In the CATSKILLS mts., in a place we call the HIDEAWAY

I see myself in utter isolation, utter anihilation, where at an I-IT moment I reject the field converging on my inner-peace--everything within my presence, and let go. I'm jailed--there is no reachable new environment I can go to anew. Then, so as to not feel abortive I conceive of the struggle, - now it is I alone & the Thou of presence received. My passport is tattooed upon my person, a veil which allows incognito surveillance of higher chambers where I'd meet a transcendent "being." (--verb) The iconoclasm of self-hood is acted upon & I am the current of the experential, the death of symbolic me. G-d is the insignificance of me. Imagine the dank halls of physical confinement: Papillon's story. He is hanging by a thin web & he alone sees how he is pinned. Like a green limb, there is no exclusion or objectivity to his source (of self-realization), he'll turn in upon himself. The imagination is the symbolic universe and it takes over & nothing is real. To evade his finitude he splits into two: the pain is acute & wrongly he imagines surfeiting the struggle into, again, the realm of representative relationship, but it is his dormancy. The sleep of the just is to whom he projects his loss of freedom, those who have died on the trail he is finding, the void of time.

The exudation from the DREGS of consciousness

Mirrors reflecting what is here, is negligible for Yeshivah bukhers--they had no mirrors in the institute, & here to them is some benchmark in history that imparts solace of an asceticism which we can guess at with our own self-realizations. Why no mirrors? Because as men we are not to suppose ourselves as vanity permits. If rooted in clarified reflection is past lives--ours or otherwise, then artificiality of thought can be surmised whether we are looking or not upon what we'd want to be as some lonesome heaven portends, or seeing oneself as a contemporary in a one world village. On Williamsburg rd. (my neighborhood of growing up) in the 88Olds, as if the red dragon of some remote past life decided to sneak up on me, I expedited a pensive notion, but quickly as like the rear view mirror in the car could contain the thought, and yet looking askew proffered a full length view of my face--in a red glare. Supposing I were in a third world pension room with my woman & we were erudite from seeing ruins of confessions of lost history and if we then stared into mirrors opposite & back to back from each other, I would have in this case reminiscent of the drive down my old street past tall oaks & the peopled side-walks, seen my past life with her as my mother.

W/ the Kiryat Arba advocates in HEBRON

I went to Hebron with Ohr Somayach (Light of Happiness) yeshivah. In the main square outside the ancient temple (mosque/synagogue) we all stand in the cold/cool afternoon milling about. A Palestinian boy comes over near our group with his donkey & they get up on this tall median-like protuberance coming up on the square's floor. There is grass growing there, a way to feed his animal, no doubt a mundane ritual for the boy. The mention of the evil past in Hebron beween our two opposing sides sort of does not contain me--seemingly obsolete, though I know there was early Arab violence really begun by radicalized elements on both sides? ...1929--I don't know much about it, except its report of pain. Now it's like theater. The boy, who I go stand next to, makes absolutely no acknowledgement of my being there. His disgust was palpable, & the Jews standing around are beyond any consideration of him, too. I wanted to laugh at this, if only they could see each other it would be a caricature of humanity & of these terrible events I know in their mind is not beyond reach. There are plenty of webs of illusion between us all. Potok (of The Chosen etc.) illuminates the struggle for Hebron nationalism in In the Beginning. But I felt dissuaded from accepting Israeli sovereignty when there, not because I sought the rights of others to that land, but because the Israelis contained it militarily, & it gave an artificial feel to my American passport functionaries. Our Yeshivah group walked past a look-out station (our first look around when we got to town), I'll assume on the corner of the Jewish enclave. & I had hoarded an extra Yafo orange, ...but seeing the soldier way up above gave me the idea to chuck it up to him, which I did, gleaning the constricting boredom of this mess of a "sacred" place.

