Journal XX - Banshees and Unrestrained Liberty

The clouds are falling out of the sky with the screams of

the banshee leading the wind. The screams don't scare me

at night behind the camellias. The wind though. It blows.

People don't believe in the banshee but they do demons.

It shouldn't surprise. The Bible talks about demons but not

banshees. Yeats does though. He was a believer. I'm a

believer. You are a believer. We are all believers. We

believe in rainbows but not in their meaning. We believe in

laughter but not in its medicine. We believe in beauty but

not that it's real. Colors aren't real, they say. Mental

constructs. Like the matrix. I have a mental construct of a

scientist being honest with the ancients. I have a mental

construct of a philosopher being open to religion. Storms

are distant and dark and beautiful and destructive, filled

with shades and gradations and heavy with the weight of

the earth, tough love for the growth and cleanliness of the

world. Sometimes I see animals in the sky. Trees like

people dancing a harvest dance, little pine arms turned

upward and sideways, swirling around in browns and reds

and greens and fifty shades of grey in between. I see a girl,

a beautiful blond-haired girl standing in fifty shades of grey.

Fifty beautiful shades of black and white and the half-light

of a charcoal morning. I want to take my eraser and wipe

away the words I said that made her stop twirling her hair

when we talked. Stop staring at me with dilated eyes.

I want to erase my eyes and my nose and my hairs, but

leave by big belly. My swelling belly reminds me that I am

in need of restraint. Unrestrained liberty is death to the

body and soul. Yes, give me unrestrained liberty and you

will give me death. My liberty is swallowing me, chewing

me like a bird being tossed about between various rocks

like in an alligators stomach - she stares and watches with

sympathetic eyes and a compassionate brow, while

laughing with her friends at my ridiculous confession from

the wet street, standing in the rain with a white shirt

plastered to my skin - no longer white. Her vintage round

sunglasses hang from her nose hovering over a smile that

says so much to anyone who has the ears to hear. I alas

am deaf to the incalcitrant sirenic songs of women. I am

deaf to the words coming out of her eyes and her smile,

her fingers and her hair. I am deaf even to the song of the

cardinal singing high in the bare tree in winter, snow

covering the land like a giant down comforter, soft and

silent and almost even warm looking. The cardinal sings a

song like something her eyes might sing if one knows the

way to look and listen. My left eye is empty. My right is

dying. I am trying to listen, to listen to the voices of my past

and my present to decipher my future. She hangs in the

balance. Any minute could mean bliss or torture,

depending on a language I don't speak or follow. The

language of eyes and brows and smiles and head tilts and

hair and leanings in and out. Crossed legs can say so

much.  I want to break the wind and push the clouds back

into the sky, stop the swelling of the rain in the streets. I

want to end the storm that has crashed into my life,

spinning me round and around, saturating my soul with its

uncertainty and lack of direction and predicability. The

storm in my soul can have been the work of Eros only. You

may know of him as Cupid. He isn't a sweet cherub. He's a

demonic asshole. Ready to drop you in the eye of the

hurricane and laugh at you as you are ripped apart while

stuffing his mouth with popcorn. What can calm a storm?

Who? There is a story I've heard about peace and

stillness. Peace. Still. Dreams that visit at night and vanish

before you can wake up with a realized smile of still peace.

3.22.2015

Journal 84 - Gettier and the Knowledge of the Moon

I discovered the moon late in life, and late at night.
The red moon hanging over a swamp at night, hearing the
critters and the creatures singing in your imagination the
dissonant sounds of heir swampy minor songs, rough and
rhythmic in their passionate cries. The moon hangs there
reflected in the water still but for the moccasin slithering
through the water with a tongue tasting the air and the
swamp, the cottonmouth swimming side to side in the
redness of the rising moon, preyful and cocky as it
shifts its weight around in the starry night. Stars shine
through time but the snakes and the rut-less deer and the
other nocturnal creatures don't notice or acknowledge this
ancient miracles of mathematical models; they eat about
their business happily ignorant of any questions of art,
induction, knowledge, warrant, fundamentalism (whether
physics or Protestantism) or justified true belief. Or
justifiable true belief - or Gettier's knowledge of luck -
ignorance is bliss is not a negative insight - regardless
of a dissatisfied Socrates. Three pages of Gettier thus
confounded the philosophical world...of epistemology, and yet
how many happy people smile happily day to day and pool
to pool, knowing full well they are happy and that they
smile, the wet smile on their wet child's face as she
jumps into the pool in a solid cannonball, splashing all
the other kids with true and justified laughter, is a smile
spread across many thousands of people throughout the
blue marshy world - smiles known to be true and justified
despite Gettier's or Plantinga's attempts at falsifying or
affirming this ubiquitous sample of natural human
knowledge. But can we trace the source of this glad
expenditure of commonality, this common human nature -
can we trace it to God our ontological Father or the cold
mixture of chemicals, accidental in their appearance of
predictability and spontaneity. Civil Wars come and
go in word and song but each day we feel the
presence of those who gave their lives for their word
and those who see the Civil Wars as a metaphor for
ourselves - our relationships with each other and our
proclivity for conflict despite our oh-so-knowledgeable Age.


12.5.2012

Journal 83 - Sound of a Bloody Sunday

The moment in the evening when there is a general feeling

that everything is all right and good, when you smile at the

thoughts of the kids in the yard spraying each other with

green garden hoses is a June bug in November - a quiet

harbinger from heaven, fleeting except to those whose nose

she files into. My nose hurts only on some spectacular

rare occasions. These occasions of visits from heaven-

painful as other-worldly visits are apt to be - slip in under

my eyelids while my eyes rae back and forth with red

blood vessels swelling into scary rivulets of overflowing

panic, and they (those extra-terrestrial parakletes) blow back

the bloody waters, to my surprise, as angels and gods should

instill despair, right? My despair is my comfort and my

vice. My depression is a yellow wildflower in October-

beautiful and in days dead. I sometimes wonder if

depression is a sin or a blanket draped over a child at

night in december - shielding an onslaught of cold sickles

assaulting what is left bare in the openness of our over-

heating world. Contradictions are sometimes, it seems, all

we have to lead us to the hint, to the whisper, of the

share of truth - the sand(?) of shepherd's pie & fish & chips.

That which is fast is fast, and that which is slow, slow.

And in the end it is we who are fast and slow, not food.

A shaved head & glasses for some reason says disciplined

intelligence, but my stats say intelligence is common

but discipline a relic discovered by a swift spelunker.

The sound of a Bloody Sunday should mean so much

to the world but I think it's just the quaint refrain

of a familiar song. BTW - my pen rests when my thoughts

sink. Why do we have to swelter here on Earth in

constant question of that which is and that which

isn't, craving like a drug addict for God's response-

only to have more questions with the answers in the

Bible while walking in fear of the sweltering threat

of never-ending hell itself? Why is the sirenic call

of the Walking Dead so sirenic? Paul cried out with

a loud mega cry: I would that I had three years alone

with Jesus, Immanuel, He that which none greater could be

conceived - though no lesser excuse could be conceived.

11.11.12

Journal 82 - Dylan Understood Revolutions Per Minute

The cold rain slipped in like a thief in the night to save

us from the perdition of summer. It is cold and wet and

the leaves glisten in the fallen moonlight and Ik now no

deeper thought. My eyes are bothered by this slippery beauty,

burning in the windy night, crying reluctant tears at all those

who have fallen in this beautiful wet world, like boxers struggling

in the last round of their last fight; like matriarchs who lie

to dance and shuffle their feet with a wonderfully wrinkled

smile and fought for twinkle in her wizened eyes, who passes through

this wet world with hymns and hugs and prayers and squeezing

hands. A hand squeezed can make the venom in a grin grown

sweet like a six year old at her birthday party when that one

certain person arrives ful of warmth and smiling laughter

conquers all anxiety. Red wine is so good outside at night in

the cold. Cold is a state of being and my being tells me I'm

cold. I see the lights strung around the small white fence

around my deck reflected in a semi-circle in my wine glass

like the lights on a runway (were they in a semi-circle) or the

pegs of guitar strings on a giant 27-string guitar; or the

illuminated connectors of a memory board stick, maybe

SODIMM;- and it is good. It is good to see no matter how

or what the method or what the content, no matter the

comparison - it is good to be aware. It is easy to judge and to

correct but to understand is a gift of God. To drink is not

to understand. But still Dylan understood. Life is a record player

and most of us are on the wrong speed, the wrong revolutions

per minutes - we are too fast. Thirty-three is good. Life is a

slow revolution of punctuated equilibrium that settles at the

bottom of someone's dirty ocean. Life is cycled seasons of laughter.

Life is learning ephemeral contemporary thoughts of you and me

and technology too, knowing too late these thoughts are

dark like a whore who has a trust fund in 3 banks. Life is

a song full of warmth and heartache on a record with a

scratch that keeps repeating itself over and over, always finding

a new audience with the birth of another credulous generation

who finds itself enlightened with the spirit of man. A child's

laugh is caulk for the scratches and cracks in this broken

world. The world may be a teetering pivot in a silent cold

vacuum but I hear the music in the dark spheres and i

feel the heat in the distant emptiness of our blank verse.

10.8.12

Journal 81 - Time Wraps Mathematical Models

Time wraps around my space the way a snake
wraps around a wet rat, wriggling but unable to
scream. Soon the clouds bellow with their water world
and grimace in anger, dropping their wet weight down
upon our hairy heads. I raise my head and poke out
my tongue to taste the moisture and absorb it into my
overheated self, hoping it would surge me like brown
bourbon on labor day...or any day really. Water means so
much to our hot world. My kids and I dance in the
rain and the rain puddles in the gutters in the street
stomping on time like a child's beach ball, waiting for it
to explode and sing its exhausted dilated tune for the
leftover observers in this virtually unobserved world of
ontologically suspicious elements - but who doubts explanatory
models really but the foolish? I do. That's who do. I
laugh at the beryon who briefly appears and then exits
like an actor who enters before her cue. Time is brief but
it's matter in the end, wrapped in a warped singular
nothing that pops in and out of existence in reported
symmetry - nothing being re-defined as something becoming
nothing close to being. I see the stars and I hear the
music of the spheres, the land of darkness and the helping
phriendly book; I see the elements burning and recombining;
I see the dust and I see the black decay. I see the stars
and I see the heavens. I hear the angelic host singing
their angelic song to the Creator. I hear the chorus of
man and lizards and I laugh heartily at God our Father,
the warm laugh a friend laughs upon seeing a long-lost
friend emerge from a snow storm. I see the pink on
God's cheeks and know He cares. He cares about waves
and particles and music and words and symbols and
love and hate and all our lovely labels.  He smiles at
our incomplete mathematical models, no matter how well
they predict and account for our observations. There is
an order and there is a mystery. There is music to
the subatomic spheres, bending the laws of our words
as we have described them. Particle physics doesn't know
it but it's a blues scale, bending reality in 3rds and 5ths
trying to reflect the experience of our rational minds
in an irrational world.


9.1.12

Journal 80 - Word Games on Bourbon Street

Words are games the philosophers say. Words are games

and games we play, but words as games leave nothing to say.

Words may not mean much and words may be sophomoric games

but beautiful women in the distance, blond and tan and wearing

a yellow sundress and smoking a cigarette in the rising moon

light mean something. And it isn't naughty. I cough when

the wind blows beauty my way. The world is wrapped in

beauty like in a child's worn blanket, and the world throws

rhythmic fits of coughing like a James Brown hit - levelling

knees and leaving smiles and rainbow eyes. The night bugs

click behind me in some natural Motown accompaniment. They

make their music and they make their itchy presence known.

Beauty itches when it moves your blood. Dragons live inside of

slender flies; they are the color of ready-to-burst soap

bubbles outside Gilead I hear. Beauty pops as Beauty should,

if the Buddhists have their way. I think Beauty should

stay and play and dance the simple pentatonic jig with all

our Southern souls. Beauty paraded is Beauty unbraided

and decomposed in a cold pedantic distinction of atomic

parts, atonal splatters of night-time blood on a warm hand.

Bloodletting is an ancient practice of God's mosquitoes,

desperate in their desire to appropriate your life for their

insignificant symphonies. The symphonies of nefarious bugs

pale in comparison to their larger cousins. There is no metaphor

for us. I know it's been long but I had a little break you

see. (stolen) I stumble across Beauty on bourbon streets and

wet humid sidewalks shifting and swinging in a warped

nocturnal dance with the streetlights of our present universe.

Despite diesel I still love our world and those who drive.

I wish I was a rain drop falling from the black sky, consorting

with my siblings to assimilate ourselves into some large slung

stream of water to clean and nurture the world, slung as

though from the large water pale of God - smiling as he

knocks us backward in our dehydrated comfort. I would

slide down the stalk and nestle in the nutrient filled earth,

while others slapped the smiling homeless soul man across the

cheek, drenching him in cleanliness while the self-rinsed

rich man cursed me for disintegrating his rich "Do." I

would leap up and slap him one last time from my sharp flagellum.

8.7.12

Journal 79 - Serial Killers and Conformism

I caught a glimpse of two lovers sneaking a kiss behind the

trees on the other side of the Art building. I found a virgin

furtively watching from a nearby car, rubbing her hands together

but not smiling, studying like a sexual anthropologist. I wanted

to open the door to her car and grab her and bring her head

to mine, kissing her with longing and remembrance, kissing

through her into that reticence yet no further. I wanted to

kiss her on her lusty wet lips then smile and say, "You're

right. It's better when it matters." Then thank her for re-

giving me my lapsed youth, my lapsed youth spent chewing

nicotine gum, staring at pointillistic dots on my computer

screen - green dots of distinct individuality, before the virtue

of the technological beauty and superiority of conformism,

at least regarding visual artistry. I think conformism is under-

rated. Conformism can be good, like the computer screen, or

the serial killer. Serial killers are bad but to succeed is to

conform. Hiding in plain sight. Of course I'm always suspicious

of the non-conformist. The tattooed, pierced vamps who

make me wonder if there is any substance underneath the

makeup, the painful makeup of black and more black clothes.

Screaming children screaming "Look at me, I'm different and

I matter, I promise; can't you see? Don't judge a book by

its cover but don't ask to open me." Forcing me to see you

as different leads me to believe there isn't much there to

see. But surprises rise from the steam of the gutters and

the cabins in the dark lovely woods. It's Frost I hear.

I want to walk the path most travelled and still make

it mater, versus the easy way of the path less travelled

where anything you do (shit in the woods) or say (there

are ghosts in the machine) catapults you to original infamy.

Anyone can be original when it's never been done. Give

me blue jeans and SUVs and corporate jobs, then make

an original work of Art so I can shove it up your

outcast ass. I of course am not me, but some other

similar who actually is original and actually can shove it

up your vampiric ass. Originality is personalised, infused

derivation of those personalized copyists before you who

also stand on the shoulders of their original peers. That

which has been done is that which will be done. No new sun.

8.4.12

Journal 78 - Forged Dreams and Rotten Teeth

I wonder where dreams are forged, in molten imaginary

lava to spur on the inquisitive dreamer. I wonder who thinks

these dream thoughts of unicorns and iron-clad monkeys, parading

around the circle like two storm clouds hovering over a zoo

with their broad brooding wings of circumspect clouds. Just

as a car needs wiping for its windshield eyes in the thick

of an August storm, so my eyes need a passing wipe of

their reconjugated vision of a modern heaven and hell.

Hell is so blase in this post-everything world. We live

for tolerance of everyone but always exempt ourselves as mere

satirists satirizing such unenlightened traditional nightmares

inculcated by our evolving and devolving times, our post

intellectual pasture is littered with the bird shit of

yesterday's "dire portents." Premonitions aunt our western sub-

conscious like a wolf in the shade of the evergreen mountain

shades his hunt for the procreating jack-rabbit. We hunt

our prey from the pedestal of enlightened tolerance aiming

beady eyes and eagle fingers at our subordinates to Shhh

and Suppress their bigoted outcry with our satirical holier-

than-thou spittle flying through the vapid void separating

us in some wet attempt to reconstruct our parched ways

of communication with winks and smiles, hugs and light

pats on the back saying "Yes" and "No" but I'm hearing

you not mocking you with my sardonic puerile gapped teeth -

my teeth are clean and it takes work to make teeth clean.

Ideas are like teeth. Rot, molded with colored rubber-bands

they are born and nurtured until unwieldy and coached to

truth by some B- doctor who forgets that grades matter.

We don't like our judges to judge us in public with marks

that could walk the line too far to the right or the left -

we who think with laughter in our thoughts and red wine

on our teeth want our thoughts to blend two realms of

faulty lore - the liberal with her satire and her wit

with the rigter and his certainty even when the shit

of words covered in tradition's blankets lands on tongues wiped

without a working blade. I try to navigate these wave-worn

words with oars on both sides and eyes in front and behind -

but pulled on each side by the undercurrent of their venom -

I gulp and yelp with water drowning every thought I give them.

8.1.12

Journal 77 - Music in Starry Nights

I'm quick to ramble about sad themes and sad stories
of sad people crying in the bathtub at night with their
wine or bourbon, but what of the beautiful happy joy
that envelopes each day? What of the hug of a friend
just returned from some dreadful trip? (see how I snuck
that minor mode juxtaposition in there?) What of sunsets on
the beach with bacchi ball and volleyballs and surfing
and beer and dogs, laughs saturated with the sound of
the waves and the music? Music keeps the world from
imploding or bursting into flames. Music is our world
and our sustenance the way water is to the colorful
fish swimming in that undiscovered land of wet joy.
Music is our life and our breath in it we live and move
and have our meaning. Music is the breath of God, the
soul of our Creator - the creative (and saving) force that
holds the very strings of our being together in their never-
ending dance of ecstasy and survival. What drives dance
but music, and what are we but dancing strings? Again,
music is our life and our marrow. I've got to get away
to where men don't wear masks or hide their out-of-tune
motives. Discordance drives the mad man. Tolkien knew
the creative force of music, and the power of dissonance.
How many people were conceived to the prompting joy
of the notes of the guitar or piano or violin? Lyrics are
second fiddle to the swaying motion of the drums and
the bass. It ain't over till it's over. Music is the seed
that grows the purple flower and the yellow bird and
the magenta clouds and the green frog and the red lady-bug
and the blue-black Starry night; the green algae on the
wet gutter is beautiful as it glistens in the soft distance
rays of the moon. The moon patrols the undeserted streets
at night, or so I've heard. I don't want to get away,
but I do want to fly high with the eagle and the red-
tailed hawk. My friend the slug draws silver streaks of
snail art on my floor - gross and beautiful in its turn
of shiny nastiness. Music watches from the cheap seats
and laughs a hilarious laugh at those jaunty folk fighting
over a front row seat to the show. She closes her happy eyes
and soaks in the Art defecated by the magisterial flies.


7.21.12