zydeco


the real problem with materialism, as far as i can see, is that it destroys friendship; and friendship is the bedrock of peace. the way marriage was toted as the microcosm of the state and, if so inclined, god and heaven.. the smaller interpersonal unit being the holographic, fractal of the larger society. so, an authoritarian, cruel state generally was filled with authoritarian, cruel families. we reflect, up and down but the down part is the generative part and the up part is always the narrow path and the slippery slope and the tightrope... we are raised by earth says the dalai lama and held down by heaven and so we are safely embraced.

i have been sad for so long, genuine, bubbly joy seems like exercise.

2010-01-31
Posted at at 00:30 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

indecisions


when we think of heroism, we think immediately of war. but that's not anywhere near the truth of our experiences here on earth with one another and nature in her seething, rambunctious glory. heroism is the act of self sacrifice for the greater good of the group. the church militant and the church missionary are outgrowths from paul's earlier incarnation in his life as saul, the good soldier. unfortunately, psychically, this has benefitted the other side in that we "christians" are taught from the cradle that the greatest act of heroism is self-sacrifice. and who is ready in the wings to gobble up all those sacrifices, great and small? ah, of course, the self-aggrandizing, culturally blessed upperuppers and their slavish elites.

2010-01-30
Posted at at 08:48 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

zoombeautiful


amidst my own languor bred from continuous mind and body examples of the complete irrelevance of me. if one less voice is heard, if one less smile is seen, what difference can it make? i hear an inkling tingling song of exotic pacific ocean meandering musings on the hundredth monkey having sex with a casual tourist, who sees the opalescent blue, green, gold, black butterfly and then stays long enough to experience the engendered typhoon. i dated a guy from india and he was all about "we are everything and we are nothing" in a thick tongue heavy accent, almost guttural but not quite, so i thought about that for awhile and i think i get what it means. but what he lived, in his daily life, was that some people are worth more than others and we should pay deference to them because they will defend their rights even unto the death of us. not only will the people who feel superbly worthy quite happily reject the humanity of people who they believe to be less worthy but it works the other way too; people who feel themselves to be less worthy quite calmly deny their "superiors" any superior qualities at all. we are each others' slaves upwards and downwards.

i wanted to escape the grid, find a way of living that wasn't hooked in to every little sway this way and that of fashion magazines and radio, tv and now the internet. go here, go there, feel this way or that... be sensational or be sensationalized but in any case it's all ok as long as you are pushed outside your core to the extremest points of self-exploitation and conspicuous consumption.

question: are you bisexual?

diana: not at all.

question: my friend said that all people are really bisexual.

diana: gee, that's a pretty broad generalization. how many people alive on the planet right now? 6,799,305,437 - that's today. who knows, in the far future that number might look incredibly large or incredibly small. it's such a mystery what's coming so it's even more mysterious thinking about how we can prepare for a future we can't imagine.

question: sometimes i think i can see into the future pretty clearly. not for myself, but a sort of general planetary vision.

diana: and which vision do you see? the one where there's lots more people or a lot fewer?

question: actually, population was never something i thought much about when i was thinking of the future.

diana: what were you thinking about?

question: sex mostly.

diana: another aspect to the population problem.

they laugh.

2010-01-28
Posted at at 17:30 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

you



at first it was easier to love you than it was to love myself. then i felt hollow, after awhile of loving out but not loving in. and then the hollow filled up with resentment and rage and terror and hunger and passion and exhaustion and by then i couldn't breathe. i would collapse randomly at events, suddenly choked and unable to stand up without leaning on something and prefering to sit and try and pull air into what felt like barbed wire infested swamps encased within my ribs.

i was living chaos and terror. i've had it explained to me a lot of different ways but basically it's that everything we experience at this point in time/space on earth has a cycle to it, an in and out or an ebb and flow or a low and high tide, a full and new moon, like the seasonal movement of the earth in it's planetary ellipsoidal dance. so i breathed out love and breathed in horror. and it took me a long time to straighten out that unhealthy habit.

2010-01-27
Posted at at 23:14 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

xylem

photograph credit/link: E. Iglich
http://www2.mcdaniel.edu/Biology/botf99
/imagesfor%20questions/stemrtimagesf/sunshadelf.html

there was a wonderful show about music by the guy who helped the beatles, the sound engineer who produced their records. george martin. he did a series about music. somewhere in the depths of that sequence is a fantastic man who records the sounds trees make from the inside. the sounds of the xylem and the phloem as they pull and pulse the water throughout the plant, feeding. loving, working, singing. it's extraordinary. all music is contained in this. all life is singing. this is a wonderful thing.

2010-01-26
Posted at at 23:17 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

wealth


indeterminate occasions delinquent my perspective, i'm bored with perception now; now that i see how many people's perceptions are carbon copied. now i'm into conceptions. conceptions are the wealth i am presently interested in.

diana: do you struggle about being taken "seriously?"

question: i used to feel that way pretty much all the time.

diana: me too. i was convinced that my father and the men in my life were blind to my realness. i felt that, without exception, every male i ever knew over the age of 14 saw me as utterly two dimensional. no one ever considered i might have ego needs. nowadays i think there's a little more tolerance for women who have ego-needs but then they put themselves into the land of the sharks and fast lane competitions and then they're up against some pretty ginormous ego-needs.

question: i've been wondering if i'd enjoy writing erotica.

diana: that sounds like it might be a change for you. from interviewing murderers to grappling with the intricacies of felatio and cunnilingus.

question: i'm actually more interested in the emotional aspects of erotic love.

diana: sure you are.

2010-01-25
Posted at at 07:59 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

verisimilitude


it doesn't really matter what you say, no one is listening. they're waiting their turn and nodding the way they learned about in body language class or in supportive speaking training but if you ask them tomorrow what you were saying today, they won't remember. maybe you don't even remember yourself.

i used to think identity was a thing, a solid thing, an outgrowth of personality and experience and inner and outer intentions and values. but i was wrong. people are amorphous; every interaction they start back at the beginning and it's amusing to them if you show to obviously your shock that they are still where you left them and haven't at all moved forward in time.

there is a sculptural aspect to experience, to life, yes, of course there is; but when you think that image you perceive a static object, a point in space/time. all points are also waves. everything we see is light and light is, in all cases, both point and wave; but our ability to interpret sensation does not yet allow for us to perceive something's wave and pointlistic realities simultaneously. we can only perceive the wave OR the point.

so, i've let go of the pointilist view of identity, that it can exist, as if an object, solid. and i've leapt onto the perception of identity as fluid, as wavelike. maybe maybe maybe, i must concede, that maybe i enjoyed viewing human elements as objects when i myself was a young beautiful object and now that i have crossed that thirty-line, i prefer the hopefulness inherent in a wavelike perception of time.

2010-01-24
Posted at at 09:48 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

ultima ne plus


i don't know the difference between love and terror. i was taught to believe that everyone is in competition with everyone else, that there is no such thing as friendship, that allies are never to be fully trusted, the only thing that matters is winning, win and everyone will love you; lose and you will be lost.

question: do you remember the first person you killed?

diana: he was so beautiful. i could hardly stand to do it.

question: what was wrong with him? why did you have to kill him?

diana: he had offended someone with enough money to pay me to end his life.

question: you know, that makes you sound pretty horrible.

diana: worse than if a man said it?

question: yes, definitely.

diana: why?

question: i'm not sure.

2010-01-23
Posted at at 09:36 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

the crucifixion is a dead end


i don't know what's wrong with the christian religions. i don't get how they can turn a perfectly amazing philosophy into a turgid approbation of torturous imaginings. do buddhists have this same problem? i don't know. i'm christian. at least i think i am. does a buddhist go to her temple and stare at pictures of misery and injustice? not hardly. so why do we? how can we associate ourselves with this idea that we are not worthy except through the disgusting murder of a saintly teacher king? how can his sacrifice be justified, even at the buying of ALL our souls? frankly, scarlet, i don't want him to do that. i want him to hang and let us all take our small share of sacrifice and pain and live happily ever after with one another without torture, without racing towards self-annihilation and calling it god's call.

there is so much about the crucifixion that is so wrong. first just doing it to anyone sucks. thank heavens we have amnesty international now and make some attempt to rescue people from random acts of excessive violence. then is the problem of whether the jesus dude was the one sacrificed that day or if he ran off with his wife mary magdalene and founded the carolingian dynasty which led to charlemagne, most of us had to learn about him in school. and he was all for this whole catholic thing going on at the time. so that could be myth too. not urban myth because there really wasn't much urban in those days further west than italy. then, third, there is the whole thing about the way christians celebrate the cross. it's gross. we kiss it. we carry it. we beg to have one of our very own to carry. ok, weirder and weirder. because, if indeed he did do this so we wouldn't have to then why are we doing it too? makes no sense at all. the only thing i can think that works about the crucifixion is that it grinds into the brain with blinding clarity that no good deed goes unpunished so anyone, anyone with half a brain is going to run as fast as they can in the opposite direction and have some fun in life.

there is an angry god on the loose. he needs to be brought to a safe harbor or pasture or black hole and laid to rest. his rampaging is ruining the neighborhood, disturbing the peace, altering the atmosphere into fear and despair. we must lay this angry god down to rest. he needs to sleep for a long time and recharge and channel his rage, gear it down from rage, to frustration, back to despair, down to irritation, then, through discipline to joy.

2010-01-22
Posted at at 16:36 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

shit


i'm so full of shit.

question: what do you mean?

diana: i think of myself as someone who keeps her promises, lives up to her commitments.

question: you're upset because of yesterday.

diana: did you wait long?

question: about an hour. it takes about an hour to get here. so, about three hours i think.

diana: i'm very sorry.

question: a punctual murderess?

diana: i'm almost offended. or i would be offended if i didn't already owe you from yesterday.

question: what kept you?

diana: a little indiscretion.

question: oh.

diana: she's very pretty. sweet. but of course it's all a lie. you get more flies with honey.

question: you being the fly.

diana: well i'm not the honey.

2010-01-21
Posted at at 07:29 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

suspicion


it changed for me when i realized that i had turned my heart into a little stone. my mother had a stone heart. i didn't want to follow her example. as i began to massage and warm my heart, coax it into opening, i began to see what a tragedy i was. i had always accepted whatever they did to me, whatever truths i was told i had to conform with, i did, why not? what harm? we are born into this world, we might as well participate in it. but so much of it made me sick and what didn't make me sick made me crazy. and i must have, at first, hidden my heart away so it wouldn't be destroyed in the whirlwind around me but then i forgot that i had hidden it and it got denser, like coal to diamond dense but diamond hard emotion is not a good thing. anyway, i've been thinking about the harshness of the world and how we react to it and then that reaction makes us just another hardness of the world to face other people coldly, without mercy, without kindness and with no remorse.

2010-01-19
Posted at at 19:43 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

real ease


so it makes a difference, if release is real ease or re-leasing.

question: how so?

diana: well if i am released from you and it's re-leasing, then i'm re-leased back to some other over riding authority. but if releasing me gives me real ease, then i am free.

question: i'd go with free.

diana: do you think about freedom much?

question: all the time.

diana: in what context?

question: i think about my freedoms and if they are the same for men and for rich people. i think about whether freedom can be given or if it must be assumed. i wonder what i'd do if i felt free. i wonder that last one a lot and it bothers me that i can't think of what i would do if i were free. that's how unfree i am.

diana: ah, i wasn't going to speak of unfreedom as i am now a prisoner. i was going to start us mentating on freedom, the way one contemplates flowers in a show garden. isn't that one lovely? isn't that one amazing? my freedoms have been enormous. i think this small space i find myself in now is a necessary contraction from having opened myself up so widely to life and all it has to offer. does it strike you sometimes that the world is unbelievably beautiful and magical? and against that backdrop, people are walking around acting as if it were the dreariest place, as if we live in a hell of unusual painfulness.

question: guilty.

diana: really? at your age? you don't feel exhilarated when you see what's out there waiting for you to make your mark?

question: after a few nasty bosses, a really nasty divorce, the split from my childhood best girlfriend, the death of my parents. no, i am kinda thinking this place sucks and life sucks and there isn't much point and then they send me to interview a woman who has murdered, well, you won't say, but it's a lot apparently, a lot of people you killed and i'm spending my afternoons talking to you for an article in a paper that will most likely be peed upon by more guinea pigs than read by human eyes.

diana: wow.

2010-01-18
Posted at at 18:02 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

quality


my father was obsessed with the difference between "first rate" and "second rate." anything he didn't like was "second rate," anything worthy was "first rate."
as time went on i got to wondering about the scale. ranking is a kind of measurement and measurement requires a scale. what is the scale from which we determine that something is "first rate" or "second rate"? it's reminiscent of the naziesque proclivity to categorize people. what is ever the purpose of that?
it turns my stomach to think that we can objectify ourselves to the point where people would rather buy a new standardized body part than experience and explore the knowledge in their own bodies. we have taken alienation to new heights.
i never meant to believe in peace. i didn't really think it was possible but i did wonder and wonder does wonderful things, curiosity is a great teacher. now sometimes i wonder how i got so lucky to create inner peace was not really a conscious choice, it was a sort of incremental change of heart from the hope that i could re-design myself away from the template i inherited from my father.

2010-01-17
Posted at at 20:45 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

pregnant


what does it mean that you can't get here except from a woman? once you're here, men are where the action is, generally speaking, though roller derby girls have changed my opinion on that somewhat. but in any case, you can't get here without a woman. but no one seems to think that there's anything philosophically or ethically important about that. maybe the reason women are enslaved is from fear that we will know that we are the gateways to heaven and earth. heaven in a sexual sense, earth in the birth sense.

2010-01-16
Posted at at 14:08 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

omg


i lived my life mostly in cities. i think in the country and in the suburbs, murder is as common as in the city but since it's more spread out, you don't feel it like a coating on every surface except in the bigger cities.

question: do you believe in god?

diana: i do. yes. but i'm not a big fan of religious institutions, except as repositories, like museums, of ancient beauty.

question: what religion are you?

diana: oh. i wouldn't go that far.

question: as far as what?

diana: as needing a religion. that's sort of like insisting everyone take heroin. of course some people need it, for the pain but for the rest of us, it's deadly.

question: i was raised a catholic.

diana: what's that word that means what you said is an impossibility, a mutually exclusive combination?

question: marriage?

diana: no. but that's really funny.

question: do you think everything in life boils down to food or sex?

diana: yes if you add death.

question: food, sex and death.

diana: that pretty much says it all. did you like being catholic?

question: i did.

diana: why?

question: it was colorful and the men wore dresses which i thought was funny somehow especially as they looked so serious. and there was a lot of singing. i like a lot of singing in church.

diana: and organs. i like a good organ in a church. and stained glass windows. and some statues.

2010-01-15
Posted at at 20:58 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

not so fast


it's peculiar. you wait for a long time for something but by the time you get it, you already want something else. this causes a plethora of symptoms having to do with desire and the impossibility of satisfaction. i think that's at the core of all addictions: a sort of perfectionism, an inability to accept the flawed nature of the self and others. a desire to end desire by fulfilling desire. an inability to accept the unquenchable nature of desire, to live the tightrope of perpetual splendors of desire. breathe and you foment more desire.

question: do you think they will acquit you?

diana: no. i have trust issues.

question: but you think they should.

diana: of course. everyone allows for self defense. if someone is threatening your life then you have to decide, will i let them take my life from me, or will i fight back.

question: non-violence is not an option?

diana: women are about two hundred years behind men, maybe three. we aren't up to non-violence yet. you have to go through warriorship to understand and implement peace. women are still on the threshold of willingness to take their violence and open it up to discipline in order to transcend it. shall i tell you the history of the world?

question: sure. should i ask you how you know?

diana: i read a lot. the world starts out like a crazy puzzle. figure you are dropped here in spirit and you don't know how anything works, everything is a toy, an experiment, an experience but lots of this is high risk and there's a lot of casualties what with people sticking their hands in the fire. but you develop some interesting awarenesses. there's language always and usually some sort of star analysis and with that a calculation of time based on the sun and moon. the cultures inundated with sun, those around the equators, seem to be less interested in the sun. the more northern lands built the round temples which were really nothing but a huge sundial that measures days and years instead of minutes and hours.

so then we get fire and that takes us ahead pretty fast to a new plane but i think in general women were sort of bossing the general social scene. however, a little after fire comes metals and that's when the men really take off running. once force is refined to the point of complex weaponry then you even have the basis for a hierarchy of work and the concept of military groups begins... so there's a lot of war for a long time and the men end up running things because women are basically interested in making life and though we have been successfully enslaved and given away almost all of our power individually, you cannot eradicate the feminine or the female from truth.

so now what? women are poised to come forward again and at least share power with men but our habits of power are prehistoric and actually more neanderthal than the men we joke about being. women's way of power is kill or be killed. you're on my side or you are on the other side. men are far more flexible after centuries of working together fighting they have come to realize that interpersonal relationships require a lot of flex, bend and flex, bend and flex. that's the key.

question: to the history of the world?

diana: bend and flex will inherit, yes.

2010-01-14
Posted at at 23:32 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

my father


my father was known by a few nicknames but one of them was rasputin and that's the one that affected what i was called ~ yes, rasputin's daughter.

question:have you ever been in love?

diana: oh yes. a few times. and in very different ways.

question: i've been in love.

diana: have you? did you enjoy it? how did it work out for you?

question: not that well; how about you?

diana: i'm not sure that the inlove thing is supposed to work out well. the whole thing is so angsty how can that end up in a good place?

question: some people seem to be able to ~

diana: for awhile.

question: that would be ok.

diana: how long would be good for you?

question: i think about twenty years is good, maybe twenty five.

diana: the problem with that, is, of course, at the end of that time, neither of you has the verve to go elsewhere so twenty turns into forty but the second twenty are pretty much a wash.

question: it's a conundrum alright. who nicknamed your father rasputin?

diana: i'm not sure.

question: because no one could kill him.

diana: yeah, and because he always seemed to have an agenda. he was always working something and it never felt good, whatever he was doing socially or culturally always sort of smelled bad. and the longer he kept those secrets, the more they festered. i think he died of an auto-intoxication of selfhate and rage.

2010-01-13
Posted at at 20:10 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

life


i don't like people very much. but i started out liking them a lot. i can't figure out what happened.

question: if you kill people, then you can't like them.

diana: that's not true. you can kill with compassion or cruelty just like anything else.

question: it used to be that women didn't kill or we didn't believe that women killed. in any case, we didn't put women in jail for killing because we didn't believe that women really kill.

diana: i know what you mean. it's sort of macho in people's mind, taking away life.

question: and women make life.

diana: but actually you need both genders to make life and both can easily take it away,

question: i have issues.

diana: me too. you want to go first?

question: sure. i resent that i went to school and left the world of women i grew up in and made my way in a world full of men and competed and won a lot, and lost some. i resent that because i can't go back. i'm not comfortable with regular women's life anymore.

diana: not many women in our civilization are. it's like war, work. i mean, in world war two when people got around, or in napoleon's war, when people got to see how other people lived by warring against them and also by the general mix of people in an army, there's a lot of random talk. people aren't relying on news to understand other people. the "others" are right there... and then they want what they see the others have, an education, status, whatever. and they come back from war demanding from their government, more. they want what is possible to have. well, now it's like that for women who work. we go out, we see what there is and we know we still don't have much of that, if any at all.

question: i'm not sure i want what's there. i wanted to go there because i thought what i wanted was there but what they want is there, what i want is in me... but i'm not sure how to make it happen.

diana: i don't have the answer for that. i bet you think i do, that i'm independent but that's silly. no one is not here. we're all here. we all have to live within the world as it is.

question: if you are that accepting, then why kill people?

diana: it's not personal. it was a job.

question: killing your father is personal.

diana: yes, but i didn't kill him.

question: but -

diana: but they say i did. but i say i didn't.

question: but i've heard you say that you did.

diana: i meant i hurt him so hard that he couldn't keep up his hypervigilance, he lost the will to challenge and defeat. and so he was an easy target. don't be silly, no one asks a child to kill her parent.

question: i think you're lying. because you don't want to go to jail.

diana: i'm in jail.

question: i know. but if you can convince them that someone else killed your father, you can get out.

diana: the problem is philosophical. the distinction has to do with how we are alive, with the essence of what makes alive alive as opposed to dead.

question: this sounds like bullshit to me.

diana: i like you better now.

2010-01-12
Posted at at 21:40 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

kitchen


is there a way to communicate that isn't ~ slander, a con, a strategic maneuver, a sales pitch, a seduction, an assertion of power?

2010-01-11
Posted at at 15:59 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

joyful


it was your dream to be creative but you loved power more. you made a mockery of your life. drinking in the poison.

question: how did your mother die?

diana: her husband poisoned her.

question: your father?

diana: no, he tortured her but he liked her alive. he thought she was beautiful. my stepfather, on the other hand, despised her. but he despised everyone. i've never known anyone more poisonous so it wasn't that big a surprise when she was poisoned. sometimes you can see these things coming.

question: was he caught?

diana: oh no.

question: but you're sure?

diana: oh yes. i hated my mother more than i hated my father, by the way. i'm not sure why. sometimes i think i might be a mysogynist.

question: i don't like women much, as a general rule.

diana: why not?

question: they justify their slavishness with rabid, depersonalized, competitive behaviours. sometimes i think that materialism is primarily a female disease and that men go along with it but women set it in motion.

diana: yes but origins were all so long ago, it doesn't really matter who started this shit. it's definitely shit. that's all that matters, and everyone is infected.

question: but, if we can imagine what it is to be free of that infection, that means we can achieve that ~

diana: i agree. can you imagine yourself free of competition? of rage? of aggression?

question: sometimes.

diana: i can't. i think i'm too infected to ever be a utopian, joyful person.

question: maybe there's a joyful but non-utopian health too.

diana: never thought about it.

question: you know, post-modernism is all about the breakdown of purist ideologies, the exposure of purism to the light of holographic, fractal, relativistic realities.

diana: i don't read that much.

question: sorry.

diana: no problem. for me, joy is an ultimate. one of those things that you can't have til you're dead.

question: seventeen virgins.

diana: sort of, yeah.

2010-01-10
Posted at at 21:45 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

i love you


no matter how hard i try, i can't figure out why it's so difficult to love. we all seem to want to love but when we are alone in a room together, it's not so easy to love. we stare at each other. we blame each other. criticize. i don't think that's what love looks like. love looks like conversation, work done together, snuggling, accepting and the occasional flare up too because if you feel too uptight to blow off steam then it's not love either... it's as though, since the middle ages and the invention of romantic courtly love, we have made no progress at all in conceptualizing and creating viable ways to love one another. we are awkward showing affection, appreciation, acceptance. take a walk on a crowded street, listen to yourself listing all the things that are wrong with this person, with that person. listen to the lies you make up, which is fine, you don't know these people, you're making it all up. but why aren't you making up amazing stories? why aren't you saying, this one is a genius. this one is beautiful. this one is great in bed. this one is so warm and lovable.

2010-01-09
Posted at at 22:47 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

hate


i hated so many things growing up. i hated my parents. i hated the cold war iciness. i hated myself. i hated feeling awkward. i hated feeling alone. i held hate like a staff i leaned on, a staff i fought with, a staff that carried me out from the horrors i was raised in and among.

but my hate is tired now. my staff is whittled itself from overuse down to a toothpick i carry in my breast pocket.

i worry about people who are stuck in a bad situation but are not allowed to hate, either because of their religion or they live with a brute (male or female)who reserves the right to hate as if it were a privilege. but i also worry about people like those brutes, who have no other consciousness outside of their hatred.

hate is salt. too much will kill your heart. not enough will keep life tasting like baby food.

question: who do you hate now with your toothpick size staff?

diana: small things can be more powerful than large things. no one. isn't that great? i don't hate anyone anymore. but i have a pure thread of hate i reserve for times when i need to spice up my energy field. all i have to do is look around and i can usually find something to hate.

question: like an energizer pill?

diana: exactly. but it only works after you've exercised a lot of your hate. you can't start out knowing how things work. you have to do a lot of things before you even begin to get the gist of what's going on.

2010-01-08
Posted at at 11:31 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

gargantuan gargoyles gaggle giggle gurgle gasp


several days ago i was seven years old and today i'm nine months old and cresting out of the womb.

question: do you think everyone is a killer?

diana: you know i do.

question: but some people are better at it than others?

diana: you, for instance, how many people have you killed?

question: none that i know of.

diana: any abortions?

question: no.

diana: would you?

question: i don't know.

diana: killed a lot of bugs i bet.

question: a lot of mosquitoes.

diana: ants.

question: oh yes.

diana: my, aren't you the bully? you only consider killing things that are much smaller than you are. i, on the other hand, contemplate, organize and effect killing goliaths.

question: shibboleth.

diana: absolutely. everyone who is anyone is also a murderer. but don't think it's always bloody. perhaps they have simply murdered some of their own dreams. you can live nonviolently but not nonmurderously. it's impossible to exist without countering other existences, combining, overcoming or destroying.

question: are all relationships about power?

diana: yes. but some are about power-over-others and some are about power-over-self but you cannot play music without making a sound.

question: i have thought that maybe i have, done that, made music without sound.

diana: with another person?

question: more often with than without actually.

diana: i am jealous of that. don't get paranoid. i don't kill from jealousy or greed or any sinful reason but rather from reasoning about sin. i am guilty of only one sin, judgement.

question: killing is a sin.

diana: oh. you are frustrating me. i thought we covered this. breathing is killing and creating both. living is an continuous act of murder.

2010-01-07
Posted at at 21:06 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

friends and enemies


friends and enemies ~ there's not much difference. not really. you engage with them and you change. other people you just ignore.

question: have you ever had friends?

diana: i've had lots of friends. how about you?

question: loads of friendly acquaintances and a few good friends.

diana: nah. i'm friends with everyone.

question: but you have killed people?

diana: oh yes.

question: i thought people who killed people didn't like people.

diana: would i kill a friend?

question: yes. ok, would you?

diana: would you?

question: not unless they went rabid or something.

diana: sure. that's the same. it's a judgement call. once you decide that it's either you or them then it's not so hard to carry through the rest of the way.

question: is it bloody?

diana: no. i wouldn't be able to handle that.

question: could you have been a murderer before there were guns?

diana: hard to say. but i feel like you are demonizing me. i think that is completely unfair. i think your whole culture, our culture, is demonic, feeding on people's pain, feeding on the lives of others, murdering people slowing and making a profit all the way. i do the same thing very quickly and generally painlessly.

question: thanatos -

diana: yes.

question: then do you believe in eros? the will to live and love?

diana: yes. but i don't feel it inside me as a directive any more. it takes awhile but eventually strategic thinking robs a person of their poetry and without poetry there is no love or life. but, i don't feel sorry for myself. i understand that everyone is necessary, everyone plays their part. my part is to end things, lives, dreams.

question: do you have enemies?

diana: i don't think so. i think as a person i'm fairly non-descript, low-key and everyone knows me in yoga class.

question: you do yoga?

diana: i'm very good at it. it's great for sex too. and focus of course. you should try it if you don't already.

question: is there anything you'd like to add?

diana: i think friendship is what the world is missing. love is a crazy potion, an ocean no one can ever safely navigate... but friendship could be based on care and respect, friendship relationships could build a bridge of lightlove strong enough to alter our relationships to everything. i think we were once friends with the world around us and that's what's called eden but i think it only exists in the womb and in the time when we are all space gas and elements... after that, it's impossible to ignore the spectacular singularities which we apprehend as differences and well, what i'm saying that, if we were friends with the world, we could be friends with each other or maybe it could go the other way, it could start with us.. but until then, and that's like saying you want to crawl back into the womb, but until then, pick your enemies as carefully as you pick your friends. and dance. it's only the dance that will make a difference.

2010-01-06
Posted at at 20:33 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

empathy


empathy is really the a of the emotional alphabet. empathy is what makes it possible to even make sense of emotions. but that's not how i was taught. i was told that competition and rage were the basis of human interaction and emotion. i was taught to kill or be killed and to never trust anyone, what they said, what they did.

the problem with all that paranoia is that its basic stance, using emotional perceptions to fuel disengagement, alienation and fear, minimizes our abilities to realize our potentials. our conversations, our peculiar reminiscences shared, our ideational harmonies, create the human world. when all our conversations, our reminiscences are discordant, when all we say and think is about the slights and betrayals done to us, the losses we have sustained, the blows to our pride, the gross humiliations... well, the psyche inflames itself and rampages. we see the results all around us and we bemoan it as fate when it is merely bad emotional communication skills. quite simple, really to heal. but there are powerful interests keeping us from experiencing that healing.

question: did your father teach you how to kill?

diana: yes.

question: how did that happen, exactly?

diana: there's no exactly about it. it's like cooking. creating a killer, is creating a dish, you have so many factors, nothing can be exactly one way, the elements determine the procedures just as the procedures alter the elements.

question: was there ever a time when you resisted this training?

diana: i never knew it was training. i thought everyone was like us.

question: what do you mean?

diana: when i was growing up, all the families had sad mothers and overbearing fathers. many of the fathers beat and/or had sexual relations with their children and with other men. some of the fathers sent their wives to get shock therapy. rarely did these men engage in the activity we call making love with their wives. most of the wives died without experiencing passion or even orgasms. the cruelty we lived in was simply the way it was, the water we fish were swimming i - so, rarely were objections voiced or even contemplated.

2010-01-05
Posted at at 23:00 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

don't stop


some people are the product of passion. do you know what i mean? some people were made from more passion than other people. i wonder, when they go all the way and have only test tube babies ~ because, by then, females will have degenerated their personalities, cut and deconstructed themselves into perfect specimens lacking any complexity at all and no one, not even the smart ones, will want to go through the labor of childbirth ~ if they will miss that factor in the personality or if it will be a big relief to have all calm people, made the same way.

i had a baby once. it was an accident. every bit of it but i wouldn't change it for the world. i'll tell you about it sometime but it's dificult to know where to start. even though people watch a lot of tv hospital stuff, there is always a doctor there, some representative of a structured, analytical frame work. but, my experiences are off that map, on a whole other territory of beingness. and when i have tried to tell people about it, there is a considerable lack of interest. so the birth thing was amazing but i think i have to explain a lot of other things first. and maybe you could ask some better questions?

2010-01-04
Posted at at 16:43 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

crash into me


it was like ice. it was like fire. and my body was electric, a generator of electric visions. lights danced in my head. a lightshow to the music my body was making with its rhythmic movements. slow and then rocking and stop and go and edge and slide and in and down. and breathing. and his breathing. another layer to the symphony of us in the dark. the stars' song audible coming closer to us the more we moved. we were bringing ourselves to the stars and then suddenly back into my interior fire and light and waterswirling bringing me to him and more to him and more. and then. then there was an emptiness in him that was filled with the dark of compleat creation and an answering emptiness in me and these to emptinesses were communicating through the hole in him and the hole in me til the fluid ran from the hole in him and entered the hole in me and truly there was perfect alignment of beingness with nothingness.

i have never been able to recapture that experience with anyone else. i've never met a man who understood his emptiness. the men i have known think they have a fullness that they pour into me after stimulating the pump for a suitable amount of time. this is also an exciting event because friction causes tremendous energy and sparks but not a bit nearly like the connection of the two emptinesses. to allow the flow of the universe through you is something spectacular. for two people to do that together, at the same time, is the perfect wave.

2010-01-03
Posted at at 11:43 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

an emotional alphabet


question: you mentioned, in one of your earlier poems, the phrase, "emotional alphabet." what exactly do you mean by that?

diana: emotions can be communicated but not unless there are some agreed upon standards for their communication. that's an emotional alphabet or grammar or lexicon. but i like alphabet because if all we agree on is the alphabet, then we don't take for granted that we are all seeing and believing the same things.

question: are you talking about conformity?

diana: i guess so. but conformity is camouflage, it's not real. we can imitate each other but we can't become the same form as they are. form is as unique in people as in any other manifested perceivable entity. i was thinking about eating, after our conversation yesterday. i was thinking that i sometimes think that everything is food.

question: that's a bit fava beans.

diana: of course. that's why that concept works. but what if it's not creepy? what if it's simply the way nature works?

question: the snake that self devours?

diana: you know about that?

question: yes.

diana: the circle of life. we annihilate each other but it's fun.

question: wow.

diana: you don't think so?

question: no.

diana: but that's what you're doing here. you are here to take my story, to take my life, to take my thoughts, to take my feelings and you will get paid for altering them so that your audience will be able to devour them.

question: (no statement or sound)

diana: does that upset you? to notice that you are as much a cannibal as anyone else? as me, for instance? should i tell you a story while you are catching your breath? i was standing on a cliff, overlooking nothing at all, and i was swept away into the sky and met a beautiful man, he looked like an american indian, long black hair, broad shoulders, eyes that laugh and cry all at once. this man embraced me and we hovered over a canyon and he pointed out the people in the houses, some were happy and some not so happy. but all of them completely involved in their own moment, their own story, their own desires fulfilling or despoiling. a world in motion. then i was back on the road, walking home. when i got home my father beat me. there was no reason why. amazing shift in perceptions for one day. surrealism isn't unrealistic. your realisms are all selling you something. see the world my way, no mine and on and on. but you will notice that only some people thrive, only some people are able to stay immune to the piranha. anyway, i met the indian man finally, i knew it was him. we spent an, of course, magical night together, speaking very little. but you said i had to be careful about what i speak about.

2010-01-02
Posted at at 21:10 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under:

basic needs



question: in order for our reading audience to understand, we would like to begin with a cursory examination of your early influences.

diana: i -

question: please wait until we have finished asking the question.

diana: i saw this. on tv. you get penalized if you don't hear the whole thing but only if you didn't guess right. what if i know what you are going to ask?

question: please.

diana: k

question: clearly, we are not allowed to ask you whether you are guilty or innocent. but we want to understand what could have caused you to even be considered as possibly having committed the crimes -

diana: is there a question?

question: the first thing you remember.

diana: eating. i remember milk pouring down my throat sucking, the effort and the flow. later, my mother told me, she used to smoke cigarettes at the time and so i was also experiencing a cascade of ash and her blowing the ash off me which probably complicated the central pleasure of effort, sucking and warm gushing milk resulting in an increase of mental activity and that is precisely an increase in sensual awareness.

question: we were thinking more like, the first time you went swimming.

diana: i was always in water. i can't remember ever not swimming.

question: do you have anything you'd like to tell us about your early life?

diana: i'd like to say that i was unhappy. i'd like to say that the world echoed in loneliness from the time i can remember, i remember a void around me, as if i was being protected for something special and at the same time, as if i were quarantined away from people in case i might infect them with something deep and dark i carried inside myself. like a human pandora's box. but other times i felt like a cocooned butterfly unable to understand where she's been or what she's becoming but not at all unhappy with the idea and process of disconcatenation.

question: ok, thank you, diana.

diana: you are more than welcome. you are a blessing to me in my hour of need.

question: what do you mean?

diana: i need to move forward with my life. my life can't be over because my father is dead.

question: maybe you thought when he died, you would be free of him and happy.

diana: and instead i'm on trial for his murder.

2010-01-01
Posted at at 22:22 on by Posted by temi rose |   | Filed under: