Walking with Selene

 

I once thought maybe you loved me

But I now know that to be untrue.

I walk among the moonbeams,

Confiding to Selene

My best kept secrets.

I reflect on that gossamer thread

You use to stay connected to me

Thin and delicate,

Easy to sever and dissolve.

Your canards may be spoken

To soothe your sense of remembrance,

Reassure your conscience

That you are still available

When the genuine veracity

Is that my presence has long been forsaken

For other pathways and diversions

I recall your avatar fondly

But realize that the night is no place

For the day’s eyes to persist

Those hide amongst Selene’s radiance

As you have secreted yourself from my realm

Any argument that the brief incursions you deign to bestow

Demonstrate a willingness to resume what had been

Are purely mythological, at best.

It is in action we discern the veracity of intention,

Or by lack of action, an aim is revealed.

© Ivar G. Anderson June 1, 2022

Shelter

I

Apologies to Bernie and Elton, but hoping you don’t mind 

My intentions to explain how wonderful life was when you were in my world 

I am not a roof sitter, nor is there any moss growing here for me to abuse, 

But I will confess A bit of ire arising as I pen these words; 

Inessential expressions to be misunderstood 

By most and many, yet digressions that pull themselves free 

To find the paper of temporary transport. 

It is not that we have so short a time to live, but that we waste much of it; 

Still, I bear the burden of realizing you are all the things I must remember 

Even as you shy away, drift ever further off 

The thoughtful imaging of an Elvis triggers questions 

And understanding that I know it isn’t me 

That engenders those previous expressed ideals. 

The occasional lament of “distance” 

Seems to smack of self-delusion 

After all, whose decision was the impetus? 

The creating of the non-us? 

The sense of core unity 

Has been replaced with a sense 

Of valence electron status- 

Part of the whole, 

Definitional in part, 

But able to be discarded/cast off 

In the aim of creating a new isotope

 Unaware of whom is part of the nucleus you have constructed, 

Only sense an absence from that reality: 

Heard this on a hike and it hits home: 

“'Cause I don't know if you are loving somebody, I only know it isn't mine” 

You move onward, with your new tribe offering nurture and support. 

Not sure how the barrier was established, was it that I crossed a signal, or a line? 

In any event, the cast is now reshuffled, 

And a relegation/delegation to a minor occasionally occurring role has taken place. 

I work to untangle these strands that entwine the present, dragging it with lethargic torpor 

Toward the horizon’s endpoint 

‘Cause I know it certainly ain’t mine to embrace any longer. 

You may have spoken the words first, 

But I fear I said them last. 

II 

Either casual guideposts to direct understanding 

Or obtuse unintended disclosures 

Demonstrate the changing dynamics 

Long suspected or realized 

Dwell upon the reality too long 

And be overtaken by a sense of loss, 

Left to wonder at unrequested declarations 

That only serve to confuse the issue. 

Sorrow inducing loss, due to unasked for barriers 

Walls unilaterally established 

The random sporadic hope-inspiring remark 

Only serving to heighten the sense of mistranslated signals 

False hope that has led to forsaken mindful exoduses into futile 

Ever-unrealized and unrealistic expectations 

Could there be a sense of dishonesty 

That rankles, 

Or simply a failure to address the truth? 

Queries are made, 

But unattended and disregarded regularly 

Then, offense taken, when gestures are not understood 

And explanation of implication requested 

In the shower, ruminating, 

Realizing I no longer possess a 

Sense of adoration any longer 

Pleased to exhibit patience, 

Humility, understanding, 

Compassion, integrity… 

But adoration, once key to my being, now absent entirely. 

III 

Relegated to tertiary status 

Certainly no longer primary 

Would not have known of your relapse 

Had I not attended that Saturday meeting 

Wonder who was the first told, and how many 

Fruitless inquiry 

Not secondary, either 

Not among those who merit 

Your rising and approaching with a greeting, 

Surely not a hug 

Thus, tertiary level. 

