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.