Calcified Bones And Aging Pine Bark

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"Your comment about "unconditional love" was instructive to me by reflection. The docetic spirit that hangs around with my me represents agape love because of my personal belief that love develops between entities of all sorts only because they are around each other a lot. For example, people who unexplainably "fall in love" with co-workers they don't even like, which always surprises me about how it makes eventual parting such sweet sorrow.  

Do you suppose the saying "Love thine enemy as yo'self" prevails when we hurl our subjective projections upon others in order to accuse them of being "the enemy"? Was Pogo right?"

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Pogo? Nobody is old enough to remember Pogo, are they?

If I respond to e-mail in the morning before I compose my almost daily blog entry, I sometime feel faintly compelled to continue the line of thought I wrote about in my earlier e-mail replies. On the contrary, if I compose a blog entry previous to writing e-mail responses my pen pals get an unsolicited dose of bloggery. It's impossible to keep the two activities separate. There is only one of me, and that's Me. Also. "Thou shalt have no other God before me."

My i/magi/nation runs wild on my me so-me-ti-me. The "natives" in my i'magi-nation get restless. Do you suppose one magi might be labeled a magician?

I have used my own reframed term "imaginator" occasionally when writing. I can't confidently claim to have invented or coined imaginator as a new word. I used it to indicate the mental facility employed by creative people for imagining abstracted constructions as opposed to defining an inherent ability (a inborn faculty) to process those abstracted images. In any case, I intended to indicate location, location, location.

If I want to abstract some images to facilitate the oratory that conveys my intent, I take those imaginary abstracted constructions to a specific place to let it be so. Then, I kick back in various ways to await the assigned genie's return to his coop/bottle/place with the requested material.

I like using i/magi/native or i/magi/nation instead of imaginator. Quite simply, the very idea of heaven as a nation of the magi just "sounds" right. It's more useful to me in face to face encounters when all the other aspects of my self-generated persona has been honed to a specific sharp edge.

It's also consistent with my experiences as a psychonaut and what the world looks like from that solipsistic stump-hole. Framed by the aging bark that's nearly always, like calcified bones, the last part of a clear-cut, yellow long leaf southern pine to go.

I lived near an old man who owned several thousand acres of primordial long leaf pine that was the only ones left by repute for far and wide. He had a sawmill he kept a black bear chained up to nearby the machinery, and five grown sons. I heard he died just after I joined the Navy.

This old man's youngest son was five or six years older than me. The only son that was anywhere near friendly to me, but that was probably due to age differences. I knew more about these men from occasional gossip than I ever witnessed. My only regret was that I never got to see that remaining virgin forest before they clear cut it while I was away in the military.

The old man was reputedly tough. Violently tough. He literally carried a big stick and would dare anybody to walk up to that chained up black bear and whack him like he did. It was told that his sons had to do that to prove their manhood. The youngest one, the only one I had a speaking relationship with, proved himself not able to do it, although he was the largest son by size. Eventually, and sadly to me, he died an alcoholic.

Not long before he died he saw me driving by the open shed he sat and drank likker straight from the gallon bottles he shared with his compadres and fellow drunks, and waved me in to talk. He was soused, and I didn't wanna do it, but the bonds were too strong for me to turn my back on him.

In hindsight, I sorta think he knew his time was getting near or nearer, and he wanted to clear some things up about his relationship with my father. They had gotten close briefly after the old man died. He was bitter about how my father, a teetotaler with an unmerciful attitude about taking a drink, had hurt him horribly by turning his back on him for being an alcoholic.

This wasn't the first time I'd taken shit from the people my opinionated father abused by his arrogant haughtiness. This guy hadn't even been one of his agriculture students. There were thousands of them, and more than I ever wanted to know about had a little something to tell me, as if my father's sins were visited upon me, and there won't no "as if" about it.

As far as I'm concerned I finally figured out why my father pissed so many people off with his idealism and arrogant demeanor. I questioned my father with the same fervid intensity I develop with complete strangers. I questioned him from the time I could talk until he couldn't make sense of the world anymore. He never knew why people reacted like they did to him. It hurt him that they felt hurt. Probably even moreso.

He grew up in the remnants of an aristocratic society that because of war became a failed political state. His grandfather fought in that war to preserve his plantation of several thousand acres of cleared cotton land, and two hundred or more slaves to make it profitable. They lost the war, but not the aristocratic arrogance that made them appear unconsciously to act dismissively toward underlings. Including their own children. How else were they to learn how they must act to carry the day,

The Jim Crow view of life made sure he was surround by this snobbish, aristocratic agrarian attitude. It was the status quo he had no reason or intention of abandoning. It was his way of life. Only the Civil Rights laws of the early sixties ever made him question the rightness of his cause, but by then it was too late for him to learn new tricks.

As far as what me and my siblings inherited from "the rightness of his cause", it might appear that my older sisters were able to cope more readily than me and my brothers. On that note, I'm four and a half years older than my younger brother, and eight years older than my youngest brother. My sense of it is that they literally found it easier to adapt to the new order, with our youngest brother finding it even easier just eight and four years younger. Neither my mother or my father ever got over it. Not so oddly, most of their caretakers in the latter days were older blacks. Everybody understood everything. Change was/is just as difficult for older blacks as it became for older whites, even though you might think blacks would do it better. We'll all die off, and it won't even matter soon enow.

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