losing touch with my own mythology

this morning i woke with a feeling of helplessness, as though my belief in my own abilities had evaporated. that's only happened once before. choreographing a dance for a class, i had a dancer go off and complain about me. the teacher jumped all over me. i became paralyzed until she came to a rehearsal and did with the dancers exactly what i had been doing. voila, the complaining dancer ended up experiencing the most success when we did a performance.

obviously i needed the support and approval of the teacher. it had very little to do with me and my methods.

the writer julia kristeva in black sun expounds the theory such dark states arrive because we've never mourned the loss of our mother. we ransack the earth trying to find the safety and comfort we once felt. we erect welfare states, we marry, we hit the bottle to feel warm and complete. it's a tough world when your mother done gone, as so many blues songs wail.

on the other hand, i like the thought of the portuguese poet fernando pessoa. he believes, as i do, we each have created a personal mythology about ourselves that keeps us going. the elements of this story could be made up of many things, some very mysterious. we might see ourselves as mirrors, always able to reflect the world around us. we might see ourselves capable of donning a cloak which makes us invisible.

perhaps we're all trying to compensate for the loss of community and family, creating an imaginary bubble to protect ourselves. and in moments of despair that bubble pops and the very things upon which we prided ourselves seem false and fear takes over. once that happens we find it difficult to function.

here's a series of poems dealing with such a story: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/gambler

"a hero is a celebrity who has actually done something"

that's what a teacher told her first grade class. i hope at least one of those tots understood what she said, took it to heart, and put it in practice.

alas, my heroes tend tend to be those characters who seem to have been unable to do otherwise. yes, i've been hot on the trail of eccentrics. last night up til two a.m. i first haunted the web for traces of the blues singer skip james. years ago i had one of his albums 'the devil got my woman.' he sang in this eerie high voice that took me off to someplace else, and it didn't sound like he'd sucked in some helium. no, it didn't have that comic quality.

track him down yourself. he first took the train north in 1930 and recorded in wisconsin 18 blues tunes, stomping his feet, pounding the piano, and battering his guitar. he thought he'd be famous - ah, how many of us make that mistake! not heard of again for thirty years, he resurfaced during the blues craze of the sixties. that's a long time to wait, but better late than never.

and after skip, i got caught up in the performances and story of tiny tim. long ago i had his first album and played it into the ground. another performer singing falsetto, what's that all about? and i've always wanted to master the ukulele. my god, tiny couldn't do that much on it and look how far he got. on youtube you can find a touching video tracing the day of his death.

fifteen minutes of fame, is that what it's all about? perhaps, perhaps. better sometime than never. these people may not be the epitome of personality. i certainly would want to share an apartment with them. what i love is their exceeding the boundaries of behaviour and good taste and making it work for them, at least part-time.

i've already mentioned the movie '32 short films about glenn gould' and videos online of janis joplin, and the documentary about the very strange recluse henry darger, who created a 50,000 page graphic novel where pieces of it now clutched by the faithful as though relics of the true cross.

in the end i hate being so ordinary. true, i've attempted at times to be a clown, a worshiper of charlie chaplin and buster keaton, secretly feeling i'm really a comedian who wants to be taken as seriously as einstein.

i have uploaded several talks, bits of forty hours of entertainment created by myself, talks given at california state university in the distant past. you can download them here:

spaceship earth april 21, 1998.mp3

american character nov 18, 1997.mp3

GRID THEORY full take 01.mp3xx may 6, 1997.mp3

when you judge others, you must be perfect yourself

the amanda knox case making me a bit crazy, bringing out the best and worst in me. not the trials and jails so much, as the amazing opinions people have voiced on the basis of only headline knowledge.

in a way i can't blame them cause i did the same. the lurid story of sex and murder involving a beautiful young woman, that's a perfect piece for national enquirer, yet how many people believe that tabloid? or the papers in the UK, the most slanderous and slimy in the world? they had a field day.

what's actually worse, reading comments on the web. i found the best and the worst in a thread on a site called http://www.topix.com and i'd like to present them. remember, judging others, you damn yourself.

which should i present first, the impossible or the likely? guess i'll do the first. it's more entertaining.

I'm a psychotherapist, and that doesn't mean that I know anything, but I'm over 60y/o and I tend to know Crazy when I see it. I see a psychotic look in her eye.
She said to a Jewish guy: "My people (German) killed your people" and she laughed and laughed and kept saying it. I've seen this kind of 'evil' before. It's an attempt, as one sadistic person put it: "to mess with the insides of the brain" That was the true intent of a laughter with a comment as the above.
This chick has a "Sexual Personality Disorder" with another diagnosis of "sexual fetishism of some sort." Sadism, tho rarely seen in women, is pretty horrific and can even be more creative and bizarre than seen in male sadists.
I agree w/one of the posters who suggested that there were 2 Amandas. These people can create as many of themselves as they choose. They aren't like Multiples, b/c a Multiple Personality has 'no choice' and the underlying character is changed. Amanda had a choice when she had her out of control blood thing, she did when she accused that innocent bar owner.
It's amazing how people can say how this girl is normal.
MOST schzophrenia episodes occur during the time when an 18-22 y/o is first away from home
Either way, God help us if "she" is outta jail. I mean, you wouldn't want Manson outta Jail? I know the details haven't been all air tighted etc. But the smell in the air says "knox is one sick child." Even if she had no role in the murders, which I can't believe, she is one sick puppy and isn't the person her "friends"

and mother describe.

now i know why my doctor friend thinks pyschiatrists evil! hope you never went to this one.

here's the second quote:

I am a journalist, live in italy and follow this case very well from the beginning. I am absolutely sure that Amanda Knox is innocent, and so is as well her boyfriend. There is no proof against them, just nothing: no blood, no DNA, no camera's, no witness. The killer is Guede. All the proof, DNA, blood, fingerprints: on the body, in the bed, in the room, in the bathroom is from Guede. This boy escaped immediately after the murder and was only found because of his DNA, sperm and blood in te bed and on the body of the victim. There has been lots of bull shit in the newspapers about Knox; I am afraid that she became somehow a kind of wet dream of lots of male journalists.- and some of the comments above. This Knox was just a normal girl, happy, in love with her Italian boyfriend, before that her room mate has been murdered. She is not 'normal'anymore: a weird kind of celebrity, nearly a year in prison and a shock about everything what happened

these from sept 29, 2008, and it's gone from bad to worse with uninformed opinion. sad so many live in the hell of impossible perfection.

"you write like someone who's never been hit"

damn, i should be in bed. it's late. the workers will be here again the morning to bang and rip the stucco off the outer walls of my room. i had to spend the whole day away. did one of my rituals, getting take-out egg foo young and picnicking at the local forestry tree farm. that lifted my spirits a bit, those haunted, broken limbs. unfortunately, the meal didn't settle too well, too much salt.

sure, i should be sleeping by now. and i would be, but i got pulled off track a little while ago. since i've bought a blue ukulele i've been trying to learn how to play without practicing, looking at books, listening to recordings. osmosis usually works, though not in this case, so far.

you cannot imagine the number of uke groups in the world. youtube's overflowing. it's an incredible feast. tutorials, flamenco, rock and roll, you name it. i keep going back for more. except tonight i wandered off into the performances of janis joplin. i'm still thrilled. again it proves i shouldn't listen to anybody else. the san francisco chronicle writer ralph j. gleason put her down as a screamer. and a girlfriend in new york who had dinner with her said she ate like a pig and spit on the floor.

very well, that may be. lately i've been going back to blues roots, a big fan of the recordings made in the 20's and 30's. patton, johnson, blind willie mctell. used to be i had dozens of recordings and i'm collecting them again. i'm not a big fan of bessie smith or the later chicago blues. that's where janis comes in. she's really a blues singer out of that tradition. and she did grab hold of me tonight.

where did my title come from? a poem called the girlfriend's train by nikky finney. it gave me a shock when i ran across it at the bookstore.

http://www.youngwomensactionteam.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=43&Itemid=114

that black woman who came up to her after a reading, using the phrase above (i've changed it a bit in order to relate) and showing her own scars. i hope the poem affects you as much as it did me. i can remember being hit lots of times as a child, yet at most i'm an entertainer, unable to open up and really sing the blues.

the railroading of amanda knox

the american student convicted last year for murder in italy. google her name to refresh your memory.

i'm not often shocked and ashamed of my own ignorance, but i should be. i discovered soon after high school american actions against indians and citizens of other countries had been completely whitewashed. for example, the 45 caliber pistol developed against phillipine rebels trying to kick the yankees out after the spanish-american war. the native fighters tightened barbs around the leg so tightly they could feel no pain when bullets hit them. the 45 so powerful it blew them apart and backwards. so much for helping peoples rebel against tyrants.

and i really should have no illusions about the u.s. press. gore vidal said he'd never read anything positive in our newspapers about another country. and look at the slanders against the french for not invading iraq with us. irony, irony, now the french have drawn us into helping al queda in libya.

instances of injustice abound, of course. take roman polanski, the polish director who had sex with a thirteen year old. he confessed enough to go for a psychiatric evaluation among known killers. the judge, however, worried about the press, decided to pursue him into prison anyway. the film-maker fled abroad for good reason, yet pilloried in this country ever since as a renegade. i dare anyone to watch the documentary

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired

and still believe he got a fair deal.

or take the novel by phillip kerr A Quiet Flame: A Novel (Bernie Gunther Novels) where i felt sick at the end. the argentinians built gas chambers and killed thousands of jewish refugees escaping from germany. (you can watch the play magic fire about a jewish family relocated to buenos aires and the threat of death they ran into. a very moving piece.)

yes, i should not be surprised by the afterward to the nonfiction The Monster of Florence by douglas preston and mario spezi where the authors reveal the desperate, dirty shenanigans of the italian prosecutor in previous cases, the knox case not even gone to trial. and the whole frame-up even convinced me she must be guilty, to my utter shame. the story so vividly presented i wanted the girl convicted.

now i have to back-up and assess my own guilt. innocent until proven guilty, the rule still holds long as presented in the constitution (or is it not in that document?) if not in the media.

communities pulled apart by surface tension

Freud again: the strongest urge to join a small community (200 or less). think about it. those old groups had to hunt and graze. no land supplied a large amount of fodder. besides, should the ensemble grow larger, some people start thinking they're better than others!

my thoughts on the subject revived while taking pictures of this co-housing's fifteenth milestone celebration. www.pbase.com/wwp/circle . and remembering those places i'd been where for a moment people unified in a common endeavor. early in the seventies, all those young lookouts drove once a week for hours to get-together, roast corn, and sing songs. here's a piece of one i wrote:

I like to lay around in the sun,

even if my work doesn't get done,

sip my beer through a straw,

i even eat my beefsteaks raw.

Lethargy, lethargy,

good old fashioned lethargy.

not great literature, but fun at the time. (lyrics have to be loose to allow music to enter in.). and it probably fit those twenty-somethings back from the peace corps, or just out of college, waiting for life to begin. alas, that did happen. they drifted apart with the wind into babies and houses and substantial careers.

at the university of california santa cruz, one particular class held together by theater, dance and music. graduation and they headed for seattle and new york, fortune and fame.

or the sixties expatriates in lindos on the island rhodes, drinking kos wine, making love, dancing. mail shouted out at the post-office. ROBIN QUEST. JUNIOR MOTTA. HEATHER GORP. ah, but we all grew tired of too much beauty. i headed for a dark apartment in berlin. so much for swimming naked while the phosphorescence flashed around us.

pieter bruegel captured it with his icarus crashing into the sea, everyone oblivious and working at their everyday tasks. without even knowing it we find a home only to leave it not much later, our wings melted by the sun.

playing chicken with history

i guess it's inevitable. watching the japan tsunami roll over houses and cars, i'm struck by how all our most precious possessions turn to junk. (lenny bruce said it first.) and that drowned man lying on his stairway, surrounded by broken objects, what am i to make of him?

looking around my room, i want to weep for my guitar and ukuleles, things built with care and by hand. the electronic stuff doesn't much matter, the erasing of my last words on the hard drives i hope i'm not around to observe. i still nurse myself through this existence with hopes of fame.

maybe like a mammoth, i'll be preserved in ice, discovered by the new strains of brainy creatures on the planet. unfortunately, my glasses will certainly be shattered, and my poor shoes - i have a real sympathy for soles, how they've carried me everywhere. i wonder at what time my watch will have stopped? will those aliens looking through our ruins understand time and its measurement, how we judged everyone and everything by whether it could measured, especially by money?

we'll probably appear a bit feeble. as they put calipers on our brains and strange rulers on our bones, they'll certainly realize we didn't think much, especially of ourselves. what possessed them to heat their homes with deadly radiation? what stupid chances they took. ah, but that's in the nature of things, my friends of the future. you too...

maybe i'm being too gloomy. in the short run this room might be preserved as others i've visited: rimsky-korsakov's, dostoyevsky's, strindberg's, carlyle's, shakespeare's. you've made a pilgrimage to at least a couple dozen. there's einstein's patent on the wall, not to mention shelves of books owned by kazanzakis, ibsen, freud, ad infinitum. a temporary immortality would be better than none at all.

here's a collection of poems to be shot off in the next spacecraft: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/eros