Flashback Queen

( from: proaudiostar )

It seizes the brain and numbs

the soul;

makes the living breathing world

a hell.

Fingers, too,

and hands and feet

belong to another,

but still persist and do their duties

ritually,

longing to touch again, and truly feel

longing to make contact

with reality.

( from: photoshopessentials )

It will come; it will come--

this curtained world has passed before,

and the waking is so beautiful,

but how I want my life to be

a continual display

of beauty.

But to do that would be to 

obliterate memory.

And that's impossible.

So I go on, still

a flashback queen,

that's me.

Antietum: Bloody Road

I woke up this morning to a story on NPR about

The Battle of Antietum, which occurred

September 17, 1862.

As I listened, my mind began to compose

some loose lines and contemplations:

(picture from NPR website; entire story at the link.)

~*~

(tablewarefare)

Antietum --

your innocent lands

still recall the

men whose blood you drank 

when they collided, driven by devotion to each

his own's belief in personal liberty:

Some, believing in freedom to all,

                               no matter their color

                                        or vessel for arriving

                                                     on America's shores.

Some, believing that the dark and enslaved

                                     were less than men,

                                                       and, as such,

                                                   deserved to remain so as they served

                                                  the economy of tobacco.

                                                          Oh,

Antietum --

two forces clashed in a 

Bloody Road, each force driven

by his own idea,

a whisper,

a thought.

Thousands lost

their lives; the idea

of equality ruled,

and history turned

towards liberation.

(from: old-picture.com )

So sad we no longer care

for history.   So sad

we no longer require

our youth to learn

to embody the lessons

of our heredity.  Instead,

we barely teach them

to get by; we teach to take a test,

then hurry home filled

with forgetfulness, anticipating

for the next episode of Jersey Shore,

or the next gossipy tweet.

( from: blogofshame )

History cannot be tweeted,

but history MUST be known,

as we stand today on the brink

of another ideological fissure,

right now embodied in

a battle over who should run

this land:

a Black Man

or

a Mormon;

a Son of Slaves and Idealistic Liberals,

or

a Son of Those Who Believe America is

The Promised Land.

But what promise is this?

Where guns are hidden and

(from National Park Service )

divisions are bitter,

the Bloody Road may be

just beyond the bend.

Our history can tell us how

to avoid it, and recent memory

of murdered diplomat,

a murder driven by 

insensitivity

to detail can stand 

as omen.

We have 

no time to lose;

the only answer is to restore

our public memory,

and with it, our ability to choose, 

and our integrity.

A Diva To Remember: Gilda Radner

As I approach the upcoming school year,

I turned to a pro for inspiration.

Have a great week!

Labor Days Ahead

Alas,

the garden goddess is overwhelmed by the height of summer,

and I,

am returning to teaching

after a long sabbatical.

Tomorrow.

Alas.

Much of my word energy over the past few months has gone

to an article I am writing about

how No Child Left Behind

and other educational reforms

have created a generation of American college students

who are way far behind.

Tomorrow, I head back to classrooms full of 'em again.

My particular focus is on student writing.

Believe me, it's very difficult to teach writing

when you'd rather be writing.

I can theorize away about the problem,

but when faced with a class full of angry young people,

my words, and skills, wain.

Because these students are ANGRY.

Our youth KNOW they have not been educated.

They KNOW it's all been a farce,

and they are amused by teachers 

and administrators

who perpetuate it.

By their first year of university, in fact,

they expect all teachers to be overworked to a point that the students simply are spoonfed

what they need to know to pass the test.

So these dear untutored and undisciplined students get angry

when a teacher actually asks them to be responsible for their own learning.

ehow-college stress

I don't blame them,

or their teachers,

but I sure have my theories

on who to blame.

Hold on tight --

I may vent here.

Tonight,

this Labor Day night,

my thoughts and prayers go out to all

the teachers in the world,

burdened by testing and assessments so overwhelming

that they get in the way

of teaching.

Garbage Bin Women (Living in the 3rd World America)

~ ~

Prelude:

My cat Pişi

(who has her own blog, by the way)

came home from me when I returned to the States

after living for four years in Turkey.

Pişi was born in the streets of Ankara.

While I did not remove her from the streets,

I adopted her when the people who snatched her out of the streets

moved on.  As you can see, Pişi moved on with me, and now,

at the ripe old age of fourteen, lives comfortably

in the U.S.A.

She's pretty, eh?  The thing with Pişi, though, is that

she's deaf.  I won't tell that story here, but you can go elsewhere

and read it.  She's also a little bipolar.  She can turn on you when you least expect it,

and when she turns on you, she turns into the wild cat she was born to be.

She's downright nasty, and fights to kill. 

She's the kind of cat who has a little skull and bones drawn on her file

at the Vet's office.  The last time we had her there, even the vet

was afraid of her.  They covered her with a heavy towel, and gave her

her rabies shot, and she was like a wild cat.  They told me never to bring her back.

I believe Pişi is going blind.  I'm really afraid that if she goes blind, she will become wild again.

Not because she wants to hurt me, but because she will feel her  power is gone,

and all she can do to protect herself, when she has lost the control of her major senses,

will be to attack.  It will be her last attempt to control and have power.

She is a very powerful presence.   She is the dominant cat in my house.
I treat her with love and respect, and hope that when she reaches
a point where she can't see, she remembers that, and gives that
back to me.

*

from: gpbtelevision

As I said in my last entry, I believe

we are living in Post-First World America;

we are living in America in decline.

It's not that we are being replaced by 

another greater power.  We are being replaced

by our own child:

a global, profit-driven economy

that at its best emulates 

the values America has represented 

for several centuries:

freedom of speech (via the internet)

freedom of belief

equality of gender and race

openness,

honesty

and a basic belief 

in the goodness of humanity.

In the meantime, though,

our power has waned,

our workforce has been emasculated,

our trust in authority, evaporated.

My students are so scarred from the abuse

they have suffered at the hands

of frustrated, equally scarred parents,

of a misguided education system,

of an entertainment world

that promotes instant gratification.

. . . .

from: unrealitymag 

This nation is ill,

and every now and then something happens

that is a glaring symptom of the depth of our illness:

Yesterday, in Niagara Falls, New York,

a five year old girl was found dead, in a garbage bag.
She was murdered by a teenaged boy,
who killed her with his bare hands,
then got a friend to help him dispose
of her body.

And dispose they did,
just like, in 2008, in a young woman was found,
folded in half, stuffed in a garbage bag
and then put out in the trash.
At first, the police ruled her death "accidental,"
the result of an overdose.  They claimed that
she had turned to prostitution to maintain her very
expensive drug habit, and put the the story away.
But everyone knows (and I've written of this before)
that no one who dies accidentally then climbs into
a garbage bag and puts themselves in a garbage bin.
A more recent autopsy has found this woman was strangled,
in a violent rape.
Her murderer has yet to be found.

I do not mean to claim that the same person
is responsible for both of these sad, sad, sad murders.
They have the guilty young boy who committed this week's
crime.  The look in his eyes chills me.

I cannot help but feel that there is a tragic
similarity between these crimes
that ends up being a glaring symptom
of the sickness that permeates America today.

Whoever put these women into garbage bags,
then into garbage cans clearly had no feeling
towards their fellow humans.  They treated them
like something to use,
then throw away.
Those killers
are not human either -- for one reason or another,
they have been led to a point where they
are like cornered animals, like my cat
trapped in a bag, and they are killing
irrationally.  Like wounded wild animals,
they practice whatever potential for power or strength
they have left, and they tend to take it out
against the powerless, the weak, those who
make them feel stronger than they really feel.

No, they should not be forgiven,
but when something like this happens
more than once, I think it's time
for us to consider what this says about us,
the U.S. of A.

Land of the Free.
Home of the Brave.



I'm not sure what the answer is,
though I heard a good idea
at a meeting I went to last week:

it's time for us to create an Adult Culture
in America and in the world
that is kind, compassionate,
wise, human --
true role models for our young,
as we move from a stratified globe
of multiple worlds,
to a single globe
where every individual is respected,
and no one
is put out
in the trash.

from artinwetlands

Surviving Third World America, Part One: Grain Elevators

Now, before I get started, I have to admit:

I have never read Arianna Huffington's book

on Third World America, though perhaps I should.

It's just my own private, personal interpretation

that I now impart: 

The U.S.A. is rapidly becoming 

a former First World Country.

I really believe that.

And as we plummet, we're becoming

the 21st Century Wild West,

most recently embodied by the armed laid-off worker

who killed his former boss in broad daylight.

It used to be, if there was to be

a dual, that both parties got a weapon.

But no, not in Third World, Wild West America.

Why are so many people going crazy?

Because so many of us have experienced so much wealth 

that we really don't know how to handle it

when it's suddenly gone.

That is, unless you live in an American city

that's been suffering recession longer than the rest of the country.

And that's where the title of this entry comes in,

because

I do.

O.K., I'll finally admit it:

I live in #2:

Buffalo, New York.

No, I wasn't born here,

(remember, I was born over 400 years ago,

in Greece, and have lived in countless places

since then) but right now,

I live in Buffalo.

And like so many other places, Buffalo

is a state of mind,

and for several years after I moved here

it was a state 

of mind

that I desperately wanted to leave.

But, unlike many Buffalonians,

I happen to have a job here, in a field

that it's hard to find a job in.

And it just so happens that Buffalo, NY

is a pretty good place to live

if you happen to have a job. 

There's lots of reasons for that, but perhaps

one of the most intriguing reasons is because,

only 100 years ago,

Buffalo was a very desirable city to live in,

and plenty of people did,

and  because of that, plenty of very famous architects did work here.

Much of it still stands:

Indeed, it's very easy to find a very nice house in Buffalo,

and live very frugally.

Now, I'm not here to convince you to move to Buffalo,

but I will say, it has grown on me.

I've learned to cross country ski

and bike, both of which

are very good ways to get around this city.

And I've been discovering that many of the secrets

of surviving, and living in

Third World America

might be answered right here.

Rather than blast you with a ton of stuff right away,

I'm going to focus on one feature at a time,

and tonight I'm slightly in awe of this:

The Grain Elevator.

Buffalo has plenty of abandoned grain elevators,

because they were actually invented here, in 1843,

by a fellow named Joseph Dart.

At that time, Buffalo was centrally located 

between the midwest

and the water ways that could bring products to the east.

This produced a need for a place to store grain, in particular,

while it was waiting to be shipped; thus, this behemoth.

And they were used continually, as the city grew, thanks 

to the Erie Canal, 

and continued to be used, a little beyond that thoroughfare's demise.

But when I moved here, I found, they just stood empty,

as they had been standing for years:

huge, hulking structures,

ghosts of an industry long gone, like the mines of 

Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, 

the work these monsters housed,

and the workers too,

are gone, long gone, and the buildings left to rot.

~ ~

Now, one of the many admirable qualities Buffalonians have

at a level much higher than the residents of other dead cities,

is a strong sense of historical pride,

and some very bull-headed local grass roots preservation organizations.

I'll write later about some of the preservation work they're doing in this town,

because it's quite remarkable.  Remember,

I've lived in lots of places, and the way this city rallies to restore itself

is pretty admirable.  Well, one of the historical fascinations among

Buffalonians is these grain elevators.  Some of them (the one above, in fact,

photographed by me about a year ago) have been destroyed,

but several have become sites of exploration.  Tours go through them now, 

and last night I witnessed an amazing thing:

a performance in a grain elevator.

My admiration was won a few years ago by an innovative theatre group called

Torn Space, and they got the job of mounting this show,

which included dancers pirouetting above from wires in the high, 

echoing, empty storage chambers,

to Beckettian monologues

to classical minimalism

(all photos from The Buffalo News )

It was, quite simply, transformative.  And when we all walked out,

to watch videos by different artists projected on the largest screen I've ever experienced,

nearly everyone there was seeing this structure

no longer as an eyesore, but rather

as a place of potential.

Knowing Buffalo, they'll keep using the grain elevators this way,

making them another exclusive hang-out spot 

for their abundance of gritty artists and performers and musicians

and cool wanna-be's from the suburbs.

This is, I would say, one of the coolest ways to 

survive Third World America:

turn it into an avant-garde art venue.

Oh, and by the way, did I tell you admission was free?

Maybe it won't be the next time,

but the flame has been lit

and there will be

a next time.

Natalie Merchant, remedy for madness

 

 

 

 

. . . as I pass through my days,

that float by in a haze

I wonder who's truly crazy --

is it the man with the coal black eyes

who can see into my heart and 

tear it in two

or is it the politicians

and the businessmen

and the generals

and the mediamen

who don't give me credit

for having a heart?

 

 

If your heart, too,

is hurting with the pain

of our planet so ravaged,

and with the pain of the farce

of our current electoral charades,

and with the pain of people gone mad

in Syria, Afghanistan, and Manhattan,

I've found something that may help ease it:

listen on, listen on ---

 

 

 

Geneology

via geneology.about

. . . and so, you see

I have been researching

my family tree, and when

you've lived as long as I, that can take

an eternity --

                    or thereabouts.

And that is one of the reasons you haven't seen 

too much of me.

My family tree is long and strong;

it goes back centuries.

On looking, I see a pattern

emerge, a story that is only marginally

about me.

It's about humanity.

I am, after all, just one tiny shoot

off this ambling oak, and one that bore

no progeny --

at least not in this lifetime,

so my place on the tree is like

earth in our galaxy.

via coolcosmos

Still, I'm part of the pattern, but

not without duty, or responsibility

to the health of tree.

At this particular point

in this particular generation,

without me, the tree

would not be.

via laceyville

This is the pattern I've drawn:

there is a long, strong base

that documentably links my family

to history.

It's full of soldiers, war heros, pioneers,

Admiral Perry,

and a questionable link to the wife

of our first president George.   Notably,

it's my mother's mother's ancestry.

But within that long noble trunk

it appears

every fifty or one hundred years,

someone stumbles,

drinks too much,

and looks askance

at the teaming world.  Smitten

by the beauty there,

that person beds, then weds

one who their own Society would label

risky:

An Irishman, a German, or

godforbid, a Pole,

an Indian, a Turk, or even Negro:

the whole clan mutates 

into a jumbled hybridity

that all adds up to me.

Accidental, incidental,

those periodic lusty embraces

between two so mismatched social faces

have produced a tangle of branches

that links cultures,

to the point that I can say,

with fair certainty,

that, dear reader, you and me

are kin, if only 

remotely.

via viz

CONVERSATION

O.K., go OK Go again

OK Go "All is Not Lost"

I lost track of this band for a little while.

They're worth paying attention to.

This is a year old, but the sentiment is, 

well,

timeless:

Cooked Meat

Why is my cat Pisi saying

when she follows me around,

              miaowing,

even after she has eaten?

Is she asking me to feed her again?

I beg to differ; she's actually asking me to feed

myself.  She is, after all,

domesticated.  And

in the cat world, "domesticated" means

to prefer ones meat

cooked,

especially over an open fire.

Because that's how it was cooked

aeons ago when

the first brave feline took the step -- 

or should I say,

the first hungry feline took that step 

into that huddle of men,

that circle of fire,

and chose to not attack

but rather accepted

                                          the rules, and in accepting

                             the rules, received

Cooked Meat.  

Cooked Meat? the first brave cat or two meowed

and then ate some more

and liked it.

And once into cooked

meat, there was no

turning back.

My cat, Pisi, might I note, is a 

frontier cat, a border 

cat,

not content with mice 

or just one street corner.

That's why she's with me.

Now, that primitive connoisseur cat invited other cats

like itself to dine with her, and gradually,

they all joined the human coterie,

and in joining

-- and surviving -- 

developed an innate sense memory to find

Cooked Meat.  Smell

sense and sound sense and 

sight sense and sixth sense, the cat 

knows the meat is cooking and awaits

its arrival, patiently.  Obediently.  After

a few generations, the cats become

programmed to believe that

Cooked Meat is the only ticket

to survival.  So

my meowing evening cat, following me

from every task to every task except 

cooking meat, is not demanding more

cat food, but rather expects that since I give her

meat even when she doesn't ask for

Meat, she'd much prefer I just

Cook Meat.   Cook Meat! is what she says, not

"cat food."  She wants

Cooked Meat.  And once I

Cook Meat, and Share Meat,

she is replete, and if I'm 

good, she might even let me

pet her,

brush her,

tame her.

My cat Pisi, plucked early in life

from Ankara's cat-killing streets,

learned fast.  Domestication appealed

when she knew the wild would 

turn her into

Raw Meat.  So she said, pass the

Cooked Meat, and keep it coming!  And she has traveled for miles

with me because I give it

to her,

even when she doesn't ask.

The domestic cat, like any

domesticated creature

requires consistency.  She

wants the meat everyday,  or else

she'll eat your ankle.

Take heed:

FEED

the cats

Ode To A Cloud

The clouds have been so fabulous this summer,

so I thought I'd write them

an ode.

Here goes:

You dance and turn and sing

O wispy thing

have you substance more than lace?

So quickly to dissolve, trace-

less, and yet your bulk 

can shudder the ships of man

almost to the point of breaking.

We should not underestimate you,

oh ghostly friend.  Only

praise and awe-fully gaze

as you drift across

                         the silent sky.

(photos by me)

bushels

via texasbasket

. . . and Jesus said, lest you be dead

don't hide your light under

bushels.

That bushel, friend, is the skin

you're in:

the woven textured artifice

often

mistaken

for who we are meant to be.

The light, dear friend, grows dim each time 

you deny its luminosity.

It guides yourself

to your

Self,

It is the christ within.

As long as you resign your Self to pine

away in the vehicle given

for living and doing on

the earth,

you are destined to

die,

and live and

die,

and live and 

die

again and again.

via artnet

the work of Artist Shoichiro Matsuoka, found at createyourcosmos

Meditate.

Dive in.

Have no fear,

when you let your light shine,

the body, too, 

will follow,

magnificently

Also with gratitude to createyourcosmos - a fabulous blog! and the artists Daniel Franke and Cedric Kiefer 

return to the garden

(all photos by Makropoulos)

At the moment when the infamous residents

of the original Garden Eden

ate the apple, something happened:

the human brain began so quickly to grow, so

much so it began to rival

God's

.

And not knowing this new power they so quickly had in hand,

they panicked.

If they had not panicked so

A + E may have discovered,
far too early,
 the distinctive 

pleasure of mind, the intense

satisfaction one can gain

from imagining worlds.

Ultimately, they, both woman and man,

might have gotten lost

in their own individual revery.

Like two fools in front of a TV,

they would have climbed inside themselves

-- godlike, indeed, one and only --

and that would have been the end

of the human race,

before it even began.

But that was not the plan.

God had intended all along for woman

and man

to make manifest the many dimensions of Him/

Her/

(Whatever pronoun we must deploy

to speak of God.)

But if so early in the game

the human players got distracted,

it would be the end.

Amen.

So God, in Her infinite wisdom,

put an end to that:

He decided that humans, 

more than any other species,

would have the distinct ability

to take intense pleasure in the act

of coupling, and presto!

it worked. 

Man and wife produced

legions, and with that too came

                         jealousy

                         pride

                         leachory

                               treachory

                             and 

                         falsehood =

all the products of minds misused

and bodies abused, in the 

lusty quest for self stimulation.

But meanwhile we have reproduced

indeed, and invented History

(written by the few, not always the wise;

the wise, in solitude, advanced technology).

And here we are now 

at the crest of infinity.

In our spare time,

we have created a facsimile 

of God=Expansive Mind,

but in our limitations

and morbid manipulations

we cannot see

that God is with us

and in us

right now.

O man, listen to birdsong.

O woman, cease your labors.

The earth pulses with life;

we are her masters.

It is our responsibility to care for her

as it is our appointed duty.

In the word huma, hu represents spirit, and the word mah in Arabic means water.

In English the word "human" explains two facts which are characteristic of humanity:

hu means God and man means mind, which comes from the Sanskrit mana, mind being the ordinary person.

The two words united represent the idea of the God-conscious person; in other words, hu, God, is in all things and being, but it is man by whom He is known.  "Human" therefore may be said to mean God-conscious, God realized, or God-man.    from: The Music of Life, by Hazrat Inayat Khan

Rainbows in the Trash

And as the sweet cicadas call,

in this, only early July,

I wonder if the world will

ever be the same again.

The bees have burrowed in the soil,

and herbs have gone to seed;

will August bring an early fall?

Will autumn quickly recede?

Then I found these rainbows in the trash

and captured them for you.

Do not despair, it's only hiding

the earth, we know, will renew--

It's just waiting for you

too,

to renew.