A Wolf by Nature/A Human by Reason
That to me is what being nonexistent (maybe nonessential, too) is. Can there be a nonexistentialism, a belief that it's all done by mirrors, meaning nothing is real? Like an Atheistic transcendentalist. Isn't everything we human animals do an effort to overcome being animals--but isn't it true, if there are gods, aren't we those gods, too? That's what I mean by my being a wolf by nature, not believing in human legends just my animal instincts. Yes, by nature I instinctually desire acceptance by a pack--the writer in me is wolfish, you see--but on my human side, where the legends interfere with my instincts, purify them, wash them in various saviours's bloods, I'm revolted by the pack. Like Frank Sinatra, I have invented my own pack, a pack of wolves like me and not rats, and when I'm not with that pack, I'm a lone wolf.
There actually was way back in the pages of history a teevee show called "The Lone Wolf." Dana Andrews, a handsome-boy actor who was so handsome and Hollywood valuable he fought a losing battle with alcohol in the end, played a detective who called himself the Lone Wolf.
Note: I still have a tendency to not put movies and teevee shows in italics--parentheticalizing them is as much honor as I'll give them--yet I wouldn't dare put a book title or even a newspaper title in parens. To me, it seems much more driven and dedicated to put a book together--so many great books it took sometimes 20 years for them to be completed--yet, teevee shows and movies only take months to create, produce, and offer for sale on a mass market system. Speedy deliveries of studio-produced movies are limited in their scope in terms of visual dimension and timeframe limits--plus there is too much graphic-manipulation and trickery in movies now--and even reality (movies acting as though they are "happening in a real time") movies, like those starring the always-perfect Merle Streep, for instance--I mean Merle is so serious an actress--yet I can spot women like Merle Streep as actresses no matter how dressed down or periodic they try to act in the films. Never is an actress's hair really messed up--even an actress's messed up hair is staged--written into the script--and actors's hair is always in a modern coif no matter the greasy, dirty, licy hair of men and women at the time the film is pretending to depict.
And reality teevee shows for instance. They ain't real. First of all when you are watching them you have to realize there are at least three cameras shooting whatever is going on. Take a show like Survivor on CBS--oooooohhhh, all these scary "they should've bopped instead of beepin'" looking people they cull out of Central Casting in Hollywood--anybody know about Central Casting? fighting some savage environment like "the jungles of the deepest otherside world left in existence." Though there have been a black or two on Survivor, most of the better actors among them are white--especially white women--white chicks who love wearing bikinis. So while these brave actors are supposedly living on-their-wits in a wildness-controlled jungle, such a challenge!, there are three cameras on the site--or more, depending on the areas they've designated as "stages"--in fact, there may be all types of cameras around, like boom cameras, or robot cameras, stationary cameras up in the trees, plus there have to be camera operators--cameramen and camera technicians, and there have to be best boys and grips around to handle all the miles of electronic wiring and such that has to be laid or strung up and then there have to be engineers running the boards and the lighting and there has to be a director and assistant directors and Girl Fridays and scriptgirls--I think you get my screen-full-of-staged scenes drift. There's always a gang of producers, directors, sponsors, assistants, etc., around any film site no matter the distance from Hollywood it claims its being filmed at--also consider that word "filmed." Not since the early days of teevee have shows been done actually live. There was a trend in teevee in the 80s and 90s, to make filmed shows seem more live by saying they were filmed live in front of a live studio audience, but if you've ever been in one of those live studio audiences, you know they control even the audience's every move, laugh, whistle, oooooh and ah, and they direct the applause and the "laugh it up" signs after ever whatever dumbass incident has just taken place--and they also do retakes right in front of you--or then after you leave the studio, they may shoot some scenes over and run a live-audience soundtrack over the film. I've just never respected filmmaking. And I tried to understand it. I attended Sam Eagle's New York University film classes in the 70s and I also hung out with a chick who went to the School of Visual Arts here in New York City and I used to experiment with her Sony video camera and monitor and editing machine and make my own Public Access teevee shows, one that showed on Channel D here in NYC--it concerned the making of Deaf Smith Peanut Butter (no salmanella in good ole Deaf Smith, only fresh uprooted peanuts--goobers)--and, yes, Virginia, there once were several Public Access channels in every city...but then don't get me started on television signals and shit like that--like did you ever realize how old CABLE television is?--it goes back to the early 1950s of the last century.
I like writing that phrase, "the last century"--and knowing my parents were born over 100 years ago now; my grandmothers over 130 years ago, and my great-grandmother, the only one I actually knew, who was born in 1860 (she said she easily remembered Lincoln), would now be 149 years old. My roots have longevity in their female branches. My mother's mother's mother, that great-grandmother, lived 90 years; my mother's mother lived 85 years; my mother's sister lived 90 years--and there the story ends as far as my mother's roots are concerned--my mother due to advanced technology, like a brand new Amurican car--a piece of junk, but brand new junk, didn't get to live past 57, but she was a healthy 57 when that eighteen-wheeler exploded the life out of her and the way I'm living on gracefully now leads me to imagine my mother living easily to 90. But writing about the 20th Century is so weird now, it was just yesterday, it is still just yesterday in thoughts, but oh how it seems so ancient also, so long ago and faraway, the same as the 19th Century seemed ancient to me back when I appeared on earth and started reasoning like a human animal.
And sometimes that's what I feel like--like I just appeared on earth one day out of nowhere, that nonexistence I started off this cathartic journey trying to reason out--with Atheistic transcendentalism--the transcendent of nothing into nothingness, but not the being and nothingness into being in nothingness and standing still living, but the nonbeing and nonnothingness--maybe the acting like you're living--the nada of Hemingway's "Lord's Prayer," "Our Nada which art in Nada, give us this day our daily Nada...." (Hemingway reads the poem this line is from on a Caedmon LP from back in the 1960s--"spoken word" recordings they were called). And in this world of Nada, this subconscious dream world, I'm playing in a sandbox with two little girls, Dorothy was one, and Betty, I think, was the other, out behind a garage under my mother's clothesline, in a backyard on East Oklahoma Street, in a north-central Oklahoma town called Enid, after Aenid. That's how I remember my appearance on the stage of earth--earth, the spinning flying orbiting-force obedient in its bowing toward the dynamic Sun of God around which it is spinning.
I'm currently trying to think along with Alfred North Whitehead as he tried to prove to me that reason functioning as the art of life is the reason human animals have always evolved upwards--it's more complicated than I'm able to declare it here--but Whitehead's making me reason through reading his remains in words (I can hear him talking) with him, his way, and that is fascinating me--like did this brilliant mathematician-turned-philosopher know anything about binary math, the math that is currently ruling the electronic world, a reality within the unreal--isn't that an amazing thought to think?
The reality within the unreal. Not the unreal within the reality--that's what films and teevee shows are.
And I tried to swear off discussing politics like a drunk who wakes up seeing bugs crawling in military-drill-precision up the drill-field wallpaper of a dingy Washington, District of Corruption, sleazebag lobbyist's hotel room-- but windbag that I am, I can't resist a reasonable swipe at politics, an entity whose reasoning is based on backwards thinking--and now I see that's an unreal position within the reality of politics. To those birds, backwards thinking is straightforward thinking. It's me who's backwards because I live as a man/wolf hybrid in an unreal distant corner of reality I've dream-painted myself into.
Deep, right? But, remember, my reasoning and Alfred North Whitehead's reasoning can never outreason (reason being made up of logics) each other or a computer.
So I feel unreal. Nonexistent, except as a character on a page that entitles itself The Daily Growler, an electronically produced page on a Google moneymaker called blogspot.com. It's like I am Jesus Christ. There's no proof that I ever existed and yet there are pages and pages of me declaring who I really am along the ethereal Autobahns of the fast endlife I'm racing towards and the particular "way of life" that has propelled me there ["the ways of life" (the Taos) very important to the ancient ones], to THAT there, and in THAT there, others of like brainwaves believe in me and that what I've done and how I've lived is true and not fiction...although, I am a fiction writer aren't I? Or am I really nada? Am I words on a page, or flesh and blood, mixed flesh, mixed blood, mixed desires, mixed drives, mixed respect of my nadaistic intincts?
It took me three days (and 1 day to proofread it) to write this.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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