Split Infinities

 

Split Infinities

I’m neither the Best nor the Beast

Neither The King of the World nor

Aqualung.

You younguns won’t get that

reference. Or maybe you

will.

What difference does that

make?

I don’t get my own references,

most of the Time.

(Only God)

There’s Nothing That gets them All

I only see what’s in here.

You only see what’s in there.

What is a split Infinity?

halved

Is that a linguistic term or a

math term? It’s only

linguistic in English. It’s an

Imaginary Number

And what’s left is...Infinite.

There’s no way I can know it.

Or is there?

Everyone misinterprets everyone else.

Sometimes my ex hears things I say

and sees things I do and figures

me for The Weirdest Man in the World

When I had no such intent.

But is it not written,

“Thou hast not seen in this

world, nor wilt Thou in the

next, anyThing that Is not God?”

So Who’s doing the talking?

Who’s doing the interpreting

hearing

Is it not also that, “The Kingdom

of God is within you?”

Where is The Kingdom not?

Nowhere, Never.

¿We can only get it all wrong, right?

We can only get It wrong, alright? And that’s All Right, Alright?

When I say beautiful shit

and someone hears...beautiful

shit that they know is God

talking to that one alone and

naught

it has nothing to do with what

I heard myself say, Who’s to

say it wasn’t in there. It’s

exactly right.

When I say beautiful shit and

someone hears ugly, misshapen, demonic

Beast noises, is that not God

hearing

deciding what to hear, think, see, (fear seer sheer cliff beauty fabric veil)

feel?

Is it less “just what I needed to hear” because it’s angular

and hard?

A guy wrote, “On the Mistaking of the Algebra for

Magick.” Maybe I’ll write “On Mistaking

The Magick for Algebra.” What’s an

imaginary number, anyhow?

Some younguns will get it. Some

old farts won’t. Age is just a number,

right? And numbers are Magick.

How to Circle Perfectly...Without Going Down the Drain

 

HOW TO CIRCLE PERFECTLY...

WITHOUT GOING DOWN THE DRAIN

It appears that the Thing can no longer be encompassed by a fb box. Not even the Former('s)(Farmer's?) sentence. Or the latter, i guess. You see what just happened there? Probably not. Someone, maybe. "It ain't me, Man." You can't see Me." I'm not saying I'm ditching Zuck just yet, but just now, if you Do want to see me, go here: t.me@Hipgnotist

or t.me@Hipgnosis21 where this will be posted, or https://hipgnosis21.blogspot.com/ still.

Yesterday or so a sweet Little Sister of mine was showering in the hot rain that comes geysering through my little firehose like Old Faithful, (Easter/Ishtar Egg! Here’s another—hi E!), and after a bit she asked, “Sooo...what is your religion???” I thought for a split second and said that the Dalai Lama’s response to the same question was, “My religion is Kindness.” But of course, that’s not All. How could it Be? (oh—i see—not herenow though). Soon after the latter exchange, the beautiful playlist attached somewhere down below was Reminded to me.

/give certain angles\

The first NINE tunes constitute an album that Mom gave me to play over and over again on my bedroom floor with one of those crappy plastic record players for little kids that were especially cool because you could fold them up and bring them with you. Albums were a bitch to carry but I could tote a pretty good pile of cardboard 33-1/3s from the back of a box of Super Sugar Crisps or whatever, (that’s right—I thought Bobby Sherman and The Archies were pretty cool; Donny Osmond, too, though I don’t think he ever made Kellogg’s greatest hits). The album is This Time Around, by that true and incredibly Old Soul, John Bassette, (God Rest His Soul), recorded and published by “Spa” John Prusnik, (if I’m spelling that correctly), at Prusnik’s Tinkertoo Records, situated in his Rubik's cube, (lol), of a rent controlled brownstone/hippie pad/recording studio/plant nursery/leather spa/and all-’round organic fuckeroo along the right-hand, (of course), side of Hessler Street in University Circle in Cleveland, Ohio, in a year waaay the hell on back in the day, for me at least—at least, This Time Around for me.

Back in the late 60s and early 70s, when I was very small—Christopher Robin small—Hessler Street was Cleveland’s small-scale attempt at a local reconstruction of Haight-Ashbury. As true a Hippie enclave as I’ve ever witnessed. It was the first I got a whiff of patchouli, (I spend years trying to figure out what that was), the first place I ever saw long-haired, bearded gentle men, the first place I caught a rumor of Mama Cannabis in the air, (people were rather more circumspect around little kids back then). I guess I could have been as young as three years old when I first found myself there, and met those guys, and the rest of the Hessler Street crowd.

Mom, bless her crazed heart, still claims she was never a hippie. I used to laugh at her as I dredged through memories of “Be-Ins” at, (I think), Carnegie Park in University Circle during the Summer of Love and Hessler Street itself and the like. I suspect she always said that because of her once-violent opposition to cannabis, but I get her denial now. I’m no hippie, Jonathan, and I’m pretty sure not so many ever existed except for in Plato’s Forms. On the other hand...another whole piece, that’s what. Perfect Circles and all.

Bassette was a super-beautiful, traveling, haunted, guitar-toting, Black hippie that lived or hung around Hessler Street, which at the time, along with University Circle proper, was an odd island of whiteness surrounded by the dark-skinned sea that was the East Side of Cleveland. Bear in mind, the country was on fire that year, and Mom drove me across town, rolling through neighborhoods that were literally smoldering, like whatever it’s called around 55^th and Chester and thereabouts, where they still had Black Panther murals featuring Mayor Perk getting stomped in the ass until the late ‘90s. The hospital where they kept my brother going that I’ve written about was part of the University of the Circle, so we/she sort of had little choice, but I’m pretty certain her extra 45-minute trips to deliver me to the Nursery School at The Church of the Covenant and Black Mrs. Klender(or however that’s spelled)’s day-care nursery-school class was quite and downright deliberate, along with her perhaps less than subtle visits to the Pope’s house, and other efforts to prevent as lily-white an upbringing as was otherwise available in the alarmingly racist North at the time.

Don’t forget that mere months ahead of my birth I wouldn’t have been allowed to piss in the same toilet as a Brother if I had been physically capable of doing so. Now,—well we forget all that, sometimes, at least us pale folk do. (Also remember—I am perfectly free, now, and capable of physical feats that few others can match. Paul, or the Romans, or someone had it a bit off: Christ can do all things through me when He strenghten-ethes me). I did mention that I intended to argue with Paul once before, you may recall. That crazy guy. And I piss in whatever toilet is handy.

Prusnik and Bassette fitted right in. More than that—they embodied Hessler Street and the Hippie thing as if they had stepped out of the world of Plato’s Forms and donned flesh like some sort of Avatars. Hessler Street would by no means have existed at all, had it not been Created by John and John, and other folks like them, (to the extent that something like that existsed). <(Not a typo right there, Y’all. I had to add it to the processor’s dictionary. Freeware, of course).

Prusnik was almost as good a friend as a tiny, weird child like I was could hope to find in the whole wide world. He taught me leatherwork, plant husbandry, how to make kombucha, (long before it was a thing), though I don’t know that I knew he did, until just now, writing this, Section—of a very circly curlicue. The ones that came the closest to that—the conscious teaching—ever, in my Time Around just now, were the Smith family. Maybe some reading this will recall Andrew—Andy, a brilliant and kind man full of joie de vie and art and laughs. Shit. I have to pause to clear my eyes. Even with these tears I can still see. Not many people that have lived a life like mine have friends that still love them after nearly 60 years, even during the past 10 years or so. Waitaminit. I guess that last sentence is still true but on the other hand (!) not one mofo has lived a life like mine with it’s joys and disappointments, loves and perturbations, lived out in my little version of the mind/body/soul conundrum. Neither has any lived Your life with all its sameness and differentness at the same fucking time….

Imma tell you right now, you will get a bit more out of this piece if you bear in mind that we are considering Circles, here. Roundness. Perfection. Life. Love. Happiness. Maybe even free will and an infinity of tangential subject matter. But those are All Nothing. I swear to you, (and I take such oaths very seriously, indeed), that I am the happiest dude I ever met. So, ya know—pay attention. Try and keep up. This will seem to Circle around a bit but I’ll try and avoid Circular reasoning. We all know circles contain irrational Mysteries though, Right?

Dang. Suddenly I may need to pause for a slice of the pizza pie in the fridge….

Captains of Industry with their stupid fucking tightly-wrapped ego-Magick rituals with deliberate holes in them so no one can get through the tangle, (ha! Fooled them; when you do it that way, you can’t either), and nootropics, cybernetic quantum singularities and gmo nursery rhymes, their women and servants and headmasters (we don’t need no) so they never have to touch their own vile offspring or ever ever Love at all, Really.

Bassette, on the other hand, and Prusnik, the Smiths, Buddy with the husky named Emma Peel, the dying kids at Case Western Reserve Rainbow Baby’s and Children’s Hospital, (we knew the “Boy in the Bubble,” back then), were all fucked up as hell, stressed out, strung out, wrung out, and left out. But they knew how to live. Hard. And how to love. Mostly our family was a mess. So was everyone else’s. Sometimes we hated each other, but...not really. Bassette’s songs were all about being strung out on heroin, rich child molesters, ditching the city for Colorado or Virginia...and yet, he stayed. Until that one last fateful day, (for him, anyhow), when he passed through The Veil, never to be seen again on this side. If he had lingered, he’d have seen how the community staged a memorial concert for him, playing his songs to remember him by. He’d have seen how this guy writing this shit can’t do it without frequent pauses to clear his eyes of tears.

The tears are not of sadness, though there may be a tinge of it. They’re joyful, with the Joy of long history, Perfect Circles. It’s so nice on Hessler Street. They still stage the Hessler Street Fair every year, I think. I haven’t been in decades; I can’t imagine that it might really be the same. How could it be? The Smiths don’t live there any longer and the kids I knew are pushing 60. John and John are long gone from this World. Everything Changes, Nothing is Lost.

When I contemplate this sort of thing, I can tell that it’s surely no wonder my life has been as weird as it has been. Between Bassette’s lyrics, Dr. Seuss, and L. Frank Baum and Judy Garland carrying on about shit going on Somewhere Over the Rainbow, along with so many other things—well, what did anyone expect. I’m quite glad to be here, though, this side of the rainbow. Did you ever see a coronal rainbow? The half-circles we ordinarily see are just that. Only half. The whole thing is a circle, and a much more Perfect Circle than we can ever draw here on Earth, no matter how much artifice or intelligence we employ. And just where did Dorothy go, anyhow?

I’m not so sure this piece has answered Bre’s question about my “religion.” I’m not so sure it can be answered in a day, or a single write-up, or a trip to a Methodist Sunday-school where you might get asked not to come back if you ask too many hard questions, or a lifetime of bullshit. But here, in John Bassette’s songs, with me from the cradle as they say, is my religion. If you can’t understand how the whole thing adds up, just go straight to Credo: I believe in Love. Damn Hippies.

John Bassette, Next Time Around+

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fa-pRGJzFE&list=PLg13GlTHQo11AXwn3qSgV6QfgTa6ly5Ye

Blame It; On the Moon?

 

Blame It; On the Moon?

Y’all are so funny with your efforts to Evolve. That shit takes bazillions of years and it’s EXCRUCIATING! It’s all starts and fits and cul de sac and deaths and cleft palates and Hearts that com out upside-down and backwards with leaks and shit in them. Mothers that have to watch their kids die while hoping against Hope they don’t themselves. It’s HORRIBLE, really. Do you really want to pack all that into this one precious curlicue of life?

What you want is to TRANSCEND.

Think on these Things. (For as a Man—or Woman—thinketh…).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBJYxPN8qIA

Red Dress

 

Red Dress

Is there a difference between

Shit under the bed and

Shit on top of the bed?

Well, yes and no

No and Yes;

So think about That.

And put on your Red Dress

And Dance.

Secret Garden

Secret Garden

The one word that comes closest to being “bad,” is

“Can’t,” but, even still, it’s a matter of timing;

And the timing is so rarely apt for that word;

One so rarely finds the time for it.

The only thing you can’t do, really, truly, and never will,

Can’t do is

Control Another.

You don’t deserve this stark, humorless,

Friendless life; no one does.

So why create it?

If/then

If/then

I see you, coming for me. I love you.

                You can’t.

                I won’t.

                I will it not.

I will us, together.

If you think I’m talking to you

Then,

I am.

I respect and trust you.

“I respect and trust you.”

This is just conflict;

It kinda hurts, but it

Doesn’t hurt anything

I know you can see it. I

Have faith in you.

And we danced.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB1Q-PfUvN0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIimr0gVg-c

MLK Day in Houston

Founder of Sparrow Hawk Village Carol E. Parrish wrote, “Once a healthy and vibrant land, our country needs to be healed of past and present violence.” That, i think, is what Martin Luther King Jr. was all about, and the reason huge crowds come out for parades and such on that day we have set aside to honor King each year. This year my wife and i marched in Houston’s parade with Randa Fox and her Not On Our Watch America Foundation, (NOOW), a Houston based non-profit seeking to put an end to childhood sexual abuse, and to facilitate healing for victims.

Now, i’ve never been around Houston before, let alone gotten out to a parade. I knew next to nothing about MLK Day in Houston before the morning of the 19th of January just passed. The theme of this year’s parade was Unity, i heard, a dearly needed principle following the events of 2014, and the nature of the relationships in the United States in their wake. The notion is somewhat confused by the fact that there were two separate and competing parades in very close proximity here. The MLK Grande Parade said they expected 300,000 people at their event that took place more or less simultaneously with the Black Heritage Society “Original” Parade in we marched. Still, a  huge and comparably sized crowd managed to attend our parade.  We walked around 20 blocks, each fully lined with families and revelers.

With over 2 million residents, Houston is largely hispanic. Blacks and whites share a fairly even share of around half of the overall population, give or take, according to the Houston Planning Department. Ours being the Black Heritage Society Parade may help explain in part why there were virtually no white faces in the crowd. There were a few, to be sure, but i think there were more white participants in the lineup than spectators on the way. This truth, and the nature of the group we marched with gave me a chance to make a couple observations that i may not have had elsewhere. In Colorado Springs, a city with many demographic distortions, we really don’t get much of a handle on the pulse of Black politics. We also attended a march in Colorado Springs following the decision not to prosecute in the Mike Brown case. One came away from that expression with the sense that Black America is angry, and the way it went down in Ferguson afterward seemed to support the perception. Not so in Houston. Though there may well have been anger among the crowds, the expression toward us, politically motivated marchers made up of an unusually pale mix of ethnicities, was very favorable; not one heckler attempted to deride our message of protection  against sexual abuse for children. On the contrary, quite many along the route were vocally supportive.

I also found it heartening that many of the banners and signs in and around the place carried messages of unity. The “amens” we heard and general thumbs up we saw in support of Not On Our Watch America were gratifying and encouraging. Maybe the frogs in the pot are beginning to notice the water has heated to a near-boil. That is, maybe the awful behavior of the police around and about, and the stupid wars, and things like rampant sexual abuse in our casual human trafficking and rape culture have finally become so unbearable that we are willing to come together.

Given that some statistics indicate that nearly 30% of U.S. teens experience sexual abuse, i have to know--have to admit--that more than a few in the crowd of supporters we passed were harboring dark secrets. I myself am sure that business as usual is still untenable. But still the degree of warmth we felt from the crowd truly served to buoy spirits. Our ability to share parade chanting rhythms with the group supporting migrant worker rights behind us did the same. Even the group of Republicans Against Marijuana Prohibition served to advocate unity by its very existence.

I really hate writing about race. There always seems to be some hidden pitfall that lifts someone’s scales. This event was not about that, though, even if MLK Day can not pass in these times without noticing some racial elements. I’ve never been prone to writing about sexual abuse, either; it really never occurred to me to do so. The more i travel around and interact with folks, though, the more i see that most of the women i know have some story to tell about an uncle or a neighbor, or even parents having committed some heinous act or another. These are separate matters, of course. There likely exists some kind of racial breakdown of instances of sexual abuse. That’s not where the action lies, though. Abuse crosses every line we know, and seems at a glance to be increasing rather than diminishing as one might expect in a supposedly enlightened era, and yet very little discussion takes place in public. Randa’s NOOW is out to change that, in as public a manner possible, and our participation in the parade with its friendly crowd was definitely a step forward. I can’t explain how gratifying it was to be so well received by the Black community of Houston as we helped to publicize such a volatile public issue.

Our country has a lot of baggage. Conquest, genocide, unfounded wars, and, yes, child abuse, both sexual and psychic have all come together to build a national identity that needs care, for sure. It’s lucky for us that we have folks like Martin Luther King Jr., and Randa Fox to help us separate ourselves from some dark history and build a lighter present that is better than tolerable, but full of real living, support for one another, and above all, Love. Sure, things are not perfect yet today, but as one of Randa’s myriad bits of literature points out, if we all work together, as we did in Houston, and keep at it, we can and will make things better.

http://blackheritagesociety.org/

Orpha

On January 5th of 2015 Orpha Bass passed along to the next world at her brother and my father Ralph’s house in West Virginia.

On the day that Mister Rogers died back in 2003 i shed a tear for my lost innocence. This is a similar day, and Orpha’s passing is a similar milestone. Orpha always seemed a strangely innocent person to me. She was a fixture of my childhood, part of the old generation Bass clan that lived along Rockside Road in Independence, Ohio, that included Dad’s mother Gertrude and her family. My great-Grandfather Ulrich had rolled into the United States during the late 1860s, bought a piece of land and established both a farm and one of those Europhile communities that don’t seem to exist so much any longer, at least not out west where i live, now. The family, including Orpha, Grandma Bass, Uncle Paul, Paul’s wife Mary, and Cousin Ray lived together in the old farmhouse. Aunt Ruth and my dad lived away with their respective families. Another Bass sibling, Ruth, and her husband Cifford--Uncle Buddy--were often there during those weekend gatherings with cousins Clifton and Janet. So far as i know, Dad’s entire generation was born there in that house, Orpha in 1925.

We spent pretty much every weekend there at the farm, living out scenes from Tom Sawyer in the North, (mingled with Kafka), without even knowing it. Orpha, an inveterate and talkative storyteller, would tell us how things were along Rockside back in the days when her dad would send her to the market on State Rd. to bring home beer in buckets. She had to walk slowly on the way back to avoid spilling more than half of the evening’s libations. She told us about the house next door, that had been a schoolhouse for a spell, after Ulrich donated it for that purpose. A family lived there by the time i knew anything about it. She told stories, and kept track of all the names the faces in those old sepia photographs bespoke. Those days--my story-forming days--were the days when fantasies were the staple of life, and anything was possible on any Sunday afternoon.

We kids would pass muster at the house and then scatter for the woods, or the barn, or the gully, to pursue some crackpot idea, (often of mine), or another. We started clubs, climbed around in the old barn that my granddad and his dad had built once and then dismantled and moved later, and dug through the ancient artifacts in the two gullies that had been used for dumping since the late 19th century. We smashed stuff for fun that would have made the guys from American Pickers weep. We got lost in the cornfields and the elder children would scare the younger in due course with silly monsters and impossible initiations. Once when i had gotten a little too much of the stress of my youth commingled with boldness engendered by avid reading, (My Side of the Mountain, it was),  i woke my brothers in the middle of the night to grab our haphazardly packed bags and move into the woods behind the farmhouse to live off squirrels and pilfered corn. This never really happened, of course, but that sort of absurdly fantastic planning was the staple of the day.

Our family took a pretty big hit during the late seventies when unpleasant business interests coerced Grandma into selling the farm to an outfit that preferred the standard veneer of asphalt and office buildings to the odd bucolic island that existed at the time there in Independence, just south of Cleveland. Grandma died a year later of what i remain convinced was her broken heart. My brother David spent a lot of time in the hospital around then, i was losing my mind to hormonal floods and a somewhat prescient case of post-industrial malaise, and Mom and Dad were barely holding civil space--for the sake of us kids, of course.

Soon after the loss of the farm and Grandma Bass’s death i left home way too young and soon found that being at odds with much of the world can be costly in various terms, mostly spiritual. When it occurred to me to reconnect with the old world--with my family, i mean--it was gone. The whole family was not really gone, of course, but irretrievably altered; and it may well be that my memories have become buffered and things weren’t as frog-hair-fine as i recall them. The huge Bass clan that collected itself once a year there at the farm may well have harbored tense dynamics unavailable to prepubescent sensibilities. But Mom and Dad were done by then and the family gatherings just never did come together again the way they had been. Surely few of the clan’s experiences were as dramatic as some of those that our branch--Dad’s branch--lived through. But i don’t know. Much of the crazier stuff we lived through you’ll never know either. To his profound credit, Dad did his best to preserve the Bass part of the thing, and Orpha and Paul ended their journeys at his reproduction of the farm there in West Virginia, more than less unencumbered by the dour nature of the way our society has progressed. 

The days from which i most remember eternally cheerful Orpha were from before all that stuff that broke our family and seems to threaten worse. Mr. Rogers days. Back then we could still collect huge bags of candy and other delicious treats some of them unpackaged from random neighborhood strangers without a whiff of consciousness about Paganism; and so far as i could tell, fourth graders never, ever, plotted to kill teachers with hand sanitizer, (whether the ones the link describes are for real or not).

I recall a day when i was around 8 or so when i wept in my mother’s arms over the pain of “growing up.” I was right about the pain, but it didn’t occur to me then that there would be great value in the years that separate me from that boy, pain and all. I may or may not be a “better” person now than i was back when Orpha helped form all those memories that amount to what perception of nostalgia that i carry with me now, but i am certainly more complete. I know a little more about what it means to be a better person because of the memories she leaves me. When i saw her last, a couple of years ago, she was grumpy. I had never seen that from her before and a little sadness came to me, then; even she couldn’t make it through unscathed. But her glorious cheerfulness remains with me, and helps to convince me--i really am convinced--that the world can come out good.

Vaya con Dios, Orpha; and true and genuine apologies to all those who have had to suffer through my presence when i failed to apply the lessons she taught me just by being. May we all learn them.

http://obits.cleveland.com/obituaries/cleveland/obituary.aspx?pid=173772567