extinction - the sonnet

Extermination is not a good thing;

it may well result in our extinction.

For why? so the rich can say it’s their bling?

Are you frightened to make that distinction?

I could see that, but fear more a bad end,

not our puny lives, the end of our line-

our future, our past; learning how they blend,

or how we found so much fear without trying.

It matters not in the end, we’ll be dead.

What matters is how we lived; how we died?

I have lived love - to exist without dread

hoping peace would come knowing how I tried.

.  . . and if not - oh well, that was not to be,

happy though, to die living to be free.

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved · 03/14/2020

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

http://theextinctionchronicles.blogspot.com

∞

survival

Why would I expend an ounce of energy to continue life in this digital miasma currently passing itself off as life? Certainly an odd question, perhaps because on its face there is no real good answer. I am aged, alone and in ceaseless pain; partly by choice, partly by circumstance. My family is everyone I meet, except for the blood constellation I was born into; my presence feels like detriment to their collective well-being, or they mine. However inflammatory or deluded this self-concept may sound, there is foundation which is mostly rooted in self-care rather than any real conviction of right or wrong - more a determination to enjoy those moments left to my mortal existence. Nor are my circumstances unique in today’s world, with brothers in my country shooting each other over hamburgers or seats in the house of worship. I am blessed with more good fortune than I’ll ever comprehend, regardless of how I meditate my existence, and it is not truly possible to be solitary. In my travels, I’ve wandered alongside far more isolated spirits possessing mute courage, the dimensions for which I can barely conceive while facing much harsher realities than mine. Still in all the individual will not exist without the survival of the collective - one of those unfortunate absolutes to which our current philosophical cul-de-sac turns an horrified blind eye, or it is possible the anarcho-capitalists at Bohemian Grove got too drunk on Ayn Randian Kool-aid Cocktails and gouged lady culture’s eyeballs out to serve as Hors D’Oeuvres at the opening ceremonies for Bilderburg this year - truly the blind leading the blind.

Pop, as kind as he was, would laugh when our conversation meandered into such cul-de-sacs remarking, “man I’m glad I’m old.” I, not mean as he, only repeat myself with this impertinent anecdote mostly because I’m old. Therefore the second thread of this discussion must needs be relate to the collective survival of our kind and not necessarily any individual death. People being what they are however, that is not gonna happen - just yet. Like any kind of good fire, the small sticks have got to begin burning first. So while you may not be entirely on board about any anti-collectivism; anti Ayn Rand screed just yet, toward the end of this spiel, I’m inclined to believe your affiliation may be more aligned with “us”, than “them” - the former being the “we” in negotiations, and the latter representing the “I” in negotiations. I’ve been diagnosed by a family member as suffering from NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) or GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder) depending on who's telling the story; as with most convictions the truth depends on what you believe - go figure. Truth is I think about others; not enough it’s true, but as much as I can spare from the tasks that I’ve assigned myself for justifying the air, water and food I consume. Oddly amongst those tasks is this exercise in sharing, not from any belief that what I’ve learned or believe is worthy of embrace, but more that by modeling “honest” expression as close as I am able given my mangled emotions as filtered through this post-industrialized-media-experiment/internet-gone-awry. In a perfect world, and with some luck this file will be opened and read by future unknowns wanting to survive. My ambition would be to give courage to another spirit to pursue the impossible task of being understood. However, my experience has been that people would rather be believed than understood, and so will say anything to feel the affirmative reinforcement we are subject to by our morbid fascination with “like key” of any kind, flavor, idea or any other metric we obey to activate the +/- 5v pulse register on the corporate servers our handlers understand as the golden nod from Mammon indicating their virtual control and our absolute obedience.

I say virtual only because from where I stand, if there is any entity grubbing to feel warmth from my meager keystroke participation, my heart opens in pity to the barrenness of such an internal landscape. The equivalent would be my opening any one of the social network platforms available today looking to feel happiness based on how many URLs acknowledged my existence - thanks no. (excuse me for a second, I’m going to check my email) a full hour and a half of self-indulgent tripe later I’m listening to “Tempest” by Bob Dylan. I am well into my day’s ration of red wine, still alone, in pain, aged, and away from family. I am surviving as best I know how, if that bothers you, or if you have no interest, I cannot help you. My marijuana connection in a small South American nation full with decency has fallen through, my hostel “friends” are in open revolt and gravitating toward haters of my own concept and design due in large part to my own retarded social skills manifesting in non-participation of social rituals which other more savvy citizens inculcate early .  .  . 1 month later . . . red wine is parked for the moment, resiny buds have materialized out of the ether - still in pain, not as great; friends of old are back in touch and long-term plans are as hazy as ever. This I feel is a much better place to be in times of such upheaval - to not know of what course to take; to feel more compassion for the isolation and pain of others and to accept fully the impermanence of existence against the fragile beauty of our species’ momentary sparkle.

Dear Mystery Reader, If you have found these 5 paragraphs expecting instructions on how to build a civilization or perpetuate a species - stay close to the ground away from the exalted; treasure: simplicity, patience and compassion. Have fun where you are with whom you are with whenever possible; resist empire, be it flags, alters, colors or lines in the sand; love is wise, hatred is foolish. fuck fear. . have more fun. Reading some disembodied voice advocating you to have fun may not be easy; especially if you are surrounded by lakes of fire, or stormtroopers armed with your exact location from the url implant in your hipbone; or your genetically modified metabolism is rejecting nutrition from the fresh food you foraged from old growth cacti; I feel your pain, and there is hope; you must be audacious though, not the fake bravery that comes from hooking up with bullies and haters, but the outrageous courage one gets from loving another without demanding anything in return. For example, what if you experience the next spirit you encounter in your search for understanding, or believability, as being one molecule finer than you found them because you gave them one half of your last kernel of rice? What if because of that added nutrition, she was able to give birth to one child with a normalized digestive tract which enabled that child to live on food that was not out of the corporate food vault? What if you found a library that did not require an oath of allegiance to read more about Lao Tzu, Muhammed, or Alfred E. Newman?

I know that what I suggest may be impossible when you have another 8 hours of entertainment you must login and enjoy before you are rewarded with a food voucher for the 12,000 calories necessary to maintain a lawful 130 kilos of bodyweight. It is also clear you are taking a huge risk by reading when the clerics have ordered that all worthy human knowledge must be gained at the alter of Youtube. Remember there is a reason that you have fought for the ability to read; and by locating the file with these barely decipherable words in chaotic sentences rather than scrolling through the oder of holy images of cats and dogs used to clarify spiritual lessons so important to the salvation of your immortal soul - that reason is doubt. The universe has rewarded your efforts to learn how to read with more things to read, more things to doubt. You might try reading the bible to learn the meaning of doubt and to better understand how something so good, could become something so bad, sort of like how the haters made food and water things to bargain with instead of something with which to make clear the love in your heart. I would share anything I have to help you find a reason to survive, I don’t have anything tangible. The world in which this was written is expiring like a campfire made of bad wood, we are choking in the smoke of things, items of little value which are hoarded at great cost to human dignity, a dignity which you have retrieved by learning how to read. May the words you read be worth that risk: the less value you place on surviving, and the more value you place on helping others find a reason to survive, the happier and healthier you will become; I hope.    

inanimate - the sonnet

I am not an inanimate object,

i am a virtual reality

built with bits others chose where to inject

into lists they believe will describe me

Madness is believing life after death

the same as thinking a list is alive.

Virtual reality without breath

means that google can decide if i thrive.

How could it be that something not living

knows what i do not know about my want,

confusing desire with what i am pushing—-

keyboard keys that do little more than taunt

If you live and think computers do too,

lets make them that critter left in the zoo.

jts 041816

". . so you can stick your little pins in that voodoo doll, i'm very sorry, baby, doesn't look like me at all" . . Leonard Cohen

life

D.E. Tuppins - “ life is one damn thing after another . . . “

I value more and more each cherished second of living as I work closer and closer to a better understanding of mortality, however futile such an effort is by definition - no one having yet broadcast from the void. This essay is one in a series paired with a thematically reciprocal sonnet: satan/g_d; fear/courage; abide/abandon etc., which while providing some creative symmetry does not necessary yield any new information about either topic, but so what? The equivalent would be to suggest that other than drawing oxygen and sustenance; yielding grease and heat there is an inherent glory to that ineffably infrared glow that is our biological mystery from amoeba to octopus. Do you see any? glory I mean - not the parochial parroting of reaction formation that the clerics use to cloud our fear about the cessation of life, I mean the sort of glory found as a child falling face down into deep grass such that for an instant your being is transported from fear by fall into a brilliance of color, smell, maybe even taste and shock from a change in scale of world already becoming mundane now again new, or the taste of cold ice cream shared in the bosom of a loving family on a hot day - your first kiss, the impossibility of a live bird dead from flying directly into a plate glass sliding door? These to me are the glories of life - not the empty promise of an ever after or some claim for the exculpation of sins that are mine alone, sins to be taken by me into a future which will care not a whit about me save anything left legible that might stem the effluence of anguish from our generation’s failure to leave the world better than when we arrived.

In our human hubris, we have become so accustomed to the miracle of existence we fancy ourselves as givers of life, rather than evanescent nodes of rhizome-like other-worldly ginger or anthropomorphized turmeric tuber. Our fulsome human conceit attributes “life-of-its-own” to many inanimate concepts - ghosts, soured domestic relations, regime change interrogations gone bad - human events for which we no longer wish to take responsibility. Fukushima, for example has taken on a life of its own - so much so there are press conferences held with world leaders where nothing is said which is then not shared anywhere to anybody - pretty powerful pull for a mute pustulating ecological chancre in a world willing to pay billions for simple finger twitches on command from pre-pubescent youth of the proper demographic. If that is confusing to follow try this, I presume to write about an activity I’ve spent 60+ years yearning to happen, yet when arrived at in its full misery run screaming for the comfort of lies and obfuscation of my own design - yeah a whole lot more clear. . . why do we struggle to feel more and more alive, yet deaden that same indescribable confusion of loving beauty when in close proximity? How can we attribute a negative value to one aspect of existence - death which only releases our loved one from that torment inherent to breath; while exalting birth that by its very nature portends grief and pain for the object of our affection? And as if that is not enough - why am I compelled to parse what I can’t fathom in such a way as to augment your experience about something I can’t possibly understand, and do so happily?

In some people you meet, the absence of fear is almost tangible as is the sense of zeal for the unknown; yet like the Indians without a prior concept of galleons being incapable of seeing the ships of their doom, so too is it difficult to recognize another human who is living rather than reacting as a trained rat might. Yes that is harsh and describes mostly my own neurosis - or vulgarity depending on ones’ sense of clinical etiquette. There is irony that Lao Tzu so closely anticipated, or more likely strongly influenced the concept of “shadow psychology” in the thinking of Freud’s alter-ego Jung. Whether a penetrating apprehension of our more base inclinations yields a brighter consciousness is ironic in the midst of this our darkest age. However, more ironic still that this essay on “life” would be so species-centric in its discussion as to preclude the devastation wrought by humans on quite literally every life form in this biosphere, as though our faculty for symbolic communication anointed us rulers in this bubble haven surrounded by a near vacuum of a possibly infinite universe - ain’t life grand. If our existence is as spectacular as we have been trained to forget, would it not also hold true that the cessation of life can only be as grand? Yet, however many millennia after the Venus of Willendorf and her mystic fertility, the bulk of our collective spiritual pursuit is devoted to dampening the axiomatic truth about life which derives its most apt description from its counterpart - death. This inextricable link whose unknown nature like Dr. Hawking’s question about time (why can we look backward, but not forward in time?) has so captivated the “lizard” brain of the human species we are paying the sociopathic ciphers amongst us for the privilege of killing each other rather than sitting in a darkened room and simply contemplating the irreducible reality of our demise. This cowardly aversion to our reality is not limited to self-inflicted torment, but has also served to blunt our natural capacity for compassion toward all life, and non-life for that matter. Why is that? Has our inability to honor the privilege and sanctity of our own existence simply mutated into the media version and its smarmy conviction that we are not facing an extinction of our own making?

Here is some magic to chew on. As incomprehensible as these words, ideas or questions might be, what if the notion about something taking on a “life of its own” is now sequencing a set of electrical impulses in your mind that will propagate to some degree out into infinity; what if even after our species is extinguished, those same electrical impulses generated by your recognition of a word combination will however faintly continue to radiate forever? Consider what happens if our species commits the ultimate farce - extinction, and we become a rotting crust. Our infrared signature will continue to dull and eventually become extinguished in the same fashion that biomass became fossil fuel and compressed coal coalesced into inanimate diamonds. We will have truly transmuted and though still possess wavelengths, those will not be the synaptic wavelengths you are generating now. Yes that is convoluted and possibly discursive reasoning; if so, try this piece of magic. What you read is expanded by your thinking and the experience you bring to it, yet for an essay which aspires to enliven your regard for something so essential as life, I am no closer to pulling the rug out from under the collective fog our species seem subsumed by, largely because I eschew the barking necessary to boost my google ranking. Somehow a handful of amoral emotional ciphers have absconded with the essential sacredness of our collective breath and are riding an existential crest of opulence to their grave on the respiration and aspirations of an entire species - does that make this desperate plea to awaken any more clear?

Perhaps we humans will enjoy a similar persistence to that barely perceptible synaptic wavelength journeying however faintly further toward the unknown, and our once verdant biosphere with its former abundance will devolve but continue to adapt on this increasingly synthetic polymer soaked orb less and less capable of supporting life. Even with all of our scientific and spiritual expertise and language we are barely able to describe much less define life. So not unlike the mathematical definition of a circle which we can only approximate as “an N-sided equilateral polygon as N approaches infinity,” life may scale itself to fit the available envelope left here on earth such that the curves of what we thought was a circle of life become more hard-edged and recognizable for the angles they are? This is my life, but I could no more tell you how I got here than I could tell you where I go. Still, for some unexplainable reason I want to prompt you a stranger toward a stronger affiliation to the indescribable joy of laughter rather than the virtual suggestion of humor found on your screen, or a private moment of sorrow felt deeply in what remains of your soul before some ad promises surcease for a price. In the end, I would choose failure for an honest effort to make clear my hope for a successful future for us all than to acquiesce to the neutering of the human spirit by those who prevail at the expense of our highest wants and aspirations - love, safety, rest; whatever desire you are capable of formulating outside of the predictable pattern of behavior we are all being herded into by the same technology that was paraded as the salvation of humanity a scant 10, 20, 30 .  . years ago but now is being used by our corporate overlords to inflict the ancient but ever effective “death by a 1,000 cuts.”  

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞

Lucifer - the sonnet

Lucifer was the name of my aunt’s cat;

though this sonnet pairs the essay Easter

wherein Easter and rising were just that.

Now i sit pink-eye-patched; tea-bagged by fear

I dared exclaimed the pain in my hard heart;

and days later it is only more so

as if by sharing, it might become art -

an art best seen by those who’ve been brought low.

Have we all been brought to this place to see

that which can only be viewed from great depth?

If so, must we climb to such heights to be free?

or is life hell, so we may rise to death?

I may very well have fallen by choice

so that on my way out, i might rejoice.?

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.