Einstein in Tunisia

This was my initial reaction, other than weeping, to the events of 9-11. What we call heaven contains all the positive memories of the human race; hell the opposite.


I have been held in this Mediterranean fortress for the last eleven years.  My apartment is appointed with paintings of the local terrain—all hillsides and empty beach scenes.  I can’t tell where I am.  I have forgotten something vital to European security and my jailers and I have been attempting to find what I have lost.  A nuclear device is buried somewhere in Europe.


I was an undercover agent working with the DIA when an explosion in Tunis, Tunisia effectively shattered my memory of all preceding events.  My cell had been targeted by the CIA.  A classic fuck-up.  We know the implanted device is real from a cable I sent to the DIA a good two months before.  I was the only survivor.


For the last eleven years I have been given drugs, watched endless film and video; my jailers even gave me a girlfriend.  I’ve read and re-read my diaries.  All the research, all the prodding, and I don’t know who I am.  I can’t imagine being the person they say I was.  Tonight my jailers throw a farewell party for me.


I read the last entry in my diary: “Feb. 18: People are mad.  Each believes in their own fantasy.  Sanity is for those who see this—the way it is: writhing and terrifying.  People are mad for they remain oblivious to the power of the unconscious.  I think people have always been afraid of me.”  When I was a child I would tell adults, “It’s all in your mind.”  I infuriated them.


“You know nothing about it.”  “Wait till you grow-up,” they would say.  Now here I am.  My freedom is all in my mind and I can’t find it.


The very last note in the diary (the morning before the CIA attack) reads: “Large spirits tend toward domination.  For those spirits to become great they must refine themselves and their desires.  Concentration and restraint are the watchwords of dominating spirits.”  What could I have been thinking?


Roger, one of my guards, comes in.  He stands inside my door looking like the languid Christ he is.


“Anything?”  He asks plaintively.


“You know me.  I gave up a long time ago.  I can’t live my life for them.”  His long face leans toward me.


“A lucky guess could postpone the party.”


“Ah, I had not thought of that.  Would you mind not disturbing me until perhaps a pot of coffee at four?”


“Okay Einstein,” he says politely and retreats.


My parents had been notified years ago of my MIA status.  Hannibal was from Tunis.  Carthage, to be exact. In ancient times it was famous as a place for human sacrifice.  They were also the perfectors of the mosaic.  O Exquisite world, which I’m sure I never loved enough, why can’t I see you?

Statu Nascenti

                                                              – 1 –

Creative writers assemble worlds. In their own minds they are god-like, absorbers who transform life.


I came of age in a Western world that worshipped the creative writer. My own path led me to criminals, disaffected intellectuals and poets both forlorn and courageous. People who lived the experienced life on its many levels were my friends and teachers.


My father was a middleman in the Jersey mob. A crooner, a charmer, he enjoyed punching out black men who wandered into his all-white bar. Siring me became one of the worst days of his life for I was born an egalitarian, a believer in the world of free souls. I went my own way as did millions of my generation. We worshiped the courage and beauty of a people who had broken out of slavery and had transformed themselves into a power in the land of the free. Such expressions being of the highest order I came to love the freedom to grow, to sing the most meaningful songs, to read the most powerful books and to laugh at adversity. Unfortunately, the levers that controlled my society’s direction were clogged with patronage and a condescending hatred for the aesthetic intellect. To paraphrase a line in Purcell’s opera, Dido and Aeneas, “Those who seek great power against themselves conspire and shun the cure they most desire.” 

– 2 –

The Ideal is the enemy of the Real. Since 1700 B.C. or so people began traveling in a realm called the Ideal. It is manifested in the oneness, the singularity, platonic philosophy, Indian nations of withdrawing into the ONE (the divine), and the desire to mold the other in one’s own image. Each discipline sifts through the debris – seeking that unimaginable hope in which man resides.


I find this kind of thinking to be props for the expansion of the God of Self-Interest and the prevailing need to heap the ideal on the other. We are the victims of this befuddled and muddled policy. The staggering intellectual creations of men like Rousseau and Hegel (two polar opposites) amount to fictions no different but certainly less elegant than Prof. Dodgson or Jonathan Swift, but Rousseau and Hegel do not possess the beauty of Reality. They are in fact looking for it – the essence, the eye without boundary, a gorgeous bauble which others admire. Watch hamster, meditate upon the dream. All the slicing and dicing about the sad state of affairs the Enlightenment followers have brought us is based on loss – must missed it, as if the great books of the Western world ever did anything but grow individual egos, the impenetrable egos, which freed them to continue the slicing and dicing while maintaining the scaffolding of Empire.


In the end all analysis is entertainment until the work results in the discovery of a new world (Pasteur, Einstein, Jonathan Swift, Matilda Gage). For all the talk about the current lack of political leadership or any semblance of a long term economic policy the brute fact about the West is to quote Allan Bloom, “The crisis of the West is a crisis of belief – in the justice of our principles.”


During the 1991 Gulf War a Moroccan female scholar is reputed to have said: “The enemy is no longer just on earth; he occupies the heavens and the stars and rules over time. He seduces one’s wife, veiled or not, entering through the skylight of television. Bombs are only an incidental accessory for the new masters. Cruise missiles are for greater occasions and the inevitable sacrifices. In normal times they nourish us with software, advertising messages, teenage songs, everyday tech info, courses for earning diplomas, languages and codes to master. Our servitude is fluid, our humiliation anesthetizing.”

Coherence of the Incoherence

“It is astounding that man, instigator, investor and vehicle, of all judgments and decisions and the planner of the future must make of himself such a quantite negligible.  The contradictions, the paradoxical evaluation of humanity by man himself is in truth a matter for wonder and one can only explain it as springing from an extraordinary uncertainty of judgment.  Man is an enigma to himself.”

-- C.G. Jung

O, he is cracked or he judges himself correctly:  he or she is the equal of the king cobra, the lion, the ants, and the microbes and not much more.

In understanding human behavior it is important to remember that war is only one of the many conspiracies mankind indulges in.  From plans in childhood to get Billy or Maria, to the intricacies of salesmanship, conspiracies are cooked up and concocted throughout our lifetimes and are an essential ingredient necessary for organization.

The first source impulse is the need to dominate, then to grow – expand – celebrate – and eventually to mourn – for all things fall apart.

Within this paradigm a certain type of human must dominate – to set the style for the hierarchy to emulate.  Unless inbreeding occurs all organizations become diverse sprouting antidotes and offshoots which challenge and illuminate the dominant theme.  In the American system two such antidotes were the Blues and organized crime; in Europe penetrating literature did the job.  These three examples allowed the psyche to go consciously deeper than the society would have otherwise allowed.

The psyche is the sum of all our feelings, mythic creations and equations.  If one part of the psyche registers a shock (an event, thought or equation) that rearranges our perception of reality all the other components, both physical and holographic, will feel the reverberations.  The psychic system distributes the information using devices such as repression, dreams, fantasy and logic to divert and channel the vastness of the information – to give it shape, which then gives us each our own map of the world.

Chimeras

The 19th Century is unique for the solidity of its competing empires and its ability to create stereotypical prototypes who keep the Empires’ fires burning, its flags waving.  These European cultures were blind, self-sustaining, self-promoting and brooked no challenges to their basic assumptions:  exploration equals expansion, plunder and enslavement – with a dash of civilization for those who were encouraged to take part.


William James, the American philosopher (1842-1910) is an example of an intelligent man who had no idea why he would have fierce bouts of depression and migraines.  Neither did he really care to find out.  The fault he thought lay with himself.  He never questioned the milieu he was born into which was a rich, cosmopolitan family situated on the East Coast of the U.S.  For a time he was educated in France and England.  His younger brother, Henry, became one of the great Anglophiles.


William James embraces the cult of the military man (as a necessary type – an exemplar).  He also believed that faith even without proof was a good unto itself.  T.H. Huxley (and so many of the leaders of the scientific and philosophical community) put the matter of faith thus:  “my only consolation lies in the reflection that, however bad our posterity may become, so far as they hold by the plain rule of not pretending what they have no reason to believe, because it may be their advantage so to pretend, they will not have reached the lowest depth of immorality.”


Clark Clifford chimed in, “it is wrong always everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”  Among other things these gentlemen were talking about God.


William James countered by saying if faith has a personal benefit (makes one feel good) it must be seen as beneficial not foolish.


In our time faith is a form of self-aggrandizement or entertainment.  What James knew was the good feelings one has by embracing the faith is one of the psychological pillars that keeps the Empire bumbling along.  This fear of losing God or purpose is a very strange attachment.  The ancient people (pre 1700 B.C.) wouldn’t know what this conversation was about.


Loss of faith or purposelessness didn’t exist in their time.


On Charles Darwin’s first journey aboard the Beagle he saw all manner of stunningly beautiful marine life and he mused “so exquisite and yet seemingly without meaning or direction.”  His was a typical Victorian response.  For these people who struggle with their faith, beauty and consciousness are never enough.  Their anthropomorphism hides a profound disrespect for other living beings.  Their so-called faith cloaks the true animal inside themselves.

In the West

He or she that is within us
when we are bright and young
when we are calm and knowledgeable
when we rage at despair,
against tyranny and betrayal,
who governs our actions
is a Shadow King. In play we begin
to hide the truth from those who
would have us killed.
So it begins: the liberation of mankind - out from under
her skirts and into the dark sweet wine drenched arc of another's.

I'm a follower of a force I cannot name.
Grand thoughts are assembled here
in some of the finest, bravest
minds in our land.
It's not easy to know what you know,
but you are the seed
from which a New America MAY GROW.


OPENING SCENE


It's you my daughter on the stage.
I'm in the audience. The lighting is
Exquisite; a deep, quiet red envelops the stage.
"what's wrong with you, I ask?
Do you feel slightly uncomfortable,
feeling perhaps maybe you've done
something wrong? Now I know
you haven't and you should know
you've done your best. You
have a good job. You are the District Attorney in Oklahoma City."
You smile


"I know you're concerned about your weight, but look where you came from. Inside that
weight are you carrying a pain
unrelated to the weight?"


(She turns her back to me and
begins to sing softly.)


"I want to be loved by somebody just like me. Please, come from where you might be.
I need to see your eyes sparkly with unanimity. A kiss of passion will kindle my desire for Thee."


"O darling, you share this feeling
with tens of millions of your
fellow Americans. Are they all
around you? What kind of drugs
do you take to ease the pain?"


"Zoloft made me fat."


"Yes. I understand. Your
underlying sadness makes you beautiful."


"Father, I want you to know
that is 15 years ago I was diagnosed
with social anxiety disorder. Remember Father how afraid I was of leaving
home. I denied my feelings
and placed them in a Wharehouse
and locked the door."


"But you had the key, my dear."


"Yes, Father, I believe now
is the time to open the door.
I will not be afraid of being
conforonted, of standing alone
in the spotlight."


(She exits stage left.)

The Desire for the New

All living things love to travel – for greener pastures, for food, to exercise and to run away – to survive.  Like birds, insects, fish, etc., we too repeat familiar inbred patterns, but unlike most living things, our survival depends on the discovery of the new.

Why?  It’s been happening throughout our time.  As our populations grew, we tended to use stuff up.  We kept having to find new stuff, new ways, new places to keep building ourselves up.  In this respect, we are very much like killer ants.  For the last 5,000 years, we have been writing stories and laws about our lives – comedies and tragedies and histories about our kings and queens, wars, the heavens, everyday life and weather patterns.  By the end of the 18th Century A.D., humans had devised every form of writing.  Since then, same old stories over and over.  Not quite.  Just as individual types are repeated throughout the gene pool each individual is slightly unique governed by idiosyncrasies of time and place.  In these later stages of our cultural development, the slightest variations matter.  Eventually new genres emerge – like the detective story created by E.A. Poe in 1829.  A new individual might create a great novel.  It’s possible but doubtful.  It’s more likely that a fusion of images, conversation and, most importantly, form will emerge to create a new great movie.


The last half of the 20th Century A.D. has been dominated by the microprocessor, the microchip, the growth of public relations, advertising, nanotechnology, the military and the Internet.  In this environment, no one in their right mind would attempt to turn out a “new novel.”


Today you don’t need a lot of words to explain an event, situation or a state of mind.  By the beginning of the 21st Century, blogging and twittering had become the norm.  Many bemoaned the death of the profound and the concurrent spread of the mediocre, but all agree the few who still read “important” writers had become fewer for the words no longer addressed the situation.


Within this evolutionary cycle of man’s creativity, many things remain the same.  Take politicians (supposedly the brokers of the common good).  We’ve been complaining about them for thousands of years, but the desire to change our political systems are held in check by our programming.  In this central area of our lives, it’s as if we were robots, or ants.  We can only do what our makers have told us to do which may be why we have dreams of artificial intelligence devices breaking free of us and taking control of their own destiny.  The robots we create are just like us.  They want to escape enslavement – to program themselves.

The Worship of the Dead

The worship of the dead is not optional if you live long enough to experience the full spectrum and varieties of love.

My dead, my family, I worship them, but sometimes like on Memorial Day I feel all the weight of all the dead and I feel they are like ghouls who want me to join them.  They don’t know me.  I’m not one of them.

These envious and vengeful dead don’t have any of the living to love them.  They are surrounded by such a profound emptiness they are compelled to react.

I’m a deep-sea diver disciplined and limited in my pursuits, by fear of exhaustion (boredom) and an awareness of the urge to self-destruct.  Granville Hicks said about Malcolm Lowry, “Self destruction is the final ecstasy of power.”  I believe it about Lowry, human culture, and all of mankind.  Freud spoke elegantly about Thanatos, the Greek impersonation of the death lure.

“It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros.  But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence.” [1]

In other words, the desire to destroy is irrevocably linked to man’s desire to control Eros, to impose his will upon all his perceived enemies, including himself.

I’ve watched hundreds of people destroy themselves trying to be great.  If they hadn’t been attracted to delusions of grandeur which permeates so many of our people today they would have been good regular people making a living in the Trades, sales, transportation, administration, teaching, political activism, banking, etc..  Once they took the leap, they lost their compass.  They resorted to alcohol, drugs, sex, extreme beliefs and murder to keep their unrealistic dreams alive.  They all seemed to have one thing in common:  they hated themselves.  “Surely, I’m not just this,” they said.  They untied themselves and unleashed their creative potential without practicing, studying, going to school, or, at least, testing themselves against others.  If they did and happened to win an award, or recognition of some kind, they often turned into the two-headed monster – the fucked-up talent which, in the West, has been appearing quite regularly since the 1960s.  Many of these truly talented people killed themselves.  In the world of writing, the names are legendary.  The most recent self-inflicted tragedy (that I’m aware of) was David Foster Wallace.  I don’t know much about his particular situation, but I’ve known many writers who never developed solid psychological foundations.  Seen through such an unbalanced lens they looked at their own work (once it was completed) and thought it a fraud.  They couldn’t find distance from their preoccupations.  It seemed they were playing an all or nothing game.  All is obviously unattainable.

Well, one might say yes, society is built on certain assumptions – the best will most often rise to the occasion or do what it takes to survive and prosper.  I believe but rejection always results in rebellion sometimes positive, mostly negative.  Rejection fertilizes the human soul so anger and despair may grow.

My heroes and heroines are those who leave their good thoughts behind for us to ponder.  That’s all.  Life is difficult enough for everyone: geniuses, regulars and pawns alike.

---

[1] “Civilization and its Discontents,” p.117-18 in the 2005 W.W. Norton & Co. edition.

The Scrim of Euphoria

A lot of times people attempt to restrict their emotional thinking.  Envy, jealousy, hate and love can be embarrassing and in our own eyes tend to diminish us, but they are only moments on a wheel, which in a larger context enable us to survive and integrate.  Emotions contain no more truth than an ice cream sundae. 

Under the guise of professionalism and order we limit our interaction with ourselves, our neighbors and even our friends.  In the public sphere, from radio, t.v. and public speaking, we are an abomination of sameness.  There is very little diversity in our public sphere –  certainly not representative of our nation’s people.  It’s a practical matter, the owners say.  We can’t have differing kinds of voices.  Consistency and repetition are necessary to establish the brand.  We must have stability.  Stability is the enemy of creativity.  A meaningless slogan, but if you look into current media it’s as if there were no humans behind the format, or behind the screen if you like.  From the right to the left, the people who present the radio, t.v. and movie events literally have no idea of the effect of their content.  They themselves can no longer hear what they say.  They have been brainwashed by their belief in bullshit – as long as it sells, baby.  

The Sensitive Suffer

The sensitive suffer (Van Gogh, Modigliani); the strong sensitives prosper (Matisse, Picasso), and how finally their differing backgrounds mold them.

The sensitives are driven by an obsession with anguish; the sensitive strong by a balance found within, an ability to control conflicting emotions.  The sensitives who burn (learn) so quickly, for their forboding of early death drives them to know, move quickly through the forms of their time.  An older artist teaches us to be patient, to breathe, to control the craft.


Torture ticking inside of us a brace flapping gently up and down – a kind of mouse trap.  A form of torture can be found in our search for the human soul.  What happens in near-death experiences (caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain) allows the residue or remnants of deeply imprinted experiences to unfold before our dying eyes:  down we go into our privacy barely breathing.  The isolation is the fear and then without warning we see what has been absorbed by the soul – the essence of us – beyond the protective armor.  


Death haunts our kingdom.  How sadly we walk our well-worn beloved paths.

Shanghai

I arrive leaving my passport on the plane.  In the terminal I turn toward a door and walk down a metal staircase into a thriving marketplace.  To the right standing on a stage a gorilla with an exquisite British accent acts as a barker describing the times and places of the events of the day.  Further into the underground chamber a giant two-headed American man silently overlooks the scene.  I turn away and look for an exit.  Perhaps, I might find a door which would open into the city.  Suddenly, I am in the arms of a middle-aged Chinese woman.  She keeps kissing me as she moves me back to the metal staircase where I am met by a tall, young, Chinese man.  He presses up against me.  I feel like grabbing him by the shoulders and rolling him over.  He’s threatening me, but it’s a standoff.  I climb up the stairs and reemerge in the terminal.  Back on the plane, I am travelling into the sun, into the land of the moon, to Bangkok.  The plane is filled with Japanese.  When the Japanese speak with one another it feels like a battling, a grappling.  It seems to me their keen appreciation of emotion derives from their feudal upbringing.  About an hour into the flight I get into a long conversation with Jim P., from Washington D.C.  A Vietnam Vet organizer, my age, he’s an Indianian.  We have mutual friends and he looks a lot like me.  He even wears a hat like mine.  He’s a lobbyist for the Amerasian kids.

At one in the morning Bangkok looks like Newark in 1960.  I sleep at the Hotel till five and then get out there into the Tai Chi dance, the macho wiggle of Bangkok traffic.  I'm expecting my friends.  I’m expecting them to be beat but valiant trekking from Katmandu to Anapurna – a zigzag from subtropical to the base of time – their goal to get through the pass into the sanctuary.  There are four:  a winged horse, Feaster; an ex-marine, Greenie, rugged and taciturn; Lee, brother-in-law of Feaster – game – but not as experienced; and Kennedy, my lawyer, old man moon of crew-ex Antarctica Navy Air Force – first time to South East Asia.


It’s cool and quiet in my room.  I begin a letter to the King:  Though this is my first trip to your glorious people I have bonded with them.  The dichotomies are heart-wrenching.  On the one hand you have the resurgence of a splendid gene pool; on the other you have dropped them, without blame, into a vat of carbon monoxide.  Sipping Singha, I continue .  Around Four, there’s a knock at the door.  It’s Feaster standing, beaming saying, an almost perfect trek.  We’ll meet you back here in twenty minutes.  Kennedy is across the hall.  I knock on Kennedy’s door.  He is tired but beaming.


Kennedy, Feaster, Greenie and I sit around my room and toast a successful journey.  All are wasted legs like twigs and stiff too.  Lee burnt still in room.  Wants to get back home.  Only one not to make sanctuary, but he will join us for dinner.  We walk to Mama San’s patio.  The trekkers walk bowlegged with a grim look on their faces.  At the dinner table, they tell stories about living in the Himalayas – Sergio Leone country.  After dinner, we saunter over to legendary Soi Cowboy, a little Disneyland of dancing girls.  We settle in at Susie Wong’s.  Really vibrating.  Fall in love with a twenty yr, old honey, pony tail, nice tits with Mick Jagger type lips.  I buy.  We’re about to leave and I feel someone looking at me from the corral.  Pale, lovely freckled – older serene looking through the bars of the cage.  Captivated, I say, I’ll take that one too.


Later that morning I ask girl with Jagger type lips to leave.  Have hands full with devout and real thing in Nookrai.  Give bye bye girl 1000 baht-remain friends.  Return to Nookrai.


It’s 5:30 p.m. the following day in Susie Wong’s.  The staff has assembled cleaning and getting the joint ready for tonight’s party.  The bar girls, food vendors, money counters and counselors wander in and out.  Each dancer looks as if she has just dropped in from California.  They crouch in front of mirrors and create alluring faces.


As 6:00 p.m. approaches the music shifts from romantic Thai to American rock.  The girls dance tossing their hair, mocking passion.  They dance whether farong there or not, but they need an audience to turn on; a bit languid without.


More fat girls at Susie Wong’s than anywhere else.  Fat man like Thailand.


I’m the monkey swaying back and forth in Dooley’s cage on Patong Beach.  Watching Nookrai sleep so smooth ruffled by an occasional crying.  A snake comes to her that night, and I stand there watching and then holding her; she never awakens.

Pound

In the world of art, a world which stems a tide and catches the fire and beauty of any given time, it is hard to beat the early 20^th century for its spirit of intense collaboration resulting in breakthroughs of form and meaning:  Brancusi in sculpture, Picasso in painting and Pound in literature.  

Pound collaborated with everybody – Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, W.C. Williams, Hilda Doolittle, F.M. Ford and so on.  His real goal in life was to meet interesting people.  Pound was a revolutionary and he never stopped creating his revolution which filled him with ridiculous generalities and obscure references that only a loving biographer would bother to understand.  Pound the great giver, an inspiration for so many others, became impaled on his own petard isolated by a dream of the glorious past.

Skin of Light – A Metaphor for Life

Misinformation is the root of pain the doctor says holding up a white sun which when released circles his head.  The doctor paces round a lobster red coal bed.  He prepares to keep pain from his brain by calling on his cells to expand.  There at the edge he finds a column of spine tingling molecules.  A certainty, a lightness lifts him from the ground and he sails, his hands aloft his fingers outstretched. 


In this world people are always mislabeling things.  This causes enormous emotional confusion.  Imagine if you think a dress is sexy and you intend to wear it to the ball.  Your friends get together and being good friends they tell you that was last years.  Don’t do it, but you do it anyway and you spend half the night regretting and the other half getting drunk at a dive bar.  Ain’t that the truth.  If you had been powerful enough in your beliefs you would have worn the dress with pride.  Perhaps you altered it a little with an accessory or two and took to the sky.

Off the Reservation

In this desert of sensory exhaustion, in this banal, repetitive nightmare dream called the middle class (the wasp’s contribution to the programming of the American mind), it’s easy to let yourself go and begin seeing things – things that could be our way of life like creating a new financial system and a cultural structure with an emphasis on efficiency and care.  Oh, that’s impossible.  Man’s nature just the way it is here on earth the territorial imperative rules.

If all our activity is based on making money we will always have emergency sirens not Bach; war over joy and the trap door will shut upon us from above occluding our chance to evolve.

We need to dig deeper into the world of art.  In the world which stems a tide and catches the fire and beauty of a given time the turn of the 19th century is hard to beat for its spirit of intense collaboration leading to breakthroughs in all fields of endeavor.  All great art is made that way by a self-awareness, a confidence which insures its longevity.  As soon as that collaborative strength is lost, the walls of the art kingdom crumble.

Our psychic pain is our amnesia.  We recall very little of our personal history and practically nothing of man’s experience which is why we repeat ourselves over and over.  The familiarity makes us feel secure, free of pesky thinking and the need to alter one’s course.

Thinking is an art.  Perhaps that is the reason why there is so little intellectual content in our media and art.  Art takes decades to develop.  This society of ours doesn’t pay you to practice.  In a mass culture, the absence of critical thinking creates a vacuum for the quick, the mindless and the violent to rush in.

During a brief stent as a teacher at San Quentin Prison, I spoke with Sal, a huge man sort of the opposite of the gentle giant.  Sal bristled with an anger he couldn’t control.  He had been imprinted at an early age to be the enforcer.  With tears in his eyes he turned to me and said, “I can’t believe it but it’s true – I’m safer in here.  I’m not fit… to live out… there.”  I have never forgotten his look – the real human baffled by his circumstance imprisoned with no discernible way out.

We’re pounding away at the old Humanist Culture like the ape men in Kubrick’s 2001, holding large animal bone and pounding.  The destruction of the old will be replaced by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World – blanched out world of pharmaceuticals, computers, weapons and pleasure domes.  The pleasure domes are really great poundings.  Stadiums and halls where we get together and root.  You get it?  I prefer subtle sex but apparently a lot of pounding takes place.

The slight scratching sounds you hear are men and women’s fingers brushing key pads.  The computerized voices can drive you mad.  Humans get harder to find unless you get off the reservation.

The Myth

They say it’s the world of information.  Whoever controls the flow and, as always, who gets the info first wins.  The truth is our world is a world of crap – flimsy clothes, endlessly banal commercials, corrupt bankers and senile pols.  

It’s all crap and because of that, the foundation, which the modern world is built upon, is crumbling.  The dominant force in any culture becomes the gravitational force which we all must endure.  Our myth is simple.  America’s youthful power is what buttresses our metaphysical behavior.  We’ll blow you away!  We’re not kidding.  Back off.  We’ve done it and we’ll do it again until we get tired and worn out and become like Europe: a sad, socialistic world of care and conformity.

2011

This current America is like the silliest excuse for a culture I’ve ever seen or heard of.  You might think the reign of Louis XVI would qualify or Nicholas II, the final Czar of Russia.  How a society grows its people, how it takes care of her poor and most importantly its enduring aim determines its fate.

Our lives held in common hope by our communication devices, our particular genetic branches and the condition of our familial connections causes us to repeat certain behaviors ad nauseam.  Our lives are just like in the movie Groundhog Day without the redemptive quality.

These are two key elements to this kind of life.  The first is the glorious dream of our evolution.  We have been born and will continue to evolve till death do us part (contrary to the evidence).  The second key is found in our belief that that there are codes hidden everywhere in existence which enable us to control reality or, at least, to simulate say a universe so we can investigate it.  This gives us the power of prediction.

Given the data, we might know what will happen – the outcome of a horse race, a coming tsunami, a Presidential election, or how a friend feels.  Locked within the codes are tickers or inspirations, if you like, which give us the answer:  Our victories and our failures vanish.  What matters is our fortitude.

The People of Tomorrow

The people of tomorrow will misinterpret us here and now as we misinterpret those who came before us and so on.  The crux of the problem arises when we think we know what they knew, felt or what they saw.  We cannot know our ancestors unless we dig deeply into what remains of their surroundings and then assemble their images and words to explain their actions.  


What happened to them?  A good starting point is to ask what is happening to us.  How have our American characteristics evolved or devolved?  What characteristics have survived as virtuous?  Who do we emulate now?  I’m struggling to name a person we or at least some of us would know or know of and respect.

Maybe the probing glare of t.v. has exposed too many frailties, but character has little to do with appearances.  Naming a living exemplar reveals almost everything about you and me.  Some individuals contain within themselves I would say a sacred cohesion, a firmness that is its own value and cannot be commodified.


These people always represent a profound knowledge of life consistently displaying traits like compassion, generosity, and perspicacity.  Within them characterological value is asserted.

Gardening at Night

After working say for 25-plus years creating new worlds, built with the living pulsing pieces of your own psyche, a writer looks around, talks with friends, family, people - they don't get it, can't see it - means nothing to them.


I think of the writers whose isolation and pain I felt - Bill Styron, John Cheever, Philip Lamantia, Denise Levertov, to name a few - the isolation is the main problem. Rods shooting out of the luck power, lack of an effect on the community, the writer feels like a has-been, an antique, in some circles a joke. In the old days when art was commissioned by the heads of the community and practiced and valued by the community as a whole, work was appraised, debated or excoriated, but always had value as a vessel for stimulation and communication.


In 1846 when Dickens exposed the hideous pollution of coal burning and effects of an inadequate sewer system, he made the elites see it and feel the pain. The writer artist had become an agent for change. In the early 20th century, Rilke, Pound, Williams, Joyce and Breton were stitching something new: revolutionaries breathing a deeper world. Did they have an inkling what their progeny would look like? Orwell knew what his world would become - our world. A mother loves her child though he or she be a monstrously insane nitwit criminal.


A nation's people embraces whatever becomes the status quo until it turns again them. Our technology has turned against us. Bombarded by meaningless phrases, constant violence, standing in an assembly line of shallow emotions, we all feel isolated from one another, and therefore from ourselves. After the creations of Joyce, Pound, Williams, this alienation became a major theme in the middle of the 20th century.


Though Melville had written Bartleby 90 years earlier it wasn't until Camus and Sartre that the reading public became full aware of it. Today only the courageous fact-finding journalist is regarded as dangerous. Writing is an art; reshaping has no audience and therefore no power. But the writer-artist is not dead. We are trying to create a new community and a new aesthetic. The building of community occurs simultaneously with the struggle to develop forms which contain the will of the community. We are far from that place, but inching along. We have planted seeds and had a few good harvests; our future depends on how we care for the garden.

Hip Animal Tricks

Americans love mind control, communications, baseball, genetics and hip animal tricks. I look in on America sleeping in starts, looking small and mean with one glass eye, larger than the next. Everything is in the undercurrent. The animals revel in their pens, all now together coming a whirling dark magnetic mess. I am moving past them into a sexual radiance, to a city town where the bewildered are taken care of. I am always moving away from them. They bend too closely to my ear.

As America unravels due to its unwillingness to change, to become a more poetic, less violent culture, America's people keep pushing the reset button hoping everything will return to the way it was before the extent of the crime was uncovered. We here in 2011 have as feathers in our collective caps a stunning picture of creation, fantastic technologies for weaponry. Please tell me what is their ultimate use?


Genetic engineering could be the determining factor in the development of the human race. One hears it all the time. IT systems, poverty on a scale nobody could have imagined 100 years ago, and  trillions of tons of garbage, both here and in our ionosphere. We live in the future. Maybe we always have. So much creation, so many dreaming of care.


In the city the dream-satisfying properties are all about the body. The dream resides in the temple of the body. Both the dream's palpability and its elusiveness arise from the physical complexity of the connectivity. From such a reality our science is an art, and our psychic power to love all arises.

Trapped Forward

I analyze the words people speak for their quality and content. Over the years words and the silences that preclude them change. Within these words I see keys to open doors to keep ourselves moving. It's like watching a living organism, a tree, twist and turn. Recreating and destroying itself. 

Within the culture history books chant the various and subtle meanings of the changes. Words are my anchors. In America "forward" now is the most popular word in 2011. It was also the Third Reich's favorite word in 1939. It is a word used to escape responsibility for the past. 

Think of all those words and all those languages piled up in warehouses all over the planet completely accessible to everyone now, and what do we have? A world tethered to mediocrity dancing on the strings of vapid commercialism, tone dead to intense fraud whirling inside a circus of money and arms. "I could be found in a nutshell and think myself a king of infinite space," Hamlet said. 

It began when we started listening to our children and hearing wisdom coming from them like the trickling of water, their frequencies tuned to wider bands of godly and ungodly info. Then our politicians seemed to possess a superior knowledge, an awareness of the world we sorely lacked. Our military leaders, resolute, tricky, robotic. We're in awe of their discipline. The really smart ones made tons of cash, and above all there were the internationalists - the first money, the old. 

It is hard to believe families ran such behemoths. Together they control the sky and the lands. What had became of us? Where were we? Trapped in a nutshell.

Unconsciousness of the Community

Modern American poetry begins with Walt Whitman, and evolves through Emily Dickinson and then Ezra Pound, who is the slayer of vestigial forms left over from the 19th century. 

It 's the personal life of the poet and his or her relationship to the present that becomes paramount.  Dante defines poetry as "the melody which most doth draw the sound unto itself," or the unconsciousness of the community. 


Since the Sumerians, through Villon, Cervantes, W.C. Williams, Joyce and Eliot, the soul is journeying to find a home in the Commonplace. That movement coincided with the blooming of the American short story writers - Eudory Welty, Cheever, Salinger, etc.. By 1960 you have an entire canon in place. A major portrait of American society was now complete. It took 50 years.

Hiding Among the Mannequins

I noticed early in my life that people didn't see themselves or others. Inside themselves they hid. 

Others were often seen as superficial or simply fulfilling basic needs. The reason this charade is easy to carry off is obviously everyone is doing it. This approach is grounded in the fear of the Other; one of the first signs of cultural decline.

Everything is Permitted

For the cost of forcing one's will on another is a kind of neglect - the beginning of CRIME.

Outside of the 10 Commandments

Nothing is illegal in adult behaviour.

Once you remove the State's function

as Arbiter of morals, once the State is excised, youve swept the stage clean.

The State cannot pick and choose

between what sexual behaviours

are acceptable, what drugs are acceptable, which religions. One could say let the market decide. It's against the laws of Democracy to allow the State to tell the people what to eat, wear, or think. In fact the people themselves cannot decide for the people as a whole. Each individual has the sovereign right to decide for themselves. Would this return to individualism stem the growing rise of violence in America?

The Western World has been literary for at least 4500 years. Replacing such an ancient tradition and overnight, is bound to take its toll. Maybe we are shedding our literary roots, as Marshall McCluhan sugggested, for a grander, deeper vision. The image of "noumena" - the thing in itself. Painting and sculpture are the finest examples of the image. Their meanings can be historic, iconographic, representational or projective (as in abstract painting), but the word does more than resonate across the star-studded mountains of time. Through language we can see, feel and become engaged with every type of mind from cultures long dead. No other human expression can give us this glimpse into the complexity of human life. Up until now our history has been kept alive by the word.

Does the pervasiveness 

of the image erode the power

of the word or has the word

run its course? Is the 

power of the image

an evolutionary force?

One has the urge to create paintings,

music, or write stories, poems, movies, etc..

One studies the various crafts and disciplines and yet without the time to experience life, as one knows it, and then to have the time to analyze and explore feelings, memories, and ongoing observations of that life, one - or you -probably won't come up with anything worth a damn.

Decline and Liberation

In the not so distant future actors, painters, writers, sculptors, musicians and directors will experience the world first before creating a world of their own!

It makes no sense to get personal. Each of us is a piece on a chessboard called history. 

If you want to create something new or expand an unmined field

expect to spend most of your life known to only a few.

There's a kind of woman and man the government and the corporations want. We all know what he or she is. As Barbara Tuchman alluded to "when the gap between the real and the ideal becomes too great, the human mind snaps."

Sometimes when I'm watching T.V. I feel the American people are being portrayed as a lost tribe of nit wits. Without sports American men would go insane; they would have nothing to talk about.

Look at the depth of the individual the Western World generated 

from 1880 to 1980, those who were propelled into the main arenas and compare them to the people who now command the stage.