1000 OAKS, AT Home, And Abroad back in '87

****To give praise is the Good thing, to rejoice I am reached. The Other Shore, or the Big Convivencia, which are one thing--a passport to being as alive as any- when what your feeling is is that you've gone alone and at the present-bearing behest of who was the indicator of what lies beyond... Now my very conscious map is a clear view of too many opaque soft-machines, me falling through the arms of embrace--lost in what no longer preserves my sanctity. One Heart, One Mind, No Meaning (if plans are foiled), No Creator--(if we thought? something Otherly compelled us to act), Heart open, Light Mind, Step.***Just watched the rest of American Splendor. When I read Pekar's comic that had made up his narrative when he committed to the yiddishkeit (Jewishness) as his topical dis-ease, I happened to have been reading the same author. Eroticism in our DNA, as unstoppable as Dali meant it, had nothing on Isaac Bashevis Singer; think it's called SCUM.
~~~At the end of the bastion of responsibilities, I got out on my porch--across the st. from my work, right when I got home , hungry, in a neighborhood just a spit's length off the sidewalk's distance from Nich'ville rd.& played my too brightly colored djimbe. The river of sight had margins of wheels on pavement reporting like the Other Shore had more convivencia than the passport of my willow and lightning-wounded-big-tree before me. Didn't play long, but at least my pulse was skank mode by the time I was done. If we believe folks like Richard Gere are real chumps, the fact is that they are impressed with beauty, whether liturgical or otherwise...they're motivated & I can catch the vapors from that. His book called Pilgrims, a big coffee table thing, is where I got the above statement with a litttle bit of my variant in parenthesis--& at the beginning of the phrase One Heart, Mind is a Rasta or I suppose sense of biblacy rhetoric. Tho' in the end saying NO CREATOR & NO MEANING, is damned therapeutic--has value.
*~* I have to say, when I was in THousand Oaks CA. where my bro lived, and I was toting books back from their bookstore, it is a sense that I see now, that I am rooted to the constituency with folks like you...in a kind of "independent" mindfulness, the way we meet the world. I see it in the dusty corners of my mind in this immanent domain, man. Fact! I look at these broad-scape images from merely reconciled visits to some place mundane yet decidely a loci-unknown, and advance the placating mind unto discernment as these places gain meaning laterally from my hodge-podge moments as I surfaced there & amongst. Just taking things apart--so that I feel as if I am projected into consciousness in its varied physical sense, & gotten a message from my path all-through. I hope that makes sense--it is my only recourse to a life lived less than zero. In *~~Oxford: Sitting out by a church courtyard, across from a man in a wheelchair. He dranks 3 bottles of wine, just tippin em back, that I witnessed. The strangeness of the environs had the evident bubble of experience around me on trial. Kept finding the liminal moment. Like home--in contentment, but distance traveled said strange translator faces looking past me. I'm peering thru turquois rimmed sunglasses--the weather is a lot like this morning, coolish & the sun on the rise. My motive was to coalesce around something there in Oxford that would be my power-spot... & then to commence to study Yiddish, which was an evaporating center. My professor came cavorting by, noticed me--asked me that shouldn't I be in class. To which I just muttered something about getting caught-up, & not feeling well... The yet bland institutions--libraries, classroom bldgs, registration offices etc--still had the techni-color academician world that divulged a history of knowledge that I wanted to reckon about Jewish Eastern-European life--these places were head-waters. What I wanted in learning Jewish ideas til then were what I felt needed to be adulterated by something that consigned motive upon the more grounded apposite study. So, Rastafarian thought was the thing I felt indicated a seive that would make the Jewish effulgence more particularized. To make reference to the repository of Jewish lit in Mom's bookcase at home, was the microcosm of a more immense plan for this Ideal. My Zadeh had a book by Scholem Aleikhem called Tevye's Daughters (where Fiddler on the Roof comes from), --Mom had something of a span of Jewish authors, including him in The Jewish Caravan--a piece taken from his book The Song of Songs. So I finally went and found this book, which is a mystical endeavor--even for me, as aloof & stale as I've become . The boy, who is our protagonist, with his cousin, & she'd be the Shulamit, together they run through the hills of an eastern European setting outside their village--& they decide picking barley greens for Shavuot would be their task (Shavuot is known by X-tians as Pentecost). My question for this woman living in Israel, I emailed about 2 months ago, is: what does this reference for this holiday--oh, and this may be really dumb, but do we call it a "hag?" I guess I am curious because the eastern European of dank vistas, and lost continuity for our religion's survival, has light at the end of those days, and how things are celebrated in Eretz Yisroel (Land of Israel) leaves me wondering if this fragmented history is attenuated? I remember my Rabbi here in Lexington Ky, as we students learned chumash (bible), said our pronouciation could be Sefardic (Middle Easterner) or Ashkenazi (European)--whatever we chose is fine. So, in my less than detailed way I tried to say "tav" (one of the letters for "T") rather than sav, etc. (written the same, but pronounced "S" rather than "T," or sometimes "Th," I've seen in transliteration. Sav is Ashkenazi!) But, in the end, I know next to nothing about the diversity we could embrace, hence my question. By the way, I am so not religious, but consider myself a ready student for Jewish mysticism and the more. Zalman Schacter-Shalomi was first introduced to me in a read called "The Jew in the Lotus." He'd been to see the Dalai Lama with a JEwish delegation discussing our success as a community having lived in exile, but primarily the book was a Kabbalistic study. To the head of Babylon, this would be what I reach for (mysticism, I mean) at the expense of jettisoned ambience.