Thursday, February 26, 2004

People put up filters to handle what makes it into their life. They use things like books, political parties, family relations, income.... just tons of things to filter out the raw world. Most of the time they also filter out knowledge of those filters. If you talk to a Super-Christian they will say that all they need to know is in the Bible, usually the King James Version and it will vary between the Old and New Testament, depending on whether they want to be generous and accepting or narrow minded and judgmental. Right recently there has been a flurry of excitement generated by the entertainment/news media about this film "The Passion". The idea is to sell books and tickets and religion to those who already have them.

The filter in this film is kinda interesting. There are several accounts of the last days of Joshua, aka Jesus, so Mel Gibson (son of a Nazi loving anti-Semitic father) chooses one which matches his own belief system. Then, since he is most experienced in bloody, violent films he accents the blood and violence. This event, the film opening, was stirred up and served to born-again evangelical Christians and will bring in millions and millions of dollars to those responsible. It will also stir up anti-Jewish hatred and violence against Jews. You know this will happen because whenever you have this Passion for the story of the torture and death of the Son of God by the Romans and Jews, Jews suffer. Romans aren't around to suffer, so they get a pass.

The Passover Plot was a story of how the group of radical Jews planned to fulfill the messiah prophecy and kick off the New Millenium of heaven on earth. Except that there were several prophecies dealing with that event, not just one. There are several accounts of the crucifixion of Joshua, aka Jesus, and several accounts of his death-and-resurrection, many of which predate the Jews. Isis and Horus, Persephone, even some oriental cultures have a winter-turns-to-spring myth. You filter ideas thru your preconceptions and spit out a "truth" which matches your expectations. This works for religion and politics. I personally do not trust national-level politicians and find lots of evidence to support my distrust.

People say you have to choose which sources to add to your knowledge base, that no one can understand all the variations. I don't know anyone right now who actually has tried. Joe Campbell did a good job and I think he showed that you can, in fact, take time to lower your filters and try to absorb many variations of a bit of knowledge. You can compare sources, compare language, and compare core concepts. So it was that Joe Campbell became rather anti-Yahweh. That is to say he found little to like in the worship of that deity, insofar as the worshippers manifested their beliefs outside the temple/church.

Recently I was showing my wife the passage in the Book of Luke wherein Jesus tells his followers that they have to hate their mother, their father, their siblings and all family members in order to love him and follow him. There is a certain kind of logic to that if you dismiss, as many have done, the meaning of the word "hate" in this passage. He didn't mean hate because Jesus is all about love, ergo, he couldn't have meant hate the way we mean hate. He meant relative hate. She did not remember that passage, which is curious because she grew up in a Catholic school environment and must have been made to read the Bible and encouraged to study the King James Version. She filtered it out or it was filtered out for her in order to not confuse, perhaps.

Hitler practiced relative hate. He tried to export the killers of Christ to the US, but we turned them down. So they went to Hell, in the form of the death camps. The knowledge of this was filtered out of the American history in much the same way knowledge of Henry Ford's fondness for the Nazi party and Adolph in particular. The Ford motorcar transformed America into a sprawling, asphalted, air-polluted factory pumping out workers for the good of the people. People copulated in the back seat and then drove home to sleep. They probably prayed for forgiveness before turning in. They prayed to la ong-dead Jew who probably wouldn't have cared less what non-Jews did in their spare time. Their time was numbered anyway because the prophecies indicated that the Army of Light would overthrow the Army of Darkness and non-Jews were by definition not in the Army of Light. Most Christians filter out that prophecy, modifying it into a vague promise of salvation for true believers.

The whole thing starts out with a pile of scrolls written in a number of ancient languages and buried or tucked away in various hidey holes in the Mideast and nearby countries. King James wanted all references to women in power filtered out. He wanted the story to indicate that a pyramid scheme of power was divinely sanctioned. He wanted it to sound European, so Joshua was transformed into Jesus, Mariam became Mary and so forth. Now we have older scrolls around and they tell pretty much the same stories in much the same language, so they must all be true, right? The seven day thing could be symbolic, since our modern religion of science came up with patterns of radioactive decay and the world seems much older than that. The transformation of animals into their modern versions could be part of that set of details that were filtered out of the Genesis stories. The story of the Fall was selected to correctly portray the male-female relationship thing, ie man on top, woman underneath cranking out babies.

Those scrolls which contained the same stories but from a non-Jewish stance were filtered out. The Flood, the Creation, the Fall from Grace.... all filtered and modified and whitened. So Isis becomes Mary, Horus become Jesus, the Goddess becomes invisible. Pretty slick all in all. It does, however, still leave behind a Hell of a lot of contradictions. Yahweh said that Adam and Eve would die, die, die. They didn't, just like the serpent told them. But the serpent is called a liar. Okay, they did get the knowledge of good and evil, but it didn't stop their kids from killing one another and that may just indicate that Mom and Dad were too busy begetting to talk much about the old homestead they left behind and what they learned there. They filtered that out. If ignorance of the Law is no excuse, then why do you need the Law at all? Why not just get rid of the ignorant and leave the obedient? Why not just build thousands of prisons, put all the bad people in them and then kill them all? That's exactly what Hitler did. That's the kind of thinking that we have now today in America. We filtered out the results of that thinking and left the build-up to that conclusion. Cure drug use by destroying the drug users. Hate the sin and the sinner.

Oddly enough, there is a filter between the lawgivers and the law followers. For instance for a long time Congress exempted themselves from the laws they passed in order to avoid a breach in the separation of powers as defined in the Constitution, that Bible of American Democracy. You couldn't have the Executive Branch arresting the Legislative Branch. It just wouldn't do. So when businesses were required to stop hiring based on skin color, the Congress could go on right ahead. When the priests in the Catholic church said homosexuality was an abomination unto the Lord, they went right on buggering little boys in their care. When the Decalog said Thou shall not kill, Yahweh blasted entire nations filled with women, babies, dogs, cats, mice, etc. The filter between the lawgivers and the law followers is more of a wall.

There's another Joshua in the Bible and every good Christian and many others know the story of the walls falling down. Most have filtered out the instructions given Joshua before the war. He was told to invade these ill-favored cities, kill all the men, rape all the women, sell the kids into slavery, burn the city and move on to the next city. Good followers of Yahweh have been following this advice for thousands of years. There was a story in the news some years ago about this father being chased down the highway by the police because he had his son in the front seat with a big knife and he was going to cut that kids head off because Yahweh told him to. I find that story interesting because Abraham did the same thing, minus the car, and he is frequently brought up as a fine example of what followers of Yahweh should be doing. There are lots of stories of people tying up their evil children, torturing them, killing them, eating them..... all because Yahweh said to. Most modern Christians have issues with that and claim that Yahweh is all about love and couldn't have told them to do those things. Curiously, they continue to read the Old Testament and have no problem with all that death, rape and pillage going on in the name and by the instructions of that deity. Times have changed, they say.

Times have changed, says our President. Those treaties we signed to make proliferation of atomic, chemical and biological weapons illegal are old and unrealistic. Toss em out and make more weapons, even sell those weapons to others to make sure everybody has a shot at using them. Firebomb civilians, rape their women, sell their children to the highest bidder and call it commerce, not slavery. Commerce is good, slavery is for blacks and our Secretary of State is a black man. Well, he used to be. Now he's a shareholder and that makes him damn white. If a black man says firebomb the children, it must be okay, because after all, blacks love their children. Just look at Step'n Fetchett smiling down on Shirley Temple. Man that boy can dance. Blacks is kindly folk, septn' in de ghetto where they is likely to carry a razor and cut you bad. Fact is, most ghettos in America are no more dangerous than any place else in America, like, say, a high school cafeteria.

We filter out extra meanings to our words in order to allow them to make sense to us. So American democracy is a system where the extremely wealthy men are given license to live off the not-so-wealthy everybody else, and votes are sometimes counted in local elections. The big choices are filtered away from the masses so they can keep cranking out them consumers. Christian Americans are encouraged to love the sinner while hating the sin and manifesting that hate-love by tying the sinner to a fence in the middle of winter, or dragging the body behind a pick-up truck. You pray for the soul later, knowing full well that they prayer will help you, but there is not any help for the sinner: they are buring in Hell. Here's a side note: if homosexual behavior is so common in the other animals, do they all burn in Hell too? Just wondering. I guess because the Yahwehists don't believe any other animal created by the deity were given souls and choices they don't get to go to Hell. Just us people who were given the power of choice and made the wrong choice. We get filtered out.

Wednesday, February 25, 2004

America is a funny nation for a lot of funny reasons. They all add up to a kind of crazy madness though. I just got home from the big grocery store. I said "big" because yesterday my wife was talking about all the little grocery stores there used to be in her old neighborhood. Now there's a great ugly, white-marbled set of colossal tombstones some 30 stories high sitting in the middle of what was supposed to be the beginning of a huge underground transport system...mostly cars. Instead, the four lanes become two 180 degree turns, dumping the driver out onto the narrow streets of downtown. So for millions and millions of dollars and the wholesale destruction of many neighborhoods with homes and businesses the city traded a potential art district or urban rebirth and got a dead end highway. Brilliant. Nobody mobbed the state house when that happened. Thousands didn't take to the street demanding their money back. They just moved away, insuring the need for the huge boondoggle that didn't work from the get-go. They had to drive their cars into downtown to work.

Further north the highway becomes a true highway, 6 lanes wide with a wide median that is just perfect for a rapid transit line which would decrease traffic jams and decrease pollution. I've been here for about 30 years and no one has really talked about the concept. This 6 lane artery zigs and zags as it approaches the river in order to take as much of certain people's property as possible and to approach the river finally at a 90 degree angle as if that angle would help people cross somehow. Actually, at the last zag the road also climbs a slight incline to make absolutely sure nobody can see around the corner once leaving the bridge. That way you can be sure of getting the maximum traffic jam as everybody slows down In case all the cars are stopped past the hill. Which, by the way, said hill was created to bring the highway over a small side road. As opposed to, say, treating that side road like the other side roads and having it cross the highway on an overpass. That would be less expensive.

Every morning for 8 years I drove that road, stopping at exit 9 for the traditional "Tail of the Dragon" traffic jam. 45 minutes later I'd be across the river, two miles away. Yup, that was fun. Much better than parking my butt at, say, exit 15 and catching a ride on the bullet train from Glens Falls to NYC. So I stopped driving that road. I stopped driving anywhere for money. It made me crazy. Americans make me crazy.

They have these signs on the side of the road, with big black numbers on them. Numbers like "65 MPH". Okay, that's numbers AND letters, but the thing is, nobody apparently reads and understands what that sign means. It means that you have to look at that instrument on your dash and try to match the numbers on the sign with the numbers that red needle is pointing to on your dash. Otherwise you lose and get fined or sent to jail. It's kind of a game. But nobody plays that game, everybody drives many, many miles per hour over the limit.... and why? They don't get anywhere faster because at exit 9 everybody stops, every morning. But above exit 9 they are driving like they were at a Nascar rally and then they stop. Sometimes they slow waaaaaay down to watch someone change a tire.

I was taught in civics class that American government was designed so that we were rules by LAWS instead of EDICTS and that made us special. I believed it. I believed it until I saw four cops throw a priest down to the sidewalk and kick and pound on this old man until he stopped screaming, lay there and took it and then they drove off laughing. Now, I'm a pagan so that priest wasn't special in a holy sense, outside of the fact that all life is holy. I just thought it was a crime that those cops could do that to him and several others, just for being on the sidewalk, apparently. I think it's a shame that pretty much nobody drives the speed limit. I think it's a shame that billions of dollars flow into state government from legalized gambling, something which if the Mafia did, they would be in that prison near my house. I find it hard to see my country as one which is ruled by LAW, not edict. The Law, it appears, it "Everybody, you're on your own!" Except when they arrest you, or kick you, or fire 40 some-odd bullets into your body when you reach for your driver's license.

I know two women who have cops for spouses. Both have told me how great it is never to have to worry about tickets for speeding or parking illegally. They bake cookies or flash their cop-wife ID. The fix is in. Everybody does it, everybody knows it and yet nobody seems to understand the collective influence of these mindsets. Law is not-Law. Disorder is the order of the day. Cheat when you can, hurt if you get the chance. Nobody will describe themselves as evil, but many will admit to occasionally cheating. If a nation is ruled by people who sometimes cheat, sometimes toss out the rules, sometimes say it's a good idea to fire bomb a city far away.... that nation is not so much a nation as an encampment. Like maybe the Mongols had when they did the same thing. An occupation, like our pals overseas are enjoying. A piece of real estate infested by losers who think they are clever, and the rest of the world is on to them.

We Americans love to break the rules, we idolize actors who portray cheats and murderers, we defend pedophile priests and maniac Presidents. We adore women who screw around on their husbands, if they do it for diamonds. It's a funny country and it makes me crazy. My faith says "First, do no harm." and "we are all family". I guess somewhere down the pike we decided that the Jimmy Stewart type was silly and weak and the Rambo type was exciting. Part of the Big Circle, I guess, but it makes me crazy. I'd still like to live in a country ruled by Law, and wouldn't it swell to live in a Democracy? Yeah, that'd be great.

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Last night I went to a site with all these pictures of an event that I had wanted to be in, but had to pass on. Hundreds of pictures of people dressed up and happy, doing great fun things en masse. I used to do that. I breathed a lot of people dust. And I got to look like a Viking, a norseman, have people step aside for me, for gosh sake! Truly amazing because so many of the people were old friends suddenly in front of me changed, fat and white haired and some of them still exactly as I remembered...Only it wasn't them, it was their child. Their child now 30 years old. An old friend's son being knighted, with tears in his eye, was an amazing sight. See, I got knighted once. A long time ago I looked up at a man with a crown and a sword and, with tears in my eye, I felt the touch of that sword. I loved being a knight. A Norse knight.

My son never was much interested in playing that game. My daughter did a bit, liked the costumes, but the fighters around here weren't shield-biters and she sorta is, so.... I was a shield-biter of sorts. That's a guy who looks at a line of armored, weaponed opponents and picks the center of power and bolts right thru it, busting through the line, killing as many as possible....That is, striking a "killing blow" preferably to the metal helm. Anyway, I was like that, I liked taking out the big guys, the ones with circlet or a white belt...Something that meant they knew how to fight, because, in part, the idea is to fight and live and learn and study and become better. It sometimes hurt for days, but each time I saw something and grew with it. Later, at the ceremonies, we all grew close and shared something about honor and skill. Sometimes it was someone getting a white belt and chain, or a white baldric.

There was this guy. He was the best fighter I ever saw, and one night when we were all watching this drunken, red-nosed, cheat step up and claim the crown.... no one could stop him but the ones who failed to stop him, so there he was. I had issues with the man personally, but as a fighter.... he was drunk. That means on pain-killing drugs, alcohol, and endorphins from each time he got hit so by then he was numb to everything. Except this young man with a serious demeanor and a white belt in his hand came up, made a short speech, threw his white belt to the ground and spat at the man in the throne. I was stunned. We all worked so damn hard to get one of those, and there was my brother fighter throwing his away.

The next meet we had I made a speech to the crowd. I announced that since the white belt meant fealty to the crown...( and therefore often the man in the crown)... and the Norse never swore fealty to a crown taken by combat, I must turn my white belt into a white baldric and swear fealty to no man. No crown. I was affected by that speech, although no doubt it was quickly forgotten by all there. It was an anticlimax after Bobby tossed his.

But I was speaking of my own honor. I needed to do this change. I "mastered myself" in the same kind of mind that Miamoto Musashi had at age 30. He decided to study himself, his own style, and therefore be beholden to no man. I suddenly questioned what I was doing there, leaping into shield walls and smashing folks in the body, in the head.....I saw that what Bobby had been about in smacking folks in the helm with his rattan sword, was honor. Real fuckin' honor. So, when I applied that question to myself I saw a way of doing the same thing without throwing myself out of the "belted circle" A master-at-arms is still a belted fighter and could do many things to improve the sport. Bobby was more like Musashi, but Musashi said to "study yourself, all things with no master". So if you master yourself, and all things with no master, you must also lose yourself, and that is covered in the fifth book by Musashi, the Book of the Void. When I knelt at the feet of a "king" and swore fealty I was not in the void. I was at some guy's feet.

That moment came and went and is gone. Those moments, really. Like some victim of a poorly plotted sci-fi-fantasy book, I have gone astray. I am in a world where honor is not well explained or followed. My son will never step to the middle and in the view of hundreds of people, accept a white baldric from my hands. My daughter will never fight by my side in a 5-to-2 close combat melee, using a weapon I trained her to use. Nope, not for me the sturdy, well-favored march thru the gala display of banners and bright faces to drop to one knee before a flag, a crown and glory. I have 14 chickens who run when I walk into the yard. They run to me because I dispense treasures... like tomatoes or bread chunks. It's not the same.

It's not bad, though, and I am allergic to dust. But it would have been grand to be a spectator, although I know I would have run into the middle and smashed my way into the best place in the house, the void, where you lose yourself and exist strictly as a symbol, a tarot card person. I was the knight of wands. After my second divorce I became the king of cups.

I hope my kids never have to divorce someone because if anything ever tears something out of you, it is a divorce. I've been thru the death of a dearest friend, the collapse of two love affairs and the near-death experience of brain trauma. All of those things unhinged me better than any peyote enema ever did. I lost my mind way too many times to find it now, and I say "Good Riddance!". It just made things worse and gave me a headache.

I'm not sure why self-medication should be illegal. That means if you do something to yourself with no one else around, and it makes you feel better, you are an enemy of the state and you will be punished. If I could grow pot or poppies or chat and it got me thru the day, why should any one go to the expense of making me live in a cell, in a prison, for a long time with unlimited access to the same drugs that got me into prison in the first place? It makes no sense. None of this makes sense. If everyone knows that killing babies is bad, why do they then turn around and decide to kill babies. Because then, with all those angry uncles and fathers and brothers and so on and so on....we'll be safer and better off. I'm sorry, but when I think of my son waking up and struggling thru rehab and learning to understand... and what he will come to understand is that his fellow Americans have been invading other countries and killing babies so we can drive big fat cars that look like military equipment. Which it becomes.

So, I feel that I was much better connected to reality when I wore Viking clothes and hit people on the helm with padded sticks. ON the other hand, I got these chickens. And they part for me when I walk, although the cat doesn't. But I get a lot of respect from the cats. I have a lap, and they don't. The chickens know I won't hurt them, how could I? I named them. Funny, but I think that Musashi retired to a farm after he had studied himself enough. I think all belted fighters should take up gardening and gentlemen farming. Even if they're ladies they can garden and farm as well as fight. IN that, I am happy. My daughter admires plants. So even if she never tries to smack a young great-grand-Bobby on the helm with a stick, she will appreciate the herb garden I'm working on.

Monday, February 23, 2004

Someone gave me a bag of black walnuts once. I thought about using the hulls to make leather tanning stuff, since someone also gave me two deer skins, fresh off the corpse. As it turned out, the hulls tanned my hands just fine, so much so that I decided not to mess with it. Likewise, the deer skins ended up not being cleaned by my ash/water solution as eaten up by same. So I was left with the nuts themselves.

I dug a hole about 3' square and a foot down. Then I put compost, goat shit and stuff like that down. I poured the nuts out on the dark earth and covered them with more of the same. Then I put a blanket of chicken wire over the bed and covered that with local surface dirt. Years later I had this tight grove of some dozen tall, straight black walnut trees. So close, they would go up straight and tall before branching out and make some great wood.

One day I was out back doing something in the garden when I heard a WHOMP sound. I looked around to try to place it and I couldn't quite see anything when I realized that one area I couldn't quite see anything wrong was in fact supposed to have a big old poplar tree, about 75 feet tall and maybe 24" across at the base. Which had snapped, dropping the poplar giant right down on those black walnuts. I was left with two saplings, one pretty much untouched for some reason and one snapped off about five foot up. A couple years later the one tree is soaring up, looking good. The snapped trunk has sprouted side sprouts, creating a brushy, yet distinctly black-walnutish thing. That wood will likely be more interesting and valuable than the one tree that is going so well. That might mean the straight tree will be allowed to grow taller. It might also mean that the strange one will produce something valued by people at least, if not by trees, like a table or sculpture, or some fantastic bit of carving that serves to enchant the eye and hand... of a human. Sometimes it is problematic being liked by those not of your kind.

I carve spruces now. I cut off the top half to create a "sacrifice" offering to both the goddess of winter and the prophet of the Yawehists. The Christmas tree goes away and the brushy shape adapts it's shape to it's circumstances. Since the Hermeticists we have known that "as above, so below; as below, so above." and for a tree it takes the form of worshipping the Earth mother with it's roots, while showing homage to the sky and sun by growing it's branches in an equal form, but skyward. So the branches approach the form of the roots and you get a structure like a curvy "Y". After a few years, when they are big and strong, I will cut them down and sacrifice them to my goddess of art. I have one cedar man out back, about 12' tall, named Andy. I'd like to add some much bigger pieces, maybe 20' tall and more, back behind and supported in part by the large white pine trees near the edge of the property. A whole family of tree figures looking down at the garden, the hen yard and the bonfire site. Like my "giants" I envisioned as a toddler back in Kentucky.

Mom would come to me and tell me that I could stay with grandma or come with momma to the store, and I would say I had to check with my giants. Mom thought I was saying I would be checking my joints and thought my knees hurt or something. Growing pains maybe. But I was, in fact, going back into the bedroom and seeing the ceiling lift up, held by two tall figures. I would ask them about this trip and they would tell me if it were well aspected. If it were, I would go. Years later I found that this sort of visioning and the several near-death experiences I had thanks to my asthma, were typical aspects of the life of the shaman.

I have two kids, by two women. One child, the oldest, is bent, twisted and mostly not responsive. Nice eyes, though, and when he is responsive it's great. To see the connection with me as my son goes flying past, spinning in his own head, is so strange and awesome. My daughter is bright and straight in mind and spirit. Like an ash tree she has become strong. I'm looking forward to watching her grow out there in the world, overcoming problems and always having a home to return to. I sometimes understand that when I see the sun come up in my back yard, my daughter might be tucking herself into bed, just like I did I when I was her age. It was such a brilliant time in my life, and I see her as dazzling.

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

I have a friend who practices karate. She has earned a black belt but still has problems with her style. She gets hurt sometimes and recently she hurt her fingers blocking a blow. Later her sensei and she had a combat wherein her sensei hit her four times in her hurt hand. Now she's thinking about leaving the dojo, maybe finding a male sensei to change the emotional equations. Years ago at one of our quarterly bonfires I spoke with her about her martial art form. Now, in explanation about what a sculptor, caregiver, househusband is doing talking about martial arts...aside from the idea that anyone can talk about anything even without prior knowledge.... for many years I practiced stick fighting. This is an American version of the art and is couched in medieval European forms. Yes, I'm talking about the Society for Creative Anachronism, but not the way it is now, the way it was in the late 60's.

The group in Phoenix was started by two people who were very much into science fiction and happened to see a demo of the SCA at a con. One of them was a karate person and he was excited by the fighting as well as the costumes. The other man, not a fighter, was a writer and was interested in the whole thing, the social aspects, the opportunities: the whole thing. I think he probably saw the group for it's potential better than the fighter, but it's hard to say. The point in this case is that my first instructor was a karate man, and a damn good one. We practiced our moves based on a kind of adaptation of karate form, but with weapons.

Ever the one to notice the fringe elements, I noted two weapons in our collection that they had brought back from the con that we did not use. They were short clubs and I was told they were demi-mauls or long maces. I asked if I could have one to practice with and took it home and modified it. I have always enjoyed reading about physics and science as well as history and art. The maces were too long, too easy to knock aside. I shortened the mace and attached a strap above the hand. I had thought to attach the strap below the hand on the end of the mace, like I saw in many museums, but it seemed to me that that arrangement was to allow the weapon to hang from a saddle, as the mace was oftentimes used by horsemen. Since I was not on horseback I needed a strap to prevent me from losing the mace if I lost my grip. Later I discovered the strap thus used was an excellent way of extending my control over the head by working as a tendon directly attached to the shaft. By flexing my wrist certain ways I could advance control from the hand to the head of the mace and create spiraling blows rather than linear blows, which were easy to track and block.

One thing to know about martial art forms is that they tend to be codified and static. A sensei will often mold a person into an image of the ideal fighter, but the stamp of approval is on completion of certain moves in a defined manner. Back in the 16th century a young samurai named Miamoto Musashi began a career as a very good fighter. He learned quickly and while still young defeated many an experienced fighter. After 30 years in undefeated conflicts, he began to wonder why he had been successful, and here is where he showed the true soul of the samurai. An expression of his was "All things with no master." This was a great break with tradition, but not with the theory of combat he had been given. In other words, although they taught samurai to learn poetry, fighting, dance and so forth, they actually encouraged young men to emulate their instructors. It was ego in action. The goal of a samurai should be ego-loss, from the influence of Buddhist teachings.

So Miamoto studied his own form. For 30 years he studied himself, living wildly and having many duels with as many people using as many types of martial art forms. Then he wrote a book for his disciple called the Book of Five Rings. This is a book that should be in every high school and taught with a rich variety of martial art forms. Football as a martial art forml teaches many things, and not just the ones the coach speaks openly about. The screaming coach, or sensei, declaring that young men must go out and "Kill, kill, kill!!" does not do much for the individual in advancing higher thought. Not available to Miamoto in the 16th century, but available to modern students is a form called aikido. This uses mostly spiraling moves which deflect rather than block and which channels the fighter's energy into a focus which can overwhelm the opponant. In the dojo students are given partners, not opponants. They take turns learning moves but begin each session with quiet meditation. So different from the gym environment!

Now, when I began to study the mace I also had to study myself in relation to the mace. That's how I do things. I was rather tall at 5'-10" but painfully thin and asthmatic. I weighed in at 125 lbs. and was being taught by a man schooled in karate who weighed much more than me. My fellow students were all much heavier than me and had backgrounds which generally included school team sports, unlike my "special PE" classes: swimming (which nearly drowned me during an asthma attack) and golf. Actually golf kinda helped my mace work, as did bowling. One aspect of stick fighting is that each weapon can be a different length and therefor have a different kill spot: the place where their force is most effective. The mace head is it's kill spot but the broadsword has a spot about 8" down from the tip, where the force is greatest and least likely to be deflected. I quickly learned that the sword would kill me at arms length but the mace could kill at elbow's length by using a spiral line to bring the mace head in. So the thing to do was advance into my special kill range, inside the sword's kill range which made the sword ineffective. I had to rush my opponant.

The first time I experienced this was fighting my sensei. He was a left handed fighter and much stronger than me, so it was important not to get hit. It hurt a lot to get hit, even thru the padded surcoat and leather gloves. The fight begins with a marshal announcing "Begin". You then have a second or two of posturing and examination, followed by the initial blows to register the defense, ie, to find weaknesses. For me, that moment was when action was required. Miamoto writes in his fifth chapter, "The Void" that a fighter must fight from within a void, with no thought, no plan, no stance. You strike before you strike, using your lizard brain, not your frontal lobe. This was exciting for me because I felt I thought way too much and had many headaches. I wanted to find a void, a place of quiet. My mace flew of it's own accord to a spot on my sensei which was not protected and he dropped to his knees, squeeking, "It appears that William has found his weapon... and we will now be required to use cups."

I have tried to explain to my karate friend how one can use the inner self, the chi, to overwhelm any opponant. As Miamoto said, "One fighter, ten fighters, one hundred fighters. It is all the same fight." She insisted that you use different moves to fight multiple fighters and I tried to express how inside the void all blows are the same. You can only kill one person at a time, but you can overwhelm many fighters at once by using your chi as the weapon, by becoming the weapon. In karate the weapon is your body and you must extend your chi into your hand, your foot, your expression. She couldn't wrap her head around this thought, feeling that you must always retain control somehow to direct the force. This is not true. That uses the frontal lobe and you should not be using any part of your brain because you have left it behind as unneeded baggage. You are the weapon. It is not merely a fancy expression used to impress fighters. A good analogy or example might be the orgasm. You don't have an orgasm using your frontal lobe. You don't say, "Oh yes. This is good. I will now have an orgasm. Yes, now I will get wet or hard and move thusly and now I will come. Yes, that is good." It wouldn't work. You have an orgasm from within a void. A brief void, but a good one.

When she hurt her hand in a fight everybody knew it. She told them, she told her sensei. She expected her sensei to avoid that spot, to protect the injured fingers. She also held her hurt hand in a fist, to protect her fingers. She put her hand in front of her and entered the fight thinking about her injured hand. She got hit four times in that hand. Now, the first hit was a mistake and you could even say it was a good thing to happen so that her inner self would be willing to do anything to avoid future pain, but the next three shots were just stupid dogged ego. Had she been taught in aikido the blows would have been deflected in a spiral and the response, coming simultaneously, would have been to follow the line of the incoming blow back to it's source, striking a killing blow while redirecting the offensive weapon away. Since she was struck four times she clearly did not understand one of Miamoto's best stances, or grips. It is called "the Letting Go of the Four Hands Grip". When something does not work, you drop it. You forget about it, it does not exist, you can always look at it later. You drop it with your body, the two hands, as well as your mind, the other two hands. Only ego would have you get hit four times because you are convinced of a response which has not merely failed you, but failed four times. That's ego.

The ego will also allow you to declare that each mistake had a reasonable explanation. It doesn't matter. The explanation is that you failed to stop your opponant from hurting you. I once tried to explain that the mace could be thrown effectively. Many pictures from the middle ages showed spears and arrows flying at the lines and often there was a mace in there flying head first. Now my arsenal includes two steel maces, one with a spike. The armorer who made it did so from my design and told me that the spike was a mistake and would get in the way of a swinging blow. He said the numerous spikes on maces in museums was an intimidation device. He had never studied ancient thinking patterns. You never throw a weapon without expecting someone to get hurt. The thrown mace was accurate at several feet and carried a tremendous force. It could be used, for instance, to impale a man to his own shield. I have demonstrated this on occasion using a braced shield against a wall and showing how the spike penetrated the shield at exactly the spot where a man's forearm would be. Try to lift a shield and think about a fight while your arm was broken and bleeding along with an extra 7 lbs. hanging on that shield. The person I was arguing with was a duke, a polished master fighter with a huge, well fed ego. He liked to use the greatsword and declared that I would be killed quickly when I threw my mace away. I suggested that the move to throw a mace also put your hand exactly where your alternate weapon would be, like a sword or dagger on the left hip. So we faced off with our padded mace and rattan greatsword. The marshal said, "Begin!" and I threw my mace and drew my sword. The duke was hit soundly in the center of his chest and staggered back, swinging his sword, trying to deflect that which was no longer there. Binocular vision has it's drawbacks when attempting to see a moving object coming up your center. The duke suggested we try again, as he was sure that he understood the problem. I suggested that a dead man cannot "try again" but that made him get grumpy and we did it again: same results and he was even more grumpy. Pure ego in action. A smart man would have dived for the ground with the sword upraised to guard the center. He was trying to knock aside my blow and run up to kill me, something that would be hard to do from the ground.

When faced with a truth, especially one which hurts, we tend to try to rationalise it as a mistake, an error which will not happen again and so, of course, we are unprepared for when it does. Each truth carries with it a part of our reality and denial of reality is not healthy. You let go of your previous stance, your previous held beliefs. You can always go back later in a peaceful moment and mediate on the problem, not to bring it back into your mind, but to bid it farewell and work with the new truth. Life is change, and truth is alive. When a teacher hurts you, they are part of a new truth, and looking for a new teacher who does not teach that truth is foolish and ego-driven. We drop the stance with four hands and do something new.

Tuesday, February 17, 2004

I don't often write twice in a day, which may simply mean that I need to reduce the aimless wandering and focus more. Maybe. Anyway today on PBS radio there were these two economic people giving advice, opinions and clarifications. Like why millions of people losing their jobs is "restructuring" or "outsourcing". I thought it was "people losing their jobs". Here's a rant I wanted to throw at them just for sport.
In this modern western world we have this thing and it's seeming to me to be like this great big stupid uncle who wanders around in his shorts, drinking all the beer in the fridge and grabbing various butts when the urge hits. Nobody really understands why this lug is there, but he's family, so there he is. His name is Capitalism. Oh no, another commie freak! Hey the war is over and the big stupid lug won.

No he didn't! We didn't beat the commies, the mafia took over the place. The system died of a sudden lingering stroke. It puked up it's nuclear guts and died. We were waiting in the hallway holding our own rumbling gut, but we didn't take him out. We just were watching. Nothing to do with the big stupid lug in the living room diddling our daughters.

See, there's this site I found in my search for alternative views. It's a Muslim site filled with news you don't get on any American paper. It also has info on Islam, which is why I was there. I have a couple of Islamic friends and I wanted not to make another mistake like giving out my home made soap with lard in it. That's a no-no. Apparently the Creator doesn't like us eating or using pigs. That's really odd, for various reasons, mostly because in the Nature World View animals we shouldn't eat either stink badly or are brightly colored, like leopards and butterflies. Pigs stink a bit, but only when we've held them in small pens for awhile. So, this site says that the truly enlightened and educated person must reject the "theory of evolution" because it violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Wow. Using outdated physics to reputiate a concept that living things change and sometimes those changes are passed on to their offspring. Amazing concept. But here's the deal: I think we can use the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics or something like it to repudiate the big stupid lug in the living room.

Nothing can be destroyed, it can only be changed. Energy can be slowed down to almost zero miles an hour, but never actually stopped. In any reaction nothing is lost or gained, just rearranged. What the hell does this have to do with Uncle Sam? Well, capitalism is based on the profit motive, yes? Mostly? The profit motive says that you put your capital into a reaction, an operation involving goods, services and people. Out the other side comes rearranged goods and services and you get more money than you put into it. Like Bill Gates is a billionaire, but does anybody really feel that he has done billions of more work than the poor Chinese political slave soldering up computer boards? Hell, no! But he's still worth billions of dollars and each dollar represents labor: people doing something. So, like any pyramid scheme, the guy at the top of the pyramid, the one eyed jack, sits and rakes in the billions by skimming a part of each dollar the laborers create. Now they create it out of dirt and sweat and blood. Bill created words. In other words, Bill did nothing.

The essence of capitalism is that you can continuously take more out of a system than you put in. This requires that many others also put in, usually labor, but that merely props up the fallicy of the concept: that you can take out of a system more than you put in. Here's another concept, or principle of money and Uncle Jack. Dollars are pieces of paper or metal that represent labor. It's easier for the accountants....the guys the Summerians invented.... to count money rather than man-hours. It's easier for a BIG country to move paper than laborers. Iraq wants help, right? We blew up a lot of roads and bridges. So we move lots of pieces of paper, and people in Iraq watch people from other countries making money planning on how to rebuild that which we destroyed. Well, if they are out of work because we blew up their business, why not have them build the bridges now, just where they were before, and feed them and house them while they work? No paper, no metal chips with pictures on them, just people helping things get better? Because Uncle Jack in the living room, planning and diddling how to get to the top of that pyramid wants to make more than he put in.

Ever notice that people often say things like "That could never happen." or "Nobody would do that!" when they are talking about things that happened and people did? The basis of our civilization, this neo-iron age is the labor of people trying to do things better. They didn't need to make a lot of "money" because there was no money. There was just people doing things. They grew crops or gathered food and everybody ate. People got sick and the community found a shaman to do a dance or a ritual and they either got better or didn't, but no scraps of paper passed hands. Nowadays I have a kid in a brain injury facility who needs a few people to stand him up or lay him down, to massage him, talk to him, show him pictures of things he might recognize and he can't get that kind of help because there is no money to be made on it. There is no profit in fixing broken people like my son. He will never work for a living, never greet people at Walmart, never purchase large things made in Communist China (which, by the way, did WIN the Cold War) Jon will never even dance. One day his lungs will fill with liquid and his heart will stop and they will not revive him because there is no point. He's just a man with no profit involved. He never made a profit in his life. He bought old cars and fixed them and sold them when he was done with them. He cooked for nice places and not so nice places. He loved various women. He loved his dog and parts of his family. But he never made much profit for anyone. So, when the time comes he will be shoved over the edge and the rowers will commence with a slightly altered rhythm.

I think his story shows that you cannot actually take more out of an economic system than you put into it. You take out billions and down at the bottom of the pyramid people get shoved back into the dirt. You have to put something back and the more you take, the more you have to put back. So it's mostly people like my son. Fathers in Iraq watching their wife burn and scream are putting something back so that Halliburtin can outsource and restructure Iraq. Children with new plastic arms have made someone on the Board very happy.

Here's a funny concept, just for those of you who may have taken acid in the 60's. Suppose we all agreed (Oh nobody would do that!) that paper was not full of meaning. Let's say for instance that a person's word was good enough for us, that Presidents did NOT have unlimited power unless their WORD was unlimited in power. So those green pictures of past presidents and friends are just that. Very expensive and neat pieces of paper, which by the way are excellent for cleaning glasses. You want food, you work for a man with food or you grow it. You want to get well, you find a healer and strike up a bargain. Nobody gets rich, nobody starts wars, nobody blindly drives into battle in a slightly radioactive tank firing slightly radioactive shells at slightly different children. Bush is GOD because we agree he is. If we agree that killing is bad, that exploitation is bad, then those Bushes who with burning words tell us we have to kill and make money in the process will not be heeded, and the moment will pass.

I don't want to drive a car if I am fueling it with my son's blood. But I have to drive a car to get to where they are holding him so I can say goodbye to him. Every time I drive down to Kingston and walk into that place with the faint smell of urine I am saying goodbye to my son and it will never stop until he finally dies. And all over the world there are fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers and even, Goddess help us all, even Uncles walking into a place they do not want to be and they are saying goodbye to someone they love because somewhere there is a person who thinks you can take more out of a system than you put into it. It's a violation of some basic Law and I want it to stop!
I wrote this note and posted it to an email list to which I belong. It's a list for families dealing wiht brain injury in the family. People with sons in comas, people with spouses learning to walk and talk again. I've been told by these folks that I have a way with words at times and that is how I started this blog to begin with. So, it seemed reasonable to include from time to time some of those focussed ramblings. I'm not lecturing anybody, because these friends of mine by and large are so much smarter and wiser than I am. But sometimes I amuse them, sometimes I make them laugh and so with my own son not really going anywhere, not learning to walk or talk...mostly just laying there in his bed or wheelchair....I put my energies toward things I seem to do well. I got my words, I have my thoughts like seedlings popping out of a compost heap. I got my ramblings based on all those big fat books and little bitty books written mostly by dead folks. I do this knowing from personal experience that sometimes we die sooner than later and it's real hard to backtrack and write something for those who may yet slide out of a bed and struggle along on twisted feet and sheered neurons, trying to understand why things don't work anymore. If you live long enough, everybody will pass thru this phase.
The Greeks were famous for many things, especially their plays. They wrote a lot of plays. The Brits had Shakespeare, whoever he was, and he wrote a lot of plays. I have noticed that when you have societies that place a lot of emphasis on plays and such there is a fair mix between comedies, dramas and tragedies, which is very much like life is...a good mix. Then you have those terrible tragedies where everybody dies...the girl dies, the man dies, the little baby dies.......audiences walk away crying and talking about it all. I think those societies where you have those deep, meaningful plays where people walk away talking about life and relationships and Fate tend to be well remembered, sometimes even defining moments in the history (or herstory if you like) of our people. The Golden Age! Well, our society doesn't have many plays with tragedy in them. We go for farces and slapstick....which is enjoyable, but defines a society with the collective age of maybe 11. So these stories of ours, families living with brain injury, are not welcome by and large. Not enough sex, not enough slapstick....although that bit with the frying pan was good.... I think we should send some of us to Sundance Film Festival and try to snag some hungry film maker and get a couple of really good, accurate tragedies written about us, about these connections we've made. I would think that some writer would get excited about the implications, especially when viewed against the New World Order. This list is like some kind of 21st Century version of Cabaret with lines of dancing chickens in the background. I find it terribly ironic, so many of these stories balence neatly against the headlines and yet we can, at best, get a small piece in a local paper in the third section near the TV guide. But our daily struggles with getting up, fixing breakfast, washing clothes...each act is touched, if not tainted, by BI! It's like a bad running joke, a husband who has to be up and pissing in the back yard several times a day, kids getting well enough to make it back to school only to be mugged by other "well" kids, mothers trying to convince a policeman that the looney in the cell needs their meds RIGHT NOW or things are gonna get ugly!

When I look at what passes for literature and playwriting in many of the national venues I just wonder...... Lately I've gotten real thin skinned about the word "coma". Wonder why? Well sometimes when the dishes are done and I'm munching a sandwich I turn on the tube. Some beautiful gal in a tight low cut sweater is telling some other bimbette that since she got out of her coma, Neal hasn't been as friendly to her...maybe it's his wife again, the bitch! So I turn the channel or pop in a friendly movie and I see Robin Williams popping out of his coma to dance and sing and lead the other long term care patients in Broadway songs! There's a long list of shows with coma in them and none of them as far as I can tell have ever required the writer to actually talk to someone whose LO is IN a coma or who has emerged from a coma. Come on down to Lake Katrine and see things the way they are....talk to the people down there and see if they make good comedy fodder. Only if you like laughing at folks in wheelchairs trying and failing, and trying and failing, but never quiting and never really getting a lot of emotional support from a kindly, funny-but-wise doctor. Most of the emotional support I have seen has been from folks who have been there. Folks like you.....

So, the "things" we are accepting are the struggles, the crazy up and down life, WAY out of control emotions and a gradual accumulation of very good pharmaceutical knowlege. That and variations of a mix of faith and hope and resignation. Good stuff for Greek tragedies, though. Not so hot for Broadway or Fox Channel. We could offer the rights to that dance-with-frying-pan, or "Will tries to make it back to the kitchen with his pockets full of eggs". I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeVille!
Will, Jon's musing dad

Sunday, February 15, 2004

Friday night we stayed with friends on the shore of the lake eating veggies, dips and sipping beer and soda. The water, it seems, was explosively charged with methane, so we were warned not to let the water run too long into the sink if we were smoking. I knew a man who liked to light his farts when bored and once I saw his apartment lighting up with blue flashes. I wandered over and watched for awhile as he worked through his flatulence and matches. I wonder how long we could have lit the sinks at the sailing club?

Now the story of the day is how sitting in an oval office sending hundreds of thousands of people out to kill tens of thousands of people counts somehow to make up for the fact that the man at the desk has the fighting capability of a schoolyard bully and the intellect of a very young schoolyard bully. I think politicians are all right about one another in a couple of ways: they're all idiots who just want to have access to all that power and all that money. They want license to kill by proxy, mostly because they are, all of them, cowards. The war heroes will fight that label, but nobody said a war hero was a hero forever. Couple of fights under their belt, some amazing escapes or mere survivals and then they get more careful, even wary.

I used to be brave as hell when it came to eating pills and smoking things. Sure, I'd jump in a car, choke down some purple acid and drive off to LA to see someone I didn't know do something I wasn't sure of. Took my friends along. I suppose if I was a different guy in a different place I'd be tossing off grenades and shooting whoever ran out of the building. Then someday when I wanted all that power and all that money and no chance that anyone is going to ask me to actually lead the charge up that hill or into that city...Hell yes I'd be brave. Brave enough to send out the orders: "Yeah, kill them people we never met, shoot em all, even the kids. Yeah, bomb the babies, burn em up, like in those Life magazine pictures. Hit the bridges, too. Burning toppled bridges look great in coffee table books."

Easy enough to do, nobody will try to stop you. You can even act like you don't like the smell of burning flesh, but since it's not your kids burning it does sort of remind you of a barbecue. So on Thanksgiving, when everybody in America is thinking of big old feasts and the genocide of the native Americans, old George snuck off to pretend he was just one of the boys, serving a plastic turkey for the cameras and grinning wildly. But fact is, he actually went for the smell of battle and the "secret steaks" that presidents get to eat. It's a little known fact that most presidents like to start wars just before an election, not to win the election... because we all know that there is no REAL election, just a huge money laundering scheme....but they get to eat barbecued baby. Sometimes they even get a big old roast woman, but not often. But there's lots of babies out there and with a bit of garlic-lemon sauce they can be mighty tasty. There is the problem of the clean up, getting those grills all clean. That's why the Secretary of War, Donny Rumsfeld, describes war and democracy as "messy". All them pots and pans. But nothing's too good for the Man and if he wasn't a brilliant student, or a present-and-accounted-for Guardsman, or even an elected President, he does have a hearty appetite.

The trouble with many people who get into politics is that they are not terribly smart... or they'd have gone into business or science.... No, they are just plain dumb, and mean. They like to tell people what to do, and they like to hurt them if they refuse. That's why we have so many children in jail, children tend to refuse to obey and they like to play with guns. Politicians are just like kids, they like to disobey, get away with it and kill someone from time to time, but it's not "real" killing because they had their fingers crossed. Not being very smart, they just don't understand sarcasm, irony or satire. Those are way too hard to figure out, so when they read a Jonathan Swift essay saying the British could solve the problem of the poor in Ireland by eating the babies, American politicians thought it was a real suggestion!

So the idea stuck and we've been burning babies for, oh, at least a couple or so hundred years. Little do those visiting dignitaries know what that great roast ham really was at the White House dinner. The Pope does it too. That's why when they are picking a new one, all we get to see is the colored smoke coming out of the little hibachi. You never get to see the little altered boys coming in the back door. Kinda makes your mouth water, doesn't it?

Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Trying to think of things to say to mom and dad that will make them take a shower. Years ago they would say things to me to get me to take a shower. My hair, my skin, all dirty and smelling bad. But I resisted many times, I refused to become socially acceptable, at least where odor was concerned. My teen aged son refusing to change his clothes, to change his underwear, finally being forced by threats to become clean again, for awhile. Could I threaten mom and dad with a whupping if they didn't get in there and shower? A saucy goose in the gander? Don't know, but I doubt it. Trying to get people to come clean is not always easy.

Politics. John Dean, a doctor, a governor, lost the election by yelling. Trying to be heard over a crowd, trying to cheer people up. Dennis Kucinich lost the election by making sense in a non-soundbite manner, by not having a face the cartoonists could easily parody or a name the talking heads could easily pronounce. They claim my grandchildren will be up to their ears in debt because of the tax breaks on the rich and the mounting cost of killing foreigners. I don't expect to have any grandchildren so the joke is on them. One child is in a coma ward, locked inside his body, unable to speak or move much. Very unlikely he'll be producing any grandchildren. One child is in school, surrounded by art and lesbians and geeks. Fairly likely that she'll not be breeding anytime soon. So the joke is on them. Money represents labor and a trillion dollars represents hundreds of billions of workers working one hour. You couldn't fit that many people on the head of a pin, so the joke is on them. George wasn't supposed to become a politician, wasn't supposed to be given the job of spending that money, starting those wars, breeding and producing those drunken young women. We noticed that all the President's women had crossed eyes, or bulging eyes or tiny, mean eyes. None of them had big blue soft kind eyes. What kind of a man is attracted to mean, tiny eyes? What kind of a man wakes up every morning to those vacant, close-set eyes and that thin, whining voice? The kind of a man whose friends and companions refer to baby parts as "messy". Flying grandchildren, bloody arms and legs, all those cocks and vaginas, wombs and balls.... flying bloody thru the air to land unused and unusable on the sidewalks of foreign cities. Messy indeed. Like a nightmare which wakes up screaming at the children, "Get into that shower and clean yourself up!" Hard to come clean when it's a bloodstain on your hand. Out out damn spot, rub don't blot.

I don't remember walking down the sidewalks of Haight Ashbury, smelling the sweet smells of American capitalism. The perfumes from exotic places where we now sweep the blood into the gutters and pour water over the stains. The pale blue smoke of the soothing drugs which made you smile and eat a pear, from exotic places where we burned the blood off the trees and built on top of the ashes. The crazy ladies, smiling with blackened eyes, speed dosed lovers warning them not to talk about it and the smoke from the pipe easing the pain. So expensive now to ease the pain, so hard to come up with the cash and the deal. It seems important to spread the pain around, to insure that only the rich poor can afford to smoke the hash, to ease out of the pain. We've taught the children well, how to lock and load, how to first use diplomacy and then the bombs and the guns, to not appear weak, to not back down, to defend their beliefs with guns and threats of bigger guns and the court appointed attorney. How much better a world our grandchildren can expect, a world where money counts as labor and body counts come as fast as lotteries. Everybody is keeping score, everybody's hands are tied to principles, principals and interest. Special interests, special rates.

How to get your parents to come clean? Threats never worked, examples never worked. We don't live in a country where coming clean is valued. Not like Japan where the people bathe en masse, not like Rome where the people came clean in public, even shit in public. We need more public showers, wheelchair safe so the broken bodied lower rungs of society can come clean. Wheeling into the showers provided by the state, they close down the doors of perception and settle in, awaiting the sound of water falling, of quiet murmurs of relief. The bodies can be donated to medical schools, but what if we run out of students? Then I guess it's the ovens, cleaning up a messy world, a crowded world, my parents world. In Haight Ashbury we bathed in gas stations and covered up the smell with exotic oils.

Tuesday, February 10, 2004

How little we know about fate. The word itself calls forth lots of little half-baked ideas, but not a lot of information. I say this looking at a cup with a missing handle, a digital camera that takes good but unpredictable results, boxes of formatted diskettes which need to be reformatted to work right with my Amiga and a printer I have never used. The walls have holes in them and dirty shadows of previous walls. What was the fate of the print of the tree that has a hand? To live on a wall with holes in it from previous pictures, prints and shelves. Prints galore to cover the worst of the holes.

Margaret put on make up this morning and asked me what I thought about the effect. So hard to be objective when looking into the eyes of the woman who most moves me with those eyes. Hard to tear your gaze away to look at those lips, those eyebrows, the cheeks... All perfect and kind. How could I say "No deal!" on anything she might do. But then, I felt that way three times in similar bathrooms, looking at similar changes and it turned out well. What was the fate of those and them? We're one out of three, or one and two. Whatever the score I think it reinforces my way of looking at my fate: a series of events, each leading to the other, bypassing all options and ending up never ending as I melt and diffuse into the pool. And in the meantime things change. When I look at my wife I certainly see what is pointed out, but I am staring down a long branch of a awesome tree, staring at a fruit or a leaf, but never the whole tree. To do that would require I forget about the leaves, the twigs or nests. You drift in and out of focus, no doubt, to the tree. Sometimes you're close enough to smell your breath, to feel your heat. The rest of the time there's the air and the sunshine, however thin and remote.

A rule to remember is "There is no WHY." There is very little "WHAT?" and only one "WHO?" like getting a big box for your birthday, spend minutes pulling out tissue and plastic foam, to find a fascinating but useless toy. For gifts there is a WHY, but not for the giver. You give a birthday gift or a valentine or even a basket of flowers for no calendar event, and it's fairly easy for all involved to form an idea of WHY? Fate is all about WHY? At first it starts to look like WHAT? or WHATFOR? but soon it is clearly all about WHY? Why did I fall so deeply in love and manage to hold onto it, the feeling, for so long, so many years, when one of my traits which leaps to mind when glancing at my FATE has been the loss of innocence, the loss of faith, the loss of friends.... Well, it also leaps to mind that I try really hard to get better at things, including being sane. I modify WHAT is sanity, since WHAT keeps changing, being alive and all that. But the WHY is constant as in the Old Testament... Which in human terms is pretty young.... "I am that I am" or as Popeye would say, were He God, "I yam what I yam." God is a sweet potato on fire as any Zen freak will understand. And so with Fate we are slated to eat our swollen roots. Not the first time and it certainly won't be the last. Don't ask WHY? because that is just repeating yourself and THAT is a waste of WHAT.

Following the flow of water seems to work well. When wandering the woods I find my way home by following the flow of water. Of course it bodes ill if we bump our noses on the trees while wandering the woods, following the flow. So sometimes you have to step aside for some tree. The roots of that tree are also following the flow, at a much slower rate. I suppose the whole tree might be as well. If all of us left a trail of footsteps, like Billy, if even the water that I drink left a trail we could follow with our eyes back to the source, what a basket of trails there would be and us at the bottom of it all, following the flow.As obvious as pissin' on the ground after drinking a beer that you brewed yourself with local spring water, or pulling up a flower in that yard and putting it into a vase. Margaret comes along and sniffs it and says "MMMMM". Now the piss smells good, showing that everything changes and sometimes these changes seem to effect our basic nature, but our basic nature is that we are what we are. Our fate, therefore, or whatfor, just IS. Right now the differences between memories, desires and anticipations are just quite wide. I never expected to see my father bent and in pain, not with, apparently, the pain going down into the core of his basic nature. Father has become more like Grandfather Riley. Smaller than the legend, but right for the job. Irony is a hallmark of a god with a sense of humor. An atheist, like any other fundamentalist, has no fear of death.

Death, the Dark Mother, can accept your lack of fear, but never a lack of respect. One of the good rerasons to show mom some respect is dad ain't dead yet. We have already seen what the Father can bring down upon us. The flaming Belt of Justice lashed many a lesson into many a young thigh. The Dark Mother does it without laying a hand on you. Sometimes it's a look, but more often is "Looking away". Now, when she looks back at you, you recall what her basic core nature is. She is Death and She brings you down to your Fate. Thus Persephone is even more important, because she indicates the immortality of All. How like Her story is the story of Osiris and that of the Hero. Older and feminine but still sacrificing an aspect of life for an aspect of immortality. How does One live forever? By changing. Fate is change, Fate is Life, or at least alive.
How little we know about fate. The word itself calls forth lots of little half-baked ideas, but not a lot of information. I say this looking at a cup with a missing handle, a digital camera that takes good but unpredictable results, boxes of formatted diskettes which need to be reformatted to work right with my Amiga and a printer I have never used. The walls have holes in them and dirty shadows of previous walls. What was the fate of the print of the tree that has a hand? To live on a wall with holes in it from previous pictures, prints and shelves. Prints galore to cover the worse of the holes.

Margaret put on make up this morning and asked me what I thought about the effect. So hard to be objective when looking into the eyes of the woman who most moves me with those eyes. Hard to tear your gaze away to look at those lips, those eyebrows, the cheeks... All perfect and kind. How could I say "No deal!" on anything she might do. But then, I felt that way three times in similar bathrooms, looking at similar changes and it turned out well. What was the fate of those and them? We're one out of three, or one and two. Whatever the score I think it reinforces my way of looking at my fate: a series of events, each leading to the other, bypassing all options and ending up never ending as I melt and diffuse into the pool. And in the meantime things change. When I look at my wife I certainly see what is pointed out, but I am staring down a long branch of a awesome tree, staring at a fruit or a leaf, but never the whole tree. To do that would require I forget about the leaves, the twigs or nests. You drift in and out of focus, no doubt, to the tree. Sometimes you're close enough to smell your breath, to feel your heat. The rest of the time there's the air and the sunshine, however thin and remote.

A rule to remember is "There is no WHY." There is very little "WHAT?" and only one "WHO?" like getting a big box for your birthday, spend minutes pulling out tissue and plastic foam, to find a fascinating but useless toy. For gifts there is a WHY, but not for the giver. You give a birthday gift or a valentine or even a basket of flowers for no calendar event, and it's fairly easy for all involved to form an idea of WHY? Fate is all about WHY? At first it starts to look like WHAT? or WHATFOR? but soon it is clearly all about WHY? Why did I fall so deeply in love and manage to hold onto it, the feeling, for so long, so many years, when one of my traits which leaps to mind when glancing at my FATE has been the loss of innocence, the loss of faith, the loss of friends.... Well, it also leaps to mind that I try really hard to get better at things, including being sane. I modify WHAT is sanity, since WHAT keeps changing, being alive and all that. But the WHY is constant as in the Old Testament... Which in human terms is pretty young.... "I am that I am" or as Popeye would say, were He God, "I yam what I yam." God is a sweet potato on fire as any Zen freak will understand. And so with Fate we are slated to eat our swollen roots. Not the first time and it certainly won't be the last. Don't ask WHY? because that is just repeating yourself and THAT is a waste of WHAT.

Following the flow of water seems to work well. When wandering the woods I find my way home by following the flow of water. Of course it bodes ill if we bump our noses on the trees while wandering the woods, following the flow. So sometimes you have to step aside for some tree. The roots of that tree are also following the flow, at a much slower rate. I suppose the whole tree might be as well. If all of us left a trail of footsteps, like Billy, if even the water that I drink left a trail we could follow with our eyes back to the source, what a basket of trails there would be and us at the bottom of it all, following the flow.As obvious as pissin' on the ground after drinking a beer that you brewed yourself with local spring water, or pulling up a flower in that yard and putting it into a vase. Margaret comes along and sniffs it and says "MMMMM". Now the piss smells good, showing that everything changes and sometimes these changes seem to effect our basic nature, but our basic nature is that we are what we are. Our fate, therefore, or whatfor, just IS. Right now the differences between memories, desires and anticipations are just quite wide. I never expected to see my father bent and in pain, not with, apparently, the pain going down into the core of his basic nature. Father has become more like Grandfather Riley. Smaller than the legend, but right for the job. Irony is a hallmark of a god with a sense of humor. An atheist, like any other fundamentalist, has no fear of death.

Death, the Dark Mother, can accept your lack of fear, but never a lack of respect. One of the good rerasons to show mom some respect is dad ain't dead yet. We have already seen what the Father can bring down upon us. The flaming Belt of Justice lashed many a lesson into many a young thigh. The Dark Mother does it without laying a hand on you. Sometimes it's a look, but more often is "Looking away". Now, when she looks back at you, you recall what her basic core nature is. She is Death and She brings you down to your Fate. Thus Persephone is even more important, because she indicates the immortality of All. How like Her story is the story of Osiris and that of the Hero. Older and feminine but still sacrificing an aspect of life for an aspect of immortality. How does One live forever? By changing. Fate is change, Fate is Life, or at least alive.

Monday, February 09, 2004

There's a song in The Music Man that goes, "how can there be any good in goodbye, how can there be any fair in farewell?" I think about that line quite often. I just spent two weeks saying goodbye to mom and dad. Not that they're dying real soon, maybe, but they sure as hell ain't getting any better. I've been saying goodbye to Jon for three years and he's still breathing on his own. Dad needs oxygen but he doesn't like the idea of wheeling around in his chair with an oxygen hose under his nose. Jon never liked being wheeled around Lake Katrine in his chair if there were people around. The nurses thought it was the stimulation, but I think it was not wanting to look like those cripples in the hallways. Dad doesn't want to look like an old man. Every Wednesday they have a tea out in the community room and mom and dad go and have tea and cookies.
So I went too. They sat at the end of a side table, away from the others. Mom would turn and speak to the old ladies, smiling in her foggy memories. Dad would hunker down in his chair, living in his fog of back pain and painful memories. His blindness protects him from the sight of the old women smiling at him. He said they always like to talk about their dead spouses, but all I heard was weather reports and gardening news and occasional "Missed you at the poker game, Peggy...." I think dad looks at them thru his misty vision and thinks of all those dead spouses and thinks about his being a dead spouse. Worrying about someday wheeling himself to the table and hearing "Sorry about Peggy, Bill...she always liked to play bingo, didn't she?" His big thick hands tremble as he sips his tea. He isn't blind, he isn't stupid. He sees that cloaked gaunt figure at the other end of the table. He sees the bony fingers pointing first at him, then at mom.

So he spits at it, and that starts a fight. Now he's got that skeletal asshole in a headlock and the skull pops off......
Now he's back in the frame, a tired old fat man with a decaying spine who's losing his mind living with a beautiful old thin lady who's losing her mind. And she's always laughing and smiling, forgetting her pains or doubts almost as soon as she frames them. Why can't he be like her? That makes him smile, almost laugh, at the thought of both of them, fooling them all, living forever, but thoughtless and care free. It makes him laugh. I watched him do this but the pain always pulls him back.

Back into the frame. When I mention this to my brother in law, he reacts by telling me that this is what I can expect to happen to me, to us all. What an odd concept.... that everyone might share the same fate. In the mind of god, sure, everything is possible...and also impossible. So, yeah. But also, no way! And no who, no why or where. So many ways to phrase it but a core somehow and it has to make sense. My parents now. First it seems important to take my son. I was already fairly calm about things when that happened. Growing plants, tilling the soil. But a part of me was waiting and anticipating. Now we hear that such thoughts the force that keeps us from enlightenment. I just find it odd that taking things away would make the consciousness expand. We tend to recoil from pain, not run to it. That's why it's pain. Doesn't make sense that they took my best friend, Teddy, in the same way.

Everybody is losing their mind. Wow. So the mystic in me understands that everything changes eventually and nothing can be destroyed, only transmuted. So nothing is ever lost, life changes things. Like the body of the swimmer changes the shape of the water nearest it, and warms it, exchanging heat with it. The thoughts and influences of us all are dispersed thru the universe, effecting the shape and quality of that universe which is closest to it. How close do you want to be to a change? See, 'want' is a very vague term. I may not want to be elsewhere, but that 'want' can put me where i don't want to be. Like a swimmer in a wake can be disturbed, but still influences the wake, both physically and temporally. You can't help but be immortal in one way of looking at things.

With that comes a certain loss of fear of death, and any loss makes you less than infinite or immortal, so THERE is the paradox. Woosh, too much thinking. Time to wash the dishes.