Opting for TORPOR

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

LUXOR, MISR==REVISITED, part II

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

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

hiddenreceived

LUXOR, EGYPT

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

DANGLING man--I'm in PROGRESSION

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

Today's interplay w/ constant SORROW

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

Running TOWARD midnight, backwards

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

The Tea-maker's CHIA-NIK!!

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

Aimed toward Ahhhs/ Amos Oz, in fact!!

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

I'M TALKING ABOUT 2 CONVERSATIONS

Say for instance there is an ensuing dialogue--you, however are attentive, conscious of the foci which is administered by, say, a posture of confidence, & IS HEART-felt. But rather your mind is floating on a myriad of conversations imagined & one that is realistic. Now your spirit is divided. And perhaps your head wins the battle, as the awkward silences demonstrate to you an awakening--a minor one, the one that always accompanies your daily travails. The only hint, literally, that suggests something has taken place is footsteps pattering in ascension, rather than the reality some one individual is going away but in descending steps. But a hint nevertheless: the following of the collusion of sounds arriving.

On Parkers Mill, near Airport rd.

A sweaty ride through that aromatic countryside, wind blowing into me... objectifying temporal thought in angst that my life was of some other place & another time. There I push off from worries, & the wind is hitting my face; I feel like congratulating it, she cries happy tears, my sweat. I'm still in my beak, hollering inside, "All this shit of self-deprecation doesn't move me anymore--just my heart full of blood & legs pulsing..." Rhythm: purple sticker thistles' smells; fields in their expanse; a car whirring by=no worries, I'm not going back so quickly; the solstice of June air; alone! I even ask myself why am I out there, as if I needed a reason one last time--leaving me prone & irksome: the diminutive self wanting to get out. I'm riding our neighbors Schwinn 10 speed, an old one, it looks like it has a gooseneck made of nickle, still not sure. There is an old raggedy home to the side of the road after Airport rd., which is all ahead of me on my way back. Then BLAM, a serious boom & I thought I was being shot at. I instantly surmise that some ole redneck from the porch of that house had to be the culprit--but nobody is around, there is no gun. But then I realize, too much air in the front tire made it explode from the hot pavement. So I get off the bike & walk the 3 miles home.

X-mas day--A Jew resides in his thoughts

What is it that speaks to us whilst we focus on experiencing just anything and something DIVULGING our insight gets to our cognitive BLAH BLAH? Like nothing stands out on one show we're watching, and then the presence of some one actor seems absolutely palpable. Obviously we get beyond the calling that life is imitated and we perceive absolute realism. I could paraphrase Camus-- He says that in order for the cognitive faculty of the mind to be in a healthy state a certain amount of dormancy is required. Watching an actor in a role, say live action or otherwise even, lets us on to a reality their respective identity imparts... & maybe if we are distracted and unfocused this (moment) can be delusional, recorded nevertheless thru our persistence, or not, and if not why do we not have the necessary down-time for our mind solvency (finding that identity) to occur (to us). If we are suicidal, something has brought us to the (in)capable moment of discordance and the ambiguity felt in whether we can go on. I say capable at once, because perforce we can never know what we could or would do. (Capable also could imply that we objectify death i.e. our ally and we can go on to the waiting now w/ the tool called impermanence -- only if we are in the known of transcendence!)

CHAPTER 1--REVISITED, AN ANSWER

Below in chapt.1 I take an idea of dying a 1000 deaths (from sitting in a particular chair amongst your families dwelling as in Kerouac's emphasis) and give it a more literal sense. The old samyasa (religious-wanderer to use a Hindi term) so to speak takes liberty from knowing the bible's characters are not quite present in this dispensation (i.e. only the morals, homilies etc. are available) as to say people have come before us and left graves and grave attributes to be memorialized (as he would choose)--& also personally for him, a man on the fringe of a more prosperous world, he has taken blows & heard the death-knell too many times FROM adopting the bigger picture: the secular world has opportunity but it remains abstract. You can look at it two ways in the day & age: (1) the opportunities are purposely not meant for him, he is left out, or (2) if a religious person is a literalist they excuse themselves rather than avail themselves of the "bigger picture" --(like the advantages in science/health/medicine, which is a commentary on the fight for a god, whatever that may be between those who cling to belief & those who see it as bunk.)

DYLAN----CHAPT. 1

People moving through this unestablicshed reward=life, seems his focus. He names names throughout. I see him in some unfurnished apartment, or taken in by someone, but solitarian occasions where the cognitive yields to the towering obsolete & it's just him & a book on the table (almost a typical scenario). He is calling himself something in the vast immediacy just to turn to his potential to see thru what he can never ally himself with, power. I'm reminded of the image of an old mendicant (wandering ascetic), in this case a Jew, and he comes to a small room in this ghetto, or tucked away village restricted from the rest of the region. To be free from the Powers-that-Be means at first to seek out the thousand deaths he maintained only to find, in his world the even more grave conceptuality of the Bible, or Book of Ethics--Talmud--more grave than anything the authority could do to him (in his mind). So he sits in a shtibel (study room) the open book swells his head with forced thoughts, he is across the room and the distance is a maze of gravid time resisted now forever 'til then. And all he can know is a Seperateness called Kodesh/holy. Dylan seems to claim loyalties, calling himself a Zionist, but again the world is out of balance & we are still younger than yesterday--think history!! The history of G-d is replete with a context of only one conversation with the Infinite that mattered. G-d said, "Hey?" & man said, "I AM!"

