Love Is To Knowledge

It was poetry that I wrote first, around the age of ten or so, and from there it was fifteen years of poetry and journal entries before I started working on the novel. The novel took fifteen years plus to complete. My excuse is that I was researching, reading, and contemplating throughout most of that time--that I didn’t have everything nailed down enough for it to garner respect as a piece of literature.

The actress was the inspiration to finish the first novel, so I could write plays; to win her heart; to fulfill the dreams of being an artist living with their muse. But maybe I was already out of the game, forever estranged for having come to know too much. Nonsense you say, how could learning too much ever estrange anyone from anyone else? Emily Dickinson once said that hearing the truth is such a rare thing, it’s a delight to tell it; but then on the other hand, Frederic Lorca said the worst thing about seeking truth is finding it. So perhaps like everything, the truth itself is paradoxical, both a delight and a horror.

As human beings we ought to relish the truth because our ability to reflect upon the past, consider the present, and imagine the future is what defines us apart from all other creatures here on our beloved, sexy, Earth. Of course there’s the well-known saying that ignorance is bliss, and so we might say an interesting person, a bold person--perhaps even a noble person--is one who cares to know the truth whether it’s a delight or not. Maybe it’s that the truth is a delight to those who are delightful, and a horror to those who are horrible.

Descartes said never accept anything as true unless you clearly know it to be true. How do we know we exist? Because we’re reading words, and we know things like if it’s day or night, and how day and night are divided into seasons, and everything that follows--all such things we clearly know to be true. We know we exist because we’re thinking--we think, therefore we are. OK great, so what’s the most important thing to us? Wait--why even ask what the most important thing is to begin with? Answer: because we can’t get where we want to be unless we first know where we’re at.

Premise: It can be contested that water and food are more important to humans than knowledge, that without it we wouldn’t be able to know anything because we’d be dead. But how do we get water into our system if we don’t first know where it is? People have died, not because water and food wasn’t available, but because they didn’t know how to get to it; and people have also died because they didn’t know what they were drinking or eating would kill them. That makes knowledge a matter of life and death. So it’s not a conundrum, a chicken or egg thing, nor is it even a question as to which is first in importance. An infant will die if uncared for because it doesn’t yet know how to survive. To reply that an infant needs food first, in order to live long enough to gain knowledge, is to confuse the requirement for knowledge with the importance of knowledge. When we make that distinction we realize that for us little naked monkeys, whether it’s first-hand knowledge--where water is--or second-hand knowledge--a parent knowing to supply it--knowledge always comes first.

To those who say love comes first, remember we have to first know who and what to love. Many people have loved things which were not in their interests to love, which in turn cost them much joy and happiness. And to those who point to Einstein’s comment--“Imagination is everything,” remember, he wasn’t making a pronouncement. How could he have developed E = mc2 if he didn’t first know what energy, mass, and light were? How could Picasso have painted Guernica if he didn’t first know what paint, canvas, and war were? Imagination requires knowledge in order to do what it does.

But what of the position that it’s love which gives us the desire to live, and that without it no amount of knowledge would drive us forward? That we wouldn’t keep making babies, building the human bridge into the future. In that sense, for those with heart, take heart, and happily, that love, not knowledge, is first in importance if you think human existence is important. Love is to knowledge what knowledge is to the imagination; one relies on another to exist, while love simply is.

Although truth is derived from knowledge, is it really paradoxical? Perhaps the notion that objective truth is a delight to the delightful and a horror to the horrible is untrue because there is such thing in the world as deceit, and while deceit often wears the mask of truth, truth never the mask of deceit. Truth is what it presents itself as and nothing else because it can’t be anything but what it is. Truth and only truth escapes the paradoxical nature of existence. And if that’s true, then knowing it and acting in accordance with it is what helps us escape confusion while at the same time vetting us as genuine--if one believes humans should operate on truth rather than deceit.

Can deceit be employed as a means to an end which is true? No, because we do not call that deceit; if it’s to bring about the truth, we call it altruism. Just as being angry and being indignant are not the same; one is due to thwarted desires, the other to injustice. That we humans even make such distinctions and have developed words to render such, that alone would lead one to believe all is based on the love of truth.

Love of truth can get you estranged and cut out of the game if that love is not handled correctly. You can either be right or be happy, but you ain’t gonna be both. Too bad for some they’re not better at hiding their love.

Holy Macaroni

It appears victory has been snatched from the jaws of defeat, dear Universe. Why are you so unspeakable of late? Coming from a person who never says nor thinks to say it, you make me want to say it: Holy Macaroni. After the conversation today, I’m 99% certain we’ll get the convention call this summer. I know you’ve been hearing about it for some time, but it appears you’re guiding the right pieces together now, but here’s what I posted to Facebook last Sunday night:

“Dear Sun,

Not only am I dealing with the burden of information in the face of others groping for truth and justice, even in conducting my life as another ordinary citizen, as a writer, as an artist, I’m getting no relief. I know you know the answer whether I’m doing a good job or not, but recent developments and recent disappointments, and failures, have me wondering if I deserve any sympathy. Although I have an excuse, being born in the year of the Dragon, blessed with abundant health, I do have a new personal myth. And even though it’s taken an abnormally long time to change it to something more realistic, i.e. not me going on in my head as if I’m 29, 30, when I’m in my forties, I can see life being fun if the right outcome to the impasse occurs. You know what I want, you’ve heard me say it more than a couple times now--that we’re made aware and sovereign to Earth. That we humans are made aware that we’re part of a larger community within the cosmos, and we’re sovereign--we say what goes and what does not on this planet. What they have done to us will be something to both cry and laugh at, but because consciousness is dynamic, in a few generations or so we’ll be back to normal, but with free energy.

“It’s so difficult to think of free energy and what it means for humanity. To know what Tesla did and what the robber barons did to him, and in turn us. Unlimited free energy would make for a different world, that’s for sure. This moment is difficult to live in, being fraught with such astounding contradictions. To be very realistic, it looks like what’s approaching, that the mouse-trap being completed, the hammer comes down. How hard, and in what fashion, no one knows. Of course we want the magic ending, the new beginning. It’s so difficult to tip-toe along the tight-rope of this year, our 2012. It’s frightening and exciting. Some days it looks like the forces which are denying us free energy will have to resign, other days that the Bank of International Settlements wins and completes its new world order. I hope we hear trumpets one day soon.

“Driving up to meet eyeball to eyeball with sheriffs, testify as to the legality regarding Article V, and what it means to them, and then getting home and waiting a week or so, and sending a final communication, and getting only one reply, requesting I remove them from the list--Hardy-har-har!”

I wrote all that, really down about a few things, and blowing it all off--or not letting the weight of it crush me--I’m through with being crushed I tell ya! One of my fellow Facebookers said they didn't get it, that I lost them at "Dear Sun." I replied that maybe I meant a fake religion, that the way I figure, it may be the best way to think about the grand scheme of things. The Sun really is the giver and the taker of life, and it's undeniably magnificent, and so why not talk to it like you would your god if you were a monotheist? I said I'd rather be a sun worshiper than a monotheist--even a Zoroastrian, and they were rad. Yes, the Sun is my god. My god is there for me every day. My god knows what's going on down here on the face of Earth, and my god loves me just as much as everyone else, and that's one of the reasons why I love my god the most.

But yesterday this one sheriff who is in the news lately because the Attorney General of his state is attempting to remove the powers of arrest from his office, he replies to my e-mail--the one no one else replied to--asking me to call. I called, we talked, and he gets it. He just wants to be assured the basis for arrest is sound as to fact and law. He’ll be convinced Thursday night when we get him on a call with Bill Walker and John Guise.

Now, the desire to be rad: why would anyone have it? A famous playwright on a well-known talk show once said something about wanting to “knock ‘em dead,” to transform how the audience sees existence by the time they hit the exit, to make ‘em laugh till it hurts, make ‘em go Wow one way or another. Why do we want to be rad? For doing new, exciting things never before done in our fields? One reason to be rad is to have access to other rad people. If you’re rad in one way or another you’re usually rubbing elbows with other rad, interesting, and talented people, and that’s fun if you’re a human. It’s very natural to want to meet and hang out with rad people. That’s not a bad reason to aspire to be rad--to be invited to cool parties. But that’s not the only reason. Is it power? Doing something rad as power for having done it? Or is it on the animal level, letting fellow animals know you.are.not.average. Or on a biological level preeminence means power, means security, and security means happiness--happiness the ideal state. Being rad has a purely animal basis. Just like birds who fan their feathers in the hopes of attracting attention and…happiness.

Some would reply that rad people don’t do rad things to have power, they do them because they can’t help being who they are. But you have to want to be rad to actually be it--rad in the sense where achievement is above/beyond the norm, accomplished through time and focus. You have to spend time and effort on something to be truly rad at/in it. Unless the person is a mystical monk or monkess of some sort, I’ll tend to attribute the spirit of most actions to the desire for radness, for power, as requisite for happiness. And again, which would seem natural--the whole thing from Ecclesiastes--vanity of the vanities.

Of course ego comes into play, and today not all ego, but certain ego, gets a bad rap. The type which says, “Ta da! I challenge anyone else to be as rad!” Voltaire and his lover Emilie du Chatelet and other humans back in the 1700s were able to declare how rad they were in that manner--in the sense of challenging other people to be as rad or radder. Isn’t that a good thing? When we see someone being egotistical about being rad, vain even, can’t it be seen in the larger frame of things, that that little monkey is strutting their stuff, ultimately to move the whole game forward? Today anyone who is rad must be blithe about it, not a hint of consciousness. Which is fine, I suppose. Maybe it starts out ego, then mellows into just wanting the Universe to flow through, to bring joy to others. Maybe that’s it, the desire to be rad and the desire to bring joy to others are interwoven. Maybe it’s ego that launches someone to their deserved greatness, and from there, best case, they carry on, no longer out of ego, but out of the desire to bring more joy into the world.

What else? I went to see the movie The Hunger Games. I’d been aware of it as a book peripherally, that it was some sort of Harry Potter phenomena, best-seller thing. When something like that appears on the radar I check to see what it’s saying about now. To which some might ask, what if it’s saying nothing about now, what if it’s just a story about some fictional time? To which I’d respond that all creative endeavors, all creative manifestations are about now, and the really great ones are not only about the now at the time they emerge, but in perpetuity--like Shakespeare, for instance. Is The Hunger Games like Shakespeare? Wouldn’t be surprised at a writer being able to tie them together.

On the way back from Washington DC I sat next to a young woman who was getting over a heartbreak, she worked for a non-profit in DC, her beau had decided on an advanced degree at Stanford, and the bond didn’t survive the distance. We talked about her iBook and she showed me how it worked, the titles she had purchased, and I noticed The Hunger Games. She had seen the movie and I asked if she thought the film had been faithful in translation. She thought it had.

It’s a futuristic scenario where wealth, luxury and affluence had merged into a bubble, where all the cool people, all the connected people, lived in a shimmering city in a beautiful part of the world. The outlying terrain was a wasteland of poverty and dearth, people scraping and scrapping along to survive. The depiction in the film is reminiscent of the Great Depression, the look and feel of the photos of Dorothea Lange, dirtied people peering out from dilapidation.

The film is very good in depicting how the cool people have been led to believe that this event, The Hunger Games, is necessary in order to keep their civilization strong, free from deterioration. It harkens back to the origins of our own civilization. The book Pagan Christs, written in the 1910s, relates how very early on in human development there were systems of belief where a member of the tribe would either be chosen or offer themselves up to sacrifice. In other words, The Hunger Games is futuristic telling of that motif of the human condition, the dynamic of sacrifice manifesting once again. What’s ironic is that many in the audience enjoying the movie, watching smartly dressed people cheering on the imminent death of “tributes,” have no idea that those the filmmakers have set up as the villains, in reality, are actually the audience itself. Those who are fat and happy enough to go watch a movie are those who are just as delusional as the pretty people in the film. That the empire of the United States, at present, is the nexus of unfettered capitalism--corporate totalitarianism--moneyed fascism and the inevitable conclusion of absolute despotism--the very same thing that runs the show in The Hunger Games. If all goes as planned this motif will become a silly dream from our past.

P.S. I’m officially a poet again, someone took on one of my poems: “Rights remain with you, although I do ask that you credit vox poetica if you choose to reprint elsewhere and there is always the possibility that I would contact you about including your work in future collections….”

I think it goes up on their site the second half of this month. I wonder how many poems I have stashed away back there in my poetry files. Maybe after this summer I’ll be able to put some focus there. I really hope to focus on the novel too. And PLAYS! We’ll see. I love you.