A young soldier's body lies on the operating table of an army field hospital, one leg mangled, chest cut open, a doctor massaging his heart. He stops, looks up at the weary doctors and nurses standing around.
"Does anyone have any suggestions?"
They are all silent. He pulls a sheet over the body. They all stand looking away from each other in extreme fatigue and silent prayer.
So much goes to failure of MISSION these days. It's the factor no one wants to talk about in the suicide rate of soldiers, and the elephant in the room that makes light conversation more negotiable. Coming home from work in a trauma or cancer center even that fails. Nothing to say. Just give me the drugs. Try to do a good thing, people explode all over you,
"Who do you think you are, progressive liberal scum!? WHAT do you think you know? Who died & said you could play Che Guevara?" We become a soft place to pound stress & fear into. So what are THEY afraid of?
As lovers or fighters or wage slaves we reach out, hands waving in the dark, trying to find a place or a file in which to put time spent as mistaken identities.
What did we do about it? What COULD we do without a "we" when somebody turned out the lights at the Statue Of Liberty and Slimeman, the super sociopath, crawled up out of The East River and slithered up Broadway shaking people down for rent on properties he did not own.
The weird thing was how puny the resistance was, how he went thru every legal and physical barrier as if the fix was in, and it's the fix we're in.
If it feels like the end of the world I may be reclining, drink in hand, in one of the deck chairs on the Titanic but I'm right in there with you.
I was right in there with you tho we never met. I was part of the 60s Resistance, marched in Washington, DC, & Memphis for the garbage workers' strike after MLK was shot. I remember the Edmund Pettis Bridge where they turned the dogs & water canon on peaceful protesters & now from that same bridge to see the white supremacists (what are THEY afraid of?) waving banners....heartbreaking, but we mustn't let it. Bearing witness is still SOMETHING.... tho i do it as a clown...ESPECIALLY if i do it as a clown.
It is not a tragedy that facades and diamond studded robes have fallen away from ugly and inconvenient truths, it's a tragi farce they were up so long.
But the enduring community of nature is unbroken. Only The Tower Of Babel is falling like a controlled demolition.
The real community, Wordsworth's
"Primal sympathy, that having been, must ever be."
is always there, in communion, with nature and all too human nature, in those certain acts of bravery and kindness that survive even death. Which having been must ever be. Always there. Whether the all too human community continues or not, nothing has changed, the TELEOS and LOGOS, the intelligence of nature (from which all intelligence necessarily derives its just governance) is neither increased nor diminished. And it's the same chance we always had. The odds don't count the chances. Never did. Never will. And death is ineffable which means it's too much nothing to talk about and yet, and still is
that redeeming grace, a motion OUTWARD beyond our sight and comfort.
And now will the real community please stand up, clowns and all? Its politics is local, VERY local, it runs thru friends and neighbors, the dirt beneath your feet, the air you breathe. So BREATHE!
So TALK to your neighbors locally and globally. TALK to your enemies. Acknowledge. If terrorism is not a country, name calling is not an argument. And that cuts both ways. Progressive Liberal having become a whipping post how about LIBERTARIAN? (for communities that stand together because they stand alone against the tyranny of government by big money?) Something the whole family can enjoy?
I think of the 76 mayors, starting with NYC's Bill Deblasio, and especially on this independence day, hundreds of community groups rising to fill the voids left by sold out "representatives" in Congress, those members of the real and enduring community who say,
No. HELL no. We will NOT profile, we will not stop and frisk. We will not do the Border Patrol or ICE's job. Show us chapter and verse where it says there is any duty except TO DISOBEY immoral or illegal orders and we will show you a Bible written by the National Enquirer.
YES it's partly theater but even more important for its ability to reveal ugly truths from a beautiful distance. I think of the prayers and cries of anguish during Wesley Clark Jr's apology at DAPLE to Chief Leonard Crow Dog for genocide against the first Americans. Yes it's theater but we need everything it can pull out of the darkness before we die lest we have lived and loved in vain.
It doesn't stop there. i didn't stop there. 1988 i made a shrine to a dead dog surrounded by flowers on West Speedway. It was called "Secret Identity". It said "Beautiful is it not the end of the world?" (it said in subscript our mathematical identity: we are part & parcel of that intelligence of nature that is neither increased nor diminished, therefore we are part and parcel of that darkness that hell is said to have.) 1989 dressed as The Ladybug Man i walked across Tucson 114 miles E to W & N to S, carrying two dummies, a pack and Ladybugs and Mesquite and wildflower seeds for gardeners, to measure the SPRAWL of Tucson with my body and created shrines that were violently torn up so they MUST have said SOMETHING(!), 1990 i wrapped myself in newspapers about the coming first Gulf war and set them (and me in them) on fire in front of the Federal Building. Useless. Useless. Voice crying in the political wilderness of sausage factories. Critics were offended. "This isn't art. Go take a hike! (What you wanted to do anyway!)" OK FINE...whatEVER! But it doesn't stop there. i didn't stop there. I started a micro farm in a barrio by a golf course, because my art friends & organizations i'd helped for years were getting kicked out of downtown and the gentrification steamroller was just getting started.
i started Casa Goofy International to create a global conversation using local examples. And with clowns at the wheel, and coming right atcha because in an absurd world what more do you want? Egg in your beer? It doesn't stop there, it goes:
communion
community
government
and when government sells out to money? When the numbers say the numbers win? Pause and then begin again....with COMMUNITY the community we are before we are individuals, the community of nature and all too human nature takes over, and spiritual survival is a given as the world is given, or as St. Francis said when asked what he would do if the world were to end tomorrow,
"I would just keep on hoeing this garden."
There are, of course, going on from that (no)place, LARGER things we could do, if anything meant anything. If any THING means anything, cities have to become farms. Plant gardens, especially giant roof gardens (eliminate transportation, refrigeration, chemicals, middlemen, the whole crazy circus) as is being done (in the third world, in China) but never enough, rooftop or floating solar photovoltaic arrays, drive electric cars & trucks & trains & ships, SHOOT exploding canisters full of micro mirrors into the stratosphere.....fucking with nature? Too late by thousands of years to stop doing that.
And there are two kinds of SMALLER things we can do: plant trees, and flowers and gardens to create MICROclimates, or else (negatively), RUN! Run like...HELL! , migrate, but if you believe in climate science and the saying among climate scientists,
"If feedback exists we're screwed."
you know there are no more safe places, not even places because it's all one system, but some will run and so goes the egoes so when will we ever value community and the natural community enough to ensure our own survival? Enter Stage Right a bogus metric, an abstraction called money. Money talks. BUT money talks MONEY.....ah money, pass the bottle.
And we are left with tiny efforts like my own, but they are HYUUUGE as inseparable from that greater, enduring community. If you helped us help others, small as we are, what could it possibly mean in the bigger picture? Or if you PUSH the DONATE button will it open the door to a world in too massive and desperate a need of compassion and money? Where would it stop? I understand. We all do what we can, yes, but what does that SAY about us? Inasmuch as we all do what we are?
WHATEVER! And whatever (creeps in this petty pace from day to day) physical or spiritual survival is possible (while the hotter it gets the faster it gets hotter), so much depends on our abiding will to take these things out and take a look at them.
Not that it would be more important than a new car, boat, TV or carpet.... CARPE(t) DIEM (Seize the day! But seize the night (and all its darkness also.))
No worries. Somewhere out in all of spacetime, it all comes out even because? Because it has all already happened because? Because that distance it's all ONE spacetime. The only loss is what we had to keep, and keep hidden. The only loss is the beauty, the art and especially the jokes we coulda made of it.
No worries.
Just something to think about now and then.
