easter

I am in Montevideo Uruguay and just now relented to use the capital “I” for the beginning of this essay. It has been raining and i’ve cooked evening/morning buckets of chicken over the last two days - an expense that was vastly returned for the simple salubrious effect on others faced with a dislocated holiday - fuck hunger of all kinds. Dark is descending in more ways than i’m comfortable with - aging - physically, emotionally, spiritually  .  . . like who the hell ain’t. A version of “Jack of Hearts” is playing after having posted “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” on fb just to create the illusion of continuity for it’s opening line “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez And it’s Eastertide too .  .” My oldest brother did not reply to my request to explain to our ma for my having been inexplicably interrupted on an international call - a pain disproportionate to the less than a paragraph of sentences we’ve exchanged in the past decade - and he is a standup guy you are as lucky to have in your world as I am unfortunate to not - still I am happy enough to want to conjure thoughts lucid enough to share with strangers in hopes of assuaging common enough grief. Is that the meaning of Easter - an arising of intent devoid of self-interest, seeking the diminution of another’s pain for no other reason than the outside chance that helping another might cancel out parts of one’s own grief in a twisted emotional equation? From what i can tell - there’s no telling, and it don’t matter even if you did like trying to codify the mastery of magic through the same effort to preserve the unpreservable that religion expands so much of your hard-earned offerings proving the same to you.

Food and the last supper for Jesus seem to echo through this easter, like how could something so simple and decent as sharing food be turned into the greatest betrayal in the history of our species? Even more importantly, how to reclaim the decency of something so pure as giving to another nourishment can once again become a hijacked sacrament of a coterie of clerics coveting the rumps of the young? that is a question, not for the most decent pope  mankind has seen in the past 400 years, but for the gazillions supporting extrajudicial killings and the poisoning of the cornucopia that had once been human heritage, but has now become little more than a scrap off some meat slicer in a perverse existential delicatessen. How can what had been one of the bravest acts in human history the knowing ennobling of one’s own death been hijacked and made into the commercial exploitation for greater and more deadly weapons of death and destruction? Again more importantly, how do we as thinking, cogent animated life seize our absolute prerogative back from a handful of ciphers whose demonstrated interest in existence is little more than a side bet on a weekend bacchanal between some private island in Greece and a hot water grotto in some private airfield in the former Soviet Republic - as though the thought or event is fictional? We humans a far more than a skid mark on some trust fund baby’s barely conscious trajectory from an anointed birth to a desolate death enabled by a silicon chip once hailed like Jesus as the savior from our collective misery only to be crucified on the cross of some hater’s dollar sign.

I just spilt the last glass of wine from a box and spent an hour expunging what cannot be expunged - the look of pity from those who smell drunkenness from sober schnozes, and i’m oddly more than okay with the smug judgement, for it so closely corresponds to issues of belonging within a family that has fought for decades to expunge my, wrongness from the rightness that at some point replaced the warmth of hearth in my home of origin. And again, you must know this tribe i speak of is as decent a collection of characters as you’ll find in any congregation, coven or quarter on the planet - how sad is that? The music haunt is just now playing a song my youngest brother swears to be his favorite “Brother where art thou” though the star of the film commands a $345,000 fee for a sit-down dinner in his company, and i wonder WTF - i’ve known many, but none i’d spend that much to amuse, or be amused by = 2 1/2 paragraphs into a holiday essay - always the best, but why? What do i have to share now anymore than another time that might be worthwhile? My ma, who my oldest brother has pledged his troth to protect from my reprehensible ways is an atheist, by protestation but from history is closely affiliated with the holiday “easter” - why is that? Not in the hypercritical pursuit of affixing blame on an aged dying spirit, but in the sense of wonderment as to why a secular humanist would have gone through the trouble of collecting local boys out of the reactionary city we lived in in early 1960s Orange County which California at that time and this represented while squiring said pre-pubescent man-children through the remnants of Mercado Central of Boyle Heights in the city of “El Pueble de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Rio Porciuncula” on Easter day? - don’t look at me, I have no clue.

I do know that 50 years later my same parent pulled my then wife into much needed pecuniary service of painting the desert home of same said atheist parent on the same ostensibly unrelated holiday, and participating in a excoriating donnybrook fraught with recrimination and specific defect which only my acquiescence could satisfy, and 60 years later i, in an unfamiliar South American town would attempt to recreate a “lost weekend” again from another magical “resurrection day” wherein my blotto brother bailed on a family gathering in which my “reaction formation” was to explore spontaneous autonomy with 14 or so other strangers by securing frozen duck and fabricating an extemporaneous Easter - a polite euphemism for a holiday i’m becoming too self-consciously afraid to attribute any scent of synchronicity, maybe always have been, but now feel free enough to flaunt, sort of like piggybacking my post celebrity confession on the back of an aged holiday still potent enough to elicit solidarity for an Israel devoid of conscience with its own precedence - i will employ any device i can find to leverage or to levitate the ignorant speciousness that allows one to believe killing another creature will satisfy a blood lust born of fear of one’s interior. I’m sorry my blood relative feels so strongly that he would not release me from my  anxiety of solitude enough to say, “I will share your reality with our mother,” or the very real need for me to release myself from my own bondage. It is not my brother who enslaves me with hated, harsh emotions but myself. If anything the knowledge that my brother suffers such hurt as to want me to be alone is cause enough to pray for his release, and therefor my own? Correct me please.

I cannot think of a more forlorn position from which to advocate than a drunken essay on a sacred holiday alone in a foreign nation exculpating one’s weaknesses with a timid enough audience to lurk rather than correct - laugh you shy people, for it takes one to know one, and i laugh harder at myself than i could ever muster for your reticence. My genuine hope is that for anyone feeling lost on a day representing the rejuvenation of all lost things - take heart. We may perish - your earnest hope for protection and fair advancement for your children and their children’s children may be thwarted before your very eyes - yet be enormously worthwhile for their having witnessed the love on your face as they suffer untold horrors you could not avert for all your best hopes and efforts. And even better, that in their loneliest despair your creative effort to share with them the finer aspects of human existence allowed them to imagine clearly your loving desire into some intangible, inarticulate void which they then might pass along next to nothing to those closest to them in a an ineffable moment of non-awareness - yeah easter is a really neat time and yes a matter of fact Edwin Hawkin’s Singers is singing “Oh Happy Day” on my non synchronistic Apple synchronistic “shuffle”, and i could give a shit - 5 paragraphs of semi-cogent thinking on a sacred holiday alone and without prospects is not self-indulgent, complacent, nor nihilistic at a time when it seem all else is - real or imagined lost. What a lucky fuck i am to spend my twilight hours in a empty place trying to mine sense as my grand parent mined material in a world then yet incapable of ravaging what aught not be .  . with love for your higher self from me and my lower .  .

abandon - the sonnet

I am leaving where I thought I'd die;

Am I running away as Lao Tzu said?

Fifty bucks taken - no reach for the sky-

Happens once - what happens when sick in bed?

Who left who? I'm old - no place else to go.

Still I run - like elsewhere is different.

Could it be I want to show high to low-

Make these bad men a job, like I'm a gent?

Abandon also means without reserve

Like Jung's "where will is without, love reigns,"

Yet pure will gets you not what you deserve

As shown when hubris makes for weird-ass rains.

I renounce fear and the hate it drags in;

If my absence helps, may it be within.

abide

A doctor said to me once, or it could have been many times, “in your family there is no abiding;” in order to be well, I’ve worked very hard at constancy - too hard, to the point of rigid. I have gained much in my efforts to understand abiding - often as not a result of “reaction formation.” My father, may he rest in peace, would say when I was quite young, “you don’t follow through with things;” good son that I am, I’ve gone out of my way to complete - everything, all too often forsaking wisdom. No small irony that his wife, my mother quit him, or more accurately they each other when I was half-way through high school. It was a predictable outcome to the adage “Marry in haste and repent in leisure,” for leisure was at that time being pruned from the American landscape in preparation for our nation’s last great war - destruction of the middle class. Small wonder I am fascinated by Lao Tzu’s admonition “man will quit just before success.”  Nor is this essay meant as an indictment of my parent’s largely successful efforts to better the world by raising moral children however dicey a proposition that may be - same for the doctor remarking about my family constellation through the prism of his prejudice. Rather I would encourage anyone reading from curiosity about “abiding” to hang with what it is they want - not so much so that one’s proportions become distorted or perspective dimmed, but in the kindly way I remember pop advocating the best for me. Near as can I understand, his expectations were that I pursue an objective for the satisfaction that comes from personal accomplishment - this essay for example. I’m 6 years later working my way back into a story about a character I’d conceived of while relearning how to love after the collapse of my 3rd marital adventure, and I mean to know the end of this story. Yet like all things different, writing a novel can be fearsome and daunting, no differently than dating a new love; moving to a new nation or forsaking erroneous convictions. So when I hit the seemingly impermeable barrier of writing on a scale larger than essays and poetry, my previous explorations of persistence allowed a certain latitude for moving sideways onto temporary projects such as an essay on what it means to “abide” so that the complex ideas inherent to a longer narrative could percolate. It is from my struggle to understand abiding that I have hopefully gained some flexibility - to not become hardened or calcified as happened to the neck of my father’s trochanter when it broke within 10 months of his death. I’m not sure I’d want to know what my father learned in those last 10 months about abiding but it is funnier than hell to know he’d be laughing about my trying to explain it in this essay. If you think I’m kidding; consider the 4 go-to expressions he carried during that 10 month march to the grave; “going down the road;” “don’t get stuck in concrete;” “what is your purpose here on earth” and “what time is it?”

I have recently applied for a visa extension for living in C_______ E_______, not because there is not much that needs to be done in my own nation, or that I have abandoned efforts for the free and democratic ideal my parents inspired, but because for me to produce creatively I must live within my means, which could nearly be accomplished in the U.S. whereas in South America it may be barely accomplished; never mind that my arrival coincided with Christmas amongst strangers or that moments before making that sentence I had learned Dharma was the name of the band creating a music video downstairs on the patio of the hostel where I was living - I can almost hear pop with a knowing wink whisper “synchronicity,” for Dharma is from the Bhagavad Gita. Having no single western meaning it can be loosely parsed from Wikipedia as: the classical Sanskrit noun dharma, a derivation from the root dhr, which has a meaning of “to hold, maintain, keep.” The sound you hear is pop cackling - synchronicity, synchronicity, synchronicity from somewhere - lord knows where. Nor is this effort to seek creative sanctuary an easy passage; to-be-expected stressors tap into a manic aspect of my honestly acquired stick-to-itiveness and commensurate blinders that confuse fear - fear that in former times for human kind informed our species with a “fight or flight” prompt that is now marketed as “Jonesing for adrenaline.” In C______ E______ I was alone and impoverished - still am, somewhat less so; isolated from family and friends - either of which I’m never quite sure where to stand. Whether fortunate or not, my socialization dictates that one find answers within - why do I tend toward solitude? I have found amongst my abundant defects, I cling - a not entirely fair pejorative. It seems during those hazy crazy days of “the sixties” the CIA used a militant feminist - Gloria Steinem to racialize the inherent decency of the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) and conflate the emerging dignity of the Black Panther movement with a contrived innuendo of the subordination of black woman by black men which then became code for a denigration of the black male as well as a generally demeaning connotation for any male desire to companionship and love within the context of gender politics. To this day I veer from anything that smacks of neediness - not unlike President Obama’s Oligarchy-like born-again adherence to the corporate putsch made manifest in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Is that itself a reaction-formation to Ralph Ellison’s chapter “Battle Royal” within the novel Invisible Man? i d k, just askin’. Our president’s changing interpretation for “The Audacity of Hope” severely complicates efforts to appreciate what it means to abide, and more sorrowfully how to attribute a fair evaluation to a hideously distorted term in office - twisted by the ruling elite against the largely decent efforts of our nation’s first black executive to steer a moderate course for our embattled ship of state. 

Back to the fictional narrative of my Arcadian transition into a life of synchronicity and creativity; the Swedish All-Girl-Feminist-Choir-full-of-hate had by this time evaporated as if by starlight - an illumination seemingly from the evanescent transcendence of a Lone—Traveler-German-Sociologist-Fraulein-passing-through as gently as the former had rankled and carped its way thru for any but the faithful; pop was fond of the expression “awe” but always used it with awe; sitting here reflecting, I have only a pale glimpse of what awe may have meant to him - but it brings tears to my eyes - tears I am grateful for however much more grateful I may be for the warm loving kindness of that transient Fraulein who in the blink of an eye managed to warm the hurt of my hard hurt heart enough to hear my great grandmother Munner exclaiming, “How Grand!” Still, this essay is meant to tease a clearer understanding of what it is to abide - “to accept or act in accordance with” (a rule, decision or recommendation) - informal definition: “be unable to tolerate” (someone or something). As an artist I find myself cued to stimuli, whether the coping of a line from a crack in the sidewalk to the illumination of the crease of a smile - artist is not a lifestyle I’d advocate to anyone, for there is no surcease from patterns of relatedness, be it clusters of hectoring within a cohort to the distracted glance of a harried clerk in a government office; so how is one to abide all of the indications - to reconcile the admonition of free thinking with the chaste allure of a foreign culture’s mating dance; or the wisdom of a Bacchanal with the clarity of a tantric vision devoid of delusion. Am I to predicate decisions on the flaring fury of another’s lack of containment - do I aver the sensuous content of the flesh because of a fundamentalist proscription from those fearing their own appetites - I don’t know.

I do know that in and amongst the “norms” there are sad individuals in the world who rather than do honor to themselves or be mindful of cues from others, will continue to foist themselves uninvited, unwelcome and oblivious to all recommendation. How does one warmly abide such aggressive behavior - be it from a nation, a child, animal or tragic figure? In the world we now inhabit it is becoming critically important to forge strong alliances of like-minded people capable of working in concert. It is also critically important to divest oneself of unhealthy interactions in as peaceful a manner as is possible - how does one accomplish that and still abide. How does one define and enforce a boundary from the flavor of a menacing malevolence and not exacerbate the fear masked behind such purulent behavior? how does anyone encourage the Nietzsche admonition Bob Dylan shared on Theme Time Radio Hour - “Go up close to your friend, but do not go over to him. We should also respect the enemy in our friend.” It is very important to chose one’s influences carefully; just look at the buffoons applying for work as Drumpf’s apprentices. This a man who has lost more money than he has made, and who after being born on third base can’t make it home without being carried on the backs of people starving for heroism - the penultimate “naked emperor” - I cannot abide, or more importantly the person I hope to be only more so, will not abide such chicanery. But there is a flip side to the covert and dishonest flimflam that passes for political dialogue today - full disclosure. Should there be filters on what can be spoken of or how. I believe no, not between consenting adults - it is with the process of identifying “consenting” adults that this free thinking concept becomes dicey. To anyone who reads this, you are free to go, from the title to the conclusion - exactly the same as if we were in conversation. Me - I have limits to  what I will listen to from others; when I’ve reached those limits i remove myself, my bad. But just the same as I would never insist that you read much, less believe what I write, I resist anyone saying what I am allowed to write, or to say for that matter. So there is truth in part to the good Dr’s observations about my family - there are things I cannot, i will not abide. 

Of late, some upon whom I have “cast the ‘cast’ in my eye” have privately found my normal reserve and reverent adoration to be explicit and ribald, not because I wish to offend, but because I no longer care to offend my self. The act of denial of my own sexual nature is onerous and fake; nor am I asking for license to offend or disrespect anyone’s sense of appropriateness. It is not my manner to intrude where I am not expressly invited. But for me to be invited someplace, I would rather go as myself - not a cardboard cutout of some avatar conjured for acceptance by others. Wherever I go I must go as the confused, sometimes irascible but always struggling-to-be-free-and-honest loving heart I nurture and try to enlarge for company with anyone who believes enough in their own unique beauty for us to as Leonard Cohen has sung “be alone together, let’s see if we’re that strong.” It is a rich irony that I should be repulsed by an irrationally determined individual who feels so strongly as to “track” another’s migration on social network platforms after being “blocked,” one after another. Nor do I ascribe malice to such irrational determination - what I experience is a level of personal disrespect for oneself subjecting what hopefully remains a healthy loving heart in the face of strict disinterest. When I approach any woman I find attractive and with whom I discern some measure of reciprocal erotic affection. I must be free of delusions; I mean to hear, respect and comply with any level of expressed disinterest; there is no more detestable location on the planet than in the company of anyone who wishes you gone. My hope is that the more honest I am with myself about what I hunger for, the less starved I become and the more peace I might carry with me out of, or into the “big event horizon in the sky” I wish to carry peace to others who may not have carried enough with them from this weird-as-fuck world where we struggle to feel what we seem unable to make - love.

P.S. I now sit in an airplane on the tarmac preparing to depart L______P______ for M________ U_______. A consigliere recommended to me by my E________ hosts determined to purloin $50 - 1/2 of a $100 “facilitator’s fee” I volunteered in part as introduction to an attorney to prepare the $450 — now moot Visa extension as well as an acquisition of $50 worth of marijuana. To my thinking $50 was more than fair for such service, so when immediately after the introduction, my consigliere became inaccessible, non-responsive and dodgy, I got an irreversible sense that after three months of earnest efforts toward the community in which I meant to reside and contribute to through to my death had become fulsome with recrimination and innuendo about a medical marijuana strategy about which I’d shared openly from the initial Christmas dinner onward. The good doctor was right - I cannot abide some things - lucky me.

g_d - a sonnet ·

On _____'s birthday i write about g_d
and think about great painters born today
who do not have brothers with the name Todd.
Does g_d just see meaning in another way?

Why do we rename high-holy feeling
with a word used for killing others?
To love my brother, i'd give him healing
hoping g_d brings mending to all brothers.

Could g_d be her, our mothers and sisters
and we have lost our way from what is near?
Is blindness why our eyes are filled with tears,
or do we lack love enough love to quell fear?

G_d may not know we are in existence,
or know just of our loving increments .  .  .

jts 19/1/2016

http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission; all rights reserved 

∞

satan · the essay

Well this aught to be fun - fucking Beelzebub, how many wet dreams have you fucked up? Believe not that I write of your evil with disrespect or regard for its capacity to wreak havoc - rather like those lords and ladies dooming our world in service of filth lucre, I choose to peer into the abyss with laughter as my only backup - that and a little liquid courage (no irony there). “Hallelujah” now plays moments after my laughter metaphor and I persist with a mouth full of medicinal plant matter - what could go wrong? Bruce Lee says to fight effectively you must become one with your enemy; how am I doing, or more importantly, what exactly is there to fight? Is it for me: whiskey/beer, herbs leavened with lime? That would seem to be a pretty picayune enemy, a little like taking candy from a baby .  . when what I ache for is justice against wrong, or a little clarity with which to vanquish bullshit - are they equivalent struggles? Believe it or not - Bob Dylan is now singing “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”; am I once again, “a dollar short, hour late and going in the wrong direction”? Or are timing and luck just like any other human constructs - g_d, love, death - anything which when unexplainable by language, tradition or agreement is ascribed your valance of “evil”? Being thoroughly afflicted by Bob Dylan’s “Disease of Conceit,” I want to convince myself that this written artifice upon which I glue my tenuous hold on meaning, filtered or not through media distortion is a little like expecting you the reader to recognize the arcane description of “9x9” - a meaning for good signal strength from the arcane CB Radios. What is a more reasonable expectation would be that you the great deceiver is working his, or her magic through my once pristine now mangled awareness sullied by age, substance and defeat such that those from which I seek understanding simply scratch their heads muttering imprecations like “jesus christ, holy shit” or the ever useful “what the fuck is he talking about?”

Can this chaos for which Bob Dylan professes no fear, or possibly points right at, be scarier than fuck, rendering us warriors against disorder and danger outflanked and mission compromised? Does our fear of evil cede the field of engagement to you satan, where when what as crusaders we really desire is to be that good “American Marine - the most dangerous human agent ever conceived against the power of evil” instinctively running toward danger rather than away from it? - that is a question . . . yeah, sign up to fight for “your country” .  . so you can go to college . . . and it only gets deeper. How did eating “Mr. Goodbar”s with pop ever become the rape of Africa and child labor abuse?” More importantly, exactly who fucked with something so good as chocolate, and where are you just now? we gonna have a talk; .  . don’t be afraid - I only want to understand. If you reader find between those lines a menacing tone - what about this, “Mr. Executive, you have something I want, leave it on the table and go in peace . . “, too demanding . ? . Is there any way to confront evil and retain kindness? Is evil only that part of us which is frustrated in our desire to have our way. Me, I like chocolate - lots of chocolate, and some corporate person has fucked with my happiness creating tension where there had been joy; is that evil? What about you who look to fb, diaspora or any virtual community for some connection, distraction or reinforcement of belief which oh so thoughtful social engineers struggle to provide herein the church of social networking, only to find this conjured controversy - for g_d’s sake a screed about satan - things demonic, am I evil? We’ve pretty well established that fact .  . .

So why resort to such lengths to deny what is so obvious to all - this evil so clear to each of my ex-wives? Is a semi-comic journey on my oh-so-slow-train-of-thought just another inroad by you - satan - the all powerful demon-of-doom into civilization’s well-armored walls of goodness which I have voluntarily absented myself from by having so thoroughly participated in : where shall I begin? non-compliance, non-affiliation, non-denomination, non-compos-mentis .  . . there really is no end - save “the” end. One of my favorite movies as a young mind was “Damn Yankees,” (yeah, no irony there); but get this you monstrous justification for all that is fucked on our planet - he Dr Faustus caught the ball .  . and there is fuck-all you can do about that; it will be the same for every hit you make into the human outfield. Just because our species wants what is beyond its grasp and is willing to bargain for it, does not constitute the “darkness” Buddha averred or justify the excrement your corporate team fields instead of skill. Just so we’re clear about the concept, you or any one of your pissant minions of wrong shit cannot buy the human soul. The human team is sanctified; “we” invented Baseball, you only perverted it with your venal seduction and illusion of commerce where fun can be the only conceivable outcome. The game damn sure isn’t to become young or old, good looking or not as . . . after 61 + years, I got no clue, save for these sad little paragraphs between emptiness and more emptiness. . . the only joy I have is knowing your 3rd base coach got no clue, and I’m on my way home. Despair not prince of darkness; try this on for size - what if just as Professor Einstein posited “we cannot fix problems with the same thinking with which we created them” and for all my posing and railing against your apparent perfidy this essay only serves to draw in high relief fears that are entirely my own, irrespective of your ambitions - ambitions which may simply be beyond my limited understanding? . . . and I like every other spiritual energy on our planet employ any argument accessible to seal my eyes from what I cannot see? Oh you are so evil, mah bruddah .  .  . 

Was it your hand - Diablo - which prodded me to commence this essay for understanding evil one day prior to the auspicious 19th of January? Did your fallen-angel powers foretell my weakness and picture my too-soon-committed punch into air; is it not self-inflicted exhaustion from substance but a metaphysical demonstration of your enormous will which poured evil down my gullet? I can smell my own fear keystroke by keystroke . . is it like Peggy Lee’s “Is that All There Is?” and my puny existence is too eager for that grunt communicating your falling scythe and my loss of awareness? Is that all you got? I’m running on fumes, and still ready to mix it up literally - or like the scene in Star Wars where Luke loses his hand, this scab on my twice frozen fuck-you-finger will soon become the beginning of my Borg assimilation. Ese, I gotta tell ya’ - you be fucking weak, wait .  . . not weak; try this - fragile. I’m getting a sense in this substance fog, that shitty affront you affect for effect is just that - a front. Is it possible that you found at some point in your quest for existential power when you could not achieve love, you sought attention? I ask this because often when I find myself trying to understand what seems to be an evil - there is nothing but echo. Problems have dimension, they can be gauged, marveled at, even sold for profit; whereas evil, shrinks from the light as though it lacks mass - like the whereabouts of all the corporate hater’s booty. No one knows where it sits - a lot like that power you claim to possess over my fate. I gotta tell you friend, I’m not getting it, and I’ve been sort of high now for, what 2, no 3 hours.

I’ll give you my dissipated youth, but between you and me Bub - you were messing with a kid. That my friend is chicken-weak ass-shit - like digitally branding pre-schoolers, sad. Now I’m closer to your river Styx in age, close enough to smell the fear on your breath when you declare me - servant. Anyone who has connived to undermine the sovereignty of another as you foreswear is your prerogative must by that same higher light know how much understanding that involves. Understand this, I die each night of my life only to wake with you once again as my brother, my sister - my soul, my love; we be one and as much as you thwart, you can only expect to be thwarted; correct me if I’m wrong, for I know I do correct you at every opportunity. Between us as friends, I heed not the ruling class economy and change the only exchanges over which I have any control - my self. Don’t panic friend, I can’t live without your weakness, that is my evil, not yours. G_d knows how hard it is for you to find anywhere lower than you have gotten thus far; you damn sure don’t need my heretical notion of your effete degeneration holding you up, when clearly there are so many ways to be more abased - you and I friend are in a “target rich environment” of vileness into which that same good soldier rushed. I promise, as much as my word can be trusted, to distance my self from you where my admitted weaknesses allow so that you may fully further sink into that ether of emptiness of which you seem so full .  . 

jts 16/1/2016

http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission; all rights reserved 

∞

courage - the sonnet

What is it to be unafraid of fear?

What is the last thing you did without it?

Was it without fear that your arrived here?

Did love wash your tears when you found the tit?

When you love without self, is terror gone?

Can others be honored before the self?

Without love is there a reason to live on?

Has any light ever been lit by pelf?

Is it valor to be ready to die?

Is it valor to be ready to live?

Can one see into one's heart and not lie?

Can one see into one's heart and still give?

Do you know why you move from task to task?

If there is no answer, will you still ask?

fear

fear

ˈfir/

noun

1. 1.
   an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat.
2. verb

1. 1.
   be afraid of (someone or something) as likely to be dangerous, painful, or threatening.

By this definition, I am afraid of everything, or nearly everything. It may be easier to describe what I am not afraid of: I’d say ice cream, but like whiskey and beer, I like ice cream an awful lot, enough so that not eating it is sometimes more difficult than eating it - a lot like drinking beer and whiskey. Flowers? yes I’m very much not afraid of flowers, though that hasn’t always been the case. I remember being in a field with a pretty young woman who also liked flowers, but she got a bee in her hair and became a screaming frightened human being so much so the memory is still vivid in my mind 45 years later. If I remember correctly, she was so frightened that she frightened me. How can I discuss fear without generating anxiety and greater fear? It may require a great deal of creativity, perhaps even courage. An essay I recently wrote but did not publish was about alcohol; I am afraid of alcohol, or more correctly I am afraid of the effect which alcohol has on me. Not in the sense of becoming someone other than myself, but more the contempt I see in the faces of others when I’m “in my cups” - I am afraid of contempt whether I am drunk or not. Franklin Delano Roosevelt said “we have nothing to fear, but fear itself,” so like the brave heart I yearn to become I drink to face my fears - a fatuous argument to be sure, if for no other reason than any contempt one sees in others is most likely projection - the same for most emotions found on the faces of others be they love, anger or hate; Mahatma Gandhi - “The enemy is fear. We think it is hate, but it fear.”

I choose to write about fear because it has become a “hot button” issue used to sell weapons, war, cars, computers, etc. Nearly every hook the shills of our consumer culture use to separate you from your hard-earned resources has its roots in some spoken or unspoken threat - “buy this to protect yourself from _______”; “if you don’t buy this _______ .  .  .”. While the veiled threat found in most advertising likely divulges more of the precarious conditions under which the professional “hawkers” function, it comes nowhere near explaining the extent to which fear permeates our world or how to find more constructive palliatives than altered states, lethal instincts or religious indoctrination. As a child my mind balked at the incomprehensible dimensions of the universe, or more expressly the limits of time - lifetime. So I began to construct edifices behind which the ignorance of my ego could cower - parents, family, school, television. I clung to anything which appeared as light against my own feelings of doubt - looking outward to assuage the darkness inside. Psychiatry - boon or boondoggle helped me to reorient the light back into self for answers to doubt. However grounding self-knowledge is, perspective is no balm to the pernicious solitude of fear, nor does the illusion of mental health answer why or of what to be afraid: parents, death, love, success, evil .  .  . fear?

Am I less afraid by writing this down? Logic says information is power, yet I voluntarily expose myself to you the reader - an unknown (or myself the writer depending on one’s road). Will disclosing my vulnerability to you make me more secure or exculpate any sins of existence? stay tuned .  . Were I guided by the “venal chart” of Leonard Cohen’s cautionary “Villanelle for Our Time”, my remark “stay tuned” could easily be a pointed prompt for anyone anxious to realize the power of confession - Catholics and Alcoholics - or those wanting to exculpate sins - drunks, capitalists and other guilty parties amongst us. Am I menacing you, if so to what end? Is it possible that like myself, I do not want you to be afraid - that rather than soothing my own doubt, if I were able to help you, if not be less afraid, then at least be more aware of possible thorns so much a part of the rose-colored glasses of our culture’s media saturation? Anyone who has ever been gored by a thorn of any kind will likely not be so thoroughly gored a second time; is that caution due to fear, or wisdom? Is it possible to learn one’s way out from under fear? If I close myself off from the reality of being gored by thorns, do I lose the ineffable wonder of roses? Are the words of this essay no more than a different edifice behind which the ignorance of my ego retreats? That you have read this far says you understand something of fear, enough to grapple with someone else’s fear. You are braver than I. The easy access to hate which fear spawns is to me repulsive - a threat I struggle to attenuate by gaining a better understanding of fear. However, I often feel as though I am treading water in a sea of hate, so like the thorn and not wishing to gored, I shrink from other’s fear and hope somehow essaying about fear helps us all learn to swim. This disclosure does very little to lessen my fear, so why share?

I really like to drink beer, whiskey and lemon, almost as much as wandering in the garden of sex, though nothing compares to the release found in another’s eyes who has been seen while sharing flesh. Does that make being seeing important or help us to fear less? Does the answer lie in  finding more feelings like alcohol, ice cream and being seen in this world; are these the keys to that doorway out of a world full or fear? While this existential bandaid does not explain the vastness of what can never be explained intellectually, it certainly serves to make for a more pleasurable journey, far more than murdering others with the latest lethal accoutrement or shifting yet another pile of accumulated wealth from one location to another, but what do I know, “mais ce que je sais” - Michel de Montaigne. Mark Twain has said “Against laughter, nothing can stand.” If I had a choice, which I do near as I can tell - I would much prefer laughter; drinking beer and whiskey; eating ice cream and loving sex, than sinking into a miasma of terror - be that of my own or other’s making. Is frolic enough, or simply the vehicle which we might choose to convey ourselves through that “valley in the shadow of death? Does all of our ceaseless existential fear stem from the intractable reality of cessation of awareness in this vale of tears? After this much human development, could we not have found a more clear and effective response to fear than that of creating more - fear? As much as I like drinking beer and whiskey; eating ice cream and pussy - I fear there is more to life .  . .

“The great spiritual geniuses, whether it was Moses, Buddha, Plato, Socrates, Jesus or Emerson have taught man to look within himself to find God.” - Ernest Holmes. Are we just dancing around about naming death for what it is: the “great spirit”, “g_d”, “yahwah”, “mohammad”, “jesus”, “barong”, “brahma” etc. What if our inevitable end has always been just that - a returning to our origins - and our fear is merely about the continuity or lack thereof of that thread? Common frames of reference suggest 1) we are comprised of stardust, 2) matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Would not the same behavior be expected from consciousness; is our panic to attribute characteristics of existence beyond that which is readily recognizable e.g., ice cream and flowers that much different than searching for alternatives to the excoriating pernicious damage done by fear. Small wonder we have saddled ourselves with gods who, while satisfying our fear of change, have never returned to confirm the truth of that much sought after eternal constancy. So it is with most, if not all, of our strategies for fighting fear - altered states may shed light on our evanescence, though not explain our impermanence; just as succumbing to fear through hate quells the aching pain of existential terror, but leaves us more hateful - the ultimate hangover. I find greater comfort considering the pleasures of whiskey and sex than cowering to some state of socialization wherein I am unconscious and numb to my anxiety, but clean, sober and sanctimonious. Do I defile all that is holy in me by saying this? Do I subordinate myself to baser instincts by this surrender, rather than struggling for that “higher plane of existence” Lao Tzu advocates, or is it possible that the happiness the Dalai Lama advocates is the only tonic to fear we can know, and that by any means possible is simply heeding the logic of Master Shakespeare’s “all's fair in love and war,” on this mortal plane?