Silence

Sitting down with a bowl of tomato soup, and a grilled cheese sandwich I dip the golden buttered bread into a sea of red. I take a bite. I feel a spark. A connection is made to some long lost place in time and space. I feel the urge to climb onto the rough and scream out lines of prose while sitting fire to effigies of Allen and Jack. I want to get up and paint pop art icons of the can and lead protests across college campuses into the hills an’ dales to save tortured beasts of burden from their unhappy fates! But this to passes quietly. It is but one spark in one small corner of the universe. But all of the times, peoples, and places brought into consciousness are to nothing more then a glint in the universes endless seething darkness. Madness. I lift the bowl to my lips and drink the red liquid as if taking part in some ancient blood rite; the kind of ritual which Franz wrote about; whose residual presence drove the men in white coats to resort to insulin therapy and electro shock to chase away the demons of those very same savages of old. I stand up as if to take a step forward, in order to break the hold of that moment, only to fall back down. Scream I think. Why bother I mutter. The music cracks, silence, the needle raises and falls onto its resting place. Silence. Embrace it. Fill it. Destroy it. 

Silence

Sitting down with a bowl of tomato soup, and a grilled cheese sandwich I dip the golden buttered bread into a sea of red. I take a bite. I feel a spark. A connection is made to some long lost place in time and space. I feel the urge to climb onto the rough and scream out lines of prose while sitting fire to effigies of Allen and Jack. I want to get up and paint pop art icons of the can and lead protests across college campuses into the hills an’ dales to save tortured beasts of burden from their unhappy fates! But this to passes quietly. It is but one spark in one small corner of the universe. But all of the times, peoples, and places brought into consciousness are to nothing more then a glint in the universes endless seething darkness. Madness. I lift the bowl to my lips and drink the red liquid as if taking part in some ancient blood rite; the kind of ritual which Franz wrote about; whose residual presence drove the men in white coats to resort to insulin therapy and electro shock to chase away the demons of those very same savages of old. I stand up as if to take a step forward, in order to break the hold of that moment, only to fall back down. Scream I think. Why bother I mutter. The music cracks, silence, the needle raises and falls onto its resting place. Silence. Embrace it. Fill it. Destroy it. 

Merry Christmas

Old women pass, as Christmas music floats within the stream of shuffling feet and crinkling shopping bags…  as old women meet and exchange greetings. Plastic cards and small pieces of paper switch hand. Fussing of children. Angry middle age women clench fists around handfuls of coupons. As old women swap only greetings and recycled bits of news…

They are the only ones to stop here in this moment…

Others busy them selves with the push and pull…

Old women stand and talk…

Simple observations. Observations which where interrupted by the reply a woman made to one of my collages upon receiving a hearty ‘Merry Christmas.’

“It so nice to hear that someone in retail still says Merry Christmas…”

Someone? Does someone include the dozen other workers? How about the throng of women wearing holiday buttons proclaiming the reason for the season… Or all of those old women exchanging just the same exact greeting. The war on Christmas is nothing more then an argument between pundits. Spend a few days, weeks, or months in retail being asked by old men if your really still allowed to say such thing as Merry Christmas and you to will observe the same. Seasonal greetings, from the perspective of anyone having passed such time in retail, become as cliché as hallmark greeting cards and soda commercials.  At times one feels the vein wish to avoid all such greetings in order to simply refuse to recognize the so-called reason for the season.

Many pundits would point to this emotional reaction as the apocalyptic conclusion to the so-called war on Christmas. Argue as you may about the purpose of the separation of church and state in the bill of rights, or the declarations made in the Treaty of Tripoli, or the morality of ‘blue’ laws, or even the history of how our first congress snubbed the Christmas Holiday altogether for some sixty odd years. Christmas is more alive then ever before. And in a season of holiday greetings and gift buying and other merry making I am much less concerned about the ‘War on Christmas,’ and more interested in why no one seems to have a problem with the Magi?

I am of course here being facetious. But do those old women, posed in conversation remember the Magi of old? The wise men, who after riding from Babylon, and coming to the town of Bethlehem,

“Saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”

Those strangely ‘oriental’ figures, with the dark skin complications of Middle Eastern peoples. I have set here two in my nativity. Three small Fisherprice Little People wise men wearing Arab head dress. For some odd reason mine are distinctly Asian, African, and Anglo Saxon in respective complications… But maybe that’s just it. We don’t have real wise men anymore, just a collective group of sudo-multicultural individuals carrying non-descript presents for the son of some monotheistic God. Is this what we where supposed to be afraid of? That secularism and political corrective-ness might rob us of the fact that the first group of men to travel into the lands of Judea to recognize our lord in savor where a bunch of Middle Eastern guys?

           In a world where it is unacceptable to portray Muslims as ‘normal people,’ or to utilize them as the sort of people who make for compiling reality television characters it is also very much unacceptable to recognize their role in the nativity. Or to recognize that Muslims may not celebrate Christmas but that they have recognized Jesus in their own unique way. Just as so many ‘fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each others salvation…’ many more fall to their knees and proclaim those very places of worship besieged by legions of atheists and Muslims bent on their destruction!

           The rest of us keep shopping. A few of us stop to reflect and share what may be our last moments with a passing friend. I do my duty to the company and continue to pass out the appropriate greetings of my choosing. In the evening I will go home and put on an old record and pour a glass of whiskey. And in the quite of night I’ll meditate quietly, wondering to my self, where my missing Joseph figurine is…

Merry Christmas

A very quick poem...

She always came in the dead of night,

Bright light of day all but gone from her,

Spurring lust and shame,

Blame always laying with me,

Be it never the same,

Flame of love now long gone,

Spawning a new dark void,

Devoid of purpose, Devoid of hope,

Groping only to find soft soap and lies,

Chastised and compromised by her thighs,

Dies all love,

But the comes a shove from above,

Mourning dove undreamed of full of purrs,

Spurs thoughts of hers and drabs of affection,

Reflections of her complexion,

Rejection and shame,

Became comfort and fresh air,

Caring from a ball of fluff and fur. 

“Never throw caution to the wind.”

Church signs. Google it, according to one, ‘there are some questions that can’t be answered by Google.’ But some light can be shed on this rather fascinating phenomenon through just such a search. Leaf through the Google image results long enough and you may come across one that I drove past just the other day.

“Never throw caution to the wind.”

           

Up in till this point in time my fascination with church signage had been a positive one. I had come to find these small quotable monuments to be the last true widely consumed articles of literate within our society. Their impact on individuals and society as a whole is for the most part a mystery to all those concerned, including my self. But their messages where always clear and impactful, yet this one of most recent discovery did not set well with me. This one was not observational. It was not a simple comical clique. It was a commandment. One not found in scripture. One which would upon further observation be found completely out of place within that narrative of old…

                   What is it that motivates a local perish minister, priest, or cleric to produce these small vignette style sermons for their signposts? A structuralist might give us an account where the church sign post is simply another one a thousand some religious pieces of symbolic language operating distinctly separate from reality or even the confines of ones imagination. No more then the many bits of historical occultism like those organized and disseminated by Dan Brown and his decedents of old. I on the other hand tend to shy away from such explanations. I find my self-trying to image the life experiences of the man or woman whose very existence resulted in this odd expression of what I will venture to label as ‘faith.’

                   This is as you may feel is an overtly academic and overly intellectual way of approaching what are nothing more then simple clerical puns. But if you would also excuse my poor play on words you may take a moment to see beyond my own sad intellectual tendencies in order to approach the church sign for what it is; the expression of ones individual response to the world around them. In the case of the above quoted sign a world which this individual views as chaotic and filled with temptation and danger. Where all people should step lightly and approach all great moral quandary with a great deal of just that, caution. But I find here that just as big box retailers may have removed the Christ from Christmas by turning to the use of secular seasonal greetings; an over abundance of caution does just the same to remove the Christ out of Christian…

                   We need only to turn to that once great narrative of old and find a man who heeded no such warning. He did not turn from the leper or from the diseased. He did not show caution when approached by prostitutes or those possessed by great evil. Nor did he show caution when calling out the hypocrisy of the Jewish Pharisees or standing in quite defiance of Roman law. And finally no caution did he show in the face of death. Not before the judgment of man, or the fury of nature, or the commandment of his lord did he show any such caution? How could anyone follow in such footsteps cautiously?

                   So the next time you find your self-viewing one of these interesting pieces of clerical venting maybe you should take a moment to consider its conception. Or maybe not? Maybe you should just keep driving.