the mystery of freedom · the essay / delusional independence - a sonnet

4 July 2o24

Two years ago to the day, my 4th of July began at 4:30 AM in Oaxaca, Mexico and ended at 11:oo PM in Bakersfield, Calif.; i returned to Oaxaca the following February 2023, no more free nor much wiser, certainly lighter, for on the return trip to the airport, my backpack was not transferred from point A to B and so i arrived in time for my departure to Oaxaca at LAX while my backpack/home of the past 7 years remained at Union Station, while i carrying a rucksack and the certain knowledge of my responsibility for that curiously disjointed synchronicity - is that oxymoronic ? 

Today i continue to learn the limitations of attachments, especially the illusion of having expunged it from one's system. When i divorced my 2nd wife, i entertained a cheery delusion that my grief would be completed during the long drive from Sacramento, CA to Fullerton, CA only to learn that whimper was but a prelude. My thinking at the time was because this was not my 1st divorce, i might have learned enough about the process to expedite some of its lessons, no such luck. It seems recent events about my continued dislocation may enjoy the same concei. 

+-+-+-

7 July 2o25

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy ... censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything -- you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him. - Robert A. Heinlein, science-fiction author (7 Jul 1907-1988)

+-+-+-

Thunder outside my window, back on the hillside of Buenavista, Oaxaca for the moment or next 12 days, whichever comes first · A year's lapse in this essay is as if i'd never ceased the struggle to make sense of nonsense over the course of the past 362 days.

*Apropos this writing thunder, moments ago, knocked wifi and electricity offline - we’ll have to wait and see how much the rtf remembers of this renewed effort ·

** And just like that - 1 hour later - power and wifi restored

"I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom·" - Bob Dylan ·

*** Apropos this increasingly curious essay, Googol "a Ieye Overview" categorically states that quote is not found .  .. but goes on to explain: 

'Here's why this quote resonates with Dylan's overall message:'

I've been listening to Bob Dylan from the age of 12 or 13, i'm now - 'none of your fucking business', older than dirt, and i would never presume to say what 'Zimmy' is on about; i only know how grateful i him to have had 'his wisdom oozing out of my ears' when 47.2.0 rode 'its tired maga nag' back into my realm dragging the carcass of thralldom behind it like some fiend from a lost chapter J.R.R. Tolkien left in the aether.

Yet here is this disembodied, inanimate string of 0s and 1s conjured by a wet-behind-the-ears billionaire trainee  explaining to me what "Dylan's overall message" is, and these mooks have that 'launch codes' - goodness me. Makes my wonder if Madame Paradox and her whelps "T'is and T'aint" haven't defected and secretly interning at Palantir, maybe hoping for some of that 'Honeymoney' Epstein bequeathed to Petey the 'Gr8 Pumpkin' eater, makes me wonder who's guarding Ghislaine's cell¿

Wednesday 9 July 2o25: resumed power outage from yesterday, ergo wifi and its 'stop barking app' and so enjoyed 4 hours of piercing yelps by the neighbor's hound. The paradox is i'm more judicious in my use in an effort toward Pavlovian 'Behavior Modification' than the land owner who'd abandoned the two dogs to their fates when she extended her week's journey to CDMX for a month. I was already noxiously sanctimonious about the dogs lack of shelter during the 4 week deluge when saddled by their sustenance; unclear in my own heart if it was umbrage with being presumed upon by a quasi-aristocratic, clearly-wounded, Art/Patron/Illuminati or intolerance with my own hubris of precipitous decision making in times of planetary turmoil¿ using an inverted 'A-Okay' forefinger-to-thumb-to-nose, aussie-fashion gesture "Fuck Knows"?

I've forgotten how much fun it could be to pour words onto a page in search of meaning; what i haven't forgotten is the World History 101 class at Fullerton College where i first heard the origin of the word essay 'to try', due to the exertions of Michel de Montaigne in 16th France, (for those like myself) possessed of peculiar learning modalities, that would be the 1500s in eurocentric historical records. 'flash of insight': (a word for which "A iEye" is unable to yield the result i seek, how curious¿ In my studies it never, or at least to my aging memory, never occurred to me that William Shakespeare and Michel de Montaigne labored in near synchronization producing some of the most formative thinking for our 'whitemanepoch' unbeknownst to each other.

What, you may be asking yourself, does this essay have to do with the mystery of freedom. "What's money, a man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between does what he wants to"- Bob Dylan described as success, i would say the same quote well defines freedom - or part of its mystery.

14 July 2o25

Ma died in October of 2o24-five days from now she'd have been 95; i come from long lived stock. Of our last visits, i confided to her a trepidation about my plans to return to Mexico, her reply, "what's a matter, you scared¿" She was brash like that in an unkind way. This morning i am putting the end touches on a transition some 8 years in the making, it involves cessation of personal fictions, confronting specters, some rooted in ma's acerbic wit, some born of personal evolution. I'm vacating a location which has held a manifold of cathartic moments conflated with Bob Dylan's notion of success. 

My nation is fighting for its existence as a free nation; i am aging, my family is evaporating, my work is coming into focus though its reason d'être is skewing from the cultural sea change flummoxing our world that ". . . Seems sick an' it's hungry, it's tired an' it's torn. It looks like it's a-dyin' an' it's hardly been born. Hey Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know .  .. " - Bob Dylan · 

And i'm at peace, not quite sure why. Keeping regular hours; breathing deeply down to my pelvis late at night helps much; may have even discovered the root of the degenerative osteoarthritis that has been hounding my steps since birth. I say that with some facetiousness and not, for i was fitted with an insert for a 'fallen arch' at age¿ 8,9,10 and learned much later that Leonardo DaVinci said "Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else."

I'd love to write down how this writing process has magically expunged wounds from a parent who must have suffered greatly to behave the way she had; however my memory of her throwing onyx bookends from Mexico through my parent's window screaming about what a difficult birth i was, the same summer Pop euphemistically 'relocated' with the eldest brother and my Beagle 'Snoopy' disappeared give pause to the expression 'magically expunged', 'cauterized', maybe, 'lanced', possibly. Oddly, the feeling of having embraced a suffering child would be more accurate. On that note: Ma, and other ancestors participating in this humble chronicle of our species' paroxysms of growth, or 'if it be your will lord' witnessing the shudders our shuffling off this mortal coil.  

+-+-+-+

  / x / x  / x /   x  /  x     /    x

delusional independence · a sonnet  

"What ain't¿" he retorted to the aether

"What is air?" - asked from more playful times when

"Delusional Independence" was not 

the pivot upon which our world could end

Reality tortas aren't so healthy 

as they seem, nor dulcet tones a cure-all

for each discord. Is 'the bell' our body

and calm the frequency we need to call

Dame Paradox says paddle your canoe 

Lao Tzu says 'ignore the voice of others 

not their slave'; da Vinci 'inter-are' do. .. 

"Drunkenness because we ain't connectors"

that this ode'll be known such it needs an

explanation would be as if you can

(˚ ㄥ _˚)                  

jts 15 July 2o25

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

∞  

Upon the marriage of Emily and Michael

Upon the marriage of Emily and Michael 

x   /  x   /  x   /  x   /  x   /

it was a gift i did not see coming 

somehow more generous today than then

for it continues to declare meaning

amplified by time's kind intervention

the hand was so young, and the gift so old

yet to this day informs some mystery

full with an understanding; fine as gold

yet powerful and wise, an old-growth tree.

how’d a child know how much stone meant to me¿ 

how did so small a hand lift such a thought?

how could someone so young see so deeply¿

how do i contribute hope where i’m not?

through this poem - in the spirit of learned love;

found deeply within - warmth from far above.

jts 12 july 2o25 ∞ semper fi · friends

adaptation - the essay / resistance · a sonnet

“Real Artists Don’t Starve - They Thrive · “ was enough of a trigger to provoke me to my last version of this essay begun at the end of last year and has been stalled for the past 3 months having deteriorated into a miasma of self-indulgent dreck. I capitulated this morning when i sat upright out of an existential stupor hoping the change in surroundings i landed in due to a precipitous decision to evade “The inevitable;” my neighbors where i live are ‘noise thugs’, meaning that to make their pound of flesh, they think nothing of coopting the tranquility of the entire colonia to whatever variation of ‘music’ deemed popular for whatever crowd by whoever is making those choices, nor to they give a fig whether their volume of entertainment might disrupt anyone else’s activity for a radius of 300 meters; the insult is their contempt for the sleep of those who depend on their weekends for rest - these ‘masters of music’ feel their creativity is so sacred that 1, 2, or 3 in the morning is too soon to interrupt their cultural ‘elan’.

So i took a room in a lodge away from the gossips who have ascribed ‘hatred’ of the culture as motivation for my seemingly bizarre choices - or so it seems to me. The irony is that the hope to ‘evade’ rather than adapt has only created a cascading gaggle of ‘ducklings’ waddling after my every effort to control my environment. The room i was placed in was catty-corner to the ‘off-cycle’ kitchen at precisely the moment when the chef-master wished to do his most creative work on the same Sunday morning i was hoping to disentangle myself from real vs fantasy impediments of my creative process. “En Vino Veritas” once again saved the day and kept me from acquiescing to rudeness and so found my self further complicating the scene by sharing my ‘unframed-inarticulate’ objections with the Dame/Manager on her Sunday morning, knowing i’d be calling down the dogs of sanctimonious indignation for my arrogance.

I’m really not sure what to do next; it is impractical to change countries every time a cultural rift sticks in my craw, the equivalent echo would be to change families when yours will not alter their preferred brand of toxin when you object. The problem for me is that my yen for kindness is retreating more quickly than my ability to adapt to solitude and rationalize my circumstance as a form of existential dignity without any attending support. Media and its orchestrated distraction is a poor substitute for flesh and blood; while fear and isolation are poor compensation for the courage it takes to defy coalescing into the ‘pod’. The irony is that it “T’was been ever thus.” - Larry Golden · I did not sleep well after the kerfuffle but could’ve; it was the anxious child in my looking forward to the pleasure i know can be found in massage + temezcal (steam bath). Sadly i no longer access easily the metaphysical wonder found in not understanding some things. In my earlier pilgrimages to where i now live; may die, i’d channel Don Juan, and find magic under every rock.

Now i’m just tired, possibly besotted, having found sober allure in the wisdom of Mescalito - ‘the more things change the more they remain the same.’ - old french proverb. Mescal is the most benign intoxicant i’ve found, while the catechism is oddly the same; moderation, all things moderation. Days ago, I thought for a moment i’d fallen for a woman; mostly because i’m a ‘hopeless romantic’ but i know in the darker chambers of my being i want to vindicate myself and be worthy of what lovers know, rather than the hard-bitten realist i have become. The paradox is for those 60 seconds that i flirted with this woman, i lost 10 lbs of angst and added 15 years to what is increasingly looking to be a telescoping future. My bravado has met its match in degenerative osteoarthritis of the hip, even if i can analyze whys and wherefores and maintain an optimum physical condition - the world i face doesn’t admit my type of genius, and as much as it galls me to say, George’s boot on the throat is as courageous a commentary as i’ve found.

And it would be a lot of fun to devise an existential ‘Hail Mary’ that might provide some leverage for liberty to those who’ve peeled the digital claw from their skullcap and stand outside the tangle of what had at one time been a human vista which yielded the Shakespeares, the Dylans, Rembrandts, and Einsteins of our world. I don’t know what it takes to gain traction over the blare of computer models and their handmaiden, artificial intelligence. I am proud to think i can continue to stand here with my ‘little wild bouquet’ of aphorisms cobbled together in the manner of a modern day Montaigne, and would love to leave you reading with a lighter heart than the one you brought to the screen; the best i can tell you is it will be more valuable to you when you find it within your own tool box, because the same as you are peering over my shoulder is a search for the right size screw to cinch this ‘bad boy’ in place, there is no doubt someone in your world peering over your should assessing and evaluating what you read, why and noting what you build - good luck to us all.

+-+-+-

resistance · a sonnet  

Adaptation isn’t resistance, it’s life;

and what resists, persists - a paradox

for both states - life and death · describe much strife:

life through fullness, death’s void walled off by locks.

To what end persist, if both states lack peace?

What state teaches peace; can it be acquired

If it can’t be learned, what about hired - a lease?

My flesh is borrowed, why can’t calm be hired?

“A bunch of words” - how’d they learn to fight back?

Do words resist writing, to serve a poem birth

adding strength to its life ducking’n ai hack

Does it matter to this world’s shrinking girth?

so goes the saga - ‘Willy or Won’t he -

performed on the stage of ‘Don’t get a Fee’ ·

(˚ ㄥ _˚)                  

jts 7/9/2024

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

∞

raison d'être; an essay - breathing; the sonnet ·

10 days from today is my birthday; none of your damn business how many - think ‘old as dirt’, 4 days from now is my sister’s, she is older than dirt. We were estranged; as i woke in my lucid dreaming fog, she was traveling to China, an image which provided emotional leverage to explore unresolved issues that only the unconscious mind can navigate; it was very helpful. It is now late on a wet Oaxacan afternoon; a good day overall, though i fell riding my bicycle back from the outdoor gym. Given events of the past year, much less the past week, i applaud my pluck. Pancreatitis is the new Sherrif in town, which should make for an interesting denouement from my honest efforts to gnaw as much creative gristle from the Bohemian bones that have comprised nourishment during much of my flicker of existence. Without being ‘wasichu’ about it, know, i’m in no hurry to check out, but more accurately; before i do, i'd like to honor the miracle of breath that has taken me so long to percolate up to the surface of my persona. 

One Christmas, while my father was gaining his supine footing at the onset of his end days and the elder siblings had circled the wagons in an effort to quarantine his peace from the ‘wild indian’ my spirit apparently manifests within the family mythology, i wrote my first sonnet as an homage to his journey. In that sonnet, i blithely foreswore my raison d'être as emanating from stone - if there’s afterlife, Pop is getting a good yuck’ off of my dawning awareness of such hubris. Well pop as long as we’re laughing: of the handful of times you laid a marshal hand on me for developmental emphasis was the the time i was ratted out by “the poor weak 'sister' creature” for nominating her to her face as a ‘she dog’- she was then/whether she still is i can’t say, she now eschews ‘simple existential dialogue’ - Pop’s enlightened reaction at that time was to corner me in the elder brother’s ‘premium’ primogeniture accommodation and ‘bitch’ slap my head from side to side, something i can only imagine the two siblings regaled, and continue to regale for my existential comeuppance, according to their ‘lights'. However, i am no longer fresh, not even confident, but am curious what morsels of understanding can be teased from this aged writing implement that had once represented liberation and redemption, which are now no more than a warm presence, like that of the murmuring from an old friend waiting to hear the end of your last sentence. There is also the bulwark against the contemporary terror foisted on the population by a cynical ruling class well aware of how deeply they have failed in their responsibilities to honor the privilege that chance and circumstance have provided their human experience. My creative elan is no longer manic - weighted by the gravity of destiny. Rather i would extrude each tidbit of beauty found through the prism of curiosity. 

Bob Dylan opined a parent’s wisdom still oozed out of his ears, my parents were never short on opinion; of my earliest memories is a photo of a ‘perplexed’ me looking up into the camera whilst my bright red cape was being affixed to my neck, not unlike that of a noose. The consummate craftsmanship of my devil costume was dwarfed by the weight of its horned symbolism. All of 3 years old, if that, and yet little more than a projection screen for the too active imagination of my exceedingly smart Dame and her gaggle of ready-made stories waddling behind her Hannibal-esque march to her destiny. All of this to say; there never was room or awareness adequate for a crosseyed sensate in the superheated cauldron of narcissist apprenticeship that was my childhood. I developed what innate mimicry i possessed, modeled the ‘cocktail hour vignettes’ that constituted the cognoscenti in the dead space south of San Francisco. I glommed onto the detritus of art supplies and open books that reflected the interests of my fascinating parents, substituting the proficiency i gained from factotuming in my parent’s faux bohemian billet in exchange for the dearth of affection and simple human acknowledgement that i grew up starved for in that house full of ‘vain’ appetites.  

So true-to-form on my elder sister’s birthday, i participated as uninvited interloper, sending a sonnet and sundry photos reflecting my obtuse, however sincere effort to be what i’ll never be - welcomed. Her birthday occurs on 9-11. For a time my strategy was to send whatever humor i could picture might serve as counterweight to someone i am welcome to ignore, and whose grief i’m not welcome to commiserate. Fb in it’s mechanical stupidity only serves to exacerbate my isolation and relational confusion. Zukè prompted me with an exposure of a statue that is magnificent in its own right and weighty in its failure to rise like cream into the cultural stratosphere, In the spirit of frolic i conjured for my birtday, i posted the foto only to discover an innocent remark from a stranger asking if the form the subject carries ‘is a cat?’ I held my tongue, but more importantly did not react, except here; out of context, in an essay attempting to parse the complexity of ‘raison d'être’ for my existence which i more and more suspect has less raison than d'être that one might find in the accretions of the same stones i have spent my life shaping into congruous shapes which at best are ambiguous, at worst opportunities for commentary by other isolated aesthetes. Yet in the scheme of things, though the nice lady from the South meant nothing more than to pose an interested question that through no fault of her own caused me grievous existential perturbation, my life is so configured that i sit content in the afternoon sun chewing on morsels of events that do little more than feed my soul - and feeling tremendously grateful for such nutrition in a starving world.

A shot and a half of Reposada, after a week and a half of vibrant good health; give or take a day, and this birtday morning the kindly Doctora at the local clinic teased Lima Bean-size, or at least large Pinto Bean-size detritus from both ears - i knew it was there, but took successive visits for liberation. I have been lucky so far in life debriding them myself since my patron saint of ENT Dr’s, Doctor Sammy Lee was called back to the mother ship; or at local Vietnamese Barber shops; (why the American war there was doomed out of the gate.)  There’s an autoerotic fascination about holding molted tissue that is so primary as to mimic an infant’s fascination with feces, and the world’s equally irrational repulsion - don’t believe me, try looking up the psychiatric expression for infantile interest in feces. My fascination with the intrinsic nature of esoterica formed on rainy days inside a weekend-empty home drenching myself in the encyclopedias my loving parents invested in. The comforting plethora of what was ‘known’ then against my increasingly insatiable curiosity about what is known now, nestles nicely in the paradox of our “monkeys with guns and money” reality that we drag behind our gimp; traipsing with our fragile skeletons onward past the chimera of oh-so-certain signposts into the nearly unfathomable enormity of our, forgive me Leonard, “invincible defeat;” 

don’t know about y’all - i had a blast wiping this one off the slate · 

“what’s the numerical equivalent of sex¿

68, one more and you eat it.” - A. Nonymous ·

Oscar Wilde — 'All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.'

 X    /   X    /   X    /     X    /    X   / 

breathing - the sonnet ·

More than breath, there is little much to life

yet we fill our days with such distraction¿

What explains our fascination for strife

except as diversion from examination 

Of what, for why¿ permission to enjoy

the act of creation from deep within?

who would dare to arbitrate - with what ploy ·

‘We’ll need to see papers you were given,

to make something out of nothing, t'ain’t right; 

breathing must have authorization - 

how else can we know you have seen the light?

You might have knowledge without condition.

'Our' system is made to provide comfort,

It’s how we gloss over pain, you call 'hurt'. 

(˚ ㄥ _˚)                    

24 September 2o23

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

∞