stay - an essay / go - the sonnet

I am faced with the unenviable decision to leave accommodations i very much like; and because of that there is internal dissonance which i must also face. Such as, “if you so very much like it, why go¿” I like women, and remain single; i like alcohol, but call a halt - enough so as to enjoy the next day. There is no black and white standard, but we are prompted to apply either or thinking daily. It would be easy if i could attribute my desire to leave to others, then i could absolve myself and say “it was because of them that i did not stay.” However my experience has determined that to be a bullshit reason to do pretty much anything, much less something as important as staying. My mother changed the locks to the house i grew up in when i was 15 - i was an unruly child, in a family of unruly people. They were so unruly that i was not given a new key. It was the kindest thing ma ever did for me; over the years she has done many kind things, not always helpful, but often oddly kind. My sense is that contrary to outward appearance, for she is a truly beautiful woman, her wounds and affronts affected her more deeply than her beauty aided her. In our struggle to reach mutual understanding, i believe her wounds informed her compassion about how to raise a loud, cross-eyed, intellectually precocious, and socially awkward human being in a family of pretty people. So when she said “you are not welcome here unless you obey,” by changing the locks, i had to choose which version of ma i was to obey - the vain, petty, selfish woman who abandoned her marriage because it wasn’t lucrative enough, or the shrewd, hardheaded desert urchin willing to sacrifice all she had, including her family, for the sake of a better station in life? For far too long, i believed myself to be wronged, yet her decision gave me something i believe she may have deprived my siblings - self-respect.  This is not to say she has ever abandoned her dreams of perfecting me to the degree she has improved my siblings, but then that is why i respect her.

She isn’t convinced. One day, not all that long ago i drove from past Bakersfield to Seal Beach; picked her up and drove from Seal Beach to the Getty Museum so that she could see Vermeer’s “Blue Lady.” As we entered the afternoon 405 South traffic and i was transitioning into the carpool line, a 3/4 ton pickup decided i wasn’t accelerating quickly enough in the carpool line, just as the sea of brakelights to my immediate right was coming to a screeching halt; the truck was tailgating me at 60+ mph, ma took this opportunity in our journey to turn full face to me in her seat and exclaim in her best umbrage, “YOU DON’T RESPECT ME.” This and other formative events have helped me to respect and admire her all the more, if only for being something of an emotional idiot savant in a world full of acolytes to the Church of Internet. One might think my extravagant gesture in squiring ma to a magnificent painting demonstrates filial respect, but her keen sense of her own misery was more correct - it was a very patronizing thing for me to do, not much different than dragging a person who has just had their stomach stapled into an all-the-steak-and-potatoes-you-can-eat-buffet. Once she and i had returned to Seal Beach, i did not stay the night. Rather i drove the 3 hours home. I covered more than 400 miles for the day, only to learn ma knows more about respect than i do, but then i’ve always been an unruly child. If you think this retelling is some twisted rendition of a yuppified “Stockholm Syndrome,” you might be right - i have had just enough sense beaten into me to not be sure - ergo, i essay - do i stay, do i go¿ “Be content with what you have and the whole world belongs to you” - Lao Tzu. I do not have another mother, and the one i do have has now taken up residence in an assisted living facility. It is not practical for me to be at her side. She needed protection from me declaring to my eldest brother one particularly morbid evening i committed “elder abuse” because i would not concur with a statement she had made - another long drive home late at night. My being at her side while she faces her end, would likely only enflame her, or him, or possible worse confirm for the other two her death was a direct result of my deep-seated matricidal tendencies, after all she is only 90.

I have decided my responsibility is to seek peace for myself which doesn’t include being where i am not welcomed. I don’t know how my siblings acclimated to our mother’s unique schema of the world, but i now know it doesn’t include updates from them to me on her wellbeing. Nor is that a complaint, i pity them their inability to see quite how much that behavior mimics ICE and its racist adherents. And just like the nazis of wwii, these are nice people i’m talking about. But one thing my brethren did not take away in their adaptive strategies was the sense of independence that is the hallmark of our Mater. I don’t know that they ever gave themselves permission to decide whether they would obey or not; if they did, they may have seen the cost to me for disobedience, and so chose a more stealthy resistance. It is here where our tale of family harmony turns on its ear. Each sibling has chosen distance as an adaptive strategy, with two living as close to the U.S. borders away from ma as is physically possible, and one, the eldest, yoked to the shackles of abundance which his fealty has cost him. That is a harsh judgment, and may simply be sour grapes on my part, or it may be hurt i feel. I’m leaning towards hurt, for i don’t put much stock in avarice. I don’t like to cause pain, so when one who i looked up to as a hero fails to understand my militant pacifism, i move away: physically, emotionally, but not spiritually. For like the injustice i have endured at the hands of a well-meaning but not very self-aware parent - it is not realistic to declare of a family member “you are a nonperson”, much less unworthy of my love - one of the aspects of self agency i prize. While it is not always a kindly thing to remove oneself from an unpleasant circumstance; is it any more kind to remain when one’s presence is not inservice of a greater harmony? I don’t know - clearly i don’t know. But what if we take that a step further and ask about living a lie, knowing that someone thinks less of you than you yourself do, or worst, vice versa. Self esteem is a miracle when done with panache, and impenetrable armor where it only serves the possessor. For all i might be conflicted about with regards ma, i perceive her as wearing her self esteem with panache, while her prolific complaint a mere pitfall in her complex perception.

If the theory is correct, all that is needed for me to live a happy fulfilled existence anywhere in the world is a little panache with my self-esteem, however, my self esteem is the ruggedized variety, more wash-and-wear than the Rodeo Drive variety all the rage today. In the bullpens of the engineering discipline i have spent much time in, we’d describe the empty suits periodically wandering the halls with noses of their sycophants close behind as “all show and no go.” I’m not particularly comfortable with people who need to impress, and again this may be entirely my own projection. The flip side would be my reluctance to be anywhere i cannot be myself - as much as i have discovered who that is. That’s a pretty tall order in an increasingly orthodox and regimented world, and not. I have shared in this essay as honestly as i know how, shared things i am not allowed to share with my family. The gist of this whole discussion boils down to “allowed by whom.” In my family, ma is the arbiter of good taste - but she is 90, and though i have protected her long life with a talisman bought and prayed for in the Taoist Temple of Bejing there is only so much “fake it ’til you make it” left to a nonagenerian. My hope for ma is that she retains enough of the gumption that guided her to separate from my father to satisfy for herself whether her conflict with abundance vs deprivation proved useful. if not for that reason, then perhaps affirming the oh so well framed statement by A. Nonymous - “life is like a shit sandwich, the more bread you got, the less shit you have to eat.” Mostly i wish for her to the end is self-agency. Let her passing be a choice she makes not as a regret she must struggles to defy. After watching ma experience a life of opulence, i cannot say that it protected her from her early childhood poverty, any more than my brother, armed with her fantasies about my character, has protected her from self-inflicted suffering. What i do know is that she now more resembles the kaleidoscope of pharmaceuticals she takes to stay alive than the powerhouse of personality that inculcated respect and admiration in this unruly child.

If i have cancer, i choose to die from it rather than accept the strategies of a medical establishment whose priorities are clearly conflicted between a client’s welfare and great personal wealth. While i’m alive, i look to be well, and this includes peace where i live, including and most especially within my own skin. I don’t ask for much from others, and look to share how i can what i have. Given my eclectic perspective, this sharing does not always include material gifts, and like all good mysteries in the universe involves a conundrum. All i have of any real value is myself and my time, time i have bought and paid for at great personal expense. Oh mother of god! will the irony never cease¿ I have yet to meet that tribe which takes great joy in my presence over extended periods of time “guests and fish are alike in that they both stink after 3 days” - old Chinese proverb. What is left to me is to be at peace within my skin. As the external voices of what i should have; could have; would have been; recede into former times and places, what i occupy myself with is what i do which is: write, draw, cook, eat, drink, shit, piss, sleep, exercise, tai chi, meditate - rinse and repeat. If there becomes too much interference with that program i move on. What i strive for is helping others do what they want to do in the belief that karmically that will eventually comeback to, if not me, than somebody who could make good use of it. I am not anxious to travel, nor am i afraid to settle down - whatever that means. What i don’t want to do is cling to the pain of being evicted from my home when young by devising some perfect circumstance that is fool-proof, ironclad and will endure through the ages into eternity; that is a fiction. I cannot protect my mother from herself, anymore than i can correct my brother for his misunderstanding of who i am. All i can do is make any effort available to me to better understand who i am, why i do what i do, and share that knowledge with anyone who is curious. “My three greatest treasures, simplicity, patience and compassion” - Lao Tzu; may you all become stinking rich by that standard. May you r . i . p . ma.

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go - the sonnet

“Go” she said. “Where he cried?”-"you can't stay here”

she replied scornfully, though not cruelly.

“shit” he thought, not yet knowing of his tear.

“you’ll be sorry” he groaned so piteously,

What he really wanted was to give love,

and to be loved. Was that so much to ask¿

Off he went to where life fit like a glove,

yet without ruby slippers - what a task.

The yellow brick road was now a tollway

allowing no pedestrians - only cars.

“With gas,” he thought, “it might get me part way.”

He didn’t know where - just not behind bars.

what a surprise when he got to the end-

where he began unwilling to defend. 

jts 19/09/2018

http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved e

 ∞

flux - the essay / stasis - a sonnet

I normally write on Monday’s, but just now realized that to ponder an essay about flux on Sunday would be apropos. By definition it is not possible for anything to exist, but in a state of flux; yet as humans we have conjured the word “stasis” and its appropriate definition, however false:

Stasis (from Greek στάσις "a standing still") may refer to: A state of stability, in which all forces are equal and opposing, therefore they cancel out each other. Stasis (political history), as defined by Thucydides as a set of symptoms indicating an internal disturbance in both individuals and states.

As creatures with the capacity for language, but the inability to explain the whys and wherefores of our time alive, how is it possible to parse any part of that which we do not understand into equal and opposing forces¿ I can understand the desire for stasis - a respite from the storm, cessation of loving hostilities within the framework of marriage, or even a pause in the unending pursuit of answers to Shakespeare’s eternal question: to be or not to be. Has there ever been a stasis of any kind, a pause in any mountain’s erosion toward the inevitable valley¿ I don’t see how. And yet there it sits in our lexicon of language, which is often more than adequate to settle, at least, arguments in games of Scrabble. How many other words do we use that have no relationship to truth? “If you want to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh or they’ll kill you.” — George Bernard Shaw. The truth, is i hope you’re laughing, ‘cause i ain’t quite ready to do the ever-after-two-step. And this is where it gets dicey, what good am i to you if i am not prepared to die for what i believe¿ Fucking paradoxes. Pema Chödrön uses the simile of flux within the universe to explain the futility of holding on to a closed heart - (paraphrasing) that circumstance which initially closed your heart has inevitably changed since you used it as an excuse to close your heart. Oddly one cannot understand that idea unless one has actually closed down one’s own heart. Is that the essence of change, simply pre and post prompts? Are there conditions that must be met in one’s own growth in order to grasp certain other concepts¿ How the fuck are we as a species supposed to transmit knowledge from generation to generation? Is all education conditional and only subject to immutable laws of organization¿ How can that be if knowledge cannot even be presented in a predictable sequence? Is this barrage of words gonna change any of the needless suffering in our world¿ If not, what will? Were i a day younger, i might have had some silly conceit of using this essay as a vehicle for personal change . ha . ha . ha .

This begs the question, from what to what. Just now standing outside smoking 3 of 6, i’d determined that the click on the keyboard from my longer nails was dissonant to my particular brand of autism, so i cut them and now type quietly enough to sooth my retentive state of denial. However it does provoke the possible irony of quiet keystrokes in a world where wunderkinds are worth multiple billions simply for their capacity to harvest a predictable cacophony of keystrokes. The acute reader will rightfully take umbrage with my mixed metaphor equating my not entirely private act of writing with the emerging science of bandwidth presence and social engineering. I was long-nailed joseph, now short-nailed joseph, though during the ten minutes of time on this 2nd paragraph, approximately 960,000,000 of my cells are now dead and replaced with brand new ones. If one were to expand that logically, how does one transform a self that is already ceaselessly transforming? There seems to be a fixation on permanence in our planet; i carved stone for 40 years in some convoluted reaction formation about mortality, and some declare _rump was anointed in heaven. What if our confusion about eternity is simply a question of perception¿ My particular eyesight has provided me a broad spectrum of strategies to manage visual acuity. What if perceiving eternity has more to do with the amount of clarity and openness we can experience each moment than any contrived notion we each might conjure out of the labyrinth of our human archetype? I was about to rail just now about googol’s chief scientist and his fixation on the transgenic uploading human DNA to a silicon matrix, for why rail¿ It’d be sort of like shaking one’s umbrella at the rain - don’t ya’ think? Just like early cinema was a slight of hand - many pictures seen quickly - so too we seem to want to blur and provide an illusion of mobility, rather than peer deeply into each moment you inhabit. 

