What Keeps Us Apart?

Chapter 1

One thing about us humans is apparently keeping us apart and keeping us thinking we are impotent in the face of those who would dominate us. We are readily bought. Not necessarily with money, commodities are purchased in that way, we know we are alive...so...we are bought from within where life resides. Because we are living things who created money and are taught to treat it as treasure, money plays a role, it is a prop, in the buying. We are bought with the lash. And the fear of it. Many of our taskmasters are quite meek in behavior and learned. Often we accept friendship from them. The lash in our case can be a threat of expulsion from a gang of comrades. The comrades are other people who expect us to think like them.

Clamor do we to be the next one bought. It is the strange tendency, shortly following incarceration inside a social institution, (a family for instance, a clan, a city, a nation, a school, a football team, a job, any gang really) to become a voluntary self jailer who maintains his assigned station as if it were his very own dream. This quality is the one keeping us apart, oddly, the strong wish to be a part of something. That seems absurd on the surface. Is it a paradox? Maybe. But what is certain is that it is so only because what we seek we have and when you are in that fix, having what you desire, you are at a complete loss to know what to do except to keep looking only harder! And since you have it, you will never find what you are looking for so desperately in that way. Make sense?

the PARIS REVIEW
Amusing Myself: An Interview with Bob Neuwirth, by Gary Lippman, Oct. 6 2014
Down the decades, Neuwirth, now seventy-five, has made the scene in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Berkeley, Paris, Nashville, Santa Monica, and Austin, stopping in at the fabled festivals of Newport, Monterey, and Woodstock and associating along the way with Janis Joplin, Lou Reed, the Coen Brothers, Brice Marden, T Bone Burnett, Joan Baez, Shel Silverstein, Elvis Costello, Sam Shepard, Kris Kristofferson, Larry Poons, The Band, and The Band’s former front man, Bob Dylan. In Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan recalled the decades when he and Neuwirth were especially close: “Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in On the Road, somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth ... If ever there was a renaissance man leaping in and out of things, he would have to be it.”
For someone on the receiving end of such high praise from the famous, though, Neuwirth has a rather low view of fame itself. “Being famous is a full-time job,” he told me over lunch recently in the West Village. “You can get more done being anonymous. I know how people can get famous, but they have to want to do that ... It has to tickle the G-spot of their minds, because being anonymous is so much more powerful. You can get so much more done if you’re not worried about fame and fortune. You can get a lot done.

Me, I don’t give a shit. I’m just there to do what I do—for me. If anyone else gets enjoyment out of it, great, but I’m really trying to amuse myself. I was trying to think of something to do onstage, and I was driving past Will Rogers Ranch and I thought, You know, you can have an act by having a non-act …”

end interview.

J Swan: It must come down finally to this: all we name and discuss is nonsense and much chatter about nothing. What is real cannot be captured in a thought. When I cease thinking, I know.

When I cease thinking, I know.

All power is in knowledge after all. With that power at hand I proceed. Without it, I am a blathering fool.

And yet, people, not swans, insist upon treating their writings and speech as the ultimate knowledge and so long as that continues to be the road taken we shall get the same results we have always gotten. All praise to the author! To the copyright owner go the spoils! (blame)

All golden language worthy of a genius points only; does not claim to be the thing to be studied. It is much like this: the wise person tells us to “know thyself” so we proud-fully canonize the words by placing them in libraries and take great pride in our heritage and we never even look to see what it is we are. What fools!

In the universe there are waves and there are particles. There is light too. We know we see it. I read in a science book that light behaves sometimes as a wave and other times it behaves like it's a particle and it is neither. That brings me to the discussion of something that is but is not namable. Every time a person gets ready to name it, it disappears, and the person cannot find what it was about to name so is left holding an empty bag which is embarrassing and so the person claims there is no such of a thing. Or, at least says, “I never saw one.” Or, what is most usually the case, the person says, “I believe there is one of them but we cannot know for sure until we die”. I say we can know this thing better than anything! The thing I am discussing does not come and go, we do.

I wish to communicate about a certain type of exploration. A person who explores without moving to another place from the place where he is when he decides to explore. The art of exploration of where I am is a real one. The keenest one. The one that is most efficient of all arts. To many people it will seem a complete waste of time or as an act of vagrancy, a crime. For someone like me to decide, all of a sudden, I am just going to make an in-depth study of exactly where I am as a worthy activity more so than the pursuit of a degree at a place like Harvard is astounding!
You might be asked a standard question upon meeting a stranger at a party, “Well, So-and-So, what is it you do?” You may pause, seem to reflect inwardly, and then answer, “I study the moment. In that way, I am at work right now.”
“For whom do you work?”
“For myself.”
“Are you paid for it?”
“Not by anyone you can name, but, yes, I am paid mightily.” 
“In money? How much is your income?”
“That is a very personal matter. None of your business.”
“Yes. I am sorry. I meant I am really curious to know how this works.”
“I make no agreement with anyone to pay me an amount of money in the way you are accustomed to think of the means of a livelihood in a system manmade. I have nothing to sell. Can you grasp that?”
“Not really. How do you pay your bills?”
“Hmmm.”
“No, please, you do have bills to pay do you not?”
“Yes. And no. I have made agreements with some others to pay money to them in accord with a schedule they insist upon, like rent and utilities. But you asked me how I pay such bills and I am trying to help you understand.”
“Thank you, please continue if you don't mind.”
“Simply, I depend upon a power which communicates to me intuitively since birth, and before it, to provide me with whatever is needed for fulfilling my purpose on Earth, including money. But it provides me so much more, so much.”
“What do you mean?”
“People have been living this way far, far longer than the way you now want to believe is the best way. You see, it is a lost art, but not really. The very best aspect of what I am telling you of is the fact that it depends upon cooperation with others in truly intimate ways that fulfill the yearning of a human heart for companionship and love and shared triumph. I could talk on, but will not, for now, this is all I wish to say.”

My Story Of Darkness

I am reading a good novel, Love in the Time of Cholera. I am only beginning it. But, it turned me to writing. There seems to be a common fear of death in the form of a fear of darkness, death as a darkness, in other words. The chief character of the novel so far, an old man in his eighties, tells that he fears death because of his fear he will not find God in that darkness. I remember my mother at that age telling me she was afraid. “Of what?” I asked her. She replied, “Of what everybody fears I suppose, death.”

In old age we begin to forget. We lose our learned skill of keeping up with life by treating everybody and everything we encounter in the way we treat a story as we read one. We begin to notice we are returning to a child like world we had forgotten. Now, my question is this: whether we comprehend by reading in accordance with the experiences we have had in life or is it the other way around? Does the practice of reading (and especially the experiences of being tested on the book) train us to live in a false way regarding the things of reality? To treat them by false ideals, I mean, by what we come to call by reading more and more, our good judgment? And, sound principles. What excites me here is really the notion we acquire our judgment falsely because it, reading, reveals a world we can seem to control. Therefore, we like it! So, could the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Bible actually be a metaphor for a book? Could a book held in one's hands be telling that a book is going to curse you soon in a terrible way and you will be cast out of paradise and left to earn your living by your wits? What a funny joke that would be! (All I know is there are two ways to read the scriptures and they are vastly different.)

What about this? I read a book to find out whether the author knows me rather than to read a book to find out whether the author can teach me what I do not know to help me understand how to control myself. In the first way, I am looking for a friend. In the second I am looking for a teacher who knows what is the matter with me who can straighten me out.

If I were a swan...I might ask why there is a darkness in the first place. And, why do I fear it? My friend urged me to meet the darkness now, while alive, and find out its nature. Asked me whether I thought it better to wait until death to find out. I was able then only to see: I want now to know! How about you?

(hmmm...notice the silent letter k is all that separates the words now from know.)

That leads me to suggest to you that you have encountered trouble when you have tried to meet the dark one, the one who does not speak your language, does not even think at all, never scolds and never asks questions; and that trouble has come from your trained mind which comes up with all manner of things for you to consider other than that. Correct? Why would you not want to meet the rest of you so much that you would interfere with an honest wish on your own part just to prevent it? You know, it takes a lot of attention and hard work to keep somebody from just sitting still for a little while. Must be a real threat, huh? A threat to what do you suppose? 

I met the dark void and knew it had been banished by my own decision to engage in selfish struggles to earn my living here by my wits; banished to a dungeon in the soul of me where it had remained until I found it and asked what it was doing there and would it like to be my friend. It had been waiting is what it made me to understand.

For what?

For you. What took you so long? 

That is my story of darkness.

The Strange History of Human Beings

Peopel began in the wilderness only because what is called wild now was all there was then. Peopel lesrned to spell correctly. Then they became real people.

Before, they played together in paradise. They made each other laugh and want to keep on laughing so they did and then they fell in love. Laughing.

Then they started to make each other cry. There is something wrong now. A mistake was made. What was the mistake? This cannot be love. Love does not make anyone sad. People are sad when love is not around them. Inside them.

When people fell in love the next thing that happened was a monarch appeared out of nowhere. Every nation had one. An emperor or czar or king who was supposed to have unquestioned authority ruled them all. He could make anybody rich if he wanted to and he could kill anybody if he wanted to do that. Before, nobody had any authority except what is recognized naturally as authority that everybody has. Like anarchy. Not anarchy as power but anarchy as no power. There is a force that arises from powerlessness that nobody can deny. Is that love? There is a power that is debatable and there is another power that is undebatable. The first is majority rule and the second is law by consensus. In the latter, only a law that nobody denies can be enforced. So, no law need ever be enforced, silly. In the former, laws are made by a voting process and then those laws are denied and denied and denied...more often than not by the very people who voted for them are they broken. In fact, I would have to say always, invariably, those laws are broken by everyone who ever makes one. For example, take the case of President Andrew Jackson who swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States as a condition for assuming his office and then before you could say “Jimmy Crack Corn", with military force he removed all Indians across the Mississippi River into Indian Territory in violation of the very Constitution he had sworn to uphold. If you do not believe me, ask any redskin in Oklahoma how their ancestors happened to all move there and call it Indian Territory. But don't ask how many died on the trail unless you are willing to cry.

It happens that ever since history began it has told the same story. Told it again and again. Everywhere on Earth. Same. It amounts to this-the fair minded framers of the Constitution wanted only that, to frame it and hang it on the wall. Never did intend to live by it. Marriages are like that. People who spell correctly tend to embarrass themselves. Better to get kicked out of school for poor spelling than to live a lie. Love has an all or nothing at all nature people who spell correctly cannot accept. Fukit!

Love is all that matters...if you do not have it, nothing else will matter to you

and, if you do have it, nothing else will matter to you. By the way, you will know love

by its all or nothing at all nature.