Right now I feel like getting drunk. My youngest brother just stopped by for a visit. He had a present for me. A few months ago his first wife died from complications due to diabetes. Her sister came from England to settle her affairs. In her house she found some of my earliest poems that I thought I had destroyed. I have a habit of burning things so I can move on. She sent the poems to my brother and he brought them to me.
I just got through reading through them. It's not like I forgot them over the years so much as I had put them behind me to move on to wot was sot before me in the present. Reading these poems moved me very deeply. They made me realize that a lot of what I think now was formed way back then, and that my awareness of what is real to me has deep roots.
When my brother handed me the stack of poems I glanced over them quickly, then lay them aside to give attendance to his presence. We chatted about this and that for a while, and then he reached over and shuffled through the poems and then laid them back down again. I didn't realize why he had done this. He had already told me that he had made copies for himself because he knows of my penchant for burning things like this.
It wasn't until he was gone that I picked the poems up to look at them again. When I read the one on top, I realized why he had shuffled through them. He had deliberately put the one he wanted me to see first on top of the stack.
We have another brother who is the middle of us three boys. In June of 1970 he was up in Maine working on a test car that was designed to find flaws in railroad tracks. He got sick up there, real sick, and was very close to death. I was away somewhere and didn't know anything about it. I wrote an odd poem at the time. At least it was odd to me, and a little out of my usual flow. A coupla months later it became apparent what the poem was about.
Farm Alarm
The whispering sounds of stillness
Are a symbol of the night,
And the thoughts of warning call me
Through the flash of inner sight.
Is there someone near in trouble?
Is there something I can do?
I gnow no answers easily,
But the call keeps coming through.
Where in Hell is my brother?
Does he need my help right now,
Or is he struggling just to call me
Or is it the lowing of a cow?
Tomorrow will bring the answer.
I hope it's not too late,
To gnow if it's a delusion
Or a gift I'll learn to hate.
June 26, 1970
Later, upon talking with this brother he told me that day was when his situation turned around. He was in a Catholic hospital and the local priest, thinking this incoherent fellow was Catholic, administered the Last Rites. Maybe that's what did the trick.
There was one poem I wrote just after my divorce from my first wife I had just about forgotten about. I probably forgot about it because I felt like I had to forget this woman and what we had shared because it was too painful. Some years later I came up with a theory about certain dynamics that happen between some men and their spouses that I thought was fairly original at the time. Today I read this poem and realize that I knew the truth even back then.
Love's Labor Lost
There was a little boy
who sat all day
and watched the sun
and clouds at play
and felt the breeze
blow through his hair
until his mother's love
caused him much despair
so he ran away
he ran away.
His joy, his thoughts,
at last felt free
without control
no love had he
to remind him of
the clouds and sun
and his heart
went out to anyone
then he was scared
cause no one cared
So he did look
'til he had found
a woman's heart
with love abound
to replace the fear
of no one near
who cared for him
and held him dear
then he was glad
and no longer sad
He lived with joy
most everyday
and watched the sun
and clouds at play
until the day
that they were blessed
with a fine young child
a welcome guest
until he felt her share
with the child her care
Again he felt
his love betrayed
mistaken thought
had love mislaid
his world was small
it made no room
except for him
the bride and groom
so he ran away
he ran away
There was a man
with a little boy's mind
who watched the world
and prayed for time
to find the love
he thought he'd lost
until he found that love
was his only cost
so he went away
he just went away.
December, 1971
Monday, July 21, 2003
Funny thing, my dream life is great these days, but my days are less than exciting. I think I must be going through some change whereas the things that have interested me in the past don't interest me so much any more. It was only a feigned interest for the most part anyway, so if a change is coming (or already here) I could not be more pleased.
I have been attempting to write a piece on the process of how we each form our personalities from birth. I can see it in my mind's eye, but the effort to write it down gets tedious. I feel like I'm writing stuff that anybody with any secondary education should recognize, and most of them do, it's just that they don't seem to connect it with themselves.
Developing a personality as the modus operandi for dealing with the world appears to exist as the main thrust of our existence for most of our lives. Yet, this very effort seems to lead us to our deepest problems in acknowledging what the purpose of life is. The purpose of life can get understood intellectually fairly easy. But, the problem in carrying out the purpose of life seems hindered by the very part of us that understands it, our personality.
We seem to revere our personalities more than that part of us that creates the personality, and that aspect of us that actually creates the personality, once done, seems to get left behind as not important. The message in most of the myths of the world is that this transformation of the degree of importance attributed to the personality is what leads us to live in illusion, and living in illusion causes most of the heartbreak that happens in our lives.
Last week I was reminded of this by a correspondent on one of the e-mail discussion lists I subscribe to wrote about the kind of person he is. He named off several personality attributes he had developed. He wrote that he didn't drink any acohol; he didn't hurt animals;he has studied karate and become somewhat of an expert at it;he was the member of some socialist group, and some other activities that seemed to indicate to him that he was a pretty good person. In in my response to him I questioned whether his determination that he was this or that kind of person was all that noble, and his response was that's the way he was. He wrote, "That's just the way I am." In effect, he seemed convinced that who he really was... was his personality!
I don't know the exact mechanics of just how we make the mistake of thinking that what we really are is something we ourselves created, but it appears to exist as a very common event. The myths tell us over and over again that the creator can get very pissed off about being ignored in this process. John Bradshaw, a writer who was a Catholic priest at one time, describes the problem by calling the creator the child within. In the story of Jesus in the Bible, and other documents, he speaks of the child and children in general quite frequently as the redeeming factor that allows us to truly see life as it really is. In some ways his message appears to be consistent with a lyric from back in the 60s that goes, "... we got to get back to the Garden."
Getting back to the Garden means to me that we return to the state we were in as newborns. In other words, we have to get back to the state of mindlessness as we first appeared at birth previous to developing our personalities. This state, which pre-exists any and all personality attributes, accepts all the world as if it were just part of ourselves. It was only when we begin to learn to distinguish one object from the other that the trouble began. In this state of being, we didn't know our ass from a hole in the ground and all things were equal.
That is not to say that one should abandon the personality, but the personality should not rule the roost. It exists as a tool the creator uses to make it's way through the world of the senses. Some myths seem to suggest that both the creator and the personality can be transformed into a separate but equal entity which can change the entire world we live in, and in fact this transformation appears necessary to move on to the next plane of existence.
I have been attempting to write a piece on the process of how we each form our personalities from birth. I can see it in my mind's eye, but the effort to write it down gets tedious. I feel like I'm writing stuff that anybody with any secondary education should recognize, and most of them do, it's just that they don't seem to connect it with themselves.
Developing a personality as the modus operandi for dealing with the world appears to exist as the main thrust of our existence for most of our lives. Yet, this very effort seems to lead us to our deepest problems in acknowledging what the purpose of life is. The purpose of life can get understood intellectually fairly easy. But, the problem in carrying out the purpose of life seems hindered by the very part of us that understands it, our personality.
We seem to revere our personalities more than that part of us that creates the personality, and that aspect of us that actually creates the personality, once done, seems to get left behind as not important. The message in most of the myths of the world is that this transformation of the degree of importance attributed to the personality is what leads us to live in illusion, and living in illusion causes most of the heartbreak that happens in our lives.
Last week I was reminded of this by a correspondent on one of the e-mail discussion lists I subscribe to wrote about the kind of person he is. He named off several personality attributes he had developed. He wrote that he didn't drink any acohol; he didn't hurt animals;he has studied karate and become somewhat of an expert at it;he was the member of some socialist group, and some other activities that seemed to indicate to him that he was a pretty good person. In in my response to him I questioned whether his determination that he was this or that kind of person was all that noble, and his response was that's the way he was. He wrote, "That's just the way I am." In effect, he seemed convinced that who he really was... was his personality!
I don't know the exact mechanics of just how we make the mistake of thinking that what we really are is something we ourselves created, but it appears to exist as a very common event. The myths tell us over and over again that the creator can get very pissed off about being ignored in this process. John Bradshaw, a writer who was a Catholic priest at one time, describes the problem by calling the creator the child within. In the story of Jesus in the Bible, and other documents, he speaks of the child and children in general quite frequently as the redeeming factor that allows us to truly see life as it really is. In some ways his message appears to be consistent with a lyric from back in the 60s that goes, "... we got to get back to the Garden."
Getting back to the Garden means to me that we return to the state we were in as newborns. In other words, we have to get back to the state of mindlessness as we first appeared at birth previous to developing our personalities. This state, which pre-exists any and all personality attributes, accepts all the world as if it were just part of ourselves. It was only when we begin to learn to distinguish one object from the other that the trouble began. In this state of being, we didn't know our ass from a hole in the ground and all things were equal.
That is not to say that one should abandon the personality, but the personality should not rule the roost. It exists as a tool the creator uses to make it's way through the world of the senses. Some myths seem to suggest that both the creator and the personality can be transformed into a separate but equal entity which can change the entire world we live in, and in fact this transformation appears necessary to move on to the next plane of existence.
