words last, pictures don't

having been mad about photography for the past five years - and art my whole life - i know this is an odd assertion. how can bits of nothing, passed by pen and breath, outlast stone and papyrus? i don't know!

i just have faith that they do.

words cut into the psyche perhaps more than pictures (even if we dream and think in images). maybe because they are 'other' and do not exist in nature, they avoid our defenses and drive deeper. yes, who hasn't be hurt for life by words? or inspired? what we overhear has a mystery. and what is yelled at us resonates in the bones.

that doesn't mean i won't keep making pictures. i love doing so. yet i have a feeling when a poet meets a president, something memorable has to be said, especially with the rest of the nation taking off in spaceships. see (hear) what you think:

www.pbase.com/wwp/angel

moonlight fire 64,478 acres

when the relief lookout called me and said a fire had just made a five mile run out of moonlight valley, i thought i had to be hallucinating (or he was). okay, it was several thousand acres already. for the rest of the afternoon, i felt on pins and needles. how could i stay away from my post? when he didn't answer the phone the next morning, i knew he had to be down in the valley protecting his house (he was). so i packed up a day early and arrived to see an incredible sight, which grew more so over the next couple of days.

you can see some pictures here: www.pbase.com/wwp/moon

that said, the reality tough to represent. you had to be there. tonight, a week later, i've been able to see the whole forest for the first time, the charred cliffs, the spot fires still burning inside the line. tomorrow, a weather system passing thru with high winds. we'll see if the crews can hold the fire back from exploding all over again.

there it is, more than a hundred square miles. and after almost 25 years of spotting smokes in the area which others succeeded in putting out! and all this from the tiniest of sparks.

fire info: http://www.inciweb.org/incident/978/

flirting with franz kafka

something strange has happened. i almost don't want to talk about it, maybe it's just a mood (so much is!). for the past couple of days i've lost my fear of death. it's always haunted me. a counselor said i was too impressed by death when young.

this re-enforced at 17 when i wandered through the halls of letterman army hospital at the break of dawn, selling the san francisco chronicle to patients as they woke. haunted eyes. burned backs. a captain whose body withered more each morning with cancer (he finally died and his wife told me to stop leaving him papers). six months of this travelling among the ill and dying surely filled me full of ghosts.

of course, i've tried to counter-act this in every way. for example, 'the fine art of flirting.' advice i enjoyed so much i condensed it into poetic passages: www.pbase.com/wwp/flirting maybe they'll give you a chuckle, or at least a wry smile of acknowledgment.

then i've done the opposite, plunged into the fateful world of franz kafka. in santa cruz i adapted 'the metamorphosis of franz kafka' into a theater piece, playing the doomed cockroach myself! www.pbase.com/wwp/kafka with the object of escaping into another realm at the end. (the process of doing the show as crazy and anxiety-ridden as the story.)

well, i do feel a tightness in my stomach. obviously, i haven't escaped the terror altogether. but i've realized i fear the pain of dying, not the simple disappearing. if i accept the latter as a fact, jumping across the pit of physical misery, i land safely in nowhere. and that seems simply a matter of ease.

picasso, conversations with the master

not everything has to be a lesson. as freud said, 'sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.' but some of us can't help being fascinated with gurus. take shakespeare, for example. at 20 i read all his plays, a play a day. images, phrases, repeated scenes updated, all these gave me a sense of his hand-writing.

or kafka and dostoyevsky. later 20's i read practically everything each had written. pilgrimages included a visit to the apartment in st. petersburg where the brothers karamazov written, and walking with a kafka reference book in hand around prague. (in 1992 these places remarkably unchanged from their authors' days.)

then there were other fascinations. with federico garcia lorca, his plays and poems. in 1966 the village where he was born near granada full of images from his works. einstein's apartment in bern where he changed history. strindberg's apartment in stockholm, as gloomy as their former resident.

zurick had no memorial for c.g. jung, but at least i spent a night in town.

we all have role models. robert graves, the novelist of the I Cladius series, wrote much about the importance of poetry and jazzed me up. who were some others? i tend to forget.

at the moment i'm a fan of bjork and francis bacon. i've eight dvd's of bjork, concerts, her biography, music videos, the making of. she's a fascinating character. (i'll be interested to see what she does in the second half of her life.) as for francis bacon, i never thought i'd enjoy his work, but i've read three books, including his really interesting conversations with david sylvester.

what all these have in common is a kind of animal energy (yes, even kafka). a force of nature that can't stop creating. contact with them, even at a distance, gives me a jolt and a will to continue. of course, this goes for picasso too, and you can read an account of my adventures with him.

www.pbase.com/wwp/picasso

other recent additions, including more pictures http://www.pbase.com/wwp/root&view=recent

dance your way to god

we all have trouble with gurus. whether lovers or friends, people on a pedastal or outcasts on islands, they ultimately prove to have feet of clay, if they fall in love with their own image.

personally, i've listened to the 'tao te ching' over and over. lao tzu did it right. he wrote down his thoughts and disappeared. he resisted the temptation to be anybody. (when mourners were weeping over a body, chang tzu, the taoist phisolopher, said, 'he must not have lived right, otherwise these people would be laughing.')

yet in my lifetime the the guru i've enjoyed the most is rajneesh, later known as osho. alas, when he came to america, all went wrong, and he never quite recovered his feet after much wandering and his return to india. (after his death the poona ashram became an upscale resort.) this said, i really much enjoy readings from his early years.

my favorite book is 'dance your way to god', meetings with his disciples. finally i decided to pull out a few found poems and aphoristic gems. (the guy was an insatiable reader, originally a professor, and he digests and regurgitates the spiritual wisdom of the world - with a sense of humor.)

here's my little contribution to the memory of what he was at his best. i still find what he says very encouraging and relevant to my travels through this lifetime.

www.pbase.com/wwp/way

and for the latest listings: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/root&view=recent

the tough questions...

is addiction bad for you? should you avoid your insane grandmother? does it really pay to have money in the bank? can you live on the street happily (no bills)? always blows me away to pass a panhandler sitting amongst his belongings, smoking a cigar, and petting his perfectly healthy cat!

the ragged edges of life, as long as i don't have to be around them too much, are very entertaining. and without obsessions we'd have no art, no electric lightbulbs, or panty-hose. it's the wild ones who come up with the exotic inventions and who destroy themselves in dramatically entertaining ways (fodder for the movies).

i used to try to figure things out, and i had a lot of prejudices. ultimately, i realized it's great that most people have jobs and lead settled, dependable lives. this leaves plenty of room in the cracks for the rest of us. true, there's always a certain uneasiness being outside the mainstream. my most memorable grafitti on a men's room wall in berkeley, california: "the price of freedom is loneliness." i'm not sure it's true, yet every important choice involves risks.

so, here's what a friend called a 'sordid tale.' one of the seven one-act plays i wrote last summer: www.pbase.com/wwp/addiction

also you can get a quick rundown of my latest picture and literary posts at http://www.pbase.com/wwp/root&view=recent

have you tried hypnosis?

once i listened to a tape of milton erikson hypnotizing someone. spooky. compelling. then i got his book, 'my voice will go with you' and read it a couple of times. sometime later i found a copy of transcripts from his monologues. they reminded me of poetry, so i wrote some of my own: www.pbase.com/wwp/trances

reading more about hypnosis (and being hypnotized once by a therapist friend), it dawned on me: we're hypnotizing ourselves all the time. first thing in the morning on waking, we have to recover our personality: i'm so and so, living in such and such a place, that's my purse/wallet, now let me find my face in the mirror. we re-create ourselves every day.

and of course, there are times when we've been jolted awake, no time to put on our habits or remember our address. (the chinese say you're blessed if you have a bad memory.) if only we thought to change aspects of our character/looks at such a moment. ah, it's too terrifying. we assume the old rags of identity as quickly as we can.