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