Sublimation

3-31-06 Sublimation



At first I did it to kill the pain I felt every night from sleeping without her, eating dinner without her, being in this house without her. It was a defense strategy to save me from nightmare. I knew she loved me & I knew I loved her. She was with some guy she didn't love. And I believed they all were-----the beautiful women. And this had been going on so long I actually was numb to the pain. I also went to jail once upon a time for an absolutely beautiful woman who loved me as I did her. She could not save me because she also was a prisoner I learned too late. And she was the most beautiful woman I ever met. Well, my present lady of absence was beautiful too. The one that drove me to the movies in my living room every night. And sometimes a double feature. I actually mastered the pain in this fashion. By using my art & genius to concentrate on the business at hand: to wit, watching a movie 7 nights a week. With one exception. On the nights I hosted and narrated my television program. That was the only night I ever left the house. Like I say, or was trying to say, at some point this experience became an actual Pleasure. Call it real Sublimation. I was burying my sexual drives in the name of Art & Beauty & Creation.

What was I doing in the meantime to change this state of affairs with respect to unrequited love? I was doing this. I was writing The Story Of My Life every morning & afternoon. And in the evenings I would haul out the movies I picked up at the video store. At that time I went to Tempo's just up the street. They charged only 99 cents for a movie. 1.50 for Recent Releases. And once a week 2 for one. I saw every murder mystery in the store I believe. Though that is exaggeration. I saw numerous good films and a few superb movies and hundreds of losers. Found something to admire in almost everything. I love movies. I did discover that. I won that battle. I absolutely Refused to feel sorry for myself for sleeping alone and waiting for Beauty & me to be united. I had no method. I also had no money. I couldn't buy my way out of any trouble. But I did manage to change my consciousness. When I turned the lights out every night & popped that video into my VCR I opened my eyes and I was prepared for Pleasure. This is the purest case of Sublimation I have ever heard about. I did not suffer for that 100 minutes I was watching the film. Or the double 100 minutes. I enjoyed. I studied. I became an authentic authority on movies.

Before that I was merely known as The Best Poet in L.A by the man who is now the principal art critic for The New Yorker Magazine. That was a considerable tribute but in those days it felt obvious & had no influence on my psyche. Perhaps reading my poems and prose so many times all over L.A. & then on television so many times actually made me even more aware of the power of the magic celluloid. But one a.m. arrived and I had to climb into that bed alone every night without the Beauty of my life. And I became therefore from this continuous methodological film-watching---I became something of a robot in the field of my very own Romance. I forgot. I actually forgot how to woo a woman. I mean this literally. This kissing hugging Passionate man Robert Greenfield had his erotic gifts erased as it were--his simple Gift (Mine) to love a woman with automatic & deep & expressive Passion. I had lost that simple but tremendous power. The power to slide across the front seat of a car and hold a woman in my arms & kiss her & hug her & feel her creamy shoulders and smell her hair and her face and caress her & stroke her and kiss her repeatedly. I forgot that. O, of course I remember having experienced that amazing Passion so many times. But now it was gone. And my lips had literally begun to shrink from years of not kissing the woman I loved and not receiving her kiss back and her hands stroking my face and head and ears. That has not happened in ten years of absolute nothingness.

My television show rolled on. It had a tremendous amount of Life in it. It was full of erotic passion. Of course. My entire sex life was bound up in literature and movies and books and music & painting. Of course it was full of Passion. As I sit here this very moment 8:54 p.m. Friday evening I just stepped away from my VCR where I am indeed this very night watching once again-----YET!-----a movie. And this movie which pushed me away to register this BLOG is titled 'MEMENTO.' It is a quite amazing movie directed by Christopher Nolan about a man who has lost his Short Memory. He can't remember anything that occurs to him. His memory stopped back there around the time his wife was raped & murdered. In any event, what I have just recorded above concerning my past is still the same today. The beautiful woman now has temporarily at least disappeared. She probably still loves me & I probably still love her. But by this time I am totally in the dark. I have no new information. And I certainly have no replacement for her. One never changes one's criteria for Love. They constitute one's actual psyche I have learned. Only people without criteria even talk about such things. I have heard the ramblings of those men who have no criteria. They are always people outside the world of Creation. I never talk with them any more. They don't want true love or true art or true beauty which are always unified. They want machine sex. I have had enough machine sex to know it is a waste of time & virtue. I am now going to return to my movie to watch the conclusion. I saw this movie a couple of times ten years ago or so. And, I don't remember it. The amnesia that afflicts the main character in the movie has also afflicted me. I don't care. I have nobody to report to. I just want to coast through this night on something better than bad memories or cheap regret. I still believe the only Reason I am on earth is to bring Beauty into the world. And to me there is no Beauty without mutual love with one woman.

RLG Copyright 2006

Love, Sex & The Golden Mean

3-30-06 The Classical Way


According to the doctrine of The Golden Mean it is wise to avoid Excess & Defect alike. Stay away from Wealth as much as Poverty, say these wise teachers, for both bring Suffering. According to this ancient view of Classical Antiquity & also of Classical China The Middle Course is The Wise Way. In our culture-----yours & mine-----no such classical doctrine is espoused by the powers that be. "Greed is Good," it was prophesied by The Reaganites back in the ugly eighties. And Newt Gingrich and his fanatical right wing friends have pushed the same sick views on an essentially comatose America. America is pretty much married to its machines-----its cars & its computers & its games. There is no real original blood thinking happening across this perishing Republic that is accessible. I mean there is nothing jolting you & me out of bed every morning with that transcendental Radiance. Is there? It's all up to ourselves to shock ourselves into Wakefulness.

That of course is what The Golden Mean has always been to the Enlightened Mind. To awaken from this nightmare of daily drudgery that drags us down into the dirt to think dirt thoughts and do dirt deeds and, never forget, to pray dirt prayers to the Dirt God to spare us from Suffering & Death. But, according to every Wise Man & Woman I have ever read our master mistake is to believe that having great feasts and tremendous blow-out sexual experences & to roll in money by the millions of dollars & have 2 or 3 Luxury Power automobiles and the same number of 5 million-dollar mansions and all that with them go---to have these advertised experiences is to be Happy Happy Happy and at last home free from the big S-----no more damned Suffering. Because with an incessant supply of luxury goods and huge bank accounts and ten million dollars of cash stuffed in various drawers & cupboards & suitcases ready to meet any emergencies one should be damned well fortified against the outrages of Nature & Civilization & Its Discontents. No, Brothers & Sisters? That of course and work 7 days a week 10 to 15 hours a day to Prove to The Gods that we mean business & do not take the cultural mandate lightly: "Subdue the earth and increase and multiply!"

What a deadly recipe for a totally failed LIFE! For of course everything I have here listed as Pleasure is assigned to the cause of Suffering by the gods & the goddesses. For these are all symptoms of the unsatisfied and never satisfiable Id. And we are full of distortion if we believe that any of these false gods will bring Pleasure. Though we believe it until the very moment Death knocks on our door. We actually live as though these things are true. Especially Duty, if not the attainment of satisfaction by loading up on the best food the best clothing cars computers friends wives & mistresses. Is this not the case? If you aren't all beat out of your head by physical goods & things---food, sex, & money-----then at least you might justify your existence by being a full-time slave to Duty. Oh, Yes, that sells like hot cakes in the local community. These are worker bees or ants. Holy Holy Holy. This is America The Beautiful. And we were built into this mighty Empire by blood sweat and tears. The blood was shed largely by the Indians & the foreign peoples who continue to bleed & die to this day. And the sweat belongs to the backs of the slaves who owe their bodies to The People. Duty, let me see now. How does Duty fit into the Big Picture? O Yes, Duty---that is what my Parents decided was good for me. That is what the priest & the minister & rabbi have decided is for my own good & therefore for the good of that great bugaboo "Society." Amen, then. Better not ask any questions of DUTY. Next thing you know you''ll be questioning the existence of God who Ordained these laws from His mighty citadel in Heaven.

Well, I am truly sorry. But Duty is imposed from without and may get you a sound sleep of 2 to 4 hours every night but it is of no consequence whatsoever to arriving at a state of Being that we might call FREEDOM. For the only way to become Free is to be liberated from the chains that presently hold the prisoner: to wit, following the same old path that the Master Society dictates. And I say this: Everything wrong with the world presently goes back to this insane American drive for THINGS. Emerson wrote 'Things are in the saddle and ride mankind." Never has it been truer than it is today. And the only Revolution that can ever happen begins in the individual human being. And this Revolution will come from an AWAKENING---it is always irresistible. But it also needs stimulus. It needs pressure. It needs to be super conscious of itself in order to be born as the language for example of Hegel so clearly reveals or of Henry David Thoreau. And Thoreau is the clearest of all. Mohandas Gandhi spent a good portion of his rich life in jail cells drinking water and saying & doing nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Our very greatest political activist---himself not politically inclined in the least though a masterful attorney and speaker in plain Christian Hindu Humanist parables. There must be a simple lesson here. As in the old fairy tales & The Metamorphoses & those wonderful fables. The message is take it easy. Quit ruining your life with stupid work & jabbering at the water fountain. Time to have Real Joy! The kind that doesn't cost money or come from the rules of the church or the state! The Simple Kind.

RLG Copyright, 2006

The Pecking Order Of 20th C. American Literature

3-26-06 Concerning High & Low Church Modernism


W.C. Williams the good doctor who delivered many a baby among the pure screaming products of America---was he not also a pontificator extraordinaire behind the glasses of neighborly Good Times Generation Man friendly codger? Did not this same pediatrician preach the gospel that His Way was The Only Way, in a way? I mean sure, T.S. Eliot was that evil ex-patriate Royalist Look Down Your Nose footnote intellectual and should've kept his Waste Land in London in the basement at Lloyd's Bank. And, yes again, Ezra Loomis Pound was too Yooropean to be trusted by the likes of you & me as we talk over the back fence concerning things not ideas, idioms not idiotic abstractions among a game of pool let's say in the Pool Room which is a peculiarly American institution not imported from The Continent. Do you dig? The son of a bitches in The Academy got The Ache for abstraction that comes with age and too much time in The Stacks & doctrine---o, yes, that above all else. The doctrine of The High Church of Esthetical Cant. If you cant get it up you do The Down Syndrome in esthetics-----follow the leaders with the most crooked line. Since a straight line is the closest distance between two points and that spells trouble, it's too easy. There must be something wrong with it. It is available to the Poor, God help us all. And we all know sex is too good for the poor. Maybe it (this ideal poem) is also Radiant like the sun. Let's say it's Simple & Direct and actually Here & Now present(!) to be touched & tasted & smelled & seen & heard-----if you have the essential tools.

But like I say, if you don't have them-----the Gifts of taste, & smell & hear & see & touch-----then of course you can hide in the stacks at the library & invent mighty deeds of the abstract Intelligence told in a language unrecognized by the common herd-----The Rabble. In fact you can invent a whole theology whose Secrets can be gleaned Only by the elect-----who are of course the clergy predestined to be the Interpreters of the new sacred & Infallible & forever Clandestine scriptures. In nebulo veritas. In the Clouds are truth. Long live nebulosity! But of course who gives a damn about you and your world of clouds & fake reality?

Take up thy cross & follow me, you little lizards. For breakfast you get stones. For lunch sticks. For supper turds. Be grateful for your appetites. They will save you from much mischief. Such as whole weekends wasted on gourmet gravy and all the STD sex you can eat in 72 hours of non-stop moaning & writhing & continuous loss of oxygen: or, what you previously thought to be Pleasure. Cleanse thyself of rampant Stupidity. Which attacks the brain like a raging fire that spreads with ferocious velocity & consumes the entire organism with that unstoppable disease : GREED. I WANT MORE, you son of a bitches, & I'm Gonna Get It-----over your dead bodies. That lame line of a dying organism.

RLG

Theory Of Reminiscence

3-24-06 Reminiscence & The Principle of Complementarity


According to the theory of Reminiscence we all know potentially everything but we have forgotten. I first encountered this theory in the writings of Plato. Now I am speaking more loosely & from my own experience. Still, that notion is wondrous to me-----the notion of Reminiscence-----that there is knowledge in the world & within us that only needs to be recollected, to be discovered. It is inside our amazing Memories. But somehow we have lost sight of these memories. As we make our way through life we experience Memory jogs that shock us into awareness of past experiences & truths that reveal the very essence of our lives & also the minds with which we perceive our very existences and whereby we give them shape & continuity.

There is another idea I came across In Jung that I am certain is already latent in Plato & has been expressed by other thinkers and that is the principle of Complementarity. The notion that while we make our plans and have our conscious intentions, our goals and our methods, there is within us at the same time a Counter Plan at work in our Unconscious that is totally inaccessible to our concious ego-minds. This is to me an equally wondrous idea. And I wish I had allowed this idea to have more space in my own consciousness through the years. For, of course, we plan this and that adventure and if The Unconscious which is autonomous has Other Plans then we are doomed to fail in our conscious wishes and purposes unless we admit The Unconscious to have adequate Place in our planning & thinking. This is a most powerful Reality---this principle of polarity that flaunts so many of our plans and adventures and can turn ecstasy into agony if we do not admit the negative into our affirmations. Heraclitus already had this whole idea in mind when he said "everything tends sooner or later to go over into its opposite." This is what Jung had in mind. That underneath all our planning lives The Unconscious which has its own independent wishes & desires and if they are not in some large & significant way taken into account by our consciousness then the organism will be thwarted from fulfilling its conscious plans.

Thus when we want something too much in our lives and that something is resisting our enjoyment or fulfilment thereof it usually means we have failed to listen to the deep and blind drives of the organism that are alive underneath our visible intentions. This calls for a relaxed attitude. It is akin to what Allan Watts once called THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY. I.e., Watts counselled us to quit hanging on and to stop squeezing and manipulating facts and people in order to achieve our goals. But rather to assume the Zen posture of watchfulness and careful relaxed attention as we go about the business of living. A constant sense of humor is called for in this situation. For the more we push or pull at things the more they resist our claim on them. While when we relax things also tend to flow naturally. Watts often put it this way: when we try to float we sink; when we try to sink we float. That is the wisdom of insecurity. Let yourself go & you will ride on top of the water in agreement with its pressure. Here is how Albert Camus put it in "The Myth Of Sisyphus":

"When the memories of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of Happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in the heart of man."

RLG

GW Bush Is An Embarrassment To Us All

• 3-23-06 America Is Now Considered A Third Rate Country Around The World
  
  
  National prestige is at an all time low throughout the world because of the shenanigans that Bush has been masquerading as policy ever since he stole The White House in 2000. This sickness needs to be cured. And the only CURE is going to come from The Citizens not from the monsters posing as spokesmen on national television hired to mouth the right wing crap issuing from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. We of course have a comatose electorate. But that has been true from the beginning I suppose---largely. There are moments of half-life when a President dies suddenly such as Lincoln or Kennedy. Then there is a momentary spasm of guilt that produces a flash of blood (a blush) in the national face. Or in the case of a traumatic event like 9-11. Of course that event probably was hatched by the CIA or one of its affiliates. Bush does not have the qualifications to govern wisely. He has no love of government or of national service in his heart. And his history of hatred of government is shown by the contempt in which he has dis-served this country. He has sent this whole country and its national government into a tail spin. Never before in American history has the USA been so internationally despised and solely on the basis of Bush's contempt for democracy. Yet he uses the word as if the Bush Family actually minted it in Texas. There is not one iota of evidence that George W. Bush has ever honored the concept of democracy. Yet he speciously uses the word "democratic" to suggest that is what HE is going to IMPOSE on the people of Iraq with his Almighty Will. By the way, what CRIMES did Iraq ever commit against America or threaten to commit? NONE. This war is so transparently illegal it stinks up 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue & the worst half of the state of Texas. Would it not be more sensible to begin Bush's great plans for his new form of "democratic government" in the USA itself? What is DEMOCRATIC about giving trillion-dollar hand outs to millionaires & billionaires who are already so obsese with wealth they could give most of their money to the needy without in the least suffering any inconveniences to themselves or their corporations? Charley Sheen is definitely onto something. Everything about 9-11 from the start smelled like an Inside Job. It is about time grass roots Democracy begins to wake up and rise from the grave where it has been decomposing---don't you think, Fellow Believers in Fair Representative Government Of The People By The People & For The People shall not perish from The Earth! OK. Just kidding. But don't you agree it would be NICE if people got up out of their dead brains & dead hearts and began to bleed a little LIFE into this perishing Republic? Wouldn't that be hunky dory for The Easter Bunny?
  
  RLG
  

Invitation From The Muse

3-21-06 First Of Spring



This is the moment of Creation. It never dies. The Muse will incinerate Death. Lovely blonde in blue denims walks in. This also is piece of the Universal Discourse. I need a microphone & an Audience. No steps backwards into The Great Void. Sexy lady with large hair bound on top. The movie "Gladiator" with Russell Crowe & Connie Nielsen sings inside me. Movie actors & actresses belong in The Cave where The Holy Muse nourishes them. Do your work & get out of the limelight. Let The Work speak. It is time for unadulterated Art to raise its grand & luminous body out of this dead ground of unburied excrescences. I am the priest os seminal Light. I am The Host of Beginnings. My name is Alpha-Omega. I drive a 2006 Lincoln Continental Custom-made. Decidely Uncustomary. I love The French! This is The House of Love-----wherever I dwell. This is The Temple of Creation: It is no place & it is All Places. Because it is the veritable Kingdom of Heaven that never had a spike driven into it or wet concrete poured on its surfaces but is The Eternal Seed of Light itself. And is above & beyond & below & inside & always itself The Principle of Transformation. The Urge & Ion the Nuance & the Momentum: I come to incinerate the dead----& end this reek.

I met a lovely lady here & she told me her name is Scandalarius. I called her Controversiosus by mistake & she laughed her lovely laugh completely decimating my props. And I said, Oh, Ah, don't ever stop smiling your smile-----it prevents my deafness & my dumbness & my blind bad luck. She beamed & told me she derived from The Ancient Hellenes. O yes, she did. And I threw a most stylish & mellifluous shawl about her shoulders. Where I got that shawl & how I perceived its divine mission in life remains a mystery unbeknownst to me. My hands were wiser than my brainy plans. And the sun cooperated with our expedition.


RLG Copyright 2006

True Love

3-20-06 First Day Of Spring



My first year as a producing poet I experienced my first miraculous Fairy Tale Love. And I mean I met The Princess of all princesses, W.R., of Venice, California. She was 31 years old and as innocent as the rain. As pure as sky before human being arrived on earth. White skin. Black radiant eyes. And a voice that rose up out of the inner depths and walked through my blood and thrilled me. A deep voice with those perspicacious eyes. I've never seen eyes of such beauty either before or after. They were like twin goddesses. And don't get the idea goddesses aren't sexual. This was a whole new universe for me. I walked into that office where this woman was presiding as the manager of the apartments at The St. Charles Hotel in Venice California at 25 Windward Avenue & I was immediately transported. I was a New Man. I was in love with this whole woman for the first time in my life. I used those words previously a few times. But that was child's play I now could see. This was The Radiance. Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, Who's the fairest of them all? Wendy is. She wears the loveliest dresses. Unlike any of the other women in Venice. She has a texture that is absent at Beyond Baroque Poetry Foundation. She is Everything I ever wanted in a woman and never knew existed on earth before this moment. I had been writing "love poems." Junky throw-away flippant skin sensations. Plenty of lust. Here today gone tomorrow. Like the dust of all penny ante lust. And this day I stepped into the room & Love literally gazed into my eyes and She walked all the way inside my being. And she has been there ever since.


RLG copyright 2006

The First Kiss

3-20-06 Top Shelf Sex




By the way, I am not into Hugh Hefner & that phony attempt to plagiarize sexual intercourse by stealing beautiful women's breasts as he tried to debunk Jessica Alba for instance and selling them at retail prices as a commercial for "the healthy Libido." That's just larcenous prostitution. I don't want any censorship by the government into the expression of opinions. But a woman's body is still her property. I want to boycott the whole false Respectability angle. As if Love & Sex need Playboy Magazine to be their guardian angel to keep the wolf away from the door. It's exactly the opposite. Would you want Hefner standing guard over your chicken coop at night with all your living poultry inside? I wouldn't.

She never said a word about The Subject as far as that goes. And neither did I. I was too busy watching her skin that was so smooth I had to examine it more closely to glean its secrets. The skin of a princess out of a fairy tell. Fair. Don't see that much any more on this planet. So I didn't even hear what words she was saying in answer to me. In fact I had no memory of what I myself had said to her. Total absorption into the body female. I was totally lost inside her bodily texture. And the shape. Texture is everything. It tells something concerning the inside of the person I was saying to myself. We were trying to get acquainted I believe. She was standing there inside the coffee shop where I had been faithfully recording a direct narrative into my notebook. Now, suddenly, here she stands. I'm not even close to getting to first base. This is just stand up & say something. Any cliche that is available. Well, not a cliche maybe. Just what small words crawl out from under my tongue. This is Starbucks. Not exactly The House of Passion. So naturally I mention her face. As in The Fairy Tale. I couldn't even begin to find a vocabulary. Early in the morning my pen and notebook in my hand. White skin. Smooth. Like blue sky. My hands really begin to feel soft and light and full of life. Kissing comes to mind naturally. And it was not necessary that I see all those amazing Fairy Tale love stories of the pure kiss just about this time. But all of this is under the breath.

RLG copyright 2006

Manifesto

3-19-06 Written on 2-21-06


I am going to reed this poem to you & you are going to eat it. I don't give one paper damn what else you do with this day. You can go back to your lousy stocks & bonds and your money prisons where the walls of your minds are plastered over with your cheap slogans. I do not give one thin goddam. But I am going to nail this poem in your brain with my steel Hammer. And you are going to eat it with your 33 feet-long intestines until you drain all the sewage out of your eyes & ears. And you breathe again. I am going to force-feed you a train wreck. Take it like a man; like a woman. Take eat remember and believe. And shut up about your five & dime penny ante 99-cent bought at Walmart deaths. I'm going to make you breathe again.


RLG copyright 2006

The Golden Age

3-19-06 The Golden Age


This is The Golden Age. It is not bound to past civilizations or cultures or regions. But it is an eternal state of mind where Radiance Harmony & Wholeness rule. Watching the movie "Gladiator" with Russell Crowe reminds one of the Central place of Beauty & Truth in the universe. There is one satisfying lover's kiss in this movie between Connie Nielsen & Russell Crowe. This is one true love kiss that holds the whole movie together. It takes place in Russell Crowe's jail cell where he is being held prisoner by the psychotic Roman Emperor & his former beloved Nielsen has sneaked in to visit him. "I have felt Alone all my life---except with you" she tells Russell Crowe. And these words here on this white page cannot exude the potency they contain coming from the lips of Connie Nielsen on the screen in that momentary cave of intimacy in the jail. They are omnipotent words. They tell The Story of Love for every day and every century from the beginning of recorded history to the very present instance. True Love almost never happens. Look about you. This movie is about the historical reality of man and woman's sojourn upon the earth-----the history of the human race. It's gut-check time for Russell Crowe in The Roman Empire 2,000 years ago and Maximilius (Mr. Crowe) chooses the path of The Hero. Or maybe it is more correct to say the path of Courage attracts Russell Crowe to be its shining Warrior Prince for The Good The True & The Beautiful. Watch this movie and you will feel (whether you are a woman or a man) that tremendous heroic struggle taking place inside your psyche. I do not care what you do in life. You may be a clerk in a store or a mail carrier or a priest or professor or actor or author or homemaker or an attorney or a senator. But one thing is certain: every day we make choices that cause us to walk one path or a different one. The movie "Gladiator" shines the light on the heroic possibilities of human being existing in an alien world of rampant greed and untempered lust & psychotic hatefulness. This is an effective movie. It strikes at the heart of the human predicament: what it means to be born on earth and to live among men & women & children in a world of madness governed for the most part by unconscionable devils. Out of this hell director Ridley Scott has fashioned a lucid & painful & glorious parable of illumination. Man and woman can only redeem themselves by following the heroic code thrust upon them by themselves. There is no other truly human course of action possible other than rank subservience and a whole life of relentless cowardice and betrayals. Amen, Ridley Scott---Amen, & Good Night.


RLG copyright 2006

L.A.

3-18-06 L.A.


I was born in a small town in Wisconsin. But I always wanted to live in L.A. ever since as a kid we watched The Rose Bowl every New Year's Day taking place in Pasadena, California. I always wanted UCLA to win even back then. And I was crazy about L.A. weather. It was usually around zero on New Year's Day in Wisconsin. Insanely cold. Unjustifiably cold. It was 75 or 80 in L.A. Why not be in L.A.? Well, of course when you are eight or ten years of age you don't have a whole lot of say in the matter. And I never had the real guts to run away from home say, at age 16. I didn't have the necessary independence at that age. I was not intellectually mature. I was late in the maturation department. So I didn't get to L.A. until after a pretty mediocre career in college. Essentially I slept through college. I went to class but I was never there. Do you dig? My mind was always in some other place. Under some lovely woman's dress most likely. Or just walking around escaping Reality in some extravagant manner. Why put up with this incessant worship of death? That seemed to be the only thing on people's always concealed minds. Everybody in town was on a death trip as far as I could see. And this was true at college also. The students and their habits of study and the whole grade epidemic. The whole lousy program was aimed at making death happy. I could see that. This was hell. Hell was owned and operated by Pluto. And Pluto was getting no static from the citizens in the town or in the college. They were just happy to kiss ass night and day.

So, like I say, I slept through college. I woke up only for moments. Never for breakfast. My landlady and her husband were from Lebanon. She would sometimes sneak me a big bacon & eggs breakfast up in my room. With great flat slices of pita bread. Orange juice and coffee. I would devour this food like a starving savage it was so good. Then I'd go back to sleep. Take a bath. Go to my first class that met at one p.m. I scheduled all my classes at one p.m. or after. So I could sleep till noon every day & make up for all the sleep I lost in high school. I liked to do my studying at night. Wrote all my term papers at the typewriter spontaneously. I moved to L.A. in 1962. And then I was home for the first time. My mother wept when I left for California. She cried as hard as I saw her cry the morning my brother Ruben went into the army and was headed for Korea. She cried that hard. God, that hurt my heart to see her crying. Made me feel like a heart-breaker. But I had to go to L.A. There were no two ways about it. I had to get out of those killer Wisconsin winters that never seemed to end. And away from The Christian Reformed Church. The most Fascist hateful & utterly repressive church in the history of Christendom. O, the things they have done in his name. None worse than drag me into the house of god to hear 2 sermons every sunday 52/ year after age 2. And in the Ray Greenfield family you did not skip church for anything less than major surgery. This was hell on earth. And to think Jesus himself couldn't stand Synagogue and listening to those damned priests pontificating on the law. Yeah, later those same priests tried to kill him for violating the Sabbath by healing the sick. Bum-mer. Healing the sick on the Lord's Day that is a real law-busting event in Galilee. Or Crawford, Texas. But me---I had to get to The City of Angels. I had business to comport with The Most Beautiful Woman In The World. I knew she lived close to the true blue Pacific. I knew that. So, here I am, L.A. I'm ready for your beautiful lady. Please don't hold me hostage with cruel distractions & spurious innuendoes. Just bring her to my front door.


RLG Copyright 2006

Starbucks, St. Patrick's Day, 2006

3-17-06 Green Morning At Starbucks Cam. Real


D is lean & clean & coordinated. She lopes out of the cafe into the rain. Jesus the Unjudicious laughed at the great bulging nets full of wild leaping fish. It's Friday & St. Pat's Day on the Eros-kissed Earth. The Oirish eat fish on this special green piscatorial holiday. Christ the Jesus got nailed to the wood on Good Friday by Roman soldiers & the Hebrew Sanhedrin, the Sadducees and the rest of the priesthood or the old order. St. Paul offered more of the same stone tablets. Saul of Tarsus couldn't handle the Big F offered by The Miracle Worker: No Freedom in Galilee-Samaria. Not without the revolution of Henry David Thoreau, Buddha Siddhartha & The Gentle & immovable Gandhi with no smoking guns. The tall blonde looks clean & shampooed in her blue jeans & the shining smile. It's raining here in the suburbs of L.A. The Goddesses are juicing the dry roots of Earth with their tasty nectar. And all the women are fresh out of the bath into this new promising world of chlorophyll. This is breath & water and the garden of Easter: Resurrection of the dead.

Concealment of the sexual. The cloth is a veil displaying & hiding & defining the hierarchy of complex human needs. The Wish is revealed in the texture & colors & the lay of the cloth & thus the female is illuminated or shaded & transformed by every nuance & fall & cut of the hair the shine & aroma of the head-----first the eyes but also at once the lips & brow, ears---the Whole: walk & talk & listen, pose-----stand or sit, steer or ride, pause & exude. Story: She mounted a white horse & rode gently through an open meadow far from the neurotic crowds. Then what? Then she came upon the prince who did not know he was the prince sitting under a tree with nothing in his mind. Here she must say something or he must make a comment to arrest the movement of the other. Otherwise, the pair will not become acquainted with eachother's purposes. Their eyes immediately take in eachother's countenance. This is quite a long swallow of mutual beauty. It fills them both up to the brim. Now what? Now we must have a long dramatic in-depth pause. How else can beauty run inside the eyes through the body's numerous clandestine channels to reach the heart the brain the liver as well as the marrow inside the bones & each of the glands & the organs & the knees & feet the nose & teeth the hips & tongue as well as the lips & hands & arms & legs & groin. Beauty travels swift & her Journey is at the same time peripatetic, slow & cunctatious, pausing here & there in its miraculous sojourn of Ecstasy. A never before charted Romantic Adventure impossible to plan.

RLG Copyright 2006

The Judgment Of Paris & Getting Laid

3-16-06 The Most Beautiful One & Getting Laid


Something happened. The wheels didn't come off but something weird occurred. When I use the word Beauty with respect to women I mean Sexuality is present. I have no interest in inert forms of esthetic contemplation. I have always had trouble putting the two together-----lust & admiration. I have always felt a little uneasy for lusting after a beautiful woman as if it is something she shouldn't know about. This comes from being brought up in a Calvinist home and utterly repressive church. Making out was fine. Everybody did it starting as early as possible. But making out with beautiful girls meant girls that didn't go to "our church." That was verboten. And it is odd how that poisonous memory seems to have done some damage to my psyche as indeed repressive Calvinist Christianity has ruined many a good day and night in this country for millions of people. How To Get To First Base With A Beautiful Woman. This has to be elementary, Higgins. This can't be me begging in the dark for courage to approach that one and only woman again. This has been going on for about 30 years it seems. I am talking anbout available women. I am talking about mutual love. I am talking about all those women who disappeared from my life without our Making Love. That is what I'm really talking about. I want every one of those women back. We didn't even get to the first kiss. They are still hot in my psyche. Some nights I wake up about 1 a.m. and I recall the exact passion in her eyes & lips as we stood about to kiss. It was there. The chemistry was 100 percent in our favor. What happened to make true love & poetic justice go so to the dogs? I can't believe this true story I'm telling you. I'm talking about a mutual love so good it is fit only for kings & queens and Romeos & Juliets. The flow between us was that good. The 'Mirada Fuerte' they call it in Andalusia where Picasso grew up: 'Strong Gazing.' Where the soul of the beloved comes flowing through her eyes into my own in some irresistible manner. This cannot be wrong. Of all the things we experience and perceive in this universe of imponderables and anxieties and anguishes and Ecstasies this surely must be good and true and beautiful. So the next step is the mutual embrace and the profound and satisfying kiss of love. That absolute declaration of love must now occur or we are no longer human and sane but merely futile & berserk appendages of passionate longing.

RLG

The Beautiful Woman

3-16-06 The Beautiful Woman Is One



They contended for me with their tricks. But those artificialities were to me part of the ugliness of prostitution---an attempt to make a sale based on greed & the profit motive rather than love. And that word 'Love' defines everything in the universe correctly. It puts things in their place---including myself. When I lose it I also lose harmony, wholeness, and radiance-----the symptoms of Coherence. These sound like fancy words on the white page here now. But they are vital & essential words that describe Reality. Love gives the mud and blood and the rage and chaos of the world its shape and its direction and its energy. It also cleanses our motives of muddied desires and twisted emotions. The eyes are the gateway of the soul. This was almost a commonplace during the Renaissance and in Elizabethan times. The eyes and face tell the whole story of the individual. They reveal the inside situation. Love begins in the eyes and face. And that is where Beauty starts. I know when I begin to feel those vagrant lusts for "women" that they are mere unfocused appetites until true beauty makes her appearance. Now as I read these words they sound almost like an esthetic sermon. But they represent an actual epiphany. They are like a lightning strike in the heart where all is made clear and unified. That is what Love does. It clears the track of ambiguity and double vision and it realigns the heart and head with the groin. As I write this I feel that Wonder has something to do with One-ness. Those words have the same root sound and they also emote the same quality of Radiance & Surprise. I have been floundering up to this moment in a great kettle of lust and disorganized sexual energy because I had lost my path. The beautiful woman had disappeared from my conscious everyday life. Then she also disappeared from my inner map as it were. She fell back into the swamp of my unconscious . My Dreamer brought her up from The Darkness and placed her back in my active pysche. However pedantic this may sound it is so forcefully real it is undeniable. Love had to wake me up and roll me out of bed and pitch me back into the current-----the flow of Beauty & Truth & The Good. Because it is true: One cannot move into the world of love without having one's heart readjusted to the path of The Good. The Good & The True & The Beautiful are inseparable from Love. As long as I was buried in the fog and steam of my own sexual desires various individual women leaped and lurched through my Consciousness inciting me to fits of desire that lasted for minutes to be replaced by the next individual sex object who likewise disappeared without a trace as soon as balance and proportion and symmetry returned to yield me fresh integrity and clarity. The dizziness of lust is so all-consuming and also so full of Life and Passion that it completely overthrows one's capacity to employ the faculty of Reason.


RLG Copyright 2006

The Tedious Gene

Wed. 3-15-06 The Tedious Gene


She hit me with the "tedious" gene. That went down hard. No woman previously had ever uttered that curious word to me in conversation. But it hit my ears sweetly. And I have forgotten the sentence and even the paragraph that contained the exact sentiment: 'tedious/ adj. tiresomely long; wearisome.' ( Oxford Essential Dictionary). She made tedious into something not diseased and symptomatic of a rapidly deteriorating organism but a hopeful even a sexy prospect. Yes, we were headed up Hope Boulevard straight toward Romance Avenue. Now I could open up the governor so to speak of my hidden engine. Let 'er rip. But, hold it. Something is wrong with this scenario. I believe she is actually accusing Your Most Humble Servant of decadent politeness in his Come On. She is actually criticizing me. Perhaps even suggesting that I get back into the Ring without the 99-cent varnish job. Ugly ugly ugly. Tedium is not the stuff of Romance. It does not ignite the organism into 8-cylinder full raging pistons on fire irresistible Sexual Desire-----name your Pleasure. I'm off on the wrong foot again. And the reason for that can only be one. I came on with the sexual proposition way ahead of schedule. That should have never even entered the conversation. Once you mention sex you have shoved the pace into overdrive. Never ever bring up sex before the first kiss. How could I forget that with the most beautiful woman in the world sitting directly in front of my eyes? How do I get back to Page 1? We have to get back on the road to The First Kiss. None of this advanced sexology at this stage of the game. Not with a woman of such primeval Innocence. And I do not mean she hasn't experienced sexual intercourse. I mean she is incomparably Beautiful and has pure irresistible eyes. Yes, tediousness may be a symptom of boredom. But it is at least palatable. And it is far superior to talking the sexual game before we have even so much as held hands. Stay away from sex talk. Period. Let your hands and lips lead the way---not in the formation of verbalisms but in the gentle expression of pure ardor. No need to flip out every passing appetite. What happened to me? That was out of character. It does not run true to the pure Passion flowing out of my chest. I have been listening to the wrong words spoken by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. And those words have infiltrated me and turned me into an imp of the perverse. That was not me back there throwing out a sexual proposition to this beautiful woman with the pure eyes. That was a strange guy borrowing the lingo of hustlers on The Boardwalk here in Venice. And now I am back on Square One if I'm lucky. Time to speak in The Greenfield Code where the heart & the head agree with the flow of love.

RLG

The Fairy Tale

3-12-06 The Only Story In Town


The minute you try to love this single person you are doomed to self-destruction according to The Wisdom Of The East & according to Dr. Jung and Heraclitus. Everything seeks its opposite pole. And since life is in constant flux the movement of the electrons never stops. I know this from the day to day operations of my own psyche applied to all significant matters. The minute I become set in my wishes to attain a certain object---say the Object of Desire---what happens? Either I attain the Object and soon tedium sets in. Or I fail to attain & my Desire remains strong. That is the source of the old saw: be careful what you Wish for you may get it. The minute your Object is attained the reason for your desire has disappeared. Then you find yourself in a New World of changing desires & goals---especially with the break down of the once staid Christian Church in America. Now infidelity is wide spread even in churches & among ministers. Because all the Absolutes have been exposed to be authoritarian gimmicks intended to keep women in the kitchen as a form of incarceration while men go out and play. The cat is out of the bag. Women found out it actually didn't hurt that much after a while after they began to see the light of day to have their husbands gone. For, the women began to discover their own Romantic Opportunities. And now the shoe is on the other foot. And things have begun to even out in the Extracurricular Sexual Activity Department. Of course the children are bewildered at least up to the age of 10 or so when they begin to talk to their friends and note that misery on that front is wide spread. Thus, kids opt for themselves. No wonder they are trying drugs in third grade. They are on their own. So, we've got a brand new ballgame. Things never get better in the sex & family or in the love department---throughout the history of this "Evolving Species." Things remain at Chaotic Level-----totally tempestuous. The magic words have their magic. But it doesn't last long. It's like some of that quick-stick glue that dries fast and loses its sticking power in a matter of hours.
RLG

Christopher & Dana Reeve: In Sickness & Health

3-11-06 In Sickness & In Health


Christopher Reeve, the actor who played Superman so well, alias Clark Kent, news reporter for The Daily Planet, died on October 10, 2004 at the age of 52. He had existed for 9 years in a state of paralysis from the neck down. Before that he had been a very active stage actor (his favorite profession) a Hollywood actor of course, and a sailor and a veteran and skilled rider of thoroughbred horses. Mr. Reeve's wife Dana died this past Monday on the 6th of March, 2006. They were in love--this husband and wife. And when Christopher lost all his vital powers that love was no longer capable of being satisfied in the normal ways of the human organism. Mr. Reeve had been robbed of his sexual powers. He and Dana had been married for only 3 years at the time of his fall from the horse, named "Eastern Express," on the 27th of May, 1995. This true story has been running through my mind for the past week. It is a remarkable story for me because I also value physical activity much in the fanatical way Mr. Reeve did. I have a crazy love for strenuous physical exertion and for superb food and hot long baths and of course the deepest intimacies capable to the human---the passionate love of one woman. To observe a fellow human being of such fame & health as Christopher Reeve brought so low changes one in some almost unfathomable & irresistible way. That experience becomes Myth---Our, your & my, Experience as long as we are Conscious of our true inner Nature. For nine years Dana & Chris stayed true to eachother & Battled The Grim Reaper and foot tooth and nail for Restoration of Christopher's Life Force and the renewal of his Feelings throughout his body. Science could not assist him at this stage of our evolution.

We often complain about this and that---especially our lame romantic lives when they fall empty or dull. For a long time I have noted (and I mean for 25 years and longer) that no matter how many nights one suffers from Unrequited Love it is still a tremendous Force in one's life to be Alive & potent with health. Even without the immediate gratification that we naturally seek with one Object of Desire. I say it is still something extraordinary to experience Desire itself and to have The Power Alive & Functioning inside one's amazing body. This feeling was made even more intensely present to my consciousness when I began to read the life story of Christopher Reeve and his wife Dana. There was something so satisfying in their continuing love after Christopher had lost his most precious sexual powers and all the attendant sensations and emotional pleasures that go with them and was relegated to a wheel chair for the remainder of his life. This truly was a national & universal experience, an heroic event in the life of the nation in which every one of us participated if we so wished. Such is the nature of Love. It is never merely individual egoistic experience but it is in some way Human Collective Experience that goes beyond the contours of the bodies of the participating individuals in especially such a grand and generally known instance as that of Christopher & Dana Reeve. There is no question about it this couple brought their love or rather their love brought them out of their private ego lives into the realm of the collective life of the nation and they became mythological figures. And we participated in their joy and suffering insofar as we permitted ourselves to do so. I cannot prove this by logic of course. But I know it to be true because I experienced it.

RLG

Consiliences

3-7-06 Consiliences


M2 sat next to me on bus this morning as I proceeded to Starbucks Camino Real Plaza in Goleta. She is a very reliable looking woman I often saw about 8 & 9 yrs ago when I took coffee & did my morning writing at McDonald's near my house. She & her husband & poodle used to sit in the patio. And the reason she appeared so miraculously as it were this a.m. I am certain is because yesterday I was thinking intimate thoughts concerning M1 who used to say very Personal unforgettable things to me. Now she is the mother of a son & not apt to respond to me on that intimate level. But it's funny she is now part of the structure of my psyche as it were. It's like incest. Somehow she has become part of The Greenfield Family without asking or giving me permission. These things just Evolve. Please note and study the title of today's notations: CONSILIENCES. First brought to my consciousness by Dr. Wilson a Harvard Biology Professor who wrote abook of that title. It covers a lot of psychological & physical ground. Throw in some magnetism & hypnotism & mythology & we are on our way.

M used to tell me that running (speed-walking) is good for my liver. (It's even better for my LIVER-----puts lead in my pencil). Last night after the rain I went to mail a letter & ended up taking a 90-minute speed-walk about the neighborhood & found myself floating all kinds of beautiful memories that were popping up all over the place I guess to remind me that LIFE is Right Now & Here! MY LIVER was starting to get SOUL! & not next year or last year but in THE HERE & NOW BODY-MIND! Well, M1, I hope youre listening, Reading me. Because you gave me some good permanent ideas that are eternally useful & you make great Leek Soup. Also good for the liver & all the body's organs that seek more Life. I want no other ideas than the practical. So I got home from my delicious Walk & ate some delicious celery & spinach & tomatoes & parsley & garlic ground in The Blender with water. And some split pea soup & a glass of hot non fat milk with loads of raw unheated Honey on the side & I praised my life for being so at least in this Instant unapologetically Sensual. Ok Ok Ok. No woman to sleep with. To bed alone again & all that. But better than being with the wrong woman as I have been a few too many times in the sack, no? O yes. Always better to sleep alone than with somebody you do not LOVE. I mean of course admire in some genuine way.

Dammit, didn't mean to let my guard slip & admit to The Omniscient Reader---You, O Holy Ones, that I am Mortal & ergo always have sex on my mind. Always a Woman trying to break through the Greenfield mental habitat. And largely succeeding inside my mind. But outside my mind? That is a totally different kettle of fish. Nothing happening except politeness & political charades.

As I was saying I got home from the dance & ate some good raw foods. 50 percent of your diet should be RAW FOODS. You can take that to the bank! And then I turned to Mr. Henry Thoreau that most odd American Writer & Dissenter (1817-1862). What a heroic man. The very best Writer America has ever produced with no exceptions. I happened last eve to turn to Thoreau's essay "Walking," which I first encountered as a ph d. student at the University of Texas Austin where I was studying American literature. Professor Joseph Moldenhauer assigned me the task of writing a term paper on "WALKING." Interestingly, I was by no means a Walker in those days. Let me give you the opening words of Thoreau's essay:

"I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,-----to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school-committee and every one of you will take care of that."

Here's what gets me. "There are enough champions of civilization." And: "Every one of you will take care of that."

I have felt that way about WRITING---My Whole Life its very Essence-----& university English professors. Sure, I have myself learned much from the professors. But THE WRITER must tend to his CRAFT 24-7-365. With no exceptions. Including death in the family. Let alone Christmas & New year's & 4th of July. This is not a 9 to 5 Monday through Friday affair. Who ever said it was?


But Thoreau & I differ on one thing. HDT got along without women. But then he never MET a woman except one who hit Henry in the solar plexus and knocked the wind out of him. And his brother fell in love with her at the same time. The woman it turned out was a Congregationalist & her father, a strict one, refused to allow her to have anything to do with those Transcendentalist Thoreau boys! Thus, Henry's love life ended in little Concord, Massachusetts and instead America inherited the greatest masterpiece of its poor up to that time literature. Women do not enter HDT's narrative even once. Yet he is the purest Writer America ever produced. He makes his contemporary & neighbor and of course much more Famous Emerson look pale by comparison. Read "WALDEN." Read "Life Without Principle." You cannot be the same after truly reading these masterpieces. They enter your blood stream if you have one that is working. And they change your life. Give me that! Give me only Authors that are capable of changing the course of my life. Yes, give me only Women capable of changing my Life and steering me away from the coma that is always theatening to settle in & capture my consciousness.

I began by metnioning a little miraculous incident on the bus this a.m. A form of Communication that comes down to me almost like those ancient goddesses appeared to mortals. But I prefer of course a more literal rendering. Yet, I am grateful for any signs of Love that occur. And this is no mere space-filling babble. I value love. In this greedy shabby world of liars & deceivers only Love can help us rise above the tide of absolute mediocrity. Only Beauty has the power to rehabilitate us and regenerate us. Nothing less. I got out of bed this morning & hauled out my old tattered copy of Keats. I wanted to find his famous declaration of Beauty & Truth as recorded in his letters. It is also stated in his poem "ODE ON A GRECIAN URN":

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-----that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.


My dear friends, John Keats was born in England in 1795 & he died in Italy at the age of 25 in 1821.
He went to Italy to die so he could spare his beloved Fannie Brawne & his other dear friends the sight of his decaying body which was going to spoil from tuberculosis. This utterly brave & brilliant poet & great, truly Great Human Being! This Leader of Men & Women.


RLG

Monday Morning At Starbucks Camino Real Plaza

3-6-06 Notebook Utterance


Run, Rabbit. Find the bluebirds. Easy lay is death. The movie goer is the womb lover. Home is where you head for at twilight. 8 O'clock in summer. So quiet. You can hear love talk under the trees among the lights in Westwood. Home again. In the clean restaurant with the woman of pure eyes. So clean they make the rain run straight. Everything else is distraction. No talk. Car & wheels & running music. That's baby talk. Her Holiness The Queen of Love. She was born of the foam of the sea say some. Some god's lost genitals. More rumors from The Golden Mountain of fairy tales. The sea is dust to the lovers. The sea is paint. Man & woman & the city. Stasis at the bus stop. A calm night for the unhurried lovers. They have names unspoken to the grinding sea. Apprentice sailor gods have been pounding the ocean to coax it into butter. 444,000 years are as one hour to Aphrodite The Most Beautiful. Long slow haul of the briny deep. Yellow moon is butter to the jaundiced eye of noon. Memory plays with people & makes sport of their history. The lovers walk slowly their lovely hands intermingled with quiet force. Unstampeded by the herd of shrill night talkers. The night is a movie theatre. The rare students on the sidewalk are eloquent. A few stars pierce the upper canvas. They rock the black waves of night with bone-clean light. The lovers know essential things. Underneath the trench coats & street lamps & the shy nervous glances of fugitives & phrase makers, the whispered summaries of a day that never happened. Sit in the cafe & drink eachother's Silence-----the royal nectar of lovers. Do not say it & make it unhappen.


RLG

"CRAZY"

3-5-06 "Crazy" by Patsy Cline



Last night I heard Patsy Cline sing "Crazy" at Starbucks in Calle Real in Goleta, CA & I'm telling you that song went through me like the hand of The Goddess. Patsy Cline died at age 29 in a plane crash but she did sing "Crazy" first. And she left that song behind for us. Plus a few other irresistible love songs. And a few losers. But "Crazy" is a great song. It sticks in the craw. And it won't let you go. It busts the chain of logic that has us all hemmed in most of the time. THAT is what a great song or poem or story or movie can do: it smashes the frozen sea within us. And for one hour I am a New Man. I am a Transfigured Being. Amen, Patsy. Amen.

RLG

Phyical Experience & Words

2-25-06 Physical & Emotional Experiences & Words



It was the building itself. It shut people up. In a good large heart-healing sense. The immensity of the cathedral. A building without ministers or sermons. A certain grand sofa & easy chair aspect softens the walls & the great high ceilings stretch out. Lends luxury to repose. What is repose without luxury I wonder. The luxury of no outside or interior pressures trying to coerce one into subservience to any external authorities.

I am describing the church. Free of the whammy of dictators. The comfort of great furniture and architecture: Interior Decorating. This I have been saying is a greatly undervalued art by the intellectuals who would erect their cosmos & stage it on museum walls because that is the way it has been done for 2, 000 years or whatever. Everything we experience is mental. It runs through the mind as it is being experienced. And we judge it---every bite of food delicious or insipid, every look at an object contains our instant agreement or doubt. Every kiss has a value. We never shut off our consciousness in order to have a physical experience. Even sexual intercourse itself is as mental as it is physical. The mind is recording exactly what the organs of sense feel & also what the pysche itself is feeling---possibly 4 or 5 separate emotions at the same time depending on one's Memory Rotary Index. And this is not something experienced by "intellectuals" who majored in philosophy or abnormal psychology. Everybody lives with these layers of memory & consciousness at work on some level.

There is no such thing as a Simple Experience. You ate a bowl of cereal for breakfast this morning sitting at a table. Sitting next to you was a woman who was eating an order of eggs over easy & bacon. You were looking at eachother while you masticated your food. You were aware you were eating food and at same time you were talking to eachother & listening to eachother's words & also attaching meanings to those words & sometimes double & triple meanings as the texture & flavor of the foods were registering some place also in your psyche. At the very same time you were both half listening to a love song playing on the radio that was very powerful. And that also entered your psyche & influenced the texture of the moment. This is just off the roof of my head without any premeditation. No doubt you can add other actual aspects to this already complicated Mutual Situation. Sexual intercourse is even deeper with implication and levels of inner meaning. Everything we do we turn into words at least to ourselves if to no one else.

I do not believe words live alone in an Empty House with no walls, no ceilings, no floors & no furniture. I believe they are attached to actual things & experiences that happen to real people. But they sure are Important to us. We depend on them for everything we do not only. But try thinking without words. Try feeling without them. I mean sooner or later they will come to you if you don't go to them just to find out what youre feeling & thinking of any moment about any experience or detail of your life whatsoever. So, I'm saying to myself about now I better start learning how to say what's on my mind. Otherwise nobody else will know what I really have in mind and heart. I must say it is not easy at least for me to be accurate concerning my desires of a specific moment. Take this morning for example. I might have asked a very attractive young woman to have lunch with me if I only knew exactly how to get to the Question. But I was in fact too locked up inside my head to make that simple suggestion. And now I feel guilty about it. Or at least uncomfortable. Lunch alone wasn't as good as it would have been with her I'm sure.

RLG

Starbucks Postmodern Love

1 March 06 Starbucks Love



I met her there one day and she had clean hair. And of course that was not all. It never is. She had a pure face. And she opened the door for me. I never know what to say at the moment of crisis. That is the moment our eyes come together in the blender. I always figure that IS saying it. That look. To add words to it is superfluous. But of course then I ended up walking home alone. Ate supper alone that night. Same old story. Which is why this past New Year's I made a vow henceforth to treat my love life exactly like a business account. More exactly, treat romance like money. It's an exact quantity. It can be counted. This is how much love I have in my account right now, 1 March, 2006 C.E. (Christian Era)-----blank blank blank blank & so on. And you can either spend it and get something specific in return or you can hang onto the money for dear life & watch it collect interest at about 2.1 percent & dropping. What else is the point of having money if not to spend it on the best of all possible causes? Ditto with love. What good is love sitting in the bank collecting low interest rates & not being active in the world of commerce? Might as well spend it. Because if you spend love wisely it tends to multiply.

And here I have without conscious intent brought up two terrific subjects that invade our lives from all directions: Love & Money. They are considered opposites by the church and also by many lovers. At least until it's time to pay the bills. Somehow too much money can corrupt good love it is thought. Because money buys material possessions but it cannot buy true love. Or so I have believed all these years. Maybe I'm way out of wack affirming these 19th century ideas. Just one hour ago I finished watching 'PRIDE & PREJUDICE' with Keira Knightley based on The Jane Austen novel. It is quite a pure movie. And it definitely is about love and money. Though I had no intention of bringing it up until this moment when it popped into view. And I have no more to say of it except it is certainly worth watching. Love & The Beautiful face. The face of The Bride. Money can buy you a big smooth shining automobile and a house if you have a great deal of it. Money can buy you flashy or elegant things. And these can comfort you when Love is not knocking at your door. In fact you may fall in love with money. Many people have. And they have never gone back to the real thing. Sex is a train wreck compared to money. Say a million one hundred dollar bills. That's a lot of money. Now cash that in for Love. It's not easy to do. Most love banks won't accept cash. They want something more durable. Something they can kiss and hug & hold in their arms and stroke. OK. I hear you. You are going to sleep with greenbacks. And make love with money. OK. I give up. You convinced me. It's worth a try. But even Elvis Presley never took it that far.

Me, I don't know anything about love any more. Strangest thing happened to me. All my love affairs went blank. My romantic palimpsest got erased. All that love that was in my bank account---all those deep true love kisses, those long clinging mutual hugs of passion. Wiped off my Memory Index. Now my pysche is a tabula rasa---a blank slate. I don't know if this is good or bad. I forgot how to do the simplest things that once came so natural to me they never crossed my mind. I'd just slide over on the car seat and it would begin. The whole wondrous miraculous operation of the first kiss. It would happen out of the blind. I was like a happy stunned witness to my own blind spontaneous operations. My hands my arms my lips were secret messengers of the covenant---angels operating unhesitantly on their own autonomy. And passionate angels. Full of tenderness and ardor. Well, that's over. This is an entirely new planet. The one I am now living in. The desire feels the same. But somehow somebody made up a whole new book of rules. And I don't know the language. I'm still talking American English that I learned in college & even high school with a bunch of unique words thrown in from my writer friends. I don't know what the hell is going on with the women. They are as pure of face as ever. Like Keira Knightley in that movie tonight. But they never take my hand in theirs & give me the straight dope on how to get to first base. And then second base. Third. Home plate. In fact I learned these strange words from a book called "HOOKING UP" written by an old guy. Time to go back to elementary school & get the facts.


RLG