SUBJECTIVE UNIVERSE

joel shapiro

Just now had a brief flash of a concern in childhood I've carried all the way along. I had a hard time talking like other kids. They seemed to flow freely when they talked. I didn't know what to talk about. Subjects that interested me were of no interest to anybody else. I wanted to talk about "deep" stuff, "heavy" stuff, which I took for life. I'm remembering a woman I've known awhile, at a cocktail party talking about every detail of what her children did that day. I had to walk away. I thought, Shit, is this what people talk about? I reminded self, this is why I stay at home. Two-thirds of a century of television. And now we have killer cops as a rule. I'm paranoid about driving on a public road anymore. I stay out of group scenes because I never know what to talk about, and when I do talk, I ask self, why are you talking? You're focusing all your attention on saying the least in the most words. Only way you can be acceptable at a group gathering where everybody stands around in small circles of four or five and talk as fast as they can go getting nothing at all said. I can't exist like that. Since childhood I've been speechless in a group of more than half a dozen people. I'd rather listen, then I get called out for judging everybody. What? Whatever. So I stay home where I belong. It's even tiresome in cocktail parties where everybody reads. It's even more difficult to be in a room of people where nobody reads. That's where I'm really lost. I've taught self how to be comfortable in a world of people that don't read. I'm as comfortable now with people who don't read as well as people who read. It's a major gulf, a grand canyon between the two. Totally different ways of thinking and interpreting. 

joel shapiro

In the city, I worked in a bookstore and my social world was all people who read. Also, nearly everybody I knew was a Democrat. I came to the mountains and know precious few people who read and almost everybody I know is a Republican. The other side of the coin. I meet somebody who reads and it's Tom Clancy. Last year I thought about reading a Clancy novel to see if it would pull me through it, feeling in need of a page-turner. I opened a copy and saw in the front "dedicated to Ronald Reagan." I put the book down like it spontaneously combusted. Somebody that much a Reaganista I don't need in my head. I don't mean to imply I believe readers are more intelligent than nonreaders. I've not found that to be so. I include people who read only the Bible among readers. I feel like when I'm reading somebody's writing, I'm tapping into another perspective of the world I live in as a human being. This can be done, too, just knowing somebody. Knowing somebody is much better than reading what somebody has to say. Knowing somebody, I'm in touch with another perspective, somebody with valuable insights, whoever it is. Reading what somebody has to say is another way of knowing somebody. Reading Henry Miller, I am in touch with someone who has become my friend through reading. It's something like a facebook friend I've never met, though have come to know over a few years that if we were to meet, we'd be friends in the way our minds resonate. I have several facebook friends I'd love a chance to meet, or even better have them in my community, in my immediate world. And people I already know who are facebook friends, the facebook interactions add to our friendship. 

joel shapiro

This blog has become my friend. It's my journal. This is the place where I can open up and flow freely as myself in self-exploration. It's something on the order of the psychotherapist's couch where I look for perspective. I don't concern myself with opening up publicly. It's not "the public" seeing it. I feel like anyone reading any of these journal entries is my friend. It's easy to open up with friends. This journal is also an exercise that started as a discipline and became so much fun that the word discipline has no relevance. I associate discipline with marching, standing at attention, doing something I don't want to do under duress. I wanted to write every day, make myself write every day, even when I don't want to. I allow missing a day or two a week for recharging the battery. To do it every day without a break would be punishment. I don't believe discipline equals punishment. Earlier, I was thinking about skipping today and having a good sleep. I've learned that when I'd rather not write is when I write my best. I like writing in the midnight hour. It's midnight now. A good time to start. I like best writing while most of the people in my time zone are sleeping. It is this journal I go to for meditation. These writings read like I wrote them out in the time it would take to copy one. Each one is a meditation. I approach first sentence with empty mind, no idea of where I want to go, put down a first sentence and see what follows. Something happens. Right away I'm in a groove, one sentence follows another. I go with the wind like a butterfly to see where it takes me. I like flying through the interior landscape. Some of it I like to look at, some of it I don't. Both have equal value. Balance is what I look for, a Taoist balance. 

joel shapiro

The writing is first person subjective experience. I've come to believe the subjective is is where "truth" is to be found better than in the objective. I take objective for scientific method. It works good for documentaries. I'm not writing a documentary. I am limited to my own point of view. I have access to no other, but in reading or knowing somebody. I observe and interpret by way of my own point of view. I look at the variety of comments that come up on various political issues and it makes me glad I don't know any of those people. What I'm getting at is the radical difference of perspective from one to the next. The comments are so adamant they make me distrust my own opinions. I distrust them anyway. I don't recall ever being comfortable having opinions. Of course I have them, even when I don't call them opinions. It boils down to point of view, each of us having our own. I'm writing here as one person in one place in one time. A subjective historical document, a collection of letters. Gore Vidal gave good reason why we have no history. History is written from diaries, journals, autobiography and letters, all of which are self-serving, and newspaper articles we all know are not accurate. He points out for me that what we have for history is subjective. We have access to no other way of seeing, but by data. Then we make sense of the data subjectively. Reason introduces some objective, a good balance for the subjective. I like to weave reason into my subjective point of view for balance. I know I can never be right about anything. I'm in the world of illusion where what I think is going on aint it, whatever it is. I float along the best I can like staying upright in a kayak through white water and calm.

joel shapiro himself

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THE ABSOLUTE SUBJECTIVITY OF EVERYTHING

     store window

I'm seeing now the mental invasion of what is called long term memory, remembering back into the years I never wanted to remember. Yesterday a kid from the neighborhood in childhood came to mind I've not thought of in many a year. Ray Neinmeier. I'm not sure about the spelling--phonetically it is nine-my-er, accent on first syllable. He was 7 years older than me, and a hotdog in football at Argentine high school in Kansas City, KS, when I was in 4th and 5th grades at Franklin. He was good to me. When a bunch of kids would get together to go on a sledding expedition in winter, Ray would take me along. When kids would get together at the football stadium, a block and a half away, to play touch football, Ray would include me, a shy little kid. After high school he went into the Army or something and was sent to the Korean war. He survived, came home, married and disappeared. I don't recall that I ever saw or heard of him again. Ray's mother and dad, like my grandparents, were old country people living in the city where the work was.


One interesting aspect I've found in that early part of the life was a knowing without knowing that my adult life would be one of many changes. I wanted to be open to the changes, whatever they might be. I came to believe that so much, I possibly made it happen because I believed it, or simply foresaw it, I don't know which. I've no idea what made me think that, but I wanted to live my life open to change, open all the way. I believed having a mate would be a hindrance. Suppose I suddenly need to move to someplace else and mate has a good job and can't leave. It's one of those decisions I probably made at age 8 that I live by. Brings to mind a woman I met in the coffee shop from Raleigh; Krakow in Poland before. We talked of Roman Polanski's film, The Pianist, and how Poland has been the historical battleground between western Europe and Russia. She had an 8 year old son. We talked of how Polanski's parents were taken to concentration camps and he escaped when he was 8. He lived as he could, involved in the resistance until 12 when the war was finally over. She mentioned living on decisions we make at that age. I confessed I live by decisions made then. It is not an idle age.


As I'm driven by a natural process that has only to do with the physical, atrophy of the brain, it looks like there is no way around diving back into childhood, looking at those stories I've turned my back to because they are from a sour time in the life. Suppose I resolve to myself while looking into that time to look at the happy memories, not the sour ones. They'll come in too, but emphasis will be on the memories I like. Like going into downtown KC by bus with my grandmother Brink on her day off to see a movie, like Betty Grable in Big Top, the woman with million dollar legs. I was 4. She had a good time showing off her grandbaby and I had a good time being with grandma, her all dressed up and it just us, nobody else. Perhaps my earliest film experiences with her made a movie theater into a kind of cathedral of love. The stories we watched were about love and I loved grandma. From the church angle, going to movies was a sin. So was living your life.


I imagine it was around that age of 8 that I came to understand a fundamental truth on my own. I didn't think it in the words I think it now, and don't recall the language I thought it in, except American English. It was the absolute subjectivity of everything. I saw that there is no objective except in the mind. I valued that thought I couldn't talk with anybody about. Adults couldn't talk about such things, the adults in my life. Kids couldn't talk about it. I kept it to myself as something I knew that nobody around me seemed to get. I had quite a lot of knowledge in that time that I knew not where it came from. Now I say it is knowledge from previous lifetimes. Whatever it was, I lost it. School, church, home, television was all about the objective, like only the objective is real. Maybe that's why I took to rock and roll so strongly. It was not objective. Maybe not believing in the objective was behind why I did so poorly in sciences in school. My conscious mind forgot over all the years of education the reality of the subjective with too much emphasis on the scientific method, which, nonetheless, is important. I see the objective as a way to separate a tree from the subjective forest to identify it, to learn the nature of the entire forest by studying the trees. I can't say if it's good or bad. It is what it is.


Another of the questions I had during the time of psychotherapy in my 50s concerned something important I knew in youth that I'd forgotten. Didn't even know how to look for it, having no clues to go by, only something forgotten. So it wasn't an up front question to puzzle over, but one that swam in the back of the mind, always there, searching like a catfish, wondering. Finally it turned up. I have no recollection of how, but the answer was: the absolute subjectivity of everything. All the way along I've been taught from every direction that the objective is what's real. Objective study of a dragonfly doesn't get even close to who it is. Someone is there, a consciousness. Studying how it flies, how it lays eggs, etc, seems like nothing much, but then, like the way fiction builds, more and more information is gathered objectively, making it possible to connect the dots and get some idea of what a dragonfly's subjective consciousness might be like. Each dragonfly is a particular individual, like us. Now we can read their DNA. Science has studied behavior of insects for so long that the ways of the insects are very well known. The movie ANTZ was a subjective story depicted by what has been learned of ant behavior through years and years of meticulous objective study.


It is tragi-comically funny that a couple centuries of objective study of the earth we live on and with, has come to an entire political party, a quarter of the American population, following a doctrine of anti-science by denial. Not education, but denial. Deny it and it ceases to exist. I've an idea the republican party learned this process when they started luring the working class, the baptists with racism. The whole South switched to republican the way you switch churches because democrats let the niggers in. So don't tell me republicans are not about racism. What person of any race looks at a black republican with respect? Automatically, we know it's a man lacking integrity. Clarence Thomas was hired to be the 5th republican vote among the supremes. He brazenly shows that to be his only reason to be on the court by openly sleeping through the sessions. He doesn't have the brains to prove himself of value on the court for any reason other than a parrot for a solid republican vote. Thomas made political gain with republicans by being a black man against Affirmative Action. Research discovered rather easily that he had gone through school on Affirmative Action. He held firmly against it. I'm thinking he knows himself to be an example of what Affirmative Action produces, a man devoid of personal integrity. I wonder if, when Thomas was 8, he saw himself asleep in his recliner during supreme court sessions, thinking, that's easy living. Pays better than snoozing under a shade tree at the fishing hole.       


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BABY VADA SAYS HELLO

       hello

       mama's in the bathroom


As one who takes everything for subjective, I see objective being a condition created by the human mind to help understand the subjective, taking it apart, naming the parts, dividing the seamless infinite, the continuum of Now into millenia, centuries, decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, tenths of a second, hundredths of a second, thousandths of a second, the nanosecond (a billionth of a second). Terms that everyone can agree on, the definition of reality, essentially meaningless. Is reality, thus, meaningless? I think so. Yesterday I saw Vada, 1 yr, standing by the edge of the coffee table, using the edge with her right hand for balance. She saw Justin's Marlboro gold pack box. She picked it up with her left hand like a cell phone, held it to her ear and said, "Hello," leaving out the l's, something like Heh-ho.


I held her up to see the mounted deer head on the wall; she'd pointed to it while we were going around looking at pictures on the walls. She looked at the deer face-to-face and said, "kit-kit," her word for cat, kitty. I got it that she saw its face covered with hair, a different kind of face from ours with ears that stick up, and big round eyes, like kit-kit. She's differentiating "reality" out of the seamless continuum, one image, one word at a time. I'm seeing her learn this "reality" by every experience in the course of a day. She feels sleepy, she wants to hold her blanket. It was the first time I'd noticed her make associations, the cigarette pack for a cell phone. Same shape, same size. I believe she knows it was not a cell phone, but saw the association and played with it, a toy. She saw the deer head with hair on its face and associated kit-kit. It seems like she's walking, one step at a time, out of the seamless void where there is no depth of field, something like seeing the forest, not the trees. They would be there only like in a dream that sees everything inside the eye's frame, as "unreal" as a movie, light on a screen. Each thing she pulls out of the seamless vision is differentiated into its form, given a name and understood as real. This table that helps you stand up is real. It has a name. It is solid and heavy; you cannot walk through it. It must be walked around.


She has to learn in this new body that sharp corners on tables hurt, that you can't walk through a table. She's learning to separate objects from the continuum one at a time by name as she learns them, and I see going on in her eyes immense curiosity about everything she sees. I blew bubbles for her outside on the deck. She said, "Buh-buh." She imitates sounds so well, no matter whether it is a sound like clicking the inside of one's cheek or a word, I can't help but see her as a translator at the UN so fast she can translate simultaneously with the original. Sounds are so interesting to her, she reminds me of a musician finding new notes, new chords, new runs. She's connecting sound and object. Learning the names to things, she is also learning which sounds have no meaning beyond the sound itself. We, the adults, are teaching her to differentiate "reality" from the seamless continuum as we were taught it, one thing, one word at a time, as we collectively believe it in agreement with everyone else. I think it's called enculturation, a Margaret Mead word. Then, in another language everything has a different sound. Like gato and kit-kit.


Yesterday I had several hours with Vada, watching her, seeing her have a new experience every second, delighted discovering reality at so fast a pace. It's like the world she's new in is opening, revealing depth of field to her, separation of what she sees into particular shapes that have names. She sees a bird fly over. Mama says, "Bird," and points. Vada looks up and bird is gone. She does see them, though, and knows mama means those things that flicker in a straight line across that big expanse of sky. It fascinates me to watch her about like it would sitting in a class with Noam Chomsky the professor, which I've never done, but imagine it would blow my mind every class. Baby the professor teaches me by experience, blows my mind every time I'm around her. I see her watch the bubbles hop on the breeze and drift down to the table, pop-pop-pop. She would watch until the last one went out. It took me back to my own disappointment seeing bubbles pop when I wanted them to last on and on, delicate crystal balls floating like dandelion parachutes surfing the breeze.


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THE RIVER OF MIND

     katy sage's grave unmarked in the old indian part of the cemetery

I'm beginning to see the writing in this blog is something like putting a kayak in a river at a certain point and riding it to a getting-out place. It's a different place along the river each time. It's always the same river on its way to the ocean. Different scenery along the same river. It is a daily paddling to the sea. As long as there is river, I'll be recording the scenery, unless the river runs through a nursing home and all I see after that is ceiling, the movie screen for memories. Like the Chinese philosopher who questioned if he might be a butterfly dreaming it's a man, maybe I'm in the nursing home now and my everyday life is memories seen on the ceiling above the bed. Maybe not. Macro is as interesting a fractal to investigate as micro. It seems the more I investigate, the more I come to see motivation in karma, and the components of the illusion we call reality are entirely subjective. We agree collectively on some aspects of reality, the objective. We're on our own where the subjective is concerned.


In childhood, one of the many subjects I could not talk with adults about, or other kids, was seeing the subjectivity in everything, that there is no objective but in our minds. Years later, a decade and a half ago, I went to see a psychotherapist for two reasons, and both were satisfied. First, why I was attracted to controlling women? Second, there was something I knew in childhood that had been taught out of me and forgotten. What is it? It turned out to be the absolute subjectivity of everything. When that came forward, it was a major find. It had, indeed, been taught out of me. I remember a big field that had once been meadow, where the realization came to me initially, big sky, no trees on the unpaved road to Monkey Mountain that looks over the Kaw River, a good smoke signal place for Indians. Monkey Mountain was my favorite playground. I found fossils of sea shells and creatures that once lived on the floor of the ocean. I didn't take them seriously as a big deal find, rather as evidence for me and me only that this part of the world had been ocean floor. Nobody at home cared when I showed up with fossil sea shells. If I could waste my time at such foolishness I could wash the car, mow the grass, whichever. Taught me early to keep wonderment to myself, to guard that which was precious to me from the indifferent context of my life, from certain punishment.


Overzealous belief in punishment is the only parenting skill I know. I never wanted to pass it on to another, to have it coming FROM me to somebody else I would not want to do that to. That is why the thought of reproduction has mortified me all my life. My sister and I fought physically parallel our parents fighting emotionally, every minute of every day. The tension in the air inside the house was so dense as to need a password. It terrifies me to think of living like that again, by choice. I took the deep plunge once and it didn't work. My head was so full of ongoing arguments, television, debts, tension, I looked ahead and saw that I cannot live like this much longer. Somebody else might have taken 12 years to be able to cut the chain, but once I saw what was happening, I could not, would not live the rest of my life like that. I wanted a good life for myself, not one tangled up in psychic tension with somebody I didn't even like anymore, and somebody else's kid. By good life, I mean with a possibility that I not have arguments going in my head all the time with my "better half," who is going through the same thing with me. I could not live my life according to the social formula my mother, who never gives up attempting control, would attempt to enforce all the rest of my life.


I've chosen to stay beyond the bounds of her radar screen, out of control's way. By now, she's given up, is actually allowing me to be myself making my own decisions. She's caught on there's no other way. Ask anyone who knows me. I will live my own life. Some say, I want you to be like this. Some say, I want you to be like that. I say, y'all go ahead and be like this and that yourselves, you be the ones to reap the benefit, if it's so great. Leave me out of it. I think so often of Jacques Prevert's poem, JE SUIS COMME JE SUIS, I am as I am, I was born this way....  It's in an anthology of French poetry in the other room on a shelf, probably online too. It's kind of like a Parisian whore's answer to, What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? It is Jacques Prevert, himself, the rooster saying, Cock-a-doodle-doo!!! Here I am. I am I. I man. Jah rule. I think of Prevert's poem the ultimate answer to the ongoing question, Why don't you conform? Answer: I am I. I don't care to be a robot concerned with playing the assets game, the status game. I don't like to golf. I like to have room in my mind to get in the kayak and see what's ahead.


I didn't know it then, but the cemetery Katy Sage of Elk Creek, Virginia, is buried in--white girl kidnapped and sold to the Wyandotte Indians of Ohio---was directly across the river. Katy Sage grew up the blond princess, then the blond queen. Raised as the chief's daughter, she married the next chief who died young. The next chief married her. The tribe was pushed westward to what is now the Turner section of Wyandotte County in Kansas City, Kansas. I grew up in Wyandotte County. The school I went to, Ben Franklin, was directly across the river from Katy Sage's grave, in Argentine, an easy crow flight. By road, it's five miles because it's a couple miles to the bridge, then a couple miles back to the cemetery, a very long bridge and complicated ways to get on and off it (for somebody doing it the first time). The sign at Elk Creek, Virginia, by the side of the road, reminds me of seeing her grave, feeling an interesting connection with her by proximity.


I grew up identifying with Wyandotte County, named after Katy Sage's tribe. Her brother found her after several years searching. He wanted to take her back to see mama. She declined. That wasn't her life any more. If I had known about Katy Sage then, I could have seen the cemetery from Monkey Mountain. Now, that big meadow on top is a subdivision as far as the eye can see. I didn't even want to find what developers had done to Monkey Mountain. The place seemed to me to have a life of its own, or you might say its own spirit, like I believe the mountain I live on has its own spirit. For me, Monkey Mountain was a connection with Indians of that region of the Plains states. I knew for a certainty, just by it's location above the river, the river making a bend around it, that Indians made smoke signals there. I imagine they believed it had powers, a consciousness, a name other than Monkey Mountain. I never knew where it got the name. Possibly a traveling circus monkey escaped and got lost in the woods around the sides of the mountain. It was a tremendous acreage of woods, especially in the time of traveling circuses, if indeed, that's the case, which I doubt. There are not too many ways a monkey could have got there in the time the "mountain" got its name.


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