My sweet, sweet Buechner.

Here he is. No introductory abstract necessary.

"If literature is a metaphor for the writer's experience, a mirror in which that experience is at least partially reflected, it is at the same time a mirror in which the reader can also see his or her experience reflected in a new and potentially transforming way. This is what it is like to search for God in a world where cruelty and pain hide God, Dostoevsky says-- "How like a winter hath my absence been from thee"; how like seeing a poor woman in a dream with a starving child at her breast; how like Father Zossima kneeling down at the feet of Dmitri Karamazov because he sees that great suffering is in store for him, and because he knows, as John Donne did, that suffering is holy. And you and I, his readers, come away from our reading with no more proof of the existence or nonexistence of God than we had before, with no particular moral or message to frame on the wall, but empowered by a new sense of the depths of love and pity and hope that is transmitted to us through Dostoevsky's words.

Words written fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, can have as much of this power today as ever they had it then to come alive for us and in us and to make us more alive within ourselves. That, I suppose, is the final mystery as well the final power of words: that not even across great distances of time and space do they ever lose their capacity for becoming incarnate. And when these words tell of virtue and nobility, when they move us closer to that truth and gentleness of spirit by which we become fully human, the reading of them is sacramental; and a library is as holy a place as any temple because through the words which are treasured in it the Word itself becomes flesh again and again and dwells among us and within us, full of grace and truth." --Buechner

Dear God, could it be said any more deliciously sweeter than aforementioned? 

It was Dostoevsky who stated, "Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid. Love a man, even in his sin, for that love is a likeness of the divine love, and is the summit of love on Earth."

The month is October. And I say no! to the indoor encapsulating cascade (but I am inside this cozy trendy coffee shop off 8th and I am not leaving). Rather I intend to say yes! to the roaring wind (duh, when I leave here), dried out things, and early onset pumpkin spice fatigue. I have already produced pumpkin mac and cheese once and I can rightfully appoint myself CHEESEMASTER extraordinaire. I too often proclaim as Flannary insists, "I am but a cheese, God. Make me a mystic." I like being a cheese some days, and wonder why Flannery thinks cheese and mystics serve better to be polarized. Either way, a mystic would question his art in being a cheese, as do I, but am not resistant enough to deflect such a dairy-ing claim. Bring it all on, AUTUMN, and persuade me to think I am wading heartily in both the transition of seasons as well as perspective.

I have been readily addicted to the Scumbag brain memes recently (well, again). Maybe the psyche tells us to be intrigued by the psyche, both succinctly and periodically (ARE WE NOT ALL BEING TROLLED BY THIS ORGAN?), but my fascination usually hones in when the brain is being fed well enough to think about itself ( that self-righteous bastard!). I have been chewing on Nietzche's words “Did you ever say yes to a pleasure? Oh my friends, then you also said yes to all pain. All things are linked, entwined, in love with one another.” Making decisions or even PLANS for the future that can affect your current state of being a human bean. To be continued...

Anyways, I bought a new notebook about a month ago in hopes of stirring the wrist again, hoping to evoke the lady penmanship to try fitting a new type of ship with me (aka friendship). The task of doing so is still daunting-- I am as frozen as an Edward Scissorhand sculpture and lacking its artistic prestige. But one can still hope. Here's to the challenge at hand and in the head.

Quoters Gonna Quote

Anne Lamott has been my non consensual priest again this month, well for months-- I suppose. We met back in 2009-- (well one of us met the other without the other's knowledge). Neither of us have been the same since... (One being unconscious of the other is irrelevant here).

I am wholly convinced that in my postmodern, pseudoreligious state of mind that we have many soul mates out there-- out there as in "Earth." That antiquated Zeus tale that infers an ideal of a perfect partner was just Plato pulling the regular 'tard card. No duh we live in a world starved for silence and connection-- so why would we have one iconic and other tangible whole awaiting our completion? Our lives wreaking havoc until that damn human shows up to the game.. no matter how late. Undoubtedly, it remains another egregious Greco claim. 

Back to Anne--- she is one of the few soul mates of mine. How? Why?

I'll make a list...as every sharpened and linear mind tends to make (note the sarcasm here...NOTE IT):

1. She is funny. Idiosyncratic. Neurotic. 

 “I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.”


2. She writes. She takes time and effort in translating her thoughts into imaginative and formative pieces of art.

 “You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.”

3. She recognizes the truth of her personhood, grapples with it, and let's grace have her way with her.

“I do not understand the mystery of grace -- only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us."

"Hope is not about proving anything. It's about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak shit anyone can throw at us."

4. She is honest with her own illusions, dreams, expectations.

 “Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.”

5. She is committed to the process. The human process as well as the transcending process.

"We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.” 

 “I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We're here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don't have time to carry grudges; you don't have time to cling to the need to be right.” 

And with the limitations and the bounty of rich words, I find myself and God amidst her. The very echo of thoughts and reminiscences of something I do not understand, but long for. A sweetness awaiting to be found.

Anne just did a year on Match. com-- and her ventures continue to parallel thoughts on my own. Read for yourself: http://www.salon.com/2013/03/31/my_year_on_match_com/

I revel in my skin the family crest of "We Don't Give Up." Highly kickass.

After being on Match.com and experiencing the utter exhaustion of trying to connect and be who you are while trying to impress, I was convinced that having utter self-respect in the midst of things not working is okay. To rush away moments at hand for idealized things of the future seems a bit asinine. Hanging on to something for the sake of mere self-preservation seems to be a cop out. But learning to love yourself, having grace for you and others, giving to people among you the gift of you, and letting go of what life was suppose to give you is a worthwhile whirlwind. Sometimes it feels like a bloodsucking whore to the mind, but what the hell, we press on.

Soulmate review to be continued...Flannery, Hesse, Buechner...all coming soon. (Being that they're already dead, I take great heed in procrastinating with great subjugation over such reviews).

"An honorable human relationship--that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love"--is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few to go that hard way with us."

--Adrienne Rich

"Laughing At the Word Two"

Only

That Illuminated

One

Who keeps

Seducing the formless into form

Had the charm to win my

Heart.

Only a Perfect One

Who is always

Laughing at the word

Two

Can make you know

Of

Love.

I am a writer.
And my faith in the world of art is intense.
But not irrational, nor naïve.
Because art takes us – and makes us take-
A journey beyond price
Beyond costs
Into bearing witness to the world as it is, and as it should be.
Art invites us to know beauty, and to solicit it, summon it,
from even the most tragic of circumstances.
Art reminds us that We Belong Here.
And if we serve -- We Last.
My faith in art rivals my admiration for any other discourse.
Its conversation with the public, and among its various genres
Is critical to understanding
what it means to care deeply
And to be human completely
 I believe.

-Toni Morrison
Vanderbilt University Senior Day Chancellor’s Medal Address
May 9, 2013

"And if we serve-- we last. And if we serve-- we last. And if we serve--- somehow, we last."

All I got from her is that hope must be an intoxicating and resilient condition of the soul. Imbued, rendered tenderly, yet fiercely determined.

The Lady in Disguise

Early prevails, early assimilation.
Greetings of gentiality along with fineness!
A cup of destiny accompanying
Thy discrete and pervading Highness.

Dress me in thy righteous code,
Propriety! and sophistry too!
My salient companions of extremism
Befitting upon her relentless woo---

Flow, glisten--petal of exuberant beauty!
For implacable fanaticism is the light to see--
Do not dissolve the distinguishable, never!
And do not fall...between the idea and the reality.

From thine a blessed inheritance I receive!
Prescribed expectations with noted piety,
An impetus for insanity and vexing tension--
No recourse to adapt to beyond my destiny.

Displace her quickly! Hide her from me.
An absolute depravity quickly absolving--
She does not befit me.
But I hear her: this is the way to be free?


(This poem is in response to William Faulkner's consistent theme in his novels regarding the externalistic driven Southern moral code. Insenuated into the hearts of her occupants, the South's pervading coersion of expectations and duties has conflicted the hearts and minds of many who felt entrapped and enslaved to relent on in such despair. Some are unaffected without awareness of the code or it's inhibitions, while others have no skills to acclimate to another path other than that preceding through his/her line of blood. We consistently discover that one's greatest tragedy is the inability to transform amidst despair. Likewise, humanity's greatest sign of intelligence is illustrated as such: to adapt, to evolve, to endure.)

Thoughts As Of Lately

I have heard it said before that speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.  

I've always wondered about that, as the act of verbalizing an idea or thought takes great heed, or affirmation, in comparison to our aforementioned perception of something.  

But then again, my male puppy has been conspicuously intrigued by his own nipples. What affirmation of such a thought can be sustained? 

Plithing ponderings.

I spent the last two days in an alcove between two semi-acutely ill patients. This is normal routine. Sit, look, watch, chart, and...repeat. Luckily and thankfully, I was by the window in the hole. Just a moment to catch a play-by-play liner of the crane man who moves the crane once before lunch and then once after. Other than that, he sits there. Maybe watching something, maybe just sitting. Probably watching, sitting, and farting...as all good humans play the part ever so well.

Where did it ever reach the point of sitting and watching another person sitting? A year ago this Betty would be in her patients' rooms-- talking, engaging with family, feeling friendly, feeling compelled that care involves persistent reiteration of one being "loved "and affirming one's presence of existence. 

"If only they knew they were loved...", "If only they knew their special place here..." would be my motivators. Fear in my own heart that they wouldn't know. Which--yes, of course-- were readily progressed with the incessant conditioning of the Protestant ethic. And by no means was that a binding motivator. It was merely limited. And limited are we all!

It's different now. My care is different, as am I.

To usher in motion the very stillness within--this may be the most elusive and transient experience to inarticulately convey.

A tenderness that extols. A silence of being that evokes. A moving meditation.

I felt over these past few days all my insides stewing. Sitting there watching outside that window. Thinking how comforting it is to know someone enough to be at peace in silence, and to appreciate that words unsaid are most uncommonly felt and noteworthy.

I just reread Brave, New World, and it is one that channels new blood and oxygen to the brain. New sourness, and satirical provocation of how we are and who we are becoming.

  Mother, monogamy, romance. High spurts the fountain; fierce and foamy the wild jet. The urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby. No wonder these poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn't allow them to take things easily, didn't allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the uncertainties and the poverty–they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable?
                                            .......................................


"Stability," said the Controller, "stability. No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability." His voice was a trumpet. Listening they felt larger, warmer.

The machine turns, turns and must keep on turning–for ever. It is death if it stands still. A thousand millions scrabbled the crust of the earth. The wheels began to turn. In a hundred and fifty years there were two thousand millions. Stop all the wheels. In a hundred and fifty weeks there are once more only a thousand millions; a thousand thousand thousand men and women have starved to death. 

Wheels must turn steadily, but cannot turn untended. There must be men to tend them, men as steady as the wheels upon their axles, sane men, obedient men, stable in contentment. 

 And then I forgot how much I fell in love with Bernard like I did back in high school. 
   
"Two hundred repetitions, twice a week from fourteen to sixteen and a half," was all his comment. The mad bad talk rambled on. "I want to know what passion is," she heard him saying. "I want to feel something strongly."

"When the individual feels, the community reels," Lenina pronounced.

"Well, why shouldn't it reel a bit?"

"Bernard!"

But Bernard remained unabashed.

"Adults intellectually and during working hours," he went on. "Infants where feeling and desire are concerned."

"Our Ford loved infants."

Ignoring the interruption. "It suddenly struck me the other day," continued Bernard, "that it might be possible to be an adult all the time."

"I don't understand." Lenina's tone was firm.

"I know you don't. And that's why we went to bed together yesterday–like infants–instead of being adults and waiting."

"But it was fun," Lenina insisted. "Wasn't it?"

"Oh, the greatest fun," he answered, but in a voice so mournful, with an expression so profoundly miserable, that Lenina felt all her triumph suddenly evaporate. Perhaps he had found her too plump, after all."

.................................................................................................

My tendency would be to take the conspirator route and conjour up all things for the sake of man to be so-called "stable." Instability, affliction, struggle, challenge-- what we yearn not for, but is what puts hair on our chests (and maybe some other places, too, if ya know what I mean). 

How faint and yet toxic of a persuasion! That a means to an end-- an expedited end--whose goal of stability would transpire into an implorable and induced state of being. The obscurity! (Here, I feel similarly the bestial rage of Gibson in Braveheart...They may take our minds, but they will never take our freedom!)

And yet the thought is so instinctly engraved within? "But Betty, I know you're having a hard time. Just do what makes you happy." "Are you happy, Betty?" This advisory force is not solely and instrinsically hedonistic, but scarcely understood. It is tiresome and misguided, that indefinite and opaque term. 

Like in an instance, I feel so intensely provoked to protest our very progression and evolution. Can we control it? Is their another direction apart from self-transcendence?
 
"A New Theory of Biology" was the title of the paper which Mustapha Mond had just finished reading. He sat for some time, meditatively frowning, then picked up his pen and wrote across the title-page: "The author's mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to be published." He underlined the words. "The author will be kept under supervision. His transference to the Marine Biological Station of St. Helena may become necessary." A pity, he thought, as he signed his name. It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose–well, you didn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes–make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere, that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible. He picked up his pen again, and under the words "Not to be published" drew a second line, thicker and blacker than the first; then sighed, "What fun it would be," he thought, "if one didn't have to think about happiness!" 

Nom Nom Nom Nom

The clustered repetition seems banal, infantile, even a bit vapid in a sense of description, yet in consideration of WHO is saying it, somehow it is perfectly appropriate.

Books. NOM NOM
Puppies. NOM NOM
Old people. NOM NOM
Sillyness. NOM NOM
Ideas. NOM NOM
Community. NOM NOM
Garden. NOM NOM
Intimacy. NOM NOM

Get chu sum new teeth thar sonny, thar a'rottin' cauz ya ben nibblin' on too much schweetness!

A presupposed Hunger Games of sorts to which I find myself adhered. Yet, it is no game, since I always win. (Ask to see my moves, post-blog read). Always hungry...which in some case may just be a vain allusion in appearing passionate or overzealous. It should be rather, ALWAYS HUNGRY. All caps to communicate the fleeting sense of extreme intensity. But that is my predisposition-- I cannot refrain from that honest fact. And to compensate in being overzealous, I hunger for knowledge to somehow equate some sort of balance in my brain.

It's such a silly question to pose, to question why you hunger for such things and ideas. Is it consummated from an unknown deficiency to which you can never quite fill? Is it your own irreconcilable and dissented disposition? One in which you are hastened to for your blood, for your very breath, for some mild sense of sanity?

Hell if I know. Really it seems asinine to analyze the thought. How unfortunate the yearning to be made aware-- and then the powerlessness to which your very awareness catalyzes.

I remembered life back in West Virginia, living with my 50 year old landlord with whom I haggled on about politics and we smoked out our angst like we were first years at an Ivy League university. We prompted so much pretense, so much forethought as if our opinions would further enlighten the godforsaken ignorant world. I was restless as hell, on my own, uncertain and unsure of my direction with deep longings for clarity. She was going through her third divorce, dissuading my cultural conditioning and pushing me to pursue my own individuality and independence. I did not lack avidity for independence. She unsettled me greatly, maybe because she hadn't figured "it" out despite our similar hungers. Or that her life was inexhaustibly messy, and hers was perhaps a precursor to my own. She was tall, strong, stubborn, and intelligent. Why would I not want to end up like her? Was her struggle with men unnecessary or preventable? What distressed me most was that she did not choose her struggle, her fight. Let me be clear: I want struggle. I want challenge. But I desire it the way I yearn for it, not as it is designed for me. But who has that ability...to design an appropriate destiny by one's will? One infallible with a remnant of livability?

At that time,I was so sparked by Edward Abbey, of course, the infamous outdoor enthusiast. He was a sad soul, someone who echoed the long aura of aloneness, but one akin to my own and who remained surprisingly comforting. His confession reverberated back to my own: “Gluttony - that's my vice and my curse. I want too much of everything. Books... Love... Music... Color.. Form... Philosophy... Travel and Adventure... the result of this bestial lust is the indiscriminate and promiscuous splaying of my energies - wanting all, I accomplish nothing; desiring everything, I satisfy nothing and am satisfied by nothing.”

Could it be said any better? There are those out there that understand this, and others who do not. And Edward Abbey could have gotten lost out in the woods and died and yet HE STILL WROTE THIS QUOTE so he sure as hell accomplished something. What a beautiful, magnificently turd-ish soul.

And then back to Chile, a mesmerizing time when I lingered in the presence of strangers. I remember an evening at a lounge in La Serena where I met a charming German man. Suave, alluring, confident...and he spoke the endearing language of words. I don't quite remember how we came upon the topic, but we spoke of our places in life, amidst time and the process. It was an unusually strange initial conversation, but I was all in, no doubt. He talked about this word in German called "sehnsucht." It referenced the deep, unimaginable longing within--as if anticipatory and in expectation, an indicator that excites. I loved sehnsecht. I didn't know what this guy was expecting in relaying a word about expectation to me, but I didn't care. I was in a love affair with this word. It was as if there was this innate confirmation that if you know hunger, there must be food. "To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." So, research shows.

I want to remain angry. Angry and bitter that I YEARN (reference note: Seinfeld, Season 3, Unknown episode). Oh poor baby Betty-- her self-imposed martyrdom is just a projection for a future prolific obituary... she just wanted so much, especially the articulation of her own juxtaposition with the physical and spiritual realm.s So verrrry poignant. It's so arrogant!! How to love yourself amidst your wants? How to fulfill your own needs with sound judgment and realistic expectation? Is this suppose to occur naturally? Yet we find our desires coalesced with our blood-- risking arrogance, risking disappointment. Feeling something. And that seems like terrible, terrible philosophical rubbish, but what philosophy is not?

Something tethers goodness in our souls. And that reminds me of that word, that ethereal and exuberant word, Shalom--the ushering of some sort of universal flourishing, or wholeness. Shalom, the life blood to what we are and what we crave and where we are going.

“In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

All I can ask is that grace be my prevailing constituent and sweet patience my closest companion. And also to yearn for Toblerone more frequently... well all the time, preferably..anddd a regular bowel pattern...and maybe a puppy. Wait a second.....is this real life?!?!

An Ode to Nipples

Coming soon...