The project is scheduled for release this MAY. It includes a deluxe limited edition hardcover. There is also a 14-track album featuring original music and spoken word. Additionally, there is a signed limited art print of the cover illustration by renowned Scandinavian surrealist painter Katarina Anderssen.
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
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!
Felix the Cat is an existential hero. He best embodies the bridge between modernity and Post Modern in the last century. Felix inspired a generation of leading French and German philosophers shortly after WWII. His magic bag of tricks played a large role in this inspiration. Felix the Cat was the model for Camus’s protagonist Meursault in his most widely read work The Stranger. Felix went on to inspire Sartre, Beckett and Martin Heidegger. He served as the personifying primary answer to the question. Heidegger poses this question in his seminal work Being and Time, ‘What is Being?’
Heidegger answered his own question with, ‘why Felix the Cat, of course; and his Magic Bag of Tricks, silly”.
Few people know that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle originates from his experiments with Felix. He repeatedly tried to put Felix in a box with a capsule of cyanide gas. Felix was able to elude death my virtue of his Magic Bag but nonetheless was still able to serve as the model for modern quantum physics. Without Felix, there could not have been a moonshot nor Musk’s Tesla automobile.
Dashiell Hammet’s famous existential hero/detective Sam Spade is said to be loosely based on Felix. Humphry Bogart spent weeks absorbing all of Felix’s cartoons. He did this in preparation for his cinematic portrayal of the existential sleuth. The sleuth is forced to choose duty over love. He eventually overcomes his own choices by using his bag of magic tricks.
Much of Samuel Beckett’s work is set inside of Felix’s bag and the playwrite was often overheard muttering under his breath “where’s my bag? Where’s my bag? I can write nothing with out my bag of magic tricks”.
In February 2025, the University of Heidelberg will be hosting its annual Felix the Cat academic conference. Felix scholars from around the world will present their papers on the cat and his impact on 20th-century thinking. The conference is entitled Felix’s Bag: Magic or Science?
As an internationally renown Magic Bag expert myself, I was invited to attend but unfortunately have a prior commitment to take a cat nap on the day. Inside my Magic Bag, of course. The conference is free and open to the public who are encouraged to attend with their own magic bags-of-tricks
Homeless Bound You’re a vagabond, a two bit clown You charlatan, Sleeping in your own feces What brought you to this hell-whole? This inner space of longing and despair? Longing for a warm embrace
Who are you man, with your upturned frown? With your magic crystal pipe and your temper’s dynamite? What happened to make you fall A-sleep through your own existence?
Who are these demons that have driven you here? Did you get their licence plate number? The ones you argue with all day on the street, The ones who drown you in fear and misery? The ones you are speaking to right now while I recite this poem. Who are the devils who make you shout and scream on the street corner on your pavement of shame? Who did this to you?
Which monster soiled your clothes? And chased you down the alleyway to where you hide from your life? Hide and huddle under your sleeping bag drenched in urine. Your Whole Food’s shopping cart full of dirty clothes and broken dolls. The dog you feed and care for more than yourself. Your debris of useless familiar possessions you could not bear to leave behind. Who drove you to this insanity, Or did you call an Uber? Was it me then, after all? Did I do this to you with my neglect? With my high minded judgement. With my stepping over your sleeping corpse? With my avoidance of your pleading gaze When I ignored you tripping over your own tied-together shoes? Was it me, because I did nothing when I could of? Because I was too preoccupied with my own useless, familiar self-possessions?
($85 a month of public storage). Is it because I ignored you when you tied your shoes together ?Or if I did see you and looked away, shaking my head At the slapstick clown you have become? Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin gone to seed Shitting in their own clown shoes.
You had a job once You had a wife once You served your country once. Now you serve the rats in your alleyways You’re a waiter serving up garbage and despair. A collector of cans and copper wire. Did you steal my bike today to trade to Judas for his silver? Are you Jesus betrayed so that the Romans might like us? (The best seats .at the orgy.) No, instead you are Sampson chained to the broken pillars of our “community”. You are David with a tangled slingshot, Daedalus with broken wings. You are my brother and my father. You are the son, I have forsaken. For the sake of a better car.
My shelter is my castle,
From who’s high, lofty turret towers I pour anguish down upon your head I pour my diarrhea of sanctimony Down upon your head! I write you off. I wish you were dead. Instead of haunting my street corners My pavements, my libraries and alley ways Plugging your phone in at Star Bucks Just to watch your cartoons all day With the phone Obama gave you to call for help. To call for your sanity to return.
I will call the police I will call the police I will call the police I will call the In-Sanitation department of human garbage. They’ll come in a truck to bag you up and haul you away, for the refuse that you are. They will throw you into jail cells without clocks or any measure of time. They’ll lock you up into tented cities far away from the children of humankind. Lest the children see what could happen to them if they will not tow the line.
Now you do have to live like a refugee! In these times of Oceanic Wealth That drown the poor in misery In squalor. In dead end jobs 3 at a time just to pay the uncontrollable rent. Who did this to you, you dusty pale ghost of your former self? Who beat your spirit down? Who lost you to become unfound? Who beat you to the ground? Who broke your holy crown?
Was it me? Did I do this to you? Was it me? When I forgot that you were me? Was it me? When I took silver for my humanity? Was it me? You are my father, you are my brother Was it me? You are my son that I have now forsaken For the sake of a better car. Was it me? Did I forget that you were me?
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.
In Episode 6 of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers: Masks of Eternity, Moyers and Campbell discuss the common experience of God.
This is the absolute truth. No one comes closer to identifying it. It is what pedestrian minds refer to as ‘god’. And yes, I do know better than believers because I’ve spent my entire life contemplating this concept. Not ‘God’ but Being.
My earliest conscious memories began when I was 5 or 6 years old. I wanted to know what THIS was all about. What was the explanation, the reason for existence? Why THIS and not something else. I demanded an explanation.
At 9 I asked by father, a distinguished academic with 2 PHds (in Anthropology and Sociology), if he existed.
“Of course I exist”, my bemused daddy answered as he drove his Ford Cortina, his family in tow, to La Jolla Shores.
“But Daddy, how do you know you exist?”, I countered.
My father gave me a sideways glance to determine whether or not I was teasing or serious.
I was serious, deadly serious.
My father knew everything. He should be able to tell me how he knew that he existed. From there, I could derive some conclusion about the nature of all existence.
That’s what parents are for.
My dad smiled. He said, “I know I exist because I can feel my skin. I feel the breeze on my skin and my breath.”
“Yes”, I interrupted, “But how do you know that this is all real and not a dream? How do we know if anything’s really real? How do we know if we exist or not?”
I was 9 years old.
I was deadly serious.
My life’s work is to answer my own question.
I owe it to myself, my 9 year old self, my every age self and to every other self.
What is the true nature of existence?
What is Being?
“God” is no answer, “God” is just a vanity reflected in a fractured mirror. What THERE IS, what is really going on is much bigger. It is much deeper and much grander than any silly sky-daddy can answer.
MY BELIEF is that asking that question ‘What is Being?’ is the only human activity, the only human mental cognition worth bothering with.
The only person who has nearly answered this question satisfactorily is the German Existentialist Martin Heidegger. It is the premise of his opus Being and Time.
(GERMANY OUT) *26.09.1889-26.05.1976+, Philosoph, D- Porträt- 1960 Foto: Paul Swiridoff (Photo by Würth GmbH/Swiridoff/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
He asks the question on the first page and by the time you are through he answers:
“What is the true nature of existence?
What is Being?”
Answer : “Who is asking?”·
In Episode 6 of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers: Masks of Eternity, Moyers and Campbell discuss the common experience of God. They explore how this experience spans across cultures. Campbell provides challenging insights into the concepts of God, religion, and eternity. These insights are revealed in Christian teachings and the beliefs of Buddhists, Navajo Indians, Schopenhauer, Jung, and others.
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!
My art is also poetry and short “fiction”. And I am head on confronting this very issue every day of my working life. I turned my back on academia where you can get paid to regurgitate curriculum while you do your real work.
Why? Because ultimately academia is a crutch that consumes your mind and soul after a while if you’re trying to be an artist. I call academia the artist’s meth. It feels great while you’re smoking it; status, paycheck, the admiration of the young….but ultimately your artist’s teeth fall out, you get uglier from compromise, and the admiration of youth makes you psychotic when you start actually believing it.
So I decided 6 years ago to starve to death.
No, let me tell you the truth. I determined that the undervaluing of poetry by the mainstream (commercial) was a social malaise, a symptom of a wider social problem compounded by the monetization of popular culture.
Cactus Flowers by Margarita Zuñiga. Fine Art for Sale: Enquire Below
I looked at who was actually reading and writing poetry first by hitting the poetry readings circuit. There I found the old clutching at reminiscences and the young clutching at life and strait jackets.
The number of young people 16-26 earnestly writing and writing confessional poetry struck me. Especially young women. They were confessing their angst and being young, about being raped, about being molested, about living in a world weighed down by the gravity of the male gaze. There were also cocky young men, rapping and slamming their hearts away.
So I started writing for them. The same age group that suffers from historic levels of suicide, anxiety and depression, gave me fodder for my writing. I wrote and read to them in public and my piece Suicide Note gained an audience of lonely girls who would approach me after my reading to highlight how that poem in particular struck them as they didn’t realize that other people felt as they did.
Someone I Missed
I also began carrying copies of my modestly selling my author copy books with me everywhere I went, signing and selling copies by hand at readings. But also if I met someone new in a cafe or party and the conversation got to the “and what do you do”? part, I’d answer, “let me show you” and pull out a copy of my latest.
“I’m a poet, would you like to hear a poem?”
IOW, regardless of the market, I decided to take my professional seriously and not try and disguise the thrust of what I do. I always have enough author copies of my books within reach so that when someone asks where they can buy one of my books, I list the usual Amazon, Barnes&Nobel, bookshops local to me and then I add “or you can buy a copy from me and I’ll sign it for you”.
At this point, I am ahead of the market because I have numerous direct contacts with my buyers. I talk to them. I find out who they are and why they read and what they need from an author.
Laborious, yes. Low yielding revenue, yes. Time consuming, yes. But I would match my market research on my audience against any data crunching publisher, any day of the week.
I am determined to make poetry pay. Not a lot, but enough to make a bare boned living at. I stopped buying things. I stopped trying to be middle class. I live in a meager apartment. I collect food stamps and any other government assistance I can talk my way into and I have absolutely no shame. The government is paying me to be a poet, a writer and an educator.
That’s my government subsidized job, in the long standing, centuries old tradition of the patronized arts.
There is never any shame in survival. How many fast food jobs did Socrates work? Or Ovid or Homer. Did Dante pack groceries at Trader Joe’s in one of his circles of hell?
Break Out!
I teach independent poetry workshops at libraries for non mandatory donations. I lecture on poetry. I do readings and signings. I collaborate with a music producer in Stockholm, Frederic Iriarte who records my readings to mix with his music and publishes them on line as albums for download streaming. Do they make any money? No. Barely enough to justify the effort.
But I am getting paid to write and read poetry, just not very well. I love my work and the place it puts me mentally and spiritually to labor through, more than the comforts of middle class continuous consumption I have had to leave behind.
I am totally dedicated to improving upon and perfecting my work for the sake of an unseen audience. For the sake of readers I haven’t even met yet.
I am not unemployed, although I collect unemployment. I write and teach poetry and writing. That’s my job.
Here I am: http//igorgoldkind.com
Igor, the Poet
Don’t get me wrong, it’s much harder to be an artist than a businessman. But over 6 years, I have built an audience. I have 5,000 FB followers, nearly a thousand subscribers on other media, including my blog.
I now run into people both on and off line who knows someone who bought one of my books. I also get anonymous phone death threats, obscene emails and am persona non grata among my local amateur poetry community.
But these are small prices to pay for being to hold up my head and answer “Poet” when someone asks me what I do for a living.
I like to add “But I’m only in it for the money”.
Rebecca Behar:
“Igor Goldkind You are just describing the life of dropouts who succeeded, why not – my best friend was like this, but she went to Italia. Depends on the place. Also in some countries you cannot do anything directly with a bookshop or a library – the distribution is perfectly controled, no freelance accepted.
But it does not matter, I belong to this underground and we did wonders, and now slam and spoken word are still great. So I agree that it is very difficult to kill poetry – like weed. But just compare with Victor Hugo – not only his poetry paid for a big house in Guernessey, but for his expensive way of life. And anyway he believed that he was a kind of prophet. But there is something else which is what ppl can accept and understand, called “reception” in general. I think that a real poet provocative and misunderstood by definition.
About an audience and ppl reacting, this became quite easy with internet, but again all these video kids are relying on marketing. My concern is that written, hermetic, creative poetry is obviously confidential. PS – I just visited an exhibition on surrealism, this is exactly what is missing : a big bang, a scandal, a movement breaking all this business & technology boredom. I think that it is happening in Iran, with the movement “women, life, freedom”.”
Rebecca Behar, look at the life and lifestyle of Stephan Mallarme, at a time in Paris where Poets were rock stars. He didn’t compromise his art for the sake of his acquired wealth and fame. The Roll of the Dice, his last work was perhaps his greatest masterpiece inspiring CharlesOlsen and the Black Mountain Poets, as well as my first book, Is She Available?
Rimbaud was a great poet too, but died poor in Africa. And Charles Baudelaire lived off of his mother’s money his entire life. This didn’t qualify his genius nor the fact that he gave world our Edgar Allen Poe; who without Baudelaire’s promotion would have been buried in obscurity.
The Mind in Motion
The general point being is that financial reward and market value has very little to do with art and nothing to do with talent.
It’s funny that you would refer to my naked confessional as “Dropping Out”. I worked decades at corporates, in publishing in academia as a professor at the University of Liverpool. I always earned good money for marketing and publishing other people’s work. (Ever heard of the “Graphic Novel”? I coined the term in the mid 1980s and made publishers billions!)
And earned steady income teaching students how to be artists.
But I never had the balls to walk the line myself and it does take balls (or the equivalent female genitalia). And I was never completely happy with my life, having had wanted to write for a living since I was a child.
Now some 45 years later, I get to do this. And I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. Because now regardless of my food stamps, I know that every working hour I live is dedicated to my authentic being, to the truth of my experience.
In Flight With the Truth of My Experience
(I also live 4 blocks from the beach and go there a lot to swim and stare at the horizon).
So no, I haven’t dropped out; I was a drop out, I’ve dropped in. I’ve dropped out of the ‘real world’ of stable salary, constant consumption, obeying the dictates of fools and being happy chattel for human crushing machine Ginsberg named the demon Mollock, in Howl.
The Naked Poet: Allen Ginsberg “Death in Mollock, Cocksucker in Mollock”!
And I’ve dropped into the actual world, behind the real world, where poetry and art connect me intimately with 10,000 years of my compatriots from all over the world.
I’ve dropped into the world where me and Rumi can share a bottle of wine while watching the sunset.
In vino veritas.
You can call me a drop out if you want; but in my experience, I had to drop out to drop in.
I would like your permission to republish this dialogue on my blog. Igorgoldkind.com
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,
An old middle school friend’s father died yesterday morning. So he called.
We’d been talking about the passing of his parent for a few weeks now…a drawn out disease where death has grown comfortable in the waiting room is no slow cruise. It is interminable waiting. It is placing your life on hold while the greater forces of life and death intervene in your routine.
This is death up close and centered. He’s in the waiting room sifting through the magazines. Death never entered the room. He’s always been there. Patient with our ignorance of his presence. He doesn’t care if we ignore or write poems to him. He does what he does, which is to attend and to await to present the final gift, the present life brings each one of us,
Wrapped in delicate personal memories; tied with a silver bow of faint regret. I listen to my friend. I listen to the scene he recounts in my head of an over eager hospice nurse, of a fatal dose of morphine. He doesn’t want to sue, he wants me to write something, to tell people what happened to his father.
Perhaps there is a story there to be heard but there’s the story that my friend is ignoring. The passing, the death of his beloved father, his parent, the man who held and protected him when he was helpless. Who first guided his clumsy thinking, his testing of the world. The source of advice, the font of all wisdom:
Pater meus a patre. Vos estis qui de caelo cadit, sicut pluviam et omnem animam in maius et luminare minus idem. Qui dedit nobis sitim extinguere pluvia rationem in radicibus excoquendi in sole.
Those of us who have lost a parent, both parents feel the shadow of our mortality move closer to us. It is not a selfish observation but a crucial one. A glimpse into the truth of our own existence: short, meagre and thin.
The death of a loved one is tragedy but a necessary one. It is necessary to be reminded of the life we are living and the world that we are actually in. To wake up from the amnesia of wishes we have been distracting ourselves with, is to literally smell-the-coffee.
It’s bitter, it’s scalding and it’s blunt metal real.
Urgently real.
There is no solace for loss, just the empty space left behind by the one who is no longer there. Which is where you are, holding that space in your mind for them as someday, your loved ones will hold a similar space for you.
Maybe that’s where heaven is: the space your loved ones hold for you in their minds long after your body has left with death, the waiting room.
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
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.
What if we thought of this uncertainty as the Jews consider our Sabbath— As a sacred space in time? Stop travelling Stop buying and selling. Stop working. Give up for now, trying to make the world better than it is.
Instead, Sing. Dance. Pray. Write songs and read poetry. Paint the pictures from your eyes. Walk amongst the leaves and the stars. Touch only those to whom you have commited your life.
Sit down. And when your mind and body have become still, reach out with your heart. Know that we are connected in ways that are both terrifying and beautiful. No one can deny that now.
Do not reach out with your hands. Reach out with your heart. Reach out with your words. Reach out with all the curled tendrils of compassion that connect us invisibly, where we cannot touch each other.
Promise this world your love for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, For as long as we all shall live In this time of mass uncertainty.
Death is in my garden again, Whispering to my flowers as he pulls away the weeds. Plotting and potting each stem as it grows Making certain that the roots are shaken of clinging regrets and life’s debris. Only to cut my life short more easily.
Does death have a sweetheart? I wonder. A beautiful woman who he woos and waters with my love? He gathers my blossoms into a beautiful bouquet Of lost souls and freshly cut lives. To gift to the one who holds him closest.
She presses his dead heart to her breast with one hand The bouquet that surmises my life with the other. She holds his weight against her body. Until death sighs and buries his head between her breasts So she is certain that he will return to his labours in the morrow.
There are few shreds of dignity left When you drown face down in your own back street gutter. You can cry out as loud as an archangel’s horn, if you like. It won’t do you any good, or any harm either. You still can’t silence the wind or turn back the tide. Fate is nothing personal.
It’s just the universe catching up and then passing you by. Your dream of yourself evaporates, Forming clouds that obscure the night’s sky. The stars are leaving you now, blinking out one by one. This is the last moment of your own self-awareness. Your last chance to figure out what the fuck’s been going on.
It’s very much like the moment you first awoke Although your mother’s smile is nowhere to be found All that remains of her unlimited love is your fast fading memory The sound of her voice calling out to you to come home now, In the far distance, From where the stars have gone to mourn your passing.
So you think you’re going to Shoot Me? I got news for you goyim, You’ve been shooting at me for 900 years From arrows to bullets to canon and you still haven’t hit me. Because I am no other than you. How can I replace you when I am you? Open your eyes, you are shooting the gun at yourself.
You don’t get it. This must be the trick of the devils’ twisted tongue, right? The one that tries to deceive you With the facts of truth Poured from the grail of reason. Go on, have a gulpful .
No, you can’t shoot me, you can’t even aim straight. Your hatred is so predictably boring, Always looking for someone else to blame For your failure as a human being. Anyone should do, but Just like a bad movie cliche, you pick the Jew.
How can you shoot me, When most of us are already dead? Replaced, misplaced, driven from your nations’ borders. Baked in your ovens. Never even pausing To wonder what the difference ever really was.
Now we have nations, guns and missiles and Our own black-booted armies, to protect us from bad shots like you. To protect us from everyone but ourselves. Now we can sip from the same blood cup, While hating then shooting, All of the Other Jews.
You are our lady And now your dress Is flames. The beauty of your sunken dome from a drone Is a poem in itself. Written by us and Destroyed by chaos.
This is what we do that rivals the stature of the gods: To astound ourselves and each other, With the wonder of Pure enduring creation. The sacrifice we all make to our better selves Who gave buildings wings and Lay the foundation stones of Our own perfecting.
Epiphany is not found in the act of worship It is found in the insight gained by a gratitude for the world. Exactly the way we built it. Exactly the way we know it to be. Whispered prayers are but poetry That none other than you will listen to. It is good to talk to yourself, To sing in harmony with all the selves who are listening,
Wearing Not false, but true masks Revealing the kind of truth that can only be told with a lie. The subtler architecture that carves heavens into the spaces on this earth. Reconstructing what can be seen behind your faces, Behind all the saints who guard you, Behind the divine grace of your stature. The sensuousness of your catastrophe is breathtaking.
Existence is a limitless screen of emptiness Vibrant with jubilant celebrations. And gratitude for the joy in rolling a boulder blissfully up this steep hill. Tripping over our own thoughts like loosened cobblestones, We no longer see the reality directly in front of us.
The truth is a truce we struck with certainty ages ago. After losing the desperate struggle… To cling to some kind of hope buried deep beneath the root of ourselves. I am fearful of fully failing myself and yet I love myself best when I am alone with eternity.
Ever since I returned from England, and discovered to my consternation, that no real path to a teaching career was open to me without a specifically California teaching credential, I’ve been looking for fulfilment outside of a cubicle inside a cubicle, inside another cubicle…you get the picture.
This in spite of my teaching for some years at the University of Liverpool at a full professor’s salary and the Oxford University Internet Institute at a considerably less salary. As well as guest lecturing at St. Martin’s School of Design, the London School of Printing and the University of Lincolnshire’s graduate program), As I have not the means to afford to both pay and live for a year’s teaching credential (nor necessarily would agree with the manner and criterion by which that credential is achieved), I have made a point of teaching any and everyone who wants to learn and will bother to listen.
Education should not only be free to those that cannot afford it, but it should flow freely from those that have it to anyone who wants it. Teaching is not a skill, it’s a disposition. It’s an interactive sport. Not all great achievers in the arts or the sciences have that disposition. Teaching in the Starbucks forum is my revenge on what has become since I departed the US in the early 1980s, the Business of Education. The California educational system has become a money making scam by institutions colluding with banks to profit off of student debt.
A Scholarly education is no longer relevant or desirable; it’s about acquiring credentials which of course must be purchased more readily than earnt. Thinking originally or independently of a hiring institution poses a threat to that very institution. Thinking differently might bring about change and the risk of losing power over others.
Of course, there are many exceptions, I have friends from high school and college who are to this day conscientious, curiosity-driven teachers, researchers and college professors. In that sentence distinguishing between the teacher and professor, I expose my level of submission to status and accreditation. Neither of which has anything to do with the scholarly pursuit of knowledge in order to cultivate wisdom.
The sure sign of a good teacher is not their credential, status or the number of degrees, but if they are focussed enough on continuously learning and re-learning their subject through their students and the actual experience of teaching. Teachers and professors who are in education for the status become administrators and bureaucrats, ironically adding to the very obstacles teaching teachers must surmount just to do their job and teach their subject.
Teaching is not a job like selling insurance to the elderly who are too confused to know they are signing their life savings away; teaching is a vocation. It takes endless study and self-scrutiny. It takes listening to and learning from students outside of the educational caste system.
So since the institutions won’t accept me without taking the prerequisite bank loan so as to accumulate debt and pay interest to the banks, Starbucks and the streetcorner are my classrooms. The park, the beach, a dive bar, a brewery, an art gallery, the library and yes, even the streets where the public and members of every class are allowed to circulate freely without being hassled by the authorities.
Everywhere I go I strike up conversations with the people around me. (No, not everyone. I’m not a public nuisance.!) Instead, I stay in one place until the carousel of human activity aligns someone into non-threatening social proximity. Even then, I am cautious, seductive. I really don’t want to disturb anyone, just engage them.
The old and the young are the best. The old because most people ignore them as they have nothing to offer the perpetually youthful society. The young because they are not yet quite jaded and curious as to why someone twice or nearly sometimes nearly thrice their age would want to talk to them. I treat most people the same and people younger than me find that attractive. I don’t condescend, rather I enquire. I ask a lot of questions and most people do like to talk about themselves.
The characters I have written and are currently writing all stem from what I am able to capture in the wilds of a Starbucks or a sidewalk street corner. And then I teach. I teach people how to think. Not by telling them how to or what to think but by taking their trains of thought and passing them through my station and asking a lot of questions.
Some folk disembark and stroll around my lack of conformity. They breathe the rare air of freedom as there is nothing that I prohibit them from doing or saying; unless of course, it causes harm. My lack of inhibition is contagious and people tell me things, particularly the elderly that they would never tell a stranger, although I am one. Those that linger become my friends over time. Others just can back on board their train and depart my station.
We don’t always agree but we do respect each other which grants another kind of freedom. The freedom to be yourself a reprieve from having to perform your self for the estimated sake of others. A psychiatrist once asked me if I considered myself a nonconformist. I assured her that I wasn’t, that I was normal it seemed to be everyone else that was a little off centre. Besides, I continued, I am always trying to conform. Not to convention or others but to myself.
I struggle to conform to the person I strive to be.
There are still a few options available to you still, apart from death. Yours is a free choice. Your death is yours. No one is making you choose; Death is after all, inevitable.
Not so much an option as fast forwarding to the point where there are no further options. Living is dying anyway, so why speed up the process? To stop the pain? Many have endured much more Still clinging to any delay of the inevitable.
Regardless, suicide doesn’t stop the pain it merely passes the suffering on to someone else. Remember them? They remember you. They will remember you with pain.
You no longer feel of worth or of value anymore? To whom, exactly? yourself? Perhaps your judgement is drunk or wanting in discernment? Perhaps your judgement is just wrong and awaits over-ruling by a higher judgement. Who are you, really, to judge yourself so severely? If you are worthless then your judgement is suspect and certainly not worth acting upon.
What if you went and saw a movie instead? Or got drunk? Or went to sleep? Or made love until the dawn found another, better judgement to wake up to. A truer, more temperate version of yourself. One who can solve problems and get you out of the sweet jam you’re stuck in.
Do you long to die because life is absurd and void of meaning? What took you so long to notice? Does your slowness make you want to do things quicker? Instead of death, you could seek laughter, which is really a form of dying; A release from the known into the unknown by way of Catching your breath inside its own rhythm. Inwards and outwards.
What if you were about to hear a joke you’ve never heard before? That made you laugh so hard that it woke you up into the wide-eyed, open world that embraces this one? If you die now, you will miss hearing the eternal joke That would awaken you to a world where you no longer wanted to die Because you suddenly found yourself here, Where you belong Where you belonged all along, Not living or dying But blinking and breathing like this, Like this, like this, like this…
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.
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,
Yes, indeed that’s a provocative title; but this ain’t click-bait my friends.This is the real deal.If Thomas Paine were alive today, he’d be in the nation’s capital with a pistol waiting for the selected president.Of course, he’d be waiting a long time considering as far as he knew, the capital of these United States was in Philadelphia.I have a vision of old globalist Thomas standing outside Ben Franklin’s door, knocking as hard as he could, shouting
“Benjamin!Benjamin!Come out, our nation’s in trouble and its much worse than the British.Forget the kite!’’.Kind of like the scene in Street Car Named Desire where Marlon Brando is standing outside Stella’s window in the pouring rain in his soaked white T-Shirt.
Marlon Brando would have made a good Thomas Paine in the film, the graphic novel and the computer game but this doesn’t answer the question embedded in the title of this diatribe. Why would Thomas Paine if he were alive today,track down Donald Trump and put a bullet in the back of his head? In principle this would require Donald to be on his knees, facing away from Thomas with his tiny hands wrapped around the back of his head.I suppose you, dear reader, are ‘en-titled’ to an answer as the to why and the wherefore; but stay with me as we savour the moment.The ultimate retribution of history: to be shot in the back of a head by one of the Founders of this revolutionary nation, ironically with a pistol no less.One that Thomas didn’t have to register or submit to a background check to acquire from the antique pistols and muskets booth at the gun show a couple blocks away.
So before Thomas pulls the trigger and the tiny lead ball propels from the pistol’s mouth through his dense skull and lodges somewhere in the soft tissue that Donald referred to at his “brain”, let’s pause and assess the situation. Let’s skip over the time travel details as to how Thomas Paine got from the late 18th century to the early 21st.We’ll leave it to the graphic novel to explain that bit; him jumping a little over two centuries in time.Although we really don’t have to figure out anything at all.Thomas Paine’s words, his ideas and his rebel spirit not only jumped but survived intact more than 2 centuries and the soul of our national sovereignty. So if Thomas Paine were brought back from the dead by some mysterious force, it could only be due to his words, his ideas, the nation he fought for being under threatened.
And that, my reader, is precisely the point being made by my title and the words you are reading now.Today, not 2 decades into the 21st century, the essential values that built this nation, this American experiment by a motley crew of post-enlightenment landowners, orators, tradesmen and inventors is at risk of being destroyed.Not by Trump himself, you realise.But by Us, by We the People in our impotent complacency to stop him.
We are not revolutionaries, we are the revolution Thomas and his friends dreamt up, drew the blueprints for, and built on the hot blood that soaked the green countryside of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Carolinawho’s names are only possible because of the stubborn bravery of these idealists, these socialists, these men of vision that had the hubris to build a nation founded not by the right of kings or church or even the wealthy, but by the enlightenment values of Liberty, Justice and Freedom.
These values, of course, aren’t just American, although they are the foundation stones of our democracy.Thomas Paine author of Common Sense, The Age of Reason and the Rights of Man who’s title alone reveal the nature of his philosophy:to build a nation on Reason, not religious superstition.It’s not that Thomas Paine didn’t believe in the Divine, he just believed in Reason more:
“It is by the exercise of reason that man can discover God. Take away that reason, and he would be incapable of understanding anything.”
Later, a member of the French Senate, he would lend his hand to writing the Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s version of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789, along with Thomas Jefferson.Rousseau’s Rights of Man became the basis of the UN Human Rights Charter as well as the EU Human Rights initiative.So next time you hear some jackass complaining about Liberals going on and on about Human Rights you might want to mention that they’re disrespecting theFounding Fathers, two of whom (Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine) contributed to the declaration.
In fact, Universal Human Rights is the soul not only of our Constitution but the Declaration of Independence, the UN Charter and the adopted law of all members of the European Union.Human Rights is the one thing that Donald Trump can’t abide because he has dedicated his life to the accruement of power, power for its own sake.Trump really isn’t that bothered by actual money in spite of his public persona.What he is dedicated to is what money buys:people, power and governance; and this is exactly where we have gone astray from the origins of our nation.We have handed our own governance over to banks, corporate interests and the uber-affluent who can afford to buy a Congressman or a President.
Mueller’s investigation will very shortly reveal the origins of the money that bought Trump his presidency.We know already that the NRA contributed 30 million dollars early in his campaign.Do you remember that lie about how Trump said he was incorruptible because he could afford to fund his own campaign?I know, I know, it’s hard to remember all the lies Trump has spouted.
Do you know why the Truth is better than a lie?
Why? Because it’s easier to remember.
But going back to the pistol Thomas Paine is holding against Donald Trump’s head; no, I didn’t forget my premise.Imagine it with me.There’s Thomas Paine, his hand steadily holding the cocked pistol, fully powdered and loaded with a small lead ball.Tiny, but big enough to leave a good sized hole at such close range.And there’s Donald Trump on his knees, shaking.He’s already wet the pants of his the suit he’s wearing.He tries very hard to hold back his urgent need to defecate and fails.
Now Donald Trump is soiled.Soiled himself the same faeces he’s been feeding to the American voters for years.Soiled by his indifference, his empathy deficit, his reckless, unfeeling impulses, his sociopathic disconnect from the human race.Remember, Donald, to say ‘I hear you’.It fools them every time and leaves plenty of time for self-gratification at the expense of others.Trump is soiled by his own inhumanity, his unbridled carnal greed to accumulate, wealth, power, women.He assaults women not because he can get it up anymore but because they have power which he needs to dominate.
Look at his wife.I haven’t seen such a blank dead look of a hostage to circumstance since Patty Hearst.It was the money that bought her and (like some particularly gruesome episode of Back Mirror), she got exactly what she paid for, with her integrity her and self-respect. Imagine the morning she awoke to the dawning denouement. Sure she could leave any time, with her child.But where would she go?What would she do?In the afterlife of existence everyone writes a book and sells it.When things go badly; when the world seems to be against me; when I lose; I always remind myself – it could always get worse and at least I don’t have to fuck Donald Trump.
The thought makes me feel better but my heart tears up when I think of her suffering.It is the suffering of the affluent.The ones who have accommodated everything they were told they needed to be happy.Everything they worked hard to acquire in lieu of happiness only to find that very objecteluding them. That’s the horror of the denouement, you reach the summit of your life’s ambition and now the only thing left to do is jump off.Because Happiness is not an object or an objective.It flits effortlessly in and out of our lives like a butterfly, briefly lingering on a flower and moving on.Ever try to chase a butterfly? Exactly.
Back to Donald Trump having shit and pissed himself while one of the Fathers of our country held a pistol to his head.Perhaps at this point Donald would beg for his life.Like the scene in Miller’sCrossing.“Please, Thomas, Please.Look in your heart, look in your heart.You don’t want to do this.You’re not that kind of man.Look in your heart, for godssake !”.
God is a natural place to go to.After all, the divisions we are now facing in our country are by no means recent.They’ve been brewing for decades.The divisions are not entirely geographic although the 3 states that assured Donald of his electoral victory does have a concentration of post-calvinistevangelicals.No are they solely cultural; after all, Donald Trump is the epitome of the urban gangster.A smooth talking, wheeling dealing property developer soaking in the comfort of Manhattan luxury.He should be anathema to his base of supporters.But he’s not, instead he speaks their language; the language of PT Barnum and Charlie Chan both as fake as a wooden nickel but master showmen to a ’T’ (Only white actors played Charlie Chan which ironically was invented by Earl Derr Biggers asan alternative to Yellow Peril stereotypes and villains like Fu Manchu).
And Trump talks about God.He doesn’t so much talk about his beliefs (if he has any), but about the threat that nonbelievers and other religions pose for Christian Evangelists, particularly targeting Islam.Trump runs his own Circus of Fear and the punters are more than happy to pay to be scared or at least have their irrational fears affirmed. Donald Trump should be played by the late Robert Mitchum (if he were still alive. Hey, we brought Thomas Paine from 2 centuries ago; a zombie Robert Mitchum should not pose too many difficulties).To be exact, Robert Mitchum in his role as the greed-laden preacher in the class American Gothic The Night of the Hunter in which he plays a psychopathic man of the cloth bent on money and murder (in that order).He pursues two children who hold the secret to a hidden fortune down a river in the south, riding a donkey and singing hymns.A fake, a demon, a creature of merciless malice.
So is Thomas going to shoot Trump in the head for using religion to accumulate power?Of course not.Thomas was a believer but not in God, in Reason.“It is by the exercise of reason that man can discover God. Take away that reason, and he would be incapable of understanding anything.”The reason Thomas Paine is holding a cocked pistol against the back of Donald Trump’s head is not God; Trump hasn’t blasphemed against Faith; he’s blasphemed against Reason.Trump has spent his entire career disseminating the appearance of things, not the truth.Truth is the enemy of Donald Trump, because in Truth, he is an insignificant man in the scheme of things just as we are all beholden to the significance we manufacture and some of us have made peace with that.Donald Trump has not. Like a Hungry Ghost Donald is compelled by desire, call it lust, a lust for significance.This is why he builds towers, not to house offices or hotel rooms, but to prop up as high as he can his name: Trump.
At the start of this year, we had a crisis
in authority due to the steady lies being pumped from the Whitehouse by Tump.The first rule of autocracy is to shake people’s belief in authority so that they only can believe in you.Donald Trump is attempting to destroy the pillars of the 4th estate.Now we’ve entered a period ofcrisis in competence.When the very ability to address real-world problems by Trump and his stooges is dubious at best.
Remember that the balance of powersin the Constitution is all beholden to having a Free Press in which people can report the truth and express their opinions of their government.That’s what Thomas Paine counted on in drafting our rights.Each right has a corresponding duty. Paine said our first duty is to be kind to others. Paine also said that a person’s corresponding duty is to allow the same rights to others as we allow ourselves. From this basis we can use our abilities to promote mutual understanding. These expanding circles of reciprocal duties and rights weave a tapestry, built on democratic norms, of liberty in the context of societal interdependence.It’s called a society based on equality.
Did you know that Thomas Paine was the very first American abolitionist? In 1775 he wrote “To Americans: That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain, is rather lamentable than strange. But that many civilized, nay, Christianized people should approve, and be concerned in the savage practice, is surprising; and still persist, though it has been so often proved contrary to the light of nature, to every principle of justice and humanity, and even good policy, by a succession of eminent men, and several late publications.”
“Our traders in MEN (an unnatural commodity!)must know the wickedness of that SLAVE-TRADE, if they attend to reasoning, or the dictates of their own hearts; and such as shun and stifle all these willfully sacrifice conscience, and the character of integrity to that golden idol.”
Thomas Paine was the first white citizen Member of Black Lives Matter.He and his pal Thomas Jefferson originally included an amendment to the Constitution ending slavery.They wanted to create a revolutionary society in which ALL men are created equal.As usual, women would have to wait. Ofcourse this amendment was vetoed by the southern slave owning states.The same states suspiciously from which Trump derives the concentration of his base support.
But the point being that the Founding Fathers, if not all, enough wanted to establish an egalitarian society in all respects.Paine referred to this, as did the other Framers as ‘the common good’ something the alt-right abhors the notion of as they translate it into control by some body that isn’t them.Nonetheless, contrary to Constitution literalists the “common good” involves a mental posture taken by citizens in their deliberations where they account for, yet transcend partial interests to look at the good for each and all in their decisions.
Even in business, Trump’s claimed turf,the right of commerce was seen as transforming the mind-set of feudal, dependent relations between men and their government. It helped transform subjects into confident citizens. Trade was viewed not as laissez-faire, but in a web of social interdependence. It was seen as a major modality for individuals to use their Reason (not Faith), to develop better mutual understanding of others interests in society. While aware that too much indulgence in commerce could lead to the decline of spirit and patriotism, making reason subservient to commercial interests, Paine felt that man would use his religion of reason to place commerce within a broader quest for lifelong education in the arts, sciences, engineering, and philosophy in order to progress to a universal society and universal happiness.
Paine believed that man’s highest spirit of reason in its motives and applications such that it does not have to be concentrated solely in pursuit of commercial interests. Art, science, and commercial enterprise can be placed in service to humanity and universal happiness.Moreover, each individual deserves minimal dignity and a minimal economic base to pursue their natural rights. Like Paine and Edward Bellamy advocated two hundred years ago, some form of guaranteed minimal annual income ought to be adopted for each citizen, regardless of wealth or other distinctions. Imagine what Thomas Paine would make of the modern day commercialized medical establishment!
Sounds like a socialist that Thomas Paine, don’t he?Not at all really, just your average post-Enlightenment philosopher and thinker.Or only as far as Socialism is dedicated to the fairer distribution of resources so that everyone might enjoy Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness more equally.“Some men and women, through greed or disproportionate natural or social advantages, will contribute to others being systematically impoverished in the imperfections of manmade civilization”
”The earth is the common property of the human race”; thus each human being is equally entitled to have dignity and minimal share of the earth’s bounty, including clean water, air, and access or rents from landThus, men and women must discover those laws operating in society which will create a greater harmony of overall interests. Democratic communities will have to choose to redistribute some minimal baseline of societal resources to those at least most vulnerable not as charity, but as a right in the name of social harmony.”
Paine conceived of autonomous democratic nation-states forming alliances of mutual aid. Mikhail Gorbachev has said that we ought to have a balancing of interests, not a balancing of power on the global stage internationalization, with the primacy of nation-state alliances, is a major alternative to the trends of corporate economic globalization. In the myth of a “flat” world of economic globalization, where the world is made safe and frictionless for capital expansion,
Citizens and nations do not vote for corporate influenced governmental-military-industrial-media alliances and trade agreements which establish “the rules of the game” subtly conditioning the thinking of the masses.
These are not ancient words.These are the principles America was founded on and without which we would have early on taken the road to the same form of despotism and autocracythat Donald Trump is trying to lead us into. Trump only wants power.Power to control what is true and what is not.Power to determine the fates and existence of as many people as he can.This is why he loves the idea of a wall, the decoration of undocumented long term residents and the border checks at airports that targets people of the Muslim faith, as well as people that white people think look like Muslims!
In his own way, from his visionary perspective, Thomas Paine was what the right wing calls a Globalist or even more bizarrely a statist.Of course the founding father were statists, they constructed the blueprint for the United STATES.
Bernie Sanders was right. Trump isn’t Conservative or moderate, much less liberal; he’s an autocrat who has no respect for the Constitution and has failed as commander and chief to protect this country from a foreign antagonist.
Back to the curb where Paine is holding Trump hostage to the imperatives of history and the gentle squeezing of Thomas’s trigger finger. Because Donald Trump is a traitor to his state. He has been under the influence of a foreign antagonist Vladimir Putin since at least 2014, shortly after he first announced his attempts at the Presidency. He needed money to run a campaign for President and he didn’t have any.No bank would loan him money because Trump always welched on his debts. So he had to turn to Deutsche Bank, the same bank that Putin and his oligarchy use tomake money disappear and reappear wherever is most expedient.In this case it was the Presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump.
This will all become very shortly apparent as soon as the next wave of indictments are issued by the DOJ. Trump is in a jam that he can’t get out of. Mueller’s investigation on behalf of the federal department of justice is very far from being a witch hunt. Read the indictments, all the evidence is published there, enough to hold up in federal court. Mueller, if you recall, is a conservative Republican of impeccable integrity.
BTW, I don’t detest Conservatives; some of my best friends…etc. But Trump isn’t really a conservative, he’s a con man playing the GOP for whatever he can get away with. I don’t hate conservatives, I hate liars who shamelessly lie every day they open their mouths. I hate incompetents who can’t even keep one national security advisor on board during his first year and whose family and campaign advisors were meeting with Russian intelligence during the 2016 campaign.
At this point in the event, Donald Trump moves his head slightly.Thomas steadies his hand.Testing Thomas, Trump slowly turns his head enough to glimpse Thomas’s steely stare.As unflinching as Mueller’s investigation.Once again Trump pleads, begs for his life.“What do you want Mr. Paine?I’ve got money tons of money.What about women?I can get you the most beautiful models in the world.What about an audience with the Queen of England, she’s easy.” Thomas pauses and for the first time speaks to Donald J. Trump:
“I want my country back.I want the nation myself and my brothers built out of Reason, Compassion and Equality back.I want what this nation is meant to be, not what you have defiled it as.”
Trump knows his goose is cooked.He can’t repair the damage he’s caused.It will take others, long after he’s gone to rebuild our country.Others who are younger than a 70-year-old patriarch.Others who have grown accustomed to being one nation in a physically interconnectedworld.Others who aspire to rise above the fumes of spiritual superstition to the level of what Paine himself called “our living awareness of the Infinite Presence.” by means of Reason.Science, the Arts, the cooperative nature of our fellow hairless apes.The high school students who have stood up and proclaimed “enough is enough”The women who no longer cover their mouths and stifle their words when being subject to interpersonal tyranny.These are the children of Thomas Paine.These are the people he fought for and wrote for.
As a species we survived and dominated this planet by virtue of our complex means of cooperation, not competition.That complex is what we refer to as a Society and those who reject the notion are, welljust anti-Social.
Donald Trump speaks to Thomas Paine one last time.
“Please Thomas, I promise to be better, I promise to live up to your virtues, I swear I’m a changed man.Look in your heart Thomas, look in your heart, Please!….”
He speaks hislast four words to the man on his knees in front of him:
Has been entered int the Realistic Poetry Contest and thus is no longer available on my blog as it is defined as non-exclusive or previous publication by the contest rules.
Who knows, I may even win.
Either way, it returns once the contest is over in February
Tune In.
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,
Death and his brothers are in my garden again.
Moving my plants around.
They tend to the growth quite delicately
Careful to not reap the harvest until the plants mature
And begin to lose their hair.
Death and his brother are in my garden again,
Whispering to each other as they pull away the weeds.
Poting and repotting each plant as it grows
Making sure the roots are clear of regrets and debris
So that in the end, it’s life can be cut short more easily.
Does death have a sweetheart? I wonder.
A woman whom he woes with words of love?
As much as death can love any living thing, at all.
He gathers my plants into a beautiful bouquet
Of lost souls and freshly cut lives.
To gift to she who holds him near; squeezing his dead heart in one hand,
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!
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.
Caught in the Diamond Rain
Caught unawares in a diamond downpour.
When did Karma get so immediate and so personal ?
So judgment-like and familial?
When did I last escape from my room
And begin to orbit outside of time?
That vantage point that surrounds me,
Is not just this moment, But every moment you or I have ever lived.
A handful of jewels lie scattered at my feet.
Each crystal catching and tricking the light into
Reflecting each and every possible face of existence that there is,
All at once.
Each stone weighs down heavily on my stomach.
Forced downward by the sheer gravity of events.
When did I last step outside of myself again?
I am no longer there.
Or rather I am here, just not in this world.
Instead, I’m living in a different world
built on longing, solitude, and reflection.
Two mirrors face each other
One rag wipes the dust and the sweat from both our dirty faces,
Go on, reach out with your finger tips to
Caress every surface of this jewel
We call living.
Can you see over there, that distant surface we exist on?
That reflects the face of every other face.
On all the falling jewels that surround us.
THIS is what it is to be caught in the Diamond Rain.
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.
You know I owe it you my friends, those of you who have been generous in your thoughts for the loss of my mother to tell you something: Although it has been a long, arduous road from my mother’s first diagnosis of dementia 4 years ago to her leaving my world 2 weeks ago and in spite of the struggle (not least with the authorities), to see her way clear to a happy death; it has been an extraordinary, indeed enlightening experience.
I’ve been distracted so much of my life by shiny, trivial things and this last year certainly, has brought me into a focus and permitted me insights into things I had never known. The most pedestrian insight being the sorry regard our institutions have for the aged, the infirm and the demented. We don’t treat our weakest very well and I’m afraid that is because
we really don’t treat ourselves very well either.
The insight that I do want to share or at least attempt to convey is what I did feel this past month observing my mother’s diminishing capacity to engage with her surroundings first socially then practically. I had a tactile, visceral sense of an arc of a life; a universal trajectory from birth to death, as something that comes and then goes.
(The Rainbow in Norse mythology is the bridge to Asgard and Valhalla, the hall of fallen warriors.) I have no experience of the supernatural.
It’s all natural to me. But I did feel a deep and distinct tone, like the pealing of a bell resonating beneath my feet in her passing.
Between the last evening that I saw her, held her hand and spoke to the steady light in her eyes and the morning I visited her room from where life had been so recently evicted, I knew I had seen a life depart and the place in the world that it had left. I did not catch a glimpse of death.
I saw life very clearly as it fled my mother’s corpse.
That thing, that is everything, that same thing that still animates us all. Until our clocks wind down as well or are tragically, shockingly shut down. I saw life leaving me behind as it disappeared around some bend and I saw the life that was me, within it’s own place, on its own trajectory of escape.
I saw the light in the eyes that created me, that cherished me; fight, fade and extinguish.
I know that I will go there too, following her footsteps and those of my father’s before her and my sister’s before him. A death parade towards an unknown horizon. I don’t know where they went, I just know that they are no longer here; nor any where I will ever be again.
No ‘where’ to go to. Just end. Just stop. Just no longer being.
And these fingers tapping on my keyboard are tapping out time too.
Beatles onto LSD, and we all know where that led: cultural, spiritual, and social Revolution! 
Flight UA1827
Flight LH1285
Secure and supported by this universal clarity.
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.
Marlon Brando would have made a good Thomas Paine in the film, the graphic novel and the computer game but this doesn’t answer the question embedded in the title of this diatribe. Why would Thomas Paine if he were alive today,
God is a natural place to go to.
I pray that I still have something to say.
Caught in the Diamond Rain
But every moment you or I have ever lived.
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.
is the bridge to Asgard and Valhalla, the hall of fallen warriors.) I have no experience of the supernatural.
igorgoldkind
FACING the WAVES
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March 29, 2025 | Categories: books, comments about poetry, death, Existentialism, Igor Goldkind, Illustrated books, jazz, literature, Meaning of Existence, Meditations, Mindfulness, new poetry, poetry, Poetry Therapy, Self-Therapy, sex, spoken word, Transmedia, Transmedia. multimedia, Uncategorized, world jazz music | Tags: consciousness expansion, Existence, Existential, Igor Goldkind, Jazz, literature, Love Poetry, philosophy, Poem, Poetry Therapy, Self, Spoken Word | Leave a comment