Question (From Jim Means, a professor friend of mine I’ve known since High School): Paul Erdős–the most prolific mathematician of the 20th century, lived such a nomadic lifestyle. He would wander from continent to continent, knocking on the doors of other mathematicians and announce “My brain is open!” with the hope that they would invite him into stay in their home for weeks or months. Most would invite him in. They knew this would guarantee them a collaboration with Erdős. Consequently, they would get one or two academic papers out of it.
Perhaps you could do the same with other poets.
My Response: Well, it’s not a bad thought. However, there’s not much market demand for poetry. There’s also little demand for the works of poets. At least not as much as for mathematical or scientific papers. In Europe, poets rely on the state’s arts stipends to fuel their work. Poets, writers, and artists are considered respected vocational pursuits throughout Europe. This contrasts with the US; where saying one is a poet or a painter is basically to invite the retort, ‘why, can’t you get a real job?’
Art takes decades to master. It must be perfected into a discipline to produce value that a market will pay for. The problem in the quick-buck US is that there is no infrastructure outside of academia that permits an artist to practice and perfect their craft. We live under the delusion that artists either are born with it and immediately recognizably ‘geniuses’ or piddle away in isolation dying long before their work is recognized and cashed in on, ala Van Gogh.
The fulfillment from creating beauty is profound. It attempts to point at the eternal and universal. This beauty endures long after one has shaken off mortal constraints. It is worth the hard times and sacrifice.
It’s a stab at immortality, if you will. If you can’t take it with you, you might as well leave something worthwhile behind.
There is nothing I can rent, buy, or lay away that matches the genuine human connection art brings. This connection forms when a young person approaches me after a reading. They genuinely express their appreciation for the ideas and images I put in their heads. These ideas changed the way they saw things. This is when I realize my work is effective. And it is worth a million times more than some contrived award or accolade.
There is no greater enjoyment of humanity that I can muster.
The moon before the Ginsberg morning. Negro skies before a christian dawn My voice itches for cigarettes and Tibetan hymns. I want the circuit of Blake, Whitman, Ginsberg and Dylan To course through my limbs
Electrocuting my fears and lame desires for acceptance. I want to feel holier than a cantor Or a Muslim call to prayer. I want fuzzy peaches where my balls are And a giant fist of a cock thrusting upwards
Between my legs I will infiltrate the dreams of daytime sleepwalkers With hummingbird vibrations Of sound, soul and spirit.
I will wait to grab a discount Lyft Neal will be at the crazy wheel And no fucking GPS For Moloch to deviate our destination From paradise To damnation.
The Naked Allen Ginsberg in Morocco image that will ironically get me banned on 2025 social media. Nothing has changed from 1955, same censorship same McCarthyites
“Igor, Why are you smoking and drinking your self to death? Smoking, if you don’t inhale cigars, can still give you bladder cancer. Tell tale signs are blood in your urine, often after about forty years of smoking.”
Writes Michael Brett
michael, thanks for expressing your concern and I will answer your question as thoroughly and honestly as I can.
Well, for one thing, I don’t have blood in my urine. Every body is different and reacts differently to different things. For example, my body does not respond well to cannabis although people are constantly praising its health virtues and persuading me to replace it for my consumption of alcohol and tobacco.
Maybe it works for them but not for me. I used to smoke cannabis, a lot of it. But if I smoke even a hit now, I lose focus for days. I become lethargic. I feel demotivated and lack self certainty.
I smoke strong chemical free cigarettes and high end Cuban cigars for. one main reason: The nicotine increases my focus. It also relieves the stress of coping with the seemingly endless stream of idiocies and obstacles that people and their bureaucracies hurl at me. If human beings weren’t so maliciously stupid, needlessly cruel, deliberately ignorant and undermining, I probably wouldn’t smoke at all!
Likewise alcohol, I now drink nearly every day, but only after I’ve finished working, so around 5 or 6 pm. I start work at 5-6 am each and every morning. 7 days a week. God took Sunday off which explains why the world is broken. Repairing the world is a 7/7 day a week vocation.
I drink only the best wine, tequila I can afford and only when I’m in Britain or Germany do I drink beer. British real ale and German Pilsners are living nutrients; unpasteurized and nourishing to the body as much as the soul.
I drink exceedingly but seldom get drunk and even more rarely suffer hangovers. The latter is down to the premium quality of the alcohol I consume. All natural, no additives. And yes, more expensive.
I drink for two equally valid reasons:
1. I’m in pretty constant pain in my extremities, mainly my legs and mainly my right leg. I was diagnosed with lymphedema last October. The American medical system has failed miserably in getting me even a lymphedema specialist. It also hasn’t provided a proper treatment for my condition. Nor even effective pain relief.
American medicine is only about money and the doctors, nurses and health practitioners care about little else than you insurance coverage. It is a disgusting, mercenary, greed-fueled system that should be scorch-earth, burnt to the ground and built from scratch based on a nationalized health model.
But money breeds greed which necessarily breeds incompetence. Beware getting ill or needing any kind of mental or physical health help in America.
You won’t get it unless you’re rich and even then, there’s no guarantees when it comes to American health care, None at all!
So I drink as much as I do as a means of self medication. When I find decent medical treatment for my condition in Europe, I will probably reduce, but not eliminate my alcohol intake.
In spite of my excessive drinking and smoking, my last physical in November, 2024 was according to my nurse practitioner, a 4 star ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ result!
Blood, urine, stool test all came up trumps (and I don’t mean Dumb-Hitler). Blood pressure a little elevated but within normal parameters, cholesterol down, liver super fit, lung capacity excellent, could lose about 15 pounds of excess wait but I apparently have the body of a 35 year old.
That’s what having the right genes from a mixed racial parentage and background gets you!
2. The second equally valid reason I have for drinking in excess is that I’m lonely. My last girlfriend, a Mexican beauty and mother of 2 from Jalisco dumped me because I wasn’t rich and had no intention of getting rich. We were still trying to be friends but I think she more recently decided that the time she spent with me was time she was losing finding a millionaire. She’s not greedy as she’s looking for a millionaire not a billionaire. But as with everything in America, money lies coiled at the roots of all value, even Love.
I am desperate for feminine companionship. Not overtly, but inwardly desperate. I prefer the company of women to men. I think that women in general, are better human beings than men are. I was raised by a strong, intelligent and independent mother and I am passionately attracted to the same type.
I loved my baby sister, Natasha, now deceased, am on warm speaking terms with my ex wife and love my 25 year old daughter Olivia, more than my own life.
I treat women with respect, with consideration, with affection and when they are open to it, passion.
However, this has proved no formula for success.
This is partly due to culture and geography. Being trapped in Southern California for the past 8 years has been an emotional and sexual nightmare.
California women are by nature, defensive, suspicious to the point of paranoia (much of which is justified, considering mentality of Californian men!), spiteful, callous, cruel and rarely know what they want romantically, socially and most certainly sexually.
It is akin to a pandemic level neurosis. I’m sure it is caused by the dominance of excessive consumption capitalism. America is a Nation run amok with Hungry Ghosts wandering aimlessly in constant hunger for commodities that never satisfy. So that the sad ghosts are compelled to consume more and more and more. As well as waste resources, energy and everything around them; including other people and even themselves.
I detect this neurosis most in women, because I am not physically attracted to men and therefore expose my self to more slings and arrows of overpriced fortune from women. Beautiful women; inwardly and outwardly. I say this because what underlines all the female Hungry Ghosts is money. An insatiable desire for money and the companionship of men who can provide it.
My experience and impression is that without money, the Californian branch of the human tree would wither and die from lack of procreation.
I’m not calling Californian women prostitutes. No, they’re far worse than that: they only give of themselves, their love, their affection, their emotional investment to the IMPRESSION of wealth and money.
Actual prostitutes are more transactional. California women are constantly playing games, with themselves as much as others. They live in a cacophony of mixed messages, confusion, self-loathing and passive aggressive spite.
Many appear to both fear and despise men at the same time. But rather than just leave us alone, they like to play cat and mouse games of allure and refusal as a means of compensating for a sublimated sense of power.
I am not the only man who thinks and feels this; btw, before you start hurling more misogyny cards in my hat. Men, especially foreign born men, confess the exact same conclusions about Californian women when there aren’t any women around to overhear.
Even feminist women, who I admire and prefer, have great difficulties expressing what they want and Don’t want from a man. There’s deep insecurity at the heart of the west coast female that more often than not, manifests as passive aggression and occasional overt aggression.
For evidence of this just read the comments from women that will inevitably follow in reaction to this post.
I will find a lover eventually, if not a partner, somewhere in Europe or possibly north Africa, soon enough. Of that I have no lack of self certainty! I was happily married to an English woman for some 18 years.
I have a great deal to offer the “right” woman: intellect, humor, tenderness, insight and genuine affection. I have never been told that I am other than a passionate and satisfying love who gives more than he takes. Whose greatest pleasure is to give pleasure to the point of repeated climax. I am a gourmet chef for whom the greatest act of love (apart from the very act of love) is to cook a favourite meal for a friend for my family, for my lover.
I am very industrious, ambitious and am well on my way to making my career as that of a best selling author and successful poet.
But most of all I am kind.
I do not suffer fools gladly and I state the truth no matter how critical the truth is or how easily offended the recipient.
I feed and house the homeless when I can. I enjoy talking to young people both young men and young women who I speak the truth to regardless of what their elders or authorities think.
I am a critical thinker in the tradition and spirit of Socrates.
I question authority.
ALL authority.
I try my best to alleviate the suffering of others.
I regularly meditate.
I adore the arts and all forms of music (apart from breakfast cereal jingles).
I am the best Poet I have ever been in my life and my life is far from over!
I have very close ‘girlfriends’ and “admirers” in Holland, the UK, France and Algeria. Some are with partners and therefore our relations are Platonic for the time being. Others have issues of faith that prevent them from acting on their attractions and some. I just haven’t met…yet.
But I am actively looking, just not in California or the US, ever again. So for both health and romantic reasons, to quote Robert Hunter “I’m going where the weather suits my clothes”!
Masturbation is no sin In fact, it’s the most marvelous thing It will ease your stress Fulfill your life There is no need to sacrifice What every body finds so nice Masturbation is no sin it makes our lives worth living in It shines you hair cure your stutter It makes you feel like no other Person in the world can harm you now When you stroke yourself so close and tender. Masturbation is no sin Pay no heed to those who say other For they would pervert both nature and each other. Maturbation is no sin In fact it makes our lives worth living in.
Any time of day of night Is just as right for loving your self like another Do not worry about the mess you’ll leave Tissues and towels suffice, I believe. There is no shame in loving who you are Or touching your self like a falling star After all we are all who we are And loving one self is the start of loving each other from afar Masturbation is nothing In fact it is the most marvelous sin. Now, touch yourself in loving pride! For you are the center of all you abide.
The Mass market digital edition is out in April, but I’m only signing the $54.95 limited edition. $34.95 for the cheap, print on demand edition out in April, 2025
Original cover by Norwegian Surrealist Painter
Katarina Anderssen
(Also available as a fine art print, signed and numbered by Katarina )
Original music and spoken word album composed by the magnificent Israeli Jazz composer Gilad Atzmon available in March for download, CD and Vinyl entitled The Broken Star, a musical and poetic indictment of the current state of Israel.
Album cover design by the designer, illustrator, comics artist, visual god Dave McKean. (Arkham Asylum, Sandman, Cages).
International signing and performance tour of Spoken Word and Live Music coming in the Spring of ’25
This is Art. Sample the Stone Soup:
Rumi’s Mirror the reflection of a reflection is your reflection. upon the mirrored surface of a pool, that is being slowly filled by the very source of the life you reflect upon
Now jump in the pool!
Music by Gilad Atzmon Digital Graphics by Mayssan
Modern Haiku A boy goes to school And tears his schoolmates apart With metal piercing bullets.
This is normal now.
Facing the Waves Waves are your faces Crashing in real time, Raising the tide Against your complacent shore.
Waves are your faces Curved towards you: White-bearded men, Relentlessly knocking on your front door
Reality, an unknown intruder Upon your inner core, Beats rhythmically, poetically, Drowning you in what you do not know.
Waves are your faces Melting into one and the other; Beating, imploring you, To open your locked front door
Waves are your faces Beating on your front door Eroding your discomforts Seeking to drown your inner core.
Beating senselessly, endlessly Against locked doors, Waves are abandoned faces Beating on your front door.
(Email info@themissionarts.com To be added to our pre-order list. order in January for a 99.50% discount!!) Look for it sweetheart, you ain’t seen anything like this before!
(Email: igor@themissionarts.com To be added to our pre-order list order in January 2025 for a 99.50% discount!!) Hey, No one does math the way we do!
prelude to the storm San Diego is a city-by-the-sea with a population of 5 million. It has spaghetti freeways numbered like 5, 8 and 805. These firmly establish the metropolis as a driving town. I grew up in San Diego in the 60s and 70s. We first rented an apartment in Point Loma named Loma Palisades. I attended Barnard Elementary School, which has since been converted into high priced condos, like everything of value in San Diego. Life was relatively laid back. The beach, particularly Ocean Beach, was close by. I began attending the early Comic con meetings in Ken Kruger’s science fiction, comics, and porn bookstore. My new friend Barry Alphonso joined me at the nerd-meets. The founder Shel Dorf would regularly give his moral sermons to us geeks, freaks, and comic book hounds.
I didn’t actually read comics at the time. I was kind of snobbish about them. However, my friends Barry and Bryan Smith did. They consumed comics ravenously. My parents didn’t give me an allowance. They were strict about where their kids spent their hard earned money. Science Fiction was another story. This genre I consumed like a dehydrated camel at an oasis. First Edgar Rice Burroughs and A Wrinkle in Time but soon it was Harlan Ellison, Theodor Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick (who I barely understood), Philip Jose Farmer, Kurt Vonnegut and then there was Ray Bradbury. Of all the fantasy, horror and SF authors I read, it was Bradbury who spoke deepest into my soul. I saw Bradbury as a kindred spirit. Along with Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, Malarme and Zola who I also consumed with ravenous glee.
But Bradbury’s poetic novels forge my writing and poetry to this day. The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles, and the devastating Something Wicked This Way comes. These stories infected my dreams. I recall having vivid dreams of sitting next to the illustrated man. I also dreamed of being on the carousel of youth in Wicked and meeting the Martians on Mars. It was his short film “Dial Double 0” about an actual artificial intelligence (NOT that misnomer marketing term AI!), born in a phone box haunting a terrified man with phone calls that animated my imagination. That and the first series of Star Trek (yes, I am old enough to have seen the first series when it was broadcast, sitting next to my dad who was equally mesmerized by heroic space exploration. My actual dad and I bonded over Star Trek AND Ray Bradbury.
Deeply profound imagery, is what Bradbury delivered and my being the son of a painter, it was the paintings he put in my head that I could not get enough of. My father, a professor of Anthropology at SDSU, encouraged me to read. He had taught me how to read English. I learned Spanish first in a Costa Rican Catholic school. My father loved Science fiction, being a scientist and he reveled in the fact that I would empty the SF section of the downtown library every two weeks when we took a family outing to the library. I eventually met Ray Bradbury at the age of 14 (or 13). It was thanks to my serving on the Comic Con steering committee. Walking up to the man in the ice cream suit and white fedora took all the nerve my nerd self could muster. He was standing by himself on the first morning of the Con, next to the El Cortez interior swimming pool. (Not in-door, but outside under a windowless sky light in the center of the hotel lobby. I walked up to Mr. Bradbury in terror. Here was this magician, this shaman of words who had entered my dreams at night and took me to far flung peaks of aesthetic bliss mixed with mystery and terror. Of course Mr. Bradbury was always Mr. Bradbury to me. Even when I got older and saw him briefly before his death, I never called him ‘Ray’. I deemed it to be a desecration of his powers.
I did summon the nerve to get him to sign my first edition paperback of Something Wicked This Way Comes and found him shining his benevolent smile into my eyes and face. He wasn’t a powerful, dark, intimidating wizard after all! Ray Bradbury was a kindly, warm, sincere man who cared about his fans. The artist as saint. He returned my paperback to me and smiled. I knew that I was safe from his dark magic. I could venture to ask him what I really, desperately needed to know.
“Mr. Bradbury”, I said before he turned to go to attend to his convention duties. “Mr. Bradbury, can I ask you a question?” Ray Bradbury stopped in his tracks. He turned back towards me. Leaning over my form, he replied, “Why of course, young man. What is it that you would like to know?” I hesitated for a split second. It occurred to me that he was mentally anticipating a question about one of his stories, some character, or plot twist. But I had a bigger question in my 14 (or 13) year old hungry mind.
“Mr. Bradbury, tell me, how can I become a writer like you? Is there a special school I need to go to?” Now it was Ray Bradbury’s turn to be enchanted; by little old me. Mr. Bradbury motioned me over to two pool lounge chairs cruxed by the blue fluoride pool of creation. He sat down and faced me. He examined my face intently. Then he uttered these words: “First, young man, you’ve got to get the name of my profession correct. It’s not writing, I’m not a ‘writer’, I’m a re-writer. The vocation is called re-writing for a very good reason. Because that, my son, is what you’re going to spend most of your waking life doing. Some of your dreaming life as well!” I became so mesmerized by meeting my hero. I didn’t remember what he said after that. It was about a 20 minute conversation and then he left to attend to his celebrity duties.
And That, My Friends, is how I became a writer. I was baptized by the worldly experience of a kindly, white-haired, be-speckled magician. He wore an ice cream suit and a white panama hat in the San Diego sun that blazed all around us, through the skylight at the very center of the El Cortez Hotel in the summer of 1972 (or 73). The El Cortez Hotel of legend, mystery, and comic book panel has become over-priced condos. This change happened because money is money. Culture and history are really just for the poor.
THE REAL STUFF NOW: (Hold onto your Horses!) As the previous heading sign-posted, this was all just the prelude to the true subject of my dissertation:
Which is in fact, the Poetry Futures Poetry Festival I attended only yesterday, hosted by the San Diego Poet Laureate Jason Perez and held at the Cross Cultural annex of the UCSD campus. There was no publicity covering the event, no posters or flyers to guide the poesie aficionados, but I was able to navigate my way to the upstairs set of conference rooms.
On my way up the stairs I found myself at pace with a young, well dressed Asian man with horned rim glasses. I asked him if he knew where the poetry festival was being held. He smiled an affable smile. “That’s where I am going as well,” he said. He reassured me that I was heading the right direction through this academic labyrinth.
Upon entering the reception room and pausing to shake Jason’s hand to thank him for inviting me, I found that the horn rimmed well dressed Asian man was actually the poet Lee Herrick! The Poet Laureate of California! Which I really cared nothing about. What I cared about was that he was an honest, good poet who had truth to tell in his writing. I had only read a few of his poems in an academic journal but he was the real thing. An adopted Korean child who had grown into a gentle, sensitive man.
Lee was not only a formidable wordsmith but the very man I had wanted to connect with in order to further my plans for the first international poetry festival to be held in San Diego: The Balboa Park International Poetry Garden Festival .
But more about that later. I plan to leave San Diego in 2025. However, I am also resolved to leave a lasting monument to the culture of quality in literary arts. A yearly Poetry Festival could continue long after I relocated back to more civilized climes. In conjunction with the festival, I also want to organize a poetry competition. The proceeds from this competition would go to building a Rumi’s Poetry Drinking Fountain in the center of the Prado. This fountain would be accessible to the general public. It would feature a stone sculpture of the Greek Pegasus, the symbol of poetry.
Donald (Dumb Hitler), Trump’s triumph in last November’s election convinced me. I realized that I was no longer suited to the American nightmare. For the first time, he secured a majority of the popular vote by only 175,000. I knew a nightmare was about to be unleashed. The day after the tragic election results, I made two long distance phone calls:
The first to my ex wife, Felicity Brooks, the Managing Editor of Usborne Books with whom I had a tempestuous separation some ten years previously. As soon as she answered the phone, I didn’t have to say a thing. “I’m so sorry, Igor, I’m so sorry about is happening to your country. What do you need to get out? I’ll help you with the home office to re-establish your residency and your work permit. I’ll even tell them that we’ve reconciled and are back together as a married couple. “Whatever it takes”, she continued.
“I’m so sorry, I know that you loved the US but the time has come to make the hard choices you have to make to survive”. My heart leapt at her kindness and generosity of spirit. How many men can count on their ex-wives as reliable friends? But I also understood what she was saying and why: Both of our parents had lived through WWII and understood the reality of political upheaval. They knew the plight of refugees escaping political oppression and tyranny. Now it was my turn to be a political refugee. My ex-wife knew that some forces in life are stronger and more important than mere marital squabbling.
The second call I made was to my never-actually-met-him Facebook friend, the musician Richard Torres. Richard was a punk rocker in the 1980s London scene and had had a hit. A big hit. But bad punk rocker that he was, he didn’t spend all his money on drugs, alcohol and womanizing. Instead, he betrayed his genre by buying a mansion in the Gothic quarter of Alicante, Spain!
What a loser!
3 years ago, I was illegally evicted from a house in Clairemont. This was after the passing of Louise Karsten. She rented me a cheap room in exchange for tending to her massive yard and building a vegetable garden. I also paid for the restoration of one of her three bathrooms. I had found myself vaguely homeless. Couch surfing from friend to friend and eventually anchoring myself to the outdoor couch of my bike mechanics overpopulated two bedroom rental.
His family and he were avid meth consumers. Every morning, I used the bathroom coming in from the front garden. I would be greeted by billowing clouds of smoked speed. I was invited to partake. Eventually, my polite abstinence proved to be an unalterable faux pas. I was inevitably asked to leave for not conforming to the social norms of their meth-smoking “community”. Which is directly relevant to my account of this festival.
After shaking hands with Lee, I wandered through the space. I was looking for poets to invite to my festival. They could teach as guest teachers at the Pegasus Poetry Workshops. It starts the last day of January 2025. They might even contribute to my new poetry journal, The Mission. I began to recognize some familiar figures of the San Diego Poetry “scene”. Poetry Underground had constructed a long table promoting their books and events. I avoided the eye contact of Anthony and “Sunny”. My last encounter with them was when they barred me from their underground open mic poetry reading. It was because I read my anti gun poem. THE BULLET FROM MY GUN. Anthony and Sunny founded Poetry Underground. They are proponents of the school of thinking that believes everybody who even tries to write a poem deserves accolade. I’ve always believed in support and encouragement for young artists; but support without critical discernment, without discipline, is no support at all.
Poetry takes work, not complacency. Each to their own but Poetry Underground’s so called “mental health” agenda leaves me a little bit worried. My concerns might not have a cause. However, it’s healthy to recognize your limits. By doing this, you can surpass them and grow as an individual and an artist. The slogan for Pegasus Poetry Workshops is straightforward. Poetry Underground blatantly rebuffed it. We will teach you the rules of poetry. Then, you will know how and when to break them. Poetry is not a nightclub, it’s a hard earned craft that requires discipline, focus and dedication, not constant applause.
My anti gun poem I read at my last ever ™”stand up tragedy” at Poetry Underground is reproduced above.
Anthony had took umbrage at my poem and its contents. He was especially upset at his audience’s reaction.
The audience was visibly excited by my heart-felt honesty. I had exposed the mental problems of gun obsessives. My poem highlights their detrimental impact on American society. We have too many guns and not enough gun control. The number one cause of childhood mortality in this country are gun deaths! That is obvious even to servicemen and women. However, Anthony did not see it that way. As MC, he seized the stage after my performance. He denounced my poem with a tirade about Second Amendment rights. My poem called out the gun nuts who want to spread even more death and mayhem. Gun violence is a reality, not an opinion in America. We experience a pandemic of gun violence every day in the US. This is a fact, not a perception. Gravity can be an experience, but it is not a perception or an opinion.
It is the truth.
I was pleased that my poem had triggered (sic) some kind of reaction but Anthony was adamant in his denunciation. As an ex military type, he had always eyed me with suspicion and barely concealed hostility. He could smell my liberalism and it made him sick. Some time later, I called Sunny to invite her and Anthony to my Pacific Beach Poetry Workshop. She found my invitation insulting. Her attitude towards me was evidently infected by the same hostility. She informed me that if I decided to return to their open mic ritual, “Anthony wants a word with you, first.”
That was enough for me.
Unlike some of the aspersions cast in my direction, I am an adamant pacifist and avoid conflicts at all costs. What I have learned is that if you turn away from “trouble” to avoid it, “trouble” will often follow you down the alley way anyways. It might even mug you from behind!
Needless to say, I never returned to the Underground. (Take notes, Dostoevsky!), These days, I keep my feet above, not under the ground.
The Poetry scene in San Diego is parochial at best; and that, relatively speaking is a compliment!
San Diego as a whole, is a metropolis sized city with the mentality of a small town. It has no real literary or arts scene comparable to San Francisco, LA, Oakland, Sacramento or even Fresno. In Southern California, artists are seen as stunted adolescents. They are treated as if they won’t grow up and get a real job packing groceries at Whole Foods. Most other major California cities have thriving poetry and expressive arts scenes. Poets stand together in brother and sisterhood and help and support each other.
San Diego Poetry “scene” has been and is still, more like an open dog fight between warring and self-aggrandizing factions. The gatherings and readings tend to be mutual admiration clubs of gratuitous glad-handing applause. It reminds me most of the participation awards of the 1990s when everyone wins just for having partaken. On a few occasions, I’ve heard a young poet with promise recite an amateur piece. I approached them afterward to encourage them to “Rewrite” and think about who they are writing the piece for. I am then admonished by the host poets and told off for being “negative”. Critical thinking is abhorrent to the San Diego poetry scene. Writing is too.
Curan was a rare exception. Sadly, he is now deceased. He was a white Buddhist gay poet. Curan ran the Mission Hills Library monthly workshop. He was genuine and real and we are publishing his work now posthumously in The Mission monthly. Curan was the exception. The rule in San Diego poetry readings is that there are featured “stars” backed by their publishers to sell products. And there’s the so-called “Open mic” monthly gatherings guaranteed for applause. This is regardless of merit, and discussion or feedback is profoundly discouraged. At one such “open mic” reading I asked the assembled audience of would be poets, to hold their applause. That if they wanted to give me feedback to approach me after the reading and tell me what they honestly thought. This caused the bah-bah-ing, amateur sheep to deride me as I was challenging their ritual. The veterans at the same reading openly mocked me for even suggesting such a trespass of their precious norm.
All of this petty-clique behavior is more worthy of a bad high school TV drama than a literary tradition. This has inevitably led to an impoverishment of poetry as a craft in San Diego. A vocation which in fact takes literally decades of hard work and endless failures to achieve anything of merit. Art is a vocation, not a dilettante’s hobby.
