have - an essay / have not - a sonnet

apple, has just informed me that i do not have permission to save the document you are reading - fucking cheek. Clearly they are confused about what have means. Then again i could just be getting old and don’t know what computers are supposed to do, nor have i figured out what women want yet. I can say that i do have a computer i’m not so sure i want, and do not have a woman - if woman could ever said to be had - i’m pretty sure i want one. I thought i had a few, but they each clarified that presumption for me in their own unique fashion. I think i’ll have a cigarette, or it me - more confusion about to have or have not. Our world is being ground to dust by idiots believing that a piece of paper is adequate evidence they have the right to do so - why is that presumption any more stable a conviction than my own belief that a woman can be had. What if in some bizarro universe the idiots just never learned to want a woman and so did not have the advantage of being educated about why a woman can never be had. That really would be great wouldn’t it¿ All the world’s problems could be solved simply by teaching those idiots who have been substituting their desire to love a woman for world dominance. I don’t know fuck all about women, so i guess we're still shit out of luck. Who would have thought existence could hinge on some something so simple as knowing what a woman wants. I have a mother, however she is aged and while she would be thrilled to know i acknowledge such good luck - she is truly a miracle of creation - she most certainly would not describe knowing what a woman wants as a simple matter; i have learned that much.

True this - Bob Dylan is just now singing “ you’d be as happy as you could be if you belonged to me,” so it is quite likely given Mr. Dylan’s keen instincts distinguishing love-fact from love-fiction, we should be on the right track. Though there is still that issue of my computer depriving me of rights to save this file, and the fact that i am not online to query “the cloud;” what i do have, is problems, which in this world hardly makes me unique. I have a bed and a refrigerator, while not exactly mine, having access to them makes me increasingly unique today - how sad. Yet i can honestly say i do not have sadness, who needs it? I have time to do this, which as i age toward the void gives me an increased appreciation for each second, and get ready for this, creates great doubts as to whether i have time at all. It's been said, "make the time"; i’ve made a lot of things in my life, but i’d be a damn liar if I said, based on what little i can understand about Sir Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” that i have ever made any, time that is. By all accounts one’s word is something one wants to keep, yet the  current administration is actually capitalizing on Mr. M.T. Suit’s legendary prevarications to the tune of billions depending on who you blow as much as who you know. This essay does not seem to elicit peace which in these days may have become an even more pertinent issue to discuss, vis a vis - have. What i've learned is that i cannot give peace if i do not have peace. Just how does one go about having peace, unlike having a woman who can often be wildly diverse in her concepts of belonging, like ma. Peace however, that is more like a blood sport which requires no team, no permissions, no time - you just focus. Then again, is saying “i have peace” adequate to take possession of such¿ We’ve nearly established that those 6 men holding as much wealth as the bottom 7 billion humans alive have needed little more than a surprisingly similar assertion “it’s mine” - poof - ipso facto - welcome to the white ages.

What is not clear to me is how they got so many to agree to the difference between pilfering from the till, and the enforcement of such as anything other than an absurd bastardization of our marketplace. As much as the grinning baboons parading as commentary/corporate shills want to describe our lot as something other than a horrid ice burg gash in Starship Earth the reality is much more simple. They need us, we do not need them. Just as my heart’s hunger to have a woman is now where near enough scratch to turn the tide of love so too is the ruling class anything but deposed for no other reason than lacking a winning hand. Voila - poof - ipso facto - BOYCOTT the shit out of the lying skanks - and goosing the Dupont bottom line with toybomb decals is not depriving mr. m.t. suit of a thing. have your bliss, have your self respect, have your love, have your peace - all those things the chimera of consumer addiction have never nourished or manifested. The scrutiny you are enduring by some pencilneck geek’s concept of technological adroitness pales against the incomprehensible stupidity of apple selling a product that is not loaded with the finest dictionary immediately translatable into all human language. So if i can’t have peace, maybe i should shoot for patience - another blood sport which requires little or no visible means of support. I could probably get a lot more done, not the least most especially with regards my quixotic quest to the only worthy dream of any male worth his salt, to live in that land of milk and honey where i have a woman.

I’m a little confused, do we even know if it is possible to have a woman¿ i know what it is to not have a woman, so i picture myself half-way home. It was not having peace which has allowed me to learn what i don’t know about peace, though that is as close as i’ve gotten; i find the emptiness oddly comforting, even a little inspiring. I wonder how much i could learn by knowing less about other things¿ Funny that; if this were true, knowing as little as i know about woman, i’d again be halfway-home. I think we’re getting somewhere what if all the copious records collection of it-ain’t-none-of-your-business has caused the geeks to sit back and wonder about what they haven’t learned from their conspicuous consumer collection¿ Sadly, i could give a fuck - a personal defect. To have love in my heart is somewhat stymied by the attention necessary to devise a language with which to explain this to the haves who haven’t been able to divine what i would happily answer should they ever grow a pair and ask to my face. I’m suspecting the illusion that anyone can have anything is a myth - a fable woven by loving parents to jolly children who begin to wonder what happened to their mutts. Object permanence became a metric by which smart people found patterns, a scientific effort that was supposed to alleviate suffering but like many events involving fire and meat was hijacked by a family member looking for the fattest piece food. Look up the story of Bernais, nephew to Sigmund Freud first Scientologist to be cleared. This surveillance is bi-directional, and if anyone reading this doubts there was an unseen hand keeping this from you as long as possible, you’ve never met my agent.

What, you don’t think i could have an agent¿ Fuck you, go read some other body whimpering about what he can’t have, see what i care. You can begin to see why i respect my agent a lot, mostly when she takes my calls. Then again i could be lying and trying to inflate my numbers so i can have everything i ever wanted and wouldn’t have to rationally rant my sublimated defeats into semi-fictional commentary. It is now closing in on 3 hours that i have paid to better understand have. I like having a computer, and it doesn’t please me that apple may take back the three hours i used, but fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. I guess that’s why they are making the big bucks, because they can. I’ve seen it, rich and poor; loved them both, but if and when it comes down to it, would i sacrifice a cigarette butt to see a celebrity or spend an hour shooting the shit with my neighbor - hand’s down i’d say Miguel Angel. Those things i cherish have dwindled and dwindled more while Bob Dylan is singing “Congratulations, for making me wait, Congratulations, now it’s too late.” So i guess the paradox of being owned by that which is yours is one that will haunt, or hunt us to extinction. I have the pleasure of puzzling through this time with you - whoever you are. That is something that can never be taken away from me, and i’ll likely go around the barricade which prevents me from storing these fragile symbols only representing vaguely the pleasure of having had this fun with you. Thank you. 

