together - the essay / alone · a sonnet

I first met one of my closest friends the day after a windstorm blew down his fence. His father was repairing the damage, and i was young and strong thinking nothing of helping an old man do work. Years later, the then psychiatric intern son confided he thought me crazy for such behavior - i get that a lot, but not quite so qualified an opinion. Of course there was much else about our relationship that colored his thinking, me being an artist and, he being a doctor in the making. What made our relationship magical was our mutual interest in the other's vocation. He was naturally curious and unnaturally intelligent and i was crazy out of the womb with an unnatural capacity for 3 dimensional thinking and a congenital inability to perceive it with my 2 dimensional vision - we had fun for a time. He was older, and i was given to deference - a mostly defensive reaction formation to a world not easily viewed. Our first project, likely our only collaboration was a conceptual art deconstruction of his garage - 1930 era standalone two car garage in the bowels of Santa Ana. He had kindly provided space for my 2nd or 3rd carving because it was impossible to work in my single room. Apparently this experience touched us both powerfully, for i eventually participated in years of intensive psychoanalytic psycho therapy and he pursued passionately an avocation as artist. What is missing is the synchronicity and mutual enhancement from such a fortuitous relationship. Nor would this be an isolated instance of missed opportunity for aggrandized power. Of course i do not allude to his influence at every turn of my own dubious “mental health;” what i feel is missing is our mutual acknowledgement of a collaborative contribution to each other’s growth; is it even possible to do justice to the myriad of useful relationships each of us have had in our unique development?

“The secret of human freedom is to act well without attachment to the results” - The Bhagavad Gita

post-publication author’s amendment from dead-of-night ruminations - using the analytic skills learned from my friend’s powerful influence, it occurred to me consciously, then unconsciously just how much he had honored our creative relationship. 1) commissioning a dual portrait of he and his lovely wife. 2) confirming in a dream the accuracy of my deeper awareness by an image of great height reflecting the original graphic used which needs be replaced by their kindly commissioned portrait.

“People make themselves appear ridiculous when they are trying to know obscure things before they know themselves.” - Socrates

I mean to be free, for i was beaten senseless as a child anytime i showed surrender, kidding - sort of. The more critical aspect and why i take the time to discuss “togetherness,” there is a dead loss at humanity’s severance from each other. I recently watched a TED video from one of the progenitors of our “internetedness” wherein he minced words for the takeover of the human mind - euphemistically declaring it a huge mistake, but one which with determination could be rectified. According to this expert, all that would be necessary to tame the AI monster unleashed on the riders of the “information superhighway” is for us all to forgo the free information delusion of googol and fb and adhere to a paid subscription model; POOF ! ipso facto all the surveillance would magically evaporate, the click bait mentality foisted on the world would recede like the biblical parting of the waters, and the ever finer parsing of wealth would cease as if it were commandments 2.o - straight from the heavens - i say bullshit. Just as my hyper-educated friend glommed onto youthful creative elan and transferred its influence to origins of his own exhaustively, but clinically approved self analyzed motivation, sans moi. fuck it, who cares - if it helped, god bless him. If i could only find a way to free myself of the need to be recognized for what i feel to be a relentless quest to be decent, everything would be okay - not. We are humans fraught with consciousness, however aged, that still needs discipline like that of an infant. Do good, and forget about it - rinse and repeat. Given the types of curses i’ve seen past friends subjected to, this exhortation to do good is not as oppressive as a cocaine or heroin habit, and a damn sight less costly than any addiction to power and opulence.

As an older male, i find i am increasingly freed from the testosterone fueled face offs provoked by hunger for handsome pussy, but the cultural anchors at the heart of literature and manipulated internet fantasies remain as pernicious as hopes for healthy family relations. What strikes me as so sad about where we stand as a species, is how much different things might be with minor adjustments. I have found in drawings; i can fight for weeks to accomplish the right relationship between dark and light; mass and space; expression and depiction, but when the mark is made that links all the parts, it is often so slight, i wonder how it wasn’t more obvious before. I am beginning to suspect this process is not much different than what we as a species face - wouldn’t it be wonderful to think we were just a tweak away from paradise. It almost appears that the ruling class got drift of this idea early on, maybe from reading 1984, and armed with a handful of troglodytes have accomplished mayhem of, as Mr. Jaron Lanier might expostulate, a Nietzschean scale. We seem to have lost the capacity to work together, almost as though the only valid human effort is of a solitary nature. Most people i’ve ever known are noble in one way or another. It is odd that this effort toward decency i witness daily from others is somehow invisible. Today, i stopped on my way to mail a postcard to ma and bought olives in a single use plastic bag from an old woman on the street; she laughed at my reply, “still old” in answer to her question “how are you?” So i asked in return “how are you¿ to which she replied without batting an eye, “younger.” I told her i would pay for the secret if she cared to share - “i don’t resist getting old,” her reply. The pittance i paid for such knowledge under different circumstances would be robbery, but she was as happy when i left, as when i found her.

Is that what it means to be together - a simple give-and-take with all parties as well or better off then before? The owners of where i live just returned with their grandson from his flute lessons. I am certain he does not understand how much happiness he has given them, nor am i sure they quite know how much more than the gift of music they bestow with this weekly ritual; it is enormously fortifying to watch such a dance in a personal sphere, and i hope each who reads this finds some example of selfless devotion in the interest of another. We are being driven to extinction by a handful who have convinced the rest that only in service of some Ayn Randian commitment of solitary achievement that all mankind will somehow be raised to a pinnacle that best represents our collective worth - greatest wealth, highest height, fastest time, most ______ fill in the blank. I don’t understand this anymore than i understand a woman who wants confirmation of my love from the dead bodies i have piled up protecting her. I concur that each individual strive to her/his utmost, it is the end game i question. I seek not the pinnacle, but the root. I do not envy the Rothschilds a good god damn, and i’ve seen pictures of the opulence; charts representing their range of influence; read theories on the achievement they understandably obscure, if only for its ugliness. War seems to the the only product the wealthiest amongst us has conceived, and i find that pathetic. . . after an interlude of connection with my neighbor, the tortured tin smith, i return to a change of music from Tom Waits singing his musical version of Hopper’s Nighthawks does Nirvana to Woody Guthrie. We are woven into a magnificent human tapestry that is being rended needlessly. Each of us possesses some thing of use to everyone we meet, but we are forced by an outworn adherence to gain and loss and so then withhold what we have leaned and know from each other, believing somehow this paltry professional knowledge will somehow manifest into great riches if only we can befriend, manipulate, cajole or intimidate the right person to our will.

What bullshit. We are collectively little more than bugs creating heat in an increasingly heated vacuum within a vast expanse of cold comprised almost entirely of a dark matter we have yet to describe. Our ancestors were fortunate to have the common objective of beauty. Today i saw while scrolling, an earthworks divide between Wales and England. As futile as such an example of our vast capacity as human beings is, it pales compared to what reality demands from us now - whether our species deserves to replicate itself. “Smart money” is bent on creating single generation food seeds for no other reason than profit. That blows my mind, or as Pop might have said, “it discombuberates me. The consequences of such stupidity boggles the mind. I am stupid, but hopeful; i feel as a voice in the wilderness; but, hoot i will, for i’ve seen the human soul on fire. There is nothing virtual about it, unless it be the striking resemblance between human passion and our ultimate benefactor Papa Sol. The irony that our spontaneous combustion might prove to have been a self-inflicted wound born of greed and laziness is rich. That we have irradiated the primordial muck our forebears crawled from and corrupted its abundant life with the waste of our conceits does not bode well for a safe landing with our wax wings. However, we are also full of Helen Keller resourcefulness and Colin Kaepernick courage, besides i don’t hear no fat lady singing. So if you’re reading this on a phone, lose it. Life will not be easier without it, for the capitalists have nearly arranged things so you cannot live without your +/- 5v manacle; i can testify to that fact, but the focus on people’s faces in their scrolling search for what is literally right in front of them is well worth any inconvenience. Sadly, our digital undoing may actually hold the key to our survival. It is first necessary to learn how to distinguish the corporate siren song screeching through your apparatus into your mind as just a voice with an agenda foreign to your best interest, then to take control over this instrument and point it at what you deem to be useful - broadcast - express yourself and your genuine hope for the welfare of all humanity before you become collateral damage from the occupation of planet earth by the 1%.

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

alone - a sonnet

it is not possible to be alone

away perhaps, but never really gone.

even if dust’s all that’s left - still once bone

though night be real dark, that day - still once dawn.

a baby born arrives with its mother

if she’s lucky s/he will love her passing.

Die alone if you want to discover

who the person is your ma was nursing.

the myth you are apart from anything,

while more clear when swapping spit with your dear,

is more clear with the air you share just being,

or star tossed atoms passing through your ear.

the ego is only named, though enough

to twist the softest of hearts until rough

jts 04/16/2018

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

advantage - an essay / disadvantage - the sonnet

It isn’t often i rewrite an entire 5 paragraph essay - this will be my 2nd attempt to explore some meanings of advantage. Be advised it may contain references to family - so if you’re the squeamish sort, look away now. Growing up i loved my family more than is healthy, which perplexes me to this day. How can a feeling so buoyant and full of promise as waking up on a spring day to a full day of baseball, become as scabrous and burdensome as a wake for a loved one that never ends? The good news is, i am entirely responsible; the bad news is, i am entirely responsible. Nor am i sure how to explain which is which. As with most good stories of the human kind, it involves tension between the flesh and the spirit. In this case an antique, owned by the most loving personality i can recall from my early years - great grandma Munner who could make the arrival of mail sound like the birth of Christ - “How Grand! How Wonderful! How Splendid”, also the same woman who stiffed my old man for his share of the family home at 1024 W 20th St, Los Anngeles - built by my great grandfather; the 2nd home in L.A. built by an ancestor. When pop died, somehow the letter explaining this decision to my grandmother came to me. The man who received the entire proceeds of the family home, cousin Charles, was a decent enough guy, but hardly worth the entire share. This event made pop tough as nails concerning some 'things' and dumb as a post regards sentiment. Having nothing but conjecture, to explain this decision, I imagine the idea was to give Charles, the elder more powerful cousin, a leg up; from which he was to then reach down lend a hand. This same fiction played out on the maternal side with my great Aunt Eula, putting grandmother Maude through school, yet when it came time, Maude absented herself to teach in the badlands of Nevada where she met; married and bore 3 children in quick succession to my grandpa Joe. Sister Eula, without a degree then pursued a civil service career where she climbed through ranks eventually providing home, security and companionship to the college educated, but given-to-vapors, sister Maude - now with 3 children and a never gonna strike-it-rich, miner husband Joe, 20 years her senior. In my travels, i’ve crossed paths with many people from other cultures encouraged to some fantasy about the easy lives of ‘mericans - easy betrayals perhaps, fictional alliances maybe - the only ones living the good life in ‘merica are the ones born on third base thinking they hit a triple.

My oldest brother emulated Charles and pursued a life as labor leader. How much of this vocation was unconsciously telegraphed to him through pop’s processing of a savage family betrayal, i’m sure i’ll never know, same as i will likely never find out much about my eldest brother; we are not close. I was cross-eyed and loud as a child, the loud part coming from a ruptured eardrum making voice modulation difficult for one already given to enthusiasm. I’m fairly certain my quiet brother felt the unfortunate medical focus i received as the Identified Patient (IP) in our highly dysfunctional family constellation was somehow an advantage that was rightly his as the oldest sibling - but i fear we’ll never know the answer to that question - battle lines having been drawn and tender hearts hardened. For years i believed i could prevail over the circumstances of my birth and encourage love from my recalcitrant older siblings. Any advantages that beauty and rank in the family order conferred, were not of the sharing kind. So the path to individuation seemed the only advantage left to me, the misbegotten fool. It didn’t cause too much permanent damage that as the IP i was introduced to the vocabulary for the mentally ill - neurotic, depression, inferiority complex - words no young person should ever learn when expressions like fuck you, eat shit and die, your mother wears army boots are available. The real advantage of my upbringing was the conceit of education, for my father truly believed that everything could be understood when properly studied, including my mother; this patronizing patience of pa’s drove ma wiggy, for she was having a difficult enough time attempting to reconcile the multigenerational malignant narcissistic disorder and the reality of the dirt-floor-kitchen summers spent with her father in the wilds of Nevada and the southern belle airs of her maiden aunt and conveniently delicate, but college educated mother in prewar Los Angeles. It is no small wonder my family is conflicted about love, much less  positions of power and objects of worth. Ma eventually shook pa off like a bad cold and honed her skills as a beauty of consequence, foot loose in the opulent broken-home terrain of post WWII, pre 'OC' Orange County California.

To her, i am sure she felt these changes were to her advantage, and i would not fault her apparent success in the world. My responsibility to myself is to disentangle the real person she is from the cartoon cutout Beverly Hills maven she was to become as the 2nd wife to a Jewish insurance CEO - an entirely decent man himself, though his office referred to him as the 'Ayatollah' - a sadly ironic jibe at the pre 9-11 Iranian fanatic before the current genocidal mayhem of the zionists in Palestine. Had the world ended then, i think my entire family would have died happy - sadly, even pop. The pernicious influence of wealth, and its trappings eventually seeped into the empty recesses of my hungry family. Our fates had been sealed long before the delusion of wealth and power lowered its veil over our hearts and colored our visions of success. My stepfather was a standup guy, but the introduction of 'plenty' into my family’s impoverished roots created a growth we will never dig out from under. It has created craven appetites and desires that may well have subsided without the Faustian banquet a Beverly Hills address provided. To have the possibility which riches can represent waved in front of you, is not unlike Dicken’s Great Expectations - a lot of smoke and mirrors. When a larger-than-life proxy parent looks at your latest creative effort and drunkenly quips, “fuck ‘em, we’ll hire the whole god damn gallery,” it is easy to not see the 3 whiskeys talking, nor understand the routine office braggadocio of the corporate world; i later learned the fine line between truth and fiction in the upper echelons. I met my last wife one Thanksgiving within this cauldron of confusion; she taught me a lot about taking advantage. At that time depending on one’s perspective, she was the housepainter/waif/occupying force. For my step father, i became the interloper, for ma, living proof her twice married son was not a total washout, and a convenient foil for her husband's errant interest. 20 years later, 5 years after my divorce to her former rival, ma was compelled to point this woman only married me because i had a rich mother.

The peculiar thing about that story is i’m fairly certain ma thought that by telling me, she was giving me some kind of advantage. The real curiosity is why she waited so long to share¿ This may become a real problem for the entire family - waiting for some perfect moment to open their hearts again and to begin anew. I fear greed has taken too deep a root and is now finding fertile soil in the minds of the children’s children. Is this how the fiction of a growing economy is propagated - to find a sufficiently conflicted upwardly mobile family constellation; expose them, like Pip, to the trappings of ease and comfort, just enough to compromise normally humane and generous feelings for each other, and then let greed grow like the weed it is from heart to heart until it has destroyed everything in its path, except that one successful person who then goes off and infects some other family constellation susceptible to starvation-based ambition¿ For a time, i worked in a major corporate commercial real estate firm - 7 years. It is no small coincidence this job coincided with the collapse of my last marriage. That a person of my political persuasions would have ever been caught dead in such a working environment is the important question. I am not immune to greed, but it took a long time for me to parse that aspect of my character; i still have not found a vaccine. Taking advantage seems ingrained within the human DNA; it may be what allowed us to take the high ground when cooperatively fighting Mastodons. However, in those days family wisdom was passed down generation to generation, whereas more often today families are estranged from each other or the language that is not taboo is so normalized or culturally coopted, where for example buen provecho, 'good advantage is conflated with bon appetit, good health', that we’ve lost the capacity to take real advantage of that keen intellect which distinguished us from the larger, faster and meaner creatures of our past. I do know from my experience in the office and civil service cultures, you will find the same mix of decency vs pathological avarice that you might find in most every other demographic. 

This writing exercise began in an attempt to clarify a heartfelt, however ungenerous position to estranged, disinterested family members. It is not necessary to recount the morbid details; suffice it to say the anguish i shared was from a much younger version of myself who wanted to believe he could influence older siblings into generosity and love by contrasting perspectives. It didn’t work when young, and i’m fairly certain it won’t now. What does work is the process of open, honest, and gentle expression of one’s interior. It may be that what i seek, more than any material claim is simple human communication. To not be barricaded from what had once been a safe haven, however dangerous environ, can be a very damaging experience. Like Bob Dylan said, “You can always come back, you just can’t come back all the way.” Some places and some people are only meant to be with us for a time, and no amount of money, or planning or manipulation will alter that fact. We live in a temporary realm which from the changing perspectives of our relative ages and understanding only appears to be stable and inalterable. The real change that takes place is our capacity to reckon with a highly mutable reality - to adapt and to learn whatever will aid in relieving oneself of a socialized fiction that ownership is anything other than a tired refrain destroying relationships, nations, and the planet. The person who appears to be invulnerable is dying inside for having to maintain an impossible fiction. To the amoral sociopaths amongst, us death may be little more than a curiosity, for the balance of humanity the real advantage of being alive is to give to others as much of oneself as is possible - with my father those gifts were tools and a hunger to dig deeply into the mystery of existence; then to share that knowledge with everyone; for ma, it was a realtime demonstration of the mutability of the human personality. She has been as honest about her desires, hungers and pathology as any human being i have ever known, whether or not that influence becomes an advantage for me, time will only tell.

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

disadvantage - the sonnet

  

Controlling must be a disadvantage;

unlike herding a swarm of butterflies

where “lead, i’ll follow” - is an adage

more than useful, it actually applies.

Wanting what doesn’t exist, makes no sense.

So why spend a lifetime hiding from death?

Can’t buy a pass with a gazillion cents;

yet, they steal yours like it were their last breath.

Carrying other’s weight, can’t be useful,

though we wear our parent’s dreams like a suit;

sometimes armor built with plate by spoonful,

sometimes, dreams of joy dressed up as more loot.

The odd thing being, they - the most disadvantaged 

get little from life, save what they’ve vantaged

jts 04/02/2018

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com

all rights reserved 

∞

abnormal - the essay / normal - a sonnet

Normal is way too overrated, if it exists at all. Yesterday i ceased a 186 day language learning streak, not a little like when Forrest Gump stopped running. Neither could i ever stop learning anymore than i could stop breathing or prevent the image of Forrest Gump from bubbling up to my consciousness. But for those 186 days, my lessons were as much a part of my makeup as family members and family memories which i don’t want to forget. Does that make this learning experience, normal? What about writing essays, is that normal behavior - especially essays more concerned with reducing my anxiety, than yours? I was born cross-eyed with a bald patch on my left temporal lobe - normal has never been an option for me, much to my sibling’s chagrin. At one point in my life i even believed it was necessary to accentuate my eccentricities, much to my parents' chagrin. Today, i am grateful to the universe for giving me something at birth, which i fear too many others will live their entire lives never knowing - what it feels like to be different. In psychiatric jargon, to become apart is labeled “individuation” and lauded - sort of; “normalization” is also a behavioral modification modality employed by workers of the mind to diminish anxiety - so what is the objective, according to whom¿ Having no frame of reference except for what i would never be - Normal - my socialization was what might be described as interesting. One part of my being through my one good ear would literally hear the demands for homogenization from commercials, teachers, parents etc., etc., etc., while the somewhat less than deaf side of my reality might sort of hear something like - “what, are you stupid?” The trouble often being i couldn’t be sure whether the quizzical look from the other was surprise from my weird eyes or from some extravagantly inappropriate comment/question. Metaphors are sometimes too real for words. What eventually became clear, was if i allowed the external world to define for my "normality," - there would never be a place for me in the world.

I once asked my mother, why it seemed gay men wanted my attention - without missing a beat she replied, “maybe because you are so colorful.” That may be the kindest thing ma has ever said about me, kidding, sort of. Having spent many years of study in the arts, a tolerance for people’s life style choices was a given until a savage domestic betrayal wounded me so deeply that i am only just escaping the blanket condemnation of an entire segment of the population. Nor would my narrow-minded reaction be an abnormal response by any number of cultural metrics. It is during times of personal development, my abnormal inclinations become really useful. The people my last wife used to effectuate her liberation are the only persons worthy of my oh-so-rare enmity, and so we’re clear on the concept, rather than enmity, i should be creating honorariums, and lobby for national holidays in their names. It is the blanket condemnation which i bring to bear, when thwarted, that it not normal, or more accurately, too fucking normal. People strive for stasis, the same condition to which a healthy organism rights itself whenever possible - hungry - eat, tired - sleep etc., etc., etc. The world we inhabit has been hijacked by a concept which considers those natural instincts abnormal, or not a personal prerogative. From a profit extraction point of view, i can well understand the awkwardness for a superior being told by an employee, “Excuse me boss, had a tough night, and i gotta grab 40 winks. See ya’ in about an hour.” That is, if you accept profit extraction as a normal criteria for human behavior, which i don’t. This is not because bettering one’s lot should not be a widely propagated idea, but to do so at the expense of all around you, is not only not normal, it is insane. It is the same sort of disconnect we have arrived at existentially - i am alive, that is good; death is going to happen, and i don’t know what that means · ergo, it must be bad.

The divide and conquer strategy of the wealthiest amongst us has so much relied on this fixation with greed and death, that their profit extraction systems are endangering the very existence of our species, all save those empty souls believing the human experience can be fathomed by digital technology and even be uploaded into an immortal race of droids; in powerful circles this is not considered abnormal thinking. If we of humanity were as intent on understanding their 'trail of excess' as the uber-rich are in knowing our 'trail of crumbs', we’d all be able to call that excess up on an app and see their perfidy for ourselves. However, “normal” today means the chief executive to the highest office in the land, need not share his tax data with you; you on the other hand on penalty of ________ fill in the blank, must cut out your monetary heart and prove that it is beating for any middling bureaucrat, public or private sector (the lines are blurred anymore as to who is who) that asks. Yet that arrangement is considered normal by the news analysts tasked with explaining the workings of reality to the great unwashed. How can things have gotten so far from the pursuit of happiness, that happiness is considered touchy-feely-new-agey-gay-communist-2nd-ammendment—attacking liberal propaganda? If you don’t believe me, look up from your screen and feel how many around you are happy. That is a nearly impossible task, for so many of us have been sold a bill of goods which dictates unhappiness is reason enough for medication, shopping or any number of other inducements that are guaranteed to protect you from Blaise Pascal - “All of humanity’s troubles stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Based on this definition, we are heading for more trouble, not less. I can’t speak for you, and i am no marine, but i don’t have to seek out trouble, it manages to find me. It is a sad commentary on our level of development as a species wherein the Dalai Lama has to remind us that happiness is normal, not the lucre from some tooth and nail donnybrook at the mall.

I have friends that i grew up with; some who view their monetary position as achievement; some their lack of accreditation as failure; while others are convinced their spiritual pursuits will provide immortality - these are very normal conditions within the cohort i grew up. That was a long time ago; it has taken some fairly jarring events, and a good deal of aging to reach a point where i can accept those circumstances as normal for some, but not for me. Nor could i really tell you what it is i do seek, or whether in fact i haven’t found what i seek and am too stuck in a former frame of reference, lacking the courage of my convictions to accept that i am happy - well that sounds a little harsh, not unlike the criticisms one might hear from the ambitious cohorts i grew up in. Today i spend months on a single drawing; that is not practical and it causes consternation with artisan friends who labor under the Sword of Damocles to make a living from their alla prima concept of creativity. I am not an art worker, nor dilettante from wealth and privilege; early in my art vocation it became clear i would never be the captain of my ship and ever at the mercy of art movers and shakers until i could buy back my creative prerogative and own my time. I do not recommend this approach to anyone with their heart set on fame and fortune, for it is abnormal to laugh at one’s patrons, much less eliminate them from the buyer’s pool. If i have any say, which if Mark Rothko is any harbinger, i do not, but if i do have any say in what happens to my work: you must prove 1/2 of your net worth has no relationship to the richest .01% HNWI, or you may not purchase or possess my stone carvings. It is a conceit to believe you have control of anything, but it is immoral to have something and not take responsibility for that. Laugh if you must; don’t buy if you like, but don’t expect to find hand-hewn stone carvings, or machine-hewn granite by a left-handed two-eyed cyclops anywhere else in the world.

So if normal has become abnormal, and vice-versa what good is tradition? In days-gone-by acceptable behavior was developed over time for a community, or culture; dangerous and unfruitful behavior was gradually extinguished, while what contributed to the common good was nurtured and propagated. Today corporate media wizards control what behavior gets propagated, and the only motivation i can see for why one behavior is favored and another extinguished is profit. To me that is not only not illogical, it is not normal. A quaint homily while growing up was “it takes money, to make money” has now morphed into “critical mass” - a point at which a self-sutstaining state is reached. Remember we are only talking about symbols representing value, symbols that have no relationship to wellbeing, tragedy, love, grief or any other commonly used expressions for the human condition. That is not normal. Even the black holes of our universe emit something identifiable thanks to Sir Hawkings’ abnormal mental acuity, whereas financial wherewithal is more like a cancer which only exists for its own growth; that is not normal, or it’s a normal that needs far better understanding if it is to ever take its rightful place in our infantile civilization. If you feel yourself to be abnormal, as i do about myself, i can only recommend that you narrow that grandiose gauge back down within your own skin - to begin to evaluate normalcy based on your own internal metrics. Learn what your limits are by exceeding them and pursuing the boundaries of your comfort zone. However, if you find your very existence provokes others to describe, or behave toward, you as though you are abnormal, you may want to find kinder friends, for If we expect to survive the coming test of our so highly touted adaptability, it might be a good time to bone up on the fundamentals. John Wooden - “Happiness, begins where selfishness ends.”

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

normal - a sonnet

life is too fucking short to be normal;

by the time you found any examples,

the test proctor’d be saying the clock’s full.

Say you found normal - odds on, it was pills.

Some say “you need to be like us - not odd,”

others ask why can’t you be different¿

When i hear that now, i just look and nod

hoping to get back - following the scent.

Normally i get hungry, so i eat

guided to food by its fine aroma

grown much finer giving most of the meat,

but not all the carnal phenomena.

beware clerics who demand you believe

if you just be normal, you’ll never leave. 

