FEAR

700 billion to Wall Street, with 25 billion going to CitiCorp. 600 billion to "stimulate" the economy. Another 20 billion to CitiCorp. Don't EVER let me hear again that we don't have enough money to educate our children or care for the suffering!

I used to think that money was our only motivator but I was wrong. Fear is what makes the world go 'round. Money is just our symbol for fear. As Geno just said: It's really dark in here with our head up our ass!

FURTHER THOUGHTS ON VIOLENCE AS SPORT

The previous post, THE LUCHA LIBRE SHOW, promted a response from Berone well worth posting here. His is the voice of the poet touching with gentle (or not so) precision the keys of the subject so that ones mind is stimulated to "see" the human truth and to "know" more than what has been said. The song of the poet, music, the most abstract and soulful of the arts.

Email to the Buffalo
11/16/2008 12:23 PM Bersone:

Dear buffalo,

I read the vital exchange between you and Larry that discussed violence, the ritualization of violence, the commercial promise of violence, the use of violence by the media to capture our senses, the glorification of violence, the violence in art, such as the murals, violence as a bonding medium between men and boys, the sexual spiciness of violence, the occult uses of violence, the righteousness we feel when we abhor violence, the communion we feel when we go to a game, the strange loss of entertainment value we feel when, for example, a running back, McGee, I think, audibly broke his leg on a run, effectively draining any enthusiasm the crowd had for the remainder of the game, the ability of violence to almost single-handedly sustain and propel the industry of computer games into perhaps our only example of a growing field, to except career opportunities in prison management, and I have read how inevitably the theme of violence turned to consider the relationship between the individual and the group, for witnessing a hanging (a popular event in the old west) or witnessing a whipping, or some poor soul yoked in stocks, his rear end vulnerably exposed to hectoring by children, the sacrifice of Inca individuals having their hearts ripped out of their chest while still alive to honor the Jaguar, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, of Obama on the campaign trail, and couldn't help thinking of the long line of individuals, for the savior is always an individual, whether he be Galileo or Rimbaud or Novice Theory or Jacqueline Kennedy, who has offered him or herself as a liaison between our everyday world and other worlds, real or imagined, which we long for and dread, such as the man singled out by the Dogun, a tribe in Africa that centers all its activities and structures, the arrangement of their huts, for example, on the orbit of the Dogstar, a star we were unable to detect until the nineteen thirties but which this tribe has worshipped and communicated with for god knows how long, singled out to sit on a ledge, where he sleeps and maintains communication with this star, whose meals are brought to him, and who must never be touched! and I am led back into painful disappointments I experienced as a child in the schoolyard when, swept down upon by the mob, to fight Huey Sullivan, for toughest kid in the fifth grade, Huey, a friend of mine, both of us at the mercy of the mob, feeling the murderous cowardice and unquenchable appetite for safe entertainment of the mob, faced with a no-win situation, for fight you must, one way or another: to fight and win, you lose a friend but gain a crowd, an insufferable master; fight and lose, perhaps deepen a friendship and lose the crowd's crown, no doubt made of thorns, saving the mob from its own cowardice; chicken out, which I did, and hurt yourself, which required a later fight for redemption, but chosen alone, after school, unseen by the crowd, a bitter fight but a respectful fight but a fight that left me still afraid of the crowd, and I thought of another fight, at YMCA camp, with a bully, rolling and spitting down a hillside, until asked by the counselors if I would enter the ring for the boxing tournament that culminated the camp, and refusing, which confused them, someone turning down their honor, for I felt behind their offer the urging of the crowd, and as I read of your exchange I was led through my memories through a string of fights, arguments, some violent some verbal, which can be even more vicious, some heroic, some cowardly, some chosen some imposed until I was led to consider how one fights, where one fights, how one chooses and accepts the arena, what one fights for, who one fights for and realize that to fight for life, for a truth beyond yourself is the difficult thing to do, although it may not lead to honor or victory or salvation: you can be burned at the stake like Giordano Bruno, swept up in the Catholic Inquisition, or you can be peppered by the paparazzi, but to fight to be yourself, to fight to be heard, to fight to be seen with the mask ripped off, which ironically may require a mask being pulled on, to choose to fight, that is difficult indeed, to choose not to fight out of a higher awareness like Thich Nhat Hanh, perhaps the most difficult path, for, as he has shown, both sides hate you, even though you fight for the deeper being with everyone, yes, as I read I felt the spiral that contemplation of violence revolves us in and am left with the dizzying confusion the bull must feel, taunted and speared into attack to play a part in what must be an ancient primitive ritual, the Bull, formidable but not a predator, a grazer, a prey animal, killed by a man in tight pants, tortured into a foaming wrath by incomprehensible motives stirring in the crowd of people around him, him, an individual bull against an individual man, whom we would love to see gored as we deserve to be gored, or transcendentally avoiding it by a deft pivot and sweep of the cape that resolves our terror in a beautiful gesture . . .

Mon 11/17/2008 8:36 AM Buff:

Phew! That’s one hell of a sentence! As your comments confirm, there is a mystical rapture for violence in the human soul and always has been. In this, nothing has changed since the emergence of primitive man to what we now call civilization, except perhaps the levels and forms of expression. We humans can imagine the potential for peace and love yet inevitably opt to grovel in the dust, stirred by this holy and dark longing for destruction, pain, and danger. Mysterious to me. When I was a skinny kid at Christian Brothers School in Sacramento our P.E. class was visited once by the famous boxer Max Baer, a pug nosed veteran of the ring with a kind heart a big smile and cauliflower ears. Somehow I found myself in those high waisted boxing shorts, black high ankle shoes and thick red boxing gloves stepping into the ring with another kid to receive some pointers from the Champ. Without waiting for the bell or a word from the Champ the kid attacked, pummeling me with flailing arms and leather gloves until I was on my back looking up at my assailant and an amused Max Baer while the mob of classmates cheered the action. Lesson learned. I would be a lover, not a fighter. I would rather wrestle under the sheets with a lovely than on the streets with a thug.

I don’t much understand the human animal, his motives and purposes. I don’t know where we come from or where we are going, nor do I grasp my role in all of this. I have always been in the crowd but not of the crowd, watching life swirl all around me while I seem to be standing still. It is quiet here in the eye of the storm where one hears the music of the river and the song of wildlife. And when the hawk suddenly swoops down through the glare of the sun to sink its talons into the body of the rabbit, as I witnessed recently near my house, there is grace to the lifting up into the air, the rabbit hanging limp and silent, grace to the rising and falling of the strong wings, the flying up and away. Violence seems to be uniquely human. Even the ferocity of a pack of hyenas ripping at the flesh of a struggling zebra calf has a form and purpose and sense to it that I just don’t find in two men fighting in a cage, the mob roaring in rage.

The sport of human violence is a form of entertainment, a source of human pleasure. We find joy in the pain of others, pleased to see the blood flow, to hear the crack of a bone, to see the agony in the face. We cheer this and then go home to kiss our children in their beds. Because of our physical adeptness and mental faculties we find ourselves at the top of the food chain, yet there is something dark in the human spirit that brings us down, down below all other forms of life and dooms us to the vagaries of greed, deceit, and violence, the Achilles Heel that may one day destroy our specie and life as we know it.

So it goes.

THE LUCHA LIBRE SHOW

Photo by Larry Miller


On October 29th, Lorenzo posted this photo of the lucha libre event that they were planning to attend that night in Oaxaca City, Oaxaca, Mexico, where they are vacationing.

I made this comment: “Doesn't this make you wonder - just what in the world is going on in our heads?!”

His light-hearted response: “Tom, it seems perfectly human to me.”

The next day he posted this flick:


Photo by Larry Miller

My rather sarcastic comment on this one was: “Human Beings just having a little fun. Is that a skull I see in the audience?”

That comment prompted the following Email to the Buffalo exchange:


Email to the Buffalo
11/01/2008 5:46 PM Lorenzo:

You sound a little disgusted in your comments on the lucha shots. I was surprised at how friendly the whole thing was. It was like watching a morality play where the cheaters win at first but good triumphs in the end. The crowd boos the bad guys and cheers the good. All the wrestlers play to the kids, posing with them after the matches and freely handing out autographs. A good bit of money is made selling tshirts, masks and photos.

There was one match that was very violent and hard to watch. It was the the next to the last. The good guys won and were presented with an award belt. Then two big bruisers jumped in the ring and announced they were taking away the award. They then proceeded to beat the holy shit out of the guy, who was slimmer than the rest and not masked. While it wasn't real violence, it was too effective for comfort to my gringo mind. They threw him out of the ring, beat him with chairs and finally carried him off bleeding from a scalp wound and hanging over the shoulder of one of the bullies. It seemed like stepping back into some ancient, violent, sacrificial rite. Now I wonder if they have one match like that on each bill.

Hope you and yours are well.

don lorenzo

11/01/2008 9:26 PM Buff:

Good descriptive. Sounds a bit like the bull fights and just might have come out of that tradition - the bull being the symbol of power - fear - evil. Usually the toreador wins with the sword, but everyone is really there to see the skinny guy in tights get gored. What I noticed first in the poster you put up was the skull, which is the graphics champion of this decade. Of course it has always been popular, but now it is being worshipped, and an essential sticker on any and all high springs "Off Road" pickup truck. The skull and the masks of the luchadores expressing evil, danger, fear, etc. is what made me pause to wonder what in the world is going on in our heads. Young boys go for it immediately, and the daddies encourage it. It's an obsession with fear and death. Of course the same claim could be made of any contact sport, especially American Football. But this lucha/skull/pickup truck stuff is a kind of symbolism that goes beyond any sport, even football. At the end of football games the players hug and kiss. Luchadores smack each other with folded chairs until there is enough blood to make the crowd happy. Of course what was called "Professional Wrestling" was big in our youth and a lot of people actually believed it was a sport. But now it has been ratcheted up a several notches to the level of what is called "Extreme Fighting", two guys fighting in a cage, no holds barred, knees and elbows, teeth and snot, while the smoky crowd sweats and cheers, hoping to see someone knocked cold, and maybe even a broken neck! A human cock fight. Are we itching to get back to the gladiators? Christians and lions? Thumbs up or down? The Taliban took it all to the supreme level with the public beheadings in the soccer fields. And they always drew a good sized crowd! You know, I always thought that if we are so intent on having Capital Punishment here in the good ol U.S. of A., the executions should be public and painful. Why fuck around? If the point is to deter crime, we might as well go all the way. The one and only way to sanctify barbarism is to drop the pretense, be out front about it, ritualize it like the Aztecs did. In our so highly "civilized" societies there would undoubtedly be a lot of support for open and public torture and execution, and the Christian extremist's would definitely be first in line! "Kill him!", they shouted about Obama while the "soccer mom" grinned and winked. As a people, we are like a great herd of animals just on the verge of stampede, chaos. Come to think of it, however, it just might be the lucha libre, and the secret executions by poisonous injection, and the NFL itself that holds us all together as a nation, a people, a civilization. How can I argue with that? Imagine the alternative!

Go 49ers! Fuck the Rams!

:)


11/02/2008 5:28 AM Lorenzo:

the executions should be publicand painful.
I have thought that for years and the coffins of our soldiers and pictures of the innocence we kill in war.

While it is dismaying to realize how barbaric we are as a species I don't think we are that way as a majority. Most of the people in Oaxaca weren't' at the lucha. Most people weren't yelling kill him at the rallies. I continue to think that more of us are nurturers than killers.

I do believe that the universe is evolving and that we are part of that. I don't know that we will reach the kind of perfection that you and I would both like to see, but I think we will help. Then again then nature doesn't seem to particular care about kindness or mercy to individuals.
Questions, questions and damn few answers.

Its 7:13 am here and I can hear the comparse band playing in the distance. They have been marching around our little barrio since early last evening dressed as werewolves, skeletons, bishops (a favorite) and a few guys dressed as hot looking girls. They would stop and shoot mescal in your mouth from bota bags.

I guess all we can really do is be what we want to see.

love
lorenzo


11/04/2008 8:38 AM Buff:

I don’t disagree with: “I don't think we are that way as a majority.” I guess what irks me the most is the pandering to ignorance as a capitalistic strategy, which gives ignorant attitudes social status. If it makes a buck, it’s OK – the one and only morality judgment that we, as a collective society, make. All of this confused me as a kid – the Church and elders teaching one way, the society living in another. Eventually, I threw them all over and went to sea in my own leaky boat. I’ve never been a functional part of society since.
Yes, “I do believe that the universe is evolving and that we are part of that.” And, no, “nature doesn’t much care about kindness or mercy”. In the evolutionary perspective we’re all OK, living out our natural potentials and tendencies. And the peace and stillness of the natural world is a great solace that some of us have found. When I maintain my evolutionary perspective, all this pandering to violence washes over me, but the images are just so strong and graphic! I must say, at times they cause me physical pain – a shudder of excruciating empathy. I wish it wasn’t so, and that I could find the humor in Lucha Libre and Extreme Fighting and all the off-shoot “gear” that comes with those “sports”. I wish I could ignore the children being enrolled by the parents in such “entertainment”, not really dissimilar from the children we once saw in the KKK robes and masks. But I am effected by this pandering to the base instincts; my sensibilities are assaulted. I wish it wasn’t so, and I accept this as my personal issue without meaning to assign these feelings to anyone else. And I do not feel, nor do I want to imply, that going to a lucha libre match is wrong or even disrespectable. It’s the kids, it’s the images, it’s the capitalistic pandering that turns my head and makes me shudder. There is a higher way, we all know that, and perhaps we are just following the path to that place. I hope so.

Go Niners! Fuck the Rams!

:)

11/04/2008 1:43 PM Lorenzo:

And I do not feel, nor do I want to imply, that going to a lucha libre match is wrong or even disrespectable.

I didn't feel that you expressed that. I wasn't personally peeved. Obviously, I guess, the place of evil and violence in the world is difficult for me to understand, a constant question, but I can see I am less sensitive to it than you. Most likely from the defenses I have built up over the years. One of those defenses is the "well that's how humans are".

love
larry

11/05/2008 11:06 AM Buff:

The defenses we erect to protect ourselves from the inevitable assaults on our person and our sensibilities by the social world are natural, helpful and good. They enable us to function in a society that is littered with customs and habits that run against our own personal truth. None of us can fit neatly into any society and we all must compromise and protect ourselves. My rant on this subject is, as usual, impractical and inflated by my preachy nature. Yet, I never approach the pulpit without having at least attempted to restrain myself, for we must choose carefully our battles and skirmishes. I took this one up because your photo of the lucha poster reminded me of how prevalent violence has become in our games and other forms of entertainment, and also what a huge part of our lives entertainment itself has become. I may be remembering this inaccurately, and correct me if I am, but I don’t remember anywhere near this level of violence worship in my teen years, the fifties. Entertainment was “Fibber McGee and Molly” or “I Love a Mystery” on the wireless, or Lucile Ball on the flickering black and white TV, or a cruise down K Street in Sacramento. The advent of transistor electronics and then the internet have brought us finally to the place of total entertainment, so total that it has become essential, at least for many of us, the youth especially. And the “thrill” of brushing elbows with danger and evil underpins a large part of this “entertainment”. Most of us accept this, or just haven’t noticed. My kids’ generation accumulate and use the communication and entertainment devises without question, assuming that it has always been so. And the violence that has been carefully interwoven into this fabric is accepted without question. I think it needs to be noticed and questioned, and I don’t mean legislated. I am feeling the need to nudge against some of this and to encourage my kids to take notice of how they are being marketed, setup and sold by the capitalists. The extreme thrill rides and parks, skulls and crossbones, the low grade language in the music, the me-first and fuck you attitudes, the high springs pickup trucks and all the other macho posturing have become so familiar we hardly notice them. The Ad Man has infiltrated the fabric of our social manners to create a continuing market he can control and cash in on. That is what offends me the most, and I feel a need to resist at least a little.

I know that I will never change the attitudes my youngest children (Erick and Brigitte) have been brought up in. They believe I am out of step with modern society, and I guess they are right. But I will and do confront them with these feelings when I feel the need to do so. They politely tolerate me while ignoring everything I say.

And so did I.

:)

FINANCIAL PASSACAGLIA

Email to the Buffalo
10/19/2008 Sunday 12:17 PM Bersone:

Buffalo

Thanks for the call of concern yesterday. The stock market fall is a wonderful event, of course, and it has lowered my stock value by about twenty-five thousand, although it has given me the opportunity to buy a few things at low prices. I considered selling off all my losses to write them off to offset my capital gains tax which will be considerable because of the sale of my five acres, and buying back in, after the required thirty day delay, but I never did so -- partly because of my important work on the endocrine show or the innovative learning show or various other wheels of commerce to which I have diligently leaned "my queer shoulder into", as Ginsberg has said, but partly because I felt that the naked emotional hysteria in the stock market had reached a point that I only wanted to watch it, rather than participate in it. I have also tried to understand it.

Economics is a marvelous field, equal almost to poetry in that no one really knows what it is. We do know that it is somehow the study of movement of some sort, the movement of value, which depends on agreement between people about something, in this case, money, the value of which has become unknown, due to derivatives and other imaginary concoctions so complicated they aren't even understood by those who created them and certainly not by those who sell them. As nearly as I can figure out, this particular confusion began in 1971 by our then beloved president, Richard Nixon, when he signed the Breton-Woods Accord that disengaged the dollar from gold, allowing it to float freely on the world markets. To "float freely" may be metaphor enough to imply what the dollar is: "Shit floats" is a phrase that comes to mind. In any event, the United States at that time was suffering a liquidity problem, which means that it was broke, because of ten years of the Vietnam war. The smart move then, since the dollar was pegged to gold at thirty-five dollars an ounce, was to get into gold which eventually went to 800 an ounce, slightly lower than where it is at the moment. That agreement bought us about thirty years of illusion that the dollar was worth something, no one really knowing what. We had the surplus of the Clinton years, created by the taking away of vast sums from the military, which drove people such as Cheney crazy, his world-view based on fear and a predilection for order stemming from violence. A sort of bully attitude. So, a war was in order, which we've had, what, five or six years of now, and find ourselves in the same lack of liquidity situation.

But something happened during the intervening thirty or forty years since Breton-Woods: namely, Globalization. Not only has this process been working on behalf of the very rich, who have worked through the World Bank to achieve their ends, but it has also brought together militant Muslims who eventually became Al-Qaeda. It was the U.S. who brought them together in the Philippines in an effort to create a fighting force of "freedom fighters", to use Reagan's phrase, to be used in Afghanistan against the Soviets. Apparently they began talking and realized that all their problems led back to the U.S., a realization they had never had before because they had been separated and hadn't achieved this world-view. Globalization made interdependence of all people and nations visible, to both pro- western and anti-western people alike. Another thing that happened was the collapse of soviet Russia, which made it look like America and laissez-faire capitalism had triumphed, a perspective that gave Globalization its imprimatur.

But, as I say, Globalization, that is, a level of awareness dawning in the minds of most people around the world, is not just a concept benefiting western capitalistic interests. It is a real event that even those interests didn't realize, which explains why nobody saw this banking debacle coming. The interconnectedness of people agreeing on the value of the dollar throughout the world had dire consequences. If one market was hurt, it hurt another. No one was left out, or, as Henry Miller observed, "Everybody gets fucked." The soviets, who were counted out, after enduring an economic depression in Russia during the nineties equal to the one we went through during the thirties, suddenly found itself awash in cash due to its oil reserves and the doubling of the price of a barrel of oil. And the fact that more dollars have been printed than could possibly equal the gross national product of all industrialized nations put together for many years to come, rendering it useless, puts us on shaky ground, as well as anybody else who depended on it having any value.

Nobody knows what anything's worth anymore, especially the dollar. We're almost back to coming up with seashells again. Even oil, which was what, $150 a barrel is now back down to $70. One thing is certain: the safeguards established during the thirties are obsolete because of the interdependencies of global markets, and that Scale, the studies of which are what the recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics were about, is the difference between our depression in the thirties and now: So anybody who has any money, South Korea yesterday, for example, is pouring money into banks to try to protect Stability, without which we descend in anarchy, which despite my predilection for it, is murderous. History has proven, Napoleon would be a good example, that people opt for tyranny over anarchy any day. So freedom and democracy are in a precarious state. The answer, of course, is for people to trust each other, and let the flow of goods, services and ideas flow. The big banks don't trust the little banks enough to lend them anything to keep things going. And keeping things going is above all the requisite for survival. Except that what often needs to be kept going, such as cars, are a threat to survival of the life. We have been fucking each other so long we're like a tangle of earthworms to the point that we don't know what end or whose end we are sucking and, like an earth worm, if you cut it in half you don't know which end is alive. The crows may feast, soon.

But I am a man of faith. Man's illimitable capacity for illusion may save us, for what I'm not sure. If we can agree on some universal illusion of value, land probably being the most real, food a close second, warmth in there somewhere, sex, actual or imagined, quite helpful, love, of course being the best, but we must have something real to agree on as having value, something like a seashell or, The Bank! Whether or not we will achieve this agreement without further bloodshed, who can tell. It depends on our courage to change and imagine. And what is the difference between illusion and delusion, between Sarah Palin and, say, Groucho Marx? The function of the artist, the person of imagination, during these times, is to create like a madman and, above all, to follow his most irrelevant inklings, not presuming to know any answers except what turns him or her on! As my old friend Andre Codrescue said, "Workers of the world -- disperse!"

I do realize, of course, that you're concerned about my personal situation, and there is a negative effect to these economic events on my life, such as house value and stock market losses, and they are requiring me to work more than I should; but be mindful that I have been steadily producing poems throughout the year, not earth-shaking but nevertheless satisfying, and remain hopeful that I will produce them in some tangible form soon. I had an appreciative email from Steve Schutzman recently, concerning recent poems, as well as a nudge to enter some contest he felt I should win. I do need to get shit in the wind. But looking backward, over the past two years, I have written, married, maintained houses, sustained friendships, thought and breathed as I was showered in sunlight as I walked down the street and so held my being a bit longer than might otherwise been expected.

Thanks for calling. Yo bro in love and guts, Eujenio


10/19/2008 Sunday 9:03 PM Buff:

Marvelous piece!

I enjoy the way you relate historical events! Historians are so wrapped up in idiomatic language that I no longer understand the words, the idiom, or the gist of so called "expert testimony". You, however, teach the histories as a poet, making it easy and joyful to follow the drift.

I have long known that money has no intrinsic value and that the pegged value of the moment is a living fantasy not unlike those found at Disney World, or the Vatican. You and I worked at The Bank pushing millions of dollars of bank notes and checks from one side of the building to the other, carefully reconciling its value throughout the process. That was one of the biggest banks in the world and you and I were actually bringing it to balance every night around eleven-thirty PM, just before trudging over to The Bit of Paradise for steak and eggs, a shot and a beer, or two or ten. How can anyone take such a system seriously? They said that when the market recently took its first dive, a hundred billion dollars, or so, just vanished into thin air over night. Pretty tricky! Anyone who would invest their financial future in this sort of whimsy might have more guts than brains, present company excluded of course. This is the NFL of Finance, recreation at its highest league level. A game of chance. It’s a game we take so very seriously because it provides us with the illusion of balance and control, with which we are quite familiar. The only alternative we can imagine is a drift toward the counter-illusion of chaos, about which we know very little, and "the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know", so I have heard. Fear is the base energizer in all of this, and as we each know but don’t have the guts to truly accept, fear always and only evokes more fear.

I'm pulling for a complete collapse of all the markets, ours first. You're right that we would probably choose tyranny over anarchy, but I'd just love to see us take an honest shot at it for once and perhaps try another system of values such as love, as you suggest, or even just a little self-respect. Sea shells work for me. The truth is that as a society we have lost touch with the hard-on in our heart and have become caricatures of ourselves, of actual human beings. I saw a TV commercial the other day that bragged of using "actual people" in the ad. I wouldn't have noticed if they hadn't mentioned it.

I am sorry that your financial balance has become unsettled, but only because you are working the job longer and harder than you would otherwise. Fuck the money. It’s nothing to lose sleep over. WE WILL EAT! And we have our friends and families. We have the sweetness of sea or mountain air and the song of the river to remind us of our true core values. So the market value of our homes have "depreciated" (not in my mind!), so what! I don't give a shit, I ain't movin' out!

You HAVE accomplished a lot in the last couple of years! As far as the writing goes, a whole sheaf of poems have emerged. The real work never stops, and how ever much of it gets finally translated into our chosen media of expression is not really the point. The work is the point, and for you that is an ever ongoing process. It's the labor that I detest, other people's work, and I hate to think of you doing it. Yet, if you couldn't handle it you wouldn't be doing it, so who am I to poke my nose in. For myself, I am doing less and less labor and I suppose that's progress. It's a strange transition though for me. I'm not unlike the prisoner who after forty years in a cell suddenly finds the door left open and unguarded, yet fearful of leaving, hesitating before taking the first step outside into the free world. As I drift through these final years I find that I know less and less about the social world and a little more about life.

I'm starting to understand why old people sit and rock and look. There's not much more that really needs be done. There is a time when the river finally becomes our destiny, our chosen reward or final resting place - I mean, place to rest and wait and to maybe understand without knowing or even having to know. Certainly I trust aboriginal man over modern man and I’ll never fear aboriginal anarchy, so if the fantasy of modern social values somehow gets reworked or destroyed, so be it, mox nix. It'll be fun to watch, more fun than a barrel of monkeys or a political circus or even a 49er/Ram game. When it comes to the social world, I'm pretty much a season-ticket holding spectator. I'll root for the under-dog and glory in the accomplishment of others. I'll wear my game face and follow the stats as the endless financial season unfolds. I think I know when to hoot, and when to toot. But I will never ever take it seriously.

