home

I now sit in the hometown of a personal hero, Paul Cezanne; one could even say I reside here, for I’ve signed a contract and paid monies for a domicile; however, you may not send me a letter; there are no cheques with my address; no utility bills; alimony payments or community associations claiming my responsibilities. My handlers at the NSA have access to every bank transaction I’ve made in the past 12 months, though not every expenditure, or why. Any skank with middling hacking skills has access to my email, but my phone is turned off and I’ve not figured out how to place a phone call from a pay phone - everyone here speaks French, or tries to. If every man’s home is his castle, mine would be under siege, or I’m not home. 5 Minutes ago I had no idea how much Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong had influenced my life - writers who wrote the song “Papa was a Rolling Stone” for the Temptation’s which powerfully established an image in my mind at a very young age of what might be coming - a romanticized “white bread” version of actual reality for far too many, but a vivid image nonetheless. It was more than synchronicity by which my divorced father-of-four became the horrific reflection of all male disfunction during the sisterhood-is-powerful epoch of the late 20th century - an epoch which brought us the 77% pay ratio, twerking and the much beloved shill for Monsanto the corporate-sponsored presidential annointee - Hillary Rodham Clinton; while in the meantime from another personal hero - William Shakespeare author of Hamlet, the still apt expression “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Whether it is coincidence or synchronicity that of my many homes, one was on Hamlet St, or whether having another street address at Figueroa St for that same home diluted any synchronicity and augmented the coincidence or only augmented and confirmed Master Shakespeare’s prescience about betrayal, my last wife sold my castle out from under me - (IJDK) I just don’t know. I do know - after that illuminating experience wherever I lay my hat is my home, try as I might to conjure hearth and home. So what the fuck is home? I get the part about formative and am at peace with my people and my parents - grateful for them even, very grateful - especially the more I'm in the world which includes my propeller-blade ex. Earlier in my saga, a tender young heart had embroidered for me a pillow long since hugged to dust which read “Houses are made of Brick and Stone, Homes are made of Love Alone,” that she married another tender young heart less than 3 years later is not the point; that I love Paul Cezanne for his integrity and courage is - bourgeoise son of a banker or no; g_d in her tender mercies bestowed upon me a brother of my own who shares birthdays with Mssr “C,” and although my sibling confuses autonony with some fantasy of having reign over what I say, IJDK; I do know love is a choice; I choose to love my brother, his mother and all of her children - including myself, because that’s how I roll - like a rolling stone.

In my last post card to ma, I wrote “not sure if I belong here or anywhere, or everywhere.” It does make all things more possible if it is love and contentment which you unpack, be that an airport bathroom or some pseudo art patron’s pool house (actual patrons having expired with the Medici Family). The origins of art as talismans protecting and aiding a community’s wellbeing supported by the tribe’s patrons has been usurped by the same commodification of mother earth as with Warren Buffett twisting the ideal of home ownership by being the largest holder of mobile home mortgages. Capitalism is the science of making the lowest common denominator pay which is why art and capitalism are mutually exclusive - the delusion of modern artists believing themselves outsiders rather than harlequins need only research the corporate funded fine art scholarship surrounding Jean-Michel Basquiat. Yet still within me the creative sits as close to my core as any other wholesome inclination I possess, so what of this semi-autonomous region of self I drag across the planet seeking a dwelling place to call home or atelier depending on which pretty French woman I’m trying to impress. The advantages of having a dwelling were explained by metaphor of “setting down roots.” The word Dwelling itself a misnomer of the Old English dwellan to seduce, get lost; related to Old Saxon bidwellan to prevent, Old Norse dvelja to delay tarry or stay, Old High German twellen to prevent - each expression describing the interruption one’s way in one manner or  another - pick your poison, so to speak.

