I just came across this illustration from a 1950's kid book.

I thought this is just the sort of digs I'd like to live in or regularly visit.

It reminded me of the play cabin my grand Aunt Josey built for all us kids behind her place.

It was our Wendy House.

I was blessed in having her and Uncle 'Louie'.

He was a Merchant Marine. Sailed Convoys in WW2. Torpedoed yet went out again.

After the war he worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Built aircraft carriers with his bare hands.

Wadda a guy.

We were so blessed to have him Aunt Josey, and the play cabin. I'm just remembering she had some rabbits and a lamb out back too. She lived way out in the country, so she let them roam about. Then there was that 1940's rubber wading pool she's drag out for us. Any family out there remember that? She also gave us little boats made of twigs and leaves to play with.

Uncle was who I came out to when I was 16. He told me to tell him if I had a problem. 'Said, there's nothing I could do he ain't heard of or done himself. So one afternoon I went over.

He sat me down at the kitchen table lit up a Chesterfield and said: "...It's okay just tell me" He had a way of looking stern yet loving at the same time. I said I might 'like' some of the boys at school. ...pause... He blew his top.

But not for the reasons you'd think.

He said ...said my dear Uncle Louie. Said he: "...What?!!!

Is that all?!! I thought you got a girl pregnant!"

Turns our he my ma, and all my aunts knew since I was born.

They always called me, ...sensitive. Code for, ...well 'sensitive'.

Mind you my teen years like everyone's was a speeding dumpster full of flaming shit. However my family cut me slack on the Gay thing. Most seriously didn't. ...especially back then.

If they make a movie of my life, and times that scene with Uncle goes in.

That and when we saw a UFO.

A FB friend mentioned she may soon be using a cane to get about. I'm now using one sometimes. Folks were already holding doors for me giving me seats on the bus, and subway. Offering to help me carry things up the stairs. Before I'd politely refuse but these days the help is welcome. My dear sister Sylvia a few years ago. She held me by the arm as she took me about for a haircut, and Easter suit make over. This thoughtful attention by those around me started in increments. The first time, a decade ago was at the movies. I'd turned 60 and they didn't ask for my ID for the Senior discount. Age is slow so are the signs. I don't mind. I find it fascinating, and sweet.

I wandered outside today. Hot but not humid...much. A mild summer predicted. Fine with me. "The sun and moon chase each other through the seasons." From a script I wrote 20 years ago. I like it because it's true. We watch as eternity drifts by carrying us and our shoes laces with it. Time is so strange. Sometimes a day is a year, and a year a day. Thank gawd for iced tea.

 

Wonders of the modern age.

Some game said it could show me as a Barbie.

Hey I'm game.

So I clicked the damned thing and got this.

Eh...not what I was expecting but I'll work with it.

 

 

 

 

"...Deb World"

It's a warm lonely semi-lockdown

for some elders anyway, Memorial Day.

Gone are Bar-B-Q days.

Hanging with pals or even as I do below 

honoring our vets who saved our ungrateful butts.

However, while staring blankly, I found this.

An historical artifact from da BBC.

Oh, to be a class enemy.

These gals existed side by side 

with 1950's Brit working class squalor.

Much as gleeful 2022 fashion shoppers today

step over the forsaken homeless.

As I mentioned.

If I were a Greek gawd.

I'd be chucking antimatter lightning bolts 

and gay wedding cakes at the oblivious 

despoilers of the earth.

 

It's Memorial Day. It’s the start of the summer season. Also it’s the day we remember all of our war dead. All from every war we’ve been in. I’ve been thinking about my father, and other relations lately. Particularly about my father and uncles. This in regard to they being Negro and fighting for the racially segregated U.S. armed forces during World War Two.

There's my Dad. Sargent Alfred B. Smith United States Army Air Corps 1944. He and my Uncles were Americans defending their country. Despite everything they had suffered this was their country. As they saw it, no one, not the Klan not Hitler was gonna say it wasn’t. I’m thinking back to the 1950’s when I was a little boy, and my Dad, and my Uncles, combat vets all, towered over me like redwoods.

There was a strength even in their softest words. I felt very safe in that forest of elders. They’d come back. They were home, and were setting about to make their country, their rightful home better. They had just fought and helped to defeat the most evil powers to appear in centuries. If those forces had won I would not be here nor would many of you.

My elders never spoke openly about what they’d seen, and done. However we could see the road map of battles cut into their body’s. When at the beach I saw war scars on my Dads legs burns on an Uncle, and shrapnel wounds on another. They didn’t have to tell us we saw, and understood.

