Origin of Specious

 Once upon a time, a very long time ago, there was a social media platform called Myspace where I kept a blog called Ao Vivo. That's Portuguese. Recently, I was reviewing some of the posts I'd written from it and this one scrolled into view. I don't recall writing it, but then I write a lot of things I don't recall writing ... or thinking ... or in this case, dreaming. This is from a series of posts I called Tales from the Nine. Most likely, it was written in or around 2005.

On The Origin of Specious...

 

Would someone please explain to me why, if dreams are merely garbage sorting mechanisms, they can't just do it like it's done in the waking world? Why is it necessary to resymbolise and change the paperwork to look like something else? Perhaps, I say blithely, they work just like private enterprise and bad government bureaus; everything has to "look good" and "balance" at the end of the day, so the owner/manager does the obvious...cheats.

 

Last night, or rather just before I woke up this morning, which happened to be nearly not morning as I arose quite late because my job at the Nine has shrunk like a man's penis in very cold water. The hours there have become nearly invisible...sorry I digress. The dream.

 

Very late this morning I had this dream.

 

What the dream involved, as I am sure you guessed by now, was my chasing a very beautiful woman and having to compete for her with a guy who was strong and handsome and not very bright. She was genuinely interested in me, but, in the way of dreams, had some long-term, ongoing connection with the other guy, who wanted her to see him as something more than a boy-toy with large lifting muscles and great hair.

 

Since she felt so guilty not thinking about him as anything other than a nice ornament, and he did have the unfortunate habit of getting excited and ... um ... well ... getting and excited and ... sort of ... losing control of his ... um ... child producing apparatus ... with all the attendant side effects ... did I say that right? Anyway, she felt guilty for just once in a while hanging on his arm because she thought it was sort of encouraging him, which she told me she didn't really want to do, but there it was. He was a lovely chap to have hanging on her arm, but exchanging ideas and conversation were ... well ... hmm ... let me put it this way, he had limited originality. So she seemed attracted to my somewhat greater mental capacity. And I must say she made a nice ornament for me.

 

And now you say, ha HA!! He just said she was an ornament and now he has told us what we really want to know! And you might be right, but let me finish.

 

Yes, she was quite beautiful with one of those girly-girl sort of shapes, and I'll leave it to your imagination what kind of shape that is, because she was in my dream and I don't want to clutter my ideers of beauty with whatever you happen to conjure up. So beautiful ... and able to carry on conversation, and here's the problem, in a limited sort of way.

 

Yes her old friend, the big-muscular-perfect-hair fellow, couldn't have carried on a conversation if his life depended on putting a complete sentence together, was indeed limited. Not to mention the unfortunate side effects of his propensity for excitement, which made him even less verbal and, in fact, had quite the opposite effect. Whenever, and that was quite often, he got excited, he started issuing the kind of sounds unknown since, say, the age of pre-tool making capacity. Not the complicated system of grunts we call language. No. It was just the grunts without the complication. I suppose that is a very round about way of saying he became very non-verbal, which, together with all the other side effects made him just a tad messy to be around. But, he said scientifically, a very interesting and mostly cheerful specimen. But, and here is the big but, nay, I have said the wrong thing, here is the large exception ... she herself, while better at conversing about most things, seemed to steer the conversation continually back to the same things, which were, in this order, the big guy's conversational limitations, I originally missed a key typing this and wrote 'imitations', which, when you think about it, is kind of what he did ... sorry ... the second thing, and ... ahem ... her lengthy period of estrus.

 

Now, I ask you, why would my masculine brain contrive to turn some awake-time thing into such a symbol? But it gets stranger, Stranger.

 

At near about the three-quarter point in dream time, I found out from this beautiful creature (her) that the other beautiful creature (him) was, in spite of his manly look, actually part ... and I feel so silly telling you this, but with red-face glowing, here it is ... he was actually part something else. And this is really how the conversation in the dream went. When she told me he was actually part something else and from her conspiratorial tone when she said it, I assumed it had to be something really unusual. Like Lithuanian. Not so, said she, and she looked at him like the old friend he was, admiring the bulging biceps and pectorals, he is half lion. ... Blink ... Blink ... Blink.

 

"Lion??" I asked with my nearly scientific intelligence trying to recatagorise whole families and genuses and phylums, etc. Yes, I was thinking, thinking, thinking. How could two such species get anything like a hybrid like this? Was this possible?? Naturally, I immediately thought, he has to be, you know, like a mule ... sort of. But at least mules come from creatures that look somewhat alike! Lions and humans? Or, at least I added thoughtfully, human-like. But the oddest thing was, in spite of my questioning, I took her at her word, or words, whatever. So we sat there, on a little cement retaining wall, (see? I told you dreams have strange symbols!) discussing this; is this miscegenation? Anyway, as we had our little chat, we watched him get more and more excited until, sure enough, just like a cat, he started to spray. Please forgive my bluntness, I myself was quite taken aback. But that's not all! As she and I spoke, I admired how clever she was to know this and, in a fit of my own excitement, asked what her own background might be.

 

I can tell you I nearly became inarticulate myself. In the course of this retaining wall talk, she admitted that she was also the result of a combination effort. Blink ... Blink ... Blink ... But, but, but, I stuttered, you don't look like anything but a rather attractive woman! Yes, said she, I AM rather attractive, aren't I? And here she coyly batted her eyelashes at me. And here was where the conversational shift shifted, to her oncoming estrus cycle. Again.

 

Forgive me for asking, I tried as non-judgemental and casual a tone as possible, but just ... what ... kind ... particular ... particular kind ... what particular kind of combination ethnicity are you?

 

"Well", she said moving quite close, so that our bodies, or at least our legs were touching, and she did it quite smoothly, so I almost didn't notice, "well ... I am half hyena".

 

You remember how inarticulate I said muscle boy was? Well, that's how inarticulate I was at this point, but only at this point. Then she threw in the rest.

 

"I will be reaching estrus in about a minute and a half." Eyes batted, body undulated.

 

I wanted to ask her, so I did, if that's why she couldn't, wasn't, didn't seem much interested in the other fellow, after all, lions and hyenas never did get along too well.

 

And she said, and I quote, undulating a little more and eyelids beginning to look like those signal lights they use on ships, "it thertainly ith."

 

Now, I must tell you, I have another part of my ever-so-active brain that keeps a monitor on dreams, reminding me that I am dreaming. This is called the 'lucid dreamer', for those of you who care about such things. Well, when she answered me in that girly-girl lisp, my lucid dreamer kicked in, and told me that, yes, I was dreaming but to be very cautious. It also told me, that while maybe the lion part and the hyena part couldn't make a go of it, maybe the human parts could. On the other hand, was it possible for a human/human and a hyena/human? I thought not.

 

After all, I told myself in a Groucho Marx voice, a hyena is still a hyena.

 

Even when it's a lion hyena.

Waiting for a Train in Venice

We were waiting for the train in Venice

after a winter week sipping Giudecca

at the Calcina?

I can’t recall.

I wrote a story at that window

framing Chiesa del Santissimo Redentore,

or Chiesa San Giorgio Maggiore,

a story starting 

an opera ending 

with a woman, singing 

while Venice ends,

and Mestre ends

Lido ends,

and she, singing,

ends, falling 

while sighing

into a filthy canal.

We were waiting for a train in Venice

After a winter week sipping Giudecca,

At the Calcina?

I can’t recall.

Murano sparkled,

glass chandeliers,

glass figurines,

glass shops, 

with glass things

that just catch dust,

the glass museum, 

glass dumpsters,

overflowing colors

from before time:

I heard an English voice

say “look at how pretty…oh…

it’s a skip!” 

But it is pretty,

this mountain

glittering color,

and it was a skip, and a hop,

and a jump, 

from Giudecca

to Murano.

And, there is a cemetery.

I ran my camera,

along narrow

Venice streets and closes,

acqua alta splashing,

bouncing on planks,

stretched brick to brick,

spotting sandbagged doors,

shutter clicking 

I ran without aim,

before leaning palazzos

over tiny canal bridges,

I want to remember

the couple bickering,

is a child’s school

a place for learning,

or a madhouse,

the silhouette 

an elderly couple make 

strolling under 

an ancient archway.

Then we waited for a train in Venice

After a winter week watching Giudecca,

At the Calcina?

I can’t recall.

A vaporetto conversation 

about snow returned,

as it slanted downward, 

a veil for Santa Lucia, 

we waited,

and we waited,

watching the old-fashioned monitor

slowly flick destinations 

upward until 

our destination was lost

in the sky

and falling snow still fell.

I knew this opera

was nearly over, 

its tragic beauty

veiled in Venetian snow,

while the lady’s song

reached crescendo.

We were waiting,  the train from Venice 

was very late, snow was falling

after a winter week of sun and Giudecca,

at Pensione Calcina?

I can’t recall.

Here's To All Your Severed Limbs

  

 

Here’s to all your severed limbs

that lie drying in deserts

far from their owner’s sins,

and more of the same 

that have long lay rotten,

far, far away in jungles

forgotten. Will all these bits

lacking prayer leaven,

after a time find their twin

in a somewhat mangled heaven?

He Wasn't Beat

  

Morrison wrote

         a prayer

for some American

         he didn’t know.

All read it after those words

         fell as ink

on a page 

         like California rain.

 

Was it as Lord 

         or New Creature

when I ran laps 

         around my rooftop

balcony’s rail

         to wonder slowly

between quick steps

         if there was time

for a laugh

         at faces

on my neighbors 

         as I passed

their windows

         as I fell

to an end of days

         to that sidewalk

where some ancestor

         carefully engraved 

a bleeding penis.

 

Morrison drowned

         before Bastille Day

his words

         buried in Pére Lachaise

 

Weed in the Median

Waiting for a green turn arrow,

there, at Skyline and Sharp Park,

there's cement median strip

marking a boundary

between northbound and 

southbound lanes;

it is an old section

of road at a boundary

between earth and sky;

every cardinal direction,

a choice.

Growning in cracks

in the concrete 

anyone can see a sparse 

clump here, an individual

weed there, swaying in a wind,

some with tiny flowers,

all as green as spring

and alike as twins,

though standing solitary,

others grouped like

a small gathering

of brothers, none aware

that his look alike

carries a similar burden,

Every individual and group,

a headstone for multitudes,

in a cemetery for their dry

and discolored fellows,.

every destiny the same

a season of sun then fog

and rain, finally to be

forgotten as a distraction

from perfection.

Just a weed in the median.

Interface

I am trying to crack the hardness surrounding my mentality, or at least a piece of my mentality. I remembered this morning the incident of the “missing exercise record” from my youth.

In brief, I heard and became quickly enamored of an exercise recording at school one day with a catchy tune called “Chicken Fat” that was probably a product of some physical fitness campaign. Some fellow brought the record to school and put all of us fourth graders through all of its eight minutes of exercises and being thrilled with the thing I immediately ordered a copy for which I had to pay out of my allowance some outrageous sum…probably four or five dollars.

So thrilled was I with the record that I took it home and played and exercised over and over, stretching the eight or so minutes of exercise into something like maybe fifteen or twenty. Not a bad aerobic workout for a fourth grader. I must have really got the exercise bug, because I remembered faithfully going through the routine every afternoon for about a week.

However, my mother wasn’t as thrilled with either the record or my exercising, and I couldn’t say which bothered her more but she did say that if I wanted to exercise I could go out and dig in the garden or cut wood or rake up leaves or some such thing. Whatever it was I cooperated fully and completed the task because I knew that her “suggestion” was a command. I will not say I did whatever it was cheerfully, but I did it.

So after that final routine I carefully put away my record in its sleeve and did my chore. The weekend went by and the following Monday I went back to school actually looking forward to getting home, not a common occurrence, and once again exercising to my record.

Upon arrival at home however, I could not locate my record anywhere and I put in a great deal of effort looking. It took me years to realize that my mother had most likely thrown it into the garbage and because I was always suspicious of my parent’s actions, it was a place I checked. What I didn’t realize was that she probably buried it in the garbage knowing I would dig through the top layers of the stuff.

What does this have to do with me today?

I have recently tried to inject an exercise regime into my life. Exercise is not difficult; I am not overweight and while I am slightly ‘jiggly’ around the middle, I am certainly not fat. I need more to move weight rather than lose it; in fact, I may be a little underweight. To accomplish this, I have joined a website that promotes fitness and has a social networking aspect to it as well. More importantly, it demands a certain mindset of positive energy and its founder speaks eloquently about spiritual aspects of health and fitness.

So what is the problem? The program has certain requirements. There are a series of ‘assignments’ to be read and carried out and the founder has carefully laid out a syllabus for students to complete. Therein lies the big hurdle for me: I am essentially a terrible student. I think I like to learn but learning takes effort and somewhere I learned that effort isn’t worth the effort.

I live almost completely upside down and backwards from the average American, whatever that is.

I have difficulty competing because competition wasn’t allowed by my parents or in my family environment. For example, when my siblings and I played the game Monopoly (which we all blithely called Monotony), no one ever won because it would mean someone was trying to win! The only way anyone was allowed to win any game was by complete chance; skill and strategy caused too much dissention and anger. So every ordinary game we played was a chance-driven game like a strange little card game my grandmother taught us given the curiously aggressive name of “Beat Your Neighbors Out Of Doors”. Games that were completely driven by the roll of dice such as board games were pretty much okay, but games like chess stopped being played as soon as someone seemed to start improving beyond the abilities of my parents.

Some of us did eventually learn to play whist and gin, but these were games which had such long stretches of time between playings that they had to be relearned every time or were actually learned long after my parents had lost any interest at all in games. There is certainly skill to games like cribbage but that skill has to be taught and my parents had no interest in losing and taught only the barest of fundamentals of how to count the cards and when and if they started losing, they stopped playing.

I mention games because I have heard that the learning of games is one method of learning how to interact with and deal with the complexity of a society. If this is true then an individual living in a complex, competitive society needs to learn how to compete and understand the social complexities and these skills are most easily taught and learned during formative years. What happens to the individual who does not learn the skills needed in his society?

I remember one evening my brother and I sitting at the dining room table, which was where school homework was usually done until we finally acquired a desk for our room sometime during my middle school years (and even then my brother tended to pile books and papers on it in such a way that it couldn’t easily be utilized as a desk). I do not remember what we were actually involved in but I made a comment something like, “well, I need to strive to achieve (it)…” using the word ‘strive’ because I had read or heard how striving to reach ones goals was how things were done. My brother, who had been listening to my yammer suddenly interrupted me saying, and I will never forget this, “Oh no! You must never strive for anything!!” His interruption shocked me. To this day I am not sure whether he said it because he really felt that way or because it was his way of breaking the ‘non-competition’ rule of the house.

I later asked him about it and he seemed to indicate that he actually believed in non-competition but many of his actions seem contrary to the idea. He did tell me one afternoon sitting by the American River in an almost confessional way that my father had spent a lot of time comparing my supposed grace to his clumsiness and apparently gave him the idea that I was favored in some way. This completely took me by surprise because I had always thought that he, as the elder, was the favored one! Some time after that event my father began to reveal some aspects of his personality that astonished and depressed me.

He revealed a certain bitterness about some events early in my brother’s life that my mother and her parents developed a monopoly on my brother’s time and only allowed my father special access when it suited them, taking my brother to watch my maternal grandfather in his workshop or taking him to his place of work, never allowing him to see my father at his place of work.

When my brother was registering for the Selective Service he told them he had seizures and was listed 4-F. My father was angry and told him and me, and then told me again later that my brother had been “stupid” and “should have lied”. Again, this astonished me, because we had always been conditioned, sometimes violently, to “tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. I rather confrontationally asked my father where we would have ever got the idea that under some circumstances it would be okay to lie? He didn’t seem to care that my brother’s circumstances could endanger another human.

At the time, I tried to smooth things over by saying, “well that wouldn’t have been a good idea because (my brother) wanted to be a pilot and it could have been really dangerous…etc., etc. … He really wanted to go into the Air Force Academy … you know, to become a pilot, an officer...” To which my father replied, “Oh, he just wanted to surpass me.” I was and am shocked that a parent would say this about his child, and the offhand way in which he said it and the gleeful relief in his voice that it hadn’t happened still stirs my ire.

Which brings me to another problem: my parents didn’t seem to believe in or want a future, or maybe even a goal. The future, and its corollary, goals, were either nonexistent or at the very least, suspect. “Why do you want to do that?” was always the question. “What’s the point?” Recently, one of my sisters told me she isn’t sure there is a point in thinking about the future. The question arose again while I was filling out a job application recently and came across a question, which read, “What do you want to be doing in five years?” It took me a few days to think up a response and I can’t even remember what I wrote.

My elder sister, toward the end of her high school years contacted a school that trained airline personnel to become flight attendants, ticket agents and the like and a representative of the school came to our house to interview my sister and talk with my parents about enrollment. I was really hoping my sister’s excitement would carry the day and she would get hired by one of the airlines, mostly because I thought maybe I might get to fly somewhere exotic. It was a beautiful spring day; I love to fly so I went for a walk to daydream about flying to Honolulu or Rome.

At the very moment I returned to the house, my sister came running, crying and screaming out the front door and, not too far behind her, the woman from the school tightly gripping a briefcase came striding, angrily, red-faced, toward her car. Then she stopped, turned and yelled something back at the house about what “…you are doing to your daughter’s life…” I stopped abruptly in the yard to watch her throw the briefcase in her car, slam the door and speed away, nearly running the car off an embankment opposite our driveway, but just before she got in her car and slammed the door, she yelled at me in a rising crescendo, “Don’t have any dreams!”

A moment later when I warily entered the house, both my parents were sitting comfortably in our living room, my mother looking like she had just won the academy award and my father had an unfathomable grin on his face, rather like an agent whose client had just won an academy award. I knew in that moment that any plan I had for any kind of future for myself must be kept completely secret until it became fait accompli, Worse, any plan or goal I might have had up until that moment completely evaporated. To this day I have difficulty visualizing goals unless they are extremely short term, but practice has given me an ability, however slight, to anticipate consequences.

But this disability hasn’t stopped me from continually trying to reformulate my future.

Today, I was monitoring my body because of the program I am trying to accomplish and suddenly realized that pursing my lips has become habitual! I love to laugh but I have forgotten, if I ever knew, how to smile! When I started trying to loosen the musculature around my mouth, I noticed my eyebrows were either in a mild frown or slightly raised in surprise, or maybe fear. What is happening here?

Here is my theory.

We are, all of us, creatures of habit and some habits form without our knowing it. We may all be born in beauty and joy and surely some of us develop in beauty and joy but what happens when our development is skewed away from it? I think a kind of anger forms from the loss and that anger is expressed in various ways, perhaps the least of which is a habitual form of facial expression.

I think it is our nature to “wear” our bodies into a shape that satisfies our most constant mental and emotional condition. This isn’t anything new; actors and dancers have been using an enforced technique of this idea for thousands of years. The Greek comedy/tragedy masks are a good example. But what is necessary to alter that conditioned stance?

My answer is some kind of readjustment that has as its genesis an alteration of the inner mental/emotional/spiritual condition. This isn’t new either. In fact, nothing I write here is new, even the fact that I myself am involved in an attempt to alter my inner climate. I previously wrote about how I got the idea to enter the Navy but I did not write about the ideas that kept that idea on track.

In high school and even before, I developed a way of interfacing with my universe. I use the word interface because I saw myself as a unique system that could not operate with any other system without a special program operating. After I developed my ‘interface’, I could interact. Part of that program allowed me to mentally slip out of one personality mode and into another, usually without anyone noticing very much. Those who did notice usually didn’t comment. To anyone reading this, I know how this sounds. My brother actually called me “a little schizo” (and he meant small not ‘just a tad’…) once and my mother quite belligerently told him that I wasn’t because that is what she was diagnosed as being and I couldn’t possibly be the same. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. However, I am not schizophrenic nor do I have multiple personality disorder.

But let me return to my interface technique.

This self-developed program allowed me, like an actor, to put on a personality or character if you will. In school, I necessarily developed what looked as close as I could reckon to what I thought a “shy person” must be like. I used my siblings and shy schoolmates as patterns and worked very hard to keep up this appearance and it was quite difficult because I am not natively shy at all. It was also this ‘character’ that I most often slipped out of accidentally. Another ‘character’ was a kind of spy I used when I felt I wasn’t getting enough information or I felt there were sides to a story that hadn’t been expressed completely. I used ‘the spy’ to ferret out what I thought of as the reality of a situation. I used detective and espionage novels and movies to learn spy characteristics and learning this ‘character’ was also useful in learning to listen.

The most difficult part of developing this interface was the problem of being alone. First, it was lonely, and second I didn’t know what ‘character’ I needed to play to interact with myself. It was a very thorny problem because I knew on some level I had to develop a way of listening to myself. I had read and heard many times that we all have ‘that little inner voice’ and unfortunately, mine seemed to be missing or, at the very least, muffled. My paternal grandmother was the first person I remember who told me about listening to my inner voice and while I am fairly certain she meant something altogether different, because I was quite young, I took it to mean and began listening for a voice inside my head that sounded like a voice outside my head. Thankfully, this did not happen.

What I did notice though was that when I slipped into one of these characters, my proprioception changed! I have always been fairly ambidextrous, even to occasionally writing with both hands. Changing hands can be forced but hand dominance stays the same. This is difficult to explain to most people but there are also moments when the dominance changes and using the opposite side is much easier and, more importantly, it can be sensed. It is an odd sensation that feels a little like I am going through a minor earthquake, but when the sensation passes I am seeing differently or feeling the need to use the opposite hand from moments before. These changes of hand or eye dominance however, have nothing to do with slipping in and out of character other than my ambidextrous dominance changes primed me for being able to feel when my body had ‘slipped into character’.

What that means is that when my mental/emotional inner climate had changed, something about my body changed. What changed might be my tension level, or the slump of my shoulders, but the inner change always occurred first. However, occasionally in forcing a physical change, I could promote a dominance change and that seems to mean that changing a physical posture might also change a mental attitude.

Now many years later, having learned a great deal of cynicism and not needing the interface any longer, I have misplaced the ability to use it. Perhaps I don’t really need it but isn’t it also possible that if I can alter either physical or mental posture my demeanor to others will be altered as well?

What I now need is to reacquire some beauty and joy and release some mental and physical tension from places it has longed called home. I wonder if it is too much to ask for an epiphany?