Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Doubt Both but Need Try




This is just to say (I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold) I release myself from my enthusiastically self-imposed Egoslavian obligations, rules, and laws I have masochistically laced myself into over the past eleven years. That sentence's William Carlos Williams' poem demonstrates my probable inability to employ the release, as does the Morton Feldman, as does this post. Regular programming cannot return if it never goes away.

This is not a bleggacide's farewell nor a hiatus bluff, but the past few months, and intensifying over the past few weeks, this hasn't been fun like it used to be fun. I would be lying if I said I didn't pay attention to who and how many read, but this iteration of the blog has, as I type this, 1858 posts, 7349 comments, and 724,020 page views over just over four years: the numbers are fine. The Kind is good. The not-fun isn't you or lack of yous. My head has been, is, and will always be loud, but Dark and Angry are starting to dominate: I've always used here to indulge them, but they are seeping into real life and I will not indulge them there. Perhaps not indulging them here will help squelch Dark and Angry there, perhaps not indulging them here will help here too. I doubt both but need try.

11 comments:

  1. Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky

    Now, let us suppose that ... you begin to observe, for example, that your thinking is negative, petty, fearful, resentful, or hateful towards yourself and others, [which] is precisely the point where you can begin to consciously work on the development of your consciousness, to begin the work of cleansing the mind, leading to a change of being and living ....

    Only through the discipline of uncritical self-observation will you catch sight of something definite to work upon... Only gradually will you begin to take notice how instantaneously the "demon" of self-justifying does everything in its power to prevent your working on yourself; it will do all it can to protect not you, but the definite negative emotion that you have caught sight of....

    What, then, are you going to do next with these definite and clearly-observed negative emotions if you are no longer eager to fly off into self-justifying or rationalizing your actions (such as: "Of course, I'm not to blame," or "It's always been like this," or "I don't deserve to be treated in this way," or "Am I nothing and don't I count?", or "Wouldn't you, under the same circumstances, feel just as I do?", or "You don't understand all I've had to put up with," or "Of course, you have everything you want," or "You wouldn't understand—no one ever does,") and so on? ...

    Realizing that to permit a negative state to exist unchecked and un-arrested is to give it tacit permission to do its worst, and realizing also, as one Eastern system says, that negative emotions, when "identified" with—that is, when the negative emotion "becomes" us and we "become" the negative emotion that acts through us of its own accord—is similar to a wound in the body, and if one is serious about this matter of self-transformation, one can resolve, so to speak, to "hold court" to find out what this negative emotion is all about, that is, where it came from and what is its cause?

    You must hold this court in your mind—not in public. You must let the various sides of you take part in the "court proceedings." Listen to each player—prosecutor, defendants and all witnesses—and let each speak clearly. All of this requires an atmosphere of inner attention.

    You will find that indignant, furious, and bitter or blaming speakers ("I's") will each take the witness stand in their turn in this "trial" being held in your mind. But, there is one important point to remember about this court room—in this court room there is no judge. Like the woman, as told in the Biblical account, who was taken in adultery, the one, Jesus, who was expected by the accusers to judge the woman (so they could justify their stoning her to death) said only, "Neither do I judge thee. Go and sin no more. Your sins are forgiven." If you hold to this same spirit with regard to yourself and all other participants of this trial going on in your head to discover the truth about the cause of your negative emotions, after a time you will notice that the whole affair has cleared up and vanished—as it did in the Biblical account when all of the accusers turned and walked away...

    [T]o receive the great value of uncritical self-observation, that is, freedom from the bondage of your negative emotional states, which can lead to permanent and lasting change of being, one must be gentle with oneself, and with others who, like yourself, when acting from the unconsciousness produced by their negative states, "know not what they do." Therefore, to change your being requires that you forgive yourself—and everyone else.

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  2. Sam Cooke-Accentuate the Positive

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnErt_ff8-w

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    Replies
    1. Charlie, I love you, but if an ant starts moving a rubber tree plant in this blog's comments, I'm going to have to kill you. Wait. Fuck me.

      Delete
    2. duly noted

      i also promise to refrain from posting a link to "everything is beautiful" - not the ray stevens original, not the jim nabors version, not even the kylie minogue video which is a completely different song

      Delete
  3. Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams
    Kenneth Koch

    1

    I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
    I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
    and its wooden beams were so inviting.

    2

    We laughed at the hollyhocks together
    and then I sprayed them with lye.
    Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

    3

    I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
    The man who asked for it was shabby
    and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

    4

    Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
    Forgive me. I was clumsy and
    I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

    ____________________

    from Rose, where did you get that red?: Teaching Great Poetry to Children ©1973 by Kenneth Koch

    Dear Dog by Lorrain Fedison (6th grade)

    Please
    for
    give
    me
    for
    eating
    your
    dog biscuit


    Dear Biscuit by Mayra Morales (6th Grade)

    I’m
    so
    sorry
    for
    taking
    you
    away
    from
    your
    friend
    the
    Dog.


    Sorry But it was Beautiful by Andrew Vecchione (6th Grade)

    Sorry I took your money and burned it
    but it looked like the world falling
    apart when it crackled and burned.
    So I think it was worth it after all
    you can’t see the world fall apart
    every day.

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  4. Maybe it's just the times we are living in. Everything just seems to get worse. Reading the news has become a painful enterprise especially with the slant and destruction of history that predominates. And things look like they will continue to worsen. Or it might be because as we age we loose that youthful enthusiasm, it's hard to maintain as we become more aware of things. Also sometimes I think having a bloug and reading and writing about all the negative things happening has to take a toll sooner or later. Yesterday High Arka stabbed me in back, again. He/she wrote this ridiculous post about something I had written a while back. But I don't really care as High Arka isn't really very important in the scheme of things, and to be fair neither am I. He/she did say that I wasn't particularly evil, an interesting idea. I don't post every day because I don't always have anything to say. I refuse to react to everything that happens in this world and there are plenty of others that are doing the reacting. Let those who wish to react, let them react, for now is the time! I think most bloogers get bloog burn-out at one time or another, nothing wrong with giving it a bit of a rest now and then.

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  5. But I fucking wanted those plums, man! For breakfast.

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  6. It seems to me that it might be the level of engagement required for some of your kindly linking that has unduly allowed the dark bleed into your personal meatspace. It also seems to me that that might be kind of what you just said even if you didn't or didn't want to.

    If and when you do decide to post again, maybe enforcing an "annual tribute, poetry, and music only" period will be soul cleansing.

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  7. '...this hasn't been fun like it used to be fun.'

    The locus of the carnival leaving town, yes - and I have wondered myself whether I was wasting the time of others by coming back to blog, even in such a sparse and unpublicized way (Not my own time of course, for a stark self-review of my pixidelic contributions, aimed inward reveals a rather large degree of subjective time wasting over a decade).
    So what? No one entity, save my own compulsions can force a contribution from me. There is no money, no demand for service,'enlightenment' or psychic protection from slavering hordes - and nothing to be said in my tortured superhero syntax that was not already covered in excruciating detail.
    Should a class IV solar flare hit Wall Street tomorrow and at long last hasten the new dark age, no one will care - My contribution in this medium will be just another black screen amongst a vast sea of defunct foodie blogs and former sports memorabilia lists.
    I should say that I value what you do, as an expression of individuality from one to another. Should that expression continue, there is that to be cherished according to one's whims. My experience (not necessarily to be taken internally) is that if one truly wishes to renounce this expressive form and all it contains, one must smash all the canvases and burn the museum - the temptation, the 'what if...?' impulse within the Id cannot be exorcized in any other way. This I shall do, when the right time comes for me.

    ;>)

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