BORED BY WHITE PRIDE

max ernst

Saw a thing on facebook promising this could change the way I think. I couldn't click on it. It looked like something like a hugging contest. Something unexpectedly sweet. I couldn't go there, whatever it was. The intro that it's about changing the way I think did it for me. Not that I reject having the way I think changed. I'm always open to adjusting, fine tuning my thinking. I already know my thinking is based in illusion, mixing details, facts, trends, beliefs I'm unaware of, connecting the dots in my head into a skyscraper of cards. Every card a bit of misinformation, inaccurate details, images arranged into a construction composed by my own attitude toward life. What does some person on facebook who never heard of me know about my thinking? The presumption that I think a certain way is what turned me off. How does that person know I don't already think the way he's making a case for? And what if I don't? I'm half tempted go take a look at what it has to say, but refuse to. It brings to mind somebody saying a sentimental act of common decency restored their faith in humanity. Every time I hear it, I think, but cannot say, If that's all it took to restore your faith in humanity, it must not have taken much to lose it. The American madness to change other people's thinking is totally out of bounds in my way of seeing plain decency. The church I grew up in tried to convince me it was my duty to browbeat everyone I know about changing their way of thinking to the only way, the right way, the way the preacher at the church thought. I wouldn't want to lay that on anybody, God as Fear and Punishment. I had to shed that mind. It took fifteen years by school education and self-education by reading and paying attention to the people I know.  

max ernst

Since childhood, I've wanted through the course of my life to know people from different backgrounds, social circumstances, from the poor to the rich, from religious to non-religious, from pastoral people, who live by supposed-to, to ex-convicts and foreigners, Yankees too. I've been fascinated by the varieties of humanity since as far back as I can remember, always interested in people of different cultures, different nationalities, different races, different languages. I even like knowing cops. I believe our Sparta town police, now, are honorable people. It hadn't always been that way. My best friend through grade school was American-Mexican. He was as American as I was, but he was Mexican. My mother worked sometimes in a TG&Y store as accountant. We'd go pick her up after work. A Mexican girl in high school worked there, Juanita. I loved Juanita. I still love the name. She knew that Mitchell was my friend. I loved the Mexican in her. That she was Catholic fascinated me too. I was like a l dog following her around listening to her talk. I asked her once to say something in Spanish. She asked what I wanted her to say. I couldn't think of anything and we laughed. I had Mexican friends all the way through school. I didn't care that it made me suspect to the other white kids. The Mexicans were far more interesting to me than the white Baptist kids. I also did not like the way they were shut out by the white kids. I extended myself to them, wanting to know them, appreciating them as themselves, liking them especially for being different from the suffocating pride of whiteness. White arrogance toward people I knew to be valid human beings made me ashamed of my white privilege. 

max ernst

In the Navy, my friends were the black guys. I was on an old WW2 destroyer that was sold to Brazil soon after I was released. It could run, and it could ride the waves. It took a 90 degree roll one night and uprighted. I loved how the ship rode the waves. In the very worst times when three-quarters of the crew were out with sea-sickness and and puke was everywhere, I kept on going, thinking to self I'd pay for this ride, and it's paying me. I loved it, walking down a hallway bouncing from wall to wall using upper arms for bumpers, going up steps and stepping down what seemed like three feet to step up to the next step, I didn't like the aroma of puke everywhere, on my clothes too, no avoiding it, but I refused to give in to sea-sickness, because riding the waves was my reason for choosing the Navy to stay out of the Army. I loved riding the ocean. The ship had a dozen or more black guys. I liked them the best and enjoyed social times with them. They were people just like me and the other white guys that called me nigger lover. My closest friend on the ship was Muslim, from Boston. One of the guys on the ship from Texas had a cousin who was going with Joe Tex, then a pop singer on the radio. Going onshore, I always went with my black friends. They were the most fun. The white guys went en masse to the sailor bar to drink as much beer as they could and talk big man talk about pussy. With the black guys I went to jazz clubs. They knew where these places were. Had some great jazz club experiences in Europe along the Mediterranean. My friend, Ameen, played jazz piano on the order of Ahmad Jamal, and jazz vibraphone, vibes. We'd go to a club, enjoy the music by good musicians from all over Europe. During intermission he'd introduce himself to the band, we'd drink with the band and talk. Every time, the piano player asked him to play some tunes. His courtesy was never to play more than two.

max ernst

After being acquainted with a fair variety of people, weary of racial tensions, I committed to a white working class community of mountain people, a real culture. As a white dude, I felt most at home among mountain people. I found my grandmother Worthington in them. From early years in these mountains unto now I feel in the mountains as in grandmother's arms. The attitude was hers, the philosophical mind was hers, the colloquialisms were hers, and the feeling was hers. I didn't learn until I'd been here a quarter century that her parents moved to Kansas from east Kentucky, Pulaski County, not long before she was born. Her older brothers and sisters grew up in Kentucky. She grew up in a mountain home, in Kansas. She married a boy whose parents had just moved to Kansas from Ninemile in eastern Tennessee, Bledsoe County. After living here feeling at home in mountain culture as nowhere else, I learned I've got hillbilly blood, lots of it. It was one of the happiest moments in my life to learn I had hillbilly blood on the Worthington side. Great-great grandpa fought for the Confederacy and survived. One of his brothers didn't make it. I felt closest to grandmother in childhood as to any relative. She was my home base. I had fun telling my sisters in Kansas they had hillbilly blood. Throughout my life, I've regretted the divide between races, religions, nationalities in my country. In the grocery store a couple days ago, a black man I'd never seen before came up behind me in line with two items. I invited him to go ahead of me. He was so surprised he looked suspicious, backing up a step. He declined. I said, Go ahead, I'm in no hurry. He did and spoke his gratitude. Mary at the register said that was nice of me. I said, I can't stand to unload my buggy with somebody behind me who has two items. What's the rush? Then realized it was "nice," unexpected, because he was black. I've done the same for white people and got no notice.  

