The founder of LINES Ballet, Alonzo King talks about the limited scope in which we define ourselves — and speaks of a bold vision of life that loses its barriers. After he speaks, Alonzo King LINES Ballet company presents a breathtaking performance.

“If we can understand the process of life without condemning, without saying it is right or wrong, then, I think, there comes a creative happiness which is not ‘yours’ or ‘mine.’  That creative happiness is like sunshine. If you want to keep the sunshine to yourself, it is no longer the clear, warm life- giving sun. Similarly, if you want happiness because you are suffering, or because you have lost somebody, or because you have not been successful, then that is merely a reaction. But when the mind can go beyond, then there is a happiness that is not of the mind.”

–Jiddu Krishnamurti (May 11, 1895 – February 17, 1986) was a philosopher, speaker and writer. In his early life he was groomed to be the new World Teacher but later rejected this mantle and withdrew from the Theosophy organization behind it. Wikipedia

Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist and tenured professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.

Diamond Dave

On Monday, May 8, I attended a City College of San Francisco Town Hall for candidates for student offices.  One of my friends from my “Introduction to the United Nations” class was running for Student Trustee so I wanted to support him.

There were six candidates who spoke.  They were asked general questions like:  Do you support a raise in the student activities fee from $5 to $10?  What would you do about increasing  participation in the student council?

I had my hand up for several rounds, but was never called upon. Perhaps it was my gray hair.  Almost everyone in the room (except the campus policeman) were under 30.  (“Never trust anybody over 30” was our motto in the ’60s.  So karma is real.)

My question dealt with the subject of lifelong learning.  Often in the past, whenever budget woes arose, those in the lifelong learning community (people who take classes outside the 2-year track towards transferring to a 4-year institution, simply for self-improvement or for learning a new skill) have been threatened with cuts from the budget.

Then somebody asked about racism.  That brought out a bevy of responses from all six candidates who stumbled all over each other trying to out-victim each other.  They were taking on their victimhood identity and running with it, one competing with the other about how much they had been victimized due to race, gender or other intersectionality (“the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage” per Google.)

No wonder  incendiaries like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter have emerged to such great effect.  It was kind of inevitable.

When I was a high school student not far from Stanford University, there were several (including myself for a while) who were on the Stanford track.  But the ones who made it there (not me) were not whole people.  Sure they had all the grades and extra-curricular activities checked off on their curriculum vitae, but there was something empty inside.

I took another track.  I was empty inside as well, but I quit this and failed that until I finally arrived at the doorsteps of The Prosperos, a school which emphasizes unlearning, undoing the shocks and blocks which have been placed (or which we have allowed to be placed) in our way.

In The Prosperos victimhood is not celebrated.  It is discouraged.  That’s a big difference with modern academia.

Both lifelong unlearning and lifelong learning are vital in life:   unlearning who we think we are; learning the history of the multitude of those who have gone before and made the breakthroughs in consciousness (whether in science or spirit) that have preceded us.

As Diamond Dave said after the town hall:  “They’re just a bunch of kids!”  Let’s hope they get off the wrong track and onto the right one.

Dear Mick LaSalle: In 1968, I was 15 years old and very newly in love with my 17-year-old boyfriend. We attended a showing of “Romeo and Juliet.” Directly following the balcony scene, when Romeo clambers joyfully and ecstatically down the brambles, my boyfriend leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I know exactly how he feels.” Wow. Wow. It remains one of my most splendid memories.

Elizabeth Koebsell, Forestville

Dear Elizabeth Koebsell: That’s lovely. And what a nice thing that your boyfriend had the emotional intelligence to recognize both the essence of the scene and the fact that he was living it. That he actually said it out loud is pretty impressive for 17. Men usually keep that sort of feeling quiet and express themselves more through what might be called activity. I have always loved that scene — or rather, interlude — because I think it expresses male nature in a way that gets short shrift in movies: It’s not just about sexual anticipation. It’s about the universe opening up. The feeling is like being a fish and finally there’s water in the fish tank. And of course I remember being that guy and doing exactly that — having a sober goodbye at the door and then, when I knew the girl couldn’t see me, running through the streets for half a mile out of sheer joy. Anyway, wow is right. Thanks for sharing that wonderful story. And consider this: That happened to you almost 50 years ago, but you could live to be 100 on that one and always have the dignity of the loved and the beautiful.

