Friday, February 11, 2005

Part Two of... Being Smarter Than the Average Bear.

Being smart nearly always involves looking stupid. The fact is the smart thing to do is the opposite of what most people are doing. I’m not suggesting calling attention to yourself like the contrary Indian in Little Big Man by over dramatizing and acting out to an absurd degree; then again... heh heh.

We often don’t understand where the motive power comes from or how to use it to our advantage. If the truth exists at right angles to everything else -just making examples here- then everyone is going in the wrong direction more or less. Some wrong directions indicate a journey of serious length and some directions, since they are circular, indicate infinite length of travel until some force knocks the traveler off center. Perhaps the frustration of never getting anywhere increases the pace until the centrifugal force sends the gyro off to God knows where or turns the traveler into pancake syrup.

The larger body of humanity congregates in urban fantasies of dream engineering and appetite diversification. They fill stadiums and beach resorts. They pack into casino’s and Celine Dion concerts and don’t get the Titanic pun of the thing or even seem to mind being accompanied by a terrible soundtrack on their way down, incrementally or all at once; time lapse or fast forward... it’s like living with a chronic toothache. How long is too long?

The larger body of humanity shares a more or less common appetite for the same things. Society applies yellow tape around certain extremes and practices. Some things are a little out of bounds and some things are way out of bounds, unless you’re connected and then they are considered party favors. But sometimes the wind isn’t right no matter what. Michael Jackson might want to consider something more than a moonwalk and a studded glove for this one. I don’t get the outrage really. Who else would you expect Michael Jackson to have as a love interest? People who get all twisted into outrage over age of consent laws and sexual selection are pretty much standing around with their eyes squinched up in the middle of a stampede. You’d be no doubt quite surprised to find out what’s really going on and to what degree it is going on and at what level of society it is most prevalent. Michael Jackson’s a light weight. His real problem is the exposure. It’s a John Gotti sort of thing in a more cartoon realm.

Oops, I digressed. Anyway, there’s your generic humanity going cradle to grave through the amusement parks and the war zones and the occasional red light specials when they can manage it. There they go beer in one hand, baseball bat in the other. The Star Spangled Banner is playing over the land of sugar pops and curls in the center of their foreheads and the TV is just going on and on and the whole thing squeezes like tooth paste out of a tube until the things empty and then it gets thrown into the trash. And here comes another row of toothpaste tubes off the assembly line.

It’s like being on a merry go round and deciding when the best time to jump off is. After awhile you forget about jumping off. You forget that was ever an option and one day there’s nothing but skeletons holding on to the rails as the wheel turns in the cemetery. There’s the skeletons on the roller coaster and the skeletons in the house of mirrors and the skeletons in the funhouse and draped over the concessions stands and the cotton candy and the spider webs are indistinguishable and you see what you didn’t see then, that there are huge spiders moving across webs strung all across the amusement park. There are horrific creatures that you can’t quite make out because you’ve never seen the like before and can’t identify them.

There are huge halls in Berlin and Paris and New York and Milan and the glitterati are preening and air kissing to beat the band. Everything is dripping with color and there’s a sensual mucosa that is slithering over the forms and under the gowns and there’s a tension and a heat and sometimes the pressure of the heat is uncomfortable and it seems to be fighting with some other part of yourself that, wait a minute, that is yourself so what is that other thing... Somebody is getting an award and somebody has just unveiled a sculpture that consists of a bed on which the covers are twisted and its got half squeezed toothpaste tubes on it and several Tampax and various cosmetic containers and random stains and they’re getting an award too and the scene splinters into thousands of rooms like the facets of a spiders eye and they’re all getting awards, or gold watches more like, or nothing at all even and Ken Lay is smiling and he’s getting an award too.

On the face of it nothing seems sane or fair. But let’s be honest, if you’re in the middle of that you’re not sane or fair either. Part of the kick for the orchestrators is to see just how inane, absurd and unbelievable they can make it and still have you buy the whole thing. The ever increased pushing of the envelope is just a form of entertainment for those watching from another location and laughing about how unbelievable it really is and yet people are still watching and still buying and still dying to defend this wonderful land of opportunity to be free to die by any one of thousands of really unpleasant deaths while being attended to by physicians who don’t know what they’re doing and urged on in clueless humiliation to the grave. All those banquets and awards shows. All the preening glitterati are a hallucination. Looking at it directly, free of the special effects, it’s full of skeletons and bats and spiders traveling overhead. I’m not kidding here. I’m not kidding at all.

If you go running around, yelling out loud and telling everyone about it they’ll lock you up. You can get locked up for many different things and shot for a number of others. There’s a lot to be said for the wisdom of the phrase, “Be cool baby.” There is a system within the madness and there is a contact point within you. If you stand on a street corner and yell for a cop, a cop will show up sooner or later. If you call out inside yourself for whatever you hope or imagine may be there, it will show up too. The pressure to go with the tide of bodies pushing for a seat on the Titanic is fairly strong. It’s strong like the pull of the surrounding waters as you attempt to swim away from the thing as it’s going down. There is a strong magnetic pull from all the concessions and doorways into large collection areas. There’s a definite heat. There’s a definite pull. People are going to laugh at you if you are undulating while you eat, if you’re talking to the sun or people they can’t see, if you’ve got curious ways that don’t seem to make sense. But you can experience that laughter as if it were a pleasant rain falling from a benevolent sky. It’s really in the way you perceive it. I don’t mind skeletons myself. I used to take acid in graveyards. After all, that’s what this is, a graveyard. You are presently dead; you wake up when you die. It’s the reverse of what it appears to be.

I know there’s a God. Since I know this I consider romancing God to be my chief concern. If I associate God with every action I perform, every thought I think and word I speak, then it’s seems natural to assume that God will respond to me in kind. Somehow people got the idea to associate God with churches and rituals taking place at specific times. Unless it’s a full time reality it isn’t real, is it? Either God is everything all the time, or God is only this and that some of the time. One of these makes no sense.

Living and breathing God makes God more and more consciously present; the guide in these quarters and the ferryman into the next. As crazy as it may seem, the idea of associating God with every function, sex, elimination, eating, what have you- has a tendency to spiritualize the thing, heal the function, protect the container, evolve the inhabitant and integrate the process. You’ve got to decide at some point what’s crazy and what’s sane. And that may have a lot to do with your need to increase the pain. We do it to ourselves. When we’re going the wrong way, even if we won’t admit it, we are damn sure going to make sure we suffer from it until we catch on. Think about it, it’s not like it isn’t happening right in front of you this very minute.

The amount of bliss waiting to pour out, as I think it says somewhere in Malachi, is actually more than you can contain. You get in the way of that by associating everything you do with it. The idea of separation is the root of pain. The desire for union with the false image burns like a fire. Think about a real vacation, you’re sitting under a waterfall of nectar, there are angels tumbling inside the fluid as it falls all around you and your blood has turned to music as it courses through your veins.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

First rate!!! Truly first rate!!!

Bruce

Anonymous said...

You know I like this kind of thing the best. This ones a classic!

CC

Anonymous said...

You're a machine gun with a sniper scope. First I was laughing and then I was shaking my head and then I got run over by an upsweep of beauty that turned into a waterfall.

z a

Anonymous said...

nice. i found you

Anonymous said...

I love it when you go off like that. Then you sneak up behind me and breathe on the back of my neck and make me jump.

Carla

Anonymous said...

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

?

Anonymous said...

It's always disappointing on the days I come here and you haven't put up a new essay. I guess that's all I have to say.

Anonymous said...

sigh...





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