Outside of ELLENVILLE, NY

Thinking a shtetl is relative, one world village--I feel I am among the seen of those who portend signs of spiritual realization, like Rebbes on top of roofs, {fiddlers on roofs} as I walk down the street ankle deep in angst, a dot of angst that surmises what I can emote of the significant dream images I have of Poppa on on top of the bungalow as if my outstretched arm was right there ready to offer him a tool. Like biblical masks veiling faces, or just transient looks I project upon people--these characters whether dream-like or here, not knowing what else or what root race seemingly contorting out of serene looks heralded into my plain of view. Dybbuks, spiritual possession, has to be like channeling; the voice of split cognizance occurring--the patient drone awakening in your mind that now you are amongst.

In Cairo circa DECEMBER '86

These guys we saw were the Israeli version of the European ex-pat. one would find abroad from their respective motherlands. Though the Israelis were by consignment still avid patriots, one would think. We, as representatives of job-ONE, as if we were of the American ethos, seemed enjoined looking at how the Israelis clean-clarity stood out from the glum cigarette smoking of the Arab citizens i.e. 3rd world is glum and not shiny though 3/4 of what we absorbed was submerged like islands in the deep (Simply speaking, we were just not seeing the whole picture.) These Israelis had built a loft & fixed up their hostel room down from our stark, unglassed windowed one on the corner of the building, 6th floor. I knew I was seeing Jews in an absolute & uncompromised situation (the polite tourist, if you will) than I had ever witnessed before e.g. it wasn't the synagogue or relatives, was going to be unforgettable for me. Rob, there with me exuded confidence & came from the recesses of his experience, but my proffering anything brought to the table had a sense of the provincial & unworldly. Still, in my mind I reviewed what I would tell them. And that was I know them, but I don't, and yet I would remember their aura of the traveler-absurdum (All they're doing is defending, so to speak) of merit because of their travails. (And yes, I see both sides: this is MY sense of things & I HAVE no currency w/the polity of disharmony.) This was also, however, a big brother scenario-they were my big bros., & though I would wear thin thinking familial-ly about the world, it really always gave me advantage at least predeceasing going into new situations because wondering what came next could be as good as intuiting the same.

On NORML, HEMP legalization tour

Waiting, waiting & gathering what is bubbled up from the crevices of surface reality, which we find is rarely other than that. This is my locomotion into the dark mundane, as critical understanding of what I had gone thru was nil, yielding to observation only--that being only potentiality of what could be adduced. Like a monk, I sought solitarian being & no-struggle towards what was social distraction, & silence. The bus, like a cavalcade of the known, took to the utterly bland fields of Ohio as if a hostile voice streamed towards its goal--my presence of mind, making up an ill-considered cosmic tourist of me. I had taken along Luis Borges' Labyrinths calculating its Cabbalistic intensions, like a deep-aside to an ascetic report. My dissipation was ominous and unyielding i.e. we were on a "hemp" tour, and what came of my academician quality looking at that book for hours at a time, only makes sense today (the soft machine becomes part & parcel of a greater organism). Words, plains of pavement, empty train tracks following the highway, novocain mind drivel - all left me seeing each word on the one chapter page, The Circular Ruins, with having a green shadow cast upon its black print. A truth from an ancient time seemed the order of those few moments, like the first literate beings conceptualizing waywardness would have been looking into plants on the ground, the world around colluding just enough to make them wonder what comes ephemerally from beyond...

apropos of a WET SNOW

Living in active pursuit towards experiencing your interests is a waiting game for it to catch up w/ you, over take you, but you are the hunted--it is gainful to look at it this way & we do. But when there is a lack of pursuing of activity one begins to haunt the very grounds where you were once caught-- caught up in life's grand reward. The waiting now becomes superceded by the duly noted objective, your not there to spend time now. Haunting is like chasing thunder, it can be all around you (this thing you've gravitated toward), but you have only suceeded in becoming soaked & beyond its report. (a pop, a flash, a bubble, a shadow... {Kerouac}) You're terminally late, not unlike a spirit. Relating to this somehow is a goal I had one time of grabbing the horns of relationship's BULL, riding it out, & not sacrificing my self-respect: I had nothing better to do at the time, in other words. So I break into my girl-friend's car w/ a wire hangar, she drove a big black Eldorado which I subsequently kicked leaving a dent in the front fender. It is February probably, cold out & I wanted to rummage through her ashtray to find an old roach to smoke. She is in the restaurant across the street working. Found, I sit there smoking in the flurrying rain listening to the radio. Now the haunting begins of an old mind that knows to commune with relationship means something other than this...

A Poem for Grayson to make LIGHT of!

Tea, the peace like taking in the ocean one sip at a time// Sea, like a void we walk up to, to glimpse the sublime// Explore, everything until that point--in this rhyme// Pieces of beyond, we hold in just this one pond// In our hand, grappled unto abstraction--our struggle and...// Focus, which gave us allegory, the fusion is a gate all hoary// A bus, the cavalcade of what is known, stretch the fiction, pick a bone. ***Rationalsim IS the HIGHEST Spirituality*** If there is a thought, then there is the principle to thought, the simple beginnings. If there is intelligence in the world, then there is its beginning, the intellect. For every condition there is its potential. This simplicity is known as G-d, according to the rationalists (I think, the Mutazilas--Muslim). If we dream thereby we must exist. To exist then whence that energy promoted reflection upon the necessary condition, there is a principle to existence. Though it may be beyond a dualistic approach as our minds accord, still one may necessarily expect a Principle behind that value. Why do the Fundamentalists therefore say, leave the most profound queries about origins (cosmogony) up to faith i.e. mystery? What is it do they not want to think about?

I potok-ularly like reading POTOK!

I'm following the conclusions of yiddishkeit there for my perusal via Potok's spin on Jewish up-bringing. I see myself assess from a cntr.-my cntr., which leads to expectations like: this is Jewish because..., but I can't finish. Yet the cntr. is never exasperated and I demand more. Religion is to me these few moments: a cntr. unfulfilled yet dwelled upon the constraint as if no other thing could have brought me to it. The human condition to be naturally parasitic is relieved of its affect on me, because change begins with me, & I'm not trying to convey expectations on anyone else. If asceticism is a product of danger (desperation is desire's brain), then I am rehabilitated, because a healthy mindset means the path I am on is from the minutiae of where we are all prone to lead i.e. solitude.
****Shlomo Almeoli's is one of the numerous books Potok mentions as curricular to what has developed as an immersion into the secular encumbering the ascetic. A character would find resourceful allies in literature shared from an anonymous world or perhaps a mystical old lady, from which, in this case this Book of Dreams is proffered. I see the world unqualified to go along for the ride as an illustrated artful world of ideas allows the characters to close doors, and we find their eyes adjusting to abstractions out of which the material world ceases to be observed. Books within books, threading tendrils which hook me into an evolving surveillance of the zwischenmench (in-between man); everybody is half of something!

Submitting to Peaceable REASON

I am of the mind to expose maybe an underlying psychology of the circles I moved in, at one time, advances on indicting relationship which is conjured and not real is thus embarrassing. I gained ground just with thoughts like I was being written in the book of life as long as the mundane was eluding me, because spontaneity wholly meant quite the opposite, that it was not written (predestined), it (my life) would have, rather, made its own current. It is a fine point. Timelessness has the same sense. At my detached best I would look at the gods of abundance, that being whatever sense of the providential I could construe, and ask that I may have time: time to live rightly, time to create movement of thought so that I may consider the corner I occupied. This now gives me the sense that I am not ridiculed in the face of impermanence. But because i feel dropped into positive and novel circumstances, there still is a sense of artificiality to it. I have begun erasing what is beneath (I am a palimpsest.), though the past is jumping off points, its happenstance is irredeemable. In medias res!

REBEL ROAD

When I worked in some kind of capacity that seemed filmy & unnatural, for the business, when Eric first started it, I remember the phenomena of only seeing off at a certain distance upon the vistas that surrounded where I was spending most of my time (this neighborhood). I said to my cuz Andy it was like being in command of views that would go dim in a really overt way the moment I'd project into those perimeters. So Andy, as if his physical prowess could help, picked me up & said now look... & if not for that I wouldn't have been true to my contempt for my condition (not quite contempt, but rather grappled unto abstraction). It was like a pipe dream realized: if these soul-eyed observations where ever on a grand scale i.e. if my soul wasn't simply this small constraint which I find it to be, then the whole picture would be jaded, shaded with say the majesty of what I envision as the convalescence of the souls I see just passing through (around me). What I'm saying is, is that the view is more organic the more one observes at one time. On Oprah there was a soul-dynamic discussed which explains the bridge to awareness when I pass-thru as if I were cast out to sea, like a small sea-worthy vessel & I am destined to follow the mothership, just follow, no goal in mind to where I'll end up. If you seek the ocean as a path, you are lost!

the Dream & Sqqqqecial Media

Sometimes I wake up with just a black field & one image (personality) upon it. I am of course sleeping with Valerie, and this is a status quo dream, because I am electrified from conveyance then in those moments, as if I was looking around the room, but my eyes are closed. I have to ask myself why is it I inculcate & suppose Valerie in a dynamic with our slumber characterized. And I guess the answer is, this is what we do. We sleep. And I have a nocturnal conversation with her, which is only answering me with a soft question: "Why?" To perceive relationship, it seems, we first place identity at our cntr., apparently--this is homeward, rather than wayward.****************************************************** (about a week ago) My eyes feel feverish today--recently. The image of the primordial man (Adam-kadmon) on the cover of Gershom Scholem's Mystery of the Godhead has no eyes, but is reverential of the solitarian me (or anyone) like to guess at a face from the back of someone in a crowd is the same demand we have of a facade of self-hood thru images. The guy at Sqecial, who always trades for my books, had a sleepy Al Joelson look to his eyes--I am used to seeing by now elsewhere, like lines of reflection from intensity, concentration & everything I guess at, respective of me (though I don't have these eyes) are like my sense of my power spot, which is under the cascade of shadows cast under the auspices of community, an entirely visual reality. I remember in around 2000 visiting my brother there in Newbury, Ca., sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed (just a mattress on the floor) as we carried on. I still see him peering from furthest-most reaches than just the few feet between us--even at that point I imagined novelty in that look (and the point is not necessarily fraternity), though I knew til now now I remained intellectually un-intimidated (like anyone with an attitude of benefits to studying regularly). On one level we ceased regarding anything grander than ourself because its torpor cannot surfeit our exhaustion.

the little smoke & the Brujo=JUST allusions

The sense that we can have self-realization out in the wilderness is interesting to me. (though the concrete jungle remains available) Sakyamuni, the Buddha spends 6 yrs. with 5 ascetics, those who live in renunciation of the world. (stark) The perspective is that IF we must struggle to survive i.e. work, then life is worse for it in the samsara, karmic-cycle. So he sees a local girl down by the river, from the deer park in which he currently resides, & she offers him a bowl of sweet rice, which he decides to partake of. Then he sets the bowl in the river & it flows upstream: this is a sign to give the form & nature of the body the things it would require=the middle path. As a child he had reached the First Jhana, trance, the first sense of concentration cognitive of compassion, near the planting field, under a rose-apple tree. He naturally acceded to a position of just the right amount of tension, his breathing was tempered (pranayama)--the breathing yields to patterns as we promote a certain control over it, & thus affects consciousness. A centeredness! Being, a the peak of monster consciousness, the deep aside to sensory perfection. I turn upon a ritual-realized thing like attuned to the cultish don Juan's apprentice going out into the desert & "seeking" a higher ground, as conditions in the natural world would be the closest to a freed imagination (spiritual ally). Nature is allegory, in other words.

To the Dylan fans I know, as the back of the fish truck unloads:

The chic who started WRFL (Kakie Urch), the student run Univ. of KY Alternative radio station, once told me some kind of perception of those who wondered at the esoteric life of Dylan. They said at his door, I guess the facade at which we would come to his "house," a large dog was at the watch. And as a boy sitting under the mural my brother put on the wall--seeking what was beyond the framed portal out of the flying carpet, there in the mural, the Semitic purveyor of distant travels, all appealed to the logic of seeing Dylan's wizened head from the side and obscure, on the blue G. H. album. Like looking at clouds and imagining images that bring closer the affect of the details of the mind, I thought I could see half the hidden face, but this was all that I projected--as the songs supposed the details of the thing from which he translated the world ...the illustrated face in the abstract, which unjustly, I couldn't help but not see in its entirety.

JUMPING from HER WATER

In the Boyscouts in Wander Woods was a just found new opening to another branch of Mammoth Cave. We pried the door free & went in--I think this is where the impression was born of falling, spinning out of control like a cycle where all things relevant pass the cntr. equally. I am compulsed to find my cntr., here realizing the French word Rousseau uses, tourbillion. Thinking things in a patent way as a situation demands is a cycle, which without, you are doomed to search for cntrs. from outside of you, of not your own making & the losing end means your forbidden path. I once worked for a lawncare co. & the outrageously blowing wind animated an experience of chimerical quality, of little whirlwinds blowing forth around me until I was enveloped in one. I thought I was at the cntr. of a top, & as it landed the world around me would have me suddenly in an entirely different corridor of, well, where I occupied space--this is me being precluded from minding the here & now--there are a lot of things that stop us from seeing the moment fully divulged. I honestly thought being in a soul was at once within the forces of ever broadening whirling tourbillions, & this was to take me to somewhere giving me the chance to gather myself, but again changing the path I was on for so long, in a very drastic way.

Mid-East Travels, then in Musr (Egypt)

My pal I traveled with was an example to me of a life of study, experential as well as literary, but in common with my attitude that I intellectually had a struggle to which I could attend. The irony was that I had thought advice should be sought-after from reading a book, and yet I just didn't get around to reading all that very often. I was highly vicarious in this regard--just gleaning the report of continuity of academia to then the present, as if time meant more than filling endless rows of bottles with its impermanence... I had a sense of measure for inducting memory which was inculcating adversity (my neurosis, no doubt) rather than anything concrete. All this tended to fill me up, and as long as I could reach the surface of my internal struggle, then that movement gave me currency. It is all that seemingly I would require. ****In Egypt, about 35 mls. outside of Cairo, Rob Loco aka Jamaal Roy Valentine (the pal mention above) and I were visiting a home of big fat Adel, the first Egyptian we befriended, a restaurant owner called al-Salaam Restuarant, there in Cairo. Adel, we had just come to find out was just then embracing Islam - ritually speaking, not just in name, (due to his poor health, perhaps?). He introduced us to his family there in what looked like a ubiquitous Egyptian kinda light industrial town. And he said says as we were moving towards the door, "Tonight I want to swim!" To this day we have no inkling as to what he actually meant. Rob patted him on the back and said, "We know you want to be with your lady, man!" But no commotion in the effort to give us quarters were proffered and we just continued on our travels (obviously we weren't staying there)--in some such order we took a row boat out onto the Nile, that day. We have a picture of Adel picking his nose, out on the water.

Red heifer is to the politicos as the bread of affliction is to stale saltines

Peace is not the placid surface of a spring, a contentment that this distance between me & characterization of strange lands that allows for an oblivion that will satiate the eternal. The eternal being the last few minutes making up my feeling now, my experience in the world making up a subtle ignorance of a strange future. The spilled milk of consciousness is functional as wall-flowers of the drab people-garden of industrialized-West, because it'll never be an entrance to thought-scapes, but only its exits. Suturing suras (measures) of Believers & Seekers from a mt. top as these novels, I read, tend toward a travelogue, I get at from vacation smells that never go away- Texans afoot on Temple-Mount, by the Dome of the Rock leave little room for solvency of an excuse to build bridges with identification between nations.

