together - the essay / alone · a sonnet

I first met one of my closest friends the day after a windstorm blew down his fence. His father was repairing the damage, and i was young and strong thinking nothing of helping an old man do work. Years later, the then psychiatric intern son confided he thought me crazy for such behavior - i get that a lot, but not quite so qualified an opinion. Of course there was much else about our relationship that colored his thinking, me being an artist and, he being a doctor in the making. What made our relationship magical was our mutual interest in the other's vocation. He was naturally curious and unnaturally intelligent and i was crazy out of the womb with an unnatural capacity for 3 dimensional thinking and a congenital inability to perceive it with my 2 dimensional vision - we had fun for a time. He was older, and i was given to deference - a mostly defensive reaction formation to a world not easily viewed. Our first project, likely our only collaboration was a conceptual art deconstruction of his garage - 1930 era standalone two car garage in the bowels of Santa Ana. He had kindly provided space for my 2nd or 3rd carving because it was impossible to work in my single room. Apparently this experience touched us both powerfully, for i eventually participated in years of intensive psychoanalytic psycho therapy and he pursued passionately an avocation as artist. What is missing is the synchronicity and mutual enhancement from such a fortuitous relationship. Nor would this be an isolated instance of missed opportunity for aggrandized power. Of course i do not allude to his influence at every turn of my own dubious “mental health;” what i feel is missing is our mutual acknowledgement of a collaborative contribution to each other’s growth; is it even possible to do justice to the myriad of useful relationships each of us have had in our unique development?

“The secret of human freedom is to act well without attachment to the results” - The Bhagavad Gita

post-publication author’s amendment from dead-of-night ruminations - using the analytic skills learned from my friend’s powerful influence, it occurred to me consciously, then unconsciously just how much he had honored our creative relationship. 1) commissioning a dual portrait of he and his lovely wife. 2) confirming in a dream the accuracy of my deeper awareness by an image of great height reflecting the original graphic used which needs be replaced by their kindly commissioned portrait.

“People make themselves appear ridiculous when they are trying to know obscure things before they know themselves.” - Socrates

I mean to be free, for i was beaten senseless as a child anytime i showed surrender, kidding - sort of. The more critical aspect and why i take the time to discuss “togetherness,” there is a dead loss at humanity’s severance from each other. I recently watched a TED video from one of the progenitors of our “internetedness” wherein he minced words for the takeover of the human mind - euphemistically declaring it a huge mistake, but one which with determination could be rectified. According to this expert, all that would be necessary to tame the AI monster unleashed on the riders of the “information superhighway” is for us all to forgo the free information delusion of googol and fb and adhere to a paid subscription model; POOF ! ipso facto all the surveillance would magically evaporate, the click bait mentality foisted on the world would recede like the biblical parting of the waters, and the ever finer parsing of wealth would cease as if it were commandments 2.o - straight from the heavens - i say bullshit. Just as my hyper-educated friend glommed onto youthful creative elan and transferred its influence to origins of his own exhaustively, but clinically approved self analyzed motivation, sans moi. fuck it, who cares - if it helped, god bless him. If i could only find a way to free myself of the need to be recognized for what i feel to be a relentless quest to be decent, everything would be okay - not. We are humans fraught with consciousness, however aged, that still needs discipline like that of an infant. Do good, and forget about it - rinse and repeat. Given the types of curses i’ve seen past friends subjected to, this exhortation to do good is not as oppressive as a cocaine or heroin habit, and a damn sight less costly than any addiction to power and opulence.

As an older male, i find i am increasingly freed from the testosterone fueled face offs provoked by hunger for handsome pussy, but the cultural anchors at the heart of literature and manipulated internet fantasies remain as pernicious as hopes for healthy family relations. What strikes me as so sad about where we stand as a species, is how much different things might be with minor adjustments. I have found in drawings; i can fight for weeks to accomplish the right relationship between dark and light; mass and space; expression and depiction, but when the mark is made that links all the parts, it is often so slight, i wonder how it wasn’t more obvious before. I am beginning to suspect this process is not much different than what we as a species face - wouldn’t it be wonderful to think we were just a tweak away from paradise. It almost appears that the ruling class got drift of this idea early on, maybe from reading 1984, and armed with a handful of troglodytes have accomplished mayhem of, as Mr. Jaron Lanier might expostulate, a Nietzschean scale. We seem to have lost the capacity to work together, almost as though the only valid human effort is of a solitary nature. Most people i’ve ever known are noble in one way or another. It is odd that this effort toward decency i witness daily from others is somehow invisible. Today, i stopped on my way to mail a postcard to ma and bought olives in a single use plastic bag from an old woman on the street; she laughed at my reply, “still old” in answer to her question “how are you?” So i asked in return “how are you¿ to which she replied without batting an eye, “younger.” I told her i would pay for the secret if she cared to share - “i don’t resist getting old,” her reply. The pittance i paid for such knowledge under different circumstances would be robbery, but she was as happy when i left, as when i found her.

