom I'd seen a heron. He said, "Kill it! It'll eat up all the fish in the lake!" I thought, All the fish? The bird isn't big enough to eat all the fish. It was passing through, saw a restaurant and dropped in. I did not kill the bird. The thrill of killing was one of the first characteristics I learned about old man Tom. His eyes sparkled when he told about killing something, anything. The thrill was the kill. I wondered how a man who talked about Jesus with genuine adoration, obeying God and love for God, can want to kill everything around him. In his later years he sat in an upstairs window facing his garden at sunset. I would hear a .22 rifle shot and know Tom shot another deer. He would wait for them to go into his garden he did not keep a fence around, shoot them in the belly with a .22 "so they'll go off and die." He didn't want them to fall down dead in his garden. Set up internal bleeding and they'll go away to die. He talked of it with fascination like he'd figured out something really special. He hated the deer. I asked him about the snakes in my first year. His answer, "Kill ever one ye see!" I didn't follow that counsel either.  

wassily kandinsky

Tom's brother, Millard, an old-timey Regular Baptist preacher. Brilliant man. Bible scholar. Truly inspired in the pulpit. Killing was his answer to solving problems. Seeing the evening news with him one evening, Iran and the Ayatollah issue was on. His recommendation: Nuke em. I said to him, You nuke this one you don't like, another one you don't like, there will come a day you've nuked everybody and you're the only one left. "That'd be all right." He meant it. I wanted to take it for humor, but it wasn't. He meant it. And it fit his character perfectly. Though he preached Jesus and love, outside the church love was a four-letter word and he didn't like hardly anybody. A Reaganista. The part that gave me pause was these are Americans from the traditional belief system of the time before electricity. These are people who call land "improved" when all its trees are cut down. Tom was not above pulling power on me to make me do his will. One example, I had a maple tree growing close to where I park. It was a nice tree. I liked it's color in the fall. Tom told me to cut it. I said no. He went to Ted Stern we were both working for and told him to tell me to cut it down. Really pist me off. I was told to cut it down because Tom wanted me to. After reasoning over it a day or two, I cut it down to keep peace and made firewood of it. Tom said he likes a place open. He can live in a damn desert if he wants to, but leave me alone about my trees! Next spring three sprouts grew up from around the trunk. I let the three maple trees grow in the place where there was one. The tree is even more beautiful now. This memory brings up a time he lied to me looking straight into my eyes. I told him I didn't believe it. He said, You calling me a liar? I had to say, Reckon I am. An intense moment. I did not see myself getting to my car alive. I did expect to be shot there and then. His eyes became shotgun barrels, and I felt like I was shot in his mind. I had nothing to do with him for four months after that. I couldn't even look at him I was so outraged by the betrayal. I thought we were friends after about five years. Turned out we were not. Ok. I never got over it. 

wassily kandinsky

I tend not to get over betrayal. It's not so much a principle I cling to, but deeper than that, down in that place I don't have a lot of conscious control over. Throughout childhood my mother betrayed me every opportunity. I learned early on I could not count on her. She taught me to lie to her. I became a private child. I couldn't count on either parent nor the church. I could count on school. School was my home. Loved going to school in the morning, hated going home. By the time I got into factory school, the fun of school went away. I've had a fondness for school, because that's where the love was in childhood, the other kids I was growing up with and teachers that really liked the kids. A second time, school put me on my feet by way of a small Southern college that was intimately small with a largely good faculty. I came to the mountains and moved into a schoolhouse. The house is the old Air Bellows school house. Now, in this time of the life, the place I call the home of my soul is a schoolhouse. I put all this together and see school in childhood was my refuge, and now in my adult life a schoolhouse is my refuge. My schoolhouse is loaded with shelves and stacks of books. At home with parents I was not allowed to read. If you got time to read a book, you got time to cut the grass, wash the car, wash the dishes. So I watched television. No consequences. As soon as I was in my first apartment, I stayed in and read as much as I could. It was like the dam broke. All I wanted to do was read. It's been that way ever since. I can't read Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum; that kind of writing spits me out before the end of the first page. Instead of turning to page two, I close the book. There is so much that is good, I'm unable to waste my time on pop testosterone fluff. Thomas Powers wrote a fabulous biography of Crazy Horse. I'm glad I did not miss Saul Bellows' Mr Sammler's Planet by reading some espionage nonsense of the day. 

wassily kandinsky

Something else I'm seeing the first time tonight, my adult life is characterized by reading. It's not the act of reading I like so much, but what I'm learning. I've been in cultures all over the world by way of reading. I read a nicely written novel from China and get a keyhole glimpse into the culture there. Reading takes me inside the minds of some brilliant people. Russian artist Kandinsky wrote two small books on art that taught me some important qualities of color that inform my every use of color. Poetry has been one of the great loves of my life. Reading it more than writing it. I have to thank Allen Ginsberg. He wrote in such a way a high school graduate could read it and feel like he got it, at least somewhat. Next, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the greatest introduction to poetry there ever was. I may have to find a biography of him. Everything I've seen about him over the years has told me this is an intriguing character, a man who truly took his own path and made it work for him. I still love his poetry. It blows my mind he wrote Coney Island of the Mind in the 1940s. Henry Miller's writing was astonishingly contemporary to today in the 1930s and 40s. He was writing in a place and time, but it's more like he was writing in that time, not of that time. His writing does not date. Nor does Ferlinghetti's. Miller's Tropic of Cancer made a sensation with its American edition around 1960. It was originally published in English in Paris, 1934, and I have a copy. It's still contemporary. I love Miller's writing. Reading him, I'm observing his thought process, his attitude toward life, his associations. I feel like he was so formative in my early reading life that now, diving into his mind again, I feel like what I'm reading was written by a close friend I understand well, just from reading his story. I admire his character. I admire the man. I admire who he is. I learn from him. Perhaps his most important message he had for his readers was to love your life and live it. Every page I read by Miller I'm in awe of his beautiful writing, how he tells a story, the freshness of his mind. If I'd spent my life watching television, I'd have never had the opportunity to know anything Henry Miller had to say. A tragic loss it would have been.  

wassily kandinsky himself

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