You Give your More to Receive your Less

Think about from whence comes perspective, if it is the floor & dregs of consciousness, though the grounding affect is still realistic--it would take one longer to find the equinox where shared experience emanates, that of light-heartedness which is middling, where most OTHERS are found: do we sacrifice this ambience? Life really takes sensitivity to its game, because everything we can say about it falls short, thus the impetus to embrace the floor of our SPHERE of influence--it is all allegory, but we have one desire, to touch a nerve! What about deciding upon your angst as the thing that makes you emote: that sometimes is all we are, a dot of angst! If we pry ourselves open and leave us vulnerable to this deficit in thought I'm talking about, we could fill up with loneliness; I want to be born each moment until I see people's heads rolling at my feet in hysteria, ecstatic hysteria! Look at them full of themselves. There is nothing funnier than that. Pride made them look at you that way. Soon we will be completely objective about it...

KENTON'S BLUEHOLE; have you ever walked a mile?

Allowing for the owners of adjacent land surrounding the creek leading down to Kenton's Bluehole & then beyond to that farm born off a hill, I'd take my time looking for a grappled hand-full of mint, or chew a piece of watercress just wanting to know this plot. The church up the way had pine trees lining the parking lot & I'd lay under one in its fallen needles & read awhile absorbing the once-was & ominous reckoning that meant a soon-to-be disturbance because of thoughts about an earth-scrapper abandoned, but not this place (over-all), as I am here, & what is next? Having fallen in the creek in the dead cold mid-winter snow, never gave its desired affect, that I should leave well-enough alone--just walked home & got into something dry--a detail that lends no-struggle to ITS report. Or the old collapsing ice-house with a perfect cemented-room for a club house, though we couldn't have maintained an incognitive presence there, the Colony neighborhood being so close by & really the wooded vistas around it naturally was effective like this: we were there for it & not what an encumbering urban sprawl could offer. Spring water from the moldering earth was part of the pace at which we received the tally of everyday living in Gardenside neighborhood. ****If words were sentient & only awaited to penetrate innumerable spheres of being, then into the bubble of experience which surrounds us as identity-projected is its destined helpmate. I nutured & stoked the fires of awareness drawing upon my diary actually drawn-characters, symbolic though they were of the time spent re-evaluating the direction I had been going. I considered a flagging wisp of abstraction as the explanate moments walking back from the Univ. of Ky to Rebel rd. The meaning of which would necessarily come to me in dreams inspired by physically struggling to get back home walking that long distance, late in the wee hrs. of the am. down past two hospitals, stores, yards, apts., etc. The dream containing these wisps had me rise off the ground in expectation of catching the siren of pain-escaped, mottling through the air with shadows in & out & under the street lamps in a grand chase. Non-assessable consciousness is utterly the result of physical exertion, & finally I knew it was all not for nothing that I could embellish my walk experience with a dreamt-reprieve... dreamt it was!

BUG day at Missy Grizell's house (GLOOM chic)

Through the sands of the hour glass, so are the days of my 9 lives: morally & physically bankrupt made observation of a greater world impossible & a lesser world-- my mind--obviating itself. Out at this goth-chic's house in the country, I realized I looked at everything as an opportunity--just thought it thus, hoped it so... Like her proffering a joint, made the leaden mixed up mind of me see the tent poles consciousness dismount even before the drug reached my cortex. This is the sand metaphor. What little I could adduce from stirred-up consciousness was the milting sands making a hole behind the hardened exterior of my yeahs, like inventing the means to relate to her was inviting me, the star of some grand parade to an after-dinner show--but it was me who was being consumed. I knew it was yet another life of mine being discarded, because I ceased hearing her, seeing out the window into the farm rain-dampened hay fields, & demurred from the smile-fest that ensued. I couldn't even well up w/ the intensity that senses were failing & felling me as I wondered at the lack of adjustment I sought in my new predicament ...just begging for an awareness of the sense of a corrupt higher-self, who was gone already w/ the pretext of a sedentary world now at-large (and as gone), leaving me at that point, I was desperately patient.