Madison Avenue, commercial hackers, designer jeans, celebrity fashion perfumes and paraphernalia, Warhol’s pop art — the soup cans on paper — decisions to make in a life and how to walk the line.
Fulfilled? This is the question. I can’t help but weave these scenes in and out as they jump off the memory banks down memory lane: visual images from trailers left snipped and unedited. The Jesse Files. Push the buttons which electrify the bio-rhythms, the biofeedback recordings of heartbeat, the transition of brain waves and emotions and the struggle to achieve and conform and compete to survive.
The losses and grief and sadness lap at the shores. The melancholic circumstantial evidence that convicts the soul, enslaved just ahead of the mantras and the speeding to nowhere. Yes, these walks in the park pushing the baby buggy, this reading and information intake, are all destined to make sense and stop making sense and nonsense. Entropy decides the randomness of these little ant-beings running around, feigning disenchantment.
No, this Jesse is happy for awhile, for the next five minutes, or two hours, or until that elusive state sticks and looks like a smile and a feeling of well-being. Jesse has always been happy, ever since he was born and they pulled him out with those forceps. He thinks he is OK, and that is enough.
The pondering and wondering are all that is needed for Jesse to reflect on the reflection. Just enough for the thinker to think the thoughts and feel and emote and act and move. Everything is Mentalism after all, lived practically and spiritually. Philosophy, according to Paul Brunton.
12.
HEREABOUTS, AGAIN . . .
So, back, now. I am still walking. I keep on walking, as the gray skies lift, and I remember where I am. Back from those thoughts across the great divide. These are the Vienna Woods/Wienerwald, and it is all right to drift and let the thoughts fall where they may. How old am I? And what does all this thinking have to do with living? Keep on trucking, I say. It seems like it’s been a couple of hours now, and I haven’t seen anyone, anyone human, that is.
That’s great, because in the U.S. there would often be city people up on the trails, and rangers with pistols acting like policemen, and concession stands selling hot dogs, and a lot of litter and parking charges and admission tickets to nature. Paying to maintain the upkeep of walled-in, maintained nature, just one step ahead of the developers and mineral rights activists and progress. Can’t stop progress, and as for the developers, forget that tamed old spotted owl and all those endangered animals. Why, man is growing endangered. We couldn’t lose our jobs over a little bird; they will have to find a new habitat. It’s survival of the fittest, isn’t it, and if those critters were meant to stay, they would adapt or retire into oblivion along with the other endangered species. Either that, or go extinct. What were they ever good for, anyway? You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Besides, it’s not us, it’s those farmers digging the roads in Brazil that burn those trees, and in Indonesia and elsewhere, fueled by self interest again, that cause us to deplete the ozone hole, that warm us all up. It’s often the scientists on the payroll of corporate America that dispute the real facts and figures in order to preserve profits at all costs. Why, we eased out of the Kyoto and Rio global warming agreements, for instance. Besides, the “have not” nations don’t have to abide by it, even China and India. Why should we, who are 8% of the world’s population, use 25% or more of the total energy of the world?
Besides that, you people in Europe can’t even get your own act together, what with Bosnia-Herzegovia, Kosovo, nationalistic interests first, the IRA, Chernobyl, ethnic cleansing, the Holocaust, the Middle Ages, the Inquisition, the Crusades. There are still imperialist types of colonialism all over the world, couched in other, so-called beneficial, names, such as globalization, the G8, NATO, the vested national interests using the “information highway.” The Armenians and Ruandans experienced genocide, the Kurds and Palestinians are struggling. And then there’s Israel. There are the Islamic Fundamentalists under the guise of sanctioned terrorism, Algerian massacres, and in Africa, blacks murdering blacks. The Taliban, the Iraqis, Iran, and Al Kaida, needless to say. What about the previous so called middle/far right anti-foreigner regime in that small country called Austria? I see those skin-and-bones babies awaiting death from malnutrition, like 12 million preventable deaths of children worldwide every year.
I could go on and on with facts and figures and horror pictures seen on CNN. What is the UN doing? Hey, step back pardner, get off your wild horse and tie it to the hitching post, relax and smoke a cool Marlboro man, or is it Mann? Who is talking here, inside this man, disturbing my peace? Is this some internal inner-leftist holdover diatribe?
Why, it’s the boogeyman inside, taking that American point of view and allowing no other perspective. How dare he climb into my head, here on this peaceful day in the woods?
I think I’m getting a little tired now. Oh, good. Here is this green meadow. It doesn’t look wet and is full of those yellow little wildflowers. I’ll just lie down now and call it a day.
I still have a few hours of light left. It’s about, let’s see, my little Swatch watch says it’s 16:00, that means 4:00pm out West, and it seems like the clouds with their drops of water, their gray foreboding, are moving eastward. I can lay right down here, next to this tree. Maybe I can put this little pack, rucksack, as they call it here, down, and lay on my sweater, that brown pullover v-neck which blends in so nicely with the earth and leaves.
Those birds sure can sing, and it seems like so many different kinds now. What am I going to have for dinner? Wasn’t I going to cook for Anna, my Austrian girlfriend? She was supposed to come over about 19:00/7:00pm, and I was going to have an American-style barbecue. Let’s see, I can have those frozen green beans with that French style bread. Maybe I’ll put garlic butter on it along with the meat that I bought. I sure didn’t eat so much meat in the States. But here the meat is so good, and I found a bio-fed natural beef that I like, that tastes so good. No BSE/foot-and-mouth disease and additives for me! I’ll have to start the coals about 18:00, so that when she arrives they will be hot enough to put the meat on. Besides, I’m getting hungry. Where was I? Yes, here I am, lying down out here. The sun feels so good now. I’ll just close the eyes a little more, and bye-bye . .
13.
LAPSE
INTO . . .
. . . It feels as if I’m falling, falling, falling now, faster and faster. I can’t keep up with the velocity. It’s through space. Timeless. It’s after death, or on another plane, between life and death, another plateau. I see all of these lights go by. I see some faces now. They are people I don’t recognize. There are old women laughing at me, and then there are some young boys without their clothes on, running and playing on the beach.
I see all sorts of things as I keep falling and looking and wondering, as in Wandering Jew: Where I am going? It is at once exhilarating and disturbing, fearsome and exciting. I am alone, yet I have many others joining me in these movements. Is it a black hole I’m in? When will it stop? This is not real, yet it is so familiar and so real. The paradox astounds me as I hear music and sounds and people talking. I see many buildings, and foreign places where I have never been. Isn’t that the Taj Mahal over there? And then there are cows, and the Ganges, and bodies burning, and old saddhus walking: skinny men with long hair and white loincloths and bare feet, begging and praying.
I see one man who is sitting in sort of a lotus, yoga-type position. He is chanting something. I fly over there. Wait, I think I hear some sort of chanting voice . . . “ram, ram, ram,” . . . over and over, and somehow he tells me to repeat after him . . . “ram, ram, ram,” slowly inhaling, and exhaling slowly. So I find myself saying this, doing this breathing. I don’t know if anyone can hear me or if I am just saying it, as if an inner ear is hearing this. I hear the man’s voice inside me. It is ancient and eternal, as if this very word has never stopped, and it has been going on forever now in my voice. I am carrying on something. It is really deep and profound and has some incredible meaning, but I don’t quite grasp all of the significance of it, and I find I must leave this place.
It