LOVER

ACE

7:30 a.m. the air a broom of burnt coffee and greasy meat sweeping off the river. Workers on bicycles with lunches tied to the handlebars swinging in plastic bags. Old men reeking of cheap soap walking with canes waving hello. Cats glaring and disappearing underneath houses, underneath cars, underneath banana trees. Things exist in multiples. The dog in the road lowering her head. Me on the bike thinking my sweat was rain. I reel it in and go at it again. If you love me like you say you do you'll try a little tenderness. This day is it - an/other chance.

 

What have you done, my brother?

 

 

These women had to be survivors because of, you know, the abuse.

- An ambitious production
- Make it look like an accident
- Umbrage
- Burned & burned
- The Black Hills were stolen from the Sioux
- Mine the miners
- Death by knife
- Martha Jane Burke
- Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
- New language comes from a real place in the soul
- Eyelash
- Persimmon
- Dahlia
- Cold cream
- Beholden to no human cock-sucker!
- Most moral codes are elevated expressions of economic necessity.
- Cohabitation of the primitively obscene with an ornate presentation
- Freighted
- Let's not dog our hustle
- Obscenity protects by not giving facts
- Lost eyesight
- Create a theatrical version of reality
- How to be, regardless of defects of character or inner demons
- People unable to turn wishes into passions want to appropriate the value of the people who live lives of passion.
- Community is the secular version of religion
- You can't think your way to right action, you can only act your way to right thinking. 
- Peaches
- Praying over it
- Ambulators
- The benign version of yearning
- Encounter all of the materials that are trust-worthy then forget them.
- Precious to give ourselves in imagination, take joy in respecting integrity, treasure difference
- Walking around with a secret

Is my way less noble than any other?

(History is a lie agreed upon. So in this case, the women of history were voiceless, simply the instruments of men's will, and kept drugged, one way or another, 24 hours a day. Society always tells us that when they're imprisoning people outside of prisons they're doing it for that person's own good: hence: hysteria (a beautifully evolved word). So hysteria is behavior of the essence of being a woman and if its the essence of being a woman it's crazy. So she's hysterical which means she's "being a woman" which means we drug her. Opium. Fear. Control. The hysterical woman was made to further the illusions of every man she came into contact with, which is the essential truth of the constructed Western Woman.)

Truths swallow each other up

- Get to the most general universal -via- being rigorously specific
- Attraction
- The "American Story" is original sin reenacted
- The violation of the sanctity of another person's heart is the unpardonable sin 
- There's all kinds of cannibalism.
- Pseudo-speciation
- To distract the populace from any spiritual unease is to give them a more convenient object upon whom to focus their anxieties.

(The spiritual need in every person must be answered on a nightly basis. If that need can't be accommodated in acquiescence of spirit, it's accommodated in anxiety, and the habitual receptacles for anxiety are drugs, gambling, sex, food, alcohol, fear, control.)

- That sad tale
- The fundamental dynamic of humor: things survive 
- When one suffers all suffer
- What's the verdict?

(Pick a road to go down. And keep going down it. I haven't been down any road I haven't found interesting. You just have to know how to look. What allows you to look and to see is humility. Which doesn't require of the road that it conform to your expectations or your previous experience of roads. Then the definition of a road begins to expand and so - uh - you know - uh - I never think of what I'm gonna write at the beginning of the day. I pray and I sit down. And - uh -

the illusion of control is fundamentally at variance with the going out of the spirit, which is what you do when you create

- Visions come to prepared spirits
- It's not by any virtue that I receive these gifts
- The muse does know where to find me
- Keynote, struck                                  

Armor

Old chains rusty gates twisted concertina

worn cement hard red brick dull metal

mountains hills boulders stones rocks pebbles

mud hay glue spit shit

paper hair keys safety pins paperclips

broken plates bent spoons cracked knives candle stubs

bike locks bicycles spokes wheels hubs

mufflers carburetors engine blocks

oil radiator fluid brake fluid gasoline

shovels rakes buckets bones

books mirrors empty lipstick tubes

empty perfume bottles

empty water bottles, crushed

feathers petals leaves sticks burnt matches

driftwood firewood roots trees

whole trees

vegetables fruit rice walnuts acorns pecans

shells and shells and shells

moss

starfish snails slugs

rolled up rugs torn towels stained sheets

pillows and pillowcases

ragged shoes ragged sweaters hangers

cameras telephones blenders irons coffee pots flasks burnt pans

everything cracked bent broken fucked

all the broken glass off the street

nests from branches, branches

aluminum tin vinyl duct tape plastic tarps

whole cars

guitars turntables microphone stands

microphones

thousands of pens hundreds of pencils

sharpees crayons tubes of acrylic and oils

chunks of chalk pastels charcoal cans of linseed

olive canola coconut sesame oils

seeds from all the things

threads from all the things

buttons scraps quilts blankets robes

all the clothes

all the dreams, hopes

smashed crushed compressed 

splintered, packed

what can get in or out 

 

 

“We need a thinking that does not fall apart in the face of horror” George Bataille

We try to organize the world, which isn't organized the way our brains want to organize it. We tell stories about the people in our lives, we project ideas onto them. We project relationships with people, we make our lives into stories. I don't think we can avoid doing that. There's no way to approach anything in an objective way. We're completely subjective; our view of the world is completely controlled by who we are as human beings, as men or women, by our age, our history, our profession, by the state of the world.

Change is most likely to occur through people who are as far removed from cynicism as they are from utopianism. At this point we lack any practical blueprint for action, unless we are willing to act as architects and engineer a new conceptual framework for our lives. When a particular cultural idea like freedom becomes so abstract and overvalued that it finally assumes control of the entire personality (or collective mentality) and suppresses all other motivations, then it becomes dogmatic and limiting. In this formula, anything which is not “in the whole” is not individuality but egocentrism.

The question always remains: to what are we really committed? Is it to playing it safe and manipulating our life and the rest of the world so that it will give us security and confirmation? This takes the form of people claiming to be "revolutionary" or "on the outside" as much as anyone else. Or is our commitment to exploring deeper and deeper levels of letting go? Do we take refuge in small, self-satisfied actions, speech, and mind? Or do we take refuge in warriorship, in taking a leap, in going beyond our usual safety zones? Being "avant garde/revolutionary/outside" can be as much of a safety zone as anything else -

I think the current high pitch of cultural anxiety is a reflection of core insecurities in a wild and wooly universe that we cannot control. We try to convince ourselves that we are more meaningful than anyone could actually conceive. It's no doubt that horrific things are happening, there is no doubt that these horrors have the capacity to challenge life at its core. Hearts break, creatures die, innocence is destroyed - evil seems to take control. What can we control? This is a spiritual lesson in powerlessness and acceptance - feelings of hopelessness deepen when our idea of what we can do is out of sync with what we actually can do. I will not surrender to hopelessness; I will focus on what I can actually do. That's not a little - it's everything.

Use, social behavior, mental events - nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures. Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse. Within this framework, we suffer when our family suffers - and our family is all life. Collective responsibility becomes the only answer. Humility in the face of what we cannot control becomes the bravest response.

The love we seek overrules human nature. There is no love that doesn't pierce the hands and feet. I do not know whether science will formulate its grand theory of the universe. I know that it will not make it any easier to read the plain text of our hearts. Creation and destruction are the same. Nothing is created purely out of the ether. Everything comes from something else. This is a comfort to me.

Spin Me Round

return to EARTH

 

Lucky

I know that it's an absolute privilege to be able to buy, cook and eat clean food that nourishes my body and soul. I can't afford to do it everyday, but I have the intention - it's become my primary instinct. Also how could I ever forget my times of homelessness and abject poverty, and the fact that millions of creatures on this planet are starving today? I can't forget. It's my experiences of suffering that have borne my greatest gift - gratitude. I give thanks to the Creator for providing me with all this sustenance, may the strength I gain from it fuel me to give it away.