I Think Therefore I Don’t Get It

Tags

Basquiat, dysfunctional family, military family

Dear Maggie,

I remember the chaos on Wabash –

Kally threw Clackers at the door mirror. I remember the glass that fell left a shape that resembled the United States.

When playing “Rescue 8” we tied sheets to our bunk bed and hung them out the window. Dave climbed down the ivy covered wall like a monkey.  As soon as I let go of the sill and grabbed the sheets, there was a big wooooshhh as I crashed through the ivy and landed flat on my back. The air was thrust out of my lungs and for about 20 seconds I could neither inhale nor exhale.

I remember somebody throwing a handful of silverware at someone as they raced out the front of the house.

Dave nailed me with a hard green apple, right in the face from about twenty feet away.

Jeb whipped me with a jump rope in front of the others because I had swung on the plumbing pipes in the basement.

I remember standing in a rubber boot full of my blood as I tried to reach mom on the phone after gashing my knee. The snow storm had caused a mess. I finally got a ride to the hospital in a cop car. 36 stitches.

I remember the most popular girl at school got hit by a car and died. It’s one of the three funerals I have attended; Jane’s Mom Rosie, and one of my students who also died in a car crash.

Mike pretty much beat the shit out of me on a rather regular basis. I cried a lot.

I remember hearing “Goddamnit Barbara!!” a lot.

I remember Jeb giving all three boys a military style lesson in wiping our ass. He was sick and tired of the soiled tighty whities. Two sheets to wipe, Two damp sheets to wash, Two sheets to dry. Don’t you just love the precision?

Ahhhh, those were the days….

J

Advertisements

Mercury Drops and Shatters

Tags

AIDS, Apartheid, concentration camps

O Geshela Geshela,

thou art stirring this pot mightily to near hurricane whirl.

Faster and faster the filth comes to the top . . . memory after memory of the truth of the debasement all around me that formed this body (which is as debased as all others) . . . the pouches of energy in the One, where, from a narrow perspective such as I often have . . . these pouches of energy appear to be dark bleeding corrupt inconsciounable barbaric destructive greedy grasping AFRAID stagnant clutching the stagnant judgmental traumatizing thieving lying inability (long lost) to make Co-Respond-ences (connecting the dots, i.e., the Universal Law of Cause and Effect), or correspondence as in a good conversation.

Inquiring minds appear to be in vast decline.

Concentration camps appear to abound in this country.

Most Western mainstream medical workers appear to have AIDS                (Arrogant Ignorant Doctor Syndrome)

and appear to be killing and crippling and diseasing millions of people . . .

with complete impunity, it appears.

So, with all of these appearances that I see when I try to rise higher in the sky to get a better picture of the whole, I want to re-member it all . . . bring all the shattered mercury members together, and give them a nudge. They will find each other and instantly become One!

But it may not happen if I don’t re-member everything, every single drop. Because every single drop is critical to the Whole, the One. If a drop is lost, there is no longer One, but Two separate divided opposing conflicted forms or conditions.

And then I won’t Understand.

This is analogous to Apartheid.

A prophetic dream of the deepening suffering and schism that is to come (after George Orwell’s 1984)

Tags

Dharma, Earth, Staff Sergeant, Tibetan Buddhism, United States Marine Corps, YouTube

Image by Martin de Witte via Flickr

  

Withdraw the mind from out there to in here.

Make everything that is in here become out there.

In the year 2065, when my son, a Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps is 84 years old—if he is still alive, and I wish him a long long life—and when I will have left this work of mickey to go on to greater responsibility, the United States will control the world. The Bible Belt will be the “axis mundi” and the only remaining resources of pure air, pure water and pure food will be piped in, as Mother Earth is sucked dry and left rotting outside a colossal tube of arched plexiglas spanning higher than Mt. Meru and enclosing the several former states. Light and air and green trees, running waters, abundant food, flowers and peace inside—dark gritty smog, ashes, rot, rubbish and skeletons picked clean, hungry ghosts emaciated, outside the bubble . . . all over the earth it is like this, except in that swathing white belt on the former North American continent.

White and worthy Christian children play in piles of warm sand, their clothes clean and ever new, colorful, novel, with pockets and nooks filled daily with bubblegum and surprises by mothers lounging poolside, or continuously sipping cocktails in swirling jacuzzis on wooden decks jutting out from huge mansions. Their men know their place better than any and stride fearlessly over massive grasses of golf courses. If they had been able to chain the sun and halt its democratic dance of day and night, these virile intellects would have done so long ago after cleverly imprisoning all other earthly resources indefinitely, though most old war chiefs continue to ponder this strategic necessity so as to bring the ancient ball of fire permanently into homeland service for the security of these deservingly-blessed and royal few.

Dark noses, dark faces, dark and dirty palms, dark sky, dark groans of hunger, lean to the plexiglas perimeter. Rotting flesh of death stinks the air to palpable dank. Flesh has long since been consumed by starving hoards who, despite bleak prospects, continue to mate and propagate. Copulation remains the only small pleasure, yet soon they might be eating each other for whatever final drop of pleasure and relief from suffering that might bring. There is no telling who is black, white, brown, red or yellow outside the dome of the privileged blessed . . . all outside are sooty black with the ashes of death; all inside are creamy white in the blissful American tunnel of this good life.

And this is the making of her own mind. There is no stopping it. She withdraws her mind, relaxes back, and the whole scene becomes an “emanation of the wisdom of voidness and bliss.”• And so she feels blissful at the vision. Everything is happening just as it should. “By means of this development of wisdom, the entire earth and all space become filled with clouds of offering . . . ”• All the objects of her six senses become opportunities to experience bliss and emptiness. Visualizing the horror of earth’s certain demise in this way, she dreams of flying. Her mind falls back upon pillows of soft feathers. She exhales, and the sufferers disintegrate to pure light. The privileged become no less, all in a moment in her mind.

 • from The Lama Chöpa:
Offerings to the Spiritual Master:

The Method of the Profound Path, Inseparably in Bliss-Voidness, of Offering to the Guru and Assembly