Reality Hits

A damaging wind storm is heading my way. I'm camping at its epicenter, waiting for my new apartment to open up. That means that I will move from the boonies back into the urban eye of COVID-19. Tomorrow is showtime. 

Showtime, the TV network, will air a revealing documentary on the Ronald Reagan presidency. We have yet to come to terms with Reagan's surreality. Or JFK's, for that matter. I hope that we soon will.

By now, Television has pivoted to Internet images. I am of the first generation to grow up with TV, although we were restricted from watching it at my home. I did watch enough on our little Black and White TV to understand that it presented a kind of idealized world. Perhaps I was provided some inoculation.

I've been shouting into the wind about Reagan for most of my life. But people liked the way they felt with him as our TV president. If they were white and suburban and "middle class," which, of course, we all were. It's hard to imagine that was not Reagan's core.

He'd been a union man until he became General Electric's shill. Somehow he was groomed to be the image of a new Republican ideology which has only hardened over time. Front man for wealth making, no matter the ravages along the way. Shill of the rich and powerful. Ascribed identity for our country, our home. 

It was unions that ushered in reality TV. When the writers struck, the producers simply said among themselves, 'we don't need no stinkin' writers!' The people themselves will write their own scripts when put in front of a camera. If we select them carefully, and then edit the result carefully, the masses will buy it. We did. 

Sure, I have a TV in my tiny house. I feel as though I need it for reality check along my travels. Trailers don't lend themselves to city living, so I've mostly toured Trumplandia, with respites, occasionally, in National Parks; playgrounds for cosmopolitans with money and education, to some extent.

Mostly I use the TV to stream movies, which make for nice diversion when the weather's not nice and my eyes won't stay still for reading or writing (mostly translation work, which is another story altogether).

Anhow, that lifestyle is coming to an end, as it must. I want to re-establish a home, as my kids establish theirs. Truth be told, as I told you here before, I'm camping now to be out of mandatory quarantine for my son-in-law whose house I'd been living in while repairing all its many deficits. 

My body remains sore from that, and so I imagine I won't be up for the mobile life for all that much longer. I like being around family, even though I will likely no longer be able to visit Mom in the memory care unit. Because of the COVID reality surge.

But anyhow, I've had - and continue to have - plenty of occasion for lively discussion with people who, according to my belief, inhabit fantasy lands with eyes wide shut toward what's actually going on all around them. We all create our internal narrative with ourselves as the protagonist, pulling in all the descriptions from abroad which feel right.

I have yet to meet anyone who enjoys having their version of reality challenged. I keep trying to broaden my own. I must be among a minority who enjoys that. No brag, just fact. Ha!

The Internet was supposed (by all right thinking people at its inception, though some of us saw dot com for what it was. We'd started when the Internet was mostly academic. Now it's for real!) to remedy the mass-mediated sleep walk into lala land. By now we are split - the Internet has literally split us - among realities, none of which are entirely coherent. Since there's no way to digest all that's available, we have to pick and choose.

Or, rather, we have to let the keepers of our preferences choose for us. It can be very hard to see how that's any improvement on what preceded reality TV. The lala land of Ronald Reagan, which a majority of us once did internalize. We felt like one nation, very much under God. Now we don't.

The course of my own personal history feels like one long political slide into the swamp. Can you even imagine that Dubya seems a statesman in retrospect? I can't say that I've been all that aware, but I suppose that I did interact with people who were. I'm astonished at my own ignorance back in the day, so I can't take credit for being in better touch with actual reality than many of the people I interact with seem to be. I'm not on solid ground, still. 

But here to my left I talk with people who declare supporters of Trump racists before even talking with them. I understand the sentiment, but it's not what I've experienced. Sure many are, and it's not hard to discern that in the way some talk about personal grievances. But again, to my political left, are plenty of racist union folks.

As many folks have remarked, the political center has been hollowed out, so I can't exactly claim to be there. If there were a center, it would be more real than either extreme, I'm pretty sure.

In my expressed politics, I lean hard left. But reality tempers my belief that those goals can be soon nor certainly easily achieved. Tempered by reality, I want to believe in achievable goals, and not just those achievable by "natural disaster." That seems to be the only realistic scenario just now, writing from the eye of every storm. 

That means that I have to believe that there is a narrative which can bring us together. As the name for my blog indicates, I am a believer in the foundational power of narrative. It's how we define ourselves, pulling in whatever version of reality suits us. It's what politics is made of, and it's surely how religion compels belief.

My own faith is that there is - imminently - a scientific narrative which can and will embrace and overcome the corrupted Jesus narrative which seems to prevail now on the right. That new narrative will describe the limits to materialistic science. It will embrace emotion as part of reality, and not just as part of human subjectivity. It will end the illusion that complete understanding is ever possible. 

In very simple terms, that's because our human understanding will always include the creative fictions which we will always require to keep on keeping on. Understanding our own creation is not the same as understanding what gets called God's creation, and never will be. I believe that to be foundational, even though I would quibble with most God language.

I've tried here over the years to explain the particulars of my belief. I doubt that I've done a very good job, but it's about all I've got. My mind grows frail, and I doubt that I can do this any better. I'm not signing off. I'm just calling out a moment which feels very very fraught. 

I am begging people to pause and to consider that they might not be entirely right in their beliefs; about reality and about each other. 

Love is a pause of sorts. A suspension of disbelief. I hope and I pray that we can pull it off.

Well, I'm camping now in my new apartment. The heat is fine and the windows sound as the tree outside my third floor view dances in the wind. As though it had its own motivation. My landlord tells me that a previous tenant climbed the tree these three stories to climb in through the terrace. He'd forgotten his key.

I suppose I will slowly furnish to fill in the expanse of the polished oak floor. The camper's safely put to sleep. I have hope for the future today!

A Dream of the Good Old Days Before Juneteenth was a Holiday

Just now, like many of us, I'm holding my breath that Agent Orange won't carry on to drop his COVID nukes in Tulsa. The day after Juneteenth. We celebrate today, for tomorrow we may die. I wish all my black sibs the happiest of Juneteenths, the newest Federal holiday!

I'm also trying just now to restart my entire read-through in Chinese of the Dream of the Red Chamber. This is a book which many Chinese count as their North Star for what it means to be human on the planet. I remember thinking that as well. Like reading Tolstoy, I don't quite remember why. I only know that it changed me.

And I remember very well driving out to Madison, Wisconsin as a grad student of classical Chinese literature. I was going to attend the first-ever international conference on "Redology." That's the term for academic study of this singular Chinese novel. 

Along the way, I dropped off my friend at the University of Iowa where he was attending the renowned writing program. His father, Parker Po-fei Huang, a well-known poet among Chinese, and a low-ranked but highly esteemed "native informant" at Yale, where language instructors were not professors - his father had told my friend that he had no business writing; he hadn't truly lived. I could relate. My own father was stern that way too. 

But we all loved Professor Huang. I guess we all have our less good sides. 

I was allowed to sit in on a class. I don't remember the notorious tear-down masculine ethos that got the program so many celebrated and mostly male authors. I do remember wistfully feeling that I was not of that crowd.

How well I also remember driving north to arrive at the beautiful campus on Lake Mendota at Madison. It was summer, and the coeds (code for women in those days) were sunning themselves on the grass all over campus. A northern and wooded grassy California beach. I was somehow shocked. Never had I seen so much brazen skin. This was not my conception of what 'midwest' means. Not my crowd either, for sure!

The opening reception was held on the panoramic top floor of a circular tower. All the younger westerners were glued to the windows, gazing out over the beautiful campus to hide our social awkwardness. Very few of us were expected, after all, to have some bit of expressive performance queued up for presentation on demand, as all Chinese are. All the senior Chinese scholars were looking inward toward friends, and new acquaintances they had already mostly read. 

In the buffet line for dinner I chatted with David Hawkes, the premier English-language translator of The Dream of the Red Chamber, or as he properly called it, The Story of the Stone. All of us were waiting with 'bated breath for his completion of this life's work. I was a bit star-struck. I chatted up a different professor who was into using computer technology to analyze classical Chinese literature (he confessed that he couldn't really read it himself). That was according to the dictates of the structuralism which was then in vogue. The science of literature. Looking for stable patterns across works. 

But what I wish to write about today is our economy. I'm old enough to remember the 'good old days' when the local hardware store was manned by knowledgeable clerks who raised families on their salaries. Our store stocked everything from model airplane engines to lawnmowers, and all the parts and tools in between.

Milk was delivered in heavy refillable bottles then, and Grandma would sometimes send one of the kids down to the ice cream store with a crock, reminding us to have them pack it tightly so that it wouldn't melt along the walk home. 

Now I buy things from Amazon, and watch the prices creep up to cover the free shipping, while the quality seems increasingly indifferent. Caveat emptor and read the editorial reviews. That old hardware store would never tarnish its good name the way that Walmart always does, or Home Depot, or Amazon, by allowing shoddy goods along their shelves. They couldn't afford to. What happens when all the minimum-age hardware helpers age out?

My friend, a structuralist himself, and brilliant professor of Chinese met us at the conference. He took me - well, I took him since he didn't drive - to visit his old college friend who lived just north of Madison. This was a talented young man who'd forsaken an academic life to start a business. 

He had designed a refined set of mountain climbing chocks, and had set up a very high-tech and sophisticated manufacturing process which he explained to me in detail. The process ended up with nicely anodized pieces which were color-coded for size and usage. They felt wonderful in the hand, and apparently - by virtue of angles, metallic composition and surface treatment - held wonderfully in the field. 

Again, who knows what such a business was doing in Wisconsin, but he enjoyed showing me all the steps, partly because I understood them, and likely mostly because I was so googly-eyed. I especially appreciated the step where the nearly finished pieces were blasted with glass beads to provide golf-ballish micro-divots.

Speaking of which, I've only swung a golf club once in my life, and that time the ball went exactly where I was aiming it, to my absolute horror. It sailed right across the neighbor's long back yard, across the street and over the next lawn right into the "picture window" of the hardware store owner who lived around the corner. This is a sin from which I shall never recover. It taught me to always fess up (which I didn't do that time). I was a natural Zen archer, I guess, as I remember the magnetic pull of window to ball. 

It definitely wasn't my doing, although come to think of it I got three bulls eyes the first time I held a bow and arrow and the first time I fired a .22 rifle. I should have known better. But then I was never able to repeat those feats. Story of my life. 

Anyhow this wonderful climbing hardware manufactory was set to go out of business before it even sold its first chock (I received a bag of them as souvenirs). The poor fellow hadn't realized that even the niche sport of climbing was controlled by the one large manufacturer who determined which products could be stocked on pain of withholding all the others. This was just when even sporting goods stores were turning Big Box, and before distribution channels got disrupted. 

