I have long appreciated Camus’ standpoint on theism:
“I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live my life as if there isn’t and die to find out there is.” ~ Albert Camus
But then there’s the other side of this logic. Comedian, Stephen Fry says, “If you assume there’s no afterlife, you’ll likely have a fuller, more interesting life.”
“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
I.
I am the mother of “Fringe” who some say is a son-of-a-bitch (that makes me the bitch of origin). I gave him the name “Taylor” but now he’s a hybrid of him now/him then so for the purposes of this poem I’ll refer to him as “Fringe Taylor”.
What of this nefarious person who was born more artist than citizen, born of an artist out on the fringe? “Spawn-of-a-fringe-bitch” (I coined a new epithet).
What of them?
I freely admit I am a Mother Bitch who encouraged a son’s phantasmagoria (read: delusions, psychosis, mania) if the allusions were just him, if the dangerous ideas were his choice; his poetry and art, his to keep or give.
I called that freedom and eschewed medication.
Sparing the rod too, I tried not to mold him too much, to belittle nor otherwise oppress except when he didn’t do the dishes or keep his room clean or clean the dog up–no Internet. I didn’t teach him to fear dirt or darkness. I didn’t send him to the public schools that prepare for future slavery, uniformity, mediocrity, and blind obedience. I didn’t encourage him to covet, to consume, crave for approval, or live on credit, and by not doing so, unleashed upon the harsh and authoritarian world, a new breed of crazy, starving artist, one without baggage.
For I insist his artists’ worth is not in what quantifiable commodities are produced.
As other mothers polish A+ report cards, praise their childrens’ conformity with pride at this promise of high-paying job, I do not hide from you my guilty pleasure to see this young man sleeping happily outside, free, more or less with a backpack of worthless stuff and a thrift store guitar just pickin’ tunes and scribbling doodles in a notebook under the stars and among The Travelers.
Any pity in my heart is reserved for myself for harboring any foolhardy expectations for what would be or that he would always be at my side.
Some say poetry is more how the words are arranged. Some say art is how the medium is plied or paint laid. Some even call conversation an art. These may be the experts who say this, maybe the sideliners, spectators, or sometime-dabblers who don’t know what it means to be free much less express freely. Some just assert their bias. While they hate the cliche, I suspect they hate it so because they may live the cliche whereas Fringe and I accept these words that come upon like second hand clothes. My son ornaments them and makes of these his own clothes; he wants to think his own thoughts; choose his own words; be his own man. Whatever comes of it = Not cliche.
And I was the reckless author of him, this living story that went on to be a song of Himself.
I am Goddess, He is my art at a distance.
II.
A doctor tells me on the phone they have my son, that he’s crazy, delusional, psychotic, maybe even schizophrenic and they have him on medication. I don’t get defensive, I am truly alarmed but my true words and reasons are unhinged as I ask appropriate questions and navigate the institutional system. Soon I’m smiling, knowing they can’t see the smile growing on my face (relishing this private freedom). I’m smiling as my heart restores itself to faith when they describe his suspicious quirks.
They don’t know how they undo their work to release him to my “protective” embrace.
They’re releasing him because they say the medication’s working and so they pack him on a bus to me so we can have Thanksgiving together and I am thankful, I don’t wait to give thanks ’til Thanksgiving: that strange holiday that supposedly celebrates celebrating coalition, good food, and mutually independent volition. I don’t believe those pioneers who broke bread with the “savages” were as frightened then as our herd of contented Americans are now, such easy pickins for The Man, so ripe for harvest.
(I can’t wait to see him.)
III.
Fringe Taylor got on the phone then and told me about The Harvesters and what “the harvest” means. He said there are belief harvesters there now, he’s there among them. (This is supposed to be more of his delusional thinking.) But I, his mother, mother of his mind, I see the metaphor and understand.
I wait for the bill to come in the mail.
While there’s time before the bus back home departs, Fringe tells me of his travels, of long walksand hunger, meals stolen, and confesses he is craving for his first “legal” whiskey in a bar he hopes to share with me, his mother, his closest family and lifelong friend. He describes drug experimentation past and done. He tells of books, ideas, and wondrous things, of strange people and places (but spares the fucks), describes beautiful fireworks observed from a mountaintop, where he spent the night in some temple and I ask if he saw the forests burn in Los Angeles. Though he was there, strangely, he did not. It was there he was found naked and wandering (read: out of his mind) and was soon incarcerated. He says he cut his dreads off while in jail, where he was sent for panhandling. But not because anyone told him to– because he saw “the signs”. (Don’t think it’s drugs, he wasn’t on them. I’ve been assured that he was tested.) He proceeds to tell me of apprenticing to a western psychic, of interstate bus rides and concert tours and crowds, of peyote and graves in New Mexico and of solitary pilgrimages to nowhere in particular, of friends he’s made, and love, about new music, and a world clock that he swears someone said connects EVERYTHING and is directed from above by four invisible people on a plate, suspended by a bird. I wonder if this is crazier than believing in God. I am so proud of him and of us, of This. How many mothers hear their sons speak and hear their souls unleashed in the words?
Doctors point “word salad”, my heart paints poetry.