Prologue ‘23
I start this prologue in June when the sun is high and hot, for I feel it is at this time people could use philosophy the most to keep them grounded in understanding…but I may very well return to this prologue in the wintertime to put on finishing touches, and I will certainly not be done editing until the end of December right before the serial publication of this opus begins. The twelve months of this one book are filled with daily articles.
I use “articles” as a catchall term for stories, reflections, fragments, and essays.
I planned to write between 1,400 and 2,000 words a day, a quota I’ve adhered to in the past when practicing after taking this wordcount recommendation from successful older authors, but I have never published casual, daily writings because I am careful about what I consider a finished product. I enjoy taking time in revision with the longer works of my yellow books and consider the reworking of poetic language to be one of my most effective rhetorical strategies.
Part of my form with this project was to complete a piece each day rather than to continue any article over the course of days. After all, many articles are shorter than 1,400 words because I was careful not to force writing when it did not synthesize with my lived experience, which was the impetus of this work. First, I wrote as one wanting to give my neighborhood stories, next I wrote with my neighborhood’s movement. This is a new style of literature for me to finish. It suggests that writing can activate a creative part in people around oneself who might be wanting to express the same things that were unconscious prior to because they were felt in isolation and not termed for the collective.
Or perhaps we all want to record a meaningful experience in our lives in this age of censorship and mass-confusion.
Wisdom visits all of my neighbors and this has been an attempt to write down a year that we can refer to as an eternal reminder that life is possible in Worcester, Massachusetts.
While living at 50 Franklin Street, I was blessedly saved, as I had been mercifully empathized with in San Diego, by people who spend a lot of time watching life outside, some “homeless,” whose coins and cash accepted from me turned over night into indispensable support in the form of gestural reminders that I was moving in a direction that is moral.
As I wrote articles, I was invigorated, taught, and watched out for by members of cultures I have been introduced to through travel, music, religion, open-mindedness and aspects of sisterhood. Groups I know little about have been granted identity in 2023 because placing others in wise folkways is a better starting point than trying to scrutinize people one may never meet face-to-face. Human history without acknowledging cultures and religions is ahistorical. Strangers who understand what it’s like to feel afraid and unable to escape condemnation are more empathetic to one striving for liberation than those I knew before they handled human communication like it is only a job-interview, and this distinction calls one to join the public.
I would rather a public of people sharing unique, familial, or religious wisdom for the sake of health than one racing to get money amidst exploited financial instability that grants a false sense of goodness by things even if waiting on better interactions becomes challenging and requires trust.
This is not to say those successful in the business sector this year are ignored in my articles, but the American Dream has been limited and needs art to keep it organic.
*
What big issues there are in America can be helped at a local level when one understands their sensitivity not for a disease but for humanity and learns how to stay in touch with neighbors non-verbally which involves seeing that consciousness is something that is shared. Perhaps anxieties about crime are shared and yet we isolate them to have others be the cause of our ‘bad feeling’ while we proceed with lives that are convenient. The issues that make us afraid, big or small, work back to being physical pains in our bodies, confirms the Buddha. We can transition from a country sick on inflated political and globalized concerns from digital propaganda by working below propaganda and seeing our immediate surroundings as ecology, a place of biological living where unwanted qualities may not be blamed on the individual but solved between neighbors.
That is America as a land.
That is other than what big gov promotes as America, getting us riled.
This will require new understanding of why we use language and appreciating education outside of the classroom.
WE can become a better people by learning to accept and respect our neighbors and not listening to so much yellow journalism.
WE can understand the human body so that our anxiety is not blamed on a stranger we are looking to who might be able to tell you that your heart is beating.
WE might continue to realize America for a place of freedom for movement, religion, as well as expression and earning, not just a place of gains and losses.
I ask, when you feel a threat by instinct and look out your window, who do you expect to see?
This is what I asked myself in the keep.
I now describe the setting of these articles, the downtown district of Worcester, Massachusetts. I live on the eighth floor of a renovated hotel. The rooms I wrote in are eighty feet high.
There are three double hung windows with curtains, two black, one yellow.
There is a kitchenette and a bathroom.
There is a sliding-chair that belonged to my mother when I was born so that she could nurse me, and I have a vermillion couch inherited from my grandmother.
Years prior to 2023, as I wrote my recently published yellow novel, Larify’s Dismissal: A Novel from the Hubbub, I was working through a lot of personal trauma in my apartment. I had come to a place where I was paranoid and unable to make sense of my behavior, not having understood key differences between child psychology and adult psychology while exploring Buddhist meditation. Liberating myself from something distant and abstract by deciding to print my books and place them physically in measured places assured me I was a body in the world not just a nebulous cloud of critical-thinking.
I came to earth once I recognized I could not throw a rock from my window to the corner of Portland and Myrtle.
Realizing physics, I got out of my own head and became one of the numbers.
I got active like those who move in tribal patterns.
As a Catholic Christian, I was made aware that due to my upbringing there were good reasons why I felt the way I did that became more tangible when I saw my religion as a system. I could not meditate on Jesus alone if I were already part of a religion practiced by the people around me who sought to follow the same prophet, though I had not recognized the religion, fearing that any abnormal behavior was only attributed to mental defects. The gospel I’ve experienced is of earth. The scripture is not spoken by a priest only to be forgotten at the church gate, nor ahistorical and discordant with scripture, but local Christians are supported by an outer church who practices something like cynicism.
There are underestimated people who keep touch on the severity of human qualities.
They live on the ground. They are not capitalist.
The local stone church is a place to connect with the absolute, keep history, and mediate strange behavior with humility and adherence to rites. A church is a physical building at a certain coordinate, but The Kingdom of God must be understood as omnipresent and unilateral. In my case, one who preferred authenticity to generic and acceptable personality in an unrealized city that was overlooking gypsies and street acts, I was helped from isolation into my community by true Catholics who showed me local gospel was too towny due to ignorance; men did not have insight into the mystical roles of other cultures in understanding of scripture.
I was anxious, in part, because my hometown had terrible definitions of important qualities like Time and historical personages, which made what’s possible unrealistically limited. A lack of self-education allowed fascist behavior to appear warranted since it was easier to keep things comfortable with a small mind than to learn more about the origins of diverse people’s ways of life.
To reserve judgment is difficult depending on one’s profession.
What was true about the human condition as a status quo was lazily asserted.
*
Late-stage capitalism has involved men pushing others to rush for gain by strange, unnatural methods, like the fast driving of oversized trucks at measured times a day to enforce a material routine. A perceived macrocosm overlooking that global economy is not adding up creates this microcosm based on generic ideas of conquest and “America.” As an Irish Catholic, I identify the superego of fascists to be using the name of Catholic or Christian while being overcome by the Seven Deadly Sins.
Their complacency leads to countless problems as they claim to be the standard of Man while they are simply vocal oafs who take advantage of the Christian sentiment of treating others as you would like to be treated whenever confronted about their unaccountability as individuals. Their habit is to project the Devil onto feminine qualities and foreign cultures, not aware that this thought process makes them agents of Satan.
Wise men from Eastern traditions say that blaming others for one’s lack of peace is a shortcoming, but I do not live in a temple nor a forest. I am surrounded by heavy machinery. If I live in a community where an ideal like Nirvana is considered Evil before being likened to the ladder to Heaven by good deeds and renunciation, I will be targeted for doing something of which I am not guilty by men with unresolved spiritual issues.
The sacrament of marriage must be respected as a key building block of order in civil society that allows people to relate as adults, regardless of their culture, and raise interpretations of the world to be morally organized rather than materially based.
Check for the sacrament and preserve the honor of family.
It is important that women are recognized as sisters, daughters, and wives in public first, not targets for blame or pressure by people with low moral fiber who would play hero by blaming the different man for the tension in the room. WE can be sure that crimes of passion, as well as general anxiety, are being pressured by irresponsible Satanists who don’t atone for sin and maintain a standard that is corrupt but easy. This becomes generational. A goal of my writing in 2023 was to eliminate the narrative of small-minded and unpractical mental organization that causes fear and humbly acknowledge the unknowable. If one limits one’s own vices and becomes more aware of bodies around oneself in innocence, one will realize and separate from intentional & unwanted social pressure.
If you are able to recognize that religion remains important to people in your immediate area, you may find new life after years of being confined. Our desires are intentionally exploited for control by commercial and political propaganda, and this is enforced at a local level by men who cannot handle the freedom to make their own decisions at a deeper level of meaning. Although we cannot understand all cultures or prevent all crime, we can learn to silence our mind on a daily basis so that we are not the ones implicating dangerous assumptions based on our own inability to fathom information. My suggestion is right effort by daily reasoning and respect of each body around oneself. Language is unnecessary when we respect the presence and posture of another as a statement in itself. A central tenant of true Christianity is non-judgement, but this is perverted if we are trying to appease arbitrary biases of a superego.
What is done religiously is not necessarily religion.
The man standing outside in the cold every day is closer to you than those who distort your reality by repeating your name and what happened in high school.
Acknowledge his progress.
*
The writing process of 2023 suggests that shared awareness directed toward a more cooperative future, viz peace and reason on Earth, can be cultivated by acknowledging two dimensions.
A) One must recognize that an area of land is unique on Earth, i.e. a certain city.
B) One must utilize Carl Jung’s definition of the collective unconscious, a part of the human mind that hosts the essence of dreams, symbols, and history. The unconscious mind is said to span from the waking world to sleep.
Jung concluded that we cannot understand our own lives in full until we pay attention to our dreams. As I am the author of 2023, my perspective is self-important, but self-discovery was done with others in mind which bred freedom of expression. The breadth of this work involved the entire neighborhood because I acknowledged the presence of strangers thinking. The impetus was a nod to self-expression and true freedom of speech accepted by living people at a certain time in a certain place. The result is not chaotic lapse of order, but better order with what matters most in mind, less stress, more understanding and respect. I would not have been so free to create if I had not been accepted by neighbors as an artist using important terms because my behavior required touching base with others supporting daily creation, and it is important to state that my work was done by a particular human because other people were developing spoken language that could not possibly be written down as I was writing.
I assert the ability to dream forward in one’s life and make the future can be mysteriously confounded if there is an oppressive superego in one’s environment that is forceful about false values on important words and symbols that decorate reality and what’s possible. Today there are many symbols used for advertising or entertainment that create abstract associations, leading us to forget the root meaning of important terms. By exploring the collective unconscious and etymology in writing, one starts to realize fallacies that cause stress between people – it’s probable that if people are motivated by a misconception, they will feel foreboding because their foundation is cracked. For example, Jesus being a Jewish rabbi ought to have one appreciating a local synagogue as well as a church if one cares for chronology.
Art was done to express what went on between the cracks of superficial categorization of good, bad, rich, and poor and to better situate folkways in the ongoing narratives of human history before the land was industrialized.
The small pond became the ocean.
Human beings must be respected as capable creators of life even if you don’t understand what they must do to feel free.
The person below your window or living down the hall values their life, and, though their representation may differ, our intrinsic values should guide us. We have separated our perversion from our neighbors not knowing the solution is in acknowledging our inability to feel fulfilled and safe in a bogus culture that fills the void and invades privacy without giving it, and a revolution with neighbors in mind, empowering actual lives and safety for families through knowledge and organic culture need not be broadcasted because that is humanity in itself.
Let 2023 remain a testament of the importance of clean, eternal principles.
Stories written from pure imagination are to soothe the inner child while delighting the children. Stories are also to make space for new experience and illustrate suppressed fears.
Who can say what further effect this product will have?
I will not continue to write like this because the goal here was to facilitate usable, eternal truths, not to keep directing with description as a journalist would do.
I do believe in God’s plan and accept that I cannot know it.
I once heard from a colleague that philosophy is best described as “…what a philosopher does.”
In this year, I did philosophy to better my own enviorn’mint.
If I express “I checked for the sacrament” or profess some holy writ, I don’t mean to be sanctimonious…sound like a good person…but I’m describing my thought as action.
As an avant-garde poet, I will appreciate new creative form until I am so old my rickety bones are able to think through my fingers in blocks of simple sentences.
I have learned to respect the spiritual boundaries of others by establishing the historical basis of my own religion. As my ability to identify my own folkway and remove myself from the corruption of it bettered, I was able live more comfortably in the present. I became more tolerant of what I still consider to be oppressive forces and confident in my understanding of the public.
My adventures this year included two vacations and several concerts.
I would like to thank my family, the downtown district, the greater community, musicians I listened to or saw live, thinkers I admire, and colleagues and students at Worcester State University.
Our dark nature must be cultivated and not made evil but beautiful and neutral like a flower in Elm Park under the stars.
Know the date!
Awaken.
From 2023