Is that what it means to be together - a simple give-and-take with all parties as well or better off then before? The owners of where i live just returned with their grandson from his flute lessons. I am certain he does not understand how much happiness he has given them, nor am i sure they quite know how much more than the gift of music they bestow with this weekly ritual; it is enormously fortifying to watch such a dance in a personal sphere, and i hope each who reads this finds some example of selfless devotion in the interest of another. We are being driven to extinction by a handful who have convinced the rest that only in service of some Ayn Randian commitment of solitary achievement that all mankind will somehow be raised to a pinnacle that best represents our collective worth - greatest wealth, highest height, fastest time, most ______ fill in the blank. I don’t understand this anymore than i understand a woman who wants confirmation of my love from the dead bodies i have piled up protecting her. I concur that each individual strive to her/his utmost, it is the end game i question. I seek not the pinnacle, but the root. I do not envy the Rothschilds a good god damn, and i’ve seen pictures of the opulence; charts representing their range of influence; read theories on the achievement they understandably obscure, if only for its ugliness. War seems to the the only product the wealthiest amongst us has conceived, and i find that pathetic. . . after an interlude of connection with my neighbor, the tortured tin smith, i return to a change of music from Tom Waits singing his musical version of Hopper’s Nighthawks does Nirvana to Woody Guthrie. We are woven into a magnificent human tapestry that is being rended needlessly. Each of us possesses some thing of use to everyone we meet, but we are forced by an outworn adherence to gain and loss and so then withhold what we have leaned and know from each other, believing somehow this paltry professional knowledge will somehow manifest into great riches if only we can befriend, manipulate, cajole or intimidate the right person to our will.

What bullshit. We are collectively little more than bugs creating heat in an increasingly heated vacuum within a vast expanse of cold comprised almost entirely of a dark matter we have yet to describe. Our ancestors were fortunate to have the common objective of beauty. Today i saw while scrolling, an earthworks divide between Wales and England. As futile as such an example of our vast capacity as human beings is, it pales compared to what reality demands from us now - whether our species deserves to replicate itself. “Smart money” is bent on creating single generation food seeds for no other reason than profit. That blows my mind, or as Pop might have said, “it discombuberates me. The consequences of such stupidity boggles the mind. I am stupid, but hopeful; i feel as a voice in the wilderness; but, hoot i will, for i’ve seen the human soul on fire. There is nothing virtual about it, unless it be the striking resemblance between human passion and our ultimate benefactor Papa Sol. The irony that our spontaneous combustion might prove to have been a self-inflicted wound born of greed and laziness is rich. That we have irradiated the primordial muck our forebears crawled from and corrupted its abundant life with the waste of our conceits does not bode well for a safe landing with our wax wings. However, we are also full of Helen Keller resourcefulness and Colin Kaepernick courage, besides i don’t hear no fat lady singing. So if you’re reading this on a phone, lose it. Life will not be easier without it, for the capitalists have nearly arranged things so you cannot live without your +/- 5v manacle; i can testify to that fact, but the focus on people’s faces in their scrolling search for what is literally right in front of them is well worth any inconvenience. Sadly, our digital undoing may actually hold the key to our survival. It is first necessary to learn how to distinguish the corporate siren song screeching through your apparatus into your mind as just a voice with an agenda foreign to your best interest, then to take control over this instrument and point it at what you deem to be useful - broadcast - express yourself and your genuine hope for the welfare of all humanity before you become collateral damage from the occupation of planet earth by the 1%.

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alone - a sonnet

it is not possible to be alone

away perhaps, but never really gone.

even if dust’s all that’s left - still once bone

though night be real dark, that day - still once dawn.

a baby born arrives with its mother

if she’s lucky s/he will love her passing.

Die alone if you want to discover

who the person is your ma was nursing.

the myth you are apart from anything,

while more clear when swapping spit with your dear,

is more clear with the air you share just being,

or star tossed atoms passing through your ear.

the ego is only named, though enough

to twist the softest of hearts until rough

jts 04/16/2018

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

advantage - an essay / disadvantage - the sonnet

It isn’t often i rewrite an entire 5 paragraph essay - this will be my 2nd attempt to explore some meanings of advantage. Be advised it may contain references to family - so if you’re the squeamish sort, look away now. Growing up i loved my family more than is healthy, which perplexes me to this day. How can a feeling so buoyant and full of promise as waking up on a spring day to a full day of baseball, become as scabrous and burdensome as a wake for a loved one that never ends? The good news is, i am entirely responsible; the bad news is, i am entirely responsible. Nor am i sure how to explain which is which. As with most good stories of the human kind, it involves tension between the flesh and the spirit. In this case an antique, owned by the most loving personality i can recall from my early years - great grandma Munner who could make the arrival of mail sound like the birth of Christ - “How Grand! How Wonderful! How Splendid”, also the same woman who stiffed my old man for his share of the family home at 1024 W 20th St, Los Anngeles - built by my great grandfather; the 2nd home in L.A. built by an ancestor. When pop died, somehow the letter explaining this decision to my grandmother came to me. The man who received the entire proceeds of the family home, cousin Charles, was a decent enough guy, but hardly worth the entire share. This event made pop tough as nails concerning some 'things' and dumb as a post regards sentiment. Having nothing but conjecture, to explain this decision, I imagine the idea was to give Charles, the elder more powerful cousin, a leg up; from which he was to then reach down lend a hand. This same fiction played out on the maternal side with my great Aunt Eula, putting grandmother Maude through school, yet when it came time, Maude absented herself to teach in the badlands of Nevada where she met; married and bore 3 children in quick succession to my grandpa Joe. Sister Eula, without a degree then pursued a civil service career where she climbed through ranks eventually providing home, security and companionship to the college educated, but given-to-vapors, sister Maude - now with 3 children and a never gonna strike-it-rich, miner husband Joe, 20 years her senior. In my travels, i’ve crossed paths with many people from other cultures encouraged to some fantasy about the easy lives of ‘mericans - easy betrayals perhaps, fictional alliances maybe - the only ones living the good life in ‘merica are the ones born on third base thinking they hit a triple.

My oldest brother emulated Charles and pursued a life as labor leader. How much of this vocation was unconsciously telegraphed to him through pop’s processing of a savage family betrayal, i’m sure i’ll never know, same as i will likely never find out much about my eldest brother; we are not close. I was cross-eyed and loud as a child, the loud part coming from a ruptured eardrum making voice modulation difficult for one already given to enthusiasm. I’m fairly certain my quiet brother felt the unfortunate medical focus i received as the Identified Patient (IP) in our highly dysfunctional family constellation was somehow an advantage that was rightly his as the oldest sibling - but i fear we’ll never know the answer to that question - battle lines having been drawn and tender hearts hardened. For years i believed i could prevail over the circumstances of my birth and encourage love from my recalcitrant older siblings. Any advantages that beauty and rank in the family order conferred, were not of the sharing kind. So the path to individuation seemed the only advantage left to me, the misbegotten fool. It didn’t cause too much permanent damage that as the IP i was introduced to the vocabulary for the mentally ill - neurotic, depression, inferiority complex - words no young person should ever learn when expressions like fuck you, eat shit and die, your mother wears army boots are available. The real advantage of my upbringing was the conceit of education, for my father truly believed that everything could be understood when properly studied, including my mother; this patronizing patience of pa’s drove ma wiggy, for she was having a difficult enough time attempting to reconcile the multigenerational malignant narcissistic disorder and the reality of the dirt-floor-kitchen summers spent with her father in the wilds of Nevada and the southern belle airs of her maiden aunt and conveniently delicate, but college educated mother in prewar Los Angeles. It is no small wonder my family is conflicted about love, much less  positions of power and objects of worth. Ma eventually shook pa off like a bad cold and honed her skills as a beauty of consequence, foot loose in the opulent broken-home terrain of post WWII, pre 'OC' Orange County California.

To her, i am sure she felt these changes were to her advantage, and i would not fault her apparent success in the world. My responsibility to myself is to disentangle the real person she is from the cartoon cutout Beverly Hills maven she was to become as the 2nd wife to a Jewish insurance CEO - an entirely decent man himself, though his office referred to him as the 'Ayatollah' - a sadly ironic jibe at the pre 9-11 Iranian fanatic before the current genocidal mayhem of the zionists in Palestine. Had the world ended then, i think my entire family would have died happy - sadly, even pop. The pernicious influence of wealth, and its trappings eventually seeped into the empty recesses of my hungry family. Our fates had been sealed long before the delusion of wealth and power lowered its veil over our hearts and colored our visions of success. My stepfather was a standup guy, but the introduction of 'plenty' into my family’s impoverished roots created a growth we will never dig out from under. It has created craven appetites and desires that may well have subsided without the Faustian banquet a Beverly Hills address provided. To have the possibility which riches can represent waved in front of you, is not unlike Dicken’s Great Expectations - a lot of smoke and mirrors. When a larger-than-life proxy parent looks at your latest creative effort and drunkenly quips, “fuck ‘em, we’ll hire the whole god damn gallery,” it is easy to not see the 3 whiskeys talking, nor understand the routine office braggadocio of the corporate world; i later learned the fine line between truth and fiction in the upper echelons. I met my last wife one Thanksgiving within this cauldron of confusion; she taught me a lot about taking advantage. At that time depending on one’s perspective, she was the housepainter/waif/occupying force. For my step father, i became the interloper, for ma, living proof her twice married son was not a total washout, and a convenient foil for her husband's errant interest. 20 years later, 5 years after my divorce to her former rival, ma was compelled to point this woman only married me because i had a rich mother.

