SURREALISM IN AMERICA AND DONKEYS IN THE HAY

donkey jen

 

 

The last few weeks I've been training myself to hear the misinformation of the day, aka the news, with dispassion. I want to be able to hear American news as unengaged as if it were North Korean news. The part of the news that matters in Washington DC is of no relevance to me. I cannot be a participant in democracy because democracy is over. I enjoy listening to BBC international in the night to hear about events in the African countries. Only because Africa is the only part of the world American news never mentions, except for American military involvements in North Africa. Something the government in Sierra Leone did has the same relevance to me as the latest foothold in the American right wing's takeover of the US government. A few of the democrats are attempting to alert us to what is happening, but I'm thinking most of the democrats have their hands in the same pockets as the republicans. What's really going on is taking place on the top floors of skyscrapers and we the people are the ants crawling inline on the ground. Of course, they can't take us seriously. We, the non billionaires, are the same as ants. Step on them--so what? Scorch them with a magnifying glass--so what? Destroy their economy and take all their resources--so what? Pour gasoline down the hole and throw a match on it--so what? I do like to keep abreast of what is behind a sudden surge in yard sales, selling used clothes on facebook, daycare centers closing. Paying attention to current events I have come to see the people playing the headlines game, keeping their faces on the cover of Newsweek, are ruthless and devoid of caring. They're from the dark side. Their way of life is the dark side. By way of life, I mean consciously bleeding our economy. Why should I give them so much attention?

 

donkey jack

 

 

At Sri Aurobindo's center in Pondicherry, on the southeastern coast of India, the room where the international newspapers are read they call the Room of Lies. Gore Vidal's summation of why we have no history is it is written from diaries, journals, letters, memoirs, all of which are self serving, and newspaper articles, which we all know are inaccurate. 1-2-3-therefore: we have no history. Why do I take it as anything but what it is? The news is a corporate daily soap opera that is bigger business than tv football, basketball, baseball, the works. It's a big money tv show. Corporate news has the stamp of approval by level headed businessmen that have our best interest at heart. Like Godzilla had Tokyo's interest at heart. I haven't paid attention to tv news in so many years that when I see something inadvertently at somebody's house or in a restaurant, I'm stunned. They're not touching any subject seriously. Their haiku brevity telling it in the least words possible with a moving picture of a familiar face, an explosion, an image of military might, is impressive when I listen to the script as a concisely written brief documentary poem. Very well paid script writers work backstage. Headlines and images interspersed with commercials for tires and hyper expensive cars, razors, underarm deodorant with ingredients hardly a computer could spell, a peek-a-boo shot between a hot babe's legs on the beach at Cancun with a guy that lifts weights--they're having a rare, expensive beer. When you don't see tv for a long time, it's as hysterical as Sponge Bob Square Pants. We surely are in a time of surrealism. I think of the Hangover movies. They are Marx Brothers funny, and every bit as surrealist. 

 

donkey jen

 

 

I watch the race with my friends on Sunday, a commercial comes on, the channel is switched to a football game. A commercial comes on, we're back at the race track, or if commercials are still on the race channel, switch to another football game and watch until the next commercial, then back to the race. I have a ball. I don't know what they're watching, but I'm watching surrealism in everyday life. As I let go of the belief system that more is better, I see the surrealism that comes to us through what we call media. I cannot go there. I can, however, see some tv every once in awhile, like looking at an exhibition of surrealist paintings. It's like watching a movie of tv trends of the present. I cannot give myself over to hypnosis by the corporate media listening to them tell me over and over I'm no good unless I have fill-in-the-blank that I can't afford. I don't want it in my mind and don't want it in my consciousness. Last Sunday I chose not to go see the race because I was in a relaxed place and did not want to enter that mind of coercion to buy something I don't want. It's so bad that after a pit stop, the announcer is required to say, "he filled up with Sunoco racing fuel." Sunoco is funding the race with big money and they want the product mentioned a certain number of times per hour. I know it's all business, it's how things are done, we couldn't have the race without it. Sometimes it's over the edge. I see tv as bringing a continuously changing billboard into my home, my quiet space. I'm not filling up my space with noise about potato chips, mattresses, crappy tacos, windshield wipers, cellphones, stuff, stuff, explosions, none of it anything I want. Sunday was a day I did not want that belief system in my head, even as a folklorist observer.

 

donkey jack

 

 

I rested and worried in the bed between spells of sleep about the donkeys in the cold at night, in the cold rain. I wanted to convert small chicken shack to a shelter for the donkeys. Had to tear out a rotted floor I put in at least 25 years ago and a wall. It's not as complicated as it sounds. I borrowed a power jigsaw that cuts through nails easily. Opened the wall up, no problem. Backed the car down to the barn, tossed a heavy, tightly-packed bale of good hay in the trunk, left the lid up and drove up to a place I could throw the bale over the fence and roll it down to the donkey den. Parked the car, went back to the hay bale, cut the twine and opened the bale for the donkeys. Jenny buried her nose in it. I think she'd eaten baled hay where she lived before. She played with it, loosening it with her dexterous lips, ripping out a mouthful to chew on, chewing it like I'd made her day with a box of chocolates, and it was good hay too. I watched her taste it with her first nibbles, assessing the flavor. A smile came to her face and she picked up another swatch and started chewing. Jack acted like this might have been his first hay bale. He may have eaten from round bales before. He approached the hay with some hesitation, needing to check it out. He saw Jenny chewing on it and he pulled out some to chew. He seemed to be discovering the dried grass, unsure how he was going to like it, and it turned out he liked it. I covered the ground in the shed with hay for them to lie down on through cold winter nights and when the weather is bad. I know they like the ground, but I thought a little insulation might help keep the ground from being so cold. They might decide to eat it. They're welcome to it.  

 

donkey jen

 

 

*

OTHER AND SELF

marino marini

We're in a time of being manipulated into division over caring and not caring. All my life the people who go by conservatives, who used to be called reactionaries and hawks, have looked down on the progressives, the doves, the peaceniks. It's like the heat is turned up and the parts in the stew are swirling in the pot, the bottom rising to the top and the top going to the bottom. In our democracy where we are declared created equal as the foundation of our law, the present illustrates the movement cut loose by the Reagan Revolution of belief that one man's ignorance is the equal of another man's knowledge. It's frightful that the political party representing half the population, the below average half, believes education is misleading religiously and politically. The half of the population that sometimes entertains rational thought is largely overwhelmed by aggression of the ignorant obsessed with abortion, pussy, racism, in other words, smokescreen. Everywhere I go I hear somebody making a declaration that starts with "This country." It's all mental generalizations categorizing the unknown.

 

marino marini

 

 

It has become amusing to hear the varieties of the lists that follow this country. It's like a collective wave is going through USA that seems like self-examination, but turns out to be figuring out what's wrong and pointing the finger of blame. Blame the other while three fingers point back at self. We're picking it apart relentlessly, even mindlessly albeit by way of mentation. The trend coming into the new century is surrealist slayings in random locations all over the country. By surrealist I mean in the time of Surrealism in Paris between world wars one and two. One of the surrealists declared the ultimate surrealist act would be to carry a pistol into a crowd and shoot someone randomly. The other surrealists did not take to his idea and soon after put him out of the group. They were creators, artists, not killers. Love was the surrealist theme. Killing did not file well with love. The so-called ultimate surrealist act is now common news in television world where fantasy is reality. Somebody with advanced degrees in psychology, a guy not long out of high school, a guy working at a shipyard. Before the surprise mass shootings were the post office shootings by frustrated employees let go and denied their pensions.

 

marino marini

 

 

It's easy to say it's an expression of disregard unto contempt for others. Killing anyone who is present with no personal reason is an obvious expression of contempt, the most obvious. Looking at the lists of comments after almost any kind of article online, often the rudest, most contemptuous language is used by somebody who doesn't even know who it is on the receiving end, the other. Disregard for others is from ego and the Western attitude toward self in relation to others: me first, others last. The people committing these  outrageous acts for television news show absence of regard for other as a self. No empathy. Throughout my lifetime, experiences in this world trained me away from empathy until the time the Light revealed itself to me. Once I've seen it, I cannot live as though I had not. It's only then that empathy became important. In the time of developing my ego, the time before my understanding, empathy wasn't even a word I knew. I don't mean to sound like a preacher who tells about himself as the worst sinner who drank, played cards and danced, until Jesus turned him away from his evil ways. Not that at all for me. I wasn't living an evil life. I was just trying to make my own light and it never worked.

 

marino marini

 

 

On this side of the divide of empathy / non-empathy, I can see that somebody who has watched people killing on tv every day of his life since a baby can act without empathy. The other is the same as a mushroom. So much contempt for the other indicates three fingers pointing back at self. Self-loathing appears to be an epidemic of this time of the center not holding. The people who commit these slayings most often kill themselves. The guy in Aurora, Colorado, who did not kill himself is a mystery to me, something like Bradley Manning who released a Pandora's box of US government secrets knowing he'd be in maximum security prison for life, no parole. You don't do something like that not knowing what is next. I believe he wanted prison. That's not a psychic insight. It's how it appears to me going by what I've seen about him. The Colorado shooter evidently wanted to live the rest of his life in torment. I don't understand these people, because I don't understand anymore the absence of empathy. I don't believe it's widespread as these psycho actions make it seem. I don't believe these isolated incidents of zero empathy tell anything about the rest of us.

 

marino marini

 

 

I see the news, hear the talk, read articles and books, hear interviews, and I see the people in the world I live in. We're not anything like the generalizations and categorizations we're pigeon-holed by. We're under immense stress as a culture, stress factor kept up by television that tells us relentlessly we're not good enough. It's the weakest link in the chain that snaps. Everybody I know has strength of character that could never allow themselves to sink to that self-centered a way of life. That kind of self-centered behavior is particular to the individual. Each of us has our own karmic history that is particular to self, same as personality, fingerprints and horoscope. In the rainbow of human experience we range from the lowest down dirty chickenshit emeffer from hell to the most gracious flow of helpful kindness in an uplifting spirit. We run the scale of everything between these poles in what we call duality. Most of us waver in the middle somewhere. A swing to the right is balanced by a swing to the left, back and forth, the pendulum of time. I live in a world of wonderful people who would lend a hand before they'd take from behind your back. Empathy is slow to leave mountain culture, despite several generations of television stripping away empathic values from traditional beliefs. Yes, the end is near when the false values are cleared from our traditional beliefs to make way for the new. The beginning is next. That's the part I'm looking to. The day after the last day is the first new day. The last day has to happen to let the new day come in.   

 

marino marini

 

 

*

 

APOLLINAIRE AND THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD

       francis picabia

Yesterday in the morning, a question came to me about Guillaume Apollinaire, French poet from the first two decades of the 20th Century. Apollinaire kicked off the Modern with his poem ZONE. It brings to my mind Allen Ginsberg's HOWL that kicked off the second half of the 20th Century. Apollinaire looks to the modern world with fascination from the first decade of the 20th Century. His book of poems, ALCOOLS, was published one hundred years ago, 1913. That was the same year Duchamp painted Nude Descending A Staircase that kicked off the Modern in the world of visual art. ZONE welcomes the new century, airplanes, the Eiffel Tower, Pope Pius X (the most modern European).