Last month, as it began the final phase of its 13-year exploration of Saturn, the Cassini spacecraft sent back a picture of its home planet. While not visually dazzling, I thought the photo was profound.

There, in the jet-black gap between two icy rings of Saturn, is a tiny dot. That dot is Earth. Our home. Although there’s no detail visible in the dot, NASA says the southern Atlantic Ocean was facing Cassini when the photo was taken. This is what Earth looks like from 870 million miles away.

There are no continents visible in the photo. No oceans. No countries. No boundaries. All the differences and conflicts we think are so important can’t be seen. This pale, blue dot we call home stands alone (except for the Moon, of course), surrounded by the unforgiving nothingness of space. It truly is all we have.

I’ve often thought it was no coincidence that the environmental movement took off in the late 1960s and early ’70s. That was when NASA released the first photos of Earth taken from the Moon. We saw our home, with its blue oceans, tan continents and white swirls of clouds, as a small speck in the vast blackness of space. It was the first time we truly saw Earth as a planet, not just a collection of people and continents. Especially when compared to the gray, airless, lifeless Moon, we couldn’t help but realize that Earth is something precious that should be protected and preserved.

We humans tend to think we’re the center of the universe. We’re the best, the smartest, the greatest. This exaggerated conceit has been used to justify wars, intolerance and environmental degradation.

When we’re young, with a childish worldview, we think the world revolves around us. As we age, we learn that is not the case. We see that each of us is just one part of the larger whole of human society, just one part of the larger fabric of life on this planet.

Similarly, over time, scientists have learned the reality of our place in the cosmos. We now know we live on a tiny planet that orbits an ordinary star located in an out-of-the-way section of a galaxy that is, itself, just one of billions of galaxies in a universe that modern cosmology suggests may not be the only universe that exists. No matter how big we may think we are, the universe is much bigger.

From this cosmic perspective, the differences between people just aren’t significant. Humans share a genetic kinship with all life on Earth, the result of evolving on the same planet from common ancestors billions of years ago.

You and the person sitting next to you on the bus have 99.9 percent of the same genes. Humans and cows share 80 percent of the same genes. Even bananas have about 60 percent of the same genes as humans! In a cosmic sense, no matter the species, we are all first and foremost Earthlings.

Yet, some leaders still try to capitalize on the exaggerated human conceit that we are the best, the greatest, the center of the universe. These politicians highlight the differences between people, pitting group against group. For short-term personal or political gain, they exploit the natural world and ignore problems that threaten the environment that sustains life on our planet.

That’s why I found Cassini’s photo so profound. It shows us Earth not as we often think of it, but rather as the rest of the cosmos sees it: a pale, blue dot in the cold vastness of space.

Astronomer Carl Sagan once said that seeing the Earth from a distance “underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Cassini’s photo couldn’t have come at a better time.

Sally Stephens is an animal, park and neighborhood activist who lives in the West of Twin Peaks area.

RIOULT Dance NY - Bach Program from RIOULT Dance NY on Vimeo.

Bach Dances is a series of powerful dances set to Bach masterpieces. Characterized by a unity of music, movement, and art (animated projections), this program includes “Views of the Fleeting World” “City” “Polymorphous” and “Celestial Tides.” When possible, RIOULT Dance NY endeavors to perform this program with live music by local chamber orchestras. Recent collaborations include the Manhattan School of Music, the Bethlehem Bach Orchestra in PA, and the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra at The Center for the Performing Arts in Carmel, IN.

You might not expect to find inner peace inside a bustling elementary school, but a growing number of students in Baltimore are learning to seek just that. They start each day with deep breathing, and if the kids misbehave, they’re not sent to the principal’s office, but to the meditation room. Tony Dokoupil reports.

THE SEER LETTER #1

To Georges Isambard
Charleville, 13 May 1871

Cher Monsieur!

You are a teacher again. You have told me we owe a duty to Society. You belong to the teaching body: you move along in the right track. I also follow the principle: cynically I am having myself kept. I dig up old imbeciles from school: I serve them with whatever I can invent that is stupid, filthy, mean in acts and words. They pay me in beer and liquor. Stat mater dolorosa, dum pendet filius. — My duty is to Society, that is true–and I am right. — You too are right, for now. In reality, all you see in your principle is subjective poetry: your obstinacy in reaching the university through–excuse me–proves this. But you will always end up a self-satisfied man who has done nothing because he wanted to do nothing. Not to mention that your subjective poetry will always be horribly insipid. One day, I hope–many others hope the same thing–I will see objective poetry according to your principle, I will see it more sincerely than you would! I will be a worker: this idea holds me back when mad anger drives me toward the battle of Paris–where so many workers are dying as I write to you! Work now?–never, never, I am on strike.

Now, I am degrading myself as much as possible. Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a seer: you will not understand this, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a questioning of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. The sufferings are enormous, but one has to be strong, one has to be born a poet, and I know I am a poet. This is not at all my fault. It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: people think me. Pardon the pun [penser, “to think”; panser “to groom”].

I is someone else. It is too bad for the wood which finds itself a violin and scorn for the heedless who argue over what they are totally ignorant of!

You are not a teacher for me. I give you this: is it satire, as you would say? Is it poetry? Is it fantasy, always. — But I beg you, do not underline it with your pencil or too much with your thought:

THE TORTURED HEART

My sad heart slobbers at the poop,
My heart covered with tobacco-spit:
They spew streams of soup at it,
My sad heart drools at the poop:
Under the jeering of the soldiers
Who break out laughing
My sad heart drools at the poop,
My heart covered with tobacco-spit!

Ithyphallic and soldierish,
Their jeerings have depraved it!
On the rudder you see frescos
Ithyphallic and soldierish.
O abracadabra waves,
Take my heart, let it be washed!
Ithyphallic and soldierish,
Their jeerings have depraved it.

When they have used up their quid,
How will I act, O stolen heart?
There will be Baccic hiccups,
I will have stomach retchings,
If my heart is degraded:
When they have used up their quid
How will I act, O stolen heart?

This means nothing.

Answer me care of M. Deverrière, for A.R.

Warm greetings,
Arth. Rimbaud

To Paul Demeny
Charleville, 15 May 1871

I have decided to give you an hour of new literature. I begin at once with a song of today:

PARISIAN WAR SONG
Spring is in evidence, for
From the heart of green Estates,
The flight of Theirs and Picard
Hold wide open its splendors!

O May! What delirious bare asses!
Sèvres, Meudon, Bagneux, Asnières,
Listen to the welcome arrivals
Sowing spring-like things!

They have a shako, a sabre, and a tom-tom,
Not the old candle box;
And boats that have nev … nev …
Cut through the lake of reddened waters!

More than ever we swagger
When yellow heads come
Collapsing over our ant-hills
In special dawns:

Theirs and Picard are Cupids,
Thieves of heliotropes;
They paint Corots with gasoline:
Here their tropes are buzzing about …

They are friends of the great what’s-his-name! …
And Favre, lying in the gladiolas,
Makes an aqueduct of his tears,
And his peppery sniff!

The Big City has a hot pavement
In spite of your showers of gasoline,
And decidedly we have to
Shake you up in your roles …

And the Rustics who loll about
In long squattings
Will hear boughs breaking
Among red rustlings.
A. Rimbaud

–Here is some prose on the future of poetry:–
All ancient poetry ended in Greek poetry, harmonious life. — From Greece to the romantic movement–Middle Ages–there are writers and versifiers. From Ennius to Theroldus, from Theroldus to Casimir Delavigne, it is all rhymed prose, a game, degradation and glory of countless idiotic generations: Racine is pure, strong and great. — If his rhymes had been blown out and his hemistichs mixed up, the Divine Fool would today be as unknown as any old author of Origins. — After Racine, the game get moldy. It lasted two thousand years!

Neither joke nor paradox. Reason inspires me with more enthusiasm on the subject than a Young France would have with rage. Moreover, newcomers are free to condemn the ancestors. We are at home and we have the time.

Romanticism has never been carefully judged. Who would have judged it? The critics! The Romantics? who prove so obviously that a song is so seldom a work, that is to say, a thought sung and understood by the singer.

For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. This is obvious to me: I am present at this birth of my thought: I watch it and listen to it: I draw a stroke of the bow: the symphony makes its stir in the depths, or comes on to the stage in a leap.

If old imbeciles had not discovered only the false meaning of the Ego, we would not have to sweep away those millions of skeletons which, for times immemorial, have accumulated the results of their one-eyed intellects by claiming to be the authors!

In Greece, as I have said, verses and lyres give rhythm to Action. After that, music and rhymes are games and pastimes. The study of this past delights the curious: several rejoice in reviving those antiquities–it is for them. Universal intelligence has always thrown out its ideas naturally; men picked up a part of these fruits of the mind: people acted through them and wrote books about them. Things continued thus: man not working on himself, not yet being awake, or not yet in the fullness of the great dream. Civil servants, writers: author, creator, poet, that man never existed!

The first study of the man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, complete. He looks for his soul, inspects it, tests it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must cultivate it! It seems simple: in every mind a natural development takes place; so many egoists call themselves authors, there are many others who attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! — But the soul must be made monstrous: in the fashion of the comprachicos [kidnappers of children who mutilate them in order to exhibit them as monsters], if you will! Imagine a man implanting and cultivating warts on his face.

I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer.

The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences. Unspeakable torture where he needs all his faith, all his super-human strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the one accursed–and the supreme Scholar!–Because he reaches the unknown! Since he cultivated his soul, rich already, more than any man! He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them. Let him die as he leaps through unheard of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where the other collapsed!

— To be continued in six minutes —

Here I interpolate a second psalm to accompany the text: please lend a friendly ear–and everyone will be delighted. — The bow is in my hand and I begin:

MY LITTLE MISTRESSES
A lacrymal tincture washes
The cabbage-green skies:
Under the drooling tree with tender shoots …
You raincoats

White with special moons
With round eyes
Knock together you kneecaps,
My ugly ones!

We loved one another at that time,
Blue ugly one!
We ate soft boiled egges
And chickweed!

One evening you consecrated me poet,
Blond ugly one:
Come down here, that I can whip you
on my lap;

I vomited your brilliantine,
Black ugly one;
You would cut off my mandolin
On the edge of my brow.

Bah! my dried saliva,
Red-headed ugly one,
Still infects the trenches
Of your round breast!

O my little lovers,
How I hate you!
Plaster with painful blisters
Your ugly tits!

Trample on my old pots
Of sentiment;
–Up now! be ballerinas for me
For one moment! …

You shoulder blades are out of joint,
O my loves!
A star on your limping backs,
Turn with your turns.

And yet it is for these mutton shoulders
That I have made rhymes!
I would like to break your hips
For having loved!

Insipid pile of stars that have failed,
Fill the corners!
–You will collapse in God, saddled
With ignoble cares!

Under special moons,
With round eyes,
Knock together your kneecaps,
My ugly ones!

A.R.

That’s that. And note carefully that if I were not afraid of making you spend more than sixty centimes on postage–I poor terrified one who for seven months have not had a single copper! — I would also give you my Lovers of Paris, one hundred hexameters, sir, and my Death of Paris, two hundred hexameters!

— I continue:

Therefore the poet is truly the thief of fire.

He is responsible for humanity, even for the animals; he will have to have his own inventions smelt, felt, and heard; if what he brings back from down there has form; if it is formless, he gives formlessness. A language must be found. Moreover, every word being an idea, the time of a universal language will come! One has to be an academician–deader than a fossil–to complete a dictionary in any language whatsoever. Weak people would begin to think about the first letter of the alphabet, and they would soon rush into madness!

This language will be of the soul for the soul, containing everything, smells, sounds, colors, thought holding on to thought and pulling. The poet would define the amount of the unknown awakening in his time the universal soul: he would give more–than the formulation of his thought, than the annotation of his march toward Progress! Enormity becoming normal, absorbed by all, he would really be a multiplier of progress!

This future will be materialistic, as you see. — Always filled with Number and Harmony, these poems will be made to endure. — Fundamentally, it would be Greek poetry again in a new way.

Eternal art would have its functions, since poets are citizens. Poetry will not lend its rhythm to action, it will be in advance.

These poets will exist. When the endless servitude of woman is broken, when she lives for and by herself, man–heretofore abominable–having given her her release, she too will be a poet! Woman will find some of the unknown! Will her world of ideas differ from ours? — She will find strange, unfathomable, repulsive, delicious things; we will take them, we will understand them.

Meanwhile, let us ask the poet for the new–ideas and forms. All the clever ones will soon believe they have satisfied the demand–it is not so!

The first romantics were seers without wholly realizing it: the cultivation of their souls which began accidentally: abandoned locomotives, their fires still on, which the rails carry for some time. — Lamartine is at times a seer, but strangled by the old form. — Hugo, too ham, has vision in his last volumes: Les Misérables is a real poem. I have Les Châtiments with me; Stella gives approximately the extent of Hugo’s vision. Too many Belmontets and Lamennais, Jehovahs and columns, old broken enormities.

Musset is fourteen times loathsome to us, suffering generations obsessed by visions–insulted by his angelic sloth! O! the insipid tales and proverbs! O the Nuits! O Rolla, O Namouna, O La Coupe! it is all French, namely detestable to the highest degree; French, not Parisian! One more work of that odious genius who inspired who inspired M. Taine’s commentary! Springlike, Musset’s wit! Charming, his love! There you have enamel painting and solid poetry! French poetry will be enjoyed for a long time, but in France. Every grocer’s boy is able to reel off a Rollaesque speech, every seminarian carries the five hundred rhymes written in his notebook. At fifteen, these bursts of passion make boys horny; at sixteen, they are satisfied to recite them with feeling; at eighteen, even at seventeen, every schoolboy who has the ability makes a Rolla, writes a Rolla! Some still die from this perhaps. Musset could do nothing: there were visions behind the gauze of the curtains: he closed his eyes. French, sloppy, dragged from tavern to schoolroom desk, the fine cadaver is dead, and, henceforth let’s not even bother to wake him up with out abominations.

The second Romantics are very much seers: Théophile, Gautier, Leconte de Lisle. Théodore de Banville. But since inspecting the invisible and hearing the unheard of is different from recovering the spirit of the dead things, Baudelaire is the first seer, king of poets, a real god! And yet he lived in too artistic a world; and the form so highly praised in him is trivial. Inventions of the unknown call for new forms.

Broken-in to old forms, among the innocent, A. Renaud–has written his Rolla; L. Grandet has written his Rolla; the Gauls and the Mussets, G. Lafenestre, Coran, Cl. Popelin, Soulary, L. Salles; the pupils Marc, Aicard, Theuriet; the dead and the imbeciles, Autran, Barbier, L. Pichat, Lemoyne, the Deschamps, the Des Essarts; the journalists, L. Cladel, Robert Luzarches, X. de Ricard; the fantasists, C. Mendès; les bohemians; the women; the talents; Léon Dierx and Sully-Prudhomme, Coppée; the new school, called Parnassian, has two seers: Albert Mérat and Paul Verlaine, a real poet. There you are.

So, I work to make myself into a seer. — And let’s close with a pious hymn.

SQUATTINGS
Very late, when he feels his stomach sicken,
Brother Milotus, an eye on the skylight
When the sun, bright as a scoured cooking-pan,
Darts a migrane at him and blinds his vision,
Moves his curate belly under the sheets.

He stirs about under his grey blanket
And gets out, his knees against his trembling belly,
Terrified like an old man who has eaten his snuff,
Because he has to lift up the folds of his nightshirt
Around his waist, as he takes the handle of a white chamberpot!

Now, he has squatted, cold, in his toes
Turned up, shivering in the bright sunlight which daubs
A cake yellow on the paper windowpanes;
And the old man’s nose where the crimson catches fire
Sniffs in the rays like a flesh polypary.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The old man simmers on the fire, his arms twisted, his blubber lip
On his belly: he feels his thighs slipping into the fire,
And his pants getting scorched, and his pipe going out;
Something like a bird stirs a bit
In his serene bely like a pile of tripe!

Round about sleeps a mass of cowering furniture
In rags of grease and over dirty bellies;
Stools, strange toads, are hunched
In dark corners: cupboards have mouths of cantors:
Opened by a sleep full of horrible appetites.

The sickening heat fills the narrow room;
The old man’s brain is stuffed with rags:
He listens to the hairs growing in his moist skin,
And, at times, in very seriously clownish hiccoughs
Escapes, shaking his rickety stool…

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And in the evening, in the rays of moonlight which make
Droolings of light on the contours of his buttocks,
A shadow with details crouches, against a background
Of pink snow, like a hollyhock…
Fantastic, a nose pursues Venus in the deep sky.

You would be loathsome not to answer: quickly, because in a week, I will be in Paris, perhaps.

Goodbye,
A. Rimbaud