The beautiful lady and I have taken a grand nest in the Silverlake hillside.

It’s a spanish hut with white walls and wood floors. Birds live here.

The walks are on a slope and the sun can touch the ground in some places. The trees do in most others.

I’ve been shuffling between hard and soft images a lot lately.

Opening the fridge, I can find an equal share of celluloid and fresh greens.

This hill is a new canvas. Every walk is a new picture…painting…thought…expression.

Building shoe racks and buying time.

Strange dreams are comfortable, but only when lucid.

I’ll be on the resting drive.

*

Would you like to see?

Dear little Six – Billionth Living Person: As one of the newest members of a notoriously inquisitive species, it probably won’t be too long before you start asking the two $64,000 questions with which the other 5,999,999,999 of us have been wrestling for some time.How did we get here? And, now that we are here, how shall we live?Oddly – as if six billion of us weren’t enough to be going on with – it will almost certainly be suggested to you that the answer to the question of origins requires you to believe in the existence of a further, invisible, innefable Being “somewhere up there”, an omnipotent creature whom we poor limited creatures are unable even to perceive, much less to understand.That is, you will be strongly encouraged to imagine a heaven, with at least one god in residence.This sky god, it’s said, made the universe by churning its matter in a giant pot. Or, he danced. Or, he vomited creation out of himself. Or, he simply called it into being, and lo, it Was. In some of the more interesting creation stories, the singly mighty sky god is subdivided into many lesser forces – junior dieties, avatars, gigantic metamorphic “ancestors” whose adventures create the landscape, or the whimsical, wanton, meddling, cruel pantheons of the great polytheisms, whose wild doings will convince you that the real engine of creation was lust; for infinite power, for too easily broken human bodies, for clouds of glory. But it’s only fair to add that there are also stories which offer the message that the primary creative impulse was, and is, love.Many of these stories will strike you extremely beautiful, and therefore seductive. Unfortunately, however, you will not be required to make a purely literary response to them. Only the stories of dead religions can be appreciated for their beauty. Living religions require much more of you. So you will be told that belief in “your” stories, and adherence to the rituals of worship that have grown up around them, must become a vital part of your life in the crowded world. They will be called the heart of your culture, even of your individual identity.

It is possible that they may at some point come to feel inescapable, not in the way that the truth is inescapable, but in the way that a jail is. They may at some point cease to feel like the texts in which human beings have tried to solve a great mystery, and feel, instead, like the pretexts for other properly anointed human beings to order you around. And it’s true that human history is full of the public oppression wrought by the charioteers of the gods. In the opinion of religious people, however, the private comfort that religion brings more than compensates for the evil done in its name.

As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn’t get it right. There was no celestial churning, no maker’s dance, no vomiting of galaxies, no snake or kangaroo ancestors, no Valhalla, no Olympus, no six-day conjuring trick followed by a day of rest. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

But here’s something genuinly odd. The wrongness of the sacred tales hasn’t lessened the zeal of the devout in the least. If anything, the sheer out-of-step zaniness of religion leads the religious to insist ever more stridently on the importance of blind faith.

As a result of this faith, by the way, lt has proved impossible, in many parts of the world, to prevent the human race’s numbers from swelling alarmingly. Blame the overcrowded planet at least partly on the misguidedness of the races spiritual guides. In your own lifetime, you may witness the arrival of the nine billionth world citizen.
(If too many people are being born as a result, in part, of religious strictures against birth control, then too many people are also dying because religious culture, by refusing to face the facts of human sexuality, also refuses to fight against sexually transmitted diseases.)

There are those who say that the great wars of the new century will once again be wars of religion, jihads and crusades, as they were in the Middle Ages. I don’t believe them, or not in the way they mean it. Take a look at the Muslim world, or rather the Islamist world, to use the word coined to describe Islam’s present day “political arm”. The divisions between its great powers (Afghanistan against Iran against Iraq against Saudi Arabia against Syria against Egypt) are what strike you most forcefully. There’s very little resembling a common purpose. Even after the non-Islamic NATO fought a war for the Muslim Kosovan Albanians, the Muslim world was slow in coming forward with much needed humanitarian aid.

The real wars of religion are the wars religions unleash against ordinary citizens within their “sphere of influence.” They are wars of the godly against the largely defenceless – American fundamentalists against pro-choice doctors, Iranian mullahs against their country’s Jewish minority, Hindu fundamentalists in Bombay against that city’s increasingly fearful Muslims.
The victors in that war must not be the closed-minded, marching into battle with, as ever, God on their side. To choose unbelief is to choose mind over dogma, to trust in our humanity instead of all these dangerous divinities. So, how did we get here? Don’t look for the answer in story books. Imperfect human knowledge may be a bumpy, pot-holed street, but it’s the only road to wisdom worth taking. Virgil, who believed that the apiarist Aristaeus could spontaneously generate new bees from the rotting carcess of a cow, was closer to a truth about origins than all the revered old books.
The ancient wisdoms are modern non-senses.

Live in your own time, use what we know and, as you grow up, perhaps the human race will finally grow up with you and put aside childish things. As the song says, “It’s easy if you try.”

As for mortality, the second great question – how to live? What is right action, and what wrong?- it comes down to your willingness to think for yourself. Only you can decide if you want to be handed down the law by priests, and accept that good and evil are somehow external to ourselves.To my mind, religion – even at its most sophisticated – essentially infantilizes our ethical selves by setting infallible moral Arbiters and irredeemably immoral Tempters above us; the eternal parents, good and bad, light and dark, of the supernatural realm.

How, then, are we to make ethical choices without a divine rulebook or judge? Is unbelief just the first step on the long slide into the brain death of cultural relativism, according to which many unbearable things – female circumcision, to name just one – can be excused on culturally specific grounds, and the universality of human rights, too can be ignored?(This last piece of moral unmaking finds supporters in some of the world’s most authoritarian regimes, and also, unnervingly, on the editorial page of the Daily Telegraph,UK.)

Well, no, it isn’t, but the reasons for saying so aren’t clear-cut. Only hard-line ideology is clear-cut. Freedom, which is the word I use for the secular-ethical position, is inevitably fuzzier. Yes, freedom is that space in which contradiction can reign, it is a never-ending debate. It is not in itself the answer to the question of morals, but the conversation about that question. And it is much more than mere relativism, because it is not merely a never-ending talk show, but a place in which choices are made, values defined and defended.

Intellectual freedom, in European history, has mostly meant freedom from the restraints of the Church and not the state.
This is the battle Voltaire was fighting, and it’s also what all six billion of us could do for ourselves, the revolution in which each of us could play our small, six-billionth part; once and for all we could refuse to allow priests, and the fictions on whose behalf they claim to speak, to be the policemen of our liberties and behavior. Once and for all we could put the stories back into the books, put the books back on the shelves, and see the world undogmatized and plain.

Imagine there’s no heaven, my dear Six-Billionth, and at once the sky’s the limit.

• Extract from Letters to the Six Billionth World Citizen, published in English by Uitgeverij Podium, Amsterdam.

(//This is also context fit for today’s struggles in the socio-political and tyrannical sphere. Take a look around…Iran is crumbling…N. Korea is pushing buttons…Iraq and Afghanistan are wasting away…And so many other nations are beginning to reach closer into the possibility that it allcould be for nothing. Nothing but a system of control and fear that keeps the dying machine from shutting down. Ah, Renaissance…//)

Thank you dredg for resurfacing this article for your art and our eyes//ears.

Lately, it seems that being lazy or restful is not quite on the menu.

Not that I’m complaining, though… I’ve been quite content actually. I share my time with a new friend, creating new inspirations…new thoughts…a new outlook on things that I don’t believe I’ve thought about in a good long while.

Yet, every time I sleep on my own, it doesn’t feel like sleep. It plays like another chore, just like the rest of them as the days go on into nights and what not. Almost as if lights are beaming through my bed and mind alike while I sleep…burning like traces of sun flares through my eye lids…and I’m watching the whole show. All night.

It is of course just a matter of rest and revival that I’m wearing thin upon. It is of course just all in my head. It is of course that I find my job to be the same thing every day, with no way out other than dreaming about the next outing from that stale, cold, brown slab that supports plastic parts from the penny saver’s business section…otherwise called a desk by those that still believe in it. It’s true, my patience has worn thin and this town is poison.

I only look forward to the moment that I can actually work within the craft that I love…not for it. Not for them. Not for anyone, but it.

A matter of rest…a matter of revival…a matter of change…a matter of believing that some day, not just the personal life will be lovely, but all of it will come full circle and I’ll be happy with every waking moment.

Aside from weekdays being similar to pulling teeth, the world is not at an end.

Posted in thoughts Tagged: love, photography, play, sleep, Work, writing ]]> http://peaceinvisible.com/2009/04/23/a-matter-of-rest-and-revival/feed/ 0 peaceinvisible http://peaceinvisible.com/2008/10/08/my-brain-is-a-forest/ http://peaceinvisible.com/2008/10/08/my-brain-is-a-forest/#comments Wed, 08 Oct 2008 20:57:29 +0000 peaceinvisible http://peaceinvisible.wordpress.com/2008/10/08/my-brain-is-a-forest/ ]]>

My Brain is a forest.

My skull is the sky.

My blood is the pond that surrounds like a moat.

A crackle in the fire.

A cackle in the moonlight.

I’ll twist my fingers around the steel braids of my snare woven heart.

I’ll listen for the sound of trees stretching and falling.

I’ll hear nothing.

Nothing but a faint whisper of the mocking birds above.

I’ll carve my name in trees that stand underneath my eye lids.

Darren sits on his tattered high-back sofa as the war plays on the distorted television screen. Although appearing to watch as the bombs, bullets, and guts of a lost generation rip through his living room, our tired old boy gazes upon the endless seams of the table that cradles the screen. His hair: clean-cut, yet settled without care. His eyes: watered. Not from tears, but rather the swift irritation stemming from the dry fanned air in his locked down den. Darren stares as though he faces a million year ultimatum like the stalingrad from the old days of Butch Cassidy or Billy the Kid. To whom does he owe for such a swift immersion into a lackluster bliss? Averting from all things that matter for a so-called state of normality, more bombs and embedded distress cover the landscape of Darren’s eardrums as he remembers what silence used to feel like as a color in his head.

Once, not long ago, our boy was deeply in love with the strange days that tempt all the living creatures to reach out and be somebody. Whether large or small, simple or complex, mortal or divine; such feelings only remain out of contempt for those that seemed to have passed him by while he was suspended in a moral noose. Sharp cramps shoot up Darren’s arms as he briefly looks down to confirm that his fingers have been neglected and tightly clenched into his knees in the same way children animate make-believe spiders on their momentary lovers’ limbs.

The only thing Darren fears is that he will relapse into a mental state that has slowly consumed him for the last few lingering weeks of his life. Something that cannot be explained without discomfort: a state of sleep in the form of an internal combustion mixed with a second and unknown realm inside his waking life takes over in waves of purple rouge. What started as an unusual event every so often has now become a perfectly measured routine that is entirely involuntary. Call it a trance, or coma if you will. Whatever it may be, and wherever Darren goes while inside of himself, he hasn’t quite yet realized that this secondary world is not true to the reality that we all know so well.

Blood begins to trickle out of the edge of Darren’s right nostril and fills a line through the spaced pores of his lip, down to his chin. His eyes suddenly adjust and focus onto the television’s fanfare as if he had not even been aware of it at all. Darren is awake now. Darren will be dead soon. Whether he knows it or not, he will be dead and he will not be resistant to such a notion of the things to come. Even if it were staring him down like wolves, Darren will not run from his death. He is done running, for now until forever.

These are our letters from yesterday.