Fruit and challenge
captivated, spit on
cheeks washed in brine
a boat splashes away
yesterday a window
it passes as still life
for society, the dinner guest

a comment on how the waves rest

appearances and the texture
water falls as if combed
by it’s tempest mother, a homage to the iris
the sculpture of feeling
swollen and ripe before swift cuts
to the sun-kissed strawberry
the happy phantom

By Hijiinks

Damned Good

You’re blessed if you do
blessed if you don’t
foot after foot step as ancient wood
creaking boards talk and the water under
the river lapping water splashes a drop
in the wind to seal together
a wandering mind and the whispering present.

Sitting down level with a row of boats
bows like mouths smile and frown
looking into the soul of the ocean
way down river distance blurs behind
vessels returned in the morning fog.

They sit tied while we travel back
to sit over the water looking at the
floating characters: hand carved osprey faces,
Viking dragons, turtle claws and smooth
linseed eyeshadow protects the journeys to come.

They rise and fall
each with it’s own voice that flies and dives
in slow harbor waves. Dreaming innocence
soars as a bird and echoes sacred songs,
spying as they come and go leaving foodscraps.

When they’re all gone there is no place to go but outside
exiting time itself the voices turn to dancing colors
we are taken in the teeth of coyote, no regrets
for his lapping of our blood is a trick of the light,
the blood a waterfall. The smell of cedar and love in balance
with life’s community; where have the solid plastic edges gone?

No, They are gone. A hand extends to you from a smiling chief
humor and grace invite you to join this moment
to celebrate karmic flight on the wings of spotted tail
to stay where the thunderbird comes
and goes at the ends to time to return.
Whether from the Black Hills, deep in the Amazon
or at the edge to the northmost lake where the polar bear
and snowy lynx hunt. The meek mouse tells the great story
again. We return to the holy feathering of lifetimes
upon cultures upon separations, gathering round
to hear the quiet tale of how we return to fly as one.

by Hijinks

Life Half-Priced by Jon Ash “Hijinks” Clark

Translation from English by François Desnoyers

blessures de l'âme, soulevée
Pour que tous le sachent, La chaleur,

la vacuité des mots

Ils parlent et je n'entends pas. Je connais le message,

encore et encore et cela seulement    brille

Tel des robes d'or et blanc,
Je ne peux les voir, je sais qu'il n'y a rien sous leur voile

Des mots me font oublier les mots

profondes imperfections, blessures béantes, risibles
« Souviens t’en »
elles sont l'unique savoir
Un savoir vide, aucun besoin de gratter pour l'enrichir

Je pose ma tête sur le sol
À l'instant même où le soleil, se levant, touche la terre

“When we hear a Dharma talk (casual monk teaching) or study a sutra our only job is to remain open. Usually when we hear or read something new, we just compare it to our own ideas. If it is the same, we accept it and say that it is correct. If it is not, we say it is incorrect. In either case, we learn nothing. If we read or listen with an open mind and an open heart, the rain of the Dharma will penetrate the oil of our concsiousness.

The gentle spring rain permeates the soil of my soul; A seed that has lain deeply in the earth for many years just smiles

While reading or listening, don’t work too hard. Be like the earth. When the rain comes, the earth only has to open herself up to the rain” (The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, by Thich Nhat Hanh, 1999, p. 12)

Duality like judging speech as positive or negative, good or bad, skillful or unskillful, learned or unlearned, connected, respectable, true,… can prevent listening and growth. What is the goal of conceptual work? Usually we just move from idea to idea without end. We find one idea that we like or feels new and fresh, we stop there for a while and have some peace.

This problem of both the promiscuous or the celibate thinker is called the Liar Paradox, and these thinkers perpetuate themselves with work or support from others because they cannot find an escape from the Liar Paradox. See the first post of this blog for more on the escape conceptual work and find ease.

Questions in Logic: How to escape the Liar Paradox

JONATHON CLARK on 3/16/2023 12:52:50 PM wrote

Cautions of skepticism and it’s ease

A whole world of trust issues
bi-polar where both poles themselves
are bi-polar, confused
at whom to trust, skepticism is a satisfying elixir
the drink of easy friends. A fork in the road
it appears commingling the sun and fields of grain

“It all depends on the camera angle.”
is announced over the background of classical piano
a raindrop suite splashed upon our dry face
that we didn’t have a good angle on it is subsumed in peace
the summer smell of algae while fishing under the overpass.
Fish-like, our eyes escaped from traffic and are absorbed
in the crescendo of noise

Alone in the eagles circle joined
by the archetier of hellion, hired by the lily pad
grown deep from the silt of
generations of frogs and pollywog tails like
fruiting bodies, inky caps. Staining the petals
of the water lily. Still and waiting for it’s own
green bee, to sneak by, when the sun ordains.

The moment of pollination
obscured by a dream-like state
the camera could never capture it.
Our faculties fail.
Skeptical scowls are permitted
we release hands with faith in our own past
the cliff we watched from crumbles
we grow wings instead of falling
they glide on silence, embrace the self
transcend the need to be better
a good idea contingent on solipsism

worse things have wings to fly
to float is easy. Never seeing beneath
where goldfish play and delight in currents
our angle reveals the twisting fluid fins
currents that shed no ripple into our reflection.
It shows our smile and we delight again
in the sensation of seeing it.

God in us and the smoothness of water
this watches over our wish for human progress.

Stochastic equilibrium is the shading of forgetfulness
waking between dreams to protect ourselves
with blankets and small rations of food, becoming
self-defined. Winds unbroken by the forests shield
they move our happy vessel mere inches. Adventure
a greater source with the ageless battle of flowers.

The happy people sit on the banks skipping stones as
sinuous swimmers wait to dine on the peaceful doe.
Rising to the surface skeptical that anything less than
blood will do. Sardonic the memory of what you had
and what you lost, but that is just the past.

The present shines; don’t forget take caution
at the ease of skepticism and become the water lily
opening it’s bright eye to see the iridescent
miracle of life for a blink of a dream
The fluid epiphany of nature.

How happy is the little Stone

That rambles in the Road alone,

And doesn’t care about Careers

And Exigencies never fears—

Whose Coat of elemental Brown

A passing Universe put on,

And independent as the Sun

Associates or glows alone,

Fulfilling absolute Decree

In casual simplicity—

Emily Dickinson

This is a hearty attempt at describing the rock. I believe she wants to learn how to be like a rock, because honest things are always good company. Yet there is no leaf or rock or bone that does not have some rhetorical force, something that sways the blade of grass one way or the other. There is no real complete stillness, no perfect vacuum for Newton’s Laws to find their absolute truth. Honesty doesn’t exist, except in the imagination or in spiritualism.

Listen: https://download.pariyatti.org/dwob/samyutta_nikaya_1_168.mp3

The entire world is in flames,
the entire world is going up in smoke;
the entire world is burning,
the entire world is vibrating.
But that which does not vibrate or burn,
which is experienced by the noble ones,
where death has no entry–
in that my mind delights. (Saṃyutta Nikāya 1.168)

Honesty is a lofty goal, one that would be very dangerous to achieve without some protection or isolation.

What we can hope, as most humans cannot undertake a path to being like a rock as it really is, is to set one who is bent one way to be a little more straight, (or bent in the way needed for the moment), not with honesty or saying things just as they are, but with rhetoric.

Buddhist texts are very rhetorical. The Buddha describes the texts as like a raft that you leave behind when you have reached Ultimate Truth.

People really expect a lot of their friends (and rocks as they are experienced) if they want honesty.

Aristotle would say that the formation of a rock “acts out,” imposing its form on the world. But it is not only a bodily, or “thinging” influence. The acting out of a rock is not different from rhetoric, and I am sure Aristotle would disagree with me here.

Rugged individualism, or the term “well, actually …” or FYI (For your Information) have their own brands of rhetoric disguised as honesty. (and mathematics of course, especially mathematics. on this fact, I could speak forever)

What rhetoric doesn’t have this disguise?

This offering I hope will help to see the lie that objects are more honest than people.  A scientist will say, for example, that Nature is a matter of competition and adaptation, and then you will find yourself in a company of people competing with each other and trying to adapt their personalities to be powerful or fearless or whatever, all because this scientist tried to say the truth about Nature. He was trying to be honest (his intention, but still not the truth), and the effect of his trying to be honest was only and always rhetorical. Whether this rhetorical effect is good or bad should be the first question. The ethical status of your words is the foundation, not some appeal to objects and Nature, as if such things were honest.

My attempt to show the lack of truth in Nature has used 3 metaphors so far. Rhetoric is like the wind that blows grass, Rhetoric is like a fire: color, and quality in its most elemental sense. Also Rhetoric is like water, the flood we use the raft to cross.

The shore and the raft are earthy things, a metaphor for truth used by the Buddha, is rhetorical. It is not so that earth is not rhetorical, and Dickinson shows this is so, whether she wanted to or not. It is a poetic puzzle… to describe a rock from the heights and limits of language that is poetry.

wounds of the soul, lifted
For all to know, The warmth,

the emptiness of words

They speak and I do not hear. I know the message,


again and again and it is only       Shining


Like robes of gold and white,
I cannot see them, I know there is nothing under their veil


The words make me forget words

deep flaws, open wounds, laughable
"Remember them"
they are the only knowledge
An empty knowledge, there is no need to claw for more

I put my head on the ground
Just when the Sun, rising, touches the Earth

“To write everything is to put a sword in the hands of a child”

red turns to green, Do not make a difference.

both the same and the different

are cut down all the same by war machines.

Endless mistakes of snow

words falling, failing

My imagination turned black

False stars, ghost stars, the sky envelops us in stone

the weather is our pagan religion, lost within caverns,

faith in the eye of the whirlwind

vacuum salesman

they were hired and fired

on a creative discipline of compulsion

They will come to your door and ask to speak with your children

And your children will recognize them as the friendly guy on TV

They wrote a book “The Big Book of Knowledge (for kids)”

Everything you want to know about

“What if the moon suddenly disappeared?”

There would be space completely unlike the space in a bowl.

The space between subnuclear particles follows the confines of certain ceramics

That can be bent by gravity

Pressure the mind to condense, it will begin emitting gravitational waves

How does gravity grip us across the chasms of space, not just any space, but the space we have defined, the space most inductive to our understanding?

If the mind has control over the pressure acting on itself, could one enact as an act of will? The ability to grip objects across space.

And how would we use this power harmlessly?

By making the actors so poor, that for survival they operate on others minds

to buy vacuums.

—

the brick wall reality makes a house of cards

The hermit creates a fire of austerity.

The warrior depends on his body and the touch of earth beneath his feet.

The riders of the Great Vehicle

Generate a flow of their energies to be harnessed at a loss or gain.

The lovers shun the Prince of Air

The fool is our goddess with child, who’s giving, yielding breasts are the beginning of the wheel of fate.

A human is an even number

And this ghoulish lump that writes 

to self-curb

obscene flaps of skin,

makes light pen strokes that barely touch the page,

gestures of wings disappearing into the white sky,

A sneeze and a tissue to mop this face, afterwards,

the dream continues

I think the word “science” has become too general and ambitious a word. If people look at an octopus, they say they are “doing science”… and maybe they are right, but I prefer that the union of such disparate thinking that is now under the term science would instead occupy a nebulous and all-connecting field of rhetoric. I believe rhetoric is what connects mathematics to poetry and everything between.

Poetry is an exploration of ideas-as-sensation and the texture of language. In that sense it is a science, not a science of the mind, but a science of the contact of the mind with mind-objects like ideas. In this sense poetry is quite a vast realm of doors to new knowledge. It replaces much of what we consider science, and It is limited only by a consideration of what is direct sensation with the other 5 sense-doors. If the mind intervenes with our other sensations, such as in an expanded uncertainty principle, we return to the realm of poetry.

I cannot emphasize well the shift I am describing, where body-contact (such as sex) is sensed with the body, not the brain or the mind. The body and all its organs don’t have their center in the brain. The sources of knowledge are decentralized when mind-objects are distinct from body-objects and tongue-objects. I am describing a return to the whole human organism, where sex-as-knowledge, eye-contact-as-knowledge, etc is not centered in an ethereal observer that has never been found even in the brain. Transcendence can come later, after we have returned and recognized the objects of mind (as distinct from the mind) distinct from other direct sources of knowledge.

With this return, thoughts, which are just another kind sensuality, can be brought down from its heights, and real transcendence of all 6 sense-doors can be pursued.

https://fb.watch/hSO6icPQhd/