May 12th, 1977 at 11:00 am
by Rastaban (1977)
Ah shame-faced girl! Be a shame-faced girl, that doesn't care. Come dancing blithe-footedly down the green, and earrings and razors in your hands; pile them on [an] altar of sacrifice to the green-eyed gods of life. Pile mascara and makeup and fingernail polish on the altar of life, then sing your thoughtless song, strike the match. Burn it all on the altar of life. Incense for the gods. And as its stench goes light smoke waving skyward to etheral death, there your shame goes with it. Put your shame as well on the altar, and watch it up, gaily, gaily up!
But you must be a shamefaced girl first, before you can burn your shame on the altar of life, and send it on to its eternity in the realm of the dead. How the city of Dis deserves shame!
Shame. Shame. Let us learn to know our shame. The painful illegitimacy of being but half-alive things, divided selves. Shame, of having abandoned dear life, which is our baby—we abandoned our baby! At the steps of the city of Dis, there we left our baby in the dark night, wailing, squealing away. Shameful mothers we are, to have so limply cast off the little sparks of our pre-life wombs, sparks of life. We sent them up as sacrifice to Dis, and got shame for return. Now we must set shame itself on the altar, if we would have our babies back.
For oh, we have lost our childhood, and now we have come to know what price it is. We abandoned ourselves on the steps of Dis; now we want back out. It is not so easy.
Were there a wise owl in the Catalpa tree, he would tell us we had forgotten how to hoot.
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May 11th, 1977 at 4:00 pm
by Rastaban (1977)
Oh mirror, mirror on the wall
Who's got the most beautiful balls?
Check them here as they sit in the stall
Who is the balliest in Morris Hall!
Is it Mike or James or Philip or Billy,
Charles or Steven or Dicky or Willy,
Who's got the most beautiful balls?
Or do none of them have any in Morris Hall?
There was a grey swan was really Zeus
Who abducted the young Leda for his use
Pushed his web-feet into her loins
Jammed his wet-seed into her groins
And came up for air, outdone by her IUDs!
There was a young maiden from Spain
Who gave her donut to a dog in the rain
Dog entered its dark places
And touched all her bases
But after, she wondered how puppies would explain.
There was a plumber in Stalingrad
Whose wife looked like a horse-bodied hag
He threw at her his two stones
And his six-inch pubic bone
And explained he'd given up as a stag!
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May 10th, 1977 at 4:00 pm
by Rastaban (1977)
I really do feel that the healing of life (and modern life desperately needs healing) must begin with the body, with our attitudes to the body. Not until we realize that the body is us, the body is all we've got, can we begin. To degrade the body is to degrade life, and to try to run away from the finality of our short life. Since touch is that thing we most tenderly desire, it is but insane to run away from it, as we do most effectively when we get into the mask of degrading things, or of turning things into games. It is fear of life.
So we must begin to begin by putting some sort of hood over the socialized aspects of our minds. This, and I'm afraid only this, will enable us to think cleanly about ourselves, and others. It will prepare us for the next step, which is carefree nakedness. But girls will find that nakedness has a lingering feeling of degradation hanging onto it, until the hair on their legs and arms grows back, and until they reject unconsciously all the social norms of human beauty. A woman is beautiful because she is a woman with a woman's body—had she three legs, or a breast turned inward, then she would not be very beautiful.
The important thing is to see the body with the innocence, or rather, the ignorance, of young children who have not been given the notion of it as some “dirty” or “sexy” thing. Let us replace “sex” with copulation. Let copulation be free enough to occur in the grass, in public.
But the main thing is that hood over the sharp-headed, defining parts of our minds.
Until I can walk naked and leisurely across north campus, I will know that we live, still, in a world we don't deserve. Until I can walk unnoticed—or rather, noticed, but only by eyes that see the wonderful human animalness of me. It is such a feeling, such a discovery, to see the natural human animal self-absorbed in its own animal being. This (to be Eastern) is Tao. And as Lao-tzu or one of the others said, you can't bring the shy human animal out of yourself by effort, you can't “make it happen”. It just has to happen, and will only happen when there's nothing to frighten the shy thing away. Effort frightens it away. So does talk that carries with it implied (or unstated) judgments.
For the shy human animal is the natural physical life-awareness come blindly, adventurously out. It is physical, and directly, physically mental rather than causically mental (i, e., mindedness that sings, not judges). You can't will the physical out, nor can you think it out. You just have to resign yourself gaily to your physical body, and then, if the coast becomes clear, your body will slip out, look gaily, joyously, blindly around, and so be life.
That is the object: not to live, but to be life.
Again: not to be Life, but to be a life.
We must begin with nakedness and with shy blindness.
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May 9th, 1977 at 3:00 pm
by Rastaban (1977)
I admit I am very self-conscious around machines, even a sort of illegitimacy. I feel somehow I am indicted, somehow I am guilty of not belonging.
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May 7th, 1977 at 2:00 pm
by Rastaban (1977)
I have seen the drunk, wreckless, lion-like trucks screetch by, with a dust of pebbles: boy trying to prove to girl how exciting, important, his life is. And girl, sitting in front seat, looks out with a quick, rouged, powdered, ear-trinketed mask, with eyes painted wide and a fixed grin, as if to say, “How much fun I'm having in life! How important it all is!”
I hope the truck rolls over and kills them all, I'm so tired of such scenes. Or puts them like crippled vegetables into the hospital: then we'd see how fun they thought life was.
Ah, but silly, it wouldn't do any good to give them cracked skulls: they're already cracked. And even as an armless, legless thing in the hospital, they would never think: “maybe life isn't what I thought it was. Maybe in the end, fun with trucks doesn't matter.”
Anyway, they'd probably start being religious, so incapable are people to learn anything about life, no matter how explicit experience tries to make it.
Perhaps, after all, all the swelled-cranium intellectuals are right, that, without its myths and opiums, life is meaningless and only painful. We are all shipwrecked, and without hope for any full life, so entertain us, drug us, fill us with tales of afterlife, give us toys, toys, and toys enough to divert us from our doubts. For without the glittery frosting, we would find there is no cake.
As every Christian, even every Deist, knows, if there's no God, no Afterlife, no world soul, life is meaningless then.
I only know that between the closing jaws of religion, music, drugs, drinks, trucks, afterlife, make-up face-masks, glittery frosting and all, life is made meaningless. The whole thing is become a joke without a punch-line, though a moral of sorts: the dead find the joke was on them, i.e., that they are even more meaningless in the end, than the joke itself.
The more one thinks about how meaningless modern life is, and how religious everyone is in consequence, the more one's head and blood spin. Anger. Real blooded anger. But you can't do anything with it, you can't throw it about, and so soon anger sinks into despair at the pointlessness, the uselessness of life. And then back into anger again.
I want to just say damn them all, and throw off my clothes and all my learning, and tear off earrings on every girl I see, and smear off make-up, and tell them each to either take off their clothes, or cover up their sassy hair-less legs and arms, and be decent and shame-faced for once.
But such things can't be done. Even take off your clothes, and all faces will crane to look, and mental heads will start shooting away, turning it into a joke, a mass-joke, as if to convince you of the pure ridiculousness and meaninglessness of even the naked body.
A human body can't live in modern society, until he destroys himself, and becomes something else: namely, a destroyer of other human beings. And all that is needed to do any of this, is words.
Words pre-suppose “facts”, and views of life. To even talk to other members of modern society, you have to accept their words. Yet, once even that is done, you've already turned yourself into a liar.
The only hope for mankind lies in his cutting off his tongue. Even then, I'm sure he would find other ways to illegitimize the experience of each other.
The truth of the matter is that real life, simple homo-sapiens life, is not legitimate in the United States of America today, to speak nothing of legal. It only exists, if at all, in the counter-culture in the country.
The whole problem is that there are too many people. Our physical space is penetrated by others, all the time. We have to draw defenses (because after all they are strangers, and our natural tendency is to not let strangers too close), and to do this we resort to words. We abstract from our real experience, thus abandoning our real words, to our “common” or “acknowledged” experience, thus using trite and worn-out, standardized words.
So our very choice of words and phrases, being dead ones, ones that have died and no longer contain any quick of life in them, degrades our own lives. We can't talk truly about ourselves; we only use words that are lies.
In the slang at its earliest inception, you notice a meagre attempt to buck having to constantly lie, but as new slang becomes widespread, it too dies, often into an even harder, deader-than-ever shell.
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May 7th, 1977 at 7:15 am
by Rastaban (1977)
Morning sounds push hastily in the window, but I am awake already. I hang in bed, still tired, without heart for day again and I lay my cheek on my own arm and shoulder. It has a draughty skin smell. My hand falls gingerly on the strange skin of my upper arm, caressing it like a woman's hand would. If only there were the dead-weight body of a woman for me, with its great fleshy “thereness”. Piece by piece, touching me sacredly and blindly, she could recover me to life, and bring my blood to the surface again in joie de vivre.
Oh, the heavy, fleshy body of a woman. A girl, a woman, her flashing, blood-built body. Tender, with the heavy touch of female blood. Mindless, thoughtless blood.
If only she could be mindless and thoughtless, and in no hurry. Could run the little hairs of my arms between her lips, to return them to their protein glory, no longer little headstones of half-death. We would pass the unknowing soft gentle twitches of the pulses, like blind sentences to each other.
Oh, I want my blood to come out of hiding, come to the careful, cellular surface, all in strength, and make her touch, and touch. And I want my head to become consciousless as an arm or a leg, with the blood come blindly to its surface, for touch with her blood, and not for thought. Let us be overcome by our own bodies, and taken under.
And let us never have the mind of the common social world.
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