While i was growing up, my mother suffered from insomnia; her suffering strongly affected my attitude toward rest and alertness - without rest one cannot be alert - fatigued, burdened, fearful - but not alert. I equate alertness to awareness, an innate capacity to respond to the manifold nuances within the world. Just now I chose to forego work on a drawing I’d very much like to finish because my rest was incomplete. I slept deeply, but had troublesome dreams. This may very well be because I’m traveling back to the region wherein I grew up, mostly to visit my mother. We have mended our fences as well as any 88 year-old parent and 63 year-old offspring could with a history such as ours. Nor will i bore you with the morbid blow by blow; suffice it to say i got everything i deserved as a snot faced wooly mammoth teenage wannabe; she, i have to believe, was as entertained as any post war divorcee with a career could have possibly been. They were very intense days, but manageable. At that time in history there was no concession to the decay of civilization - you were either awake and propagating all that was promised by the burgeoning technology which landed a man on the moon, or you were hunkering down, battening the hatches and pulling up the rope ladders. The conceit that this was a unique time in human history evaporated with the election of Richard M. (I am not a crook) Nixon. There has been much hash made over the drug induced fantasies of that time; speaking only for myself, it was not recreational - social networking perhaps, entrepreneurial even, but mostly a vehicle for enlarging consciousness. I can’t say given follies of reflection when old, how much was a function of naivete or how much was a sharp perception honed on the brashness of youth. I can say my experiences were eye opening. What fell away, or was torn asunder was the simple confidence in status quo. I question everything, but mostly myself.
Drug deals gone bad are hard on idealism, for witnessing deaths from excess sap one’s faith. Yet I watch horrified as a generation of coop-shopping hipster doofuses acquiesce to the poisoning of the food chain and the shackling of our attention span on screens the size of baseball cards while extolling the virtues of a democratic corporate shill simply based on her plumbing. I wonder what lessons my fellow americans learned during the slow motion coup d’etat that began with the seduction of Pete Rose, and climaxed with coronation of Mr. M.T. Suit. I am guilty myself and know very well the temptations of socialization. It began with therapy, which i advocate if you have a strong sense of self and resistance to indoctrination and terminated with over a decade of relative good living as an aerospace drudge. To my credit, i invested the excess lucre into a bachelor’s degree in English believing at the time i could transition as a teacher. It was too late for me, my taint from designing weapons provoked so much reservation about the logic of our world that i was unable to reconcile the differences between the obvious needs of an inner city student body aware that it was being warehoused with the newly ensconced “leave no child behind,” a polite euphemism for “teach them what ‘we’ want them to know, and to hell with what they want to learn.” It is hard to distinguish within the arc of happenstance how i got inoculated from the dream of make amerika gr8 again, but these notes into the aether will clarify how ill i am, susceptible to contagion and incomplete that inoculation might have been, if at all. The best i can do is fight the fatigue that comes from a culture designed for the leisure of handful at the expense the whole.
I don’t know what parts of my psychic makeup have not awakened, but i do find it nearly impossible to turn a blind eye to the desecration and destruction of our world. My youthful disillusionment has certainly sharpened my bullshit meter, yet i’ve returned to smoking and drinking with all the attendant rationalizations for such destructive habits - why is that¿ I have convinced myself that purity of purpose has no relationship with reality if it is conducted within a vacuum, so to be truly pure requires contamination with the vices of our existence. “Emotional masturbation” you might say, and “why not but i prefer copulation” might be my reply. I do know the more conviction i felt about what is right the greater my dissonance - the inclination to sully is mine alone. There is no Marlboro Man i can point to and say, “it was his fault” - the equivalent would be pointing at the followers of Muhammad and condemning them for violence in the world. I am my own worst enemy and my sole loving companion be that in the midst of hordes or in loving embrace. Woman, when I carved my first statue, it was out of a limestone tailing off of a Manhattan demolition; I included amongst the minutia an arrogant young artist full of confidence might pursue, a vedanta pulling the veil from a man seated in a lotus posture. Where is that vedanta now, or are you she and just to shy to say so¿ It is i who is too shy or wary; just this morning i conflicted myself over whether to accost a young woman walking in the rain so as to loan her my umbrella just inside the door in my backpack. Months earlier i had made a similar gesture to a young merchant at a festival out of concern for his mother getting wet - he kept the umbrella. I am not one to quibble over chump change, but the question remains was my reservation to share with someone in need a punishment of the transgressor, or to myself for a lack of clarity in purpose? I don’t know. Is the nature of internal conflict knowable?
Is there a corollary between knowledge and understanding? We live in a world awash in knowledge, and some people who know me seem afraid of questions I ask - why is peace on earth impractical¿ How can 7 billion people allow themselves to be bullied by the population of a small village? Are you angry with me¿ Am i angry with you? What is death¿ etc., etc., etc. . . My suspicion is that facts matter, but my downfall would be “what is a fact¿” When young and at art school, i read a quote by one of the surrealists in effect “when i came to understand atomic physics, it seemed the world dissolved in front of me.” Somehow this memory was intertwined with the image of the fur-lined teacup - modern information superhighway could only find an echo, or source document depending, from Wassily Kandinsky substituting dissolved for destruction. The fact is, i did not conjure the memory but find little trace of its existence in a world awash with information. I know where i am in the “universe,” but don’t know what i am or what a universe is. I know there are men alive on my planet who are killing each other over the meaning of and act of the word “love,” and/or permission to love that deity which they understand. My sense is god is a woman with a very finely tuned sense of humor, but her bivouac lacks entertainment, so i’m it. When she is bored synchronicity is triggered and i find myself knee deep in something seeming to me - unfunny. The Great Spirit has my back, so i remain unafraid - too fucking exposed, but unafraid. I have learned that if you do something long enough something will happen, so i try to find beauty where i can and regurgitate it as what the art market forces are paradoxically iridescently attracted to and simultaneously repelled by. I also know it is bad form to end a sentence with a preposition and/or a prepositional phrase; both of which just did i.
I find it helpful if i close my eyes to sleep repeating a mantra i made up as compactly as a layman might, it focuses my mind and trims my breath for rest:
May you embrace your suffering, may you be free of the roots of suffering - greed hatred, delusion; may you enjoy happiness, free of the roots of suffering that impede happiness - greed, hatred, delusion; breathe in pain, breathe out simplicity, patience, compassion; om mani padme hom; ho'oponono, i'm sorry, please forgive me, i love you, thank you; namu-myoho-renge-kyo; may you possess unconditional self worth developed through radical honesty.
Because i integrate this repetition into rudimentary isometrics and more brief Qi Gong i subject my battered wannabe corpse to each morning there’s a visceral echo throughout the day i like. Just like the pushing through the confusion at the beginning of any project for the breakthrough that makes it seem as though you are rolling a big rock down a low sloped hill slowly, rather than being eternally damned with one sort of scavenger or another, feasting on the existential viscera of your innocent good intentions. What is wakefulness when perseveration interferes with mindfulness? How is it narcissism is poled with self respect, are we whipped dogs of some disembodied corporate shill, or 7 billion remarkably talented human beings of stupendous capacity for decent human warmth? I guess you can begin to see how some may take offense with my curiosity - Madam God and her minions are tireless in their quest of mirth. And i find myself a willing acolyte, for not knowing how to make someone laugh is the single best avenue to figuring that out - lucky me. It occurs to me if anyone finds a mystical resonance and chooses to congregate, i hope to aggregate a list of questions into the book of questions and leave it out in the aether for future +5v/-5v impulses to find correspondence. Sad the cryptic has offended the septic, whose roots were plucked by the aristocratic, in service of the plutocratic with nary a peep from the proletariat. C.G. Jung - “The pendulum of the mind swings between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” By that logic nothing we can imagine in this world that makes sense to any one of us is verboten, how can we make that happen¿ just askin’
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awake - the sonnet
i dreamt i was awake, but had to pee.
if true sleeping is just a little death
how can we do it so much and stay free¿
if my confusion offends, take a breath.
does anyone look out for anyone
hoping that they are good, safe and happy?
if not, it’d been better we were long gone
leaving those with balls and pussy to not flee.
yeah just a bunch of wiggling organisms
lost in a vacuum said is fraught with love
how would profit wrong, said the lower -isms
“easily” chirped back the broken winged dove.
laying her dying breast on a dead planet
she sang, all she knew with her heart in it.
jts 070717
http://stoneartist.com reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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