discipline · an essay / 'going down the road' - the sonnet

I sat in ma’s dining room after she had been taken to have a basil carcinoma excised from her cheek; anxious for her comfort and unwelcome to her side by the eldest sibling and his anxiety, which my fantasy tells me is his need for me to be guilty so he can justify his rancor. I am not innocent - he has cause, as is the case with all estrangement - a condition requiring active participation from all involved. My complex demands constant mindfulness if i am to extricate myself from a destructive family pattern where no one is served - especially not our mother. He 'ghosted' me, after escorting her to and from her procedure. Her overflowing pill dispenser ever populated with another expensive medication the medical industry uses to keep the dying from death. 'The crux of that biscuit' being her anti-anxiety fix which she began and ended each day, and the only medication she'd plunder at will when the need for rest was too great; historical self-discipline informed her what dosage was needed to rest. Pop had a slightly more spartan approach to discipline. He rarely resorted to corporal punishment to enforce his existential notions, I remember one occasion when quite young when his response to my claim of having vacuumed my room was to place his hand over mine on the vacuum handle and vigorously maneuver to every corner under my desk, then the entire room. Later in life I was to learn this direct method of instruction had been a long standing practice of the very practical Balinese tradition. What I took away from his intense focus was a deep appreciation for anything related to cutting corners - a now defunct antiquated value pertaining to thoroughness and pride in one’s work which the ruling class has upended with shoddy product - the only plausible outcome of today’s anarchistic capitalist monopoly.

I write about discipline out of great respect for those values imparted to me by my father which allows me to now sit in Montevideo, Uruguay persisting in an activity greater than my own comfort - writing. Dorthy Parker — “I hate writing, but love having written.” While in California, I watched some Television and was amazed by the amount of content compared to when I was young, yet, like the products for sale as a result of today’s mass production - volume does not translate to higher quality. If anything the bloodless nature of capitalism has resulted in its singular most pertinent innovation - “planned obsolescence”. For the uninitiated, this expression acknowledges that those responsible for taking your money and providing you product deliberately create defects in their products that force you then to replace those products in a predictable pattern. It is for this reason the computer you upgraded to requires replacement. “Tech experts generally agree a computer should last anywhere between three to five years before needing to be replaced” — Matt Koble. While some may exhort the discipline applied by this twisted ethos is what “builds” the economy by expanding the consumer base; i say bullshit. It is a lack of discipline that has subverted the exchange of value between the consumer and his/her erstwhile providers. The greed of our corporate overlords is the antipathy of discipline and now manifests as the greatest seizure of assets in the past 200 years - a demonstrated lack of restraint. If anything it is the patience, even the survival of humanity which is being put to the test. Fracking is poisoning the water table, throwing dice with the proliferation of genetically modified seed stock is enhancing the capacity of our nutritional products to transport the corporate poison Glyphosate into our planet’s life cycle. 8% of fossil fuel continues to be diverted into the production of “new” plastic when by 2050 it is expected there will be more plastic in the oceans than there are fish. These defects in the much lauded form of provisioning our species - capitalism - is not from discipline, but from unbridled greed.

I understand greed, mostly in a fashion similar to how Leonard Cohen sings of in “We were locked in this kitchen, I took to religion, And I wondered how long she would stay, I needed so much To have nothing to touch, I’ve always been greedy that way.” Somehow the intangible is what my interior hungers for - to make a cogent thought understandable in written form, or the turn of a lady’s cheek expressive as a creative facsimile. Even my vices are of a more impermanent nature, not for any alteration of inherent awareness. but as something of a prod to shake off corrosive socialization that numbs natural freedom for which our consciousness is capable. It has confused me from the time I first learned of Dionysius, and his offspring Bacchus how large parts of our history are full with elixirs and substance whose sole purpose is to jolt the unexamined presumption of normal anything. Einstein had said “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” It is my belief that Dr. Einstein was not describing any state of bliss to which zealots of all stripes aspire - be it “70 virgins”, “Rapture” or even “Nirvana,” rather those miracles he described are, or are not found from a close study of our world. This activity requires a strict discipline, for we are asked on a daily basis to aver our sight from scabrous aspects of current existence, contrary to any happy depiction of commodities guaranteed to satisfy a hunger never present at birth and which has only become insatiable from  relentless exposure to a false insinuation that whatever you possess is inadequate, be it peace, product or appearance.

Lao Tzu — “Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” I have read this kindness repeatedly for nearly 50 years, and still find it difficult to fathom. For example, how does one reconcile this concept with violence, hatred, cruelty, greed oppression, etc. . . .? Is is not natural to resist all that is not in service of the greater good? Yet I am finding from actively opposing ills of our world as best I could understand at the time, few if anyone has ever welcomed or wished to consider alternatives. It is a growing conviction of mine that any effort to persuade, dissuade or convince another of anything is futile, yet to keep my mouth shut in the face of obvious stupidity, especially willful stupidity, requires every ounce of discipline i’ve ever gained. There is hope, i pray for the survival of our kind because we have worth. We are not the pale echo of ourselves shown in the ever present self-serving advertisement; there are heroes who daily exert themselves unselfishly loving, and learning to love, the impossible - that hideous grotesque caricature of our once beatific existence. The most powerful affect ever known to our kind is love, nothing of any comparable force has ever accomplished as much, especially not hate. Yet where hate is so easily accessible for a variety of reasons, not the least of which would be the fear which our leaders foist on us in supporting the delusion that sells mechanized death as anything but more death; love has illuminated the fact that peace is our inherent nature, compassion our most noble instinct and happiness our highest aspiration. Nor do i feel compelled to persuade anyone of this truth; it is enough for me to feel it; i’d be lying through my teeth to suggest to you, i’ve arrived at this conclusion through anything but assiduous discipline - regardless of any dictionary definition.

It has been the absence of will which has brought me closer to my objectives than any delusional belief that discipline is best understood by an act of willfulness. If anything, forcing that which is not into existence has resulted in defeat after defeat, while patiently waiting to see what unfolds of its own volition has always yielded the deepest love, the finest expression and the clearest images. Carl Jung has stated “Where love rules there is no will to power, where power rules, there love is lacking. The one is a the shadow of the other,” or put differently by Jimi Hendrix - “When the power of love overcomes the love of power - the world will know peace.” Google (the god of all meaning} defines discipline as “the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience,” yet behavioral science is unequivocal that intermittent positive reinforcement is far and away the more successful method for behavior modification. That the practice of wearing a hair shirt for “mortification of the flesh” has been part of Western tradition is no coincidence, we have been, and are being, punished by unscrupulous spiritual leaders based on their ignorance, not ours. We continue to retrieve baby ducks from sewer drains and exalt the miraculous accomplishments of the limbless amongst us; it is our nature to act with compassion which TAFKAP (may he r . i . p .) so sagely observed as verb, not the adjective which the clerics have subverted into the same language used to murder with effectiveness such that those earning from our slaughter are the sole beneficiaries of humanity’s patience. My objective is to transform that which is intolerable in my existence into a recognizable form that may help others to not feel alone; this ambition comes from a discipline learned within the bosom of my family; i am grateful. Dr. M.L. King Jr. - a scholar warrior of fore observed, “Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.” I am incapable of altering my family or its concept of me, yet freedom and “on-the-hand-guidance” from loving parts of that same family sustain and encouraged me to learn ways to organize for peace, regardless of any limits my upbringing may have presented. Are we any different than that rhizome which Carl Jung used to describe us the family of [wo]men?

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'going down the road' - the sonnet 

“going down the road” pop often replied

after a broken hip laid him down hard;

his irony survived, for he had died

with well chosen words like any good bard.

I wonder if he found life is a dead end,

or the road we travel is interstellar?

I will not know until i reach that bend,

or g_d answers the question i’d asked her:

“if i live well and peer into the void

with love in my heart; kindness in my soul

and resist all calls to become android,

may i pass beyond with peace as my goal?”

i’m in no hurry to get where i go

to learn what it is no human can know.

jts 20/8/2016

http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

all rights reserved 

∞

  

pride / shame - the sonnet

Thinking that a snort of grappa will prime the pump in such a way I may drink red wine like the ruling class - without thirst, is a vanity. I am old and can barely afford such delusions - note to the young: don’t try this at home. To write a sentence much less an essay about a topic so deeply rooted in my own pathology is the height of conceit, an excessive aspect of pride, for I struggle with what it means to have pride in oneself - no clue but am learning how to capitalize “I.” This self-conscious affectation is mostly due to the influence of D.E. Tuppins’ jocular admonition, “after me you come first.” The painful lessons of self-respect, however, are rooted i imagine, from belonging to a brood of beautiful people struggling with their own vanities. When i say beautiful, i mean literally - multigenerational homecoming queens, swimming champions, and bomber pilots - all. My own extistence is more ambiguous - cross-eyed with a bald spot the size of a fist spanning the temporal lobe; distractingly loud for compensating from a ruptured eardrum and a weird as fuck personality by default from parsing a 3D world using a 2 dimensional monocular vision .  .  . I share this not as an excuse for poor behavior, but from pride at having got this far life and still be open about defects - like the conceit i will become sober from drinking grappa - an arrogance which by extension morphs into the delusion that essays on pride could be useful to those left alive amongst the last DNA strands of our species. As a proud man, I struggle to find ways to contribute to the outcome of our collective future - not based on any delusion of utility, but because that is what I have been fortunate enough to learn - “do your best, without attachment to the results”(derived from Vedic scripture)- A. Non 

My aged instincts tell me if there is a spiritual force, she is feminine and very funny. For example from what i’ve learned, self-respect requires that one feel self-love, yet all those i’d model appropriate lessons for such are knee-deep in their own issues of exaggerated self-love - the pretty monster, Narcissus. If i live to be a 1,000 year’s old, nothing’s gonna change and i’m gonna be ugly as fuck on the outside, weird as fuck on the inside - and confusing as fuck to all nearby; Madame g_d, i defer to your superior forces, but know this: i’ve learned of the existence of William Blake and mean to permeate my being, my work and my attitude with his irreverence - is that okay? i find i’m proud, but not necessarily stupid; seriously Madame g_d - what the fuck do you want? I’ve done my best, and am surrounded by much beyond my best effort - hate, jealousy, cowardice, greed, .  .  . etc. Nor am i petitioning you for terms of surrender - my time is coming soon enough, and though i may not be at peace, i’m not necessarily not at peace - enough so to mock you as you do me - take your best shot, i did and all i got were three wives, but please guide me - i’m lost and not without heart. When i look to what I can feel good about during my time here on this one of your more innocuous celestial bodies - flat or otherwise, doubt seems to be my only companion, beauty and joy having ditched me between marriages; either 1 , 2 or 3. Still i do my best like any well meaning, hell-bent-for-leather wish-he-had-something-to-be-narcissistic-about aging man in the days of rapture looking for any excuse, lame or otherwise to feel good.  .  . 

Dear Reader, you got this far - so you know how to read .  . well done - try and teach others. Reading was one of the first life gifts that made me question the seeming absolute nature of self-loathing, that there might be more to being alive. Yet as with all things - the price of pleasure comes with a cost - in this case understanding, or more accurately a desire to understand. How is it that all the finest authors, from antiquity to today have been able to plumb the existential bowels of our kind; prepare symbols in an order that permit strangers to share awareness, yet from Hammurabi to Leonard Cohen, our finest literature has not prevented grotesque aberrations like Fukushima, Monsanto or the Donald “T” with access to power over life and death - even that of the continuation of our species? Such considerations kind of make my curious efforts at sobriety and clarity weak, don’t it? Truth is messier, for i’ve been broken so many times one more defeat is nothing. If anything, my earnest hope for some happy outcome to our collective existential cul-de-sac is nearly the height of “conceit”? How can it be possible that a want for one’s kind - people - to endure, conjures images of omnipotence, delusion or worse “vanity”? Truthfully, I essay in a desperate effort to comprehend the pitiless stupidity of our demise, that and fathom my own reality. e.g. I have lived now more than a year without a home when it seems all humanity is being evicted and threatened for its freedom, love, safety - existence. My occupation and companionship during this sojourn have been a series of portraits of remarkably complex women with varying degrees of relatedness to myself in an excessively prideful, not quite conceited effort to see into the beauty of the incomprehensible; small wonder i fantasize about a female g_d who laughs at my foibles. My last wife’s comment on her portrait was “you have to have balls to sit for Joseph.” Given her ties to the gay community, i’ve often wondered at the ambiguity of such a remark. 

The companion sonnet for this essay was to be modesty, yet according to the internet dictionary, shame is higher on the list of antonyms for pride - and once again, i’m confused as fuck. To my thinking shame and modesty are wildly divergent concepts - the latter being a laudable objective, especially in a world full of greedy people using pelf as validation of big shot status. Shame, however is a corrosive residue from poor parenting; educational indoctrination or a blunt behavioral tool for socialization into consumer fodder which like any illness is fair game for healing. The Dalai Lama said, “if you cannot help, at least do no harm,” and my old man Harold Reed Stevens said, “if you’ve got nothing good to say, keep your mouth shut”. I believe them both as well as a strong adherence to Lao Tzu who said, “what is a good man, but a bad man’s lesson; what is a bad man, but a good man’s job?” In the hostel where I have stayed for three months, a conflicted young man spontaneously kissed my neck as a woman might, except his was unbidden, unwelcome. He was consumed by his own confusion. This hostel is in a latino culture with which i have a deep bond with, even familial relationship to, coming from Los Angeles. However, given my nation’s arrogance, I also suffer American guilt by association - sort of like being an old white man in the Philippines where if you haven’t bedded every barely pubescent woman, someone who looks very much like you has. My interpersonal relationships that aren’t historic and sacred, are often tenuous, if there is a storm to be found, the “perfect” one will find me. Rather than knock this boy’s dreams to the ground and step on their oblivious throats - i moved as far away as an architectural remnant of grander days would permit, and in his conceit, he attempted to normalize his fantasy by supervising access to common areas. Witnessing this passion play through the lens of my own prejudice with a limited emotional palette i pulled out the family standby for behavior modification - extinction, or in the vernacular - shunning, “cut them off at the knees”, “pull their ticket”, “know them not”, etc .  .  .

Mute shunning is one of the cruelest realities one can come up against - to lose, in an instant, access to what had been moments ago considerate, positive, nurturing exchanges is shitty. I am not proud of my limited repertoire for responses to intrusion by a world which often seems to make this quiet retreat my go-to protection against behaviors i’ve found can be amazingly aggressive in their indifference to my own excessive sensitivities, but more importantly and for purposes of this essay about boundaries which i remain confused - another hot-button issue in my personal minefield of upbringing having been diagnosed, according to one professional - albeit much too late to be of much help, as the “identified patient”. Ergo, when the external world, which can be quite lazy about its own self-awareness, attempts to project responsibility onto me for realities inconsistent with what i know to be my behavior, i resist; i resist with the same fervor i rely on to examine my own copious faults, and if you think considering one’s own issues of sobriety, gender confusion or concepts of self-worth in a 5-paragraph essay is a cake walk - try it sometime. Perhaps now you have a better sense of what a proud fuck I am? This conceit is not just embarrassing, it’s dangerous, for having come from a family where vanity was a blood sport, sanctimony and self-righteousness were and remain shadow ministers to shadow emperors. Irony begets irony and obviously i’ve yet to convince Madame g_d that modesty is my ambition and humility my divine objective. This delay may be due to my shadow narcissism looking for its day in the sun, or the paradox that to properly conceive my own insignificance it is necessary that my mind grapple with the extent of those nether regions in my apparently, or delusional, expanding self-awareness. 

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modest/shame

how can modest shame be opposite pride?

the dictionary calls them “antonym,“

which makes sense if from guilt one runs to hide;

is there sense in a modest battle hymn?

i sought love from one thirty years younger;

she came chirping to me, rare bird - no shame.

confused me such i thought myself stronger

instead of an aging stallion gone lame

i could feel humiliated, i don’t;

her brave heart sought logic where there was none.

when young i might have resisted, i won’t

she is keen, but must say if we are one.

i am old, wrong and too glad to say no,

if i am damned or redeemed she would know.

jts 10/8/2016

http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

all rights reserved 

∞

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.?