For Johanna Marie Rose

I don’t feel like being

not remembered
she said and sighed
the past lies dead
and expertly dismembered
the lies are the realm
of the effortlessly bleeding
my eyes see the new
and are no longer pleading
I don’t feel like being
not remembered
music comes dressed
in my new mirror
where I choose
what I wear
and what notes are the bearer
of me in the now
a surprising ascender
I don’t feel like being

not remembered

I don’t feel like being

not remembered

she said and sighed

the past lies dead

and expertly dismembered

the lies are the realm

of the effortlessly bleeding

my eyes see the new

and are no longer pleading

I don’t feel like being

not remembered

music comes dressed

in my new mirror

where I choose

what I wear

and what notes are the bearer

of me in the now

a surprising ascender

I don’t feel like being

not remembered

nyc 12.7.2020

“Let us go in; the fog is rising.”—Emily Dickinson

SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO?

This morning I woke in a haze of despair, not the great, meaningful despair that reflects the greater injustices on and to the planet, but the kind that comes from dark, smaller and more personal places all at once, the kind that says, “Remember us, the unfinished business? Well, we have regrouped and decided it’s time for you to attend to us, once and for all.”

Instead of heeding their collective nag—heeding the poet to go ‘inside’—I did what I usually do as I get ready for the day: feed the cats, make the bed, slip on my unfashionable running gear, check my e-mail and log onto fb. Immediately I saw that someone had posted a youtube of a Clash song: “Should I Stay Or Should I go?” Well, I thought, that’s fortuitous, considering a recent conundrum.

Should I stay or should I go? Exactly the kind of question I have asked myself when life’s spasmodic reminders tell you that you haven’t been exactly honest, or that you have allowed dishonesty from another; at those forks in the path of destiny that trip you up and prick like a bastard.

Should I stay or should I go? A question often asked in an unhealthy first marriage, a soul-sucking job, a tenuous friendship, an endeavor—either singly or in collaboration—that stalls. Should I stay or should I go from any personal creative endeavor? In the past, as a painter, I labored over canvases that should never have seen the light of day. Presently I am more attuned to the signs and if a short story in progress feels forced I can put it aside. Start another that flows more freely. I don’t have to see everything to a conclusion. Or do I?

How about Facebook, the time I spend in that arena of aphorisms and misunderstanding? Is it time to go? I don’t want to see the names of politicians I abhor inserted into jokes that are as crass as the ones their side tells. Just how many pre-packaged riffs on motherhood, childhood, sluts, husbands and lovers, bitchiness, alcoholism, and backstabbing friendships can a person take on? Not to mention the feel good axiom that every day is a new day. Yes, of course it is.

A very good friend of mine told me recently that when she was a child her mother had taught her that people who resort to sarcasm can’t offer reason and rational discussion with a point of view. “Sarcasm is the weapon of the unarmed,” she said.

Now, I used to be one of those hooked on sarcasm, as I mistakenly qualified it as wit. When I began to wean myself from that churlish habit I found, in so many instances, that I had nothing to say. What did that tell me? Well, it told me a lot. It told me I had to be better informed. It told me I had to listen. It told me I had to learn a better language to communicate a better thought. It told me that every time I went outside of that commitment I stood the chance of being misunderstood. It told me that if I was to continue in an effort to remain virtually connected with people I have come to admire and respect that I had better create an alter ego, one Pollybollocks, to play the cynic if I was to survive the social network. She would never resort to packaged sarcasm, at least.

So, this morning I logged off Facebook as quickly as I had logged on. I had a short story to write. The only thing to do was to face the nagging doubt head on. I did what I usually do to clear the head and the heart and started for Central Park and my morning constitutional, or as I like to call it, a spirited refresher of my personal bill of rights.

The Manhattan skyline at the south end of the reservoir was very nearly invisible behind a slow-burning haze, pictured like a watery, under-exposed black and white print in a tray of developer. Perfect, I thought, for the fog that clung to me. I remembered an article by Robert Wilkinson that a certain planet is currently in retrograde. I picked up my speed on the reservoir track. I had sped clumsily over words in the article like triseptile, inferior conjunction, and desire on the actional-physical level of experience to get at an understanding that those nagging questions about friendships, commitments and past events, both recent and practically historic from the perspective of my actual time on the planet, were meant to coalesce. They were meant to emerge as answers from a reflective consciousness. They were meant to make sense. They were meant to annoy the shit out of me.

My chosen route today was to the south end of the reservoir on the west side and then over to the area in Central Park known as the Pinetum. I swung around in a detour to extend my exercise, take in the stately assurance that Nature was alive and well somewhere on the planet, though slightly more manicured than intended, and then doubled back behind a carefree group of tourists who had discovered the free standing swings. I continued on the walkway along the Great Lawn, a 55-acre verdure being readied for the outdoor pursuits that warmer temperatures bring for the rabidly competitive. Natural rejuvenation was evident in the frill of cherry blossoms—inspiration to still bare branches of trees I don’t know the names of. I stopped to take in a silent convention of black birds meditating on that lawn. They greeted my appreciative audience with a raucous retreat, en mass, to the surrounding trees, scolding me for my intrusion. The sprinklers were out in full, wetting the lawn and making gentle shushing sounds as they flicked synchronized jets of water at each other.

I thought back to the Wilkinson article, that “capacity to look objectively at oneself and at others…to develop an objective awareness of existence.” What was bothering me had been bothering me for some time. Since Mercury insists on going backwards for a spell, I will be confronted with the life vs perception conundrum whether I like it or not. I’m going to have to reassess whether I like it or not. And I am going to make decisions and I am going to like it, whether or not it makes others happy. What doesn’t feel positive, either in individual relationships or on a larger scale will have to go. I don’t mean someone else’s idea of positive. I don’t mean to be bullied into the middle of the road when another path, which may not be as traversed, looks to be going in a better, braver direction. If someone’s idea of me is that I am a mush-filled cynic I’ll find some way to humorously work that into a story. If I have to close doors I will. If I have to let another close a door on me, I will. If I have to open new doors and step into uncharted territory, I will.

“Intuition,” wrote Wilkinson, “will be up for those who can plug in their imagination, see what they need for a more stable and enjoyable public participation, and clean out their ego-minds to get a fresh set of perceptions. There will be many specialized conditions showing us all how to overcome fear, become more harmless in our interactions with self and others, and transform our interactions to make them more effective and practical.”

I rounded the south end of the Great Lawn and caught a frisky arm of sunlight slap the grand turret of Belvedere Castle. I stretched my legs and briskly made it back to the top of the reservoir. The fog had diminished in the south and the skyline of Manhattan more familiar. There was still some way to go but the image was slowly becoming sharper.

With gratitude to EP for stealing her thunder

HAPPY SAMSARA

“Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us; the other softens us.” Pema Chödron

If I had ever wanted to borrow a few bucks from my dad then the first words out of his mouth would have been: “What’s it for?” Then, “How are you gonna pay it back?”And he’d have reason to ask. He never had the money to lend me but he always had the reason to ask and then say, well, “No.”

If my fifth grade teacher, Mr. August Simondson, asked me a question in class I had to answer the question. Get it wrong, maybe, but not answering the question was simply out of the question. Turning from him and winking conspiratorially at my audience—after asking if I could call him Augie and coyly declaring that I would not answer the question and instead speak directly to my American class mates—would have kept me after school, hollering in vain at retreating school chums: “But we are the most respected nation in the world!”

If I misplaced (read: lost) something that was going to cost my financially hard-pressed parents money to replace, say, gloves, umbrella, schoolbooks, or I don’t know, my sister, I could try and deflect the blame, though certainly not onto my missing sister: “Er, she lost herself after she lost all the other stuff,” but I would get a smack on the bottom for my efforts.

If I stole something from Woolworth’s on Steinway Street in Astoria, even something as relatively trivial as a bottle of nail polish (only on a dare because I—as a self-avowed tom boy who tortured her fingernails with her teeth—would never deign to wear the stuff), I would be made to return it to the store and stand red-faced before the stern gaze of neighborhood women under home perms pin curled into a stranglehold on their scalps, their unquiet hands pat-patting away in the pockets of their matter-of-fact smocks who not only knew my mother but liked her even less. I knew what punishment awaited me back home. The Twinkies Insanity Defense (or in Bernie’s case, kreplach) would fall on deaf ears. My sister declared regularly that I was insane. No big deal.

If I hit another kid because I thought that kid was going to attack me first well, you get the drift. If my parents didn’t read me the riot act, then the kid’s parents would.

So, what it’s come down to today is that somebody else’s parents weren’t quite so strict, or they weren’t around much because they had lives of their own, and let their kids off easy or they were the role models their kids grew up to be. Those kids get away with murder—some literally—as adults. They grew up to be bankers, financial advisors, vice-presidential candidates and presidents. They’ve grown up to be the bankers who have been handed billions of taxpayer dollars, which, like the entitled brats they are, they refuse to account for. Billions of dollars have been stolen by grown up financial advisers and left investors—big fish and small fry alike— reeling (and a lot less rich) from a pyramid scheme that sounds like a childhood game. A little girl grows up to be a governor with aspirations to the Big White House on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. and decides in a widely watched political debate that she is just not going to answer the moderator’s questions and then flashes an ‘us against them’ wink at the television audience. And then some do make it to the Big White House and blithely make pre-emptive murderous strikes on foreign nations and don’t get even get a ruler thwacked across the knuckles, much less a more appropriately lengthy term in the Big House.

Growing up I learned right from wrong, tripped up a lot and eventually executed said wrong doing with less and less conviction until it became painful enough to make me want to stop. When, as an adult who had chucked organized religion for its failure to live up to any promise and that left only eternal damnation that may or may not pan out, I began to explore philosophies I could learn something from and live with. I was raised as a Lutheran in a church that held candlelight processions along stone pillars bedecked with fresh pine boughs at Christmas and draped the mournful purple cloth over Jesus at the altar on Good Friday where, as a girl desperate for forgiveness, I sat quietly pious in an empty pew for seven hours as the last words from the cross were delivered from the pulpit every hour until there were no more. A fire and brimstone-hurling pastor aptly named Pastor Ripper headed the congregation. I sang in the choir until I was a teenager. My sister and I appeared on a television program called Faith For Today, white robed and singing our angelic little hearts out—a momentary halt of hostilities. Aunts, uncles, and my poor unsuspecting cousins prayed under a different clerestory than we did that the world would be rid of the kind of homosexuals the boys grew up to be. They answered to the evangelical call and were born again, which apart from the hypocrisy I was witnessing firsthand, confounded me no end. Born again? Once is enough, thank you. I don’t want to cower before a god, rely on a god, get pissed off with those that do and then rationalize their ungoldly behavior because they have found god.

Atheism suits me but I am not so narcissistic as to think I don’t still have a lot to learn about hedging one’s bets. And I’ll admit to the heart-racing ghostly sighting and a penchant for German films about angels tumbling to earth for love. Over the years I have sporadically attended talks at the Shambhala Center in Manhattan, drawn by the Kerouackian sound of their dharma gatherings. I don’t call myself a Buddhist. I do call myself a gleaner. I like the Zen philosophy of “Once you know you can’t un-know.” If anything has kept me relatively crime free it’s been this simple phrase; that, and the ‘do unto others’ chestnut. I was, and still am, an avid reader and until I began exploring further the tenets of Buddhism, inspired in part by the writings of  Pema Chödren, a Buddhist who follows Shambhala tradition, I relied on the witty aphorisms of the likes of Mark Twain: “Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.” And “If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.” “God made idiots. That was for practice…” For relief from the more dire aspects of life I turned to comedy: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”—Mel Brooks.

This brings me to Samsara and The Wheel of Misery. What I was doing was looking for a way out of the miseries of life. Catholics had Purgatory. So what if the place itself had been downgraded; sin and its consequences was still a pretty unpleasant notion if you weren’t going directly to heaven. Jews have Gehenna where it might be a year between death and salvation. For Muslims, hell is temporary residency for some who have erred and for the worst evildoers it’s eternal strife with no get-out-of-jail card to be had. Evangelicals have The Rapture. The country club mentality of Protestants suits their religious ends as well. Been good? You’re in the everlasting members-only private club. Bad? You’re not.

Buddhism was a jolt to my not fully released grasp of life after death. Religious afterlife: Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Protestants Evangelicals, Mormons; they all had it going for them. If I could make myself believe there was no hell, maybe there was a heaven; a relentlessly charming afterlife devoid of bankers, politicians, landlords, armed peace officers. Or incarnation! Poor and not nearly as smart as I secretly aspired to be in this life would be rectified when I was born again as a fabulously wealthy do-gooder scholar. Nope. Samsara blew the chips right off the table. Whereas reincarnation might be thought of as kind of do-over, in Buddhist philosophy that just means repeat, repeat, repeat.

If I can’t watch a movie like Marley and Me in this life because I feel miserable about all those dogs in shelters that get passed up for the costly designer breeds, I can expect the same angst in the next. I’ll never lose the acute hearing I am suddenly cursed with when I overhear conversations on the bus about losing jobs at Christmas. The only way I’ll release myself from samsara (in my humble opinion) is to just stop thinking about it. When we meditate we are meant to stop everything; movement, thought, helping yourself to that extra and wholly unnecessary slice of pumpkin pie.

We meditate so that we can learn to be in the moment. So when The Mister and I see an old friend who is on her own and we accompany her and her expensive but adorable Maltese to the dog run in Riverside Park, I’ll also be aware and invite pleasant passing conversation with a stranger and her newly adopted mixed breed that narrowly escaped being put down at a shelter. I’ll listen for the sympathetic voice in some other stranger’s conversation about lost jobs who counts himself lucky in a schadenfreud kind of way because he’s got his own place. “Nobody’s ass, nobody’s feet but my own. No matter how bad thing’s is goin’, somebody else is got it worse.”

I’ll come to understand misery as a personal journey I need not be on but that no one but me can navigate the map of my own enlightenment. I may be on a journey that takes longer than this present earthly existence to complete, but I’ll continue to seek out the billboards along Transcendental Highway that read: “Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little,” from Cheng Yen. I’ll return again and again to those earlier signposts from my literary guardians like Virginia Woolf: “Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”

Recently I came across a quote from the owner of Le Cirque on being successful: “You can’t be afraid of anything, but you have to stay nervous all the time. If you aren’t, there is something wrong.”

I’m somewhere between that angst-inducing fog and blissful enlightenment.

Happy Samsara.

"I drink to make other people interesting." George Jean Nathan


SENIOR MOMENT

Last Sunday I spent an hour or so online perusing the Observer before heading downtown to meet for the first time the members of CEDP’s prison letter writing group; and especially to personally introduce myself to Rebecca Kurti who heads it.

There was one article in particular in the Observer—described as a ‘national Sunday quality broadsheet, sister paper of the Guardian, specializing in in-depth analysis and comment on UK and world news and politics’—that caught my attention. Not so much for the thrust and content of the short piece, but for the fact that it was published in the Observer, which I’d come to appreciate as the Sunday extension of a rather lefty intellectualism that covered the rest of the week in the pages of the Guardian.

THERE’S NO SHAME IN BEING SENIOR AND SOZZLED.

“So what if older people like to drink”, says Christopher Manthorp, “don't judge them for indulging.”

Now that’s a headline I expect to see in the Daily News or the UK equivalent, the Daily Mail. I have to say I have noticed the odd bit of yellow journalism making it’s way into the venerable pages of the Guardian and even the New York Times. Well, maybe not yellow exactly but soft journalism to be sure. The edgy snark of the blogosphere once derided by print journalism has, I think, begun to be embraced with a great big catch-up hug from mainstream media. Articles like the one that appeared in the pages of the Times on February 15 (Bad Economy? Good Excuse)—which is having its own game of dodgeball over bankruptcy rumors—are giving the Gray Lady a jaundiced pallor. I used to think these self-serving tales about the shallow rich suddenly deepening with soul were meaningless in the overall potential for popular revolt, but as the Bernie and Ruthless Show has widened the viewing arena of the fiscally disenfranchised, perhaps these frivolous mots will be more of a spark than they bargained for. Got a long-time nanny whose perfectly reasonable request for time off irritates the heck out of you? Let her go! Blame it on the recession. Then—hire a new one! Don't really want to shell out for a Tiffany bauble or a watch from Cartier? Well, then it’s time for creative gift giving for your love who’s like a red, red, tomato and celebrate Valentine’s Day with a nice ripe (cheap) love apple.

Photographs at demonstrations on Wall Street of protesters hoisting placards declaring “Jump You Fuckers!” won’t make the evening edition of the Times. And you can bet the popular protest on Wall Street slated for April 4th won’t be televised. But if statements from a terribly overindulged bunch who feel they’re going against the recession and doing something wrong by throwing a party, and other equally profound witticisms from otherwise financially secure persons that chirp: “It’s the silver lining in the recession cloud,” don’t agitate the newly poor into the streets to protest, then I don’t know what will. Articles like those might just provide the seeds of foment for people who actually have lost their jobs, have actually been hugely affected by the recession—and as a result of Madoff’s bombshell will enlist in a class war between the same classes. (Does one capitalize recession? Is it that stage yet? Can we, in fact, call it the Great Recession and leave room for its sure follow up: The Even Greater Depression?).

It’s enough to drive a person to drink.

So, on Sunday afternoon, I was thinking about this on the downtown No.6, still mulling over the piece in the Observer. Later I would hear from friends weighing in with their opinions on the Observer piece I’d sent to them. Snug between passengers on the train, I was distracted from reading the autobiography of Assata Shakur (a.k.a. Joanne Chesimard of the so-called Black Liberation Army) when a man at the other end of the car crooned the all too familiar refrain: “Ladies and gentlemen. I don’t mean no harm. I am homeless and I need something to eat.” He then launches, acapella, into a doo wop favorite: “Under the Boardwalk.” What he couldn’t see was that another man had entered the car nearer to where I was sitting. This man had a blank expression, worn at the edges like an old rug that had been trod over countless times until the pattern had faded. A twine necklace was attached to a hand lettered sign on a bit of cardboard: Homeless. Hungry. HIV Positive.

The two met just in front of where I was sitting and I watched to see where this interaction would take them. Would they ignore each other? Or, as I have seen before, would one silently surrender the begging terrain to the other and back off onto the subway platform at the next stop?

“Hey Snake,” the singer greets the man with the cardboard sign, who only just raises his eyes to him as they tap their paper cups. “Been uptown for the meatloaf. You got to sit through the preacher’s talk—new rules—b’fore you can get to eat.” Then he tells him about a guy in front of him in line who bought a scratch off and won six hundred dollars. “Just like that. I coulda bought that ticket.” The singer pushed off at the next stop and the man with the cardboard sign called after him: “One day at a time, brother.”

CHARTREUSE 1988 oil on canvas 34" x 38"

“If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.” Marcel Proust

THE BOY FROM ENGLAND

IN HER YOUNGER DAYS: from my journals, 26 November 1988

Letter to R. in Paris: “Your letter came to me on a day when I called for you very strongly from my heart. I had been at an office doing magazine work & feeling so far from the art. I was composing a letter to you on the subway home…

‘Dear R., I feel so sad, so lonely for the art & the friends who understand me…’ And I came home to your precious letter.

This letter will seem disconnected because I am disconnected. There are stops & stops & in-between there are low points and high points. This week I will send some little presents to J. then in another week I will send D’s little painting and the photograph to you.

This week I bought a new CD [player] (because my other one died). So, I’m back to music—to the Theresa Stich-Randall. I’ve been looking for the book—Brock—but so far no luck. The problem with looking for a book is this: I go into a bookstore and looking for a new love I come across old loves and so I buy them. It’s a very expensive road to a new love. I bought these two books: Destroy, She Said, Marguerite Duras & Early Poems Of Charles Bukowski.

I’ve been doing a lot of the magazine work. I make money & I don’t know where the hell it disappears to.

In a week the boy from England* is coming to stay with me for five weeks. We have become friends. He writes to me. We talk twice a week. I’m a little afraid but the best things to happen have always had the fear.—Have I told you I want to leave this country? Well, I do. And it terrifies me, but it also gives me strength—I told you this letter would be disconnected.

Today I have for painting. And I ran 6 miles in Central Park. Now I’m listening to the Eurythmics. I think: I am not in love, but I can only think in English time. The last letter I wrote to him I included part of your last letter to me—he feels like we do. So I make one artist meet another. We are all crazy for solitude. We are all crazy.

This last magazine job I quit. I was crazy with aggravation—the work was garbage. Who the fuck cares what they pay you if it ain’t what you want. Sometimes the responsible part of me gets sick and tired of being responsible. I hate this work that keeps me from the canvas. But that’s a meager excuse. It’s easier to hate the jailor than to steal the keys and get the fuck out. Maybe someday I’ll be brave enough to escape. Do you think I can do that?

Getting very drunk is a brilliant release—suddenly the chains have exploded & I’m left free & slightly unsteady in front of the canvas. I’ve been to three lectures at the Metropolitan Museum on Frida [Kahlo]. In a week or so, I go to a performance piece on Frida. There is all this stuff on Frida & how come nobody knows her still? I feel like crying because I can’t read your book.

I have an idea to do a painting. When Frida had the accident & was naked & covered w/gold & blood, but like Marilyn I have to see her as a hero—not a martyr. So, maybe it will take me awhile.

Tonight I do some drawing. God, I want to be out of here, away from here. I want to take the space and scent of me to another place & work w/out the damned history.

I’m reading Proust again—this time very slowly. Now, I listen to my new CD—the soundtrack of Les Ailes de Desir. I’m rendered helpless R.,I always cry. I have seen the film nine times. When he [The Mister] comes here we’ll see it again. I told him: “This is a test. If you are going to love me, this is the test.” What is it about this film that pulls my insides outward? That makes me turn in the street to look for the spirit? I think of D. now, I think he really loved this film

I’ve done a gouache of the courtyard at Chartreuse, the cypress where the little cat is buried. Only I’m not happy with it. The spatial quality is lacking. I think I need to be there again. Vincent [Van Gogh] was able to bring the sketches home & turn them into paintings. I should not be thousands of miles away from what I want to paint.

Do you think there’s a little space for me in France? Can I travel, like the snail, slowly with my work atop my back & finally settle in a country & be a butterfly again?”

*The boy from England turned into The Mister. He came to stay and it will be 21 years in May.

“Where thou art, that is home.” Emily Dickinson


SANDCASTLES

As a girl I first recalled hearing the phrase “bailout” when it signaled my father's escape out the front door, first ritually checking for his wallet, lighter and his cigarettes before warbling in a modified W.C.Fields delivery: “Boy’s in trouble. Gotta bail out Louie” or “Looks like Frankie needs bailing out.” He didn’t mean he was actually going to have to put up money to get any one of the boys who belonged to his drum and bugle corps out of jail. Likely, one of them was in a jam for drinking beer on the street or a girl’s father had caught his daughter canoodling with the reprobate and threatened a charge of statutory rape, not an uncommon occurrence in my day. The beat cops knew my father. He was a life member in the VFW and self-made director of a drum and bugle corps in Astoria called “The Saints.” Playing in the band was an alternative to wayward street life but with my father’s dedication it evolved into a competition-worthy enterprise. The VFW post—a little white brick building on 41st Street in Astoria—was a safe place for boys to gather, learn to play an instrument and know more Broadway musical tunes than they surely ever would have. The boys would call ‘Billy’ before they would their own fathers to come and get them out of whatever scrape they’d happened into. He’d pull on his black wool band jacket (which I still treasure) and head out into the night—me thinking, he’s off to be a hero again and praying it wasn’t one of the boys in the drum line on whom I had a mad crush.

Many years later—unbeknownst to him—my father had a chance to bail me out. Married at the time to a man whose family’s prosperity was earned—a Park Avenue apartment, valuable antiques and a drawing collection of Italian masterpieces inhabited their nouveau riche world—me and the Ex were often offered VIP seats at Madison Square Garden from his uncle Maury, or Maury al Gusto as he liked to be called. A large-framed, gregariously generous Jew, he was a self-made millionaire with a string of printing presses and he fancied himself an Italian mobster. As a young woman, newly married into an alien world, I would cast furtive glances around Jilly’s saloon on West 52nd Street when he took us there, seeking out the celebrity and then any celebrity while Maury, without batting an eye, asked the maître d’ if Jilly himself—best known as Frank Sinatra’s chief aide and inseparable companion—was in the house. No one really knew where Maury’s nickname came from; stories of its origin varied over the years. 

At the height of the war known as the Viet Nam conflict the Ex and I were courtside at a basketball game, within popcorn flicking distance of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman if memory serves. The audience stood in a rush for The National Anthem and I did not. The Ex, a self-professed anarchic, had to be prodded with a charged glare from me, a newly formed lefty, into passive seated resistance among a throng of rabid patriots who shouted at us to “Get back to Russia.” The commotion brought the Commissioner of Basketball—a friend of his uncle—to check us out. Needless to say we were banned from complimentary tickets until about a year later when Maury presented us with a pair to a hockey game and informed me, with a knowing nod, that it was a good thing my father was a life member in the VFW—something I had never revealed—and while he appreciated my fervent political protest, could we, from now on, arrive after the anthem had been sung, please?

My parents were not homeowners—far from it. We were one of the first families to move into the newly completed Jacob Riis projects at Avenue D and Ninth Street on the lower east side when I was two. Built by a pioneer for social change, it housed a multi-ethnic brew of humanity. Though I can’t remember witnessing any of it, I recall my dad’s stories about live chickens that ran in the hallways and the bleating kid (animal, not child) he was sure was destined for a ritualistic end and not the family pet. And I think that’s why we moved, for a ‘better life’ in a serviceable ground floor apartment in another housing project in Astoria, Queens. Life there for my unhinged family was played out like reality TV way before there was such a concept and we acted on our tumultuous dysfunction behind the living room window for the eager audience in the courtyard outside who took in every shouty argument. Everyone knew when the electricity bills went unpaid and playmates gathered around our darkened window on the stoop beneath to await my dad and me as I made my shame-faced way alongside him to the housing office.

Later, we followed my father to Hartford, Connecticut to an undistinguished rented apartment in a nondescript yellow-brick box on a street full of crumbling Victorians. Mark Twain’s house—a fanciful Victorian Gothic—sat at the end of the street, neighboring Harriet Beecher Stowe’s smaller, neater Victorian.

Owning a home was an alien concept growing up; still is. I don’t own now—not a house nor a condo. We don’t own a car or a summer getaway. When we can manage it, we escape to Montauk and rent a room with an ocean view having driven there in a rental car. Home ownership is not in my DNA. It just feels inherently grabby. Simpleminded, perhaps, but suited to a simpler life.

Relatives on my father’s side lived in a house in New Jersey—the only homeowners in the family. It was a porch-lined, shrubbery fronted Cape Cod and had all the exterior trappings we witnessed on family television like “Leave It To Beaver” and “Ozzie and Harriet.” But the inhabitants, despite the moralizing attitude of an insufferably God-fearing aunt, harbored painful secrets.

The Mister grew up in a semi-detached house, one of many in Leicestershire known as Jelson homes. On my first visit to his native village of Huncote I was struck by its smallness, possibly the tiniest house I had ever been in; a home where even the Borrowers living under the floorboards might feel cramped. But to The Mister it seemed just spacious enough for mum and dad and sister growing up.

Reading dire news about the current mortgage crisis is almost like reading news of a foreign country, that country of folks who aspired to the so-called American Dream, the very same dream that President Obama tells us is now threatened. Of the 70 per cent of Americans who own their homes, more than a million have been foreclosed and another million or so are facing a similar dangerous fate. Searching the news on the Internet I am struck by how many homeowners refer to their homes as ‘investments’ or ‘speculative ventures’ or ‘equity’ for their retirement. These homes, once castles, have been hit by an angrily destructive economic wave, sliding their owners into a sea of debt and paralyzing consternation.

And where do these homeowners turn? Where do the unemployed turn? Mark Twain, former neighbor: “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

In the stimulus bill just passed billions have been allocated for mortgage relief but there is no compulsion on the part of the banks to do the homeowner any favors. This bill, from what I can tell, creates work, and not jobs for the long term. Bridges will be built, and highways repaired but sustainable employment is not necessarily a guarantee. It seems, to me, like a gigantic workfare project. All it will do is get the infrastructure fixed at the expense of the humans deployed (not employed) to fix it. It may not fix the human beings in the long run. Both political parties have whipsawed citizens—homeowners and renters alike—with a faltering economy badly dealt with, threats of terrorism, and an astronomical war debt with no less human and monetary casualties.

I mean, who didn’t see it coming?

And then, to add to the foreboding of already tortured legions of nail biters (of which I am a card carrying member) were the statements made by Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, on a recent episode of Bill Moyer’s Journal in response to Moyers uttering the dread "O" word. "...an un-American term, as you know. It means a government by a small number of people. We don't like to think of ourselves that way."

Bill Moyers: Are you saying that the banking industry trumps the president, the Congress and the American government when it comes to this issue so crucial to the survival of American democracy?

Simon Johnson: I don't know. I hope they don't trump it. But the signs that I see this week, the body language, the words, the op-eds, the testimony, the way they're treated by certain Congressional committees, it makes me feel very worried.

Bill Moyers: Geithner has hired as his chief-of-staff, the lobbyist from Goldman Sachs. The new deputy secretary of state was, until last year, a CEO of Citigroup. Another CFO from Citigroup is now assistant to the president, and deputy national security advisor for International Economic Affairs. And one of his deputies also came from Citigroup. One new member of the president's Economic Recovery Advisory Board comes from UBS, which is being investigated for helping rich clients evade taxes.

Hmm, barn’s burnt down, let’s get the resident arsonist to rebuild it. And there will  be no kvetching over the paltry dollars that will pad out your weekly paycheck as a result of the much touted tax cut. You can see the moon now, can’t you?

Christopher Dodd, the Democratic senator from Connecticut stated that, “…it's all window dressing.” Wall Street—those creative aquarium keepers—will still find imaginative ways to feed its sharky execs huge sums of money in the years to come.

At Goldman Sachs, if I recall reading correctly, retention awards are the name of the game now. So, don’t you be calling this no bonus, hear?

Say, what?


"The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than the aristocracy, more selfish than the bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes." Abraham Lincoln 16th president of the USA

DIARY FROM DEATH ROW By Robert Will

February 1, 2011, Tuesday

How Do I Describe It?

“When there is disharmony in affairs,

that means that there is something unknown.

When there is collusion but not solidarity, there is

overt alliance but covert alienation. When there

is disharmony in affairs sages do not make

plans for them. Thus, when there is intimacy in

spite of distance, that means there is hidden virtue.”

The Master of Demon Valley,

Classic text of the

Zongheng Xue school of

Chinese philosophy, circa 500BCE

Earlier I went to rec and, as always, I carry some type of supremely powerful anti-indoctrination weapon. Today I went to the rec cage with a collection of Eastern classics on strategy, council and the acquisition and exercise of power. I’ve found that in this environment people are much more likely to listen to you if you talk about such things as The Art of War, The Way Of the Zen Warrior, Ways Of Warriors, Codes of Kings, Bushido Warrior Codes and such things as opposed to say Ghandi, M.L.K., Yoga or perhaps strictly sociopolitics.

I had a bunch of passages marked and a list of topics of discussion. I held council with a few dudes while working out. I don’t care how disturbed my mindset is I never have and never will let it affect what I do around here on a daily basis, what people would call “activism.” I don’t give a damn, it’s just not going to happen. I wonder how many people out there in the activist community, in the social justice struggle, live this way? I don’t write about or mention 80% of the things I do around here. I would feel a bit silly doing so and plus I have no desire for accolades or praise. A few of my friends always tell me I need to write about such things but the prospect of doing so seems rather embarrassing and ridiculous to me. Perhaps I’ll try, however.

A thought just occurred to me: When I talk about something like discussing a book while working out as I described above, I think this may sound quite strange to people in the Freeworld. For one, I always feel very mechanical when I write something that isn’t going to someone I know; I feel as if I write in a very bland, machine-like manner that severely lacks the personal expressive quality that is conveyed in letters I write to actual people I know. Also, this place is so very insane, just absolutely, fundamentally twistedly Orwellian that I’ve found it impossible to properly describe how things are around here. Plus, the way I interact with people is…How do I describe it? I’ve never been one to have mundane, trite, banal conversations. All human interaction should have purpose. Life is to be Lived. The future is to be grasped. I generally speak in a dialectical manner and naturally use the language of metaphor and symbolism. I’ve been told I’m a very eccentric individual and hell, I don’t know and whatever-the-hell, let me try to describe what I mentioned above.

So, I was out in the dayroom rec cage, which is just a larger cage than our cells, which directly face the dayrooms. I holler at a few dudes I’m cool with while stretching:

Me: What’s going on?

Person I: Just listening to the radio.

Me: Yeah, I thought I heard some wretched corporate propaganda that is viciously assaulting and corrupting the youth of America coming out of your cell.

Person I: Hell’nah! I had KPFT on and they were talking about what’s going on in the middle east.

[This person is pretty politically conscious so we had a short discussion on current middle east sociopolitics.]

Me: (To Person II) What’s up? You ready to catch this workout and chop it up on this hard-ass book I have out here? It’s on a warrior vibe (I flip open the book to a marked passage and read) “The way of the warrior means familiarity with both the cultural and martial arts. In ancient China the single word ‘Shi’ or ‘Knight’ mean both scholar and warrior. The training of this class of men was considered to be one of the most important tasks of the culture.” This is some real serious stuff right here.

Person II: Sounds interesting but, man I can’t work out at all. That hernia I told you about awhile back has gotten much, much worse.

Then, I talked with the guy for a while about how to strategically resolve the extreme medical neglect that the medical staff around here is quite fond of. I talked about various policies, forms, paperwork, grievance procedures and legal procedure around lawsuits; who to talk to, how to talk to them, who to have his supporters talk to and how to have his supporters talk to them. After this, I started working out and discussing the passages marked in the book. Probably sounds strange…Picture this: I hit a set of push-ups, an intense set, leap up and reply to what the guy I’m talking to has just said concerning the topic of our discussion. And, as always, I relate everything to our current situation and its relation to our larger collective Existence.

I also talked with another guy about some crazy drama going on with some of the overseas anti-DP groups. Dudes around here have all these “girlfriends” and “wives” and engage in all sorts of labyrinthine drama the likes of which Jerry Springer would stand before in confused disbelief, as if before him loomed some great drama beast whose intricate make-up has rendered him speechless. I’ve never engaged in any of that wretchedness and I see it as absolutely undermining the Struggle. The guy I talked to has a girlfriend who is with one of these groups and we discussed some productive ways to weave through the wretchedness and advance the cause of Abolition.

Now I’m back in my cell and Ah(!) Stravinsky’s Firebird is about to come on. Some good music to finish my workout to…The evil ogre Katschei appears. Strength training! Weight bag curls…The tempo picks up and I have a Firebird to catch! Running in place…Ah-ha, my most beautiful Firebird, I’ve caught you. What is that you say? You offer me the gift of a magical feather for your release? What do you take me for, a marauding hoodlum?! I merely was transfixed by the illuminating brilliance of your flaming beauty my dear Firebird, and I had to admire it up close. You are, of course, free to go, but thank you. I certainly appreciate your gift, indeed your beauty is certainly a gift bestowed upon the earth from the Mystic Heavens. Shaolin Qi Gong “Joining the Heavens and the Earth” exercise…

(This music is nice, Stravinsky wrote some pretty good music.) What is that I see? A bunch of hot maidens in a garden grove reading poetry, doing Yoga, holding dialectic on socio-politics, strategizing on how to bring about social change, painting, playing sitars, violins and cellos, playing with golden apples? Gotta make sure the 6-pack abs stay rocked up. Crunches and Ab twists!…O.K., O.k., I know the original story only mentions the maidens in the garden playing with apples, but what the hell is that? Perhaps they were listening to Britney Spears and gossiping about celebrity news and the latest must-have fashion trends also? (My apologies to Comrade Igor, but I added a bit of personal fantastical flourish to the idea of enticing women.)

Thus, I venture into the garden and chill with the maidens for a while and follow them back to the palace of the great demon-ogre Katschei. Dah-Dah! The Infernal Dance Of King Katschei ensues and … I’m caught. Well, I guess I’m not the Billy Bad-Ass I thought I was—more curls and some jujitsu!… “To Stone!” You say Katschei? Solidarity call to the Firebird! And the Firebird arrives and charms Katschei and his nefarious demonic minions into a friendly dance…Dancing Shiva Asana, more Jujitsu…And Katschei and crew fall asleep and I’m freed and go and find the hidden casket where the ogre King’s demonic soul is kept and…I destroy it—swift sets of 1-2-3 punches…

Katschei and his ghoulish companions disappear, his captives who he turned to stone become human again, and the evil of the Kingdom is gone! Now, I form a life long bond of Love and Solidarity with a Princess who was Katschei’s captive and we help form a Peoples’ Coalition to transform the toppled autocracy into a true participatory democracy! Yes, in the original story the hero of the tale, Ivan, just marries the princess and they rule the Kingdom happily ever after. But this is indeed my workout session while listening to Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird so I’ve felt free to remix the story a bit. Whew, that was an excellent training session. Now for some nice cool down Yoga…very nice. Now on to some important legal organizing work—time to move my scimitar, my battle-ax, my pen in a different direction and hope to create more harmony in the fight. I’m engaged in, despite being distanced and confined in this twisted infernal Hell.

From the Spirit of

Mastering the Art Of Life

In a Valley Of Sorrows

Rob Will

February 1, 2011, Late night/early a.m.

Earlier at mail-call I got some discouraging news. I desperately need a legal team, more funds, to do productive organizing, more solid proactive solidarity on the outside…whew…thinking of all this was a bit overwhelming and I suddenly had the urge to pick up my pen and some colored pencils to do a bit of sketching. It’s the middle of the morning and I’m about to crash out but I figured I’d write this short note and with it send out the quick sketch I did. The basic center outline of the woman is something by Mike Hoffman and the words in he background are a hymn from The Gospel Of Sri Rama Krishna:

In dense darkness, O Mother,

Thy formless beauty sparkles;

Therefore the yogis meditate in a dark mountain cave.

In the lap of boundless dark,

on Mahanirvana's waves unborn,

Peace flows serene and inexhaustible.

Taking the form of the Void,

in the robe of darkness wrapped,

Who art Thou, Mother,

seated alone in the shrine of samadhi?

From the Lotus of Thy fear-scattering Feet

flash Thy love's lightnings;

Thy Spirit-Face shines forth

with laughter terrible and loud!

Vivekananda (1863 - 1902)

On the back of this little quick sketch I wrote, “Kali, Kali, Kali…” I need to get some rest. I’m sentenced to die for a crime I didn’t commit and things are just not going good right now…Yes, I need to try to get some rest…

Rob