Warren's Words

What The Orphan Knows About Light

2012-01-25T11:05:00.000-08:00

Pretext to season the offering below, giving contexts :

"We love what we lack." - Edward Edinger

"What I find most astonishing--besides that belief of mine, which never ceases to surprise me by the very fact of its surprising lack of unpleasantness, the belief that I might very easily, as they say--lose my mind one day, not that I suspect that I am about to or am even...nearby...for I'm not that sort; merely that it is not beyond...happening: some gentle loosening of the moorings sending the balloon adrift..." - Edward Albee. A Delicate Balance.

"If my life were not a dangerous, painful experiment, if I did not constantly skirt the abyss and feel the void under my feet, my life would have no meaning and I would not have been able to write anything." - Hermann Hesse

"Who has twisted us like this, so that--
no matter what we do--we have the bearing
of a man going away...so we live,
forever saying farewell." - Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am an orphan, alone: nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.” - C.G. Jung, this was carved by Jung on a stone at his tower in Bollingen

**

for Anna Kamienska

'I don't believe in the other world...But I don't believe in this one either unless it's pierced by light.' - A. Kamienska

Seems I've been leaving a lot, a life theme really--departure. I was born after only 4 hours of labor. Postpartum began the going, going, adios, get me outta here to some where and there which I shall probably be leaving again soon enough--a puer thing?. Still, I'm halitose which belies some earthiness. Now, finally, maybe, I am departing the grandiose search, a Chaplin-esque lurch for omnipotence in the falling apart world, the ceiling collapsing all around me, the heavy once-was-ill-too-depressed-from-the-illness-experience-young-man suffocating me in my dream last night.

Oh snap! And I've had bad asthma for the past two weeks now. Duh. Here we go. Dreams are damned good, know how to give the real story in all the wheeze and "god-almightiness if you pleez." I've been "working air" as friend Joan says of asthma, the work it becomes to breathe makes one very present, concrete. And blue. And the dream provides some meaning to asthma other than just outer dust and a consumptive spirit: there's grief afoot. Grief is about departure, yes? And as anyone who knows me or reads some of the newsletters or essays here, I give much weight to dreams, the one real "thing" that seems to really mean something in all the dumbshow of my grab-atting and scrab-ladder balancing acts, holding on to chandelier which is grandiose lighting, for sure. Oy. Humbling.

Around the time of an unpleasant and inevitable "parting of the ways" from a religious facility I once taught in, I dreamed of a gigantic, overladen, bleacher-like altar which collapses. Trungpa Rimpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist guru/teacher, writes incisively about the "spiritual antique shop" which much American "baby boomer religiosity" has become and is even more so now (note that Trungpa took full advantage of the "spiritual antique shop" and the curiosity of the boomers searching for something other than variations of Christianity and the spiritless positivism of modern science). The altar in my dream was jammed with collective symbols, statuary, rocks, crystals, projected-upon objects of desired power indicating some spiritual arrival, all purchased in spiritual "supermarkets" for the hungry-ghost "boomer" consumers residing at the polluted Western pool of Narcissus, long gazing, addicted, at selves reflected but not enfleshed, real, substantial.

I have most certainly spent way too much time in this "antique shop" (and beside the pool) where one commits to the spiritual delectables displayed for purchase as one does to the hankering of the day for a certain food item, today the potato salad is "it" but tomorrow "it" may be the tuna tartar and on and on, the only commitment is to taste the various offerings. This is puer religion at its "best or worst," depending on how you look at it, the puer (the eternal child) tastes but rarely commits, such is "boomer religiosity." There are, of course, exceptions to the puerish samplers in the antique shop (I've nibbled and dabbled, too, a serious but dallying dilettante), those who have committed to one chosen path who actually fall into the pool of Narcissus and sink to the depths in order to find themselves more truly. Such sinking is initiation into self knowing which means the death of faces and egoic embraces of identity which are (grown) false to fact, no longer authentic, which are shed in the process of self-possession. Jungian analyst and writer, Edward Edinger, speaks of the myth of Narcissus (and narcissism) as the condition of being alienated from the self:

"Narcissus represents the alienated ego that cannot love ... because it is not yet related to itself. To fall in love with the reflected image of oneself can only mean that one does not yet possess oneself. Narcissus yearns to unite with himself just because he is alienated from his own being...we love what we lack. Narcissism in its original mythological implications is thus not a needless excess of self-love but rather just the opposite, a frustrated longing for a self-possession which does not yet exist. The solution of the problem of Narcissus is the fulfillment of self-love rather than its renunciation. We meet here a common error of the moralizing ego which tries to create a loving personality by extirpating self-love. This is a profound psychological mistake and only causes a psychic split. Fulfilled self-love is a prerequisite to the genuine love of any object, and to the flow of psychic energy in general" (p. 161).

This dream altar described above, a version of the pool of Narcissus, was located in the meeting space of the religious facility. The over-burdened altar began to sway, the over burdening being the Narcissus weight of need for self-knowing projected upon the objects/images/totems, et. al. in hopes of gaining self-love, for "fulfilled self-love is a prerequisite to the genuine love of any object, and to the flow of psychic energy in general."

[This photo and the one immediately above, by Warren Falcon]

I knew there was no way I could prevent the altar from falling though I tried (in Chaplin-esque fashion recalling the dream now). As it swayed and shook, groaned and rattled, I tried to stabilize it but nothing doing. It was going down. Just as it teetered on the verge of total collapse I impulsively reached out to grab something from the altar, to salvage something. I remember seeing a Buddha head serenely tilting sideways mid-fall but my hand bypassed that beauty and impulsively grabbed instead a little souvenir from Switzerland, from the Western world, a tiny beer stein. And down went the altar into a pile of rubble and dust.

I stood there in my underwear, an "inconvenient truth" more naked than not, which dreams freely dole out, brutal truth, cold and precise, without mercy, BEHOLD: tighty whiteys, covered with dust billowing up from the rubble. Bewildered, I held the little stein tightly in my hand. In walked two of the faculty whom I experiences as most inflated and overly-identified with the guru/messiah projections they pulled for and got from students and aping disciples. Sneering at me, noses literally up in the air (it wasn't the dust), they passed me by, heads turned away in shunning fashion. I noted that there was no charge at all, no feeling either way about them as they passed. They were dumb but colorful hobby fish in a child's small aquarium. Slicking back my own fins and gills, I happily walked to the front door to fresh air, dry land, terra firma, REALITY; blinking Chaplin-esquely, I opened the door, brushed the altar dust off my feet in good New Testament fashion, stepped over the threshold into the busy street, and left once and for all thinking, "Now, you must get some clothes on and then make something of this stein. No turning back which would be regressive sure." While waking out of the dream I heard within the words of a Bob Dylan song, my favorite, "You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last/But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast/Yonder stands your orphan with his gun/Crying like a fire in the sun/Look out the saints are comin’ through...strike another match, go start anew...It's all over now, Baby Blue."

Well, at least there is a match, what remains a'pocket. Grabbed stein in hand. Match stricken.

Even so, departures are not easy. They are damned hard. The firing and the collapse came at the end of what had already been occurring in me for at least 6 or 7 years before the actual denouement. Good riddance to all that. But the inner departure has been slow, more a "ridding, here, there, now and then," as there is that inner Chaplin (a play, perhaps, upon "chaplain" since it was a religious institution I had taught in after all, and I am a now, ironically, a titled "reverend") who is so naively, bravely invested in doing the impossible, attempting, at least, to keep the ceiling I, a personal sky, and the sky from falling, as well as that overly laden altar crumpled in his head and heart.

Symbolism of Beer, Stein/Stone, Dust, White and Orphan

Now. I don't really like beer. I'll drink it if I must, a dark bitter brew goes down best but it's not my beverage of love or choice at all. I'm a wine drinker. Some tequila makes me scrappy but happy. However, I did not grab a chalice from the altar, nor a shot glass. I grabbed the little stein, a Swiss stein, and in my undies headed away from the New Ager-gods-and-goddesses-R-us comic book illustrated, fluffy world, yet another "spiritual province" tried, tasted, and come to not much at all in terms of planting a spiritual identity flag, pouring concrete around it and proclaiming a temple my own. Makes sense though, the effort, to balance the negative inflation ("I am a worm, a wretch) of Christianity I was fed and fed upon as a kid a la Calvinism and other conservative flavors served up from Catholic to Protestant. Low to high, mud to sky, as James Hillman says in his "Puer Papers" book, "Peaks and vales." Exhausting. Draining. Notice, too, how it's all vertical, up and down which are the same thing depending on where one is heading on the heavenly ladder. Notice there is no horizontal, or not much value given to that dimension. It is, rather, to be escaped, risen above, sublimated, transcended.

But the stein means "stone" in German. And a stone implies weight and ground. Horizontal. And horizon. And Switzerland, peaks and vales notwithstanding, of course, is the very palpable land of Carl Jung who I am convinced is what this grab-stein is all about - Jungian psychology and dreams, a non-grandiose working and living out of and within "the symbolic life" on solid ground, the good earth, the creative play implied in the heady joy of beer drinking, the molding and shaping of clay, of carved, sanded stone into containing vessels for beer and the enlivening it can bring here and now, an intersecting at the horizon line of the 4 directions, above and below which together make a circle, a sphere, here here. Here-ly/highly creative work, the royal road of dreams, working them, an ancient "trade" of "consciousness craft-workers" in all cultures through all ages. The alpenstein, so-called in Switzerland, or white stone- (alpen = white, thus the white snows which name the Alps) -stein is a symbol true. Beer in a stein is an everyday/everyman-woman drink of the masses, the workers, the "volks" of the world. And thus this little stein/stone, a worker's cup for inductive brew - beer is a goddess drink made of Her distilled grains and in some cultures, honey - keeps one in touch with the world, this world, the hard work of it where (no matter what preventions are taken, prayers made and actions forced, prescribed rituals performed and charms laid out) things fall apart, fall down, and one has to do a walkabout for awhile in his skivvies, staying close to the instincts (the "only-skivvies" image symbolizing instinctuality, creative organs and principles less filtered/disguised, skivvies a kind of container, too) but looking for the right clothes (symbols of adaptation to life) which make something of the stein/stone of one's life and self in response/obedience to the Self at play mercurially.

Just a word or two about white-alpen which a Jungian analyst recently pointed out to me is a color signifying the feminine principle, the Material, Earth/Creation dimension, the archetype of the Great Mother. In alchemy white can signify an alchemical phase called the albedo or the whitening which is a pulverizing, the making-most-small, the refinement to dust or fine white ash, white foliated earth, thus a symbol of a process of incarnation, materiality, matter, mater refined (and still or even more earth without devaluing the baser stuff, the gross of earthiness, what loving mothers do all the time with their "beloved little shitters and snotters, sleep blotter-outers," love, love (while taking deep breaths for patience), patiently refining, no matter the effluvium/the muddier, with and out of/up from the primitive consciousness of the child nurtured/channeled into ego, conscious self, thus become self-known creator and maker responding to what presents within and without rather than "only-just" reactions. And one cannot incarnate without a mater, a mudder, a mothering into the matter, and that mattering-forth which dreams (a form of desire, we touch upon logos here, the nous, the mind, the idea, the creative seed and masculine principle, entelechy) of bringing things to matter that matter in and between the deep blue see and me. There's no matter without a mater to matter us. Add this white to the stein/stone grabbed, perhaps even stolen, the cup itself then becomes an alchemical vessel in which the process unfolds/infolds which ensouls matter and matters soul on earth, ensues ensouled, once a meta-matter, into the realer in need of metta (compassion), itself hard, once fallen from heaven in need of earth, the clay and the "say" of its experience here upon/within harder/here-er stuff..."hard nose, the highway," as Van Morrison sings it, the way it is or appears to be, and certainly is real upon and beneath the skin.

Jung carved upon a stone in his garden, some words about an orphan, “I am an orphan, alone: nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.” In the text of this Jung-stone the orphan describes itself in part as "a white stone from heaven" fallen to earth...there is no room here for an extended amplification of this heavenly white stone's pointing-to (what symbols do) but to say only that it falls to earth "mortal for everyone [incarnated in and as everyone], yet is not touched by the cycle of aeons.” Falling is an image of coming down from above into material reality, incarnation, what is called coagulatio in alchemy. This process marks the dynamic moment when the high becomes low, ideal/idea/thought becomes act then takes on/brings about material form, limitation, quality and quantity, time and space (in this case thoughts become "things" or are capable of bringing things into material being as extensions and expressions of ideals/ideas/thoughts), giving material and symbolic (symbols are real!) heft to what was and is etheric, the "very or too light" and, limited in its "too-lightness," needs/longs for the low, the thinginess of mind and substance, form and function, compulsion, compunction and a bursting forth into some ever new expression from the conflagration come from mind and matter, spirit and flesh, air and earth, and on and on in these couplings, the opposites.

Poet William Blake says it very clear, that this "too lightness," let's call it Eternity, "is in love with the productions of time." He tells us in many of his poems to take care of the orphans, the lost children, the abandoned ones, the abject "littles" and "lambs" who seek reunion, inclusion and the effusion to be found in the "gardens of love" where uniqueness, individuating ones, can play and grow where "down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run, And wash in a river and shine in the Sun. Then naked & white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind. And...have God for [their] father & never want joy ("The Chimney Sweeper")." And love implies a longing for completeness brought about by the other-than-itself-or-one's- self which is not a static congealment but one which endlessly, in prick-and-puerperal principle, reproduces not just exact uniform copies but diverse, overflowing cornucopias of "little ones," varied, variant, verily valuable...Blake says/insists/counsels us to "tend to the little ones..." Thus in our tending eternity "falls from heaven, a white stone" an orphan stone, say, carved in Jung's garden speaking of these things imbued with and displaying reality, stones, hard, real and more real.

My little alpenstein of dream partakes, I think, in this mystery, my little mind, very small, can barely grab/grasp the preponderance of the small which gets low down and willfully refuses a King/Queen's crown and throne except that of "the prince willingly turned the pauper" choosing his/her stone upon which to sit and rule the ant, "a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity [Ezra Pound, Canto 81]"...

Crowned bairn of the barn, the chimney, the alley steep, wears the wreathed crown of pricks which downward brings blood, blood which affirms the reality, the here-ness thick, thusness of incarnate existence, wickedness a vital part, too, Eternity's lover, and vessel, and "shapely mind (consciousness)" with prehensile, yes, tail and hands/tales to give form and forth-ing to and of and for and with the "ten thousand things" which, O Buddha, sorry, are indeed real and not just false products of baseless mind, mere projections/ghosts, mere epiphenomena but rather these things, hard pressed down provided, provisional, base mind and matter ever dividing the swarming swarm teeming torn between the one and the many which partake of each, one or many armed. "Things that have hands take hands," says poet, Theodore Roethke, and thus eternity needs/makes hands/minds, takes hands/minds which take, too, take back, grasp, grab and delight/suffer the grubbiness of the reach, and the consummations thereof. Love plays and is played out in sequences and ever hints to that which extends love, greater's love, the more. But to dwell in "Love Abstract" and not act in tongued and lunge-ed love, is a bore. White stones fall from heaven sure in the need for dirt and time. Love there in the muck and the wash is love all the more because not "pure".

One, then, grabs a little suchness from a falling altar in pretentious postures ("Pull down thy vanity"), a white stone in the hand suffices a mystery, leaves the fishbowl one has confused for the universe, is driven from or abandons yon local central hill and value, a centaur wandering in skivvies and bones, an orphan alone yet everywhere, Kansas (is) Kansas even though "Baltimore gleams in supernatural ecstasy" (Allen Ginsberg, HOWL) yet "in woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons [C.G. Jung].”

Now, the dream stein is a souvenir. And souvenir is French for a remembrance or memory, a memento, keepsake or token of remembrance, an object a person acquires for the memories the owner associates with it. Dream work a la Jung (and others) involves working with memories of one's personal past as well as the "remembered" archetypes and symbols of the unconscious. Memories go deep. One reaches, excavates, as do dreams, for personal and collective memories, symbols and their associations which show up in life in order to ken meaning of things beyond what "just presents" but are precisely for what is presented here and now in a life. And dreams are progressive, intending growth, development, advancement, renewal and generativity/creativity. And most importantly, relationship/relatedness, I and other, I and not-I, I and (even) I...dreams expose often enough how we avoid relationship of all kinds (O Narcissus) and thus intrude/relate to us at night or other "in-trusion" which insista on relation. The goal is not grandiosity and escape via dissociation/inflation but the work is grand in the sense of most important and meaningful and available to one and all no matter class, age, education, cultural or spiritual caste and, apparently, species. Animals dream but to what end we can only speculate. As do we. We are caught in the speculum of the dream, the unconscious and may gather another view toward being and relatedness which serves greater and better purpose to more than our own species.

And my little stein/stone is just that, little, small, not very big, won't hold much so it keeps me practical and present with just who I am, Chaplin-esque grabbing at things to stabilize but they do fall. Old orders, structures break apart, burn, come down, and one walks about a bit dazed like Charlie, who nobly picks himself up, smooths back his hair, dusts himself off abit kicking up greater clouds of schmutz, coughing and sneezing, stepping out of the rubble head held high as if to say, "I meant to do that. Now where's my valet?" The I Ching says of the small thing in Hexagram 62, Preponderance of the Small: Success. Perseverance furthers. Small things may be done; great things should not be done. The flying bird brings the message. It is not well to strive upward. It is well to remain below. Great good fortune.

In many myths and religions it is the small, devalued thing of little repute which accomplishes the large, the great task or goal. With me we shall see but I have suffered the disease of my culture, god-almightiness and the need for acclaim. I hope I am done with all that. The dust and the wheeze may indicate some arrival for the departure from Olympus to where I am now, a dusty studio apartment counting pocket change for Kraft macaroni, 4 boxes a dollar at the Dollar Store. Life is good. Cheesy.

Seems I am often enough departing things, grandiose religious schemes and structures even of the spiritually advanced (or so they think)...my dreams have me regressing or re-vancing or de-vancing, and my own ridiculous pomposity is, really now, to be laughed at. Last night's dream of the wellness doc/spiritual healing man with his destructive "daughter of the damned" makes short work of my loftiness...seems the healing is in the destruction of nothing less than everything, the wholeness is in the breaking apart, the departing. Into the hinterlands once again or perhaps just to take up simple residence where one is and give up the pretensions and insolent grasping. Either way, I gotta breathe. And deal with the old rags once too proudly worn. Perhaps the most appropriate things to place upon any altar anywhere. Dylan again, "The vagabond who’s rapping at your door Is standing in the clothes that you once wore..."

Fine with me. Perhaps tis Chaplin rapping, the repairman with his too long ladder and wobbly walk, very wary of ceilings, continually misspelling and misjudging gravity, who really makes me happy because human is all I ever am and shall be, an utter/eventual cloud of dust, scattered ashes, in Mexico at a highland spot most special to me. Thus, heretofore, or try, I'll be Chaplin-happy humping my way through the lumps and dumps carrying the remembrance stein/stone of the Self, even Its continual breaking apart into some other thingness held in the mind if not the hand which is memory unto wholeness/holdness with holes and cracks still here/there/somewhere or not, announced by a slight wheeze from too much collapsed altar and ceiling dust inbreathed, asthmatic and baby blue.

The first image of the essay is a painting, Escaping Criticism, by Pere Borrell del Caso, a Spanish Catalan painter (1835 – 1910). The images of Jung's Bollingen Stone and that of Jung are from Google images stock photos. Same for the painting of the Swiss beer stein still life, the lamb painting, and the Charlie Chaplin and the Anna Kamienska photos. All other images are Warren Falcon's photography, all rights reserved.

****[Some poems of Anna Kamienska:
http://www.ap.krakow.pl/nkja/literature/polpoet/kamienska.htm

The Mad Boy Writes Feeble Colors For Love - Some Heft For Dark Times

2011-12-13T11:34:00.001-08:00

[Photo by Mario Novak. I have no claims to rights for this photograph. From the book, Croatia, ArtCroatia LLC, 2007, 340 pp., ISBN: 978-0-9798691-0-5 (English). Mario was a friend. Miss him.]

for Mario Novak, d. July 2010

"What thou lovest well remains." - Ezra Pound, Canto 181

But first, to orient, some ground, some Robert Creeley: "As a kid I used to be fascinated by people who, like they say, “traveled light.'...The scene is always this: “What a great thing! To be a writer! Words are something you can carry in your head. You can really 'travel light'...I'm really speaking of my own sense of place. Where “the heart finds rest, ” as Robert Duncan would say. I mean that place where one is open, where a sense of defensiveness or insecurity and all the other complexes of response to place can be finally dropped. Where one feels an intimate association with the ground underfoot...with that crazy water, the trickles of water everyplace, the moisture, the shyness, and the particularity of things like blue jays. I like the rhythms of seasons, and I like the rhythms of a kind of relation to ground that's evident in, say, farmers; and I like time's accumulations of persons...This is a very basic place to live. The dimensions are of such size and of such curious eternity that they embarrass any assumption that man is the totality of all that is significant in life. The area offers a measure of persons that I find very relieving and much more securing to my nature than would be, let's say, the accumulations of men's intentions and exertions in New York City. So locale is both a geographic term and the inner sense of being."

- from a Paris Review Interview, Fall Issue 1968, Issue #44

As I get older, my relationship to ground is problematic. Balance is no longer an assumption that delivers. Is it the room that leans or is it me? My sense of place has never been too pleasantly real or here (but for parentheses happy-enough and for these I am indeed thankful) , and place has been and still is found more in sound, a very early childhood thing, in what I hear by ear or eye when I read. Totem in this my life is the book and it's associated familiars. And now, older than I have ever been, which is a painfully obvious tautology standing long at the urinal waiting, waiting, a poem may arrive more quickly than other flow, poetry has taken on an urgency which orients me, grieves me, and leaves me somewhat in relation to light though I burn the midnight oil to work a poem through the dark, and my eyes can no longer focus...but, it's ground work. Gives some heft, makes some meaning. Still, can't say I have traveled light. Not really. But heart's the better for the journey forced, or freely taken, pockets full of pieces.

Soon be ground myself, though. Hope Creeley's somewhere I can meet him.

from And The Daylight Separated The Mad Boy From His Shadow - Cancion for Garcia Lorca

The mad boy
writes feeble colors
for love
the halt the lame the
mute which within
around which intends
bends
distorts (in your glass
case)
twists takes
traps light to
separate
the mad world
from shadow

Both
we are
contortionists

thus take our
place with clowns who
know tomatoes thrown
and juggler's (bare necked)
necessary concentration.

You are the maestro here
whom I trail behind at respectful

distance

murdered by the too ordinary
controllers

So long

So long to image
to suffer on dear
bruised M the
void of course

o bring me
beauty no matter
how terrible

created by His
own opening
which makes
Him forever
Lorca's girl

"a pomegranate
[a god] biggish and
green and I can't take
her in my arms or
dress her.

Won't she come back?
Why won't she?" [from Lorca]

You, dear, will read
of my heterosexual shadow

a great lover who serenades
Her in the terrible contradiction

of the moon caught
in bare tree-limns/strophes

just outside Her window
the fool below in rouge

head hung, singing

O hurt

heart's tin can
tied to belt loop behind
of his ragged pants
pants

waits

to be filled with
whatever flows

in the dirty lane
he leans his
love against

*
Imagine
this asterisk
which contains an aster
is a rose transforming yet again
because it can
because

Lorca

has willed it obediently into being
letter by letter, petal by petal
bee-kissed by brazen bees
a clutch of stamens
assassin's ink
out flowing

*

Are You Hungry? - Poems for Departure

for Karthik, departing

"Who has twisted us like this, so that-
no matter what we do-we have the bearing
of a man going away...so we live,
forever saying farewell." - Rainer Maria Rilke

Prologue

Out of decibels
out of hearing,
the last sense
to go
sing to me now
before ears take
leave and I shall
have no more need
for words, sounds,
even these my sighs
heard as I hear you
drop the soap in
the bath.

I imagine you bending
vague in the steam to
find the bar by scent
as you wash away
your own which has
so compelled me
again and again
into much life

So gladly the
little deaths
cleave to this
I say aloud
though you may
not hear my plea
in there
from where I sit
bent doubly-over
multiplied with grief
for leaving all this
assumed pre-
sence chalked
now upon crumbling
slate.

1

I wait with this
sense of what
is unfolding just
out of reach,
once familiar
now fogged
with herbal scent
clouding the
bath, my heart
embarrassed
to speak of it

remains,

cocked,
to one side
tilted, to hear
all news of
you that is
left in there
touching the
lucky water.

2

You emerge
from the bath
reaching for the
towel, soft, obeying
daily habit, wipes you
dry, each cleft, the pit
of my longing rubbed
without caution.

