Old Man Jazz, 2wo
Like people all around the nation we sit at home because we don’t go to restaurants anymore. We don’t go anywhere because when you get there there’s no there there. The world is Oakland. And Trump continues to lead a faction of Americans which is bent to the will of a tyrant. And it’s not that they are submissive or weak, it’s that they need to serve a master. Most of them probably didn’t know that until the right guy came along. It’s almost like being in love.
What a beautiful deception, and what a rosy path, to divide the people against each other so that they lose sight of the one thing the peace of a united people would provide, a balance point which we all serve, because there is nothing more intelligent than balance. Whether it’s the sugar in the blood or the wall thermostat, walking down the street and missing the lamp post every goddamned time or being the truth and thus not having to look for it, or making love like nobody’s watching, or just being funny, it’s all about the balance of elements.
Enough of that. This is old man jazz, so I can move into the ether because when you are serving the balance, you don’t crash and burn when time is not there. I first grasped it from William Burroughs, that an external system which mediates behavior, and provides a navigation system, is worthless when there is no time. It doesn’t matter what it is, it is external and so it takes time to bounce off of it. It becomes an artifact. The navigation system has to be on board. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
The master of assassins taught his adepts to repeat this to themselves before sleeping, nothing is true, everything is permitted. The legend is that the old man had a psychic connection with his assassins, so that he could strike from a distance because he was not at a distance. He was in the center of the field, which he had extended in the form of his assassins.
James Joyce said in real art, there is a moment of esthetic arrest which unifies the opposites and shows the entire field in balance. Pornography, Joyce said, was making the reader like one person and dislike another because of prescribed virtues or vices. This is all manipulation of the reader to follow a morality tale through to the reward at the end. The service is to one polarity of the field and the other has been vanquished, except that no matter how often vanquished, the energy returns as a black man, disinherited but with nowhere else to go. There is no occupation of the center until he is acknowledged as kin.
In the best fiction, the characters are being directed by a pattern of the collective unconscious, and the only way out is all the way through, so that at the end, we know that moment of freedom, when we can see what swallowed us, and know we will be swallowed again, and again, until we know the patterns from the center of their origin, and in tonight’s old man jazz, thaz where we end, with a mandala on my mind.
