THE WRITING LIFE

By David Eide

The writing life gives legs to the impossible.

"It moved through thick and thin, light and dark. Many projects, many failures, many bitterness's, many joys, many of everything but goods and money."

I had to pass through several overwhelming experiences:

Nature: That is, what precedes us and continues on forever with the perception of form and beauty on an undiscovered planet in a galaxy we have not yet discovered, on the principle: Nature is abundant and grabs hold wherever it can.

Science: Cosmology; space, mass, velocity, chemical composition, etc etc. The little markers we love to pronounce: Quark, meson, String. The path to a certain glut of elegant facts.

Culture: Cities or the complexity of things built out of the cussedness of human nature in love with its own powers. Sumer, then all the functions, systems, inventions, through time. The determination of walls, streets, crowds, and social structure.

Family: Identity through the growth of personality

Freedom and its resistance.

Separation and its Longing.

"Wonderful densities we travel through!"

* * * * * * * *

The old wise woman said, "he didn't become an expert at anything but his vision was comprehensive."

Projects, relations, communities, jobs; difficult modern mundane and fasincating life.

I never believed I was superior to anyone but I didn't allow the stink of human nature take down my potentials.

The writing life, then, was akin to a path, sometimes of discovery, certainly contemplation.....

* * * * * * * *

"The well-springs of your own productive self. That is the center. That is where it is done. That is where happiness and joy are born." That's what she told me as I contemplated the Bridge way off in the distance but right beside me as well.

"And most of the morality and virtue books don't get it for the most part. You have to go to the original types who have struck the fount. They are the trust-worthy ones."

I relented to her advice even though I didn't want to.

It was around the time I was trying to write novels. I never got to that "fount" as she called it. So I moved away from novels and tried other areas; poetry, thought, political discourse, contemplation's, etc.

Very simple. I said, "talent, go where thou wisheth," and it went into the areas it did. I treated my writing as though it were a restless son who you let loose into the world knowing he will get creamed but be the better for it.

* * * * * * * *

The quandary for the writer is judging what is and what is not productive....a few lines of Rilke appear more productive to my sense of things than a 500-page novel of nothingness. The market may disagree, certainly.

But it is a personal thing is it not?

* * * * * * * *

A young writer learns the following like a dart through the eye on some dank battlefield:

Era's can be destroyed by Nothingness. In a culture divided between exploiters and victims there is little truth; there is little building or constructive principles.

A writer thanks God for the hearty laughter of men!

To fight the easy sort of Nothingness leisurely parading itself, a writer needs to focus on his or her:

• Writing life
• Publishing career
• Pursuit of knowledge
• Personal life

Sometimes separate, sometimes meshed and blended.

In an Era of Nothingness the writer learns patience and develops the belief that his work is his own, for whatever end he feels necessary for it.

* * * * * * * *

The Speed of Light

The stated limit is duration=1 second= 186,000 miles in the space we create, if not occupy. It is the description of one limit and therefore, celebrated by poetry. It is a kind of facement of God.

Duration, as a reality, is all we know. That is poetry.

However, to be human and healthy we need to slow everything down. That is prose. We need to understand. That is prose.

* * * * * * * *

The Pursuit of Truth

The writer enters that haunted state of demoralization when he discovers the difference between the "pursuit of truth" and the "will to power."

The pursuit of truth comes in through beauty.

Events emerged from the post-Vietnam era, its pessimism's and degradations. The old liberals showed me history and the perspective to see one's own time as it will not see itself. They taught that if you hit your head against steel thighs your head, eventually, will fall off and nothing will have changed but one more headless writer. But just when the learning was good came the old-Bolshevik-takes-over-and-rubs-out-the-idealistic- Menshevik syndrome. It was an interesting show but left the writer amazed by the destructive power of politics at a time when he needed models. A more cutting-edge thing going on at the time were the rise of cults, harvesting armies of the old drug culture or idealistic waifs who wanted no part of the dank, discredited American society.

It's hard to communicate how deep that wound went.

My Virtual Space emerged out of a simple question, "how do you build a political state on a nation filled with rotten people; ignorant, addicted, gross, lousy, putrid people?"

That was a recipe for disaster I thought to myself, not prepared for the arduous task of self-examination it required from me.

I separated the political and literary this way. The political was the self-evident machinery of due process, debate, policy-making, etc. Anything that made its way into the political machinery no longer had interest, ipso facto, to the literary imagination.

I think of protests against the Vietnam war or equity/justice issues for example. These became self-evident political issues that were significant to the citizen but not the literary imagination. The one issue where this was most tested was the environmental since it implied the core of literary imagination, that is, nature. But that too became a political issue decided in the political system.

The literary imagination extracts from these issues what it can.

• Battle, for instance and the persistence of war through time
• The wildness of nature and its necessity
• The liberation of the female for her full development
• The depiction of a perfect society or a perfect citizen

.....these things unattainable to anything but the appreciative imagination are what the writer focuses on.

The undiscovered problems.

* * * * * * * *

There is society and then there is the individual. The society is either wealthy or poor. It is Republican or Democrat. It is swarming in gadgets or not.

The individual is usually all of these things at different times. And the writer is the quintessential individual in that he demands all his focus is on what the society despises. Or, is not adventuresome enough yet to take on, such as new ideas or new perceptions.

The writer rationalizes the need for wealth without too much trouble. "It is better to be in a society swimming in wealth than in one deep in poverty." One creates leverage after leverage that even the writer can stand on. Poverty is one surly ride down the mineshaft.

And to secure this wealthy state one must live in a stable republic. And that depends, not only in the ability to create weath but in the continual attention on the needs of the middle-class. The writer sees all of this in a very positive light.

But then, the individual is not the society. He meets many who think they are! The individual writer can do those things the economy and the politics can not, that is, roam freely through all the different pluralities, all the states of wealth and poverty, all the classes, all the activities and functions and come out the other end more a writer than a nutcase. Sometimes things are on the balance beam but regardless.

For a few decades I had what one could describe as a "disaster" when it came to publishing. I didn't have the foggiest notion of what I was doing. I started and abandoned projects as fast as I could, deluding myself that I was being productive.

CLUE: When the beginning is off-center, don't go in a staight line.

Sometimes I entertained the idea that I would die young and all my papers would be found and printed. Decades later a professor would do a paper on me and the contents of my folders. Other times I said, it's just a matter of time....something will happen......have patience.

* * * * * * * *

Discouragement is the deadliest acid for the writer. If even a few spoonfuls gets on the tongue a writer is apt to lose confidence in himself. When that process begins there is the ten-years-of-sliding- downward syndrome until an ugly rock or vicious animal tells you to pay attention.

Even the most precious project crawls to the margin.

I think, in the modern world, it's smart to live 3 or 4 distinctive lives. This is possible and necessary to do in order to sustain levels of interest and energy.

Between the ages of 25 and 35 I was very concerned about the global situation, the future, nuclear dilemma, ecological problem, resource depletion and the rest of it. I didn't separate out my moral concerns and literary concerns.

And I thought a free, liberal democratic person should, in fact, take on those larger questions. You can't solve them but, at least, you get to know the world on a scale hitherto unknown. But, only youth and its energies can take on all of those things. Eventually, the energy runs downward and there is the need to transform.

* * * * * * * *

It is crucial to know when one life is complete and done with.

* * * * * * * *

Between 35-45 was, as well, a complete life in a way. It was centered in family, self, and the cohesive properties of life. The conservation of energy, perhaps. The conservation of liberal, democratic values since those were being threatened every moment.

One life comes to an end and another is being born; based primarily, in strict self-interest. What is my self-interest as a writer? What is my self-interest as a economic being? What is my self-interest as a citizen? What do I need to do in order to fulfill these roles and obligations? What sort of intentionality is necessary? What sort of plans? What sort of demands do I have to put on myself and others?

That describes the sort of life I am going into.

* * * * * * * *

Early on I had the intuition that the modern world was creating a society of very passive/aggressive types who sat back and let themselves get zapped by the horridness of other people's intentions. This is something that belongs to hordes not to liberal, democratic citizens.

Culture, to be valuable, must first be hidden. It must be discovered on its own terms. That process produces authentic individuality; spoon-fed culture produces a distracted, addicted, dumbed-down population.

The writer has to make this sort of distinction since the marketplace is dominated by lies and promises rather than self-discovery.

It only matters when we take stock of who is ruling the roost.

* * * * * * * *

A society is never in trouble when the bad arises and resists it and fights it. The society is in deep trouble when the good arises and resists it and fights it. That follows an inevitable process of corruption over several generations and drains whatever remaining morale it contains straight into the void of space.

* * * * * * * *

In the first phase of my career I was concerned with questions of repression. What represses the imagination and intellect? What, in other words, is the enemy to free, liberal democratic culture?

* * * * * * * *

I was one who studied the end of life on planet Earth. It seemed reasonable, in youth, that such a fate awaited the future. "Ah, the end of life, the end of the human prospect...." There was a stubborn egotism that didn't allow for such a view but, then, something large and real made me realize that it was probable and what, then, was the writer's response?

After all, the weapons were not myths. And their delivery systems were not myths. It made it absurd to continue as though nothing had happened or nothing need change. To the poetic consciousness the absurdity appeared fatal and, in fact, I was convinced great and wonderful things had to happen.

That anything less than the fantastic discovery of new form, new imaginative horizons, new aspirations was a sacrifice to the demoralization brought on by the blight of the modern world.

It's quite shocking to take this view into society and see the responses one gets.

But, I was convinced that an utterly new thing had to come into play. The only thing that is not conditioned is the poetic imagination.

Therein is the tale of a thing or two.

Freedom experienced as a splendid future!

* * * * * * * *

One thing that I fought with and that was the status and nature of the novel. I felt that the novel had been stripped various ways by modern technology. That the writer should leave off "telling stories" in this form and focus or extract the very best qualities embedded in novels; insight, vision, and connectedness with a sense of place. Those were the great qualities of the novel.

But those qualities could be developed any number of ways. The novel was reduced down and shuttered in by the growth of so many things outside the dimension of the novel. Better to move to exciting new ways of presenting the essence of those qualities the novel once embedded in so many delightful, dynamic ways.

* * * * * * * *

If the novel is not an expression of our freedom, then what is it?

* * * * * * * *

Influences fly from me like angry ghosts. "You beats and old European novelists, consummate artists as you were; crazed philosophers, confessional poets, shrinks, and monks," I mutter as they all fly skyward after they had their way with me.

I was influenced by all things not permitted in the United States but in small college and university towns.

* * * * * * * *

If they could contemplate in the depths of the 13th century why can't modern types do the same thing? It's a simple and frightening question.

And what people have denied in themselves; that was a painful influence for me.

The greatest influence is the fully human in stride through love, death, nature, hate, power, and beauty. It is a form not obligated to anything but its very best.

* * * * * * * *

An indelible influence keeps the mind open in the face of skepticism, cynicism, hatred, ignorance and crowds of common ailments. Addiction, certainly that.

There is, then, the miserable voyage through the untrustworthy nature of human beings; passage, shock, horror, and then the telling move.

And when we pass through we must turn back and admit what has gotten us through. It is a commingling of the sacred and the profane.

Richness.

Light.

Happy resolutions!

The American writer is never free while he exists in the shadow of old Europe. The old Europeans were transfixed by "society," rather than "freedom." The American wants to be a free dog, the freest of the free. "Society" is for the days when things travelled at 11MPH and the circulating coil for money existed on one level and the rest were cold and bitter.

Not "freedom" perhaps but the "effects of having a free life..."

Mostly we don't struggle with questions about basic freedoms but struggle to maintain the freedom that is here and exploring its implications and new horizons.

It is, then, the obligation of the American writer to establish new vistas, new combinations, new worlds. That is the thing.

It is a goal that seeks for its fact.

* * * * * * * *

Some of the gravest conflicts in human history are reduced in America to a kind of so what-ism. A dash of spiritual wisdom, a slug of knowledge is usually enough to detox the materialism of the American spirit.

* * * * * * * *

The deep impressions made by the possiblity of nuclear war and the adventure into space initiated my experience in the world. Terror and its effects are real even when nothing happens.

And the Moon reflected to Earth the physical reality of space in its infinite yawn; its capacity to devour worlds without sound. Its trillions of light years of absolute hostility to life.

* * * * * * * *

The sweet path of writing includes an orientation to the past, present, and future!

* * * * * * * *

At times the world was so absurd it was rather liberating. At first, it was demoralizng. But then it was apparent that it literally didn't matter what others thought.

And this introduced me to the dangers of nihilism as well as to the pleasures of engagement; freedom with responsibility or freedom because we are morally responsible and want the good.

* * * * * * * *

An American writer; the animal that carries the seeds of something vast, protected yet open; regional but experienced in a few regions. Knowing the ocean and mountains. Experience. Mountain man of new paths if the people don't hang him for it; they certainly won't patronize him or permit him to live on his writings alone.

He who takes all up into himself and, at the end of it, wobbles but stands firm. He knows the machinery of politics and business but avoids the gears as much as possible. He is eaten up by time piece by piece and records the apex and nadir of the experience. He really is not after enemies. He likes fellowship and friendship, cordial relations between people. Sanity. He knows the bitterness of living without things. He knows the sublime freedom of living without things. He is humiliated at every turn but seems to land on his feet ok.

* * * * * * * *

And after being ground down into the soft, fine dust of it all what American writers does he still remember? Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, Twain, London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. The youngest of these fine talents died about 40 years ago. Nothing in 40 years? What in 40 years?

As far as America it could be any number of things. Pop culture rose into prominence. Amplified music. Television. Glossy magazines in a fragmented marketplace. Non-fiction over fiction. Open verse in poetry with some retreat back into structure. Declinism of a sort. Melodic meaninglessness but touching on the beautiful without embodying the beautiful.Transient and forgotten in half a generation. Freeing of African-Americans and women; a good fulfillment of the democratic idea. The immense struggle over the role of America in global politics; world history. Computers. Space. WMD. Consciousness of the effect of human activity on the environment. Travel. Money. Freedom of a kind. Sex. Intoxication.

The quickening; convenience, privilege, humans and their machines like pets now or an appendage grafted onto them by the powers that be. Religion either so harsh it contradicts the center of itself or so airy-fairy it's rather nonsensical. Lost in cities, found in wandering crowds milling around the stadium. Roars above and from below.

* * * * * * * *

In writing it is always the human element; nothing more, nothing less. The machines and institutions can take care of themselves. And, if the human element declines it's superfluous anyway. The human beings relation then to what is supreme and what exists as the central facts. Stories. Mind in support of the commonweal of humanity. The mouth of nature. The terrible fears. Persona of the time. The fragments that make up the whole. A night sky lit up with little dreams. The moon as a traversal point. The aim is at the origin of things. Pity the poor souls who find it. Pity the ones who stop or give up. Man. Woman. That. Throw in Children. Yank from them their best and give it back to them as long as they pay you for it.

Immersion in the now; the dark paltriness with huge eternities on either side of it. So. Observation. Alertness. Laughter. Good cheer.

* * * * * * * *

Let us make an outline that is as inhuman as the thing we see. But, the outline is not the thing. The thing is all inside.

* * * * * * * *

The writer is not a camera. The writer is a human observer. He observes without commenting. No! Now he must comment, things have gotten too far. Ah, now he will simply permit the built-up energies running through him exit in interesting ways.

Truth is more complex than any particular cause.

He emerges from a modern romanticism to see himself and his culture in a sober light; one that has darkness, one that has delight. One that has beauty, one that has evil. One where the massification is deadly, yet one can escape the massification. The marks of it are everywhere and he observes. He is a silent camera. He carefully lifts and places, rushes off a caption and turns the page.

* * * * * * * *

If there is something real in the term, "democratic soul" or a "liberal, democratic spirit" a writer is obliged to flesh it out.

No matter what position the pyramid happens to be in, the writer uses every opportunity to contradict it.

A lot of creative energy is driven through technical objects or organizations. The one out for the literary type is mindfulness. He waits patiently for the unintended consequence of mindfulness.

* * * * * * * *

Reading is a defense against the palling claws of the nightmare days. The cynical, nihilistic, dumb and dumber all have their secret but transparent codes. Let them go. Be utterly aware of them because they will try and pull you from the fount as soon as they see you get near it.

The seed of a great American myth: "Make it new but know all that has gone before." And the two sides must be joined together. If it is only one thing or the other then it results in lies and fanaticism.

The shadows of even those we think we know can throw us into a deep shadow ourselves.

The writer tries to protect two distincitve areas: language and imagination. He can't say everything there is to say about them; he knows when they are strong and when they are weak. Anything that overpowers the individual weakens the ability of both language and/or imagination to tell the truth, to be courageous, to have vision, to root-down into the supple Earth.

We don't have tyranny, yet, here in the West.

Writing is an act of individuality. It is a mark of a particular individual. Most people are exposed early on to a mass culture that teaches very powerful techniques and so on. It reinforces some popular wisdom. And it does so at the moment the educational system is at its weakest. It's much more likely a culture of this type will produce a huge, grey slagheap and frightened children who are commanded by smart guys then that you will produce a culture of individual people who love the culture, it's history, yet maintain a very critical view of power. And who continually grow and develop and support their sensibility as free liberal democratic citizens.

* * * * * * * *

Power, itself, is an enemy of language and imagination.

* * * * * * * *

The writer has to be courageous enough to build outside the walls of power.

* * * * * * * *

Even though I read philosophy from time to time I consider myself fully, a "man of letters," a character who was much despised in the era I grew up in; a product of leisure and privilege. Americans are not good with leisure or privilege and no one can convince them that sitting on ones rear writing or reading is a productive use of time so, perhaps, the "man of letters," is a kind of civilized outcast; knowing the core and center but banished to wander along the steel, titanium edges of the thing he is part of. And, after all, it is but a case of one man or one woman with an imagination, intellect, experience, knowledge putting a world together with language; the language he or she possesses in relation to a world he or she does not make but there as solid as the stadium filled with crazed fans.

And what one looks at is telling. What dives deep into the spirit is telling. All the person of letters can do is present his language in as many forms as possible, try to focus on what he or she does the best, let go of vanity, serve the art, serve the language.

* * * * * * * *

I operated, as a good poet will, with three or four myths intact. I searched for the mythologies and knew the light and dark of each. One came about because of the Internet; that is, the myth of the colony, cut away from the Empire but connected to it and struggling with that connection. The Empire has superior things, perhaps, and luxuriates in a power it will lose sooner than later. The colony takes the best virtues of the Empire and then tries to create the new future. And that dovetailed into the myth that the framers set from the beginning. "Make it new," but know the past 3-4,000 years of human achievement, degradation, genius, wonderment and comedy. Know it as well as you know your own name. A beautiful profound myth. And then the modern one that I discovered in the 70's. On one side the weapons that can destroy whole cities in a flash of light. And on the other the breaking of the seal of space and the universe becoming a tactile entity that leads the mind to infinity; a real experience and one that expands the present and gives hope for a future always threatened by the insanity of human beings.

* * * * * * * *

I ignored ideology, even politics from time to time and the long odd parade that makes up any given time. I connected with what filled me with delight, wisdom, and knowledge. I ignored everything else.

* * * * * * * *

I can't force the writing of poetry. It used to be that one time a year I would get into a poetic rutting season and have a go at it. I felt it was a mystical sort of activity, expressing the spirit in a free and meaningful way. It was a private art, didn't need a huge public. Prose narrative, the novel, is a public art and needs a lot of eyeballs to flourish.

That is one of its problems, certainly.

The commentary stuff came about as a way to re-orientate myself back to the present. In my teens and early-mid 20's I was fully and happily imbued with the present and rode in it in fine style. Then it became repugnant to me. As a good American I rushed way ahead to the future and speculated about a number of things. When that dried up I went to the past and absorbed that monster. The past at least had real people in it and events that had, in fact, happened. That lasted into my mid-30's I think. Then I left the past and tried to orientate myself to a new present. So, almost all of my commentary work is an orientation. You orientate through knowledge and experience in relation to "what is going on."

* * * * * * * *

There are significant tribes in America; one of them is the critical tribe that exists in media and the university. Then there is the creative, building tribe that includes makers of poems, music, as well as bridges and computers. And then there is the mainstream tribe who carry, collectively, the burden of society, develop its market values and drive the political values.

I always alternate between loyalty and disgust for those tribes that demand my allegiance or attention.

Once I was divested of the critical tribes’ hold over me I lost a certain automatic scorn for the mainstream and, in fact, learned a great deal in that tribe. After all, the only way to learn something is to travel through it all the way and peek your head out the other end. Both the market and politics that come out of the mainstream can be eviscerated but it is far better to build according to principles of truth. Much better, much healthier.

* * * * * * * *

Apothegms for the Times:

There is a shadow to individuality; there is light. The light emerges when one is doing their very best at their chosen activities and lives with the results.

If you go through change or transition and people don't help you, drop them. Cut them loose because you always need positive energy when going through a change or transition.

Who would destroy the fruits of the fathers labor deserves the black hole they will sink into. And that goes back a good many generations.

The weak adhere to collective myths that appeal to their prejudices or abysmal desires. Be very aware of this and put a staying hand to it.

* * * * * * * *

I can admit to the problems of dealing with (1) philosophy (2) poetry (3) spiritual

Are they three separate domains or simply impossible to grasp by one consciousness fully since they include and exclude along different pathways? I think what one has to admit is that at different times those three activities are sufficient; they are needed at different periods of time during any persons development.

The personal question is, what emerges out of the interplay with these three dimensions? What, then, is the new horizon?

Philosophy was necessary to deal with the overwhelming nature of the physical world, including political/economy, science, technology, etc. I felt the path to truth came more through the spiritual, with poetry a kind of mid-wife, sometimes bursting into a thing itself. Left to itself human nature repeats again, again, and again with seizures of the irrational thrown in for good measure. However, the spiritual forgave human nature and offered imaginative constructs that would allow for a greater humanity, a greater self.

The reader of philosophy, poetry, and the spiritual learns after awhile that it was the form of expression that was the key, including the form of personality that did the expressing.

History and memory were another large category.

However, a man can enact well in only one thing. He can and should try a lot of things when young. And then he settles on the one thing he does very well or better than the other paths he chooses.

* * * * * * * *

We focus on the self because there is the constituent element; just as the quark is the constituent element in the construction of physical space. Or, whatever it may be at any give time. The string, for instance.

Ride through perilous waters and you'll see a lot of cargo go overboard.

* * * * * * * *

A good deal of writing is simply orientating the self to the ground of its being, to nature, to the mysteries of what moves it, to buildings, houses, and machines, to systems that flow through it, to facts, to lies, to power, to events, to what we believe and what we want.

Why is "democracy" such a fascinating term? Why do I keep coming back to it? It's about "all with the potential for good and abundent life....so he, so she....so that man, so him."

Democracy will end when it's frozen in fear of its own implications. I would rather see democracy evolve and push itself beyond what is here and view today as a beginning rather than an end.

We are still restless for the signal that we should begin something.

We are there!

* * * * * * * *

The greatest myths in America are created by "the open road..."

* * * * * * * *

The writing life was an irrational response to things. It was edged in the belief that structure ensnared and devoured talent. But, freedom without structure turns quickly into addiction and turns on itself after awhile. So, structure comes to have some meaning.

Structure and outline.

The Constitution, to take a random example, is a structure of governance settled by agreement after a lot of ferocious argument. And science is a structure that seeks facts after the deluge of sense. It is the fact-finding structure with its own types of checks and balances, due diligance and so forth. And technology is a kind of physical structure of science that imposes and conveys; helps and destroys and is ignored at the risk of having a skewered view of the world.

So I find that an outline for the modern world; the one I occupy at any rate.

Several things:

When I was a young guy in Berkeley, even in college before that, two things struck me. One was that the "novel" was being written by poets like Joyce, Kerouac and Lawrence. And "novelists" were becoming more like journalists like Hunter Thompson, Mailer, Wolfe, and Capote. That the traditional novel had lost its audience but that journalism still had an audience. Thus, the change in prose during the 70's period of time.

It stood to reason to study and write poetry and get a foundation down that made sense or, at least, worked. And it made it much more reasonable to ignore the mainstream and literary worlds that insisted that the novel was this and journalism was that. It also meant a protracted study of society: Many people. Many circumstances, many jobs, many neighborhoods, many places, many things.

It became clear to me that the prose writer could sever him or herself from the immediate, the now, the reportage of life and become much more contemplative, much more meditative.

So, there was that conflict.

* * * * * * * *

I wrote in The Digital Writer several years ago that a Milton could flourish these days whereas a Dickens or Dostoevsky would have a difficult time. The epic was a product of leisure and focus by a singular talent. The novel was fully market driven. The market has migrated to film, TV, internet etc.

The novel seems rather fallow these days. A Dickens or Dostoevsky could certainly write on the Net and flourish but it would be through insight, through inventive character sketches and columns rather than novels. Just a passing thought.

* * * * * * * *

I had knowledge at the center, a thirst for knowledge but I think now, rather than a center of culture, knowledge is a structure inside the head of a person without which his or her head will implode from all the information streaming from outside of it. Knowledge is a ballast against what is outside of it; in that sense it is real.

* * * * * * * *

The poet sees mytholodgy laying on top of the surface since machines initiate the mythologizing process and dive deep into the consciousness of the people. The two major machines-creating modern-myth are the nuclear device and the space vehicle. A big thing happened when we penetrated space. Space became its own reality at that moment. It became tactile; it became a form that took the mind with it. Up to that point space was a virginous abstraction we projected hopes into. The mind then connected to the odd idea that maybe life existed beyond the Earth; that life was proliferating throughout the immense universe and we weren't equipped yet to find out.

On the other side was the destructive fury of nuclear weapons and their god-like ability to reduce everything down into dust and ash, yet, initiated by human action. This introduced another ancient myth; that is, all life disappearing in great cycles of destruction and rebirth. So, if things got out of hand here and we just did ourselves in, life would pause for a million years, a mere blink of an eye, and then start up again.

A myth but a pleasing one from time to time.

* * * * * * * *

I don't think the "materialistic" society is a terrible thing. A city with riches in it is usually a good and interesting place. And so the people who create the materialism are no doubt good servants of the social creed.

I have no problem as long as I am not disturbed in my pursuits.

I do think there is way too much emphasis on it and it corrupts the young very early on who then have to find the right balance. I've never pit the writing life against the materialistic life. However, the materialistic life, like family, is a density the writing life must move through. In that sense a lot of ragged bits of flesh and bone are hanging on the adventure. So, the writer develops stragetems to get through and do the deed. If "materialism" is an eternal Now and a function of the human animal, which basically it is, so be it.

* * * * * * * *

To sacrifice for the future is extremely dangerous to do in a materialistic culture.

* * * * * * * *

Money was a bug-a-boo. On the one hand I ascribed most bad things to money. But, more importantly, I experienced the world as a speeding, out of control freight train headed for its own doom. That did not encourage my talents. Therefore I had to block out the driving engine to the mad dash to doom; money. From little coins to vast accounts with a multiplier being the thirst human beings have for money, all driving to the apolcypse. To a young heart it sometimes appears to be the case. The older heart laughs but not too much.

But for a young heart to passively insert itself in that sort of machinery was not going to be tolerable. "Aren't I a free guy too?" Therefore, I followed my path as best as I could and denied money the claims it had made in the world. It's a test of sorts.

And as Kafka put it, "if you're in a race with the world, bet on the world."

I wanted to be a writer, not a consumer.

For me a book was a treasure and a good word or bit of wisdom an object of great value. That may have spilled over into places it shouldn't have gone. I know that people wanted to correct that attitude in myself. I held on as best I could.

* * * * * * * *

It's very difficult to be a writer in America. There really is no economic incentive. I think one of two things happens. Either a person finds they have writing talent and it's exciting to exercise that talent and then finds the necessity to write; or, a person finds some necessity and then develops a writing talent to fulfill that necessity. It's not enough simply to have talent; you must find the necessity. That converts the writer from a lonely creature to a social one. Where else would the necessity be but something not working in the world around you? Where else it would be but wounds within the self that others can chase away through money or material goods? So, the problem of writing starts there and it puts the writer at odds with others who have different incentives, more mainstream, natural incentives. And the writer is tested, tested, tested. Up and down, every which way there is a mighty test for the writer in this world. And you either find ways to meet this test or give up or disintegrate by degrees. You meet the test through some common American verities: deferral of gratification, humor at one's bad lot in life, spiritual devotion, continually plunging down into the values you have choosen, satire, criticism, etc etc. There are all kinds of ways to keep the ugly ghosts from invading too deeply or sharply.

* * * * * * * *

I trust the spirit, the created object, the beauty in nature much more than the vanity of human beings and all the clever ways it is disguised, whether in criticism or politics.

* * * * * * * *

How the writer is to make his living is an old question. I don't like the idea that writers are beggars or homeless heroes wandering the mean streets of the worst cities in the world. No. I don't like the idea of the writer as a scrounge rat living among rats in little apartments ducking in and out of gunshots.

Writing taught me patience and how to climb up and out of terrible states of mind. I knew I was capable of making a living but I did not want to sacrifice whatever talents I had. To me that was a distinctive negative; whereas sacrificing the good in life for those few things I believed in meant a great deal more to me.

* * * * * * * *

When young the thing to fight is hate. Hatred is a virus that is easy to catch. Check hatred in oneself and you will know the secret of how to avoid the pernicious disease when its blown your way. Respect all human beings you have contact with unless they prove they aren't worthy of it. That is one of the simple secrets of life.

Fear is a ghastly distortion, smoothed over time by thoughtfulness.

Let the impression of society pass through, study it, make some conclusion about it, and then focus exclusively on your own efforts.

The romanticism of youth becomes a sentimental dumbness as you get older. Get hard and firm and look at reality as it is.

Take all the generous resource you learn in youth and make it your own, keep lapping it into the current project.

I find myself, now, in a much more resolving sort of mood. The fight consumes everything until we realize it is only the struggle of the individual to reach some kind of fulfillment in this life even if he prepares for the next one. Both the solar power and Sunoasis.com were faces to the real world, faces to the established arena where poetry, philosophy, and beauty, and truth have hardly a chance of surviving. That was a compromise that I worked hard to achieve because I didn't want one to devour the other to be frank about it. And it's still rather tenuous.

The problem in my case was that I always choose the writing life over the material life. Only in the last five years or so has that changed a bit. I worked much harder at sunoasis.com than I did on my writings during that time.

It was difficult not to pick a career path with normal channels and then shoot through it. That was not my fate to do. Nonetheless, it's not an either/or situation. Are we not free to choose?

* * * * * * * *

A formula: Escape the vanity of the time and all its trappings; yet, return to the present fully human, fully prepared.

* * * * * * * *

It's important to distinguish between the "power" of the world outside the writer and the world as the writer conceives it on paper or screen. The power of the world is fairly well known, is rationalized as benefiting the greater good. Law is a great power, politics, economics, the “soverignty of nations.” The Earth itself is a vast power and connects us with the greater power of the universe. We belief the universe is connected and that the unknowable God is that power. Whether it is or not we do know the universe as a physical fact and explore it as a fact. And in doing so we know, now, that it is immensity plus. And since we know that and since we've trundled a bit in its emptiness we feel rather captured down here on Earth; we feel as though there is not enough space for us.

This is a dilemma for our time.

* * * * * * * *

The writer's consciousness is concerned with the macro and the micro; the individual standing on the surface and the vastness above him. What is in between is certainly interesting and is that great world outside the writer whose powers are vast and way beyond the writer or any particular person or institution for that matter. He studies this. He acts in it occasionally. He has experience of it, good, bad, and ugly. It forces things from him that he doesn't want. He is pleased with some of it.

* * * * * * * *

Those who struggle for power between the individual and universe usually try to destroy or, at least, dismiss the two.

The vast majority of people are only concerned with the enacting of self-interest through career, through relationships, through ideas, through the institutions and so forth. Drama is created out of it certainly. Disillusionment is certainly wrought out of it.

* * * * * * * *

Knowledge is important to all of this but knowledge is endless and captured by specialists and plugged back into the institutions to help them function. Why should it be any other way? Knowledge for the writer is equilibrium and he turns his knowledge into a kind of playful discourse on things.

Experience is also important but limiting. When young we seek experience to change the ruts we fall into. We test ourselves. We want to know. Experience is part of the color of life and color of language.

* * * * * * * *

Democracy has its charms no doubt. It has its ludicrous aspects and often asserts itself as the living end of all things. In practice and theory democracy is only a becoming, always evolving, always transforming and never satisfied with the status quo.

So it's no wonder why one's work, one's precious writing, should not suffer the same sort of fate. And all things will reverse and topple into the grand sea of time. Good. Democracy is good. It permits light and says "go to the highest level and always push the envelope and always transform what is solid."

Yes.

* * * * * * * *

My youth appears to me as a curious mistake or, at least, a series of stupidities. I was studious sometimes. I was thinking and making up stories no question. I had ambitions without a doubt.

The Berkeley years were far more intense and productive than it first appears. I was reading, writing, and thinking. And between those activities lived in a series of wombs; neighborhoods, jobs, friends and people I associated with and so on.

* * * * * * * *

And there was constant attention on the "world situation"; the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era. That's when I picked up on the computer revolution, the possibility of digitizing texts, wireless and all of that stuff that convinces even the skeptical writer than we live in a magical poofland.

I just consumed it all as an imagination will and read a little bit about it. I also got interested in solar power and the question of resources; how they are transformed, the nature of scarcity, political issues surrounding them etc.

"He read a great deal, as though he knew the light was being put out." It was the post-60's in Berkeley and it wasn't pretty.

* * * * * * * *

The Internet put me back into society, sometimes in very painful ways. It brought a lot of stress and disruption to my bucolic life. The last three or four years have been the most difficult because I had to do things for very little money and so became that archetypal American: the very frustrated dude.

The Net introduced me to a few dark pains and a few hits of adrenaline. It introduced me to business and many people I would never have had any relation with; as I said it put me back into the society in a big way. It wasn't without its pains and costs. Nope. Could not escape that.

What it did more than anything was re-initiate myself into thinking about the future, my own and generally as a member of the human race.

And it proved to me that a person can do much but can't do it all. That a person is so remarkable when given the freedom to be so. But he isn't an island. He isn't all of himself, total and complete.

* * * * * * * *

Like many I started out a utopian---youth believes all is possible and if life were simply rational all would be well. I tapped into the generous vein of utopian thinking that came from both the religious and political side. Looking back I can see it is a good but doomed vein; and you have to go into the next stage which is a confrontation with the real complexity in things. In the end is either understanding and knowledge or nuttiness of a sort.

The utopian view is sustainable only by students and wealthy half-crazed aristocrats who don't want to get their shoes sullied by the working stiffs, the "wage slaves," as they aptly put it at times. The utopians suffer great inflations and hyperbole and the good in them moves on, leaving the crumbs and trails of cults that litter the landscape.

A confrontation with complexity requires an enormous amount of knowledge, structure, and discipline. We finally weed out what we can't handle and focus on the next development which is careerism in a specialty of one sort or another where energy is released and driven down one narrow channel. At the end of this process is a person, a citizen, someone who, hopefully, is productive and resourceful.

* * * * * * * *

The writer passes through an odd moment of total disgust and disbelief at the world. In my case I had no confidence in the dominant institutions; that is, science, technology, capital, and bureaucracy. Each was fully built and roaring by the time I gained consciousness. There was nothing innovative about them; they appeared like conquering armies of an imperial power that will subdue the people and make them submit to whole new rules and rituals. Science created an age of reduction, completely antithetical to the literary imagination. Technology was a taunting of the spirit, often; capital favored the very worst in human nature and marginalized the very best and bureaucracy was this oppressive, corrupt weight that crushed out aspiration. This was the feeling when I was a younger man. It's a dangerous moment and I countered it with as much optimism as I could muster. I countered it by spiritual discipline, knowledge, thinking through, abandoning the irrational, and trying to understand that which dominated. .

* * * * * * * *

I still view it a very dangerous proposition for free people to glide or bump and grind their way through life without understanding that which surrounds them.

The most pernicious was the reductionism since it enflamed every hatred and gave it a gleeful weapon.

Certainly these activities were connected to human activities and to human beings some of whom I actually knew. That makes a difference. And knowledge makes a huge difference. But, even an educated person needs to study a great deal more than simple college courses and apply concentrated effort to bring these behemoth powers down into a sphere of understanding. Absent of that effort is alienation and a fruitless search for equilibrium.

* * * * * * * *

It is the type of lonliness sailors experienced in their sea voyages, seeing and feeling things with the depth of the element they found themselves in. There! Devils climb the deck and through the rigging. "And de sun be some spirit blazing into the open, withering heart."

The smell of death must have been in their nostrils. Too, the longing for old friendships, old loves to take away the stink of the daily mirage.

And what does the "new land" promise but it is new and belief makes it so. Call it San Salvador if you wish. Name it India. It is where life will be lived for the next epoch as we watch the old life crawl from the ship and disappear into the grey rolling sea. Old failing wills and demoralization get filled by the crustacean and nautillus.

A joy is felt that nature has recognized the emptiness and the spirit is on the path of testing itself once again, freed for a moment from the pall of old habits.

Health! Simple recognitions!

* * * * * * * *

"We left them because nightmare had become fact."

"The old, you see, just increased the tensions built into the damn world." .

* * * * * * * * In the new land old hatreds are sublimated into beauty. A more profound exchange of love and understanding takes place. New pride rises up from new consciousness.

The Fewer Impressions The Better:

A mass culture destroys everything but its own obsessions. How to reach those who are filled with obsessions not their own?

No one lives it for us. We can commiserate.

The people are shockingly manipulative, suspicious, ignorant, without an ounce of understanding and yet want to be pampered at every step along the way.

* * * * * * * *

No shame in the chastened and humbled body.

It's a battle between fascination with what is going on in the world and fascination for what is going on in front of the screen or a piece of paper. The world wins out yet the mind prevails.

* * * * * * * *

Things slow to the speed of turmoil as human culture feeds on what has been thrown in front of it.

Full of irony, I tried to find the source of my own productivity and emphasize that.

* * * * * * * *

It feels right to imagine our phases of development as expansive discs flying through the mind to push back inhuman pressures.

* * * * * * * *

People project all the time, thinking they are ridding themselves of something bad. The bad simply waits for them down the road swinging down from a tree to smack them on the ass.

* * * * * * * *

You can only absorb the world if you have already committed yourself to "remaking" the world through your stories and language.

* * * * * * * *

There is a dog in every man wanting to chase down a cat and make it a victim.

* * * * * * * *

America was the center, I knew that. Where was one to go? And nowhere one goes allows the self to escape its problems.

* * * * * * * *

One problem that carried me off into some twilight adventure was the "end of literature as a mode of entertainment." And in came problematical literature based more on philosophy or scholarship than entertaining fellows with tales of their own kind and others. In one way I was prepared for that, in other ways I certainly was not. Art, after all, begins in play. And I think of the entertainments my brothers and cousins devised for the parents of the town I lived in. And I think of the endless parade of entertainments that trooped through the brain whether it was TV, movies, music, magazines, books and so on.

A vast leaping and jiving thing.

Literature needs to be conveyed pleasantly and entertainment values are intrinsic to it but the story, now, can be macro and grand in ways it couldn't when the novel, for instance, was the central piece of entertainment.

And so reponse.

I can't do anything about the systems in place. I respond as best I can. I can't do anything about the nature of the universe but I respond. I can't do anything about death or sex. I respond.

Life is a great breathing-in to the point of sharp pain, then paralysis that such a world runs amok in one, and then breathing-out into the world that has shaped him.

* * * * * * * *

It's not so important to be right or wrong or know everything. It's important to know what you are doing and why.

* * * * * * * *

Life is not something I would want to repeat.

I will empty myself of what I have and fly onward to some mysterious tundra.

* * * * * * * *

When the first rains come I write and, later, think about language. It's a ritual from way back when I would sit on a chair on a porch with a canopy and watch the new rain move in from the Bay. "Yes it comes again to clean the tar of things and thoughts from the surface of the city."

Language forms from a writers' struggle with "his moment." My moment, in the 70's, was a total crack in the Great Egg of reality. The world was divided between joy and doubt. Young people who don't yet have a language of their own had the joy, the rest of the people had the doubt. Naked perceptions down-dogged the language to an amazing extent.

Dreams intruded into reality and started staking their claims for the future.

The world was an unprecedented bitch of a thing. Everything with authority was doing the absolutely wrong things. "Here, here my good man, come into our wonderful room of death and sacrifice yourself!"

I started exploring many traditions, many ways, many places. It cost me a novel writing career perhaps, but then, in an unprecedented world who can write novels? They are impossible to write without the credibility of knowing the world you are in.

* * * * * * * *

I listened intently to people when I was a young guy; alternating between the meaning of the person speaking and to the sound of the word itself without, necessarily, reference to meaning. I saw language as a painter sees color; it is in nature, it is in the world as a utility. He experiences both along with the tradition of color in painting and out of it tries to come up with something that has never existed before.

Language is seeded in nature, animal-speech, birds, the "speech of machines," conversations, speeches, journalism, sales letters, songs among other things. What combinations create the spirited spaces of literary writing?

* * * * * * * *

Hawthorne I learned from. Whitman. I think Mark Twain was very important because he combined sublime wisdom with the common language; the language of ethnic groups, tradesmen, the frontier, slaves and so forth.

* * * * * * * *

The language I inherited went through a meat-grinder of credibility from the elite to the street. At the end of the process were a set of assumptions people took into the future, nearly out of exhaustion.

* * * * * * * * Experience taught me that language should clarify the chief responsibility in a democracy which is to prove that freedom works. It works because the person gets better, wider, deeper, more inclusive, more willing to help, happily engaged in his or her contradictions because they have faith that freedom is both grace and courage.

* * * * * * * *

I started with a series of abysms in my mid-20's. For one thing I felt the novel, as a panoramic expression of the society, was impossible. The novel had been successfully squeezed out of the popular culture where the money was and fit tighter into an academic/intellectual bandwidth that was cut-off from the vitality of the culture it so hated and criticized.

I felt to write novels a writer had to use large quantities of experience and knowledge, cultivate the mess, overcome all points of alienation, connect with or, at least, make contact with as many distinct points of the culture as possible and move through its major categories of activity including science, technology, capital, bureacracy; both experience and knowledge would be brought to bear on the circles of social reality, family, classes, distinctive communities, city/suburb, rural, etc etc.

That was my subjective prescription to write novels of any substance. Anything less was going to produce the ideological novel or one that was too dependent on the institution that gave it support. Therefore, the novel could say nothing to contemporary people or to the future.

* * * * * * * *

I wrote everything but novels. Some of the writing reflected the process of knowing or experiencing things; some of it was pure emotion, some of it was genuine insight.

The basic mode was simple: long cycle of knowing and experiencing the society/region; short cycles of creating or writing in the various forms that existed through '95.

* * * * * * * *

Once I left my hallucinatory youth I got concerned about the shift in values from what it had been to what it was becoming. I'm thinking primarily about "sacrifice" and "deferral of gratification" versus "instant gratification." The advent of the consumerist culture made buying and its mania central to the life and survival of the society. And buying excluded much more than included.

To me it was not a matter of pitting one against the other. It was a matter of choosing which values would allow for the building of projects, a writing life and other improbable meanings.

So, I went with sacrifice and deferral of gratification and built as best as I could; sometimes in very adverse circumstances, relatively speaking.

I was tested at every step. The goal was to have a lot of writing under my belt by the time the Net came along. I had read about it in college and during the 70's and felt confident that it was going to happen.

Why not?

* * * * * * * *

Hopefully one learns with sad laughter that there are more interesting things than pure idealism.

* * * * * * * *

I believe now that things are better than they seem in the mind.

The mind can be a tricky old devil!

* * * * * * * *

Write as though you are a benevolent king and feel responsible for everything going on in your domain.

"Mommy, that man is strutting down the street with no clothes on!"

And as they chop away at the good king-writer he learns some valuable lessons. And stories emerge, along with a few themes. His eyes remain fixed with a startled gaze.

* * * * * * * *

To a young guy of sentience society appears to be a collection of white, pillared, even grey buildings set in various cities. In Washington D.C. they are architecturally classic and austere filled from youth with the aura of myth and power. Then there are the financial pyramids and ziggurats of Manhattan, filled with the machinations of criminals and those who like criminals or those frozen in fear of the criminals.

And all the games, music, TV, newspapers, magazines, houses, communications technology, roads, and ships make an impression depending on the state of being of the observer and experiencer of these things.

Every impression carries its secret signals, overt and covert messages, its histories, and documents to the eyes of a single, solitary heart and mind.

A man has a sadly beautiful love for what is familiar to him.

* * * * * * * *

Youth wrangles in itself over whether the society exists for the individual or does the individual exist for the society? It's never answered in the classroom; only where the living and dead commingle, always cajoling one to come over to the other side. Rare is the young person who doesn't believe that the individual has to become large, bountiful, thoughtful, experienced, at ease in the life he's been issued into rather than manipulated, debased, thwarted and made self-conscious so all his great imagination, desire, and even will becomes passive and supine to some form of authority.

So the youth asks, "Can this society inspire the best efforts of the men and women in it?"

Youth carries around a happy intutition: Freedom is more than what is demonstrated as proof around us! Sometimes the body is satisfied with its freedom of movement but the spirit is not satisfied and other times, the spirit is satisfied with its infinite worlds but the body is restless for motion or action of some kind. When I fly over the land and it blurs beneath me does it make me freer than those who moved drip by drip through its arid desert? And whose hardships are hardly measurable in our own time? Of course I who am flying must land and face hundreds of contingencies the old pioneer didn't have to face. So perhaps that blur of land is filled with laughing and happy ghosts.

* * * * * * * *

MONEY

The money system, something the writer did not create, is another one of these infinite conflicts the writer experiences. In my case it has not been pretty.

Reading Thoreau last night I realize how much influence Henry David had on me, how I perceived him as a beautiful soul; intelligent, independent, truthful, creative; the perfect model for a free liberal, democratic writer and how, nearly, unattainable it is under the present set-up.

Perhaps not.

"Oh writer, rebel in the mind rather than the street as they take you to a place you don't want to be, away from the center of your own gravity."

Thoreau was one of my first models, definitely. Dostoevsky was another. These occurred in college. Dostoevsky merged literary art and meaning and had a great influence on the way I viewed reality, at least into my mid-20's. But Dostoevsky was a fundamentalist rather than a liberal democrat. Walt Whitman was another model for awhile. Rimbaud and Baudelaire for a moment. Henry Miller. James Joyce. D.H. Lawrence. Thomas Hardy. Eventually Rilke, Yeats and a few others. Nietzsche to some extent. In my 20's I was influenced by who I read. And I read a great deal, way into my 30's. I must have read as much as a decent professor.

I read to shake the demoralization of pure ass dread.

Dread as only one with enormous talent and no money can experience in a world like this. Terrible, bone chilling dread.

And I often put the books to battle with this dread, if not the world itself. That began to change in my mid-30's.

* * * * * * * *

One word of wisdom was worth a million dollars in the bank, as far as I was concerned.

The pressure was immense at the time and the ways and means of fighting it told me a good deal.

* * * * * * * *

Once in a great while, in a superb moment of clarity, I would experience a rare freedom. The moment was powerful enough to convince me that freedom was a reality, if not reality itself and to be treated with respect. And that freedom's great enemy is mass thought, mass activity, mass demoralization, mass depression, mass weirdness. And so much of modern media had tried to reduce everything into a slag heap of massiness.

Nothing can emerge out of massiness but dangerous leaders.

Whereas a free people will produce wise leaders.

One tendency in the mass was to hypnotize themselves in the belief that money had permitted them to transcend history. Facts justified the feeling they were on the otherside of history and everything they did was producing a new history.

But one fact does loom up and over this period of time: Unconscious of the past and we simply are the playthings of old ghosts. Full understanding of the past and we are free in ways that are full-bodied and allow us to live as free, liberal democratic citizens.

We are unique only for the opportunity to be unique; it is not ipso facto the case.

* * * * * * * *

The feet fit the land. On one side of this land the sun rises, in the middle the sun replenishes acres of grain, in the west the sun sets. On all coasts rolls a mighty ocean. On all borders exists another nation. The land is rich in material and natural beauty; lakes, rivers, mountains, plains, deserts, forests, varieties of plant-life and birds all with their degree of sizes, shapes, sounds, tastes, and textures. Mists, fogs, snow, rain- tempests of nature; earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, hurricanes. The simple inventory doesn't do justice to the individuation of each phenomena and the way each weighs in the self that experiences them. If I have no relation to the facts of my community then I have no relation to it at all.

With the facts comes history that moves in and out , as much a part of it as the mountains or streams and this history stretches back to certain expressions my kind begins to evidence. The curt eye. The tongue on the edge of the wings of the lips. As much as the trees and mountains I must have a relation to this community or else risk no relation to it all. In fact, my relation to it will tell a great deal about myself.

The history is a struggle between what they want and what any other par of my community is willing to give up. It's a struggle and tells me a great deal about the parts of my community and my relation to this struggle tells a great deal about both parts of my community and my relation to this struggle tells a great deal about myself.

Ah, they struggle against themselves! And I must have a relation to that and most importantly to the modern vanity that sucks up whatever ideals and value my community used to have.

The first intimations of my community are rather misty and mythological. Great nourishment can come by the first intimation. The later intimations are documented fairly well so I can begin the supreme effort of making judgements about how one part of my community has dealt with the other.

Has it set traps along the way? Perhaps in the whole of the community we see the trap. Perhaps not.

Has it started to fan out, adventure into the dark interior where reliance is no longer on the tarnished ideals of an old land but the instinct of something ancient, always new?

* * * * * * * *

After ten long years on the internet I find it to be a problematical beast. I don't regret it.

The internet is resource certainly but it is also everything you wanted to avoid. Everything. And the crowds destroy Everything eventually. So, it is more like a crowded bar a bad friend has taken you than a new land.

The hardest thing is to rope the internet to your best interest. That can only be done by rigorous editing which, not a coincidence, was the original intention of Sunoasis.com

"Liberate the finest energies and avoid useless, out-moded conflicts." The was the initial mighty voice of the Net.

Filled with toxicity the Net can squeeze the heartiest brain into the neurosis of conflict-not-wanted or enaged in unilaterally because a person or group are flailing away powerless wondering why the world doesn't recognize their truth. Stay clear. Laugh.

Make sure the space you make for your own efforts is a productive and constructive one.

What one learns:

Some good knowledge to have or at least be cognizant of:

• Modern cosmology
• Any study on the impact of communications on the human being.
• Experience the cities fully by living poorly in them. Ride the busses. Walk the streets. Read leisurely in the parks. Talk to people.
• Drive and fly.
• Understand the difference between information, knowledge, and wisdom
• Come to some conclusion or understanding of why democracy is so necessary, why it is good, and why it needs to develop more and some directions it can develop towards.
• One must let go of as much jealousy and hatred as possible and let things be as they are. Be happy for the success of other people.
• Be happy that people are in a great culture manifesting as they are. Be as free of resentment as you can. Be light. Work hard. But be light.
* * * * * * * *

For one thing you need to comprehend your "own time." For me that stretches back to the 50's--the first event I was aware of was Sputnik in 1957. From that time you cull out the main things. Here's a list:

• space adventure
• cold war
• communications revolution
• popular movements
  a) civil rights
  b)women's rights
  c)environmental
  d)anti-government/anti-tax
• change of economy from scarcity to surplus

Obviously, many changes take place in styles and music and so on. It's also necessary to study the systems that flow through everything, including the individual person. Transportation, energy, communication, economic, political, education and so on. It's necessary to have some grasp of the administrations Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush2, Obama. And the congresses through there, the legislation, the decisions by the Supreme Court.

Then you want to look back further into the history that preceded you. WWII, Depression, Roaring 20's, Wilson years, TR years, settling of the West, Railroad, Civil War and Reconstruction, migration West, first quarter of new government, Constitution, Revolution, Colonization, Slavery, European powers meeting native peoples (Cortez, Pizzaro), Sea-Crossings, pre-Columbian peoples in South and North America, migration from Asia, flora, fauna, and landscape changes through time.

Then you need a solid knowledge of global history. Know the personalities, the deeds, the good, bad, and ugly about it. The past is a lesson, just as the framers knew. A good, healthy even innocent mind will find all the places, persons, objects what he or she needs to given a bit of passion and sacrifice and work ethic.

* * * * * * * *

Politics is the stink of liars and mad dogs on their way to the control of money and weapons.

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Discreteness and wholeness; A battle engaged for the conjunction of these qualities. A wonderful set of objects is created for the writer to muse on! In this culture the discrete and linear dominate; the wholeness is a creative function. They need each other. I think you need enormous experience with both modes without getting confounded by everything that passes through as you experience these modes. Perhaps the threshold point that divides one from the other occurs when we are filled with disgust for the nonsense that is carried by one form or the other.

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What gives us meaning and/or pleasure but the sense of knowing both discreteness and wholeness instantaneously too bring them so close together that they look at each other in the eye and do not blink until the other one smiles. We hope it is a smile at any rate.

We admit that the great struggle is for coherence. That we admit we move along a series of spots and then there is great influence exerted on us at every moment. It's as though we are Buddha at the moment just preceding his great illumination and all the demons and seductresses are rushing at him to knock him off track. They do not succeed because Buddha knows what he is about and, obviously, if they had won we would never heard or known the name or the system attached to Buddha.

So we are on the west side of things rooted as we are on the east side of things. And rivers roar and carry our common heart to the ocean. And we imagine the tracks left by those who want to dance for us; who throw their head back in a seductive pose, who smile knowingly at us from a distance. And then we are one city among thousands of lit cities, feeding on the dead. And no one has told us, yet, the proper way to read the papers or to digest the gorgeous image when the camera is pointed just right. There are no royal courts or passing crowds that circulate through us; only empty space occupied by those who struggle for singularity. And when they give birth their brains fill with the responsibility of the age until the burden is too great and, collapsing by the riverside, they breathe the sun and want, no more, the encounters. So, an endless series of books is read and yet nothing moves. So, the impression of a past and buried century comes to us effortlessly and we sink down in our ignorance. And then the great plane flies onward with all the passengers yelling for us to get out of bed. Ah yes, at first, the division between the man and the woman. Are they roped yet to their specific contingency? We like the way a good woman laughs~

It's been a series of transits in vehicle I neither built nor owned. It's been a series of people who know me less than I know them. It's been a series of desperation all having to do with money and the lack of it. It's been a series of misunderstanding between people who exert a deadly will. It's been a series of fits and starts not in the direction of choice but, contradicting the prime choice.

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Tasks have replaced motive. The day, week, month and years of tasks with, thankfully, time for reading, re-writing, thinking, conversation, travel, breathing in the ocean air, contemplating beautiful women who I have known or who has passed by me, a deep connection with what I find indispensable to live; to, in fact, be an American at this stage of the game.

There is an integrity to American life that one must know deeper than anything; if they do not know this integrity they will grasp the empty sound of their own will to power.

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