The framework of essays have a melody, but in the wrong hands (read mine own) can be much like the fiction of time, a sweeping minute hand registering favorably with whatever edition of socialization was supplanted within the blossom of our early selves. To stake out a position about change precludes discovery. Discovery suggests a state of unknowing which is not possible. It is the cudgel of conviction that blunts our capacity to peer deeply without ascribing value or judgement. The limits of perception are self imposed. I have read that humans have on average 12,000 to 70,000 thousand thoughts per day, however 98% of those thoughts are the same ones that you had the day before. Given the size and scope of the universe, and our unique capacity for reason aided by our senses, i’d have to say we as a species are seriously underutilizing our capacity for perception. Unfortunately the +/- 5v straw sucking your focus down the rabbit hole is diminishing rather than enhancing any vestiges of curiosity left to our kind, and i mean that in the nicest possible way. Fucking paradox, the slower you the more you see. At the end of Siddhartha by Herman Hess, it was the river passing which yielded Siddhartha a sense of change as it pertained to himself. I resist change, which makes no sense. The illusion of using stone carvings as a means of establishing a state permanence, is little different than climbing the highest mountain which was eroding the whole time you were climbing it and even while you stood at the pinnacle. I haver read that Rembrandt was fascinated by the changes to his face as he aged, that is the root of curiosity in my mind, but moreover a wonderful capacity to peer into the abyss. In the town where i live there is an older woman who sells fruits and nuts. She kindly asked “how are you?” I replied “older, thank god; how are you¿” i asked. “Younger, thank god,” she replied. “Please share with me your secret.” i asked. “I don’t resist.” she smiled.

There was a thread of wisdom across my screen this morning. The kernel i took away corresponds to Jung’s notion of the shadow. To embrace that which we repeal. I cannot retrieve a time in my life where i might have done things differently, but i can do things as differently now as i would have then. Am i making decisions today based on an effort to preserve the home in which i grew up? I was powerless to stop it’s disintegration. Have i been making decisions based on the same conviction for the past 50 years¿ There are very good reasons to look deeply into the place we exist, rather than clutching at a time, idea, or person whose entire cellular structure may have changed since you actually shared air together. I was raised by patriots, yet ma did look up at me without guile while the fox channel piped in like some sycophantic sibling, and asked - “Do you really think Trump is such bad guy¿” I was horrified, and not. Our individuation would not allow that debate. My own struggle be a good son had brought me full circle to the “he” she would change. She’s a crafty woman, so i’ll never know if that had been her plan all along. What i have gained is a kinder appreciation for her own unique dialogue with permanence. She is approaching her transition, and i with who she shared her childhood “inconsolable fear of death” cannot alter her path. What i have learned, is that she cannot alter mine. I would say to her now, “ma, that’s a good thing, don’t you see¿ If you cannot change my path, that means no one can change yours either. You are powerful ma.” About this time she might be weeping, trembling or worse yet - tossing tissues at me. What saddens me was not conveying clearly to her the she i found her to be. Ma was present during the same domestic collapse that affected all us. I’m not sure she was ever able to forgive herself, and i only say as much for knowing how long it has taken me to forgive myself.

And it is here in the melody we find the “crux of the biscuit” - Frank Zappa. .. forgive who, for what i ask. Once one has permission to consider the vastness of what we do not know about where we are, the tragedies and accomplishments we cling to shrink - the “so large against the sky, so small against the stars” late Leonard Cohen shared. When the not yet dead Jim Morrison sang “you cannot petition the lord with prayer” it later resonated for me with readings from Lao Tzu. Much of the wiser things i’ve read or learned are not so much concerned with the capacity to change one’s environment, but in understanding one’s relationship to one’s environment. When this practical advise is held up against what we’ve learned about the scope of our universe in just the past 50 years, much less the last 100 years, there becomes a great onus, to again try and understand, rather than to change one’s place in the much larger universe. My sense is the deeper we are able to peer into all the realms of our world the more real change we might find. Me, within the frontiers of my own skin, i’m doing good when i keep it to 2 shots and 6 cigarettes, much less attenuating my language around ma, whom i’ve known forever but have only begun to understand recently her somewhat remote humor, much less that which she wants. I know this, on any 10 trips to the store she will change her buying habits for everything but buttermilk. Her passing is not something i welcome, and not. My hope is that her infinitely pliable perspective comea full circle, from: inconsolable fear of death, to: the Valkyrie like bravery it must have taken to unmoor from a 60’s suburbia sham and to damn the torpedos, full speed ahead into a paradise or kingdomcome, whichever comes first - however hasty the timing of her decision may have been. I now know, she was being shadowed by her own internal dialogue as are we all no matter what lengths we go to to make the unconscious conscious. We are all different people, even from the people we were when we made the conscious decision to change. “Be like water my friend” - Bruce Lee, and even better “Don’t resist” - la Sra. Gaia de Donde yo Vivo.

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stasis - a sonnet

stasis is the trip you can’t ever take,

and because of that you can’t ever leave.

There are beings who’ve never ate aught but cake,

some whose fare is naught but beans; i believe,

not that i choose to, because i’ve seen it-

just about. there’r more on beans than cake,

yet here we sit in a pile of shit

being told “this is gonna change, but I’m fake.”

However, distribution wasn’t ever thus;

not that long ago . .. we took what we earned,

including kings - lot’s dethroned without fuss,

because justice ain’t aught, when you get burned.

To say there is a balance of power,

means you accept death, nor never cower.

jts 09/03/2018

http://josephtstevens.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved e

 ∞

expert - the essay / idiot - a sonnet

I am not - an expert; i have at times thought myself one - but no longer. It’s only fair to you that i share this now so you may continue your search for one, if that is what you were searching for. Nor am i immune from the allure of consulting an expert, or taking an expert’s advice at face value, but now resist the absurd assumption that anyone could know more than i do about the question i have asked. Certainly there are members of the audience who are more familiar with the chemical makeup of Jupiter, or can say off the top of their head which 3 countries have the highest per capita post graduate degrees within the population, but i have to ask “so what”? There is no school that i’m aware of which offers a Doctoral in Self Awareness - not being an expert at either self awareness or post graduate degrees, it is entirely possible one could become a doctor of “Self Awareness,” but then what¿ It’s hardly a marketable skill, besides what industries would hire an expert on self awareness, and what would they do even if they found a job? One would think in a world filled up to the brim with experts, such an industry would have long since been established. Makes ya’ kind of wonder about the usefulness of experts. Still in a world where one cannot open a screen without being persuaded about something - from personal deodorant to whether Hillary was an agent of Satan, it is natural to expect a greater degree of tranquility than the transient spikes of reality one might sift in between the massive advertising influx we now enjoy thanks to deneutralizing of the internet by the real experts of our world - the advertisers.

I’m not sure i would even become an expert again given the chance. It’s a tremendous fiduciary responsibility - at times i think it is the insurance industry’s actuary tables that drives the need for expert leadership. If the actuary table says you gonna die at 57, there has to be somebody on staff that can explain why you did not. While navigating my way through the career minefield, it has been fairly frustrating to possess a natural curiosity about most things but finding most trades have established expert requirements which entails schooling, which entails money; i am mostly glad i do not have to place graduate of _rump University on my resume, although the more difficult alma mater might have been Florence Ursala Taylor University - ole' FUT U. We’re lucky to be living in times when knowledge no longer has the cache it once had. I picture growing up and someone declaring there is a gyre of plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean three times the size of France. Firstly, someone might even have known what a “gyre” was, but secondly if you inhabited the “free world”, such a declaration would most likely have been held up as a communist conspiracy, or if you lived within the communist block, such news would be used as an example of western decadence and capitalist inefficiency. Experts can be found to testify about most anything, except what is. No one knows that; so like the drunken husband with something to hide, we stumble from one assertion to the next all the while, the savvy wife (our decaying world and its plastic gyres) simply peers into his degenerate heart and then weeps silently inside at the travesty which life has made of her love.

We know today what we are supposed to know; what we are losing is the capacity to understand its meaning. Everyone who possesses affect, is faced with fleeting senses about the world. This awareness expands with more and more experiences which we use to inform our judgements; unfortunately, these same experiences are filtered through the input of those we have selected as experts. My mother and father were my go-to experts while growing up and that is a difficult influence to modify. Yet over time, it has become clear that their estimation about events, particularly those pertaining to my own emerging self awareness contradicted my own beliefs. According to the experts this is a normal process known as individuation, i can’t say how that process has gone for ma, but pa is dead; so that aspect of my process has gone as far as it could using real time input - as though it were a neatly wrapped package complete with beginning and end. As an experience, however indistinct, the ability to stand alone has meant everything, including my willingness to scrutinize its utility using this essay. For too long during this inchoate struggle to differentiate authority from self knowledge it was a war, sometimes with both parents and sometimes running battles with one or the other. Like most things of enormous import, we pretend in preparation. I substituted different authorities who concurred with my assertions about whatever: relationships, drugs, education, faith. But all the while there was a gnawing sense of dishonesty about another’s undue influence. Anytime i abdicated my own agency in favor of someone else’s belief it usually turned out badly. However the reverse is equally as true, each time i assumed responsibility for my decisions, a part of me grew, not necessarily in power, but awareness.

This has resulted in making me a better student of good advice, for any unwillingness to hear the wisdom of others is the mark of a weak mind. One indication of good advice is understanding the advisor’s ability to set aside self-interest, or more accurately a capacity to advocate for the greater good. If someone’s sole interest is your betterment, that probably comes with a hook, whereas when the logic of any recommendation could as easily apply to all, that tells you something. Another aspect of advice is how invested is the advisor in his/her own advice. The path to expert status is expensive and time consuming. Malcom Gladwell states in his book “Outliers” that anyone can become a master of something with 10,000 hours of practice. As a child of the 60’s, i’ve heard some pretty astonishing theories, but that is just weird. It stands to reason you are going to improve the more times you practice anything, but whence stems this maniacal urge to codify the process. I suspect it has something to do with insurance actuary tables but am unwilling to spend 10,000 hours devoted to proving that theory. How many young pianists read that quote in some self-help blog and abandoned the pleasure of a life of music simply because the haste that accompanies adolescence whispered “no”? Early on while searching careers to sustain my passion for carving stone, i thought of becoming a barber. What better way to grow smarter about the human head than cutting hair? Pop put the kibosh on that idea, just as he had looked into my impressionable face and declared, “you’re not a painter, you’re a sculptor.” There is nothing wrong with paying careful attention to a parent’s advice, except that Bob Dylan also described it as “oozing out of my ears.” Anytime we neuter our own ability to hear ourselves clearly and honestly, we do the world a disservice.

The older i get the more convoluted becomes reality. There is the promise of the ever-after which has kept us at each other’s throats since we decided it was a good idea to seize resources not rightfully ours; If i believe that my god is the keeper of the keys to the ever after kingdom, it only makes good sense for me to control your wealth. Then there is the high-minded ambition of creating “civilization” as opposed to allowing 1st nation cultures to educate their own children, utilize their own resources or preserve their own culture. Which brings us full circle to the “crux of the biscuit” - Frank Zappa, the “Economy.” This contraption that grew up around the industrial revolution is now being uploaded into the cerebral cortexes of lab rats in preparation for saving humanity for the experts, and that is enough for me. I’ve worked with experts who could devise methods for target acquisition on a black battlefield at night in the snow, but who also believed because their pastor - an expert - said “that god is a republican; poor people are evil and satan is a black lesbian”. These same people whom i have worked closely with who were loving parents, good friends and devote christians. The economy, as it stands today, represents a system of mindless extraction oblivious to consequence. This is not consistent with our physical universe. Our species exists because conditions were such that our environment fostered development, of our bodies, our minds and our future. However that same genius that giveth, can and shall taketh away. While walking yesterday, it occurred to me that no one knows whether the first domino to fall in climate change isn’t a breathable atmosphere. We have a cadre of AWOL captains of industry, using hired-gun “experts” to declare that fossil fuel, glyphosate and constant surveillance are necessary for the economy: how much more crazy is that than positing that what we don’t know about our future is simply resulting in less and less and less .  .  . breathable air¿

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idiot - a sonnet

Idiot, is a species of moron

as we are a species amongst others. 

We share a planet, but treat all as pawn

expecting that we become ancestors,

a status many believe - exalted.

Yet not a one has returned to confirm

there’s more to the great beyond than being dead,

much less where one’s penis is ever firm.

We know love is healthy, but let it die

We know war is useless, but still we pay

We know truth is sacred, but still we lie

We know god is in us, but still we pray

i know some - dumb as posts - myself am one,

and rather be, than ruled by one - when done.

jts 08/13/2018

http://stoneartist.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved e

 ∞

fun - an essay / misery - the sonnet

6 August 1945 146,000 human beings senselessly murdered:

. . . and things have gone to hell in a hand basket from there .

I am not feeling as frisky as i was last night when i picked this topic after a good day’s work and the prospect of my daily jingle of mezcal, but what the fuck is better than playing with words when your honey is no where to be found¿ I resolve the former by spending my days drawing women’s portraits - momma didn’t raise no fool. We as a species are losing the capacity to act as agents of our own diversions. This is a natural outgrowth of our faith in a system which was purported to provide for all our wants at the mere cost of employment, your freedom intact by being allowed your own choice of occupation. Like writing an essay about fun on the 73rd anniversary of the first “anonymous” incineration of human beings is dissonant, the contrast of an empty promise of stability against the reality of a world leadership in denial of our imminent extinction is dissonant as well. I do what i can using fb to propagate information; you will have to make your decisions. I choose to have fun - my mother is in the later moments of her existence, and my inclination would be to bring my frolic to her bedside. I did for my father in his end days; it caused a ruckus, but gained his blessings. Pop was better at having fun than ma, besides ma don’t like no ruckus. So i wave from afar, and blow her kisses by way of weekly postcards. I fear it is all the fun she can handle; pa on the other hand could have more fun with a stick he found on the beach than most debauched executives i’ve known could manage with a limitless per-diem in a foreign land. Pop’s capacity for fun is more than content in a digital morass, it was a native resourcefulness that kept our tool cabinet limited to an ancient pipe wrench, sloppy crescent wrench, screwdriver and hammer. If it couldn’t be fixed with those tools, it likely wasn’t broken. When the TV broke, who cared - it just meant you got to pull the back of the TV off and yank all the tubes out to take down to the market to test. If that ain’t fun, i don’t know what is.

Of course my opposition to corporate conceived amusement, could certainly just be sour grapes for not being tall enough at 6 year’s old to ride on Disneyland’s Matterhorn, or it could be i have more confidence in your ability to devise your own fun than i have in any corporation’s ability to create any kind of fun. A little harsh, but corporations aren’t playing, why should i? There was an afternoon, long ago when we managed a cardboard box that once housed a refrigerator, and than sat at the bottom of “the bluffs.” I couldn’t say what was more fun, being out of the house in a strange neighborhood; being with a friend; or figuring out the best track to ride down the bluff once the carton got hauled up the 60 foot slope - couldn’t tell you how many trips we made, but i know we didn’t spend a dime for something i remember

50 years later. My experience with corporations is they always want to do more for less, and when i say “more”, i mean they want to sell more units for less work - a great formula for stock holders, but shit for the balance of humanity. The result is mediocrity for all, even the stockholders. The herd instinct necessary to work at Amazon, most especially the executive suites is almost too repellant to consider. I know there was a rock opera before creativity got sucked out of the genre; i just wonder why no one has written one for the executive suits of googol, or fb. I would think the court of Caligula tame in comparison. Who knew muckraking could be such fun¿ Lao Tzu says to keep your desires simple and your disappointments will follow suit. He ‘twern’t kidding. As much as i miss nesting - puttering in an old well-worn atelier is an ancient rite - i ain’t lugging to my grave half of what i was just 5 years ago - less as i get more simple. Same with my fun, if i can’t have fun where i am - pretty sure i won’t wherever i wander. Pop liked the pay-as-you-go plan - it’s the same for fun and women, if she don’t want me now, why would i believe she’d want me when i .  .  .

Ladies, that’s not a complaint; your notion of fun is truly the best. But truth be told, without your shopping addictions to fuel the fictive economy - the capitalist captivation would end - again with the paradox of dissonance. “The difference between being married and being single is like the difference between watching TV in black and white and watching it in color” - A. Nonymous. Case in point; i read this quote years ago and just now peered into googol looking for an echo - not a fucking thing. Any way you slice or dice it - zip, butkus. How can something become a repository of the human experience and not manage to incorporate a simple quote. It is because those tasked with populating the info super oneway not unlike the Eloi in H.G.Wells “Time Machine,” or workers at Amazon getting zapped back onto schedule with the wrist band that rat’s them out anytime they veer from their task have lost personal agency. Without the corresponding approbation of those deemed important to us, we are unable to navigate an independent course. That is sick. I had a blast with my friend that afternoon tumbling down a bluff in cardboard box, but i don’t feel compelled to re-create that event or even that relationship ad nauseam. While i’m a firm believer in what is repeatable, i’ve found myself in too many ruts to follow a single formula for anything, much less something as sacred as fun. And now just for fun, i’ll launch a monkey wrench into that logic. Within the most restricted can come the greatest liberation. For me it began as a time-management issue. Working full-time, because i am a man of faith and no bum, it was necessary to portion free time diligently toward my passion for carving stone. What i discovered is while it was a rigid in many respects, i was liberated from the yoke of accomplishment. I did not have to cut a single flake of stone, as long as i was having fun. For anyone who knows anything about carving stone, it is always better to hear what the stone is trying to say than impose some shape someplace it does not belong.

That’s fucking whacked, some of you may be saying, and i’d have to agree. But outside of the cost of tools and storage for those finished, i paid no one for my fun, and had the pleasure of really old company. The profiteers of pleasure do not enjoy such leisure and so suffer the pressure of creating diversion that you will spend a lot of money on. Regardless of excessive salaries at the highest echelons, those responsible for putting that smile on your vacationing face endure hideous privation and abuse in the process - how much fun can stem from such¿ Without question there are wizened corporate veterans amongst the ranks who find pleasure in such a pressure intense environment, just as there were certainly brokers who enjoyed remarkable adrenalin rushes during the crash of 2008, but the cost to independent human agency as regards fun cannot be overstated. I find fun in taking the obscure and making it more clear. The drawing i am working on is a total failure, yet enough of the subtle reality of this woman’s beauty can be nuanced to make even the failure an expedition into understanding the possible expression of one other human being through the medium of drawing. What corporate environment could i apply to and expect a favorable interview? That is the point - who defines what is fun, if not each individual human being. What possible good can come from a corporate civilization which demands that you be mediocre and that your fun be of their choosing¿ Like so many fun things, this writing effort is not one dimensional; it requires painful personal acknowledgement of the limits of speech, or my own facility, to convey meaning; without deliberate patience awaiting the pace, i could abandon all hope, yet if i listen and follow the clues stories evolve with purpose. That is enough for me, for now. I have taken nothing and made something and even sort of enjoyed myself. If you opened this blog expecting to find some pathway to the countless dead ends i have traveled in search of the holy grail of fun - guess again? (as he chuckles his way into the next paragraph)

Nikola Tesla - “you may live to see manmade horrors beyond your comprehension.” This statement was in response to an admiral at the “First Electrical Exhibition” in NYC-1898, commenting what a magnificent weapon Tesla’s radio controlled boat could become. What the admiral failed to realize was that Tesla was having fun at the admiral’s expense. Shit is going south in a hurry for mankind, and the stilted, pinched, cheap reasoning born of the corporate ethos just ain’t gonna provide the juice to get over the hill. Any system that is top-loaded with a bloated executive staff that can’t grab its ass with both hands is doomed. And today folks - that is the only game in town. There are lots of tribes making noise, but most i can see are just looking to take the place of their favorite antagonist. Try as i might, solidarity becomes more and more elusive - so just like whenever i get in a tight corner creatively, i let go. There is no pressing, there is no successful program that will magically remove the haters from office. It is down to each one of us to search our hearts and ask - what am doing, am i having fun doing it - is it harming anyone else - the very last concern should be whether it pays. To the many eyes rolling back in their heads saying into their cartoon bubble “he’s an idealist, commie pinko, LGBT sympathizer, renegade pagan - let him take off his rose-colored glasses, wake up and smell the coffee” to which i reply - fuck you, and i mean that in the nicest possible way. The corporate yellow brick road is gutting the human spirit of belief in itself. The man is foisting an avatar on you compiled from what you believe or independent keystrokes of your own volition, when they are no more than multiple choice questions on whether you prefer your anonymous incineration posted to your page for future generations or only - selected friends. I don’t know what planet you came from, but that ain’t my kind of fun, i want a warm hearted woman who will look at my failures and say “it is beautiful, but it don’t look a thing like me - let’s have a drink and your can start another one in morning.” 

1. <- chicken shit -
2. misery - a sonnet

misery is not pain, but it can be-

anything can, if you are not careful,

but mindfulness might help to make you pain free

once you crawl past the need to eat ’til full.

but then you have hunger - though less anguish.

An empty stomach is easier when

you can use both your hands to reach the dish

but dining in a wheelchair ain’t heaven.

emptiness from lost love could be the worst

but makes no sense, cause love is yours to give,

and if you lost it, it ’twern’t yours at first.

Any love, is just what it takes to live.

To suffer is not a wise choice to make,

but letting go is nothing one can fake.

jts 08/06/2018

http://stoneartist.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved e

 ∞

artificial intelligence - the essay / pain - a sonnet

One would hope that to create an artificial anything, one must first possess an original something. I look out over the horizon and see death, destruction and cruelty - all byproducts of stupidity and ignorance. There are reasons that this injustice persists - it may be that stupidity and ignorance are profitable. I prepared for this essay by reading Wikipedia on “Philosophy of AI,” more specifically to learn whether computers are capable of feeling. But I guess the question really is are those benefitting the most from the world's chaos capable of feeling, for if they possess the resources necessary to fuck the world, they certainly have the ear of those coding for AI. Is it the intelligence of the ruling elite we should be considering, or rather the capacity for critical thinking of the proletariate. As a child from a family of teachers, my bias is toward learning, though the longer i live the more i learn secrecy is the lingua franca of most civil society. This orientation toward communication seems senseless on its face, but impractical in practice - unless of course you are insider trading or attempting to suppress land value to your advantage along a proposed commercial corridor. All self-help-touchy-feely papers i read on healthy interpersonal relations suggests candor is the cornerstone of successful interaction - ¿ - I would wager my appointment with Dr. Faustus that there are aspects of development of AI networks that will never become public domain. Yet i am asked to divulge habits, hopes, hindsight and social security number in order to retrieve my googol password. Though it’s highly unlikely Sir Stephen Hawking was ever interrogated by googol’s AI henchman for his password, Mr. Hawking was still specific in his choice of words - “AI could spell the end of the human race,” but more accurately he advocated wiser integration of AI’s utility. My lament as with the inept randomization of iTunes library is the hierarchical obsolescence that is the de facto commercial design baseline deployed.

My objection is not so much the intrusion of technology, but its lack of interactiveness. When studying computer technology the concept of 4th generation computer language was presented - natural speech capable compiler. The net effect of developing this user based programming capability would make your voice equal to that of jeff bezos within the internet bandwidth - obviously, that didn’t happen. Yes and no - once AI, or its more benign moniker, ai is utilized within the context of available utility resolving climate, ecology, indigenous solidarity and resource distribution equity, there is a glimmer of hope. kurzwell’s conceit to mechanize the human genome is, again in service of no one but those with the keys. Unitization of human isolation is not the same as the joining of humanity. I accept you are not a part of my world and yet - ipso facto - you be. This is different from my responding to a bell attached to my wrist, flickering at +/- 5v hz ad nauseam . _ . _ . _ yet for whatever reason the ai you have deployed returned you back to this post at a pace of your election . If this rises to communication with ai, so be it. Our species is given to communication, ergo dogs folded into the fabric of our tribes, as well as indelible images of prized equine heads in beds of those with whom we might use emphasis in our exchanges. Ai is one dimensional in this regard, able to only tally valence - where that value is derived from a hierarchal input, or horizontally distributed sourced is at the core of any valid discussion regarding ai as a non visceral dimension. Revulsion, fear, fury, lust, grief - are myriad realities that coexist with the human reality - save those ciphers who save only themselves. This exception is noteworthy only to the sociopaths reading. Human reality is mutually exclusive from the capacity of ai to render service as it exists today - the profit motive underlying all keystroke capture is parasitic rather than salubrious. Reorientation of ai’s utility in service of general human welfare is possible, but best design practice would utilize a 4th level language input resident within horizontal distribution platform to source criteria for ai coding, with an emphasis on rugged wraparound architecture.

Ricky R______ is East L.A.’s reply to mr. m.t.suit. Mr. R_____’s favorite expression was “it’s gonna happen.” That this not so innocent observation, correlates to a dawning certainty that my habitation will change is beyond fathoming for ai. If there 4th level language compilers interfacing with ai within the warp and woof of commercial nodes. Today’s ai morality is modeled on the sociopaths that disproportionately occupy the HNWI (high net worth individual) strata. My middling bandwidth today is little different than the bugger at the gate begging alms for oh so long, not so long ago. Because - bear with me - there are six voices (CEO’s - major media corps - public record) that speak to 96% of the internet, whatever percentage is left, is shared between 7 billion of us within which to express ourselves and learn of the larger reality. It’s nonsense that 7 billion human pay to listen to 6 voices - that’s crazy. I’ve met a lot of people and would love to maintain contact outside of data poaching sites; however, to not own a phone is liberating in a way that is difficult to explain, but i’ll try. My last wife and i lived in a loft off of abandoned train tracks. It was fun, but i too remember the puzzlement of pulling a TRS-80 out of a paper bag, then hooking a landline phone to a modem to generate tones indicating acceleration onto the “informational super hwy”. We didn’t yet own cell phones, but soon. Craigslist was the single site i could load that deciphered. I did not grock DOS which was the os du jour. It’s dreadful to realize the shrinking number of humans never having known life without siri. There’s a lot of chatter about deep learning, but the equivalent would be one of those indiced webpages which i certainly shamelessly hustle to gain a seat amongst the 7 billion sharing what’s left when those 6 voices are not droning on and on and .  .  . i wonder if some wisenheimer ai coder took John Lennon at face value and translated his cannon into ai libraries, him and Bob Dylan. Trojan Horse of sorts - the AI Death Star infused with the logic of “Imagine”, and “Masters of War,” http://stoanartst.blogspot.com etc, etc 

Early coding ethos evinced such cheery homilies such as Garbage in / Garbage out (GIBO), or the ever favorite morphism “do no evil” to “do know evil”, and my personal favorite “move fast and break things” to “Gabba the Hut - does the Beltway.” I’ll be curious to learn if http://www.sacred-texts.com/tao/taote.htm weaves it’s way into ai logic. Much hay is made about the insatiable appetite for data AI requires for its “deep learning” - doesn’t seem so efficient a system when you think about it. These 6 voices are paid by 7 billion people to provide an efficient method for the exchange of information between those same 7 billion people, and to add insult to injury, that same 7 billion people pay, again for the privilege of watching whatever those 6 voices decide would be good for me to see. Well this task just proved too difficult that AI was conjured from the muck to rescue humanity from itself. The product they are charging the 7 billion for the privilege of viewing is culled from a vast accumulation of data you have provided the 6 voices. Rather than acknowledge their product is little more than a caricature, they are forced to sell. There is no free market, you buy what is served, never knowing that your own expression is much richer and finely textured than any hackneyed version their screen jockeys can conjure. More practically speaking charging coming and going is bad business practice. Were ai given a benign responsibility to serve the electricity to which entropy claims us all, we may have provided the extent to which we were useful from an entirely hierarchical perspective. Taking the more traditional view that trees are a bounty, the land does not belong to us - we belong to the land, and that the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right of every human being alive, yet born, or never to be. What if in some bizarro universe i’m the ai whisperer and like some genie in lore the petal of light humans can be has left a thread in ai? stranger things have happened.

If as the song said “aI reigned over judgement day,” i’d be curios to learn how ai explains that feeling. One can to an extent be inured to providing non-compensated date to the AI gullet, by reflecting the hook. computers are a binary system at core which no amount of scaling will resolve. Analog vs digital almost echoes the question of wavelength or particle. I maintain that it is the inefficiency of the AI modeled as deployed is more clusterfuck than expertise or best business practice, “business” defined as compassionate survival of life on earth. That is the will of the people, no one supports the stories and fictions about pinnacles or winnable wars. There is a great collective wisdom within the 7 billion that must be heard. Using ai to facilitate and collate as many stories directly from the subject as can be done is a practical accumulation of the human experience as any data driven computer model which is to civilization what “Moneyball” was to baseball. How would you translate the feel of grass on your feet after 3 hours of hotly contested 9-year old baseball on the first day of summer vacation into ai - this given there is no 4th generation computer available with which to communicate with ai, that is if AI even gives a fuck what i think. We have fake leaders, corporations as persons - why not AI faking itself as my friend. I got friends that fake as friends - why not an algorithm? I believe people should be empowered in every way they can. To encourage the human potential rather than constrict, regulate and program is to denude the essential quality of being human - the apprehension of our own demise. Will i have surrendered and be spoon fed my media fix as my decrepit frame settles into its bedsores. As it stands that is the extent of this miracle of technology aids me like manna from heaven; guiding me into the flickering screen, or was that, live giving light - the line is beginning to blur.    

By definition, artificial intelligence can never understand what pain is, and thereby grasp how it would be wrong to inflict; ergo ai is of dubious value to humanity·:

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pain - a sonnet

pain cannot be defined by algorithm, 

though they often inflict much destruction.

Feeling is not a code but a rhythm 

pulsing it’s own story from its inception.

wounds are much-liked winter meat, nutritious

the echoes of one’s learning can inform

all growth when purging the egregious. 

All demons are made friend in proper form.

As it is busy, pain welcomes the rest

resuming only when and if ready.

Nor does pain have a need to build a nest 

happy as nought with a new remedy.

from as little as 'ah' know about pain,

it always goes unless asked to remain. 

jts 07/30/2018

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved e

 ∞

purpose - an essay / hate - the sonnet

I began this essay looking up the definition of curiosity. I never got there, for being curious about the antonym of purpose i discovered someone had assigned “hate” as one of the antonyms to purpose - odd that, enough so i shall essay. I also discovered that unlike their hidebound predecessors, the internet does not include antonyms in their dictionary definition - curious that. “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.” - Philip K. Dick. Please don’t share that with the hoards who seem anxious to pick and choose my language. Nor i am sure am i alone in this predicament. Although i am certainly guilty of the internet meme about “not listening, but waiting to reply;” my guilt would be more too anxious to please. When people tell me their, often fascinating stories, i search for comparable personal experiences that might serve to enlarge their passion. This has not always been the case; when young and bored, i’d invite the witnessing Jehovah’s Witnesses inside to discuss their faith. I did this as mean-spirited sport just to poke holes in their faith. It may be my karma, and why so many today seem determined to fold, spindle, or mutilate my meaning. I mean no harm, except to the ruling apparatus that would homogenize the human spirit into a pliant consumer android buying shiny baubles that scroll across screens, in between snippets of communication that mostly parrot the advertising between which the snippets are placed. I can’t say exactly what motivated me to torment religious acolytes at such a tender age. It may have been reaction formation to the sham of civilization that i was just beginning to understand was not at all civilized, or if it was - it was a fineness that had long since passed, or i may have just been a mean little kid. Yet witnessing to anyone is a full contact sport, and if you go, or remain anywhere advocating to others you know what is good for them, you ought to be prepared for a blowback of substantial force. I remember one drunken conversation with my now deceased aunt, wherein i intruded my child rearing concepts as pertained my youngest cousin. While it seemed perfectly natural to me, for she had openly discussed her ideas about my own upbringing often enough; my modeling of her behavior did not play well.

I do not understand how one person’s purpose can trump another’s. Anymore, i am less and less curious; there was a time when understanding others meant knowing the what and why about their activities, but questions lead to more questions; and if someone is conflicted about their purposes, s/he will likely be conflicted in their answers. Anymore, i try to listen with some detachment, as much for their comfort as my own. I can’t say if this strategy impedes my compassion for others or no. I am unsure if compassion is an emotional muscle that responds to exercise or not, however i am certain that awareness is a capacity that expands or contracts. My purpose is to expand my awareness as much as my being will allow, and in so doing i might learn more about compassion. I feel compassion strongly, when a child cries mournfully, it wrenches my heart as much as a child wailing petulantly amuses it. Is that difference identifiable between the two pleas for a attention - not without asking the child. Our culture has gone far past that point of polite society when it was understood, assumption was the fool’s gazette. We now enjoy the hyper-smug certainty as faux idiot savant’s having been educated with all the advertising hooks used to distribute googahs no one needs, all that is necessary to know another’s heart is a glance, the same glance we give our telephone screens. Yes i could very easily be projecting - i am very uncomfortable when someone begins asking penetrating questions when there is no relational foundation. This is different from the inverse when there is a long personal history and your conversational counterpart has no interest in learning more than what they already know about you. I’m not the same person that started this essay, much less someone you thought you knew 50, 40, 30, etc., years ago. Awareness has it’s upside once you get pass the unnerving fear of staring into the abyss without the handrails of foreknowledge, conceit, judgement, comprehension - nothing except a willingness to accept whatever you can see.

I had thought the 1st time i had carved stone, that i had found nirvana (knowing not what nirvana meant, only that it was a “good” thing). This was in the basement of the Art Students League of NYC. I took a sculpture class simply to aid my understanding of mass, for at the time i was a fledgling inveterate painter. The instructor Jose De Creeft, was old, old school, 90 and able to talk trash about Pablo Picasso, casually pointing to a picador sculpture hanging in the rafters of his studio. It was made of found objects which he constructed in prewar Paris, and an idea which Picasso cravenly ripped off; because he could. I loved this old man and would have followed him to hell, if i wasn’t so young and stupid. What i loved most was the moral tone of his discussion, preferring hand carving to machines, because the quiet allowed him to think; encouraging students to pursue a wide range of studies. The difference between Mr. De Creeft and what passes for education today, is that his authority was born of experience, not a sheepskin. I did not look back, and spent the next 45 years carving happily. I construed this time as purposeful, but not honestly. In my tunnel vision of passion there was never a question but that at one point, creative gravity would intervene and my work would command attention and respect by virtue of nothing more than i worked hard, understood my craft and cultivated a superior aesthetic. That is not how it works, or at least not how it works for all. While in Jose’s class, i fashioned a clay bust, and in my haste to reach the pinnacle of notoriety, flung it back into the muck from which it came. A newly enrolled dilettante from the upper west side retrieved my work in whole from the muck and proceeded to work on it for the next 6 months. Any objections i can remember about this travesty of justice pales in comparison to my own arrogance, a character defect i must to this day hold on a short leash lest it expose me for the fool i am.

Fool, and not - my dumb luck was latching on to an activity defined, to a large degree, by gravity. Carving stone is in many ways a deceptive activity - one might imagine it requires brute force to cut rock, and to watch many mangle their work that might be true. Yet to cut stone well is more akin to cracking eggs, than tearing down columns of stone as Samson was said to have done. Stone tends to remain where it is placed, so it is not a really portable activity, which runs counter to much of modern civilization - with portability and mobility signifying power and strength. What i have gained from a lifetime of carving stone is not the wealth and acclaim i had initially been attracted to; what i discovered was myself. The quality necessary to master stone is the ability to submit, to listen. This was not easily accomplished for it required the subordination of my ego. In the last stages of my last piece, i realized that an anomaly in my vision prevents me from ever perceiving 3 dimensions. I either spent 45 years of my life on a fools errand for fame and fortune, or there is something more i am to know about living that does not include vindication. For some years, i have threatened to destroy my stone carvings before i die. That would be a hateful thing to do, not because that act might deprive the world of hard fought beauty, and yes, i believe my work is beautiful, but only as beautiful as my evolving ability to communicate with stone allows. No, i don’t converse with rocks unless they are old republican friends making ‘merica gr8 again, but the kind of communication one gains from accepting an entity at face value and working together to create something greater than the sum of its parts. This requires permission: 1st - from oneself to aspire toward decency - fake stone carvings slapped together for a buck will never be anything but. 2nd - permission from the material. I once watched a PBS documentary on a hooked-up artist with all the trappings; shots of him in the quarry at Carrara, vignettes about his tortured vision as shared with its arms akimbo maquette, and finally the quality of his superior supervision of the masons preparing the “huntress diana” for the artist’s final masterful strokes creating a masterpiece. Yes you hear rancor, but only because i am allergic to phony people. Anybody who pays masons to execute "a work art" while asserting that they are better qualified to select the stone to cut is a fakir.

It is the same for our political processes today, that we are indoctrinated to listen to talking heads explain how poverty is the result of character flaws, but that a billionaire mocking another human being’s palsy is worthy of the nuclear arsenal launch codes describes a lapse in logic that may prove our undoing. Humanity has no purpose today but acting superior to every other human being they meet. Show me the error in my logic, and i will happily retract my statement. I wouldn’t be writing this now if i didn’t at some level feel superior - the difference between me and mr. m.t. suit, is i know i am not superior, nor inferior; i am simply aware of my need to feel superior. Nor can i say i gained this helpful information from personal effort or insight, i was taught by rocks. In the scheme of things, given the likelihood of our extinction and my own advancing age, to be disabused of delusion is a worthy purpose. I draw pencil portraits of women; it is as close to stone carving as i can get without hammer, chisel or rocks - both have a native gravity which one ignores at one’s peril; either is unfathomable without humble supplication and acknowledgement of superior forces - and both are beautiful whether hard or soft, big or small, polished or rough. Because paper is essentially a 2 dimensional surface, i have the time necessary to reconcile my vision anomaly such that there is a closer facsimile of the of focus when complete. Whether i will ever learn as much staring into a woman’s face hour after hour, and day after day as i have learned from carving stone, i may never know. I do know i am grateful to both for teaching me more about myself than i ever could have learned alone.

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hate - the sonnet

hate has no purpose, thus its antonym.

without purpose most will become hateful

save those where sole meaning resides in hymn

which suggests that god might just be spiteful

or too confirm hate really is foolish.

i knew not my own hate ’til the rot grew

so foul, i no longer passed for rakish 

just old and bitter - too much like the flu.

shakin’ the flu’s a cinch compared to hate -

flu’s got fever and chills - hate got nothing,

but use it enough it becomes your fate - 

a life empty and without, i’m not bluffing.

Nor do i say my way or the highway,

for you have helped me see a way new day.

jts 07/23/2018

http://stoneartist.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved e

 ∞