Why I Didn't Like History Class

It was always the same story

That seemed like some kind of slapstick

Show from a carnival midway

Where someone with a big toy hammer

Bonks the noggin of somebody else

And takes his bag of oranges

And then a different guy

Bonks the first guy on the noggin

With a bigger toy hammer

And takes the bag of oranges from him

They acted like this

For century after century

in Russia China England Germany France?

And in my country

They paid kidnappers

To bring people over

On these creaking death galleons

From across the ocean to pick things

That grew from the earth

Because they wanted more things

I’d never seen anything so stupid

So much evil death killing

With no greater message

That’s it? I said

I read Shakespeare plays

And there it was again

This guy gives gave a big speech

On a hill in front of everybody

Getting them ready to die

Just because he wanted this thing

This other guy had

The efflorescent language

The agonizing the weeping

The whispers in the night

The friars and the priests

People in robes and people in uniforms

Smoky white candles pooling wax

Souls wailing beneath the distant moon

In the cold winter sky

Because this one guy had something

The other guy wanted

I went downstairs into

My friend’s basement

For band practice

I played a white Stratocaster copy

He played a silver drum set

With some blankets and a brick

Holding down the bass drum

We learned Clash songs

Bob Marley Gang of Four

I hoped we were doing

Something different

It felt like we were

The Lethal Canard

Most people alive today do not know that much of human history was spent in small, non-hierarchical groups with little-to-no incidence of mental illness. These were the times before large scale agriculture which began with the Neolithic Revolution in Mesopotamia 10,000 years ago. (Modern humans appeared at least as early as 230,000 years ago). Some such immediate return hunter gatherer cultures still persist today, but, of course, they are threatened. Our lack of awareness about these other ways of living in what could be called primal anarchy (without hierachy) - indeed the purposeful erasure of these peoples and the vanishing of the knowledge of their lifeways - has extremely grave consequences for our lives today. It means that virtually everybody thinks that we have to choose between three relatively miserable options: Capitalism, mass scale authoritarian "communism" or feudalism. Obviously, social democratic countries offer a more humane form of capitalism than what we have in the US. But even those nations are still mired in work-as-toil, severe hierarchy, "race"/class/gender–based oppression, ecological alienation and the destructiveness of the extraction economy. We need settle for none of these miserabilism-based options. The idea that we must settle for one of them is the lethal canard rocketing us and our planet into the inferno. (Link to a relevant TED Talk video below, "Depression Is a Disease of Civilization," by Dr. Steven Ilardi, KSU).

Depression is a disease of civilization

Yusef Lateef, The Rebel Who Revels Reveals

 

Blue Yusef blows reeds

signifying grace and uplift

pharonic blues 


to rock the river Nile


make a woman smile
 


slow drag smoky room


an astral-terrestial flag


hum a gospel tune


slow tambourine jangle


helps untangle the times


we've been undermined



strings sing of fields


Delta and Elysian


felt in Euphratean hearts


leaping like Lateef


under the moonlight

blue with the tattoo


of so much longing



true to the belief


in the splendor of coral reefs


and recumbent seas that speak

in sparkling dawn 


colorful blinks of light



Yusef Lateef

the rebel who revels

revealed


peels back centuries


of decrepit thuggery 


unseals the dignity

and scenery of unheard music


green area of a higher plane


caught a slow train


like Coltrane


fans the flames of the furnace 


of higher mind or cools down 


the eternal sine and co-sine


for minds to unwind
 


insisting on fat riffs


drum beats like shape shifts


through estuaries of song

drift fragments of ghost ships


transformed into haiku bliss

Animals, Landscapes, Us

Be surprised at nothing. Brittle white and collapsing coral reefs. Monarch butterfly swarms whittled down to butterfly quartets. Reduced birdsong. Emaciated bears. People bent over desks day and night, growing more and more unhealthy. Neighborhoods poisoned by the burning of medical waste. Children’s asthma spiking there. Landscapes of dumb lawns, monochromatic. You may see a defunct satellite tumbling at you from the heavens. Snuff films made publicly by the police. All is faltering, wavering. Glowing coals and debris are plowed into the lake. Children stalk the hallways of vast schools in military vests as if in a snake venom fever dream. Carcasses of hogs are left to rot in the river, poisoning the people, the river animals. There is no end to it. It exceeds all science fiction novels, all science-fiction films combined and all that will ever be written. It was launched by an idea and the idea calls itself the economy and the economy is not you. To the economy, we are like great and graceful Russian bears reduced to performing idiot circus tricks for coins. The economy is not you or me. It is a cluster of numbers spinning, wavering, flickering like a Fourth of July sparkler that singes the fingers and then burns through the body. The economy is a hovering cluster of malice and bottomless want. Strange new creatures are born out of the waste of discarded tires. We make enemies of our fellow Earth species. Driving roads cut through forests and mountains, we sense the animals’ fear of us and their hatred of us. Eyes watching from the hills and then going out. A black fin slices the water as we walk along the polluted industrial wharf. Glimpsed briefly and then gone. Grass grows high behind the nuclear reactor and the noise of insects reaches endolymph-crushing levels and then retreats. Rabbits amass late night on the baseball diamond. What could they be doing? You approach, only to see them scatter in all directions like tossed gravel. Such strangeness not seen before. There are no owls in this neighborhood, are there? I mean, there never were before, were there? 

Lines Across Cities (story of a tv show told in a poem)

Istanbul. 2018.

The woman in the hijab

And long, button down

Blue gray coat

Exits her house

On the outskirts of the city

Walking through fields

Copses, crossing bridges

She takes the bus

To the modern apartment

Lit by natural light

That she cleans each Monday

She puts several containers of

Homemade baked goods

On the kitchen counter

Before she leaves

Next, she’s facing

An uncovered, pretty

Intense-to-the-point-of-vibrating

Forty-something psychiatrist

For her first appointment

The conversation is found

In their eyes

The gaps and ellipses

The verbal references

That require

Steps to link them

To an emotion

Or an experience

Next, we see the psychiatrist

Talking to her own therapist

Who is also uncovered

And poised in the way

A volcanic mountain

Appears to be still

From a distance

The psychiatrist

Is deeply upset

By her meeting

With her new patient

Who she is treating

For fainting spells

Covered women from the provinces

Traditional Muslim women

Come to work in the city

Rattle, even enrage her

She lets slip that she is estranged

From her sister who is religious

Now the second therapist

Is at the apartment

Cleaned by the patient

In the hijab and long coat

She, the therapist, is the lover

Of the handsome, red-bearded

Man who lives there

The woman in the hijab

Returns home on buses and on foot

To a falling-down house on a hill

Her brother is a tall

Brooding fellow with a mustache

His wife is ravaged by depression

She looks out the window

Perhaps remembering something

She can speak only

Quietly to her son and daughter

The brother works late nights

As a bouncer at a club

He asks his wife questions

Which she struggles to answer

This provokes frustration

And reeling tantrums from him

He only relaxes when speaking to

The imam who leads reading groups

And collects charity donations

And who maintains a flower garden

Down the road

Lines across cities

Roads and streets

Cell phone towers swaying

Bus routes into the past

Zones of stillness

Only occasionally

People who see

Speak to each other

Now we see Concert footage

From the 1970s,

The echoing singing

Of a man who enters

a trance of longing

He seems to hover Above the stage

Dreams/Life

Dreams are the other zone of consciousness. They are the world of swaying weeds and skirting minnows navigating the bottle-green, particle-filigreed world beneath the surface of a pond. Or dreams are the reflection of the sky beaming forth from the surface of the pond, toward the convex lenses of your eyes. Clouds vaguely shifting, resonant blue hues hovering about. To live without dreams or the memory of dreams is like trying to play soccer without a ball. We run about, making all the moves and gestures, but can't properly play the game. I should know. I lived without dreams or without the memory of them for over three years. I would lay down on my mattress at night, quickly sink into unconsciousness, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up and getting ready to make coffee. The hours between the fall into sleep and awakening were as lost or removed - time eaten up by some force and vanished.

My partner has a rich dream life. Morning after morning, she tells me about the fantastical and often unsettling adventures she experiences while asleep. Her dreams can sound like scenes from a Tim Burton film and quite often they appear to be a series of visual representations of powerful emotions from her waking, conscious life. The dreams she shares with me also seem to be depictions of long-term projects of transformation she is pursuing. Invariably, when she recounts her dreams to me I am struck by their vividness and importance of message. It is as if her unconscious is saying, "Hey. You know that stuff that feels confusing and overwhelming while you are awake? Well, this is what's going on. But you will have to take it in with the wacky and jarring dream language that we employ. Once you fall asleep, it's our house and this is how we communicate here."

Somewhere along the way, I seem to have developed a decent capacity for interpreting the language of dreams - probably the result of years of therapy, of studying poetry and of just talking to people about their dreams. While exploring the metaphors and visual reveries of poetry and song lyrics has helped with understanding the symbolism of dreams, something I learned from a great therapist who practices in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago was to always ask myself: “How did you feel while that was happening in the dream?” The imagery and the emotion felt – taken together - can offer information essential to us as we navigate life and seek to persevere, to grow, to love and to create.

Until 2017, I too, had benefited from a somewhat active dream life. Though I did not remember dreams as frequently as my partner, I received certain dreams that depicted knotty emotional struggles I was waging with such striking and eloquent visual language that I consider them crucial to the person I am today. However, in September 2017, a pharmaceutical and herbal medication SNAFU provoked two horrific episodes of serotonin syndrome which, in turn, set into motion my abrupt cessation of the SSRI Lexapro which I had been taking for 12 years for (occasionally crippling) OCD. The two bouts of serotonin syndrome were more physically and psychically violent than anything I’d experienced in 50 years of living. The abrupt cessation of the SSRI was done in an attempt to avoid another serotonin syndrome, but the consequences of that cessation were devastating. In addition to the major depressive disorder that was activated, I ceased having any dreams that I could I remember. The major depressive order persisted for a year and required hospitalization to resolve. But as I came back to wellness and even thriving, my dreams did not return. The blank journey through no-time continued each night... until the last week or two.

The recovery capacities of the mind and of our bodies, more generally, should not be underestimated. This has been made clear to me in multiple ways. Among these are my ability to return to some guitar and some songwriting after more than twenty years sidelined with chronic tendinitis and my regaining the ability to smile and laugh after those seemed to be permanently extinguished while I was depressed. And now, I feel my old friend, the dream, coming back to keep me company as I sleep. And what is playing at the dream cinema as the projector flickers back to life? Well, a couple of dreams which are right up to date - current - so to speak. These are anxiety dreams wherein I find myself among a crowd of friends laughing, having a good time and suddenly I realize that neither I nor any of my friends are wearing a mask. I am filled with panic, regret and dread. This dream is the replaying of a similar experience I had in real life a couple of months ago. It was one of the very few times I’ve spent with a group of friends in the last year. We were enjoying each other’s company and what we were working on and we forgot ourselves a couple of times. I white knuckled it through ten days after that hang out, hoping desperately not to experience any Covid symptoms. Mercifully, I did not.

Another dream I’ve had since that particular cinema has apparently reopened is one from the sublime/transcendent dream category. My friend Sean, who I haven’t seen in 27 years, was strumming chords on something that looked like the combination of a guitar and an autoharp and that was played upright. The music was very beautiful. The harmonies ringing from the chords had an ineffable quality. They sounded the way honey tastes or the way a row of candles appears: multivalent, familiar but not completely so. That music I heard and who was playing it and where he was playing it – in a small room with supportive friends half-circled around him – have provided me with fuel, strength and energy in the days since. And for that I am very grateful!

Meditation on Morris Berman's "Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline"

"In the end, what was America really all about?" asks Morris Berman in his 2012 book, Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline. He concludes that the founding idea of America was: the hustle. Since its colonial days and escalating after the War of Independence, US America has billed itself and has built itself as the place where the role of a good, "patriotic" US American citizen is to make a buck and "get ahead" and if you need to bullshit, swindle, and chisel people along the way and if you need to sell them things that are bad for their health, bad for their community, bad for their land base and bad for their soul… well then, so be it. In fact, that just means you were more ruthless and clever than the other guy – laudable characteristics in US America. This is what passes for values in mainstream US American culture, according to Berman.

Agreed. And I would add that it is bewildering, strange to be born into this culture that defines itself by its commerce. We stagger about, seeking always to adjust to this artificial landscape. But we cannot.

Bury the daily blows in a shot of heroin, immerse them in whiskey, douse them with sugar, deep fry them, try to sleep them off, "work them to the bone" -- work them to oblivion, throw money at them, package them up and tie a bow around them, stick a fork in them - they're done.

There is no adjusting to them without sacrificing too much of what you hold dear as a human, as a mammal, as an organism pulsing with the blood-life force, billions of years after the universe condensed into a point of immeasurable primal energy and finally exploded, sending its ideas, its love, its stories across the constantly unfolding heaven-ocean - the periodic table of elements tumbling into the black, coalescing, forming landscapes bubbling forth with question marks that formed into bacteria, pulsing cells, life forms, we among them and we remember all of it.