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

Rogue

Long have I wondered how and why I should be other than I am as told: White, Middle-Class, Male, American. A gift from St. Patty this morn; though I am Orange and by root going back to the Old Sod, that lovely green isle, Newton-Stewart, not distant from The Troubles in Belfast. But this branch of Spratts, dying with me, left there in 1812. . . .Where, come to think of it, God is in the land and sea, sky and heavens; not in the definitions between who wears the Green, or not, this day.

Nevertheless I owe much to The Holy Roman Catholic Church teaching me to be myself. And become that odd thing born of abrasion, so admired in other Catholics, I have known, loved and admired throughout my life, from beginning to end, so I’ll say of myself I’m catholic = universal, small ‘c’.

Well as that may be I was impelled to write this moment by St. Patrick’s confession and intentions; lovely, loving and only good will he had and so much a part of me now for all life not those who claim to be Christian or Catholic. Whatever that means to them I know what it means to me.

To achieve escape velocity from what I was. I had to lose most all things I loved. Mendicant, beggared, unwanted and seemingly, not despised, but abandoned by accidental birth.

Life with my parents taught me to survive, no mean accomplishment, especially in these times or any and all time. Not to mention the time before time was measured by the likes of us and what will silently remain, no evidence we ever existed: the lot of us. 

Yet now all things taste, feel, touch, smell and are heard differently. Better. And I have a model of perfection in Jesus: equally balanced between male/female, thought, feeling intuition and sense. Add, in my poverty, I am humiliatingly arrogant in that I am wealthy beyond any means, measures or standards I am able to find to gainsay that. At least insofar as I am willing to accept, reverence or submit to.

What remains, that which I would convey, communicate or publish, is a simple sense that dad’s funeral shroud tightly woven about my perceptions wasn’t his in the first place. But a ‘gift’ from the materialist who seemed, in his time and mine, to desire that we be enslaved to them. The author’s of the Great Depression, now euphemistically refereed/referred to as the Great Recession. Statistically dissimilar yet experientially similar.

I former terms I’d say of my death, ‘soon enough will I be worm shit,’ at least insofar as this biodegradable body is concerned. Now, even now, and forever more, will I say what I leave behind will be days I would not have wanted to live through. If I weep for my lost children, and I do now healed of my grief, I weep more for the children born and those to follow them in this shrinking opportunity to live free of exploitation by the rich and privileged, High-and-Mighty, those who seek to own everything. Then too their puppets the politicians who in their greed for acclaim, power and a false sense of accomplishment prostitute our future for their paltry gain.

Perhaps we need a plague in Congress and Wall Street?

I advocate no violence towards those who do violence to me. In that I wonder about the potential of injustice serving a greater cause or crime towards a greater end. Even here in the ordinary of my life under the fascist rule of J. L. Gray Management I have learned to be more attentive to spinning about this abode; a broom in my ass, with dusters in both ears, twirling about their property; my life dedicated to its maintenance; a Stepford Betty Crocker in high heels.

So what else is new? Our privacy raped, as with the economy. The future bleak if nonexistent. The earth itself prematurely scorched beyond habitability. 

Same--Same authority gone riot. 

Immoral. Top to bottom, all who presume to lead.

Feed a person, they live for a day. Teach a person fish, and they will live for a lifetime. But what if they, the teachers, take away the sea? Befoul the sky, make of life: slavery?

“No man is free who is not master of himself.” - Epictetus

Oh Epictetus, where are you now we need you so? The difference between my father’s generation and mine/myself is that I listen to that quiet, small voice, speaking in my sleep and waking; annotated by the likes of Epictetus, to name only one of a growing, hourly, list of those who sought truth not political fame. . . .The cynics who know the price of everything but the value of nothing. (Paraphrase of - Oscar Wilde)

I am who, what, where and as I am; free of chains and the stripes turned to scars, thanks to the follies of others and my own. But, still I ask; what of the children to come and those who remain homeless, hopeless. . . .Taught vocations for which there is none for them to occupy. Never taught to think for themselves. Conformist to a system that is no longer in decay but dead. 

“If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.” 

- Epictetus

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” 

- Mahatma Gandhi

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” - Anatole France

. . . wisdom and truth are not exclusive to any one definition, or another, of it

130317 01:26 Rogue

© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

miscreants

Miscreants beggared me, voiding (in) my cupped hands; once adequately filled sufficiently for sustenance. Not that I object. But for others, who’s lives ended prematurely for want of medical attention, or suicide, etc. . . especially those homeless now. I belabor the issue.

And even now of my father, years afterward, I would say; “Thank You!” Even though I suspect he thought - No! I know - he presumed me insane. And for whom I suspect his misunderstanding of my avidity; seeking love from someone who knew nothing of it, save a slogan on a brand of toilet paper or lurid novel. . . . the dart of his disdain and dismissal, nominal melioration, with his last breathe given on a borrowed cellular telephone.

Death holds no fear for me, but dying slowly - by attrition, does. A moment ago I called to assess the feasibility of visiting a friend who had so lingered for near a year or more in my attention. Sadly. No longer allowed to visit save at risk of meeting the person responsible for my absence, I hopped around one foot to another too long.

Nothing, and no one, is lost within all the universe; save being for me a page, no, a large swath torn from the cyclorama of my psyche in the ordinary of my life; mourned. Scarred, healed, I struggle on.

My intention, before the news, just received, to share what small sanity I possess, attributable to the kindness of strangers. In her case, became an intimate confidant and friend. What saved me from shredding from sole to hair follicle the one who dismissed me!? A Sufi once spoke of crossing the chasm upon a thread but now sensed, as on thin air. Again, in her case, her last words to me, our fingers intertwined; “Keep the Faith . . . . “ and I will, as I’ve done, but to not one - but The All, the author of all prophets, my apprehension of what they sought.

My point? Kindness is something free and easily given; a word, smile, gesture or the mere; “I see you!” In passing, brief of long. It may be the only kindness, as in my case I’d ever known. Best: a touch.

For now.

Forever.

Riot in words, she collected quotes as well. The blossoms of those who cared to give their best - themselves - remembering there is no love in a clenched fist.

. . . if nothing else, prayer, like kindness, changes the giver of it eternally.

Be well.

PS In the name of greed, America’s current religion, murder is committed daily.

20130316 11:34 miscreants
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

2nd Thought(s)

We mass men, all sentient life, among us there seem a preponderance of people, in America at least, who, in masturbatory self-aggrandizement, now maunder their meaningless thoughts via text or voice on portable devices while driving intoxicated as legends in their own minds. Addicted in conceit. Indifferent to all life otherwise. . . and of those who cannot, pilot grocery carts hazarding the isles of Wally World. Eschewed for employee policies and attempting control of the earth.

Then too, tutti, is commercial broadcast television. A high-colonic, infusing then sucking out everything: self, time, imagination, joy and originality.

No wonder we are factory farmed by greeders fanatic for our material wealth, mental and physical health; tracked and/or infused with spurious, specious, mystery chemicals of unknown consequence - present in all rampage killers; an after-fact regardless of armament.

Better for me to await the crematoria sucking my thumb, fetal, in the corner silent? I seem more often now to leap off the edge of our known universe attempting flight, soaring not plummeting.

My 2nd thought(s) are regarding the previous post ‘bemused’ and what it might mean to greeders whose sole entertainment is the serial abuse of all life for their pleasure and profit. Not ‘evil’ but anti-life, at least the lives of others. Being, at one time or another - subject/object - of all the addictions I can imagine, brief or long, I empathize with those possessed.

Yield?

No!

In the interest of full disclosure, a confession: In recent memory there was a young man expelling sounds musical, as welcome as Fox TV News, which also was polluting the silence of the men’s locker room. I turned to a fellow senior and commented that posterior insertion seemed appropriate.

When you run over me with your vanity, please kill me, do not instead, leave me quadriplegic and unable to remember ever having lived otherwise.

Remember, please, the self defined “MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE” gambled away the world’s economy for which there is no absolution save, insertion of red hot pennies, endless, until expiration or explosion. . . . thus ending their bottomless avarice.

One-by-One

. . . no, Virginia, I am not a nice person; I subscribe and prescribe: “An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.” - Mahatma (Mohandas K.) Gandhi

. . . However imagination affords me a laugh or two. The illustration used without permission but in gratitude, no gratuity, for: http://www.brainpickings.org/

130316 0850 2nd thought(s)
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

bemused

Bemused, at times, remembering, unamused & clinical; this light dimly glowing in the dark of eternity will soon be snuffed out. But the light, soon to come, dawn, will also be gone; itself blown away; consumed; out. Recycled, not here, but beyond the beyond; my current reach - for now.

Awakened the debate that if we be “The Church.” One and each, coupled with all of us together, sans boundaries, then we must of need be ‘god’ - by particle - not whole. The vision has seldom visited me, but well remembered for when it came, never left, but remained asleep, awakened now and again.

The motto of those who clone animals; “Replica not Resurrection.” Reminds me of He who said He would come again! In part or whole? And in what measure or means would time, intervening, have varied Him?

He is my root, from which I have sprung. Yet in all my wandering - wondering - curiosity I find the spirit of inquiry in many, who amongst us all, few, give meaning instead of taking it; freedom not slavery.

Enkindled by whom or what. . . .

Why?

Why not!

Did not the light enkindled, consciousness, come from friend not foe. Neither anthropomorphic nor knowable as such: thing or energy but both; extrinsic and intrinsic?

For which from beginning to end and returned? Recycled!? Be celebrated in life; and the absence of it!

Speaking solely, i can participate and be responsible only for myself, altering nothing but submitting to the inevitable. . .singing for others who betimes listen for truth

“When to the heart of man
 Was it ever less than a treason
 To go with the drift of things,
 To yield with a grace to reason,
 And bow and accept the end
 Of a love or a season?”
—  Robert Frost

130316 06:29 bemused
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved