12 – 2 – 20
It’s funny how these words will/can potentially live on longer than the thoughts of their thinker creator, when often what gets written is far from profound or the thinkings that feel so to me. In the car and the shower I slip close to divine in the loose formings and coilings taking place in my mind. Here, I get constricted in the execution, the ideas never quite meet my perfect.
I intend too much without realizing, brings into question intention.
12 – 3 – 20
For all given garnish, I think I’m just lazy.
I watch children every day grow into shadows of their potential, and I do nothing to motivate the change. If they want to become zombies, and nobody else notices or cares to intervene, why should I offer up my impermanent assistance I disbelieve?
I’d grow them to meet standards to which I do not hold myself, because they pay me. I elect dumb freedom instead of intelligent authority, and cannot tell if we are better off because. I just know I’m not ready to lean into power, the price still seems too high, though the times certainly encourage my leap to lean. I look out at the young and see mainly waste and doom. An improved tyranny seems all but inevitable. We do not care for it otherwise. Freedom without idiocy requires tremendous personal effort anathema to our times, so much easier to slip into ignorance.
12 – 4- 20
Today driving into work I thought on the dangers of fiction, the quiet and joyous manipulation done by the author to the audience to impose whatever vision of reality they seek to impress. Songs, music, narrative, history – we stop thinking from the self and instead think in the modes and methods of these creators, we come to see life through the screen and the page and the eyes of others who create or perhaps regurgitate with their own chemistry . The church was right to fear all tellings outside the good book, but the old ways creep in either way.
This Sun Day I soak in the day with intention.
This Moon Day I worship the night without reserve.
This Dyeus Day I dance for fertile rains and new life.
On Woden’s Day I praise the protection of my fathers,
For on Thor’s Day I scream in the storm
With the love I gained on Freya’s Day of sight
We all swing at the party on Saturn’s Day.
Our language reveals our hidden elephant-minded truth.
We are guided by a morality we don’t even know.
Every day we guide ourselves on a little bit farther.
–
I think, to carry on yesterday’s thought, that it’s too much education required to those too adamantly unwilling to learn that makes me not care to enlighten kids/the ignorant. Let them be, out of control, if that’s how their existence determines it best to exist. I watch a child eat candy every morning. He throws away his packed lunches every day, eats buckets of sugar, and rarely if ever pays attention in his online class. His face must be near held to his task, finished with the utmost begrudgement. His parents resign themselves to his fate, in fact equipping him to the task of fulfillment. To force my knowledge upon him so he redirects his ways seems authoritarian, unkind to how I deem good practice at life. I’ll always offer up my answers to those who might ask, but feel deep discomfort at force. Gentle guide, good example, but the freedom to live as a cunt. Life will no doubt balance itself to match. It starts with children never forced to change by their sacred guardians and then only at the motivation of the self. Where do we expect the instillment of individual responsibility in any place but home? What right do we have to ask that of teachers, of outsiders in our lives at a glance? There is no Society, there are tribes intermingled together, in this ethicless American Best.
Our attention determines our values, who we see is who we come to emulate. Our children become us for better or worse, and the standards we hold for ourselves. How can I certainly say your manners are worse or better than mine?
I can only gauge life by the sensations inside, by the sufferings or pleasures found from my actions. I feel good in moments of civic partnership when people electively view me as a guide. It is my own responsibility to equip myself to reach such position no matter the obstacles between me and my charge.
12/7/20 Chomolunga Sagarmatha Everest
Tenzing Norgay believed Miyolangsangma led him to great Everest’s peak. The Goddess of Inexhaustible Giving protects the mountain, tireless in her denial as gift and her admission as curse.
Bob Dylan still creates history spun for me, just like back then for daddy. Maybe for his daddy too, never got a chance to ask. Probably not, probably not, that was never their bop, just the old country western.
We keep singing songs – dirges, elegies. Good thing we turn back to Homer, we simp sons. Though, we’ve always been suckers for average.
Next week I turn twenty-seven, I begin to hear heaven drum, drum in the deep.
How much easier to imagine pulling the future out of others instead of creating that unknown certainty for ourselves for our children. No, let’s leave it on the kiddies to figure out some new tricksies.
“I” without performance, why? I’m already on stage, already speaking lines to ghost crowds. Loyalty not to thee, but to the stars above — thank God, you, that they shine in your eyes.
They would have me play the martyr for a starring role, applaud when I reach my climax.
Stone me, stone me, stone me home.
12 – 11 – 20
“And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A Scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridor shells.”
So much of poetry’s magic is in the perception of these evocative turns of phrase that cannot be gripped nor handled by sense. Where else but a poem would we read of the “calyx” – yet when the great Kevin Prufer deigned to read my bad writing in class he took me to task for biting from an Antonovka. Be specific, in poetry, but not too much so lest you sound like a twat.
To who?
Poetry is by for and of twats, a forgotten artform relegated to the sappy soft and meaningless folk of the Earth who feel that deep insistence they be heard because by go I Have something to say about this great something I see and I can say it so very well, so spectacularly sulking and spitting the essence of Sam or someone or something. Don’t sound like a twat to the twats, but if you do make it stick, stuck in shit.
What if — oh let’s not begin with what if — we seek understanding and solace in poetic rejection?
How can these be the masters who guard at the gate, dictators of worth and the not? In these, the mornings of freedom.
I find myself tripping over the common truths we hear on repeat. Freedom comes at a price, currently looking like it’ll be a half million. Piss. What was Antietam’s bloodshed, the Irish Death, the Holodomor? Blips in human self-expression, attempts at an alternative life revealed short. The safety of a tyranny or the danger of choice? A known, no matter, is preferred to the infinite (k)not.
12 – 15 – 20
Today is my 27th birthday, and Shoshauna suggested I write a year in review, so perhaps I just might. But first – a thought:
These technology doomsayers pontificating on the coming intelligence sound like critiques of the narrative taking place in the shadows of the cave wall, with no regard to the wider game. So we are being manipulated by Facebook? What’s new? Humans are creatures of manipulation, always victim or perpetrator (usually both). Advances in ability creates nothing new, only realizes deeper potential for what’s always lurked within our kind. It is our individual responsibility to realize our condition and match up, to analyze and understand our own mechanics to at least force the manipulation to become more complex to match the task. We’re so busy acting as crying little baby victims to understand the condition leading to our being so victimized.
We’ve become – no, we have always been – tools used by superorganic forces thinking ourselves independent. “Consciousness is a living solution to the living problem.”
Luddites.
These fears really are so old hat, so dull.
12 – 16 – 20
I’ve sometimes wondered why I write these, and thinking on it during the car ride into work, a beautiful and excellent time for contemplation, I realized that they are in truth Letters to my Daughters and Sons.
Perhaps it seems presumptuous to assume that I am interesting enough to warrant the future’s attention, in which case these words will be unneeded or at least unheeded and go without fulfilling the reason for their creation. Well, one reason at least, for even in the very act of their creation they have satisfied within me a sense of fulfillment and purpose that otherwise goes unscratched despite itching. Even if only selfishly, and thus centrally, they are a gift.
I write because my father died before I could really get to know him, to understand him as an individual and a human crafted to meet their condition, to understand and discover why he lived how he lived and what and why he thought what he did. Now I can only guess and infer. That’s not to say life would unfold otherwise had he lived, but that’s fantastical speculation at an impossible reality. There is only what is and what will be, and the thinkings on what one day could be. What we could make be, at that, at this – at life.
Writing allows me, at the very least, to see and understand my thoughts, my being and my voice, outside of my head and silent without the distraction of accent, pitch, timbre that distract, closer to the message without messenger. We are still, however, separate individuals and so still require the messenger to deliver, and while I myself hear the message coming so clearly from the universal authority, I can tell it goes unheard by so many. I spent so many of my earlier years trying, then, to speak the message loudly, but the louder I spoke the more I went unheard by who mattered, so I learned that all the heard were my actions. Who follows the advice of a life they have no wish to emulate? Show them the godhood if you want their belief.
12 – 17 – 20
We have grown big and strong, gluttonous and fat, feeling protected by the muscle and weight, giving excuse to the turgid and plaque.
I recoil at the notion I should only be nice to these kids throughout their moments of abhorrent behavior. We allow them, by this, to become assholes, and by now have just come to accept it as a part of the process that will get corrected down the road.
How cruel. Something we can take care of at eight we allow to fester and grow uncorrected to pollute every event at which they are present to take. I am weak because the systems were weak with me because it was too hard without explanation for those who came before. Reacting to trauma, we strip away the foundation, believing it’s there that we will dig out the rot in the walls from the elements.
We must assume we will go unsupported by the wider social net, we have only our cultivated bond of fellowship in our family and friends. Even these we should not take as certainty.
Assume nothing and work outwardly in faith balanced with reason.
During the Corona Virus, I think about Jesus among the lepers before I leave home.
12 – 20 – 20
I have a wart on my face that’s disgusting.
Veruca Vulgaris. Vulgar, I know.
In secret, I do my best to pick it off.
Thankfully, and dreadfully, it grew into prominence during the corona.
It began in a daydream of that time in before, when life was just a struggle and normal.
One day, in my flailings and attempts at your trying, I noticed something on my lip.
What began as a speck had slowly grown into a mark upon my face at the exit of performance.
A blab blab talker, firstborn of his name, picked at it while pretending at unimportance.
All the time knowing greater, all the time knowing more, all the time pretending Socrates’s ignorance and growing nothing.
A cute girl asked me at work, one day, what’s that on your lip and embarrassed I gave immediately in to the lie:
Oh, it’s nothing, just a scar.
But I knew this untrue and I felt myself lie with the devil that slides round my heart.
So I picked, and I chipped, and it grew.
12 – 22 – 20
Cain -> King
Cain is not Abel.
The king is not able to task.
The judges could not deny The Return of the Kings.
Do we give in to the devil to surprise, no, survive?
Here you go, rich man, I’ll pay for piece of mine.
What happened to David? Who sings for us forever now.
Kendrick Lamar for President, Beyoncé Imperator Mars
Why does Sadhguru not give his watch to a dalit?
Or to a Brahmin in the muck and the blood?
Does it seem I have a chip on my shoulder, poor me.
The man may not be bad, but a saint oh he ain’t.
Let Sam by the judge, as his due. Kingmaker, not king.
Who — Not a king, but a Queen.
Not a queen, but a pawn.
It’s all one. Me. You. It.
–
Any peasant can think arrogant, any peasant can understand themselves as galactic, gods of the self, soul, the stars.
Cheesy.
–
I come back again to that same old problem of language. I’ll take the flood any day, it’s the destruction of the tower that I curse. I think daddy destroyed it so we can build it back better. After all, who wants a tall tower without a lift? The journey from the bottom to the top would take too long. Also, the purpose was off.
Here’s where my questions and ponderings take me:
the Babylonians brought together the peoples of their middle kingdom as they grew in reach and power, taking in their domain more disparate peoples by slavery and by opportunity, one and the same so often (always?), and soon the conquest overtook the cohesion. Language ties us to our morality, our understanding of the Earth and our grasp of its nuance.
How can we expect worker cohesion in such conditions? Where do we root instruction without shared foundation? Are we founded in our humanity, or something beyond? We see evolution as a physical process.
What if — there’s always what if.
We, we. I. I. When I say we I mean I, and arrogant, I see myself in you. I am you; you me. Yet still we have our families. What does that mean? How do we understand meaning? What is the process to understand? Did feeling first guide us to reason, did reason guide us into feeling, or are the two the one, and the same?
Is this nothing but the nonsense of a one struggling at the all?
–
Let my words equal the testament of Mary, unworthy.