Epimetheus** Looks Back - Upon Gazing at a Photo of Sixty Year Old Me from My Now Being Seventy One

"So abandon all hope ye who enter here. Best to veer away unless willing 

to risk some secure rumored footholds of logic, meter, measure, rhyme, 

sanity. I'm with old Ezra's humbled fife and thrum, 'is repentant, haggard, 

niggardly self in ripe and rife old age, beyond chastened, crumpled yet 

and yes but for a tongue and pen still at and in't, the wiser for 'is sins n schisms/"

- from text below

**Epimetheus is Prometheus' brother. Name of Prometheus means "sees ahead" "forward seeing" "future sight" whereas Epimetheus means "looks back" perpetually

[NOTE: This site has utterly defeated me.  The text page for writing, indexing, etc. is utterly inconsistent and one part of the text will extend into the  right margin edge, another part will be hard left but then make a space between lines of the text, text can be of a completely different font and size arbitrarily imposed by whatever fractured algorithm insisting upon making essays on this, instead of being pleasure and ease, an exhausting and defeating task.  I curse the AI gods or lazy controllers of the did-jots and spit-tittles of composing and posting for such a torture, may you be bitten by a thousand fleas....To the very rare reader here, thank you, and welcome, I apologize here for the sloppy pastiche layout that is the site's cyber-no-brain's fault, not mine.  I literally spent hours of agony just trying to make it as presentable as I could but to no avail.  Entonces, I admit defeat because ecce homo, and not AI. I am flesh, blood, bone, think and snot but not necessarily in that order (I bray, I mean, pray), I am not abstract coding, rather the only code I got is DNA and DNA will whip AI's

  

the 'god-image' of this site -

any familiarity of that/those

of Western "Syphiization "is

            accurate]

non ass in and out of any space and time corridor. 

Code is no victor here though I admit defeat. William Blake has it right, "Eternity is in love with the productions of time."  And Carl Jung has it right too, though many many will call him heretical, and he would admit it and without shame, Eternity is in utter need and dependency upon creation, humans particularly, to unite the opposites of IT's N0 Self within each ourselves and in so doing mitigate and perhaps some far time in the future (if future there is) IT, will also become more whole since IT is split too...there's a danger in such uniting of good and evil but that's another essay for another time and perhaps on some other site with less budgy-fudgy-excre-mental-bytes-but-bloats all the more with rank Kubricks, I mean, HAL hubris.

All images are my own unless otherwise credited. All texts/poems are mine unless otherwise credited]

Photo taken in 2013

Tis a Selkie, not a selfie. A decade ago in the Adirondacks, wood stove flue over my left shoulder. My zennish days more or less or not at all, my NOW AND ZEN SOME days, my zen teacher a proponent of Wrecking Ball Zen which explains the glazed right eye and the intense left, bereft of self or no-self. 

"... to begin with a swelled head and end with swelled feet..." - Ezra Pound

From the journal then:

ENTRY 13:

Sensei tells me: It's undertow that matters.

Me: I am stumped. 

ENTRY 14  (Caught in the undertow mind m-utterances)

One adjusts. Continually. 

The persona is adaptation 

appearing to be solid but sleep reveals the neutrality 

of the animal. 

Dreams tell us otherwise 

when we remember them as it takes an ego to witness, 

to remember. 

They reveal that we are 

caught up into something so much greater than 

flush and stir. 

It's a wonder we make do 

as much as we do and still call ourselves by name, 

a species of animal, 'homo sapiens'. 

I regret self pity. 

I'd reject it if I could but it adheres, 

last resort of old coots born honestly 

into it no matter the copious Mercurochrome baths, 

the smelling salts obviating the needed nipple. 

The stippled trout I nightly catch, 

pink insides turned out by blue blade 

kept beneath the pillow, 

baits me with the riddle 

again and again. 

Something about a stand of trees, 

a man carving some bark, 

what breath is for. 

ENTRY 23  More's the muddle w/th' not so subtle nuance "there's no undertow in a puddle" 

aka Han Shan 9th century Chinese poet:

"Who will lend a dipper of water

To save a fish in a carriage rut?"

Today the Market reports a run on Mercurochrome. 

Birth goes on. 

I am for rebirth. 

A dirth of days makes me suddenly Hindu, 

foregoing gurus and bindu point. 

I've made my own here,

one foot well into 'Cracked and Crank', 

the drunk tank a memory 

worn out. 

Doubt is my companion. 

Love, too. 

No remorse here. 

Buys me time, aftershave and 

loads of underwear for the trickles ahead. 

Thank the gods for all that. 

Oh. And one last good cigar. 

I'm switching to Groucho Marx Zen aka

"You sed th' woid, you got th' VOID."

ENTRY 2635 - Years on in still at zen.  Nothing broken.  Nothing to mend...and yet...and yet...

               

Ramana Pajama, 

Coda Pagoda,

rolled outta bed, 

sat. 

Sang,

"No more sensei." 

Epimetheus looks back

"So, friend, you die also. Why all this clamour about it?" - from The Iliad XXI by Homer

...but it's late and I've been under-slept, much distressed, stretched through veil and moan, though I dreamed last night a sweet not-dog/yet-dog sleeping upon a burning log most inviting. I see now it is a sacrifice that has consented to such and thus is resolved, at peace, surrendered to gentle flame, to rules of the human consciousness game, and/but I want to secure its comfort and safety though Fire winks at me and says, 

I got this covered.

So.

What to do? 

Out of my league as creature alone, 

I demur to Fire.

Am awaiting further instructions. 

Marinating in petrol. 

Negotiating 

with Combustion Union 

even as I 

speak or spark, 

whichever comes 

first which will 

inexorably of course 

come last then 

ashes to ashes 

and the mourning

a thousand 

or more books unread, 

not understood.

Tou jours 

mon ami, 

mon frere

to rhyme 

with fire

and sireling.

                                         

Me during covid "warrentine" 2020 upstate New York

ENTRY 2637 - Sensei's 7 years dead now, the "sitz path" continues unsure, it proceeds still, path-enough

SENSEI'S PARTING SENTIMENTS 

Where have they gotten too 
these graces clumsy on their feet? 

They've fled, easy wings balletic 
toward ocean or other, black, they 
bob low over white waves, confuse 
themselves for sails or Van Goghs 
or Cezannes, even Twomblys, and 
so steady they do go away, or de- 
pending on time of day and slant 
of sun, they may wobble or appear 
to do so when things, even birds, 
are bent, mirage-podge-and-puddle, 
trajectories and intent, fused in- 
stincts, prevailing, so weaving they 

have went, 

their patience with the city spent. 

They're fled. Gone. 

 

tell me now 

glass-handled knives 

I'm not clear where we started

between the rain 
whose throat is blue 
like a wild fern is clear 

I am sad when I see you

your letters arrive fat 
swollen with human form 

they fly out from my palms 

look around you

The distant gazebo of that small 
town wears white lights garlanded 

round, and snow. A boy without 
gloves reads alone. 

He is no fool who takes his time and 
place to know.

I rediscover you a gift here still as 
I have in good counsel curtsied and coughed 

often enough, my own hand to my own groin
to discover a fissure again, again to repeat, 

that you are tissue essential still and 
fabric to my own particularity upon a hill, 

a house, one fence above a stream and rails, 
a blinking boy turning wet pages knowing that 

you or someone similar, only a few years 
ahead, already familiar, dwells inside 

compels his reading just before sunset 
squinting at words beyond and past the 

fence and the stream, the train late, 
footprints dark blue in the patient drift.

ENTRY No longer counting - see ZERO praise below - after thoughts, setting-away zen, begin again - arrivals, departures three years after the Quarantine (Warrentine) Journal, Quetzal dreams as koan:

again, for sensei, and George E. 

afterplay, and fore, for, foregoing lookingbacks ahead, familiar dread bed head pillow play dreamed the dead analyst returned blind to me, kind faced, staggered as if dizzy and holding onto walls, face turned toward me then walled he through a door into clouds white, nevermind the triteness of image, I felt love, relief, received his blessing after all the failing him and me and what ever the Self requires of me/not-me.  Again, yet, arrivals, fretted departures, never say 'not' nor 'never' so unfolds mind-tries three years after:

"Who turned us around like this, so that we always

do what we may, retain the attitude

of someone who's departing? Just as he, 

on the last hill, that shows him all his valley

for the last time, will turn and stop and linger,

we live our lives, for ever taking leave." 