“If you want me, just whistle. You know how to whistle don’t you Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.” - Howard Hawks, channeling Ernest Hemingway 

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-

have not - the sonnet

being black is not a death sentence, but close.

murdered by a bunch of fucking haters

who don’t need guns - they can’t tell friends from foes

protecting ignorance using their fears.

let us kill all those with hate in their hearts!

But wouldn’t that be a hateful thing to do¿

And that rank odor of my hateful parts

i run from like the piquant ode d’poo 

maybe i’m war waiting for armistice?

maybe i’m peace and not waiting at all¿

maybe birth was enough to have everything?

and death just reward for having a ball.

I’ve not wanted a lot of what i’ve had;

were what’s left at peace, i’d be kinda glad

jts 09/22/2017

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

∞

future present - an essay / past present - the sonnet

I arrived at this present future moments ago - a gallery in Mexico whose owner like all artists of merit is searching for more time to work. My business model allows for adjustments, and our two purposes coincided. I am writing at his front desk awaiting the client who will offset such demands by buying his work - but that is in the future. I now know where to empty my bladder - always a future eventuality for those who are years’ challenged. My last drawing has left its mooring and for better or worse i bid thee bon voyage. As ever one would hope to end any 6 month relationship having learned something, but i fear my choice of subjects for my present drawing belies such optimism. What i was thinking about when i woke up today were the parts of the valley Maria Sabina looked at and whether i am capable of intuiting the profound expression in her quiet determined face. Ah well, no sense getting worked up, or as some might say “buying trouble.” If i am able, it will be done, and if not something close - meaning i’ll be foisted on my own petard of excoriating judgement about something i just spent 6 months loving. I have found that writing is an essential function of my creative process, and consistent with my unique right brain/left brain civil war. Just like the hunger to find a loving image to faithfully internalize, or regurgitate, or any of the other equally bizarre interpretations of graphic/plastic arts, writing nourishes me in ways that objet d’art are unable to. Each activity works for me as a lens to consider the manifest complexities of this life and therefore give better understanding to that interminable quest for self-awareness, for knowing the heart or mind of another is a virtual impossibility in this manifestation of spirit.

As much as i’d like to fancy myself immune from the opinion of others, its indelicate presumption festers and goads me to further growth, or greater clarity about the human i have become and am becoming. What is there to know about the caverns of one’s being, or are we collectively no more than that progression of snapshots the ruling class has compiled of us each supposedly aiding in the protection of ourselves from ourselves, but more likely some sort of elaborate “chutes and ladders” game resulting in our certain separation from time, independence, imagination, love etc., etc., etc. What fascinates me is how difficult it has been for me to arrive at even the barest of outlines of that celebrated unconscious our society’s experts have posited, expounded and even cured but never presented in any tangible fashion. I am often mystified that our mute acquiescence to surveillance amounts to more data collected about our behaviors than is readily accessible to ourselves unless you happen to be a system administrator with the “keys to the kingdom” and writable media or permission to transmit such as those demigod technocrats, from whose ranks the freedom fighters of tomorrow are emerging - Thank You Mr. Edward Snowden. The gallery has now been put in order for the day’s culture traffic and the owner has receded into his emerging future - the “table rasa” of fear every creative spirit faces when commencing that peculiar process in which artists of all stripes seem unable to resist. How the fuck does this pertain to future, past or present, you might be asking yourselves. If so you’ve just made my day. 

I’m of the mind there are not near enough questions in the world we inhabit. So much so, i’m horribly self-conscious about presuming on your time with assertions of any kind. Yet the question of what our world will look like in 50 years without having made the effort to establish a question beachhead in this world of knowns. But just like my 1st aerospace lead Doug W_____ so sagely opined too long ago, “it’s not who you know, it’s who you blow.” However keen his Machiavellian instincts may have been, he missed the orientation by about 180 degrees, and future of our world has been pinned to a pinnacle of successive ass-kissers whose seeming competence is predicated wholly on one’s ability to deliver on high while demanding the best from all who would follow. While writing this, it occurs to me how much hay could be made from what i don’t say, and that i would have to ask who the fuck cares. Mr. M.T. Suit is the preeminent  ass kisser, just ask his financier, Mother Russia, but what for me nails the logic of my admittedly dubious concept of our collective straits, is how this narcissistic baboon managed to garner so many hard bit, hard charging, hard up yankee razorbacks to pucker up and engage in such a carnal pyramid of fakeness. Then again he could be right, or left given his consistency, about me being a sore loser. If that were true, rather than stretching to do my best as an equal opportunity menace to sacred cows everywhere, mostespeciallymyown - i’d be asses and elbows on the “information super-highway currying favor by conjuring witty and acerbic repartee so much the rage in the talking head echo chamber that constitutes our current media stream. Instead, i’m questing to enlarge my contribution to those around me and at the same time utilize the fuzzy logic my “loving/doing their best parents” kindly beat into me during my wayward youth, and which i now allow as lead sled dog in a world that may forget what snow is in the lifetime of my brother’s youngest grandchild.

It is that world which compels me to consider such a threadbare topic as imagining the future. Nikolas Tesla “we may live to witness unimaginable horrors” This was prior to the collapse of NYC with the end of the twin trade towers. It is hard to accept there are millions of teenagers alive today who have never known a world prior to the current American Empire. It is the "corporate inevitability" which Arundhati Roy speaks of that sticks in my craw, for along with all the saber rattling and fake as fuck exhortations to fear we are at a nexus in time where the greatest transformation of our species could as easily, or is as easily transpiring as we speak. Your call. I was very fortunate to be raised in part by a thinking man who demanded the same from me - not to believe as he, but to use what mind i have to consider my world without being prey to others or preying on others. He was an existentialist which to sum is to be responsible in the same vein as Rumi’s quote “you are not a drop in the ocean, you are the ocean in a drop.” I refuse to surrender to the self serving concept of our divided reality when there is so little difference between all of us. There is no mother on earth that does not have the biological hardwiring to help her child survive, even the emotional ciphers devoid of affect resort to the intellectual equivalent if only to remain in camouflage. What amazes me, is how easily we have been torn from each other. I am not amazed because i have not personally willfully, even cruelly separated myself from those who have professed great love for me, but after time and contemplation the murderous rage so close to our human skin abates and even the most heinous of betrayals in my life now inspire little more than a cruel indifference. What is truly amazing is how bad i feel for not finding some way to surmount that indifference with the flag of peace which i so vocally and cravenly pronounce as mine own.

What bullshit, for you see the charm of existentialism or any level of self awareness is not dissimilar to Gertrude Stein’s observation “there is no there there,” or even the “i am you as you are he and we are all together” of Beatle lore. The best way i have found to confront my own abundant blind spots, is to accept my resistance to admit the vilest amongst us as brethren - essentially it is my fault the world is as fucked up as it is. This personal unkindness is a double edged sword, for as deeply as i am able to peer into my own murderous abyss of rancor and befriend that beast, the sooner i will be able to dissipate those prideful, needless barriers to warm open heartedness which Mr. Leonard Cohen so sagely summed as “love is the only engine of survival.” Oddly the thorniest of anxieties pale compared to the challenge of being kind to oneself, especially if that self is intractable in penetrating the veil of personal darkness. If there is to be a future of any worth, it will not be from bombing each other into 'sticks and stone' battles over boundaries in some purulent oozing environment. Our only hope for a future worthy of the majestic mystery of this planet and its inhabitants is based on those whose memories that go back into our species origins. As much as it is good for any leader to stand and say “we put a man on the moon,” we have yet to hear a leader declare we have conquered war and are resolved to find ways to mend our oceans, heal our rivers and nurture our abundance. Until this happens we are no more than jesters for an evil royalty in a twisted court full of palace intrigue, inbred gene pools and riches that are believed to reside on servers in the sky. Fuck the cloud, love someone today - you will feel better.

Lao Tzu - “if you are depressed, you are living in the past; if you are anxious, you are living in the future, you will be anxious; if you are at peace, you are living in the present.

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-

past present - the sonnet

why does the past seem to happen again

and again¿ is sadness DNA made?

what made DNA¿ is it from heaven?

will we be more punished because we prayed?

one asked how we see past but not future?

i hope such questions will be remembered

while askers be fabric for our culture

if so, then our days may not be numbered.

however “past is prologue” has been heard

enough times to justify hard choices

to kill, to die - so we may cull the herd.

power behind closed doors - only voices.

what if all our pasts are the illusion

and pollution caused our real conclusion¿ 

jts 09/15/2017

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

∞

arte

Al escribir esto, tengo 61 años; Mi padre enseñaba inglés en la escuela secundaria y era un poeta; Mi madre enseñó arte de la escuela media y es un artista. Yo estaba solo en un ferry entre Amsterdam y Londres para mi 17 cumpleaños; Pop había recogido una furgoneta Volkswagen en su camino a Grecia con su nueva esposa y su hijo, donde escribió poesía durante un año sabático. Yo estaba en una búsqueda de la visión y fue guiado en la escultura por un maestro de alfarería amable que también resultó ser un profesor de arte en la Universidad de Brighton. La misión de Visión es taquigrafía para la juventud disipada, porque "Haz lo que quieras" en ese momento era más que un comercial en MTV. Que yo no muriera con una aguja en mi brazo se debe en gran parte al estímulo de ese profesor. No comparto esto en falsa intimidad contigo, ni con 12 pasos en tu moneda de diez centavos, pero para que puedas sentir el alcance de compromiso que siento hacia una actividad que se remonta a los albores de nuestra historia colectiva. La posibilidad de que pueda estar viviendo entre los últimos artistas / chamanes es una ironía que se desprende incluso de mi imaginación vívida sin embargo addlepated con la edad o embotado por el miedo que una vez la imaginación viva puede ser.

Mark Rothko era un pintor de campo de color cuya demanda de pintura se convirtió en estratosférica después de su suicidio. Fue traicionado por su colega artista, amigo y ejecutor de la finca Theodore Stamos, instructor en la Art Students League de Nueva York, donde asistí unos 5 años después de la muerte de Rothko. Su traición por un amigo con fines de lucro fue ruido de fondo a la santa influencia de mi amigo y mentor José De Creeft - un español de 90 años de edad. Hay una foto él y nuestra clase en una fiesta de Navidad en la Liga; Él había colocado su mano en mi cabeza donde me había arrodillado para la foto del grupo. Siempre estaba haciendo una mierda así. Por ejemplo, me mostró una pintura de él por un admirador que se representa con un brazo alrededor de su hombro; En la versión que compartía conmigo; Él había pintado sobre ella como un elefante con su tronco alrededor de su hombro; En otra pieza fantástica había modelado una rata en posición vertical, sujetando una nuez a sus mejillas en una cacerola llena de tuercas y pernos. Soy el heredero de esta irreverencia, que es todo lo que constituye mi auténtica persona como artista, más que los 1.000 de las horas de estudio; Conferencias eruditas o vagabundeo de museos que forman parte de la formación muy real y necesaria para llamarse "artista", nunca me he hecho llamar artista; Pasaron décadas antes de que susurraba la palabra tan fuerte mi aversión a los diletantes que he visto ocupar el alto terreno del comercio.

Lucky me - mi entrenamiento se convirtió en una batalla no muy diferente a la del alma de Charlie Sheen en "Pelotón". Mi alma colgó durante décadas entre la traición atroz de Mark Rothko y lo sagrado - el mismo conflicto entre tiempo y producto sobre el cual Miguel Ángel Y el Papa Piados luchó; El Papa, según Vasari, despachando el aparato político de la época para recuperar al artista renegado de su Florencia natal sobre un desacuerdo sobre qué exactamente el artista debe dar vuelta a su mano al siguiente. Tampoco era tan cortado y seco como los criterios puramente venales de hoy del valor artístico (por más que se determine), pues Miguel Ángel era un alma reverencial que creía profundamente en la santidad de su obra - hoy el arte sagrado es el bando todopoderoso; Este hecho triste juega hacia fuera todo hacia abajo la línea excepto que los "creatives" en ciernes de hoy son ahora indicadores del mercado con sus propios filtros y contenido del pre-consumidor que es "empujado", "incitado", "querido" en su subconsciente, y la pulsación de tecla Salida entonces cosechado como gusto de las tendencias que hace un poco de la cogida rica un poco más rico y mejor capaz de aprovechar lo que las guerras del arte del gladiador "están sirviendo para arriba como cultura superior de la tapa - hable sobre su hámster en una rueda de ardilla.

El arte ha sido secuestrado por los profanos precisamente en ese momento de nuestra extraña historia humana cuando una visión mística de esa exitosa cacería existencial que podría guiar a la humanidad a través del horrible peligro que enfrentamos como especie. Casi todos los artistas contemporáneos que conozco hoy están totalmente y completamente absorbidos por la realidad financiera y la necesidad de un estatus de celebridad y un modelo de negocios proporcional que proporcione exceso de inventario; Escondite forastero y / o espacio en la pared en la "casa grande" - el museo papa. Muchos artistas son desviados de lo sagrado a la validación comercial por la tentadora influencia de los nuevos ricos medios. Hipócrita que soy, aquí me siento sirviendo a usted un lector desconocido que raspa para "pulsaciones de teclas" u otra recompensa viral que podría traducir en centavos con el que continuar mi asalto quijotesco en ese mismo mercado - sólo otro traidor en la mezcla. Mi alma mater - "La Liga de Estudiantes de Arte" ha sido subsumida en una disputa intestina amarga sobre un proyectado fragmento de penthouses desde el nuevo rascacielos más alto adyacente en Nueva York.Este proyecto está siendo calzado en el Manhattan rápidamente gentrifying y es una metáfora perfecta para Lucha de nuestra edad - ser humano contra corporación.

jts 11/08/2017

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

∞

being - an essay / not being - the sonnet

In the dead of night i entered my bathroom to rinse a kidney, the irritating automatic light did not come on; aside from an empty bladder, there was a moment of relief which one instinctively feels in the absence of anything automatic. That relief was soon followed by the not implausible reality world leadership had gone off-the-rails and the nuclear option extinguished some part of civilization and its handmaiden - electricity. Sublimating my terror outside with puffs of tobacco, i could see street lamps, but not whether neighbors had suffered a similar outage. I lit a candle on the stairs of my hosts, and began to wonder about the complexities of life without electricity - for example, my computer battery . . . 26% . . . 25% . . . I am fortunate to have writing as an expression to explore feelings of panic, depravation and curiosity when faced with turmoil, however unlikely it is i’d resort to longhand should my battery expire. That is a bizarre commentary on my commitment to the written word, but then again, since waking, i’ve considered the possibility that our world might have been extinguished at the hands of a “leader” - an even more bizarre commentary. I think i’ll have another cigarette existence . . . 23%. . . 22%. I guess the question is whether my desire to express myself is greater than the convenience afforded me by technology.

I wonder how important expression is when what one says runs counter to most of what is heard about the world we live. I'm hard-wired for survival, so for me the alternate reality of corporate expression creates cognitive dissonance. The sound of rain on the roof and the familiar petrichor outside my window are ancient like the smell of damp fur for our forebears, yet our species' possible extinction based on actual data saps any security i might feel having shelter from the rain. Electricity has been restored, and the obnoxious automatic bathroom light that may have been a luxury to our forebears only seems to exacerbate my feelings of precariousness - why is that¿ One of the foundations of design engineering is repeatability; if we are entering an epoch of intermittent utilities, would it not be wise to cultivate tolerance for outage, be that food, water, electricity, and g_d help us - the absence of the internet. In a capitalist society such as ours, where the ruling elite are buffered from the same austerity they would use to build character for a restless population, it makes no sense to look to the profit model as a solution for shortages that are a fact of an infinite growth economy in a finite resource world - shortages which will only grow in severity and scope.

Reform of our economic model is not viable or correct. What i resort to for legitimacy is an intense application of my skills, with challenges beyond my experience. If this defines me, then good. Whether my selfish inner direction provides an example of a life beyond consumer addiction, i can’t know. I mistrust mobs or group-think, and persuasion of anyone about anything is bullshit. Yet i care deeply about the injustice and oppression fostered by hatred and the grasping born of an exclusive concern for one’s own wellbeing. I am able only to take care of myself and to extend help to as many as i may without taking on water. This selfishness torments me when i see rafts of human beings being plundered and shipwrecked by those from whom the refugees would seek haven. Is there a solution? How does a solitary creative life contribute anything to a new paradigm? I am no saint, yet it our times demand the best from all of us. I do not possess the inner fortitude for the selfless devotion of a monk, except, as Arundhati Roy said, to chase "beauty to her lair”. I am grateful Mssr. _rump for giving a face to the vanity our entire planet turned into a bloodsport. This is a remarkably harsh and unforgiving judgement, and i include my own existential quest in the equation. I see nothing else to turn my hand to, if not the finest work i can create - that is sad.

Perhaps not as sad as success defined by some amount of bytes catalogued on a financial server, or assessing a person's character by how many human beings agree with that person. Michelangelo painted a view of himself as skin held by Saint Peter; when asked why, Michelangelo replied, and i paraphrase, “when i die, i wish to be empty of all i was meant to create.” That idea makes perfect sense, much more sense than qualifying merit based on publication or shows. I don’t know what to be means, which may be my most successful creative effort - to have doubt in a world full with certainty. I know some things about family, about love - esoteric knowledge - worthless to anyone but the curios. The most difficult subject i’ve ever encountered is to know myself. I have a vague idea, a hazy outline that might suggest a "who", but not an "am"; why is that¿ I am happy, i am sad describe states of the who, but not the kernel. Descartes said, "je pense donc je suis." which satisfied many, but the nagging question remains, what is the throne of consciousness, what's driving the train? hunger, pain, love - your cell phone¿

This line of thinking is dwarfed by the enormity of our physical world, meaning either the expanding universe, or below the event horizon, depending on one's perspective. Can we be more than that which we are comprised, gas, molecules, protoplasm, minerals, gravity, wavelength, etc.¿ How could anyone possibly answer that question when we have no real idea of just how extensive our universe is, or parse what's missing from our primitive catalogue of knowledge¿ These are the questions i come up with when attempting to “know myself.” Is it simply a case of will, "i think i can, i think i can"¿ Can one wake up one morning and say, I will become president of the United States, and epso facto - voila - one is president; it would seems so for Mssr. _rump. The deeper question for me is, who would want to be the president, and why; who would want to be the richest human being in the world or the fastest, smartest or most beautiful when one can just be happy¿ Sounds goofy, i know, but is it any goofier than spending one’s entire life acquiring things someone else said they should have, and then going to work to pay for those things because someone else said you had to earn them. What does that even mean - to earn. Have i earned the right to express myself¿ Apparently I have, because i am right now. Yet daily there are more and greater attacks on that ability, nor are these attacks solely on our rights of expression; now the attacks are on our very right to exist. This right i will never cede. I don't know why i am here, but i do know any force other than death which is greater than the sum of my parts is the only force i acknowledge; I do not know what it means to be, but i will keep seeking answers, with or without permission from the media shot callers and their cell phones attempting to define what it means to be. 

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-

not being - the sonnet

prior to the big bang there was something

the event horizon is not the end

our presence or absence is not nothing

and all in between is more than a trend

up, down, in, out, off or on is our lot,

so why do we squirm so vigorously?

Is there meaning in that steam off our pot¿

Do we make matter from mortality?

Is it possible our lives radiate

outward like the big bang forever more

still emitting once we de-animate

like some odd Hawking black hole metaphor 

who gives a fuck if we are mystery¿

our legacy - whose memory are we

jts 08/12/2017

http://stoneartist.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

communication - an essay / silence - the sonnet

My father was given to homilies, and i remember hanging up from phone calls with him where he’d invariably close the call saying “communicate.” Like all good advice, it’s easy to hear - a little more difficult to put into practice. I have read where a huge percentage of all human communication involves body language. We derive a great deal of information from cues found in the posture and carriage of other human beings - filling language with elegant phrases like “turn of a woman’s ankle.” The question becomes what is understood by whom based on what¿ I can say with good authority that many a woman’s turned ankle was saying nothing at all to me; ah misunderstanding and what it can teach us if we are good students. Awareness is a solid partner to the barely understood and often maligned effort which communication brings to any exchange. In order to convey a thought or feeling, one must have an idea or sense that might be of interest to the right party. Not all turned ankles are speaking directly to you; so how to learn which ankle is the one that beckons with all the delight and joy that might accompany such a quiet expression¿ I’m beginning to have my doubts that a computer is capable of conveying such complicated communication; which if true, means that communicating the fundamental nature of allure via screen does not bode well for parsing the manifest other pressing misunderstandings in our rapidly devolving civil fabric, much less the rapidly evolving isolation of the human soul.

My skin is the boundary of my self-awareness with my aged senses informing a fading echo of the sharp rich odors and sounds of youth. However, as with all vacuums, the fallow field wants to grow something. It is almost as though as the world recedes with all its attendant distractions the stranger i’ve avoided all my life grows more confident that it might be heard. Memories become just that, faded echoes of events no longer present to the senses - love, hate, want, misery. All once vivid demands from a complex interchange of indoctrination, assimilation and socialization now cardboard cutouts with balloon voices repeating ancient litanies about exhausted turmoil. The stranger within is vastly more comfortable with these specters of past power than what my withering “i” is willing to accede. The self once so intent on satisfaction of all urges has trouble ceding ground that doesn’t result in accomplishment or gain, while the stranger seems more content just to be heard. However, like the honest misunderstanding of the lady’s “turn of an ankle,” simply because my quiet stranger was not the one being addressed at the time does not mean the dame’s own stranger was not expressing a want, just not a want for me. My internal stranger conveys much want when not shouted over by what Leonard Cohen wrote as “the blizzard of the world” or at least that is what i’m beginning to hear. Perhaps my life would simplify if i just allowed my interior to speak its desire and fly with any yes or no reply. 

I accept that any reader considering the forgoing abstruse dialogue would require persistence to locate meaning, yet if there is this much difficulty for one person to make clear basic ideas about self-awareness, how much more difficult must it be for all of us to discuss with others far more complex issues such as shame, fury, fear or hatred, most especially in a media culture filling itself up to the rafters on scandal and excess¿ For myself it has become very important to learn how to hear without taking a position, save understanding. Is the woman’s ankle turn addressing me; is my prostate hardening; is the war i object to mine; is en vino veritas true - ad nauseam¿ That the universe could be as curious as i aspire to is very encouraging, yet if i’m as obstinate a student as when young, what could i possibly learn from a curious universe whatever its dimensionality¿ Awareness is a correlation of communication in so far as one can barely speak of what isn’t known - an interesting intersection in the top secret world of ours. A paradox for me is the concept of what can possibly be known outside of one’s own self. If love is relinquishing: where love predominates will is absent; where will predominates, love is absent - paraphrasing Carl G. Jung, what can i affect but myself. So too with awareness, craving a woman will teach me very little about her, while watching her ankles can be quite instructive.

Understanding the world and possible meanings of reality about our existence is not going to give up much ground from a frontal assault. I could join a militia that adheres to my particular flavor of freedom and proceed to take no prisoners, but then i couldn’t sit here and share my confusion with others as puzzled as myself, possibly more so - maybe you will help me find other members of my tribe - stranger things have happened¿ I’m becoming more certain that fun, nee happiness is closer to the core than anything normally   found virtually anywhere, and its far cheaper - air travel being the climate change elephant with its footprints in the jello, so to speak. You didn’t really think tripadvisor, hostelworld, couchsurfing etc., etc., etc., were just touching base to know you’se well - didja¿ Wherever you go - there you are. The dilemma goes back to an argument i had with a young engineer - his position being “knowledge is finite” vs my continued belief how can you say what you don’t know. Are we species simply the micro to the universal macro¿ Rumi says we are not a drop in the ocean, but the ocean in a drop. If true, introspection takes on a whole new wrinkle. What if my reticent stranger whom i am only beginning to appreciate was actually “the” stranger and we are just notes in g_d’s song¿ As yet, i’ve never read anything to prove this potentially heretical idea false, but the administration is young still. What is useful regards an honest desire to communicate¿ This is a complex question for me because there are many who are close and not so close who would, if not shut me up altogether, then at the very least have license over my tongue. This awareness is grievous, but i’m unsure whose sadness it is. My stranger has heard awful things spoken yet because it has never harmed me as the faded echoes of memory have, i feel more safe with myself than anyone i’ve ever known, and i’ve known some very loving people in my very fortunate existence.

The further i travel the greater the mystery; i will feel better when i can say the same for fun, nee happiness. I know the essence of my happiness is not virtual; the corollary would be that my faded memories left because i no longer made them happy - it would be insane to believe oneself so powerful as to make another happy, unhappy, angry, sad, strong, weak, better or less. I have found i am more comfortable with crazy people once i learned it is not contagious, but it can be a perilous contact high if they are beautiful or hallucinating. My deeper concern is welcoming home the stranger who has patiently waited to share my heart’s desire. I believe it be nearly impossible to give kindness to another if one has not found within one’s own skin a deep and abiding warm regard for one’s life. I also believe that if one acts from this warm regard it is possible to know better one’s own pain, suffering and inimical factotum born of our collective history within a dark and sometimes dangerous world. The fact remains the more things change, the more they remain the same and it will likely be true as it is now that when you are born crying while everyone around you’s laughing; and when you die laughing, those around will be crying. But the in-between time when you have the opportunity to “leave the world a better than you found it” - Jane Sterling, is where your internal quiet stranger has a chance for redemption and reintegration if one can still hear the serenade of a mother’s laughter or cadence of prayer in a father’s important lesson throughout the places one visits or rests one must acknowledge with respect to our human frailty.

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-

silence - the sonnet

it is quiet on a Sunday morning
but somewhere in the world there’s too much noise-

crying in the eyes of children mourning

something that can’t be done with any poise.

what is the sound beyond the human grief-

is it love, or an infant in deep sleep¿

why is our good ship earth stuck on a reef

so dire, while the good captains make no peep¿

is a tornado core eerie’n silent?

is our world a tornado core- passing

with zephyr winds foretelling bad intent,

or have we learned and all our hearts massing¿

it seems to me the quiet that is found

while loud beats calm with silence all around

  

jts 06/30/2017

http://stoneartist.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

asleep - an essay / awake - the sonnet

While i was growing up, my mother suffered from insomnia; her suffering strongly affected my attitude toward rest and alertness - without rest one cannot be alert - fatigued, burdened, fearful - but not alert. I equate alertness to awareness, an innate capacity to respond to the manifold nuances within the world. Just now I chose to forego work on a drawing I’d very much like to finish because my rest was incomplete. I slept deeply, but had troublesome dreams. This may very well be because I’m traveling back to the region wherein I grew up, mostly to visit my mother. We have mended our fences as well as any 88 year-old parent and 63 year-old offspring could with a history such as ours. Nor will i bore you with the morbid blow by blow; suffice it to say i got everything i deserved as a snot faced wooly mammoth teenage wannabe; she, i have to believe, was as entertained as any post war divorcee with a career could have possibly been. They were very intense days, but manageable. At that time in history there was no concession to the decay of civilization - you were either awake and propagating all that was promised by the burgeoning technology which landed a man on the moon, or you were hunkering down, battening the hatches and pulling up the rope ladders. The conceit that this was a unique time in human history evaporated with the election of Richard M. (I am not a crook) Nixon. There has been much hash made over the drug induced fantasies of that time; speaking only for myself, it was not recreational - social networking perhaps, entrepreneurial even, but mostly a vehicle for enlarging consciousness. I can’t say given follies of reflection when old, how much was a function of naivete or how much was a sharp perception honed on the brashness of youth. I can say my experiences were eye opening. What fell away, or was torn asunder was the simple confidence in status quo. I question everything, but mostly myself.

Drug deals gone bad are hard on idealism, for witnessing deaths from excess sap one’s faith. Yet I watch horrified as a generation of coop-shopping hipster doofuses acquiesce to the poisoning of the food chain and the shackling of our attention span on screens the size of baseball cards while extolling the virtues of a democratic corporate shill simply based on her plumbing. I wonder what lessons my fellow americans learned during the slow motion coup d’etat that began with the seduction of Pete Rose, and climaxed with coronation of Mr. M.T. Suit. I am guilty myself and know very well the temptations of socialization. It began with therapy, which i advocate if you have a strong sense of self and resistance to indoctrination and terminated with over a decade of relative good living as an aerospace drudge. To my credit, i invested the excess lucre into a bachelor’s degree in English believing at the time i could transition as a teacher. It was too late for me, my taint from designing weapons provoked so much reservation about the logic of our world that i was unable to reconcile the differences between the obvious needs of an inner city student body aware that it was being warehoused with the newly ensconced “leave no child behind,” a polite euphemism for “teach them what ‘we’ want them to know, and to hell with what they want to learn.” It is hard to distinguish within the arc of happenstance how i got inoculated from the dream of make amerika gr8 again, but these notes into the aether will clarify how ill i am, susceptible to contagion and incomplete that inoculation might have been, if at all. The best i can do is fight the fatigue that comes from a culture designed for the leisure of handful at the expense the whole.

I don’t know what parts of my psychic makeup have not awakened, but i do find it nearly impossible to turn a blind eye to the desecration and destruction of our world. My youthful disillusionment has certainly sharpened my bullshit meter, yet i’ve returned to smoking and drinking with all the attendant rationalizations for such destructive habits - why is that¿ I have convinced myself that purity of purpose has no relationship with reality if it is conducted within a vacuum, so to be truly pure requires contamination with the vices of our existence. “Emotional masturbation” you might say, and “why not but i prefer copulation” might be my reply. I do know the more conviction i felt about what is right the greater my dissonance - the inclination to sully is mine alone. There is no Marlboro Man i can point to and say, “it was his fault” - the equivalent would be pointing at the followers of Muhammad and condemning them for violence in the world. I am my own worst enemy and my sole loving companion be that in the midst of hordes or in loving embrace. Woman, when I carved my first statue, it was out of a limestone tailing off of a Manhattan demolition; I included amongst the minutia an arrogant young artist full of confidence might pursue, a vedanta pulling the veil from a man seated in a lotus posture. Where is that vedanta now, or are you she and just to shy to say so¿ It is i who is too shy or wary; just this morning i conflicted myself over whether to accost a young woman walking in the rain so as to loan her my umbrella just inside the door in my backpack. Months earlier i had made a similar gesture to a young merchant at a festival out of concern for his mother getting wet - he kept the umbrella. I am not one to quibble over chump change, but the question remains was my reservation to share with someone in need a punishment of the transgressor, or to myself for a lack of clarity in purpose? I don’t know. Is the nature of internal conflict knowable?

Is there a corollary between knowledge and understanding? We live in a world awash in knowledge, and some people who know me seem afraid of questions I ask - why is peace on earth impractical¿ How can 7 billion people allow themselves to be bullied by the population of a small village? Are you angry with me¿ Am i angry with you? What is death¿ etc., etc., etc. .  . My suspicion is that facts matter, but my downfall would be “what is a fact¿” When young and at art school, i read a quote by one of the surrealists in effect “when i came to understand atomic physics, it seemed the world dissolved in front of me.” Somehow this memory was intertwined with the image of the fur-lined teacup - modern information superhighway could only find an echo, or source document depending, from Wassily Kandinsky substituting dissolved for destruction. The fact is, i did not conjure the memory but find little trace of its existence in a world awash with information. I know where i am in the “universe,” but don’t know what i am or what a universe is. I know there are men alive on my planet who are killing each other over the meaning of and act of the word “love,” and/or permission to love that deity which they understand. My sense is god is a woman with a very finely tuned sense of humor, but her bivouac lacks entertainment, so i’m it. When she is bored synchronicity is triggered and i find myself knee deep in something seeming to me - unfunny. The Great Spirit has my back, so i remain unafraid - too fucking exposed, but unafraid. I have learned that if you do something long enough something will happen, so i try to find beauty where i can and regurgitate it as what the art market forces are paradoxically iridescently attracted to and simultaneously repelled by. I also know it is bad form to end a sentence with a preposition and/or a prepositional phrase; both of which just did i.

I find it helpful if i close my eyes to sleep repeating a mantra i made up as compactly as a layman might, it focuses my mind and trims my breath for rest: 

May you embrace your suffering, may you be free of the roots of suffering - greed hatred, delusion; may you enjoy happiness, free of the roots of suffering that impede happiness - greed, hatred, delusion; breathe in pain, breathe out simplicity, patience, compassion; om mani padme hom; ho'oponono, i'm sorry, please forgive me, i love you, thank you; namu-myoho-renge-kyo; may you possess unconditional self worth developed through radical honesty.

Because i integrate this repetition into rudimentary isometrics and more brief Qi Gong i subject my battered wannabe corpse to each morning there’s a visceral echo throughout the day i like. Just like the pushing through the confusion at the beginning of any project for the breakthrough that makes it seem as though you are rolling a big rock down a low sloped hill slowly, rather than being eternally damned with one sort of scavenger or another, feasting on the existential viscera of your innocent good intentions. What is wakefulness when perseveration interferes with mindfulness? How is it narcissism is poled with self respect, are we whipped dogs of some disembodied corporate shill, or 7 billion remarkably talented human beings of stupendous capacity for decent human warmth? I guess you can begin to see how some may take offense with my curiosity - Madam God and her minions are tireless in their quest of mirth. And i find myself a willing acolyte, for not knowing how to make someone laugh is the single best avenue to figuring that out - lucky me. It occurs to me if anyone finds a mystical resonance and chooses to congregate, i hope to aggregate a list of questions into the book of questions and leave it out in the aether for future +5v/-5v impulses to find correspondence. Sad the cryptic has offended the septic, whose roots were plucked by the aristocratic, in service of the plutocratic with nary a peep from the proletariat. C.G. Jung - “The pendulum of the mind swings between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” By that logic nothing we can imagine in this world that makes sense to any one of us is verboten, how can we make that happen¿ just askin’ 

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-

awake - the sonnet

i dreamt i was awake, but had to pee.

if true sleeping is just a little death

how can we do it so much and stay free¿

if my confusion offends, take a breath.

does anyone look out for anyone

hoping that they are good, safe and happy?

if not, it’d been better we were long gone

leaving those with balls and pussy to not flee.

yeah just a bunch of wiggling organisms

lost in a vacuum said is fraught with love

how would profit wrong, said the lower -isms

“easily” chirped back the broken winged dove.

laying her dying breast on a dead planet

she sang, all she knew with her heart in it.

  

jts 070717

http://stoneartist.com  reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

gone - an essay / going - the sonnet

I am leaving a place where i’ve lived for some 5 months. There are many conflicting emotions which i’d like to sort out if i knew how. Are humans capable of selecting what they feel, or is the challenge simply to recognize as much as possible the dimensions of one’s emotions - or a blend of both - to understand what one is experiencing and to then choose the “appropriate” response? i don’t know. It would certainly simplify most matters if we as a species could know as much as possible about what we are feeling at any given moment, and to then make an informed decision about which way to turn - fight or flight, as they describe the lizard reflex. It is 6:30 am on the day of my departure, and ordinarily i’d have spent the next 3 1/2 hours sucking on the internet tit, but mysterious circumstances have rendered the internet inaccessible. A suspicious component of my character attributes a petty vindictiveness by the proprietors of where i’m leaving, nor is my unease entirely a projection of the expected anxiety that attends moves such as i am undertaking. Part of the difficulty in going anywhere is to be where one is welcomed and comfortable; those conditions do not describe my current habitation, and there is no fault. There is little i can do to change the suspicious attribute in my character, for that would be like asking a leopard to change its spots, but there is much i can do about which behavior i choose for company. I’ve watched three biographies recently when access was allowed - John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Each of these stories described, in part, individuals who had been swallowed by the personas attributed to them by the coercion of fame. If i’ve stumbled into an environment where those in a position of responsibility would employ deprivation, be it internet, water, respect etc., to express a conflict in their hearts, the only rational response is warmheartedness regardless of how valid my suspicions might be.

