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

Sought and found. A kindred soul to be a lover found, finding multiple souls eclectic. Finding mine. Yet to have and have not a single soul save mine own to inhabit. Penetrating all, discovered, the many as stars known. And to know in time the height, width, breadth and depth of all the heavens.

. . . unique, specific, explicit

Epoch or apocryphal.

I have never been fully confident or convicted of what purpose I serve or aspire to. And refuse to disown all the persona's I have been for each lends it’s own tincture to now. A point of view and definition to what I sense is beyond the seen in life or death.

I do, however, know there is an intelligence above and beyond anything detailed in those who I love, present or long dead and absent, written; sung, painted, acted or danced. A thread? No. Not an umbilical cord either. How to day it? It is, in a sense, a musical hum; infinity of course but has energy, personality and a will that we own ourselves . . . fully inhabit our capacities . . . in some sense to grow organically evolving into good for others who’s fears and terrors are so similar to mine once now long ago.

At the moment, this day unique, I sense myself inadequate the task I sense and long to inhabit having visited and revisited the boundaries often. Attempting to grown or drag the body mind and soul into fill the void.

Grief, from beginning to end, reconciled and balanced now. Still inhabits and drives me to comfort others who, by violence or attrition, are blown from safe harbor into the raging sea of chaos.

To communicate, make possible this experience, I will fail, again and again, being imperfect; the ideals and lover who loves me manifest in real and ordinary time. Free Will is indicative of neither having or not having that which leads live through it’s cycles of birth, existence and death. But, at that, it is -- this magnificence -- and invitation to create and thus become part of the evolving chorus of those who say yes to the invitation.

I still laugh at my dyslexic conclusion, the first hearing/reading: "You can hear the sound of two hands when they clap together," said Mokurai. "Now show me the sound of one hand." . . . it then meant no applause . . . now it is, in absolute silence, the laughter, love, tears and joy I hear always.

To which I, betimes, am deaf, dumb and blind. . . .being similar to a winning lottery ticket crumpled and swept as litter along with the monsoon flood flushing the cutters of life into the sewer of oblivion .

. . . 11:32

To the Golden Rule, or as Confucius would have or call it, “Silver,” I would add, not for me alone but all life; “Ask and you will receive.” Could it be only available to one whose life is bereft and in endless suffering; all material lost near unto death? Or. At least unwilling to take another breathe.

Why me? I seldom sense worthiness; being a cracked clay cup, no chalice, and yet at times in flood -- a tsunami of love -- unexpressed would drown me and dissolve the vessel; no dust remaining. . . . at least for now while my heart still beats, it is enough to attempt healing another’s grief:

"Home they brought her warrior dead."
"I hold it true, whatever befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within."
"Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers."
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

121230 05:55 error
http://www.newdimensions.org/difficulties-give-rise-to-something-good-with-patricia-sun-2/
© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

who & what & why

Old to most, a baby considered by a few, remaining more like road kill than youth; I am what I am and that is enough. Suffice to say that with each turning day my sense of self becomes less important given all that I see in the diminishing of me from such a great distance away beginnings now near ending.

Easily swayed by those I allow in the virginity of my soul/self/mindfulness, I remember better the words of a few than the many. And possibly Vladimir Nabokov’s thesis that few consider the before while anguished over the after of life. From where to whence with small wonder of why or how.

Packed rats is what we’ve become, the many of us, vastly, by at least a third over capacity on earth. Enslaved by those whose competition to be the epitome of fame, fortune and success holds us beneath the surface of the cesspool they’ve made of life. 

Discerned long ago in the 60’s I call it as stated; but a clinical term; “Population Stress Syndrome,” better explains the phenomenon of random violence to me. Of evil I could speak endlessly having known my own maunders towards retaliation of which it seems now inevitable given the goiter of greed sucking all the children, homes and future into it’s maw. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Sympathy states ‘I see,’ while empathy experiences your pain . . . yet cannot suffer it. In some small sense this is a prayer for all the women abused for being such. And for us, the we, the family of mankind; helpless to forestall or prevent or mend the consequence. 

For myself I would easily choose to leave and make room for the succeeding generations yet note with sincere sadness the number of educated, well endowed and intended, who refuse not only to marry, nor to mate or procreate. It amuses me to ponder my own origins and the length of time it has taken me to get over being white, middle-class, from Greenwich, Connecticut and enter a place of peace loving one and all the prey and predator.

Am I true patriot of the cosmos? I wonder. For I have no passport or identifying tattoos to tell me where or why or how I become such. 

. . . continued 21:56
At times I simply wander away, attending tasks or distracted. And in time sense I should curl into a fetal ball betwixt floor and corner sucking my thumb. Seeing myself as simpleton verses simplistic . . . seeking a vantage point, an overview, detached from the plague of greed America has become.

121229 14:04 who & what & why
© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved