2/16/23: Pipe Dreams #poetry
Groups are a sucker bet. They never pay off. There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Success is a scam. There is no solace in the applause of others. If you can’t please yourself, you can’t be pleased.
A pipe dream is a desire for an impossible ideal, that is invariably defeated by a bitter reality.
No group is going to accept you. You can contort yourself for their acceptance, but then, you aren’t you, are you?
If you have integrity, you walk alone.
O’Neill won a Nobel Prize, and knew it was bullshit. Then he started really writing.
Why did they bother me so? They don’t bother me any more. My focus shifts from them to me.
I don’t like them, I don’t respect them and I hold all that they do in low regard. So why did they bother me?
Pipe dreams?
Hope is a fickle thing. It makes you feel great while you have it, and brings you to your knees when it leaves you.
Why did I have the illusion that I would find friendship and understanding in places where they didn’t exist?
I’m no different than you. In a way, I’m better. If you feel content with how things are, a success or just happy to be a part of things, you are a fool.
Don’t feel bad. I was a fool. We are all fools. We weren’t born fools, but we were infected immediately.
It’s not an accident that The Iceman Cometh takes place in a bar. It’s a world populated with drunks, and its hard to put down the bottle and walk out of the dark dirty room into the sunny day.
I’d leave one group and think I’d find a better group. There aren’t any better groups.
O’Neill’s greatest writing was written with no ambition for the plays to be produced. His wife got that job done after he died.
You can’t be happy, truly alive, or great until you swear off groups.
Stanislavski, the great philosopher of acting, that most vulnerable and exposed of arts, said “Be alone in the public.” Even good actors have to ignore the audience.
I would be pleased and they attacked, and they made me feel bad. Was it as simple as that I wanted them to be happy for me? Did I love them or need them?
I think I loved them. What they thought mattered. They disappointed me. But they were stuck in their own pipe dreams and it made them mean and stupid. I was never those things. I’m too proud. I won’t lower myself.
Maybe I still love them, and it wounds me because I can’t do anything for them … because no one can do anything for anybody. All you can do is be yourself.
Whatever I was doing provoked their hatred. They despised me for not observing the rules of their servitude, which they referred to as “reality”.
Letter to a Pure Artist:
Google suggested I read an article and I thought of you.
Al Pacino’s favorite movies:
Looking for Richard —- his busman’s holiday, your life
The Local Stigmatic —- his yearning … your plays and films
Serpico —- your ambition to do art in congruence with where the larger audience is
You are Pacino’s dream.
If he cooled to you, what else could he do. You are everything he wants to be. If he became that, Al Pacino Inc. would fall apart. It would take Christ himself to transform in that way.
He knows the difference between you and Scent of a Woman … and knows he’s trapped and can only pursue his inner being on the side.
When he praised your intelligence, he was admiring, among other things, your self knowledge and your choices in life.
There is no greater fate than to be born a pure artist.
The photo that accompanies the article is Pacino posing as weariness, a cunning and conscious portrait of his soul.
I thought of old Picasso posing … shirtless and barrel chested on a beach with a radiant face and joyful eyes.
My accusers would tell me I wasn’t working. Hah! It bothered them that I was having so much fun.
There is no greater fate than to be born a pure artist.
I’m thinking of Steve Wynn and his multi- million dollar art collection (if it hasn’t been seized by some authority … )
The businessman works, connives, bullies, fights, steals to build his empire.
And then he buys art.
The artist just sits in his studio and makes it.
There is no greater fate than to be born a pure artist.
Picasso’s eyes were fierce and joyful.
I realize that I was mimicking Mamet’s “I pity the writer who’s not from Chicago.”
End of Letter
Picasso’s pipe dream came true? Then why was his art so great and his person so mean? What made him put out cigarettes on Dora Maar’s arm? It wasn’t what gave him fierce and joyful eyes.
Is art my pipe dream? A pipe dream that I can transcend pipe dreams.
Years ago when I was just past being a boy — JUST LIVE! — he or she shouted.
What’s the difference between pipe dreams and meaning? Life has no meaning. We have to create it. We can’t make it up. We can’t search for it. If we live, we discover it, or rather … them. We careen from illusion to illusion. I tell myself that each illusion hold a lesson, and each is a step toward the promised land. Back — to the promised land.
Young Robert Redford is in the cast. He is so much better than old Robert Redford. Was he contaminated by pipe dreams?
