In Oxford--raining as one should expect in England--I stand in a tree, the solid state I could imagine in natural architecture of the skyline in definition, like here in Ky. Certainly the roiling hills & dark weather is Kentuckian. It seemed that some undifferentiated giant was smattering sprinkles of rain on me, teasing me--and I'm already feeling vindicated, because I knew not enough rain would come & ruin my bookbag & clothes. By a tennis club the day before, I got on the local double-decker bus & asked Norman an African, probably Jamaican, for some smoke. Clearly, like the drug train courses thru the same conscious map in this guy as it does me, my radar was on in situations like this & prooves illicit behaviour gave me the pass... The reggae sounds' path is what I meant to parallel my Jewish instincts as diminished as I felt it was then--Israel & Egypt now on the horizon. I went to a Rasta club which looked a little diminished itself that night--Norman must have pointed me to it...a little off the main drag, where I witnessed a legless man in a wheelchair down bottle after bottle of red wine. The club is as close to Jamaica as I knew I'd come--but ethereally, I was already there. Egypt is however a pivot in a similar goal soon to be trod (by me & my man Rob). Like a dinner with stars & moon I was out-played--in my prevailing disconnect, by a motivated academician, this other Jewish guy, in his pristine dorm kitchen--where we sneaked some of bubby's chicken soup. He let me crash my last night of the month I stayed there in Oxford, at his flat--so the bus would be conveniently met the next day. Still, my time there was black magic speaking=records as my literary path, music as the godly thing, so I could determine the Jewish motive as a terminus. I met a French guy studying at one of the colleges--he's the one turning me toward a Black Panther, Brixton stylee: Linton Kwesi Johnson in his rhetoric, verging on a dialect I'd maintain in dream-scapes of what ever it meant that the third world man is the Trees, & the cosmopolitan suit was destined to wander the forest alone. But as LKJ's reggae forebearer says, "it don't rain on one man's house..." yet as Bob Marley's humanity comes across, some have merely nothing but "old brown" to call home!! So, turning this into a moralism, look at the flood victims on that Salvation Army commercial--or to my point about suffering imbibed by us existentially to wit: the guy at the bottom of some stairs, maybe at some public restroom, whose past hasn't placed him prone to any significant future, & his future is linear=from point A, a pained sentience, to point B, confused reckoning that he doesn't know any other way to ask, why ME? **=**Jewish missionizing was kinda there--in a convenient stranded audience I'd become - doing Jewish studies at Oxford...and not far off the guilt fingers laying a yarmulke 'pon my wayward head at the Western Wall, haKotel. My brother having done these travels before me, scholarly & bohemian--said to me once about being in Europe proper, by the Vatican, "this is one Jew whose soul they won't put ecclesiastical claws in..." something to that effect!! Akhenaton beat his stagnated Holiness to a kind of worthy worship more akin to perhaps "our" ascetic view--3500 or more (?) yrs before. Apollonian antecedents are definitely present in the Christian iconography... (Apollo is associated with the Sun's virile potential--and is correlated with the Christian view of G-d) Bab-ilui (Babylon) means gate of the gods--I imagine a god therein as a solar diety as well. There is no evidence, by the by, that Moses was monotheist due to Egyptian origination. To belabor the point, it is an obvious apposite sense of self-actualization to announce our submission to the sun, what is interesting is the Hindu value put on G-d the InEffable as transcendant from the Known. The known being Brahman, who manifests all that IS. So the Sun IS--and what is behind it is an Endless Notion--a Void Ocean. This Limitless is the Tremendum & Fascinans Jews meant when the sun is submitted to an even Higher Ground. ****Red Fly Nation circa psychedelic dispensations had Rob smuggling a couple of hits of LSD, now having made Jerusalem our major stop-over for this trip to include Egypt--This was the (i) hit solution I deigned to take as if I could get more exposed to a Jewish awareness, since dropping all preconditions was the actionable tabla rasa when dropping Acid.
Like a flight thru my nerve, high up, one moment seized, a note or two takes hesitancy & a babel of thought, making an un-nuanced few hours surface. Like the police at the corner of the street/alley from where we sauntered by, the police state now translated as I'm looking down upon a separate-likening from the norm. Rob & I squeezed into the razor's edge moment, and a narrow alley's passage, while I looked down & hear the Palestinian detained--his verbage waning from the tether toward what I grappled with--in my mind--now all confused. Lights strobing but not ecstatic, and only because no siren hollering, I'm quiet in my own thoughts before an all-nighter doing LSD or whatever some unknown chemical purporting to be Rob's acid. Then that night, I want to become mused by some Jimi Hendrix (& Coltrane was the obvious choice), but nothing was ringing true to an inner-attention & sounds having arrived the days before clotting up boredom are now all dissipated. Downstairs in our kitchen--at the youth hostel near Meir Sharim--an intense early settlement of ultra-Orthodox Jews & I barely looked at a welcome door as if turning to them I wouldn't already be understood. I find myself vaulted into a need for conformity-where families meet over breakfast, but the day arising doesn't beckon me, I languish like a Siberian gulag inmate stretched thin of any soul-greetings i.e. the sun won't be screwed for fun, the food has the taste of my sweat, people crowd me though only one other is in the room. And I can't see thru the skein of pale-self, language has no vital amenity=it's just heat under my arms, gray morning emblems, and a reckoning of filth. The pulse of escape creeps into my pores relinquishing the pained stutter of bad self, purity is a distant dream (this was my personal collaboration with the ungranted few moments--the wait I maintained as if the prayers I meet in arisen chambers are a fat soul of plenty that the religious might bestow unwittingly upon me.)--& now no choice to avail the garment of existence is unwilling to give me the propriety of the middle of the room (my room) where I stand and feel like turning circles as a dog would to assimilate into a new posture.
--
RAISING MY HAND toward the MARGINALIZING of CONFORMITY ...hmmm. In this dispensation the 3rd world man is the Trees and the Cosmopolitan Suit waving his plastic finger, is destined to wander the forest alone. LIGHT plateau - dark CORRIDOR; white black white black: I watched what I saw! The last TIME we gave ourselves to the moment may have been our last reFLECTion before the veil of tears reMINDed us that IT had been a Karmic death.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Tea & kabbalah: The Project of my Worth
What's his name Whittington? (the bookstore owner, downtown Lexington) said he always liked to go out to the woods, take refuge in a cabin with a bottle of whiskey & commence to read Dostoevskii. The fog & forest din should make us project the concretized & xenophobia Russians as Joseph's vari-colored biblical mantle--a buffering garment, but imbued objectively as a stranger before the spectacle of some new yet old culture. I always think of some nod East via Gandhi & his brahmacharya way, when drinking plain-lemony soda water. It is as if my appetite gets prone, acute, so turning toward some relevant invention for self-actualization the motive becomes my new mean. Many folks believe in rituals for their various green teas. Tea generally gives me some atmospheric refuge--& depending on the coffee, I imagine Lonely Planet's Ethiopian exploration with the coffee made & roasted over fire before the traveler. My meekly made soy Ethiopian mocha, but boiled in a pot is as close to the scented Turkish variety heralding the reigns of my senses like I am back in the banana fields/moshav in the West Bank...taking that 10 o'clock am break, after getting up before the sun. (Moshav Fatsa'il) In Egypt I drank helba which is cardomon seed tea; karkadea--hibiscus tea, highly sweetened red as the dust arisen in the desert horizon obscuring the yellow of the sun manifesting in a red glower. And the obvious choice - chai, whose Arabic version is just as it is in the Jerusalem yeshivah's samovar, where I was in my moment of peak consciousness--drinking it in the confines of the institution, as opposed to the finite scholasticism & religion all rhetorical & conflicted in mind like classes WOULD have been this phenomenon. (Honestly, there is a lot I give due to the Rabbinic teachers, tho' liberating moments in those classes' cognizance were somehow standing before the chainik or samovar.--a day's objective glance back as if pilpul is what I was learning to do...at least gaining insight to contexts therein.) The Black Tea. The black tea in its heavy kettle drew one into presence & persona of Euro-Judaism - his/her temporal remains stark & hot in contrast from the then December air making cold exudation stone floors rehabilitated. ***Mental apostasy is all I can attest to. Living toward self-Realization is only a road to traverse if we had sign-posts/symbols that avail those who trod (like Israel, like Egypt) with the Motive to plant his/her next step. This begs the question, in the case we don't live in a symbolic universe--then when are our thoughts elevated enough making things Thus? To maintain a state of meditation in the entirety of a day -*vipassana*-a deep aside may just be the center you find from without, & it is enough... If you are running away from yourself, look at the path that colluded in your effort to jettison Point A the intangible You, to Point B--the spectral shore that is infinite in your mind, even if the "ancient rosy colors behind your eyelids" (Kerouac) sought self effacement... I looked into so many shadows of nearly an empty mind's reckoning, that the query I projected into that loam of self-space, was the irony that fact was my fiction. I decided to put down the menu, & just eat... No more deliberation. I guess, as sort of a cop-out I imagine my "creativity?" as part of something macrobiotic. So, rather than seek out a Certain crowd, I stand in the place where I live. (Unfortunately, that mimicks an REM song title.) Honestly, I am as provencial as those who more obviously look concretized in their particular condition. But, I seriously want to get with it, as some suggest. I bet if you read the bio (maybe in wikipedia) about Bernard Malamud there is a good example of someone who lived in quite solitarian circumstances--& thus has a ground-of-being he sees as constituent with the maypole he circumambulates 'round. Today--this am. I'm going to check out something by Alan Watts--it is a Jesus-placed Buddhist thang & well from him it'll get into cosmic myth & nothing terribly reflective of the ditch standard religions' ritual lays on us. If the Sky is the Limit, then looking up into the light is the distance strung - the project of my worth!! I have about 6 of Gershom Scholem's books & the one I want to get back to is that tome about Sabbatai Tsvi--the false messiah. Anyway, I like the idea that Metatron, **Upon the Throne** is the angel who writes the Adherent into the book of life. According to one account, the one known, Scholem says Thoth is equated. Yeah, Mysticism may have begun with the Book of Enoch being expounded upon by the Geonim & the other two generations of Talmudists, the Amoraim, & Tannaim =Is what I read in Scholem's words. But, fully,-- as the conventional atmosphere for Jews, they were developing kavannot (focus prayers, so to speak) like less than a 1000 yrs ago. I read in Suleiman Ibn Gabirol--this Seferdic Jew (Spanish) --a book about him and translations of his piyyutim (poems) that he brought in this intent--of G-d being proximal, before Nachmanides in France in the late 1200s--whose Midrash & Mishnaic writings delivered a blow to the rationalism of Moses ben Maimon only a generation or two before. So I close my eyes, then persist! Now, I'm acquiring from which is a lesser result of objectivity, merely its potential; just darkness, that indeed has a beginning, a rosy colored ancient intra-mantra slavery w/provacative patterns=I'm alone! If what I began to record means motive, then this must be the essential form in which my consciousness will ultimately take if I am as I think I am, rooted into karmic ineffectiveness--here after! I keep a basic rhythm that I could go back to, and only when I knew I had gone far enough beyond the reach of identifiable solace it had just given me, the sense that spirituality is rationalism seems proven. (I keep the lines out before the tie that binds.) So, not to dismiss Maimonides, rational self-improvement always has its place.
