raison d'être; an essay - breathing; the sonnet ·

10 days from today is my birthday; none of your damn business how many - think ‘old as dirt’, 4 days from now is my sister’s, she is older than dirt. We are estranged; in my waking fog today, she was traveling to China, an image which provided emotional leverage to explore unresolved issues that only the unconscious mind can navigate; it was very helpful. It is now late on a wet Oaxacan afternoon; a good day overall, though i fell riding my bicycle back from the outdoor gym. Given events of the past year, much less the past week, i applaud my pluck. Pancreatitis is the new Sherrif in town, which should make for an interesting denouement from my honest efforts to pluck as much creative gristle from the Bohemian bones that have comprised nourishment during much of my flicker of existence. Without being ‘wasichu’ about it, know, i’m in no hurry to check out, but more accurately; before i do, i'd like to honor the miracle of breath that has taken me so long to percolate up to the surface of my persona. 

One Christmas, while my father was gaining his supine footing at the onset of his end days and the elder siblings had circled the wagons in an effort to quarantine his peace from the ‘wild indian’ my spirit apparently manifests within the family mythology, i wrote my first sonnet as an homage to his journey. In that sonnet, i blithely foreswore my raison d'être as emanating from stone - if there’s afterlife, Pop is getting a good yuck’ off of my dawning awareness of such hubris. Well pop as long as we’re laughing: of the handful of times you laid a marshal hand on me for developmental emphasis was the the time i was ratted out by “the poor weak 'sister' creature” for nominating her to her face as a ‘she dog’- she was then/whether she still is i can’t say, she now eschews ‘simple existential dialogue’ - Pop’s enlightened reaction at that time was to corner me in the elder brother’s ‘premium’ primogeniture accommodation and ‘bitch’ slap my head from side to side, something i can only imagine the two siblings regaled, and continue to regale for my existential comeuppance, according to their ‘lights'. However, i am no longer fresh, not even confident, but am curious what morsels of understanding can be teased from this aged writing implement that had once represented liberation and redemption, which are now no more than a warm presence, like that of the murmuring from an old friend waiting to hear the end of your last sentence. There is also the bulwark against the contemporary terror foisted on the population by a cynical ruling class well aware of how deeply they have failed in their responsibilities to honor the privilege that chance and circumstance have provided their human experience. My creative elan is no longer manic - weighted by the gravity of destiny. Rather i would extrude each tidbit of beauty found through the prism of curiosity. 

Bob Dylan opined a parent’s wisdom still oozed out of his ears, my parents were never short on opinion; of my earliest memories is a photo of a ‘perplexed’ me looking up into the camera whilst my bright red cape was being affixed to my neck, not unlike that of a noose. The consummate craftsmanship of my devil costume was dwarfed by the weight of its horned symbolism. All of 3 years old, if that, and yet little more than a projection screen for the too active imagination of my exceedingly smart Dame and her gaggle of ready-made stories waddling behind her Hannibal-esque march to her destiny. All of this to say; there never was room or awareness adequate for a crosseyed sensate in the superheated cauldron of narcissist apprenticeship that was my childhood. I developed what innate mimicry i possessed, modeled the ‘cocktail hour vignettes’ that constituted the cognoscenti in the dead space south of San Francisco. I glommed onto the detritus of art supplies and open books that reflected the interests of my fascinating parents, substituting the proficiency i gained from factotuming in my parent’s faux bohemian billet in exchange for the dearth of affection and simple human acknowledgement that i grew up starved for in that house full of ‘vain’ appetites.  

So true-to-form on my elder sister’s birthday, i participated as uninvited interloper, sending a sonnet and sundry photos reflecting my obtuse, however sincere effort to be what i’ll never be - welcomed. Her birthday occurs on 9-11. For a time my strategy was to send whatever humor i could picture might serve as counterweight to someone i am welcome to ignore, and whose grief i’m not welcome to commiserate. Fb in it’s mechanical stupidity only serves to exacerbate my isolation and relational confusion. Zukè prompted me with an exposure of a statue that is magnificent in its own right and weighty in its failure to rise like cream into the cultural stratosphere, In the spirit of frolic i conjured for my birtday, i posted the foto only to discover an innocent remark from a stranger asking if the form the subject carries ‘is a cat?’ I held my tongue, but more importantly did not react, except here; out of context, in an essay attempting to parse the complexity of ‘raison d'être’ for my existence which i more and more suspect has less raison than d'être that one might find in the accretions of the same stones i have spent my life shaping into congruous shapes which at best are ambiguous, at worst opportunities for commentary by other isolated aesthetes. Yet in the scheme of things, though the nice lady from the South meant nothing more than to pose an interested question that through no fault of her own caused me grievous existential perturbation, my life is so configured that i sit content in the afternoon sun chewing on morsels of events that do little more than feed my soul - and feeling tremendously grateful for such nutrition in a starving world.

A shot and a half of Reposada, after a week and a half of vibrant good health; give or take a day, and this birtday morning the kindly Doctora at the local clinic teased Lima Bean-size, or at least large Pinto Bean-size detritus from both ears - i knew it was there, but took successive visits for liberation. I have been lucky so far in life debriding them myself since my patron saint of ENT Dr’s, Doctor Sammy Lee was called back to the mother ship; or at local Vietnamese Barber shops; (why the American war there was doomed out of the gate.)  There’s an autoerotic fascination about holding molted tissue that is so primary as to mimic an infant’s fascination with feces, and the world’s equally irrational repulsion - don’t believe me, try looking up the psychiatric expression for infantile interest in feces. My fascination with the intrinsic nature of esoterica formed on rainy days inside a weekend-empty home drenching myself in the encyclopedias my loving parents invested in. The comforting plethora of what was ‘known’ then against my increasingly insatiable curiosity about what is known now, nestles nicely in the paradox of our “monkeys with guns and money” reality that we drag behind our gimp; traipsing with our fragile skeletons onward past the chimera of oh-so-certain signposts into the nearly unfathomable enormity of our, forgive me Leonard, “invincible defeat;” 

don’t know about y’all - i had a blast wiping this one off the slate · 

“what’s the numerical equivalent of sex¿

68, one more and you eat it.” - A. Nonymous ·

Oscar Wilde — 'All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.'

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breathing - the sonnet ·

There is little much more than breath to life

yet we fill our days with such distraction

what explains our fascination for strife

except as diversion from examination 

Of what, for why¿ permission to enjoy

the act of creation from deep within?

who would dare to arbitrate - with what ploy ·

‘We’ll need to see papers you were given,

to make something out of nothing, ain’t right; 

breathing must have authorization - 

how else can we know you have seen the light?

You might have knowledge without condition.

our system is made to give you comfort

that’s why we gloss your pain, you say it's hurt 

jts 070923 raison d'être; an essay - breathing; the sonntet ·

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∞

the Macabre New Year - 6 months L8r · an essay and sonnet

 

110623 the Macabre New Year - 6 months L8r · an essay

This, my last essay, ‘the Macabre New Year’ was written at the beginning of the year in another country, different narrative; never published - too macabre. Suffice it to say, after a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and a broken wrist from getting knocked off my bicycle at Thanksgiving; my whining about getting Covid after Christmas was pretty predictable · the vestiges of that confluence of inequity are locked in the PDF file that refused my tortured efforts this morning to open and complete my mission. But rather than beat a ‘dead horse’, let’s see if it is not possible to invent a train of thought inaccessible to the fake-as-fuck jargon the ruling class is passing off as entertaining prose, because why not? I can say this because i’m likely much closer to death at my age than your ‘presumed’ younger demographic. And unless you’re a bored, aged operative tasked with supervising the slightly nefarious rantings of any miscreant jeopardizing public harmony with disaffected, however diffident, evocations for generalized mayhem, the possibility of your casting off the yoke of your carefully fitted mental manacle are next to nothing.

But then again who’d have thought anyone surviving an automobile collision from a blue-tooth distracted officer of the Kern County judicial establishment, could muster the gumption to swim upstream south to the land of Emilio Zapata and the much younger Mexican Revolution? And to what end; it’s not like the boink on my head knocked anything out of place or even jarred loose cogent meaningful narrative capable of derailing the ai choo choo and its mission of world domination by using carefully crafted, however verbose snippets of rhetoric seasoned with emotional denial and the sour grapes of a life wheezing into its end days without an African Queen fitted for any kind of ‘Hail Mary’ gesture to bracket its quest for meaning.

