INTRODUCTION + POETRY + MUSIC + ESSAYS + TRAVEL + FICTION + TEXTILE ART + HAAG'S BIO
Picture me lying on clean, white, sanitary sheets
on my bed atop
Pacific View Drive reading
spiritual books in the sunshine longing for
God --
perpetually disappointed, as each book, instead of concluding
in enlightenment, ends with the injunction: get a
guru.
Find a teacher, they enjoined, a guide
(preferably the book's author),
saint, someone to take
your hand, show you the path, someone to
help you put your preferences on hold. I
needed, they said, to
rise from the white
sheets, to put my trust in an other
human,
follow their footsteps. It seems new thought,
invention, a creative
seeing of the world, making
new things, having new insights all
happened thousands
of years ago. There is nothing to learn
except
what has been said before. The body
of tradition lies
more heavily on one than
even the physical body. What's a new person
for, I cried (continuously) if we're only supposed
to walk within
old footsteps. A rebel, I
guess, from the git go, with a great
cause. They try to confine everyone to following
the wisdom of
someone else invented some time
ago. But what fun at the dawn. Think
of the fun of Ashoka, the fun of
the ancestors of Chih Huang Di,
Buddha, Aristotle
and the boys, Jesus and his students, making
it
up as they went along, not having
to drag the body (of law).
It, human
knowledge, began somewhere, sometime with people as gauche
as me looking at the stars, looking at
their liver, reading the
cracks of bones, painting
bison in caves. Someone probably
already telling them:
"Grind the ochre this way." "Use camel hairs
not warthog bristles." Surely at some date, back
in pre-history,
pre-pre-history (maybe) someone knew the ecstasy
of discovery.
Shouted: Do it this way! I
see it! Paint it! Before being subjected
to
all the dead theories that, sooner or later,
turn out to be
wrong. Surely what births
in the world with a new mind, new
ways
of loving, lying, should be given a
chance -- a big chance! Before
education (indoctrination)! Look
at the mess the world's in, surely
you
don't want me to learn all that! Even
today (in this world) we
have to agree
that it's often the maverick mind (the outsider)
that
discovers, adds to, enlarges the shrinking world.
Today, lying on
my clean white sheets on
my floor reading mysteries, I am unable to
fathom the hold sex has over humanity. (Or
does it? Does it only
in books? -- where
it's needed to sell the non-sense one reads
to
relieve the pressure of time heavy on
one's hand between birth and
eternity.) The implication
being that one -- me, I -- need
(?) to go
out, find a teacher, indulge in sex which
was only an
interest, ever, of a few
minutes of my night or day. I need (?)
a guru of the body. Why? I need (?)
their experience,
not my own, to make me
whole, a human. Left alone, how many at
what age would think up sex as time
filler? as more entertaining
than roaming, say, Monument Valley?
Created by humans, with too
much time and
not enough oomph to move beyond eat, sleep,
work,
pro-creation (what our soft-purring, sure-footed pets do)
diddling,
drug-warring -- do I really need to believe
that the clean white
sheets, the sanitary reading,
the non-sense of life is pervasive? So
why
all this awareness, this longing, if no one
can, no one even
wants to try to
move beyond this "human nature." Is consciousness
given
us only to ridicule the absurdities of having
been given
life? Wonder? Curiosity? Invention? Need? Enlightenment?
The
incorrigible delight in doing it "My way!"
#19 OBJECTIVITY
INTRODUCTION + POETRY + MUSIC + ESSAYS + TRAVEL + FICTION + TEXTILE ART