My mother gave up on teaching me knitting because I kept losing stitches.  That should have been a sign.  Sure I was only seven or eight at the time.  But I should have known.  Instead, what did I do?  I ran down the street to play.   Now it’s time to weave all the dropped stitches back in.  There’s a few strands as it turns out so it’s not going to be a quick job either.  But it feels good to wake up to these tasks, knowing some of what I must do. 

 Naturally I can’t speak for everyone, but in general, if something is snagging your spirit and dragging you down, whether it’s a schedule or a program, a person or an element, I think it’s time to take out the cosmos kit and get cracking.  For the most part our bodies respond and produce the biochemicals that we need to function properly.  But when we get run down our rejuvenating ability gets shut down.   We might need a shot of B12 or a certain form of coaxing and motivation to get things rolling again.  Who knows, our push towards a new horizon could simply come from a shift in the winds.  The winds could come along like our spirit returning and nudge us forward.  And then we’ll wonder, is it a weather system or our spirit which hovers around wondering when will we get going?  Sometimes it seems that change comes easily once you realize that whatever was streaming before is now damned and diverted.  It’s time to break through the walls and let the water come rushing.

I sometimes think of Hermes, that quicksilver being, as someone that has eluded the whole issue.  The time he steals allows us to close the gap between our true but divided selves.  With his help we can understand the multiple worlds we live in and bring them together in the context of our being, the interlocking triangles of our skin.  It’s almost as if when we listen to the many voices of our divided selves we can also elude time.   Eluding time is not living as an alien or reject on the outside.  It’s belonging in a non-linear way. 

Time is one of the catalyst wounds evoking what we know as sacredness from within.  Sometimes we receive this like a vaccination to make living in the world possible.  But it prevents the deepening of our experience as much as it blocks the disease it tries to save us from, time the destroyer.

Bird in Space

            Then I dreamt about Brancusi’s statue, Bird in Space: bronze, smooth and sleek.  Flowing and going.  Never static.  Moving but not just through space.  Moving as if there were nothing around it to cause friction.   After all, what can a bird in space have friction with?  A relative, a lover, an unrewarding job?

            After forty years on the planet I have developed a stare.  This can create difficulties when I want to read.  The muscles that work my eyes have lost some flexibility.  “Union rules”, the old fashioned optometrists say, “after forty years the eyes want to take a break.”  And so the analogy they’ve developed for this is that you’re born with forty diopters of vision which are like chips in a poker game.  You use one up for each year of life on earth.  After the last chip has been played on the reality table – you’re in need of reading glasses.

            That’s an old model.  But now that I’ve brought it up, what if, as I have recently supposed, I have spent many of those years in alternate realities?  Does the same analogy of forty diopters carry through to these other realms?  I have split time in different realities.  I have fantasized, journeyed, followed my mind’s eye, created interior lives that I’ve watched and lived in.  I have slipped in the slipstream.  I have lost worlds and felt loss.  I have been in darkness.  Only forty diopters of vision?   I don’t think so.  I have hardly used all the diopters that I’ve been given.

            Vision has begun to mean different things.  I cannot define it so readily as some optometrists.  Maybe their diopters have fallen down through the time chasm.  Mine have swum past Saturn, sailed through the milky clouds of the upper world, spiraled down through the basement surgical floor of a Florida hospital.  I have many diopters left.

            I asked my friend Verna what she thinks about when she paints.  “I don’t know that I do,” she said.  “Well, I may have some notion when I begin but I soon forget.”

            Beginning on the canvas is like creating the world again.  There is a sense of creating space by differentiating with paints and all is worked through the time spent on the canvas.  The artist’s awareness flows through the space.

            “But what else is there,” Verna continued as if she read my mind, “other than space and time.  Really, that is all there is.”

            O.K., I know Albert agrees.  Me too.  But black holes also exist.  In addition to many more diopters of vision I have many more visions of diopters, of lenses in which I can characterize this experience and that.  These experiences flow in the stream of consciousness.  Which brings me back to Verna.  I was sitting at the same table where a friend wrote her first stream of consciousness novel.  “Kate,” she told me, “is a troubled soul.”  I did not want to hear this.  I thought she was completely involved in her art.  I thought, she is deeply steeped in her art as I sat there learning that art isn’t about thinking or knowing anything when you are doing it.  When you are in the stream, art is like the poultice which brings out the beauty in you.  Yet this poultice, creating a sourcing gravity, will also pull on the blackness within you.  It will pull from the rich, dark soils, the compost of your years, and also raise the angers, hurts and painful history.  Art, like an alchemist, will bring this all to the surface and use it for creation.  The joys and the sorrows.  The meaningful and the frivolous.

            With these lenses I see.  Perhaps gaining a new lens with each experience.  Multiply this by all the levels of reality in all the worlds, in all the dimensions of time and space.  Only forty diopters?

             Georgia O’Keefe said she liked to start down in the lower right hand corner of the canvas and work her way up towards the top left.  She liked her painting “Jack in the Pulpit” so much that she wanted to take parts of it and keep making them larger.  She created enormous canvases with pieces of the pulpit.  This is what art, the centrifugal force that particular gravity pulled from her.

            Like a supernova, we give off more light than we can contain.  A supernova is an enormous explosion of cosmic brilliance forced by its own inherent gravity to collapse powerfully upon itself and then be completely diminished by the darkness.  From this, the birth of a planet.  There is so much to learn from space and time.  So many forms to take shape on the canvas.  I used to believe that definitions were limiting.  I understood that they could explain one something as opposed to another but they might, if applied to a person, prevent the generation of new combinations.  They might cease possibilities like the deadening halt and singular dimension of a black hole.  But I find, now, that certain definitions can open up your world and release the bind that unconscious knowing can have on you.  If you are an artist then you speak see taste feel touch hear – creation.  You move forward through time like a bird in space.  And time moves through you.  After all, what else is there besides space and time?  The canvas, the table where A Bird in Space caught the particles and particulars of consciousness.  And more.  Life is a bowl of cherries.  Life is a conundrum, a riddle wrapped inside a mystery like a cocktail frank in a blanket.  Life is a stream.  There are all kinds of streams.

            I felt a deep connection to the O man.  He came to me like a gift, or life preserver tossed at the right time when the waters seemed so deep.  It wasn’t as if the waters were deep.  It was more as if they held deep memories for me.  I felt separation separate from me.  I could understand his desire while following mine.  Also, I knew that to go forward sometimes means to go away.  When I was little my mother taught me a few Yiddish phrases.  One of them was, “Geh weg.”  Go away.  A play curse, never said with annoyance or anger.  It was a charming way to tell a child to go away, like telling a fly to “Buzz off.”  Go away.  When you go away you find that your identity becomes stronger because you suddenly begin testing your muscle against this element and that.  As you leave home you meet the world.  This is one of those conundrums that we all share.  Every journey, you could say quite neatly, if it’s a good journey, will bring you home again.  Deeper, stronger, different than before but with the same small kernel of what is true about you.

            I wouldn’t ever have started a conversation with Nic if I hadn’t quit smoking.  There wouldn’t have been a need.  No cause, as Lear said to his daughter.  But the agony once the cause has begun.  Well that is the story, mine and everyone’s story who has had a relationship with Nic.  Quitting clearly brings new elements into your life.  So even if you’re leaving some things are coming.   Right at you.  Sometimes new people, and if they don’t quite measure up to personhood, then shall we say, sometimes new characters, or characteristics or elements.  You’re messing with a whole lot of dynamic physical laws by closing the door.  Nic is an example of one of the new characters slipping past the shut door.  After all, he’s part of the process.  That’s why everyone loves a process.  Or was that a parade?  Today at least, process has taken on the pageantry, be it inward or otherwise, of a parade.  

            Now people will want to know if you’ve quit smoking before.  How many times till it was “successful.”  Etcetera, etcetera.  They’ll want to know the usual answers to the usual questions.  I haven’t been asked many unusual questions around the whole process of quitting smoking, mind you, and this process has been one of the most remarkable, and unusual experiences of my life.  It has been a tale.  I have felt as if I were tailed, hawked, and beared down upon by some insidious, psychically slithery character and the most some people can ask me is, “Was it difficult to quit?” 

            I suppose that the measure of difficult that any process might bring is something to legitimately talk about.

            So you see, to me asking about quitting smoking – the difficulty, the length of time, the process etc. brings you into becoming a part of the process itself. 

            If you can appreciate the idea of never being able to step into the same stream twice then you can certainly understand that quitting is an ongoing process.   It evolves.  It’s as if I could take out my wallet and show you snapshots of each face I’ve encountered along the way.  Many of them my own. I could show you these photos much like a proud grandmother and then maybe you’d be in the process with me because you would see the changes, remark upon the common features, ask who that one is in relation to this one here.  As I said, quitting is a process, and sometimes process is a quitting.  You leave things along the way.

Note: 

from  Quitting, is from Conversations with Nic by freda karpf

            I didn’t think I would know myself without Nic.  And I was right.  The “stars” showed up the first few weeks.  They were all hyper crazy and hungry for mischief.  Nic was among them hanging back in the crowd.  He was insidious but not loud.  A constellation fractured by the cold squares of winter and withdrawal. They were all a part of the party people that come out during the initial cravings.  Making concentration and sensible inhibitions impossible for the while.   It’s actually not a bad time.  But Nic, and you know there’s always got to be one in every crowd, was into mind games.  He was especially interested in having me cook on all burners if I were intending not to burn any tobacco, the dish he always craves.  He banked on the odds, the odds being that sooner or later you’d cave. 

            I can’t help but to think of Nic as an element and a being.   When there are two people sharing the same name, their friends often differentiate them in some way.  When I was a kid, I knew two Moshes.  There was Big Moshe and Little Moshe.  Big Moshe caught more fish than Little Moshe.  But when it came to tenderness it sometimes seemed that Little Moshe should have been called big because he was easier to love than the rough and tumble man of the gaff.  It’s not a bad idea to distinguish people this way and it makes me want to think about Nic that way too.  Although it suggests a hierarchy and that wouldn’t exist consistently throughout “their” behaviors.

            And so we have nicotine and Nic the character that remains when you quit smoking.  You might be tempted to call the element nicotine Little Nic, but if you’ve ever left it, you would know there’s nothing short for nicotine.

            The fact that you might want to be organized and systematized, slick with your own Webster, means nothing during this time of withdrawal.  Nic takes care of that.  Grammar and elements of style are out the window.  You can only hope that a natural restraint and societal pressue keeps you from ending up behind bars. 

            Remember that there’s nothing little about nicotine.  And when you remove nicotine from your body you got yourself a hungry ghost and that’s not a little thing to deal with.

            Hence the transformation and transmigration of a demon coursing through the veins of a planetary-bound soul who was once, when connected with a particular part of your cerebral cortex, known as yourself.   Nic isn’t just a bad habit.  

            It’s inescapable.  The following conclusions are not mice that can squeeze through the fence or shimmy under the conga bar to get to the Big Cheese.  Your self, your cravings, your personal pantheon, who you are and what you eat and everything that makes you tic are evolving at such a revolutionary rate that evolving as a verb is just too damn slow to let you know what the hell is really going on.

             Imagine, if you would, for the moment, a planet so small that it could fit in the palm of your hand.  You may want to people this planet and place animals and farms on it.   Even duplicate Kansas and the Great Wall of China.  Fine. Go ahead.  But take some of the scientific knowledge you’ve got from the info-glut and think what this planet’s daily regimen would be like in our solar system.  Think about the rotation on its axis, the small wee little axis that it has.  Suddenly, this son of a gun planet is going so fast that the poor, wee little people that you’ve got on it seem more like a belt loop around the entire planet than coherent and functional individuals.  There you’ve got your first indication of what it’s like to be who you are at this moment, however transitional it is, in time.  You are, quite simply, a revolutionary being.  And everything and everyone else that you must deal with, including the people you must know in order to know yourself (and by the way, you may experience a slight, hopefully temporary, alienation from them) move too slow.  

            It is a revolutionary transmigration and it effects your life completely.  It happens faster than hard candies can roll up your arm into your arteries. ( Of course they’re working against gravity until you realize that you can get them into your system faster when you devour them upside down while hanging in your space boots.)  The transformation you’re adjusting to is the shift from nicotine to Nic the character.  And let me tell you, he’s quite a character and an elemental being.

—————————————–

            I used the words, “not smoking,” as if this represented what you are doing.  But it really only says what you are not doing.  But you might be going through withdrawal.  But here’s a question: “While you are either doing or not doing whatever it is you do to be who you are, who is Nic anyway?”  Is Nic a part of you and are you co-founders of the person that you’ve come to know through some synergistic effect?

            That’s the question that started the quest for me. 

            Nic isn’t very similar to a human child.  At birth we gasp for our first breath, crying with our first full lungs from the shock of the new.  Nic isn’t shocked if his lungs are full.  He likes that.  I’ll probably get back to the developmental stages but when you’re on an anthropological mission such as this, you can’t expect everything to be handed to you neat and clean.  It’s not like I’m following an outline after all. 

            Every once in a while I stop to light some incense because I miss smoke.  And then I remember that the whole point of all this mishegoss is about not smoking.  That gets me going again and before you know it I’m about as confused as can be and mad at everyone who ever said, “Wow, what an accomplishment to stop smoking.”  Big deal.  Try being coordinated right after quitting.  That would be something.  Before that, it’s back to the old grindstone churning out more reasons than Sun Maid’s got raisins to explain why every moment for the first five months I’ve felt like I left something on when it’s off. 

            In a way not smoking is similar to not farming.  We all know the absurdities of commerce where people are paid for ‘not doing’ things.  I imagine that some wheat farmers in this country might want to threaten their government, when the money just doesn’t seem good enough ‘not’ to farm anymore.  I know it’s a powerful temptation. “Watch out!  I might farm alfalfa also.”  Then the money men come from the Capitol with bags of bucks so they also won’t farm alfalfa.

            You see, if it happened to me, I’d go, “Watch out, I might smoke.”  So earlier, when I said that we should talk about the effects of not smoking, I wasn’t kidding.  On Capitol Hill there were publicly appointed representatives actually listening to tobacco companies telling them that this stuff is not addictive.

            It’s a shame I’ve sworn off cursing since I quit smoking.  I had to.  I didn’t do it right away but it became necessary when I realized I had an serious deficiency of all other adjectives from my vocabulary and was suffering from an imaginative anemia.  Had I not noticed this problem in time I might have said, “Are they effin’ nuts, smoking not addictive?”

            Repetition seems to come about as a matter of course during the Great Transformation.  More hard candies, lots of carbs, food food food, even dishes previously sneered at, and many, many more refrains of that old standby, I Wish I Could Just Smoke One Cigarette A Day.  Of course that tune is very well known but do you know If I Could Have Just One Cigarette A Day I’d Have It As Dessert.  These are old country standards and thanks to the transformation of so many classical music stations northerners are finally being taken into the heartland. 

            Nic’s not much of a singer himself.  In fact, he’s really quiet.  He’s often doing a pantomime in your background.  More than that, it sometimes feels as if he’s holding the sticks that move you around like a puppet.  When I think about it, really get the whole scope of his control, I’m blown away.  No pun intended. 

by freda karpf

            An image that reminded me of Brancusi’s statue, The Kiss, came to mind.  There was also an ancient version of a kiss.  They both look like two stone monolithic figures held by a boulder. The only reason you know there are two figures is because of the lines cut into the stone indicating the shapes of the figures embracing.   The entire piece looks like a chunk of stone that could be a single die or a boulder squared by a geometrically minded sculptor.  But here I drew a parallel to myself and Psyche.  She represents something on the bottom that needs to rise up or someone stuck in the labyrinth trying to emerge.  In her case, that is the chrysalis.  It’s also my personal shorthand for not having arrived yet, for being stuck through all the possible stages between dead fast and pure release.  As a reflection of this sculpture I would be represented by the top section.  I can imagine arrows pointing out the flow of direction between myself and Psyche because I sense that we are connected like the figures of “The Kiss,” separated only by lines of demarcation.  

             I used to joke that the gods hate me, but the truth is that at least one of the gods really did hate her.  Psyche had to go through trials.  One of the trials is to go to Hades and retrieve beauty lotion.  She must not partake of food or conversation there otherwise instant death.  This wasn’t easy.  All the spirits, the hungry ghosts called to her; they yearned for her contact and she had to look past them towards her goal, otherwise these people, some her relatives, would drag the life from her, drive her off her quest.

            She goes through these trials because she longs for Eros and this is the way to reach him.  She wants to merge with Eros.  This is the ultimate kiss.  She is spirit, potential, the would be butterfly, wanting to come to the surface and merge with a warm body.  Otherwise she can’t live out her potential.  In the darkness of the chrysalis she is always in a state of becoming.  Until she breaks free of the shell and is born to the surface world of flesh, the open air, whatever you want to call this thing which she yearns for, until she breaks free, she is only potential. 

            There is always a part of her spirit which is becoming.  This relates to her time within the chrysalis.  And this has at least two features.  There is always a certain sense of frustration and a sense of richness, of growing and becoming, of yearning and moving towards that which she desires. 

            Fragments of my life, my old neighborhood and my yearnings were coming at me from all directions.  It’s all got to do with time, with the labyrinth, with moving on into the world.  To move on I needed to reconnect with my desire, with the urge to merge.  But where did I leave it?  I had to find it or I could imagine, at least, that it, in some way, had to find me.  That it was tracking me as much I was searching for it. 

            Beauty is only skin deep.  Maybe that’s why Psyche went into the underworld for the lotion, one of the impossible errands she was sent on.  She went, not to fulfill the mad errand that Aphrodite sent her on but, to find a magic lotion that would transmute her spirit into flesh.  Her ticket to the outside.  So, I have felt a need to travel.  Some of it is over old territory, the old neighborhood where some of the splitting began.

            In this dream I am learning all about Psyche.  She is all desire, spirit wishing to merge, to kiss.  I also thought how we walk around, not being whole, incomplete until we once again, merge.  Up on the surface, on Johnson Avenue and then on all the other streets we walk down, we are fragmented people unless we realize our connection with Psyche.  Once the connection is made the effort to merge, probably from both directions, can meaningfully take place.   So you can say that she is merely a spirit in her chrysalis but she completes our life on the surface and we may do the same for her as she luxuriates in the chrysalis stage.  Because she doesn’t only wait there, passing through time with a dream of flight.  She lounges, grows and matures there as she becomes enriched.  Her spirit, connected with me on the surface world gains the experience of my time too.  She becomes streetwise.  Don’t expect her to be as ephemeral as some would have you think of the unbodied.

            There is no break between the two beings that wish to merge, but there are some differences.  And these could be the lines in the sculpture cut to show the differences and then the lines that cut to mark them or decorate the beings.   But I compare all these lines to our personal history, both the ones that cut and those that make us who we are.  We are so different.  In some way, I think at least metaphorically of course, Psyche is always striving and never resolving her “issues” with the chrysalis.  Of course she must try.  But this is so different than the myth of Sisyphus, the guy with the rock, because she has emerged, if not in flesh, then in our spirits.  Psyche, literally “butterfly,” is spirit.  She is sulphur, a torch not lit, longing to take fire from another’s flame.

by freda karpf

 I want to live and I’m beginning to appreciate the difference between waiting and living.  They would seem as if they could exist in parallel.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  These dilemmas may be what purgatory is after all.  The differences show their faces in the small details.  You’ve got to look closely at everything.  All of this may seem obvious but I find the common more remarkable as I go along.

 I’m aware of all these aspects of my being that I never took account of before.  They all seem to have a different take on life, on waiting too.  My sophisticated self looks for something different.  My dreaming self waits for a better time.  My fantasy self goes off into the nether worlds.  And my regular old self, is left wandering the streets a dried shell just like the shades Odysseus met in the underworld.  Too foolish to know they’re dead they’re lost in the half life, phantasms.  Some think the dead are counting their dreams on your fingers.  Well they are.  So, look alive there.

Alternately between chewing on a sentence and digesting it I would have the thought, almost like a cognitive comma, about how I might be received or not.  Would I be recognized or not.  So on and so forth.  And then I thought the string of troubling thoughts that seem to go down to my core like a fishing line.  This string begins with:  What if I’m not welcomed?   What if I can’t make the connection?  What if this and what if that.  All of this counter to what I should be doing with my time.  “Next time you go fishing,” I told myself, “use better bait.”  Maybe I’ll catch something useful.  Fear as bait on my hook just won’t feed me.

by freda karpf

In tearing each page it seems as if time is nothing but a mechanical apparatus to pull us through our days.  I guess it could be like an amusement ride if you’re only waiting for the next day to go by.  But I thought there’s got to be more than that.  Something beyond counting and accountability.  Something more Zen-like. 

There’s got to be flow and some way to be fully alive within the framework of our agreed upon time.  Otherwise it feels like we’re being sold down the river.

Surely there’s some formula that can help us all out.  Like something we can load into a pill.  Perhaps a time capsule.  This can contain so many parts of this and so many of that.  The essential effect of this pill is to help us go with the flow.  It allows us to metabolize and integrate the stream of consciousness.   Rather than accepting a dull recognition of the days gone by we can fully participate in the movement. 

No wonder some of the Zen masters slapped their students with a stick.  Thwack.  As if to say, “Snap out of it.  You weren’t there.  You were dead.”  Slap them on the backside.  Bring them back to life.  Show them how to give birth in the water, how to slide into existence, taking the water slide ride into life and go with the flow.  Otherwise we’re in danger of being ripped out of our moorings like the pages on the calendar.  What could be our inheritance?  We’ll become a community of collectors.  Everything will be considered a collectors item.  Including our lives and our lifestyles.  We’ll be the exhibits left in the Zen museum.  Throw out the diadems.  Make room for the human still lives and Rockwells, the made to order fossils. 

What I need is a sense of stepping into a different stream with each step.  In jest my mother used to say, “Go soak your head.”   Perhaps this was a reference to the stream.  I need to soak my consciousness.  I need to go down by the river, throw the Zen calendar in the water and watch its wisdom disappear round the bend while I listen to my mother’s orders.           

You see, I struggle to understand what everyone is doing.  Maybe there’s something that I should be doing now and I’m not.  I don’t want to be left out.  But I do want to keep everything simple.  I can’t always do that but I always prefer that.  Simple understanding and simple relationship to that understanding.  That’s where my head is at.  That’s what I thought I could learn from the Zen calendar.  Live and learn.  I came, I saw, I grokked.  Conquer?  Who could be bothered?  The energy it takes.   Maybe these were Caesar’s thoughts prior to the moment he was jettisoned into history and the clock started ticking.  Once the clock starts people feel compelled to do something.

Right now it feels like I’m sandwiched between time.  Outer time is going way too fast.  Inner time, by an amoeba’s standards, is going swimmingly.  If this is how the continents drifted into their present formation, I should hit land any millennium now.

*Zen Calendar is from Conversations with Nic by Freda Karpf

 http://bit.ly/gJyUFm is the zen of withdrawal pretzeled with the Odyssey.Pretzels with mustard are good.Try one instead.#smokeout

Wrapped in a few words like an egg roll homilies bring to mind the simple things in life.http://bit.ly/9hs5Mt 

…support your dreams. Any road that helps you quit is a good path to follow. http://bit.ly/dD2cqd

I like the idea of reminding folks to drink water because otherwise the desert will drink you up. Smoking is the desert.

If smoking were a person you’d have to ask, “Am I following my desires or his?”  Follow yours and learn what triggers his.

 Write it out. Talk it out. Or the incessant chatter of the habit will run your conversations.

Hold onto your desires. Have faith in yourself. Keep your pace. And mind the distance.

As you leave home you meet the world. This is a conundrum we all share..a good journey, will bring you home again. Quit Nic.