Lao Tzu defines the excellence of a residence by its “suitability.” Bringing us full circle to purpose instead of possession for good reasons why to live anywhere. Like any really creative corporate whore, I live to make art, so you’d think somewhere with lots of artists would be logical - maybe LA with its adrenalin junkies scribbling wannabe proletariat esoterica upon wannabe corporate esoterica - either too passé or not passé enough; IJDK, I do know if the “writers” hate any harder, they is gonna hurt themselves; Paris, maybe as a hotbed for creative growth? I was just there and I’m sad to say how oh-so-orthodox scribble has been anointed to haute culture, but there it sits in the City of Lights; not just sits but displayed prominently right there on Champs Elysees, a golf swing from Arc de Triomphe, emblazoned on the Peugot dealership - Oh the Humanity. ! ; I was weak-kneed for much different reasons than you might imagine - think laughter rather than weeping; kinda gives très chic a whole new slant don’t it? I’ve even lived on an island made of marble in the Philippines attempting my own esthetic Arcadia but found the pernicious and largely anglo patronage of Sex Tourism just sucked the suitability right out that plan. Despair not intrepid reader, for not to be funny or anything, Woody Allen did say 90% of life is just showing up, and what Bob Dylan shared about “my bell still rings” still rings true for me; so again I ask you, if there is no place like home as Glenda so kindly pointed out, where is it here on this rock encrusted molten core hurtling through space that is not exactly like every other place on this too soon to be “formerly homo sapien inhabited” planet; I want to go there I’ve been told it’s home - on good authority .  .  .

But I’ve been told many things in my lifetime, “I love you;” “leave” of course my personal Trump favorite “you’re fired.” Darling Glenda, have you lied to me? before you answer, remember one can lie once, twice - some their whole lives and still be believed, but as the Vaudevillian Heirloom once said “you can fool some of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time. IJDK - I do know I’d rather be fooled than be fooling; I also know that I want peace, good food, and love - any love; it matters not whether it’s hard:soft, smooth:rough, long:short, right:wrong - it just has to be real. Maybe that’s what Frank Baum meant for Glenda to say instead of “home” - “There’s no place like ‘love’;” maybe he’d been on the phone to Frank Capra and was a little confused. Dig this ! What if the human heart is all the home we ever get or were meant to have; once the ticker starts keeping time the only way any of this phantasmagoria will make sense is when the heart is in love, because love is where the heart came from and hopefully, love is where the heart will go? What if all the yearning and capitalizing and hating are just convoluted efforts to get back to the heart - not dwelling in one’s own empty orchestra, but the dancing to; the following of one’s heart - listening carefully to all the contending ideas and discordant feelings of a dying world struggling to dethrone and distract what your heart is telling you - what Leonard Cohen has described by “blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and overturned the order of the soul.” What if from these exertions we learn there is no single location on the planet that is home, but all places are home - stretching logic a little further, is it possible there could actually be rapture in our lifetime at that precise instant our beloved but immovable Gaia and the irresistible force of the clearly male-flavored and long-anticipated Mr. Singularity simultaneously discover each other; and the Vulcan mind-meld which was not entertainment at all but the instrument of our next step for spiritual evolution resulting in a love-inspired, however long-abated, and not entirely welcomed but no longer anonymous incineration torching our carbon rich atmosphere from what is still today the mythical spontaneous combustion? don’t laugh - this sound reasoning describes abiogenesis - something we may need to know more about if and when we kill all life in our home . planet earth . . IJDK .  . .

Death

I don’t want to, but I must - like using a capital “I” for the first person singular subjective personal pronoun in this essay rather than my preferred lower case “i” - death is incontrovertible; there, I’ve spoken truth to power. Stick a fork in me, I’m done. Wasn’t that fun?

Sadly it is just that simple and yet here we are 2,000 plus years since the death of Christ and still murdering each other in the vain hope of helping the victim to heaven. Were it that simple we would not have allowed our collective existence to be hijacked by a bunch of mercantile pimps selling the promise of afterlife camouflaged as deodorant, or gratitude disguised as Mother’s Day flowers. I can remember lying awake as an 8 year old trying to understand what it means to die, possibly precipitated by the death of a new pet rat that got its head stuck in the mesh of its cage and pulled itself apart, but more likely reaction formation to the dawning realization that the family I was born to and idealized, had no concept of unconditional love and I could not reconcile myself to their growing list of conditions; so like any 8 year old with the power of the universe at his disposal, sort of, I imagined my family into an all-loving fable as seen on TV and substituted the vague outlines of the incomprehensible - death - as the immediate cause of my growing existential “angst” ( good word - look it up ). From this resistance to the reality of character formation and the pressures of socialization, I threw my puny intellect up against eternity and the limits of infinity - got nowhere, but it felt better than looking at brothers and sisters embarrassed by my crossed eyes.

Yes you’d be right, he not only looks funny - he won’t shut up. It is still not clear what they are more embarrassed by, my presence or my tongue, i d k? I do know, I still have difficulty reconciling my love for them against their “terms of endearment,” and I still aver from applying the apt expression Leonard Cohen coined - “bitter searching of the heart” because I suspect that might lead to love, growth, maybe even acceptance; then what would I have to grouse about? Unfortunately after this much time, I am more enamored of the consequence of death than any mysterious key which might unlock access to the mythical loving hearth of yore. Death, however is certain - I know because my rat beheaded itself in pursuit of its own liberty which only serves to prove my childhood rat was a better patriot than that large percentage of non-voting U.S. citizens reclining in their impotence rather than face the uphill task of dethroning the “paper tigers” who have overthrown our hallowed halls of liberty - very much like that 8 year old me afraid to change so-called objectionable aspects of my being for fear of finding out nothing would inspire love from the unloving. Like every briar patch, there is a silver-lining, for I have cultivated a lifelong fascination for the inexorable end of life. In case you’re reading in search of eternal truth, sorry to say I’m no closer to an understanding of death, but like an old pair of tennis shoes, if you keep something around long enough eventually it will become, if not comfortable, at least irritatingly familiar.

So too with death, but this is where our “gamer” culture and I part company. Today’s ruling class has staked its existence on a demonstrated ability to keep us at each other’s throat - politically, religiously, ethnically .  . . etc., For me, while death has certainly not subsided in its fascination over the years, rather than the familiarity of a cranky relative for whom one must attenuate one’s attention in order to maintain perspective, and or dignity - death strikes me more as a beautiful paramour who commands one’s attention regardless of proximity or time. Nor by this disclosure, am I lending credence to any mullah’s fictional depiction of 70 virgins waiting on the other side of a suicidal jihad; besides what good could come from chasing death, anymore than what might be accomplished by attempting to, as Arundhati Roy has suggested “pursue beauty to her lair;” clearly I have anthropomorphized Ms Roy’s far more courageous and sublime metaphor in service of my own narrow gender idealization - I’m a man; what can I say. Michel Montaigne said about death - to paraphrase “what an expert it is, for it has been doing what it does much longer than our lifespan allows us to conceive; therefore picture the expertise it must have at what it does; relax and enjoy the ride.” Unfortunately logic, death and humans never seem to agree and so some 500 years after Mssr Montaigne’s generous efforts, John Q Public is still being sold a “pig in poke” and still trotting off to war with a promise of protecting somebody from something as long as death is allowed to validate the ticket. The sad truth is even if I was to track down the dirty dog selling the “pig in poke” theory and slit the throat of said dirty dog - some other dirty dog would step in and continue selling “pigs in pokes,” because, I guess, John Q Public has a genetic appetite for “pigs in pokes.”

Unfortunately for the species, the stakes have risen to where the haters are not content with organized war to winnow the unsightly excess of what Paul Cezanne described as we “bipeds.” Today the bored-to-tears, never-worked-a-day-in-their-lives ruling class has gambled life as we know it against a hubris born of psychotic upbringings rendering compassion for anything other than opulence a chimera to be caged and eviscerated for whatever profit can be sucked out of its marrow. To those of leadership defined by wealth, we are fodder for the economic cannons of the long discredited and ever new “infinite growth paradigm.” Never mind that by the digital barons' very own computer models we now sit at the precipice of the 6th major extinction with the human population square in the cross hairs of a technology run amuck. The ability of marketing mavens to create euphemisms such as “information super highway;” “war on terror;” or my personal favorite “clean and sober” is so great that while ad men for monsatan are drinking glyphosate in front of school children, the marketing shills now describe our salvation in an evolutionary event being propagated as “the singularity.” This coming deliverance, not unlike the movie, will bend over our kind like the newly coronated TPP is bending over the ghosts of Mom and Pop stores echoed from an America even up until fairly recently - which for me as an old man has a much different meaning than some homie in Hollywood looking to make his bones throwing up on the Hollenbeck Station - ironically even that effete act of rebellion is diluted by the cancer his momma is dying from - a disease she got picking strawberries in a glyphosate inundated field in Garden Grove when he was just a baby - but that homie or homette will never learn this fact because the haters have convinced an entire generation that learning is black magic of “whitey.”

. . and still death keeps on coming and coming like some sex addict looking to get out from under in a zen retreat sponsored by Hare Krishna - meaning no disrespect to the sacred. There has to be some reason we continue to write, to draw, to sing; unless death is more like I have conceived her - a beautiful woman who must be serenaded and we being too much like Cyrano De Bergerac are ashamed of our big noses, or like me with my crossed eyes, must dress up our fear of her rejection (or embrace depending on your particular neurosis) with creative offerings, similar to how I convinced myself as a child, “if only I was .  .  . then they would love me”, or for the purposes of this essay death in her insatiable hunger might become so distracted by our myopic efforts to separate ourselves from the inevitable cycles of growth, decay and demise within this physical realm we inhabit that we could somehow become exempt. Perhaps the spirit of desire in itself is enough to staunch that hemorrhaging of our life force spilling into the world’s battlefields; or depleting our former human capacity for excellence on the charnel floor of the newest mall built, itself upon the carcass of a dead neighborhood rich with recent human history having been sacrificed for a parking structure in which to house conveyances that burn the life blood of dinosaurs from our planet’s last “great extinction.” Nothing will stop death, not religion, not money, not love; if there is no way out, then I choose to go with love in my heart, for I have yet to discover a more consistent feeling of wellbeing and accomplishment than to love that which cannot be loved, even death.

Dedicated to the future of my species from planet earth; 3 July 2015      

what it means to be human

I possess most of the grosser aspects of being human - birth, potty training, guilt; but the keener more salubrious aspects of life seem to elude me: love, belonging, contentment. The question of how to achieve these important objectives seems to me to be a perfectly valid ambition - grand perhaps, but perfectly valid. A practical individual would methodically separate each ambition listed however esoteric and find what is necessary to satisfy that ambition and then set about accomplishing that feat; unfortunately, of the many things for which I’ve been accused, the word practical has rarely been used. So like the blind men describing the elephant in ancient Hindi folklore, each with his own certainty about that elephant - be it the rope-like tail, snake-like trunk or tree-like legs; there is a hunger inside of me seeking understanding about an incessant yearning that is as limited a description about this elephant called life as those blind men’s honest efforts to comprehend their part of the beastly elephant - elegant, holy, far more sacred than I will ever become, but still a beast, if for no other reason then she and her parts are prey to our manmade demons. 

Were that all there was to being human - our demons and the sheer magnitude of their destructive impulses, life would be simple, hideous but simple. My good fortune has been the distinct privilege to have lived on the fringes of a creative life. I say fringes, for I have been able to sustain the financial burden of buying my own time, and in so doing become the sole arbiter of my own good taste - a lonely bitter road, but with blossoms on occasion that make the whole comedy worthwhile. I say bitter not with the acrid biting pain born of hate and resentment, although I have personal experience with that flavor, but bitter in the way Aloe Vera will pucker parts of your alimentary canal but mend you in a balancing kind of way - if that makes any sense. The same as how some life lessons cannot be grasped at first blush, or a loving heart be gained without knowing its counterpart - be that companion pain, anger or even fear clutching at and catching the normal open flow of, for lack of a better expression the “good shit” - your first wheelie, first kiss - any of those feelings that astonish and gladden the spirit, the human spirit, or whatever animal parts of it left after the invidious, incessant assault of the Borg Corporation and its “resistance is futile” bullshit has gotten under your skin, into your dreams, between you and your bliss - whatever fucked up thang’ the ciphers and their minions are plotting to dethrone you from or subject you to . . or both.

You see what I mean about hate, so fucking accessible . . , but like Lao Tzu said about going into the darkness - I’d never know just how full with hate I could be were it just an aspect of existence, rather than a choice; I choose love, or as Voltaire said, “I choose happiness, it is better for my health.“ Ya’ gotta love the French, and I do. Yet as codified as happiness has become, even having its very own location in the American Declaration of Independence : 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by    their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it .  . .

there is no lock on any outcome as pertains happiness .  . rights or no rights. Some of our current confusion about this aspect of the human condition may derive, in part, from a fungible interpretation of the meaning of human - corporations having been accorded the same rights and privileges as people - a semantic leap accomplished by the powers that be, “government” no longer being a sufficient description of who or what is driving this train. And so we are now full circle back to the blind men describing some manner of elephant, only now like some shitty shell game we are being asked to question the very essence of being, or at best compare our hopes and aspirations with the financial bottom line of a McDonalds or Walmart. Can there be any doubt about why there might be so much confusion about happiness when we are so easily fooled about who or what has infiltrated our tribes, as easily as I have substituted happiness for love using a rhetorical coup d’etat - or weren’t you paying attention enough to notice I had substituted happiness for love?

We will always be a conglomeration of tribes, branches being the essence of our DNA sequencing. What is in question is who is doing the pruning and to what end? Prior to the microscope giving voice to our myopic hubris about the role of illness and death vs an eternally shifting stasis around and about the logic of harmony over chaos, our kind followed the flora and fauna in a luxuriant path filled with endless varieties hurtling through the expanding poorly comprehended universe on our moist orb of minerals and gas - not bad work if you can get it. We had it all “dicked” or as they say, “pussied” depending on your slant, and we could still - were we as human as our heroes have made us out to be. Not the sport/celebrity freaks serving as gladiators/minstrels/lapdogs to the corporate overlords and their cipher sycophants, but the heroes bursting through the walls of history unrepentant and unbowed by any fashionable ethos or conventional wisdom - the human spirit made manifest by the voices of Muhammad, Christ, Groucho Marx. Any intellect capable of discerning what love is and what love is not must be brought to bear - be that intellect digital, simian, canine or human - in throwing off the shackles of despair and depression wielded over our planet by the narrow interests of hatred, cruelty and profit - instruments of the weakest amongst us used to divide and conquer for no other reason than an irrational fantasy of building mountains - so irrational that the agents of hate cannot even be consistent about what exactly is gained by making mountains, much less digging endless holes into our hurtling orb - still moist, however sullied.

You reader, are patient - I know this because you have gotten this far in an essay which can have no ending. Even if our species were to cease its existence, a not unlikely outcome given our perverse delusions concerning eternal salvation; the points raised by this hackneyed narrative using crude symbols to represent even cruder ideas will continue, as it has been continued, somewhere in the universe, in some form - simple math; does that quest for understanding or being understood constitute humanity? That you are even reading this comes from a digital command manipulating your fingers and focusing your attention, ergo the digital domain present and accounted for; Koko has proven the Gorilla wants to be understood, enough so she would make the effort to learn our sign language; and I know from being one’s companion that a good canine will let you know when it is time - each are examples of a non-human entity extending itself beyond its tribe to communicate; so by definition the search for understanding cannot constitute the definition of being human. If you’ve ever seen a bitch surround its whelps in a snarled fortress of impenetrability, what better example of the tenacity of love for one’s own could there be? So love, and its manifold expressions cannot be the exclusive purview of Homo sapiens; and I hate to disappoint former Governor Romney, but just because some bought-and-sold-for shill of the merchant class declares that disembodied “credit default swaps” made manifest by +/-5v echoes on some HD storage media behind a foreign server’s firewall makes them the embodiment of “people too” - that my brothers and sisters is just laughable . haha . . . hold the phone . ! that’s IT - laughable, we humans are laughable, for as often as OE (operator error) has made me laugh at myself, there is nothing funny about how computers have become people kind’s latest in an endless parade of violent to non-violent shackles; nor is Koko in all her giggled ticklishness, funny in a cage; and as much as I love the grinning mutts, it is a dog’s life, ask any pooch at Yulin’s dog meat festival - but me sitting here thinking about you the kind reader, scratching your bewildered head wondering if that fuck might be right - well friend that is enough to make me laugh, even if only quietly at myself thinking I got a reader . . .

les muses - the sonnet

I thought I knew what a muse was, but no.

now i know how little I know about them,

muses I mean. I found more, but they go 

away - again - like dream lessons from REM.

With good dreams, I will fight to remember,

and with good ones, they will keep teaching me.

bad dreams singe you - a never cool ember

teaching you the same - what it is to be.

One cannot pick one’s manner of muses:

anymore than one can know one's extent.

what remains to be is what one chooses,

for those choices become every moment.

lucky to find some who mend misery,

with any luck, we'll learn more history.

jts 15 June 2015 stoneartist.com

what it means to write in a capitalist society

Like every other subject in the land of Mammon; you seek succor; you bite the hand that feeds you; or you kill the farmer and take his seat at the table for your episode of “Animal Farm.” Unless you, as I seem to be, are haunted by the ghost of Don Quixote, in which case you reconnoiter the battlefield (planet earth); muster your forces (anyone capable of love); and liberate the ungrateful (the 99% waiting in line at “Club 1%”). However, you’re reading because you have a curiosity about meaning as it pertains to writing in a capitalist society - that’s easy, memorize a few billion lines of advertising until you can spit copy out like it was your own, slap some rugged individualism on it as though you didn’t care a whit what anybody thought; add a splash of testosterone (gender neutral if you’re really gifted) - stir and serve chilled as though you invented the word blasé. Who you serve it to, however, is the key, and whichever “man” you choose must be a deity from the temple of “The 3 Attributes” - one, he must be richer than g_d. two, he must be successful. three, you are unable to defy his will. If you can find a patron possessing these qualities and gain his approval, write as though your soul depends upon it, for it most likely will.

Sounds a little like Faust, don’t it. Who else spurned the offerings of the most high in order to satisfy greatness? That is not a rhetorical question; it is one which has plagued our species back, and prior to King Hammurabi in his role as "protector of the weak and oppressed.” Only in those days kings had more than money - they had heart and soul. Whereas by the time the legend of Faust was gaining a head of steam, royalty had been whinging for many centuries about not having it all . This bait and switch excuse for vacating positions of responsibility for unrealized or unacknowledged appetites has become more than a breach in the dike of the human condition held in place by a highly responsible Dutch boy, for it is coming down to whether the human species can serve each other and survive the coming apocalypse or bow before the all high god of Mammon and perish in the cauldrons of our own arrogance. Writing use to have a place in this discussion, now it is the bean counters who are calling the shots and the writers simply line up behind who is parsing the largest pile of beans. Previously, as was the case of King Hammurabi, one's beliefs were paramount and the medium simply a representation of the purity of one’s convictions - thus the “Code of Hammurabi” was inscribed in Basalt which if you have any knowledge of stone or how it is worked is no mean feat. Today this nobility of purpose is reduced to Bob Dylan’s undeniable observation, “You know, capitalism is above the law. It say, ‘It don't count 'less it sells’”.

Then again Mr. Dylan asked, “What’s money? A man’s a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.” Our imaginary patron of “The 3 Attributes” has so far outstripped this modest ambition as to chase at the heels of 'the' real g_d, like some sort of lost canine, yet still manage to hoodwink 7 billion human beings such that if they too affect airs of superiority; claw and scrape their way to the top of the heap (however local that may be); or slit the the throats of all those threading their way from the bottom of whatever heap one's clambered atop surrounded by rising tides; then and only will they consider your petition to step into the ring of Ralph Ellison’s “Battle Royal”. The magic of this success is the illusion of free will be stamped inside the forehead of every manjack popped out of each fetus factory the sanctity-of-life franchise has brilliantly positioned on every street corner of the planet - replete with the delusion of strength-in-numbers nationalism piped into every nursery training future soldiers for the gladiator wars all the rage in our bored-to-tears dying planet. I’m still astonished how the ruling class with so little gumption, bereft of any distinction other than an obscene predilection for amassing everything, could conjure the fiction that they are happy, when they, any one of them, possess no more capacity for feeling of any kind than one might find on an uninhabited asteroid in apsis of its orbit away from our Milky Way? - and yet they rule our planet or enough of it so as to render the planet virtually uninhabitable for those on whose sweat they float. 

Talk about your blind obedience, but then again here I sit laboring under the same delusion of success and hoped-for-freedom; save the fact my patron is a female god impoverished by her male oppressors and too timid to express her undying love for my gentle heart and stalwart ways - ah the sweet 'dame irony' of human existence, or as I prefer to think of it, the rich humor of m’Lady G_d. As to obedience, she has only to point to a mountain and say climb and I commence, or point to the sky and say jump - I ask only “how high.” It is she - this goddess of love, who has forced me to denounce the fiction of literacy through this hackneyed myopic whinge about all the good work that has been crafted by earnest hearts seeking understanding in a world wanting no more than to be told "thangs" will be alright - a world willing to listen to any siren song representing a surcease of the illimitable grief that is part of breathing - a world that will claw one to death for speaking the truth unless it can be made to laugh at the same time. How is it possible to compete with the well-heeled big shots willing to pay copious amounts of money for any sequel that echoes or even whiffs of the bliss of success and harmony; of any prosperity regardless of the hollow sound released from the caverns of disbelief and betrayal fed daily by the inexorable reality of death and gratuitous suffering wrought by a handful of ciphers disguised as humans. Our dumb luck, as it happens, is the mortal coil from which we shuffle, for it contains the only law we must obey - even suffering is a fiction for which we have no one to blame but ourselves - there I’ve gone and said it, sharing why I will likely never succeed as a writer - can’t keep my mouth shut or my keyboard hushed.

However, this essay is about what it means to write in a capitalist society. I don’t know, may never know - not sure I want to know, but for the sake of amusement, let’s assume some of what I’ve written means something; I live on a capitalist planet, and I write. Some of our world’s most popular entertainment evolves around virtual voyages through galaxies in a starship “Enterprise,” or one of its many avatars, not to confuse enterprise with capitalism however useful that sleight-of-hand may be to the ciphers amongst us. This same planet and its Freedom Fighters have also recently managed to dethrone the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” or at least underwrite their transition to market economies - talk about your fictions. Herein lies the rub, the real fiction is that there is any sort of market economy - we are a Thralldom, or what used to be called a Kingdom before Napoleon began fucking around with semantics. If we were a truly capitalist society there would be market forces very much in play - there are none. We buy what we are told, like it. We may grouse, even saber-rattle because we see it done on the flickering screen, or what was once a flickering screen - now just a +5v/-5v twitch affixed at the end of our wrists fed from the mothership's servers in our rigidly controlled, vertically distributed network (though not actually a single network, the distinction is too fine to parse in this essay). The writers for the tractor beam of this highly effective Death Star are today’s much sought after, and well compensated high priests and priestesses of “content.” My concern and reason for this essay is born of an insatiable appetite for meaning of which there may be none - that the coalescing of resources and decay surrounding our existence is exactly what is found in nature with no other meaning than what one might find in the protoplasm of a flattened ant at the bottom of a rockslide which had come unhinged by another ant clambering up to the pinnacle of the topmost stone in an effort to satisfy an inexorable, insatiable, and ceaseless existential hunger, I just don’t know .  .  . 

jts 1/4/2018

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∞

le mauvais fils en France - the sonnet

I now sit in the "Place de la République";
my lodging's gone, family's gone, future's gone.
From where you sit, you might think "fucking bleak,"
without hearing clacking skateboards moving on.

How great's the fall from grace, or're we mid-air?
Newton says increase is the same throughout,
but it's said "flying's easy - landing takes care.
We're gonna find out - i care not your doubt.

Physics and its meta trumps misery;
which makes my puny concerns laughable.
My regret's not writing this from a tree,
but real joy's walking while still capable.

This "Place" was made to displace the villains; 
Help François Villon come this way again?

my night at the "theatre"

Mark Twain said “write what you know,” so I share. For anyone having read my previous essay will know I’ve wandered off to France in search of my lost heart and what better place to search than the stage, for as Master Shakespeare himself has told us “ All the world’s a stage, / And all men and women merely players.” Fortune has favored my script with lodging in the home of a young actress in the city of Paris. My first week in France was spent in astonished confusion by my good fortune at having fallen in with such interesting folk, for she and her beau also happen to be, as I understand the French expression “très sympathique” - never mind my boorish frontier manners or my borderline grasp of reality for having believed any young woman would have pity or interest and respond to my earnest efforts to find a live-in model/companion/business partner ( http://josephtstevens.blogspot.fr/2012/05/model-companion-business-partner.html ) willing to parley my life’s work into cash as a financial buffer from the inevitable ravages of decrepitude, and/or for us a great deal of fun and profit in a world quickly going to hell-in-a-handbasket . . 

Being old has benefits other than the inexorable decay made so apparent by own nation’s imperial posturing; for example, at my age vanity is so much a part of my existence that it at times feels like a skin which may or may not be torn from my skeleton depending on the jagged edges of whatever environment I’m in or whatever foolishness I may be engaged in. The old French adage “plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes” is particularly applicable with this essay, for while I’d like to think with age I’ve acquired some dignity unavailable to the gangly arrogance of youth; no such luck. My gracious hostess invited me to the opening of her play, the efforts of which I could only appreciate by the enormous time and dedication that had occupied her waking hours in my short week in her home. I felt giddy with the prospect of becoming a witness to the culture de Paris, however tangential or imperceptive that awareness may have been. I began to doubt my salvation while sitting in the lounge waiting the call, and it was Shepard Farely’s tired ripoff of Lichenstein’s groundbreaking exposure of modern comic book culture decorating the lounge area - a hand grenade turned into an aerosol nozzle - très original.

But we are here to laugh at my peccadillo here, not the limits of ruling class capitulation to urban scrawl, besides I had a responsibility to my hostess to fully appreciate her work and to honor her kindness and that of her beau for opening their home to me - a barbarian from the western fringes of culture, California. Never mind that my language capacity rendered me deaf and dumb to an art form derived from the epic foundations of modern literature - Greek Drama with its ancient muses transformed by our keen modern sensibilities into a clarion call to humanity in post-history Paris. I was determined to render my meager perceptions fashioned slowly by decades of assiduous application in service of beauty, nor would I allow for any distraction from the artistes by being recognized as a pretentious infiltrator. No, I would use my keen undercover skills to blend in perfectly as just another pre-apocalyptic human seeking solace in tradition. I don’t think I could have been any cooler were I sitting on park bench in Omaha Nebraska on Valentine’s Day - good thing too for the play required all of my attention and focus just to imagine my hostess in her role as 16 year-old disaffected ingenue in a dystopic family when for the entire 1st half of the play, all dialogue was between two men of vastly different backgrounds in a set resembling a disturbed “Waiting for Godot” arguing over monetary issues full with what appeared to be constant double entendre which I conjectured solely from a tittering audience at middling bawdy mimicry.

However determined I may be to affect the sophisticate, I am not genetically capable of laughing at humor incomprehensible to me, so when the play passed the halfway mark and my hostess, nor any players suggesting anything resembling family dynamic appeared I began to suspect my location in the universe was suspect, so I surreptitiously began to inspect my playbill and documents searching for clues that might explain any absence of family in a play named “Une Famile Aimante.” Funny how close giddiness and humiliation can reside in the gut, for my play bill did not read the same as my ticket, yet my gut felt about the same, except now more of a sinking feeling than exaltation. What next - 20 Euros is a lot of money to spend to stand on ceremony, and my mute participation added nothing to the intense performance the two men were working so hard to present. Yet to walk out of a performance any performance - be it the miming poverty of a street beggar, or the proud exclamations of an infant mastering the use of tongue is as hard and heartless as accumulating the world’s booty from the film of human sweat and broken bodies only to retreat into the opulence reserved for the profiteers posing as leaders on our self-extinguishing planet once called paradise.

I am not without heart, but it is so scarred that the choice of silently affecting the dynamic of a performance of those I know not by walking out, or supporting the effort of one in which my late entrance may have had a useful effect by walking in, was not a difficult choice to make. And again my arrogant assumptions proved my undoing, for the same young dame who affably took my ticket for the first performance was now in the role of magistrate and executioner - what else could she do, a philistine unable to appreciate the complete work of a renowned playwright; exiting midway; and then to urgently seek access to another venue underway - vraiment! “Death to the Infidel” may have been read in her eyes if there was a language capable of interpreting the indecipherable - though I felt the daggers clearly enough. The real irony would be the amount of self-knowledge available in such a circumstance if one is able to quiet the shame and panic enough to hear the kind admonition of my actress friend’s beau when hearing my version of hell later that night; “ah,” he said “something happens to everyone,” and while this did not fully assuage my shame or humiliation - a process each individual in isolation with his or her particular puzzle must solve it did help me to fully appreciate the title for the play which my own barely acknowledged limitations allowed me to only partially appreciate “L’Homme de Paille - The Straw Man”