One of my brothers had a birthday this week; i greeted him electronically as cordially as i know how to find that what i know must be offensive, or my expectations too high - as well as all the emotional terrain in between - he’s made no reply. This morning the door was closed and non responsive where i volunteer, the same place i did not attend or advise of my absence last week (inadvertently) but a lack nonetheless <- (how did that ever get to be a word)¿ The second gallery i believed to have been on good terms gave me the shuffle-off-to-buffalo though they were an email behind in the thread. Perhaps once again, my “good terms” do not align with other’s definition. Brothers in art, in family, in fill-in-the-blank _____________ seems to be an elusive concept for me today. How to remain open hearted is to me more important than confronting a situation that is not at the core of my purpose. Is it irony that i elect to essay one of the more famous relations in western/middle eastern cultures? I am confused about which is useful between essay and fiction; useful in the sense of providing some illumination along the long dark way to our end. I have been profoundly affected by many fictions for that all important “willing suspension of disbelief”; Yet, however buoyant i may picture Dune’s Vladimir Harkonnen, or repulsed by Portrait of a Lady’s Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle i am not living in those worlds or fathoming the challenges of their lives. I have a brother who blew me off like lint and gallery owners who have no discernible interest in my life’s work. Somehow i find the expressions of people attempting to navigate and depict their lives more useful than the anonymity which fiction so kindly provides. Nor is it a cut and / dry one or the other, as that which i seem so often to gravitate. One of the most fantastical stories i’ve ever known of is being written by an individual immersed in very positive community activities, including the herculean task of seeking common ground with the nascent fascist farce evolving in my native land. The brother i am essaying also participates dynamically in a broad spectrum of humanitarian efforts - a reality which only further confuses me. One of my professors maintained suasively that the Bible is essentially poetry - a highly moral fiction, but fiction. So even the underpinnings of my intrepid struggle to better comprehend the reality of brotherly love are rooted in the imagination - swell.
Cain offed his brother in a fit of pique. I can relate, but murder, that is tired. When the twin towers collapsed i exhausted every available second on a cheap knockoff to kill Bin Laden video game - there’s a month of 40 hour weeks i’ll never get back. Pema Chodron talks about the soft heart - one that sees into the abyss and still feels the pain of others. I aspire to that softness, however unlikely given my own perilously puerile pride. The closest i have gotten is remove myself from the field of battle, which i’m learning can be nearly as cruel depending on who is gone and who remains - all about perspective, ain’t it¿ The dilemma becomes awkward when each new environment contains the larger parts of whatever archetype you subscribe to. I was a television baby when it was still called the boobtube. One program contained a homily i still refer to sort of like Einstein’s offhand remark - “the electromagnetic spectrum is the irreducible constituent of all physical reality” - memorized during a quiet spring morning in my sister’s barn/eden house reading through her library when i was a fresh human. This homily was broadcast on television during a time when public interest had not been entirely subsumed by the shills of the ruling class - “there are four kinds of people you will meet 1) likes you for the wrong reasons 2) likes you for the right reasons 3) doesn’t like you for the wrong reasons 4) doesn’t like you for the right reasons - the last kind of person is who you want to learn from. As with most things worthwhile, much easier said than done, for if the root of evil in the world is the harm we do ourselves , there is no room in our own internal wellness for the 4th kind of person. Fucking paradoxes, they seem to have taken me a some kind of patron saint, can’t wipe my ass without the conundrum of how to switch off the now dirty spigot with my now clean hand. I wonder if it was the same for Cain after his hasty fit of pique - got his wife, but pissed off g_d - fuck ! . . .
Letting go of phone ownership has been a godsend for gaining some perspective on what constitutes interpersonal anything. Just now i castigated myself for not remembering to apprise the involved parties of a potential leaky water bottle - with a phone, i might have been inclined to call the company and see if this oversight could be rectified, or as is the case with my brother or the gallery owners - call and make my offering in hopes of a favorable judgement - more Cain and Abel. Could reality be that these are just not a good fits for me. One knows when and where one is welcome. There is not sugar coating what one feels, so why am i in such haste to curry favor - to secure a favorable response? Is there some imaginary friend i have who resembles our general concept of the divine - even the redoubtable “my karma just ran over your dogma” Do i still quest in search of #4 who can see into my heart and can dislike me at will for my baseness? Oliver Wendall Holmes - “Your right to swing your fist ends at the type of my nose.” Imagine how different our worlds might be had Cain read that quote before the results of the contest were published. I guess the difficulty gets to be what we consider aggression, a volatile topic which has changed considerably for me over the years. A professional once advised me that your thoughts are yours alone, you can have any fantasy or consider any twisted concept without threat of condemnation, it is only when your act on an idea the the world of consequence comes into play. As it happens, this is not necessarily true, though at the time it was a huge relief. Now i am not so sure. The discipline of the mind is a truly personal responsibility, yet it is equally true what Jiddu Krisnamurti said “it is not measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society;” to that i would have to add family, art scene, job, relationship etc., etc., etc. Up leaps paradox . ! . ! shut the fuck up screams the author, “BUT” ! stfu . . . who determines that standard; what gauge did Cain use to determine in his own mind that his offering was superior to Abel’s, so much superior that he justified fratricide by his lights. If he was just throwing a pissant hissy fit, and that his jealousy was more about being frustrated in his affection for g_d. Then fuck him - oh shit trapped tricked by my own paradox. . arggh
The Dalai Lama says the warm heartedness gives you confidence and i believe him. For too long a time i have been compelled to try and help others gain self confidence, possibly due to a dearth of my own. But i am beginning to think that is a conceit to change anyone for any reason. For example in the case of my brother, at another time, and yes to some degree this week, i may have considered him our famous agent #4 possessing secret knowledge of my baser being. My inclination would then to be fathom from the unknowable some justification for what i perceived as deliberate aggression, perhaps even convince him of the fallacy of his judgement - then whose judgement would that be - mine own. I cannot make anyone like me, the best i can do is to plumb the caverns of my heart in search of warmth that i might then share with another. There is a vendor who sells ice cream on my street. He pushes a cart up and down hills in increasing heat. He sings out his product in the most consistent distinctive bass voice that it pleases me to aid his endeavor with water and glass for his concert. Just now when i heard him making his way up the hill, i checked to make sure the bottle was full; some snook had boosted it, cup and all. But this is the crux of the biscuit as Frank Zappa might say, rather than focusing on our mutual project and simply offering him a glass of water - i felt stymied and forgot about his thirst; let not yourself feel stymied - it’s just a distraction from the important work of helping others. Yet our friend mythical hero #4’s criticisms can be useful, especially the one’s that point out that your breath stinks where other lesser friends might just shrink away from the stench. Does this mean we have license to willy nilly tear into the myriad of follies conducted by those around us - good luck. In my quest through the caverns of my own cold heart in search of heat, i’ve found folly enough of my own design to be very careful about how i frame another’s stinky breath. So what of Cain, this poor schmuck without the backbone to stand up for himself to his own god and say “Excuse me, you hear that¿ That’s the sound of someone wanting me to return - i gotta go, see ya’ in the funny papers. If or when you find favor in my offering let me, i’ll bring more.”
Could it be that was all Cain needed - a conviction in his own mind that his was the best offering he could make, and that would just have to be good enough. The flip side of course might be that if Abel had survived having won the contest of the holy father, he might have become a vain unprincipled lout taking more of everything and attributing it to his blessed position in g_d’s eyes. Eventually become so complacent and bloated by his wealth and blindspots his only satisfaction in life was taking more and more for himself utterly convinced of the worthlessness of those less well off - think ruling class. A perfectly decent human being to begin with foisted on his own petard of complacency. Where all the progenitors of Cain were put to death in the great deluge, we now have the entire lineage of this avatar for Vladimir Harkonnen; Abel the gentle shepherd boy turned rogue, populating generation after generation of competitive impressarios slitting the throats of all who dare to question the order of clearly what was g_d’s design. I’m pretty sure i’m gonna get taking out by terminal pardoxism. But between then and now i mean to find more warm spots in this cold, cold heart of mine. I’ve searched the world over for the family i once belonged to, but instead of finding the hearth and fiction of childhood memories i have found a friend who has taught me more about kindness and cruelty than any construct i have ever clung to in the desperate hope of belonging - my self. So what if it is closer to my end than my beginning, what better company to exit with than that shaggy beast who has haunted the darkest places of my being for no other reason than fear of what the charlatan “I” might remark. The truest blessing of this friendship is when faced with the fallacious and extravagant egos of those defined by the world around them, my beast says fuck ‘em, if they don’t wanna play nice - we can wait them out and amuse ourselves plenty until they come back to their senses and we will melt snow once again with loving kindness.
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Seth Abel - the sonnet
Could have been, you should have caned Seth, Abel?
Loading a debt of karma on the back
of a brother is pretty mean trouble;
Didn’t your death create sufficient lack¿
He was the eldest and he took your life,
you worked influence and tried to compete.
you knew too that the outcome would mean strife
even though it turned love into a feat.
You were once a family, all of you -
right, wrong and indifferent like us all.
If i had to guess, Seth was a shit too.
Cain’s problem began when they made him crawl.
No one is immune from their upbringing
though permission derives from every being
jts 01/22/2018
http://stoneartist.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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