I am caught up in this
vision without glasses
squinting for what is
real or not though you
are faced to mine as I
obediently move my
shaking hand to your
belly, the scar there,
edges still hot
to the touch.

3

Much there is I will
make of this moment,
drying your back as I
have daily done -

once
began the rite
first night

gathering now
the last

o when
the towel easily un-
folded, drank

woven
little mouths many

deeply
into what
has become
natural in me
with the wiping.

In this
I am become
free now of
thinking intent
to this my task
to last, this minute
or two, to linger,

each is
become a touch
this one.
and this,

without
decibels.

4

I am right now to speak
of this, retrieving the soap
which clings one strand
your hair tangled there,
a cypher I read
with joy grown
long into cleaner
disorder.

5

a leaf upon the
bathroom floor
blown in through
the night window
random now
for discovery
a gift

I bring it to
you calling to
me from the
bedroom
as you pack
fumbled upon
the unmade
bed,

Are you hungry?

[Painting by William Hawkins (Self-Taught American artist, 1895-1990) Horse with Yellow Tail Ricco Maresca Gallery, New York]

A coda, this indulgence, verses here from Missive For Darkness As Vocation, William Hawkins In Mind :

I once, your other darkness, quoted Hopkins to you,
'seasons of dryness, ' in the bitter pitched midst
his discovery, 'What I do is me, for that I came, '
not a text for self worship but, rather, an assent
to keep world woe personally felt in that greater
perspective, making poems from orphan woe,
from ever furtive grace which eludes then surprises
in bleakest place, sudden, parses newly in the
greener green of things while pleading still,

'Lord, send my roots rain.'

The shorter light, the extended nights of cold and
star-bright questions, may cast clumsy net forward
into what it all might mean to fretted you, to me,
stretched, though I will not thrust these words any
longer upon your pen or paint but make offering
with thanks for your own work to feed us through
the eyes, perhaps time to mount that Hawkins horse
and soldier on or to fall off again, gain Damascus
perspective yet, from one's back watch vision
distort the massive horse into God receding into
necessary darkness foregoing image in order to
see what may form in the spreading dirt,

what resurrection there is in the smell of paint.

Moments From The Orange World

2011-11-07T11:34:00.000-08:00

[Photo by Amanda Friedman, from Saeed Jones website: http://saeedjones.wordpress.com/]

Here is a poem which partakes of "harvest" - death, dreams, love, dirge and demi-urge, the task of harvesting consciousness from unconsciousness, from the clash and claw and cling of opposites, each has their tasks, the dogs on the edge of the orange world, Death, too, has it's purpose rendering from that which nascently exists and is coming to be to not be again. Selves and part-selves are birthed/deathed to incarnate myriad possibilities of being which is the human experiment, each is a harvest returned to fallow ground. Each is a murmur, a sound expressed then passing into stillness. And myth.

Murmur: "(A) to make the sound mu mu or mumu, to murmur with closed lips, to mutter, to moan...(B) to drink with closed lips, to suck in..." - Liddell & Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, 1897 ed.

"In such cases myth is the truth of fact, not fact the truth of myth." - Kathleen Raine, "On the Mythological," Defending Ancient Springs"

"The repressed value contains transformative energies and a consciousness of its own..." - Charles Ponce

"The Saviors do not lend themselves to art successfully: they are outside the pale, beyond, as incomprehensible in their love as in their example. They have never become incorporated in the blood stream. Forsaking the world, they become as the idols they sought to destroy. This is human perversity. Throughout the ages it displays itself in the individual life, and now and then it bursts forth in cosmic waves of futility and self-destruction." - Henry Miller in an essay on Kenneth Patchen

As Dew On Grass Sleeves No Longer Stiffening In The Wind
- Moments From The Orange World - After Kenneth Patchen

"...do not grieve, therefore, those who are lost to you; they were ever so to themselves..."
- Kenneth Patchen - from "There Is One Who Watches"

I've lost my way and wait for signs.
Distant signal fires indicate 'wait here'.
No gate ahead. The iron dogs are waiting over there
to chew all who approach edges of the orange world.
Best to settle in, grin at stinking Death who is
sinking into the ground winking at me as if to say,

You will soon sink. You will soon sink.
Who do you think you are or were?
Step forward if you dare.

I've observed how furred things give up without much complaint.
They grab often enough so Death grabs back.
They sigh or call out in their animal way, Son of a bitch!
but in the end they relent and they sink leaving only their
pink tongues spread out over the dawn as if to say.

I blink in the dark looking at edges distant fire.
I wink back at Death who's left only a bony hand
on the ground where He waits just beneath.
How trite He is but it does the job, conveys His trap clearly.
When dawn tongues awaken licking dew from my face,
and my fears, I shall raise both my hands, too, as if to say.

And flaunting these two hands to Death's one, and with flesh,
I shall walk away the way I came having done with burning signs
and a night's work of waiting, my presence taunting the dogs,
Death baiting as if He has forgotten one hand upon the dirt.
We have flirted, Death and me. Not the kind of company
I like to keep preferring furred things to winking bones,
Death's head all teeth and no whistle. But I earn my pay.
I walk away, my own tongue licking as if to say.

I can barely contain myself arriving back at camp where
She waits dreaming shyly in our tent, a Bedouin soul bending
gently over wells in Her keeping on Gentler Hill.
I shall lick Her face then. I shall not tell Her how
I have survived the night with Death at my feet,
the taunting signals over there at the edges, iron dogs alert.
I shall not hurt Her with knowledge of this orange world,
all the dark things within it. I shall softly settle beside Her
where She breezes as dew on grass sleeves no longer
stiffening against the wind.

I shall bring Her in as a fisherman brings
in his boat, softly singing a fisherman's tale,
his throat a song-sore nocturne rocking night waves,
beacons ashore flaring where his Love lies sleeping
awaiting conjectures, his folding, folding into Her
gently suspiring guesses -

Is my love away at sea, at sea,
dark as wine presses as he will
surely press me?

O drink from the wells I tend -
I earn my pay - and away with
ocean roaming!

Distant lights demur sure in their beckoning.
Sudden, he turns singing boat and heart to shore,
starfish near at hand yearning beyond foam for depth.
Dawn tongues slowly raise up the land-sunken houses,
stilled curtains in darkened windows not yet stirring.

Nearing, he shall not shake the dew from his cloak but gather
as much as he can to bathe Her - feet, hands, those parts
Death cannot sink into but he can. And life will continue on.

As will the other, his lost brother of the inland tent
now gratefully at rest forgetting the ever orange world,
edge fires signaling unseen until dark,

and then the dogs,

and Death's hand,

and then back to work again.

"Fear was my father. Father Fear"** - The Lost Son & A Cowboy Surprise That Makes Bread

2011-10-16T11:15:00.000-07:00

"Loneliness seeks diversion or togetherness in order to forget the uncomfortable fact of individuality. To be an individual means to be a special favored one, and also a lonely one. If loneliness is faced instead of forgotten, it can lead over to the creative acceptance of the fact of aloneness." - Edward F. Edinger

54. Jesus says: "Blessed are the solitary and the elect, for you will find the Kingdom!
65. ...I (Jesus) say this: "When (a person) finds himself solitary, he will be full of light; but when he finds himself divided, he will be full of darkness."
79. Jesus says: "Many stand outside at the door, but it is only the solitaries who will enter the bridal chamber." - from "The Gospel of Thomas"

"Now is the time to say I hated the work of fields,
and I am old. No more to fold the earth.
No more to pull stalks from frost
but to lift this last rock and hurry home."

- Warren Falcon, from "Word of a Dying Father"

I find myself reluctant to write about Saturn. Carl Jung has warned that when writing about an archetype it may most likely be evoked and then there will be whatever hell or harvest to pay (Hell's a kinda harvest, too, right?). And Saturn is the last god I need hanging too much around, or so I once thought. I'll go into that in a moment.

James Hollis, Jungian analyst and writer, sums Saturn's myth this way:

"Saturn was the Roman god of agriculture. On the one hand, as a god of generativity, he helped create early Roman civilization; on the other hand he was associated with a string of dark and bloody stories. His earlier, Greek incarnation, Cronus, was born of the male principle Uranos and the female principle Ge or Gaia. Uranus hated his children for he feared their potential; legend tells us he was "the first to devise shameful actions." His wife Gaia fashioned a sickle and induced Cronus to attack his father. Cronus struck and severed his father's phallus. From the drops of blood that fell on the earth were born fearsome giants. The sperm-flecked, fecundated sea gave birth to Aphrodite, whose name means "born of the foam."

"Cronus-Saturn replaced his father and became a tyrant of equal magnitude. Whenever he and his consort Rhea produced children, he ate them. The only child who evaded this fate was Zeus. In turn, Zeus led a revolt against the father and ten-year war ensued. With Zeus's triumph many civilizing forces emerged, but he, too, fell prey to the power complex and became tyrannical...Thus the Cronus-Saturn story is one of power, jealously, insecurity--violence to the principle of eros, to generativity and to the earth. As Jung once noted, where power is, love is not."

I am now in my second Saturn return, an astrological event where Saturn, the planet and the archetype, returns to where it was at the time of birth in one's astrology chart. It takes this planet thirty years to orbit the sun, thus it's association to time, to slow passage. When Saturn is near one's birth spot by 3 or 4 years his energies start to press. Life can be disrupted, turned upside down, spun around into disorientation. Thus Saturn, the experience of the archetype, has been characterized as "Sat On." And I am, indeed, for quite some time quite sat on, and am just 6 months shy of Saturn's knock on my door (already much around).

Saturn is the archetypal "wise old man." He is the monk, the hermit, the priest, the solitary with his cane and lantern illuminating the next step ahead. He is associated to heavy metal, lead. Typically he is associated to depression and descent. He brings us low down, he presses a crown of thorns into all our brows and nails us in place, in fixity, the endless moment called the "Dark Night of the Soul," the ""via negativa" or "negative way." The little lantern light brightens only the immediate place where one hangs on or drags apace, halt, lame. But this is only the darker side of the archetype.

Saturn is also a god of harvest, of plenty, of full coffers; the famous Saturnalia festival of lore acknowledges that effulgence come from plowing through. Saturn, indeed, requires literal hard work, the back-breaking preparation of soil and field, with hoe and plow, the bloody handed removal of rocks, the sowing of seeds, and the watering (the hauling of it in buckets) or the easier irrigation channels (which one must dig out, reinforce and shape), patiently pulling weeds, stuffing scarecrows, dangling pie tins (my Saturnian father's flashy trick) strung on strings between the rows to frighten crows and other beasts all too ready to harvest the just planted seeds or the fruit born of them, the patient tending, waiting for the fullness of germination determined by weather, light, and human verses critter fights.

All this patience-in-chronicity (we get our word "chronic" from this old tough father Cronus) bears literal harvest, larders full, and the harder rewards of patience. Opines poet Gerard Manly Hopkins: " Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray, But bid for, Patience is! Patience who asks Wants war, wants wounds; weary his times, his tasks; To do without, take tosses, and obey. Rare patience roots in these, and, these away, Nowhere...Patience masks Our ruins of wrecked past purpose." Another name for Saturn, and his fruit, is patience. Our humbled egos survive the hard blows, time and turpitude turned into tolerance and turnips leaving "comfort root room," more Hopkins. Wisdom be that hard thing which Saturn brings. Wisdom be that knowledge derived from suffering/enduring in space and time his dessicated domain hard toiled, sweat oiled, blooded patiently (or not), kenned but skinned alive, licking wounds when pungent Saturn takes you to his tasks, hard ones, in his "Blues School".

I had never heard of a Saturn return until a few years past my first one. I had crashed, burned, and turned my Southern innocence-lost-and-still-mourned 31 year old self toward the North, New York City, to be exacted even more than before, pressed further down, drawn out, fractured past easy fixes of religion, writing, booze and jazz. "Murthered" I was, in my Harlem basement roon beneath West 142nd Street, continuing inner wars in further exile. I read my staples desperately, Blake, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Lorca, Rilke, James Baldwin, the Zen "death poets" and mystics of the Church. I had begun my Jungian analysis two months after my arrival in Manhattan which was my clearest purpose for coming to the city. The other was to write poems the better. And to hear live jazz from the great ones.

"Fear was my father. Father Fear" - The Lost Son & A Cowboy Surprise That Makes Bread

About a year into my Jungian analysis, I was finally working on my "Saturn Return." This is an astronomical/astrological event in which Saturn, the planet and the archetype, returns to where it was in the sky at the time of one's birth, bringing depression and disorientation in order, it is believed, to orient one toward mature adulthood. During this return I anguished over my internalized Saturnine father for whom I am named. A would be writer, I writhed, writing little. When friends back home asked me how my writing was going, I quipped, "Just great. Prolific. I now write checks and suicide notes".

Though a puer (the archetype of the "eternal youth," the "flying boy" who never lands) my father doled out massive portions of Saturnine woes, perhaps intentionally, perhaps not. The devastating effects remain the same. I have noted in my years as a counselor that the "devastation" from puer fathers has definitely Saturnine effects, the crush and grind resulting upon their children leaves them depressed, in the dark, dissociated not in a puer's flight but in a necessary leap upward and away in order to survive the quicksand of incarnate existence. In my late 20s the throes of anger and hurt coagulated, a veritable "tar baby" I was unable to get free of. I struggled to escape the inner affliction of tyrannical contradictions that my father was and that I had, to my horror and despair, become. Or was well on my way to becoming.

My analyst, Betsy Halpern, who trained with Carl Rogers in Chicago then later became a Jungian analyst, patiently endured my deeper descent. I literally lived in a Harlem, New York sub-basement for awhile which often found me questioning whether I should, or even could, go on (Samuel Beckett's "I can't go on. I can't go on. I must go on," from Waiting For Godot, was perhaps my most authentic prayer at that dungeon time) with the horrible business of seeking meaning in the grizzled gleanings from my father's field, physical and psychological. My yield so far was not much. Long serious study and struggle to reconcile myself with that small, authentic mystical circle of Christians, they who had captured my heart and imagination as a world-shy child in the wild woods and hard dirt of my father's hurting soil, insisted that I "grow some corn." Or something. Anything.

Betsy spoke to me of Saturnian things in order to bring father and myself into some meaningful focus, and into a "realer" internal reconciliation. Still reeling, I wrote poems, one titled "Small Favors of Mourning," and I dreamed once of a lone crocus. Betsy appeared relieved by this dream. I had no idea what it meant except that I associated the flower to a poem written by a former lover for a best friend who had committed suicide when the crocus blooms in New England. I was not as relieved as Betsy given my personal association to this spring flower with death by suicide. Meanwhile, I spent my down time—when I was not waiting tables in order to pay the bills, one of which was for my twice weekly analytical sessions—at the weighty, old, cast iron iron Underwood typewriter missing a few tabs (thus literally shedding blood for words until callouses built up) pounding hard away at my craft, such as it then was, poems as wobbly as the three legged chair I had reclaimed from the Harlem street, my writer's perch, my sinner's bench beneath the city sidewalk, a Pentecostal church next door full of Holy Fire where tongues aspired upward to Spirit while I sought in the ruins of my relationship to Christianity one verbal bone in a valley of dry bones from which a Living Body just might miraculously be regrown for actually living on the planet, and for authentic worship.

Betsy taught me how to do active imagination, a Jungian technique where one re-enters a dream or product of the Imagination and, while awake, engage dreams and dream figures, dialoguing and interacting with them in order to integrate what is hinted therefrom toward personal wholeness. Not at all enamored of Saturn (often referred to in astrological circles as "Sat On" because Saturn, heavy, leaden, sits long upon one's soul and presses/oppresses one down), the myth or the god, I was stuck like the old Chevy truck mired forever in father's upper front field above the garden where crab grass rooted beneath and around the rusting chassis. One day in (justified) exasperation and impatience with my perpetual victim-hood, Betsy suggested that I do an active imagination with Saturn, "the god himself." I reluctantly agreed to try when I got home. I sulked and skulked my subway ride home, Herr Sluggo, Warren of the Wasteland. Oy.