They're gone now, and I miss them all. So I say God Bless you Dad, Uncle Lee, Uncle George, Uncle Clyde, Uncle Owen. Thank you for giving us our lives, our hopes, and the World.

"...Lend Lease"

Lately there's articles interviews saying sending arms is unwise. Ukraine should just cede more land to Russia and call it a deal. The same Russia that said its goal was to extinguish their national identity. They're leveling cities murdering civilians. That and Finland entering NATO sez da Boston Globe " ...is a big mistake". Some are getting edgy. This this starting to look bad for business. I also read: "It's hard to negotiate with a bear while it's eating you."

Also the nuke question. Putin may go there no matter what we do or don't do. If I had to choose between two white nationalist cultures. I'll take my chances with a vaguely democratic Ukraine. As opposed to a gulag building Russia. Yeah they're building new ones for the new generations of non-persons. Those who are opposed to the war and the growing totalitarian methods of Putin. Did I mention the unofficial interment facilities for Queers they've had for years?

 

"...John at the Front"

 

 

 

 

"...days"

Thinking on these times we've live into.

These words come: "...We are so many selves."

There's just one soul with billions of bodies.

The loss of any are keenly felt but the soul remains.

Life goes on days go by.

(Last light on my bamboo shoot.)

 

Speaking of war plague the butchery of children and mass death generally. An old radio pal mentioned that he was always amazed at my feelings about other races religions cultures. In that I didn't seem to have specific hostilities. Well, I'm not remotely angelic. I'm a grumpy Queer Anarchist from way back. I can't stand certain individuals. However, going after whole races religions or nations is just too damned much work. I'd rather throw pies at people one at a time. ...way more fun.

Anyway, my ma my extended family traditions had much to do with my attitudes. I'm from a multi-ethic family of many colors. A lot of that in this country...more all the time.

As a child I thought a mommy could have a baby of any color. This seemed to be happening before my eyes as my new cousins showed up. I thought all mommies were having babies of all the colors. No one in my family told me otherwise. With this as a given, we all turned out as we are.

'Hate asparagus though.

Most of my bigotry seems confined to vegetables.

"...stop"

They hide the dead the slaughtered from us. They should show them to us. In close up detail. Every time for every mass murder. Show us show the world. This is the only country where this happens on this scale. We need to see the blood bones the flesh. Military grade rounds hitting children leaves little to bury. We have to see them every time it happens. Maybe then we’ll get that we’re all complicit. There’s a chance a very small one if we saw it. If we did. It might stop.

 

 

First ya has to talk them into it.

Then the trick of getting them into the scene.

Then keeping them there for the shoot.

Don't start with the Action Figure Union rules.

Wadda mess those are.

 

Remember!

Bring all your toys in when it rains.

 

As listed earlier there are life courses I could have followed.

Cowboy Monk Astronaut Ballerina. 

For specifically a Ballerina I might need to be a girl.

That or Trans identified boy and started when I was six.

Could also have been a 

Contemplative Monk Cowboy Astronaut.

Cool t-shirt in that.

There are alternate Earths 

where I was all that and did all that.

We are all of us so many selves.

 

 

“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it,

the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.”

~ James Baldwin, from Nobody Knows My Name ~

 

I persist. I'm enjoying hot soup on this cool May evening. Planetary changes has us fried one day wrapped in a comforter the next. It's a strange era of plagues war and social chaos.

Yet we endure the Earth abides.

I don't understand the times nor seem to belong in them. Like my grandmothers both born at the end of the 19th century. The dolls represent them. One born in Mississippi one in Asia. They lived to see us fly. One lived to witness us go to the moon the beginnings of full Civil Rights Gay Pride parades, and the early digital age. Like them I feel a stranger in this even stranger land.

Like that book's title. "Still, I Persist in Wondering."

"...Outro theme"

Article by Bill Weinberg.

Peter Lamborn Wilson, celebrated "underground intellectual" and a pivotal figure in the revival of American anarchism over the past 40 years, died May 23 at his home in Saugerties, NY, reportedly from a heart attack. A controversial as well as inspirational figure, Wilson was the author of several cult classics, ranging from ecstatic rants to anti-authoritarian interpretations of history and what he called "drop-out culture."

Although he had been in failing health for the past years, his death was not expected.

Moorish radical bohemia
Born in Baltimore in 1945, Wilson was radicalized in the early 1960s. While studying classical literature at New York's Columbia University, he fell in with an eclectic and semi-facetious invented spiritual sect called the Moorish Orthodox Church. This was a white beatnik offshoot of the Moorish Science Temple, a surviving predecessor to the Black Muslim movement, founded in 1916 by the Prophet Noble Drew Ali. The MOC was a small circle of white dropouts alienated from white culture and identifying with Islamic and eastern mysticism, and especially the Sufi tradition. They were given a recognized franchise by a local Moorish Science chapter in Baltimore.

Steeped in bebop jazz, cannabis and Persian poetry, the MOC maintained a motorcycle club on Manhattan's Upper West Side. They also had interactions in this period with Timothy Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery, which was pioneering early experiments with LSD as an aid to meditation.

Journey to the East
in 1968, Wilson undertook his journey to the East. Initially flying to Lebanon, he would travel across the Islamic world, from Morocco to Indonesia, spending much time in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, studying Sufism and meeting with spiritual masters.

Peter ultimately settled in Tehran, where was involved in theater and translation work. For some time, he was the editor of Sophia Perennis, the journal of the Iranian Institute of Philosophy.

Anarchist icon
Wilson left Iran with the 1979 revolution and returned to New York—just as the US was undergoing the Reagan "revolution," and big shift to the right. This further radicalized Peter, and he began to change his former quietist ethic for a more vocal and activist stance.

In the 1980s, he joined New York's Libertarian Book Club, founded in 1946 by mostly Jewish and Italian left-wing anarchist exiles from fascist Europe. Peter became a key figure in the LBC's resurgence in the '80s, the slightly moribund organization infused with a fresh generation informed by the punk subculture and ultra-left thinking such as Situationism. Peter delivered an annual "Chaos Day" lecture every December, which was the biggest draw of the year in the LBC's monthly Anarchist Forum series.

During this period, he settled in Manhattan's East Village, where he was for many years a neighborhood fixture.

In 1988, Peter started producing the Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade on New York's listener-supported WBAI, a weekly anarchist variety show in the station's idiosyncratic late-night "free-form" tradition.

He also became a prolific writer. Among the works produced in this period were Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy and Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam, which both discussed the anarchistic strains of heretical Sufism, and Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes. He was also a contributor to the anthology Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout Culture—about "tri-racial isolate" communities in colonial America, made up of escaped Black slaves and white indentured servants who joined the Indians. In 1999, I co-edited with Peter Avant Gardening: Ecological Struggle in the City & the World, which focused on the community gardening movement on the Lower East Side, then under attack by the real-estate interests and Rudolph Giuliani administration. All these titles were published by Brooklyn's Autonomedia.

Hakim Bey
Peter became widely associated in the popular mind with the mysterious and reclusive author Hakim Bey, held by many to actually be Wilson's pseudonym. Hakim Bey's classic work was TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, in which he expounded his theory of "ontological anarchism." More militant in tone was his Black Fez Manifesto, striking an anti-civilization note. With Abel Zug, Hakim Bey co-wrote Orgies of the Hemp Eaters, an exhaustively researched compendium of cannabis culture, with an emphasis on the herb's ritual use

Hakim Bey would attract several controversies. He was especially assailed by another iconic American anarchist: the Vermont-based theorist of Social Ecology, Murray Bookchin, who accused Bey of promoting an individualistic and self-indulgent "lifestyle anarchism."

Semi-retirement and legacy
Some 20 years ago, Peter retreated to New York's Hudson Valley, where he continued to write, research, produce art, and occasionally give lectures and readings.

I served as Wilson's understudy on the Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade and eventually became primary producer of the show as Peter slowly turned it over to me in the 1990s. Another LBC comrade, Ann-Marie Hendrickson, was also brought in as co-producer. The MORC was cancelled by WBAI amid a political purge at the station in 2011 but can be said to have two successors—my podcast, Counter Vortex, and Hendrickson's late-night program on BAI, A Mansion for the Rat.

Peter's legacy is discussed in the first episode of the short-lived YouTube version of the MORC.

"...As for Angels 19 of whom were just gunned down"

Review by Anatole Broyard 

ANGELS. 

By Peter Lamborn Wilson. 200 pages Illustrated.  Pantheon Books. 

WHAT a good idea, to write a book called ''Angels,'' to tell us something about those enigmatic-looking figures we've seen in so many medieval and Renaissance paintings. Peter Wilson is, among other things, a poet, and perhaps we need a poet to describe angels to us.

As we read Mr. Wilson's ''Angels,'' we see how science has sophisticated us, how it has married us to the matter of fact. When medieval man looked up, he saw hierarchies, ''impassioned geometries,'' to borrow Pascal's phrase - and we see weather or airplanes. What a frenzy for distinctions men used to have! In ''Celestial Hierarchy,'' Pseudo-Dionysius describes the final stages of spiritual distillation: ''From the most holy imagery to formless, unific, elevative principles and assimilations.''

Angels, Mr. Wilson says, were intermediaries between God and man. There were reasons for this arrangement. To name just a couple, God was beyond man's understanding, and the mere sight of him, or contact with him would be too powerful a stimulus for a human being. Entering into the spirit of ''Angels,'' one feels also that God created them for his pleasure, because they are so decorative. Gliding Above It All.

''Where angels are concerned,'' Mr. Wilson observes, ''the art of Christianity is far richer and more prolific than its theology.'' The illustrations in the book bear this out: many of them are both beautiful and striking. A medieval German manuscript shows a seven-headed serpent ''swallowing the waters of the earth, sucking all the time and matter into the maw of chaos and world's end,'' while an angel glides above it all, a ''promise of safe harbor beyond time itself.''

A splendid double-page spread of Giotto shows several angels experiencing ''pure grief'' in response to Christ's suffering. As Mr. Wilson tactfully points out, we ourselves can know only impure emotions, for ''our reactions are mixed with our imperfections.'' Another fine picture from the ''Tres Riches Heures'' of the Duc de Berry, depicts streams of angels hurling themselves down from heaven in a spirit of wanton forgetfulness. A 15th-century Russian icon showing a soul in ecstasy is also particularly good.

Angels, Mr. Wilson informs us, figured not only in Christianity and Judaism, but also in classical myth and philosophy, in Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Islam as well. Sometimes, he seems to stretch the term to accommodate this claim. From 1971 to 1978, Mr. Wilson lived in Iran, where he edited the Journal of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy. This may or may not explain why Oriental angels play such a large part in his book.

Most angels, he observes, are masculine or androgynous and rather passive looking. Perhaps they practice apatheia, the suppression of visible emotion. Hindu angels, who are sometimes voluptuously feminine, are more playful. Before the time of Noah, a legend says, angels came down to earth, fell in love, married and sired human heroes. Another legend has them fathering cannibalistic giants. Some chaste angels reproduced by sweating. Weeping 70,000 Tears

Early descriptions of angels are filled with baffled hyperbole. An angel has 1,000 tongues, for example, or weeps 70,000 tears. The Archangel Michael, together with Gabriel, has captured popular imagination. The poet in Mr. Wilson is evident when he describes Michael slaying the dragon: ''Solar, chivalrous, victorious day against the lunar, watery and reptilian night.'' The dragon represents evil, the ego and human weakness, among other things.

Azrael, the Hebrew angel of death, ''turns the world this way and that, just as men turn their money in their hands.'' Here is a characterization of the guardian angel from the Mandean ''Liturgy of the Dead'': ''I go to meet my image and my image comes to meet me: it caresses and embraces me as if I were returning from captivity.'' William Blake complained that angels had no sense of humor.

Despite what seems a bias in favor of Oriental angels, Mr. Wilson has written a picturesque and original book. At the end of it, he leaves us with a heartening thought: according to Clement of Alexandria, men, too, can become angels. One wishes, though, that Clement had recommended something other than philosophy as the path to that condition.

I'm tired of race.

I'm tired of white people.

I'm tired of having to be black.

I'm tired of talking about race.

I'm tired of this country and its angry murderous people.

Such days as these. 

The count has since grown.

Now 19 children 2 or 3 teachers murdered in Texas.

One police officer and

13 to 16 kids wounded being treated.

These numbers change by the hour.

 

"...This just in..."

19 children three teachers shot dead. 13 kids wounded along with a police officer. All this at an elementary school in Uvalde Texas. I'm watching the usual coverage on assorted networks sites blogs and chats. Even the first 'False Flag' accusations showing up. The details are familiar. Nutter with a gun does the usual. The same sort of semi auto weapon converted to full auto.  The same lame gun control bleats the same 'arm everyone and this won't happen' dementia. Just heard death count may go up.   

They never show the dead the butchered. They hide the evidence of what this kind of culture manufactures. If they showed the slaughtered children at Sandy Hook or this or any the the now over 1000 mass killings in the last decade. If they had showed them all in detail this might end. If these were rubbed in our faces each time with the legend: "...you allow this". Not even Fox News and their armed fans could avoid complicity.

In local news murders continue on the streets and public transit here in the Emerald City. After the bomb and shooting massacre on the subway a few weeks ago. Consistent slaughters since. Mostly unlike Texas in ones twos and threes. 

A couple a days ago a person shot in the head randomly on the subway. No reason...the disturbed shooter just felt like it. Today another attempt. Tho' this time the shooter cornered shot himself in the face. I guess that counts as a win. See below post from Canada for where this is going.

Have a nice day.

"...Canada preparing for U.S. Collapse"

While the United States appears to hold true to the ideals of democracy for now. Its democratic institutions have suffered erosion, as reflected in partisan pressure on the electoral process, bias and dysfunction in the criminal justice system, harmful policies on immigration and asylum seekers, and growing disparities in wealth, economic opportunity, and political influence.

The U.S. is now ranked 11th below Argentina and Mongolia in democratic stability.  

According to the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC), the government of Canada is fearful of what that might mean for them. Former national security advisers and directors at the Center for Strategic and International Studies warned Canada that the U.S. could become a "source of threat and instability" in the coming years.

Citing things like Fox News presenter like Tucker Carlson then President Donald Trump's attempt to overthrow the government. That, and the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol are a growing list of anti-democratic warnings. Their data gathering comes from top-secret information and a briefed cabinet on emerging threats. It warns that Canada has been complacent and warned it's time to tackle this problem. It fears possible future armed conflicts and American refugees on a Ukrainian scale attempting to enter Canada.

(MSN News)

I saw a post that asked what would I be if I followed my childhood dreams. Well to start: A Cowboy Architect Cartoonist-animator Airline Pilot Geisha. Toss in Ballerina Carpenter and Combat Nun.

"...Time and again"

 

Peter Lamborn Wilson, RIP

Jim Fleming

Peter Lamborn Wilson died in his apartment in Saugerties, NY last night, reportedly from a heart attack. Lewanne Jones, Fred Barney Taylor and I spent Saturday afternoon with him, filming what will have been a final interview with him for Konrad Becker in Vienna. Peter seemed no worse than usual, but of course he has been in bad health for a number of years. I will provide more details as soon as they become available to me.   Add new comment | anarchistnews.org

(Photo by Chris Funkhouser)

786/303

*The above video is a spoken word version of the below piece by its author.

It has been brought to my attention that Peter Lamborn Wilson (Hakim Bey) has passed away. Some of you may know that PLW acknowledged me several times in his two final books which were released only a few months ago. PLW and I began corresponding through an intermediary and friend of his beginning in 2014 after he reached out to me while I was living in Berlin, Germany, since he did not own a computer and did things the old fashioned way. Inspired by some of my writings and translations of Bayānī texts, in 2019 PLW formally requested to enter the Bayān and was simultaneously made an honorary member of the Fatimiya Sufi Order.

I first encountered PLW's writings in 1990 as an undergraduate freshman at the University of New Mexico. Already having become a disciple to the writings of Henry Corbin (d. 1978) when I first came across PLW's SCANDAL: Essays in Islamic Heresy (1988), more than any other work this book sparked my genuine interest in the IsmāꜤīlīs and especially the Alāmūtī concept of the Imām-of-ones-being.

In 1995 I briefly met PLW at the annual gathering of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society in Berkeley, California, where he gave a presentation that would later form the first essay of his SHOWER OF STARS: The Initiatic Dream in Sufism and Taoism (1996). That book resonated with me because of a few of my own initiatic experiences in the Imaginal World of the Dreaming. His notion of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) and Ontological Anarchy has also gone a long way in helping me formulate my own political theory of Theophanocracy.

While there was a lot I agreed with PLW about, there were also some features to his writing and overall work which I profoundly disagreed with, esp. his advocacy on behalf of NAMBLA, although I am of the mind that this latter feature may have possibly been a qalandarī and malāmatī form of warding off people and preventing himself from becoming a guru and unnecessary focus of adoration by bringing blame upon himself as an initiatic act: adoration which has sometimes corrupted even the best and erected turbid veils due to the cultivation of the base ego.

Nevertheless, for whatever of his faults, lapses, omissions and commissions, in my 'Book' Peter Lamborn Wilson left a positive legacy to this world and leaves this life as a 'believer' (mu'min) in the Light of the Bayān, the Primal Point, His Letters of the Living and Ṣubḥ-i-Azal, which he acknowledges in his two final books published this year.

Although I am not a PLWilsonian, in a sense I feel his acknowledgement of myself, the Bayān and the FSO was a sort of passing of the mantle. I would have liked to see PLW live longer and write and publish some more, but the Lord of All-Being and Mistress of All-Life opened a new chapter for him in the Book of Destiny in the afterlife. Peter was 77 years old, i.e. the abjad numerical value of Yā Allāh (يا الله), and he was considered by me a Letter of the NUR.

The Light of the All-High be upon him in every moment, before every moment and after every moment!

https://wahidazal303.blogspot.com/

إنّا لله وإنّا إليه راجعون