Perpetuation

You don’t know us, know us, we know. I know and she knows and he knows. We know one that we know, that one that we know. One, two, three O’Leary. Cookie cutter cosmic consciousness. The seed is very simple. I am very simple. The seed divides and multiplies, divides and multiplies, divides and multiplies. I am very simple and very complex. One two three O’Leary, watch me grow and grow. I know, I know. I repeat what I know. Repeat what I know, one two three… You don’t know, how simple to grow. Something small. Something simple. Replicate. Something small, something simple. Create. From any one line, make another, and another. Make a triangle, a trinity, triumvirate. I am one shape and many lines. Make a pinwheel. I am one shape and many. I grow and grow. You were one cell and now many. One cell. Divide. Replicate. Grow. Make and shake and quake. One cell divides. One being, many cells. And many comes back to one. I am a pinwheel. I am a triangle. I am a line. I am a line. I am an angle. I am a triangle. I am a pinwheel. Again, again! We like to grow. Replicate. Create. Mate. You know mother. You know father. You know X. You know Y. You don’t know us. We are pleased to meet you. Know us. Us. I. You. I know you, I know you, I know you. I know U. Love you. Yes. Y E S. Young, yarn yearning eternally excavating energy stored somewhere sleepy. Replicate. Young yarn yearning, eternally excavating energy stored somewhere sleepy. Reverse. Sleepy somewhere stored energy excavating eternally yearning yarn young S E Y.
You don’t know us, know us, we know. I know and she knows and he knows. We know one that we know, that one that we know. We know you. U. You know. We know we. Congruent. Triangles. Web. Very simple, very complex. One, two three, O’Leary! I am a line. A line segment. The line extends eternally. I am a segment. We are an angle. We are a triangle. A circuit. Spin. Ta, ta, ta from me to he to she. Cookie cutter cosmic consciousness. The seed is very simple. It grows complex. Many branches from one seed. Many seeds dropped from one branch. We grow and grow. One cell divides. One being, many cells. Grow and know, and know. I know and she knows and he knows. One two three.

Biological Creation

They used to tell the boys in the villages, in the places where the dark forests reached in behind the city walls to snag unattended children and little lambs and chickens, that it was a dark magick and should be feared. They didn’t need to be told, they saw the blood and it filled them with dread, a terrible sickness, a curse of some kind had come to claim their mothers and their sisters. They knew this. They never forgot it. Even when the moon was a silver sliver hanging in the darkened sky and the women were clean and the blood no longer flowed from between their legs, they knew that some dark magic lived there, they knew it, and they feared it and they longed to touch it. Only warriors, men who spilled blood in open fields and lived arm in arm with death and open wounds could consort with women without fear. Warriors and whores could keep each other in the truest company, forgiving of each others’ gruesome sins. Farmers and shepherds who spent all of their live long days in opposition to death could never love women like warriors did, and the wives of shepherds and farmers could never be women the way whores were, and the boys who were frightened by warnings and signs of blood would grow to be tillers of the land and herdsmen, while those who were unafraid would quarrel over women and love them and leave them and fight the wars of little lords in possession of crumbling estates, or they might seek out the alchemists and apothecaries of the wide world and learn some dark magick of their own. Women who weren’t whores and weren’t content to sweep the floor of a thatch cottage and milk a cow and birth one child after another and show no sign of enjoying lovemaking with their husbands… such women were witches, witches who sneaked beyond the city walls at night so that they could touch their dark magick in the wild places like the other wild things do, away from the eyes of the people who fear darkness and chaos and danger. They would whirl around bonfires and eat strange things and ride upon their broomsticks and love one of the old gods of the forest that couldn’t resist such a rumpus and then steal away back to their straw mattresses before the cock crowed and dawn glimmered golden with the promises of day. Then they would sweep the floor with eyelids half shut and milk the cows until they fell asleep leaning on their flanks, and they would hold still for their husbands at dusk but drink the potions that would prevent inception, and wait for their next gathering.

Solar Deity

From all time and for all time, sun, glorious sun that feeds those who count their revolutions round its throne. This is time for us, the turning of our face from you, our slow elliptical orbit around your mass. We would not be were it not for you. We count our days and months and years by you. There is nothing that we eat that at some point did not come from you, no product that is manufactured that would be without you, we have you to thank for our sight, for our warmth, for our lives. We forget this in our days of industrial obsession. When we learned to make a pale fluorescent day of the night and work through every turn of our course around you, we began to forget. When we embraced the religion that called for only one God that was almost you, but not only you, we started on our journey into the realm of the abstract, the vain, and the forgetful. Sometimes still we lay out on the beach or in a hammock in our yard and we thank GOD for the lovely sun, but we no longer thank the sun itself, and we no longer know what GOD is or could be. Now we put panels on our roof tops to help power the electric lamps and the electric stove, and the heater so that your warmth may extend into our darkest loneliest hours. We are never without the comforts and necessities you provide and yet we take your role for granted, all but forgetting you, cursing you when we forget our spf or when the heat of a summer afternoon fills our toil with sweat and thirst. You are a companion so constant that your presence is invisible to us. We still call for you on the cloudy days. In the winter we hold the feasts and carry on with the traditions that celebrate our slow return to closeness with you, but we talk about the son of GOD instead of the SUN itself. We are a tangled and confused lot, and always were. Perhaps you have never noticed us, or perhaps you have and now miss our straight forward adoration. Maybe we would know which is the case if only we still listened to real voices, voices that penetrate from without instead of welling up from within.
In any case, here is to you, the glorious, the shinning, the powerful, Sun.

Anger

We must begin with the understanding that I am a very angry person, so much so that nearly anything that comes from me is sure to be laced with a fine trim of rage, either subtle or not so subtle. This is because I have been sensitive my whole life to being forced to do as others suppose I should. I have been threatened by angry outbursts and squashed and prodded with the hope that I would become what is considered a model citizen.
My father made me mad in every sense of the word. My mother played the role of the villain’s henchman, the one that is in the story for comic relief and because the villain needs someone else to do their dirty work. I am angry because I was told that my drawings weren’t good enough, that you must do something right or not at all. The music that I liked was NOT music, it didn’t qualify. All real music was set to 4/4 timing, a rhythm that was natural, like the beating of a heart. I am angry because I was told that reading fiction was a waste of my time and I should read a real book. Perhaps the only thing that was praised was my writing, my story telling, maybe because a teacher had reported that I was talented. Then I was prodded to write stories with the idea of selling stories, as though there were no other possible reason to write a story, sing a song, or paint a picture. When I did make music I was told that I needed to make an effort to write a song that could be sold to Joni Mitchell so that she could perform it. When I announced that I would be an actress, I was taken to a commercial acting class… “O.B. sanitary napkins keep me confident and dry all day long…”
Anything that wasn’t pleasing, relaxing, and palatable by the masses wasn’t art. My father would have liked Hitler’s paintings. This is the reason that I am angry, so angry that I don’t even notice that I am angry, so angry that I could jump off a couch crush strawberries over my face until I am crimson and recite the national anthem backwards to the tune of a Lady Gaga song. I am angry because I knew that he was wrong but I was too small to defend my delicate creative being from my father’s corrosive view of life. I am angry because I was bullied by a greedy critic for more than half my life.
When I see anything that resembles these characteristic in others, when they champion greed or criticism with know-it-all confidence, it triggers a violent reaction within me. When someone appears to be making even the subtlest attempt to place a yoke over my creative being or that of another, even a hypothetical other, I feel the urge to smash a glass on the coffee table and slash the offender from their guggle to their zatch in order to fashion a hat from their entrails and paint the story of my victory over the walls with their blood.
Instead, I write something that will never make it to the best seller’s list or be published in a Newberry award winning children’s book because now my delicate creative being is active and productive and I will let nothing stop it.
I do not think that anger has no place any more than I should think that laughter has no place. They both belong here in my selection of words. Whatever I am, whatever I think, whether I am angry or frightened or joyful, that is what I can use, the raw material that I have to be creative with. I must not wait until I am a happy or peaceful person to start creating. Then I would never create. I write on the wall with my own gory entrails. The twisted workings of my machinery are bent to the ever unjustifiable purpose of being a free builder. So while I must confess that in my spirit aggression is a very near cousin to affection, I feel that there is nothing at all problematic with that unless it prevents me from doing that which I am determined to do: make stuff, whatever kind of stuff I can.

Warm Star

It is a lovely warm little star. Not the biggest type of star there is in space, a blue giant, and not the smallest type either, a blue dwarf, but a lovely yellow sun. A unique star in this part of the universe, in that it is steward of a planet that teems with carbon based life forms. A motherly star. A star with a warm heart. This little planet that it has fostered is rare too, at least within this region of infinite space. A sort of museum of varied life forms. In the minds of other planets and other stars within this locality it may well be that this planet and this star are regarded as a pair of deviants, a sort of mutant team hosting a sort of infestation. Or they may not notice at all. One must wonder over the beauty of it, the rarity, the precise positioning that makes this museum of life possible; the star doing its best and the planet offering the elements that make up its composition to spawn and sustain a myriad of creations.
Fantastic.
We humans have put a motherly face on the sun and then a fatherly face on it and a motherly face on the earth, thinking of it as male or female. We suppose that whatever we happen to be down here in the museum sets the standard for the principles of the cosmos. As if the painting dictates the nature of the painter.
We know nothing. Certainly nothing of the love of stars and planets. We see black holes as frightening, the death of a star. What if the black hole is the flowering, the blossoming of the star? Or perhaps what we know of as stars might be like the blooms on a tree, and the black hole resulting from the star’s super nova is the fruit. The fruit of one tree is the beginning of a new tree’s life. That fruit contains and feeds the seed until it is ready to sprout.
We imagine that some being or beings from outside might look upon us humans of earth and be wowed by our capacity to love and be stunned by our ability to hate. It is the equivalent of ants dreaming that their service to the queen will touch the heart of an elephant. An elephant would hardly notice an ant, or even an entire colony of ants, and if it did, intelligent though elephants are, they would not take the ants service to the queen in the same context that the ants themselves do.
We are rare and unusual, but we are not the center of the universe. All things do not correspond to our own evolution, our own processes of insemination and gestation. We are one possible outcome of certain conditions, randomly produced sequences of events. That we are a product of chaos makes us no less beautiful. That we were not planned neither adds to nor diminishes our potential. Our potential to do whatever it is that we can do using the most of our abilities.
Imagine a bucket of multicolored interconnecting blocks. That is the potential. Imagine spilling them out onto the rug and endeavoring to build whatever you can using as many of the blocks as possible. There would be different ways to configure them, many possible variations. It would also be possible to refrain from using all of the blocks, all of the potential, in order to build something that was only blue, or only white.
As far as our potential goes, we are like a child who hasn’t even seen all the blocks because he was so taken with the red ones and particularly the red squares, and is only vaguely aware that there are more blocks on the rug and he could build something other than a high red tower.
We know nothing. We wither as blossoms. The fruit never swells, the seed is never nourished, the gateway to the new tree is never opened.
Still, it is a lovely warm little star, doing the most it can. We are just a side effect of its own self explorations.

Creation and Property

Nobody can own music.
Nobody can own a sound.
You can make music, you can make a sound, but you can’t keep it in bondage.
It’s like a child. You may birth it, name it Rainbow and raise it on organic vegetable matter and Dalai Llama quotes excerpted from coffee table novelty books, but when it turns 18, if it wants to ride in red sports cars with gangstas and shake its ass in a skin tight mini skirts made of genuine baby white tiger skin, then that’s just what it will do.
The things which accumulated in you and resulted in "the song" were not unique to you, they came from elsewhere.
For example, your siblings also feel the angst that remains from your father’s drunken abuse, and your love of wild flowers is shared with scores of green peace enthusiast, hippies and botanist. That chord arrangement is only slightly different from others, and probably is identical to an arrangement featured in a polka song written by an accordion player that lives with his mother in Michigan and works as a used car salesman by day. The only thing distinguishing your arrangement from his is that the rhythm is different and yours is strummed on an acoustic guitar rather than keyed on an accordion and you have an audience and got a record deal while he suffers from loneliness due to his pig nosed face.
The very idea that creative material should be owned is an uncreative idea. It is an idea that says: “Now I have made this and no one else can make anything else like it or from it or I’ll sue their ass for copyright infringement”
Creativity is using anything and everything and making something new from it, something slightly different or unrecognizably different. Kudos to anyone that can take part of a song about love and peace and turn it into a song about hate and violence. That is called being creative. No one comes up with anything brand new and all their own.
We are all composites of the many different influences which converge within us and our ideas and creations stem from this composite creation that we call self. We do not know the nature of our self, and not knowing our self, how could we ever presume to possess it, let alone those composite spores that it spews into the ether in the form of poetry, song, or sculpture.
This self is on loan. We borrow it for a while, taking it for a spin before it evaporates. These impressions shaping our creative impulses, are viewed through the borrowed lens of self. They did not originate within us. The color of the sky was present long before we were and the birds were singing about it long before we started writing about them singing about it. The thing which made the song was not yours, the things that the song is made up of is not yours, those things that inspired its making are not yours, how could the song itself be yours?
Nothing is new under the sun. There are no original ideas. Your ideas come from others. From the sound of your mother’s voice when you were twelve, from your father’s old car, from the lake you nearly drowned in, from the song that played on the radio when you first kissed, from the way she screamed when she left, from the theme of that cartoon you watched when you were four, and the song your grandmother hummed when you were 13 months old.
There are things at work within you which you are not even aware of. That song you wrote may very well be an approximation of something you heard when you were a child or in the elevator three months ago. That you were unaware of its influence on you does not make the resulting song original. It came from somewhere.
To be creative is to see what there is to work with and work with it in any way possible. To steal, to borrow, to reuse and cause mutations, that is creative. To forge something new of what was is God-like, opening up infinite possibilities. To spend one’s life obsessed about protecting a small blot of intellectual material is limiting and can only lead to decay, to the end of possibilities.
Creativity is brave. To be a true creator is to scatter creations like droplets of water from the trembling wings of a heron. You do not take time to count the droplets, or to try to catch them before they can dance off of the wings of another.
If someone takes what you have made and does something new with it, that is a compliment. If you were focused on creation and not ownership, you would be unafraid to loose the drops of water that scatter from your wings, you would know that soon you will dip into the waters of life in search of the wriggling fish and new things will scatter from you as you part with the water again and ascend with your catch. This can happen again and again if you are active and not busy catching and adoring the product of dives into the deep that occurred once long ago.
When you create, you are in the present. What you created, that is already in the past. Dead and gone. If you are interested in ownership, sue the earth itself. For that is where you came from and that is where you’re going.

Give

Silence. My life is like a tomb today. No music to make me wiggle. I read On The Road and I know what they’re talking about. I know exactly what IT is and I know exactly when I had IT or when IT had me. I remember being out there on the dark floor swinging and a guitar was screaming its love for me and I showed my appreciation by letting go! Getting wiggly. I let that wailing in, let it have a turn at the wheel, let it dance the body electric, shake it. I remember that I could see them, the music makers, and I could feel ME alive and willing, my heart wide open, and dimly in the background there were others and they barely moved. I remember the social animal whispering in my ear, “Perhaps you are making others uncomfortable.” Something else roared back, “Damn that comfort. Some bodies got to give. You don’t come to the altar as a spectator. You come to make a sacrifice baby, so give!”
That’s what I did in a concrete room with groovy squiggly drawing of figures dancing all over the walls and all the real humans with three dimensional apparatuses hugging those walls and the couches, hanging thoughtfully back as though they would prefer to be two dimensional themselves. There were these stick figures that wanted to get groovy and these Russians that wanted to be sticks.
I have been places though, where everybody did give. Other darkened rooms, other musicians. Places where we let IT have us until we were nauseated and fainting. How many times did we do that? There was a bunch of us then, and we got together every two or three months and it wasn’t easy because we were separated by miles and miles. Most of us lived down in the dusty desert and slithered around on our bellies like lizards most days, baking in the sun and talking about free will and the transmission of transformative substances carried in blood, sweat, semen, and saliva. The music maker lived far away in a misty bay. When we wanted to wake up and whirl around and commune with the GRANDFATHER, with the BIG TIME, with THE MUSIC baby, then we either had to pile into a car and go to the music maker or we had to bring him to us, and either way it wasn’t easy.
I spent those lazy lizard days putting people in the sensory deprivation tank or selling moonstone earrings and Eckhart Toll books and scrambling to get the music maker to come down to us. And we argued all night. Bored housewives, big middle aged Indians in button up white shirts and purple jersey T-shirts, school teachers, philosophers, college drop outs, sexual deviants, a market research man in a big black hat, a pack of sham men. Like werewolves, we were one part someone you would spit on at the bus stop, another part something unspeakable. Lonely, broken down, and crazed. Arguing all night about who did what and what should we do and could we make pornography instead of selling moonstone, and how were we going to make the rent so that we would have a place to argue. I knew, we had to make the rent so we could bring the music maker, bring him, bring him, and it was hard but we did it a few times before we exploded and showered out like the sparklers after the grand finale of a fireworks display. Whatever else we did with the torturous months and years that gurgled by, whether we understood or didn’t understand the market research man and his jive, we did let IT dance through us more than a few times.
I live by the music man now in the foggy bay. I tell him I’m thinking about the good old days and he tells me these are the good old days. He’s right. I’ll look back and think about this time later, my one dance with the Russians and the way we stay up till a reasonable hour playing board games, screaming and howling and brooding and nodding and playing air guitar to old tunes coming out of the computer. We did this on Friday night and IT had us then. I remember that I could hear everything we said as if we were performers on a stage of Jell-O and the music makers that made noise in the background were scattered or dead and still helping us with our invocation. I remember that I began to tremble towards the end, it was all so much.
And truly, even that little hoowa at my kitchen table wasn’t easy to put together. There were weeks of being sick and too much toil for the music man and the sullen little girl must have had plenty of troubles I know nothing about that nearly prevented our gathering. One of our ranks even refused to come in and participate and instead hid in the bedroom watching Anime, so even this small happening had to be fought for, but we did it.
Today I cough and roll around with a stomach ache and things are quiet and as long as I let myself get beat this way, quiet they will stay. I have to get up and do something if I want to break out of this tomb of quietude. I have to give.

Unhinged Words

So beautiful I could cry. Friendship is a mysterious ephemeral thing. We all do know from experience that no one gives us anything for nothing. All has its price. And yet sometimes, rarely, once or twice in a lifetime, someone looks at us and their heart is so brimming with compassion that it spills out through their eyes and they offer us something that no one should offer; something so good one usually keeps it all to one’s self. True love, pure love, friendship, compassion. One in the same, these many words, these many unhinged words.
The sun peeks out for a while, then the sun goes away and there is cold again and gray mists. My life again. Wondering about the story of my life, how it will read, what it will awaken in the reader. Will my life bring others to life? Or will it go out like a light, extinguished with a clap so that only empty full darkness will remain? What has been done to us? Have we really done this ourselves? Betrayed ourselves so that we are no longer free?
No longer free to live. Another unhinged word. Free. Live. They have all come undone. They all mean nothing because they refer to experiences that we have never had, that our parents have never had, that someone, dear fool, did have and bursting with it endeavored to explain, to share by virtue of oral communication, spilling pearls out onto the grimy sidewalk before pig faced orphans that grabbed them all up and snuffled them and rubbed them in sweaty hands and passed them on to a new generation of piglets.
There are still a few fools rattling around out there, a few who have had the experience and then watered at the eyes realizing that they had said compassion, they had said love, they had said discipline, responsibility, freedom, but had never experienced it until this moment. And now in this moment the word means something, for the first time ever.
Can I give you an example? Can I give it to you now in writing…with words, some of which are still empty for me, and some of which are full?
Empty full darkness that clings to us on all sides. This one life, this one moment, perhaps infinitely more complex than we realize, like the insides of a pomegranate, can it be lit like a fuse? Make it bright, dazzling for a moment so that we can see the delicate tendrils that connect so much to so much else?
With pictures darling, with stories.
By seeing the woman sitting on the flat trailer bed in her red and white striped dress, singing, while the man drives the tractor round in circles. What does it tell you? The buildings are stretched squares making them rectangular and they are frosted with white stucco and pale blue stucco and the pigeons stand around kissing on top as though they were the adornment of a dirty wedding cake. The thick black power lines hang crossing and re-crossing over the streets, making the sky into a piece of modern art when viewed through the eye of the round boy in his stained white shirt and black pants looking up as the flock of pigeons flies from one frosted rooftop to the other, basketball gripped under his arm. There are iron bars on the windows and gates in the garages and front entry ways so that small brown girls stand behind them looking out like prisoners before retreating to ride pink plastic tricycles in the gloom. At the end of the street the chain link fence stands between the apartments and rows of head stones besieged by mustard yellow lichen, keeping company with decaying bouquets of both organic and synthetic flowers. A fence to protect the dead from the living, and a wide green lawn punctured by words, where memories go to slowly fade away. A mysterious, ephemeral thing. So beautiful I could cry.