Friday, November 21, 2008
when fact is Fiction, & TV is reality (borrowed U2 lyric)
The psychiatric doctors said that w/schizophrenia the mind is like a 1000 TVs going on at once... so in a murmur between nods of my reading regimen IS not going to make fade the noumenon that is the fray of dialogue I tend to answer for--with the pseudo-Norm. Besides, it is active entertainment if you see the silent threshold in between talkingHeads, just as the Corner of the room emits in a wall of vibratory properties, like soothing white noise. I dig bookSpan--watching plain imagery, people just blathering, but w/language as the field of something sensorial, IS very iconoclast & I can maintain I am not dragged into some nowhere Zone. In Buddhist thought the face is a translator, different masks in optimal moments when you're actively listening, give us a sense we are indicated by the experential--whereas the grotesque spectacle of smilingLying faces from the yackBox, means our nature adapts to something a little more aloof. & if we're aloof, maybe we take less seriously flow of consciousness type dialogue--even if it is merely our own perception to see it as such. Creativity is in the eye of the beholder, it is a threshold we've decided the character meets, whether they intended to or not... I just want to attain real objectivity in people's self-expression. Camus says something about actors acting a piece a 1000 times & what it is that is possible to derive from their performance, discussed in Sysiphus!! "the organs of consciousness work w/One & Against itself" as Nietzsche depicts--requires dormancy, says Camus, to run efficiently. & the patternic reality--the call & response of dialogue we have been carried away with, makes the riffs & peaks illumine something other than content--which we can bet would be dull--but something abstract & less linear is the detail of our kaliedoscopic mind. **Moving from a Wide Open perspective to a Corridor of Trees is just the mental faculty it takes to cohere what is perfected in Thought & then Actionable. One would not any longer deliberate on the esteem granted us thru our art if only & forever we came in from the Cold toward encumbency of presence of mind, & stayed there. However Light dark Light dark is the road we take. At A Certain pt. that portal we take into a creative purging of the moment will seem forever behind us. For instance, all this experience which is the sum total of identification w/the Now, is assessable when I look upon the familiarity of my environment. Before it was merely that I knew its foci, but now I tend to justify it. Two days ago, over in the Captain D's parking lot, I began to assess the billboard w/U2 on it, which seemed to be an emoting of penultimate inner-sensei - I felt someone out there, generally had a positive easily self-required message. People would actually be helped by those guys, & well we all need help somehow, so "help" was a good thing to imagine. *** George Harrison's guitar gently weeps, just as Kerouac's broom gently sweeps. Harrison lives in the urban myth w/cosmic implications just as the Eastern Nod of Kerouac has the Here & Now i.e. the cosmic life of Americana objectified under Mt. Hozomeen--when he was out in one of the national parks for a few months as a ranger. The world sleeps, our minds require dormancy, so that we peak in moments of repose & awaken to language which lights the fire simmering under the malaise of nothing having much to do with Us anyway. ** Listening to Magical Mystery Tour--really the only Beatles stuff I grew up with--always laid a layer of philosophical air descended from the eves, upon exigent views beyond immediate walls, while I tried to mirror little jips & caricatures--chipping off pieces of that totality. I thought it was popular asceticism & I wanted to yield to something deeper--just maybe the key would be found in proximity to the distance strung... Somehow I knew looking under the streetLights of the night all-ahead & paved ubiquity, was interesting, & yet the key was in the alley off the beaten track.
To conclude, I have a techni-color thought. I have this image of "a sad man wanting to stand up in my eyes" from Elias Khoury, a Palestinian author contemporary with Amos Oz--the Israeli author/Peace Now activist. The sad man is the sand's collapse like "ancient rosy colors behind my eyelids" (Kerouac) where something called Mine sought oblivion. One peak moment was in front of the tube sitting down by the fire-place--w/Dostoevskii's character in mind-- Alyosha burying his face, & in his case turning toward something, & in mine--turning away! If you've read very much of Kerouac's stuff--or Buddhist writings otherwise, you may have come across a meditational technique called vipassana. It is something about illustrative thought=imagery consigning the incidental space with more meaning. Well, somewhere between some loss in the sensorial & habit, dross conventions thru the TV kinda left me numb, & there was what I imagined as hooks in the ceiling (a scenario of the reproven Karamazov father) & a lot of fire in a spectral shore making TV the enemy... I threw away the Outward Fact somehow--& Americana went with it via that damned yack box.
To conclude, I have a techni-color thought. I have this image of "a sad man wanting to stand up in my eyes" from Elias Khoury, a Palestinian author contemporary with Amos Oz--the Israeli author/Peace Now activist. The sad man is the sand's collapse like "ancient rosy colors behind my eyelids" (Kerouac) where something called Mine sought oblivion. One peak moment was in front of the tube sitting down by the fire-place--w/Dostoevskii's character in mind-- Alyosha burying his face, & in his case turning toward something, & in mine--turning away! If you've read very much of Kerouac's stuff--or Buddhist writings otherwise, you may have come across a meditational technique called vipassana. It is something about illustrative thought=imagery consigning the incidental space with more meaning. Well, somewhere between some loss in the sensorial & habit, dross conventions thru the TV kinda left me numb, & there was what I imagined as hooks in the ceiling (a scenario of the reproven Karamazov father) & a lot of fire in a spectral shore making TV the enemy... I threw away the Outward Fact somehow--& Americana went with it via that damned yack box.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Alliterative yet non-fundamentalist in terms of religion
That mostly no one I know has an intellectual goal, is rather the way of the world, so all I can do is attract someone subtley & hope he/she awakens to a bigger picture in their own way. If you see from this I tend toward the abstract, then my sense of temporal reality might be plain & studious unto something else--like something more intense we all kinda expect as a release or relief: believe all that is there too!! But brother, I am a reading fool & it has granted me an objectivity I didn't have so many yrs ago...so hopefully imminent transition is what I am wired for, & is the appearance of single-mindedness anyone could understand. This perspective is about concealment: I can only do so much for an-other & if they don't see that life is a problem because its simplicity is eluding us from our striving, I am not going to be an example of striving to show then that that is going to be effective. *** An Ineffable G-d is the strict Jewish & Islamic sense, not a Personal god--has an iconoclasm feeding the greed of my consciousness. But that 3/4ths of everything we see is submerged beyond the requisite perception, appearances suggesting that there is an immeasureable energy... this is a Theist Ideal//even Pagan I'd imagine--and we can call it the Deficit we Fill with Meaning that our Direction in Life, our path means multiply: Noumenon, enumeration, Intellect. We are necessarily acquisitive & self-conscious, though deriving an objectivity & being understood in light of it remains on par with Ego-centricism. It All is Personal, somehow. This is the point; a spiritual sense of our condition doesn't have to be Unknowing & satisfaction therewith. And if you say you have questions, you question--you're not done yet, then you prove my point about Rationalization--that this is our faith. Query is Spirituality. When we sit in the pew & the cant is spiritually uplifting then we look at the rosy coloured mourn of those old ladies, & the lines of age that an old man's hardwork seemingly terribly fateful/magnificate, then we are at the peak of a moment=its convergence of Time Place & Community. To Observe this, we are necessarily in the Heights of the Noumenon, Intellect, the Rational. Yet the Mind asserts we must live up to an expectation that we have made the Right Choice, & More than that the mind asserts we have made a Choice et al!! Spiritual equals Rational=it can't be clearer than that. *** So, what are we renunciating, you may ask? Well, why should belief not be attended to? MY answer is Be Careful what you wish for. In the end G-d provides everything--meaning we become reductive & we problematically don't know that there is much more to life (at the expense of belief!). Therefore when we see that G-d doesn't come to court & we see that not much is really going on...that our lives don't have substance we want to be filled with??...this is just our Minds trying to put a value statement on our Condition: Right Wrong Good Bad True False. Isn't this the mistake Adam made having eaten the fruit of the Knowledge of Good & Evil? One way to look at it! Hell, we can do that til kingdom come, what good is it? Are you asking for G-d in your life? Because if you're asking then necessarily G-d is somewhere other than before you. So renunciation is killing the Desire. Remember answers are a dime a dozen. Ask if you must (as to what TO believe), but belief is only taking up a certain amount of space where relationship OUTSIDE of us would rather be what we attend to. Simple Logic.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Olam--Kehilla--Ulema-Talmid=One World, eternal in this life
I've been dreaming of my bro. lately--the oldest, in Ca. Even now I can't believe my memory 'flect w/such consignation (as opposed to resignation) fine details of these night travels. Down by the Univ. Hosp. there's a bldg on the corner w/those checkered bricks one could easily climb had he wanted to. There was a bldg like this, its facade covering a masjid (mosque) & we were across a plain of grassy field from it=me, my bro., & some folks I think I've imagined thru discussions from the abstract Tribe.net folks, who regularly I wouldn't see--tho' am regularly supposing their presence. We were listening to some music choosing intervals when one & another would put on their choice. I thought Mark was in the same office that still contended the Muslims couldn't liturgically recommend this entertainment as strictly firangi-Western, because some Muslims would indeed not try to coerce these social settings. And then the question was, did we need to get the approval of this local cleric, being in vicinity of their prayer-house? Meanwhile, Mark puts on something, in the dream, that my mind illustrated, but wasn't auditive (just visual). We were listening to stuff like Baaba Maal (Senegalese), & that Talking Timbuktu album w/Ry Cooder & Ali Farka Toure. And one album came to mind but I couldn't verify the sounds arriving, was Raichal Edon--an Israeli w/Ethiopian players, singing in Hebrew, Amharic & Arabic--not to mention the banner patois of Rasta variety in at least one of their songs I've heard. This type of rhythm, hypnotic down on the One-Drop--as Reggae is desribed, has even more imbued culturally, an extent of vast distances & fealty to mysticism...if only the parameters of the dreamScape allowed, I would have brought down the blue dome (in the whiteHot sky) of the pleroma above, & figures would have taken flight... The sense of the setting also reminded me of Laneer H.S. up the street from where we lived when I was first drawing conscious maps the 1rst 6-7 yrs of my life--in Texas. The bare-ness of the H.s. up at the the top of the hill always portended an endless Summer to me...Texan climate all adulterated in my thought: Think (of our) Sefardic Synagogue & deserts!! Here at work, recently, I asked an Iraqi woman about the word Takkiyah. She thought for a minute & was clearly not someone who practiced it. Rather, the Indonesian woman I asked once before, took a cold but academic stand to it--acknowledging this is about "concealment." The Dar al-Harb, World of War, in fact is implicated. The idea is that a Muslim, & at the suggestion of the Iraqi, a Shi-i, would harbor distrust--she said Hate, & then not show outward signs of this, but graduate to the norm w/out the opposing "group" knowing their real intentions. Also, a Moslem (the farsi pronounciation) from Bombay had come by here.--we discussed the Akedah. This is the Sacrifice of Isaac, by Abraham. I thought I kinda remembered, but he reminded me that this word meant Faith (?). Clearly this gentlemen was a grander student of people's differences, & having a sense that a beginning point is not always in one's own backyard, but centers from without: A Jew, an Evangelist et cetera. THink mutual arisings. (He spoke of a Christian over-wrought on their Good News THen on offer to him--the Moslem...but affably.) There is Urdu script written on some of the Indian paintings Mark brought back from India, hanging on my wall--but this Bombay man (he says rather than Mumbai), knowing Urdu, recognized it rather as Arabic, & thru his basic understanding of the language didn't see any Urdu words he knew as such as Urdu. In light of the nod East, I've been listening to Ravi Shankar & Ali Khan lately. The measure of Ravi's sitar's thrum in some octave containing its frequency that gets 1/8ed, 1/4ed, 1/2ed etc, has images concretized in the murmur of my senses. The entitlement I feel I get from understanding the scrawl of ancient musings in its hypnosis, makes me question that "ANY" way of expressing how I get lifted from it--is lacking. It was entirely the palate of diet consciousness, but not as if I'm at the table of Indian culture...rather just the Village of One World, ...whiling away under some tree, unsatisfied yet prone w/my vital resources, & focused upon my ephemeral body like it is a measure of something greater than its pain.
Friday, August 22, 2008
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.
Monday, July 21, 2008
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.
Monday, June 30, 2008
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.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
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.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
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.
Friday, May 16, 2008
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.
Sunday, May 04, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
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.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
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.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
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.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
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.
Friday, March 21, 2008
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
**the title from Artur Rimbaud
Saturday, March 01, 2008
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.
Friday, February 29, 2008
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.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
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.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
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.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
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.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
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.
Monday, January 14, 2008
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!!
Saturday, December 22, 2007
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.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
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.
Monday, December 17, 2007
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.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
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.
Saturday, December 08, 2007
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.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
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.
Friday, November 23, 2007
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.
Friday, November 16, 2007
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.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
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.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
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.
Friday, November 02, 2007
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.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
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.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
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--
Monday, October 22, 2007
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.
Friday, October 19, 2007
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
paul k's website is paulkweathermen.com
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