A WHOOPER SWAN'S DIARY: 07/04/23

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, July 4, 2023

THE WAY OF GOLLY*

In earlier times watching a moving picture show was invented. For the first time, for the price of a ticket, one could go to a darkened room and take a seat and look up at a huge screen and, well, go away. Forget worries until after the film. An escape from reality. A sort of drug. It became very popular. Huge profits were made and stars were created who could be sold like candy.

It was labeled, perhaps falsely, as art. What is art, anyway? The most elevated description is that art is created to disillusion a mass of people trapped in illusion. In other words, just backward of what people think they are buying and sellers think they are selling. So, only the artist knows what was created. And that one cannot say. This leads to a suggestion that every activity of humans is art if only we knew how to look or listen or touch, smell or taste. I recall now Bob Dylan telling a journalist “I have no explanation for these things I write, I just write them.” Or, words to that effect, anyway.

If a human makes something intended to disillusion you and me and we choose instead to use it to go away from reality, or, what we think is reality…

here we go again at the point of turning the whole thing around, and, oh, my, my

…being shoved into a new dimension, unknown, where beauty is not out there, on screen or inside a face or in nature or anywhere but…in me! The beauty I see, I mean. The beauty beheld is in the eye of…and what beauty there be in a tree is beheld only by the tree itself. Not by me. I have my own. See? And now we know when we fall “in love” with anything beautiful to us it all takes place inside the psyche and we are free to love it and secure in the knowledge it cannot leave us so jealousy and envy are no more! And, miraculously, no commercial transaction has occurred, none whatsoever! No license is required either! I am my own licensor. People who doubt their own ability to be completely responsible for their conduct cry for and demand leaders and rules and jails and and dismemberment and rejection and excommunication and violent death. The rest simply read what is written inside and it is done. Go-oll eee! I cannot prove it, but what if all there actually is is beauty? Doubt and beautiful reality.

*an eighteenth century euphemism for “God”