a clown looking for ms. valentine

hmm, never wanted to be a hero? or let's say, i've always seen myself as a clown tumbling through the universe, responding to forces flipping me this way and that, always hoping to land on my feet (so far so good).

the hero seems to me stiff and rigid, resisting the dictates of fate. he/she doesn't bend, therefore risks being broken (tragedy). in the film 'el topo' the central character gets shot through the feet and hands (it's a western) in imitation of christ. even at 20 i knew i didn't want to be a martyr.

now the clown position does have it's disadvantages. for one thing, you might make people laugh but they don't really respect you. that can be tough to take. and you don't have control over the universe. you bounce like a ball thrown by the gods to genuflect whichever way they will. for example, being at the whim of chance, i either find interesting things to photograph, walking around, or i find nothing. arranging things seems like a big bore.

true, i like directing plays. and there i do have to take charge. but it's a fine line. mostly i try to elicit the genius in other people. and as anyone knows who's done theater, the chips fall where they may. so, i like working with givens, doing without doing, as a zen master might have it.

therefore, i've no career. o i suppose i could have joined the circus. i've always loved them and performers. alas, every circus story seems to end in tragedy. the clown ends up being cuckholded and shooting his favorite bear. (ingmar bergmann). or the beauty loved falls to her death from the high wire. (some film seen as a child.) more often than not, it's the audience who experiences tragedy turned into comedy while the roustabouts are left holding the bag.

yes, there's a lot of passivity in this position. the best i can say is it's often the drunk who survives a crash cause he/she is so relaxed. maybe he'll sober up behind bars, yet that is the most helpless position of all. (unless you're the birdman of alcatraz.)

and you can enjoy never knowing what's coming!

here are a few circus pictures seen through the lens of memory:

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

sounds kind of awful

the one thing that's been bugging me as i grow older is the desire for completion, a feeling of having succeeded. so far every taste of it has proved momentary.

for example, i felt exhilerated going up to accept a prize for a winning play, applauded by fellow theater folk. definitely could use more of that!

or making it to india. now, i thought, i've tested my travel mettle. of course, i'm dissatisfied cause i feel i could have seen and done so much more. (but the taj mahal was very grand!)

or even surgery this past week. i feel like i've done something adult, submitted to fate, accepted help (lots of it). instead of taking more pills i've headed off disaster and can pee like a two-year-old. oops, maybe that's an example of regression.

still, the nagging continues. i just read this in robert henri's book 'the art spirit':

"Today must not be a souvenir of yesterday, and the struggle is everlasting. Who am I today? What do I see today? How shall I use what I know, and how shall I avoid being a victim of what I know? Life is not repetition."

gadzooks, now that's a challenge. and a particularly american one: you can never rest on your laurels. production is a must. and you have to top what you've done before or be considered a failure. yet i've experienced people's personalities as unchanging, unless there's brain damage. we're unique, despite our desire to conform and be ordinary.

so, there is another way (and it may merely be a redefinition of henri's terms). at the very beginning of 'the tao of photography' by tom ang, the author quotes 'the tao te ching': "To follow the Way removes the need for fulfillment."

that hit me like a thunderbolt: TO FOLLOW THE WAY REMOVES THE NEED FOR FULFILLMENT.

now, i've listened to the whole text of the tao at least a dozen times while on the road (stephen mitchell trans.) and yet never heard this line. even in the sixties, visiting the united nations, i wrote down taoism as my religion. how did i miss this quote? perhaps i had to be old enough to hear it.

what does it mean? that's another matter. the way i take it the great sage means that prizes, india, and surgery are simply part of the Way, that the journey is the goal. of course, if i were enlightened, every day would be different!!! i'd experience and recognize the fact no two leaves and no two snowflakes are exactly alike.

alas, i'm not enlightened and don't hope to be. the wheel keeps turning. yet, maybe, just maybe, i'll escape the nagging suspicion i've done nothing of what i wanted to do, though that's what i thought i was doing all along.

www.pbase.com/wwp for pictures of the journey. (i did invent string theory in my 20's, thinking 'everything is actually happening at once. only our consciousness is linear. but never published this, unfortunately, another escape from fame.)

surgery and haiku

ah, under the knife for the first time. quite an adventure. i feel more traumatized two days later than i did at the time.

it was sort of like reporting for duty at the coast guard, only these people were really kind. but again, to lay aside your clothes and wallet, to have a needle stuck in your vein, waiting to be moved into the operating room and reading haiku did make me feel i'd suddenly intruded on another civilization.

one thing learned, things can suddenly get very hectic. patients wheeled to and fro in different cubicles. a new voice suddenly coughing. a doctor talking with a nurse about the novels of john dos passos and the movie 'the african queen.' (this became time travel. those were part of my youth and college. alas, for most people no more.)

finally, it was my turn. three nurses and the anesthesiologist. the doctor. they all briefed me. zoom, i was in the operating room sliding onto another table. the knock-out drops entered my veins. i briefly woke with an asthma attack when they pushed a tube down my throat. but it seemed like it was all happening at a far distance. am i on tv?

things went well i'm told. my prostate now shrunken, a catheter hanging down my leg (another first. unfortunately, the next day when i pulled it out i'd forgotten some instructions. so a new one had to be put in and i'm sitting rather uncomfortably with it now. sorry, i know you don't want to know all the gory details.)

my body seems to be fighting off bronchitis, which i've all-too-often gotten this time of year. strong antibiotics seem to be holding it at bay.

a couple things: get everything you need to do pre- and post- written down. skip a step and you're in trouble. also, get up, if you can, and walk around. a visit downtown this afternoon made me feel more normal. though, i must say, as i looked at 'things' beautiful and otherwise in shopwindows, i thought, 'those are for people who have a future.'

no photographs from this experience, unfortunately. it looked too much like the movies. that said, go to www.pbase.com/wwp for pictures of my former life. (hopefully, this is not a sex change.)

and many thanks to the doctor and all the others who helped!

surgery and haiku,

the poem that cuts

to the heart of things.

art and memory

so, another year! and i'm feeling reading 'crime and punishment'at age twenty, lying on my family's living-room couch for several days, has left a stronger impression than love-making or traveling. which goes to say, art is an experience which may be more powerful than anything else we do.

i can't say why. maybe it's the intense effect of form, missing in most parts of our lives. or perhaps it's the fact we fill in the blanks. a great story becomes our story, our possession, or our being possessed.

on the way to mexico we listened to the story of a flyer over africa. i can barely remember the real road we traveled.

and this xmas last summer's obsession with the painter francis bacon met one of his paintings in the berkeley art museum. suddenly, i felt inside it - and the paint so beautiful.

how vividly art expands our memory, our desire, even our dreams. at times i don't know what was 'real' and what i imagined, and i'm not sure it makes a difference.

i'm posting some photos taken at a graduation ceremony several years ago. the pictures seem to me to have this indeterminate quality. yes, it really happened. did it happen this way? darned if i know.

these thoughts come during the last hours of the old year. and on the other side of the earth it's already tomorrow.

www.pbase.com/wwp/memory2

the magical landscape

a friend just asked: "what do you think of the harry potter phenomenon?" hmm, took me a minute. then I remembered reading a book on children's lit years ago. the author said english books different because of their magical landscape, a long history of figures rising up thru the earth, or an adventure in another land set off by a ring, stepping through a clothes closet, or falling down a rabbit hole.

americans, being at heart pragmatic and wedded to science, don't have this hidden world around, below, inside them. (the indians did. www.pbase.com/wwp/indians_ghost_dance) it opens up too much that is ambiguous and frightening. our land is mostly raw material with a few mystics thrown in (thoreau, for example). but the need for this kind of magical feeling doesn't disappear from children or adults, tho it becomes submerged in our education.

well, this made me realize my whole creative endeavor has been to get in touch with these unrealized worlds. I've just posted 'in the mystery of a room' which you are invited to peruse: www.pbase.com/wwp/mystery and if you look elsewhere on the general site www.pbase.com/wwp you will find many manifestations of this experience: 'epiphany at peet's,' 'the secret life around us.' and I've done a black and white version of the chico dance theatre's photoshoot which shows in black and white the unsuspected stories evolving, yet never explained: www.pbase.com/wwp/bwphotoshoot

also in writing I suppose I am in the magical realist category, attempting to show our lives as surrounded by magic as any in mexico or great britain. take a look at www.pbase.com/wwp/spirit or www.pbase.com/wwp/apple my hope is that a more mysterious connection with our own home will push us to take better care of it.

don't project your own decay

onto the world! this is tough. as i grow older and feel my body falling apart, the opportunities diminishing, i rather naturally assume the world is collapsing as well. ah, but it's not, not really. as my friend jeff shore said years ago, "it's a matter of our technology keeping ahead of our stupidity." so far, the circuit boards are keeping us afloat. computers saved our bacon, making better use of the resources we have. and look at normality returning to kosovo, croatia booming with the tourist trade.

yes, luck plays an incredible part. i've no way of telling how much. the world can be made to fit any paradigm and thus remains a mystery. the nice thing is, i can interpret it anyway i want. so, i'll be a doctor on a space ship next time. (except, right now, simply not existing after the demise seems more relaxing.)

perhaps i've said it before, but it can't be repeated too many times. my grandmother told me on her 80th birthday, shortly before entering another dimension, "do it while you can." friends have died at 11, 12, 23(2), 36, 37, of bullets, cars, cancer. albert camus wrote, "there's no substitute for a long life," but some people like egon schiele pack a lot into a short time. as ramana maharshi recommended, "put one thing in practice."

ah, thanksgiving. how fortunate i've been, 42 years without health insurance, traveling in 40 countries with almost no money, good friends, interesting family, time to read 71 books in one summer, paid for looking out the window. actually, i was much more pessimistic at 20 than i am now.

count your blessings, cut your losses, and keep moving.

latest pics moody early morning shots: www.pbase.com/wwp/creek

the soldier's wound

last night i attended a new play 'another day in bagdad' by david a. tucker, II. based on his experiences as a reserve officer in iraq, it reminded me so much of vietnam i had trouble sleeping after. summary: the call-up is followed by a year's duty, two killed, one wounded, and ends with a second call-up after that. the show ends with a projection of names, those from this area who've died. as an afterward, the playwright answered questions very thoughtfully. he had, however, no resolution to the conflict, but said the situation in afghanistan demanded attention and to fight a war on two fronts classically disastrous (not to mention the possibility of three.)

first thing this morning, i did find an echo of my own thoughts: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/us/politics/02obama.html?th&emc=th i'm sure like nixon going to china, this is what's necessary.

though i never showed it, and it was never performed, pruned and fine-tuned for production, i did write a play about vietnam in 1967: www.pbase.com/wwp/red this is what it felt like on the home-front. and david said last night the disconnection of the american populance from the present war very troublesome.

i've never felt too good writing about politics, for a poet lives in the world of absolutes and perfection. in reality we must operate in the realm of the possible.

ah, getting back to this world has been tough. i've been out in the park taking fall pictures at least every other morning: www.pbase.com/wwp/creek