Windmill and Crows, San Francisco

Click on title above, "Windmill and Crows, San Francisco"

Meditation on Moses

It is damn near a Full Moon (99% and gibbous).  Before today, I inhabited Martha and Thom's house and courted their cats while they went for a few days to Mt. Shasta.  I guess the mountain must have been in my subconscious as I had this meditation on Moses (him again -- must be the Hierophant in my last Tarot reading):

Another Meditation on Moses

     After his anger subsided, Moses went back up the mountain for another long while and returned with the ten commandments.  Words from the tablets he had broken the previous time sometimes troubled him and tumbled through his mind with the sound they made in their breaking; sometimes, certain words pressed into his mouth like little pebbles rolling at the sea’s edge, begging to be spoken,  but he could not speak them.  This was the broken language resting among the broken rocks at the base of the mountain where he had received a great inspiration. 

     Some clever ones thought there might have been something else written on the original tablets, but, having given the people the list of ten moral precepts, Moses never answered if anyone asked what the other words had been.  Of course, he remembered the words the Wonder of the Plenum had hammered out of his soul, but he would never repeat them. 

     His throat often ached to speak them, but his sorrow over the people’s stupidity forced him to embrace the broken pieces as his own disillusionment. No use to offer to any others an understanding they would lose or betray.  Just give them some rules.

     His only hope was that if any searched for the deepest meanings they might find a wholeness that would cause them to see the words from the lost sentences little by little fitting together -- the breaks and confused loss of that clear vision healed, pieces of the old, broken compact falling into a new vision of wholeness.

     That was his great and private loneliness and vanity, his waiting for someone to reach the peak of understanding he had reached, able to hear not only the ten moral precepts, but also the language of the lost tablets that he had broken (was it truly by accident?) that might free them from static precepts -- words of origin that would allow them to flow free -- but he saw those meanings could not be given or spoken, had to be earned, could only be self-taught.

     Each of you must be a Moses, he thought, which even he was not.

The Cure for Creative Panic

I suddenly recognized that a particular state I was in had to be called "creative panic."  I wondered what to do about it.  It seemed such a ready term that I wondered if it wouldn't show up on Google -- Google serving as one of those fortune telling balls you shake where the answer you seek floats up and appears under glass.
The top of the list of possible sites was "creative pancakes."  Then
               creative pancake ideas
               creative pancake recipes
creative pancakes out of sight.
And I had already eaten biscuits earlier.

CHANTING IN MOVIE THEATERS APPROVED

I doubt if the New York Times will publish this letter I sent them in favor of a sane personal environment:
Thinking thrives in silence, while we are assaulted by continuous noise.  Hoping for silence before sinking into Herzog’s CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, instead I heard 25  commercials.  Let it not be forgotten that there was a time when movies were not preceded by commercials.  In every public place, you are undermined by some monotonous beat.  Even your doctor’s office has an undercurrent of music that no-one can hear clearly, yet it never ceases.  There are now twice as many loud television commercials in spite of the efforts of Representative Anna Eschoo.  Have people’s brains  been so deadened by continuous noise that they are unable to defend themselves against psychological damage?  Why am I unable to get friends to join me at the movies to generate a chant of “No more commercials!”?  Is there no sound citizen left alive to defend against this danger, among others, from greedy exploiters -- in this case, sound pollution?  CHANT WHEN THEY PLAY COMMERCIALS IN YOUR LOCAL THEATER!

(1) The Greatest Vice (2) Military Suicides

THE GREATEST VICE

  At first, Muslims were blamed by the mob for the mass murders actually commited by those clean-cut young native sons of the U.S.A. and Norway, Timothy McVeigh and Andrew Behring Breivik.  As McVeigh was murdered by the state we will never have the opportunity to see if in the future he would have comprehended his own actions, or how society might have learned from observing him how to prevent future McVeighs.  Fortunately, the Norwegians are not so murderous, and Breivik will not be killed by the State, while he has stated that he knows he will serve life in prison.  We will have a chance to see if he ever wakes up to the reality of what he has done, or tell us how he got there.

       One thing that these two young men have in common is what is universally considered a “virtue,” but what is actually the worst vice on the planet:  self-righteousness.  In simple old common sense language, they were “so right they were wrong.”  Beside the factors in their personal psychology histories – which are as important as anything – they were clear in their statements about what had aroused their righteous indignation, which, for them, justified the most extreme reaction. 

           Even those not directly harmed by their acts are apt to be seized by the vice of self-righteousness and will call for their murder by the state, a state of mind no different from the state of the mind of the murderers they want to murder.  But will the people who call for their deaths recognize that they are the same as those they wish to murder?  How many people possessed by the vice of self-righteous will openly celebrate or smile in private when they hear of the murder of a doctor who provides abortions.  While in other parts of their lives they may be loving citizens who personally would never murder, when it comes to whatever makes them feel full of a supposed virtue of self-righteousness, they will feel justified to celebrate a murder.  Bless Norway that seems to know the poisonous nature of feeling righteous.  Look at every sick situation on the earth, in the nation, and in our personal lives, and you will see that the root of the conflict is this vice of self-righteousness.  The robber feels that, compared with others, he is not getting the share he deserves, and feels righteous about a rough achievement of equality.  Some will react negatively if I say that resentment and envy justifies in the rapist’s mind his violent act.

Does anyone do wrong?  Or, rather, is the wrong they do not done with a sense of self-righteousness that empowers?  I have certainly in my life not been free of this so-called virtue which is the worst vice, and I always hope I can face up to my fear of examining how it exists in my life, past and present, but I do know that enjoying a sense of self-righteousness is the opposite of being one who helps create a world of peace and love. 

Postscript:  I have to add this about another matter – military suicides.  It is heartbreaking to hear the “sleepy” reaction of relatives of service people or veterans who commit suicide:  “I don’t understand.  He seemed O.K.”  Will the time ever come when they will understand the decency of their child being troubled by murdering people (let alone if they awaken to the fact that they have been manipulated by the sordid motives of nations and war profiteers).  Here is a human with a conscience reacting with horror at murders he or she has been forced to commit. Around them, there is no one to celebrate them as the true heroes, and they are far from people who might have told them the thoughts that lead to their suicides proved their greater humanity, not that they were failing some primitive definition of manhood or  spurious patriotism.  

  

Impression of Werner Herzog's CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS

IN Werner Herzog’s film CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, the caves in themselves are incredibly beautiful, crystalline with rock like folded meringue, surfaces like crystallized sugar, and old bones seeming turned into enamel.

     Perhaps, like me, you have many special feelings about caves, from many connections, real and metaphorical, but my strongest feelings derive from reading anthropologist, Geza Roheim’s writings about the significance of caves to aborigines of Australia as the residence of The Eternal Ones of the Dream, central to their myths and rituals.     (http://www.amazon.com/Eternal-Ones-Dream-Psychoanalytic-Interpretation/dp/1417977132) .  Except for one significant story he tells about the caves in Australia Werner Herzog does not seem aware of Roheim’s wonderful, but obscure book, The Eternal Ones of the Dream, and it is perhaps just a common feeling about caves that caused him to name his film, CAVE OF THE FORGOTTEN DREAMS. 

     The meaning Geza Roheim gathered from how the aborigines felt about their cave of the Eternal Ones of the Dream is sublimely rich:  a cave that is both womb and tomb, end and origin, where the bones of the ancestral past feed the present what it needs to sustain its soul. 

Perhaps intending to allow us to have that experience of the cave where real and myth are at last fused, toward the end of his documentary Herzog allows us a time of wordless meditation as our eyes travel over the images in the Chavet cave, and our own thoughts wander and wonder.  What is the power celebrated in these big-chested animals?  Why the panache of their curling horns?       The amazing artists of that time, almost 32,000 years ago, lived with more powerful antecedents of the current descendants of those animals, as drawn on the cave walls.  And the trick that hits home is that a recurring pair in human history and myth are joined here “at the beginning,” a figure that is the head and torso of a bull blending with the lower torso of a female human.  

In the case of this movie, the 3D adds immeasurably. 

DO SEE See a short, incredible interview with Herzog where he speaks about the film’s postscript about radioactive albino crocodiles: http://www.wernerherzog.com/index.php?id=64

The only thing not answered for me is how they painted the figures:  Was if from the charcoal on the burned end of a stick?  Were their earth dyes?  The drawings are done with an easy swing of the arms, but where a hand-print was made, I guess all the people who did that thought up the same thing:  To chew some material until it was pulp, then, through puckered lips, spray at the hand outstretched on a rock.

I guess it was all done with “charcoal,” but I need to go and check that out.  The movie should have told.

SOME DAYS IT FEELS LIKE (...a rough-hewn sort-of-sonnet)

The following was a private venting of the bad feelings of the times -- a means for catharsis, but someone urged me to place it on my blog:

SOME DAYS IT FEELS LIKE...

My heart is more than broken.

It is pierced by shards

Of human toil and turmoil.

All that may be spoken

About all the broken accords

Cannot redeem our soil.

But dirt is just where it ends

And where it all begins again,

Trucking through this bloody muck.

From somewhere something sends -- 

When you decide to begin again --

Something as strong as the word Fuck,

Stronger than the idea of God,

Something inside you -- Call it pluck.

6 July 2011 -- Clarion Alley, San Francisco

Walking with Leslie Angeline and Martha Hubert to have lunch at PicaPica (serving variants on maize) we passed Clarion Alley, and stopped to look at the art -- more and more, alleys and buildings are covered with murals, art, graffiti as art.  Click on title above if you would like to see what we saw.

5 July 2011-- J and J Create a Drawing

Jim Breeden came over from San Francisco with the plan that he and I, Jim Eilers, should make a drawing together, trading stroke by stroke.  What should we name our first attempt?

4 July 2011, with S.F. Mime Troupe

Lloyd Stensrud suggested seeing the San Francisco Mime Troupe in Dolores Park on the 4th of July.  The Mime Troupe always skewer the ills of the system, an antidote to the blind patriotism that sentimentalizes the blood sacrifice of America's youth for leaders who are little more than the pimps who whore us all -- and that was the theme of their little musical -- how to survive capitalism with any sense of integrity.  Consider how their audience can sometimes be 50 to 100 people sitting on the grass before the stage, this 4th of July, the attendance was EPIC (as shown on the slide show you may watch by clicking on the title of this section).  Afterward, on my way to the 24th Street BART station, for my return to Oakland, I walked down Osage Alley, which is becoming another of the many alleys devoted to graffiti art.

Code Pink Tags the Israeli Embassy, 30 June 2011

In front of the building in San Francisco that holds the Israeli Embassy, Code Pink left messages about the impending peace flotilla to sail to help the people in Gaza.
Click on title above to see a brief slide show of the messages they left.

Gay Pride 2011 -- For Bradley Manning

Click on title above if you want to see a short slide show of Gay Pride 2011 in San Francisco.

In the mass of humans at the 2011 Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco, it seemed that every 5th person had a camera, meaning that a hundred thousand photos were taken of people and elements in a parade that lasted many hours.  Mine are from a very tiny niche:  The photos are mainly from when I was waiting for our contingent -- in support of Bradley Manning -- to begin marching.
Also, I was wearing my collage poster for Manning so it made it rather difficult to take any photos.
Also, I like best taking pictures of children at such events, and, in this case, beautiful women.

Check out James Day's dynamic use of watercolor

Click on Title Line

Take Time Out for a Quiet Moment

Click on "Take Time Out for a Quiet Moment" and have a minute or two of peace with a very brief video.

What Is It?

Click on "What is it?" for a short enough video on which I ask, "What is it?" -- Comments welcome, no matter how scathing. 

Rain on Palm Leaves

There is a central court where I live, full of palms, and I love to hear the rain fall on the palm leaves:  Click on "Rain Palm Leaves" above for a very brief video -- maybe just long enough for you to sink into a moment of peace -- and I hope you have sound.

Pardon -- a Sunday Sermon

Slain Elephant:

     Coming out into the general nature of the earth, each of us is free to conceive and attempt to embody our individual definition of “human nature” – It is ours to choose, and the more valuable and beautiful the longer we search to understand and define it.  We are free to choose a better or worse definition, as revealed by our actions and attitudes.  For some of us, the imagination that we wish all humans would favor and attempt to demonstrate is centered on Compassion – the sense of empathy and justice present in the first rule learned by every child:  “Treat others as you would have them treat you.”  Simple, but clearly not easily realized in our world, and, by many, rejected.

     Many are familiar with the concept of “the vital lie.”  While we live in a factual reality of the senses – now, in the past, and in the future – through language, thought, and creativity we create an overlay that we may call The Word, and we live under that imaginary dome as well.  Ideas, dreams, goals might be called illusions in comparison with our finding ways to survive as physical beings in a physical world.  You may choose to call this metaphysical world a vital lie, but we are not about to live without that other, symbolic reality. 

     Remembering how we are almost ghostly or fictional or spirit-beings as we play with thought, art, and invention, beyond meeting our daily needs, we might hope to escape self-delusion and self-division if we let Doubt be our guardian spirit, ever questioning our pleasant fictions and conjectures, and reminding us that they are human projections. 

     It is not likely that humans can live very harmoniously without some mythos of a general human unity – the challenge is to create a sane and wholesome imagination of a “human nature.”

     The dominant mythos so far in human history has been of there being some parent reality looking over the human race.  It is a comfort for humans to turn to that fiction when feeling overwhelmed.  But sanity requires that we move on.  With tragic consequences world-wide as we shift from one world view to another, God is taking a long time dying; notions of an afterlife are blighting the only life we shall ever have.  Most of the present population will miss the chance to embrace truly the only life they will ever know.  If they do not find the riches of the mind and imagination and humane values, they are not likely to make the transition out of the God delusion into an awakened life.

     The transition from that mythos of God and eternal life is stalled, and until that change is complete we cannot know a new general sense of balance that might happen through a new imagination, in which Doubt and Questioning are central, not Faith and Obedience. 

     “In God we trust” makes no more sense than “In the Easter Bunny (or Santa Claus) we trust.”  As in the tale of the Emperor With the Invisible Clothes, we must listen to those people turn to as leaders who weave that delusionary reality around everything they say, invalidating everything they say, using a delusion to delude others into actions destructive to the human race.  The comforts found in religion can be found in human metaphor, and all the trappings and stories and comforts of religion would be made less dangerous if seen as metaphors.  Time for the human race to grow up, awaken, and learn to be self-parenting.  All is possible with the jewel of Compassion.

     There are probably innumerable sites on the Internet and in any library where voices urge this same change.  A quick glance finds

http://www.johnkaminski.info/

John Kaminski offers this quotations by Johnny Barzakh:  “A society that denies death winds up killing all that it loves.”

Kaminski urges a “new consciousness that mandates transcendence of the pathological aspects of belief while keeping all those old wonderful values that we all love.”

     “We’re all trapped in a complex web of mistranslated myths that have been used to anesthetize the populations for purposes of commercial exploitation. This is the pattern of all history. Keeping the peace means getting people to agree upon a pleasurable lie. And always, the local God is turned into a hammer with which to slam the neighbor.”

     Becker:

     “The killing of others anesthetizes our fear of death.”

     “War is a sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular hatred of the ruling classes into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies.”

     “Killing others lessens our own fear of dying, although it is own sense of animality and inferiority we try to kill — and never succeed.”

     “There is nothing in man or in nature which would prevent us from taking some control of our destiny and making the world a safer place for our children.”

     Others addressing the matter of “the vital lie":

http://www.lowenkopf.com/2007/04/vital-lie.html

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-deception/

Circo Poetico 22 May 2011

Click on title line above to see slide show.

 Joan Howard of the Main Street Theatre, 915 Cayuga Avenue, San Francisco, and Alice Elizabeth Rogoff of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal -- in collaboraiton with Carlos Ramirez, Cesar Love, Genie Cartier, Indigo Hotchkiss, and Stephen Kopel -- produced this charming and delightful combination of poets and circus performers -- CIRCO POETICO.

What an Easy and Mellow Way to Turn 74

Witness the wonderful "personalized" chocolate cake Jim Breeden made for my birthday along with one of his gourmet meals:  to say it was Caesar Salad with chicken does not convey the rich taste, with home-made croutons, and all.
It was the climax of my eating my way through my turning 74, with kind and sweet friends helping me slip through this happy pause in what Gary Gach wished will be my "Happy Continuation."
For the subliminal level that was connected with food:  Thank you, Martha and Carrie, for the candle stuck on a pint of hard-to-find Three Twins Cardamon ice cream. Thank you, Dana, Bud, and Doris, for brunch at the restaurant at the south end of the Ferry Building: artichoke, chard, and gruyere cheese omelet.  Thank you to the two Pauls for dinner at the Pacific Cafe:  salmon bisque, halibut parmesan, and Mitchell's strawberry ice cream.  Thank you, Fred, for dinner at that French restaurant near Laguna Honda Hospital:  onion soup, flounder with capers, and floating island (meringue).   And in all those places, with all those meals, wonderful conversation.

Robert Bly at Hillside Club, Berkeley, 20 May 2011

Click on title above if you would like to see a slide show of Robert Bly reading in Berkeley on 20 May 2011.  I was happy to hear him say that for him poetry begins with sounds, even before meanings.   He read in The Hillside Club.  From their brochure: "The Hillside Club was founded in 1898 by a group of Berkeley women who wanted to preserve the rocky contours, live oaks, and waterways of the environment and protect the hills of their city by ensuring that buildings be designed to blend with the natural landscape.

 The original 1906 club house, designed by architect and member Bernard Maybeck, was destroyed in the Berkeley fire of 1923.  The current Hillside Club was built the next year by Maybeck's partner and brother-in-law John White in the character of the original building.  The club grew into a venue for cultural activities."