yes, on again, off again. for example, two people persuaded me to be a vegetarian. one a doctor in pollock pines, california. he showed me pictures of the esophagus and insisted it proved humans not meant to eat meat. the other fellow an actor in new york. i'd seen him perform off-broadway and one night found myself sitting next to him at the theater. he radiated health and youth. my god, turned out he's forty-five. i asked him his secret. you guessed it, lay off the animal products.
which i did for thirty-two years, until i had an asthma attack. where i live the respiratory disease capital of the world, yet i'd had no problem in twenty-six years, dropping dairy and wheat whenever i felt a twinge of the local allergies. ach, suddenly, after eating three pieces of cheese one spring afternoon, i gasped for air. terrified, i convinced myself i could die at any moment. eventually, no collapsed lung or other devastating physical disability, the doctors figured out what it was. luckily, the vitamin expert at the produce market said you have to learn to breathe again.
what a concept! my doctor suggested something very simple, breathe out and relax when you choke up. yes, i had been trying to take a breath after a sip of water. ever notice how you breathe out, as a natural matter of course. fear had me trying to do the opposite. i visited an eighty-two year old chiropractor in amazing health. she believed in eat right for your blood type. as an O positive i required meat. now i only tend to believe people who practice what they teach, who inspire by example. what fun to have a hamburger after three decades!
right or wrong, i do eat a bit of meat. buffalo feels healthy, beef doesn't. and the journalists keep repeating, the latest evidence, red meat causes cancer, heart-attacks, obesity. this week i watched fat, sick and nearly dead. the over-weight australian travels the usa with a juicer, talking with infamous americans over three hundred pounds. on his fast he loses over a hundred pounds and finds freedom from powerful prescription drugs for the first time in ten years. i immediately browsed the stores in town and bought a jack lalane machine.
with another birthday coming up and younger people dropping dead all over the place, i'd like to reduce my girth. disguising it with loose shirts, i can't avoid my protruding stomach in the morning's mirror. in a few minutes i'll have my first taste of inebriating grass. stay posted.
following the advice of leonardo davinci, i keep finding figures in carpet stains and landscape photos. we really do live in a mythical world. i've entered a king arthur series in a photo contest. http://www.leica-oskar-barnack-award.com/en/submissions/leica-oskar-barnack-award/1448-wayne-pease-1 be sure and read the captions. it's definitely not what they're looking for! well, why not?
Jack Lalane:
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almost every significant creator riding the crest of a wave. i once took a class in shakespeare's contemporaries, ben jonson, christopher marlowe, etc. the prof said, "imagine william listening to the others and thinking i can write a better clown than you! " i often wonder what influence san francisco and north beach had on me? as an aging teenager, i wandered in and out of the co-existence bagel shop, mike's place, city lights, starting in 1956. a lit prof in berkeley brought alan ginzberg to class and he read from kaddish, which he'd been o revising in the quad. in retrospect, beardless, how incredibly young he looked.
who was that teaching assistant who read my first poems? later he became a legend in poetry circles, jack gilbert, views of jeopardy.
and what about josphine miles, a poet and teacher crippled in a wheel-chair who encouraged me, hearing my first efforts? for better or worse, youth needs inspiration from a crowd. no wonder new york the mecca. all in all, i spent three years on Manhattan, beginning in 1962. back and forth across america by bus and car, not even having read on the road.
or what about being a firelookout? i'd visited my first, cone peak, at eleven in 1951. and i applied to montana at seventeen, in the heart of the beat era. i'm not even sure i knew then snyder and kerouac had been tower-sitters. gary, to this day, asked time and again about his two summers on desolation peak. and here i am working on my fifty first year and forty-ninth season. actually, i didn't know any of these guys. that probably removes me from my role as the last beatnik, despite the virus entering my blood, never to leave.
maybe it's important to be able to see yourself as part of a generation. i'll have to go back and read some of my own poems: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/poems
as usual, i'm amazed by the obvious. who would have thought i'd spend my first full evening with a new ipad going through my friends list on facebook. stumbled into it, just like everything else i've done. and i had revelations, expected and surprising. for example, i missed certain people out of the hundreds, mostly their quirky attitudes, insights, and conversation. we only have a few people who've had our experiences or can relate to them.
and of course, this business of having children. quite a few on my list former students i met from 1995 to 2009 while auditing theater and choreography classes. the team-work rubs off, easier for me to relate. blew me away how many have been busy creating kids. one said, if you haven't seen a child take her first step, what a lot you've missed! and suddenly, ah, that's it, those miracles that happen before children turn eight. most parents seem to remember their children at that age, to recall the three-year old when the thirty-year-old going through her second divorce, her offspring part of a heart-ache.
yes, all my close friends pretty lucky. a few have lost children early, to car-accidents and cancer. they experienced a tragedy i can only faintly imagine. partly their own mortality gone, mostly they'll never experience the full cycle, whatever good or bad it brings. one friend felt so guilty for his twelve-year-old son's death he gave himself diabetes in atonement. these early deaths seem so outrageous, so out of order, so unfair. and again, the meaning of life is lost.
oppositely, the new grandmothers simply gaga over their new grand kids! now they can have the fun of experiencing those early years all over. and it does feel like the quest to be remembered will be fulfilled. i don't mean to diminish the pleasure, the immediate experience. they plunge back into the present moment as though it hadn't left them years ago.
looking on a tablet at this parade of a familiar humanity much easier than on a big computer screen, more intimate, it's sitting in your lap, you can pick it up, lay it down, and most of all, flick through the pictures with your fingertip, almost touching the crowd out there, spread across the earth. i invite you to look through your own history. and if you branch off into a friend of a friend and then a friend of theirs, you'll perhaps experience how close all of us ultimately are.
yes, for me life a circus, where i'm a clown. a few of us have to be left on our own to teach and entertain the masses. http://www.pbase.com/wwp/cyrk
okay, it's not a new concept. that said, on a personal level, the internet gives me the whole of the past, including art, science, religion, etc. i've caved into this fact, buying a new, fast laptop and the updated ipad this week, and i'm eligible for a new smartphone. you say, you, the world-traveler, how can you do this to yourself? yes, i sacrificed a trip to paris, a walk in kyoto, all for virtual adventure. luckily these tools arrived after i'd squandered my youth.
and speaking of that glorious, miserable time, i ran across this modigliani painting on my tablet:
okay, it's a pleasant picture, how does it relate? this reproduction, large-size, pinned above the bed where i first got laid, fifty years ago. i won't be too indiscreet, but i simply couldn't get it up the first night, rising to drink coffee and hiding my shame. does the event exist out there in the universe, replaying itself, time no longer of any consequence? seems like it. we certainly remember the anxious moments vividly, for whatever reason. this story had a happy ending, for her too, her first time, though ignorance doesn't necessarily bring bliss.
here's a photograph from an earlier era, my first year at an advanced educational institution, valparaiso unversity, where they allowed dancing on campus for the first time, never at a loss for lust, i'm sure. yes, i began my girl-watching in earnest that season.
this dorm next to the railroad tracks. every time a train passed, dust rained down from the ceiling. i did at least complete one campus tradition, kissing a coed on the bridge over the tracks as an engine thundered by underneath. yes, life not really linear, merely a collection of episodes.
at one point many moons ago, polish circus posters fascinated me. in those days you couldn't find many reproductions. suddenly, last night, i felt inspired and looked them up on the web. there they were in all their glory.
my god, what a feast! i downloaded over a hundred of them and began drawing big-top drawings of my own.
you can see more: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/cyrk we've found eternal life, even if it doesn't last that long.
well, i've certainly been out of the loop. here i am, finally living with my own generation, and i didn't even know it. damn, all i had to do was look around the room, i mean the classrooms where i audit classes, listening to lectures over and over, hoping to learn by osmosis, this the fifth time with the history of photography, and with three different teachers. and now i've stumbled upon a welcome truth.
on the same day, drinking my coffee at the bookstore cafe, i browsed two technical magazines: howdesign and the british version of wired. lo and behold, articles in both explained the same issue, the habits of the millenials. jeez, i must admit, i'd never heard the term. as described, this the generation born between 1978 and 1999, exactly the kids i've been sitting beside, thinking all the time i understood them. as usual, i entertained a fallacy.
evidently, these very students the group of which they speak, described as multi-taskers, those who believe what they read online, more devoted to their private life than work (they've caught up with the french), seeing work as a series of experiences and not a career, hopping from train-car to train car, not afraid of change, and liking to work in teams. lord, where have i been. most of this obvious when i think about it, which i obviously hadn't.
that last paragraph describes myself. you could throw in their 'feeling of entitlement' and 'readiness to leap onto the latest, greatest thing.' previous generations advised 'not to try to hard to realate' and 'understand the social consciousness and commitment of these budding souls.' not rebels against their parents in the old sense, they like their parents' taste in music and movies. take the latest oscar winner the artist, a silent film. now that's going back some!
yes, they may very well drop out. why wait til you graduate to change the world? they're inspired by the TEDD.COM talks, like me, and though i'm certainly not a 'futuremaker', i can understand the thrill of being one. hey, folks, the world may be in better hands than we think. i certainly hope so, since i'll be soon skipping school permanently.
if i may coin a phrase: life is one long improvisation. for example, last evening i took my camera to the park. on the way i noticed knot-holes in fences, which have always fascinated me. i snapped a few pics and found a common thread when i arrived back at my computer. here's eve and the serpent: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/eve
http://hbr.org/2010/05/mentoring-millennials/ar/1
what makes this so difficult? i mean, i've always wandered cemeteries and read the notes on tombstones: in life she was anything but an angel, now she has a chance. hey, i could written that about myself. better to be witty than too serious about the whole subject. after all, the world won't exist once i'm gone. poof, vanished, lost in space. as my friend randy said before he died, 'when i retired, i thought the forest service couldn't go on without me. in the fall i visited the office and i overheard some kid ask, "who's that old dude?"'
somehow i care what people might say, all the conversations in the world 90% gossip. yet i don't expect to be mentioned at the water cooler all that often, though i'd like the lazy bums to use one of my aphorisms now and then, even if they don't know where it came from. the mother creates the poet (and kills him). i could talk about that for awhile. she puffs him up and then he explodes with drink or an overdose, leaving a trail of lovely lines behind. shall i compare thee to a summer's day? poor guy, they were lying on the beach as she watched the oiled and muscular guy play volleyball.
i could go to the other extreme. in airplanes he always assumed he'd be the lone survivor. of course, being the last human being on the planet can't be much fun. imagine adam before eve, bent sadly over his grape juice and petting a cougar. god realized his creation needed lots of trouble to wake him up. yes, the sexes enliven each other. and when they discover what sex leads to, the murder of abel by caine, it's too late and they have to deal with the divorce. no wonder 41% of babies born in america today to single woman. they've realized though they might miss a bit of alimony the guy will probably be a dead-beat.
born into a world of war, he tried to be at peace with himself. unfortunately, that one doesn't apply to me. in my philosophy you have to suffer if you want to be like other people and relate to their lives. sitting for years under the bo tree like the buddha good for some people. i'd rather ride a bus through the costa rican jungle, even if the road be bumpy. alas, self-deception the reason we have so many conversations with ourselves, to find agreement on just about every prejudice we have. yes, we're not alone. and i'm not getting any closer to the objective, an unvarnished statement of the truth.
hmm, the only thing i can say for sure, 'he encouraged other people to be independent. no wonder he passed away in solitude.'
here's evidence of his obsession with funerary monuments. he always read the dates to see how long the permanently reclining had lived:
http://www.pbase.com/wwp/marble
http://www.pbase.com/wwp/marble2
nothing makes me break out into a sweat like wrestling with this fact. i'd rather be a machine with replaceable parts and the know-how to do it myself. alas, i'm basically a flowing river held together by the banks of my skin. to understand the brain a two pound sponge mostly full of water, how does that help me keep my feet on the ground? and with my blood flowing fifty thousand miles a day, can i really be expected to control my thoughts?
for a contr0l-freak like myself, this the issue. to actually experience my body during a colonoscopy, to smell a kiss, to wash my underwear, is that really all i can do? so much is literally out of my hands. why have friends so much younger died? am i suffering from survivor-guilt? (unlikely) i wish i were somehow separate from nature. for instance, it's spring, lots of sunlight, warm days. my body bounces like a cork on the sea - and that's the key to being an american, walking with a little hop.
or if i listen to smooth jazz, i can feel myself flowing slowly over the walls, to the moon and back, a part of the liquidity of life. if i weren't so susceptible to being hypnotized, could i really write poetry or fall in love? and to my horror i find i'm the living proof of change, enjoying feeling good lying around, rather than charged up by the sites of a foreign shore. comfort, i know, is the great enemy of creativity, yet these gorgeous mornings i fall asleep over my tea and dream of heavens not reachable on earth. yes, the memory of the journey much more enjoyable than the sand-fleas and train-crashes of the actual.
i'm a little frightened. this very drop in adventure marked my friend berta's exit days. her last trip to some island in the south pacific to see an unusual sculpture left her unsatisfied. she'd rather read a book or go paint out graffiti than visit another alien place. and then she died, at sixty. true, her sister sat her down with a world map and they stuck pins in all the places she'd been. the earth looked like a porcupine. maybe she needed time to relish the prospect of that final journey, though she hated leaving the pack she carried everywhere behind.
we are a journey. perhaps this is a better way of saying it. you can find pictures of my travelling companion as she circled the earth like an albatross, never lighting too long: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/berta
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