Dear diary,
I don’t have bad timing; I AM bad timing. Even when the timing is perfect somewhere, and luck is in the air; it straightway dissipates, as soon as I enter the scene: all ticking time curdles.
It’s like a carpenter who has a lengthy line of nails to hammer. As long as he hammers unconsciously, humming and daydreaming, the nails are hammered fine, firm & flat; but once the carpenter’s attention is drawn to his task, so that he begins to second-guess & over-think his actions, he hits his thumb. So I Bryan am like a thing that causes the world to beware of itself. Wherever I’m at becomes a point of universal organ-smash. And my body’s buzzing angst is like space crying “Ow!”
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thot;
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
As Hamlet always sez.
Alright, I feel that I’m going to be changing the subject a lot in today’s post, cuz I’m haunted by the fact that I must meet with my family later this evening for a feast, and that makes me nervous, and when I’m nervous my mind flits from whim to whim like a rabbit.
Or like a squirrel. Spazzy and anxious. I understand rodents. Isn’t that gross—to have rodents as your people? Well, one can’t choose one’s species. “So much the worse for the wood that finds it is a violin,” as Rimbaud always sez, in one of his letters (I think it’s the one to Izambard: the same letter where he says some other stuff).
Have you ever looked at an animal up-close? One time I heard a bonk-bonk-bonk on my downstairs window, and I turned around and there was a goose outside, touching its beak to the pane; probably fighting its reflection. The creature apparently couldn’t see into my house, so I was able to approach the window very close without it knowing. Or perhaps it DID know that I was there, on the other side of the glass, observing it carefully; maybe it just didn’t care. I’d have thot the thing would fly away in fear, at the sight of me. Why wouldn’t you fear an ugly human, especially if you were a wild bird? Humans look like sickly bears. Anyway, this encounter with the goose began my habit of frequenting the space by that downstairs window, since it seemed to be a favorable lookout for exotic beings. And I wasn’t disappointed:
One time a rabbit was sitting there, eating some of my weeds. (There were clumps of weeds that grew naturally, right next to the Air Conditioner unit, which was situated outside this same window.) I was able to stare long and long directly at his rabbit-face – again, either he didn’t know I was watching, or he didn’t care. I’ve begun to believe that he invited me.
Two memories of this encounter stick with me: one is the realization that I couldn’t really see him from the front; I mean, because his eyes were bulging out from either side of his head, his front view was just this narrow strip of fur terminating in a nose-mouth combo, which never did stop twitching-and-munching; and the eyes were jet-black semi-spheres occupying the sides (that is, the sides of this face that I called a narrow strip of fur). So when he cocked his head, I could see him eye-to-eye, but only one eye at a time. From this I conclude that rabbits must have a two-dimensional soul, like a thin sheet of gold located at the center of their being. And people assume that rabbits’ brains are tiny, but I say that we don’t know enough about them to judge just WHERE their thot occurs or how much volume it should displace. I think their thinking takes place within their nose. — That’s the other of the two memories that I keep in my heart forever, as souvenir from our date: His nose was incessantly twitching. And that’s exactly how my imagination works; so I conclude that we’re related. The nose twitches and rotates left, right, up, down, diagonal, always seeking to know more worldstuff: it “sees” thru scenting, and it probably plays with all smells by way of its fancy.
Also note how squirrels and mice are so nervous that they vibrate. Their breathing is like an in-out-in-out engine. If you could hold one in your hand, I bet it’d feel like a warm soft motor. We think of the heart of such rodents as being a single-cylinder contraption, but, as I said above about the mind of the rabbit, the heart of the squirrel is beyond our comprehension. I say it’s at least about six or seven cylinders strong. Cuz I’ve seen squirrels leap from branch to branch on my neighbor’s trees, and they jump seemingly X times their own body length. I can’t even jump more than a meter; and when I land, my paps jiggle. So if anyone has a single-cylinder heart, it’s us menfolk. And you should see mine, specifically: it’s like a shriveled black raisin.
. . . to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you . . .You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
Those snippets are from the poem called “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” by Wallace Stevens.
So I come from being a fan of rap music, thus I’ve been exposed, maybe more than other pink suburban creatures who lack rap-love, to many of the problems between light-skinned and dark-skinned people. In fact, that’s an understatement. Let me just come out and admit the truth: I am the sole expert on this issue; of all people, from all cultures and colors of skin, I Bryan Ray the ex-rapper journo, am the only one who understands properly all the problems of so-called race.
Now the first thing that you need to understand is that there is no race at all. What I mean by this is this: If I, a pink suburban creature, go visit the beach (I’d never go on my own accord, cuz I hate the beach; I’d have to be kidnapped and dragged there, kicking and screaming) and chain myself to a rock for the whole afternoon, soon my pink flesh will change to light olive & then greenish, and I’ll come home looking more like an anastasia spider mum than a cotton rosemallow. But that does not mean that I am now a totally different race.
. . . purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crowtoe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,
The glowing violet,
The musk-rose, and the well attired woodbine,
as Milton’s uncouth swain always sez in “Lycidas”.
And that’s the same way that all the so-called races were invented. In the beginning: we were all one free-range egg. Sort of umber in hue, maybe a little ocher; for it contained all the colors & possibilities. Then a giant hand came out of the sky, and it was the hand of a child, and the child did a magic trick which caused the egg to become fruitful and multiply, and the egg filled the earth, and then this child-hand took some of the eggs and dyed them purple, and others it dyed sky-blue and swirly gold. And some got stickers put on their shells, and some got glitter. This came to be known as “The Easter-Egg Tradition” but originally it was considered just a regular fertility rite. Cuz eggs stand for what comes from hard work (that is, what happens when co-workers perform a ‘quickie’ in the office); and the whole “Easter bunny” phenomenon is due to the fact that bunnies are prolific artists, in the realm of eroticism. Plus they think with their nose, which never stops twitching.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that all the “races” are just interchangeable casings for the same telecommunication device, because we’re all human: that’s the only thing that matters. That’s what I mean when I say there’s no race, there’s just one egg of many copies. And soon God will hatch.
But what do these ur-Gods call each other? They call each other “white” and “black” and “yellow” and “red”. As we pink suburbanites were taught to sing in Church School:
Red & yellow, black & white
They are precious in his sight,
with he being the Church’s “Christ”, as the verse concludes: “Jesus loves the little children of the world”. As I explained earlier, this love of Jesus for children should be distinguished from the child-love of the Church’s priests. But my point is that, when we’re young, before we have learned how to think for ourselves, the religious institutions of our caretakers & guardians brainwash us into using the language of color to refer to one another. So that’s where all the talk of race derives from: Religio-Scientism.
I’m being too flippant, to say that. All racism really stems from the capitalist system. Plus people themselves tend to focus on their differences when they’re terrified. For, say that you enter a strange town, because you were out taking a stroll thru my blog post and enjoying the names of the flowers that I cut from Milton’s poem above; and you come to this latter part of the entry, where it turns a little strange and scary. How can you help noticing that the people in this part of the world have slightly hotter bat-wings than your own? You can tell because they glow a little brighter. You fix upon this difference because you’re terrified, and a frightened brain becomes religio-scientismic and begins to compare & contrast the facts of its environs, in hopes of determining the chemical structure of the available resources, so as to facilitate the concoction of a longer-lasting power source than these lithium-ion batteries that we’re cursed with nowadays. Because your portable telephone went dead; and that’s how you ended up wandering past Lincoln Street and into Upper Hell. (In the 1986 motion picture Blue Velvet, Jeffrey’s family warns him never to venture beyond Lincoln Street.) But once you learn the language of the locals, which is but a continuation of the vocabulary of your own native tongue (with some sexy new syntax), you realize that you’re all the same fallen angels; so there’s nothing to fear from each other: the only thing to fear is the LORD, who made this place and cast you here.
Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments. (Ecclesiastes 12:13)
Never mind what those commandments actually say: nobody knows; or nobody can agree on the list (do we include the pork prohibition or waive it off as devoid of common-sense because bacon is tasty?) and even if we could know these laws, we’d never be able to live up to them; therefore we are doomed.
What this has to do with racism is this: If you get so scared of a new town that you begin to scientifically classify its inhabitants based on the color of their skin rather than on the content of their character, thus overlooking the poetry in each soul and focusing instead on the mere surface qualities, you’ll remain trapped inside the weak lie of appearances, UNTIL the devil before you addresses you directly in French; THEN all your fear-borne bigotry melts away and your self resurrects into the eternal truth of mere being:
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
(That’s Wallace Stevens again, from “Of Mere Being”.) And that fire-bird is the foremost source of the winged devil you just met.
“Truth,” by the way, is the term that earthlings use for “the strongest lie”—the siblinghood and holiness of all living creatures (as opposed to what I called above “the weak lie of appearances”). One way of judgment is far better than the other, even if they’re both a little off. The truest truth is that we’re all utterly alien, which is exactly the opposite of our adjusted gross truth; and that’s A.O.K., in an ongoing manner. For our “gold-feathered bird” simply
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
Yet, if race were real, it would mean that we’re genuinely connected, at least to our own biological parents; and that’s untenable. We’re most truly (most strong-lyingly) all foreign agents, to each other and to our wholly foreign God: whose nickname incidentally is THE FOREIGNER; the ghost who is ever about to hatch; and who is like a rabbit, and who is like a king. (I use similes here because our shared root possesses no bad traits, and all traits are bad-god-breathed; yet poetic tropes are beguilingly self-accurate.) As it is written, in the latter half of “Allogenes” (literally “The Foreigner”; translated by Bentley Layton in The Gnostic Scriptures):
I was seeking to know the ineffable & unrecognizable god, of which people are certainly uncomprehending even if they understand it, the intermediation of the threefold power that is located in stillness and quietness...
Now the powers of the luminaries said to me, “It is enough that through the search for the incomprehensibles you might disperse the inactive element that resides in you.”
Action centered on intuition and earnest instinct, then, is the key; which is why Blake’s most seemingly harsh proverb advises:
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
So let me return now to slavery & the question of reparations:
If you abuse someone, and society catches you red-handed, society makes you pay for the crime you committed. For society has laws just like its God. Nobody can keep track of either set of commands, but the difference in society’s case is that judgment overtly occurs (it’s unknown whether God’s judgment manifests in a covert fashion or not at all; hence vague guesswork like karma and rebirth). So society caught you abusing your brother, now you must pay. One wartime in the slammer, plus a fine of a thrillion dollars.
But consider the case of the lighter-skinned people who enslaved whole multitudes of darker-skinned people. When they were caught red-handed doing this, what did society rule? Did the parties involved even meet to settle in court?
For it’s precisely because there is no such thing as “race” that this crime is abysmal. If race really were a reality, then society might say “O well, whites will be whites,” like a mom says “Boys will be boys” to excuse her brats when they’re caught genociding sauroids. But this is like if we entered the actual heaven that St. Paul established when he dreamt up the residence for his Christ, and we saw there a group of dull-winged man-bats caging and whipping another group of bright-winged men. (I feel that the qualities of “dull” and “bright” interject a bit of bias into this parable, and thus my major point is slightly weakened, but I really want you to identify with the downtrodden; and what’s the point of lying, if I don’t have designs upon your soul?) Beholding this crime, we’d shout “Stop this mayhem, in the name of flux, for you’re all divinities!”
Then if the dull-wingers shamefacedly desist their tormenting of the bright-winged angels, and let the angels out of the cage, and turn their whips back into kinky pleasure-toys like REAL deities, should we let them just walk away without justice being implemented? I mean, the bright-winged ones got their gold sandals and their togas-of-invincibility confiscated during the Top-heavy Redistribution; and now all the dull-wingers have whole closets full of footwear and multiple togas apiece. That ain’t right. I don’t think it’s uncalled for to tell the dull-wingers to return the stolen merchandise to their friends. (Can they ever be friends again? Or will God have to make another newfangled heaven-and-earth?)
Now consider the case of U.S. slavery, how how much more severe was the crime, and how much harder to remunerate the victims. For countless are dead – how do you return a life to its owner? But even if not a single soul had expired, and the whole U.S. slave trade happened yesterday, how would society arrive at a fair compensation for this wretched system?
I myself don’t know all the details, but it seems like a lot of the perpetrators of the barbarity got to walk away with mountains of ill-gotten riches; and meanwhile the humans who suffered this and survived, after having lost absolutely everything except mere being – these souls are told by their oppressors’ smarmy representatives:
“Listen up: we stopped that particularly ugly manifestation of one aspect of this system, but we’re gonna keep this system going, just tweak one of its dials slightly; and now you yourself, after having suffered thru its Inferno, must go back and WORK to stay alive in the very same Inferno. But we pledge to enact our cruelty more slyly this time.”
Even having the memory of the trauma would make it nearly impossible to get thru each day, but a survivor (or her family and eventually her descendants) must continue to compete on the same “playing field” as if all is equal between them and the people a few states away who were born upon cushions of wealth!?
The reason this concerns me is that I favor the human mind and its productions, yet the productions of genius are being curtailed by our allergy to justice. I don’t mean that the perpetrators (or rather their offspring, since too much time keeps passing) need to be harmed or jailed; I don’t really believe in those things – physical punishment, let alone capital punishment, or even imprisonment; especially not for the children of those who were sinners – but, considering what we know from history, the wealth of our world is too tarnished for a soul to have any attitude towards riches but revulsion. The machine needs a complete upheaval and refurbishment. All money is dirty.
But in case you haven’t figured it out by now, I should admit that I know nothing of the details of U.S. slavery. All I know is that if you just peek at one or two smallest parts of that story, you’ve seen enough: You return from your scouting mission with the following report:
“Forget everything; there are no words: this wrong broke the scales; we need to start the galaxy over; flip the board, sweep all the detritus off the table: re-set things right; focus on the basic needs of humankind for the sake of the future: limitless compassion, with harmonious life as our aim, creative relationships as the highest goal. And wealth is the boy who cried wolf.”
*
Too sanctimonious. Now I must perform the job of tearing down this pretty thing that I built. Because I don’t want to be remembered as a preacher of goodness; I want to be a bad influence: a role model who says the evil thing as advice, to trigger you to think for yourself and stop listening to me. I know nothing. There’s only one good thing I’ve discovered in this world, and that’s light beer, filtered cigarettes, and decaf coffee. Also Diet Coke.
Everything you order from McDonald’s, I urge you to supersize it. Get the fries, and when the cashier asks “Do you want those fries supersized?” Answer yes, immediately. And don’t just buy one order of crispy fried chicken: buy a number of buckets. Now pour gravy on your biscuits. Eat the rice with your fingers. (Use the chopsticks to drum.)
I suggest buying a red sports-car. Drive slowly down the block. Make sure you’re middle-aged and balding, so that people know you mean business.
Join a political party. It doesn’t matter which one: any will do; just make sure to argue with your opponents.
Wash your sports-car with sudsy water. Do this in your driveway, and take your sweet time with it. Use a bucket and a sponge. Make sure the water hose is green, and that it has a nozzle on its end with a trigger for the sprayer. If anyone passes in front of your house — for instance, if a kid comes sulking home from school, or a poet bikes by — tap the spray-trigger to give ’em a burst from the hose: just a friendly bit of mischief.
And when you soak your sponge, make sure that it’s dripping with suds; then smooth it in large slow circles over your hood. Note how warm the hood feels: that’s cuz the sun has been shining on it. The hood absorbs the heat.
Now give your car two coats of wax. Again, take your time: this is not a race; it’s all about flaunting your presence to the community. Keep a mid-sized boombox nearby, and play soft rock at medium volume throughout the proceedings.
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