I know I know, why bother!!

Our minds demand order, order is in simplicity, & simplicity is in the statement our memory makes that something is feasible to THINK. So say we have a divisive moment, nothing to do with that one statement but to admit we'd go about our day w/o dwelling upon it, this one time. Now when I'm facing losing out on certain imagery, & only those occasions when that static quality to thought demands a blunder of space to deal with, I know I'm not going to pursue the "thinking" just for release. I refuse to consider my experience as if it could be any better or worse just from the influence of thought. Resultant imagery now remains accessible=that space is inside (vast), & not obviated in a way where time controls me.

beit (hebrew)=HOUSE; EIN SOF= G-d as the ETERNAL

The house is the symbol of the receptivity of the Infinite; & gives it a place, w/o negating & creating a sense that in another place Ein Sof wouldn't belong. I dreamt of a sidewalk flush up against a yard in a neighborhood of houses. But the sidewalk was a rushing stream, and to cross it was my prerogative. I saw it for what it is--the gap that contains me from imposing on an-other the just abstractions, incoherencies, & quasi-social thoughts in a half-light, was all within a fence (this stream) of mental imagery, and spanned only in expectation that the ulterior self, on the side of the house, will receive me. If energy comes from other planets, in the sense of scenarios we've built-up & made affable, home-like, like a job, a coffee shop, shopping cntr., an apartment et cetera, we gain solace REVISITING our instincts that made us make those places a part of us. The imagery is energy, in other words. And a planet is like the greater world now contained in OUR smaller world.

Walking to the BANK the other afternoon

I think it is kind of strange how we have an impulse to hone down a sensory moment. The wind was coolish and I was emptied of thoughts in intellectual pursuit (which is a good sign, because at those moments I'm wailing back to find its application) & I wanted to embellish the consciousness of that sensitivity with the desire for more of it--quantifying, that's all. I was at the peak of the deep, and I wanted to get it behind me: truly in this case hindsight was going to be 20/20. That is the instrument to my success--having felt presumptuous, if at a point of endurance from no longer being the spectator (observer) of the realistic--but of only illusion: my perception. & more than that not an intellectualization (like this) but rather an insensed moment *as an actor would speak of: the observation of neuro-activity, like that of a winter's day as a kind of competing for its profit (the existential thing-ism).

HEARING the conversation in the OTHER room

So the lolls are really riffs, a hesitation & expectation. When everybody knows the general course the conversation will take, someone grabs the floor & tries to give entrance to his peers--but loudly. It is like a bubble someone tries to blow up & take a gander at, just to create an edifice & lend to its demise. It really has stereotypical qualities I personally try to excise from my principled dialogue w/ others: kill the pattern!

I am ANTINOMIAN

The general malaise of purpose unites us all in polite contentment & seeing, in this case, Asian Indians, say, at the Univ. Library I find myself in a salutation deliberation, because well he/she treats me the same. The American Wasp is somehow different: perhaps I don't seek his purpose--in the CONSERVATIVE trend. I call going to an ethnic restaurant or foreign market something in line w/ the thinking of my bro Mark, or looking to a pluralist individual like YOU. I get there and look for clues as to what about this place suggests you all would be a part of it. You are me, we're blood, & I learn from the comparison/contrasting. But then like the annihilation of the ego I don't sense identification w/ the pack anymore, instead I am a stranger in a strange land. (or am I just merging w/ the whole?) --& my bros cannot brandish an understanding that this one world village contains me. I've surfaced. So now I want to claim the old way (that may be the affable self, & somewhat ineffective). I'm assuring myself until, yeah, that is gone too, thus the antinomian conceptuality=calling it what I fancy to perceive, while the reality on the ground, the logoi, is what I find at the surface, to which I cling--still w/o a sense of seperateness, allowing me to yield to the strange. The radiance of perception burns away the contours of mischief I'm apt to learn from in identifying this thing through your eyes.

It is a SNOWY KY. morning

I went out to Natural Bridge a few years ago, early Fall. I knew that it sustains more brisk air in the forest, than elsewhere. (It had snowed on me one March Spring break, there in Daniel Boone National Forest.) This one time Valerie was w/ me, and the cold on my face made it hard to talk. Now the obstacle I naturally impose thru communicating was obverted into something really now beyond my control. And since we absorb a modicum of absolutes, and endure them similarly, I projected into relationship that I am understood from incredulity: she's cold, I'm cold et cetera. This morning the weather eclipses my way as I am refreshed from the norm of it all--expecting harmony of spirit asunder. There is a silence, Im apophatic--9/10ths of everything is submerged like I am buffered from one day running into the next, this dispensation is not not-eternal. This day's angst is in the shadow of the SUN, it is cool & approachable...