One spring Saturday morning when young enough to treasure baseball and green grass, i was tasked with vacuuming my room i did so in the most cursory manner possible. It was to become one of those formative moments that only makes sense much latter in life, like about now. Pop wasn’t impressed with my effort and told me so, and i did not possess sufficient respect for his opinion. It became a contentious pattern of “irresistible force and immovable object” that would also serve us each much better later in life, drawing us closer. However this particular saturday morning, the normally immovable object clasped its hand over mine and patiently vacuumed into the nether regions under mine and my brother's desks, and along with other grosser oversights. This same man, exacted a solemn promise from me before he died that i would never stop writing - ergo. From this seemingly retentive indoctrination i wandered into the infernally sacred world of integrity, however my own efforts toward meaning in an inchoate atomic vapor have gradually massed - lucky you. I know for certain my life would have been far more vacant without my dogged struggle to understand the meaning of that Saturday oh so long ago. Today, i’d rather be drawing than tearing my heart out of my chest using letters to make sense for a reader already fraught with altogether too much guilty pleasure of reading with so much scrolling left to do in the day. But here i sit pondering how to advocate ideas about responsibility to people whose thinking i’d rather not change¿ It has become painfully clear to me that where i live has an expectation with it that the “1st floor respond to the front door - i resist; not because i don’t wish to be of service, but because i am here on the 1st floor to work, i feel compelled to do just that. Sometime recently a statement made to me by an old love “nobody is going to do for you, you have to do for yourself;” this kind quote drove home the question of in whose interest is help. It has also heightened my awareness of how important it is to honor those who have shown kindness by returning kindness back out to the larger world.
Dorothy Parker - “I hate writing, I love having written.”
I’ve wandered past the point of noreturn and placed the eyes in my latest drawing, and it doesn’t help that her lips are what can only be described as a luscious red - most of the guideposts prior to the point of noreturn consist of a blind faith that if you piece together enough marks, eventually they begin to seek each other out and one who can follow begins to find paths. - depending entirely on one’s capacity to follow anything. My weekly postcard to ma has been moved out days by the drawing - the dissonance of which is complicated in ways a 5 paragraph essay have not yet explained. So the steps necessary to comply with a dying man’s request are part of what’s at stake when i hear any knock on the door. I dropped my last phone on a rooftop in Uruguay, and before it hit the cement, i had decided not to replace it - talk about your knocks on the door, +5v zzzZt -5v zzzZt +5v zzzZt -5v zzzZt +5v zzzZt -5v zzzZt . . . ∞ the loss of bandwidth has been well worth the convenience of boycotting bezo’s amazon without breaking a sweat. Dissonance demands disclosure in the temple of the soul and issues of self-discipline need be laid bare. I just listened to Johnny Cash sing “Satisfied Mind” written by Red Hayes and Jack Rhodes; one the manifold benefits of self-discipline is supple flexibility - fucking paradox: ya’ can’t live with it, and ya’ can’t shoot it. It comes down to pussy - the eternal yin yang, even Leonard Cohen’s “delta of the alpha the omega” - Pema herself - “things come together; things fall apart”. Even moderation has its limits and from “time to time, shit just gets crazy.” - A. Nonymous. So i resort to activities which led to happiness, having written, forexample - is it possible that ignoring spell check long enough the morphed version is embedded in the library? I ask because in reviewing my text i joined no and return to find it was a single word no different than forexample, you see - two rings on forexample, DING, DING DING . . . 3. Who knew editing AI could be so much fun, if only people were so amenable - said no lover to each other ever .
The birds are whiffling outside my window, and i’m on schedule to even get some drawing in today - i learned from stonecarving - another wannabe one word miscreant: “wannabe” already having been absorbed into the errorless spellcheckaether. Eroticism can be inflaming to the spirit, yet love is the engine of survival according to Mr. Cohen. Where is the demarcation where passion is not destructive, or selfish? I wonder at times if rigidness of purpose is an interloper to the world of logic. Is it sufficient to accept constancy is a fiction and wander to Johnny Cash, or try to describe impossible things which somehow coalesce, if done enough times, like pluck fastic¿ How many time in polite company have you wanted to drop some truth on somebody, but shied away not wishing to give offense? I feel ya’. Is there really anything that should not be spoken of -¿- have we collectively shamed ourselves into believing that war on humans, drugs or even war on mother earth is anything but a moral evil, but to rail against such is disallowed and dangerous. That the monster monsatan named its poison roundup is an irony even i cannot resist. The dissonance provoking this 'try' on the topic of discipline could be as simple as guilt - an entirely self-imposed rebuke born of moderate excess. Bob Dylan - “I’m okay with chaos, not sure if chaos is okay with me” The point is whether discipline is a worthy subject, but whether discipline is worthy. I can say for certain it has been; my father allowed no arms out the car windows, and to this day i have all my limbs; i have sonnets; i have stone carvings, and now i will possess an essay devoted to the subject of discipline. I guess you have a pretty good idea about how good i am at devotion - more like plodding - step lightly has taken on remarkable changes in meaning of late. I’m pretty sure that issues of “core” are at stake in the temple of the soul - core dump taking on a whole new meaning in the cybertronics fantasyland of today's rulers. This dystopian take on technological advance is born of long chawed thoughts on integrity from a saturday morning with Pa years ago.
I may be hypersensitive to 1st floor expectations from already having been a conscripted concierge at a pensione in Montevideo, or is that one does something until it is done and then moves on to something else. I was unable as a child to paint by numbers, a failure which haunts me to this day. If only i could decipher the codes - the world would be safe and ‘merica gr8 again - not. There is no code, we are not going to be rescued, and as she-who’d-been-queen said once, “nobody is going to do for you, you have to do for yourself.” It seemed like a good idea at the time, like so many good ideas, “yeah, that’s it! i’m a ‘stonecutter’ - what could go wrong¿” kidding, sort of. At the time it was one of the few things i can remember feeling if it all ends now - i will not be condemned for what i was then doing. Just now the man making his living hauling castoffs parked his well laden truck over a 2-day old cement patch - This patch of the commonwealth only required eight days to cure for it to last centuries as well-cured cement in our overly cemented world bears out. It reflects the lack of collective discipline we have come to today where to muster barriers that bars traffic for the good of all is fraught with controversy. As it happens - barriers have become a hot topic for it is obstruction of traffic the opposition is using to make its point in the city i reside. Nor is it unique in the annals of protest - having taken 5 hours one day to move a rented car 1,000 yards at the airport in Marseilles. I swear solidarity must be at times sister paradox laughing at her favorite fool. It is difficult enough to make my cigarettes back to 6 again, how would it be possible to distill the world’s protest into a single voice? My struggle with language has not been so much to curtail, as to make the unexpressed - expressed. Given ours may be the last voices having witnessed some part of our fascinating future, it would seem so sad to have left one 'i love you unexpressed', even though 'i love you might sometimes come out as fuck you.' - "Ambiguity is the handmaiden to her sister paradox.” - A. Nonymous.
The clock is ticking and i can feel the time in front of hot lips receding - is it discipline to plod on, or is this scribble a variation of Pavlov’s Dogs and thoughtless mimicry a family variation of today's cellular +/- 5v zzsZt prod? How many in the audience knew the french meaning of essay is “to try”¿ I did not try to replace the barriers that were thoughtlessly removed, i did not delve into the darker aspects of discipline; is discipline also the ability to refrain from action? If ambiguity is paradoxes handmaiden, then certainly ambivalence holds the whip. I liked skateboards when my frame matched my affections, it was the fluidness of rolling so foreign to walking and its compressions that drew me in before ego and and its fake tricks distracted me. Lao Tzu apocryphally describes thoughts as monkeys swinging through the trees - fun to watch. There are many civilizations that have crashed and burned for as many reasons as there are scholars, i’d be willing to bet the metrics will prove out that the social systems which failed correspond to metrics reflecting a loss of self-discipline. And as anyone who has quite smoking - discipline doesn’t have as much to do with the proess as desire - a moral question even - do you honor the temple you occupy to pray in for a short time in this domain. I’ve had occasion to be around severely disciplined individuals but the landscape is a tad stark for me. I wonder if i have restricted my own being in the process of hewing out time and resources to do what i have found yields small happiness if practiced long enough. I can’t say how you spent your afternoon, but i have found questions about an activity i believed myself to have mastered - self control. The release i have found in allotting my days to what i do provides the patience to not do anything. When we are in a target-rich environment of must do’s as this world is clearly, the youngish tendency is to muscle through, but the more practical truth is to not waste ammo. The most powerful weapon we possess today is our minds, so fuck 'success or fail' - find your bliss and apply your potty training.
@ the event horizon of discipline - this "try" has been semi-selfreviewed . . . read at your own risk . .
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chaos - the sonnet
some fridays where i live are close to chaos
as i’d care be, struggling free from order.
watching the calle can school one on loss-
mythologizing gain at the border.
humans die based on the color of skin
i barely see color from light or shadow
how could i ever know from kith or kin
much less which shoulders off whose heads shall blow
death is not chaotic, war is very.
“the that way to hide leaders
i would ask “they” to make “it” less scary
“they” could make some places with fewer fears.
“she” said you can befriend uncertainty!
could it be so simple - be and let be?
jts 06/04/2018
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
∞
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