Go Niners!

Buff

FRIENDSHIP

We attempt to group the “Email to the Buffalo” postings by a central subject they address, yet some seem to follow no theme. In the following sequence Gene and I wander from writing, to politics, to humor, and to dirt and grit on the cosmic level. But what echoed for me throughout the sequence was the importance of mutual trust, respect and friendship, and how true friendship, someone believing in me regardless of my obvious limitations, motivates me to work diligently toward the fulfillment of my personal potentials, an impossible but singularly worthwhile effort.

I am fortunate to have several really good friends, both men and women. Some I have known all my life, most from thirty to fifty years. Some are from my genetic family, all are from my cosmic family. We share the same generation, have aged together, suffered and succeeded together. We remember what happened in the 60s and 70s, how those times effected our lives and shaped our future. It is upon the foundation of those tumultuous years that we know one another in these times – our elder (not elderly) years - and understand in our blood what we are now experiencing individually, and collectively. The support of this group of family and friends is everything to me in these “put up or shut up” years. Death is not so scary as one approaches the gate. What is truly scary is to not have lived, to have squandered this beautiful life, and to not have worked with all my effort to fulfill my own silent promise to myself. Friendship is my comforting companion in these efforts, my mirror, my validation, the impetus of my motivation.

Email to the buffalo
10/03/2008 9:44 AM Bersone:

Buffalo,
Re-read your latest piece on the blog (KITE) and it had a wonderful calm to it, sad but calm, like the sea can seem at times. This story of yours that is unfolding is going to be wonderful to behold. Publishers categorize these stories as "coming of age stories" and are often a writer's first book, such as James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When I think of you when I met you, guarded and ready to strike, and yet with a great laugh and readiness to leap into positive joy on the subject of jazz, but full of Man this and Man that, as if warning the person that you were from the world of musicians, which we knew were akin to criminals, the world of beatniks, the world that gave the lie to the suburban fifties, and when I think of you now, how capable of love and encouragement to the soul you are, and having such beauty coming through you, I can only say that this book will be a real one, one earned because it is driven by an urge to climb out of the mud of lies that plague us when we're caught in a web of fear into the clear air where we can be seen for the wonderful animals we are, worthy of the wind that has been going in and out of us for years, not like a dusty accordion that somebody has been jumping up and down on in an attic but like the river that came through Clifford, who turned sound into sunlight, causing it, however briefly, to dawn in the heart of man.

I'll attach a couple of things (see the next two postings below), one a reworking of something I sent you, the other sort of a journal note. doing some good reading up here, but upset over the stock market; Larry and I watched the Biden/Palling debate last night. that Biden's a good man; she, on the other hand, should be hanging sheets on a line pulling clothespins out of her mouth as she gossips to a neighbor. Perhaps we should just cut to chase on this dummying down of America and let the homeless and insane take office. It reminds me, years ago when the trade show industry was looser, we dragged a wino off the street in San Jose, sat him down at a table, gave him a pizza, gave him a stack of labor orders and made him the guy exhibitors lined up to see to get their labor to build their booths. It was hilarious, watching this guy being approached, called Sir by a bunch of silicon valley people, taking a bite of pizza, rummaging through paperwork guided by a comment or two by us on the sidelines, hardly able to contain ourselves, as this guy dispatched the crew and got the show going.


10/03/2008 1:26 PM Buff:

Your words are eloquent and generous! That this eloquence and generosity should be directed toward me is indeed a blessing of the first order. We did our best, and as you have said, we did it our way. It was the only way we knew and trusted, the way of seeking truth. From the perspective of a tribal elder, those years of emergence are now a story that was told, a tribal history that must be repeated and embellished for deepest truth, the telling now being ritualized. The truth carries like a hawk in an air stream, sailing over the land of creatures and beasts. High in the air with eyes that see beyond horizons and glittering sun spots, eyes that are silent and wise. We speak into the quiet minds of children and mothers and workers with hoe and pick, nagging at the rocks and roots hidden beneath the crusty earth. The children and women and men singing as they work and then quiet as they listen to the stories told by the dark and patient elders. Nothing has changed in a million years and nothing ever will. The stories must be told. The truth carries like a bird.

Having just finished a slow re-reading of “Women In Love” (should have been called: “Men and Women in Love”) the final 10 pages resonate like an Asian gong. Gerald frozen in the white snow, Birkin defeated in his quest for the perfect friend. Looking at Gerald’s frozen body Birkin says: “He should have loved me. I offered him.” Perhaps in our own way, we have found what Birkin sought, the friendship founded on freedom of spirit, respect of spirit. The friendship free of question, doubt, condition, even free of love, for only then does love bloom in its truest glory, in peace. A friend is like a mirror, a validation, an image of life. Only our friend truly sees us, we cannot see ourselves. When we look into the eyes of a friend and see love, we are looking at ourselves. That is the nature of love, and how love engenders love.

Your words bring me to this thinking, they freshen my spirit and motivate my will. What more can one give?

“If humanity ran into a cul-de-sac, and expended itself, the timeless creative mystery would bring forth some other being, finer, more wonderful, some new, more lovely race, to carry on the embodiment of creation.” (“Women In Love”) I feel as though I am walking in space, striding in seven league boots through the stars, energized by the gravity of the future which pulls me, pulls me into the night toward the impending dawn, passing through limitless space and freedom. I am hearing an old teaching in my mind, “the truth will set you free”, and it takes on a grander meaning, becomes larger than ever I knew it to be. To speak the truth is perhaps our highest purpose – live the truth, speak the truth, be the truth.

Yes, Biden is a good man, perhaps too good for the job. I love your wino story and its deep truth. But instead of installing this clothes pin lady with the poufy hair, I would pick a 300 pound mama from the Fillmore with a bad attitude. Only she could really shake up Washington and the House of Non-representatives! Wouldn’t that be a sight!

Great thoughts you sent! I LOVE the guy eating the pepperoni pizza, flicking through the paperwork with greasy fingers, “What did you say your name was?” “Next!” Good stuff!
Buff

10/06/2008 7:07 AM Bersone:

My dear man!
A fresh cup of coffee, a new dawn in a promising October. I feel as wiry as a deer springing up a hill. To what do I owe this alive feeling? The complete collapse of the stock market! Thank God! May it rot like a silent log in the wet forest, soft with fungi returning it to something useful -- mere dirt. The word mere has an old meaning. It doesn't just mean only; it used to mean pure. Pure dirt. Mulch, soil, loam, the vegetative detritus, fossil fuels, dirt, the thing into which one falls, sometimes lyrically, like a leaf, sometimes like a bowling ball hitting the lane frumped forward by an overweight housewife trying to get in the wind in, say, Everett, Wash. I have seen your teeth snapping, my friend, sharp and ready to tear like a wolf, tear the shit out of phonies, suffocating bullshit, deadening parades of put-ons and try-ons, I have seen you cross-legged at the second campsite wearing a purple bandana holding a cup of coffee, looking out at the world. And what is pure about dirt, since it contains everything? It is pure nutrition and pure poison. It is the earth, the terra-cotta, the adobe and adobo: it has passed through the mouths and bowels of men, animals and elves. It has the shit of starlight in it, the ring of gold, and it sings like the mother it is. It is, above all, a relief, a relief to pretense, lies, deception of all kinds and above all, Vanity. "Vanity, vanity, saith the preacher, all is vanity" Ecclesiastes. A handful of topsoil takes a million years to create, they say; our culture covers it with houses, in a world of homeless. The ironies are manifold. All is coming back to earth, to find what it truly valuable, since we have lost sight of value. What is valuable is a good laugh, an affectionate grin at the checkout stand, the ways we touch the world: "God bless the ground! I shall walk softly there / I learn by going where I have to go / she moves in circles and those circles move" - Roethke.

I say Bless the new Day! It has never been seen! You, whoever you are, have never seen it before. Let us watch it, eagerly, like inheritors, full of expectation. Rhythm depends on expectation! Eternity is in love with the inventions of Time. and so on . . .

SHARDS OF SONG - BERSONE

Shards of Song


So what aesthetic
Can come
From constant interruption?

The Praise Houses
Come to mind for some reason

Where voices could be heard
Five miles away, voices
Before Ma Rainey that sang --

Our need to sing
Stronger than our need to sleep --
and perhaps even

more compelling our need
To find a unifying voice
Formed in the throat’s cauldron

where the necessary angel’s wings,
persistently scrape the iron sides
Like scratches on an old recording,

Distract us with her struggle to fly
From the flames
On a coherent song.

