Lift me from the Wondermaze, Alienation is the Craze

There was an old lawyer who lived in a shoe.
(Of course, don't tell him he's old--he believes he is in his prime)

He had two children, he thought he knew what to do.
(Whether he does know what to do is for you to decide)

Hey diddle diddle the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon.
(Yea, the old lawyer reads alot--especially at night--it helps him fall asleep)

How many words could the old lawyer read?  If the old lawyer could read words?

(Well he read enough to think that he learned something important in life.  Some formula to follow.  It went something like this:  to get good at something, you must practice.   How else could you become an expert?).

The little dog laughed at the old lawyer to see such sport--and the dish ran away with the spoon.
(But before the spoon disappeared, the old lawyer noticed when he was called upon to do public speaking, he would practice his presentations much like a musician.  Over and over.  However, on the day of the actual performance, his speeches rarely followed the script or "notes" he had memorized. They went somewhere else.  Often of their own volition.  Often they were better than what he practiced.  The words seemed to flow from him.   It was like he was improvising as a musician.).

Hush little baby, don't say a word.
(And at this point, perhaps we don't need to say anything.  It all seems a reasonable proposition.  Like any craftsman you must hone the skills of your trade.   But does the metaphor of "practice makes perfect" have any relevance when applied to your life?  Can you practice your life to get "good" at it? And if so, what and how would you practice?  What would you expect to gain from it?).

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
(And of course, if you did start to practice life, you would pay attention to all of the basics of life:  sitting, eating, eating, shitting, fucking, reading, talking, sleeping, and attempt to master them.   Aren't these activities, and thousands like them the basic "notes" of life?   Wouldn't this be what you would practice to master life?

When the bough breaks the cradle will fall.
(Ok, Mr. Smartypants.   You think you have the formula for everything.   If so, show me your original face before your parents were born?

The clock struck one.
(Ok, Mr. Smug question for everything, I have an answer, but it is too obscured by coal dust for you to make any sense of it.

Did you ever see such a sight in your life?
(I recently met some high school classmates that I hadn't seen in over 30 years.   As they started recounting stories about other classmates, I realized I had no idea of what was going on 30 years ago.  I had no idea that one of my classmates had not graduated, and had gone off hunting elk during the graduation ceremony.   Of course, that person now runs a multi-million dollar business guiding the likes of Dick Cheney and his ilk on expensive hunting trips for elk.  If I went back in time 30 years ago, would I be able to make sense of it all?   Or if I turned the way way back machine 40 years and I saw my grandparents alive, who did see my original face before my parents were born, what would I see?  It would likely be too obscured by coal dust for me to make any sense of it.  But I could probably hear the cough of his black lung disease.

The Unlatched Door

After I had lay me down to sleep, I heard the faint stirring of a specter levitating across the room disturbing my otherwise tranquil slumber.

As I perched myself up with a variety of cushions, pillows and other props to clear a modicum of drowsiness from my countenance, I be-spied that my visitor was a ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and desolation:  that to which my merciful consciousness previously strove earnestly to conceal.  God knows that in my horror I saw in its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines an abhorrent travesty that bore a clear resemblance to places and times I had thought were long behind my current state of relative peace and prosperity.

My eyes, bewitched by the glassy orbs which stared loathsomely into them, refused to close; though they were blurred the darkness.  I could neither focus on the shape, nor avoid it, caught in a limbo in the nether-worlds betwixt slumber and wakefulness.

But my lack of visual recognition was of no consequence.   A burst of black memory surfaced in a chaos of echoing images.  Long in dreams had I fled from these accursed recollections, the young man in his prime frustrating his youth and potential in the fables of solitary alienation which bespoke of disappointments and the pathological drive to connect frustrated by an inordinate amount of awkwardness.

My nemesis was hungry, devouring, and insatiable.  The undulation that revolted me almost as poignantly as to its cause, the vividness of the inconceivable betrayal I had dealt to the most innocent of intimates which had turned into an unmentionable monstrosity which in an instant meta-morphed to a herd of delirious fugitives.  The silent swarm rotated in a kaleidoscopic intensity of the sameness of my dubious paternal bequeath who, haunted by his own demons, had retreated into a cold introspective intensity.

Further sleep was out of the question, so I ignited my intelligent hand hold electronic device to determine if any wards might be of use in discharging the demon, knowing that I did at that time that to focus on the unmentionable provided it strength and sustenance.  The more you try not to recognize it, the bigger the blank space in your life becomes. The black space will remind you of its presence.   As such, my emerging plan was to expand my focus of perception so that in juxtaposition to the whole reality, this particular manifestation would only been seen as a small portion to the overall immensity of presence.

With this practice, I soon devolved once again into a peaceful slumber, encumbered by dreams of a more agreeable nature.

In the clear caffeinated morning there brought a new realization sparked by the words of Keizan-zenji in The Record of Transmitting the Light:

         A splendid branch issues from the old plum tree

          In time, obstructing thorns flourish everywhere

With the rose comes the thorns.  The thorns are the hungry ghosts of our life.  There is no life without them.  Best to make space for them.  Mind the brambles!

For more information on hungry ghosts, click HERE

 

Life's the Same You're Shakin' Like Tremolo

When we lock up the man, it's like locking up part of our own human potential--the part we fear.

But we are all locked up in our own prison.

If I could give a turning word, to help you see, to help me see, to set us free,  I certainly would.

The universal panacea.   Just one word to set us all free:

Click here find your own personally tailored turning word.

It would convenient if we could simply go to the nearest Walmart and purchase our turning word.   We can buy everything else right?  Instead, our thoughts seem to be held captive by the tumult and shimmer of the artificial world.  Stereotypical mental content coming to us from the outside.   Echoes of a soulless world.

To get by, we have the illusion of the superhero.  Its us against the world.  Its us getting by in the world.   If we are creative it can be something creative.   The good wife and mother.  The good provider.  The "naughty" librarian.   The intoxicated monk.  

And I have been imprisoned in this fox body since I was born.  But my illusion of cleverness is no longer a shield.  Now all that remains is the illusion.  Not super, certainly not a hero.

The whole world could change and we wouldn't even know it.

It's like we are on a plane, moving fast, and you think that you are standing still.

Sitting in motion.  Or moving in stereo.

What lies within the secret compartment?

L.A. Guns.  Lots of bike rides to the winery.  And graphic novels about superheroes.  Can't you tell?

The Flick Fandango Phoney

Subconsciously, I think I had already prepared the ground for the new shade.  The leviathan that conceals its terrifying immensity in the murky depths of the ocean was my new familiar.

Click Here for more information.

Perhaps I had started too late on my new enterprise?

A man who has no belief in himself can expect none from others.

Others, who expect nothing, often have no beliefs.

Unexpected beliefs, often find a man (or a woman for that matter), who otherwise have started a new enterprise.

On board the Starship Enterprise, I expect that the characters will exhibit similar expectations and beliefs such as:   I wouldn't click "Here" if I were you.

But since I'm not you, I can make statements such as:

Ain't it cool, drinking the sticky sweet syrup of self-adulation?

Click There for more information.  Or if you just want it all to stop.  In fact, you don't have to click anywhere, and it will eventually stop.  Like it did for these: Robert Wise, 86; Bob Denver, 70; Daniel Richie, 56 (French Editor and Scholar); James Doohan, 85; John Fowles, 79; Scott Winnett, 42 (former Locus Editor); Keith Parkinson, 47 (Winner of two Chelsea awards); Warren Norwood, 59 (author of "The Planet of Flowers.") in 2005.  Which was ten years ago.

It might just suddenly end.   And you cannot do a thing about it.  "Captain, I cannot do a thing about it, I'm a giving her all she's got, but the warp core has been breached."   All you life been doing things, making things happen.  Making things possible.   The illusion of control.  And then poof, like a thief in the night.   Nothing happens.  I wonder what nothing would be like.   Is it the Flick Fandango Phoney? 

The Wisenheimer Brainstorm

Going back to the Sir Thomas More eyes for a second, remember these?

He was this highly intelligent dude that lived 500 years ago.   I was looking at his painting and thinking wow dude, I'm sure you were smart, but five-year hundred years ago, people had all kinds of crazy ideas.   For starters, most people believed that the earth was the center of the universe.  Then, they had all these alchemists (including no less Isaac Newton) trying to make gold out of everything and poisoning everybody with mercury in the process.   And doctors?  Well lets just say that I'm sure you wouldn't want to be under the care of any physician or surgeon back then.
   

After a little San Pedro Mescal, I commenced myself to a wee bit of thinking, to wit: what would people 500 years from now think about our ideas and beliefs?  We hardly know the first thing about the complex interplay of the human body.  Scientist are just now starting to study the gut  microbiome which may be one of the primary players in health even though for centuries we have been clobbering it with anti-biotics, vitamins, and lord knows what not.  Similarly, there is a whole unexplored world of fungi in the soil that we have been similarly altering without really knowing what we are doing with new fangled crop sciences, herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers.

 Nature has been evolving for millions of years.  It is perhaps naive to think that the recent scientific "advancements" in crop science in the past century or so would not be without repercussions when they have altered what has been going on for eons.  What would you rather eat? Something from McDonald's or a diet from Japan or one of those islands off the coast of Italy where 50% of the population live to be over 100? It is probably not an accident that the longest living people on this planet eat a diet similar to what their great great great great great grandparents were eating and not the recent fad diet coming from a "nutritionist" in the U.S.
 
I envision a future where there are all sorts of sophisticated monitors in our body to maximize our own potential by recommending that we eat the right foods in the right amount at the right time-- then, of course, the inevitable sip of a bit of wine and all the programming goes out the window.  Its the old maxim:  "whats the point of having a rule if you can't break it?"

Moonrise expresso Avec novel de graphic 

Miss jubilee Avec humdinger en Augusta 

And I for an Eye

Ok, I know its Fourth of July weekend, and I shouldn't be talking about work, however, I need to touch briefly on the art on the wall of my office.   Here it is:  

Ta da!   Ok, that's an old picture from my old office downtown taken four years ago.   Here is what my office looks like in the photo I took today at work: 

Ta da!  This painting, by former Springfield artist Andrew Woolbright is of Sir Thomas More, the almost patron saint of Lawyers.  He wrote the book "Utopia" and for his efforts, he was beheaded by King Henry VIII.  There is a famous original portrait of Sir Thomas More painted in 1527 by More's friend Hans Holbein which now hangs in the Frick Collection in New York City.   As you can see, Woolbright's painting is an abstract version of the Hobein masterpiece:  

I was intrigued by Woolbright's abstract riff on the original portrait.   I mean here we have the "original" lawyer, all black and white, full of clear cut and unambiguous rules, regulations, checks and balances being morphed into abstraction where nothing is clear and everything is blurry.   What might seem like a good Utopian idea in the abstract becomes messy and fuzzy upon implementation. Indeed, Woolbright told me that his original vision for the painting was to juxtapose More with the "Utopian" St. Louis public housing project of  Pruitt-Igoe of 1950s St. Louis which ended as ignominiously as More's neck.   I discussed Pruitt-Igoe in a blog in 2011:

http://sittinginmotion.blogspot.com/2011/09/things-that-dont-go-together-5.html

Also interesting is Woolbright's treatment of the More's eyes.   Note in the original portrait, More's left eye seems tired as if it has seen too much of this world, while his right eye retains its steadfast vision of some ephemeral truth:

Christopher Andre, in his book "Looking at Mindfulness" states that one eye is "sharp with attention" while the other is "soft with compassion."  Andre suggests that we cultivate a mindfulness practice "capable of both."

It is fascinating that Woolbright picks up on the difference in the eyes in his painting:

Note that More's left eye in Woolbright's treatment is clear and sober, like a placid pond while the right eye is obscured in swirls.

Draw from this what you will.   I certainly will.   We are creatures of dreams and creatures of practicality all rolled into one.   May we keep our head on our shoulders.