BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.... it was the new year and I had diarrhea. The Indians were turning on the music full blast. I was taking the loss of my Tibetan Family very hard. I was stuck with Rosie and Nanina, a French student of Bero's and a German dharma groupie. "It's getting worse and worse, Michael," lamented Rosie. "Ten years ago there was nothing here. Now the Indians are destroying this place," she sighed. But Rosie got me to a doctor. I was saved in the nick of time. Nanina was also sick and spent most of her time lying nude in her room. She asked me if I wanted to fuc k her. I said no. But it was Bero's appearance during his difficult time that inspired me. He was an ox of a man, beefy and huge. My head would swell and shoot sparks whenever he passed me. I followed him to the stupa and sat with him inside the giant monolith's guts; we faced a huge glowing Buddha figure. It seemed to sit in suspended anima tion.
All Buddhist statues pierced you with their weird trance. I began to feel light and free. I heard the Buddha speak: CHANGE YOUR LIFESTYLE. My rib-cage was smarting. I could feel Summer's subtle body. It was denser than mine. She had a lot of witchcraft behind her. "Don't get lost in a dream world with her," the Buddha warned. "Balance your energies CORRECTLY and CONSISTENTLY, RELEASE MORE!" I could hear the New Year crowds heaving and barging outside. It sounded like empty bottles rolling and clanking away. But in a strange muffled sort of way. I gazed ruefully at the floor. Memories of Bero's frescoes flooded my mind. I saw strange half-clad figures; they tied knots in their heads and had deep nasty stares; these were the wrathful Maha-siddahs, the crazy adepts Jim had so admired. I started to cry. I was disgusted with Jim and at the same time missed him terribly. Jim's weird legacy still haunted me. Summer was on my mind, too. Was she also a new sacrificial victim? Was she also a victim or just another perpetrator of the black arts? Did she abuse her powers and skid off into an illness spiral? My head began to tingle. Bero was getting up. A strange humming entered my ears. Bero was blessing me, I could feel it. Now was the time to plunge into the unknown.
I took a bus to Gaya, a miserable and ugly town, dark, intense, menacing. A medical student who had befriended me at the stupa showed me off to his roomies. These young Indians were obsessed with the dazzling mammon of the west. My Olympus camera and worn-out Walkman were minutely inspected, and I was hosted to a dinner prepared on the premises and served steaming hot. My hosts wanted visas for the promised land. I was noncommittal.
I was on my way to Calcutta. My train arrived on time in Gaya. I was in desperate straits. I was running out of money in a foreign land at the very start of a brand new year. My hosts were from Uttar Pradesh and were looking for a hustle. They guided me to my cabin and left me in a Bengali world. The screech of the train pulled me back from my self-imposed trance. I was frightened and now had to face KALI. The black Madonna of India, licking the world's sins with her lethal tongue, making my movements absolutely mad. No words, no words .... inside KALI'S mouth. I began hearing her haunting refrain .... CHAI, CHAI, CHAI, KOFFEE, KOFFEE .... CHAI, CHAI, CHAI, KOFFEE, KOFFEE. I looked outside my window and saw a wall of thick haze and tropical vegetation. I could see industrial infrastructure everywhere. If Delhi was like Beijing, than Calcutta was like Shanghai. The train crawled into Howrah station.
Howrah was a monster. All kinds of noise and squalor, videos and beggars, huge lines and crowds, touts too. I was in shock. I could not afford a taxi and didn't know which bus to take, so I walked across Howrah bridge. It was mesmerizing, zillions of people and moving objects swarmed over the bridge in both directions. The smog was astonishing, like a vision from hell. The Hooghly river was barely visible. Calcutta was madness.
