Caught between something and nothing

We're all angry. We're all fed up. Jaded, fuming or self-righteous. We're tired of thinking about it, tired of analyzing it. Hell we're even tired of talking about it...and when a person is tired of hearing himself talk, well, that's someone who's just sick of it all.

Each of us, according to whatever criteria you choose, has reached a point where we've chosen our island and we'll use our teeth to defend it if necessary. The old world collapsed a hundred years ago and the false front we put up in its place disintegrates as we breathe. The poisons of our greed and speculation are starting to show up in the most dire of readings, even the luddites know something isn't right.

Popular music has reverted to absolute twaddle, nonsense, silliness...because no one even wants to sing about it anymore. We're losing whatever tenuous grip we had on reality because nothing makes sense any longer, each new theory is scattered to dust by the slightest zephyr of logic. Deep minds continue to ponder, politicians to lie, soldiers to kill, robber barons to fleece us all 24 hours a day, but the shape of a new future stubbornly refuses to crystallize. We've pulled away the curtain at last and...POOF! There's nothing behind it. Not even the Great Oz in bumbling, lever-pulling bearded old man form. Just nothing.

The center of our days is whatever the newest gadget in our lives might be. It's all we talk about, all we rejoice in, or at least it's all we talk about rejoicing in. Our lives, our culture has ceased to progress, only the gadgets progress. It's their future, we've handed it to them.

We live in a grey area between the death of the last vestiges of our culture and the coming of another which, in fact, may never come. It's almost like we've run out of ideas...or iterations of the same goddamned ideas we've been squeezing the life out of, like spent tea leaves, for centuries upon centuries.

So here goes...

How long is the wait between trains?

on this platform where oily steams turbulate, wizard-y mists cloak wheels and wire

in this half light that could be dawn

or dusk, there is little point in asking

no one knows or if they do

they will not tell

It can’t be long –moments only- since we stepped off the train that brought us

onto platforms where my train-mates already sleep

curled on benches, slumped on suitcases

even my memory seems asleep when I recall that train,

that brought us here: pictures only, fragments as though

experienced second-hand.

The train tarries; the rails are cold, even the coming of night (or day) seems delayed

time between trains grows wider or time

is frozen, or differs for each traveler

maybe the train will never come or if it does there will be

no room for us who’ve aged too quickly, grown too old

for destinations

(for there are those born between one time and another, for whom there is no future)

I believe a train was meant to come for us as it has

for so many other travelers, since ever before any station was built

so many travelers caught changing trains, to wait in ignorance

of timetables, charts or schedules dismissed as nonsense

there was always a train before, for us,

But maybe not this time

Digital Oblivion At Your Fingertips

Well, break out the luddite hammer because here I am. I suffer from a growing horror at the digital devices that are gradually replacing the art of living.

Now I should mention that I do love computers. I found my calling when PCs became what they are now, and when the internet became ubiquitous. I couldn't function without my cell phone (or so I believe), I love DVDs...etc. I'm not living in a steampunk fantasy or ripped from an Andrew Wyeth painting of bucolic simplicity. But the crisis is that these tools of productivity and entertainment are no longer confined to a place of work or fun, and that was important. Even a laptop is a sort of confinement because it requires a prone position and a WiFi signal, and for most of us an outlet (the battery is brother to the printer in the dreary reality of forgotten tech) since our batteries are little more than ballast within 6-8 months of purchase. Such confinement was important because it kept those technologies on a leash, it gave them a specific place in the pattern of our days and nights. But now, oh ye gods...now...

...we walk around like animatronic mannequins with eyes glued to iPads and iPhones and all their i-clones. We watch movies and play silly games and fritter away entire paychecks on the little digital droppings of the dark side...apps. Our lives are being absorbed into our devices.

Television commercials portray people holding their special little digital tablets in front of them, to block the world and show what is surely a superior 'image' of the world via GPS and mapping and re-rendering and all kinds of other crap. There's one image of a young man who stands atop a stark and majestic mountain, gazing out into an endless panorama of mountains and valleys, escarpments and waterfalls that should boggle the mind and feed the soul. His hair blows in what must be a bracing breeze indeed. But does he revel in this? No. He gets out his iPad and uses some 'app' to change what he's seeing, to manipulate his experience in a thoroughly meaningless way. He's not even there, he's sucked into the vortex of digital rendering; a false front to life. It;s marketed as life improved, but it's a lie; it's life benignly replaced with a hologram. Other commercials show what we see all around us (assuming you raise your head from time to time): entire families strolling clumsily around the zoo or the city or the park, little fingers flickering across keypads, movies being accessed on the fly, shopping being enjoyed without so much as a credit card being pulled from a wallet...all these joys without any tactile involvement whatsoever. Meanwhile, life is passing them by.

What the hell is this all about? Don't get me wrong here...games are awesome, movies are sublime...I love having access to the internet when I need it, but I fear that the frivolous nature of this newer wave of gadgets disarms our warning systems...

WAKE UP PEOPLE! Your imaginations are under attack! Your senses are being filed down to the nub! Put the damn thing away...just for an hour or two?

Some people just have it all worked out...

Tonight I am writing because otherwise I will open my mouth and tell this fellow sitting two seats away that he is an Olympic class yo-yo. I’d like to use a stronger word but let’s just leave it at that. His ‘views’ are almost certainly an amalgamation of Glenn Beck, Limbaugh and all the other gas bags of ultra-conservative radio and TV, which he has re-arranged a bit and called his own.

Let’s call him ‘our friend’. Our friend here is trying to impress some unfortunate woman by spouting a series of platitudes about why universal healthcare in a mistake, why he will suffer if it is passed, and why essentially the rest of the world are a bunch of lazy pigs because they don’t have comfortable incomes from their comfortable jobs at P&G (I happen to know he is employed there). He is proposing the same old tired argument that anyone on welfare or unemployment is a bum and deserves their fate, and that anyone who doesn’t have solid healthcare and everything else they need is merely someone who isn’t trying hard enough. People such as our friend with a college education and every advantage like to assuage their upper middle-class guilt by assuming that they had to work as hard as anyone else to get what they have. They don’t resent the advantages that their skin color, their gender and their privilege give them, but they resent the hell out of a single dime that “their taxes” pay into to charity or any sort of government program that is designed to help people less fortunate than themselves. Our friend pontificates that to create a socialized health care system would bring everyone down to “mediocrity”, and parroting out the usual sweeping platitudes that socialized health care is only one step away from Stalinism. He maintains that since he works for his health care (or so he believes), he has earned a higher level of medical attention. Hmm. This is nothing short of saying “I have more money, I deserve better.” Our friend supports his position by pointing out that Great Britain’s healthcare system, for example, has plenty of “issues” (his word). But he doesn’t in fact mention any of these issues…almost certainly because he doesn’t know anything about Great Britain’s healthcare system. He just heard that idea somewhere out there in easy-answer-land and since it supported his cookie-cutter opinion he absorbed it into his litany of unsubstantiated claims.

What I have to ask is ‘why’? Why is it that people who don’t seem to take exception to the trillions of dollars being spent on foreign wars will still carp endlessly about every dollar spent on people who are losing their jobs, or whose jobs won’t offer them healthcare? Just the slightest bit of research would reveal to our friend that nearly all the unemployed right now are not crack-dealing crime urchins or lazy slobs glued to daytime television and smoking doobies. Sure there are welfare freeloaders, but aren’t there also trust fund babies who never work a day in their lives because their way is paid for them? As far as character goes, what’s the difference between the two? Why does our friend think that it’s simply a choice for everyone to get everything they want? That fate and luck and starting position and so many other factors don’t determine our lives just as much as his Hemingway-esque determinist claptrap?

Why can’t our friend understand this? Because if he did the whole rationale for his comfortable life would unravel in an instant. Because like some of our other fellow citizens, he is thinking only of himself and not willing to give up even a sliver of his comfort so that so many more can at least stay warm, fed, and maintain a few scraps of dignity…and he hides that selfishness behind a veneer of well-informed moral outrage. But sadly, it’s just a set of blinders so he can continue to live the way he wants without worrying about the facts.

the madness of the king

Okay, so today some guy went nuts in Dallas. Started bellowing with the clearest voice he’d ever known in his life, something about the Truth. Something about waking up and seeing the filth of his life and the path of lies he’d always followed. What does any of it matter, he raged, if it’s based in a lie; just another staged reality to poison the world, just another black vapor to choke on. The atmosphere of our collective world can only hold so much. These stinking opaque clouds won’t dissipate without great effort…and there are so many of these vapors floating like demons through our days. Will that atmosphere soon overflow and destroy us? He knows his epiphany sounds like madness but with the genuflection of the reawakened he persists in his vision, which only increases the perception of his madness in the eyes of the sleeping robots around him. It’s not that he doesn’t care –he does-, it’s just that he cannot cross back over to where he was, it is in fact the whole point: it would be a betrayal of his own heart, which he has realized he is utterly incapable of ever doing again.

This didn’t actually happen today. It didn’t happen in Dallas, or maybe it did, probably it did. Probably it happened in a dozen cities around the world, or a thousand cities and small towns and army encampment; in grocery stores and shopping malls and corporate office complexes, wherever people come together to perpetuate the society they adore but do not understand. The point is that it does happen, it happens all the time even if we don’t hear about it. Even if we’re more interested in the judgment of our favorite contestant on TV’s newest sensation, or the fluctuating price of gasoline, it happens. We are all going mad, one at a time, or in bunches. Our world has increasingly turned into a poisonous environment of lies, betrayal, murder and subterfuge. But of course, what has changed? Wasn’t Egypt like this, or Mandarin China…even in the Quaker communes people slept with each other’s wives and put hemlock in each other’s morning coffee to settle rankling grudges. What’s different now? What is different now is the wealth of rationalizations we have for inviting murder into our homes, for selling it and dressing it up as something necessary and honorable, or at least excusably profitable.

That’s what he was yelling about in Dallas, and the woman in Utah, the high school principal in Provo, and the cop in Pittsburgh. They’ve all lost their jobs, of course, and will find their ways into a byzantine labyrinth of “help”: pills and hospitals, twelve-step programs. The pills designed and dipped into that poison by the same criminals they were raging about. The programs and seminars that drove them to madness to begin with. Now they’re thrust back into the vapor and there they will wither. Not just ignored but in fact hidden from the rest of us, lest we get a glimpse into the kernel of truth that fueled the urgency of their message.

Here’s a thought: what if they’re right? What if some of them aren’t six shades of loony but rather finding themselves confronted inescapably with the truth and finding the courage to let it out, to free themselves from the terror that keeps our lips screwed tightly together, only opening to furnish prescribed responses? What are we doing then? Are we calling them crazy while we ensure the survival of our own collective insanity? If not, if we are so sane, then why did that man go crazy today in Dallas? If it wasn’t today, it’ll be tomorrow, you can be sure of that. It might be me, or it might be you bellowing in the clearest voice you’ve ever known, that the Truth has found you at last. And it will be the rest of us telling you you’re mad and packing you off to a medicated limbo. Good luck.

don't take my word for it

Seeking to describe beauty is a dangerous thing, it often leads into a marsh of predictable phrases, the lines of another artists’ vision broken into pieces to fit your own, or those of a culture’s tamed and tired standards. You can flit through the indexes of your memory, retrieving phrases or color swatches from favored artists and creating a thoroughly unsatisfying pastiche, calling it art, and perhaps this is a grand sort of test: if you are in fact satisfied with your abominable Frankenstein of art-shards, then most likely you were not truly moved by any new beauty, since being pleased with such an unpalatable and unoriginal expression of that beauty, and the stamp it supposedly made on your spirit, is evidence enough that no true stamp was made. When you are struck by beauty, truly struck to the center of yourself, you’ll know it and artist or not you’ll endure the frustration of seeking an original expression worthy of that beauty: you’ll face sleepless nights and a mind like a mad tangle of crossed wires. The artists are usually the first to get there, if even they succeed, of which there is no guarantee, and some few other stragglers arrive exhausted but lit up like fireflies with the joy of release, of harmony. They have found a suitable voice for their heart’s healing, and in some few cases, it is enough.

The frustration doesn’t truly begin until you’ve thrown out all of your first useless attempts at expression, since the process itself is what can, if you’re fortunate and persistent, lead to the truth. Only by sheer luck or unique genius (and often that is not enough) is such expression achieved in the first try. I doubt even the geniuses’ word when they swear they had little difficulty. And the weary souls who’ve been smitten by beauty -a beauty of any kind, by the way- will all tell you, whether they succeeded or not, that what they sought to describe was something very small, not complex nor vast; a kernel of brilliance, perfection. A perfect melody, phrase, color. A glint, a fleeting moment, a blur of movement flickering in the usual chaos. Irretrievable, never to be replicated. In what regularly repeated things is there much beauty beyond prescribed comforts, the numbness of safety or choking banality? So it is that we all, when so smitten, seek somehow to capture it, to learn its secret for ourselves, to heal the sweet wound or at least endure its embrace and understand the whisper it makes to our soul.

Then again, what the hell do I know?

Play time

I played with toy guns when I was a kid, sure. I wanted to play ‘war’ and shoot my friends to pieces from my comfortable perch behind the neighbors’ station wagon. We all used to raise eyebrows in sympathy when one of our friends had those parents who wouldn’t buy them a toy gun. It makes perfect sense to me now. Does that make me a boring old man? It sure as hell sounded ridiculous to me when I was a kid, though. Who knows which mentality was correct? Perhaps when I was kid there was less of a desperate effort at controlling all of my choices and actions as there seems to be today, it’s possible I was able to rationalize back then that whether or not you let your kid play with toy guns made little difference to their viewpoint on what real guns did. Maybe it actually helped give kids a sense of the danger instead of remaining sheltered to the point of ignorance. Maybe I was just plain stupid and wanted to shoot imaginary rounds at imaginary enemies without recourse to the dark reflection of reality that our games possessed.

All I know now is that I am disturbed by the sort of toys that are marketed towards children: highly realistic soldier figures dripping with weapons and military equipment, tanks and artillery pieces that look more like museum-quality replicas than toys. Fighter planes and bombers with little pilot action figures with titles like “Special Forces HEROES”, et al. I guess that’s the part that bothers me the most: the idea that we are teaching kids that it takes an automatic weapon and a combat attitude to make a man a hero. This country, especially over the last five or six years, is saturated with the poisonous idea that simply joining the army makes you a hero. How many young men and women will go and die in foreign lands for the vanity of a presidential administration and the greed of corporate titans? How many will have their lives ruined because they think that they’ll be heroes by lifting a rifle and pulling the trigger? So naturally I wonder how many children will grow up with this mentality, how many future soldiers are we creating?

The next thing that occurs to me is that nothing has changed, it’s just more intensified right now: We’re still marketing toys to our children that reinforce the idea that we should become a nation where the young women grow up to be baby-factories and home-makers, and young men become soldiers. The toy stores shelves are still festooned with toy ovens and cribs and strollers, ‘realistic’ baby dolls that shit themselves on command…and in the boys’ section it’s floor-to-ceiling planes and guns and combat knives (plastic, of course), hand grenades and military paraphernalia.

Of course the toymakers are out for a buck, I don’t fear some grand cabal of toymakers meeting in secret and planning to corrupt the lives of children on presidential edict. What I’m worried about is the atmosphere of children being poisoned with the thought, in part by the toys they play with, that it is a glorious fate to kill and destroy or stay home and make babies; that these are the best choices for them. After all, the value of play for children has been well known since the dawn of civilization. That’s how, for instance, lions teach their cubs to hunt and kill prey….just to make a point.

.

Something Else

There are times, and they are not infrequent, when I feel an urgency to define what it is I seek or, more to the point, what might seem worthy of seeking. For me, at least. So what is it? Goddamnit there must be something more than money or sex or fame, all so fleeting and all of which can be taken from you as easily as given. Surely it isn’t religion, such as it is described, for that has always left me emptier than when I began. If God is out there, he has long ago turned his gaze from me.

Is it some amalgam of these things?

I must be mad to think there is something else, must’nt I? These things I have named above have given shape to humanity’s cravings and quests since time has been recorded and, it is to be assumed, even further back in our murky past. Might it not be an utter waste of time to seek beyond the limits that we ourselves have determined through eons of success and failure, exultation and despair, satisfaction and disappointment? Perhaps it’s even arrogant to assume that there exists something which I could see that others have not.

But who says others have not? What if, not being able to give it a name, or a shape, these others have simply given up? What if they have in fact named it, but were misunderstood or simply a poor hand at expressing themselves? Yet I don’t think it matters much what has come before. Not now, not in this case. All that matters is that there are times when I truly feel that the satisfactions of the flesh, and those few barren pursuits offered for the soul, are so flimsy in comparison to what might be out there, or within, for the seeker determined and open-minded enough. Religions and spirituality are, for me, a deliberate desolation of the soul designed to replace the warmth of our inner fire with the phantom heat of a distant force, a godhead whose inscrutability is for some inexplicable reason wholly accepted by its proponents. I’m not just picking on Christianity here, or the creator-god religions. I have found little more solace in the earthier varieties; pagan or Buddhist meanderings just to name a couple, though I cannot say I have ever delved too deep into any of them. But this scrap of sanity I have held on to: That I trust my own judgment when a thing fills my soul with dread or ennui, or that I know that I am simply not fit for it. This is, sadly, ever my reaction to such “spiritual paths”, when shown to me in earnest.

Surely I have my own set of flaws in this endeavor, I cannot pretend that I don’t and I can’t see how it would profit me to do so. Probably I am too reluctant to ascribe to anything due to the husks of past attempts scattered behind me. I see so many who say they have changed their lives with this pursuit or that belief system, and yet to me they seem as fragile and scattered as before they began, as anyone else for that matter. If they have not gained from it, if they have not grown, then what worth can it be?

I do not say that there ‘must’ be something else. I simply hope there is and that I might be lucky enough to discover it. For the record, I wouldn’t keep it to myself, for in finding such a thing how could I not want to at least quietly show it to others? Though often that ends in being tied to a stick and barbequed for my trouble. Ah, what the heck. It’s worth a try.