After The Flood

Requiem For A Friend, Death Knell For A Dying Paradigm

By Phil Rockstroh
Dissident Voice
November 17th, 2012

So much has been lost to the hubris and cupidity inherent to the
hyper-industrialization and commercial hustler that defines the
Anthropocene Epoch.

To take it all in, to allow oneself to feel the full implications of the
dire situation, of the ecocide and humanity lost to endless war and
economic exploitation, one would be knocked to one’s knees with
sorrow or compelled to give voice to bursts of full-throated rage.

Therefore, as the grid-decimating tide of Sandy recedes and the
power and lights have been restored to our East Village, fifth floor
walk-up flat, I sit at my writing desk, and I am staring down the
scope of my cerebral cortex, desiring to unload both barrels into
the delusional asses of climate change deniers.

This mutant strain of hurricane (that has inflicted much disruption
in our lives and a great amount of stress on my six month, pregnant
wife, Angela) was caused by changes in the Gulf Stream, wrought by
manmade greenhouse gasses.

Personally, I’m done with attempting to persuade idiots by
intelligent discourse and fools by plying them with common
sense, finished with issuing reasoned warnings to dissemblers
and dimwits who claim the iceberg directly in the path of our
ocean liner is simply an ice dispenser, conveniently located to
refresh our beverages.

Sandy (as did Katrina) reveals, how tenuous the grid work of final
stage capitalism is… how rapidly it comes unraveled by nature’s
impersonal fury.

While composing the first draft of this essay (pre-Sandy) — as I
was writing the following lines, “Often, the soul is forced to get
your attention by guiding you into situations that serve to open
your heart by means of breaking it.

Closed off from the temptation and tumult …” — I received a phone
call bearing the message that my best friend in this breathing world
was dead.

The next lines I wrote were: Alright then, soul, you have my full
attention, although my eyes are blurred and scalded by tears.

After inexplicable and heart shattering events, one’s mind searches
for deeper meaning…even when there can be none gleaned from
quotidian tragedy.

In this case — a fall involving a bicycle, and a friend, a brilliant
artist, a vivid soul, a warm, passionate human being, a generous,
compassionate companion has been forever lost.

Meaning is an ad hoc, flimsy structure…erected of metaphysical
eggshells…convictions garnered from happenstance, the traumas
of early life, books happened upon, chance meetings, misheard
advice, friendships lost and cultivated.

In the presence of death and in the aftermath of great storms,
we apprehend how vainly we cling to the illusion of certainty
and permanence.

Yet, deep down, we know how insubstantial our constructs are.

How fate and circumstance can intervene, and can leave us
staring into the indifferent maw of eternity.

“For in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth
knowledge increaseth sorrow” –Ecclesiastes 1:18

To John, my departed friend:

I’m not going to allow you to travel too far away from the realm
of the living without your soul glistening with my abundant tears.

As Sandy raged around our home and then departed, I stood in
grief’s dominion.

There are empty spaces here — graceless voids — torn into the
hours of the day after a person close to you has been, suddenly
and without warning, taken by death.

John, you and I spoke often and for long durations about
the necessity of artists and writers allowing themselves to
be undone by life and remade by creative choices.

For me, your sudden death has accomplished the primary.

Through, our perpetual dialog, we explored the interplay of polis
and ecosystem, and how this essential criteria was absent from
so much current day art and curation e.g., how in art one might
limn New Orleans’ ragged (yet vividly alive) grandeur — the city’s
alluring, dangerous, vitally alive character — its crumbling agora
and the forever living, always dying nature of the bayous and
wetlands that surround the city.

And the manner one might merge and express those elements in
one’s aesthetic. (Apropos: Much of the city of New Orleans itself
was comprised of swamp land that was drained, thus creating the
city’s familiar crescent shape and susceptibility to deadly flooding.)

In John’s art work and curation, he desired to evoke a dialog
between the ghosts of the past and the living present, human
beings and nature, cityscape to backwater, brain to gut, beating
heart to eternal moment, phantom to flesh, memory to heavenly
fire, compost to possibility, possibility to fruition.

John was driven to entice the individual artists out of his/her prison
of enshrinement/exile of hyper-individualist alienation …to bring the
work of an individual artist into a broadening dialog with the work of
other artists…to create the affect of a vital agora.

He grasped that art does not exist alone; it is not an embalmed
corpse, but a living (and dying) thing; hence, it must share common
space and communion to be fully alive as well as decay to compost
(and therefore be granted renewal) when it dies.

John desired a dialog between passion and putrefaction.

He grasped the nearer an artist drew to expressing the impossible
was made possible by exploring the realm of the possible. But, in
addition:

Messing with things quotidian, breaking them apart, caressing,
tormenting, tweaking …reconfiguring all available material into
new forms…Like lover’s, battling and entwined, whose love fuses
the familiar and the alien, thus broadening the lives of both
parties, by allowing them to become greater than the sum of
their parts, art must challenge our verities; it must induce one
to become more like one’s essential self by the dissolution of
safe, but soul-defying, habitual thinking.

An awareness of the ongoing (and exponentially increasing)
catastrophic changes to the ecological balance of our besieged
planet can serve the same end.

Otherwise, one would risks being as devoid of character as those
reality-adverse creatures — monsters really — possessed of
inexplicable self-regard, who wield power in this age of hype and
hubris.

Conversely, one’s suffering unites the psyche with the sorrows
of the earth; teaches us that we are bound by its limits and laws.

The knowledge grounds us in humility, by revealing that eternity
is boundless, but we are not.

Because eternity treats us with such callous disregard, we feel
an affinity with other vulnerable things.

One recognizes the commonality of suffering, thus one gains
empathy.

Yes, death is implacable; the only thing close to matching death’s
tenacity is the persistence of memory and the urgency of the soul
to make every moment holy.

Often, in the locations where one’s heart has been wounded by
circumstance, thus seized by novel (even agonizing) apprehensions,
as is the case in the sections of a forest that have been scoured by
fire — new life, nourished by ash, will grow.

Have you ever walked through a field of bright wild flowers,
risen from the charred ground, where a wild fire has blazed?

Over the last few years, many people close to me have died.

A firestorm has run riot through my heart. In its wake,
regions of my soul are vivid with eternity’s wild flowers.

The view is breathtaking.

History is a story of bitter grace and pain-wrought wisdom. In
this tale, we learn:

Collective trust is a catastrophic misjudgment, made possible
by its partner in crime, an artist of legerdemain, who goes by
the moniker, Hope.

Once you have had your heart shattered into pieces, and even
though time has mended it back together, because all of the
shattered pieces and scattered shards can never be retrieved,
you, as a result, will never be the same.

And that is a propitious development, because room has been
made within you for novelty and wisdom.

The process allows for transformation, for one remains oneself, as,
all the while, alien elements are merged with one’s own uniqueness.

Accordingly, providence favors those whose faith has been shattered.

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not
prove anything.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

Life begins in mystery, what lies after life ends is unknowable —
and, in between, we experience constant bafflement. Yet, how
exquisite the landscape is as it rolls by; what exquisite sorrow
we yield by being part of it all.

My best friend was plucked from this tormented world.

My father died last May…I’m buffeted, shattered by circumstance,
but Angela, my dear wife, is more than half way through the
second trimester of pregnancy.

The event has engendered much soul-searching for a certain
father-to-be i.e., wandering in awe and bewilderment through
the landscape of his psyche, and forays, in his better moments,
into the image-rich landscape of Animus Mundi.

Art is merely artifice, if it is not sown from the soul’s
veritable soil.

What is the song of the night bird sans the night?

A thousand gradations of green comprise a swamp’s canopy.

The heart is just a pump, sans a loving/embattled (both are
borne of libido) connection to the soul of the world.

My recent proximity to the realities of birth and death has
forced me close to the living heart/inhuman abyss of the
soul of the world.

Yet amid this startling landscape the mind abides greater,
even agonizing truths.

Climate chaos. Dying oceans. The degradation of U.S.
corporate/militarist empire and the concomitant collapse
of the global, neoliberal order.

Our child will be born into a world where there will be a
paradigm shift — or there will come mass tragedy.

My father was born on an Indian reservation.

My mother escaped Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport, shortly
after her father was taken to a concentration camp for anti-Nazi
activity.

Angela, was born in a small, rural home, a sharecroppers shack,
in the South Carolina Low Country that housed generations of
cotton-harvesters and tobacco-croppers.

Our people, sharing the fate of multitudes born into this world,
have endured and even flourished under terrible conditions.

The Tyler/Rockstroh whelp will be afforded the same opportunity.
Who is his grim augury-prone old man to deny him the chance?

That would be the very emblem of hubris, because, among the living,
there exists no bottom line — only how you choose to write the book
of your life.

“Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life
has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it,
than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes
to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate
or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty,
painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength,
if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for
him who has the vision to recognize it as such.” — Henry Miller



Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in
New York City.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/11/after-the-flood/