- Rainer Maria Rilke, from Duino Elegy 8

Thusly,

"Mark the first page of the book with a red marker. For, in the beginning, the wound is invisible." - Edmund Jabes

"Toot Toot Lovers! Bag of bones coming through!" - Richard Hugo 

"We happen to live at a moment that is going to get worse before it gets better. The world went inside the internet and became the world...a poem may not conform to your worldview, your tastes, or what you think a poem can be. I often hear students get exasperated if a poem stretches the bounds of what they think poetry includes." - Sean Singer

"There is another world, but it is inside this one." - Paul Celan: 

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

"There isn't any one correct way to write poetry. Poetry is a word like love: an endless confusion of different things all warped into one word because no vocabulary of discrimination exists." - Jack Gilbert

Old now, haiku 

easier on the breadth:

Road gets narrower 

eyesight dims, 

even signs wave

Basho's ghost 

guides with ink,

HERE NOT HERE

Can't ever cross 

Rainbow Bridge

Beneath it, though, 

a billet of mist 

On the other hand,

me, just to be clear at another outset, to set it out, to lay out or in 

what follows, is to follow, rather, I follow IT, lay it out as IT and how 

it plays and wants to say, perhaps its stay - which now all below as 

they go-and-go, are excerpts, patches from poem after poem, a long 

roam, a life time roaming of them toward rumored HOME, more the 

homing devices, words, than settling, planting one flag for everything, 

impossible to do as things, even words do fray down to string and 

filament fly loosened eventually strand by strand (as do I, me) in 

fate-wind, and thus the pastiche ensues, unwinds/unravels on purpose 

not to my own end but to poetry's ends (plural) in creating, destroying, 

reconfiguring worlds of possibilities plural. And from below bellow 

scraps filched from whole poems that doubt their legs capacities to 

stand on their own aka poet Robert Duncan's declaration that

'language, words, make meaning, I don't...'

So what's below is no rural romp or tread and though most readers 

dread having to participate in the reading of such, having to use their 

heads and more, better, use their ears without fear of noise or nonsense, 

then let the lazy forego their efforts here and head off to church or 

collective shrine or club or circle and so 'knit one pearl two', don the 

harder shoes that force a straight unyielding path to (or so it is thought 

and hoped) chaste and bidden conformity to believed to be 'received 

revealed' paths of doggerel and sentimentality.

Or, alas, early 19th century exiled American poet's proclamation 

propounding to 'make it new' all the while living in classical Europe, 

is now, early 21st century, 'the old soft shoe' boogie bougie of those 

new penners currently blowing in the wind, the Bestseller genies 

sprung like Athena from Zeus's noggin fully formed Jack n Jill 

Horners patenting both thumbs and plums having believed that 

they are progenitors of both. But I'll be plumbed, forego the curd 

topping the pie but stick, rather, a nether in an eye to scrie or effort 

something wanting to show itself though shy or disguised to throw 

readers off petrified 'tried and true'. Ask not for whom the tell bolls,

it bolls prithee (which is a fun thing to say 'slythy-ly') .

If the reader is a free bleeder and curious about the flow and where 

it goes or takes one then have some fun and fuddle, let red matter 

puddle in the mind, the ears, at least one, the better ear the bad one 

cuz then one must squint an eye try to hear, must effort to ken what's 

to be be heard that matters in the dim dumb hum haw hem 'to wit, to 

woo, to whom to what will 'draw flies or better' if it can (or can it) or 

draw curiosity that begins and ends in further quests such are questions 

behest that one at least not tarry too long but scurry or surrey forth 

in whatever meter one finds is adequate to the moment. There is no 

certainty here, capital C, so run away to yer barnacled BIG BOOKS 

HOLY WRIT yer RECEIVED THINKs. A tinker's damn from me to thee. 

With humor, old and newer meanings both, risk laughter at what Allen 

Ginsberg calls 'shapely thought' and of course 'unthought' that can 

open to mystery though the masses are horribly afraid of all that! 

There's plentyuh old mystery to be had easily and so cheap (tho stale) 

at The Dollar Store with or without a steeple or shrine or other tell-tale 

once was symbol now reduced (and on sale) for only a sign, the spark 

that was once in the totem fled or dead matter tho nostalgia goes far 

enough for most.

Still, wonder can shew even in an image of Jesus (choose holy man 

or woman or symbol) apparition-ing on burnt toast.Now THAT I'll 

take seriously for I could never worship a deity or sacrality that has 

no sense of humor, one what can still fun us with rumored visitations 

in the juub juubs and baubles, from Babel to Babble (how many 

denominations are daily born, each claiming sole authority?), veritable 

spawn of further holy wars.

There is some rhyme here below too, some poems, though rhyme's 

now long verboten in mod school of poesy forgetting that it, poesy, 

still 'surely hath its posies' aka Ernest Dowson with whom him too 

I am and 'have been faithful to thee, O Cynara! ' fiddle dee fiddle dim 

dumb. He died of debauch. But I am the more abstemious preferring 

profligate torrents of words and what surds may jell even if but for a 

moment or just plain even if.

As a boy my daily chore was to dump food scraps and other 

trash-could-rot into large mulch piles to use for father's gardens. And 

to dig in the dark dense layers for fat worms with which to fish. From 

this early boyhood chore, the fishing too - a worm on a hook fathomed 

into unseen depths for a hopeful forkful revelation of fin and flash 

cornmeal battered, a vocation long emerged into verges with disregard, 

and dys-regards, effort taken with reading oracular shards glyphs for 

meaning or leanings toward such that one could take for meaning even 

if arrived at by other than expected, received and baptized means.

So abandon all hope ye who enter here. Best to veer away unless willing 

to risk some secure rumored footholds of logic, meter, measure, rhyme, 

sanity. I'm with old Ezra's humbled fife and thrum 'is repentant, haggard, 

niggardly self in ripe and rife old age, beyond chastened, crumpled yet 

and yes but for a tongue and pen still at and in't, the wiser for 'is sins 

n schisms/

Head of a shouting man - Matthias Grunewald

from Pisan Canto LXXXI by Ezra Pound 

"What thou lovest well remains,

the rest is dross What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee

What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage Whose world, or mine or theirs

or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable

Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell, What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,

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,

Paquin pull down! The green casque has outdone your elegance.

'Master thyself, then others shall thee beare'; Pull down thy vanity

Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail, A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,
Half black half white
Nor knowst'ou wing from tail

Pull down thy vanity
How mean thy hates

Fostered in falsity,
Pull down thy vanity,

Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity, Pull down thy vanity,

I say pull down.

But to have done instead of not doing this is not vanity

To have, with decency, knocked That a Blunt should open

To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity.

Here error is all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered..." 

- March 25,2023

Deer Dance/Fire ceremony, Ohkay Ohwengeh 

reservation, New Mexico

Entry - Exuent - Fluent yet Flatulent - 04/23/2023

My words here are not intended, nor are they able, to exclude what Word-oriented, revealed religions of 'the Book' have brought to us and advanced, but now, next 2000 years, the creative struggle will be to conjoin meaningfully polygamous images of psyche into compressions (es-pressions, as in espresso) and ex-pressions (pressed out) by and with word and Word which have tendencies toward monotheism, one true meaning only, which results therefore, can't be avoided, into a heavy-handedness in terms of a perceived/derived one and only Absolute. Ironically, the Arabs discovery of always heavy Zero - which, to me, is the only Absolute of merit - gave birth to a multiplicity, diverse, perverse, all the more irascible yet embraceable, maddeningly erasable, while growing arms beyond counting, the better to carry the unforgiving densities.

Count them (or try) we must; for congenital compulsions such are calcifications - spirit, soul, life in the body - are gripped in the teeth of the world; beatific, we perceive ourselves to be in the image of deity. Still, we can believe we are 'safe' within these calcified 'absolutes' - o here is the 'burning bush' - or we can risk the profligate ramble which is consciousness, a fire still burning, an intuition in each image that there is more here than meets the eye or thigh or deities as imaged. We all look, or try, beneath the skin of things - under what is presented, or within it - for that half-guessed/hinted at and/or 'felt sense' that there is MORE beyond the barred nerve, more and 'other-than' the shock of a chrome bumper-bent world careening, aware that within all is here-a-Presence, all images and words assuming that Presence - the Arabs gift of the non-alloyed Zero unmeasured by mass, a better name for god depending on thermal history's twisting vector or ghostly mirage, if any are to be had - the base in spite of or within the Metallic Matrix of the blacksmith heart hammering verdigris, chambers, ventricles, into shape, Newton's grave conjugations, living time solidified, hardened, stiffening Presence into dilute renderings of base metal, and chaste Frida Kahlo, her canvases chasing plutonium wire unaware, bears the blunt end of Presence at the end of the Aeon of the Fishes still barely beyond Bronze Age's just sharpened edges fluted, pre-Christian Mexico preferring obsidian ones hacked, chipped, scraped upon hard flint. Frida, volcano born, turns into conjugal vessel, Quetzal plume conjoined to Serpent skin rebirthing extensions of crash, a returning God, boat and horse delivered from the red beard of the bloated sea confronting yet one more deity requiring blood.

Frida Kahlo. The Broken Column

ENTRY Unexpected - Presumed To Have Fledged, Upon Witness Days, Asynchrony Of Swallow Murmurations In Christmas Season - A Gnoetic Poetic of Eye to Ear and Back Again into Adoration

"The spirit as it awakens is adoration." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

murmur - (A) to make the sound 'mu mu' (old Greek) 

or 'mumu', to murmur with closed lips, to mutter, 

moan... (B) to drink with closed lips, to suck in...

-Liddell and Scott, Greek-Engish Lexicon,1897 ed.

"when the attentions change

...even the stones are split

are rive..." - Charles Olson, from The Kingfishers

So ensues the Murmuration moan, , 

wind mutter the winding matter bebothered 

of Swallows

NOTE: ASYNCHRONY OF SWALLOWS

which is a-synchrony, just to remind =

absence or lack of concurrence in time

In other words, no rhyme scheme

or known reason though presumptions

occur in observation of patterns that

such are the habits of nature to assist

drawing conclusions which are surmises

which are in the end and beginning 

always "unhatched eggs" or, better,

words as eggs

**

(all praise) and what marvelous 

vapor is life restive (as are days)

in thousand undulate congregations 

no need for a falconer after all 

when Chaos a daze of a Sunday 

evening seems to know something 

so falls into 

purple fields 

(O Friend, remember) 

edged by sheer snow peaks where 

sheep surefeet know no fear of 

heights and there do dung and 

play fearless or at least pretending

not to fall in their waking dream 

which is the thing -

concavity curves 

in a dead hatchling's sparkless 

eye reflecting dead eggs' perfect 

forms soft brooded upon as 

one might brood one in hand

pondering which is the better 

off the flown lone one or the 

ongoing knot which can also

denote an egg - unhatched or

not or clotted everyly or other- 

wise - is all surmise who knows 

what is the thing joy's winged

malingerers in sudden annunciate 

thunder a flashy entrance as 

Swallows do so flash as flash 

can and (it 

Awe) may last along awhile 

if 

memory 

serves 

is glad 

one's self 

to have 

hatched 

and fledged 

see what 

glory can 

be made 

and had 

at edges 

(earth's 

clearly domed 

the shape of 

eyes makes 

it so) 

and one knows or someday will 

in lighter or heavier bones scry 

the effort was/is made at all  

as self portraits which may 

or may not be the actual 

who/whom we perceive 

as selves to be we 

(one feather 

at a time 

necessary dreaming 

of

air) being adhered to dirt 

so verily molded by known 

and unknown forces within 

which we make or 

so we think 

choose 

but nevermind but 

no 

let us 

return to mumur to suck in 

sounds through and behind 

lips and be naturally moved

bothered to somehow care 

which with heart we indeed 

do hard swallow. 

 

One bird elder 

once said to me

 

my being newly 

fledged and flung

 

me at her knobby wither-knees 

admiring her mustache and tooth 

told me to observe and note 

one or three do-re-mi's or more 

(to better feathered choirs with) 

so try at least to sing it, IT, 

even if choking on what cannot 

as yet be chewed/swallowed 

IT being our 

being-in 

being-for 

being-with 

or without 

craw or claw 

but IT, bliss?, 

eventually might if not understood 

or withstood or notwithstanding

words thoughts ideas -

(throw in image which 

is not spare aspire or

parenthetical but a must

so is) 

in other 

words 

and perhaps

all birds

perhaps arrive land perch alight 

a lift-off life time of chew and choke 

then with some digestive orientation 

from and of such sing of 'ossible

bone-tones some parsings or 

other some conjugant choralling 

which may/might ascribe flight

night daylight the usual things 

so granted for taking so often 

misspoken or under sung, we 

being always flung trying yet 

to cling to what cannot be 

undone but forever always 

clotted until we indeed do fly 

no more in mind or breeches 

and inevitably come 

(completed?)

to full glottal stop 

presumably fledged 

utterly

Christmas Eve, Village of Focces, Gers, France 2019

Post-Almost Rapture/End of the World (Joplin, Missouri - Misery - much in mind) - Prayer to the Broken Western God Image

A not so benevolent deity sitting in the arch entrance of Canterbury, England. 

Made the fearful day of the wrongly predicted "end of the world" by 

a Christian Fundamentalist madman (May 23, 2011):

Thus thusly under the covers I go in part for fear that perhaps that 

Christian madman is right, for God really too, like us, is mad mad 

mad and bigger than us and even though I protest a mad god and 

a madder world I tremble beneath covers and pray..."Stay the day 

of Thy return, o God, o stay and leave us be...do not return until 

Thou, too, art whole and restored within Thy Triune Threnody.*

 

Should'st Thou return now only a repeat of blood and fury would 

ensue then there is indeed nothing new under the sun even in  

Thee, o broken but Mighty.

 

Again I plead that Thou stay away until one true day when all shall 

indeed be reconciled and there is no more requirement of my blood, 

that of others, to ineffectively cover the emptiness within Thine own 

Self - we are image of each, O God, but Thou hast the greater 

power. What satisfaction would come from slaying me who is as 

subject to forces as Thee which keep us both inwardly parted, 

separated,  longing yet for some turn about, some authentic 

change where wolf may indeed lay down with the lamb, swords 

become plows, and Thou, o God, art indeed become at last a God 

of real Peace."

 

* Threnody - a song, hymn or poem of mourning 

composed or performed as a memorial to a dead 

person. The term originates from the Greek word 

threnoidia, from threnos ( "wailing") + oide ("ode");[

ultimately, from the Proto-Indo-European  root wed- 

("to speak") that is also the precursor of such words 

as "ode", "tragedy", "comedy", "parody", "melody" 

and "rhapsody".

**

The fundamentalist Christian college I attended. Yon John 

Calvin's dark hill...I fled and found other mounts, refuged, 

solitary, poetry became more than an interest...

My first published poem after leaving the Christian college

linked below.I was till choking on apocalypse for breakfast. 

Was really into aleatory poems, constructing them late 70's":

https://newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/2014236912/

1982-05-01/ed-1/seq-14.pdf

Tipping Cosmic Cows, Feeding, or Trying, Upon Transcendentals - "Teacup talk of God"

Photo by Warren Falcon

"Man is an animal who feeds upon transcendentals." - Raissa Maritain

"Break all our teacup talk of God." - Hafez

**

Spiritual bypassing is a manic defense against depression and death, a denial of the realm of "pathos" - suffering in existence - from which the word "pathology" is derived, the path or pattern of suffering in being.

