FOCUSING ATTENTION

louise nevelson

 

Something big has changed inside me in the last week. I've seen it coming for quite awhile, without knowing that's what I was seeing. An understanding I've entertained for several years has finally soaked into my head until I got it. It came to me like a minor Eureka experience, maybe what is meant by a peak experience, a moment when multiple observations add up to understanding. Finally, I realized what I already know: our entire system of government from Whitehouse to county commission and town council does not consider the working people of the country or the county in even the breath of a thought except for manipulation by propaganda, marketing targets, and all possible ways to take our money to the Cayman Islands and keep it out of circulation, sinking us deeper every year in poverty quickly. We the working people of America are consciously being pushed into a poverty class of crime and killing each other. Population control. I don't even care to take it any further than that, when the problem is what has already been done, how deep we of the working class are into the process of our own undoing. Unions have been busted in a step by step process of denying us rights. The American working class does not even know itself as a working class, because those words are seldom unto never used in corporate media. Post WW2 the American working class has had its identity and its cohesion as a group force stripped away systematically by the corporate powers funneling the money of the working people up to their tax-free off-shore bank accounts.

louise nevelson

Finally, it has hit me that the ruling class regards the working class the enemy to be controlled by manipulation, by hate radio distracting the working people by inspiring us to hate one another. The right-wing hate machine is about population manipulation, and we fall for it, keep it going by believing it. I have a feeling the atmosphere was something like we have it now in the time before the Civil War. Conservative and Liberal, whatever they were called then, stirred unto hate by money interest of the Bank to manipulate the population to the Bank's will. Keeping the population focused on money as the highest ideal, by way of Manipulation Central, television, has the people of the working class working against themselves in every stitch of work they do. I realized that any attention I give to our political hacks is working against my own interest. My interest being my life. Any attention I give to that system of politics and economics works against my own interests. The Corporatocracy, the ones manipulating the people who work for a living, are bleeding us of our resources the same as they're doing with the surface of the earth. We are left in a slag heap when they're done with us and move on. Bristol Compressors in Sparta, one example of countless many. Moving factories from the South, the lowest paying region of the country, to Asian sweatshops put the South into an unacknowledged Depression.

louise nevelson

In pop culture we see the national popularity of vampires that drain us of our vital resource, blood, symbolizing our other vital resource, money. Zombies are the living dead, completely uninspired by a lifetime in front of television, manipulated without noticing, lullabied into the zone of hypnosis by explosions, gunshots, screaming, murder, killing, nudity, sex and displays of wealth, seductions to debt. Control. If you want to check these observations out by testing them, stop watching television for a year. If you can't do that, then simply pay attention to what is going into your unconsciousness by way of eyes and ears. Get your head out of that world of manipulation telling you to spend more money on things you neither want nor need. The message of television is that ignorance trumps knowledge. This has become the American belief system after two-thirds of a century. The less educated we are, the easier we are to manipulate, the more quickly we give up our resources by way of debt. I've known all this for years and years. The part that stopped my mind was realizing that anything I do that participates in this political / economic system goes against my own interest as a human being, as an American citizen who prefers Democracy, as a drop in the ocean of the working class, as one who mourns seeing cultures replaced by the television belief system that emptiness is fullness, that money is the only reason for being. Religion television sells the same belief system.

louise nevelson

What do I do? For one thing, the corporate web of dependency is so pervasive there is no way out of it. I say I won't want to support big corporations that are destroying our country and the world, but I have to deal in money. I need gas, groceries, shelter, etc. So I don't want my money going to Walmart for a host of reasons. I want to buy locally. I'm of the attitude if I can't get it in Sparta, or by mail, I don't want it. Corporate bookstores have shut down thousands and thousands of small bookstores all over the country. Amazon has the market on books. My spending is down to the minimum. About everything I spend money on is a corporate product. I can't help that. It's the nature of the society I live in, and I must perform at least that minimum for sheer existence. But I don't have to buy the belief system. I already have, to a great extent, but think of it as "rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's." Then as now, Caesar, government, wants our money. Jesus' take on the matter was to let them have it. Money is worthless anyway. I don't need to buy the philosophy or the belief systems. I can give less attention to the serial comic strip called the News, give less attention to wanting new things, put my money, my energy, in the hands of small businesses in my community as much as possible. I will limit the focus of my attention on political machinations in DC and the breakdown of American life, and give more attention to my own world, my community, the people I know and care about. It's not a lot that I have to ask of myself, except just shifting attention from the toxic to the nontoxic.   

 

louise nevelson

 

 

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APPLE BLOSSOMS AND ANDRE GIDE

 

 

 

It's apple blossom time in the mountains of the central Blue Ridge. Earlier today on the phone with someone I know, I was asked, "When is spring going to get here?" I needed a pause. Didn't quite know what to say. "The apple trees are in blossom, the temperature is 60 every day, the grass is green. I think spring is here." "But it's raining." "Uh, it rains year round." I was thrown. I had forgotten. It had been a long time. A neighbor I forget to love. A voice from another period of my life. Or should I say cycle. I've seen my life in something like seven year cycles. May now be in the final one, so I'm paying attention to it, enjoying it. Writing this every day is one of the aspects of this cycle. The Friday night music at Woodlawn is very much a part of this cycle. The old people I have known, the people who have told me their lives, are dead. The old people now are my peers. We look the same to each other as always; our hair just turned white. I like having white hair a thousand times more than red hair. I liked the transition, though. Dark hair goes through gray on the way to white. Red hair just gets lighter and then it's white. I liked all the shades of getting lighter. Never learned to like the full intensity of firetruck red on my head. You get used to it like you get used to having a big mole on your forehead.

 

 

 

 

I don't think I have a problem paying too much attention to the past, unless it would be through adherence to any tradition, though I don't think I have too much of that. I am hesitant where futurism is concerned. I don't think much about the future except to see something I'd rather not see. I grew up in a church where it was a daily knowing that this may be my last day. I've never been able to plan for the future. I've never known the certainty I'll get there. My only sense of future for myself is I feel like there is time ahead; though, whether there is or not I have no way of foreseeing. Don't want to foresee it. I mean by years. Don't want a psychic to tell me. I like the old way: we live and then we die. I'm questioning now about my living. Am I really living? I think I am. Enjoying reading in the Journals of Andre Gide, a four volume set I acquired one at a time used in good condition. Decided it was time to dive in. I once knew a man who read the Journals when he was about the age I am now, and he said it was one of the great reading experiences of his life. For the beauty of the writing and the quality of the mind doing the writing. Really good writing comes through translation. Yes, it's true the clichés about translations not getting the subtle nuances. I don't care. The story carries through and the quality of the writing carries through too.

 

 

 

 

This is the Eighteen-nineties. Another world, another place, another time, The time of the post-Impressionists in painting. I think of Cezanne and Vuillard in this period of Gide's life. The good writing is a joy to read, no matter what it's saying. Who knows if I'll ever finish the four volumes? I don't care. I'll enjoy reading them a page at a time. Already I'm seeing this is a brilliant mind, somebody in his early twenties who is very well educated, and the education took. I believe I'll enjoy watching the evolving of his thinking, see how it changes, see the people he knows, see through his subjective mind. He has a very interesting mind to flow with. Sit still for awhile, pick up Monsieur Gide and let him tell me a little bit more about what he's observing, thinking, people he's spending time with, his goals, his dreams for himself. I continually forget he's writing what I'm reading in his early Twenties. Already I see he has many levels of understanding, I'm beginning to see him a scholar who writes stories and plays. A very French writer. French like Jean Anouilh, like Mallarme, like Baudelaire, in prose. Somebody's experience in another world from mine.

 

 

The buds on the apple trees were ready to open today, but the sun never came out; it was rainy and damp all day. The buds stayed curled up to save their opening for a sunny day when the bugs will be out looking for flowers to pollinate. No more honey bees. The demise of the bees has been traced to Monsanto. Oh well. Too big to fail. Lobbyists with perks. Goodbye bees. Nothing gets in the way of money for very long. The Corporatocracy is bleeding us of our money, our blood in the flow of the economy, Pop culture is entertaining us with vampires to identify with, people who have had their life blood sucked out of them, and zombies, the living dead, dead from an entirely commercial society, dead from believing money is the only. Our life spirit, our life blood is being drained from us by Corporate rule that targets us for our resources. Oh well. I'm leaving this time we're in, going back to the 1890s in the mind of a young turn-of-the-century French scholar with ambitions to write beautifully. I'll ride with his mind for a while.

 

 

 

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