Naked and spectacular

Total pageviews

2013-02-28

Layer upon layer of California

Why do we persist in this haze?  How do we continue to walk around in this stupor as if everything is normal?  How does the world not collapse around us, so tenuously built on so many of our non-existent concepts? 

I look around me and I see layer upon layer of illusion.  There is the illusion of the culture that exists eternally.  Despite our frequent libraries full of histories, we know our culture has always been like this.  Despite science telling us that the sun will eventually collapse, we know our culture will last forever.  It is fundamentally non-existent and therefore not bound by the laws of physics or even logic.  I grew up surrounded by it, like a slimy birth fluid.  This culture can easily be washed off in the shower, but we are encouraged, via advertising, to subsequently coat ourselves in it; oily paint that destroys our skins pH, petrochemical and alcohol skin products, constructs of metal and stone and woven fabrics.

The illusion is enforced.  I say it is easy to wash it off, and I know many people who have, but life must continue.  In the city we are surrounded by people in uniforms dedicated to surrounding us with threats and weapons.  We know that if we do not at least pretend, we will be attacked.  If we do not exchange the currency of this culture daily we will be attacked.  If we want a home, we must pay this currency to a rich person who claims to "own" it, because they have a piece of paper and because they possess more currency than we do.  If we choose to not pay this lord to live in our own home we will  be attacked.  If we are hungry we cannot take food without exchanging this currency or we will be attacked.  If we try we must remain invisible.

Why do we maintain this illusion at the expense of everything?  Who are these people, these demons, these law enforcers, these one percent?  Are they not us, members of our own species, members of our own culture, people like us, doing their jobs like us?

Illusion upon illusion.  Every morning I wake up surprised that I am not lying naked on the earth surrounded by my sleeping family, that I am clothed, surrounded by artificial light and concrete.  Where did all this come from?  I have been to Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Scandinavia, Central America and California, and it's the same everywhere.  What is happening?

I grew up in New Zealand surrounded by the voices of the other side of the planet.  I grew up with media that defined my world to a large degree but was not related to the area and people amongst whom I lived.  It was produced in Los Angeles, California.  In all of the places I have been, they are watching and listening to the same media, the same messages, the same culture, the same subliminal propaganda.  We take very seriously our consumption of media.  I cynically criticise here what I am undoubtedly a part of.  I put a great deal of energy and time into finding the best cinema available in my environment and exposing myself to hours of it, when I could be sitting on the grass in the sun.  I am hopelessly trapped in this layer of illusion and thus seek not to liberate myself from it, but to refine and improve the quality of the meida I expose myself to.  I avoid television completely but I continue to go to the cinema.  I avoid microwaves completely but I continue to eat cooked food.

In my lifetime another layer of illusion has carefully been laid upon us, with nobody flinching.  I did not use the internet until I was 17.  How quaint and hilarious I thought it was when my mother told me she didn't have television until she was 12.  I couldn't imagine a home, a living room or a life without a television.  We have barely noticed as this complex layer of wire and information has been laid upon the world like a protective coating.  Where does all this come from?  Google, Facebook and Twitter are all based in San Francisco, California.  When I was a child I knew nobody with a mobile phone.  Now I cannot communicate without a mobile phone and Facebook.  I upset people if I only have Facebook and not a mobile phone.  I am trapped in this world.  This world is California.  This world is Purgatory.  I give it names, though the names mean nothing.

We don't know how to respond and so we play along until we figure it out.  In the meantime we get old and die, blamelessly perpetuating and further developing the illusion because we didn't know what else to do.  What should I do? I ask, again and again, already having figured out that I am no longer capable of getting a job, paying rent or buying food.  Destroy it, I hear.  Destroy it without compromising what you value.  Destroy it with the unique gifts that you possess.  Destroy it in a way that has never been done before, in a way that reinforces everything you know to be true.

When I walk through these streets I see people avoiding my gaze, I see people staring right at me and I turn away frightened because they are threatening or because they are beautiful.  I see polite people just trying to get on with things and I don't have the heart to disturb them, so I try to be polite.  I see unshaven men muttering to themselves facing the floor, I see men limping, I see women pushing trolleys and going through garbage, I see dandies in purple pants, I see drunk blonde women laughing, I see bums accosting everyone for cigarettes and coins.  Everyone I meet is intelligent and beautiful and caring and gentle.  Everyone I don't meet is terrifyingly unpredictable and potentially dangerous.  I see zombies stomping down the street with their eyes bulging out of their heads.  I see zombies striding with the confidence of a suit and the justification of a credit card.  I do not understand why we allow it to continue.

People shout in the streets.  We ignore them, including I, the morally superior one.  We see those who commit "low level quality of life crimes" being harassed by bums in blue uniforms and we pretend its normal in our consciousness though our stomachs claim otherwise.  We sit at home or in the park and we talk openly about it all with the people that we trust and we wonder why it is not changing.  Jesus announced the apocalypse as the Roman Empire encroached on the villages he was born amongst.  My global tribe, goddess bless them, announced the apocalypse at the end of last year.  I knew what the apocalypse would look like cos I knew what the apocalypse needed to look like.  I was disappointed to the core, though I had carefully veiled myself in scepticism.

I suppose it will go on as it has, illusion layered upon illusion when the old illusion wears thin.  I suppose I will get old and die and never feel comfortable to have children.  I will find a niche and fill it and be satisfied.

2013-02-27

Living in houses

It's time to get back to the earth. Living in houses destroys us in more ways than we can comprehend.

For example?

Sleeping patterns. There is one reason why we don't go to sleep when it gets dark and wake up when it gets light. Houses (and electric light). One example.

Partying and live music is another good reason we don't go to sleep when it gets dark.

I guess if things were different we would party and perform live music during the day, or at night under the stars and especially the full moon and around the fire (rather than in houses).

They promote compulsive behavior. They disengage us from reality; earth, air, water, sun, other plants and animals. They separate us from our neighbors and even our friends. In houses we sleep in different rooms and different beds; when we sleep on the earth we naturally sleep together, if only to keep each other warm.

Agreed Chris, I am completely off balance after coming back from Mexico, main reason being where I'm living.

If you clean up your house sufficiently, you will be vacuuming the floor until you are back on a healthy living soil and you will be dusting the roof and walls until they no longer protect you from reality and the air flows and the sky is visible in all its beauty.

I am a fat slob.  I live in a house.  I may not be actually fat, but I feel like I am.  When I eat a big meal I look at my stomach, it juts out rudely.  After eating a big meal, I feel like eating.  While eating I feel like I should be doing something, like reading or watching TV.  I want my food to be cooked and heavy with carbohydrates, specifically crude grains; fried rice, tortillas, bread or pasta.  I eat because there is nothing else to do.  I eat because I can't relax.  I eat because my environment is entirely uninspiring.  I create my own space, I cover the walls with beauty, I keep it clean and I fill it with comfortable furniture and meaningful objects.  I enclose myself in this space, surrounded by these objects, alone.  Here I am able to create a fantasy world, in my thoughts perhaps, or when asleep in my dreams.  At my best I create stories to reach out to the world from this space, but usually I don't have the energy.

I remember when I used to be alive.  I used to sleep on the beach.  I used to make fire before going to sleep at night.  I used to fall asleep looking at the stars.  I used to breathe fresh ocean air, cleaned by the salt.  I used to run naked up the beach when it was empty and leap into the water with exuberance and submission.  The ocean would always deposit me back on the sand, safe and refreshed; reborn.  No matter how many hot chlorinated showers I enjoy I cannot recreate this type of cleanliness.  No matter how many times I masturbate down the drain pipe I never have the feeling that I have entered the vagina of the Earth and been accepted.

I am a filthy smelly bum.  I sleep in the park.  I carry bags around with my everywhere I go.  I have everything I need on hand.  I sleep in the bush, surrounded by trees, cosy on a yoga mat in a sleeping bag, wrapped up in a woolen blanket.  When I wake up in the morning I eat my stolen breakfast on a picnic table in the sun.  I wash my hands and face and collect water from the public toilet.  I rarely shower.  Sometimes, when I am on a crowded bus or in a crowded cinema, I feel self-conscious about my smell or wonder if I have dirt on my face.  In the park this does not matter.  I love being in the city, I love to meet people and to have experiences and to expose my self to cinema and theatre and live music.  But public transport and shedules are so stressful in comparison to the world where the clock is the sun and the moon and the agenda is sitting on the earth and urinating on a tree.

When I am in a house I crave to be alone, to have my own room, to be able to close and maybe even lock the door.  When I am outside I love to sleep with everyone, in a row, to snuggle, to keep each other warm.  I look at the pigs I live with, sleeping in piles, and I envy them.  I sleep alone in a bed.  I sleep on the earth by the fire beside all my friends.  I sleep in a pile of humans in the bush. 

2013-02-26

The Homosexual Solution

There are too many people in the world; too many human people to be precise.  Derrick Jensen suggests that with six million human beings on this planet, we are actually taking away available biomass for the life of other species, all the non-human people who are dying rapidly.  Aside from the denial justified as morality, the morality that it is wrong for humans to die, even more wrong than other species dying, there are solutions to the population crisis that are worse than the problem, reeking of the worst totalitarianism.  Some people claim these solutions are already happening, that the governments are poisoning us through our tap water.  Others resign themselves to the necessary unpleasantness of some mass natural disaster, like a tsunami or earthquake.  Some people stress the importance of solutions allowing the economy to grow, some value solutions that adhere to pre-ordained codes of conduct, such as laws and dogmas.  No one seems to suggest pleasure as a guiding principle, or love as a process.

Why are there too many people on the earth?  Isn't this a silly game to be playing?  Surely one billion is more than enough human beings to praise Economy and Yahweh.  There is evidence that in previous human societies, tribes that lasted sustainably for thousands of years, population was controlled.  Some people hear that they killed foetuses and infants and disabled people and are horrified at the idea of human beings dying.  There is also evidence of very simple birth-control methods involving simply awareness of a woman's menstrual cycle, surely the sort of information that was violently repressed by the Catholic Church during the Holy Inquisition, or women burnings.

My suggestion as to why there are so many people on the planet is the same reason that we created all these civilisations that are merging via globalisation into the mega-culture that will digitise the planet.  Grain.  Civilisation, and therefore ever-growing population, is a result of the addiction of an entire species to grain.  Look around the world, every civilisation is defined by their grain.  There are the American corn cultures, the Asian rice cultures and the European wheat cultures.  Apparently 75% of the food eaten by humans on this planet is these three grains.  When we were gatherer-hunters, back in the garden, we would have eaten a wide variety of plants, whatever was available in our environment, taking a little from each plant so the plant could continue to flourish and provide.  We would never have eaten huge amounts of one thing as agriculture allows.  But then we discovered grains, wheat being the most popular in the world, native to the Fertile Crescent as civilisation itself is.

Why would we create agriculture when we were living a balanced life in which nature provided us everything we needed, we did not take too much and we did not threaten our environment with over-population?  Grain.  We discovered grain and the more we ate the more we wanted to eat.  I have noticed that when I start the day with a big bowl of satisfying comforting nutritious organic oats I am hungry again an hour or two later, much hungrier than I would otherwise have been.  It is no secret that these things that we use to bulk out our meals, to "fill us up", actually expand our stomachs and therefore fail at the one task they are given.  We grow up in a culture of lies.  I was told throughout my childhood by advertising and all my elders, that dairy is a source of calcium.  Scientific tests show that cow milk contains calcium, they conveniently do not mention that the human body cannot assimilate dairy and the accumulation of dairy in the body actually leeches calcium out of our bones.  There are many lies around, but the greatest lie of all is that grains "fill us up" when they actually expand our stomach.

We are addicted to grain and we can't stop ourselves.  Why would we create agriculture when it is so much easier to gather?  We decided to work hard stripping the land and planting monocrops of wheat, rice and corn that require a lot of maintenance, simply so we can eat more grain.  This is very hard work, so to take some of the burden we make more children to help.  With all these additional human beings we need to grow more grain to feed them.  Thus, expansion.  More expansion equals more work equals more people equals more grain.  Soon there are so many people it is necessary to form cities, where we can organise ourselves and divide labour so we can enjoy everything more comfortably and easily that facilitates the growing of grain.

If you do not believe me, give me another reason why we would go to the hassle to create civilisation.  "God said, "Be fruitful and multiply.""?  I do not believe you.  A page or so later he curses us with having to toil with the earth and watching as the earth becomes dust; after the beauty and simplicity of the garden.

There is one solution that has been overlooked, that will enable our population to slowly decline, reduce violence against women rapidly, allow us to value and honour the children we already have and bring great pleasure to everyone who participates.  The solution is Homosexuality.  Women have been the victims of male violence for generations and it is going to take generations to perform essential and necessary act of healing this pattern of behaviour.  Why have women been the target of such violence - domestic abuse, sexual violence, witch burning and marriage?  To oversimplify, because they are women, because they have vaginas, because they threaten men's ability to control.  The solution is homosexuality.  Not only have marriage and heteronormativism removed vast areas of sexuality from human life, but the simple act of touch has been channelled into violence as its only suitable expression; wrestling being the healthiest form of this, war being the least.

All violence is a form of sexuality, and mostly it is men fighting men.  The solution is Homosexuality.  I believe that it is necessary for all men to be sodomised at least once in their life, otherwise a fundamental human experience has been lost and an entire aspect of the psyche has not been allowed to develop.  To empathise with those who are temporarily weaker or submissive to us in some way, we need to experience the receptive.  To experience the intensity of being penetrated is to empathise with the person you penetrate.

The solution is joy and love and freedom and sexuality and humanity and can be started and enjoyed immediately.

2013-02-16

In the beginning was the word; in the end will be the word

In the beginning was the word.

In the beginning of the story is the word; in the beginning of the world the story depicts - the world the story inadequately conveys, the universe that the story dishonestly embodies - is the spirit, the unmanifest, formless, unspoken, the unspeakable, that which simply is.

On this particular day God, or someone without a name, spoke into existence the form in which he would temporarily experience the spirit that hovered over the surface of the waters.  The waters, it seems, are the conduit between the spirit and the form, the unmanifest and the manifest.  The water is receptive and selflessly conveys messages between these two dimensions, often bringing spirit into form through life in the material world.

God is like us humans and his every motivation, his compulsions and his true nature is largely hidden by the incessant noise of the voice in his head, obscuring everything but its own insanity.  Because of this no one remembers why God did what he did, any more than we know why we speak religions, wars and industrial economies into existence.

Often after doing something and not knowing why, God will simply wait for it to finish, knowing everything manifest is limited in time.  Or he will use the time to figure out why he might have manifest such a thing and what lesson it could possibly teach him about himself and about he universe.  At what point are we now in this process?  I suppose we are deep within this lesson of God, anticipating the end but with no idea where the end might lie.  It seems we've lost sight not only of the beginning of this process, we have lost sight of our present position, so desperately focussed on the end as we are.

If God can speak into existence the beginning, can we speak into existence the end, we wonder?  Or can only God speak the end into existence?  And if God can do so, why has he not yet done so?  Surely he's figured all this out by now and can end it all and inform us of the punchline.  Surely, we say.

So perhaps it is us who must declare the end, like we declare war.  In so many ways we have already attempted to say the right words, to declare the end, to announce to the manifest world that the story ends here, or at the end of this sentence, this paragraph, this chapter.

In the end was the word, and the word was spoken by the species who suffered the most, and who caused the most suffering, and the darkness on the surface of the waters was permeated by light, and the light illuminated and revealed all the curves, all the rhythms and vibrations of the waters who make up the living systems of the manifest world on the Planet Earth.  The waters know what time it is, and when the time is right the water will flow with an unrelenting momentum along the most gentle path to the vastness of the ocean, that of which we humans know so little, that of which we respect and fear much more than we would admit.

How can the beginning and the end be so close together?  How can the beginning and the end be so far apart?  Has this God abandoned us?  Is he observing dispassionately?  Does he love us and wish the best for us in some vague ineffective manner?  Is he the image of our own distant all-too-human father who we project onto the dark panel of our forgotten?  Is he the will and the intention and the powerful creator within us, obscured by the symptoms of our schizophrenia, falsely externalized and objectified to avoid the responsibility of manifesting our own necessary apocalypse?

In the beginning was the word, at least as I remember it, because I do not remember the beginning, my culture and my education have obscured the genetic memory that connects me to my ancestors.

In the beginning was the word, because all I remember is the story told about the beginning, made fully of words, revised and retold very recently.  When I truly listen and try to comprehend these words that reverberate through my body as the rhythms in which they are spoken, I become very confused and disoriented.

These words, this story, are like a nasty paranoia, separating me from the world in which I was born with my own resistance, my own anxiety about my inability to resonate with the vibrations offered to me.  I listen to this official story again, it is the same story, I notice, that is told in the schools, in the cinemas, in the speeches of presidents and parents.  It is the same story told in 99% of our books, 99% of our conversations and 99% of our laws.

I am trained in the perpetuation of this story, so when I don't listen, when I do not notice the vibrations moving through my body, the vibrations which may or may not manifest the first cancer cells to consume my earthly form, I can correlate the story with all the buildings, all the institutions and all the expectations in my environment.  Everything which does not correlate with the story falls into two categories: that of which we can deny the existence, and that which we can dismiss as "Nature".

"In the beginning was the word," I read in a weighty underrated overemphasized book that blatantly defies everything that is said about it.  I feel strong and confident and I dangerously allow the words to reverberate through my body as the spoken vibrations which they transcribe.  I am briefly confused by my inability to correlate the official interpretation with the intelligence innate in my body, my manifestation in the manifest world, my conduit between my home-universes.  I realize the words I am reciting in my head, read from the pages of this exceptional book, tend to create an image in my mind, like a projection onto a blank canvas, and do not seek to acquaint me with the reality I experience through the conduit of my body, therefore there is no reason why these words should resonate with my body.

I breathe easier and the paranoia eases off, I relax and am able to perceive my environment more easily.  I observe with my senses, create images and theories with my mind, and constantly try to place myself in relation to everything I find.  I test everything against the body with which I experience reality.

"'In the beginning was the word'?" someone says.  "What a crock of shit!  In the beginning was genetic determinism."  They tell the story of the determined Gene who made us all in his own image, who loves us and compels us to be fruitful and multiply and spread his good news around the world, subduing and repressing all other species in favor of the One True Gene, on Gene to rule them all.

In the beginning was the word remains because God must have used some word to speak this process into existence.  The best I can come up with is AUM and I get together with hundreds of people in nature and we hold hands in a circle and chant our word long and slow, with a full deep prolonged breath as a single word.  We focus and we respect the process and afterwards, in silence, we check the resonance with our body, with the sky and with the earth.  We notice the calm, the peace, and the acceptance with which the elements receive this syllable.

But the dream from which so many of us are aware we need to wake, this unusual and unknown and now unconvincing process that God spoke into existence at the beginning, persists and we must continue to live within its bounds.  We know little about this process or the reason for it, but we know that it is unacceptable because we are experiencing it as humans and the world we have culturally manifested does not promote human life.  We notice our dependence upon and interconnectedness with all life on this planet and we notice the cultural process persist in destroying all life on this planet and the environments in which life flourishes.  We notice the love we use to orient us, to stabilize and guide us in this world subjugated in favor of money as a guiding force and how love makes us feel beside love.

This world is unacceptable, we tell God, and he does not respond.  We tell our peers and they stare at us blankly; they don't care.  We gather together with others who have noticed and who care and we no longer need to state the obvious.  We do, however, need to continue living in this world, and moving through this process.

In the beginning was the word and in the end will be the word, but they may not be the same word.  We attempt various formulations and keep record of our closest approximations to the word that will finally bring about the ending that we're all anticipating.

In this world, regardless of the relationships we have with this or that deity, anticipation is not enough.

We are responsible beings, intelligent, creative, empathetic, adaptable, and we all must manifest this word in whatever form comes most naturally to us, that correlates with the innate responses of our body, our connection to the manifest, our connection to the unmanifest, the conduit for spirit and life and finally truth, that Holy Grail, that elixir which may just bring down this whole unholy edifice, this Babel Tower, this false god, this refuge from responsibility; the resonant realization that will release us from ourselves, from Jahweh and Allah and from the selfish gene, these demons who do not exist and therefore we cannot understand.

~

Don't tempt me with the few insidious myths that provide futile solace to my often overwhelmed heart.

When we breathe deeply we not only calm and centre our body and its modulating emanations, but we inhale the scent of our environment, we smell the hormones and the pheromones of each others' bodies, released via our pores.  We inhale the particles of light that we cannot see surrounding each of our bodies and we learn a lot that we cannot necessarily speak or think about with the language of our birth.

We are present for each other and that's all that matters.  I can feel the warmth and scent of your body and I feel love though I do not examine the conditions that accompany that love or the timeframe during which it is allowed to bloom and blossom.  I do not cling to it any longer than necessary and if I do I simply experience slightly more pain before inevitably letting go.


2013-02-10

How Australia Made Me An Anarchist

How Australia Made Me An Anarchist
Journey of a homeless poet through the stolen continent
by Chris Kirk

A new cover is coming for the new edition and there will soon be copies available.  Please message me via Facebook if you would like a copy of this book.

https://www.facebook.com/chris.kirk.7503