A Dallying Dance with Death

So obviously oblivious, the dilapidated wretch's coat of life slips away, barring freedom no more for the worm's sweet meats. The functionality of loneliness escapes the bereaved's lips, laughing a lonely translucent screen of delightedly tangled emotions. Softly, the innumerable reasons and half-chanced perforations to mortality tap listlessly on the bent shoulders of absolution, screaming the courting whisper to glide with abject reasons to a double step tango. However, there are "no mistakes in the tango, not like life. It's simple. That's what makes the tango so great. If you make a mistake, get all tangled up, just tango on." Leaving a succinctly real imprint upon the soul's clinging, wide-eyed attempts to not falter or fail. A dance that leaves all breathless, astonished at a previously unfound swagger towards surreal and superfluous thoughts of grandeur, immortality, and all other child-esque failings that claim victory over the most vivacious and real thoughts of reality.
Dumfounded explications of unwrought misery falter at the adjunct truth that the static conclusion empties every cup, whether partially filled or brimming full. Cataclysm's that gape their maws, ferociously fanged, yet harmlessly tethered, bringing disillusioned fear unto the un-fearable. Apathy objects no less, but delights ever more, when confronted with intelligible wants and cast off needs; levering fact away from fiction until fictional facts constitute lightly trodden footsteps absent of a path. The eternal gaze from eyes, clouded with the mysteries of the ever-after, glance accursedly at sobbing lines of ritual. Peace, a rarely found entity, holds no immeasurable sway over angelic choruses or satanic riffs; however, it finds a loosely abridged juxtaposition within the six feet under Blake's reveled marriage. Emaciated, rotting words hold no king's title over rented plots of plastic carnations while bloating and bothersome eulogies puff pretension through the bellows of summarizing the un-summarizable.
The prize of unwavering determination skips through the fingers of all but those with the cyclical knowledge of life. Fear of no control, pain, thoughts left unexpressed... the nightmares of human protagonation swept with fiery vehemence provides no excuse or allowance for the self-pity of the inevitable. Life is better lived than watched, better watched than feared, and better feared than apathized .

A Storyteller in Each of Us

We find at some point in our life we feel a detachment from the life that has given us the substance of our past. We lose the vivacity and color that enchanted us for so long. We feel lost in a sea, trapped in a boat made of stone, slowly sinking from what makes us...us. Our displaced identity follows like a shadow, ever slinking behind our shoulder, it's length supplanted by where each of us are in our respective journeys in life. Mario Vargas novel The Storyteller shows one of the main characters, Saul, in such a situation. Saul's displaced cultural identity detaches him from his Western roots, deeply seeped in a dominant discourse, and eventually show's Saul's slip back to what made him who he was. Moreover, the arguments for and against the effects of globalization that skate throughout the lines of the novel effect Saul's search for a new identity and his overture to the true chord of his life. 

The storyteller resides in all of us, we all have past, present, and future experiences that give weight to this world. Whether it is escaping to a foreign country or a lengthy walk in a favorite destination, we escape for moments or months from who and what we really are, we exist in a discordant harmony with  everyone and no one. Tell your story if someone asks, not only they, but you, will be surprised at what you hear and find. 

Know that knowing is not knowing that you know

First I want to share a quote by Socrates and include a little-known secondary quote relating to it.

"The only wisdom is in knowing that you know nothing."

-Socrates


"Oh, here we go! Can't we get through one meal without your goddamn philosophizing? No, I guess not, because you think you're soooo deep, don't you? You just can't get over what a cool guy you are, can you? All day long I have to hear this, on and on, beauty and truth and virtue blah ba blah and I'M SICK OF IT! YOU HEAR ME?! Xenophon's wife doesn't have to put up with this shit! And why? Because HE has an ACTUAL JOB! Oooooooh, crazy, isn't it? He goes to his ACTUAL JOB and does ACTUAL WORK! Oooooooooh! Philosophize that, you ass."


-Mrs. Socrates

So there was this guy, you know the kind of guy I'm talking about, yeah that guy. The one who is kind  

of a dick, ok ok I am being a little nice, this guy is a complete pile o' shit. He had these preconceived notions that he was some all-mighty, king-like god...(<--haha I know right, what a dingus) well any-who this guy, whom we shall (for the sake of this story) call Suez (he was a part-mexican border jumper or something) really liked sheep... I mean REALLY liked sheep. He would disguise himself as something completely innocent and unassuming, like Justin Bieber or Amanda Bynes-esque, and this guy, Suez, would fly around the whole goddamn world, stopping off and sneaking into fields (like it takes a fucking ninja to sneak in to a field...) and he would get jiggy with the sheep, yeah this guy was into some serious beastailitly. Gross. I know. Anyway there was this one night when he was feeling particularly engorged by his baaaa-d desires (get it) and he flew over to Copenhagen and sneakily snuck (like he was some sort of Mission Impossible badass) in to a sheep field where gasp there were some sheep. He saw this one in particular who was... I don't know...hot? curly? swexy? (sweater-sexy?), it got him all hot and bothered. So he disguised himself as David Shwimmer ( you know that guy who kind of looks like a goose) and snuck right up to this swexy sheep and in his deepest Shwimmiest voice he says, "Hey big girl, you look like you could use a stress reliever." (It was getting sheared the next day, so it was a little worried that its wool wouldn't be swexy enough)

The sheep replied, "Baaaa...baaa.baaaaa...baaaaa.baaaaa," Loosely translated to "O M G! David Shwimmer! OMG OMG!!!." 

"Ohhhh yeahhhhhh," Suez thought to himself, "Doesn't even recognize me...because no one has really ever seen me without one of my super cool disguises....hmm so how the hell would anyone know it was me?" (It was because he had a super terrible tan all the time... he was just oblivious...or dumb....or dumbly oblivious)  but he starts to seduce this sheep (I know right!? What the fuck) and the sheep starts to say "hey, hey, lets slow it down here.... I am not a shlut (sheep-slut)." But Suez would have none of it and in all his power (ok ok it's not that much power, I mean its a sheep and he's a guy; why don't you try it with a Grizzly you ass) he held down the poor sheep and raped her... And oh I almost forgot! Suez had a wife... pretty crazy, I know. But somehow his wife found out what he had been up to (checked his iPhone) and went into a cool and reserved rage on him, but shit hit the fan when she found out who the sheep was (like it was the sheep's fault or something) and she went to Copenhagen and she found this sheep who had been shlutting around with her man so she did what any pissed off wife would do and she made the sheep's wool all itchy and scratchy, and that's why wool to this day is still itchy.... And pissed off wives still bitchy. 

The Initiation and Creation of Hammerknee

Pain...what a broad word that bears so much strife, bares so much blood, bares the broken heart; crushing fortitude, allowing growth, prevailing life. The universality of being injured dilapidates the soul, whereas pain is felt, the feeling of feeling that pain is compressed and adversely delineates the fragile wall of courageous endurance that, in indifference, can bleed worse than that of any wound.

We, as humans, of course carry our stories of pain with the zany zeal more accustomed to children at a carnival; yet we will throw a pathetic attempt of hesitancy in telling the story.

So there was my attempt...

It all begins two and a half years ago, when in the throes of full summer, a young man attempted and succeeding-ly failed in reserving the sanctity and health of his body. In a hope to save a life, the life of a fluffy, soft euphoric creature, the life of a young canine, the life of a puppy, he instilled the strict constitutions of pain firmly in to his heart for all of his short eternity.
This young puppy had forgone all warnings and strong commands to revel away from the flowing, watery destiny that hid in shadows and swirling currents. In mistaking gravity for firmness of foot, or rather of paw, the young puppy fell to the water, faster than Hades to the underworld, faster than headless Medusa...
The crashing water grew in noise tenfold, time faltered towards an inconsistent standstill, and the young man had no choice in his choice of action, for how could anyone let a puppy be swept away in a guilty torrent of apathy?
Leaping from his rock perch, he sailed in a plummet of adrenaline towards the young puppy thrashing miserably and desperately, inevitability rushing soon to wrap him in it's watery cocoon. It was in a sudden, startlingly flash of reality that the young man was made aware of his path of descent, a descent of doom in many ways. Boulders flickered haphazardly beneath the rifling, sun-specacled water. Boulders that were very real, very sharp, and just beneath the surface.
In that brief moment of staggering realization that all witness when en-route towards the despairing path of pain, the young man twisted his body as if hoping to change the unchangeable.
A splash to rival any krackenous monster, the young man came down with an arm around the puppy, while his right knee came down around the edge of one those boulders. Pain flashed, pain seared, pain as real as dragons, roared and racked through his body...
His knee had absorbed the very essence of brute force, his patella shattering apart, much akin to the shatter of ice on a frost-swept day. His vision swam as though trying to carry him from the watery clutches itself; the puppy howled in the indignation that only a young puppy about to drown could hope to.
The current pulled the young man farther away from the shore, but somehow, through the pain his survival took precedent and one arm stroking, the furious persistence of that sun-specaled water clinging to him as if he were Odysseus and it Calypso..
Crawling to land, and helped by the woman who's puppy had decided upon the day's aquatic adventures, he lay shuddering and gasping.
Thirty minutes later, his knee was being stitched up and he was sent on his way with cautions of a deep bone bruise and some bleeding, with no pain relief to be found or prescribed...
He sat awake for over 24 hours, in a pain that description could only hope to emulate, with only the soft, pathetic brush of tylenol to help appease his constant silent screams..
It was not till 32 hours later, after twisting the knee in a fit of an unavoidable lapse of balance, and no significant pain relief, that it was conclusively determined the serious nature of this injury...
18 hours later... lying in wait for surgery
4 hours later... so hopped up on anesthesia that recurrent warnings to breathe were more often than not, and the new addition of three screws to hold together that damn important kneecap...
The rest of that summer.... a loss of two jobs, the inability to walk, move his right leg, sleep on his stomach, popping pain pills like tic-tacs, and a complete unraveling of the social life of one who has yet to experience his first summer being 21. It was more than physical pain, it was a pain that was resplendently preserved through pain and the self-pity that accompanied with it.
A new respect was developed for the guys in movies, you know the ones, the guys who mobsters threaten to break their kneecaps...well all this young man can advise is keep those knees healthy!

My kneecap looking like Pac-Man




The Letter H---The creation of hammer knee

That Hottie Helen

So lets get the breakdown, the down low, the fast and skinny of a big ol' fat page out of Calasso's book. I took the random liberty to dig deeper into pg. 127 of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, and boy oh boy, I hopped aboard that brain train and found myself speeding hap-hazardously towards Helen's birth/life/ and all the problems it caused. "The life of Helen marked a moment of precarious, fleeting equilibrium, when, thanks to the deceitful cunning of Zeus, necessity and beauty were superimposed the one over the other" (Calasso, 127). It wasn't Helen's various doing's that caused her trouble, it was the "deceitful cunning" of our good ol' serialrapist boy Zeus. And now back to what made Helen who she was, it was the combination, no not combination, but overlapping of necessity and beauty, creating a lady so fine that Calasso call's it one of "the most formidable theological gamble[s] of Zeus's reign"when he rapes Nemesis <-- what a name! Perhaps in the raping of Nemesis, Zeus in turn created a nemesis in Nemesis-- Calasso goes on to state that "provok[ing] a forced convergence of beauty and necessity was to challenge the law of heaven" (same page in Calasso). So Zeus was challenging his own laws? The cosmic laws?
But that challenge is what turned Helen's life into such a sad state of affairs... I mean here we have the most beautiful woman in the world and she can't even enjoy it, can't even swing her hips with over-emphasized sway without starting a bloody war! Calasso ends this little gem of a paragraph by saying that (me)n would go on fantasizing of her, long after she was gone. In that instance, did Helen leave behind a legacy of beauty? Can all pretty woman give thanks and praise to her who suffered quite literally as being the most beautiful woman in the world. (Makes me think how a Victorias Secret model would hold up next to Helen?) whoa... no wonder men still dream about it.
I know this section wasn't chalked full of startlingly wondrous and superimposed myths, but Helen is still referenced today as a comparison to great beauty So there has to be something more behind that story than what we know....like what Calasso just shared with us!!

That talk of Dionysus today in class and sharing such stories of being under the transcending  hallucinogenic spell of drugs/alcohol brought me back almost a year ago to this day where some friends and myself found ourselves quite suddenly (took a little while) under the trance of psilocybin in a day that I will never forget. Anyway I wrote a poem at the end of that day, still feeling the effects, that helped to turn that memory into the best day ever.  Here it is:

Kaleidoscope Skies and Wizard Staffs- A Journey

Glittering trees waved
tendrils of color
Waves, scattered with laughter,
and views of new worlds.

We were boys of the bog, taken
away from our troubles and swept
to the childish giddiness of
old.

Where cameos of adventure gripped
all; The Steen’s and Max’s, Beersti’s
and Dub’s, and of course Deucel.
We were us, scattered together
in the beauty of our world.

A world without apathy, a quintessential
paradise where weird waves swept us
too and fro.

Rivers of dead trees flowed as gently
as a laughing brook, flecked with
the deciduous yellows of Fall.

A Fall that melted into a pulsating
being, beckoning us, waving to us,
enveloping us.

Where wizards ripped openings
into the clouds, a magic that connected
us into a discordant harmony.

How the sky faceted into a jeweled
kaleidoscope, spinning a myriad of
pieced clouds into a hypnotically
translucent painting.

We were beautiful on the edge of our
own world, pioneers of life
that witnessed eagles as majestic
as the dragons of ancient lore,
carrying the moon to the heavens.

We were swallowed into it all, and
together we were lost in a place we
all hope to find again.

Photo by: Kjersti Johnson 

The Rig Veda

My creation story was the Rig veda:

related portals: Religion. sister projects: Wikipedia article. The Rig Veda is a collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns counted among the four Hindu religious texts known as the Vedas. The Rig Veda was likely composed between roughly 1700–1100 BCE, making it one of the oldest texts of any Indo-Iranian language, one of the world's oldest religious texts. It was preserved over centuries by oral tradition alone and was probably not put in writing before the Early Middle Ages. The Rig Veda is considered to be oldest written book on the planet, and was likely composed between roughly 1500–1200 BCE. It is the earliest of the four Hindu religious scriptures known as the Vedas. It consists of 1,017 hymns (1,028 including the apocryphal valakhilya hymns 8.49-8.59) composed in Vedic Sanskrit, many of which are intended for various sacrifical rituals. These are contained in 10 books, known as Mandalas. This long collection of short hymns is mostly devoted to the praise of the gods. However, it also contains fragmentary references to historical events, notably the struggle between the early Vedic peoples (known as Aryans) and their enemies, the Dasa. The first of The Vedas.- Wikipedia also here is a little youtube video on it.

Pity of the Gods?

It is interesting to view the shift of religion over time as it relates to the Greeks, and then later Romans; how they changed from a shame culture to a guilt culture. How deities were renamed and viewed with reassigned roles. How they viewed their paths in life extrinsically and then suddenly (a few hundred years) intrinsically. Yet Calasso points out another regime that men went through pertaining to the gods, in fact a couple regimes. "Mans relationship with the gods passed through two regimes: conviviality, then rape (quite blunt isn't he?). The third regime, the modern one, is that of indifference" (Calasso, 52-3). Quite the shift if you stop and think about it... I mean "there was a time when the gods would sit down alongside mortals" (Calasso, 53). They were buds, bros, homies on the high-downlow! (Get it) Man and the gods were pals and then the gods got all shifty (ahhemm Zeus) and started raping people, and there was crying and bastards, blood and swans, and who's going to forget about that bull! And then (a few hundred/thousand years later) there is text, oral delivery, and outright devotion (or atheism) to it all. Makes you wonder what the dinner conversation would be like in this day and age if God, Allah, Muhammad, Buddah, Jesus (a mexican native), the Dali Lama (for kicks), and Jesus (the one with the sandals) all happened to swing in (on their way to bingo) on that forlorn Wednesday evening (right when you were about to watch your show!), and invite you to sit down over some chinese...? Most people would probably freak out, yelling "oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God."
Meanwhile God is like "Yes my child? Yes my child? Ok. What the (rhymes with buck) do you want!?"
...Ok, ok, sorry I got a little carried away there but you can see where the picture was going... and yes it was painted in a --insert verb-- way (didn't/don't mean to offend anyone).  I guess I was rather intrigued in the human emotion and its changes and adaptations over the course of millennia and how will change in the next hundreds of years?