Later, lighting a candle in the sub-basement gloom, I settled down beside the hot plate for some heat and went inside to that inner place where dreams and poems had always arrived. I soon found myself in Alaskan wilderness walking carefully down a steep hill covered with tall weeds brown with Autumn. Rounding a knob, I could see a magnificent blue body of water with glaciers in and around it. This was my destination and so I continued on. As I pushed through the trail overgrown in places I suddenly saw not too far ahead of me a man, his back turned toward me, standing still. I stopped to take him in and to determine if he was safe or not. He was dressed in denim shirt and pants like a cowboy, dirty cowboy boots, a well worn cowboy hat tilted to one side on his head. A short compact build, muscular from the trail and, I assumed, cowboy work, he remained gazing at the broad blue body of water. I decided to walk toward him making enough noise in the shuffle to alert him of my approach. Despite the racket I made he did not turn around. I walked on until I was at his side. He then turned to me and brightly smiled, a long brown stalk of wheat with a grain or two on the end of it between his teeth. "You?!!" I shouted, stunned. "Why the hell not?" he laughed. None other than the Trappist monk and best selling writer, Thomas Merton, blue eyes clear and impish, turned fully upon me.

I was not at all prepared for monk Merton in cowboy garb, wheat shaft in teeth, to be my personal image of Saturn. Yet it made sense somehow given the Saturnine severity of the Trappist order. But therein Merton was wild, playful, a man of Promethean vision and humor. Gifted. And for me and many, a gift, with the experienced knowledge that individuation can occur in the oddest of places, from Kentucky monasteries, austere and stringent, to forbidding, exquisite Alaska "serenely deigning to destroy" one and all unprepared creatures, to a sub-basement tenement cave packed with poetry and mystical books, a stained and dented tiny espresso pot the nearest administration of "grace"—o bitter bitter—I could grasp. Merton companioned me in this "Dark Night of the Soul" where I holed up with Gustav Mahler Symphonies and Van Morrison's mellifluous, dark, mellow "Veedon Fleece" album, such lyrics as, "And as we walked through the streets of Arklow, oh the colours of the day warm, and our heads were filled with poetry, in the morning coming onto dawn..." soothed my cold bones with pastoral tones and hopes of inner peace.

I had discovered Merton when I was 14 years old. I wound up "by accident" at the very small Catholic book section of a South Carolina bookstore and had just haplessly reached onto the shelf and selected a small paperback, The New Man. I read a few pages into it about "Primal Adam as Prometheus" and though I did not understand much of what I read, I bought the book on blind intuition (though I knew nothing of that) and read it through cover to cover. Years later, while I was having my nervous breakdown, or spiritual emergency/emerging, out of the Calvinist Christian college and denomination I had been a member of since I was a kid, a friend and fellow pilgrim showed up at my door with gifts for me, "for no good reason," a box record set of of Gregorian Chants, three vinyl albums inside, and a red-covered paperback of flames, A Thomas Merton Reader. Bill, my friend, did not know of my early Merton find and feast nor that I had not read him at all after reading his book I'd purchased. He said without much emotion, "I saw these and something told me you'd like the chants and this Merton guy, some monk/mystic/poet or other."

I did like.

I devoured the book, a compilation from some of Merton's poetry, essays, and journals. I soon owned as many of his books as I could order from the none-too-Catholic-friendly bookstores I haunted in downtown Chattanooga, a protestant wasteland if ever there was one, its only redeeming grace, or one of a few—I'll be kind—is Bessie Smith who was born there on 3rd Street, a street I lived on well into my breakdown/emergence. Merton's mysticism met my mangled, confused, "sat on" soul rigor mortised in a Calvinistic steel grace-brace, his becoming an orienting ground and beacon for my despair and nostalgia for some mythic kingdom where I might be most truly myself, a poet, a mystic, a lover, and a brother to what and whomever divinity might embrace me "just as I am, without one plea." I had not yet realized that I, too, needed to actively embrace both 'braceable' and unembraceable parts of myself and of life and, yes, that which theology and her crowd rejected, left out, or ignored. I dwelt most in the latter three. The dwelling there has set me free to be utterly me, human all too human.

Thus began my active imaginations with Merton, an irreverent mystic, seriously "sat on" himself yet eternally boyish in his humor and ability to be authentically himself, a rebel-monk, hermit-artist, writer, poet, mystic, charmer and, yes, a lady's man, having had a relationship with a woman (kept well-hidden) during the last few years of his life where, inflamed with erotic love which deepened his love for God and his vocation, he was accidentally electrocuted by a faulty fan in a humid Bangkok room at a conference for mystics of all faiths. Perhaps this fact of burning explained the paperback bookcover of his selected works; he wrote years before dying that he worshiped "the Christ of the burnt men," one human child born of a flaming bright star in the midst of barn animals, instincts which burn, too, to keep life going, no matter the dampening and dangerous flue the official Church had become. The "dumb brute" of the Child, mildly in a stone feeding trough, lost his divinity for flesh and still we ponder and wonder at that Life that remains powerful in spite of negative, let's assume positively intentioned, Saturnine preservers of stalwart "truths," a noble venture for finite creatures who remain, after all, asses in the barnyard where Presence is born.

During one of my later sessions with Merton-Saturn he said to me, "It's about time you plant this; tend it well, and go make bread." He proffered me the wheat stalk with its one or two attached grains. I tearfully took the gift though I did not comprehend what it meant. I have spent the rest of my days since tending to the grains planted, my little psyche-field yielding some more stalks and grains, and plenty of stones and weeds. I have yet to resolve the mysteries of leaven, but the hermit/monk in me patiently kneads and kneels alone. And in time my own father has come more into focus, a broken human after all, and not a god at all. To my glad surprise, I found love for him who had hurt me most.

Still, I am not a good farmer. I poorly, unlike Auden, Yeats and Merton's real gems, have "farmed a verse" in order to "make a vineyard of the curse." I have healed-enough my Saturn wound, and that of my father to whom I offer this little loaf, he the life giver to me after all, with gratitude for his attuning my boy-vision upon the earth horizon and not the sky, my childhood-Christmas telescope focused on a flashing, red, radio tower beacon in a far field beyond the front field and near woods which were my father's kingdom. This red light, its steady pulse, has served me well as I wind down the hill toward that glacial lake with Tom Merton and Carl Jung, fathers, too, to thank:

Repose of Needles

for father

Repose of Needles
for father

If you need to stand or lie
in the shade for awhile then
do so as farmers do, as does
my father who farms his despair
in hot sun then lays beneath
pines in cooler shade to rest,
to dream that activity between
dirt and sky means some lasting
thing in its doing even though
his ruined life cannot make
it right between clouds and
his obsession with weeds.

Between the garden and the
untilled woods he rests,
repose of needles and bark,
mid-day sun insisting its
question slowly. Night dawning
he at last in darkness stands
returned from day, a practical
vision of green shoots to come
from blistered hands.

Up hill to the colder house,
he wills himself to life-enough,
speaks some words to wife,
arcs widely around silent wary
children and lives to be old.
His loss of memory leaves it
for others to forgive, to live on
in the rich rot of that ongoing
question which nurtures his
memory haltingly, gracefully, on.

Astonished, I have arrived at
love for him who hurt me most,
have learned to obey the odor
of decaying things compelling
hands to dirt. Within the dream
of staying, the tendril and the heart,
my aging body takes on my
father's form. I, too, like him,
am a farmer when I note how
it moves in its winding reach,
rooting, rising, giving horizon.

*******

**"Fear was my father. Father Fear." - from "The Lost Son" by Theodore Roethke

"Go Drink Tea" In A Time of Collective & Personal Economic Decline

2011-09-08T13:43:00.000-07:00

[Easter fireworks. Oaxaca, Mexico. Photo by Maria Cipriani. Click on the image to enlarge it]

The universe is forever falling apart --
No need to push the button,
It collapses at a finger's touch:
Why, it barely hangs on the tail of a sparrow's eye.

The universe is so much eye secretion,
Hordes leap from the tips
Of your nostril hairs. Lift your right hand:
It's in your palm. There's room enough
On the sparrow's eyelash for the whole.

A paltry thing, the universe:
Here is all the strength, here the greatest strength.
You and the sparrow are one
And, should he wish, he can crush you.
The universe trembles before him.

- "Destruction" by Shinkichi Takahashi

Nothing can deviate from the fact of its own existence:
it is the perfect example of what it is. This is Suchness, and
Suchness is Empty.

- Lee Robertson

Remember when you're feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth...

And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, cos there's bugger all down here on Earth!

- Monty Python, from "The Meaning of Life" movie

I want to sing out a few crazy ideas for I am a man of strange tastes and find ideas to be actually beautiful, sometimes stunning like fireflies lighting a dark path, flashing, disappearing and flashing again. Ideas melt quickly from concept to story, from story to music. I want to leave the reader with a little music, a little utterly unreasonable hope.

