We choose a knave or an eunuch

To rule over us.

The age demanded an image

Of its accelerated grimace,

Something for the modern stage,

Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries

Of the inward gaze;

Better mendacities

Than the classics in paraphrase!

The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,

Made with no loss of time,

A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster

Or the “sculpture” of rhyme. (Pound)

Good evening or morning or afternoon from the far Left Coast. To my dismay on a lovely warm day too many of my customers young and old, Asian and not Asian, had to mask. My dismay is two sided. First, I sit behind PEXIGLASS PROTECTION. I am half deaf. Imagine the soft spoken person behind the mask muffled by two barriers and my eagerness to help. A droll exercise and a true comedy.

I feel deep anguish that the old world is dead. I felt it in 2019. I wrote about it starting then and have not stopped. I have to shout out and fight back. I was born this way.

Never in my lifetime will people stop masking, Hold that image briefly. Go into it. Like a koan struggle with it, “ Original Face/Original Self – The term appears most famously in Case 23 of the koan collection Mumonkan, or “Gateless Gate,” in which the monk Myō, jealous that the Sixth Patriarch Enō has received the robe and bowl of their master, chases him through the mountains and tries to take them by force. Enō places the robe and bowl on the ground and invites Myō to take them. However, Myō finds that they are too heavy to lift. Overwhelmed with shame, he asks to be given the teaching instead, and Enō responds, “Without thinking good or evil, in this very moment, what is your Original Face?”

COMMENTARY:
What face did you have before your parents were born? The question isn’t hard. It’s like asking a sunflower what it was before it was a sunflower, or the wind before it was wind? A true Zen master never asks to see something that isn’t already there.

That’s one way of saying it. Another is this.

Millions of years ago, a snub-nosed fish roamed the watery shelf below the continents wearing a face that had been passed down to it by countless species through deep time. That fish passed its face to amphibians, and amphibians passed it to reptiles. Reptiles passed it to mammals, and mammals passed it down in exact accordance with the dharma—from the great apes to Australopithecus, and from Australopithecus to Homo habilis, and from Homo habilis to Homo erectus, and from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens, and from Homo sapiens to Homo sapiens sapiens, who became so sapient (or “wise”) that they discarded it—or tried to. Because really, how can you throw away your face?

I answer: WEAR A MASK.

Max Picard: THE HUMAN FACE

THE CONTEMPLATION OF A HUMAN FACE

He who looks upon a human face is moved to the very core of his being; his emotions, his understanding, his will are affected, and even the very depths of him, where his emotions, intelligence and will coexist in that dark formlessness which we call presentiment or foreboding, he feels the face which he looks upon. His whole being is ploughed up.

Man’s face is the image of God. And the image of God is like a call to the spectator: the whole being of the spectator is called together and held together. It is as if the image of God were being shown that man is still the whole creature that he was when God placed him upon the earth.

“The wheel is turning and you can't slow down
You can't let go and you can't hold on
You can't go back and you can't stand still
If the thunder don't get you, then the lightning will”

I again ask, an empty question, rhetorical even, where are the Maquis? What resistance exists in fact that is ready to go the distance to stop the Nazi? Phrased slightly different than the folk song about Flowers, “Where have all the Americans gone/long time passing?” What street protests arise around masking or vaccination injuries? None. Black Lives Matter not vaccinated or masked lives. I exist enraged and write. I smile though that no phone banks are fighting for freedom. Our medical heroes are advertising nostrums, holding chit chats, rather elite in group science discussions seemingly all about “Saving the Appearances.” In my jaundiced cynical dark eyed view everything is reduced to saving the virus

Who organizes people by going door to door, as I went door to door in hot summer sun in Sacramento, to mobilize concern about irrigation water toxins including rocket fuel? https://www.ewg.org/research/rocket-fuel-drinking-water

I know I am out of key with my time. I expected-well I don’t know. Mass affluence changed many things and Covid too and together evidently created Circe and her SWINE. This feeling is not new. I wrote letters as a child opposing the Vietnam War. I studied how to free minds in college and decided Alan Watts was right, it is like getting drunk by way of the ears this freeing of minds by words. Cannot be done.

Now it is the selection season and people are getting giddy but not getting their gun. The next round of insanity awaits. And the masked and injected surely are safe.Ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity

DISCLAIMER:   The Journal of Lingering Sanity is a reader-supported publication from Old Gold Mountain (Chinese: 旧金山. We are beholden to truth not party.