Sunday, June 21, 2015

what it means to be human


I possess most of the grosser aspects of being human - birth, potty training, guilt; but the keener more salubrious aspects of life seem to elude me: love, belonging, contentment. The question of how to achieve these important objectives seems to me to be a perfectly valid ambition - grand perhaps, but perfectly valid. A practical individual would methodically separate each ambition listed however esoteric and find what is necessary to satisfy that ambition and then set about accomplishing that feat; unfortunately, of the many things for which I’ve been accused, the word practical has rarely been used. So like the blind men describing the elephant in ancient Hindi folklore, each with his own certainty about that elephant - be it the rope-like tail, snake-like trunk or tree-like legs; there is a hunger inside of me seeking understanding about an incessant yearning that is as limited a description about this elephant called life as those blind men’s honest efforts to comprehend their part of the beastly elephant - elegant, holy, far more sacred than I will ever become, but still a beast, if for no other reason then she and her parts are prey to our manmade demons. 

Were that all there was to being human - our demons and the sheer magnitude of their destructive impulses, life would be simple, hideous but simple. My good fortune has been the distinct privilege to have lived on the fringes of a creative life. I say fringes, for I have been able to sustain the financial burden of buying my own time, and in so doing become the sole arbiter of my own good taste - a lonely bitter road, but with blossoms on occasion that make the whole comedy worthwhile. I say bitter not with the acrid biting pain born of hate and resentment, although I have personal experience with that flavor, but bitter in the way Aloe Vera will pucker parts of your alimentary canal but mend you in a balancing kind of way - if that makes any sense. The same as how some life lessons cannot be grasped at first blush, or a loving heart be gained without knowing its counterpart - be that companion pain, anger or even fear clutching at and catching the normal open flow of, for lack of a better expression the “good shit” - your first wheelie, first kiss - any of those feelings that astonish and gladden the spirit, the human spirit, or whatever animal parts of it left after the invidious, incessant assault of the Borg Corporation and its “resistance is futile” bullshit has gotten under your skin, into your dreams, between you and your bliss - whatever fucked up thang’ the ciphers and their minions are plotting to dethrone you from or subject you to . . or both.

You see what I mean about hate, so fucking accessible . . , but like Lao Tzu said about going into the darkness - I’d never know just how full with hate I could be were it just an aspect of existence, rather than a choice; I choose love, or as Voltaire said, “I choose happiness, it is better for my health.“ Ya’ gotta love the French, and I do. Yet as codified as happiness has become, even having its very own location in the American Declaration of Independence : 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by    their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it .  . .

there is no lock on any outcome as pertains happiness .  . rights or no rights. Some of our current confusion about this aspect of the human condition may derive, in part, from a fungible interpretation of the meaning of human - corporations having been accorded the same rights and privileges as people - a semantic leap accomplished by the powers that be, “government” no longer being a sufficient description of who or what is driving this train. And so we are now full circle back to the blind men describing some manner of elephant, only now like some shitty shell game we are being asked to question the very essence of being, or at best compare our hopes and aspirations with the financial bottom line of a McDonalds or Walmart. Can there be any doubt about why there might be so much confusion about happiness when we are so easily fooled about who or what has infiltrated our tribes, as easily as I have substituted happiness for love using a rhetorical coup d’etat - or weren’t you paying attention enough to notice I had substituted happiness for love?

We will always be a conglomeration of tribes, branches being the essence of our DNA sequencing. What is in question is who is doing the pruning and to what end? Prior to the microscope giving voice to our myopic hubris about the role of illness and death vs an eternally shifting stasis around and about the logic of harmony over chaos, our kind followed the flora and fauna in a luxuriant path filled with endless varieties hurtling through the expanding poorly comprehended universe on our moist orb of minerals and gas - not bad work if you can get it. We had it all “dicked” or as they say, “pussied” depending on your slant, and we could still - were we as human as our heroes have made us out to be. Not the sport/celebrity freaks serving as gladiators/minstrels/lapdogs to the corporate overlords and their cipher sycophants, but the heroes bursting through the walls of history unrepentant and unbowed by any fashionable ethos or conventional wisdom - the human spirit made manifest by the voices of Muhammad, Christ, Groucho Marx. Any intellect capable of discerning what love is and what love is not must be brought to bear - be that intellect digital, simian, canine or human - in throwing off the shackles of despair and depression wielded over our planet by the narrow interests of hatred, cruelty and profit - instruments of the weakest amongst us used to divide and conquer for no other reason than an irrational fantasy of building mountains - so irrational that the agents of hate cannot even be consistent about what exactly is gained by making mountains, much less digging endless holes into our hurtling orb - still moist, however sullied.


