To be continued...

We are all Fathers; fathering, fatherless of orphaned rascals.

Man, women and children all, the subjects of ourselves to be led and coaxed.

I am a father to my own stubborn griefs sitting complacent atop my hearts cage,

Where the soldier's spear gave ease to the crucified, where Adam gave that bone to be Eve... We are the hobo father.  

Even as Neptune, fluid as grace ever was, we batter the mother for wet dust.

That it all be pulverised to build the scars and the scabs, the palaces of the longing made of obsidian cuts, sew with the echoes of howling wolves, that we can know ourselves by our disease.

Rock that baby, jive the still blind infant, be with the joy amidst crashing tragedy.

Be the father, be the tears of a toughed heart... On all day's we are the father.



Excuse that above, or don't, it's from a ways back, not too far back and I think I might have already published it on facebook though I kind of went searching for it and couldn't find it in my recent past... so who knows?

But for some reason, right now, it does makes certain sense to carry on underneath this draft from whenever because I think it somehow captures the sense of what I might be coming to terms with.

About 5 years ago someone put me onto the 'Power of Now' by Eckhart Tolle and about the same time I was fairly ensconced and starting to make some headway in a dealer gallery. So I was working like a bastard and meditating like a bastard too. Mr Tolle said I didn't really need to do the meditation thing but I always have so I used that to work my way through his book.

Long story short I left the gallery, under the guise of being kicked out, but I'd made up my mind previous to that and from a particular instance whereby I decided that that particular procedural system of art making and art selling wasn't actually of much use to me as I'd figured, and made use of, the ways offered by Mr Tolle to the extent that the making of the art, how it comes to exist and find it's way into the world, was of far greater importance, somehow, than the art itself.

So I went ambitionless and it wasn't hard at all as all those ambitions I'd had were pretty much attained and achieved... okay, things could get bigger, that might have been the new ambition except the essence of achieving had been well and truly sorted so it was quite easy to drop such things and just meander about.

And this I did. For about 4 years I just meditated whenever I could and just did as little work as was possible to keep the base sense of what was needed chugging along. To this extent I was what might be called lucky as I'd already managed to put together a framework, for existence, which didn't need much feeding and that was simply because I knew if such needs were small, paltry even, then I could put all my efforts into the art I'd decided it was worth having a go at.

Anyway, as time went on I began to feel that Mr Tolle, and subsequent study of other 'Guru's', seemed to be missing something, something important,and it's been somehow nagging me to figure out what it actually is.

Because the interesting thing was that whilst I stopped wanting things the things themselves didn't stop wanting me and as time went on this became somehow understood in the sense that with my head out of the equation, because I've ended up pretty good at not thinking, a deeper sense of want seemed to be a part of me. We could quite easily put this down to the subconscious becoming conscious and it's a pretty good way to see it but it also seemed deeper than that somehow too, wider even, and it might sit better possibly as a mixing of the collective consciousness, as posited by Jung, with an evolving earth consciousness.

Then at the same time I found myself apt to talk and make jokes, and generally have fun, at and within any opportunity that presented itself and this seemed somehow to go back to the Tolle thing, the now, and be a very simple and genial sociality. And I like that, and I still do like it. A lot seems to be the willingness to play the fool, to be unencumbered by ego and just serve within any group of people to steer, even if ones self needs immolating (set afire), towards easiness and the abandonment of harsh, serious and all that other stuff.

This then sets up a dichotomy of sorts whereby we , or I and can drop the supposedly royal we, have the totally now resonating sociality where all boundaries of power and status disappear and the animal of human congeniality raises it's head to purr in simple gestures of fun and comradeship and on the other hand we have what might be a world starting to shape itself which would be entirely conducive to this simplified and easy sociality... but it isn't yet.

And this seems the missing bit. The guru's can't help but 'be there' and then in communication advise us how to 'get there' too, and while being in their direct area might actually communicate this more readily than the words do without the presence, this then seems to be the area where work needs to be done... the transition, as it were. That while our heads and our hearts hearken to this state, and may often be in it, the physical world has such a burden of inertia about it that we can't help but be adverse to it yet at the same time it may be the biggest and most vital thing we could be 'adapting' ourselves to.

If it isn't yet what shall I call it?

I was out driving yesterday, a few things spread across our metropolis wanted finding by me, and maybe it's somehow about that. That ideas about what might be are just sitting out there waiting to be found, not formed even, and it, that state of possibility that is, is about being possible too. Bugger, that doesn't make sense, and somehow I don't think it can... until it's ready to.

And I think quite a few others have found that driving, sitting in a car and watching, can be advantageous in the sense of being inspirative. Maybe it's the betweeness, between theres and heres as in this was this and that'll be that.

Lots of people tend to find nature inspiring and maybe theres something to that but possibly more than that is that they are allowing themselves to just wander, and yes nature can be restful, but as well an expectation that nature is inspirative might make the whole gesture a waste of time as this supposed communication comes from nature when it could very well be that not expecting it, inspiration, it what makes it available and it's far less about the circumstances that might bring it forth.

Me, I was on the motorway first but that just bogged up real quick and I got off at the very first exit, Otahuhu, and kinda meandered... I always take the path of least resistance, whether it be physical or mental. Yesterday it was physical in the sense that as soon as those cars bogged up, made their lines of impatience I just went another way, and given I always have time on my hands I'm not really adverse to wasting it, and I ended up at a place where I used to go years ago, Rosenfeld Kidson which is an exotic timber supplier. I made up an excuse for myself that I'd see if I could find a bit of Maple as it's in the back of my mind somewhere that I'll eventually get back into making guitars, so excuse found I went in and followed my nose.

The sum of that visit was, and I had no idea of this as I wandered about within this cathedral of potential, was as I left after getting a price for one particular piece, which ended up being Cherry, that wood that always tends to remind me of Chekov and Russian springs, I remembered my own great piles of stashed timbers and realised how profoundly rich I am. And that's partly that I recognised, remembered my own great stash of timbers, but also that adding the odd new bit, like adding a notion of a $100.00 bit of Cherry when theres a spare hundie floating about, it all adds up to this richness of having time and space available to actually be my own sense of what rich is.

Ah, even with this meandering writing I do I have an objective except I have no idea how I'm going to get there and yet this wandering has given me a hint as I remember back to yesterday, which already seems so far away, and in that timber place something of my being bouncing off others seems to have made sense. It's as if me just carrying my time about lazily and the possibles I might be accruing even looser it seems to spark off in others a wondering in themselves of what might concern them to hold stuff that way. There was a point I was talking to a chap, not at but around somehow, the appreciation of timber and I mentioned finding my own as packing crates and sawmills being unwilling to go near them for the possibility of old nails left in it and so having to build my own sawmill in the driveway and I, now in hindsight, felt this fellows wondering himself about fixing his old boat to go fishing more.

How is this? I didn't see it yesterday... I'm sure of that, but I know I felt something, an opening, a gap as it were, in the defined wandering towards the yet to be defined... interesting.

Now should I open that up a bit more or go straight to the objective?

The objective I think and it was about the how of realising ones own projecting, the mirroring we all do where the world is us, but in somehow being able to see that but also see beyond that to the reflective reflections... and it's the interference patterns, which are what light does... when it's a wave.

This was actually a couple of weeks ago and for some reason I'd gone back to the experiment with light through slits and where before the slits it was particulate and after the slits it became wave like... it made no sense then and I didn't really need it to but it must have found it's way into what I call the back of my head because yesterday as I passed those mansions of Remuera Rd and wondered why I like them so much it occured to me the question of being reflective and understanding oneself in those reflections was also about seeing beyond the reflections and feeling, seeing, whatever, the reflection reflecting of others and quite suddenly this experiment in light came to me.

And it's an insight but it's an insight still sketchy... but that's it's business and not mine, let it go then and if it wants to come back it might even find me willing, or busy chasing others... and it reminds me too of Pacific navigators, which incidentally makes a certain unquantifiable sense too because the other day I was looking for the Latin of boat and it was navi, but also vessel and ship etc, and, anyways, how the navigators watched the waters for interference patterns. That for most the waves might be doing what waves do and all moving one way except on the edges of those waves are the waves which move underneath and there are layers of these waves going all the way down... that they can see the reflections of the Islands they are wanting to get to.

And, of course, having gotten this far theres something sitting on the edges right now beckoning and playful, some remembered idea or thing which will bring it all together, tantilising... but, it'll come in it's own sweet time, or it won't.

Patience indeed might very well be a virtue.

Prejudice and discrimination.

Straight off the bat you might think I'm going to go off and add to the demonisation of these words... which might in itself, that start, show off my own prejudice within my own expectation of how I might decide you are coming to this post.

I suppose then, in the above instance, I could be illustrating why prejudice and discrimination are problematic and it's therefore easier to just bannerise these poor words without giving them the time and the space they might actually require.

I love prejudice and discrimination! (How's that for an opening? Throw your half empty coffee cup at the screen right now... and leave disgusted!)

prejudice

ˈprɛdʒʊdɪs/

noun

noun: prejudice; plural noun: prejudices

1.

preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience.

discrimination

dɪˌskrɪmɪˈneɪʃ(ə)n/

noun

noun: discrimination; plural noun: discriminations

1.

the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex.

2.

recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another.

What has brought this up for me is one or two friends I've been talking to over the past few days who shared what for us, in hindsight, was growing up as a minority... except then it might have been a racial minority but now we don't really say such things as that and what we say is cultural minority though that doesn't work either because way back then, living and going to school in South Auckland, we were all part of that culture so even then cultural minority didn't apply unless one really went big and used the appellation in regard to the whole of New Zealand and the comparisons became economic stratifications...

So what it was is that we were white kids within a culture of predominantly darker skinned kids, see how difficult this is? What actual descriptive terms am I allowed to use?

The thing is that, and this comes through with quite a few, but by no means all, these people of Euro descent I now come across from the old days, is that it wasn't at all about measured differences at all and just surviving in what ever way seemed to be the best way to just keep surviving... and having fun.

And while I was talking to one of these old friends I even told a story where I went to Art School and the first month or so I felt uncomfortable and I couldn't figure out why until I eventually realised I hadn't actually spent so much time, day after day, just in the company of white people.

The thing was, I think, that we learned, without thinking about it, that prejudice was required to a certain degree (while at the same time we didn't even know prejudice was even a word) except it had to be held fairly lightly and one had to discriminate very quickly. What that means is that situations and circumstances could change all the time and you had to be fluid, you had to weigh up situations quickly and then live by those decisions... until things changed.

To that extent survival, if things got hot, depended somewhat on not being extreme in ones prejudices whereby one was overly positive or overly negative... that would get you into trouble. And with all that said the colour of ones skin was never more than a surface treatment. Far more important things came up first as instinctive and intuitive decisions had to be made.

Like one day you might be down in Mangere Bridge and at a house where the family were Maori but the father had been in some government job for decades and they lived in a much better house than you did and they introduced you to cheese spread out of a jar bought at the supermarket but then the next day you'd be on the other side of the mountain where the shade cooled out the house for most of the day, and be with another new friend you'd met at cubs, and their house would be run down and full of just washed clothes with a bunch of semi-pulled apart cars littering the section and learning how to shoplift down the local dairy and this boy would have blonder hair than you did.

It was just this big huge melting pot of difference, and yes, there were fairly obvious differences though they simply weren't differences that counted, and you just couldn't be prejudiced but then at the same time you needed to have some prejudice available in case it could be thrown up as a point of difference, a uniqueness to make things interesting. Yes, you did see prejudice, as we now like to call it, except you didn't 'look' at that. You 'looked' for anger and problems and the colour of ones skin had nothing to do with that... though of course it actually did.

Discrimination then became a life line. You needed absolutely to discriminate, to be discriminating. Again it had nothing to do with the colour of ones skin... it was the edges that counted, What was underneath and around the edges? What was the emotional underpinning, what seethed and boiled if anything? Was a smile at a joke hung on difference loaded or authentic?

Because what you did learn fairly quickly was that when situations might get tense it was often that this minority which you were supposedly a part of made you the representative of the majority you weren't actually a part of at all except, by default, simply because of the colour of your skin you became.

So yeah, I've had these few chats with white people who shared the same basic upbringing that I had and we're prejudiced as fuck, certified card carrying members of not even giving the bastards any chance to be anything other than what they obviously are... that surface details don't matter but they give you clues as in what kind of shit might be hidden and under what cloaks... or not.

Do I resent ever being part of what ever supposed minority I might or might not have been a part of given whatever circumstances were in progress that used such definitions to define what might be prejudicial? Fuck no, that'd be stupid and take away some of the fun. 'Cause in the end once you've figured out the possible use of prejudice and discrimination it, they, are a useful set of tools to get one more orientated, aligned as it were, to having fun and being interesting, and that, as far as I can tell, has absolutely nothing to with colour, gender, money or anything fucking stupid like that... while at the same time somehow being all about it. It's then nothing to do with what it is but what you might do with it that counts... in my book anyway.

Progress is hypocrisy in action.

I had something happen last week, I think it was last week, where somewhat out of the blue I was invited back to an old haunt. I had said to someone that this would eventually happen, to which they had doubts, but it was one of those things that just felt inevitable though in this case somewhat akin to unfinished business.

And that made sense simply in how the invite was couched. As in like come back and start at the bottom, which I didn't answer except I did say I would surely come back in for a chat at the least. Because, for me, there are things I'd quite like to do and in this regard theres a possibility of investment in that so I'm more than willing to offer my side of what might be a round of bargaining.

In the meantime I tied up again some old strings left dangling and with that reviewed a little of what said old haunt was up to and made a seemingly innocuous comment... boom! Door closed. Oops, but then again, not really oops as I'd tweaked an emotional edge got a reaction and realised nothing hew had happened so the whole thing would have been a waste of time anyways.

Then, just the other day, someone gets all upset about an attack on something cherished and new and goes mad, as in angry this and that and then this and then that, and again I'm like bloody emotions, they can be a pain in the ass.

Now I've nothing against emotions per se except when the owners of said emotions are victimising themselves with their own emotional outbursts and basically using such to blame the world for all their own unresolved problems.

And this leads to one of the things I say quite often now which is that when people are irrational then no amount of rationality is going to make any difference especially, it seems, and this is something I've encountered recently, these people who have these emotional outbursts seem to enshroud their denial in being all for critical thinking... weird.

But then again I don't really care that much and instead of trying to push my own ideas of what might be going on I turn things around and wonder why I might feel a need to offer what I think are either answers or a better set of questions to address whatever any emotional outburst is actually sitting on top of. To that end it's like feeling the magnetism within any outer shows of emotions which seem to be irrational and then feeling whether these outbursts are setting off little echoes in me so I can dig down deeper into myself and uncover any little pots of my own gold.

I still like intellect though and maybe that's about all the years I've spent meditating and being able to quiet my mind not to the extent that it's an enemy worth vanquishing but that being able to isolate the intellect and then feel around it's edges for attachments to emotionality has somehow honed the abilities with intellect I might have. It's not that it's suddenly so much better so much that it's possibly a little more refined.

Trouble is though that even this seems problematic in the sense that so many people seem to ride the unbroken horses of their emotionality that even being rationally unencumbered, not completely of course, seems to be a threat a lot of people can smell from ages away and start fighting even before the lines of the cage are even drawn.

What I do find though is that hypocrisy seems to be the defining gesture. An unrecognised hypocrisy which seems entirely obvious to me yet seems to be entirely oblivious to the people who brandish it alike their own form of nationalism and patriotic fervour... weird.

Me, I love my hypocrisies, and often go in search of deeper and more vital inconsistencies... they are the emulsifiers of my existence, hypocrisy is that ingredient which allows the disparity of oil and water to mix and have the best of each doing their work together.

But out there in the world there seems to be nothing worse, nothing more demeaning of post modernist development and progress, than hypocrisy. Yet, if theres anything the whole world swims in it is hypocrisy except it's always outside... never can it be inside.

That seems then the catch 22, if I even remember what a catch 22 is (so I better google it) but before I do that I'll speculate... it is the point at which disparity must be faced. "a dilemma or difficult circumstance from which there is no escape because of mutually conflicting or dependent conditions."

So it is then pretty much what I thought it was except I see it as something to be embraced whereas the accepted meaning is it is something to be avoided at all costs. 

Now I come to my own catch 22 and there was a quote a few years ago I read but alike I usually do I just read it, took it on board but forgot about the details of who said it and what was specifically said. The gist of it was though that some enlightened dude said that once you are enlightened you know completely and utterly that such cannot be explained but that the whole and inexplicable reason for having attained enlightenment is to try and do so.

Even then, at the supposed heights of human achievement, what do we find? Hypocrisy.

At this point I think I'll go right back to the beginning, not of my life, but this post. Why? 'Cause I like intellect.

So we have an attack or a defense of something and let's say it's an intellectual stance yet the attack/defense is powerfully emotional. This power, then, which underlines the intellect is drawn from the emotion. This then is the obvious clue. Power.

Therefore, I'm bored now and I want to rap this up, any display of power is hypocrisy in action and what may define it as useful or otherwise is the order to which it is recognised or not.