stay - an essay / go - the sonnet

I am faced with the unenviable decision to leave accommodations i very much like; and because of that there is internal dissonance which i must also face. Such as, “if you so very much like it, why go¿” I like women, and remain single; i like alcohol, but call a halt - enough so as to enjoy the next day. There is no black and white standard, but we are prompted to apply either or thinking daily. It would be easy if i could attribute my desire to leave to others, then i could absolve myself and say “it was because of them that i did not stay.” However my experience has determined that to be a bullshit reason to do pretty much anything, much less something as important as staying. My mother changed the locks to the house i grew up in when i was 15 - i was an unruly child, in a family of unruly people. They were so unruly that i was not given a new key. It was the kindest thing ma ever did for me; over the years she has done many kind things, not always helpful, but often oddly kind. My sense is that contrary to outward appearance, for she is a truly beautiful woman, her wounds and affronts affected her more deeply than her beauty aided her. In our struggle to reach mutual understanding, i believe her wounds informed her compassion about how to raise a loud, cross-eyed, intellectually precocious, and socially awkward human being in a family of pretty people. So when she said “you are not welcome here unless you obey,” by changing the locks, i had to choose which version of ma i was to obey - the vain, petty, selfish woman who abandoned her marriage because it wasn’t lucrative enough, or the shrewd, hardheaded desert urchin willing to sacrifice all she had, including her family, for the sake of a better station in life? For far too long, i believed myself to be wronged, yet her decision gave me something i believe she may have deprived my siblings - self-respect.  This is not to say she has ever abandoned her dreams of perfecting me to the degree she has improved my siblings, but then that is why i respect her.

She isn’t convinced. One day, not all that long ago i drove from past Bakersfield to Seal Beach; picked her up and drove from Seal Beach to the Getty Museum so that she could see Vermeer’s “Blue Lady.” As we entered the afternoon 405 South traffic and i was transitioning into the carpool line, a 3/4 ton pickup decided i wasn’t accelerating quickly enough in the carpool line, just as the sea of brakelights to my immediate right was coming to a screeching halt; the truck was tailgating me at 60+ mph, ma took this opportunity in our journey to turn full face to me in her seat and exclaim in her best umbrage, “YOU DON’T RESPECT ME.” This and other formative events have helped me to respect and admire her all the more, if only for being something of an emotional idiot savant in a world full of acolytes to the Church of Internet. One might think my extravagant gesture in squiring ma to a magnificent painting demonstrates filial respect, but her keen sense of her own misery was more correct - it was a very patronizing thing for me to do, not much different than dragging a person who has just had their stomach stapled into an all-the-steak-and-potatoes-you-can-eat-buffet. Once she and i had returned to Seal Beach, i did not stay the night. Rather i drove the 3 hours home. I covered more than 400 miles for the day, only to learn ma knows more about respect than i do, but then i’ve always been an unruly child. If you think this retelling is some twisted rendition of a yuppified “Stockholm Syndrome,” you might be right - i have had just enough sense beaten into me to not be sure - ergo, i essay - do i stay, do i go¿ “Be content with what you have and the whole world belongs to you” - Lao Tzu. I do not have another mother, and the one i do have has now taken up residence in an assisted living facility. It is not practical for me to be at her side. She needed protection from me declaring to my eldest brother one particularly morbid evening i committed “elder abuse” because i would not concur with a statement she had made - another long drive home late at night. My being at her side while she faces her end, would likely only enflame her, or him, or possible worse confirm for the other two her death was a direct result of my deep-seated matricidal tendencies, after all she is only 90.

I have decided my responsibility is to seek peace for myself which doesn’t include being where i am not welcomed. I don’t know how my siblings acclimated to our mother’s unique schema of the world, but i now know it doesn’t include updates from them to me on her wellbeing. Nor is that a complaint, i pity them their inability to see quite how much that behavior mimics ICE and its racist adherents. And just like the nazis of wwii, these are nice people i’m talking about. But one thing my brethren did not take away in their adaptive strategies was the sense of independence that is the hallmark of our Mater. I don’t know that they ever gave themselves permission to decide whether they would obey or not; if they did, they may have seen the cost to me for disobedience, and so chose a more stealthy resistance. It is here where our tale of family harmony turns on its ear. Each sibling has chosen distance as an adaptive strategy, with two living as close to the U.S. borders away from ma as is physically possible, and one, the eldest, yoked to the shackles of abundance which his fealty has cost him. That is a harsh judgment, and may simply be sour grapes on my part, or it may be hurt i feel. I’m leaning towards hurt, for i don’t put much stock in avarice. I don’t like to cause pain, so when one who i looked up to as a hero fails to understand my militant pacifism, i move away: physically, emotionally, but not spiritually. For like the injustice i have endured at the hands of a well-meaning but not very self-aware parent - it is not realistic to declare of a family member “you are a nonperson”, much less unworthy of my love - one of the aspects of self agency i prize. While it is not always a kindly thing to remove oneself from an unpleasant circumstance; is it any more kind to remain when one’s presence is not inservice of a greater harmony? I don’t know - clearly i don’t know. But what if we take that a step further and ask about living a lie, knowing that someone thinks less of you than you yourself do, or worst, vice versa. Self esteem is a miracle when done with panache, and impenetrable armor where it only serves the possessor. For all i might be conflicted about with regards ma, i perceive her as wearing her self esteem with panache, while her prolific complaint a mere pitfall in her complex perception.

If the theory is correct, all that is needed for me to live a happy fulfilled existence anywhere in the world is a little panache with my self-esteem, however, my self esteem is the ruggedized variety, more wash-and-wear than the Rodeo Drive variety all the rage today. In the bullpens of the engineering discipline i have spent much time in, we’d describe the empty suits periodically wandering the halls with noses of their sycophants close behind as “all show and no go.” I’m not particularly comfortable with people who need to impress, and again this may be entirely my own projection. The flip side would be my reluctance to be anywhere i cannot be myself - as much as i have discovered who that is. That’s a pretty tall order in an increasingly orthodox and regimented world, and not. I have shared in this essay as honestly as i know how, shared things i am not allowed to share with my family. The gist of this whole discussion boils down to “allowed by whom.” In my family, ma is the arbiter of good taste - but she is 90, and though i have protected her long life with a talisman bought and prayed for in the Taoist Temple of Bejing there is only so much “fake it ’til you make it” left to a nonagenerian. My hope for ma is that she retains enough of the gumption that guided her to separate from my father to satisfy for herself whether her conflict with abundance vs deprivation proved useful. if not for that reason, then perhaps affirming the oh so well framed statement by A. Nonymous - “life is like a shit sandwich, the more bread you got, the less shit you have to eat.” Mostly i wish for her to the end is self-agency. Let her passing be a choice she makes not as a regret she must struggles to defy. After watching ma experience a life of opulence, i cannot say that it protected her from her early childhood poverty, any more than my brother, armed with her fantasies about my character, has protected her from self-inflicted suffering. What i do know is that she now more resembles the kaleidoscope of pharmaceuticals she takes to stay alive than the powerhouse of personality that inculcated respect and admiration in this unruly child.

If i have cancer, i choose to die from it rather than accept the strategies of a medical establishment whose priorities are clearly conflicted between a client’s welfare and great personal wealth. While i’m alive, i look to be well, and this includes peace where i live, including and most especially within my own skin. I don’t ask for much from others, and look to share how i can what i have. Given my eclectic perspective, this sharing does not always include material gifts, and like all good mysteries in the universe involves a conundrum. All i have of any real value is myself and my time, time i have bought and paid for at great personal expense. Oh mother of god! will the irony never cease¿ I have yet to meet that tribe which takes great joy in my presence over extended periods of time “guests and fish are alike in that they both stink after 3 days” - old Chinese proverb. What is left to me is to be at peace within my skin. As the external voices of what i should have; could have; would have been; recede into former times and places, what i occupy myself with is what i do which is: write, draw, cook, eat, drink, shit, piss, sleep, exercise, tai chi, meditate - rinse and repeat. If there becomes too much interference with that program i move on. What i strive for is helping others do what they want to do in the belief that karmically that will eventually comeback to, if not me, than somebody who could make good use of it. I am not anxious to travel, nor am i afraid to settle down - whatever that means. What i don’t want to do is cling to the pain of being evicted from my home when young by devising some perfect circumstance that is fool-proof, ironclad and will endure through the ages into eternity; that is a fiction. I cannot protect my mother from herself, anymore than i can correct my brother for his misunderstanding of who i am. All i can do is make any effort available to me to better understand who i am, why i do what i do, and share that knowledge with anyone who is curious. “My three greatest treasures, simplicity, patience and compassion” - Lao Tzu; may you all become stinking rich by that standard. May you r . i . p . ma.

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go - the sonnet

“Go” she said. “Where he cried?”-"you can't stay here”

she replied scornfully, though not cruelly.

“shit” he thought, not yet knowing of his tear.

“you’ll be sorry” he groaned so piteously,

What he really wanted was to give love,

and to be loved. Was that so much to ask¿

Off he went to where life fit like a glove,

yet without ruby slippers - what a task.

The yellow brick road was now a tollway

allowing no pedestrians - only cars.

“With gas,” he thought, “it might get me part way.”

He didn’t know where - just not behind bars.

what a surprise when he got to the end-

where he began unwilling to defend. 

jts 09/10/2018

http://stoneartist.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved e

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flux - the essay / stasis - a sonnet

I normally write on Monday’s, but just now realized that to ponder an essay about flux on Sunday would be apropos. By definition it is not possible for anything to exist, but in a state of flux; yet as humans we have conjured the word “stasis” and its appropriate definition, however false:

Stasis (from Greek στάσις "a standing still") may refer to: A state of stability, in which all forces are equal and opposing, therefore they cancel out each other. Stasis (political history), as defined by Thucydides as a set of symptoms indicating an internal disturbance in both individuals and states.

As creatures with the capacity for language, but the inability to explain the whys and wherefores of our time alive, how is it possible to parse any part of that which we do not understand into equal and opposing forces¿ I can understand the desire for stasis - a respite from the storm, cessation of loving hostilities within the framework of marriage, or even a pause in the unending pursuit of answers to Shakespeare’s eternal question: to be or not to be. Has there ever been a stasis of any kind, a pause in any mountain’s erosion toward the inevitable valley¿ I don’t see how. And yet there it sits in our lexicon of language, which is often more than adequate to settle, at least, arguments in games of Scrabble. How many other words do we use that have no relationship to truth? “If you want to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh or they’ll kill you.” — George Bernard Shaw. The truth, is i hope you’re laughing, ‘cause i ain’t quite ready to do the ever-after-two-step. And this is where it gets dicey, what good am i to you if i am not prepared to die for what i believe¿ Fucking paradoxes. Pema Chödrön uses the simile of flux within the universe to explain the futility of holding on to a closed heart - (paraphrasing) that circumstance which initially closed your heart has inevitably changed since you used it as an excuse to close your heart. Oddly one cannot understand that idea unless one has actually closed down one’s own heart. Is that the essence of change, simply pre and post prompts? Are there conditions that must be met in one’s own growth in order to grasp certain other concepts¿ How the fuck are we as a species supposed to transmit knowledge from generation to generation? Is all education conditional and only subject to immutable laws of organization¿ How can that be if knowledge cannot even be presented in a predictable sequence? Is this barrage of words gonna change any of the needless suffering in our world¿ If not, what will? Were i a day younger, i might have had some silly conceit of using this essay as a vehicle for personal change . ha . ha . ha .

This begs the question, from what to what. Just now standing outside smoking 3 of 6, i’d determined that the click on the keyboard from my longer nails was dissonant to my particular brand of autism, so i cut them and now type quietly enough to sooth my retentive state of denial. However it does provoke the possible irony of quiet keystrokes in a world where wunderkinds are worth multiple billions simply for their capacity to harvest a predictable cacophony of keystrokes. The acute reader will rightfully take umbrage with my mixed metaphor equating my not entirely private act of writing with the emerging science of bandwidth presence and social engineering. I was long-nailed joseph, now short-nailed joseph, though during the ten minutes of time on this 2nd paragraph, approximately 960,000,000 of my cells are now dead and replaced with brand new ones. If one were to expand that logically, how does one transform a self that is already ceaselessly transforming? There seems to be a fixation on permanence in our planet; i carved stone for 40 years in some convoluted reaction formation about mortality, and some declare _rump was anointed in heaven. What if our confusion about eternity is simply a question of perception¿ My particular eyesight has provided me a broad spectrum of strategies to manage visual acuity. What if perceiving eternity has more to do with the amount of clarity and openness we can experience each moment than any contrived notion we each might conjure out of the labyrinth of our human archetype? I was about to rail just now about googol’s chief scientist and his fixation on the transgenic uploading human DNA to a silicon matrix, for why rail¿ It’d be sort of like shaking one’s umbrella at the rain - don’t ya’ think? Just like early cinema was a slight of hand - many pictures seen quickly - so too we seem to want to blur and provide an illusion of mobility, rather than peer deeply into each moment you inhabit. 

The framework of essays have a melody, but in the wrong hands (read mine own) can be much like the fiction of time, a sweeping minute hand registering favorably with whatever edition of socialization was supplanted within the blossom of our early selves. To stake out a position about change precludes discovery. Discovery suggests a state of unknowing which is not possible. It is the cudgel of conviction that blunts our capacity to peer deeply without ascribing value or judgement. The limits of perception are self imposed. I have read that humans have on average 12,000 to 70,000 thousand thoughts per day, however 98% of those thoughts are the same ones that you had the day before. Given the size and scope of the universe, and our unique capacity for reason aided by our senses, i’d have to say we as a species are seriously underutilizing our capacity for perception. Unfortunately the +/- 5v straw sucking your focus down the rabbit hole is diminishing rather than enhancing any vestiges of curiosity left to our kind, and i mean that in the nicest possible way. Fucking paradox, the slower you the more you see. At the end of Siddhartha by Herman Hess, it was the river passing which yielded Siddhartha a sense of change as it pertained to himself. I resist change, which makes no sense. The illusion of using stone carvings as a means of establishing a state permanence, is little different than climbing the highest mountain which was eroding the whole time you were climbing it and even while you stood at the pinnacle. I haver read that Rembrandt was fascinated by the changes to his face as he aged, that is the root of curiosity in my mind, but moreover a wonderful capacity to peer into the abyss. In the town where i live there is an older woman who sells fruits and nuts. She kindly asked “how are you?” I replied “older, thank god; how are you¿” i asked. “Younger, thank god,” she replied. “Please share with me your secret.” i asked. “I don’t resist.” she smiled.

There was a thread of wisdom across my screen this morning. The kernel i took away corresponds to Jung’s notion of the shadow. To embrace that which we repeal. I cannot retrieve a time in my life where i might have done things differently, but i can do things as differently now as i would have then. Am i making decisions today based on an effort to preserve the home in which i grew up? I was powerless to stop it’s disintegration. Have i been making decisions based on the same conviction for the past 50 years¿ There are very good reasons to look deeply into the place we exist, rather than clutching at a time, idea, or person whose entire cellular structure may have changed since you actually shared air together. I was raised by patriots, yet ma did look up at me without guile while the fox channel piped in like some sycophantic sibling, and asked - “Do you really think Trump is such bad guy¿” I was horrified, and not. Our individuation would not allow that debate. My own struggle be a good son had brought me full circle to the “he” she would change. She’s a crafty woman, so i’ll never know if that had been her plan all along. What i have gained is a kinder appreciation for her own unique dialogue with permanence. She is approaching her transition, and i with who she shared her childhood “inconsolable fear of death” cannot alter her path. What i have learned, is that she cannot alter mine. I would say to her now, “ma, that’s a good thing, don’t you see¿ If you cannot change my path, that means no one can change yours either. You are powerful ma.” About this time she might be weeping, trembling or worse yet - tossing tissues at me. What saddens me was not conveying clearly to her the she i found her to be. Ma was present during the same domestic collapse that affected all us. I’m not sure she was ever able to forgive herself, and i only say as much for knowing how long it has taken me to forgive myself.

And it is here in the melody we find the “crux of the biscuit” - Frank Zappa. .. forgive who, for what i ask. Once one has permission to consider the vastness of what we do not know about where we are, the tragedies and accomplishments we cling to shrink - the “so large against the sky, so small against the stars” late Leonard Cohen shared. When the not yet dead Jim Morrison sang “you cannot petition the lord with prayer” it later resonated for me with readings from Lao Tzu. Much of the wiser things i’ve read or learned are not so much concerned with the capacity to change one’s environment, but in understanding one’s relationship to one’s environment. When this practical advise is held up against what we’ve learned about the scope of our universe in just the past 50 years, much less the last 100 years, there becomes a great onus, to again try and understand, rather than to change one’s place in the much larger universe. My sense is the deeper we are able to peer into all the realms of our world the more real change we might find. Me, within the frontiers of my own skin, i’m doing good when i keep it to 2 shots and 6 cigarettes, much less attenuating my language around ma, whom i’ve known forever but have only begun to understand recently her somewhat remote humor, much less that which she wants. I know this, on any 10 trips to the store she will change her buying habits for everything but buttermilk. Her passing is not something i welcome, and not. My hope is that her infinitely pliable perspective comea full circle, from: inconsolable fear of death, to: the Valkyrie like bravery it must have taken to unmoor from a 60’s suburbia sham and to damn the torpedos, full speed ahead into a paradise or kingdomcome, whichever comes first - however hasty the timing of her decision may have been. I now know, she was being shadowed by her own internal dialogue as are we all no matter what lengths we go to to make the unconscious conscious. We are all different people, even from the people we were when we made the conscious decision to change. “Be like water my friend” - Bruce Lee, and even better “Don’t resist” - la Sra. Gaia de Donde yo Vivo.

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stasis - a sonnet

stasis is the trip you can’t ever take,

and because of that you can’t ever leave.

There are beings who’ve never ate aught but cake,

some whose fare is naught but beans; i believe,

not that i choose to, because i’ve seen it-

just about. there’r more on beans than cake,

yet here we sit in a pile of shit

being told “this is gonna change, but I’m fake.”

However, distribution wasn’t ever thus;

not that long ago . .. we took what we earned,

including kings - lot’s dethroned without fuss,

because justice ain’t aught, when you get burned.

To say there is a balance of power,

means you accept death, nor never cower.

jts 09/03/2018

http://josephtstevens.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved e

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