love and work . . .

. . . work and love; that’s all there is.” - Sigmund Freud - so sayeth the man who called woman “the dark continent,” and whose cocaine habit may have had more to do with psychology than either his id or his ego. Yet how does one quarrel with such a notion, even his alter ego Carl Jung described something similar - “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being,” and if you have never lit a fire in freezing weather, you may never fully appreciate love and work . . . or you may appreciate each more, idk. I use to know everything, then I fell in love - that’s the last thing I remember clearly. That’s what makes love so fascinating, everything is so vivid, breathing, brushing your teeth - even shopping. Why else do you think there could be so many men standing outside any store on the planet picking their noses not causing a ruckus - it is because the men are in love, while the women are spending money the men earn working. Cocaine or no cocaine, Sigmund Freud was right. I may have married for love every time; but like Socrates said, “By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll be happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher, ” so what of me - a happy philosopher. 3 times married, each wife leaving for a different reason; still not clear why, but I’m working on it.

I keep falling in love, or more correctly - I keep loving, however much more my once animal magnetism is now more magnet than -ism. G_d, in her infinite mercy has blessed my decrepitude with more work than love, where when young I had more love than work - “plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes.” I never dreamed the future would be quite so sudden, perhaps because I’ve yet to love; have known lust; shared delusions; even shared enthusiasm? I can’t say if I’ve ever been “in” the kind of love where one’s giving is all that matters; whether as hard as I’ve worked at being worthy of love, or being worthy of not being left, or whatever it is which men use to convince themselves they are choosing “she who would be Queen,” and not some pale echo of a movie or storyline? I’m not sure if there is a place in my heart where it mattered whether I’d been loved in return. Have I in fact ever been to that sacred land of “everloving” as I like to sign my letters to ma? If so, wouldn’t I still be serving; still buying flowers for “ma miel” or bringing my check home? And what of pain; wouldn’t that be purely fictional, a momentary distraction; minor irritation - hardly worthy of a Heathcliff? Maybe I’ve never really learned how to work at love, even the non-work of Zen love; that for all my efforts to be, what Oscar Wilde described as “earnest,” have all been some cobbled-together front made up of snippets of Valentine's day indoctrination from commercials - nothing of substance; nothing on the scale of a visceral imagination able to conjure the “face which launched a 1,000 ships.” (google Homer Helen of Troy)

Not to be Euro-centric, just because I am, but of my earliest literary memories was kinship with the gimp Hephaestus of Greek mythology, never mind the curios sea-change to my psyche from deep, now receding, pain of sciatica - denial of grief? a sympathetic psychological solidarity with the broken hip of a now deceased parent? What is truly fascinating is the capacity for Greek Mythology to anticipate existential oddities of a particular life from the viewpoint of the physically challenged. Consider the following - a gimp 1) fashioned the first woman, Pandora and a box for her which contained all the world’s evils; 2) a box subsequently opened by the gimp’s wife, Aphrodite, loosing evil into the world, 3) who after which was snared with her lover Mars trapped by a net the gimp designed, for he was also principal artisan for Zeus himself. The gimp got the gimp either from an injury suffered when Zeus throw him to earth enraged because the gimp had sided with his mother Hera over some godlike struggle, while in other versions the gimp was cast out by Hera because she was mortified to have given birth to a god with a hideous birth defect .  . whoever g_d turns out to be, she has a wicked sense of humor. From my youth, I can still picture one snarky doctor remarking in some physical exam, “oh one of your legs is shorter than the other;” all I asked was “why are my eyes crossed?” When you’re twenty, a short leg is meaningless; after running a marathon in your fifties - such information takes on new meaning. Many inconsequential observations take on new meaning with age; that I’ve been cuckolded by 3 separate wives has for example, nothing to do with Mars or Aphrodite - it is from my own stupid choices made while becoming a “happy philosopher.”

A poor choice by the gimp is given as the reason Zeus threw Hephaestus from heaven having sided against the Zeus - “the ruling class;” or it could have been pure luck to have a flaw for which he could be cast out of heaven, who wants to live with a bunch of gods anyhow. I’m pretty sure he was cast out of heaven for being, as Johnny Cash described in song - “an unruly child,” certainly not for some congenital birth defect. I prefer to see calamity as part of the happy philosopher training - Super High Intensity Training (SHIT), though I never imagined so much job training, and I’ve had some high intensity training; I remember one Memorial Day being set up with a contraption in a yard with weeds as tall as myself, a big yard. The way this contraption worked was to push down on the handle while pushing forward which leveraged the lawn mower a good couple of feet higher like the maw of some serpent gulping down weeds with each bite - it was a long, long day. Yet here I sit with a Dick Tracy-like +/-5v digital signal stapled to my wrist telling me the “oceans will be dead in 40 years; accept austerity because the world is running out of money, the color of your skin and your zip code determine how much jail time you get and . . . the next ‘great extinction’ is about to commence;” Even at my age, I'd prefer a decade or two more of that Memorial Day 40 years ago, rather than witness the end of my species without adequate love or strength to thwart Zeus from killing our planet - or whoever the fuck he, she or they might do . .  .

Today is ma’s birthday; I love her, and don’t know whether I’ll be able to find an international phone to call and say as much - yet, just as it is my responsibility to know love from what she has shared with me about this complex - but thoroughly fundamental emotion, so too she has only her own heart with which to know my wishes. Sometimes - most times; all the time, no matter what is said or done about, to or for another we have only our own interior to inform us what is truth. As with work, talk is cheap and I can go on, and on about what I’ve done, or mean to do - all that will be left is what has been done without explanation or adherents. This is no different for our species and how we live in our world - we can be members of 1,000s of different groups and be recognized as leaders or as one of Mr. Dylan’s “Early Roman Kings,” what will remain is whether our planet responds to the love we each apply by how we live. If we are asleep or uncaring, that is likely how we shall perish, yet the opposite is as equally true - if we sustain the pain of healing, and live with love in our hearts for all, including the ciphers amongst us who have caused so much devastation for such a small momentary thrill as to ride in a rocket or limousine from private jet to private gate without once having to look into the face of hunger or anguish - dying with love in one’s heart is a vastly more worthwhile objective, however hard the work.

home

I now sit in the hometown of a personal hero, Paul Cezanne; one could even say I reside here, for I’ve signed a contract and paid monies for a domicile; however, you may not send me a letter; there are no cheques with my address; no utility bills; alimony payments or community associations claiming my responsibilities. My handlers at the NSA have access to every bank transaction I’ve made in the past 12 months, though not every expenditure, or why. Any skank with middling hacking skills has access to my email, but my phone is turned off and I’ve not figured out how to place a phone call from a pay phone - everyone here speaks French, or tries to. If every man’s home is his castle, mine would be under siege, or I’m not home. 5 Minutes ago I had no idea how much Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong had influenced my life - writers who wrote the song “Papa was a Rolling Stone” for the Temptation’s which powerfully established an image in my mind at a very young age of what might be coming - a romanticized “white bread” version of actual reality for far too many, but a vivid image nonetheless. It was more than synchronicity by which my divorced father-of-four became the horrific reflection of all male disfunction during the sisterhood-is-powerful epoch of the late 20th century - an epoch which brought us the 77% pay ratio, twerking and the much beloved shill for Monsanto the corporate-sponsored presidential annointee - Hillary Rodham Clinton; while in the meantime from another personal hero - William Shakespeare author of Hamlet, the still apt expression “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Whether it is coincidence or synchronicity that of my many homes, one was on Hamlet St, or whether having another street address at Figueroa St for that same home diluted any synchronicity and augmented the coincidence or only augmented and confirmed Master Shakespeare’s prescience about betrayal, my last wife sold my castle out from under me - (IJDK) I just don’t know. I do know - after that illuminating experience wherever I lay my hat is my home, try as I might to conjure hearth and home. So what the fuck is home? I get the part about formative and am at peace with my people and my parents - grateful for them even, very grateful - especially the more I'm in the world which includes my propeller-blade ex. Earlier in my saga, a tender young heart had embroidered for me a pillow long since hugged to dust which read “Houses are made of Brick and Stone, Homes are made of Love Alone,” that she married another tender young heart less than 3 years later is not the point; that I love Paul Cezanne for his integrity and courage is - bourgeoise son of a banker or no; g_d in her tender mercies bestowed upon me a brother of my own who shares birthdays with Mssr “C,” and although my sibling confuses autonony with some fantasy of having reign over what I say, IJDK; I do know love is a choice; I choose to love my brother, his mother and all of her children - including myself, because that’s how I roll - like a rolling stone.

In my last post card to ma, I wrote “not sure if I belong here or anywhere, or everywhere.” It does make all things more possible if it is love and contentment which you unpack, be that an airport bathroom or some pseudo art patron’s pool house (actual patrons having expired with the Medici Family). The origins of art as talismans protecting and aiding a community’s wellbeing supported by the tribe’s patrons has been usurped by the same commodification of mother earth as with Warren Buffett twisting the ideal of home ownership by being the largest holder of mobile home mortgages. Capitalism is the science of making the lowest common denominator pay which is why art and capitalism are mutually exclusive - the delusion of modern artists believing themselves outsiders rather than harlequins need only research the corporate funded fine art scholarship surrounding Jean-Michel Basquiat. Yet still within me the creative sits as close to my core as any other wholesome inclination I possess, so what of this semi-autonomous region of self I drag across the planet seeking a dwelling place to call home or atelier depending on which pretty French woman I’m trying to impress. The advantages of having a dwelling were explained by metaphor of “setting down roots.” The word Dwelling itself a misnomer of the Old English dwellan to seduce, get lost; related to Old Saxon bidwellan to prevent, Old Norse dvelja to delay tarry or stay, Old High German twellen to prevent - each expression describing the interruption one’s way in one manner or  another - pick your poison, so to speak.

Lao Tzu defines the excellence of a residence by its “suitability.” Bringing us full circle to purpose instead of possession for good reasons why to live anywhere. Like any really creative corporate whore, I live to make art, so you’d think somewhere with lots of artists would be logical - maybe LA with its adrenalin junkies scribbling wannabe proletariat esoterica upon wannabe corporate esoterica - either too passé or not passé enough; IJDK, I do know if the “writers” hate any harder, they is gonna hurt themselves; Paris, maybe as a hotbed for creative growth? I was just there and I’m sad to say how oh-so-orthodox scribble has been anointed to haute culture, but there it sits in the City of Lights; not just sits but displayed prominently right there on Champs Elysees, a golf swing from Arc de Triomphe, emblazoned on the Peugot dealership - Oh the Humanity. ! ; I was weak-kneed for much different reasons than you might imagine - think laughter rather than weeping; kinda gives très chic a whole new slant don’t it? I’ve even lived on an island made of marble in the Philippines attempting my own esthetic Arcadia but found the pernicious and largely anglo patronage of Sex Tourism just sucked the suitability right out that plan. Despair not intrepid reader, for not to be funny or anything, Woody Allen did say 90% of life is just showing up, and what Bob Dylan shared about “my bell still rings” still rings true for me; so again I ask you, if there is no place like home as Glenda so kindly pointed out, where is it here on this rock encrusted molten core hurtling through space that is not exactly like every other place on this too soon to be “formerly homo sapien inhabited” planet; I want to go there I’ve been told it’s home - on good authority .  .  .

