Over the past week the temperatures here have averaged eleventy-billion degrees. It is like living inside a solar flare. Many old people, if they happen to open the door to let the cat out, and inhale just once of the outside air, collapse in a heat coma. They are then rushed to hospitals overflowing with people seeking treatment for third-degree burns incurred when they laid hands on the molten metal handles of the doors to their cars. If you have not seen any of this on the news, it is because there is a Coverup.
During this period, I have not been around this here red, because I have been intensively involved in a Science Man study. You see, it is my hypothesis that, through some Unholy process, the interior and the surface of the earth, they have somehow been Exchanged. So that here, on what once was the surface, we are now living in magma.
However, as ever, all is relative. For yesterday, in the late afternoon, in utter grumperment about the warp-ten heat, and as I was trying not to pass out in the kitchen, I switched on the local community radio station . . . mostly to learn if there might be anyone else left alive.
There was.
I heard chirping a young pre-teen, hosting one of the station’s “kids’ shows.”
The heat certainly hadn’t beat this human. In fact, she was content, even joyful, in it. For this plucky little person played the song offered below, “Walking On Sunshine”; the sunshine, or something, making her feel all bouncy, and happy, and hopeful.
And, through her, at least as long as the song lasted, I felt that way, too.
This is Faith, church cat at Church of England (Episcopalian) Church of St Augustine’s and St Faith’s, Watling Street, London.
She was awarded the Dicken Medal in Silver, and a silver medal from the Greenwich Village Humane Society of New York, for her courage in sheltering her kitten (Panda—he was black and white) in a hidey-hole in the rectory basement, to which she had retreated from her more comfortable position upstairs, in the course of a severe bombing raid on the night of 9 September, 1940.
The church and rectory were, basically, battered and burned to destruction by the Luftwaffe, but Faith continued to shield her kitten, under a heap of smouldering rubble, until rescued by her human friends the following day. Shortly afterwards, the remainder of the church fell down, destroying her position of refuge.
Faith resumed her life as church cat, dying peacefully some years later on her mat in front of an ecclesiastical fireplace. The kitten, Panda, went on to a successful career as resident cat in a care home.
Yes, I know—this will seem silly to many In Here. But consider. Apart from the fact that it is true, Faith’s story became widely known in London at the time, and must have contributed to the morale of many hard-pressed Londoners. Her courage and endurance reflected something that Londoners hoped to find in themselves—and generally did.
The whole thing is so utterly insane that it just sickens me. Eileen and I have decided that if war does come the best thing will be to just stay alive and thus add to the number of sane people.
—George Orwell, September 29, 1938
Ten years ago this March a lawyer in my then-office was arrested for uttering the word “why.”
He had just come back from court, then walked a block from the office to join the rest of the staff. We of the staff were gathered on a street corner supporting several dozen people sitting in our small burg’s main street, protesting George II’s lighting the fuse on Operation Iraqi Fiefdom. Shortly before his arrival, state agents had announced that those on the sidewalks needed to leave. Unbeknownst to us, then, even law-enforcement officers in our little town had received the BushCo national memo: the new tactic was to dissolve such assemblies by dispersing first, and, if necessary, arresting, the observers, rather than the observed.
This lawyer had not been present for the dispersal announcement. When he reached the corner, and asked us what was going on, before we could reply, a gendarme brusquely informed him that he needed to leave the sidewalk.
He then asked, as would any reasonable human, “why?”
His arms were immediately pulled behind his back; he was cuffed, arrested, and frog-marched to a waiting cop-bus.
I recall this event often. For the word “why” is the one word that those who promote and pursue war never want uttered. Because following that word to its inevitable conclusion always exposes the Potemkin facade erected to excuse senseless slaughter.
For there is no answer, here, to “why?” Other than: “Madness. Madness.“
(Somehow May Day has come and gone. How did this happen? Who are these time bandits, who gallop around with the hours and the days, so that I don’t notice that they’re passing? Oh well. Belatedly, here’s a May Day something from three years ago.)
Millennia before the political people got hold of it, May Day was for lovers.
Equidistant between the Vernal Equinox and the Summer Solstice, arrived that day when human beings participated in the seasonal renewal of life by themselves bursting into bloom—making love.
Details varied. In some places, particularly in the Celtic realm, this day was known as Beltane. Sometimes a woman and man, recognized as particularly sympathetic to or skilled in the magic arts, would, representing the Goddess and God themselves,couple in a ritualized ceremony, either observed or alone, and most often in a freshly seeded field.
Very often, as it says here, “[y]oung couples were encouraged to test their fertility with Beltane trysts, and any babies born from Beltane were believed to be blessed by the Goddess herself.” Pretty magical, such witch children.
Too, “[t]rial unions, called hand-fastings (as the lovers’ clasped hands were bound by ribbon), were also popular at Beltane, committing the couple to each other for one year and a day in preparation for a marital commitment.” Such a ceremony is today popular among some contemporary neo-pagans.
Other places, on this day, there was a sort of relationship “time-out,” when the people of the tribe, in the interest of renewing the earth, could couple indiscriminately, and without consequence.
Of course, “without consequence” is in such things more often a wish, than a reality. In many versions of the Arthurian tale, for instance, Guinevere and Lancelot first acknowledge the inevitability of their attraction on May Day. Fair to say there were some consequences from that one.
Richie Havens was best known for an improvisation, a prolonged riff on “Motherless Child,” which he spontaneously transformed into a new tune subsequently dubbed “Freedom.”
This “Freedom” he in-the-moment created and performed when the hapless organizers of the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival more or less ordered him to remain on stage for more than three hours, as the artists scheduled to follow him were hopelessly stuck in snarled traffic.
More normally, however, Havens was a careful-craftsman inspired-interpreter of songs originally penned by others. That was his career, for more than 40 years. Until his heart retired—beating elsewhere now—on April 22. Below is my favorite medley of his. Go well, Mr. Havens. Into the light.
when the day goes down on watertown
when the sun sinks low all around
that’s when i know i need you now
yes you’re what i miss
every little kiss
every little one
I come from a place that is all light.
I know: because, even, grounded, here, I’ve seen it. Multiple times.
I see it now.
But here, on this planet, it is most commonly believed that there cannot be light, without darkness.
Nah.
There is this pretty sad persistent duality disability here. Gotta have everything in oppositional twos. Light/dark. Yin/yang. Good/evil. Etc./etc.
Nah.
Where I come from, there is no duality. But instead infinite multiplicity. Which resolves always into light.
And nobody needs darkness to define that light.
Long ago, we, from where I come from, said just this:
There is no darkness anywhere. There are only sick little men who have turned away from the light.
I have all my lights on.
And it is my own face I see in the blazing windows of all the houses on earth.
But that was so long ago. Now there is no darkness, no sick little men. Only light. And all our own faces, blazing in light, from every illuminated window.
Light is just all there is. All gold, all streaming, all forever. All, all right.
This past week, if you were an American, and if you were connected to America, the term and the town of Watertown came crashing into your consciousness. And not in a good way. It came in via violence, and mayhem, and unknowing, and fear. And it squatted like a nasty poisonous toad, across your life.
I love Watertown. The name and the idea of it. I have since it first entered my consciousness.
That was in 1986. I was walking down a street in the Mission District of San Francisco. And from a tiny sliver of a pizza parlor sounded a song I had never heard before, from a band I had never heard before. The song, “Every Little Kiss,” I later learned, by something called Bruce Hornsby and the Range.
I was in that instant transported. Not easy in a city. Cities—like money, and guns, and jobs—among those things that are, soon, going to go. They have to. For they are artificial and dangerous and de-evolved anti-life entities.
Still, if one must be in a city, San Francisco was one, then, to be in.
And, in that city, upon hearing that song, I was transfixed. Drilled to the sidewalk. I had one of those onrushing clarifying totally experienced experiences: that all is all right, and always will be.
Everything in that moment seemed open and possible to me. Because in every moment it always is.
I can recall that moment now, twenty-seven years later, better than I can recall what happened to me an hour ago. Because that moment was real. And so much of the rest of it is just slogging through the sludgy eyes-wide-shut motions.
And what I experienced then, twenty-seven years ago, of Watertown, as transmitted to me through “Every Little Kiss,” is what Watertown is.
It is not that recent-week fraught place of violence and fear. It is not non-ordinary brothers said to have careened through vomiting out every car door bombs and bullets. It is not stolid phalanxes of armed-past-the-tits security goons, in reaction, marching marching marching to Pretoria. It is not a place of darkness.
It is a place of light.
It is, like anywhere else, about somebody wanting to curl up next to somebody.
A man has two legs.
He’ll build a house—from cellar to rooftop, with his own hands.
He’ll put seeds in the ground.
He’ll watch the sun and the rain at work.
He’ll take a woman to bed.
He’ll find enough tenderness and love to get him through the day.
You’d think that man deserved a little something.
You’d think that man was worthy of a jot or two of sympathy and consideration.
You’d think that maybe someone would say,
Let’s just let him alone for a while, and see what he can do.
It is like every other town of human beings on earth.
Occasionally bad people will run through it. But it’s error to think the dark exceptions are the rule. Anywhere. Because the rule is the light. Everywhere.
Eros is always ascendant over Thanatos. Maybe only barely. But ascendant she always is. Else we wouldn’t be here. But we are. And always shall be. Unto The Great Wide Open.
You do realize that everything is connected. That there are no coincidences. And that all is leading into only light.
Among those extinguished in the Boston bombing was a young boy who, in response to the extinguishing of Trayvon Martin, inscribed a sign that said “No More Hurting People.”
What more do you need. To know that there is a conscious universe. That it is willfully expanding all towards light.
Just kiss. With love. That’s all there is to it. Into The Great Wide Open. Into the light. Bring everybody along with you. With every little one.
Here’s how it works. In the video below, the sweet little white boy is missing his sweetheart. He’s out there in Watertown. But, in Reality, in all of his being, he’s anywhere she may be.
Nothing matters, not to him, but her.
He’s at this moment especially and intensely connected to her, through his presence in Watertown. Because of the four elements without which humans cannot live—air, fire, water, earth—water is the most sensual. And he is at present immersed in a whole town of it.
At 5:03 in this video, he enters the zone. Not Bach, not Beethoven, just earnest sloppy rocknroll, but he gets There. To where it could just keep going like that forever. All Eros, no Thanatos, anywhere around. And, in his smile, you know he knows it: is riding, so high, knows it could keep on going like that forever.
(This a piece that, since its first appearance here several years ago, has never really been able to figure out whether it’s for Christmas, or Easter. So now I generally reprint it in both seasons.)
* * *
In my Father’s house are many mansions.
—John 14:2
A couple years ago, in contemplating Santa and Jesus, the two began to get confused in my mind. Santa Claus, for reasons that have never really been explained, devotes each year to overseeing minute laborers who fashion gifts which he annually delivers, in a single night, to all deserving children the world over. Jesus Christ, for reasons that have been variously explained, roamed for a short time across a relatively minute plot of land, uttering gnomic wisdoms, then was seized and subjected to excruciating suffering, so that all, deserving and undeserving alike, might be gifted with salvation.
When a sprout, I was taught that while Santa’s labors never end—a yearly, year-long grind—Jesus’ was a one-shot gig. Wander around Palestine, ascend the cross, into the tomb, three days later out again, brief appearances before various friends and lovers, then up to heaven for a well-deserved eternal rest.
I no longer believe that. I believe that, as is set forth here, “Jesus Christ suffers from now until the end. On the cross. He goes on suffering. Until the death of the last human being.” That is the mystic meaning of his tale: he suffers with all beings suffering in the exile of existence. And we are called upon to do the same—to grow to empathy, so that thy neighbor truly is thyself, and suffering everywhere, for everyone, may be eased. With this meaning there is no need for the resurrection. All of us are him, doing the same work; our work, his work, never ends.
For those who are wedded to the resurrection, the advances in science and philosophy in my lifetime, in the understanding of the multiple dimensions and multiple worlds about us, too mean that his work never ends. For the planets, it is now known, are innumerable, and so are the dimensional variations of this one. And if salvation is indeed his calling, he will forever be busy as twelve bastards, for there are those who need saving, inhabiting every one.
And, hereabouts, we call our church this: Kneel Before Mary Holy Mother Of God Blessed Lubricious Wonderment Eternal Wet Waiting Willing Open Golden Flower.
So let it be noted.
So let her be noshed.
I am outing myself, as priest dude, because here, in this 2013 Passover and Easter season, members of our congregation are, more than usual, expressing Despair. As we wander through the wilderness of that time, in this world, when and where there is no god.
Did I mention—speaking of Passover—that I am also a rabbi?
Why, though—the fuck?—should I have to.
Because, as everyone knows, one cannot be a priest, without first being a rabbi.
Musical interlude. While, those unacquainted, strive to process.
“When I listen to him,” Zina said on the second side, “I hear a first boyfriend. Men are like malicious children, but he is like a first boyfriend, the sweet one. Maybe he is a merman, a child of the sea. In a rough sea, on a big boat, I hold on to the rail. Down below, on his small deck, he stands with perfect balance, riding the waves.
“I listen to his innocent voice over and over again. It would be a dream, he says.”
“When I was preparing to be whatever it is I’ve become, I was sent to work in a hospital. Comfort the dying. I remember the mortuary there—it was very Victorian. Neo-Renaissance. In the foyer there was an inscription in Latin. ‘Let smiles cease,’ it said, ‘let laughter flee. This is the place where the dead help the living.’”
The older man in the group got to his feet muttering.
“Bummer!” he shouted at Egan. His heavy face grew red with anger; he raised cupped hands to amplify his voice, and screamed. “Bummer!”
“I’ll describe a picture to you,” Egan told his congregation. “I’m sure you’re familiar with it. A group of men are standing over a pile of corpses. They’re smiling and they have guns. Some of them have tied handkerchiefs across their faces but not to give themselves the raffish air of banditti—because of the smell.”
The priest wiped his mouth with his sleeve and took a cautious step forward. “That’s the big picture, children. That’s how it is now. That’s why you see that picture every week in all the magazines. You know—there are variations, the people, and the uniforms come in different colors, but it’s always the same picture.”
Around them the silences and the darkness deepened. Ramon nuts pattered to the ground through a web of leafy branches, making a sound like soft rain.
“Now why,” Egan asked, “are we made to see this picture week after week until it’s imprinted on the backs of our eyes and we have it before us dreaming and waking?”
No one answered him.
“Will these dead help the living?” he asked. “Are we to seek the living among the dead? What does it mean?”
“And yet,” he said, “and yet—where?” He opened his eyes and peered at them across the firelight. “Because you can stare into the faces of the dead—I’ve been doing it for years, I ought to know—and you won’t see anything. Anything more than plain death, I mean. You can look as sharp as you like, you can pray for a sign, for something, for the slightest hint of something . . . more. Not forthcoming.
“You can look into the dead face of the world, try to catch it unawares—no good. You keep looking, you tell yourself you’ve seen something, some little imitation, you know, of something . . . living. The Living. But it’s no good. You won’t. It won’t reveal itself that way.”
He had been standing, swaying, dangerously close to the fire. The heat warned him away.
“I mean—you look outward. To the stars, to the farthest nebulae. Not a sign. Or you look in. Close your eyes and look down from the outside in and what have you got? Blisters. Skin, eh? Flesh, parasites, sour guts and a little concupiscence. Then we’re down among our several intoxications and delusions and we find our minds, the little devils, the devious protean things. Anything more? A glimmer?”
Some of them sat with their eyes closed looking in. Others stared at Egan or into the fire.
“Maybe yes,” Egan said. “Maybe, eh? Who knows down in that mess? But maybe there is something. A little shard of light. What is it?
“It’s the why and wherefore,” the priest said, “that little radiant thing. I’ve never seen it, you know, but it has to be there. It’s the life. The Life. There’s all this death and this dying and it’s the only difference. It’s the only difference things make,” he told them.
“There aren’t angels,” Egan said. “There’s none of that. Thrones. Dominions. All that business—it’s rubbish. But there’s life. There’s the Living among the dead. I mean, you can’t ever quite see it, can you? You’d hardly know it was there but it has to be, doesn’t it? It’s only mislaid.”
He was dizzy, his chest felt hollow. He steadied himself against the stone again.
“Because it’s there—everything’s all right.”
He tried to see each of them among the shadows and flickering light.
“You have to try and find it, see?” Egan said. “If you can’t find it you have to believe in it. If you can’t believe in it you have to hope you will. If you can’t hope then all you can do is love the idea of it. Love it at a distance if that’s the best you can do, children. Love it like a secret lover.”
He seemed perplexed by their silence. He walked around the fire into the semicircle they had formed.
“It’s the only meaning in all of things,” he said. “There aren’t any others.”
Times are tough, these days, for Science Men. Because a lot of what a lot of Science Men want these days to Know, involves stuff the Science Men cannot see, or otherwise sense or easily detect. And/or that is, additionally, remote in space and/or time.
And so, they operate, most often, in the land of Guesstimate.
This can, and does, result in a lot of flipbook-rapid changing of opinions. As the Science Men seek to squint, ever finely, through a glass darkly. It also can, and does, result in bouts of belligerent bickering with one another.
This last is currently on display in the ongoing controversy over whether the Voyager 1spacecraft has or has not left the local solar system. Some Science Men say it has; some Science Men say it hasn’t. But none of them really Know. Because Voyager 1 is out there some 123 AU from Earth. Where no Science Man has ever boldly gone before. Out there some 123 AU from Earth, Voyager either is or is not in the heliosphere. The heliosphere is a thing the Science Men think exists. Though they don’t really Know. Because they have never been there. And the boundaries of this heliosphere, these they don’t really Know, either.
But they sure have a lot of opinions.
To those of us who closely follow Science, the Science Men quarreling over the present position of Voyager 1 is amusing, in a “fighting in the captain’s tower” sort of way. To wit:
ezra pound and t. s. eliot fighting in the captain’s tower while calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen hold flowers
This is because we, we wizened Science-followers, Know that the interstellar mission of the twin Voyager probes, has already been accomplished.
So it don’t really matter, now, wherever the things might be.
You see, each of these Voyager craft were touchingly dispatched with a “golden record” aboard, one that contained pictures and sounds of Earth and its beings, and also directions on how to Get Here. It was hoped, by the humans, that some spacefaring strangers would happen upon one or more of these craft, spin the disc, and then come to visit.
It was so embarrassing. What was, and was not, included, on the “golden record.”
Because hide-your-head-in-shame knuckledragging ur-human retroverts succeeded in erasing from the disc accurate illustrations of the male and female human being.
They objected, these swamp-coolers, to the depiction of the reproductive organs, of male and female.
And so, these were eliminated.
The “golden record” thus went into the great wide open, showing only human “silhouettes.”
All the “naughty parts,” airbrushed out.
Leading any passing extraterrestrials to wonder: how the fuck do these humanoids reproduce? Since they lack the parts to fuck?
Fortunately, past the hang-your-head-in-shame knuckledragging ur-human retroverts, passed a recording, successfully placed on the “golden record,” of the Rolling Stones’ “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.”
That that alone, was sent out there into space, means the species shall survive.
For: ah—upon hearing this, would understand any passing extraterrestrial—I get it. One of those planets.
This, in fact, occurred. The interception of a Voyager. By an extraterrestrial race.
As set forth in the 1984 documentary film Starman.
There we learn that extraterrestrials scooped up Voyager 2, grooved to the pictures, words, and tunes contained therein, and then sent an ambassador to Earth . . . a being who, as soon as s/he entered the planet’s atmosphere, was promptly shot out of the sky by the yeehaws of ekpyrosis.
But extraterrestrials are not so easily extinguished.
The ambassador, abandoning the crippled craft, found nearby some stray human DNA, and so fashioned a temporary corporeal container. Of the young Jeff Bridges.
Not a bad choice.
The news clip below depicts the encounter of the newly incarnated Space Bridges with his first human, a female monikered Jenny Hayden.
Who, upon hearing the naked, and decidedly strange, Space Bridges, recite lines from the Voyager 2 “golden record,” loses consciousness.
Things get better.
Jenny Hayden assists the Space Bridges in traveling cross-country to the Barringer Crater in Arizona. This, it develops, is the traditional landing pad for the Space Bridges form of extraterrestrial (said pad, spacecraft descending, may be viewed in the image that inaugurates this here True Science story). There, at the Crater, the Space Bridges can hitch a ride back home.
The beings of the Space Bridges, we learn, have, over the millennia, monitored humans, from time to time.
They are hardly the only race of extraterrestrials to so indulge. As the documentary film 2001: A Space Odyssey amply demonstrates.
Of course, in order for Jenny Hayden and the Space Bridges to reach the Crater, they must many times evade the yeehaws of ekpyrosis. Who desperately want to lay hands on the Space Bridges. So they can avidly kill and joyfully dissect him.
Because the yeehaws of ekpyrosis can never be happy, so long as they are not avidly killing, and joyfully dissecting, any and all people, places, and things.
Which is why extraterrestrial beings like the Space Bridges do not straight-forward contact the whole of humanity.
Before the Space Bridges goes home, he and Jenny Hayden engage in tender and loving, Real, sexual congress. Which, in the course of things, results in a child, representative of both species.
Such a thing is not all that uncommon. In fact, as we speak, the Huffington Post, also known as the Weekly World News of the intertubes, is canvassing for people willing to tell all about engaging in sexual relations with extraterrestrials. So far, it is said, there have been 15 respondents.
But all these people lie. Because humans, and extraterrestrials, who join in Desire, do not kiss and tell.
Those who Know the true-life documentary film Starman are aware that the Space Bridges arrives on this planet equipped with a number of silver balls, what humans would consider more or less magical and/or transformational objects, which he may deploy, from the palm of his hand, if needful—and the need several times arises—to protect him, and his, or project him, and his, from the extreme and unnatural Danger and Weirdness that is this Earth.
I don’t suppose that it will come as a surprise, to anyone who has long been on this blog, and in anywise Aware, that I am not unfamiliar with these balls.
And that, as shown in the photo there above, I, from time to time, come to hold one, in the palm of my hand.
Chris Colwell is an emergency room doctor in Denver, Colorado. This is the world that he sees:
“I see patients every day that are right on the edge of being unstable and are out there in the environment, and they describe problems with access to medications, problems with access to psychiatric care or substance abuse care, problems with access to homes or to shelter,” says Colwell. “But they don’t describe problems with access to guns.”
This is how this man lives his life:
He sees gun violence victims on a weekly basis. When those cases are fatal, they are hard for him to forget.
“They’ll come in, and they’ll look at me, and they’ll talk to me, and then they’ll die.”
(Okay. Time to put things in perspective, with a reprint of George Orwell’s “Some Thoughts On The Common Toad.” This piece appeared first in Tribune on April 12, 1946, a time when things seemed just as fraught as they do now.)
Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible towards the nearest suitable patch of water. Something—some kind of shudder in the earth, or perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the temperature—has told him that it is time to wake up: though a few toads appear to sleep the clock round and miss out a year from time to time—at any rate, I have more than once dug them up, alive and apparently well, in the middle of the summer.
At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-colored semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.
burns incurred when they laid hands on the molten metal handles of the doors to their cars. If you have not seen any of this on the news, it is because there is a Coverup.
Recent Comments