BUOYED ON THE DENSE MARINE

anselm kiefer, the red sea

Day 8 of blogathon calls for thinking about a red ocean and thinking about a blue ocean. First thing that came to mind for red ocean was this painting by Anslem Kiefer, which I have laid eyes upon. It is disturbing. It's huge. A bathtub of blood. It takes my mind to writer, Jerzy Kosinski, who sliced his wrists in a bathtub when he felt like he had nothing more to say. As we say round here, More power to ya, feller. This is where an ocean of blood takes my mind. Kiefer's paintings had a great deal to say about post-Nazi Germany with the Nazi period looming enormous in the national consciousness. I see in a sea of blood the earth wounded by international corporate indifferent excess, earth's wrists cut, waiting for spirit to rise and go on. I see what the Reagan revolution did to American democracy. I see red ocean an ending. The ocean fished out by corporate fisheries all around the globe. With sonar as advanced as it is now, the last fish will be found. I see the international economic system indifferent to humanity and all other life forms. They are a bloody danger to us. We sit back in the recliner and watch the water turn red, thinking, Cool. Punctuated by commercials. I see a society so deeply and vigorously dedicated to the false in just about everything, I'm reminded of the 1981 quotation from CIA director Wm Casey, appointed first thing by Reagan, "We'll know our disinformation campaign is complete when everything the American people believe is false." The disinformation campaign was successful. Thirty-two years later, I see an ocean of blood. Y'all hadn't oughta sent me down this path. I can go to some dark places and not bat an eye.

 

 

I have a very powerful feeling I don't talk about, because I can't prove anything. I'm going by feeling, that I went out last time by way of a German concentration camp. First, a psychic told me; second I did a regression on my own and saw it. I suspect it has something to do with why I've spent a large part of my life with a major grudge against Germany, never even wanted to fly over the country. In 1954 I was in the 6th grade when Life magazine published the first photographs of the mounds of skeletal corpses, their lives wrecked and them killed by arrogant Christians. Those Christians were about like what has come forward in USA as Christian in our time. It's the reason church attendance in Europe is down to 10 percent, and in USA is shrinking fast. I have strong feelings about that time, shared by nobody around me, ever, except Jews I've known. In that time when the pictures were coming forward from the concentration camps, I became obsessed with the pictures. I remember a poem by Anthony Hecht, powerful poem, powerful as the bathtub of blood, of people digging their graves and being shot. I read that poem over and over, wallowed in it. I used free time on the destroyer in the Navy to read. I found the series of novels that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone deBeauvoir wrote, each their own series of several long, intense, novels of the French Resistance during WW2. I was in resistance too, involuntarily incarcerated by a fascist government for being born male. I don't do well with authority. It's called ODD, Oppositional Defiance Disorder, a scientific way of saying Taurus. And then to be born and raised up in that very same Christian mind. We become what we hate. I had to experience Christendom from the inside because I hated it so much last time around. Of course I would reject it and run for my life. The red ocean.

 

     

 

Time now to think of a blue ocean. I recall the summer of 1960 with Navy Reserve taking a two week ride on a destroyer with missiles out of San Diego. It was my first time on the ocean. I love riding the ocean. I felt the ocean under me then as I feel the ground under my feet now. I love what Walt Whitman called, the dense marine, and Homer called, the wine dark sea. Seasickness never overtook my belly. In the very worst storms, bad storms, I loved it. I loved it. When belly would start to feel queasy, I'd say to myself, I'd pay for this! I have stood on the top level of the ship where the guys that waved flags operated, hanging onto the rail, watching the front of the ship dive underwater and the whole front end rise up completely out of the water and splash back under, sending a huge wave over the top of the whole ship each time. It gave the sensation the ship went underwater. I held onto that railing taking it in the face like a cowboy in a water rodeo. I loved it. In those two weeks out of San Diego, I saw the Pacific was a gorgeous blue as I would imagine a blue diamond to look. I loved the blue of the Pacific Ocean. I ignored the rules against gawking. Was spoken to a few times about it, but so what. Speaking of blue ocean, I have an unfinished project in the house I've been looking at getting to in the next few days. It is a chunk of cement I picked up at a building site that had somehow fallen to the ground. The print of the grass it landed on is the underside. If its mass were liquid, it might fill two coffee mugs. As it landed it did a slow splash, and folded into itself. I see ocean splashing on a rock. I soaked it in a bucket of aqua blue latex paint, half and half with water, for a week or so. It sits on the square pedestal of half a very old brick so black it looks like it had been in a fire. I'm wanting to take some white oil paint thin on a brush and touch the edges of places that look like spray, give it the suggestion of surf. A still splash.

 

 snoopy and Charlie brown contemplate blue ocean

 

Blue ocean. In those first two weeks on the ocean I was 18. The blue Pacific in my memory has the translucence of wine. Later, I rode the Atlantic, a green ocean. The Pacific Ocean I felt was a majestic unknown. Those first days of my life on the sea, I thought of whalers from before electricity, sailing ships crossing the ocean carrying passengers. pirates. A friend who had some psychic about her told me I was a pirate in the Thirteenth Century along the northern African coast, meaning Mediterranean and open sea. It may have something to do with why I only wanted to dress up as a pirate for Halloween, or an Indian for the same reason. May have had several seafaring lifetimes. I did have a need all through my early years to be on the ocean. I needed to ride the ocean. Not always, at least once. For old times sake. Lord have mercy, it's a sight how I love the ocean. I think of the Pacific and see Gauguin paintings of Tahiti, those beautiful things that look like the light is shining through them from behind. I see Japanese paintings of the Pacific in its beautiful blue. Mount Fuji in the distance. California surfers hanging ten with a great white under them in the wave they're riding. The way I see it, everything in the ocean is looking for something to eat, and my meaty substance amounts to fish bait. I'm a worm with bones instead of a hook. I stay out of the ocean. My mortal frame has evolved for land. When I used to wonder where was my place on earth, I'd start with land. The ocean is so vast, so immensely indifferent to ego. The infinite ocean of love. It's equally immense in its beauty, in its deep translucence. Like in a blue diamond, there is no accounting for where the blue comes from. It's the mysterious blue of distance. Earth, the blue pearl, glows blue seen from out in space. This is our home in the universe, the Blue Pearl.      

the dark spot is the shadow of a moon eclipse

 

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PERSONAL IDENTITY LOST AND FOUND

 

jessica stockholder

I tend to think an awful lot about the people I know, people directly involved in the weave and flow of my life such that I'm in the weave and flow of their lives. I really do think this is where my head mostly dwells, on the others in my life. I see over years my habit-thinking of the various individuals was actually a projection of how I felt about myself. In the time I was in despair about myself, teens and twenties, I objectified others somehow, left out their hearts, addressed their minds. I wanted to know people that impressed me, and even they weren't really it. Eventually, my attitude toward self changed and along with it my attitude toward others changed. When I finally came to respect my own heart, even my inner child came to life. This happened in my early thirties. Up til then, I wanted to live solely by mind. My heart was so incredibly wounded in childhood, I did my best to shut it down, to quit feeling, because all I felt was rage and the continual depression of holding the rage inside and pretending on the outside I'm happy. It took until late twenties before I even noticed the inner rage that projected my attitude toward life. I wanted to live, but didn't know why, except to get away from parents as far as land allowed and have a go at living without their absolute control and suffocating religion. I didn't do my wild-thang time very well, between ages 18 and 23, when children of dysfunctional families run wild and fall into every kind of pit. I think of my time with them as a dog chained to a doghouse with a ten foot chain, living on a circle of bare dirt a couple inches below the level of the topsoil around it, something like a miniature baseball diamond. One day somebody let the dog loose and it ran and ran in any and all directions, heedless from inexperience, falling, getting up running, ran across a road without looking, out of control. If left off the leash, it would soon be hit by a car. I grew up on a short leash and did just what a dog does, ran til I was out of breath and couldn't move. But stumbling, uncertain, devoid of self-esteem, hesitant, not believing my own feelings and thoughts, taught not to.

 

jessica stockholder

 

I fell on my face, fell on my face, fell on my face, through my wild-thang five years. The first half of it I made stupid decision upon stupid decision. Sometimes fell on my face drunk. Drunk was the easiest kind of falling on my face. I married daddy in a woman's body. When I realized I had bought myself more of same to live with the rest of my life, I bounced off the trampoline. He was done and in the past. I wasn't living the rest of my life as the life theretofore had been. I was not going to live in the same mental climate all my life. A window opened and I jumped. The US Navy seen through the lens of Oppositional Defiance Disorder was my enemy. It took me away from my life against my will, set me back two years. It took care of me in those two years when I could not have taken care of myself very well, not well at all. Working in a shoe store with head in knots. The Navy took me away from it. Navy put me on the sea with head in knots. It allowed time to untie some of the knots and learn to live with the ones I couldn't untie. During the time on the ship I mostly read novels in translation of the French Resistance in Paris during the German occupation. I read the French existentialists almost exclusively. They spoke my truth. I wanted education desperately. By the time the Navy was over, the marriage was over. Out of the Navy on Friday, started school Monday, weekend at the beach, the first days of my life. I look back at my life starting at age 23. I'd taken care of the checklist of obligation to society, church and parents. Leaving the Navy base the last time, I stepped into my new life of decisions made for my life by my self. The Navy got me safely through the time of running like a dog unchained. In retrospect, I look at how the Navy served my development as a human being by putting up guardrails when needed, and now is giving me a monthly assist. I have to say I'm as grateful to the Navy for shelter through my storm as I am the College of Charleston for opening the door to the rest of my life.  

 

jessica stockholder

 

Ego having been buried for so long, it was time for ego development, discovering personal identity. A friend at the college said something that stayed with me as a kind of a minor Zen koan. He said college is the time when we create our own identities. I was thinking it meant as a kind of style, like a writer's style that is one's own, or an artist's style. Imagine it, then become it, was how I took it. I think he thought of it that way too. I wasn't able to compose for myself an identity I wanted to live by, so I left it open to see what happens. Seeing that time in the context of a lifetime, I can see that I did indeed discover my personal identity in that time. For the first time in my life, I interacted with others without the inhibition of bleachers full of judges who believed I was their hand puppet. In the beginning, I kind of became other people's puppet temporarily, because that was all I knew. Did not yet know how to make decisions for myself. It was fun to exit the chute of living by other people's decisions for my life. I can't say I did it gracefully, but got through it standing up. I learned the importance of being a friend. I loved that the College of Charleston was then a small Southern college a couple hundred years old, Old South neo-classical architecture. It felt like a grandmother's arms. It was a nurturing place that helped develop my ego, my self-identity, gave it sound principles, again like a grandmother. The honor code was absolute, no two ways about it. Caught cheating, you're out that day. See somebody cheating and don't report it, you're out same day. I remember a guy caught cheating on his last final exam of his senior year. Out. It got me over any, every propensity I might have had for cheating. It has stuck for life that cheating amounts to cheating oneself, caught or not caught. Learning not to cheat was a primal step in the progression of discovering who I am that became a significant part of decision making.

 

jessica stockholder

 

In a student body of under 500, I had a handful of friends and others I only knew from classes. I had an attic one-room apartment and worked in a bookstore. All through the Navy, when the ship went into any port, I found the bookstores. With just a few hours in Nice, France, in uniform, I found a French bookstore and bought a book of poems by Jean Genet in French, an inspiration to learn French in school well enough to read it. After classes of a wide variety, my interest zoomed in on Twentieth Century American writing, prose and poetry, and American art. By the time I finished at the college, I knew these were the interests of my life. These were the longings from deep within I was unable to satisfy without education. I had a longing to go to graduate school in something like existentialist drama, something I know, and knew then, I would love. I aimed to be a teacher, maybe high school where I felt I understood the kids somewhat. By the time I'd done undergrad, I didn't want any more school from either side of the desk. But I did uncover my self-identity by letting it evolve of its own. Now looking back it's clear that the interests of my life are good writing and good art. It was in the college years I learned that. Without the years of school, I'd have been more lost at sea than I am now. I think Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti were the first poets I had experienced on my own after high school. Starting college, the first book of poetry I picked up on my own was Selected Poems by Robinson Jeffers. I lay awake in bed all night reading it over and over in awe of what I was seeing. He spoke to me like no writer had ever done before. And to this day, I can sit in awe with Louise Gluck's new collected poems, or Elizabeth Bishop's collected poems, Robert Lowell's Notebook 1967-68. I don't make my living from it, but these writers and a host of others inform my interior life. This is how I created my self-identity: I found it by being open to it, an affection for Twentieth Century poetry. It serves nothing but my own aesthetic satisfaction. It's untarnished by money and ambition. It's uniquely my own.   

 

jessica stockholder

 

 

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AN ANGEL UNAWARES

ai weiwei

 

Earlier this evening, my friend Lizz Jones asked me on facebook to list ten of the more significant books of my reading life. Wow, I thought. How do you do that? I looked at her list to get an idea of what she meant. Books that inspire a new way of seeing, such as that. One that radically changed my life was Albert Camus' The Stranger (l'etranger). It took hold of me from page one. It was a story told for me to read. He didn't know who or where I was, so he had to publish it in book form and leave it to chance for me to find it. It woke me up to something within. It told me I was not alone in my thinking. Somebody else in the world sees what I see. He showed me that thinking the way I thought then, half a century ago, was a philosophy with a name, existentialism. He turned me on to other existentialist writers and other French writers. Camus wrote some plays and turned me on to some other contemporary French plays. Less than ten years later I had the opportunity to see Genet's play, The Balcony, in London at the Royal Shakespeare Company, opening night. Not that it was a big deal, just an accident of timing. It was see it that night or not at all. But I still thought it was cool. Camus kicked off my interest in 20th century theater, taught me an interest in reading plays, starting with his, Sartre's and Genet's, and ones Camus wrote about in his essays I found in paperback.

 

 

ai weiwei

 

 

It was a time of my life when the whirlwind of fate was blowing a hurricane all around me and I existed in the still space in the middle. The storm was my mind. I was sucked into the storm and carried away to sea in the US Navy, involuntary servitude for two years. The day before I was to leave on the plane for Norfolk, Virginia, to begin my life behind bars, a high school senior I'd only met once before, and then for a short time, handed me a paperback copy of The Stranger. He suggested I read it on the plane. I don't even remember his name. That was the last I ever saw or heard of him. I've often wondered if he might have come to me, an angel unawares, to hand me something that would wake me up at a time I needed help. I'd made a weak attempt at college and wasn't ready for that level of serious homework. I thought I was going to Kingston Trio Disney World, or something. I couldn't take the big anonymous school. Factory school. I was not prepared in any way for that. Church had less than twenty. Classes at school had less than twenty. All the way along, it was like that, then jump into auditorium classes and classes with professors talking way over my head and the text indecipherable for this average high school student. I never learned the art of homework. It was always a drag for me. I couldn't read with much comprehension and read very slowly, still do. By the time the Navy pulled me out of my life for two years, I understood my key issue was inability to read with comprehension. I spent those two years reading as much as possible. Reading some incredible contemporary French writers, much of it the French Resistance in WW2 against the German occupation. I was in my own interior resistance.

 

ai weiwei

 

 

Camus was a guide for me in that time, turning me on to writing tuned to my view of the world. This was my own college-prep course, two years of reading inspired by Albert Camus. Also listening to early Bob Dylan in that time. Kennedy, Johnson, Viet Nam, early 60s, civil rights, protests, Communist listening devices in every bush, the importance of dying for your country. H Bombs. A head full of Hi-Ho-America on one side and resistance on the other. My Oppositional Defiance Disorder was young and raw then, unconscious, not self-aware. An American working class dumbass with an ego the size of two football stadiums. Unskilled. Unlettered. Unanything. An ego in a body looking for a job, fantasizing unaffordable car, unaffordable babe, unaffordable pool, Playboy magazines by the stool. It makes my head swim to go back to that time. It's so far away it's like somebody else, something from a movie with a title I forgot. My confusion in that time was enormous, incomprehensible to me now. Incomprehensible to me how I got through it. The Navy snatched me up at the moment I needed rescue. I resisted it like a fish on a hook, but I had to wait out my time. I just now spoke of myself out loud, "What a fool.' That was spontaneous outburst from observation. Some years ago I got up by internet with a friend from that time. It didn't work for me. He was a constant reminder of that time, He liked to talk about that time and the people. It wore on my nerves until I couldn't stand it anymore. I may, at the end of this lifetime, look back over it and exclaim simultaneous with thinking it, What a fool. It's actually about the highest praise I can give this lifetime.

 

ai weiwei

 

 

Better to be a tarot card than a slave to a false god. I'm recalling Jr Maxwell telling of his life, summing himself up a fool. He made a very convincing case for himself a fool. I was seeing him a man of real wisdom and could make a good case for it. He mad a better case for himself a fool. I thought of him as the wise fool. What else could a wise man be in this world but a fool? Though he was calling himself a fool for having more than one of those whirlwinds of confusion in his life, looking at times of making self-defeating decisions. I couldn't stand any more of those times that bring out my own fool. Yet there is something comforting about seeing my own self a fool knowing Jr Maxwell thought himself a fool, too. Starts getting kind of Taoist. There were times, sitting on Jr's cement slab porch in plastic patio chairs, the kind you see stacked in front of the Dollar store, watching the cars and trucks go by on the highway, talking and not taking, being, I wondered if we might have had lifetimes together in the past. Surely we did. We knew each other right away when we met my first year in the mountains.  I wondered if the lifetimes might have been in shamanic cultures and he my teacher. It felt like a spiritual connection. I felt like I was sent to him to learn from him and in return assist him in his vulnerable time to make it possible for him to die in his own bed. It was important to him and important to me for him. In one way, I was doing it "for the least of these," the hopeless and helpless who wanted to die in his bed, not in a nursing home or hospital.

 

ai weiwei

 

 

In another way, I was serving the Master, exactly as the Master himself, the same. The opportunity was that precious to me. That leads me to suspect the shamanic lifetimes, one the other's teacher possibly several times. It may have something to do with why both of us were fools in entirely different ways this lifetime. Id like for Jr to be my older brother next time around, but won't ask for it. I've known so many friends in this lifetime I want to know again. I hope the old belief bears out that we'll meet our loved ones over yonder on the far away shore in the beautiful home of the soul. I want to see my grandmother I listened to Grand Ole Opry with when I was a kid and preferred Elvis and Shake, Rattle and Roll. I want to tell her first thing I finally got it. I came to love the music we listened to, but I didn't yet have an ear for it. I want to see all my dogs and cats there. I want to hold them all. I've been thinking a lot recently about what carries over from lifetime to lifetime. I'm thinking it's more than I'd let myself imagine before. I'm inclined to see it that only the body is different. What does it matter to us to change bodies? We don't see ourselves as others see us. I need a mirror to see my face. I who am seeing out from my eyes is the same I from lifetime to lifetime. It's just that all the parts around the eyes change, the body, experience, place, time, horoscope. I, who see through my eyes, think my thoughts, the same me, the same I, from one life to the next. There is only one thing I can say for certain about what's on the other side, anything I have ever imagined about it is not the case. I was about to say the best thing to do is stop thinking, but that's an unrealistic anti-solution. Just flow with it is all I know to do.       

 

ai weiwei himself

 

 

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NELSON MANDELA WAS HERE

I don't know what to say, but I have to say something. The day a celebrity dies is not necessarily something I feel sad about, remembering the time my aunt gave me hell up one side and down the other for not knowing Conway Twitty died that day. All I know about Conway Twitty is his singing voice. I made a mental note of it the day I heard Eudora Welty died, but didn't give anybody a lecture for not hearing about it. I turned the radio on BBC radio in the night and learned Nelson Mandela had died. That, I took note of, remembering first thing, when Time magazine declared Einstein the Man of the 20th Century, I felt they'd missed it. My own personal pick for the man of the 20th Century was Nelson Mandela. Yes, Einstein was a great physicist, and yes, he wrote enough about world peace to fill a thick book, but as man of the century, I feel like his greatest contribution was to give us a new word for genius: Einstein. He's an important man looked at historically. Einstein was also on the tame side of the fence. He didn't lead demonstrations and make white people anxious. He assisted white people in blowing up yellow people. Also, by the end of the century, Einstein's name had become a product, and Mandela's name only meant disturbing news, black people rising up. Memories of Custer's Last Stand. White people don't forgive such behavior. Since I suffer from Oppositional Defiance Disorder, Mandela's humanity is more important to me than his pigmentation. His color has no importance to me other than thinking it's beautiful. I would like to have seen him in person, just to see his actual skin tone. It is different from one color photograph to another due to lighting and film, and, in the digital age, manipulation.  

 

 

 

 

Nelson Mandela is the only celebrity I know of whose hand I wanted to shake, to honor him and to feel his energy. I know his hands were hard as rock, like a coal miner' hands and a hillbilly farmer's hands, people I respect. Mandela broke rocks into gravel with a sledgehammer every day for I don't know how many years. He spent 27 years in hard core prison for BLACK political prisoners, Robben Island, nearly all of it spent making little rocks out of big rocks with a hammer. South African white people hated the kafirs and oppressed them as our country does the Indians, as Australian white people do the Aborigines, as the Chinese do the Tibetans. Racism is not just an American thing. We are the people of the world. American white racism  crossed the ocean as English racism in particular. Racism has been a big issue all the way through the 20th Century all over the world, though in denial largely. It didn't appear to me that racism was dealt with in the American Civil Rights movement where the agenda  was legal rights. Television helped keep racism under the rug. It kinda looks like racism is up for  being dealt with in this time. Even television is declaring racism evil and coming down on racists like it's the Sin of the Year. Corporate board rooms allowed black people into commercials, movies and tv shows, but it didn't change racism. Calling racism evil, as they're doing now, just gives it the golden glow of taboo, gives it energy, enlivens it. Political correctness in the white middle class is mere boutique activism, a social checklist to go by for being thought cool. Black people all over the world live under the boot of white oppression at work, in government, in business, in the ghetto, in prison, at home. Colonialism lives.

 

 

I cannot help but respect a man who defied (Oppositional Defiance Disorder) the authority of South African institutional apartheid. Mandela was criticized in his retirement because in a few years he had not diminished poverty among the black people, etc., but South Africa is no longer under white rule, the troop carriers don't unleash a white firing squad on a black community shooting anybody running or standing still. He made the change possible and turned it over to his black brothers and sisters to make it work---it's what you wanted, here it is. When it comes to hopeless and helpless, I can take the feeling about as long as I can take breaking rocks with a hammer. One day would be more than enough for me. Mandela did it one day every day for a lot of years. He learned about hopelessness and about helplessness for a very long time, an eternity seen from inside that time. His story is the story of Job, the guy God turned over to the devil. I doubt Mandela had a hard time figuring out who the devil was. I expect, from words he is quoted to have said, he eventually found that devil in himself and became free within. Job's experience was his enlightenment, and Mandela's experience was his enlightenment. Not often do we see an enlightened man in political position, or in any kind of position. Not often do we see an enlightened man. His time in prison created situations for his wife, Winnie, that were more than she could handle. She became the representative of somebody she didn't know anymore.

 

 

 

 

My respect for Mandela is for what he went through. I respect all the other people who went through the same but didn't have the political support to come out of it a national hero. The others go home broken old men. My guess is Mandela went into it an advanced soul. I'm even suspecting a soul who came in with the purpose of breaking the bondage of South African apartheid, ready to buy it with a quarter century of making gravel. How he did as top dog in South African government doesn't concern me so much. I'm more interested in Mandela's character than his performance with political power, though from what I've seen he did as well as one man could do. Danny Glover played Mandela in a film made in the past I can't find at netflix. I remember one called Mandela that I can't find at netflix either. Morgan Freeman made a good version of Nelson Mandela in his movie Invictus. Actors presenting Mandela seem to focus their presentation on his character. His character is the most outstanding aspect of who he was. His character is why he was held in high regard around the world, especially in Africa where black people are ok, mostly. Had he not been tucked away in prison over those incendiary years of anti-apartheid activism, he might have been assassinated, might with a high likelihood of success. It's one of those situations that we want to call bad, that he spent 27 years in prison, a target for abuse. But, another way of seeing it is he needed the suffering for the fast lane to the enlightenment he needed to be the one to make the transition from white rule to black rule, a first step toward democracy, in his homeland. He put an end to the systematic apartheid abuse by the South African government with forgiveness.

 

 

 

 

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A RAINBOW OF DUALITY

I've recently discovered a new name for myself. It is ODD, Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Get pushed into a corner and come out fighting: Disorder. It's about people who don't take well to authoritarian behavior. That it is called a disorder does not allow for the fact that many authoritarian figures don't know what they're about, don't make rational decisions, and look down on the people they have authority over. Authoritarian is a disorder, too, if oppositional defiance is a disorder. I can't help but think that the science of psychology has so far worked against us humans. After a century and a half of psychology as a science, psychoanalysis is prohibitively expensive but for the upper middle class. The part that applies to the rest of us is manipulation by marketing and political manipulation. Collectively, we are manipulated by a field of study sought initially to be to our benefit that has turned against us. Given that these sorts of manipulation amount to authority, my own ODD comes  into play and I oppose  the manipulation. I can't fight it. It would be like fighting the wind. I can't control it, can't even manipulate it in turn, can't even talk about it without somebody calling me a cynic, which I have no problem with. Online dictionary gives it two meanings. One is Greek philosophy that virtue is the only good and its essence lies in self-control and independence. I have no argument with that, looking at virtue as spontaneous instead of structured. Two is believing human conduct is motivated by self-interest. I have no argument with that either. Our popular use of the word, cynic, tends to mean somebody not optimistic. Remember Dr Bernie Siegel, pediatric surgeon who wrote feel-good self-help books ten to twenty years ago? In an interview, I heard him say, "Pessimists are right, but optimists live longer."

 

 

 

 

 

I've questioned it ever since I heard him say it. It's one of those generalizations that begs exception. In a plane crash, optimists go down with pessimists. When an American bomb blows up an Iraqi or Afghani neighborhood, optimists die with pessimists, at the same time. Is he talking about laboratory conditions? Out here in the world, not all circumstances are self made. Earthquakes, for example. In an apartment building that collapses from a quake, pessimists die with optimists. It's obviously not a statement meant to be analyzed. Hear it, agree, be impressed by its cleverness, take it as a saying from on high, an authority, one who knows more than you do. I remember hearing it, thinking it insightful, like men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then questioning it immediately, impatient with myself for questioning the obvious. But it's not obvious. Maybe by empirical study it would bear out. But I don't know how such a study could be controlled, considering the unforeseen is around every corner. People who don't smoke get lung cancer. Some people who are crazy drivers have wreck after wreck and survive, while some have one wreck and die. I know a guy who went through the windshield of his car and woke up on the hood unhurt. Another I know drove into a tree dead center front bumper 70 mph without seatbelt and survived. The air bag knocked him out. He woke up lying down in the seat, otherwise unhurt, holding the gear shift in his hand, it separated from the transmission. I don't think they survived because they were optimists. The first one was so drunk he probably couldn't see. He flowed like a fish through seaweed. The second one was racing. I wouldn't say either one was optimist or pessimist, just working class guys bored with labor jobs that have no fun in them and home life that has no fun. It's called: I'm the only hell my mother ever raised.

 

 

 

 

 

My other question is how somebody of Siegel's extensive knowledge would see it so either/or. People who would be categorized optimist have some pessimist in them. Pessimists have some optimist in them. All in varying degrees according to DNA, sun, moon and planets, experience. The more I think about it, the more they bleed together such that it is not one or the other, but interwoven degrees of both. Either/or makes it easier for our minds to grasp thin air. It acknowledges duality to see opposite poles. Yet, there is darkness in the light and light in the darkness. In this world, there is no absolute good and no absolute bad. Get down to defining these opposites and it starts getting fuzzy. The woman who loves her abusive man because she understands why he's bad. He aint all bad and she aint all good. Getting down to what we mean by good and bad gets subjective in a hurry. When our karmic return on a given action is to our liking, we call the action good. When the return is not to our liking, we call it bad. An individual's liking varies from person to person. People who like arguing take arguing for the good. People who don't like it take it for the bad. People who like heroin take it for the good and the people who don't like it take it for the bad. Objectively, we may say heroin is bad because it is self-destructive. So is everything else we do, though heroin self-destructs in the fast lane. From what I understand, "when I'm rushin and on my run, you know I feel just like I'm Jesus' son." That's from Lou Reed's song, Heroin. The people who use heroin evidently think it's to the good. They'll debase themselves to the gutter for it. That's unconditional love, giving it all you've got, giving it your life. However, we can make the objective call fairly convincingly after the good in a heroin rush wears off and what you're left with is infinite craving, wanting to crawl out of your skin. That's what we call the bad. Then go back for more of the good, which leaves you again with the bad, round and round, duality, the nature of this world.  

 

 

 

 

 

I've made a turn in my life away from the political because I see it's all about the poles of good or bad, rich or poor, black or white, reduced to extremes of duality, which makes a very unreal world. It is said that it is shades of gray between black and white, but I say all the colors are between black and white. In paint, white is absence of colors, black is all the colors. Everything in between is the rainbow of colors. In light it's just the reverse, black is the absence of light and white is all the colors, illuminated by way of prism. I've realized recently I'm giving an awful lot of attention to ignorant professional politicians, the lowest grade of human being. I see their faces over and over every day, feeling revulsion. Finally, I asked myself why I want to focus so much attention on these people who don't think about me, don't give a shit about me, not even the remotest shit. The only thing they want to do with me is get my money. Why do I pay attention to them? Why am I not paying attention to artists, poets, writers I love reading, more than I have time to read in a lifetime. Good movies, art projects, good reading. I have a good life. I don't need to have my head full of ignoramuses whose only purpose is money. These people are not even authorities in my world. They exist when I turn on NPR and BBC radio news or look at online news. They exist when I flip the On switch. It is totally by my own volition I am exposed to these people I personally have no respect for, people I would cross the street to avoid shaking hands with. It is time to relax further into my home on Waterfall Road, leave the vision of the poles of duality for the vision of my everyday life, the rainbow of duality. Along the way, I've seen the good in bad people and the bad in good people. The badest man and the badest woman I know, I see in both of them good people. I tend toward "bad" people, because they don't advertise the good in themselves. When it comes to good, the bad people have it all over the good people. And when it comes to bad, the good people can make the bad people look like beginners.    

 

 

 

 

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