ONLY FAITH CAN BE BETRAYED

"The experience is there, the reality is there,
but how to get at it?
Everything I type turns into a lie
simply because
it is not the truth."

Joyce Carol Oates

Once again Red Dirt Girl’s persistent query into the whole idea of belief and truth has catalyzed my own to again foolishly offer that my own poor approaches might be growing more inclusive in scale and comprehension but never more exact. The primary problem Joyce Carol describes is that, like science, language isolates any noun from all context in an effort to define its uniqueness, get down to its nuts and bolts, the atoms. This is a problem with any chosen, named and described subject; the only connection to the truth left of the original, real entity is the husk; the fact that such a description and invented name find general agreement only on being arguing points in logical arenas —— left for poets to remedy with a gentle return to the contextual background of the sublime cosmos from which it came. For truth the problem is insoluble because it is that ultimate sublime context of everything and is greater than any container. Truth suffers no such isolated interpretational authority by arguable, subjective belief systems; never truth in its total inclusiveness of all interpretations while being captured by none.

Tao is a word for the way, the nature of everything, a trinity of the perceiver, the perceived and the perception. Using belief to define truth more specifically, to claim a more exclusive truth is to declare butterflies to be the only example of life while slapping mosquitoes. Belief is powerful stamina for the individual who knows to keep faith in and to the capacities and possibilities of the unique self one finds oneself to be. Unfortunately such home grown energy is often wasted through a loose wire flopping around zapping random friends, foes, ideas and institutions with jolts of ones belief, trust, faith, certitude, hope. Belief has a positive effect only when applied to oneself and becomes an unrepayable, unrequested debt of behavior when turned outward upon others. Often the disappointment we feel about the world is the catching of ourselves in transferal of belief from our responsibility for our own judgment to the judged who never asked for it.

Since the advent of the written word, the record of events, it has become evident that although each word of a sentence or story may find agreement among many readers the story will result in as many interpretations as readers and hearers in attendance. That we ever come to anything resembling a truly mutual understanding with another seems to me to be the rarest of occurrences based on its ever happening to me. At best, we can have an almost unshakable faith in our assessment of others, but adhering to and not veering from our mighty strong theory about them should never be a concern of theirs. The lash of frivolous faith stings at both ends.

Sure, we all have the same general bells, knobs and whistles — so uniquely tuned that finding kindred spirits is as rare as four-leaf clovers. If they weren’t we’d all be crammed into somebody's kitchen. The key here is that such commonality must be discovered. Creation of a belief system to bind individuals to rigid concepts excludes the unique contributions and extensions necessary for any naturally evolving entity or its parts. Just as the history of mankind seems headed for the instability of a planet who’s biomass consists exclusively of humans and corn, the history of man’s belief in a grant from some god to do with the planet anything he could think up has brought us to the lemming’s brink.

Western civilization is like the drunk found seven feet below the water in his brand new Cadillac at a low water crossing during torrential rains who declared after being winched out to dry land, “I got so damned tired of all the detours and delays that I just speeded up for this one hoping to skim across.” Civilization does seem to be speeding up, but our ability to achieve escape velocity and leave the nest is bogged down in all the shits we’ve taken in it. Our salvation is in no ones hands but our own, I believe. Time to become a friend to the mother from which we all came, Gaia, the life of Earth on the path of Tao.

•

On a lighter note,

SUCCESS:
At age 4 success is . . . not peeing in your pants.
At age 12 success is . . . having friends.
At age 16 success is . . . having a drivers license.
At age 20 success is . . . going all the way.
At age 35 success is . . . having money.
At age 50 success is . . . having money.
At age 60 success is . . . going all the way.
At age 70 success is . . . having a drivers license.
At age 75 success is . . . having friends.
At age 80 success is . . . not peeing in your pants.

KINDRED SPIRITS

I have got to refer you to the right-on rant of Jason titled "Shouting at the Devil, 'Fuck You, Capitalism" over at Thomas Paines Corner of Cyrano's Journal, to which I immediately linked and commented the following,

You nailed it all. You also evoked this tangent: On item 8, the view of being one with the world had by young children is not narcissism until culture severs that connection in the public education run up to the competitive world of capitalism with ratings by reward and punishment according to personal obedience to indoctrination goals. It is that innate sense of oneness with the world that reemerges and seems like a religious revelation when the rat race is recognized for what it is. It’s often referred to as enlightenment through the ages when the prison without bars of culture’s myth is seen beyond. The real culprit is the inculcated belief so unconscious that it seems natural: that we own all we survey as granted by its supreme creator just for us to do as we damned well please, manifest destiny, eminent domain all the way out to the stars put there just to serve as our calendar!!

THE HERETIC AND THE WIZ

He saw the truth just as it is
No words to claim it as his
He watches others claiming
To know just by naming
Those things given names
By the Wiz.

The Wiz takes many a form
Authority’s the only norm
Gospel is the song it sings
Righteousness the curse it brings
To those being cursed
By the storm.

The Wiz is parents, churches, schools and states
Science feeding at corporate plates
They form the bossy body politic
Giving rise to our heroic heretic
Light to shine for lives in the dark
On their fates.

His message clad in metaphor
To distance the sacred from the gore
Watching chickens’ pecking order;
Wolves peeing on their border
Not like our wars and walls and waste
Of life galore.

Every body is made of cells
In the center of each there dwells
Intelligence giving local reports
Coloring pictures to which the body resorts
Prejudice makes the unknown unable
To ring any bells.

Curiosity limited to exploitation
Imagination given shoddy information
As the tautology perpetuates
Unwillingness to clear the gates

To where thinking thrives on fresh ideas

After Wiz regurgitation.

DANCING LIGHTLY

Part of my efforts to lighten my footprint upon the earth in passing is to not stomp so superhumanly hard using the leverage of the petroleum propelled prosthetic products with which western civilization has outfitted itself to become the bionic species that farts poison and shits plastic, homo artificialis.

Another part is to lighten the load of baggage I accumulated over 36 years of fully complicit, if slightly resentful, participation in and contribution to the mythical exceptionalism of the American Way of Life, the envy of the world, onward Christian soldiers, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!

I have no idea how commonly the experience of feeling that everything one was ever taught is wrong occurs among the general population but I can recall inklings of it all my life from Santa Clause to George Bush. If there is anything at all flawed about man, ala original sin, it may be our gullibility. The willingness to commit ones life to authority seems like a positive alternative to the pains of withheld affections, privileges and rewards that accompany disobedience as the indoctrination begins in the crib, class and courtroom. Once one learns to mock those who are not yet with the program one is as fully engaged in the unconscious perpetuation of the myth as were their parents before them.

Although it is an ongoing process of untying knots from a higher consciousness than tied them, replacing the impermeable asphalt habits of forgone conclusions with the levity of reopened alternative possibilities is a process of sprouting from the compost of ones past that makes the journey a joy to be rejoining evolution.

Then there’s my actual physical weight which seems easier to accumulate the easier I take life. Walking, turning the compost and garden, and cutting what lawn that needs it with hedge clippers are the only activities I feel motivated to do with any exercise component to them. There’s just not anything I want to change around here anymore except the slow process of learning to grow food better.

There is a beautiful part to the wonderful life on the island of Tikopia when it seems more appropriate to sit at the foot of a coconut tree and reminisce about a full life and good times had over the course of a life spent in the activities of children. The Tikopia culture considered one a child all through life, bearing and sharing children as one big happy family tending taro pits, climbing coconut trees and fishing in the ocean were as much play as chasing chickens and puppies were when they were learning to walk. Adulthood announced itself as timely as second teeth and pubic hair when sitting under a coconut tree with a lap full of toddlers telling tales about when one was their age and growing up became a priority. I have a coconut tree given me by my brother, Chuck, in whose shade I feel destined and about ready to sit. In fact, I’m already sitting there, waiting for the shade.

One of the great mistakes western culture makes seems to be the wasting of the wisdom of the elderly as the prime source of educators, not so much for the old traditions they might pass on but for the insights into life that seem to clarify once one has laid down the axe, finished the rat race, raised healthy, responsible children of their own and finally with the time to reflect on life with a relatively timeless perspective. Young teachers may instill enthusiasm in their students, but until they’ve had a career of their own they are just parroting their own untested education with no demonstrable experience of application in the field.

WERK, WURK, WIRK — JUST CAN'T GET IT RIGHT

Feeling like I am still suspended between the possibilities of living a natural existence, where all I need to remain healthy and alive I can eat from the plant and animal life with which this planet yet naturally abounds and a civilized existence whose primary effect on earth is to turn nature’s bounty into loot and the remaining symbiotic hunter-gatherers into new labor forces shamed into producing hundreds of garments a day for a year to afford to cover their suddenly sinful bodies with just one of them. The thing about the midas touch they never mentioned in the fairy tale is that, instead of transforming everywhere civilization touches into the golden age of that culture, in the greedy, imperialistic hands of western civilization the population is transformed into froie gras geese for the diseased golden egg of their cheap labor in exchange for which they get newfound poverty, population explosion and eventual starvation under the authority of their new market value, the Pope and a head gander dancing on neocon strings.

Okay, okay. That was a bit extreme for an example of the level of exploitation to which the individual is subjected every day in the incorporation of the planet. It is playing too raw an emotional card to show the atrocity of our arrogance in conquering the wild. So lets back off to a less harsh, though no less true reality of being born right here in the good old US of A, or as Michael Ventura phrases it, the F-USA (Former United States of America), a term gaining common usage among historians as they follow the neocon declaration that 9/11 changed the world, as was their intent. No longer wild, born in captivity for many generations, animals take the bars and fences and walls of their enclosures for granted with only slightly uncomfortable instinctual pangs at being unable to go as far as they can see.

I had a friend who took a job on a horse ranch with intent to learn horses and earn enough money to just ride from Austin to the Pacific on a personal westward ho. In his research for the venture he realized that he was literally fenced in and would be restricted to the sides of the highway.

With about 2% of the population growing food for the rest of us to line up at dispensaries with tokens of our labor to exchange for an undeniable necessity of life, I sense a cage just as does the pacing polar bear cub in the zoo. Within this cage ones ability to earn tokens has replaced ones ability to hunt and gather food before farming eventually wiped nature from the primary attention of 98% of the population.

So now we’re down to the crux of this post, what do we do for food? Of course it is much more complicated than that, since most of what one earns in modern society goes to obtain and maintain trappings of the Great American Thingathon. There is a variety of approaches to getting money from using ones body to dig ditches or score touchdowns to using ones imagination to build a better mouse trap or dig tunnels into others treasures. How one earns tokens is part of ones character among fellow citizens, and, as a naturally responsible entity, a source of well being to any individual.

I can only testify to my own evolving attitude toward “work.” My work ethic came as naturally from my father as my hair color came from mother. I was helping him do any one of the multiple projects he was always involved in; new room on the house, rebuild the wooden part of our Chevy Station wagon (they really were wood in those days), build a sailboat, paint 30’ tall whiskey bottles in blends of brown and yellow with a 2” brush and buckets from a ladder on billboards out on the highway. Such activity never took on the negative connotations associated with the term work until he sold me into slavery during the summers of my 13th and 14th years to a dairy farmer who’s idea of a good time was a movie once a month, otherwise it was farm work dark to dark every day. It was then I realized the difference between getting to live your life and having to. Later, in a class on dynamics I heard the only definition that work has ever meant to me since, “effort against resistance.” Although I remember those summers on the dairy farm fondly now, the fact that I had to serve the will of another, loved one or not, puts it in the category of work. I have no recollection of any tokens I earned, I’m sure there were some. I ate fresh farm food, as much as an adolescent can eat. Necessities, covered.

I have always gone with the most attractive possibilities at all points of my life when they opened to me. Joining the Marines in order to get myself out of Mississippi was the last time I let repulsion make another form of hell look attractive. When the attractive possibilities of marrying proved to be based on a flimsy premise nine years too late, my yuppified idea of earning vaults of tokens to guarantee the future forever seemed just as hollow and I moved from the IBM ghetto of Oak Ridge into the center of Austin. I learned how wealthy corporations are like military bases, only peripherally connected to the towns outside of which their compounds are sufficient unto themselves, add little to the economy of the town except higher prices and between which personnel are transferred in their career’s rat race to the bottom line.

The depressurization of leaving the corporate compound for the life of an Awestun slacker was one of those phenomenal experiences that must be thrust upon oneself since planning could only lessen it with expectation. I lived in a communal household whose maintenance was pleasantly afforded by two ice cream truck routes. Often I took work as a rock mason, carpenter, house painter or printer to keep up child support payments. Three years of living a form of socialism amongst dear friends showed me how being carried creates cripples and what a loner I was by nature. I moved out to a place of my own and a steady job as chef at the Hole in the Wall directly across from the school of communications at the largest university system in the world.

As the carpetbagger’s economic boom hit Austin I saw the house I sold in 1972 for $35,000 go on the market for $130,000 six years later, I saw my chef’s pay become insufficient to maintain a minimal existence — if my food weren’t free I couldn’t have afforded rent. Speaking with my friend Peter one day I remarked, “Man, I need another job.”
To which he replied, “No you don’t, you need more money!”

I don’t know if the irony of the exchange comes through to anyone else at all, much less the slam in the head it was to me. All the things I’d experienced up until that moment made my next remark inevitable, “I’m gonna begin Green Graphics.” I have drawn, painted and sculpted all my life but, like many practical people, earned my tokens in surer, more lucrative jobs. I’d once matted up about fifty of my pen and ink drawings and sat on a blanket with the rest of the hippies on the drag. Although I made around $80 in one day, whenever I sat down to draw all I could see were visions of the people thumbing through my work and thinking of their judgment paralyzed me. So I left that idea alone for a while.

Within two months of imagining Green Graphics I was in business, er, ah, business cards anyway. I designed my own and cajoled friends into ordering their own, and greeting cards, and calendars and t-shirts and bumper stickers and I was off and running and haven’t looked back since. Although I have made many publicity packages and posters for artisans, gardeners, businesses and bands, I have never needed to make an ad for myself; one of the benefits of graphic arts.

This all boils down to the value of action through attraction rather than being pushed into choices between two evils. Since every being on earth is born sufficient unto themselves to survive, adapt and thrive in the bounty of nature, the commodification of everything indulged in by civilization seems to be nothing but negative choices, as nature is most surely letting us know in no uncertain, inconvenient truths. We are in a shouting match with the planet right now. We need to back off our attack, sit back and meditate on the results of the bad premise that ownership of all he surveys is man’s providence. We’ve done things we cannot take back and must suffer the losses they caused, but there is still time to reconcile our differences from our natural selves and cease choosing between two evils. None of it has to be work.

For an excellent article on just this area of thought, I refer you to the aforementioned Michael Ventura's second installment of F-USA.

A BRIDGE OVER NO DIVIDE

Back to man’s need to believe.

A modest premise I offer, belief not required or recommended, but certainly not prohibited — you can’t curb nature without distorting experience

The cosmology of the universe
Is a continuum in flux
Within and without ones skin
Whose change we perceive
As evidence of its and our existence.

Nothing too outrageous there, none but the most rigid toes trod upon so far.

Let’s call the nature of existence the tao
The path, the way of all things
The megametaphor for the Big Mamu of Nature
The truth, the reality, the essence of all conceivable and inconceivable entities that exist.
What freely remains existent in plain sight after the best words,
the best theories, the capture of which fall short .

Okay, I’m feeling the rumblings of rebuke from the no-objective-reality crowd with that one. As you may gather, I think various viewpoints are healthy, so long as they are not trying to enforce uniform allegiance. So far there’s no call for believing anything — its just a theory.

The teflon nature of the tao
Is the nature too of glue
The wisest, well lit line of words
Aimed nighest to be true
Yet enlightens only kindred ears
While enraging those who kindle fears
That truth is changed by sayings
Wearing out their knees with prayings
On the off chance they are right.
They might spread their fright
Recruit you to their might
If you survive their night.

Now we’re into it — I have crossed into the territory of belief, wherein I tromp on all believer’s toes — not because I want to, but because the mere existence of people happy without belief upsets those whose belief is so tenuously fragile that everyone else’s agreement, nay, tacit conversion is required for its maintenance. Like so many aspects of western civilization, I find the parallel between church and state so fitting I have to remind myself of the supposed difference, as blurred as that between the two parties in this neocon merger of military/industrial complexification beyond the ken of lay or latin.

The process of belief, as I gather from those who profess to be unable to live without it, involves a kind of leap into the unknown tethered by faith in the trust in the belief in the perfect hope or perfect fear that the promises of righteous authority from pulpit or podium are true!?! Okay, fine, whatever floats your boat. I’m just kinda wondering what is the reason and where lies the responsibility for either choosing to weave for oneself such a web of dependence or to move into one ready made in the "Easier Than Thinking" mental retirement village, Nailed to the Cross Arms, complete with an owner’s manual for all morality and appliance questions.

If the answer is a version of, “god spoke to me,” we’re done here. I can’t converse with one who cannot recognize one’s own voices. Shoo!

If the answer is a version of, “I fell in love with the _______,” I can only ask if the belief is required to make _______ real or to distance oneself from ones own love by creating a bridge that separates by conditional dependency?

If the answer is a version of “I am afraid not to, Santa and God are watching everything I do,” I can only say, get over yourself. Any higher consciousness you may imagine is informed by a body of which you are a part the same as you are informed by each of your cells in the gestalt of your wisdom. Such belief could be a sop against indifference found in searching the stars for someone who cares.

Then there is that far too common, less holy or legally binding, negotiable type belief system where wedding vows and handshakes are backed by prenuptials and contracts necessitated by the simple fact that none see that no one can promise anything about the future, even the continuation of their most ardently held beliefs in the present. In fact, it would seem that the most rash of such promises, if kept to the letter of the promise made in the past through time, warp what might have been a natural, healthy lifetime friendship into one both parties resent for their own faithfulness and loyalty to the other's trust, too stubborn to admit what both know about belief.

I am a complete entity informed by the genetic memory inherited and sensations instantly reported by the cells of a body responsible for its own continued existence. With such equipment and the good sense to see the far reaching compassion in the golden rule there is no unknown I fear, for I know only that I know nothing conclusively. Belief in anything more remote or supreme than my own responsibility for my own existence is like driving a wedge between consciousness and conscientiousness, splitting mind from morality, blasting a rift betwixt intelligence and integrity through some mythical flaw of original sin, that price everyone is supposed to have where they pimp themselves to a savior, be it a supreme being or just a sugar daddy. Bah, humbug. Humans begin life much better than any price they may be persuaded to settle for, but ——— everybody’s doin’ it, doin' it, takin' their life and screwin' it, screwin' it.

It feels perfectly natural to have more than one soul mate.

THE VOLUME OF TIME

OR
"You are what you don't shit."

We have little trouble imagining a three dimensional representation of space, here, there, and up there. So why did we stop at a one dimensional clothesline to represent time? If every point in space is that point for all time what represents its history through that time? Another point very close may have a slightly different history since events seem to be like weather casting fuzzy shadows and moving seasonal textures across the landscape of the space-time continuum. Such a volumetric view of time seems to always have known extremities between the most ancient past imaginable (big bang or god’s creation of everything six thousand years ago, whichever comes first) and the present and the relative direction you’re headed up to now. If we look at time like a volume within which events condense, navigate and precipitate, wouldn’t the dynamics of the past anticipate the momentum into the future clearly enough to dispense with leaders to misguide us. Just as unique perception of reality creates a unique reality tunnel, events common to all precipitate as many unique histories to effect the weather with the additional feedback event of our existence wherever we travel whenever we get there. With such an exponential increase in the complexity of cause and effect of changes in space and time what good is going beyond the one way clothesline of time other than the fun I find in thinking of time as weather?

How about going beyond time and space by doing without the existence of maps for either in the realities of personal time space experience. I exist only now, there is no other time for existence. Every thing I have ever experienced in my existence informs every thought and action I entertain and exercise in the present. I exist only here, there is no other where for existence. Everywhere I have ever been in my existence informs every place and direction I go and dance here, now. There is no time, it is all now. There is no space, it is all here. The big bang and the creation myth are demanded by those who want a good story, with a beginning, a middle and an end — the chaotic continuum of life in the universe blends such abrupt change into oblivion, the full moon does not tick. The concept of other wheres than here and other times than now arises from not seeing that even at the extremes of the the largest and smallest, the most ancient or farthest into the future to which we may imagine traveling, those extremes will remain just as remote when we get to the time and place we first intended.

Existence is a gloriously entertaining chaotic continuum being made digitally dull with the appearance of time by a flurry of schedules and records, with light pollution by fear of the dark and need to be noticed, with sound pollution by mechanical prosthetics and death dealers, with emotional pollution by senseless atrocities and cold blooded indifference to suffering and with environmental pollution by not needing heeding our greedy breeding and seeding by weeding out all but the deeding of every inch of America, the no longer so beautiful.

At this time of the year and in February I completely turn my gardens and mix in a volume of compost equal to the turned soil, bringing the bed up level with the boards that contain them. Each new season begins with soil as loose as in a pot that is half organic food. At harvest I eat what nature has made of some of that compost and next season’s compost is made of the remainders of the plants I harvested which, themselves, ate the remainder of the compost of which they are composed. At the end of each season the combination of watering making the soil more compact and the plants using the organic material to build their bodies the soil level drops as much as four inches.

At most any time of the year I can eat something out of my garden, although I am quite far from my ideal of eating only out of my garden. So far okra, sorrano peppers, spinach, lettuce and arugula are the only plants that exceed my consumption of them. For short bursts I get too many tomatoes, but Tejas summers are seemingly a no grow period, no matter the rain pattern. What I don’t eat of what I bring into the kitchen goes back to the compost from whence it came and what my body doesn’t use of what I do eat goes into a composting toilet.

Entities are accumulations of matter and meaning retained from their experience of an existence of passing through the space time continuum — or of having the space time continuum pass through them. Orbits complete, cycles repeat, pendulums return to their seat. Choose any beginning. It’s right next to its end. My mother believed plane crashes happen in threes so firmly that she saw no flaw in counting a fourth as a new number one.