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ARCHIVES
In Order of Appearance:
Click on Title to Go There Fast
Reflections on New York City's Tragedy
Essay on Overcoming Anger
The Wisdom to Choose Good Over Evil
Essay on Overcoming Anger
The Author Remembered by Trinity Valentine
Two Stories by A Home-Schooled Writer
A Very Brief Life Remembered
Photos of a Child Taken Too Soon
Celebrating 8 Years of Debauched Chicanery
Photo Essay of Several Drunks Drinking
Photo of Jack Kevorkian and Trinity Valentine
Discussing Art & Alternatives to Suicide
BEYOND ANGER
"I BEEN LADEN WITH SADNESS THIS PAST WEEK"
In Remembrance of September 11th 2001
“I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair…
with a love so vast and shattered, it will meet you everywhere.”
Leonard Cohen.
illustration by Basil Wolverton - 1959
Some of Fred Burkhart's thoughts on Tragedy:
With the traumatic and indelible reminders of this past week's mass murders by terrorists in New York City, we are indeed being greeted from the other side. I am reminded that twice this past week as I rode my bike along the main streets of Chicago, with my long and knotted beard blowing in the wind, young punks from the street cheered me on with their tragically insensitive taunts, “Bin Laden… Bin Laden…” mispronouncing the name to sound like "Lay-den." With the sad holocaust of this past week still burning its reality into our combined sensibilities, it would appear that even these insensitive youth were attempting a primitive, however cruel identification. My long beard twisting like knotted ropes must have acted like a lightening rod and momentarily grounded them in awareness. How sad to encounter these two groups of young wanna-be gangsters with pants falling down around themselves, posturing their scare-crow mockery of the twin towers collapsing in on themselves. These were mere children with designer logos that spoke for them in absence of the true logos. These were American youth, their racial identities a mixture. Twenty years ago they would have jeered at me and called me Castro or Manson and smiled at their defiance of America's ideals… in fact they did just that up until this past Tuesday when a newer and more terrible name passed over their lips.
Oh yes, we have been greeted from the other side all right, from deep within the bodies of huge aircrafts, where hundreds of living souls were mixed with volatile fuel to the temperature of molecular melting. Innocent lives used as a spark to trigger the destruction of thousands more, in an act that the aging evangelist Billy Graham poignantly referred to as the “mystery and reality of death.” Ironically, these terms - mystery and reality - represent the only means by which we can approach an understanding of life. These deaths that hang daily in our memories are never explained to us by anyone with any certainty, be it artist or scientist, preacher or parent… we are all touched with unbelief. Death is only “real” for others, it would seem. It always happens to someone else, never to us. All we get from it is continued life, an uninterrupted flow of creation. Other people die, but we are renewed. The wisest of teachers have told us it is all an illusion that presents itself to our senses. The combined journals of science and religion have demonstrated it to be Eternity, an Infinity to which we are always connected and cannot stray. When we witness another's death it is our own senses that are heightened and renewed, our own pain that is apparent. Life itself is increased.
And what is the “other side” of sorrow and despair? And why can we not exempt it from the equation? Good and evil are constants that we all know. But how many of us call the evil “good,” especially when it is ourselves doing it? The answer is: All of us. Our religion is the religion; our political party is the party, our educations and social class, our skin color and language, etc. The exception is the occasional soul that comes to show us that all judgment is in error and none of it reveals the truth of the human condition. Only Omniscience has the ability to discern truth. Is it one thing to be destroyed by a terrorist, and another to be erased in a natural landslide or frozen climate? Is it any less of a horror, as our life slips from us? In a genuine analysis, our indignities and sense of unfairness come from the judgments we make about others. Of course we have the right to choose life or death, good or evil, but having done so, we are left to an order and process that can only be understood on its own terms.
Listen to the religious extremists who designed these extravagant and bizarre deaths in molten steel and flesh; they are the same voices that seek revenge, no matter from whose mouths they come. Revisit poor Dresden and the fire bombing of women and children and their men and animals by the “righteous” Americans as punishment for the Nazi Holocaust of World War Two. The two big bombs dropped on the Nagasaki and Hiroshima, with no respect for life at all. The assault on the American Indians… and on the South American Indians. The same inferno and the same devil. We did not punish the guilty. In our anger and ignorance, we punished the innocent. We do not understand who the guilty are, even in our own society. Witness our own Civil War, declared in 1865 and still going on today.
Once I was locked in a room with an assortment of a dozen Klansman, Skinheads and Nazis, as they beat me into near death before an unexpected intervention halted their destruction. They tried to kill me because I was an enigma beyond their comprehension, living in a world peopled by everyone, equal to everyone. It bothered them that my world also included them. Steadfastly they held on to their self-proclaimed superiority when all that was really evident was their anger and frustration at not producing any works that would acknowledge them as superior. I walked away from their hostility, and when the wounds they inflicted on me healed, I laughed at their seeming judgments. But still, I can understand and sympathize with how they could be trapped in their own limited awareness since birth, as are the many liberals and enlightened who chided me and insisted that it was those SOBs that should be destroyed. When I pointed out that the other side felt the same way about them, the liberals pointed out that the klan was brought up that way, bigoted and hating. When I suggested that the same was true of them they were angered at me, in the same way the Klansman were - because of my association with the other side. Both groups avowed to never approach the other, only to kill them if the opportunity arose. And thus I became their messenger; I delivered the message that neither group had the courage to deliver, attempting to bridge the great gap and plant a new seed.
I am not Bin Laden - nor am I in agreement with his hatred of America or his militant solutions - but I have been laden with the same sadness that permeates our universe, from his land to ours. It is obvious to me that he genuinely trusts his God to give retribution for the acts of evil that have been fostered on his own people by the supposedly righteous. This is no less or no more than what we are calling upon “our God” to do: to erase the evil we behold. Where is either side's compassion when each pretends that God is settling a score that they themselves are taking great glee in perpetrating - the massacre of the other side?
I have also been laden with sadness because the same nightmare devastation has finally arrived at America's doorstep. We got a collective glimpse of it in 1963, when we watched over and over the bullet(s) enter John Fitzgerald Kennedy and blast the contents of his skull and brain across the eyes of innocent TV watchers the world over. But this week we witnessed this same living tissue splattered 5,000 times over, mixed with fire and steel into a molten hell. Kennedy was the prototype, the microcosm; this new act is the greater extension into the macrocosm. This time we watched over and over as living matter was blasted out the other side of a great and cavernous skull known as the World Trade Center; for it indeed had come to be a living organism, filled with life and intelligence, a community several thousand strong, pulsing with the heartbeat of America. While an earlier generation watched one lone president taken out by “one lone nut” and was saddened, this present generation has been touched more personally. How many tens of thousands have been filled with the ultimate pain of separation and personal loss?
Jesus foretold this devastation in the spear that pierced his own side, and he also gave us the answer to our utter futility and anger… “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And what is it they don't know? Three days after the crisis, during an all-faith prayer service in New York City a Muslim in skullcap offered his prayers up “to the God of Abraham AND Ishmael…” After all these years having been inculcated with the belief that the Christian God was and is only the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their so-called superior family, we have been prompted to acknowledge our brother and add him back into the mix. We can no longer blame God and our Brother for our own prejudice and history of violence. There is a Law, like gravity, that operates in the flesh and blood experiences we meet from day-to-day.
In the beginning, before language, and when all was measured in space and time, the alphabet grew out of and was revealed as a series of mathematical equations. They were very simple ones, like A+B=C; like Adam and Eve begat Cain and Abel, as expressed in an earlier attempt at language and history. And of course, we all know the next equation: Cain killed his brother Abel and unleashed a new and devastating energy upon the earth: E=MC2. Fire and brimstone, death and destruction: Hell and its inhabitants. It was all so simple to avoid - and still is. As we return to the truth once delivered, we come to realize that our own supposed “understanding” of Good and Evil has merely been our own erroneous judgment of others as being evil, while we attribute the good to ourselves. This is what the original God warned us about, that we would make the mistake of assuming that our Knowledge of Good and Evil also gave us the power of discrimination and the ability to judge others, to see the world as God sees it. It didn't. And we are today left with sorting through the debris in search of a truth that can never be found there.
Sixty years ago, when World War Two was declared, I was an infant of six months. Over the next two years, as our country pulled together and "united itself" in the name of the war effort my poor child's heart watched as the world around me was torn apart and my family split. Today I am saddened by the knowledge that again we will watch as our country answers the recent bloodshed with more bloodshed. But beyond what our country is declaring for us, we must each answer in our own unique way. I have found that in our daily efforts and relationships we are bound and limited by the words we use, usually without thinking.
A man named Vrle Minto once told me: We keep the original of everything we say, feel, and think… We only give the carbon copies away. When we condemn and judge and hate, however justified, the original feelings remain alive within us and swirl through our blood and body, condemning and eating away our very souls, minute-by-minute. The only sensible response in any of this is to learn forgiveness, for like the enemy we attack, we truly do not understand it, nor do we know what we are doing when we act out of fear and retaliation and anger. It is not enough for God to bless America only, as we all unite against the other side. It is finally upon each of us to learn to love our enemies and call upon God to bless them as well. Ishmael as well as Abraham. The enemy as well as the friend. The way we've been doing it there will soon come a day when we have no friends left, only our growing suspicion of everyone around us.
My advice is to forget the war that's being waged around us, and instead, greet everyone with a greater love, one that surrounds evil and smothers it. Of course, our countries are going to continue the various wars that rage around us daily, and yes we will have to try and dodge the resulting destruction, but do we really need to turn over our individual lives to the effort of continuing the hate and retribution? I say give it up, acknowledge each other's love, embrace them as if they were your own. But always beware… a suicidal terrorist involved in a holy war will embrace you with a bomb pressed to your heart as quickly as an abortion clinic will suck the life right out of you, while down the street a thief will cut your throat out for a $2 formula for his own starving child. The irony. They all have the best of intentions. They all want to take your seemingly useless life away from you in order to further their own fantastic goals. That's the world we live in... Good luck with expressing your love.
And now... Part Two
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE
"THE SERENITY PRAYER"
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…
the courage to change the things I can…
and the wisdom to know the difference."
Standing here at the root of the Tree of Knowledge, with its many branches trunctured into Newspaper lies, I've finally got the message reduced to two pages, recycled from my own poems and pulses. Each of us, in our childhood, should have been instructed in this truth: the awareness that all knowledge precedes from revelation, and is only confirmed through our senses. That is obvious. That is, until the worm turned and puberty rewired us, and gleefully we bit into the fruit from the tree that the Snake deluded us into thinking would give us our own special knowledge of the good and evil that surround us. It was supposed to be a superior knowledge.
But today there are few of us who will admit that we are fundamentally and fatalistically in ignorance of this awesome landscape called earth on which we have found ourselves. We erroneously conceive the earth in terms of our own understanding of it, taking too much credit for ourselves, because we have been given the ability to both label and judge it, good and evil. However, in the beginning it is stated that God created Good and Evil and set it before us - so that we might choose. Our only part in Creation has been this ability and freedom to choose how it will unfold… how it evolves. We never did, and never will, create any of it. “By the way… choose good!” was the instruction from God.
Of course, Adam and Eve made their infamous choice for the rest of time, for the rest of us: They chose to pretend that they possessed the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they chose to give birth to Cain and Abel, the pitiful personalization of opposites in the universe. They did so by taking an observed phenomenon and judging it in terms of their own limited awareness, without the input from the phenomena itself or from its Sustainer.
Of course we can ignore the Creator and attribute it all to Darwin and his painstakingly slow evolution that transforms the strongest into one superior race that is “programmed” to stop at nothing short of the total annihilation of all the rest of the inferiors who get in its way.
Or we can get caught up in the Judeo-Christian's favorite trap and give the credit to an anthropomorphic god like Jehovah, an angry God who systematically created a superior race of warriors out of Moses and Abraham, and all the young Isaacs and Jacobs that followed from their bowels. “A superior race of people,” no less. Stop with me for a moment and marvel at the power and authority this god gave to them from on high to do away with all of their brothers and sisters, the unfortunate Ishmaels and Mohammeds of history.
Or we can partake of the opposite deception and side with the other camp, which also spouts the same inequalities and venom. Does it really matter which side we are on and how we justify it when we are engaged in war and its senseless killing?
Then there are those who will attribute it all to just plain anarchy, with its no apparent outcome, and assign everything to the realm of chaos and destruction. That should give them good cause to eat, drink and be merry for however many days they've got left. This is the camp most Americans find themselves in, in spite of their dedication to god and country.
But you know, you can call me old fashioned - I'll do what Ancient Wisdom has always demonstrated to be the essential reality, and stand firmly planted on the holy ground that was created for all of us to share, not just for one superior race... be it Abraham's, Adolph's or Abdul's.
From where I stand this brother killing looks like the result of a long line of Adams and Eves laying around the garden all day fucking each other senseless… obviously overlooking the fact that they are likewise fucking everything else up; not for themselves, but for their kids. After all, it is the children who are the ones forced into the service of a hypocritical morality and outdated vendetta. It is the children who are being instructed to blow it all up, themselves included. And the Adams and Eves still remain, not one bit wiser or more knowledgeable for any of it, in spite of their fascination with the forbidden fruit called knowledge.
In the beginning Adam and Eve wanted to know what was going on, like all children in their infancy. They wanted a glimpse behind the inner workings that the subtle Snake had hinted about, and so they coveted the knowledge of Good and Evil. And because of some seemingly magical act, Eve got pregnant and begat Cain and Abel, the Archetypes of Evil and Good. Cain murdered his brother and that was the end of the beginning. Conversely, it was the beginning of the end. Moses and Pharaoh continued the beef. Abraham and Ishmael have been at each other's throats for centuries. Witness the modern day Bin Laden and Bush, intent on living out the absurdities of their own religious fervors, while leaving the rest of us to tremble in their wake.
Doesn't it finally occur to anyone that we are all entombed in a kind of stasis, when instead each of us should be responsibly developing the ability to administer the balance that will keep this world stabilized and continuing on its journey? It was a very long time ago that the original creation began to overflow its energy into time's streaming essence, a very long time since an all-wise God created the man and the woman to have dominion over this creation.
What should be clear through all of this is that no one gets to heaven by blaming his or her brother and sister for the conditions on this earth. We do not erase evil by programming each new generation to systematically kill the enemy, especially when the enemy is us - our own brothers and sisters and even the innocent embryos that overflow the corner waste baskets. Each of us certainly has the right and the responsibility to eradicate evil from our midst, but this doesn't happen via the perpetuation of more evil. It occurs through acts of forgiveness.
Here's an experiment. Forget for a moment what our “leaders” are doing. That's their balancing act, not ours. Instead, the next time you get mad at the enemy, check to make sure it's not some fellow American you've encountered on the bicycle path or sidewalk, or more often the family or friend at your side. How will you react with them? Remember… you've only got two choices… Kill them… or let them live. Oh, I guess there's a third choice... condemn the lot of them, go off somewhere and hide in a cave for the rest of the show.
I doubt whether anyone within range of my voice is going any closer to Afghanistan than the very remote controls on their television sets. It's time to turn off the hypnotic virus you are being infected with. Return your awareness to the very places you have some control over. Forgive them, because the obvious truth is that “they” are someone you know. Be careful. The enemy is in this room. Wait a minute... is that really the enemy sitting over there... or don't they know yet that we are friends?
Forget programs from satellites and the vested interests of war and the economy, the perpetuation of Cain and Abel's misguided brotherhood, the sad war against or for terrorism the world over. Both sides are for terrorism, by assuming the very idiot ideology that they are fighting against it. Only Abel had it right in the beginning... he went about the business of worshipping and sacrificing for God the fruits of his labor, that all might benefit and be alive to enjoy it. Cain didn't know his multiplication table and decided to subtract instead.
Recall the truth... Seek first the kingdom of God and your place in it, brothers and sisters, without rivalry. After all, this is America and its promise. We are the Americans who will make our reality known, for good or for evil, through forgiveness or continuing judgment.
KESEY REMEMBERED
Two Stories by Trinity Valentine
KEN KESEY WITH TRINITY VALENTINE 1995
"KESEY 101"
written by Trinity on November 15th 1993 (age 7)
Part of my education is going with my dad to see important people. Thursday night, while most kids were getting ready for bed, my dad and I went to see the famous author Ken Kesey. While other kids were sleeping I was learning firsthand about famous authors. My dad always jokes that I'm in night school. Out of a thousand people I was the only kid there!
Ken Kesey is the author of ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST and SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION. The one I read was especially for kids: LITTLE TRICKER THE SQUIRREL AND BIG DOUBLE THE BEAR.
Kesey said that he didn't care about being a writer anymore - he just cares about being a warrior and a magician. Then he pulled a bird out of his hat! It wasn't a real bird though. He flew the bird but it didn't land by me. The person it landed by gave it to me though.
After the show, during the book signing, Ken let me create designs in the books and rubber stamp the books too. It took 3 hours to sign and stamp the books. Then we went home and had dinner and I went to bed. It was one o'clock in the night kitchen. By the way, my mom was there too.
INSIDE KEN KESEY'S MAGIC BUS "FURTHER"
"KESEY 102"
written by Trinity Valentine Burkhart in 1995 (age 9)
Today my good friend Ken Kesey came back to town to do an author's reading. Before when he came he was dressed in an unmatched suit carrying a suitcase shaped like as swordfish. Now this time he was dressed like a cowboy because his new book was about cowboys.
Unlike last time, I did not go right up on stage to see him because I was embarrassed. I also felt that he might not remember me from two years ago. But Ken Kesey s a very good friend and did not forget me but called me up and introduced me to the audience. Then I was more embarrassed! But I was also very happy.
During his speech he read chapters from some of his books. The best part I remember is when he read LITTLE TRICKER THE SQUIRREL AND BIG DOUBLE THE BEAR. When reading the book he sort of formed a play out of it and did a little dance. THE best part about Ken is that he makes his stories into play and forms them into real life.
If you met Ken Kesey on the street, you would not know he was a famous author because he doesn't dress fancy or act like he's "all that." He makes you feel important instead of himself. He made me feel really nice.
Well, got to go now. I have to meet Double The Bear for lunch. I sure hope he doesn't think I'm the lunch!
Text & Images Copyright 2001 by Fred Burkhart & Trinity Valentine
TRIBUTE TO LYNNE POST
March 29th, 1986 -- August 30th, 2001
A Very Brief Life Remembered
Rest In Peace, Child.
It was a privilege to have known you, however briefly, and watched you at play
with your friends. Often, with Life's blessings come pain and bewilderment, as
your parents and friends are now experiencing. And you are now most certainly
experiencing what lies beyond our inadequate understanding. No one knows
first hand what that is, but we can hope that Death itself is a greater place to be
than Life has shown us, that it is a return to the Creator who gives us all, that in
its wake the earth and our hopes are once again refreshed, like the new rain
which washes our eyelids as well. Along with the others who have known you,
I too share the pain and joy you have left as a guide for us, that we may grow in
our care and love for one another. Thank you.
from Fred Burkhart
JACK & TRINITY
Jack Kevorkian & Trinity Valentine
discussing art and the possibility
of a future without suicide
DELILAH'S EIGHTH
CELEBRATING EIGHT YEARS OF DEBAUCHED CHICANERY
All Images Copyright 2001 by Fred Burkhart
BURKHART STUDIOS
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