OUT THERE AND IN HERE

lewis carroll

I sit here at the desk with thoughts in my head transferred to black words on white looking back at me, each word a still point in a running monologue of the mind. I look at the green world outside through the window, the world I live in, look around at the interior, books and art supplies, an external reproduction of my own interior. I read on facebook about the civil war of terrorism going on in America, see pictures and stories of white men, and sometimes white women, seething with hatred for everybody else, video clips of cops killing people with hands up, a group of people calling it murder, another group justifying it. I saw tv journalist Chris Hayes attempt to interview a lawyer, Mat Staver, who advises the Kentucky clerk in jail for contempt of court. His firm, based in Jerry Falwell's church university in Lynchburg, Virginia, is the one with the agenda. They found in her a stooge willing to go along with their show, someone who dwells in willful ignorance, an easy target, the broad side of a barn. He said she got in touch with them, which I'm automatically inclined to doubt, now that I see whose agenda is directing the show. Soon after he started talking, I learned not to be taking anything he said for true, which he verified repeatedly. He has great future potential for a republican congressman.

 

lewis carroll

 

I see the stories we get through the news, in all its forms, caricatures of a collective dream shared by all connected to American news sources. Fake news is willfully ignorant and serves the willfully ignorant portion of the population. The politicians, like Jindal, Cruz, McConnell, the list goes on and on, are demonstrably ignorant by will. Jindal went to Oxford. Somebody as stupid as he acts is ignorant by will power. He plays the role of somebody who could not get into Oxford in England or Oxford in Georgia. He is a master at working CEOs, convincing them to give him more free money. He's a master deceiver. His apparent ignorance is a magnet to the willfully ignorant, the Fake news viewers. At the same time he deceives voters to support him, he deceives donors to get their money. The propagandists have discovered the population of the willfully ignorant easy to manipulate as wet clay. Tell them what to say, promise national attention and money, it's done, no matter how stupid it sounds. It's smokescreen, so content doesn't matter at all.

 

lewis carroll

 

I call this the world of the collective mind. It is a world we are trained to believe is "real" and amounts to "the real world." I've been told countless times along the way I need to get with the real world, start watching television. In a way, it is a record of human activity across a vast spectrum. This so-called real world is composed mostly of the worst of us as human beings in civilization. I pay attention to this world with curiosity driven by its unpredictable turns, assess the bigger world I live in, the big world that includes my small world of Air Bellows. The big world implodes and I go with it, like when the volcano under Yellowstone blows, it will take out the western half of the continent and counteract global warming with several years of dense volcanic ash in the atmosphere. The world of the mind. The world I live in is green, birds fly from tree to tree, donkeys graze in the meadow among wildflowers. I seldom hear a plane fly over, cars seldom go down the road, almost never a motorcycle. Wind blows, the wind chimes ring a melody of chance notes. Crickets and katydids, I can't tell if they're outside or inside my head. A crow in flight calling in crow language across sky. Even from inside the house, I can make out where the crow is located in the landscape around the house by ear from inside the house.

lewis carroll

 

Caterpillar just now  returned to the house after being outside for twelve hours. Unusual this late in her life, I've been outside calling her, worrying myself into a swivet, calling it concern instead of worry. I wrote everything before this paragraph with worry over Caterpillar in the front of my mind, telling self, "don't worry, be happy," she's having a girl's night out. I saw her walking down the path from the road above the birdfeeder, telling me she'd been the other side of the road or this side of the road in the tall grass. I have no idea. Caterpillar has favorite places in every direction from the house. The house is her center. She was born here, has lived here all her life. I jumped up when I saw her, put down a bowl of fresh catfood and put fresh water in her bowl to welcome her home. She ate and then drank like a camel. Ate again and drank more water. She wasn't looking for attention. She went back outside. I suspect she's tapped into wild mind, where she has not gone in some years. When she walked back out the door, I had the feeling she was still in wild mind. She was home, but still in the outdoors part of her mind. Next time she walks through the door, wild mind will have settled. She will say Mao when she sees me. Like Caterpillar lives happily in two worlds, I need both the simplicity of the green world and the complex world of the mind. For Caterpillar, I suspect it's the other way around. The green world is the complex world of predator and prey for her, in the house her simple life.  

 

lewis carroll himself

 

 

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SWEEPING OUT THE TRASH

masahisa fukase

Made a quick round trip to town today. Didn't think to take camera. It's just as well. It's not easy to stop, pull off the side of the road, get out and go to where the picture was I saw, especially when the sides of the road are mounds of snow from the snowplow. It was a beautiful drive. It always is, any season, any time of day. Today the landscape was white with the black lines of bare trees, black cows in white meadow, trails running through the snow, the houses where people live their lives, some of them I know, most I don't. I notice driving by a house of people I know, I see their images in my mind's eye. Now that my life is slowing down, attention slowing down, no worries, mind not held by vain desires, ok with the world and everybody in it, not wanting anything somebody else has, my mind has cleared up remarkably. I've just noticed images in my head like they're new. They've always been there, my mind has been too cluttered with pressing issues. Now I have no pressing issues but to write here every day, but this is fun, it's recess. Here is where I deal with what's important to me, bring something up and examine it. It's much like the psychiatric couch, a place where I open up and let it flow, see where it goes, see what comes up, freewheeling, meandering in all directions like the Mississippi delta. Five years into writing every day, I've found from it the benefits said to go with journaling. I've found my thinking mind now thinks like when I'm writing. It's kind of like I'm writing all the time in my head, and it's fun. I like it a lot. I talk now the way I write. I write as I talk. It runs in a circle. Where therapy is concerned, I'd recommend it to someone seriously wanting to get to know self. I have such a better perspective of who I am since I've written it out nearly every day. Self-esteem has smoothed considerably like a shirt on an ironing board. 

masahisa fukase

Self-consciousness in public does not require approval and has no problem with rejection. Of course, I automatically respond or react to approval or rejection, but the feeling passes and next moment it's gone. A wonderful aspect of awareness I'm in my last years is my response to approval or rejection is so what. I don't have enough time left to waste mental energy concerned with it. I don't have time to have emotional reactions to the corporate marionettes legislating us into police state while we watch every day on the news. We don't need editorial cartoons anymore. I'm glad to see the fall of the American Empire consumed by it's love for money is happening in my last years. I feel like I'm seeing it from afar, like in the last row of the top balcony in a gigantic auditorium. The actors on the stage are ants standing on their back legs, far away, like flying over an interstate, seeing the cars below like ants on their ant trails. It doesn't bother me to know we have no privacy. I don't recall ever believing we did. Phone tapping was a common paranoia in the 1950s. I've been aware of watching what I say on the phone all my life. At the start, I saw the internet snuff what little sense of privacy we had left. I stay out of other people's business and don't worry about somebody seeing my social security number. Anybody who wants to find it, can find it easily knowing where to go online. I like at amazon and netflix they profile me by my purchases and recommend items aimed specifically at what I go there for. Netflix almost never recommends something I want to see. Amazon is better, but not so good either. I only get ads and political articles on facebook that might be of interest to me. I hear the news and repeat what has become a mantra: What do I care? How can I care? Why would I care? 

No longer do I have gut reactions, a wrenching stomach, seeing such ignorance in positions of power, knowing they are well paid puppets with long noses. They only make me laugh anymore. Since the corporate coup, intelligent people don't have the stomach for politics. Nobody with any sense would jump in the ring. It makes me question the ones that give the appearance of good sense. Gives cause for doubt. Appearance is their game. Appearance is what they do. I can't concern myself with them anymore. It has become so reasonable not to give them any attention, I question why I ever did. It's like growing up seeing Hollywood films only, then one day out of the blue, Fellini's La Dolce Vita. It opened a door to another world and I entered. Soon after, I read Camus' The Stranger, another door to a new world. There was no going back. I feel like I've come into a new place since letting go of giving attention to the false. Less of the negative thinking and feeling that goes with it. In another time I could have waxed opinionated about Nothin-yahoo addressing a republican congress to be a sharp stick in the eye of American negotiations with Iran, or whatever else is under the table, where the real action is. My guess is it will be comical in the international arena if Nutty actually does address republican congress. He knows actions have consequences. He's a bit too vulnerable to be snapping at the hand that feeds him. He struts his stuff and crows like a banty rooster, he's little but he's loud. He believes force solves problems to the point force becomes the problem.   

It's more fun seeing them scripted by their "think tanks," following the directions of their strategists. Keeping their names and faces in the news (I don't care what you think of me as long as you remember my name). Such shallow people, shallow as the laptop screen they're projected on. Why give them my attention as anything but the cartoon page in the paper? I can read Chris Hedges and Billy Idol's autobiography and get much more from it, while enjoying it immeasurably more. Seems like my mind took a step toward clarity soon after I shut them out of my attention span. I can't avoid them on facebook and radio news, but they don't make me sick anymore. I just say to self, this is how it is now. It was this way in Will Rogers' time and in Mark Twain's time. It looks kinda ongoing. All the more reason to let them that want it have it. I see a new gaff Sarah Palin made and have to click on it for a laugh, though turn it off soon after she starts. I cannot listen to a full minute of her or Bill O'Reilly. I don't care that he lied about a story. He's scripted. He doesn't know if it's true or not. It's all fiction to him. My sense of O'Reilly is he's so self-involved he doesn't care what he says. It feels better in the inside not to be aggravated by the manipulation by way of propaganda. I see it as such and let it go. I've finally learned the construct in my head made from information picked up over years is made from false information. Poof. So why have a construct? Let it go by as false information and let that be all I need to know. 

masahisa fukase

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VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE IN THE NEWS

The news has become so objectionable with Ebola as something to fear, another in the never-ending list of fears we cannot live without, I can't listen anymore. It's either proving Obama is the cause of Ebola or proving he is not. Cops kill unarmed people across USA daily, yet we're expected to trust the police state and fear a disease that killed one. Fear Isel or Isis, whichever. Fear immigration of poor people of color. It's kind of Old Testament, fear the Lord thy God. I was raised in that paradigm, fear the Father, fear God, fear the Law, fear Church, fear parents, and be hysterically afraid of Satan, cause he's gonna getcha if ya don't be afraid enough. Love was never an issue. Of course we love, cause we're s'posed to. That's understood. But fear comes first in the s'posed-to list and love is last, down there with no consideration at all. The fundamentalism I grew up in, the same as is purported to be Christian now, was all about fear and nothing about love. Love might be misunderstood by the "common" people to be carnal, and that aint it. So we don't go there, while the preacher is screwing this one and that one, saying, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God. The nonsense quoted from fundamentalist politicians is so ridiculous, I can't believe he or she is so free of embarrassment. My estimation of politicians has hit rock bottom and is furiously drilling a hole to take it deeper. Confidence in a politician, a fundamentalist, a cop, is not possible in me anymore. These three have shown themselves incapable of rational thought, which I already knew, but denied, looking to allow for exceptions. Never found any. 

