Personal Essays

Paying Second Attention...

A PERSONAL ESSAY BY EUGENE BISCONTE

Someone once told me that we are all born with every answer inside of us that we will ever need, but that the only way we will ever find them is not by looking for them but rather by simply letting the answers find us. I thought it was ridiculous too when I first heard it, but now I see why—I thought he meant the answers I wanted. He meant the ones I needed.

As I grow older I see that he was right. It is in moments of joy and happiness when we doing what we love and spending time with the people that we love that our mind is open to all of the answers we truly we need.

The Buddhist—and I hope any reading will forgive me for over simplifying this point—call this the “second attention”. They believe this is the part of the mind that wanders free of this physical world seeking answers for something when we are focused on something completely different. This is why we remember things in the middle of the night or think of something that escaped us weeks ago in the midst of a conversation—in the very moments we aren’t even looking for them.

As I grow older I see it is possible for us to free this special attention whenever we want. We do so by being who we love in doing all we love for in these times that we are focused on happiness, we can never know fear. It is this happiness that frees our second attention allowing it to find answers, it is fear and sadness that muddle the mind with thoughts self-centered thoughts of pity which hold the second attention here.

We often become frustrated that we can’t find the answers we want that we become miserable—as though we need these very answers to live. Think about it. Are there any answers you truly cannot live without? If this were true—with all the mysteries this beautiful world holds—there would be no one reading this article.

Rather than drive ourselves mad over the answers we foolishly think we need, perhaps we should just be thankful for the ones that do find us and choose us ready. This will lead to more happiness… and more answers. Frustration and anger will only shield us from these answers we need—sometimes for years—until we learn to let it go.

I know this well as what follows is a simple message my mother revealed to me moments after she died in the most blatant, obvious fashion. But I missed this simple, straightforward message. I was so angry and frustrated trying to understand why my mother died—an answer I sought—that I closed my heart to her beautiful message—the answer I needed. Only in a brief moment of happiness did this answer that sat within me for over six years beat me over the head.

My hope in submitting this is to show you why I believe that only by seeking happiness can the world can reveal so many beautiful answers we need in each and every moment. Once we see this we come to realize that there is no limit to the beauty and joy this world can show us.

I only ask that you approach it with genuine joy and openness so that it may reveal something to you—maybe as you read it or perhaps decades later. In any case, pay second attention as you read it.

If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad
-Sheryl Crow

Those lyrics blasted out of the radio in my Jeep as I drove home from the hospital the night my mother passed away. It’s been over six years since she ended her eighteen month battle with leukemia -- a battle several doctors gave her no more than three months to lose-- and I still remember the night my mother left this world like an angel.

It was a chilly October night when I told my mother to stop hanging around for me. My mother, Jennie, had weathered eighteen months of hospital stays, blood transfusions (often accompanied by allergic reactions), as well as the brutal fact she was sharing her once vibrant body with an uninvited evil that was methodically destroying it. Now, as the horrible dance was drawing to a close, my mother lay motionless in her bed in a sterile hospital room filled with devices more concerned with not dying than with living. The room was several feet down the corridor from the one mom lay in seventeen months earlier while her husband was being buried. Leukemia doesn’t take a rain check, mom had to miss that too.

Around nine that night, the nurse explained to my brother and I that though mom was unresponsive, she could certainly hear us and that this may be our last chance to speak to her. I didn’t want my mom to go. I wanted to take all my hate, all my anger, all my rage that I had bottled up inside and use this raw energy to summon my mother back. Even if I could have done such a thing, it would have been selfish. If there is a beauty in everything, and there most certainly is, it is this selfishness we feel towards the people we love the most. Mom needed to go. Mom was still alive, but she was no longer living.

So I said what I still suppose had to be said.

I wish I could remember the exact last words I said to my mother, as much for myself as for this piece, but I can’t. I can remember a blinding rage. I can remember the paralysis of my self-pity. Most of all I can remember how each word burned as it choked its way through my throat. A few hours later, at 12:04 am on October 4th mom was gone; and I was alone.

My next recollection is driving alone in my black Jeep down Vineland Highway Route 55 to my now empty childhood home. It was a road that I driven down hundreds of times in my life, yet never had I felt more lost. The emotions of despair, relief, agony, guilt, and anger all combining to make me perfectly numb. Luckily my mother was there for me, as always. I turned on the radio and Sheryl Crow’s “If It Makes You Happy” played. Now, you can take it as a sign, as a coincidence, or as a song that simply had come up in the overnight rotation and you would be exactly right. Things are simply what any of us perceive them to be, no more, no less, but in that car at that moment I know now my mother was speaking to me. Yet despite all the beauty and the simplicity of the message being spoken by one of my favorite singers, I heard nothing. I couldn’t understood a thing, I could only wail in anger at the infinite sky.

The habit of despair is worse than despair itself
-from Albert Camus’s The Plague

I kept up a strong appearance the year and a half that my mother was sick but the daily commute between New Jersey and Delaware was taking its toll. I look back now and realize that this is when I forgot to be happy—trapped alone for long car rides with only my anger and sadness as it twisted my weak heart and mind. I didn’t see it then, but my mother did. I still see her beautiful questioning smile as she would look into my confused, frightened eyes pleading for me to remember how easy it was to be happy. She would have told me if she could, but words are useless, only actions lead us to happiness.

I see this now because now I see beauty again. Then I saw only anger.

Happiness is like anything else we practice-- a language we speak in word as much as much as action. Like any language, the less we speak it, the more we forget until we understand nothing of it at all. It sits lost in our head waiting for us to reawaken it. But once we do see it again, as with any language, our understanding of it increases, we better express ourselves, and most importantly, we begin to think in this language.

We reawaken this language every moment of everyday simply by listening with our hearts. It is then we are able see that people speak of joy only when they do what they love. In these moments we hear this language and-- when it leads us to act out of love-- we most certainly respond in kind. And the beauty of it is, no matter how long it takes, happiness will always be there waiting for us the moment we simply choose to see it.

In a twinkling we will all be changed,
and I’ll wait for you, and I’ll wait for you…
-Jonatha Brooke

In the 43 years my mother was a teacher, I never saw her teach in a classroom. I did see her come home from school every day smiling, singing and dancing. I saw her get up every morning and make breakfast for my brother, father and myself and smile so brightly that it literally filled the kitchen. I saw this every morning. I saw her do the same when she came home from work each day. I felt joy every day but I took it for granted. I thought it happened everywhere, I assumed it happened everyday.

Then my mother got sick. And everything stopped. Rather then focus on my mother's joy of being alive, of being with her son, instead of seeing her smile when she talked to me, elated to be able to spend another day with her family, with this beautiful world—a God-given gift that in my anger and stupidity I failed to realize— I saw anger. I was used to seeing hate, I was blinded to the beautifully courageous fact that despite machines, doctors and bleak diagnoses, mom was still finding beauty in every moment she was alive. I thought she was sad because she was sick. She wasn’t. She was sad that her son had forgotten how to smile and that she couldn’t bring me back to something she’d taught me every day, something she was still teaching me. I look back and am ashamed that I had forgotten everything her smiling, beautiful, passionate heart showed me.

Thank God someone helped me remember.

Recently I went to see another of my favorite singers, Jonatha Brooke performing solo in an intimate little venue-- stripped of everything but her voice and instruments. She stood behind a microphone singing in her perfect voice as though it were the only place in the world she could ever be. I sat in amazement as I realized that microphone, that crowd, that moment gave her more life than any machine that will ever be put in a hospital room. I felt the chills of joy as she beat on her guitar less as though playing an instrument and more as though wringing every last life-giving note out of it. I heard not only each beautiful note and lyric of her angelic voice but saw the urgency in her voice, one that told me how important it was for her to be doing this, how anything else would be death.

I watched as her life’s work sustained her, and felt the joy in her soul literally fill that room. And in that moment six plus years of frustration subsided as I realized a simple fact.

Each of us need to do only one thing. We need only to do what our hearts will not let us NOT do. This is our passion. This is the language of happiness. This is all around us in every moment of life. It is in our work, in our hearts, in our friends, and in the beauty that finds us every day if we are simply open to it.

I can’t tell you how to do it. I only know only I am happy right now searching for what I want to say and so happy to be able to come to this page and share my journey with you. I feel the passion in my hands as I literally beat the words from this keyboard and I need this ache as my eyes well up with anger and joy remembering my mother, remembering the stupid little boy I was. I cannot NOT do this and I hope that these words will continue to find people each day and fill them with the joy and passion I feel simply being alive and awaken a remembering in you that will remind what we always know but sometimes forget.

We need to be happy.
We deserve to be happy.

There is joy to be found in every moment and we find it as we follow our souls to those things we cannot live without. Those things that allow joy to pour forth from our hearts as we tap into the beautiful energy that is all life. Jonatha Brooke showed me that night behind that microphone. My mother showed me everyday by simply being alive.

As I sit here on yet another mother’s day, i know she is so very much here with me now. I can’t take credit for anything written here. There’s nothing here I haven’t known my whole life, it is just what I remembered when I opened my heart to the beauty of music, passion, and life. But I do know I would have never gotten this piece out of my head without mom’s beautiful eyes watching over me. I know she watches me every day; is with me when I am on stage making people laugh, when I am holding my niece, and right now as I sit hiding behind this keyboard, feeling a burning in my heart that most certainly is my mother sitting beside me just as she was that night in that jeep.

But this time, THANK GOD, this time I finally hear her voice speak those words that have been frozen in time waiting for my stubborn stupid heart to open up and hear them. They crash down on me like angry waves breaking against a rocky shoreline as I hear my mother’s beautiful voice. Gently she instructs me as though I were a child again and she were telling me something important, asking me to repeat her words so that I never forget them….

“Now say it to me one more time, Eugene. I want to know you understand. We've waited long enough to get it right. What did I just say to you in that Jeep”

I answer timidly, a little game I played when I knew the answer. Down deep I was certain I was right and would receive my mother’s proud smile.

"You said… ‘Do what you love. Smile, laugh, write, sing, dance, sleep, and be good to each other. Do whatever your joyful heart won’t allow you NOT to do.’”

A pause, and while I’m taking in the beautiful language of her smile that i so ache for every day, she demands softly, yet insistent, as though I may have forgotten the most important part, “What else, Eugene?”

“Oh yeah. ‘If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad…’”

copyright Eugene Bisconte
http://www.geocities.com/genocom.geo/

The Laughing Tiki

AN ESSAY ON POPULAR ART
by Bradley Hamlin

I think of the old cats, writers, artists, poets and painters hanging out, always some special sacred group of them. The bohemian Lost Generation, the artists of Termite Terrace, the Beat Generation, The Rat Pack, etcetera.
Hemingway.
Tex Avery.
Kerouac.
Sinatra.
They all had their tribes. But what now? You find most groups of artist-writer-singers gathering at coffee shops and clapping at each other’s lack of invention over whipped cream and espresso.

Whatever happened to good taste?
The previous groups seemed to have a sense of real style. They had art on their walls and it was important to have art on the walls. Sure, people have art on their walls now, but mostly prints of the previous generations or lame efforts of the new. I haven’t met one modern “artist” yet (from the coffee shop crowd) that produces something I’d like to hang for all to see. They scribble incomprehensible pretension and simply pretend it’s art. I would much rather hang the artist on the wall. Even then, he or she would remind me of the bad art in the first place and still piss me off.

Yet there are alternatives.
Let’s define that word: alternative. You can find just as much crap in the so-called alternative world as you can in the chosen popular expressions. Alternative should mean, finding a different venue that you can relate to separate from the one the mainstream control system offers. The coffee shop, once a backdrop for the literary outcast is now a painfully above ground venue, sporting weak underground mutations for all who will look or listen. As soon as it’s deemed cool or alternative to hang out reading bad poems or penciling elves with square-tipped ears—you’re in trouble.

Stay out of Starbucks.
Well, you can buy your espresso, but then get the hell out of there. Quickly. Because while you’re hanging out listening to the latest my daddy fucked me in the ass poem or looking at some balloon-headed pencil drawing from some kid you used to steal lunch money from—art is happening all around you outside.
You have to stay away from the coffee shop generation. They’re jittery, and worse than lost, they’re confused. They believe in made up expressions like “Generation X” that has no meaning or basis in an actual group expression at all. That term had been used plenty of times before it was slapped on the cover of a book in the early ‘90s to simply make money off of a generation out of sync. No tribe. No unity. No collective expression. Of course we have to understand that Generation Out Of Sync has always been around and is simply a symptom of being a blockhead or a square. Someone who refuses to open his or her mind. You may say, how dare anyone be so presumptuous to call someone else a blockhead! Who said you were cool? Well, yeah, that might be a step in the right direction. Don’t just question authority: question everything. But back to the point, the half-hearted artists will give you art with the least amount of effort and energy and ask for a thunder of applause in return.

Some of the greatest no-talents in the world expect the most noise at their arrival. Examples of overrated artists include but are definitely not limited to:
The music of mumbling Dave Mathews.
The smug acting of Julia Roberts.
The sleepy-safe writing presented in The New Yorker magazine.
Or anything produced by Michael Jackson—after his Jackson 5 days. Now there’s an applause junky for ya.

Meanwhile …
There are many artists hard at work in all sorts of popular and unpopular venues that usually fall into a category that isn’t considered Art with a capital “A.” One of the great original American art forms is of course the comic strip, book, or graphic novel. The art form that gave us Dick Tracy, Superman, Flash Gordon, and Batman. If you want the greatest example of modern or popular art, simply read any comic penciled by the great Jack Kirby. Or look at the animation of comic heroes produced by Bruce Timm. Or how about the nameless artists that put together the kooky three-dimensional representations of pop culture, such as lunch boxes, action figures, or cereal box prizes? I would much rather have a vintage Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea lunch box on my shelf than a clay sculpture of someone’s abusive mother from Europe.
The Ramones understood.
And they should have had their own TV show, but that’s a different article.

You don’t need to follow the rules of the past to get in touch with art, but you should examine the past and take along with you the necessary tools to move forward. In other words, beg, borrow, and steal. Beg yourself to get off your ass and find the missing treasure of history that they forgot to teach you in class, then go find those rare garage bands that you’ll never see on MTV. Borrow inspiration from art that gives your heart an erection. Steal bits and pieces of everything you love and build a new monster out of the arms and legs of those who have gone boldly before you. The art that surrounds you should not just express what the artist feels; the art inside your house should illustrate the pieces of your own soul as well.

I grew up with punk rock, cartoons, comic books, and science fiction-fantasy television shows. So, hanging a picture of Tina Louise as Ginger in my living room would be perhaps just as pleasing to the eye as say, a Monet depicting a particular scenery important to someone else. For me, Monet’s sceneries don’t say anything. I can appreciate his intense use of color combinations, okay, but the pictures themselves do not speak my language.
Art should make you feel like dancing with yourself.
Why?
Well, what is art?

Art is a creative representation that you can relate to, something that lowers your stress level when you look at the thing. At least that’s what good art does. Bad art does just the opposite. Bad art raises my blood pressure. Looking at a Six Million Dollar Man action figure in the red jumpsuit with bionic eye lowers my blood pressure. A poster of the latest remake movie raises the pressure.
Someone timeless and exempt from generational viewpoint would be Picasso. He painted the actual soul in action, but how often are we given such human treasure? These goofy kids today can’t seem to speak past their peers. Everyone wants to mumble like Dave Mathews during this cycle but last time around everyone wanted to mumble like Kurt Cobain—and look what that did for his mental health. I mean, what the fuck happened to that little whore called the muse? Did she get tired of being used and leave town forever?

I believe we have to find our own gods and goddesses and let them speak inside our own ears until they reach the heart and make it pump. It’s the same thing with food. People are told that “gourmet” food is better food. But more often than not, gourmet food is over-complicated and poisoned with strong cheeses and sour sauces and just as overproduced as a modern Quincy Jones album. A good cheeseburger & fries is just as good as any other meal, and perhaps better. A taco is the perfect creation, high art food for sure.

So, when you come to my house you need no longer ask why a grown man has a collection of comic books, action figures instead of Van Gogh prints, vintage TV show videos instead of Federico Fellini, or lunch boxes on my shelf instead of a bust of Beethoven.
It is my art.
G.I. Joe is my magic totem.
Gumby my light-bearer, reminding me of pure creativity.
The Monkeemobile my time machine taking me back to a safe state of mind, allowing the imagination to flow—unhindered by modern stress.

Laughing tikis.
Magic belly dancers.
Flying saucers.
Low-tech robots.
All high art.

And now the preaching is done. It is Saturday. There are cartoons to watch and later I will play Justice League vs. the Legion Of Doom with my son. Perhaps I will find a mint condition Fat Albert lunch box on ebay today. Iggy Pop has a new album out and Stephen King’s latest paperback has just hit the shelf. There’s plenty of it, too much of it. Art all around. So go, get your coffee, and don’t walk: run. There are monsters and rockets and mystery people with dark masks waiting to pull you around the corner—into the cave of the unknown full of hieroglyphics and graffiti that only you can read. You may need x-ray vision or 3-D glasses to interpret them, but all the better. All the better for you.

Keep em’ flying,
Bradley Mason Hamlin

Bradley Mason Hamlin is a writer and publisher, born in Los Angeles and currently living in “Capitol City” Sacramento, California with his beautiful wife Nicky and their many amazing children. His poetry and short stories have appeared in several small press magazines in print and on line and
he is the creator of the metaphysical crime series: Monster Zipper, featuring the Intoxicated Detective, available at: www.mysteryisland.net

Article and images copyright Bradley Hamlin