Okay, younguns, a bunch of dreams lately, and some ruminations, and the adventuresome guy that publishes Poetic Outlaws most days and one of his readers, and a drop dead hilarious guy in nowhere Nebraska conspired to persuade me to explain to you today how, why, etc. I became The Anti-Capitalist 😎.
P.S. Be sure to click on the link for Free Radio Rulo in one of my comments, and read what that free spirit wrote and his and my perhaps only slightly significant discussion of ETs being bad omens 😎.
Being Alive
By: D.H. Lawrence
POETIC OUTLAWS
MAR 18, 2024
Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.
—D. H. Lawrence
The only reason for living is being fully alive;
and you can’t be fully alive if you
are crushed by secret fear,
and bullied with the threat:
Get money, or eat dirt! —
and forced to do a thousand mean
things meaner than your nature,
and forced to clutch on to possessions
in the hope they’ll make you feel safe,
and forced to watch everyone that
comes near you, lest they’ve
come to do you down.
Without a bit of common trust
in one another, we can’t live.
In the end, we go insane.
It is the penalty of fear and meanness,
being meaner than our natures are.
To be alive, you’ve got to feel a
generous flow, and under a
competitive system that is impossible, really.
The world is waiting for a new great
movement of generosity,
or for a great wave of death.
We must change the system,
and make living free to all men,
or we must see men die,
and then die ourselves.
Sloan Bashinsky
Sloan’s Newsletter
Liked by Poetic Outlaws
Given how it turned out, Lawrence was a prophet.
Born in 1942, I’ve seen America morph into something grotesque beyond my childhood’s wildest imaginings.
In elementary school, the only novels I wanted to read were science fiction. Literature didn’t do shit for me. Nor did poetry.
I wasn’t a happy kid, and I suppose science fiction was my way of escaping my personal despair, an alternate reality which had never happened, but could have, whereas literature and poetry was looking backward as shit coming back around in my own life?
When I can bring myself to watch CNN news for a little while, or read online news about my country tis of thee, and about other parts of the world, I see very little to cause me to be hopeful, and a great deal to cause me to wonder if the best thing for humanity is the planet makes a giant sneeze and shakes off the fleas that are destroying it.
Unable to do anything about any of it, but what leaves my kitchen as scraps, for I need a car to drive and to survive where I live, and I am too old and physically impaired now to live outdoors in a tent like I did when I was broke and homeless, I’m killing the planet, too.
As I sit in my apartment, killing time by reading stuff online and shooting off my old mouth on my laptop keyboard, and watching Netflix and Amazon movies and serials, and some sports I still like, and playing chess and bridge with friends and online, while waiting on the Lord to take me, sooner, hopefully, than later, as my failing body causes me far more grief than happiness.
The young have so much to look forward to, which they yet cannot begin to imagine. Perhaps they would be better off if not only the good among them, but all of them die young? I can imagine the planet would be happier without humanity.
But for what was written down on paper, and later on cyberscript, and made into films and podcasts, and art and architecture, of what humanity once was could have been instead, would an alien species visiting a planet whose so-called sentient beings were no longer give them even a first thought?
My father and his father were very successful capitalists, and that was their religion, and church was perhaps where they went to repent? I very much wanted to be a great capitalist, too, but either my soul didn’t cotton to it, or maybe it was the devil.
Thank God my father suggested I take a typing course my first year in high school, when neither of us knew my soul was a poet, my heart was a pen and my blood was ink, and the Muse was my jealous mistress.
But, my God, did it take such a very long time for me to figure all of that out.
Lasita
Lasita’s Substack
DH Lawrence’s piece uplifted me. I suggest you write a poem, finding reasons to be grateful for your one precious life.
I do empathize with your sadness but I need to contradict some of those feelings when I feel them — in order that I bring joy to the world and not depression.
Sloan Bashinsky
Thanks, Lawrence wrote what he saw and experienced. It was not very pretty, but it was very real. He’s been physically dead and gone for a good while, and maybe he’s easier to read and salute than if he were doing his thing today?
I do feel grateful that I eventually woke up and the poet, novelist and writer in me took over. A great deal of it is told in various books of fiction, non-fiction and stranger than fiction at the free internet library, archive.org.
What you call depression for me is stark cold truth. Joy for me is the precious moments, when something wonderful breaks out and runs free despite the horrific miasms around it. For example, something at Radio Free Rulu yesterday, which can be reached by clicking this link:
https://freeradiorulo.substack.com/p/news-from-rulo-928?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
There are no fig leaves in paradise, nor any secrets. The good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, and even the horrific are in plain view.
I’m 81, and I don’t know where you are in your timeline. I went through Christianity, and when it didn’t help, I plunged into the New Age, which mostly focused on the bright side, which energized the dark side even more.
Then, I gave up and asked God to help me and offered my life to human service. Be careful what you ask for.
Angels grabbed me and told me I would be pushed to my limits, and oh my God, it was all over but the shouting. They turned me upside down, inside out, and every which way but loose, and stood me before endless mirrors looking at me, and at everything else, too. My perspective of everything changed. They are still at it. NO, I don't attend church. I don't know when I'm ever not in church.
Along the way, with help from a woman friend around 2008, I discovered Leonard Cohen, whose line, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,” pretty much summed it up, I thought.
Yet was Cohen asked, as I was in my sleep in 2004, “What do you think of the species?” I woke up and said, “I wish you had not asked me that, but since you did, look at how I’m doing after all the angel help I’ve gotten, and it ain’t very pretty. So, here’s what I think. The species has lost its creativity and is cloning itself spiritually and devolving, and perhaps the kindest thing that can be done is to remove the species from this planet and put it somewhere it has a better chance of evolving. For if what angels did to me is done to the species, perhaps 500,000 people will survive it.”
I later reduced that number to 50,000, then to 5,000, then to 500, then to 50.
Lasita
Lasita’s Substack
Thank you for thinking and sharing so deeply. I hope to return and follow the links.
I also want to apologize for writing a suggestion that may have made you more sad and not contributed to your finding more things to be glad about.
Perhaps the fact that I cared enough to write to you can be a reason to have some hope in humanity.
Sloan Bashinsky
Again, thanks.
You did not make me more sad.
Lawrence didn’t seem to have much hope for humanity, and look at how humanity went after he crossed over.
If people ask me, I tell them to forget about trying to save humanity, and focus on saving themselves, by doing their best to be who they really are, instead of what they were programmed by their parents, priests, friends, society, the government, to be.
Leave herds.
Take the path less traveled.
Be true to themselves, be genuine, authentic, regardless of the risks.
It looks to me that is what Lawrence did.
I doubt the religious right care for Lawrence, or allow his writings to be read in public schools, but his writings will haunt humanity for a long time to come :-)
Sadness for me is having a body that is breaking down and causing me to wish the Lord will take me in my sleep.
Sadness, and far worse, for me, was an infant son dying in his sleep, and several relationships with women I loved dearly, that didn’t work out, and feeling I fell far short of being the father my daughters needed me to be.
Sadness for me was failing as a capitalist, despite my Herculean efforts.
I see now that my son's death so disheveled me, that it was impossible for me to become what I had been programmed to become.
I think the cure began when I met the woman who would become my second wife, a very gifted watercolor painter, who had stopped painting.
It took her a while to tell me why.
She had borrowed $3,000 from a son of a rich capitalist, and she was to repay him with her next three paintings. Instead, she stopped painting. I went to my bank and had them cut a $3,000 cashier's check payable to the son of the rich capitalist. I gave her the check and she took it to him.
She still didn't want to paint, but she felt she wanted to open an art school for young children. So, I gave her the money to do that. Money I had inherited.
After a year or so, she started painting again, but she didn't want to show her work in galleries.
After a while, she agreed to show her work in a Birmingham, Alabama (our home town) gallery, and a local newspaper art critic praised her work.
She drove to the Pensacola annual outdoor art show and won first place in her medium. Later, she drove to the Disneyland annual art show and won first place in her medium.
I saw practicing law was not working out for me, and I convinced her to move with me to Santa Fe, New Mexico, which had a very large artist community.
She got into a respected gallery in Santa Fe. She wasn't making much money, but she was honoring her soul's calling, and she's still doing that all these many years later, in Santa Fe.
She very much hoped we would have children, but my physical health was horrible, and I had two young children by my first wife, and I didn't feel up to trying to raise another child.
She got pregnant twice, because she did not tolerate birth control pills, and I didn't like condoms, and her IUD was poking my penis. Abortions ended two pregnancies, and she was torn up about that, and I felt horrible for her and had a vasectomy.
Before we moved to Santa Fe, I wrote my first book, then my second, then my third. They were picked up by the Prentice-Hall Division of Simon & Schuster in New York City. I was interviewed on national, regional and local television and radio stations about the books, but Prentice-Hall was in disarray and did not have books in bookstores, and my dream of becoming a successful capitalist author were dashed.
In Santa Fe, we split up. Not long after, feeling I had failed in every way a man could fail, which was abject sadness, I made that desperate prayer to God.
Something in my second wife awakened the writer in me.
When a large inheritance came due a couple of years ago, I gladly gave her what we had agreed in our divorce settlement. it was long past time for her to stop being a starving artist in Santa Fe.
I told her yesterday in my thoughts that I was sorry that I was so messed up when she met me.
I dreamed last night about where her art school for children was located in English Village, on southern edge of Birmingham.
I've been writing a book called "Grandfossil's Tales to his Grandchildren", for my own grandchildren, and for anyone else who might be interested. It's a free read at grandfossil.blogspot.com.
Erik's D.H. Lawrence post today and my comment under it and your and my discussion will be the next chapter. Eventually, it will be a free read at archive.org.
Lasita
Thank you for writing again.
You are a very talented writer.
Sloan Bashinsky
Thank you, again.
For me, writing became part of my soul rhythm, and I wrote from my own personal experiences.
Being down in the dumps is one thing, but being in a dark night of the soul is much more difficult, and being in a black night of the soul, where there is no light, and all you want to do is kill yourself, is much worse, and I have experienced all of that, and much more, and somehow I’m still here, breathing, getting up each morning, greeting the day and what it brings, and engaging that.
I have lots of friends I can cut up and joke with and tease back and forth, but I only have two friends who have been some of the places, or similar places, I have been, where religion, medicine, psychology and being positive are totally out of their depth and should not pretend or presume to be able to treat.
Looking back, it’s amazing to me that I didn’t give up. Something was with me, helping me to keep going.
That was very personal.
The external work, although personal, required that I be detached, objective, and subjective. For much of what goes on is not easily seen by the intellect, but can be seen, felt, sensed, if those faculties are working ok.
Humanity is in really deep shit, in the main.
The angels who have been with me since 1987 are kind, but they also are honest, and while they meet people where they are, few people are ready for the leaps that cause them to die, so to speak, and rise up an entirely different person.
I came to think that only the truly desperate are ready for such a thing, and only the very fortunate survive it.
Lasita
I live in Santa Fe ; do you still live here?
Sloan Bashinsky
I moved to Boulder, Co in 1987, and back to Birmingham in 1995, and to Key West in 2000, and back to Birmingham in 2019. Many reports and tales of all of that in my free non-fiction books and novels at archive.org, and various Google blogspots.Several of the blogspots became books, which are at archive.com.
These two blogspots below are the newest, and they will become books. They have a sensitive content warning, which is a Google option. I use it because I pissed off a lot of people on the far right, especially, but also on the left, and there have been flags, and I wanted Google to know they were forewarned :-).
In the time order created.
redneckmysticlawyerforpresident.blogspot.com; grandfossil.blogspot.com
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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