Remember a short time ago the preacher in Kansas screwing a teenage boy to cure him of his homosexuality? Remember the tv evangelist, Jerry Lee Lewis's first cousin, Jimmy Swaggart, he of crocodile tears on tv, who went to whores to peruse and sniff? Talk dirty to me, baby. To touch makes it a sin. Making the people two-fold more children for hell than they, themselves, is not a sin. Nor is hypocrisy. It's tradition. And to complicate the news further, it's election time. The Supremes recently ruled, predictably, lying in a political campaign legal. News? Really? Insurance against lawsuits for republicans. Now white man militias in cammo, carrying assault rifles, are talking of intimidating democrat voters at the polling places, black and tan people, women, profiles, anybody that looks like a Ay-Rab, or appears to be of an IQ above ten. Of course, white men would be free to pass, How y'doin, Bro? In my very most jaundiced thinking pre-1980, I'd have never guessed this would be the nature of the fix we're in during the course of time when everything that never worked became policy. Only thing the news is telling me: This world is not my home, I'm just a-passin through. I had no idea back in 1961 when I turned my attention away from television, how just that separation would separate me so definitively and so distantly from the world I live in. We who read books are the tiniest minority of all, unworthy of notice politically, unfit for consideration socially. I tell myself the absurdity "out there," in DC and Raleigh, is not my world. I don't believe in the entire system anymore. I have no confidence in Capitalism, no confidence in religion, no confidence in police state, no confidence in voting. The Supremes nipped what little confidence I had in voting. That the republican party goes to such ridiculous extremes to inhibit anti-republicans from voting, it makes me think there might be something to it.   

Before 1980, I voted against the worst of the candidates. Only found one to be for in my long history of voting, and he was crucified. Carter. Since 1980, I vote to be one digit that says, I want democracy. Voting has been my act of protest in police state. I know my vote  has no value outside myself. One party or the other, like Ralph Nader said of his direct role in turning the election over to Bush-Cheney, the losers, "the republicans will get us there first." Both parties are marionettes of the billionaires club. The democrat politicians like to pretend they're not in it for the money, we're here for you, while the republican campaign approach is fuck-all-y'all, and it works for them. The entire American political/economic system needs to break down entirely to restructure. As in construction, you want to put up a new building in the place of an old building, the old one must be taken down. Democracy wasn't real democracy before the word was used tongue-in-cheek, anyway. Considering the absence of value in my voting to the point that I fool myself in the act of voting, whatever the justification, I must vote. It is too important to the republican party that I not vote. Like I told the country club woman who said, I bet you voted for o-BA-ma, He's a sharp stick in the republican eye. When I take a moment to vote, it will be motivated only by an opportunity to be a sharp stick in the republican eye, albeit a minuscule grain of beach sand. I doubt the militias will actually appear at the polling sites, taking it for a propaganda sound-bite using the news to inhibit black people from making the effort. I don't even care anymore. I care about like I care who wins a football game. The game was amusing to see, but the outcome is the same, whoever wins, another game tomorrow night. Even though I see it for this is how an Empire crumbles, like reading the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, witnessing history in action, it continues to be distressing. Better to stop listening to the news than to start a Zoloft addiction.  

I wonder how republican politicians think up the stupid things they're saying, and it doesn't take long to find the answer. The Heritage Foundation. The politicians are scripted to appeal to the ignorant. Considering half the population is below average, they have 50% at the start. Strategy. I cannot participate in this belief system, can't listen to it anymore, don't even want to see pictures of the cast members. I've come to a place where I feel envy toward my friends who pay no attention to the news, don't vote, have never heard of Ted Cruz or Ann Coulter, unaware that democracy is over. At the same time, I'm grateful that I've followed our political system unto my own disillusionment. Disillusionment equals enlightenment. In my enlightenment, I look out the window and see my world, the world I live in. I look around this room and see the world I live in. The donkey meadow, the trees of autumn, a nice day with door open, recent paintings drying, Caterpillar outside lying in a patch of sunlight, the ground drying a little bit after five days and nights of rain. The fog that accompanied the rain made my world into a wonderland. Today, the sunlight makes my world into a wonderland, too. I can't see wasting my attention on the intentionally false when a fly just now flew into a spider web in the window's corner, the spider tying it up using Wonder Woman ropes, and the fly broke free. I am that fly. I broke free of the paralyzing power of the false. It has been amusing along the way, but amusing in a dark way. I am pulling my attention inward to my friends I care about who care about me. I will read in the life of van Gogh, paint when I feel it, write in my journal as blog, watch films from around the globe, read the columns of Chris Cox in his new book, The Way We Say Goodbye. The vacancy left by extraction of the false will fill up immediately like the hole left by my hand when I pull it from a bucket of water. I will vote because I believe it is important to vote as an American citizen, whether I believe in the political system or not, just to be a sharp stick in the republican eye.  

photos by tj worthington

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD LIKES THE POPE

I put off going to town today until after 4. Necessary to go to grocery store for catfood, carrots for donkeys, and may as well pick up items for self, granola bars, bananas, apples, paper towels, Bounty, the only kind I'll buy because they work, peanuts, a cranberry-grape sugar drink with "no sugar added," ice cream Klondike bars with a polar bear logo, something to nibble on while writing, reminding me that polar bears are on their way to extinction but for zoos. African elephants may be extinct soon but in zoos. The gorilla is on its way to extinction. So curious. And what can we do? Nothing. I once knew a woman for a short time who worked in Rwandan refugee camps and other African refugee camps, mostly burying bodies with a shovel. Several years of it made her gaunt and took the light from her eyes. She was serious, wanted to do something to help, wanted to help the suffering. She couldn't change it, but she could do her best to assist survivors of international horrors. It broke her spirit. She entered a short-lived, disastrous marriage hoping to rehabilitate herself living rurally in America, the Appalachians, with a guy who lived simply, grew his own vegetables and hunted his own meat. Except he was crazier than she was. She jumped out like the frog dropped into boiling water. I hated to see her go, but was glad for her she cut and ran instead of sticking around being miserable. She was already miserable. She wanted to rest from it. She comes to mind when I feel impulses to want to do something about the vast horror show of extinctions going on and genocides and people hating each other for mere existence. It is possible that too many parasites can kill their host. After how many thousand years of religion as an ongoing part of civilization and pre-civilization does it take for humanity to get it?

People calling themselves Christian spew hate predictably like Old Faithful blowing steam. They're the most hard-hearted people around and they point the finger at the rest of us (three fingers pointing back at themselves). When I meet somebody with a hard-hearted attitude, I know right away its a Christian. Not a Catholic, not an Episcopalian, not a Lutheran, not a Methodist, not a Presbyterian, but a Christian. This is behind my Woody Allen quotation in the column to the right. Jesus really would not ever stop throwing up if he were to come back and look at what was being done in his name. For once, the Catholics have a pope who expresses compassion and caring for down and out people, maybe first one since the beginning, one who wants to dress simply and know people, wants to be in among the people around him, to feel their lives, their living spirit. His eyes glow with love as do his sayings. Strange to see the top dog bureaucrat in the original bureaucracy is of a sincere heart. He sets himself up for assassination going against the Sicilian mafia and says, What have I to lose? So I leave the body. I will be free. My jaw drops to witness such a man in the papacy. Some say he speaks truth, but does he live it? He gives the appearance that he does. He won't wear red shoes. He wears the simplest garment allowed a pope, wants a simple room for himself. He has been elevated by his character to a place where he can make a difference to the poor by appealing on their behalf as infallible authority to a rather large population. He may yet be offed for so much emphasis on the poor, the billions of people having a rough go of it all day every day, hungry and no help coming from anywhere;. The poor have been his lifetime concern like some people are concerned for pandas and ecology. I continue to be in awe that such a man would even be considered for pope. He's pissing off the rich Catholics and alienating important (translates: self-important) people everywhere in the world. He's a rebel.

Pope Francis came to mind as someone who has a position he can use to make a difference appealing to the higher self of the people who look to him and to many who do not look to him. He's the only pope of my lifetime I'd like to meet. But then, why? If I admire what he does, I can find in myself a way to "make a difference," whatever that means. I don't have money to give to the poor. Hell fire, I'm one of the poor. That's by American standard, not by the Zimbabwean standard or the Somalian. I don't know what I can do to help the poor people in my world. When I come face to face with somebody who is poor, I don't turn away. I regard the poorest people I know with even higher respect than the well off people I know. In fact, the poor people I know get a great deal of my respect. They have hard lives that I can't change. I work with the Hillbilly Show in Sparta to raise money to help some people of the county in need. We can't take care of everybody, but we can help some. We're a dozen devout believers, each in our own way, who come together in agreement that we can do something toward giving an assist to people who need help. Sometimes I give money to somebody asking for it and sometimes I don't. An individual's worth, to me, is in who the person is, character. The wealth factor is just a way of life. I prefer the company of working people, the working poor. I came to the mountains wondering what it was about the poor that God loved so much. Some years of living in the world of the working poor and having known about as many truly poor people as I've known very well off, I find the well off are better educated, experienced in the social graces, dressed up pretty with every hair in place, and every suit showing its price tag. The poor are every bit as obsessed with money as the rich. And the poor are stuck wherever they're living, unable to afford to move someplace else, like the rich live near the source of their income. The poor have nothing to fall back on but God, while the rich have money. They're God liberated.  

I've never known where I stood in the matter of being a benefit to the poor. I see so much going on around the world that is creating human misery, animal misery, misery to all life, poisoning the worms in our lawns, poisoning the ants with lethal food that kills the whole colony. Roundup spray for weeds is the first thought now, like Raid for bugs. All this happening at such an alarming rate, it's looking like the momentum is going in an obvious direction, everybody sees it. We're like watching it on tv. Even the news on television is fantasy. What can I do to stop the Japanese from killing whales? How can I turn the rising temperature of the ocean? Our politicians are on the take. That's the long and the short of it. They're no good to us. They're a large part of the problem. The part that floors me is that everybody in the congress and senate and supreme court is college educated. They don't sell a college education any better than Michele Bachmann sells Jesus. A large number of them have law degrees. I look at them and listen to them and think: What? An educated man who speaks like a fool. So many of them. What is it about our educational system that doesn't educate stupid out of people? It seems like transcending stupid would be a matter of education, but these people are educated and, as we say in these hills, dumber'n shit. It is surely the end of the American Empire when our representatives only represent our ignorance by acting it out publicly. I know there are intelligent people in this world, a lot of them, but they're staying out of sight in this time. This is the age of ignorance in the driver's seat, the Reagan Revolution 34 years into its purpose, ignorance its trump card. Ignorance has taken over our government from local to state because intelligent people are staying out of it. It takes low intelligence to want to be a politician in this time, and a very real inner cheapness. Our "leaders" are not respectable in this time, except in fake ways. My answer for myself on where I want to aim my respect is never for wealth or the show of wealth, but for individuals with compassion in their attitudes.  

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THE WORLD THE WAY I WANT IT TO BE

cheyanne, 7

Today is vacation. I fed the donkeys and the birds, went to the mailbox, and that was it. Slept quite a lot, as much as sleep would allow. Up for a few hours, asleep for a few hours. Weary and wore out. Didn't want to do anything. I think I've abandoned the blogathon. Ten days of writing after somebody else's "prompts" I feel like my head has been underwater and I needed to come up for air. Yesterday I wrote on my own again. It felt refreshing, so much that I don't want to go back. The blogathon is coming to nothing for me, anyway. Yesterday's theme was to write about risks. The prompts are turning to the business of art, and I'm so not interested in going there I remind myself I have a choice. This evening, not wanting to write, read or anything, I put on a fairly recent James Bond movie, one with actor Daniel Craig, Quantum of Solace. The surrealist title tells zero about the story. Not that there's a story. It's a rapidly paced sequence of events punctuated by guns going off. I couldn't help but reflect on the common belief that killing solves problems. Watch television a few minutes and you'll see at least one gun. The worship of the gun has become about as intense as the worship of money. It comes under the news editor's rule of thumb: if it bleeds it leads. The world of media plays to the third grade level and defends it saying, it works. I'm remembering in the time of Women's Liberation much talk about getting soap commercials off the air of moms doing laundry. Corporate defense: it works. We're in a time of low-bid architecture and exposure to appeals to our lower selves through ongoing commercials and the varieties of entertainment coming out of Hollywood. On Sundays when I see tv, I'm continually glad I cut out exposure to commercials a very long time ago, 1961. I know nothing of television since then except seen at other people's houses. I see so few commercials that when I see a hundred or so during the race, especially pizzas that look like coronary bombs, I see quite obviously they're appealing to the stupid in me. I cannot give my attention to an appeal for ignorance every day and let it soak into my mind by repetition several times a day. I don't want advertising jingles in my head. I don't want that in my world, so I don't participate. My world is wonderful without television. I have none of that continuous coercion in my mind. I want the world to be without tv, but I can't do anything about outside my world. In my world, I'm free of it. I see it on Sundays by choice. Fortunately, I forget all of it by the time I arrive home.   

 

selfie by cheyanne

 

One of my own rules of thumb is never buy anything advertised on tv. That's near impossible, but I do pretty good. About all I buy after utilities, food and gas is very little. I buy books and cheap dvds and the occasional cd, none of which is ever advertised on tv. I stay away from Walmart too. Occasionally, something I need comes up and Walmart is the only place I can find it. That's not more than once in two or three years. Even when things cost more in Sparta, I'm one to put my resources into the local economic flow. What little bit I shop makes negligible difference to local businesses. It's not even principle. I don't put much confidence in principles any more. I also do not ever imagine logic, reason or foresight could have a role in anything. It's more practical than a principle that guides me to spend as much of my money at home as I'm able. I stopped drinking Coke when I learned the corporation was hiring death squads to kill union activists in Bolivia. I can't do anything about it, but I don't have to participate in it. Of course, the corporation has so many other product lines, I probably use toilet paper made by Coca-Cola Inc. I do my best to participate the very least in an economy I see goes counter to the soul of humanity. Again, I can't stop it, but I don't have to be an assist if I don't want to. I can't avoid contributing to the world of international corporations that make me ask if a corporation is a person, then is a person a corporation? Some people are, but not anybody I know or would want to know. A great part of my absence of ambition to make a lot of money is I don't want to wed myself to the belief system I don't believe. I remember in childhood and teens feeling so jealous of this lifetime, I wanted it to be all mine, my own, not have to pretend sophistication because I make a certain amount of money and it's required. I don't want to have to go to classical concerts in full dress and stand around in the lobby during intermission to be seen there.

 

selfie by cheyanne

 

One of the great guidelines of my life has been the words attributed to Gandhi, my own paraphrase, Be the way I want the world to be. Not the exact words, but close enough for a rule of thumb. Perhaps I wish there were more empathy and compassion going about among people. I can't do anything about it outside myself. I don't rule the world, nor do I rule anyone but myself, and self not well. Without access to prayer I couldn't even fool myself into believing I rule my life. If I want the world to have more compassion going around, I can activate it in myself. When I think and act with  compassion, it has a front and center place in my world. It is a part of my world. When I regard others in the world around me, the world I live in, neighbors, people I know, relatives, the animals I see regularly, with compassion and empathy, my world is suddenly characterized by compassion. I don't need to wish the whole world would do that way. I don't need to missionarize and browbeat the people around me with the Truth. I live it. What I put out comes back to me. I put compassion out into the world and compassion comes back. I have compassion all around and within. I need never wish there were more compassion in the world. I want the world to be without racism, but again, I can't stop racism in Moscow, Kansas, or Paris, Kentucky, or New Haven, Connecticut. That's way out of my range. But I can be without racism in myself. I regard someone of another race or religion or nationality the same as I regard my own, with the same respect. I see no reason to be otherwise. It is the god within that is who we are, not our race or beliefs about God. Skin color is no more than the color of clothes we're wearing on a given day. It's the difference in cultures that has us believing the difference is one's shade.

 

 

vada by cheyanne

 

I don't like racism, I don't have to do it. Again, I don't do it, there is none in my world. It means the people I'm drawn to are non-racist kinds of people, and then there's no racism in my world. I don't want the ignorant minds of Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh in the world, but, there again, nothing I can do about it. I choose not to give them my attention and suddenly they're not in my world anymore. I can't stop them from being in the world of American politics, but I can pay no more attention to them than I pay attention to politicians in India. I am training myself to care no more for anything to do with American politics than I care for the politics in some place in Africa I've never heard of. Ignoring it does nothing to diminish it "out there" in the world of no interest to me. I pull them into my world paying attention to them. I stop paying attention to them and they cease to invade my world. My world is devoid of them. I saw some pictures and headlines today on facebook of Palin making silly analogies from a children's book. What do I care? Cartoon characters good for the Comedy Central channel. As long as I pay them no mind, they are not in my world. However, I carry enough contempt for Dick Cheney to pull him into my world whenever I see a picture of him. I feel a clenched fist within, would want to go back in time and have him aborted. Just that kind of thinking pulls him into my world the same as if I had respect for him. When I pull him into my world, I can let go of him fast and send him back to that world out there. In my world his name has no more importance than Putin's. The world I would want to live in would be a world without them. My world is, indeed, without them. Simple as that. They're someplace else. They only come into my world when I pull them in. I don't pull them in and I'm free of them. It's my choice. I choose to leave him and all the rest of them in their world. I'll keep my attention in my world. They have no place in my world. My world is people living their lives, doing what they have to do. I care about the people in my world. I like keeping my mind closer to my heart.           

 

the blogger by cheyanne

 

 

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LEGACY

marcel duchamp

Paying attention to the news in this time is too ominously boring. I believe I see where it is headed, at least the direction. I don't want it to go there, but it will, already has in spirit. It's looking like the push is to go all the way now. It looks like one thing, while actually it's quite another. The ignorance level of the people in our government making laws we have to go by has become so obvious in this time. Equally horrid is that the most ignorant ones are the most popular. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. The ignorance behind the law is excused. The strategists use ignorance to disarm us, keeping us in the realm of the irrational where surprise attack is the game. It is very well paid master propagandists having a ball. We stay preoccupied with smokescreen, corporate news. I've been questioning my own intelligence paying attention to the likes of these people, attention given to ignorance. What do I want to do that for? That's not what's going on. I tell myself to let go of interest in stupid. It is not amusing. They're corny cartoons. I pay attention out of curiosity concerning the strategy behind their ignorance front and center. Every time we call Sarah Palin Caribou Barbie, she rises another notch in name recognition. Composer, Jean-Carlo Menotti told college president Ted Stern, "I don't care what they think of me as long as they remember my name." I see video clips of interviews with celebrities of a wide variety. The ones that pretend they're not playing the celebrity ego game, Bob Dylan, took the step beyond of playing the role by not playing, one-upping the other players.

 

marcel duchamp

 

Ted Stern told me what Menotti had said without passing any judgment on it even in tone of voice, though I knew  it struck him extraordinary or he wouldn't have said anything. Stern, himself, was a celebrity in his world, felt at home with other celebrities, and my feeling was he took what Menotti said to heart, something like, Confucius say. The celebrity's creed. When Stern told me, I was new in years on my spiritual path, aware of ego as ultimately self-defeating. In the world of people I live among in this time, I can't think of anyone who would say that of themselves. Surely somebody in the county is thinking it, I don't know who it would be, but maybe a teenage girl dancing with a Christina Aguilera video when mom and dad are not at home, longing to be on American Idol. To my ear, Menotti's proclamation of indifference to what others thought of him went radically against my school system education where popularity was number one. Unpopular, you were nowhere. In the Fifties you were square. Even if you couldn't be popular, being liked a little bit was at least something. Even though I don't have that motivation now, it remains underground within. Initially, his saying shocked my sensibility as a reckless thing to say, or as an Old Baptist might call it, a bold thing to say. Simultaneous with the minor shock wave that ran through my mind, I got it. He's an artist, he's busy. Like it or don't, he composes his music and lives his life. It's what he is about. Somebody doesn't like something he said at a cocktail party, oh well.  

 

marcel duchamp

 

The part of me that got it was interested to note Ted Stern tucking it into one of his memory drawers like where a cow keeps its cud to bring up for a good chew when he has the time. One of his maxims he lived by, by his telling, "Hesitate and you're lost." He lived it for so many years it was automatic. He never lost time to hesitation. He would take time to think something through, and when he saw it, he saw it. Jean-Carlo Menotti was an internationally known composer in his later years with legacy on his mind. Remember the artist's name, carry it into the next generation, remember his name five hundred years from now, the maestro Menotti of Italia. He wanted his name remembered, meaning his music, not his reputation. He knew reputation faded quickly with time and he was thinking of his music's place in the canon down through time. It told me Ted Stern was in the time of his life when awareness of his legacy comes into play. He lived long enough to see his influence fade, called himself a once-was. By his hundredth birthday, he saw his legacy and found it to his satisfaction, publicly affirmed. He would be remembered. He could not be flippant as an artist with his reputation. Ted Stern wanted everybody to like him, everybody. He could turn his bitterest enemies to devoted friends and keep them there. It was a talent. The good man part of Ted Stern was not fake. Often his heart influenced his mind and vice versa. He had a good connection between heart and mind. Like Menotti, he wanted his legacy to be the continuation of his name down through time, in Stern's case the man who walked Charleston through the transition from Old South to New South. His role in the history of Charleston is substantial, as well as in the state history. His legacy, like Menotti's, sez: this man's lifetime contributed in a beneficial way.

 

marcel duchamp

 

I like living in the rural working class where a legacy amounts to a tombstone. It could be called "rural romantic" living outside of society, though from the inside I don't see it like that. Underachiever I can identify with. I've worked hard and know the hopelessness of day after day labor all one's working life toward making ends meet. The romantic part would apply better to an empathy for more than half the people on earth, way more than half, living very sparingly, who don't have the irony or the luxury to imagine what it would be like to think about a legacy. This is where I chose to live out my days, where self-important behavior is frowned upon. I don't want to need to worry over a legacy other than he didn't hurt little kids. I don't like it when somebody hurts little kids in any kind of way. But who needs to be remembered for longer than the lifetime of the last person to remember you? What does it matter how long a man's obituary is? Same as what does it matter how long his wiener is? But it matters a great deal. According to Freud, the biggest deal. OK. It matters. I'm glad every day of my life, am satisfied and grateful not to be a star. Oh yeah, I remember him from when I was little. I think I heard somebody say they cremated him. Aint no grave that nobody knows nothin about. You ever heared about him havin a grave, Honey? No, I aint heared nothin about him in no ground. They said the thought of his body layin in the cold grave for thousands and thousands of years give him the shivers somethin terrible. He said he'd rather go up in a puff of smoke. That's what I heard he said. There won't be no grave for nothing to raise out of when the trumpet sounds. What's the poor soul gonna do? Reckon he'll be left behind? Far as I know. Wonder if he was saved? How would I know? I heard he was weird. Yeah, I heard that too.

marcel duchamp

 

 

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WHEEL OF FORTUNE TURNING

all paintings by feng dakang, china

Every day I hear concerns on the news that NSA is surveilling our email accounts and facebook accounts, and everything else. I wonder whence this pose of naiveté. I took it for granted from the beginnings of emails and facebook that they were available for government surveillance and were at least set to key words like bomb. I've taken it for granted that this daily blog is surveilled for key words from the beginning. I went into it aware of cyber surveillance. I tend not to use key words that ring alarm buzzers. I read and hear indignant accusations of government for spying on us. We the people are the enemy, anyway that's how the rich, our elected "representatives," the corporate world and the Supreme Court view us. By regarding us the enemy, they are making themselves our enemy and they're now working against us to drain us of the last drop of our blood/energy/money. That we have been subjects of surveillance has been the case all my life. In the Fifties when we talked on the telephone, it was characteristic of everyone to suspect a crackle on the phone line a sign of surveillance, then it was called wire-tapping, and sometimes we would say things to insult whoever might be listening. Of course, no one was listening to teenage chatter over the phone. Then, they were interested in communists, now it's terrorists.

feng dakang

I can't help but think it a fake naiveté to pretend it's a surprise we're being surveilled. It won't be long before interstate traffic is patrolled by drones that just happen to gather other information too. Police state is here and it doesn't appear to me that surprise is authentic. It is a popular police state. I believe Marx said that if change doesn't come by legislation, it will come by revolution. Legislation is on HOLD and revolution is in the air. Not like in the Sixties when every band was required to have a song about revolution and it meant nothing, but the Occupy movement and all that goes with it is becoming a problem. The suppression of the movement by corporate media, including NPR controlled by republicans, is making it into an internet underground that is growing all over the world. Big change is at hand. Big change is happening. As always, our government is the last to get it. Government has become a behemoth with a life and mind of its own like Hal the spaceship computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Over the last 30+ years government has been our enemy. If you've ever paid your liability insurance for the car a day late, you know what I mean. The State of North Carolina has already informed me with certainty that it doesn't give a shit about me, only wants my money. All I can say is, that's all right---it runs both ways. Since I was informed by the State of NC of my status, I see NC as lines on a map and that's it. No emotional identification.

feng dakang

I have a feeling it would be a good thing to withdraw my interest in what government is doing. I've learned it has nothing to do with we-the-people except as the enemy. All I can do is accept and go on. The world of the people I live among is far more interesting than the news. Our political parties have minimalized to the not very bright vs the truly ignorant. It has reached such a low it isn't worth paying attention to. They say if you don't pay attention you're not participating in democracy. Well, we don't have democracy, the interest of we-the-people is nothing of consideration except for polls that inform the manipulators, the propagandists. I always hang up when I find it's a poll on the phone. I don't care to participate. I don't care to hear about Sarah Palin, for or against, and a long list of the others. They only make me puke when I hear them talk or read something retarded they said. That these people win elections tells me republican gerrymandering over the last 30+ years has successfully shut down democracy. Or that half the American population identifies with stupid. That's the part I find scary. So easy to manipulate they're boring for the propagandists.

feng dakang

The people around me are so much more interesting than our present run of politicians. Yet, I don't recall a time when they were better. There used to be the occasional bright light, like Fulbright and Moynihan, not many. Every president I've admired as a man was annihilated by relentless republican dirty tricks, starting with Kennedy. It's time to listen to more music. I like hearing news from Africa on BBC in the night when I'm up late. I like being aware of what's happening in Syria now and Turkey. I'm curious about China, how it is evolving. China is evolving now while USA is devolving. We are in rapid devolution. China is moving forward. We're moving backward. The wheel of fortune is turning. We're about ruling the world. China is about doing business with the world. We can't do business with other countries without controlling interest. China doesn't do that, so the developing countries of Africa, Asia and the Middle East turn there for business. China does not have historical interest in expansion or the Western urge to rule the world. USA made a mess of its time at the top, squandered its wealth and influence. The 20th Century is called the American century. The 21st Century is already China's century. They will have Taiwan back before long and then China will be whole. It has been important to China since the day it became China to be its own version of united states. China means Our Land. When China is whole, I can't imagine a Chinese attempt to rule the world. But that doesn't really mean anything, my imagination. It is what it is and will be what it will be.

feng dakang

 

 



I have noted several times as a kind of refrain that the people I live among are so much more interesting than the people who compose our government. I live among people who work for a living, work at the low wage rate of the Reagan Revolution that froze wages from then to now, thereby running profits way up to pay CEOs multiple millions. We the American people have been easy targets. I won't let myself get involved in any of the political belief systems enough to feel the tug of wanting to do something to make a difference. I discourage that kind of thinking whenever it arises. The only "difference" I can see that I, as an individual digit, a pixel, can make is person to person in the world of my friends and neighbors, to help somebody having a hard time, to be a friend who can be trusted. I don't dare presume to aspire to any more than that. I don't have the last word or the answer to anything. Seeing my baby friend Vada once a week has become something of far greater value than anything to do with political systems. Time spent sitting on the floor with Vada watching her draw or helping her put shoes on is time spent at the apex of possibilities. Right now, at this time in my life, I can't think of anything I regard more valuable than time spent on the floor with Vada, watching her play. In the not too distant past I could not have foreseen saying such a thing now and meaning it from the heart. It tells me my heart is alive and well. In that way I can say my life has been a success.   

feng dakang

 

 

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THE MORALITY OF POLITICIANS

     joseph beuys, the end of the 20th century

I found a note today I'd written myself several days ago. It says: What's wrong with the morality of our politicians? Next question: which politicians? They're kind of like people in that they're individual and can't be categorized under one word. I like to think there is a difference between Senator William Fulbright and Newt Gingrich, between --- I draw a blank. I was trying to think of a politician who had some integrity about representing the people, the voters, the working people (not just the working class), the people that pay the taxes that pay their way and the the military that doesn't defend us any more. It's involved in preemptive strikes, attacking countries in poverty with nonwhite people: collateral damage, no problem. The Iraq propaganda started with the killing of Iraqis, the stated goal the capture of Saddam. They caught him and killed him before he had a chance to talk publicly and tell what they don't want told. The US forces went on killing Iraqi people. The war of "Iraqi Liberation" has become (from the start) the war on the Iraqi people. After our government reduced the people of Iraq to rubble, they continue to beat them down and beat them down. The Iraqi resistance is saying, Get out and leave us alone. Oh, but they're sitting on an awful lot of oil. The USA is going to have it if they have to kill the last Iraqi. American history has no problem with genocide.



The morality of the politicians would be the same as the morality of the American people. You say each one of us has our own standards of morality, not all the same. Like birds of a feather, we tend to the company of people whose moral standards are about the same as our own. We end up in clusters of the like-minded. Largely, our government's policy is to support dictators and keep them supplied with military equipment to keep their people down. It's a quandary, even for the Obama administration, what to do about the Arab Spring, people wanting democracy and rid of the dictators USA has supported all the way along. State Department wants to publicly embrace the democracy movement, because it sure looks good. Except they don't want us. They don't want American democracy. They know how fraudulent everything is that comes from America. They do, however, want the money. Uncle Sam money bags. Hey Uncle, how you doin? Since Reagan, Uncle Sam has turned into Scrooge McDuck and the Sheriff of Nottingham in one. It's like our government's role is to take from the working people and give to the corporations that don't pay taxes.



I can't think of morality as something to judge, but something to assess, like telling the tree by its fruits. Morality, like everything else in illusion, is relative according to circumstances and perception. I have an idea the politicians have a different moral standard from mine. For one thing, my moral standard wouldn't allow me to be a politician. Why? Have you ever heard a politician tell the truth about anything? They speak with forked tongue, consistently. It can be said of them all. Lying is a politician's truth. One of my favorite quotations from my friend, Jr Maxwell, If you can't lie, you can't be a politician. The Reagan Revolution cut loose greed and taking from the poor. Reagan is how the people kept in mental institutions by tax money were put out to find their way as the homeless in cardboard washing machine boxes. People unable to take care of themselves. They get picked up for peeing behind a bush, put in jail for indecency, no trial, no charges, no anything. They end up dying in prison of AIDS after several years, traumatized until they give out and die.



The part I have the worst problem with is that the so-called representatives represent only the rich. They represent money and money only. It used to be they pretended to represent us at least a little bit for show, but by now the pretense is gone and they're up front about it. Money is their only purpose. The republicans have absolutely no regard for the American people, especially the half of the population "of color." When all the "representatives" vote according to what they're being told by the strategists to do, vote no on everything, they do. And they have their state representatives doing the same thing. Virginia Foxx who "represents" my district of NW North Carolina, you can be sure does not represent me. I aint got no money, honey. The press throws democrats in with the republicans doing the irresponsible voting, but they're not. The press has been throughout my lifetime the organ of the political right wing. Our press, of course, is corporate. Therefore it is used for smokescreen to cover what we the people aren't supposed to know. We have become the enemy of our government. Since the assassination of Kennedy when the corporate world took our government by coup, the corporations and the government protect themselves from us the best they can.



One thing I have to say for the Occupy Wall Street throngs, is they are making it last. It is gradually sinking in as more and more people become aware of it, that we really are the 99%. It's as powerful an understanding as looking at Andy Warhol's soup cans until you see them. Of course, the 1% control the media, which will be used to set factions inside the 99% at odds with each other. They'll use the tool of the Reagan Revolution: Divide and conquer. They will infiltrate and divide, another strategy. Occupy Wall Street is powerless politically. But the longer it keeps going, the more they show their peace, they start catching the attention of more and more people. It's not like they want to convert anyone to their cause. They're standing up saying we the 99% are subject to the 1%. It's not so powerful the first time I hear or see 99%. The longer I think about it, the more every day I see that we do have the advantage and we have given our power to the 1%. All we have to do is take our power back. Everybody may have a different reason, but taking back your power is taking back your power.



I've wondered for a long time about a president who orders a given action, like sending several hundred soldiers into Beirut, almost 300 are killed, the rest come home. Oops. A president who orders a missile strike on a place in a city, and kills several people nearby, collateral damage. Does the misery created by the decision stay with the individual president's soul? Is "following orders" absolution from killing kids, pregnant women, old people? The people who have done that have had very difficult times forgiving themselves, even though they were following orders. They'll never follow orders blindly again. It really doesn't matter if a politician is absolved of mass murder by decision. Governors make decisions about death row murders. What about an executioner's soul? That's off into places that are not mine to know. I don't want to find out by doing it to see. What is the morality of giving the nod to the assassination of a president to step into his place? What is the morality of assassinating somebody's character, reputation and credibility to shut them up? I can't help but think a lot of it sticks to the soul. I want a simple life where I don't have to worry about whether it sticks or not.



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