Grief for Newtown Connecticut

121219 06:59 consumed

Consumed by the latest updates on Newtown Connecticut’s news, I am filled with anguish for the children, their parents and the shooter; empathy knows no discrimination. And news by it’s very own definition is never good. This I know all too well having been there, done that and bearing the scars.

Though I have publishing nothing for the past, now five days, I have written my heart out and my angst is unworthy of your attention. Sufficient to the day are the joys and sorrows within for anyone including the remaining family of the assassin . . . I pray for his soul. It would have been a suicide of no consequence, not ‘news’, had he simply done away with himself otherwise.

As a child I learned to tell time by light, not clocks, while living with my maternal grandmother. To bathe she would turn on the hot water heater and then turn it off; otherwise she would heat water on the stove and fill a tub. There were far fewer people then and their birth and death were celebrated. Now the world is overpopulated by one third and we, the populous are going insane: wholesale. Expect more insanity. It is not guns but mental health. However, true to history, small people tend to seek power over others becoming tyrants in the process.

Where are the wise?

When we need them most?

Reflecting on my angst, now, I recognize that the noise, or so called news, is killing my objectivity. Not all terrorist wear costumes different from ours. Most, that I am aware of are politicians, bankers and stock manipulators who write laws to condone and conceal their theft.

With each passing day, remembering the day of my son’s death, December 10th, I have found sanity through reading the words of those whose wisdom is worth remembering in any or all times of crisis. At the same time never fully able to ignore or be indifferent to the 30 million children dying yearly due to neglect.

Have a care. We are what we consume in all dimension and parameters: food, water, air, the earth itself. Beware of the terrorist who consume us in slavery. The greatest con artist claim to be “Public Servants” while they steal you blind and kill our children. Why should 1% have all they want while we slave and die for them? Collaboration is win/win not communism; it is a middle way. Balanced.

They serve nothing but themselves; their vanity is an addiction to power and wealth. Mine is to wisdom sought. That is why I write.

© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

We are one family

121213 05:39 We are a whole, an entirety, one family called life; consciously lived.
Love, grief and suffering, seem part of the same whole tapestry once traversed. My beginning was within an  delusional ideal of seamless continuity. Nearing the end, I/Thou becomes aggregate  a we communal. A consciousness being love for all not just the other, together or apart. . . .

121212 1306 love
Many of my dreams, it now occurrs to me, are debates with my self who appears faceless yet oddly familar. I seem to be a con man/woman selling, not used cars, aluminum siding or life insurance but, alternate ideations that I laugh at.

I will be cremated and my dust left in a plain brown corregated box. The experience of Emily Dickinson’s grave, head stone covered with pebbles, remains in my memory as do all the other literary memorials I have visited. Not intentionally but accidentally given the need of my then companions. As for my remains, or even my body now, I haven’t a care visualizing my life as if it were a one penny firecracker ignited and about to pop. As insignificant as a dog barking on the far distant side of the Organ Mountains that I cannot hear.

The dream from which I just awoke was, obviously, about burial plans. I derive a great deal of pleasure from figuring out cons; especially those I con myself with given all my wishful thinking. It seems I expect mayhem given my childhood and professional experience. Between serving at hospice and reading Annie Dillard I am a changed consciousness: fearless.

I awoke with a sense of regret, that I had lost my original intent, keeping a personal journal. Yet to save one life, other than mine, is in a humble sense to save the world if not the universe. “Life and let live.”

© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

Seems true of me that I learn as much from my dreams as I do from reading or writing. The number of times I have awoken laughing is surprising, looking back. And yes, I do talk in my sleep; shouting at times. Some dreams have taken decades, others I am able to analyses instantaneously.

I remember being, once-upon-a-time, a binge reader inhaling authors one-on-one. Finding themes not otherwise obvious. Then messages to other authors sidereal, oblique and wonderfully intimate; not sexual but intellectual.

The current Dalai Lama summarized his sense of religion as merely kindness. This seems vastly more true of all who write leaving their summary convictions for others. It is not literature alone, but true of music and painting and all creativity as ephemeral as song and dance. Not one single methodology or ideology ideal since all lead eventually to the realization that we are one family. The nucleus of life itself.

I have been floundering since leaving hospice. Seeking a new reason to get up of a morning and lurch around the world interacting with others. Because as I always say the canvas of God is flesh. We seem, at least to me, to be the loom upon which God creates new images of what life can be about; not what it is: slavery to closed systems of anti-social behavior; exploitation not love. I think more seriously about writing, given all that I've read, but especially due to Annie Dillard, Emily Dickinson and Rumi . . . with a special and eternal nod plus endless gratitude for M.

Exploitation has always been true of power and force -- regardless -- Church or State. Pretending to be benevolent while actually demanding conformity to serve the gate keepers welfare: slavery.

Experience indicates I need be careful of my thoughts; to me prayer is more potent than holocaust; or the end of the world.

We stand with the third world now on the brink of extreme change. The Congress of Baboons would do well to volunteer their lifetime security for ours. Their behavior reeks of usury and decay, self-congratulatory and rewarding the bankruptcy of morals, ethics and celebration of living off the sweat of others.

I think of material wealth as ill gotten gains from tyranny, assassins and thieves who aggregate power and force to hide their selfishness. But then politicians are only pimps and we the whores for allowing ourselves to be enslaved to the obscenely rich.

Worry not about the end of the world for now. However you would do well to contemplate the end of safe food, water and air. Not to mention the dying seas surrounding us.

Define yourself as free or remain a slave.

121212 04:33 seems true
© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

Annie Dillard has become the hot poker to my mulled rum. A catalyst expanding my meager education. Someone I admire for her education and mind nakedly portrayed in “FOR THE TIME BEING.” My first full read of her. From micro to macro her trombone perception fascinates me. Though admittedly I am not confident of her conclusions -- none of which, so far, she has detailed.

Perhaps it is my perception, or lack thereof, or dullness, but given that statement, I confess I’m not really looking for a TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER membership. Having never found, definitively, a construct for my eclectic seeking for an identity probable to my needs.

Learning to read has surfaced as my greatest experience. Mother read to me at times, not often, but when she did, the memories remain. Add, the many and various phrases, words, constructs, cockleburs, that eclipse even my first sexual experience now. And I confess the several, well actually, many that followed linger at the back of the stove growing indifferent by comparison. Making love with, not to, is an art seldom shared.

It is true of me that mother castrated me with her accusations of incest . . . have I mentioned the mystery of my baby sitter and her kissing lessons? That preceded the accusation, at twelve years of age; not specific mind you but experientially something cataclysmic, taking nearly a lifetime to understand . . . the engine of my curiosity? Perhaps.

Soon to depart life I no longer mourn the lack of a woman into whom I could tango my soul. I remain something of a Boy Scout about sex. Too dedicated to love itself; tolerant to a point of ridiculous loyalty. Staying long after the slander and disdain became unbearable. Accustomed to being an inconvenient commodity, a stray, I have always struggled not to treat anyone else that way.

Apparently I am more turned on by a well defined mind than an ankle, knee or breast. An expensive education, nominal, but adequate for what ever remains of my life.

Bewildered at all my failures in relationships, I wander back and forth examining the details, to the limits of my capacity attempting to understand my part and responsibility. I think we all lose the love children and pets can give; not dependent upon anything -- eventually -- but the core of it. That which loves despite being burned alive. . . .or beaten to death.

I live to mine consciousness seeking an education outside the box of vocation or relationship to one individual. . . .all institutions seem tar babies to me. . . .caught in the thicket of thorns and murdered with ten thousand cuts.

121210 05:16 Anniversary

Death is not an end in itself but a beginning again. I do not know where my son or daughter are yet for me they remain not dust but vital elsewhere. Today is Randy’s anniversary, the day he died before my eyes. Swiftly followed by his internment; myself prostrate with grief beside him remaining broken until now thirty-six years later.

My dreams inform me of alternative attitudes. Remembering now the many wherein Randy’s mother remains fixed immutable conventional mired in her time and culture . . . so like my mother and the daughters one biological who died the adopted one abandoning me as it seems by her dearth words I did her at critical times.

While writing, sometimes, I leap away, not from boredom, or block, but seeking the words coincident to mine in time. Quotes being my favorite resource. Today is the anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s birth and the death of my maternal grandfather. I am less bewildered by any part, one or all, the events forming my now. All read and reconciled forming a bridge over which I will pass the pit of “The Holiday Season.” Traversed on thin air; alone.

Could it be that Santa Claus is more emblematic of God, giving free gifts unconditionally, than the one or several Saint Nicolas’? Or Buddha with a sack upon his back?

In any case I shall, as I did this former night, awake Christmas morn with gifts in my mouth and a spasmodically flashing star growing from my crown. The greatest of which is fearless faith in life as gift not punishment.

121211 04:23

During the intervening hours since I last wrote I became conscious of a new perspective on why and what I write. Time passes and I swim against it’s theft of my life. Discovering that it was not my children alone but for all the friends and acquaintances lost I annotate the world as I sense it. Astonished that I care instead of simply go berserk.

Grief being the darkness of love, the obverse is indifference. And why, in general, I avoid the box stores and commercial broadcasts of “holiday spirit.” I have a sense that I am not swimming but standing, a hoary old stone laved by the on rushing flow of time worn smooth; reconciled to the ebb and flow of creation. Sand blast being quicker than water or wind but more subtle than oblivion.

Had we met, at any point between Randy’s night and now, I would have told you first that I am the parent of two children past . . . that is not exclusively true of me, for I never had a life before now. It walked, talked, made gas; but enclosed within was this penchant for making cathedrals of words transparent.

So in some sense loss is finding a reason to go on living another minute, hour, day -- otherwise it would be like Jerzy Kosinski suffocating himself nude in the bathtub while holding a plastic grocery bag . . . now that’s real dedication; an intention fulfilled.

121209 13:02 education
© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

Epiphanies come and go, in the sense that each is a rebirth; the death of one epoch and virgin birth of another.

My spool of yarn plays out growing both smaller and larger in consequence. Fond of bread crumbs myself, I am aware, that for most, the crumbs are eaten by predators who contort and control our time, culture and history.

Healing is sold in terms of magic bullets -- one time solutions. And pain is an overwhelming issue, or master, that impels us to move from now to somewhere else; a new perception?

Self knowledge is for me something that I fear losing; becoming apostate to my self. Impossible now and I wonder why? Faith and fearless confidence is my conscious choice.

Wander, wonder, curiosity are apt descriptions of my consciousness. The season of Advent is darkness for me, once confessed and shared with other adults, randomly, I am surprised that many share my feelings of impending doom. December, it seems, is the month of death and suicide. Survival of which implies another year of life. Such knowledge lends little tolerance given my experiences. Of course it helps to write this out yet in doing so I am aware that for others, significant to me, no, more beloved; I am a terror to their mood of conviviality. So I burrow into the season in an attempt to understand and prevail. The effort is not to own but wrestle my life into some form of meaning, organic and whole.

It was once an ideal to suffer with a mate. Yet never able was I to trust that they would not betray me, or my sense of self, as something other and unwanted. Astonished that I still live and live well a life alone since I can turn off the noise of commerce selling me alternative feelings. Small wonder some go berserk running amok killing anything within view, attempting, or so I sense, to establish a normative truth for themselves. (Laughter!)

Writing is obviously less lethal and rewarding in the sense that it gives me something to do instead of playing  with myself seeking intimacy. I profoundly miss having the hospice staff ask how was my Christmas; then telling them, “Well it’s over, isn't it?”

Intimate with death I discover reasons to go on living and prize the experience.

121208 12:44

Naked, alone, in darkness, face down upon the glacier of indifference this world become; life sold as commodities, in the pit of covetous selfishness; burned alive, not frozen, before the Judge. I ask that I be given the courage to forgive what has become of our lives and the ability to forgive my anger.

Black Friday, aptly named, thirty six years ago, I stood handing my son Randy an early Christmas gift; knowing he would not live until the day. He asked why? I was speechless; in reply he said; “Oh.” We left the milling throng of consumers behind to finish the six year long journey into the night: 7pm December 10th when he drown in his own blood a victim; of Leukemia begun when he was four.

Ten years old. He was and remains, the best of what I wanted of life. Destroyed by doctors and nurses who, before his birth, knew nothing of the cumulative effect of radiation via x ray in his mothers womb.

During the intervening time, until recently, realizing the cause, I presumed it was I, not the doctors who killed him. The only reason I did not run amok was that it is not my nature but the thought remains lending empathy to those who do.

 - Noam Chomsky
"It is easy to be carried away by the sheer horror of what the daily press reveals and to lose sight of the fact that this is merely the brutal exterior of a deeper crime, of commitment to a social order that guarantees endless suffering and humiliation and denial of elementary human rights.”

"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."

Having many questions is my only value to myself. The answers I have discovered are my only wealth; mine exclusively.

Life, short or long, is a death sentence; sell it dearly. I wish for you to be precious to yourself. Not as defined by those who purport to lead but by your own definitions moderated by doing no harm.

Be well.

121209 10:44

Parts of me remain mired in grief regarding the deaths of my children. Manifest at times and defined as sadness, anger and, at worst, emphatic rage. Indiscriminate--against everything indifferent to experience, truth and individual freedom to feel, think and be as we, separately, need to be or become for the love of life itself. By sincere honesty I confess that God is included yet moderated in time by the realization that God asks, or seems to ask, that we do for others what God refuses to do in ordinary time. The apogee being imbalance between indifference and love demonstrated by selfishness or generosity. Simply stated: those who take and those who give. Henry Ford’s; “Don’t find fault, find a solution.”

It is easy to throw stones; finding fault. A cheap intellectual exercise without consciousness of why. Avoiding or our responsible effort to understand our perception and it’s source and nature. Fraught with addiction to status quo. Such wisdom, as I might aspire to, has been gleaned from monumental failures. As demonstrated by my foolish attacks; irking the ire of those who would slay me as easily as they do and have done with most, if not all, who provide an inconvenience to them.

In person I am neutral, balanced, at time humorous, possibly glib; yet sincere in my concern for the difficulties of all I meet. If appropriate, or possible, I attempt to lend a hand, or a saving/salvific word. A touch upon what I perceive to be the brokenness to retard the headlong rush to self destruction or the indiscriminate mayhem towards anyone or thing handy in the moment of rage.

If you know yourself it is possible to ride the dragon more often than be eaten by it.

- Horace
"He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses."

"Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant."


"Think to yourself that every day is your last; the hour to which you do not look forward will come as a welcome surprise."

121208 04:03 self-determination
© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

Burlesque of Governance

Tho i make jest, the burlesque of governance, it is a deadly business bankrupting the world’s economy with self-congratulatory rewards for doing so. I would rather call them murders than thieves; but they are in fact both and unworthy the mouse droppings it would cost to obscure their ashes in death.

Everything I might say regarding what is good, fine and beyond, moth and rust, has been said before; better and by far wiser than I can aspire to be. Immortality is not an issue of acclaim, celebrity or guaranteed afterlife. Yet it is true and exists in all life; nothing is lost in infinity save that which is prostituted for material gain in the present.

Why do I write and about what? It is for those I have known; and now know well in poverty; of the wealth of living fearlessly in a time of chaos. The abortion of all moral and ethical values.

True, many have passed beyond my reach in death, yet are remembered and best reflected in/to not those about to die or their bereaved. But. Perhaps better in the avoidance of reality: our time, culture and institutional exploitation. The a fore named fleas who feast upon we the dog populous and the host upon which mutually ride.

This format is strictly a personal journal of all candor and transparency. Foolish? Perhaps yet in fact life and keeping a journal is not the goal; the journey is. Process. What we see is not what we get. We are not our bodies or minds but something far grander than one can imagine alone. Love and the discovery of love, real, actual, is a task for all life self-defined. Our time colludes to obscure reality from us by entertainment for profit in the process perverting self-knowledge while milking us as if we were factory animal farm ciphers.

121205 07:50

I write now with a significantly different intention; no longer frantic with inspiration, but aware the after effect. That small drop of water on the surface of still pond ripples beyond the shores containing it.

Ask and you will receive from a source unimaginable outside all the orthodoxy of history. In wondering “why” and “what for” I have come to a perception that is not exclusively mine from a source beyond understanding. God? Lover! Both. Names imply having what cannot be had or had by.

With extreme prejudice I was accused of incest with my sister, who I now believe had, at age six, no idea of what was going on. Nor did I at that point, 12 years old, but now many decades latter it becomes clear the contortions imposed in what I now consider castration. For which I am grateful since it informs my motives to write now for others who are similarly decapitated by the authority of parent, tribe, nation.

No.

More nearly burned alive at the stake of conservancy.

Such an unjust death is inevitable yet when seen in context it is less traumatic. To be touched by this energy, the power, wisdom is impossible for me to describe: what informs me that I must act instead of be a victim. And at that lends me no sense of what happens in transition from “life” to “death” or the afterwards. If I have any genius, whatever that means, it is the will to accept the unknowing, or the unknown speaking to all life above the din.

Loving, comedic, compassionate and empathetic . . . why do I weep? It was clearly stated by Paul once called Saul: Corinthians 1:13. To gaze into the dark glass and see what sees me looking is astonishing. Nothing changes except perception.

I am utterly different from day to day, yet I seem, to others, the same. Without intercourse with the real world around me I would otherwise remain oblivious to the unfolding of a consciousness in time; an arbitrary construct.

What is real love is immaterial; leaving no monument or trace in context of receiving but giving. Confused from birth until now I recognize the healing as a process begun from then and ongoing. The gem of consciousness is organic, gestating with new facets; unfolding mindfulness. A Buddhist term for self healing which, I sense, can only be inseminated by suffering. Given birth through becoming nothing--no thing--definable. Kindness by way of a simile, recognition, merger with reality.

121206 23:17

It is true of me that I live to work; versus work to live. This realization is after a lifetime of prostituting myself to other ideals and/or persons idealized. This is the oddest Advent Season of my memory, stunning in the realization that I love and am loved by someone uncertain of seeing again in this or any other lifetime imaginable. In this sincere knowledge it follows that were I as brutally honest with you as I am with myself, I’d tell you that birth is a sacrificial event. We all die and thus, as with myself, to you I’d say every moment it precious for in the next minute we die. At the same time I would advise all to educate yourselves as if you will never die.

When Jesus answered Nicodemus with “born again” it forms my sense of actual virgin birth, death, resurrection and/or reincarnation. In a sense to live light years in a moment.

Yet in fact I am not exclusively; Christian at least insofar as I am able to discern by others who proclaim or profess being so. Instead I consider myself a citizen of all creation; conscious of at all times the number of AIDS orphans and the Tibetan Buddhist burning themselves alive in protest. When I express my gratitude for the meal, silently to myself, I remember those residing under Interstate bridges. Knowing them of greater dignity than any other I can think of.

For an overweight lower middle-class white boy from Greenwich Connecticut; this astonishes me. Looking back at my high school years, remembering a trip to Greenwich Village with one of my two favorite art teachers, being told it would take me a lifetime to get over being middle-class I now realize it was a self-fulfilling prophesy. As indicated by Twain, Einstein and several others: it is not so much what we have learned but what we must unlearn to find the truth of our individual self; our greatest creation.

My son died on December 10th, a date I memorialize; remembering that my maternal grandfather also died that date, eleven days before winter solstice. M’s birthday is the next longest day: the 22nd. Only one astonishing facet of she who saved me from ending my life.

Love, for, or from me, never tells another who they are. Possibly incomprehensible to them and thus a burden instead of a gift. My only exception being to remind them that they can be fearlessly precious to themselves.

Be well. Be the wealth you are for others.

121204 0844 burlesque

© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

Shameless to admit; in both good and bad times, I have set the outermost limits: seeing mankind as vermin and divine; both. To choice between the two polarities is our greatest, at least for me -- for now -- the best expression of free will communicable.

A little of Annie Dillard, a lot of Franz Kafka and a smattering of manifold authors throughout time helps a great deal. Their conjecture defining the parameters of consciousness and conscience. Of course, it is impossible to leave out the wisdom books. To which I add all and not exclusively The Bible.

121201 02:45 Swiftly submerging into nadir of life, the longest night, I do add: to me the world is a dog and upon it ride, for free, fleas who rule by theft. That, in the main, is the body. The tail however is wagged by lunatic zealots or fanatics; fundamentalist who in large measure treasure the past over the present.

Happily bereft of anything other than a companion cat; I am able to no longer need television to hold my private thoughts immune from housemates accusations that I am insane. It follows that upon entering, thrice weekly, the men’s locker room, I witness the excretory functions of celebrity “tits and ass” plus a few Chiclets toothed men in Armani suits being flatulent through the obverse orifice. The burlesque is enhanced by a braying politician.

Molested from infancy until recently; so near death. In a sense learning to traverse life as if in a dark room covered in marbles; chaos and chance being my middle name actually. I find myself no longer resentful of those who stole my inheritance and now promise to censure the World Wide Web.

Odd, the education I’ve received, paid to witness the supercilious pretending importance. More bizarre; is the ability to bless my executioners knowing their divinity indifferent to them. To suffer the fools I have.

- Demosthenes

“A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.”

“It is not possible to found a lasting power upon injustice, perjury, and treachery.

“What we wish, that we readily believe.”

121130 05:12 The absence of fear

© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved