A STONE CALLED BALANCE

brer rabbit and tar baby

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

brer rabbit and tar baby

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

tar baby

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

brer bear, brer fox and tar baby

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

uncle remus

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IDIOTS RULE

     eva hesse, 1962

Flipping through some headlines I see a Baptist preacher in Florida is now calling for assassination publicly, using the Bible for backup. Then there was that yo-yo in Kansas legislature calling for assassination of the president, using the Bible. Get it? Does anybody get it? This is what I mean when I say the Baptist attention given to the dark side they call Satan has now taken over their behavior. Shooting doctors is sanctioned by the religion same as using the Bible to publicly call for assassination of the president. This tells me what I knew back in the last half of the 1950s that the Baptist religion was giving its power to Satan and now I see the results. On tv you have evangelists with hair two feet high on the women and bad, really bad toupees on the men, and covered in gold and gawdy clothes, both men and women, preaching about Jesus, dreaming of gold toilet and bathtub fixtures like Tammy Faye. Now that the Baptists are given the illusion of power by Karl Rove's Tea Party, their colors are showing and they aint pretty. What's going to happen is they will self-consume and be no more. They have gone over to the dark side and that's the end of that. They'll be after political power now that the dark is their light.


I can see now coming to fruition what I saw back then listening to preachers preaching politics, anti-communism, still locked in colonialism, preaching No, Don't and You Better Not. Love? Who ever heard of love? It's a four-letter word, only to be spoken with quotation marks and a disclaimer. Now that ignorance has been unleashed and given political power in the republican party, backed with billions of dollars from pockets of corporate wealth that want to keep the proles ignorant, like Gore Vidal said, "We're out of business." Perry Ferrell's song, Idiot's Rule, especially applies now. It's one of those sayings like It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. It fits any and every time. Idiots rule is as universal as willful ignorance. I have to confess that in the days since the political conventions I've been somewhat concerned about election outcomes. The Supremes unleashed corporate billions to support republicans, knowing that the candidate spending the most money wins consistently. Pray for exceptions? Sure. Go ahead. If those muthas buy Romney in, I'll be all the more glad I'm on the edge looking into the other side.


The night of the Dem convention I talked with Ted Stern on the phone, him in Charleston. I asked if he was watching the convention. No, he laughed, he was watching football. He's 99, what does he care about the next administration, what it turns out to be? I hear Baptists and other right wing minded people I know saying in seriousness that if Obama wins we're going down the drain. Maybe white racism will, that precious institution that defines USA more than apple pie or baseball. I'm cracking up that this election seems to be bringing racism out from under the denial it's been covered by since the Repo party became the racist party. It was the Demos, then the Dixiecrats, then the Repos. In my lifetime. Now racism is out in the open again. Get the nigger! That's the Repo key (unspoken) words this election. Remember, the Repo party does not need to win an election for the Supremes to give it to them. The Supremes brought us the Bush-Cheney-Rummy-Rice Junta against the will of democracy. Cocaine money brought us the Reagan Junta. These two juntas put an end to democracy in America. The sad part for me is seeing how happy the American people are to be done with it.


Why should I care? I don't have a great deal of future left either. I can count on not being subject for very long to whatever comes next. Police state. That's it. With or without Obama, Police state is it. I don't want to live in Police state for very long. Probably won't. If it gets really bad, like bringing troops home and turning them inward on the American people, I really don't care to be a witness to it. I can just stop taking medications. I pray for next lifetime to be someplace else, not Somalia either, please. I'd just as soon be born into a Tibetan refugee village in eastern India as anyplace. I have loved the USofA all my life and happily claim it as home and I believe in doing my part to further its well-being. It turns out this is self-destruct time. Even though I understand the wheel of fortune, what goes up must come down, it hurts to see it fall, undermined by ignorance, like rot at the base of a big oak tree's trunk. USA ran way up in international power at the end of WW2 when the other powers were compromised. Alas, USA, which calls itself a Christian nation, has no ethical foundation to stand on and did not have what it took to sustain power. In its time of power-over the rest of the world, it has only been a tyrant to poor nations of color. If USA is a Christian nation, why does it hate the poor so much? That's not Jesus-sanctioned behavior. I think he'd say, "I know ye not."

Now that ignorance is the theme of our time, there is no telling what we'll be seeing. It gets stranger every day. Not a day goes by that I don't hear something totally outrageous some ignorant American who would do best to learn to keep his mouth shut and pay attention to old country wisdom--keep it shut and nobody will know how ignorant you are. This is the time for ignorance to take voice and soar like the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now, "Scares the hell out of the slopes and my men love it!" This really is the time of the Absurd. Art indeed precedes life by half a century. The works of Pinter, Ionesco, Beckett and others presaged the time we're in now, the time of the Absurd. TV news itself is theater of the Absurd. Most interesting right now it seems like is the break down of systems that hold fast to absolutes, religion. Absolutes as belief system is over. We haven't done absolutes in a long time. These are the last days/years of that kind of thinking. Religion and politics are the holdouts that time is catching up with. It's looking like their time is now. Both have gone off into absurd and find their satisfaction there. Whatever.


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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.


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THEATER OF THE ABSURD IN EVERYDAY LIFE

     didi and gogo from waiting for godot

Hearing the news about the republican "front runners" and clips from their speeches, I find over and over when I hear Romney that he has the gift of sounding totally insincere in everything he says, so much so it's in his voice as much as the absence of content in his sentences. It's a great gift for an American politician. Seems like the most insincere sounding politicians get the most attention. His insincerity is on his sleeve. Newt Gingrich, the propagandist, talks insincerity up front, though in his case it's a smoke screen for what he's hiding. He's the master of smoke screen. I don't mean to be giving these monkeys so much attention. I try to ignore them, but they pop up with their daily absurdities that make me wonder who is believing their nonsense. It's an easy answer: republicans. Republicans are awfully Soviet--you believe what you're told to believe, never question what you're told, follow party line to the absolute letter. There's only One Way, and you will follow.



On the NPR interview show, FRESH AIR, I heard Tina Fey yesterday telling of John McCain on the Saturday Night Live tv show. She said when he came to do a Saturday Nite Live, the crew took to him. McCain and Tina Fey had a good association where they liked each other and became friendly. She said that it was later when he was picking his VP that he picked Sarah Palin because she looked like Tina Fey. One thing about it, he saved Alaska the disaster of her sitting out the entire term of her fluke governorship. It's so odd. Tina Fey became a name celebrity due to her Sarah Palin skits. That likeness took something Tina Fey said in a comedy, that she could see Russia from her kitchen window, and media misattributed it to Sarah Palin as one of her funnier gaffs. The Tina Fey / Sarah Palin likeness became a very thin line, to no line at all between the two; that is, in their public persona.



It's said that art precedes life by about 50 years. I have an idea the amount of time varies in different times, but will accept this as a general rule to measure by. Like a generation is said to be 25 years, but it's not always exactly 25. To look at art preceding life, we have the Theater of the Absurd that started in the late 19th century and early 20th in eastern Europe. It made its way to Paris, Eugene Ionesco (Romanian) and Samuel Beckett (Irish), and New York, Edward Albee, and London, Harold Pinter. There were many others, but I chose these well known names for brevity. Pinter ended up with the Nobel Prize and a body of work that will be as influential in the future as Shakespeare was in the past. The Absurd. Now the absurd is everywhere in everybody's lives. About everybody I talk with these days is both alarmed and amused by the general absurdity of everything around us. That's people of different political persuasions. And different ways of seeing varieties of absurdities.


I noticed Palin stopped tailing the repub elections after seen following the first one in Iowa like she believed she might be invited in if she just showed up. She wasn't invited. She's over except as a FOX news celebrity of the blockhead set. Her brief foray into life as a public spectacle devoid of shame gave a lot of people plenty of good belly laughs and made her name a national joke. She's done very well financially as a republican stooge. So did Linda Tripp, Paula Jones and Jennifer Flowers. And one of her gaffs made a new word in the dictionary, refudiate. That is one of the great ironies of my lifetime. A semi-literate air head who hunts wild game from helicopters made such a ridiculous gaff it couldn't miss the evening news just for the absurdity of it. Next, the dictionary incorporates the word. It will be a good one in the future study of word origins.



I've wondered how the Absurd would manifest when it became our way of life. An approximate half a century later we are in full-blown Absurdity in every department of our lives. I have sat at a table with 15 white middle-class adults, every one of them talking continuously, no one ever finishing a sentence. The rule of the game was to interrupt every sentence spoken. Everyone's role was to interrupt a sentence they heard someone else starting. It would have made a great premise for a contemporary play. If the people at the table had been told to continue what they're doing so I could make a video, they couldn't do it. I'd have been asking them to be conscious. In unconsciousness, they were able to talk at all times. No one ever heard what someone else attempted to say, didn't want to hear it. That was the only thing I heard going around the table, every one of them talking was saying to every one of the others: I don't want to hear anything you have to say. I stayed out of it, sat and marveled at this absurd moment, watching it as I would a play, Dinner Theater of the Absurd in the round. Actors would have had to rehearse and practice long hours to recreate an hour of such pure spontenaiety. It was tremendously animated. They looked like they were having fun. I noticed three others at the table in the same sort of shock I was in. Another thin to nonexistent line---between art and life.

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