authority

Should I now genuflect, kowtow, bow, curtsy, kneel or merely grovel at your feet kissing them?

Authority, by experience, superficially benign while seeking to eat my lunch; then something far worse biting my heart and extinguishing my life. Authority, in general, seems intent upon survival at any cost regardless Darwin’s suppositions mangled to individual survival; not the body politic; the species or the Earth for that matter.

Yo-yoing between bed and throne, having forgotten to take my medication causing the trips, many, and loathe to return the dreams that continue to haunt my sleep. Regarding not the obvious concern for those about to die but their stewards--the Business of Death. The aftermath of leaving hospice continues to query my consciousness; in that I had presumed to die there standing up. And happily so since I love people. In specific, not the herd.

It then seemed best to sacrifice myself than to continue in what had become apparent: my inconvenience to the administrators. A moment of anxiety until I thought perhaps it was time to move on. Having had a recent near death experience I know the value of such time as remains to be alive. And having accommodated the random aspects of life in our time I was less inclined to abide the sure snark of their presence, never benign.

At that, I should have paid them for the experience; both the coming and going. It is possible to grow your soul in isolation but not a personality capable of swimming the sea of chaos . . . much less . . . thinking of Jesus: striding the waves becalming them. How many of my heroes died before their time being assassinated and forgiving their assassins! I too forgive they who dismissed me arising to another life. One once thought impossible in this individual much less while traversing the closing days of it, near or far.

. . . 07:34  If I spend the treasure chest of my love unto the last dregs, it is renewed with dividends. Yet I do protest and suggest for others that what is spent upon infertile ground is a waste.

But then what do I do with my dreams? How to respond? Serendipitously I hope! From birth until now I have labored to turn the slings and arrows of vicissitude into cupid’s messages not intended to annihilate me. A pincushion with pins scattered like grapeshot I do not twitch and writhe upon the stake planting me in place. In most previous cases I’ve waited patiently until the moment, not mood, seemed opportune to scamper silently away to the residence of my solitude and solace of my soul.

However in some instances my leave taking has been grotesque and lingers as does the leaving of hospice. Add, the awareness of my love for people manifest there is no longer possible beyond random kindness to those whose lives and deaths intersect with mine in the ordinary of my life.

Would it have been, in other circumstances, best to buss her posterior in obeisance? I think not; since there are many things worse than death.

“Everything keeps its best nature only by being put to its best use.” - Phillips Brooks

She who was unable to feed herself who’s birthday was to be on (Saint) Valentine’s Day had passed and there I stood dying myself the waste hurled upon me by a mercenary mind. Actually I’d been fed the gall several times before and come to shutter the sight of her--not the one past but the one present who--sought to void upon me all her anger.

To close: I am reminded, this long afterwards, I am subject to wondrous sychronicities in words and events at other times and places. So my protest falls mute in awe that something better may be the offing. And therefore regard the event as another excursion. Then too I must remind myself that even the best I’ve ever heard of, or known, have bad days. Yet after several there by the same author I quit.

. . . 23:12 perhaps I misspeak framing what is essential: is any institution about the truth or only true to itself. i.e. religion is about God but not God. . . .add: my daughter died in a similar institution alone in an iron crib packed one hundred to a warehouse room. I doubt that I will ever expunge my guilt for that choice. My experience is the motivation for my anger with authority. Any why will find a how . . . if I cannot tend to the dying I can tend to the living who have no sense of life’s value.

130210 03:06 authority
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

root of joy

Roots of Heaven reside within all life should it pray for realization day & night. Not by ritual or rote but by ordinary life itself. And those we call family is all life.

“You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.“ - Epictetus

I scarcely know myself as I was or will become. Never totally a lump but nearly more so than ever before. Since the peace I know is certain and eternal--extending before and after this corpse I inhabit.

Sensing now the way between Heaven and Earth is fraught with what we must do for ourselves leaving the Author of Life to other greater matters.

For myself I wonder wandering through the many suggestions of M. Actually few in number but having great impact. First was hospice service and when retired from that she suggests now that I write a ‘book.’ But my sense is that in my wildest daydreams I do imagine something fictional, a sugar coated pill as anodyne, take one and call me if the distress continues, an aspirin for our life's and times. Episodic seems more representative of my way; the journey that brings me to today: eternal in a moment continuity. Poetry seems better for those moments of ecstasy; few since The Massacre at Newtown.

To speak of the art or craft: writing now seems not the effort to record so much as the effort to see what is, as it is, and not as I would wish to see it. Else the ideal would fall flat as some sort of conceit and aggregation of ambition. Factually I am happy with these maundering I do from day to the day as enough. Save in the sense I continue to grieve for the parents and those who like me, as I was, still wander blindly through life. Living not but merely subsistence existence.

Oddly?! My eye wandering across the multitasked window before me fell upon: “God has many names, though He is only one Being.” - Aristotle . . . and I would speak of that: the many names and ways we are inspired to live, long or short, in these closing times of love as we knew it. . . .in ecstasy or agony I would know and celebrate it all now.

Neither noun, love nor God, but verbs as living and giving never epitaph or graven. As nature ever renewing evolving into what is to become. Never remedial. . . .what do I inflict or infer? The children murdered are fine but their parents and the society which allowed the crime is challenged. I seek the motive not the method seeing prayerfully those who forgave their assassins in the act not by ritual but reality. In some sense, deeply, we’ve slain the earth.

“Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.” - William James

. . . I integrate what I find: an interplay between what I write and discover . . . coincident? No. Serendipity or Synchronicity. I’ve yet to discover a single ark, covanential or floating zoo, within which to place exclusively/discretely all my trust. No single religion or governance worthy exclusively for all my thoughts. All institutions, like myself, have a lifespan; a beginning, middle and end.

I once feared being apostate to myself; failing all ideals briefly or however long held. But now I have no concerns for myself since I sense this biodegradable self-motivated and educated thing rides upon the winds before and after all that is. No one special or unique since what I advocate is within all life and best defined by one word: love. Add kindness and life as love is possible.

130207 05:39 roots of heaven
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

betwixt

Between polarities of dream and awakening, perilous lay, the arch of thoughts resolved. Sometimes forgotten between habit and morning ritual; then: times amplified and unavoidable.

If I find peace in my ignorance is not to say I do not battle it but that there is a source of instruction attributable to submitting to the flow life wearing away: aggression, assertion and acceptance of what is. Hesitant to name God since the verb means so many different things and for the most part idolatry.

Too well do I know my dance of avoidance to not tell it in other ways non-fictional. Today’s fiction becomes a fact fixed and immutable until it is worn away by experience. The deeper I rend my self/soul the more I fear, unlike most, I never was imprinted with trust. Fearlessly tearing farther I know myself better and trust that.

In person I cannot console so much as be there for one who queries. Knowing this better by the agency of those whose solace I sought in times past -- continuing daily by the course of my study to find both wisdom and knowledge with greatest emphasis on the former.

Considering the above I wonder is it wisdom by attrition? Or merely acknowledgment of my way or path traveled to what end? I would rather be myself than any other or ideal. Since my sense and conclusion is that this is what all whose words I read or have heard is what they sought and found. Their acclaim, celebrity or success does not fit me for I would be smothered in their robes; a flea in eternity.

Then factually I do adore: the scientist and saint of any gender, creed or race. And sense our extinction is inconsequential for the force/energy which begot us. Feeling strung upon an invisible string; beginning before and lasting after all that we know will vanish. What urgency can I feel knowing that?

130203 08:52 betwixt

The faults I find in myself are sought to remedy them. Not by palliative but at worst to accommodate, contain and restrain them. I celebrate both rage and ecstasy; the height, width, breadth and depth of all that I know and experience. Yet I find no blame for it is ill to contain rage for long smothering my middle way. Or the life I do live in reality; the ordinary of my life.

What is extraordinary is unbidden by any conscious effort the remedy for what has been the nadir of my life: being unwanted, unworthy of attention, a fool, an idiot. All the facts of life, the achievements, awards and celebrity have no lasting value in what I sought. And when people I know well or poorly speak of “God” I know nothing of what they sense beyond a brand name.

Yet if I can leave nothing of value, having eaten, excreted and died -- no curse but blessing in that -- I do witness God as as my savior, lover and friend. Best teacher I have ever known. Lead to seek and see what is ineffable. Bold to say I never was psychologically imprinted with anything but the why and what found in these previous days . . . a child’s prayer: “please be real!” Answered in uncommon ways. Anyone of which could be remarked monumentally but are not save in the history of my words annotating the process of from whence to where and beyond.

A runaway, not from, but to this -- loyalty inexpressible save by behavior and choice. A loose canon upon the decks of slave ships.

. . . 130104 05:42

Gyring thoughts hurl me aloft, strung together as pedals of roses in bloom--words--compassion incandescent with passion; suck me into oblivion the river of time behind and before me.

At lunch yesterday, M, said; “Why not write a book’ . . . ? (Though) Who me? But then in recognition of the two or so thousand pages those kept and lost--why not? I have!

But then previously I’d perceived books as accomplished things: fixed and immutable and what I write writes me across the void; darkness, not a star in sight.

I am not sad to so late discover the love of words at my hand and mind since I suspect most of us: this generation and those to follow, if they will, or do, suffer, in the majority, being disaffected and unwanted: the many of us who are an increase degrading the lives of one another by our number.

The race, this species, is beyond the point of no return; privacy shorn and no one individual unique as those I read remaining save the sense we are chattels to the rich who factory farm us injecting strange and exotic synthesized chemicals for cosmetic and commercial--mercantile--purposes: cupidity/calumny/usury.

Of fiction I can only say, by experience, they are the vestibule of intimacy. Hinting at what waits within yourself; the greatest experience one can know, if sought, inferior only to the souce of all being: The All.

My prayer for all life is this: imitate no one except yourself as being the best you can be for now and eternity.

. . . 130205 12:21
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(psychology)
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

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