LOOKING OUT THE WINDOW - BERSONE

Looking Out The Window

Standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee
Listening to sparrows pecking seeds from the carport roof
Like . . . beginning rain
September 11, 2005, feeling the turn
But giving in to it today
Not holding back like yesterday
No rancor, no resentment, giving
In. And so a tenderness
Like the gray sky, has been
Bequeathed me.

Last night
After pulling over to take a leak
As I was driving through the valley:
Lightning in the clouds
Over the Sierra, far away. Lightning within
The clouds. The sweet wind. Passed a
Bunch of lights, after midnight, generators, trucks:
Loading tomatoes: an urgency to get them
To market. We need urgencies
And repose to reflect. Even during war

Like the soldier in Red Badge of Courage, when he leaned
Against a tree in a calm clearing, after the battle, the sun weak --
A wafer hung in the gray sky
A yellow flower or two still
Swaying indifferently among the bodies.

THE KITE

The kite was made entirely from scraps and found materials by my grandfather’s calloused and wise hands. The sticks came from the scrap pile in his wood shop where he fashioned fine cabinetry for his clients, the wealthy who lived on the bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the fine shops and churches in the Monterey Bay area. The paper was news print, a chronicle of political and social events. The string was found somewhere in a utility drawer among other forgotten items where it had waited for who knows how long to finally be of use. The tail was made of strips of cloth torn from an old discarded red shirt and tied together into a new form, a new glory.

He worked patiently, explaining each step. “We tie the two sticks together like this, you see, to form a cross”, the cigarette always hanging from the left side of his mouth, his gray eyes squinting behind the soiled glasses. Gradually the little kite took form, the strings attached, and finally the red tail.

In the grassy fields near the sea where the others flew their great kites of many shapes, sizes and colors, he handed the little black and white paper kite to me and said, “Now fly it”, and I did. Running into the wind with the kite over my shoulder I saw it rise above me and come to life, turning and tugging at the string. “Give it more line”, he shouted, and the little newspaper kite with the grand red tail rose higher into the sky, happy and alive. I handed the string to my grandfather and he flew the kite so high it became a speck, a small bird, a freedom of life far above us as we watched in silence.

The grandfather, the child, the tiny life tugging at the string. The wise, skilled hands, the young heart beating in the child’s body. Two faces looking up into the sky watching the rising speck of life.

But there was another face there that afternoon, one not seen in the photo. This face was not turned to the sky where the kite flew tugging at the line, but to the old man and the boy. The unseen face looking through the lens of the camera, framing the shot, making the aperture and shutter speed calculations with one part of his mind while realizing with another part and with his heart that this was a true moment in life, a special moment on the grassy bluff with the wind blowing out toward the sea, with the child and the old man looking up at the kite, a moment in life that must be captured, and click, the shutter snaps and the unseen man dissolves having done his deed, fading away forever, no longer a living part of the story. The unseen man, my father.

.

Email to the Buffalo

10/01/08 7:10 PM Bersone:

.

Very moving account of the kite, my friend. It's as if there's a string somewhere inside all of us that once in awhile gets strummed, and we can feel an accord, an accord between ourselves and others, between our present and our past, between what's inside and what's outside. That accord achieves a balance that let's us be quiet for a moment, to feel something. I remember, years ago, in your apartment in the Marina, which you didn't have too long, capping on this and that, which was our wont, coming up with the title of your first book, "My father's skirts!" created by a slip of the tongue, talking about priests' cassocks, and how we laughed, stoned and drinking red mountain, enjoying Roggieri who had a great laugh, not realizing what lay underneath such mockery. Now this moving piece with the full emotional movement in it. Very nice.

TRUTH

“There wouldn't have to be any truth, if there weren't any lies."
DH Lawrence - "Women in Love"

Thinking:

What is the point of "being right" when it sets you against those you love? The truth is in the mind of the beholder. We each know our own truth, and if we are courageous, live by it. If we are not courageous we place judgment on others, an attempt at "being right".

Right?

It's almost a knee-jerk habit - one I have been struggling with all my life. Now, finally, I know I must work to peel away the skin of fear. What is there to fear after all? We are all human beings! Henry found his voice when he found his courage. Sing! Let the song be what it is. Say, YES! If someone doesn't take to it, they needn’t listen. My life, as depicted fractionally in the "Capricorn" posting, had been a secret, a shameful secret, hidden behind veils of personas I had worked like a thespian to master. Why? From what was I hiding in that darkness, hidden from light and fresh air? The truth I feared to face because of the lies I had been smothered in as a child by the Church, the education system, the so called "adult" world, humanity itself. I felt I couldn't measure up, had been as much as told so, over and over. And though I wasn't unaware of the truth of myself, the person I knew I was, and whom I shared with a very limited number friends - like two - I knew the "adult" world would never accept me as I truly was, and yet, no matter where I turned, I was living there, on Main Street, Sacramento, California, USA! I couldn't avoid it! What to do, as a child of fourteen, and then a young man of twenty-five, and then a forty year old "adult"? Hide! That was the easy way out. Avoid contact with THEM.

And yet there was this urging, something urging me on, urging me toward the light of day, or a night beneath the open, starry sky. Something would not allow me to capitulate entirely, something that I believed in, but couldn’t name. Henry, especially in “Capricorn”, became my companion, as did DH Lawrence, Durrell, and the great story tellers like Steinbeck and William Golding. And, of course, the music, Clifford, Miles, Coltrane. There was where I went to dream, and be quiet and to plot my eventual emergence into the light of day.

Well, time is a-passing, as they say, and death has lain out the imperative: It’s now or never, and never is not an option. This little skirmish with heart disease is like a boot in the ass. “Get out there on the field, son. It’s time to get into the game and show us what you’ve got. It's now or never.”

So I work on the “Suicide by Prayer” writing about the 50s, and when I finally get to the “Age of Aquarius” section, the 60s and 70s, those little blurbs in the “Capricorn” posting are but a sampling of what is to come. You may want to cover your ears, eyes, and mouth.

Hear no evil. See no evil. Speak no evil.

A RIDE ON THE OVARIAN TROLLEY

Commentary and Excerpts from “The Tropic of Capricorn”, by Henry Miller

Labor Day

My eyes snapped open like those of a marionette – wooden body; glass eyes. The air came cool through the open window behind my head, ocean scented. It was 2:26 AM by the atomic clock on the desk. Only the steam-like hiss of a distant car gave texture to the silent night. But then I heard what I knew had awakened me: a small near imperceptible “pah”, and then a silence of a few seconds, “pah, pah”, like the touching of the tongue to the roof of the mouth. It was the drip of the faucet on the deck near my window, “pah”, dripping onto a random board below. I would never sleep until I had tightened the faucet to stop the drip. “Pah”. I decided to read for a while before attempting sleep once again and reached through the darkness for the book shelf until I touched the volumes , removing one at random. What I would be reading would be left to providence. Having tightened the faucet, I sat in the living room under the lamp and smiled at the volume providence had provided: Henry Miller’s, “Tropic of Capricorn”.

I would say that this was Henry’s best book. Perhaps not his best writing, that would most likely be "The Colossus of Maroussi", his favorite book, or perhaps "The Tropic of Cancer", where he first heard the sound of his own voice. But "Capricorn" is for me the best because it sings to me like no other writing ever has, and it has endured the test of over fifty years as one of my constant companions. Often, when feeling a longing for his council, I will open the book randomly and begin to read. His voice is open and assessable and amazingly clear. His words are light and easy, so that one can even hear the Brooklyn accent which brings a smile, and yet rooted deep below the surface into the miasma of the inevitable truth, that truth which cannot be ignored except by the most calloused and lost soul. Each time I read from this book it is as if for the first time. I follow his voice and listen, receiving the song, occasionally singing along.

I plug on…It’s just as hard to go back as to go forward. I don’t have the feeling of being an American citizen anymore. The part of America I came from, where I had some rights, where I felt free, is so far behind me that it is beginning to get fuzzy in my memory. I feel as though someone has got a gun against my back all the time. Keep moving, is all I seem to hear. If a man talks to me I try not to seem too intelligent. I try to pretend that I am vitally interested in the crops, in the weather, in the elections. If I stand and stop they look at me, whites and blacks – they look at me through and through as though I were juicy and edible. I’ve got to look sort of grateful, too, that nobody has yet taken a fancy to plug me. It’s depressing and exhilarating at the same time. You’re a marked man – and yet nobody pulls the trigger. They let you walk unmolested right into the Gulf of Mexico where you can drown yourself.

Yes sir, I reached the Gulf of Mexico and I walked right into it and drowned myself. I did it gratis. When they fished the corps out they found it was marked F.O.B. Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn; it was returned C.O.D. When I was asked later why I had killed myself I could only think to say – because I wanted to electrify the cosmos! I meant by that a very simple thing – The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western had been electrified, The Seaboard Air Line had been electrified, but the soul of man was still in the covered wagon stage. I was born in the midst of civilization and I accepted it very naturally – what else was there to do? But the joke was that nobody else was taking it seriously. I was the only man in the community that was civilized. There was no place for me – as yet. And yet the books I read, the music I heard assured me that there were other men in the world like myself. I had to go and drown myself in the Gulf of Mexico in order to have an excuse for continuing this pseudo-civilized existence. I had to delouse myself of my spiritual body, as it were.

When I woke up to the fact that as far as the scheme of things goes I was less than dirt I really became quite happy. I quickly lost all sense of responsibility. And if it weren’t for the fact that my friends got tired of lending me money I might have gone on indefinitely pissing the time away. The world was like a museum to me; I saw nothing to do but to eat into this marvelous chocolate layer cake which the men of the past had dumped into our hands. It annoyed everybody to see the way I enjoyed myself. Their logic was that art was beautiful, oh yes, indeed, but you must work for a living and then you will find out that you are too tired to think about art. But it was when I threatened to add a layer or two on my own account to this marvelous chocolate layer cake that they blew up on me. That was the finishing touch. That meant I was definitely crazy. First I was considered to be a useless member of society; then for a time I was found to be a reckless, happy-go-lucky corps with a tremendous appetite; now I had become crazy. (Listen, you bastard, you find yourself a job…we’re through with you!) In a way it was refreshing, this change of front. I could feel the wind blowing through the corridors. At least “we” were no longer becalmed. It was war, and as a corps I was just fresh enough to have a little fight left in me. War was revivifying. War stirs the blood. It was in the midst of the world war, which I had forgotten about, that this change of heart took place. I got myself married overnight, to demonstrate to all and sundry that I didn’t give a fuck one way or the other. . Getting married was O.K. in their minds. I remember that, on the strength of the announcement, I raised five bucks immediately. My friend MacGregor paid for the license and even paid for the shave and haircut which he insisted I go through in order to get married. They said you couldn’t go without being shaved; I didn’t see any reason why you couldn’t get hitched up without a shave and haircut, but since it didn’t cost me anything I submitted to it. It was interesting to see how everybody was eager to contribute something to our maintenance. All of a sudden, just because I had shown a bit of sense, they came flocking around us – and couldn’t they do this and couldn’t they do that for us? Of course the assumption was that now I would surely be going to work, now I would see that life is a serious business. It never occurred to them that I would let my wife work for me. I was really very decent to her in the beginning. I wasn’t a slave driver. All I asked for was carfare – to hunt for the mythical job – and a little pen money for cigarettes, movies, et cetera. The important things, such as books, music albums, gramophones, porterhouse steaks and such like I found that we could get on credit, now that we were married. The installment plan had been invented expressly for guys like me. The down payment was easy – the rest I left to Providence. One has to live, they were always saying. Now, by God, that’s what I said to myself – One has to live! Live first and pay afterwards. If I saw an overcoat I liked I went in and bought it. I would buy it a little in advance of the season too, to show that I was a serious-minded chap. Shit, I was a married man and soon I would probably be a father – I was entitled to an overcoat at least, no? And when I had the overcoat I thought about stout shoes to go with it – a pair of thick cordovans such as I had wanted all my life but could never afford. And when it grew bitter cold and I was out looking for the job I used to get terribly hungry sometimes – it’s really healthy going out like that day after day prowling around the city in rain and snow and wind and hail – and so now and then I’d drop in to a cozy tavern and order myself a juicy porterhouse steak with onions and french fried potatoes. I took out life insurance and accident insurance too – it’s important, when you’re married, to do things like that, so they told me. Supposing I should drop dead one day – what then? I remember the guy telling me that, in order to clench his argument. I had already told him I would sign up, but he must have forgotten it. I had said, yes, immediately, out of force of habit, but as I say, he had evidently overlooked it – or else it was against the code to sign a man up until you had delivered the full sales talk. Anyway, I was just getting ready to ask him how long it would take before you could make a loan on the policy when he popped the hypothetical question: Supposing you should drop dead one day – what then? I guess he thought I was a little off my nut the way I laughed at that. I laughed until the tears rolled down my face. Finally he said – “I don’t see that I said anything funny.” “Well,” I said, getting serious for a moment, “take a look at me. Now tell me, do you think I’m the sort of fellow who gives a fuck what happens once he is dead?” He was quite taken aback by this, apparently, because the next thing he said was: “I don’t think that’s a very ethical attitude, Mr. Miller. I’m sure you wouldn’t want your wife to…” “Listen,” I said, “supposing I told you I don’t give a fuck what happens to my wife when I die – what then?” And since this seemed to injure his ethical susceptibilities still more I added for good measure – “As far as I’m concerned you don’t have to pay the insurance when I croak – I’m only doing this to make you feel good. I’m trying to help the world along, don’t you see? You’ve got to live, haven’t you? Well, I’m just putting a little food in your mouth, that’s all. If you have anything else to sell, trot it out. I buy anything that sounds good. I’m a buyer not a seller. I like to see people looking happy – that’s why I buy things. Now listen, how much did you say that would come to per week? Fifty-seven cents? Fine. What’s fifty-seven cents? You see that piano – that comes to about thirty-nine cents a week, I think. Look around you…everything you see costs so much a week. You say, if I should die – what then? Do you suppose I’m going to die on all these people? That would be a hell of a joke. No, I’d rather have them come and take the things away – if I can’t pay for them, I mean…”

All of this takes me back to the ‘60s when I was giving the “day job” and marriage route an honest try. As I rode the bus across the Golden Gate into The City each morning I would be reading a passage like this one, and still trying to do the right thing. They say, “The truth hurts.” I say, the truth is inevitable and cannot be ignored. It MUST be taken in. It MUST be consumed, and somehow incorporated into one’s life. But how, in the face of the pressures and expectations? How, if you just cannot ignore for one more moment the insanity of it all? How, when your sharpest instinct tells you to give it all up, throw it all out, cut and run? If one’s life is a sham, if the pursuit of a job, any job, is obviously idiotic, if the dedication of your life to standards and practices that you know in your truest instincts to be a sham, useless in the deepest sense, if you must lie to your own self each and every morning just to get up the gumption to put on that three-piece suit and get out on the corner to catch the bus into The City just in order to perpetuate this repetitive madness, how can one live with himself with a sense of pride? It was a gap that I could not cross. I could, at times, stride the gap, one foot on each side of the divide, but I could never fully accept myself with pride and a sense of accomplishment. Getting a job was always easy. Putting on the smile, showing up to work, going through the motions, climbing the ladder to success, was always easy for me. I could have been any of the characters on the list they gave me in the sixth grade of possible professions to choose from, but I instinctively knew that none of them would make me a true man, alive to the hilt, filled with the joy and wonder of this existence we all share. None of them would make me “successful” in the truest sense of the word. So, where did I fit in? What was the source of my passion? Music? How could I raise a family on the income of a mediocre musician? And besides that, playing music in the “music scene”, being a performer, was never of interest to me. I always looked at music as an art form, a way to express the inner churning and yearning. I never wanted to perform, be an act, go on the road, create a following, become famous. I was an alchemist; I always wanted to make the stuff, conjure it up. JUST FOR THE SAKE OF DOING IT AND NOTHING MORE! Even on that day when I had sat only a few feet from Duke Ellington and his piano that time at the Sacramento State Fair, when he had noticed me watching his rehearsal and had invited me back for the performance, even then at the age of fourteen, sitting so close to what I could tell was genius at work, when I watched the band members play his compositions with such a high level of craft and devotion, even then I knew that this was not me, the smiling, dapper performer. So where did that leave me. My mother always encouraged the music, but with a word of caution that first I had to find a good job. A job. What the fuck was a job? Working all day every day for what? It just never made sense to me.

And always, there was Henry. I would consult him like a prophet. I would read his words and wonder why I couldn’t find the courage to adopt his optimism, his powerful sense of self, even while drifting through the horseshit of daily life in the streets. Even while being confronted by the insanity of the work-a-day world.

I knew very well I’d have to make a break one day; I knew very well I was pissing my time away. But I knew also that there was nothing I could do about it – yet. Something had to happen; something big, something that would sweep me off my feet. All I needed was a push, but it had to be some force outside my world that could give me the right push, that I was certain of. I couldn’t eat my heart out because it wasn’t in my nature. All my life things had worked out all right – in the end. It wasn’t in the cards for me to exert myself. Something had to be left to Providence – in my case a whole lot. Despite all the outward manifestations of misfortune or mismanagement I knew that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. And with a double crown, too. The external situation was bad, admitted – but what bothered me was more than the internal situation. I was really afraid of myself, of my appetite, my curiosity, my flexibility, my permeability, my malleability, my geniality, my powers of adaption. No situation in itself could frighten me: I somehow always saw myself sitting pretty, sitting inside a buttercup, as it were, and sipping the honey. Even if I were flung in jail I had a hunch I’d enjoy it. It was because I knew how not to resist, I suppose. Other people wore themselves out tugging and straining and pulling; my strategy was to float with the tide. What people did to me didn’t bother me nearly so much as what they were doing to others or to themselves. I was really so damned well off inside that I had to take on the problems of the world. That’s why I was in a mess all the time. I wasn’t synchronized with my own destiny, so to speak. I was trying to live out the world destiny. If I got home of an evening, for instance, and there was no food in the house, not even for the kid, I would turn around and go looking for the food. But what I noticed about myself, and that was what puzzled me, was that no sooner outside and hustling for the grub than I was back at the Weltanschauung again. I didn’t think of food for us exclusively, I thought of food in general, food in all its stages, everywhere in the world at that hour, and how it was gotten and how it was prepared and what people did if they didn’t have it and how maybe there was a way to fix it so that everyone would have it when they wanted it and no more time wasted on such an idiotically simple problem. I felt sorry for the wife and kid, sure, but I also felt sorry for the Hottentots and the Australian bushmen, not to mention the starving Belgians and the Turks and the Armenians. I felt sorry for the human race, for the stupidity of man and his lack of imagination. Missing a meal wasn’t so terrible – it was the ghastly emptiness of the street that disturbed me profoundly. All those bloody houses, one like another, and all so empty and cheerless looking. Fine paving stones under foot and asphalt in the middle of the street and beautifully-hideously-elegant brownstone stoops to walk up, and yet a guy could walk about all day and all night on this expensive material and be looking for a crust of bread. That’s what got me. The incongruousness of it. If one could only dash out with a dinner bell and yell, “Listen, listen, people, I’m a guy what’s hungry. Who wants shoes shined? Who wants the garbage brought out? Who wants the drainpipes cleaned out?” If you could only go out into the street and put it to them clear like that. But no, you don’t dare to open your trap. If you tell a guy in the street that you are hungry you scare the shit out of him, and he runs like hell. That’s something I never understood. I don’t understand it yet. The whole thing is so simple – you just say Yes when someone comes up to you. And if you can’t say Yes you can take him by the arm and ask some other bird to help out. Why you have to don a uniform and kill men you don’t know, just to get that crust of bread, is a mystery to me. That’s what I think about, more than about whose trap it’s going down or how much it costs. Why should I give a fuck about what anything costs? I’m here to live, not to calculate. And that’s what the bastards don’t want you to do – to live! They want you to spend your whole life adding up figures. That makes sense to them. That’s reasonable. That’s intelligent. If I were running the boat things wouldn’t be so orderly perhaps, but it would be gayer, by Jesus! You wouldn’t have to shit in your pants over trifles. Maybe there wouldn’t be macadamized roads and streamlined cars and loudspeakers and gadgets of a million billion varieties, maybe there wouldn’t even be glass in the windows, maybe you’d have to sleep on the ground, maybe there wouldn’t be French cooking and Italian cooking and Chinese cooking, maybe people would kill each other when their patience was exhausted and maybe nobody would stop them because there wouldn’t be any jails or any cops or judges, and there certainly wouldn’t be any cabinet ministers or legislatures because there wouldn’t be any goddamned laws to obey or disobey, and maybe it would take months or years to trek from place to place, but you wouldn’t bear a number and if you wanted to change your name every week you could do it because it wouldn’t make any difference since you wouldn’t own anything except what you could carry around with you and why would you want to own anything when everything would be free?

I admired and was inspired by Henry’s sense of self confidence, yet I found none of that within myself. If I just had the guts to be my true self, to live to the hilt, to fill my life with joy and love and inspiration and self respect. But I hovered between indecision and disgust, and took the route of least resistance whenever I could. In short, I sold myself out to the corporate world, the world of acceptance, what I imagined to be the expectations of others. Henry was waiting for something to push him over the edge, something he knew was coming in its own good time. He said he was afraid of his powers of adaption. I could understand that because I was a victim of mine. I was avoiding the push, frightened of being out in the streets . I lived in the shadow of my true self. Ten years passed before it all started to turn around.

Everything I had written before was museum stuff, and most writing is still museum stuff and that’s why it doesn’t catch fire, doesn’t inflame the world. I was only a mouthpiece for the ancestral race which was talking through me; even my dreams were not authentic, not bona fide Henry Miller dreams. To sit still and think one thought which would come up out of me, out of the life buoy, was a Herculean task. I didn’t lack thoughts nor words nor the power of expression – I lacked something much more important: the lever which would shut off the juice. The bloody machine wouldn’t stop, that was the difficulty. I was not only in the middle of the current but the current was running through me and I had no control over it whatever.

I remember the day I brought the machine to a dead stop and how the other mechanism, the one that was signed with my own initials and which I had made with my own hands and my own blood slowly began to function. I had gone to the theater nearby to see a vaudeville show; it was the matinee and I had a ticket for the balcony. Standing in line in the lobby, I already experienced a strange feeling of consistency. It was as though I were coagulating, becoming a recognizable consistent mass of jelly. It was like the ultimate stage in the healing of a wound. I was at the height of normality, which a very abnormal condition. Cholera might come and blow its foul breath in my mouth – it wouldn’t matter. I might bend over and kiss the ulcers of a leprous hand, and no harm could possibly come to me. There was not just a balance in this constant warfare between health and disease, which is all that most of us may hope for, but there was a plus integer in the blood which meant that, for a few moments at least, disease was completely routed. If one had the wisdom to take root in such a moment, one would never again be ill or unhappy or even die. But to leap to this conclusion is to make a jump which would take one back further than the old stone age. At that moment I wasn’t even dreaming of taking root; I was experiencing for the first time in my life the meaning of the miraculous. I was so amazed when I heard my own cogs meshing that I was willing to die then and there for the privilege of the experience.

What happened was this…As I passed the doorman holding the torn stub in my hand the lights were dimmed and the curtain went up. I stood a moment slightly dazed by the sudden darkness. As the curtain slowly rose I had the feeling that throughout the ages man had always been mysteriously stilled by this brief moment which preludes the spectacle. I could feel the curtain rising in man. And immediately I also realized that this was a symbol which was being presented to him endlessly in his sleep and that if he had been awake the players would never have taken the stage but he, Man, would have mounted the boards. I didn’t think this thought – it was a realization, as I say, and so simple and overwhelmingly clear was it that the machine stopped dead instantly and I was standing in my own presence bathed in a luminous reality. I turned my eyes away from the stage and beheld the marble staircase which I should take to go to my seat in the balcony. I saw a man slowly mounting the steps, his hand laid across the balustrade. The man could have been myself, the old self which had been sleepwalking ever since I was born. My eye didn’t take in the entire staircase, just the few steps which the man had climbed or was climbing in the moment that I took it all in. The man never reached the top of the stairs and his hand never removed from the balustrade. I felt the curtain descend, and for another few moments I was behind the scenes moving amidst the sets, like the property man suddenly roused from his sleep and not sure whether he is still dreaming or looking at a dream which is being enacted on the stage. It was as fresh and green, as strangely new as the bread and cheese lands which the Biddenden maidens saw every day of their long life joined at the hips. I saw only that which was alive! The rest faded out in a penumbra. And it was in order to keep the world alive that I rushed home without waiting to see the performance and sat down to describe the little patch of staircase which is imperishable.

I drifted through the dream and what was called reality freely, seamlessly, barely knowing who I was from one moment to the next. I was at The Bank in the three-piece suit leading a training session for my twenty-two district managers and their assistants, explaining the differences between telling someone to do something and enticing them to do it of their own accord, all the while eyeing the redheaded manager from Salinas with the enticing orange lips. Or I was in my living room watching the first lunar landing with the children, passing the joint on to Curtis or Goodall. Or perched high up in a tree up on Mt. Tamalpais twirling under LSD watching the unwary hikers passing below on their way to the summit like an owl in a nest. Or I was catching a quickie on my lunch break with Slattery’s girlfriend Jan in another lady’s apartment to which I had a key. I could be anyone or everyone all at the same time and went in and out of the endless set of personas without a second, or even a first, thought. It was madness over which I had no control.

