BLUE COUP D’ETAT

Kung Fu Dream Part 1

“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”
Jake Barnes, The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway), the last line of chapter 4

Lord make me an instrument of thy peace
Where there is hatred let me sow love
Where there is injury, pardon
Where there is doubt, faith
Where there is despair, hope
Where there is darkness, light
Where there is sadness, joy

Oh Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console
To be understood as to understand
To be loved as to love
For it is in pardoning that we are pardoned
It is giving that we receive
It is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life

(NOTE****THESE ARE WORDS AND IMAGES FROM NEARLY FIVE YEARS AGO)

I just found out Stanley Kubrik died, Derek left me a message. He sounded sad.

My dad told me he is getting in touch with his body. He is sitting in a chair in his hospital room with tubes in his nose, an IV in his arm, and a cathader in his penis. He has a button in his hand for “pain management” or morphine drip. Somehow he is wearing a pleasant look on his face. He keeps nodding, I think he’s doing his own personal form of meditation. I told him the prayer of St. Francis but I don’t think he really listened. He has to do it his own way. He has a gash in his stomach about the length of a hand which is held together by four staples. It is intentionally not sealed all the way so that the infection in his stomach cannot fester and abscess. The half closed wound reminds me that we are all meat just like at the grocery or the butcher shop. Our bodies can blow up on themselves, they can fail us and there is little we can do about it but we can be tough. Toughness is in the mind, the body follows the lead of the mind. Even though you don’t talk, you inspire me. They tell me his bowels aren’t working right now and I can see the waste that the machines are pulling out of his body. His urine is the color of used cooking oil, slightly red, scary color. The solids come out through a tube in his nose and resemble a measureing cup full of diarreha. The road to recovery is tough. “He says he’ll walk in a little while,” the nurse said. “He didn’t put out that much urine. The resident said the color looked terrible.”

The Room: 2 TVs, list of channels, attending physician Stiegmann, a menu, bouquet of bird of paradise flowers, a bulldog puppy get-well card with their paw prints, gauze and saline solution, a blower to help him take deep breaths, a Douer urine bag, oxygen from the wall. A stack of Medline powder free latex examination gloves small, medium, and large.

My Dad just gripped my finger–he’s strong. The two nurses are trying to figure out the machinery hooked up to my Dad. He rolls his eyes and I smile. I just saw the wound again–the edges of the openings look like ground beef and there are actually six staples and six openings in his stomach.

AFTERWARD–my Dad is alive and well this day Thanksgiving 2004 and I want to give thanks for that, amen.

Here are some Oscar Wilde quotes–
………………………………
“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”
………………………………
On advise: “People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.”
………………………………
“Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.”
………………………………
“The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.”
………………………………

These guys are reconstructing my heart with light sabers.

Thanks to Ayako and Koubuchi-cun, raining in Tokyo after another really great dinner, sashimi and soupy rice with the house specialty–grilled unagi (eel).

Hot tears yawn like lava

(more mismatched words and images)

Life seems like a senseless stream of events, can’t quite get a grasp on what’s going on. Used to be a burning hope for love, used to be the reason I got up in the morning. Now (only in these moments because I know this too will pass) I feel the desire for distance, numbness, not caring–it is a trap, later I’ll regret this indulgence. This is not to say that I appear unhappy, on the contrary I laugh and smile often but feel cut adrift, floating without aim, dreamless.
………………………………………
The calming waters roll off my cheeks, sit on my skin, pores open like sunflowers eating the sun.
………………………………………
If the leaves turned blue and grey I could say they were the color of your eyes

If the sky felt soft and warm on my skin I could say your breath haloed my face

If absence were presence you’d be here

(The writing here has nothing to do with the pictures or does it? Thoughts from somewhere besides Kamakura, actually at least four years ago in Harlem before I even met Tomoko.)

Its a sad state of affairs when you don’t trust anybody, when you don’t believe anybody, when doubt clouds the way, when confusion tips the scales. These things are always around but they’re only dangerous when they gain weight and take the form of a filter through which you see the world and then it is a conscious effort to stop and look at the bright, to find the positive, to live a thiking life and concentrate on the hard thoughts, the thoughts that make dreams reality, the thoughts that make the world better instead of plunging it deeper and deeper into despair. Despair is easy, it takes no effort, you see it, you feel it, you succumb to it. Joy is difficult to succumb to, even when it is right in your face because you have to let go of so many things to embrace it whereas despair is all about holding on and sinking.
………………………….
I slip into a reality where the words happen, the thoughts take shape but I never move just sit there, mouth slightly agape, doing nothing, caught up on an interior dialogue that tries to fit the world into something understandable, hopefully something desireable, usually only really and truly in the solitude of my imagination.
………………………….
Objects, that’s it, that’s the problem–Objects, inanimate objects, seeing it all like pieces on a board that I can move around just like that, chess, check-mate. But someday I realize that the only piece on the board that I can really control is my piece, just mine despite all illusion and egotism. Or maybe I don’t realize and I’m full of false expectations.

(more old thoughts, random and brief but not from Tokyo)

History rhymes and now we’re recording it.
…………………….
Somehow feel as though meant to love, to be in love, to make love, to be loved and every moment outside is dead time, purgatory, waiting. But I forget and live, work, occupy myself and move with the seasons, then the pain of realization.
…………………….
Sleep calls warm and inviting but still I struggle and blink out of habit like an exuberant child twisting and turning becoming petulant and disagreeable as the eye lids droop and all breath is yawning and the hours slip away inperceptably and I sleep late, feel late, am late, then work late to compensate.

A little bit of an abstract version of the place. Oji is a neighborhood in Tokyo, I found out that Oji means “prince”. The place I was staying wasn’t all that princely (a gaijin or foriegner’s house) but it was fine for sleeping and meeting new people.

The 12 to 13 hour path of a direct flight from New York to Tokyo actually goes over the North Pole and vast, snowy mountain ranges that I romanticly assumed were Siberian . . .

I might really like fountains, keep taking pictures of them. Reminds me of that Kenneth Anger film with the French title . . . Eaux d’artifice. Really beautiful and sexual film full of fountains spouting water some out of demon faces.

Wanted to go to the museums but they were all closed that Monday (think they might always be closed on Mondays, also another tidbit of tourist news–the trains stop running at about 12:45 am, essential knowledge to night owls like myself who are unsuspectingly stuck miles away from their hotel in a foriegn country. The busiest city I’ve ever been to suddenly becomes void of pedestrians and full of cars, road construction workers, and very expensive cabs that have doors that open and close by themselves) Anyway . . . so I wandered around this beautiful park alone. Was later told there are many homeless people here but I did not see them.