Deep dark wrinkles etch the face looking up at me

An Indian at the post office, back against the wall

Legs curled under him, or maybe none at all

His sign reads: homless, hungry, plees help me

I kneel down, knees on the ground, now eye to eye

Strange alter--the thought flashes and rushes by

What tribe I ask, pulling out bills for this hungry guy

Duwamish he says, sounding shy with a tear in his eye

You know of Princess Angeline then, Seattle's daughter.

Ma told me stories yes, said that gramma knew her

No one believed her, cause she was a whisperer

But I've been where Wewick squatted, with her beads and her water

How about we exchange: give me a dream, I give you dollars

You the crazy man, but I'll play. You serious?

Ask your friends. They call me Doctor Serious

You a doc? PhD, a freeloading member of a community of scholars

What's with the rhymes? Keeps the talk from being small

What's the dream? I was gettin' outa the wind at the new hotel

They called the police and ran me off. Today it happened, real as hell

Same as the dream. At the Marriott? Yes, just using their damn wall.

Can't see it's worth two bucks he says as I hand him the money

Oh it is, it is, and more, but that's my going rate for now

I'm off to the Marriott, I'll explain the origin of my new vow

I will say, I will not stay, I will not pay, not even a copper penny

Another Kind of Blue

Monday, January 23, 2017

4:14 AM

and        and  and         and         and                    and

fffft                     ffft                              fffsssss

First Aide: Whoa girl, you're drinking from a pail…not good

Second Aide: She's

cat's tail, monkey's mail, all hail the third rail

argghhhhhh

Policeman: she's not making any sense

cracks in                           facts

                artifacts for                  sealing wax

Social worker: She presents as a 30-year old delusion.

black in                    white       not                           polite

give me                                                 candlelight

Doctor: No, it's chlorpromazine for you young lady.

lights out                         no                  doubt

hey                        doc    wanna gawk        a hawk   a fauk

Nurse: Room seven will be available shortly.

i'm an                        alternator             forthe     dictator  

i'm a               leading                       indicator

ok                       ok                   I'm           outa       here   

hear                        

Sickness Afoot

Thursday, January 19, 2017

7:22 AM

The Parliament of Owls is in session

But we cannot see their eyes

Their heads are looking behind them

Because owls do not move their eyes

What's coming comes from behind

It's not what is clearly seen, so visible now

It's the sickness afoot, the sickness coming

That's what the owls are looking for now

Sickness is afoot, evil's in full view

Sickness is afoot, where is our guide?

Sickness is afoot, what to do? What to do?

Sickness is afoot, where resides the guide?

Leonard wrote that magic is afoot

And Buffy sang his words

Leonard wrote that God is alive

And Buffy sang is words

But now, sickness is afoot,

And evil is alive, and where is our guide?

Sing the song that's in your dream

Dreams of the night will be our guide!

A Note…

In the dream I saw owls sitting on branches of a tree.

No eyes could be seen as they were all looking behind

them. A sound began to rise, I think it was from the owls,

singing the line, "Sickness is afoot."

As I woke, I started hearing Buffy St. Marie singing

Leonard Cohen's words from his book, Beautiful Losers.

Dreams have to do with the future. Our conscious intentions

as well as our hopes are all formed from what we know,

from what is past.

The owls know what is coming. Look to your dreams

to provide the hints.

How the War on Reality Ended

Tuesday, January 10, 2017
6:22 AM

http://ralockhart.com/WP/HowWarOnRealityEnded.wav

They say breathing will remain free

And there will be no charge for sleep

The call of nature will be untaxed

     except in public facilities

There will be no tuition for mandatory

     courses in Newtruth

So I've been told

Hard to know what to believe

Except what has been ordered

By the PDC, the Provisional

Declaration Committee

Authorized in Tweet 767

In the Year of Our Trmp 1

The crowd's hands are not tied

But well sat upon

The crowd's eyes are not blindfolded

But no one is seeing

The crowd's ears are not plugged

But no one hears

The crowd's mouths are not gagged

But no one utters

The crowd's memory

Is not remembering

The crowd's imagination

Is cowed

The crowd's dreams

Are no more

The crowd's soul

Has departed

The crowd's ruler

Tweets in tweetspeak

A recent dream pictured a stack of manuscript pages with the title page showing. This dream, like several other dreams in the  past, came with a sense of task, as if I was being presented with something to do. I am used to this feeling, and quite a number of my articles and books have had their origin in such dreams.

These dreams arrive from somewhere outside my conscious intention, but obviously having their origin in the intentionality of “something other.”  I don’t need anything else on my plate just now, yet I cannot ignore what has been presented to me by what I have called the “presentational psyche.”

I have decided to post this dream on my blog as a way to publicly commit to the project because it feels crucial to me.

Here is the image from my dream.

The dream image shows the title, the subtitle, my name and my press, along with the publication date. What was startling to me was that the image was presented in the typeface of the 1956 Olympia portable typewriter I just received for my birthday. I realized that if I was to fully follow the intention of the dream, I would have to write this “book” …if that is to be what it is… on this typewriter.

Here is my “provisional” introduction. I say provisional, because what I will be posting in this blog is my original typescript pages. I trust you will tolerate this reversion to older technology, without the modern convenience of automatic error correction and other such wonders. I encourage feedback. I will use your feedback later on when I begin to edit whatever this project turns into.

Please feel free to comment on the blog or by email.

I graduated from high school in late spring of 1956. My graduation present from my parents was a new Olympia SM3 portable typewriter. It was the first in a long series of typewriters I collected—just as my Esterbrook fountain pen acquired a year earlier was the first of scores of fountain pens in my collection. I still use that old Esterbrook and it remains my favorite pen.

I've given away all my typewriters, replaced now by an endless string of computers.

My first experience with computers was in the spring of 1958. It was my sophomore year at USC, and the computer was a Honeywell—their first entry into the computer market. I learned programming, card punching, and how to deal with large computer printouts. I also learned how to ferry all those cards and all that paper on special carts without spilling it all—a computer user’s nightmare in those days.

All this has come back to mind because my wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday. What sprang instantly to mind was a manual typewriter!

As I began to research this desire, I was surprised to find that typewriters were still being made. But I could tell they were all plastic and cheap and unlikely to last long, as is the ethos of the modern consumerist culture. What rose up in me was the desire for "the real thing," a typewriter made of metal, a typewriter that was built with precision, a truly crafted typewriter.

In short, I began to lust after my original typewriter—that O1ympia SM3.

A few quick pecks into Google and I was linked to an excellent refurbished model of the Olympia SM3. I learned it was one of the best manufactured typewriters built to high standards, of high quality materials, design and craftsmanship in post-war Germany—a kind of Mercedes or Porsche among typewriters. The proprietor had just decided to sell it because he had found an earlier model for his permanent collection. He gave it one last work-over and in a few days it was on my desk.

As I typed this blog entry, I experienced wonder that my fingers remembered how to strike the keys to make them work properly—nothing at all like the soft silent touch of the computer keyboard.

I love the touch, the sound, the slowness, even the errors. The machine needs no electric power and no connection to the Internet. It feels "right" in some way I cannot articulate. I don’t think this is the romantic nostalgia that so often grips people of my age (I will be 78 later this month). The closest I can come to expressing this inchoate feeling is that more and more we seem to be serving the machine, rather than the machine serving us. This echoes the much-neglected thought of Lewis Mumford (see for example, his Art and Technics published in 1952). He argued for the primacy of the person and it is personhood that is being "replaced" by the machine (robotics, artificial intelligence, and the mechanisms of commodification).

Hey, Mr. Thomas Wolff, maybe we can go home again. I do feel "at home" with this machine. And I have company. Though I am not a fan of any of Danielle Steel’s 100 novels, I do like the fact that she typed them all on her 1946 Olympia typewriter!

There are three great intertwined denials, ubiquitous in their reach, hegemonic in their power, and life-destroying in their structure and dynamics.

First, is the Denial of Truth. The first level is our full reality. We are unconscious of much of who we are. Becoming conscious is the great dream of psychology, depth psychology in particular. But the degree of humanity working to become more conscious is miniscule to the point of vanishing. The degree of unconsciousness underlying the great bulk of individual thoughts and actions is vast beyond imagining. Unconsciousness pervades our relationships, from those most intimate to those of only passing interest. It pervades our involvement in the groupings we become part of, and our unconsciousness multiplies with other’s unconsciousness to maximize the corrosive potential of collectives at all levels of cultures, nations, and all else. What passes for truth in the public consciousness is grasped after as if such could function to bring individuals to consciousness. Dreams are the great “truth tellers,” but how many among us billions of humans listen, let alone bring such truths to manifestation in life?

Second, is the Denial of Risk. Unconsciousness cuts us off from the fundaments of life, not only in our own body, mind and spirit, but in the body, mind and spirit of all life around us, including the life of our planetary home, the earth. Unconsciousness breeds the denial of risk inherent in separating human life from its rhizomic necessities. Chief among these risks is what functions as the life-blood of our contemporary life: money. Money has become our operative religion. More than any other single factor, we have become unalterably attached to money, as if “In Money We Trust,” would sum up every department of our lives. The powers that be that operate the world’s financial system know this, count on this, rely on this “belief” system, and operate as grand priests of the money temple. What we are not told, what is kept from view, is the degree of risk building up throughout the world. The risk is denied. Yet, the collapse of all great powers and empires has been triggered by risk gone wild and triggering the collapse. Because money has become more foundational in our lives than any other factor, this coming collapse poses catastrophic risk for everyone’s welfare. And, sad to say, most everyone is denying this risk.

Third, is the Denial of Love. We can only do to others and so much of what is happening in the world, when we deny love. We can only do to the life of the world, what we are doing, when we deny love. We can only do to our habitat, our home, our earth, when we deny love. As unconsciousness persists, as money invades and pervades every facet, love disappears. Freud spoke of the great battle between Eros and Death. Without love, death of most everything of value will be what we live. That is our present future.

It is not clear there is sufficient human will to say no to power and money and the commodification of desire.

Dreams are raising this issue as a great question mark.

[To be continued…]

PACO MITCHELL’S REPLY TO RUSS’ CATS ACCEPTING CHRIST BLOG POST

Hi Russ,

When I first read that you’d had a dream instructing you, point-blank, to read a Wallace Stevens poem every day, I was not in the least surprised that you planned to accede to the dream-mandate. How could you not? After all, to refuse such a dream-hatched directive is a most foolish thing to do.

So, when you next announced your plan to respond to each daily Wallace Stevens poem in whatever poetic way came to you, I thought: “Harrumph! Well, that’s certainly an interesting project, old boy! Eminently sensible. Stands to reason.”

Then I read your first “Stray”:

Gods and Tuna

A little-known secret:

Cats accepting Christ

Buddha and all the others

Like so many tuna

Humans could learn

From cats—but don’t

Wait for that to happen

It’s hard for me to describe what happened when I read the second line—“Cats accepting Christ.” I was like one struck by lightning—a commonplace phrase unless it happens to you. I’ve read a lot of wonderful poetry in my life, but there was something about those three words that “electrified” me.

Knowing the danger of explanations and interpretations, which can drain the precious life-essence out of a poem or a dream, I’m reluctant to say too much about my experience, besides scrabbling for a handful of superlatives. Perhaps I can make a couple of comparisons, though.

Anyone who would like to get a feeling for the quality of my “Cats Accepting Christ” experience, might consider looking up Jorge Luis Borges’ marvelous story, The Aleph. An aleph is a “point that contains all points,” and whoever sees one can see every point in the universe simultaneously. Such was the rush of images that flooded my mind when I first read that little line, that the experience reminded me of the aleph!

Another way to think about my “poetic” experience is to imagine spinning together—as in an immense ball of yarn—the entire history of Western religion from the most primitive animal ancestors, the archaic shamanic cults, through the Egyptian cat-goddesses, to Dionysian blood-rituals and mystery-cults, to Christ and the Christian Mass—the body and blood of Christ—all the way up to the present, the New Dispensation and the Coming Guest.

As you can see, this kind of experience does not readily lend itself to explanation, unless one is willing to emulate Philip K. Dick, who spent years of his life, writing 8,000 pages, in pursuit of his visionary exegesis.

Needless to say, I was dumbstruck, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how I was being affected by that simple spontaneous line. Not being Philip K. Dick, however, and having been afflicted with an annoying series of Mercury Retrograde misfortunes, I did manage to compose this little poem in response:

Cats may accept Christ,

Buddha, and all the others,

In the form of tuna—

So solemnly addressed

With licking tongues and gnawing fangs,

Whiskers quivering over the sacrificial bowl.

“This is the body of Christ, my child,

Take and eat."

Alternatively, cats may also accept roast beef, lamb, pork or kibble

As Christ, et al.

But what about water from the tap?

“This is the blood of Christ, my child!

Take and drink."

I’m just skimming over the surface with this little poem, of course, but it will have to do for now. Besides, it keeps me in the flow of your poem. Thanks so much for posting your “Strays.”

Paco Mitchell