I first met one of my closest friends the day after a windstorm blew down his fence. His father was repairing the damage, and i was young and strong thinking nothing of helping an old man do work. Years later, the then psychiatric intern son confided he thought me crazy for such behavior - i get that a lot, but not quite so qualified an opinion. Of course there was much else about our relationship that colored his thinking, me being an artist and, he being a doctor in the making. What made our relationship magical was our mutual interest in the other's vocation. He was naturally curious and unnaturally intelligent and i was crazy out of the womb with an unnatural capacity for 3 dimensional thinking and a congenital inability to perceive it with my 2 dimensional vision - we had fun for a time. He was older, and i was given to deference - a mostly defensive reaction formation to a world not easily viewed. Our first project, likely our only collaboration was a conceptual art deconstruction of his garage - 1930 era standalone two car garage in the bowels of Santa Ana. He had kindly provided space for my 2nd or 3rd carving because it was impossible to work in my single room. Apparently this experience touched us both powerfully, for i eventually participated in years of intensive psychoanalytic psycho therapy and he pursued passionately an avocation as artist. What is missing is the synchronicity and mutual enhancement from such a fortuitous relationship. Nor would this be an isolated instance of missed opportunity for aggrandized power. Of course i do not allude to his influence at every turn of my own dubious “mental health;” what i feel is missing is our mutual acknowledgement of a collaborative contribution to each other’s growth; is it even possible to do justice to the myriad of useful relationships each of us have had in our unique development?
“The secret of human freedom is to act well without attachment to the results” - The Bhagavad Gita
post-publication author’s amendment from dead-of-night ruminations - using the analytic skills learned from my friend’s powerful influence, it occurred to me consciously, then unconsciously just how much he had honored our creative relationship. 1) commissioning a dual portrait of he and his lovely wife. 2) confirming in a dream the accuracy of my deeper awareness by an image of great height reflecting the original graphic used which needs be replaced by their kindly commissioned portrait.
“People make themselves appear ridiculous when they are trying to know obscure things before they know themselves.” - Socrates
As an older male, i find i am increasingly freed from the testosterone fueled face offs provoked by hunger for handsome pussy, but the cultural anchors at the heart of literature and manipulated internet fantasies remain as pernicious as hopes for healthy family relations. What strikes me as so sad about where we stand as a species, is how much different things might be with minor adjustments. I have found in drawings; i can fight for weeks to accomplish the right relationship between dark and light; mass and space; expression and depiction, but when the mark is made that links all the parts, it is often so slight, i wonder how it wasn’t more obvious before. I am beginning to suspect this process is not much different than what we as a species face - wouldn’t it be wonderful to think we were just a tweak away from paradise. It almost appears that the ruling class got drift of this idea early on, maybe from reading 1984, and armed with a handful of troglodytes have accomplished mayhem of, as Mr. Jaron Lanier might expostulate, a Nietzschean scale. We seem to have lost the capacity to work together, almost as though the only valid human effort is of a solitary nature. Most people i’ve ever known are noble in one way or another. It is odd that this effort toward decency i witness daily from others is somehow invisible. Today, i stopped on my way to mail a postcard to ma and bought olives in a single use plastic bag from an old woman on the street; she laughed at my reply, “still old” in answer to her question “how are you?” So i asked in return “how are you¿ to which she replied without batting an eye, “younger.” I told her i would pay for the secret if she cared to share - “i don’t resist getting old,” her reply. The pittance i paid for such knowledge under different circumstances would be robbery, but she was as happy when i left, as when i found her.
Is that what it means to be together - a simple give-and-take with all parties as well or better off then before? The owners of where i live just returned with their grandson from his flute lessons. I am certain he does not understand how much happiness he has given them, nor am i sure they quite know how much more than the gift of music they bestow with this weekly ritual; it is enormously fortifying to watch such a dance in a personal sphere, and i hope each who reads this finds some example of selfless devotion in the interest of another. We are being driven to extinction by a handful who have convinced the rest that only in service of some Ayn Randian commitment of solitary achievement that all mankind will somehow be raised to a pinnacle that best represents our collective worth - greatest wealth, highest height, fastest time, most ______ fill in the blank. I don’t understand this anymore than i understand a woman who wants confirmation of my love from the dead bodies i have piled up protecting her. I concur that each individual strive to her/his utmost, it is the end game i question. I seek not the pinnacle, but the root. I do not envy the Rothschilds a good god damn, and i’ve seen pictures of the opulence; charts representing their range of influence; read theories on the achievement they understandably obscure, if only for its ugliness. War seems to the the only product the wealthiest amongst us has conceived, and i find that pathetic. . . after an interlude of connection with my neighbor, the tortured tin smith, i return to a change of music from Tom Waits singing his musical version of Hopper’s Nighthawks does Nirvana to Woody Guthrie. We are woven into a magnificent human tapestry that is being rended needlessly. Each of us possesses some thing of use to everyone we meet, but we are forced by an outworn adherence to gain and loss and so then withhold what we have leaned and know from each other, believing somehow this paltry professional knowledge will somehow manifest into great riches if only we can befriend, manipulate, cajole or intimidate the right person to our will.
What bullshit. We are collectively little more than bugs creating heat in an increasingly heated vacuum within a vast expanse of cold comprised almost entirely of a dark matter we have yet to describe. Our ancestors were fortunate to have the common objective of beauty. Today i saw while scrolling, an earthworks divide between Wales and England. As futile as such an example of our vast capacity as human beings is, it pales compared to what reality demands from us now - whether our species deserves to replicate itself. “Smart money” is bent on creating single generation food seeds for no other reason than profit. That blows my mind, or as Pop might have said, “it discombuberates me. The consequences of such stupidity boggles the mind. I am stupid, but hopeful; i feel as a voice in the wilderness; but, hoot i will, for i’ve seen the human soul on fire. There is nothing virtual about it, unless it be the striking resemblance between human passion and our ultimate benefactor Papa Sol. The irony that our spontaneous combustion might prove to have been a self-inflicted wound born of greed and laziness is rich. That we have irradiated the primordial muck our forebears crawled from and corrupted its abundant life with the waste of our conceits does not bode well for a safe landing with our wax wings. However, we are also full of Helen Keller resourcefulness and Colin Kaepernick courage, besides i don’t hear no fat lady singing. So if you’re reading this on a phone, lose it. Life will not be easier without it, for the capitalists have nearly arranged things so you cannot live without your +/- 5v manacle; i can testify to that fact, but the focus on people’s faces in their scrolling search for what is literally right in front of them is well worth any inconvenience. Sadly, our digital undoing may actually hold the key to our survival. It is first necessary to learn how to distinguish the corporate siren song screeching through your apparatus into your mind as just a voice with an agenda foreign to your best interest, then to take control over this instrument and point it at what you deem to be useful - broadcast - express yourself and your genuine hope for the welfare of all humanity before you become collateral damage from the occupation of planet earth by the 1%.
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alone - a sonnet
it is not possible to be alone
away perhaps, but never really gone.
even if dust’s all that’s left - still once bone
though night be real dark, that day - still once dawn.
a baby born arrives with its mother
if she’s lucky s/he will love her passing.
Die alone if you want to discover
who the person is your ma was nursing.
the myth you are apart from anything,
while more clear when swapping spit with your dear,
is more clear with the air you share just being,
or star tossed atoms passing through your ear.
the ego is only named, though enough
to twist the softest of hearts until rough
jts 04/16/2018
http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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