max ernst himself

*

FINDING PEACE IN A WORLD OF WAR

This morning I finished reading Chris Hedge's book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. A powerful read. Hedges was a NYTimes war correspondent in Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Rather than give accounts of battles, Hedges covers the lives of survivors, the trauma of war they live through for several years, their memories, losing children, parents, relatives, neighbors, friends, people they don't know. He writes specifically about the difference between the myth of war and the actuality of killing and being shot at. In the myth, killing is the glory of war. In actuality, killing makes the young have nightmares and memories they can't live with for the rest of their lives. Soldiers returning from active duty hear people say, "Thank you for your service," which comes from the myth of war. To the ears of someone back from the actuality of war, it sounds hollow to be thanked for service. Many kill themselves while involved in the military, and later. So many, it's another epidemic in a society that is overrun with epidemics, like cops killing three thousand American citizens a year and beating up multiple thousands more. Soldiers coming home with PTSD and no job prospects become cops, the citizen the enemy. And what do we do? We justify it. Growing up in a martial society is not easy for a kid who wants to live in peace. The war on drugs is a war on the American people who want peace in their lives. I saw a quip from DC chief of police who said arresting people for marijuana use only makes them hate the police. Half a century into the war on the American people, what can I say but: Duh. 

I talk with people I know who have been to prison about the epidemic of cops killing in such excess, the answer comes back, they're scared. Of course. They're scared from half a century of brutalizing peaceable people. They activate peaceable people into protest movements. The NYPD is now trying to make legal protest into an act of terrorism, full reign to kill, maim and arrest peaceable citizens. All the time reading Hedges' book, I was recalling my own feelings subject to the draft, hating being forced by threat of prison to be a part of the killing machine. It comes to a choice of taking my chances as a target or years in prison where I am a target for gangs and guards. I took my chance, fortunately between Korea and Vietnam, a small window. I've thanked God all my life that I've not been forced to take part in killing action. I'm of a mind that I think  I'd rather be killed than kill. The consequences of being killed amount to a shortcut to heaven. The consequences of killing is a lifetime of inner torment, justified by law or not. The problem I wrestled with under military duress was that I did not want to kill or be killed. Guys the same age as me on the other side don't want to kill or be killed. I don't want to kill somebody like myself who does not want to be there, but is there to stay out of prison, like me. I was on a WW2 destroyer in the early 1960s. The ship was sent to patrol the harbor at Santo Domingo. A communist cell was known to be in the city. The ship had orders to blow the hell out of the city if anybody shoots at us. I hated it. I did not want to be a part of the machine that would kill and maim random innocent people, children, people who wanted to live. 

My "general quarters"  role was to load big shells into the elevator that took them to the big gun fired by a young officer just out of officer training school, who had the same ability with one of those guns as I have with a handgun. None. Their targets were the only safe places. I saw them during practice shooting at sea. They hit all around their targets and never the target. It was the same with the big machine guns that fired shells that glow red flying through the air and skipping on the ocean surface like a stone skipped on a lake. They never hit the target. I remember my moral dilemma transferring the big shells from the racks they were stored in to the big gun. I would be as responsible for the damage done to the people and homes of Santo Domingo as the ship itself. I wanted to live a peaceable life and wanted to allow the people of Santo Domingo a peaceable life. The ship running back and forth outside the harbor for a month provided some interesting sights. Look over the side of the ship and see hammerhead sharks and other kinds of sharks, water I did not want to fall into or have the ship sink in. I was fascinated seeing the hammerheads. One time I saw a huge herd of sharks circle a school off bonito in the harbor itself. The ring of sharks closed in on the thrashing circle of bonito that shrank smaller and smaller until the last one stopped thrashing. An amazing event to behold. Not a good place to go in the water at the beach. On lookout duty at night, I watched the movie playing at the drive-in theater. They were playing The King And I, many years after it was new, a movie I never wanted to see, but was fascinated to see it through binoculars from a ship. There was still much child in self at the time, especially the wanting to live aspect of childhood. 

It pissed me off that government, parents, church, every adult in my world wanted me there. What could I think? Fuck all y'all. It felt like the entire society wanted me dead. I had a secret longing to be a communist, anyway. In childhood, daddy said to me out of the blue on one of the unfortunate Saturdays he was home from work, my second least favorite day of the week, Sunday the worst, he said, "If you ever join the Communist Party, I'll kill you." It was the McCarthy era. Of course, he didn't know what he was talking about, but he did understand the threat. This moment made me want to find a way to get with communists. Couldn't find any. In college, after the period of involuntary servitude, I read about communism and took a course in Soviet history. I thought Stalin was cool, because the adults of my world were so freaked out by his name. After a biography of him and learning about his time in power, I thought: shit, he's worse than what we've got. He killed millions of his own people, made the Nazi holocaust look not so bad. No. He's not my leader. American cops have killed well over a million in my lifetime. The latter, however, is hush-hush, so it's not as bad. Growing up, a kid in a world of adults that wanted me dead, I came up without much confidence in the adults around me, certainly not in believers of the myth of war. By the time I finished college and saw I could get a good job I'd probably like, I could not join the world of participation in the myth I did not believe. The time came I found that God, indeed, is, and then I had reason to live beyond automatic self-preservation. I realized I wanted to live in semi-isolation in a place where I  can follow my own light, avoid being swept by social forces not very well thought out. I have found my peace where I can look out the window and see donkeys grazing hay and lying down on it for a siesta in midday sunlight. 

*

HANGING ON TO POWER

 

 

arshile gorky

This has been a good day for laughing at myself. The emotional and mental turmoil of this week past has disturbed my inner peace, my quiet, like jumping off a diving board and doing a cannonball to make water rumble to the other end of the pool and splash on everybody around the pool. This is days later, half a week, and I'm still charged to the nerve endings. It's like I can feel the lines of nerves in the body. The experience with law enforcement leaves me feeling powerless, and that causes in turn the reaction: I'm not giving my power away. It's the Brer Rabbit in me. Some time ago in childhood I saw the Disney feature-length cartoon, Song of the South. The story of Brer Rabbit became my childhood identity. "You can do anything, but please don't throw me in the briar patch." The characters being mean to him took it to be a good idea of what to do with Brer Rabbit. They threw him in the briar patch and he hopped about dancing and singing, "I was born in a briar patch," happy to be home. Even in the Navy where I was never what they called "squared away," my theme song was, I was born in a briar patch. Squared away was an identity I could not accept for myself. In that time, the time between Korean War and Vietnam War, the term "Gung Ho" was relatively new from the Korean War era. Gung Ho meant squared away and inspired to be the best you can be. I was never gung ho either. It was an insult to tell somebody he was gung ho.

 

arshile gorky

 

It is in my horoscope and I see it throughout my life that I react when expected to adhere to false values. I've been careful not to make too much of an issue about hypocrisy in others, it's such a subtle expression it runs through everybody at one time or another. I cannot say I've never been hypocritical. I don't recall, because I never noticed. It's not something we notice in ourselves so easily. I've been careful about the use of the word, because it is so overused by the self-righteous of religious or political belief systems, which are about the same thing anymore. Often hypocrisy a word used to point blame without much attention to the word's meaning. The only way I've found I can live without entertaining false values in the way we are now is to stay at home, certainly never get involved in money dealings. I was told once not many years ago I was a fool for not paying attention to the stock market. I laughed within. I've known too many people who let the stock market rule their mental and emotional life each day. The only time Wall Street matters to me is when they rip off the entire middle class of their retirement savings. What happens then? Wall Street stripped the middle class of its resources and got a pat on the back, well done. I refuse to partake of that world. I saw too many Recessions in the Eisenhower years to endear me to corporations. I vowed to myself in teenage years never to work for a corporation or a factory of any sort.

arshile gorky

 

In the last year of college several corporations sent recruiters to offer jobs to graduates. I didn't go anywhere near them, didn't want them to see me. This was late 1960s. I'd already been through my military obligation (the draft) for being born male in a warrior society. I was ten times the rebel I was before going into the very core of fascism, military. As I see fascism push American democracy aside, it flares my flame of rage deep within. When I feel it clutching my heart and squeezing down on it, I pull back telling myself it's not worth an emotional reaction. I'm powerless against it. It is what the corporate takeover of our government and legal system has given us in the name of freedom and liberty. The best I can do about it is ignore it and live my life.

Not any of those people care anything about me but what money they can get out of me. So why do I care about them? I can't care about them. They work for corporate power that has destroyed the democracy of my country and it's legal system. I can't prevent it, because it's already done. Therefore, I make so little money, and have all my life, that none can be taken away. I have no problem of people hanging onto me because they think my money will rub off. No one rubs up against me for my influence. I have none. That's how I designed it from the beginning. Here, in the time of looking back, I see it has served me well all the way along. It has kept superficial people away. I don't have to avoid them.

 

arshile gorky

 

Just before I started this writing, I was looking for a song by Nina Hagen on YouTube, clicked and the cursor was on a trailer for a movie, Twelve Years a Slave. Early in it, one slave said to a new slave to the plantation, "If you want to survive, do and say as little as possible." That rang my bell. Sound counsel. The recent NSA findings released by whistleblower Snowden confirm it just like in slavery days, we have to watch what we do and say. Some pigs are more equal than others. People who have perceived power are jealous of that power. It can slip away too easily. The power they have is the power of people who give them their own power. I will not give a politician or a corporate exec my power. This brought up a funny memory. One day some people were standing around my mailbox waiting for another car of people to arrive toward a walk to the waterfalls. A man maybe ten years my junior, expensive car, expensive casual clothes, country club sticker on the car. He spoke. We talked briefly. He told me he had once played football for the KC Chiefs. He looked for that excitement in my eyes of being impressed that he had actually been on television and played football. Hot dang. I wished he hadn't said it; I could not summon even a fake version of being impressed. I saw that's what I was called upon to do, to stroke him and give him my power. I had to fess up and tell him I don't watch tv. He would not have been impressed if I had told him I used to paint houses.

 

arshile gorky

 

It cannot be said that I'm becoming an intractable old turd, because I have been for many a year. It's my nature. I like it. I shop locally as much as possible, trying not to need or want anything that can't be found locally. By giving my power, I mean when I feel my heart get involved, that clutching feeling in the heart of commitment. It also means giving someone else authority over my decisions by influence. Sending money to a cause is one way of giving our power. When it comes to giving charity money, I prefer local again. There was a time I sent a little bit of money from time to time to some animal saving outfit based in DC. I got to thinking about the expense of their offices, paying all their employees, my little bit maybe pays for a hundred stamps on fundraising envelopes. That's spread too thin for me. I'd rather give to the local food closet. None of it is skimmed off by bureaucracy. And Alleghany BROC, where every cent given works toward the intended purpose. Because of distaste for corporate chicanery, I keep my power at home as much as possible. I like to save it for my life. I cannot give what little money power I have to politicians or religionists. It has to be something practical that works in the world of people in my home county. Everyplace in the world has people who need help. Why would I send money to help Ugandan orphans when plenty of people in my home county need help? I'm so sympathetic with the Ugandan orphans I realize how helpless I am to help. The same in Sudan, Namibia, Indonesia; every place in the world has heart-wrenching issues people are dealing with. I can't go over there. But I can do a little bit at home for the people of my world. This way I'm not frivolous with my power, in my way of seeing.

self portrait

arshile gorky

 

*

 

MY INNER CRIMINAL

jasper johns

Monday's and Wednesday's encounter with perceived authority has my nerves still rattled. Some inner stuff came to the surface I didn't see coming. It's still raging. I continue to see the dead eyes I looked at that were the same as a statue's eyes, eyes that are looking but don't see. I looked at his name tag, because I like knowing the names of people I'm interacting with. It turned out I was the only one interacting, meaning there was no interacting going on; it takes two to interact. When I spoke it was the same as talking to a statue of John C Calhoun, somebody from so far away in time and so high on a pedestal that I, meat puppet on the ground, have no relevance for attention. I had to remind myself this is how police state works. This is what 1950s propaganda told us the Communists were like. Be careful what you hate, because we become what we hate. After all the Cold War time of hating Communists (people without rights), here our side is, the Christian side, manipulating the population by propaganda, police state. In America now the cops give us attitude that they have power over us, that I can be put in prison by their whim if I give a smart-mouth answer to a smart-mouth question.

