BEYOND LIFE AS WE KNOW IT

I have gotten dizzy by mere reading! Gene Wolfe’s Severian speaks of many incarnations of one spirit and many spirits inhabiting one incarnation and I reel at real sensations of Popa, Leonardo, Vincent, anyone I have loved observing my life through my eyes at least as intimately as I have through theirs.

Ah, the ever morphing realizations of internet possibility … I looked up Gene Wolfe and found almost as many words about his writing as he’s written, with speculations, questions and extensions by all sorts of contributors from readers and authors. That he is as obscure as he is, and was to me before being introduced, must be due to the lack of true literacy in the English speaking public. Those that do read range from escapist dalliances to serious saturation as indicated by relative knowledge expressed by anything from frivolous ideas to a list of extensive references to prior works proposed to be influences for everything from speech patterns to philosophies, from creatures to entire civilizations. Amazing.

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My happiness sails upon the ocean I am. The waves and ripples and tides are my moods reflecting the winds of nature’s constant change and the islands and continents of my fellow humans’ actions and the orbit of my deepest love. The crests of well swelling require troughs of hell dwelling, for I could not feel so well had I never felt as poorly. The logarithmic comparison of such contrasts results in my happiness’ buoyancy. Attachment to pleasure and avoidance of pain amplify the deviation in such a way that confuses the location of my center amidst the storm at sea until I once again remember that my home port is my boat.

Dove, Love and Diamede

Okay, I can no longer pretend I am at this keyboard gleaning observations from my October ‘04 journal entries. The urge to come here was to purge myself of the all consuming awareness that the youngest of we four lovers of this home is no longer with us. After her usual nudging me into the playing stroking game, Diamede went back outside and left me as she found me, working on illustrations of topography in Java…Indonesia that is. The next thing I know, I hear strange cat sounds and a broken bottle from a shelf on the porch. I go out to find both Love and Dove watching in fascinations as Diamede is lying there as if asleep. When I go to her, she looks up at me and takes a raspy cough of a last breath. Her eyes never moved again. It is all I can think about. I suppose I am glad I am still so vulnerable as to take such a being so deeply into mine. It was no less than when my daughter died so young and suddenly. When mother died she hadn’t communicated with anyone for a week, she was so drugged, but she squeezed my hand in goodbye at the last breath she took. Diamede looked straight at me as her light went out. It has been thirteen years since I buried Ink and swore I would never go through that again. I know where the myth of the Flying Dutchman comes from … there is Love and Dove. Wisdom without sadness is at the shallow end.

OLD AGE IN THE NEW AGE

For the first time since beginning this blog my sometimes occupation has been quite constant with requests from my two favorite clients. Contemplating what to post is too distracted by their concerns to launch anything with continuity about my thoughts, so I am going to glean partial ideas from past entries in the life long journal in which I have made no entries since beginning the blog.

Having discovered the joys of iChat AV with my pal Erica in New Yawk as we cranked up new iMacs and simultaneously lept back to the future of Dick Tracy, sharing coffee and early morning thoughts face to face is a bit of a distraction as well. You don't have to have an iMac, just a way to get a video camera into your computer and iChat will link you to anyone in your address book with the same deal. AOL or .mac membership is also required, but hey… find out what has been missing in your phone conversations. I've spent half my life without a phone, I'd rather read a letter, but face to face conversation is something totally different!

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I am becoming Chance the Gardener, discovering that I have been tending the Old Man’s garden ever since he took me in as a child. As I tour my pots and plots for signs of health and growth, the requiting of my love and appreciation for being here, this small haven from the ill wind I've been driven by, and eventually driven from, with full awarenness of the value my life is to me in my part in the universe. I feel these inspired jottings to be new leaves, occasional flowers and rare mature fruit growing from my limbs, energized by the sun on my trunk and fed by the soil on my roots. I also like to watch. Everything we do is a version of nature, even the freedom to make bad choices, just not for others.

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Old Age in the New Age
The competitive pride of youthful minds and bodies becomes tempered by the tautological cul de sacs of committed belief and the physical pains of excessive abuse. By the time most of us learn to get it right, we are unable to do it at all.

Live a full life while you may. If you do it right you may well out live your legs and will need to be able to sit around with folks of your age, which, as one gets older seems to be of a similarly increasing span, swapping old sea stories, without many to add and saying, “I could have,” too heartachingly often.

I will not brook an old age preserved in a pickle jar where the container is us and the brine is the pharmacological stewpor concocted and prescribed by the witch doctors of western mythology and sent running through our veins.

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“Fear is like those diseases that disfigure the face with running sores. One becomes more afraid of their being seen than of their source, and comes to feel not only disgraced, but defiled.” —Gene Wolfe

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If you want to entertain a man give him something round, like a ball, or an argument, or a woman at a ball.
If you want to entertain a woman give her something long, like a bat, or an agreement, or a man with a bat.

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Granting the same potential to all, mans noblest act is not exploiting his vast discovered greatness. To have experienced such enlightened beings teaches that learning can best come from examples in life rather than lectures from pedestal, podium or pulpit.

MY HEROES

The following is a dedication I made to the heroes who set the example to which I aspire. I collected them in a calendar which I produced for 1997 as my first self-produced venture. I post it here, not from lack of ideas in the present, but for the inspiration I got from reviewing the calendar again tonight. Between the authors of my potent quotes section and these characters you'll find all the reference to the past my present is informed and encouraged by.

The people pictured on this calendar are incarnations of an universal spirit to which my inner ear resonates, with which my innate voice harmonizes and from which a pattern of understanding arises to obviate our genetic and environmental conditions as various decorations on the same cake. They're teachers by example, leaders by inspiration and so varied as to identify and ground the center from which all our growth occurs. By recognizing the ocean within no matter what sort of cup, their curiosity has led mine beyond even their own conclusions, their levity has dissolved all fear and regret about some future or past imagined in this benign, eternal present and their excellence of expression reminds my own words that they are in vain if not voicing an observation by an eye of the universe to one of its ears – all else is Babel.

Each one of my here celebrated gurus has made obvious the plight of our higher, inmost essence to remain the standard of our values and the voice of our conscience when all of society demands we sacrifice such cognizance for the “sake of the masses,” sells us convenience and expedience in denial of our intrinsic abilities and the fiction of time, and promises a superior competitive edge in the running of the human race, if we’ll just choose sides against nature to help build a paranoid Utopia out of the rain forests of Eden by turning our better judgment over to the church, nation, business, team, clique. I’ve already got a belly button, what else am I s'posed to join? Yahoo!

Taken as a whole, these avatars demonstrate a body of work that is greater than the sum of its parts, rather than the lowest common denominator as represented by the motherflocking masses, extolled by the shepherd and aspired to by the newborn lamb whose fledgling voice is drowned out by the bleating of the toady flock, and whose cosmic curiosity is bored to distraction by the prospect of eternally artificial pastures.

NEW 'PUTER

In the process of learning how to wean myself from the debilitating convenience provided by modern western civilization and to distance myself from the pollution of air, water, land and silence among its clamoring mob of purveyors found in the city, I'm glad I grew up somewhat of a loner. There aren’t a lot of people moving away from population centers much further than the latest development level beltway of urban sprawl. Having a computer on the internet appears to be absolutely essential in tempering my love of solitude with an outlet for my love of friends and conversation. Books, occasional visitors, Email and blogging have verbalized an otherwise wordless existence over the past two and a half years.
The silence and lack of need to speak have served to allow my curious mind to drift further and further from the over explained monotony of the judeo-christian, western civilization program upon which my brain is trained with less concern for having it at the ready in the case of a pop quiz.
All this is to ease my conscience for my rare submission to the entire convenience and capitalistic greed of acquisition afforded me by the American Way of Life as a hedonistic splurge of my pent up shopping urge when I just ordered a souped up 17” iMac over the internet two days ago. I’ve been awaiting like a kid before xmas ever since. It’s my fifth mac, yet no less anticipated for the new features, like video chat and faster, bigger versions of the old faster, biggers that I’ve since normalized into the realm of slower, lessers. I have long ago decided the computer is a good thing for human evolution, if we can just learn to get the same thing out of a technology which isn’t so environmentally detrimental.
The personal computer and the internet return human communication to a lateral activity of personal choice, rather than the top down verticality of propaganda so virulently showing its faults through media sycophancy recently. One of the beauties of the internet is that it will return the individual to a life of infinite choice rather than the rigidity of the societal norm. Just as areas of coagulation form around different interests in chat rooms and blogs, so may societies, like tribes, form which themselves are as independent of centrality as the internet itself.

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Besides, I have a friend who just got a new imac as well, and I am looking forward to being able to set up video chatting … I have been secretly looking forward to that since Dick Tracy’s wrist video phone back in the ‘50s. Black ops took over the levitating bucket technology.