[jasonwentcrazy.]

I’ve always been in love with found photographs and a couple of months ago I’d been working out some exhibition to show some of the best ones I’ve collected over the years. I had been up early and was in that in-between, liminal place where I needed to go to sleep or just power through and wake up. My phone rang and it was an old friend I hadn't seen in a while. She just wanted to talk and catch up. We talked for a while and when the conversation came around to found photos I was glad to have been reminded of an old photo album I found a long time ago.

I was excited to be reminded of this and asked my friend if it was okay if I recorded the call. I use Google Voice and it allows you to record phone calls and it saves the audio for you and it even attempts to transcribe it. It’s good for interviews and stuff like that and I am glad to have this little conversation with my friend. 

I just found out she is dead and I don’t know what to say really other than I feel selfishly happy that I immediately got in touch with her the moment she reached out. 

People don’t do that until it’s too late and to paraphrase Bukowski, ‘there is nothing worse than too late’.

This is the file and it’s pretty terrific that I have it and there is so much to this conversation that says a whole lot about my friend. I’m sure that she wouldn’t mind if you listened to it. I don’t mind for sure.

A liquor store in the midwest had the idea of offering their customers the value added service of cashing their paychecks. They offered this convenient service by opening auxiliary check-cashing business inside of the liquor store and it was a big hit. In order to expedite the check-cashing process they implemented a membership database that consisted of a Polaroid instant photo of each customer. They stapled an index card with the name and address and contact information of each client and that was stapled to the photos. 

Years later the liquor store changed owners and the check-cashing part of the business was closed. The photos ended up in some box and were destined for the trash when they were saved and these are some of those photos. Most of them share the same backdrop of a door with electricians tape marking, I imagine, the height of the person standing there, There are some that are taken with different views of the shop itself or the check-cashing window but mostly they are the same.

All told there are hundreds and hundreds of these things and I think they are just incredible. 

I’ve been thinking about The Little Prince a lot after just recently really reading it for the first time. I mean, I’ve assumed I’d read it plenty but that wasn’t totally true. I just knew enough about it in context to have some small conversations about it but I really never knew the story before at all.

It’s pretty amazing and I really like the bit about the fox part the best.

As soon as the Little Prince sees the fox he says “You are very pretty to look at”. [Which it would have to be cute as shit since they are in the Sahara Desert and the foxes that live there are Fennic foxes and if you don’t know what they look like, well, here you go:

Right?! Holy crap. Super cute. But the fox doesn’t care about how cute it is and comes back with the classic line of, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye”.

When the fox and the little prince meet for the first time, the fox asks the prince to “tame” him. When the prince asks him what “tame” means, the fox says it means “to establish ties”. Through the process of “taming,” he explains, they will come to mean something to one another and they will need each other. Without “taming,” the fox says, the prince will be “nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys”. And to the prince, the fox is “nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes”. They’ll be lost in the crowd and they won’t mean anything to one another.

But after the fox is tamed, the prince and the fox will become unique for each other. They will hold a special and meaningful place for one another.

What the fox means by “tame” is to “make friends” or “to establish a relationship.” According to the fox, unless you build a relationship with a person and get to really understand them, that person will remain indistinguishable for you from the hundreds of thousands of people in the world—and you, too, will not be “unique” or special to them. You’ve got to make a connection with another person and that takes time and trust and patience.

My favorite bit is this when the fox is trying to explain why the little prince should commit to taming the fox:

“I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat..."

And how does the prince tame the fox? He sits down on the grass at a little distance from the fox and says nothing because, as the fox tells him, “Words are the source of misunderstandings”. The fox looks at him out of the corner of his eye and every day, at the same time, the prince arrives at their designated spot and sits a little closer to the fox.

This is a process that requires enormous amounts of time and patience. You’ve got to be dedicated to this idea and according to the fox that’s the whole point. Building relationships and deep connections with people is hard work. The fox remarks: “One only understands the things that one tames….Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends anymore.”

After the fox is tamed, it is time for the prince to leave, and the fox is about to cry. Because of this, the prince worries that the taming has hardly done any good. But the fox says it has done him good “because of the color of the wheat fields”. The golden wheat will remind the fox of the prince’s golden hair, which will make the wheat fields a source of happiness to the fox – until he was tamed, the wheat fields meant nothing to him. According to the fox, it is our relationships that make the world around us significant and meaningful.

I mean, the fox doesn’t even eat bread but he says, “And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat..."

Hoooo!

[I’ve pasted the fox chapter just below the read more break.]

I’m missing New Orleans a lot lately. It was pretty terrific spending the day looking for John Kennedy Toole’s grave and it was even more powerful taking a little charcoal rubbing of his name. 

Dewey has some questions about the nature of God and prayer and he asks his Sunday School teacher about it and he ends up answering those questions himself. 

Look within, thou art the Buddha.

There is a Mountain Goats song San Bernardino that I love so much and I’d do well to let @johndarnielle describe what his own song is about and this is what he says about it:

The two kids here give birth in a cheap motel somewhere in San Bernardino, probably right off the freeway, and the young man tries to express his love for the girl who’s about to give birth. Which she does, and they feel at home in the world, even though the world isn’t giving them its best yet. I feel hope for them, because they love each other. I know that that is a corny thing to say, so for people who have corn allergies I apologize. But these two, they’re going to be the future, so it’d be awesome if we could give them enough leeway to become who they’re gonna become, and encourage them when we can. I have a fondness for them though I barely know them. Their feeling for one another inspires me, is what it is.

This song is definitely a ton of bricks because it’s difficult not to be moved by it. It’s something that has always made me feel hopeful for the future and optimistic that in spite of appearances or assumptions that there is an inherent beauty and sweetness inside of everyone. But I like it even more for thinking of the line about the flower petals. 

The man draws a bath for the woman and as he’s doing this he pulls some flower petals from his pocket to add to the bath water. This small gesture of adding flower petals to the bathwater was only possible because some forward-thinking and preparation  happened first. Presumably the man, in the days prior, had this idea that he’d maybe end up in such a situation where he’d be drawing a bath for the woman he loves and having the flower petals to add to the bath would make that moment all the more lovely. [The future is, after all, fiction and is just a story we tell ourselves that may or may not ever end up being true.]  So at some point he made a decision to stop for the flowers and he bought them and later removed the petals from them and then he stored them in a bag in his pocket. He kept the petals with him where they sat waiting for the moment came that allowed him to use them as he’d planned. 

Maybe the couple never made it to the hotel room and the chance to draw a bath for the woman he loved never came to pass? It’s possible that the woman went into labor earlier than expected and she had to go to the hospital by ambulance while he was stuck in traffic? The point is that things don’t always happen as we might plan on or hope for and, for better or worse, life goes where it goes and there isn’t much you can do to change that. 

Even should there never be a use for those flower petals the more important idea is that the intention and effort were made just in case. Because who knows? Thinking of the possibility of how those petals in his pocket would add to this lovely and loving idea made the man happy. His toes wiggled over thinking of this idea and he was overjoyed thinking of how moved the woman he loved would feel when she saw those petals floating flagrantly on the surface of the bathwater. He never even considered that it wouldn’t happen like that. It didn’t matter if it didn’t work out that way. It only mattered if it did and it never could happen if not for having made the effort in advance. 

There are timelines that exist where the work we do and the efforts we make don’t pan out or come to fruition. And even if they do pan out it’s not guaranteed that we’ll be around to witness the results when they happen. For me I’ve never cared too much about actually seeing the results. That’s nice enough should it work out that I’m there to witness it but the most important part to me is the act of setting things up so there is the possibility of something really lovely happening. 

And before that planning and preparation comes you need the idea in the first place. You have to have a mind that actively looks for those possible moments and they need to move you so much that you’re compelled to share and express it in some way. And before that you need to have the imagination to see something beautiful or the possibility of adding beauty where it might otherwise be so readily apparent. 

[I suppose, too, that this is about as good of a definition of what makes someone an artist or a poet and in some ways I think it’s a large part of my own practice as a Buddhist.]

What I mean to say in all of this is that to me it’s absolutely critical that I spend as much time and energy on actively looking for potential beauty anywhere [and in anyone] I look. And I am never not preparing for these possibilities of loveliness just in case. 

I think about things like this a lot. 

When I really think about it I’d say that this is maybe at the center of everything I do and say and feel in my life. It’s maybe the thing I care about the most really. 

So if there is ever a chance to increase the odds of loveliness or beauty that comes when people connect with one another or with themselves through some form of art or creation that I had some hand in creating then I will never not do that work.  And I’ll never not make that effort or go that extra step just in case it works out that I’m able to add something to the story.

I’ve been reading about how our brains are wired to have this Negative/Danger File where we hold every threatening experience we’ve had so that we can instantly avoid this danger in the future. We see what we think is a snake and we just leap out of the way and only later do we have time to dig deeper into our file cabinet to determine that it was actually just some curved stick. But having that file on quick demand is life-saving and we’re wired that way from evolution. We react to negatives and potential dangers in a big way and we ignore or overlook the things that are harmless or offer us safety or security. 

Meditation is a way to really make some subtle shifts in the way we think and learning to see the complete picture while understanding that we’re hard-wired to entertain the Disaster Narratives means we have the ability to change our minds. For good.

This is what Chogyam Trungpa said:

“We often approach life as though we were defending ourselves from an attack. Many of us, when we were growing up, were frequently reprimanded in ways that made us feel bad about ourselves. Whether the criticism came from our parents, a teacher at school, or someone else, it tended to reinforce a feeling that there was something wrong with us. Criticism often produced a feeling of isolation, a feeling of you and me, separated by a great divide. We learned many defense mechanisms at an early age, thinking that a good defense would be the best protection from further reproach.

We have continued this approach as adults. Whether it’s a confrontation with a stranger on the street or an argument with our partner in the bedroom, we believe that we need good excuses to explain ourselves and good logic to defend ourselves. We behave almost as though we were professional negotiators, our own little lawyers.