cremation of ambition

Ambition can make one more so, ambitious to the extent, in myself, I felt cremated with jealousy. Made small, inconsequential, mean and evil of intent. By the talent/genius/works and words of others. Rendered charcoal tendentious.

Yet offered the opportunity to write and teach, I became something else. Nascent at first then growing, weed or tree, in the darkness of my envy. Now I remember Edward Steichen’s remark, “ . . . the best photographs remain unknown on processing house (mill) floors.” He was then Director Of MOMA’s Photography Department and author of THE FAMILY OF MAN: exhibition and book. Obviously in previous times of chemical & silver photography become currently a tsunami of images, digital.

The same World submerging, is true by words, as well, now flooding; no paddle canoe or ark.

“GOOD, BETTER, BEST” being a ruse employed by merchants of greed not need. And none in reality being more consequential than another but just one more singer in the choir/chorus of Creation. In & of itself the glory not the singer since all, if honest, would attribute creation to the Author of  it inspired/conspired. Not eclipsed, but illuminated - incandescent - kindled road flares burning through the common pavement, a path, not THE PATH! Going where no path was before; making plain the highway of joy, wide and obvious.

Oblivious, anonymous, I remain inconsequential, muttering and maundering, as politicians are want to do. Save in my case lacking any ambition other the joy of knowing I am, briefly, fully human, alive & joyous. Acknowledging creation goes on with or without my voice in the choir; here or above.

Ambition leads most often to addiction; never filled, crying more - More - MORE! The rictus of greed is bottomless; consuming everything in sight, cannibalistic.

It is not by false humility that I speak but earnest and sincere celebration for all the voices I hear and see. Even those of my Enemy who I was suggested to love instead of smite. To forgive seven times seventy, and again, and yet more, in particle replica of what I experience as The Creator. The revolutionary, anarchist, evolutionist, impelling all life to move forward and be.

My ‘enemy’ tells me, through inconvenient terms and behaviors, what may well be their truth; but not mine. In the process informing me more about they who would and will strike me dead, should all negotiations fail.

No one wins a war, the cost is too high! The innocent, the poor, those with nothing have less in consequence the contest. Those who advocate conflict or inflect preemptively strife are bored and ignorant of love. . . .Or profit from it.

We are one family. And no soul is either one gender or the other. None superior, or has the exclusive truth of our origin, or destination; were it so there would be no rape, pillage, war.

"There is no way to peace peace is the way" - Mahatma Gandhi + A.J. Muste  
"When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment he needs help. That's the message he is sending."
“Why rush? Our final destination will only be the graveyard.” - Thich Nhat Hanh

130319 05;38 cremation
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

had she said YES!

Women have always been a dark deep well into which I fling myself in prospect of peace, pleasure, becoming whole, imagining joy. And had she said YES! I’d have been lost. For between us was a trust and she incarnated kindness indiscriminate to all yet in those fleeting minutes alone more so to me from time-to-time, day-by-day and then.

A flickering glimmering smile equivocal glittered and then she said; “I’ve given up on men. . . “ Amongst the peers surrounding us, all women grinning. Intimacy is not penetrative but embracing. But embarrassing, momentarily, at least for me it was. Recognizing her need, then and now, to flee; I within milliseconds understood.

She remains embossed upon the titanium steel drum of my prayer wheel; spinning 24/7/365; a resolve to remain celibate, bachelor alone . . . mendicant solitary. Yet again had she said YES!

I’d be now up to my hair follicles in snow and me a desert rat. . . .Too old for one and too young for the other; lost in the limbo dance. Just as well, since the pleasure of anticipation seldom is met with reality; latter on when the bonds strangle; growing bald; the expectation of whatever, worn away.

Heaven forfend I should dance forward instead keeping my mouth shut.

. . . now, at least now and lately, I better understand why He said, “forgive them for they know not what they do” . . . to see within is to know the glow, the pearl, regardless the dark prospect displayed. The Master makes no slaves but masters of ourselves. Something never lost. Light and Love projected unquenched requited or not


. . . but then, as when it began, so it follows, as now, best friends,
4 me the ideal objective of all relationships; marriage in particular


"Man loves little and often, woman much and rarely." - Anonymous

4M&PD

130318 03:33 had she said YES
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

self-deprecation

My unabashedly riotous guffaws are the product, a lifetime in self deprecation. Over which father and I would compete in odd places. Times. Remembering now my mother, who seldom laughed, was looking for a hat in Bloomingdales of all places. When suddenly he and I, in the mirror, appeared beside her grinning in ladies chapeaux.

I laugh now with more than a tincture of sadness, for the memory, while humorous, betrays what I saw in her eyes; terror.

Mercurial in the best of times, worse when intoxicated, a daily event after five of the afternoon. Latter on, the marriage failed, she alone, would disappear for sometimes days and my sister would find her alone in her, always Cadillac, two vacated quarts of Scotch on the floor; unconscious.

"My love life is terrible. The last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty." - Woody Allen

. . . we’re a pair M&me two spirit ghosts dancing; passing through one another. And it was she who invoked within me, without knowing really? that I in the end would rather enter a woman’s soul than her body. Few of the many I’ve known came remotely near the passion, the - to me - sacrament which M calls aggression . . . Small wonder now she once called me a ‘priest’ but then I love her all the more for her confidence. I’d no real life before, thinking myself too stupid to live. . . . Worse. Attempting to prove it.

I’m an old man alone, growing older moment by precious minute. Formulating the thesis that success is an illusion. Happy with a companion cat, laughing and crying, about/over which, she the cat, Annie, is bewildered and consoles me. A sailor of the galaxies I know well the term “cats paws” barely rippling the sea becalmed; calming me with her barely perceptible touch, asking are you okay?

Forgive me please all those loved and left to find myself at long long last happily alone. More cautious with language spoken not written, Thanks Be To God! Or whatever/whomever speaks to me now awake or sleeping the dreams impelling me launched into wakefulness.

Obvious to me and should be to you; I’m a very bad boy. So much so to defraud all my longings to be otherwise.

I know the Master loves me, as does M, neither making of me a slave to anything or one.

“To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.”- Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

. . . which I now, even now, and forever more, add the pearl of great value is within each of us; seek it nowhere else. As grateful as I am for M and the Master I know only now that love is not that which we receive but give. Our true selves.

. . . candy is dandy, liquor quicker, money works too, but to be real, give of your soul; forever renewed.

. . . oddly, or perhaps not, discovered when I went to post:
“Conquest is an evil productive of almost every other evil both to those who commit and to those who suffer it.” C. S. Lewis

130318 01:16 self deprecation
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved