10 days from today is my birthday; none of your damn business how many - think ‘old as dirt’, 4 days from now is my sister’s, she is older than dirt. We are estranged; in my waking fog today, she was traveling to China, an image which provided emotional leverage to explore unresolved issues that only the unconscious mind can navigate; it was very helpful. It is now late on a wet Oaxacan afternoon; a good day overall, though i fell riding my bicycle back from the outdoor gym. Given events of the past year, much less the past week, i applaud my pluck. Pancreatitis is the new Sherrif in town, which should make for an interesting denouement from my honest efforts to pluck as much creative gristle from the Bohemian bones that have comprised nourishment during much of my flicker of existence. Without being ‘wasichu’ about it, know, i’m in no hurry to check out, but more accurately; before i do, i'd like to honor the miracle of breath that has taken me so long to percolate up to the surface of my persona.
One Christmas, while my father was gaining his supine footing at the onset of his end days and the elder siblings had circled the wagons in an effort to quarantine his peace from the ‘wild indian’ my spirit apparently manifests within the family mythology, i wrote my first sonnet as an homage to his journey. In that sonnet, i blithely foreswore my raison d'être as emanating from stone - if there’s afterlife, Pop is getting a good yuck’ off of my dawning awareness of such hubris. Well pop as long as we’re laughing: of the handful of times you laid a marshal hand on me for developmental emphasis was the the time i was ratted out by “the poor weak 'sister' creature” for nominating her to her face as a ‘she dog’- she was then/whether she still is i can’t say, she now eschews ‘simple existential dialogue’ - Pop’s enlightened reaction at that time was to corner me in the elder brother’s ‘premium’ primogeniture accommodation and ‘bitch’ slap my head from side to side, something i can only imagine the two siblings regaled, and continue to regale for my existential comeuppance, according to their ‘lights'. However, i am no longer fresh, not even confident, but am curious what morsels of understanding can be teased from this aged writing implement that had once represented liberation and redemption, which are now no more than a warm presence, like that of the murmuring from an old friend waiting to hear the end of your last sentence. There is also the bulwark against the contemporary terror foisted on the population by a cynical ruling class well aware of how deeply they have failed in their responsibilities to honor the privilege that chance and circumstance have provided their human experience. My creative elan is no longer manic - weighted by the gravity of destiny. Rather i would extrude each tidbit of beauty found through the prism of curiosity.
Bob Dylan opined a parent’s wisdom still oozed out of his ears, my parents were never short on opinion; of my earliest memories is a photo of a ‘perplexed’ me looking up into the camera whilst my bright red cape was being affixed to my neck, not unlike that of a noose. The consummate craftsmanship of my devil costume was dwarfed by the weight of its horned symbolism. All of 3 years old, if that, and yet little more than a projection screen for the too active imagination of my exceedingly smart Dame and her gaggle of ready-made stories waddling behind her Hannibal-esque march to her destiny. All of this to say; there never was room or awareness adequate for a crosseyed sensate in the superheated cauldron of narcissist apprenticeship that was my childhood. I developed what innate mimicry i possessed, modeled the ‘cocktail hour vignettes’ that constituted the cognoscenti in the dead space south of San Francisco. I glommed onto the detritus of art supplies and open books that reflected the interests of my fascinating parents, substituting the proficiency i gained from factotuming in my parent’s faux bohemian billet in exchange for the dearth of affection and simple human acknowledgement that i grew up starved for in that house full of ‘vain’ appetites.
So true-to-form on my elder sister’s birthday, i participated as uninvited interloper, sending a sonnet and sundry photos reflecting my obtuse, however sincere effort to be what i’ll never be - welcomed. Her birthday occurs on 9-11. For a time my strategy was to send whatever humor i could picture might serve as counterweight to someone i am welcome to ignore, and whose grief i’m not welcome to commiserate. Fb in it’s mechanical stupidity only serves to exacerbate my isolation and relational confusion. Zukè prompted me with an exposure of a statue that is magnificent in its own right and weighty in its failure to rise like cream into the cultural stratosphere, In the spirit of frolic i conjured for my birtday, i posted the foto only to discover an innocent remark from a stranger asking if the form the subject carries ‘is a cat?’ I held my tongue, but more importantly did not react, except here; out of context, in an essay attempting to parse the complexity of ‘raison d'être’ for my existence which i more and more suspect has less raison than d'être that one might find in the accretions of the same stones i have spent my life shaping into congruous shapes which at best are ambiguous, at worst opportunities for commentary by other isolated aesthetes. Yet in the scheme of things, though the nice lady from the South meant nothing more than to pose an interested question that through no fault of her own caused me grievous existential perturbation, my life is so configured that i sit content in the afternoon sun chewing on morsels of events that do little more than feed my soul - and feeling tremendously grateful for such nutrition in a starving world.
A shot and a half of Reposada, after a week and a half of vibrant good health; give or take a day, and this birtday morning the kindly Doctora at the local clinic teased Lima Bean-size, or at least large Pinto Bean-size detritus from both ears - i knew it was there, but took successive visits for liberation. I have been lucky so far in life debriding them myself since my patron saint of ENT Dr’s, Doctor Sammy Lee was called back to the mother ship; or at local Vietnamese Barber shops; (why the American war there was doomed out of the gate.) There’s an autoerotic fascination about holding molted tissue that is so primary as to mimic an infant’s fascination with feces, and the world’s equally irrational repulsion - don’t believe me, try looking up the psychiatric expression for infantile interest in feces. My fascination with the intrinsic nature of esoterica formed on rainy days inside a weekend-empty home drenching myself in the encyclopedias my loving parents invested in. The comforting plethora of what was ‘known’ then against my increasingly insatiable curiosity about what is known now, nestles nicely in the paradox of our “monkeys with guns and money” reality that we drag behind our gimp; traipsing with our fragile skeletons onward past the chimera of oh-so-certain signposts into the nearly unfathomable enormity of our, forgive me Leonard, “invincible defeat;”
don’t know about y’all - i had a blast wiping this one off the slate ·
“what’s the numerical equivalent of sex¿
68, one more and you eat it.” - A. Nonymous ·
Oscar Wilde — 'All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.'
X / X / X / X / X /
breathing - the sonnet ·
There is little much more than breath to life
yet we fill our days with such distraction
what explains our fascination for strife
except as diversion from examination
Of what, for why¿ permission to enjoy
the act of creation from deep within?
who would dare to arbitrate - with what ploy ·
‘We’ll need to see papers you were given,
to make something out of nothing, ain’t right;
breathing must have authorization -
how else can we know you have seen the light?
You might have knowledge without condition.
our system is made to give you comfort
that’s why we gloss your pain, you say it's hurt
jts 070923 raison d'être; an essay - breathing; the sonntet ·
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