jasper johns

Yesterday and today, all day, I swam in my ongoing subconscious argument with authority figures, militarists who like marching, shouting orders, saluting, obeying. My time in the Navy was a time in hell for me. It was a culture totally alien to who I am. It was about killing. I am not. My childhood was spent dominated by a Jar Head who was proud of it. "I'm a marine!" I'd think: Hot dog! You're big an bad! Liked uniforms and badges and guns. I'd hear, "I want some respect outta you!" I'd think: Show me something to respect. I'm not an actor; I can't respect on command. These memories from the past came up in the presence of being looked at and talked at like I was automatically a criminal because I'm a citizen. I knew the authority figure could see absence of respect in my eyes. I saw stone deadness in his eyes, he saw disrespect in mine. Lack of respect really sets off obedience robots. In the place called home, I was beat into the ground to start showing respect, and never broke. I saw myself one of the tough guys on the pirate ships in 40s and 50s movies strapped to the mast being whipped, never showing on his face a wince of pain and never in his eyes a glint of repentance. You can beat me all the way to death and you will never see a split-second of respect in me.

 

jasper johns

 

Officers in the Navy saw it in me. The most authoritarian ones saw it on sight. They saw they would never control me, that my obedience was superficial. All authoritarians see me, on sight, the enemy. It has to be my eyes. My eyes don't brighten up with respect, nor do they show fear. They show indifference, because I know I am face to face with the same to me as a dead man, one who thinks manhood equals obedience to authority. I'm possibly as anti-authoritarian as it gets. I'm not a reactive anti-authoritarian who obsesses with contempt for authority. I totally ignore authoritarian figures. They have no part in my life, in my consciousness. I do my best never to attract the attention of a self-important authoritarian robot. It's why I wear what I call my old-man hat that says Farm Bureau on the front. Old people are past being regimented and authoritarians know it. I have a friend whose job requires a uniform, badge and gun, but he's not an authoritarian personality. He's not somebody who would stop you and say, "What's your hurry?" or another one I've heard, "You going to church?" No, I'm goin to a pot party; we're gonna have a orgy and play cards all night, might shoot beer cans off of each other's heads with a shotgun. Stuff came up from way far back, things I would think when threatened. Couldn't say anything, but nobody had any control over my thoughts. Not even me. There was, "I oughta hit you for what you're thinking." My thought: If you really knew what I was thinking, you'd kill me. You don't have a clue. That's what authoritarians see in my eyes. They want to hit me for what they perceive me to be thinking. They want respect for nothing and I don't have it to give. Respect is earned or not at all. And it's not that I'm devoid of respect, because I respect a lot of men and women and children I know. I lean toward the people I respect, and away from the others.

jasper johns

I know cops I respect. They've earned the respect. I think of them as good men. They don't use their uniforms to bully people. They're obviously not authoritarian types or I wouldn't know them. This week's encounter with obedience robots has unsettled my nerves like I don't remember happening since quite awhile. I don't like it when this rage comes to the surface. It takes me back to the part of the life I prefer never to think about. They say in old age we remember way far back clearly. I don't look forward to that. I don't want to get that old. This week told me that rage and hatred for authority is still burning in a furnace in my heart. Maybe it came up to be looked at before I fade into thinking I'm spiritual or something hi-fallutin when a blue flame of rage continues to burn in the deepest part of who I am. I don't even want to go there to deal with it. Can't even stand to watch cop tv shows or movies. In cop movies, I tend to pull for the criminal. Possibly this rage inspired identification with Plains Indians in childhood, enemy of the white man that speaks with forked tongue, authority in a hierarchy of obedience. Obedience is what it takes to make a good military. I am not military. I don't want to kill others who are every bit as uninterested in being killed as I am, nor be a part of the legion that does the killing. Like I don't want to be a mechanic who works on planes that drop bombs that kill many and hurt more, people who aren't even a problem, just anybody. The enemy? I'm the enemy.

jasper johns

That brings to mind a moment in the Navy that cracked me up at the time. A lieutenant talking to a bunch of the boys, talking every old star-spangled cliché there ever was, remember Pearl Harbor, Communists, the enemy. I stood there, "at ease," laughing inside, thinking: Hey man, I'm the enemy. But kept quiet. Didn't want to draw attention to my behavior. The enemy is not out there. He hated me too, for my superficial obedience. I didn't get in trouble, much, because I obeyed, but they all knew I was not converted to automatic obedience and never would be. I could not dedicate myself to murder and be proud of it. I was pist off at my country for putting me through mandatory warrior training. I'm not a warrior for anything or anybody until the threat is real. Then I'm in front, ready to fight. No matter what I may do to intellectualize my distaste for authority bullies, give it rational associations, it comes from childhood and has nothing to do with the US Navy or police or any other form of social authority. It came from daddy. There it is, the thing itself. Because I rejected his irrational unto arational authority controlling a child by fear, it is a deep down within rejection of what turns out to be his insanity. One day not very long ago mommy said in a light-hearted twinkly way she glosses over denial, "Well, you had your share of discipline." I couldn't stop it--it came out of my mouth bypassing my inner editor. I heard it at the same time she heard it. "Mine wasn't discipline. It was insanity."

jasper johns

All I could think was:  It must have needed saying. She didn't take it hard. She already knew I knew. She knew it too, just kept the denial lid on it. The blessing I derive from this neurosis is that I am not an obedience geek. I am happy to the very core of my heart this is the case. The only freedom in this world is in disobedience. It's why our prisons are so full. No matter where my rejection of obedience came from, I'm glad I have it. I'm glad I don't like having cops look me over like if they look hard enough they can find reason to put me in prison. I am a criminal at heart, and they know it. I don't want to steal anything from anybody, don't want to hurt anybody, don't want to kill anybody, don't want to kill a cop, don't want to run over a dog. I just want my American freedom to be who I am, suspect as that may be. I don't like it being expected that I should want to be an obedient warrior. In a world where war is ongoing, I don't want to be expected to kill teenage kids conscripted by the other side, like me, when American wars are about more money for the rich and less for the working people. Why would I even want to put myself in harm's way toward such a self-destructive end? That's how I saw it then and how I see it now. I'm guessing that what the men in authority positions see in my eyes is that furnace of rage flaring up, confronted by a man demanding respect for nothing. No wonder they dislike me so intensely as soon as we meet. I'm glad they don't like me. Keeps them away so I don't have to deal with them, except when the spider catches the fly.

 jasper johns

 

 

*

 

AN ALLEGORY

Took a nap this afternoon and woke from it in a mind I've had all my life, a mind I've done very little to settle, to deal with, except avoid thinking about, because it always brings me down. Lying in the bed recently awake, I was looking at why it takes me to my own place of unresolved issues that I've already discovered I don't want to resolve. Given the chance once, I chose not to. Chose not to because I realized I didn't want to. It's like attempting to make friends with somebody you don't like and realizing when it's down to able, you don't want to. Didn't want to because of absence of trust. I don't want somebody for a friend I know I cannot trust, somebody I know with my life I cannot trust. And I don't want somebody for a friend I don't like. All the way along in church I hear, Honor thy father and mother. My ongoing question has been, Why? Somebody hits you every day, berates you every day, beats your self-esteem into the ground in the most vulnerable time of your life, and when you grow up, wants to be your friend. Who ever heard of loving the school bully because he picks on you every day? Or even liking him? Nobody picked on me at school. The only place I was bullied was at home, to the point that home became a place I never wanted to be. Loved going to school, hated going home.

I was lying in the bed looking at the ceiling a little bit ago, considering how odd it is that since I've grown up and left the nest, I'm expected to keep in touch, come to visit, never talk back, and take orders like go to church, one thing or another, whatever mother's obsession with making me mind is entertaining this decade. It felt like, lying there looking at the ceiling, I was of a new mind today. I was lying there in a mild awe of the effrontery of expecting, intending that I forget our history, and spend my life denying it, honor thy father and mother. After age 6, I couldn't honor him any more. After age 10, I couldn't honor her anymore. From then on I was captive by way of childhood vulnerability to living with these people who were my foremost enemy. The only time I heard love was, I hit you because I love you. How do you expect even a child to believe that? I was thinking about my new donkey friend, Jack, how I am easing into getting acquainted and becoming friends with him. I don't become his friend by hitting him, telling him he's a dumb jackass and nobody wants to hear him bray. I don't berate him every minute I'm around him. That's not how I make friends. I treat Jack well, talk to him gently, touch him lightly on his neck and back, showing him by body language, tone of voice and eye contact that I am no threat. I feed him carrots by hand and talk to him like he's somebody I care about.

I can't imagine hitting Jack every day and telling him he's stupid and come out of it after fifteen years his friend. He would be obedient, but only sometimes. Making a friend of him by treating him right and showing I am his friend will gain his absolute obedience without any reservation. I don't want obedience, but use it for an example. I don't want him biting me and kicking me, but he won't. The four-leggeds, like children and adult humans, all return what they receive. If I were pushing Jack around, forcing him, yelling at him, demanding, I know he would kick at me when he had a chance, or bite just for the fun of watching me yell out in pain. But I'm showing Jack that I care about him, I want to know who he is. I am connecting with his consciousness, with his mind, by showing him that my mind is with him, on his side. I bend down and look eye-to-eye talking to him. I tell him I'm happy he's here. He likes that. He likes getting to know me the same as I like getting to know Jack. He's not going to kick me. He would kick somebody who threatened me. This is my idea of how to make friends. Kindness, open-hearted caring. Not threatening and hitting and keeping a child in constant fear---at home. Kinda gives the kid a twisted feeling about what constitutes the word home. Upon leaving them, I never wanted to see them again. But duty intervened. Honor thy father and mother. What? How? This has been the question of my life, How? Forgive? How? Obey? How does one obey insanity without going insane?

I've pretended, pretended all the way along. I was like a vulnerable baby smiling and being cute to be cared for. Cheshire cat grins, acting like I liked living with them, because I was afraid to run away. I knew cops would bring me back and there'd be hell to pay. So I kept myself below the radar as much as possible. I didn't want them knowing anything about my inner self, mainly because the only thing in there was hate for them. Like the time I was told, "I oughta hit you for what you're thinking!" I laughed inside. You don't know what I'm thinking. If you knew what I was thinking, you'd beat me to death with your fists. You wouldn't allow me to live. And then there was the pride in telling a neighbor, "He's my kid! I'll kill him if I want to!" That was mommy speaking. I was thinking, 'She's my mommy. I'll kill her if I want to,' knowing the consequences before being stupid enough to say it. I lived two lives. Around them I learned to keep quiet, tell them nothing, stay out of their way as much as possible. Watch tv. And that didn't always work. It seldom worked. But sometimes it did. It wasn't a problem keeping my inner self under guard, because they didn't want to know anything about who I am, then or any time since. In church they were told to FEAR THE LORD. That's how you love God, be afraid of God. I supposed daddy interpreted that to have something to do with how his kid was supposed to regard him, with fear. As long as he saw fear, I was ok. On the other hand, I had my life at school with the other kids and sensible adults. Also had grandparents who cared. Couldn't have made it without them where love is concerned.

I still laugh at the Saturday morning, age 14, probably 1956, I got out of bed and went to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal. Had to pass through the living room. Saturday was hell day, daddy was home. He was sitting right beside the door I had to pass through looking at the newspaper. That was a funny sight in itself. Him reading was something of an oxymoron, though I didn't know the word. On sight I knew something was up. When I walked by him he said, "If you ever join the Communist Party, I'll kill you!" I thought: Gee, thanks, daddy, you're the most. This is where I learned my irony. Of course, the only thing his wisecrack did to the kid was make me curious about the Communist Party. What is it? Where do I join? And atheist. That sounded so cool. It freaked out all the adults. That was the first day of my curiosity about Communism. I didn't study it, but paid attention to it. By the time I read the Communist Manifesto in college, I was all for it. Bring it on. It wasn't anything like the propaganda about it. Then I took a course in Soviet history. I was turned off by Communism before Lenin died. He turned out to be an emeffer from l'enfer. Stalin was worse. I was thinking: Shit, what's so great about some ego-maniacal testosterone freak for my leader? I think not. Had enough of that at home. I admired Angela Davis in her time of making the news, proclaiming herself a Communist. I started her autobiography, which was interesting by a brilliant woman until she joined the party. It turned into party doctrine and I quit reading. It was like reading Republican parrotry. I lost my interest in Angela Davis the day I closed the book the last time.

Communism failed, which was not real Marxism. Capitalism failed in its own excess. I came to think of Soviet Communism militarist socialism. And I think of American Capitalism as militarist fascism. Neither one is a real ideology because both are militarist first. Like colleges that put the majority of their budget into the sports program, it's their money maker. Our military force is also our corporate government's money-maker. Hence, perpetual war. Defense contracts. Halliburton. Exxon. Suits. Suburbs. Country Clubs. Swimming pools. I went intentionally to a small college that did not have government funds in their budget for research and had no sports program. It was great not to be required to fake team spirit and buy season tickets to something I'd rather watch on tv or not at all, esp the latter. The day of discharge from Navy was the last day of living my life by somebody else's command. Got out on a Friday, started at the college on Monday. It just worked out that way. That weekend was the first days of living by my own command. Went to the beach. Been through a two year marriage. Married daddy in female form. When I saw that, it was like the frog dropped into boiling water. Looking back, from leaving high school to leaving the Navy, a period of about 5 years, this was one dumb shit hobbling around with no idea about anything, a head boiling over with confusion like dry ice in a bucket of water. And that's a self-serving way to say it. Unable to make sense of the circus of the false calling itself the truth blinking and flashing all around me, my heart shut down the best it could.

I rented an apartment and started reading novels from drugstore racks; Peyton Place, A Summer Place, novels from movies, The L-Shaped Room, Ben Hur. Jack Kerouac was coming out in Signet paperbacks at the time. And Grove Press was printing Henry Miller in paperback. This was the beginning of my reading life. I didn't know what was "good" to read or what I was "supposed" to read. I just wanted peace in my mind and it wasn't happening. Today, at this time in the life I feel like peace is the nature of my mind. I don't have anything in my life that is wrenching my heart with guilt, remorse, fear or hate. It's been a long row reading fascinating psychology books, the most helpful being Alice Miller's FOR YOUR OWN GOOD. She blew my mind to smithereens. I'd felt so guilty for so long for hating my oppressor. Alice said, Of course you hate your oppressor. To deny it is neurosis. Uh. That set my guilt adrift like a note in a bottle to ride the waves between sea and sky forever. Alice taught me that what I feel is real, not what I'm supposed to feel. Don't deny it. Start the healing from understanding that it was not the victim's fault. First step. Thank you, Alice Miller. I've wanted to write her to thank her for several years, but inhibited the impulse by knowing in advance the letter would be way too long, take way too many pages, would have to be mailed in a box. I couldn't do that to her. Who wants a long letter of nothing but gaga praise and gratitude for so much the list is endless? By now, I've found the home of my soul in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In the Blue Ridge Mountains I feel the peace of home. Like in Jimmy Arnold's song, The  Rebel Soldier, "Tell me parson, will my soul pass over the Southland?" I'll be asking, Will my soul pass over the Blue Ridge? And when the parson says yes, I'll ask if I can write in the sky over Alleghany County, I love every one of you.

 

 

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AFTER VIETNAM

robert rauschenberg

 

Vietnam has been an enigma in my lifetime. The communist hysteria, the domino theory, all of it propaganda attempting to make popular a war with the intent of keeping the American economy going, an economy created by the boom of WW2. The Cold War kept economy going pretty good with "defense" contracts, making jets that cost multiple millions unto billions. Vietnam came along to keep economy going. It started with a presidential lie on television to the American people, LBJ, one of the great liars of history. He showed me nothing at all where integrity as a man was concerned. His integrity was to the rich only. His only legacy for me is liar, like Reagan and W Bush. Can't leave out Nixon. I don't understand the present urgency of the right wing being in control. I do not know of a time in my lifetime the right wing was not in control. I found the English even further to the right than USA. I found them in 1972 going through the political agony of adopting a health care system that would benefit working people, everybody, even the poor. No way. That's socialism. How will people have incentive to go to medical school to work in socialism? It was the same as here now, only English style instead of American style. They like their healthcare system now and wouldn't have it back the old way.

robert rauschenberg

 

The propaganda in the time of Vietnam had been anti-communist for at least a decade to the point that even today, half a century later, communism is a loaded word. It could make a fun short documentary film to interview different kinds of people asking them questions about communism and hearing all the different explanations of why communism is evil. Evil is where many of the answers would start. We have not had communism yet. It comes after capitalism. Soviet Union's communism I interpreted militarist socialism. And we do militarist capitalism, fascism. This is what I mean by the right wing control in America is not new. I recall fundamentalist preacher harping about communism, atheism, evil, lake of fire forever and ever, eternal agony for being born into one economic system instead of another. It never made a lick of sense to me. In my childhood I wondered in bed at night how it could be that a kid my age born someplace behind the iron curtain was doomed to hell just by where he was born. I thought of the people in the very remotest parts of the world that never saw a Bible or heard of Jesus. It failed to make sense to me that God, omniscient, the knower of our hearts, made such a crazy rule that anybody dies never having opportunity to get saved automatically goes to hell, mandatory sentencing.

robert rauschenberg

Vietnam brought out love-it-or-leave-it. A lot of people left it. It was also the time of Are you a boy or are you a girl? With yer long blond hair you look like a girl. American establishment is not kind to outsiders. It was the time of white college students discovering marijuana realizing they wanted to live their lives, not go kill gooks and get killed too. The San Francisco sound took pop music to a new level. We had a whole generation of the college age white kids divided over Vietnam. The majority was for it. We saw photographs of demonstrations on big campuses. It looked like a lot of people, but the percentage was low. Most of the people in college in that time did not want to endanger the possibility of a career because their picture might appear in the paper with a demonstration against the war. Too, if a corporation were in somebody's sights, that person is careful not to commit to any cause or controversial point of view. Stay away from the controversial. We knew that in the corporate world, the world we were expected to look to for good-paying jobs, disobedience was not held a virtue. Gotta be squeaky clean to be a corporate somebody. I realized young that I would never succeed in this world.

robert rauschenberg

I will not give up my humanity, no matter how self-defeating it may be, to make big money and have big things. I hear Peggy Lee, If that's all there is, my friend, let's keep on dancing. I won't give up my inalienable basic human rights for a job, position or status. I learned early on that the higher I go on the money ladder the farther away I go from my humanity. No, it doesn't have to be that way. It is not ultimately true that war is a force that gives us meaning, either. But in this world, war is a force that gives us meaning. In the time of Vietnam, to commit to being against the war was the same as being against America to everybody who was not a protester. The protesters knew they were acting out of patriotism. They were saying don't send us to a disastrous war that is about big money for some big corporations at our expense, to end up homeless begging on intersections of American cities to get through the days in our later years, Vietnam vet statistics. I had the personal good fortune to slip under the wire, did the limbo, got out of Navy just in time. The ship's next destination was Vietnam. What a joy in my heart it was to leave that Navy base the last time. Then I watched Vietnam happen on the news and watched a great big split happen in America, a major gap between the older people and the younger people. It seemed that the leftover belief systems since WW2 were laid to rest with Vietnam. It kind of summed up what went before, tied up the loose ends and got on with what was next, destabilizing Latin America

robert rauschenberg

 

 

 

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JUST SAID NO TO HIERARCHIES

howdy!

I must withdraw my interest in the workings of the world that do not directly play a part in my life. That Obama has shown his hand I can't worry over any of it. I held out with a little confidence in Obama I wanted to have. I trusted him because I wanted to. I forgot, however, that he has to behave as required by the .0001% that rule. When he became president, he became a member of their club.(I'm your puppet.) That's all. I'm disappointed by him. I understand that the republicans are tripping him up in every nit-picky way the lowest mind among them can think up. In the end, he bends over for the republicans. Democrats continue in their spineless ways since the beginning of the Reagan Revolution. Since the beginning of Reaganism (Ayn Randism) democrats have conceded to the right wing unto encouragement, put down the red carpet for them. The democrats are taking us to police state, but like Ralph Nader said in the election campaign of 2000 that the republicans will get us there faster. The republicans are showing it too. The Boston bombings showed me the city police are now trained and practiced in taking charge of urban populations.

air bellows rock formation

I came to the mountains in 1976, a time when the oil corporations were shutting down independent oil companies and gas stations by what they called the Oil Embargo. We are not in the hands of people who make decisions in our interest. That time is long past over, if it ever was. We, the American people, are on our own. Government preys on us, does not protect us. What is labeled Defense is actually Offence. I feel sorry for every poor clod who joins the military believing he's "serving" his country. Going through what they go through in jungle and desert warfare for tax free corporate profiteers is dispiriting to the troops when they finally get it, minus a pair of legs. I did my Navy time in the time of the draft knowing this to be the case before I went in. It was sail the seas and play military for two years or take that much time in prison. I picked the Navy for the ocean. I longed to be on the ocean. I think it really sucks, though, to be born male and have no choice but to go through military. I was one of the examples of why the draft is self-defeating for the military. I don't like living by military rule. Not that I'm afraid of them; I don't like being one of them. I don't like their culture. I don't like adhering to a false belief system because it is expected. It is outside the military too, but the military is the core of that kind of hierarchical thinking learned from the Catholic church, which by now everybody knows aint what it's held itself up to be.

jackson pollock was in whitehead

I've refused to live my life in hierarchical work conditions. In the last year at the College of Charleston corporate recruiters were talking with seniors with job interviews. I didn't even want one of them to see me. I turned my back to that kind of thinking very early in the life, in childhood. I saw the republican recessions in the 50s and saw the advance of corporate influence such that to sign over for a job in a corporation I give up all my rights that are guaranteed an American citizen. I like those rights. I'm not signing over my basic rights and I'm not kissing ass of all the men on the ladder above me, none of whom I respect as an individual human being. From very early on it was a guiding light that I never live by hierarchy. I would live among and work with people I respect. It has been my way of life to work for an individual with a small business. I seldom made anything more than minimum wage, and then temporarily. I chose not to participate in the money making game because I did not want to shut down my self for a job, for money, for Mammon. Not that I think in Mammon terms, but that's the bible name for the god of money. Everybody knows it. And everybody knows Mammon is not a benevolent god. The US of A is on the verge of finding out how fickle Mammon can be. I've spent my life using money as immediate gain for immediate need. Paycheck to paycheck, as they say. How else in the working class? I never worked for a corporation or a factory. Worked for the state of SC for a year and learned all I needed to know about that.

roadside sculpture in sparta

In retrospect I can see I've lived my life as close to person to person, individual to individual as I could, hanging on to that connection with humanity, the other people in my life. Taking a high powered job takes one away from the world of people who appeal to one's heart and forces one into a world of people that don't give a shit about you in any way you look at it, except maybe sexually, until the next one comes along. A world of pretend. A world of continuous climbing. They never get tired of it. It's like their emotional vibration is wound up so tight they can't live without that tension. It takes that degree of tension (stress) to keep the pretend going. It's for the paycheck, and sometimes for the neurosis. In my early job years I had a crappy job and after a couple weeks the boss asked me why I was working there, I said, The money. Response: If that's all, then why don't you leave. OK. It was a moment, like about all moments, when you can't say what you're thinking, I wanted to say, What? But I didn't care. The feeling was mutual, as it usually is. Because I won't work for a factory, system or government, it has kept my job opportunities humble. That's what I wanted for myself. I did not want to be high up over anybody. How else but in the laboring class. I came to the mountains to do hard work, to labor body and mind. I can't even estimate the number of post-holes I've dug with a hand-held post-hole digger and how many miles of barbed wire fence I've stretched. I've done some dangerous tractor commandeering, enough to teach me that when IT happens, it's now, not a ten thousandths of a second from now, but now. By the time you realize what happened, it's in the past. The second experience with IT learnt me. I wasn't going for strike three. End of working with a tractor.

barn windows in whitehead

I was something of a spiritual idealist diving into my own humanity that I'd not valued sufficiently before. I was going by a premise of my own that manual labor would work off the anger within that had been a problem all the way along, to the point that I finally caught on it was in me, not out there. It is said awareness is the first step toward healing, and my experience affirms it so much I take it for granted. To come back around, I think I'm coming into an awareness that it does not serve me, my understanding, my life, my reason for being, my mental health to go on paying so much attention to the fake human beings we call celebrities, both Hollywood and DC. It can be said of DC as David Hockney said of Hollywood  in his film, "Scratch the tinsel in Hollywood and you get brighter tinsel." He laughed from seeing in his mind's eye a simulcast slideshow of several examples of his meaning. Over a period of years in California he gradually drifted away from the tinsel, spending more time at home focusing on the people close to him. He took a step deeper within going back to Yorkshire over a period of three years to stay with his sister and live in the house and neighborhood he grew up in. Going home, you might say. Going within. I'm feeling that impulse to withdraw my attention from the fake people and focus it on the people around me, the people I live among, my friends. That's my "real world." In the first half of my life, I have to say I did not value others. In the second half it's in others that I find value. I learned true values in the mountains.

 

 

    


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SEEING THE PATTERNS IN THE PAST

     vladimir horowitz

I put on some Schubert, les derniers quatuors, The Last Quartets, by Melos Quartet of Stuttgart, Germany. The cover of the 2cd album is a woodcut by Edvard Munch, the Norwegian artist. This is one of my desert island albums that satisfies me completely every time I hear it. Another favorite is Horowitz playing Schubert and Schumann. That's one of the loveliest albums I know. There are many. These are the ones that resonate with me. Asked who my favorite composers might be, I would not think to mention Schubert, but it turns out I like his music as much as I like Dvorjak's quartets. In classical music I tend toward the quartets and piano. I don't care for big orchestras the same way I don't care for bombast heavy metal in rock. I have collected such good (to my taste) music that I have a houseful of every kind of music I like. I've gone with preference to hear what I want to hear, not whatever some radio station's programming gets played, and I don't like commercials. So I buy my own music, books and movies. Thanks to netflix I have access to almost everything on earth in film. I have too many of these items for a sensible human being, but I'm not a sensible human being, so it works out just right. I want to play more music. I prefer my own classical to radio classical and prefer my own rock to radio rock.

Thinking of this music historically, considering Schubert only lived to age 31, he composed an awful lot of music in his twenties. Like Rimbaud the great French poet who quit writing when he was 19. One thing about youthful geniuses such as Mozart and Keats, their art is vibrant with passion. By the time I was 19, I was barely literate. It was about that age I discovered Allen Ginsberg's Howl, Ferlinghetti's Coney Island Of The Mind, Kerouac's On The Road and Dharma Bums. 17, 18 and 19 is when I was reading these guys. I was just out of high school and feeling like I was up for what was next. A guy in high school turned me onto On The Road, the latest cool thing, another turned me onto Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn. These writers were instrumental in opening my perceptions. Also Alan Watts books, Way of Zen one of them. These are the sorts of things I came out of high school reading, besides Peyton Place, Dr Zhivago and Ben Hur, the latter two on account of the movies. Pasternak was one of the first writers I read who was what might be called a heavy weight to somebody just out of high school. I wanted to take senior English, but it was all about reading and I wasn't fast enough a reader to keep up with the best readers in class. After high school I read the books from the senior English class, Catcher In The Rye, Brave New World, etc.

I realized how dumb I was upon graduating from high school. Not qualified for any kind of work. Barely literate. Totally uninformed. Didn't know how to work. Had worked plenty, but didn't know how any more than I knew how to study all the way through school. I'd have been so bright to have taken one of those short classes on how to study. I never learned how to study. My study amounted to cramming for exams, staying up late the night before a test. I wasted a lot of schooling not knowing how to study. It would be as good a course to teach in schools as geometry, like typing and driver's ed. It's a shame baptists are so hung up about sex they don't want schools teaching sex ed. I took it at my high school and appreciated it. It loses its sexiness right away and becomes clinical. That part doesn't matter. What matters is the education. Driver's ed was extremely valuable too. These are practical courses that apply to everyday life. Seems to me that's more important than a history class where the history is distorted and reduced to sentences to be memorized for tests. The history is important too, but driver's ed in the world we live in is vitally important.

The day before I took the plane from Wichita to Norfolk, Virginia, to go into the Navy, a guy I had only known a little bit handed me a paperback copy of Albert Camus' The Stranger. I read it on the plane and finished it soon after arriving in the transient barracks. It woke me up like a firecracker under my bed. I can't say I "got it" intellectually, academically, or even could have done well on a test. But it rearranged my thinking to where I can say it changed my life. So many changes were occurring in that time, I can say the changes Camus triggered I followed and embraced most closely. I read his plays, his other novels, his essays, his philosophy, everything by him I could find. He turned me onto the plays of Jean Genet, the novels of Sartre and Simone deBeauvoir, philosophy of Heidegger. Read some Henry Miller in that time. An interest in the Surrealists in Paris between the wars took hold of me, an interest in 20th Century French poetry and American poetry of the same period. By the time I left the Navy I was ready to start college. I knew how to read. I can't say my comprehension was way up high, but it improved a great deal. I actually went into college with a bit of a boost from all that reading during what I thought of as my time out, the time of involuntary servitude for being born male in America. I used the time reading as much as possible, for escape and education.

The officers and all authorities saw me a hopeless tool, which is what I wanted them to see. That's what I was. I had nothing for the USN. It didn't care if I lived or died. It wanted me to think dying was honorable so I'd be happy to line up and make myself an obedient target charged with nationalist propaganda. He's a rebel and he'll never ever be any good. But as I look back, that period of time the Navy took me out of my life was a great time for assessing what I was about. It turned out to be one of the most valuable times of my life. No doubt about it, I was a tool. It wouldn't do to attempt to articulate that any more than the one word. Tool will do. I've heard it said that in one's advanced years memories from the past come forward. What I see happening in self is looking at the past in patterns, seeing how a period of time was different in its function from what I saw at the time. Events and people I took for granted turned out to be important in the changing patterns. I find it interesting the people from the past I remember and the ones I don't remember. Most of them I don't remember. I like looking at the patterns. They help that which has no meaning appear to have meaning. Patterns organize illusion like the constellations organize the night sky.


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