     You read the handbills catalogues posters that sing out loud and
          clear
     That's the morning's poetry and for prose there are the
          newspapers
     There are tabloids lurid with police reports
     Portraits of the great and a thousand assorted stories


It would be another 10 years for Surrealism to take shape after WW1. Apollinaire expresses the hope that came with the New before WW1. He survived the war, but only by a couple years after a head wound. If you think of Symbolism in poetry parallel Impressionism in painting, then Apollinaire's book of poems, Alcools (poems 1898-1913), is there with Post-impressionism (vanGogh and Gauguin), Fauvism (Bonnard and Matisse), Expressionism (Kirchner and Kandinsky), Cubism (Picasso and Braque), just before Dadaism (further breakdown of form and color during WW1, the chopping block of before and after), then Surrealism after "The Great War." Apollinaire's place was between Symbolism and Surrealism, that tremendously gestative time. He wrote in a March, 1913, essay, Through The Salon des Independants, For the past twenty-five years, it is the Salon of Independants that has brought to light the newest personalities and tendencies of French painting, which is the only painting that counts today and which is pursuing in the face of the universe the logic of the great traditions. This year the Independants is more alive than ever.

The poem I went looking for that set off this morning's spell of reading Apollinaire's poems was THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD, very much a Symbolist poem creeping toward Surrealism. The poem is like a dream in the way the story unfolds. It concerns walking by a row of shops called an arcade, shops with big glass windows and mannequins. He calls the mannequins the dead.

     A diamond angel shattered all the windows
     And the dead accosted me
     With looks from another world.

The dead stepped out from their glass mausoleums and joined the living people walking by. Some fell in love, some rowed boats in a park's lake, some walked holding hands. A dead woman sitting on a bench / Next to a barberry bush / Allowed a student / Kneeling at her feet / To speak of betrothal.

     "I'll wait for you if I have to
      Ten or twenty years
      Your will shall be mine."

     "I'll wait for you
      All your life,"
      Replied the dead woman.

At a given time the dead return to their windows and lie down,

     Waiting for burial behind their windowpanes

     They did not suspect
     What had taken place
     But the living remembered it as
     An unhoped-for happiness
     And so real
     They had no fear of losing it


Several years ago I discovered that Apollinaire wrote The House Of The Dead to the music of Pachelbel's Cannon in D, which he evidently had in his head very well. They didn't have recording devices then like we have now. I don't recall how I discovered that. Possibly I heard its slow progression in his short story in verse of the living and the dead having a night out together. I had Pachelbel's Cannon on LP to listen to then, but don't have it on CD to listen to it now. It works to read the poem slowly at the rate of the music's flow. High places match, low places match, the feeling carries all the way through and it ends at the right time.
\
I've been going nuts trying to remember the title and author of a novel written maybe in the 1930s or 40s that is the story of Apollinaire's poem told in Symbolist prose. It is a little-known classic. I have searched until I've convinced myself I gave it to somebody many years ago. I don't even know how to search for it on google or amazon. I'd remember the writer's name and the title if I saw them. Not able to call them up from the ocean floor of my mind. Maybe like a rising bubble it will surface in a few days. When it does, I'll note it here. I've been so distracted today so many times attempting to write this that I've lost the sense of it. The translator I've used here is William Meredith from his 1964 translation of Alcools.


* 

LEGITIMATE RAPE IN AMERICAN LIFE

Labor Day Monday, wet, overcast, foggy, a good day for cat to stay indoors. Rain is not falling now, but the ground is wet and the edge of the roof dripping. I've heard the Hillsville flea market didn't do so well this weekend. I suppose it had something to do with election year and all the news about the economy that isn't news, rather misinformation for the proles. It being a big day for working people, the people who work all the time and have little to nothing to show for it, there wasn't all that much money going around among people who work for a living. The top ten percent are taking the resources from the bottom ninety percent. Working people don't have much to spend since the beginning of the Reagan Junta. It cracks me up, talk about winning elections. Reagan bargained with Ayatollah to keep the hostages until Reagan was elected, bought with money from Central American drug trafficking, via CIA, illegal as illegal gets. The Bush-Cheney-Rummy-Rice Junta stole the election both times. Since Nixon, Bush One is the only elected republican president we've had, and that's probably needs investigating.

