A Momentary Taste of Being

As through some distorting lens my eye cannot see what is there but only what sits heavy in my chest--dark pluton of ancient choices, thoughts formed in the furnace and through time warped and bent and changed and turned and now looking new--but so so old--the ore of the idol that called Moses down from Sinai to cast the new law to the ground. If only I could open up to devour this excess--like earth consumed Aaron's handiwork. That this core of mine would vanish, resolve, change itself-- the crooked lines made straight and my darkness light.

He spreads  his hands to any who will take him  and his face is  wreathed in smiles at the slightest provocation. Slight paraphase of a description by Louise (Taft's mother)of WHT as a baby-- quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit)

Not the days, not the nights, not the ocean, not the waves not the sky, not the clouds in it

You haunt me--you fill my head with snapshots of you I should not see--they boil and seethe within the limitless confused  molten furnace. You say things that cannot be unheard and like obscene petroglyphs they litter the landscape on either side of the molten frenzy that is the core of who I am--its banks and curves unknown and too dangerous to explore on my own-- and there you stand, naked and grinning and poised for the dive into oblivion I am powerless to stop--you haunt me. (4/27/15)

I Good Wace tells us that Constantine to Totnes came and thereby hangs the tale. II What would the world be if not for the Duke of Tintagel's wife?

Sorry bud but what you got is a dude older than he thought he'd ever live to be who doesn't wear a raincoat because in Florida's tropical downpour raincoat paper bag about the same thing, and if he did would never consider cleaning it because hell didn't the rainwater just do that who walks into a bookstore sees your name on the cover and plunks down an obscene amount of cash to be able to open the book with his morning coffee. Sorry man, better luck next time. My writing   Poetry   Drafts

If simplicity of living is a valid principle, there is one important precaution and condition of its application. I can explain it best by something which Mahatma Gandhi said to me. We were talking about simple living, and I said that it was easy for me to give up most things but that I had a greedy mind and wanted to keep my many books. He said, 'Then don't give them up. As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, you should keep it. If you were to give it up in a mood of self-sacrifice or out of a stern sense of duty, you would continue to want it back, and that unsatisfied want would make trouble for you. Only give up a thing when you want some other condition so much that the thing no longer has any attraction for you, or when it seems to interfere with that which is more greatly desired. Richard Gregg, 1936

I saw a five star Met Opera cast and staging presenting what seemed to be little more than a two star opera. Some of the music was wonderful, but most of the characters were nitwits, hotheads, or amoral monsters.

Reading through "Agamemnon," which I'm certain I read in college and I'm a little surprised by my reaction. I have a lasting impression of Clytemnestra as the villain of the piece along with her lover Aegisthus. This reading I understand much more clearly Clytemnestra and can even summon up a little bit of sympathy for Aegisthus--at least so far as their crime against Agamemnon. The sacrifice of Iphigenia tore out a mother's heart--destroyed her completely. And what happened to Thyestes (Aegisthus father)--being fed his own children by Atreus (Agamemnon's father), certainly explains some things, even if I am not into the generational vengeance thing.  I used to think them the villains of the piece but this speech by Clytemnestra pretty much sums it up: So now you sentence me to banishment, allot me hatred, rumbling civic curses. Back then you offered him no opposition when he, as casual as at one death among the crowding and luxuriant flocks, sacrificed...

You treat love like a rare earth element infinitely precious, Incredibly valuable, in so many ways powerful, and rare, to be dolloped out in micro- and nanograms, to be used only here and there to coordinate functions and link however temporarily things that are apart. What will it take to convince you that love is like the atmosphere– infinitely precious and in the universe–rare enough. But oh my it’s everywhere–in and on and around all living things It is our home and our life and without it–a barren rock is all there’d be. Just try to hoard the atmosphere, stuff it in a bag, dollop it out in nanograms it goes where it goes and it stays there despite all you can do to drive it out.

If your house is on fire, the most urgent thing to do is to go back and try to put out the fire, not to run after the person you believe to be the arsonist. If you run after the person you suspect has burned your house, your house will burn down while you are chasing him or her. That is not wise. You must go back and put out the fire. So when you are angry, if you continue to interact with or argue with the other person, if you try to punish her, you are acting exactly like someone who runs after the arsonist while everything goes up in flames. Anger Thich Nhat Hanh

" They mounted and set off for the house. Ordering the servant to ride on before with the lantern, Leila brought her horse close in so that they might ride knee-to-knee, solaced by the touch of each other’s bodies. They had not been lovers for very long —barely ten days —though to the youthful Mountolive it seemed a century, an eternity of despair and delight. He had been formally educated in England, educated not to wish to feel. All the other valuable lessons he had already mastered, despite his youth —to confront the problems of the drawing-room and the street with sang-froid; but towards personal emotions he could only oppose the nervous silence of a national sensibility almost anaesthetized into clumsy taciturnity: an education in selected reticences and shames." In Mountolive  by Lawrence Durrell, and describing him (Mountolive)

Suffering is contagious in a way that joy is not--we are ENGULFED by the passion but the transfiguration trundles by ignored.

Jammin' with Basquiat Art decore888888888 sp A C E and Muse-sich decar8888888888 t-I me but po et tree descar888888888 theme eind.

For all the problems I see around me, I prefer no time to my time(really, they were all the same but now you can see both light and dark. No longer do we sit in complete ignorance while others tell us how great we are); no age to my present age(though sometimes in the aches and pains, it sounds nice to be a younger self--the pain of the fire that burns too intensely and forgets more frequently that life is the only real gift far outweighs these signs that I've come far enough to delight in what the world offers);  no place but my place(the spirit of wandering sings loud and the lure of having ever more and more persuades, until I think of the hours and days and weeks and years expended in keeping all fine and catch a glimpse of me as servant to all that owns me, and know that however far I go, I long still for a place of retreat). In short, I can be content if I settle down to be.

I'd like for my biggest problem to be "What shade of blue do I wear today."

Seeing It was like He said Let's put a black box around your head and cut a small ragged circular hole in it right in the center just above the bridge of your nose and cover the hole with a million year old, scratched up gray filter. Then let's light the room with dim red bulbs accented with a silver bright flashing strobe light. And let's fill the room with fog like sublimating dry ice and then send you in to pick up a thousand black pins from the deep pile dark green carpet. If it doesn't seem right just keep at it until it does. And not knowing any better you do. poetry   Drafts   My writing

This evening saw Collateral Beauty with my son. We both liked it, but critics, predictably hated it--a lot.  They found it predictable and manipulative and cynical.  Probably all true--but it is of a type that is designed for all of that--a tearjerker.  As such, it has a formula--and the execution of this formula was remarkably well done.  Except for one bit of overexplaining toward the end, it was a predictably simple story with an interesting twist which I did not see coming. In case you're wondering this is all about making sure that I've posted something today, to try to get back into the regular rhythm of it.

And retreating here to set up a sort of accountability for my writing.  I hope to take back up with the same mix of the literary and spirituality, with perhaps the latter in greater abundance than hitherto.

In his third book length publication Jonah Lehrer takes on the world of creativity, innovation, and to some extent imagination--though that is hardly touched upon at all.  Leaving the secure ground of neuroscience (particularly in the second half og the book) Lehrer strays into the fields of social psychology and sociology with somewhat mixed results. Perhaps that is only for me.  I tend to become quite skeptical when research involves more than empirically verifiable fact and strays off into the territory of group interaction.  You can say that something worked, but it seems difficult to pinpoint why that something worked in the particular instance.  Taking the well-known example of Pixar, Lehrer  (summarizing the work of others, implies that success was largely the result of architecture forcing hallway meetings and interchange.  This, in turn, blossomed into some of the wonderful films we see from the studio.  If such chance meetings and random co...