Come… listen to the dreamer, the idealist, the impractical unrealistic one; with ideas unworkable in this modern world. Ideas and ideals certain to lead you to chaos and dissension, turmoil and conflict—or heaven. Yes, heaven, if such a thing has been, is, or could be, then it is here and now; not on some gold-plated, thick-carpeted, air-conditioned cloud city with excellent plumbing—a place mortally unattainable, unknowable. Listen—we of the flesh, here is our heaven and here our hell. Come… share my vision—follow this thought-path leading—leading where? Out this madness? Yes, I know your fear. Leaving the security of the known. Perhaps I’ve seen more of the madness—but try. Perhaps I see more—but try. Can’t you see your pain is now your comfort? Your pain is like an old friend who long ago stopped giving you pleasure, and the tedium and the boredom set in so gradually that if exposed to it suddenly, it would be unbearable.
“Sure I know he’s an idiot, but I’ve known him for so long! Why, we were friends in school—I can’t be cruel.”
Cruel hell! Don’t talk to me of cruelty, your pleasurable self-destruction is sickening to me. If your mind would become clear, crystal-clear as an always fresh, always renewing, sparkling mountain stream… you can’t let idiots with muddy minds go wading through it. Old friends!?!
I refuse to die here. To die in modern society is one of the most degrading experiences imaginable. It’s illegal to just die—just die and go back to the soil. It’s illegal—really. There are a group among us: the modern ghouls… the undertakers—they haunt buildings called mortuaries. These ineffectual sadists, mother-father cutters, rapists, incestuous dead-body diddlers, blood-pumpers, cotton-cheek-stuffing, ghoul make-up artists—o to hell with ‘em, I don’t even want to discus them—let’s just give our bodies back to the soil.
A thick skull is a sick skull.
Funny, I just read one of those articles: the kind that magazines feature so often. This one about what they called the problem of Heart Trouble and Sex. I don’t know if your imagination is as vivid as mine but this one threw me into laughing tantrums. They soundproofed a room, got a couple of couples—young married ones—fastened pulse recording and other electronic equipment to “their” equipment; turned out the lights and said go… and go they did—all for science. Everybody got their gun and the magazine got their article. C’mon all kinds of guys with bad pumps have died while fuckin’—only question is—was it or wasn’t it worth it? These commercial writers are really too much aren’t they?
Well anyway—they recorded pulse rates as high as 170 on those fuckers for science—when the average is 72, and pointed out the hell that plays with a bad heart and how many guys die that way and how tough it gets psychologically—when you want to go, but are afraid. No way! No busy “business” life for me, no hustle-bustle life with its ulcerated lace curtain stomach and sloppy heart valves. Like I said, let’s lie on the beach this afternoon, get some sun, we’ll run up to the rocks at Malibu, after I’ll buy you a yogurt… happy balling kiddies.
I’ve been trying to talk St. Peter into canonizing Satan, BUT HE ABSOLUTELY REFUSES. Seems in the millennium-fold statutes—somewhere in the deep dank archives of ecclesiastical law—canonization can only be performed upon the deceased, and when we talk of eliminating Lucifer, he gets fidgety and shifty-eyed and very suspicious, I think he knows that I know. I suppose I should be more cautious: another inquisition would finish me. Ah, forget it, I’d rather die than shut up and shut down the Mind.
Today the screaming in the streets hurt my ears again; I tore up my brain and the head pain again; came back to my room again; locked the door again; pulled the covers over my head again; masturbated again.
God, I wish you were true.
They-are-coming-closer-and-closer-with-their-razor-edge-apathy-for-my-red-pulsing-throat-Why-do-the-want-to-kill-me-when-I-snatch-death-from-their-minds-I-hear-their-blood-smelling-footsteps-pounding-sounding-hollow-dead-end-I-am-very-tired-don’t-cry-they-will-be-quick.
People would say, “You two are so much alike, how do you stand each other?” Opposites attract… who’s kidding who? If you believe in yourself, the basic substance of yourself, what can you do with your opposite? If really opposite, they can’t be much more than a curio—and what has this to do with “love yourSelf?” So many seem to feel that the spontaneous affinity you feel, when you observe and contact in another person a belief or an attitude that you see as precious in yourself, that this is a negative thing, an unhealthy reaction. Look! If I dig Ellington or Debussy, it’s because they talk to me; I should be attracted to those who don’t or can’t? No—I believe in mySelf. I believe in my evaluation of what I see and hear. If someone shows an interest in me, give him or her credit for being discerning at least. The outspoken ones, those who lay it on the line, not afraid to say, “This is me—take it or leave it—if you don’t like it, okay tell me about it. If you’ve got something to say and enough guts to declare yourself, I’ll listen for awhile—I know you could be right—I know that I have been wrong, will be wrong—don’t like it, being wrong. Tell me, I may fight you, probably will, but I’m worth straightening out.”
And that’s the thing… you feel that they are worth it, worth the effort. Obviously, few are. But if they are, they’re that rare thing—a human being in growth, in flux, and well worth a kick in the ass. Don’t worry, these people you don’t hurt… all sinewy inside, strong enough with the knowledge of Self-worth. If they don’t put a high evaluation on you, your efforts to hip them will only be laughable… If that even.
This thing of being wrong reminds me of Hank: he and Huru, his Japanese girlfriend, rent my little downstairs studio up here on Lookout Mountain Road in Laurel Canyon: a sweet guy who would like to paint but can’t let himself go, even after years of technical training, even after years of analysis-style therapy. He makes his living doing renderings for architects: those insipid watercolors of proposed buildings architects show to prospective clients.
He’s an intelligent guy who loves himself and hates himself for it—Yeah!
How many are fighting this one out? Well, it stopped him dead. LOVES HIMSELF AND HATES HIMSELF FOR IT, and what else could he do with Old-World Italian background and Catholic beginning; a brother who wants to become a pries—What chance? O well, like Mr. Mortimer Sahl says… Onward.
A day I’m digging around in the yard for a stash I’d buried (I never did find it) and casual dialoging with Hank—probably about abstract painting, a mutual interest—when I’d remarked that I’d been wrong about something—some incident, I don’t remember what, and what a drag it was.
He jumped me, “What’s so bad about being wrong?”
That stops me dead. These things always come at me like out of another world… and they really are. I have to shake my head, re-orient myself—this is the way they think!
I say, “Well, when you goof you blow the moment.”
“Huh?”
“Look, Hank, can you see that life is a thing of moments, or say incidents happening one right after the other, sometimes it seems with practically no continuity, like maybe a badly cut film, with scenes randomly sequenced, seemingly unrelated one to the other. But nonetheless each has emotional content, the potential to express extremes of joy or hate they should express or, more generally, extremes of passivity.”
Hank’s quiet awhile, then he kinda clears his throat and says, “Now this form of empiricizing is of course impossible other than on a very superficial idealistic plane; a really well-intellectualized idealism comprehends through and beyond this quite easily…”
I cut in, “Whoa, what the fuck is all this incoherent crap? Sounds like something plagiarized from a third-rate Huxley imitation… look, Hank, like this… driving, wanna make a left turn, car coming opposite side, you turn, mind’s elsewhere, depth perception all off, miscalculate speed… suddenly heart pushing your tonsils; screech… Carrrruuummmblang tinkle tinkle blood all over the place… man you were wrong! Like it’s not nice, you goofed the moment.
“Want more? Okay, say right now standing here, some crazy-looking chick comes walking up the Canyon and she’s under full sail, fully-rigged, heels, Chanel-cut suit, a straight kinda boutique hat… ok you know how to handle this type: like a wild man—into the pad, off the sandals, off the sweatshirt, the jeans, on the twenty dollar sport shirt, new-cut slacks, gold mesh belt, Filipino shoes—all that Xmas stuff you thought you’d never wear and you catch her two doors up… man, the chick’s a non-objective painter of note—new from NY, the Village, visiting a sister up the street, who ranked her day, draped her in same-size square clothes, drug and dragged her to a Valley wedding reception but she just couldn’t cut it, split—one thing in mind: get home and out of uniform. And now this yo-yo comes sliding up to hit on her, you’re dressed like you’re out looking for a wedding reception. Too tired to even put you down—just totterlytilts onto her sandals. And man you were wrong! You’d stopped a beat and Seen, you’d’ve Seen that something about her is out of sync and probably even figured the situation and conducted Self properly. But no! You goofed and it’s the biggest drag in life! Sure a growing person gleans lots of what they know from mistakes but that shit’s gotta start stopping somewhere. Let’s face it when people pick themselves up and dusting off say, ‘Well, it was good experience, I had to learn’—stick around, usually you’ll see it’s a repetitious thing. Like I say if you’re alive and learning, you learn and life starts getting fun—after awhile things begin to click. What’s wrong with being wrong? Wow!”
O at times how I hate my trivial paltry petty drip-shit world.
Even Einstein became a monster… how Jewish he must have felt when he composed that letter to Roosevelt, “We can raise hell,” he said, and did… and the stench of the ovens ceased. yes, in the biggest stench of man-flesh of all ages… the ovens ceased. And Jews stopped nerve-jumping in the fires of Auscwitz and Japanese began molecules melting in the fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And now sweet kind Albert—gentle soul we honor you. Thank you for hell kind-eyed old man who became less human and more gentile and more Aryan and more black and more brown an more blue and more pink and more red… and more ashes.
If you think a young girl more beautiful than the old man half-eaten by cancer; a bouquet of roses more beautiful than a pile of feces; a new fat tire more beautiful than an old lacy worn flat one; if you think the crystal-clean Miami Beach walk more beautiful than the vomit and mucus-spittle smeared skid-row walk… then I say you are frightened, have never really looked into beauty—don’t know what you call beautiful or ugly are only effect and the cause—pure beauty. Yes, the cold relentless irrefutable laws of this-makes-that, the gorgeously impersonal laws of pus and scabs, fire and water, drop and break and the flaming cometed geometrical warp of the cosmos.
If you think he more beautiful than she, or she than he, or his than hers, or hers than his—if you would be alive… your hope lies as much in the dissonant decayed, as in the melodic ripe lush flesh; each only the end and result of truth; wonderfully functional, believable, dependable, omnipresent truth.
Truth… the good friend, the sire of your rotten ovary… your breath-stenching, fuming, congested, gaseous colon.
Truth… the good friend, the sire of the lovely, coordinated, rhythmic, happy pulse and flow and glow of your healthiness.
Do you cry often little man? I cry often—yes. Why do you cry little man? I cry for the human blood smeared across its face. I cry for the hate in my brothers for themselves. I cry each time anew, yes each time anew I see him standing whimpering, for a soft spot searching himself, and the sharp hate thing in the other hand—ready.
Wulf Zendik’s (1920-1999) life and art were a process of mutual discovery, a masterful combination of aesthetics and integrity. Poet, novelist, musician, essayist, orator and inventor – Wulf’s tremendous legacy includes the open-ended concepts of Ecolibrium (ecological equilibrium) and Creavolution (creative evolution) – which together form the basis of a new way of living on Planet Earth. Zendik Farm, the cooperative artists’ culture which was Wulf’s home and creation, continues to thrive as the living embodiment of his benevolent ideas. To learn more about Wulf and his legacy, go to www.zendik.org.