The writing is what it is. The world is what it is. The reaction between the two is what it is.
Hickey says he knows the truth and he’s at peace. O’Neill knows that’s not the case. Does anyone know either?
I once lived on the praise of people I no longer respect. The great rush of happiness of the past has evaporated. I cared so much and it didn’t matter.
Maybe the worst fate for a person burdened with a pipe dream is the encouragement that it came true, or could come true.
The Empty Space
Pipe dreams arise in misguided response to the Unbearable Lightness of Being.
I was so happy yesterday morning. Just happy to be alive and to be a writer. And darkness rushed into the void on cue. The old hurts that were processed long ago. But now the focus changed … not the idiots and assholes … but me … why am I troubled when there is nothing to be troubled about … then I realize it’s not about the past … it’s a prophecy … my current pipe dream is exposed … a new group that I long for, like a sap after his fifth divorce who never learned a thing … and I realize it’s the same shit in a new bottle … I look at photos on Instagram of these people … and I’ve known them for years …
and I still want to go be with them … but this time I’ll be like Stanislavski … and I’ll be content with that illusion for awhile … but I know the real place for me is where O’Neill went when he settled home.
The greatest moments of my life happened alone in my room.
The Hindu philosopher negated everything until all that remained is what is …
Do not go gentle into that good night …
rest in peace my ass …
Jung says don’t make suicide literal
Keen says a break down is a chance to see what’s up
Break after break after break …
illusion after illusion after illusion …
merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily … life is but a dream
We are the stuff that dreams are made of …
Becker says don’t deny death
Arendt says evil is banal
Banal, evil dreams … idiots and assholes …
Herzog suffered the burden of dreams
I dream of the company of the enlightened and the kind …
They don’t exist in groups
They happen one by one
Groups exist for those afraid of life and death
Pipe dreams are attempted escapes from life and death …
O’Neill was sick and dying and wrote his greatest plays …
Alone …
Living and dying at the same time
Life is lived in the unknown
Death occurs in the unknown …
Pipe dreams are born in fevers of fear
Michael Corleone yelled THEY PULL ME BACK IN! …
the apron strings of other cowards
Who knows where my writing goes and what new things life, and the world will reveal to me?
I wish this writing could relieve me from … what?
Joyce said, “History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake!”
Do wounds ever heal or do they just reveal ever deeper truths but never THE truth …
THE truth is beyond us …
I don’t worry about what is the point …
I’m not afraid of life and I’m not afraid of death … (who said they were afraid of dying, but not death? That’s me.)
except when I am …
in moments … and maybe those moments are part of what is too …
I’d like to get rid of them … I’m not sure it’s possible …
Pipe dreams are a living death …
Pipe dreams are violent, murderous things …
the source of all conflict …
How we justify our rotten -ness
The banality of evil …
I thankfully never had the perverted nerve of acting out my pipe dreams on the world …
I acted them out in the theater of my mind …
I just gave the world my sweet authenticity …
and they came after me with pitchforks and torches …
which didn’t do me any harm …
because all they wanted was for me to go away …
and when I did, they did too …
but they gave me images for my pipe dream imagination …
which never gave me anything but pain …
sometimes it deceitfully made me feel excited
and then cunningly made me howl and bleed …
Pipe dreams taunted my free will
CHOOSE!
and I always chose life and death …
Malamud said “Talent is not enough.”
Florian Zeller said “Love is not enough.”
They were both right … talent and love without the knowledge of life and death …
are pipe dreams …
My latest pipe dream group is reduced to reality …
the people will disappoint … but the money and activity would be alright …
I spent my life rebelling against necessity, and now I find great solace in it …
It’s a relief to just think about the things that you need, and be who you are …
You aren’t anti-social or in exile for the world … but you put the world in its place …
the world is the place you get what you need …
and your room is the place where you know who you are.
Note: Hickey is similar to the Anti-Semetic bully in The Fablemans who is humiliated by the love of the person that they torment. The guilt. Which breeds hatred. I can’t relate. But maybe I can understand my pipe dreams better.
I hurt because I loved the idiots and assholes. Like a fool.
And they tried to kill me in a murder/suicide.
I saved my body and repaired my mind as best I could. Always returning for more triage when needed, finding and treating newly discovered elements of my condition.
I’m better off, but I’ll never be without them.
We are all scarred.
And that’s the way it is.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
The Rick Blog 