- Michael Ortiz Hill

***

Dear Penurious Pilgrim,

Ebb and flow...tides, moon...breathe...Trust, be in the daily minute with some joy and, if not joy, then with some good purpose to be present and just "drink a cup of tea"...Trungpa Rinpoche (Tibetan Buddhist teacher) and Sung San Sunim (Korean Zen master) used to say to their students when they lamented the slings and arrows of material existence (samsara) and of mind, "Can you just go drink tea?" My answer, silently in my head, is "Yes. With a shot of tequila on the side....grrrrrrr...." and then I chug-slug my shot of double espresso! Often. And life goes on...Things will change, are changing...we may have to rearrange ourselves in the universe which really does a "bang up job" out there and all around us, whole galaxies colliding with each other so who says it must be pretty cuz it ain't, not for the collisions and without insurance policies to cover all that. Witnessing this cosmic show we "oooohhh!" and "ahhhhhhh, gorsh dang, vur' pritty!" from our planetary perch we imagine is safe, secure and solid. HA! We, too, "but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!" (Jack Kerouac).

Thus, be present, praise, pray - "You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid" - T.S. Eliot - raise a little Cain, and push your way into places which may not easily yield...one has a birth right to push, one must in order to escape the womb and once escaped we push the harder still to escape the memory of womby places and people which keeps us forever immature, undeveloped, sucking addictively at one or many spiritual "teats" but these are "winter teats". These keep one frozen, arrested, forever pulling at withered dugs promising salvation, enlightenment and surcease or wealth, health, good looks and power, while said promissory teats refuse to be let go of - "Thou shalt not wean!" - demanding suck while the "soma" (narcotic) fluid flows into mutual infantile dependencies between the dug and the dug tuggers.

These we must flee at some point to drink much stronger stuff, Life-as-It-is, bitter, dark, perhaps with a pastel finish, a little sweetness on the tongue but, taste as taste is and can, we can become fortified eventually, without need of regressive libations...a hero's journey sure...there are days, though, when just drinking a cup tea is a heroic act, affirmative, not a denial of but an assent to apparent, lived contradictions as such tea is made and drunk while "watching the sunset and feeling the samsara (suffering) of the world (Trungpa Rinpoche)," and small "graceless moments" become lovely (enough) from good/right uses/intentions. No magic solutions but profound alterations of awareness may (no guarantee) emerge within the crush of polarity, hands empty, heart broken, mind empty or full, tea cup or stronger brew nearby perpetually filling and spilling.

One reaches. In reaching we are aspirant broken gods imaging and informing other broken gods perhaps to no avail but avail we must, we must respond, and in our response inform, answer the appeal of samsara within the gods and selves, within the very cells, imaging our worlds, galaxies, universes...dreams of constancy are the constant. We must make do with tea and trust, eyes wide open, reserving full rights as creatures to protest and preserve our nests of mind and mortality, our dreams of being more-than-mortal coil spinning, too, hoping to somehow outlast dirt and hurt.

You are a unique witness (literally, with-ness) to that-which-is unfolding , your eyes and consciousness give it meaning by your witness and response. No guarantee of an easy ride but while you are cogent, eyes wide and with feeling function operative, bear witness tear by tear, prayer by prayer, respond/avail/advance, be with, and push, ADVANCE, when and where you can, and go brew and drink your tea. Tell a joke or two with the wife, get out some night in the coming weeks and look at stars (those which are not shy and allow themselves to be seen)...say to your self, "It's rougher where they are." Hear the crickets, the bullfrogs, perhaps the sound of wind over waves, smell pines and leaves...realize you are one of the wealthiest men in the universe in that, and this, moment...yet, and yes, we blink and loose that wealth, then we yet again open our eyes and there it all is, disarray, misery, aurora borealis reminding us and the universe "to be gay," to shine on brightly bearing the aboriginal burden of wakefulness.

Perspective and orientation make us alternately kings and paupers. The human experience is this-as-such in the suchness which "is a fundamental, intrinsic, or characteristic quality or condition" within and upon which, as Zen Buddhism poetically/alleviatingly paints it, "the Bird's Path" which unfolds/reveals each life into it's unique variant expression and deviation liquidly in quiddity as we each are invited/enticed to cultivate the witness in "king state" of mind/seeing (fullness) and evenly/equally, too, in "pauper state" of mind/seeing (emptiness), paradoxically the richer for the poverty and all the poorer for voraciously stuffing "the universe into our eyes" (poet Shinkichi Takahashi)...but there is no judge really of either state though the animal we are reserves just rights to complain at empty bellies, encroached territories, crotch urgencies, skin withers, fur falls...brittle goes the bone, so small the gathered human corners, so great the necessary mercies. We must not dishonor the animal we are with "spiritual" instruments designed to cut off our tails insistently singing false praise to "holy" denials and "sanctifying" trials to better or annihilate the brute and brawn of of our spinal existence...and yet...and yet we humanly discern variegating and variant states of mind, each discernment a gateway in potentia...these lived contradictory states "just are"- no fault of our own but of our stars and scars - the way things are. Just is. These states flee into other formulations, spinning vortices continuing, worlds coming into existence, worlds going out of existence, and so go their local gods as ours, too, expire minute by minute winking all the way, pointing away from themselves saying, "Hey, don't blame us (wink wink)!"...meanwhile, someone or something somewhere may now be looking down on your life exclaiming, seeing beauty in the majestic conflagration of human beingness, "and everybody goes "Awww!"

THEREFORE, HENCE FORTH:

"Make a joyful noise!" - proclaims psalmist King David - which is a vocation I can get with.

All this suchness to sing though it may not fill your belly though perhaps the heart swells into sounding, therefore, therein is one's right to PUSH! One may kow tow, or just be cowed, but if the universe is a Thou then one may bullishly assert, NOW! and advocate, even fight for one's birth right - some bread, a bed, a patch beside a stream or a doll house street, sweat-and-blood won, proclaiming a personal kingdom. It's all meat for cosmic forces "running the show." Best to bare the tooth when needed eschewing tempting teats. Now harken! there's laughter of rivers, earthly and cosmic, Milky or Muddy Ways somewhere to be heard. Hard to hear but it's there in our jokes within apparent linear absurdities, i.e. the requirement of Some(No)thing Some(No)where for such suffering, such stunning loss which human and perhaps other one's have sacred duty to scoff at, a reminder of free will though we spill down worm holes devouring our own tails/tales, middle fingers proffered, battered lips praising still that we have witnessed, yes, cracked, all this. And thus with a mortal kiss Love in the crush and crank is sealed.

Another job I endorse - useless kisses toward "a bliss beyond the fiddle." (Poet Rainer Rilke)

"Go drink tea." - A Letter To One Suffering Calamity of Purpose In A Time of Collective & Personal Economic Decline

2011-07-19T09:32:00.000-07:00

[Blind street musician. Oaxaca, Mexico. 2006. Photo by Maria Cipriani. "Oaxacan Angel" photo also by Cipriani. All other photos are by Warren Falcon. Click on images to enlarge. ]

It is recommended that one read the entire essay and then click onto the links which are meant to provide visual/aural emotional contexts for what is written.

*******

"I want to sing out a few crazy ideas for I am a man of strange tastes and find ideas to be actually beautiful, sometimes stunning like fireflies lighting a dark path, flashing, disappearing and flashing again. Ideas melt quickly from concept to story, from story to music. I want to leave the reader with a little music, a little utterly unreasonable hope."

- Michael Ortiz Hill, from "Blues Song At the Edge of Chaos"

And I went and put my hands
into the ground, and they took root
and grew into a season's harvest.
I looked behind the veil
of the leaves, and heard voices
that I knew had been dead
in my tongue years before my birth.
I learned the dark.

- Wendell Berry, from "Song in a Year of Catastrophe"

Dear Penurious Pilgrim,

Ebb and flow...tides, moon...breathe...

Trust, be in the daily minute with some joy
and if not joy with some good purpose to then
be present and just "make a cup of tea"...

Trungpa Rinpoche (privately affectionately called, "Rin Tin Tin Pooche (Pooch-ay)) and Sung San Sunim (Korean Zen master) used to say similarly to their students when lamenting the slings and arrows of material existence (samsara) and of mind,

"Can you just go drink tea?"

I answer silently in my head,
"Yes. With a shot of tequila on the side....
grrrrrrr...." and then chug-slug my shot of
double espresso! And do. Often. And life goes on...

Things will change, are changing...we may have to rearrange ourselves in the universe which does a "bang up job" up there and all around us, whole galaxies colliding with each other so who says it must be pretty? cuz it ain't, not for the colliding galaxies. Witnessing this cosmic show we "oooohhh!" and "ahhhhhhh, gorsh dang, vur' pritty!" from our planetary perch we imagine is safe, secure and solid. HA!! :

“...but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!” - Jack Kerouac

...thus, be present, praise, pray, raise a little Cain and cane and push your way into places which may not easily yield...one has a birth right to push, one must in order to escape the womb and, once escaped, we push the harder still to escape the memory of womby places and people which keeps us forever immature, undeveloped, sucking addictively at one or many spiritual "teats" but these are "winter teats". These keep one frozen, arrested, forever pulling at withered dugs promising salvation, enlightenment and surcease or, if New Age, wealth, health, good looks and power, while said promissory teats refuse to be let go of - "Thou shalt not wean!" - demanding suck while the "soma" (narcotic) fluid flows into mutual infantile dependencies between dug and dug tuggers.

These we must flee at some point to drink much stronger stuff, Life-as-It- is, bitter, dark, perhaps a pastel finish, a little sweetness, but taste as taste is and can, become fortified eventually without need of regressive libations (click here)...a hero's journey sure...there are days, though, when just drinking tea is a heroic act, affirmative, not a denial but an assent to apparent, lived contradictions, when such tea is made and drunk as one "watches the sunset while feeling the samsara (suffering) of the world (Trungpa Rinpoche)" small "graceless moments" become lovely (enough) from good/right uses/intentions. No magic solutions but profound alterations of awareness might emerge within the crush of polarity, hands empty, heart broken, mind empty or full, tea cup or stronger brew nearby (click here).

One reaches. In reaching we are broken gods imaging and informing our broken gods (perhaps to no avail but avail we must, respond and in our response inform, answer the appeal of samsara within the gods and selves, within the very cells), imaging our galaxies, universes...dreams of constancy are the constant. We must make do with tea. And trust. And eyes wide open reserving full rights as creatures to protest and preserve our nests of mind and mortality (click here). You are a unique witness (literally, with-ness) to the unfolding universe, your eyes and consciousness give it meaning by your witness and response. No guarantee of an easy ride but while you are cogent, eyes wide with feeling function operative then bear witness tear by tear, prayer by prayer, respond/avail/advance, be with, and push, ADVANCE, when and where you can, and go make and drink your tea. Tell a joke or two with the wife, get out some night in the coming weeks and look at some stars (those which are not shy and can be seen)...say to your self, "It's rougher where they are..." and hear the crickets, the bullfrogs, perhaps the sound of wind over waves, smell pines and leaves...realize you are one of the wealthiest men in the universe in that, and this, moment...

...yet, and yes, we blink and loose that wealth, then we yet open our eyes again and there it is...perspective and orientation makes us alternately kings and paupers...usually both...the human experience is this as such and we cultivate the witness when we are in the King state of mind/seeing and evenly (though not experientially), too, when we are in the pauper state of mind/seeing...and there is no judge really of either state (though the animal we are reserves just rights to complain at empty bellies, encroached territory, etc. and we must not dishonor the animal we are with "spiritual" instruments designed to cut off our tails singing false praise to "holy" denials and "sanctifying" trials), yet we discern differences of states and each discernment is a gateway in potentia...these lived contradictory states "just are", no fault of our own but that of our stars and scars and the way things are, just is...and then these states can flee away into other galaxy formations, spinning vortices continuing, worlds coming into existence, worlds going out of existence, and so go their gods, too, as ours, too, expire minute by minute winking all the way and pointing away from themselves saying, "Hey, don't blame me (wink wink)!"...meanwhile, someone or something somewhere may now be looking down on your life, your wife's, going "OOOOOooooo! AAHHHHhhhh!" seeing beauty and awe in the majestic conflagration of human beingness..."and everybody goes "Awww!”

THEREFORE, HENCE FORTH:

"Make a joyful noise!" (click here) says a Hebrew Psalm of King David.

Now THAT is a vocation I can get with. YOU TOO! and YOU DO! and it's free!

Pay day comes in unexpected ways. Watching an immigrant now sweeping stoops, whistling a tune from his native place. His song is his assent to being as it is. Dreams surround him. Acts of faith while living "in the teeth."

"When we cannot trace [find/understand the reason for suffering/contraction/pain] then we must trust..." says Ernest Holmes, founder of Science of Mind. In every being is a radical "faith in life" no matter what is happening which contradicts/challenges having faith/trust...the perfect example of this for me is in Monty Python's, "The Search for the Holy Grail" (I have rusty recall of details of the scene so I will embellish to make my point), when a soldier guard challenges one of the Knight's of the Table Round to a dual for according to the guard's job description the Knight "shall not pass!" Said Knight easily hacks off an arm of the guard who is still swinging his sword saying, "Have at you!! just a flesh wound!" Off goes the other arm, blood spurts from both shoulders like broken water mains, the guard screams, "Ha! mere cuts...come closer! I'll bite your legs off!" Sword swings and off goes a leg, hopping on his one good leg, the defiant guard shouts, "Coward! come near and I'll bleed on you! I'll push you down with a chest lunge and then jump up and down on you till you're dead!" The other leg is cut off and the guard, like a tree stump in the middle of the pass, continues hurling insults at the Knight who, confounded, passes on his way. Now that is radical faith! and the right to defend one's place in the universe and even though it looks bad for the guard, and is! he's still at it, aggressively alive and saying to Knight, to Life, "Just a flesh wound! Have at you!" Radical faith in life is even though arrival and deliverance from problems, from suffering, is not yet seen, not traced; one must trust and in that trust is a radical affirmation of belief in the constancy of unfolding good with the bad which forms our character, lives in the teeth of life reminding life to be not only wild colliding creative/destructive galaxies but peaceful flowing streams and dreams...neither cancels the other but exists in tandem with each...expansion/contraction, life/death, calm/conflict...and you bear witness to it all, experience it all, respond to it all in the multitude of creaturely ways humans have...

...you love the blues, jazz, black gospel music, the response of slaves and former slaves to crushing ongoing genocide and cruelty by white Americans....untold millions suffered and died but the tracing went on and the "have at you!" the PUSH AGAINST AND PUSH BACK affirmation of life force continued until the time came when society shifted via violent and non-violent aggression...something must and will give especially at the forced breaking points, willed and unwilled...some new order will come and then ongoing crush and creativity ensues...more blues to come...best have a good pair a walking shoes...

And always this (click here).

Culture (and Freud's apt title and phrase, "Civilization and it's discontents") comes of this struggle with things as they are, bitter/sweet, soft/hard, peace/war, reasonable/unreasonable, etc. It's what we humans do with and within the inexorable opposites as does perhaps myriad other species (and galaxies?)...apparently only we can know it and sing it and just plain "Mother Teresa" as well as "Malcolm X" it, all options on the table or under it (usually) with and for self and others. Whether new and better orders endure is not a guarantee; that is remaindered to trace and trust. Just be sure to wear a truss! Paradise or bust! or a quiet patch along a stream might be all the redemption a poor soul needs, prayer beads of stars at hand, and a rosary of smooth stones for a throwing child, an old man's memory skips across serene pond or shouting stream, he reminds the quiet glade of shadows, " It is "I and Thou" oh difficult Lover, O Universe...I and Thou... "

All this to say though it may not fill your belly, therefore one's right to PUSH! One may kow tow or just be cowed but if the universe is a Thou then one may bullishly assert, NOW! and advocate, even fight for one's birth right...some bread, a bed and a patch beside a stream or street sweat and blood won. It's all meat in cosmic forces running things. Best to bare the teeth when its needed eschewing tempting teats. There's laughter (of rivers, earthly and cosmic, Milky or Muddy Ways?) somewhere to be heard. Hard to hear but it's there in our jokes about the apparent absurdities quotidian, the requirement of Something Somewhere for such suffering, such stunning loss which human and other one's have sacred duty to scoff at, a reminder of free will though we spill down the worm holes, middle fingers proffered, battered lips praising still that we have witnessed, yes, all this. And thus with a kiss, love in the crush and crank is sealed. Another job I endorse, wielding lips for praise and kisses.

Warren