the advantages of putting your house in order

as my friend susie passed through the living room to get the gun off her recently deceased stepfather's wall, her aged mother counting something on her fingers, to shoot herself, all she could think about was the closet she hadn't cleaned. so, the first advantage would be not putting  a rifle-barrel in my mouth, even if i survived, as susie did. of course, part of this was my fault. i'd recommended she read life after life by ... she expected the singing of angels, "and all i felt was the incredible violence." alas, she ignored the parts in the book describing attempted suicides. 

with the help of prozac i've survived so far. that said, my rented storage space a jumble. true, i'd put most things in boxes, yet having, among other things, one hundred and twenty of them books i wasn't reading made me feel guilty, like i should know everything in them. before leaving the lookout and mountains on a beautiful october day, i had wished all i owned could be packed into the pickup. perhaps i desired to shed the weight of memory? 

at any rate, lady luck smiled on me. a friend bravely opening a used bookstore in berkeley. so far i've taken her eighty boxes of books, these forty still to go. don't they look neatly piled? what a relief, down to mostly the self-help and psychology books in which i've underlined too heavily. (looking at them, i despair: how little i learned.) 

in a second space i've taken everything out except  boxes of notebooks, photographs, diaries, recordings of talks and readings. it's a bit tempting to toss the whole shebang into the ocean, but then i would be searching for a pistol. nobody else may be interested in them, but i'll be out of here and won't notice. as i've said, i'm here and then i'm gone, the means of passage irrelevant. like most of us i don't enjoy pain. hopefully, i won't even notice. 

going through photos and scrapbooks, i've put a few memories in order. i'm pleased i once had a physical life: swimming, football, trips with the boy scouts, hayrides with girls. i'm feeling awfully lethargic and sedentary these days, allowing my body to sag, even as i buy toys to help me exercise. after trips to the dumpster and the thrift store, selling the first three of my expensive camera lenses last night, i'm suddenly feeling like things are manageable. 

i may not have enough possessions to shore up a sense of identity. the keeper of my storage space says, 'the drug addicts often come to simply look at their stuff.' i can understand that. i have created myself through what my mother called 'consumer therapy.' how much fun to spend money! eventually, like all who live long enough, i don't want to be buried like an ancient egyptian pharaoh with food and jewels for the journey to never-never land. maybe if i lighten the load enough by april 1, 2013, i can take a real-world journey. 

speaking of journeys, here's an account of one we made in 1951 across the united states: 

http://www.pbase.com/wwp/indiana 

and here are a few of the scraps i've mentioned:

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

and each of us individually eventually experiences the end of the world:

http://www.pbase.com/wwp/colusa 

the stony path of an empiricist

after listening to a dozen lectures on voltaire and being another ten into a series on the 17th century enlightenment, a light bulb has gone off in my head.  i've discovered i'm an empiricist. this, i suppose, is something like being a pragmatist. what could help me (and others) live better, my personal quest. and i've become convinced a lot of modern thought and theory only confuses the true issue. 

for example, what if the unconscious doesn't exist? so much of our present life dominated by this idea: we're driven by forces buried so deep in us we keep colliding with our 'conscious' desires. the russian poet boris pasternak said, "psychology invented so we'd think we'd know what's going on." hah, and the whole premise is we don't know what's going on. if we dig into the depths - our dreams, our slips of tongue - we can gain control over our actions. false assumption, alas! 

my empiricist proposal is basically buddha's, though i certainly don't consider myself a follower. awareness, not some invisible self, will clear the way. of course, i want to deny it, more satisfied to believe my life out of control, not subject to true knowledge. pragmatically, i realize i always know what's going on, but i pick which stimuli i'll pay attention to. quoting susan m. weinschenk, author of one hundred thing every designer needs to know about people, 

We're faced with an overwhelming amount of data (millions of pieces of data come into the brain every second!) and our conscious minds can't process all of it. The unconscious has evolved to process most of the data and to make decisions for us according to guidelines and rules of thumb that are in our best interest most of the time.

unfortunately, she uses the evil words conscious and unconscious. i would rather say, we go on automatic pilot, making decisions according to how we've decided before. in other words, i'm stuck in a rut most of the time, by choice and laziness. rather than be aware, which is pretty scary and takes work, i simply let 2 and 2 equal 4, not acknowledging  this is completely arbitrary. that's how i'm submitting to history, personal and social. 

the empiricist in me cautions me. it declares, "you can be aware of everything around you, and in moments of extreme violence, that awareness kicks in to help your survival. ie. the way everything slows down during a traffic accident, a common experience. time slows down, now becomes all, what the zen folks call enlightenment." when i unfocus my eyes or quit listening to a particular sound, i can see from the soles of my feet and the back of my head, an orchestra of natural instruments accompanying  in the background.

to quote oscar wilde, everything is on the surface, stay away from the depths. i suspect it's most helpful to think of ourselves as a 'personality' born with certain tendencies, which then adapt to the world. this means 'the self' is within grasp. of course, i could be accused of behaviorism. no, i'm declaring, we always have a choice, we pick a way on the path every moment. 

One hundred years from my day there will not be a Bible in the earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity seeker.

Love truth, but pardon error.

It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

Common sense is not so common.

Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.

This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

Where lies friendship, there is one's homeland.

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women.

Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities. (Voltaire)

Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives, and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time. (Voltaire, ESSAI SUR LES MOEURS ET L’ESPRIT DES NATIONS, 1756)

how do you know when your work is done?

i must confess i've been very satisfied to do nothing creative in the past two weeks since leaving the lookout. this summer i enjoyed the day before my days off because i dedicated it to cleaning house, loading up the truck, packing the laundry. i closed down the computer by noon. what a relief! no pictures to work with, no snow-white pages to fill. i abandoned the effort of digging into my past, my psyche, and blackening  the blank page. 

yes, i find it so much easier to simply shuffle my stuff around. for 14 days i've been going through boxes and tossing bags-full  of papers, taking cameras and gadgets to the local jewish thrift store. they provide a free, walk-in health clinic once a month, so that produces something concrete. a new, never-used electric guitar and  a synthesizer keyboard. more manila envelopes than i could count. 

as for the storage spaces i rent: a hundred and twenty boxes of books going to a friend starting a used bookstore in berkeley. (two trips completed, two to go). everything not packed in boxes, like the musical instruments, had to be cast out. true, i've a whole wall of manuscripts, notebooks, letters, memorabilia. to tackle that i need a bit more courage. forty years of writing, ten of taking a million pictures a years, mementos of travel in forty countries, not to mention the laden army-lockers once belonging to my father. 

so, here i sit. yesterday, i spent the whole day rifling through boxes of camera equipment, getting them organized for a future sale. the rabid picture-making of the past decade seems to be waning. why take another photo when i already have one like it? and as for writing a poem, i've kept a couple thousand from the past. repeating myself has never been fun, the reason i couldn't become a teacher.

ah, i have realized: there is no good ending for an artist. all the pleasure has been in the work and the process the first love. which leaves out children, most people's true legacy. it is a risky business. death, drug-addiction, failure can dog the kids, eliminating your gift to the future. yet, when it works out, the parents can say, 'i've done my bit.' and they can putter in the backyard with a clear conscience. in fact, anything taking a lot of effort and concentration hardly seems worth it. their time has passed them by.

last night i watched a documentary of the intellectual life of new york in the fifties. i passed through in 1954, retaining scars on my face to this day from hitting the bottom of the swimming pool in the st. george hotel. hmm, i wonder where that picture of me standing in front of the statue of liberty with bandages on my upper lip and forehead might be? showing off for my mother again, leaping off the high-dive. is that what it finally all adds up to? 

family albums at http://www.pbase.com/wwp/snap and http://www.pbase.com/wwp/album

                                                                                           

is personality really destiny?

                                                                kanga makes a discovery

the thought makes me shiver in my boots. could predestination be behind all my supposedly rational decisions? okay, tomorrow i leave the mountains for the flatland. i don't feel like moses or zarathustra, carrying wisdom to the masses. in fact, quite the opposite: like a scarecrow being put in the barn after a wild summer scaring crows. here goes my usefullness, and my stuffed, straw body, full of insects and dry seeds, doesn't help me much to face the darkening days. one must have a mind of winter, says the snowman of wallace stevens. 

is it better to burn or to freeze? the question doesn't help. i just hope the mice stay away from me! i'll be living in a box. i promise to exercise more. i'll walk downtown through the park, ramble to the bookstore cafe, jump up and down assiduously on my trampoline. if i have to, i'll take a journey, perhaps to tierra del fuego, or mars. travel is the best exercise. when else do i carrying a pack ten hours a day, climb up inside church towers or wander museums? 

could i do something dramatically different? get married? adopt a kid? buy a house? those thoughts feel like an early grave. sentimentally, i'd love to adopt, gain a sense of purpose like my sister did. yet i know i don't even want to have a dog demanding my attention. as my mother said, "when you were little, you played so much alone, i didn't think you'd have anything to do with people." and that's before i remember anything!

                                                             personality conflict
                                          

i've tried, god knows i have. look at all those theater adventures, pursued around the world. the production photos i've taken, the classes i continue to sit though for fun. and love affairs. now those seem impossible. it's one thing to have a young body and look, the women attracted to you, another to leer at them like an old man. yes, yes, a scarecrow i've become. however, that is power.   if i can't inspire love, i can inspire terror! and maybe my first love, judy garland, will come along as Dorothy and carry me off to oz. maybe that's why i devoured all the oz books? 

they say you can't escape from yourself. rather than a self  i'm coming to believe we're born with a personality, which we expand and fill out during a lifetime. every parent knows the baby born with distinct characteristics. perhaps the very idea of a self  is an illusion? something to keep us warm on a dark night, something buried deep in our unconscious. now there's predestination, for you. the poet boris pasternak said, "human beings invented psychology so they'd think they know what's going on."

hmm, maybe that's why hypnotists and psychics seem to be in the know. oscar wilde said, 'truth is in the appearance.' and these kinds of counselors can read me like a book. the twitches in my nose, the trembling of my hands, the mottled look of my eyeballs, they give me away completely to those who can truly see. is this a consolation? no. no wonder i hide my body on a mountain or a tiny city room. i'm terrorized by it being discovered i'm an impostor, a scarecrow in human clothing. 

we're all connected

...it's so odd. i feel the drawings i make give me completely away. luckily, people want photographs, not reality. you can delve into the depths of the surface by following the path of the androids:

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

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

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

http://www.pbase.com/wwp/android3

http://www.pbase.com/wwp/android2

http://www.pbase.com/wwp/android4

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

love is something you give, not something you get

to my deep embarrassment i've been reviewing what i've written about love. my moods vary considerably, as can be seen in the woodcut self-portraits i've just posted. lately, if i can't say something positive, i don't try to cough up any words. goethe, for example, never wrote poetry in the wintertime. smart guy! unless i wanted to vent my spleen, which, alas, i've done more than once. 

grabbing a page at random from a collection of aphorisms called love and minor matters, i find such statements as these:

63. Love reminds us of life seen through a sickness. 

76. Ambition is more reliable than love. 

101. We need relief from love if love is to survive. 

well, these don't sound too awful, especially the last one. let's face it, love can use us up, unless we find the right formula. ah, to call it a "formula" sounds worse than anything i've said  before!

except my statements on marriage. here i've definitely transgressed. 

17. Marriage has nothing to do with love, but with raising children.

18. People expect from marriage what they can only get from community.

19. Divorce has the virtue of putting more adults in a child's life. 


the question of children makes this subject most interesting for me, love between parent and child seen as the ideal model. if children don't get it, the saying goes, they don't learn to give it. trouble is, i've known at least two women who've thrown their babies against the wall. my therapist friend karma has counseled kids whose progenitors killed each other in front of them. can parenthood always be separated from selfishness? folks love to brag about their offspring. my favorite bumper-sticker: my child the most responsive to drug-rehabilitation. 

however, i'm ignoring the title of this little peregrination. or maybe not. i do have a more positive, if still realistic view, in Aphrodite Speaks. 

THE MOST AMAZING 

Thing  

about love is

it

empties us of

everything

we once thought

important. 


i invite you to search through these sins against the goddess. perhaps i've cursed myself most of all:

aprhrodite speaks:  http://www.pbase.com/wwp/aphrodite

love and minor matters: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/minor

self-portrait woodcuts: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/wood

on falling on my head

or, how to get your life to flash before your eyes without dying. yes, twice this summer. earlier i described bouncing down the steps of the back deck and banging my head three times against an oak tree. three weeks later, my visor blew off as i measured the fire tower wind. stepping down into the bushes, i grabbed a branch and began to lower myself. i twisted sideways and knocked my head on a piece of old asphalt. i let the visor lie. 

this brought back stepping through a hole in the new church deck, age six, and landing head-first on the steps below. and even earlier, at age one, i slipped off a slide in the park, unconscious for half an hour. the doctor said not to worry. i wonder if this wasn't my shamanic initiation? do the three times i broke my nose figure into the equation? whatever it is, when a friend asked his 85 year-old aunt how to live a long life, she said, DON'T FALL. 

considering i've been getting shaky on my pins, i've had the urge to round up the past and press it for answers. for example, i watched a twelve hour lecture on hitler's rise. as a teenager playing in 1950's stuttgart rubble, only girls interested me. history i didn't even notice. ignorance has great value when you want to simply indulge the senses. ausschwitz and goebbels documentaries and i felt i'd heard enough. no wonder the fascination with world war II. so many dramas and mysteries, all of humanity insane. 

and i'm reviewing the history of literature, having studied it in college, most of it forgotten in my own reading of thousands of books. since i wrote an unfinished play about nietzsche while living in a berlin basement, i'm in the middle of 24 lectures describing his life and ideas. http://www.pbase.com/wwp/nietzsche  and i just downloaded a course on modern british drama, a second on chaucer, and a third on the romantic poets. this the tip of the iceberg. add: the art of reading, masterpieces of short fiction, the english novel, 

yes, i do feel like socrates waiting to die. when asked, 'why are you learning to play that tune on the flute. you can't take it with you? he said, 'at least i will have made myself dance at the last." certainly, all this review doesn't mean anything. yet these subjects bring flashes of the past. in london i sat under the tree before the keats' house where he wrote ode to a nightingale and i wandered into the room by the roman spanish steps where he died. i did a lot of literary visitations: dostoyevsky's apartment in petersberg, stringberg's flat in stockholm, kazanzaki's grave on crete. 

jung said, 'have your adventures and hit the books later.' i firmly believe this and put it into practice. i even wrote a poem, if i can find it. blast, i can't. here's another early poem, probably more appropriate (click on it):

here are pics taken while searching the city of my deliverance: 

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

why should i grow up?

i don't see the advantages. maturity means subservience. say i get a real job (awful thought), a clerk in a large organization, private or public, it doesn't matter. as a newcomer i see a thousand ways of improving how the company does business. i make a suggestion. the manager smiles and says, 'good thinking. keep it up.' wow, a green light to creativity. i take him at his word. nothing happens about my first suggestion. this doesn't deter me. i make another. this time someone up higher in the food-chain hears about it. my supervisor gets criticized because of the short-coming i've seen. suddenly, i'm a pariah, a whistle-blower. 


think back to the third grade. i had more freedom. the teacher applauded my imagination, my drawings hung at the county fair and awarded a blue ribbon. the irony? i couldn't wait to get into the wider world and show them who i was. alas, this applause couldn't last. high-school began clamping down. okay, i didn't care, sex mattered more to me, whispers and kisses in the dark, than expressing myself in public. i became the class clown, undercutting the teachers whenever i could, the trips to the principal's office routine. he told me i'd never succeed. i said i'd rather live under bridges.

and yet, and yet, i could see those who attended college received higher paychecks, and the longer they stayed in bondage to the institution, the more they'd be rewarded. so i did and was, or so i thought. wow, my friends say, 'you've got a job?' when i told them the pay, they insisted i buy them a drink. at that very moment i should have seen the handwriting on the wall. being a alpha male of the university kind would be very costly. maybe i should live on that bench in the park?

no, i desired comfort, a wife in bed for sex on demand, kids who would prove my potency. this meant i must be employed. and the result? i corralled my instincts, accepted 'don't step on the grass'. eventually, i watched the bums going by the window of the fancy restaurant where i dined. and terrible, subversive thoughts overwhelmed me. they don't have phone-bills, or to pay for insurance policies, no time spent cutting the grass or listening to complaints from the other half. i observed them closely. a bum meets a bum and they greet each other like old friends. each has a healthy-looking dog on a string. my god, they can afford pets. 

needless to say, this got me thinking they should grow up, get a job, and at the same time i felt the clean napkins on the table worth less than their tattered backpacks. they'd light up cigars and cigarettes, and i'd think they support very expensive habits, how do they do it? i realize they live like children who loved their messy rooms and the world of self-invention. did i miss something, i think, as i dutifully pay the check and leave a 15% tip? 

no wonder i'm attracted to festivals and fairs: 

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