Just as is now the case with movie theaters, R.I.P., it doesn't matter how good the product is if you can't get it on the shelf at eyeball level. Money changes hands, as I learned later in the beer retailing business. Smaller brands have got to cheat to win: You have to brazenly follow the big boys and swap the shelves when no-one's looking.

I hadn't heard of WalMart or maybe it hadn't gotten started yet, but I did get an education from that young entrepreneur near Madison about how "Wall Street Money" will pay to overstock shelves with goods sold at a loss for the sole purpose of forcing competitors out of business. I also learned that such practices were illegal in Germany, say, among other countries. 

Some long time later, circumnavigating the continent in all innocence on my little Harley, I happened into Bentonville, Arkansas, where I took a break in front of what looked like the old five and dime hardware store I grew up with. 

Inside, a very nice old man who looked the part gave me a kind of personal tour. It was a museum disguised as a store. I knew something was amiss when I saw a photo of Gerald Ford shaking Sam Walton's hand. Sam would get the Presidential Medal of Freedom later from George H.W. The same medal that Rush Limbaugh just got.

So we give out medals to those who destroy the very fabric of our society now?? People on Wall Street - investors - make a bet on what will be the next blockbuster. But it's really not a bet. It's a sure deal that an entire industry will be disrupted, which means destroyed, by predatory marketing practices. Along with the industry go unions, local ownership, and knowledge of the sort built up over years of purchasing decisions and getting to know the people. 

Gone now as the cost of doing business is so much else that we once did value. Local eateries. Doctors who make house calls. Packaging that isn't killing the planet. Short hauls from farm to table. Local craft beer. You know, the stuff that's coming back, if you're white and well off. At least we got the wholesalers out of the way. Hmmmm. 

Frankly I think black lives have gotten more and more marginal during my lifetime. Our celebrated progress with civil rights hasn't translated into main street lives simply because those aren't the kinds of businesses that we value anymore. 

When things are created digitally - where there is no marginal cost for each additional widget - mountains of investment will be piled into whoever gets the most eyeballs. The losses equal the mountains upside down until the existing players are fully destroyed to leave a sole monopolist. The monopolist is never guilty of the syndicate-style behaviors which anti-trust regulations were designed for. 

These are all nice and mostly white and mostly male youngsters who want to hit it big. Well sure, sometimes they cut corners and act ruthless. Young blonde women beware. Anyhow, the consumers fall like flies in their belief in falling prices. Those falling prices are themselves a temporary illusion, but life is short. 

And it's not as though Google is providing their services for free! Read Surveillance Capitalism, please! We are not the product. Our behaviors are. We all work for the Man for free now. Click to agree, and Yahoo!!

Eyeballs or ears, it's an easy bet that Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern will get most of them. Pornography powered the Internet. Any hit to our most basic emotional plexus. And this is how we want to engineer our future? Well, I guess it is, now, isn't it?

Plastics, Benjamin, plastics.

You have to imagine a world without plastics to imagine a sustainable future. That's a fact. It's hard, but not impossible, to do. Wooden boats are more fun to own than the plastic sort. And they last longer. But you have to enjoy the actual work to own one. You don't need toxic paints - water based or oil - when you can use linseed oil and so forth.

Plastic bags were invented as a way to support the industry which would otherwise have been too expensive for the car companies. That's a fact. Black lives keep getting reinvented downward from slavery to jail (Watch 13th please!) so that we can have our capitalism and eat it too.

This is no way to live, people. We have to bring our economy back down to earth, and use the digital stuff to compute optimal infrastructures according to the data from our now fully instrumented planet. Sure, we need to have the entertainment side - the plastic baggies - to support that overhead, but it's already a done deal.  We just have it all upside down and backwards again is all.

Digital and plastics are fine in small quantities, so long as we pay up front for all their externalities. Short of that, bakelite is pretty good. Natural rubber and steel. Stuff that requires skilled workers to maintain. Writing on paper.

We will always require good writers. My apologies. I can fix a lot of things, but I don't seem to be able to fix my writing. Sorry!

New Man!

I fit right in among the blasted working class at JJ's House of Breakfast, where the special just went up from $.99 to $1.55. Where everyone looks a bit worn down, and propped up by canes and walkers and artificial joints they make fun of right out loud.

Yeah, right, just like I used to fit in with the biker crowd when I rode my Harley. But still, the food is great, and I learned a thing or two about how real people use their iPhones (people there don't worry about who is overhearing, plus the guy had a hearing aid and just naturally spoke up).

And I sure did look as though I need some medical appliance too; barely able to get up from the table to pay my bill for "four thousand and ninety five, and how did you like your aches and breakin?". Maybe it was "broken and aches?". Some kind of East Indian humor translated effectively enough into English.

That was after arriving late to the dentist. They weren't happy with me, who is also late with payment on my crown-tooth appliance. My rent, my health insurance, my . . . well the list does go on. But my smile is clean, and I got to hear all sorts of new and updated stories.

Maybe like my favorite pair of chimney sweeps, the one seeing his partner's face all black who goes to wash it, and the other not bothering to, since his partner's face looks clean. I can't remember the moral of the story, unless it was something about look in the mirror before you start judging others, but everyone there at JJ's looked as though they had just gotten out of bed, which made me self-conscious about my unkempt halo of tendrils just this side of bald.

My favorite Italian barber, whose memory is gone, but who still remembers how to cut hair and give a really good head massage, is closed on Wednesday, so I went a few doors down the map of Sicily to discover that Vito comes in a pretty close second. Hence New Man!

Well, except I can't move.

I listened to a little bit of NPR's take on the American Dream, which makes a guy feel pretty OK with all the mess-ups of the second half of the twentieth century. Regan cleaning up after LBJ's overreaching. Now Obama can clean up after Reagan's. It's all good.

Well, OK, it's not all good. But there's plenty of reason to believe one way or the other, you know left-right, red-blue. Sometimes I just wish people wouldn't get all exercised about it. Then we could find some way down the middle which wasn't just a useless compromise. Political compromise doesn't end up in the middle so much as in the muddle of pleasing no-one except the ones already in power, who wield protectionist threats against the ones already in office.

OK, now where was I? I started this the other day, and have moved many miles in the meantime. Good thing I got my hair cut, because I got called in for an interview. My back is calmer. The house has yet to close, but the boat also has yet to move.

Here in Buffalo they issued dire Lake Effect snow warnings just as I was headed out of town to my favorite tire shop back near my house to replace my baldys. You really shouldn't drive in Buffalo on bald tires when the snow is wetly flying. But I circled the neighborhood, and decided that they were doing OK. Heart in throat, I made it beyond the city limits, where, of course, the sun was shining and the roads were dry. We do live under a cloud here.

Under deadline of the tireshop, I did manage to clean out the house entirely about 2 hours East of here - now only the garage and boat remain. My apartment is piled with debris, and no place to put it, but I've gotten pretty good now at letting go of stuff.

I'm getting better at detaching myself also from any emotional relation to money, and just imagine some skinnier person excited with my nice clothes from yesteryear. Or surplus kitchen gadgets. Or electronics. Shoes, coats, furniture galore.

And with a little time to muse, I'm struck with how all money, just like the corn sweetened food we're killing ourselves with, has become primarily a token for emotions. We eat, it seems, to fill an emotional gap. And money stands in for other kinds of insecurity. We're afraid to leave lousy jobs, because we might not be able to afford getting sick. Talk about a vicious cycle! Eat sick work eat.

There's no such thing as enough money, because we could easily be without a job. The "system" seems to like it that way, because it leaves us willing to do most anything. I think sex trafficing makes a pretty good metaphor for how we're treated; there should be no real surprise that slavery is still alive and well in these United States. We demonize and dehumanize so many categories of people now as "illegals". Especially, come to think of it, the sex offenders. Go figure.

And it does seem to me that profit margins now are all - I'm being metaphorical - just reflections of gaming the system. When prices relative to value keep dropping - whether because of outsourced labor to China or the relentless pace of Information Tech's zipping ever faster - it's really hard to know what a fair price really is.

You end up being stuck trusting the brand names, but even there - Dell being the best example - there is no such thing as a model designation which sticks. The parts can change almost literally from minute to minute, and they have so many categories of target market, that it becomes utterly impossible to make apples to apples comparisons among the various flavors of warranty and bundling.

Insurance companies are "forced" now to deny claims or hit you with incredibly rising premiums. The only need test now being your literal ability to roll over and take it. How far up against the wall are you? They have plenty of ways to find out and wear you down along the way.

U-haul very cheerfully refunded their overcharge, by the way. It was a fair arrangement, but took a lot of effort and diligence on my part, not to mention electronic savvy and equipment. I happen to have solicited the labor of a solicitor friend of mine (that's "lawyer" in American, but it was fun to pun) to help with the move, and he suggested I take a picture of the gas gauge. Of course I have a camera on my phone. It shouldn't be this hard and take this many good connections!

But while U-Haul's arrangement with me was logical and fair, they still got the difference between their calculation of their truck's mileage (which you know isn't going to be in my favor) and the way I drive (my car has 300,000 miles on it and I just got new tires after having gotten 90,000 miles on the last set, no kidding!) and the fact that I had to overfill the tank to prevent them exercising fiat against my credit card.

Profit used to mean genuine value added, by the manufacturer, the marketer, the wholesaler, the person who brings it to your door. Now it means almost entirely the value of the logo, which you should really read Naomi Klein about if you want to understand it. But you can verify this yourself easily enough by tracing the price compared to the value of, say, Nike shoes.

Those assembly lines in China provide the same product often enough for the branch which gets the logo and the sky high price, and the one which goes to the pirates. I mean, they're not stupid over there.

But mainly, it's the gaming gap between your ability to gauge value and theirs, which is that much more powerful. Stock market manipulation by any other name?

We're happy enough when things are moving in our favor - on the up and up - but just like with my recent house sale and move, if I were to have to pay for this move instead of being able to recruit friends and family and abuse my still (barely) moving body, I would have lost plenty in the sale. I've already lost enough up against the house's value, never mind its replacement cost. Incredibly falling prices indeed!

Now my Cadillac insurance would have paid replacement cost if the house burned down. Well, at least that's what they say, but who knows what Katrina exemption they'd come up with?

There's just something wrong with this picture. The honest wage for honest work for honest price equation is messed up beyond recognition. And if I did have to invoke insurance, that would be the last insurance I'd ever be able to afford. What?

Oddly enough, Information Technology, which is in one sense at the root of all these issues, can also provide the solution. Ain't it ever the case? Like my two chimney sweeps, it all depends on how you look at things.

IT made just-in-time manufacturing possible. It created the miracle of dropping prices, and in its own manufacture by the magic of photorealism in the fab plants, there is no real incremental cost to power once you get the design right. So everyone always wants the newer, especially when it's cheaper.

Which pretty much becomes the way we go about everything. Cars, TVs, clothes-with-logos, and a lot of the time those things keep getting better and better too, because their design is improved by the IT behind their quality control and manufacturing processes.

Now, of course, in the background of everything is endless oil. It transports the parts which are created where the labor is cheapest. It provides the raw material for the plastics which are, not incidentally, always cheaper by the piece the more of it gets manufactured. That's what plastic bags were meant for back in the beginning when plastic was way too expensive for car parts. Never mind it poisons us and never goes away. The price equation has always been way too compelling. If plastic is ubiquitous, it's cheap! Not because it's ubiquitous, like water used to be . . .

OK, let's leave the oil alone for a minute, because you know how easily side-tracked I can get. Still talking about IT now, how can it be the solution to the problem it created? Well, it can be used to get the price right. If we bring in all the externalities, so called, including the true future cost of oil, of parking, of global warming, and all the rest, then we'd all probably drive our cars at least forever and wear our clothes longer than I can. Maybe we'd all even lose weight so we could keep our clothes longer.

Now that's never going to happen for so long as we allow ourselves to be gamed. But in the meantime, we could develop an emotional connection to something other than food or money, if you can imagine that.

I know that the huge bags of rags I've had to throw out with the trash make me feel really really bad. I actually do wish there were some place that could or would use them to make something, anything, of value.

Maybe there is, but I couldn't find it on the Internet, so it might just as well not exist. Hey, the Yellow Pages. Hang on. Nope, just like the Internet, I can only buy or rent new ones for my shop. And I just learned we somehow waste 1/3 of the food we produce, somewhere along the line from harvest to manufacture to serving to trash. What indeed is wrong with this picture?

I still feel sickly guilty if I throw food away. I feel still worse if I throw plastic away, like I had to do when moving. An entire cupboard stuffed only with plastic bags I'd figured I'd find a use for. At least I was able to give away my little 14 year old fishies, or I'd have had to flush myself down with them. And the cats go with the house, thank God.

OK, I don't feel all that guilty. If I did I would always carry reusable bags and not drive so darn much. And guilt is part of the problem anyhow. I feel just plain lucky. I delivered beer kegs as a youngster, which gives me a strong and resilient back now although I have a plastic front tooth which can't be cleaned as the result of throwing a keg into it. Long story, but I'm kind of glad it lasts forever.

I ate dirt as a kid, so I don't have allergies or asthma. Or maybe I picked up hookworms somewhere. And the money parts? Well, I don't think those who love me will let me starve. I'm a lot more worried about stir crazy and loss of degrees of freedom.

I sure would like to see a system where you don't have to be as lucky as I am to have a shot at that whose pursuit was supposed to be a declared right of all mankind. Happiness.

I guess I'm on a sit-down strike against being gamed. I don't mind if you take insurance as a metaphor for socialism (horrors!) or if you take capitalism as a metaphor for solicitation of love (sorry, had to get that in there), what I'd really like to see would be the implementation of an actual system where trued facts would rise to the top of everyone's attention (think science), where gaming would be instantly exposed (think religion) as such, and where American values could be lived in reality instead of fiction.

I'll try for better sense tomorrow. But I've fallen way behind here. I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, and not so much keyboarding. Too bad for you my body needed a break. Or lucky, depending on how you look at it. Time for breakfast.

From not moving to barely moving from the move

I'm certain you neither want nor need to hear about this, gentle reader. But there really ought to be a statute of limitations on bodily exertions and requirements to move premises without the funds to do so. I should really have simply executed a sit-down strike, which is all I've got since I'm not a violent person no matter how outraged I become.

But it's easy enough to score some Vicodin (r) from among the oversupplied. (I'd thrown mine out years ago, after taking one course so that I could work through some broken leg pain) It's easy enough to rally. And I'm not dead yet, although I wasn't sure there for a while, with endless shelves of books remaining in the U-Haul (r) and zippo (r) energy remaining in my sore and beaten body.

So, now begins the endless process of unpacking and more winnowings. Meantime, I discover that a few words of mine have stirred up a hornets nest among the right wing of the family. Remaining silent and being thought a fool is ever the better part of valor, but I'm the genuine article - a fool - and couldn't keep my yap shut. Good thing I was absent to defend myself this time, since I'd a stuck it in deeper.

But really, I don't think the right wingers should be both fanning the flames of fear of "death panels" at the same time that they are preaching personal responsibility. It's not rationing we need. Just simple rationality, which, like the smart grid, would allow good decisions to be made on the basis of good information devolving to the point of decision. The doctor and the patient. Who should not be adversaries in this match, the way that I am with U-Haul, say, or the drug companies, or the purveyors of death however striped.

You know at U-Haul they warn you that it's easy to reverse the F and E on the fuel gauge, so that you don't get dinged for thinking you've sent it back 3/4 full when you really sent it back 3/4 empty. And then they give you the contract saying it's 3/4 full and you believe them, until you discover they've made the mistake they warned you about. And you feel like you've just been flim-flammed.

Shouldn't they really send the truck out with a full tank so you don't have to be gamed on the return anyhow? Where they reserve the right to ding you if it's under, such that you have no choice but to overfill as some kind of insurance against what they could do to you? Not to mention the insurance they sell you in some very vague distinction from the kinds of protection rackets which have been illegal for quite a while now. The implication being that you might just be bankrupted without it, so you pay the carefully calibrated fee. They've got you over the barrel.

I remember loving my windproof Zippo back when I was young and immortal and thought that smoking was a nice way to spite the world. I don't remember any drugs working for me though, except the kind that are really cheap and therefore must be controlled. Once when my appendix burst on its way out. Everybody I know wants to push drugs on me though. And they get angry when I suggest that they might be subject to the advertisers' placebo effect of oversupply. Well, I'd get angry too, but I still demand my liberty to just say no.

And I'm too tired now to think. Too tired to write, but I have this obligation going. Today I received maybe five gentle emails about how after much careful consideration, no, in the end, they won't be able to take the old sailboat I'd offered up for free. Still, I feel mildly abused, to be the object of dreaming battled out with sensible spouses back at home across some dining room table.

My friends offer now to subsidize the boat's move, since they have fond memories too, but I think that what's on offer is a kind of shared ownership, which - as in the case of love too come to think of it - can never work with an old wooden sailboat. The awareness while under way requires an intimacy, a familarity with each of the particulars, which is at the very least unlikely when the work is delegated.

You can't sail a wooden boat the way that most people drive now; almost as if the airbags were part of the calculations, in just the way that legal transgressions are part of the calculations of most successful businesses. It's the profit margin for insurance companies, and credit card companies, not to mention the porn which provides the profit margins for online dealings. Right wingers should get a clue about such things. They make their money denying claims they're obligated to pay, just because they get away with it from a significant number of us. They make their money on late fees. They're gaming us. I'm tired.

Lots of people make scant consideration for bounding deer when they crowd you on country roads; for saturated traffic, and things which weren't repaired right. But here I am repeating myself - I'm pretty certain I've made that identical observation before, now buried beneath my energy to search for it.

And I cannot even cook my dinner until I unearth the things still buried in boxes around the small apartment. So, I've gotta go, but I'll be back. Well, unless the bald tires don't make it to the credit-card shop, since we've had our first real snow this morning. Let's see, together with my still unpaid dental crown which comes due tomorrow or they won't clean my teeth, that makes a dollar three eigthty left after the house closes at the end of the week, plus there's the cost to move the boat . . . well the happiness I feel. As they say on that credit card ad, Priceless!

The End

I just re-read my "In the Beginning" screed, and realize that I've become a broken record. Not a huge surprise, that. But still, there are only so many ways you can say the same thing, and I don't seem to be getting any closer to what I'd hoped I might be able to do here.

I'm not even sure I remember what it was anymore. Except a glimmer, an in-love kind of sense that if I would just write and write and write, then I might find myself back where I was one night living on my sailboat. Having actually discovered, in writing, something to give me direction and sense and hope.

I still have all the hope I ever did. That someone more literate than me, for instance, will be able to pick up my thread and make more sense than I can.

But I woke up last night to the cruel surprise I'd been, so unwittingly, waiting for. That it never has been me whose story has been writing itself across my life. That my boat was never a cocoon from which I ever could emerge a butterfly. That metaphors like that can only leave you fallen from flight into artificial light which burns because it's way too close to be real.

I myself am the cocoon, the husk, the lifeless word-woven tent within which an abstract idea has taken shape. And I don't even think the word "idea" has any sense, so now what am I to do? It's no idea at all, it's just another bundle of words, just like a formula in physics, but without the math.

And without the math, there's no way in heaven or hell to get to where every thinking person must agree. Not that I'm asking for any leaps of faith here. I'm not even asking that you look within yourself to see if you can feel what I have felt as a way to true this bunch of words. What I am trying to say is much closer to science; just a few words to change the gestalt shape of what it is our progressive sciences have uncovered these last brief centuries.

So, if you were to read me right along, you'd see it too. No tricks. Not like stupid Scientology screeds which are only massive P.T. Barnum tractatuses. No Biblical tales whose true believers now do more harm to any possibility of faith than good was ever done before. No Mormon protectionist scheme.

But I can't quite make it readable. Or at least not here.

The hardest things to learn are those which first require unlearning. Somewhere somehow, even if only by omission, we were all taught the divisions of nationality, race, and religion. And so, in setting out to discover those marvels, we've made us all the same now. And protesters against the wall are blown up or blow themselves up for being so stupid as not to want to be like us. We Americans were taught that these are our shores. We Christians were taught that ours is the only trued God. There seems to be a lot of that going around.

And in the end, folks like me, scientifically minded, become cemented in the one sure thing, that the only reliable certainty is doubt. That there is and always will be suffering in the world, as there always has been among us beasts.

But we humans may at least aspire to more, and science is our compass.

What are we to do then, except to continue the endless struggle to uncover whatever secrets are left in the world around us? Hoping against hope that someday really soon we will have found that powerful key, to unleash something as powerful as nuclear energy, but without the fallout. That somehow, along with it will come enough raw surplus that we can make every human life OK again, and never need to leave anyone on the outside of our fences. You know, unless that's where they want to stay.

We hope that we will find something that powerful, that much stronger than the locomotives which still seemed to help us out despite all the corruption along their way to getting built. Something also to put a stopper on the need for bombs at all. So that it will overwhelm the greedy among us, perhaps by just making it look silly to still be wanting more when you can so easily have whatever you want beyond your wildest dreams.

