Being Free

'When someone seeks,' Siddhartha answered, 'then it happens all too easily that his eyes will see only the thing he is seeking, that he cannot find anything, cannot let anything in, because he is always thinking only of that thing he seeks, because he has a goal, because he is possessed by the goal.  Seeking means: having a goal.  But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.  You, Venerable One, may indeed be a seeker, for striving toward your goal, there is much you do not see which is right before your eyes.'

-Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Home.

Someday I'll be nothing too.

"I hated long views of life when the infinite overwhelms the finite subjects.  Not even forever lasts forever, and again I thought no matter what I do, someday I'd be nothing."  

Arthur Nersesian, The Fuck-Up

Madison, Wisconsin

The Truth of Man

"I, on the contrary, chose justice in order to remain faithful to the world.  I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning.  But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one.  This world has at least the truth of man, and our task is to provide its justifications against fate itself. "    

Albert Camus
"Letters to a German Friend: Fourth Letter" 
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death 
1943

Wisconsin-Iowa

Women's Weapons

Oh, reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beast's.  Thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm.  But, for true need--
You heavens, give me that patience; patience I need!
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age, wretched in both.
If it be you that stirs these daughters' hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let no women's weapons, water drops,
Stain my man's cheeks.  No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall -- I will do such things--
What they are yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the earth.  You think I'll weep.
No, I'll not weep.
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
O ere I'll weep.  Oh, Fool, I shall go mad!

-King Lear by William Shakespeare
Act 2, Scene 4, Lines 262-284

Wisconsin

The Bluebird

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that

Madison, WI

he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there
so don't be
sad.

then I put him back
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

-Charles Bukowski

A Constitution of Iron

"All his life he had tended and operated on the soft humans of civilization, who lived sheltered lives and had descended out of many sheltered generations.  Compared to White Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life without strength in their grip.  White Fang had come straight from the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter is vouchsafed to none.  In neither his father nor his mother was there any weakness, nor in the generations before them.  A constitution of iron and the vitality of the Wild were White Fang's inheritance, and he clung to life, the whole of him and every part of him, in spirit and in flesh, with the tenacity that of old belonged to all creatures."

Jack London, White Fang

Lake Monona, Madison, Wisconsin

Willa

This will never stop being my favorite.

"She smiled -- though she was ashamed of it -- with the natural contempt of strength for weakness, with the sense of physical security which makes the savage merciless.  Nobody could die while he felt like that inside.  The springs there were wound so tight that it would be a long while before there was any slack in them.  The life in there was rooted deep.  She was going to have a few things before she died.  She realized that there were a great many trains dashing east and west on the face of the continent that night, and that they all carried young people who meant to have things.  But the difference was that she was going to get them!  That was all.  Let people try to stop her!  She glowered at the rows of feckless bodies that lay sprawled in the chairs.  Let them try it once!  Along with the yearning that came from some deep part of her, that was selfless and exalted, Thea had a hard kind of cockiness, a determination to get ahead.  Well, there are passages in life when that fierce, stubborn self-assertion will stand its ground after the nobler feeling is overwhelmed and beaten under." 

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

1937

Baya and the Thunderstorm, Wisconsin Summer, 2012

Flowery Benedictions

"The path the old man took was a fire trail that had been built by the C C C.  From the glade in which he now made his home he had to climb nearly a thousand feet to reach it, but once on the trail the walking was easy and excepting the injured shoe he would have swung along at a good pace.  It was six miles to the river where he crossed and came to the highway and the same ubiquitous crossroads store with the drunken porch, the huge and rock-battered Nehi signs, the weather-curled laths, the paintless stonecolored wood--but the old man had taken an early start.  Through the gap in the trees he could see the valley far below him where the river ran, a cauldron in the mountain's shadow where smoke and spume seethed like the old disturbance of the earth erupting once again, black mist languid in the cuts and trenches as flowing lava and the palisades of rock rising in the high-shored rim beyond the vally--and beyond the valley, circling the distant hoary cupolas now standing into morning, the sun, reaching to the slope where the old man rested, speared mist motes emblematic as snowflakes and broke them down in spangled and regimental disorder, reached the trees and banded them in light, struck weftwork in the slow uncurling ferns--the sun in its long lightfall recoined again in leafwater.

Brogan and cane and cracked pad clatter and slide on the shelly rocks and stop where a snake lies curled belly-up to the silent fold and dip of a petal-burst of butterflies fanning his flat and deadwhite underside.  Scout smells cautiously at the snake, the butterflies in slow riot over his head, flowery benedictions of their veined and harlequin wings.  With his cane the old man turns the snake, remarking the dusty carpet pattern of its dull skin, the black clot of blood where the rattles have been cut away.

They go on--steps soft now in the rank humus earth, or where carapaced with lichens the texture of old green velvet, or wet and spongy earth tenoned with roots, the lecherous ganglia of things growing--coming down, pursuing the shadowline into the smoking river valley."

Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

Wisconsin, Summer 2012

I Used to be Lonely

"The other side is made of men, Jim, men like you. Man hates himself. Psychologists say a man's self-love is balanced neatly with self-hate. Mankind must be the same. We fight ourselves and we can only win by killing every man. I'm lonely, Jim. I have nothing to hate. What are you going to get out of it, Jim?"

Jim looked startled. "You mean me?" He pointed a finger at his breast.

"Yes, you. What will you get out of all the mess?"

"I don't know; I don't care."

"Well, suppose blood-poisoning sets in in that shoulder, or you die of lockjaw and the strike gets broken? What then?"

"It doesn't matter," Jim insisted. "I used to think like you, Doc, but it doesn't matter at all."

"How do you get that way?" Burton asked. "What's the process?"

"I don't know. I used to be lonely, and I'm not anymore. If I go out now it won't matter. The thing won't stop. I'm just a little part of it. It will grow and grow. This pain in the shoulder is kind of pleasant to me; and I bet before he died Joy was glad for a moment. Just in that moment I bet he was glad."

In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck, 1936

Lake Michigan