A writer?

A “writer” or “author” I am not. At least not by intention, or ambition, but simply so because it seemed the direction of integration in the line of my life - what was next.

Prayer beads are sometimes called, at least I think they are, ‘worry beads.’ And when I trace back from here to then I sense, and laugh at myself, for tall the various and sundry reasons of me, the why, what-for, where I am and will be beyond this moment unto death and beyond the beyond.

Metaphorically I should use ‘pearls’  but instead I’ll describe myself, being a pebble, worn smooth and more so from experience. Strung together as neither prayer or worry beads, but a necklace of experience and love for it all . . . including the “going home,” Or as Emily Dickinson said; “ . . . called back”

Upwelling water, dripping from my open eyes, tells more than I can ever say to others about, or of love, what is joy!

Light like words I adore, having for a, now, long long time; yet never knew what to do with them - either or  both. Conceptually they are dissimilar, one being a symbol, the other ephemeral. Yet equally  transient - revelatory and fluid too towards what end or meaning definitive. Nearer death at least consciously so knowing my probabilities I still see myself as a child stomping in mud puddles of light and words. Seeing and hearing the splash feeling the moisture wicking up my pants, arms pumping up in celebration not supplication.

Validation is difficult to find. Add that I have had a victim posture for so long taking silence to be another way of telling me that I was unworthy of hearing, too dull; valueless. So it was the dialogs imagined, but actually monologues, internal, reasoning why I had value so swiftly dismissed by others important to me. Today I discovered a new validation. One that healed a long held sense, mostly of guilt, regret, an unbidden sense of fault, sin, flaw, dysfunction towards the bride of my youth for leaving her:

"I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

. . . there have been others; women I loved . . . and left . . . riddled - NO! - the word shred comes to mind’ as in shredding myself. From whom I sought what was impossible, for they were not my mother: mute, prone to rage, mercurial, immutable, capricious, abandoning me. In time, with endless effort I have come to sense they abandoned themselves, but then that is, seemingly, “normal” given the demands of a woman giving birth to a child dependent upon them thus becoming that new - always new to them - thing: a mother.

And the folly of seeking sexual intimacy a surrogate for her, either/neither, loving themselves by yielding finally to me. Sex is not love, it is something else. A facet, at best, of what is best: friendship, trust, confidence and intimacy . . . to be known and loved nonetheless.

"He who looks on a true friend looks, as it were, upon a kind of image of himself: wherefore friends, though absent, are still present; though in poverty, they are rich; though weak, yet in the enjoyment of health; and, what is still more difficult to assert, though dead, they are alive." - Cicero

. . . I am blessed by serendipity, what C. G. Jung called synchronicity . . . i have faith in that and for which I weep freely in gratitude; what impels my prayers, works and faith, faith and prayer: all is work, for work is my joy.

Think, please, call and response. . .
and be well.

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. ” - Nietzsche

130323 05:47 A writer?
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

dare I say

Dare I say The Author of it All has bestowed upon us more than we can know at one sitting. In the banquet of this we call life. In some sense to do so would be to drink the universe in one gulp!

Innocuous, a tread actually, seems a greater truth than all the wisdom books together end-on-end. But I be a fool to so say since I’ve read only snippets of them. Yet gargantuan in my appetite for the words and worlds of those different in gender, religion and convictions regarding governance from mine.

And of what I write the lesser parts of threads bonding me to generosity; nothing lost but less said. At that compelled more to speak in my own way the random rogue associations caused by experience.

. . . it was a bitter November night, filled with portents of the coming winter, distress compelled me towards he who sat before me in a small pool of yellow light listening to my plea. The audience he gave, the quiet still listening remarkable more than what he finally said that made of me pacific a mill pond unwrinkled. . . . to wait, be silent and wait some more

Sad sorrow and exultant joy, reverence too, began there, or where perhaps merely another thread wrapping the cable of my certainty now . . . not to speak of myself but by way of illustration, a literary device, not egoic. (laughter!) could it be that time and galaxies wrap us like a golf ball unraveled rocketing towards another place?

After all, upon awakening I remembered the sun works 24/7/365 and that I am not strange, at least to myself, eccentric to others, to anoint the day when I do sans light save that which explodes from within.

And then, then remembering the vision of myself at the oar, one of many, moving the lot of us forward, centimeter by centimeter, becalmed upon and endless immobile eternity awaiting the coming dove with olive branch; Peace Eternal.

It seems The Author speaks to each of us in various ways and diverse tongues. Astonished. We then take it as revealed truth and kill one another to prove a truth actually common to one and all.

All is hallowed, this ground of our being now, yet owned by some and contested by others. Add. I remember he and wife who sailed the Golden Rule into the area around the Bikini Atoll in protest.

“I shall be like that tree,—I shall die at the top.” - Jonathan Swift
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ a way station on the course of my day begun at whenever I awaken, seemed to explain my urgency to speak before I drool, my brains vacated by the fools who attempt to own/control everything. I've seen ‘the beast!’ not evil so much as vacant and a cynic incorporated.

Closing thoughts before retiring for the rest period: He who I called my son, came through me not for me (paraphrase of Khalil Gibran) and was for himself what he need to be or become in life or death. The same is equally true of my daughter both of them, one dead the other AWOL. The time of my generation is passing away -- Good riddance?! -- Sadly we've left you little, growing less daily, to live for, or by. . . . That is a material view, metaphysically we've the entire universe ahead. The common threads discovered lead to joy for all equally.

04:12

Several collisions coincident: Having finished A Canticle for Leibowitz (in places lucid lyrical transcendent - to me salvific) I viewed shortly thereafter PBS broadcasts on the largest explosions made by man. And thus integrated the woe I anticipate from the mindless collection of data about us individually and consequent applications in the Police State, our current status, factory famed slaves for the greedy. For whom we seem a herd of lemmings to be sacrificed wholesale. The majority of what passes for communication being propaganda supporting nothing but failed ideals.

. . . M seems little inclined to judge the good or ill of me, having set me free from bondage to my past self-enslavement to others; as victim or prey for predators. As I would do for all life, if I could but the fact is that we heal ourselves, or can, should only we discover we are worth more than all the money in the universe; no one of us greater than another.

“Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, and in their pleasure takes joy, even as though it were his own.” - Johann von Goethe

. . . if you do not own your life, others will, and then consume you as they have materially. We are a world apposed to cannibalism, yet they are our masters. . . .who pretend to be otherwise. Supping on your brains and soul.

(Caption for illustration:
To see The All in a raindrop is a gift seldom bestowed. Grander, by far, less obvious divide called The Grand Canyon. Between Creation/Creator/Created)

130322 02:55 dare I say
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

envisioned

Of few, so few it, would be foolish to call them, the company of several, I am wealthy by the sincere joyous pleasure I take in our being face-to-face.

Or via other modes of communication. And best, thoughts of them from memory. Wherein I am better able to assess, laud and celebrate the gifts and graces of their ever being at all, a friend and beloved of me.

Imperfect.
I have many flaws.
Amongst which is the penchant to listen and allow the eclipse of myself;
naked of desire for anything other than their well being.

Of the several, nay, many I’ve left behind and will so do again in death, I have left in knowledge I was no longer needed as I am to myself. Neither a convenience, utility or character, two dimensional, a prop in their play.

Service? Yes?
But theft of my time and attention. No!
This is possible, feasible, and freely given; attributable to light years traveled alone, not lonely, time recognized as my true joy.

"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people." - George Bernard Shaw

I sense now, in no small measure, why those greatest amongst us have forgiven their executioners. If for no other reason than defining their truth and choice exclusive to the injustice apparent in their departure.

Disquiet, temporary, has nettled me since discovery (within the past 24 hours) of myself as a cypher in the police state we inhabit. My self an unwitting slave wrapped in chains invisible.

Solitary confinement, in life or death, holds no fear for me since, in reality, and by experience, I am never actually alone. Nor is anyone save those who refuse to listen to themselves.

130321 07:38

envisaged / inclined / invoking / her giggle / sigh / laugher / dissolving / licking / nipples / enraptured

. . . 15:26

The issues seems simple; we are governed by lilliputian subhuman minds, morally and ethically challenged. Whose incomprehension, regarding compassion and empathy, is indicative of why I discern them as unworthy of debate. Not the face of evil but of what is a subspecies of mankind. Invoking thoughts of the Tibetan Buddhist who immolate themselves instead of kneeling before the politicians of China. For whom forgiveness is folly since the word and deed has virtually no meaning. In America, overwhelming the political process are multi-national greeder/banksters who apparently have forgotten that economies are mediums of exchange, barter, not to be held and admired as an object of lust/addiction.

130320 1958 envisioned
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

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