The "Infinite Now:" A Clue to Finding Forever

In the beginning
THE was the word and
the word was THE and
it was an Object and
the Object was good.

THE Object was the center and the focus.
The light which shone from it was the light
that was shone upon it,
the light illuminated
all that it touched and cast deep, black shadows
upon all that was
behind it and
under it and
darkness was there.

But when we had THE,
we had Everything and
we were good because we had it.

THE was all we needed and if we had THE our lives were complete and we were better than anyone around us and they envied THE Object and admired us.

But faded THE did, and waned THE did and lost its luster and attraction and the feelings faded and THE was no longer the Object that it once had been,

causing us to search

for an Object to be found that would be THE Object, and we would
be restored by it and we would
keep it glistening, never to let it get
dull and fade as had the olde one, THE . . .  such a THE which we had revered, but had now revealed to us as never we thought it would that it had:
Finiteness,
a limit,
an age or
eon, through which it would serve,
but then would pass and like a long, long play upon a stage,
surprise us with a dropping curtain when just
we felt that it would never end, but entertain us
throughout all eternity,
or least-wise 'til we dozed The Sleep,
bigger than all other sleeps combined,
whenever that transpires, "Later,"
sometime amidst the infinite years.
 
So THE becomes a Finite THE,
THE With and End, to our befuddlement, but why?

We should have known that Infinites need Finites to exist or How can they?
(Exist, that is).

They have no foil against which they can ring the trueness of
their depth, save when compared to
Things that never end.

And that's the Object of
The Story of THE, An Object,
with a start and end and a life unlike all others.
It exists and fades, no matter that we hold as tight as ever.

THE has held us and we it,
THE slips away in spite of all, and we
are left with empty hands,
a state for which we weren't prepared, but which prepares us
for the coming phase,
unlike our previous plans which have prepared us
for nothing, save
frustration that our energies all went for
naught.
We "should have stood in bed" for all the good it did.

We watch THE Object go and realize that We have Not.
(Gone, that is, with it).

We're left behind to watch THE go,
to watch another THE appear as though a Grand Supply of THEs
was just behind the hill,
awaiting Time
or Chance
or Grand Design
to give the cue for it to show its Face.

We watch THE come and go and, disenchanted by the passing line,
seek refuge in a place that's more akin to our
felt needs
and wants
and longings, deep, primeval, for a womb, a cave, a hideaway.
So,
crazed,
we wing our way from here to there,
then stop.

We realize THE's gone,
in decadence it's disintegrated right before our eyes and  . . .
wait.

We're not only still bemused, but also back from one full circuit 'round the castle, moat and all, and right back where we started from.

How nice.

The path is Infinite,
a circle
without ups and downs
or corners sharp
or curves all winding.

Arcing slowly to the left
or right,
I guess we could decide,
but always coming back to Here,
much better than Olde THE, a Finite Cuss who always disappointed us
by crumbling in the End.

So now we know:

the game's to Play ... to PLAY, not THINK ABOUT.
The Game's to Play for Playin's sake,
the opposite of "Play to Win" or
"Play to Lose" or
"Play to Smash Someone to Smithereens."

Who cares about Them anyway?
We've got Our Game to Play
and
They
have
Theirs.

Save passing in the night,
the twains shall never meet,
and that in darkness,
not knowing what transpired,
except for wind and dust and
clacking clicks of wheels on steel
defining cracks between the rails
by beating out a rate-dependent rhythm of
"clickety-clacks mean
steely cracks:
you'd better not
fall in one."

THE seems to be forgotten now as
Play we must at new-found games.
Who knows their names, or cares? No one I see,
although I can't see everyone, so
someone,
somewhere
might know what to call this, but
The Game
is good enough for me.

The Game; it energizes and it teaches as we Play.
There's no way to lose except to stop,
because
the Playing of the Game is Winning and
the Winning's in the Playing
not
the start or
middle or
the end, like THE, Olde THE, Olde Useless THE,
whose passing never indicated Joy was on the way
to take the place of Long-lost THE.

Well, not so much was Joy the
real replacement for Olde THE,
as was Relief,
my God! Relief!

I never thought there was so much to feel
when THE was gone
as when I first met true Relief.

With Happiness so uppermost in song and story,
fable,
lore and
Constitution
who would think Relief would hold a candle to
Pursuit of Happiness?

The thing about Relief:
when it comes, it's Now,
not later,
not tomorrow,
after meals, when meat and spinach are all
gone and then
dessert
is carried in.

No, not Relief.  Relief says:
"Hey! I'm here! It's me, right Now,
                                       right Here,
                                       let's Revel,
                                       God I'm such a Party Person!

"Don't you get it?  I'm Not This,
                                     not That,
                                     not THE
                                     or Them
                                     or anything External.

"Just Relief, in Here, down Here in inside from top to toe I'll
make you feel content, serene and calm.  And that, along with
Common,
Unexciting and
Ordinary beats
Happiness
hands down."

The outcome of the process is to realize a Truth:
we've gone from THE to THE and found that THE is wanting
by itself,
it ages, dies and leaves us
seeking yet another THE to take its place.

But, as a word alone, THE's not a strong contender.
So then we went for Infinite,
since THE was Finite,
endings leaving us non-plussed,
empty and
anxious for
"some more" of This or That.

However, with its Infiniteness, the Infinite leaves
a big, black
Question Hole:

"Infinite" in what direction, where, when, how, with whom and why?

The answer is, of course, Right Now.

The Infiniteness is greatest use to us Right Now.

It turns out that, alone, the three are
of no use to us
or to each other.

However:

Combining THE with Infiniteness, with Now and,
like a three-leg stool,
they hold each other up,
supporting THE with Infiniteness
at just the time we need it,
Now,
since that is
all we have.

You can't sit on that stool tomorrow and
if the date's "today"
you've missed your chance to do it "yesterday,"
but Now You Can,
forever Now,
and ever.

No time constraints,
no limits
nor no bounds.

THE Infinite Now permits you, in its wisdom (and hopefully in yours), to take a chunk of time so big you can't imagine where it ends or starts or where the middle is, because it doesn't have those parts to worry you.  It doesn't start, it doesn't end, it just IS, and since it IS Right Now, let's use it, but don't rush, no need, I'll give you one Now at a time and if you need another one I'll give that to you too.

Time to get to work.
Gotta go.

See you "Later,"
whenever That is.

Why "Life Stinks" doesn't

Comments on “Life Stinks” which, your mother will tell you, you should get the DVD of and watch, while contemplating the message(s) for you it is sending (already) !

            Mel Brooks is not wrong.   The Critics are wrong. The Critics say Mel brooks stinks.  Mel Brooks says life stinks. I say The Critics stink and they have completely missed the point of the movie,  del Brooks did not stink as the 2,000 year old man or in Blazing Saddles or High Anxiety or ...

            He is one of the world's funniest people and a comedic genius.  So let's think about this for a minute.  Do you really think that the comedic genius who has either written or picked the successful scripts like the ones above over the years would be blind to the LACK of humor in this work? Do you think someone who loves being the Best Buffoon would unconsciously pick a Non-Boffo showcase for his talents?

            After all, this man does not have to say to himself "let the Schvartz be with you," He IS THE SCHVARTZ! And the Schvartz, take it from me (and you ought to because I don't deserve to have it) . . . The Schvartz Never Does Anything Unconsciously . . . sooooo I think you should weigh the idea that when The Schvartz, who has been funny for 2,000 years, does a piece that EVEN HE CAN'T MAKE FUNNY, then maybe, just maybe (which, of course, means For Sure!) he did it to sensitize us to the things around us today which are so bad, need so much attention and are being ignored by so many ... to get us to think ... to fill the intellectual blind spot into which we shove the homeless, the poor (urban and otherwise), the poor (urbane and not so urbane and otherwise), those people in whom a sane idea could not find a home (a slightly different kind of "homeless" person).

            What if we reject the hypothesis (which is even difficult to write about it is so ridiculous) that some mindless twit in the finance department of the studio has been told "Give Brooks whatever he wants, $10, $20 million, whenever he wants it."

            He would probably get a bigger laugh from the request for $20 million than he would for the jokes in a bad script.  These are the times when 8, 10, 12 writers go over and over a script before it is produced.  So I personally think we have to reject the hypothesis that the picture was produced by zombies in their sleep spending down overflowing money coffers to avoid paying tax on earned income.   

            Anyone who has ever tried to tell a joke, write a skit or get a laugh at a party knows two things: 1. you have to think hard to get it right; and, 2. thinking is hard work.  So this movie didn't just "happen," it was created by hard-thinking people who know two more things about comedy than we do: nobody likes pain of any sort and all good comedy is based on suffering, hopefully the suffering of someone other than ourselves.

            Therefore, assuming that the apparently mindless comedic genius of Brooks has to have a mandatory sense of the painful, then what kind of movie would he produce if he wanted to talk about suffering to an audience that doesn't even want to THINK about the pain and suffering of others, let alone DO anything about it?   VOILA!  "LIFE STINKS! Already !! "

-------------------------

Life Stinks: IMDB pages: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102303/

The Death of Pumpkin

     He was 52, married, with a lovely wife and three children, a girl and two boys, and was, as liver patients go, a deeper, creamier, richer looking yellow than any patient I had seen in a long time.  He was also dead, a fact which I did not have to go all the way up to the sixth floor to tell them, the family.  They had been with him night and day throughout his hospitalization. They had all been there when he took his last breath.

     The problem I was having with the man was he was three years younger than me.  It was nothing new, pronouncing the death of someone younger, but his condition seemed to create a unique new awareness in the back of my mind for the first time.  I have seen all kinds of patients die, kids, young people, very old folks who "have lived a long, fulfilled life" and not ever thought much about any of them.  But this guy was different.

     The questions kept coming and I couldn't answer them.  Was it the way he looked: healthy, firm, younger than me, in good physical shape, like a fun guy, with an interesting face carrying a permanent smile, even in death, well-proportioned in this day and age of fat, sloppy, overweight and out of shape people for whom all of life was a spectator sport.

     Was it just his age?  Was it the injustice of the disease that had started in his colon with a small, cancerous polyp, spread to the lymph nodes and then into his pancreas and liver and stopped the vital functions of digestion and protein synthesis and bile excretion (and a thousand other things the liver does) from continuing to function properly?   He certainly looked intelligent enough to have done all of the right things about a serious problem like colon cancer, especially if he had known it was growing inside his body and getting ready to kill him just as surely as terrorists mow down innocent folks in middle eastern airports.  I mean, the cancer didn't "know" him any more than a Palestinian terrorist on a shooting spree knows a Canadian tourist as they both walk through the Rome airport, one looking for a vacation, the other looking for a victim.

     Yes.  Maybe it was the innocence combined with his lack of awareness and ability to have taken preventive or curative measures that disturbed me so.  He never had a chance.  It was like choosing the wrong summer to take a trip to see the Vatican, or the wrong night to be in the German cafe where the bomb went off and killed two US servicemen who had just gone in for one last beer to end the night.

     That, however, didn't seem to be the whole answer to why he kept drifting back into my consciousness for weeks on end — weeks after I had walked into the room, checked his pulse, noted he wasn't breathing and said "I'm sorry, he's gone" to the family.  I looked right into his wife's eyes when I said it.  I was on the side of the bed nearest the door and she was sitting on the opposite side, holding his cold, yellow hand and gently stroking it as if to say "everything will be all right very soon."

     It was worse than looking into the urban chasms surrounding the observation deck of the Empire State building.  It was stomach-churning, sick, like the empty feeling of stark terror you get when you are looking in to a dark room wondering what made the floor creak, who is lurking there, what is going to happen to you, who is going to hurt you and how bad is it going to feel, how alone you will feel when you are   in the dark being beaten up and unable to fight back.  Even if you don't walk into the room because your fear the dark and the pain, the mugger will snatch you by the arm or the coat or whatever is lose, drag you into the pitch black and cause you deep, acute, sharp, screaming agony that will follow you for the rest of your life.  It will be such a deep hurt your life will never be the same.  You will never pass a darkened room without feeling a surge of devastating panic.  You will be fearful from that moment on because you are now aware you don't know what will happen next, ever, to you or to the loved ones you depend on and want to share your life with.

     I knew a psychiatrist in Kansas City named Vic who taught me the secret of psychiatric diagnosis, the complexities, the intertwined and complicated methods of how to put a psychiatric label on a patient . . . how to do it quickly and accurately. Vic said the way to do it is to get in the room with the patient, clear your mind of all thoughts, ask the patient to start talking . . . Just talking about anything . . . and "listen with your eyes closed to how the patient makes you feel."  You "ignore the words and listen to the music."  If he talks and you feel angry, he is hostile.  If you feel wild and agitated, he is manic.  If you feel down in the dumps, he is depressed.  If you feel crazy and confused and like things are unreal, he is schizophrenic.

     I thought of Vic at the very moment I looked into the eyes of Pumpkin's wife.  I felt such fear a mental block was raised immediately.  Now, I thought of Vic again, as terror flooded my brain a second time, I realized what had been going on each day since Pumpkin died.  I hadn't been worried he was three years younger than me, or that I could be harboring some sneaky damn disease that was creeping up behind me like his colon cancer did to him.  What I had been feeling was his wife's total emptiness, despair and monumental loss of a 30-year companion and best friend.  My own anguish was compounded by a wave of nausea when I thought back to the moment when I babbled "I'm sorry, he's gone," comparing those powerless words to the profound depth and breadth of the pain caused by this breach in her life.

     I vaguely remembered the void in the eyes of Pumpkin's children.  I swept across their gaze as I turned to leave the room.  The suffering was almost overwhelming as I realized how correct Vic had been . . even more correct than he could have known . . . more than Just a single patient, you can diagnose a whole room full of agony in one quick glance across the faces of a group.

     Pumpkin was still alive in their minds, which made the loss much more acute . . . the pain was nearly killing them, too. What Vic didn't tell me was how deeply I might feel the patient's pain that I was trying to diagnose.  What he didn't KNOW to tell me was I would feel the pain of all four people into whose eyes I stared that night.  Maybe it was a good thing he didn't tell me . . . or did he keep it from me by design?  If I had known before hand, I might not have gone into the room at all.

     At the time I didn't know why this common on-call episode had been so different from all the rest.  All I knew was it was hard to sit still and write the last note in the chart . . . the one where you have to say "Expired at ..." and then write down the time.  I scribbled it as fast as possible, walked quickly to the elevator, rode back to the second floor, went straight to the call room and threw up.

     Now I know the answer: I looked at death and didn't even flinch; I looked at life and felt what wives and daughters, sons and husbands feel when someone dies.

     If I don't quit looking in their eyes from now on, I'll have to give up medicine.

People Come and People Go

PEOPLE COME AND PEOPLE

GO

SOME ARE GOOD AND SOME

SO-SO

WHO CARES?

NO ONE INQUIRES WHAT'S

INSIDE

THEY JUDGE THE CATTLE BY THE

HIDE

WHAT MATTERS?

NOT YOUR THOUGHTS NOR INNER

FEELINGS

NOR SECRET INTERPERSON

DEALINGS

SO WHAT?

THE SO-SO ONES WITH PRETTY

HIDES:

BEWARE OF MOTIVES DEEP

INSIDE

THEY CARE.

ABOUT THEMSELVES, THEIR WANTS, THEIR

NEEDS

THEIR ACTIONS ARE SUCH SELFISH

DEEDS

THEY WANT.

THE GOOD ONES PLAN AND THINK,

INQUIRE

THEY HAVE NO BEAUTY BUT

ASPIRE

THEY GIVE.

THEIR THOUGHTS ARE ALWAYS OF THE

OTHER:

WIFE AND EX-WIFE, SISTER-BROTHER.

THEY PLAN.

BEAUTY HIDES BENEATH A

SKIN

TRANSLUCENT, ALMOST PAPER

THIN

THEY BRUISE.

FANCY THOUGHTS BRING

RIDICULE

SO THEY USUALLY PLAY THE

FOOL

SO FRIGHTENED.

SHOW THE PEOPLE HOW YOU

THINK

NEVER, (WHAT THEY DO IS

SHRINK).

GET SMALLER.

SQUEEZE THE LITTLE MAN

INSIDE

QUIET, QUIET, STEM THE

TIDE

BE COOL.

ALL THE TIME HIS MIND IS

BURNING

IN HIS GUT IDEAS

CHURNING

THINKING.

SLOWLY COURAGE GAINS A

HOLD

HE GETS BIGGER, STRONGER,

BOLD.

HE'S MOVING.

SO HE TESTS, SUGGESTS

PROPOSES

AND THEY ALL LOOK DOWN THEIR

NOSES

NEVER GOOD ENOUGH.

BRIEF THE FIRE AND SHORT THE

HEAT

QUICKLY STUNG AND SIMPLY

BEAT

ONE WORD.

SO WHAT HAPPENS TO THE

SOFT ONES

TO THE ONES WITH

QUIET BEAUTY

DO THEY WILT AND DIE LIKE FLOWERS

IN THE FALL

DO THEIR DUTY

FOLLOW ALL THE OTHER

PATTERNS

NATURES HAS PRESCRIBED FOR

CYCLES

DROP THEIR PETALS AND GO

DORMANT

DEAD-LIKE

UGLY

BARREN STEMS?

PROBABLY.

APPRARENTLY, (THE SECOND IS A BETTER CHOICE)

BUT THOSE SCIENTISTS WHO

DISCERN NATURE'S

CUNNING WISDOM

CAMOFLAGED

KNOW THAT

DEEP

WITHIN

AN UGLY, BARREN COVER

IS A BUDDING LEAF AND FLOWER

UNDISCERNABLE TO ALL BUT

INTELLECT

UNDETECTABLE TO ALL BUT

IMAGINATION

INVISIBLE TO ALL BUT

PATIENCE AND

THOSE WHO BELIEVE

IN MAGIC

BUT WHY NOT?

IT'S A GREAT DEFENSE!

LIE DOWN AND DIE AND

WHO BOTHERS A DEAD BODY

NO BODY HURTS

A LEAFLESS TWIG

PEOPLE DON'T PICK PETALS OFF

WILTED BUDS

HEAT BURNS (INFERNO) IN THE HUMUS. GUEST, (EDGAR?)

HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL IN THE HUMAN BREAST, EDGAR.

HEAP DUNG (INFERNAL) ON THE HUMOR,

LEST IT SPRING TO LIFE

INFERNO-LIKE

WARMING THOSE

BREASTS AND

BRINGING LIGHT WHERE

ONLY DARKNESS LAY

ENCASING THE DEAD TWIG

NOW INTAGLIO AGAINST A

SETTING SUN

A SILHOUETTE OF WHAT

ONCE WAS

NOW COVERED WITH THE VERY

NOURISHMENT

(AD NAUSEUM)

(CUM PUNISHMENT)

THAT WILL FEED THE TWIG

ETERNAL SURVIVOR

BACK TO LIFE

FROM WHENCE IT CAME

TO       WHERE IT IS..

TO       WHERE IT WILL ETERNALLY RESIDE

HAVING LIVED AND

TAKEN LIFE FROM DUNG AND

DUNG FROM LIFE AND

MADE ONE OUT OF BOTH

TO SPROUT

AND GROW

AND BLOOM

AND FOOL US ALL

BY SEEMING TO DIE, BUT ONE MORE TIME

REINCARNATE ITSELF

DEFIANTLY AND

ETERNALLY

SELF-RENEWING

ANACHRONISM.