Was a time… 

Posts or messages were answered 

Now, they languish in the ether 

Decision made to cease the effort, 

Since there is little response or even recognition 

No point in pursuit of that which no longer exists 

Chasing phantoms is unproductive 

No longer one to whom queries are posed, 

Advice requested. 

Tertiary it is. 

Time to accept and step away. 

 IV 

Realizing that it was your decision to cease our connection 

And that led to the desiccation and disappearance of the Us that had colored my life 

Although I never gave up on you and I 

I realize that the one thing I cannot detach from 

Has lost connection with me 

There have been the occasional forays 

To relink 

But always with a qualification that makes it unworkable 

As a relation worth valuing 

Tertiary at best 

And that is in no fashion a best for me 

February 7, 2022

© Ivar G. Anderson

 

Freedom Paean

 

Freedom Paean

 

Sincere sentiments

Treated with distrust or doubt

Heartfelt expressions

Ignored or at best breezily address with minimal allusion

Not full contempt, merely indifference

The investment yields no return

And therefore, demands withdrawal

Cast off and set free upon the open waters

Time to drift onward and allow the paths to diverge

Come to terms with futile longing for a return of expressed attention

An idea submitted time and again, futile denial now terminates

And the journey of discovery proceeds apace.

You may have said it first,

But I am destined to say it last.

April 3, 2022

© Ivar G. Anderson

I Said It Last 

Those terms of endearment 

Once so freely spoken 

Ended one cold winter night 

As a unilateral determination 

That these ideas and words should no longer be spoken 

 Trouble was, the feelings did not cease 

Not immediately, not currently 

Perhaps you spoke them first 

Alas, I say them last 

September 12, 2021 

©Ivar G. Anderson

Pondering in my heart

September 12, 2021 Got some things to ponder over these days. So...gonna be posting some of the thoughts that I have committed to paper or digital form as I find them in the detritus of my USB drive. Be prepared for none of it to make much sense. But since this blog is rarely frequented (even by me), not exactly a burning issue, now, is it?

 Waking morning vision

Single lavender rose

tightly budded

long stemmed

laid atop a set of white wooden stairs

leading up to a paneled deck

before a closed glass entryway door

Sylvan Lake

September 21, 2020 

© Ivar G. Anderson

The Stoic Viewpoint

I can recommend this article. I was told about Stoicism recently after I spoke at a gathering, telling a crowd that my existential philosphy had been discarded along with my former drunken alchololic lifestyle. I am now searching out a copy of the Meditations that Poet Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote long ago. Here is a brief entry into that train of thought, for a start, though.
Darius Foroux: Marcus Aurelius-3 rules for life

The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look (republished from Aeon)

‘Hypersanity’ is not a common or accepted term. But neither did I make it up. I first came across the concept while training in psychiatry, in The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (1967) by R D Laing. In this book, the Scottish psychiatrist presented ‘madness’ as a voyage of discovery that could open out onto a free state of higher consciousness, or hypersanity. For Laing, the descent into madness could lead to a reckoning, to an awakening, to ‘break-through’ rather than ‘breakdown’.
A few months later, I read C G Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), which provided a vivid case in point. In 1913, on the eve of the Great War, Jung broke off his close friendship with Sigmund Freud, and spent the next few years in a troubled state of mind that led him to a ‘confrontation with the unconscious’.
As Europe tore itself apart, Jung gained first-hand experience of psychotic material in which he found ‘the matrix of a mythopoeic imagination which has vanished from our rational age’. Like Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Heracles, Orpheus and Aeneas before him, Jung travelled deep down into an underworld where he conversed with Salome, an attractive young woman, and with Philemon, an old man with a white beard, the wings of a kingfisher and the horns of a bull. Although Salome and Philemon were products of Jung’s unconscious, they had lives of their own and said things that he had not previously thought. In Philemon, Jung had at long last found the father-figure that both Freud and his own father had failed to be. More than that, Philemon was a guru, and prefigured what Jung himself was later to become: the wise old man of Zürich. As the war burnt out, Jung re-emerged into sanity, and considered that he had found in his madness ‘the primo materia for a lifetime’s work’.
The Laingian concept of hypersanity, though modern, has ancient roots. Once, upon being asked to name the most beautiful of all things, Diogenes the Cynic (412-323 BCE) replied parrhesia, which in Ancient Greek means something like ‘uninhibited thought’, ‘free speech’, or ‘full expression’. Diogenes used to stroll around Athens in broad daylight brandishing a lit lamp. Whenever curious people stopped to ask what he was doing, he would reply: ‘I am just looking for a human being’ – thereby insinuating that the people of Athens were not living up to, or even much aware of, their full human potential.
After being exiled from his native Sinope for having defaced its coinage, Diogenes emigrated to Athens, took up the life of a beggar, and made it his mission to deface – metaphorically this time – the coinage of custom and convention that was, he maintained, the false currency of morality. He disdained the need for conventional shelter or any other such ‘dainties’, and elected to live in a tub and survive on a diet of onions. Diogenes proved to the later satisfaction of the Stoics that happiness has nothing whatsoever to do with a person’s material circumstances, and held that human beings had much to learn from studying the simplicity and artlessness of dogs, which, unlike human beings, had not complicated every simple gift of the gods.
The term ‘cynic’ derives from the Greek kynikos, which is the adjective of kyon or ‘dog’. Once, upon being challenged for masturbating in the marketplace, Diogenes regretted that it were not as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing an empty stomach. When asked, on another occasion, where he came from, he replied: ‘I am a citizen of the world’ (cosmopolites), a radical claim at the time, and the first recorded use of the term ‘cosmopolitan’. As he approached death, Diogenes asked for his mortal remains to be thrown outside the city walls for wild animals to feast upon. After his death in the city of Corinth, the Corinthians erected to his glory a pillar surmounted by a dog of Parian marble.
Jung and Diogenes came across as insane by the standards of their day. But both men had a depth and acuteness of vision that their contemporaries lacked, and that enabled them to see through their facades of ‘sanity’. Both psychosis and hypersanity place us outside society, making us seem ‘mad’ to the mainstream. Both states attract a heady mixture of fear and fascination. But whereas mental disorder is distressing and disabling, hypersanity is liberating and empowering.
After reading The Politics of Experience, the concept of hypersanity stuck in my mind, not least as something that I might aspire to for myself. But if there is such a thing as hypersanity, the implication is that mere sanity is not all it’s cracked up to be, a state of dormancy and dullness with less vital potential even than madness. This I think is most apparent in people’s frequently suboptimal – if not frankly inappropriate – responses, both verbal and behavioural, to the world around them. As Laing puts it:

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last 50 years.

Many ‘normal’ people suffer from not being hypersane: they have a restricted worldview, confused priorities, and are wracked by stress, anxiety and self-deception. As a result, they sometimes do dangerous things, and become fanatics or fascists or otherwise destructive (or not constructive) people. In contrast, hypersane people are calm, contained and constructive. It is not just that the ‘sane’ are irrational but that they lack scope and range, as though they’ve grown into the prisoners of their arbitrary lives, locked up in their own dark and narrow subjectivity. Unable to take leave of their selves, they hardly look around them, barely see beauty and possibility, rarely contemplate the bigger picture – and all, ultimately, for fear of losing their selves, of breaking down, of going mad, using one form of extreme subjectivity to defend against another, as life – mysterious, magical life – slips through their fingers.
We could all go mad, in a way we already are, minus the promise. But what if there were another route to hypersanity, one that, compared with madness, was less fearsome, less dangerous, and less damaging? What if, as well as a backdoor way, there were also a royal road strewn with sweet-scented petals? After all, Diogenes did not exactly go mad. Neither did other hypersane people such as Socrates and Confucius, although the Buddha did suffer, in the beginning, with what might today be classed as depression.
Besides Jung, are there any modern examples of hypersanity? Those who escaped from Plato’s cave of shadows were reluctant to crawl back down and involve themselves in the affairs of men, and most hypersane people, rather than courting the limelight, might prefer to hide out in their back gardens. But a few do rise to prominence for the difference that they felt compelled to make, people such as Nelson Mandela and Temple Grandin. And the hypersane are still among us: from the Dalai Lama to Jane Goodall, there are many candidates. While they might seem to be living in a world of their own, this is only because they have delved more deeply into the way things are than those ‘sane’ people around them.
Neel Burton
This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Letter to LeeAnn #3

Happiness is an ephemeral thing.  I was recently told, "It's me, not you," and while that is a terribly trite phrase, I fear in this situation, it applies.

That was from something I meant to post earlier, much earlier. I fear that I have deeper problems than making people tell me that it is not me that is causing the problem. I am fairly certain that it is me, only me, that poisons relationships. Got to work on that.

I frequently think about a line from an Elvis Costello song that goes:  "Sometimes I almost feel just like a human being." Sometimes I truly do, other times it all seems so odd to be here, alone and with many who are part of my life. A dilemma that I ponder on a daily basis.

If I follow through on the "Stepping Out" process that my cousin (Sylvia) Carol explained to me recently-actually, I had already decided on this course, just did not have a cool name for it-I will miss certain things, I realized. Amongst the things that I would pine for are:

The smell of lilacs on the spring evening breeze.
The taste of absinthe, chartreuse, bourbon and scotch.
Sleeping next to a naked woman.
Streets of Fire, The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai in the 8th Dimension, The Sin of  Harold Diddlebock, Repo Man, Bar Fly, Kung Pow, Casablanca, The Princess Bride, Young Frankenstein, Army of Darkness, Blazing Saddles...and lots more.
Cooking an excellent dinner, or just making something out of what is in the refrigerator/freezer in the crock pot.
Growing my own herbs and peppers for cooking.
Writing.

Note:
Discovered this in the drafts on my blog. Things are much different in my life since I originally crafted this post. For example, the discussion of bourbon, scotch, absinthe and chartreuse is wildly misplaced in my current state of existence. I am guessing this to be at least two years older than the publication date of May 2019. Why publish it then? As a glimpse into my past being, I suspect.

Dark Night Prayer 5.11.19

Pray in the dark night that the magic will emerge

Dance in the moonlight

Open your heart to the light

Talisman-bright and shiny

Carry me onward by grace of your being

Familiar companion, afford me your shielding asylum

Tread this path together with me

Faith departed

Then cold rain fell from the heavens

Soaked and shivering, we huddle, dissolute and dissipated

Feeling abandoned alone

Remember:

Pray in the dark night that the magic will reemerge

Dance in the moonlight

Open your heart to the light

I falter

Listening for the call of the soul

Guide me to your embrace

That I may discover purity and peace

Once known but now rebuffed

Pray in the dark night that the magic will reemerge

Dance in the moonlight

Open your heart to the light

Thinking about Dancing

There's this woman-
     a goddess, really-
who
     has
          stolen
                    my
                          heart.

I like this,
     I realize.
The totality of her
is more than enough
for me,
but I will
     simply
 accept my gift.

Her presence
in my life
is my present
source of joy.

To think this
sense of fulfillment
came about
after a leisurely lunch,
savoring a shared flatbread 
with my enchanting companion,
inspiring me to be forward
with my intentions...

Only 37 days,
such a miniscule amount
of time together,
but oh, the wonders
she brings to my life!

I've had time to reflect
on our dance on New Year's Eve,
and now am confident,
that I can be her partner,
on the floor,
as well as wherever else
she will allow me to be.

2:55 PM Sunday, January 5, 2014 Farmington Hills 

"A Parting Glass" (Irish Farewell)

Now this is how you say goodbye to a friend:

Understand that you are more beautiful than you believe

This is an example of what most (if not all) of us succumb to, the fallacy of finding fault in ourselves where it does not exist.


Give yourself a chance.  You have so much to offer the world, so long as your thinking is not clouded with negativity.

October 30, 2013

I have been mulling over the sense of loss I feel with Lou Reed no longer being with us.  Prolly my favorite musical artist since college days, I remember my wife buying me tickets to see him at the Royal Oak Music Theater for my birthday, and me declaring after the show that I never needed to see another concert as my musical goal had been met.
What brings this to mind today is listening to the Slows music system unexplicably play the Velvet's Black Angel's Death Song.  Wonderful symmetry occurs in this place.  Just earlier, I was musing about a Carlos Castaneda reference I had tried to explain to a former companion, about finding a PURPLE place, and now my rock 'n' roll idol's come on to the music system to further plunge me into a reflective funk.
Anythehoo, RIP Mr. Reed.  You certainly did stomp upon the terra.

Letter to LeeAnn #2

Hey, Kiddo.
It hit me tonight just how much we shared, listening to Simple Minds playing Don't You Forget About Me.  Remember how often that song played in our hotel room in Paris while we honeymooned on the Left Bank?  I need to look at our journal from that trip tonight, I think.
Your boys would do you proud, I believe.  Stephen has been in a stable relationship since his freshman year, far as I can figure.  Brian has turned out to be a polite, intelligent young man, although he needs to date.  Working on that.
I am dating a nice woman (a blonde, can you believe that?) who has three boys, so we have that in common.  I still really wish on a daily basis that you were here with me.  It is difficult to put 30 or so years behind me, but I do go on, tough as it is.
Brian and I are doing well at the house, and taking care of Mitch.  I thought for sure he was a goner about 2 weeks ago, but that little shithead has more lives than a litter of cats.  His goiter has burst, but that seems to have inspired him.  I was all set to find him still and lifeless, but there are no graves to dig today.  Or anytime soon, it appears.
I've dated several women since you left me alone, and four that I would consider serious relationships.  One just faded away, one went on for a long while but wasn't going where I wanted and I guess I forced her away.  The third was batshit crazy, but I didn't pick that up initially.  Now on #4 and very happy.  Not so sure I ever want to marry again...what if Jesus was correct and you meet all your wives in heaven?  Then again, not much chance of that for me, but still...
I still prefer your family to mine, for the most part.  Going on the Hofstad fishing trip this summer was special.  Your boys made a special effort to connect with your dad and that was why I wanted to do the event.  Time well spent.
Not to be morbid, but your gravesite is lovely.  So glad you could rest near your Mom in the Lake Nebagamon Cemetary.  I hope spreading part of your ashes on the shore meets with your approval; just seemed the right thing to do.
I still dream that you are with me.  Not as often, but talking with my friend Olin, don't think that will ever end.  I know that makes little sense to you, but it matters to me to put it into written form.
I will write again soon.
Love,
Your Dr. Woo

I Don't Do Crazy

I Don't Do Crazy

Over the top

Accusatory

180 degree rotations

Not at all

what I want from my summer

Let's just take a step back

recall what was good

and go on our separate

merry

ways.

You had me

until the chain was broken.

Glitter on the floor mat

a reminder

of broken vows,

failed endeavors.

I see now

how foolish I was,

what my friends

attempted to tell me.

No time for this,

I have other plans.

You have written yourself

out of my itinerary.

Be well.

Just not with me.

Farmington, MI  7.29.13 10:30 AM

Dawn

Dawn

Morning light

breaks thru

last night's storm clouds

You sigh,

roll over,

and the sheet

leaves your body.

I drink in your beauty

with my eyes

silently

adoring you

listening to your

soft, slow breathing

I move stealthily

my lips

trail along your

delicate curves

tasting the salty

remnants of last night's

exertions

We matched the

Gods' exhortations

with our own

collapsing before dawn

exhausted

I recall gathering you near,

then nothing 'til now

Love's amnesia

erasing any dreams

I prefer this

waking pleasure

until you rouse.

July 20, 2013 8:25 PM Detroit, MI