woman - an essay / man - a sonnet

I rarely know what subjects i will pair prior to writing; this morning i thought perhaps drunk and sober might be apt, but puzzling over some better idea of what woman means is much more appealing to me, though i can speak with greater authority on drunkenness. I enjoy both, and i’ve found that both can be quite painful when taken to excess. That might be said of nearly everything known to our species. However, few things inspire me to abandon my normal probity as liquor and women. I have occasion today to be repulsed by both, and not. Last week on my way back home, i stopped to pick up my paid-for loaf of sourdough bread, but unable to remember the pretty cashier’s name i remarked in my execrable Spanish “i forgot your name, because i was looking at your eyes when you gave me your name. “She laughed, and i was elated though mindful of my precarious circumstances. I know that giving offense to pretty young maids can be lethal within some cultures - even the one in which i live. It is something of a double bind in which man exists with respect to the fairer sex. For example, the home in which i reside is also a habitation for three pretty young gringas, having grown by two within the last day. The vibe is as unpleasant as i can remember in terms of simple amicableness. I try to parse my feelings in any case of tension to discover my role and rectify, because why not. The root of my discomfort may be as simple as rejection, but not from any forwardness on my part that i am aware of; the original resident (a dynamically pretty young woman) gave a party to which i was uninvited. 

Where she a man, that would be considered punk-ass behavior given we are two foreigners within a household of 4, 3 of which are over 60 years old. At 63 years old with 3 ex wives i have experience with some of the nuances of the mating dance and am extremely circumspect about reading “come on” from a woman, especially the young and pretty variety. So much so, on my way here i stopped and offered my apologies to the young baker who inscrutably nodded back with happy dancing eyes. I have enormous regard for the torments of the attractive, my mother and sister both being beauty queens. But i am a man in a world run amuck by leering demands for a salacious surrender to the wonders of money and its perverse relationship to love - that is not the kind of human i wish to become. I am erotic to a fault, but far more interested in the wonders of a sexually responsive partner, yet the intimacies shared by loving hearts between considerate partners is a mystery i mean to learn. I know that subservience has no role in human relations, but beyond that i have no clue. It was late in life that i acceded to the reality that love can be predatory, not the least of which, my own dark love. The more i accept and nurture that shambling beast rather than dress it up in manly homilies and chivalrous raiment the more readily apparent the parallel darkness of woman seems. In my zeal to take possession of those personal failings that would result in so much derailed love much less the holocausts of three domestic collapses the less inclined i am to pursue a woman that is anything but open and forthright - however even the ballsiest broads i’ve known had guile about them even if only to themselves.

So what of woman, would i ask her to be different. Is it a finely tuned sensitivity of my party giving housemate that discerns my unapologetic beast and simply wants no part of it as i do her conceits? To say there is no difference between man and woman and that equality is legislate-able is a conceit of the modern world when we are unable to codify peace and fairness, two keys to human survival. I am tired of being afraid of woman for her ability to break my heart, so i’ve learned to carry on with a broken heart. What confuses me about that condition is that i invariably become better for the damage. Is that the heart of woman - her capacity to find growth in destruction, therefore she breaks that which she loves just to make him better? I enjoy the concept of C.G. Jung where he channels the anima and animus of yore into plausible aspects of either gender, and then there is Hank Williams’ observation about woman “it’s better to talk with them, than to talk about them which may be closer to the root of my conundrum. As much as i enjoy speaking with the housemate, that explicit insinuation that her beauty is sufficient to presume an inability on my part to resist and which requires from her an outward state-of-siege behavior which turns party invitations exclusive is a tad pompous. I know this because of my own bloated anima that gets orgiastic about its inability to resist what  Arundhati Roy describes as the “pursuit of beauty to its lair” in my own work. Then again, it could be simple fear of that repugnant feeling of my own fury having been insulted; i don’t know.

I do know that without understanding we are doomed, so i try to commune with my peace and learn how to understand what others want and give it to them if i am able; as the good Dalai Lama remarked kindness is always possible. However, i am only just now coming to believe that my absence from all circumstances is not necessarily kind and to seek those circumstances and that woman who enjoys the company of me and my beast. A deep and close woman friend of mine once asked after yet another debacle of one sort or another, “has it ever occurred to you that people might be afraid of you?” How is that even possible to fear one so shackled by socialization that he could get himself in dutch with one woman for possibly being too shy and another for being too forward? What remains is there is no form of manliness which when conformed to, results in harmony, so i’ve taken Jung’s advice “privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” I also search for gender neutral language and behavior, not because i am so compliant, but because it would be bullshit to advocate liberty without seeking it for all people, creatures, places and things - the same for happiness, peace or nearly any other esoteric concept one would like to propagate in this profit driven miasma we inhabit. Woman and men are more effective together than either is apart, though it is well documented women fair better in solitude than the hapless, short lived male. Why is that¿ 

My father, g_d rest his soul, distilled his concept of woman down to a single question for her, “what do you want?” For all my protestations about self expression to ask another “what do you want?” strikes me as peremptory, pushy, and officious, though my divining rod quest using sensitivity as my pack mule is killing my mule. I have learned this much from my last three wives - what a woman wants you to know she will tell you, and what she doesn’t want you to know is indecipherable by and immune to any forensic examination or force of will. Men pride themselves on willfulness, but if your anima is a wilting lily, good luck in the blood sport of love. The cowards effecting women’s policy in the testosterone bubbles of D.C. and Wall St boardrooms believe their imagined dominance to be from will rather than the Naked Emperor charade tumbling down around their ears for no other reason than the lack of actual information they function with, believing instead what computer models tell them from data extracted by the mighty data mining apparatus which defines so much technology today. No model for human relations is valid without a deep and profound appreciation for the formidable will of woman. I am currently drawing the profile of Maria Sabina gazing across a valley comprised of rugged terrain and determined human habitation. Her expression is etched with pain and endurance while remaining utterly open to what it is she sees. For me to presume the content of her sight would be ignorant, but to beg any form of welcome to her patient vigil has given me greater peace and hope for the survival of our species than any lust i’ve ever run to ground, however ravishing she may have been. Only g_d knows the limits of that animated power of love which resides in the heart of woman; i most certainly have not plumbed her depths, but i’m trying.

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man - the sonnet

Out gunned, out fought, out thought - the lot of man,

yet like every other day, out he goes

to lie in graves from the battlefield plan.

The bad soldier does it still though he knows.

The fighter does not make war, he makes love

the more he understands, the more he makes.

A man won’t do much without a good shove,

trouble is, once going he ain’t much without brakes.

The one thing that makes his life practical

would be his mate - his love for which he lives

be that a purpose, a god, or more pull

you know he’s wallowing in what he gives.

a handful of men are thinking they won

by not using hands and taking a ton.

jts 09/29/2017

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

have - an essay / have not - a sonnet

apple, has just informed me that i do not have permission to save the document you are reading - fucking cheek. Clearly they are confused about what have means. Then again i could just be getting old and don’t know what computers are supposed to do, nor have i figured out what women want yet. I can say that i do have a computer i’m not so sure i want, and do not have a woman - if woman could ever said to be had - i’m pretty sure i want one. I thought i had a few, but they each clarified that presumption for me in their own unique fashion. I think i’ll have a cigarette, or it me - more confusion about to have or have not. Our world is being ground to dust by idiots believing that a piece of paper is adequate evidence they have the right to do so - why is that presumption any more stable a conviction than my own belief that a woman can be had. What if in some bizarro universe the idiots just never learned to want a woman and so did not have the advantage of being educated about why a woman can never be had. That really would be great wouldn’t it¿ All the world’s problems could be solved simply by teaching those idiots who have been substituting their desire to love a woman for world dominance. I don’t know fuck all about women, so i guess we're still shit out of luck. Who would have thought existence could hinge on some something so simple as knowing what a woman wants. I have a mother, however she is aged and while she would be thrilled to know i acknowledge such good luck - she is truly a miracle of creation - she most certainly would not describe knowing what a woman wants as a simple matter; i have learned that much.

True this - Bob Dylan is just now singing “ you’d be as happy as you could be if you belonged to me,” so it is quite likely given Mr. Dylan’s keen instincts distinguishing love-fact from love-fiction, we should be on the right track. Though there is still that issue of my computer depriving me of rights to save this file, and the fact that i am not online to query “the cloud;” what i do have, is problems, which in this world hardly makes me unique. I have a bed and a refrigerator, while not exactly mine, having access to them makes me increasingly unique today - how sad. Yet i can honestly say i do not have sadness, who needs it? I have time to do this, which as i age toward the void gives me an increased appreciation for each second, and get ready for this, creates great doubts as to whether i have time at all. It's been said, "make the time"; i’ve made a lot of things in my life, but i’d be a damn liar if I said, based on what little i can understand about Sir Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” that i have ever made any, time that is. By all accounts one’s word is something one wants to keep, yet the  current administration is actually capitalizing on Mr. M.T. Suit’s legendary prevarications to the tune of billions depending on who you blow as much as who you know. This essay does not seem to elicit peace which in these days may have become an even more pertinent issue to discuss, vis a vis - have. What i've learned is that i cannot give peace if i do not have peace. Just how does one go about having peace, unlike having a woman who can often be wildly diverse in her concepts of belonging, like ma. Peace however, that is more like a blood sport which requires no team, no permissions, no time - you just focus. Then again, is saying “i have peace” adequate to take possession of such¿ We’ve nearly established that those 6 men holding as much wealth as the bottom 7 billion humans alive have needed little more than a surprisingly similar assertion “it’s mine” - poof - ipso facto - welcome to the white ages.

What is not clear to me is how they got so many to agree to the difference between pilfering from the till, and the enforcement of such as anything other than an absurd bastardization of our marketplace. As much as the grinning baboons parading as commentary/corporate shills want to describe our lot as something other than a horrid ice burg gash in Starship Earth the reality is much more simple. They need us, we do not need them. Just as my heart’s hunger to have a woman is now where near enough scratch to turn the tide of love so too is the ruling class anything but deposed for no other reason than lacking a winning hand. Voila - poof - ipso facto - BOYCOTT the shit out of the lying skanks - and goosing the Dupont bottom line with toybomb decals is not depriving mr. m.t. suit of a thing. have your bliss, have your self respect, have your love, have your peace - all those things the chimera of consumer addiction have never nourished or manifested. The scrutiny you are enduring by some pencilneck geek’s concept of technological adroitness pales against the incomprehensible stupidity of apple selling a product that is not loaded with the finest dictionary immediately translatable into all human language. So if i can’t have peace, maybe i should shoot for patience - another blood sport which requires little or no visible means of support. I could probably get a lot more done, not the least most especially with regards my quixotic quest to the only worthy dream of any male worth his salt, to live in that land of milk and honey where i have a woman.

I’m a little confused, do we even know if it is possible to have a woman¿ i know what it is to not have a woman, so i picture myself half-way home. It was not having peace which has allowed me to learn what i don’t know about peace, though that is as close as i’ve gotten; i find the emptiness oddly comforting, even a little inspiring. I wonder how much i could learn by knowing less about other things¿ Funny that; if this were true, knowing as little as i know about woman, i’d again be halfway-home. I think we’re getting somewhere what if all the copious records collection of it-ain’t-none-of-your-business has caused the geeks to sit back and wonder about what they haven’t learned from their conspicuous consumer collection¿ Sadly, i could give a fuck - a personal defect. To have love in my heart is somewhat stymied by the attention necessary to devise a language with which to explain this to the haves who haven’t been able to divine what i would happily answer should they ever grow a pair and ask to my face. I’m suspecting the illusion that anyone can have anything is a myth - a fable woven by loving parents to jolly children who begin to wonder what happened to their mutts. Object permanence became a metric by which smart people found patterns, a scientific effort that was supposed to alleviate suffering but like many events involving fire and meat was hijacked by a family member looking for the fattest piece food. Look up the story of Bernais, nephew to Sigmund Freud first Scientologist to be cleared. This surveillance is bi-directional, and if anyone reading this doubts there was an unseen hand keeping this from you as long as possible, you’ve never met my agent.

What, you don’t think i could have an agent¿ Fuck you, go read some other body whimpering about what he can’t have, see what i care. You can begin to see why i respect my agent a lot, mostly when she takes my calls. Then again i could be lying and trying to inflate my numbers so i can have everything i ever wanted and wouldn’t have to rationally rant my sublimated defeats into semi-fictional commentary. It is now closing in on 3 hours that i have paid to better understand have. I like having a computer, and it doesn’t please me that apple may take back the three hours i used, but fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. I guess that’s why they are making the big bucks, because they can. I’ve seen it, rich and poor; loved them both, but if and when it comes down to it, would i sacrifice a cigarette butt to see a celebrity or spend an hour shooting the shit with my neighbor - hand’s down i’d say Miguel Angel. Those things i cherish have dwindled and dwindled more while Bob Dylan is singing “Congratulations, for making me wait, Congratulations, now it’s too late.” So i guess the paradox of being owned by that which is yours is one that will haunt, or hunt us to extinction. I have the pleasure of puzzling through this time with you - whoever you are. That is something that can never be taken away from me, and i’ll likely go around the barricade which prevents me from storing these fragile symbols only representing vaguely the pleasure of having had this fun with you. Thank you. 

“If you want me, just whistle. You know how to whistle don’t you Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.” - Howard Hawks, channeling Ernest Hemingway 

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have not - the sonnet

being black is not a death sentence, but close.

murdered by a bunch of fucking haters

who don’t need guns - they can’t tell friends from foes

protecting ignorance using their fears.

let us kill all those with hate in their hearts!

But wouldn’t that be a hateful thing to do¿

And that rank odor of my hateful parts

i run from like the piquant ode d’poo 

maybe i’m war waiting for armistice?

maybe i’m peace and not waiting at all¿

maybe birth was enough to have everything?

and death just reward for having a ball.

I’ve not wanted a lot of what i’ve had;

were what’s left at peace, i’d be kinda glad

jts 09/22/2017

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

∞

future present - an essay / past present - the sonnet

I arrived at this present future moments ago - a gallery in Mexico whose owner like all artists of merit is searching for more time to work. My business model allows for adjustments, and our two purposes coincided. I am writing at his front desk awaiting the client who will offset such demands by buying his work - but that is in the future. I now know where to empty my bladder - always a future eventuality for those who are years’ challenged. My last drawing has left its mooring and for better or worse i bid thee bon voyage. As ever one would hope to end any 6 month relationship having learned something, but i fear my choice of subjects for my present drawing belies such optimism. What i was thinking about when i woke up today were the parts of the valley Maria Sabina looked at and whether i am capable of intuiting the profound expression in her quiet determined face. Ah well, no sense getting worked up, or as some might say “buying trouble.” If i am able, it will be done, and if not something close - meaning i’ll be foisted on my own petard of excoriating judgement about something i just spent 6 months loving. I have found that writing is an essential function of my creative process, and consistent with my unique right brain/left brain civil war. Just like the hunger to find a loving image to faithfully internalize, or regurgitate, or any of the other equally bizarre interpretations of graphic/plastic arts, writing nourishes me in ways that objet d’art are unable to. Each activity works for me as a lens to consider the manifest complexities of this life and therefore give better understanding to that interminable quest for self-awareness, for knowing the heart or mind of another is a virtual impossibility in this manifestation of spirit.

As much as i’d like to fancy myself immune from the opinion of others, its indelicate presumption festers and goads me to further growth, or greater clarity about the human i have become and am becoming. What is there to know about the caverns of one’s being, or are we collectively no more than that progression of snapshots the ruling class has compiled of us each supposedly aiding in the protection of ourselves from ourselves, but more likely some sort of elaborate “chutes and ladders” game resulting in our certain separation from time, independence, imagination, love etc., etc., etc. What fascinates me is how difficult it has been for me to arrive at even the barest of outlines of that celebrated unconscious our society’s experts have posited, expounded and even cured but never presented in any tangible fashion. I am often mystified that our mute acquiescence to surveillance amounts to more data collected about our behaviors than is readily accessible to ourselves unless you happen to be a system administrator with the “keys to the kingdom” and writable media or permission to transmit such as those demigod technocrats, from whose ranks the freedom fighters of tomorrow are emerging - Thank You Mr. Edward Snowden. The gallery has now been put in order for the day’s culture traffic and the owner has receded into his emerging future - the “table rasa” of fear every creative spirit faces when commencing that peculiar process in which artists of all stripes seem unable to resist. How the fuck does this pertain to future, past or present, you might be asking yourselves. If so you’ve just made my day. 

I’m of the mind there are not near enough questions in the world we inhabit. So much so, i’m horribly self-conscious about presuming on your time with assertions of any kind. Yet the question of what our world will look like in 50 years without having made the effort to establish a question beachhead in this world of knowns. But just like my 1st aerospace lead Doug W_____ so sagely opined too long ago, “it’s not who you know, it’s who you blow.” However keen his Machiavellian instincts may have been, he missed the orientation by about 180 degrees, and future of our world has been pinned to a pinnacle of successive ass-kissers whose seeming competence is predicated wholly on one’s ability to deliver on high while demanding the best from all who would follow. While writing this, it occurs to me how much hay could be made from what i don’t say, and that i would have to ask who the fuck cares. Mr. M.T. Suit is the preeminent  ass kisser, just ask his financier, Mother Russia, but what for me nails the logic of my admittedly dubious concept of our collective straits, is how this narcissistic baboon managed to garner so many hard bit, hard charging, hard up yankee razorbacks to pucker up and engage in such a carnal pyramid of fakeness. Then again he could be right, or left given his consistency, about me being a sore loser. If that were true, rather than stretching to do my best as an equal opportunity menace to sacred cows everywhere, mostespeciallymyown - i’d be asses and elbows on the “information super-highway currying favor by conjuring witty and acerbic repartee so much the rage in the talking head echo chamber that constitutes our current media stream. Instead, i’m questing to enlarge my contribution to those around me and at the same time utilize the fuzzy logic my “loving/doing their best parents” kindly beat into me during my wayward youth, and which i now allow as lead sled dog in a world that may forget what snow is in the lifetime of my brother’s youngest grandchild.

It is that world which compels me to consider such a threadbare topic as imagining the future. Nikolas Tesla “we may live to witness unimaginable horrors” This was prior to the collapse of NYC with the end of the twin trade towers. It is hard to accept there are millions of teenagers alive today who have never known a world prior to the current American Empire. It is the "corporate inevitability" which Arundhati Roy speaks of that sticks in my craw, for along with all the saber rattling and fake as fuck exhortations to fear we are at a nexus in time where the greatest transformation of our species could as easily, or is as easily transpiring as we speak. Your call. I was very fortunate to be raised in part by a thinking man who demanded the same from me - not to believe as he, but to use what mind i have to consider my world without being prey to others or preying on others. He was an existentialist which to sum is to be responsible in the same vein as Rumi’s quote “you are not a drop in the ocean, you are the ocean in a drop.” I refuse to surrender to the self serving concept of our divided reality when there is so little difference between all of us. There is no mother on earth that does not have the biological hardwiring to help her child survive, even the emotional ciphers devoid of affect resort to the intellectual equivalent if only to remain in camouflage. What amazes me, is how easily we have been torn from each other. I am not amazed because i have not personally willfully, even cruelly separated myself from those who have professed great love for me, but after time and contemplation the murderous rage so close to our human skin abates and even the most heinous of betrayals in my life now inspire little more than a cruel indifference. What is truly amazing is how bad i feel for not finding some way to surmount that indifference with the flag of peace which i so vocally and cravenly pronounce as mine own.

What bullshit, for you see the charm of existentialism or any level of self awareness is not dissimilar to Gertrude Stein’s observation “there is no there there,” or even the “i am you as you are he and we are all together” of Beatle lore. The best way i have found to confront my own abundant blind spots, is to accept my resistance to admit the vilest amongst us as brethren - essentially it is my fault the world is as fucked up as it is. This personal unkindness is a double edged sword, for as deeply as i am able to peer into my own murderous abyss of rancor and befriend that beast, the sooner i will be able to dissipate those prideful, needless barriers to warm open heartedness which Mr. Leonard Cohen so sagely summed as “love is the only engine of survival.” Oddly the thorniest of anxieties pale compared to the challenge of being kind to oneself, especially if that self is intractable in penetrating the veil of personal darkness. If there is to be a future of any worth, it will not be from bombing each other into 'sticks and stone' battles over boundaries in some purulent oozing environment. Our only hope for a future worthy of the majestic mystery of this planet and its inhabitants is based on those whose memories that go back into our species origins. As much as it is good for any leader to stand and say “we put a man on the moon,” we have yet to hear a leader declare we have conquered war and are resolved to find ways to mend our oceans, heal our rivers and nurture our abundance. Until this happens we are no more than jesters for an evil royalty in a twisted court full of palace intrigue, inbred gene pools and riches that are believed to reside on servers in the sky. Fuck the cloud, love someone today - you will feel better.

Lao Tzu - “if you are depressed, you are living in the past; if you are anxious, you are living in the future, you will be anxious; if you are at peace, you are living in the present.

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past present - the sonnet

why does the past seem to happen again

and again¿ is sadness DNA made?

what made DNA¿ is it from heaven?

will we be more punished because we prayed?

one asked how we see past but not future?

i hope such questions will be remembered

while askers be fabric for our culture

if so, then our days may not be numbered.

however “past is prologue” has been heard

enough times to justify hard choices

to kill, to die - so we may cull the herd.

power behind closed doors - only voices.

what if all our pasts are the illusion

and pollution caused our real conclusion¿ 

jts 09/15/2017

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

∞