We who are, or were, possibly all who have cameras can be photojournalist. In the sense we are engaged in recording truth as it occurs; or can be. Recording witnesses to our time; history in the making: the what occurred or is happening.

I once thought myself ‘blind’ being without camera on or off ‘duty.’

And too well remember being assigned to illustrate an article for The New York Times. In Chicago, the murder rate was down from average and I was instructed to photograph two Homicide Detectives.

The general theory being that an illustrated article received greater attention/readership than one that was not.

I went to the appointed time and place laboring to make an revelatory image of two middle aged men in cheap suits. First in their office, then outside in the parking lot with an ocean of Black & Whites though they drove unmarked police vehicles.

They were conscious of my frustration and suggested that I go to the City Morgue. The place was astonishing: bodies draped partially in dark green plastic garbage bags, clothed in what they were wearing at the time of death, replete with toe tags. Stacked from floor to ceiling upon green steel metal shelves . . . imagine a warehouse with a ceiling some thirty to forty feet in height. Crowded with nearly one hundred corpses.

This was at a time before we had digital photography, so I shipped the film directly to New York. At 03:00 or thereabouts I received a telephone call from the picture editor distraught with having seen my “take.”  . . . . “why oh why!?@!?”

At length she seemed to have said what she needed to say. I asked if she was satisfied with the diatribe, not in those terms per se. “Yes.” I replied defining to her that my job was to collect and hers was to edit. Deciding upon that image most appropriate to her intention. Mine was not to edit out all possible choices offensive to me.

This collective monologue was based upon a conversation with an Associated Press photographer who confessed authorship of an image I found objectionable to me personally.

Consciousness is the string upon which we form our necklace of experience; whether pearls or smooth worn river stones. I am many things but not a voyeur; having witnessed the before, during and afterward of birth, life and death. This history began at an early age and is the engine of my curiosity: knowing the what and wondering about the why.

I envy no one and fear nothing, remaining sincerely grateful for it all.

Be well and be aware. Censor nothing; especially yourself.

in reply to: http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2013/01/28/169536213/what-it-feels-like-to-be-photographed-in-a-moment-of-grief add an afterthought: Many years later incorporating the deaths of both my children: I sense nothing is lost in or to God. Thinking now that we all are actors in life; the play of which is our collective prayer for love and truth to be real. . . .Some kneel and others record.

Photo Caption and Credit:
Aline Marie prays outside St. Rose of Lima church in Newtown, Conn., on the day of the school shooting. She says being photographed made her feel "like a zoo animal." The photographer says he tried hard to respect her privacy and grief.
Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images (without permission)

130130 03:57 photojournalism as witness
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

dad: blood lust

Got a low ignition point aflame from dropped lit matches falling from the heavens in solitary nights. Thinking of loss and he who claimed being my father but was in fact a silly boy and an infrequent friend. Sometime friend like an older brother I never had. Playful then suddenly indifferent. Wandering off dreaming of women who wore skirts, fancy cars and things he’d like to be able to say to glean the attention of his ‘Betters.’

Saved my ass once or twice swimming a fabulous distance to drag me back from going to sea in an inner tube. Latter on terrorizing a neighbor boy older than me making me cry with nasty words about mom. Had him on his back whacking him about with slaps and words he did. Couldn’t we both in times be certifiable as I was making coffee thinking I’d shred my half-brother for the theft of my life’s slavery to earn “our Father’s” love. Sure as shooting I go to eternal hell for the mere joy of tearing them together or singly apart with teeth, hands or toenails.

Orange Men from North Ireland -- crazy with blood lust -- with only me knowing the blues. Must be in the genes. Little wonder I now wandering towards the grave me self the loses I’ve embraced. Passionate for a Sphinx who leads me further into the maelstrom of me incandescent with words leaping about lighting strikes in the desert night blight observed from afar.

Then wide eyed awake in the dark, no dream, just thoughts of being Ginger Rogers and he Fred of course. Me dancing backwards in high heels thinking nothing of playing whatever role it took to hold his attention.

I dream wide awake en kindled with thoughts of the ballerina Degas wrought and hearing of her life at fourteen in a school for paramours. Did he touch her? Seeing her first in a museum she still haunts me. All children do; living or dead or the one who abandoned me.

No memory of benign touch remains save those I gave. And of women best the ones who loved and love me still I remember better the Sphinx and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Add both grandmothers and many - many pets.

Could it be that peace can only be communicated by touch?

. . . 130127 09:16 I’ve a new scheme: waiting awhile between idea and posting. Whiling the time between pillar/birth and post/death wondering what to reveal and what to hide. Yet my model is the candor of several who lent me their “Oh! I’m not alone . . . . “: not the only one to question or doubt or understand the full cost of consciousness. Add: the responsibility of choice in action not words.

Names can shame me but sticks and stones break my bones. How to define a life, impossible, absent honesty . . . an exceedingly rare commodity.

“To make no mistake is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.” - Plutarch

Rote and rite have no place in my life. Free flight through all thought is to know the limits of one’s perception. And with effort the source and end. . . . perchance return to the placental sea of unknowing reborn then dying again fearlessly to the sea of uncaring. Ignorance is limitless however to gyre is to measure the extent not humiliating but lending humility expansive.

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/10/25/anais-nin-on-parenting-character-and-personal-responsibility/

"Accept your own divinity. Everything is a manifestation of God. When you know that, the power that is LIFE is inside you, you accept your own divinity, and yet you are humble, because you see the same divinity in everyone else." - Don Miguel Ruiz


130123 01:23 dad
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

distemper

Distempered dreams infrequently visit my periods of rest. But when they do none are populated with terror, save, occasionally, fraught with incompetence; or monsters. Yet they leave me feeling that I had not slept at all.

My sense of success at hospice was met with conflict and attempts at suppression to which I finally surrendered: retiring. Intervening time has shown that I was correct in my assessments.

In this dream I did return having been returned several times for one who remains there still, a patient.

This time it was for my own curiosity. Finding in one wing a museum displaying remarkable mythic figures of plastic corpses. The staff population punctuated with cartoon characters. Not humorous but fantastic embodiments of oddities.

