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!

Monday, December 27, 2021

 GOING HOME



I’ve been reading a very different book to any I have read before called The Origin of Vermillion by Katy Masuga. I ordered it because I heard her interviewed in France or Belgium concerning the book and learned she is a lover of Henry Miller’s writing and has written two monographs on his works and I happened upon Henry Miller at a tiny library in Jonestown Texas and found inside its pages a close friend so I wanted to read her book as soon as possible. 


Writing a play concerning wild kids has taken me back to Bob Dylan again and again. I own two DVD’s of his early career in the 60’s. There is a time on a European tour in 1966 in Italy where a reporter asked him, “When will you return to Italy?” And Bob replies, in pain, holding his head and rocking, “I don’t know. I just want to go home.”


In that is something all humans have that fascinates me. "I just want to go home." The alpinist wants that. In her book at one point Katy Masuga writes about a character who sees a trail of skywriting with a crowd who are trying to read the message and all the particular character sees is a message for him directly. “They are signaling me “ he says. He cannot read the words, does not consider the message to be words, only beauty, exquisite beauty. 


It is a life that amounts to a following of signals of exquisite beauty that I find to be real. At a point of watching all collapses into a wholeness, like cream stirred into a cup of hot coffee, and nobody is there to say that some signaler who can be named sent a message to some receiver who can be named. It happened. It is being home. 


I am beginning to appreciate the difference between “concentration” of ones faculties (school learning) and “giving full “attention" of all one’s faculties to all there is (adventure) two entirely different ways of living…different dimensions. I find it profoundly sacred that the people who know a remarkable mountain climber or tight rope walker report he is doing something extremely dangerous as seen from where they are situated and yet is completely at peace and comfortable. Don’t you?


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