Yesterday i attempted an essay on simplicity which devolved into more esoteric complexity, but at least i am trying. At the conclusion of yesterday’s writing, i had the good fortune of being visited by the buffalo herder. I take the inclusion as a great honor, and was rewarded by the calf taking a drink of the water i put out each time they visit. The herder returned today and is standing at the back of my chair watching me write which i do not find offensive or threatening in any way. The struggle is to find a way for him to feel at home where i live while he takes his charges from fallow field to fallow field. It is possibly delusional to think that i can contribute to relieving his suffering, if in fact it is suffering he experiences. His life is rural - his friends are patient buffalos and i know nothing more about his life than that · yet we share tobacco and he seems content to watch me write.
Somehow this constitutes success for me - to be accepted as a feature of the landscape and a resource like the poem about the “shade tree” the children in the school in Nepal would recite when their teacher was not available. As an elder traveler without family or knowledge about who is friend and who is not, this peculiar arrangement leaves me happy. Whether it will detract from an already goofy writing regime, we’ll just have to wait and see. When he returned this afternoon, i knew that i must establish a priority for this chronicling, otherwise it would become fictional posing of an effort to recount life at what may be the end days of our species. I have written in many environments since i took up the banner of writing after my father pulled me by the collar to his face and made me promise to never stop writing - this after he broke his hip and was in the midst of expiring.
My vision is such that drawing which had once been a great comfort is now more like looking for water with a witching stick than the culmination of a lifetime of chasing the “masterpiece.” I am luckier than most to have backup outlets, but it doesn’t relieve me of the responsibility to do my level best at some meaningful expression regardless of the form. I used to say that it didn’t matter about pop’s senility, if he was reduced to a vocabulary of two words, those two words would have more meaning than much of the noise that passes for literature, or in the modern vernacular - “content”. I just had the most meaningful conversation with a buffalo herder through googol translate than i’ve had in the past year. The buffalo herder is open and curious surrounded by a supposedly sophisticated closed culture - tell me i’m not the luckiest duck on a planet about to ________ fill in the blank.
The manager’s of content have successfully conjured as Noam Chomsky suggested they might: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” I’ve heard expressions of “turnkey tyranny” with regards to what had once been euphemistically described as the “information super-highway” - more like “highway to hell” · 3 years into the 1st fascist of the free world’s rape of Washington D.C. and what had once been the cradle of democracy now struggles with the fundamental logic of masks in a plague, or whether to preserve the lives of children by removing them from school. My family has for too long enjoyed the delusion that shutting me up would some how benefit the family’s honor and i find their honor is as dishonest as the honor of my birth nation which today murders people with impunity based on skin color and rewards corruption with greater and greater ill-gotten gain.
My friend the herder let himself out the door when i described “back to work,” i can only hope he returns and brings friends. I welcome friends, not allies - because those days are long past - the delusion that there is anything that separates us as a species but each other is suspect. I welcome the flesh of a lithe loving companion, but am unwilling to abdicate the values i’ve fought hard to learn, much less apply. I know what i know, not from conventional allegiance, but from pain and confusion that Pop was able to show is the lot of each and every one of us - anyone claiming that fictional state of arrival · is suspect and all who cluster to share their anguish, their pain · their open hearts are welcome at whatever table i sit, but if you come to persuade me of my evil, my weakness or my dishonor, i can only ask that you look deeper into your own reason for seeking my company. peace and love friends.
jts 09/07/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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