As an again…after having finished reading Cat’s Cradle, first I think that anybody who has called this pertinent kid’s stuff is lying…& merely trying to ascend themselves above something they cannot possibly allow themselves to be seen enthusiastically associating with intellectually.  Setting it up on a high shelf, yes, but not wearing loudly, in a pressed shirt and polished shoes ensemble, for all to judge it in or out of adult fashion.  But it’s deep.  It’s no less than the bulk sum total of all human understanding…in a fictional journal; to call it otherwise is all about the ego & social pecking-order methodology. 

Who is that there, as a child of the past, sitting in the ditch, a singular pile of dirt is all that he surveys.  He needs only few things to occupy him:  To set some stuff up in an interesting fashion, be it plastic figures or whatever; to eventually knock them down

with precision, with balls of dirt or stones or a squirt gun or something that explodes if

he could get his hands on some firecrackers or the like; &…to look at or touch upon a consenting naked girl’s body…and see how she reacts ~~ girls smell so good.  The mind of a male child in the processes of earliest adolescence is not all that complicated, even when they are poetic and inquisitive.  They are very curious sorts, driven by action and happy with simple set-up and knock-down randomness when not presented with other sources of possibility.  Maybe this is what we are, …perhaps this is why we find ourselves in the disappointing state we’re in as a so-called progressive society.  What if Mary Magdalene was the Holy Grail.  What if you had some ice-nine in a small bullet-shell sized vile on a chain?  How would you use it, or preferably not use it?  If I had the resources to improve it, to stabilize it into ice-10 via the science of the times, …how then would I use it?  This is the Cat’s Cradle of destruction, the Cat’s Cradle of confusion, the Cat’s Cradle of flush accountability to one’s self & one’s neighbors.  So many daily Cat’s Cradles of potentiality in every walk of life.  Maybe we will never get it right;  suffering one another for sake of id & ego.    Maybe the best in us will always be overshadowed by the machinations of moot  conquest.  Of setting things up and knocking them back down. All we really need is the sun to rise and the breakers to break.  Perhaps we’d all relent and die…if not for our living curiosity…& a sense of the love we have for others.  

…thank every ounce of goodness and renaissance for the electric guitar….

~

…braced

atop

an

oubliette

iz

where

my

life

has

placed

me

on

this

rare

occasion

that

I

may

find

all

my

senses

triggered

freely

towards

hopes

&

dreams;

apparently

I’ve

seemed

to

be

like

moths

a’flight

in

a

jar…

never

trying

anymore

to

pass

beyond

the

removed

otherworldly

barrier

so

clearly

braced

atop

an

oubliette…

~~JBear ‘89

~~

     Young Castle called me “Scoop.”  “Good morning, Scoop.  What’s new in the word game?”

     “I might ask the same of you,” I replied.

     “I’m thinking of calling a general strike of all writers until mankind finally comes to its senses. Would you support it?”

     “Do writers have a right to strike?  That would be like the police or the firemen walking out.”

     “Or the college professors.”

     “Or the college professors,” I agreed.  I shook my head.  “No, I don’t’ think my conscience would let me support a strike like that.  When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.”

     “I just can’t help thinking what a real shaking up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems…”

     “And how proud would you be when people started dying like flies?”  I demanded.

     “They’d die more like mad dogs, I think---snarling and snapping at each other and biting their own tails.”

     I turned to Castle the elder.  “Sir, how does a man die when he’s deprived of the consolations of literature?”

     “In one of two ways,” he said, “petrescence of the heart or atrophy of the nervous system.”

     “Neither one very pleasant, I expect,” I suggested.

     “No,” said Castle the elder.  “For the love of God, both of you, please keep writing!”

~~

if you never read Cat’s Cradle, the whole book, then at least

read chapter 114, “When I felt the Bullet Enter My Heart”