But I’ve been told many things in my lifetime, “I love you;” “leave” of course my personal Trump favorite “you’re fired.” Darling Glenda, have you lied to me? before you answer, remember one can lie once, twice - some their whole lives and still be believed, but as the Vaudevillian Heirloom once said “you can fool some of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time. IJDK - I do know I’d rather be fooled than be fooling; I also know that I want peace, good food, and love - any love; it matters not whether it’s hard:soft, smooth:rough, long:short, right:wrong - it just has to be real. Maybe that’s what Frank Baum meant for Glenda to say instead of “home” - “There’s no place like ‘love’;” maybe he’d been on the phone to Frank Capra and was a little confused. Dig this ! What if the human heart is all the home we ever get or were meant to have; once the ticker starts keeping time the only way any of this phantasmagoria will make sense is when the heart is in love, because love is where the heart came from and hopefully, love is where the heart will go? What if all the yearning and capitalizing and hating are just convoluted efforts to get back to the heart - not dwelling in one’s own empty orchestra, but the dancing to; the following of one’s heart - listening carefully to all the contending ideas and discordant feelings of a dying world struggling to dethrone and distract what your heart is telling you - what Leonard Cohen has described by “blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and overturned the order of the soul.” What if from these exertions we learn there is no single location on the planet that is home, but all places are home - stretching logic a little further, is it possible there could actually be rapture in our lifetime at that precise instant our beloved but immovable Gaia and the irresistible force of the clearly male-flavored and long-anticipated Mr. Singularity simultaneously discover each other; and the Vulcan mind-meld which was not entertainment at all but the instrument of our next step for spiritual evolution resulting in a love-inspired, however long-abated, and not entirely welcomed but no longer anonymous incineration torching our carbon rich atmosphere from what is still today the mythical spontaneous combustion? don’t laugh - this sound reasoning describes abiogenesis - something we may need to know more about if and when we kill all life in our home . planet earth . . IJDK .  . .

Death

I don’t want to, but I must - like using a capital “I” for the first person singular subjective personal pronoun in this essay rather than my preferred lower case “i” - death is incontrovertible; there, I’ve spoken truth to power. Stick a fork in me, I’m done. Wasn’t that fun?

Sadly it is just that simple and yet here we are 2,000 plus years since the death of Christ and still murdering each other in the vain hope of helping the victim to heaven. Were it that simple we would not have allowed our collective existence to be hijacked by a bunch of mercantile pimps selling the promise of afterlife camouflaged as deodorant, or gratitude disguised as Mother’s Day flowers. I can remember lying awake as an 8 year old trying to understand what it means to die, possibly precipitated by the death of a new pet rat that got its head stuck in the mesh of its cage and pulled itself apart, but more likely reaction formation to the dawning realization that the family I was born to and idealized, had no concept of unconditional love and I could not reconcile myself to their growing list of conditions; so like any 8 year old with the power of the universe at his disposal, sort of, I imagined my family into an all-loving fable as seen on TV and substituted the vague outlines of the incomprehensible - death - as the immediate cause of my growing existential “angst” ( good word - look it up ). From this resistance to the reality of character formation and the pressures of socialization, I threw my puny intellect up against eternity and the limits of infinity - got nowhere, but it felt better than looking at brothers and sisters embarrassed by my crossed eyes.

Yes you’d be right, he not only looks funny - he won’t shut up. It is still not clear what they are more embarrassed by, my presence or my tongue, i d k? I do know, I still have difficulty reconciling my love for them against their “terms of endearment,” and I still aver from applying the apt expression Leonard Cohen coined - “bitter searching of the heart” because I suspect that might lead to love, growth, maybe even acceptance; then what would I have to grouse about? Unfortunately after this much time, I am more enamored of the consequence of death than any mysterious key which might unlock access to the mythical loving hearth of yore. Death, however is certain - I know because my rat beheaded itself in pursuit of its own liberty which only serves to prove my childhood rat was a better patriot than that large percentage of non-voting U.S. citizens reclining in their impotence rather than face the uphill task of dethroning the “paper tigers” who have overthrown our hallowed halls of liberty - very much like that 8 year old me afraid to change so-called objectionable aspects of my being for fear of finding out nothing would inspire love from the unloving. Like every briar patch, there is a silver-lining, for I have cultivated a lifelong fascination for the inexorable end of life. In case you’re reading in search of eternal truth, sorry to say I’m no closer to an understanding of death, but like an old pair of tennis shoes, if you keep something around long enough eventually it will become, if not comfortable, at least irritatingly familiar.

So too with death, but this is where our “gamer” culture and I part company. Today’s ruling class has staked its existence on a demonstrated ability to keep us at each other’s throat - politically, religiously, ethnically .  . . etc., For me, while death has certainly not subsided in its fascination over the years, rather than the familiarity of a cranky relative for whom one must attenuate one’s attention in order to maintain perspective, and or dignity - death strikes me more as a beautiful paramour who commands one’s attention regardless of proximity or time. Nor by this disclosure, am I lending credence to any mullah’s fictional depiction of 70 virgins waiting on the other side of a suicidal jihad; besides what good could come from chasing death, anymore than what might be accomplished by attempting to, as Arundhati Roy has suggested “pursue beauty to her lair;” clearly I have anthropomorphized Ms Roy’s far more courageous and sublime metaphor in service of my own narrow gender idealization - I’m a man; what can I say. Michel Montaigne said about death - to paraphrase “what an expert it is, for it has been doing what it does much longer than our lifespan allows us to conceive; therefore picture the expertise it must have at what it does; relax and enjoy the ride.” Unfortunately logic, death and humans never seem to agree and so some 500 years after Mssr Montaigne’s generous efforts, John Q Public is still being sold a “pig in poke” and still trotting off to war with a promise of protecting somebody from something as long as death is allowed to validate the ticket. The sad truth is even if I was to track down the dirty dog selling the “pig in poke” theory and slit the throat of said dirty dog - some other dirty dog would step in and continue selling “pigs in pokes,” because, I guess, John Q Public has a genetic appetite for “pigs in pokes.”

Unfortunately for the species, the stakes have risen to where the haters are not content with organized war to winnow the unsightly excess of what Paul Cezanne described as we “bipeds.” Today the bored-to-tears, never-worked-a-day-in-their-lives ruling class has gambled life as we know it against a hubris born of psychotic upbringings rendering compassion for anything other than opulence a chimera to be caged and eviscerated for whatever profit can be sucked out of its marrow. To those of leadership defined by wealth, we are fodder for the economic cannons of the long discredited and ever new “infinite growth paradigm.” Never mind that by the digital barons' very own computer models we now sit at the precipice of the 6th major extinction with the human population square in the cross hairs of a technology run amuck. The ability of marketing mavens to create euphemisms such as “information super highway;” “war on terror;” or my personal favorite “clean and sober” is so great that while ad men for monsatan are drinking glyphosate in front of school children, the marketing shills now describe our salvation in an evolutionary event being propagated as “the singularity.” This coming deliverance, not unlike the movie, will bend over our kind like the newly coronated TPP is bending over the ghosts of Mom and Pop stores echoed from an America even up until fairly recently - which for me as an old man has a much different meaning than some homie in Hollywood looking to make his bones throwing up on the Hollenbeck Station - ironically even that effete act of rebellion is diluted by the cancer his momma is dying from - a disease she got picking strawberries in a glyphosate inundated field in Garden Grove when he was just a baby - but that homie or homette will never learn this fact because the haters have convinced an entire generation that learning is black magic of “whitey.”

. . and still death keeps on coming and coming like some sex addict looking to get out from under in a zen retreat sponsored by Hare Krishna - meaning no disrespect to the sacred. There has to be some reason we continue to write, to draw, to sing; unless death is more like I have conceived her - a beautiful woman who must be serenaded and we being too much like Cyrano De Bergerac are ashamed of our big noses, or like me with my crossed eyes, must dress up our fear of her rejection (or embrace depending on your particular neurosis) with creative offerings, similar to how I convinced myself as a child, “if only I was .  .  . then they would love me”, or for the purposes of this essay death in her insatiable hunger might become so distracted by our myopic efforts to separate ourselves from the inevitable cycles of growth, decay and demise within this physical realm we inhabit that we could somehow become exempt. Perhaps the spirit of desire in itself is enough to staunch that hemorrhaging of our life force spilling into the world’s battlefields; or depleting our former human capacity for excellence on the charnel floor of the newest mall built, itself upon the carcass of a dead neighborhood rich with recent human history having been sacrificed for a parking structure in which to house conveyances that burn the life blood of dinosaurs from our planet’s last “great extinction.” Nothing will stop death, not religion, not money, not love; if there is no way out, then I choose to go with love in my heart, for I have yet to discover a more consistent feeling of wellbeing and accomplishment than to love that which cannot be loved, even death.

Dedicated to the future of my species from planet earth; 3 July 2015