Great Nature runs riot upon and within that which we project to be "transcendence" but, without a doubt, crushing dissolution, decay and ending is Nature's insistent way despite all our reification of wishful "happier" metaphysics - read "escapes" - bypassing inexorable existential givens.

We choose to believe that these spiritually flavored subtleties of Imagination must concretely be true given understandable human desperation in the teeth of facticity, of throwness feet first or head long into the maws of life.

Searching for transcendence long sought and hard fought for in the all too human act of artifice, art, alchemy and religion, in the depth cry toward surcease and significant if but momentary peace of mind and body, I no longer wonder that some are wont to take holy vows who, tipping Cosmic Cows (or piercing murderous bulls), cloak themselves in Blessed Silence, a long breath out-sleeved.

There may be more to me and thee, O Mercurial Verities between How-and-Now Cows, than the undertaker's shovel and the deep blue sky and sea but I am a soul man, partial to soul, to space, to time, to locale, at more than a lover's quarrel with the world and very much at quarrel with spirit and entire "congregations of vapor" (Shakespeare).

This argument is ongoing as it should be, at least for me. What follows here below are extensive quotes from thoughtful, clear-headed and compassionate writers who rediscover and sing/argue in the face of the bypassers (as are we all, truthfully, us "hopefully transcending ones") of and for the nobility inherent in suffering Creation and Her creatures, including humanity, as part of living and dying into and out of conscious existence:

Alan Watt's: "Man has to discover that everything which he beholds in nature - the clammy foreign-feeling world of the ocean's depths, the wastes of ice, the reptiles of the swamp, the spiders and scorpions, the deserts of lifeless planets - has its counterpart within himself. He is not, then, at one with himself until he realizes that this "under side" of nature and the feelings of horror which it gives him are also "I". - The Wisdom of Insecurity, Chapter 7: "The Transformation of Life", p.111.

Charles Ponce, Jungian/archetypal astrologer and psychoanalyst, brilliantly writes, arights and reorients us very necessarily toward the urgencies and immediacy of Existence, of Nature in Her appeal, in Her drive for attestation as She is. I quote extensively here for it is a much needed compensation to the overly-inflated and hysterical spiritual bypass which is most certainly the manic "happy" newish religions and and bipolar (manic-depressive) culture of contemporary America):

"...we rebel essentially against the autonomy of Nature, the natural breakdown of Nature, the need of Nature to relax into itself, even to collapse into itself in the way that trees retreat into themselves with the advent of Winter...We turn away from our bodies in illness and death not because we have resolved the issue of the wound, but because it is far easier to think of an afterlife, far less fearful and painful to surround ourselves with the good feeling that we may not only escape this life in one psychic piece, but that we will no longer have to concern ourselves with our physical humanity...This approach to death robs us of our tie to Nature, strips us of our humanity in favor of an exquisite angelology of the ego. It allows us to slip past the experience of the mystery: that the body is indeed a great temple which moves slowly towards a breakdown and dissolution. The alchemists knew this: that the soul cannot fly, cannot be released from the vessel until the body is broken down, dissolved, and even putrified. When you read the alchemists you will discover that this breakdown and dissolution is the beginning of the Great Work, and that without experiencing and seeing, watching and attending to this momentous operation--keeping the fire of heart and attention at the proper degree--nothing happens. The soul does not fly, the subtle body is not created, nor is the imagination which is the soul's experience of itself open to eternity. It is this focus on the body and the wound in both life and death that leads to the sacred marriage of the alchemists. Paracelsus stressed, "The eternal is a sign of the dissolution of Nature, and not the beginning of created things, and the end in all things which no nature is without...A true medicine and counseling should therefore be one that addresses the immediate, the body of things and the body, for if we really wish to enter into the eternal, see the universe in a grain of sand, we must in our imagination understand..the soul's expression of itself through body, and that woundedness, disease, and the putrefactio of our humanity are for us in the West ordained as the focus of a yoga that sees in these sufferings the gods we have rejected." -- Charles Ponce, from "Paracelsus and the Wound", Working the Soul, Reflections on Jungian Psychology, pgs. 25-26.

