You're Joking!

I'm not referring to the times we joked with each other. I'm on an expedition here into the times when the jokes went wrong … and to understand why that was particularly distasteful. The key to understanding the issues here are simply the way a man flatters himself … whether that's by words … a raising of the brow … a twinkle in the eye … or that suppressed smile that reveals itself years later … in laughter lines around the eyes.

 

The crunch zone is where laughter meets with sublime self flattery … like a junkyard full of the old and rusted … and yet we hope there might be something valuable there everybody missed. Like running into a place on the map called … ' Malay falls ' … in Nova Scotia. It makes you wonder … especially when you find a rusty kris in the junkyard. Krises are made with rust … for that slow kill … and encountering an old kris … that is rusty … in no way refers to it as an old issue to be discarded.

 

Or the specter of meeting zombies … trolls … and the like … that represent in the passions … the promises of the old Pharaohs … that they will come back alive again someday. What's a word like Malay … doing in Nova Scotia? Its the people native to Malaysia. In such an obvious mysterio of the usual … we are forced to suspend the merely ordinary … and wonder about the times when the extraordinary visits with us.

 

Self flattery … does that include saying we are right about something?  And the times when we say that … does it always involve a little self defense? Would it be nice to ease up on that … and accept another possibility? Another way of viewing something? From someone else? I'm saying here that that there's a line of consistency in our affairs that relies on everything everybody says to make the true. And its the same line that links us in a relationship we don't know.

 

I joke about a lot of things … but I'm careful to stay a little sober … on that which grips me in the passions … like carrying a child and finding its suddenly afraid of something and holds you tighter. We can pause there for a moment … and take a look at it. To simply move on … and ignore … helps us to keep moving … and sometimes we need that … but so does pausing for a while. It certainly is a balance.

 

In the extraordinary experience that matches the dream orientation … with the physical reality of life … in the world … comes a companion who wonders … about how its so similar … but hey! … is it supposed to be that way? Are some people blessed with a knowing art … in their disposition … the chosen perhaps … to be the lead for others? The world has always relied on such … over the ages. There were the Assyrians … the Jews … the Persians … and now?

 

A man named Hesiod … whose parents had moved from Asia Minor … to one of the islands in Greece … that he described as … ' a cursed place, cruel in winter, hard in summer ' …  thought perhaps he knew. That it wasn't very different between the images a man sees in his collected sense of mind … with the perceived sense of physical reality of the world … wrote about it … and founded the basis of a cultural practice … not just for Western civilization … but the world.  Others like Homer … Asclepius … Virgil … shared in the art and gave us something to relate as self and society.

 

Today as a society we continue to refine the experience … and observe opportunities to get it lucid … and coherent. Its what science calls lucid dreaming. Its the will we seem to express about … knowing what we deal with … even as we are dealing with it … and then maybe relying … on some reflection in the quiet of the four walls … to tweak it for greater relevance. Curiously … it works so easily and so strangely well sometimes. Except of course for the moments when we might have stepped out … in the blazing lights … to announce … ' I know.' Whether we did that as a prophetic guide in church … the office of political administration … or the property developer with a plan to renew the town.

 

' Keep your eye on the sparrow ' … says a Sammy Davis Jr song … and we are reminded to maintain a clear view of where the line is … that separates two aspects of life's realities … in a less than fussy day in the company of the social milieu. Its quite wonderful the way the ladies simply dismiss … small contradictions in what that is. But then she has far more to fall back on. A man tends to take things like that seriously.

 

But when … after an exhausting day of keeping up appearances … do we say … ' I'm just sick and tired of it ' … or do we find new ways of making it work again? Staying with the line of discernment … is that like the gal … who got talked by her friend … into going for that party … and then the rest of her life was defined by being married to that man? I guess everyone did that … whether or not it was by a friend.

 

I was viewing the videos on Floyd Red Crow … the Native American elder … on Youtube. It brought me into graphic representation of what it takes to recover from a slack in the line. But not everyone needs to be a Hesiod or Homer or a Bhagavatar. These days … we stay close to the fridge … and as long as the shelves are filled … we figure that might be alright. And perhaps more importantly … we stay healthy.

 

Obsessions are terrible things … and sometimes they lead us into the experience of other lives … that produce the effects of a life lived elsewhere. The constant suggestion I get … about cannibalism tendencies … sodomy … pedophile urges … and narcotics abuse … that threatens to extend beyond merely liking oneself … and contracting the dreaded leprosy … follows with a dogged persistence. The practices of self realization … and the rumors of such in ancient Judah … Africa … the Orient … brings a shuddering thought to excesses … where its plain no doctrine was eventually brought to the public's attention.

 

The one difference may be knowledge … as compared to merely accentuating on the self gratification of the experience … and bringing that to a new heights of liberal self confidence. And in consideration of such concerns … we are grateful … for those moments of unusual cruelty … we may have come across … that placed a mark on us … not to cross the line. It makes us view such marks today … virtually as a badge of passage.