We are a signal. Our bodies are radios, our brains antennae that resonate the signal to manifest our being. That's why it's important to stay in shape, the better to manifest being physically. Damage to the radio or antenna results in partial loss of signal or, in rare cases, a change in channel. Each signal's manifestation of being affects the others, and goes on in many ways after the radio goes off by breaking or wearing out. Some play music, others chat, and some a mix. Some issue nothing but static. Each receiver unit, or person, adds to the message that is existence. What are you playing?
Notice, too, that when the radio goes on or off, it does not affect the signal at all. Signal is eternal.
--Bu Xan Da, Tenshin Monastery, "Talks"
Friday, November 13, 2009
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
In the Woods
The woods I grew up in were clear cut during the years I spent making my way in the world. By the time I came back to where I’d been raised, to look it over and size up it’s importance to me, it looked, and was, so different as to be irrelevant. This led to my memories of growing up being the only link I had to the past and, being intangible, they were all the more easily enshrined.
Nothing remained as a touchstone. Gone were the trees, the long days running among them, and the animals my friends and I occasionally startled from the undergrowth, or whose nests we’d find and investigate, or whose spoor we’d track, pretending to be on safari. Gone, too, were the streams we’d leap over or splash through, and the tall ferns we’d lie down among to imagine ourselves back in dinosaur days. Gone were the deer paths, the rabbit warrens, and the bushes dense with berries where we’d find a snack that stained us inside and out, tongues, lips, and fingers, shirts and jeans.
So my childhood woods were internalized. What else could be done with those memories but to swallow them? And naturally, over the course of further years, as I handled them, they rounded and smoothed and began to fit together better into a coherent story, because that is what we do, we make up stories to cover the gaps in memory, in knowledge, and in experience.
In this way we build a life, and yet, paradoxically, also end up lost in our own inner woods, in an artificial landscape of our own devising, one that teaches us perhaps more about our wishes than our lives, and more about our fantasies than our hard knocks. Those cuts and bruises of being a little kid, those gulps of cold water on hot summer days when you come in panting and smiling fresh from laughter and running, those clear moments of pure joy fade into just another twinkle of fairy dust in a tale told by an idiot who should for once know better.
Gold into lead; it is an alchemy of disappointment and diminished expectations, hopes, and dreams, and it leaves us wandering in the woods with a handful of electroplated junk metal and shiny plastic slag extruded from our hopes and dreams, the pieces of potential we fashioned into a real live life, and eventually these replacements, these transformations, and these ashes of fizzled magic weigh us down.
That’s when we try to go home, to find more of the good stuff, and that’s when we usually find home gone, itself shrunken and changed and unrecognizable. And that’s when we realize we’re lost in the clear cut woods and, worse, we’re alone there.
Alone with the shadows.
/// /// ///
Nothing remained as a touchstone. Gone were the trees, the long days running among them, and the animals my friends and I occasionally startled from the undergrowth, or whose nests we’d find and investigate, or whose spoor we’d track, pretending to be on safari. Gone, too, were the streams we’d leap over or splash through, and the tall ferns we’d lie down among to imagine ourselves back in dinosaur days. Gone were the deer paths, the rabbit warrens, and the bushes dense with berries where we’d find a snack that stained us inside and out, tongues, lips, and fingers, shirts and jeans.
So my childhood woods were internalized. What else could be done with those memories but to swallow them? And naturally, over the course of further years, as I handled them, they rounded and smoothed and began to fit together better into a coherent story, because that is what we do, we make up stories to cover the gaps in memory, in knowledge, and in experience.
In this way we build a life, and yet, paradoxically, also end up lost in our own inner woods, in an artificial landscape of our own devising, one that teaches us perhaps more about our wishes than our lives, and more about our fantasies than our hard knocks. Those cuts and bruises of being a little kid, those gulps of cold water on hot summer days when you come in panting and smiling fresh from laughter and running, those clear moments of pure joy fade into just another twinkle of fairy dust in a tale told by an idiot who should for once know better.
Gold into lead; it is an alchemy of disappointment and diminished expectations, hopes, and dreams, and it leaves us wandering in the woods with a handful of electroplated junk metal and shiny plastic slag extruded from our hopes and dreams, the pieces of potential we fashioned into a real live life, and eventually these replacements, these transformations, and these ashes of fizzled magic weigh us down.
That’s when we try to go home, to find more of the good stuff, and that’s when we usually find home gone, itself shrunken and changed and unrecognizable. And that’s when we realize we’re lost in the clear cut woods and, worse, we’re alone there.
Alone with the shadows.
/// /// ///
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
I Kneel A Sweet Command
“I Kneel a Sweet Command”
by Gene Stewart
I can’t believe in kneeling down
Men demand we kneel, not gods
I’m not a man who bows my head
It matters not if I am owned
Forced obeisance mocks respect
Fear breeds hate to murder love
Dread is predator to joy
Free is nothing that’s released
A truth once taught is only man’s
Intrepid reach finds perfect height
Thought is father to a life
Light makes warmth a sweet command
/// /// ///
by Gene Stewart
I can’t believe in kneeling down
Men demand we kneel, not gods
I’m not a man who bows my head
It matters not if I am owned
Forced obeisance mocks respect
Fear breeds hate to murder love
Dread is predator to joy
Free is nothing that’s released
A truth once taught is only man’s
Intrepid reach finds perfect height
Thought is father to a life
Light makes warmth a sweet command
/// /// ///
Monday, September 21, 2009
Why Are Writers the Only Stupid Artists?
Did Michaelangelo need help carving David? Did Beethoven need help composing his symphonies? Did Da Vinci need help painting the Mona Lisa? Did Schulz need help drawing Peanuts?
Why do writers, then, “need” editors?
Ask any publisher and they’ll say, “Good editors help bring the book to life. They can help the writer shape it, and they know the market so they can make the book the best it can be to go out and meet the readers.”
Ask editors. “We spot errors. We make sure everything’s in the right order. We trim here, cut there, compress elsewhere, and make the book more readable. We get the book in its best shape and make sure the finishing touches are put on.”
Writers must all be stupid, to need editors. Is not editing part of the writing process? So writers -- and all agree on this -- are the last ones you can trust with the work they produce. An outside, objective eye is needed. Writers are too close to their work to see it clearly. An editor provides perspective.
It is incredible to contemplate how good other forms of art would be if they had the benefit of editors.
“Hey, Michaelangelo, maybe instead of their fingers not quite touching, man and God could high five each other on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.”
“Psst. Beethoven. Hey, you deaf or what? Listen, you can’t put a chorus in your Ninth Symphony. You should know better by now the public won’t stand for that kind of stuff. And that poem, what, saccharine nonsense; who wants an Ode to Joy in the middle of their music?”
“Da Vinci, seriously, pick one, smile or frown. This kind of ambiguity will just confuse the public and they’ll never know what the hell La Gianconda’s thinking.”
Yes, editors sure were needed in those other arts, it’s obvious how much better some trained, experienced, and objective advice would have made those flawed masterpieces we all know.
Writers, being stupider than composers, painters, or sculptors, have benefitted and the record shows it. There are so many superbly edited books that no single one particularly stands out. Year after year we see such a consistently high product being produced by editors that it begins to matter not at all what raw material the mere writers hand in.
Were it not for editors, where would writers be?
Standing on their own two feet, apparently, and responsible for what they did, or did not, accomplish in their work. Thank heavens they never have to suffer such an indignity.
Why are writers so stupid? Because they can be.
/// /// ///
Why do writers, then, “need” editors?
Ask any publisher and they’ll say, “Good editors help bring the book to life. They can help the writer shape it, and they know the market so they can make the book the best it can be to go out and meet the readers.”
Ask editors. “We spot errors. We make sure everything’s in the right order. We trim here, cut there, compress elsewhere, and make the book more readable. We get the book in its best shape and make sure the finishing touches are put on.”
Writers must all be stupid, to need editors. Is not editing part of the writing process? So writers -- and all agree on this -- are the last ones you can trust with the work they produce. An outside, objective eye is needed. Writers are too close to their work to see it clearly. An editor provides perspective.
It is incredible to contemplate how good other forms of art would be if they had the benefit of editors.
“Hey, Michaelangelo, maybe instead of their fingers not quite touching, man and God could high five each other on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.”
“Psst. Beethoven. Hey, you deaf or what? Listen, you can’t put a chorus in your Ninth Symphony. You should know better by now the public won’t stand for that kind of stuff. And that poem, what, saccharine nonsense; who wants an Ode to Joy in the middle of their music?”
“Da Vinci, seriously, pick one, smile or frown. This kind of ambiguity will just confuse the public and they’ll never know what the hell La Gianconda’s thinking.”
Yes, editors sure were needed in those other arts, it’s obvious how much better some trained, experienced, and objective advice would have made those flawed masterpieces we all know.
Writers, being stupider than composers, painters, or sculptors, have benefitted and the record shows it. There are so many superbly edited books that no single one particularly stands out. Year after year we see such a consistently high product being produced by editors that it begins to matter not at all what raw material the mere writers hand in.
Were it not for editors, where would writers be?
Standing on their own two feet, apparently, and responsible for what they did, or did not, accomplish in their work. Thank heavens they never have to suffer such an indignity.
Why are writers so stupid? Because they can be.
/// /// ///
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Life In Air - poem
“Life In Air”
by
Gene Stewart
A man’s love enflames
A woman’s sustains
In our drought
We crave the rains
That quench our doubt
A child’s love blames
A pet’s entrains
In our flight
Silence remains
Companion’s delight
Dry ground
Water-laden air
Seeds twitch
A stormcloud’s shadow
Gravid airflow
Skyclad witch
Spiral despair
Sky bound
Ungiven gift of names
/// /// ///
by
Gene Stewart
A man’s love enflames
A woman’s sustains
In our drought
We crave the rains
That quench our doubt
A child’s love blames
A pet’s entrains
In our flight
Silence remains
Companion’s delight
Dry ground
Water-laden air
Seeds twitch
A stormcloud’s shadow
Gravid airflow
Skyclad witch
Spiral despair
Sky bound
Ungiven gift of names
/// /// ///
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Birth Dream
A dozen people, me included, in an airport, were separated and herded into a holding room. We wondered what was going on; it was a motley mix, no pattern among us discernible. A door at the other corner of the room opened and we were confronted by a tall, naked person of a golden color, definitely Other, who held aloft a glowing wand. He waved us forward and no one moved, but then there were others like him among us, herding us again.
As each person passed through the doorway, the wand was waved over and around the person’s head a few times, then the person was pushed through. As a big, boisterous woman ducked through, she smiled and swung around to lower her head for more. “Oh, I can feel it,” she cried.
“What’s it doing?” we called.
“It’s shaving away our thoughts,” she said.
This terrified the rest of us, but we were forced through, as if we could not resist or were children too afraid to offer physical resistance.
As I passed through I felt nothing, and found myself shoved into another room pretty much the mirror of the first. We milled around, wondering what had just happened, feeling dazed, and once again, the door we’d entered through vanished and another door on the far end appeared, this time not open, but closed.
That was when we began noticing something horrible was happening to us. We were visibly getting younger, even as we watched. We aged backwards, and it was fast, as if each blink of the eye took off a decade or more. Soon we really were frightened children, and then I remember falling to the floor, a toddler unable to balance. My head bounced on the floor and I saw a baby in front of me, crying. I was bawling too, utterly abandoned, and bereft of anything but craving need, and then I saw the infant on the floor beside me deliquesce into protoplasmic jelly.
Even then, I felt my own body go, too.
After a blink of darkness I opened my eyes and I was again myself, but insubstantial, like a ghost. I saw others groaning and shaking heads, as if hung over. We each came to, pushing ourselves to our feet and staggering to collapse into chairs arranged as if on a bleachers, in rows one over the other. We sat gathering ourselves, no one talking.
Someone, a man I think, yelled, “I can’t stand this, I’m getting out of here,” and charged the door. It opened at his touch and he fell through, and we all gathered at it to see that it was gaping outer space out there. The cosmos, with stars, planets, galaxies, nebulae, and most of all a depth of nothingness.
A surge of emotions -- we can’t let him do that, we should join him, panic, desperation, despair, hope, even joy -- slammed through us and before I knew it I was deciding to join the others as one by one we leapt out of the room into space.
We free-fell, but could still breathe -- or did not need to -- and communicate -- perhaps mind-to-mind. We felt the need to stay together but also to get the hell away from out captors. As we fell away from the room we floated around and gazed back, seeing not only the doorway shining light at us, but a verdant green world of dense foliage, with minaret and breast-shaped domed structures with round windows, apparently our captors’ houses.
We shrieked denial and fear at this otherwise bucolic sight, and drifted around again, gazing at each other, and that was when a pair of us drifted close enough to touch. At once they combined, and the rest of us seemed drawn toward this new person.
Before I knew it I was joining with the others into one sexless golden being, very like our captors, and this one being maintained all our individual thoughts. We were able to converse freely, make suggestions, and discuss our plight. We experimented with this body, and found that we could drift faster if we thought about it. Then we found out how to take galaxy-spanning strides. All of our will focused on getting away from our captors.
When I asked where we might end up, everyone at once thought that we wanted to go back to Earth, to our lives. And as quick as thought we did it, seeing the blue globe approach in one glimpse, in the next standing on the ground.
And here we separated into our individual selves again, and each of us went to our distinct lives, only to find that we were as ghosts to them. We could not be seen or heard, not separately, and something drew us gradually back to becoming a single being again.
And this single being began its own life among people, lonely inside in too many ways to express but also alive on the outside, solid and real.
And then I woke up.
/// /// ///
As each person passed through the doorway, the wand was waved over and around the person’s head a few times, then the person was pushed through. As a big, boisterous woman ducked through, she smiled and swung around to lower her head for more. “Oh, I can feel it,” she cried.
“What’s it doing?” we called.
“It’s shaving away our thoughts,” she said.
This terrified the rest of us, but we were forced through, as if we could not resist or were children too afraid to offer physical resistance.
As I passed through I felt nothing, and found myself shoved into another room pretty much the mirror of the first. We milled around, wondering what had just happened, feeling dazed, and once again, the door we’d entered through vanished and another door on the far end appeared, this time not open, but closed.
That was when we began noticing something horrible was happening to us. We were visibly getting younger, even as we watched. We aged backwards, and it was fast, as if each blink of the eye took off a decade or more. Soon we really were frightened children, and then I remember falling to the floor, a toddler unable to balance. My head bounced on the floor and I saw a baby in front of me, crying. I was bawling too, utterly abandoned, and bereft of anything but craving need, and then I saw the infant on the floor beside me deliquesce into protoplasmic jelly.
Even then, I felt my own body go, too.
After a blink of darkness I opened my eyes and I was again myself, but insubstantial, like a ghost. I saw others groaning and shaking heads, as if hung over. We each came to, pushing ourselves to our feet and staggering to collapse into chairs arranged as if on a bleachers, in rows one over the other. We sat gathering ourselves, no one talking.
Someone, a man I think, yelled, “I can’t stand this, I’m getting out of here,” and charged the door. It opened at his touch and he fell through, and we all gathered at it to see that it was gaping outer space out there. The cosmos, with stars, planets, galaxies, nebulae, and most of all a depth of nothingness.
A surge of emotions -- we can’t let him do that, we should join him, panic, desperation, despair, hope, even joy -- slammed through us and before I knew it I was deciding to join the others as one by one we leapt out of the room into space.
We free-fell, but could still breathe -- or did not need to -- and communicate -- perhaps mind-to-mind. We felt the need to stay together but also to get the hell away from out captors. As we fell away from the room we floated around and gazed back, seeing not only the doorway shining light at us, but a verdant green world of dense foliage, with minaret and breast-shaped domed structures with round windows, apparently our captors’ houses.
We shrieked denial and fear at this otherwise bucolic sight, and drifted around again, gazing at each other, and that was when a pair of us drifted close enough to touch. At once they combined, and the rest of us seemed drawn toward this new person.
Before I knew it I was joining with the others into one sexless golden being, very like our captors, and this one being maintained all our individual thoughts. We were able to converse freely, make suggestions, and discuss our plight. We experimented with this body, and found that we could drift faster if we thought about it. Then we found out how to take galaxy-spanning strides. All of our will focused on getting away from our captors.
When I asked where we might end up, everyone at once thought that we wanted to go back to Earth, to our lives. And as quick as thought we did it, seeing the blue globe approach in one glimpse, in the next standing on the ground.
And here we separated into our individual selves again, and each of us went to our distinct lives, only to find that we were as ghosts to them. We could not be seen or heard, not separately, and something drew us gradually back to becoming a single being again.
And this single being began its own life among people, lonely inside in too many ways to express but also alive on the outside, solid and real.
And then I woke up.
/// /// ///
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
