Notes from the Bunker #2: Return of the Baboon

Ain't no money in poetry, 'cause that's what set the poet free. Well I've had all the freedom I can stand. - Guy Clark

I am like a night raven in the house. - Psalms 101:8 (DR)

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. - Dr. Johnson

The best lessons are the ones you have learn over and over.

Most of the problems I encounter are entirely self-created. This is true for the majority of people. At the onset, the previous statement is not considered to be an especially sexy one in this day and age of the perpetual victim, the labeled and disregarded, the self-disenfranchised, and the botched afterbirth of an aborted american dream.*

It's true that the machinations of the dominant culture in these, the days final days of American Empire, are constructed on a model similar to the kind of economic Social Darwinism that grand designers like Milton Friedman, Henry Kissinger, JP Morgan and John D. Rockefeller saw as the only way to yoke the possibilities that absolute democracy present. The cards are stacked against the very myth our civilization ** insists on pushing on its people --

that hard work alone will create the success we believe we are entitled to simply because we are Americans.

This being true, however, does not remove from an individual the responsibility for learning how to act in, react to, and walk through the world. 

One of the fundamental mistakes people -- usually the young, the inexperienced, or the naively optimistic (I've been all three, sometimes simultaneously) --  make at this point is to generalize and make some outrageous claim like 

IF EVERYONE JUST DID _____________________ THEN WE WOULD ALL BE ______________! 

While it's always fun to play the Socio-economic Edition of Mad Libs, it's not especially useful. The

problem is that while we're all in this together, every single person has to figure out their own path to where ever it is they want to go. The truth is that the truth really is a pathless land.*** If you're walking in someone else's tracks all the time, you're trusting someone else's instincts to get you through. 

My first mistake in ensuring my or my family's survival is signing away my self-sovereignty. I do this for a lot of reasons that are all well and good, and for a few reasons that are simply reactions to some deeply-embedded issues tied to my father's death and my sometimes tendency to look for father figures when I don't need one. On some level, I will never be sure Dad would be proud of me because I can't hear it from him. 

When I feel my lowest, when I feel powerless, when I feel like an absolute failure, it is almost always when I allow myself to fall prey to that old issue.  When I doubt myself, I chain myself to an image of manhood that does not address the angels and the devils in my nature. 

And when I walk through the world honestly and with power, I bring all of myself and I lumber through this world like a mad baboon. It's impossible for me to exist in the world without embracing my limitations and failings as much as I embrace my successes.When I ignore those things, a giant hole opens in my soul that swallows all of me. When this happens, I'm no good for anyone.

 

If you like what you're reading here, I have work for sale on my amazon author page:
www.amazon.com/author/mickparsons

______________________________________________________________________________
* It may have been true once. Maybe. I tend to think that the "American Dream" is like "Tastes Great, Less Filling." It's one more commodity we have been sold to keep our noses pointed to the ground.
**I use that term loosely, as the United States demonstrates more each day that it is not anywhere near civilized. I blame this on the failure of memory. More on that another time.

*** Jiddu Krishnamurti

Mr. Mick Goes to Washington, Intermezzo (Necropsy, Report #1)

“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” - The Buddha



Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present. --

Albert Camus

Just as I was able to hobble around on my left foot, last night I fell and hurt my OTHER foot... the ankle, to be precise... so I am spending today (again) on my hosts' couch... which is entirely frustrating. The ankle is fine... swollen, but fine. Having fallen many, many, many, MANY times in the past, I know there's no need to worry. The swelling has already gone down from last night, when I tripped walking up Georgia Avenue with my friend and host Eric Riley. I stepped off the edge of the brick sidewalk to make room for two women walking the other direction... one of whom was a not unattractive blonde in a short business skirt and high heels.

And here, I must confess -- though I am staunchly opposed to Capitalism, the women are hot.

And while that may not be definitive proof that chivalry is painful, it at least provides more evidence to suggest that at least some of the pain some men put upon themselves comes from sex and it's related mess.

I hobble forward -- metaphorically -- however, undaunted.

Prior to my first real tumble (no metaphor) in more than a year, I had spent several hours that afternoon in the East Building of the National Gallery of Art. My plan was to visit several sights of interest and report to you, Dear Readers, on it all; and that may happen yet, since no one knows what tomorrow brings. But I did know I had to go and see ONE THING, even if I didn't get to see anything else:

The Rothko Exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. 

3 of more than 30 of the Seagram Murals.

Rothko has been one of my favorite painters for several years. Prior to seeing these up close, the color field paintings were my favorite. But now... at least at this point in my life... these are my new favorites.

These three are part of a series he painted as part of a 1958 commission for the Four Seasons in New York by Joseph Seagram. Rothko, notoriously OCD about how his work was shown, and feeling like a restaurant wasn't the proper place to show his work -- maybe out of fears that people would be too busy eating to really pay attention -- pulled out of the commission. But continued to paint the series anyway.

These three murals -- and really, all of Rothko's later work, including the color fields -- are all about boundaries for me. You see this more by comparing these to his other works; but the work is in all the fine detail. Sometimes he paints staunch impassible lines through which no color bleeds. In others -- like these in the National Gallery of Art, the colors bleed. (To see the difference, look at  these Rothkos at the Tate Museum of Modern Art.)

I sat in front of them for a little over an hour, taking them all in. It was something of a religious experience for me, sitting there

-- even with the insufferable noise of some stuck up art critic trying to impress his views on a much younger and thoroughly enraptured student about the "message" of a surrealist mural placed inappropriately near Rothko's murals.

The word that kept filtering through my mind was boundaries. Rothko battled them in his work, and in the end, when he sliced his wrists open and committed suicide in 1970. I've always fought them, too. Boundaries define us as much as they hinder us. As Americans, we have grown accustomed to boundaries... set by government, primarily... but also those boundaries set by other people.

And it is those I found myself meditating on.

I started this blog with the tagline:  NECROPSY OF THE AMERICAN DREAM. Okay, so I tend to be ambitious, and I'm still gaining momentum. Traveling around has always suited me. Visiting friends, seeing places for the first time or revisiting them with new eyes. You can't get a sense of the country you live in while you're on a guided tour. To really see it -- and to have a chance to experience it without someone else's interpretation -- you have to set out and see it.

One thing you begin to realize is that most boundaries mean very little except to others. State boundaries. County boundaries. City and town incorporation limits. Abstract. Nothing. They bleed, always bleed, whether provincially minded residents believe it or not. Every place I've been in my life, someone has said:

"That's the weather here in [insert locale, county, region, or state]. It can turn in 20 minutes." 

[Translation: the weather is never as predictable as we'd like.]

Boundaries bleed, and sometimes the blood is real. We have proof enough of that in every war in history.

I've been dealing with a sudden lack of boundary... which is freeing and terrifying and heartbreaking all at once.  And this first segment of my travels has been, in some ways, a methodical autopsy of the relationship.

But the boundaries bleed.  A marriage in America is about more than love. It's tied into tax money, real estate, visions of success and failure, manhood and femininity. Marriage in America, like it or not, is tied to our culturally driven definition of The American Dream. That's why political sex scandals are so interesting. Most politicians are married -- because the electorate like "family oriented" folk -- so when a politician gets caught diddling the intern or looking for anonymous gay sex in airport bathrooms, we become hyper-focused. Marriage -- and our conceptions of it -- is tied to everything.

And when a marriage is over, all of those things change.

For me, there's a still certain bitter-sweetness to all of it. 

Yet as I sat in front of Rothko's murals, the proof of his own struggle with the boundaries that defined and confined him, I began to reflect on the fact that even though I've been essentially decompressing and dealing with a complex amount of emotions, that I've also felt pretty good. Settled in my soul, somehow. Because while I may need to eventually find a place to store my books and keep my cat and have a place to write, I also just need to be able to go. 

P.S

If you're into Post WW II American Artists, it's worth checking out the Jackson Pollock they have in the same gallery as Rothko:

Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)

This one, too, and the rest of Pollock's splash paintings, also remind me of boundaries; but we each have our own ways of fighting them.

P.P.S


(More today. Still.)

[If you like what you read here, you can help by:

1. Passing the link around.
2. Graciously donating to the cause using the button on the right hand side of the screen, or by going to paypal.com and donating to mickp@gmx.com. THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT. If you DO decide to donate, I will mention you in the blog. Promise. 
3. Contact Catherine Sellers at Greyhound, 415-331-6049. Tell them you are asking about a sponsorship when the operator picks up. At this rate, they're losing my love to Amtrak.
4. NOTE: My next stop will be NYC, and then Boston for a long weekend. After that I'll be swinging back through the Midwest to in order to take care of business in Illinois and to gather steam for a push west. Stay tuned.

Scratching the Itchy Foot

The first part of the trip will be to go visit my daughter, Stella. It's been a couple of years since I've seen her and I want to make sure she's not taller than me. Stella is 17, focused on getting out of high school alive as well as intellectually and psychologically intact. She's also starting to look at colleges and is looking for a job.


That used to be an easier thing: finding a job. When I was a kid, all you had to do was go fill out a McDonald's application and you could have a job. There was poverty, there was unemployment -- but a kid who wanted to earn money and begin that lifelong love and hate relationship with the IRS had a reasonable shot at finding some sort of demeaning, dignity impugning, soul killing job that paid very little and left none of  the feelings of satisfaction often talked about in pre-employment literature.


Right now in America, there's 4 people for every available job. And that doesn't include the 15% unemployment rate for veterans returning from the wars they fought to keep Halliburton in business. Unemployment benefits are stretched, and there are those -- we call those sons of bitches REPUBLICANS -- who would cut off unemployment insurance and let people starve. We also have some folks -- we call those assholes DEMOCRATS -- that are going along because their mommies keep their balls in a silk bag in the back of an armoire. Right now we're living in a country where we have The Haves and The Have-Nots. Right now we're living in a country run by politicians who are signing away our freedoms. Right now, the banks and corporations have taken over.


Right now, it's only getting started.


And right now, there are stories to be told. Someday, we'll have historians explaining to our grandchildren what all this recession bullshit was really about and what the long term impact of shrinking civil rights and banks on the national tit was. Or maybe we won't. Maybe we'll have talking heads and history memes on social networks, lost in the shuffle between the Two Girls, One Cup video and the latest free social networking game that eats up computer speed and distracts people from seeing the world for what it is.


Re:visionary is my way of trying to tell the real story in real time. There are stories to be told, songs to be sung, poetry to be written. Re:visionary means,  for one, revision. Life, like a poem draft, often  requires revision.


For another, it means Re(garding) Vision. How I envision my self, the country, other people, the world. 


And I'm hoping you like what you read.