I forgot how much fun it was to just write minus the ego orientation of accomplishment and need to present for recognition proof of how much one knows by what one writes, rather than how much one feels by sharing what one has discovered. For example, in this perfect cocoon of creativity that i have been searching for since i left my last studio, i have enjoyed the most blissful hours of focused work that i can remember for a long time; and yet that thorn - the pebble in the shoe Muhammad Ali referred to in his aphorism about ‘it’s not the mountains ahead you have to climb that wears you out, but the pebble in your shoe’, almost like the universe has to add emfasis to the sylahble by infecting the metal door on my patio with a mechanical chirp so i won’t get too comfortable and get all blissful with the creative - but that’s just a mean way to see the world, almost like some pathology of my own can’t stand the thought of my having fun and wants to drag me back to the world of .  .. help me, what’s the word i’m looking for?

Same for the lover i was about to take until she fit the mold of previous ‘harridans’, i’ve known and left me hanging without a nod, or was it that i was just too dam close to that happy threesome, but too dam fundamental in my thinking? I really don’t know. I know there is no perfect relationship and that my siblings are not superior to me for having carried their harnesses in the conventional way for so much longer than our poor tormented and not so tormented parents had been able. I have also burnt the fingers of my soul trying to fly too close to the sun and would rather fight for a lifestyle that permits me to explore my world and its language of ideas as best i can without censure or fear in the hopes that simple gravity of ‘too much to ignore’ may one day escape the confines of the facile conceptions where social engineers render curiosity and imagination to such narrow confines as to be easily defined by 'affectless' algorithms.

In engineering the ‘go to’ whimper for losing scads of work to an ill-placed keystroke was, it’s always easier to rebuild 'it' - no matter what ‘it’ was. In this instance, the simple pleasure of writing without an ax to grind, has been more fun than i’m inclined to waste time explaining, but if as was posited by the erudite photographer of the Hollywood YMCA, who later looked the other way when i tried to associate in Aix, “Lord willing and the creek don’t rise,” i will come visiting again and more often. I like the act of sharing and while i make no claim that what you read or learn herein is of any use to anyone but myself, i can say what you've read is as open and honest as i can make it without charging you a whit for its reading; Good luck to us all, and to all a good night.     

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the Macabre New Year - 6 months L8r · and sonnet

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Habits are great if they don’t make you sick

“what doesn’t kill you, will make you stronger.”

Not my words, but they are still pretty slick, 

though they’ll do fuck all to keep you younger.

“Fountain of youth” another fuckin’ myth,

designed by greed to keep you in great need.

for if you could just find out who to tithe,

the hunger you work for wouldn’t need feed.

Then again without form, Kaos might reign;

Maxwell Smart made it clear how that worked out.

The truth people feared might happen, became -

The good guys lost, and evil reigned throughout.

a sad parable, if you can listen,

might present itself past a distant din.

  

jts 110623 the Macabre New Year - 6 months L8r · a sonnet

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∞

Christmas Eve & Xmas Day - the essay / joyeux du noël - a sonnet ·

 

The year my father died he melodramatically, as only he could, pulled me by my lapel down to his bedridden face and elicited a solemn promise that i would never quit writing - ergo i write, however painfully. If you have been reading the saga of my journey to face certain death, my last blog entry contained besides my usual smarmy self-righteous sanctimonious observations about my relative moral superiority - an account of having been knocked to the ground by a holiday hasty Mercedes Benz.’ (my christmas eve gift was a polite declination by the injury attorney i’d approached about the ‘scene of the crime’ due to the grey area of my ‘green light does too short of a yellow light’ transgression; however i was trumped by the offender’s apparent relationship clerking for a ‘cheese’ in the local star chamber.) 

I used to believe with conviction in my capacity to overcome physical adversity of any kind, but this youthful fiction was always consistent with the ‘hothouse’ cultural environment my semi-privileged  upbringing that suggested such a conceit was my birthright when my mortality and the un-prosecutable afore mentioned chariot of power drove over my arrogant presumption; i’m okay, having started out a little cock-eyed; i now possess just a little more character, a lot like gilding the lily. However, my existential stamina which has never been in short supply due to an apparently inexhaustible supply of cosmetic raison d’etre; is now nearly exhausted as an aged ex-expatt itinerant stone carver with a broken wrist and no prospects save an ignorant willingness to cross the DMZ of post-Jan 6th corporate insurrection ‘merica to stand shoulder to shoulder with any anti-corporate renegade brigade looking to face off against the nascent pre-apocalyptic ‘merican apologists. Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke, or as the now deceased, but not forgotten Doug Rubardt, late of 60’s Telegraph Ave, Berserkly sandwich shop, cum restauranteur fame, “Joke ‘em if they can’t take a fuck” R·I·P·, may your personal decency ride through the eons of space and time to lovingly inform cosmic cardiac muscles anywhere.

Ma is in her deathbed and the ever mindful eldest has organized a ‘zoom’ Christmas that included me; though he was present on my arrival back into the states when i bought my first telephonic device in 8 years abroad - a ‘Consumer Cellular’ flip phone incapable of such techno feats; well played elder brother - you do Cain proud. The great thing about writing is that no matter what sanctimonious rabbit hole you wish to wander down in search of the holy grail of innocence - there you are - facing no one, but you yourself the author. In the background just now is the Xmas day gift opening ‘feeding frenzy’ that the holiday has become replete with matchbook toy track that has its own propelling device that sounds just like a poorly tuned sewing machine. The shrill captive birds understood this morning’s noise explosion as an invitation to ratchet up their incessant piercing plaintive squawk as though with the right decibel their ‘music’ might crack the barrier of my self-referential flinty heart which finds no welcome for the shrieks of delight that the material-gain of this holiday has come to represent.

The upside is that the dearth of feeling that object oriented’ celebrations have choked off, leave the region of compassionate understanding wide open - fallow fields long untilled and lacking appropriate DNA, ’heritage seed stock’ to grow anything other than what the corporate consumer shills have picked to propagate. I do not know what to plant and consider myself extremely fortunate to be able to string words together - the existential doubt that has replaced my former implacable confidence is now icing on the cake · my own twist on Marie’s sage pronouncement of “Let them eat cake.” Pop was right to wring from me the solemn promise to never stop writing, for having slogged through the past 48 hours cherry picking ideas from a shattered future and attempting to forge meaning in a life that is no longer anchored by the chimera of delusion i’ve used to hammer out meaning - my opinion about this holiday has no bearing for anyone but myself and my creative lodestone which had been yoked to recognition and ego is now fleeing down the ‘rabbit hole’ searching for any feeling of relevance which only ‘work’ can provide.

Previously my youthful focus on power, force, and grace created an endlessly uniform panorama that obscured the crevices and pitfalls that one can only recognize from within whatever limited perspective into which one has tumbled - much like the Arizona landscape one views on approaching the Grand Canyon. To get in and out of those vastly different terrains, one must know and understand the use and function of which skill to use when - a skill which when developed using slight modifications, and clear well thought out purpose allows for a much easier and effective transition from smooth uninterrupted landscape to many varieties of challenging landscapes; all that is necessary to master these gifts is that desire which Martin Luther King so eloquently articulated “If you can’t fly, then run; if you can’t run, then walk; if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”

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joyeux du noël - a sonnet ·

what i love - laughing at a poem title;

don't knock it 'til you've tried it, like blank verse -

starts out oafish but skeins to pin-point subtle

nestling nicely with guffaws plucked from tears 

what's to any holy day without joy?

solemnity devoid of nurturing; 

compulsory gifting · love me - buy toy

seating in our soul's throne a long dead king?

we calcify if we will not alter

the Tao said when you die, you are rigid

when are born you flex and are like water;

odd that men’s life maker is called turgid

frolic has no place not knowing sorrow

just as now is becoming tomorrow

jts 122422 Christmas Eve Day

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Thanksgiving - an essay / Giving thanks · the sonnet

 