Labor Day. Big deal. Workers' day off. A chance to drive to the lake and put the boat in the water. Spend some money. Good for the economy. Since the Reagan Junta the workers have been regarded by government as the enemy, in the same way the teachers and administrations in schools regard the kids the enemy. They're to be kept under control or they'll break loose and run wild in all directions at once. I've watched fascism being brought in to push out democracy, job completed by now, thanks to the willful indolence of the American people who would rather watch tv than go fishing. the people who have dumbed down really fast since the Reagan Junta, willfully, the way the people of Hong Kong gave over to militarist China in one day, no problems. From one day to the next they went submissive. They knew the consequences. Surveillance is so pervasive in America now we're like herds of sheep rounded up by sheep dogs following orders. Rush Limbaugh is one of the sheep dogs, Rupert Murdoch another. Keep the workers divided, at odds with each other and they don't need control. They control themselves. They never catch on what they're doing. Like Jesus said, "They know not what they do."


This election year it's looking like the republicans have backed themselves into a corner, focusing on female sex organs and talking straight out about funneling the money of the workers to the rich. And, of course, the only thing they're really talking about that they can't say is the Nigger in the Whitehouse. Now that the republican party is openly the white racist party, after years of being the racist party and denying it, it's all out in the open and hilarious. They're talking about legitimate rape. Romney, whose personality is an anti-personality, doesn't want to be caught showing human character any more than the monkey that teamed up with him. They're the kind of people I don't like to be around. Plenty of them out and about. I have managed all my life to live among people of right-wing mind. They're just like anybody else to live among. Republicans have the arrogance of whiteness with them. It's come to the place for them, since what they do is behind the scenes to be lied about publicly. The smokescreens that once were about thinning out the population of color are now about grading rape.


A legitimate rape is ok. Like when the bitch doesn't submit, beat the shit out of her and show her what a man's about. Is that legitimate rape? Like in the Japanese occupation of Nanking, turning school girls over to the soldiers to be fucked to death. Is that legitimate rape? Didn't rape laws initially concern black man on white woman? Same-race rape has always been ok. She seduced him and changed her mind. Just like a woman. That may have something to do with what they mean by legitimate rape. Same race. White man rapes white woman, legitimate. Black man rapes black woman, legitimate. Who gives a shit? When it's a who-gives-a-shit?, it's legitimate. No problem either if a white man crosses racial lines and rapes a black woman. That's white man privilege, legitimate. A white man can't rape a black woman, anyway, cause they're all nymphomaniacs. That's why we have so many of em. These are the people that reject the scientific method with the same zeal they reject the teachings of Jesus, denial, and are lock-step walking us into theocratic fascism. It will be easy. Americans are as docile to manipulation as the Chinese. Do what you're told is so much easier than paying attention and making decisions.


This Labor Day, 2012, we have the most ridiculous spectacle of electioneering that's ever been: the republican convention. They don't know what to say, so they make thoughtless gaffs, then hang onto them to justify them and expand them. The only thing they're saying is between the lines and everybody understands: get the nigger. It doesn't matter what they say up front. Everybody gets the underlying meaning and already agrees with it or they wouldn't be there. It goes beyond surrealism into the absurd. Listening to these monkeys in yahoo news clips is pure theater of the absurd. Then there is the justification of the absurd, making it into something so silly nobody can follow it; thus giving it the mystique of Truth. Nobody gets it, so it must be Truth. Repetition adds credibility too, so they keep on talking about it, policy being to repeat it until everybody believes it. I'm reminded again of the words of William Casey, Reagan's CIA director, 1981, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believe is false." Are we there yet? We know the republican half of the population is. They've shown us repeatedly they don't need to be elected.


* 

SURREALISM IN AMERICA 2012

      photo by diane arbus

This particular election year has really been boring, and it's getting worse as it goes along. Romney is even more boring than the guy Obama beat so soundly in 08. Romney's running mate is even a male version of Sarah Palin--big mouth, not much brains. I suppose he's got some kind of smarts, Obama called him the philosopher of the Repubs, the title I thought Limbaugh owned. This guy must be about the equal of Limbaugh. Like I would say Limbaugh doesn't have much brains, except he's generated his stupid mouth into a $4million commodity pumping up white men to hate everything not white male. I hear on NPR now quite a lot of attention given to republicans. It's because the repubs have been breathing down NPR's neck since Reagan, taking money away from them, reducing them to syndicating BBC. Each repub administration threatens NPR a little bit more. And when we have a democrat administration they do nothing to help NPR. The most recent threat is include more news about republicans or lose more money. So they put on news stories about Romney and it's funny how much like dead air time it is when Romney is the subject. When he talks, he takes insincerity to new heights, or lows, whichever.


It seems like Obama is sitting back letting Romney & Co talk and get as much attention as they can, because they're so boring they make Obama look interesting. It's like they're playing Whiteman's Last Stand again. That's all the repubs are doing these days is playing Whiteman's Last Stand. All for the white man, nothing for anybody else. Freedom for the white man, bondage for everybody else. That's been the way of the USA from the start, so who's to say it's going to change now? It won't be long before white man in America is just another minority, albeit the most arrogant minority, the one the others allow the delusion of power because it's so important to white man to be number one. Every time I see Romney it's the same pose, same face, same expression, like the image of George Washington on the dollar bill, always the same any way you look at it. Or like a face on a postage stamp. It's a face. It's always the same. A bland American whiteman face gazing into the distance like in Soviet and Maoist "realism." Like the new Martin Luther King statue in Washington DC designed by a Chinese sculptor who evidently had his foundation in Maoist realism where peasants and soldiers gape at the rising red star.


It's hard to even believe this is an election year. A little bit of bland talk about Romney, then a little bit of an example of his bland talking that goes round and round like a roulette wheel without a marble. He's totally upper middle-class suburban country club, only the best, Mr Niceguy with a benign smile for all. He has the authenticity of Al Gore, the reason nobody much cared that the Bush-Cheney-Rummy-Rice Junta used the Supreme Court to take the election away from Al Gore, the winner despite Ralph Nader making it difficult for him. I have a feeling that people generally get as enthusiastic about Romney as they did about Al Gore. Gore was a bland suburban Ken doll to the soulless max, as is Romney. In the Sixties they'd have been called Plastic People and Nowhere Men. They both were created by the political image machine from the time they were little. They play the role required of anyone in politics in America, a mask with a smile, nothing else. Whoever might be behind the mask has no relevance. Image is everything. Appearance is all. As seen on tv. And I'm told by people who want me to think they know what they're talking about that television is not having any kind of effect on people who watch it. I wonder if we'd have had these random sprays of rapid-fire bullets into anonymous crowds of people before television. No I don't wonder. It did not happen before tv.


Except: Paris in the time of Surrealism (1920s and 1930s); one of the Surrealists, possibly Andre Breton, envisioned the idea that the ultimate Surrealist act would be to walk into a crowd of people and fire a revolver randomly. It was held up as a kind of idea of the ideal, until one day somebody did it and it wasn't funny. I hear on the news about a whiteman taking an AK47 or something into a kindergarten classroom of Vietnamese immigrant children and blowing away the kids, the teacher and himself. How Surrealist is that? Kids shooting up a school. Surrealism. Suddenly, unexpectedly, out of nowhere, not even out of conception, a couple of guys start shooting in the cafeteria, in the library. Son of Korean dry-cleaners walks into a university classroom with an automatic pistol, shoots professor, several kids and self. The ultimate American statement. Maybe this is to say we are in a Surrealist time. When 98% of the population goes around during the day with last night's commercials, sit-coms and sports on television in their heads, there aint much going on but keepin on keepin on. Pantene for chlorine damaged hair. It's a riot how television leads us by imitating us; following the lead of a parrot, another word for the say-what-you're-told politician and reporter.


If you want to see mastery in lying with a straight face, check out Lyndon Johnson on YouTube telling the television audience about the patrol boats shooting at American ships in Tonkin Gulf, knowing it had not happened, that it was a fabrication to fool the American people into believing it was a justified war action taking place to start killing farm families in Vietnam. Before the March on DC in 1968 Johnson called a press conference and told the press what to report, a made up press release that was nothing like the event itself. They all had front row to the event and reported as told. Free press? Free to report as told. Only the Village Voice told about the press conference and told about the event as it happened. Later, Rupert Murdock bought Village Voice to shut it up. Too liberal. Politicians have to be good at lying the way a rock star needs to be good at screaming. I look at Obama when he is talking in so convincing a manner, the come-along-with-me appeal, and I think, What a good liar. He came out of his couple weeks briefing after the election with the FBI and CIA and the other top secret places of dark ops with deer-in-the-headlights in his eyes, up to and including the inauguration, where he so famously made a blooper. From then on, he's been a really good liar. The only reason Bush was busted for lying so much was he was not a good liar. He was just a dumb guy that lied all the time. Obama would be good on Broadway playing America's First Black President. The black man that lies as good as a white man. Electable.


*

JACQUES PREVERT -- I AM AS I AM

carla luvviness

            I AM AS I AM


            I am as I am

            I'm made like that

            When I want to laugh

                 Yes, I roar with laughter

            I love him who loves me

                 Is it my fault

            If it's not the same one

                 I love each time

                 I am as I am

                 I'm made like that

                 What more do you want

                 What do you want of me

                 I am made to please

                 And can't do anything about it

            My heels are too high

                 My shape too curved

            My breasts much too hard

                 And my eyes too sunken

                      And so what

            What's it to you

                 I am as I am

                 I please whomever I please

           
            What's it to you

                           What happened to me

                      Yes I loved someone

                 Yes someone loved me

            Like children who love one another

                 Simply know how to love

                           To love, to love...
           
                 Why question me

            I am there to please you

                 And can't do anything about it.


                                  ---Jacques Prevert
                                      tr: Anthony Hartley

REWRITING HISTORY

late summer flora

It's a time now of wildflowers yellow, white and purple, the same as the colors of spring. The colors that are first in the blooming cycle are the same as the last in the cycle. Looking at the blooming cycle as a circle, the two ends meet as half the circle while mid summer flowers make the other half. Watched a Japanese samurai film this afternoon that only had on actual sword fight. It wasn't a slasher samurai extravaganza with blood spewing on the camera lens. It was a love story that took a very circuitous route, speaking of circles. A coming back to the beginning in a new way, setting out at the end on the next cycle. Beautiful Japanese interiors of vertical and horizontal lines, exteriors that flow with the landscape in color and design. The Japanese artist's eye is very different from the Western even doing the same things, like visuals in Japanese films, like abstractions, and colors, there's nothing like the colors Japanese artists find. Like Jr said of Earl Scruggs, he could find every note there was in a banjo. Japanese artists consistently find new tones of colors never seen before in the West.

For as long as I can remember I've been attracted to the Japanese eye in art. American art goes back a few hundred years and it's a step above stick figures. Japanese art goes so far back we have to ally ourselves with European art to have a history that goes that far back. When they join their Asian origins with China, it goes back to the pyramids, as does Western art. Then there was the Asian art from India to Persia going that far back too. Different cultural origins that weren't aware of each other for a very long time, and then only slightly, Marco Polo's Italian interpretations of what the Chinese were about. I believe he was in the time of Kublai Khan of Coleridge's acid poem. What I think I'm getting at is back at the origins of the various directions visual art took throughout the earth were very similar in their origins.

Folk music, the real old-timey kind barely remembered from all around the world sounds awfully similar all around the world. First time I heard Greek folk music, there it was. Not too far from American old-time. Egyptian. I have an idea the music played to King David's hymns (psalms) wouldn't be as foreign sounding to us now when we hear music from all over the world if we want. Egyptian and Ethiopian were the musical worlds of perhaps his people as they came to Egypt slaves from countries south of Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia. My guess is the music as it was played then in and around Jerusalem, just a few generations after leaving Africa still had plenty of Africa in it. This was Isaac Hayes's point with Black Moses. Moses was an African. His people came from south of Egypt where the roots of their music would be too.

Scholars know what the instruments were in that time, and whatever they were, there is something the same or similar played somewhere in Africa today. A one-string violin, and people who played them became masters in their old age of manipulating the sound with one string. The rhythms would still be African. Their caravans went back and forth to Persia and India. I suppose caravans in the desert navigated by the stars as mariners did. They had a lot of cultural interaction. I remember the scene in the whore house with Mary Magdalene and all the men of different races, languages, cultures going by what they wore, in The Last Temptation of Christ. Jerusalem as a place where caravans came and went had every kind of people probably from Africa to Asia this side of the Himalayas.

They didn't have suburban middle class laws about getting drunk. These were tough people and among them bandits and thieves galore. It was wild times. Look at the parties King David threw for his men after a battle. I'd say it would be a good guess that they had drums going on too with black men playing them. The girls would be every race and nationality from Marrakesh to Calcutta. There would probably be several dead of various reasons in the morning. These are guys good with knives. Drunk. Stupid. The knives come out on Saturday night. Celebrating surviving another battle, something not everybody does, and there's no knowing going into it who may return. I doubt the wine they drank was 10%. I doubt a movie could be made to duplicate the scene. The smells must have been overwhelming. BO from hell, literally. I don't think they had locker rooms then with showers for after the game. Everybody smelling so bad nobody notices. When we from tv world go to places on the globe where deodorants aren't quite the vogue they are here, it gets our attention.

In that place and time after all day on the battlefield, hacking, stabbing, spearing, shooting arrows, probably covered in blood something like a pickup after a mudsling covered in mud. And the babes love it. Harley men without restraints. Telling stories all night long, drunk, of Bruno getting his head lopped off, Igor run through with a spear, and the guy whose guts fell out. Everybody laughs. The hos in awe of these Arnold / Rocky / Chuck Norris bad guys that kill for the thrill of not being dead. Get stupid til you drop and wake up on the floor around noon. It would make Las Vegas look silly, prim and ridiculous. We tend to think of the time and place as Bible Times, therefore really special, God's chosen people on a serious killing spree like Genghis Khan did later, destroying population centers, doing like the ones with the most powerful armies do in all times, destroy defenseless villages and towns and have a party afterward. They destroyed all that went before them.

Genghis Khan destroyed and looted from Mongolia to Afghanistan with an army no army could defeat. Men that rode horses all-out day after day, lived their lives on their horses. It was a very different life from the American soldiers in Iraq doing the same thing, big superior Army destroying a defenseless country, and then we'll leave, except for bases set up all over the country, that our troops went in to establish. We don't do slasher war any more. We do video game war. Push a button in the video game in your tank and shoot a direct hit on another tank over the horizon out of sight. Those drones they nab the enemy with that direct a missile to a specific spot, like when Ahab is sunbathing on the flat roof they have where it doesn't snow, somebody can be operating the drone from a computer anyplace, Memphis, FtWorth, Anchorage, doing it like a video game. That's really weird.

If you're still with me, you're as surprised as I am at what a turn this took, Surrealism in everyday life. Good. I've been wanting to be able to skitz off into the unknown and see where it went. I tend to want to anchor myself in what makes sense. That was fun to just let go and see whatever happened. I hope it didn't bore you too much. I haven't read it yet and probably won't before it's posted since I'm so often drained by the time I'm done writing these entries, I just spell check and wait til morning to see if any sense was made. You see, what I'm doing at this end is having a ball. That's why I give it 3-5 hours a day. It's my time to dance the only way I know how. I write about my experience because it's the only experience I have access to. I don't care anything about writing fiction, because even a direct account of an experience is fiction. It's told from one perspective of many possible, interpreted, filtered through mind and personal associations, comes out in brief paragraphs devoid of context.