The Price on Wilson

Labor Day 2012

digital image / slightly rendered

So they say to Terry (Brando) Malloy, "This ain't your night."   Why's that?  

"We're going for the price on Wilson," they say.  

~
So my grandfather signs on as a laborer building the Panama Canal in trade for resident alien status here in the U.S.  And by luck he lives through the malaria, murder-for-your-pay-pouch and the daily danger of working in the pit.  So why not years later, drink homemade wine with your paisans and pass out in the cherry orchard?  He the night watchman for nineteen years until they say, "It ain't your night tonight, John."  Just shy of retirement benefits.  The factory can watch itself.  Tonight.

Decades later Pham's turn comes.  Never mind the hard work and the good standing and the extra hours just to learn the new machine with no pay.  It ain't his night, either.  Then his co-worker steps in and says, "I'll go.  This man has a young family.  Mine are grown."  Huge machines churn plastic and sheet metal profit while young men grow old and dream of fish and new kitchen floors.

Nail-aprons, leather gloves and welder's face shield.  Uniforms and name tags.  Musicians, engineers, farm laborers, craftsmen and union members.  Cops, cooks and ship captains.  They build cities and keep them safe.  They run trains on time.  Keep the lights on.  They design solutions keep the books and give to others.  They work.  They play taps for veterans and don't want fame.  They labor and love and ask only for a fair shot.  Go check their reflection in the Statue of Liberty and on countless war memorial plaques posted in towns and cities throughout this country.  Daughters, sons, fathers, sisters, mothers, brothers.  These people pray the sun up each day.  This is their day.

So to the extractors, the algorithmic traders, and those who profit unfairly from others' honest sweat...those who design complex financial products and push the limits of legality and logic...who pay untold millions to lawyers and hide their profits (and losses) while CEOs make obscene bonuses and low tide strands everyone else on the mud-flats of 'the-way-it-used-to-be'...I say, "This ain't your day."  Take your Cayman Island-flagged yachts and sail out to international waters.  Forget the price on Wilson.  He's sitting here with us.  I just bought him a cold one.

+++

Persona

"There can be no transforming of darkness into light 

and of apathy into movement without emotion."

- C.G. Jung

Yashica T4 / 35mm / FujiFilm / iso200 / rendered

Arizona - Dragoon Mountains
January 2011
~ 
DRAFT

A Simple Conversation

Linville Gorge, NC / June 2012
Pentax Espio 115v / 35mm / FujiFilm iso200

($3 at Goodwill)

image slightly rendered

~

"Nice photo.  Where did you take it?"
     "Glad you like it.  I saw it in my dream last night."


"You took a photograph of your dream?"
     "Yes."


"How?"
     "It imprinted itself on my soul and in the morning, before I was too awake, I pressed  myself against the patio door glass."


"What were you thinking?"
     "I wasn't."


"So, you captured this....image...?"
     "Yes, on the patio door.  It's a rough outline of the image on my soul.  Just a sketch, really; a rendering.  I can't describe the real thing in words."


"Beautiful."
     "You have no idea."


"I love the beautiful green and the sky and the horizon.  And the clouds - I love how the clouds form over the deep river-gorge as if constellating its opposite."
     "It's not a gorge and sky and clouds."


"What is it?"
     "The Mystery."

+++

a beautiful hymn from the self to the Self

by Moya Brennan

No Matter Where You Go, I Will Find You...

+++

stolen gardenia

draft 1

digital / slightly rendered

summer 2012

Hymn of the Universe

Ricoh Auto 35 / 35mm / Fujifilm iso200 / rendered

"To be pure of heart means to love God above all things and at the same time 
to see him everywhere in all things."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Hymn of the Universe

NY: Harper & Row Perennial Library, 1965 (1961), p. 127
***

Integration of Opposites

digital / slightly rendered

spring 2012

Chinese philosophy...sees the primal opposites of Yin and Yang.  Yin is the principle of rest, the unchanging, the dark, the cool, the moist, the female, the side of the mountain in the shade.  Yang is the principle of movement, of change, the bright, the hot, the dry, the male, the side of the mountain in the sun.  Yin is continually going over to Yang, Yang is continually going over to Yin.  The two are combined in the T'ai Chi.  Yin has the seed of Yang in it, Yang has the seed of Yin; Yin is perpetually becoming Yang, Yang is perpetually becoming Yin; the whole harmoniously working together for the man, or the people, who can see the opposites in their deep consonance with the ordinances of Heaven.  Wu Wei, an untranslatable expression, usually rendered as 'not-doing', a wise acceptance of life, an inaction which enables the creative activity to operate, is the essence of the Chinese view.

~

Experiment in Depth

A Study of the Work of Jung, Eliot and Toynbee

P.W. Martin, Kegan Paul 1955, p. 141

softer light

Soft Light

Down to my last cigarette and you ask me whether it's a wave or a particle.  Crazy.  Everything between dream and death is fair game and all I want right now is a drink but I can't have one.  So don't bore me with stuff even Ray Carver wouldn't touch.  What we talk about is better left unsaid most days.  Cloistered sisters shout, "Throw away your bucket; jump into the ocean!"

     Wave-particle duality postulates that all particles exhibit both wave and particle properties.

Edward Steichen, "Ascending"

Paris, 1902

You say there's a difference between her skin and her scent.  Crazy.  Just let me feel that reticulate curve of her body once more and I'll tell you a story.  Shimmering planet and summer lightning bug hovering high in a pine tree is all the same to a man who needs glasses.  I don't care about exoteric or esoteric and I don't know right from wrong on certain days.  I swim upstream.

         A central concept of quantum mechanics, this duality       

   addresses the inability of classical concepts like "particle" and  

  "wave" to fully describe the behavior of quantum-scale objects.

I am not lonely or afraid or sad but I do have this wish to come closer into her orbit and celebrate simple things in silence.  But crazy doesn't cover everything and talk is cheap.  Fish rarely surrender they find refuge behind rocks.

          Standard interpretations of quantum mechanics explain this paradox as a fundamental property of the Universe,

I don't want to debate I want a smoke.

   ...while alternative interpretations explain the duality as an emergent, second-order consequence of various limitations of the observer.

***

Daily Life

Ricoh Auto 35, 35mm

Fujifilm ISO200

slightly rendered

~

"The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are."  -  C.G. Jung


Lately, I have had a desire to live for a while in a big city.  In a neighborhood with some quirky character to it and lots of resources nearby.  Like a park and a library and a corner coffee shop.  Even a bar if it was reasonably up-scale and had some charm.  I would love to be able to walk to things like free lectures or a parade or a 3-dollar cinema.  I would take classes in Japanese calligraphy and photography.  A good bookstore where I could sit and read and browse all sorts of subjects.  A good bench for sitting and people-watching.

A city where I could ride a bicycle most places and do the grocery shopping at a small market and cook simple meals.  Concerts in the park and the occasional demonstration for some good cause or another...just to keep things interesting.

I would watch the people and traffic and weather and feed off that energy.  I would find a beautiful cathedral that had a small chapel off to one side where I could go for meditation and solace in the middle of the day.  I would like street lamps that shined a warm light through the snowstorms and also softly lit the summer evenings as I walked along.  I think I would walk a lot.  Maybe join a yoga studio and once in a while drop in to hear what the weekly talk at the Ramakrishna mission was about.  I could lose myself in plain sight.  Live simply and quietly.  I'd do qi gong in the park on Sunday mornings while people read newspapers and others played chess and children played and young mothers walked strollers along the footpath.  I'd smile and try to be present to whatever came my way.  I would try to be patient.  I would buy coffee from a push-cart vendor and ice cream in summer.

I would find a place in a park to fly a kite along with others.  And I would look at historic buildings and wonder about their beginnings.  I would find a new construction site and watch a skyscraper being built.  Just sit and watch almost daily as the giant grew from a hole in the ground into an extraordinary creation of modern man.  I would go to good concerts and maybe even a club to hear music.  An orchestra and also a jazz trio.  I would see pretty girls and wonder what it would be like to be their boyfriend.  I would see old men and wonder what sorrows had visited them.  I would find a cemetery and walk among the massive monuments and feel like a speck of dust.

I would find a small Italian restaurant that made spaghetti the way I like it and go there once a week.  I would never wear a suit or get dressed up but I might have a lot of hats.  I would not care too much.  I might write but only when I felt like it.  I would get up and leave a play or a movie if it did not capture my attention.  I would turn down offers for dinner if I felt like it and I would ask a woman for a date if I was intrigued by her.  I would not be desperate.  I would not be intellectual.  I would not shave every day.  I would be happy to speak with strangers just to enjoy some banter.  I would collect myself and be strong within.  I would maybe plant something in a community garden but more likely I would just walk by and watch the garden grow.  I would be tanned and lean and healthy.

I would smile most times as I walked along and I would laugh easily at a joke or a funny thing I saw happening around me.  I would not be sad or longing for anything.  I would be free and open to new ideas.  I would go visit if someone invited me and I would write letters to my grandchildren and would visit them just often enough to be a presence in their lives without being a pain in the ass.  I would not have a pet.  But I would have a favorite animal at the zoo.  I would observe but not try to learn or resolve anything.  I would wonder.  I would meditate and also maybe visit the zen center once in a while.

I would watch the skateboarders in summer and ice skaters in the park in the winter.  I would love more.  I would listen.  I would offer and not hold back.  I would even dance if I had a partner.  I would find a place to swim and figure out how far it would be to get to the ocean beach so I could walk and breathe.  I would drink tea every day and would sleep soundly at night but would not try to remember my dreams.  I would wear comfortable clothes.  I would forget my name but not my nature.  I would, once in a while, do a sufi whirl on a sunny day on the sidewalk in front of a locksmith with no one in particular watching.

Simply because I hear the music inside me and I remember I am a dust mote in the cosmos and want to celebrate because I have seen and felt and heard and tasted God in everyday life.

~

Holy Spark

"When you desire to eat or drink, or fulfill other worldly desires, and you focus your awareness on the love of God, then you elevate that desire to spiritual desire.  Thereby you draw out the holy spark that dwells within. You bring forth holy sparks from the material world.  There is no greater path than this.  For wherever you go and whatever you do - even mundane activities - you serve God."

-  Levi Yitshak of Berditchev, 18th century Kabbalah

Holga 120CFN, 120mm
Fujifilm ISO100

~

This kitchen sink is my yoga mat.  And the aches-pains-complaints, my mantra.  Missing car keys, telephone bills and the annoying neighbor.  Dog-sitting.  Grocery shopping.  Cows standing in pasture give rise to luminous thoughts of love.
                   Miles from nowhere...
                                                                         guess I'll take my time
Turning / breathing / stretching / laughing.  Dirty dishes come clean, coffee cooked.  Muscles move in minor key as earth's rhythms echo ancient chants.  The lone duck on the mist-driven pond makes way for smaller things.
      Look up at the mountain
                                                        I have to climb               Oh yeah, to reach there.
And the work and the children and the chores and the marriage and the dues and the do-nots.  I signed up for this a long time ago.  Before there were words.  I came here, I know, not to rest but to awaken.
                                                 Lord my body has been a good friend
As the Cathars say, "these birds outside my window are the Virgin Mary."
                                                                                But I won't need it        when I reach the end.

(acknowledgement to Cat Stevens)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzplmeMMB84

Chakra Beat

digital

Hey Black Mamba doing the samba
sittin' at the base of my spine.

Don't you think it's time to slink
up through the wide of the sky?

Sax man wail your trail of scales
call my lover up from Washington Square.

Don't linger there just pay the fare,
I'm stuck at the belly of the beast.

Mamba moves on a breeze of grooves
up the ladder of my last resort.

To Ezekiel's Wheel no one can steal,
while I listen to the un-struck chord.

Echoes flow from the world I know
as my Lover beckons heart to heart.

Black Mamba's tide bids me arise
taste the pure and all-sustaining grace.

Illumined eyes show no surprise
endless blessings from the Holy Place.

Now I am One completely done
a thousand petals crown my shining Face.

~

Ricoh 35 Auto

35mm / FujiFilm ISO 200

redon