09-25-2011

It's been some time since I've written anything and I don't particularly know why.  The days are getting shorter now, but only moderately cooler.  I'm sitting here in my apartment alone, watching some Kurosawa epic about samurai warlords.  That's not quite true.  I'm listening to it; the Japanese language relaxes me, and occasionally, when I do look at the screen, the costumes and settings are also soothing.  But mostly I just listen.  Images are difficult to connect with.  Sounds are more understandable, and they seem to go deeper.  Alas, this film is full of men with gravelly voices; they bark about honour, about peace, about killing their enemies.  Occasionally, they laugh.  There is silliness.  The Japanese seem well realized.  Old cultures are like that, I suppose.  They can lean on their history.

Young cultures look ahead for validation.  The familiar patterns of desire and attachment are evident whether it be a single person, a small group or a whole country.  Why not?  Nothing done by humans is bereft of human assumptions.  Somehow this is overlooked in the final evaluations.  We trust in so much nonsense and wonder why things get out of hand.  These silver screen samurai know better.  In a single scene, they are variously exuberant, morose, severe and light hearted as the situation demands.  They adapt perfectly despite their rigidity, and perhaps even because of it.  Their clothing is chosen, manners are well defined; they're oriented to the world by a system which they've been conditioned to respond to with a great deal of trust.  Without the burden of endless, superficial, stylistic decisions, they can react more naturally to what comes.  Is their nonsense better than our nonsense?  No, but they seem to have embraced it as such, whereas we tend to believe in what we see.  They're talking strategy now, bowing gracefully to each other despite the evident tension.  There's a battle taking shape.  They know what's at stake and still they laugh.  It's all just what it is, though it could easily be something different, something more humane, without losing any of its effectiveness.  But goons are goons the world 'round.  Manners are just manners. 

And greed is just greed.  The trouble with ego trips is that the return ticket is a bastard to get.  These journeys are indistinct, uncertain.  You feel yourself moving, are encouraged to move, but nobody can say what the destination is.  You're expected, so you go ahead confidently.  So much is left behind, so much more taken on.  Wanting is so easy and maybe that's the tip off.  That feeling of permanence you can buy into, but never really trust.  It's always "one of these days" or "wait and see" as though seeing were believing and believing could be enough to justify a lifetime of deception.  There's no salesman on earth more effective and dangerous than the one in your head, and none more easily defeatable.  What can we do, really.  Live in accordance with ideals that make us feel valid, leave alone what we can, and handle with care what we can't.  Is that naive?  Plenty would say so.  Plenty more would say it's narcissism to be so concerned with your own life.  I don't think that's true, it's just true with some.  All you really need is to need less.  Less talk, less stuff, less input.  Less as a principle, as a starting point.  And then, finally, less of less.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Maybe.
Wait and see.

                  

Life Spent Is First Earned

Tonight, everything is perfect
And in the morning
It will be the same
Nothing ever changes
Though we say
That tomorrow, tomorrow
Comes after today

Breakfast, Lunch And Dinner

This morning came and my world
Was born like a heartbeat
All the little perfections
Reflected infinitely
Everywhere, altogether
Without knowledge, without need
Existing, prevailing 
As life will

There was murder
A cat in the garden, sleek, guilty
Unrepentant
There was benevolence
Old maples shading
The smallest of their kind
With strength and wisdom
And colossal silence

All of this and everything, happening
As sunlight broke my windows
And breezes took my words
Like quick angels 
Insects gathered my bones for a scaffold
Sparrows got my clothes
Foregoing reason, incapable of rhyme
Until only a mind was left behind
That least dependable item

Paid In Full

Empty liquor bottles
Huddled together on the dining room table
Stale relics of another Sunday  
That cloying bar-smell permeating the whole house
And as I wake to start my day
I find a local drunk
Passed out in my living room
She snores horribly, as I consider
Whether or not to throw her out
Between coffee sips, teeth grits
And deep breaths 
'You awful mistake,' I lean down and bless her,
'You cheap filth.' 

-Get out of my home.  I would kill you if I could.-

My eyes are gleaming, murderous
As I turn away from her 
To face the man responsible 
For all these years 
All these mornings
A grinning man 
A man like cancer, like a stain
I could so easily wipe away
If only she had the courage
To be alone
If only she had the courage 
To let me be her son  
And scrape this shame off our lives  

-You were never family, you worthless shell.  You were tolerated.- 

A Drop Of Want

Used to think
I could just exist
Somewhere maybe
Quiet and closed off

You know the place.

Just a little spot
Not far
Beneath the safety
Of a greening horizon

Like a new heart.  Like joy.

Used to think
I was carrying it clean
In my otherwise
Empty pocket

Wrapped in waiting.

But now I see
My pleasant dream
Is a dream in need,
Imagining me

Too proud to refuse.

A raft, adrift

I make some sweeping generalizations here, I know.  It's a work of opinion.  Hopefully that's evident.


I've had a lot of time to listen this past year.  To myself, my friends, the news, the wind, the rumblings of change and inevitable transition.  I've been looking out for an opportunity to break into the next phase of whatever it is I'm involved with here.  The more I consider this progression as something natural in a material or outward sense, the less convinced I am of its validity as such.  What I've been doing is so much internal, the changes so personal, that tangible results are understandably absent, except perhaps in my appearance, attitude and writing.  My physical circumstances remain mostly unchanged simply because my focus isn't on changing them.  Nonetheless, the question of career ambition continues to hover; but it seems, when I really consider it, more a question of surviving in a material sense than undertaking any kind of pressing meaningful endeavor.  I have many such already and they keep me well satisfied, in my way.  It's like finding a perfect lover and being told there's no future with her because she has no name.  You're in love and content and paying the rent is just paying the rent, but somehow that's an invalid lifestyle because it's illegitimate in a technical sense.  It bears no seal, no credential to prove its worth.  Pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and for love of it has an air of misguided absurdity about it these days, and the reasons for this stigma are obvious.  You may be learning, but you aren't earning credit.

But don't get me wrong.  Academia is a fine path, so long as it's not just sophisticated hoop jumping masquerading as relevant, enriching study.  I wouldn't be the person I am without the teachers I've had and the earnestness of their efforts.  Good professors make good students because they have a genuine affection and talent for their subject and that process is a beautiful thing to be a part of.  It's also a fragile thing, dependent on a coincidence of conditions nobody can predict.  They can introduce you to a part of yourself through intellectual engagement, and set you on a course, but that course must be a personal one in line with your character and natural affinities.  It's given to you, not as a kind of tool, but as a guiding light; something spiritual as much as practical or profitable.  The interesting thing is what happens when you leave the grading paradigm behind.  You start grading yourself.  And far more comprehensively because you really want to understand the thing, as opposed to simply proving it to someone with the power of pass or fail over you.  Failing is not an option for someone who's in love with what they're doing simply because they're not doing it for anyone else.    

What I can't get over is the presumptuous nature of whole programs designed to turn open minds into efficient, technically capable instruments, with so little emphasis on whether the systems they're being trained to maintain are worth having at all.  It's this question again and again: what's education for really?  Job training or character development?  I love the creative advantages of critical thinking and the potential of the human mind to understand itself and its relationship to other minds and the physical universe, but I didn't develop that wonder in a classroom.  It's true I wouldn't have the skills necessary to pursue my intellectual interests without formal instruction, but that's not what's really at issue.  It's the spiritual blindness which occurs after taking a fundamentally selfish, exploitative and adversarial view of life because you were educated-that is, convinced, coerced, conned or forced by repetition, rote, rationalization or fear-to do so in order to make a living.  A living (life) which will mostly be comprised of working to pay for things you're not sure you really need (because you really don't).  So you're left with a kind of societal rift between the 'educated'-those who've completed their designated amount of classwork-, 'undergraduates'-those in the process of doing so-, and the 'unskilled', 'uneducated' or *gasp* 'dropouts'-those without the desire, ability or means of obtaining an institutional credential.  What's immediately implied in most people's minds at these divisions is the income associated with each, not an interest in the underlying motivations of those involved or the quality of the knowledge pursued and its humanitarian utility.  It isn't what you know, it's how much you know.  The size of your mountain, not the wisdom gained in climbing it.  Why?  Because it's understood, as a matter of normal course, that economic profit is the main purpose of academic engagement.  Why?  Because our culture measures worth in dollars and cents.  Why why why?  Because you're not supposed to listen to the wind, or the rumblings of transience, or yourself.  You're supposed to be busy.  You're supposed to be getting an education so you can be competitive and ultimately successful in some distant golden future.

It works the other way too, of course.  Non participants are degraded to the extent that their counterparts are lauded.  And sometimes the criticisms are valid.  A lot of people need to be kept on track, especially during adolescence and early adulthood.  The means of doing this are as varied as the cultures of the planet, but the end is the same: taking responsibility for oneself and one's role in the community.  It's a perfectly sensible and decent and natural thing to expect.  And, along with so many other natural things, it's been twisted and manipulated and mutilated by our delusional status quo.  We're born on probation, and until we live up to we're not really alive.  It's a game, and we want winners and only winners.  Not runners up, not the sick or frightened or those too disgusted to play.  We want the young and the beautiful and the strong and we want them to stay that way forever.  And if they begin to fade or become unhappy or stop doing what we need them to, we replace them with new winners.   And the losers?  Well, there's a place for them too of course.  Plenty of places actually.  And so long as they understand where they belong and stay there, we can forget their suffering or say it's their problem or condemn them as cowards when we're feeling low.  It's the information age after all.  Who has time to look around in the fast lane?  Adversarial systems make winners and losers, not God or Nature or anything else.  Animals that get killed and eaten by other animals aren't losing, they're being killed and eaten.  What we do is made up.  And if you buy in, don't be surprised when they sell you out.

Aegean

I've never been to Greece

But I think of it constantly

Its cracked marble and sand

And its native sons of noble lines
Who are destroying, with inherited pride

What their fathers killed to protect

Seeing little value in myth
Because gods can be replaced

So easily
And any fool can sail a ship
Without blessings and oracles
All the way and back again
Faster than Zeus can blink
In this age without limits or wisdom
When the blood of champions
Is the oil in the olive
And there are no more women to rescue
But I like to think they remember,   
When their meat is cooking
And the sky grows dark with hunger,
Just what a father can be
I like to think they're reminded
When a dust of ancient bones
Blows hard against their doors
And the sea booms and crashes
Like a horror in a maze,
Just what it means to be brave
And I wonder too 
When Helios ascends to show them
How his brothers lost the fight
That men look up and see him
As the enemy of night