D E E P I N T O A R T L I F E WEST

Friday, May 22, 2009

Dancing with werewolves

A little over one week ago, strange, but not really strange considering the enormous grief we have to wade through before the true self emerges with revelation, we read these words:
...I can’t shake this feeling that the cavalry is on the way. I keep hearing the hoof beats. They increase and recede like the waves upon the shore. They seem to come from all directions. I can’t interpret it but for some reason, I feel better today and in recent days than I have in some time...
Maybe you reading them now, all over again, are like me in these things, a reader who reads between the lines, always looking for the meanings with which we can identify. To identify with another person's experience unifies us and that unification is compassion. Its helpful to read Visible's masterwork again and then again. There are all sorts of thrilling lens flares bursting beyond the paragraphs, so many you easily miss some as one outshines another and so forth.

For longer than I knew, I've been disgusted by the tabloid turn of events. My mornings are repeatedly spent edging into and away from anguish by my own participation through reading the articles and headlines issued by the Illusion. I won't link anyone reading this to them. I'm not cruel. If that is what you want your world to be, you already know where to find it. Immediate access is instantly available to everyone everywhere, like the seasoning packets in the San Francisco Treat or even faster, your TV. At first, I didn't recognize what was happening. I just knew I should be doing something else, something finer with my time. I thought maybe it was the ads. Then I thought it was the dial-up process and buying more bad news delivered at higher speeds would help. Then it was the trolls or the spies or the robots, which were only more targets of off-topic blame that avoided the original issue concerning the stunning absence of that something finer.

The Calvary coming is an us that removes ourselves from the abyss by individual boycott. The magnet drawing us to the edge is never going to disappear. You are aware the abyss exists, but you also see your participation, however small, invites anguish. It will forever beckon because it is a mystery which we know how it unravels and feel an obligation to explain. We always knew it and through conditioning denied we knew it, again through conditioning, participated in the questions and played inside its maze. I will go so far as to say, it is the zeitgeist in which we live and love, day in day out uniting in our anguish, identifying with the disease, dancing to its music, wearing its fashions, allowing its predations to color our dreams and produce its nightmares while we sleep.

I don't feel that it is required of me, or anyone else, to take a stand at this time. Take a stand and you're right back in the maze. Think of it as a huge impenetrable balloon. You can touch it, see it, smell it, press it and it plumps out again, it has no lasting response to pressure. It does not change except to increase ever larger until its taken over the entire horizon. But if you look away, you don't see it at all. To exist, it requires us looking at it.

Need I even mention we are all in unique personal situations, the same but different? We're outside the balloon experiencing it from billions of complex angles giving it billions of excuses for existing. Of course, this would be the increasing and receding echo of that Cavalry. If you turn off and put away all of your electronic diversionary magnets, you can hear it more clearly. As the next wave of Option ARMs is upon the land, coinciding exactly as it will with religious and mercenary pedophilia, economic corruption, pipelineistan and climate chaos, the beating of hoofs is going to turn into whole Earth shattering thunder and we might very well see that which we were destined to see. Ask yourself, how are these elements helping you personally? What is the attraction? Why even bother...

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hoof beats of Gene Krupa kickin' ass on the drums--or the four horsemen--can't see em' anyway, so I'll take Gene this time around--

I knew it, and you knew it, but I left the Tea Party behind tonight after having caused a Fray type ruckus. Even got called a heathen and a Nazi in the forum--pretty good work don't ya think--lol-- I think it was just the smart ass in me that had to do it--now I'm done and have returned to the calm-it's so good to be back in myself again-couldn't agree with you, Les and Ms. Su more--this all, you all, leads me to believe that a breaking with what has been is already here and happening--we are all witnesses of our own design--
Will stay here and a few other places, but I don't want to mask the symptoms any more, I want to be free of the disease that I have allowed to be created and maintained inside me--
And I had the key the whole time, from time to time....
Much love and respect,

Jim--Jj-JjGalt, JjPrince,The Artist Formerly known as JjPrince--Jj Cougar Mellencamp--JjCougar---

Anonymous said...

oops, just had to come back and remind us that stacey and ben--possibly michael have been a little ahead of us on this one---each in our own time--
J

Jacob Gittes said...

Nina:
You are a true visionary. Despite the fact that many of my family and friends think I'm a tripped out eccentric or psychopath, I'm actually pretty literal, trained as a scientist. I stick to observation and interpretation, and have, until somewhat recently, been afraid of and ignored my own dreams and interpretations.

You obviously have not!

I feel freer every day to let it all go. I can even,with some peace, let my dear wife carry on the battle with the balloon and the struggle to "better ourselves" with careerism and home improvement, while really just calmly going about my withdrawal from unreality... thank the powers above for seeds, soil, earth, sky, rivers, fish, and frogs.

I mentioned finding a sewing machine on the street, recently, abandoned and freed. Last night I found, in the neighbors garbage, new clothes with the tags still on for my wife, and a large Casio keyboard for the playing of music!
Today, on the way to pick up seedlings from my dear friend and only fellow-prepper J, I found an abandoned electric wheelchair with a sign saying "free" on it. I plan to use the deep-cycle batteries fro solar & wind electric storage, and the DC motors for either a wind-turbine generator, or perhaps some kind of electric vehicle.

This society is jettisoning perfectly useful resources, while tent cities spring up everywhere - which I try not to read about, but you can't avoid all the news fit to print.
Hope all's well out there... my son turns three next week. He loves playing pirate. A good career option these days!

nina said...

I really like the Gene Krupa, the trumpets, some screaming alto sax, do you Rumba? Oh why not call up the ghosts of the 78s and throw a huge USO party at the Lincoln Memorial. Dance marathons up and down the steps. Dah te dah Tuh! I'll bring the palm tree sets, Publius can launch his birchbark canoe in the reflecting pool, straw hat, ukelele, throwing chocolate cigarettes over our shoulders, Billie Holiday, Strange Fruit on loudspeakers at sunrise and we leave by bus, done forever, off to Visible's Fellowship Ranch of Divine Equality.

nina said...

my withdrawal from unreality... thank the powers above for seeds, soil, earth, sky, rivers, fish, and frogs.... and used sewing machines and drawing tables and drafting chairs tired of being stuffed in garages behind fenced yards, and keyboards and thumb pianos and rocking chairs with torn seat covers and empty photo frames and deep cycle batteries and huge plastic garbage cans and cast iron cookware and the clever people who know exactly what to do with these things. Publius, you saw what Ran had to say about experts? Those are just people who have the will to figure out how something works and the interest to do it. Now with your skills, you will be a popular person!
Have a look at Trout Clan's greenhouse and Ran's tent. You can do these. Heavy duty needles and parachute weight nylon. Get a sailmaker's glove for the tricky parts.

su said...

Now Nina why the hell can't I write the way you do.
Brilliant. Why do we keep the balloon of suffering inflated by breathing our awareness into it.
Why do we keep having our breath taken away by the futility of existence tabloided underneath the all important news of Posh Beckham's 1.5 million pounds worth of handbags.
But we do.
I do because I believed it fed me.
But then the questioning arose what did it feed me.
It fed me knowledge but of what use is knowledge that has no permanent reality.
A teacher wrote to me the other day about Mithya. He says let us you have a flower. You pull away the petals, where is the flower gone, now you only have stem. You crush the stem and now you have a powder. Every single aspect of form is like this it has no independent existence.
Someone once questioned Ramana Maharshi on the war of partition and he said where is the war. Can you see it right here, right now.
For years I sort of wrapped myself around that concept but now it is beginning to reveal itself.
The balloon only bounces around in the air because I put my attention there. How would my existence change if my life became more immediate. Can I truly extricate myself from this attachment to this fragile veneer of information.

I think blogs such as this, give me the opportunity to connect with beings where there seems to be a resonance beyond computer time.
And I do believe that is what I have been seeking in time spent puffing up the balloon. Connectedness.

Anonymous said...

"What is the attraction? Why even bother..."

because that is what we do. who among
us can pass by an accident and not look? we are like moths drawn to the flame. great post nina!

Anonymous said...

Like those little child rubber balloons that have the heavy rubber band that we grasp and bounce the balloon off of our hand (or head)--boom, boom, boom--just cut the rubber band and set it free--maybe there is helium inside--maybe we just thought it couldn't fly because it appears to be heavier than air--
Su, I am sending you a few pounds, or in your case, kilo's of confidence that you seem to have misplaced--it has your name on it, so I know it's yours--you write beautifully--accept that--don't compare yourself to others--it only does the same thing that we are talking about--how could Su write anything but what Su writes--and lovely Nina, always tending the pot and stirring lovingly, giving heart and thought to what should be added to the mixture, or not--This is a very wonderful post and I will return from time to time just to feel the tenderness of each hand that holds the others--
Jj

nina said...

Su, connectedness, here you take me back again to the great literary genius, Henry James, who said of his protagonist, Benvolio (1875), endeavor that does not lead one to broaden his relations with others and the world at large, leads to ennui:
... One was often idle when one seemed to be ardently occupied; one was always idle (it might be concluded) when one's occupations had not a high aim. One was idle therefore when one was working simply for one's self. Curiosity for curiosity's sake, art for art's sake, these were essentially broken-winded steeds. Ennui was at the end of everything that did not entangle us somehow with human life ...
I think you would enjoy this story.

nina said...

Note to Selves: Re-read and re-view
After Armegeddon's newest don't-miss-it selection Truth of Life.

nina said...

usxp, so very true.
Its that connectedness thing Su was saying, our representative self always wants to know what the other representative selves are doing. And after reading your Chuck Burr piece this morning, I see we just can't help it in this circle. Its unavoidable and necessary. It may not be possible to ignore that which is another part of us. This would then be the dual reality behind the increasing and receding of the waves upon the shore. We don't want to see it and we must see it.
Thanks.

su said...

Yeah, better to just surrender to the joy of the connection than thinking one needs to sever it.
So human is it not, trying to change what feeds one.

nina said...

Indeed SuSu.
I was just thinking of you already, before plugging in. That's the part I'm not interested in changing.

brian kennedy said...

Last night I watched the first three episodes of John from Cincinnati by David Milch. Milch is an amazing writer. He did Deadwood. He creates this character John Monad who is living in a state of non-separation. This series only went one year, and was discontinued. but I found it really enjoyable because Milch was at least trying to point his finger at something profound. I reccommend it.

nina said...

Hi Brian! I caught as many of the episodes as were made and liked it. My only criticism would be the jumbling of so many plots as each character suffered fading exposure while another was spotlit. And then it was just poof, gone, like Dexter. Poof. Gone.
Seriously, we have more than enough reasons to detest TV.

However, I find the Sopranos ("We ARE the Romans") and the Tudors (fickle brat born into Monarchial plantation ownership) interesting lessons in the never-ending terrorization of human vs human, just in case we might have a passing delusion terror is only a product of the little toilet.
I'm kind of shocked you watch TV at all, of all people, after all your experiences, you allow yourself replays with commercials?

brian kennedy said...

Nina,

Yes, I allow replays. I think psychopaths like to use shock as a weapon, so on the level that one feels it is useful to "preserve oneself," (Krishna--"Remember Me and fight") it is useful to skool yourself in combat so that you are harder to stun. I am very interested in my fears, they are my most accurate "self"-portrait.


I don't have a TV but will go on a media jag at the slightest provocation if, say, I am in a town that has one of those theaters that plays the "good stuff", (you know prize winning stuff that people who follow cinema as an art form have culled out from the junk.)

I became a fan of David Milch when I read a fascinating story about him in the New Yorker, and got Deadwood on DVD, and I just loved it. I have not watched Hill Street Blues, or NYPD, as of yet, because I have to overcome a resistance to watching "a cop show" just like , without reading that article, I would never have watched "a western" and thus missed Deadwood. So I am slowly overcoming my prejudice, as time permits. That jumping around is deliberate, online you can find some recordings of Milch lecturing on TV writing as an art to working and aspiring TV screenwriters. Every word of dialogue is placed with great care as to what it communicates and when and how. I need several viewings to get half of it.
The Sopranos are also on my list to watch at some point. I have seen a few episodes and loved what they were doing with that show. It was like a hilarious morality tale because it was a sendup of the tackiness of the Mafia lifestyle and its psychic consequences. I saw the one where he gives his mother some stolen tickets to go to Hawaii and she gets busted at the ticket counter. So funny.

I heard shows like these became possible with cable TV and some writers saw the chance to escape from the dumbed-downness of the TV medium. So, yes, I do media jags on these things when conditions are right. As Borat sez, " Verraniiiize"

Anonymous said...

We had the most remarkable days yesterday--perhaps one of the most complete days ever--continuing today--just wanted to share--
It has been the way life is supposed to be--you were all here with different names--how cool is that
Jj

Mat said...

Brian, you'll enjoy John from Cincinnati the further you go. Then rewatch it, and you'll catch many more small things, all interweaved through the stories. It's an inspired work, and I think they pulled it off at the end.

And Nina, thanks for recommending the Wrestler a few weeks ago. It was very good - not least of all the heavy metal music, which reminded me of high school! All the fight scenes made me think of it as a ballet.