Notes From A Burning House

I cannot remember the first wallet I ever owned, but I remember receiving it as a Christmas present from my parents.  In a box with clear plastic bubbles I had to remove. 

There have been a few wallets since then.  Is it rude to talk to about ex-wallets?  They don’t mean anything to me anymore, honest.  And there weren’t that many.  It’s not like I’m Wilt Chamberlain or anything.  You know, he claimed he had 10,000 wallets over the years?!  I can’t fathom it.  No, it’s not that I had a lot of wallets in the past.  Sometimes I just wonder what happened to them, you know?

And how terrible is it that I can’t clearly remember the first one? 

There was the reddish leather wallet Halley gave me, that lasted for years until the clear plastic trifold windows were yellow and barely translucent.  There’s the wallet Mauro gave me because he was sick of seeing me with my driver’s license and ATM card in my pants pocket all the time.  The wallet was European, and shaped differently than my money.  It fell apart.  I was back to carrying things in my pockets until Tam bought me a hemp wallet on Venice Beach.  It fell apart.  I went back to pants pockets, but sometimes carried things in a little silk purse I bought at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore.     

So I spent ten bucks and bought a wallet.  Now my pockets have more room for all the random receipts I collect. 

*     *     *

Dadaism is described as nihilistic, yet in the Cabaret Voltaire episode I yet recognize an authentic emotional response to current events.  Hugo Ball used phonemes like a child uses fingerpaints, and there is such joy in  reading him aloud.  The poetry of Tristan Tzara, the man who wrote a manifesto in which he declared himself against manifestos, so playful and irreverent and rebelliously nonsensical, still conveys his anger and his nausea at World War One and a world where nonsense was taken for sense, where the conventional wisdom was insanity, where poison thunderclouds boomed and pipes clanged and tubas belched formaldehyde.  He took his great question about the human condition with him on a trip from the avant-garde, through surrealism, and into lyric poetry.

*     *     *

"It’s a good thing you bought a wallet - that was going to be your Christmas present."

Marvelous!  Causing someone to change their minds and return to the mind that comes before square one, this we call a dadamitzvah.  It is a small revolution.  That’s the effect of a Zen koan and the works of art I tend to enjoy.  Even better are the everyday, ordinary, un-special occasions where my mind is stopped and altered, even a tiny bit. 

*     *    *

In the course of thinking about the war I remembered my first wallet after all.  It was a light brown leather wallet with huge, decorative white stitches and a picture of a Native American on it. 

*     *     *

Speaking of an age gone mad.  Sense is dead and all that’s left are fractured points of view popping away blindly like land mines that maim innocents.  With so many wars going on it is as if the firemen are sitting around saying theres no sense in putting out a wildfire in the desert, since another one is going to start up again anyway.  We want to argue about the oxygen’s point of view versus the deadwood’s point of view versus the homeowners’ point of view and the right of a matchstick to fulfill its destiny instead of regarding uncontrolled combustion as the main problem.  In other words, we have learned to stop worrying and love collective violence.  War is peace. 

Sense is dead.  Our investment in Iraq makes perfect sense: the fact that it was predicated on falsehoods and deceit is now viewed, even by our one opposition party, as irrelevant.  The truth, that is.  Irrelevant.  Sense only detracts from success.  It is counter-productive.  Sense is unelectable.  Sense is unpatriotic.  Surrendering our will to wage war at will is seen as a violation of our sovereignty.  So war is freedom.  War is nation. 

Common ground is bad television.  Harmony is dissonance.  Points of view conflict - that’s good television.  Pundits shouting, prime ministers pointing, kids in ammunition belts, sectarian monologues.  Points of view don’t seek peace. 

What if people looked at things with no point of view? 

That would be a BIIIIIIG dadamitzvah. 

*     *     *

there are things you don’t know

without spending time being still

and paying very close attention

to yourself

it isn’t pretty, but that’s no surprise

what might be a surprise:

it isn’t ugly, either

*    *    *

In exchange for point of view, the Cabaret Voltaire soirees engaged no-point-of-view.  Before point-of-view, true nature is creative and playful.  More creative than many of us dare realize. 

*     *     *

So my ATM card with three brown bears on it and my drivers license with a photograph of myself looking like I swallowed a condom full of water and drowned with a morgue-ish grin on my face, and one ten dollar bill, all sit in my new black leather wallet.  It has a sleek, efficient appearance.

Yet hold it to your ear.  Can you hear the Chief of the Mohegans praying in his powerful language?  Yes, yes I can.  And while he prays, the bears inside the wallet are going through his food.

What can I do? 

Put things in it and keep it in my pocket.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.