In the selections from “Gruffworld” which follow, substitute the writer for each time the Gruff muses about self and other in this apocalyptic world.
Finally, the largest slab gave more than all the rest. It fed continuity and brought about sense. The gruff was no longer diffident, but vastly curious and concerned. Could it be?
Woe. All is woe. The sound itself runs downward into my pith, my soul. Crag to crag, I live, a splinter of flesh seeking hearth, respite — anywhere. All is egress. I flee more than any other ever runner. I ache. I lack the solace of a mate. I am bereft of all outward gestures, of any kind, for so long have I been absent from other men. I am among animals, a sparkle of intelligence easily destroyed. What folly! I find it hard to go on, so I glyph (write out runes) these slate sheaves for any other awareness to see. What folly! How I record and how foolish is this effort, yet I persist or I will be driven mad in scape…I must give meaning. How ironic, indeed. Mad in a mad world –how sane that is. To be aware, wanderer, is to bite fate upon the amstring, bitterly. Yet i cannot capitulate. I will not cede. I will endure. Although I am not gruff nior any longer friend ofthe greart gruff, I will make do. Or e devoured as I try to make my way in this sinkhole of existence.
So after many adventures the gruff has reached a point at which he is becoming aware, the awakeening of intelligence. And now he decides to record what he feels and thinks, to leave a record of his presence in the very world which inanimately seeks to destroy him. It is, of course, a pronouncement by me, the writer, of my intent. We go on.
Indeed, the gruff’s first breakthrough to awareness was his intensely rude and shocking realization that he was in his world, and not a device or fabrication of the heavenly abyss above.
As a remembrance the gruff chose to create a monument. He wrought havoc upon the walls of a cliff, and composed several great stele in a semicircle, rubbed smooth ith the abrasive rock about, until their amber yellow limestone shone glumly, ready for sign or symbol.
For a moment he could not write. It did not come easily, all was evanescent in his mind. Then, almost feverishly, the dam burst within, and the gruff carved deeply his own script into the cheap resiliency of the steles, flakes falling lustily upon his horned soles.
To you, exile and wanderer, my friend, I send my love and fondest thoughts. Like everything else upon these barrens I came aross your cairn by accident. You and I, are we not? an event of such randomness, and so was our friendship. It is as if a prime mover moved over the firmament of scape and punctuated it with both of our awarenesses. I have read closely and behind word your lonely memento of a life spent in flight from my kind and I am sorrowful. I cannot protect you from them. I cannot protect man. The task is too much. I can only share what awareness forms a bond between us. I urge you not to ‘capitulate.’ I urge you not to fall prey to such guilt, for it is awareness that is our father and mother, not our species; a species is just the flesh and blood expression of that. We each inhabit a bruyise. Awareness carries nointegument.
Here the gruff left space,paused for a moment, and continued his efforts.
We are a rare happenstance, you and I. Let us reunite when and if we can upon scape. We cannot rush that. It will occur when we least expect it. Since we haveparted I have taught one other gruff to see. He has become my son. And like you, he has gone on his way. We three share knowing, the spiritual lightning of within. It is our relationship no matter how far we travel from one another, or what fate decides to give us as our reward for such suffering. When you are alone and in the grasp of awareness, torn and harried by its demands, what best remedy is there than to think of we three, ‘scape shapers,’ all thinking, feeling, worrying about one another?We are very much part of each other, and we drink fromn the same tarn. When and if you can, leave your mark, for we are a testament. It is allwe have,our curse,our blessing — and I am beginning to blieve, our real meaning: to express ourselves in act, creatively, when we meet our death maker in scape, we only surrender ouyr weary husks and no more.