I was inside KALI's belly and a monster was now shaking up and down, first sideways, quick walking, sitting, then crossing its legs, then uncrossing them, then getting up and rubbing its hands, now rubbing its fly, hitching its pants, then slitting its eyes to see everything, then grabbing me by the ribs, and screaming, screaming. This was KALI'S song. There was no money waiting for me at the bank. I had given my stepmother the wrong wiring instructions. I had to contact her and start from scratch. money was running out and I was in a hot spot. I found lodgings at a Theravadan temple, just in time. I plunged back into the maelstrom and sent two telegrams.
Then I went to visit KALI for she was the queen of Calcutta. Her face was everywhere. I found relief from the heat and noise in the unfinished subway system and zoomed down to Kaligut. Here KALI'S blood lust was satisfied. Priest touts showed me the sacrifice altar where goats were killed every morning. I poured water and flowers over a shiva lingam, a kind of stone penis , and said prayers for the family. I swished around some incense and got slammed for a donation. There was red paste on my forehead. The cry of ravens was everywhere. Beggars roamed in every corner smelling of strange purification. I thought about Brown Eyes. KALI knew how to work with the elements, with blood and water. Here I was exactly one year to the day since my final puja at the Burmese place. I could taste Summer's honey suck le breath. The world was in turmoil. The hard-liners were gaining ground all over the world. Exotic nickknacks and fast food absorbed my attention as I walked back at night. Men piss ed right on the street. Smoke was everywhere. I had survived my first day in Calcutta. KALI was laughing and taunting me, then making love to me, she was now my consort for this nightmare part of my journey. I was really protected
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The trailer window is blank. I see a tree. A raven flies swiftly by, close to me
The trailer window is blank. On the far left upper corner of the window, a raven flutters far away.
Tthe trailer window is blank. I see a raven smoothly glide, left to right. The trailer window is blank. It remains blank, but caws, rivets, and hoots sound off.
I now see a tree. The trailer window is blank. A raven's wing faraway, brushes, brushes by the upper part of the window.
The trailer window is blank. I am now the raven looking at the window. The trailer window is still blank. I am now the window.
Well, I've been blogging away now three weeks here. I've blogged on MY SPACE, Lit.org, FACEBOOK, Twitter, and OTL of course.
Now I'm looking at the KUDOS board here. It's a curious thing. Noisy Introvert and Taarnagh were neck and neck yesterday each with 447 points. This moment Taarnagh pulled ahead by one point.
This reminds me of my market days when prices for stocks and currencies and commodities fluctuated on a minute by minute basis. But there the measure was money.
On social networks it's WHUFFIE or social capital. You find whuffie everywhere. In tribal societies---that's the real currency of choice and it can be pretty dicey, but also in the office and in the family. Wherever humans congregate.
There's also WHIFFIE. Fake human capital. Spam celebrities. Artificial and that has it's place too, but the life-shelf is less for memes like this.
So how is whuffie spent on Salon Personals?
That's not really clear.
But it must be spent.
Banks like circulating their capital.
On YOU TUBE and other social sites accidental whuffie is often wasted because the person had no clue what to do with it.
I mean it's all fractal in nature.
Fractals rule markets, clouds, and any system that's organic and messy and with frightening predictive power.
Then there's karma. A concept with a heavy fractal dimension which westerners have but a shallow understanding of.
Too bad because it's far more important than physical attraction or " chemistry. "
A word I find exceedingly lame.
Off to the beach to walk the dog.
Then script writing
Digital networking.
That's it.
M
Two blogs I like.
Buttercup9: Good take on Y psychology.
Ebbsnflows: Very refined poetry.
Toodles.
Oh, BTW Saloners, please DO NOT send me your private e-mail or phone number when sending me your first private messages!
What can I say these last two weeks have been fairly interesting.
I have received messages from as far away as Paris and also from Plano, Texas. That was a tough one I had to do a wikipedia search on that. Nice gal, very good looking. A bit on the young side by uh, let's see two decades?
The Paris gal was also strange. She claimed she was a doctor, but on her profile only a masters degree?
Then there was this curious gal from Vermont who contacted me and I'll be dipped in shit. We both once lived in the same neighborhood in Marin, county!
Then there was this beautiful Russian woman living in LA who worked for a drug company in its marketing division. She had such stunning blue eyes they violently smacked you in the face. She also had a Ph.D, Hum.... we talked about the golden age of Soviet cinema and Russian writers, but left it at that.
Then there was a profile I contacted of a woman in Walnut Creek. The profile showed only a toned torso with an intriguing white skirt.
Well, this gal seemed to be heavily involved in S & M kink quite a bit. The curious pictures she sent me were uh, artistic?
Is that the right word?
Got a few decent poems out of that encounter, but ultimately said goodbye.
What can I say?
Ritual torture in the bedroom is not really my thing.
Then I walked over to the Kudos section and discovered a most interesting trend.
Out of the 24 people who have the most kudos, 15 are bi-sexual and/or also are looking for couples of both genders.
Straights were a minority here.
I wondered what this possibly meant.
I guess some of our most busy bloggers are pretty sexually frisky?
I'm a very boring straight white guy.
Ah, well....
After three exciting months I finally cast the ensemble in LA for my new i-comedy. It was all done via webcam.
Now I have to rush down to LA next month and shoot.
I hate leaving the Bay Area, but the actor talent pool up here like really sucks.
It was in the last year of the Clinton administration as Al Gore was battling vote fraud in Florida against baby Bush that Bill Clinton de-regulated not only derivative futures, but also energy futures. This double whammy is now exploding. We all know about the housing loan crash, but de-regulation of energy futures allowed Enron to make huge bogus profits.
Enron got caught.
The oil companies and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley did not. Massive profits on oil futures and huge surges in oil prices turned the oil companies and these investment banks into a huge two-headed oil/money monster.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley not only made money on crappy housing loans, but they also morphed into oil companies in their own right. These banks owned oil fields, tankers, and pipelines. But that is not all. These banks along with their oil company buddies owned the energy exchanges where the oil futures were traded.
What a deal!
Obama has to now cut these de-regulatory loop-holes and re-regulate the energy exchanges and tax big oil to build mass transit in the US where mass transit does not exist unlike Europe and Asia.
In addition Obama has to roll-back a massive US military build-up not only in the Middle east, but in Africa where the US has set up a unified military command to battle the Chinese for oil in a new great game. Pretty surreal, huh?
When you consider that China is the US's pay-master.
Stock market will drop another 50% before mid 2009!
Such a decline will be the final death-blow for many hedge funds, brokerage firms, financial news shows and institutions, auto-makers, banks and mortgage companies.
It won’t be as bad as “The Great Depression,” but it will be plenty bad.
I was watching an old clip about the Korean war on You Tube. The US and China were locked in mortal combat in 1951. China lost over a million men as the US pounded badly equipped Chinese troops with massive and superior firepower. The US lost more men in Korea in three years, percentage-wise---than it did in Vietnam in almost ten years.
How far away that seems today.
Today China and the US are locked in a different kind of embrace. China is now America's financial master. Chinese reserves are 2 trillion bucks. America's are a paltry 76 billion.
Together China and America control one tenth of the world's land mass, one fourth of the world's population and are responsible for one half of global economic growth in the last eight years.
China saved and grew as America spent like crazy and got low interest rates. Now the US is asking China to finance not only its own fisical expansion, but also China's simultaneously.
The biggest global bail-out in world history.
China's economy is slowing down. Political revolution looms. Yet, China has options. The US does not. China can focus on American consumption or on Chinese consumption.
With political chaos looming in China. China can accomodate the US only so much.
Can the US take its tin-cup elsewhere?
The answer is NO.
Japan and the Arabs cannot fill this financial vacuum.
Russia and Europe certainly cannot.
Should China and the US go their seperate ways you can kiss off globalization for good.
The world is now looking at a hinge moment in global history.
In 2002, I received my autographed copy of POEMS TO READ: A new favorite poem project anthology edited by Robert Pinsky.
Robert Pinsky was hailed as America's poet laureate for three years by an act of congress in Washington D.C.
My commentary on Gerard Manley Hopkins' " Spring and Fall " was published from just 200 commentaries on favorite poems selected from over 25,000 entries.
I submitted my commentary in 1998.
Here is the poem I chose:
Spring and Fall
Margaret are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost gussed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Here is my commentary on the poem:
It was a strange flash, I was reciting this poem for the umpteenth time when all of a sudden I saw the scenery of my childhood: the old road on the way to the shopping center; my father driving me past a winery, the autumn trees shedding their leaves, the whole thing feeling so alien and remote, yet also very intimate. It was all so long ago. My mother was sick then. She is dead now, and so is my father.
Despite all this, I knew I was standing on sacred ground. This vast killing machine had transformed the landscape and made it holy. This was the epicenter of BLACK STRESS. I did my first daylight puja near some demolished barracks. The Nazis had tried to burn as many of them as possible before fleeing the advancing Russians. The huge camp complex was large and seemed to expand forever in all directions.
The day was overcast and the camp seemed almost deserted. Mocking birds sat on the barbed wire fences, chirping away, oblivious to the deeper meaning behind the fiendish light surrounding the camp. The spirits were lisping, writhing, flopping and moaning. They howled and fell back in despair. They hovered everywhere. They hovered near the huge and ruined gas chambers and crematorium. The spirits knew that there had been fire above and gas below. Moloch lived here and he had devoured his children all day. I saw ash pits and shit tanks, confiscation rooms and killing fields. I did another puja near a pond filled with ashes. I could see white crosses and white Magen Davids strewn out all over the place. As I was finishing my puja, the sun came out and broke through the dark overcast skies. The guides had answered. Many spirits were being released. I was tapping light in the darkness.
I hitched a ride back to "Little Auschwitz." I prayed to the great death machine. I visited the crematorium and gas chamber. It felt DENSE. This was the epicenter of the epicenter. It was all CONCENTRATED DEATH. One could barely breathe. It was suffocating. I did puja to release from this squeeze. This death-like density seemed to resemble holy density. It was a bit uncooked and unrefined, but it was the raw manure of bliss. All the ingredients were there. All that was needed was a little holy compression. There was a surplus of fear here and a shortage of blessing. It could all be eventually transformed - of this I was certain.
I could see signs everywhere of the Jews reclaiming their holy ground. Candles and all kinds of small and large memorials dotted the landscape. MY SORROW IS CONTINUALLY BEFORE ME. This was the big message. I listened to klezmar music on my Walkman. It sounded intense and surreal. I felt like dancing and it didn't feel wrong. I was now comfortable. The night was descending, but the shock was now gone. All the pujas went well. I was completely alone, but felt no fear. It was routine now .... and it felt like bliss. I could hear the heaves of relief from all the sentient realms in this holy and dense spot of Earth. The Guides were answering all my calls for release. Their compassion was unconditional. My panic was gone. I passed the gas chambers and crematorium and felt FULL.
I got back to Krakow late in the evening humming the bars of the Polish anthem in fabulous triumph. I had survived Auschwitz and it was now time to pack up and move on to Vienna. Jerzy came over to say good-bye and told me stories about the Grand Wizard's escapades. I got two Polish guys all excited about a nutty export-import scheme involving strange wire trinkets.
A guy called Lech helped me get on the train. Lech had been a philosophy major and understood that it was important to explore the mind that jumps between systems rather than the systems themselves. All systems were products of the mind, so it made sense to start at the source. Darkness was descending on Krakow and the city's numberless buildings were just beginning to sparkle on their lights. I staggered off the tram with Lech and we sniffed and stretched for a moment. It was time to board the vortex train and ride off into the secret night. Lech waved good-bye and turned into a blur as the train picked up speed.
The entrance to "Little Auschwitz" had the famous ARBEIT MACHT FREI letters hovering below the clouds like a sad and lonely riff. Once past this, Marush and I followed a dirt path that led directly to the prisoner's barracks and some pretty revolting exhibits. Stacks of hair, eye glasses, and suitcases greeted us and made us flinch.
Small piles of Zyklon-B gas cans stood as mute testimony to GROSS and HEAVY BLACK STRESS. There was even a small-scale model of how people were processed through the gas chamber assembly-line. All this frightened Marush and he was anxious to leave. I decided to do a puja with Marush at the memorial wall where countless prisoners had been shot. I could feel a heavy pressure in the evening air, but the space began to expand as I chanted through the Tibetan texts, the blessings of the compassionate guides. I soon started feeling release and so did Marush. The locals were begging for blessings. The stress had been enormous here. Transforming this shock and evil into bliss and release was a momentous task and I could feel the protectors and guides helping out. Words were useless here.
The moon as seen from Auschwitz:
The seas on the moon are like stone and there is either a killing brightness or complete darkness-there are no gentle transitions on this dead planet. Everywhere the surface shows the effects of intense pounding. There is no atmosphere whatever. There is no life.
Auschwitz as seen from the moon:
There seems to be a haunting bottomless quality, hinting of possible enlightenment, down there, on that little plot of land. THEY ARE MINING LIGHT OUT OF DARKNESS.
The facts on the ground at Auschwitz:
Marush wanted to go back to Krakow so I escorted him to the train station. I then had to find my way back to "The Museum" in the dark. The bus dropped me at the back of the camp and I got lost. The energies felt sinister and evil. I began walking away from the camp into a poorly lit road leading out into the dark and unfriendly fields. A cursing drunk stalked me and a dense and terrifying panic soon engulfed me. I was doing wrathful puja almost by accident. The drunk was my assistant. I eventually stumbled into the camp after retracing my steps from where the bus had left me.
I suddenly found myself next to the crematorium and gas chamber. It was pitch black except for a few lonely lamps that silhouetted the watch-towers and barbed wire. I could hear the locals wailing and the protectors were very aggressive. I slowly walked and recited some mantrum. I was now unwittingly doing advanced Tantra in Hitler's cemetery of cemeteries. I was plowing inside BLACK and discovering more BLACK. I walked out front, finally and trudged out to a deserted highway. All puja was instant and automatic in this challenge zone. The Nakpa who had died recently and had helped Summer and me at Konopiste was helping out here too. There was a deep connection here between all three of us. Summer and I made our offerings to the Czechs with the Nakpa's approval. Now I was making my offering to the Poles here, at Auschwitz with his blessings once again.
I ultimately found the "INFORMATION CENTER" and booked myself a room for the night. A priest took a liking to me and started quizzing me about "my pilgrimage." Father Pytor was a devout Catholic, but demanded the need for proof on the spiritual path. "I need to hear myself think," he aggressively announced. "God allows me this space in my mind," he added. Yet, how could any observation of God be real if the observer himself was an illusion? I wondered quietly to myself. (Jarek had also jammed on this quite heavily.) Father Pytor sensed that my seeking was genuine and the next morning drove me to "Big Auschwitz" about a mile and a half from the "Information Center." He dropped me off at "The Gate of Death." Father Pytor pointed his finger towards the gate. "There! Over there, you'll find God!" His car sped off, leaving a cloud of dust to linger as an additional reminder of my predicament. I now had to face some nasty demons and my only real weapon against them was compassion. Did I have enough of it?
I was in Birkenau. It was almost beyond description. It was at least three times larger than "Little Auschwitz." The rail tracks went right through the gate. The trains deposited the victims right in front of the gas chambers and ovens. It was a HIGHLY ORGANIZED AND INDUSTRIAL PROCESS. Humans were the input and fertilizer was the output. It was a sick Second Wave process. There seemed to be no moral constraints. I climbed the tower and gazed at the vast death factory in front of me.
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