MY BUDDY ASENATH

I have got to send you over to my friend Asenath's blog for her beautiful testimony to the inspiration Barack Obama's message has brought to her. She actually had been humming that tune a lot while making a movie about the birth and growth of her sunshine son hiding in the belly on the right in the above picture. It is her version of the feeling I expressed in my post, Obama, about how his central message is above, while inclusive of, the rabble. Good on you Ase.

BRUNO'S ART & SCULPTURE GARDEN

My favorite sculptor so far is Rodin, whose figures emerging from the stuff of which all of nature is made evokes a kinship deeper than art appreciation, something closer to the truth of existence than its skillful artificiality. My favorite painter 'til now is Van Gogh, whose faith in and passionate dedication to expressing his unique perceptions is an ultimate inspiration for my own.

Well, the Thinker might need to scootch over and Kiss my favor goodbye because I passed through the Gates of Hell and stumbled upon a sculptor named Bruno Torfs who lives on the edge of an Australian rain forest and has carved out a garden in which live magic creatures of his imagination growing out of tree stumps and waterfalls…

… evoking the same kinship to nature as Rodin's work, combined with the play of Brian Frood and Alan Lee in their book Fairies. These few pictures give an inkling of the over two hundred figures being constantly increased. Do nature's magic beings overpopulate?


The coolest part of my grand introduction to this fellow was upon visiting his web site, Bruno's Art and Sculpture Garden, to learn that he is a painter who, judging from his self portrait and the too few others shown, that he paints very much like Van Gogh.

If I hadn't been by the time I came across him, this fellow convinced me of our preexisting identity by being made of the same stuff, housing the same observer, viewing the same truth, through unique windows.

COLORS

As this big blue rotisserie turns me to once again face the fire’s molten golden orange rays, they excite Brownian movement by singeing atmospheric particles on their way to pierce a billion pin holes on mean free paths shuttered by the flickering irises of green chlorophyll filled filters yet dancing on black branches to illuminate the dark blood crimson bougainvillea before me into the backlit brilliance that strikes the sensors of blue and yellow that tile the bottom of the pool my eyeballs are.

AS IF…

Washington, D. C. January 20, 2009 — The next thing President Obama said at his inaugural after he said, “I do,” was, “Officer, arrest these men!” as he handed a list of war criminals in attendance to a forewarned CIA agent in charge of a cadre of men designated to handcuff and march George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld. Alberto Gonzales, Colin Powell, George Tennant, Carl Rove and Henry Paulson to a cell without a phone call, bail or contact with a lawyer in an undisclosed location until such time as their mess can be straightened out enough to begin national healing and to have an airtight case against the perpetrators of treachery and all their toady little henchmen.

The next thing he did was rescind all signing statements and hand a list of legislation passed in the past eight years requiring review of their constitutionality and desirability by the new congress to Henry Waxman.

The next thing he did was loosen his tie, take off his coat, grab his wife and kids and start dancing right there on the podium to music by Bruce Springsteen and the Dixie Chicks.

Yeah, and on the second day …

I VOTED

It only took sixty-nine years, three-hundred-fifty eight days of not wanting to even know there were people running this country, much less care enough to get involved in choosing who they were, to finally realize how absolutely responsible my apathy is for the Viet Nam War and every other bad thing the US has perpetrated since. So now that I have cast my ballot in the pop poll for prez, I expect everything to be set right at last.

While out voting I also bought a two year supply of beans and rice, just in case. I feel like an atheist after my first communion refusing to kneel. I certainly don't expect anything to enlighten this woman or her sneeringly certain cretin cohorts.

UNDER SURVEILLANCE

I’ve been following myself around, observing my actions, enumerating the possible motives, calculating the probabilities that I have never been in control of anything I have ever done. I am coming to find much agreement between the theory put forth by intensive study of social insects and my experience of observing how many of the indications that I am alive are admittedly authorized by other than me, the voyeuristic stalker of myself, whoever may remain after this investigation into the atoms of the self.

I know that I have a knack of being able to fill in all the unknowns with a comfortable story so facilely that I often forget and take it for reality rather than the life journal it is. Experience is a constant expansion of that saga as my borderless worldscape invites diversity as the fractal identity of scale ties it all together in a mobius loop of parts and wholes, chickens and eggs, us and them.

If I can do that with the unknown that confronts me every day so automatically that I mistake my painting for the tree without vigilant awareness, how much more refined have I become with the story of how I meant to get where I find myself. I could possibly have become so slick at the weaving the story of my life and what I’m doing that I interpret the changes in the hive of my biological bees as they motivate my thoughts and actions with a plausible narrative of what seems to be happening as I go along in such lock-step lip-sync that, like a glib football announcer calling action on the field, I can seem to be in control, at least enough to fool myself most of the time and would be monitors always.

Yipee! Something else to slow down for, new flowers to smell, more shit to dig up to fertilize new growth. It may turn out that the only thing left in my control is my attitude about being an ongoing chemical reaction which like the basis for every attitude, is a choice of having to or getting to be whatever we are.

That leaves the question of what is it that is left with such an awesomely simple choice?

OBAMA

Watching the comedy relief to the rancorous, divisive presidential race tonight at the Annual Al Smith memorial dinner I was relaxed enough by the self deprecating humor of Obama’s admission that he wasn’t born in a manger, but on Krypton sent by Jorel to save the planet Earth that, when he wound up his speech and I heard him use the term god, he conveyed the sense of preexisting connectedness I feel when I think of the tao. I first felt that sense of the word, “god,” in reading Buddhist literature when speaking of the godhead within each being, which my love of the natural curve has translated into the eternal theme to the infinite variations that are the life of the universe, the tao — the resolution to all duality when seen as a dynamic.

This makes me especially happy because, for me, it resolves not quite understanding my repulsion at use of the concept of god as some divine division between his idolaters and we indifferent or antagonistic atheists, not to mention the idolaters of other gods. Of course my discomfort peaked at having that line be drawn between my daughter and I — by my daughter — in her attempt to be honest with me in our mutual struggle to pierce the fog of memory since our estrangement these thirty-eight years.

The one great difference between Buddhism and all religions (Buddhism is not a religion) is the exceptionality, by their own narrow standards, claimed by religious believers to be above the non-believers. Buddhism warns against belief as the veil distracting us from finding the eternal oneness that exists at our deepest essence despite external debilitating divisiveness.

I don’t particularly consider myself a Buddhist in so far as that is a qualification for anything. Tonight I heard Barak Obama use the word, god, and I knew what he meant and agree with him. I think he communicates above the level of common arguments and will change more than anyone ever dreamed one man could do for this broke down country because he is acknowledging our preexisting oneness to each of us beyond our preconditions. May the circle be unbroken and nonexclusive. This is not a political endorsement. Take it for what it is worth.

All I know is a great cloud has dissipated above my head by realizing that my abhorrence of making an isolating wall of exclusivity out of the concept of god was in honor of a deeper meaning rather that the dismissal of the concept altogether.

Religion puts qualifications on brotherhood
In nature, there is no "other",
though none the same.

Artist: JAMES JEAN

I DREAMT I WOKE UP…

…to the world in which I fell asleep, except that during the night technology had disappeared from the face of the earth. It wasn’t some Mad Max post apocalyptic war over the last drop of fuel for the last working gadget or a useless grid for the electric prosthetics in every home. There wasn’t a trace of a gadget more technical than a straw on which to collect ants to lick off for their protein. No man made object existed, everyone was naked. Everyone knew whatever it was they knew the night before, but the worth of each individual among fellows suddenly became the degree to which they had already lived symbiotically with the nature upon whose bounty the lives all humans depended no matter how aloofly exploitive for the profits of raping the ecosystems they might have been.

The first effect was starvation and murder of at least three-quarters of the population furthest from access to farmland where crops were rotting in the fields awaiting manual harvest. That part flashed by in snapshots of months of hoarders finally being overthrown or running out of their stash without having planned to renew it, being so busy defending it and all; people roaming the countryside looking for signs of food, reverting to using a straw to get protein from all kinds of once disgusting, now delicious insect stages of life; packs of dogs banding against owners in competition for food and cats the meal for all.

It wasn’t pretty. But it was the natural result of being unable to adapt to natural conditions without inherited means to artificially make nature adapt to ours.

Indigenous people didn’t even notice until the ice returned, the hunting was better and the rivers were clear and full of fish again.

The one saving grace for the domesticated breed of homo sapiens was the "back to the garden" exploration of the dirty hippies in the sixties and seventies havig fostered the ones who learned and still followed the precepts of symbiotic coexistence with our natural sustenance. The naturally reduced population of survivors relocated around the most naturally fertile farmlands and took up tending crops from the seeds of edible plants indigenous to the local ecosystem. Each acre tended manually by families that ate the food produced ten times the nutrition than what the same amount of land had under the agribusiness chemically enhanced automatic food factory approach. Not to mention the sense of wellbeing being personally responsible for one’s life as opposed to shopping for packages of processed food-like stuff is beyond compare.

They made shovels and man powered plows but refrained from casting the labor upon other beings than themselves to feed themselves. Other species often found ways to communicate with humans that served their mutual benefit, such as the vegetarian animals were encouraged to defecate in areas adjacent to the areas of distribution of their share of the harvest in appreciation for their precomposted manure being so easily collected to fertilize future mutual harvest distributions.

Over generations, feral mankind rejoined the natural curve and the evolution of the mind now unstifled by fearfully incurious certainty that mankind is god’s special child in a playpen made just for us. Unstifled hell. The only thing stifled were guffaws whenever anyone mentioned wondering if the earth was flat or whether someone who created us is pulling our strings.

That was how it was going when my miraculously surviving cat climbed on my chest and did the old nose rub to remind me to arise and greet the sun from our perch in the garden shed, collect the eggs from the Dawgranch chickens, sip my ganjava to ward off the fall chill and wonder if this is any different than the last of my dream.

Then, the perversity in my character came inside and tuned in Amy Goodman, and I remembered the difference.

I am as free as Nature first made man,

Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
——John Dryden

PREEMPIRICAL

Cain's campaign mission for Sarah, "Bring me the head of …"

Just as Bush rushed the US to war as a preemptive strike against entire nations suspected of being either the hiding place of the terrorists suspected of the September 11, 2001 attack in NYC or being led by an evil dictator we trained and armed, the fine point of conclusions based on empirical evidence, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic, seems to have gone missing in almost all faith based actions. From George Bush’s oil grab covered in God’s will to creationists expecting atheists to accept faith as empirical evidence since they have preemptively accepted a cooked book as conclusive fact.

Just as the overwhelming majority of the population can nod in toady agreement at the “melting steel beam” theory offered by the culprit’s excuse finding commission while watching video of three simultaneous, expertly engineered implosions of three huge skyscrapers at freefall speed from every angle, no one in the entire UN, when Colin Powell presented pictorial representations of the rolling-weapons-of-mass-destruction-laboratory as proof positive that Sadam Hussein's evil deserved the obliteration of his country, no one stood up and said, “Hey, wait a minute, ‘Ceci n'est pas une pipe’. Neither is it proof of anything but the skill of a computer graphics artist to follow the dictates of a hidden agenda!!!” Authority is taking us for much more than granted, it relies on its obedient little lickspittles like hyena’s follow lions for the scraps, with apologies to the hyenas.

Hearing amens in unison, whether for a preacher’s or a politician’s certitude in delivering preemptive promises against all contrary, empirical evidence, sounds like steps in the gradual approach of empire. Preempirical, you might say.

Sometimes the roots of language are able to tangle up the realities of literate people — remember they are not the truth — just versions of it, the most anyone can ever express. Empirical evidence over logical theories over faith-based fear of the empire are the levels of being able to even visualize the truth, much less express it. The truth requires no crib sheet.

GOLDPHISCH!!?

Can anyone tell me what is happening to my oldest, goldest fish. In February I thought she was pregnant because of a little tummy pooch? Now this fish is a spine ending in a tail and a mouth lying across this ufo-blimp-disk swelling. She is three times longer than her offspring, non of whom have exhibited such behavior.

SCHISM

after Camino Santiago

NATURAL — ARTIFICIAL
NATURE — CIVILIZATION
BEING — DOING
DISCOVER — INVENT
SYMBIOSIS — ANTAGONISM
EVOLVE — CREATE
SHARE — OWN
EVOLUTION — ENTROPY
SUSTENANCE — MATERIAL

Fear not to imagine possibilities
Experience weighs the probabilities
Beginnings, middles and ends are for stories
Told of the eternally morphing universe
Imagination’s journals of curiosity’s cruises
Delighted occupation of the intelligent
Comforting authority of the incurious
Carrots and cattle prods for the certain

Unable to see through the skin of our body
Past the certainties of our mind
Beyond the attachments of our spirit
We miss the infinite scale of the cosmos
Where all bodies are parts of what they behold
The unknown is not unknowable beyond words
And the spirit of universal life connects all.

The barrier is a fear of a fate carved by a father
Who made of nothing, this entire world
And a path for us to walk it.
Or else…
So goes the story.
There are many others.
None are the truth,
Only about the truth
And the twisting of it.

AUGHT T' UMMM…

Sap retreats from each new chill
Leaves leaves’ juices without the will
To cling to indifferent branches
At end of summer romances’
Glory filled thrill of chlorophyll

I had a wonderful soundtrack for this video but it fails to upload with the picture.

STEPPENWOLF, I

This is that place I imagined Hesse took Harry Haller on his awesome journey into the most contagious description of depression I ever hope to encounter. I have lost something I never had. My understanding of genetics, like every other thing I experienced over the past four decades, only served to experientially reinforce an idea I’d long forgotten was only wishes and took to be inevitable.

The idea was that my genetic heir would eventually question the myth of her culture without the influence of my heretical slant during her formative years. I made the decision in acquiescence to the other-half-of-her-genes’ wishes that my only contact be child support after several years of futile 1,200-mile round-trip fireworks-filled visits to see her. In a process of dematerialization begun with selling our house five years earlier, it was the deepest divestment of possessiveness I’ve ever made, propped up by the misunderstanding, the hope, that the curiosity inherent in my genetics would prevail over her culture despite or because of its lack of diversity and our true relationship would return.

She returned all right. First it was out of curiosity about this crazy person her mother saved her from. Her curiosity had its limits. She has never invited me to visit her and since dad died I have no other excuse for showing up where she is. Next it was about saving this crazy person from the same person her mother saved her from. Curiously enough it was Jesus in both savings. In answer to my protest of her condemning me to hell she explained that she just wished she’d be able to see me in the big afterlife party to which my needlessness of her god denied me admission.

Part of what I am facing is the fact that all my curiosities have been partly directed and driven by consideration of becoming a mentor for the inevitable curiosity that would demand first hand experience of her parent after years of estrangement. I have been keeping journals of observations of my life in the world and in my head for four decades, combining and condensing them into more comprehensive theories, and those into essays much the same way I learned to comprehend my college courses.

Coming straight out of the service into freshman mechanical engineering, having dropped out of high school after my junior year four years earlier, I was in a bit of an overwhelmed panic about getting up to speed. I decided I would have to learn to cheat on quizzes dealing with incomprehensible, seemingly unrelated and irrelevant facts, constants and formulas. My method was to sit down with the book and go over the material, rewriting it so that it made as much sense as I could get out of it, rewriting the part I understood in more condensed, abbreviated style and ask questions in class about the parts that didn’t fit, and thence to a little crib sheet I could write on a business card or my hand on test day. I actually never did the last part, having discovered the best way to study information coming from anywhere; hearsay or my own perceptions.

It would now seem that I have prepared myself for the great gig in the sky and find only pie. Pie are round, pi are squared. I have found my place in the grand scheme of nature and my would-be-question-asker, the one with my genetic curiosity has beat me to all the answers because she has the big King James version crib sheet written by the creator of what I am lamely settling for formulating only theories about. These kids these days. As time passes, my gratitude for what I have learned in preparation for her questions is overcoming the sadness of finding a brick wall of religious certainty where I’d imagined curiosity might be.

In reading another attempt to assert faith as unassailable reason at the “thinking conservative” web site Conservativity, I just realized that debating creation versus evolution is like trying to mix oil and water, being distracted by the pretty colors as the oil scum reflects the spectrum of the sun while the toxicity of oil spills ruin water, just as the debaters get off on the fireworks of their own zinger points reflecting the truth from their side of the argument ignoring the toxicity of belief to curiosity. I really don’t care that much about how oddly others view the world, even when one of the oddest ways is the overwhelming favorite of 85% of your local fellow humans. What I do care about is the ruination of the rest of the body when treated as property by a minuscule part of that body. The belief that entities other than human are somehow inferior in purpose or intellect fuels the rape of the earth, enslavement and murder of people considered animals and the cultivation of flocks of barely human dependents on the lie, just to feel better about swallowing it.

This post has been in the “cookin’” file long enough to have lost most of the depression reflected in the beginning. The biggest resolution came in contemplating Ed Wilson’s declaration that a truly curious mind with a scientific discipline, while not necessarily believing in or seeking an intelligent designer, would, if it found a theory so complete that it needn’t exclude contrary evidence to remain valid, prove the existence of at least a design if not the designer to creationists. The cosmic upshot of all these curious scientific minds probing the unknown of their choice seems to be further support and extension of the theory of evolution. Like a living thing it must grow. Certainty is stillborn.

With what humor is left me on the subject, this is my latest attempt to communicate with her:

I don't believe in anything, it is a muscle I was born without. Every time I try to flex it, it's like trying to wag my tail, it's my choice. I don't have a tail, but I do have the intelligence to remember I have a choice and I choose to exercise it on more relevant curiosities than the existence of a master puppeteer up in hebbin' or wagging my tail — though I often wished I could, but then I figure you don't want to hear anything about phantom limbs carried by genetic memory evolved since we swung from trees by them.. Whether we like it or not, no matter what belief system we choose to snuggle up to for bedtime stories and instruction for tomorrow or what theories we choose to keep us up all night probing the unknown, the choice is ours. That is as close to truth as my theories may ever get. Who knows, if I ever arrive at the truth I may find you to be a long time resident — the crazy old lady down by the sea, a creationist, don'cha know? After all these millennia. So sad.

LAST GRASP

In my last post I spoke of the herding of the sheeple through managing their water and food. Silly me, I forgot to mention the inventions now considered life essentials, oil and money. Well, folks, welcome to Bush's ongoing war for oil being capped by his final manufactured emergency demanding Executive's exclusive control of the treasury with no oversight from Legislators or Justices. Sound anything like a coup? Larissa Alexandrovna's post Welcome to the final stages of the coup… nails it

Now, if you do not yet understand that the Wall Street crisis is a man-made disaster done through intentional deregulation and corruption, I have a bridge in Alaska to rsell to you (or Sarah Palin does anyway). This manufactured crisis is now to be remedied, if the fiscal fascists get their way, with the total transfer of Congressional powers (the few that still remain) to the Executive Branch and the total transfer of public funds into corporate (via government as intermediary) hands.

The Bush family, in the form of Prescott Bush, has tried a more aggressive coup before in order to install fascism in this country. This treasonous plot was called "the Business Plot," because the high-level plotters - including Prescott Bush - were Wall Street men who openly supported fascism.

It seems this time around, the Bush family is trying the more subtle approach to open bloodshed: first create a crisis, then under the guise of addressing that crisis, overthrow democracy. Yes, it does sound terribly conspiracy-theory-esque when explained just this way. But what else does one call a criminal conspiracy to destroy Congressional powers permanently, alter Judicial powers permanently, and steal public funds?

As I see it now, we have but two options and I have long alluded to hoping against hope that one of these options would not be the only one left to a peaceful people. The first and frankly most preferable option is for Congress to immediately begin impeachment proceedings against the members of this latest Business Plot.

No time needs to be wasted on hearings as we already now have in writing, formally as presented to Congress, the intentions of this administration to nullify Congressional powers permanently, to alter Judicial powers permanently, and to openly steal public funds using as blackmail the total collapse of the US economy if these powers are not handed over. You do see how this is blackmail, do you not? You do see how this is a manufactured crisis precisely designed to be used as blackmail, do you not?

WELL?