I’m Just A Traveler In Other People’s Reality — Image by a Fellow Higher On The Trail
Invoking the Full Meaning of Life
How best to express sharing new life
when each moment deserves its face.
What seems apropos for the moment,
when the next moment fosters a unique experience.
Is it in a number?
The number of days?
The number of thoughts?
The number of heartbeats?
The number of turns?
The number of prayers?
. . . you can count the ways,
only to still not know life’s score.
Is it in a word?
Loving?
Caring?
Sharing?
Giving?
Sheltering?
Words to communicate thoughts and feelings
when manifested in knowledge and experience.
Or is it in art?
Transforming thought,
expressing feeling,
experiencing emotions and
the desire to evoke life,
even when distance
appears to separate a lifelong bond.
I wrote this in the 1990s. Since then, retirement and moved 1,000 miles from where we had spent 25 years, putting distance between bonds. In the twelve years since moving, we have watched the bonds drift away, causing me to question the desire to evoke life, even when distance can’t separate a lifelong bond.
We moved to the Sonoran desert with the illusion that friends and family would be beating a path to our new home in the desert southwest — not such luck. So we try staying in touch through social media, often questioning whether the bonds were ever real — confirming that we remain tourists in other people’s reality.
Old Jules was a 70-year-old hermit, living with three cats somewhere in the Texas Hill Country and writing a blog I enjoyed reading from time to time. Old Jules, who passed away April 21, 2020 at 74, had concluded that he has spent over a third of his life “being insignificant in the lives of others.”
In 1992, after 25 years of marriage and a career of 20 years, he began a new career and life in Santa Fe.
“All secure in the knowledge the extended family and friends remaining behind were part of my life in which I’d been and remained important.”
Over time he concluded it was all an illusion.
“Kids, young adult nephews, and nieces I’d coddled and bounced on my knee pealed out of my life-like layers of an onion. Most I never heard from again.”
He began to realize that he was merely tolerated, “. . . a piece of furniture in their lives.”
Over time he rebuilt his life with a more potent dose of skepticism concerning his worth and place in the lives of others, which resulted in his becoming a hermit.
“I no longer assume I’m important in the lives of other human beings and get my satisfaction in knowing I’m at least relevant to the cats.
Because cats, though sometimes dishonest, aren’t capable of the depth and duration of dishonesty humans indulge regularly.”
Old Jules had come to believe “. . . that life is entirely too important and too short to be wasted in insignificance.”
His new awareness of life is now in teaspoon measurements, “. . . measured in contracts with cats not equipped to lie. A determination in the direction of significance measured in teaspoons of reality,
as opposed to 55-gallon drums of dishonesty and self-delusion.”
“Teaspoons, I find, don’t spill away as much life in the discovery
when they’re found to be just another ego-wart of pride and self-importance.”
Bonds, illusion or not, have difficulty being when the moments are separated by time and distance, becoming gleams of light, for an instant, in the long night.
I understand where Old Jules was coming from and feel his disillusionment. There is, however, a binding force that comes from a homesick longing to be whole, to have completion, as Plato described in the myth of the human halves passionately striving towards one. Like all mythical totalities, humans are subject to the triple dramaturgical rhythm of primal completeness, separation catastrophe, and restoration. The most significant attraction effect occurs between the second and third acts of life’s drama, which is where I find myself today — maybe this is also where Old Jules is. I am learning to understand myself from a new divide, one half experienced, the other inexperienced — in such a way that I’m learning to understand myself in new ways.
In the summer of 2006, we spent three months trying to get rid of a systemic infection that resulted from hip surgery. Mother passed away on September 8, 2006, only a couple of weeks after Joy took this picture. Everyone had convinced me that she was ready to stop fighting — the pain was too much.
— kenne
*****
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.
Little Cactus On Mt. Lemmon — Photo-Artistry by kenne
The most visible creators I know of are those artists whose medium is life itself. The ones who express the inexpressible — without brush, hammer, clay, or guitar. They neither paint nor sculpt — their medium is being. Whatever their presence touches has increased life. They see and don’t have to draw. They are the artists of being alive.
Texas Johnny Brown at Houston’s Shakespeare Pub — Photo-Artistry by kenne (Click on Texas Johnny Brown to see archived blog posting on TJB)
Texas Johnny Brown is a major talent who simmered on the blues scene longer than all the beef stew cooked in the ’40s, the decade when he first began playing and recording. Like pianist Johnny Johnson of St. Louis, Brown is an artist who did not get a chance to record a full album as a leader until he had been in the music business more than half-a-century. Also like Johnson, the results of coming in so late in the game have been a pair of highly acclaimed, prize-winning albums including the righteous Blues Defender. Brown can take plenty of the credit, since he has taken over almost complete control of his ow arranging, production, and mixing, as well as the string bending and blues moaning. He began his career as a sideman for the Duke and Peacock outfits in the ’50s about which discographers make comments such as “… the record keeping at that time was less than desirable.” As a result, some of Brown’s playing on releases by artists such as Lightnin’ Hopkins and Joe Hinton remains uncredited. The guitarist, singer, and songwriter began his professional career as an original member of the great Amos Milburn band known as the Aladdin Chickenshackers. Brown’s picking is killer on early Aladdin recordings by both Milburn, and on Ruth Brown’s first Atlantic sides. Atlantic allowed Brown to make a few recordings of his own in 1949, buoyed by the enthusiasm the label had for Milburn, who played behind his sideman on these sessions along with the rest of the Aladdin Chickenshackers. T-Bone Walker is the dominating force in Brown’s stylistic palette, an influence that was considered something of a driving permit for any guitarist venturing out of Houston during this period. Before finally getting the biggie recording opportunities in the late ’90s, Brown did an ARC session in Houston in the early ’50s that was never released. He also performed regularly with Junior Parker during that decade, remaining based out of Houston. As a songwriter, Brown’s most famous work is “Two Steps from the Blues,” a big hit for Bobby “Blue” Bland, with whom he also toured as a lead guitarist in the ’50s and ’60s. By the ’80s, he was considered only sporadically active on the blues scene, but this turned out to be only a temporary brown-out, so to speak.
Mastro’s Ocean Club Gourmet Restaurant In The Shops at Crystals at Aria Resort and Casino — Photo-Artistry by kenne
Many are making love. Up above, the angels in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing are braiding one another’s hair, which is strawberry blond and the texture of cold rivers. They glance down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy— it must look to them like featherless birds splashing in the spring puddle of a bed— and then one woman, she is about to come, peels back the man’s shut eyelids and says, look at me, and he does.
Jack “Old Jules” Purcell — Photo-Artistry by kenne
In June of 2006 Old Jules wrote on his blog So Far From Heaven “The More It Stays The Same.”
I hadn’t watched Easy Rider (Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson, circa 1968) in three decades.
When I saw it again this past weekend I appreciated it again for the first time:
Nicholson: You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.
Hopper: Huh. Man, everybody got chicken, that’s what happened, man. Hey, we can’t even get into like, uh, second-rate hotel, I mean, a second-rate motel. You dig? They think we’re gonna cut their throat or something, man. They’re scared, man.
Nicholson: Oh, they’re not scared of you. They’re scared of what you represent to ’em.
Hopper: Hey man. All we represent to them, man, is somebody needs a haircut.
Nicholson: Oh no. What you represent to them is freedom.
Hopper: What the hell’s wrong with freedom, man? That’s what it’s all about.
Nicholson: Oh yeah, that’s right, that’s what it’s all about, all right. But talkin’ about it and bein’ it – that’s two different things.
I mean, it’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace.
‘Course, don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free ’cause then they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are.
Oh yeah, they’re gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ’em.
Hopper: Mmmm, well, that don’t make ’em runnin’ scared.
Nicholson: No, it makes ’em dangerous.
Three young men searching for America who found it wasn’t what they bargained for.
Thomas R. Turner (May 23, 1942–November 13, 2014) — Photo-Artistry by kenne
This posting is the first of several I will be sharing from a long poem written by Tom
sometime around 1980 after his wife left him. Today is the fifth anniversary of his death.
24 to Harwood and Cropsy: No Road Back Home (Taken from a Brooklyn Bus Route and the Title of a Blues Album.)
Standing above me in Smith's roomAwkwardly looking down through a clipped hesitancyOur lives came together.TURNERWith all the ambiguity that last name usage impliesWas what she called me.Mannerisms of ingenuousness and a tendency toward the atypicalBespoke your ambiance
(Ineffably I wanted Her)That voice -FalsettoLaced in bursts of Peter's guffawsSeemed contrived with a dreamed-of authenticity.
(Your mouth, my love,the
thistle in the kiss?)
From within mutually cancellingVignettes of naturalness and gender-cliche'She kissed through closed lips ofPristine openness.Innocently I loved.Through summer notes of vulnerabilityTogether we embraced an entangled growth of uncertainty
(Our fictions were tempered in
a painful and inward time)Desperate needs equivocated against ordained directions andDead-end holdings of night-bakery-work.Even then yours wasn't other-directed butA need to keep the Self-absorption of your Ann Arbor soul on a
Pedastal of conforming difference.Eliptically we lived in the intersticesBetween an illusion of Fulfillment and letters etched with"Know what?"
Returning from a morning walk my eye caught a Cooper’s Hawk flying into a nearby Mesquite tree. After closer observation, I could see the hawk had captured a mourning dove. Since the tree was near my house, I quickly grabbed my camera and began shooting.
Predator and prey Each seeking to win the chase A daily event.
My daughter Kate and grandson Kenne Jaxon — Image by kenne
Each week I get an image, like a postcard from Dewitt Jones. His images are inspiring, and his voice is my voice. So, I share his TEDx with you — enjoy. — kenne
Jack “Old Jules” Purcell — Photo-Artistry by kenne
Photo-Artistry by kenne
Thomas R. Turner (May 23, 1942–November 13, 2014) — Photo-Artistry by kenne
Joy and Kenne — Photo-Artistry by kenne
Cooper’s Hawk and Prey — Image by kenne
Mountain Marigold on Mt. Lemmon — Photo-Artistry by kenne
Father and Sons In Sabino Creek — Photo-Artistry by kenne
My daughter Kate and grandson Kenne Jaxon — Image by kenne
Becoming is Superior to Being 