preemptive

I care little for the time I inhabit being exhausted with the mercantile mind of lawyers and business people. But then, of course, I speak from experience. Could it be exhaustion with myself?

I think not since I am somewhere between worm and butterfly in the chrysalis stage so to speak. And such luster or glimmer, I may -- or may not have, is attributable to the suffering of not merely myself but all life so treated at the hands of those who take versus those who give.

All good and ‘proper.’ ‘Legal’ so to say or as established by the Plutocracy as “ALL GOOD AND NORMAL” Even religion resides in the shameful shadow of greed, power absolute: abusing all that differ.

Curiously science and religion are melded in me via the handbook of life; and here I speak not merely of The Bible but all wisdom books. Add to which the voices of all who cared enough to risk censure and trial by standards inimical to free thought. Behavior and choice: cookie cutter ‘normal.’

To write is nothing but a con to sell you to yourself; at least it is for me: now.

Gideon fleecing God in order to discern/divine what he should do. Has in our time become The Great Con. Shearing all people of their human rights. Well what the hell, in for a penny may as well be a pound. Include all the animals, the sea, the air, the water and food we eat.

Spaceship Earth, our home and nest, to which we all are emigrant stewards of, is beyond the point of no return; what it was before we polluted it. Water, essential to life, is more valuable than all the gold in the world. All that is, is all that was, and all that will ever be.

130130 08:49 preemptive
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

We who are, or were, possibly all who have cameras can be photojournalist. In the sense we are engaged in recording truth as it occurs; or can be. Recording witnesses to our time; history in the making: the what occurred or is happening.

I once thought myself ‘blind’ being without camera on or off ‘duty.’

And too well remember being assigned to illustrate an article for The New York Times. In Chicago, the murder rate was down from average and I was instructed to photograph two Homicide Detectives.

The general theory being that an illustrated article received greater attention/readership than one that was not.

I went to the appointed time and place laboring to make an revelatory image of two middle aged men in cheap suits. First in their office, then outside in the parking lot with an ocean of Black & Whites though they drove unmarked police vehicles.

They were conscious of my frustration and suggested that I go to the City Morgue. The place was astonishing: bodies draped partially in dark green plastic garbage bags, clothed in what they were wearing at the time of death, replete with toe tags. Stacked from floor to ceiling upon green steel metal shelves . . . imagine a warehouse with a ceiling some thirty to forty feet in height. Crowded with nearly one hundred corpses.

This was at a time before we had digital photography, so I shipped the film directly to New York. At 03:00 or thereabouts I received a telephone call from the picture editor distraught with having seen my “take.”  . . . . “why oh why!?@!?”

At length she seemed to have said what she needed to say. I asked if she was satisfied with the diatribe, not in those terms per se. “Yes.” I replied defining to her that my job was to collect and hers was to edit. Deciding upon that image most appropriate to her intention. Mine was not to edit out all possible choices offensive to me.

This collective monologue was based upon a conversation with an Associated Press photographer who confessed authorship of an image I found objectionable to me personally.

Consciousness is the string upon which we form our necklace of experience; whether pearls or smooth worn river stones. I am many things but not a voyeur; having witnessed the before, during and afterward of birth, life and death. This history began at an early age and is the engine of my curiosity: knowing the what and wondering about the why.

I envy no one and fear nothing, remaining sincerely grateful for it all.

Be well and be aware. Censor nothing; especially yourself.

in reply to: http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2013/01/28/169536213/what-it-feels-like-to-be-photographed-in-a-moment-of-grief add an afterthought: Many years later incorporating the deaths of both my children: I sense nothing is lost in or to God. Thinking now that we all are actors in life; the play of which is our collective prayer for love and truth to be real. . . .Some kneel and others record.

Photo Caption and Credit:
Aline Marie prays outside St. Rose of Lima church in Newtown, Conn., on the day of the school shooting. She says being photographed made her feel "like a zoo animal." The photographer says he tried hard to respect her privacy and grief.
Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images (without permission)

130130 03:57 photojournalism as witness
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

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