I prefer to remain as open as i know how; having said that, i consider myself a very private man - yeah, i know - another fucking paradox. I would prefer not to be as private as am, but my journey has convinced me that not everyone will treat injuries the same. Those things about myself that are not accessible to anyone or anything but my own heart pertain to suffering. I have not always been reluctant to confide the inner recesses of my being; before i understood anything about the mechanics of socialization, i was more than happy to divulge whatever was of interest to another spirit. From that openness, i learned betrayal, shame and fear. I also learned self-respect, discernment and a profound appreciation for Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s song “Don’t Take Everyone To Be Your Friend.” What is left to me, is the process of opening back up again; if in fact i ever was. I have learned there is such a concept as “false intimacy;” which is apparently based on an analysis of behavior for predatory personality types; sadly, i could certainly be included in that spectrum - if you can see it, you can be it. I feel like i am tiptoeing around the concept of “secret” which is precisely my objection to the intrinsic nature of secrecy. When i become aware of someone trying to hide something from me, it is insulting - as though, i am unworthy of a confidence. This is an irrational reaction-formation to a family dynamic long gone, but the residue is pernicious. If anything, when someone is clearly hiding something, i have begun to feel compassion that person having to resort to such constraint and restriction. When i was a young man one of the more worldly wise of my wooly friends remarked, “when you think you’re looking good, you’re looking bad, and when you think you’re looking bad, you’re looking good.” I’m sure there was more than a trace of recovering Catholic in his wryness, but the key to remember - there is no obscuring the truth - you can’t fake shit. Ask anyone who has tried to live a lie; people know truth which is why Hank Williams’ song If You Only Loved Me Half As Much As I Love You is so poignant.
What’s the use to deny we’ve been livin’ a lie
That we should have admitted before
We were just victims of a half hearted love
So why should we try anymore?
I’ve had job assignments, more than i am happy about, which required fairly high levels of fidelity - one pertained to family estates, another national defense. What has stuck with me about both, has been the bald-face hypocrisy of both. It seems the more steps you take to preserve some fiction of security, the more dodgy become the principals. I won’t go into details, because then i’d have to kill you. A clear outgrowth of the fallacious concept of security is the humongous growth of surveillance. It reminds me of a Dr. Seuss story about the Star Bellied Sneetches. The idea that there is a segment of the population who can be trusted vs a segment which can’t, runs contrary to logic when at society’s core - the family unit, there is no consensus between siblings. Who benefits from the illusion that a metric could be developed which determines honor; just like the story of the Sneetches, only the guy who could place or remove the stars came out ahead. But do we learn ? NOOooo - we still put faith in leaders, be they generals, presidents, popes or bankers - always knowing that anyone occupying that position of power is no more likely capable than yourself to formulate a logical response to an illogical circumstance. What is worthy of hiding? They thought the launch code to the nuclear arsenal would be worthy of termination with extreme prejudice; now we have an individual in possession of those launch codes who also feels he can grab women’s genitals because ________ fill in the blank. There used to be an actionable offense for trading in industry secrets, now we have a stock market which by all accounts is made up of the richest, and a government at the beck and call of those who can pay. If the insiders are running the asylum, how can you call it “insider trading”, much less prosecute it?
When the concept of honor has become as indecipherable as the steps taken to protect it, we need to take another look at who is hiding what from whom, or not. I am severely incurious with anyone about anything they don’t want me to know. This nearly vicious disinterest, i’m sure, is more reaction formation from a domestic collapse which involved my stolen dog, a man i thought was the friend i never had, and a wife who didn’t want me, for purely pecuniary reasons, to know her dad had died - if that sounds bitter, i assure you it is not intentional, for it is beyond funny - i think it’s called tragicomedy. She is still in hiding, supposedly from the danger of my _______ fill in the blank. It is greed that drives secrets, greed and shame, if you have enough of both, there is no place on the planet where you will ever feel secure. Sadly the opposite is not necessarily true; if you have reached a point in your personal development where you could not give a fuck who knows what about you and there is little of material value you seek outside of roof and enough to eat there is no place on earth where you are not easily accessible to anyone who wants to find you badly enough. I recently read an article on the superiority of what vs why in my own journey toward personal growth, and while the logic was formidable in support of “what,” what was missing was the author’s agenda. There is no magic bullet - one size fits all for anything in our world. Any strategy which leads one out of the dark into the light is valid. Self knowledge by all accounts is the only adversary worthy of struggle, and it seems to me fewer and fewer of us are even curious to know why that is, if indeed that is a true statement. I am living in a country with a language different than the one i understand, and it has been a fruitful experience to differentiate what people say vs what they do - if for no other reason.
I would be lying through my teeth to say suspicion hasn’t haunted my steps and would be equally dishonest to suggest that on balance people are exactly the same with or without comprehensible language understanding. The same behaviors that distinguish the decent from the less decent manifest for the same reasons, greed, love, hate, compassion. What is different is the illusion of protection, those who understand each other are more confident without any real foundation for that trust. It is not dissimilar to the Blue Wall of Silence for police; Omerta/Black Hand for the homies; or now the Bible for ‘merican fascists. Why is that? Can it be that the fear of standing alone has become so pronounced from the divide-and-conquer strategy of the ruling class that we as human beings are no longer capable of distinguishing fact from fiction - that the dreaded TOP SECRET boogeyman haunting our keystrokes and our footsteps is robbing us from the simple realization that we came into this world alone and we are going to leave alone, regardless of how many others with who we may be gunned down? What concerns me more is my own willingness to forgo my own native curiosity in favor of emotional armor. “You don’t want me to know, fuck you - i won’t even look.” That behavior is ignorant and like the cartoon lump where when you push it down one place, it just pops up in another. There is a difference between looking and seeing. I see it often in my drawings; my ability to discern parts of my subject are completely obscured from my perception until enough work has provided a context to see more deeply. I had read an apocryphal story of the indigenous people who without the context in which to view a sailing vessel were unable to see ships which conveyed their invaders. I’m hoping the same is true for personal growth, that only after enough other events will those morsels of understanding i quest for appear.
Just like there is no hiding the avarice and greed of today’s leaders from the bulk of humanity whose very existence is threatened by the princelings and overlords aspiring to today’s exalted thrones of opulence and power, so too will the character of humanity reveal itself when faced with a non-fictional choice between love and hate. A man knows when he is loved, just as a women knows when she loves a man and vice versa. There is no altering that condition of our kind, nor can you hide “nothing” behind unassailable measures of protection and expect people to believe there is something rather than nothing. Just as money has turned out to be a fiction which serves a handful, so too will the bytes and terabits be revealed as figments of someone’s imagination. What i won’t share with you cannot be pried from my soul any more than your humanity can be hidden from you. It is not in our nature to become so numb to mayhem that images of mangled babies and the parents who mourn them can be inoculated by diversions of greater and greater fantasy. When your woman betrays you - you know it and there is nothing she can say or do but to accept that fact and move on. So too with our kind - your job, your church, not even your language is going to protect you from the certain knowledge that shit has gone terribly wrong and without a whole lot of love and determination by a whole lot of like-minded people, it’s going to continue moving in that same direction. The reverse is as equally true, the fewer fictions supported by the civilized world means more and more human beings will resort to what they had learned from centuries of word-of-mouth heritage, that is if we can manage to avoid the poison of a dying culture and embrace the loving human being you just met as you got up from your computer or looked away from your scrolling-hand held just now - there will be a ray of hope left to us, and you won’t even have to remember your password.
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public - the sonnet
How can “public” be secret’s antonym ¿
If i hadn’t asked, i’d never’ve found out.
Way easy to pass the veil of a hymn-
what else can be taken without a bout ?
Commonwealth will not fit within a safe,
yet our world believes that passwords protect-
bullshit is worthless - excess, is one waif.
You have a vote and must make it elect
“Privatize” means “I’ll take what you can’t have”
-having everything doesn’t mean you are,
anymore than television is a salve
for believing yourself close to what’s far.
What is hidden, may not be hid. Maybe
it sits in plain sight, helping you to be.
jts 03/19/2018
http://stoneartist.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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