Artwork © Richard Spisak

 

Chapter 12

Irrespective of it being a relationship of two or more parties, the length of its continuation, the pleasantries involved, whether Platonic or physically intimate, or of broad professional engagements and aspirations that might be for profit or of more altruistic objectives, the impermanence of such bonds should be self-evident and not open to dispute, and yet every day dispute it we do in everything that we do as denial, deflection, and repudiation are the components for responding to that which we dislike in ourselves, and that which we dislike most is our tenuous, tentative presence and all bonds that tenuous, tentative presences make with each other. So of course, there is the pretense of stability displayed by easily dispersed vapors of man through denial, mendacity, obfuscation, delusion, or misconception—call it as you may, and a mixture it might well be; and it is embedded and reinforced by the very institutions and functions that are constructs of modern society. It is in marriage contracts, savings accounts, homes, stocks, and all other securities and contrivances to obtain a delusional sense or nonsense of permanence in this world that attests otherwise in all things. And yet creature of lies that we be, not truths, we can be no other way for how do we really get through the days of the years fulfilling our function and objective of breeding into existence and raising offspring or making a forceful presence of authority in our jobs and order in the disparate individuals that compose society if constantly sensing ourselves as dust pelted about in the winds of life?

The family unit is the epitome of this delusional immortality, this sense that we are ambulatory statues of marble. Created with a spouse, it is meant to supersede earlier family with individuals stepping respectively out of one pair of shoes, so to speak, and gently slipping comfortably into another pair unaware, sanctioned and lauded as they are in such milestones and ceremony of courtship, engagement, and marriage, of any shedding and loss of former family with mesmerized belief in the newer now being real and forever and that reality trumping the older and obviating and falsifying earlier notions and even earlier states of being being predominant even when knowing that in rare relationships lasting decades the two partners die separately, for what else could there be when one’s separate space is the real essence of our lives?

Unequivocally, the separate space is the real essence of our lives, and yet we expend energy like kids in a dysfunctional family thinking if we do so—if we do something just a little differently to meet expectations and ingratiate ourselves with those inept guardians that we have—parents using prototypes of their own parents as the sole guiding light and willfully ignorant of parental guides and childhood development books, so a dark light it usually is at that—we can finally gain solidity of bonds that we so desperately yearn for like a kid needing affirmation, affection, and adulation. The positive bonds that we create with others, we think, will be perennial even though obviously all sentiment, as all beings, are ephemeral. We continually strive to restore tattered relations with all others throughout our lives even though relationships, no matter how nonpareil we judge them myopically by the euphoria that we have at the time are temporary and for being temporary unworthy of care—temporary because one is continually racing the clock to gain the requisite experiences and changes in the self to make the self seem more than a wilting sedentary sprout in its soil confines and its brevity. Thus, we leave Person A behind to get to Person B and this becomes the pattern. In ways it is commensurate with the body being besieged with hormonal titillations tickling fancy in a brain that already knows from countless earlier sexual experiences that the prospect of this newest alliance will be equally unfulfilling and yet goes ahead with the relationship nonetheless. We expend energy mending tattered relations when even knowing that with enough time memory of specific individuals and groups will be dispersed from memory like smoke in the air, eradicated completely except for the later, sometimes, in generalized historical abstractions, and, as Emerson points out any group of three or more individuals requires so many compromises ad nauseam by compromised individuals with their compromised individuality that makes blending with the herd an effacing of that special uniqueness that makes life special, and a sickening experience at that.

We are separate entities even if our survival is predicated largely on some degree of cooperation in these social networks referred to euphemistically as society as though being social extracts or at least represses the savage from us and as though in progressive uniformity and its comfortable complacency originality is not extracted from us in every union we make unless with a best friend who gives one license to be himself. Thus, a sensible man must prioritize above all else the company within, and by the choices he makes, he becomes guardian over this subterraneous self, ensuring that it stays as virtuous as possible in such a corrupt brutish world of self-survival and when amongst so many others with their objectives toward self-aggrandized thrivings at the expense of weaker individuals and species, and when the self, even when insular, original, pure, and true, alters in neurological changes and experiences over the years, and endless adaptations and readapting to the changes of the environment that influence perspective and understanding pragmatically if not stultifying and vitiating it fully.

Like it or not, we are alone in this world with most of us finding the company of self intolerable unless drowned out in the boisterous noise and cacophony of others, allowing, in the brief time we are with them, a false self to emerge that is the gestalt of our shallowest cordiality projected back to us favorably from others like beams of our own light, albeit artificial and mostly false light at that, refracted intensely and magnified off broken shards of a mirror. Real self lost to a subsumed obfuscation, this ersatz-conflation, that has superseded it, it is no wonder that attitudes vacillate, and that the perception of whether the world is indeed a good place pivots based on the mood of the moment. Most of us are like men who feel suicidal until diagnoses of terminal illnesses suddenly makes being alive seem more precious than it would otherwise due to the possibility of it being snatched away unjustly and these inconsistencies of the vast majority ripple out affecting collective perspective and attitudes. Just as, clearly, most people have no clarity as to whether life is worth the tragedies and traumas that we experience being in it, so they are unaware that much more tragic than being alone so much of the time is to close off the deep caverns of self that if opened militate against the superficiality and complacency that do, I must admit, make life more comfortable, but also allow for a more alien and eerie thought stream imbued from diminished memories and a wordless subconscious logic of associations to flow forward for a richer, more complex self to emerge. But as being in solitary confinement inordinately rattles logical thought processes even of those recluses most inured to it like the seismological activity of an earthquake leveling a city—a part of us, and we may safely say a large if not the largest part of our neurological circuitry, being wired for the wiring of others, which also explains the predilections of this particular writer who is not only exploring his caverns of mystery but is writing of it to posterity—it is understandable why people would run away from themselves even when living in a relatively pure, unstained conscience beyond minor foibles and peccadilloes (Plato of course suggesting that tyrants when taken over by the third element of the soul cannot live with the memories of their horrendous deeds and so become more gregarious to escape themselves). However, there is “gold in them there hills” of mines and the point is not to fight the discomforts of one’s aloneness by asphyxiating it in superficial companionship the way a nightlight for a young boy is supposed to chase off the boogeyman, or birds that disperse when a shirt is taken off and thrown into the air—a new trick I have learned in Hawaii. Ours is to be enriched by those subterraneous caverns of self by communing with ideas within and placing sentinels and sphinxes in front that will protect the rich mines from corrupt influences. And just as Giordano Bruno in 1600 was subjected to church investigation and execution for his purported heresy of suggesting that other worlds are inhabited with life which, by inference means that a doting God with his “special” relationship with man “created in his own image” is less likely, we too must be prepared to walk on hot coals to defy the stagnation of conformity. We must say what is true at all cost. And so I shall in the following.

One of the most horrendous aspects of returning to the states is not loss of my possessions and friends, nor experiencing firsthand sleeping on sidewalks of Honolulu with its cold mist showers that last only for a few minutes, or moving into a shelter run by ex-convict case managers and fellow felon night/day manager thugs mandated to be there by the courts, or even having half of what I had confiscated by night managers and stolen by residents, but of the evangelicals and Trump trumpets that even exist in this azure blue Democratic state of Hawaii.

Artwork © Richard Spisak

This country grapples with erosion of trust not only in elections but all forms of information which is a result of various factors: the obviation of newspapers and magazines and news sources to the Internet for a less controlled, less scrutinizing, and less elite/less erudite sources, news media becoming ever more a means to proliferate editorials and opinion pieces because it is more financially viable to do that than to give the news, the insolence that “my opinion [bereft of facts and study as it is] is as good as yours [even if yours is more informed], this idea that opinion is fact, this sense that the common man’s ideas are the majority and in a democratic country they matter more than educated studies, this failure at understanding that nothing can be proven with absolute certainty so that which is plausible from study of the facts is our means of making informed decisions, and this working assumption that wrong ideas, even lies, can be made right when repeated relentlessly for sooner or later they will be believed and if they are believed by the majority in a democratic state they are sanctified and usually codified. Trump trumpeting the news media as being the enemy of the people unless they support him and that votes are meaningless unless they are votes for Trump has become the death knell of American democracy, and it can seem alarming unless we consider that societies like everything else rise and fall and hegemony is not forever. Honestly, less myopically, if we consider the annihilation of American Indians, the slavery of black Africans, the wars for territory, and that the country is awash in guns and economic disparity this society loses its sanctimonious platitudes quickly. Although there is hope that Trump will languish in a prison cell and all or most of his initiatives will be shackled by the rebuff of federal judges I think it is fading quickly as he has been reelected with the Senate, two chambers of the legislature having dominance and a preponderance of federal judges that were appointments from his previous term in office. Plato had been vindicated. The masses cannot be counted on to make informed decisions as they follow their feelings and mistake crudity, vulgarity, and hatred toward minorities as honesty and truth.

As for religion, it is baffling how these people can read and recite favored passages in “scripture”, as if wishing to know well their paragon of virtue, Jesus Christ, and not know that there were gospels that did not have the popularity that was the gravitas for being subsumed into the Biblical Canon. Perhaps the specific details of the historical record would be daunting for anyone, whether religious scholar or layman. Better would be to understand these accounts generally to which few care to do. Even the brief sayings that are attributed to Christ are ones most religious zealots would prefer not to be burdened with, favoring instead a few easy lines from which to peg or nail him with—the pious, in interpreting certain traits or feats emphasizing mercy or severity, interpreting them as they do, and hammering their epiphanies onto bystanders as they tend to do creating their own unique slant, their own denomination, their own religion, whether they acknowledge it or not. This notwithstanding, my understanding is that for several centuries after the death of Christ various churches or various localities containing various churches believed very different stories about him based on locality and traditions and partiality to these localized story variants. One particular gospel mentions Jesus Christ as a boy killing another boy. This gospel over the course of time was not a popular enough tale to transcend regional boundaries and be believed by the masses and so it never made it into the Bible, even as apocrypha, when an attempt at homogeny was enjoined on all believers. Christianity during the days of the historian Tacitus was still a minor sect. It is true that because of specific verses favorable to the poor and disenfranchised (i.e. the meek shall inherit the Earth) Christianity was on the rise and, given enough time, would no doubt have eventually become a world religion. But it was Emperor Constantine who expedited the process. The empire had been divided amongst four separate emperors. When Constantine’s father died, bequeathing to him a sizable portion of the world, it was not enough to satiate his ambitions. Seeking control of all four parts and sensing the political expediency that would be needed to allow him to do so (he had married off his sister, Anastasia, to the Roman senator Bassianus, so was no novice to political expediency), he made Christian soldiers out of his troops—soldiers with a religious quest in a rather secular society and would have impetus of conviction and determination to fight off unbelievers, a stronger vigor than merely fighting for their emperor. A few favorable battles emboldened them further while at the same time intimidating the enemy who worried that the Christian god was protecting Constantine and his military and that his side might be the winning side, God’s side. After winning all the battles that were requisite to ensure that all of the Roman empire was in his control, he then declared his vast empire a Christian state, and then executed his sister, Constantia, his nephews and nieces, and the Emperor Licinius whom he had at one time arranged to be his brother-in-law. In this world no one should believe that the most “virtuous” of institutions materialized from the pure hands of angels. Of course it would be engendered in psychological manipulation and violence like most enterprises. The point is that every man must embrace his solitude for it is within it that he is able to forge a separate independent self with his own unique and nuanced conclusions that do not match anyone absolutely, and if he were to attempt to treat a general match as though it were a specific one (i.e. I am of this political party) the compromises he would need to make in the interest of uniformity would no longer make him true to himself and he would feel as though he had sold his soul to the devil, so to speak. And it must be said that all informed opinions are never engraved in stone. One must be open to ever new facts that allow for a new evolving perspective, even if it means reverting to earlier conclusions. I may disagree with a politician like Liz Cheney on nearly all policy matters but with her great integrity and courage, and it being so nonpareil, I would be willing to vote for her if given that opportunity.

 

Steven David Justin Sills is a literary writer in Honolulu Hawaii. His early book of poetry is in many academic libraries in the United States with a scanned copy in the Internet Archive. Sills’ early work can also be found on the Online Book Page at the University of Pennsylvania. After Sills finished his last literary novel “The Three Hour Lady” over three years ago, he began devoting time to writing a long war poem about what is happening in Ukraine. Most of those 25 cantos including his most recent canto can be seen at this particular journal. As his graduate degree is great books of the Western Canon, he has been hoping to write his own ethical treatise, and this forum affords him that opportunity.

As the Arkansas Gazette says, “… Sills’ vision is often a dark one. He writes of the homeless, the abused, the forgotten people. He is also intrigued with the mystical, the sensual, loss–as in losing those whom we hold dear, such as a spouse or lover–as well as the lost, such as someone who is autistic, who seems unreachable. Sills’ skillful use of the language to impart the telling moments of a life is his strength. He chooses his words carefully, employing a well-developed vocabulary. He is thoughtful about punctuation, where to break lines and when to make a new stanza. He’s obviously well versed in ‘great’ literature. Sills’ command of language helps to soften the blows of some of the seemier passages found in his poems. Seamy may not be the best word to use. Perhaps gritty is a better word or just plain matter-of-fact and to the point…”

Richard Spisak began his artistic career as a light artist in the Lumonics Studios of Mel Tanner, a legendary Light Artist. After serving under Jack Horkheimer as a planetarium operator at the Miami Space-Transit Planetarium, he left to begin traveling with Lumist Kenvin Lyman, whose show Dazzleland Studios traveled across America. Richard later worked as a Laserist with LASERIUM and Laser Productions, served as a technical producer for the festival company PACE Concerts, and later as operations Manager and Senior Producer at WWHP and WTCN-TV in Stuart Florida.

Richard writes for Theatre, TV, radio, and the web. He published two short story collections, Two Small Windows, in a Pair of Mirror Doors, and Between the Silences. Followed by his poetry collection 7370 Allen Drive and the recently released STONE POETRY. Richard also produces “POETS of the East,” a televised webcast featuring poets from across the globe.