Love at a Reasonable Price

That you can write yourself well in all the ways a person needs to be well — from the interaction of conscious awareness feeling and thought with the spiritual core shining through each conscious moment, out through your felt-thought, into ideas, words, symbols, actions; and even out into the wider layers of yourself: communities, organizations, governments, worlds.

For the irony of human life is that in one sense we are completely alone with God, locked within individual conscious spaces that are comprised of Godlight shining through feeling/thinking/acting; but in a deeper sense, that feeling/thinking/acting is not really real, not really us, and so we are simply Godlight shining more immediately through our “own” semi-sealed conscious moment, but also through everything we experience, everyone we interact with, all the systems, organizations, assumptions, governments that we live within and that shape our “reality”.

How is it that

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength; and your neighbor as yourself?

And

The wise rest on interdependence and impermanence as seagulls rest on warm air rolling up off the sloshing sea.

And

By suspending all belief, the Academic Skeptics were pleasantly surprised to discover a sense of Blessedness?

All point to the same Truth?

Human language — from baby’s first words through literature, math, science, and so on — is fit only for poetry, only for pointing-towards realities and Reality. For example, science is “real” to the degree it points towards a completely accurate picture of what we discover when we discover when we pair our inborn logical assumptions (of which mathematics is a part) with our inborn sense perceptions and inborn assumptions about how sense perception and logic fit together; but science is “Real” only to the degree it points an observer towards the Love that contains within Itself and transcends Beauty = Truth = Goodness = Fair Play/The Well-Ordering of Systems (from an individual human’s system for organizing themselves around the Love shining through each conscious moment, to larger systems to various degrees informal and informal — like families, schools, churches, friend groups, towns, nation-states, et cetera).

Yes, we replaced “Justice” with “Fair Play/The Well-Ordering of Systems”. You could use “Justice” there, as Plato did in his Republic, to mean, “every part knowing and performing its function”, but the notion of parts “knowing” their place has created a great deal of trouble; and using the word “Justice” without any kind of careful formulation mostly just seems to make trouble. Beauty, Truth, Goodness, and Justice are all spiritual Goods — the concepts point past human ideas and feelings to some angle of our deeper inner sense of what is really going on, what really matters, and how we should move with what’s really going on towards what’s best for all — ; but “Justice” is a highly flammable concept; people are so ready to confuse it for “revenge” that it often seems more trouble than it is worth.

The Reality is spiritual Love, an infinite eternal Love that chooses everyone, and that creates, sustains, and shines through all things. The Reality is Pure Love: an infinite joyous giving. Everything else is illusion. We are Real to the degree we are free to the degree we are our truest nature, which is Pure Love. To the degree we remain our own ideas and feelings, we are the big interconnected daydream of information, minds, bodies, all running together in accordance with the laws of cause and effect. But to the degree we live in and through and for Love we allow Pure Love to go from being the transcendent cause of all things to the immanent cause of all things. Naturally, the process is never perfect, and we are always somewhat — perhaps even largely — illusionary, but moments of consciously living Pure Love do to meaningful degrees happen. And it is worthwhile to practice awareness, honesty, clarity, compassion, loving kindness, and joyful sharing: it is worthwhile to follow those inborn tools towards the inborn Way, towards communion with the Love that is prior to ideas and feelings. To the degree we don’t, life is too boring and lonely for us to understand, believe in, or care about. The Absurd is the sense of alienation we experience when we try to suspend all belief. The Truth is the explosion of Pure Love we experience when we suspend all belief, and are left with our own conscious moments at a point beyond all stories (which are always a mixture of feelings and ideas).

That is itself only poetry. We writers, speakers, friends, and lovers are (after all) stuck here in the way words and deeds flow in and out of ideas and feelings. But feelings are wider, deeper, and vaguer than ideas and words; and yet by working to feel, think, and act more aware, honest, clear, compassionate, and joyfully sharing we can get better and better at relating feelings to ideas and words. So why not use a similar process to get better and better at relating feelings, ideas, words, and deeds to the Love shining through everything (including each conscious moment)?

Poetry heaped upon poetry. Your shoulders still getting tense. Still need to get to work soon. Still worried about x and y and z.

To “write yourself well” was never just writing. The writing was just supposed to be a path to put all together. To feel your way to health, and also to the mystic, and also to a way of living both in Pure Love — which is outside of timespace, and all particulars — and in this human world, where you need love and work, and to somehow find a way for that love and work to be more in service of Love than in service of animal hoots and hollers, and other things that are fine and neat and if they weren’t, why bother creating all this?, but that are, when all is said and done, not quite Real, not quite free-cause, not quite us, not the core of what we’re here to learn.

But time space, motion, and information have a way of drilling through, hollowing out, disassembling every project. A person is a project. A life is a project. Relationships are projects. Organizations. Every human endeavor is an organization, a system, a project. Time space, motion, information; and the admixtures of these elements: All illusions, but some illusions point human conscious experiences better towards the Truth than others.

The jig is up.
We’re found out.
And tomorrow we hang.
The gods in the heavens are too blessed and immortal to notice.
The Great God beyond all timespace, motion, information, feelings, ideas: that God Knows that all is well, and so that God also will not stay the hangman’s hand, though his noose-y fingers kill us, and each time he uses them, he wears his heartmind down a little thinner, kills himself a little more.
So that leaves us, but we’re no match for the tumbling stones and the spraying lava, and soot that in a great poof first fills and them seems to become the sky.

Author: Bartleby Willard
Technical Assistant: Amble Whistletown
Copyright and standing on the platform as the last train chugs out the station, just out of reach: Andy Watson

But in this place
And in this time

We learned an evil song
it wasn’t very good
but it wasn’t very long

We wore a shabby robe
It wasn’t very nice
But it kept out the cold

We believed ten thousand lies
It felt like walking dead
But we’d hoped to win a prize!

We looked for love and flowers
We found cheap beer and shows to binge
And so dripped by the years, slow hour ‘pon stolen hour.

In peacetime we schemed for fancy homes
In wartime we dreamed of safe respite
We hadn’t known what we’d not been shown.

Who will pardon Adam’s seed
When mixing with Adam’s rib
It turned to awful contorted deeds
And always answered so pep so glib
?

Who will forgive us when we turn to ash
high up on Mount Horeb
?
We were young; insecure; silly; rash.

I’ve seen the art of the demagogue
It was no art, but merely a type of crime
against the soul, athwart the heart, betraying the mind
and I’ve seen us turn, cog upon cog
within this evil worn like mink stole
remember? We were so proud. And then the folds
of age and shared misery wore through
what we’d said about me about you
about our love and friendship too
yes we saw ourselves and we knew
we were liars through and through

Author: The Man the Egg the Dream, Mr. Humpty Dumpty!
Crew: Bartleby Willard, Amble Whistletown — We don’t care what you think because you are stupid anyway
Copyright: Andy Watson — also thinks you’re stupid anyway

be healthy, wealthy, wise
help the country
find my wife and family
sell Pure Love
write for real

how?
when I feel only zero
when I think only blah
when pills get stuck halfway down the line and spit seeps at the corners
when surely I’m done
and the country’s woes
and my various vaunting ambitions
and even just a little honest abiding love
were all always anyways way
out of my league?

A thin man, sinewy, not tall; his face
so craggy ageless as an old oak tree.
Already ancient when he took his place
in yon medieval cloister o’er the sea —
on crooked layered lichen-splashéd cliff
above calm steel-blue, in loughs foaming white,
cold northern sea — where peacefully he’s lived
these thousand secret years out of mind though oft in sight.
A druid: seer, priest, judge; well versed
in ancient arts — forgotten now; by science, faith, and law all cursed.

What magic — now banished, obsolete — play
has him so well so long in plain view hid?
Don’t know. But mornings, while his brother’s pray,
he opes stone walls and ups stairs curving amid
the starry vacuum of space into black hole door
out which not light nor thought nor soul may pour.

How does he come and go where nothing can?
Don’t know. But within this impossible place,
a salvation machine floats, not just stands.
A machine built of thought where man comes face
to face with God outside timespace. Yet God’s
no face, but only Purest Love divine
that shines beyond our human piecemeal thought —
a Light past feeling body and thinking mind.
A salvation machine is layered because
Salvation’s layered. The machine does what it does
‘fore time and space; before what’s hoped or feared;
‘fore will of man or God; ‘fore chance; before the wyrd.

A self’s an overlapping collection
of lies — evolving, and more near or far
the Truth. The wiser know that perfection
of knowledge or ignorance are both a bar
too high for mortal reach. To hold the fancy’s flights
of self and other aloft whilst aware
of how they do and don’t reflect the Light:
This wisdom practice will salvation bear:
Salvation in layers like a jigsaw onion
Salvation through every myth and perversion
of the one Light that Eden saw play,
of the Real ‘neath twists of everywhichway.

All day into each night he plies the gears
and levers, threading from his seat in formless giving joy
through fateful warps and chancey woofs to guide all us children here —
felt-stories of self and other, of nation, tribe and town: all this noise
about how I’m this or that, my allegiance and/or boundaries lie here or there –.
I cannot say if his work touches our world or if he’s spun another one
from ghostly dreams he’s gathered as shells all glittering in the summer sun.

Who shall be saved? What spared the fire
that burns every feeling, thought or deed
not born in through and for the Love that never tires?
I wanted too to help, to let the evil bleed
away. I too wished to find a poetry
to heal our souls and the structures that we
both operate and seem sometimes to be.

But waxen wings and all I tumble down
to slow blue sea. I saw you and conceived
disdain: “Such little people”, I said and with a frown.
So very small of art and thought I believed
you to be. But now, my body torn and heart washing up
on the pebbly shore — my mind catching and tossing up
the sunlit edges of tilting waves —
I think I’d wheeled ’round to gore
a wounded, tusk-foaming, gloss-eyed boar.
Seems a shame, to die violent, enraged.
A vengeful death; a low rebirth.
A hateful charge burns up much worth.
Everyone’s flimsy, equally zero and nil.
But caverns broken by the Love past will
and won’t, past is and not: they ope
upon a vista bright and infinite in scope.

Ah well, let it ride, our druid was cast out
for telling his fellow lawgivers that Law
forbade the wicker man, ignored any pleas and shouts
they might heap up on burning human flesh and all
such false and erring mystical buffoonery.
But now he hides in the gear-works of a refined sorcery
and all he touches blossoms like roses in springtime,
as age upon he forgets his life, recalling only something sublime —
some little thing; I know not what; I know only that it somehow twinkles in his still-young eyes;
and that every morning he yet does rise and to his work he yet flies, with no demands and no earthbound or heaven-found why, our salvation yet — best he only ever can he tries and tries — for to ply.

Author: Dr. Humphrey Dumphrey
Production Crew: Our Bartleby and Our Amble
Copyright: Andrew M. Watson
Lesson: We give up; we are tired; when our mother, the sea nymph Thetis, dipped us into the sea — that every spot of what we were that felt old Ocean’s cold salty kiss all mortal wounds would on-ever outrun –, she held us by our infant ankles, and that is why a lucky shot by a third-string archer has laid us out upon the dusty killing fields of ancient wind-swept Troy.

sweet potato, vegetables, turmeric, garlic, cumin, olive oil, salt and pepper
Dance, yoga, meditate, pull-ups and dips, various push-ups
Energy glow from center-line out / alternate with think/feel glow
Health how?
Self, relationships, communities, nation, world
Healthy how?
Inside out, accept the mystery, each moment a prayer for wisdom and to feel our way towards the better away the worse.
Healthy how?
I need you
but how can I be any good for you?
the gathering blobby evil must be off-ramped
but how to combine elan compassion competence here and now enough to make decent lemonade out of rotten lemons and hydrogenated high fructose corn syrup soaked in three hundred artificial flavors and a thousand artificial colors?
Healthy how?
And aren’t we supposed to be selling Pure Love?
Pure Love, Something Deeperism, wisdom meme — isn’t there anything in all that to lift this operation out of this doldrum that threatens to snap the hull stave the ship founder her upon a sea calm blue and sunny for mile upon motionless mile?

Intimate
Specific
This portal’s for you
And you alone
It is your path
Out of this shared illusion
Into the One Light
That Eden saw play

Death is always ready
To step in
When your body
Loses its balance
You think it’s far away
But it’s always all over you
Coating you, waiting
For one little misstep

If Death is stalking you
You can’t ask for love
You have to be readying yourself
For a solo trip

If Death has marked you
You can’t start a revolution
You must say goodbye to
The world and its projects

Death’s a sleepy headed
Companion
But you still can’t
Sneak past

A few talismans arranged at random
on a small redbrown table with a thick gloppy finish

a paper plane made of shiny silvery paper
a yellow table tennis ball settled into a knot
a single jack, once red, but with the paint chipping to reveal silver steel
a mixed tape a friend made back when we were still friends
a bit of shriveled orange peel
a black crow feather
a large swath of the Milky Way Galaxy
a clipping of God’s toenail even though that’s doubly impossible
an empty brown beer bottle without any paper left that I still sometimes think of returning for that long overdue dime
an audiophile of something outrageous Jesus once said to the Buddha when they were still pretty young and given to gloating
a

Never mind.

Rewind.

Start from

fuzzy caterpillar scrunch fore to aft
up the pussy willow branch
next to the river
where we lost

Not so fast so far.

Restart.

Start from

dollar bill kissed goodbye
by his thin wan lips
then handed over
by his long mottled veiny hands
to her with pink fingernails manning the mechanical cash register
ca Ching

nope

Alive or dead
he’s already failed
The bounty and the poison
The thug and his lackeys
The hamburger and its special sauce
The lie and its symphony
Never mind
Alive or dead
it was over before he started
it was over before Vesuvius rained down that awful powder
it was over before the asteroid dust blackened the sky, froze the earth, tipped over the thunder lizards
it was over before Jesus stepped through the eye of the needle to thread every destiny contained within this spacetime, which he did while wearing a Christmas shirt figuring a wreath of thorns, which he wore with irony, which was not a metaphysical irony, but merely a teenage coming of age claiming humor for him and his friends and their generation and the stars to come
it was over when I thought I was Elvis Presley bending the big steel microphone towards my long white teeth and the crowd went crazy, feeling the moment eternal, glowing with the passion of well-fed youth.

Why should the Lord of me a nation build?
And why should I care about descendants?
I seek no promise, nor need one fulfilled
here on this world of make-believe events.

And now He tests me by naming my child
His blessing upon me?! A child lives,
A child breathes; he feels to think; and, mild,
should grow into his own estate. Who gives
permission to kill an innocent?
What God would foist mere history
upon humankind, that we might live by hints,
and put our faith in what pretend we to be?

Now binding Isaac on the altar, I’m
slow-moing every moment; and thus
I stretch this act out to the edge of time,
to wait out the Lord himself, if I must.

And Isaac lies so very still. He knows
this knife now aimed and sinking at his throat
will never slice the neck through which I flow
from dust to more and grander dust. We float
together forever. We will wait out space
and time, man, woman, God. We’ll take our place
among stones and sand, where winds dissolve each
wild, reckless claim to solid certain reach.

Man’s nothing compared to God the Wise
And God’s more constant than the sun
But God’s face changes in our eyes
And though His will must always be done,
that will is not always as it seems
to us flinchy squawky foolish little things.

In crystal shard or sky-clear orb
By upward falling waterfall
or blackhole flower absorbing
all the shit we ever fought for,

The Knight of Faith will clean his blade
in waters pure as snow that melt
where mountaintops through clouds do wade
and everything we ever thought or felt
evaporates to bright blue sky,
recalling only Purest Love:
forgetting all the surrounding lies —
every pull, every shove.

In mystic lands where ogres pant and wheeze
and Yetis hide their heavy tracks,
where pilgrims march upon their knees,
with crosses strapped upon their bowing backs,

The Knight of Faith may slay his hopes
and fears with violence thieved like fire
from the gods, with indifference, shadow and smoke
he borrowed from the Fates — too eternal to conspire,
too blessed to nit-pick, to infinite to care
what people believe do say, how they wear their hair.

The Knight of Faith his shield he polishes
A mirror round and perfect to espy
Medusa’s fanged and wriggling locks — which is
not needed now. She’s changed I don’t know why
but anymore she keeps the dark magic under a hat
and you can just ask her help and she’s cool like that.

All around every town rubble lays
fallen cities with dragon carcasses
their broken necks splintered this way
and that in the dusty clutter
homes churches fields: a bloody circus
dead peasants clergy nobles and others
who strayed by chance into swift blade
of our Knight his Faith a battle for to wage.

By virtue of the Absurd more heroic
than the hero who live in the open
in morality in values universal

By virtue of the Absurd more wise
than the wise who pray that God reveal the way
to a gentle kind resolve that ties,
interlines heart and mind into the soul that shines
through everything everyone the bells that ring across and through the sun

By virtue of the Absurd more faithful
than the humble churchgoer who prays for everything
who puts God first and lives only to ever sing
the praises due a God of perfect holy Love.

Knight of Faith:
Will God tomorrow slaughter me
like fatted cattle roasting sweetly
on altar stone? My faith I see
a blazing start of art discreetly yet metely
reorienting us all
to health wisdom orders that don’t fall
to meanness, folly, vanity, dishonesty
whathaveyou bullshit commodities

Discarded:

I couldn’t find that heart with space
for worries mine, who might face
with challenges local near
or communal far.

Abe: I’m lonely, tired; don’t want to die alone.

God: You’re crazy. You can’t tell what’s real.

Abe: Every wife was a daydream. Every success
just some kind of dress-up playtime afternoon.

God: You can’t talk in the mystic. There’s no words
here.

Abe: Too soon old; too late wise.
Too far afield; a horse collapses
into tall meadow grasses as short-lived
hoppers thwack triumphantly on all sides,
not guessing the impending dissolution
of their flimsy segmented
hard-skinned, sloshy-gutted bodies.

God: You can’t feel in the mystery.
The mystic’s before ideals and feels.
You cannot mope around inside Pure Love.

Abe: I thought I could feel my way
from inside out. To wisdom, health
and even as wide as a nation, as commonwealth.
But I can only watch as the Fates
absentmindedly turn me off,
one switch-flip at a time.

God: You don’t know what’s going on
And the mystic’s no place to discover
details
like
if so and so likes you,
if your planet survives,
if the weather improves.

Abe: I need someone to talk to, someone
who believes the things I say, someone
who forgives the lines I draw without pretending they never happened.
The mystic’s too lonely when you’ve so little faith.

God: Oh ye of little faith!
Why don’t you melt yourself
down into the formless explosion at the core of everything,
a-shining bright out every moment.
Right there in your own consciousness
is the nothing that’s everything, is
the Love
that swamps all like a Light so bright it burns through every edge, every boundary, ever particular —
the Love
that’s All.

Abe: I don’t find It. I grow sleepy.
I don’t want It. I just want a wife
and a safe place to hide with her —
to shelter with her out of the hurly-burly,
away from the crime, apart the lie.

God: You’ll have to shift your expectations.
You’ll have to prefer heaven to earth.
You’ll have to choose Love over touch.

Abe: A wooden sailing ship drifting farther and farther
from course; her crew less and less
interested in their journey, more and more
resigned to fading drying out settling down
as parched white bones
on a deck of fallen planks
on a ship who glides
forever to the edge of the sea
and then forever totters
over those falls
from which no knowledge returns.