As if it doesn't look pretty silly already.

I think it's way past time. A world so tamed that all the beasts only occupy some plastic menagerie with labels is no world at all. Like Noah's arc and no receding ever of the flood. Wasn't there a movie about that recently? Even Christian types liked it, I have on high authority. Wall-e.

There must be some way we can all agree.

But I will call my journey ended. This one. Who knows now what's in store for the "real me". What odd jobs I can take or which will take me.

Because there's really only one kind of memory which endures. That's the kind which comes from unlearning, either crazy notions that you were schooled in, or the crazy ones you came up with on your own. And once you do, you can't go back, no matter how much you'd like to.

No matter how much you'd like to believe in Santa Claus again. No matter how much you'd like it if there really were a personal God. No matter how comfortable you've always felt in the certainty of your doubt.

Once you grow beyond those things, there's no going back. Ever. And I'd thought, silly me, that there could or would be some way through writing, to get at least one other soul to see what I can see.

Chasing, chasing after some perfect encapsulation of that trued set of words. And looking back I see that I can't do any better. It still must look like an hallucination to you.

So there you go!

And off I go. The fire I've kept going for many weeks now won't catch this morning. But I think it will be warm outside. So, what the hell, eh? No sense staring at a screen all day.

But I have to leave you with a wink. Because who knows, I might be back. I never seem to be quite as good as my word.

This is the Day

My Day. This is my day. I woke up an hour early, squandering the extra hour I was granted yesterday at the close of silly "daylight savings." I crunched across the frozen grass, facing the full moon, overhung by twinkling stars which would not be flooded out. I gathered in my load of firewood, and now the house is warm again.

Outside, toward the road from my garage, is the cocoon from which I molted over 25 years ago now. My old wooden boat which has sat under tattered cover these last 6 or 7 years. I'd thought that I could or would find the time to complete its reconstruction. But my work days grew overlong, and my weekends were full of shuttling daughters back and forth to their weekday home in Buffalo nearly two hours away by car.

Eventually, the ambition was worn away, and now I would really like only to give the boat away. Craig's List, that beautifully primitive site, brings me surprising numbers of passionate wooden boat enthusiasts, but I fear none of them will take my burden from me. Perhaps my passionate descriptions of this boat's qualities, which I want them to have for free, are that far too improbable. I fear I shall have to hire someone with a chainsaw.

And I still do remember living aboard well into the coldest winter on Connecticut's record. Waking to my own frozen breath, and racing then to get the tiny coal stove cheering red again before the stiffening pain in fingers and toes would overwhelm me.

Sometimes the wind would reverse the flow down the far-too-short chimney stack, and I would be choking from impossible fumes. Sometimes the early arriving mechanic at the boatyard would run down the dock to see which boat had caught fire at the root of all that black smoke. Most mornings I would win the battle, and then sit back with rough percolated cowboy coffee and another unfiltered cigarette to start my day.

I loved the rocking. I hoped for storms. There was a small propellor suspended under my hull to keep the frozen Connecticut River at some remove from this eggshell which protected my tiny envelope of warmth. It sent up unfrozen water which gave my sleep a gentle burbling rocking even without any wind.

That was when I started to write. One day when the ice was broken up by howling winds and rain, and I had to go out in bare feet to push the block away that had wedged itself between my boat and the much larger one next dock. I still remember standing on my bowsprit, the rain so hard that it ran over my toes on deck. I remember waking up.

I was at some limit then as now, beyond which there had to be something different. I went below and started writing. I didn't stop for very many hours. I didn't stop until I'd actually solved, through writing, the puzzle in my brain. I hadn't expected that at all. I hadn't even been aware that I'd been praying.

Poor Peter, awakened at maybe 3 AM. I'd thought somehow it was a more reasonable hour, but he could see that I needed in. Magically, he set me up with bed and word-processor; one among a very few then on the planet I'm pretty sure.

And then I went slowly back to sleep across the years of marriage and teaching and a little bit of leadership. Very little. I knew that what I'd discovered was the very same thing that all writers discover only in their writing. I spent a fair amount of time then, reading. I knew that I had and have none of that talent which true writers have. I am more the scientist, but the burden to write out in scientific prose that thing which I discovered was still further beyond me than the more artistic style of writing I still so much admire.

I have been that confident that someone else more talented and harder working, would express in better words than those I had found to cobble together, what it still is that needs to be said out loud.

But now, here I am, still absurdly holding on to the shuckings from my awakening. You know, I've sailed that boat in storms and wind which make me shudder still though they didn't at the time. I've had all the life-long pleasures that so many toil after, and feel that they were all granted to me, very nearly without cost at all. This makes me feel blessed, and hardly proud. OK, I'm proud beyond words of my two daughters, but I credit their Mom with that.

And here I am again, without ability to carry on in my current manner. And in the meantime, as if for my very own purposes, this weblike cloud has cocooned our very earth which promises also to transform into its butterfly promise.

And though there are many many authors now, and filmmakers and poets and musicians and more who would present the world and do that very same insight which I had that day, they present as does my friend and former student at his Subversive Theatre, to a diminutive audience of those few who've already seen their light. Still Pete Seeger strolls along with banjo, awaiting the moment serenely when his fingers cannot pluck.

But I search and cannot find my simple insight. I have even had search engines built for my very purpose, and there is nothing out there saying this terribly simple thing. So I must and shall pick back up my thread, and try it all over and over again.

This is the day the cocoon breaks apart, my dearest reader. This is the day when light pours through that crack. (this is the first sunny day the whole darned summer, it almost seems) This is the day, entering into winter, when the peepers perversely sing because there is no more time to wait for the springtime warmth.

I have nothing other than crudest words. My tools are poorly made and cheap. My boat also should not have sailed this long (take her, please!).

But before that large Hadron collider wastes its breath, I must tell you again and again and again that there is no further need to look in that particular direction for more answers. I have no opinion, by the way, about what will get discovered when that collider finally runs. I only know what already has been.

I have no desire to pull any rugs out from under world-class scientists who are my truest heroes all. I have a far simpler desire, to outline what has already resolved itself into my view, so that you may see it too.

This is not some new conjuring from nothing of something there only in my designing mind. I have no inventive powers. This is a paradigm shifting, properly, which will place into better perspective all the scientific labors which we still must bring to bear on life's issue. And I'm very afraid that there is not a moment to lose.

But I am no longer terrified.

The thing is simply this: that mind and matter both must be seen to coexist, neither one nor the other taking precedence.

There has been much misconstruing of the physics of quantum electrodynamics (I've always wanted to throw that term around, but quantum mechanics would work just as well) to promote or refute the notion that the measuring mind has actual impact on what gets measured.

That's wrong. That's a misconstruing of the problem of Schroedinger's cat. It is not our perception which collapses the probability wave. It is the rubbing together of all such waves, such that they already exist, these supposed particles or strings, in the conspiring together of so unthinkably many of them. One alone would fill and be the entire cosmos. But one alone could exist only in some mind.

We have brought our minds to the very brink of abstraction now, which is itself an enactment of insanity, to determine what in essence, minimally, must be the smallest unindividuated parts to the cosmos in which we find ourselves. We hope and pray that we do not find a mere figment of our imaginings. That we are not left hopelessly in charge of our reality. Even as so many of us still fight to take over God's prerogatives. Especially those who say they worship at that Name.

To be sure, I am no believer in any God that can be named. So don't get worried that I would like to spring on you some new religious fanaticism. I am talking purest science here, of the sort which requires no new experimentation, but which, in proper theory, resolves all the data which we already fully have in our possession.

This is the day when I must call the realtor, the lawyer, the water test company and order up my storage pod, so this is the day beyond which I will have no more time to write.

Just as on that day those many years ago now, when I had run through all my money. When I had spent perhaps a week with seemingly terminal diarrhea and vomitting, sleeping in the hull in its cradle up on land in the boatyard among all the other abandoned husks. It was toward the end of the summer and everyone else with viable boats had been sailing the full long season. I would sneak out each night to empty my body's stinking load.

And in the morning white-haired Nick, whose hair had turned that way one single night in Viet Nam, would climb my ladder to see if I was still breathing. He would later agree to come out sailing, and I consider it my proudest moment that, while heeled over with waves coming in over our rails, he never did panic although he'd said he would.

And then finally, they nearly dropped it, lowering my boat into the small creek from maybe 50 feet in the air, or so it seemed. The old crane had a clutch worn shiny, and it would slip and catch, in mockery of my heart. The water poured in through the stuffing box which I had neglected to tighten.

And then we motored out, Dad and I - he had driven to Connecticut from Buffalo from some truly strange compulsion, since there was only a shaking head in response to my ridiculous project - to pass under the low railroad bridge as the tide was reversing its flow, giving us scant time to race out into Long Island Sound.

At full tide, there was no room for even the boat to pass under that bridge. And as I watched my long wooden mast being lowered into that hull, there were four or five boys in line along the railroad bridge, waiting for the train's whistle to test their courage. And still today I see that final boy's face, whose toes still touched the tie beyond the moment when he could force his body to be more horizontal. The whistle would have drowned his screams. Gravity won, thank goodness.

That is the face I wear today, internally.

When I first raised my jib, I had to crawl on my belly out the bowsprit. I later learned to stand with but a finger touching the forestay, bounding into whatever weather, the boat and I all one.

And Dad will soon be moved to a memory unit in the home where he now lives. He wonders "now, where did you go to school" though only weeks ago he would brag to my Mom's mortification, about how many times I'd dropped out of Yale. And Mom finally wants nothing more to do with him, which is her triumph in the end. He was that verbally abusive, and bound her to his money.

So, this will be my last salvo for a little while. This desperate claim that I have something to say that you should want to hear.

What I have to say is trivially simple. There is no need to look for arcane mechanisms in the brain to prove the quantum implications of our thinking. I'm not saying it wouldn't be interesting, and that I won't want to read about them when they're found.

But already we can understand that emotions are real and not just some distraction from what's hard. Already we can admit that these are the true organizing principle to what it is that we can resolve with our instruments, no matter how cleverly or massively or orbitally deployed. No matter how much energy we inject into their production.

These emotions are what turns our attention this way or that, and not, by far, some merest accident. Because at the farthest remove from our control is always accident. That's what we mean by random.

But what gets held close, what informs our dumb and stupid matter to something approaching life that we can love, that must be informed by something better than accident. Something more than random.

When we destroy the life by too much design, it will inevitably leave us. When we approach it with love, it will return that love with the same reward which my old wooden sailboat has returned to me, while underway and powered by just this freest wind.

So, I am done with bodily pleasures. I have no more need to smoke or drink or eat the bloody stuff (though, trust me, I won't refuse it when it's offered, well, except for the cigarettes - they're just gross). I'm done with passions directed toward things. I'm reentering the world as naked as they day when I was born, and born  and born again.

Hello World (I've always wished I could be that much of a programmer too, come to think of it)!

You see, the thing is that you've already responded to me, dear reader, and so I don't feel all that alone any more. I'm OK with how much longer it still must take to get it right. I'm pretty sure I can make my simple argument hold water. And then we can go sailing, you and I, across the ether.

Which also, by the way, doesn't really exist, as has been proven now over and over again, except in the mind as blankest conceptual space between all the hard stuff. It's the emotional connections which count to set our direction, and not only the magnetic compass.

Resurrection

Resurrection is the hardest part of the Christ story to get one's head around. Why so extravagant? Why so inconceivable? It's paired, quite magically, with the virgin birth as those things which are at once perfectly beyond the reach of science to touch, and which present such great taboos when science does approach.

There's cloning on the one end. Frankenstein monstering. And at the other a kind of fever dream of robots or zombies or uploaded souls. Still with the full knowledge that these could never approach the absurdity of Christ's resurrection, and before that His virgin birth. 

And people do aspire to believe these things, quite "literally," or so that term does get abused. These, of course, are people who by definition can't read, and so you're left to wonder what literal could possibly mean here. You can find it in the Left Behind series, which does earnestly and without apparent effort that which Saturday Night Live can only accomplish with heroic labor. You find it in Ray Kurzweil's absurd celebrations of man's dominion; a scientist overcome with himself and the manic dream of creating the one thing nature never will endure - a geometric expansion which sustains rather than destroys life. 

I say, imperiously, that they can't read, so we'll have to wonder just what reading is along the way toward resurrection and creation out of nothing. Let's just say, for now, that to read is reliably to place a set of words in their proper context. A joke occurs along with the jarring of words quite out of context. A joke on oneself when words are misread and contexts traded. People lounging on chaise, say, or when liberal education is thought to relate to books and liberaries (sic). We all do this, and manage to endure, despite the ridicule of our betters. 

But when you extrapolate full out, you gain a sense of just how difficult reading really is, and how absurd such phrases are as "absolute truth" or "faith".  And how unlikely, at the fringes, that anyone really can read another soul. Or in my case, that I can even read myself. 

So "Left Behind" and the "Singularity is Near" are cosmic pratfalls among people who simply don't know how to read. They are those roobs who fall for the magic trick and then want to buy it for use at home. "Disappear your wife" in five simple steps. 

But I guess the Jesus story endures because it does provide, somehow, that limit. That end beyond which there must and can only be God. A cosmic joke for sure, but also a true endpoint to what we can and should and will ever read and true against what can only be very personal and limited experience.

Science provides a trueing along the way, of readings we must share. I mean this ever so simply, as to describe those things, like knowing that the ground underneath our feet will support us, on which we must agree. By abstractions to the max in our mathematical descriptions, and reductions to the very most economical structures, we seem able to arrive at many many understandings (English is so punny - but not, I assure you, as much as is Chinese) which have that wondrous quality to be universal.

These understandings describe the same reality in any cultural setting, and presumably across the cosmos, though we may not be quite ever finally confident in our ability to translate these to technological controls. There's so much confusion between these two pursuits, especially now that we have become so overcome by our own technological prowess, that we have almost forgotten the science. Scientifically now, our wonder at ourselves will ecologically if not by geometric release of nuclear fissions or fusions (same thing monkey boy) only destroy us.

There can be no question now that the scientific enterprise not only did not but could not have developed in some other culture from that of the Christian European West. Post modernists can and do go fuck themselves, but this trivial observation (that science is culturally grounded) takes nothing from the universality of scientific conclusions, properly made. (It's the "properly made" part which makes those post modernists right almost all the time, but their language is just so damned annoying, and itself always a parody of what they rail against).

So faith starts there, with feet on ground, and finally gets rendered up to what it is we confront in contact with another human being. How much can or do we know that person? Or a book. Or perhaps an entire ideology (what a word, that one!). God?  I think not! (therefore I am)

It's never so trivial to trust that to which we're attracted in another soul. They might turn out robotic, like that sociopath next door. Or we might discover that we're turned off by their feet when we do finally get in bed together, and then the thrall is done for. There's divorce and much worse utter foolishness to pay for these mistakings.

But hanging back from ultimates, many many friends if not lovers do prove true. I guess because the expectation is so much less. The navigations and negotiations so intermittent; the in and out from other's lives so much less quickened. And friendship is capped by that fine taboo at end of day that you never ever will or would get in bed with one another.  Sure, in a pinch, you might for survival, or even intimately resuscitate, mouth to mouth. But if there were a quickening there in bed, I think the friendship must end, don't you? Or blossom. 

But it is that impossibility in principle which defines friendship at its limits, and enables a kind of constancy. Don't worry chum, I'll never stop at your home for more than a few weeks at a time, along the road to somewhere else. But we'll share better times than you will ever have with your wife - that much is certain. And our souls will come much closer and merge more fully simply because there is that boundary to define, contain, and shape our perfect pairing. Nothing lost, but geometric expansions and progressions gained in that most true conspiring. There need never be any subordination at all. There is perfect parity, and no struggle between and among, say justice and relating, the male and female roles, however sexed.

But the ultimate faith, of love, of marriage, in God, just for a few examples. That one is a leap so long that only fools attempt it. The rest of us find ourselves pinnacled and without place to go but down down down, and still along the way there has never been worse terror than to lose oneself that way. It would be so utterly foolish. So like the man who would dive right through the ground. Buckaroo Bonzai!!!! And away. . . . 

I must and do confess that I am terrorized by the act of sex. Not quite in the sense you think. I am not nerdy sexless, nor timid in the act, and would some safely aloof former partner quite allow it, there are no limits to what I wouldn't like to try (hohohaha!). None. But it's the implications terrify me. They are so much forever. Not just disease, but possibility for hurt and misunderstanding, and fallings out, no matter what the interval. That moment is sheer terror. That aloof moment where you realize that yes, it was only physical. Or chemical. Or instinctual, and in any case not forever or even a day. Or far worse, that the deal you'd meant for a moment won't ever stop. Ever. The deal does not get any simpler, young friends, as you grow older.

***

In that interval right there, gentle reader, in service to writing's worst enemy (necessity for taking a dump) and on the toilet reading the New York Times while I still can (yes, it was on my phone, OK?? So, put me in jail already! Throw away the key, I both read on the toilet, and don't pay any attention to internet ads. At all!) before its also necessary demise, I am saddened almost beyond reason to learn of the death by suicide of Sylvia Plath's son sweet Nick sweet son. I know nothing of either of them, yet enough to understand the dimensions of this tragedy. And I must apologize to you that I have been diverted from this writing in and by the act of writing species of love letters toward human contact of the sort which terrifies me more, apparently, than to be alone forever and anon. You just aren't there, you see. I have not yet, and despair I ever will, that kind of faith. That there is a reader.

But I still do make this pledge: That my writing and living and direction will never tend in that particular direction. I will never make that secret pact to end on some high note because I fear my ability to endure the lower lows. It is to life and love and light alone that I direct myself. Alone. All one.

***

Now where was I? That faith which is so hard to conjure. I do actually believe, you know? That in extremis, when finally I must leave my job because there is no more room for me there. Up against that wall where, let me now enumerate, love is not possible across the taboo of workplace, though that's the least of it. Where faith is superstructured by the only living remnant of medieval monarchy to outlast enlightenment (though I actually have no problem with that, it's just that this particular institution's perversions remind me much too much of the Sadean version). I cannot live in public any longer what I mock so hard in private. 

And I will surely never trust myself in love again, after once tripping over my own feet on the way toward what became a lifetime of indentured servitude, and another time in pursuit of what never was in the first place attainable. These twinned poles represent for me all that is possible in the falling out from sense and good friendship's underpinnings. I retreat now and again for long intervals into some sort of mild cocooning, and I'm not even sure that it's time yet to molt again and again and again. 

But I do trust - have faith even - that it's the right time now to refuse any more work or love in which I am not quite myself. Extravagant though that is, and I'm not after "authenticity." I want only to be just one me, cliched and ordinary dull though my character might prove to be.  I must strap myself to whatever mast I have (it's rotting) or can find, to resist temptations for comfort and repose and six figure rescue from the necessity to disburse a lifetime's debris of bicycles, boats, books and papers papers papers, though these I can and do and have uploaded to that proprietary cloud whose stewardship I perversely trust so much more than tangibles in my possession. 

I refuse, I do, any further servitude in maintenance of my slack body and it's sprawling messy dishevelled extensions. (The real estate lady demurred a bit when she came for a visit, that perhaps we can start showing "next week" after I manage to dispose of a few more things which make it difficult to navigate the space. Not so bad, please, as those left behind houses of demented souls having pathways through piles of newsprint and garbage to some inside nest you can't conceive.) Just the look of a house vacant all weekends because in the end, my remaining at-home daughter just cannot endure teenage occupancy alone with Dad in the wilderness. That is not a sentiment I care to contest. At all. And so I write only weekends, apartmented in the city. Wondering where and when and how I'll find either the time or energy to wash the windows and overall brighten up my latest silly womb with but dim view. My house in the country I now must leave, in preservation of what time I've left to write my way out of this ethereal paper bag.

So, that's the faith I have. That at this post-half-century turning point, I have become proof against ever taking another day job act. Against ever again so energetically pursuing love that I shave my beard and trim my hair and my rhetoric too and wear other more presentable clothes, or God help me, endure the indignity of a younger babe so easily mistaken for my daughter. These things make me just cringe anymore. I cannot but be myself. It's less the finding of my authentic self, than the drooling paunch of no more choices, but I'll take it.

Sure, it does help that my hormones no longer rage. Not quite so old as "brother" Cohen, I still have no real regrets for leaving that garden I never did quite enter and therefore won't have to leave. It was only ever thorny for me. (Well, OK, so invite me in and we'll just test my resolve)

It helps also that my mind is aged by cigarettes and wine and never enough time nor energy to read the things I really should. Not near so much capacity in dissipation as say, that self-same Leonard Cohen, but I feel the same dimming he talks of but does not show. The structures for mind's youthful blooming recede, and I haven't the energy, even in principle, to elaborate just what I mean when I talk about particle physics or Chinese poetry or other pursuits on whose trail I once was hot.

I doubt I will ever have that energy again, though I guess it's not impossible. I mean, if someone were to pay me for it, I surely would re-systematize my knowledge. But the university is not open to my paltry accomplishments. I don't own those degrees of freedom, and even if I did I'm just not so sure that there wouldn't be still more constraint there than on my own; with political pathways up, and narrative trueings so much more constrictive and less open to surprise than even the most extreme cases of anti-global-warming-conspiracy-of-dunces-theorizing.

I must remain unbounded. Promethean in my reach if surely not my grasp. But I am so lost with torch burning down and noplace yet to alight my spark.

You see, these folks are quite right in at least one reductive sense. (I had dinner finally just the other day for the first time after almost seven years with my good friend and ultra conservative Catholic neighbor, and had to endure, though it cost me absolutely nothing in good humor, his fulminating rhetoric about the global warming hoax) Approaches to scientists will automatically fall flat and dead at that point where you wish to implicate them in their research.

I do believe that there is one most false branch to science; cosmology. It is there alone that science cannot go, but demands to still. It is there alone that science will and does and has, would it but wake up to that fact, find that it is measuring only the mind of the observer.

Oh, I hate these personifications, as though "science" were some "them." Science does not "say" anything, and scientists, surely at the limit of cosmology, are so unlikely to have read the stuff they really need to comprehend before they peer off into the readings out from instrumentation at least 17 miles in diameter (was it circumference???) and declare any findings.

I do know from hard experience, that it is equally difficult to talk to - just for example now - a disbeliever in global warming, about science, as it is to talk to a scientist about the end(s) of science. They are simply not prepared for that particular surprise, so invested must they be in towering edifices of accumulated understandings and trued arcane verbiage and degrees of distinction from everything and everyone here below in the muck of direct experience.

So I was and remain chastened now, this Easter morning, by last night's meeting with my former student. I'd tried to teach him Chinese once so long ago (though I was and am a fraud, I did have and could teach, at least, perfect pronunciation, and build a good foundation, demonstrably, for more native ministrations), and then as headmaster, by the skin of both our teeths, to get him some degree. 

He surprised me to tell that he never did earn any single degree. Not high school. Not college, though he often teaches theater there. And I am chastened, not just because I feel so lucky proud to have pulled what degrees I own back from the temptations, always, to chuck it all (it took three rough passages through Yale before they let me out. Sanctioned my outing, is more like it). I am chastened because he has become so fully my teacher now. And because my failure was not his.

I came to him for help to stage my "Womb with a View" (working title, please) monologue. And he, upon only the very briefest hearing, shot back authors and plays and readings so erudite that I had to beg him please to email the names, since I had no hope of recall. 

I held his door last night - the house was absolutely packed with only one last seat for me. I only snoozed a moment this second time to witness his terrific play. I think I snoozed because I felt the beginnings of some relaxation to my quest. There will be those who know so much more than I do, can help to true what words I have. There will be help along the way. 

And so I think it time for me to de-cocoon once more. I don't know about spreading any wings of Icarus or surfactin-stimulated butterfly, as was the manner for my little peanut daughter to survive her own way-too-early escape from her mother's womb; butterfly wings and kisses. It must be the same substance. For my daughter, at two pounds she was very lucky that her mother's doctor missed the textbook case, and left her and mom both traumatized in the womb so that when she finally was hacked out (it was that bad - I was there), her lungs would not stick together which is what is the worst for preemies.

Lucky for me, I should properly say, since she would be her no matter what had happened, but now she provides me such bright pride and joy and even company. She listens to my words and claims they make sense to her, which is way more than a father ever could deserve, since the obligation is so much the reverse. And she never did try me that way. Always so easy to understand. Such a joy.  So perfectly articulate.

So, it must be this same substance on butterflies' wings, which must get discharged in some precise quickening before the molt. Why cocoons must never be warmed. Why term is at all costs to be allowed before the labor is begun. Why sometimes, with luck, too early de-cocoonings, like even that one for me from boat so long ago, can still be survived provided further artificial incubation. 

For me, all artifice has ended (Well, lash me to some mast, we'll see). Perversely, I will endeavor to refuse all offers of comfort - at least those even where I only have to torque my soul a tiny bit (metaphorical, since I don't have faith now in the literal one) to represent someone else's brand. Not Church. Not government. Not China which does not know herself at all. Not startup internet business even, unless it wants me as I am. I'll whore for anyone, provided the deal is honest. Now there's the rub.

It is only you, gentle reader, that I can or will but also surely must have faith in. It is you must be resurrected here. Your context for some reading. Your willingness to make that effort (I do know that it is extreme, and beyond all reason what I ask) to read. To listen. To watch. To make some sense. Not of me and what I write (don't be a fool!), but of what is now so out there. You really have to be perverse, and bound to rigid stupid absolutist words - I guess simply because you're so afraid that you might be fooled? - not to read it. Right off the web, the wall, the street, the news. Just learn to read is all.

And you, gentle friends or daughters, who must trust that Howie or Dad has not now finally lost his mind for good and ever, and isn't marching off perversely into some chip-on-shoulder spiting of himself. That I will never refuse love when offered, nor to offer it to my full capacity, which might not be very much. But I'll try. I do try. I am very limited is all.

Let's hope it's true what says AARP, that there is life after 50. I sure do hope so. My younger daughter is my very best companion. And yet I want her so much to be free that I hang back criminally from enough guidance. I offer no discipline. She does far too much what she pleases.

But I do, I guess perversely, still have faith that it's the love that counts. Love expressed in seasons turning, a conspiracy of life entire, which guarantees that the moment for the peepers is just the right moment for decocooning. That there is more than just her father to mediate her growth. And that what she needs most from me is more gentle than those stern and fearsome words I got, which still did no good against my own transgressions and fallings short. Though I won't blame them for that. Nor their deliverers. The times were different, is all.

If Dad has lost his mind, he might yet be in good company. There are readings all around (I'll get them shortly by email) which move in the same direction. I guess there might be enough surfactin now that I can fly myself, alone, flittingly, for just a moment before the season turns again. 

I do believe, you see, that there is so much more to life than what can be accomplished alone. That mankind's flight is made of words, though words alone, whether those of science and its instrumental extensions, or the true distilled and very litterary great essence of our greatest minds, cannot describe the flight. For that there must be face to face and much more quickened turnings.

And as my young former student (and now my mentor) did so charmingly wonder, why is it that actual presentations must be lower on some scale than literary readings?  He had become somehow aware that in our past - and I think this is true - those who could read were regarded with suspicion. Those who could read silently to themselves were thought possessed. Out of commerce with where life actually quickened, and where profundity could be found first hand. Only priests were sanctioned to read, leaving witches, demons, perverts and other outlaws as the only other possibilties. More dangerous than revered for what they might know. 

And now this equation is so fully reversed. To where televised presentations cannot, and likely do not, even potentially possess anything near the power of the written word. But why not? Why not YouTube? Why not theater again? Why must it be contained in and by words, this truth we would approach, though never, because it would blind us and melt our wings, quite touch?

Well, because the metaphor is wrong is all. Truth is not a thing can be approached. There is no Omega endpoint to this questing. That's misplaced words. There is no absoluting truth. There is only trueing, and for that we need each other, alive and stimulating and responding and being and here. And there.  Which is neither here nor there, silly reader.

Do I leave you now, alone. Having fallen this far short? Were you expecting some great final revelation through these words? (If I did not doubt it, then I would not dare to write it, surely!) Well, if so, here it is. That punchline I never can remember, or even reconstruct. That final turn of phrase which captures, just right, that moment of apprehension you used to go to Church for. That apotheosis of the Word. Made flesh. Was God.

Well, here, then, it is. Here it is. You'll have to read it all again. And again and again and again and anon. 

There's really nothing more to say, though I will keep trying, poor gentle reader. For life. For love. For my daughters. I will make you pay me, too, since what choice do I have? What choice do you have?

Well, Happy Easter, and I do pray for your resurrection. I really do. Turn off that one-way television. Turn the projector on yourself, and YouTube it to infinite regress. But then please do go outside. It's a beautifuly day to be alive!

Happy Easter, you nonexistent fool you. Happy Easter!

The Final Chapter from 1983

It's Saturday, March 6. I've been staying with friends in Mystic, Connecticut. They've been kind enough to care for me while I am possessed by this writing. They have a word-processor, and I have developed an addiction. I hate the infernal machine, but there is so little time. It really helps a lot, and with patience, it can be trusted. But I have been addicted to the writing. For several weeks I have been doing my time in the desert of words. Not to go outside. And now I have a cold.

I was up before dawn this morning. I couldn't sleep. And I know better than to fight such feelings any more. In the past, when I have journeyed, the single most important rule has been never to return along a route already traveled. That has been a good rule, because it has taken me places I otherwise wouldn't have gone. It's gotten me into plenty of jams, too. I remember being pinned under my five-hundred pound motorcycle on a rocky dirt road that had become too steep. I was swimming in sweat by the time I had the machine righted. But I couldn't go back down.

The road ended at the top of a small hill. It opened into a farm field. The view was spectacular. I don't know what impelled me, but I took off cross-country on my highway motorcycle. It was crazy, but I just refused to return along the path I had come by. It was an exhilerating ride. I remember that the exhileration lasted until I was back on the highway. I had checked over the bike after its minor spill, and when I came to my favorite switchbacks through the woods I was more sure than ever of my connection to the machine. It was a game. The road had become ever more familiar with each new challenge of its dangerous though well paved curves. Each time I was more sure of myself. This time I was one with the bike and the road, and there was no real limit to my speed. I took curves at well over eighty which had been marked with warning signs of thirty-five miles per hour. I certainly wouldn't do it again unless I knew. Another biker saluted me when the road became straight again. He had watched.

And so this morning I discovered the beauty of well-trod paths. As the dawn broke, it was the familiar songs of the familiar birds which stirred my soul most powerfully. And the houses were not an affront to the natural scene. I was reminded of dawns in Canada, away from houses, but this was not deficient. There was only the roar of the distant highway to disturb me. Along which blind men hurl at silly speeds wanting never to return. But here, in Mystic, I watched a seagull circle toward me and away. He had something to say to me. As I watched I knew the pure joy he felt in his movement. Not joy, really, but oneness. When you are a bird, you just rise at dawn. There were lots of stirrings.

As I walked back, the cars were beginning to come alive. I felt a little sad that their life should be so shielded. The seagull's message was open-faced and honest. But the stirrings of human life had its beauty too. And I didn't hate the cars. I was only sad that it would be so difficult to penetrate the armor.

This morning as I rounded a corner in the road and saw the red beginning to show across the harbor, I remembered what one can really see if his heart is open. I was startled as if there were a face in the scene. The tears came to my eyes for the beauty of which I felt so much a part. For the first time in so many years. The utter beauty of the world. A world in which there are other souls. The birds and fishes both willing to give their lives to each other when the time comes because not to is to deny everything. I have seldom felt so moved. It was a natural scene, where man's intrusion too felt natural. Mystic is a pretty town.

But my tears of joy at joining the dawn were also tears of sorrow. I felt the evil of man who is so rapidly eradicating those other souls. My heart truly reached out to all the unsung life of the earth which is suffocating with hardly a cry. I heard the roar of the highway, and I was sad.

It is thrilling to always discover newness. But it can become an addiction. In the end it numbs one toward what is most ancient. I remembered this morning that the soul is stirred more strongly by the familiar than by the new. I remembered that there is no need to be cut-off. Newness is a quality of mind. Under the sun, there is nothing else new.

The birds don't hate when they kill. And they don't thrill when they fly. But they are connected. And it is love that connects them. I felt it. It is the same love that we can feel when we allow ourselves.

I began writing when I changed the quality of my reaction to what was happening around me. I felt summoned. That is simply the feeling that comes when the mind lets go and allows the connection to be made. The stormy morning was welcome because I changed the quality of my reaction because I decided to believe that my life meant something. I was summoned because I summoned myself. It is a circular argument. Don't kid yourself. All good arguments are. Truth has a familiar face. Arguments with a point cause blindness. And a mask over truth is required in defence.

In writing, I have tried to be honest with myself. I had to invent you, the reader, because I had no confidence that anyone would want to read what I would write. But I had to imagine a reader in order to keep me honest. Writing that is too secret only digs a hole for oneself. Words are for sharing. I have written boldly, but not with pride. It is as big a mistake to pretend you are smaller than you are as to pretend greatness. I have tried to be honest.

That is what makes all the difference. And not worrying. As I wrote I began to see the shape of my life. The bright points in my memory began to have a purpose. I had always known that, but I had no confidence to make sense of them. Now I can look at my life -- the real thing and the literary form -- and know what it means. I am finally my own best critic. There is no other critic, no authority, no psychoanalyst, no reader who knows the significance of my life better than I do.

That is true of everyone who is honest. When we erect the wall of lies, we build also a barrier between our conscious mind and the unconscious which more easily makes the connections to what is familiar for all life. There is only one way to make our minds whole, and this is the only moment in history when it is possible to be whole. Words rule the conscious mind, but poets have known how to unlock the barrier and make words meaningful. The rest have used words as weapons or tools for manipulation. Finally, they have become the bulldozers of the fertile earth of our minds which must include our hearts.

But I am as immune as the earth. The earth will die without hatred if we feel we must pierce her skin and draw her life's blood out. And I will die without hatred if the message I bring is too hard to take. But it's all so unnecessary. We've all been this way before. It is not necessary to repeat the mistakes of the past. It is not necessary to remain willfully blind when the mask has been removed.

No-one can know the meaning of your life except you. And you must be honest. I see now that my boat was not another attempt at transcendence of the skin as I had feared. I would laugh at the suggestions of womb-space because they were so obvious. But really, I did have to crawl back in and be reborn into the swirling maelstrom. I had to be shocked into tears from the numb slumber into which my life was slipping. Wy boat has been a womb because only there was I able to shut out the noise -- the conscious voices and the authority. Only there could I ignore the guilt that kept reminding me that I had to make a living. Only there could I remember the connections that make a life. And finally I could become whole and now I must emerge.

When you are whole, the story of your life writes itself. Believe me. I am the man who made you blind by asking you to believe in me. And now I must make you see. There is a way if I can only let go and feel it. This writing is the axe, and I am the woodchopper. I must find the moment. Please don't imprison me for my boldness. No man has authority over any other.

Sometimes the words are enough. Sometimes putting on a mask -- acting like you believe -- is enough to lead you believe. If you really pray earnestly. Don't tell jokes. Don't lie. Just try to be the words.

I was blessed in Chinese with a wonderful teacher. I tried to put what he taught me with what I knew into my graduation essay. It was just passable. But at least I couldn't forget what I'd been taught -- what I'd already known.

I wrote about Li Ho, the "mad/demonic" genius. He was a little out of the classical tradition. But enough in to be remembered as a poet. Some comparisons have been made to Western poets. I wrote about his poetry in terms of the rules of Classical Chinese poetry. These terms aren't found in books, nor taught anywhere else. They are the terms that only my teacher had the nerve to translate properly from the Chinese. He is a bold man.

I believed my teacher, not only out of respect, but because what he said made sense -- complete resonate sense. So I wrote about Li Ho who died of old age when twenty seven, and who broke the rules of Chinese poetry just enough to be considered mad, or demonic. With the help of my teacher, I began to realize the power of his poetry.

In Chinese there are no metaphors. In the canonical, classical language. Believe me, it's true. I didn't make it up. It's not my idea. And yes, there are no ideas either. No Platonic eternal abstracted-from-the-substance ideas. There is no appleness in Chinese. Only apples.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not speaking absolutely or from a position of authority. This is a tendency in the Chinese poetic language that I know to be true because I know that it makes sense. Anything can be translated. Words can be made to read anyway at all. But there is such a thing as mis¬reading. And to translate Western terminology for explic¬ations of Chinese poetry always results in a misreading. Something is always lost.

Sure, the words for things are said to look like things in Chinese, so you don't need ideas. That's not quite the case. The words are abstract symbols. They are simply spatial rather than linear in their arrangement. There are no capitals at the beginning nor periods at the end of a classical Chinese sentence. There is a shape. There is a rhythm. The meanings and the sounds rhythmically cycle with their ebb and flow. The emphasis is on the space and not the line.

Sure, you can find metaphors in Chinese. And if you can't find them you can put them there. It would be an act of translation. The language would still make sense, though something would be missing. The crucial thing. Same with ideas. Anything. Any world can be translated into any other world. It just takes time. And sometimes it's more interesting to notice the differences. Sometimes learning an alien language just to read a poem is worth it when the translation can lack so much. The tendencies in the Chinese classical, and particularly the poetic language are different than those in the West.

Lines point. They point beyond. Beyond the text to where the meaning lies. The ideal realm. God's realm. Where the answers are. Abstraction. Metaphor points. Using what is familiar to point to what is remote. Beyond the text. Beyond life.

Spaces are. There is no progression -- only rhythm. There is change, but it is cyclic. You don't read for the point or for the ending. You read to meet the heart of the writer. Or, if you read the oldest texts, you read to find the heart of the universe. Not just the center. The heart. In Chinese the term for heart is the same as that for mind. Hsin. They didn't used to leave the feeling out of thinking. Until they took to studying the West.

There is Heaven above and Earth below. Man is in the Center. Where Heart is, and Mind. Hsin. But heaven isn't the ideal realm. In Chinese, it's peopled with all Sorts of mortally weak immortals. They act like their counterparts on earth. But for the educated -- literate -- Chinese, though not quite all the gremlins are ever eradicated, the heavens are simply a model of constancy and order. One doesn't look beyond life for meaning. You look for clues in the more constant life of the heavens. So that the maelstrom may be ordered. Chaos made still for a while.

Words are wen in Chinese. Sounds like "one". Heaven has its wen. Earth has its wen. Wen is pattern. It is not separate from the substance on which the pattern is manifest. Words don't point to the ideal. They don't mean anything beyond themselves. They are the pattern through which order is manifest. They indicate what is at the center. What is at the heart. It is only through wen that the center is apparent, so buried is it in the shrouds of flesh, rock, or whatever. Attempts at hiding also show up on the surface, though a reader must be adept to see the wicked heart.

Heaven has its wen. The constellations, the clouds, the rain. The moon. The apparitions. Earth has the rivers, the trees, the animals. The ten thousand things and the apparitions. Man's is the realm of hsin -- heart/mind -- and has it's words. The words don't point -- metaphorically --to the meaning of heaven's order or earth's order. The words place hsin in the universe and thus make it whole. It is an act of ordering that seeks not to control, but to perceive and to create at the same time. To find what is there and to join it.

China had an elitist tradition, and words were at the center. Gestures, faces, and other meaningful patterns were ignored in favor of words. So the literate were elite. And the illiterate had no power. But they were not ignored.

The reader finds the poet's hsin in the words of his poem. He finds it forever after when he is reminded of the occasion on which the poet wrote. A mountain, a kind of bird, a singing girl. The poems are memorized, they are borrowed from -- plagiarized, hackneyed. But they are never fiction. A Classical Chinese poet doesn't lie. He doesn't invent his poem. And poems are dominant over narrative which has a direction and a goal. Narrative has been dominant in the West. And fiction. Mythology. Metaphor.

There is rhythm to a Chinese poem. Not just the sound, but also the meaning. The basic poetic unit is the couplet in which components of each line are placed in parallel opposition. The word for "mountain" opposes the word for "lake" for example. The relationships are complex and deter¬mined by tradition as much as by rational cosmology; if there can be said to be any difference between the two.

Li Ho began to move his couplets from the rigid structure of the written line out into the world. The effect on a classically trained reader is hallucinatory. You can't tell what is real. Instead of observations being contained in the old form by a poet the truth of whose vision is trusted implicitly, the observations take on the bizarre juxtapositions that are possible only on the page. You have to move to see opposed things together, though they can appear to¬gether on the page. The Chinese poet looks for poetry in nature. He looks for couplets. Li Ho was describing a landscape that could only occur in couplets that had been invented on the page. The movements in the real world that would have been required to unite the opposites seem impossible.

If you trust him, the scene is hallucinatory. If you don't, then you might call him a liar. But the poetry is beautiful. Li Ho was considered mad. He was being tempted by metaphor. A structure of meaning which points beyond any substance to meaning in the abstract. Beauty. The word.

According to our language, he would have to be considered mad by most. The magic carpet rides that would have been necessary for him to unite with his literal vision what was on the page could not have been actual. So the reader has to get confused. The poetry is too beautiful to simply call Li Ho a liar. To say that he is making it all up.

Perhaps for Li Ho himself there were some magic carpet rides through his poetry. Perhaps he saw something there in the nature he describes that was literally invisible to stricter minds. Perhaps he was hallucinating. He describes ghostly events. Written characters in the landscape. He unites visions that would require something like a motorcycle for their literal coming together. All he had was a horse.

I'm sure that in the sense that we understand, he was inventing things on the page. He had discovered a meaning different to that approved of. It must have been unbearable. His hair turned white and he died at twenty-seven.

Fictional narrative was being discovered in China during the same epoch in which Li Ho wrote. My last attempt at staying in school was thwarted by a wrestling match with a long Chinese narrative called "The Jouney to the West", or "Monkey" as it is translated. The title alone seemed significant to me. It concerns the upstart monkey who acts like a man. He is a willful little bugger. It seemed to me that this story did represent the literal beginnings of a Journey to the West for China. The discovery of the power of will.

The literal journey is the travelling of Tripitaka, the Buddhist monk, to India for the scriptures of Buddhism. The introduction of Buddhism to China brought many things. Storys. A pointing away from this life. Forsaking of worldly ties. Of family. A new pattern was emerging whereby the secular authority of the written word was implicitly challenged. As is usual with China, the new was assimilated without subverting the old completely.

But the book is not really Buddhist. It represents more than the literal journey. In this book, which has always been considered frivolous by the literate Chinese -- a children's tale -- Buddha is a God-like figure. Or rather there is a God-like figure who finally thwarts the will¬fulness of monkey who would subvert the whole order of the universe by his willfulness. It is a brilliant book. And what a brilliant way to keep it from being understood. It's childish.

Monkey has a phallic wand that he can use to transform things at will. He can make whole armys of himself with the wand to fight off adversary gods. He refuses to recognize the existence of any other will than his own. They are all a threat, and so he must have clones of himself. He uses the wand.

And there are plenty of magic-carpet rides. In a humorous sort of way, one might easily see the modern world de¬scribed in the Journey to the West. Not literally. Not even by using the magic devices as metaphors for cars and planes and telephones and what not. But mostly because monkey describes pretty well the modern mentality. If we are honest we will recognize ourselves in him.

Li Ho was smitten by the demon invention. He sought an immortality beyond this life, and so he died young. But 0 the life that has remained. The words are his immortality. If we understand them. We kill every writer we misunderstand. And every gesture we misread because of our unwillingness to see. Because we are blinded by our own lies about ourselves. They are not our lies. They have been forced upon us by authority.

The Chinese chose their magistrates according to their knowledge of and ability in poetry and the classics. The purity of the tradition has waxed and waned with the dynasties, but that has been the rule. A man's hsin was more important than his reasonable intelligence. He had to be good at reading other men. There were plenty of abuses. People lied all the time. Liers got into power. But they didn't trust law. They knew that whatever is in a man's heart cannot be read mechanically from his actions by the application of some perfect rule. They knew that only another man could judge the contents of the heart. And the judge would have to be screened carefully. Not the common law which is an institutionalization of misunderstanding. Authority behind the mask of the common man. But the elite charged with the responsibility of their position.

The punishments for misuse of power were severe. And among the most severe was banishment. To be excluded from the community. Not quite literally, but to be placed at a remove from the capitol which was the focus for all the tradition which ultimately had given the poet his vision. His vision was what was most precious. To be cut off from the source was terribly painful.

Some chose reclusion. Their vision turned them away from power. The word for them may have led back to the gesture, and they mistrusted the right to judge. But they had their books. And some wealth, since the written word commanded so much power in China. The recluse wasn't quite cut-off. He just didn't want authority, nor did he want to be subject. It is a great and long tradition.

China has never been in a position to reverse its ages old elitism. They never had science. Nature was recalcitrant and provided floods to wipe out advances. Droughts to decimate the population. They took these things to be the way of life and didn't complain too much. The magistrates felt responsible. When nature was uncooperative, it was assumed that the pattern had been disturbed. By an intrusion of will. Or by a lie. By a failure to live up to responsibility.

It has always looked silly to we who are so sure that the events of nature are only random. We pity their ignorance. Yet we all know the Chinese "invented" many tools before the West. They're different. Not better. Not deficient. And they have always been elitist until recently.

We trust the Word in the West. In the beginning. The logos. Science. Truth in the abstract. We believe that there is only one truth -- one answer, and that it is absolute. We think the perfect law can be written that will solve our problems and dilemmas. Pro life. Pro choice. Freedom or Socialism. Heaven or Utopia. They are all the same thing. The true choice is the one we have been avoiding. It has seemed at times that there has been a conspiracy to make us avoid the true choice which allows us to find truth that is not abstract.

We don't trust ourselves or each other, so we must trust the law. The machine. An accident -- fate -- or the doctor's fault. Somebody's fault. Guilt. You can't have it both ways.

All the choices we offer ourselves in the West are the same. They are all perpetual evasion. They are no choices, only a diversion from real choice. A diversion. A game. There is only the personal choice. The answer always bears two horns. Paradox is at the root. The serpent eats its tail. Progress is a myth. Stasis is impossible. Metaphor is the only way to know truth. Truth is metaphorical. Metaphor is myth. There's no way out. The Tao that can be uttered is not the eternal, unchanging Tao. There is NO ANSWER. The Name that can be named is not the true Name.

There are many more words, but it's getting late. It has to be NOW. There is no return and there is no progress. There is no decline and no fall and no ascent. They were not lies before, but they are lies now. The truth is time-bound. There is only NOW. There is no time to find but the one you remember NOW. The program that can be designed is SHIT. It's out the door. It's already too late. It's NOW.

Now is the time to take your money out of the banks which have been financing the lies. It goes in seconds to the powerful. Not the people. The machine. You are giving it your power. Do you agree with the power structure? You can't disagree with words. You can't complain and moan about the fate of the earth when you're paying for it right now. You are the system. You can't design a better one which will solve all the problems. All you need is confidence and faith. I know that words can do at least that. They can give confidence.

You're in control. YOU.

Don't keep the money for yourself. Burn it. Fast. It's an abstraction. Wealth is you. Don't sell your soul to a machine that pretends to take care of everything. The machine can't make all the connections. Only you can do that. Money isn't evil. It's the blind faith people have that makes it evil. The economy is everyone. It works when we work. But don't depend on money for your survival. The true wealth is you.

And don't listen to anybody who tells you what to do. Listen to yourself. Listen with your whole being, not just your mind. Feel your choice. Don't let people tell you you're wrong or bad or evil or dead. Only you can know that.

Nothing's going to change. We're there. We have the keys to the tractors and the super-markets and the cars and the plenty. There's no longer any need to listen to THEM. They are us. There is not any difference. We all hold the keys. You don't need to pay your own jailer. Look around and see who's hungry, sad, afraid, angry. Feed them. Calm them. Love them. Now. Not in heaven or in utopia. We're here.

And don't listen to what anybody tells you to do. Don't love because you're guilty -- because you think you ought to. Look inside and see if maybe it's easier -- more alive -- to love than not to. Maybe it's only you that's holding you back. Not your luck.

And it certainly isn't them. If you don't care for them, then why give them power? Why listen? You know what to do. Nobody else.

We've got the TV's and the computers and the knowledge and the power. If we need something someone else has got --we give them what they want -- everything and anything. We can do it together, but only together. It's us in America. The "middle class". We are the tyrannical warlords of the earth. We're the lucky, the wealthy, the responsible. We're lying when we say we've got to look our for number one. Not then, but now. We've got it made. We throw away food in this country. We burn up money -- energy -- at the same time we crave it. We've got to kick the habit, because all our addiction is doing is making us more numb. We are in limbo.

Don't be afraid. The world hates us, you and me. The earth hates us. And they are not afraid of us. Put down the knife and confess -- together. Not guilt. Just look inside and ask who is it. Who is the millenial coming. The time to remember is now. There is no choice.

But you must believe.

Buckminster Fuller is right, only he's not nearly literal enough. Gravity is Love. It is -- really. But science isn't going to solve our problems. We are. Truth can't be pointed to. It has to be felt. Perhaps we have progressed to this point. Perhaps, just maybe, Christ was -- is -- real. His would be the only true guilt. He has been responsible. So don't feel guilty when you kill him. He killed himself.

The earth only hates us because we hate ourselves. Don't try to tell me who or what I am. And I won't try to tell you. I know who and what I am, and so might you.

We have progressed nowhere. We have only rehearsed the ancient Chinese knowledge, and my mother's knowledge, that there are good times and bad times. The problems come if you tip the balance too far. If you spin the yin and yang too fast it escapes the chamber and returns to a bullet. A vector with trajectory and only destruction at the end.

We have gotten it all backwards. Science is a metaphorical language. It can be very beautiful to the initiate. But it is not the language of truth. Poetry is the literal language. Read some of the old poems and see if it isn't true. See if they didn't know something about us that we have forgotten even though we are here.

Read some of the new poems. Listen with your being. Look at a daisy.

Preachers are metaphorical bulldozers. Listen with your heart, and you will find the unadorned beauty. There is a place for everything. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is right. The choice belongs to each individual self whether their whole being is tied to a positive future or a negative one. Do you feel good? Do you feel good about yourself? Please try.

We are at the point of explosion. Fate has brought us there and fate is not meaningless. Christ was real -- not fictional. Not a myth. Real. In the flesh. Believe it. Our tradition has brought us to this point. Our concern with beginnings and endings has brought us through science to where we have little choice but to take careful control of the earth. Christ knew, but he couldn't have known. He couldn't have known that when he was asking only for faith in Him, he was offering also the numbness of the most dangerous insurance policy. The crossroads. The crucial, critical point. The cross. He took our guilt upon himself. But he has led us down a path toward blindness. The woman has been left out.

It could be considered an accident that so many have found ardent focus for ther participation in the sweep of Western culture in the Christian myth. They could all be stupid and misled. Or Christ could have been a man who was connected. Who knew what he had to do to bring the future -- this future -- into being. It doesn't have to be a bad moment. Christ didn't manipulate. He took what was in the fabric of the civilization and believed in himself. If he wasn't the son of God, then it was exactly as if he were. And now we are all responsible. Not guilty.

But he lived in a different time, and could hear the voice of God. It may have been his own voice separated from himself by the barrier between conscious and unconscious. He couldn't have known. But he heard the voice of God and he listened. Now we must listen. And don't forget the woman.

I've given little lectures about the I Ching. Usually people go to sleep. They're about how, if you don't believe in God, and you don't believe in will -- classical Chinese doesn't have an identical term, though you might mistranslate -- and you don't believe in beginnings and endings, then you might believe in connections. The roll of dice is meaningful. The accident is telling you something if you know how to listen. God does not exist, yet He is Buddha. The serpent eats his tail. The man accepts the woman, and pray to god the woman will forgive. If she picked the apple, we gave the reason. And we've run the show. God-damned Mother Fucking men of the Earth. Wake up! Feel. Cry. It's getting late.

The hexagram is chieh, "limitation".

We are reaching the limit. I know my fate. You will have to remember yours.

I know this is all unclear. I know it's hard to read. But if something stirs you, why not read it again. Start from the beginning or wherever. Don't be upset with me. I know I can't write. But I doubt I've been responsible for all of this. Do you recognize something here?