politics, the great sadness

what a shame it is, the fact of life. everything in which you will be involved for your working life will include the push and shove of politics.

i know it hurts. you will be promoted, demoted, lose your job, gain prestige according you how you play the game.

i wish i could let you off the hook. to say that virtue and the best of intentions rewarded. alas, it is not so. every job, every enterprise, means you must gain allies, demote your opponents.

how odd it is, some love the politcal endeavor, which means gaining allies and mentors, those above who will protect you, further your interests. and your ability will determine your success in social life, if you want to be a nice person, to hold your place, then everything will depend on your connections. who likes you, who doesn't. as a friend once said, you don't lose your job through incompetance, but through a personality conflict.

social animals, good gravy, we are that. freud, late in life, believed our primal urge the desire to belong to a small group. exile means death. and this is our limitation.

if we can go to the bars, love sports, then we will be beloved. and if we cannot, hiding in books and intellectual endeavors, no one will protect us when we need aid. politics is a fact of life, in the office, on the diamond, in the home. being primates, we must find influence within the group, in order to further our cause, whether it be personal or social.

and depending on this ability, we will rise or fall in the social order. we will find people to support our causes, or not. what a difficult fact of human life.

i've posted more rehearsal photos of the chico dance theater:

www.pbase.com/wwp/nov30

the program is being gutted. where is the afficionado who understands life is a dance? without it we will all wither. even when we think we're standing still, we do a small dance. doing it well is the difference between life and death.

stay away from imaginary places

my last trip to greece ruined me for greece. ah, i could cry. my time on the island of rhodes in the sixties a mythical experience. you can see the novel here:

http://www.pbase.com/wwp/greece

and my trip to russia extinguished its dream:

www.pbase.com/wwp/russia

it wasn't that i didn't have lots of luck and a great time. the cabin of peter the great, the homes of dostoyevsky, rimsky-korsakov, pushkin, chekhov, pasternak, a visit to the hermitage and the moscow art theater. everything fell into place. prostitutes wandered in and out of the hotel next to red square. i roamed the kremlin (how cramped the churches inside).

yet the reality harsher than my adventures in russian lit. yes, i'd read everything. almost all the novels of dostoyevsky, the plays and stories of chekhov, gogol, pushkin, tolstoy. the list is endless and the fascination lasted for years. alas, reality destroyed it all.

the same happened in india (i didn't have a camera with me). true, indelible scenes imprinted themselves on my brain. i made it to the taj mahal, then to nepal after thailand and sri lanka. a friend once said, 'we travel to see ourselves in a place.' all too true. unfortunately, we'd better go to places we've never romanticized. india the actual obliterated the india of my imagination, all the stories i'd read, the history. garbage replaced the pristine fantasies.

actually, i'm looking a tiger in the eye right now, one from bandhavgarh national park, india, a bengal beast. it's a screensaver that opportunely popped up. how magnificent it is. the real thing would probably leave me cold.

yes, matisse always looks better to me in books, and the paintings of bonnard worse. only picasso seems to reproduce easily, his work illustrative, the colors not complex and the lines strong. so, go see the work of the last two in paris - it won't disappoint. avoid the work of matisse. he always looks more pallid than his reproductions.

someday i want to write about the lady of shallot. transfixed by images in the mirror, she had a vibrant life. running after the actual sir lancelot, she died a miserable death. don't take the risk of making certain dreams come true. pick and choose.

here are the pics of the chico dance theatre run-thru before thanksgiving. this reality will definitely be better than the dream:

www.pbase.com/wwp/pre

and i've re-worked some of my native-american collages. i'm not sure they aren't more intriguing than any photograph. these last often tell you more than you want to know.

www.pbase.com/wwp/west

and many of you have already seen the pictures of the blue room fall ball:

www.pbase.com/wwp/ball

yes, it is embarassing, but i've also posted pictures of the production i directed several years ago, 'incorruptible':

www.pbase.com/wwp/incorup

look into the abyss

and the abyss will look back at you!

