THE STORY OF JOHNNY WHOOPER SWAN We go to school trusting our parents. We meet a teacher there who stands up front with a big desk, and a pointer. She or he trains us in an authoritative manner. We attach mentally to a life long need for authority in order to live lives successfully. Right so far? In my case, at the age of 25 I was ready to enter the practice of law where I hoped for success and a happy life finally. Very shortly, very shortly, I became anxious. There was a foreboding. I was made more uncomfortable with each experience. Law work is nothing like what I was told it would be. The system is corrupt. But I still cling to my expectation that career success is necessary to my happiness as a man. Each day my grasp of what the fuck success amounts to after all becomes more clouded, murkier. I hear songs on the airwaves and at concerts which describe my life as the life of a fool. What am I becoming? I want to rip off my business suit to run naked in the street with my hair on fire! But I am too afraid. In strange, weird (weird comes from a word meaning wise), fragmented steps I go about a journey of my own believing myself to be the first man to have failed in such a total way which journey works so as to break up my career, end a marriage, and start an entirely new way of relating with my two children whom I love deeply. Almost magically I meet a woman who is a career counselor who asserts a beautiful message that I am made to be joyful in my work everyday and at all levels. This understanding sets me on a completely new course. It is no longer a world of systems to me but an undivided one of unlimited beauty. It reminds me of a painting. A true masterpiece. I am drawn from within to learn the truth about my identity and nobody else can teach me that. From this point onward I will use thinking capacity for mastering mechanical processes and follow my heart, which includes my whole nature, which includes your whole nature and that of every human being for all the rest. I’ll go by the name Johnny Whooper Swan who does not explain itself to anyone. By my fruits shall I be known. Watch me soar!

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

And Another Thing, Too,

In a silly press conference in the sixties, Bob Dylan, when asked to define Folk Music replied, “a constitutional replay of mass production”. I refer to this moment as an entry into a very important fact of modern life concerning humanity all over Earth. Mister Dylan was playing and he was making a serious point that if made directly then would have been ignored. It sticks out to this day as an unanswered dilemma, and a growing cancer.

What have we become?

We will hurt ourselves again today. We sponsor our injections in pain-numbing doses and blame “them”.

It is not to say that there are no true art expressions. It is that there are so many fakes so readily made available they drown the real thing. The rela thing requires a serious, diligent, unstoppable search, and it always will. Art used by a system of mass production to further its interests is bound to be a “replay of mass production”. The question on all the minds of all the artists used this way is “what sells?”.

Book publishers, theatre production companies, film production companies, from the largest right on down to the single artist acting alone on his laptop attempting with the best of intentions to make dough from his art are asking it.

As an example, a sizable commitment in time and money and professional collaborators was made just prior to the almost certain entry of the United States into World War II in the form of a film entitled How Green Was My Valley. That award winning film, emotionally stirring, brings tears to all our eyes to this day. The performances were of the highest quality. It is called a masterpiece. It portrays real hardships in a low-income mining village of proud hard working miners and their families. Wages were being cut for these men solely because the owners could hire unemployed workers from nearby towns at lower even starvation wages. The patriarch of one of the families who has spent his whole life in the local mine dies as the result a cave-in at the end of the film. The whole story has been told as seen through the eyes of an innocent child of that unfortunate man. All who watch suffer his grief. But, the film ends in hope. It is the replay ending of all such works. We hurt ourselves with the pain of the miserable state of
our true situation as much as we think watchers will tolerate and then entertain the hope that we can keep up the same way of life that has led us time and again to horror and one day all will be as it should be.

I have known, sadly, a lot of alcoholics who have followed this tired, old saw right into the jaws of death. One more. But for grace, one of them would have been me. We have met the Illuminati and it are us.

Illuminati” is a word for an unknown who is, or one day may be, the real ruler of the world. It is us, our greed, our fear, our anger, our intolerance, our ignorance. Each is brought to the point of realization in his own life, and it happens this way, I am the one I hate. What have I become? Maybe the Dark is from my eyes? The evil I see in another is in me.

In this manner is the solution a most personal thing. I must end the process for myself, begun in childhood, of following another's formula for my life. It turns out The Jedi Knight” or the One I have been wishing for and praying to, is me, and has been all along. I know I truly joined the entire human race when I ceased looking outside for my answers. We are in the same boat.



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