I don’t know, and that may be the smartest i’ve been since i discovered “intellect” and began bludgeoning the world with speech - a world which i could barely see much less understand why it would wish me harm? That is an infantile fantasy - to feel something and attribute that feeling to the unknown. Now i am at the other end of the life cycle and am no better oriented than when i arrived, which is not entirely true; just now i listen to the farmer family next to me and know enough about their reality to understand that the 70 year old patriarch at the end of what has to have been a brutal day of sowing the new rice fields in a heat that is not oppressive, more like lethal. What i hear across my wall is a grandparent finding more sustenance in the squeals of joy from his granddaughter than the bowls of food at his table to provide him strength. I am not lessened by my envy, rather hopeful for all around him who cannot but be influenced by the power of his love for his family - not a fake, chest thumping love one finds on every media channel within the reach of the digital overlords · but the love only a small child can hear, understand, and from which gather necessary nutrition for a precarious future the grandfather knows too well; whether he knows it or not he is inoculating her from with his simple, pure expression.
The cataclysm our kind is about to encounter has no example in our recorded history, except by those who take interest in what “science” has revealed about our precarious development as a species on a volatile orb in a vacuum of “dark matter” we conjecture constitutes the bulk of our physical reality. What we are “paying” attention to are silly-ass vibrations bouncing off eardrums, or flickerings of an optical spectrum which we discern partially - very partially. In my art training i had a visceral reaction to Paul Gaugin - a spiritual kinship i was not completely surprised to learn in my later years coincided with a predatory and largely destructive relationship to the islands of Tahiti. My kinship with his work was at a time where my ego was centered on recognition of an earthly nature - as though, because i could understand his palette spiritually, i had entre to his - what’s the word i am looking for ¿ ilk ? yeah, that’s it ! ilk. What i wanted to do was abandon my art training and all its noble ideas; parle what i’d learned and instinctively knew into a studio with patrons standing around admiring my earnest and noble efforts to add a link per Paul Cezanne’s instructions to the sacred “chain of art.”
So you might see why i feel so much better thinking “i don’t understand,” than taking some lame ass position about ________ fill in the blank. I’m pretty sure in the end it has something to do with resting my head on the pillow, or rock nearest me as my lungs cease their autonomic rhythm and i leave go with the residual sentiment i was unable to articulate about what i was thinking at the time - jaja, fearsome inferno of an intellect · little more than a tiny Bic lighter barely able to light a joint much less a fire under the ass of a species that had allowed themselves to be yoked to an ass, like mssr. d_rump. You’d be right, if you felt that i might be laughing at you - i am · as much as i am laughing at myself; likely, i’m far funnier than you, only because i am more closely related to Madame Paradox, i’m sure. Arrogance was a blood sport where i grew up honed on the teeth of fact: i remember one occasion backing my (little - parenthetical only because i know he hates the moniker) brother, into a corner of the yard - as i had learned from my older to dominate. To his credit, he kept his handhold on the galvanized pipe stub that was part of our suburban landscape and as i made my move to enforce my opinion over his, the pipe in his hand hit my right front tooth that was no longer a baby tooth.
It was a perfect fracture that required no squealing to the authorities, who never knew the better - a corner of my smile chipped into the aether at an early age, barely visible even now, but having forged a lesson about limits lasting to this day. I have no idea what comparable lessons he might learned from me during his lifetime - he, as a near as i can tell, is angry with me and has refused to share the name of an antibiotic ear drop i once found in his medicine cabinet. He may be concerned for his nurse-wife prescribing without a licence, why i can’t say - what am i gonna do; sue them for malpractice?. I do know he labors under an onus of fictional responsibility for me foisted on him by both parents that is/nor was autonomous or liberating. Pop when he returned from his sabbatical in Europe during our teen years, brought meaningful souvenirs for us each - carved wooden pens from Spain, mine of Don Quixote, and my brother - Sancho Panza. That cannot have been easy to swallow for a man of his capacity, to be subordinated not only in family placement as the “bambino”, but literally and metaphorically to me the crazy older brother. My kid brother is a good decent human being, as much as any i’ve met in my years on earth - and his resolution to his own fate has been complex as any i’ve known. He and his wife literally plucked three children from dire straits; giving them more than a fighting chance at a meaningful existence - yet for my brother the cost has been great · his will and its corresponding force, borders on sadistic, i believe this only from a limited understanding of what i have learned about my own capacity for cruelty.
And here i sit, looking to share useful insights to a reader who may or may not have access to anything written herein due to corporate charnel floor vetting logic of who gets to read what for what reason - talk about “quixotic” fantasies. Please understand i love the people i am maligning in as wholesome a way as i can, and know that what i share is a reflection of my defects as i have come to understand them more than any valid accusation of people you have never met, nor ever will. Ma, lamented my birth arrival to my face i’m sure, and periodically thereafter throughout my lifetime. For a woman who had been described as a “Miss Goody-Two-Shoes” by a sister-in-law whose CEo brother rescued Ma no differently than Sir Galahad had rescued _____ fill in the blank, she relished the high ground like few generals in the history of the world. But vis-a-vis my kid brother it is hard to forgive the yoke she served on him as a lad. Much later in our lives Ma would wax nostalgic, when not telling me my teeth were “dirty” and ask “have you heard from C_____¿” and i would say “no, we’re not close” - without missing a stitch or seemingly having heard a word, Ma would look wistfully at me and remark, “he’s been a ‘good little friend to you, hasn’t he?’” I fault neither she nor he for attempting to fill in missing places in this world with whatever strategies they might find useful - for me · i cannot, but die without peering as deeply as i am able into the chasm as my the blindness from my delusion permits - may you find similar clarity.
jts 08/06/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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