peace

I have just woken from an afternoon nap; the disquiet of work is not yet deafening; the wispy tendrils of undiscovered-love are quiet and pain is not shouting; is this peace? The creative tension between whether to draw or write pushed me to the keyboard with it’s illusion of understanding, yet the fallow gurgle of color bubbling on the surface of the drawing-in-work is almost creating itself in front of my eyes. Is there a magic for compounds that were once together to again coalesce into some image of pertinence and meaning? Is the act of dialectic questioning a tonic to the terror of not knowing? Or can it be as simple as remembering how to breathe? The sun is dampened by the high clouds of the Himalayas; my lungs have cleared somewhat from decades of abuse; and I have come to accept the quizzical looks on people’s faces as they laugh at me, “ki bhan ca!”  The drawing continues to clamor for creative attention. Creative work is not so much different from the poor schmuck Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the Hades hill; only to get inches from the top so it can roll back down - over and over again. Constant creative tension disperses ego into mystery. Is that the nature of peace - the oblivion which creation has the capacity, but not always the kindness to provide? It is clear when there is no self between color, tone or shifting mass from Plato's 3 dimensional ideal, just consecutive decisions - an ever evolving where and how to smear, shear or grind closer to that moving target - beauty; it is as close to bliss as I have been - is that peace?

Why then does it at times feel like such a battle? How can so many extraneous unrelated discursive ideas intrude? How much difference is there between meditation and creation? Each requires an absence of will; the a subordination of distraction; a heart full of love, or whatever guise the loving heart cloaks itself in at the time - suffering, pride, lust - all those passing squalls of dissonance the chattering monkeys of the mind seem so adept at conjuring. Still none of these props comes close to nourishing the hunger that comes from searching for that precise application which Paul Cezanne described as not “clashing with nature (g_d)” - writing is no different. When conjuring a portrait, each soul tries to reveal itself; I try to discern that feeling or experience that is not easily shared but cannot be disguised or forgotten. It is for this reason self is an unwelcome companion in the creative journey - to remove all possibility of projection. It is the same trying explain an idea in such a way that someone may find their own experience in the concept and permit a kinship - then words are friends. My good fortune was to have parents with two distinct passions - literature and plastic arts. They applied themselves honorably, and in so set an example for what is possible through consistent effort - music unfortunately skipped a generation and I’m left to the eternal damnation of a tin ear. As with all tragedies the silver lining is my love and appreciation for beautiful music is reciprocal to my lack of capacity. Is that some sort of law of nature - what gets taken away is returned in some balanced aspect, true for love, kindness, and honor? If so we just need the patience and pluck to perceive each transformation.

I recently watched a clip of George Harrison - his last interview. He struck me as completely at peace, if anything somewhat anxious to be on with it. What was most vivid in his discussion was a determination to contribute something of value - not of value in the sense of what he George Harrison had discovered, but an exhortation to those of us left to seek higher ground. It was almost as though there was no George, rather someone who cared about people he didn’t know, nor ever would know; I like that. However, it still confuses me when compassion runs full square up against stupidity and bullshit. I am more comfortable with someone attempting a strong-arm robbery on me than being played. When an institution such as facebook sends me Halloween greetings after sifting my content for what can be monetized or traded with whichever corporatized government apparatus believes my irreverent contempt for trust-fund-babies-cum-nouveaux-riche-lords-and-ladies is analyzable, I chortle to myself. Where with interpersonal dealings, when someone presumes to take, I chortle in their face just for the pleasure I get from “afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted” - Oscar Wilde. It only gets dicey when, as just now, I read myself taking pleasure in someone’s discomfort, because that is real; it is a defect which is mine - a smug satisfaction at the expense of another which at another time in my life would be a torment, an imperfection subject to the shrill denunciation of self loathing but which today is no more than grist for the mill. I am determined to take no real pleasure other than striving toward better understanding through whatever existential lens I have at my disposal at that moment.

Lao Tzu said “if you are anxious you are living in the future; if you are depressed you are living in the past; if you are at peace, you are living in the present,” which again leaves more questions than answers. For example, writing that sentence takes me back to 1973-something and the emerging orthodoxy of Baba Ram Dass and his “Be Here Now" acolytes. I had come by an Irish Setter who was abandoned to her own devices in a barnyard because the Ram Dass ashram wouldn’t allow animals. In my 60's-flavored self-righteousness and solidarity with my new best friend, I agonized for her having suffered an externally imposed arbitrary spiritual regulation completely at odds with my no-holds-barred concept of freedom. I share this for the simple awareness of how little I have changed. I still chafe at oppression under the guise of orthodoxy - be here now - is still a fungible concept however correct Eckhart Tolle, Lao Tzu or Baba Ram Dass may be. Peace, however, is not subject to any criteria other than what can be found within the struggle of each human heart, creature, system or dynamic. I use a variety of realities to describe peace, for quiescence is not unique to the human condition. Take for instance the critical mass of a thermonuclear device - it is the peaceful resolution of contrary physics allowed to expand to their potential - just as the exhaustion of rage is subject to the limits of its fury. Peace is not the idyl defined by Jesus, Muhammad or Buddha, but rather a shifting condition somewhat akin to a wave one needs to paddle for to ride that much sought state of peace. Does that make any sense?

The art of calm has been and will continue to be developed by advocates from “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” by Dale Carnegie; to “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius; to this humble 5 paragraph essay by nobody you know - yet we burn with passion, seethe with jealousy, weep in misery and laugh hysterically - why? Why must we struggle to either maintain, evolve or discover peace? How is it that our natural condition is so antagonistic to the state which so many strive to achieve through drugs, meditation, passion or force of intellect? Is it possible to be hostilely peaceful like the cartoon of the hippy and his peace sign T-Shirt shouting “you want a peace of me” or the way Richard Nixon’s peace with honor cashed in on the backs of 58,220 dead Americans - how about the American Indian holocaust with estimates of 95 to 114 million human beings murdered by disease, starvation and superior technology while my nation barely takes a backward glance in its headlong leap into further death and destruction - all the while screaming manifest destiny, exceptionalism or 9/11! Clearly my sense of peace does not come from a blind eye to pustulating injustice and ignorance; though the sadness I feel from plumbing these examples of hypocrisy is more of a tonic to me than that existential tic which pulls more alcohol from a bottle than wise; caves-in to stress riding in the gut and gorges on GMO contaminated comfort food; or wallows in some delusional state cowering from some command of an exalted promise of bliss by ___fill-in the blank___ etc . . . world peace will never arrive until personal peace is nurtured, shared, and/or taken. So by my lights you may find me in a backwater somewhere peacefully struggling to depict the majesty of a naked woman or typing ideas on how to survive the havoc of a handful of haters who will never know peace; may you not be one of them.

post script: this morning Paris was savagely attacked in an effort to be heard by a body of people whose families have likely been attacked in kind by imperial forces raining anonymous destruction from the skies above - war is over - we are our own enemy.

peace - the sonnet

I sit in Nepal and I am at peace-

still close to hurt and anger; could be mine

I feel - maybe warp and woof - my life's piece.

Still I wonder if I’ve crossed a line,

or if I care anymore where I am

but more about easing pain not my own.

What I feel is my own; I have no dam;

why seize debris? D’be like taking a loan.

I don’t know, but I can learn what you teach;

if you want to know more, I will no less;

if you want to take, I’ll move within reach;

if you want to win, I can become lifeless.

What’s not your’s to have is me on my knees,

for to own it, you must make your own peace.

the illusion of internetedness

Computers are now making decisions about who to kill without the aid of human oversight - to the extent this insanity exists, Steven Hawking has lent his name to a petition of world leaders opposing Artificial Intelligence for drones. Synchronistically during the flight in which I began this essay, the random films available included “AI” - a cute film wherein Pinocchio meets the microprocessor; and the latest from the Terminator franchise in which the former governor of California hams it up on camera for a gazillion(x) wad of $s. “Skynet” is unvanquished; I guess so some bean-counter-intern can practice squeezing cabbage from a turnip. I used to think computers were nothing more than an on/off switch to the Nth power, I’m coming to believe they are more of an effort to squeeze blood out of stone, with us being the stones. Originally heralded as the ultimate in labor saving devices for its ability to save labor as well as calculate Pi to googol decimal places, computers and their stepchild the internet are now the most lauded and overwrought purveyors of pornography our infantile species has managed thus far, (paraphrased out of context from a TED presentation by Clay Shirky). If computer power has enhanced our capacity and perception all that much, how is it no one is computing parallels between the increased rate of destruction of our planet with processor speed or computer memory? How is it possible to have such unparalleled poverty, corruption and war (and fuck Bono’s giddy shilling for ruling class about the any-moment-now party-line end-of-poverty bullshit). How can so many be kept in the dark from a simple addiction to an empty media stream?

Lest you believe me a luddite, this essay is written on a computer and will be published on the internet with little hope of ever reaching print - a great irony to use the same channel which is being used to oppress the best part of humanity with trite trinkets and baubles not dissimilar to what the Dutch paid for Manhattan. Today instead of costume jewelry, the invaders are using virtual puppet shows to captivate consumers, and as Albert Einstein said “manipulate the emotions of the masses and thereby control them.” Nor am I immune to the siren song - the illusion of not being invisible which Zuckerberg and company have so glibly foisted, spliced, conjured in their quest for amassing gobs of pelf at the expense of all which could have been accomplished with this communication technology or might have been developed had we not allowed ourselves to be bamboozled by a bunch avaricious pin heads posing as visionaries. It seems that the more complex our world becomes, the easier it has become for a handful of humans to twist larger and larger bodies of people into a predictable pattern, or at least so predictable as to monetize a keystroke or click of a button. I refuse to be consigned to the pale echo of myself which Zucky and company attempt to constrain into evermore rigid venues stripped of any of the joy and suffering which I prize as evidence of my existence.

While writing this at the eastern edge of Kathmandu valley in Nepal, I had to reconcile an irrational fear and unnecessary anxiety about change to the status quo of a tenuous domestic happiness against the reality of the addition of a calm and compassionate rocket scientist from Kazakhstan into my fantasy cohort of compassionate souls - ostensible champions to an underserved elementary school in semi-rural Nepal.  Shakespeare said truth is stranger than fiction, and of all the scenarios and the public notices I’ve viewed and posted on the “internet super highway,” or Zukè`s twisted toll road, my continued astonishment at the richness and complexity of the people I cross paths with and the challenges they face, dwarf any diluted silhouettes contrived by the lords of the data stream. Nor do I see the ham-fisted efforts of digital designers to fashion a narrow gauge description which fits their business model coming close to facilitating the nuance which comes from the skin to skin, breath to breath reality one gains listening, walking and sharing with those in our midst, and I have dear friends I’ve never met, or will possibly ever meet which without the internet would never have been possible. How can we who occupy this wondrous dying planet seize the initiative to exploit technology rather than each other. What irony that an inanimate technology with the capacity to amplify each voice and transform the fractured broken chorus of people kind into a pool of knowledge accessible to each and every hungry mind but is now used as no more than a goat’s bell apprising the lords and masters of our exact whereabouts and activity of each person yoked to a +/- 5v shackle.

Am I shrill in my denunciation of the waste and utter incompetence of current design and architecture of today’s computer interconnections, perhaps. Given the ability of the sirens of media to shout over any and all other voices than those specifically in lockstep with the infantile and grossly irresponsible concept that 1) being like them is a worthy pursuit 2) doing what they say will lead to a seat at the grownup’s table - I may not be shrill enough?

I haven’t written a word in weeks, if not months. There is nothing or anyone to blame, but sitting here searching for words to describe the multitude of experiences and emotions of this journey, I feel weakened. How does this pertain to an essay on the Internet, and why do emotion and personal expression seem so inextricably connected? I just about abandoned this effort to begin emails to people rather than an amorphous dialogue with readers of an indeterminate composition: that anything is "either/or" is part of the indoctrination to on or off species from an analog anatomy. 

It is now the next day and my toe is cringing from repeated soaks in saltwater for a hangnail - those funny contradictions, the painful cutting to a “V” of a nail edge that is throbbing to the contrary. I wonder if the tension is analogous to Leonard Cohen’s “bitter searching of the heart,” or when Lao Tzu says “pretty words may be ugly and ugly words may be beautiful”? Writing is an odd balm to the disquiet of sitting in the midst of another culture’s high holiday and knowing so little or being known so little. But somehow this all pertains to the internet, for the content we sift through like children at the seashore sifting through sand for treasures is not within the capacity of the “rainbow makers” of media to provide. It is only within each heart to process or not, to feel pleasure or not - just like the writing discipline for me wicks away the discursive chatter so easily mimicked in the 5 second pageantry scrolling from interminable flicks of the wrist. Nor is it lament I seek to share, but rather a demand on myself for more than the egocentric stroke from yammering on line, or fake feeling of contribution by believing you have more than anyone else no matter how much you give away. Yet oddly coming full circle to what it means to give, and whether this contrivance of broadcast upon which you read this means I have actually shared - you have something you did not have before. I care about that - and you didn’t have it prior to this point in your curiosity.

Is that enough to blow Hurricane Patricia the fuck out before she hits landfall making more rugged a whole lot of already rugged Mexican lives? There is the Lorenz Attractor which says if enough people actually were able to blow hard enough at precisely the correct moment as determined by scientific law the hurricane would cease; however that loving killjoy William Shakespeare got there first - “so near, yet so far. I have to say I’m riding with Lao Tzu on this, for the simple fact that I have no control over any other person. So while I may be willing to blow for the benefit of others, it is more likely the act of expunging my frustration with this semi-cogent diction of addlepation is as close to rabble rousing as I’m going to get. Besides, people mostly look at you as though you’re cray when you stand up in mixed company and declare “hey everybody, listen to Bill Nye the Science Guy and blow hard when he gives the signal”, but then for all you know, I’m hardwired into Google Inc, and have closely coordinated the time of release for this document based on a data feed of what makes people laugh mined from the “youtube” analytics. 

note: that derisive snort you just made is enough to avert, not Patricia but the hurricane forming on her heels which would have dwarfed Patricia in its savagery and intensity - I hesitate to say stranger things have happened. but then again I never thought I’d be duped into working for a smarmy Harvard non-grad for laughs because the rat bastard is too cheap to pay me my worth. go figure .  . 

jts 

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission

all rights reserved

∞

family

At one time in my life - my fear of being away from my family was the only thing that bothered me about death. It wasn’t the unknown or cessation of life that disturbed me - it was the act of separation from what I believed to be the source of all good things in the world - mother, father, brothers, sister. At some level, past a deep denial of pain, I’m sure that feeling of good remains true - past deep, deep denial. Aided by a reaction formation to that discomfort, I spend a fair amount of intellectual capital attempting to cultivate brotherhood amongst all I meet. As part of this quixotic pursuit, I have found in similar proportion the same dissonance which I feel in the bosom of my family within the greater body politic. This correlation doesn’t auger well for any conceit about personal evolution or augment the objectivity necessary to write about a topic as old as Cain and Abel. For example, after my father, my greatest hero growing up was my older brother. He was Fonzerelli, Hans Solo and Che Guevara rolled into one, whereas pop just had an uncanny resemblance to 007. Laugh if you must, but in my mind’s eye my family suffered from great beauty, and me - great beauty because like wealth and friends one can never be sure if people hang or are hanger’s on, and me because I have the temerity to drag my cohort out into the light of day rather than afford each the dignity of privacy within which to consider issues of family or even beauty. In deference to this fair objection to a conceivably entirely conjectured affront - I apologize, but will press on as is my wont, fantasy or no. Of my earliest memories would be of my older brother, my hero, remarking to me “someone is gonna punch you in the face for your big mouth,” and he was right. The assailants name was Bill H____; I had been talking to his girlfriend at a party the night before, so when asked the next day if this was true, I said yes. In one swing, he broke his hand on my face to the degree the military wouldn’t take him; due to this self-inflicted injury he escaped service in Vietnam - an act of compassion, which was more synchronistic than intentional. 

My brother was drafted and inducted into the military imperial expedition known as Vietnam. He had the balls to tell the Army he would not go to Vietnam, so I went to break him out of the brig. Which did not become the revolutionary act I had pictured more - what's it look like in the belly of the beast. Still, they had captured my hero brother, so armed with a “Bantam Complex” - David and Goliath delusion writ small , I confronted the amassed superior forces of Camp Pendleton. They mocked my puppy dog heart; The spirit was willing but the flesh was unable to break my homie out of stir. I had seen done in TV and movies since first exposed to the boob-tube, but solidarity was all I could muster. The sad extent of my military campaigns consists of a failed breakout attempt and a life lesson which says if you make nice with another man’s woman, there’s a fair chance you might get punched in the face. I’m pretty sure my brother never knew about that lesson, or if he cared; what I’m not clear about is whether I got punched because he told me when I was young that it was going to happen? Having heroes can get dicey if you are not real clear about what exactly you want to happen and why. I wanted family, or more importantly the feeling of family - love. It took many, many years to distinguish one from the other. First, it has become necessary to confront the fact that what I feel is not necessarily aligned with what others feel. Keep laughing, for I am just about as dense as I sound. My good fortune is to genuinely love my family and by extension love all people-kind or at least those at whom I am able to stop snarling; what seems to elude me is that part of love which is mine? Keep laughing .  . cause’ I love you too . . . < written in France ; written in Seal Beach, CA > ma’s star is beginning to twinkle or as she stated so simply “I want to clunk out;” the oldest brother, my hero has a seething exclusive fury manifested by “don’t speak to me,” flavored with early school yard bully. It is difficult to hear and remain compassionate, but not so hard to understand nor difficult to imagine how he would believe shutting me out will make the pain go away - 

I embraced much the same fiction to facilitate my own effort for escape velocity from the family event horizon. Growing up, rage was the lingua franca; always attributed to the other, rarely embraced for having originated at one’s core - we were too civilized. My father was a man of discipline and outbursts of anger were not included in that discipline - small wonder I’m “mad;” I can’t even come clean without blaming some other body, even that of a dead man. Ironically there is no one with which to find fault. My parents did the best they could with what they had - exactly the same as my brother is doing the best he can with what he has. As I write this, ma is scarfing my last pistachios from France, and the small boy in me wants to run and snatch back my precious morsels — as though saving pistachio meat might preserve that French experience. The irony is that ma may be feeling those morsels contain some precious memory if she could only find the right one. As "little boy", I am angry and frightened but the "educated-striving-son" of my parents I wonder if my brother and I share similar fears or depravations and see them too clearly in each other for comfort? Ma is just trying to satisfy a craving, scratch an itch, fill an emptiness. How is it possible to harden one’s heart to such an honest hankering? It seems all of life is about seeking a successful strategy to attenuate hankering of one sort or another, be it family, booze, broads or the latest corporate labor-saving device. (talk about your oxymoron)- sort of like the “brotherly love” I have for my sister - the consummate broad - a beauty in the mysterious sense of the word - the inexplicable, inexorable - indelible. I have found myself on more than one occasion looking into some artwork I’ve made only to find my sister’s sublime expression asking I know not what, nor is it some incestuous taboo that I surreptitiously examine with you. Everyone sees the world from their crib of origin; I just consider myself fortunate to have lodged with striking characters out of the gate. One might say I am “oppressed by” Leonard Cohen’s “figures of beauty.” Of the artifacts I studied early on, Maillol’s sculptures defined for me a moderne classic quality - an influence recently reinforced while witnessing his Ode du Cezanne at the Louvre. Family and beauty are conflated for me with love which leads to more beauty unless otherwise cursed.

“By means of beauty all beautiful things become beautiful. For this appears to me the safest answer to give both to myself and others; and adhering to this, I think that I shall never fall, but that it is a safe answer both for me and any one else to give - that by means of beauty, beautiful things become beautiful.” - Socrates as quoted by Plato in “Phaedo”

Beauty nor family is enough, for there is so much ugly loneliness in the world that the flood of  cheap knockoffs which Corporate Inc. flogs as real are snatched up by a population starving for what only the human heart can discern - real love, real family, real beauty. Computers are attempting to parse the natural language of yearning found in infancy and within the cauldron of childhood so as to mimic some discourse which all the world hungers for - belonging. Even orphans know the difference between real and fake, why is that? Have I improperly conflated beauty with family; can the mystery of family be distilled? Is ugliness a key ingredient to family, what about violence, when one brother slugs another to seize the last dollop of peanut butter is that cruelty merely an echo of Cain and Abel, or a hook upon which some unevolved ad lackey for the corporate overlords to hang his cap of profit upon? Or is our family of [wo]man as Carl Jung perceived - a rhizome of sorts, residing just under the threshold of life, mingled in the soil with countless generations of human suffering and joy - an organic configuration of DNA - a complex of emotional impulses spinning in some convoluted axis of love, hate and hunger? That sounds poetic, yet is more substantial then the television novellas used daily to indoctrinate entire generations to whatever flavor of pulp fiction the ruling class cares to feed its population. I say “its” population in the full meaning of the possessive, for whatever illusions homies may have about the role of freedom and outlaw-hood, or fantasies the tea party fringe feel when they fondle their weapons instead of their women, there are few free-minded humans left with time or inclination to wage the sort of war necessary to liberate the human spirit from this sham culture posing as holy provider of food, shelter and spiritual sustenance. We have become a conveyer system of profit for a handful to harvest; we sleep-walk from cradle to grave well reflecting the fake food we eat and the rote learning that passes for understanding.

It may be time to expand any interpretation of family to include every living and non-living aspect of our world, to begin examining whether family as we understand it is only a primitive effort by a feeble species to respond to the vastness of a seemingly limitless sky anchored by violent surroundings; that the feeling of belonging our family constellations provide as a ready made group resembling each other in appearance, language and ambition is more like the comfort of a molecule within a larger anatomy. This alternative perspective begins to make sense when our world is viewed at a distance from the planet itself - a perspective hitherto unimaginable to earlier generations. Yet that newness does not mitigate the level of violence which open wounds of war describe daily by body counts and hysterical rhetoric used to justify the simple greed of a handful of human ciphers preying on the body politic all the while camouflaging its avarice as righteous prayer. The good news is like any of the plethora of organisms amidst the wondrous flora and fauna found on this moist orb in the middle of nowhere, we humans may be little more in the evolutionary chain than the vestige of tail which the coccyx in our own body describes. All of our struggle and strife may be no more than the closing of skin over a stump of bone which no longer contributes to the health and welfare of the planet - metaphorically speaking. However it is as plausible that our human joys and honest efforts to mimic the love of parent, the warmth of siblings within the honor of community may be enlarging the planet’s cerebral cortex and fortifying the brainstem and spine of this figurative mother earth with which to explore the greater universe and find our true family constellation amidst the boundless galaxies and worlds which we have barely begun to perceive - i don’t know . ?

stillness - the sonnet

I sit at ma's house on my way to Nepal,
though when asked, the I Ching replied, "be still."
Do I not listen like some know-it-all,
or do I "be all here" right up until .  . . ?

Ma sleeps, wakes and sleeps - too soon, a long sleep.
May it be deep rather than the restless
rest which made much of her life way too steep.
Will my journey help her to find stillness?

Himalaya means "abode of snow",
and I with no home nor knowing what rest means
thinks to find someplace which only she'll know.
I'm either a good son - or full of beans.

The truth is, where you are will soon be empty,
so give what you can - all your empathy.

train surfing France - the sonnet

T G V is a bullet train in France,

my ticket did not include a seat number.

so once more - where to sit was up to chance-

two cheats stole mine - lost theirs - who looked dumber?

I did because I then saw cheats everywhere-

that blindness made me twice as big a fool;

not just for time lost in a fool’s lair,

but nearly missing train surfing’s best school.

I’ve had good rides; Bejing to the Blue Line.

one twenty through France c’est tres magnifique,

Much finer than sitting looking quite fine;

body felt contours - the far better peak.

“Silly” you might say - many do and will,

nor never know is this more boast than skill.

jts 31 July 2015

a friend - the sonnet

It is said, “to have a friend - be a friend”
though being one doesn’t mean you will have one,
nor does “friend” mean they’ll be one to the end
Muhammad Ali says know “friend” when done.

I will be a friend to Muhammad Ali,
though he need never know - because I do.
I’m his friend, because he's been one to me,
nor need he know this before he is through.

If I am a good friend, he need not know,
in the same way he taught me a life lesson
by planting seeds only wisdom could grow -
like seeing how wise pop was though I have no son.

Pop or Ali - friend both, or one of them
either may help stop ignorant mayhem. 

jts 31 July 15