11.13.1

Modern Peasant on vacation till the end of the month

�we were sitting over a beer at Shorty�s one evening in the time of the year when the end of the workday and the start of the evening push in on each other, when everything feels like it�s already too late.�

No Colder Place by s.j. rozan. page 1. very noire. i'll tell you more when I finish the book, but i think it lists another reason I don�t do the season, malls lit like airports notwithstanding.

this passage sheds a little light on why I dislike the holiday season so much. in addition to the fact that I don�t like being used abused & confused by the economic juggernaut dangling Christmas bells. yeah, I admit it, I don�t like it. the holidays are like a game show where nobody wins and half the contestants have minor breakdowns.

the best ad I�ve seen so far this season (already??) is the one where you can get a cliff notes version of the "night before xmas" along with a coca-cola Santa Claus.

anyway i'll be away for awhile, I�m plunging into the holiday maelstrom, driving to chapel hill NC and visit son eli, his wife melissa, their daughter my granddaughter lily, son Nathan, daughter Nicole and her son my grandson Corbin, and my former wife Sally, whoa, last minute flash, also a. woolf who is delayed getting back to NYC and wants to say hello to b.crane and hopes to visit soon.

sally is currently battling lung cancer. this disease is a killer and real underfunded. kind of interesting that the repugnance against tobacco has spilled over into a stigma against those suffering from this disease. more women are killed yearly by lung cancer by far than any thing else including breast cancer, yet lung cancer is way underfunded compared to breast cancer. just shows you the power of words: "she smoked, she did it to herself", and other nonsense while we are all like a slowly sinking ship, the captain running amuck on deck protesting innocence.

anyway next i fly to phoenix on the 19th, the land where everything is new, clean, and shiny, recreational shopping is a must, the cathedral ceiling homes are two feet from each other, and it�s a dry heat, like the moon is a dry cold.

there i'll see sister Jane, Jane�s husband Fred who wouldn�t be caught dead in a crazed web site like this, their children Jonathan and Anne, my mom and dad, and my oldest son Eric.

I�ll be back in business pointing out the delights and paradoxes of semi-conscious life in the 21rst c. western hemisphere late November, when i plan to collect the pictures scattered throught these pages in one place.

and remember, don�t believe everything you think.

i'm not the forest
i'm a tree;
i'm not a you
and you're not a me

11.11.1

"A basic law of psychological understanding is the mercurial one of keeping images in motion, letting them generate each other. This leads to a depth of vision, not in a logical, linear kind of reasoning but in the richness of texture that a emerges from such a process.

...Its is important to keep changing the subject. The subject changes before our very eyes. It is important to keep changing our mind -

The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its resemblance find.

The mind, or the imagination, the original shape-shifter : Thrice Greatest Hermes."

The Planets Within: the Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino
by
Thomas Moore

Change Your Mind. It's About Time

11.10.2

woke up from a nap today that i had been putting off for several days - the radio was on low and playing "it's all over now baby blue" by bobby d. if he'd never made another record...er, CD... his dent in my life and yours would remain. then the same radio speaks of "the former writer ken kesey".

i came back from greece in 64 or 65 and was visiting my mom and dad and noticed a paperback laying around, "cuckoo's nest", and read it. i could not believe it, much less that it was in my parents home. i guess i remember thinking everything was going to be better now. i know i did later.

anyway to hell with cultural histories and milestones to nowhere, unelevate the artists everywhere, free art from the capital "A", and a little respect for those who did. who am we? we are a creature of our time, and our time is a creature of the beyond.

11.7.1

a nod towards the world of islam:

"And here, no doubt, is one of the the characteristic implications of Gnostic anthropology. By arousing the human being to the vocation of a potential angel , it causes him to move in this world as a Stranger, a "Prince of the other world" on his way back to his native home. Hence this extreme gentleness, this appreciation of the derisory character of any exercise of the will to power, of any appetite for kingship, or for conversion tending to bring about a monolithic Unity. The Gnostic lessons of the apocryphal Gospel texts which recur in the writings of our Ismailians have given us this teaching: the form of your vision and of your worship bear witness to what you are, you answer for the vision you have of your God. And what God becomes is revealed in the mode of relation attested in man's mode of understanding Him."

Henri Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis

that was fun. now this:

inside my cave

11.6.1

you can�t have your question and answer it too. i knew i went too far when i knew it was you. three am madness weathers the storm. already gladness is finding a form. i walk without magic without a care. because if i�m here you must be there.

diamond graffiti

3.7.5

it�s hard to know what to do. while the last strands of personality dissolves into celebrations of the predictable. how can we live like we used to? we can�t. who gets to remain in the newly minted mode? the guy who looks like a carny tele-evangalist and has a penchant for jolt-cola? the womwan who lost her pearls in a south of the border gas station and would rather not talk about it? how about the young kid who walks the pier every morning when the sun rises and never says hello? the old man with the rock who doesn�t own a tv? the young woman with the delicate touch who slowly waves her hands in mind-stopping mudras while time stutters around her?

the old dies and the new is born: we know that. changes without end. if the personality we walk and talk is eroding because it has outlasted its usefullness and reason for existing, what comes next? the bothersome thing is that from this tiny point in space and time it appears that a diminuation is coming, not just a subtraction, or a destruction - we always knew it would involve some of that; but a wholesale substitution of the old and ragged by the vacuum. the artiface and manners arriving any day now seem backward, an idiot wind,, signifying bits of this and bytes of that, all simulcra of a world we have forgotten, but has it forgotten us? maybe it has, and if so we wink out like dying stars staring into space, golden days gone and nights trembling with moonlight twisting in the dust.

but wait, there�s more...

only the wrong survive

11.4.1

have you noticed it's getting harder to express the inexpressable? or maybe it's getting easier to notice it's getting harder. in the last 10,000 years the human being has managed to lose the invisible. almost.

the invisible still creates some of the turns the visible takes, like "why would somebody paint his hand on the wall of a cave? in the dark?"

some of the turns: maybe less and less. maybe evolution is moving "us" along to the point where bright light, ductile texture, calm lobotomized semi-thought and smooth talk will be the measure of all things. clouds and shadows will be a dim memory. human beings will no longer wonder in the small hours of the morning, "why did i do that?". they won't even wonder "now who just thought that thought?"

there won't be any inexpressible left to inexpress. everything will be clear as they say water used to be. the only thing left to do will be, like they already say on tee-vee, "wealth-creation".

there goes the neighborhood

11.2.1

the personality (which may be obsolete in the near future) & History
from �Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present�
1967
James Hillmen

"...As we individuals are fastened to the facts of our personal case histories by what we remember of our personal lives, so is our history addicted to the history of profane time. An addiction demands more and more, faster and faster,. Much of our inventiveness serves merely making, gathering, and reproducing events."

[profane time; current events; factoid of the day; disneyland; the new york times]

11.1.1

interesting piece on anthrax scare, but more about previous climate of under-the-table fear embedded in our culture for the last, oh say, 30 years.

"I have sometimes felt that living in America now must be a little like what it was to live in a medieval village on the edge of the Black Forest in the 12th century. Daily life flourished with belief in hobgoblins and other unseen threats--all brought to life by word of mouth and rumor."

-OpinionJournal - Wonder Land