~ foot work ~

It seems I’ve lost.

If I could choose words to best convey.. soft whispers of foraging (and forging) amidst an underworld. Once you can spot themes and patterns embedded in all myths through time, you can spot them anywhere and you begin to see symbols in all things. It can really make you curious.

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I am now lodged in isolation.. as best as I can get for now. I am writing. I have many stories. I believe your gifts flow through you and if you do not give them back to the community, your gifts become your curse.

So here goes…

Maybe this will help someone, or not.

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I’ve got foot references in this site.

My toe is greatly being healed which means nothing to you because that is one of many stories I’ve neglected to share on this blog which was designed to do just that.. share the story of these adventures.

But I hesitate at the exposure. Something to do with my birthdate (this friday.) Anyways,

I left California and that hurt a bit. I met some special people there. The worst thing is right now I don’t know why I left, nor why I am here. That part of traveling sucks.

The times you’ll only find out if you allow yourself to pay attention, the times when your brain spins with the questions that erode any memory of a moment bringing worth you’ve ever had. Run-on sentence.

Another paradox among human behavior, we need to have a story to keep us afloat, though we truly never know what the hell we’re doing and it never works out the way we imagine. The only thing we can promise is that it will not happen the way we imagine.

Time to use the cure-all.

I’m sad. What am I doing with my life? Am I doing something worthwhile traveling the country or am I just kidding myself and am a huge bum?

Yes.

Would I rather wake up tomorrow and go to a cubicle. HAHAHA FUCK NO!

Ok I feel better.

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Here’s something.

In the years since I’ve left my home, I developed a pseudo family. There is a moment though, where you might be staring at a sunset or watching a movie projected on a wall at a friend’s house in the desert and you have a striking feeling that you’ve outgrown your pseudo family.

Its a tearing feeling, both a feeling of being torn inside and streams of tears coming from the rip. And that feeling hurts but not as much as when you know you must press your ear to them and listen to the whispers between the tears. They tell you what you know, what you’ve always known. That something indeed is or has come to an end.

Course you weren’t ready for that yet, but now you are, at that very moment as the sun sinks beyond the lips into the throat of the desert frame and you wonder what Rumi meant when he said the Ruby held against the sunset becomes the sunset.

The voice inside says “I am the ugly duckling, but with more stages than they ever let on. Forget the pupae. Move on.”

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Robert Rodriguez says “Creatives can learn to us technology, but Technos can’t learn to be creative.”

Stories are quite like bowls of soup. They can hold ideas, wisdoms and therapy for healing a culture’s wounds. The problem we have is Hollywood seems set to only make broth tolerable to the pickiest child. So we get bowl after bowl of Macaroni and Cheese or something equally lacking in nutrition whereas stories told used to be polished to the point where they resonated truly with human experience.

Luckily, the time has come where anyone with a laptop and a camera *could* conceivably create their own movie. The ideal situation would be to sift out the symbols and themes which help the unconscious of your average viewer to deal with the wounds common to our society.

With our current leadership (or lack thereof) it is very clear that we’re going to be needing a generation of Elders and leaders who actually can embody the wisdom that leaders once had. These youth will need all the help they can get to find themselves, they are currently being drowned in a sea of useless commercials, anything but true reality shows and garbage which does anything but mentors them to finding out who they are.

They and we need help. The technology is there so we can end this homogenization of insipid culture. If anyone is with me, let’s begin.

Here’s my attempt at splicing together film and 3D CGI. Hope you all can see it.

Click Here if you cannot see this.

Its shaky but its a start. Be well.

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You have to be kidding me. I found the biggest FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) frock article for the day. Yay for me!

Emos exposed
Emos Exposed (PDF Version)

Well their ploy worked, they got me to pay attention. Even if it is solely for their lunacy. Now some of you might look at my words above as scoffing, it is. But what is important is the consequences of this mentality.

EMO is an abbreviation for emotional. Part punk, part goth, emo kids celebrate sadness and pain. Psychologist Judith Zimmerman tells ABC 4 NEWS, “Part of the guiding philosophy of EMO kids is pain. That’s the sub-current.”

Celebrating sadness and pain… that sounds to me like (gasp) Zen Monks.

What?! what do you mean Zen Monks..

The Buddha’s first words: “All life is suffering.”
The first words of Scott Peck’s book the Road Less Traveled: “Life is hard.”

The whole point of meditation is to choose your suffering. It is a manifestation of the suffering we feel by just being alive.

Youth want to celebrate sadness? Let them, they have been for thousands of years. Youth celebrating suffering is called an Initiation Ritual, or a Rite of Passage.

The idea here is that people don’t really learn much about themselves (inner selves, the unconscious elements of psyche) unless they have struggles to enact them. Taking an inner struggle outwards is the essence of Ritual. Once there you can actually work with it.

If this weren’t so, we simply wouldn’t have Weddings any longer. The unconscious needs to be told symbolically through some means it is time to die and be reborn.

If our society understood this, we’d have more Initiation Rituals, Divorce Rituals and Soldier Return Rituals which we are going to be really in trouble when the Iraqi War returns to our streets.

To isolate youth further from community is only going to be more of a detriment to them. Think of how amazingly isolated these kids are. I’m unsure how to help but I suppose it is time for me to do more mentoring again.

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There’s loads of potential here. The irony is that where we have the tools to do amazing things (see below), I have such a hard time finding those with time and focus. I’m talking about making movies on the cheap, but good ones because we know the endless regurgitations Hollywood spews.

I don’t know how to do much of this yet, but I’m beginning to see a whole new way of creating the stories and myths for our society. Anyone else in on this?

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Dear Science and Religion,

Please stop bickering. I’m tired of it. You make it worse for the kids and you act just like them.

I know you’ve had your problems. Things are rough and you’re changing power on things. Religion was on top forever and now Science seems to be taking over. Holding on to your position won’t do any good for either of you.

Please have makeup sex Science and Religion.

Science and Religion I can’t stand you not having make up sex. I don’t want to hear bickering, I want to hear orgasms. Its really irritating, when I hear you bickering in my computer, when I turn on the TV or when I’m driving and you bicker on the trunks of people’s cars. Please stop bickering this way. You both want it so badly, please for the sake of our sanities, get freaky.

Don’t tell me you have both gotten so childish that you take yourselves this seriously. Science, I know that Religion’s view on the world seems insane and that Religion, Science’s view on the world is very arrogant to anything you can’t quantify.

Sigh.

Religion, you know about faith. I shouldn’t have to tell you the opposite of faith isn’t doubt, that it is certainty. Why do you keep getting in this mess? You know in order to have true faith you need to have doubt! If you remembered that, it would be easier for you to convey your point to Science. You just shouldn’t take things literally, these are metaphors right? Jesus spoke in parables and people didn’t get it… please don’t forget that, please don’t eat the menu. If you need help, just ask. There are great people out there, Joseph Campbell, Thomas Merton and others who can help.

And Science, you should be ashamed of yourself. Oh you are so very smart and you won’t let us forget it. But how smart is it that you forget Newton’s second law of physics? Does ‘equal and opposite reaction’ ring a bell? Doesn’t it make sense the way to make things worse is to get antagonistic. Its ok to voice your opinion but please stop saying that Religion is ridiculous. That hurts Religion’s feelings and Religion can’t listen if you do that.

Maybe you should remember that unlike you Religion might have had bad experiences with academia (I have.) Maybe you should think that ‘hey I’m clever, maybe I’m clever enough to come up with a way to communicate this better. Or I should look at Carl Sagan’s work because he did ok respecting Religion and I should watch Contact.’ I mean hey.. maybe Religion has had an experience of life that you won’t have, and it really sucks to have someone tell you what you did or didn’t experience. Did you ever think of that?

Science and Religion, please stop and have make up sex. You’re making your children fundamentalists. Has it always been so bad? You know you are both after a sense of wonder. That wonder is the experience which seeded both of you. And when you get so literal you lose the wonder you know.

Dear Science and Religion,

In conclusion, make up sex is waaayy better than being so literal. Please soften your hearts and stop messing with the people in this already too fucked up culture.

Oh. and please wear protection, we don’t need another Scientology running around.

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I got a webpage up which I’m hoping will help people communicate to organizations working on Rites of Passage for Soldiers. I don’t know why I feel called to this, except there is a need for it and I’m hoping to help. I don’t want to turn my head away.

Soldier Return Rituals

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If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.
~Dorothy Parker

So I’ve been furiously focused on aiding the returning soldiers. We need to give them their Rites back.

I was disappointed, this stone is too large for me to bear in its fullest sense, but should I be able to grasp at least what it is I can do. Jill Silverthorne wants to do this a bit bigger. I would say she is starting to have dreams about it as her main motivation.

Last night I had a dream where I was in a guy’s locker room. My clothes were torn, I was disheveled. Then I began to get hazed by one of the other men (one I had known in high school.) I was essentially tackled and my glasses taken. I managed to get free and jump into a pool.

I recognized all of them, the athletes from yesteryear except one. He was the strongest, the most cut and the most animalistic but in an alluring way, perhaps like Steve McQueen would be my best way of conveying that. So I managed to escape except for that one. He caught up to me and was full of sadness. We were encased in a dark box, a prison and he knew what that was like and I was relieved that he and I had a commonality and were no longer in conflict.

The rest of the situation resolved itself. My drill instructor of a coach showed up (I believe he had oked the hazing) and as I went to change, I realized that all of the athletes were in various places around the locker room masturbating. Many sat in a pool (which my unconscious recently added) and many were hermaphrodites and serviced both pair of genitals.

I could not find a place to change and one hermaphrodite began female ejaculation from behind his/her scrotum which coated everything in the room with fluid. (You impressed with how fucked up this is yet? At least its very alchemical and is trying to show me the resolve between male/female or I’d be a bit freaked.)

I had to wash off but the pool was now “wine-dark” (I’ve been researching the Odyssey) with semen (ocean brine/Oranos/Aphrodite.)

I found the most clear pool and figured I was already soiled from it all so I might as well rinse what I could off. When I swam to the bottom, one of the men (who is now a Marine) sat on me accidentally. I was glad I could navigate upwards to air despite disorientation.

And I believe then I awoke to my cell phone.

I’m curious to see in these next years and my endeavors working on rites of soldiers how this plays out.

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How to Write With Style

by

Kurt Vonnegut

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.

These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful — ? And on and on.

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an emptyheaded writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.
1. Find a subject you care about

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.
2. Do not ramble, though

I won’t ramble on about that.
3. Keep it simple

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
4. Have guts to cut

It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.
5. Sound like yourself

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when your write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.
6. Say what you mean

I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable — and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing, if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.

Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.
7. Pity the readers

They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school — twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify — whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.
8. For really detailed advice

For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, in a more technical sense, I recommend to your attention The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. E.B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.

You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself, if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.
In Sum:
1. Find a subject you care about

2. Do not ramble, though

3. Keep it simple

4. Have guts to cut

5. Sound like yourself

6. Say what you mean

7. Pity the readers
from: How to Use the Power of the Printed Word, Doubleday

Available from International Paper, Dept 5DM, P.O. Box 954, Madison Sq. Sta., N.Y. NY 10010 for $7.95 (includes $2.00 for p and h).

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My luck unfolds beautifully. I was invited to a wedding on the Apache reservation this weekend by a friend of mine, Jill Silverthorne whom I met through Joyce, the head of the Los Angeles Mythological RoundTable.

I had a lecture at the San Clemente RoundTable on Friday night and we drove from there till dawn reaching the Apache Reservation. The ceremony was at dawn, largely in Apache and un-filmable. I filmed stretches of the beauteous desert though which I hope to drop on here.

The ritual went as such: the couple created a wikinni which was a small hut made from boughs nearby the previous day. They stood before their structure in full garb, white doeskin dress and ribbon shirts along with excuisite shoes. As the two were united, a butterfly flew over.

I made some good friends among the kids by helping to get the dock in the lake rocking back and forth and also by chiding the couple after the ceremony when they were to take down their wikinni. (I thank my mother for introducing me to the fine intricacies of Native humor.)

Of course at the reception, I had a good talk with Mike Judge’s Uncle and was grabbed to dance by various women repeatedly which was good fun though I had to give up my past dance skizzlez, we were having fun.

Jill and I worked out aspects of working together, discussed various mythic themes, etc. and dropped by Surprise to see my Aunt Monica who played a highly influential time in my early years of not entering the corporate world, back in ‘01.

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