Identifying Islam, With Judaism--as a Jew

You may question after reading this, how could he LOve "blankety-blank blank," & why does he defy identity calling himself blah this & blah that? The reason is that--what I love is not contingent upon commonalities of presumption, but rather the patterns in revolutions in thought. If I'd divorced knowledge from thought, I'd have faith: but I reckon the womb of understanding (is this the seferah Binah?) is arisen by whatever label we give it! **I added to this just to clearUP some concepts. In the example of etymology in a recent debate w/a friend, he mentioned the consonantal root to Kaddosh..., but just because a word has more involved in its telling, the very articulation=guttural, he said, doesn't seem to imply that it can't be older than its more prefigured context. (meaning yeah it still could be older) Aum is old, changing the subject, but a complex whistle is just as antediluvian in the broader aged-world sense, askew to just the biblical. I mean just before the before of the bible & axial age. According to K. Armstrong--& I read it in a couple of her books--kaddosh is defined as Separateness--it is like our word existential. (QDS is its root; contemporarily think al-Quds, Jerusalem.) This is the feeling the Priest imbibes in the inner sanctum of the Temple. This ancient word probably predates El & Baal & Marduk etc, tho' was used in co-ordination w/these gods. You must get Armstrong's book, A History of G-d. That in gnosticism Logos is stretched to fit the personal ascension of said adherent, is only one aspect of what mysticism would be defined by--the direction this post is going in. She speaks about all trads. (what we'd expect!). In its array, I dreamt about Islam last night, telling a Muslim that the shirt I wore was not meant to offend. They proscribed their right to wear things that may chip away at what we'd assert as the Compassionate Edifice in our Paths, if we did the same to them. There was laughing, adrogyne (funnily) with the women in Americana social situations, yet probably just palpable only to me--I adduced. I definitely felt answerable to these Believers--these Faithful on the other hand, because in the end this is most elusive to care about at what point we'd meet at the equinox of the minds, making all asunder part of the answer, rather than the problem. In Islam the idea of a concealed community, not making outward remarkable & observable actions that may bring harm to the ulema--community of the faithful (a real practice), is instructive in the covert & cryptic office I obtain in the "feeling" that I too am a Muslim...in a converse way & in other cases a Hindu. (the thing that flew into my head as if I never consciously turned toward it--but felt a draw to an Ideal--not really any Cleric's calling as such, but an ideal. Which I bet thru your studies so bespoke of an integration of Middle-eastern types?) Now obviously, perhaps, I know no Muslim rituals, wouldn't "witness" to their ideology--but reckon the commonality in the uses of language. Think Moses ben Maimon here, when he said other trads that speak of our prophets are also educational to us, & should "if possible" be indulged in. Hindoos figured prominently in what I read in The Guide to the Perplexed (that one excerpt)--still Islamism would be the more obvious, but I simply haven't come across it in extant (except from Geniza docs). Talking to a man who heralds the masses as one vast organism, has me sing out I Love Islam--in the dream. I can't get to that-without steps having started w/Judaism. But Judaism doesn't typically paint broad strokes to tolerate a world imbued otherwise w/responsibilities toward the Ideal in other faiths!! ...yet I do, & my Jewish identity isn't left behind. So if it isn't me actively leaving behind the obvious choice in my spiritual progress, then in meeting what is foundering at the edges of Jewish Thought has relationship in DreamTime.

Unlettered Just When: Hai, Hai Gandhiji

Before I was working regularly, back around, I think '96-'97, I'd go over to the Univ. of KY's stupid cntr & read. This was a communal activity for me. I felt encumbered enough, maskless enough--to coin a word, that it didn't matter the weight of fantastic individuals as Gandhi or also some solemn Judeo-Arab, who I would characterize as subjectively as possible, as a relief thru identity--making up new fleeting personas. The halls of the new part of the Student Cntr seemed plain-like, where intelligence could freely roam & the older part had a dusty too well-worn quality, appositely I was looking at study as being a new vocation which nothing could mar & embellish=the well had no bottom & my sorrow had no end-time, so I looked at immediacy, nothing more. During one loud cicada-filled Summer's afternoon my translating face ever watchful & made-up of "sighs, glances, & whispers" (Potok's words, in IN the Beginning), I thought I was glimpsing behind a veil which thence exposed a hard-souled reciprocal look upon me - the observer was observed! The face looking back was a not so diminutive Gandhi, now a wakeful giant in the MInd's Eye, & fear that I would effortlessly be defined by a tableau-rasa, without a constituent baby step into the blue of yellowing pgs, would ensure all academic, school-of-life efforts had come to nothing. I can only say that I must have been looking at an individualized icon of self hitherto unseen. Gandhi was a womb of knowledge, whose night-watcher was guard-like personas I'd dream at the periphery of my 4 cornered room. Easily Mother India, as head-waters in religion siphoned across continents: Gandhi held my heart Open, light to my Mind, & the step it was to take to find the menu I read off of for so long thru intra-mantra slavery, whose service was thence broadened in its proffer in diet-as-consciousness. This piece is delivering me thru images, probably the persons I find in the corners & shadows of the rooms I occupy. When I was in Jerusalem the first time, I imagined the world stocked w/spirits--clouded by jinns & ophans=which are wheels that make a room conceived of as that of shapeless angels making our conscious space manifest. Down by the washing machines, it was December--I'm there at the yeshivah for 10 days, & my cousin has been at her yeshivah then yr round... I want to hug her, but wholeness in my piercing what is conventional to most, this contentment!! was cheerless--& well (Orthodox) women don't touch men non-matrimonially. I watched what I saw, that the world had gotten fragmented, & I was scurrying for the details, but that the big picture was better for perspective about religion, self-realization!! because to enter into its arms of erudition meant giant steps, not mental langour=this thing that shoves me clear into the grey...& makes me look for anything I can for collusion of mental anguish (grasping=dukka in Sanskrit)/this effort & corporeal heated condition of forced thought.

Yeah, that Other World

People living in contradistinction of ourselves: The characterization of our old neighborhood had everything to do w/the surface viability of the known. That being I felt ever maintained that people constructed themselves thru appearances & the motility of their recourses around me as assurances they were in comfortable cognizance, all terribly assumed. Then when I spiraled into a solitarian lapse from the crowd, not only was being becoming reductive, but life's entirety became eventful in constant yet more disparate notions. A desert or void of Non-being, maybe spirit world w/only a few evidenciary facts. This narrative is One. = I have sought keys to opening up dormant chambers of the vital norm: meaning, those who live at our periphery--sometimes--see us as mere shadows. And as a shadow I've had the reality of a spirit world open up to me w/out being in the currency of the norm we typically attenuate. My nephews were out pitching baseball. The arc of the ball went barely over my head, & yet they didn't cease or acknowledge me coming between them--more, as I walked past, it was apparent our varied autonomy would not be breached at all. I got to the edge of the yard where they stood, into the neighbor's drive, placed my hands as if upon a ledge, & hefted myself into the air--while a dozen hands across this transparent surface countermanded my repose. I was conscious of the fact that I COULD stand upon this "ledge" & walk up into the adjacent tree...but from there, there was a sense of no-return. So simply, the momentary mid-air posture wasn't acknowledged by the boys, thence I jumped down walking past them again & back into the house. Just like the last few pieces of a puzzle, before I had stepped out of the house initially, I had known that my presence was in somekind of existential pocket. The look into some Cosmic niche first was just the purveyance I could assume from the details of wall decor to the wall's blemishes: obstacles as conduits into broader spatial reality. Distances as vast as a continuum intervening in-place of the immediate physicality, now was hinting at something portending to be bridgeable. & Full-On I wanted to beckon the spiritual nomenclature as I knew only a few other times would access be solvent. Figuratively, I just want to Bomb-Atomic until the next load. But that begs the question, what kind of factors in my environment will offer themselves up to my lowly existence, that I may breach the autonomy this mystically concealed reality has me chained to. Ignorance is concealment, but meanwhile we see that quality of our unknowing as a deficit to fill w/substance. Most people's problem is to fill it up w/self-preservation at the expense of being prone to transition & impermanence. Things go away, so we equal it by assuaging release, & feeling all the better that we hadn't clamored for consciousness. I got news for the unawake, consciousness is there to be won. And the death of one's spirit by dulling down DIFFERENCES that give life this wonderful path, is ridicule of this One World, defrauded by complexity & stress & consumate pain from desire. Truth is In the World, it is an answer outside of us...meaning we have to seek it. UNtil we make observations that consciousness is as much a satellite on our way from point A birth to point B rebirth, we will see ourselves one against the Outward fact. We visit consciousness just as we visit the post office or anywhere else that makes up the pattern of the music we call life in its myriad alliterative path. Consciousness is Outside of us. We scale this Cosmc House--this edifice that is our ever-goal to clothe our souls within.

The Hearth & Dragon at my first Home--some dream

In light of studying--its provenance--I can read Hebrew characters (masoretic), know some vocabulary, but to the point, have thought & meditated on Arabic, just as if it were on the table of scholarship as one imagines Bernard Lewis perhaps going thru evolutions & even convolutions til he saw this language as just as necessary as the Aramaic & Hebrew he'd already acceded-to in proficiency. I dreamt of my cousin's husband, she is a rebbitzen therefore he is a rabbi. He'd begun intently only recently at the time to study Aramaic. In the dream, we stood in my brother's room adjacent to the family room containing the fireplace. As if the ashes were subject to the outdoors, bricks were removed from the back of the grill & cool winter winds mingled thru our basement. Mark's Esher-esque mural in its conveyance dominating the psychic-theme of my early morning vision. I'd presumed it was a Sefardi Jew upon the flying carpet in its eternal loftiness & his view thru a window as out of a wall in a castle, but instead placed in a fold of the carpet. A dragon (leviathan?) to one side of him with maybe a terminating lotus-hand gesture. And to his otherside , the sprawl of a tree, like an axis mundi of the painter himself--I easily imbibe. The rabbi says to me, "read from your siddur (prayer book)!!" Well, it is regularly my motivation to do this--this is perhaps that interval in a few month period when I pick it up. So looking at the script, it may be kufic, but I don't know any Arabic characters, of course. Plainly his nod meant that seeking a teacher to diminish the worry that Judaic thought would lessen if only in my mind--needed a symbol that in fact it wouldn't. Admittedly consciously, I never felt disloyal to things-Jewish if only to study Islamic civilization. (I had one class at the Univ. of Ky, & continue with Goitein, Bernard Lewis, Edward Said *some*, Norman Stillman, Joseph Guttman etc.) But to personify the ideal, was to have some sense of a melamed as the FIRE that I've drawn ever closer toward. It all should be. I don't think that my solitarian home-life is a Promise= these kind of dreams emanating from this refuge--and then fulfilment=the kind of hindsight that I've gotten somewhere with an ideal in finding my mystics in another Arabia, as Kerouac puts it. In that its enormity is become reductive to me in a moment seeing in my mind's eye THe Tiamat, or the Arabian Tiamah cleaved into two=the void now making up a horizon beginning w/the sky above me & the earth at my feet. Marduk had done the cleaving with his great knife, perhaps. Tiamat is to the Hebrew tehom, as this tale is proto-semitic becoming our myth in Genesis (Bereshit). Or in this case a wilderness in a babel of lost tongues with only the language ladder of self-educated presentiments.

From Kerouac, to Afro-Asia, & then dreaming Burroughs

In Kerouac's book Big Sur, Kerouac had walked down to the beach & tried to become conveyed by the ebb & flow & splash. He's coming off the mt. figuratively & momentarily in this intellectually enterprising solitude--meaning the Noumenon that is the source of Our intellectual prowess is going to carry him until his demise. This occurred when walking back from the ocean on a path that passes a stand of trees in which he particularly like to meditate. He sits & waits for instruction that surely is his-only as one's loneliness allows. But there he sees the "ancient rosy colours" behind his eye-lids & w/out its portents--look what has done that to him. If our self-realization was orthodoxy we'd be turning toward something rather than away. The void within sought to obliterate itself. On the other hand, I really think I got the "time" on this thing that Jack Kerouac proffered in On the Road. He says, "for just a moment I had reached the pt. of ecstacy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, & wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, & the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, w/a phantom dogging its own heels, & myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off & flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent & inconceivable radiancies shining in bright mind essense.... I was too young to know what happened." In view of the mystic approach--my experience was Gershom Scholem's texts on the Kabbalah. I've deliberated upon them since I was 15, I turned 42 a few days ago. I remember lying on the floor, trying to gather the imminent FACT as if sounds-arriving--traffic close by, house settling, birds...whatever would convey me to what Now seems to be What Then I was illustrating in my mind as ascendant chambers, called hekhalot. This is what we might call HigherGround & I'd say every excellently translated Rumi poem draws our attention to these particulars, meaning we are at once temporally grounded--moments later, perhaps, we find that we can reflect What-Is=the experienced-Forms, or in the Jewish Mystic sense, energies called seferot. A weird mental apostacy--run for the exit type existence or fantastic illumined escape, because better-Now than-Ever occurred to me in Fustat looking at what I was told was the oldest synagogue in Cairo. Ravens appearing on my shoulders in my convalescense around the ancient histories of an ent het enheh belief (the castle of my Eternity, in Egyptian), like it was parallel to what I solemnly try to be objective about. So rather than assume our unique history, I wanted to be in the presence of it--the Geniza (domestic memory store) referenced Jews since 1200 yrs ago. This new cultural Roof was an African Sun from white heat to roseate, & leaving fly-ridden langour in our minds as if we were equally as ubiquitous & yet expendable, trying to land on noble purposes for the puzzle of a meritable adventure to lend expression. Burroughs seems to be my cosmogony as Egypt is to an alchemically mindful protagonist dealing with mortality. His book Exterminator has 1 story w/the use of pyretheum--an insect agent used in woman's house whose son had died some yrs before. These introductory moments has his (Burroughs') character sit in the son's very chair where perhaps a 1000 of his lives have passed on. The tweezed out lives in filth-real or in mind, like bugs skewered for consumption, figuratively, filters into images of the 6th floor hostel I stayed in in Cairo. Woolen-filled mattresses, no shuttered window--just a door size opening to the oily air of a city riven of dust & desert. Looking down to the street below, we watched a young man in modern attire chase a weasel down down the street whomping it like a futbol. Malaria was a threat we wondered about, as if our shots would fail & yield to the fantastic universe a world apart from any 1rst world preparations. The muezzin hollarin' & throaty incantations we could tune into on the jam box--all a language whose lexicon was as real as the eliminated solace of our motherTongue in reprimand of our American passport functionaries (etiquette)--seems to be something thrown rt. out the door. The internationalism we assumed 'til then had pathos graffitti'd in roughShod ways across this society at the pains of over-population--should have ethnic definitions apropos for this N. African country just how Linton Kwesi Johnson means it saying that it is the chocolate hr of the red bulb, a stain in the brain & the blood flow. The dreamt Burroughs, was my seeing what striving scenario my sub-conscious comes up with, as we were discussing my book--it was that ephemeral. The thing that took my undivided attention was the whiling away moments looking at the 2 opened pgs which had like-colored balloons with scratched writing in them. They said things like G-d is in Prison; G-d is in Exile; G-d spoke & two things I have heard; & if G-d is On-High then every other place is left vacant. Some had lengthier things said in them, but it was hard to digest as everything--see this--everything was in flux. A subjective view of G-d had been a particular persuasion of Weisel's, imparted to me & the impression was made. So toward the notion of mystic endeavors as dreamscapes in self-security, in conclusion, the imminent G-d is actionable thru "the breaking of the vessels," a Kabbalistic notion where G-d recedes from his-self making room for the Godhead=Adam Kadmon/ primordial man, & the ultimate recipient of "this expression"--humanKind. A word anthem for an alliterative trek.

REd Flying past contentment

Surmising the plain hearth, I gathered the concept of having sought release with the musicians I ran with, now yrs ago. The mayhem tree (as such I dubbed) down on campus seemed to be transition in place, of place, allowing me to yield to the CURRENCY of norm, which I now objectify for its strangeness--it's all good, I feel--nothing to prove. Now there is nothing outside of me, drug or otherwise which has a distance strung toward the box Others fill with contentment, that I can't do myself with the florid hyperstatic way my life flows now. I am movement, life's grand reward, a positivist's momentum. Why I sense my concealment at all, as it has never changed, is almost beyond realization: I could be scaling the exterior of this life's edifice--a house, wanting to get in--or already confined to some "bamot" (immemorial worshipped space) w/expectations on par w/the cosmic. Either way I am buffered by exaltation. Lit nerves of floods raising the proximal to mere reference points that used to be so distant invents the psyche as the appearance of yet another satellite. If I only had the advantage of goal orientation, the conscious map I miss out on is all the past langour 'til now the ever present. It seems thru real focus if I intentionally takes my eyes off the ball for only a moment, then all the stimulation around me, like the hum of traffic, the fans of my computer, noises countered off of the immoveable= all go through me at light speed. But I'm looking off still, so my wave of thought is still body conscious of slo-fi. When kabbalists are acceding to higher chambers of belief & knowledge, it is due to their concealment that they can bury the heart of the "other-side"--the sitra arkha. I am the convergence of wanting in & getting Out. I know that a man who had his senses wrenched thru either his own fault or ultimate suffering, had only the blue empyrean to thank, or a tree, the smell of breakfasts, the laundry smells wafting thru the suburban-scape--had no abiding & gave no thanks to streams of social interaction, which could not suffice for his longing. If the ulterior self is the "house" on the otherSide, to revisit it is done in the sense of scenarios we've build up & made affable, like a job, coffee shop, shopping cntr, apartment--et cetera! People I have known sometimes fly into my wonder, & I seek the fulfillment of imagination, kind of instructing the sense we are all present in the threshold of the day, at that very moment. The thing I felt I saw, at once by the house I grewUp in, was ephemeral imaginary of my dad, but only in that that something was taking place under the frontYard tree. I imagined an elliptical hand-held mirror, kind of hovering as if it was held before a face allowing for a look into what was behind the statement of my projection=me walking by an appended identity of my father.

A stain in the brain, & the blood flow. Electric lights consoling

The title is borrowed lyrics from Linton Kwesi Johnson. Niggun is the Hebrew term meaning the intonation of prayer-speak...it is the "chocolate hour of the red-bulb." (LKJ)
This essay below is all the assessment from the convolutions of my manOwar attitude even unto going right up & steeling consciousness back from the side of me hiding in meditations. Babylon, the word, means "gate of the gods." Babilui is a more accurate transcription. Had that there was a mean where I live from its grasp, this much I know, that the cool waters of consciousness is WithOut. That is where it "falls." The feeling that comes to a meet & greet of the struggle to maintain within its grasp is the heat of thought coming to my eyes as I seek to reconcile the view outside my window framing the days past. The beginning to my effort, as beginnings go--some strange motive seemed allied & possible. In effect that I could look at my limbo appearance. The first mystery availing the existence I scrutinized thru some Hindu-query of body consciousness beneath the the rung or limb I was then pinned on, was a multi-armed self ambulating as if I had maneuvered to maintain surface affability. I meditate on Lee Perry's reggae electronica primitive beats & lyricism. I had noticed a clef in my brow, a first visual=just a visual of shadowy self, which fortunately I was aware that images would transition & only up until the point of observation/assessment. It was & is just creating a sense of fluid movement casual non-compliance w/a set way of administering to a day's embrace, or its lack of embrace...! It isn't any formal understanding of posture, visualization, mantra et cetera: eg Aum would have been a lack of embrace, no observation of release so, I decided on Aum tic Sat toc Tot teac. Thinking that soon I'll do something creative has immediacy written all over it. In fact by thinking it, I'm not even in process. Just to conceptualize "wanting" to be in good presence of mind becomes incindiary, as in the words book or mysterion, which sits on the floor of consciousness & I have to admit I'm merely a potential. Hebrew got heavy like this. I had already sped thru the silence of a few Hebrew prayers, which were typified as Un-Eastern (which they're kinda not un-Eastern), & unfortunately ungravid from a kind of refuted familiarity. As of now I believe in liquid skies and expect a sad man to stand up in my eyes.

Saturday indicating the MusicScene's Embrace=WRFL

Monk-like in the final yrs in the house where I lived for 27 yrs, growing up was a Mutual Arising of the look of self supernally--but rarely if only on this one occasion. Now writing this, the hr seems late. Wakeful dreams, but nothing special, just a feeling in my eyes as if the room is in a mirror in my eyes--& this may be all the look of Higher Self I am permissed. I recorded a session of bongoPlaying primitively & laughable, but the measure of the pt. was to grasp the affable look into certain recesses of the day that had otherwise eluded me. If Babylon was falling, I met it at the door, there in my room radiating light in my concealment, with my weight leaving impressions in the blue carpet from the 60s beneath me. My concern was that the peak of a solitarian day made observable--the very crescendo like an arc of the Sun we screw, & thus being not late for it. The patternic bongo beats telegraphed in a conversation I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear what I might otherwise say if only to be neither the habit of self, but recognizable as an ally in time. This claim to division of self was what the crowd enjoined me to grasp the solitude again now with them as one-Body. (April 26th 2008) I could have stood there all night, but alas at 42--as of next month, the recreated intensity all dithery toward the mundane & the norm of weariness is refocused seeing Tony Briggs in the crowd. (& I had thought & meditated on his person(ality) some days before, & now glad to see him.) History of the musicScene real &/or ephemeral gets claimed as just the same conversation (=dread & beat) -- actionable but tilted into my subjective cause now=the hr spat it had gotten late. If not for me, then definitely for him--or it would seem--but regretting this summation. Rob & I met him yrs ago & it's not me that I think the rub of acknowledgement was his glance & stride past me as I stood prone to the message makers--these down folks whose scan across the crowd is a conscious-party, whereas I yield to a jumping off point the first time words were exchanged. Tony was at this gathering over by UK's campus--near the fireHouse, & people were milling about in & out of openDoors & plateauing Minds. There was probably 2 yard bags full of herb on the kitchen floor... I said to Rob,"dude, this guy is pivotal in the creative energy in Lexington's musicScene." My oldest brother's words figured prominently. So, Rob & I went & introduced ourselved out front/asking him what he thought of our own bag of shake--would anybody want this stuff? Still all day unto what was called down watching The Apples in Stereo playing wallFlowered auditive power: I thought, "yes me friend we take the streets again." --from B Marley & the Wailers' Burnin' album. In the ethereal way the Rastas interpret urbanTrascendence, like what The Ethiopians sing: One Day We'll Walk the Streets Forever, it is verily idealistic & antithetical that we would & should defy impermanence.

Repeat of some imagery, but I had to mention Crowley this time

Aleister Crowley painted in red letters--in Up-state NY upon a cliff (@ the turn of last century, thereabout)--Do what Thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. (&-granted, he is no example of humility) This would apply had someone made a solemn sacrifice: some grandiose measure of self which we could relinquish because it had become a less than humble factor. Bob Marley said, My Head is My Home. We stand tall wanting the puzzle of thought to complete the experential picture. Krishnamurti calls us out--on this--with a practical sense definition that Thought is Fear. If your rule is Thought as Reprieve, then the "valley of indecision" (somewhat derivative Marley-ism) is around you & you have no Higher Ground!! Sacrifice thought, this side of yourself, if it is a means to your security. The answer is outside of Us...there is no autonomy. A noumenon started with Zadie, as if he were a recipient of long ends of my days spilling headFilled ideas of life back at our original** home. He *had* lived in Up-state Ny & as if life "is one big road w/lots of signs" (B.Marley), then the image of Crowley having put his graffiti up, had Zadie written all over it. If only to bare the sense of accumulated & drab of mind drive there, like at its peak, was all a granted finish to the anticipation the Native American land could wash across my epiphenomenal convalescence in the North. (the point being that the episteme--how we know thought--is only in that we do it!!) Also, the map of being on top of something creates a suspension of Will, & yet the energy of thought was more actionable, than the slow-Fi days wiling away all ahead of me (just hanging, no different than the tangible skies & roof of back home). The narcotic effect-as a heirophant of edenic philosophy, had the glossiness in the obstacles making up my day make me fall into dross matter, as if the corporeal body, this physical soul of mine, had to gesture at an ever wider berth of its langour. Up-state Ny--treed & obsolete in my mind, like boughs of protective limbs in corridors of paths thru woods, was a green uniformity of streams whose surfaces I broke & into the first tentative breath of air in vapors, made breathing seem washed because the integrated moment was vital & fresh. Words complicating, even implicating identity are necessarily limited. As an attribute of Higher Ground, my subjective cause, asking who is the atman self--like Our Maker, is querying an indefatigable question...no end in sight. At the home of my growing up**, I see the ground of being around the house reeled into the leveling out of intellectual effort as I proceed back into repose within (the domecile). The brownstones mentioned in Alfred Kazin's A Walk in the City, a Jew in his environs, lent to me from Wiesel's eponymous Williamsburg NY--as if, & also the name of my street, were the nationalities we'd expect symbolized by one structure then the next--just as my neighborhood grew personalities & prying eyes reflecting my scrutiny, therein ever more.

Mind made-up of a dream-dump

Made reference to Louis Jorge Borges' short story in a dream post, recently. How there is intermediary space, just as his character lies proximal to the forested mantles, but within an ampitheater, in the middle of the gradins progressing outwardly. His intent is to dream a personification of his archetypal self--himself as his own son, I think--maybe in a story called the Circular Ruins...! I'm conjuring this all to suppose just how the psychic strife in night vision avails life's path, but only at the point of convalescense--say from exiting a room, across a threshold--outside of it into a bigger pallet. Somehow toward gaining our strain of objectivity from the loam of mind where in fact we become limited from imagination now arguably the colorless space of marginalized sentient greed--in dream imagery! The point here is that you are still every characterization of time & place, & the beauty of it is that that negative space looses its anthropos conjecture. You've become vibrant properties of sensory activity, say "white noise" --torpidity rather than ambivalence. So, all thru the mischief of three conversations the day before this all hit me, I felt I owed a debt of intensity to some better creative explanate moment==thought battling!!! And then after some reading & the cognitive resources having been once-jettisoned now all in memory reflection & at the ready, I got back to full effect.

Farmland a street over

Thoughts started with Zadie, as if he was a recipient of long ends of my days spilling headFilled ideas of life back at our original home. Frequently I was going down to the creek or out into our backyard to read in seclusion. I see the paradisiacal Ground-of-Being around the house reeled into the leveling-out of intellectual effort as I proceed back for my repose within (the domecile). Sitting on the tiled floor in my unwell-lit room, I attached some significance to thinking formulaically, which left me wondering how vital Wakefulness was. And again, how few the words are in my mind to maintain a sense of this beginning. All beginnings necessarily suggest everything is possible. But for the fear that the new dawn fades is also a beginning, to a din of restraint. I held a Marcus Aurelius book, its covers in shreds, in my desk drawer--my feeling of resigned "fate" to the exudation of these peeling tiles, probably not the stoicism a solitarian existant slacker could call covenantial. Had I looked out of my basement window & felt my way back the day before, it would have been a gathering of the concept of a Yiddish exercise book & hymnal. The standard for its care was my dream: I saw some thought-image of self go to Mom's bookcase & rip the pages from the crease outward. The intention was to dare the watery materiel to come together back from its opposite=this dis/ease. Only one other floor--stone like Israeli architecture demanded (in Petah Tikvah), but cold in the proximal Mediterranean environs, had seized me & moulded a perspective as tangible as a feeling in my eyes that something Jewish, Sefardic, would herald in time-well-spent of the future coming to pass. The furthest reaches of reflection on todays climate--this air, all a thread til then--MaKiNg sense of headwaters in Zadie as concept toward identity he granted me, a hierophant to edenic philosophy! Down by Kenton's Blue Hole, a natural spring, sometimes in tentative breaths I can imagine Now, it was as if I'd just surfaced in a body of water...& into the first breath of air-in vapors that seemed washed because I Was, & the integrated moment is fresh, vital... The narcotic effect of the glossiness in the obstacles making up my day had me fall into dross matter as if the corporeal body, this physical soul of mine, had to gesture at an ever widening berth of its langour. The "brownstones" mentioned in A. Kazin's A Walk in the City,... a Jew in his environs, lent? to me from Elie Wiesel's eponymous Williamsburg, N.Y., the name also of the street I grew up on, were full of the nationalities we'd expect symbolized by one structure then the next--just as my neighborhood grew personalities & prying eyes reflecting my scrutiny, therein evermore.

The Blue Slumber of the Moon-soaked Shade**

If only someone said Now You know everything... This idea comes to me late in the night sometimes--even now trying to reproduce this seems endless & hopeless at the same time. The zeigeist & formalism that heralded the Eastern philo to the West--I suppose--was the interpretation of the triad force of soul in the idea of Body Mind & Expression... usually til this read, what I'm referencing, I had seen that Spirit was in place of Expression. So, it ensued that a correlative was somehow there, but not implied. That in its (this triad) similar use in Jewish Mysticism, RuaKh is used in terms of Spirit, or Emotion & Soul. But, now I've learned it is also the word for Wind--like what swept the world before Light was created ex nihilo. Expression of Taoism fits nicely w/Emotion in the Kabbalistic sense. The climb to limit the langour of Feeling, to transcend it, is learnt from now knowing the Cntr of your awareness is a span of Outward fact beginning w/that illustration in mind that has to be set free. Just to note, what gives me context is that personification--these Western ascetics--somehow are interpreting all the while, making me look askew at something w/manifold truth, but colored in Traditional language/western lexicon--I end up making Amends that the liturgy would be obsolete in the force of its original intent (a Chinese language), so I'd have to play this game of trailing the ecstaticism while demanding a quieter Mind...
**the title from Artur Rimbaud

Before the gate, upon the the door's rib

Seeing how I or anyone gets caught-up in the fray of gratification giving-up to their on-line due, I can't but hit a wall with absolutely no contours...if I want to turn away from it & toward more encumbent Thought in a read from a book. It's like the nemesis of the ubermensch on the boardwalk--he sees the man w/purpose & faces himself momentarily to proove something to him Or not= all & all his motive is bland, but his infirmary is evident because of his desire to run into the ubermensch & stop his momentum. One Sunday am., going to the in-laws for breakfast, the car I follow across the burbs has the sense on offer that he was off into the horizon, into the roseate rising sun, an overt direction meaning multiply. For whatever reason, possibly thru our dissipation, it may occur to us that we at least want a motive--& it is all too clear it manifests looking toward others, because we don't!!--at least it can start there. The abject reflections are a solarity whose sheen contains us but had just set that other car free. And an Otherness-purpose left my manic rumble taking up the rear while embalmed w/the houses at the periphery, confirming my hypostasis. This am. I reach to the cats, in play, & sense I have a varicolored day ahead. Visiting this one image, back on Transylvania ave (a Univ. of Ky's neighborhood, heavily treed, long wide median)--I'm over for a cup of Red Zinger. My brother looks at me, it's concise his bearing is tethered to academia & the filter of my irresponsibility is perhaps this wall w/so few contours: it just takes a glance from the bookish toil he's used to, to gather the simplicity implicit when we (him & now I) have the wisdom of so much of that effort. And leaving that mt-top is rather having our backs to the peak in hesitant moments looking at others or Something that suggests slack reigns. There is something recognizable about finding our footing in Purpose that we-the nemesis of the ubermensch, call our cntr, but now from withOut.

If you fear it, you hate It--if you hate it, You Love It!!

You said it just the way you saw it= it was clearer to you than you thought: watch what you see! The mind always looks at what stands out, so patterns aren't always that obvious; meaning the mind just wants the slope of momentum--so tell it You mean it...there is nothing rhetorical in the mind. You can't just note the experience around you & assume it was then & only then. There is Nothing to turn off, for all our intents & purposes. Say the mantra of What-Is, & your memory will give you a path--if you want it. The whole issue rests, that of my last entry, on one illustrative point: the caricature of white noise as low energy Is just as auctorial (think "actor") as the glitter & spectacle of A-type personalities, like some person booming in your face that the answer is plain, when in fact it may not be, whether they emanate from our ecstaticism & life's fire Or simply we characterize ephemeral moods & subtlety. This is our Out. Thusly, sometimes we observe and barely channel a swath of some vista, so why not be availled of this as our ground-of-Being. I did something & thank whatever Proof was immediate & evocative... I used to wonder at the emotive regrets I'd have & knew that it was only time-developing thru real relationships that could answer for it--it is all existential & the way to fight that fire is thru "masakah"==lighting a fire!! Constant revolution (Ye. Zamyatin) / every breath counts. The revolution will not be televised (the Last Poets)!! This word in quotes is Hebrew--I saw in reference to the Jewish Enlightenment, which could merely be a sea-change, in the human-totality/ Jews watching their worlds disappear (the diminutive implication of sea-change Now might be concentrated to the report of the Whole Ocean's devastating proportions On one people) & deciding they'd better get to the Intellectual & cultural truths of the matter. Enduring from the 1700s til early 20th century, probably unto most Jewish European communities' last= WW II. ** The subject Title is from Zamyatin's book WE, early 20th century.

Here's the ill tip, called Vision

Recently, I reinvigorated my stark motive to maintain On my psychotropic meds. The interval of not taking as much left some creative encumbrance to the presence I defend thru manufactured motive: this is all any one can wish for, in my book. I lept to a limb of extremity Thought, because these absent, confused, reckoning that somehow I'm just not being reached, & definitely existential moments as captive audience amongst these folks I see daily--were the lapses in my reality. Knowing I scramble for answers forth-coming in the natural course of things--is the last thing my mind records before the dark alley gives me fair warning. If stark reality Is to be equalled at all it is in the strangeness of my meditations of youth. I remember being up in that church steeple, close to home, One afternoon, saying to myself, "f*&^ jesus...I'm all about It-- there is no threat-down; Jesus is just alright w/me!" There should have been, in fact, a calm w/the notion that no-fire need be stoked that Yeah, I'm up on a church--others tend to superficial faiths, Mine is now & ain't all this drama. But...! Something said to me then: Go, Learn, then dismiss the peasants--til now Thoughts Rt. as rain as proof seemed to grant (that calm should be ensued), are without the humilty of experience. So, to appeal toward the empirical was to introduce myself to that conflict=merely a blue image, like a face hoping (as in hope) down from up above; an impending caricature of white noise, rather an auctorial moment/ I was on the stage of indifferent chorus' of an indefinite audience, me a millionth of a million souls--had to merge. If its social disfunction, by way of making it worse from LSD, as I did in my 20s, then the ego attenuating this socialism by now is getting old. I'm tired of seeing the protagonist heading for the light. Wu-hsin in the Tao, is No-mind & truth is a pathless land, so I'm convinced that feeling that there is no-where to go IS Rt. action (=wu-wei). Back in my palimpcest days, erasing what is beneath--for instance the focus I graduated toward, whiling meditating on No one thing in particular, was intensional (tabla Rasa). Meditate on nothing, & nothing is the solvency...no thing to answer for, or less in effect. Like 4 corners you call your own, & then being drawn into its concealment when Otherness expands into the Sentient-Greed at once the usual & natural reckoning people thrive-On, became the formula I couldn't answer for--15 yrs later, the story is different.

Numbers add up to nothing, but there IS nothing outside the Known

Compartmentalizing, creating order is the demand & natural condition of the mind. In a self-counseling moment to be in proximity of some conversation in another adjacent room can be, at once, the peak of the egocentric sense of that event. Yeh, perhaps you'd be the subject. In some mind, mine--a schizophrenic mind, I'll necessarily translate one subject of one's input as putative & correlary toward referencing its advantage Now, as compared to his/her intent really being unsubjective. A voice. Speaking to me, & not to the shared intended object of our consternation. The last time I saw Mat, before last night, was yrs back, driving around Lexington looking at the fallen electrical wires from the latest storm. It seems, he said--enveloped in the obtuse sheen of the street we're coming upon, "I'm already there, hooked around at the top." It was as if the traveler became the road & bearing down on his load, was in effect wholly a responsibility in cartage of each other's psychic assumption. So, channeling is all the pt of this, but reckoning it in a view of IT, just as I sit before you. This thing that, we use the narrative of one another used to drive me into ridiculous corners, as palpable as it may be, ensuing conversation, I thought was observable in marginalizing it, tho' as far as I could get was what Elie Wiesel called talk-embarassment. Everyone gets to the intuitive crescendo, & rather than toppling the affect, I'd be the aweful identifiable static moment. These days necessarily in contact w/certain RFL folks--left me dependent for rides sometimes--Sean, Jack k., Jim O., & others once or twice in the waning days. Otherwise I'd walk--from the Stupid Cntr to rt here off of Southland dr. to Rebel rd. Those late night walks in & out of shadows--not much traffic--we're weary moments to make amends in perspective. Consciousness is afforded only thru the gate of epiphenomenal stimulation--so I'd begin to wonder, as time getting home becomes reductive, just what evidence I could be granted That the Tabla rasa wasn't going to beget Nothingness. If we dream, thereby we must exist=the ground of being Of its staging may imply a maker! And this was my hope, because the langour I prided in the effort-of-my-Mind-sore, to wail up & give evidence for some reason of the night's strife (physical & otherwise) ... left me wanting.

Compared to Wallace Stevens... identity Framed!!

I looked him up--& will indulge his words the more, but this is what stood out to me, as it was a determinant feeling I share. He said, "rise liquidly, in liquid lingering, like watery words awash." Paul K lyric'd on his rare Cycles album, that he wishes he could jump from your water. And as if the bubble of experience--in my view, as aura, like a pleroma of some stately Being the first & last thing of presence we receive from each other--like the surfaceable union of gravid streams, these cyclical bodies, to me is like experiencing Jimi's belly-button window thru which we see each other. I'd drink milk=poisonous milk--I'm allergic--& recite "whiskey" in mind, as if a narcosis was to be beheld, & now I believe this was just the Merciful attribute of water I was trying to get at. A tripartite regimen, standing at the proffering goods in the refrigerator back home: booze as cultural leverage, water as asceticism, milk as body consciousness. Mark it, as the years turned & pushed me up upon banks of experienced-norms & boredom, I'd create symbolic universes & that was an antinomian resolve. Milk WAS whiskey, but rather body consciousness, in truth. The refrigerator was reprieve & was the cultural embellishment of family-Life, I in fact called Man-On-the-Street--the arc of the Familial, perhaps.

Beatniks' long lonesome by-way (figurative)

These colours of your dreams you speak of, known only to one's self, are identifiable somehow when a guy like Kerouac describes his night-visions in a kaleidoscope, carnival-esque perception, an I & We syndrome, w/dancing lights, though the Observer stands in solitarian repose to it all. He says, "big floats take notice,"--this gravid cntr of attention (the ground of Being) away from preoccupied birds-eye view to something in the Water=Perhaps, danger & longing/ only still waters drown their victims. And his down-by-the-river watery consolation that he knows his limits, in an impermanent recourse to the airy-philosophical point in self-actualization that we may indeed be saved, in the end...is where we all see ourselves: an action in paces=Time getting by like a flowing river. He knows better but is ever deserving of a greater hope.

The Apples In Stereo referenced here...my neighbor

*A day in the life well-lived: Cold house this am., now I'm rt across the street at work (MCAinc.) doing my usual Saturday clean-up, 'round here. Misty am. the weather is sweet...to note Marley's lyrics. I was in some half-light last night--I had just put down a book called The Closing of the Western Mind, by Charles Freeman. It'll drive home some Church teachings into the abyss of time--deservedly its terminus, which is just a visual context, say, a 2000yr old box & then some. I'll look at one pg & the facing pg developes little symbols, always reminding me of Greek letters...like picking up on flourishes & looping paths of letters, tho' abstractly because the apophatic fact is found in silent corners at my periphery & reduced down to some visual in counsil of Greek irony, the language of whom I've never studied. So, there it is I was in a zone. I've been reading f*&^ing abundantly. Last night was some weird liquid sky few moments. The report of just that one piece of the void I chip away to alight my awakened silence toward the Uncarved Block (me, rt?), left me in a sort of langour. Really, kind of confused. I dig the struggle, but these intervallic muddles from a studying effort must necessarily have some goal in the end--I gotta believe that...if only a feeling of encumbered night. Just listened to the first 3 songs of the Apples in Stereo probably latest plate (CD), dude himself gave me, R. Schneider. ...& the World is Made of Energy, very nice. Reminded me of Cornershop (in its positive iration, to borrow a term, not from them.), but better musicianship here. I asked dude who was that Brit yelling out about the feed-back? In Oxford when I did an intensive study there one summer, actually before Jamaal Roy Valentine was to meet me in Israel, the cats I mingled with live up to the stereotype they try to capture=urban M Fs, man--but not as sinsiter as that, I know. Give me purple thistles of Summertime over big city types any day--"cosmopolitans!!" Marley's Concrete Jungle, In & Of the street lights reflecting in the eyes of one sweet woman one lonely night yrs back, had my norm of explanate wonder What business the Shitty-city could ever give me solace Again. Aahhh the Exhaust!!

DESCARTES & nothing better to think On

The human context is about this big: I'm pressing my thumb against my pointing finger. We know our dialogue with one another, here in the West, is derivative of an impetus begun 2000 yrs ago and then some--& therein lies reality for most who don't look outside the corral of belief in ritual=their security, into the human totality i.e. they don't look East. Maimonides, however, speaks the Orientalist vocabulary (I know that term is dated--anyways!) when he said G-d is Reality & there is nothing that we can know that isn't Real. Hindus by the same measure say Brahma manifests Everything that is, & there is Nothing outside the Known. The old man--former owner of the local Chinese restaurant, stirs the energy in the room, kind of like a tourbillon, the Wind of Dreams. Each moment proffering an advent of encumbered step or fall toward whatever relationship you tend to make whole, is none other than a Cycle (a sense of what Descartes illustrates). The air is something we all know quite a lot about. We circumambulate from someone showing us distance-as-their-device for the current norm. I mention to the old man "sunyata" & distance becomes relationship: Jews & Muslims have their High G-d, El or Allah respectively... similarly, the Conscious-Void=Sunyata is somewhat conventional 'til ethereally it is developed into the Higher Ground of Compassion contained in his pervading glance, while putting substance into what no longer seems empty. Distance is Relationship--and presence is defined by motive. In The Jew & the Lotus s(h)unyata is shown its comparative qualities with the Jewish "Received" or rather Mystic tradition=kabbalah, use of the word for G-d going from the Cosmic here & Now to the Objective Ineffable & back again. The term is Ein-Sof=All or Nothing. This word packs the biggest punch than any other reference to the Ultimate reality, in the Jewish tradition. Had I said Ein-Sof to an adept Jew rather than sunyata to Buddhist adherent the effect is exactly the same, we are all borne of an Eternity, and mostly we are ineffective answering the Consciousness illumined from our participation OF it.

Mdm. Blavatskii & Our Anthropos

Madame Blavatskii, founder of the Theosophical Society, which Krishnamurti inherited their helm, & subsequently-& rightly relinquished it--rejecting a kind of authority-toward the search for self-realization--(Mdm. B.) had discussions on root races, in her Esoteric Writings, that some meta-physical formidable spiritual content to the archetypes we understand of the variety to which humankind is composed. We know of the traditions somewhat, but when the Anthropo-Observer-student looks at presence beyond obvious stereotypes & sorts out the project of his/her own worth, the stranger amongst typically equals that effort, & we learn... **Something, yeah, was on NPR--& is in their archives, I checked out a couple of months ago, I guess. The Clash featuring Strummer's direction thru & beyond. Now-today on Utube, his version of Redemption Song, I have to say, leaves something yet to be desired. At first I didn't sit thru it all--but damn is It as f*&^ed up as he sounds, thru-out? By way of disclaimer, Bob Marley's theme'd "concrete jungle" assuages my attempt at marginalization of an urban-dirt type twang, via Strummer,=his vox. Still, those boys are very political, & unless the pain of suffering world-wide is graduated to me in one sedate glimpse into a face, then I can't translate the effort so easily. Not to say there is No face here--only that it is Harder to look into some settings. Let's just say Strummer is rt, et al, tho' I contrast this thing. Bob Marley, however, had a presumption of Funk, & I determined the black man veiled in earth-bound treatises, puppeteering some soul-happening in & of the temporal kingdom in which I am imprisoned... just as I do, seeing women (moving the boundaries of what we speak of in terms of a Race: our multiplicity has individualized identities!) as keepers of the elegant throes of some covenant I must dance for, because she is earth & I am heaven-bound trying to find my legs. Like Marley says, if you have legs, you know you are on the ground. Root Races, for all its false decor, seems to be the struggle for relativity--on going=subjective to cosmic; general to personal.

In & Around Bluegrass Airport/ gentrification not availing us yet, on Parkers Mill ln.

Coffee-water colored, next to the median-way/fields between the back-roads & THAT stream, we sussed out between rocks & spiderwebs looking for beercans...later to be washed & dipped into oxalic acid to remove the rust that never sleeps. Corruption of REMs, which this rust made-up oF the dreamt repose of those hilly-country roads, lying across fields of corn, horse meadows--I saw paths only proffered under-foot in nighttime vision yawning ahead just as my feet sought its hold--as the unveiling dream flowed forward in undulating ambulations like I have never left these things I sought=beercans, Country-air w/purple thistle stickers corn-flower smells, & exertions from distances on trodded roads. On Frogtown ln. a farmhouse settling ever deeper into the firmament, invited us to explore in our stealth: timelessness for One, & a buena vista social-club (to coin a phrase) in its patience for our membership once removed from the harsh light of schooldays then encumbering our world. We'd eat peanut-butter sandwiches on roman-meal bread & drink warm sodas, if we had them, all carried in our backpacks, or tied in Kroger bags onto our handlebars--A day in the life from restless youthful consciousness.

Apropos of an actionable Academician

Wandering images on campus, upstairs, into hallways--transmogrifying into a squirrel--then defying physical categories, becoming the usual shapeless mass & a book-of-rules, again. By saying again, I mean a coherence of a shapeless-mass=a body consciousness w/full attention say upon the elements of outward fact. It is a derivative idea, originally implying something not of my assertion. This would be in opposition w/some fragment of self-image competing w/my better intentions. If I had not been a sh.-mass, self-image would obviously have been frustrating/derivative, in the dream. All too busy of a dream-scape was my presentiment of an interlocuttor who hadn't the time to address me. I begin to fumble w/some writ, symbols on paper which avail my eyes only whence the eyes focus upon the opposite pg. "Forest of life underfoot" (Patti Smith) as I get to the perimeter of campus into My own--a Chinese man comes across the POT square w/the Red sun at his back. He's on his bike coming my direction, so I climb atop the (now gone) fountain, & take in distances academia has yet defined for me. The day is coldCool, steam coming from vents in places, but the bldgs are locked & rather it is the final day or days before the M.I. KING library would close for good (on the Univ of Ky's campus). Assuming some thoughtless Asana pose, my book called Pilgrims w/Dalai Lama's wordsAmongstimages--R. Gere's thing, tells of nirvana & refusing it to lasting resignation on earth--my telling of it. The posture could be colluded in the yogiclike practice of Abraham Abulafia--13th ce Seferad (Espana). My eyes' recused vision of ancient times always seeks Hebrew symbols, letters, especially as the lazy mind becomes delivered of the dearest cryptic scenario, where the heart lies. Nirvana may just be that chamberOFwisdom, hekhalot, that presumes an advantage in intercession in the form of the community we identify w/most, OR that crowd we channel that may not be an organism of One-mind (like gems refracting from the illumination of a flashlight, rather than the burnishing of the ultimate Solar-disc)!--as opposed to the zeitgeist of the media driven world. So there I find myself, a khalutzim, pioneer or pilgrim, on the way to the temporal kingdom. Only to find patterns of language, the way we constitute the onlyAttributes of G-d we may otherwise have no way of articulating. The Glory, as Gershom Sholem relates. When I was 6yrs old at the neighboring st. in Laurel Grove Austin, Texas--I sought to be conveyed in a few moments the thoughts that constituted what was to me My lifetime. So to be articulated into something not so easily defined, I thought I should start At-the-End of the path/those thoughts/that day/This life. My question is this: we tend to sort out the last 5mins in any kind of constancy, our life's totality i.e. generalities supposing some inertia that there is some Grand design to our efforts,...usually means something epiphenomenal like the image of the rabbi, in my mind, that has the dust of archetypes upon it (life's exquisite dust, assumed in "the tea-maker's pose" -P. Smith, again)--rather a motivating emotion I suppose in meditation. Is this K'fitsas haderekh? translation: Skipping, what one does w/visions & thus the experience of presence.

The way they use you, live big today--tomorrow you're buried in a casket

George Harrison says, in some interview about self-realization--this interlude within the context of more topical stuff, "one has to sift thru the grains of sand to get to the sugar...." I like getting my mysticism from other arabias, rubbing out symbolic thought while finding that stark monad in some immense void--(a Kerouac-ism, in terms of ARABIAs), & this is thoughts on why there is no imminence front. What all is the fuss about? The very real constituent activity I undertake daily IS knowing what I'm leaving behind. But, not acting in its stead. There is definitely radical forces--institutional entities that creep into our thinking. --Lying on my bed, back in the house I grew up in, then in the 1990s, Bionic Rats was playing on my turn table, reggae, --I knew that the one effort that informed my mind w/o cessation was weeding out improbable notions THAT I had a certain amount of control over just what was now before me...! "...in the garden..." (lyric'd theme commonly heard in Rasta music, think Iraq now--war, war & rumors of war then as now--& only a desire for "Certain-skies"--Arthur Rimbaud) meant just that spiritual on-set of victory over any supposed responsibility to deliver myself upon the threshold of common zeitgeist gnawing at the corners of the emptiness I maintained--in my concealment. The churning riddims of Lee "Scratch" Perry's Open the Gate, did this for me. A field of light WAS as casual as glances beyond this kaleidoscope in front of me, but for the moment the gaze into shadows w/florescent animicules, like a varicolored veil, kept my concealment from advancing. No longer would I seep further into empty chambers; everything now would be a constant departure. Hard to understand, I know. Just imagine white noise & vibratory properties as a visual. Exuding frenetic energy, turning upon smaller & smaller experienced forms, I was quickly turning off and tuning in. (this thing I projected was visible) Utterly indescribable isolation, those days, my condition was everything just short of monkhood--minus the doctrine, though it would come. Turning off everything I could, 'til the zealous projection of light energy was all a contagion before me.

Masr or Mitzraim to the Ostyuden disambiguation

Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man, though conditionally not theist bent, brings me into the fold of memories about a tambourine man, an Arab, Muslim as much as one would consider any one body sentient within Arab lands (...that includes animals--according to the Qu'ran, and the characterization of the T. Man==More, animals, as I've read, have already "submitted"--define "islam" here, but Man must take upon himself the Shariah, therefore identifying himself as an adherent--I think the word "witness" is appropriate, here, in his forebearance). But to expand upon the poetic nature of confliction over theism, tremendum and fascinans, the adult playing the tambourine down the butcher's street, on the way to the train station--in Luxor Egypt--Just his giving voice and weird credence to the pity borne of ritual/religion--his music, like mine: vanquished! -- animated the dust coloured walls to chaotic fly-ridden meat (halal-!)--laterally his domains--into tacit moments otherwise not warranting this Westerner to get all that close. The man was clearly transcendent (the local masjid in vicinity, by the way, its door let out upon that dirt road) to typify his insanity (=majnoon in Arabic, one posessed by a demon, a jinn), probably not to the nether regions, but more closely toward disease & propriety in his next breath. Now we see the Mumin's or Musselmanner's treatment of his kithe & kin or my misunderstanding of it, along w/whatever we'd see in the following. (Muslim detractors called Muhammed majnoon, inappropriately--I reflected on this word working construction in Southern Israel, amongst the other Palestinian laborers, unknowingly, & got punched hard in the shoulder over & over again for my indisgression. I had only thought of its similarity to the Hebrew word Meshugga=same meaning--words aren't cheap to some!!)--Covering all bases, to continue: In Visions of Joanna, Dylan uses the lyrics about the empty sheet that now corrodes, the Fiddler who walks to the road, says everything is returned that is old, & Dylan's conscience explodes as the back of the Fish truck loads. In what seems to be his telling of unique histories, the fiddler is he--the so-called fiddler of E. Europe, On the Roof...it has to be. And the whole Judeo-Christian ethic, New Jerusalem (from maybe the Jerusalem of the east--think Litvak) on trial--is of One product, as he tells it from its report, meaning his conscience exploding--the fish is emblematic, Rt? If anything I'd bid his perspective at the equilateral-ness of the monotheists. It wouldn't be conceptually, except in some very essential ways, but definitely socially/politically--as Downpressors? (a Marley-ism). We could take the whole context time-line of the last 2000yrs & brandish its beginning as a deliverable context in itself. Called the Axial age, we now see, and the impetus of the degrading human condition thereafter. **See Unripe Walnuts below for schizophrenic allusions--my take on the supra-normal, short & sweet.

Once intimidated, twice Intimated

Standing out on the log pile in our half-acre backyard, just a yard away from farmland & more bluegrass, off the wet ground--a balance from the tethered past 'til that purple night--all a handshake w/the homewardness I'm leaving... The stocked kindling used to be over at the front side of the house, & there had been a couple of bouts chipping away at dull wood w/hand on an axe blade & no handle--just because! Toil, I guess had to be equated--mind to languor in the late night hrs. A yellow breeze from long ends of the days puts yet another attenuated sense between me & the Ky star-lit sky. I'd come back from Cinci earlier that evening & thought about the midnight sky as something to be excused from the Will its path conjured, because I foundered on the dialogue w/it thru its impermenance now solving the crisis I'd be heard by those vast distances. A young fellow had been belched out of the smog & din of Bogarts frequenters, I asked him for that ride, which stretched in a kind of asking throughout the ride home, conjoling him I'm not too far from downtown Lexington. I'm tired of looking at the antiquated biblical familial nods, but this just-out-of-h. school dude looked like my older bro, 1970s & all, in h.s. in Texas--I'd call it beatnik, or more wholly--vital & beat, like Kerouac would say. The late in the am. hrs out around the neighborhood, w/my bestfriend yrs earlier, had heavy skies throttling my composure, as if we were at a kind of bottom layer of atmosphere, walking into the field enclosing the church. & for a moment backing off--in recalcitrance, I sought my friend, wondering if he too felt burro-ish...? Our primary regard for what we had become, midnight ravers, meant ignoring an escalating sky & committed us to groundlings: some strange headless sense, just part & parcel Of the arbors' flat earth in the burbs--sunken. That is why the voice I heard, mired in solace up outside of Bogarts, struck me as entirely appropriate. "I'll see you up here, tonight," to which some bird-song crow-vox informed me I'd be arisen from what was a kind of opposite rung of, rather, people's lightened load.

The DISTANCE strung,the THOUGHTS traveled

In Cairo there was a sweet decadence in a day where at one moment I felt I was unlimited, & I gained a reverence for the immensity of experiences travel had to offer. Vast & eternal because I was somewhat ill-received these faithless days & yet stood beleaguered by the profundity of distances & finality of that. I would have to say that smoking herb there in Egypt sealed the deal, but more importantly I was solidly assured that my liberation was at hand & no water (or High Sun) could put out that fire, ...meaning indulgences like smoking. I can't sit here & promote marijuana use & say it is a means to an end, but whilst we contently articulated a day's consignment of these meager illusionary moments--in repose of those Dec. days in Cairo, I remember some thing in my eyes which made me subject & audience of my own independent means to get Born under circumstances=having gotten away from the constraints of time & place e.g.hometown so remote & automatically assumed in its pressures, however abstract they may get. I carried this idea all week now, & thence I dreamt of an ex-patriot accord, w/an old head I know here from work. ==In this domicile we found ourselves in, I kept promoting reflection on the advantages of setting up camp there--Valerie now in the picture & here & there responsibility on making her comfortable--but my wandering mendicant of a friend wouldn't yield to me & was dubious throughout. This made the dream & its mundane possibilities that much more a recess I had to indulge in: I wasn't going to leave behind this place & reject the illuminating conjuration of New-bounds Unseen. Captivated. All domiciles (in my dreams) have the portents of a forested corridor as the people are the trees & I am destined to wander or trod. Even the illustrations in mind of my wakened moments there in Egypt--this unwooded Afro-Asian desert--leave me off at a quake of protective boughs.

The Climate of the Bee-Catcher=The Will of Higher Ground

I saw a passive environment there in Ontario, Iron Bridge, next door to Neil Young's hometown Blind River--we actually went by his sister's house, we thought. Though the feel was dormant/slow-like, it didn't have the pretense of winter coming on though it is. Now in the stale office air, looking out to the road trafficking students & associated agents of this town's school yr arising, the humid winds (of Aug/Sept) sweeping past in gray skies look awefully Autumnal from here. Here's the rain now in a new shower from only 15 mins ago & it actually looks bright out. The seasons are kept in a deep well pocket of mine, & now I elicit the respect from lone days spent as if I have some kind of will tied into a climate of change/& the greater Will. I remember going to Mark's--my oldest bro, & summery heat of an apt this casual no central air was at least bearable & mostly just where one would want to visit to think of the emanations of headiness of healthy foods & soaps & incense. That is the times-in-between, & the identification of a fixed state of mind to make it jumping-off pts, & leaving the negligible responsibilities to the moments when I'd do THAT too--it just wasn't THEN.... This is when one sees a sort of composite of unyielding time just out of reach--he or she would claim that crystaline air as effortlessness--a karmic resolve. You'd think one would get the "news" peripherally indefinitely. Accurate force of what we reckon we need to be hit with, IS found a 100 pgs into a book when you're ready to put it down for good. Still , one's back pgs is the acquisition of persons' manner we're more easily going to antiquate. Those 4 corners in some room decorated w/projections of whomever would understand you/ we will never know--not really... but I throw dust on images of self-reflection until I see that nothing looks back. AND then the whole winter solace is ahead of me: one man one plain; nothing derivative.

Call it biblacy, but this read was New yet Old

This is probably my first book, besides a Beatles bio, which I had never thumbed thru--this book is called The Rastafarians. (ras=rosh; tafari=tiferet goes from translating the Arabic to Hebrew=head (of) the creator/ Ras tifari+ but I'm no adherent.) I importune a feeling of complacent lounging on my bed or floor in the rooms I grew-up in, as I looked upon this book in my bookcase. It is literally an edifice of those moments, remonstrating perfection in contentment & clarity, though unachieved, claims me as an adherent--toward a noumenon. I intended a vista through walls coming down from there in my solitude into the shelves at Sqecial Media, yes sQecial, where I bought it. It is the advantage in identifying space as a power spot, just as in Don Juan's, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge: It seemed someone had led me to my room & said find where you belong in it. I composed myself until I broke the recluse bounds & tore off pieces of titles languishing in repose, there for my assessment. The BLACK abstraction that was an emanation of word beginnings imparted by Mom, is just that sort of gathering of concepts as my gaze moved around the room & landed upon maybe in OTHER cases, like Gershom Scholem's writings. I am mystic, I am fistic, I am hiss-tic.

The Smell of Unripe Walnut Rinds on Your Hands...

Hill & dale down the walnut tree'd main rd into & between my neighborhood (Beaumont park area) toward suburban ubiquitous devolution behind the local shopping cntr (Gardenside), I'd sometimes walk in the wee hrs, maybe for a juice up at the market. My schizophrenia full-blown at the time, at least, remained laughable to me--even in the seriousness of mind-sore imagery, in this case an auditory hallucination. Literally, dormant interiors to people's secluded rests faltered the broad-scape visual (behind well-kept yards) I sensed...anticipating my own respite, while only being the convergence of their's. Like a whine, patterned from row upon row of houses, I thought the thing I heard was nocturnal communication= people in dialogue in order to sustain a dream state. (I was privy to...) And this (dream state) included the path's vistas I carried forward upon wondering if the language would translate into maybe a morning that this time wouldn't get away from me.

A hobo got to hide--Williamsburg rd. for 27 yrs

First, to step rt into the deep, I saw a chasm of ams, just as many do--seeing active pursuant thoughts that defer us to relationship-social amiable distraction. I'd get up & the meager earnings I accumulated for my lax communication w/others had me question why one would be so willing to be filled up w/such surface affability. I knew that a man who had wrenched his senses thru either his own faults or ultimate suffering had only the blue empyrean to thank, a tree, the smell of breakfasts, the laundry smells wafting thru the suburban-scape--had no abiding & gave no thanks to streams of social interaction, which could no longer suffice for his longing. 2nd, to evade relationship is neither here nor there, relationship IS regardless if the dynamic is presented or as in my case the projection of personas becoming as real as the object reasoned WILL to find an intercessor for my longing (a potential, Yes?). I guess at this pt I might as well admit that I had hallucinated. From the front door of the house One would step out & the grand ash tree of my growing up held the promise of achieving rootedness as nothing else could. People I knew sometimes flew into my wonder, & I sought the fulfillment of imagination, kind of instructing the sense we are ALL present in the threshold of the day, at that very moment. The thing I felt I saw, at once, was ephemeral imagery of my dad, but only in that something that was taking place under the tree. I imagined an elliptical hand-held mirror, kind of hovering as if it was held before a face allowing for a look into what was behind the statement of my projection=me walking by the appended identity of my father.

In Eilot, Israel==Autumnal couple of days

We'd come back from Dahab only hrs before, showered--I extricated the hidden hashish from my ass, & felt a little lost in a homeward-kind of present. I wanted to feel linked up w/complacent reflections of the Danish girls there in the apt. They, at least 2 of the 3, were hooking...flowery still, something nice. I went out to the deck (in the dark desert sky), we were upstairs, laid my head back on the cool rain swept tile & tried to lure a Fall relevance to distance traveled & a back home revelry. The others, my friend Rob (of Red Fly Nation) from here in Lexington, our comrade a British cat about our age, & those women, were all sitting around drinking beer & wine, which didn't interest me, fever was coming on. One really striking chic from Denmark, unusually darker than the others, & I went for a walk the next day--I wanted to go by these solitarian picnic tables & watch traffic, across from the airport near the Red Sea (Yam Suf--actually the Reed Sea). I had earlier in the week seen a morbidly obese wanderer--some woman w/splitting wounds running down her ripped stockinged legs, sitting there mayhem-like. Life had motion, just being w/the Danish chic, however--there was clarity in her attention of me, presuming there was a there there. I fancied Yes, but in reality, I merely thought this out of distraction. Back the night before one of the girls--her--came up on me & pointed out my anti-sociality, then threw a pot of cold water in my face, laughed, and left me alone.

THere's nothin' really, nothin' really to turn Off

Keenan Lawler said from his Myspace, frustration or anger leads One beyond the traditional. (& in the view of the Reviewer, his was a third alternative) TicTOCteac (Lee Perry) thanx G-d for making him mad. We always conjure Order (making a distiction from those things our focus becomes delimited). We see a freshly mown lawn & say, I want it to go like That. But it is like that. But again, I want it to go like that--still it is like that!! (suburban death, is quite another idea) A child whose energy which convalesces in the mundane outside his/her provenance seems wholly possible. And maybe we all projected energy from other planets (...VU's electricity comes from other planets recognized here) Lee Scratch says the Spiritual man IS mad. But I'm certain the MF (namely reprehensible conservative jips) detailing me how he'll make my monies work for me, is as mad as a reckoning of some Absolute will make some One. And yet I am on the front lines of a battle I wage to compete w/Ego...it's all ego, yeah, but when I let go I observe just that deficit in awareness, rather than fill up w/some kind of social status--

On the way back from Canada=Toledo Ohio, in August

We stopped by the graveyard where my wife's Grandma's parents are buried--in Toledo. This is a mostly Polish graveyard--though we were there for her Hungarian grandpa & Canadian great grandparents. The Poles traditionally were extremely perversely prejudiced against Jews. (google Anomoye Potswo; their lable of an anonymous Empire--a derogatory term to explicate what little humanity they'd assumed of their Jewish neighbors) It is a reality to perceive a threat when we cohere a community still living--this relativity that Otherness is Imminent. But this part of the Polish community lies ineffective, & out of my control or forebearance. And yet I mingle head & shoulders among spirits now that their reckoning is the kind of Ultimate demise in which we all relate. They are at peace, & I solemnly care that they are. I reach to clean the gravestone, someone reaches back in reaction to a constancy I maintain from dialogue toward things here & Not-so here. I forge a People'd pantheon of relationship, and they discover a new participant to the Crowd's end-game.

Did my sentence, languished in Gehenna

I went to see Paul K & the Weathermen down on Main st., good club setting--dark dive=The Dame, actually rt across from my cuz's old loft, Red Fly Nation's practice auditorium, the band I sullenly played-in...meaning I was thick w/exclusivity then--beyond the bouyant immediacy, not as now; & also this band subject of this writing played there at a loft apt. Time. Its Irony, that of time I mean, is that all the fantastic hype of relationship w/the material void--the unassailable appearances which we seem to want to duplicate all the time, this hype has a kind of energy (maybe because it opposes our sentience)--& once we place that measure of force to be Reckoned Into a box, we see that our momentum shouldn't be consumed by it. So, here's my point: I'm standing out in the crowd, Paul absolutely throwing down, Tim no less on the kit... an exacting kind of hypostasis occurs to me. They have ever been upon the threshold of sound that conveys me, & I have ever been in the throes of ecstatic imminence watching. Just watching, like I was supposed to interpret a message from an ancient time. & Ancient times, by the way are a dime a dozen--just think for a moment that all symbols of eternity are in this Life. We know no other, & Otherness is before us as viceral-as-an-effort we'd muster to complicate the Ineffectiveness-trying-to-change-things suggests.
paul k's website is paulkweathermen.com

Under my brother's mural...looking to the light from the upstairs coming in

From the bed where I languished... once upon an afternoon-sunny bland-until-I-imposed-a-remedy I lay there w/the duality of serenity & dead-soul. I conjugated my 1 plus 1 effort, suddenly knowing my neighbor w/his spiritual machinations enthused a fusion of the ineffective-me to the vital now/I could be both! My conga drum at the foot of my bed, always w/a telegraphed presumption--this calling toward the blue outward fact & skies--yawned while my nephew (Aaron) puttered around upstairs. So I call him down to my basementCRAFT; an impetus to say something w/my hands & the voice would be secondary & readied. I said,"Listen it's something I learned, not to forget, on this drum.". So a slowed-down resumption of analysed-afternoon glum came to my hands w/a hesitation in the pattern half-way through. This is when I raised my hands even higher, closer to his face: Look at it linger, I thought. He saw it, & I am going backward in time...then in obedience to fixed notion that freedom of thought is his kind of atonomy--To relate w/ youth is formulaic FOR freedom & I wanted attention ON having always placed a half-full cup in the WAY of release, to sift into liking it for the context of an inner-dwelling.

NEAR KENTON'S bluehole--a spring on Parker's Mill

Nothing dreamt, a solid state orderly green vista, just sky & earth had captivated me, holding out the last rescue of the peace my neighborhood had to offer (after 27 yrs, I moved)--its extension out over by the farm on Parker's Mill not 3mls from the Bluegrass Airport. I read there Isaac Babel's Cossacks stories of deprivation, mystic churches, impoverished Jews, war. The emblems of these yesteryears, a percussive revolution in cognizant immediacy, were perhaps a tachancha, a kind of military wagon (Soviet), not unlike the zeitgeist we associate w/ the military industry as in the US--how it performs in our environment (fashion, culture, social demise et cetera), & horses--the sentience-of-promise in front of me there under a pine tree looking off into their field on this ubiquitous KY horse farm. The doom of destiny untethered then in my life, had me look closer at what was intermediate space in everyone's life in & around me & made IT important to me. I called it my own, LIVED up to my expectations, & gathered no more than wall-flowers, but enough of a kind of inner-attention to bring it all to the table when the new day arose.

Living on REBEL rd.--RADIO-FREE-LEXINGTON djing then

The imagery behind "this" scenario is the kind-of-event I felt occurring to me down in the basement apt at the old house here on Rebel rd. Like an uncarved block showing its potential, because I was insignificant in a way that I, alone, understood/ part of a greater whole no matter how far from relationship I became. In the half-light of chimerical ams, before getting-up & after the light of am. trapped my eyes from leaving my dormancy, I'd dream of the immediate, perhaps the room in which I lain. Once I thought I actually laid my hand on the stepping razor of blood images from my grandmother-(granny) emerging from my heart... (a black velvet shadow of projected self) if we begin to set the plates for the mindsore of characters that occupy our world, particularly when it is strictly unrealism, in the end it impels us to design the realistic.

See April's 2006POEM** //THis one is a RED FLY tip

Surmising the plain hearth, I gathered the concept of having sought release w/ the musicians I ran with, now yrs ago. The mayhem-tree (as such I dubbed) down on campus seemed to be the transition in place, of place, allowing me to yield to the CURRENCY of norm, which I now objectify for its strangeness--it's a good thing, I feel--nothing to prove. Now there is nothing outside of me, drug or otherwise which would leave me gainful of expression: I am movement, life's grand reward, a positivist's momentum. Why I sense my concealment, at all, as it has never changed, is almost beyond realization: I could be scaling the exterior of this life's edifice--a house, wanting to get in--or already confined to the "bamot" (immemorial worshipped space) w/ expectations on par w/ the cosmic--either way I am buffered by exaltation. When Kabbalists are acceding to higher chambers of belief & knowledge, it is due to their concealment that they can bury the heart of the "other side" into Mother Earth & define their opposition to it i.e. to that of the "other side" the sitra archa--the ch is a Kuh sound as in cuss. I am the convergence of wanting in & getting out.

RED FLY NATION, dispensational

The new dawn faded, thither I followed the descending sun, while living in downtown Lexington. The band was inspiring, but not for me to do things supporting it, but rather as a cause-accompli in my reaction to the world, my fait. No one has regrets, least of all anyone knowing those times in distant cognizance, however something was unsettled. I needed only to turn corners, those being dusty & worn, unremarkable, but nuanced enough to say I had forward thinking. The 3rd st. house we lived together in, the 6 of us, had me undetermined where I'd remain--if only to get the ball rolling, a current taking me into the bounds in which my then girl-friend vested her critique of our relationship, to which the plain suggestion to me was get-on-board. Literally I walked out of the house(apt) toward the settling evening air, out across the st. from Lex. cemetery, & sat under a tree in the parking lot. Still enough sun was gleaming for an allowance of alliterative resolve--my esoteric book defied the lack of patterns I'd forsaken, & given me something at stake. (I think the author was Madam Blavatskii, her mysticism-something book I stole from Sqecial Media, which considering the beneficence of the place I felt almost blasphemous.) If the coffers of the compassionate void grants us a powerspot now & again, I knew it wasn't for the moment instructive to bide those places AMONGST--(too bad, I know). But I prized the connections in relationship as something to get back to, if only... & for me that was clearly defined in the stands of trees which rustled w/ otherness, & in which I sensed the impending thunder (which we all heard), & yet I was left naked w/o a rain dance.

Met a Ma-mun (Muslim) in my DREAM last night

WE were down over by campus (UK), specifically some place either where Two Keys is now, or right there across the street at Casmir Restaurant, but inside had a kind of Student cntr feel to it. The Muslim didn't know I was a Jew, but outed me as an Infidel anyways--though I began to rally him that the world outside of Islam is not the Dar al-Harb, world of war (this sense may be part of fiqh--a kind of jurisprudence, the institution of jihad). In otherwords my dreamt self was someone purporting a reckoning of what fear & paranoia, if dissolved, could then sanction. This thing unique to our quality of life is probably a sense that we are not impelled by others toward the happenstance of any religion (think biblebelt here, and beyond!)--simply put secular ideas let lighted streets take us to a pluralist understanding of you & me. And the street is the revealed sort of powerspot, this particular area, I have dreamt of many times. Rt by what use to be White Mt Creamery--which I glanced at it while it was established--yrs ago, coming out of my old girl-friend's apt for the last time, above Two Keys, made me think I was at the foot of some fantastic obstacle, a figurative "mt," which broke the thread connecting me to a past I can never go back to. Personality can be cult-like, to stretch the metaphor, whether it is a taste of how your own has lent to a dis-ease, or if someone or something has a kind of control over you.

THE gray-ce of MOTIVE

Looking off to a corner of the room, not really in digression of what is on TV, or enthusiasm thereof, but some message reeled in thru the nature of complacency & my visual from escaping it--I feel this visual though only in inaugurating the immediate, still-solutions an on-going effort. All this effort is a cognizance of a kind of stammer--a shutter like the mortal coil announces its residing atmosphere which cannot easily be transitioned. But obviously an observation gets me thru a door.
Just today walking back from the bank I had a California moment. In CA perturbed masses in movement can be objectified because I am only there--just there, I'm not participating. Here, I smell the diesel, hear the car tires--their adjustment upon the pavement and suddenly I'm earthbound rather than KY-homeward. I've gotten beneath the firmament of time & place to a graver atmosphere, the nerve core of civilization in ad absurdum transition. I think we would agree that ideas & ideals are on a collision-course w/ experimentation & normalcy to its pinnacle there - maybe elsewhere.

KRISHNAMURTI

kRISHNAMURTI name may seem to imply new age perhaps or cult-like reverberations, but his essays are not ritual-abiding blah at all, nor are they neo-traditionalisms via Hindu study like a reformer who is ever so MORE conservative in his own approach would be apt, or religious to any degree. He takes a point like his exacting departure from the Theosophical Society, an Orientalist group, founded by Madame Blavatsky (who happened to come from the same town as my Grandmother, but in her parents time=Ekatrinaslav, Russia): Truth is a pathless land, and shows thru an exercise of conversation where we generally are left holding on to visualization of some bit of rationalization in how we cohere our response to our condition. He cajoles his reader to self-scrutiny--and one might react like having martyred a sense of relevance held closest to the vest due to his sheer plain affect. I find his writing writings highly UN-radicalized, to the effect that all else seems excessive & over-wrought.

On Fallon rd. near Beaumont Pk.

That cat who lain on the road, down 'round the corner from my house, on the oldest street in the neighborhood, struck a note of empathy in me in a very finite way==It was dead, of course, but its spirit floated close by. I entered the soul of the compassionate void, maybe ITS DIMINUTIVE space its vitality once conjured. I was touching something & I thought of my hands in that moment, on the wet road, Spring am. A black cat crossing my path, w/ a bleat in a spiritual heart I knew was manifest in every dreamy sanctioned day of my growing up there--seeing these locals' critters meander around this place. This cat meant that. Its one eye appeared as a kind of extremity, sticking out as a protuberance demanding one last visual of the road of its neighborhood life. I was as dead as it, and as alive. Marley's "Running Away" ran thru my mind--"you can't run away from yourself!" & I acquiesced to a struggle right then, at least in that moment I wasn't running, so I only had me to deal with & why not RIGHT then. If Rimbaud could lean next to a Prussian soldier in a field adjacent to his village at his final peace, and decide he could know everything now, similarly we are the convergence of tremendum & fascinans & could identify w/ a complete sense of motive.

Opting for TORPOR

The meditative moments Saturday night had one of the things I put on-the-BACK-burner as being the thing that would typically impel me to construe a night ardor. This being torpidity, thence made realization a struggle but no less a pay-off toward now of course though I paid for this feeling then. It seemed all I could do was a vertiginous pose and all I wanted was a babe-on-the-lawn seeking the brighter atmosphere. I looked at my hands for what really is a conciliatory image, not unlike a geometric-ploy of a Mohammedan in their tantric response to a world of over-bearing images: scripture as pictorial design conveying the adherent out of the cosmic to the conveyance of that & Other things. Images symbolic of sound e.g. the language of G-d's mind, are just as UNIQUE as my hands as IF they were pug marks on a path in the Wilderness and explanate of an instinct to be consoled in the distances we achieve to consume an objective cause. This would be a spiritual exercise, if not for linear thought bringing me out of the angst of LOSS of inner-attention. Inner-attention is always a godsend, but as that Higher Ground is what it is--some OTHER place, I am typically deliberating on the exudation of some Lower Order of things. --a trifling ordeal, and the simplest to contemplate.

LUXOR, MISR==REVISITED, part II

When there is no consciousness or abstraction to grapple with, one would feel entirely compelled to finish the "waiting." --(speeding thru life's current) Like how I felt out by the Titi pension, in Luxor--only the balance between being utterly away from typical amenities/comforts into a situation where we would make do, made me feel any kind of gravity. It was totally momentary--I couldn't tote it around in a wheelbarrow. I declaimed my will to move forward by jumping laterally all the time, circling the castle so to speak, I was interested in torpor & categorically ill-considered its partner=silence. Named IT as I confided in the presumed atmosphere of my last mood/struck by this and affective discontent was thusly achieved. Walking around the Temple of Luxor, the stark Middle-Eastern brightness gave no deviating shadows--I felt like taking my shoes off, though the quality of its antiquity was unfathomable. This is where tourists were killed THIS millenium. My sense of unity & goal becomes fragmented as these places disappear over the horizon, my impermanence suggestive as it courses thru people's demise yon & hither. The Nile waking thru the village's edge (right next to the Temple), I would scan its civilized banks to find a perch just to view it for awhile--but anything as presumptuous enough of being a beautiful vista was wrestled to the dust by vendors, boat rentals, or appeared too close to traffic anyway. I thought of riots as having no potential, but crowds unbarred from their willfulness wanting to climb the walls of the old British neighborhood dwellings walled around w/ shards of glass acting as barbs seized into the cement at their tops.

LUXOR--THE bank was more likely "du Caire!"

hiddenreceived

LUXOR, EGYPT

To the extent that we were using hashish &/or tobacco together or separately, one might assume there were periods when we lived in a thick dullness abiding the intensity from our brand of liberty, to its other extreme--a void, whence the harsh Arabesque sun of Ifriqqa shone past the CLARITY and into the mishap of confused reflections e.g. at the Tea House, presuming as I was, some dot of angst would color an otherwise unhealthy unknowing.*** There is a boulevard stretching toward the trainstation, our admittance to this village-town, & to the other side our pension, which we'd hoof down away from every day wondering at what non-paying wonders we would have divulged to us in our hikes around the village. It had a Banque Leumi (sp?) (wrong fact here, THIS bank happens to be Israeli--whoops!! ...everything else is as it was.) there on it, at which one Sunday we had our travelers cheques cashed. Everything seemed off from the current of modern access, as 80% of all you could see was submerged, but seethed. Toward my freedom of youth I'd admonish myself that big fish authorial entities would in fact show me how little they cared what sensitivities I contained in the contra-bearing for others in my path. Like the governmentally controlled bank we passed each day. The mosque on the other side of the side of the village where we stayed was another such place. A Midnight Express scenario played out in my mind, as much as I could think about it, while considering entering the mosque, which we did--& formidably w/SHOES. We actually looked around for some object to pilfer from it, however there was nothing within and still I would not have gone thru w/ it. By the coffee/tea house before the boulevard & closer to our youth hostel, the Titi Pension, the place was called Television-Cofe, Mahmud the owner told us that Jimmy Carter had been right by his place one day only a few yrs before, & then commenced to scatter a few glasses full of water out into the sand-ridden road? to keep? the dust down. Far from re-allaying a sense that this was memorialized space, it seemed as if this little African man looked to the promise of an immense cosmic polity which would help people & lift them up--and this was part & parcel the powerspot we sought & could sanction (merely his humanity, that is, not the content of his beneficent agitation--"Wow, J. Carter!" --I don't think so.) Power spot. No longer wearing his jelabiyah, Mahmud in his suit about the same day we were to leave, he was off to Cairo toward the granting of a loan. His securing a future was in his eyes, a certainty beyond the correspondence w/ us that was neither here nor there toward his ends... He was comfortable in his own skin & was beating the odds. We left Luxor w/ hope for him.

DANGLING man--I'm in PROGRESSION

The day unique to the freedom I've inherited, from whom I don't know, is distinguishable in a few old thoughts: the betterment of the general malaise around here. I think the eros of lies telling me I could PROVOKE my INTELLECT w/beauty, via androgyne, thus honor relationship with impulsivity, has everything to do with FREUD, though I can understand him only superficially: And of course what else should it take--we are driven to extremes in most emotions, but sorrow is largely, but evenly compromised. These guys? who said never police your own thoughts, left me unstaged as a youth, so I looked to postpone tangible successes of which "others" pretended to be so fond. I can think someone here & now, but why should I if they are only a step in the right direction. I grew weary of the thought, "I was on my way." No one could collaborate assessing my diminutive self, until what became relevant was static. And it was clear that there was no going back in time---there is no recluse moment of nostalgia in my head, but I had to say I'm not going anywhere! You proved IT, as all relationship is in EXILE.

Today's interplay w/ constant SORROW

Winter's air gathers my expectant mood in a failing resolve that I have lost something in a dark alley & then as if I find myself out under a street-light for reprieve, like it would be there for some reason. The coolness is sterile, & a free-fall thru its void leaves attachments unnecessary: No work, no time concerns, but maybe only a burnishing nostalgia. The residue of last night's foray into a somewhat sublime course thru my evening is an open playing field today. I am dying to put things at my center. At my most meditative moment researching, admittedly w/ calm non-indulgent practice, from a book Howie gave me belonging to his Mother, Russian Thinkers, I felt to be the convergent of all the nows: the book, the TV in the other room, the pulse of the shop in a particular generality (which is possible)--& this was like breaths whose report was the traffic noise outside of this front room. The immersion was complete. And then my brother says from his office, "That was nothing of what we're going to have to deal with." At the core I live in interpretive moods--NOW I think I start with nothing, & that was a place of murmured space in the back of my head, & this is what I use to step out into the fray of constant energy without it ever evaporating--a winter's trial. I could be a gallows's bird looking at the hush hush around some personalities, & the assetiveness around others. Why do we do this silent measure of affability?--we are pinballs shocked from the report of the bell's peal hammered submission from boring neon characters: it's excessive, we have to break the silence.

Running TOWARD midnight, backwards

The imagery behind this scenario is the kind-of-event I felt occurring to me down in the basement apt at the old house on Rebel rd. Like an uncarved block showing its potential, because i was insignificant in a way that I, alone, understood/ part of a greater whole no matter how far from relationship I became. In the half-light of chimerical mornings, before getting up & after the light of morning trapped my eyes from leaving their dormancy, I'd dream of the immediate, perhaps of the room in which I lain. Once I thought I actually laid my hand upon the steppin' razor of blood images from Granny (my Dad's Mom) emerging from my heart.... If we begin to set the plates for the mind sore of characters that occupy our world, particularly when it is strictly UN-realism, in the end it impels us to design the realistic.

The Tea-maker's CHIA-NIK!!

At a certain point I decide everything is game; not quite Do what thou wilt. I look at my cousin's sofer(scribe) husband and imagine he would determine something about his green-youth, unless he became mossed over w/ ritual. Even he would skewer insects in the formidable exuding floor of suffering for NO-g-d if THE G-d declaimed a world w/o the nomenclature of ritual & he'd have to live that way--so why do we (I) choose?. Following my mom from the recesses of my enthusiasm for the Old-World made recognizable (not the obvious one of E. Europe, but the Mediterranean one of Seferad=think Zohar, the Book of Splendor), while sitting under the shed awning or near-by under the apple tree (in the garden). I got up one time, all heady w/ colors w/o names for me embellished. An image of my mom walking to the backdoor comes to me in this strictly non-ellipses, no preliminary alarm-like humid summer's day. So like a duckling I was following suit & home in my head, like old brown tucked underneath my bed of acquiescence, then I pick a wall-flower from her shoulder. We may be blooms of poppies & the only religion is homeward rituals/our opiates. The most we can hope for is the finding of the pattern when the mind is rife w/ our hollow breathing. We absorb more, thus we are more acutely aware when we breathe in: the mind tells us the world doesn't know shit about the air, like we do... Now it's ritual--breathe in the black smoke exhale the white!! Black is the absence of color, so it must be the compassionate void.

Aimed toward Ahhhs/ Amos Oz, in fact!!

I seek myself in the moments in which I tarry. I was surprised to watch my mind float in & out of a surface of endeavor, whatever that may be. Getting a plate set to pile on the crapulence of fluid thought--unyielding time--spatial queries--shadowy persistence, I knew at once the dawning of articulated dreams when darkened lids like cinema screens lay desirous of relevance. All I wanted to prove is potential. If I knew that THAT was there, a restive self would be sundered into stimulated ideation/ NOWHERE to go but UP!!