Tag: backalley blogging

(Towering Spaciousness, Hans Hofman.  h/t The Blind Swimmer)

An excerpt from Digital Tibetan Buddhist Altar’s Tibetan Astrology

… I am suggesting that the time has come to absorb the longevity of a troublesome embodiment of malevolence and anger, purify it, and liberate it into basic space.

There are many ways to view this suggestion.  One can view it in its plain meaning or in the context of Tibetan Buddhist (and in this instance, Bon) teachings and traditions.  In particular, the phrase “liberate it into basic space” has a very specific meaning in both the Bon and Tibetan Buddhist practice.

So much for any hint of rationality.  The back alleys have a different ambiance.

Luxury Persian carpets and velvet curtains, leather chairs in book lined studies with gleams of brass and crystal are all very nice.

Back alleys have the silver gleam of trashcan covers in the dim white light of a quarter moon, infinitely textured shadows culminating in narrow corners turned with great panache, well la la la.

The rest is on the flip.  

That’s Rimbaud, Arthur (or is it Artur? I dunno) Rimbaud.

I read some of his poems and they were good, and I found him through reading about Ginsberg and Kerouac, Burroughs and how they liked Rimbaud during one or the other of their wild chapters of life.

Then I read a biography of Rimbaud that I don’t remember much from, though I liked it, his crowd reminded me of the backward children I hung out with in the Midwest in my salad days.  He came to Paris in 1871 during the aftermath, I think, of the Battle of Paris (about which I know very little, except that he was on the side of the insurrectionists).

He buddied up with Verlaine, another poet, and they scandalized the already terrorized Paris with their crazy living, woo woo.  After splitting with Verlaine, Rimbaud continued his crazy ways.

He didn’t write poetry for long — he ended up a merchant travelling all over the place, didn’t make much of a success of it.

Punching through

fabrics of official

culture.

Snip snip

won’t do.

Reweaves too quick for that.

***

The incessant

Boo! Boo!

becomes annoying.

Lies lies

so thin.

It can’t get louder so it gets thin.

***

Cocksucker, or

some other

shocking society word.

Pish tosh

too slow.

Doesn’t begin to approach the foe.

I won’t kid you.

Or maybe I will.  Who knows what I’ll do.  Ha!

Arizona just passed a law that is an unjust law.

But Arizona isn’t the only place this is happening.

Migrants living here who aren’t citizens are not the only ones suffering.

We suffer too.

It is the same suffering, there is no separation.

That’s what solidarity is.  Always has been.  Always will be.

Sometimes while prowling back alleys you find things that don’t bear the light of day, brass ritual cymbal turns out to be a trashcan cover, exotic seafood dinner is really rotten fish guts.

Yet perhaps there’s some truth to these lies.

Here in NYC the sun has gone down.  That’s the time to prowl.

You’re in kindergarten and some strange large being is telling you about reading and showing you something called an alphabet.  And you go with the flow and recite all the letters and hear how they’re put together and daydream and look out the window and listen some more and sneak candy from out of your desk and make faces at the other children when the teacher’s not looking and take naps on mats.

And then one day you can read.  You look at a page with black squiggles on it and all of a sudden they’re not squiggles any more, they’re words and you can read them.  You’ve taken the leap.

We’re lawless now.  The only citizens of the United States who are subject to the law are those with no power … so it’s not really being subject to the law.  It’s being subject to power.

That’s dangerous.

We see the anger forming among the citizenry and we don’t yet know where that anger is going to ultimately land.  Right now the anger is directed towards the bankers.  But that could change rapidly given the big events we are confronting, from tent cities to climate change.  Round and round it goes and where it stops no one knows.  Unknown.  Danger and the unknown.

(Video courtesy of YouTuber UnivoxSuperfuzz – and sorry for abrupt cutoff at the end)

The danger, oh we are dangerous right now, all of us, we are dangerous and who knows what we will do when confronted by the unknown adventures ahead?

“Shake a Hand,” made famous by Faye Adams (not allowed to embed),  here sung by LaVerne Baker and Jackie Wilson, courtesy of YouTuber sandfordway)

Sometimes while prowling back alleys you find things that don’t bear the light of day, brass ritual cymbal turns out to be a trashcan cover, exotic seafood dinner is really rotten fish guts.

Yet perhaps there’s some truth to these lies.

Here in NYC the sun has gone down.  That’s the time to prowl.

There is a revolution of the seasons, winter turns to spring, spring to summer.  There are revolutions in the course of humankind, kings and queens are replaced by other kings and queens.

And then there is a revolution in consciousness.  No, not evolution, revolution.  First you gotta get the bad stuff out, clean the muddied well, then you can go to the evolution part!

The irony of backalley blogging on the FP has already been noted.  As has this:

Sometimes while prowling back alleys you find things that don’t bear the light of day, brass ritual cymbal turns out to be a trashcan cover, exotic seafood dinner is really rotten fish guts.

Yet perhaps there’s some truth to these lies.

Here in NYC the sun has gone down.  That’s the time to prowl.

With no apparent purpose, I will say that from an artistic view I’ve been frustrated by folks characterizing the far left as a given known group.  Ever since I started hearing the stories of the hippies from the 60s and their adventures, I don’t see how they are ever truly portrayed in our political discourse and yet I would maintain they are the true left who inherited the real mantle from the same folks who worked for social justice in the 30s and 40s, those who came from Eastern Europe for good or ill who had a real revolutionary vision of equality and human rights which was passed through the wild American filter culminating in a generation of visionaries who to this day have not received their true (and well deserved) portrait in our album of history.  I’ve also, in recent years, come to both meet and read about some of the fierce young people who have that same spirit but in a far more difficult environment, they hop trains and live on the street and protest from sheer howling passion, and these kids have not had their portrait included either.  Anyway, just had to get that off my chest.