I May Have Named My Brother Jeb

     The unspeakable and the horror. And he saw it and he carried it. He thought it out on his own but couldn’t tell me in time. How much he cared and how much he knew. So he showed me the way by doing. He called to say he forgave me, before he died. Before I knew what I had done wrong. I think I know now, and I’d like to tell you. You know that stuff about your brother not being too heavy to carry? “He’s my brother, he’s not heavy.” You’ve got to learn how to carry your brother, or sister. It’s not gendered, though they talk about it that way in the Bible or wherever. If you want to know what love is, at every level, in my humble opinion, you’ve got to learn about carrying, with your arms and with your legs, your back and with your breath. With your words.
    There should be a way of telling, similar to a mother holding a baby. That is the basis of attachment, the holding. The baby can feel the ground through the one who holds, and the holder feels the ground that way also. Babies can pull the holder away from the earth, the rocks, float away. The soul of a baby floats, in the dream of the womb, in the thoughts and feelings of the mother as she bears the child. There is no heaven or hell. And then forever after birth, there is only carrying.
    My grandmother Margaret loved the image of cherubs, those fat cute babies with wings. How would anyone understand as well as she, who lost her mother when she was three. To an illegal abortion in 1906 (nothing is pressing my buttons more then the state of Texas right now). Margaret’s father was a train man, he inspected tracks. Was he away from home quite a bit and was her mother, ____ lonely? Her aunt ___, was a suffregete and later a progressive textbook author. In other words, she was taking the prejudice out of young impressionable minds. She was the first in their small town of Silver Creek, NY, to get a car and how proudly she must have driven that four wheeler.
    All those names and faces are smooshed together for me in my post modern brain, I paid no attention to my heritage. Or perhaps no one thought about how it is that I should know. Until later when Grandma Margaret took up geneology as a hobby. The faces and names were old fashioned and far away, Whipple, Underwood, ______. My own last name echoed this ancient quality but with a ridiculous quality, Wattles. Undoubtedly the name will be gone by the next genneration since the four cousins of us siblings are girls, in their 20’s. But we carry way more than a last name, we carry a first name and we listen for how people might say our names in the world. That is what we carry, or pretend to carry. And amongst family, the nuclear family, the sound of a name carries endless amounts, flows that we don’t understand until later.
    In my family, us older three kids actually gave Jeb his name when he was about 4. Maybe it was me, I remember the moment. We’d been calling him J.B., I think because he didn’t like Joel and his middle name was Brownlee. Joel was my Dad’s pick, from the Bible and seemed onerous, kind of heavy. Too formal. Jeb just had a ring to it, and did I actually say “lets just call him Jeb!” Yes, I should own that, though the responsibility nearly breaks my heart. When he passed away in ’96 nearly 200 people came to his memorial in Philly. Though he’d never lived in Philly, he’d visit and stay for months, and all my friends were his friends too. It’s as if we were almost twins. Though he traveled restlessly always, across the country and back, I knew where he was and he knew where I was. I’d get a feeling, and then he’d call me up and tell me the news.

Make the Angels

 Today my two remaining siblings and I are going out to visit the two sites where our younger brother Jeb’s ashes are melted into the earth. One spot overlooks the Schuykill River. There’s an Amtrak railroad bridge nearby and down below this bluff is the West River Drive. The cars actually drive through a tunnel cut through the bluff where half of his ashes were placed. There’s a long ago deserted hillside garden that you walk through to get there, stone steps and walls. But first you walk across a lawn and step over a small stream set into concrete. Always a bit trashed and neglected, the sound of the cars zooming by is a random rhythm.

I went to a drum circle there at least once, further back on the bluff. The remains of the fire pit are still there. I’ll look today to see if it seems still active. Pot fumes rising, the beat predictable and relentless, squawks of a sax or shrieks of flute invade my memory. But perhaps I am remembering the sound of an actual Rainbow Gathering, I went to four nationals, starting with Washington State 1980. I’d set off for that Rainbow because I’d heard through some far reaching grapevine that he might be there. After two years of not hearing any word from him, I did find him, he walked right into our camp when we were setting up. But then he ended up here about 15 years later. Well, half of him.

The other half of his ashes are under a tree next to Walt Whitman’s tomb across the river in Camden. I Sing the Body Electric changed America, and it also changed me. I’d read Whitman out loud, almost religiously, in my early 20’s when I’d gone to live with my Grandmother in her shady home in Florida for a year. More than something to do, I felt he was kind of a saint, along with the likes of John Coltrane and John Lennon. If felt good to read the words aloud, just like it felt good to read the Pablo Neruda aloud, in Spanish as well as English. Even if I didn’t know Spanish hardly at all. I could guess how the meanings connected. Neruda also liked to celebrate the body. My girlfriend at the time, Maria, whose mother Chonita was from Mexico, we’d read Neruda aloud together. But when I was in Florida, a separation from Maria for a year, I’d read aloud, sitting in the hot water of the old cast iron tub.

Jeb actually passed away in ’96, when my daughters were two, or perhaps it was January of ’97. I always get a bit mixed up on dates, seeing as how I was born in ’59. He was born in ’61, and we’re a year and about 10 months apart. Somehow there seems to be quite a bit of difference between 1 and 2, and it confused me early on. There seems to be no comparison between the space between 0 and 1 and the space between 1 and 2. The confusion remains like an echo and I always have to think twice about certain kinds of math operations. Being a carpenter, it comes up quite a bit.

Jeb, the youngest of us four however, was kind of a runt and he had sight problems, teeth problems, leg problems. Apparently towards the end he may have known he had heart problems. In his belongings was a list of numbers which I’ve always wanted to back check to see if they were for health centers. Why would an apparently homeless person have a list of numbers? So, in comparison, my math problems that translate into time memory problems are nothing. I learned that early on. And I remember the moment. I was wrestling with him, which may have meant picking on him since I was always bigger and knew I could always win. I was dropping a ball of spit towards his face, with my knees on his arms so he couldn’t move, and I thought, This is terrible! Don’t do this! And I stopped. It seems to me that we became best of friends and brothers after that. There were never any resentments, at least on my part. And I always tried to help him and be there for him. Though in the end I failed.

That is the harsh truth, and through working to understand this truth, I feel like I am learning to make the angels, so to speak. There was a phone call from Jeb about 6 months before he died where he told me that he forgave me. For what, I did not understand at the time, but perhaps now I do. I've been thinking about these things ever since, and I think he knew way more than me when he called that day. I too went through alcoholism, and continuing depression. That ogre of suicidal ideation still hovers nearby, even in this moment. As it must have for him, perhaps from a very early age. My parents say that he almost died when he was six months old. The medicine he was given permanently stained his teeth yellow. But if we talk to the angels they can help us. Grandmothers, friends, acquaintances. Saints from the media of music or arts. Joan of Arc perhaps. Her testimony from her trial shouts across the ages about fairies that her grandmother saw under a certain ancient tree. They called it the Fairy Tree and put wreaths there. She says she may have danced there with the other girls but she sang more often than she danced.

Do a '90 day memoir' workshop?

     Signed up for the “intro to memoir” with Alan Watt, of "the 90 day novel" fame. He professes to tell us the difference between journaling and memoir. It’s scary-but I did sign up. I mean, is it worthwhile to write a memoir, just because I love writing? And to spend 90 days on it?
    Journaling is probably my narcissistic supply first thing in the morning, so to move from journaling to memoir could be a bigger leap than I know. Could be I can’t switch, can’t keep the focus. Journaling favors the small picture, the small steps, such that I can write in any new direction at any moment. It favors discovery of connections, or revealing new things, new ideas and theories, -wacky theories, half baked ideas propelled by deficient grammar. The joy of the wonder of the new at every turn without regard for actual understanding, rather than the slow unfurling of the larger picture set in a real life scene. In short, fantasy is encouraged in journaling for me, and the presentation of ‘my life’ on the world wide stage of a book seems a far cry away.
    One thing that might aid me however is the fact that everything that I experienced back then seems to be different now. I’ve been doing so much looking back , so much recovery work, so much self analyzing & family analyzing that the scenes that I remember are endowed with a time machine quality, an elegiac glow even. Every time I return to one of them I get new stuff, new connections, a zap of realization and if not release from tension, then at least some kind of physical literal understanding. As if the postures of the people in the actions taking place were magical in themselves and glowing. Energy was transferring, a dance was occurring that transcends mere words. Even the negative memories such as my Dad spanking me for saying ‘motherfucker’, I can return to it and in the ridiculousness of the the whole being pulled across his knee and stinging wack wack wack of it, I can feel how a very particular fear of others was engendered and deposited into said buttocks, and I hear the whole universe laughing about it. And is this why I have a distant fascination with baseball, the swing of the arm, sometimes with a bat in clenched fists? Postures and intentions matter, is what I think I’m saying, and memories in themselves, can bring tears or mirth. And hopefully not malice.
    After all, it seems a miracle that people do continue to make the world go round, the working people that is. Maybe this emotional work of understanding and connection is the real work for humans and as such my switching from journaling endless narcissistic supply and channeling that towards eureka moments of my own memoir, that others can relate to, will have bonus agape value. I hope so.
    My father did let go of his antagonistic approach to parenting, as he went through tumultuous life changes, and eventually in my 20’s, he and my younger brother and I went on a two week hiking and canoeing trip around the southeast US: Okefenokee Swamp, Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia and the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. We didn’t actually talk about much, just enjoyed the views, the campfires, the woods, the waves. We’ve been good together ever since, except for that one time he got angry at me for not voting when Al Gore lost the presidential race in 2000. And judging from the climate crisis on planet Earth, maybe he was right about that.
    Because one of my wacky self propelled theories is that I was, in a profound sense, born straight into the culture wars and I’ve been lost there ever since. Is that what it means to be American? I was dropped in 14 short years from my mother’s comfy and luxurious womb straight down into the socio-politico, a charged place where war and peace are being constantly redefined. Home is yet to be definitively attained, even still, -maybe by the time I retire. I’m 61 now and thinking about retiring early at 62.

 

PS, we saw lots of alligators at the Okefenokee Swamp, the water was low because of a drought. There were too many of them so we only stayed one night out in the  bush.

Doctor on the Mayflower

  A deep melancholy, like a step up into happiness and then looking back at the wreckage of a thousand years of strewn bodies from wars no one intended to start. The deep inertia quality of these otherwise triumphant corpses. At least they had purpose, I suppose, as I lift a heavy, but entitled, heart for another breath in the present. The guilt lies almost everywhere, 99% everywhere, though I refuse to generalize completely, that would be triggering me back to childhood. And adolescence, the 70’s, America's hinge point into tomorrow. The catapult years. The days when Real Capitalism truly began stealing it’s narcissism from the products it sold and riding off scott free into it’s Trump tower and gated community heaven, when Real Capital took over the Real for good, put "heaven on earth", and the Real Earth and the 99% be damned! All the rest of the narcissists - the talkers and fibbers, the mansplainers, the doomsayers, the working class hero(lesses), the middle class models, the pop stars, the Hollywood and bollywooders, the stay up all night geeks, the stare at the screeners, the athletes shilling on ads, the rise of the mercenary armed forces - all those going for the complications of modern life and reveling in it - they still don’t cut it like the 1%. They may dance to the end of the world on that now permanent disco beat (see rave, house, deep ____, fill in the blank, etc) but to me that’s nought but Real Capitalism’s slave driving whip cracking, snapping in the air and setting the endless death spiral pace. At least rap takes that endless beat and pronounces over, past and against it. But for me I’ll always need some rock n roll, some roll through the disco rot, the machine for me just hyper charged enough, pull back from the abyss. This is melancholy, pull back from the maelstrom as E.A. Poe noticed in the days of Real Capital’s own adolescence, the Victorian era, when curtains were heavy velvet and muffled all cries of longing and loneliness for non-hierarchical spaces, almost all anyways. No wonder my grandmother got a bob at college in the early 1920’s, and then her grandmother (having taken the place of her mother who had tragically died of a back street ______, I won’t say it because of modesty for the angels, the forgotten ones, but I did get very close to my grandmother Margaret and offered her some, a little, comfort in her declining years) her grandmother made her walk around the block a few times when she returned home for Christmas. Must have been snow on the ground being upstate NY small town, I imagine. But I don’t know, I wasn’t there, I’m just mulling it over, trying to claim my small piece of the narcissistic (Plymouth) rock before I die, weave something together for the following generations. Having achieved 61 and 3/4 years and most of my close friends and lovers have either died or disappeared to far away places, and thus the melancholy.

But I’ve found a true love, near impossible in the post-modern day, a devoted and spunky (and secretly wife-ish) woman who will give me (and our decidedly normatively hetero relationship, as she put it) everything if only I do the same and maybe if I don’t, but I fully do intend to do - having a romantic and idealistic side myself and having worked out quite a bit but not all of my deep seated shitty cynicism over the last 15 or 16 years of recovery work. (I know I’m supposed to know the moment I last took a drink but I’m in denial of that perfectly discoverable date.) Cynicism I didn’t even know I had but probably should’ve, if I hadn’t been born in ’59 and living through the 60’s as a youth, those were the worst and best of times as some people say, the heyday for the American worker and also the death knell for the American worker but thankfully the adolescence of rock n roll, it’s teen years of triumph being the 70’s Sid Vicious licking the envelope to close it, and Kurt Cobain licking the stamp and the letter got sent to me. Rock n roll! means a lot of things to a lot of peeps but we need it now, more than ever. “I’m so glad, I’m so glad, I’m glad that I’m glad that I’m glad.” being the song that caught my ear and pushed my hinge. I think it was Sioux Free somehow, a genial long auburn haired lesbian a decade older than me who shared it with me, who our family knew from the Quaker Meeting in Hartford. She’d biked across the entire country and was a local heroine for a few weeks or months, with a glow of DIY accomplishment. E to W, or W to E … I think it was E to W and the winds prevailed the other way so she had had to push through them across lonely miles of the Great Plains. Or did she go with Cindy Green, her gf at the time? The two always seemed to be together and if I’d known then what I know now, would I have warned anyone about that Cindy Green? (Not that anyone at all listens to me, of course.) Because Cindy Green, bless her everlastingly gregarious heart, was eventually the ‘burning spear’ for the implosion of our little nuclear family unit. Making it more of a neutron bomb (silent but deadly) then a Hiroshima August 6th kind of deal. So just think of a house of cards, or if you think of a castle made of sand then Cindy would be a surfer on the rising tide, along with a few million or perhaps billion other women, who fascinatingly still need and at that time needed their freedom from patriarchy (I’m no fan of the Taliban, believe me you) but didn’t know what they were fooling with when they eyed up the ‘institution of marriage’, -but as I say, Cindy - the most gregarious and invigorating of peeps - entirely without an ounce of pre-prejudice towards any soul (it just goes to show that you don’t know who is the who is looking for the mother - I think it ended up me in the long run) well she was a prize of a person on earth, that Cindy, to win her over must have been something and that, my Mother did, astoundingly, and I’m still astounded today, paralyzed even, partially probably. So that’s what I’m writing about, a certain inert-itude. A certain nerdiness right next to neediness, a 99% nerdy neediness, when I take a po-mo look at a melancholy of the last 1,000 years, back to the heart of the, the, I suppose Ottoman Empire, a time when possibly things could’ve gone either way, but they didn’t and so here we are. And though I’ve lost many friends and the Covid era seems like a veil covering any entrance back to those good times of yore, I at least have the sweetest most vivacious gf who loves me for me and sings the song I want to hear. While I listen to Haydn’s Symphony No. 88 and No. 100, (both in G major emphasizing the happiness part). And poor Cindy who I wish I’d had a chance to hold her hand towards the end, has passed by now and my mother had broken up with her somewhere before, in those wheelchair bound days. Cindy was the type who would protest actively if someone parked in the wheelchair parking spot if they didn't have the right plate.

Aaah, but if only I could somewhere get rid of my own personalized debt hanging around my neck, then I could really expand on this little piece of narcissism. RnR, rest and relaxation is what I need, as well as rock n roll. At any rate, I know I’ll never be able to escape “the scream”, the sound of my mother breaking down, a few years before and invariably the reason for Cindy, and a repeat “performance” for her, a recurring “event” of an “undiagnosed” ill health; but that one scream towards the sky and the tears falling, dripping dropping from the tip of her nose . . . I was paralyzed and partially set free a few years into the Cindy ‘reign of terror’ (no, just joking, no terror, though my younger brother did become homeless then at age 13, living down by the railroad tracks in a refrigerator box, I visited and slept overnight after a pleasant evening of wandering the rust belt Worcester, MA. mid 70’s, we talked about a roof top gardens type of future and sang songs out loud from a gallon of cheap red wine) when a ‘family meeting’ brought the announcement of the end of my parent’s marriage and I cried (the only kid of four to cry) as I felt a giant egg fall to the floor and crumple into pieces like Humpty Dumpty. I always since equated that moment to Humpty Dumpty, perhaps because my name, Hugh, is similar in sound and humor to Humpty Dumpty. But perhaps that’s me in my narcissism, trying to get a piece of the Plymouth Rock. One of my ancestors, by the way, was the doctor on the Mayflower. Just a little piece of rock n roll, so I won’t be worrying my twin daughters (26) if I get any older, I’ll have something upon which to rest my weary and freakin creakin bones.

Evil & Beauty

Evil & Beauty, now

there's two things that are opposites,

if I ever saw them. It seems somehow 

they can cancel each other out.

For instance, if Evil exists,

a true maliscious enjoyment of

the suffering of another, then

how could anything at all be Beautiful? 

Unless it was opposed to Evil, of course. 

And had a joy to it that was ever resistant 

to said malice. But then,

if such joy is discoverable occasionally, 

along the way, then how come it can't 

be expanded upon and maximized,

to the nth degree?

Ugh, the nth degree sounds odious,

does it not? And so we see the opposites, 

with rude cancellation powers, 

and joy

interrupting Evil with a laugh.

A laughing in its face, as if it never 

will share a breath.

Which is why Evil is cordoned off in Hell

(in some world views)

where the fires burn incessantly. 

Who really breaths much there, 

except for the fire?

 

 

More Kate Zambreno

 Wish I could write like Kate Zambreno. Who adores Rilke, Wittgenstein, and the artist Durer. She lives through them, it seems. Scatters bits of ruminations on their lives and their artwork throughout. She just wanders carefully collecting wisps of observations, connections that barely connect, perhaps only through the air, because she hardly seems to have a body. Her body seems to be this arcane world both distant and trashy, incomprehensible, without theory or classic beauty, or classic meaning. And also beyond this world. She mentions her teacher and writing frustrations as if they are happening to someone else. Is all this a heroin flashback, existential pain as bliss, the most meaningless is inside out. Her dog is more reportable then her husband, but in a good way. 

Because if I'm addicted to writing like I am, then I know that I don't really have an identity 'per se'. But then something must be happening. What is it, to just want to kiss everything with my mind, no matter what it is? What journey is this? I certainly would not want to say too much about anyone I actually do kiss, or hug or talk to all day. I'd only want to do that if I could say everything about them. Or just turn the camera on my life like in Sherman's March and then narrate my side of the story. A real show and tell. 

Because the one who really lives in words, like a religious person or a philosopher - but not a lawyer or a politician or goddess knows - and I'm going out on a limb here - goddess knows not a social worker or an educator of social change, OMGoddess that would be the worst: the educator of progressive social change. I'd rather do anarchist self-help than parent all of society all at once. So many people with the maturity of 5 year olds... Probably myself as well. No, what I want is how to use ideas of non-hierarchy to assist in one's own well being. As well as others, but me first. Because if I experience myself as no one, at least I can take care of myself and try not to judge others. Just be in the world. Just talk to people, and listen.

 

Too sensitive as a youth probably. That might be the category. Too sensitive and lost in books. My best reading experiences were in 3rd grade when I found a series of books on the Greek, Roman and Norse myths. I ate them up. Perhaps I haven't advanced past the complexity of elementary school level English, which would explain why I also can soak right through Bukowski and Hemingway. Short stubby sentences. Kind of phallic sort of writing if I were to sexualize it. In the Lacanian sense. Show offy, slightly funny, the heat radiating right off the end of each short sentence, bouncing out of the period into the eyes, over and over and over again. Until at last the ending just appears and the reader is dropped off like a tagline, or a...

or a ...

I don't know what.

 

Yes, I don't know what. I get to the sexualizing within the writing and then I start the numerous asides and that's the end of it for me. I can't do Hemingway or Bukowski (or Zambreno for that matter), I'm too nervous, too hyped up. "Hypernormalization" is a terrific documentary I watched recently. I read that the director, Adam Curtis, considers his work "emotional documentary". I feel like I write until the heat is just too much for me to handle, I can't quite stretch it out like Zambreno does to a trascendant, tolerable level. Not yet. 

 

But maybe my personal style will fit more with movie making. Music videos perhaps, those are enormously ethereal. Who needs to actually be someone when playing music? And painting the moving images over the music? The lyrics are as close to reality as it gets. Or if I could just be like Godard and the french new wave, become like Belmondo and Karina at the stony beach in Peirrot fou something something, espousing arcane lines while looking gorgeous in the sun on a beat up old dock. Then they go skipping back to the stone fisherman's cottage with a tiny floppy eared fox hovering around. And there's a parrot, for god's sake. Then Belmondo skips up over the roof of the cottage and down the other side, always jumping down to earth like only a youth can do, from too high, so that my poor back hurts watching him. I'm getting old, goddamit. But then she says lets go back to the gangster life, which they do, as if its some kind of rite of passage.

 

Did someone say that it

might be ok, for the first time?

Divorced almost in secret, the weeping

rained through the rock n roll,

the warm cave of people was

always further away, a hut,

a homeless shelter, some branches.

American tin foil everywhere but

digging around, past the hero's

and heroine's bones, deeper, higher,

more color, more layers and

then simplify: you. Amazing!

A holding again.

Holding, gentle propulsion,

swimming, detritus - well, a leaving.

A leaning, the shore, a force,

I realize I was almost swept away,

out to sea and no one could say

much. But no matter, yet the chorus

sings there must be

a reason.

Does light move or is it

merely here? By evening we'll

know more. Did you say you'll

hold my hand? We don't care

about cars or politics or simple

pleasures like onions, but rather

the drips and drabs that

find verbal swing

or wings.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

People who come and go are like a haunting. That's all we know of all those strangers. Why make it so of family and friends? Crazy, is the only answer. The only connective tissue, because we all know by now what smiles are made of.

But frowns, is that always new? To hear the weeping over the wall and then shut it out with the large ear flaps until we're in a singular echo chamber. Somebody must have tried yelling at you at a young age or bombing you with silence, either one. If we only knew which one. The things not said, is my guess. Endless things not said, until the words themselves form like bulldozers in the sky, 3D and trenchant.

Crazy, this psychic connection to the cosmic subconscious. The Ancestors, the myths, the hauntings of jigs and reels. Could we find categories, is that worth while? Archetypes Jung said, I beleive. In moving away from the dreaded Oedipal moment.

But back to the haunting and the strangers. All it takes is words, the right words. And then the opening can open. Out of the echo chamber, into the world of people. Just people and friends and family. Who talks to whom? and how?

Eric Rohmer, Je ne sais quoi Amerku?

    Ah, to make a movie just like Rohmer except about the Philly shit. Except I see that he's not making the movies about love, like it appears, but so much more. Just to be there now, talking, breathing, beeing in a Rohmer movie seeming to be about love... Or the Agnes Vardes one about the 3 love children in Cali. Same thing. The becoming, the beeing, the singing. Movies as singing of the eyes.Within that space - and time. Time X space. Or perhaps its Space X emiT and somehow emiT seems endlessly endless. Sendless. On the edge of boring, mundane. The knife's edge. The cliff's edge. I mean, you just don't even know what is going to happen next. I mean, love is claustophobic and liberating at the same time. Bursting forth into small miniturizing differences moment by momento.

    A singing machine, movie making as. Of a particular reality, dense as love. Multifarious as the socio-political itself. As above so below. Slowly but surely unraveling the socio-politico (SP), the special, one knotty naughty word at a time, these words are meant for thine ears only, all secrets are true, a philosophical quest if there ever was one. The drama is a springboard, wound up.

    

    But Amerka, the SP w/o the cosmic consciousness at all, is seemingly a harder nut to crack. At least for me, having not tried yet. Should not all art be a cheerleading section for any and every creature to bee? And if not, is not that the definition of 'dead art'? The singing machine (SM) attacks Amerka, sinks within, is submerged there in, was actually previously captured and held therein against SM's will. And yet will vibrate still -if not vote! A tell tale heart, put on your dancing shoes. Please don't leave me...

Amerko,

the giganto question

mark!

Is

the radical gentleness

possible?

 

A walking talking advertisement for the French New Wave to return again.   A way to get into the psycho-socio-politico.

Personal is Political means Childhood's End

 

When there is no sci-fi:

  But once the personal is political is it too late to go back to the Garden of Eden? Ask Jean Luc Godard or Agnes Vardas. Once no one cares it might be ok. The revolution will not be televised? The 70's on time loop. From 1959 to the 70's, WOW! So much change, how could that not be a revolution, an evolution, future shock in real time. Like being in a boxing ring with the Kabalah and Madonna, both, teamed up. Lao Tzu and the Devil are referees. Who would disagree?

  And so, we're waiting for a normalcy that will never return. Un-freneticize is not a word in auto-correct. Best I can hope for is a room with a view down by the river under the rainbow. Nuggets of meaning are muppets in stereo. We never made it to quad. I'd like to become a 'marrying judge' though like my great-great grandfather who survived the civil war (North) and went to North Dakota. Or was it South Dakota. Red Cloud stayed on his land often enough and had a dance with his wife.

  And thus we see the rhythms of friendship re-established, from out of this mess. Anarchism (or the politics of non-hierarchy) once again has continual reference. The only answer someday. I'm just channeling everything my mother was thinking but she couldn't find the words. My father is dumbfounded but still alive. Watching tv alot in his new recliner.

 

When the personal is political ALL of the time:

you'll always get lost.

the kids will cry.

tomorrow never comes.

dryness is fun.

the sun, the sun.

the sky the sky the sky.

the oil is pumping.

and burning.

the fire next time.

Drifts - Zambreno

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Drifts, I hope I finish it this time, as anyways its better the second time starting it. Even more poignant the second time. Little details, it all falls together. Malaise, in a general way; or perhaps because she writes and yet what to write about? Dogs, cats, neighbors, wether to move to a cheaper place. . . Oh yes, Rilke's notes and comments and moving about. He seems unsettled. Tidbits about Rilke while avoiding direct enamoration. She also mentions Kafka in the same opaque way, more about how he is than what he is.

So alienation from what? in an 'I suppose' kind of way. I think its affecting because thats how life unfolds for some of us most of the time, if not all of us some of the time. Semi-interesting, at best. At home he feels like a tourist, (Gang of Four). So as a writer, someone who can't stop writing, must write and lives in writing (she also mentions Kafka in the same opaque way) the only struggle is how to be poignant, leaving spaces for the reader to exist and stretch and breathe meandering thoughts. And that can be a struggle, evidently and/or obviously. Is this a book for writers block thats not really a block but just average ennui? Ie: the real meaning of life?

  So really, it's like meeting someone and passing a few words, and then seeing them inside their house moving back and forth behind the curtains. Because, guess what, you happen to live across the street and you realize it's that person and then the house of course suddenly seems alive too. Different. It has personality as if you live a little bit in there too. It becomes another house, another kind of architecture.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Dolphins have similar personality traits to humans, study finds

Curiosity and sociability among traits found, despite dolphins having evolved separately for millions of years

Five main personality types:

Openness

Conscientiousness

Extraversion

Agreeableness

Neuroticism

 

O.C.E.A.N.

 

Dolphin Personalities

   Rivka Galchen will be putting out a book in June called "Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch". An intriguing title, and possibly true for me. So, if I can, I'll look for it around then, as I'm suddenly taken this morning by the sound of her inner voice. So to speak. Reading her 'personal history' article in the New Yorker, 'plain spoken' seems to be the best way to describe it. Can 'plain spoken' keep the intrigue for a book length novel? Perhaps. She says she lived in Norman, Oklahoma from 1st through 12th grade and mentions friends from there as if she's still in touch with them. 

    So, I decided to try 'plain spoken' writing myself and this is it. The assumption is, perhaps living plainly will follow. That would be a relief, after a phase in my life that has been filled with an endless rehashing of my childhood memories. And I never could come to a definitive conclusion as to who was to blame and who was the savior. I decided yesterday to try on the theory that everybody and everything is to blame, and likewise the possible savior, and found I liked this approach. However much this seems to imply the existence of conspiracy theories however, is only due to lack of resources (time and money) to research further and further into the muck of generation and find out the real nitty gritty. Which I would then print in full and sell as my best selling memoirs.

   Actually, as I follow the threads back and back, I'm sure it all ends up at some plain speaking reason - or force. Perhaps godlike but we're in a godless age now. Trying to move back to the plain speaking age.

    Which is why theory was always tagging along with these excavations of memories: attachment theory, Maslow's Mountain, Deleuze and Guattari's paranoia and BwO, Lacan and desire, anarchist theory on non-hierarchy (my fav), feminism, anti-racism, white fragility, and others. Nothing too deep, at least as far as I could take them. All true and connected, like a spider web of answers that lead to more questions. Which might be fine if I were a publishing author but I'm not. Unless you count the blog I post this to, which gets 0 to 1 visits average a day. Mostly zero. So probably around .15 average a day visits. Which I'm sure are random and last not longer that a nine seconds.

 

    I think so far, what Ms. Galchen has going for her writing over mine is that, in her article about the non-neighborhood she lives in, in central Manhattan near the LIncoln Tunnel, she doesn't veer into the brutalist. Like I tend to do. Somehow she keeps the kid gloves on, a gentle voice, but yet again, avoiding the genteel- which would be condescending and without wonder. She is just there, observing the surroundings and leisurely discovering our place in it. I'm not sure I can keep up.

Screen Tests

 "Screen Tests" by Kate
Zambreno. As if everyone
is equally important. Secondary
sources tertiary sources
small opinions, large critiques,
(well perhaps only a couple)
while carrying a child,
mother-in-laws and
Elena Ferrante recommendations.
Languid & languishing,
moment upon moment,
the baby loves Andy Warhol's book,
etc. and a detail in Solanas' biography.
Bricolage may be the single most
important word, ever.

In this book.
Wittgenstein's Mistriss?

Not name dropping after all.

He died a prisoner of war...

 

     Now getting interested in writing my memoirs. But without a very good memory it would have to be near fiction. Or more like 'faint reminiscences that morph into philosophical screeds'. I'd definitely want it to be readable, that is, literary. So that would be the challenge. 

    Does it help to read other people's memoirs? Probably. I used to love biography when I was a certain age. 3rd grade, so that would be 8 or 9. I remember the stacks in the library at Noah Webster school, in Hartford Connecticut, with the light streaming in from these gigantic windows, with the wide old wood casing, and overlooking the playground. 

    The playground where I had to learn to play dodgeball but never really liked it. I noticed dodgeball really only amplified the status of the bigger boys, and how hard they could throw that big red rubber ball. Wack, is the sound of that ball hitting your leg, if you had shorts on. Or smack dab in the middle of your back. Then you'd have to go outside the box, to try to hit the remaining kids out. Why did the teachers condone this game? Or did I volunteer for it? I can't remember, but I think I felt like the new kid, having just moved there from Philly.

    But up on the stacks on the left in the library was a series of biographies for young readers: Geronimo, George Washington, George Washington Carver, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman. It must have been an early attempt to put some diversity into the kids' minds, this was around '69. The covers were all the same style but with a different background color for each, green, red, blue. But inside, each person was just so different and unique. My finger would lean a book out and the story would become mine for an afternoon back home on the couch. Plain language, simple paragraphs, it almost seems to me now as if these people just did what they did, as if it were fated that way. Even the struggle seems fated, after the fact. Geronimo spent years roaming the desert with his band of guerilla soldiers until... I can't remember how it is Geronimo came to surrender to the U.S. Cavalry. At least Harriet Tubman got to live out her life with some semblance of victory, having made that glorious trip via the N. Star a multitude of times. Through swamps and over mountains, night time was her best friend. She was on the night shift you might say, on some abstractly described mission: freedom! All these people were on some kind of mission, as if on a conveyer belt, looking for something. George Washington went looking for it in the cherry tree, Abe Lincoln splitting rails, George Washington Carver in the simple peanut. Even now you can get boiled peanuts by the side of the road, from under a tent, on Georgia county roads.

    Ah, but who wants to read reminiscences about the bygone eras? People these days just want to take sides and use their own hand selected 'facts' to back up whatever judgments they have made about you because of the way you look. Its a new and old complaint about the nature of humanity. I think I'd almost like to go blind like my grandmother Margaret did, shortly before she passed away. Who wants to really SEE the world anymore? We judge so much with our eyes, I believe, checking people out as they come walking down the street towards us. 

    In a way, maybe reading (and writing for that matter) are an escape from the instant judgmentalism of looking. Reading is more like music, the words just roll into the mind and make sense in various ways. Reading allows the mind to think while the heart feels, whereas looking demands the mind make a decision. Friend or foe, prey or predator. Looking essentially constantly asks who is within whom, since everything is outside? Whereas with hearing, you are within me and I am within you, interchangably. You can't really shut your ears. Hearing is inside and outside both, looking is always outside.

    We sort it out with words and as we all know, that can be a sordid affair. Would you really like to hear what I have to say? (No wonder I enjoy poetry so much. )At least, with reading we can be sure that the words, the story, the intention, are all within us. Each one of us. One at a time. A world of our own. We are reading a story of various impact and each one of us is blessed by the story. That is, I suppose, if you want to be reading it...

Ps: I noticed when getting the image of Geronimo that it looks like he never surrendered. No wonder I didn't remember exactly what happened. Prisoner of war.