going down the road - the essay / muse · a sonnet

My father was a man of vast experience which often revealed itself in lessons or entertainment, one was never quite sure which was which. He had so little interest in dogma or doctrine that the respect reserved for elders was often as not laced with a patronizing tolerance of his unrealistic eccentricities - the perfect “taoist.” Reflecting back on my own unkindness and lazy respect for this complex and in many ways inscrutable human being, I struggle to reconcile the remarkably high standards for personal integrity which he nurtured and his unorthodox instruments - a mix of curiosity and accommodation informed by an unflagging allegiance to the most tender of human emotions - love. His concept of love was not found in the hothouse of modern advertising or cultural whims but through a devotion to learning about the whole of human history as explained in the written word - any word: good, bad or banned. He was well-described by Camus’ quote “ The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. ” However, he was not defined by any real struggle - yes, a paradox.

My father committed himself deeply to his beliefs which often set him apart from - wives, children, community standards - armament of the conventional; nor did this resistance to the status quo manifest in culturally destructive behavior almost as though he anticipated John Lennon’s “ Imagine “ and was conducting his own war on hatred and cruelty while developing concepts for a better world. That he was an high school English teacher, very nearly gives credence to the deepest fears and convictions of the rigid right about the cause of our nation’s fall from grace. The dilemma for any zealot attempting to frame this argument is that my father had no doctrine I knew of, outside the principles of decency and love. It sounds maudlin and sappy; it is not. When the big tent revivals were becoming institutional in the conservative bastion of Southern California he spent years as a member of the American Indian Church - a decision which would put him on the fringes of both congregations but closer to his concept of g_d. His understanding of love was not based on paid admission to the “ love show; “ his knowledge was gained in the battlefield - matrimonial, patriarchal, romantic and professional. He was mortally wounded by love and brought back to life by the same, so much so - he could not be denied.

I know, I tried - I ran, I raged, I blamed. I did everything but accept the superiority of his strategy which had nothing to do with politics, affiliation, assertion or occupation. You could talk shit with him, but not at him. He had the good fortune to know selfrespect as well as his own heart - he was a writer, a poet and an inveterate reader impervious to anything that did not directly further understanding about anything. I asked him once in my best snide Young Turk voice, “why’d you become an English teacher?” I said this not to learn but to elevate myself at his expense believing if I had to be in the wastelands, so did he. “ I love words “ was his reply. His focus was intense and unrelenting in pursuit of this love and he used words to good end - craftiest of the crafty - seditiously Socratic without a morsel of bullshit because he was driven by curiosity rather than certainty, hubris or supposition. His constancy took the form of loyalty as long as you took the bit in hand and worked out your own solution, the capacity for which I’ve grown to appreciate enormously as I move toward my own end. His support was often in the form of quips; He anticipated “memes,“ and it was from his last most persistent homily which prompted this essay. “Going down the road“ had become the universal solvent to most every existential dilemma or query - “ how ya’ feeling Pop ? “ . “going down the road“ . . he’d smile.

The well-schooled might take exception to this facile approach to wisdom - a wise decision, for the consequences of applying this pat answer reflects the difficulties of implementation for any of the philosophies predicated on the simple: buddhism, taoism, christianity or islam. For Pop, implementation came in the form of a contradiction - how to go down the road in bed with a broken thigh knuckle and alleged dementia. A preexisting heart condition precluded any reparative surgery rendering him incontinent and at the mercy of today’s “ best medical practice.” What would be the difference between having the cards my father was dealt and ones we are all dealt daily? - water poisoned for profit with the remaining water sold to those without lifeboats; a national election where I gambled +/- 1% of all I had saved to help elect a man who now wants to take back 1.5% from me to support the unmanned murder of grandmothers in a war without end, which pales compared to the previous; or previous to the prior - my father’s predicament, after all what are the masses without the individual? The notion of going down the road is not novel per se, only rephrased from one of the many human anthems - Sol traversing the heavens by chariot; Perseus paddling the river Styx or even Lao Tzu’s “ The Tao.” It is the scale and commensurate utility this oft sung procession is capable of expanding to which might prove useful, especially given the let-it-ride stakes to which the least responsible amongst us have exposed us all.

My interest today is to mobilize what remains of my life. Like father, like son - I like to write, but I carve stone, paint and draw as well. To get to one or all of each of those daily is a busy day, so if I’m not getting in front of one or all, am I stalled? If I was that same Young Turk sassing my old man; not a problem, plus I’d have drunk like Bacchus for good measure before I passed out a 1,000 miles down the road. I’m not that kid; it’s a chore for me just to get in 40 hours week, but the more difficult task is acknowledging I ain’t Sol ambling over the heavens, and I’d have to see the terms before I paddled any river Styx as a hired gun hunting Medusas. The more I’m disabused of fantasy and distraction the more I can create - fucking paradoxes. The most that can be said on this trek is that I’m not alone. Bob Dylan has sung recently “gone walk down that dirt road ’til someone lets me ride.“ Mr. Dylan learned it from somebody, who learned it from somebody else, just like I learned it from somebody . .  . Though there is a great effort afoot to inhibit our collective abilities to individuate or be apart, much less learn, from: parents, peers, education, or assimilation - we are all making our own journey, and we have been from the beginning of our recorded history. We may not like where we are, but the possibility that we are not on a spirit quest of some fashion or another is not likely. Whether it is marching downfield with 60 seconds on the clock; searching for lost America armed-to-nines ‘cause lord knows what kind of commie pink-o bogey man has been placed in the highest office of the land by the liberal illuminati elite depriving the rest of us, good G_d fearin’‘Mericans our “manifest destiny,” or even Mr. Natural “just passing thru,“ we is on the move, going down the road . .  .

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                 muse

She commands my interest this great woman
To see, to contemplate, to make wonder.
All those joys, wounds - the many parts of man
That skirt or shrink from light, are known by her.

Yet flesh and bone the mortar of this home
Pay fealty to reality and age
Which explains why fantasy tries to roam 
While he begs for help just to turn the page.

How much more emptied be this vale of tears
Without a heart so tender or so kind
As those who help others share their fears
Or fight the numbing "no, never you mind."

She's all these things and many times more
That's why i sing what fun is this - Alors!

jts 11/08/2017

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

∞

muse - the sonnet

She commands my interest this great woman
To see , to contemplate , to make wonder .
All those joys , wounds - the many parts of man
That skirt or shrink from light are known by her .

Yet flesh and bone the mortar of this home
Pay fealty to reality and age
Which explains why fantasy tries to roam 
While he begs for help just to turn the page .

How much more emptied be this vale of tears
Without a heart so tender or so kind
As those who help others share their fears
Or fight the numbing " no never you mind . "

She's all these things and many times more
That's why i sing what fun is this - Alors ! .

jts 8 November 2013

Value

Cogito ergo sum . spirits with parents - parents which odds say cannot provide more than food and shelter for a violent childhood , if that . So how does value emerge as a fiction in a world drawn in such bold relief by poverty, despair and violence, or put more simply - how do you constantly fool 7 billion human beings into believing what they see on the screen is more real than what they experience in their lives . ? when the maintenance for the car that was supposed to be parked by valets bankrupts the single father; the tropical cruise to find the right husband costs half as much as a semester of school, or the evening of Reality TV becomes 24/7 for which the cable costs more than preschool much less the time away from family . ? We are now facing a " turnkey tyranny " which requires little from you more than brand name loyalty paid for with your freedom, health or possibly even the future of our species .

The people yoked to this media screen of unrelenting corporate marketing are not stupid per se, but we live in a world where the consolidation of data into the hands of a tiny number of people renders a massive disconnect between the real world and market concepts based on nothing more than Return On Investment ( ROI ) - The game of " Money Ball " writ large . Unfortunately for the human race and commerce in general these corporate products assume the infinite growth paradigm which commandeers everything in service of " The Economy " and in turn guts eons of human craftsmanship ; rules of conduct ; even that minuscule shard of personal time dislodged from the shackles of our former royalty by that spark of Free Humanity we'd been . The hitch and the irony for our new masters is we are their consumer fodder . People - a beast crafty enough to climb out of the crib; avoid the chains of pit bulls or pissed-off camels on their way to and from school to dodge bullies' knives; a teacher's cant or war and then find work enough to pay for that time it takes to memorize all the playa's data oblivious to the fact that as humans they will spend the largest part of their lives floating the elite on a film of pearlesque opulence only dreamed of by early pharaohs. Old people are then rendered into a steady state of decay medically preserving enough flesh for the morticians' final insult .

How is it possible that so many of the intelligent, feeling, decent humans I've met and will meet are effectively prevented from achieving a better life . ? Not only prevented but effectively diverted into a spiral of increasing pitch and agitation blunted by fatigue, entertainment and inebriation. At what point did the vision quest become a trailer in the movie theater, and our rites of passage the nightmare of cyber bullying . ? We are sickened by our own desires - The inclination for belonging and relatedness is tuned to coercion and exclusion because we are so much more easily managed apart than together . Of our instincts is the reflexive search for good - beer, sex, music - the multitude of ancient modalities for touching and being touched are lit up today like digital Bacchanals out of Dante's lowest rings . Food and family are now defined in the aisles of our "Supermarkets" which didn't exist 75 years ago - the same thing a Walmartarian will be saying about today's Supermarkets 18.75 years from now as she shifts her colostomy belt to make sure there's enough intravenous antibiotic to quiet the bacterial lesions pulsing close to the surface of her bare midriff .

Those who have "awakened" are little better off living on the fringes of a deteriorating culture and casting about for venues of approval marked by dress and orthodoxy of an often more strident tone than the insidious hum of the empire apparatus. But still the thread of value seems lost like a door whose key has broken off in the lock. Our knowledge is pinched and caught on the fly - snippets of sense; out of context and cast out like so much confetti or scribbled on a gutter with paint bought from the worlds wealthiest chemists. We search for what has always been the human instinct - love, but our tools are no longer born of loving application and lack the quality necessary to build loving things , or even defend us from naked hatred . That we have forsaken the wonders of understanding from each other for the silicon siren out of the ether illusion may harken to the inscription for our species' headstone on the radioactive satellite thrice removed from the G2V star at the center of the Solar System:

"Here lie the remains of a promising sentient life form born from the wavelengths of their G2V fireball - able to stride upon their closest satellite using buckets of fire and air to propel and protect their delicate corpuscles , yet this brief intercommunicating animation drowned in oceans of radiation of their own ignition - oceans believed to have once been their original nest . Rest In Peace ." 

Many voices are now raised against harm to the world Bob Dylan envisioned in his song to Woody: "seems sick an' it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn, It looks likes it's a-dyin' an' it's hardly been born." We humans are what define value not some statistical stratagem penciled on the cocktail napkin of a drunken industrialist whose only edifice is the systemic neutering of the remarkable human capacity for growth - the universe may or may not care whether our damp blue ball becomes a dank dead slab sizzling in orbit around a dying sun , but as certain as hate is weak , we are doomed if we do not stand on our hind legs now and do as we've always done - climb out of the crib; shake off the mad dogs; dodge bullies and take their weapons; lovingly build things and find heroes to love - hopefully heroes looking more like each of us than those pasty-faced cranks floating on nothing more than oceans of pearlesque opulence .

more @ http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

Ma's Lessons

My Ma is a kind of mean old woman.

She is the sort there ought to be more of.

I know because i've done the best i can,

and still have not learned enough about love.

I know what it is, but not what it's not.

I have been so close that i was afraid

the reason it stayed was 'cause of a knot 

and far enough to know what i had paid.

In a world that can grind feelings to dust,

what i have learned about love is useful:

Find joy 'cause you can , not 'cause you must;

it's better to be , than thought of a fool.

Can't know if she's so wise 'cause i'm so dumb,

or i am smart because of her wisdom?

jts 4 December 2013
more @ http://stoneartist.com

suck it up sweet cheeks - the sonnet

It's sad to lose a job, worse still to lose,

so if when the ax falls, you opt to give up,

where's the good if that's what you have to choose?

Doubt me, ask the banker who messed it up.

Now is not the time to lament what ain't.

What you do now is stop what is bleeding;

get a brush and cover what has no paint

or paint over scribble that is breeding.

There will be time enough to send the bill

to those who have hijacked the public fund;

all can see whose fingers are in the till,

it's just memory lapse that gets rotund

Regard what's left of our humanity

and defend the future with dignity.

jts 12 February 2010
more @ http://stoneartist.com

Running on the Great Wall

It was Christmas  and I was in China

If not inscrutable, they can be mute

Many humans - what is the formula .  ?

Once a wall saved them, now they are the brute.

The thing about walls : they’re everywhere

and most people can be found on both sides.

That Christmas, it was fun to run mid-air

Can’t know what it means to future yuletides  

I know that holiday - I made no walls.

Still at the Great Wall; one is in or out -

For those who rule; I would be invader,

For those who attack, I am emperor

Little has changed since they made up countries,

They who would like to rule, use flags - not peace .

jts 12/25/11

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

my friend Lyle

Or as Val would say " Lyyylle.!! " My first apartment was sharing a place with Val - Lyle would ride over on his Vespa; he always had cool shit like that. One time he and I went to irrigate his Marijuana plants at UC Irvine; we drove in his Henry Kaiser; it may be as close as I ever get to being an actual outlaw, though I have grown my own and even traded in the demon weed. Lyle was a man of his own design; he did not seek an approved role in life, he was an explorer. Like all explorers he was powerful - even legendary, but I was never afraid of him. As a kid, even though he and his brother could hit baseballs over the fence consistently, Lyle did not demand that everyone else should, or that you were less if you did not. He was decent early on in life and only grew more so as years went by. It wasn't until much later that I grew to appreciate what a kind man he had become.

Maybe a decade back, I was living far from where we grew up. It was an old home in much need of wiring expertise, he was the expert. About this time, I was finishing my Bachelor's in English and through conversation I had learned Lyle was dyslexic. What struck me about Lyle at that time was his feeling for people; he had an author's understanding for the motivations of the human experience, but Lyle's smarts were from the streets, not from academic training. His higher education came from the push and shove at the margins of conventional life, nor did he always ooze warm fuzzies. He could disappear from access and leave you wondering if he was swimming for the bottom or just blowing you off because he could. That is part of what made Lyle special - he was not fake, almost as though he didn't know that was an option. Maybe Lyle's heroic demons were there to match his warrior ways.

He did battle with things that break other men - betrayal, addiction - even the most profound of questions "the meaning of life." Lyle stared into the abyss and did not shrink, he did not sacrifice his own confusion for an easy answer, almost. Lyle refused to be categorized, yet he was the "common man." Not by today's meaning of some stereotype cutout, but the common that includes strengths as well as weaknesses - Lyle had empathy, and it was always a surprise to come upon it. Like most "men" Lyle did not wear his feelings close to the surface, rather they would peek out around a subject like a shy kid. True story: I'm making a statue of a woman that has taken many years to complete; early on while she was still looking at how to fit into the stone, Lyle came over. Because one often gets too close to something, I've found it useful to hear other people's take on works in progress. Lyle looked at it with some enthusiasm and said, "it's really neat" at the same time he was leaning over and peering under her forearm to see how it rested on her chest.

The reason I share this and why it is important is that it describes Lyle's way of experiencing the world - he was a poet, an artist. Many people have looked at the same piece, but few are drawn into the experience of finding the "woman" in the stone and how she carries herself. It is a level of awareness - a way of feeling the world that few possess, and I will miss that about him. Queen Victoria said "artists associate with all classes of people, and for this reason, they are the most dangerous." If this essay is read at his memorial - look around at the people you see and you will know that is true of Lyle as well. His friends were legion and he was loyal to them all; so much so I'd be surprised if each who knew him didn't feel at some level that they were his closest friend - I'm hoping what he felt toward me was as an ally in his war with mediocrity.

Some 10 years or so ago, we quit smoking together. Later I liked to tease him about the money that he owed me from that agreement - but it is more I am the one who owes him. For though I am breathing and he has passed, his courage and inspiration are of those things in life that have endurance, and I'd doubt seriously that I'm alone in this feeling. It was frustrating to not be able to return the same level of inspiration I felt in his company; I even threatened him with a beat down if he did not let go of the tobacco ( I don't think he was afraid ) - Lyle was a stand alone human being. There are so few left on the planet that are capable of living on their own terms, for me to have known Lyle and even to call him friend has made my life immeasurably better - how many of us will have the same said? May you rest in peace Lyle Jeffrey Sears.

more @ http://stoneartist.com