I was on the bus of an evening on my way back across the bridge into Marin county. My day had been deadening and I was empty, mindless, as lost as a prisoner on Alcatraz island, caged within my own fears and inertia. Sitting next to me was a woman of, say, thirty-five, perhaps a wife and mother, perhaps on her way back to the nest after another endless day of mindless labor, and perhaps she was feeling somewhat as was I. We rocked with the motion of the bus reading our books or looking straight ahead. There had been no recognition of one another though I was aware of her just as I was aware of every woman that passed through my radar. At one point our knees touched from the motion of the bus. Neither of us moved and the contact continued. She was reading her book. I was looking straight ahead. Was she aware of the contact? I pressed ever so slightly against her to test the waters. No movement from her. Not a sign. I raised my leg slowly up and down. Still she did not move away from the contact. My breath was getting short and my vision blurred. I pressed gently against her leg and rubbed with my knee. Her book remained open but I could see through the corner of my eye that she was not reading but staring blindly at the page. The bus rocked on and I closed my eyes, breathing short deep breaths. I no longer tried to see what she was doing or if she was aware of the contact, and I slipped into a dream. I felt the warmth of her leg and the blood running through her veins and the pulse of her heart. I turned to her in my dream and pulled her into my arms, holding her close and warm as the bus swayed gently through the clouds. For an endless moment we held one another, strangers externally, but lovers deep within. She was a goddess and I a god in a golden land near the rising sea. All else ceased to exist; we had left the world as we had once known it and now swayed peacefully through our dream. Then the bus stopped and she rose to leave, slipping past me to the aisle where she turned and looked down into my face. She held my stare for a moment and with a small smile said, “Thank you”, and then was gone. I could not see, I could not think. I did not want to return to this reality and tried to will myself back into the dream, but she was gone, and I was alone once again in the three-piece suit riding the bus along the familiar corridors past the all too familiar schools and markets and gas stations of my life. Like two exotic caged birds we had reached through the bars, and for a moment touched one another, transforming our work-a-day lives into a moment on the primitive slopes of paradise. It was a small miracle in itself, brief, deep, as magical as a dive into a cool mountain lake on a hot summer day: brief, refreshing, unforgettable.

The ovarian world is a product of a life rhythm. The moment a child is born it becomes part of a world in which there is not only the life rhythm but the death rhythm. The frantic desire to live, to live at any cost, is not a result of the life rhythm within us, but the death rhythm. There is not only no need to keep life at any price, but, if life is undesirable, it is absolutely wrong. This keeping oneself alive, out of a blind urge to defeat death, is in itself a means of sowing death. Everyone who has not fully accepted life, who is not incrementing life, is helping to fill the world with death. To make the simplest gesture with the hand can convey the utmost sense of life; a word spoken with the whole being can give life. Activity in itself means nothing; it is often a sign of death. By simple external pressure, by force of surroundings and example, by the very climate which activity engenders, one can become a part of a monstrous death machine, such as America, for example. What does a dynamo know of life, of peace, of reality? What does any individual American dynamo know of the wisdom and energy, of the life abundant and external possessed by a ragged beggar sitting under a tree in the act of meditation? What is energy? What is life? One has only to read the stupid twaddle of the scientific and philosophic textbooks to realize how less than nothing is the wisdom of these energetic Americans. Listen, they had me on the run, these crazy horsepower fiends; in order to break their insane rhythms, their death rhythms, I had to resort to a wave length which, until I found the proper sustenance in my bowels, would at least nullify the rhythm they had set up. Certainly I did not need the grotesque, cumbersome, antediluvian desk which I had installed in the parlor; certainly I didn’t need twelve empty chairs placed around it in a semicircle; I needed only elbow room in which to write and a thirteenth chair which would take me out of the zodiac they were using and put me in a heaven beyond heaven. But when you drive a man almost crazy and when, to his own surprise perhaps, he finds that he still has some resistance, some powers of his own, then you are apt to find such a man acting very much like a primitive being. Such a man is apt not only to become stubborn and dogged, but superstitious, a believer in magic and a practicer of magic. Such a man is beyond religion – it is his religiousness he is suffering from. Such a man becomes a monomaniac, bent on doing one thing only and that is to break the evil spell which has been put upon him. Such a man is beyond throwing bombs, beyond revolt; he wants to stop reacting, whether inertly or ferociously. This man, of all men on earth, wants the act to be a manifestation of life. If, in the realization of his terrible need, he begins to act regressively, to become unsocial, to stammer and stutter, to prove so utterly unadapted as to be incapable of earning a living, know that this man has found his way back to the womb and source of life and that tomorrow, instead of the contemptible object of ridicule which you have made of him, he will stand forth as a man in his own right and all the powers of the world will be of no avail against him.

Out of the crude cipher with which he communicates from his prehistoric desk with the archaic men of the world a new language builds up which cuts through the death language of the day like wireless through a storm. There is no magic in this wave length any more than there is magic in the womb. Men are lonely and out of communication with one another because all their inventions speak only of death. Death is the automation which rules the world of activity. Death is silent, because it has no mouth. Death has never expressed anything. Death is wonderful too – after life. Only one like myself who has opened his mouth and spoken, only one who has said Yes, Yes, Yes, and again Yes! can open wide his arms to death and know no fear. Death is a reward, yes! Death as a result of fulfillment, yes! Death as a crown and shield, yes! But not death from the root, isolating men, making them bitter and fearful and lonely, giving them fruitless energy, filling them with a will that can only say No! The first word any man writes when he has found himself, his own rhythm, which is the life rhythm, is Yes! Everything he writes thereafter is Yes, Yes, Yes – Yes in a thousand million ways. No dynamo, no matter how huge – not even a dynamo of a hundred million dead souls – can combat one man saying Yes!

My life was a tropical storm on a path of destruction. Everything I touched with love crumbled in my crude hands. I possessed the will of a great wind, bending ancient and solid trees until they broke with a shattering scream. The will for life that had been suppressed within me blew forth now, leveling my landscape and leaving my world in a shambles of scattered lives. It was useless for me to stand against this power and I surrendered completely, letting the storm carry me where it would. I was a demon, and I accepted my fate.

The job at The Bank began to unravel after nearly fifteen years of building a “successful” career. I found that climbing down the ladder to success was much more painful and difficult than climbing up. I drank martinis for lunch, tossed my in-box into the trash and wandered into the streets. Everyone was busily scurrying about at First and Market, isolated from one another in the world of duty. I roamed down to the docks and listened to the oily bay waters slap against the planks and the seagulls screech. In a lunch packed bar I would order a beer and then walk out absentmindedly, leaving the beer on the counter and the bartender eyeing me suspiciously. I belonged nowhere, and nowhere was where I was headed.

The break came quick and clean as a death wish. After a late night with a girlfriend, I came home empty and defeated. The children were sleeping innocently in their beds and I sat with them for a while watching their breathing and marveling at their beauty and peace of mind. The wife was furious, naturally, fuming into a four-olive vodka martini. “I want you out!”, she spat as I entered the kitchen. Simple as that, the words neither one of us could previously bring ourselves to say. “This is the end!”, she added, and it was. I had no fight; I had no will. She could have told me to dive off the Golden Gate Bridge and I would have done so without a whimper. This was the end; the end of the day-job-suburban-lifestyle experiment, in most ways, a complete and utter failure. The children were precious and vulnerable and needed their father in their lives, but staying and continuing the insanity would have made things for them even worse. This was the end.

As daylight dawned that morning I packed up two old ratty suitcases with some underwear, a few books, a shaver and a toothbrush. The rest was hers; the house, the car, the dog, and the five cats. She could keep the TV, the dishes, the washing machine and drier, the knick knacks, the photographs, the lawn furniture. I had no need of any of the stuff that had made up our insane lives. We drove the children to school telling them I was moving into The City and they could come and visit any time they wanted. She drove me across the bridge, too angry and broken to speak. On an impulse she suddenly pulled over on Van Ness and said, “Get out!”, and I did, and watched the old Volvo steam away forever. It was over. I found out years later that just at this moment Gene was driving by in his old blue VW bug and witnessed the whole scene. We laughed when he told me about it and I said, “You bugger, why didn’t you pick me up?” “The scene was complete in itself”, he answered, “I could see that it was a classic moment and I didn’t want to intrude.” There I stood on Van Ness Avenue with my two raggedy suitcases. I picked a direction and started walking. With each step my spirits lightened. It was a beautiful morning in The City and I had nowhere to go and nothing to do. The great wind in my spirit had quieted and the storm had abated. After a few blocks I was whistling the theme from the movie “The Bridge Over The River Kwai” and swinging the suitcases happily. And then, in a moment of gratitude, I sat the suitcases down, opened my arms to the new life that suddenly seemed so filled with beauty and promise, raised my head to the morning sun above and said with a joyful voice of gratitude, “Yes!”

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WikipediA on Henry Miller