Anti-Oedipus

Paradox has always been a major part of my life. Defining this paradox as dualism alone does not feel right. I would say it is a cooperative paradox if that makes sense. I see dualism as sun versus moon, good versus evil, male versus female. A cooperative paradox would be sun and shadow, wisdom and knowledge, husband and wife. A cooperative paradox would be a yin yang symbol, or an Ankh. There is a flow between two realities, like a brother and sister ruling the same kingdom. For many years I have been torn between transcendent/cerebral/spiritual pursuits and organic/sexual/desire pursuits. My external struggles have only served to illustrate the internal strife that has plagued me since self awareness.

There have been times where I felt the refined senses, the beauty of spiritual purity was the lonely but true way. However, there was something liberating in the full power of loins, the animal sense of gratuitous fulfillment, the ripe strength and raw pleasure of sexuality. That was where the power of oxygenated blood and sweat and musk fueled real emotion, human feelings and dynamic that pushed dramatic art far beyond the crystalline beauty of the cerebral vision.

I guess that is why we quote Shakespeare, 

What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Human beings are living earth, and they feel the world the way other beings cannot. Yes, we have no wings. Yes, we are condemned to all the troubles of mortal coil- cold, sweat, shit, spit, influenza, broken bones.... all of it! But we LIVE life more readily than the flickering holograms that watch us in our little rooms, whether those found in palatial Beverly Hill Estates or a Neolithic round house with its thatched roof. We have the palpitating beauty of a hummingbird imbued with the survival instinct of the cockroach.

My whole blasted point is, tonight I am excited because I have begun a book which promises a possible explanation, perhaps a justification or even better, clear interpretation of this cooperative paradox between the bestial and angelic components of a human being.

Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, written by two Frenchmen, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, promises great things within the introduction. 

I am excited.

Cheers.

Anti-Oedipus, Penguin Classics

HONORARIUM

Perry

After Touring the Richmond City Morgue

There is a silence
A silence that comes before mourning
(like a sentence without a period)
The words do not come
Finality fills the room
An inevitable cold.

(we did not know him)

Science states
All ways lead to entropy.
Others say the long night waits for everyone.
While many say there is simply nothing.
But
Somewhere in the vacuum of postulating intellects
This intrinsic truth was lost in definitive nouns and adjectives.

(we did not know him)

Within singular silence
Between interior and exterior
The breathing of the wind and
A stagnant stillness

When daylight's residue paints a pale stripe in the air
An empty room with blank floors and bare walls:

A room that waits without knowing
A house without electricity
A husk in a corner.

(we did not know him)

Outside
The sounds of evening
Neighbors behind lighted windows
The smell of woodsmoke and Autumn
Trees that stand quietly in the yard.

The leaves move in the wind but there is no sound.

Inside the room, silence.
There is no observer.

(we did not know him)

There is no emotion.
The gears of the universe clicked,
There was a past
There was a present
And then a sudden motion-
Tonight the sun will set
But there is no emotion.

(we did not know him)

The room is still.

(but for the tag, we did not know him)

The State of Things

My life
It is written in an unknown script.
In rare moments, monthly and at midnight
I comprehend fragments of a line
Then it swirls away to chaos
Coffee and cream- too swift of an integration.
I yearn for delineation
The yin and yang,
Black and white demarcation
But once again
The old man wields his brush-
Stormy grey.

Rain drops have fallen
But they dry quickly
Ghostly ink blot artifacts of water
Transient fireworks etched in dust.
The earth is dry
A journalist's portrait of sun-crackled ground in Africa.

In this corridor of my restless world
A fitful wind blows
Gusts from a blinded Seraphim
Raging like a panicked bird
Against a window pane of heaven.
My history is a row of wine glasses.
Fate? A metal baseball bat swung by a pro
(each glass at impact freeze-framed in primitive animation
an explosion at the moment of ignition).

Segments of this beautiful life
(Buongiorno Principessa!)
Like separate eggshell china cups
Shatter in time to a karmic metronome
Go to pieces on the cobbles of my ground.
In this constant autumn
My careful piles of leaves disperse hourly
Under the burning trees of a purgatory
Mundane in its urbanity
I rake and rake eternally!

A poet prays for visions
For hieroglyphic portraits that define the soul,
Seeks a subtle music to raise the veil-
Blasts the brooding raven into drifting feathers
And reveals the balm of Gilead.

But on the steps of his house
Overlooking the street
He hears the churning of the factory
And smells its smoke.
He sips his cooling coffee
Watches a homeless man on his bicycle pedaling slow.

All is not lost-

Only my Rosetta stone.

This Day

I think the best years of my life are coming.

That is hopefully our common automatic thought, but personally I think falls into the category of politely meaningless, empty American middle-class platitudes: mundane small talk with the neighbor on Saturday over the fence. It lasts through the happy Sunday glaze of a good meal and football or whatever you relax to, only to fade on Monday morning when the alarm buzzer goes off. In the shower you itemize your week's task list mentally and all of a sudden the "best years etc." become "same-o, same-o".

But really. Seriously!

There is a good sky overhead and an excellent feeling in my heart. We are headed towards good things. Good Things!

Right now, I am in the process of being bombed by acorns from the massive oak tree that shades my deck. It is late afternoon, and aside from the intermittent but annoying drone of my neighbor's weed-wacker, it is an amazing fall day at the start of a four day weekend.

I have been looking at a small, humble tree across the street in my neighbor's yard. It catches tissue-paper strands of late afternoon light in its branches; the red and orange leaves glow like the golden letters of a medieval manuscript page. It's branches are unusual but eclectically balanced- the overall effect reminds me of a complex Chinese character. If it possessed all of it's leaves, it could replace that movie logo of the lightning -struck tree alone in a field- but it is flawed by a perfect and diametric asymmetry- the top of the tree is bare while the lower half is full.

What does that mean semiotically? I dunno.

I'll settle for a simple declaration that the tree is beautiful and that I am glad I was sitting here to see it. It wasn't even a Satori moment. Just a "cock head to the side and Hmmm.... I don't think I've ever actually SEEN that little tree before."

Sometimes, you just have to SEE things. Unfiltered, raw, SEEING. And then, you discover beauty in ordinary objects.

And with that....

 My neighbor shatters the reverie of the quiet neighborhood by murdering the weeds against his house in a casual vegetal recreation of the Valentines Day Mafia Massacre. *Eyebrow lifted* (Brother, when WAS the last time you mowed your lawn?)

Time for some new work and completion of the old.

The wind is shifting, and I like this change.

(my neighbor's tree is back to its shabby, mundane self. The light shifted during my final editing of this piece and the magical moment has passed. However, I will never see that little tree quite the same again.)

The tree below is NOT the one in my blog today, but it is an consistently amazing tree that captured the sun in  its branches earlier this summer one July evening.

The Slow Decay of Eternity

What is the real life?

What is smoke and what is solid?

Where is the golden jewel that shines with nuclear majesty?

Cradled amid silver twigs with blood of molten suns

That small and sacred spark shudders with a heartbeat

A surge of breath into a muscle devoid of wonder

So that meat is galvanized by electricity.

This smoke drifts and curls

I follow it in dreams

Sitting in my chair behind my desk

(My brain awake)

I watch it dance and I see clearly.

In the night, though clouds are heavy

I see with rare sight.

I have walked in this world’s streets

Tasted a dreamless sleep

The vacant eyes of people walking

Not awake

Not dreaming

Drifting like flotsam in the sea.

Their faces are worn smooth and their eyes are blind.

They cannot see.

An old man left his village to climb a mountain.

He said he went to see the face of God.

He climbed over jagged rocks

Trudged through bitter snows

Shivered in cold winds.

But he continued through the night

Passing through clouds and up the last steep slope;

In darkness he ascended the spire.

Morning came, and he clung to the pinnacle

Ablaze with brilliant light.

Early evening, he returned to the village

He could not see, his eyes were blind, but his face shone with light.

No one ever knew…

And no one asked…

Was it the fierce sunrise, unfiltered by dust and haze

Or did he see God’s face for a single shining second

Before the frail organs of perception shorted in spiritual sparks?

Yet the old man was not unhappy.

Children, even men and women

They gathered around him, sat and listened.

 He told and retold the story of glimpsing the light of heaven.

He would lean forward, raise a finger, whispering, “The Light! The Light! I have seen it!”

In his blindness he would whisper, “I see it still! All I can see is light.”