that's one of my favorite sayings from nietzsche. what does it mean? who knows? guess you have to experience it to understand it.

a couple years ago i read an article by hugh macleod and now he has a book http://gapingvoid.com/books/ you can pretty much get the gist from this web-page. i've been browsing the book at barnes & noble.

and what strikes me most is how doing some kind of odd artwork can lead you out into the world, but 'successful beware.' and i especially like 'Dying young is overrated.' true, i have wandered in and out of keats' house on hamstead heath and the room where he died by the spanish steps. gazed up at the blue house in oaxaca where d.h. lawrence wrote 'mornings in mexico.' the fanatic, as he lay dying his wife had to grab the pen out of his hand.

this reminds me of my world-traveler companion, berta gardner. she would never part with her pack anywhere. the damn thing must have weighed sixty pounds. as she lay dying in the hospital, her sister finally convinced her to let her take the pack out of the room. and that was the end.

the moral from macleod: "You are responsible for your own experience.' if you tempt the abyss, have your passion and the proper tools to deal with it. and "Nobody cares. Do it for yourself."

have you ever sat in class or in the theater, looked around you and thought, 'none of these people will be here in a hundred years?" i have, and maybe that's the abyss. the artist francis bacon thought of himself as a snail crawling across the canvas and leaving slime. hmm, being francis bacon he may not have been being hard on himself after all.

hugh maintains if you've got the creative urge you're stuck with it. compassion, not pity, my friends. if you've seen ben allen's performance of 'johnny got his gun' at the blue room, you know what i mean.

new photos:

www.pbase.com/wwp/horse

www.pbase.com/wwp/return

www.pbase.com/wwp/johnny

purity is not an option

germany invaded norway the week i was born. my first memories: newsreels from battlefields, burials at sea, a hospital-trained dog searching for wounded soldiers.

later, from our home in a converted barracks (my father joined the army as a chaplain just before korea, where he served - he died of a heart-attack a few weeks after returning from a year in vietnam), i could hear machine-guns chattering on the practice field.

ironically, as berta and i took a side-trip to sri lanka on the way to india, i had no awareness of their civil war. going thru checkpoints and abandoned villages in the middle of the night, i wondered what the hell we were doing. at 26 i lived in a half-basement room, learning to be a poet, in berlin, not far from the gun-towers and and the wall.

on the presidio of san francisco at 16, i wandered thru the halls of letterman army hospital, selling the chronicle to waking patients with hollow eyes and burned backs.

in college i attended courses in the russian and american revolutions, and realized violent upheavals create a violent society. that made me a temporary pacifist. eventually, i understood the reality, you had to nip aggression in the bud. instead of stopping the serbian tanks roll into croatia, the europeans let that war drag on til bill clinton got them to bomb serbia. once the serbians couldn't act without being hurt, it all stopped.

alas, not everyone learns the lesson. if the battle comes home, the attacked may very well lash out (pearl harbor and 911). i loved being an army brat and living on bases. i hated coast guard boot camp with a passion. it's taken me a long time to appreciate a restrained military, responsive to civilian control. yet now i do.

that said, i've just come from a performance of johnny got his gun by dalton trumbo. the monologue of a soldier, a basket-case in a hospital, no arms, legs, eyes, ears, or jaw. he's completely isolated in his mind and memories. the cost of war borne by many warriors, in the past and currently.

oddly, the play a hymn to life. i came out simply happy to be able to walk and see and breathe the night air. unless a country gets hurt, it sees today's war as a video game. that remnant of a reptile tail remains in all of us. as elie wiesel said about the holocaust:

"Those engaged in its practice (murder) did not belong to a gutter society of misfits...Many held degrees in philosophy, sociology, biology, general medicine, psychiatry, and the fine arts."

if you can attend johnny got his gun at http://www.blueroomtheatre.com/ ben allen's performance riveting. pics: www.pbase.com/wwp/johnny

and for an example of what you may have to fight to protect, in more ways than one, look at the final critique session of chico dance theater in preparation for the fall concert, dec. 4-6.

www.pbase.com/wwp/fincrit

love slobs, or 'floundering profoundly'

that title came from a wonderful dream last nite. my best inhabit a mythical new york city, one with hills, open doorways so you can wander into different scenes: a crowd where i shouted out 'congo lines', meaning hair in the armpit, and everyone picked it up as a chant. in another i worked with a bunch of theater people on 'love slobs.' i liked the title so much i made myself wake up and write it down.

i collected rare books, almost walked into a plate-glass window, invaded the lobby of a elegant cruise ship travel agency. all in all, i loved it, and felt sleeping not wasted on oblivion.

yet self-forgetfulness what i seek these days, the days of transition, unemployment, the freedom to choose how i spend the day. it's overwhelming. i realize i traveled so much not to fill a void, but to see myself as a poet, someone learning about the world, absorbing events and people unconsciously, sights and sounds. it gave me a sense of purpose, what a writer must do.

since switching to photography, it's been a different ballgame. to merely be a tourist isn't interesting. i have to photograph what i love. a small town, theater, the lookout life. and i can trick myself into believing i'm finished, done it all, why bother.

yet i do find things new. berkeley, for instance: www.pbase.com/wwp/berk2

and when i think i've done everything, i put a flash on the camera and come up with shots i really like: www.pbase.com/wwp/lair i love actors and they surprise me every time.

the seasonal life, the task of eternal renewal, teachers face it, gardeners, field hands, farmers. not always easy in the transitions. we get used to one way of life and it changes. that's the challenge. after work or freedom, it's hard to switch places. i suppose the fairy tales of the past carried the idle through the winter when they'd rather be out rustling in the corn. www.pbase.com/wwp/fairytales

i could have titled this blog love and alcohol. the two get all mixed up for me and confuse me about what's going on. the psychologist jung said in romantic love we seek the divine, something to take care of us and which we can worship. alas, in the everyday human world this task fails and we take to alcohol to dream and feel good in our bodies (the one continuum in happiness).

or we fall in love with actors, characters on the stage, larger than life, and simpler than real people.

i have to remember what i really want: a state of meditation. i can get it by spending a few minutes in the huge local university library (why i moved to this town), even though these days i smile as i pass the rows of books, thinking, 'it's all guesswork!!' or, 'human beings have to occupy their minds, otherwise they go crazy.'

yes, a visit to the tomes has always relaxed me. and i have to remember to knock on my head three times to short-circuit negative thoughts. (for me, it works). as the sculptor henry moore said, "The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you can't possible do."

i haven't found any better answer.

the facebook experience

my family got me involved. i suppose it's like the old family letter my parents and grandparents participated in. did we get lazy? or merely drift apart in search of independence?

whatever happened, we resisted ties that seemed accidental, merely a matter of chance, meeting through the womb simply a throw of the dice. yet strong emotions remained for me. visiting my brother last fall i realized we had a lot in common. not just personal history, but a view of the world and similiar interests. the visit a great pleasure - and a great surprise.

i still feel we need to form our own families. not everybody's lucky. and the great virtue, i feel, of being an american, is choice. the chance to meet and bond with kindred souls from all walks of life. (and to reject the bastards we encounter along the way, as well.)

personal choice is pretty amazing, something very rare in the history of the world and now available to so many (but not all). true, it's a burden. i'm sure many would prefer to follow orders, and we've seen plenty of that. however, i enjoy the loneliness of this freedom. and a huge number of my decisions based on keeping this avenue open.

what does this have to do with facebook? well, for one thing we've multiple lives. lots of our friends don't know each other cause they live in different worlds. our family never meets our work-mates, and the latter have no idea you once met a girl in indonesia who's now married with six kids and with whom you still correspond. the first psychic i visited (and i've found psychics to be the quickest therapists) told me we're living fast these days, six lifetimes in one, as though evolution demands it. no wonder we're part of far-flung planets which never meet.

and so for me facebook amazingly brings these universes together. and whether or not actual contact ever happens, the possibility remains for those who desire to reach out and meet before your funeral.

the great hope, of course, is unifying your life into some meaning. that would be a relief! on the other hand, just to see how the people i've known progressing through their lives a real satisfaction. losing contact not fun. the sense of living in an ever-returning void.

true, there's exposure, a certain transparency. schools of thought differ. the psychologist jung believed we needed secrets to maintain our individuality. yet, i've often thought, 'if you've nothing to hide, you're free.'

whatever the outcome, we live in the digital age, and it's fascinating. what's required is a kind of courage us older folks have to summon in order to participate. the reward: a sense of human time and continuity, a feeling we might matter, despite being discarded by evolution.

new photos of dance and travel at

www.pbase.com/wwp/jarrah

www.pbase.com/berk

if you haven't seen the pics from reservoir dolls, a show i really, really enjoyed,

www.pbase.com/wwp/dolls

is solitude the beginning of wisdom?

maybe a quiz is in order. do you wake up in the morning, totally alone, thanking god you don't have to talk with anyone? when you break wind, are you relieved no one can hear or smell? stumbling over your syntax, does a wave of relief wash over you, knowing the constant critic of the other not present?

well, on personality tests i assume you'd be pegged as a loner. and mostly, that's bad! yes, we're meant to be convivial, so the the social code goes. if you spend too much time alone, you'll begin to send mail bombs from a cabin in montana, just to have a feeling of being connected.

on the other hand, what if you can't stand solitude? you find yourself talking with the 411 or 911 ladies, making up excuses? or you turn on the tv and yell back at it? the famous walker of baudelaire hits the streets, rubbing shoulders with all kinds of riff-raff, simply to prove he/she is human. in the shower he/she sings love songs to the ghosts of steam. don't we populate our world, no matter what we do, talking with cats and dead relatives?

imaginary friends can be a madness, but so comforting! and what is the point of being alone? the owner of an ethnic clothing store recently returned from africa. the villagers wouldn't let him go to the outhouse by himself. once he got back to the u.s.a, personal distance seemed like heaven.

i hate to repeat myself, however my mother really did say to me, 'you spent so much isolated time as a child, i never thought you'd have much to do with people.' maybe i learned it from her. the psychologist winnicot maintains we learn to be individuals by playing about our mother's feet. we go off on our own, play awhile, and come back. yes, mother's still there. happening over and over again, it gives confidence.

and look at the fact many if not most of us had our own rooms as children. this stimulates the imagination. in fact, as opposed to ghetto kids sleeping five in a bed, middle-class kids don't fear other people as much as they do their own fantasies. lacking external enemies, they find them in their dreams. no wonder facebook and cell-phones save them from anxiety. 'you are not alone.'

unfortunately, if this sometime hermit can say so, the ability to be by yourself does seem to have benefits, and i'd like to quote from an interview with the photographer tina barney, who at 28 began spending time in the darkroom. the interviewer says, "Why do you think spending time alone is so important?" and tina barney replies, "It's the most important thing of all. When you're by yourself, you have to be able to have a discussion with yourself. You have to be able to turn your own self on. Nobody else can do it. If you can continue to do that, you are going to continue to be switched on for the rest of your life."

there it is, the definitive answer. at the end of my 47th fire season, i'm grateful to have tina barney on my side.

some final lookout pics, as well as re-entry dance pics from last week:

www.pbase.com/wwp/hidef

www.pbase.com/wwp/dan

this blog is dedicated to my friend laurie who is finding an empty house (except for the cats, gracie and lewis) trying and hollow.