Thanksgiving - an essay  ·

I am in bardo, 

(ˈbɑːdəʊ ) noun (often capital) (in Tibetan Buddhism) the state of the soul between its death and its rebirth;

actually Bakersfield, CA - same difference ·

July 4th of this year i returned from 8 years abroad with a very hazy agenda - one objective was to visit 94 year old ma. The date was due to a requirement by the nation i was living in to have an exit ticket when i had arrived 6 months earlier, existence by fiat is not something i can recommend to you. My choices had not always been so desultory; in fact i have lived most of my life driven by a singular purpose to create. To that end i looked out over the horizon after the death of my father, a precipitous career end, and an unfortunate house purchase, each of which was affected by the conceit or myself as artist on a mission, but suspended in a vacuum. For the longest time i could endure the crushing loneliness that is the ‘creative life, for to create anything of merit requires intense application and vast periods of solitude - characteristics i’d thought defined me well. So well, i deflect compliments about work believing that proves my ego has been tamed and my ambitions pristine - talk about ‘your delusions.’

Then i got old, not in the Rip Van Winkle manner - waking up sans hangover to find my torments gone, clutched in the loving embrace of wee-ones hanging off my ankles; however, my real realization was a ruptured disk hefting bottled water in confined quarters. My fate appears to have had much better ideas. A harbinger of things to come had been debilitating sciatica, or so i imagined. Turns out to be serious degeneration of my hip socket exacerbated by a decade of manic ‘denial’ running with pronounced LLD (leg length difference); coupled with a lifetime shifting the weights of carved stone statuary intended as a bulwark against the relentless march of death that stalks each or us, instead of a bizarre metaphor for Moby Dick careening with me and my arrogance deep into the vast ocean depths of an unknown future - the pièce de résistance, of course would be degenerative osteoarthritis, or has been said better elsewhere “i ache in the places i used to play.”

The paradox - there’s always a paradox, i am as thankful as i have ever been, however galling it is to consider any future that includes picking feathers off a floor from a caged flock of birds whose closest equivalence to my enlightenment would be the obnoxious personality Baba Ram Dass reputedly invited into his ashrams to push the acolytes off center - an oddly effective method for breaking down the ego. This holiday i have the poignant responsibility to be present during the continued fracture of a mother/daughter, time-honored tradition for the questionable reason that a child has not attended the first half of her first year of schooling; i watched the same child spiral out of control within 1/2 hour of waking because she was using a lollypop to scoop sugar powder from a candy dispenser shaped like a toilet - sad huh ? Sadder still when you consider this Sucrose Delivery Platform was designed to ‘train’ the most vulnerable amongst us - children. How would you explain to the ‘adults’ present they were sealing an hysterical semi-fate for the next 45 minutes, until the sugar ‘boost’ falls out - ah ! tradition !!

But this isn’t about you - it’s about me digging myself out of the existential rut from which i am seeking traction and another unique solution while i abase myself vacuuming feathers from a flock of manically squalling captive birds which i would gladly throttle one by one had i a killing bone in my body. I douse my murderous fury like most other murderous inclinations that visit the dungeons of my of my emerging heart by accommodating and sublimating uncomfortable feelings until i’m sure my instincts won’t damage another; not because i am afraid of retaliation, but from the very real experience of having been hurt; i have been damaged and have caused others damage. So it is not difficult to sense the same pain in others. The 7 year old ‘wannabe’ sugar addict this afternoon was being given extensions, and loudly objecting to someone else imposing a style on her captive head - not much different than the ‘judgement’ with which i plague myself. What i vow to do as i veer from my self-imposed bardo rut is to pay myself first and foremost the respect i accord others, whether understood and acknowledged or not. I cannot be thankful to anyone until i have nurtured within myself the same ‘unconditional self worth’ i pray for the world.

There is much hurt in my heart from things not of my making, and more from my own doing; nor am i yoked to the myriad bizarre notions others entertain themselves with about my reality - either former ‘others’ or recent ‘others'; everyone seems to want a say about everyone but themselves · i understand that, for having struggled to distinguish my feelings about this holiday, it has meant owning the cruelty of my birth family members without embracing whatever perceptions they use to justify quarantining themselves from me - like that would keep them from experiencing whatever illness or unexamined feelings they would apparently project on to me. We are the same four infants suckled and nurtured within the same cauldron of multi-generational pathology. My mother’s, and by extension, my sibling’s effete assertion that they alone parse the correct interpretations of gratitude, family, and decency is fascinating, if it weren’t for the contortions i go through to disentangle the illogic of such stupidity without causing them, or others pain from my own unacknowledged suffering. I will continue to express my thanks, such as it is, to a world that often feels to me as though i am supposed to be elsewhere and say nothing about that. 

- (talk about your unexamined feelings and unconscious projection, why don’t ya’)

now i’ll work on how to present proper gifts to that same confusing world, because t’is the season to be .  .. ··· 

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moments after completing this essay i went out to ride the safe zone circuit in the adjacent subdivision, but before i reached that haven within the most dangerous roads in ‘merica - Bakersfield, CA; i was knocked by a holiday-hurrying Mazda accelerating into my right of way out of a too-short lefthand turn light in a crosswalk and rendered unconscious. Though out longer than 10 minutes, the perspicacious paramedic deemed my ‘mentis compos’, sufficiently such to release me; i walked myself and too-damaged-to-roll bicycle home, evading the maelstrom modern 'merican care has become.

That was the 25 of November, by the 28th it had became an issue for the fiduciaries and i was ordered to submit to a CT scan at the ER. The results declared a contusion and hemorrhage to my right temporal lobe (approx 6 mm) which a 2nd CT scan could not find; a compression fracture to my left fibula and a laceration to my right distal phalange that was too far along in healing to accept sutures. My panicked ’primary care’ physician ordered a 2nd CT scan 4 days later, that exposed a ‘false positive’ for hemorrhaging or contusion: i'm repeating myself - welcome to the world of 'TBI'·

I am still thankful, but with additional reasons; the osteo-technician that replaced the temporary ‘ice-tong’ splint expertly fashioned by the LVN Ms. Rung during the 1st CT abomination created a sculptural masterpiece that has immobilized my fibula, yet allows me the dexterity necessary to type at will. Grateful i had the ‘presence of mind’ to examine the contraindications of taking the analgesic ‘Mobic’ prescribed because of a opiate fear that i was self-medicating with 50mg of Tramadol for my continuing discomfort and peculiar inattention by the ‘Doctors’ for degenerative osteo-arthritis of the lumbar and hip socket that was made manifest by x-rays that have now turned up missing.

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Giving thanks - the sonnet  ·

    

Hating where you are creates a hard share

which may explain the fantasy season -

give objects to others, in place of care.

ergo, it may be kinder to have fun.

Playing in this world creates more to give

because fun is finer found with others,

yet here i sit alone, happy to live

without family, sister or brothers -

instead creating ash Leonard called poems.

Is that finer fun and a better gift,

than our hijacked Xmas and twisted Oms?

or delusions from a heart shrunk and bereft?

Doesn’t matter - what does, is i’m happy

though my shrunken heart feels my gift - sappy.

jts 11/24/2022

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being - the essay / Buddha Head, come and gone; easter morning · a sonnet

being - the essay

The world is crawling out from under a plague siege; a princely oligarchy holds our wealth for ransom; and two of the world’s greater powers are saber rattling with tyrannical impotence, while the fount of judeo-christian wisdom is committing genocide with my tax dollar. Two personal delusions i have used as raison d'être, art and  literature, ebb and flow in force and fun; a cataract impaired vision has been returned to me, such that were i a 20-something rake again full of piss and vinegar, the world might very well be my oyster, but am more like a devolving infant in a playpen full of aphorisms and snippets of experience with which i still try to defend my right to exist. Dreams of recognition and accomplishment rise like vapor and dust rather than the sturm and drang i applied before as traction while i slogged ever onward toward the idyl of fame and fortune, my 4G signal swamped by 5G white noise. I know not what to do, may have never known · the glacial sheet of self-doubt forming and reforming, dragging boulders across the moraines of my fractured ego exuding a past-like wisdom, not yet compassionate, more urine plume from rusting corrugation on some remote desert roadway.

However all is not lost, and my super-simplified life provides moments of clarity - a self restraint practiced over years rising from embankments of chaos; kindness without motive and tolerant acceptance, the inevitable subduction of life force by the ‘impenetrable’ Tao of Einstein’s god. As my personal power diminishes; the nuisance of absent wifi contrasts with fantasies of internettedness, or its commensurate value for amplifying literary conceits. I find instead a barren landscape of harsh realities about relatedness, fear and love. For example, the delusion of belonging anywhere for me has been based on a super-abbreviated period of my youth after which the mysterious all-giving bosom of family vanished into a feeding frenzy amongst my kin for things that were at one time our family estate. In a self righteous and sanctimonious repudiation of their avarice, i chased prestige and freedom, with an insatiable appetite.

If i must be hungry, i would rather hunger for understanding, the type of understanding i’ve gained from a lifelong effort to comprehend art and literature and its role for humanity. In the midst of one domestic collapse, i spent an entire weekend which seemed an instant, affixed to Henry Fielding's “The history of Tom Jones - a Foundling.” There is much about that particular domestic collapse which isn’t worth a backward glance, yet the cogent discourse on issues of courage, confusion, commitment and forgiveness i discovered within the history of Tom Jones inform my thinking to this day. Then it gets dicey, how does any wisdom derived from that reading translate into comparable value for the time it has taken you to read this essay? Would more explicit images of my personal experience aid you in better understanding our world? - that i write in protest/reaction-formation/entertainment withdrawal from an intermittent internet; that there is a fraught-ribbed dog with a diseased eye and his equally cadaverous pack outside the door of my current hovel; who voices howls that hold my soul in thrall more so than the poser exertions of my covertly mendacious interest in the creative process or that i've created my 'virtual' sangha willingly under the puerile supervision of a surveillance culture financed by the taxes of my slave wages during 5 decades of skimming from my ‘gainful employment’ in service of a visible means of support’? Please don’t all answer at once .  ..

I have simplified my life at great personal cost, including the sacrifice of two intrinsic conceits - my value to our culture as a sculptor of stone, painter of purpose and author of merit - i derived enormous pleasure from each activity but the logistics demanded for them are not commensurate with the return. That is not to say that what i have created in those mediums lacks value, far from it. It is a simple financial fact defined by Dame Paradox and her offsprings T’is and T’ain’t, my life's work is not significant enough as a market share to finance the cost of my old age, much less the tax of interring my remains. I may be crazy, but i’m not stupid. There is a Youtube record of me making what i thought was no idle claim to destroy all of my stone carvings before i die; i was neither insincere, nor purely venal at the time; i was motivated by conceit and umbrage that what i had spent a lifetime creating would be subsumed by a corrupt and non-constructive industrial art establishment that opts for veneer over substance; then i got old; as delusion after delusion was dismantled by delammination of body and soul from decrepitude, i was forced to examine more closely personal fictions based on dubious ego-based assumptions, often derived from traumas of my own making.

All at the expense of the superlative creative dynamic inherent to our species. For example, a documentary i just watched on Shakespeare stated simply due to his prolific use of new words and word combinations, that 1 in 10 of our world's English language expressions are derived from his writings, yet in my own desiccated, effete search for originality, i have just dithered overlong about using ‘delammination,’ because of on an inert algorithm’s red underline; that is insane. I write like i draw, paint, sculpt, write or love, because it gives me a pleasant visceral confirmation about my thinking when loving; i see the radiant reflection of one other’s love; a feeling that draws me to the core of existence. When creating visual artifacts i search for that same reflection of love in a glance, expression or faithful interpretation of the terrain and flora we share, or in words, clear ideas that comprise the warp and woof of our fading human light.

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 Buddha Head, easter morning · a sonnet

I set the broken egg on the table.

The girl smiled handing me the portrait bust

of Buddha before unavailable - 

though the shirt i wore said 'in him i trust.'

She'd found the head in beans used to protect;

so well it worked his loss unknown t'il found.

Are we so yoked, ours to what we select;

or is ours what we find going around?

I missed it not, yet found to lose again, 

or it had never been gone; i was lost.

Here and gone are baby signposts - whose in?

When no one is in, it comes at great cost.

In either case, what's lost is never gone

because light by its nature makes dawn.

jts 25/02/2022

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

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