winter to spring 2022

 My window at the center of the world.

The sky is full of sea gulls and helicopters, and

the river is inhabited by tugboats and ferries.

A bridge over the river connects our island with their island

and on that other island two tall ghost towers stand,

eternally in flames. 

By their light I am writing.

the wind 03 03 2022

For the second day in a row the morning star’s rise was hidden by clouds on the horizon.

It is 32 degrees — literally freezing — and there’s a winter weather advisory for King’s County. The US Weather Service says mixed precipitation is expected. Total combined snow and sleet accumulations of one to three inches and ice accumulations of up to one tenth of an inch.

Slow down and use caution while traveling and check information services for the latest road conditions.

In other words, watch your step. A fall could be crippling or fatal at your age.

The internal weather advisory issued by the united inner states of my mind — the total combined fear and trembling — expect accumulations of underlying dread in unquantifiable quantities.

I have slowed down and I do use caution when walking to the subway station and ascending the black iron stairs of the Marcy Avenue station.

I take the M to Broadway Lafayette, if you must know, and go see my therapist and spend the forty five minutes trying to put my sense of dread and feeling of fatigue into words. And now I’m home and still trying to put it into words.

“Ancestral voices prophesying war” — Coleridge’s line —

and news of war on my phone comes with the weather advisory. 

What do I have to say in my little notebook?

Probably something oracular:

I am the wind that comes suddenly and blows it all down,

grabbing oak trees and shaking them and throwing them to the ground and

I am the earth breaking open beneath your feet, pulling the ground out from under you and

I am the flood that overwhelms everything in its path, drowning and crushing all living things, swallowing it all, and

I am the conquering fire of the sun and all suns, the ultimate fire that ignites suns and powers the generation of all universes,

the infinite power and glory that powers and glorifies your mind now as you consider everything you hear me say, everything being said, by this voice from the Deep,

and everything I am writing now as it comes to me out of the words I form on the paper.

03 17 2022

the wages of war

A prophet tells of a Tree that is watered by the Deep, that reaches into the clouds, and shades all nations, and is cut down, and lies dead on the ground among all the other fallen trees.

The prophet said that God will destroy a nation and turn its survivors into refugees so they will know God is the Lord.

The Day of the Lord isn’t something to look forward to.

The Day of the Lord isn’t Christmas.

Are wars the chaotic acts of wrathful deities who lure some of us to kill and die and be damned to Hell?

Are wars wrathful gods generated by our own brains, by the corrupted software of our conceptual apparatus?

Are we led by holograms to waste our lives in another stupid game, gambling everything we have, and everything we don’t have but can borrow, until our debts, our karmic debt, is out of control and we are whacked and dumped in a river?

I don’t want to study war. I want to sit in my cell, in ragged denim, among book heaps, and meditate and pray until I can wake up and see things as they really are.

I believe with all my nervous system that there is always an alternative to war, even if I don’t know precisely what it is at the moment, and even though I don’t know how to stop people from loving war.

The horror of 9/11 was the easy manipulation or our terror, turning our terror into terrorism creating horrors elsewhere, because we didn’t know what else to do, because war is what we do.

I go to protests, I sign the petitions, I wear the peace symbols, and I am not alone. We know the universal truth that war is evil, but the biggest anti-war demonstrations ever, and the biggest international popular protest ever couldn’t stop the war in Iraq. Who could stop Bush? Who could stop Putin? Whose bombs could stop the horror without creating equal horror, trying to exchange horror for horror but only multiplying horror and amplifying terror?

How will we open enough minds to the possibility of peace and how do we open enough hearts to want to achieve it?

How do we intervene in the mental health crisis and spiritual warfare of war?

War is a bad habit.

War is a narcotic.

War is unnecessary.

War is debt we are unable to pay, coming due.

The wages of war is war.

War is the wrathful god we create with our brains.

War is how we drive ourselves crazy.

War is a mass mental health crisis.

War is the idol to whom we sacrifice children.

War is the pride of men broken in the dust again and again and again.

To Earendel 03 31 2022

Once upon a time, around thirteen billion years ago, about nine hundred million years after the Big Bang, there was a blue star, a luminous blue star, whose existence was recently detected by our instruments, and whose existence is no more, because a few million years later, the story goes, it probably exploded to bits. Maybe our instruments, or somebody’s instruments, will witness that spectacle, a few million years from now.

Life up to now has been a wilderness journey and we have survived many battles. We destroyed cities and killed everyone who got in our way. God was with us. It was God’s plan. God was with us because we don’t worship false gods. Well, not any more. Maybe we used to, but we quit. We now have the correct information and the powerful technical know-how and the weapons and armies to burn a way straight through the wilderness to get here and here we are.

I dreamed I got a glimpse of you as you were years before we met and we were in different cities. Someone told me I had an opportunity to meet you by going back in time. I saw you and then I didn’t see you and you were a college student, a very pretty brunette. You were in a house where you were hosting a poetry reading, or some other kind of reading. There were many people in the different rooms I walked through, looking for you, and I didn’t find you.

I get up in the dark and stumble into another room to the coffeemaker. I remind myself of Edvard Munch’s night wanderer. I’ve become more sensitive to cold and dread the winter and am in a stage of life no one looks forward to.

The wind pushes against the windows. Gusts of wind leap at the windows. The heat is still not on.

I sit still and breathe and bring the wind inside my chest so all the processes and chemical transformations my body does normally will continue, the systems will continue and the wind and the blood and the food and the electricity will flow and all of that which is stored that I call memory and emotion, including the melancholy I’ve carried since infancy ————

I’m not going anywhere with this — this dark afternoon waiting for storms.

The rumbling of the city’s machines and wheels’ white noise like surf, the world throbs as it watches me, eyeballs me in my sixth floor terrarium. Through my big window the world watches me and in the ether it considers me. 

All my information is on the internet where it attracts no one’s attention — and in my mind countless facts of my life are presented to me and forgotten or remembered  — heaps of information that come and go and blow away like beach sand in a storm that finally comes, with flashing electricity and the roar of cherubim and wheels within wheels and up above something like a dome over all of this, and something like a voice pulls me to my feet.

Preface to the interview 04 28 2022

Take a deep breath, hold, release.

Holy breath and ultimate reality search my thoughts and open my heart.

Examine my aggregates (whatever those are), the countless parts that make up the whole that has my name — my fingerprints, my DNA, my medical history and driving record, my life signs, every memory I can generate, every answer I could give in an exhaustive questionnaire on the events and facts of my life and life history, the story I tell others about my life, and the story I tell myself about my life.

Let’s say that everything I just listed, comprising components of my self, is tossed into a dusty and battered cardboard box labelled SELF — all caps written in Sharpie —and containing the Self of Lawrence Swan, the totality of objective and subjective facts of who I am and how I can be identified.

That box of stuff is ME.

But that is not all. There is stuff not in the box, stuff on the floor, stacked or piled or scattered on the floor, stuff that used to be in the box and no longer is, stuff that should be in the box and stuff that shouldn’t. The contents of the box change over time, but the box remains — I mean the idea of the box remains — even when it has been emptied, crushed, and recycled.

There are stories I tell others about Lawrence Swan, and stories I only tell my self. I try to keep all these stories in agreement. I try to manage script continuity, but even though I commit to being truthful when stating the facts of my life I might not be aware of what facts are relevant, or interesting, or just noise. And then there are secrets I won’t tell and also the other things I prefer to keep to myself.

The facts of my life go beyond the limits of birth and death. For instance, there is the history of my DNA, the molecular history of myself, and the atomic and subatomic history of the universe. There also is the genealogy, the family stories that explain a box of photographs.

Where is this proverbial box that has my name stowed? Is the totality of data stored anywhere? —  nowhere lasts forever. Maybe the birth certificate and death certificate will remain on some electronic file to document the temporal limits of a self. Data is found and lost, put to use and erased or deteriorates. But when I no longer am, the fact that I was will remain, at least hypothetically. 

There is a bigger story that is the ultimate context of our stories — the process of evolution and creation — the selection process that involves much randomness driving the transformations of form to form, forming what humans call “human.” One’s life is a moment in an ongoing universe of moments, an ocean of being beyond your understanding, but you have stories told by professional and amateur cosmologists, evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, and the older members of your family. You have the cultural heritage of the world, the languages of the world, the stories of the world, the wisdom literature, the surviving record carved in stone, drawn on walls, painted on pottery, stored on hard drives. You have the cultural heritage — the totality of extra-genetic information that we draw on and presuppose when I tell you my story and I listen to your story, the words themselves have stories and my vocalization is made possible by the millions of years of evolution that adapted the human eating apparatus into a speaking apparatus that enables me to shape the air into phonemes I expel into the world.

What is it you want to know?