130121 14:49 distemper

. . . 130129 13:28 During the intervening time, between the above and now, there have been several encounters: people in conversation and reading that lend a new definition regarding what I did at hospice and my net gain. Instead of thinking myself a volunteer, I now say that I was a hospice worker unpaid. The abiding gift received remains a sense of candor regarding that which I formerly feared. Not death itself but the dying.

This is I conclude true of all of us knowing death inevitable but shying away from those deaths that take years; death by attrition.

Many elements of life are worse than death. Slavery to corporate greed is amongst my persistent peeves. And governance by those who pretend to serve the commonwealth of life seem utterly without ethic or moral regarding we commoners. I am confident of life after death, but not life after birth anywhere on the globe given the plutocracy that rules.

© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

curiosity

Gareth-Phillips Bittersweet Rendezvous

Curiosity seems a twin to empathy in that it has no end; being limitless.

At lunch yesterday, with M, our conversation touched many violent points in time. Not time as measured in B.C./B.C.E. or A.D. but wonderfully before, during and after; somewhere in infinity. For, or so it now seems to me, we have an icepick awareness rowed in the viscera of consciousness as to the why and wherefore of aggression.

With scant humor I suggested that politicians love overt criminal behavior for the smoke screen it provides, concealing their sponsors crimes against humanity. And here I am thinking of the comparison between Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”: search and destruction of a youth who mugged an elderly woman for her Social Security and the perpetual rape and theft of all in America of theirs by Corporate cupidity and avarice.

The steel of my dagger tempered by my own bigotry. When viewing gigantic Sports Utility Vehicles I reflexively think: “asshole.”

Perhaps I discredit myself, but I would rather be a jerk than insincere. To be myself rather than, what I perceive in general as, a faux marzipan copy of Jesus. A confection and fraud like the politicians whose words, in the abstract, seem genuine yet their action/inaction betray their prostitution.

My distemper extends to the Catholic Church for sins, past and present, obscured behind ‘Authority.’

“A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.”
- Michel de Montaigne

“Either do not attempt at all, or go through with it.”
- Ovid

. . . I think myself not unique in any sense knowing well that no one seeks to be born but is; and faces a bewildering array of should’s and ought’s beating us into submission and conformity to standards superficially enabling us to subsist instead of live all that we are capable of.

At that, there are times I understand, without sympathy or remorse, my life accidental and unwanted. Having shelter food and medical care but of love, a home, a sure and stable, sane, family: not. What better school could I have to be myself?

When I speak of corporate rape, theft, humiliation and being factory farmed for the few, it is not for revenge but to raise the consciousness of all predator and prey institutionalized crime become condoned and praised.

Thinking of culture it is possible to see and experience it in several ways. There would not be any without women who insist upon defending what is a biological imperative to reproduce. A choice few women I know well who would do it, or do it again, given the institutional fabric of violence enslaving them or their progeny at any age. But then too America as petri dish culturing slaves for war, industry and the few rich who call the dance and define life in ways so humiliating it is difficult to live in actual freedom from slavery. Manifest in so many ways I find myself far from my initial intentions.

Abandonment, for which I am exceedingly grateful, now, is akin to rape and emotional abuse regarding impact upon the victim. Bankrupting the world economy is aggression beyond understanding without factoring in fear and envy. The latter being motivations for bigotry towards all else. Ignorance, indifference, denial and avoidance seem the ideal in public education which in and of itself seems vocational slavery and of little or no interest to those who seek to know a different truth.

"Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true."
- William Ralph Inge

. . . I am not a learned person, nowhere near as bright as I would wish myself. Yet I know all institutions die standing initially upon firm ground. Noble become ignoble in time and the brand of whatever submerges in the quick sand of time. Love and kindness prevail wearing no particular face or culture; since both embrace the commonwealth of life itself.

To molder or soar, either way, I remain grateful for it all in these incandescent times alone. I have no talisman or fetish now, nothing to cling to but thanksgiving for these thoughts impelled by what I’ve seen and read . . . and those through who’s mouths the words stated by craft or inspiration.

. . . glimmering through our most recent conversation (with M) I suggested that the soul, obviously, is virgin and virginity possible, if not inherent, in meditation. But hypocritically I am apostate in my anger towards all who participate in the abuse of life using others for their sole gratification.

Be well doing no harm.

130120 07:03 curiosity
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

dreaming

photo by David-Stewart11_1

Dream by day or night I wonder is it me who dreams or the dreams having me?

All records are disposed filling Naperville, Illinois landfill. Though I could and do blame the source of my despair I refuse since in time it became obvious that all I’d achieved was nothing but a screed shouting anguish against what is life’s fate: transitory passage from whence to when it ends.

I’ve had a fabulous life demarcated by nothing so much as travel through space; unconscious until now. Remembering some dreams that bewildered me; their myth, omen, portent and symbol alluding me not illuminating the what and why of my consciousness.

Then too there were and remain and will be visions inexplicable; entire news clips detailing apocalypse universal or global or personal. Cinematic vignettes impossible to record. Bad dreams? No. Just visions that I could not hold understood.

They too remain, as do the images and words I trashed, unable to integrate or define in ways that made sense of my ordinary/extraordinary life . . . no less or more so than any life . . . just memorable to me. And in some abiding sense remains the issue of what is truth, love, meaning, purpose?

God is like the mother I never had lending me some sense of where to go, what to do and why. Yet like my real mother impossible to contain or appease . . . did I actually say that? Feel that way! Yes.

For all my heart beats soon ending I know I was encased in a vessel. In time coming to say to those who ask; “Do you travel?” Yes. Of course within the riveted aluminum tomb of airplanes and buses; steel cars, trains, ships and now within the flesh and bone transiting light years beyond anything I can define.

Going to the Moon or Mars or flashing beyond the Milky Way laughable since in time with prayer one can see or, at least, sense God.

Becalmed sea wrinkled with cat’s paws, a whiskered breeze, no shore visible. Myself naked between three floating piles of litter added to by seagulls caring more. Flotation. A resting place after limitless swimming? Or was I born there or then?

Pure conjecture: It now seems that all that I sought clinging to was variable and subject to decay. Save only in that love I give is not.

Therefore it is not my problem if the love is inadequate; since like God’s love for us, always there, is absolute but may not be perceptible given the nature of the vessel attempting to hold or contain it.

Just a thought: What sees becomes invisible merging with the all.

Could, can or does this define what I sense is the meaning of: Nothing is for naught?

God. I love playing with my mind; remaining no more consequent than a dandelion. Following on as detritus, myself, now and beginning at birth: a virus or cancer inconvenient wrestling words to convince myself as other; not a cypher more than a grain of sand. Dust floating upon the still soon to be waves colossal.

Yet do I resent being so to others who would profit from my material being. Or would or should I say feed upon me? Blithely expunged as Anne Frank was. Why not take one or two or many in my rage against the blight. Leading others more totally possessed with addiction to revenge. Dancing the fine line between the majority and the fringes; entropy and action. Begging for sanity.

Nothing is fixed all is still in motion.

Have a care for the all, the many, within what and which we exist.

No life is an island.

Conjecture?

Inherent within life itself, not as defined by institution or individual, any one -- or all, seems to speak shattering all my imaging of it or the who. What is the engine of all creation. Available to that which listens.

130119 05:29 dream being
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

ideal

photo by Alan-Sailer1

Formerly I sought in all my wildest imaging, conclusively now, a blow-up party doll I could dismiss once through making love with. Yet as child and young man I fought the good fight seeking to make love possible for the women I loved: singular, several, not too many: no where near the letch I sound. A Cub Scout and was and remain actually.

But of course I say nothing new to those of us who pass beyond the magical number of, let us say forty-five plus years-of-age. The truism “that men never grow up” but merely large and old must in some way mirror others of similar gender. Given all that was impermissible to myself as male, and now without an iota of rationalization, I can say that the suffering was worth the now of me.

The first time was all the honeymoon we had. Neither realizing the consequence. I still wonder had I known would I do it again? Yes. Of course for I loved her and love her still though parted for more years then we were married. As for M, for the bride-of-my-youth or even Dick Chenney I’d lay aside my life until either they or I departed in death should need arise.

I love this aspect of myself as much as I love the boy and man who wanted to rut considering any woman in heat or not. Yet now as then I refuse to use anyone for self-gratification.

In time, too soon for me, she became not lover and friend but a mother who had no time for me as friend or man save for the two dimensional figure of a husband . . . possibly I should have, or in ideal time would, left/leave her with an Automatic Teller Machine with, of course, endless funds.

Obviously I speak in generalities since there was no dialog regarding the two dead children or the one who abandoned by us, in the throes of our other children dying, abandoned her.

Possibly I imagine myself as disposable, like the party-doll; and I am: birth, life, death in one fell swoop. Yet there remains these finest hours of all my life for which I can take no credit. And if nothing else keeps me muttering night and day it is a longing that you, not merely you dear reader who’s attention I appreciate greatly, but all who will never give their lives a second thought.

I am interested and very curious about the nature of prayer. At times sense this is my “Now I lay me down to sleep . . . “ With or without the provision should I not awake. If “faith” gives me peace I know not how to speak of it save to suggest that it is available to you without joining anything but yourself to the ebb and flow of life with all the slings, arrows and vicissitudes it brings. Into which I factor senseless rape, theft by the rich of our ability to gain a livelihood or sustain life after we retire; or merely the character assassination by them, the wealthy, the we have no right to exist save to serve their endless addiction to power and greed.

Laughing!

Dad used to tell me a story about Elizabethan theaters wherein the peasants used to stand in the orchestra while the Toffs urinated upon us from the balcony. And then, my bladder fit to bust from need to void and laughter, he’d close with; “I say Governor can you waffle it about?!”

Humor is all that keeps me from attempting the destruction of any and all conspicuous displays of wealth. Should I think myself noble I’d say it is God who keeps me from being insane. The Devil is ostentation. Or, should you be enslaved to a mortgage: the fine print. The details of your death warrant.

In my times of despair I imagine eating alive all the residents of a certain address on Park Avenue N.Y., N.Y.  That is in lieu of pinto beans. All that is left of a handsome retirement provided by my mother and stolen by politicians, bankers, stock manipulators and those who claim to have “earned” it living off the sweat of not just my brow but all of ours.

In truth it was a small price to pay for freedom from their snark.

I would have loathed dying while wondering what happened.

130118 12:36 ideal
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

love is . . .

. . . empathy for assassins and thieves. Meaning merely that I am equally capable and know that emphatically. Yet choose differently. It seems now, given my dreams, that I have sought to define the reality of God but I would spell “God” differently as Love or merely that which is good for my beloved higher than that which I desire for myself.

I have failed this ideal and will fall again, not so much in love, because I cannot love God or Love more, at least not at the moment is it possible to define such a thing as true.

What I have sought for a lifetime is found and in finding it see no limits and no fear. As formerly I knew myself well, as in good mental health, balanced between the potential of mayhem and grace. I came to know nothing is for naught or nothing is for nothing. My greatest wealth is suffering and from those who have much, much is required.

Ya But! . . . But nothing: give and in giving, the way (a way actually) personal/sincere, the journey being the goal not the arrival . . . what might seem loss is expansion not contraction. And if my intention is to lend you my peace I would ask that you examine your fears.

But at that, this is an old man speaking upon the cusp of the grave, having suffered and found in the pain answers bought at the cost of entering my fears.

Arisen from a dream in which I was asked by who or what? Myself or “God” to measure my will to give to another that which is only potential to truth. And like Jesus, if unwelcome move along. I now sense resolution to an issue plaguing me since conception, unconscious then, but now writ large and obvious. The odd conjunction or collision between those I have loved and left came forth full and center. Not as judgment of either they or myself as good or ill but merely that I could no longer be of benefit to them aside from being a prop in their theater.

The what happens after realization: “Is this all there is?”