The owner of Verbatim Books was at the festival, there with her entourage. Of course, she avoided my path. I had tried to get her shop to stock my books. Then, on one occasion, I invited a homeless street poet reeking of alcohol. Former Beat Poet Laureate Chris Vannoy and I had heard him reciting incoherencies outside their reading. We asked him to come inside and recite his insane, psychedelic, beautiful ramblings. The owner did not take kindly to what she misconstrued as an attempt to sabotage her event. Apparently, you can’t be drunk and read poetry in San Diego. Sorry, Charles Baudelaire, Dylan Thomas, Charles Bukowski. You’re not wanted here!
After Avoiding the Poetry Underground & Verbatim, I said hello to Ted Washington who was going to be reading for the Fighting Poetry panel (which was my highlight of the festival. Ted and I have known each other for years. We do detect that we’re not exactly friends. However, we do share a begrudging respect for each other’s work. I would publish Ted Washington in a blink. His voice is angry, political and authentic, an African American raging against The Machine. Hey, we don’t have to be “Friends” with everyone. People don’t have to “like” each other; we just have to not kill each other. Poetry is a forum, a medium of expression wherein people with differences can air those differences in lyric, rhyme and reason. Jason’s Poetry Futures festival proved to be just that: political, engaging and inspiring. I met some great poets and some great human beings there. Mainly from LA, Portland, Anaheim and the Bay Area. I found myself applauding loudly, wildly at the voices of mainly women poets. I also found myself randomly running into complete strangers. We would exchange a line of verse in rhyme and reason.
“Strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hands.” Robert Hunter
The out of town readers were amazing, truly wonderful, sending shivers down my spine and music to my ears. In contrast, the academic poets both students and teachers, presented a stark contrast. Some of the UCSD graduates buried themselves in their own self-righteous academic graves. They pronounced their degrees like ancient Egyptian curses. These poets tried to conjure magic that wasn’t theirs or of any lasting potence. At best Art and Academia are uneasy bedfellows and can lead to abusive relationships as the only steady income an artist can muster while they perfect their craft is by teaching. Which is fine except that higher education in California (and probably throughout the US) is a business. The products are students and credentials that lead to paying jobs. That can be alright except when the credential is a token of conforming to an inorganic, bureaucratic entity that just wants to control the thoughts and actions of others. That’s when the relationship between art and academia becomes an abusive co-dependence.
Unrelated, Michael Klam and his San Diego Yearly Poetry Annual entourage of county editors were there too. I like Michael, even though I don’t have to. We’ve had over the years, a disagreement or two, but he’s always remained an affable sort. Besides, the Annual has published my poetry 4 years running and you don’t shoot the horse that lets you ride him. I gave up submitting to the annual a few years back mainly because ones poetry gets lost in its voluminous thickness. I don’t really know who actually buys the annual apart from the poets who are published in it. Some of its editors are friends and support what I do. Others despise me for my work, my dedication to critical thinking and my politics. I am devoted to Poetry and this poet’s life like it was my parent. Having lost both, Poetry has taken their place in loving me, in caring for me; poetry has nurtured my body, soul, and mind; without it I most likely would have taken my own life years ago. (If not for my daughter Olivia as well; who I could never inflict such trauma upon.
In the end, it is our children who save our lives from dissolution and despair.
The San Diego poet I now most admire is Sonia Gutierrez, who recognized me when she was first approaching the center, outside while I spoke to an Arab who happened to be the buyer for the La Jolla Barnes and Nobel and who I had given a copy of Is She Available? and was raving about it, asking where he could order more copies for his store.
Sonia Gutierrezwasn’t quite sure where she recognized me from but insisted that I was familiar to her. She asked me a question about where the event was (Signage, people, signage!!). Sonia Gutierrez peered at me and told me that I looked familiar. Later when I heard her read at the Fighting Poetry panel brilliantly hosted by Ted Washington, I recalled that the great Mexican muralist Victor Ocheo had introduced her to me over 5 years previous. Victor was always pushing me to celebrate my Latino, Costa Rican heritage. My uncle being the now deceased Costa Rican muralist, painter and sculptor Francisco Zuniga. (I come from Art Aristocracy!)
He wanted me to connect with other “Chicano” poets. This was the very first occasion I heard Sonia Gutierrez read. I was literally and pleasantly blown away. A non academic, self taught poet. She is now a poetry teacher. She exuded her culture like a wafting perfume. There are too many phony Chicanos in this world; too many Latinos laying claim to a uniquely Mexican American heritage. People like Peruvian painter Mario Torero who insists that he’s a Chicano “Artivista” when there isn’t a drop of either American or Mexican blood in him.
Sonia Gutierrez filled the room with sounds and almost smells of her Mexican heritage. She is a real poet in every sense of the term, as she serves her words up as a vehicle for her people’s history, her people’s culture, her people’s sounds. A woman’s sounds (like my mother singing in the bath tub, cantina songs), I wanted to embrace Sonia after her reading; and breath all of Mexico in. Instead, I invited her to come teach at the Pegasus Workshop as a guest teacher and gave her a blank cheque as to how to fill the two hours. I admired her spunk. She bluntly asked me if there was a stipend for teaching. There is not, as the workshop is a semester long and free to the public. The event is held on the premises of a public building, which the tax payers pay for. Poetry should be free. Poets do have to eat. Their words may feed the spirit, but the flesh is also wanting. Poets should be paid for their work. Buy their books, it makes a big difference!
So I told Sonia I would see what I can do. Her poem “Perspective” should be mandatory reading in San Diego’s classrooms. It is a monument to hypocrisy. It highlights the disingenuity of the new right as they sabotage our thinking, our ability to reason. They gaslight us into accepting racism and bigotry as just a matter of “perspective.” In today’s post Trump intellectual wasteland, all opinions are valid even house that would strangle opinion at its source.
Sonia Gutierrez filled the room with sounds and almost smells of her Mexican heritage.
The panel called Fighting Poetry was a little distracted by a ‘transitional” (transgender?) poet, who’s name escapes me. She was a striking woman with a beautiful face. But the transgender poet had marred her own face with a frozen smug, plastic smile. I have had friends within the transgender “community”, (Not my choice but It is their’s and I would fight to protect that human right.), But there was definitely something false, something wrong with this particular poet’s self presentation. She proclaimed the righteousness of her gender choice as if it was a weapon to be used on her audience. Her answer to fighting poetry, in which real truths were being told, was to lead the group in a contrived “breathing exercise in an off-the-shelf mindfulness.
Her poetry was mediocre although her pain and composed anger were real enough. If she had not taken affront I would have shared with her some constructive feedback. The politics of sex, of gender, and identity are volatile like nitroglycerin. A single misstep by a boring straight man like me could spell disaster. I chose to avoid the risk of confrontation.
A young Vietnamese poet, whom I have lost track of and could not find, breathed air into the room. She did this by reciting a poem that mixed English and Vietnamese words. The music beautifully infiltrated the comprehension of the poem. I am a devotee and follower of Thich Nicht Han, the monumental Vietnamese Zen monk. I have met, sat, and walked with him in London. I was well disposed to the sound of her vowels. Even without understanding the meaning of her words, they were sheer poetry.
The highlights for me were Jason himself. He bid farewell to his position as poetry laureate. Then I was captivated by the sublime psychological work of Lee Herrick. I had only read him before and never actually heard him read. His voice opened up his exploration of his own heritage, his own adoption and adaptation to my heart.
A lesson for us all: if you can always hear the poet read his or her work aloud, do it! The human voice carries the breath of the soul. Like Homer, we are all blind to the written word when it can instead take flight. It flies on the winds that come from within us into the wide, wild world. But don’t believe me when I sing Lee’s praises; Listen for yourself. Listen to the wings of poetry unfold and take flight!
Experience life’s moments on your own. The universe doesn’t expect much from us but it does want us to pay attention and listen….just listen. Thank you for reading this far, now please if you will, comment below.
I have only had two editors in my life. One was the now deceased artist Eleanor Brooks. She was the widow of the great novelist Jeremy Brooks, and a friend of Ken Kesey’s and Robert Stone. Eleanor was a British Beatnik, an official Friend of Wales, and a former Duchess of Gloucester. She renounced her title and seat in the House of Lords to marry Jeremy, a commoner.
The other and now my current editor is Dr. Miles Krogfus. He won first place in a national poetry competition back in the 1950s. This achievement paid for his entire university education. AND his PHd in Yeats, an the Romantics. At 83, he can detect the Classical within the contemporary. He keeps my poetry disciplined within the legacy and structures of poetics.
Part of The Mission is to publish the monthly Mission. My newly incorporated company will include comics, poetry, prose, and art. Mile’s work will feature in it and then after a year, we will publish a book of his poetry.
Not for his sake or mine. For the sake of the American people. This is especially true for Americans under the age of 30. They have been denied the richness of art and culture. They continue to be denied access. Art and culture are how any civilized society tends to its emotional and psychological challenges.
I am utterly certain that many Americans are mentally ill due to poverty in arts and culture. Some are lethally so. This society has ultimately commodified arts and culture into extinction.
It is difficult to pursue a career as an artist anywhere. However, it is next to impossible in America. It didn’t always used to be this way. It’s a change I’ve seen happen slowly, really just in the last 40 years. The only socially acceptable vocation in America today are institutional ones or corporate jobs. Or science, engineering and technology. because we value our tools more than we do our fellow human beings.
We treat dogs like people and people like dogs in America.
Anything else is derided as “not a real job”. With the rare exception of musicians and recording artists who are viewed as potentially money-spinning. Painters and writers and sculptors are treated like complete shit. We are advised to stop practicing our craft. Instead, we should get jobs loading paper bags at Trader Joe’s for rich hippie vegan scum.
Once when I was being processed after being arrested in San Diego for one of my many nefarious crimes (I will die before I tell them where I buried the 4th body!), I was at the booking desk and I was being asked what profession I claimed, I said “Poet” and the desk sergeant guffawed, laughed loudly and turned to the other deputy as they both belly laughed.
THAT is what Americans think of and how they treat the arts in this tragic land.
All to the detriment of the mental health and well being of our society. Yes, the word ‘Society’ does actually refer to a real thing, you just can’t buy much of it.
The last time America had an arts-based culture that pervaded society was from the late 1950s until the dawn of the 80s. This culture was admired and emulated by other cultures far and wide. Whats loosely referred to as the 60s. Nobel Prize Winning Poet Bob Dylan completely revolutionized the music industry with his songs and music. He turned the Beatles onto LSD, and we all know where that led: cultural, spiritual, and social Revolution!
Ken Kesey wrote Sometimes a Great Notion and then Cuckoo’s Nest, was experimented on by the US military with LSD and decided that not only did he like it, he would give it to everyone else!
And the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead were born, Giants of cultural upheavel and enduring art. Yes, I’m saying that Jerry Garcia wasn’t just a great guitarist like Jimi Hendrix. (Another America icon to the arts, our “Mozart” of the electric guitar.). He was an artist plain and simple. He intuitively grasped the dream nature of art, how to embrace chaos and allow the growth of form to emerge out of content. There was nobody ever like his band The Grateful Dead and there will never be another like them. Jerry Garcia was a Boddhisatava who changed the lives, improved the lives, alleviated the suffering of millions upon millions of people. For which he took no credit or accolade because he knew that it wasn’t him,, he had no ego, he was just Jerry doing what Jerry wanted to do.
Because “if you’re not having fun doing what you’re doing, you’re not doing it right!”
Jerry Garcia and Ken Kesey were artists using humanity and the people as their canvass. They improved people’s lives, period!
Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ton Carter, Sonny Rollins, Lee Morgan, Anthony Braxton (and too many more black musicians to list here), took the suffering and political humiliation of the African American people, absorbed it deep within their soul and then produced something more beautiful, more African American, more valuable than all the suffering of all their generations had endured could quell: Modern Jazz. The only uniquely indigenous American cultural product, ever. And it was our underclass, our N**g**s that produced it, that created our cultural heritage
White folk produced it and took most of the money and sometimes, on occasion aligned with it in emulation and imitation. But it was black people, African Americans who created it, from the blood and sweat of their masters lashes, the only lasting cultural worth America has every produced.
The Blues and Jazz will endure all of us for the next 2 thousand years. If humanity still exists in 2 thousand years, you can be certain. They will be listening to Jazz. Maybe ‘their’ Jazz, but they wouldn’t be listening to anything without the creative fountain of the African American artist.
Andy Warhol, Georgia O’Keefe, Jackson Pollock, (and please list painters that changed your life in the comments) didn’t just create visual art that sold for high prices. They changed the way people SEE and think about art. Consequently, they altered the way people viewed their lives as they are living.
Charles Olsen, Alen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Walt Whitman, Eugene O’Neil. John Reed, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Carver, Carolyn Forche, Jack Kerouac. Lillian Hellman, Shirley Jackson, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, Bessie Smith. Billy Holiday, Lenny Bruce etc. etc. etc.
These were all writers and artists creating the raw material that makes up our soul. They weren’t just singing songs or spinning rhymes. They offered up, from the depth of their souls, the remedies for living. They provided the cure for our social illness! They taught us how to live better. They guided us in leading more rewarding lives. They helped us overcome the slings and arrows of our outrageously over-priced fortunes.
They were and still are our shamans. They are our urban witch doctors, our counsellors, and our therapists. Without them, without more generations of artists, we are all going to languish. We will whimper and suffer in our straitjackets, in one big WHITE lunatic asylum. It is ruled by the insanest WHITE king of them all: mad Donald Trump.
Today “art education” consists of “you better pick up a skill you can fall back on”. It has taken me 40 years of hard graft. Daily work, rejection, and overcoming rejection have brought me to this point. Now, I can look the cop in the eye. I can proudly say, “yes, I’m a poet, I’m an artist. You gotta problem wid dat”?
These days I mainly talk to young people, meaning people younger than me. Guys and gals, working odd jobs, standing outside of restaurants barking customers. Because San Diego is so fucked up, the management gets weird when I talk to young women my daughter’s age. People give me hostile looks. I’m asked not to return to the establishment to spend my money. Generational isolationism is a real social problem in San Diego. But I don’t give a shit, I’ll talk to whomever, whenever I want regardless of their age or mine. Unless they don’t want to talk to me and then I apologize and go away. But young people need their elders to give a shit about them, to talk to them to ask them what’s on their minds.
That is how a civilized, healthy society functions. You go to any other developed nation in the world. You’ll find ancient town centers in England, France, Spain, Italy, and Greece. In these places, the neighborhood’s children run free. Their parents sit at outdoor cafes or at tables or around fountains gossiping away. The children run free, feeling both free and safe. They know, without even being conscious of it, that they are the village’s children. They belong to the community, and the community will care for and protect them.
Socialist? You’re damn right that’s socialist. It is much better and healthier than the fear and paranoia that dominates current American parenting. Our teachers are prison guards. Our parents are overworked overlords. Our police are soldiers. They view every citizen and every member of the public as an antagonist. How many cops does it take to change a light bulb? None. They’d prefer to just beat up the room for being dark!
America has lost its soul along with its way. Now it is just about the money; not even about what the money buys, just the frigging money.
When I last ran a company (or more accurately, ran after my company to make sure it didn’t go off its own rails!), I used to hire what were then a new breed of worker: the code, the computer programmer, the software developer. This was very difficult for me. Although I served my investor’s interests and followed my detailed business plan, I knew little about actually writing code. At the time, I didn’t even know how to write html. It’s not a code, but a mark-up language for the web.
So I had to hire some dozen coders very quickly to execute an array of electronic publishing projects, on CD-ROM at the time as DVDs had yet to be invented. So I interviewed everyone who came to apply for a poisition as I did with all of my staff. Anyone who ever works for me, who is paid by me, has a direct contact with me. A direct human to human connection is crucial in order to maintain a cohesive working environment. I do not delegate Human Resources. Because Humans come first, before even the money.
So I would typically take two strategies to discern whether or not I wanted someone working with me. The first was to sit in front of a screen and a keyboard with the individual and ask them to show me what they did that affected the screen,. Like I was an idiot. I called it my “Colombo” approach.
If the young candidate (typically college graduates in their early to mid 20s), balked and told me that I didn’t know enough to understand what they did; or try to waffle me with computer code jargon or resisted explaining anything to me; I would thank them for their application and say I’d be in touch.
I never was ‘in touch’.
If you can’t explain what you do to a 12 year old child, much less your potential employer, then you don’t really know what you’re doing yourself
My second approach is relevant to the point of this essay. At the time I had secured over a million and a half £s in corporate investment. Enough to develop, produce and market an electronic publishing platform of 8 new interactive titles. I coined the term INTERACTIVE DRAMAS to avoid the computer game association. Ironically, it was the computer Game MYST that was our great inspiration. It inspired the development of these interactive titles. I had the superb artist, designer and my aesthetic mentor Dave McKean as my nonsalaried Art Director. I also had a team of hard working, London working class designers.
They were “My Boys”. (along with a couple of girls). My Boys is my reference to Garth Ennis’s superb comics series and now Netflix series (The Boys; highly recommended if you hat super hero movies as much as I do)
So I was a happening dude in London in the early 90s. Which was a success that was all too shortlived, as all successes ultimately are. Nothing lasts forever, baby, apart from the Moon, the mountains, the ocean and the stars.
But back to the interview process relevant to my point about money and its intrinsic valueless-ness. So I had a company cheque book at the time when people still wrote cheques. My candidate would come into my office and sit in front of me and I would ask the usual questions about their backgrounds and experience. Then we’d do the computer screen test. Finally I would lean forwards and look them straight in the eyes (and smile).
“Tell me, what is it that you really want out of life, what is the real reason that you’ve applied for this job; what do you want?” Without exception, the candidate would drop their guard and answer with one word: “Money”
And these were British kids, mind you. Working class, self-educated or middle class college graduates. Not Americans. With Americans, its ten times worse. Now the lesson would begin: I would smile and say
“But of course, what would be the point of going to a job every day if you weren’t being paid. I want money,, I like what money buys me”.
The informality would open the candidate up:
“I want loads of money, I want to be rich by the time I’m 30 and I’m so good at what I do, I’m going to make that real” (or some paraphrase to that effect). So then I would start the game. I would look seriously at the candidate and say: “Would you consider a million pounds enough money?” Inevitably, they would be confused by the question. I would repeat myself while I opened my desk drawer and extracted the company cheque book. “Would you consider a million pounds enough money to make you happy to achieve your dream?” The answer was always the same. So I would begin to write out a cheque so that they could see my writing, for a million pound on the company cheque book, logo and all. Then I would rip the cheque out and being to hand it to the candidate.
“I’m going to give you this million pounds, it’s yours and you can call the bank right here and now to verify that the cheque’s good. It’s a real cheque for a million pounds and I’m going to give it to you, right here and right now on one condition.”
The candidate was never sure how real this game was but they knew for certain it was a real cheque; one guy actually called our bank and was told that the funds were liquid. But I wasn’t taking any pleasure in the startled eyes and nervousness of these young people. Instead I had an invaluable lesson to impart.
“One condition and the money is yours”, I repeated. And I would hand them the cheque so that they could feel reality in their own hands. Some would ask “What’s the catch”? Some wouldn’t. Then I would explain:
“You can have this cheque. You can have a million pounds on one condition. You must accompany me directly to the airport. We will go without interruptions and with no stops. At the airport, we will grab the first flight to Cairo. Once in Cairo there’s a helicopter awaiting us (there wasn’t, I lied). The helicopter journey will take some 3 or 4 hours to the heart of the Sahara (‘Sahara’ means desert, so to say Sahara desert is redundant). Once we have reached the centre of the Sahara, we will land. Or we will hover about 5 or 6 feet above the desert. You will jump a short distance. The sand will cushion your jump. And then we are going to leave you in the middle of the Sahara with your cheque but no water, no phone and at least a hundred mile walk to the nearest oasis.”
And then the punch line, which I would deliver while meeting the person’s eyes full on:
“So what is your million pounds worth to you now?”
The AHA! Moment (the one word that Allen Ginsberg wrote on my first edition City Lights copy of Kaddish when he signed it and invited me up into his room; I didn’t go, its another story. Always been a touch homophobic)
The day to day epiphany available to all of us any time of day, “if you look at it right”. The moment of realization of enlightenment and understanding happens when you grasp not just something new but when everything you had been thinking crumbles away. Everything that you thought to be true up to that moment crumbles away. Those scarlet begonias are a touch of the blues.
And your mind is just blown wide open to the fact that what you knew was certain wasn’t very certain at all. You can’t hide that moment on your face. And I knew with utter certainty that the look on my candidates face was their passing grade. If they ‘got it’ I could work with them.
I’m friends with some of my ex employees to this day and recently one of them, a girl now a woman, reached out to me to remind me of my little employment game and how it made her start to see her life in a totally different way.
I told her that no thanks were needed. That I was just doing my job The best way I knew how. Thanks for reading. Leave your comments below and I will respond. Still human that way.
His schedule is as follows: Flying to London to see his lovely daughter Olivia Melanie Goldkind-Brooks who he hasn’t seen in nearly 3 years! A week with her and then a train to Alicante, Spain to visit the British Mad Dog Richard Torres for a little while and check out Alicante as my probable new home as of August next year. Then catching a leisurely train (or boat) to Athens to meet up with the musical genius, composer, producer Gilad Atzmon to record the new album of my poetry from FACING THE WAVES onto a down load, CD and Vinyl
I’m hoping the working title THE BROKEN STAR will become the actual title, reflecting my moral stance against the current state of Israel in its present non secular form. To reiterate, I am convinced that the only road to peace in the Middle East is if and when Israel reform its Constitution and reconstitutes itself as a non religious, secular state as well as provide haven for ALL refugees seeking oppression, not just the European Jews post WWII. Only then can Israel establish is true heroic nature d assert its true Jewish values of Compassion, Generosity, Equality and the upholding of Human Rights.
The Jewish people of Israel more than anyone else in the world must uphold the values of life and liberty freedom from bigotry and persecution because and in honor of the very memory of the Jews of the 20th century who were persecuted, murdered and then subjected genocide because of their ethnicity and non white European. We cannot let them impose the same bigotry, discrimination, murder and genocide upon the Arab peoples, not matter the excuse or justification.
Perhaps THE BROKEN STAR will shed light for at least a few who cannot yet see that imperative
Thu, Dec 26 — San Diego to LondonTotal Travel Time 15h:05min
Flight UA1827
Economy Flight duration: 5h 16min San Diego, SAN Lindbergh Intl Arpt United States Terminal: 20 7:15 AM Dec 26, 2024 Thu New York, Newark Intl Arpt United States Terminal: A03:31 PM Dec 26, 2024 Thu Meal options: FOOD_TO_PURCHASE2h 29min layover in New York
Flight UA110
Premium Economy Flight duration: 7h 20min New York, EWR Newark Intl Arpt United States
Terminal: C06:00 PM Dec 26, 2024 Thu London, LHR Heathrow Arpt United Kingdom
Terminal: 206:20 AM Dec 27, 2024 Fri Meal options: MEA
Tue, Jan 28 — Athens to Los AngelesTotal Travel Time 16h:30min
06:35 AM Jan 28, 2025 Tue Frankfurt, FRA Frankfurt Intl Arpt Germany Terminal: 10. 8:50 AM Jan 28, 2025 Tue Meal options: REFRESHMENTS/MEAL_AT_COST1h 35min layover in Frankfurt
Flight LH456 Premium Economy Flight duration: 11h 40min Frankfurt, FRA Frankfurt Intl Arpt Germany Terminal: 110:25 AM
Jan 28, 2025 Tue Los Angeles, LAX Los Angeles Intl Arpt United States Terminal: B 01:05 PM
Jan 28, 2025 Tue Meal options: REFRESHMENTS/MEAL
In LA Our hero hopes to meet with his new IT director, his nephew Francisco Hudson the budding film maker and his production team on The Mission monthly publication my good friends Amie and Jesse Horsting
Then it’s back to San Diego to move and being teaching poetry through the library system.
I swear listening in to this documentary it sounds exactly like my autobiography! Arrogance aside, I have yet to achieve anything even approaching the pinnacle of aesthetic mastery over the English language that Beckett achieved in his life time, but my aspiration and formative years in Paris are very similar.
In my humble opinion, Samuel Beckett was the greatest, most profound and impactful writer of the 20th century; if there could even be such a thing as a number one.
Like him, I too eventually skewed formal academia as too limited to reach the pinnacles of knowledge I wish to scale. I’ve always found academia to be a poor substitute for a real education and scholarly pursuit.
Too rigid and locked into its own political circus of bought credentials and peer review, where in your competitors get to judge your work and inevitably detract from it. Higher education is only available to those who can afford to pay for one and that in itself limits its virtues to privilege and social class.
Like Sam, I too have turned to art (first though the publishing industry), as embodying the best education a self-motivated scholar can pursue. There is no one to judge your work but the public who will either accept it by buying it or give you the feedback of ignoring both the work and you.
This is what the market is for: faceless, anonymous judges cloaked in long dark robes who sit in final judgement merely by virtue of their attention span.
They either get you or they don’t and if they don’t, it’s one’s own self that bears the blame.
The vocation of art is a noble one.
A lonely one, it is true.
It takes literally decades to get anywhere near the mastery of ones craft.
The living, selling, successful artist is a figure of endurance, one who has persisted beyond an ocean of failures to the remotest of islands where a little sun may some day shine down on him/her.
Where nourishment is reduced to whatever fish one happens on, in the sea. Perhaps some berries or figs or a coconut or two.
The only sustenance a career in art can bring is the nutrition present in the work itself. Be it writing, be it visualization, music, dance, theatre, media or another medium I can’t even imagine.
It is true of all art.
True art serves its own purpose; it is for itself and nothing else. Like a tree or a river or a boulder in the middle of the desert, it has no purpose apart from the expression of its own Being. Any “art” that is for something, e.g. illustration, decoration, entertainment is no longer art. It may be “artistic” in the language and meaning it conveys but it is not strictly speaking, real art.
Real art is lie a tree, a stone, a pebble, a cloud, a sand dune, a mountain, a river, an ocean or a new born child.
It is the work and the doing of the work that is the vocation.
Fame is for John Lennon and David Bowie to sing about.
It has no place in an artist’s cramped quarters, there’s barely enough room for love and respect.
Like my intellectual idol Sam Beckett, I have made great sacrifices to perfect my craft; and yet I am still lightyears from my goals. Socially, personally, emotionally and certainly financially impoverished, I have nearly lost my daughter on art’s sacrificial altar.
I am ultimately a Poet, a writer, a producer because there is nothing else I really know how to do. I am pretty good at making money for other people, but for myself, not so much.
I don’t take orders that I don’t understand.
I refuse to be treated as a machine and I generally question any authority that attempts to assert its will on me.
I am a free man, an outlaw and a warrior.
I have no choice but to pursue the vocation I was born to do.
Which I will pursue until I am dead.
I will emulate Da Vinci on his deathbed who legend recounts his last words to be “But I’m not finished yet! I haven’t finished!”
Nature is far more super than supernatural.
So when I am dead and buried (or burnt or lying at the bottom of the sea), my words, my projects will still be with and in the world. I will be immortal without having to endure the boredom of being awake for eternity!
Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, Socio-paths of all ages. I am proud to formally announce my candidacy for America’s Alternative Dictator. If selected by the electoral college, I promise to be a dictator from day one and forever onwards.
Here is my 35 point initial plan which I promise to enact within my first week of assuming control over the governance of this fair land.
First…
1. We will be rounding up the MAGA supporters as domestic terrorists, arrest most of the Supreme Court and declare the Republican controlled Congress and Senate to be unConstitutional.
2-3. Haven’t figured out all the foreign policy details as of yet, but there will be an immediate cessation of military aid to Israel and most of the Middle East. The Ukraine will have an expedited entry into NATO and all NATO nations will draw a line for Russia not to cross. If Putin persists NATO will invade Russia, arrest Putin and immediately hand power back to the Russian people and their duly elected officials.
4. Oh yeah, the federal government will then seize all uninhabited mansions and third homes for immediate habitation by the homeless. Owners will be compensated at a fixed national emergency housing rate.
5. The defence department will be given a 3 month time frame in which to reduce their military budgets by 33% in the first year and 66% in the two years following.
6. All health insurance companies will be nationalized and be subject to the legislative restrictions and regulation of the newly formed National Health Service. Prescription drugs will be capped at the manufacturing and distribution price with no profits to be taken.
7. All student loans will be forgiven and Universities and other institutions of higher learning will have to provide new, non profit budgets so as to rationalize entry level fees for anyone seeing higher education.
8. The newly established National Department of the Arts will be granted a 60 Billion dollar a year budget to allocate to the promotion and teaching of the arts. It will also organize state and local arts festivals for the public, free of charge. All artists, dancers, performers, writers and other expressive artists will receive negotiated salaries to produce their work full time for the benefit of the general public.
9. The NDoA will be administered from the nation’s capital which will set up State Arts Centers in every state of the union as adjunct offices within the state’s main arts museums. Contracted artists will be hired and either present projects, individually or collaboratively or be assigned to individual or collaborative projects by the state SACs. The DoA will be able to be peitioned in the case of grievances and be empowered to over rule the decisions of the local SACs.
10-11. Suicide education will be mandatory in all secondary schools. Peer to peer counselling will also be taught and meditation will replace the pledge of allegience in every school classroom in the country, every morning.
12. The national curriculum will be revised by educators and lay teachers. No parents will be permitted to participate.
13-14. All existing treaties with tribal people’s will be reinstated and the entire nation will issue a ceremonial apology to past and present indigenous Americans who will now be referred to as the First Americans. First Americans and African Americans will be entitled to special citizenship benefits including free health care for life, free higher education and access to all federal records concerning individual’s origins including records of slave purchases going as far back as historically possible.
15. African Americans and First Americans will be paid restitution as a symbolic apology for the suffering they have endured at the hands of the US government.
16. The USA will be renamed The United Peoples of America.
17. And everyone will get hot cocoa before bed time on cold evenings. Hot days, they can get chocolate milk shakes.
18. It will become a federal offence to harm, torture or brutalize animals. Hunting for food. (NOT sport) will be regulated by a government licensing bureau which will issue limited numbers of animal licence tags for hunters to kill and eat unthreatened species. But not people.
19. The work week will be reduced to a mandatory 25 hour week cap and parents will be required to spend more time with under 18 children. After 18, they can tell them to go jump in the lake.
20. The minimum wage will be increased to $45 an hour for all manual labor and reduced to no more than $100 an hour for ALL professional service providers including doctors, lawyers, plastic surgeons. All workers will be required to sign up with a union as part of their employment contract, with any union and collective bargaining will become standard labor policy.
21. All currently residing immigrants will be granted 2 year residencies in which time they are to apply for employment or petition for special consideration. During their 2 year residency they will be granted all the basic rights assigned UPA citizens, albeit for a two year period which can then be renewed upon application. The commission of crimes will disqualify the entrant from seeking renewal.
22. All UPA citizens will be encouraged to learn at least Spanish and one other language through free community colleges, libraries and ‘language centers’. Spanish will become a elementary school requirement on the curriculum plus one other elective language.
23. But not Klingon.
24. Federal legislation will require that all women be paid exactly the same as their male counterparts.
25. Paid maternity and paternity leaves will be extended up to 12 months and further upon application and reduction of salary by 80%
26. All workplaces that employ more than 6 full time employees wil be required to provide federally subsidized day care from the first hour to the last hour of work every day of the working week, in the same building as the parents are working.
27. This will all be funded by the diversion of the military budget to public works and programs dedicated to enhancing and maintaining the public good, as detailed in the Constitution.
28. The breaking of the any amendment of the Constitution will become not just an enforced federal crime but an imprisonable crime, without exception.
29. A new federal crime of Political Corruption will be introduced to make such corruption a prisonable offence. All prisons will be nationalized and reformed by new federal standards of non punitive rehabilitation and education.
30. All police in every city and state of the UPA will be fired.
31-32. All police will all be presented with new employment contracts and not have to miss a day or work or a paycheck. However, they will have to re-qualify for their positions and in some cases take time off to finish college. The new national police contracts will be enshrined in a national data base of all law enforcement officials including military, coast guard and park ranger officers. Criterion for requalification will include not have be a member of or ever been associated with a White Supremacist or racist club, militia or organization. Those that have will not be rehired and be dismissed. Anyone who has ever done violence to a partner or a woman will be dismissed from the force they served in and from any other police or authoritative force in the entire country.
Any officer or person in authority who has been ever accused of using excessive force or coercion against a citizen will be disqualified from reinstatement.
33-34. Any office ever accused of corruption will be disqualified from serving however they will be able to appeal to a courtroom in which they can present evidence that the charges were false and present witnesses as to their character. All law enforcement officials will be required to submit to a mandatory psychological screening every six months and be offered free counselling if they so desire it.
35. From day one, anyone can be whatever sex or ethnicity they want to be and be legally recognized as such. I myself an African American as I can trace my genetic ancestry back to Australopitecus in Southern Africa some 200,000 years ago. Also, nobody should have the time to care what gender you dientify with, what clothes you choose to wear or who you choose to love or sleep with.
We should all have more important things to do and worry about than messing in other people’s personal lives. Anyone who worries about sexual grooming or being brainwashed about gender in schools has obviously never tried to get a ten year old to clean up their bedrooms. Get real!
I promise to be a benevolent dictator and as soon as these reforms are instituted, I will be handing over my powers to a 303 member tribunal of unpaid representatives who will serve on a rotating basis of 2 year renewable terms, with no one member serving more than 3 consecutive terms. I will hand pick my tribunal initially and then each will nominate their successor for their position at the end of their term to be voted approval on by the other 332 members.
That is all, citizens of the newly established United Peoples of America. Well, at least the bare bones of it. The rest I’ll cover after dinner.
So vote for me, or appoint me (it doesn’t matter which anymore, really), your alternative dictator. You know it makes sense.
And if it doesn’t make sense now, it will make a lot more than good sense after your mandatory rehabilitation.
After the revolution we shall all eat strawberries and cream!
But what if you don’t like strawberries with cream?
After the revolution we shall all eat strawberries and cream and like it! ~Actual Bolshevik Joke
Just a quick update to tell you developing news in the world of my crusade to take over the world and change it into a world of poetry, art and aesthetic convictions. Once we have infiltrated the power structure, we will enact our cultural Marxist conspiracy by getting key political figures to at first become more concerned about the color of their hair, their wardrobe, office furishings and back ground decor during their press conferences.
This represents phase one which we call
the iron fist of Fashio-nismo.
As key political leaders become obsessed with the arrangements of flowers in their vases, the subject matter and artists of their wall hangings. Shoe color and accessories will become crucial, time consuming judgement issues.
The next phase we called Confused Identity Syndrome is when we get our targets to actually begin to question whether they truly exist, or not. Based largely on the exemplary work of our previous agents Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Andre Breton, CIS will start with leaving copies of the Japanese Poet-Monk-Warrior Hakuin Ekakaku’sessays and aphorisms lying around on coffee tables and near water coolers within the White House, Pentagon and Congressional offices .
Boredom, while waiting for meetings to begin, will inevitably lead to bureaucrats and functionaries glance at the works of Hakuin and soon become immersed in a Zen literature that will render them confused and uncertain of even their own existence in reality. They will begin to doubt if anything they’ve ever known or believed to be true is in fact, real. Their sense of Self will be rendered void. They will gasp for breath in the vacuum of their own Being!
Finally, left sprawling and crawling on carpeted floors, tears streaming down their faces, our targets will be rendered inoperative as they crawl on the floors laughing uncontrollably while muttering incoherently, ‘there is no self, there is no self, there can be no Self, there is no Self!”
This is when we may our move.
Our crack team of Ninja Seals, Jewelry Makers and Dolphins will strike from their underground locations at the very heart of the power structure. They will be armed with books and art prints, tarot decks and astrology charts, prepared to bring the new order of Poetry Workshops, Expressive Arts seminars and forced aesthetic training into play. The targets will be interrogated with impossibly vague questions for which there are no answers.
The questioning itself will be the answer.
Targets will be constrained and forced to watch reruns of Gilligan’s Island and My Mother the Car. William Burroughs reading his work in an endless, monotonous, tape loop will become our background training will sound, never ending day in day out.
Poetry will be read to them over and over and over again until they shriek, beg for mercy and break down. We will show no mercy. What does not kill us makes us strong.
When they are broken we will rebuild them into better beings. Mainly with water color, clay sculpture and improv classes. They will please for mercy (or death), at first but then thanks to us, once the Macrame and knitting regimes are introduced, they will become pacified.
We will force them to wear outlandish fashion trends, force the men to dress in drag and wear makeup (which we will teach them how to apply), and make the women dress in appropriate formal evening and day casual wear that does not accent their breasts or rear ends. Girls will be taught how to run not like a girl, but like a human being. Boys will be taught how to cry in public, or else!
Finally the once effective political operatives, business lobbyists, generals and high placed bureaucrats will be assigned new roles as poets, philosophers, tarot card readers, astrologers, day care workers and after school program directors.
Once the revolution is achieved, peace will return to our nation and to all nations. The earth will resume its spin and stars will fill the sky in splendor and celebration at the return of the human species to its natural sanity.
May SHE (who is not perfect but tries very hard indeed and deserves a thank you card now and again), look down on us from her cosmic kitchen table and bless us with the good fortune to overcome our enemies.
I submit to you, my dear comrades and circus clowns, our plan.
Choose which side of the barricades you will be on.
Pack up your water color brushes and acrylics and tarot decks and prepare for Revolution!
btw, I’m shutting down my X (Twit) account because Elon Mollusk is a traitor to America, an Afrikaner racist and an enabler of fascism. But I don’t like what he looks like either and he fucked Amber when Johnny Depp was filming, so fuck him! Find me: https://mastodon.social/invite/nhjRLzbQ & @igorgoldkind.bsky.social
This is my welcome to you. You are new here. So am I.
I probably only recently met you somewhere on the street, in a bookshop or at the Circus. Either in the ring, just outside the ring or somewhere in the upper bleachers. (If I met you behind the bleachers, I’m not going to mention what we did there.)
I may have read you a poem or recited one of mine from memory. (Who does that ?!?) I did so mainly so that you would buy one of my books. But I also did that because I wanted to connect with you. For no other reason than that we’re both human beings sharing a scattered array of moments on this spinning blue marble we call home. We connected because that’s what we’re here to do. So please read what I’ve written here. You may not like what I have to say. Or hopefully, you may find something worth reading and repeating. Who’s to say, until you step through my door?
Open your mind and your heart and you may find yourself thinking and feeling. Or laughing, or crying or maybe even just a wee bit less on-your-own in your solitary inner thoughts.
In your sense of Self.
The great Samurai instructor and Zen Monk Hakuin, once answered his favourite student upon being asked why in a world of seeming perfection there could be so much human suffering… “That’s easy. The reason there is so much human suffering in a world of perfection is that humans spend most of our time worrying about our Self. We think about our past Self, we worry about our present Self, we anticipate our future Self. We are preoccupied with our Self to the point of obsession. We always worry about our Self when in fact, There is None”. With that note, I leave you to explore, peruse and hopefully comment, if the mood strikes you or perhaps you might strike the mood. If you want to return here or be advised of my newest contribution, please Subscribe and be part of this. And please stop worrying about your Self, when you really, truly know that…..
I’m a momma’s boy I’m a momma’s boy. Always was. Always am. Always will be.
I’m a momma’s boy. Momma gave me my name. After a passionate afternoon. Sun streaming through the blind My daddy on top of her Thrusting his bow to the strings of Stravinsky’s joyous rights of Spring
I’m a momma’s boy I’m a momma’s boy. Always was. Always am. Always will be.
I’m My momma’s boy. Sucking warm milk and egg from a plastic nippled bottle Eating the peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwhichs She made to watch over me at the school cafeteria No sloppy Joe’s for me I’m a momma’s boy.
I’m my momma’s boy. Dinner on the table Daddy gobbling his food Momma serving her family Loving her family with her food
I’m a momma’s boy I’m a momma’s boy. Always was. Always am. Always will be.
I’m a momma’s boy Daddy punched his fist through the living room wall, My momma plasters over Daddy cries at night While momma holds his head in her hands Ignoring the bruises on her cheeks.
I’m a momma’s boy I’m a momma’s boy. Always was. Always am. Always will be.
I’m a momma’s boy She slaps the faces of the mocking boys My daddy tells me to ignore As they kick me on the lawn Green grass staining jeans like blood
I’m a momma’s boy She’s my vengeful angel Who stares policemen in their eyes
I’m My momma’s boy When she stands behind me Telling teachers To love her boy Telling authorities To ignore her boy Telling Doctors To heal her boy. Walking 5 miles through the hot sweating jungle to fetch ginger ale for her little boy
I’m a momma’s boy I’m a momma’s boy. Always was. Always am. Always will be.
I’m a momma’s boy When I wake up in the hospital bed When I see her tears stream down her face. When I see my sister’s scared eyes. When I know like a freight train that I made the biggest mistake of my young life.
I’m a momma’s boy I’m a momma’s boy. Always was. Always am. Always will be.
I’m a momma’s boy When I catch a glimpse Of her cleavage Through the curtain of her night dress. When I see her clutch her dress to her breasts Ignoring my childish gaze
I’m a momma’s boy I’m a momma’s boy. Always was. Always am. Always will be. I’m a momma’s boy
Even when she closes her studio door And I beg her and beg her to come and play with me She kisses me on the top of my head and smiles Then closes her magic door, anyways.And I cry and I cry pounding my tiny fists against her magic door. How can there be something other than me that she loves more ?
I’m a momma’s boy I’m a momma’s boy. Always was. Always am. Always will be.
I’m a momma’s boy When daddy moves out I stay with her When she cries I hold her head In my hands, on my shoulder while her shoulders shake In the only love in the universe that will never leave me. Even when momma’s mind leaves me. Even when momma’s breath leaves her Even when her eyes leave me
To close forever. Momma never leaves me She never, ever, never ever leaves me. Momma was more Man than me or daddy will ever be, I’m a momma’s boy I’m a momma’s boy. Always was. Always am. Always will be.
I know Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman is a friend of mine.
And believe you me, you’re no Neil Gaiman.
Up til now I’ve been keeping my mouth shut about the allegations being made against Neil Gaiman, mainly to avoid adding fuel to fire. These rumours have taken on a life of their own. In this age of short-attention span memes and conspiracies, even the most unfounded accusations can gain traction. This happens because people associate truth with what they last recall hearing or reading.
I have nothing to say about the actual accusations. I don’t know the women making the allegations and I see Neil so infrequently, that it would be irresponsible for me to speculate one way or another as to their credibility as I really have no idea.
I do have a very clear idea of who Neil Gaiman is and how he is or is not capable of behaving. I’ve known Neil since he was a struggling journalist in the 1980s. He tried to carve a living out of writing SF book reviews for porn mags in London. Most nights, he scraped the train fare together to get back to Maidenhead.
I used to buy Neil drinks (scotch and American, as I recall) because as a publicist I had an expense account, and Neil was terminally broke.
In return, Neil introduced me to Douglas Adams (for whom he was preparing The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion), Terry Pratchett, John Brosnan, Lisa Tuttle, CliveBarker and later Alan Moore.
Neil was a sharp social butterfly at the time and although he was always on the hustle for paying writing work, he was a kind, funny guy who always had time to make useful introductions while keeping the conversations going with his wit and easy charisma. His eternal black leather jacket and devotion to Lou Reed became his recognizable brand.
I don’t think he ever took that black leather jacket off and it’s most probably now hanging in some comics museum somewhere. Neil introduced me to his first comics collaborator Dave McKean, a visual genius in his own right who actualized Neil’s first graphic novel, Violent Cases and later all the comics covers to his Sandman opus.
These were heady times. Great talents like Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz, the Hernandez Brothers, Dave McKean, and Neil himself were radically redefining the nature of the comics medium. These guys were artists who were intent on pushing boundaries and they did they succeeded,as demonstrated by the last 25 years of graphic storytelling.
At the time, I worked for Titan Books and once Neil had conned (ahem), convinced Publisher Nick Landau to publish Violent Cases as an album (pre trade paperback, Graphic Novel times), I was paid to publicize the “book”. Quotes around “book”. because Violent Cases was more of a long short story than a novel in the classical sense.
But Neil’s narrative emphasis on the role of childhood memory and mistaken memory was captivating, bringing a literary approach to ‘just another comic’ that was groundbreaking for the medium. I had never read such a theme and it’s exploration in a comic before and of course Dave McKean’s artwork, in its early representational realism style (combing mixed media of photos, sketches and painting): was sunning. No one had ever painted a comic like that before.
So I got to work alongside my buddy Neil, and my soon to be friend Dave for a few months while I wrote press releases, arranged interviews, organized signing events.
And I got paid for it.
To be honest, my best efforts only produced mixed commercial results for the album. It was too wide for most bookshops to shelve and the lessons learnt in it marketing Violent Cases is what led to Nick and DC comics settling on the standard of trade paperback for graphic novels.
But Violent Cases had a much further reaching impact: it got both Neil and Dave into DC. First with the tenuous Black Orchid limited 3 issue series (albeit featuring a stunningly handsome villain in a dark suit) and then of course Sandman.
Sandman is the reason I’m finding these accusations of sexual aggression on Neil’s part so suspect. People forget that Sandman was a break thru comic.
I actually didn’t like it at first, as I found it prosaic and flowery (inspiring me to create and write a parody of his style for Britain’s 2000AD entitled The Clown, a self obsessed, flowery speaking clown seeking revenge for the killing of his pony, Toby.
Compared to Sandman, that was a terrible strip, btw)
But in hindsight, it was groundbreaking because there were no superheroes in Neil’s fantasy Dreamscape. The Sandman was more a figure of fragile pathos than hero. More importantly, Neil’s voice was speaking not just to boys, but to girls as well at a time when, well girls just didn’t read comics.
Alan Moore once described Neil’s writing as “feminine writing” and his prose as somewhat effeminate. It sounded like an insult at the time as the big burly masculine Yeti from Northampton was busy during stakes in the hearts of boys own superhero’s in Watchmen.
But he wasn’t being condescending, he was profoundly right. Neil wasn’t just writing for boys, he was writing for boys AND girl. By the 12th issue of Sandman, boys were buying it to show to their girlfriends demonstrating the cross gender value of graphic story telling.
And remarkably, girls started buying and reading comics and then writing and drawing and publishing comics! By the late 90s female attendance at Comics Conventions was normal and Cosplay began to be a regular thing.
I’m not suggesting that Neil did this by himself. Karen Berger helped considerably. More and more male artists started to write for a gender wide audience and more and women became auteurs.
And Neil had a lot to do with this. I personally witnessed Neil going out of his way to open doors, make introductions and help women artists and writers break through the glass comics frame.
Of this I assure you with all certainty: as night follows day and day follows night, Neil Gaiman respects women. He loves women to which his daughters can attest and has supported women his entire life.
Now I’m not saying that this demonstrated respect discredits the standing allegations. What I am saying is that knowing Neil, having been around Neil, I find it highly suspect that he would commit acts of aggression, sexual or otherwise to women, regardless the circumstance. Neil just isn’t made that way.
Now sex is a funny thing at the best of times.
So is celebrity.
I think the parameters of sexually appropriate behavior between men and women have changed radically over the past 30 years and for the better.
I myself have been called out by younger men for inappropriate attitudes towards young women when within my generational context, I was paying an innocent compliment. I’ve had to change my behavior and adapt.
Why? Because times have changed and women have the right to more succinctly determine how and when they will entertain male attention, and on what terms. Now is the time when sexual attention must be overt and clearly permit-able. Men cannot assume, we must ask if it’s OK. If our attentions are welcome or, in fact, an annoyance. We also need to know when to back off without rancor or retribution. In the end, making love means just that, having love, affection, and respect for the object of your desires.
So maybe Neil has to adapt to his own generational context as well, but I doubt it. Neil was always ahead of the curve when it came to gender sexuality. He connected with trans people before it became a thing and promoted the sexual diversity of all people, regardless, both professionally and personally.
So these facts about Neil that I know first hand leads me to the latter conclusion. That the issue here being raised is more about celebrity than sexuality. Celebrity is after all, merely a surplus of attention.
Most if not all the women accusing Neil of improprieties concede that their relationship were not just consensual but mutually initiated. That’s a big deal and very different from the Harvey Weinstein or Donald Trump’s sexual assaults.
Nor does there appear to be much basis for coercion or the undue use of a professional power dynamic, which has often been true in such situations. Sex used as power is not love at all.
In reading these women’s accounts of what they hold Neil accountable for,what comes through is a tone of regret and disappointment.
Now with all due respect to their pain, I know of no human being on this planet who does not regret some sexual encounter they’ve had in their life, myself included. the pain is all part of growing up, of maturing personally and sexually. Of learning what we don’t want and do want out of intimacy.
Inevitably, this requires making mistakes, regretting them, and correcting those mistakes.
I suspect that if Neil wasn’t a celebrity author caught in the media spotlight that these allegations (some over 20 years ago), would have taken a less public form. Not that they shouldn’t be brought forwards. On the contrary, I would invite any woman I have known in my life who feels that they have been subjected to my abuse, sexual or otherwise. They are welcome to confront me. They should come forward and receive my apologies for their regret and my behavior.
I’ve made some serious mistakes with the women in my life.
I am separated from my English wife with whom upon reflection and hindsight I did not treat as well as I should have or she deserved to be treated. I cannot undo the past, but I can recognize my mistakes, apologize for my trespasses and try to live and be a better person.
Hopefully, be a kinder person who does no harm.
When it comes to Neil, all I can really say is that in the time I have known him, he has proven to be an artist, a man of integrity who’s generous spirit has improved the lives of others for the better, especially women.
He’s no saint, but he’s no demon either and his demonization is not only injust and unfair but does nothing to help the lives of his accusers.
We are all hopefully entering a gentler, kinder and more honest political and personal age. The personal is political and if I stand to be corrected for anything I’ve written above, I invite you to do so with the kindness and compassion my words invite.
I’m a Poet, a Producer and lately a Publisher of aesthetic, sometimes eclectic content that speaks to the truth of living your life in today’s moment of existence. Beyond the Real World is the Actual World, which I prefer to inhabit. There really is only one world but social delusions, language and mathematics make us concoct a duality between the “Real” and the “Actual”. It’s just a trick of the light on our senses.
Oddly and recently, I’ve received a lot of flak and unarticulated hostility from people who just like the way things are. Either they get some advantage out of our current state of disconnect or they’ve become so habituated to futilely struggling, to being dehumanized that they prefer what they’re familiar with rather than facing the unknown of change.
Having a back ground in ‘technology’ I do know one universal truth about ‘systems’ and that is ‘systems’ can always be improved upon. In fact if ‘systems’ aren’t being perpetually improved, they fall by the way side and become impediments to useful change.
As is with technology, so it is true of the human community and its social structures. My father was an anthropologist and a sociologist at a time when the very word ‘society’ was being challenged as having no meaning.
My work is about returning meaning to the term “society”. to the set of complex interactions we consider collectively as the norm and worth compromising our individuality for. Society is us and what we make of it, every day of every interaction you have with another human, either well known or a stranger to you. How you treat others out of fear or openness is multiplied by millions and the sum total consists the society we are all part of and are all living in.
No man is an island and no woman can be exiled to one.
This is not about politics or ideology, this is about awareness and mindfulness as to how each of us is as part of a whole. There’s only one race, the human race and you are part of it. The only question is with what degree of awareness are you running in the human race?
Looking backwards, in hindsight, I now realize the the steady stream of anonymous antagonism and threats I’ve received over the past year all started when my album BREATHLESS – A nostalgia for Oxygen was released last year on Bandcamp by my spoken word producer Frédéric Iriarte and largely composed by my art brother Jair-Rohm Parker Wells.
I believe it is the most popular track from the album, I CAN’T BREATH, the last words of George Floyds recited as a spoken word, ‘found’ poem by a ‘white’ voice that triggered the attention that all to soon became menacing and I have had to take unprecedented steps to protect myself from.
It is a tremendous album and well worth the free fee by which you can listen to it. I assure you that you’ve never heard anything like it before although I’m sure you’ve heard Ornette Coleman, Laurie Anderson, Willian Burroughs, David Byrne and Anthony Braxton. If not, you should listen to them too as they are the inspirations for our album.
Thank you for your attention, it’s the most precious commodity in the universe: your attention.
Take these seeds And thrust them deep inside your pockets So that when you die and your body becomes the earth Sunflowers will grow once again from the land you killed to claim.
Ballerinas and camouflaged beauty queens will greet you in the streets With pirouettes of spinning bullets behind barricades of sheets. My grandmother will serve you up Molotov’s cocktails. The orphans you murdered will dance around you sleepless until dawn So that sunflowers will grow once again from the land you killed to claim.
Do you fear for war? Ask of the stillness evermore, Ask of the field, or ask the breeze, and ask the birch and poplar trees. Ask of the children who now lie beneath the birch trees and the sky, and let their mothers tell you once more Whether or not you should fear for war.
They died so that the children from ev’ry shore might live without your fear of war. Ask those who fought, and those erased, ask those planted in the rubble of Mariupol and Donetsk Oblast Ask the women you embrace. ask your mother –ask my wife–, So that you will wonder never more Whether you have cause to fear for war.
Who longs for war? Who longs for war? No one but those who are no more. No one living longs for war But war cares not for your longing or yearning for living. Or your fears for war War will always arrive uninvited to your door.
When war comes calling to your front door. You cannot lock the war outdoors. You cannot run and hide behind your chair Or bury your head under the covers of your bed.
When war comes to your front door There is nowhere to run, nowhere to go The corpses of your neighbors will hinder your flight You cannot let fear become your general To give up the fight To surrender to might.
Instead, you must stand with the sunflowers in the golden fields Stand with our heads facing the sun. Pour your bravery into an empty coke bottle And pick up a gun. Stand for freedom, for the children we have lost Stand up for liberty, against the tide of tyranny. Stand up for yourself as much as any other.
Summon your courage to stand like man, Like a like a clown, like a woman, like a child. The cries of their answer rises loud and clear for all people, ev’rywhere, to hear. The message now is as before: Do not fear, Do not fear, Do not fear for war,
In La Jolla, California there is a holy cove Hiding beneath the palm-tree hotel lawns That match the pacific blue hues with emerald park greens, In La Jolla there’s a holy cove where my childhood still lies sheltering, Down the stairs below. Beneath the seagull soiled sand stone, the slapping sounds of flip-flop-feet, the pelican congregations and the belching, barking mad seals who think that they are lions.
La holy cove is a tiny sand-globe of cave and rock and Frolicking white puppy waves. A shelter for children learning how to swim Within reach of their parents’ gaze La holy cove stretches her arms out yearning for La Jolla Shores Across the underwater canyon, beyond the curvature of her embrace.
I jump in to swim through the open canyon, towards adventure, towards the churning waves beyond me. No longer confined by her protection, I am a wild, happy seal with a snorkel to breath and fins to fly. Swimming free, through the miniature underwater circus of la holy cove Past the orange Garibaldi clowns, the spotted leopard sharks, the casually waving anemones. Overhead, trapeze-less gulls are calling out, reminding me to come up for air.
La Holy Cove – Margarita Zuniga
Now I am beyond the cove Beyond the underwater canyon, beyond the shoreline caves Beyond the reach of Sunny Jim and the White Lady’s grin. Beyond the Tombstone markers Where there are no bodies, just the memories of long gone Bottom Scratchers, Ancient Greek fishermen, fallen on their spears.
I swim deep inside the Clam’s open cave Where I first saw the world’s sunlight bouncing off an ocean mirror, To dance on the walls of my darkness. Where the real and unreal collude To make memory a sanctuary, Where childhood warmly welcomes our return.
When I emerge and meet my mother’s scared eyes I lie down and breath in waterlogged undulations, Of sand made liquid by my body’s memory of the oceans sway The warm sand is a rocking cradle My mother puts a towel around my shoulders and asks “Why do you always go out so far? It scares me”.
These are the rules to write by, to live by, escape the penitentiary of the mediocre into the wilder realm of raw living experience, Whitman’s sun burning warmth through the skin of our beings.
These are the rules to guide by, to breath by, to masturbate and fornicate by. Rules to die by.
These are the rules, the markers of life as it is lived as it can only be truly known. Believe it until it’s no longer true.
Accept That there is nothing you can do. Accept That you cannot control or know for certain the outcome of events. Accept That you are merely one of trillions. Accept That your parents are dying or already dead. Accept That you are dying and this all means nothing. Accept That you are vulnerable, shatterable to the winds of fate. Accept That even the mountains die. Accept That you are truly alone Accept That you will die alone. Accept That you will remember none of this. Accept What you will not accept.
Igor Goldkind 2020
Illustration by Rian Hughes 2020 from: Take a Deep Breath – Living With Uncertainty
The month of January was silent due to my having accused a local mask-denier of demonstrating “a lethal stupidity”. 30 day suspension for “bullying’. I assume based on her complaint that I was telling her not to spread misinformation.
My latest trespass, again for another 30 days (first 7, until I appealed the decision), was for taking issue with a Trump supporter on one of Alexandra Cortez’s threads.
The woman was claiming that AOC had made up her account. A Portuguese participant commented in AOC’s defense whereupon the virulent QAnon proponent told the Portuguese national that he was a foreigner and to mind his own business, going back to his own country. I immediately responded in his defence by inviting him as my guest, to comment on anything he wanted to in the land of freedom of speech and then chastised the woman to stop being an ignorant American.
She complained that I was nationally slandering her for being an American manifestation of supreme ignorance. I was again suspended from using Facebook for 30 days, 27 more.
My appeals have been well reasoned and completely ignored.
I am awaiting the moral judgement of the algorithmic overlords by which human employees make decisions at Face Book. Repeatedly, I have been censured and censored for challenging misinformed comments that Facebook itself, if it contained one iota of the moral standard it claims to hold, should have caught in the first place!
If challenging and taking issue with those who question the legitimacy of the election, the validity of the pandemic or its remedies and continue to spout dangerous, Trump inspired, racist and and anti vax madness goes against Facebook’s Community Standards then those standards and their deployment are in serious need of actual public review and scrutiny.
In the meantime, I shall wallow in the righteousness of my exile. Dostoievski won’t be drinking alone tonight in the Facebook Gulag.
A book of poetry and art, fables and philosophies aimed at the pandemic of crisis anxiety so many are facing.
In uncertain times people turn to uncertain means. This is a book of poetry and art, of fables and philosophies aimed at the pandemic of crisis anxiety so many of us are going through right now in our daily lives and in our inner spaces. We are all of us and each us in this together.
The sciences but also the arts do provide remedies. The ancient Egyptians wrote curative words on fragments of papyrus to feed their burnt ashes to the afflicted. Lacking morphine, Walt Whitman read verses to fallen soldiers on the battlefields of the first Civil War.
At their best, the right words are more than therapeutic, they can be curative. Take a Deep Breath emulates this ritual here in administering remedies for living in these times of crisis, in living with uncertainty.
Original Words, Music, Video and Antidotes for Living With Uncertainty
Internationally renown fine artist and producer Frederic Iriarte and American Poet Igor Goldkind have collaborated on 9 original tracks of musical interpretations based on Igor Goldkind’s forthcoming collection of poetry also entitled TAKE A DEEP BREATH. The album of 9 tracks is being launched as a complete work at this year’s International Beat Poetry Festival and will be released for download at midnight this coming Saturday, September 5th.
This unique multimedia work was written and produced during the pandemic in Stockholm, San Diego and Moscow. It is intended as an artistic attempt to help us live with uncertainty and survive catastrophe living.
“TAKE A DEEP BREATH is most important piece of Spoken Word Art to come along at just the right time: right when we all needed it the most!” – Henry Rollins
TAKE A DEEP BREATH and step out of your comfort zone. Just don’t look down.
2020 has been a year of both social, economic and psychological upheaval. Humans have been required to adapt to drastically changing circumstances without forewarning and without certainty as to the outcomes.
We are being challenged as a species to adapt. Adaptation is our genus but it is also painful and exhausting. TAKE A DEEP BREATH is a guidebook: a pause for a moment of reflection. Take a break from panic and get a clear view of where we are as individuals, as a people and as a species.
Covid-19 has literally attacked our humanity however in doing so has done us the service of reminding us of our shared humanity, our common mutual vulnerability. These are hard lessons to learn and uncomfortable changes to be made for us to survive. TAKE A DEEP BREATH is a pause in the gloom and a chance to regain our strength and resilience to all carry on.
TAKE A DEEP BREATHis a step backwards in time when poetry and music were used and appreciated as tools for contemplation, meditation and reflection on the most crucial factor in our lives. Now that we are being confronted and overwhelmed with multiple catastrophes, is the time to return to using poetry for what it is designed for:
“The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.”
― Franz Kafka
We quest for meaningful truths about our existence and what we bring to bear upon our environments. Mathematics, science and technology enable our mechanical ability to crunch big numbers, calculate near infinite possibilities and deliver probabilistic results.
To be able to knowledgeably predict the multitude of buying behaviors of literally millions of customers using Amazon is an impressive computational accomplishment, in the service of consumer capitalism. Or to be able to use peoples’ most personal and intimate preferences and tastes as unstructured data, to be sold onto those who would better manipulate our preferences for profit.
Profit motivates the interests of those who control data to use it in order to steadily limit the range of free (unpredictable)choices to achieve more predictable decisions. The more predictable the judgements of choice, the better the profit in meeting those wants. The freer the will, the wider the spectrum of discernment between what is needed and what is merely desired. Not ideal customer relations if your goal is for the customer to buy exactly what you tell them to buy and have already prepared them to buy.
But the truth is that we are all free to make choices, even when there isn’t much to choose from.
We are still free to deviate from the predictable norm and exercise our wider, human judgement in our choices. But to do so successfully is to break down the predisposed contexts to our decision making. We would need to embrace the fact of Uncertainty, unpredictability and see beyond the unreliable predilections of Causality. We must, so to speak, break our causal chains as they have been manipulated in advance by pragmatic and diabolic conventions.
To live outside of predetermined contexts, to break out of the “real world” into the actual world, where we really exist necessitates first the understanding of context in the service of truth. To understand the dichotomy between perception and interpretation we should adopt a new vocabulary: The study of interpretation is called Hermeneutics, which is the scrutiny of language mainly text, in the context of interpretation.
However, language is not limited to text. Much of human history (of consciousness), has been devoted to poring over sacred and heretical texts; but there is also the language of dreams and music which are open to both reading and expression.
Then there is of course, the language of the image. The useful lie of representation, predating photography by some 30,000 years.
In so far as hermeneutics is the study of text and its interpretations, Irrealism examines the language of images by posing that no one account or one representation of a reality can accurately account for that reality apart from that one possible narrative. But there are millions of narratives, millions of representations of any event or occurrence in reality. There exists a vast multiplicity of perspectives and vantage points of which no one of which can be designated the sole “true” representation. Namely because the quantum diversity of perspectives is fundamental to that singular truth. This is one of infinite possible worlds but the only truth that can be found in this assertion is within the context of an infinite number of real possibilities.
Thus we each stand on a ledge overlooking the infinite, the universe waiting for us to take a step in whichever direction we choose.
Irrealism casts light on this distinction. There is no one reality or real event, but a multitude of infinite possibilities, some more probable than others in terms of predictive outcome. But to understand this and sustain it visavis perception requires first a relinquishment of the notion of one sole truth or truthful perspective. The truth is not found in once account, one representation; nor it it found in accumulating and theoretically distilling all possible accounts and perspectives. Instead, the monotheistic idea of one truth needs to be exchanged for the greater truth of infinite diversity in limitless combinations.
Irrealism is a type of existentialist literary artform for which the means are continually and absurdly rebelling against the ends that we have predetermined for them. The whole causal relationship between means and ends is brought into question and we gain the insight of restraining from linking events, so as not to fill in gaps with significance.
If we can easily detach significance from coincidental events and understand their own phenomenal existence without added meaning, then equally we can detach significance from events that just happen to follow each other in time. By freeing events and objects from the phenomenal artifice of a causal chain of meaning, we gain an irreal insight into the true nature of events and objects as they exist.
Like existentialism, Irrealism has presented itself as both a philosophical argument and a work of art in which the philosophical principles are demonstrated by the fictional subjective experience of a protagonist. For examp0le, In THE MALTESE FALCON, Dashiel Hammet’s existential detective, Sam Spade is a free man as he is free from the compulsive and lethal greed of the antagonists. At the end of the film and novel, Sam chooses the virtue of duty over love .
By proving the reality of an existential choice as a empathetic human choice, the fiction delivers a more visceral universal understanding of the underlying principle.
Some lies reveal deeper truths.
Breaking attachment to one true account or representation permits the “irreality” of circumstance to become our context. This is akin to wavicle theory in which light is not reduced to one structural account but rather we adapt our contexts to fit the data. Sometimes light behaves like and can be measured as particles and sometimes it cannot. It can only be measured within the context of waves. So is light either a particle or a wave? Well neither, nor both. The truth is that light exists outside of our realm of contexts. It is not unreal to describe light as a particles, but it isn’t solely true either. Nor is the fact that light consists of waves soley true. This quantum perception version Schrodinger’s Cat does not dwell on the mortality of the cat but rather on our ability to perceive beyond uncertainty.
The awkward term “wavicle” is a contrivance of vocabulary: there is no such object as a wavicle. All there is, is a misleading name to make it easier for us to measure and understand the phenomenal nature of light, not its physicality. In this light, so to speak, Irrealism addresses the false dichotomy of physicality vs the phenomenal. Yes, the universe is a physical one and objects and events have gravitas and yes, the universe is merely comprised of what we perceive and subject to the limits of our own perception. The universe is neither singularly physical nor singularly phenomenal; nor is it both. As both interpretations hold weight in their individual contexts, neither are false but again neither by itself is true. The perception is not one of unreality (or falsehood or fantasy) but of irreality, reality is not above what we perceive and experience, but behind it.
So it is with irrealism. The philosophical premise of Irrealism is that both the physicality of objects and events is one context, whereas their phenomenal content, our perception occupies a separate but parallel context. Objects and events exist in both worlds’ the physical and the phenomenal.
Irrealism demonstrates the irreality of events and objects by demonstrating existence as neither/or. An irreality demonstrates objects and events outside of their contextual rules. Viscerally this can be expressed in Art & Music and cognitively, in philosophy and poetry.
In philosophy, the belief that phenomenalism and physicalism are alternative “world-versions”, both useful in some circumstances, but neither capable of fully capturing the other.
Irrealist art and literature features an estrangement from our generally accepted sense of reality. Which explains the often welcome sense of discomfort or unease that often accompanies taking in an irrealist perspective. SF and Horror are good examples of that unease and rumbling anxiety as entertaining.
An example of this would be Franz Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis, in which the salesman Gregor Samsa’s plans for supporting his family and rising up in rank by hard work and determination are suddenly thrown topsy-turvy by his sudden and inexplicable transformation into a man-sized insect. Such fiction is said to emphasize the fact that human consciousness, being finite in nature, can never make complete sense of, or successfully order, a universe that is infinite in its aspects and possibilities.
Irrealism is the Impossible and the Unexplainable laid as foundation for an art form that can directly communicate, by feeling rather than articulation, the uncertainties inherent in human existence and the irreconcilability between human aspiration and human reality.
This suspension of the temporal extrapolation of causality requires a vantage point outside of the law of causality, (that every phenomenon and corresponding qulia has a predetermining cause).
The balls falls down because you threw it up because of therule: what goes up must come down. This fundamental layman’s interpretation of Newtonian laws of motion of course derives from a specific time frame that is pre space travel. To travel back to this context and suggest that this law may not always apply universally and that there are contexts such as weightlessness for which the causal relation does not exist, is an example of irrealism.
To suggest to Newton that what goes up doesn’t necessarily come down is to express an unreality to Issaic based on the context of his understanding. Moreover as Newton’s laws of motion are universally adopted as convention, to assert this truth too loudly will get you locked up in a mental asylum.
Those of us living Newton’s Impossibility know that whether or not the ball falls down is completely dependent on the existing context. To suggest a state of weightlessness to Newton’s context is an irrealism. It is false within the given context but true in a greater but remoter context. What we call ‘real’ appears to be exterior to us and perception-independent when in fact, it is neither. Irrealism exposes the mythic unreality underlying our virtual fixed world, the world we manifest with our minds by responding to certain stimuli in our environment. These stimuli and their interpretation sketch the internal map of our presumed outer world experience.
It is because of this out of context impossibilities that Irrealism is considered to be dream-like in nature, which is a justifiable description so long as we remember that the Irreal representation does not relate a particular dream that we might have had but instead evokes aspects of the dream-state within the work. Irrealist objects occupy our dreams as props for symbolic meanings much as one reads the symbolism within a medieval painting or a film wherein every object captured is there for a meaningful reason.
To understand that reality exists both outside of and inside of perception,( not in one or the other soley nor both together), is to glimpse the tapestry of infinite possibility divorced from the coincidences of causality. Quoting the American philosopher Nelson Goodman “as much as we might try to order our world with a certain set of norms and goals (which we refer to as the real world), the paradox of a finite consciousness in an infinite universe creates a zone of irreality. The Irreal is that which lies beyond [or behind], the real”) that offsets, opposes, or threatens the real world of the human subject.
Irrealist art highlights this irreality, and our fascination with it, by combining the unease we feel from a world that doesn’t conform to our desires; with the narrative quality of a dream state wherein safe and familiar realities are being constantly undermined.
“We are not speaking in terms of multiple possible alternatives to a single actual world but of multiple actual worlds.] Goodman makes no assertions regarding “the way the world is” and that there is no primary world version i.e. “no true version compatible with all true versions.” nor world-versions” of the world”. Instead he describes worlds as “made by making such versions”. As Goodman says, “Not only motion, … but even reality is relative.”
Irrealist art shows us this.
A successful irreal work of art, music or literature confronts its audience with a perception that cannot simply be translated as merely a fantasy, speculative or as a symbolist work. . Thus cut off from the familiar context of what is possible and ultimately explainable, impossible, one is left alone in the company of the absurd. It is thus communicates directly, “by feeling rather than articulation, the uncertainties inherent in human existence or, to put it another way… the irreconcilability between human aspiration and human reality.”
The artist Tristan Tondino writes, “Realism is an Irrealism. Reality is plurality – we partially create it, and we must open our universes and our perceptions to all possible versions of it.
Irrealism is a vaccine for living with the truth of uncertainty
A new acquaintance asked me why I endured relative poverty and uncertainty in California when I could easily take a tech copywriting or PR job and be living comfortably.
I answered, for which I’m sure someone reading this might wonder the same.
The answer is not simple and all has to do with my commitment to art and to the art of writing. It’s somewhat like a religious or spiritual calling; certainly as requisite of sacrifice and discipline as a monastery. (Read James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, if you need further elucidation on the subject). To become a great artist, which is what I believe I am becoming at this late stage of my life (or will at least die trying to be), takes total focus and constant dedication.
Not just to creation but to observation. Many of my best friends are not just poets and artists but scientists and mathematicians because they are processing their own observations through their own disciplines. When we talk and share words they read me and hear me, they comprehend how we’re all pursuing the same thing: the truth about life and the lives we are living.
Science and Art are really just two different vantage points in the same universe. During our Rennaisance there was no such separation between science, engineering and art. Just look at Da Vincis’s sketches if you don’t believe me. And this underlines the true failing of the formal education systems. No purely structured system can account for, much less process the unstructured data of experience.
But one truth I have learnt along this way is that we are all connected; both as a species and as sentient beings. Not just to those existing in the moment we all share but for all of us, from the very beginnings of awareness and rational self-consciousness. We are all brothers and sisters of the same mind, the same awareness that is awake and cognicent.
We all share the same biology of the mind. I imagine that when extraterrestrial sentient life is contacted, it will be the poets and artists most open to the new who will not only best describe and communicate qualitative meanings with them but decipher their language(s) to communicate with them (more of “us”?), before the actual scientists can interpret their data and the military can rationalize the threat.
From the point of commonality; this sentience itself has a common shape or form in all of us throughout time and geography. It is our human nature.
My words try to sketch its outline.
Without needing to name a god, the Buddhists have been attempting to describe this commonality of all sentient beings, for thousands of years. In art and yes, in poetry too. It’s what poetry is for: to describe the indescribable that is true for all of us, to all of us.
The known shining its single torch down a darkened corridor to the unknown. The unknown (not the unknowable), has always been our mind’s final frontier.
We weren’t born yesterday. We did not just become aware of consciousness. The history of consciousness is the history of us, of the ‘you’ that is reading and comprehending these words.
You are no different in awareness than the Neanderthal who stumbled out of her cave and looked up at the stars in wonder. Every astronomer I have ever known harbors that exact same wonder. Our tools maybe bigger, faster and deadlier but our minds haven’t changed, just adapted to our tools. They’re physiologically still the same; and only enhanced by the evolution of language, both associative, symbolic and metaphoric.
This is where we alll connect. The commonality of our senses’ perception and their comprehension. This is what is meant by ‘realisation’. When we make the world real. When we realise that the truths we know from our senses connect us to the world as intimately as to each other.
These are the materials I use to create art.
But why not get a day job? I will have to. I have learned all I can stomach for now about the tangible reality of poverty. I have made some great and tragic friends outside my walls of privilege and comfort. But when I first detected my dwindling resources, I panicked. I borrowed gas money from friends, slept in beachside campsites for free and spent too many days in chic cafes nursing one cup of coffee and a refill just to write, just to connect with the non poverished. I. applied for every job I was qualified for and hustled my books even harder.
But this did not avert my panic and the fear, until it passed of its own. And you already knnow: nothing is ever as bad or as long as we first imagine it to be. That’s when I understood how many of my needs, weren’t needs at all and that I could live without the comforting requisites of a middle class existence, just fine. In some ways better.
Less consumption = less waste.
There’s what I want and what I can have and if I diminish my wants, I can have have everything I want.
When you don’t have any money, you don’t spend any money and that initself is a good thing.
The last argument that pursuaded me of the virtue of experiencing this lifestyle is that if I really wanted to write for wider audience in a profound and meaningful way, that I might need to understand and empathize with the truth of our human condition across the entire economic spectrum, not just those who can afford to buy books
And the truth is that the vast majority of “us”do not live a middle class lifestyle and that the majority of “us” struggle every day to earn what is called a living and yet seldom ressembles it.
I have met so many, so many poor people living on the streets in one of the wealthiest cities in the wealthiest state in the union, in the wealthiest nation in the world.
None of us can afford to rest within our illusion of justice and freedom until poverty is no longer the default state of the human condition in America. Remember, poverty is a prison from which escape is difficult. But if we truly want to say that we live in the land of the free, then we must free our citizens from the prison of poverty.
They are “us” as well. Not charitable”us”, not pitiful “us”, not lazy, drug taking, alcoholic “us”.
Just us.
I have talked in depth with enough of the so-called “homeless”. to recognize them for who they really are: The Poor. You know, those people Jesus was always talking about and Charles Dickens and Emile Zola wrote about? The idea that those without homes choose to live that way is a bigoted urban myth that need to be quashed.
Yes, may of the poor have real problems with alcohol, drugs and severe mental illness. But so does every other group and class of people I have ever known. The rich and the middle class aren’t exempt from alcohol, drugs and craziness; in fact they can afford more!
How then are we less connected as human beings? Or is “humaness” only measured by level of income?
When I moved back to California to look after my mother, I was immediately struck by the avalanche of poverty that had engulfed my home town. As is every other foreign visitor to California, by the way. No tour of Balboa Park or visit to Sea World can eradicate the open poverty that everyone can see on the streets of San Diego. Which now more closely ressemble the streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti or the extreme poverty that can be found in some places in Mexico, than any American city.
The first thing that went was the last vestage of regional or even national pride. It is a crime against humanity for so rich a city as San Diego to maintain the level of homeless poverty that is evident to anyone who visits us. It is “our” fault. Because we are also connected to the impoverished and the socially weak.
You know, what Jesus was saying.
If I am to write the truth for those who want to read or hear the truth, then I ought to know what is lying outside the walls my middle class habits and worldview. What is it really like, not just for the impoverished but for the vast majority of Californians who also now live beyond the walls of middle class sensibilities, paycheck by paycheck?
Haunted by the memories of its long gone comforts.
What does it mean to be a human being living in America right now, in 2020. Aren’t we all supposed to have jertpacks by now?
What is the Truth of our American selves?
As Tony Morriosn said “The whole point of freedom is to free others”.
To my friends who have offered their support, I thank each one of you. I will never forget your kindness and your humaness.
Yes I have a new book coming out in the fast approaching Spring. It’s entitled TAKE A DEEP BREATH, A Book of Remedies and will feature much of the writing and accounts of experiences of truth that I have had living in California these last 5 years.
San Diego poets are wet gutter snipers Taking pot shots at frivolous affluence and misspent eternities From the street corners and back alleys of our prematurely grey dementias.
San Diego poets cast lines like fishing reels Screaming curses at angels in heels while Humming blues tunes to the damned, under our breaths.
San Diego poets spit surreal spiels into ribbons of unfurling images That rain down like bright pathetic confetti Against a blank horizon of an empty human empathy.
San Diego poets slide their wild, horse hair bows Across taut, tied strings that sing Above a psychedelic landscape of the gradually worsening human condition
You and me are not blind instruments of self-immolation. We do not have to sit at the center of the fire to make it our home. We can play our songs on sad air violins And dance in the rain to drown our sorrows in the sea of greater uncertainty.
San Diego poets press our runny noses against The pained windows of badly lit coffeeshops and crafty bookstores, Hosting poetry readings for the over groomed; Those educated only in the blind arrogance of their own judgements.
San Diego poets litter the streets with our menial typewriters Preaching doomsday fire sales to tourists and Liberation to those still hounded by carnivorous ambitions In the current climate of fear that tries to pass itself off as survival.
San Diego poets never have enough money to buy you a drink But will spare you a cig-regret – –if you’re willing to spare the change you need you to make –to make your tomorrow just a little bit better.
San Diego poets are all clowns, fools and charlatans Keeping ourselves amused on the ragged streets of cold hangover dawnings Whilst skipping around and dancing through the circus of mediocrity that pervades us.
San Diego poets migrate like flocks of hummingbirds Seeking warmer climes and heartfelt compassions. Blurring our wings the whole distance in getting there.
Thank you so much for your light I came here especially to see it and I was not disappointed! Your shimmering light so beautiful That it penetrates deep inside my darkest well. Filling the emptiness of the dark with your long journeyed light.
You remind me that I am part of your beauty That we are all beautiful when bathing in your light. And that your talent for night Opens our hearts and our minds To the Beauty that would hold us closer to her breast.
Nourish us with Your love So that we may flourish and Become as beautiful as You have always been And always will be.
Go Fuck Yourself, you pathetic failure. Leave the arts to the poets, the dancers and the painters Go get yourself a real job, a real vocation. Fuck off and leave those of us who fight for our culture alone. Fuck off and stop leeching the creative spirits of the secular martyrs who have sacrificed their lives on the holy altar of Art, Truth and Freedom. Go Fuck Yourselves! And each other in your sleazy stinking orgy of self-gratifying bigotry and weeping pustule aesthetics.
Go Fuck Yourself in the Ass With Your Own Extended Nose Go let yourself get fucked in the ass by all the bogus arts nonprofits that pocket tax money to further their own finances while cheating artists and reviewers out of their livings.
Go write yourself a grant.
Write up your mission statement in day-glow gold-gilded writing. Put on your ‘supporter-of-the-arts’ makeup Keep counting the coins in your bookseller’s till While prescribing the rules that determines who is in and who is other.
Go Fuck Yourself and try reading a book for a change. Go read Whitman, Bukowski, Anais Nin and Henry Miller on art. Let William Burroughs into your dreams. Go get yourself a self education. In the meantime, shut up, sit down and just listen: You are the enemy of art, the enemy of poetry, the enemy of life. And we’re coming for you. Because all you are is in the way.
Everyone wants to be free. ven from the things that once gave us comfort. We are like children who swap our blankets For softer ground.
So why do you wait to be free When the keys to your cage Are hanging right outside your front door? Reach through the bars with your hand Stretch your fingers far and bend your will around the bars.
Your mind is your best friend, your best teacher, your best doctor, Whether you believe it or not. In spite of everything you’ve done to yourself, Your mind really does care about you and often thinks of you, quite fondly.
Just let your mind mend itself Heal yourself with a few choice words. Your own words. When you say:
The truth is not a cold tombstone The truth is not a judgement The truth is a flowering realisation inside your own living mind. Pulling you outwards, & forwards, enraptured by Time.
When my breath and My will are as one, The universe swallows me Whole.
I’ve started this post after returning from a 60-day ban from Posting, Liking, Communicating, Joining, or Connecting with anyone else in the Facebook Community.
Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are “offensive,” happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal political or moral values on others. Censorship can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure groups. ~ The ACLU
What Was My Crime?
My posting one of my own published poems from my bookIs She Available? that had been posted in Facebook at least thrice before without repercussion. and is currently available in dozens of libraries and bookstores throughout California and soon to be released in the UK. The visual interpretation of a love poem by the Designer/photographer and internationally renown artist/typographer Rian Hughes entitled:
I Missed Your Scent in Paris
Although his image was a black and white stylized photograph of a woman where if you squinted and looked real close you could make out the shadow of half a nipple showing, (which is exactly what a Facebook employee would have had to have done in order to render judgement that Tian and my work contravened Facebook’s community standards.
Words by Igor Goldkind – Image by Rian Hughes Censored by Facebook
The Poem and Rian’s photo interpretation of the poem were not obscene, disgusting nor gratuitously offensive in any way. Unless of course, you consider the human body in itself to be obscene, in which case I strongly suggest you seek therapeutic help as you clearly entertain unhealthy, self-hating, anti-social thoughts.
Instead, if not the poem, then certainly the photograph of the semi-nude woman is a work of art. It is obvious to anyone who reads and looks that it had no other intention. Not being able to distinguish between pornography and erotic art is one of the great threats Facebook’s dumbed down lack of discernment poses to the thriving of a culture. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Art is the science of culture. Both are experiment–driven. ~ Igor Goldkind ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– As community-oriented and community-sounding Facebook professes to be (in its language and self-justifications of its censorship), Facebook is the enemy of culture. As well as the enemy of the community of humanity that shares the values that a free society comes hand in hand with expression free from censorship; as long as the expression poses no harm. Otherwise, it is not a free community.
“To destroy a people, first destroy their culture. ~ Mario Torero
What is it exactly about the half shadow image of a woman’s left nipples poses a threat to anyone? The last time I checked, a woman’s nipple is the source of nourishment for all of us, male and female at one time or another.
To censor the image of a human nipple is to censor the truth of what it means to be human. How can I prove this? Look for yourself! Apart from a minority of our fellow hairless apes who have lost them in accidents or horrific burns, we ALL OF US HAVE NIPPLES! It is the truth of who we are and as an artist, as a poet, I am only interested in the truth of who we are. Not the twisted Calvinist attempt at reversioning a reality where angels never fart and genies have no belly-buttons.
We Must Protect You From Yourself
I know for a fact that genies do have belly-buttons, I’ve seen them with my own eyes! And as far as angel farts go, they smell better than your own.
Article 10 of the United Nations Human Rights Act protects our right to hold our own opinions and to express them freely without government or private interference.
This includes the right to express our views aloud (for example through public protest and demonstrations) or through:
• published articles, books or leaflets • television or radio broadcasting • the internet and social media • AND WORKS OF ART • The law also protects our freedom to freely receive information from other people.
The US The Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment’s protection of artistic expression very broadly. It extends not only to books, theatrical works and paintings but also to posters, television, music videos and comic books and personal social media pages including FACEBOOK — whatever the human creative impulse produces.
The right not to be censored by an arbitrarily superimposed moral hypocrisy of a minority…. is articulated in the Human Rights Act signed by the US as treaty and thus bound by US federal law in 1964. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the United States renewed its commitment to the international human rights system by signing, though not yet ratifying, several major human rights treaties.
Including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS (ICESCR).
Liberty, Freedom & Justice But Not From Facebook
These are the laws of the land that FACEBOOK has violated in unceremoniously and without warning censoring my work. Judgement without respite and only the cosmetics of appeal.
Facebook is not a community in any shape or form as long as its private owners impose their narrow, petty, puerile, and juvenile morals on us without listening to everyone, not just the complainers, who make up that community. That includes us good for nothing, when-are-you-going-to-get-a-real-job? artists.
There is no one to talk to at Facebook. No one to appeal to; no one to reason with and no one that takes responsibility for its actions. Human beings wrote the algorithms, built the servers and the browsers to increase the human bandwidth, not to distance us from ourselves!
There is no reason to fear the takeover of robots, algorithmic judgements and machines, for we have already surrendered.
Please repost this in part or in full on your wall and please share with your friends across all social media. Maybe Facebook will recall what it means to be a human with nipples one day and stop emulating the machines (who have no nipples).
PS You think that I’m overreacting? Just another crazy, good for nothing artist making pointless noise? The Modigliani nude, the Picasso, the Rubens and all fell foul of Facebook and are all pictured as depicted after being defaced by Facebook in the name of their hypothetical Community Standards.
Today was every other day.
My boss says,
“Hey, Joe, where you going with that staple gun in your hand?”
I draw a blank on my face and turn to face his.
“You don’t really know, do you, Joe?
You don’t know where you’re going.
You don’t really know who you are.
You don’t know much of anything anymore,
Do you now, Joe?”
Then he laughs at me
In front of everybody
He laughs and points at
What everybody but me can see.
And everybody laughs and they laugh and they laugh
But nobody talks to me anymore.
My boss don’t talk to me anymore.
My neighbors don’t talk to me anymore.
My doctor don’t talk to me anymore.
My mother don’t talk to me anymore.
My father don’t talk to me because
He’s long since gone
Flown far away from the words to this song.
I call my girlfriend up on the telephone
She says, “Joe, I’m not your girlfriend anymore”
And hangs up the phone.
Nobody talks to me anymore.
I call my doctor on the telephone
He says, “hello, is there anybody there”?
I say, “it’s me, Joe, doctor help me, nobody talks to me anymore!”
My doctor coughs and hangs up the phone.
Nobody talks to me anymore.
I call on my priest in the church down the road
I say “Hello, Father? my Father, is that really you?”
“Please tell me, dear Father, what should I do?”
My priest says “Joe, God don’t love you anymore”
And throws me out through God’s front door.
Even God don’t talk to me anymore.
So, I go down to a bar to have a little swim.
There’s a bar stool there where the X-mas tree should have been.
The bartender looks at me,
But he doesn’t say a word.
I hold up two fingers and point at the sky
So he pours me a double, ten-year-old rye.
Which I toss down and motion for another
While calling him “my brother”.
The bartender stares at my face.
As silent as the stones in his wall.
Nobody talks to me anymore.
On the street, the headlights blind my blinking eyes.
Strangers push past me, some I know, most I despise.
A cop car pulls up and flashes his bright light on me
The cop points his flashlight in my eyes so that I can’t see.
There’s nothing he or I need to say.
He won’t arrest me.
It just ain’t worth his time to talk to me anymore.
A ghost walks up and stares into my face.
He doesn’t say a word; just hangs there in space
Instead, he spins ribbons of colored lights
Inside my head.
There’s no knowing with ghosts no more
The dead don’t even talk to me anymore, either!
Suddenly I see an explosion of lights
There are trumpets and harps and angels in sight
A liquor store, a neon vision of light
Promises me spirits of salvation and delight
If I just step inside….
While next door, a gun store slowly cracks open its door . . .
I am my father and my mother’s son and
I’ve never before bought me a gun.
But nobody, nobody talks to me anymore.
Hope is mortal, not eternal.
Though it may feel like eternity
Sitting in a chair by the window.
Gazing up and down the path that leads
Up the hill and down to the canyon on your doorstep.
Every morning, every evening, every day.
Waiting for an answer to your prayer for hope to be restored.
Resilience rewarded
Patience still burning brightly
Under your old photograph on the wall where you live now.
I’m not sad.
No, sadness is just passing rain to irrigate the eyes.
Instead, I’m a new planet
Ringedby the last halo of hope
The one wrapped tightly around my head.
I write this mainly for my regular readers who may be concerned about my apparent absence from FB. I’ve always used FB as a fencing ground and now I’ve been fenced out, temporarily, for 3 days.
My account has been public for the last 5 years because I always fully intended to provoke, and attract engagement particularly from those that find offence or challenge here or just take exception to my posts.
But mainly, I use this platform to hone my writing skills in real time.
It’s a form of art activism, Artivism.
Bringing the origins of my work; the emotions, the outrages, the political anger and the moral dismay I feel directly to confront on their walls, in their replies and in their faces, those who are morally failing.
Who do I mean are morally failing?
Well, anyone who still says they support the treasonous weasel in the White House, is a start. But more generally Americans who should be more French than they’re English but unfortunately share more with the English propensity for worshipping dogs and traumatising their children.
The present generation of “youf”; be they white, black, Chicano, Native, Vietnamese, Gay, Chinese, Transitioning, Korean, Japanese, Indian, African, Middle Eastern (and every combination of the above), have more in common with each other than they will ever have with any of their previous generations.
Revolution needn’t be violent they just need to turn things around.
But to the point in question, I have not been in touch because I have been barred from both Facebook and Messenger for not following community guidelines, poor dears. Except that I am as much a part of that community as anyone. Not of an algorithm that flags random posts to FB ‘s appointed moral custodians.
My crime against the community?
Reposting the profile photo of a woman’s breast dripping with red wine into a crystal goblet. In fact, her nipple is obscured as it is drenched in wine.
You can see it for yourself here below.
What is the algorithm’s crime? Well nothing, it just follows and acts on long lists of tedious commands; executed in the blink of time
No mind, I’ve been a naughty, naughty boy and my shrilling mother will not allow me to save the human race from amnesia.
I can’t stop the algorithm from making a moral judgement that supersedes mine, or any human’s. I can’t have a quick word with the algorithm or anyone at FB to teach them what a juxtaposition of symbols that create an allusion to the truth.
Such as the sweet wine depicted being the mirror of the sweet mother’s milk as is symbolically conveyed by the nude breast. You cannot make that visual allusion with a bra.
It doesn’t work.
The breast must appear as nude as it is to the baby that seeks its nourishment. Sweet breast milk, sweet primal nourishment, sweet wine that I sip in the middle of my night to remind myself that I was once a child, protected and loved by my mother.
As were you.
Algorithms have no mothers. And those who are the masters of those algorithms long ago put their mothers out of their eye’s way, in homes.
The healing effect of words has long been recognized. As far back as 4000 BCE, early Egyptians wrote words on papyrus, dissolve them in liquid, and gave them to those who were ill as a form of medicine. In more recent history, reading and expressive writing have been employed as supplementary treatments for those experiencing mental or emotional distress. Pennsylvania Hospital, the first hospital established in the United States, employed this approach as early as the mid-1700s.
In the early 1800s, Dr. Benjamin Rush introduced poetry as a form of therapy to those being treated. In 1928, poet and pharmacist Eli Griefer began offering poems to people filling prescriptions and eventually started “poem-therapy” groups at two different hospitals with the support of psychiatrists Dr. Jack L. Leedy and Dr. Sam Spector. After Griefer’s death, Leedy and others continued to incorporate poetry into the therapeutic group process, eventually coming together to form the Association for Poetry Therapy (APT) in 1969.
Librarians also played a major role in the development of this approach to therapy. Arleen Hynes, one pioneer in this area, was a hospital librarian who began reading stories and poems aloud, facilitating discussions on the material and its relevance to each individual in order to better reach out to those being treated and encourage healing. In 1980, all leaders in the field were invited to a meeting to formalize guidelines for training and certification. At that meeting, the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT) was established.
As interest grew, several books and articles were written to guide practitioners in the practice of poetry therapy. Hynes and Mary Hynes-Berry co-authored the 1986 publication Bibliotherapy – The Interactive Process: A Handbook. More recently, Nicholas Mazza outlined a model for effective poetry therapy, also discussing its clinical application, in Poetry Therapy: Theory and Practice.
The Journal of Poetry Therapy, established in 1987 by the NAPT, remains the most comprehensive source of information on current theory, practice, and research.
There is also a relationship between psychological healing and incantations; either repeated as a musical chant by the patient or in fact recited by the attending medicine man. Modern medicine and science of course scoff at the notion of magical incantations having healing or restorative powers as so much superstition. But this, of course, begs the question that if recitations and incantations had no evidential resort and no beneficial property then why would every single human culture have adopted the method and repeated it for several thousand years? Surely if there was nothing to vibrating air with the sound of one’s breath as well as the added stimulation of associative meaning being read cognitively by the patient’s mind; we would have given it and its sisters, singing and chanting aeons ago.
I am not advocating a supernatural or spiritual causation for the effectiveness of poetry as a healing agent but rather the supra-natural mystical cause which is grounded first in human nature and behavior for which can be a myriad of imprecise explanations; none of which explain why it works.
Today, poetry therapy is practised internationally by hundreds of professionals, including poets, psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors, social workers, educators and librarians. The approach has been used successfully in a number of settings—schools, community centers, libraries, hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and correctional institutions, to name a few.
How Does Poetry Therapy Work?
As part of therapy, some people may wish to explore feelings and memories buried in the subconscious and identify how they may relate to current life circumstances. Poetry is beneficial to this process as it can often be used as a vehicle for the expression of emotions that might otherwise be difficult to express
•Promote self-reflection and exploration, increasing self-awareness and helping individuals make sense of their world
•Help individuals redefine their situation by opening up new ways of perceiving reality
•Help therapists gain deeper insight into those they are treating
• In general, poetry therapists are free to choose from any poems they believe offer therapeutic value, but most tend to follow general guidelines.
It is recommended selected poems be concise, address universal emotions or experiences, offer some degree of hope, and contain plain language. Some poems commonly used in therapy are: “The Journey” by Mary Oliver “Talking to Grief” by Denise Levertov “The Armful” by Robert Frost “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman “Turtle Island” by Gary Snyder The poetry of Alan Watt, Allen Ginsberg and others.
Although the selection of material is often by the therapist, those being treated might be asked to bring to therapy a poem or other form of literature they identify with, as this may also provide valuable insight into their feelings and emotions.
My Technique in Poetry Therapy
A few different models of poetry therapy exist, but the one I’ve had the most success with is a Four Phased Progression of Attention:
Recognition – Focus – Intention – Action
In the receptive/recognition phase, the poet therapist merely guides the subject to focus on their issue. The aim is to establish concentration and cognitive focus on the details of the issue which are not revealed to the poet/therapist. Only until the poet/therapist feels confident that the subject is cognitively attuned to and non verbally focussed on the problem or issue of concern that they begin to ask suggestive questions as to how the subject feels, not thinks about their subject.
This provocation of emotion usually comes in three distinct phases of emotional content:
I. First is the one of the predicament, then the subject first becomes aware of the existence of the issue. This is the gateway phase where anticipatory feelings are registered and ideally conveyed through the prompting of the poet/therapist.
II. Then there is the full throttle stage when anticipation of the issue has given way to full experience of all emotions related to the issue. This is usually overwhelming (or it wouldn’t be “an issue” in the first place), and it is tantamount that the poet/guide leads the subject through distinct words to describe the layers of emotions experienced by the subject. Language and the use of the words is the key here because emotions always come in clusters of complexity that make it difficult for both poet/therapist and subject to distinguish and focus on underlying and suppress emotions.
“What kind of anger do you feel?”
“How would you describe your sadness”
“How much shame do you feel?
“What would you compare it to?”
Are typical of the questions a poet therapist would ask the subject.
This is a sophisticated method of word association but rather than creating bridges between seemingly disparate words, the goal is to drill down to the core emotions about the issue by uncovering and refining the language the subject has chosen.
Achieving exactitude of description is the task at hand. The Poet/Therapist makes careful notation of everything the subject says towards describing their emotion. It is important to keep them focused and not to succumb to intellectual distraction. Thoughts are illusions, emotions are facts.
Getting the subject to correctly and precisely describe the emotional facts of the matter at hand is the objective
III. The final phase is the exit strategy.
How do the feelings commence to recede? How does the issue recede back into the background? What are the parting emotions? Is there anxiety about the leaving? The anticipation of an issue yet unresolved? Or is the issue impermeable and subject to a rhythmic return?
Again, the subject’s wording, their adjectives, adverbs and phrases are the material of the poem.
At this point, there is usually a short break to give time for the subject to recover from the emotional transitions and for the Poet/Therapist to briefly skim their notes and begin to focus on the flow of adjectives. It is preferable if possible, to compose what amounts to a first draft, a flow of words which the poet can read back to the subject to confirm the accuracy of the flow.
At this first reading stage, it is possible to start interjecting logical bridges between the emotional descriptors. This is the creative factor unleashed. The Poet must be led by the subject to link coherent sequences between the emotional states. The poet suggests and the subject confirms or vetoes the phraseology, one line at a time.
Now we arrive at a second draft which is the property of the subject. It is their poem for which it is crucial that the subject now read the poem aloud and take ownership of its content. The subject can redraft the poem a third time in making it their own. But the physicality of uttering the words they have chosen to express their emotional state is an act of ownership and closure.
The Poet/Therapist can either email the finished poem to the subject, hand them his/her notes or rewrite the poem into a legible form. In any case, it is important that the Poet/Therapist ascribes the authorship of the poem to the client. If the client is hesitant to put their name to the poem than something is lacking in the poem and must be redressed or indeed started over again.
The key to the entire exercise is freedom of expression, honesty and then refinement; exacting the poem.
Other Approaches and Other Models
The process of writing can be both cathartic and empowering, often freeing blocked emotions or buried memories and giving voice to one’s concerns and strengths. Some people may doubt their ability to write creatively, but therapists can offer to support by explaining they do not have to use rhyme or a particular structure. Therapists might also provide stem poems from which to work or introduce sense poems for those who struggle with imagery. A Poet/Therapist might also share a poem with the individual and then ask them to select a line that touched them in some way and then use that line to start their own poem.
In group therapy, poems may be written individually or collaboratively. Group members are sometimes given a single word, topic, or sentence stem and asked to respond to it spontaneously. The contributions of group members are compiled to create a single poem which can then be used to stimulate group discussion. In couples therapy, the couple may be asked to write a dyadic poem by contributing alternating lines.
The symbolic/ceremonial component involves the use of metaphors, storytelling, and rituals as tools for effecting change. Metaphors, which are essentially symbols, can help individuals to explain complex emotions and experiences in a concise yet profound manner. Rituals may be particularly effective to help those who have experienced a loss or ending, such as a divorce or death of a loved one, to address their feelings around that event. Writing and then burning a letter to someone who died suddenly, for example, may be a helpful step in the process of accepting and coping with grief.
How Can Poetry Therapy Help You?
Poetry therapy has been used as part of the treatment approach for a number of concerns, including borderline personality, suicidal ideation, identity issues, perfectionism, and grief.
Research shows the method is frequently a beneficial part of the treatment process. Several studies also support poetry therapy as one approach to the treatment of depression, as it has been repeatedly shown to relieve depressive symptoms, improve self-esteem and self-understanding, and encourage the articulation of feelings. Researchers have also demonstrated poetry therapy’s ability to reduce anxiety and stress in people.
Those experiencing post-traumatic stress have also reported improved mental and emotional well-being as a result of poetry therapy. Some individuals who have survived trauma or abuse may have difficulty processing the experience cognitively and, as a result, suppress associated memories and emotions.
Through poetry therapy, many are able to integrate these feelings, reframe traumatic events, and develop a more positive outlook for the future. People experiencing addiction may find poetry therapy can help them explore their feelings regarding the substance abuse, perceive drug use in a new light, and develop or strengthen coping skills.
Poetry writing may also be a way for those with substance abuse issues to express their thoughts on treatment and behavior change. Some studies have shown poetry therapy can be of benefit to people with schizophrenia despite the linguistic and emotional deficits associated with the condition.
Poetry writing may be a helpful method of describing mental experiences and can allow therapists to better understand the thought processes of those they are treating. Poetry therapy has also helped some individuals with schizophrenia to improve social functioning skills and foster more organized thought processes. It is important to note in many instances, especially in cases of moderate to severe mental health concerns, poetry therapy is used in combination with another type of therapy, not as the sole approach to treatment.
Training for Poetry Therapists Poetry therapists receive literary as well as clinical training to enable them to be able to select literature appropriate for the healing process. While there is no university program in poetry therapy, the International Federation for Biblio-Poetry Therapy (IFBPT), the independent credentialing body for the profession, has developed specific training requirements. Several studies support poetry therapy as one approach to the treatment of depression, as it has been repeatedly shown to relieve depressive symptoms, improve self-esteem and self-understanding, and encourage the expression of feelings.
Concerns and Limitations of Poetry Therapy
In spite of its widespread appeal and broad range of application, some concerns have been raised about the use of poetry therapy. Some critics have pointed out it is possible for people to analyze a poem on a purely intellectual level, without any emotional involvement. This type of intellectualization may be more likely when complex poems are used, as a person might spend so much time trying to decipher the meaning of the poem that they lose sight of their emotions and spontaneous reactions. Poems that are unoriginal or filled with clichés are unlikely to stimulate individuals on a deep emotional level or challenge them to think in ways that promote growth. Just always keep in mind that poetry therapy may have little or no value for those individuals who simply do not enjoy poetry.
The Advertising Pitch:
Words are the Most Powerful Magic There Is
Sometimes Your Mind Has a Will of Its Own
With PEGASUS POETRY THERAPY you can
Learn How to Read Your Own Mind!
Confusion bringing you down?
Is manic depression touching your soul?
You know what you want, but you just don’t know how to get There?
Poetry therapy is what you need when the medication, the yoga, the guided meditation, the crystals, the chakra alignment and other Somatic treatments just aren’t working.
Some things only work when you let them work:
• Restore Self-Confidence
• Achieve Closure from Painful Relationship Breakups & Lost Loved Ones
• Find a More Meaningful Direction to Your Life
• Get Unstuck and Out of Your Own Way
• Overcome Fears and Anxiety
• Control panic attacks
• Change Addictive Behavior Patterns, like OCD
• Re-Write bad Scripts
Recognition > Focus > Intention > Action
There is no trick to listening to yourself and learning how choosing and rearranging your words can unlock darkened doors, de-clutter basements and clean out the attics of your life. Sometimes in merely one session.
Every Tuesday from 11:00 am until 6:30 pm at the
Inner Temple Inner Healing Center
at Eve’s Vegan Cafe 575 S. Coast Highway 101 Encinitas, CA
PEGASUS POETRY THERAPY has only recently launched its online version via FaceTime, Skype or Facebook video. Just add <poetry therapy> to your Skype contacts and schedule a date. Payments accepted through PayPal or Facebook cash. Here are some examples of the poetry achieved through PEGASUS POETRY THERAPY:
I.
Narcissus in a Nutshell
I’ve lost the person locked within the situation
Like a nut dwells within its hard shell of fearful anger.
Escaping vulnerability
Hiding from the unknown.
Hard shells, hard feelings, hardness itself
The excitement of living days in the present
Belonging to the past
I will not let go of what I can recall but not relive
My belonging to that which encompasses myself
Another nut within its shell.
To belong is to exist
Without belonging there is Nothing and
I fear nothing most of all because I do not know it
And I fear what I do not know more than
I would remedy the pain of this loss with trustworthy tools
When two liquids are bonded as one
A single drop of poison poisons the whole glass
And betrayal is always poison no matter how little or how much
The glass of Narcissus’s tears is now empty
He has blinded himself rather than drink his own poison.
Instead he has left me to sip the bitter poison
Of fading better days.
Like a cat
Poised in stillness
Distracted by nothing
Readyto pounce
I will not surrender the pain.
I will not surrender the pain.
Because the pain is my memory of the happiness
We’ve now lost
A sweet nut within a bitter shell.
II.
The Martyr
Last night I saw you beatify a martyr
With a magical brush of gold belief.
You were serious and determined
But your brush strokes were light caresses
On a sky blue span of canvass
As you gently coaxed another image into being.
You remind me of my mother earth
Stern in her compassion
Willing to tolerate just so much from me
Before reining in my love
With her brushes.
And where you have drawn your line
‘Be careful’, you said to me on parting
But all the care in the world could not stop
My bulb from bursting
Rendering me blind in the speeding night
But still seeing with the golden light
Of the martyr you have shown me.
III.
Snake Heart
This sadness, this hopelessness
Will not be swatted away
Nor drowned by the busy work
Of the day to day.
It persists
Even when I am submerged in my bathtub.
The warm water rising from the bottom of my lungs.
Until I lose the will to breath
And the sadness becomes anger
Rising to the very top of my horns
Of my red-hot raging exhaustion.
How good to be angry!
I used to be afraid of snakes but no longer. I am hissing from the centre of my snake-heart
As you try and step over me.
Your eyes fail to see as you tread on my tail.
On my snake heart.
On my resolution without confrontation.
Without the owning of emotion
All that’s left for us is the hissing sound of machinery.
I never really knew Hannah Northedge apart from our Facebook exchanges. I think it was she that first started commenting on my postings. I read her comments with bemusement and replied. Earnest, sincere, a bit young girlish but always quintessentially English. That refined contrivance that is both over-mannered and elegant at the same time. And yet we shared a sense of humour, which is an astonishment between an Englishwoman and an American.
The real English, the softcenter at the core of the cracked, hard surface, English remind me no one more so than of the Japanese. Both island peoples deeply suspicious of foreign invaders and both sewn tightly within an intricately embroidered fabric of ritual, custom and politesse. Both peoples’ have a tea ceremony; one with boiled spring water and green leaf powder, the other with scones, clotted cream and jams.
I did not really know Hannah Northedge but I knew what she was like. A middle-class Midlands girl from Leicester with financially nurturing parents and an early gift, really, a passion for music. She must have dreamed as a young studious girl coming to the Big Smoke, to London to make it big as a chanteuse, as a professional jazz singer. Hannah’s own cover version of Dick Whittington sans cat. This would have been for her a dream logically constructed from sturdy childhood building blocks. Each carefully poised upon the other, pushing gradually upwards into a stern, determined tower of accomplishments.
Hannah would teach music on the side, to students both male and female to make ends meet in a rapidly escalating London that had long driven me from its financial borders. Living in London is not an easy thing. Not for any young man or woman and certainly not for a high strung, talented musician intent on being the best at what she could already do quite well.
The dedication of an artist is blind. Blind to all things that do not further the acts of creation. There is no greater earthly power than to suddenly plug one’s hours, days, years of practice into an unearthly circuit that seems connected to the very essence of one’s living. That sudden bursting propulsion ever further, and ever greater into what you had always wanted to attain and seemed now to be as effortless as a second nature. Suddenly you are living your higher nature!
Any artist, any writer, any dancer and any musician will tell you that this moment of being ‘experienced’ of being played upon what feels like the very aesthetic strings of life is at best indescribable. This is much more than being “in the zone” as an athlete or card player might venture. This is about the zone being in you and all around you; in every pore and molecule of your being until it would take more effort to stop the momentum than to just let yourself keep falling forwards. Pulled into the very gravity of creation.
The Red Shoes is a 1948 British drama film written, directed and produced by the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and based on the story by Hans Christian Anderson about a pair of red shoes that are enchanted and when worn enchant the ballerina dancer into dancing more powerfully, more perfectly than she has ever danced before. Until tragically in the end, the dancer cannot stop the shoes from dancing her to her death. A glorious death brought to life by a magical realism. One that many would gloriously surrender to just to be swept up in that dance unto death.
Hannah had no red shoes to speak of, but her throat, her lungs, her diaphragm and her instinct for music were as enchanted as they were enchanting. They were her soul and at very least they enchanted me. I never really liked what she sang. Of course I never told her that; (why would I?) To me, perhaps unfairly, it reeked of nostalgia and a wonting for a long disappeared time. Her numbers were swing, pre-integrated jazz; the time of Louis Armstrong and grinning happy black men.
This music came to England via the American GIs that were stationed there, much to the resentment of the male British population and much to the erotic delight of the female one. Courting and bedding an English girl was the kind of overseas exotica an American GI could handle, easily overlooking the cultural gap by virtue of a common language; in fact magnetically attracted by that difference of language and nuance. We said elevator, they said lift; we asked how many blocks; they answered how many streets; what could be more enchanting? All to the sound of swinging jazz.
Hannah in many ways embodied that stalwart and determined optimism of the English. Being bombed by a vastly superior air force, on the very brink of invasion and yet somehow, against every indication to the contrary, still anticipating a break in the weather. Raining bombs on old London town. By the time American GIs were deployed to England the response of the British and I can hear Hannah saying exactly this, was “About bloody time! How nice of you to finally show up for the party!” “Better late than never, I suppose!”
This was the playful sarcasm of the English by which they kept themselves and each other bemused whilst coping with the obstacles at hand This has always been lost on my American comrades. We think it’s rather mocking, which of course it is; it’s merely a democratic mockery, a Monty Python hysteria at the awesome absurdity of Life and it all. When it comes to jokes and putdowns and the English, no one ever gets out alive, no less so than the English themselves. Self-effacement and self-mockery are not part of the American skill set and we would be fortunate in having few English Life Coach instructors to teach us a thing or two about the proper positioning and placement of the ego.
But I digress from my digression. Hannah was quintessentially English, youthfully so. Although merely some ten years younger than me, she somehow always made me feel that she was much younger than that. A child’s wide-eyed openness beaming from a woman’s face I believe that that child-like disposition, as well as her nervousness and constant stress, were hand in glove with her talent. She desperately needed to keep performing, to keep belting out those numbers because her life really did depend on it.
I was supposed to take Hannah out on a date this Spring in London. Not really a date, more like a shared joke. Both of us had frequently traded our frustrations with the opposite sex and one night I asked Hannah to describe her perfect London date to me. It involved dinner and dancing and her description was so lighthearted and life-affirming fun that I immediately promised her that as soon as I got to London I would take her out on that exact same date. I made that promise not to impress Hannah or woo her but because what she described sounded like such god damn fun that I wanted in on it! Hannah’s lust for life was infectious. Most important of all, Hannah laughed at all of my jokes, even the ones that didn’t merit laughter.
Alas, our date to laugh is not to be. The one woman in 3 years who had finally agreed to go out with me, drowned herself instead at the very prospect. Now that’s a good joke. One that Hannah would have heartily laughed at.
What can I say about suicide? And I understand as of late through a mutual friend that that is exactly what Hannah Northedge had planned in advance and self-executed (so to speak). Albert Camus said that the only question worth asking in life is whether or not to commit suicide; each and every morning when we awake we should ask ourselves that very same question. Because in all honesty, in asking ourselves that question we are never freer. Simply because if we do not choose to end it all; (and I assume that anyone reading this has chosen other than that), then what we have chosen is everything else instead. Because we could have chosen the only alternative to living there is, but we did not to.
I don’t know if Hannah asked herself that very question waking in her luxurious hotel room in Eastbourne, near Beach Head, Britain’s top suicide spot. She certainly had chosen a fine hotel in which to waylay her return to London. Perhaps I will pay that hotel a visit just to catch that final view of the sea we might have shared and toasted. I do not know what state of mind she was in when her parents sent her back home to London from her childhood home in Leicester. English parenting can be harshly stoic at times.
All I do really know for sure about suicide, and in fact, that is what Hannah committed herself to, is that it is an act of self-agency. You may not want to hear this, but please listen because it’s true. Take this bitter pill from one who knows: Suicide is a determined act to strike out against a world of pain and futile injustice. It is not weakness nor surrender that causes one to take one’s own life. It is instead the ultimate act of defiance, an act of unnatural courage and entails a great act of will against all instinct; against the very will to survive.
To look at the universe that gave birth to one’s own conscious mind and in full consciousness scream “No!” “No, this life was not worth the pain, the agony, the empty suffering of my existence!” “You can just take it, just have it all back”. “This was never going to be good enough and I’m putting an end to it here and now because it is my choice my freedom, my volition to do so!”
I do not know of Hannah’s pain apart from what she told me of it. I do know that her despair at romance and at its betrayal weighed heavy on her. If there is any lesson to be garnered from her passing, be it what I tell my own daughter time and time again: never ever believe that you will ever need a man to be happy as a woman.
It’s possible to have both, but by no means mandatory; nor is a man ever the sole path to happiness. We are at best unreliable and at worst, much worse than that.
Hannah did seem determinedly desperate in her remaining months; determined to be believed and desperate not to be dismissed as a hypochondriac lunatic. Which from my own experience with medical authorities. their tendency to treat the symptoms more urgently than the patient surely is lacking some benefit.
I know that there are those of us who in trying to find some salve for our confusion and our anger will demand answers from doctors, from landlords and mould experts; from Hannah Northedge’s own family, even. I know that righteous confusion first hand. To you, I say what my baby sister’s widow said to me at the time of her untimely passing: “nothing that we do, nothing that we try, no matter how hard is ever going to bring her back”.
Of shoeless children — and refugee ships — and the things
that all of us need…
Of arresting civilian protesters — and blood-letting priests and kings.
–– And why the sea is filled with fleeing families
And whether falling bombs have wings.’
This is the time of confusion perpetrated by those whose power is built upon the bedrock of our confusion.
We are told that all information are biased lies. To not trust what anyone says; apart from the words of those who tell us not to trust what anyone says.
In America and around the world there is a crisis in the authority of information. Never in the history of our tribe, the human tribe, has so much information, so many facts, so much data been at the command of so many of us.
The World Wide Web is truly an amazing thing, as is its name: World Wide.
And yet too much is never enough. With such abundance comes scarcity. Scarcity in the reliability of what we read, hear and see. We can no longer afford to listen to simply one voice. Uncle Walter is no longer alive to comfort us with the nakedness of facts, disrobed from opinions.
That’s just the way it is.
So we listen to the many voices inside and outside of our heads and try to tune into a signal through the rising noise levels. That signal, that wavelength, that fleeting photon of energy we’ve always known to be the Truth. What is the Truth? I don’t really know but you and me can always recognize it.
Right now the truth comes in the numbers:
In 2016, from an estimated pre-war population of 22 million, the United Nations (UN) identified 13.5 million Syrians requiring humanitarian assistance, of which more than 6 million are internally displaced within Syria itself at the mercy of the Syrian authorities, and around 5 million are refugees outside of Syria.
5 million refugees! 1.5 million in Lebanon alone. This is the biggest refugee catastrophe the world has seen since the millions of Jews who fleeing the Nazis were denied entry, turned away from this ‘Great’ nation of ours. To be deported to the death camps that awaited them and at the time no one believed were real. How could they be real? How could this be real again?
Never Forget really means Never Again.
How could a booming population of 22 million be gutted of 13.5 million civilians, more than half the country, of men, women and their children?
How could we, our tribe have let this have happened? Why didn’t somebody do something before it got this bad?
Where was our compassion deported to?
But I’m not answering questions about how we got here. Instead, I’m asking you to do something about it right NOW. Set aside the luxury of your political opinions and focus on the reality, the facts. What we know to be True, right here and right now. There are children crying out in the desert. I can hear them, believe me, I can hear them and if you pay close attention, you can hear them too.
The facts are that families, just like yours, fathers and mothers just like you and yours and children, yes children exactly like yours are living and dying in unimaginable squalor. Right now, today. And there is something you and I can do:
They need medical supplies, doctors, and nurses to treat their external wounds and trauma counsellors to tend to their internal wounds.
The teenagers’ survivors of Florida school shooting were transformed from children into adults in the course of a few short hours of a single death-defying day. Being American, they were treated and counselled for the trauma caused by the actions of one young man and a single gun he should never ever have obtained.
These young adults’ transformation, Emma Gonzales, David Hogg and the others, was miraculous. They took the worst trauma they had ever experienced in their lives and changed it into action; an effective action that has yielded results. Like alchemists, they changed rusting iron into gold. They are an example for us all, especially us adults.
I’m telling you here that we don’t just have to admire our children, we can, we must follow their lead.
Now imagine, hundreds of fully automatic guns being fired around you, at you. Imagine the infernal thunder of bombs falling all around you, decimating your home and the streets of your childhood, obliterating your school, your neighborhood, your city and everything you have ever known to be safe and solid. The destruction of your entire your life while leaving your body if injured, still intact.
Please imagine this with me now, right now.
Stop reading this.
Close your eyes and use your mind to
Reach out beyond yourself and you will hear the bombs dropping and the sound of never-ending gunfire.
Now open your eyes and do something to answer the cry of that child in the desert. Follow the children, they know the way, the golden road into a better future.
Today is #YomHashoah, the date on the Hebrew calendar in which the Jewish people around the world recall the memory of six million Jews and more who were murdered because of who they were, and to rededicate ourselves to prevent another genocide. #WeRemember#AskWhy
Unfortunately, it hasn’t been working lately, the remembering nor the preventing. Assad’s continued gassing of his own civilian population with chlorine and nerve gas is nothing short of homage to the Nazi death industry.
So you see remembering the holocaust isn’t a Jew-thing, it’s a human-being thing. No other single event in history had more of an impact on the 20th century and by consequence the present 21st, than the mass brutalisation of families or men, women and children in the camps and now in the Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon.
We are all part of the same tribe who fall victims to those who hate their own humanity.
What follows is my little piece of the Holocaust and why I can never forget even if I wanted to. My mother told me a few days before she died, addled with dementia but suddenly lucid that the most painful, heartbreaking memories are better than no memory at all. Better to be reminded of the experiences of who we are rather than to disappear completely; from the world and from ourselves.
Ivan Moscovich has created more brain-teasers than most people have solved crosswords. Igor Goldkind set out to piece together his fascinating and harrowing life.
Ivan Moscovich has his life’s work wrapped up in a bundle of about 10,000 pages of A4 paper. On those pages there are some 5,000 separate puzzles, puzzles that range from the hang-on-let’s-look-OK-I-see to beyond the fiendish. Some are variations on themes, some utter one-offs. Some are to be made on paper or card, some are designs for tricky little – or big – devices. Moscovich calls them the S.A.M. archive – science, art and mathematics. The puzzles use the techniques of bafflement to teach, and they use beauty to bemuse.
Moscovich has been making puzzles since the 1960s. Now, at the age of 70, he’s looking to transform that life’s work into new formats. He and his colleagues have started up a new company to take the ideas on those 10,000 pages and put them to work in the digital arena. Moscovich is sure that there is room for them. Having looked with interest at hits like Seventh Guest, which friends told him were bringing new life to the world of puzzles, he was profoundly unimpressed. The puzzles were hard, sure (if you weren’t Moscovich, that is), but they were variations on a small number of underlying tricks, and they didn’t add up to more than just a set of puzzles. Moscovich thought that he – or people mining his archives in digital form – could do better.
“In digital media you can build overlapping linear trees, using the media to interrelate the concepts for the user. It’s important with any problem to see – at the same time – the different paths that can take you to a solution. Certainly this is the best way to explain scientific and mathematical concepts.” The collection of puzzles becomes a sort of puzzle itself: a maze, something to find one’s way through, something more than the sum of its parts.
Ivan is looking forward to trying to put all this into practice – not least because he enjoys the attitude of the people he’ll be working with. The way that games designers and programmers think fits into his world perfectly. He loves to be with people who are bored when they’re not trying something new, even impossible, when they’re not seeking a new solution. And he can make sense of himself by being part of a group; in fact, it has saved his life before now.
Ivan likes people who try to make sense of the pieces. That, in part, is how he got into puzzles – his delight in their ability to teach eager minds. As well as making puzzles for books and toys, he has used them as serious teaching tools for engineers – and pioneered the art of transforming the counterintuitive insights of puzzling into science museums with interactive displays. Putting together the pieces of an idea is much more important than putting together the pieces of a puzzle. The wonder is that by getting someone to do the latter, you can let them do the former.
A life in fragments
Moscovich’s own life is a bewildering array of puzzle fragments. Having met him on a CD-ROM project and learned some of his history, I started to wonder how to reassemble the fragments – and what they could be made into. One of the answers is a charming, brilliant septuagenarian. Another is 10,000 pages of A4. And a third might be a technological passage through the 20th century, from the industrialisation of death to the pursuit of pleasure. A journey that charts the territory of the 20th century’s technological revolutions and its human upheavals, from the Balkans to California, from museums to the Israeli defence industry, from the ruins of Austro-Hungary to the digital age, from railways to death camps.Moscovich’s parents were Hungarian, but he was born in Novi Sad, a small Serbian town. He still retains a central European accent that, to my ears (and probably to yours) sounds like the definitive voice of modern science and mathematics. “My father was a Hungarian who escaped from Hungary into Yugoslavia after the First World War. He was a painter by profession, but in order to make a living at that time he opened a photographic studio which became very successful. He named his studio Photo Ivan, after me.”
His description of an everyday childhood in Novi Sad paints a familiar portrait of a middle-class craftsman’s family, complete with Yiddish grandmother and old-world family meals – and none of the hothouse intellectual atmosphere that produced Leo Szilard, John von Neumann, Kurt Gödel and other thinkers who left Budapest to dominate 19th-century thought. There was little to suggest Ivan’s strengths in science or mathematics – except, perhaps, a boyish infatuation with model aeroplane kits. He had, however, inherited from his father an inclination for drawing, and his father’s habit of tinkering with various gadgets – including an early air brush – to enhance his pictures was a constant delight to Ivan.
But when he reached technical high school, Ivan fell under the influence of a mathematics teacher given to explaining the precepts of science by means of science fiction. Ivan’s teacher opened up the world of mathematics by making problem solving fun. Ivan was entranced by the maths – and, later, showed that he had learned the method, too: rigorous scientific thinking through the lens of art and storytelling.
By then, though, the Hungarian fascists had invaded. They met with little resistance. And, soon afterwards, they took Ivan’s father from him. “Before they took him, he asked a Hungarian officer if he could say goodbye to my mother and in their final embrace he slipped this ring onto her finger.” Ivan holds up his hand and shows me an ornate gold band studded with eight small diamonds. It is the only surviving memento of Ivan’s youth; everything else was lost in the Holocaust. Ivan’s father joined 6,000 Jews and 4,000 Serbs executed en masse and thrown beneath the ice of the frozen Danube. All in one day.
Ivan continued his studies until the end of 1943, when the Hungarians “got cold feet” and the Germans invaded. “We really didn’t have any knowledge of what was happening in Poland in the ghettos or with the Nazis. We all hated the Hungarian fascists, but I still knew and liked Germans and, you know, communications were very different then; telephones didn’t work internationally. We were really disconnected from the rest of the world.”
When a Hungarian Jew escaped from Auschwitz and fled to Budapest to warn the Jewish community of the death camps, few believed him. So Ivan Moscovich was deported to Auschwitz at the age of 17.
“It meant stepping out of one world into another one. I was sent with my grandfather, my grandmother and my mother. When we arrived, my grandparents were immediately taken to the crematoria. My mother stayed in Auschwitz the whole time. After three or four weeks I was taken out of Auschwitz into one of the surrounding work camps. Young people were sent to work. I worked at laying rail lines.” The Nazi system was to provide rations for six months survival, after which the workers were supposed to starve to death in order to make room for new inmates. The meticulousness by which the operation was organised was not lost on Ivan. Nor would the memory escape him when two years later he found himself again working on train rails.
By that time he and, miraculously, his mother were back in Novi Sad. An acquaintance in the Ministry of Transport offered him a research position in the effort to repair Yugoslavia’s war-torn railway system. The post involved testing an enormous German machine that used high electrical wattage to weld rail lines together, a then untested invention. Mounted on a train carriage, Ivan travelled with the machine throughout Yugoslavia, in charge of the welding team. The machine was so successful that Ivan soon found himself elevated to a lofty position within Tito’s Ministry of Transport, accountable only to the deputy minister himself.
“There I was, a simple technician, at the age of 20, and I had all this power and no boss, really. People thought I was a top-shot communist because everybody had to do exactly what I wanted. The project became more and more successful, our production was way up and I was given orders to enlist more and more technicians for my team. One day I was called in by the deputy minister and was told that in order to create a 24-hour work shift, I was to take on 50 German prisoners of war.”
So, two years after surviving the German work camps, he was given control over a work team comprising high ranking German officers and regular soldiers, some Wehrmacht, some SS. He could have done anything he wanted. He could have shot them all and easily justified his actions to the authorities. He could have tortured them to death with gruelling work. He could have snapped his fingers and made them all disappear. But Ivan Moscovich had responsibilities, a quota to fill and a marvellous welding contraption to keep running.
“I had ten kilometres of rails to get out that week and it was a real dilemma whether to screw the Germans or to try to get the best output from them. I decided to increase their rations to get more work out of them, and sure enough they were grateful and worked even harder, which increased the output. I was very, very tough with them and I think they were scared of me. But I never revealed to them that I was a camp survivor. They worked for six months and then Tito released the prisoners.”
As it happens, Moscovich only worked on the German railways for six months. “I was lucky for the first six months. It was very important for survival in the camps to be with your people, your clan of friends and family; it made life easier. You couldn’t get ill, because that meant execution, but curiously, if you could show a work-related injury, a visible wound, you could be seen by the SS and granted a day or two of hospital. One day I announced myself with a bad wound. While everyone else went on work detail I was left in the enormous courtyard with a broom to clean up, completely by myself. Suddenly the gate opened and a commandant’s car stormed into the courtyard and headed straight for me. The German officer jumped down from his car, grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, threw me onto the platform of the vehicle and drove off. I was kidnapped.” Later Ivan learned that there had been an escape from a neighbouring camp and the camp commandant had stolen Ivan to make up his tally of inmates. The mathematics of death had to add up.
“Up to this point all of my feelings had been one single feeling: an enormous outrage. Rage that somebody, anybody, another power, could take me away from my decisions, my everyday life, and put me in an environment where whatever happened was not under my control. I was young and maybe too strong an individualist, but it was rage that kept me alive.” In the new camp this life-sustaining anger was broken, until he discovered a distant Hungarian cousin running the camp’s kitchens and being the “godfather” of the camp. Then he found some school friends of his father’s. For several weeks Ivan rebuilt his spirits and his body. Then the Russians pushed back the German line, and the SS made their lethal preparations for evacuating Auschwitz.
The problem to solve was – how to survive.
The Museum Man
In 1952 Ivan found a new clan – and became a leader. He set out for Israel to join his now remarried mother. On the boat to Haifa, Ivan was approached by Israeli officials interested in his skills and qualifications. The new state was hungry for skilled technicians. By the time Ivan reached Haifa he already had a position in the Ministry of Defence waiting for him. “In my group there were mainly these Yugoslav and Hungarian technicians without any training in science and mathematics. The language problem was enormous, and here was this group of technicians involved in scientific research without any basis in the field. I don’t know how it happened, but I was selected as someone who could teach the other members of the group some basic science.
My boss wanted me to instruct them outside of a formal classroom using demonstrations, models and visual means. That was really the start that put me in the direction of puzzle making.”Ivan found himself playing around with visualisations and experiments. He worked hard to come up with ways in which complex ideas could be explained visually, not so much to convey a deep academic knowledge of science and mathematics but to engender an intuitive grasp of the subjects and, most important of all, to instill the knack of problem solving needed to tackle more important scientific and technological puzzles.
By the end of the 1950s, Moscovich was creating puzzles almost all the time, and practice had revealed a rare gift for making puzzles that could be revisited, puzzles that retained a depth, an impact, even after they had been solved. “I tried to design models that were compact and effective, and in which the experiments could be repeated a number of times. This required completely original design conceptualisations. My boss, Ernst David Bergman, was the leading scientist in Israel at the time, and founder of the Weizmann Institute. He loved my work, and it was he who had the idea that some of those objects I had designed could be exhibited. That was the basis of the founding of a science museum.”
In 1959 Tel Aviv established its Museum of Science and Technology, the first of its kind in Israel. Ivan worked non-stop for two-and- a-half years converting five disused British barracks into a museum, begging and borrowing every available resource. The museum finally opened in 1964 with Ivan as its curator and director. It was the first science museum to emphasise hands-on, interactive exhibitions, and it quickly attracted international attention. His position as curator became a springboard from which to explore and express his interest in art, science and mathematics, and to do it all with the benefit of a growing international reputation.
In 1965 Frank Oppenheimer, brother of the more famous Robert, having heard of Ivan’s fantastic museum to science, visited Tel Aviv with Admiral Lewis Strauss, chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission. The two became fast friends, sharing a childlike fascination for technology and science as well as knowledge of the darker side of machines and technology. This was four years before the opening of the Exploratorium in San Francisco, for which Oppenheimer imported many of Ivan’s installations. Some remain on exhibit to this day.
The puzzle of death
In 1944, while Oppenheimer was working with his brother on the problems of designing the first atomic bombs, Moscovich was on the death march to Bergen-Belsen. Here, too, the problem was how to survive. “Everybody said those who stayed, declaring themselves ill, would be shot. As it happens, they were liberated by the Russians two weeks later. And we walked barefoot and nearly naked through the worst winter of the century, westward to Bergen-Belsen.”At Bergen-Belsen, the last stop for the Final Solution, Ivan gave up all hope. He had been assigned to a work detail in the then still beautiful city of Hildesheim, near Hanover. “Near where I worked was a statue of the mathematician Leibniz with beautiful writing on it.
And it was so strange that after so long in hell, I am seeing that statue. I felt I was being visited by a ghost, an image of the real world I had left behind. It was then, only then, that I remembered my previous life, my teachers, my studies of mathematics and all that. Up till then my memories had been blocked out. It’s impossible to imagine that every minute, every second of life in the camps, you were only thinking of survival; there was no room for any other thinking. But here was this beautiful statue of Leibniz that reminded me of the real world.”
After two weeks working in Leibniz’s shadow, “I heard this strange noise … mmmmmmmmmmmm … that filled the air, and we suddenly realised that the sky was filled with planes. The next second everything was on fire. It was the Allied carpet bombing of Hildesheim. I saw German soldiers burning, running, and everything became chaos. I ran. After a while I stopped and looked back at the city, which was one big torch. I found myself alone in a giant field, a free man. But a free man in pyjamas, a free man with nowhere to go. I weighed 45 kilos.” Ivan turned around and started walking back to the depot. With his camp clothes, his inverted mohawk, there was nowhere to run. A German woman ran out of her house and thrust a chicken leg into his hand; she never said a word.
Recaptured, he was beaten and sent back to the camp. The dead lay in their thousands. “One barracks the Germans were using to fill with dead bodies, hundreds of dead bodies. After work one evening, I decided that instead of going back to our sleeping area that I would crawl to the top of this mountain of bodies and find myself a horizontal place. There was a slot at the top where I could see what was happening outside. I slept there for five, six days; I don’t have any notion about how much time passed. It was bliss to sleep; quiet and beautiful. It was no problem sleeping on a bed of a hundred dead bodies. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have lasted.
“One day I awoke from my sleep to complete silence. I looked through the slot to see the camp was completely deserted. Suddenly through the main entrance, which I had in my view, drove a single jeep with four English officers that stopped in the middle of the square. I rolled down the hill of bodies like a log and then I felt like I was running but I must have been moving very, very slowly. I was, I think, one of the very first to reach the jeep, and you know those guys were looking at us like they were seeing aliens for the very first time. Like first contact.” He collapsed into the arms of an English officer.
Moscovich was deathly ill. By the time that English officer caught up with him again, in a local hospital, he looked unlikely to survive. So the officer found a German doctor and frog-marched him to Ivan’s bedside. The Englishman pointed his revolver at the terrified doctor’s head and said, “If this patient dies here, you die here.”
Ivan Moscovich did not die – nor, at that point, did the German doctor. Ivan was transferred to a Red Cross hospital in a small town in Sweden – a town so boring, he now swears, that the local newspaper actually ran daily updates on Ivan’s weight gain for lack of more interesting scoops. Ivan describes his slow recovery as matter-of-factly as everything else.
“At a certain moment you know, the organism decided,
‘OK, we’re going to stay in this world. ”
Toy story
In the mid-1960s, as his fame grew in Israel and beyond, another new world opened for Ivan Moscovich. “I was working on a puzzle at my desk one day when one of the ushers came in and said a couple of tourists wanted to see me. I was busy and didn’t have the time. The usher came back and said they only want five minutes of your time and they wouldn’t give up. So I agreed to see them, Mr and Mrs Eliot Handler. I wasn’t very enthusiastic but we talked and then Mrs Handler said ‘I would like our chaps in California to see your puzzles; are you ready to come over to California?’
I didn’t take them very seriously. Two weeks later I received a call from a travel agent who had a ticket waiting for me to go to California to visit Mattel.”Eliot and Ruth Handler founded and owned Mattel Toys. Its twelve-storey building in Hawthorne was the centre of America’s toy industry. Sales of their Barbie dolls were colossal, but the Handlers were keen to expand the Mattel range beyond just dolls. When Ivan came out to visit them they immediately offered him a three-year open contract to create games and puzzles for US$25,000 (£16,000) a year. His “Brain Drain” puzzle game promptly sold a million copies worldwide. This success was repeated with a series of puzzles including “Play It Again Fun”, “Visual Brainstorms”, “The Brain Power Decathlon” and “The Hinge”. Soon toy and games manufacturers from Japan to Europe were clamouring for more and more puzzles from the master. Ivan Moscovich’s gift had found the most widespread of all its expressions.
Fitting together the pieces
Somehow, all these pieces add together to produce a remarkably creative man, and one with a unique vantage point. Ivan has seen countries destroyed, reconstructed and created afresh. He has faced the most utterly depersonalising totalitarianism ever attempted, and rejoiced in the individual quirkiness of children’s imaginations. At an age where most seek nothing new at all, he is embracing the digital world with the enthusiasm of a seven-year-old offered a Game Boy.
How does he see the end of the century?
“At present we are in a greater need for a fresh creative spirit than in any other period of human history. Less and less experience is being gained directly through activities. Sensations tend to reach us increasingly only after passing through layers of media filters. Children manipulate electronic gadgets and play with computers, which is all very well, but ultimately lacks perspicuity and full sensual enrichment.
I hope to create open-ended concepts that trigger chain reactions. Ideally, the player plays my game, solves the problems and is motivated to invent his or her own variations of rules, ultimately creating his or her own games, puzzles and aesthetic structures.”
He has an avowed predilection for the physical. You can see it in his hands as he solves his puzzles. But Ivan sees unique possibilities in the digital world, possibilities that flow from the nature of his puzzles. “I’ve already published several books of my puzzles, but in a book you are restricted to the lin- ear progression of page after page, without much freedom. To interrelate the conceptual links between problems and solutions you need to be able to cross reference non-linearly, which is what a CD-ROM does.” After all, this is the point of his S.A.M. archive – that it combines science, art and mathematics as different paths to the same goal. The trajectories can be changed forever; the solutions will still provide the improvements of the self that Moscovich cares about.
“You know, humanity has been defined in various ways. For instance, as Homo habilis, skilful man; as Homo sapiens, wise man. I prefer Homo ludens, playful man, as the best definition of modern 20th-century human beings.” It was a hopeful definition that Johan Huizinga came up with in the late ’30s, at the time that young Ivan was learning science through science fiction – but the hope was serious and fearful. Huizinga was quite aware that playfulness had its dangerous side, and that the coming war would be a great, dark game; it was peace, he always said, that was the serious business.
These days, Ivan Moscovich is at peace. He lives a quiet life with his wife Anitta in west London. Within him, though, you can sense the machines within machines working, a vast inner factory of the abstract. It is hard to imagine him without them – even in the worst places the century’s history has to offer. I asked him whether his puzzling mind had helped him in Auschwitz, in Belsen; whether he had made his retreat into a private world of abstraction and pure thought.
“No. You know, it’s very difficult to explain, to understand. All of your time, all of your energy, all of your thinking is just focused on one thing: surviving.”
He did. And from the simple fact of survival he has pulled together the fragments of his life into a living inspiration for the rest of us – a puzzle worth thinking about.
Igor Goldkind writes science fiction, comics and essays, and lectures on technology and culture.
If you are concerned with the Syrian refugee crisis, the largest forced mass emigration of refugees since the Jews escaped Germany and Poland, there is something you can do. Inform your self through the Syrian American Medical Society who are running projects and providing medical supplies to the victims of the dictator Assad’s brutal and genocidal war against his own people.
Participate, if you live in southern California by attending a special exhibition of protest art at The Misfit Gallery in La Jolla California on April 21st.,
@ 565 Pearl Street. 92037 6-10 pm
I will be reading my published and unpublished work in the Spoken Word progamme as well as performing with The Third Act of Creation. But there’s much, much more. It’s a celebration of human rights and protest art to raise money for SAMS and also to join others in Mindful Resistance to the tyranny, bigotry and corruption in our present government and around the world. WE are THE PEOPLE, so instead of just complaining or getting depressed,
The Church of Science makes no philosophical claim to ‘Truth’ but instead provides useful approximations based on its ongoing peer-review methodology. What is reliable information by way of science is the result of similar enough results from replicated experiments that are strictly controlled and abide by the parameters established by a long succession of scientists. Their hand-me-down story is called epistemology.
The Church of Science makes no philosophical claim to ‘Truth’ but instead provides useful approximations based on its ongoing peer-review methodology. What is reliable information by way of science is the result of similar enough results from replicated experiments that are strictly controlled and abide by the parameters established by a long succession of scientists. Their hand-me-down story is called epistemology.
In the end, all it tells us is that under such and such of circumstances, it is most likely that these results will be achieved regardless of who you are or where you are as long as you abide by the parameters of the experiment. This consistency of results is what allows us to make engineering choices based on scientific ‘truths’. It also comprises the institutionality of these estimations into the moneyed corridors of academia and research facilities. If Science is the ideology then Engineering is the practice.
When people say they believe in scientific ‘fact’, they usually mean engineering applications of the science. No one bothers to question the science behind the combustion engine as long as their car runs reliably. And as long as a biochemical can be turned over for profit.
But the key phrase here is ‘approximations of truth’. More Absolute truths, such as the understanding of ourselves and the objects in themselves requires a different kind of perspective outside of the scientific framework. One in which the observer and the point of observation is taken into account in the observation.
This involves a separate methodology as structured as scientific methods but with different aims and thus different kinds of conclusions. The overlooked discipline is that of Phenomenology, coined by the mathematical genius turned philosopher and teacher of the great Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl.
Husserl believed that our understanding of phenomena was completely based on our disposition towards the apperception (or the incorporation of our perceptions into our existing body of knowledge i.e. our understanding of the perception).
Although a mathematician, this view of truth as being determined in the perception of the observer as much as the thing-in-itself (which can never be truly perceived apart from its set of traits and characteristics) This principle is a natural extension of Kant’s Idealism, for which Time and Space are far from objective physical phenomena and more akin to categories of perception and apperception. In effect, shared psychological states of awareness and their accounts.
This is precisely where Phenomenology collides with post-Modernism, Einsteinian physics (Relativity) and Freudian mapping of the unconscious (the Unconscious being simply everything that we don’t know at any given moment or did know but forgot).
This post-modern relativism owes a great deal to the mystical and alchemic traditions to which it shares a common ancestry with science. Science after all, derived from mystical and alchemic experimentations by mainly monks (of a different church), who upon separating from the spiritualism of the Church, (thanks to that first and great secular martyr, Giordano Bruno), continued to pursue their quest for god’s Truth. That which could be perceived, measured and recorded.
Mysticism (unlike Spiritualism), is not superstitious; rather it engages with the world in pursuit of solving mysteries unknown and unsolvable by science. Mysticism poses questions science would never bother to ask and then attempts to answer them. Metaphysical questions such as ‘Who am I?’ outside of my name and a social construct? Why am I here and who really lies behind the many masks that I wear and why do I wear them in the first place?
Why is there this world or reality rather than another?
Psychoanalysis and Psychology at their best are not sciences at all, they are merely methodical enquiries into the nature of the mind (although the current bias towards quantifiable and numerical conclusions might make one think otherwise). They are a result of mystical enquiries into the nature of the mind and how it shapes our most intimate and fundamental perceptions of the world we live in; the space in time we briefly occupy before dying. Medicine is yet another example of a supposed science that in fact is based on a field of knowledge that predates scientific methodology.
Nor is mathematics strictly speaking a science; yet it is by far more predictive of the unknown and un-experienced than science could ever hope to be.
This issue is a is crucial in the face of the current data-fixation of human experience as well as the current bias of valuing quantifiable truths over qualifiable ones. Just because you can count something accurately doesn’t mean you understand it better. Or can better predict what happens next.
How Phenomenology Works
The truth is never in the data as such, it’s in the interpretation of the data, as long as you’re perceptive enough to factor in the interpreter. Human judgement is not quantifiable and yet it is the seat of all interpretation. We are living in a world of intermediaries of the truth, much as Luther rejected the filters of the Catholic Chruch and the Vatican for the sake of a direct, unmediated connection to God, we are all also in the position to understand our reality, our lives and our existence unfiltered by data driven conveption, but by our direct experience of the subjective lives that we lead.
There is the true path of Mysticism, the parent of Science.
I am a paper bag, I am.
I am only as good as what I can carry.
I am a paper bag, I am.
I’m not the smart one,
I’m not the successful one.
I’m not the tall one who always won and
Then died.
I am a paper bag.
I’m only as good as what I can carry.
I am a paper bag,
I’m not plastic or burlap, not I.
I am paper: rough, brown and thin
I’m not waterproof, you know.
And I can’t hold any liquids or gases within.
I only have the energy for stuff that really matters.
I’m a paper bag.
I’m only as good as what I can carry.
I am a paper bag.
Wrinkled and used and too often abused
Thrown on the floor.
Buried deep inside your drawers.
I am a paper bag.
I cannot ask you for anything more
I’m only as good as what I can carry.
This blog is now my sole cognitive link to the outside world.
At least today it is.
I can’t physically be where I need to be so I’m posting here thinking that if enough people read my status, that it somehow puts me in the real world of social transactions and mini Games of Thrones.
Victory is not defeated but ailing.
I put my black steel steed in the hands of Spencer, the young mechanic who plays my Sancho Panza in this story. He’s humble because all of Victory’s afflictions are his fault. But I don’t rub it in.
“Sancho,” I say. “There’s no point in wasting time in pointing fingers. It’s never really just one cause, usually a combination of factors. I’m just glad that you’re willing to drive out here at 7 in the morning to take a look”.
I help Sancho Panza push my bike up into the back of his truck.
One good reason I’ve found for being nice (or civil, as I used to call it), is because so few people really are. Oh, they want to be taken for nice people alright; and would be highly distressed to find that others might think otherwise. Being nice provides a tactical advantage.
Although, I liked Spencer the young bike mechanic. An engineer in practice if not in credentials. My bike is first up this morning so if it can be fixed, it will be fixed in time for me to hit the 5 for San Diego and the Pancakes and Booze Art Market where I’m exhibiting some of my mother’s works for sale right next to Mario Torero. Sell some watercolours, some pastels and loads of books I hope.
I enjoy the role of an “art-barker”.
It feels like an honest effort for very little pay; however, the rewards are luxurious.
There are so many jobs that aren’t so and so many professions that once were and have since gone astray into the mercenary end of pure commercial exploitation. Marketing people use the term ‘exploitation’ to refer to the product they’re peddling but what they really mean is the market they want to buy it.
“Don’t say you support the arts, buy some!” is my shill.
So if my Victory is assured and returned to me by 3, I will make my way south on the 5 lane asphalt ribbon to the City on the Bay.
Last night I missed the ceremony for the official induction of 3 copies of IS SHE AVAILABLE? into the central library’s local author collection. Not just me, but that of my historic friend Chris Ernest Nelson, as well. His book Harvest lying right next to IS SHE? in a glass case.
Just like William Blake at the British Library when it used to be a separate building from the British Museum. And Joe Orton’s mutilated library books for which he spent prison time inside, now under glass inside the Islington Library in London, the very library he stole them from in the first place. In England, they put both the author and the work behind glass. In England, people go to jail for unpaid library fines. And mutilating books into art collages.
So I missed by success at convincing the library to take my book which they rejected at least twice. Once because it didn’t fit into their category system, the second because of Michael S Kane‘s Andy Warhol/Jack Kirby Madonna and child. But no child, just Mother Mary nurturing a revolver.
It’s been the image that has caused the most alarm and offence amongst bookstores, book buyers and of course libraries. I have been closing high order deals with chains on more than one occasion, only to have the buyer happen to land on Shaky’s spread and immediately handing my book back to me. Atta-boy Shaky, I’m living on desperation row thanks to you!
The irony is that our intention from the beginning was to apparently offend. There is nothing specifically offensive or pornographic about the image of a pre-pubescent blond girl holding a big pink gun. Not even the word ‘Vagina’ standing out in Rian Hughes‘s sculptural typography of the text to the poem.
In fact, there’s nothing offensive or shocking about the image at all, just the impression that one will be shocked. And of course, the real content, the real meaning of the poem and the illustration is that gun-violence is what we should really be offended and shocked by and yet are no longer. Judge for yourself below.
At any rate, I am home alone; sound but unsafe, calmly nervous by events beyond my control that are inevitably unfolding. G/d will pretend, when the time comes, that the end of the world was what he had planned all along.
Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror is really the best TV on your screen. It quite literally holds up a black mirror not just onto our society but to each one of us as components, now data-cogs, of the society we can no longer see anymore without the aid of mirrors. We are like goldfish in a goldfish bowl kept rotating by the shortness of our attention spans and never even realising the wetness of our environments.
Charlie Brooker, his cast, co-writers and the producers at Netflix are doing us the moral service of reminding us of the remnants of own moral outrage and how our own ethical boundaries have long since been trespassed by the dark consequences of convenience and more efficient processing.
The machines never took over, we just surrendered.
We are like commuters stuck in traffic complaining about the traffic that we are actually both part of and complicit in. Even though from our subjective vehicles, we cannot see it. Traffic controllers retain the power however it is a remote distributed, bureaucratic, systemised power that is no longer subject to one human’s judgement. Who do you alert when the traffic lights stop working? You don’t have to, they already know.
I have as of late, paraded the term Speculative Realism, borrowed from the French post-idealists. Who understand that the only way to view ourselves clearly is no longer as mere individuals but as components of a larger neuro-ecology that contains, constraints and ultimately defines us. We are the furniture that a system beyond our own subjectivity keeps rearranging “on our behalf”, “for our own safety”. “for your security”.
I have only slightly re-engineered the term in the context of a literary genre, of storytelling, perhaps the sole remaining respite of human freedom. A story is a purely human phenomenon untainted by machine efficiency as machines don’t need to tell each other stories. But we do, and in doing so we may be flexing the last quiescent muscle of our humanity. A story is comprised up 3 interlocked elements: The storyteller, the story and the audience (or to whom the story is told). At least two of these components are human, subject and object; the rest is merely synaptic grammar.
When a story is told and heard, a condensed complex of information, human knowledge and near spiritual wisdom is transmitted in a compact instant well beyond the speed or circuitry of a microchip. Remember, we are the minds that created and defined data. It is that creative mind that is both alert and receptive to the information that is vital to our survival, as a species and as sane human beings. Storytelling is our salvation and Poetry is better than prayer because you don’t have to pretend that someone is listening.
Speculative Realism is just my tag for vital, survival information being conveyed by storytellers. As essential as where the next herd of buffalo might be. Speculative Fiction has here to provide the luxurious canvas for our imaginations to ponder possibilities. But Speculative Realism is not what you might do ‘if…’ but what you will have to do ‘when…’ To survive, to retain your own identity and perhaps even your sanity. Speculative Realism is imperative, it carries the mental equipment we need to survive.
Black Mirror is a series of short cameos of Speculative Realism. The term is beginning to gain traction since I first observed the emergence of this genre in film, fiction and screen entertainment. I have since read a reference to Neil Gaiman‘s work described as Speculative Realist in his use of double vision, (the seeing of two apparent contractions as one), in his characterisations. I don’t know if he thinks that, you’d have to ask him.
Cyberpunk auteur Bruce Sterling, in Wired, refers to Speculative Realism as Philosophy Fiction,which is as good a handle as any because Speculative Realism defends the autonomy of the world from human access in a spirit of imaginative audacity.
In his recent Edinburgh University Press publication Speculative Realism and Science Fiction, Brian Willemsuses a range of science fiction literature that questions anthropomorphism to develop the Speculative Realist position. He looks at how nonsense and sense exist together in science fiction, the way in which language is not a guarantee of personhood, the role of vision in identity formation and the differences between metamorphosis and modulation.
These are useful critical and academic insights. But the real meat is in the eating and Black Mirror takes you to the centre of the Speculative Realist banquet, piling your plate high with outrage, moral panic and cautionary tales of horror. I suggest tasting a sample as we’re all going to be eating from this same table for the very foreseeable future, the future that has already arrived.
Last night was kind of my XXXmas eve, being a Saturday night, with no ghosts to placate until Monday morning. So I took my Victory out for a long ride, 46 miles down to Chula Vista to drop in on my drunken-angel-poet-brothers Alex Bosworth and Chris Vannoy. As I told them, I’ve never stopped in Chula Vista before, only passed through it; well on my way to crossing the border between Mexico and Madness.
Back in the Beatnik Days, when America was still a Great Shining Beacon of Golden Intentions and jail-breaking freedoms, going south of the border was a euphemism for leaving the straight rational world and exploring the psychedelic corridors and hallways of the unconscious mind, where the muses played poker to the sound of Gabriel’s saxophone under a streetlamp, playing for spare change, playing for the end of time. Kesey, Cassidy, Timothy Leary had all spent time south of the border, hiding from the authority.
But I wasn’t going all the way south or crossing any borders. Instead, like a Boddhisatva practising the discipline of worldly compassion, I was riding south on the great American highway stopping just short of going over the edge. Stopping long enough for the rest of my sentient species to hop on board and cross over with me. How long I gotta wait? The blur of the wind in my eyes transforms Inter-state 5 into a two-lane river of white headlight diamonds on one end heading towards but past me and on the other end, a torrent of glistening rubies speeding with me, flowing around me, carrying me forwards in one high speed direction.
I was carried on a slipstream of glistening rubies last night. Chilled legs wrapped around my angel in flight, carrying me aloft above all thought, beyond all hesitation, in that dangerous living moment when every half second of thought is solid and real with consequence; and any distraction is a trap door thumping open under the hangman’s rope.
That is the fury of mediation. That is my arrival in this moment that we all share. The calm at the center of chaos. Join me, dear reader, at the centre of chaos.
So I’m heading south armed with an unopened bottle of rye, the spirit of the season travels with me. Good whisky is about as spiritual as I get these days. It is my usual Xmas tradition to grab a bottle of good booze and head down to the Greyhound station, or the street corner, outside a homeless shelter or an alleyway or anywhere I can find and join a cluster of the disaffected, the homeless, the pointless, the ones left out of family portraits. Just to share a drink, a joke and the dregs of our mutual humanity.
But this year, not particularly in contrast, I’ve chosen the company of Deadbeat poets, failed self-construction workers, mental hospital misfits, suicide skippers and gravel-voiced prophets capable of predicting the present with uncanny accuracy. Cassandra’s children muttering under their condensed breaths, scratching their prophecies from the oracle down for the benefit of anyone who still remembers how to read; or how to listen. Tonight these are my brothers (and sisters), in arms. Raging against a sea of struggles, believing that by opposing them, we will end them and wrap our soiled blankets of peace around this cold, shivering world’s shoulders.
Dead Beat Poets
I make it to Main Street much too early and agree to meet my comrades in a bar called Sanctum. I have no currency apart from my still untried bottle of rye so I stand outside on the pavement near but not too near two young women smoking butts and laughing. ‘Merry Xmas’, I venture.
‘Merry fucking Xmas to you too’, is their reply. So I listen. A skill I am still mastering. The raven-haired beauty of the pair is recounting her love life to her friend. Telling her how she had met her intended’s eyes at work, a burning penetration in time and how happy she was that at least she knew, that she knew that she knew that there was an unstated passion, thrilling at the unstated, as yet unenacted attraction between them.
The bittersweet anticipation of passions yearned for but still yet to come.
I wanted to tell the dark-haired young woman how lucky she was to be free to express such yearning to another woman. Jealously, I wanted her to pity my poor lame masculinity and the political mindfield I had to traverse to even come close to sharing such a pure moment of true emotion and affection. But I didn’t. Who wants to hear another pitiful man’s story anyways? This was the year of raised female voices. Voices raised in anger, in righteous retribution for all the wrongs accrued., in demand of recognition. Voices of freedom insisting on justice, insisting on equal treatment without unwanted trespass.
Poor me, poor me, pour me another drink. . . .
So instead I pulled out my weapon of virtue, my great equalizer of man and woman, my bottle of rye from my bag and asked if ‘You ladies would like a drink”. “Hell yes”. And for a brief instant, I felt just like St. Peter patrolling the earth and giving comfort to lost souls.
This murdered the time until my wordly brothers finally arrived. We poured from the bottle into bright red dixie cups, swigging them down in the parking lot before entering the warmth of Sanctum Ale House to talk poetry, performance, and what we were going to do with the rest of our lives. This was beginning to feel a lot like a rendezvous of fallen angels pausing for a drink and brief reflection before hitting Hell.
Beatnik Approved!
There was no reason to take a picture or a selfie or even take note of the time. We drank, we talked, we tried to make each other laugh and we indulged in our common humanity; a focus on what we shared more than what we didn’t.
My mind spun back in time to the many drinking conversations I had with my late great friend, the writer David Halliwell. The only man I had ever met who had got drunk with Sam Beckett. So David told this story of buying a bottle of good Irish whisky and taking the train to London, from Yorkshire. Easily a 4-hour journey. On the trip, David got nervous opened the bottle and drank half the contents on the way down arriving completely cut up the King’s Road party where San Beckett would be. He did find Beckett apparently and immediately sat down to finish the rest of the bottle he’d brought. David got so drunk he couldn’t remember a word that Sam Beckett had said to him.
Last night, I told Chris and Alex about the year that David called me up to join him for a Xmas drink and The Bull Tavern in the little North East Oxfordshire village of Charlbury, whose village council insisted on calling it a town because it had 4 pubs, a pharmacy and a post office.
I walked down the unpaved bumpy road to the tavern, past the Egyptian cottage with the papyrus reeds of Isis, the Goddess, not the terrorists. I reached The Bull pub and Inn, Opened the heavy oak door and walked into a movie. The pub was nearly empty save for the bar that featured David on his bar stool holding court with his mates. Only his mates were images burnt on my retinas since childhood: John Hurt, Ben Kingsley, David Warner, Freddie Jones and his son, then unknown now better known than him, Toby Jones. I remember blinking in disbelief. I might as well have walked in on Lewis Carrol, Tolkien and CS Lewis downing pints all who had also frequented this pub some hundred years previously.
I remember David smiling, laughing his phlegmatic cough and motioning me over to introduce me to these faces from the screen. “This is Igor, he’s another writer; he’s a Yank but he’s alright”. I was just another writer in the company of actors, everyday workers taking a break from toiling in the star-maker factories behind the popular film. I was handed a bulbous goblet of glowing ruby wine and the rest is hard to remember. But I do recall making them laugh and David Warner towering over me and reminiscing about his one appearance in a two-part Star Trek opposite Patrick Stewart that had earned him enough to comfortably return to the stage for 7 continuous years. Apart from young Toby, these were board strutting actors; indifferent and virtually contemptuous of their movie work save for the vast sums Hollywood paid them for peddling their trade of packaged emotions.
The next year most of them would be dead, David Halliwell included. I would empty his cottage with a Scottish actor of his while his Yorkshire sister wept inconsolably on his stairwell. In England, people let you weep and leave you to the dignity of your grief out of respect for the exceptional display of emotion. If you openly weep in England its because the pain is so hard that you really can’t hold it in.
Back in the Sanctuum, I explained to my companions how David had taught me the true meaning and value of the literary arts, which for David included actors who tell stories with their faces. Storytelling’s place in the human universe, keeping the stars locked in their firmament and the cosmic spheres in perfectly balanced and meaningful rotation. David Halliwell wasn’t famous. He died a virtual pauper, alone, estranged from his sister, a Yorkshire man with an RSC accent from wanting to be an actor, who wrote every day of his life before heading down to the pub to argue with me.
But he was a great success, albeit not by any kind of American Calvinist standard. Rather he succeeded in staying true to his art. He never sold out to better-paid mediocrity. He stayed true to his art, to himself and he survived with the respect and admiration of his fellow artists. When he died, I wrote and read this eulogy at his memorial, after Harold Pinter came up from Hampstead to say a few words about his departed friend. As did Stephen Frears and Scott Hampton (author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses).
I read this poem to David to my friends Alex Bosworth and Chris Vannoylast night. And in my mind, I went hunting and visiting my own xmas ghosts to remind me of the true joys of this season.
Daedalus Afraid to Fly
David, you bastard, you’ve left me
Understanding here alone,
With only these words falling out of my hands
When it is yours I want to hear again.
Words of your mastery, not mine.
So what was all the swearing about then, David?
What were all those Northern fumes really burning from?
I told you the songs of Yorkshire would never play in LA
Or London for that matter):
Two cities equidistant from your Yorkshire mother.
Tell me, David, why didn’t you just sell out?
You could have bought yourself a much better pint of beer
With all that money for old knotted ropes and
Still, have coughed up the phlegm to laugh at us all.
Is death your idea of some kind of joke?
Did you finally track down the film rights to Malcolm, David
And cash them in?
Are you really, secretly living in Barbados,
Making beautiful women miserable?
To think of all this wasted sorrow and
Empty glasses of beer.
You did say that you always wanted to visit other places.
But Daedalus, you were afraid to fly.
If you had been born upside down in America
You would have been a southern writer living in some Northern town.
Spilling your southern drawl over a rum and coke in a New York City bar.
Sitting elbow to arm with Williams, O’Neill, Baldwin and them all.
Your America was always an America of the mind.
So why fear the flight?
Your America David was where Charlie Parker
was forever sharp shooting pool with Humphrey Bogart
in some room behind a neon-splattered bar
Where Chet Baker never jumped or fell but flew, man!
He just flew away.
Just like you.
So you’re off then, David?
Back up the bumpy road,
Turning the corner around the Little Egyptian cottage
Navigating the reeds of Isis, Long past the close of time.
A brown duffle coat ship, bobbing on an unpaved surface,
Weaving a few well-spoken thoughts into your
Captain’s cap.
Can you tell me, David:
Were you X-Centric, or
Merely Eggs Essential?
How about this time I tell you, David:
The spark was always there.
But not like Daedalus, like Prometheus.
The living punishment of Truth,
Chained to your bar stool,
That eternal pint of Carlsberg lager gnawing at your liver.
Like Prometheus David,
The spark is always here.
For the late, great David Halliwell; poet, playwright,
The only way to explain Zen is by describing the sleepy mind. The sleepy mind describes a tree in terms of attributes and data: the number of leaves, the leaf shape, the number of branches, thickness of the trunk, the colour of bark. Which birds make use of the tree etc.
All these observable and measurable attributes are assembled as data by the sleepy mind and voila! the sleepy mind thinks it knows what a tree is. The sleepy mind can give arguments with citations about the validity of its data. The sleepy mind works well with other sleepy minds.
And the sleepy mind isn’t totally wrong, the data it compiles in reference to ‘tree’ are all real and quantifiable features of the tree. But no matter how exact or comprehensive, the data is not the tree nor even the experience of the tree.
The awoken mind merely says “Look, a tree”, and points. Because there is no data that conveys the experience of that tree in the moment of your apprehension. The awoken mind, sees the leaves, the branches, the colour of the bark, the thickness of the trunk, which birds fly in and out of the tree as much and as well as the sleepy mind does.
But the awoken mind also sees that the spaces between the leaves are part of the tree. The negative space surrounding the tree. The unseen roots spread beneath the ground are part of the tree. The sunlight reflecting off the green of the leaves are part of the tree. The seat waiting to rest your back against the trunk is part of the tree. The awoken mind ‘see’s the tree; the form of the tree; the tree itself in all its ‘tree-ness’, the tree as a child sees a tree; and then quite simply sees the tree for a tree, not what the sleepy mind contrives to substitute as its surrogate.
First, there is a tree.
Then there is no tree.
Then there is a tree. (With apologies to Donavon)
I think this is the closest I can come to describing the Zen disposition. I say disposition because too much is made of practice and the philosophy of Zen when all are merely aids to assist in the unravelling of illusion and self-deception. Zen is not an acquisition of skills, rituals, garments or ideology; instead, Zen is relinquishment. It’s a reminder to keep paying attention. Not acquiring but letting go: unravelling, stripping away layers of calloused skin, leaving your baggage behind and not looking back over your shoulder. In the words of the bard:
“My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip
My toes too numb to step”.
Buddhists will talk about the Buddha-nature as universal, the same as our original nature. Don’t listen to them. The face that first looked up at your mother’s face is still there, submerged and (sometimes suppressed), within you. All that Zen suggests is that we are encumbered by needless worry, anxiety, expectations, daydreams and nostalgias that have buried your true self under the rubble of your crumbling castle and keeps you from seeing the world and your place in it, with any clarity.
We are all distracted by anxieties and worries about money, about jobs, about partners and children. We fear that we don’t have enough or that someone might take away what we do have. This persisting distraction is manufactured by the powerful in the society we live in to keep us consuming, acquiescent and very sleepy! It doesn’t matter if you meditate or not; if you read poetry or not; if you drink tea or practice martial arts or not. It doesn’t matter how you get there or what you wear; just that you wake up and experience the miracle of persistent and unwavering creation.
The truth of your life lies outside the boundaries of your identity, your concerns, your preferences, your joys and your sorrows. To step outside is merely to leave those things that amount to nothing behind. Enlightenment is a perpetual relinquishment of obstructing of layers not an acquiring of a state of mind.
Awareness is larger than the body.
The universe is created, then destroyed then resurrected millions of times a second, faster than you can blink; an ongoing vibration of creation.
So try to keep your eyes wide open.
I’ll leave you with the words of the Nobel Prize laureate:
“Then take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.”
– With ultimate Compassion, Igor Goldkind, 2017
Please feel free to share and copy this.
I’m just trying to reach anyone who might need to understand this.
Recent rewrite. When I first wrote and posted it, no one seemed to know what I meant by it. But now it’s becoming a favoured read aloud piece:
Insomniac Awareness
We who are hiding in our second bedrooms,
Licking the silver from the backs of our screens,
Are living in a different time zone
Of Insomniac Awareness.
Sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes four or more
Lives are lived and lost each night.
In our rooms, by ourselves
Sitting precariously on the edge of our beds.
This is our legacy
The lasting perpetuity of our sensory species:
The glow that contests the light that once shone from our eyes,
Right up to the surface of our understanding.
What is not yet known.
Or what was known and long since forgotten.
Dances across the screen you stare into.
Tripping over your coded memories; in Real Time.
Who are you reading this?Do you know
What perturbs your sleep-walk into the night?
Or are you merely waiting for the screen to pull you through?
Into your own quiet world,
Where things that count never change.
And no one is dreaming you but your mother,
Who has left you now for another child.
NOTHING has prepared you for This. Nothing ever will.
Because whatever is happening Now has never happened before.
This is a web-nurtured collaboration with 27 artists, sculptors and musicians from the world of Comics, Fantasy, Fine Art and Jazz, including Bill Sienkiewicz, David Lloyd, Liam Sharp, Glenn Fabry, Shaky Kane, Lars Henkel and the cutting edge sculptural typography of the highly acclaimed book designer Rian Hughes.
This illuminated book is a contemporary Dante’s Divine Comedy; a journey through the confessional landscape of a masculine identity. It uses poetry to construct a narrative that explores themes of death and loss, sex and love, and the modern American and Jewish identity design: by the UK’s eminent graphic designer, typographer, illustrator Rian Hughes.
The music is composed and produced by iconoclast, ex-Israeli, Middle-Eastern jazz virtuoso Gilad Atzmon, along with five other jazz artists.
Written by San Diego native Igor Goldkind, this illuminated book will revolutionize the way you view poetry by meshing comics, art, music and animation in a truly unique way. It uses poetry to construct a narrative that explores themes of death and loss, sex and love, and the modern American and Jewish identity. The book is available for download on the iTunes Store andGoogle Play, as well as in a 166 page, fully illustrated in colour hardbound edition available ORDER HERE.
The eBook edition pushes the edge of what is possible with present EPUB3 technology. It is not an App, it is a true book that marries pop art, comics, avant-garde, jazz, spoken word poetry, video and animations, and type design in a manner that we have not seen before IS SHE AVAILABLE? has the feel of an artefact from the near future – a seminal work of a new genre-fusing poetry, graphic art, music, and animation.
Sample interior pages:
IS SHE AVAILABLE? RRP is $34.95, SHIPPING INCLUDED Educational Discount for Students and Teachers:$29.95
Both deluxe hardcover edition PLUS animated and musically scored eBook App edition of Is She Available? bundle: $39.95
Shipping included in orders within the US and its territories.
If you are in Britain and/or Europe, please contact my European wholesaler Fanfare Productions who will take your order and dispatch to your address the same day: stephen@fanfareuk.demon.co.uk
Reviews ? Sure We Got Reviews. Why You Wanna See Them? Be my guest.
“Igor’s “Illuminated Book” is like a new genre.It is a wonderful ekphrastic expression; a fusion of the arts.” — Poet Mel Takahara
“His collection Is She Available? has the feel of an artefact from the near future – a seminal work of a new genre-fusing poetry, graphic art, music, and animation.” —(San Diego’s) City Beat
“Is SHE Available?” is an experiment, and reading it feels more like an act of discovery… nonetheless there’s a thrill to scrolling through its pages. It’s an ambitious step toward what digital media can (and will) be.”—The Chicago Tribune
The166 full colour, fully illustrated hard cover deluxeedition is available in discerning and eclectic independent bookstores everywhere.Including Fahrenheit 451 in Carlsbad, Soulscape Bookstore in Encinitas, the Upstart Crow in San Diego, Verbatim Booksand Mysterious Galaxy also in San Diego, City Lights and the Cooperfields chain in Marin County and Sonoma County, amongst a growing number of independent book stores.
Order direct from PayPal and shipping is included!
The only way to explain Zen is by describing the sleepy mind. The sleepy mind describes a tree in terms of attributes and data: the number of leaves, the leaf shape, the number of branches, thickness of the trunk, the colour of bark. Which birds make use of the tree etc.
All these observable and measurable attributes are assembled as data by the sleepy mind and voila! the sleepy mind thinks it knows what a tree is. The sleepy mind can give arguments with citations about the validity of its data. The sleepy mind works well with other sleepy minds.
And the sleepy mind isn’t totally wrong, the data it compiles in reference to ‘tree’ are all real and quantifiable features of the tree. But no matter how exact or comprehensive, the data is not the tree nor even the experience of the tree.
The awoken mind merely says “Look, a tree”, and points.
Because there is no data that conveys the experience of that tree in the moment of your apprehension. The awoken mind, sees the leaves, the branches, the colour of the bark, the thickness of the trunk, which birds fly in and out of the tree as much and as well as the sleepy mind does.
But the awoken mind also sees that the spaces between the leaves are part of the tree. The negative space surrounding the tree. The unseen roots spread beneath the ground are part of the tree. The sunlight reflecting off the green of the leaves are part of the tree. The seat waiting to rest your back against the trunk is part of the tree. The awoken mind ‘see’s the tree; the form of the tree; the tree itself in all its ‘tree-ness’, the tree as a child sees a tree; not what the sleepy mind contrives to substitute as its surrogate.
I think this is the closest I can come to describing the Zen disposition. I say disposition because too much is made of practice and the philosophy of Zen when all are merely aids to assist in the unravelling of illusion and self-deception. Zen is not an acquisition of skills, rituals, garments or ideology; instead, Zen is relinquishment. It is a reminder to keep paying attention.Not acquiring but letting go: unravelling, stripping away layers of calloused skin, leaving your baggage behind and not looking back over your shoulder. In the words of the bard:
“My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip My toes too numb to step”.
Buddhists will talk about the Buddha-nature as universal, the same as our original nature. Don’t listen to them. The face that first looked up at your mother’s face is still there, submerged and (sometimes suppressed), within you. All that Zen suggests is that we are encumbered by needless worry, anxiety, expectations, daydreams and nostalgias that have buried your true self under the rubble of your crumbling castle and keeps you from seeing the world and your place in it, with any clarity.
We are all distracted by anxieties and worries about money, about jobs, about partners and children. That distraction is manufactured by the powerful in the society we live in to keep us consuming, acquiescent and very sleepy! It doesn’t matter if you meditate or not; if you read poetry or not; if you drink tea or practice martial arts or not. It doesn’t matter how you get there or what you wear; just that you wake up and experience the miracle of persistent and unwavering creation. The universe is created, then destroyed then resurrected millions of times a second, faster than you can blink; so try and keep your eyes open!
I leave you once again with the immortal words of the Nobel Prize laureate:
“Then take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
When I sit at my desk in the barely blinking dawn,
I sit at the helm of a Starship.
Each dimension of time or space is available to me
To go anywhere I want to.
With the flick of a switch and a weird background sound
The course can be faithfully plotted,
At just the right warp speed to be there, be heroic and be back before dinner.
As safe as the hum of my engines.
When I sit at my desk in the mid-morning blue light that pierces
My east facing windows.
I pray that I can write something today,
I pray that I still have something to say.
My eyes are drawn to the street just beneath me,
That winds around the standing tree,
Just outside my window.
There is a spoonful of sunshine in my coffee.
When I sit at my desk in the midday sun
At the zenith of all of Creation,
I know that the bright light that now floods my room,
Will wash the shadows of doubt from these walls.
I still hear that first sound,
The Bang! that expands the spaces around.
I can feel how the act of creation was never just one moment long gone ago.
But a circus of new sensations, an ongoing show.
Will too soon leave us behind sleeping eternity away.
When I sit at my desk in the mid-afternoon sun
And the light of creation slowly dwindles,
I can reflect on all the things that I’ve done
While counting the tasks that remain to lie in the sun.
When I sit at my desk at dusk’s twilight time
When light and darkness are twined,
Each wrestles the other to the ground.
I know that darkness will eventually swallow,
The fading strength of the light.
The time for my bed is just insight
And the twin brothers have given up their fight.
When I sit at my desk in the heart of the darkness
I know that death is hiding in my closet.
I know that the covers I wrap so tightly around me
Offer no protection from what time has brought (me):
The drowning of the light by the darkness.
I bury my head in the night and dream of the return of tomorrow.
Here’s your chance to come and hear me read from my collection of Graphic Poetry IS SHE AVAILABLE? and some new poems and a short story at ComicKhazi Comics Shop at Liberty Station, San Diego on September 1st starting at 6.00 pm.
I’ll be reading, signing and dedicated hard cover copies and generally corrupting youth.
You don’t need Seymour Chwast, Chip Kidd and other designers to tell you that cartoons and comics are vital sources of creative inspiration (although they do that here). So maybe you’re thinking about exploring the graphic novel realm, but you’d like something more exceptional than usual, more out of the ordinary. Well, here’s the first of a series of suggestions that either defy or disregard categorization as comics. And the first, Is She Available?, is an eBook that also challenges conventional book classification in the process.
As you scroll through, you hear 1950s cool jazz in the background. Then gunfire blasts out of nowhere. A choir sings. Dogs bark. Bombs drop from the sky. And all the while, letterforms unexpectedly appear, tilt, transform, and vanish while spoken words interweave with the music and sound effects. Is She Available? is a trans-media poetry collection, one that pushes at the limits of eBook technology. It’s also comics, kind of.
Its author, Igor Goldkind, is a 2000AD comics sci-fi writer. He describes his 50 or so poems as “a contemporary Dante’s Inferno… that explores themes of death and loss, sex and love.” He’s included a couple of standard, panel-sequenced comic book narratives, including one rendered by V for Vendetta’s David Lloyd. But the bulk of the book is enlivened with music and other effects that enhance the moody illustrations and minimalist animations from a diversity of other skilled artists. The lineup notably includes Judge Dredd’s Liam Sharp and Shaky Kane as well as Bill Sienkiewicz of Daredevil/Elektra fame. Most impressive is the overall design, by accomplished comics illustrator and self-described “commercial artist” Rian Hughes. With graphic flair and acuity, Hughes proves himself to be a worthy digital age successor to Stéphane Mallarmé and Robert Massin.
If you’re interested in comic books, chances are you’ve heard the names Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. After all, their partnership paved the way for the Golden Age of comics beginning in the 1940s. With The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio by Mark Evanier, learn more about the duo who invented noteworthy characters like Captain America and Sandman, conceived the idea of romance comics, and created a new standard for the genres of crime, western, and horror comic books. Take a look inside the various aspects of their career, and see some of the works that defined them.
I can honestly say, this is like no other book we have ever seen before; we think perhaps – like no other you may have seen as well.
31 March 2015
For Immediate Release
IS SHE AVAILABLE? PUSHES BOOKS AND PUBLISHING FORWARD THROUGH POETRY, ART, AND MUSIC
Southern-California based publisher Chameleon Publishing releases its first major publication: Is SHE Available? by Igor Goldkind April 1 via the iBooks store.
Is SHE Available? pushes the edge of what is possible with present EPUB3 technology and how books are created and made. It is not an App, it is a true book that marries pop art, comics, avant-garde, jazz, spoken word poetry, video and animations, and type design. Its creative journey was more than a year in the making, growing from the collaborative work of artists, musicians, editors, and designers on two continents.
The poet, Igor Goldkind, is a San Diego native who lived in France and the UK for two decades while promoting the work of today’s most notable comic and graphic novel authors and artists. As a teen, he was one of the co-founders of San Diego’s legendary Comic-Con.
According to Bleeding Cool, “It was Goldkind who popularized the phrase ‘graphic novel’ with the media and found that gave them permission to cover the previously-considered childish medium of comic books . . . . Now, Goldkind’s vision of what graphic novels could be, is returning.”
Is SHE Available? was produced using an international collaborative model, but the book is one man’s voice and one man’s story. Goldkind’s words and voice inspired the art of over 26 internationally-known artists, including cover art and interior illustrations by Eisner-winner Bill Sienkiewicz (Elektra Assassin, Daredevil and more), additional interior illustrations from other graphic novel illustrators and award-winners including Glenn Fabry (Hellblazer, Preacher), David Lloyd (V for Vendetta and many others), Liam Sharp (Judge Dredd/2000 AD/Madefire), fine artists and illustrators Lars Henkel, Mario Cavalli, Mario Torero, Wendy Farrow, and many more.
Music and spoken word were recorded in New York with UK Jazz Album of the Year winner, author and ex-Israeli Gilad Atzmon. A US-based jazz and spoken word tour is scheduled for July 2015.
The type design and hardcover book are created by the eminent London-based designer Rian Hughes (2000 AD, Vertigo, Dan Dare), who includes an afterward about the collaborative design process. E-book production, incorporating Madefire animations, audio and additional animation, were provided by Chameleon Publishing in Southern California.
Due to the inclusion of video, audio and animations, and fine type design, it is playable only on Apple devices, and available only through the iBooks store. The hardcover (without music, spoken word or animations) will be published July 15, 2015.
Other “enhanced e-books” have been produced with budgets of $100,000 or more, and few have sold well. The “wisdom” is: poetry doesn’t sell. Enhanced e-books don’t sell. Most jazz doesn’t sell, either. Comic and graphic novel artists struggle to show their fine art to the public. And what publisher would take on a completely unknown poet whose claim to fame was selling fancy comic books to grown-ups and co-founding a big comic/media/scantily-clad women-fest like Comic-Con?
Twenty percent of North Americans regularly buy and read books. Nearly a hundred percent can read. Chameleon’s mission is to make books for everyone, not just a selected few.
Published April 1, 2015, in honor of National Poetry Month.
-END-
For more information and to obtain a copy of Is SHE Available? eBook for review (EPUB3 only on iOS devices – iPad, iPhone and Apple computers) or an advance reading copy of the hardcover edition contact the publisher:
The book is finally ready.I’ve seen it, played it, read it, listened to it so many times it’s near driven me mad.
The act of creation is an explosion, a maelstrom of emotional energies seeking form, vying with their own legacy of fragile structures, to Break Through to Something New.
That is the goal.
But the monotony of honing the perfection; wherein the hot metals cool and adhere to the cast, is the labour that seems unending compared to that first ejaculate of inspiration.
If you’re reading this, you can get a special discount offer on the website; a kind of 2-4-1 deal. The kind of incentive that is supposed to get you to read my stuff.
The official release is Wednesday, APRIL FOOL’S DAY, which I consider entirely appropriate. A day like any other day, displaced by a change in calendar; a recalibration of our instruments that measure time makes fools of us all when we forget what the calendar really measures:
our own steep descent in running out of time.
So like you, I am a Fool
I took the opportunity to be published and turned it into something more; something different, something that I felt should have been tried by now. But it hadn’t been.
So I did.
Try.
Doing something new.
Whilst the machinations of publishing both print and online, grind into gear, releasing steam and a rumbling thunder, I prepare for my flight from the north to the south.
I will be in the air when this book lifts off from its pad.
After shaking hands with Lee, I wandered through the space. I was looking for poets to invite to my festival. They could teach as guest teachers at the Pegasus Poetry Workshops. It starts the last day of January 2025. They might even contribute to my new poetry journal, The Mission. I began to recognize some familiar figures of the San Diego Poetry “scene”. Poetry Underground had constructed a long table promoting their books and events. I avoided the eye contact of Anthony and “Sunny”. My last encounter with them was when they barred me from their underground open mic poetry reading. It was because I read my anti gun poem. THE BULLET FROM MY GUN. Anthony and Sunny founded Poetry Underground. They are proponents of the school of thinking that 
San Diego Poetry “scene” has been and is still, more like an open dog fight between warring and self-aggrandizing factions. 
Beatles onto LSD, and we all know where that led: cultural, spiritual, and social Revolution! 
Flight UA1827
Flight LH1285
A new acquaintance asked me why I endured relative poverty and uncertainty in California when I could easily take a tech copywriting or PR job and be living comfortably.
Secure and supported by this universal clarity.
the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT) was established.
not advocating a supernatural or spiritual causation for the effectiveness of poetry as a healing agent but rather the supra-natural mystical cause which is grounded first in human nature and behavior for which can be a myriad of imprecise explanations; none of which explain why it works.
There is no trick to listening to yourself and learning how choosing and rearranging your words can unlock darkened doors, de-clutter basements and clean out the attics of your life. Sometimes in merely one session.
Just add <poetry therapy> to your Skype contacts and schedule a date. Payments accepted through PayPal or Facebook cash. Here are some examples of the poetry achieved through PEGASUS POETRY THERAPY:
The real English, the softcenter at the core of the cracked, hard surface, English remind me no one more so than of the Japanese. Both island peoples deeply suspicious of foreign invaders and both sewn tightly within an intricately embroidered fabric of ritual, custom and politesse. Both peoples’ have a tea ceremony; one with boiled spring water and green leaf powder, the other with scones, clotted cream and jams.
No other single event in history had more of an impact on the 20th century and by consequence the present 21st, than the mass brutalisation of families or men, women and children in the camps and now in the Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon.
portrait of a middle-class craftsman’s family, complete with Yiddish grandmother and old-world family meals – and none of the hothouse intellectual atmosphere that produced Leo Szilard, John von Neumann, Kurt Gödel and other thinkers who left Budapest to dominate 19th-century thought. There was little to suggest Ivan’s strengths in science or mathematics – except, perhaps, a boyish infatuation with model aeroplane kits. He had, however, inherited from his father an inclination for drawing, and his father’s habit of tinkering with various gadgets – including an early air brush – to enhance his pictures was a constant delight to Ivan.
By that time he and, miraculously, his mother were back in Novi Sad. An acquaintance in the Ministry of Transport offered him a research position in the effort to repair Yugoslavia’s war-torn railway system. The post involved testing an enormous German machine that used high electrical wattage to weld rail lines together, a then untested invention. Mounted on a train carriage, Ivan travelled with the machine throughout Yugoslavia, in charge of the welding team. The machine was so successful that Ivan soon found himself elevated to a lofty position within Tito’s Ministry of Transport, accountable only to the deputy minister himself.
it made life easier. You couldn’t get ill, because that meant execution, but curiously, if you could show a work-related injury, a visible wound, you could be seen by the SS and granted a day or two of hospital. One day I announced myself with a bad wound. While everyone else went on work detail I was left in the enormous courtyard with a broom to clean up, completely by myself. Suddenly the gate opened and a commandant’s car stormed into the courtyard and headed straight for me. The German officer jumped down from his car, grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, threw me onto the platform of the vehicle and drove off. I was kidnapped.” Later Ivan learned that there had been an escape from a neighbouring camp and the camp commandant had stolen Ivan to make up his tally of inmates. The mathematics of death had to add up.
Hungarian cousin running the camp’s kitchens and being the “godfather” of the camp. Then he found some school friends of his father’s. For several weeks Ivan rebuilt his spirits and his body. Then the Russians pushed back the German line, and the SS made their lethal preparations for evacuating Auschwitz.
“Near where I worked was a statue of the mathematician Leibniz with beautiful writing on it.
Psychoanalysis and Psychology at their best are not sciences at all, they are merely methodical enquiries into the nature of the mind (although the current bias towards quantifiable and numerical conclusions might make one think otherwise). They are a result of mystical enquiries into the nature of the mind and how it shapes our most intimate and fundamental perceptions of the world we live in; the space in time we briefly occupy before dying. Medicine is yet another example of a supposed science that in fact is based on a field of knowledge that predates scientific methodology.
The irony is that our intention from the beginning was to apparently offend. There is nothing specifically offensive or pornographic about the image of a pre-pubescent blond girl holding a big pink gun. Not even the word ‘Vagina’ standing out in 
We are like commuters stuck in traffic complaining about the traffic that we are actually both part of and complicit in. Even though from our subjective vehicles, we cannot see it. Traffic controllers retain the power however it is a remote distributed, bureaucratic, systemised power that is no longer subject to one human’s judgement. Who do you alert when the traffic lights stop working? You don’t have to, they already know.
Black Mirror is a series of short cameos of Speculative Realism. The term is beginning to gain traction since I first observed the emergence of this genre in film, fiction and screen entertainment. I have since read a reference to 
These are useful critical and academic insights. But the real meat is in the eating and Black Mirror takes you to the centre of the Speculative Realist banquet, piling your plate high with outrage, moral panic and cautionary tales of horror. I suggest tasting a sample as we’re all going to be eating from this same table for the very foreseeable future,
I think this is the closest I can come to describing the Zen disposition. I say disposition because too much is made of practice and the philosophy of Zen when all are merely aids to assist in the unravelling of illusion and self-deception. Zen is not an acquisition of skills, rituals, garments or ideology; instead, Zen is relinquishment. It’s a reminder to keep paying attention. Not acquiring but letting go: unravelling, stripping away layers of calloused skin, leaving your baggage behind and not looking back over your shoulder. In the words of the bard:
Do you know
The seat waiting to rest your back against the trunk is part of the tree. The awoken mind ‘see’s the tree; the form of the tree; the tree itself in all its ‘tree-ness’, the tree as a child sees a tree; not what the sleepy mind contrives to substitute as its surrogate.
Buddhists will talk about the Buddha-nature as universal, the same as our original nature. Don’t listen to them. The face that first looked up at your mother’s face is still there, submerged and (sometimes suppressed), within you. All that Zen suggests is that we are encumbered by needless worry, anxiety, expectations, daydreams and nostalgias that have buried your true self under the rubble of your crumbling castle and keeps you from seeing the world and your place in it, with any clarity.
I pray that I still have something to say.
If you’re interested in comic books, chances are you’ve heard the names Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. After all, their partnership paved the way for the Golden Age of comics beginning in the 1940s. With The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio by Mark Evanier, learn more about the duo who invented noteworthy characters like Captain America and Sandman, conceived the idea of romance comics, and created a new standard for the genres of crime, western, and horror comic books. Take a look inside the various aspects of their career, and see some of the works that defined them.
s) will be published July 15, 2015.
What is this thing that you can’t speak of?
igorgoldkind
The Real War of Art
Question (From Jim Means, a professor friend of mine I’ve known since High School):
Paul Erdős–the most prolific mathematician of the 20th century, lived such a nomadic lifestyle. He would wander from continent to continent, knocking on the doors of other mathematicians and announce “My brain is open!” with the hope that they would invite him into stay in their home for weeks or months. Most would invite him in. They knew this would guarantee them a collaboration with Erdős. Consequently, they would get one or two academic papers out of it.
Perhaps you could do the same with other poets.
My Response: Well, it’s not a bad thought. However, there’s not much market demand for poetry. There’s also little demand for the works of poets. At least not as much as for mathematical or scientific papers. In Europe, poets rely on the state’s arts stipends to fuel their work. Poets, writers, and artists are considered respected vocational pursuits throughout Europe. This contrasts with the US; where saying one is a poet or a painter is basically to invite the retort, ‘why, can’t you get a real job?’
Art takes decades to master. It must be perfected into a discipline to produce value that a market will pay for. The problem in the quick-buck US is that there is no infrastructure outside of academia that permits an artist to practice and perfect their craft. We live under the delusion that artists either are born with it and immediately recognizably ‘geniuses’ or piddle away in isolation dying long before their work is recognized and cashed in on, ala Van Gogh.
The fulfillment from creating beauty is profound. It attempts to point at the eternal and universal. This beauty endures long after one has shaken off mortal constraints. It is worth the hard times and sacrifice.
It’s a stab at immortality, if you will. If you can’t take it with you, you might as well leave something worthwhile behind.
There is nothing I can rent, buy, or lay away that matches the genuine human connection art brings. This connection forms when a young person approaches me after a reading. They genuinely express their appreciation for the ideas and images I put in their heads. These ideas changed the way they saw things.
This is when I realize my work is effective. And it is worth a million times more than some contrived award or accolade.
There is no greater enjoyment of humanity that I can muster.
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February 10, 2025 | Categories: Americana, art, comments about poetry, literature, Meaning of Existence, physics, poetry | Tags: memesfunny | Leave a comment