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August 7, 2007Would you puh-leeze try to controlthose impure thoughts of yours?I NO LONGER DO LOVEwrites a reader of my column “What is This Thing Called Love?” “I no longer do Love,” said he. “Your column is writ in a foreign tongue. Those of you who still believe in Love (and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny) do indeed have my sincere sympathy! I no longer believe that real Love is capable of sustaining itself in this modern life. I mourn its passing, but it’s as dead as the Dodo!” WHAT KILLED OFF THE DODO?I do believe it is the latter half of the twentieth century, “this modern life,” that spawned this brand of cynicism. The rules of romance—dating, marriage, family—collapsed. After droves of women got tired of making homes, all bets were off. Men would say, “Don’t tell me you’re one of those women’s libbers.” My response would be, “Don’t tell me you’re one of those male oppressors.” By now it’s a free-for-all of make-it-up-as-you-go-along. Prenuptial agreements make the specter of divorce an acknowledged possibility, if not likelihood. WHATEVER ELSE MARRIAGE ISit is also a wide-reaching form of behavior control. It reins people into couples or families that are beholden to each other morally and contractually. It’s easer to keep control of these units than free-ranging, free-thinking individuals. One adopts a role and is expected to adhere to that role. I am a priest, I can’t blah-blah-blah, I’m a married man, I can’t so forth etc., I’m a teacher, I must try to control my jailbait impulses, I’m the president, I can’t wage an illegal immoral war year after year…. All sorts of hell can rain down on people when they deviate from their established role in society. Scandal, divorce, jail, loss of career—impeachment?? ARE THERE ANY RULES OF ROMANCE?They’ve been rewritten, perhaps rendered obsolete. Marriage is losing ground, families are defined and organized any number of ways; there’s a lot more social chaos–and a lot more freedom to live as we want and need to be self-actualized individuals. Because people are assuming more control of their own lives. WELL, WHAT’D HE SAY?I never told you what happened when my friend confessed her love to her priest. She doesn’t remember the penance, but after a moment of silence, he adjured her to “control her impure thoughts.” Strictly boilerplate stuff. What To Say When your parishioner confesses fantasies about her daughter’s teacher, her PTA chairman, her best friend’s husband, her priest. TO TRY OR NOT TO TRYI asked her, did she remember, did he say “control” or “try to control” her thoughts? Oh, try! She laughed. “They want you to be weak! Confessionals would go out of business if people really did control their thoughts!” He was 38 to 42, she recalls, tall, dark and handsome; she was 16, fresh out of school and into the Sacred Heart convent to contemplate nunhood. Instead, she became a Las Vegas showgirl. BUSINESS AS USUALIt’s got to be in the Priests’ Standard Operating Procedures Manual. Here’s how you “handle” this “situation” and the rest is up to the parishioner. “You should endeavor to control your impure thoughts.” You’ve issued your edict and she has to seek penance for her sin of desire by saying 12 hail marys, or whatever. If they don’t “take,” he’ll issue a prescription for 12 more next week. It’s up to you to fill it. You’re off his conscience for not really knowing how to help you. I hope your priest, if you have one, has more heart than did my friend’s. IT’S ALL ABOUT CONTROLWe know this. Religion and punishment. Laws and punishment. Schools and punishment. Breaking rules and punishment. If you don’t act as this group of people act, you will not be invited into, or you will be expelled from this group. How to repel people from certain behaviors? Make them a sin or a crime. CONTROL FREAKS AND THE THINGS THEY CONTROLHow much of this world’s misery stems from its Control Freaks? Totalitarian regimes: if you can’t control a certain population—kill it off. If one country can’t control another—invade it and “conquer” it. How do you control antisocial, disruptive behavior—religion, laws, promise of heaven. The Authority issues the edict, it’s up to the subject to conform. Or else they pay the price—penance, ostracism, excommunication, prison, eternity in hell. Otherwise people will never behave and then we have chaos, anarchy, indifference—and freedom. Societal structures—governments, Golden Rules, organized religions, marriage—have been erected to make people use their freedoms responsibly—or oppress them into controlling them. If there are no consequences, we are free to not control our thoughts and act as we will. From being stoned for adultery to being burned at the stake, from lynching to the death penalty, there is no lack of consequences devised by humanity—sometimes just for being who you are. Whether they make sense or are just is another kettle of fish. MY FRIEND LARRYwas here visiting from Philadelphia. He posited: If you had never heard of God, Jesus, sin, or heaven and hell, and someone came up to and asked you to believe there’s a Man upstairs who created everything, whose son died to atone for all the crappy things you’ve ever done, and so long as you believe in and devote your life to this unseen son and his father you have never heard of, you will escape the fiery punishment of a place called hell. You’d think he was cracked! Yet a great percentage of the world is brought up to believe this very thing, to use it as a guiding principal in life. WHERE IS MY GUIDING LIGHT?My father was Catholic, but my mother won the war over sending me to Catholic school or not. Not. I was pretty much left alone as a child. I can’t recall any “My mother always told me,” or such. No one ever guided me in how to make it through this life. Without enforced religious guidance in childhood, I had no ingrained beliefs I had to rid myself of. I was free to absorb whatever idea from whatever faith or philosophy was of use to me. I have no use, for example, for concepts like original sin, the need for forgiveness for my human flaws, being “saved” from damnation, or being punished by anyone after my death. Karma is my own form of behavior control, resulting from my own choices to emit negative or positive energy into the cosmos. But karma, as Wikipedia so handily puts it, “is not about retribution, vengeance, punishment or reward; karma simply deals with what is. The effects of all deeds actively create past, present and future experiences, thus making one responsible for one’s own life, and the pain and joy it brings to others.” It’s not about someone else holding a whip over your head telling you what to think and the whip comes down if you don’t; it’s about what you think and do. You’re in control of you. You are not abdicating your power to question to the mystery of God. MY GOSPEL’S MORE GOSPEL THAN YOUR GOSPELMy gospel can beat up your gospel. Sam Smith, in the elegant little handbook for life, Why Bother? writes of an incident where Tolstoi exclaimed to a fellow Army officer who had struck a man who’d fallen out of rank, “Are you not ashamed to treat a fellow human being in this way? Have you not read the Gospels?” And the officer rejoins, “And have you not read Army Orders?” I WAS JUST FOLLOWING ORDERSA ready-made abdication of individual responsibility by invoking a higher power. “It was my duty to do as he said.” The devil made me do it. It’s what God wants of me. FALLEN OUT OF RANKWe cannot have the rank and file falling out of rank! Where is the discipline of the system if it tolerates such transgressions? How do you mold these men into “good solidiers” if they do not know how to act in any given situation? WHO THE HELL DOES?Some people seem to have all the answers; they are never at a loss, but I am in a continual muddle of not knowing what to do in response to interpersonal, societal, political situations. There may be absolute black and white at the ends of the spectrum, but I seem to spend my life tripping about the many in-between shades of gray, varied as the skies of Portland, doubting and second-guessing myself. SUNDAY AT THE CAFÉWhen in doubt, I go to my writing studio away from my writing studio, Café International. It feels like what I imagine the Beat 50’s might have. Live jazz, poetry readings, people writing, people drawing, people bopping, drinking coffee or beer, multi-ethnic staff and patrons, everyone dressed down or even subterranean, the incomparable matriarch Zara, with top knot of black hair and skin of milk chocolate, who informs me it’s against her religion to have her picture taken. I can hardly argue with that. DO YOU EVERgive someone bonus points for reminding you of someone else? Or unfairly skeeve them for the same reason? A guy I’ve seen around just came in who looks and dresses so much like Mark M., whom last column I was kissing in a doorway in Berkeley, it’s downright disturbing. He’s with another guy; they scan the bulletin board and walk out. I wonder if this Korean market is open or closed for business. I WONDER IF I AM.I just told a female friend and artist on the dating scene that I am not “looking” for involvement due to my focus on preparing my book for market. As I sit here at the Café typing away, do I look approachable? Do I still “do” Love? Well, my legs are crossed and my eyes are on this screen. Would I disturb me if I felt the impulse to do so? I don’t know, I might set myself nearby and wait for the moment of lofty “air staring” thinkers employ when ruminating, to make some kind of move. Hey, I like your toe rings. I’d either look up while still typing and say thanks, or pick up on the vibe and rejoinder. You here for the jazz? or some such. Might depend on whether I’m looking for distraction. Yes, well, Mark-alike distracted me, but he did not pick up on the vibe, because, my eyes on his back as they might be, he did not turn around and see me, though he once checked me out across the aisle on the bus. THE JAZZ MUSICIANSare priming for their Sunday afternoon jam at the Café. A guy with his hair slicked back into a ponytail, carries in his stack of drums. How wonderful, I am thinking, to have a noisy, physical means of self-expression. I have long thought, if I could have chosen between writer and world-class musician, I’d have picked musician. Music is emotion made audible, and emotion drives life. I took a ceramics class at UC Berkeley, so I could get my hands dirty with something divorced from words. The teacher said I’d have to throw a hundred bowls before I mastered it, and I thought to myself, oh no I won’t. There are enough pots in the world without my misshapen interlopers. I’ll spend that time crafting sentences. LUCKY MEI am lucky to have writing, and its instrument, Qwerty, my silver PowerBook, as the father confessor of my mental musings. Unlike with a real confessor, there is no need to control my thoughts. Some people have nothing, no tailor-made companion to their inner workings, no self-evident outlet for expressing what’s inside them. It’s hard for me to imagine. Having to choose from an array of fields and careers that seem best suited to me is alien to me; having to identify something to fill your life with, more so. I remember having a sales manager for a copier company tell me, “After grad school, my father advised me to get some corporate sales experience.” Makes me shudder. Whatever was I doing riding in a car with a guy who had taken that advice, and gone into business machines? I was play-acting as an office manager at the time. HERE COMES A DREADLOCKED GUYwith colorful knit cap and “Jamaica”-emblazoned jacket with an amp. Eventually the ensemble assembles and is blasting good-karma jazz vibes into the air. I love jazz because, like me, it goes off on a tangent and, eventually, returns to its theme. BEAT IT, JUST BEAT ITI once chastised artist Mark M. for not taking more interest in seeing exhibits of other artists’ work. He in turn scoffed at my plans to go to Italy because it’s “nothing but a lot of pictures on the wall.” But that’s exactly why I skip the three-day SF International Poetry Festival, despite powerful temptation, because I have to prioritize my own work right now. I do, however, go to photographer/filmmaker Chris Felver’s signing for his new book Beat, at City Lights Books, to obtain his permission to use one of his Ferlinghetti photos in a project of mine. IN ONE OF MY FAVORITE ROOMSin San Francisco, upstairs at City Lights on the “Beat”/poetry floor, I help myself to a plastic glass of red wine and take up my usual post of being the best unknown writer amongst the best of the known. This time, as well, as the Beat-loving writer who was born too late to partake of the heart of the heartbeat of the Beat, unlike so many in San Francisco. I’m out of the in crowd, and the in crowd is crowding around Felver. ONE TIME, THOUGH,the “known” writer at City Lights was Barry Gifford, whose erstwhile studio was down the street from my erstwhile office in Berkeley, and with whom I have a conversational acquaintance. We’d exchanged emails but not yet met. I went up to get my book signed, and when Barry found out who I was, he accorded me a delightful five seconds of celebrity in yelling to his assistant over the crowd of admirers lining up for his autograph, “Oscar! It’s Alexandra! Alexandra’s here!” I didn’t let it go to my head. I had just gulped down his The Last Martini which I’d chosen as my traveling companion to New York by virtue of its quarter-inch spine, and which I read in its entirety waiting for my plane in a remote terminal at LAX. Sometimes when deciding what events to attend, I ask myself, “What would Barry Gifford do? Would Barry Gifford go to this?” As one of the hardest-working, most prolific writers around, he is a role model for productivity. I GIVE A CHEERY HELLOto Jack Hirschman, who, though I’ve published two of his poems here on the ‘dog, one of them “One Day,” also appearing in Beat, gave me his usual perturbed look of not being able to place me. I pass on my usual tactic of reintroducing myself, as he is with a posse. There’s a fabulous picture in Beat of a dark-haired Hirshman in 1981 looking like Jack Palance crossed with Chief Seattle. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen his upper lip. I SEE AN OPENINGto swoop down on Felver as some of his coterie move away from him. I’d emailed him a couple of times with my permission request, but he hadn’t responded, so I go to nag him in person. He knows who I am, but was confounded by all the shit in my email to him. I don’t know what he’s talking about. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Apparently I’d included a link to my column for his info, which at the time was “You are so full of shit!” I was just giving myself shit for being full of shit, I explained. Doesn’t one pretty much have to, every once in a while, to keep oneself grounded? I show him a mock-up of the photo as I intend to use it, and he finally relents, much to my grateful relief, generously ignoring that I’m full of shit. Thanks much, Chris. BILL STOUTof Stout Architectural Books is also there, also not sure where he’d seen me. I remind him I’d worked for XYZ architectural firm about whose founder he’d published a monograph. I was glad to hear in this age of online buying that this niche indy bookshop is still afloat. City Lights will never go under, or we might as well all go under. The San Francisco I want to live in would never allow it. I take my leave and station myself outside the store to wait for the 15 bus. A young man with disheveled hair, wearing a holey sweater and pajama pants with flip-flops, waits with me. I wonder if he really just got out of bed at 8:00 pm. After 45 minutes I hail a cab for which I expect MUNI chief Nathaniel Ford to reimburse me $13.00. In the meantime Hirschman and his posse have trekked over to Specs. Lacking a posse myself, I go home. Christ, Andre the freakin’ Giant has a giant posse—shouldn’t I? It’s OK, my time will come. I just hope it comes before I’m forced to sell my flat! LATER THAT NIGHTI spend four hours poring over the artful compilation of, as the dust jacket enumerates, “images, text, ephemera, artifacts, and reminiscence,” that is Beat. The fabulous panoply of intimate pictures and mementos from some of the most interesting and complex personalities of the twentieth century makes it read like Felver’s personal scrapbook, almost like looking through the keyhole of his life, but it’s also the scrapbook of an era, a veritable treasure chest of Beat jewels. It puts this “collection of remarkable angels on one stage,” to borrow from the 6 Gallery invite. He lives a truly enviable life, and the book gave me the feeling of being welcomed into it and offered some superb aged wine, minus the plastic cup. I HAVE MANAGEDto embrace—physically—one Beat icon—David Amram, whom I met this past June in Lowell, Massachusetts (Jack K’s hometown), where I had flown to partake in some On the Road scroll festivities. I’m informally following the scroll around. Seen it in Las Vegas, San Fran, Lowell and next, this Christmas, in New York. I told Amram the score for “The Manchurian Candidate” has haunted me for decades. He is a powerhouse of talent, energy and soul, and a warm and friendly, accessible legend. The phalanx of amulets he wears around his neck adds magnificent flourish to his dark casual jacket and jeans. He put his arm around me so someone could take three completely blurry photographs of us. At 77, he is a total fox. FOR THOSE OF US WHO ARE JEALOUSbecause we were late on the scene to the Beat phenomenon, don’t worry, there is still plenty of beatitude going around. As Amram closes in his introductory essay to Beat, it’s alive and well “wherever creative people congregate.” If you aspire to be amongst them, don’t you dare try to control your impure thoughts.
Three completely blurry pictures of the author with David Amram ------------------------------------------------------------ I wrote this poem while my out-of-control
Religion or mind control? You be the judge. copyright Alexandra Jones 2007 |
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