robbing - an essay / stolen · the sonnet

“Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” - Lao Tzu

I had the good fortune, when young, to be taken for a big ride, losing drugs and money. One would think that might've been enough to learn one’s lesson - yeah, me neither. A month back, i gave money to a neighbor for a 'too-good-to-be-true' deal for artisanal mezcal; the error i made was in not paying attention to business fundamentals, namely cash-on-the-barrel-head. There is no escaping the, at times, lethal reality of personal responsibility. What is hard to abide is having one' nose rubbed in its own foolishness. There is time enough for my erstwhile mezcal merchant to learn about the ignorance of cheating a potentially steady client, but between then and now this pompous ass is as close to a D._rump as i care to get. The dilemma is how to tease out from that tangled web; his greed; my fury; his fury; or; my greed - a karmic weave that defies the Dalai Lama's worldwide admonition to “do no harm.” I was doing okay containing my self-loathing-masked as contempt while trying to process myself into a more benign frame of mind, when he began loudly yucking it up with his homies outside my window about the 'grand heist' he'd pulled on the tonto guero. It was here the danger of our world was driven woefully home to the otherwise isolated crags of what's left of my too generous, but altogether naive enough heart. This neighbor and his pain manifested, not in a rational denunciation of our mutual nemesis, Mssr D._rump, but mirrored with deadly accuracy all of the vile, clannish, knee-jerk reactions so skillfully elicited from the hapless hicks of my homeland by the grand snake-oil-salesman himself, D._rump. I don’t know what riled me more, to be the object of specific racial animosity after months of conscious sublimation of the contempt one faces living in a foreign land, or the frustration of not knowing how to effectively combat my own deeply ingrained white privilege? It is not just my confusion about white privilege that chafes at intentional cruelty, i was born cross-eyed and have encountered the suspect repulsion of others after no more than a cursory glance all my life, so much so my favorite halloween costume, has always been, Quasimodo - fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke, or is it joke ‘em if they can’t take a fuck (can never keep those two straight)

C.G. Jung — 'Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.'

Having been 'taking in' so well early on, i had been inspired to the fiction of a life of crime, but determined that like any lethal game, there is, and will always be one, just that much faster, or meaner or ________ fill in the blank. The fiction of a “dog-eat-dog” world was not fashioned by a dog. Dogs are pack animals and survive by throwing in 'together'; and then with the human tribes attempting to pull up and out of the muck. Man has learned his cruelty at the hands of aberrant professional sociopaths such as President D._rump; low-lifes lacking the testicles to do their own dirty work but who've found enough shells, or shills to contract with for men’s minds using nothing more than lies. “Thanks, man for saving our bacon last winter. Let me take this piece-of-shit island off your hands with all these shiny baubles”; the Spanish word for advantage is “provecho.” 

I grew up as the loud kid due to a deafness in one ear from an accidental explosion. The “soches,” in high school condescended to, and acknowledged my existence mostly to gain traction with my more conceited siblings, otherwise me and rich kids were like oil and vinegar. By that time, The Beat Generation had morphed into a misbegotten psychedelic love child, a merchandising ploy, i bought hook, line, and sinker - including knee-high moccasins and Dashiki’s when i could find them. Times were good and being young meant one never had to look to deep into anything, just buy, buy, buy, as long as the product confirmed “counter-culture” credentials. The problem, however, as with all movements, they are comprised of people like myself who by their nature are contentious, peevish, proud, selfish, greedy, loving, fearful, generous, brave, etc., etc., etc. For many years, i was convinced if i could only persuade whoever i was pontificating to at the time, the logic of altruism, the world's misery would be rectified and set straight; peace would reign and fairness would become law of the land. I laughed off suggestions that i might be viewing the world through rose-colored glasses and pressed on my merry way - still do, though not nearly as unrelentingly. Given the state of the things today my personal conviction remains; if people could see mutual benefit in each other's welfare, the human population of the world might have a slender chance of survival. One impediment has been our inability to enlarge the concept of family to include all of humanity. For a time, you heard hippies calling each other 'brother', but that was starvation of one culture for the authenticity of another - regardless of murder rates within that communities, who else but family members would kill each other so freely?

This racial fratricide was and is partly orchestrated by those in power to keep us all separated from each other, by hook or crook. However, i imagine we will see the same behavior within the tight ranks of the ruling class once shit goes really south and the police begin jumping ship when food and water shortages raises the tide of humanity up to and upon the shores of conspicuous consumption. Watching the rats of privilege feed on each other is of no interest to me, for by this time the steps necessary to right the homo-sapien ship from its sunken state will allow for nothing but the most concerted cooperation our species has ever known - i don’t see that happening. The computer technology that is supposedly saving us from certain doom, is also being used to create simulations of a wide variety of increasingly unsavory scenarios by the same unscrupulous cowards who have impoverished half the world selling useless baubles to the other half. These simulations allow the ruling class to make minor investments in major markets, or heap lavish praise on minor markets with predictable results. But just like my hapless neighbor thinking he got the world by the tail on a downhill pull by beating some gringo for chump change, so too the ruling class is motivated by the unexamined fear of having co-opted a planet of dynamic, capable and determined human beings so much so - they can only be asking themselves - “what if these stupid motherfuckers find out what we have done¿” I myself was unable to expand my concept of generosity to refrain from retorting to my neighbor, “who the fuck are you kidding?” when he greeted me affably this morning - I will suffer further estrangement from the community i have tried hard to become a member of; were i a more loving, awakened soul, i might have said, “You took from me; is it because you are in need? Here, take some more provecho.” As it is, i may have to continue my wanderings in search of a community where to ply my trade, free from aggression, but i am beginning to think that particular homecoming will have to wait until i die, or i reach nirvana. Having been entirely disillusioned by the semi-messianic upbringing i hail from, i’m afraid the odds are not good that there is a place for me in this world. What i am left with is the domain of my skin, and whatever peace i am to find will needs be found within.

Does this mean i will cease my efforts to re-establish the dignity of sangha, not likely. Just as i quest for a woman who will not sell me down the river for a better sperm donor, i will continue to make every effort to my own hyper vigilance and to expose the divisiveness being wielded by the unscrupulous, or the more camouflaged, surreptitious, but clearly unawakened techno geeks selling their souls to amoral emotional ciphers for computer models of how to take advantage of their brothers and sisters on planet earth. What is so sad is how close we are to paradise. We as humans have allowed ourselves to be taken in by our own greed, nor does it matter how you dress it up - it is our own - all of us. For example, i contracted with my neighbor, because it was a spectacular value, just as i had bought my last three pairs of Chinese shoes off of an Amazon proxy. I knew how vicious Bezo’s business model was, though it was prior to Amazon's announcement it had patented a bracelet capable of monitoring a line worker’s efficiency. Just as my neighbor lost more than a regular customer and a faithful admirer, so too those Captain's of Industry who are floating on the sheen of margins wholly supported by untold workers, as well as the increasingly ignorant consumers of our fake world economy, the titans have lost valuable market share. I will not sink so low as to impede my neighbor’s just efforts for a better life, neither can he count on my endorsement. It is the same for Bezos, i have no qualms whatsoever proposing a worldwide boycott of Amazon, for no other reason than to demonstrate the full force of the market. The economy no longer employs what the Australians describe as “Fair Dinkum;” Americans used to have similar colloquialisms: on-the-square, tit-for-tat, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander; but ‘mericans have now been turned against each other so effectively with sinister Madison Avenue perfidy, the expression “shooting-ducks-in-a-barrel” is inadequate to describe the inequity. As far as ‘merica is concerned, it's major objective is to reach the next level on whatever subscription screen for which they're paying-through-the-nose - sadly little different than the braggadocio my neighbor used to denounce President D._rump in one breath, and boast about the beating he gave the extranjero, the next.

Should any of this scrolling tripe, stink of sanctimony - my apologies. I wish my neighbor well, minus enthusiasm and material commitment, just as i pray for the soul of mr. m.t. suit. Arundhati Roy has pointed out that “they” (the corporate overlords) need us a lot more than we need them. The logic of this observation is unassailable, but why hasn’t it gained better traction among the fractured resistance of our world’s oppressed escapes me. I have recently proposed the establishment of a U.S.A. Inc. where instead of a voting franchise, we fight fire with fire and incorporate, but now i believe that Planet Earth, Inc. would be a wiser business model. Clearly capital has no borders; why should the inhabitants on planet earth limit themselves to such quaint limitations? Just as the illusion that some variation of D._rump is not lurking somewhere in every human heart on earth, any effort to change the planet, will be doomed that does not include an embrace of the warm heartedness HH Dalai Lama et. al., advocate. As long as the idea of preying on others has any credence as a business, personal or educational model, there will never be human prosperity on our planet. Prosperity is the capacity to have enough, and as it stands today the ruling class has aptly demonstrated they cannot get enough. However, as previous epochs have shown, there is no reform of power. They who have taken from you by any means necessary, can only be restrained by removing from them the source of their wealth - your cooperation. Were i to return to my friend and say, “I'm going to ignore your shady business practices, and buy from you again; i hope you won’t cheat me.” i’d have no one to blame but myself - for certainly “once fooled, shame on you; twice fooled shame on me” is true for any neighborhood on the planet, including Wall St. So why do we return time and again to an illusionary economy or any concept that does not help us to discover why we were born or aid us in the protection of the only home we can have on this material plane - planet earth?

addendum: the big shot Bandido just made good his obligation of artisanal spirits. The delivery was not as a result of my insistence and/or pressure from any pique i might've imagined, but a combination of cultural teaching; pride of product (which can never be assimilated by empire): live humbly or die trying. . . 

addendum’s addendum: an additional quantity of excellent mezcal was just sampled to me by a 'street sweeper' friend 

addendum’s addendum addendum: take care you're not the abyss you see - paraphrasing Nietzsche · 

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stolen - the sonnet

Our world has been stolen out from under

our feet; we helped them do it, willingly,

believing the lie - “WE’ll share the plunder,

but to keep the loot safe, I’ll keep the key.”

Now it turns out that the vault's been vacant

Like Dorothy, the key was always ours

with the real values defined by intent -

pride, humility, love, kindness, 'working hours'.

Things that cannot be stolen, never are.

Greed wants you to believe you can own trust;

life teaches us trust burns like any fire

or rots like old metal swallowed in rust.

Wanting something worth stealing is foolish;

We leave like we arrived - naked and fresh

jts 02/05/2018

http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

prohibited from AI sampling in any form

reprinted with permission; all rights reserved

∞

fact - the essay / fiction - a sonnet

I have lived a good deal of my life immersed in a world of creativity, some would say fantasy - likely some admixture of the two. However, i’ve also lived many years creating in an engineering environment - think weaponry. It is no small wonder that i would bring personal conflicts from this dichotomy to a professional for help to sort fact from fiction .  .  . fact: i am no longer physically young - mentally, well that’ll have to wait for another essay; fact: weapons are no defense; fact: poverty is deliberate and manufactured, not chosen; “love is wise; hatred is foolish” - Bertrand Russell. I believe in my heart of hearts that my parents did their level best, however much the facts argue against such an assertion. The only factual result of this personal conviction is that i am compelled to follow suit. I spent nearly the entire day yesterday researching the advantages of relocating to another country, based not on any threat to my safety, or demands by my hosts to vacate, but due entirely to passing feelings of not belonging - fact. This is not to say my, perhaps too, finely tuned empathic capacities are fabricating rancor of others, selfish designs on my native generosity or very real efforts by others to dominate me, but anyone who has visited enough different places can find the same behvior everywhere on the planet. The fact is where i live, i belong, and were i to act on my research and move, then i would as equally belong in that new location. Let’s try a thornier consideration; i just spent 10 minutes repairing already threadbare underwear - here is the question, was i being a responsible citizen of the world keeping one less measly cloth out of a landfill, or was i moving the clock that much closer to my 3rd cigarette of the day? All that therapy wasn’t totally wasted, i like tobacco but am also mindful of the damage my personal choice wreaks on my rapidly aging frame. For years tobacco companies claimed otherwise. I have lived both lifestyles and so my opinion is empirical much like the temperature readings of our planet for the past 6 years - can we safely interpolate that tobacco companies and oil interests care not for facts? that is a question.

If so, this begs more questions. For example, why limit myself to 6 cigarettes a day; that is easy i feel better. However to what advantage is it for the oil companies to continue extracting fossil fuel. Are they protecting children who are starving in so many countries after so many years of ceaseless war, or is there a more sinister reason? We have seen that executive pay has vastly outpaced the compensation workers receive for their contributions to the “economy.” Does this dynamic mean that executives are more valuable to the “economy?” If that were true, there would be no arguments about welfare, homelessness or any of the other maladies our governments are currently blaming on character flaws; we would all be digging in the ground for oil - fat dumb and happy. If these executives were truly valuable, they would be seeking ways to preserve the bounty of our miraculous “economy”. It feels to me as though they got theirs, and they will do anything to guarantee that their dumb luck continues. The equivalent might be someone born into a wealthy country and wanting to believe that somehow they deserve better than all of the other countries. Countries, however are a myth. You cannot go to any nation on the planet and show where mother earth had made lines on the ground saying this side is for X, and that side is for Y. In fact there is no nation on earth whose boundaries have never changed. So why are we in such a hurry to preserve something that has always changed, or better yet shall we just remove the barrier of borders completely? My fantasy is that just like my desire to relocate yesterday was prompted by personal fears, or peering into my scary interior to know if i am repairing underwear for noble purposes is just moving myself closer to my fix, our borders are unexamined internal anxieties we attribute to an external cause, rather doing the hard work of understanding ourselves - oh yeah all that therapy was really valuable.

What i don’t completely understand is why the good doctor didn’t just say, “fuck it. that job is bad karma; dump aerospace and do art” instead of his rational recommendation - to paraphrase “let the job pay for your college, then teach high school English - it’s what your father did”. The fact is it was good advice and no deconstruction after the fact is going to alter that reality; besides just like Bob Dylan said, “reality has always had too many heads.” My family is not accessible to me, though i continue to make futile efforts to persuade myself otherwise; however it is from this earnest desire on my part to be connected that I can well imagine some hapless chump trapped in a corporate boardroom with emotional ciphers regaling the “leader” with tales of conquest, while the same hapless schmuck is asking him/herself “why are my insides ragged? - who are these people¿ - what am i doing here? - can i trust anyone, but my family sure is proud of me.” The problem for me is not my family being proud, that problem would be my own, just like any behavior that concedes power to another. If past is prologue as has been said elsewhere by my betters, we are facing very difficult times and our leaders would like to believe that they know what everyone else should do, except apparently themselves. At a time when scientific discipline is needed more than ever, there is an enormous amount of money demanding the world believe: the sun rotates around the earth; earth is flat; computers connect us to each other; surveillance is for our own good; police serve and protect, armies defend and that it is a good thing to be rich. I once had a relationship to a beverly hills address; knew someone married to the Mayor of Pasadena; and saw Gene Wilder in a restaurant. These are external reinforcements to an internal doubt. Nor does this information make anymore sense in reverse, meaning do i care if any of those mentioned ever took notice of me, Fact: you come into the world alone - a given, ma was close by, but talk about bursting bubbles. Fact: when you die, no one is going to do it for you.

No amount of spiritual gymnastics is going to alter those facts. so why would the in-between time of life be any different? I cannot redeem another human being, or save them from themselves. The only control i have is within my own skin. This fact is of great help at a time when the cowards amongst us who rather than get up in your face and say “do this, because i want you to,” resort to advertising manipulation, click bait, religious conformance or any of the other indirect efforts to make you you do something you thought was your own idea. Our world seems to have lost the capacity for cooperation, favoring instead the competitive model. Is this how pecking order has come to figure so highly in our ambitions: workers want to be bosses; bosses want to be owners; owners want to be rulers and rulers want blind obedience from everyone - everyone that is except themselves. Fact: (however fuzzy) from 6 to 86 men have more wealth than the bottom half of humanity. I read an interesting meme which stated - “that describes a slave ship dressed as worldwide economy.” Google no longer allows my posts propagation, this could be market forces, or market farces depending on which side you fall out on. But i would be willing to bet a large sum of money that were my anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, anti-military anti-digital manipulation rants more generous to the great leaps which technology has provided humanity’s fearless leaders, then my views would miraculously, however slowly scale the mountain of visibility which the digital barons have conquered with their network chokepoints. A vaguely similar parallel comes to mind in the very old movie, H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine.” Rod Taylor travels to the future to find an idillic society of Eloi who use no tools, no learning and who worship the Sphinx’s dotting the landscape (think Easter Island monoliths). The rub as the time traveler soon discovers, is when Pavlov’s bell rings, the Eloi become zombies and lockstep into the gaping mouths of these Sphinxes. Turns out when the world destroyed itself, those seeking refuge underground separated into the ones who returned to the surface of the planet to become Eloi and those who evolved into the Morlacks - who just happened to feed on the well bell trained Eloi who were entirely indifferent to their own fate.

The question is whether Mr. Wells was grappling with the hazy outlines of our current human predicament. Did he foresee in his creative zeal, the time honored inclination of a segment of our human population to feed on those they can under the right stimulus response scenario so sadly resembling the clickbait addiction we are today force feeding our young in the guise of technological advancement? That is a question. We now have a leader of the “free world” mocking truth using little more than a loincloth like bluster, and a cowed 5th estate attempting to normalize this behavior for seemingly no more reason than preserving the positions of respect and exaggerated compensation into which they have clawed their way. That is not liberal bias, for it is on both sides of the aisle that this pantomime of public interest is played. Fact: the doomsday clock according to googol now sits at 2 or 3 minutes to midnight. The closest it has been was in 1953 at 2 minutes; it now sits again at 2 minutes regardless of what googol says. One has to ask themselves how does the birth of a Kardashian trump googol’s confusion about where the clock estimating the best guess of our eminent extinction sits. This is same the monster information manager we in the West rely on to filter the same data that drives banks, nuclear triggers, fb and it is unable, or unwilling to be unequivocal about our best guess for survival. That is a fact that drives me inside of myself for truth. To know oneself is not a narcissistic diversion used by the unscrupulous to avoid the hard truths, to know oneself is to discover the importance of other, it is also why our duty to the world is far greater than any self-aggrandizing importance our ego has been trained to wallow in. Nor is self awareness simply to serve our generation alone, but like H.G. Wells grappling with the emergent power of the industrial revolution and fashioning a cautionary tale of our peril for the future, so too must we be looking out over the horizon and work for the survival of those who will be forced to live in the most hideous of all abuses - the barely born from a savagely raped mother earth. 

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fiction - the sonnet

a pure fiction is one who looks down

on another - matters not the reason.

for survival we must share planet ground,

not hide in towers and commit treason.

“they” laugh at being stardust - explain stupid

to me, d’be easier to understand.

soon enough the past will be insipid -

for we’d learned their meaning of “take a stand”

laugh at this harangue, and i’d feel better,

not because i am, but because i feel.

Though they’ve stripped much from life, i’m not bitter

I can still feel, which for me keeps it real.

What i feel is not within my purview

what i am, i climb for to see the view 

jts 01/29/2018

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

(for the record line 1 has 9 feet) - no fiction

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 

∞