venus: a life in dreams

how do you overcome who you really are without losing the whole point of being alive?

we love too much. or is it not enough?

the speed of dreams

transcend meaning and hide me beside you

let me dream
let everything come true
let me fall never land
let the tidal wave recede, suck but leave me on the beach, dazed
still here

sun above
sand beneath

if it were up to me
we would walk there now
to the place i can imagine us
to the place where we are visible to one another
clear

i am getting used to the dance
used to the masks, the gowns
the timbre of a life in love
on the street of dreams

reverence & rage

the problem with identity
in a materialist conception
of one's uni-verse, is that
the perception is of an
object


NOW - STOP - DO - NOT - GET - AHEAD - OF - ME - HERE

this is a path of pebbles floating in the air
over a canyon from Pirates of the Caribbean pebble
by pebble we will
proceed

science has shown us that we can only perceive
either
the object
or
the process
you can either observe the qualities of a person as object
or
view the qualities of a person as a process

both cannot
as yet
within the present
ranges of western
europeanized imaginative
nor scientific skill
be perceived simultaneously

women primp and prepare themselves
to be perceived as objects

women compete among themselves
as to who will be perceived
as a more valuable object

women (men too of course - we're pebbling on about women right now)
are sold in imagination
as models making another
object more attractive
to a viewer
so that someone - who? will buy
the proffered object

standing next to the object for sale
the woman comes
to be seen as also available
for sale

and many of us are
and it's expanding
this sale of us
not contracting

so, enough, we have reached the far side of the canyon
must we pebble step our way back?
not at all. we can fly

the solution is simply to live
as you wish to be

if you wish to live as a free
woman, practice freedom
in any way presently
permissible and allow
your conceptions of freedom
to deepen into more self discipline
not be thrown away on some
new master

women have the right to be free

certainly women have as much
right
as men do
to be free

and i don't mean to be all
greek soothsayer doomsayer
but -
if you allow women
to be slaves, it's not
long before men will
also once again be
slaves and not
long after
that
children will once again
work as slaves to invisible
elites who cannot perceive
process
the rotting of their perspectives
from their politically
and socially
cannibalistic self expressions

people who keep slaves are always
themselves enslaved

until power over oneself is achieved
it is the only creative power
available to an individual immersed
in materiality/form
once power over oneself is achieved
many other powers come willingly to avail

if you use force on yourself
to more quickly claim
self empowerment
you will have simply enslaved yourself
and will find yourself still
on that torture wheel
so oft described
by eastern mystics

question pour essayer

what is the difference between opinion and preference?
and what difference, if any, does that difference make?

i welcome you to comment, essayer, a short literary composition on this question, presenting a personal view. or a photojournalistic essay. a poem. a testing or trial of the value or nature of the question.

a balance of powers

if we put ideology aside, for the purpose of shining a social science engineering glance at power, how it seems to function at this point in the world as we are living in it, in the cultures playing more noticeable parts on the world stage. my limits: i have no experience with the power dynamics of jungle tribes, or mountain communities, harems, cabals… in my experience, limited as it is, i see a pattern of sorts. there are two kinds of power: centralized and diffused, it is called totalitarian and socialist, but how does it function, this two power concept?

the more fundamental two powers, the famous ones, power over others or power over ourselves... we abandon for now to concentrate on systems governed by conceptualizations having to do with power over others.

in a biological, material world such as ours, immersed, as we are, in an emotive-psychologically entrenched view of power as influence over others, there are two ways to do this - we can cooperate and organize ourselves into a group which is then powerful enough to wield power over others, or we can be vicious and deadly enough that we can extend our two year old need to be the ruler of the world long past its sell-by date. those are the two ways to power over others.: organize and dominate or simply bully. (the ways to achieve power over oneself are infinite as are the beings who might wish to do so)

global power, historically, male told and made, his-story-call, has fallen to the individual who successfully combines hatefilled, infantilism with a skill for organization i.e. combining the two sorts of power to create an hypnotically appealing reality for those people still enthralled by power-over stories. as far as i know, there is no "cure" for this dynamic. this is the "wheel" that brings suffering.

venus has many faces but not one of them is organizing, this is left to the household goddesses who have vanished in our days to disturbing images of slutted out housewives polluting the air space with greed. a perfect balance to the sheiks covered in white concealing their secret insecure selves beneath even more insecure images of highly competitive means of cooperation.

genuine cooperation is conversational. as in the first meanings of the word. to turn together, through the days. to communicate by living together in the circles that our lives encompass, delineate, reveal. this type of functioning is the highest form of household "management" i.e. no management at all but an awareness of power within as the guiding light of each and every one of us.

women stay away from power over, this is not just because the political situations keep women as second class citizens, this is also because her-story will have to be about power within and, until we can manage that in ourselves, we cannot lead it or teach it or even represent it, especially not largely enough, politically enough, to be noticed, noted.