I said good bye to my mother the day before mother’s day - likely for the last time; that was hard. I’m watching adolescents cavort in a train station, not sure which is harder. By ma’s own reckoning, she is convinced that i mean her no good - it is not what i feel, and i take pains to make tangible gestures demonstrating my positive feelings towards her. It must be very hard for her to feel what she asserts about one of her own. I can understand to a degree her frustration, but believe strongly that one person is incapable of changing the mind or heart of another. However, i equally believe in the importance of honest and clear communication. I am learning that that can be very difficult for some people; ma may be one of those people. It is hard for me to hear some things, many things: no, yes, will you, you cannot, but especially no. I have such and aversion to no, that i rarely ask for anything - it is a character defect i am not proud of, but easier to remedy than those character defects i am proud of, like: stubbornness, doubt, intensity, determination, pride etc., etc., etc. I can be entirely too inflexible when i am on the trail of what my byzantine logic has deemed worthy of pursuit, and what could be useful persistence in another circumstance often blinds me to the nuances of scent, broken twigs - the capacity to listen to my own better hunter. Same too for the kill, where a simple twisted neck might suffice i tend to go for the heart. You may be getting a sense of where conflicts might arise between ma and myself seeing life in such vivid blood soaked metaphors, how could anyone as gentle as ma tolerate such a brute? she doesn’t. Tolerance isn’t my long suite as well, though i’m getting better, but i’m not sure why. I don’t really want to reach a point in personal development where i tolerate: bigotry; is that an oxymoron - “tolerant bigot”¿ Nor do i wish to reach a point in my political awareness where fascism and injustice become normalized. But to change such behavior one must be willing to confront the ignorance of others and that is hard.
Who am i to determine for anyone else what constitutes ignorance. It has been difficult enough for me to accept the barest of outlines of my own monumental ignorance about what is meaningful, where would it be possible to school another. It is quite difficult within my own cohort of age, race, education to comprehend much of the thinking that animates my generation, how is it possible to know anything enough of other cultures, much less genders such tolerance is even achievable, much less understanding enough to present a possibly better idea? It could be that in my zeal to help heal the wounds of the world, my determination rather than aiding the process in fact blocks my ability to learn from others; if you can’t learn enough about someone else to understand their position how would it ever be possible to gain their assistance in building a better world? Are we even meant to change anything, even the prospect of a better world, free of cruelty, greed, hunger and delusion? It is, only because at one time or another i have been besot by some number, or all, of those specific poisons. It was not healthy, nor am i cured; but i know change is possible, at least within the confines of my own skin. I’m not suggesting that change is easily accomplished, and i would never advocate the path i have taken; it was too hard for me, to the extent that the optimistic do-gooder wading into any and every misfortune i encountered is now reduced to a hobbling old fool who mutters to himself as a he chastises others for asking for something so simple as a cigarette. It not clear to me which character i’d prefer to spend time with - the unctuous crusader spewing homilies about anything and everything, or the dyspeptic crank standing far enough from the train tracks to evade flying debris when it derails, albeit to facilitate dragging mangled bodies from the wreck, but still that’s hard.
My young life was consumed by the fiction of carving stone into fame and fortune, and base mostly on the fact that you are not reading this self-conducted interview in Playboy or Utne, i’m thinking that fame and fortune gig is stuck in traffic. However if you are hearing this confidence as complaint - you may want to check your own orientation. I learned a lot from carving stone - about myself, art, women - even power. When considering the act of breaking rocks, one might imagine great force. As it happens, it is more like cracking eggs. For example, the harder you hit a chisel into the stone, the more likely you are to blunt your tool and do damage to the stone itself. Whereas when you listen to the ring of each blow and watch the grain open within your hands it is more like peeling the skin off of a soft avocado in the cup of your hands with your thumbs - not exactly like that, but closer than you might imagine. There are many circumstances in life where force does not yield the expected results. I was once faced with a 2 year old who, no matter how much love i might have prepared her breakfast, or how little time we may have had to explore the dilemma, would not even consider the prospect of tasting, much less eating her cereal. I was laid low to be deprived of the goto emotion of fury by the smiling face of a child. To be rendered impotent in this world today is becoming an increasingly common occurrence as you can see with ballooning gun sales and impoverishment of the commons in favor of profit for the merchants of death, yet to schooled about the limits of one’s own conceit regarding personal power by the smiling recalcitrance of a toddler is a privilege i will cherish to my dying day, the lesson is still hard.
I just boarded the train, which is easy; carrying a backpack, rucksack, 4 framed drawings and a bag with a half-empty bottle of wine a Balinese mask i bought with my last wife, and a cast replica of a human femur - that is hard. My destination is a city i’ve called home for a little over a year. Because the concept of home is quite so difficult to fathom for me, it does not feel as though i am returning as much as i am leaving and it can be quite confusing. Just to mix things up a bit the universe re-introduced me to a former love interest; i guess for the spirit of universal equilibrium, i was at that time also departing for distant lands. Muhammad Ali - “if you’re the same man at 50, that you were at 20, you have wasted 30 years of your life.” I do not feel that i had made a mistake continuing on my journey, but did drag a newly met woman back with me in one of the intervening returns. Could it be that i missed something about the person i am going to see, 40 years later, but still, and that by hooking up with a total stranger in between semesters i was trying to resolve a mistake? That is looking backward in time looking for a solution to a current question; it is what we as a species have been trained to do - reflect and learn from our mistakes. Yet we continue repeating the same mistakes: war, tyranny, hunger, poverty - this after 10,000 years of experience and libraries full of wisdom. Could it be that peering into previous experience looking for solutions to current problems blunts our capacity to see openly and thoroughly world and time in which we exist¿ My history between when i last knew of anything about my former love interest and now has not been the most simple passage, but more importantly could serve to prejudice rather than predispose my normally warm and loving nature. How does one separate out the realities of betrayal and poor partner choices, or even clearly distinguish one’s own contribution to strife vs resistance to being played, in a world increasingly oriented toward “playing” - that is hard.
What is harder is to devolve away from the loving inclination humanity is born with. We are certainly responsible for each of the choices we make in our long journey toward the veil, but if our wisdom guides us toward shutting down and clenching our hearts as though one can be protected from the pain of feeling, we are doomed. If what you have learned has taught you while it is never a good idea to sport fuck with a woman’s heart, the opposite is as equally true - love is not a commodity that can be hoarded and hidden away for some rainy day when all the planets line up and the young person you once were finally found the young person you once loved and ever after is all that is left to take place. Love is a muscle that must be exercised to remain supple and strong. Love is not valuable if it is not spent, and the longer it remains tucked away from the light of day gathering dust the less currency it carries. There is no determine when, how or if your romance is going to topple after listing for years, decades or even centuries like the leaning tower of pizza. But without a whole shit pot more of dynamic resourceful loving taking place on our planet we are doomed - not the romantic crafted fake love of song and story but the infinitely personal challenging face of unrecognizable terrain. The sort of love that comes without signposts or confidants or parents counseling the correct vs the impossible, and we all know how much fun that one is. Love is complex for me, more so than any other aspect of my existence because i believe strongly in its importance but have yet to give it over to the one person in my tiny circle who has not enough - myself, and that is hard.
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soft - a sonnet
why is woman’s skin different from man¿
don’t tell me it’s because of her lotion,
or that you think it is part of god’s plan.
woman’s skin shimmers much like the ocean.
why are babies born to her, and not him?
is it because his heart is hard like his head
and babies need someone hip to each whim,
someone kindly savvy, not dense like lead.
ever heard of a beard, soft as a petal,
or “delicate”, to describe a home run?
me neither; so how’d she get so lethal
being so gentle¿ - breaking hearts for fun?
whatever her training or formula
i pray she guides my funeral gala
jts 05/14/2018
http://stoneartist.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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