Happy Birthday, Mom

She was born February 12, 1908. She died February 19, 1969. I still miss her; and wish her well.

Giving Birth to Inertia

I'm finding it hard to create in a world (think partisan politics) that doesn't seem to believe in the possibility of objectivity any more. In such a perceived world does one create only for oneself, knowing that "beauty is [only] in the the of the beholder."

Is that what "being lonely in a crowd" means: one's writing, talking, reading echoes into nothingness; I have the illusion I hear others but I am only hearing the sound of my own voice, even when others seem to be doing the uttering? In such a world, do we humans share nothing in common, except our inevitable separateness?

As I read post-modern world (with its modern politics and art), all truths are essentially subjective. Does that mean they are also inevitably invalid; except to ourselves...or perhaps even to ourselves?

I am finding it hard to give solid form to any idea when the world believes that all ideas are individualized opinions. How does one give concrete logical form (words) when readers believe only in their personal uniqueness and not group consensus. Absent a shared human experience, I find writing becoming an act of flailing, a momentary release of individual pain (a singular, unshared shout of failure), and not a successful attempt to corral that pain into a remediation through agreement.

I thought I wrote to make other's shout "Yes, that's me," believing that the common identity will heal us both in the process. But maybe I am wrong; not only are we destined to die alone, we must also live alone.

The brilliant novelist Pat Conroy once offered that we read to find out we are not alone. I assume he meant by that we also talk, write, paint and sing for the same reason. But increasingly in this post modern world the crowd is defined only an image of oneself. In fact, there is no crowd, just reiterations of me. And, even worse, I am just a reiteration of nothing fixed or constant either, since every vantage point--even me of myself--moves on its own time and space continuum. In such a world, I find myself losing contact with reality; or question that there is reality. I fragment into pixels, suspended between oscillations of 0 and 1. The picture, the word, the phrase, the paragraph, the essay, are non-existent. I am not really alive; it is just another of my ephemeral illusions.

All this leads creativity to paralysis, and a desperate attempt to address--and redress--why I haven't written here for many weeks.

I have written now. Huzzahs! And hopefully you will identify with this blather, this shameless attempt to re-energize my computer-word-entering fingers; and forgive.

Political Process

We are born honest, with deep emotional needs. We are soon overwhelmed by emotional fears (some taught to us by our parents).

We learn also to cater to those fears.

Accordingly, we live half lives. Puberty challenges. We become self-aware human beings, sensing we are co-conspiring in our own self-demise. We lose self-esteem. To re-affirm dignity and self-worth (truth), we turn to our educational system. There (with the help of other thwarted human beings called teachers) we create a series of sophisticated intellectual social/political/economic rationales to justify our chosen fear syndrome. Reflecting Post Modernism, we are taught to cherry-pick only facts from reality which support those rationales.

We get (only) As and Bs as the student marketplace dictates. We graduate. We become Republicans or Democrats, affiliating only with people with like-minded set of half-truths. We soon reduce our quest for knowledge to watching only CNN or Fox or MSNBC. We become self-righteous. We vote.

We win. A rush of power. Emotional fulfillment. Power to the people (the mob).

Four years later...fear. Another election? Mommy! Daddy! The child is emotionally naked (and fearful) once again.

Asking an old man to be patient is like asking a poor man to spend money he doesn't have.

500 Years Later

Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Watson.
The benchmarks of the modern humans
A half-millennium journey to...myself?
They echo within me, if only to diminish me
with their fathomable truth
each waking day.

The Pole flung me out from the center of God's universe,
to become a distant star
one only lit unspectacular
among the vast void
streaking through life's uncertain tasks.
No longer it, spinning around us,
now, we
spinning,
around it .

Later, the mechanical Master offered
certainty
a fixed, inrerelated universe
(later, true, to prove an illusion)
but true enough, at the time, to create,
steam, electricity, trains and cars and planes.
Carrying me rapidly, proudly, may I say, Enlightened,
to ease, pleasure and less pain.
 
Until, Galapagos
ripped me from that reasoned, opulent bosom,
To become, only, lowly,
animal among animals, a stopping point
to who knows where--or what.
Genesis = eternity.
And no one rests (especially not my mind) on the Seventh Day.

The Vienna Jew beckoned.
Inner voyage now,
engorged penis seeking puerile pudendum
a flight into and from oneself,
to be cellularly re-invented, made immortal and whole--perhaps,
through other's hole.

The Austrian government clerk next offered
even less: he says
all this--the newness/nothingness I now comprehend--
is only relative to where I am.
An unfixed, ever-shifting dot.Soon containing a twenty-six-year-old's
double helix.

Too much truth? Five hundred years of shrinkage. Why awaken?

Because I must (Double Helix dictates)...

To discover:
life is joyful.
In spite of my (and you) being (relatively speaking), nothing but a sexual-seeking,
evolving set of mechanistic (stringed?) participles
operating (according to Genome)
somewhere of the edge of..black holes and multiple universes?;

Spitefully
(in spite of)
I am happy.
I am important.
I am...even if now I am only allowed to whisper it in a segregated locker room...MAN
(the unfixed center of myself).

Art and Amusement

From "Cliff Osmond on Acting" blog:

Amusement seeks to distract the viewer from her everyday life, to give them restful pause. It detaches the auditor from meaningful life, at least in any long-term, or deeply felt, way. It quiets the audience without pain; it heals by numbing.

Art on the other hand stirs passion up; it hurts before it heals. That is why art endures and amusement vanishes quickly. The latter, amusement, is a topical salve; the former, art, is eternal healing.

Art engages the audience; it forces them to consider their depth and breadth of their own inner and outer lives. It seeks to make the viewer ruminate inwardly on the relevance of the work of art to the fullness of themselves.

It does so by first stirring (whether consciously or unconsciously...it doesn't matter) the audience's deepest emotions, by forcing them to confront in the work of art their self-image (once again, either consciously or unconsciously...the value accrues in either circumstance), to see closely who and what they are, what are the benefits and costs of their most personal beliefs, values and inner structure (sense of aesthetics).

In art, when the deepest passions have been thus stirred, thereby ratcheting up the viewer's inner demons and conflicts to almost unbearable and imbalanced portions, only then does the work allow the viewer to rest; and most often exhausted; or, as in John Milton's famous image (at the close of his dramatic poem, "Samson Agonistes"): "...with calm of mind, all passion spent."

Great art takes courage to behold; it is fully and tumultuously participatory. It fractures the viewer's certainty before putting it together again...and generally in a new way.

Amusement on the other hand can be...it is designed to be...held at arm's (and heart's and soul's) length. In amusement, when Humpty falls, he never fractures. He just gets a bump in the head.
In art, however: "...and all the King's horses and all the King's Men could never put Humpty-Dumpty together again"...except in the subliminal--and eternal-- ensuing political and personal lesson learned (even in a nursery rhyme!) by the audience young and old : when you fall from too high a (moral, ethical) wall, you may never recover your wholeness again.

Art reveals the complexities of life. Amusement renders them (purposely; too) simple.

There is nothing more cynical than a disillusioned liberal.

Why is it that the less humanity knows about a given subject there are more experts ready to stand up give you their definitive opinion?

Death is the ultimate inconvenience.

Give me WILL over SKILL.

"Do you believe in God?" " No; but I do believe in believing about God."

Hmmmm?

Parallel with the past 40-year rise of women's prominence and feminism in the America social, political and economic fabric, America has been on a 40-year spending (and shopping) spree; so much so that our national debt is our of control?

Is there a correlation here?