The Gangs Of New York, The Crowds Of America

Turn any page of history and you'll end up with blood on your hands. You'll nightmarishly see, you'll horrifically understand, that whatever peace you have enjoyed, whatever serenity you found in the cries or the touch of a child's hand was brought to you like the swallow's nests stuck to the partition above your head, crowding your steps; this world, this world underneath the soil rotates on the blood of those who came before you.

The camera begins with a cornfield in the middle of the night. From the opening shot we are aware of nothing, only the darkness, perhaps the cold. The camera begins a slow tracking through the field only once in a while stopping and changing direction very slowly. Seven minutes later the camera switches off and the room fills with light. Did you think you were sure of what you would see next? At any moment something could have come into the frame and you could sit back and concentrate on it for a moment. Maybe you thought you would see a man digging alone. A scarecrow coming to life, mashing the corn stalks under his feet, or a fire erupting and the camera becoming trapped would focus on a single flame until the smoke crowded the lens? No. The trick of the seven minutes is that you never know. But you are always sure that something is there in the blackness. There is something there in the blackness, but you don't always see it. What is the moral of this story? Did the corn in the field represent all of that blood I mentioned underneath the soil? Did the corn stalks represent each man, woman, and child who died to bring you the freedom you enjoy? No. The corn was the corn, the stalks were the stalks, and the blood can only be reached in your own hands.



The Ashes Of Thoreau

Walking through woods you have never been in can be a sensory prayer. The trees standing and those that have fallen, the underbrush that is either scattered or almost non-existent, the smells and the sounds, are and can be a scattering of the senses with every drop of sweat and breath taken up a hill. Do you look around slowly and imagine a camera capturing the moment? Do you imagine someone is just over the next rise and waiting for you to pass? Standing alone in nature can remind you why you write, why you try and communicate, and can even remind you of how you will never be able to capture or translate to another what you have seen, heard, or tasted. Perhaps you begin with forests in state parks and imagine these lands are safe. You are already falling backwards into vines soaked in kerosene. Nowhere is safe in nature and no one in a way is more safe.

If you ever care to fully get the experience of the wilds of nature, then I suggest walking off into the forest, as far as you can go before having to stop to rest, and sit down and read a book or read over your own writing. Somewhere a few lines into your reading you will discover that the only one who cares anything about your writing, the only person for miles, is you. Perhaps you'll feel like the creatures of the forest are reading over your shoulder, maybe not. I guarantee if you seek to escape the noise of living, nature is your schooner to your complete consciousness. The writer who is afraid of writing either something bad or writing something they are afraid to show to someone needs nature, it needs the wilds of the forest.

Jake Berry writes, "The world is a rough silence on the brink of collapse." The mind is a disease nesting in the crop circles of the imagination. On your walk into the imagination you find a pathway cut into circles around the dreams you can remember and the ones that seem to crawl about your skin in waking time. These dreams are the poetry you were able to capture whether in the wilds of nature or the security of the door that is almost always about to open. Behind this door the Buddha rests Christ's head against the many arms of Kali. Books levitate and surround the hands of the writer as they grip the windowpane that will not break, and the floorboards that will give way just enough for the scent to escape but not the writer. Seclusion, like the wilds of nature, both contain wild animals. Are you one, or are you just the ashes of Thoreau?





An Open Letter To Creativity

Where in the wilderness of your soul can I find you nailed to a tree? Where would I find you naked and trembling, eating the shards of glass from the mirror you imagine you see? Is there where you keep those words you reserve only for you? You've already begun the wheel of time rolling toward you when you lifted the pen the first time. When you committed your thoughts to paper you began to die. It's said that Genghis Kahn and his followers would take out their knives and swords and cut additional holes in the body, so that more men could rape the woman. Why limit yourself to ten orifices I suppose was Kahn's reasoning. Why do you limit yourself to write only what you would want someone else to read? The flesh of a human being is weak enough to burst open when struck. The mind of a child is strong enough to shut down in the moment of tragedy. So why is it that your creativity suffers when you reach the place of suffering? Where are you in the wilderness? Tearfully recall the graft of intestinal nightmares you constructed in order to escape the dreams? Write it down, write it down until you reach the graying moments.



Thoughts Occurring After Listening To The Music Of Jake Berry

My life is like a ferrying delta of myth ruined by the towering steps of man. A trembling in the presence of a stampede doesn't always assure the passerby that indeed there is danger, thus a sad life have I led with many days of work left to do. Building a ship to concern the waters flowing beneath the floors, I have mistakenly sharpened my failing step. Sleep is for the unconsciousness to contemplate on a midwives salary, whether to wash before or after. Standing naked before my skin I am a musing of orange and blue, falling into seizures and an exposing lens left on the stable floor. My mind is a detonated mine whose shrapnel occurs beneath the lids of a very tired soul. The question to the answer of death is lost as the American flag goes up in flames.



A Horizon of Crucifixes in Still Life

Could you complete someone else's death? Could you stare right through the exit wound in the back of their head? Would you have the resolve to pick up the pieces of brain, tissue and skull? If you can't face someone else's death, how can you expect to face your own? More importantly, could you put it into words? The sun of enlightenment peers through your murky, rainy clouds and hovers momentarily. From the beginning, human beings face themselves into the first beam of light they can find. Running from death, they sometimes trip and fall and are witness to its beauty and its living peace. What must the respondents to the devastation of Hiroshima have thought? If you were to fall from the skies, would someone construct a net on your behalf?

Montagnards soak up the blood from America's hellish madness and re-name it. What do we know about death besides the fact that when it is shown on television we can't pull our faces from it. The Montagnards came down out of the jungle and moved into our minds. A steady convulsion of wrath over the many years has protruded into the way we look at death, the way we perceive it, the way we think it tastes, and the passionate disapproval we give it every time we retch into the communal gutter we call the American educational system. From our collection of writings since this country became aware, we have leaked into the space we keep between innocence and commissioned insanity.

You can pray into the dried grass you are trying to light. You can push your head into the rainwater you collect. You can employ every genius of taboo that Jan van Eyck displayed and use it to complete a debt. However, sooner or later you have to identify where the smell is coming from. You will have to bear witness to the montage spraying across the skies displaying images of the funeral of William Blake contrasted with the skin blowing away from every bullet ever fired in anger. If you can read you can understand the desire to put the book down.



A Temple Can Become An Altar
(for Hank Lazer)

When did the flesh become a prison we felt we had to escape from? True the body holds many nightmares from we cannot awaken: the worst of these being the thoughts of the mind. The aging process can normally be accepted but how do we conquer those thoughts that ease us out onto the window ledge? Simple, we jump. Stefano Guazzo wrote, "The ignorant in comparison of the learned, are worse than dead." Does that mean that if you are conscious of your body you will have an artifice against the evils of the soul? Forget the claymores under the skin and exist within the framework of vessel and bone.
A prisoner, like a prisoner, we are kept until we either die or perform an unspeakable act. Antoine de Saint Exupery wrote, "Horizon? There was no longer a horizon. I was in the wings of a theatre cluttered up with bits of scenery. Vertical, oblique, horizontal, all of plane geometry was awhirl. A hundred transversal valleys were muddled in a jumble of perspectives….For a single second, in a waltzing landscape like this, the flyer had been unable to distinguish between vertical mountainsides and horizontal planes…" (Wind, Sand and Stars, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1941, page 83.) But there can be ways to escape only briefly. That ringing in your ears after a sudden shock or loud noise may just be a calling to another. A brief shrug from another may be a brush against your shoulder where you look up to see not their face but a design the sun has made across the floor. A foray into the words of many dying children will reveal not only tears but also cries of wisdom and clarity. Those dying at an advanced age will draw you into a self-induced dramatic moment and say something profound but the real moment of truth is when the last breath escapes and you witness the expression. Does the heart stop with the mind?
The boat of Osiris may find its own path down the bloody river but man inadvertently created the wind that carries it. Dig your own hole but make it one where you can lie down in.



Waking Up, Decaying At Birth

You don't really need anyone else's words, even if you are not sure what you are trying to say. Looking up from the written page your ears will slowly become aware of the noise of the room: life makes quite a bit of noise. I think I know what it feels to be a teacher sometimes. If your creativity were to branch off into another of the senses would you be able to define it in such a way that you could identify it as creativity. With tears streaming down my face, I'm an illusion. The five senses caught in the water repeatedly lapping at the shore, unable to move out onto the lake.
If the larynx could specialize in the visual field of hypnosis could it get itself to try and stop talking? In the swell of a hurricane does a fish retreat to the bottom of the ocean or does curiosity get the better of him? Sever the trigeminal nerve on the left side of your head will you stop shaking in painful seizures or will you just become like the fish whose curiosity brought him into the winds of the storm and couldn't get back?
Barely legible to the handwritten page is the furious typing of an arthritic hand. Nightmares become poetry when documented on a computer screen. Writing down a dream upon waking in longhand brings the dream to life and somehow makes it real, unless you can't walk by and not see what you've written. Spending a life awash in the cold brutal sewer of creativity is best described in a quote from Samuel Johnson who wrote, "Going to sea is going to prison, with a chance at drowning besides." Working creatively is constructing a prison for yourself that will you will never be able to break yourself free from. Drowning? You'll have to answer that one for yourself. I know my answer.
I have had many dreams that repeated themselves and some that continued on with each instance. Like scenes being played out on a screen they just continued until they became oblivion and I began to get cold feelings and saw myself being cut up with a machete. Most dreams that have repeated in my festering sleep well of a life have occurred around watching myself do myself harm. I think my creativity springs from this underground river. Our dreams influence us as much as we would like to distinguish them in other ways. Stuttering, shaking and falling down into the grips of a human body shaking itself free of a chemical located somewhere in the body that corrupts the muscles into involuntary choices, I am like a bird in the utter atmosphere skirting the infinity of space and the screams of humanity that tend to hover somewhere between the heavens and creativity.





Anarchy (from six feet underground)

There's the eye of the storm, there's the point of impact and there's the blues. The south is like an old woman who has buried all of her children; she knows what is bringing up the roses and the weeds. Why do you think there is so much red clay in the south? There's so much blood in the dirt, so much mystery above ground and in-between there's the blues. An old black man said once to me about the blues, he said, "Well son, it's like this…it's just like the bible says, God made woman from man and man gonna cry for his heart and for his coffee." With electricity the south lit up but this only drove the darkness a little further back but it never went away. Rivers still overflowed and filled your bed before you had a chance to wake up. There was still that man who would slit your throat for making love to his woman or just walking across his land. Not even the invention of trains and automobiles could drive the madness from the south. Some believe the blues came from the fields of Mississippi, some believe from the tribes and hunters of Africa. The blues came from the bible. When Adam called out to god that he was alone and unhappy, that was the blues. Adam cried out, he cried out not in a spiritual voice because we both know what he was calling out for. No matter what brought you to the south, no matter what keeps you here or if you ever leave, the south will stay with you, kicking in your memory. You'll know you've seen where the lord sends all the evil and the dead. Where the lord keeps just in case heaven or hell lose their luster. The south can handle the dead.



The Secret of Writing Book Reviews is Reading The Person, Not The Book

Everything comes from the darkness, even the light. (Throw your head back in ecstasy and plunge your dirty fist into the open wound, the blood running down your leg to the floor.)The light will again light everything that is dark. Even a loving embrace can singe itself on the coldness brewing just under the skin that drapes itself ‘round the brain. Reading the writing of others can make you think more about their lives than the writing itself. To fully understand what a writer has written you would have to truly know the writer. This isn’t always possible as the writer may not actually be aware of everything in his or her own character. (Perspiration beads and falls down slow like a trickle of a waterfall beginning between the darkness of stones embedded in rock or earth. The clitoral wound bleeds itself dry when the victim is dead, the stomach as well.)Is it enough to know that you could kill? Is it enough to know that the darkness you sense upon waking in the middle of the night may just mean you haven’t fully opened your eyes? You know the old saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover?” I’ll go along with this axiom because the true guts of the book could never be suppressed onto the cover. (A white male hangs from a deserted sweatshop entrance, his face flushed with steam from a pressing iron. There are no wounds to the body except for the strangulation. His hands are severed and placed in the opposite pocket from the use of the hand. His feet as well are severed and placed in the shoes beneath his legs in the same manner. There is no trace of blood so you take it that the victim was moved. There’s a tissue placed around the center of a rock, the rock hangs across the victims’ neck. Moving through the doorway, carefully not to disturb the body, you see before you another pair of shoes. In these shoes the feet are placed correctly in the shoes and the hands are in the correct pockets. There is no body just a pair of pants stretched out on the floor. It is determined the killer severed his own feet and hid in the darkness, nude, without his pants and awaited the darkness to come so he could escape into the light.)Stigmatized by what they have read, most writers listen to their muse and continue on writing by comparison. Becoming a lone voice in the beginning of their creativity is too cold a hallway to stand in alone. Too narrow a passage to crawl between, crawling past that slow trickle of water that becomes a waterfall. When a writer moves into the light and is opened like the petal of a flower and can receive the blessed water he needs to write on he is in desperate danger of dying and does not know it. First he must know when to go back into the darkness. The darkness that gave birth to this breath he quickly loses upon a mirror.


Immortality


When asked about immortality I always reply, not yet. What can a writer leave behind besides what he or she has written; a collection of books? Some will say that if someone still continues to read what they have written they will live on. What if no one ever takes the time to read his or her work? What if the writer was the only audience he ever had? With the invention of the Internet just about all you have to do is post it somewhere and the page will never go away, though you may wish it could. What can immortality give you that life could not? A quick, step ahead up the rung of complete conscience? A place where all your mistakes confront you? Oscar Wilde wrote, “He stands outside his subject, and through its medium produces incomparable and artistic effects.” Backing away from yourself, loosening the restraints on your creativity would be one way of describing immortality. Perhaps immortality is a room you’ve never been in but somehow your footprints are there, nonetheless. Post mortem, what Oscar Wilde described as, “The uncultivated mind.”
Writing must become more than a calling, more than something you enjoy. If you will, it must sometimes be more than you are. You can write a poem describing a flower on a Nantucket shoreline by using the hues and dew you are familiar with, the dew and mist you read in a book when you were young or the one you just read after visiting a website that featured the technical term of the plant. But before you back away from what you’ve written ask yourself if you have done justice to the struggle of the flower. It didn’t just pop up from the earth and open its beauty to the world. The metaphor can be the worst of the penal acts not restricted to the writer. Re-writing what you have read is a common ailment in the psychological arena of creativity in a writer. To be a writer you must give up your innocence.
Dostoyevsky wrote, “When man lives in masses, then man lives spontaneously.” You could write a five hundred-page novel in an afternoon by just walking around people and listening. The environment of the writer is never subdued, even when pressed into self-containment the writer can still squeeze an ounce of blood through the keyhole without lifting a vein. I advocate the usage of everything around you. Just remember what you write will follow you long after you are dead. That’s immortality.





Iron filings, pliers blown into windshields

I saw in a book today drawings of snowflakes by Descartes, Erasmus Bartholin, and Giovanni Domencio Cassini. Through the wonders of technology the drawings have become more and more detailed, so now we know more than perhaps we should, enough that a child can subsist on its magnificence until dinnertime. Water, frozen and falling to the earth or back down to earth as you may imagine either I truly believe. In the Rig Veda you find the line, “A seed of abundant waters, he comes out of the ocean.” Like birds circling a downed power line, looking for somewhere to land, we fail to notice the smell of refrigerant emitting its unnatural squall out over the fields. Are snowflakes man-made in the sense that they seem to appear from a tree’s limb or can December’s compelling grip cause the moon’s influential tides to soar and trickle down upon us through the dense garbage laden atmosphere? Likely not. Crop circles litter abandoned and freshly seeded fields and mathematicians at a loss but at a fraction of half time create their own boulders to move from their chests. We are our own hells and we create them at a staggering pace. J.D. Bernal wrote, “The full area of ignorance is not mapped: we are at present only exploring its fringes.”





Loose Trials

I’m only able to describe my own hell; I’ll leave you to yours. My ghostlike figures move motionless in the darkness of my dreams and erupt in my waking peripheral vision. The polluted symbolism of their chants reverberate into the orifices of my body and their smells cover me with a dry powder, passionate about the hundreds of corpses left by my mistakes, regrets and loves. I feel the sickening pages of the computer screen with the details of accident victims, I am one with the snake crawling into my mouth and feeding on my vital organs. Afternoons are the worst, the time between awakening and sleep. The time you have to reflect on the dreams the night before and those to come. Sometimes I can almost feel the characters preparing for their nights performance. The cameras swirl with film in order to capture the events of the dream so they will be able to repeat their performances again and again in days and months to come. Dreaming in color and watching the hues turn to a sickly gray, I challenge the kidneys to abstain from urinating and ask the muscles in my back to avoid the frequent pain they leave me in. However, the body works as one when attacking the senses, impaling the unconsciousness with its own steel spiked pole. When being hit by your own ammunition, the wounds become indentured and cannot be torn away from the point of impact. The seed falls into the earth and never hits bottom.





A Natural Excessive


Pray with me and my willingness to reach the skies by lying on the ground. Close to me this side of life. I so want to listen to the sound of the embrace that change brings to you. It's sullen and it's home to your heart. I have widowed peace and its ever-calming stillness by acknowledging pain. The struggle to give myself over to anything but my thoughts, my wants, my needs. To be at peace is more than being an offspring, or to be a Father, or a Mother. These things come about in life through your own will. It is quite difficult to even achieve sincerity, much less spontaneity or peace. If you were to define the human spirit, I would say compassion. Compassion translates to me as appreciation and acceptance. If you can achieve this then I think you are in the right frame of mind. The Dalai Lama was once asked. "Why do we come to this world?" The Dalai Lama replied, "Nature is nature. There is no answer." When I think of Buddhism I am deeply humbled by the history of the religion, the almost seemingly impossible task of understanding what must be done and understood. But I know the mind is always learning so the sentient being will also. It does fill me with love and a desire for understanding. Pray with me.




Taken In Hand This Dirty Appearance, Flies to the Wound

(A Treatise for a School of Writing That Can Never Exist, Nor Die)

--with great love and understanding to the hermit of Teks St.--

How long would you have to dig in the earth before you found someone that looked like you? An intense being whose very nature was dependent on ferocity and the gentleness of a child? How far would you have to look into your family tree before you found a pederast sitting happily on a limb and chewing an apple, core and all? Would you have to become psychoanalytic to justify your existence? In solitude there exists a demonic form of guilt that can tear a soul from the body of a man in just a few moments. To consecrate this form of surgery it is sometimes necessary to haltingly pour oneself into abstraction and drink. Pass a needle through the eye of a penitentiary, a prison of the mind, and you will feel the saintly coldness of the guillotine. To emerge from the needle, the fabric, you will have to give up your blood and last breath. Through great concentration you will find the ability to write and the necessary substitute of reading. However, obscuring this gift is the uncircumcised cock of insanity. What originates, as melancholia can become the rawest and intense need to pull on your clothes and wash your hands in the utter despair that eats away your constant requirement of creativity. Don't reinvent the wheel; learn to translate the path unconsciously into your own need to stay ever still.






THE NOISE OF YOUR BELIEF

Animals testify through their DNA. Humans expound upon the greasy terrain of civilization and clap their hands in despair. A fire burns out of control over the forehead of a child asleep in a dream of gray gardens. Me, I sit in the handshake of a woman who has lost a husband and a son. Her eyes unable to smile as her lips trace the familiar, the expression aging in phosphorous light, like white tile against a dirty skylight. Who’ll cry for her while she feeds herself in the presence of something holy?
Writers often speak of the abyss, but why try and explain this? If you’ve been there you know that there is no way of explaining it. Speak to a group of people and if you stop to look around you’ll see who is listening, who is thinking of what their reply will be, and those that are looking past you. I wonder, can you ever really express yourself? Just how surreal is it to see a piece of thread embedded in a tree after a great wind? Do you focus only on the thread or do you look at how the rest of the tree weathered the storm? The first thing a traveling man will tell you about the road is to look out for what you normally ride by unaware. He’ll show you the man crawling from under his car from a nap. The woman cradling her child over the roaring engine and trying to keep him warm when the heater has broken and the temperature has dipped below zero.
The next time you enter a depression and look around you for an escape, remember that all things being natural, you could do worse. Christ was nailed to a cross of wood, not stone. Stone radiates the heat from the sun whereas wood does not. The nails in his hands would have become heated in the sun and if they were hot enough could cauterize the wounds. Blood loss and flesh peeled away, the witches of Salem or the books burned by the Third Reich would suffer more in the fires? That depends on your opinion of long-suffering against the idea of the skin burning and falling away slowly.





The Shadow Passes Before The Light


Everything you write is important to you. That’s relatively simple to understand isn’t it? The reader is for whatever reason attracted to it and seeks it out. Thoughts are exchanged often in silence. The silence of the writer is now in the readers mind, and the reader giving voice to your words in his head, reads on and the writing you wrote is up to the conclusion of the reader. A transparent event is unfolding and the writer will almost certainly never know the outcome. Much like the blood coursing through your veins, the blood that gives you life, may or may not ever come to the surface in your lifetime and even if it does will you truly understand what it work in the way it does? Certainly there is a sort of electricity that occurs as the blood flows along its path in the body. So there must be a reaction from the reader to what you have written. If the blood stops, if it does not continue to flow the body will die, if the writer does not show his work to the reader or make it available to him then the exchange will never take place again. Then the voice of the writer will read his own words in his mind before they are written down, the very same voice that can hound the writer into insanity if need be. Nietzsche wrote, “The most concerned ask today: “How is man to be preserved?” But Zarathustra is the first and only one to ask: “How is man to be overcome?”