The idea of god is what you have first. The experience you have of god is an experience to which you attach the name,the idea. The mad hear the voice of god directing them,the voice of their idea giving validity to internal chaos. and the saints,their compass more true,start with an idea,received and accepted,then work beyond the self and its small hungers toward the light. There is something behind the veil,at the heart of what it is to be,that our souls, when allowed,can recognize. But more and more I am coming to believe that people have built, and continue to build, something that they call god. And that this thing they have built has an existence almost,but not quite, separate from its builders. And it is in the way,directly in the way,of our experience of God. A deity that would encourage the obscene destruction,the careless harm,the blind grubbing that sustains the world we call ours,the world of human activity,can't be the supreme being. Which is not to say it doesn't have to be dealt with, appeased,even bowed to in some fashion. The police, regardless of their ethics, any thug with greater physical power,has to be dealt with,in an immediate sense. In that same manner groups of human beings banded together can become too powerful to be scorned,and must be appeased. Appeased in order to ensure the survival of what comes from our being. Many martyrs have died completely unrecorded,it is the ones who someone heard and saw that we remember. Someone who lived a compromise long enough to make that record last,so we could hear in our turn. Without that there's only the supposition, the emptiness where their lives would have made a difference, a different world. There is a nobility, a great nobility in that martyrdom. But it has to matter. It has to count.
I believe it's time to speak to this question honestly. That it was always urgent,yes,but that it's now even more so. The idea that this earth,this world,is only a passage to one more real is an evil idea,born of a selfish refusal to love. It is life that brings us into the hands of God. Our being is what gives us this relation. Any god that doesn't encourage,even demand,a love of life is incomplete at best. It may well be that we leave here for our eternal reward. There may be something in us that is immortal,but if there is,this world has been its womb. And what terrible child could scorn its mother, having now outgrown the need for her?

<><><>#@#@#@

Douglas Peacock showed a movie tonight,and gave a little talk after. He's the grzzly man. Nam vet,back home and went into the wilderness and came out to champion the bears. And now in the world doing that. and god knows what else. and it's typical of my life these days I left and walked down to the car and tears are at the edge of my expressing them and then back and then again and now it's just like it always is. something will die with us and that makes it alright. the thing that dies with us justifies it. It feels like treachery to me it feels like surrender but it feels so true. Too much has been compromised. The thing,and I can feel it as I write this,is all over me. smug and gloating and confident it has the future as well as the past to work with,has us(any of us) completely surrounded in time,which is not the same as dominance in a spatial sense a physical sense but might as well be. it is breathing down my neck as I write this and I will not be able to find what I sat down to find. The way between the contradictions. How to be human and still go on. How to be one of them and one of us and still go on. But this is a public place and it owns all public places now. and if we all have to go to ensure it goes then that will be alright. not good,not enough,and bitter,but alright. it's the serra palada all the time man. I start to do it and there they are with their shovels and their greed and their desperation. the god of the sold soul triumphs for those brief moments as everyone faces what is to be. or not. maybe I'm lying,you know? do I owe you the truth? who says? where? are we in this together? are we? am I standing up in a public place to say this? almost but not quite. not quite. and what I owe you is yet to be determined.


Next day May 8 2001 9 pm.


Again. I walk out of the theatre and it's at the edge not that I'm holding back so much as almost almost tears. I could weep with a little push break down and cry for days I think or a minute or two for sure. Peacock again. So he's a bro of Abbey's. And Harrison. So Mcguane and Rick Bass too probably and probably runs into Matthiessen now and again. Where am I in all that? What am I supposed to do? I feel like the fucking hunchback of Notre Dame before Disney got ahold of him. But on,that's the task. go on with it. Wrong moves and all. Some attitude needs to be forged some partial truth uttered so it can be added to and made more complete and of course that's it it can never be all the way,this side of the divide. We're always going to not know. It's Ok,that part of it. I'm nauseous with my own failure not as a human being but as an animal,a beast. That's it ultimately what they really broke wasn't the man,it was the raging creature I truly was and even more,might have been. That's where the failure is. That's where the sellout occurred not that I gave away my manhood my humanity but the wild the untamed the untamable thing I held I had some mutant path that was mine more than most others. For a long time it's felt like it was the unattainable membership in human society even though logic the heart's logic said no,it's deeper,and there it is. Another piece of the puzzle bobbing to the surface now it's safely too late? I hope not,I hope so much not. That it be timely somehow right and timely. That there is some way to be,in the midst of all this,that works. But why does it make me cry? Is it still coming up? Is there more still that I don't know,can't remember? Well yeah. And all this focus on the self,isn't that more of the compromise,the safety of letting them finally break you down? And I get so hung up on the idiotic fronts,the psychotic delusionals that enter the room after the doctors leave,after the agents leave,after the real enemy makes his smug withdrawal. Dwayne the janitor with his broom and his Bible. Peacock is not alone. That's my comfort tonight. He has good meals. God if he's a friend of Harrison's and by his own testimony a good cook they must feast together and all that love that Harrison locks into the page,and family air around the table,no small thing in these times. Real men keep the women from depression,even as the women do the same for them. we do these things for each other . Yes. Even me in my crazy asshole cabin. So that part yes,I didn't fuck them up. Now I need to lose this feeling of it all being my fault. The entire wrong turn of humanity somehow directed by me or my weakness,that I took that on or was laid out and had it strapped to my back when I was unconscious. I mean I don't know. But I feel distanced from it,fom the fight,the struggle most of the time. Then distanced because the crowd of ghosts won't let me in, that's how they got me I wanted in,wanted all the things,and the comfort of being inside the walls,inside the fences and walls of compromise and surrender. I wanted so bad to be normal,while these other guys went just the opposite direction,as did I when I managed to find a few seconds to pull my head out of my ass. Not enough not often enough,and even though I may deserve more forgiveness for that sellout than almost anybody else it doesn't help me. I cringe at what was wasted. Not the attainment,not the things,but the comrades,the fellowship the true devotion of a wilderness campfire. And song. Not these half mad songs of raw undeveloped poetic anguish. Songs that reach through the blood and years to what we are,which was always about what we might be,might still be and now even now even if only for a minute and a half at the end of time,what that is that we are,that changing thing might still be and that's the task to carry that memory of the not yet into the next day into the next month past the guards and the dull broken eyes,into what we haven't learned the name for.


Peacock said some stuff and I'm only putting it here to remember to remind me. He flew over My Lai on the day it happened on his way home. He got down in Abbey's grave,and it felt right. And saw 7 buzzards then 3 more and it felt right. He was a polar bear dude for some save the beluga people. The happy bear. remember the images. Bought a trailer dead drunk in Tucson and lived in it nomad style for years til his daughter was born. And he said if someone was coming into your home with an axe or a bulldozer you would stop them with whatever means was necessary and that's what's happening now. They're invading our true home.
It's a species break I(msg) think. A place where the Big Road branches out.

posted by Juke at 1:30 AM [edit]