The Drifter

Report from a Battlefield by The Drifter

…Then the Drifter said:

The Drifter is phoning it in this weekend, or at least shooting from the hip, because the kids (the twins) have pneumonia. And he himself feels like he might be coming down with pneumonia. Or it might be the effects of a lifelong insomnia problem. I remember wandering around exploring our little house in the Detroit suburb of Madison Heights alone in the middle of the night before my brother was born. I was four when he was born. I remember, like it was yesterday, the day they brought him home from the hospital. Like it was yesterday with a large gray veil thrown over it, that is. Sometimes I wonder what are all the things I don’t remember. I know what I remember. What I don’t know is what I forgot. Meanwhile, what I forgot doesn’t mean it hasn’t affected me. It might have been a traumatic thing that has affected my whole life more deeply than anything else that I do remember. I also know that memory has a way of casting a beautiful sheen over some things they could not possibly have had to that full of an extent while they were happening. This hectic week has also reminded me that you need a zen-like control of the mind in order to do any good writing at all, except maybe fragments you can save for later.

Regarding the pneumonia, the effort of providing (or trying to provide) constant emotional support while also talking everyone down and also talking them up all the time (“it will be okay, you can get through this,” etcetera), while simultaneously dealing with crowded doctors’ waiting rooms, harried medical staff, looming insurance debacles, half-assed pharmacy escapades, endless traffic jams, social anxiety disorder caused by bipolar disorder, and near-migraine headaches can be a thing that will lead to nervous breakdowns, just like it has done in the past. My well-medicated brain that has a dead patch in it from having a stroke can handle a lot but it too has its breaking point. The first sign is usually emotional, followed by physical, collapse. Lest it sound like I’m complaining I admit that all of the above is a journey too and these are also some of the most meaningful events in life. Watching your children suffer and panic and cough up blood up close teaches you something, even if you don’t know what it is at the time, and even when they are otherwise healthy kids who you know are probably gonna be okay.

The kids’ mother, my ex-wife, teaches sixth grade math fulltime at a public elementary school. Nearly half of her seventy or so students either have no father at all (that they know of or know) or have a father who’s in prison. It doesn’t make for the most controlled eleven- and twelve-year-old male behavior imaginable. The job has too many students and too many hoops to jump through almost constantly but teaching jobs around here aren’t easy to come by even under the horrible conditions. She takes over with the twins after work when they’re sick and I get to fly away like a bird, but until she’s available, the job of double caregiver is all mine. What I get out of it is a great relationship with great kids. The danger is a bunch of small nervous breakdowns that can lead to a big one. But I get to look myself straight in the eye in the mirror and say, honestly, that I’ve never abandoned them. The sense of freedom this causes through a lack of guilty feelings from doing otherwise is one more freedom in a world where we all want freedom. Freedom comes from what isn’t there as much as from what is. It’s hard to concentrate on anything else when the bombs and the bullets are flying in your direction.

I had started on a column this week before the pneumonia thing began and I here append a 287-word fragment of the rough draft as evidence. I believe it is worthy of perusing or I wouldn’t append it:

This is for all unsung spiritual warriors everywhere who know whereof I speak.

Those who do not know whereof I speak are of course free to read this anyway but it’s unlikely you’d get the same kick out of it as those in the know.

Whether this happened to you yesterday or forty years ago matters not one tiny jot.

What does matter is that the reader of this understand the concept of life as a war and certain individual chapters of it as battles and battlefields.

Understanding this concept does not mean that the symbol and metaphor indicated is real, if it were real it wouldn’t be symbol and metaphor, even though symbols and metaphors are real.

Real war is a horrendous ordeal for all involved, except the ones who get off on it, and there are many who get off on it, probably far more than is generally acknowledged.

The concept of life as a spiritual war means that the strains and stresses of living it on a daily basis can take the same kind of toll that a real war can take in the long run.

On any given day living my normal life in Chicagoland all these things might happen, sometimes within the same hour.

I might be almost run over or slammed into by an errant, enraged driver who then yells at and curses me for almost getting in his or her way even though I’m following the rules of the road and she or he is not.

I might be accosted on the street by a beggar in such a horrific, bedraggled and tragic condition of decomposition and desperation that my eyes, and my heart, can barely stand it.

I might

UNFINISHED.

Sensationalism by the Drifter

(Happy Easter dear readers; all images provided by the Drifter)

“The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.” – Oscar Wilde

Sensationalism is here defined as a form of artistic presentation (akin to but separate from melodrama, that unrealistic form that spreads its tentacles everywhere and infects everything) designed to titillate the consumer of it.

I intend the words artistic and presentation here in their widest senses, and will conclude this little screed ((manifesto)) by permanently redefining both of those terms.

The definition of titillate, that striking word, = to arouse or interest someone superficially, often with the mildest of sexual undertones, so mild that these undertones can be easily denied, often with a chuckle and a wink of the eye.

A recent scientific study indicated that 97% of the Western World now spends 79% of its free time engaged in titillation engendered by superficial sensationalism in one form or another. In other words (among other things), we have become too comfortable in our minds and bodies, and that is bad for the soul.

“Superficial” = lacking depth; existing only on the surface; purposely having no substance or purpose; and deliberately having nothing to do with anything of any importance whatsoever at all, and being really proud of it. An example might be the First Lady of the USA.

The line between “fiction” and “nonfiction” is utterly blurred in our time, perhaps in all times; even Shakespeare believed things the meanest street urchin would guffaw at today.

Supposedly serious subjects, these days, have been reduced to titillation and sensationalism all presided over by the largest and most gigantic killer clown and bullshit slinger you can possibly imagine. Pennywise and Randall Flagg are mere chump change compared to this huge dude and his incompetent, fumbling entourage slavering at the mouth with eagerness to do his bidding. And all of them look exactly the same, like male and female versions of each other, hair and make-up included. The Plastic Society has produced Plastic Beautiful People. It is no wonder literal humanoid robots are up next. But don’t worry, such things were predicted by the ancient Egyptians millennia ago.

Half of America wants its mad king back. Forget the Boston Tea Party, now we attack the White House. It doesn’t matter how it got that way. It is that way and that’s enough.

The real war is underground now and the next civil war started a long time ago. The sane ones here are one half of one percent of the population, scattered across the continent; and they are the ones who are most called crazy by the rest of us.

The likelihood of a catastrophe happening big enough to change anything in any meaningful way is not quite, but is almost, zero.

What we inhabit now on a national and local level is called PURGATORY. But if you read the Purgatorio by Dante, you see that it isn’t all bad.

Artistic means when you shape the world and/or the word (not always the same thing) for a purpose and an audience, no matter how large or small. All real poets know that an audience of one is often ideal. Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson must be the most famous American poets right now (at one time, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Carl Sandburg could compete with or outdo them, and for all we know those days will come again), and all their best poems are to one person.

Presentation means to offer someone something – as in a benevolent holiday gift – or a secret poison.

Coda: Too much sensationalism and titillation stunt the imagination, that universal faculty that allows the human species to envision future possibilities. It is like taking a stallion and placing him in a stall and putting blinders on him. He will be well fed, but he wants to get out and fly again.

“Imagination” = Leonardo envisioning submarines and flying machines 400 years in advance as if he were on drugs (and probably he was) – or Jesus and Buddha envisioning heaven on earth: which is one of the reasons Mona Lisa is smiling. “Like the vampire, she has been dead many times,” as Walter Pater so rightly observed. Maybe this is what gave her the highway blues.

Fact/s: The population of the USA in early 2026 is around 350 million. One percent of that is 3,500,000. Half of that = 1,750,000. We should all get together and ignore the rest of them; it would make a good-sized city. Athens during the time of Socrates had a population around 150,000 strong. They didn’t even know America existed, although the smartest of them felt the vibrations. Even rich people didn’t wear shoes half the time. Anybody who was anybody knew everybody and everybody who was there at all was noticed by somebody, which was both good and bad. “Privacy” as we know it didn’t exist. Even the most hard-up beggar did not feel alienated.

Put your devices away in the other room and you can still have privacy, very easily.

With imagination, you can morph alienation into a nutritious food for the soul, like a natural magic trick – if you survive long enough to learn how to do this trick.

Jesus didn’t want us to follow him. He wanted us to BE him, which means act like him – for our own good, and that of others. Such is what is explained in the profound book The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas a Kempis, a mysterious, shadowy German monk from medieval times, not to mention The Sermon on the Mount. Most of the ones who do this best now have never even seen the inside of a church up close. And they may not care too much about Jesus on a personal level. It’s OK; it’s about us more than it was about him. And he knew that very, very well. He himself only showed up at church to raise a ruckus and shake them out of their stupors.

Leonard Cohen said, “Show me the place, help me roll away the stone, / Show me the place, I can’t move this thing alone.”

The vast majority of people during Jesus’ own time who knew him or knew of him believed he was crazy. There was something in his eyes.

The Drifter

Don’t Always Take Their Advice: A 1990s Memory; or The Drifter Confesses

(Images provided by the Drifter; view carefully!)

“Yes: writing has done much harm to writers.” – Oscar Wilde

“I had a girl / Now she’s gone / She left town / Town burned down / Nothing left / But the sound / Of the front door closing / forever.” – Warren Zevon

…And then sitting on the porch The Drifter opined to the two who were there with him:

I was given some of the worst advice about writing I’ve ever received in some of the “best” writing programs in the entire Midwest. The American Midwest, roughly defined, has over three hundred degree-granting writing programs currently, both undergraduate and graduate, in Spring 2026. It was similar back then. The Midwestern Gothic is a fuel for many muses, both half-hearted and fiery. One in five Americans are defined as Midwesterners which means we are a looked-down-upon minority even though we’ve produced many of the greatest American writers, like Twain and Hemingway, Hart Crane, Saul Bellow, Robert Bly, James Wright, and Lorine Niedecker. And messy “Honest” Abe Lincoln, the pipe-smoking mercury pill addict who spent most of his time on the road with his horse because he found his manic-depressive wife intolerable on a daily basis.

I received the worst advice I’ve ever received from the most famous novelist I ever worked with. He tried to steal both my women at different times and at the same time at two different parties; drank all my liquor while saluting me; destroyed my manuscripts by spilling wine on them and burning them with cigarettes (“accidentally”); and said he was helping me. He told me not to take five pages describing a character walking across the street. He said not to describe eyes. And he provided a whole mishmash of other rotten advice that ruined an entire novel of mine. I didn’t know any better at the time. I never knew how long it would take me to really find my own voice, either. This writer, still living and producing at 72 right now, had created two minor New York Times best-sellers (one novel and one nonfiction book) back then and worked as a script writer in Hollywood for a few years. He was well-connected to such well-known literary writers as Jim Harrison, Harry Crews, Barry Lopez, Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, William Gay, and Thomas McGuane, to name a few: or so he claimed. He never came close to scoring on either one of my aristocratic underclass Ladies, as unfamous and oft’-intoxicated as I happened to be, which made me half-different from him. Both of these drama queen heartbreakers had their own side activities so they couldn’t blame me, thought I, though they both tried to anyway. This kind of histrionic performance took up a lot of time. Drinking and smoking beloved cigarettes while driving my little car was one of my favorite activities along with the music I played and I was constantly looking out for the police in a relaxed way, whether it was fighting and loud music at night, the purchase of not-exactly-legal substances or drinking and driving, which I always did in a condition of chilled-out, laser-like focus which could not be dented by alcohol consumption. My occupation was Professional Pizza Delivery Person. I left my shifts with fistfuls of cash. They couldn’t track you by cell phone back then. Of the twenty or so drivers at the store, twenty or so were males. About half were either Hindu or Muslim. There were many long discussions about religion around the ovens with cigarettes being shared and sometimes marijuana. One of the job’s key features was the potential to get either jumped, mugged, or robbed or all three at once so I was always looking out for the thieves and gangbangers as well as the police. It was another era of course and I do not recommend it but it worked for me at the time, “it” meaning the drinking and driving and running around. I didn’t go to the gym but I got tons of exercise, often too much. I had bottles hidden everywhere I lived and didn’t live, in couch cushions, in basements, in backs of cupboards, in desk drawers, behind bookshelves, under the bed, in the bushes, behind the garage, and beneath the car seats, to name a few. Keeping up my own supply of both liquor and cigarettes often took constant struggle and effort but scoring these items produced the looked-for joy every single time, cigarettes included. Got my mojo back, friend! Every cigarette I ever lit whether it was accompanied by strong, hot, black coffee, hard liquor, or air, was a love affair. It was a time when motels were cheap, diner food was good, and cheap, books, cigarettes, and alcohol were affordable and there was more than one good novelist being regularly published.

What was good about the writing programs, for me, was an unparalleled camaraderie that touched the heights of the beat writers in America and stayed there. Wichita, Kansas, and Chicago, Illinois, were lit on fire by us and we burned down both towns. And then, behind us, the towns burned down. And that developing alcoholism that would shape my life for good and ill. And all you beautiful women (enough said here) who broke my heart gradually and then suddenly. And great libraries. Somehow I never stopped reading, never. Hours daily before the bars and sometimes in the bars. And two or three days a week, all night and all day, reading. Falling asleep on the floor with one’s head in the book. And it was good again to see your friends after such self-educating seclusion. There were also trips to New York City. One time the plane almost went down. Another time we arrived in a different car than we left in, which would be a novella-length tale if all the important details were included. In NYC, I usually stayed with a friend in a cockroach-infested tenement across from Tompkins Square Park that had a guy who looked like Lou Reed sitting on the stoop 24/7, bottle in hand and sunglasses hiding the truth even at night. And I was young. Not too young, not very young, but young enough that I look back there now with longing. Not a torturous longing, more like a sweet longing that sometimes turns painful. Aging is for the birds and birds are poets. Our complicated, interconnected, lonely, over-evolved, over-commercialized, over-advertised, alienating, and fractured society where nothing of importance appears and nothing stays for a day or an hour happens to produce late-blooming artistic geniuses in out-of-the-way places. Walt Whitman, following Ralph Waldo Emerson, wanted the American writer to spread and not be only an exclusive East Coast thing. They have done so.

My talent in fiction-writing was cramming a character’s head with thoughts and their heart with feelings and eschewing the formal outward trappings of a mechanical plot device even though there was plenty of drama going on beneath the surface, or so I believed. Writing in no genre, in other words, straight from life, just like I took the Jack Daniel’s straight as well (or the lines of cocaine). I learned it first and foremost from James Joyce, who took it from Laurence Sterne and Francois Rabelais, among others, who I later also learned from, and Bob Dylan was also a massive and messy (in the best senses) influence on my style, of both life and writing. I was advised not to do it, then told not to do it, then asked not to do it by a couple of big-name folks in New York City, both an agent and a publisher. But I couldn’t not do it. “Write the other way I cannot,” said Melville, meaning he couldn’t write the formulaic, crap, restricted, hack way. Not will not. Cannot. And then will not, too. It may stem from an overactive critical imagination, an imagination which is only increased by drug use, if you target and restrict that use. There is a difference between deliberate, targeted usage and the sloppiness and self-pity of abuse. And a million gradations to be explored in writing at another time. When I was a teenager Pete Townshend was often my idea of what a writer was, along with Dostoevsky and always Shakespeare (still) as well as King David of Bible fame (his psalms, and his psychological slaying of the monster Goliath). Right now (at this moment and often at other moments) I believe the dead writer I resemble most is TED BERRIGAN, especially Ted in his fourteen-line poem masterpiece, “Whitman in Black.”

I’m old enough now to know that the slick party-going folks who run the book industry desire formulaic, commercialized, seen-before, dressed-up-as-if-new, recognizable products – cheap products. Products they can sell. You usually can’t sell what no one has ever seen before but it’s the only way to produce something original, too. The Irish weekly paper that commissioned James Joyce (for a pittance) to write the series of stories for what later became Dubliners stopped publishing his stories because they received too many complaints from all the faint-hearted readers. Good Christians, so-called. It took him ten years to find a publisher after the book was finished. It is a candidate for the greatest short story collection in the English language of all time, or it just is that. Other candidates include In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway and A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor but of these three for me Dubliners rules though the other two are so close. One of the bars we used to drink in in Chicago was called THE JAMES JOYCE. We rode the train and burned it down. Another one was called: NINE MUSES. Also THE FIELD HOUSE, BIG SKY and ALBERT’S PLACE. And dozens, literally, of other bars. More books than bars but many, many bars. While in NYC, we drank at the WHITE HORSE TAVERN because of Dylan Thomas.

I also wrote dozens of short stories while in the writing programs. Every single one was a piece of juvenilia. I banged them out on the computer while smoking and drinking either liquor or coffee or both and at least half of them were over fifty pages long. I’d show up late at the writing workshop smelling like smoke and liquor and with fifteen copies of a fifty-page story ready to hand everybody with a grin on my face. And sometimes I’m so quiet they think I’m autistic. It’s artistic, Mister. And Ma’am.

No one wanted to read it. I didn’t care. Which isn’t quite true. But isn’t untrue, either.

When I was 46 years old I became a poet. The story of how that happened cannot be told. Yet. It is only of interest, I suppose, if you’re interested in the writing life as participant or observer. All you who are already studying your own process. Jesus said, Only those can understand who already know. The rest are the proverbial swine you’re not supposed to throw your pearls in front of, harsh as it sounds. There are thousands upon thousands of well-known and/or well-paid writers (which is very often not the same thing at all) who don’t know, and by “don’t know” I mean don’t know what’s important. Or care. Some day The Drifter will write a further analysis of why their crap is crap. Mostly, half the time, I was just happy to have survived, I think…

(TO BE CONTINUED. This sort of thing could go on for years. The official title for this specific series is THE DRIFTER CONFESSIONS.)

WRITING ADVICE: Make it a lifelong (right up until the end) goal instead of a short-term payout and it will never leave you. Reading and writing are two sides of the same golden literary coin, far more precious than literal jewels. According to Harold Bloom, the literary is the personal and the Personal IS Literary. Even for those who don’t know it. It is manifestly NOT an elitist thing: while also being only for the few with the strongest hearts.

The Drifter

Love Itself? The Drifter

(Images by the Drifter)

“Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving / Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.”

– Leonard Cohen

“Both in this world and in the Hereafter, I am the nearest of all people to Jesus, the son of Mary. He was not crucified.” – Muhammad

“Literature will lay truth open upon a higher level.” – William Carlos Williams

Our definition of love has grown too narrow, where we are now and here (2026 USA).

We say we love our spouse (if we are chained to one), our family, our new toaster, our new car, our latest luxury vacation. We say we love our new toaster, and the new (latest) technology they are always jamming down our throats. And all these things can be good to love. But loving them is not enough.

We say “LOVE” is about romance between two people (or three). We say we love the way our new lifestyle is turning out.

It is not enough to love but a few things.

The crucial message of Jesus, the one and only real message of his, the message the early Christians truly began to understand only AFTER he was gone (wherever he went), the message which completely contains all the other messages, the message that should be the ruling principle of the whole world, is this:

We should love LIFE ITSELF.

Even if we are being crucified.

On the cross, Christ cried out: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Loving all of life itself does not preclude getting angry at God and asking WHY when right seems right. Jesus showed that too, as did Job before him. But in their despair, they were talking to God, NOT turning away from life.

There are many ways to talk to God and many moments, hours, or days remain for an opportunity to do this. It is NOT necessary to call it “prayer.”

Talking to God is loving life, no matter your method of doing so and no matter how angry you are. We are supposed to turn toward that when we are desperate, despairing or angry, if we can. God has a twisted sense of humor much like our own, it just may be. And just because someone doesn’t answer out loud doesn’t mean they’re not listening. Sometimes the best listeners never say anything at all. (And when She does speak, She speaks in a whisper, usually…)

Whether we are at the end of civilization or at the birth of a new civilization that is (almost invisibly) being built upon the ruins of the old one matters not one tiny jot.

Now is the time we have and now is the time we’re going a-swimming in. It never stops ticking by even for an instant even though it seems like it does, sometimes, if only for an instant or two.

It is good to love individual people, animals, plants, places, and even things, if you don’t go overboard on this last item, or for that matter any of the former items, either. Leonardo da Vinci loved water. He loved water, looking at it, dreaming over it, drawing it, writing about it, personifying it. Loving water was, for him, like loving all of life itself.

Loving only a few specific people or things is not enough. By far it is not enough.

We must LOVE all of LIFE ITSELF no matter what.

Those who do this are called by the Taoists “seed people.” Jesus also talked about those who sow the seed. There are many of these among us, but these days they appear to be in the minority BIG TIME as well.

Seed people love life even when they hate it.

They never limit their love to a single nationality, a single sexual identity, a single source of economic security, nor a single spouse who is your favorite personality.

WE HAVE TO LOVE IT ALL. All of life. Like we always continue to love the people who have left us no matter how they have left us but are still there in a different guise (as their spirits are haunting us in those things called MEMORY and DREAMS).

Jesus also said, “Do not throw your pearls before these swine.”

Because all they will do is trample them down into the mud.

The Drifter

On the Algorithm by The Drifter

(All images by The Drifter)

Instead of only blaming the inventors, propagators and perpetrators of these products, we should turn the blame around once in a while and place it squarely on the individual consumer/s of said products as well. No one is placing a gun against anyone’s head in this matter. Take it from one who once had a gun placed against his head on a Chicago sidewalk. And a switchblade placed right below his eye in a Kansas City tavern. And a frying pan swung (hard) in the direction of his head in the kitchen. (The author of this opinion piece is good at ducking, fleeing, and flying (out the back door), as well as staring people down – or talking them out of it when necessary.)

Ruthless billionaire businessmen ye shall always have with you. In 2026 USA, one has the option to ignore them, or at least not to utilize their products beyond what’s necessary, selective, or right, depending on the situation.

They have figured out a way to feed the people exactly what the people wish to eat. And the people go to the hand of the master and lap up the usual b.s. because it is the usual b.s. they long and crave for. If universal wisdom, truth, love and beauty were popular and profitable, the business people would sell that instead.

There are some people who are not in control of their minds and thus have gone out of their minds by feeding their minds on nothing but The Algorithm.

As for the rest of us, we have the option to opt out and choose better materials at any time.

It is a matter of cultivating your one and only soul. If you let someone else feed your soul with nothing but junk, you will end up with a nothing, junk soul created by someone else, which will mean that you have abdicated your personality, the only real possession you possess in this vale of tears. This egregious and pathetic non-condition will not serve you, or others, well when the shit hits the fan, as it’s sure to do again and again in this world that is both spiritual battleground and mortal coil.

The Algorithm is not a gun against anyone’s head. You can choose NOT TO CLICK ON IT and not even to look at it at all, for that matter. Any addict who’s ever gotten over anything can tell you that you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. Nietzsche said, “There are so many things in this world I never want to know.” He knew a little and ignored the rest. He also said, “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” right before going permanently insane.

A great picture is infinitely more valuable than a bad book (and can be read almost in the same way as reading a good book (and as the book of nature can also be read)).

Sincerely,

The Drifter

Nine Things Boo Be Do that Freak Me Out

(All images by the Drifter)

“Number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine…” – The Beatles

When I say “freak me out,” I mean in a good way.

(To the elite few of you who want to review who Boo is, see photos.)

ONE: Sometimes constantly watches me from across the room of the book-strewn apartment as if to make sure I’m all right (until he dozes off, which happens just as frequently).

TWO: Catches wild squirrels in his mouth between his fangs, doesn’t chomp down upon them, drops them down onto the ground and sets them free, then watches them flee (run away) without going after them.

THREE: Leaps into my lap when he gets scared.

FOUR: Hides behind me when he gets scared if I’m standing up.

FIVE: Puts himself between me and whoever it is when someone is approaching us at night along the sidewalks or in the alleyways of the Chicagoland area we roam through (or wherever we roam through). If it’s more than one person approaching, becomes even more fearlessly vigilant.

SIX: Follow verbal commands when they, paradoxically, are not even spoken aloud by me. (In other words: READ MY MIND.)

SEVEN: Refuse to follow commands just as often, and act like he thinks it’s funny, and in his own way, I do believe he thinks it’s funny.

EIGHT: Run so fast that he literally morphs into a black-and-white blur that looks like it’s flying across the ground. Fastest dog I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen many.

NINE: Stare into the distance while intuiting the Spirit World.

(Leading one to the astonishing conclusion that if dogs could talk, we wouldn’t even be able to believe what they would tell us…)

(Bonus point: can climb fences and trees when he wants to bad enough…)

The Drifter and Boo

Two Quotations that Can Save the Day The Drifter

(All images by The Drifter)

“Happy are you when men insult you, and persecute you, and tell all kinds of evil lies against you because you are my followers. Be glad and happy, because a great reward is kept for you in heaven. This is how men persecuted the prophets who lived before you.”

This week The Drifter will write little in order to let two quotations carry the day (four if you count the photos but the D will only write directly about the two quotations included in the text, one above, one below.)

When outrage and despair at the state of the world begin to get you down, to gnaw at, or devour, your mind, heart, and/or soul, these two quotations can bring tranquility and peace in their wake.

But that’s only if you let them work on you. And by work on you, I mean that you have to let these quotations hit you hard. And in order for that to happen, requirement number one is that you must have an open mind, and heart. Secondly, you must be willing to work at it. You have to let the quotations find you where you really are. It used to be called studying. Now when we say “studying” we usually only mean rote learning, i.e. going to “school” and memorizing the dubious “facts” they attempt to jam down your throat. I have two twins who graduated from high school last year, and I myself have taught for a total of at least twenty-three years at many different kinds of colleges and universities all across the rough-and-tumble Midwest, also including a three-year stint at a Catholic elementary school called Saint Leonard Parish School in Berwyn, Illinois, USA, with a ninety-nine percent Mexican student population (Leonard is the patron saint of prisoners, addicts, horses, and depressed people, which is perfect for me, and I also used to listen to Leonard Cohen on my way to and from work every day) (Leonard is also the patron saint of a woman with child or children, i.e. preggo), and I can say with an utter certainty that institutionalized education in the USA no longer encourages critical thinking and imaginative exploration in the way it once did (if it ever did). SELF EDUCATION is just as utterly crucial as it ever was, y’all. Everything is available; now you gotta use it.

The first quote is from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, as recorded by Matthew, the Evangelist. “Evangelist” means someone who brings good news to those who desperately need it. Good news that is not easy to swallow, or follow, either, but is also NOT AN ILLUSION. As Jim Morrison said, you need to break on through to the other side before this News will make you leap out of your seat and begin dancing (metaphorically at least).

The second quotation is an entire sonnet by the English radical poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was a kind of Jim Morrison before Jim Morrison (although much less famous than his friend Lord Byron while they lived). Shelley was born into a cush life and he could have stayed there forever had he wanted to, or had he been born that way. Instead, he threw sand in the face of his whole society almost immediately upon opening his eyes and he fought tooth and nail for the downtrodden and the outcast his entire life, and against hypocrisy (he could smell hypocrisy while still in the cradle) – and he died young (29) because he was worn out young in the struggle. Shelley called for and helped invent the modern form of nonviolent resistance. He inspired Henry David Thoreau, who inspired Leo Tolstoy, who inspired Mahatma Gandhi, who inspired Martin Luther King, Jr., who inspired the recently deceased Reverend Jesse Jackson.

The sonnet is printed here in paragraph form in order to defamiliarize it. It works just as well as a prose paragraph as it does in verse.

It was written just a little over two hundred years ago.

The Drifter will draw out what he believes to be the deepest message for our age after this sonnet which sounds so completely familiar and close to what’s going on in our world now that it should (rightly) give you the chills, or at least goosebumps:

“An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King; / Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow / Through public scorn – mud from a muddy spring; / Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, / But leechlike to their fainting country cling / Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow. / A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field; / An army, whom liberticide and prey / Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield; / Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay; / Religion Christless, Godless – a book sealed; / A senate, Time’s worst Statute, unrepealed; / Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may / Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.”

The age of waiting for someone else to do it for you is over. Make yourself be the Glorious Phantom bursting into the True Light, like Shelley did, however persecuted and unfamous he was (and he was both of those things). Everyone has a daimon, or form of genius, inside them. Some choose to cultivate it and will die first before not cultivating it. These are the ones who know the best advice is: DO NOT LET “THEM” GET YOU DOWN (it’s exactly what “they” want). The world has always been this way, and it always will be this way, too (more or less, and more, and less). Even nuclear war or environmental catastrophe, which might wipe out an entire (now global) civilization, is nothing new, since entire civilizations have been wiped out virtually overnight thousands, and maybe even millions, of times – and there has always been the ever-present threat of a dinosaur-destroying-like meteor peeking its head over the horizon at any time, like the worst uninvited guest you could ever imagine (the Native Americans knew this.) “AI”?!? The ancient Egyptians both predicted, and simulated, it, and the cave people in their caves waving their torches around on the cave painting walls while intoning messages to the gods and cutting themselves so they bled profusely while devouring mouthfuls of magic mushrooms had a virtual reality that would knock your socks off if you were wearing any, which they weren’t. Yes, the world has always been this way.

And that means there are always better days waiting somewhere up around the bend. But not in the usual nausea-inducing, Hallmark Greeting Card kind of way.

We always live life for our Future Self (somehow), but we MAKE our future self today. Never stop striving forward with calmness – never (not even when on the threshold of death, or maybe especially not then; Martin Luther, the greatest radical of all time in the modern Western world, believed that everything could change in an instant in that moment).

((Maybe creating is so important to us because the God who made us is also a Creator.))

The Drifter

The Sunday Drifter: The D Can Still Levitate

(All images by The Drifter)

“Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me / I’m not sleepy and there is

no place I’m going to.” – Bobby D.

Since the enigmatic being who sometimes calls himself “The Drifter” shall turn 59 years of age in two days from today, and has already had a stroke (FULLY recovered at every level), he wishes to prove that he can still levitate.

The evidence for this amazing fact is included in the photos which come with this column.

If anyone tries to sue him over the reliability of this, the Drifter is prepared to act as his own attorney, call himself as a witness, and testify with his hand upon a stack of Bibles that no AI nor anything like AI was used in the creation of these pictures nor have they been messed with in any way whatsoever.

Many have said that Rembrandt, Vincent, and Frida painted themselves so often because they couldn’t afford models etc. etc. etc.

The Drifter does not believe that for a moment. (Not everything can be explained by money or the lack of it.)

The Drifter believes these great artists painted themselves so often because they believed Jesus when Jesus said: “The kingdom is within you.” And also when he said (joyfully): “Take up your cross and follow me!”

The good life is not waiting somewhere up around the bend; it is not on a billionaire’s yacht; it cannot be found on the “dream coasts” exclusively; and it does not involve material possessions, of any kind, at all.

Jesus really meant what he said.

“The KINGDOM is WITHIN YOU.”

Or: “THE kingdom IS within you.”

You too (if you try to) can (of course) levitate.

In your very own way.

The Drifter

Whitmanic by The Drifter

“The love of money is the root of all evil.” – Paul the Apostle

“A good column makes you want to argue with it.” – Charlie Rose

“Yes!” – Norman Mailer

(All images provided by the Drifter)

The idea and outline for this column arrived in what I can only call a night vision as I lay in bed half dreaming and half waking or in some other similar liminal state. Each little section of this essay/column appeared fully formed in my mind as if it were being placed there by the gentle hand of someone not myself who had suddenly appeared in the room (where I was alone), someone far outside of me who had arrived from another side of an unseen universe on an errand only to bring this little thing my way. After this messenger’s job was done, after all the pieces had been indicated and almost as if “written down” in my mind, the being who’d brought the goods vanished into air, into thin air, as utterly silently as s/he had come. When I awoke, I did nothing else but write down what I was told to write down. Following is the result. (It’s the message of this piece, and not the quality of the writing in this piece, which is the most important thing. And any quality the writing has, has been created by the pressure of the message. The being also told me how to write this first paragraph…)

…

There’s something called “kick-in time.” It’s the amount of time it takes for a work of art to truly reach the honest reader, viewer, or hearer after one’s first contact with it. Different things kick in differently for different people. The greatest works of art, like Shakespeare’s best plays, kick in repeatedly over decades throughout one’s life and never stop kicking in every time they are returned to. Other things kick in and stay with you for a while and later they begin to fade away. Some pieces of art, like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, do not kick in immediately. Almost everyone on the Planet who sees the Mona Lisa for the first time as a young person CANNOT TELL, at all, what the hell is so great about it. It looks so unassuming, so ordinary, so “normal,” so utterly boring even, that very few young people understand this painting (reproductions of it) when they see it at first. They’re told it’s great and they might even believe that on some level since the authorities are ordering them to believe it, but they have absolutely no idea WHY that is so. Yes indeed. It takes many, many years for the Mona Lisa to “kick in.” After that, it will keep on kicking in for the rest of your life, once you understand it, every time you return to it (vast stretches of time away from it are also key to fully grasping some of its mysteries).

…

I was nineteen years of age the first time my favorite poet (other than Emily Dickinson) kicked in for the first time. I’d been trying to read his various works for at least five years by that point. I had already read and understood much of Melville’s novel MOBY DICK by that point, and while I knew Whitman was great, and was utterly fascinated by the photographs of him for some reason (as with those of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass), none of his writing had quite kicked in with me yet.

Suddenly “Song of Myself” swept me away in such an uncanny way that I literally felt like I was lifted out of my body while reading the poem. I was literally stunned by the time I finished. Forty years later, this memory is still one of the most vivid memories I have from all life, and it was one of the most profound experiences I’ve ever experienced.

This long, self-published poem by Whitman has repeatedly been called the single greatest American poem of all time, and it’s hard to think of another poem that could even come close to knocking it off that pedestal, not even “The Wasteland.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Harold Bloom called “the mind of America” because of Waldo’s profound impact on American thought, life, writing, politics, and religion, said of Whitman’s poem that it was “the greatest piece of wit and wisdom America has yet produced.” Emerson was including everything, including items by Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin. No one has surpassed Whitman since then (in poetry), and it’s hard to see how anyone ever will.

About a year later, while I was reading “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” I found these lines:

“Closer yet I approach you, / What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you, I laid in my stores in advance – I considered long and seriously of you before you were born. / Who was to know what should come home to me? / Who knows but I am enjoying this? / Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me? / …Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.”

Twenty-five years later, I read those lines aloud at my mother’s funeral.

…

Whitman is capable of entering anywhere in “Song of Myself.” From a speck of sand to the farthest star, from the lowliest peasant, pauper or slave to the highest queen and king or the rest of the “nobility,” and everyone in between, from the most orgiastic experiences (including orgasm, masturbation and every kind of sex you can think of) to the most horrible death throes, from the most serene feelings of peace to the most turbulent out-pourings of distress or violence, the most beautiful physical form and the most deformed (which he makes seem beautiful), everything and anything, all that is, was or ever will be (seemingly) human and non-, old Walt easily, clearly, grippingly catalogues it all, somehow, in 1,333 lines broken into 52 short sections.

The term FREE VERSE does not just mean that he eschews rhyme and meter. It means he is FREE to do anything in his poem. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily Dickinson’s friend, said of Walt’s poem, “It is not a great shame that he wrote it – only that he didn’t burn it afterward.” Higginson was one of the more liberal readers of his time. Another famous writer of the time actually threw his copy of the poem into the fire. To say that Whitman had a “bad reputation” (kind of like the Charles Bukowski of his day) is understatement.

Whitman’s ultimate theme is UNITY. Everything is connected. The most up-to-date physics in the beginning of the twenty-first century have only confirmed the insights old Walt had (surging through his body and brain) a hundred and seventy years ago.

In his prose book DEMOCRATIC VISTAS Walt also predicted that the love of money above all else (not money itself) would be the downfall of America.

…

Minnesota poet, scholar, editor, translator, prose writer, pacifist, activist, and shaman/teacher Robert Bly was someone whose genius could compete with Walt Whitman’s, even if he couldn’t beat him.

Bly thought the following lines were the most beautiful lines in American Literature:

“I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, / And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps. / What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? /

They are alive and well somewhere, / The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, / And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, / And ceased the moment life appeared. /

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.”

…

Gripping DRIFTER PHOTO NOTES, MUSICAL NOTES, HISTORICAL NOTES, and More (What the Core of the Message Is):

Walt the Wanderer was also a New York bar hound in the middle part of the journey.

One of these four photos shows one of the Drifter’s old watering holes in Al Capone’s old hometown of Cicero. Still joyously serving customers after all these years, now with bars on the windows.

The street photo is on the campus of the Drifter’s kids’ current college, Triton. They also attended Hem’s high school. The mascot of that school is the Siberian Husky. The yearbook cover for the Drifter’s kids’ senior year showed a Siberian Husky wearing a stocking cap and asking, “Where’s Hemmie?”

Harold Bloom has an utterly brilliant essay in which he proves that Whitman’s line, “I am the man, I suffered, I was there” (about the Civil War and all life) is the source not just for Hemingway’s writing style but for his whole life.

(The essay is so brilliant that Bloom wrote it again across decades at least ten times (changing little)).

Whitman had a stroke at the age of 53, never married, and lived from 1819 until 1892, almost all of it except for a few months in the New York area and then Washington, D.C. during the Civil War. Like Lincoln, his hero, he never traveled abroad.

He was a volunteer nurse during the Civil War. He worked, for free, in Washington, D.C. with both Union and Confederate soldiers. He did things like hold the soldiers while they were dying and sit by their bedsides trying to give as much aid and comfort as possible while they struggled to get through the most hideous wounds imaginable. He also helped them write letters home, and he wrote the letters home to the families after his patients had passed on. Most of the people dying or missing limbs (or recognizable faces) were 25 years old or less, often much less.

Hemingway was never a soldier. He was an ambulance driver who got blown up at the age of eighteen (200 shrapnel wounds in the legs) while saving someone else’s life by dragging them out of the line of fire.

Bob Dylan’s eight-minute-long song “’Cross the Green Mountain” is Walt Whitman on the Civil War brought to music. No one will ever be able to do it better, but all American musicians should try something with Whitman, whether Civil War-related or not.

Lana Del Rey has succeeded in capturing a different aspect of Walt in her song, “I Sing the Body Electric” (title and chorus by Walt, brilliant lyrics by Lana). (“Elvis is my daddy, Marilyn’s my mother, Jesus is my bestest friend…”)

FINALE Note (For Now); or, the Crux of the Message:

President Obama recently gave the best advice I can think of in a crisis, Whitmanic advice: “Don’t sit around waiting for someone to come and save you.” Jesus said the same: “The kingdom is within you.” The essential advice is: “SAVE YOURSELF (look inside).” Beyond that, exactly what saving yourself means will be very different for every single human on the Planet (and it might drastically effect what happens after we are no longer on this Planet in physical form).

Dostoevsky and Bonhoeffer both proved that saving yourself can be done even in front of a firing squad – even when imprisoned by the Nazis.

“Nero can kill me but he can’t harm me.” – anonymous Stoic philosopher

The Drifter