jts 03/26/2018

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

secret - an essay / public - the sonnet

I prefer to remain as open as i know how; having said that, i consider myself a very private man - yeah, i know - another fucking paradox. I would prefer not to be as private as am, but my journey has convinced me that not everyone will treat injuries the same. Those things about myself that are not accessible to anyone or anything but my own heart pertain to suffering. I have not always been reluctant to confide the inner recesses of my being; before i understood anything about the mechanics of socialization, i was more than happy to divulge whatever was of interest to another spirit. From that openness, i learned betrayal, shame and fear. I also learned self-respect, discernment and a profound appreciation for Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s song “Don’t Take Everyone To Be Your Friend.” What is left to me, is the process of opening back up again; if in fact i ever was. I have learned there is such a concept as “false intimacy;” which is apparently based on an analysis of behavior for predatory personality types; sadly, i could certainly be included in that spectrum - if you can see it, you can be it. I feel like i am tiptoeing around the concept of “secret” which is precisely my objection to the intrinsic nature of secrecy. When i become aware of someone trying to hide something from me, it is insulting - as though, i am unworthy of a confidence. This is an irrational reaction-formation to a family dynamic long gone, but the residue is pernicious. If anything, when someone is clearly hiding something, i have begun to feel compassion that person having to resort to such constraint and restriction. When i was a young man one of the more worldly wise of my wooly friends remarked, “when you think you’re looking good, you’re looking bad, and when you think you’re looking bad, you’re looking good.” I’m sure there was more than a trace of recovering Catholic in his wryness, but the key to remember - there is no obscuring the truth - you can’t fake shit. Ask anyone who has tried to live a lie; people know truth which is why Hank Williams’ song If You Only Loved Me Half As Much As I Love You is so poignant.

What’s the use to deny we’ve been livin’ a lie

That we should have admitted before

We were just victims of a half hearted love

So why should we try anymore?

I’ve had job assignments, more than i am happy about, which required fairly high levels of fidelity - one pertained to family estates, another national defense. What has stuck with me about both, has been the bald-face hypocrisy of both. It seems the more steps you take to preserve some fiction of security, the more dodgy become the principals. I won’t go into details, because then i’d have to kill you. A clear outgrowth of the fallacious concept of security is the humongous growth of surveillance. It reminds me of a Dr. Seuss story about the Star Bellied Sneetches. The idea that there is a segment of the population who can be trusted vs a segment which can’t, runs contrary to logic when at society’s core - the family unit, there is no consensus between siblings. Who benefits from the illusion that a metric could be developed which determines honor; just like the story of the Sneetches, only the guy who could place or remove the stars came out ahead. But do we learn ? NOOooo - we still put faith in leaders, be they generals, presidents, popes or bankers - always knowing that anyone occupying that position of power is no more likely capable than yourself to formulate a logical response to an illogical circumstance. What is worthy of hiding? They thought the launch code to the nuclear arsenal would be worthy of termination with extreme prejudice; now we have an individual in possession of those launch codes who also feels he can grab women’s genitals because ________ fill in the blank. There used to be an actionable offense for trading in industry secrets, now we have a stock market which by all accounts is made up of the richest, and a government at the beck and call of those who can pay. If the insiders are running the asylum, how can you call it “insider trading”, much less prosecute it?

When the concept of honor has become as indecipherable as the steps taken to protect it, we need to take another look at who is hiding what from whom, or not. I am severely incurious with anyone about anything they don’t want me to know. This nearly vicious disinterest, i’m sure, is more reaction formation from a domestic collapse which involved my stolen dog, a man i thought was the friend i never had, and a wife who didn’t want me, for purely pecuniary reasons, to know her dad had died - if that sounds bitter, i assure you it is not intentional, for it is beyond funny - i think it’s called tragicomedy. She is still in hiding, supposedly from the danger of my _______ fill in the blank. It is greed that drives secrets, greed and shame, if you have enough of both, there is no place on the planet where you will ever feel secure. Sadly the opposite is not necessarily true; if you have reached a point in your personal development where you could not give a fuck who knows what about you and there is little of material value you seek outside of roof and enough to eat there is no place on earth where you are not easily accessible to anyone who wants to find you badly enough. I recently read an article on the superiority of what vs why in my own journey toward personal growth, and while the logic was formidable in support of “what,” what was missing was the author’s agenda. There is no magic bullet - one size fits all for anything in our world. Any strategy which leads one out of the dark into the light is valid. Self knowledge by all accounts is the only adversary worthy of struggle, and it seems to me fewer and fewer of us are even curious to know why that is, if indeed that is a true statement. I am living in a country with a language different than the one i understand, and it has been a fruitful experience to differentiate what people say vs what they do - if for no other reason.

I would be lying through my teeth to say suspicion hasn’t haunted my steps and would be equally dishonest to suggest that on balance people are exactly the same with or without comprehensible language understanding. The same behaviors that distinguish the decent from the less decent manifest for the same reasons, greed, love, hate, compassion. What is different is the illusion of protection, those who understand each other are more confident without any real foundation for that trust. It is not dissimilar to the Blue Wall of Silence for police; Omerta/Black Hand for the homies; or now the Bible for ‘merican fascists. Why is that? Can it be that the fear of standing alone has become so pronounced from the divide-and-conquer strategy of the ruling class that we as human beings are no longer capable of distinguishing fact from fiction - that the dreaded TOP SECRET boogeyman haunting our keystrokes and our footsteps is robbing us from the simple realization that we came into this world alone and we are going to leave alone, regardless of how many others with who we may be gunned down? What concerns me more is my own willingness to forgo my own native curiosity in favor of emotional armor. “You don’t want me to know, fuck you - i won’t even look.” That behavior is ignorant and like the cartoon lump where when you push it down one place, it just pops up in another. There is a difference between looking and seeing. I see it often in my drawings; my ability to discern parts of my subject are completely obscured from my perception until enough work has provided a context to see more deeply. I had read an apocryphal story of the indigenous people who without the context in which to view a sailing vessel were unable to see ships which conveyed their invaders. I’m hoping the same is true for personal growth, that only after enough other events will those morsels of understanding i quest for appear.

Just like there is no hiding the avarice and greed of today’s leaders from the bulk of humanity whose very existence is threatened by the princelings and overlords aspiring to today’s exalted thrones of opulence and power, so too will the character of humanity reveal itself when faced with a non-fictional choice between love and hate. A man knows when he is loved, just as a women knows when she loves a man and vice versa. There is no altering that condition of our kind, nor can you hide “nothing” behind unassailable measures of protection and expect people to believe there is something rather than nothing. Just as money has turned out to be a fiction which serves a handful, so too will the bytes and terabits be revealed as figments of someone’s imagination. What i won’t share with you cannot be pried from my soul any more than your humanity can be hidden from you. It is not in our nature to become so numb to mayhem that images of mangled babies and the parents who mourn them can be inoculated by diversions of greater and greater fantasy. When your woman betrays you - you know it and there is nothing she can say or do but to accept that fact and move on. So too with our kind - your job, your church, not even your language is going to protect you from the certain knowledge that shit has gone terribly wrong and without a whole lot of love and determination by a whole lot of like-minded people, it’s going to continue moving in that same direction. The reverse is as equally true, the fewer fictions supported by the civilized world means more and more human beings will resort to what they had learned from centuries of word-of-mouth heritage, that is if we can manage to avoid the poison of a dying culture and embrace the loving human being you just met as you got up from your computer or looked away from your scrolling-hand held just now - there will be a ray of hope left to us, and you won’t even have to remember your password.

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

public - the sonnet

How can “public” be secret’s antonym ¿

If i hadn’t asked, i’d never’ve found out.

Way easy to pass the veil of a hymn-

what else can be taken without a bout ?

Commonwealth will not fit within a safe,

yet our world believes that passwords protect-

bullshit is worthless - excess, is one waif.

You have a vote and must make it elect

“Privatize” means “I’ll take what you can’t have”

-having everything doesn’t mean you are,

anymore than television is a salve

for believing yourself close to what’s far.

What is hidden, may not be hid. Maybe

it sits in plain sight, helping you to be.

jts 03/19/2018

http://stoneartist.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

cooking bedbugs - a sonnet

My life sometimes seems full of blood-suckers, 

enough so to serve some up in a poem.

What I'll do is fry them little fuckers

making them do more than mess up my home.

Logic says they're smart enough to eat me,

so if they taste a little like myself

would that just make them fruit of my own tree?

How long 'til we're buying them off the shelf¿

My folks grew up in the great depression.  

Hunger wasn't yet all about ratings 

nor were cooked varmits poetic fiction -

more like a lesson on the world's workings.  

  

If  you have intestinal fortitude 

try bedbugs for your mealtime interlude. 

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

"cocinar chinches" - un soneto"

Mi vida a veces parece llena de chupasangres,
lo suficiente como para servir a algunos en un poema.
Lo que haré es freírlos pequeños cabrones
haciéndolos hacer más que estropear mi casa.

La lógica dice que son lo suficientemente inteligentes como para comerme,
entonces si saben un poco como yo
¿Eso solo los haría fruto de mi propio árbol?
¿Cuánto tiempo 'hasta que los compremos fuera de la estantería¿

Mis padres crecieron en la gran depresión.
El hambre aún no tenía que ver con las calificaciones
tampoco fueron pociones cocinadas poéticas de ficción -
más como una lección sobre el funcionamiento del mundo.
  
Si tienes fortaleza intestinal
prueba chinches para tu interludio a la hora de la comida.

jts 2011

http://stoneartist.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved e

 ∞

home - the essay / lessness - a sonnet

Ma changed the locks when i was 15, i am now 63, and that still hurts. She, however, is not responsible for my feelings, or my behavior - i am. It may be for this reason that she changed the locks; she may have wanted me to be responsible for her feelings. I asked her once what is the meaning of “home?” Her reply was “someplace you go and they can’t turn you away.” Her father was an itinerant miner. He was estranged from my grandmother for many years; my mother was periodically left with him for extended period, as was my uncle. At the end of my grandfather’s life he was taken back into the family home in Los Angeles where he died from cancer. My sense is that these events affected my mother deeply, along with many other equally confounding dynamics one might find in many homes on our planet. My idea of what constitutes home is complex, where what i really need to do is make it simple. One of the difficulties for me, is being welcome, without which i find it very difficult to feel that i belong. That is an irrational and largely useless strategy for making oneself to home. I can only imagine what it means to children whose homes have been bombed out from under them, witnessing their family members shredded into corpuscles. In a larger sense, we are all family and the only home we have is mother earth. We are not doing a very good job respecting where we came from - were our bones are supposed to come to rest. Rather than fighting about where we live, it might be a good time to re-evaluate how we live; what is our definition of home, and what it means to be a human being.

Ma is not, nor has she been a bad mother. She provided for herself and her family to the limits of her capacity; the struggle between her and myself must have been a lesson we both needed to understand. She is aged and nearing the end of her life on earth. I would be at her side, but the changed locks are of a different nature now - she is still a good mother doing the best that she knows how; i am at a loss for how to help her, it seems i’m at a loss to help most of those i wish to help. The irony is when there is a chance for me to help, like answering the door for the upper two floors where i live, i resist. I don’t mind when someone asks me for something, and i have an opportunity to say “yes” or “no.” But i find myself unwilling to have things taken from me, or expectations assigned to me, like “you live on the ground floor, you will answer the door.” That is cognitive dissonance running contrary to my instincts for happy living today - minimizing suffering and helping where i can. If i were truly a worldwide citizen, one would think there would be no limits to my willingness to help, though i find the following true as well: Bob Dylan - “try to make things better for someone, sometimes, you just end up making it a thousand times worse”. Over the years with composite families of my own, the idea of home has undergone various changes, from being willing to give up my life protecting my family, to solitary escapes from scabrous environments. Today, that which is suitable determines where i live; if i can work quietly without disturbance, it is suitable. As with most things, definition is all. But is there more; is there an intrinsic meaning to hearth and home, or is the essence more metaphysical, having something to do with the limits of our skin?

I don’t know, I do know many have striven over generations to lay down roots, which by some calculations is a measure of belonging. These same people have been driven from their communities by changing demographics, war and other calamities, and the trend toward upheaval is only going to rise with the tide - 40% of the planet’s population lives within 100 kilometers of the shoreline. Many of these communities are ancient, reaching back into the dawn of our human history - the roots run deep. I know in my own country the pace of change has inspired virulent fear, often fed by the same unscrupulous characters that would try to sell desert lots on the promise of California falling into the ocean. However in the United States, there are more vacant properties than there are homeless people. That circumstance describes a twisted system that is not out of kilter but intentionally flawed to the core. The problem is that the same mania for profit that glutted the housing stock has been exported as a business model to an amazing percentage of the world’s leaders who are emulating ‘merica’s shameful exploitation of the natural human instinct to want to be at home. I wonder how easy it would be to sell that bullshit, if our children were raised to see themselves as members of the human species rather than factions of waring tribes fighting for fewer and fewer resources? What would it take to convey such logic to larger and larger segments of our world¿ Education is no longer a viable conduit for promulgating wholesome citizens - the smart money is, and has been for a long, long time choking off the concept that people are valuable ingredients to a civilized world, rather we have been encouraged in some gladiatorial delusion that if one can excel enough at ______ fill in the blank, security will be provided. They don’t say by whom or how, but the careerist shills are reassuring in their zealous encouragement that with the correct combination of correct skills ________ fill in the blank, you will meet with rich success.

The truth is excellence is not expected, nor is it tolerated outside of an extremely narrow spectrum of accomplishment. That spectrum of accomplishment is entirely controlled by computer models of what will generate the maximum revenue stream to a smaller and smaller number of people. The days of any child in the United States believing s/he can grow up to become president ended with the birth of Barron Trump and the election of his father. Though it actually ended much earlier with the beginning of the “Industrial Revolution,” which was neither industrial nor revolutionary. The meaning of industrial was simply a perversion of “industry” which means - hard work. As to revolutionary, orgasm might be a more accurate term - The Industrial Orgasm. Prior to this juncture in history, snake oil salesman were marginalized hucksters spiking cod liver oil with sour mash, making enough scratch to get the next village drunk. But when revolutionary industrial empresarios got wind of how much snake oil could be manufactured by machine for next to nothing, the greed race was on. It has never been a question of if, but when the banksters would simply muscle the middle man out. Prior to the Industrial Orgasm, when a man received a home, or enough property to build on, hard work was an asset; today hard work is defined by the number of hours you can clock on the account to which you’re assigned - the battle cry is “work smarter, not harder.” There are pockets of entrepreneurial low hanging fruit left, but just as the snake oil salesman was subsumed by the empresario, who was then shouldered aside by the banker, excellence in the modern era is not well tolerated. Ask Aaron Swartz, all he wanted was to share digitized knowledge with as much of the human population as possible; his fatal mistake was not including a coin slot in his technology.

The world’s billionaires do not care, not one of them - to want to control a billion dollars does not describe a personality that cares for anything but its own ego. The problem for the billionaires is that collectively they are dumber than they are individually. Because of this anomalous social throwback to their fraternity heyday, they remain largely oblivious to the havoc they have wreaked being more concerned about the opinions within their well insulated cohort than aware of the consequences of egregious stupidity. While the balance of the population is having to become more and more resourceful and creative in their growth for literal survival within the world they were born, be that suburban Costa Mesa, or Ubud Bali. The inclination to resist the phenomenal pace of coming change will impair dynamic creativity for a time, and nationalist rivalries will erupt, but the temporary infusion of disaster cash will only remedy so much and fewer and fewer problems which the havoc created by the smaller and smaller, ever more identifiable portion of the population will be held accountable. “When the shit comes down, there  will not be walls high enough to protect them” - Edward Colver. People want to cooperate, it is in their nature and when left to their devices they will build peaceful communities full of the human drama that characterizes our species. The extent of travel enjoyed today will be become evermore restricted for a variety of reasons, from ecological impact, to the cost of security necessary to shuttle the wealthy from compound to compound. Much like i had to reconcile my own behavior with its consequences about what i understand is home, so too will humanity have to come to terms with unrealistic greed and the role it has played in its own dislocation from what it had once believed to be home. The delusion that there is an app that can substitute for what it means to belong to one’s own world will collapse with the myth of home being where the heart is. The only home left to any of us is made up of the soil, water and air we have through our greed and cowardice allowed to be become polluted, possibly beyond repair. If we are serious about fighting for our homes we’d better enlarge our concept of where we belong - quickly. 

  

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

lessness - a sonnet

I had a stuffed animal, a long time;

where it was, i was at home - home is gone.

finding my way back, has been a long climb.

made much richer by all that i have drawn.

It could be that work has become my home

- a place i cannot be turned away from,

i have fun, does that condemn me to roam?

- sounds odd, like marching to war to a drum¿

i like what i do, liked my animal;

don’t like war, but i like drums - like the beat.

I can’t play for shit, just not capable.

- everywhere might be home, t’ain’t all mama’s teet

if there is any truth to “less is more”

will having less get us back to the core?

jts 03/12/2018

http://stoneartist.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved