Leaving Us All Agape

                                                            Leaving Us All Agape

                                                               (For Beth 04-02-17) 

 

Love leaves us full of fearful holes
Filled then with care just enough
To choose chancy brinks
Come to suffer us to serve

Our maker and our fellow

Effort-fully we fill once more

Our Living Fragile and Holy Skin 

To prepare for the uses of love

The exhaustion of loss

Leaving us all agape again

*agape

a- +‎ gape,   ....wide open, shocked, dumbstruck, overwhelmed, surprised, ajar.

ah-gah-pey,    ...the love of God for man and of man for God

                               *various web sources

The Shell Game: Accomplishing what can not be. (Revised.)

What we know we can't accomplish is one issue of art, what we have not noticed and what we are unaware of in our own capacity, is another. 

The trouble is the shell game of life. The bate and switch. The con of culture. 

I am a person, who wants to buy in. I want to invest and do invest in my life and in the lives and choices of those I love. I want to believe and I do. So all the hucksters see the 'Mark' on me. I don't automatically see the 'Mark' on me or on others. I don't have the gift of the artist or the salesman. I have only the gift of the pawn, the mark.  The obligation implied in our DNA is to Develop. To attempt and invest all to became what we may be capable of becoming or of course ending as most of us will, by simply finally ending. What pawns may possibly accomplish is to surprise themselves and all their peers.  It may be any accomplishment, small or large, but is part of some necessity and representative of a real need of the whole.  Meeting some hunger of the whole mass of humanity.

I think the real artists are those who we all agree are artists. They are salesman who have the problematic compulsion to sell something that is indescribable to themselves or to their culture. Too terrified to be all in but investing insight and gift, everything impulsively, under cover of detachment.  This detachment, not loving and investing all in their love for and with others but instead investing all in observing and commenting from a distance with their gifts.

Being an actual artist, is creating a value and a need, in their part of the present collective moment, some part of culture as yet untouched by the collective language while pretending not to care. The best of them appear to be largely unaware of what is happening to them as they accomplishing what can not be.  Often they simply pass away from the scene just as most of the pawns pass away from the scene.  The few, the smallest part of the whole, name some new perspective and are remembered in time.  They name a part of, or make an image of a part of,  they perform a part of the song of, or they create the cuisine, or comedy or drama of the future.

In this way the mass of people gets its inspiration and its heroes and its victims.

Chuck Berry, RIP

 

photo link

 "The gateway to freedom...was somewhere close to New Orleans where most Africans were sorted through and sold. I had driven through New Orleans on tour and I'd been told my great grandfather had lived way back up in the woods among the evergreens in a log cabin. I revived the era with a song about a coloured boy named Johnny B. Goode. My first thought was to make his life follow as my own had come along, but I thought it would seem biased to white fans to say 'coloured boy' and changed it to 'country boy'."         Chuck Berry

 Comment
For my generation Chuck Berry has been a major model in our individual struggles to define personal autonomy. What exactly does, "attitude" mean? What does, "irony" have to do with my family life. What is going on at home anyway. What do I, "have to do?" What is, "My Choice?" What the hell are, "Consequences, anyway?" I think our generation ('50's and '60's) did different things with these questions than previous generations. Chuck Berry was 'way out' there in the vanguard.  Chuck Britt

Time for Breathing and Doing

Time for Breathing and Doing

 

http://www.laizquierdadiario.cl/Protesta-internacional-FUERA-TRUMP?id_rubrique=2653

I grew up with right wingers in a mid-American state of right wingers. They were not intellectual or metropolitan racists. They were rural, isolated had recently lost their farm and their way of life and were trying to learn how to run a bleak rooming house in a mid-American town. They had a meager, very fragile income and no safety net below and they did not trust new Social Security benefits and were much too proud to see government or any other hand outs as any solution for them. Very few events in their lives brought up cognitive dissonance. 

No self-questioning of their late 1930's fear of FDR's still not proven New Deal and no questioning the way the Republicans, the America Firster's and the rich media owners of that time invited them through print, pulpit and radio to rely on their profound rural isolation as sufficient frame of reference for their sense of the future in a world heading for a very real and very metropolitan modern nightmare. 

They, now, still stiffly refuse to give credit to FDR and later LBJ for the WWII victory and the supportive post war economic boom and benefits they now rage at loosing. They now continue to blame minorities and foreigners for taking from them what Republicans, the America Firster's and the rich media owners HAVE BEEN FOR 30 YEARS AND ARE NOW CLOSING THE DEAL to take completely from them. They were then, and are now still, being taught by their trusted sources of information, to blame foreigners and minorities and progressives for the problems and discomforts (physical and mental) in their lives. Very little cognitive dissonance yet in this, my home group. 

It is not yet a good time for us to start holding our collective breath counting on them to start the self-questioning process any time soon.  

There is much effigy burning and much voting and winning a return to at least relatively progressive government ... and every day that passes with the Republicans in office... many more executive orders and much more regressive legislation to overturn.

Update:
To follow up the above: I am now remembering that my parents lost our small rural home in a forced sale to a rich city guy in the early 60's. We ended up staying in that house PAYING RENT! The 'rich city guy' was dad's boss. Two generations of major loss did not change the my parents politics. (But it did change the politics of each of their four children and apparently their grand children as well.)

Believing in photons

Believing in photons

For Constance

When I look at You

I can tell none of my electrons

Leave their place

Each cell chooses to look upon you

Without contentment they continue

Believing in photons

When You look at me

Every portion of me heats

Every electron chooses travel

Taking me thither

To you

When I look at You

My gaze is a prayer

Laniakea: Our home supercluster

Laniakea: Our home supercluster 

Please watch this great video by Nature Video. The image above came from this video.    

I The Digger

I The Digger

I know I am immature

Yet I know I will find it

In the denied

In the forgotten

In the shamed

In the beaten and browbeaten

A slavishly self imposed prison

In each of you

Everywhere I aim

My special powers see

Telltale signs of

Complication

Making so obvious

Your trigger-prison

In seemingly empty fields

Minute quarks of jailed

Potential dash in and out

Of existence...

You inadvertently show me

Where the hidy-holes wait

All my dogged hunting

Senses dive and dig

My big nostrils notice

One pheromone

My big eyes notice

One cheek tick

My big ears notice

One stifled syllable

All of my own reenergized

Slavish joining dives down

You will not see my maniac digging

Tail wagging with certainty anticipating

The base dirt of your discontent

Flying between my back legs

Yet you may notice that hole

With your vulnerable dirt flying out

And your rising bile

There... I The Digger have

Inevitably found your mood

And my adrenaline addled over-focused mood 
Bites yours