communication - an essay / silence - the sonnet

My father was given to homilies, and i remember hanging up from phone calls with him where he’d invariably close the call saying “communicate.” Like all good advice, it’s easy to hear - a little more difficult to put into practice. I have read where a huge percentage of all human communication involves body language. We derive a great deal of information from cues found in the posture and carriage of other human beings - filling language with elegant phrases like “turn of a woman’s ankle.” The question becomes what is understood by whom based on what¿ I can say with good authority that many a woman’s turned ankle was saying nothing at all to me; ah misunderstanding and what it can teach us if we are good students. Awareness is a solid partner to the barely understood and often maligned effort which communication brings to any exchange. In order to convey a thought or feeling, one must have an idea or sense that might be of interest to the right party. Not all turned ankles are speaking directly to you; so how to learn which ankle is the one that beckons with all the delight and joy that might accompany such a quiet expression¿ I’m beginning to have my doubts that a computer is capable of conveying such complicated communication; which if true, means that communicating the fundamental nature of allure via screen does not bode well for parsing the manifest other pressing misunderstandings in our rapidly devolving civil fabric, much less the rapidly evolving isolation of the human soul.

My skin is the boundary of my self-awareness with my aged senses informing a fading echo of the sharp rich odors and sounds of youth. However, as with all vacuums, the fallow field wants to grow something. It is almost as though as the world recedes with all its attendant distractions the stranger i’ve avoided all my life grows more confident that it might be heard. Memories become just that, faded echoes of events no longer present to the senses - love, hate, want, misery. All once vivid demands from a complex interchange of indoctrination, assimilation and socialization now cardboard cutouts with balloon voices repeating ancient litanies about exhausted turmoil. The stranger within is vastly more comfortable with these specters of past power than what my withering “i” is willing to accede. The self once so intent on satisfaction of all urges has trouble ceding ground that doesn’t result in accomplishment or gain, while the stranger seems more content just to be heard. However, like the honest misunderstanding of the lady’s “turn of an ankle,” simply because my quiet stranger was not the one being addressed at the time does not mean the dame’s own stranger was not expressing a want, just not a want for me. My internal stranger conveys much want when not shouted over by what Leonard Cohen wrote as “the blizzard of the world” or at least that is what i’m beginning to hear. Perhaps my life would simplify if i just allowed my interior to speak its desire and fly with any yes or no reply. 

I accept that any reader considering the forgoing abstruse dialogue would require persistence to locate meaning, yet if there is this much difficulty for one person to make clear basic ideas about self-awareness, how much more difficult must it be for all of us to discuss with others far more complex issues such as shame, fury, fear or hatred, most especially in a media culture filling itself up to the rafters on scandal and excess¿ For myself it has become very important to learn how to hear without taking a position, save understanding. Is the woman’s ankle turn addressing me; is my prostate hardening; is the war i object to mine; is en vino veritas true - ad nauseam¿ That the universe could be as curious as i aspire to is very encouraging, yet if i’m as obstinate a student as when young, what could i possibly learn from a curious universe whatever its dimensionality¿ Awareness is a correlation of communication in so far as one can barely speak of what isn’t known - an interesting intersection in the top secret world of ours. A paradox for me is the concept of what can possibly be known outside of one’s own self. If love is relinquishing: where love predominates will is absent; where will predominates, love is absent - paraphrasing Carl G. Jung, what can i affect but myself. So too with awareness, craving a woman will teach me very little about her, while watching her ankles can be quite instructive.

Understanding the world and possible meanings of reality about our existence is not going to give up much ground from a frontal assault. I could join a militia that adheres to my particular flavor of freedom and proceed to take no prisoners, but then i couldn’t sit here and share my confusion with others as puzzled as myself, possibly more so - maybe you will help me find other members of my tribe - stranger things have happened¿ I’m becoming more certain that fun, nee happiness is closer to the core than anything normally   found virtually anywhere, and its far cheaper - air travel being the climate change elephant with its footprints in the jello, so to speak. You didn’t really think tripadvisor, hostelworld, couchsurfing etc., etc., etc., were just touching base to know you’se well - didja¿ Wherever you go - there you are. The dilemma goes back to an argument i had with a young engineer - his position being “knowledge is finite” vs my continued belief how can you say what you don’t know. Are we species simply the micro to the universal macro¿ Rumi says we are not a drop in the ocean, but the ocean in a drop. If true, introspection takes on a whole new wrinkle. What if my reticent stranger whom i am only beginning to appreciate was actually “the” stranger and we are just notes in g_d’s song¿ As yet, i’ve never read anything to prove this potentially heretical idea false, but the administration is young still. What is useful regards an honest desire to communicate¿ This is a complex question for me because there are many who are close and not so close who would, if not shut me up altogether, then at the very least have license over my tongue. This awareness is grievous, but i’m unsure whose sadness it is. My stranger has heard awful things spoken yet because it has never harmed me as the faded echoes of memory have, i feel more safe with myself than anyone i’ve ever known, and i’ve known some very loving people in my very fortunate existence.

The further i travel the greater the mystery; i will feel better when i can say the same for fun, nee happiness. I know the essence of my happiness is not virtual; the corollary would be that my faded memories left because i no longer made them happy - it would be insane to believe oneself so powerful as to make another happy, unhappy, angry, sad, strong, weak, better or less. I have found i am more comfortable with crazy people once i learned it is not contagious, but it can be a perilous contact high if they are beautiful or hallucinating. My deeper concern is welcoming home the stranger who has patiently waited to share my heart’s desire. I believe it be nearly impossible to give kindness to another if one has not found within one’s own skin a deep and abiding warm regard for one’s life. I also believe that if one acts from this warm regard it is possible to know better one’s own pain, suffering and inimical factotum born of our collective history within a dark and sometimes dangerous world. The fact remains the more things change, the more they remain the same and it will likely be true as it is now that when you are born crying while everyone around you’s laughing; and when you die laughing, those around will be crying. But the in-between time when you have the opportunity to “leave the world a better than you found it” - Jane Sterling, is where your internal quiet stranger has a chance for redemption and reintegration if one can still hear the serenade of a mother’s laughter or cadence of prayer in a father’s important lesson throughout the places one visits or rests one must acknowledge with respect to our human frailty.

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silence - the sonnet

it is quiet on a Sunday morning
but somewhere in the world there’s too much noise-

crying in the eyes of children mourning

something that can’t be done with any poise.

what is the sound beyond the human grief-

is it love, or an infant in deep sleep¿

why is our good ship earth stuck on a reef

so dire, while the good captains make no peep¿

is a tornado core eerie’n silent?

is our world a tornado core- passing

with zephyr winds foretelling bad intent,

or have we learned and all our hearts massing¿

it seems to me the quiet that is found

while loud beats calm with silence all around

  

jts 06/30/2017

http://stoneartist.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

asleep - an essay / awake - the sonnet

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 

gone - an essay / going - the sonnet

I am leaving a place where i’ve lived for some 5 months. There are many conflicting emotions which i’d like to sort out if i knew how. Are humans capable of selecting what they feel, or is the challenge simply to recognize as much as possible the dimensions of one’s emotions - or a blend of both - to understand what one is experiencing and to then choose the “appropriate” response? i don’t know. It would certainly simplify most matters if we as a species could know as much as possible about what we are feeling at any given moment, and to then make an informed decision about which way to turn - fight or flight, as they describe the lizard reflex. It is 6:30 am on the day of my departure, and ordinarily i’d have spent the next 3 1/2 hours sucking on the internet tit, but mysterious circumstances have rendered the internet inaccessible. A suspicious component of my character attributes a petty vindictiveness by the proprietors of where i’m leaving, nor is my unease entirely a projection of the expected anxiety that attends moves such as i am undertaking. Part of the difficulty in going anywhere is to be where one is welcomed and comfortable; those conditions do not describe my current habitation, and there is no fault. There is little i can do to change the suspicious attribute in my character, for that would be like asking a leopard to change its spots, but there is much i can do about which behavior i choose for company. I’ve watched three biographies recently when access was allowed - John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Each of these stories described, in part, individuals who had been swallowed by the personas attributed to them by the coercion of fame. If i’ve stumbled into an environment where those in a position of responsibility would employ deprivation, be it internet, water, respect etc., to express a conflict in their hearts, the only rational response is warmheartedness regardless of how valid my suspicions might be.

I know very little about my destination, outside of its address and vicinity within a larger town. If my lack of access to the internet where i am is a desperate act expressing some inexpressible feeling, the compassion of warmheartedness is the most generous path i could choose and if the lack of internet service is simply the synchronicity of a greater mystery, then the logic of warmheartedness is a gift to myself as well as a suitable lens with which to gaze ahead into the unknown. Each of the writers mentioned above at the end of their lives seemed to have deprived themselves of this option, with two taking their own lives, and the 3rd dying from self inflicted cardiopulmonary collapse due to excessive drinking and smoking. I do know that each tackled the thornier issues of their day rather than slap a happy patina on their prose and upload content into the “clickbait factory” nee “dream machine”. Lao Tzu says “be content with what you have, and the whole world belongs to you.” I’ve thought of this often during the past 5 months, for there is much that is suitable about my lodging and i’ve accomplished good work, it is the sense of community that feels absent. This notion of community is a complex issue for me but is close to love of family, for that is what is left to me based on choices i’ve made in my life. One can never really remove oneself, or be removed from the birth family you were born into; where one chooses to live and keep one’s heart is an entirely different matter. I choose to be near any loving vibration because i have much to learn about how to manifest that sense. I am motivated partly by depravation like a thirsty traveler looking for moisture, but my travels have encouraged me to also see how thirsty all human beings are; where i am now leaving is a perfect example.

There is a tangible lack that seems to have informed every choice made in this environment; from an excessive dog pack, to manifold cisterns for holding water in a declining water table within a historical agricultural community. On the surface it would seem a copacetic, even idyllic site with ample, in a stinted kind of way, appointments. What is built into the situation that would not be expected based on its alternative-to-the-status-quo facade is a rigid ordinate/subordinate hierarchy replete with locked-away-tools, derogatory remarks about the worthiness of the area’s historical inhabitants and an almost palpable contempt for those they would ostensibly be hosting. I’ve done my level best to understand without judgement; i greatly admire the courage and pluck it took to uproot and build an estate in a foreign land; i have to ask myself at what cost¿ While weighing my decision whether to remain, knowing what i knew about the behaviors and prejudices of my hosts it was tempting to assume a superior air - if for no other reason than the illusion of autonomy within a deceptively closed society. But that is not helpful, nor warmhearted because i’d be simply be mimicking what i don’t understand. What i did find in my effort to understand was greater coercion to comply, and still i don’t understand . .  . two days later in my new digs: Polar opposites seems to characterize my life including the backseat-driver diagnoses of manic depression, blended with a touch of narcissism for taste my family uses to describe their various demons. Unfortunately one’s skin is not escapable, so i spend my time seeking peace with my demons and freedom from all fear.

My room opens into the main entrance hallway to the building; my bathroom windows open into the same hallway, so the sound of family dinners mixes nicely with whatever i may be watching as i go to sleep. The journey i’m on will not conclude here as far as i know, nor am i in any hurry to depart. The hosts are kindly, warm and native. Unbidden by me a nephew brought a board that had been fabricated to facilitate my drawing efforts - it was the single most kind gesture i can remember in my life. But this is the key, i felt no compulsion to accept. I can only hope my execrable translation adequately conveyed my astonished gratitude. I do not know the customs, but am counting on honesty to carry the day. It is too close to my demise to curry favor by accepting kindness that would not serve any purpose - i do not want to die fake. Like emerging from some sort of cocoon, over the past 5 months i’ve been forced to not only neuter a pathological hunger to help, but also tempt fate by honestly expressing what i need and don’t need. We, as a species, may have lost sight of the real journey’s that are our lives - transformation. I’m constantly struck by the transition of my own thinking - the wholesale rejection of previous convictions and prejudice in favor of more practical solutions; even the elusive avatar of self awareness seems to come in and out of focus. There are moments when i re-experience sentiments, glimpses of former realities as filtered through visceral memory like revisiting former haunts that remain similar but no longer contain any ghost of a former self - if that makes any sense.

I do know that just as we are a portable population more so than anytime in human history, so too is the terrain of our interiors subject to decisions of itinerary. We have the capacity to choose a destination and then take those steps necessary to arrive in the vicinity of that destination. But just like arriving someplace you’ve never been, it is impossible to know about the mystery and depth of your destination until you’ve undertaken the effort to satisfy your wants and needs. For example, if you decide that warmheartedness is the place you want to live, and you arrive there only to find yourself lacking nourishment and rest. It doesn’t mean that you are in the wrong place only that you haven’t yet found the resources that your unique character requires to thrive. What is important is that you are searching based on what you know about yourself, that which feeds your appetite. I am lucky to have learned that struggle is part of my hunger and that drawing and writing provide barriers to an easy satisfaction of that hunger. So i’ve learned patience for those stretches in the beginning of a project where hunger is enhanced like aromas from cooking. I now wait patiently for any point where starvation begins to abate; the trick is to let the pot simmer, and eat sparingly once the meal is cooked. I have found this metaphor works for most efforts to acclimate, be it a physical destination or the more challenging exploration of one’s internal dimensions. Wherever you travel, there will be unsavory dishes, and sometimes you will have nothing else to nourish you; be glad for what you are able to choke down having learned more about what you don’t enjoy; be comforted by the certain knowledge that if you are patient and have the confidence to continue your search, you will find provisions that satisfy whatever you have learned about your unique appetite and how to secure what provides you strength and happiness in this life. 

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gone - the sonnet

the sun was up; i was already gone

it felt funny being someplace else so soon;

there was no reason to wait for the dawn,

anymore than there’d be waiting for noon.

If i was there no longer, where was i?

is “going down the road” a destination

anymore than where i was answered why¿

my company now is contemplation.

beats the shit out of traveling alone.

could that be the “why” i left where i was-

fighting for memory- dog and his bone.

i still feel lost in the land of “because”

no more to dwell in the land of knowing

‘cause answers for “why” are found when going.

  

jts 17

http://stoneartist.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved