TRIESTE:
Trieste was the name given to an extraordinary infant, abandoned by mother and father at birth, beloved of all, astonishingly rapid of development. Early to walk and talk, by two it was discovered she had absolute pitch and a perfect sense of rhythm. The infant would while away hours by herself in a corner at a reeking, multicolored plastic keyboard in the charity nursery into which the system had funneled her, laughing, lost to the world. She was also learning to read and write at that age, and was evidently a "speed reader". It was curious to hear streams of complex sentences in immaculate English issue from the throat of what was little more than a baby, putting her adult counterparts' command of their native tongue to shame. She talked unstoppably, about everything from quantum physics and black holes to lamprey eels' boneless teeth. Everything simply fascinated her, she was the most life-full and happy creature one could imagine. Some adults figured her for an autistic savant, unable to rationalize such characteristics in any way but what the medical profession declared abnormal. But no, she got along in social situations and related to people with the same white-hot intensity and intelligence. By 5 she was an avid reader of novels in other languages, and when they could be located, musical scores. A nurse who knew a little about classical music liked to tell about the eerie incomprehension she felt on hearing the young Trieste sing, a cappella, a full act of Norma transposing parts into a child's high octaves, before saying she was tired and wanted to nap with the other children. When she wasn't doing everything she slept like a rock, invariably with one thumb in her mouth, barely able to hold back the incoming cascade of saliva, and breathing very deeply. She developed into an adolescent of glamorous features, rosy cheeks and pearly skin "lit from within", eyes dusted with the constellations, an expressive and sensuous pair of lips barely able to contain the shimmering smile from behind, and very long, radiant blonde hair, which fell into an unusual style, two thick wings hanging afore each ear and the rest thrown around in a loose halo. A generous governess and Godmother, Bellace Morrigan,adopted Treieste in her 6th year and oversaw her education and upbringing from age 11. But by the time she was 14 or 15 something had gone quite wrong in what perhaps should've been the untroubled development of this revolutionary personality. It began with appendicitis. She was taken to the hospital in a fit of pain, puzzled at the revolt in her own body. After surgery she related that her whole body felt "poison-soaked", and, breaking out in raging acne, did not want to be seen by anyone. She became anorexic, then gained much weight, eating compulsively, unable to smile, hardly moving, without first gorging an already ailing physique with sugars, starches, and syrups. She began having aural hallucinations, intense feelings of anxiety, nausea, sleep disorders, and savage crying fits that relegated her to bed for days, completely exhausted. She took up smoking and drinking, vices previously scorned. She stalked around the house grounds stark naked, cussing like a sailor (at herself or anyone that dared cross her path), and generally neglected quite everything about herself it was possible to. By 18 she was taken out of what school she went to anymore and institutionalized. Every day visitors to the hospital stood in the waiting room, pity-struck at the tragic specter of this once proud soul, now a dumpy, unwashed bedlamite, half slid down a couch from which she watched Court TV in a nest of wrappers and crumbs. She would laugh vulgarly in the face of consolation, not showing any sign of listening until… "Ha!! You just farted on F#!!!", then giggle deliriously, and then fall back into scowling at some spot in the corner that had become the previous hour's preoccupation. (The guests, naturally, were embarrassed-enough to not try consoling her again.) Her eyes took on the aspect of that rare person who "sees through" you, or perhaps, on either side of you. Each eye migrated slightly more into its outer corner until it would never be looking AT you. One got an eerie sense Trieste didn't have to; she was monitoring everything in the room, including other people, treating all to the same lethally neutral reaction. This made her a difficult presence to be around, expressionless, silent, yet definitely alert. "What can be going through your head, Trieste?" Her Godmother asked her in vain. "What are you thinking?" …She didn't move for a minute, then slowly turned to face the guest and smiled benignly. Yet she said nothing. Only the other patients could tolerate Trieste, who became something of a ward-wide celebrity through group functions. There was something about her looming, shadowy watch that spoke of untold experience and commanded authority. No one would interrupt her, a commonplace occurrence while anyone else, including the warden, spoke. No one looked her in the eye, spoke to her, or touched her, ever, though she was to remain there for a decade. The staff never remembered anything like it. "It was like she was possessed… she sat still ALL day long, and if you bothered her she would just, slowly… turn to just… STARE at you… and you'd get shivers, feeling like with a wink she could curse or cure you forever…" It was also discovered she responded to music, through the unlikely medium of the ward "Aeolian", a shockingly neglected piano she met her third week in residence. The scene apparent to other incarcerants and the security guard was this: she was sitting on the couch, watching a game of billiards being played, then for no apparent reason erupted into a veritable Mount Etna of laughter. Having never seen her not only laugh but do anything, they thought maybe she'd finally, finally snapped. But she related in an animated tone, wiping tears from her eyes, that she had just heard "5 of the most grotesquely, gruesomely, ridiculously unconscionably out-of-tune piano notes" she had ever heard in the next room, and ran over thereinto to observe the thing first-hand. It was a humble upright, reduced to shambles by the clumsy mishandlings of a madhouse's berserk assailants over many years, dusty, musty, reeking of smoke, urine, and other unmentionables, and but for a few bullet holes would be able to easily hold its own in any olden-day brothel or saloon. It was love at first sight. The inmate responsible for 5 random introductions played an upwards glissando to take his leave, then stumbled over in a fit of surprise when he was ushered off the bench alla breve by another pyroclastic advance from Trieste. She took a seat, looked the instrument over, wiped off dust from one chip-toothed key, and played a single, a middle, C. The thing rang like the Angelus, she said. It was glassy, gritty, "like a mouthful of dimes… Ugh!!" She played it again, and again, and again. And again. She showed no intent to stop, smiling, sitting up straight, evidently absorbed in her task, until the warden gently plied her away for bedtime meds 7 hours later. The next day it was explained that she had gone through all her remembered life with an extraordinary sensitivity to sound, the aspect of pitch especially. "Do you sing too?" "Play us a song, Trieste!" "I… do not sing or play." "Oh… well that's too bad. Do ya not much like music?" The warden once asked Trieste about "absolute pitch", or the "capacity to identify musical landmarks in sound-vibrations", as she called it. Lighting yet another cigarette, she related that it was curious more people didn't have it. "It's easy. The octave repeats 12 little notes that have familiar and beautiful faces. *Inhale* *Exhale* Is it difficult to remember Mr. and Mrs. E and Ab, or Brother Bb, Gran'pa G, or cousin C? I think it's a natural symptom, so to speak, of an alive and active self. *Inhale* Of course, when you don't go out and play they may turn gray." –At which triple rhyme she giggled, jetting out 3 clouds of smoke from nostrils and mouth. Then looking up at the sun to enlighten two rolled eyes: "ho-hoo-ooo…" *Inhale* *Pause* *Exhale* "What I mean is, if you become insensitive to the vibrations of sound surrounding you *Smiles* you don't even want to see, hear, –whatever– process them." *Assuming a Distant Tone and Looking Downward* "Feel them, technically…" *Inhale* *Exhale* "The chief thing is to want to, through the cultivation of the self." The day came when medicine was tried. Lithium, at first. It caused her irritating dry mouth and heightened her sensitivity to pitch even more, to where she was mesmerized in conversation, staring blankly at a person's talking mouth, yet hearing nothing but morphing key signatures and microtones. Once in a while someone would laugh a major triad, and a smile would flit across her face. Or at night her cell-neighbor would weep in minor seconds and thirds, sending Trieste into a hoarse, uncontrollable fit. No words, just whispered screams of agony, pounding on the door, scratching at the walls, breaking things. A nurse was called in to restrain her and found her pulling out her hair, weeping uncontrollably, snot and blood smearing her face. The lithium was stopped. The next medicine was even worse. She could no longer hear pitches at all, or rather, could not find her beloved landmarks. They had "turned gray". Now she would just lie in bed, looking at the wall, unmoving for days, totally uninterested in everything. The doctor came in, with a cheery "How ya feelin' there, Tristy? The new meds workin' out for ya a'dall?" …and sat down on the chair next to her bed. She stared on, about a foot in front of him, not even blinking. He pulled the chair right in front of her, giving her the ultimatum of staring on defiantly at the hopefully uncomfortable view of his lardy lap, or to meet his gaze. She opted for the lap, not making any sign of even knowing he was there. He sighed. "Say, you'd like some ice cream, wouldn't'cha?" He attempted, more desperate. "You know, I hear they have a new mixture of caramel… your favorite!" Silence. He was getting nervous. "Say Trieste, what note is this-" he hummed an off-tune G, then leaned in for the answer. He did this time hear a slight whisper… so leaned closer. "…Kill me … " And so it went. Trieste's is one of the strangest accounts of then-day human life for its alarming middle year period. Instead of the cherished, rosy adolescence and young adulthood a young woman in well-to-do-enough circumstances could safely expect to inherit those days, she endured ten additional similarly haunted years in the small space from cell to window-room, taking no pleasure, or part, in life, overcome with a mystical sadness no one could explain. But as the Phoenix is caged in the egg in its cycle of death and rebirth, so is to be seen this blight period from which Trieste was soon to emerge in white-hot novae at destiny's call. "Somewhere between a choice, and destiny, is happiness." BELLACE: The first thing she was aware of on coming out of it was a dog. It was looking at her. "WOW!", she thought… about many things now. That the dog was looking at her was something of a miracle, but to that let us return shortly… we have something bigger to chronicle. Bellace Morrigan, age 50, 4 months and 3 days into this year living so badly she was biologically and physically in decrepit old age, had just come back to her body after what was known as an "NDE"-- a near-death experience. Her body vibrated with power, she could have wrung the sweat out of the clothes she was wearing, and she was gasping for air. Bursting up off of a couch, tearing her face away from the dog's gaze, she bodily clawed the air for want of release from the flood of pain which then descended tsunami-like upon her. In her mind was utter confoundment, alertness, and power, in her heart was shame, love, and awe, but in her body, the old demons still held sway and were to, for yet some time. She had lived a horribly ungrateful, sedentary life, silver-spooned from birth by two lavishing, but dim-witted parents, who both died when their cruise-ship sunk off the Gulf of Mexico, leaving the 20-year old Bellace to fend for herself, with some inheritance to get her through college (the rest was mysteriously filched in a series of governmental complications and procrastination the girl's soft, spoiled will couldn't fight very hard against). School was all she could cling to, so to that she went, miserable as ever, friendless, overweight from excessive eating and drinking, with vague aspirations anent being a poet (but unlikely any self-respecting reader would have deliberately downed something as terrible as… "I sit in the house, crying. The fire, in the corner, is dying. And so am I, I'm not lying.. But you don't care about me, for you aren't my wing"). Bellace, egotistic, vain, became ever more stuck on herself, to the paradoxical breakdown of her entire personal organization. She never had a boyfriend, never had a job, never even did anything of distinction in school. She would drag herself into the classes, wheezing expulsions of that patented sirocco of lukewarm morning breath she did manage to achieve some recognition for, lethargic from blood sugar- and pressure- complications from her nightly habit of gorging herself to sleep in front of the TV. It wasn't long before her teeth rotted away, her hair (except a moustache) gave up the ghost, and stubble, warts, moles and carbuncles bubbled and warped over every inch of skin it was possible for them to. If her personality was repellent before, now she was a badger, edging people off the sidewalk with cusses, staring teachers down in class, spitting wherever the notion took her (not always outside), and again not accomplishing anything in life. All this took place in the city of Lubbock, TX, where she was born and, it appeared, was preparing to die. Her life meant nothing to anybody, she was barely aware that the sensations and rude interruptions which had the effect of delaying her wallowings on sofa-cushions at night were life, and the worst was still to come. At twenty-five she finished school with some "BA-SCA-FRA"-or-another degree, allowing her to get slid down the funnel of a dying economy into a dead-end job at a newspaper factory. She claimed to be a reporter, but she was actually just a call receptionist, then proofreader, and hated every minute of it. Eventually for her bad disposition they moved her into the mail room, and kept her there for 20 years, mercifully allowing the daily deluge of curse words, spit, and odor to deploy more harmlessly among the high-school interns who constituted her co-workers and subordinates. One kindly offered to walk her home one night, and she reported him for sexual abuse (NO ONE believed that, but they fired him anyway, because Bellace had more authority). Another asked her for alcohol, she had the offending girl arrested. That all continued unabated until she had a child, in her first, her only, sexual experience. It could almost look that her life had finally some sense of purpose, but she treated the responsibility as she did everything else, neglecting her son's development as far as she was able, abusing him, starving him. She never had him vaccinated and so, at the age of 6, he passed away from viral infection. One year before this she attempted to "normalize" their lives by blackmailing a top reporter through her company she had seen drinking in his office in secret, while on the job. She had proof too, for a tape recorder was in her possession that day and she knocked on his door, asked him if he had been drinking, and when given the rebuff "It's none of your business, get out of here before I call security", had lifted it from her fanny pack, knowing it to be conclusive. They stared at each other a long time, and then he agreed to give her money to keep it secret. "Agreed." "Alright, give me the tape." "Nope. You said if I would KEEP it …secret." "You KNOW what I meant!" "Eh. Hah. Too bad." Finally this man, the prominent Kittridge Webb, agreed to house, clothe, feed, and pretend marry this creature for a year in exchange for the tape at the end of that time. (It was her plan). He was already twenty-three years her elder, a closet homosexual, and had one child himself of a previous, a much failed, marriage, but these strange circumstances were indeed set in motion, for he was a man of honor and valued job more than life. This marriage, if it was possible, failed even more resoundingly. Bellace was not cut out to be a mother, and served only to complicate the father-son family, with the addition of Cody, her five-year-old. This ugly, diseased woman, nightly sticking to her routine of bloated mindless indulgence, could barely tear herself away from a television long-enough to argue with her "husband" for fear of missing the soothing companionship of popcorn kernel #6,114,792 or a moment of "COPS" . That's how the rest of her time there time was spent. The pretence surrounding the marriage was laughed at by all, whenever visitors were received into the Webb home and told, in an uncustomarily halting and uncertain voice from the host, that this -- then gesturing couchward into the stalely reeking and grubby dark place Bellace made her nest-- was his wife. The children did not get along at all. Jesse, the other, was Kittridge's 15-year-old son, barely in school, ever in trouble, always on drugs, hurt Cody and was indirectly responsible for his death. He also had a few nasty fights with Bellace, and threatened to kill her before running away from home. He was the opposite of his father, very undisciplined, rebellious, even dangerous. We'll get to him later. Father Webb didn't really know what to do with him, still less with the strange child Bellace brought, who was excitable, curious, and fragile, all things tiring at this point in the day and at this point in life. He started drinking more and more to compensate and, ironically, was to eventually lose his job from resulting complications… One kind thing Kittridge did for Bellace, or as a gesture, of bribery, was to buy her a dog near the beginning of their relationship, a perceptive-looking collie of sweet and curiously humanoid disposition, whom he doubtless hoped she would make some effort for. She never named it, and never even remembered seeing it come home. One day there was just an extra thing to hit. Cody named it "Vance", which everybody in this morose, gloomy household went along with. After a while the dog became morbidly fascinated with shadows. It wouldn't look up, ever, but only down to the carpet, the chair legs, the grass, where roamed the twisting, vivid formations from another dimension far more amenable. The animal froze, deaf to the humans, and with a charged, unblinkingly adrenal look overtaking its face, more and more hours of the day, just staring at one particular shadow in a remote corner, cast by the leg of a piano, watching its slow progression from floor, to wall, to floor again as the sun rose and fell. That disturbed visitors to the house, which the Webb-Morrigan-Dune-Deleware family received with rapidly less regularity. The news of two family deaths stirred Bellace slightly. Jesse went first. He had shot himself off a bridge on the way to Canada, and she'd seen the report on the news. His "fucking" father, in his room sobbing, could not be brought out, while they arrived and did their report, surprised at the maid?-wife?-thing's fortitude. She answered the door and all of their questions, eyeing the TV several times with a shameless lack of tact. 5 Days later not she, but Kittridge, found Cody dead in the room he and Jesse had shared, not shot but infected with disease and malnourished. That shook her a bit. She switched her watching habits, so it has gone on record, from "COPS" (her favorite) and court shows, to religious programs and Nature shows. Kittridge Webb even stated, off the record and perhaps in an apocryphal moment of drama, to walking out on her the next day, hesitating slightly because he saw a tear rolling down her face. It's a story that one hopes is true. Then came her death, and this is where we pick up the narrative from the chapter's opening. "Near-death experiences" were well- and increasingly- documented at this time, and hers was a classic in the category soon to be known all through the world, and which radically changed her life. At the moment she passed over, the last thing she remembered was the light of the TV surrounding and enveloping her, pulling her into a tunnel. She sat up, and realized the couch was no longer there, and staring around herself noticed her body was not there either. At that she began to panic a little, which was not helped by the realization that the light was darkening, thickening, turning into fire and storm clouds around her, with a feeling of an unbearably intense G-force all around her. Then she saw it... MEMOS: (excerpt) time passes, and with it fades the virginal vividness of life. so slowly the transformation creeps up on us that we hardly see it; the air becomes stale, our ears grow deafer, our muscles reluctant & sluggish; food is tasteless, sleep restless, emotions' thrill taken their edge off by a mummifying apathy. this is actuated by habits, prejudices, disappointments, failures, unrequitted loves, accidents and 'the small stuff' that, while young is water off a duck's back, we begin to 'sweat'. pretty soon you're drowning in that sweat, marbled thickly with blood and tears, feces, urine, puss, semen, nail-clippings, eyelashes, hair. the spectacle of a madly amused, maenadic fate has you lowering slowly into a festering pool of their tepidly accumulated disgustingness. misfortunes of the above type crank her lever and you're one jerking chain-link closer to immersion. with a hot bag o' popcorn she sits back, content. life is dull, blunted, and insipidly sad. getting mired there is the worst misfortune that can afflict who could once've been called the living, for with their life's substance gone there is no reason to live. life becomes death. the depressed ones, the 'chemically imbalanced', the excessively aged, those stricken by cruel handicaps, they sensitively aware of societal injustices cultivated to work as much against them as possible~ they live day in, day out of sorrow. it becomes their natural habitat. There was an amusing occupation, as it would in those days've been called, 'occupied' by the absurdity called a 'psychiatrist' in this quaint time & place in the world. their living was earned essentially strapping on the muddied reeking boots of clinical indifference and wading into the Augean Stables of 'the average man''s mind, therein to paint manurey gray area, heart, soul, repression, confusion, as target for a nuclear airstrike of the 'technically advanced' day's heaviest ammo. antidepressant drugs, hypnosis, or plain out-and-out brainwashing of the "I just need you to believe me" sort are examples of such advancement. what it did was just to sweep under the rug, till it bulged nakedly with an Everest of it, the pent-up malignancy, bitterness, hatred, greed, stupidity, confusion, pain, and sadness of generations of people. it was not the natural way of things. no wonder they failed. Like many human children, -- STOP. that phrase is so commonplace it begins to assume associations in people's minds. they compute that there is probably about to be a valid comparison, consciously or unconsciously, valid because of the numbers. here is what i was going to say-- Like many human children, Our Boy was sent to what was then referred to as "Public School" (pub-lik skool). He was NOT like the many human children, however! so we saw unfold the metaphor of a train, set steadily on its way down a trusty pair of steel rails, suddenly thrown a divergence in its otherwise unblemishedly straight way. it crept slightly to one side now. after a day it was jolted, after a year miles from the forecasted spot, after a DECADE of them absurdly lost. for those darling "most human children" the words finishing that sentence would've been "irreparably lost". their 'trains' had long since lost sight of any such simple, unobstructed paths as the straight and narrow, and now rumbled jarringly along jumbles of spikes, twisted metal & wood, inevitably crashing into others who were likewise abandoned to the murderous runnels of train-allegory land. The only way His escaped a similar fate was to steer slowly back in the direction of its intuitively felt original course, over mountains, briar swaths, and through dark woods, to arrive, horribly delayed and defaced all over with scars from the journey, at its station.
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from "Who Knows", 10-14 I always felt like being an artist was so natural and somehow inevitable... and very blessed I suppose to have those abilities, because I could choose a more peaceful & positive lifestyle than, for example, being a coastguardsman or security officer... this world can make nasty people out of perfectly good souls, and burden them down with bad karma they wouldn't have if, say, we could all just be artists. No one is perfect, but I think ALL people have that instinct, to create and work from a place of harmlessness. To actually spread GOOD through this world as their main purpose... but sadly that's not always the case. If we could truly find our niche in this world, it would all fit together like pieces of a beautiful puzzle, clasped into perfection. Historically the world has been a dangerous place, and sometimes brutal, but as / IF we move into an Age of Peace, there are massive redressals to be made. Certain taboos & paranoias we no longer need, and we have to shift most people's participation in this world from being mute witnesses & slave-workers, to fully awake & engaged human beings. "We have so much work to do," as my wise & late Grandmother said as last words to me, before we create Heaven on Earth. from "The Eagle", 7-14 Then the noise begins. Strange sounds, flashing lights, dizzying gravity... From within are heard the sounds of voices, dogs barking, strange music in the distance... the spirit grows curious, wondering, 'Where am I? What is this life about?' The day of pain comes, assaulted by a ruckus of thunder and screams, when, ripped from the amniotic cocoon, the newborn first lays eyes upon this world. It is hideous, twisted, filled with men in white coats, with rigid limbs and balding heads, women with painted sneering faces, a hyena's whining tone in their voice, assailing him with tinctures and needles. The trauma unfolds unabated, a madhouse of new and bitter sensation, yet one lifeform seems to stand out from the rest, offering a mote of reassurance and compassion. Fairly soon this creature assumes a role of responsibility and ownership in the young spirit's life, he comes to associate her with routine and stability. Her personality and manner are familiar, she is a friend. Yet within time the spirit finds that even in this being is an enemy, with a moral rulebook of Do's and Dont's. Her knowledge is questionable. 'Who IS this creature that forces my hand, with a smug disposition and a mean look on her face? What does SHE know about what is best for me?' The boy glimpses a faint trace of his mission, to make this world a better place. Yet everyone seems to have their OWN ideas of what he should do, where his mind shall go. He looks around at the world they have created and knows them all to be wrong. from "The Eternal Now", 5-13 I disagree with those scholars and theosophists who claim that, in "The Eternal Now" there is only joy. The Eternal Now is -- EVERYTHING. Anything and Everything Possible... It depends where you dip into the stream. Choice... vs Chaos... You cannot control it all through choice. There will be instances when you are just "on the rollercoaster ride", to be tested if you like. Consciousness is always exploring. As I've said before, you're ALL of yourself, MORE of yourself than you've ever been, at any given moment of NOW. In principal that gives you infinite power. But it's up to you how to channel the energy. This world IS amazing. The ways it works are amazing, but not always the way we channel them. Because you see this flow is always moving through us, creating the new NOW. We are a bit like filters or "strainers" that way... though we create a unique particle of energy all our own also, to circulate through other life forms. Connecting... It's all just about how to connect from one point to another. "The Nightmare Charade", 10-12 As twisted limbs contort into lock with eachother on the stage floor, flood the hall with lights and enter our hero, making his way through a half-cemented slag of crippled, stiffened bodies to center stage. each step is a turnstyles of rigid, cracking joints barring the way. Advancing up the stage and casting an eagle's glinting glance out into the audience, sweeping an eye over the wretched, cannibal-breathed masses in their toil. They lashed at eachother with hungry bites, they were desperate, ravenous, starving for something that would slake their lust. With a snap of his long, unplagued fingers, there fell from the ceiling a stock of grubs. Large, hormone-supercharged larval humans from the sedentary adult population of the upper world. They had to be plucked from up there, several plate-layers above and close to the earth's surface, where the sun broiled an angry supernovaeic pink and cherried them to plump ripeness in just the right span of time. The upper world was a place of vast black domes to house these "grubs", as the rabid zombies in the lower world thought of them. The domes were erected a century before by those who saw the nova coming, and made to protect their bland, witless ancestors. All the grubs in their native atmosphere wore dark shades and full body doping suits to protect them from the radiation, but even so, their lifespan was cut ever more freakishly short by omnipresent rays. That was the least of their worries, however, with the snarling hordes of the zombie population growing in number and ferocity. From the scoured-black molten swaths of emptiness of the upper worlds, to the dank dusty caverns down here, was an arduous trail through the other plate-levels requiring the best use of all their technology, which was too often sabotaged. Between here and there had evolved other mutant species with their own agendas to fulfill, including their immediate upper-neighbors who had been ceaselessly bombing the tunnels for months. The grubs themselves were defenseless, but the heat and light up there were intolerable to the lower predators. Thankfully these grubs had been procured without incident, from a fuel facility connected with one of the main funnels, and came tumbling out of supply with the reeking smell of vomit, feces and growth hormone typical of good stock. As they hit the floor, from about a 30-foot drop, there was an initial helpless moan as bones smashed, organs ruptured, and the luckier of them blacked out. The others were about to learn just how much feeling was stored inside each cell, each inch, of their flaccid bodies... It was thought that enough consciousness still existed in the softened windings of these creatures' brains to ask, upon death from 20 angles of sharp nails and teeth... WHY!? The man who had snapped, and cued the feeding frenzy, was the only non-plague member of this society, and still was still compelled to eat with the aid of careful nutrition. His was a diet of artificial-lit plant leaves and dirty water, a most unsatisfying regimen, and he often wondered if a hunger existed in him similar to that he saw in the zombies. But they were all hungry in this shattered world, weren't they? excerpt, 4-12 You can also explore your own inner images through drawing. Your private stock of expressions, metaphors, psychoanaliticalities, etc. We each have a unique set thereof. Certain people's "Worlds" draw us in-- and on their imaginary beaches maybe we can plant a few wild trees, or in our mountain ranges somewhere the silky saffron-infused foily lacework of another's fantasy yellows the landscape. To a certain extent I have noticed this third fascinating thought in connection with this lately... that if one makes an IMAGE of oneself in his brother's mind, his brother can, to a certain extent, create him INTO that image in their simultaneous reality. You shape people from real life, physically, into a form that meets somewhere between their self-image and your interpretation of it. With drawing you empower that Mana-trance of creative power, or manifestation, through the images you hold, making your drawings come to life, bit by bit. Yes, be careful what you draw... I've seen dreams come almost STUNNINGLY true. Telekenesis, 10-10 I so LOVE how we're given a treat from God, fate, the Universe, Karma, or whatever in the form of the occasional "sign", don't you? Today in a choral rehearsal I played for, a most singular thing of the kind was granted the some 200 people looking on as it happenned. The rehearsal was nothing out of the ordinary -- the week of a concert AND college midterms attitudes are taut, people are high-strung, stress is high. I walked to the fine arts building in gloomy, cloud-guilt weather, with the following story playing in my mind: This concert has been planned for a month, and we've been rehearsing 3 times a week. But only last week the tyrannical man who "direct"s it, motioned to tell me he intended to have it done on organ -- a creaking, wheezing, cheaply-made, porcinely howling organ at that. I am NOT an organist, I am a pianist, and as you wouldn't ask a violinist to give a concert on a cello, so you shouldn't even propose such a request. I reached out to the misguided professor, arguing that for the good of the bad piece he'd himself foisted on all the choir, we'd be much better off using a good electronic piano, which he has. Amplify it if necessary. It will suddenly be legato, staccato, forte, piano, and everything in between and all around in any combination of combinations, much more like the full orchestra intended. He agreed -- to TRY it for monday-- today-- but then yesterday, Sunday, sent an email with, among other psychotic things, this in it: Thank you for your concerns about the organ, etc. today. I want this to be a rewarding experience for you, and I know you are "taking one for the team" with playing the organ. As I think about it, though, I really want to try the organ on this concert, and see what kind of sound we can get in Performance hall. ...Which is a dimplomatic professorial way of saying he simply went back on his word, squashed the notion to even TRY it, and means to go ahead making the ensemble look as ridiculous as only he could. (It has to be added that this is the man who SIMILARLY went back on his word last year in promising to perform a piece I then WROTE... then never even looked at the score.) B U T The above mentioned force, fate, God, Nature, Life, Reality, whatever, intervened, and here is another one of those "miracles" I sometimes see strewn in my path by music... I arrived at 12:30, took my seat hoping to be ignored. Instead people were looking at me in a strangely "expectant" way. I must've looked a presence. The Organ ground its way through one rendering of this Lumbering, preposterous piece under my disgusted fingers. It is called "I Was Glad" by Sir Arthur Parry, a British composer of no significance at all, and fornicates vulgarly for a dozen pages on slimy, chromatic Franck-goes-to-Hollywood type motives and modulations to deliver rambling text about a University-sponsored excursion to Jerusalem. ...yeah... anyway ONE rendering. I am sullen-faced and sandwiched in the middle of the battle between pompous prozaced profs and the choir kids silently shouting the man down, KNOWING it all sounds terrible and something must be done... another run through begins... 1/2 way through it... I shift into a more serene mood: that of simply not caring. Shortly after, 1 minute at the most, is when the miracle ocurred: The organ simply shut off. One Dr. Huff, turning the pages for me (rudely), chastised me for pushing some or another button that caused the disturbance. (I didn't think I'd pushed anything, said nothing letting him think I accepted that though... I already suspected something 'magical' had happened.) We had to stop the piece and start about 1/2 way in again... I had a feeling it might happen again and... It did! IT DID! Not in exactly the same place, but somewhere very close to it... a measure before or so. Once maybe, but twice? Now there was silence in the room, people looking at me... but we tried it again... ...and yet AGAIN! The miracle, at an even slightly earlier spot now. At this point people checked the organ up and down for power defects, problems with the stops and pedals, etc., and could find or feel nothing wrong. So we tried it ONE more time, in a mood of totally changed focus. No longer was anyone thinking about Sir Parry's musical pontificance, all were almost ANTICIPATING the disastrous choking of hideous organ tone at the appropriate time... and indeed that's exactly what happened, one last time. Everyone's head snapped to me, and the frightened page turner quickly excused himself. By now I couldn't help laughing elatedly, feeling I had "triumphed" in something, and even the director said the "Organ Gods" were against him. I still laugh when I think of it... what an inspiring, enlighteing thing to have happen! "Hm.", 12-08 Reflections prompted by what develops from the first rest I've had in months from a suffocating regimen of what is wrongly called "work", cast as always toward the fact that, in order to produce anything worthy of one's self, one must be in a healthy, relaxed, balanced state of mind. The environment which compels people to "work" achieves usually the opposite of the word's true meaning; that is, it so tires, bores, or numbs them that any and all real work becomes impossible. It is easy-enough to fall into the trap: after a spell of even a few days of bad feeding, bad sleeping, bad breathing, overworking, undersexing, the further gone one is in it the more effort being expended repressing insanity, --the human animal begins to shut down. '"Body and soul", be there thought a distinction, one is a wreck, unable to accomplish anything but sweating just alive through another heated hour of frustration. Is it any wonder one gets naught but nothing done? This, it will be objected by the unthinking, is an idle and "idealist-world"-type argument, in favor of abolishing work for the luxuries of such things as art. So the logic of ignorance incarnate proceeds thus: Work, as they mean it, comes first, for this enables security, which enables one to carry on more or less as one will in what remains of one's more or less free time. Then, they would suggest, he may produce his "art". What kind of sense is that supposed to make? Dragged home from a day wasted on menial tasks not only not requiring little but forcing less of the individual, what can one be envisioned producing? For bear in mind that art, as the same would call it, is unquestionably a mirror-image of what the person making it feels. This being the case, such thinking deems manifestation of mankind's greatest achievement attainable in a few wretched sculptures or charcoal-smears of wart-covered shit and bloody vomit; for this, after all, would be the condition of any intelligent self-respecting individual treated as described. SO Rather: one makes both the "work" and the "art", in quality DEPENDING ON THE CONDITION OF ONESELF. They are really quite indistinguishable bi-products of the same body, soul, thinking, and feeling. The best artist could also do the best work of the world, and often has. Similarly persons who elect not to make of art a means of livelihood are often the greatest exponents of it. It is because either category must and does include both and, indeed, all types, and only the very satisfied right-minded of the living can be expected to do it. But you can do nothing if not yourself. It is yourSELF, your true self, that gets the best results with everything, and, after all, no one feels bad by default. How to achieve that peak level...? That is really the trouble, I tell you... A few basic things certainly help: Proper Rest Nutrition Emotional Stimulus of a positive nature Physical Comfort Useful Exercise Social Living Common Sense over long term spans Wisely-Directed Effort, the discrimination to know when and how it works Something must be appended versus the distinction between "art" and... everything else. In harmony with the arguments in the previous paragraphs, there is then this principle, that "art", and the state of mind capable of creating it, are different only in that there is "in some keepable form" a way to verify the one. They are really one and the same; things like painting, composition, mathematics, and writing become the highest states achievable to man, with the least possible of the average, pre-made, inhuman raw materials and the most possible of his supercharged self. Things, incidentally, like photography and choreography are thereby seen as "lesser arts", because they involve more "prefabrication" by the arts of science, or music, respectively, heavily leaning on technological props which subtract from the equation by just so much the amount the "artist" weighs in at on the creative scale. It is the "from scratch" stuff that, it seems to me, counts the most. ... "Don't practice "art", per se, practice BECOMING YOUR SELF!!!" |
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