A STONE CALLED BALANCE

brer rabbit and tar baby

Drove to town today for prescriptions, primarily. Attempted to take the trip for a leisurely drive like the day last week driving to town relaxed the entire circuit of the drive. It worked pretty well. Drug store, speak with Bonnie at the register; gas station, speak with Doris at the register; grocery store, speak with Consuelo at the register. Made an impulse purchase at the drug store. A new box on the counter of impulse sales items next to a display of glass beads for homemade jewelry, beside a display of foil-wrapped chocolates, cheap, I saw this box of smooth stones. The stones among all the packaging of items stood out for me, called me home: oh boy, a rock. It was like seeing a red-tail fly in front of my windshield. The stones had been rolled in a rock tumbler to smooth as glass. Each had a word sandblasted into the stone and painted gold, words like wisdom, joy, happiness. I was thinking they're pretty, a bit too cliche for my liking. What do you do with a rock with a word on it? I saw BALANCE. Yes. That one connected. A reminder, a beautiful rock with a word that's important to me. A moment to pick a word that connects now, today. A tarot card for the day. Bonnie, when she read it said, "Balance." I said, "It's been my key word lately." The word has relevance emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually. Balance matters in all those worlds. I seek balance in my temperament, in conversations with others, in joy and sorrow, aware of the ebb and flow of experience. Some days I need activity, some days stillness. Some days I want to be around others, talking, interacting, and some days I want quiet, alone. I find my balance in this flow, ride the waves that come and go, see others when I'm feeling like it and staying alone when feeling like it. Like Saturday, I'd have done better to honor my feeling of wanting to stay home. This moment, now, I am where I want to be, fingertips dancing on keyboard writing to you. Seems like this is where I want to be all the time. 

brer rabbit and tar baby

I went to youtube at the beginning of the paragraph above, found a video of a full concert by John Fahey. listened enough to fall into it far enough I was unable to turn it off. I switched to another window to get here, leaving Fahey's guitar playing. I like to write with music going on, but it has to be just right for the moment. Hearing  Fahey's first notes, I was thinking this is a good sound for this moment. Thought I'd see how far I could go with it playing. It feels different looking at the monitor of gray horizontal lines, the music coming from the space behind the page, playing through the page as through a window screen. I like it. It is Fahey's concert at the Horizon Theater in Atlanta, 1997. Abstract guitar picking. I think of the composers who have sought the abstract in music, Harry Partch, the first to come to mind. He would be a good one to listen to while engaged in writing. Partch made his own instruments, instruments unlike any before, and composed for them. Fahey's picking plays like holographic wallpaper in my head and the thoughts, the words float in that space like the words on the monitor float on a background of twanging guitar strings  The music has a way of quieting my mind, overriding thought. There it is. This is the appeal of music. It overrides the never-ending, continuous mind. I feel like this has something to do with why I only see happy faces at the end of a good concert. It overshadows the mind, mind slows down, gets out of the way, enjoys the vacation, enjoys the music. Words play in the left brain and music plays in the right brain. Both brains occupied. Only problem I find with hearing this music while writing, I can only think about the music, can only write about the experience of hearing Fahey's internalized, non-aggressive sound ring in the arena of my head. I take long pauses, tell self to get back to it, ask self, why? I listen some more, return to the video to see his fingers working the strings. I like it better not seeing him. The visual distracts from the sound. Thought distracts from the sound, too. 

tar baby

The concert is over, the appreciative audience is clapping. Silence. I like the silence too. The silence has its own beauty. I think of Tibetan monks meditating and praying throughout their hours awake. To quiet the mind, and, ultimately, transcend the mind.They may be in the fast lane, but I'm in no hurry on my spiritual path. Mine is a footpath, not the Autobahn. I'm enjoying my earth experience since I've settled self-esteem issues, neurosis issues, not completely, though enough to have them out from  under foot. Learned how to live with them, accept them and go on. I'm one who likes to see and experience the scenery along the way, whatever the scenery may be, except in some places, like West Virginia coal mines. Several years ago, when I was new in the hills, my parents drove here to visit. They chose to drive over the mountains on hwy 58, "the crooked road," and it comes by its name honest. I asked mother how she liked the scenery. She didn't see anything. Nothing? "I watched the road." It must be from her I get living in my head so much. I can't imagine how someone can ride shotgun in a car crossing the southwestern Virginia mountains and see nothing. She wasn't lying. That's what she saw. The road. At the same time, I can see using the boring time to review her Sunday school class, the church, the people at church, her work, the people at work. It was perhaps a good vacation for her mind, to think everything out, nothing to do but sit and gaze at the wavering ribbon of highway ahead and worry about her errant firstborn who won't never do right, stays outta control. Like the Van Halen song, UNCHAINED. The dog ran and did his wild thing, went to the mountains and laid down on somebody's porch, been there ever since. Having them here for three days and nights felt like every year in school K-6, parents night, kids have examples of writing and drawing on every desk, parents talk with teacher and teacher tells everything I did wrong. Before the judge. Up for judgment. Guilty as charged. With a smile. It's for your own good. You need punished. It's time for you to go home now.

brer bear, brer fox and tar baby

The rock that says Balance has landed to the right of the laptop, the side of the toy race car with Caterpillar written down its side, and the pocket knife. The left side is where I stack rocks. The new rock is not yet ready to mix with the others. Its purpose is different. It's the only one of the rocks that was bought. Does that make it privileged or a slave? It would be a curious find for an archaeologist in another round of civilization a million years in the future. Earth experience is so very weird. The ones who know the secrets of life and death say the world around us is what we make it. The trick is to figure out how to create what we want consciously, instead of letting our neuroses create the world around us unconsciously. I've found that when I treat everybody and everything around me right, everybody and everything around me treats me right. It's like with Donkey Jenny. I've only treated Jenny right. She has only treated me right. Everything we "put out into the world" comes back like boomerangs. The air is full of boomerangs spinning toward me. Thoughts and attitudes go "out there" as much as words and actions do. They're constantly coming back, as I'm constantly putting thoughts, attitudes, actions and words "out there." This is how I see we create the world around us. I've an idea it's just a peephole view of the beginning. It surely involves the world of spirit, where, it seems, everything happens first. It is said that art precedes life by fifty years. I've been aware of art for fifty years, can see it in history and in our collective development. First example to come to mind, it was in the Sixties that I discovered the theater of the Absurd that had been going on since the Fifties and Forties. Half a century later, take a look around. Absurd is the nature of our society. Like WB Yeats wrote a century ago, The center does not hold. May not be the exact words, but it's the meaning as I understand it. Balance I want to find for myself. While it looks like mayhem all around, I keep my center, the place just below the navel, the center of balance, and stay upright. It's all I know to do. 

uncle remus

*

MY FRIEND HENRY MILLER

Continuing to look for where my own art impulse came from. I know it is in childhood somewhere, because all the way along I longed for art expression. I had self-esteem issues that were debilitating, stopping the kid from doing something I might want to do by telling self I'm not able for any of a number of possible reasons. I'd learned to believe that anything I thought up had been thought before. Anything I can do, somebody else can do better. Or I'll never be able to accomplish, I don't know enough, am not detail-oriented enough. The list can go on forever because these roadblocks are arbitrary, imagined for the particular occasion. All through school I was taught from all directions that if you're going to do something you gotta be great. You gotta make an A. You gotta make a lot of money. You gotta be a leader. I never wanted to be any of that, I, myself. My learning mind was engaged in trying to figure out how this world works and how to get used to its ways and enter that jumble and make a living. It was hard for me to learn it well enough to believe I could jump in and swim. I didn't want to learn it. Gave it a go in college years and a few years after, but it didn't take. I only knew what I did not want as far as work or career is concerned, yet at the same time I had wants that were inaccessible, like a half a million dollar Italian sports car, teenage stuff. In my teens, music was the first art form I paid attention to, rock & roll. Little Richard's early songs had some pretty good lyrics, so did Chuck Berry's. I was drawn to songs with more or less artful lyrics and musicianship. Always listened closely to individual instruments in the bands. Never learned an instrument. Too much chaos in the air at home to allow for learning. And too much chaos inside my head. I knew no one who had ever heard of art. Yet I had a longing inside for some kind of artistic self-expression, believed only gifted people could do art, and it had to be learned with years of training, or so I'd been led to believe. This was the Fifties when abstract expressionism was happening in New York and nobody outside New York knew about it, except in the universities I had no access to.

 

 

 

It is looking like the longing to write came from the childhood years of lying in the bed at night crying from frustration and rage, I felt like I had valuable things to say, understandings I wanted to write down so I'd remember them. I didn't write them because I had no privacy. I was given a diary for a birthday and never wrote in it knowing mother would read whatever I wrote and tell daddy what she saw. I learned to keep to myself any ideas or insights, new understandings. I'm recalling at an age of around ten I'd been out riding the bicycle on an old dirt road through a big field that seemed endless to a kid. I listened to the crows and watched them fly. They were saying haw, haw. It was not caw, but haw. I listened and listened. It was always haw, not caw. Later, at home, excited about my discovery, the kid told daddy the crows are saying haw, not caw. That set him off. NO THEY DON'T--THEY GO KAW, emphasis on the K. By this time, the kid was accustomed to it. Of course, they say KAW. Nothing came of that. By this time I already knew better that to try to talk to him, but was so excited by the discovery about the crows, I kicked myself later for being so ignorant to forget rule number one: do not attempt to talk to him--you know better. That was probably the last attempt I made. It was excitement that made me go against what I knew, so I got with myself about letting excitement take me out of control. He taught the kid self-control because every attempt to approach him with positive attention was turned immediately into negative return. At age 14 crying in the bed at night, the kid got with self and made a vow, I will never cry over them the rest of my life for any reason. That was the end of it. Never cried over anything having to do with either one of them again. Didn't have a problem with crying for some other reason. It was in that time I secured my heart in a vault and forgot the password. School was my safe zone. It's where I found others I liked who liked me. School was where my friends were.

 

 

I had a longing to write, but could not write. It was all I could do to write a one page paper for a class. Had zero command of the language. Had a natural gift for spelling. Or so it seemed. By the end of high school I could not write anything that would make sense. Had a longing to learn the language. By end of high school, I could not read with even minimum comprehension. I dove into reading when school was over. I wanted to go to college, but knew I could not read. Tried taking some classes and learned I wasn't even ready to start. Didn't even consider taking an art class, self-esteem on the bottom of the ocean. Didn't believe they'd even let me in. I was drawn more to learn the language, learn to read with comprehension, feeling a longing to write, knowing I did not know how to write. I read as much as spare time allowed. Bought paperbacks of best-sellers from drugstore paperback racks. Found some interesting books there. Found The Third Eye, the story of the Tibetan monk. It blew my circuits. The ultimate escape from my reality. But I knew I could not sit still that much. Read Alan Watts' The Way of Zen. Didn't get it, but got it read. Some understandings sifted through the chaos of my mind and were retained. It was an introduction to future readings of journals of Zen monks, like Hakuin, that served later to inform reading Chinese and Japanese poetry with a little better understanding than without the peephole into the spiritual vision of the East. I gradually took an interest in Eastern religions, Buddhism and Hinduism. From what I saw in the reading, it was the same as Bible teachings, different places, different names, the same stories. I was going the way of mind, the path of knowledge. I knew I was the bottom of the barrel where knowledge was concerned, and I wanted to correct that. I wanted to learn how to read and learn how to write. I felt like I had something to say without knowing what it was. A rumbling within needed expression.

 

 

 

Here, again, Henry Miller enters. I found a friend when Henry Miller entered my life. Getting close to the core of the matter now. Almost finished  rereading his Colossus of Maroussi, I am seeing, page after page, how I retained what I learned from him and what I learned from him became my own way of living. He encouraged my interest in art. And he encouraged my interest in writing. The interest was already there. Upon college graduation, I worked a year, saved money, sold everything I had with the exception of some LPs and books. Spent a month in Athens. Went to the acropolis half a dozen times, the museum of antiquities, and went to Crete and took a bus from Iraklion across the island to Phaestos to see the ruins of Knossos, the beginning of Greek civilization. And back to the mainland at Athens, took a one day tour bus to the ruins at Delphi. Reading earlier today I came upon his visit to Delphi and before that his visit to Crete. I had forgotten that Miller was the motivation for me to want to go to those places. He published the book a year before I was born. It was almost thirty years after his visit that I was there. Nothing had changed in those places. Reading it now, I can see in my mind's eye the places he saw and wrote about. We took the same road across Crete, and I saw the same landscape he saw. It really is as magical as he tells it. By magical I mean it has a glow about it, like an aura that is not visible, though it enhances the visible, gives the feeling that it's alive. So it's Henry Miller where I got my fascination for Greece, modern Greece more than ancient Greece, though the Greek plays are a pinnacle of art. It is still a regret within that the library in Alexandria burned and took so much we'll never see. It makes what we have all the more precious, Medea, Prometheus Bound, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone. They make Shakespeare seem provincial. It is looking I have to point to Henry Miller for the core of my impulse to art by writing. Meher Baba came along later and opened my heart with a can opener. It took awhile. By this time in the life, I feel like my heart has opened sufficiently that I can live by a balance of head and heart, and write from that balance. And from the balance possibly be able to write something from time to time worth reading.

 

 

the dalai lama

 

 

*

 

 

  

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.

 

 

*

GROWING INTO LOVE

 

There it is. American so-called Christians don't want to help the poor and will not do it, no matter what. There are exceptions, like the Sparta Methodist church. My early years were spent having the Old Testament rules and regulations repeated unto belief system that what Jesus did had a spiritual meaning that doesn't apply to living in this world; you're to love the brothers and sisters in your church. Love your neighbor means to me the people around us, next door neighbor, people in the same restaurant, essentially everybody we come in contact with in the course of a day. Not killing my neighbor does not equal loving my neighbor as I love myself. That's a little much for a fundamentalist whose idea of religion is I'm-right-you're-wrong. Introspection? Assessing self is never a priority in fundamentalism; only assessing what somebody else is doing wrong. "That's not how it is in my church." How come your church isn't doing anything to benefit poor people? Some people are poor because of crystal meth, varieties of drugs, inebriation generally; they're sinners, that's why they're poor. The wages of sin: Christians won't help you. If you're in prison, it's because of sin; Christians don't approve of sin. That's the big deal I grew up under: don't-approve-of. I say shit someplace and somebody says, "I don't approve of that kind of language." I say, "Then don't use that kind of language."

 

I came out from that kind of thinking when I left the home of my parents. I did not know in my late teens that there was an alternative to Fundamentalist thought. I went to a Unitarian church for awhile to appease mother that I'm in church. I figured Unitarian was as far away from Fundamentalism as it can be in the same religion. I really didn't take to it. It too concerned preachers and disapproval. I was still such a dependent that I asked the preacher to talk to my parents to appease their fear that I'd gone to worshiping Satan. I was still subject to mother's control issues that never let up. In my early years on my own, I was learning to make my own decisions, anathema in fundamentalism. The fundamentalism I was subject to drove me to atheism, mainly to get it out of my mind as a force of inhibition. You-better-not. It had me twisted up in such tight knots that I had to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so desperate to get rid of the filthy bathwater the baby had to go too. Deep within, I knew there was something to Jesus, but all the rest of it was so interwoven with the gospel that I couldn't have one without the other. So I chose none of it. An entire childhood of prayers not answered turned me against "God." I pleaded and begged God in sobbing tears every night in bed to free me from the shackles of my parents, and it never happened. It only got worse. I stopped crying at age 14, told myself one night in bed with face in the pillow that I will never wet my pillow with another tear over them. I'd cried and screamed into the pillow so they couldn't hear me every night before I went to sleep. I'd get the shit beat out of me if they heard what I was screaming. That was the final end point of the parent-child bond. Answer to prayer. Our relationship had been of them keeping me crying. When I refused to cry, our bond was broken.

 

In myself I saw it as liberation. I had to do as they said, but only in the same way I had to do what cops said. Rule of Law. Nothing personal. It felt like liberation to me to distance them to the objective. Answer to prayer? Yet on the psychotherapist's couch it looks neurotic. Very neurotic. This diving within for liberation is the beginning of schizophrenia. While it's happening, it's quite comfortable. It's next best thing to walking out the door and never seeing them again. I was afraid to walk out the door because I knew I wouldn't get very far, cops would bring me back, and then there would be hell to pay in super-abundance. I wondered for a lot of years why I was living in such hate, and it was indeed hate, over people who went to church every minute the church door was unlocked, and took me along. Out and about they were so sweet like good little Christians who obey the preacher like they're supposed to. Behind closed doors: look out, yer on yer own. From the way it looked to a teenager, God was the problem. The Old Testament God of YOU BETTER NOT mixed with God's son who died because I was a sinner, all of it was too confusing. I threw it all away. Good riddance. By the time I was in my mid twenties, I laughed at religionists. 

 

I also found by my mid twenties I was unable to love. Love was not even available to me. I believed an unknown someone in the future was waiting around a corner for me to fall in love with. Never anyone I knew. It had to be somebody I didn't know. If "the one" ever showed up, I'd never have noticed. Love was shut down in me. Hate was easy. Angry inside. It was a boiling rage. When I see a man with a really red face, I know what he's feeling inside. And I know where it came from. By the time I fell in with Baba at age 33, I was still unable to love. It was some years with Baba applying WD-40 to my heart before I was able to get it. The key was the day I was reading some of Baba's words and he said that understanding was a form of love. I thought: I can do that. I did have understanding. I understood that black people are people too. I felt empathy for their situation. I knew how oppression felt. Yes, I could understand. That one word was the turn of the key that opened my heart. I'd been pursuing the development of my ego. It came to a place where ego gets out of control and becomes self-destructive. Then one's life goes to shit. It might look good on the outside, but it doesn't feel so good on the inside. Then the outside becomes a mask of what's missing inside. Round and round it goes spinning webs of illusion so thick there's no way out.  

 

The chance opened up to move to the Blue Ridge Mountains, live on a remote gravel road at 3,000+ feet on a mountain with waterfalls a short walk into the woods on an old cow trail. I'd longed subconsciously for mountains all my life. In Kansas there weren't even any hills. All highways went in a grid of straight lines. Kansas fundamentalism was the dirty bathwater I threw the baby out with, the state where they have a problem with teaching evolution in the educational system, unto legislation popular with a majority of the population. From Kansas, Southern Baptist looked liberal. The preacher from our church made a bid every year to be received by the Southern Baptist Association in Atlanta, and was rejected every time as too unrepentantly hard shell. Really. He was a Swede from Minnesota, whose parents came over from Sweden. Ingmar Bergman and I had the same religious upbringing, Swedish Protestantism. It made us both into existentialists. Perhaps for Camus, Sartre and deBeauvior, French Catholicism had that hard core a hold on their childhoods. I've not read their biographies, so I don't know. My friends who are ex-Catholics had the same issues in childhood as my friends who are ex-Baptists and ex-Jews. It's not the whole, but particular families in the whole that spit their kids out unable to love after defeating their spirit with church.

 

I believed moving to the mountains that manual labor on a working farm every day would gradually work off my anger that was still loud and clear. The anger didn't go *poof* when Baba took hold of me. Year after year I kept the anger. It boiled in me when I was out stretching barbed wire, putting fence posts in the ground, cutting firewood, digging with shovels, hitting nails with hammers, mowing hay and putting it up. It seemed like the harder I worked the angrier I got. Inside, I was growling and questioning what was going on. I'm supposed to be learning something about love and I go about angry all the time. After seven years working the farm, it was time to move on. I took up house painting. It was easy, I liked it, I could work alone. Curiously, the day I left the farm all my anger went away. It was like my lifetime of anger was packed into a helium balloon and released. It all went away in one package. It really did go *poof.* I don't understand the process, but it taught me that the way of the spirit, the way of love, the path I have chosen, albeit against my own wishes at the beginning, the Way takes time, requires experience, understanding, reflection, evolution; it's truly a process of inner evolving. It's the Tao. It might be about becoming a better person or it might not. That's not what it's about in my way of seeing. Becoming a better person is a side-effect to establishing a love relationship with God. It's not the purpose. Once caught up in God's love, Divine love itself, becomes the purpose. A love relationship with God really does make for a beautiful life. It keeps me in touch with simple, honest (or dishonest) people doing what it takes to get by.

 

Friday evening in Galax Lowes, I spoke with a guy who was dirty and poor and a little bit slow. He was carrying a rolled up rug and we were waiting for the sales clerk at the register to return from wherever she went off to for whatever it was. I asked if that was a rug rolled up he was carrying. He said he was getting it for his grandmother whose rug was dark and she wanted a lighter rug. I asked how old his grandmother was and he said after thinking about it up in her 80s. We talked like people who knew each other. I saw in his countenance he was a lover of God. He was somebody on the social ladder who was bottom out of sight. His boy was with him who looked about 11 or 12. I could see in their connection that the boy watched out for his daddy who wasn't too good at getting around in the world. I saw in him the boy that led the blind wise man Tireseus. Clerk comes back, we go off in our different directions. I felt like I'd had a God moment, made contact with an angel unawares kind of moment. I don't have any money to give the poor, so I work with BROC in the county taking care of the poor immediately in our world, our neighbors. Putting on the Hillbilly Show once a year is our fundraiser. We don't get government money and we don't play religion. Everybody involved, about a dozen, are church going believers, individuals who paid attention to Jesus advocating for the poor. This is how I do my part for the poor. I can't join some refugee outfit and distribute rice to people in refugee camps in northern Africa and bury the dead. I can extend myself in a heartful way to someone "poor in spirit" and listen when somebody is having a hard time, needing to talk to somebody. I don't have to be doing it all the time. Only when the moment presents itself, the only times it's real. Forcing it just makes a mess of things.

 

 

* 



FOR BEING GOOD TO A KID

robert motherwell, red

It was in my first years in the mountains, late 1970s, that Malissie Pruitt told me something that stuck with me. In those years I was enamoured of country wisdom, still am, though the old wisdom is going away with the old people. About all that's left of country wisdom by now is in nursing homes on the foggy mountain top of memory loss. I remember Malissie was standing at the sink working in the kitchen and I was standing beside the refrigerator, we were talking. I don't remember what we were talking about, but she said, "Be good to a child and you'll have a friend for life." That's the kind of knowledge I think of as wisdom. I tend to be sympathetic with kids, appreciate them as individuals, am able to listen to kids and roll a ball back and forth without end. I like a child's point of view that is not yet corrupted with traditional ways of seeing and thinking, expectations, and then the sexual confusion at whatever age puberty happens now that puts an end to childhood like a door slammed in your face. It's easy for me to be good to a kid, and I did see over time that kids I knew continue to know me after they grow up and we're always glad to see each other.

Then, maybe five or so years later a kid was born I didn't yet know. When he was about two, I became acquainted with his daddy putting up hay and working together. Became friendly with the family and visited them more and more as time went by. I became a friend with everyone in the house. The boy was having a rough time that I recognized as a version of the hard time I went through in my vulnerable years. An insane daddy. In my time, a couple who were friends of my parents, Jack and DeLouris, became my "witnesses," meaning they witnessed what I was going through at home. I found in a book I think by Swiss psychologist Alice Miller that a witness is very important to the child in cases of what we call now abuse. Then it was called getting the shit beat out of you every day, for any reason, even "general principles." I learned that hitting kids only makes them angry and breaks down systematically the bond of love a child automatically feels for a parent. The child is put in a place where survival within oneself requires backing away into deeper and deeper resentment until it turns to hate.

In the register of deeds vault I was doing my work and a lawyer I knew was in there. Somebody he knew saw him and came into the space talking to him about a turn of events in his life. He lost his boy. The boy left and won't have anything to do with him. He was down in the heart about it. I felt nothing even remotely close to sympathy for him. I thought: treat somebody like shit and this is what you get. You had plenty of time to think about it. I left my parent situation and went as far as land allows, to the coast. Love for both parents was beat out of me by the time I was ten. From then on, the hitting and wisecracks only further alienated me. And of course, guess what. It's MY fault. It's always the kid's fault. The kid won't mind. I hated to let go of love for daddy and mommy, but to hold myself together, I needed to separate myself from them. My silent mantra upon being berated and knocked about was, You can control my body all you want, but you will never have access to my mind. And I shut myself off to them. Around them I wore a mask of obedience, and behind the mask I was myself. Didn't know who or what myself was, but I was I, and neither one of them would ever see who I am. Because no matter what I was or was not, it was in need of ongoing correction. Not guidance, but punishment. When I left them I never wanted to see them again the rest of my life, and I knew that. It wasn't an emotional reaction. I have seen them, but it's always been duty, like going to church.

I saw this little boy going through what I went through from that age. Watching him grow up was for me a review of my own relationship with my daddy. An anti-relationship is what it amounted to. I saw my little friend's daddy creating an anti-relationship with him, too. I chose to continue being a friend to his daddy, not out of respect, but because his wife told me that "when you're here, he's an angel." And I never saw anything angelic in the way he treated the kids. I thought then I can't do anything to stop the abuse, but I can be a witness for the kids, one who understands that they are right in not liking being beaten daily. And it's not their fault. By my presence they were treated less viciously. That was the best I could give them and still be able to know them. I'd think to them without saying it, just hang on, do the best you can, and bear with it til you reach the magic age of liberation, eighteen. Then you're free. Nobody can help you now. Social Services would only make it worse. Assassination works, but it's not an option. I watched my young friends bear with it. It brought back much of what I'd been through. What I learned was that I was not the problem. I was the target of an undiagnosed insane man who thought he was a rooster. I was better able to understand my own situation seeing it objectively outside myself. I was able to extend understanding to my young friends, and they got it. By "they" I mean his little sister too. We couldn't talk about it, but I believe telepathy flows over lines of love. 

How many times I heard, "I want some respect outta you!" All I could think was, Show me something to respect. It goes without saying, I was not allowed to say anything. That would be talking back. The biggest problem was that I dared not ever say what I thought about any of it. I could only speak a long string of expletives supporting the occasional word toward eventually completing a phrase. I remember with a laugh the time he said, "I outta hit you for what you're thinking." I laughed inside, thinking, If you really knew what I was thinking, you'd kill me. That I live tells me you don't have any idea what's in my mind. I was free. Like a good schizophrenic, I dove within, the only place where I was free. My body and my decision making were shut down. But my mind was my own. I recently saw a guy in a Norwegian movie, ELLING, who had been similarly driven within, alas so far in that he couldn't come back. It's a beautiful movie if you can tolerate subtitles. I only watch subtitled movies, so it's no problem for me.

My young friend whose childhood I witnessed for his mental health sake turned eighteen. Daddy rooster went apeshit at the loss of control, brought an ultimatum to me that I can't be friends with both of them. OK. It wasn't even a decision for me whose friend I was. That was the end of friendship with the daddy I had lost all respect for by then. I told young'un he had some years of inner wildman cut loose going off in all directions ahead of him. All I asked was he survive it. And he did. By now, he's turning thirty next birthday, and has turned out to be one of the very best friends of my life. I won't try to grade my friends in best, next-best, or anything like that. It is a love in the heart that is the same in every case, like loving your kids. In my adult life, my friends have the most value of anything else in my life. Friends come first. No two ways about it. Less than a year ago, somebody I know was throwing off on my young friend and I had to interrupt him and mention that he was the same as my own, so when it comes to taking sides, that's already set. What all this is coming down to is I was good to a kid and now that kid has grown into a friend I could trust absolutely, in the true sense of the old-fashioned, pre-facebook meaning of friend. He has a fabulous wife who loves him and kids that love him. He loves all of them. And I am happy to see he is able to have a life post-eighteen of effusive love in his own home.


*

TED STERN AN HONORABLE MAN

     cleve gray, red thrust on gray

This is the day Ted Stern had his memorial service at the cistern, by his request weather permitting. I found a short video Channel 5 put online of the flag-wrapped bier with a friend of more than half my life inside it dead. First time I went to google to look for info on his passing, I saw "Ted Stern dead at 100." It knocked me for a wobble on my track. Dead. It was a little bit hard to take. Dead  is such a dead word. It's inert like a cinder block. A name and memories. The first time I saw him, he was walking across the cistern on his way into the main building. We at the college knew we had a new president, though I hadn't seen him. One day I was walking into the quadrangle through the gate between the library and the main building (1968) and saw Ted Stern walking over the cistern. At a distance and at a glance, he looked somewhat formidable. He walked with a self-confident air. I'd heard he was retired Navy, which turned me against him automatically. I'd been in the Navy too, though he and I had very different experiences there. The Navy was good to him. He gave it his all. The Navy was not good to me, because I gave it my time that it had usurped in the period of the draft, and nothing else. The ultimate authority. I resented having two years of my life taken because I was born a boy in USA. In retrospect, I have an entirely different version of the time in the Navy. Yes, it took me out of my life, but I needed it at the time. The time in the Navy was my transition from rule from outside myself to making my own decisions for myself, which theretofore I'd failed at repeatedly. I needed to get outside my life at exactly that time to assess the pit I'd fallen into of my own ignorance.

I'd come out of a family situation where I had been taught to reject authority. In photographs I've seen of self in childhood, I see that rejection of authority started about the age one and a half. That's when the deep furrows between my eyes started their very early development. Resentment. Hating being hit. Hating the ongoing berating. By the time I left parents, I was dead set against authority and dead to parents. Him for the hitting and berating. Her for never protecting the boy child from his insanity. Hitting the kid sublimated hitting her. Resentment of male authority runs deep in me. Like I say, all the way back to age one. The child within hated being hit daily without recourse. Didn't just dislike it. Hated it. Hated. Going to a Kansas fundamentalist church five times a week, it was hate that was developing in me, not love. Love was nasty. It was a four-letter word. Bad. There wasn't any of it going around in our house, anyway. Certainly not in the church. Church was duty. Or else. In my time in the Navy and the College of Charleston, love was a word I scorned. Had no idea about it. Experienced some heat, but it wasn't anywhere near love. It was a peep hole, nonetheless. A beginning.

I tell this for the origin of my rejection of authority. The authority I grew up under was wildly irrational. There was no reasoning behind it, no guidance, no correction. The only thing I was required to understand was No, Don't and You Better Not. I was promised a better life if I could start everything I do with no-dont-you-better-not. A kid has to move. A kid has to talk. I refused the straight-jacket, so I was in trouble every day. Existence was the cause of my trouble. It doesn't sound good to resent parents openly, but when your mother tells a neighbor woman, "He's my kid, I'll kill him if I want to," and then tells the kid about it, proud of herself, it causes a child to question the advisability of living with these people. But there was no place to go to. It was a matter of seeing I was born in prison with a sentence at least through high school. Free from parents and church, then I had the prison sentence of the military to go through for being born in Amerika. Then there is the prison sentence of you-better, you-oughta, you're-supposed-to, you should, the rules unspoken, but you're expected to know them and go by them. When-ya-gonna-get-married-when-ya-gonna-get-married-when-ya-gonna.... I got married, because of supposed-to.  I'm an Hephaestus personality drawn to an Aphrodite personality. He failed to see the humor in his wife's infidelity.

All this to say that in the first view of Ted Stern at about fifty feet and maybe ten seconds, I saw Authority. He was big with a big Jewish nose, which I respected. I'd known a few people of the Charleston Jewish community, liked them all and respected their intelligence. Upon seeing him with his Hebraic schnoz, I was entirely disposed to rejection, though with curiosity. The Jewish part told me this is not the average white man. It indicated that the board hired him for reasons that cancelled any prejudices among the Southern white men of the Old South way of thinking. Still, it didn't matter to me, one way or the other. Navy. Authority. Why did this have to happen at my school? Within, I was braced against him. There came a time I did something arrogant, disrespecting his authority. He handled it like King Solomon. I was so impressed by his way of "taking me to prayer meeting," rationally, intelligently, as well as firmly, I came away from it respecting his authority. He did it in front of about thirty people, never letting on who he was talking about, never making eye contact with me to say, I'm talking about you. I sat in my metal folding chair red faced in awe. I had never experienced such intelligent authority. My respect for Ted Stern started that day. It didn't change anything between him and me, because I didn't know him to avoid him or cultivate him. I just stopped talking down about him among my friends.

It was not cool to admit I admired him suddenly. His pattern all the way along in his time in Charleston was to turn the people most dead set against him into his most ardent supporters. I saw it even in cases I never believed would be sympathetic with him, like my own. He had a great deal of opposition in his first few years with the college, and he played through it. I'm recalling a Miles Davis concert in England, Isle of Wight Festival, in a documentary about his music. It was a big outdoor show of what is now called classic rock, the Who, Hendrix, Janis, the Doors. Miles was playing his electric music. Audience was throwing every kind of trash at the band, booing them. At a certain point in the music, the bass player told Miles he couldn't take dodging flying bottles and being booed any more. He wanted to quit and leave the stage. Miles said, "Play through it." By the time they finished the set, the booing and bottle throwing had ended and the audience went nuts in ovation wanting more. This sentence, play through it, has been with me since Ted Stern's passing. He played through it when metaphorical bottles were thrown at him and he came out of it beloved by the people of a great Southern city, his funeral a major moment in the history of the city of Charleston. For the College of Charleston, corny as it sounds to say it, Ted Stern was indeed its founding father. His obituary could be reduced to three words, an honorable man.


*

THIS BE THE VERSE by PHILIP LARKIN

kenneth noland

    

               THEY FUCK YOU UP, YOUR MUM AND DAD.

                   THEY MAY NOT MEAN TO, BUT THEY DO.

               THEY FILL YOU WITH THE FAULTS THEY HAD

                  AND ADD SOME EXTRA JUST FOR YOU.


             BUT THEY WERE FUCKED UP IN THEIR TURN

                   BY FOOLS IN OLD-STYLE HATS AND COATS,

               WHO HALF THE TIME WERE SOPPY-STERN,

                  AND HALF AT ONE ANOTHER'S THROATS.



                MAN HANDS ON MISERY TO MAN.

                   IT DEEPENS LIKE A COASTAL SHELF.

                GET OUT AS EARLY AS YOU CAN,

                   AND DON'T HAVE ANY KIDS YOURSELF.




                                       ---by PHILIP LARKIN

REBEL WITHOUT A PAUSE

Over the last couple weeks I've been idly looking at war films made in the field during WW2 and Vietnam. The WW2 footage is the tv shows in the 50s, Victory At Sea (Navy) and The Big Picture (Army) and You Are There, narrated by Walter Cronkite. Victory At Sea was my favorite. Saturday tv viewing in the time of b&w tv. Every time I see an episode or 2 now, seldom watch more than 2 in a row, I remember the time in childhood, 11 and 12, how seeing the war my daddy went through made me afraid there would be a war for me. Looking at American history, going to war has been a rite of passage. Discipline. The Army was the key to a young guy learning discipline. Discipline at home had nothing rational to it, becoming thus an anti-discipline. Mine was not the only home like that. Boys in America tend to be raised without guidance for being a responsible grown up man. Perhaps it is the ongoing war pattern that left discipline to the military the way parents leave teaching to the schools and reverence for God to church.