Ernest Becker: Sensitive souls have reacted with shock to the elemental drama of life on this planet...this bone-crushing, bone-drinking drama in all its elementality and necessity. Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at the end of each person's life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs, and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening. To paraphrase Elias Canetti, each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good. -- Ernest Becker, Escape From Evil, pg.2

Guillermo Arriaga (transcribed from an interview at PEN Writers Conference 2007): "...So I said, "I am going to be a boxer...so I began training hard and hard and suddenly I have a pain in my chest so I say, "It's nothing, a torn muscle," and so I began again and again, training, training, training, and I went to a doctor and say, "Yeah, you have a torn muscle." Wrong. I have an infection in my heart so I went to a cardiologist and he said, "I have good news and bad news...the good news is that you are not a hypochondriac. The bad news is that your heart is completely swollen and that you can have a heart attack maybe today, maybe tomorrow, I don't know. So you have to go to bed NOW." And so I say, "Fuck!" And so I watch my hands. I say, "My hands may be the hands of a corpse tomorrow.They will not move anymore tomorrow." So I make a commitment to caress the skins I have to caress, to beat with my hands those I have to beat, and to build something that will survive my hands," and that's when I began to write furiously without stopping and I have my studio full of skulls, not real ones but of wood, stone...and every time I get tired I say, "Arriaga, you are gonna die. You have to do something with your hands."

So until now I have caressed the skins that I have to caress, I haven't beaten people that I like but I don't want to be violent anymore, and I have been writing since then. Thus, a personal fight against death...so I have two thoughts about pain--the first, the worst thing you can do with pain is not using it. You cannot waste pain. Another one is that pain is inevitable but suffering is a decision so I use pain for writing and every time I have pain I try to keep it and use it in a certain way...

I personally believe that Death doesn't present once, it presents daily and I always think that Death has a giant tongue that licks you. For example, this [rubs his thinning hair] is death licking my hair and says, "You thought you were okay? Well, there goes your new look." And, uh, cellulite in women and tits going down, it's like Death licking and, you know, we men (makes a gesture of an erect penis deflating), is like wop! wop! wop!...and when you lose someone you love, a woman, you are carrying the corpse of someone you love inside you...

They say that dust is skin flakes and I believe that every time

we wipe the dust we wipe the corpse of who we were at that time..."

-- Guillermo Arriaga, acclaimed Mexican writer, in conversation with Paul Auster at 2007 PEN Writer's Conference, has written screenplays, Babel, Amores Perros, The Three Burials of Melchiades Estrada, 21 Grams, and more.

Alexis Zorba: Why do the young die? Why does anybody die?

Basil: I don't know.

Alexis Zorba: What's the use of all your damn books if they can't answer that?

Basil: They tell me about the agony of men who can't answer questions like yours.

Alexis Zorba: I spit on this agony!

-- from the film, Zorba the Greek, based upon the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis of the same title

**

Of the Shadow of Divinity -

Tired of Speaking Sweetly

Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,

Break all our teacup talk of God.

If you had the courage and

Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,

He would just drag you around the room

By your hair,

Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world

That bring you no joy.

Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly

And wants to rip to shreds

All your erroneous notions of truth

That make you fight within yourself, dear one,

And with others,

Causing the world to weep

On too many fine days.

God wants to manhandle us,

Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself

And practice His dropkick.

The Beloved sometimes wants

To do us a great favor:

Hold us upside down

And shake all the nonsense out.

But when we hear He is in such a "playful drunken mood"

Most everyone I know

Quickly packs their bags and hightails it

Out of town.

- The Gift – versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky

**

easy sleep

easy rest

easier to be an animal

than not - Jerome Rothenberg

**

All the time I pray to Buddha I keep on killing mosquitoes. - Issa Kobayashi

**

Outside of this Heart there is no Buddha

This Heart is the Buddha.

Outside of this heart there is no Demon

This heart is the Demon.

- Huey Nin, the 6th Patriarch in the present era of

Dao lineage is credited with this quote. This quote was later expanded upon by other Buddhas in the lineage of Dao to include the bottom two lines.