The Eleven

In 1973 God called my sister to liberate some Haitians from the West Palm Beach police department.

Betty died this month. I am studying the texts my sister left behind, her two books, and this is how our relationship continues for now. I wish could talk to her now.

Her memoirs unearth my own memories.

I am reading her first book, Operation: Devil’s Garden. She published it in 2005 and when I first read it I found it was full of stories she has told me and in the voice that is her voice. I hear her voice when I read them and I think the stories are true, if embellished, and she might get that from Dad, who was a Baptist preacher who followed the standard practice of evangelical preachers like Dad and Aunt Betty and Papa — our Grandfather Weakland — to embellish true stories to better deliver the message of the sermon.

My sister’s two books carry a mystical/mythical approach to meaning but an essentially compassionate, courageous approach to her kind of activism, or ministry.

The first story in my sister’s first book is called “I’ve come for the Haitians.”

Betty tells the story from memory that isn’t always accurate, but we also have a newspaper clipping with the story that provides some details:

“Housewife Aids Refugees”

“Betty Luckey Helps Haitians in PB Gardens”

Betty’s husband, Gary Luckey, was a cowboy and also a technician at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, a defense contractor that also built rocket engines. My mother also worked there. Lots of people in Palm Beach County worked there.

Betty had been praying all day, she said, and her praying grew in intensity until she was face down on the floor.

She asked God if He was trying to tell her something.

Her words:

“I was hardly prepared for what happened next. He spoke to me in a clear, audible voice (at least in my spirit, it was audible). He said to me, Go to the West Palm Beach jail and say, ‘My name is Betty Luckey, I’ve come for the Haitians.’ I asked Him to repeat the message and He did, and then I heard myself agree to do it!”

Betty got in her pickup truck and headed to West Palm Beach. She didn’t know any Haitians. All she knew about Haitians were that they were from Haiti, she said. She wasn’t even sure where the West Palm Beach jail was located but she found it. She went straight to the dispatcher’s window and said, “My name is Betty Luckey. I’ve come for the Haitians.” The dispatcher asked her to repeat that and she did. She had Betty sit down and eventually a cop with a clipboard appeared and asked her how he could help her and Betty said, “My name is Betty Luckey and I’ve come for the Haitians.” He gave her an intense look and then left to get a higher ranking cop.

This higher ranking law enforcement officer appeared in the doorway and called, “almost as if he knew me, ‘Ms Luckey, what can I do for you?’”

You know what she said.

“I’ve come for the Haitians.”

I am pretty sure this higher ranking officer was familiar with the name Betty Luckey. The year before her name was often in the news for various actions. She and our cousin Eraca Cleary organized what I think was the first major antiwar demonstration in the county, The Unarmed Forces Day Parade  (I drew an eagle clutching broken arrows for the flyer). It was the first peace march I participated in.

The plainclothes policeman told her to wait and then left and another cop came and took her somewhere else in the building. They led her to a counter where a different officer had her sign a paper she didn’t read, or read it and forgot what it said.

Eleven Black men, the Haitian prisoners, were brought in, and she led them to her pickup truck. They couldn’t speak English and she couldn’t speak French. They were excited and she was in shock and everybody was talking.

“I knew what they were wondering, who was I, how had they been released, where were we going now, etc. Actually, I was wondering the same thing, but all I could do was shrug my shoulders and finally I said, “Jesus!” 

This reassured them.

One of those Florida rainstorms hit and then a Community Action bus pulled up they all got in and Betty led them to our church in Palm Beach Gardens, and showed them the pews they could sleep on and the eleven cans of soup and eleven blankets that had coincidentally or miraculously been donated a couple of weeks before.

The press immediately got wind of the story. TV cameras and reporters were in the church parking lot. Betty Luckey was up to something again. Involves Haitian refugees.

The newspaper story says the eleven sailed into Jupiter Inlet New Year’s Eve in a 35 foot open boat from the Bahamas. The Haitian dictator Baby Doc Duvalier threw them out of the country because they had been preaching a subversive message. 

“They were all preachers”, Betty said. 

They were tired, scared, hungry, strangers in our strange homeland.

“We all be killed if we go back to Haiti. We said words against the government. We want to stay in America. Get jobs. Become Americans,” one of them, Joseph De Graff said.

“These people placed a great deal of hope in America,” Mrs. Luckey said, “It just didn’t seem right they should be put in jail as soon as they reached free soil.”

The US government considered Haitian refugees to be mere economic refugees, as I recall, while Cuban refugees were political refugees. Also, the Haitians are generally much darker than the Cubans, and that distinction was important in Florida when I lived there, important to both the native crackers and the nouveau crackers transplanted from the North. I transplanted myself to the North. I had assumed that things were slowly getting better down South, but now I’m not so sure. I’m not so sure about our country, now on the brink of full blown fascism, with a man every bit as petty and dictatorial as Baby Doc Duvalier favored by about half of the country. 

Each of her stories begins with a scripture reading. Her account of this story is introduced with Luke 4:18 and 19:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has appointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

I wish I could talk to Betty about the prophetic call to provide for the strangers, the refugees, and to seek justice and the state of things now, as well as Isaiah’s call, cited by Jesus, to deliver good news of liberation to the oppressed, and to claim that the time of liberation is NOW.

The Community Action Council and some church members helped the eleven strangers to purchase bus tickets to Miami where one of them had a friend. They spent the night at the church, sleeping on the pews, and the next morning they had breakfast with Mom and Dad and Aunt Betty at our house. I remember meeting them before I hid in my bedroom, freaked out about the whole thing.

 

What is Endarkenment?

 

Break free from the bonds of what you’ve been taught to believe and think for your self. Think anything you want to think. Free your mind! Follow your own rules. 

With some constraints, of course. 

I mean, when you’re driving I’d appreciate it if you are in the correct lane, stop when the light is red, go when it is green, and when it is yellow proceed with caution and not close your eyes and floor it. There is a social contract in effect, after all.

We’d been living in an age of enlightenment for the past few centuries, although not in an enlightened age. We sought enlightenment. We looked for lights to light our paths. Light of all colors, but mainly lights that will help us find our way and not lights that only project movies that show us things that are not there, and situations that never occur, and behavior that is unlikely.

We cast off many traditions that misled us or harmed us, beliefs and belief systems, entire meaning systems collapsed around us, and even some cognitive categories are no longer relevant.  

We’re dizzy and disoriented and grab onto the first hand that is offered and steadies us. A strong hand that is attached to a powerful arm which hangs from broad shoulders on which a thick neck stands like a mighty oak that lifts a beautiful head with an open mouth from which a confident voice speaks sentences that sound plausible enough.

He — yes, he is a he — claims God has told him what is going to happen. He has an explanation for the weird things going on. You no longer trusted the fake news and your parents meant well but they didn’t understand everything you are going through and how the situations in life are different today, the old authorities lost their authority, so you were susceptible to a charismatic prophet.

So you follow your new guardian, safe at last on a path as you stride confidently together, hand in hand, over the cliff, falling into a deep deep deep pit of ignorance and grief where you are robbed of everything you value and love, whether you know it or not, and you still may not be aware and may never be aware of how lost you were when you pulled us all down with you into this pit of stupid suffering.

You are absolutely free. Your mind is free, to some extent, and free enough to choose to do the right thing.

What is the right thing?

Let’s say you are faced with an ethical decision.

Immanuel Kant offered this useful rule of thumb:

Act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will to be universal law.

What in the world does that mean?

You know, treat each person as an end, not as a means to an end, but as an end in themselves.

That is rather abstract.

Well, here, let me recite the entire Torah while I stand on one foot:

“That which is hateful to you, do not do unto your fellow.” ( a famous rabbi said that).

Oh, you mean like the Golden Rule. Like: 

“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” (another famous rabbi said that).

What about, “Mind your own damn business,” or “We’re all in this together?”

Don’t those contradict each other?

I don’t know.

What about you are faced with a decision you are forced to make, a decision only you can make because only you understand what your existential situation is, what you think your life’s purpose is, or what your, let us say, moral position is, which you can’t really articulate, but which positions you nonetheless so that you say, No, I can’t go there. This is where I draw the line. I can’t cross that line and you can’t make me. But your state legislature has determined it is really their decision, or that of their base, and THEY know what you need to do, because your body belongs to them, to the fine, honest, wise men who managed to get elected to office once, because they had the financial backing to dominate the media that you depend on for your information.

No, it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there, as the poet said. We don’t yet live in the Dark Ages, but we do live in an age of endarkenment. I am not the first to use that term, and, yes, it is a joke about Kant’s essay, “What is enlightenment?” 

Kant argued that enlightenment is humanity emergence from self=-imposed immaturity, meaning a childish inability to use one’s understanding, to think for oneself, without submitting to the opinions of others, without questioning those who claim to be authorities.

We don’t question these authorities when we lack resolve or courage to use the ability to reason that we are born with. Laziness and cowardice, in the Kantian view, keeps us intellectually immature.

I’m not sure that Kant’s view is still adequate. Facts are still facts, and the public use of reason still requires that one distinguish what is true from what is false. But we have become dependent on a powerful information technology that is also used to misinform and to shape public opinion. You check a notification on your phone and release a Niagara of false data from an unknown source, often passed along by someone you trust, who received it from someone they trust, but that ultimately came from some manufacturer of a Big Lie.

We live in a new age of endarkenment because the new technology of disinformation is all pervasive. Not everybody is fooled, but enough people are fooled, and in our current non-democracy it doesn’t take a majority of votes to win an election, just a majority of electors to win the electoral college.

When you finish reading this, I want you to read that essay, or watch a YouTube video about it.

“What is Enlightenment?” by Immanuel Kant. 

I want you to write a short essay on what you think about it or if you prefer, you may write a short satirical piece, similar to this one I am reading to you now, that demonstrates your own confused musing on the issue of truth and moral authority in the post-postmodern condition.

You will not be graded and you will receive no credit.

Learn to educate yourself.

Tree at the center of the world

 

About two inches of room temperature Coca Cola left in the bottle I forgot was in my bag. Enough to wash down the boiled egg I’m masticating. I’ve been 70 for five months now. I ride the subway to a job. I stop at a place where I can sit at a table and write for thirty minutes, if I left home early enough. I use the timer on my phone to measure out this time.

The high wall of the marketplace is covered with decorative green plastic representations of flora and fauna, a plastic wilderness to contemplate while you eat quickly. 

A young man with green hair passes by. Human activity, we call it.

Yesterday I was looking out a window at the security tent as we waited for the ferry and I noticed a bit of real foliage sprouting from the top of one of the pilings on the dock. I took a photo of it and named it “Tree.”

The piling is still a tree, despite having lost its limbs when it was put to use at the dock, and I wonder if it is still growing roots underneath, and can it take root under the water and grow branches.

In time, if humans and human activity leave New Amsterdam will all the pilings become a new forest? Even if there is no one here to see them? If one hand is clapping in the inhuman forest, do the trees acknowledge the applause?

I perform my human activity. I sit at a table or stand behind a cash register and take root and something green sprouts from the crown of my head and, if left alone, I slowly become a tree. 

God willing, I become Yggdrasil.

Middle of August already beginning to seem like September, late summer light and cool morning and vague back to school nostalgia. Labor Day weekend will mark twenty six years as a resident of Brooklyn. I’ve lived here longer than I’ve lived any where else, over a third of my life (so far). Twenty three years after 9/11, eighteen years after getting married to Lori, and nine years after she left__________________________

Seventeen years after Mom left, sixteen after Dad left. Now we wait for my sister to leave, and how many years before I leave?

Life doesn’t begin at seventy, but it doesn’t end until it ends, if it really ends, if there really is an end. We are in the embrace of the unconditioned all the time, and isn’t recalling that, recognizing that, what it’s all about?

Orion seems menacing now when I see him out my kitchen window. Orion is not really a “he” or “him” or any pronoun at all but a few stars that appear regularly in the sky in the same configuration from my POV. This connect the dots figure travels in a regular path, or appears to, and I think about our ancestors observing the stars and their paths and feel the mix of awe and fear toward these uncanny things far above us and much older than us and even now way beyond reach of our rockets, and even though I know there is no Orion, there it is, familiar, and always a sign of September mornings and the approach of another 9/11 anniversary. 

I tell a co-worker that what freaks me out this year is that it has been twenty three years and I can’t even process that. Everything that happened in the past twenty three years are like the images and scenes that flash in the window of a train racing to the terminal. A third of a lifetime. 

I mean, I’ve been seventy for six months now.

Fire and Water

Summer of 2005 I got on a bus at Port Authority to Richmond, Virginia. I was going to meet up with my very hot new girlfriend. We had started dating in March, on my birthday, and she was already talking about marriage. I didn’t feel secure about that, I didn’t think I was really the material for being a good mate. I was more of a phase a woman went through in her search for a mate. I expected her to dump me before long.

Anyway, the bus was leaving late at night. I sat near the front. it would be an all night bus trip. An all night bus ride is a state of consciousness close to sleep but not sleep, not at all restful, but a sustained hypnagogic revery until the dawning destination arrives.

As the bus was pulling out of Port Authority some passenger in front of me started a conversation with the driver about a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico that was supposed to hit New Orleans soon. I guess I knew there was much media hype about it, but I was surprised when the conversation turned apocalyptic.

Well, we know the world won’t end with a flood, the driver said. “God gave Noah, the rainbow sign.”

That’s right, the passenger replied. No more water, the fire next time.

Bus Driver of the Apocalypse, I thought. Weird.

I drifted into that altered state of nocturnal Greyhound dreamtime

full of strange thoughts I couldn’t really put into words.

The rainbow is God’s promise to destroy the Earth by global cremation, I thought. Modern cosmologists hold that the sun will one day engulf our planet, some billion years from now. If all goes well humanity will figure out utopia by then and we’ll spend our time becoming intergalactic immigrants, or attaining a state of consciousness beyond life and death. Maybe this is what the belief in a “Rapture” is about, a dream of our evolutionary future as collective enlightenment. I dreamed on.

My girlfriend, as it happened, was in New Orleans, but left before Hurricane Katrina hit. She was with her sister, who was in town for a medical convention. She’s a pediatrician and would invite Lori to stay with her in a hotel in whatever cool city the convention was being held . They were out of the city by now. Lisa back in Houston and Lori in Richmond, so my interest in hurricane news evaporated.

Lori and her friend Jimmy met me at the bus station. We stayed at Jimmy’s house in a neighborhood where old houses had front porches where neighbors would stop and visit.. Lori and I were in art school at the same time, but in different cities. Oregon Hill reminded me of my old neighborhood in Cleveland. Jimmy carried the air conditioner he rarely used up from storage the basement to the second floor room we slept in. It was very hot and humid that August. 

Lori showed me around. We did a lot of walking.  She wore a green halter top I liked very much. Hollywood Cemetery is at the end of Jimmy’s street, near his house, and we’d go there. There is a big granite pyramid that serves as a memorial to more than 11,000 Confederate soldiers buried there, sacrificed to the lost cause.

I like Richmond. Lori went to school there, at Virginia Commonwealth, got her undergraduate degree in Commercial Design. She became a painter years later. When she was a student she wrote reviews of punk shows at local venues. She loved the Ramones. I think she wrote under the name Lori Richmond. I liked Lori’s many friends there and now they are my friends.

We walked to Monument Avenue where statues of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and other Confederate figures stood. Richmond was the the capital of the Confederacy and was abandoned and burned by the soldiers fleeing Grant’s army. The statues were put there in the Jim Crow era to show that even if they lost the war the White power structure had not surrendered. It seemed like they would stand there forever. It was not a site to be proud of. I wondered when they would finally fix this boulevard of civic shame. It took another fifteen years, a global pandemic, and a video of a Black man choking to death under the knee of a White cop. During the protests that followed George Floyd’s murder the idols of Monument Avenue began to fall, until the only statue left is of Arthur Ashe, the Black tennis champion.

Praise God.

We didn’t watch TV at Jimmy’s. Maybe he didn’t have one and I think he still had to dial up his internet. What he has is thousands of vinyl record albums, because that is what Jimmy deals in. He buys and sells vinyl records. Lori played The Fall’s cover of the Kinks’ Victoria and I played her some Fred Neil, who became a favorite of ours. 

But no TV, and no news, and it wasn’t until we went to DC, where we’d take Amtrak home, that we got caught up on what was happening in New Orleans. We had lunch in a Nigerian restaurant that had a big screen TV where we all watched Americans standing in flood waters, who had lost everything, and who were crying out to an administration that only knew how to destroy.  Dubya was still Commander in Chief and we were in the second year of the War in Iraq. With two wars going on, Katrina was another fiasco he could claim. As in the 2020 pandemic, most of the suffering and dying after Katrina was among the poor and people of color. It is much easier to pull down flags and statues than it is to change a rotten and unjust system. James Baldwin warned us, if we don’t change it we will destroy ourselves. He might be wrong about next time, though. Next time it might be both fire AND water, and maybe a virus in the air.

But we didn’t know the bad news of Katrina when we were in Richmond that golden summer. We didn’t get married until a year later. but In my reminiscence, that week in Richmond seems like our real honeymoon. Jimmy came to the wedding and gave away the bride, and the following year we went on our official honeymoon, a gift from Lori’s sister, in New Orleans.

Level 7

 

You are about to arrive at Level 7.

The elevator door will soon open and you will be a septuagenarian.

You will be given a bundle of old man problems. 

Congratulations!

Hello. My name is Lars and I am your greeter. That’s right, I am you. You yourself. Thou art that. Some of the surprises are being saved for your next wellness check up. Each year there will be more surprises. As you know, your financial situation is not secure, which in America means you are not a millionaire. Be careful. Your diet could be better. Many of your comrades have already fallen. You are fortunate you have made it this far, so once again, congratulations!

I am afraid of wasting time.

Time is all I have and I too easily lose it.

I misplace the time and don’t know what I did with it.

The time clock is on my phone and my phone is shackled to my wrist. A chain is attached to the phone and to my wrist so the phone won’t lose me.

Dig this time. Dig into it. Dig into the dust from which you came.

I know there is something buried here.

A thought is buried here.

I could use a thought detector or a dog trained to sniff out thought,

A thought detector that would locate the insights and inspirations and theories that are HERE in front of me or HERE in my memory or HERE underneath the paper or inside the paper and if I scratch or tickle the paper with this pen it will burst out with laughter or cry out with pain and then I’ll have something of value, something to make you laugh or cry, or even think, or even act.

All I have is time. All I ever had was time and now it is running out and I don’t know how much I have left and I’m afraid, scared, terrified, of wasting it.

I’m writing these notes on the back of this week’s work schedule. I have a little more than two minutes left to have a thought.

I’m sitting in the Marketplace at 8 in the morning, waiting to sell a good portion of my day for a few dollars. I’m a member of the labor force, a unit in the economic system of an Empire, and my free time is almost up.

Today is February 29 and it is Leap Day. If we don’t have a leap day every four years Halloween would eventually occur on Easter, which would make for some peculiar theology involving a zombie Jesus. Why seek the living among the living dead? Why seek the living among frozen eggs? If we were formed out of dust is the dust a person with the rights of a human? When you return to dust, does the dust claim its due? Food turns into shit, but I don’t eat shit. I return to dust, but I am not dust, even if I’m dusty. 

This morning I read on my phone about the young man who was brought up in a Christian community that practiced a militaristic discipline. He left the community and joined the Air Force. He poured gasoline on himself in front of the Israeli embassy and set himself on fire screaming, Free Palestine!  There is a story that connects these three facts of his life but I don’t know it, we don’t know it, and you don’t understand it. He was twenty five years old.

Israel bombs hospitals because Hamas wants them to and Israel seems committed to doing what Hamas wants as long as it involves killing Palestinians. Hamas kills 1200 Israelis and Israel kills 30,000 Palestinians, and counting. Israel is almost as bad as America. I can’t say I understand it and I can’t really say what Ezekiel would say about this, or Isaiah, or Jeremiah, or the minor prophets. Did that young man’s Bible teachers tell him this is God’s plan and these are the End Times? Did he realize this is crazy, but it drove him crazy also? What God or Devil pours flames on the heads of the confused? What Zombie Christ calls for genocide and suicide? What do you do when you look for life among the living and only find the dead? What do you do when you look for truth and only find lies? We live in the fantasies we’re given and then move on to new fantasies. Easter is Halloween. Ash Wednesday was Valentine’s Day. This calendar is a mess. Independence Day is April Fools Day. Day becomes night becomes day becomes night. I wake up and dream. I fall asleep and work. Labor Day is for veterans of the class war. On average, seventeen military veterans kill themselves each day, and that’s down from 17.2, so that’s supposed to be good news, seventeen military suicides a day, but I think the military is losing an invisible war.

I dig a couple of thoughts out of the ashes:

Memorial Day is for survivors to pretend that organized killing is a force that gives us meaning.

When the church becomes an empire the Christians become the crucifiers.

Behold, the Door opens.

Welcome to Level 7.

Watch your step.

Mind the gap.

You either leap or you fall.

Troubadours

 Melanie Safka died this week. She was a few years older than me and I didn’t know her and didn’t have any of her records, but she was on the second Woodstock album, which I did own, and she sang a song called Beautiful People, which I suppose is a corny flower child song but it has a line I’ve carried in my head all these years that sometimes comes to me, usually ironically, when I’m on public transportation:

Beautiful people

you ride the same subway as I do

every morning

That’s got to tell you something

We’ve got so much in common

I go the same direction that you do

So if you take care of me

Maybe I’ll take care of you

(Melanie singing Beautiful People is on YouTube)

How could I not have a crush on this cute hippie girl from Astoria?

Half Ukrainian, half Italian, and one hundred percent from Queens, but the family moved to New Jersey and I guess the people there didn’t get her because they taunted her for being a beatnik, so she dropped out of high school and became a folk singer in coffeehouses in Greenwich Village and somehow got some recognition in Europe but she wasn’t known by American audiences until she appeared onstage at Woodstock. While she was singing it began to rain and people were lighting candles and it looked to her like half a million fireflies and gave her an idea for a song that became a hit and made her a star.

She had a couple of songs on the radio, but the performance that got to me was the one I saw her give on TV at a Phil Ochs tribute a month after his suicide.

I have to tell you that I cried when I heard Phil Ochs had died and I cried again when I heard her sing his song Chords of Fame:

I found him by the stage last night 

He was breathing his last breath

A bottle of gin and a cigarette 

Was all that he had left

I can see you make the music

Cause you carry a guitar

But God help the troubadour

Who tries to be a star

(Chords of Fame, sung by Melanie, also on YouTube)

I’m no troubadour and I don’t want to be a star. I don’t know what I am, some kind of artist, and maybe if I had the right kind of lever and found a place to stand I could move the worlds of some of you beautiful people the way these troubadours moved my world. 

(I Ain't Marching Anymore sung by Phil Ochs, also on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rVTBCtYjoY

star struck

 

It came up recently in a conversation, I didn’t bring it up, but someone else was talking about the clear blue sky of September 11. 

I recall leaving the house that morning before dawn to go to the Trade Center and seeing Orion bright and dominating the Eastern sky over the house across the street. My father taught me how to identify Orion and how to follow the line drawn by the three stars of his belt to identify the Dog Star, Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. I read that the ancient Egyptians called that constellation Osirus. I think nomadic hunters looked for the rising of Orion the Hunter as a sign of summer’s end and the coming of autumn and time to head for the winter home.

September mornings before dawn I see Orion out my kitchen window when I’m making my oatmeal. Orion is my 9/11 memorial, so even those phantom towers, whatever they’re called, that light display in Lower Manhattan is irrelevant, although those twin beams always takes me by surprise — Yikes! — they still do that?

That day, after the attack and I got safe distance, I needed to call my parents to tell them I was OK, but none of the pay phones  or cell phones worked. When I finally got home to my landline there was a voicemail from my father.

His voice said, “I know the Lord is blessing you today.”

Many heavenly lights, you might say, are hidden in the city light, so my stargazing is limited to a handful of celestial objects. The sun, moon, Orion, some of the planets. I keep track of the lunar phases by looking out my windows.

I wonder about that time in human evolution when people began naming heavenly bodies they recognized and began to discern regularity in their movements until they could chart the paths of the sun, moon and other stars and begin contriving ways to organize their time, creating sciences and belief systems. But the driest physical description of the mechanics of our solar system doesn’t distract me from the amazingness of it all.

I get star struck by the miracle of a celestial array. Heaven is not really “Out There” and apart from us because we are part of it, flying on another celestial object flying around one of the stars. The heavens are among us and within us in our stardust bodies — this whole crazy scheme of matter in motion — this constant cosmic metamorphosis we are undergoing together. Radiant emptiness or whatever.

The veils of urban light pollution only reveal a handful of stars, nothing like the explosive light show of the night sky in upstate rural places. Only the biggest stars appear in the Manhattan sky. The smaller ones disappear in the city lights. If you’re walking in Midtown at night you might look up and see a planet like Jupiter or Venus or bright star like Sirius, the brightest star, which, as you can recall, you can identify by following the line of stars that are in Orion’s belt. I mean you can see stars in New York City but many people never look up at them. Sometimes I see shooting stars. I was walking on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint one night and saw the fiery trail of a meteorite. I looked around me and saw that no one else had noticed.

A monk is reading scripture to a corpse:

Hey, star child!

Now you have arrived at so-called “death.”

You should conduct yourself according to your conception of the spirit of enlightenment.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil.

Behold, I tell you a mystery!

We will not die, but we will be changed.

Whether or not the departed is still in some sense present and can hear the words and be liberated by them, the monk who is reading these words could hear them as a call to pay attention, to this holy moment in the presence of this corpse to whom he is reading, this holy moment of so-called death, I want to believe. 

I wanted to be able to say this without too much transcendental schmaltz.

A few weeks ago I in fact saw a man who might have been dead. He was flat on his back on Broadway. Not the famous Manhattan Broadway, but the gritty Broadway of North Brooklyn. I couldn’t see his face. He was in a black suit and he had black leather shoes and he was lying on dirty pavement, his ankles crossed like he was taking a nap on a sofa. He was surrounded by concerned neighbors and strangers who watched the police officer try to administer CPR. 

I don’t know if the resuscitation effort was successful or if the man was taken straight to the morgue. My own thoughts surprised me — that might not be a bad way to die. Maybe better than a hospital bed with sorrowful loved ones present. 

I was in this morbid frame of mind because at the time I was waiting for the results of a biopsy. Something on my shoulder had caught the eye of my dermatologist. She murmured something about melanoma. She cut the pimple off and sent it to a lab and meanwhile I thought about it a lot. This might be it. 

I wasn’t afraid of death, but I wondered what dying would be like. Rather than a slow lingering hospital death, dropping dead on Broadway didn’t seem so bad.

I made a End of Life To Do list, things I want to get done before I die:

First, finish assembling my book and make a few copies.

Second, put house in order, clean the studio and organize my art work so whoever has the task can easily take it to the dumpster when I’m dead.

Last, gather the required paperwork for death — a contact list, a DNR, a will and testament or some written statement of intention regarding my possessions, insurance,  cremation and interment costs, arrangements, etc. Get the place organized so it’s easy for my loft mates and neighbors to deal with.

I imagine I’m at my own graveside. Why do I seek the living — myself — among the dead? 

Why do you seek your life in your death?

My legacy will mean nothing to my ashes. It is hopeless to look for immortality in your work, but you can look for life while alive, if you truly live, and here I go into schmaltz.

Creator Spirit, or Spirit Creator, inspire me to write or paint something true, something that is worth being thought about for a while after I’m gone. Something that does not obstruct human evolution and is somewhat beneficial to the entire space full of sentient beings.

The lab report came out negative. It was a benign growth called a seborrheic keratosis.

After too many overcast days, there is a perfectly clear pre-dawn sky and I see Venus has arisen over a rooftop.

Hail morning star! 

Identified with Isis and Christ, the Queen of Heaven and the Bridegroom.

One night right after I turned twenty, half a century ago, I took some LSD and watched television with some friends. TV was a trip into the inferno so I went home and read the Revelation of St. John.

 After wrestling with the psychedelic angel all night, I sat at my bedroom window and waited.

I was certain something was going to happen, 

cosmic metamorphosis, the great unification, or my even own ascension or death. 

I was looking out my window into the dark before dawn and a light appeared over the Eastern horizon. I could almost see it move. I didn’t know if it was the Mothership or an ICBM or the Comet of Doom. 

I woke up my father. 

There is something in the sky, I said.

“That is the Morning Star,” he said. “The planet Venus.”

He had even written a song about it.

50 years later, I still look for it when it is there, and there it is. 

I raise my hands.

Hail, Morning Star!

What name do I use for the creative source of our lives?

Spirit Creator? Creator Spirit? God?

Or better to give no name to the abyss of the creative ground?