“Beyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.”
💀Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death💀
🌟 I had just Plunged again, running from the madness of incessant reflection trapped within the refracted essence upon the stage ….. ran off into the unknown and ended up after 3 1/2 days of greyhound bus adventure, to the jungles of San Francisco, eventually landing at the skeevy Travelers Inn on 5th street. These were some of the wildlife also passing thru, and I ended up doing my very first ‘poetry reading’ escorted by Aussie Jeff, at the Brainwash Cafe; Beginning of July 2000 just a few weeks after arriving to SF and plunging headlong into another adventure…..
🌟One of the poems I read on stage was this:
Ah, my stage! Everything always falls into play!
Action to action- day to day
I’m making my living in the same old way-
Ha! Taking my giving and tossing it away!
I can see them watching me;
I can feel them contemplating me and what I bring;
They know I know they are just actors on my stage-
players in my game.
Things happening so fast
I can barely pass my own tests,
let alone manipulate the world for the rest!
From their eyes I see the glow-
the burning, itching desire to know-
and in me they see that flame-
unperturbed by that sick sad game;
And, oh my stage! How petty yet brave!
How genuine to feel the time
as it shrivels up my human mind
like a prune awaiting the prime.
Is it here on this wooden plank, dark and dank
with musty space,
that all my dreams are made and forbade?
-All that commotion I’ve shut out…
Ive crept up into the attic
where I rest.
Ah, to pass the test!
To crave the crest of the unbroken tide!
Always willing to go along for the ride.
And yet again- My stage! My stage!
Everything always falls into place-
action to action, day to day
I’m living my making in the same old way.
6-28-2000🌟
Charleen Johnston
BlissNinja 