I know very little about my destination, outside of its address and vicinity within a larger town. If my lack of access to the internet where i am is a desperate act expressing some inexpressible feeling, the compassion of warmheartedness is the most generous path i could choose and if the lack of internet service is simply the synchronicity of a greater mystery, then the logic of warmheartedness is a gift to myself as well as a suitable lens with which to gaze ahead into the unknown. Each of the writers mentioned above at the end of their lives seemed to have deprived themselves of this option, with two taking their own lives, and the 3rd dying from self inflicted cardiopulmonary collapse due to excessive drinking and smoking. I do know that each tackled the thornier issues of their day rather than slap a happy patina on their prose and upload content into the “clickbait factory” nee “dream machine”. Lao Tzu says “be content with what you have, and the whole world belongs to you.” I’ve thought of this often during the past 5 months, for there is much that is suitable about my lodging and i’ve accomplished good work, it is the sense of community that feels absent. This notion of community is a complex issue for me but is close to love of family, for that is what is left to me based on choices i’ve made in my life. One can never really remove oneself, or be removed from the birth family you were born into; where one chooses to live and keep one’s heart is an entirely different matter. I choose to be near any loving vibration because i have much to learn about how to manifest that sense. I am motivated partly by depravation like a thirsty traveler looking for moisture, but my travels have encouraged me to also see how thirsty all human beings are; where i am now leaving is a perfect example.

There is a tangible lack that seems to have informed every choice made in this environment; from an excessive dog pack, to manifold cisterns for holding water in a declining water table within a historical agricultural community. On the surface it would seem a copacetic, even idyllic site with ample, in a stinted kind of way, appointments. What is built into the situation that would not be expected based on its alternative-to-the-status-quo facade is a rigid ordinate/subordinate hierarchy replete with locked-away-tools, derogatory remarks about the worthiness of the area’s historical inhabitants and an almost palpable contempt for those they would ostensibly be hosting. I’ve done my level best to understand without judgement; i greatly admire the courage and pluck it took to uproot and build an estate in a foreign land; i have to ask myself at what cost¿ While weighing my decision whether to remain, knowing what i knew about the behaviors and prejudices of my hosts it was tempting to assume a superior air - if for no other reason than the illusion of autonomy within a deceptively closed society. But that is not helpful, nor warmhearted because i’d be simply be mimicking what i don’t understand. What i did find in my effort to understand was greater coercion to comply, and still i don’t understand . .  . two days later in my new digs: Polar opposites seems to characterize my life including the backseat-driver diagnoses of manic depression, blended with a touch of narcissism for taste my family uses to describe their various demons. Unfortunately one’s skin is not escapable, so i spend my time seeking peace with my demons and freedom from all fear.

My room opens into the main entrance hallway to the building; my bathroom windows open into the same hallway, so the sound of family dinners mixes nicely with whatever i may be watching as i go to sleep. The journey i’m on will not conclude here as far as i know, nor am i in any hurry to depart. The hosts are kindly, warm and native. Unbidden by me a nephew brought a board that had been fabricated to facilitate my drawing efforts - it was the single most kind gesture i can remember in my life. But this is the key, i felt no compulsion to accept. I can only hope my execrable translation adequately conveyed my astonished gratitude. I do not know the customs, but am counting on honesty to carry the day. It is too close to my demise to curry favor by accepting kindness that would not serve any purpose - i do not want to die fake. Like emerging from some sort of cocoon, over the past 5 months i’ve been forced to not only neuter a pathological hunger to help, but also tempt fate by honestly expressing what i need and don’t need. We, as a species, may have lost sight of the real journey’s that are our lives - transformation. I’m constantly struck by the transition of my own thinking - the wholesale rejection of previous convictions and prejudice in favor of more practical solutions; even the elusive avatar of self awareness seems to come in and out of focus. There are moments when i re-experience sentiments, glimpses of former realities as filtered through visceral memory like revisiting former haunts that remain similar but no longer contain any ghost of a former self - if that makes any sense.

I do know that just as we are a portable population more so than anytime in human history, so too is the terrain of our interiors subject to decisions of itinerary. We have the capacity to choose a destination and then take those steps necessary to arrive in the vicinity of that destination. But just like arriving someplace you’ve never been, it is impossible to know about the mystery and depth of your destination until you’ve undertaken the effort to satisfy your wants and needs. For example, if you decide that warmheartedness is the place you want to live, and you arrive there only to find yourself lacking nourishment and rest. It doesn’t mean that you are in the wrong place only that you haven’t yet found the resources that your unique character requires to thrive. What is important is that you are searching based on what you know about yourself, that which feeds your appetite. I am lucky to have learned that struggle is part of my hunger and that drawing and writing provide barriers to an easy satisfaction of that hunger. So i’ve learned patience for those stretches in the beginning of a project where hunger is enhanced like aromas from cooking. I now wait patiently for any point where starvation begins to abate; the trick is to let the pot simmer, and eat sparingly once the meal is cooked. I have found this metaphor works for most efforts to acclimate, be it a physical destination or the more challenging exploration of one’s internal dimensions. Wherever you travel, there will be unsavory dishes, and sometimes you will have nothing else to nourish you; be glad for what you are able to choke down having learned more about what you don’t enjoy; be comforted by the certain knowledge that if you are patient and have the confidence to continue your search, you will find provisions that satisfy whatever you have learned about your unique appetite and how to secure what provides you strength and happiness in this life. 

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-

gone - the sonnet

the sun was up; i was already gone

it felt funny being someplace else so soon;

there was no reason to wait for the dawn,

anymore than there’d be waiting for noon.

If i was there no longer, where was i?

is “going down the road” a destination

anymore than where i was answered why¿

my company now is contemplation.

beats the shit out of traveling alone.

could that be the “why” i left where i was-

fighting for memory- dog and his bone.

i still feel lost in the land of “because”

no more to dwell in the land of knowing

‘cause answers for “why” are found when going.

  

jts 17

http://stoneartist.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved