Most-Basic Vocabulary: a poem

You are a liar

If you’ve felt so confident

Eternally flat footed

Participating in this unraveling happening

Not confused from the head down

I doubt you

Very much

I distrust you

As a politician

As a teenage smirk

But somewhere we are not liars

You and I

We and they

The summer months

A vital clarity

Some dangerous dodge

Or whatever peak of heaven you please

The hairs of your arms and neck

Sobering up

And your being follows

For me: that place where the grass grows high

Grows straw colored

Where it blows in the wind

Endearingly

The soft wind alone

The gentle golden hills alive

I only ruminate of shy young women

Or those of soft grinning wisdom

With the same unflinching affection

And there, off the well-traveled freeways

Along lonely one-laners

I make my way

To those vistas and meadows

Those places that are mine somehow

And they welcome me as an ally

Here, my highest rituals I embrace:

Trying to remember the central things

That nothing’s ever truly personal

That resentment is a child’s fiction

That if you want to improve yourself

Be content to look stupid and foolish

And out here, I come to rest

Come to retrieve the rudimentary

Some most-basic vocabulary

That appears fully pronounced

When I make the effort

Coming back

To me

Like the smells of my childhood

And true rest is never with others

Not yet

For I wish the lot of them away

All those interruptions

All that arresting of my development

They don’t give off quiet

What all my veins long for

Where I may hear the source of things

Hear and feel the wind

Know the wind

Of this self I am among

That’s what I want

For compromise never really suits the appetite

The stomach never settles

The noise lingers on

And breakfast, so hard to eat

The mind

Turning over

The enslaving duties yet to be done

The body already resistant

For the food cannot be taken

With the worthy spirit

Of a hungry man

The sacred respect it deserves

If you’d ask me sincerely

I’d say that I want to be flying

Absolutely at the front of the game

Developing the damned thing myself

Fuck the benefit

I want to feel it, I’d say

Through the veins

When I breathe

It’ll be there

At-hand

Birds gotta fly

I’ve gotta fly

Far beyond the bullshit:

That entrapped enlightenment

Prescribed by the smart,

Well-adjusted fucks within the institution

And out there

On the edge of the thing

All warm and soft with kerosene

I’m swaying with the golden grass

Breathing it in

Sick with health

Melting in violent balance

The health of having nowhere to go

Having no one to please

I make me way

To my most-basic vocabulary

Like a man who finds himself interesting

After the second or third drink

Conjuring up that thing I was to be getting on with

That thing I meant to do

Have meant to do

That thing daydreams often storied

The quiet of real work hungered for

That true education

That emendation of the intellect

Remember

You’ve sat against yourself

In the screaming body of a victim

Your body

So many years

Always digging yourself out

The body like a wet towel twisted dry

And the familiar disease we call consciousness

The crippling possession by worried thought

That continual negation wherein the energy escapes

Every thought checked by another

Possessed by the community

Itself split and dead

Never able to swim wholeheartedly

In your most deliberate moments

The only felt problem worth addressing:

How to overcome destructive thinking

You would do well to remember, Pilgrim

If you want to play your card

Forget that you are injured

It does no good

To leave the highest trajectory

For another time

Play that damn card

Nod at it like you nod at a good wine

All there is can be summed up thus:

Unaccountable weirdness and unaccountable longing

And so nod at it

And throw everything into it

There is nothing else to do

And only when you throw it all in

All your energy spent

Are you hit by that absurdly good news

That health the wind relies upon

That sees everything as an art

As an endearing art

On 'Recoursing'

Wasted time is murder of sorts. You sense that in order to not commit this crime you must be able to ‘recourse.’ To recourse is to return to your highest purpose, to get in touch with the warmth and meaning of the endeavors of your circumstances. Such a movement, in order to be an effective tool, must be made available in a variety of habitats and moods. It must be utilized not just in moments of ease and deliberation, but also in moments of crisis, and in moments of near despair and pervasive dissatisfaction. More important still, this most-basic-vocabulary, this grounding project, will need to be sensed when distraction sets in or is about to occur – for movements of distraction and escape are far more prevalent than crisis in an environment of air conditioning, automobiles, Avon, and supermarkets.

So, the most-basic-vocabulary will need to be fleshed out, translated from experiential value to existential project. Trust in the project is essential. Deliberate projects, that is, goals that one makes a resolution to bring about do not often work. Sleep sets in. One forgets the ‘why’ of the project and so the effort to remain resolute loses its justification subjectively.

The problem of how to remain resolute has been with you for sometime – at least since you independently undertook to face your fears socially. Philosophically, you noticed Gurdjieff/Ouspensky and Krishnamurti to be talking about this problem: How to stay awake, they would say. Hyrum Smith in his book on Natural Laws of Success articulated many helpful things in this direction. Yet there is still the problem. There is still the submitting to sleep, the forgetting, the hopeless lost feeling of having no most-basic-vocabulary ‘at-hand’, for you often fall off, give in to pressures, to peers, you often indulge in entertainment and other releases, waking up out of their resultant hallucinations days later. As for meditation, you stopped looking at this direction because of its hurdle of boredom. Perhaps it is essential to get beyond this.

There is, though, the yearning for purity, for clean honesty, for a practice and a walking of the path at a stable speed.

If you blame a lot of this suffering from self-forgetting on environment, and you feel a lot of it is because of the ‘noise of thought’ of the familiar – from expectation and poor ways of living of family and community – then how do you live upright, stably, purely, in this environment until you move up to Arcata in January? How to prevent entanglement?

Discipline is necessary but not sufficient. For you will need to develop trust in the reason for the application of the discipline if you are not to develop resitance to it and so fall into entanglements. The search for Quiet will have to be subservient to the deliberate project. In the past Quiet was sought when it was not in play even if it was in conflict with what the high project necessitated. You have noticed the limitations of this. Quiet is essential. This is true. But it is not an end in itself. Or perhaps it is, perhaps the highest end is Quiet. You notice however, that such an end will not suit your circumstances, circumstances wherein action and decision are demanded. And so you will, for the moment, let the highest end shift and leave the evaluation of its meaning and assumptions for another time. This is where trust must come into play if ‘recourse’ will be a useful tool in times of distraction and crisis.