Love at a Reasonable Price

Looking for some other girl to bother with me
Not what I want to do
Admitting you’ll never talk to me ever ever
Not what I want to do
Pointing out that I don’t know anyway what was possible or preferable or anything since all was just hopes and zaps
Not what I want to do

This problem eddying about my gut
This knife stuck in my belly
and yanked up and around around
This evil choking me from the inside
This sickness bleeding through me like blood in the water
Messing me up, knocking me wrong, kiltering me off
What can I say?
Tired, lonely, disappointed in me
Sorry that I cannot stand up and help
Stand up and find the Beauty that helps
Stand up and find the words that glow
so brightly they hold us all together
in a shared glow within a shared purpose
within the Light that Loves the Light that IS

The wisdom meme
That was the idea
A koan so clear and bright
that none could resist its wisdom
A snapshot of Pure Love so wonderful
no one could escape enlightenment
What would it be?
It would be an irresistible summary of both individual and group Something Deeperism
wrapped around a poem of Pure Love that couldn’t help but turn everyone towards Pure Love and how It flows into consciousness, into feeling, thought, and life
Where is the wisdom meme?
And the cut in me that I don’t stand up to
And what wisdom do I even pursue, let alone find?
But the meme was to help me to; it was a Hail Mary for us all; it was the same old
you see,
the wisdom meme
is the addict’s desperate lunge
When you drink and you need one more
One more will get you there
One more will be the escape that is also victory
One more will be the salvation that is also easy and safe and sound
One more
The wisdom meme is a
One more
that would actually work
Because the wisdom meme saves me and you and us, carrying us to the Way
we’re supposed to be
The wisdom meme written by me is a shared victory,
that final wonderful moment that makes all moments flow together in gorgeous harmony

Oh my god
How much evil
have wannabe wisdom memes wrought?
The violent revolution in the name of this or that perfect system, undeniable duty, clear glory
Leave me, leave me evil intent!
And yet, perhaps
in the safe folds of art
we might yet
seek a newer world

It was fine
This burial mound
where they laid me
down to sleep
for the Lord my
you know
to keep

Golden rings on my strong fingers
A crown of silver upon my noble head
Raiments of flowing color soft and supple as the hundred fingers that loved them into shape
And marble urns on either side full of precious spices and foodstuffs from the many lands that have become One
under my mighty hand my tremendous will my divine leadership

It was fine
To rot here all alone
with the corpses of some wives and virgins I’d not yet had the pleasure of
arranged neatly nearby for to sate my famous needs my amazing interests

These evil days that I pulled my people up out of
Yes, it wasn’t easy
But the getting there
I’d not trade that for all the spiced urns and all the fainting virgins in all the melting worlds

It comes to this
If God but grant me one token
If my soul be forgiven enough for one favor
Let me find it
what I didn’t even seek
while so busy doing and creating your business

I’ll tell you what the real problem is here
It isn’t so much that you won’t talk to me,
but that you shouldn’t
It isn’t so much that you turned away,
but that I made it impossible
for you to turn this way,
towards me towards any kind of maybe us
working it out together

Now I’ll tell you how the wisdom meme goes:

It is long known of old
that there is a way
that unites all Ways

It is long known and oft invoked
that no one’s meaning is meaningful to anyone,
except insofar as the interpretation and living
of that meaning
is aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving kind, and joyfully sharing.
Insofar as we humans do not comply with these basic rules for feeling, thinking, and acting;
we cannot understand, believe in, or care about our own feeling, thinking, and acting:
we cannot travel with our own thoughts to our own conclusions:
we cannot meaningfully inhabit our own conscious spaces.
So we’ve not choice but to agree
both within each human’s conscious space (that writhes and wiggles with many contradictory notions, impulses, ideas)
and between human beings and inside their organizations and systems and rules and regulations and ventures big and small
that we will not sacrifice these universal values
for any reason whatsoever
for to do so
is self-defeating
is sawing off the ladder’s rungs with the ladder’s rungs
is the way towards individual and shared
chaos, madness, corruption:
the meaningless temper-tantrums
that both create and are created by
a failure to
put the universal values before
individual and shared feelings, ideas, impulses, soliloquies and conversations

Some argue for exceptions due to expediency, for emergencies, for immediacies
Or on account of how God or Magic is beyond human conception, human values, and so on

But these arguments misunderstand
the situation

Emergencies arise
Rules must sometimes bend
The core of human meaning is indeed either a Light beyond human feeling, thought, and action;
or nothing that can mean anything to humans:
No one really understands
what that Love is
with which all things are bearable
and without which everything is dried paste in our mouths and throats and filling our eyes and ears like soot falling upon Pompeii back in the day

But sacrificing the universal values
amounts to leaving the tension within which
human meaning
— both inside an individual conscious space and between humans —
takes place.
Sacrifice that tension and you are like a ship dealing with an emergency by throwing out it’s rudder and engines and crew and everything that steers it and that it was built to care about.
Sacrifice the discipline of the universal values and you are a believer following and praising God by making it impossible to hear God, to feel God, to believe in or care about God.
It just doesn’t work
Because of the way we are wired
We need meaning to move with our own feeling, thinking, and acting; and meaning requires adherence to the universal values

What lies beneath?
Why does it matter how we feel, think, or act?
That’s where Pure Love comes in.

There is something within through and beyond
that is
beyond feelings, ideas, words
We know
because
this Love shining through each conscious moment
appears to be
more fundamental
than any of our attempts to describe, prove or disprove, praise or blame It
Either that appearance
is illusion
or we
have not possible way
to mean anything to ourselves or anyone
This is because
our sense that we’re all in this together
and that Love is Real
is our most fundamental universal value
Everything else we require
for meaning
rests upon
that sense
that Love is Real
that life is worth the effort
that Aware Clear Competent Kindness is the Way

So we reach
the conclusion
of our philosophy
and the crossroads
of our individual and shared
feeling/thought/action

To the degree
that one finds
within one’s conscious experience
an ever deepening and widening
way
to know that and in what way
it is True
to say
“We’re all in this together”
and that also explicates
the universal values;
one is at a starting point for internal meaning
(for feeling/thinking/acting in a way that is meaningful to one’s own feeling/thinking/acting).

To the degree
that groups of sentient beings
create an environment
where they can individually pursue wisdom
—
here defined as an active self-critiquing and -improving
organization
of one’s feeling/thinking/acting
around the Pure Love
that must
if we are to have any hope
at internal meaning
truly shine through each conscious moment;
bounded by the universal values
and the concomitant sense of
being all in this life together
and thus
being beholden to one another
and the Light
that binds us
—
and
where we can collectively
safeguard and live by
the universal values
and the
concomitant
sense
that
all sentient beings
belong to each other
and must be
good to each other
gentle with themselves
and others
alive to the joy
of kind delight
and shared exploration, creation, celebration, and service

This is the way forward
I’m sure we can all agree
But how?
How?
How??!??!?

I’ve been so lonely for so long
It wears me through
And the world wobbles
We are the world
USA for Africa
Or
China for Africa
Or
Africa for USA
Or
Africa for China
Or
Everybody for Everybody
before it’s too late for anybody
to smile in the spring sunlight while the tussling breeze flips your collar and kisses your cheek.

It was more than twenty years ago
In Le Havre, killing the English-speaking me
with French and German
wandering in the springtime sun and breeze
swimming at the round-stone beach
and having pizza with egg (I didn’t ask for the egg, it was just there, floating in the middle of the pizza, mostly cooked) on a cement patio outside a yellow wooden hut on the beach with freighters parked all around those sliding steel walls so high overhead.
And the walks in that little town park
Seeing a pretty girl and supposing I might talk to her and meet and marry and stay and be there with her and
walking right past her into some bar
where I drank some cheap wine and gazed ahead in this long white-walled room without windows or anything to meaningful to sink your gaze and its longings into
The green square park ringed with a dark sparse metal fence and with Christmas tree pines planted here and there at the edges and with rougher boughs hanging this way and that
and then a bandstand
round and roofed
with perhaps even a band
It doesn’t matter

I wanted to say
Ah yes
We need a way
to do this
Something Deeperism: There is a Truth and people can relate to It meaningfully, just not in a literal/definitive/exclusive way.
Pure Love: The Truth / Light / the Love that chooses everyone, and that creates, sustains, shines through, and love-lifts us all no matter what always and forever.

Oh!
We didn’t cover the “jut not in a literal/definitive/exclusive way”
That’s because if there is a Truth, it is wider and deeper than human feelings and ideas — which collapse in paradoxes when they try to define or prove or even describe or grasp the Truth; and which anyway know themselves to be limited, finite, prone to error, and generally unfit for capturing things like Knowledge = Truth = Reality –, but we rely on human ideas, feelings, and ideas to think/feel/act and relate; so the only hope is for us to relate our feeling/thinking/acting to Truth in a poetic way. What does that mean? A poem about your walk on the beach captures not just literal images, but an experience and a sense-of-things. A poem points beyond its constituent parts, to an individual vista that we can share because we assume that we are all essentially the same. Poetry and literature do not work without this assumption, but nothing does: we learn how to call and arrange our feelings and ideas through empathy (my father stubs his toe; he clutches it and yells that it hurts, my mind maps his expressions and actions and I feel along with him and thus gain insight into his use of language) — if others are not essentially like we are, our worldviews collapse into unfathomable mush. And so we ask neither too much nor too little of poetry when we bid it guide us towards the Truth. Not like everyone has to be writing poetry to be wise! Although it’s a salutary exercise and all that. But the point is that our feeling and thinking and doing and speaking should all poetically describe the Pure Love that shines though each conscious moment and that — though deeper and wider than human meanings — is the only adequate source for human meaning: since nothing else quite matters if spiritual Love does not shine for Real.

As individuals we organize our feeling/thinking/acting around the Light within. In the regular ways. Prayer, meditation, contemplation, discussion, study, practicing humility and loving kindness, through the discipline of following the universal values in our internal and external interactions. Things like that. Different ways of poetically interacting with the Love that is beyond literal definitions but that is not therefore necessarily beyond our thought as a whole.

Thought-as-a-whole: feelings, vague notions, ideas, sensual experiences, internal and external interactions, all shot through with Pure Love, which is all there really Is, and which is therefore everywhere, in each conscious moment.

This is the spiritual wager: that this Pure Love IS and that our inborn rules of thought (the universal values, the need for Kindness to be Real, the need to understand that and in what way it is True to say we are all in this together): This is the wager that a human conscious moment must make and succeed within, if that human conscious moment is to understand, believe in, or care about its own feeling/thinking/acting.

If we confuse our own ideas and feelings for Pure Love, then we clutch dogmas tighter and tighter even as we understand/believe-in/care-about them less and less.

But if we don’t bother to pursue Pure Love, we end up in the same chaos built of feeling and ideas that don’t really mean anything to anyone.

So we stand there in the tension between literal Knowledge and an absolute abdication of any claim to Knowledge. We stand there and work on wisdom: on moving better and better with the Love that chooses everyone and abandons no one, that hurts no one ever.

But for a group?
How can groups agree to agree on what they already agree upon?
Because people seeking power will often give lip service to Truth and Goodness and the universal values and even to Love, the greatest God of all. And people are suckers for power and glory and sex and food and drink and prestige and wealth and being on the winning team and all that eternal nonsense that is part of the animal condition and cannot be pretended away.

The point of representative democracy is so that the people can peacefully serve as a final check on madness and corruption in government.
Madness and corruption are the same in groups as they are in individuals: organizational structures that select for folly and against wisdom: where bad impulses and values more easily gain and keep prestige and/or power than good impulses and values.

Madness and corruption slide into one another and blur together. Sanity and wisdom do the same. Since the root of both sanity and wisdom is meaningful engagement with the Love that loves everyone. And the lack of that engagement is what makes it easier to turn further and further away from Love.

The point of separation of church and state is because combining spiritual prestige with worldly power invites people to lie to themselves and each other about the most sacred things and thus invites corruption.

The point of transparency and openness in government is to encourage good behavior and so that the people can better serve as a final check on madness and corruption in government.

The point of individual rights is to keep the majority from mistreating the individual. It is not so that a minority can indulge in behaviors that harm the majority or that undermine minority rule.

The point of separation of powers is that power corrupts: It naturally wants more and more of itself and this is bad for collective feeling, thinking, and acting.

The point of honesty, clarity, and civility in political debate is so that we as a group can more meaningfully decide and act together.

The point of representative democracy is for everyone to work together to create systems, organizations, structures, and cultures that are better for everyone.

Let us think for one moment
of the last time
we were on a park bench
or in a cafe
or at home
or walking to work or school
or anywhere
relaxing, enjoying a moment of freedom to think and feel and speak our minds and hearts
And be grateful for whatever we have of representative democracy
And to work together to build more of it

Violent revolutions
Wars
Great victories for the Volk
Pouting and shouting along with pundits more interested in ratings than the Truth
All this is fire that burns up and melts and otherwise disappears the gentle process of growing individually and collectively
Don’t let’s throw it all away
on pretend
freedom valor integrity

Let’s think again
Let’s sink down as one
And remember when
Our many lives were young
And reach out together
past the brooding weather
into the heart of it all
where we all start — the Love that calls
and would be heard, known, followed

Why God
Are we here?
In this strange world
where nothing is real
and yet everything touches the Real
where nothing is true
and yet all laces into what’s True?
Strange worlds
odd realms
a delicate tremble
shakes the thin branch and slender leaf loosing a drop of water clear heavy- and round-butted, that must soon but not quite yet sploosh upon yon rock down under yonder

Hmmm

aw well

I am sorry I didn’t say I love you
in a kind way that cuddled you
I am sorry it came out all twisted and broke down
I am sorry I flamed out all silly and choked on
I had a chance to tell you
I wasted that chance
I am sorry
That is all

Authors: B Willard / A Whistletown
Copyright: AM Watson

From the hag and hungry goblin
That into rags would rend ye,
The spirit who stands by the broke-backed man
In the Book of Books defend ye,
That of your five sound senses
You never be forsaken,
Nor wander from your heart unwound
Abroad to beg your bacon,
While I must sing, Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing;
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Goodbye can injure nothing.

When your heart so bright would warm mine,
In grave hopes I did dissolve me.
And thus enraged, my dreams I mixed for thine.
If you chance the warden, bid ‘im call me:
I scratched them in the bed head —
‘twixt the buttocks and the siren.
Were not his knots that kept me
but lumpy wishes where I’d lie on.
Now found wrong I sing for food and for feeding,
Feed or drink or clothe one;
Come ghost or bod, be not afeared,
Farewells shall injure no-one.

Delirium’s a hole where some unravel
unaware and innocent of carriage.
But I rolled along the edges for to travel
to you in magical love and marriage.
I thought it well. I deemed it right
to explore what I felt in wanting you.
But quick it caught and held my belly tight
while whispering love — love we knew and would do.
What is the path that finds the deep wide way
beneath what’s clear-day said and done?
I thought faith’d bring me love, not astray.
I’m sorry. For what I sought and won
will never breathe nor ever mend.
Goodbye is all — our only, a broken end.

With a host of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end:
Methinks it is no journey.
Yet will I sing, Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing;
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing.

You stupid boring braggart
It was into Goodbye that you slipped the dagger
that slashed friendship apart
you hurt a nice person for no good reason
in the squand’ring you broke your heart
I try you for contempt of love, the highest treason
And punish you to silence
in the cavern where speak the shadows
that comprise both day and night
So get you now and forever hence
Let some wiser other say what’s right

Middle Bedlam verses and a couple slight emendations to the first verse, and of course the final verse:
BW with AW, copyright AMW

we need Pure Love to overflow Susan and Esmeralda, and then blend into the mindless effervescence of magic within Anne, and then explode like an atom bomb through everyone and everything. And we need to see how the magic affects Samuel and the brothers Hector and Manchild and his band of dragon-freers, and the opposition here and there, and the dragons freed and the dragons flying in, and the mindless reanimated corpses, and the monsters reduced to tiny chirping critters, and the termite colony that showed up out of love for Manchild, and Manchild’s father and sister, and on and on through everyone, wider and wider reigning supreme without demand or edict, with only Love.

Do we dodge the real question?
When Pure Love wins the war and silences all crime,
then we don’t get to see what happens when Pure Love guides people through violent times.
But how does it?

Anyway,
you gotta help me
you just gotta
you just gotta

I need a cigarette so bad
What am I asking for?
Nothing much
Just to go back to Heidelberg at 21
when my body didn’t care what I did
and I was yet coasting on future triumphs
while escaping into smoky bars
and wanderwide cobblestone streets

Yes, let me go back there
And not just once
But over and over again
until I get it right
The first few times I’ll drink and smoke in the low-ceilinged basement bar
and then I’ll relax the dissipation and find somebody nice to hike over Die Alte Bruecke and up to the Heidelberger Schloss with
and then I’ll relax the longing and learn something, the kind of magical patterns I’ve always meant to understand, so as to make a mysticism out of science and an art out of scholasticism.
and then I’ll relax the learning and write something, the kind of something that sings without trying
and then I’ll
I dunno
but let’s forget the cigarette —
it’s clearly besides the point

I was gonna do that
Stop that Evil
Turn everything round
But then
something snapped
an axel, I think
Because we jolted suddenly
to one side
and into that tree
that didn’t move or give
But I’ve mixed things up again
The death of Albert Camus
with my never minding Truth=Beauty=Goodness=Justice
Another one of these mix-ups
So if the Evil would kindly
stop on its own
I’d much appreciate it
If the Evil would be a sport
and cool its nefarious jets
that’d go a long way
to making me feel Okay
about how things turned out

it hurts and I can’t deal
it bleeds through and I can’t staunch
it wins and I can’t argue
it hurts and I can’t say
it drives me into the dirt

who is to say?

there’s real problems
real fences that need mending
wars that tear life from limb
sins that break bones behind the panels
waters rising and fires colliding
children lost and parents dying
real problems

that’s why I must pull it together
because what’s real makes what I do look silly
still it’s what going on I guess will I will I
so well
anyway
any ideas?

Not everybody has a brother on Spotify
Not everyone can Spotify-search memories
Not everyone’s so lucky in this world

The world is closing in
I blame the Fates
You blame the Republicans
The evil is turning all the pages
I blame the laziness of the gods
You blame the Republicans

Jesus is getting old
It shows around his eyes
and at the corners of his mouth
Eternity used to be easy for Him

God is getting fat
You see it now in his face
and hear it when he talks
Beauty used to be breathless for Him

The Holy Ghost is going nuts
You hear it in Its speech
Especially in the Men’s Room —
which brings out the worst in everyone

The world is closing in
I blame myself
You blame yourselves
The evil is flooding in on all sides
I blame my greed and the break that splits me in half
You blame the children and that they don’t listen

Who’s on the hook for the wonderfully mild winter we had?
The sparrows are suspiciously chipper
The squirrels unaccountably eager
The bunnies uncannily frisky
Surely there’s a clue here or there

Death closes all but there must yet stand
some final note for bird and man to shout
The curtain falls quick but surely we’ve time
for one more flip tuck and land
oh god that we land this one well

Jesus God the Holy Ghost
These three abide, smoking in the hallways
cigs rolled up in their T-shirt sleeves
so pleased with themselves and their rich abundant youthful hair that will reign forever

Oh no oh no oh no
I think I got it wrong
Oh no oh no oh no
I think I broke the song
Oh no oh no oh now
I think I got it all wrong

I can’t do this anymore
Please
No more
Please let me leave this behind
It doesn’t work

what is the sin
that marks and mars me?

I can’t do this anymore
Please
No more
Please let me grow past this
It’s got no wings

what is the crime
that holds and harries me?

I can’t do this anymore
Please
No more
Please let me live for real
like a body should

what is the break
that twists and turns me?

Long ago at the waters of the river wide
stayed a troll more fair than any alive
She danced all alone where the sand leans
ringed by tufts of bending grasses green

Long ago with his musket, knife, and bow
paddled a warrior the waters wide and slow
Seeking elk deer caribou — what the waters drew
And there he saw a troll that no one ever knew

Long ago in the magic wood where trolls prance
no human’s ever been, never seen how they twist in dance
She turned and smiled at the creature with face
and arms much like her own, but with body replaced
by a long curving tree gliding upon the water
It looked, but at her chest belly hips, not her

Long ago in the time of the giants the centaurs the elves
a troll man found a troll woman where the soft water melds
into the land hard and certain, beneath the sky clear and bright
He said I need this thing that is moving now within my sight

But how to help for real in this land where buzzards bank
and gyre down to peck your liver and give our God thanks?

Long ago a man sinned and a woman wore the blame
Long ago the cattle lolled while a bull ran the plains
Long ago a mystic prayed until he knew what was best
He won the secret formula and by God was blessed
Long ago the weather turned like a hawk on the wing
We asked for a Beauty we could together sing
Long ago

Author: BW
Editor: AW
Copyright: AMW

There was a minstrel man
loved a lady fair
Wrote his songs to tell an’
pledged much to the air.

There came a parting song
near the castle keep
Came out everything wrong
a broken bleating heap

Wander back to her smile
Tell her you love her
Go back a thousand miles
Don’t pull or shove her

Make your way alone
dusts and stones along
A soul without a home
You sang her a false song
Now you two cannot know
what was real, what just show

Wander back to her laughter
to a kingdom where you’ll never be
Go back past what came after
And sing songs that help you see.

I’m sorry
Fo how I said what I said
I wish I’d said it
such
that we might try
to speak, to hear,
to find, to know,
to discover together.

Author: Amble Whistletown
Editor: Bartleby Willard
Copyright: Andy Watson