All through my teens I was afraid of having to be in a war, though by good fortune slipped in and out between Korea and Vietnam. There was no way I could know that in advance. By then I knew USA was about a war for every generation and I was next. Looking back from my late 60s, seeing these anti-war films at ages 11 and 12 made me all the more afraid of going to war. I knew by then I have no such thing as "good luck." I never won anything. If there were a hundred chances on something and I had 99, the o1 would get it. It taught me at an early age never to gamble. War was a gamble for your life. Everyone goes into it knowing the chance of survival or not being made a cripple for life is uncertain. It was the kind of odds I did not see worth betting on. But the draft gave me no choice. Like Bruce Springsteen, I was born in the USA. By no will of my own, I was an American boy and war is what you go through when you're American.



Now that generals are no longer presidential material, the presidents turn out to be men who didn't have to go to war. They are more ready to set a war in motion than the generals. Got an economy problem? Start a war. John Wayne, the great WW2 hero of the movies, was a draft dodger. I didn't have a choice. The draft was on. Daddy saw to it I was enlisted in Navy Reserve before high school graduation. By then, the military was about the same as absolute evil where I was concerned. Because I was born American I had to join the war machine and be an active cog. I was not a good sailor. Graded for my performance in those 2 years active duty, I'd give myself a D-. An F would be dishonorable discharge. I fell just short of that and going to the brig for incompetence and absence of interest. I was that guy in the 50s pop song, Please Mr Custer, I don't wanna go. There's a redskin waitin out there fixin to take my hair.



I didn't want any of it. Never wanted to wear a uniform. Never wanted to march. Never wanted to salute somebody just because he went to college and I didn't. Never wanted to kill anybody. Never wanted to live in hierarchy. Did not want my life to be about death. Did not want to die young. My desperation to live in that time is extraordinary to look back on from here. I wanted to live. Wanted a chance to see who I would become. Wanted to have a life. As far as I could tell, I hadn't had a life yet. In fact, I felt like the day I was released from military obligation for being born in the wrong country was the beginning of my life. Up to then, I had lived by other people's directions, had no idea of my own, except to be outside the constrictions of reliance on war and money, and the false religion that goes with it. It was like all that was sacred was my enemy. All 3 systems, plus, wanted me dead.



I'm not proposing this as rational thinking. It was the thinking of a teenager who felt no support from any quarter, but a grandmother, the grandmother who came from these hills. She taught me things I needed to know, like don't be looking around in church, how to transplant something so it would live. Parents never taught me anything but to stay away from them and church. By age 23 I was finally able to live by my own decisions, however poor and uninformed they might be. I wasn't going back. That's when I was released from involuntary servitude and decided that to live on I needed education, needed to learn something worth knowing besides how to hold a rifle or kill the enemy. The enemy was all around me, the whole system of servitude for bullshit reasons I'd grown up in. Everything around me was unreal. I wanted to be real, whatever that meant. Authentic, maybe. Sincere, maybe. I don't believe those questions ever got settled. Even today when I call something real or unreal, I don't know exactly what I mean. Maybe it's what we call gut response. I know it down deep, but not on the surface in the world of words.



One of my apprehensions, now, about growing old is they say memory of the distant past is present. I've consciously kept my mind out of that era before age 23 as much as I'm able. What memories from then jump to the surface leave me in a bad mood. I've spent my adult life reparenting myself, exploring in the mind, learning as much as possible without it being a fixation, unplugging mental / emotional logjams, staying outside society. Patti Smith's song, Rock & Roll Nigger is playing in my head, Outside of society--that's where I wanna be! Baby, Baby, Baby, I'm a rock & roll nigger. Patti didn't make no bones about it. Recalling at a Papa Roach concert ten or less years ago, when they did the song with the lines, I know my mother loves me, but does my father really care?, it became a male chorus. The crowd was louder than the band, and it was all guys singing. That moment, I realized this is not just my issue. It's a national epidemic. Born in the USA.



The overwhelming popularity of the song Man Of Constant Sorrow from the movie O Brother spread the song to the city audience of men that the men of the country listening to bluegrass have known very well since Ralph Stanley recorded it not long after WW2. We are a nation of men of constant sorrow. Of course, there are exceptions. Recalling the time I mentioned to Jr I'd found Man of Constant Sorrow copyrighted by Carter Stanley. He said, "It's older than that. That song goes a long ways back." Carter must have copyrighted his arrangement. The song goes way back, but the song before it was written probably goes all the way back. 6,000 years of patriarchy, this is what men have come to, constant sorrow, which we pass to the feminine via dependence and to the next generation via dependence. Authority is how men rule, and I never wanted to have authority, nor did I want to be subject to authority. I can only tolerate someone I respect having authority over me. That's why I've worked mostly for women. Didn't make much money, but respected intelligent authority.



*