You reader, are patient - I know this because you have gotten this far in an essay which can have no ending. Even if our species were to cease its existence, a not unlikely outcome given our perverse delusions concerning eternal salvation; the points raised by this hackneyed narrative using crude symbols to represent even cruder ideas will continue, as it has been continued, somewhere in the universe, in some form - simple math; does that quest for understanding or being understood constitute humanity? That you are even reading this comes from a digital command manipulating your fingers and focusing your attention, ergo the digital domain present and accounted for; Koko has proven the Gorilla wants to be understood, enough so she would make the effort to learn our sign language; and I know from being one’s companion that a good canine will let you know when it is time - each are examples of a non-human entity extending itself beyond its tribe to communicate; so by definition the search for understanding cannot constitute the definition of being human. If you’ve ever seen a bitch surround its whelps in a snarled fortress of impenetrability, what better example of the tenacity of love for one’s own could there be? So love, and its manifold expressions cannot be the exclusive purview of Homo sapiens; and I hate to disappoint former Governor Romney, but just because some bought-and-sold-for shill of the merchant class declares that disembodied “credit default swaps” made manifest by +/-5v echoes on some HD storage media behind a foreign server’s firewall makes them the embodiment of “people too” - that my brothers and sisters is just laughable . haha . . . hold the phone . ! that’s IT - laughable, we humans are laughable, for as often as OE (operator error) has made me laugh at myself, there is nothing funny about how computers have become people kind’s latest in an endless parade of violent to non-violent shackles; nor is Koko in all her giggled ticklishness, funny in a cage; and as much as I love the grinning mutts, it is a dog’s life, ask any pooch at Yulin’s dog meat festival - but me sitting here thinking about you the kind reader, scratching your bewildered head wondering if that fuck might be right - well friend that is enough to make me laugh, even if only quietly at myself thinking I got a reader . . .

Saturday, June 20, 2015

les muses - the sonnet


I thought I knew what a muse was, but no.
now i know how little I know about them,
muses I mean. I found more, but they go 
away - again - like dream lessons from REM.

With good dreams, I will fight to remember,
and with good ones, they will keep teaching me.
bad dreams singe you - a never cool ember
teaching you the same - what it is to be.

One cannot pick one’s manner of muses:
anymore than one can know one's extent.
what remains to be is what one chooses,
for those choices become every moment.

lucky to find some who mend misery,
with any luck, we'll learn more history.

jts 15 June 2015 stoneartist.com

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

what it means to write in a capitalist society


Like every other subject in the land of Mammon; you seek succor; you bite the hand that feeds you; or you kill the farmer and take his seat at the table for your episode of “Animal Farm.” Unless you, as I seem to be, are haunted by the ghost of Don Quixote, in which case you reconnoiter the battlefield (planet earth); muster your forces (anyone capable of love); and liberate the ungrateful (the 99% waiting in line at “Club 1%”). However, you’re reading because you have a curiosity about meaning as it pertains to writing in a capitalist society - that’s easy, memorize a few billion lines of advertising until you can spit copy out like it was your own, slap some rugged individualism on it as though you didn’t care a whit what anybody thought; add a splash of testosterone (gender neutral if you’re really gifted) - stir and serve chilled as though you invented the word blasé. Who you serve it to, however, is the key, and whichever “man” you choose must be a deity from the temple of “The 3 Attributes” - one, he must be richer than g_d. two, he must be successful. three, you are unable to defy his will. If you can find a patron possessing these qualities and gain his approval, write as though your soul depends upon it, for it most likely will.

Sounds a little like Faust, don’t it. Who else spurned the offerings of the most high in order to satisfy greatness? That is not a rhetorical question; it is one which has plagued our species back to and prior to King Hammurabi in his role as "protector of the weak and oppressed.” Only in those days kings had more than money - they had heart and soul. Whereas by the time the legend of Faust was gaining a head of steam, royalty had been whinging for many centuries about not having it all . This bait and switch excuse for vacating positions of responsibility for unrealized or unacknowledged appetites has become more than a breach in the dike of the human condition held in place by a highly responsible Dutch boy, for it is coming down to whether the human species can serve each other and survive the coming apocalypse or bow before the all high god of Mammon and perish in the cauldrons of our own arrogance. Writing use to have a place in this discussion, now it is the bean counters who are calling the shots and the writers simply line up behind who is parsing the largest pile of beans. Previously, as was the case of King Hammurabi one's beliefs were paramount and the medium simply a representation of the purity of one’s convictions - thus the “Code of Hammurabi” was inscribed in Basalt which if you have any knowledge of stone or how it is worked is no mean feat. Today this nobility of purpose is reduced to Bob Dylan’s undeniable observation, “You know, capitalism is above the law. It say, ‘It don't count 'less it sells’”.

Then again Mr. Dylan asked, “What’s money? A man’s a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.” Our imaginary patron of “The 3 Attributes” has so far outstripped this modest ambition as to chase at the heels of real g_d like some sort of lost canine, yet still manage to hoodwink 7 billion human beings that if they too affect airs of superiority; claw and scrape their way to the top of the heap (however local that may be); or slit the the throats of all those threading their way from the bottom of whatever heap you’ve clambered atop of surrounded by the rising tides; then and only will they consider your petition to step into the ring of Ralph Ellison’s “Battle Royal”. The magic of this success is the illusion of free will be stamped inside the forehead of every manjack popped out of each fetus factory the sanctity-of-life franchise has brilliantly positioned on every street corner of the planet - replete with the delusion of strength-in-numbers nationalism piped into every nursery training future soldiers for the gladiator wars all the rage in our bored-to-tears dying planet. I’m still astonished how the ruling class with so little gumption, bereft of any distinction other than an obscene predilection for amassing everything, could conjure the fiction that they are happy when clearly they possess no more capacity for feeling of any kind in any one of them than one might find on an uninhabited asteroid at apsis in its orbit away from our Milky Way? - and yet they rule the world or enough so to render our planet virtually uninhabitable for those on whose sweat they float. 

Talk about your blind obedience, but then again here I sit laboring under the same delusion of success and hoped-for-freedom; save the fact my patron is a female god impoverished by her male oppressors and too timid to express her undying love for my gentle heart and stalwart ways - ah the sweet irony of human existence, or as I prefer to think of it, the rich humor of m’Lady G_d. As to obedience, she has only to point to a mountain and say climb - I commence, or point to the sky and say jump - I ask only “how high.” It is she - this goddess of love, who has forced me to denounce the fiction of literacy through this hackneyed myopic whinge about all the good work that has been crafted by earnest hearts seeking understanding in a world wanting no more than to be told "thangs" will be alright - a world willing to listen to any siren song representing a surcease of the illimitable grief that is part of breathing - a world that will claw one to death for speaking the truth unless it can be made to laugh at the same time. How is it possible to compete with the well-heeled big shots willing to pay copious amounts of money for any sequel that echoes or even whiffs of the bliss of success and harmony; of any prosperity regardless of the hollow sound released from the caverns of disbelief and betrayal fed daily by the inexorable reality of death and gratuitous suffering wrought by a handful of ciphers disguised as humans. Our dumb luck, as it happens, is the mortal coil from which we shuffle, for it contains the only law we must obey - even suffering is a fiction for which we have no one to blame but ourselves - there I’ve gone and said it, sharing why I will likely never succeed as a writer - can’t keep my mouth shut or my keyboard hushed.


However, this essay is about what it means to write in a capitalist society. I don’t know, may never know - not sure I want to know, but for the sake of amusement, let’s assume some of what I’ve written means something to me. I live on a capitalist planet, and I write. Some of our world’s most popular entertainment evolves around virtual voyages through galaxies in a starship “Enterprise,” or one of its many avatars, not to confuse enterprise with capitalism however useful that sleight-of-hand may be to the ciphers amongst us. This same planet and its Freedom Fighters have also recently managed to dethrone the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” or at least underwrite their transition to market economies - talk about your fictions. Herein lies the rub, the real fiction is that there is any sort of market economy - we are a Thralldom, or what used to be called a Kingdom before Napoleon began fucking around with semantics. If we were a truly capitalist society there would be market forces very much in play - there are none. We buy what we are told, and we like it. We may grouse, even saber rattle because we see it done on the flickering screen, or what was once a flickering screen - now just a +5v/-5v twitch affixed at the end of our wrists fed from the mother ship servers in our rigidly controlled, vertically distributed network (though not actually a single network, the distinction is too fine to parse in this essay). The writers for the tractor beam of this highly effective Death Star are today’s much sought after, and well compensated high priests and priestesses of “content.” My concern and reason for this essay is born of an insatiable appetite for meaning of which there may be none - that the coalescing of resources and decay surrounding our existence is exactly what is found in nature with no other meaning than what one might find in the protoplasm of a flattened ant at the bottom of a rockslide which had come unhinged by another ant clambering upon the topmost stone in an effort to satisfy ceaseless hunger, I just don’t know .  .  .