Rosenbush Cafe

Diamanda Galas: She can handle truth; can you?

“I Think, Therefore I am” — 17th century French philosopher René Descartes

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Deep, profound and sometimes profane feelings regarding myriad subjects transmogrifying with opinions of the author through a lifetime of independent thought.

Famous writers will forever be remembered for jewel-encrusted quotes, often taken out of context which generally diminish their true meaning. Beat generation author William S. Burroughs expressed himself in a manner that traumatized many, as with his brilliant surreal stream of consciousness and highly misunderstood “Naked Lunch,” while unaffecting readers hip enough to understand his drug-fueled journey into a parallel universe of characters and stories.

Burroughs spoke many truisms and this ironically reticent quote soothes my loquaciousness like shooting up bug powder.

“Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.”

That quote should be our anthem; its prescience is significant today as the airwaves, classrooms, corporate boardrooms and churches are infested with verbalization that makes subversion of personal rights a spectator sport and global control over civil liberties inexorable even with the most power insecticide available: “individual thought.”

George Orwell’s “thought police,” from his novel “1984,” metamorphoses with frightening ease into 2010 through manipulation of how different governments classify what is, and is not, restricted in their societies. In some Moslem countries, where the view of women is a travesty, rape victims are treated worse than the offenders, and face death rather than sympathy; in Africa, vaginal mutilation takes the horrific imagine of the chastity belt to a surgically nightmarish conclusion and in Iraq protestors were allow to dissent until the military decided the world was actually paying attention to the corrupt elections.

Liturgical freedoms are worldwide but depending on which deity is worshiped inequity and intolerance stain worship in crimson.

Child rape and murder, especially in the United States, is punishable so disproportionately it is not a deterrent while violence against women ensues that rape victims are persecuted worse by the courts for the courage to face their attackers.

Like a twisted fairy tale, “Once upon a time…” there was sanity in the world but it has been subjugated by male rulers and perverted. From Aesop’s Fables to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, with emphasis on grim.

It’s time for me to open a temporal warp, my personal time machine, and invite you all on a journey back in time so that in the present we explore together from what he have evolved from to what we have devolve into.

When we ponder the simple metaphor of which came first the chicken or the egg followed by why the chicken crossed the road the debate begins. Rather than accepting the allegory that chickens hatch from eggs and that humankind, like chickens, must, by necessity, invariably cross the road to get to the other side and attain greater knowledge from the journey from the passage we are ensnared by convolution. Like the ageless inquiry into “if God exists who or what created God?” we are obscured by “If the chicken came from an egg what came before the first egg?”

Our thoughts are uncluttered as children before adults introduce logic and the difficulty that syllogisms purport to answer. The logical conclusion is specious. Fallacious thinking only keeps one from a restful night’s sleep. My first syllogism was what I surmise most children face when they are introduced to death.

I was about four years old when I found an injured cat – she had been in a fight and sustained a leg injury that was rapidly packed with maggots. I knew nothing of maggots before and the cat, which was frightened and had secured herself beneath the steps of our next door neighbor’s back porch, allowed me to bring food and water. Had I the later knowledge that perhaps a veterinary visit could have saved this animal I would have done so; however, I was unaware that the cat was dying and that the maggots were only doing what they are designed to do: eat flesh. After three days of feeding the cat before and after school I arrived to find that the maggots had covered her and she was dead.

I cried.

I did not understand that death was inevitable and afterwards convinced my father to do something. He buried her in our backyard and that night explained to me that every living being on this planet would one day die and depending on the circumstances fated to become food for maggots and a variety of insects. I have always appreciated that he told me the truth. He did not attempt to minimize what death was just because I was a child; he knew that when I asked a serious question I deserved a serious answers. We are never to young to learn:

“We will all die eventually.”

Death haunts our thoughts because everyone and everything that is alive will die: you, me, the trees, grass, birds, bees, cats, the good, the bad, the evil all have a one way ticket, long ago punched with a moment when all shall end. It should not be feared; merely accepted.

“Dwell on death and you waste your life worrying about something out of your control and you still die,” my dad would remind.

I find that wondrous. There is freedom in death. My mother died from complications due to Alzheimer’s disease and was in constant, extreme pain. Thanks to my father’s lack of fear of death and what comes afterwards I was able to assure my mother it was all right for her to let go and accept death rather than continue to accept the pain and anguish that brutal disease causes: lose of the simpliest memories and that most precious of our freedoms: the process of thinking.

My cousins could not accept that I could allow my mother to believe it was all right to die. They did not understand the daily turmoil I faced watching a 92 year old woman robbed of even the basic knowledge of how to relieve herself. I was fortunate to still have the freedom of thought to understand that she would never recover and that the longer she lived the more difficult it became for her to die.

You see, she no longer had that freedom. She could not comprehend that dying was a natural and inevitable conclusion until I reminded her and she quietly said, “Good bye,” and died.

Back to my childhood;

For days, I would go to bed and like most children on my era, we said our prayers: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take.”

That simple prayer, which I no longer say, introduced me to the illogical and frustrating banality of thought where questions had no answers. “When will I die? When will my father and mother?” I will credit the prayer with one simple codicil: I have an inherent appreciation for sunsets more than sunrises for as I have learned death can occur at anytime and if I eventually die in my sleep I will have at least enjoyed on final sunset; the end of a day and not its beginning.

As I relaxed in bed, my four-year-old intellect begins the syllogistic paradigm: I was born alive. I am living. Therefore, I am alive. I literally spent hours thinking about existence and what if I did not exist. What if the universe did not exist because my parents had already advised me on what I was looking at when I gazed at stars? They did not merely say, “Oh, that’s heaven.” It was the universe; galaxies, stars, suns and other worlds beyond my reach.

I can also credit this late-night mentality with turning me into an insomniac.

Before I knew the word epiphany existed, I astounded myself one night with what would become a lifelong love affair: hypnagogiue and the surrealism that comprise and compose the dream state.

Writers, artists, poets, musicians, saints and sinners, losers and winners all dream. Inspiration and creativity drive our dreams and when I met fellow blogger and artist-poet-photographer Kalliope Amorphous, in 2007, it was another epiphany because she also believed in hypnagogiue. Her awesome talents continue today to amaze me and at the moment of me writing this exploration she is creating more hypnagogic art for her blog Musecatcher

Dreaming Thoughts

I have come to believe the carbon-based life cycle was never meant to receive answers and therefore the questions are irrelevant. Theologians and the clergy endeavor to answer with even more questions because none have the answers. If you want to believe in God or Heaven and Hell or non-existence that is your privilege.

Think for yourself.

Descartes simple quote has been trivialized, reconsidered, argued, accepted, rejected and ignored. I read nowhere of how this philosopher would presuppose that five words could be misconstrued.

In 1969, the British rock group, The Moody Blues (a far different collective when I saw them in 1988 at Oak Mountain Amphitheater) radiantly ignite the argument in the opening minutes of their third album, the 1969 “On the Threshold of a Dream,” when after an instrumental introduction, a male voice questions and then proclaims at 1 minute 11 seconds:

“I think, I think I am, therefore I am. I think.”

Suddenly, a mechanical voice replies vindictively: “Of course you are my bright little star. I have miles and miles of files, pretty files, of your forefather’s fruit and now to suit our great computer your magnetic ink.”

The album is about dreams and anyone who has ever heard it will never forget the original. For purists, forget the digitally remastered 2006 version, unless you just want nine additional tracks not on the original or the 2008 remastered CD which, like all reissues, loses the ethereal sound in favor of producing versions for the “High-Deaf crowd.” I am fortunate to still have the vinyl album and below is the opening:

Back to Descartes, do we defend or attack with radical skepticism the cogito? As already discussed, the moment we are born into life itself the questions are raised: Why are we here? Where did we come from originally? When do we die? Logically, there will be far more unanswerable inquires raised from our first breath to the last whisper as the breath of life is extinguished but the fact we can raise the questions is justly extraordinary. The significance of individual thought is inspirational on its own; the concurrence of idiosyncratic relevance should not be dispossessed from one person to another but savored like a fine wine’s bouquet.

When the earliest human beings first looked up at the night’s sky it would have stimulated brain cells to begin the quandary of wondering why we could not reach out and touch them; moreover, what exactly was this black tapestry with tiny speckles of light engulfed in the unreachable recesses of space? We were gazing at something we did not understand and incalculable millenniums later we still may only glimpse such a infinitesimal quadrant of space that we cannot comprehend it fully.

Scientists may give us an earthbound conception of its size; width, depth and dimension but no one is proficient at knowing its true origin, magnitude or creation. We send insignificant probes into obscurity, designed by the human mind with primitive instrumentation to explore and accumulate sequentially statistics and records of its journey understanding that when finally ascertained for relevance its creators will have been dead for immeasurable more millennia.

Questions never answerable; they were erroneous once the emotionless explorer was freed from the limitations of present-day terrestrial technology. Even if we could see beyond the nearest galaxies we would be incapable of making use of the knowledge.

Take one hundred scientists from around the world and ask them one question and get myriad answers. They could all be astronomers or physicists or a comprehensive cross-section of all sciences and most would not agree absolutely on how the universe was created. While the “Big Bang Theory” could still be the predominant hypothesis their elucidation would assimilate so many variables that in the end no concise answer would satisfy concomitantly.

Unsurprisingly, a deity might be involved. God created the universe or an agnostic principle would replace the concept that the beginning had to have an architect. Before the protractors began to fly across the room the next question would need to be pondered as to what created the inventor of everything and what came before creation itself.

Individual human thought is fundamentally unaffected from what our ancestors thought, sitting around a fire: what is the beyond that void of space, how was it formed, and by whom, and then settling down to examine themselves and their place in this vast unknown. It is primarily the process of thinking that has evolved from simple questions to convoluted answers because we are all caught in the minutia and unsatisfied with the mysterious. The unanswerable is more captivating than accepting disembodiment.

Earliest humans were attuned to their environment and as such were able to discover that fire produced heat for warmth, could roast food and were destructive if uncontained within a small perimeter of space. The wheel made movement easier and animal skins covered their bodies from cold and the as clothing became further added to avoid the embarrassment of gender differences and sexual identity.

If one were to only acknowledge solipsism and that the self is the only existent entity we would all be egocentric rather than plentiful egotists. There are enough self-centered humans already and it is a disgrace that altruism is rapidly an extinct conception.

While the philanthropic still exists there are far too many malevolent forces negating benevolent aspirations. If the self knows nothing but its own modifications then self is fooling its own identity.

There is more to the mind than meets the mind’s eye and for contemporary man to think of its ancestors as primitive is the definitive affront to our own heritage. For all we have learned over the course of our insubstantial development countless have embraced nonentity. We see and do not believe; converse saying nothing and hear and do not comprehend.

The more cultured and educated we become the less sophisticated; yet we manage to survive.

History is revised so often that what was academic in, for the sake of a modified paradigm, the 19th Century, is frequently challenged as false or utterly inaccurate. We should have sympathy upon future generations trying to salvage the historical perspective of the 20th and early 21st when records are being rewritten relentlessly.

Did Christopher Columbus discover American? Was it really the Chinese? Nomadic hunters from Eastern Siberia who crossed the Bering Strait during the last Ice Age some 14,000 years ago? Prehistoric Spaniards; aka, the Solutrean hypothesis? For centuries everyone from scholars to false prophets have tried to determine and disprove that native Indians were already here. Pity they did not have an “official document” to protect their land before William Bradford and the Mayflower Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock (later to become Massachusetts) on December 21, 1620 and the genocide began.

For all anyone knows, a group of time travelers were there first but were wise enough to depart from earth on December 20th. The indigenous people of the North American continent were unprepared for mass killings at the hands of European settlers who would rather have all the land than share it with the natives.

What the human mind can conceive is simultaneously wondrous and frightening: the Spanish Inquisition, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin, Napoleon and the doctors who first used electro-shock therapy to cure schizophrenia.

With mitochondrial DNA scientists are now armed with a new technology that can distinguish genetic markers to further confuse and enlighten equally as to the origins of early Americans. European or with genetic origins in Asia?

Once again with questions. Before DNA analysis it was all guess work in theoretical venues and even with all the science behind the questions we are once again ensnared by minutia.

I Think, Therefore I Am Here Now and That Is All That Matters. I no longer care who discovered America any more than I am concerned with whom created the earth, the universe or what created the creator.

Freedom is just another word for Conformity

My father’s father came from Germany, my mother’s mother came from Hungary and for most of my life I was told my mother’s father was from Scotland. My father’s mother, America. Imagine my shock one evening as I sat drinking a Black and Tan at the Garage, a Birmingham bar with an outdoor courtyard when a cousin called to advise he had given my cell phone number to a man in Kentucky who was researching my family tree and when he called to ask me questions told me my grandfather was not born in Scotland but America!

Rather than an epiphany it was a heartbreaking realization that my mother, dying from Alzheimer’s disease, had deceived me for 53 years with stories and myths. I was told her was born in Kentucky and that his relatives fought against slavery during the Civil War and were responsible at some point for arresting Jesse James.

This started me on another journey: the accepting of the thought processes and how we are all capable of deception, whether or not it is intentional was no longer a viable argument but an unequivocal fact.

We all lie. We all deceive. We all think we know everything about, as it turns out, nothing.

Fascinating, but frightening, too. The progression of electrical impulses; axons, neurons and dendrites in the human brain and for what purpose are they actually serving?

Freedom of thought.

I thought I was free but I was mistaken.

As a writer, it is my obligation to explore from within the spongy finite matter beneath my receding hairline. At 56 years old I now realize that much of what I thought I knew I didn’t and that each day time is wasted in trying to assess fact from fiction when it is all an imaginary tale invented for conformity.

Traditionalism has never been my milieu anyway. I learned that while still in grammar school from illiterate white trash school mates who berated me for their beliefs that Jews killed Jesus Christ, who was himself a Jew and not a Christian. Nevertheless, rather than acquiesce to the prejudice I knew that in my own thoughts and beliefs I was not responsible for killing anyone, let alone a man who, if he existed at all, died over 1,965 years before I was born.

I am not here to dispute whether Jesus existed anymore than Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses or the Romans, Greeks or anyone else who lived in all the thousands of years before my unlikely birth. What I will quarrel with is that my early years were a testimony to the same arguments over who discovered America, if God exists and if so who created God, which in the end account for my later diffident viewpoint on all things unanswerable.

A few years ago I got into an impassioned, and thoroughly gratuitous, disagreement over whether or not we live in a Democracy. I saw no, “We live in thoughts of a Democracy.” My opponent, a former journalist, who last longer in the Fourth Estate than I, began to pontificate; I was no less dogmatic.

His position: elections, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and so forth.

My dissimilarity came in the form of a row where I used my personal experiences with all of his points.

My first opportunity to vote was wasted: I voted for Richard M. Nixon who turned out to be supreme example of political corruption in a poorly tailored suit: Watergate occurred while I was in Journalism School. “I am not a crook,” he told the American people, which would later be repeated by /bill Clinton’s assertion that he did not know Monica Lewinsky or had relations with her. He was pissed, but at least I used both a Republican and Democratic lying President.

At least Dwight D. Eisenhower, for all of his foibles, admitted to the American people that Gary Powers, the pilot shot down in his U2 spy plane by the Russians, were in fact spying on the Russians for the United States.

Freedom of Speech is always problematic; without it I would be unable to voice my opinions here on my blog. I would not be alive very long if I did it in Iraq or North Korea, but even in America radical thinking is still punishable by unenlightened ass-pockets who cringe at anyone who they believe is mocking religion or the societal malaise of the illiterate mind set.

We went the full Del Monty on this riff; I reminded him of what happened when Gandhi, Martin Luther King, John Kennedy and even Jesus expressed openly about peace, loving fellow sisters and brothers, racial equality and then it was time for me to buy another round.

My brief stint as a journo was truncated because I seem to always get jobs (all in the south) with newspapers operated by corrupt owners who would tell me I had to write something even if I could not substantiate the fact. I never did and from 1977-84 had so many different jobs that I finally was no longer hirable because even though I left the newspaper business with morals, ethics, scruples or dare I say my sanity intact it was a sad experience to see the future of news reporting and realize today I knew what was coming over twenty five years ago.

Our squabble slowed down, thanks, in part to many dark beers and a little taste of herb, when we came to religious freedom and I had to remind him of my experiences growing up Jewish in an area where we were not only in the minority but a hotbed of the KKK. True freedom would have meant I could remain Jewish and not listen to ignorant white trash and unenlightened Christians telling me how wrong I was in my beliefs when until that started I was even defending myself verbally.

That literally changed in one afternoon when I finally stood up to a bigger fellow high school boy, during a softball game in PE, who just would not shut up about how the Jews were all rich and controlled everything. My family was not wealthy and I finally realized that the only control I had was to either walk away, as I had done for about seventeen years, or stand my ground.
I stood tall and promptly struck him with a baseball bat right as he told me I was going to Hell.

Naturally, I was in the principal’s office and would have many visits my junior and senior year because even though the word got around that Henry was no longer taking the verbal abuse – freedom of speech works both ways – others had to test the theory.

Even in college I found that anti-Semitism continued because, well freedom to think also means freedom to open mouth and spout opinions. Oddly, my biggest nemesis were two guys, one from Philly, whose father was a policeman, killed in the line of duty, by, you guessed it, a Jew, and another fellow from NYC. Thanks to a friendship with a much older man, I began learning to finesse my repartee and since 1973 have as sharp a tongue as the tip of that Pitchfork of the Devil so many people have told me I was related to!

Democracy is still looking for a home and has found it here

Since I have always lived in America I feel qualified to see both sides of the question of what is egalitarianism. Our freedoms are getting more and more crushed by the mechanism of selfishness. I would not want to live in three quarters of the planet earth where the mere posting of this lengthy discourse could get me censored at the least, possibly jailed or at the worst, murdered because I dared to articulate opinions rather than keep them inside my head.

Everlasting thanks to Kalliope because I have become a Galas supporter, in that I adore the music of Diamanda, but moreover appreciate her honesty. Like my comedic mentor, George Carlin, who continued my education of the fallacies of language and words, DG is the most awesome example of straightforwardness in the world today. Her music and lyrics are impassioned beyond description and when she is interviewed she is often the pilot, crew and passengers she is so intensely direct. This is a trait that attracts me to Kalliope, as well, in that in today’s world it is difficult to find people who speak freely about what they believe without self-censoring themselves.

Diamanda’s three-part interview at the beginning of my treatise is wonderful. She is intellectually unequaled by 99.9 percent of the music world because she does not just think about what annoys her; she writes songs that are poetry to music and often destined to piss off everyone from the Vatican Mafia to homophobic mental masturbators who wouldn’t understand clarity if it was just a sheet of lucid glass smashed across their decisive foreheads.

Certainly, dictators and smarmy congressional representatives, who are entrenched for life in their powerful positions, usually say whatever they feel because they are unafraid of getting voted out of office, but the average citizen wants to keep their jobs and rather than stand up and being heard takes it out on their family, in automobiles through road rage, or merely acquiesce and remain mute.

Even Helen Keller learned to communicate so I am satisfied that while all may not agree with my ascertains they have the power to comment with disapproval or accept they are taciturn and keep their opinions in the mind.

It is not my style to remain mute. I gave that up in my teenage years and have never looked back with the slightest degree of regret.

I Think.

I Am.

Therefore, I Continue to Think I Am.

Conformity is Compliance to the wishes of the Majority. I Subsist on the belief that I can follow my dreams into reality and am better served if I do not conform to everything because someone in a pointed hat or robe tells me to accept my faith in fate and consent rather than dissent.

Does this make me a radical?

I sincerely hope so because I dream of a world where hope and love and charity are more than ideals espoused from a pulpit or from behind a presidential seal but put into practice and that all will taste the freedom of the fruit of that vine we are always reading about that is somewhere along the road to Oz.

I humorously pondered earlier how the late Dr. Seuss would have re-envisioned Descartes so I will close with my dedication to my newest writing friend, the esoteric thinker extraordinaire, Steven Van Neste, with possibly the best example I can give of how the mind processes internally, the lips go from a cruel curl to a smile, and the fingers depress upon the keyboard of freedom to express thoughts into words and words into ideas to be shared with the world:

I Think, Therefore I Am
Going To Eat Ham
Hence, I Am
Adding Green Eggs to My Ham
But, I’ll Be Damned
It’s Spammed, My Ham
So My Cat, Wears A Hat
To Remember Round From Flat
And that Blue Fish
Makes a Tasty Dish
But the Red Fish
I chance to Wish
Is contaminated with Mercury, apish!