The peculiar thing about that story is i’m fairly certain ma thought that by telling me, she was giving me some kind of advantage. The real curiosity is why she waited so long to share¿ This may become a real problem for the entire family - waiting for some perfect moment to open their hearts again and to begin anew. I fear greed has taken too deep a root and is now finding fertile soil in the minds of the children’s children. Is this how the fiction of a growing economy is propagated - to find a sufficiently conflicted upwardly mobile family constellation; expose them, like Pip, to the trappings of ease and comfort, just enough to compromise normally humane and generous feelings for each other, and then let greed grow like the weed it is from heart to heart until it has destroyed everything in its path, except that one successful person who then goes off and infects some other family constellation susceptible to starvation-based ambition¿ For a time, i worked in a major corporate commercial real estate firm - 7 years. It is no small coincidence this job coincided with the collapse of my last marriage. That a person of my political persuasions would have ever been caught dead in such a working environment is the important question. I am not immune to greed, but it took a long time for me to parse that aspect of my character; i still have not found a vaccine. Taking advantage seems ingrained within the human DNA; it may be what allowed us to take the high ground when cooperatively fighting Mastodons. However, in those days family wisdom was passed down generation to generation, whereas more often today families are estranged from each other or the language that is not taboo is so normalized or culturally coopted, where for example buen provecho, 'good advantage is conflated with bon appetit, good health', that we’ve lost the capacity to take real advantage of that keen intellect which distinguished us from the larger, faster and meaner creatures of our past. I do know from my experience in the office and civil service cultures, you will find the same mix of decency vs pathological avarice that you might find in most every other demographic. 

This writing exercise began in an attempt to clarify a heartfelt, however ungenerous position to estranged, disinterested family members. It is not necessary to recount the morbid details; suffice it to say the anguish i shared was from a much younger version of myself who wanted to believe he could influence older siblings into generosity and love by contrasting perspectives. It didn’t work when young, and i’m fairly certain it won’t now. What does work is the process of open, honest, and gentle expression of one’s interior. It may be that what i seek, more than any material claim is simple human communication. To not be barricaded from what had once been a safe haven, however dangerous environ, can be a very damaging experience. Like Bob Dylan said, “You can always come back, you just can’t come back all the way.” Some places and some people are only meant to be with us for a time, and no amount of money, or planning or manipulation will alter that fact. We live in a temporary realm which from the changing perspectives of our relative ages and understanding only appears to be stable and inalterable. The real change that takes place is our capacity to reckon with a highly mutable reality - to adapt and to learn whatever will aid in relieving oneself of a socialized fiction that ownership is anything other than a tired refrain destroying relationships, nations, and the planet. The person who appears to be invulnerable is dying inside for having to maintain an impossible fiction. To the amoral sociopaths amongst, us death may be little more than a curiosity, for the balance of humanity the real advantage of being alive is to give to others as much of oneself as is possible - with my father those gifts were tools and a hunger to dig deeply into the mystery of existence; then to share that knowledge with everyone; for ma, it was a realtime demonstration of the mutability of the human personality. She has been as honest about her desires, hungers and pathology as any human being i have ever known, whether or not that influence becomes an advantage for me, time will only tell.

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disadvantage - the sonnet

  

Controlling must be a disadvantage;

unlike herding a swarm of butterflies

where “lead, i’ll follow” - is an adage

more than useful, it actually applies.

Wanting what doesn’t exist, makes no sense.

So why spend a lifetime hiding from death?

Can’t buy a pass with a gazillion cents;

yet, they steal yours like it were their last breath.

Carrying other’s weight, can’t be useful,

though we wear our parent’s dreams like a suit;

sometimes armor built with plate by spoonful,

sometimes, dreams of joy dressed up as more loot.

The odd thing being, they - the most disadvantaged 

get little from life, save what they’ve vantaged

jts 04/02/2018

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com

all rights reserved 

∞