Wounded in life, I seek to staunch the wounds of others . . . . --xoj

"Jack Spratt’s two centavo Guide to Redemption”
©2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved

God's tapestry, all creation, my greatest value an attempt to live/love for: in gratitude, mercy, forgiveness, regardless of Age, Race, Creed, Gender, Gender Proclivities, or Generosity . . . seeking to make redemtion salvation & resurrection potential in all unique, precious, individual lives, human, plant, animal, world. . . .through words & images - Jack Spratt ... KISS

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Love - Art Nouveau


A study in blues, as in Rhapsody in Blue.

The breaching whale of my dream broke into consciousness; acknowledging the conflicts of my grandparents and parents. Their difference in loving and living style within societal constraints; their lives and times.

Will I never learn not to fall asleep with music!

Or write!

At the surface, half in/half out, I recognized the style and thought of them: women married to men. As, chained together running away, in opposite directions, fetching up – failing their flight; collapsing. Awake now I wonder is this not true of almost all marriages eventually? A seamless continuity of remaking the other into an ideal partner absent all conflict.

Two realizations before I go on: I too failed the test to become a friend submitting to my then wife. For much, I think now, the same reasons. And now our “All American Dream” has been gambled away corroding the ideals of marriage, home, children with a future. Future? What future? Through thick and thin, thinner, then vapor. No hope for the children, homes lost. As for old age; forget about it. While the Banisters on Wall Street gloat and smirk. Having bankrupted the world.

130406 0111 mere mortal

. . . notes in reply to a dream just awoken from, wherein a dialog was spoken to an unknown woman whose inspiration this is. Can I say; “Call me Ishmael”?

What and why I write are merely notes on a life unfolding. But then, equally, I could say being enfolded. Such ego as I might once have had is slowly evaporating in awe for the process I annotate daily in my personal journal: for me a proof positive of all that I am, a mere mortal, touched by something vaster than whales, etc. Awesome in and of itself, this process, I have yet to grow jaded in reply to all that has happened in my life. About which, with sincerity I will say this, it is not for me but us equally available: a genius we all possess. Should only we say “yes” to the invitation to be ourselves beyond the boundaries of definition common to all life and language.

In some sense I propose that we all are filled with events, if strung together, form a necklace of value and purpose. Not to control, rule or exploit, own, so much as to serve one-another. In truth and love imperfect, for now, but participating in a purpose and intention beyond what we can now understand or define. Albeit the direction of integration not destruction.

I know the details of my life and process about which it would be boring to detail or imply since each of us perceives it: Life, Love and Truth differently. A Tower of Babble purposeful.

It is said that to talk to oneself and get answers is problematic. In psycho babble, Schizophrenic.

Damned or Blessed either way I will press forward.

(03:10 If I have lived for nothing other than this hour, celebrated, alone; the feeling, intuition, sense and thoughts. I will have lived for something of such value it cannot be told or sold. Convicted that I must share with others the potential of such joy.

And then I crashed. Returning to sleep for a time to recoup the earliness of my awakening and dreamed again. Another young woman in my dream, this time a fellow photojournalist, we were comparing/competing for work. Within the dream I seemed to demure to her, she being younger, desirable and so desperate for work. Yet now, awake, I remember myself before Randy’s diagnosis at four with Leukemia: I was a terror defying all authority to get my images/vision/version of what was the truth before me.

At least so as I thought myself by compare to the wilting fern persona I adopted with my mother from infancy until sixteen. Who’s savage rage, sober or drunk, I was able to begin to deflect at age sixteen when the second false accusation of incest seemed eminent. The point to this aside is that I have had an unusual deference towards woman lending them a power they can no longer possess. Which I now, loving and being loved my M, no longer need; that former sedition against myself; begging for love. For all we, all who could but do not, rampage, attributable to rape, abuse, abandonment; I healed will attempt to save those who insanely go forward murdering.

"A good mind possesses a kingdom: a great fortune is a great slavery."
"The most important knowledge is that which guides the way you lead your life."
- Seneca

10:59

At times I wander about, at stopping points, seeking affirmation to what inspired me in the first instance or amplification: unspecific. For me a process I trust, more often rewarding than not. I still flirt with exploding my mind a la C. G. Jung and Montaigne even Einstein did; wanting to go as far as IT – FAR goes farther beyond the beyond.

Returning to The Rhapsody in Blue(s) My maternal grandmother had remarried having been married at thirteen. Little, to no, mention made by my mother regarding her father: dead by accident or design when she was four. Except any mention of firearms.

My point being that my step-grandfather never lived with us in Ripley, Ohio. But visited us randomly upon a Sunday morn late after his Catholic service and we returned from the Methodist for Sunday Supper the chicken he killed by hatchet or wrung neck, even the one I attempted to toilet train; a pet. My sense of marriage was thus discontinuous and well remember chancing upon them making love beneath a patchwork quilt and the eves of the attic above. Still it disturbed them not; not that they continued but didn’t hide either.

Then there was mom’s confession that dad expected her to be both whore and The Virgin Mary, why I don’t know, but she was sober at the time and not especially, wildly, enraged either.

At twelve, when she accused me of incest with my six year younger sister I hadn’t a clue what was going on but fled. Running away to be found by my father, how? I don’t have a clue for I was in the middle of Innes Arden’s Golf Course. Otherwise, and I’ll close here, my sexual relationship with women beginning at four: she losing her panties at every excursion. Then the kissing lessons given by my baby-sitter in her white nylon slip and I in Y fronts. Exiled to band camp, The University of New Hampshire, at around thirteen, passing for eighteen then and dating older women! Well, what more can I say, I’ve had a ball and despite the sorrows healed it’s been fabulous! So with M our being a pair is comfortable since my ideal of love is infinite, if sometimes discontinuous. . . .and no fooling around.

It may be, in retrospect, remembering a letter from mom; “You don’t need my permission to write.”

I was then unconscious of what I might have said in mourning or celebration of her. Or, any and all women since then and now!

Laughing since the spirit and body are willing and able; still at closing seventy-three: too soon for me.


Photo Caption:
Three-year-old "Esperanza" named her pet pigeon after her wheelchair-bound teenage uncle in Watts, Los Angeles. He was shot by a rival gang member in a drive-by shooting, 1994 credit photo: Donna De Cesare – University of Texas Press

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© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved