Cain & Abel - the essay / and · a sonnet

One of my brothers had a birthday this week; i greeted him electronically as cordially as i know how - he’s made no reply. This morning a door was closed and non-responsive where i volunteer; nonetheless, (how did that ever get to be a word)¿ a second gallery i where i also volunteer, gave me the shuffle-off-to-buffalo. Perhaps once again, my “good terms” do not align with other’s definitions: brothers in art, in family, in fill-in-the-blank _____________, seems to be an elusive concept for me. How to remain open-hearted is more important than confronting a situation that is not at the core of my purpose. Am i being transparently ironical to essay one of the more famously flawed relations in our collective culture? I am always confused about which is useful between essay and fiction; useful in the sense of providing some illumination along this long dark way we travel to our end. I have been profoundly affected within many fantasies from my apparently inexhaustible “willing suspension of disbelief”; yet, however vividly i may conjure Dune’s Vladimir Harkonnen, or am repulsed by the oily Gilbert Osmond in Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, i do not live in those worlds, but do 'channel' the challenges of those character's, lives. I have a brother who 'blew off' a cordial greeting like lint; and gallery owners who have no discernible interest in my life’s work. Somehow inflating the travails of people i know, and interactions i have, feels more useful than the anonymity which virtual immersion might more bluntly provide. Nor is it cut-and-dry; a one-size fits all solution; this one, or the other, a universe of binary solutions, a fictional contrivance into which i seem so often attempting to contort. One of the most fantastical stories i’ve ever known is being written by the same brother about whom i complain; his world is comprised of very positive community activities, including the herculean task of seeking common ground with the fascist farce evolving in our native land; this same brother also participates dynamically in a broad spectrum of humanitarian efforts - a reality which only further confounds my myopic self-involved lament. One of my professors maintained suasively that the Bible is essentially poetry - a highly moral fiction, but fiction. So even the underpinnings of my intrepid struggle to better comprehend the reality of brotherly love are rooted in the imagination - oh swell .

Cain killed his brother in a fit of pique. I can relate, but murder, that is tired. When the twin towers collapsed i exhausted every available second on a cheap knockoff 'app', killing Bin Laden over and over - that’s a month of 40 hour weeks i’ll never get back. Pema Chodron talks about the soft heart - one that sees into the abyss and still feels the pain of others. I aspire to that softness, however unlikely given my perilously puerile pride. The closest i have gotten is to remove my physical self from the field of battle; in behavior mod' terms - 'extinction', which can be as cruel as the original transgression depending on who is gone and who remains - it's all about perspective, ain’t it¿ The dilemma becomes awkward when each new environment contains the larger parts of whatever archetype you subscribe to. I am a television baby from a time when it was still called the boob-tube. One program contained a homily i still think about like the Einstein quip I memorized during a quiet spring morning in my sister’s rustic utopian barn home - “the electromagnetic spectrum is the irreducible constituent of all physical reality” - at that time i was a fresh human and she and i were not estranged. This homily was programed on television when public interest had not been entirely subsumed by the digital shills of the ruling class. I paraphrase the gist: “you will meet four kinds of people; the first likes you for the wrong reasons; the second likes you for the right reasons; the third doesn’t like you for the wrong reasons, and the fourth doesn’t like you for the right reasons. It is the fourth kind of person from whom you want to learn. As with most things worthwhile, much easier said than done, for if at the root of all evil in the world is the harm we do ourselves, there is no room in our own internal wellness schema for the voice of that 4th kind of person; 'the eternal paradox' of how to close a dirty washroom spigot with a just-washed hand; was it the same for Cain? - avenged your slight, but pissed off God - oh fuck ! 

.  .  .

Letting go of phone ownership has been a godsend for gaining some perspective on what constitutes interpersonal anything. Just now i castigated myself for not remembering to apprise the involved parties of a potential leaky water bottle - with a phone, i might have been inclined to call the company and see if this oversight could be rectified, or as is the case with my brother or the gallery owners - call and make my offering in hopes of a favorable judgement - more Cain and Abel. Could reality be that these are just not a good fits for me. One knows when and where one is welcome. There is no sugar coating what one feels, so why am i in such haste to curry favor - to secure a favorable response? Is there some imaginary friend i have who resembles our general concept of the divine - even the redoubtable “my karma just ran over your dogma.” Do i still quest in search of wife #4 who can see into my heart and dislike me at will for my baseness? Oliver Wendall Holmes - “Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose.” Imagine how different our worlds might be had Cain read that quote before the results of the contest were published. I guess the difficulty gets to be what we consider aggression, a volatile topic which has changed considerably for me over the years. A professional once advised me that your thoughts are yours alone, you can have any fantasy or consider any twisted concept without threat of condemnation, it is only when your act on an idea the the world of consequence comes into play. As it happens, this is not necessarily true, though at the time it was a huge relief. Now i am not so sure. The discipline of the mind is a truly personal responsibility, yet it is equally true what Jiddu Krisnamurti said “it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society;” to that i would have to add family, art scene, job, relationship etc., etc., etc. Up leaps paradox . ! . ! shut the fuck up screams the author, “BUT” ! stfu .  . . who determines that standard; what gauge did Cain use to determine in his own mind that his offering was superior to Abel’s, so much more superior that he justified fratricide by his lights. If he was just throwing a pissant hissy fit, and that his jealousy was more about being frustrated in his affection for g_d. Then fuck him - oh shit trapped: tricked by my own paradox. .  arggh

The Dalai Lama says the warm heartedness gives you confidence and i believe him. For too long a time i have been compelled to try and help others gain self confidence, possibly due to a dearth of my own. But i am beginning to think that is a conceit to change anyone for any reason. For example in the case of my brother, at another time, and yes to some degree this week, i may have considered him our famous agent #4 possessing secret knowledge of my baser being. My inclination would then be to fathom from the unknowable some justification for what i perceived as deliberate aggression, perhaps even convince him of the fallacy of his judgement - then whose judgement would that be - mine own? I cannot make anyone like me, the best i can do is to plumb the caverns of my heart in search of warmth that i might then share with another. There is a vendor who sells ice cream on my street. He pushes a cart up and down hills in increasing heat. He sings out his product in the most consistent distinctive bass voice that it pleases me to aid his endeavor with water and glass for his concert. Just now when i heard him making his way up the hill, i checked to make sure the bottle was full; some snook had boosted it, cup and all. But this is the crux of the biscuit as Frank Zappa might say, rather than focusing on our mutual project and simply offering him a glass of water - i felt stymied and forgot about his thirst; let not yourself feel stymied - it’s just a distraction from the important work of helping others. Yet our friend mythical hero #4’s criticisms can be useful, especially those that point out your breath stinks where other lesser friends might have just shrunk back from the stench. Does this mean we have license to willy nilly tear into the myriad of follies conducted by those around us - good luck. In my quest through the caverns of my own cold heart, i’ve found folly enough of my own design to be very careful about how i point out the 'stinky breath' of others. So what of Cain, this poor schmuck without backbone enough to stand up for himself to his own god and say “Excuse me, you hear that¿ That’s the sound of someone seeking my company - i gotta go, see ya’ in the funny papers; if, or when, you find favor with my offering lemme' know, i’ll bring more.”

Could it be that was all Cain needed - conviction in his own mind that his was the best offering he could make, and that would just have to be good enough. The flip side of course might be if Abel had survived having won the contest of the holy father, he might have become a vain unprincipled lout taking more of everything and attributing it to his blessed position in g_d’s eyes. Eventually become so complacent and bloated by his wealth and blindspots his only satisfaction in life was taking more and more for himself utterly convinced of the worthlessness of those less well off - think ruling class, or better yet - zionists. Perfectly decent human beings foisted on the petard of complacency. Where all the progenitors of Cain were put to death in the great deluge, we now have the entire lineage of this avatar for Vladimir Harkonnen; Abel the gentle shepherd boy turned rogue, populating generation after generation of competitive impressarios slitting the throats of all who dare to question the order of clearly what was g_d’s design. I’m pretty sure i’m gonna perish from terminal pardoxism. But between then and now i mean to find more warm spots in this cold, cold heart of mine. I’ve searched the world over for the family i once belonged to, but instead of finding the hearth and fiction of childhood memories i have found a friend who has taught me more about kindness and cruelty than any construct i have ever clung to in the desperate hope of belonging - my self.  So what if it is closer to my end than my beginning, what better company to exit with than that shaggy beast who has haunted the darkest places of my being for no other reason than fear of what the charlatan “I” might remark. The truest blessing of this friendship is when faced with the fallacious and extravagant egos of those defined by the world around them, my beast says fuck ‘em, if they don’t wanna play nice - we can wait them out and amuse ourselves plenty until they come back to their senses and we will melt snow once again with loving kindness. 

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Abel - the sonnet

What if Caine had killed Seth instead of Abel?

Loading a karmic debt onto the back 

of any brother ain't worth the trouble;

Didn’t Abel's death create enough lack¿ 

Cain was the eldest; he took Abel's life,

who worked influence wanting to compete.

knowing then that the outcome would mean strife

whenever one turns love into a feat.

You were once a family, all of you -

right, wrong and indifferent like us all. 

If i had to guess, Seth was a shit too.

Cain’s problem began when they made him crawl.

No one is immune from their suffering

when greed is the basis of everything

(˚ ㄥ _˚)                    

jts 1/22/2018

http://ExtinctionChronicles.blogspot.com 

http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

prohibited from AI sampling in any form

reprinted with permission; all rights reserved

∞

birth - the essay / death - a sonnet

I recently gained access to a music library i had thought lost forever when that computer died. Just now i pressed “play; Los Lobos “peace” is now playing; this after having a Temezcal in the Zapotec tradition. As a child of the 60’s, sweat lodges, hot springs and the mystical are not out of my realm of experience, so it is hard to disentangle one’s skepticism and indoctrination from ancient traditions much less not see that all “hot hot blazes come down to smoke and ash” as Joni Mitchell sings about. Yet what exactly is so concrete and beneficial about the world we live in? The metaphor the curadoro used for this cleansing experiance is rebirth; the scientist in me had to be chained and left at the door to the sweat lodge, because i wanted to welcome any kindness this stranger could conjure. Pain is not something i feel i can entrust any longer to the medical industry, not simply because the pain is so great, but because i believe it contains the lessons for my recovery - if that is what the universe wants for me. My own birth, based on my mother’s enthusiastic exclamations caused her extraordinary pain - a Frank’s Breech delivers a folded over at the waist infant, rather than that of the supine figure normally endured by most mothers. Sadly, i did not pray for her comfort today during my rebirth today, but i did pray for others - many others. Pema Chodron has said, and i parphrase “when things are going badly, think of others, when things are going well think of others.” What are the odds that the past two hundred years of medical development gets trumped by stranger in a strange land? I’d say they are about the same as the 3 billion human beings on our planet whose combined wealth is less than “six men” going to the door of “those same six men” and demanding a more fair split of the world’s bounty.  I would pay a lot of money to see that childbirth happen, but alack, i fear my money is safe - sort of. 

Something else Pema Chodron has talked about is the flux which we cannot escape even if we tried. If you take your own life for whatever temporary reason, your essentials revert to their origins - a little like changing shoeboxes, shoes is shoes. Even while you live sitting there wasting your time reading this your body is dying off and rebuilding itself until the day your focus vacates whatever seat your soul call home. As a child, i was terrified of losing that seat; “what will i do without my family”? this question would torment my early years late into the night too often. Life provides answers to those questions, and more; i am without my family - a condition for which the talking heads bemoan my sorry state, yet i have food in the refrigerator, a friend - maybe two somewhere on the planet, i’ve been deeply in love, and suffered its loss - more than once and i am going to die someday sure as shit. If it gets any better, i’m gonna have to give up writing and go back to my drawing just to contain myself. If i am experiencing and infancy from a rebirth - i like it. I can’t afford it as often as i want, but so what. Does anyone remember anything about infancy¿ It is peculiar that so little memory survives what the experts tell us are the most formative years of our lives 1 - 3 years. While at the same time we panic at the mere mention of dementia as though our minds and thoughts are the only true measure of the richness of our life experience. Then again if you believe that, you probably panic when you get locked out of your favorite social network, or g_d forbid the internet goes down. It is for these reasons and more i am rapidly losing faith in the conventional definition of success. The healer i saw today tried to help me which is a lot more than many doctors i’ve been treated by; employers who supposedly where helping me make a living; or even instructors whose marks were meant as a gauge of accomplishment for me rather than for themselves.

In China as i understand it, they have citizens grading other citizens - something we as humans have always done through gossip with the gifted rising in station while those indifferent to ridicule populating the lower rungs of society - at least until now. Somehow where gossip had been an open and free exchange of the dirt on others, it has became a closed loop system wher the bad/good shit is now hoarded on servers and sifted through as though it were gold. I cannot say what i was thinking in the first three years of my life, but i’m pretty sure it had nothing to do with gold. I wanted tit, i know that only ‘cause i still hunger for it though they fed me goat’s milk as an infant - something about allergies, but i think it had more to do with birth order. If the healer was able to bring me through the canal again and what your are reading is the squall of a new creature in our midst - we’re in worse trouble than i thought. But if we can begin to relearn what it means to be alive we may find different ways to approach our death. This time around i came out hoping for the health and safety of others, while my first go around i came out twice the size my host was expecting which is little like pissing off the surgeon as you are going under - not a good idea. She is still my mother and i wouldn’t trade her for nothing, event though somewhere in her soul she probably still rankles at the thought of my painful childbirth; still and all she was kind enough to make of me a man. My only wish might be that i wasn’t quite so proud, or perhaps of me she might be a little more. In truth, i wouldn’t change a thing about her, anymore than i would have picked different parents, a different life or a different day to die. To what end, Envy - based on what i know, or think i know. What manner of creature would i be to wish for something that is not in front of me just now? I prefer the semi-idillic notion to be searching my life for something about birth that might be useful to you - where’s the harm in that?

Then again, if i could have known ahead of time about the pain my birth caused ma, would i change anything¿ I can’t even say whether being folded at the waist during birth caused me pain - if it is not possible to avoid pain simply by the complexities of our ever changing world, what is all this bullshit about being afraid - afraid of losing your family, your wife, your country, your home etc., etc, etc. What of this concept of fighting - blood lust i think they call it? Has anything ever been solved by two persons, or two million persons fighting each other¿ As an infant, i was suckled on the destruction of the Axis, and the need to repeat the process with the communists. Today the leader of the free world is a fascist put in office by a Russian communist operative - where is the logic¿ If i am reborn free of fears and training about which this world has worked so hard to convince me, than is all that i now face something like each cell in my body that has died since the day of my birth - reluctant to die but ready for another to take its place and continue the work of feeding the carbon chain which if i remember is the point of our existence where nourishment becomes energy? that is a question. What nourishes all of us in this life¿ I’ve seen grown men laid low by hate, and i’ve seen the broken hearted sprout the wings of new growth and leap back into the fray. I cannot say i have not been miraculously healed by my visit to the Temezcal which is a healing of its own. There is no magic bullet as Tom Waits and many others have said, so why do we forget that simple lesson and search the world over for the fountain of youth. Did those explorers murder each other on the high seas, sponsored by the crown because deep in their hearts they knew salvation and a life ever after was as unlikely as my vain hope to be released from suffering without the common discipline of living a healthy life - fuck stress, eat fresh vegetables, be kind to yourself for no other reason than if you do not you will never bestow that on another. And this is the key point, regardless of how much you pray or practice good living you are going to die - oh boy .  .  .

.  .  . and i’m in no big hurry, pain or no. I would be satisfied to know by whatever channel, ancient abstruse wisdom or modern digital hocus pocus that one small thing i have done helped our species to survive a millisecond longer than the greedy, hateful irresponsible end which the ruling class has slated for us. I work very hard at expunging hate from my being because it is corrosive and unhealthy; what is more of a challenge is to open my heart to the cowardice of today’s leaders towards those they have connived their way into leading. I still have trouble with huffy shrews believing Ms. M.T. Suit’s snarky campaign was anything other than an aborted coup d’etat for the corporate brokers that bet on the wrong horse and lost bigly, but are still making out like the bandits they are - because playing both sides against the middle is profitable. So exactly why would i purge this morsel of hope from my chest - this shard of intention for the wellbeing of infants that have not been born. Because life is good, and if we survive long enough there may be enough babies born immune to the medical industry to parents too poor to afford book learning that has become classroom management in the guise of civilization - parents whose roots to the earth are deeper than the flickering screen and its promise of modernity. Am i reborn, no - do i want another life than the one i possess, no. It is hard enough to recognize friend from foe while holding onto a dogged determination to find something of worth in the souls of human beings who have sold their souls to a chimera of wellbeing proffered on the screen. Life is fucking hard, it takes effort to open your heart to the appalling senseless mayhem that is being used to frighten us all into conformance - a conformance designed to . . . that is the cruel hoax. We have established throughout history that we are a resourceful, loving and generous species, what we have not established are the personal limits of that capacity. Until we fight as hard as we do for all others as we have been fighting for our own self interest - we are doomed. But once each human being understands their personal wealth is based on that which is in their hearts finding a path to self expression when we may all of us be born into a worthwhile future of .  .  .

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death - the sonnet

There was a species called itself human

until it was forced to become extinct.

“By whom for why¿” you ask - “not by woman”

i’d have to reply “though she may have winked”

the entire species died without reason

makes perfect sense to other species gone

without cause to places without a sun

along with lessons about brains vs brawn

it proves that more is not always better -

death had visited much before they left

each one grievous - sometimes just the mother

mourned the day it was born after such heft

but herein told each life was special for 

without each of them the whole was more poor

(˚ ㄥ _˚)    

jts 15/1/2018

http://ExtinctionChronicles.blogspot.com 

http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

prohibited from AI sampling in any form

reprinted with permission; all rights reserved

∞

delusion - the essay / truth - a sonnet

Maria Sabina - “There’s a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby and invisible”

I have spent more time in the past week than i would have liked wiping a disc from a former machine. The machine was my constant companion after the death of my father while i lived in virtual seclusion within a virulent conservative enclave in the high desert of California. It is as close i care to get to spending time in Mr. M.T. Suit’s white house. This machine had accompanied me across four continents and a dozen countries while i searched for a quiet place to live out my days and do whatever work i can manage as a doddering old fool. Soon after i arrived where i now live, it crashed to the floor as i reached for it in the middle of the night - the too-heavy laptop tumbled off the nightstand and refused to wake up. The short answer is i opted to sully my soul and replace it with a much lighter version of the same machine - there are not enough paragraphs to describe the frustration of having to make decisions about what to transfer standing at a counter speaking a barely coherent version of a 2nd language to a man whose contempt, was only exceeded by the greed in his eyes. For 10 months this broken carcass of a machine sat in a closet as a painful reminder of the precarious nature of computer augmented experiences, mostly as a concession to the reality that no one really wants to see, what used to be your “slides,” but is now just hour after hour of scrolling photos. As an afterthought to an xmas eve dinner, i gifted this thought to be dead digital vault to a pair of brothers for what i had imagined as forensic examination/destruction - asking only if there was any data that could be retrieved it be treated securely and returned to me - all of this of course in my garbled wannabe-a-native-speaker enthusiasm. From there it just went down hill, quickly. The next day, xmas morning already feeling queasy about having cast off one more remnant of my tattered history i was faced with whether or not to pick up the pile of shit some merry maker left across the narrow street from my window. I picked it up because that beats the shit out of leaving it for someone else; i then found out soon after my former best friend who i had thought died was in fact alive and responding to electricity.

I was able to narrow my mixed emotions down to the very real threat of having personal data floating freely in the world, nor was i able to convey the seriousness of my predicament to the new owners. 4 days later, i was able to secure the machine having no real expertise to do what was necessary. Were i a more gifted agent of kindness and decency the new owners would never have seen a frightened little boy alone in a foreign country demanding that they relinquish their new xmas booty. However, the question remains, was that delusion theirs, or mine? The reality is it was a dangerous position to be in and i behaved in my best interest not theirs. From where i now stand, that would make the delusion mine, not theirs - yet it was not fantasy that regardless of all other gestures of generosity to the contrary, they perceived my stubborn urgency as “indian giving,” which for me is a greater insult than if you called me a republican. How could the ensuing offenses and counter offenses been stymied out of the gate¿ 1) personal responsibility - had i taken whatever steps necessary to confirm the data was secure rather than shuffle that task off onto the shoulders of another 2) be clear about gift-giving motivations, was i more threatened by unsecured data, or the fact that rather than a broken castoff slated for destructive fun, the object was a living manifestation of my own precipitous behavior toward things of value - even what constitutes value. or 3) a missed opportunity for a more profound lesson on unexamined issues of attachment. C.G. Jung - “The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” My grandfather was diagnosed by one psychiatrist via the anguish of my just-divorced mother as a “classic” paranoid schizophrenic, of course this same “doctor” instructed me at the ripe old age of 15 to strip down to my underwear in his office whereupon he gazed for some-too-long a time. These are the days which constitute our slice of eternity - a time where common sense is no longer common, if it ever was.

The upshot is as recently as last night, my experience - that same experience which insisted i take extraordinary steps to protect personal data - was evaluating my evacuation - from here to where, and why? Is that unnatural, do i care? My upset at others for being disinterested in my plight is just that - my upset; i’ve gotten far enough to understand this truth. That is not to say i can’t, at times, be a spitting cat at the end of one’s wrist, but fuck - who can’t; it ain’t hard. What is hard is to be able to amplify a slight self awareness to a global scale and then consider the impact of such puerile, however honest behavior against the very slim odds that our species might survive the next 100 years - oofa. I am nearing the end of a drawing of Maria Sabina - a woman who was basically taken from quiet community healer to be pimped by the 60’s movers and shakers such that she was shot by an angry drunk from her village, the same village which also burned her house down in retaliation for bringing so many foreigners to what had been a quiet god-fearing community. The concept of an alternative reality is familiar to me, one might even say essential to my formative years - as though these ain’t formative years. What is riveting about the image by this unknown photographer is the interweaving of a visual collage of vaporous clouds with the ancient ruggedness of this woman’s beloved land. The image is so fundamental that there is no room for interpretation and defies any exacting depiction. What i am faced with is a subject which is so vast that however far i get into it - it continues to recede into the distance while giving off more and more information - sort of like a beautiful woman waving at you as she walks away. Maria Sabina’s life was solid enough to allow her image to persist across an expanse of cultural history and remain crystal clear regarding her essence. After aborted efforts to clean the disc of my resurrected, however much conflicted former best friend it came down to a single press of the button to eradicate 4 years of my existence.

After i had dropped my phone in Uruguay and was forced to confront my inner prompt to leave go the habit, i fantasized that i was cured of my addiction by simply by being without the object of desire, sadly that is the equivalent of crying from Sacramento to Los Angeles in a U-Haul thinking that would be the end of that marriage. Oddly i went through a similar confusion faced with the reanimation of my dead friend. How much time have i wasted scrolling through what turned out to be 20,000 some-odd jpeg files¿ it may be that what i was processing during this post-holyday clusterfuck was the dread of reliving days passed, and it doesn’t matter how far back you go, for amongst the 20k images were photos of my father, my great grandmother, myself and siblings from a family dynamic that no longer exists, or just as easily can never be erased from the face of the earth as long as our species survives. That fecund aspect is part of the majesty which i have found in the image of Maria Sabina, a majesty which i have failed to capture but which encourages me to believe i’m on the right trail. The time i have spent in the company of this beautiful human being can never be expunged from me, nor the lessons learned attempting to honor the life of someone i’d never met but whom i greatly respect as well as grieve for with only a marginal understanding of her suffering. Where it gets bizarre, is how this experience contrasts with my relationship to the gobs of photos i took of my own suffering father in his later days' struggle to remain alive. I will treasure the drawing i now have of Maria, yet the prospect of watching the surviving video of pop and i playing pool while he was still on his feet rests a little too closely to any other glut of media i now consider a burden, perhaps not much different than the cabinet of slides packed like sardines waiting for my sainted mother’s passing to get tossed. I say this not with indifference to the herculean task of guiding ma into the next world which has fallen on my brethren but simply nodding to the reality of my father’s slides wasting away in the same storage space which contains my own “slides” in the guise of stone carvings from my long life of fantasy as artist in a world which despises creativity.

Yes i am delusional, why do you ask? I even imagine there is a way our species might survive and like the beautiful Nepalese maid, i have no idea of how to depict such a magnificent beauty - but because my parents beat me at the first sign of surrender i plunge ahead - asses and elbows afraid one of them will catch me leaning on the rake and penalize me some portion of my “allowance” - kidding - sort of. What is real is the fact i am going to die, and soon depending on what scale you use to measure time. I enjoy the dumb luck of measuring my time by how close i can get to an honest depiction of whatever it is to which i am turning my aged hand; my ignorant miscalculation however is that i am currently painting using pencil points. Perhaps you are beginning to see what i mean by delusional. The question becomes, or has always been, whether art is for the artist or the patron which begs a larger question. Are we here at the behest of lords and ladies who have hijacked our existence using the “flim flam” of a supposed economy, or are we all of us independent agents of a greater purpose. I have been on both sides of the fence and was fired from my last job, for being too good at what i do. Literally - suffice it to say i got too close to reading who was doing who in one small corner of the L.A. Superior Court revenue stream. The edifice of our collective hallucination is teetering and without a very clear and very united gaze into the depths of our profound and inextricable relationship to each other, humanity is no more than a daisy chain around the twin towers just prior to collapse. I can say for myself during the past week any thought or idea of mine which varied an iota from the wellbeing of those in my immediate existence resulted in an emotional pustulence which i’d not wish on anyone. It would be fun at the end of this document to say, “well that about says it all for delusion,” guess again. Ironically, i’m getting a sense that the frontiers of delusion can be found amongst the myths of self and other - that magic time and place when we leap from the womb confused by the sudden absence of a beating heart which taught us so much about ourselves and our future

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truth - the sonnet

I learned this year “In Vino Veritas”

was used to vett the proposed laws of old.

Our truth today has no such wall to toss

drivel is passed out for justice - served cold.

Truth hasn’t changed - just became background noise

while brother/sister shit has gotten loud,

so loud “they” won’t give vino to the boys

instead “they” just start shooting at the crowd

truth, however has different ideas,

and runs down the slopes into the same sea

where everything big or small always does

unless you’re on a planet that can’t pee.

where we live, we fucked its only kidneys; 

if it's prayer we wanted, we'd save our bees.

jts 01/08/2018

http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

all rights reserved 

∞

nuyier - the essay / olyier - the sonnet

I have learned more about myself in the past week than the past 10 years - sort of; i kind of hate to see the year go. And you greedy reader want me to go into the salacious details, ad nauseam - perhaps later. The passing of years in days gone by was represented by the grim reaper pulling calendars off the wall, now it is just one more consumer event in a full schedule of holy days used by the ruling class to separate you from your hard earned scratch. However the piper is playing and the fresh and new has become one more harried challenge to get through each day, week - year. Why is that? How can something as open and liberating as an open vista become so entangled and arduous? We are not necessarily a stupid species yet we have become so caught up in the drama scrolling across our screens we seem to believe it is real rather than virtual. The pile of shit some sad human left outside my window xmas morning was very real - as was the anxiety of daring do matron thousands of miles from her stolid roots when confronted by another sad little human exposing his too small phallus to her the afternoon of nuyier’s eve. This is our world and it is only going to get . . . help me, what’s the word i’m looking for¿ . . weirder . Yeah that’s it’s going to get a whole lot weirder before we land. Like my past week, perhaps as our trembling souls awaken to the rapidly onrushing future, we may find our learning curve telescoping - not the felonious fake knowledge supposedly found at the end of click bait, but the sort of simple fact - it doesn’t really matter much where the shit came from, somebody’s gonna have to pick it up. This is a daunting hope, when contrasted with the young quote of Steve Miller chief sycophant in this administration’s inner sanctum (giving a whole new twist to the roots of sanctum) - “why shouldn’t i leave trash on the ground if want, when there are immigrants that are paid to be custodians” or words to that effect.

We do not enjoy the margin of safety necessary to support such weakness, for there is no other description for anyone who believes the person sitting next to them wherever they be, is not as equal and valuable as they perceive themselves to be. Nor is that faith an easily acquired conviction. Myself, i have much trouble with crowds of any size having once been pincered off my feet against a grating by a mob emulating a foaming shorebreak at the Wedge in Newport Beach. This unfortunate coincided with dawning reservations about the value of all things counter-cultural. Months later people were murdered at another rolling stones event and the cherry was popped - so to speak. But just like Mr. Carlin said “bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity.” There is no outside agency that can provide a peace for you, yet “only a life lived for others is worthwhile” - Albert Einstein; again the fucking paradox. If we are not all striving for something to look back upon with pleasure what then of this new day of the new year. Master Dylan had said “for me the future is already a thing of the past,” and while his detractors will condemn this plagiarism of so much ancient wisdom - fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. If we don’t find humor outside of social networks soon, we will become like the office joke about workers confounding the new hire. Having been there so long the employees had numbered all the jokes to save time, but when the new hire stood up shouting “9” the entire room was silent rather than the gales of laughter enjoyed by other number tellers. The new hire sheepishly inquired of the same kindly comrade who had explained the scheme about what had gone wrong. The OG gently told his new friend “i guess some people can tell a joke and some can’t. Oscar Wilde had said “If you tell people the truth, make them laugh - otherwise they will kill you.

We are not being killed, we are being winnowed like cattle. Our objectives have become so invaluable to the ruling class that simple sustenance has become a petition. This is wrong, it is upside down and everybody knows it. I don’t have the answer, which is a great relief for i have a genetic flaw that dictates if i know of something that might help another, i must share it. This inclination is often misconstrued as some kind of command for reasons that still elude me, but for which i am slowly gaining some insight. People take a great deal of pride when they have an new idea. However, this warm feeling may stem from foregone times when cooperation was a common practice and this manner of help was an expected ambition. Today with the emphasis on concurrence, we seem to have lost the capacity for incorporating differences (talk about your taking back the meaning of words). Maybe we’re looking at this all wrong? Some obscene percentage of the stock market is owned by the Highest Net Worth Individuals (HNWI), but has the concept corporation been hijacked by a pack of jackals just like the internet was perverted by handful of greedy pencil-neck-geeks. What if rather than elections for office we as a planet simply incorporate and throw our resources into the grandfather of all corporations - Planet Earth Inc. It’s not as crazy as it sounds; the devil is in the details. I would nominate Bernie Sanders as CEO, and Arundhati Roy as CFO. The bylaws would have to be carefully considered with financial penalties for excess and stupidity as demonstrated by modern executive standards. Then again rather than subsidizing a bunch of middle management parasites as congress and local municipalities have become, we could park our gazillions offshore and pay no taxes. We could then franchise the shit out of Planet Inc., opening bike shops worldwide with free daycare side by side sort of like taco bell and pizza hut - except feeding poison to the population we would be helping each other. Are you beginning to see the logic¿ If not, i understand - i get that a lot .  .

My beef is not with the mook who dared display his dinky winky to the sad old woman upstairs doing her best with what she’s got left to her - it is the disrespect to the community where i live - people who have accepted my faltering language and odd demeanor. I am learning, while it may not be much, just to care about others is enough to the relieve some of my own suffering from fucking paradoxes; i think my case is terminal, but i won’t know for sure until i’m gone. This year is past as has my father and friends, yet here i sit perpetuating their memory - courage or cowardice - matters not. I can tell you they would not want to be exalted - remembered, but not exalted. If a year in time was to be personified, can you imagine the collective wisdom of 7 billion souls aggrandizing their importance and demanding exaltation? yeah me either. The people i’ve met and spent times with are generally kind and confused which only really manifests in a common ambition for keeping others in the dark. I am guilty myself having become so deluded as to think i can anticipate what another might feel if i say this or that to theme and so live my humble version of Leonard Cohen’s “secret life.” I know vain people who seem to feel that no matter how much assurance and encouragement i give to them - i never really seem to see them well enough; guess i’ll just keep trying. It is difficult though when my own pride is so repugnant to me that it numbers amongst the most dangerous of my vices; am not certain, but i’m pretty sure i couldn’t plea for my life if i had to. However, last night i watched Anthony Quinn outfox his German captors using just such a ploy. The “Guns of Navarone” is a not an over-the-top indoctrination film about all the positive things war does for us. I used to envy my parents the clarity of WWII, mostly in regret that the quagmire of Vietnam was less of a war than preview of the oil companies at Standing Rock. Sitting here now writing ties my stomach in knots knowing how stupid i can be - quite a harsh take on a little useful self awareness.

Now multiply my benign confusion by 7 billion likely much smarter people - i’m liking your corporation idea more and more. Time however is less of a resource than current lifestyles permit. But then again, if owning your own corporation with 7 billion other human beings means that you once again own your own time - how wrong could that be? Albert Einstein - “Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by terror or force, whether it arises under a fascist government or communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.” This statement did not come from a batshit crazy climate sellout, it was an observation out of the mind of Albert, the same mind which gave us E=mc2. A seemingly simple equations which has also enabled the ruling class to wield anonymous incineration over the heads of all mankind. To be fair, Albert’s heart was in the right place by also telling us to be, and do our best. Based on the inanity i found myself wading through day and night when i owned a phone - i’d say we’re in deep shit. Why are we not using the computer technology available to us to analyze and delineate clearly all the ways we are being screwed and to then coordinate and cooperate with all cogent creatures on the planet opposed to such oppression? - lacking any answer to that question, i’d say we’re still in deep shit. But, hell we got a nuyier to become new and improved as well as a number of timely consumer holy days soon, don’t forget the rapture right around the corner. I’m grateful for the past year, for the people i’ve tried to love, and then messed up; for the people i cannot love, but keep trying to and for all the happiness i see in others while knowing of their hardships and defeats - people who remain brave enough to care - and not. “I used to care, but things have changed.” - Bob Dylan. That is an enigma; we live in the hay days of enigma - never in human history have we been so close to success and yet so certainly doomed. It is not my place to say what’s going to happen, and am pretty sure Leonard Cohen was right “There is not decent place to stand in a massacre, but if a woman takes your hand, go and be with her” and until that happens, I will be hunting Lao Tzu’s - “three greatest treasures: simplicity, patience and compassion”

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nuyier - the sonnet

what is so damn new about this nuyier

what if it weren’t years we pay attention,

but lifetimes of other people’s good cheer

without fucking competition.

i won all last year losing all i had

the less i own, the more i do - “How so”¿

you might ask - “simply, it is not so bad”

“You are poor, what could you possibly know”?

“Enough to write this down” I might reply

“Big deal” - says you. Says i, “you would be right”

“Fuck you” she might think “Right again, no lie”

hell the, year’s young, plenty of time to fight . . .

lets just pitch woo until we learn the game

‘cause lady, the screen i’m seeing you on’s lame.

jts 01/01/2018

http://stoneartist.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

hapy xmas - the essay / not hapy xmas - the sonnet

Last xmas i spent the holy day in a hotel room in San Francisco; last night i enjoyed a wonderful meal in the home of a loving family doing their best to remain a loving family. This morning when i arrived at my volunteer station, i spent minutes searching my backpack for my computer that was sitting on the desk in front of me; and found the charger for the broken computer i had given as a gift the night before; then opened my laptop to find the email saying i would be early to the volunteer position - unposted. Confusion is our friend, but only if you can enjoy it. I do wonder how at this time in our planet’s history how we could have let simple generosity be hijacked by a handful of parasites? (a not terribly generous remark in itself - much less xmas day). Nor do i have answers for how to effectively organize against organized hatred, yet it occurs to me my own need to be organized might very well be residue from the same socialization that leaves me in dread at the prospect of not having given something to all i love, while at the same time, has me wielding gifts like the hammer of justice - bestowing the best to favorites and lumps of cool to others. It’s odd how the dissonance of this particular day mimics my own conflicts. Are we so well trained that one day of the year is understood as a “day of generosity” while all other days we tolerate supposed leaders looting the commonwealth in the name of fiscal responsibility, to provide generosity to the already rich¿ I am not always comfortable with confusion, but am getting more comfortable with asking confusing questions. For example, how do you stop violence without fighting fire with fire. I know for myself when i feel insulted, i retreat to a distance where i begin to feel fortified - a very aggressive burden when one is struggling to remain open and loving. Just as all roads lead to Rome, so too the path seems to keep returning to self - one cannot be loving and open with others until one is willing to be so with oneself. What thwn is the role of honoring one’s reservations/fantasies about others, or the role of rectitude as regards frank and candid exchanges? I don’t know, but i mean to find out - come hell or high water - both of which seem not too far off.

If happiness can be described as the absence of “greed, hatred and delusion” what is it to scour one’s soul of these ever present attributes¿ I’d be lying through my teeth to suggest that the specter of suspicion was not my go-to partner when my computer was not where i first looked, with greed and hatred hot on it’s heels. His holiness the Dalai Lama says the mind is a remarkably pliant and powerful asset when tended to by correct hygiene - what Thich Nhat Han describes as “mindfulness,” and i’m beginning to believe them both. Of all the things i could be doing, trying to aid a fellow artist in multiplexing his business/work hours is a privilege while simultaneously searching for ways to unite with the handful of humans (according to the highly suspect statistics of googol inc.) who read my gibberish, and because it is loving, does not make it less gibberisish. I read a comment this morning about our current chief executive, Mr. M.T. Suit which in effect said we have never before had a human who was less cogent and clear in his thinking, so perhaps there is hope for me yet. I mean if you can get elected to the highest office in the land, what’s to say i cannot express my opposition to an insane world without losing my life? So what is it to have a hapy xmas? I remember one year riding a skateboard that i had desperately wanted - talk about your pleasures of life, yet another year i was presented a girl’s bike - never mind that it had brand now butterfly handlebars and the oh-so-important banana seat - i was crestfallen. My parents were very ahead of their time and immune to the petulant disappointments of youth - perhaps the best gift i’ve ever received. However, this lesson in no way resembles the current sacking of the ship of state by stooges of the corporate state. My parents loved me and demonstrated nobly what it is to do your best with little, while the only apt description of today’s leadership is bald faced greed grown from a root of hatred buried deep in a soil of fear.

I understand fear, it is not my friend, yet the only way to stifle its incessant wail is a warm embrace. And while love certainly can soothe its whimper, its hunger is bottomless - consuming all and wanting more. My dumb luck is having owned a girl’s bike once in my life has taught me some compassion, which with the right perspective is as insatiable as any appetite i’ve ever witnessed in my hungry life. It’s like fun - once you’ve tasted fun, everything else is just bland. It is these paradoxes of life i believe will be our salvation, for there will come a time when the barriers and restraints used to maintain a pliant population will no longer suffice for control and the natural pace of the human heart will undertake the challenge of living and loving rather than Leonard Cohen’s cautionary “having and getting” that defines ambition for so much of our world. When people open their eyes with love and compassion to the overwhelming grief of the ruling class and its vacuous avarice, and rather than emulate the trappings of power begin to fashion a lifestyles based on generosity and openness we will once again unite in sister and brotherhood. There is no overcoming something that is without power, be that pain, or hate or loneliness. Once the light of interest takes fire in one’s heart, it will illuminate and its energy source will last forever. However if that interest is in the service of domination, it will be exhausted by the first free heart it encounters, one can imprison a body but never control a heart. So the ruling class is going after your appetite, believing you to be as empty and vain as they. What they do not understand is from your suffering you have learned things about life they have no equations for.  Just like programming a computer to create art, the only way for AI to create is to emulate what it is shown, there is no formula for original thinking - it is a uniquely living quality. The reason seeds are able to evolve is from their suffering, what doesn’t work will wither and die, while what is successful will thrive and multiply - even be hapy. Show me a hapy computer companion and i’ll show you a fake-as-fuck programmer who was given a lot of money to satisfy a sad-as-fuck financier.

Money and gifts are not what will nurture human kind; we are the result of generations of struggle - not built of the soft life the ruling class is attempting to con us into buying. From this struggle we have codified in our genes the capacity to distinguish the real from the unreal, it is why delusion is one of the 3 chains of suffering, without clarity in your heart you will be fooled by the first huckster, tiger, snake, dark night that comes down the pike. Yet once you have embraced the real fact that you are a temporary aberration of a permanent flux it only makes sense to enjoy yourself by helping others to find happiness. Can you imagine the tangled logic used by doctors to make people sick so they will buy drugs that make those same  rich doctors richer¿ How many layers of denial have gone into the fantasy that you can win a war, or that the object of any education is to find an answer¿ Talk about your dead-ends, it only stands to reason any system which uses questions to reduce the number of questions generated is self-defeating. What about a holiday that is based on giving presents that only deflect the pain of not having enough love in your heart to believe that someone would love you without receiving a gift from you. We have convinced ourselves that it is possible to buy happiness - that is sad, but only if you believe it. I do, but i’m unlearning it as quickly as i can type. If it can’t be bought, what then. I cooked turkey thighs in ceramic pots and scared myself half to death in the process, only to be exacerbated by the flames that erupted from sputtering grease. Yet the look of confused pleasure on the face of hungry people eating the results was for me almost as hapy as writing this now to the ghost reader googol hides from me, or me from them. It does not matter, for i do not express myself for googol’s magic metrics, but for my own growth and understanding.

It is the same for art that i create. Last night i spoke with a dear old man recovering from a surgical wound that i have had personal experience with. What he said troubled me such that i dreamt of an avatar from my past. When i asked the kindly old man “what do you want to do?” he replied “i don’t have to do anything, why do something that someone pays me to do and then criticizes what i do¿” - a point i well understand, but the hurdle i could not get past or through to, depending on one’s orientation “what do you want to do¿” It was almost inconceivable to this otherwise very sage man that he was the root of his own power. That it was enough to search his own heart for an occupation, and that a worthy objective of his own design was more valuable than reaching a state of disuse. Truly, it may very well be my own myopic task-oriented indoctrination speaking and that his own canny sense of peace is my lesson to learn rather than some arrogant supposition of cultural superiority on my part. But he will have to go some ways to convince me that hacking my way out of confusion using words as my only weapon could be surpassed by any bought-and-paid-for pasture of high clover. Still, i need to learn more about the words he gave to me, otherwise why converse if it is not to better understand another¿ Am i any happier than last xmas in San Francisco¿ I don’t know that i live to be hapy or that hapy circumstance animates my choices? I do know that i take a great deal more pleasure in finding ways to help others find happiness than focusing on my own. There has been more than enough Peggy Lee’s “is that all there is” in my life to accept happiness when it arrives and to not despair when it is called elsewhere, rather to enjoy the more consistent conviction that if i can relive one person’s suffering that is a worthy objective of my precious moments left alive.

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not hapy xmas - the sonnet

Has there ever been a not sad xmas?

For g_d’s sake t’was the birth of a doomed man

for which the richest church on earth says mass

but for any respite, the poor they ban.

Does a gift celebrate nobility¿

or just enable the money lenders? 

Would a doomed man be hapy now or flee¿

he fled once, leaving only his tears.

What if he’s still here waiting for our love

to grow worthy of his noble ideas?

Might he object the slaughter of his dove

by yanking the plug of their medias¿

too soon to know if he might’ve succeeded,

but we all know how his love’s been treated 

jts 12/25/2017

http://stoneartist.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved