Christmas Eve & Xmas Day - the essay / joyeux du noël - a sonnet ·

 

The year my father died he melodramatically, as only he could, pulled me by my lapel down to his bedridden face and elicited a solemn promise that i would never quit writing - ergo i write, however painfully. If you have been reading the saga of my journey to face certain death, my last blog entry contained besides my usual smarmy self-righteous sanctimonious observations about my relative moral superiority - an account of having been knocked to the ground by a holiday hasty Mercedes Benz.’ (my christmas eve gift was a polite declination by the injury attorney i’d approached about the ‘scene of the crime’ due to the grey area of my ‘green light does too short of a yellow light’ transgression; however i was trumped by the offender’s apparent relationship clerking for a ‘cheese’ in the local star chamber.) 

I used to believe with conviction in my capacity to overcome physical adversity of any kind, but this youthful fiction was always consistent with the ‘hothouse’ cultural environment my semi-privileged  upbringing that suggested such a conceit was my birthright when my mortality and the un-prosecutable afore mentioned chariot of power drove over my arrogant presumption; i’m okay, having started out a little cock-eyed; i now possess just a little more character, a lot like gilding the lily. However, my existential stamina which has never been in short supply due to an apparently inexhaustible supply of cosmetic raison d’etre; is now nearly exhausted as an aged ex-expatt itinerant stone carver with a broken wrist and no prospects save an ignorant willingness to cross the DMZ of post-Jan 6th corporate insurrection ‘merica to stand shoulder to shoulder with any anti-corporate renegade brigade looking to face off against the nascent pre-apocalyptic ‘merican apologists. Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke, or as the now deceased, but not forgotten Doug Rubardt, late of 60’s Telegraph Ave, Berserkly sandwich shop, cum restauranteur fame, “Joke ‘em if they can’t take a fuck” R·I·P·, may your personal decency ride through the eons of space and time to lovingly inform cosmic cardiac muscles anywhere.

Ma is in her deathbed and the ever mindful eldest has organized a ‘zoom’ Christmas that included me; though he was present on my arrival back into the states when i bought my first telephonic device in 8 years abroad - a ‘Consumer Cellular’ flip phone incapable of such techno feats; well played elder brother - you do Cain proud. The great thing about writing is that no matter what sanctimonious rabbit hole you wish to wander down in search of the holy grail of innocence - there you are - facing no one, but you yourself the author. In the background just now is the Xmas day gift opening ‘feeding frenzy’ that the holiday has become replete with matchbook toy track that has its own propelling device that sounds just like a poorly tuned sewing machine. The shrill captive birds understood this morning’s noise explosion as an invitation to ratchet up their incessant piercing plaintive squawk as though with the right decibel their ‘music’ might crack the barrier of my self-referential flinty heart which finds no welcome for the shrieks of delight that the material-gain of this holiday has come to represent.

The upside is that the dearth of feeling that object oriented’ celebrations have choked off, leave the region of compassionate understanding wide open - fallow fields long untilled and lacking appropriate DNA, ’heritage seed stock’ to grow anything other than what the corporate consumer shills have picked to propagate. I do not know what to plant and consider myself extremely fortunate to be able to string words together - the existential doubt that has replaced my former implacable confidence is now icing on the cake · my own twist on Marie’s sage pronouncement of “Let them eat cake.” Pop was right to wring from me the solemn promise to never stop writing, for having slogged through the past 48 hours cherry picking ideas from a shattered future and attempting to forge meaning in a life that is no longer anchored by the chimera of delusion i’ve used to hammer out meaning - my opinion about this holiday has no bearing for anyone but myself and my creative lodestone which had been yoked to recognition and ego is now fleeing down the ‘rabbit hole’ searching for any feeling of relevance which only ‘work’ can provide.

Previously my youthful focus on power, force, and grace created an endlessly uniform panorama that obscured the crevices and pitfalls that one can only recognize from within whatever limited perspective into which one has tumbled - much like the Arizona landscape one views on approaching the Grand Canyon. To get in and out of those vastly different terrains, one must know and understand the use and function of which skill to use when - a skill which when developed using slight modifications, and clear well thought out purpose allows for a much easier and effective transition from smooth uninterrupted landscape to many varieties of challenging landscapes; all that is necessary to master these gifts is that desire which Martin Luther King so eloquently articulated “If you can’t fly, then run; if you can’t run, then walk; if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”

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joyeux du noël - a sonnet ·

what i love - laughing at a poem title;

don't knock it 'til you've tried it, like blank verse -

starts out oafish but skeins to pin-point subtle

nestling nicely with guffaws plucked from tears 

what's to any holy day without joy?

solemnity devoid of nurturing; 

compulsory gifting · love me - buy toy

seating in our soul's throne a long dead king?

we calcify if we will not alter

the Tao said when you die, you are rigid

when are born you flex and are like water;

odd that men’s life maker is called turgid

frolic has no place not knowing sorrow

just as now is becoming tomorrow

jts 122422 Christmas Eve Day

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

all rights reserved

∞

Thanksgiving - an essay / Giving thanks · the sonnet

 

Thanksgiving - an essay  ·

I am in bardo, 

(ˈbɑːdəʊ ) noun (often capital) (in Tibetan Buddhism) the state of the soul between its death and its rebirth;

actually Bakersfield, CA - same difference ·

July 4th of this year i returned from 8 years abroad with a very hazy agenda - one objective was to visit 94 year old ma. The date was due to a requirement by the nation i was living in to have an exit ticket when i had arrived 6 months earlier, existence by fiat is not something i can recommend to you. My choices had not always been so desultory; in fact i have lived most of my life driven by a singular purpose to create. To that end i looked out over the horizon after the death of my father, a precipitous career end, and an unfortunate house purchase, each of which was affected by the conceit or myself as artist on a mission, but suspended in a vacuum. For the longest time i could endure the crushing loneliness that is the ‘creative life, for to create anything of merit requires intense application and vast periods of solitude - characteristics i’d thought defined me well. So well, i deflect compliments about work believing that proves my ego has been tamed and my ambitions pristine - talk about ‘your delusions.’

Then i got old, not in the Rip Van Winkle manner - waking up sans hangover to find my torments gone, clutched in the loving embrace of wee-ones hanging off my ankles; however, my real realization was a ruptured disk hefting bottled water in confined quarters. My fate appears to have had much better ideas. A harbinger of things to come had been debilitating sciatica, or so i imagined. Turns out to be serious degeneration of my hip socket exacerbated by a decade of manic ‘denial’ running with pronounced LLD (leg length difference); coupled with a lifetime shifting the weights of carved stone statuary intended as a bulwark against the relentless march of death that stalks each or us, instead of a bizarre metaphor for Moby Dick careening with me and my arrogance deep into the vast ocean depths of an unknown future - the pièce de résistance, of course would be degenerative osteoarthritis, or has been said better elsewhere “i ache in the places i used to play.”

The paradox - there’s always a paradox, i am as thankful as i have ever been, however galling it is to consider any future that includes picking feathers off a floor from a caged flock of birds whose closest equivalence to my enlightenment would be the obnoxious personality Baba Ram Dass reputedly invited into his ashrams to push the acolytes off center - an oddly effective method for breaking down the ego. This holiday i have the poignant responsibility to be present during the continued fracture of a mother/daughter, time-honored tradition for the questionable reason that a child has not attended the first half of her first year of schooling; i watched the same child spiral out of control within 1/2 hour of waking because she was using a lollypop to scoop sugar powder from a candy dispenser shaped like a toilet - sad huh ? Sadder still when you consider this Sucrose Delivery Platform was designed to ‘train’ the most vulnerable amongst us - children. How would you explain to the ‘adults’ present they were sealing an hysterical semi-fate for the next 45 minutes, until the sugar ‘boost’ falls out - ah ! tradition !!

But this isn’t about you - it’s about me digging myself out of the existential rut from which i am seeking traction and another unique solution while i abase myself vacuuming feathers from a flock of manically squalling captive birds which i would gladly throttle one by one had i a killing bone in my body. I douse my murderous fury like most other murderous inclinations that visit the dungeons of my of my emerging heart by accommodating and sublimating uncomfortable feelings until i’m sure my instincts won’t damage another; not because i am afraid of retaliation, but from the very real experience of having been hurt; i have been damaged and have caused others damage. So it is not difficult to sense the same pain in others. The 7 year old ‘wannabe’ sugar addict this afternoon was being given extensions, and loudly objecting to someone else imposing a style on her captive head - not much different than the ‘judgement’ with which i plague myself. What i vow to do as i veer from my self-imposed bardo rut is to pay myself first and foremost the respect i accord others, whether understood and acknowledged or not. I cannot be thankful to anyone until i have nurtured within myself the same ‘unconditional self worth’ i pray for the world.

There is much hurt in my heart from things not of my making, and more from my own doing; nor am i yoked to the myriad bizarre notions others entertain themselves with about my reality - either former ‘others’ or recent ‘others'; everyone seems to want a say about everyone but themselves · i understand that, for having struggled to distinguish my feelings about this holiday, it has meant owning the cruelty of my birth family members without embracing whatever perceptions they use to justify quarantining themselves from me - like that would keep them from experiencing whatever illness or unexamined feelings they would apparently project on to me. We are the same four infants suckled and nurtured within the same cauldron of multi-generational pathology. My mother’s, and by extension, my sibling’s effete assertion that they alone parse the correct interpretations of gratitude, family, and decency is fascinating, if it weren’t for the contortions i go through to disentangle the illogic of such stupidity without causing them, or others pain from my own unacknowledged suffering. I will continue to express my thanks, such as it is, to a world that often feels to me as though i am supposed to be elsewhere and say nothing about that. 

- (talk about your unexamined feelings and unconscious projection, why don’t ya’)

now i’ll work on how to present proper gifts to that same confusing world, because t’is the season to be .  .. ··· 

112522

moments after completing this essay i went out to ride the safe zone circuit in the adjacent subdivision, but before i reached that haven within the most dangerous roads in ‘merica - Bakersfield, CA; i was knocked by a holiday-hurrying Mazda accelerating into my right of way out of a too-short lefthand turn light in a crosswalk and rendered unconscious. Though out longer than 10 minutes, the perspicacious paramedic deemed my ‘mentis compos’, sufficiently such to release me; i walked myself and too-damaged-to-roll bicycle home, evading the maelstrom modern 'merican care has become.

That was the 25 of November, by the 28th it had became an issue for the fiduciaries and i was ordered to submit to a CT scan at the ER. The results declared a contusion and hemorrhage to my right temporal lobe (approx 6 mm) which a 2nd CT scan could not find; a compression fracture to my left fibula and a laceration to my right distal phalange that was too far along in healing to accept sutures. My panicked ’primary care’ physician ordered a 2nd CT scan 4 days later, that exposed a ‘false positive’ for hemorrhaging or contusion: i'm repeating myself - welcome to the world of 'TBI'·

I am still thankful, but with additional reasons; the osteo-technician that replaced the temporary ‘ice-tong’ splint expertly fashioned by the LVN Ms. Rung during the 1st CT abomination created a sculptural masterpiece that has immobilized my fibula, yet allows me the dexterity necessary to type at will. Grateful i had the ‘presence of mind’ to examine the contraindications of taking the analgesic ‘Mobic’ prescribed because of a opiate fear that i was self-medicating with 50mg of Tramadol for my continuing discomfort and peculiar inattention by the ‘Doctors’ for degenerative osteo-arthritis of the lumbar and hip socket that was made manifest by x-rays that have now turned up missing.

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Giving thanks - the sonnet  ·

    

Hating where you are creates a hard share

which may explain the fantasy season -

give objects to others, in place of care.

ergo, it may be kinder to have fun.

Playing in this world creates more to give

because fun is finer found with others,

yet here i sit alone, happy to live

without family, sister or brothers -

instead creating ash Leonard called poems.

Is that finer fun and a better gift,

than our hijacked Xmas and twisted Oms?

or delusions from a heart shrunk and bereft?

Doesn’t matter - what does, is i’m happy

though my shrunken heart feels my gift - sappy.

jts 11/24/2022

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

all rights reserved

∞ 

being - the essay / Buddha Head, come and gone; easter morning · a sonnet

being - the essay

The world is crawling out from under a plague siege; a princely oligarchy holds our wealth for ransom; and two of the world’s greater powers are saber rattling with tyrannical impotence, while the fount of judeo-christian wisdom is committing genocide with my tax dollar. Two personal delusions i have used as raison d'être, art and  literature, ebb and flow in force and fun; a cataract impaired vision has been returned to me, such that were i a 20-something rake again full of piss and vinegar, the world might very well be my oyster, but am more like a devolving infant in a playpen full of aphorisms and snippets of experience with which i still try to defend my right to exist. Dreams of recognition and accomplishment rise like vapor and dust rather than the sturm and drang i applied before as traction while i slogged ever onward toward the idyl of fame and fortune, my 4G signal swamped by 5G white noise. I know not what to do, may have never known · the glacial sheet of self-doubt forming and reforming, dragging boulders across the moraines of my fractured ego exuding a past-like wisdom, not yet compassionate, more urine plume from rusting corrugation on some remote desert roadway.

However all is not lost, and my super-simplified life provides moments of clarity - a self restraint practiced over years rising from embankments of chaos; kindness without motive and tolerant acceptance, the inevitable subduction of life force by the ‘impenetrable’ Tao of Einstein’s god. As my personal power diminishes; the nuisance of absent wifi contrasts with fantasies of internettedness, or its commensurate value for amplifying literary conceits. I find instead a barren landscape of harsh realities about relatedness, fear and love. For example, the delusion of belonging anywhere for me has been based on a super-abbreviated period of my youth after which the mysterious all-giving bosom of family vanished into a feeding frenzy amongst my kin for things that were at one time our family estate. In a self righteous and sanctimonious repudiation of their avarice, i chased prestige and freedom, with an insatiable appetite.

If i must be hungry, i would rather hunger for understanding, the type of understanding i’ve gained from a lifelong effort to comprehend art and literature and its role for humanity. In the midst of one domestic collapse, i spent an entire weekend which seemed an instant, affixed to Henry Fielding's “The history of Tom Jones - a Foundling.” There is much about that particular domestic collapse which isn’t worth a backward glance, yet the cogent discourse on issues of courage, confusion, commitment and forgiveness i discovered within the history of Tom Jones inform my thinking to this day. Then it gets dicey, how does any wisdom derived from that reading translate into comparable value for the time it has taken you to read this essay? Would more explicit images of my personal experience aid you in better understanding our world? - that i write in protest/reaction-formation/entertainment withdrawal from an intermittent internet; that there is a fraught-ribbed dog with a diseased eye and his equally cadaverous pack outside the door of my current hovel; who voices howls that hold my soul in thrall more so than the poser exertions of my covertly mendacious interest in the creative process or that i've created my 'virtual' sangha willingly under the puerile supervision of a surveillance culture financed by the taxes of my slave wages during 5 decades of skimming from my ‘gainful employment’ in service of a visible means of support’? Please don’t all answer at once .  ..

I have simplified my life at great personal cost, including the sacrifice of two intrinsic conceits - my value to our culture as a sculptor of stone, painter of purpose and author of merit - i derived enormous pleasure from each activity but the logistics demanded for them are not commensurate with the return. That is not to say that what i have created in those mediums lacks value, far from it. It is a simple financial fact defined by Dame Paradox and her offsprings T’is and T’ain’t, my life's work is not significant enough as a market share to finance the cost of my old age, much less the tax of interring my remains. I may be crazy, but i’m not stupid. There is a Youtube record of me making what i thought was no idle claim to destroy all of my stone carvings before i die; i was neither insincere, nor purely venal at the time; i was motivated by conceit and umbrage that what i had spent a lifetime creating would be subsumed by a corrupt and non-constructive industrial art establishment that opts for veneer over substance; then i got old; as delusion after delusion was dismantled by delammination of body and soul from decrepitude, i was forced to examine more closely personal fictions based on dubious ego-based assumptions, often derived from traumas of my own making.

All at the expense of the superlative creative dynamic inherent to our species. For example, a documentary i just watched on Shakespeare stated simply due to his prolific use of new words and word combinations, that 1 in 10 of our world's English language expressions are derived from his writings, yet in my own desiccated, effete search for originality, i have just dithered overlong about using ‘delammination,’ because of on an inert algorithm’s red underline; that is insane. I write like i draw, paint, sculpt, write or love, because it gives me a pleasant visceral confirmation about my thinking when loving; i see the radiant reflection of one other’s love; a feeling that draws me to the core of existence. When creating visual artifacts i search for that same reflection of love in a glance, expression or faithful interpretation of the terrain and flora we share, or in words, clear ideas that comprise the warp and woof of our fading human light.

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 Buddha Head, easter morning · a sonnet

I set the broken egg on the table.

The girl smiled handing me the portrait bust

of Buddha before unavailable - 

though the shirt i wore said 'in him i trust.'

She'd found the head in beans used to protect;

so well it worked his loss unknown t'il found.

Are we so yoked, ours to what we select;

or is ours what we find going around?

I missed it not, yet found to lose again, 

or it had never been gone; i was lost.

Here and gone are baby signposts - whose in?

When no one is in, it comes at great cost.

In either case, what's lost is never gone

because light by its nature makes dawn.

jts 25/02/2022

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

 ∞

Upon leaving Viet Nam, an essay - Cork in the Ocean, the sonnet ·

 “If sad were a drug, i would be high as fuck” was printed on the t-shirt of my friend Le the waitress from Circle Cafe who proudly displayed this metaphor in a selfie video on her fb page. You would have to know the quiet, painfully shy, but exquisitely beautiful young woman to fully appreciate how unexpected it was to find this quote - but there you have have it · VN in a nutshell. It will have been 2 1/2 years when i blast off from Saigon, most of my time spent in Hoi An, a boutique’y World Heritage site overrun by digital vagabonds, and foreigners - from the most venal and shallow to the most benign and high minded - all of us sharing one thing, we don’t belong. Though Hoi An is understood historically as Faifo - ‘friendly meeting place’ · the era of covid has rended the ancient fabric such that a painful delusion has risen like smoke from dirty wood that it is lost without the freebie income of the tourist. It breaks my heart to see this misconception anointed, propagated, and kowtowed to when there is so much left to do by the heart and soul of the town - its people.

I am sore like i’ve never been, yet healed in ways i wouldn’t have believed possible 2 years ago. I am mended not by magic, but by the simple product of superior reasoning. For example, some 7 years ago walking the gentle inclines of Montevideo, i developed a hitch in my step wherein i would falter as though someone had buckled my knee from behind. I couldn’t know at the time it was the convergence of a perfect storm of growing old, and being visited by past due accounts from ancient injuries. By the time i’d arrived in Hoi An, my condition manifested in agonizing sciatica - if only. Walking became unbearable and i was only able to exist through the friendly offices of my trusty steed, Xe đạp (bicycle). I resigned myself to an abbreviated future and the indignities of old age as an invalid, except .  .. through happenstance and dumb luck i found myself in the hands of Doctor Tam an empathic physiotherapist who was able, based on a remarkable comprehension of the human anatomy commenced a regime of spine stretches, adjustments and manipulation of my short-leg, wherein i began to understand my rocklike spine of yore, was more like a piece of corrugated tin that had corkscrewed over time and pinched the pelvis such that pain was the only place i able to walk without mindfulness.

I now sit in a corporate coffee shop on the corner down from my hotel trying to organize the last details of my journey so i may remain mindful of the viral scourge devouring our planet lung by lung during the interminable waiting that air travel has become. The friends i am leaving in the small seaside town where i found safe haven weigh heavily on my mind, yet the certain knowledge they bid me bon voyage will make my journey more than tolerable. The feelings i have cannot be fathomed in a 6 paragraph essay, so i hope for the unrehearsed candor of speaking from the heart. I have not only been healed in my time here in Viet Nam, but i feel to have grown in ways i didn’t expect, not for lack of trying, just not converging with the proper elements that nurture growth. Nor do i know anymore what those elements are exactly. I do know that love is key; not the gobsmacking romantic variety which knocked me on my keister here, but the unremitting relentless ever present one-love that pulses through all the star dust of our planet. There is no other explanation for the transfiguration of my soul - i am not the same man that arrived 2 !/2 years ago; nor am i better or worse just different; different may be the wrong word - ‘more so’ better explains my feelings.

Just now, for example the Mocha that caused me to return to this ca phe shop where i finally met the woman who had originally been the reason for my journey to Viet Nam, lacked the one ingredient for which i had returned - chocolate. Rather than rail, i drank it. It is the same for being deported, as much as i had deemed here home - it did not deem me so. I have not failed, and the country is more than wise to diminish the foreign presence, not because that presence is inherently foul, but some plants need proper nutrients to flourish and the socialist culture bought and paid for with the righteous reasoning of Uncle Ho is worthy of better food than the contaminated fare proffered by a collapsing empire. Last night i had takeaway pizza that was execrable. On its face it sounded perfect, its glossy ad appeared lush, delicious even humanistic, but because all the establishment had for a business model was the conceit of its foreign investors, the experience failed from top to bottom: service, logistics, food, to follow up. Rather than being guided by the deep pockets of fatuous foreign influence, i would advocate the leaders of Viet Nam marshal home grown wherewithal and rally the native entrepreneurial spirit - that indomitable will which using bicycle power vanquished the most powerful military force known to the planet.

I can’t say whether i will ever return, but one thing is certain the ineffable and unknowable magic that aided me during my stay will never be lost as long as i draw breath. There is a fair likelihood that my departure will sound a death knell for my existence - a smoker running the international Covid gauntlet - so be it. I feel fulfilled and am at peace with my fate, as much as a man in my shoes can be. However, i feel the spirit of my life has been rekindled and i venture forth not as a hangdog acolyte seeking what is missing from my life but with curiosity to find what i have missed in my narrow focus life of ambition heretofore. I have no ambition but to delve deeper into what i don’t understand - just about everything; curiosity has returned to my being, or better, has been uncovered from its complacent lair. The birth family of my youth mimics conceit within which my culture has cloaked itself, even the act of inquiry for my ‘learned kin’ has become a desiccated social form adhered to like the latest fad or some arcane litany from a dead faith rather than the mystery and awe that deep love demands - a love that has been cruelly coopted by the well compensated Ad-Men adherents of Edward Bernays and his merry band of psychopathic sycophants fronting for Profit.Inc.

No doubt i could be just one more disaffected wanderer deep in his cups of sour grapes, for i certainly feel like the 9 year-old me who didn’t get picked for the noonday softball. Or it is that i am a wizened veteran from the culture wars rueing the short-sided plunge of a once noble nation chasing the chimera of ease which the digital wizards and their mercantile handmaidens have fashioned, from all but candor, about the shackles ‘like’ buttons and such actually are? I don’t know, nor do i much care, i’ve far exceeded my 10,000 requisite hours of studio time and now find myself with new sight that i didn’t realize i’d lost - it makes me kind of horny, but i’ve never been far from that dimension of our ineffable existence. For a time i toyed with the idea of traveling to Tieu Hieu Pagoda as a supplicant and beseeching one far wiser than i to live and die within the sangha of monastic life. I may never know if that was ‘the road not taken,’ or whether by some mystery in this universe of awe we are passing through that my spirit guides have provided a few more moments of discovery which i have invariably found through the act of interpreting our material plane using the filter of my physical being in the throes of a spiritual experience. Perhaps it is not for me to know, but to find out by remaining as open as i know how using the feeble senses with which i've been blessed; will keep you posted;

when i know, you’ll know.

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Cork in the Ocean - the sonnet ·

She asked me tonight “how was your day?”

what could i say “i'll be gone in three days?”

though just a text box, she didn’t say “stay,

we’ve so much to do, maybe write a few plays.”

I’d been asleep by then, shifting time zones;

but the place in my heart’s not given to moves

like my remains when all’s done will be bones -

a cross grain through the mason's carving grooves.

Some beers later, words appear aping love

that passed a shore torn away by time,

events, confusion from demands above.

I fooled them - leaving sentiment in rhyme,

though nothing will change that pulsing ocean -

feelings still coincide, now and again ·

jts 13/01/2022 

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