In the final chapters I reveal the struggle of awareness, the awakening of intelligence, the need for relationship, to express one’s self creatively. I try to reach an apotheosis. And what better way to attain all this than to have gruff become an artist of a kind. I write:
Breathtaking in its scope, intensely subtle in every detail for its mammoth size, the sculpture evoked a constellation of feelings in the observer, a galaxy of mood; and the galactic effect was brought down to the real grit and grub of scape by an all encompassing resonance that spoke gently to the artist, to all men and gruff who wish to create from their very essences a magnificent expression, in loving defiance of death — To the gruff, he had read and deciphered it with ease.
Artist, it has been given tyo you to be your own expression, for you are the inheritor of awareness, life giving life. Artist, you areyour own beauty and truth. Rejoice!
HereI am beginning to bring all aspects of my own personal struggle, latently so, for I was not conscious at all of what I was writing so embedded was I in the gruff’s apocalyptic awareness, but the engine driving all this was my own unconcious needs, to express, to be, to transcend, to learn very much, to be the perennial learner, to evolve, to grow, to ascertain self, to be a presence unto myself.
In a fantastic spasm of creativity the gruff creats a monument from all the riven cliffs and scarps about him; he creates his “David.” When writing these last chapters I recall how quickly they flw by, because of how quickly I was tapped into my unconscious and simply lifted the flodgates to whatever flowed within, down to a sunless sea.
And after making his masterpiece which was a huge enclave of promenade and statuary, I write:
One day, near dusk, filled with such mystical issue within — he impulsively carved into a slabs the following sentiments: —
What you see before you is mind speaking to this world. What you see is within you, stranger. And not to make of yourself a work of life is to add insult and injury to the world. Whether you raise monuments such as these or attain great heights of intelligence, it does not matter. What matters is that you see as clearly as the pydhawk’s eye…that you are in relationship to all. In that there is much truth and wisdom…Look about you…even scape struggles to be..Look as if it were the first time!
Clearly this is swollen with what I was reading and metabolizing from Krishnamurti. So another duck and drake entered my blood system.
In the penultimate chapter, “Choiceless Awareness,” I finally am able to stammer out all that has preceded the gruff’s adventures.
So It came to pass that the great gruf lived moment to moment, in action, free of idea and ideology. Acting in one fell swoop of process, experience in itself, free of the split between experience and the experiencer, he was all, and he truly saw what is, free of the accumulation of past experience, thought, and meory, and his life was whole.
He was happy. He entered the deep stream of life unconcerned about endings or beginnings, but to see what is. fully and completely, rid of the tempestuous thought of nhis past. And his mid was swift and true, for he discovered truth in what is, in the moment, and he chose to be choicelessly aware, not give truth meaning or taint it with label or give it flesh and bone.
For once the gruff categorized, identified, condemned, judged or justified what is, it became old and weary, a truth to be remembered. Since memory was conditioning, it prohibited seeing what is freshly. In his genius the gruff realized all this, and consciously avoided any system, any method that would arrest him in dealing with his world. For him the world was his relationship with his gruff son and man friend. It was in this relationship that he knew himself, and it was this knowledge that changed his world.
Clearly it was who he was that he projected upon the world. Scape took on that sense and sensibility of his inward projection. If he could psychologically revolt, he could be in his world, a free gruff, for all else was imposition from without. All his life, in one way or another, aware and unaware, he had been in revolt. The gruff saw deeply, split realiy into deep furrows, and plowed life energetically.
Themes aboud galore in the book, many come from psychoanlytic thought — loss, attachment and separation, trust, and from K’s focus on choiceless awareness, the awakening of intelligence, being as opposed to becoming, one denotes sruggle and evolution which he would say involves time and memory, or the heavily gritted emory board we apply to ourselves.in order to “become” wealty, et al. So K gave me nothign and that is what should be. I took from him what I needed to grow, to become aware. he entered surreptitiously my fiction at the time and in “Gruffworld” I work out, I do hope so, and I work in what I needed from Mr. Ducks and Drakes. Never met K. I only saw pictures of him, read about his life and read his testimonies. Fascinating, isn’t it? how casually we pick up stones on a shore and in casual play come upon all kinds of wonderful realizations.
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