The urge to merge, possibly to procreate or announce ourselves as worthy of attention and touch, slowly evolves as old age becomes the present; unimaginable in youth. The frantic lust born from attraction becomes reality in companionship; ideally as friends between whom love making is but one facet of all the keys on the organ of life. Pulling out all the stops. Here I’m thinking of J S Bach and or Jimmy Smith.

Being human nothing human surprises me; save that I am curious of my addictions and hypocrisy. Instead I attempt to live by conscious choice doing no harm. Yet even this is hypocrisy since I still smoke cigarettes and breakfast on coffee until my stomach rebells. Adhering to no one religious or political construct and I know of and about many well. I live by my sense of justice for all not merely for myself.

That said I will share with you that my dream was magnificent and myself unworthy of dreaming it except that in the course of my methodical pursuit of quotes I discovered: "My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings." - Mary Shelley 
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley

Where and when I should grovel laying prostrate in thanksgiving, given the synchronicity of such a discovery, I habitually, now, attempt to integrate both the dream, discovery and information into the whole or all of the above. My sole ambition is now to share the process of self creation not for fame, acclaim or fortune since I have all that I need in solitude . . . alone save for that which or who informs me to go further and leap beyond death . . . of myself or this planet soon to die; at least insofar as we knew it.

Most curious is my dyslexic perception of things drawn forward from first impressions and tried against current inquisition. A self auto-da-fé  follows from which I resurrect with possibly a gleaning of what is implied by Jesus coming again. So my habit is more a Bond Fire of Vanities than seeking something to write about. (Laughter!) Humility being more an extrusion eliminating the impurities of desire for anything save the next breathe, or heart beat. What keeps me keeping on for what else is there to live for but love. Not for God, or self alone, but for all of it.

Be neither a lender or borrower, the images or wealth of others, or one another; but of self be true. Then you need not beg the love of another, as I did, to be real. Your love given will be true freely given without desire or expectation of reply. And the self who gives genuine. To give material things is needed but more so the gift of self, simple as sincere attention and more, is enough. Seek no applause; for in giving we create our self.

“ 10:38

Wandering around, contemplating borrowing Frankenstein from the Public Library, I fell to wondering why not after so long open and use my brand new i Pad instead? I purchased it months ago anticipating finishing out my days volunteering at hospice. Yet, it seems, fate had other intentions for me. I left over a dispute regarding ownership of my photography . . . well, actually there was more conflict than I care or will list. My time and talents I freely give but steal them from me and I will not retaliate but simply leave and seek other activities for these precious moments I sought to endow with my attention between being required or not during my voluntary hours.

Our fearless scatocephalic leaders have stolen all our social security and so I pay and pay for their folly. Chuckling as I read Montaigne’s remarks about their excreting the same as I, not daffodils but that which reeks; mere waste. Life would have no meaning without death and it is not morbid to think of them as I do of myself. Add. I never say of another, any other, what I’ve not said of myself. I can find no answers for us, but for myself I persist seeking a reasion to live another day. And wonder not that there is public mayhem occasionally remembering that law is remedial while love is preemptive. They who lead seem to know the price of bread while flesh and blood is spilled endlessly and at times I think of  Al-Qaeda in Congress wrapped in the American Flag brandishing the Cross of Christ. No less fanatic/zealous in their terrorism than our purported foe.

It follows that at times I’ve seen myself as monstrous. Yet when facing my foes I have learned from them that what is grotesque can teach me humility. It is easy to sneer but difficult to find solutions; the effort is worth everything we hold of value in life. . . . or given our current condition nearing the end of everything: a habitable earth and consciousness as so known while living this life I take pleasure, no, actually joy in the fight.

There is no evil but choice to waste others for one’s self aggrandizement. Beware of old men wearing tuxedos preaching greed.  No one and nothing is merely “this or that.” What we judge in lieu of our fear is the full measure of being judged ourselves.

The “history of the world” is written by self-congratulatory overweight old men filled with self-importance; and being legends in their own minds.

130118 06:14 Love is
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

Post Cards from Creation

Change is inevitable. In my experience not dramatic, something like awakening as a cock roach. Rather it began somewhere/someplace backwards in time.

Just your ordinary little dust devil dancing alone in the night. From dust to dust; but what dust! We, all life, are the dust of creation attempting consciousness of purpose, from/to, what and why.

I am reconfiguring my sense of writing. No longer a personal journal, as such, attempting to gain sanity. A pretense and pose, attempted and achieved, somewhat, in adaption to my life as begun and near the end.

I think in terms of voyage or journey but neither term applies. Curiosity, perhaps a disease I was born with, is better. A seeking/seeing truth regardless of cost or what is revealed. Initially furtive and covert for fear of being proved the village idiot. And those who knew or know and love me nonetheless have paid the price of caring for an abducted child who in reality merely wandered off.

Possibly leaving behind a trail of bread crumbs or sending back post cards from within eternity.

130109 06:54 Post Cards

All of life is individual, stars within the darkness. Matches once struck, flaring, then extinguished.
Recycled?
The matter yes.
The consciousness?

Quislings govern us for the profit of a few. Who in their turn own us, en mass, a herd: slaves one-and-all. Thinking it bad for me I become conscious it is worse for women.

Something akin to “I wept because I had no shoes until I met a person with no feet.” . . . here it is well to remind you that we are persons, whether women or men, child or adult. Add that “man” is generic for human and not sexist in my perception. But ever aware of the enslavement of women I attempt to alter and alert all to the simple fact that the soul/self is genderless.

It may well be that I am ‘divinely’ inspired yet I claim no divinity to myself nor am I worthy of it. But at that, given five or so hours of sleep I awoke with the word “quisling “ on my lips. Culmination of various and sundry thoughts in the past twenty-four hours. Possibly longer duration. Since a friend described the death of a man slightly junior to the listening audience all beyond retirement age.

Apparently the man was a lumber jack, one who topped trees; those trees whose height is too great to fell from the base. It is dangerous work. He was topping a tree at home and kicked off his perch falling upon his head beneath and dying in his wife’s arms.

To which I responded; “What a wonderful way to die,” having witnessed the deaths of many from attrition, starvation, inability to swallow fluids. The ways of death are many and for myself I would rather be burned alive than most.

I am in no rush towards my own death, yet knowing and being mindful as I am, I sense life is a far greater value than those who steal it from us. Quislings, those who practice cupidity and avarice, those who hoard and those who abet the bankruptcy of the world . . . well what can I say? The world and it’s ways will change. Gazing into the abyss of greed lends me the sense we must change or perish all together. Yet must not change via the covert violence done to us least we become addicted to power and greed ourselves.

130111 00:48 life as prayer

These past silent days have been spent in reverent awe for discovery of actions and choices, in current time, humiliating to me.

How else can one become conscious other than to be become aware of attitudes, perspectives and hypocrisy that are doomed to fail, or at the very least cause the soul to die?

Save what we can, accept what we must, submitting to the flow of our reality, leaving the rest to it’s own resolution. I do still bridle at injustice and sense seeking the cause. That it is not my fight. Not my battle but the war in general that pervades all life throughout history. I change nothing but my self the only variable available to me. Leaving behind notes of encouragement to those who seek the why and how we are we, the family of humans, imperfect. Seeking happiness become joy in peace.

There seems no one author, other than the Author of Life itself, who makes available a construct of coping consumable at one bite. A magic bullet or pill remedying fit for all sorts and conditions. But then I speak of my failings not successes being at times a rock and others a fish in my small portion of time alloted to me.

My process goes on collecting quotes from which I derive a greater overview, a cross section if you will or must, of all thoughts available worthy of remembering in times such as these we live. Remove from them all the obvious progress and the experience remains essentially the same.

I sense myself changing in tectonic ways. Nothing shattering but slowly evolving into someone I don’t know yet. But the process, or journey, is worth it all, since to own one’s self is wealth without measure. Even if that self is discordant with all that passes for reality.

It now seems resolute that for me to write is the best I can make of a life once dedicated to images and music. I sense it was impossible before but now impossible to avoid or deny.

130114 05:20
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

Credit my dreams as I do. At times takes longer than most. Yet this one from which I arose is plain to see memorable. The landscape was similar to one I knew in childhood, traversed on foot and extensively explored: Laddin’s Rock, Old Greenwich, Connecticut. The scenario frequently reprised is expansive fascinating and at times contracts to the memory of being there in snow wearing canvas sneakers. . . .and punctuated by the destruction of a fabulous large cast iron skillet used to cook lunch. Not by me but the negligence of a fellow traveler in the snow. He laughed, his responsibility and crime. Inwardly I cringed and wept, lamenting the folly of what the skillet represented to me. Reaching back beyond my maternal grandmothers time.

What was wild and uninhabited during my experience of it is now residential mostly. Bewildered I arose thinking it was indicative of something else developed for something other than W.A.S.P.s . . . or pretenders to what formed this country initially. Our collective rape and theft of it from the natives who lacked any sense of ownership beyond the providence it provided.

At lunch during the previous period of light, with M, I confessed again my love for her. The proclamation was preceded by an interesting event. In the corner of the restaurant was a family: father, a young son, a slightly older daughter. Their costume palate of color subtle, punctuated by red poinsettias wrapped in red gilt.

M replied to me; “I noticed. Being trained in observation--in depth.” Leading later to our conversation about the origins of such vision and my thesis that we who were abused in childhood (or even in recent events experienced by those who return from war or rape--surviver’s guilt?) . . . or merely endless mourning; the events tearing our sense of normal to shreds.

We, M & I, seem to have a remarkable similitude in childhood and differ widely in adaption. She sought a formal education in psychology. While I, thinking myself too stupid to live, labored on using my own devices. The topic of Hypervigilance came into play. My thoughts tending towards a motivation for paranoia. To which she elaborated alternatives.

An aside: I sense that given the trauma of abnormal events, regardless of societal regard: definition or shoulds and oughts. Hypervigilance can tend towards chaos and explains much of my previous behavior and choices. Through extrapolation and/or intuition I sense that most of the violence demonstrated against the public is an outward manifestation of internal chaos; an attempt to illustrate that which is unacceptable to the aggressor. As animals we go to ridiculous extremes. Remaining for the most part asleep in normalcy; wage slaves or anarchist. Unconscious that life is to be lived not survived. Most education is given in order that we conform to expectations set by those who profit from our obedience.

Neither God nor love is a noun but a verb.

Returning to my dream. There was a woman, virtually unseen, within, who influenced me to make of the overt chaos, a place like Laddin’s Rock during my childhood, into a place of peace, a park for transient visitation not the privileged habitation of a few.

"A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same." -Elbert Hubbard 

At one time I loved her because of gratitude. Now I love her as friend; for herself. Leading me to realize, that like Jesus or Buddha, M is for me the source of becoming and not what I sought in having someone captive as a resource immutable. Conditional verses unconditional love. It seems wise to chose a mate with whom one can converse for a lifetime.

130108 03:37 Dreams remembered
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

Marilyn & dawn

Dawn’s promise become pronounced since three in the morning’s night watch. Charlotte Jean trimmed and snoring through a calm sea. Free of the helm I stood upon the bowsprit flying through eternity.

I weep for not that which is lost but found in now. Those who follow will have none of it, the glory and the horror. For it will be, I fear, all of the former. Seamless without relief.

Dreaming of Marilyn Monroe, knowing her only through a peer, who’s dad had been a producer for “The Misfits.”

When do boys become men and predecease one another remembering priorities of one piece of quality, versus a flock of schlock, furnishing our lives ahead; now dwindling. He dead while I tarry upon the cusp of my demise remembering when and why.

I live now by succor of words, symbols of what might become of the all of us as surf breaking upon a distant, unseen, desert beach beyond our keen.

The All before, still, afterwards--always--Be Here Now.

. . . royalty resides in all of us.

130107 05:47 dawn & Marilyn
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

epiphanies & love

Lovers and epiphanies come and go. Leaving behind bits and peaces of experience, some to suffer, others celebrated and life goes on; with or without us--our witness. Short or long each of us, actually all life, has sufficient suffering regardless of role: predator or prey.

Pain passes and suffering lingers, the joys forgotten but then joy begins and spreads outwards towards both; their instruction in how life is lived and left.

This that writes, a mindfulness, conscious of being extruded from moment to moment moving still. Towards a goal unannounced, certainly not death. Touching, then inhabiting, eternity brings an panache to season every moment, fearlessly, with now joy versus sorrow. I do however discover myself, not suffering so much, as being with a deep concern for the course of life surrounding me. Towards which, were I so inclined, I might write fiction. To me a candy coated finger pointing, essentially, to dysfunction. My pains are forgiven and forgotten save for illustration or narrative . . . I write to save another tossed in the storms surrounding us -- swimming -- not waking on water.

Love is preemptive, law is remedial. Neither God nor nature can heal the past. More laws make more criminals; love removes both.

130106 13:00 writing - why

Ebullient when writing goes well, aggravated when not, but then can I call what do “writing”?

My reverence and joy, hymns of antiquity, today’s songs of praise I read, and heard from voices echoing on the winds. Reminds me, in view of what occurred betwixt the previous post and now -- proof positive -- of serendipity and synchronicity at work. An essential truth. My effort goes on. Affirmations, in kind and scale, beyond my wildest prayers answered.

I think myself not unique, nor special, in anyway since what I receive is available to all who seek. Add, unsought, those moments when an epiphany occurs: too good to be true, listen to your muse. . . . and take the television/radio and throw it out the window.

It is well to remember the ages and stages that must be survived until we become curious about: “Is that all there is?” in life. At the same time I forget more often than not. The physical history of our planet renders civilization, roughly, and generous at that, seven thousand years. Like the very thin membrane of onion skin. By comparison my life and concerns are but the duration of a fruit fly.

I claim no divine right of Kings or Prophets. Astonished to be alive having never thought myself able to survive beyond forty-eight-years of age. I happily remember the gift of my political interest being thwarted by The Greenwich Connecticut School System and population et al.

I cannot now recall at any time my parent’s demonstration of reverence for anything they could not buy. And oft recall dad’s, despite being honored and loved . . . he was never a father to me but more like an older brother in the sometimes benign sense . . . telling me that the ideal life was to live by the sweat of other peoples brows. Shortly thereafter I mentioned this in elementary school and the teacher, thank god, hauled me out into the hall and gave me holy hell. He had worked all his life as I did and do to gain an education.

As surely you must suspect by now, death will not end mine.

I did not cause nor can I fix the grief that happens. Save to remark that it is more typical than not and one is wise to expect more. The Muse, The All, suggest adapt, improvise and prevail . . .

- Talmud (attributed)
“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

Be well and do the best you can
when you fail get up off your face and keep moving.

You can, you know, be the best you are.

130104 0923 affirmations

I discover myself as moving via empathy into situations way beyond my capacities. Consciously and unconsciously in thought and dreams.

Add to which I am processing massive, at least for me, amounts of information making up for feigned self indifference to education. I do crash and burn. And am dependent upon mentors. Or as I have learned, I remain an apprentice to the wisdom of those I love and trust.

I have come to trust the process of whatever it is that I undergo by experience, imagination and love. It is even for me difficult and demanding. At the same time humbling. Not humiliating . . . I lie. I take myself apart like a child's construction toy attempting to see and understand what and why I seek and the way I go.

I don’t take myself too seriously given that I am well aware of myself as an integrated system dependent upon continuance and the discontinuity of life, especially at my vintage. What I imply is an pastiche derived from desperate resources. Each in fugue. When I saw Jesus weep, he wept without grimace, eyes filling with tears.

And so it was not to long ago driving to water aerobics, the musical commentator said that J. S. Bach’s greatest fan was Mozart, something I never knew and impossible for me to imagine; then followed with a string quartet arranged by Mozart from one of Bach’s themes . . . wrecked on music. But no. I was able to control the automobile continuing on my way.

Thinking back to my first conscious mentor, a fellow journalist, who said of me that I was then, and remain now, “sullen to discipline.” In her presence I was able to laugh and cry without explanation.

I bolted from sleep conscious of a number of scenarios wherein I was witness to harm being done to others by peers. Assessing what I might do or say to forestall the incident; influence the outcome. I fear I failed the tests. It was not in distress that I awoke but in the realization that we fail because we are helpless not to. Implying that there are forces at play hugely beyond our influence; in some sense entering the victim and the predator’s state of mind. Empathy is astonishing that way.

I should know better having been utterly helpless to die instead of my son as his disease destroyed him. There was a certain grace within the experience since I am aware of parents whose children simply disappear and their fate remains forever unknowable. It is true of me that my consciousness if that of a parent informed. More profoundly so than the victim I was as a child. Add that I retain a sense of responsibility for life that I do not apply to myself making of me a fraud.

So it is that while reading Annie Dillard and Michel de Montaigne concurrently I am being cross pollinated by the sewer of violence world wide. On one hand euphoria, on the other, diving head long into a box of broken razor blades. Wafting though this is a sense, the genius of God, manifest in various prophets and saints who I sense faced the same issues personally.

I once read a contemporary Hindu’s sense of addiction as being the avoidance of God. This is a vantage point I glean from both Dillard and Montaigne sans conclusions; theirs or mine; learning to live with it. This life and time we live. . . .Ask, receive and find yourself the strength to adapt, improvise and prevail. Accepting the reality of being imperfect; failure inevitable yet it is worth the price to own yourself.

In the following sense. In failure we learn to get back up on our feet and keep on keeping on, our consciousness ever so slightly expanded and kinder to all.

In conclusion neither of my children were “mine” but their own life to live regardless short or long. Laws are remedial while love is preemptive; though dead they both live in something vaster than my mere memory.

“Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.” - Confucius

130104 03:33 parenting
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

love is a virus with a nod to Eric Hoffer

Cyclonic disturbance, within the quiet scintillation of conventional conversation, banter actually, gives rise to events unfathomable. statistics well known but causes mysterious.

Spectral dances a potential of resolution.

“The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.” - Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955), Section 124

Is love really a choice given all the tears in our collective continuity? I think love is a virus afflicting, a contagion going viral, only to those who seek to know the good of all life not the one, immune, masked as indifferent. They who seek immunity do so by isolation, being unique in a celebratory way, and sequestered behind walls become stone. Fixed, immutable, and untouched by the flow of life; intolerable.

I sense we are born with the virus of love, some call cynically or skeptically: dependence. Life becomes adaption to chaos; for or against, this or that.

“The impulse of power is to turn every variable into a constant, and give to commands the inexorableness and relentlessness of laws of nature. Hence absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.” - Eric Hoffer,  The Ordeal of Change (1963), Ch. 15 : The Unnaturalness Of Human Nature

. . . 130104 05:14 . . . Winter Dance, in order to survive the season, for the most part, I silhouette the vinyl floor tiles beneath my bed and wait for it to be over. It very well be that I am a victim of Seasonal Effective Disorder? Too sensitive to the longest night yet very couscous of the now increasing light.

However, that stated, I remain bewildered by the chaos annotated by world wide news and feel victimized by it. In empathy I feel their pain, the victims, perpetrators and those who remain bereft. To survive I read the Bible, but not only the Bible but other resources as well. Finding as much balance to counterbalance my distress in Eric Hoffer, Annie Dillard and Michel de Montaigne.

Add that I continue to expand my garden of quotes and am able to rest in them randomly . . . the words, sentences, concepts copulating with reality; worthy of remembering. For now my distemper is ameliorated with the wisdom of those who have, in their time and way, encountered the same issues that never seem to go away. Pimps, whores, assassins and thieves who run the world, all seem to adore chaos in that it lends a smoke screen to their crimes against humanity. Yet they too are afflicted by the virus of love making exception not by indifference but addiction to power instead.

Be well.

130103 05:29 love as virus
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

I discover myself as moving via empathy into situations way beyond my capacities. Consciously and unconsciously in thought and dreams. 

Add to which I am processing massive, at least for me, amounts of information making up for feigned self indifference to education. I do crash and burn. And am dependent upon mentors. Or as I have learned, I remain an apprentice to the wisdom of those I love and trust. 

I have come to trust the process of whatever it is that I undergo by experience, imagination and love. It is even for me difficult and demanding. At the same time humbling. Not humiliating . . . I lie. I take myself apart like a child's construction toy attempting to see and understand what and why I seek and the way I go. 

I don’t take myself too seriously given that I am well aware of myself as an integrated system dependent upon continuance and the discontinuity of life, especially at my vintage. What I imply is an pastiche derived from desperate resources. Each in fugue. When I saw Jesus weep, he wept without grimace, eyes filling with tears.

And so it was not to long ago driving to water aerobics, the musical commentator said that J. S. Bach’s greatest fan was Mozart, something I never knew and impossible for me to imagine; then followed with a string quartet arranged by Mozart from one of Bach’s themes . . . wrecked on music. But no. I was able to control the automobile continuing on my way.

Thinking back to my first conscious mentor, a fellow journalist, who said of me that I was then, and remain now, “sullen to discipline.” In her presence I was able to laugh and cry without explanation.  

I bolted from sleep conscious of a number of scenarios wherein I was witness to harm being done to others by peers. Assessing what I might do or say to forestall the incident; influence the outcome. I fear I failed the tests. It was not in distress that I awoke but in the realization that we fail because we are helpless not to. Implying that there are forces at play hugely beyond our influence; in some sense entering the victim and the predator’s state of mind. Empathy is astonishing that way. 

I should know better having been utterly helpless to die instead of my son as his disease destroyed him. There was a certain grace within the experience since I am aware of parents whose children simply dissapear and their fate remains forever unknowable. It is true of me that my consciousness if that of a parent informed. More profoundly so than the victim I was as a child. Add that I retain a sense of responsibility for life that I do not apply to myself making of me a fraud. 

So it is that while reading Annie Dillard and Michel de Montaigne concurrently I am being cross pollinated by the sewer of violence world wide. On one hand euphoria, on the other, diving head long into a box of broken razor blades. Wafting though this is a sense, the genius of God, manifest in various prophets and saints who I sense faced the same issues personally. 

I once read a contemporary Hindu’s sense of addiction as being the avoidance of God. This is a vantage point I glean from both Dillard and Montaigne sans conclusions; theirs or mine; learning to live with it. This life and time we live. . . .Ask, receive and find yourself the strength to adapt, improvise and prevail. Accepting the reality of being imperfect; failure inevitable yet it is worth the price to own yourself.

In the following sense. In failure we learn to get back up on our feet and keep on keeping on, our consciousness ever so slightly expanded and kinder to all. 

In conclusion neither of my children were “mine” but their own life to live regardless short or long. Laws are remedial while love is preemptive; though dead they both live in something vaster than my mere memory. 

130104 03:33 parenting
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

Annie Dillard

130102 04:35 Annie Dillard
It is my nature to love. Something I think we all have yet lose in the process of dealing with life itself; perhaps trained so, or gained so by experience?

I am humiliated to realize that I have loved women unreasonably in ways that were initially erotic, yet now intellectual/spiritual, the urge to the merge long lost in tragedy. Add now: Improbability.

Admittedly in love with God. Knowing what that means to me exclusively. Manifest daily & providentially. I sense this true in my encounter with M and so now with Annie Dillard. I am reminded of the several times I’ve drowned, or nearly so, being hurled from death upward having given up the struggle to live. . . .And haunted by Jim Thorpe’s choice to drown himself in three inches of water. Or Jerzy Kosinski's suicide by self suffocation with a plastic grocery bag. Possibly I am doing the same thing, virtually, by smoking cigarettes? I know very well what death looks like and have no fear.

To love this way is naive, humbly childish, and most often unrequited in any sense save the satisfaction of being within the same universe and time we inhabit. An accolade I seldom give. To some I’ve said, of their writing, I would read them as avidly as I might the Manhattan Telephone Directory should I know them the author of it. But then it is true of me: I inhale people with my eyes and ears. I always have since infancy. And then for forty-five years I had the legitimacy of doing so as a photojournalist.

I think this permission, the validation and enfranchisement, is something best discovered in Eric Hoffer but better articulated through the only medium I though previously impossible: writing.

Obscenely intimate in that I am unable to shrug my shoulders, shuffle my feet and grin when asked; “what did you mean by this!?”

Face on, bold, I ask questions. Now remembering a man whose frontal profile was oblong. Why? He ran his motorcycle into a traffic jam, hurled over five cars, he landed on his face and survived. And happy to relate the cause.

Why do I love Annie Dillard? She details a universe in macro/micro dimensions. With astonishing candor weaving the experience in ways tactile. Replete with doubts and conclusions implied. Add. She loves and has read the same people from history’s wisdom and their trivial as well.

She is like, to me, all those whose confessions I’ve heard regarding their love of life. (Tearing up!) Since I never forget and will count them amongst those embossed upon my prayer wheel beyond death.

At that there are now added the many, daily sought, through quotes, who by intuition are whole and complete enough to know them as fellow travelers and I am less alone. Having found a home, finally. Wherever I go they accompany me along with the Author of Life.

There is about Dillard an elasticity and terminal contraction, potent in collision with the narrative . . . stunning and exquisite. In a very personal preoccupation with The Last Supper, I have sought, and sometimes found, as in Hopper’s Night Hawk, the Terminal Lunch.

I love playing with my perceptions; conclusions, the why, the what, the when, towards what ends? Dillard has broken me of a conceit learned long ago from a very beautiful Daugherty of a very beautiful mother, both editors: never to use the same word in any sentence or paragraph. Yet, occasionally, Dillard does in reminiscent ways of roofing a home with shingles; each repetition a nail driven home to remain until blown away in the next hurricane.

She, Dillard, lulls me with descriptions of normalcy; then shocking with death. Being which part of life. The before, during and afterward, expansive from grain of sand to a desert universe.

M does the same with silence punctuated by observation . . . I love them both and yet it is my nature to love unreasonably . . . while skidding face down across the concrete of life.

© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

deliciously obscene: sensuous

130101 06:00 sensuous
Sensuous, deliciously obscene, the pleasure of reading another's soul in books. 

Sadly the dominate voice in our time has become canned mystery meat. The illusion of ‘WHAT’S GOOD FOR YOU!’ A confection of conceit and a concoction of profitably for one at the expense of all. Worse, it--movies and television--sucks the marrow out of our soul for momentary pleasure leaving no lasting potential of joy. 

I might, or should, expand my purview to include education, news, politics . . . the list, actually, is endless. Against which I rail with accusations equally accurate of myself as those I accuse of being scatocephalic; individually and en mass. What is love? If not intimacy with another!

To make love, or have love made manifest, upon the flesh of dead trees besmirched with black ink--naked: the author’s soul splayed. 

. . . 19:56

For all my memory, time has been measured by tide, train, river, highway or visions of apocalypse: Tokyo seen from one hundred miles out; a mushroom cloud of pollution above the Pacific.

Light and dark, the cycles of lunar passage marked from mountains to gleaming upon my kitchen floor. Tumbling from my exodus from hospice for copyright reasons. Chagrined and wondering what I should do with time . . . the last of everything measured by eternity in moments, days, weeks, months or years; death will not surprise me since I’ve begun in earnest to write for myself.

My dreams are prophetic only about/to/for me. I must attempt to abandon my sadness for the world I will leave behind. Life is for the living and the price is worth everything, to own yourself.

It is difficult to grow a soul, or become a person aware, in the violent sterility of our culture. Someone above and beyond “living a life of silent desperation” or mere existence. Awaiting death, avoiding all issues of conflict except threats to your/or my favorite dance of avoidance: addiction. 

© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

Confessions of celebration

121231 05:29 confessions
I awoke with a sense of celebration; being the village idiot and a scaborous stray. Whose life, essentially, can be defined as the runt of a litter in my generation attempting to force my way to the trough of what I now consider, know and am convicted is, the swill fed to the pigs.

I am too familiar with suffering and death to be much afraid of it and less so now. This awareness is a gift beyond any treasure I can imagine since it endows my curiosity to fearlessly consider my own conceits, sentiments and conclusions.

It amuses me to awake with these thoughts upon a blank blackboard and discover that time has no meaning. At least to me it dosen’t; my “New Year” having begun at the nadir of my life: the 21st of December. Which for me is the depth of winter; the longest night. Only now, at that date, realized as the longest day in Sydney Austrailia.

At my age, I am, after all, an animal. A biodegradable vessel whose body, while currently viable, while soon not be.

Laughter.

In recognition that I was once informed my fear seemed, that I’d never die but continue. And this was not conscious or detailed but latter applied. That I did give all my power to women for who’s love I’d do anything for, sacrificing myself, to gain the illusion of completion. With this bald pragmatic, sans all sentiments formerly held as ideal, I do love a woman who loves me. Our love affair being intimate not sexual. Nor is it dependent upon the absence of conflict since there is little we agree upon politically in the ordinary of life yet spiritually merge on the important issue of perception and value; the what and why one is willing to die for or live by.

My sense, immutable, is that our love is transcendent in the case of that which is not dependent upon condition or response. Hard learned and remarked upon in a recent chide to which at any previous time would have destroyed me; now, I eventually replied, in context, I love you as you are. I remaining whole not shattered.

Such love I wish for one and all since it is our gift to love without recompense. To give without desire or expectation of reply.

It follows that I loved my mother, not as potential sexual teacher/partner, but in that she might come to love herself. But at that, as with my father, love was impossible for them since they were, as I was, taught they had no value in family, tribe or nation. Save by what they could acquire.

God, or that which I hear and sense by hearing in the stillness of my heart, loves me as I am, as I do He/She . . . and of need this, or such, love ripples out to those assassins who govern us.

“All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are ... punished by fear.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The beginning and end of love is what we give. What we receive from God is overwhelming and conducive towards humility; not humiliation. But this requires that we love ourselves instead of beg for love. And at base, at least mine, I remain convicted that I must accept myself, imperfect and flawed, as does God. Self acceptance and honest awareness of my failings is the nexus, or basis, of change.

Truth is never for sale, it must be experienced and lived.

© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved