fear - the essay / desire - the sonnet

“There is no fear for one whose mind is not filled with desires” - Buddha

We are born and almost immediately begin screaming, for what - another slap on the ass which caused our first breath¿ if that defines desire, i am more than prepared to renounce this world and its desires. There is much to be said for a calm mind, and there is much to object to about acquisitions - especially those we cannot afford, physically, financially or morally. Those whom i’ve known to have satiated their yen to the utmost, have not had the calmest minds if only for the constant fear of having those things taken from them or assertions disproved - be that beauty, strength or intellectual dexterity. I possess fear, and it has been for the most part as a direct result of attachment. What i physically possess fits into a 10x10 ft storage space, and most of those objects could be best described as sentimental detritus clung to like buoys, but amongst the flotsam and jetsam are 13, more or less, stone carvings that i have fashioned over my adult life - as well as a driftwood pipe holder i carved for my nonsmoking father when i was around 6. These carvings and miscellaneous objet d’art might be said to describe my remaining attachment to this material plane. However, were that true i’d hardly be sitting here looking to exonerate my sins on your dime. The truth is writing for me is a therapy which i value for its ability to laugh at my shortcomings and focus on my more positive inclinations. What else is left to us as a species, but to develop as creatures in search of purpose. When i began my art study, the life and work of Paul Gaugin captivated my imagination, not just for his ability to strip woman down to her most simple beauty, but also for his quest for truth. One stand-out painting of his was embellished with the following quote. “who are we, why are we here, where are we going.” In an age when creative success is defined by astronomic prices which often have more relationship to the artist’s capacity for social climbing than her/his contribution to the chain of Cezanne’s creative heritage metaphor this quote from Paul Gaugin was not a fashionable contemporary quip, but a marker on the trail for others with courage enough to admit they might be lost.

I know i am, lost. Not a bad place to be at 63 and aging quickly, for it can provoke one to fulfill rational fantasies like smoking only 6 cigarettes a day; imbibing no more than dos caballos of mezcal, and a dash of marijuana each day in my two pots of beans and rice. Being adrift can also inspire one to focus energies toward what creates happiness for oneself and relinquish those things that excite the mind. It would give me great satisfaction to describe nirvana in cogent prose, but alas i have no idea outside of what i’ve described. Nor is my mind tranquil, if anything stripped of the delusions of accomplishment and community which had occupied my waking life for so long, my only companion now seems to be the beast that i am. For example, i have searched many times on the “acclaimed” internet for an apocryphal statement by Franz Kafka - “if a man were to meet himself walking down the street, he’d probably turn and run,” I liked the quote when i read it 40 years ago, but didn’t really understand it until more recently. At the time it mirrored my badass costume from behind which, like the Wizard of Oz, i invoked images of fear and power because that is all i could see of the world. Now, thanks to the grim reaper’s stalking behavior, what do i care whether anyone wants to play with me? I care the same as i did then, but am no longer convinced that anyone can be persuaded about anything. I’ve mostly come to this conclusion because so few have been persuaded by anything i’ve ever tried; but more likely because so few have rung true for me over the course of time - including me for myself. Yet there are signposts along the way left by previous seekers, mostly snacks; i think this is because gorging on the road of truth can impede progress, that or those ahead know if you are not self-sufficient there is nothing they can give you that will suffice. What I have never found on the road of truth is: fear, hatred, greed, anger - all those commodities of our current culture which declares itself without shame, or irony - the zenith of civilization.

Well fuck that shit - hard. What a crock - so what if i’m afraid, am i going to ransom the pleasure of puzzling over a mystery of such an etherial and ever-passing wisps for the sacred rock of what - certain knowledge that i will live forever, which in some sects includes 70 ravishing beauties at one’s beck and call. (maybe those two should pool their resources instead of crusading against jihad, or vice versa). I am more afraid of closing my eyes for the last time and not being worthy of that sublime moment of a lifetime, or this instant for that matter. Mark Twain said “I’ve experienced a 1,000 horrible things in my lifetime, and some of them even happened.” If i am the beast all those fleeing from me will attest to, then i had better find a better channel for communication then the Rube Goldberg contraption a la Frank Baum which i managed to fortify myself with for the better part of my adult life - today is my 3rd day smoking 6 cigarettes a day. It seems to be enough to quiet the beast, the dilemma is which beast - that voracious wooly rebel ransacking all that which titillated and excited my young probing intellect, or is it the sanctimonious, severe, goody-two-shoes, that like Leonard Cohen`s - “the maestro calls it Mozart, but it sounds like bubble gum” mocks its own excellence or illusions thereof. I don’t know, i do know that Michel de Montaigne said about death to befriend it, to occupy your imagination with all that comes from that unknown and thereby remove the thorn of fear. This works with most things that are scary - get right up into its face and love the fuck out of it. But then it wouldn’t be called fear if it were that simple, nor would so many be so easily enslaved by its effects. It may be for this reason that psychiatry has been suborned to the darkside and made itself available to Guantanamo, facebook and the too-little-too-late “impeach the bum” talking heads. The more the outer world appears to change, the greater the need to command one’s own sphere above all others, or what Bob Dylan describes as the “greasy trail.”

It is now 12:56 pm and by design i will have my 3rd cigarette of 6 for the day at 1:30 pm. There is a perverse pleasure in running counter to that same abstinence i thrived on for a decade before my “fall.” Like all fears, the fear of restricting my beast to 6 a day was contrived and magnified by not taking the plunge and simply altering my behavior. Yet like all decisions - based on what criteria, even that delusional self talk which allowed for the “fall” included criteria that made it seem perfectly plausible to take up smoking after a 10 year hiatus. I do not regret the choice, because i like smoking - but i also enjoy being well and smoking is a dangerous past time. I was righteously turned out of the home at age 16, and spent my 17th birthday drinking competitively with an Irish las and a Scotch lad on a ferry between Amsterdam and London. I was emancipated in name, but am still attempting to re-familiarize so to speak. This is a more complex equation than some Pavlov’s dog variation that smoking reduction represents, and not. Because of my experiences i have developed a sense of self-respect that was born of William Blake’s paving stones of excess, but whether that long awaited self-regard is adequate to bridge the oceans of compassion we need between ourselves to survive as a species. I’m having a hard time allowing anyone close enough to find out. What does that tell you about espoused conviction and con - kidding, sort of. As was the case with tobacco re-initialization and the more practical reduction - so too it appears love may be. I can love all people, some more easily than others, much easier - but i no longer delude myself that my own love is meaningful to another, rather i am content to be as loving as i know how which includes the meditation of honoring in pencil tip an old curadora savagely betrayed by what later became the hipster doofus brigade, and this chant you are reading that i cast out into the rapidly evaporating aether, now being sucked into bitcoins for the enrichment of the same handful of human ciphers which have consigned our species to the dungheap of history.

Oddly, that does not frighten me - i have railed, cajoled and cheered ’til i’m blue in the face, but Orwell’s sage observation about sports and beer holds too true and it remains go Dodger Blue while the ruling class is hocking their next 3 generations into prisons for profit with nary a peep from the aggrieved. But i do not fear for them, anymore than i fear returning to star dust as my body decays and my name is forgotten while my life’s work become tchokyes of greater or lesser value gathering dust in the havoc of post human planet earth. I don’t understand why i am here, but i have done my level best to try and understand, including doing self-therapy of a kind in a vain effort to leave some signpost on this odd trail i now share with you. So what of that fear which i act on unawares, the dark one which Jung says becomes one’s fate if not welcomed into the labyrinth with all the other gargoyles and other pet monsters one accumulates over a lifetime of slaying dragons for that pretty girl who hands you heart back from out of your chest, while she walks away with a “real” dragon-slayer - kidding sort of. At this turn i’m not sure which holds greater respect from me - pretty girls or dragons. Perhaps like the beasts of my inner hell, i will befriend all the pretty girls and let them wander at will through my fantasies which for whatever reason have not entirely abandoned me. I can begin to understand why those further up the trail only seem to leave snacks, for it is god awful heavy dredging up something i hope will useful from this effort, or i just haven’t yet figured out how to leave a light line in the right spot with the right bait to bring me together with that fish seeking to have some fun with my odd ideas about fear and desire while leaving me whole - “they don’t let a woman kill you, not in the tower of song” - Leonard Cohen

“be not afraid” - Joseph T. Stevens 

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desire - the sonnet

i am a man with a lot of desire

i want love, peace, and dignity for all.

so how does my want create so much ire?

could be my want’s a “put” to the world’s “call”?

i have discovered much from my lacking,

what is essential what is incidental 

who is giving, who’s taking - who is king¿

what don’t figure is how they got such pull?

then again everybody knows - ‘cause they paying-

buying this - buying that - for what, for why

what i see’s a bunch of hunger and pain

from having what you can’t take when you die.

money is not the root of all evil

the root’s whatever ’tis that shames your will.

jts 10/20/2017

http://stoneartist.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

to be - the essay / not to be - the sonnet

“The ‘what should be’ never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no ‘what should be,’ there is only what is.” - Lenny Bruce

I am struck by the irony that i’ve lived in a time when the fable of “the sky is falling” actually has foundation in reality, and there is no boy crying wolf to be found. Many will still maintain what they declare is the sole truth of existence, but anymore i am finding fewer and fewer with questions about how exactly we have gotten into this painter’s corner we face. My drawing of Maria Sabina has become more of a refuge than any loving fantasy about the many beautiful women i have drawn these past few years. I am at a lost to explain why. When young, i was quite inquisitive about the parallel universe Sra. Sabina introduced to the many unscrupulous personalities riding the crest of post WW11 optimism. Near as i can tell, she had a fundamental reservation about why these characters were searching for god, rather than using what was for her, a medicine with which to heal. It is this misalignment of the fundamentals which seems to have a role in our current predicament - more irony that we are about to be anonymously incinerated by zealots at the behest of “their” god. I don’t know what god is or even whether i believe. I do believe there is good reason that the wisest of teachings stopped short of defining such mystical dimensions. Some descriptions i like are: the holiest prayer of the holiest sage barely touches the foot of god; the peace pipe is used to tickle the nose of god; “god is the inpenetrable.” - Albert Einstein. The sad truth is if we are not god, then there is no god. The whole notion of adhering to some prescription for divinity is fraught with  illogic. One is sanctified or one is not, how could it be otherwise. To believe if one only did this (fill in the blank__________) then one would be holy begs the question - what does the this refer to¿ Who is to say god does not want us all to do exactly what we are doing - destroying the human race, and thereby put an end to our species so that a more benign, less excoriating organism might take root on our magic orb and perhaps know peace, or that that hardy cockroach isn’t actually godhead who has allowed our species to congeal onto this current corrosive precipice simply out of boredom from having survived so long on the third rock from the sun?

Nor am i averse to the tenants of decency and wisdom found in all the scriptures which i guess makes me an Omnist - an omnist without a phone. I do not have much faith in the church of technology as it is, too much driven by the profiteers in our midst. In any exchange the one doing the taking does not hold nearly as much fascination for me as the one doing the giving, be that money, love or hate; but pound for pound it is that special breed of life that gives of oneself that completely intrigues me. This morning i had a funny black butterfly land momentarily on my tobacco smudged fingertips, i think i was as nearly touched by this as the text exchange i had with my Nepali love interest, both being miraculous in vastly different and implausible ways. As a re-reformed non-smoker the image of being touched by an ineffably delicate mariposa exacerbates my conflict about smoking, but confirms there are no condemned amongst us, only tense people. I only wish that i had within me a way to have given more to this winged creature who brightened my morning the same as i would hope to have with my young Nepali maiden. I do not know much about what is holy, but i’m fairly certain love is at the core, and if it is not - i know from personal experience love is a damn sight more fun than hate. Who doesn’t want to have fun; so just how does one go about loving? From what little i know, it begins by not hating which is a more complex concept than i had imagined when i first began my quest for unconditional love. If love is the absence of hate, also defined in Hindu scripture as “aversion,” what am i to do about all that to which i am averse - war, greed, cruelty? Yet these are concepts and definitions as much subject to the distortions of charlatans and usurpations of the unscrupulous, and as much a part of my own character as my hope for human survival. Is it simply a case of integration and acceptance of our own foibles? Could it be we might all be saved by admitting to our indecencies; was President Jimmy Carter truly the last leader of the free world when he copped to having “lust in his heart¿” This is where it gets dicey, how will that play out when i explain to my chaste maiden of the Himalayas that i am as struck by her beauty as her mind? Do i want to evaluate what i share with anyone predicated on how i imagine it will be received - that smacks of a level of manipulation for which i’m not interested, though i know well enough how it works, or at least well enough to feel it when it’s coming at me.

You see, fucking aversion - my own, and i’m swimming in it. Maybe that’s what’s really meant by water off a duck’s back. Do any of us have any real choice about what we are going to be? I choose love, because hate is tedious and foolish, while all of the best times in my life have been a direct result of love, including marriages, divorce/lessons, those christmases i compare to others, and most especially all of those people whose touch allowed me to more fully appreciate an itinerant mariposa in a foreign country. Can we make mariposas do anything, much less give love¿ That’s about as stupid as believing i have any control over the feelings of a young mountain maid. What little control i possess is personal and currently being mocked by my fantasy about smoking 6 cigarettes a day. However, i have learned something about being happy; i have found if i am patient with myself and allow for the time it takes to depict an image i enjoy, eventually something emerges that is oftentimes worth the struggle. If that is called art, so be it. Is that what it means to “be” - to look out over the horizon of possible choices and to gravitate toward that which seems to feel right¿ If so, what is the criteria one uses to define “right”? Would that be some magical result of our incessant socialization by parents, friends or ostensible rulers of the universe¿ I would not be the person i am without a measure of input from the world, yet the deeper i get into the miasma of our world and the further i am able to plumb the depths of my own darkness, the more i wonder whether choice is part of the equation at all. I can discipline myself until i am blue in the face, but that does not seem to affect the heart of any love interest i’ve ever known. I am beginning to doubt the conceit of any manner of efficacy knowing how diabolical my fears can be.  What is left upon which we might base our decisions - the will of the universe? If this is so, we are fucked big time. What is it Einstein said - “God does not play dice with the universe.” So we must have been betrayed by faith and its shills, our families are bloodied and broken, the money lenders are laughing at Jesus, and our mother’s womb - the oceans have become a piss-pot for the petrochemical concerns. Maybe Kojak was really on the trail, “who loves you, baby”?

What i have difficulty abandoning is the fight, not that gory bloodbath born of revenge for real or imagined offenses, but that Herculean effort to make one more line, to find one more flower .  .  . to feel one more love again. Is it really more like Jung’s quote “Where love rules there is no will to power, and where power predominates, there love is lacking”¿ I am convinced there is not fuck all i can do about my demise - will or no will, so all those fucking vendors peddling that pig-in-poke of everlasting anything are about as welcome at my table as my last wife, bless her heart. Besides, what exactly is there left for me to be so all fired willful about¿ Do i make a full court press and act on my instinct to run that shy young thing to ground and subject her to my love fantasies dressed as romance? No, but that doesn’t mean i can’t send love her way because i admire her style, and want to reinforce her very understandable awareness of her allure. I’m not sure i have enough soul left to be mortally wounded as i have been, whether or not my misery was self imposed. I do know that the fantasy of any perfect anything is worthless and vain. We are squirming piles of biomass with a short shelf life, but we are also imbued with the capacity for self-awareness that permits us to question our very most sacred cows - love, family, pride, humility and faith. Could it be this doubt is our best friend. Lao Tzu says “make self confidence your best friend” which i also prefer, but if i had to have anything riding shotgun, i’d prefer a skeptic to some of the arrogant pricks i’ve come across in my trek through life. Still in all, if i have to be something, i would rather be myself, for it seems one has very little choice about not being, unless of course one is a suicide afficionado; however this vocation comes with a much shorter shelf life than those who persist in puzzling the mystery, or even those for whom it has never occurred to entertain a question.

“Now that you know who you are, what are you going to be” - McCartney/Lennon. 

Ah . .  that sweet myopia of youth; I have said that i was many things during my life behind that fucking mask of ego, and now all i can say is thank god for the stranger who never told me no, that shaggy shambling beast haunting the caverns of my wounded heart quietly healing each and every self-inflicted wound. Wounds which while attributed to every avatar to whom i’ve ever given up the reigns, but who also ultimately disappointed and betrayed me, often without ever having known of their blunder. There is no one on the planet who can ever be for you what you are for yourself, so for god’s sake, or tobacco’s sake or even the sake of Sra. Maria Sabina’s sainted memory, be kind to yourself because there is no one who can ever do it for you, not even if they could crawl into your skin and shake hands with whichever agent of the ego answering the door at the time. But remember this, when you are unable to recognize the person in front of you as asking, demanding or begging by whatever behaviors they command for whatever it is which may result in your feeling assaulted, overwhelmed, insulted or loved is likely related to that same part of yourself which only you can know, otherwise you have likely lived a pretty empty existence. We are a single species and each of is simply that reflection of the other which through the lens of our experience we are able to understand about the other. The more you can hear what others know and feel, will reflect your efforts to see into your own heart and to know why and how you do whatever it is that makes you who you are. The exceptions are those lacking empathy for other and who while able to conceive emotion have no internal register - the ciphers amongst us now commanding, and not surprisingly inculcating the emergent Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology with the same inability for awareness and compassion toward human suffering that has resulted in the current profit driven distribution of our world’s dwindling and increasingly corrupted resources by using power over the weak to control through force and fear - in other words our current world leaders. If you wish to continue to be whatever it is you have found suits your unique capacities and desires, i would suggest you include a way to help others do the same - to be whatever it is they want. I choose to be happy because it improves my odds of finding like minded others, like you.

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not to be - the sonnet

i was raised not to be, but to become-

a loving well-intentioned oversight.

but helps some believe that sweet kid’s a bum.

Is that from only seeing what’s in the light.

it’s possible to not be what you are

but the effort is great, and not worthwhile.

maybe for a while, but you won’t get far.

except maybe to amass a great pile.

of what - remains the question no one asks

why’s that - could be easier than asking.

our work world makes little room for more tasks

except those that feed the greed of our king.

still and all i’ll never stop not to be 

what i am, just to be’n another's tree

jts 10/13/2017

http://stoneartist.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved