C.J.Sellers

It occurs to me that I am a preacher and so are you. Everyone is biased and we wear our bias/colors like plumage, some of us to bond us to a group out of defense or to better attack, which may still be some sort of defense.

On my pulpit, as an ex-patriot of the herd, I wear no colors in particular. Mine are a kaleidoscope of holograms reflecting the whole of creation, just what I can see from my vantage, this little spot here that I own, I own all that I survey, you included. In my ex-patriotism, I’m for no one in particular and everyone in general.

I just want to tell you, from my soapbox, that the sting you feel from the preacher man/woman on the corner is not from what is said or from accusing silence, but at the implication that you are not of the same ilk, that you, one or the other, are an alien object, not you both the integral subject. What stings you is the sense of disunion that comes from the absence of love.

Three quotes on love that illustrate my meaning:

“Love is not just looking at each other; it’s looking in the same direction.”
~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing.”
~Anais Nin

“Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.”
~ Oscar Wilde

You can ignore the man on the corner but you can’t escape him in your heart. And you will never reach your enemy if you call him the enemy. You will never know his love if you tell yourself he is not capable or worthy of yours. Never love the lie that we, as individuals, are separate from the whole of creation and from each other, it has been proven untrue, not just in our hearts but by modern science! When I’m dead, I hope they put that on my tombstone so I can keep preaching love from the grave.

Cheers!

by C.J.Sellers

you there who are a bullet
and the gun and the hand and the wound
not knowing your without or within
you think you cannot know your purpose
until the action or the war’s won

you don’t see start, trajectory, or end all
you think, you lose, you win, you wind eternal
you nonsense exegesis spectacle

you think this is your heart’s now
you think this is your place here
you feel you know the reason anyhow

you thief, cop, martyr, monkey, Hyperborean
shoot your godsend, suck the treason, wile
fuck, breed, eat, shit, beat, breathe, dial

you think you are between or as you are
you tower, you to and from
you sweet and salt of

you one, you one, you one
you one of many who make your one
you body, cell, nucleus, quantum, logos, holy ghost

you seed, planet, universe
you’re flat, you’re round, you’re diaphanous
you’re subjective and objective as

you god, you speak your logos wrong
you speak it like a web to catch all
you fateful aspect spinning sins and angels

you past, you present, you future danger
you part and participle, noun
you solo, orchestral, polyphonic child

you sun and moon, you all and nothing
you lives, you deaths, you births
you sentient, loud and silent sound

you unity of all of
you one who has no name to speak of
you who is and is of
[...]

“An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water.” — Arthur S. Eddington

“We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.” — Arthur S. Eddington

No, I tell you, it was an ordinary day when things first gave way in my mind.  Things were going along just fine, had been for a long time; uneventfully, in fact.

You think that crazy comes on gradually (least I did), that you have time to head it off at the pass, so to speak. Not for me at least. No, not in the least.

I think of crazy people and what comes to mind are like I dunno, gray and fearful, mumbling, twitching bunnies,  (though some not so tame).

I’m fumbling for words here…

Ah, what do I know of crazies? I’m talking to myself right now on a computer, seems less strange but it ain’t  necessarily so.  The doctor says I don’t seem crazy and so there’s none of that *tension*, you know… talking ’bout crazy stuff is just somethin’ we like to chat about now and then.

For instance, did you know crazy people are not strangers to reason. Their reasons just aren’t the norm. Or so I’m told.

Sanity is friends with the empirical I gather. The empirical is just that which can be proven …to a doctor. We’re supposed to agree on what’s “real”.

Tchyeah right.

Why don’t they see the gift it is to flee from reason and the tyranny of consensus? Don’t tread on me. My crazy don’t need a reason. I don’t have no  hang-ups or fixations, what have ya…

I don’t need a reason nor some professional validation to accept what I see clearly here before me: this ghost, this inexplicable, ridiculous apparition. I’m not even afraid of it. No, I have to laugh, just from startling when I catch sight of it. Otherwise, there’s not so much to be jolly ’bout at the moment. So I don’t mind the ghost(s) even if you can’t enjoy them.

Yes, there’s more than one.

I know what you’re thinking, it’s what I thought before this, those Hollywood ghosts, those Poe-ish, Gothic ghosts and so forth but no, sorry to disappoint.

This ghost right here appeared sitting in our old rocking chair. But I tell you, and try to imagine this, ha-ha…get this…
it’s just the soul

OF THE CHAIR!

Ain’t that a hoot?
hahahahahaha

And it talks.
hahahahahaha

And what it talks about is so boring!
hahahahahaha

You know, if you could imagine what a chair would know…
hahahahahaha

Well now I know. If you don’t have a sense of humor, then be glad you don’t see  (and hear) my ghosts.

Oh, one other thing I found out here,  crazy people don’t think they’re crazy.
But I do. Ipso facto, I’m not.
hahahahahaha
Whateva.

Are you comfortable? Would you like a chair? Oop, don’t sit there, not in that one…
hahahahahaha

Oh my goodness what she just said about your ass…
Ahem…let’s leave it there
shall we?

[Author's Note: "Powys' Ghosts" was inspired by the works of John Cowper Powys wherein ordinary things have spirits and lives all their own and communicate with one another, even human spirits.]

Personality is the only permanent thing in life; and if truth, beauty, goodness, and love, are to have permanence they must depend for their permanence not upon some imaginary law in a universe half-created by personality but upon the indestructible nature of personality itself. ~ John Cowper Powys, from “The Complex Vision“

by C.J. Sellers

Venus Libertina, my Sophia,
death’s muse who would be widow,
now peers through my prison window,
whose invention’s she, the gods’ or man’s?

What her seekers set in motion:
those Zoroastrians sought her union
with the King of Gods–did they there, that hour
merge me, mere Yeshua, syncretic:
Aeneas, Buddha, Mithras; Mazda; Horus?

Beyond the din of captive bodies and their ignorance,
beyond armies claiming mandate of the Logos,
beyond enslaving orthodoxy, beyond ideal,
beyond form’s confusion, beyond the lie, beyond words,
hear you how my muse sings forth
endless, inhuman excogitation?
So why then do the Romans call this morning light
love’s seed and inspiration?

Magna Mater to no one, she beckons, “End,”
trotting out her hot, barren orb
slow and languid ’round, a careful compass,
erstwhile, men contrived their epics, magic
mysteries, tragic and comedic skits in the
quintessence of her dark, emblazoned skirts.

Insensate, she elucidates the divine path,
seen past, of small part finds our humble earth.
Her mandala lucubrates secret truths
awaiting a nirvana to be parsed.

You, Judas, once mused how my captors praise
the many stars and not the One. I’d have laughed,
yet, my gaze was fixed upon impending gnosis.

There’s precious nuance praxis hinges on.
If I should say, “There is no darkness here
without some light,” could faithless Peter
build a church upon what he thrice denied?

They’ll paint my Venus pale, a virgin,
for Constantine’s militia will hate the women.
Sprung from a rock was their Mithras.
They’ll deign Peter rock, not you, Judas,
nor Mary Magdalene nor Judas Thomas.
For you my friend, just “traitor”.
I am sorry. You understood Us.

For you, dear Judas, not for silver,
for a kiss, I offer bread as parting gift:
follow and own your own cross to Pleroma.
Mind silent, we’ll both find Libertina.

by C.J. Sellers

Between walls and hills
where green booze bottles
splay fragmented among the dead
fish and coal fly ashes,
beside shores where too much
or too little grows well,

Between body bags and body farm,
diseased needles and crusted,
discarded, bloody condoms
that in this Sodom tells
of love or desperation?

Between tidy lies and lawns,
between votes cast, lots pulled,
and elections bought or won,
freedoms lost, greased palms,
and bills crimes committed
by lobbyists and politicians,

Between cracked panes and arrests,
twisted arms and vain protests,
obscenities and wrists vented,
bullet-riddled premises
or alerts to 911 sent,

Between the shots and bombs
fired or lobbed in revenge
at peopled church pews
or from or at a Muslim
(it makes no difference),

Between commercial breaks,
and the sweet mountaintop wastelands
of Southern Appalachia, my home,
where Bibles were once
banged but now are hugged,
where creeks and wells
polluted with cow dung
and pesticides, coal
fines and rubble come
from what began a
mountain but is now
a pillar of salt,

Between the ears and in hearts
too preoccupied to hear or feel,
between U.S. and them,
and prayers for us and ours,

In a barn beneath a golden calf tarred
and papered with devalued cash
that was once our dreams and labor
lies a new and naked child,

And what of it?

[Author's Note: The title, "Between Lots", as well as the first paragraph are references to two short poems, listed below. "Lots", "Sodom", "Pillar of Salt", and "Golden calf" are all references to the Bible. This poem is staged outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, at the foot of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, specifically, at the foot of Clinch Mountain, in "Rich Valley". On the other side of the mountain lays "Poor Valley". Once upon a time, beyond this point was considered the "Wild West" and I live along the Wilderness Road settlers once traveled to get there. This mountainous region was populated with a stubborn breed of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, later turned Southern Baptist. My husband's family is of this ilk, the Whites and Sellers families. His Whites came over on the Mayflower.

The poem is generally about the degradation of the demarcation between the old ways and the new and the rural and urban here in this place.  At various points, it's about a loss of individual identity, loss of faith, loss of blissful ignorance of what goes on elsewhere, and about theft of value and "family values".

The stanza about politics is about the loss of faith in people in positions of authority who write the laws Americans live by. It's a story told from rural/conservative point of view, invaded by an onslaught of "liberal depravity" and midway through, the urban idyllic is suddenly attacked by the conservative when guns are fired at peopled church pews, this is a reference to a shooting at a Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville.

Here and there, I've blurred the line between the urban and rural with fuzzy logic, confusing the point of view. This is an expression of the Quantum Aesthetic.

When I wrote it, I had recently read "Between Walls" by William Carlos Williams and "Between Two Hills" by Carl Sandburg. My intention was to fill in the space between the lots characterized in these poems and give voice to the anguish of losing an idyllic, agrarian social identity. It's both from my perspective and not as I'm a liberal living in an highly conservative area. I'm no fundamentalist but I cannot remain truly separate from the perspectives of my family and neighbors here in rural East Tennessee.

Other local news/cultural references include the TVA coal ash spill, mountaintop removal, NPS contamination of water in this karst region, the UTK body farm. Larger issues (local to national and world lots) include the wars in the Iraq and Afghanistan, and national politics.  As of 2009, fewer rural people own a computer or often use the Internet than in the cities and urban suburbs.  Much of this news is brought here via the television.

"In ...Appalachia...where Bibles were once banged but now are hugged" is a reference to the threat of religious relativism and postmodernism denying the authority of a single doctrinal narrative. Here again, about loss, the church has experienced an increasing loss of new membership over the years. Young people increasingly look elsewhere than religion to find the meaning of existence.

Additionally, there is symbolism in certain pairings and choices of wording that I won't get into here for the sake of brevity.]

Between Walls by William Carlos Williams

the back wings
of the
hospital where
nothing
will grow lie
cinders
in which shine
the broken
pieces of a green
bottle

Between Two Hills by Carl Sandburg

Between two hills
The old town stands.
The houses loom
And the roofs and trees
And the dusk and the dark,
The damp and the dew
Are there.

The prayers are said
And the people rest
For sleep is there
And the touch of dreams
Is over all.