Mind Fields: When Nothing Makes Sense

Posted: October 17, 2025 | Author: artrosch | Filed under: Commentary, Mind Fields, The Human Condition | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Commentary, Human Condition, Mind Fields, Writing to be Read | 3 Comments

Background: A sunset Text: Mind Fields by Arthur Rosch, Ideas on the Eternal and the Fleeting

Much of our personal sanity depends on our ability to form a narrative that describes our life in a coherent and stable way. Without that….we’re crazy! And perhaps its necessary to be crazy some of the time, to let the choo choo run off it’s tracks. The main reason craziness is so important is that it often breeds originality.

Here is the question: Is there a Power, a Force, an entity that is either within my body or external to it that “takes care” of me in matters of spiritual and emotional progress? I would like to believe that there is, but I must first be aware that wishful thinking plays a huge part in any such inquiry.

My life experiences seem to demonstrate that there is some sort of “path” which can appear if one makes a commitment to the walking of the path. Who or what supervises the traveling of this path? Is it ME, myself, or is it something that is both of and alien to my personal guise?

I suspect that the only answer to such a question must be found somewhere in my mind or consciousness but that would be a cop out. There apparently is no answer available on the human realm. My inclination is to BELIEVE that such a force does exist. Essentially the question resolves to this: is there a god? I’m a sort of pagan pantheist; I believe that not only is there a god, but there are gods by the millions; beings who live on another plane of life. We can only access this plane via disciplines or sheer grace. They are HERE, but we can’t see them.

About Arthur Rosch

Arthur Rosch is a novelist, musician, photographer and poet. His works are funny, memorable and often compelling. One reviewer said “He’s wicked and feisty, but when he gets you by the guts, he never lets go.” Listeners to his music have compared him to Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, Randy Newman or Mose Allison. These comparisons are flattering but deceptive. Rosch is a stylist, a complete original. His material ranges from sly wit to gripping political commentary.

Arthur was born in the heart of Illinois and grew up in the western suburbs of St. Louis. In his teens he discovered his creative potential while hoping to please a girl. Though she left the scene, Arthur’s creativity stayed behind. In his early twenties he moved to San Francisco and took part in the thriving arts scene. His first literary sale was to Playboy Magazine. The piece went on to receive Playboy’s “Best Story of the Year” award. Arthur also has writing credits in Exquisite Corpse, Shutterbug, eDigital, and Cat Fancy Magazine. He has written five novels, a memoir and a large collection of poetry. His autobiographical novel, Confessions Of An Honest Man won the Honorable Mention award from Writer’s Digest in 2016.

More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com

Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos

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This segment of “Mind Fields” is sponsored by the Roberta Writes blog site, where you can find the poetry, photos, videos, and book reviews by Robbie Cheadle and so much more.

Mind Fields: An Insight In Sight

Posted: September 15, 2025 | Author: artrosch | Filed under: Commentary, Mind Fields, The Human Condition | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Commentary, Human Condition, Mind Fields, Writing to be Read | 2 Comments

Consciousness is a word that describes the phenomenon of processing information so that it turns into experience. Experience is the next phase of consciousness. It feeds back the enhancements it has acquired to its original source in Consciousness.

The human brain is not the seat or source of Consciousness. It’s a tool in the workshops of awareness. It’s complexity may in fact be some kind of microcosmic expression of a macrosmic purpose. Neurons touch stars; this is quantum reality, where everything is interconnected. The source of Consciousness is simply everywhere.

About Arthur Rosch

More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com

Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos

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Mind Fields: Evil

Posted: August 29, 2025 | Author: artrosch | Filed under: Mind Fields, Poetry | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Mind Fields, Poetry, Writing to be Read | 2 Comments

Evil

is the movement of pain

from one place to another.

Evil has a source, a river of fire

rising from Hell. Evil

dwells in the Land of Bad Intentions,

where power is never shared.

Who makes the pain?

How does suffering dive off the board

of one person’s mind

and land

in a pool of fear in someone else’s?

Should I be surprised to find evil

right here, inside myself? Hardly. I know what evil I carry.

I won’t surrender any more

to the cruel aspect of my mind. I can think in polarities,

evil is “this”, good is “that”. I get exhausted with polarities.

Can Evil simply Be? There is no countervailing impulse, no good deed to excuse the causing of pain.

The goal of evil is undeserved suffering. That suffering

is everywhere. The ones who cause it

are also everywhere.

More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com

Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos

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Mind Fields: “Ugly”

Posted: July 30, 2025 | Author: artrosch | Filed under: Mind Fields, Poetry | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Mind Fields, Poetry, Writing to be Read | 2 Comments

Unfortunately

There is really ugly

And I don’t mean an ugly look

I mean an ugly vibe a thing that got loose

Like a contagion

It wears a face

An ugly face

It is shrill

It steams like poop

That’s how ugly and

I’m having a tough time

Getting that shit out of my head. I mean

It’s everywhere

I can’t take a piss without hearing about ugly

Can’t wipe my ass without comparing uglies

And I’m a beautiful lad, trust me, I am.

I don’t like ugly but it’s the opposite of beautiful

And what can you do? That’s the way shit works: there

Isn’t one thing without the other. So if ugly has to exist

I better change myself to accommodate

Make rom in my spirit for such crap cuz it isn’t going away

Any time soon.

About Arthur Rosch

More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com

Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos

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Mind Fields: My Eating Disorders

Posted: June 23, 2025 | Author: artrosch | Filed under: Commentary, essays, Mind Fields | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Eating Disorders, Mental Health, Mind Fields, Writing to be Read | Leave a comment

Keeping The Faith (While Completely Fucked Up)

Arthur Rosch

January 22, 2021, The Year Of The Great Fungus

I have a conceit, i.e. that I should hold the title as “The World’s Most Fucked Up Person”. The only problem is that all of you would also like to hold this same title. Don’t try to con me. I know what you think. The only reason I know what you think is that it’s the same thing that I think.

Or. I used to think. When I recognized that each of us claims this title as the most neurotic person on Earth, I began to have more confidence in myself. Surely, I reasoned, if I am exactly the same amount of fucked up as everyone else, then I must belong to this Family of Man. I’m human. And we all know that there is great dignity to being human. We are builders of pyramids, makers of satellites and space ships.

I have a very weird relationship with food. The first time I grasped that I was deeply crazy was when I began to eat huge amounts of food. I indulged especially in sweets. If I were to make a pie chart of my life (and refrain from eating it), I’m sure it would show huge chunks of time in the bulimia/anorexia’ zone. The worst of my food disorders followed me through adolescence; years seventeen through twenty two. I was out in the world, trying to maneuver by being on or near college campuses.

I had a sneaky way of being anorexic. I deluded myself into thinking that this was a spiritual discipline. I was drawn to exotic food disciplines, like Macrobiotics. It would get me high, exalt me spiritually. By eating small portions of brown rice and onions, chickpeas in barley, I was the paragon of yogic discipline. This was who I wanted myself to be. I got skinny. I weighed 125. On top of this I was taking LSD and smoking weed. I was deep into my purpose, my destiny of becoming a musician of salvation and a figure of reverence. The things that young people think: oh my god!

Then I came to a breaking point. After a year of Macrobiotics I had such a craving for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that I bought the ingredients and took them back to my hidey hole. “What are you doing?” I asked myself. “This is a self betrayal, this is the opposite of Macrobiotic food. You asshole, what a failure you are!” So I ate it. Then I ate something else sweet and gooey. Then I couldn’t stop eating every kind of junk food on the planet. I had been like a spring ready to snap. Boing!

I was so ashamed of myself. This was 1967, before eating disorders had been invented. I was a pioneer. My bulimia wasn’t the pukey kind. It was the Exercise Freakishly type of bulimia, the one where on alternate days I would purge with sweat and effort, then follow with a day of relentless eating: an entire apple pie, backed up by a half gallon of ice cream. After that came the cookies, and so forth. One day exercising. One day binge eating. Back and forth, one followed the other, for more than a year. I looked for help. I went to the college shrink. He said, “I don’t know what’s happening to you and I can’t help you. Besides, you’re not even enrolled as a student at this college”

I lost weight during this time. My waist was a twenty nine or thirty. I was living in a vacant student’s quarter, avoiding the security guys and bedding down with a pad and sleeping bag. I got money from my dad. I worked as a stable boy at a local horse ranch. A stable boy.

I had my drums stashed at the university’s music building in a practice room. I practiced there for hours every day, getting high by all means and experimenting with the limits of my technique. That was the point of not going to college. I let my dad pay for semesters at Western Reserve or Wayne State and then I would slip down to Yellow Springs from Cleveland and hang out with people who talked to trees. I would practice all the time, working through the famous “Stick Control” book and listening to Coltrane records.

This was a pleasant period that lasted about a year. I think that I’m conflating two different periods of time. It doesn’t matter. That’s the way memory works when it sort of fails to work. I think there’s a memory bank in the brain and it gets filled up and needs to be purged once in a while. It’s all just story anyway. Life truly is fiction, it has to be. I just want a subject to write about and my life has been so bizarre that it qualifies as the stuff of novels. That poor guy (that is, myself) didn’t know what lay ahead. He thought that if he took enough acid, did yoga, ate rice and played the drums then he would launch himself into nirvana. It’s not a bad plan, really. The problem was that I was fractured psychologically, harboring behaviors that would shame me again and again.

These were adolescent ordeals, but they were precursors to my future. In 1967 my eighteen year old self dreamed of cosmic unity while the biggest thing that lay ahead of me was heroin addiction. I interrogated my psyche by reading about psychology. After that came years of therapy. I was determined to save myself.

It took a long time, but none of it can be repudiated. It’s lucky I’m still alive and well.

I’m still slightly food disordered. I control, compensate, manage. Mostly I exercise.

I get a lot of exercise.

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About Arthur Rosch

More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com

Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos

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Mind Fields: How Humble I Am

Posted: May 30, 2025 | Author: artrosch | Filed under: Creativity, Mind Fields, Reflections, Self-Discovery | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Artistic Talent, Mind Fields, Reflections, Writing to be Read | 1 Comment

In spite of my flamboyant reputation, I must admit that am innately modest and humble. I am, of course, joking. Having reached an age where I have experienced numerous great THUDS from life, I don’t have the conceit anymore to come out and tell everyone how great I am. Maybe that’s a problem. I know who I am. I’m a great artist. Unfortunately there’s no way to prove this assertion. Most great artists know they’re great. No one can talk them out of that notion.

For every great artist there’s another hundred million who think they are great artists. But they aren’t. How does one tell the difference? Damned if I know. Having a large audience doesn’t make one an artist. Nor does having a small audience. I would guess that one of the biggest tips that one is in the presence of mediocre art is the amount of sentimentality contained in the art itself. I recognize myself as a great artist by my ability to connect with the deepest regions of creative inquiry. You can take that or leave it. That just means that I received a gift from God and I was astute enough to treasure and protect it. That’s what talent is: god’s gift to you.

My writing tongue speaks as in a conversation with a friend. My music tongue sings as if playing with the birds in our tree. Making art is a process of extracting Truth from the sloppy ores of earthly life. Art is finding meaning in Existence and putting it into a form that communicates. When art becomes dishonest it stops being art. The truthful exposure of yourself is essential to obey the guiding spirit of art. most of the time art will contain an element of beauty regardless of how dark the subject matter.

As an artist I have greatness. As a human being not so much. I’ve been a pathetic human being for decades. These days less pathetic; I’ve changed a lot by doing the work of deep psychothereapy . It’s often the case that an artist is so focused on the art that he or she forgets how to behave. That’s how I used to be.

Awareness of myself as an artist came to me at fifteen. I was in love with a pink blonde girl who was a sex addict. She was’nt a sex addict with me which became the topic of extensive wheedling conversation. She did one good thing for me. She helped me turn my suffering into art. From that point forward I have never deviated from my core identity.

Art never stops. The practice of one’s craft never stops. The practice is your companion through life. Your instrument, your paint brush, the limbs of your body. These things you train every day. The quest for Art resembles a combination of athletic and priestly discipline. Thecalling of art requires much study.

It has been often said that it takes Genius to see Genius. That may be the reason so many genii remain invisible, like the spirits who inhabit the hollows.

Genius is lonely. I am always out there in the crazy-sphere, where my mind occupies itself with stupid things.

I admire people who are unique and know it. I admire people who retain their consideration for others in spite of their talents. Talent may buy you a hamburger but only character will help you digest it.

About Arthur Rosch

More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com

Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos

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Mind Fields: What Is A Jazz Musician?

Posted: April 30, 2025 | Author: artrosch | Filed under: Mind Fields, music | Tags: Art, Arthur Rosch, Jazz, Mind Fields, music, news, Reviews, Writing to be Read | 10 Comments

What makes a jazz musician?

The first word that comes to mind is Commitment.

Jazz is a high-order musical language that has developed by incorporating various other musical languages. Blues and classical techniques are fused in an ongoing exploration of sonic vocabularies. It is a complex, demanding musical discipline that requires time and effort. Jazz began as an American language because it arose from the experience of black Americans in the formation of our culture. Having survived slavery and all the rest of it, the African Americans developed identities unique in the world. These musicians have their roots in southern blues, gospel and church music. When combined with virtuoso classical techniques, The music that emerges is emotional, loose, given to hyperbole both dark and funny. The Blues is like the bottom layer of a pyramid: everything else is built on top of this idiom. Jazz maintains the cries of both pleasure and suffering that arrived on the guitar strings of early blues musicians. The singing voice has some gravel in it: slightly hoarse and redolent of something more ancient, something like voodoo magic. In jazz it is the Mysterious that beckons so powerfully. It is a musical world of spells and trances, of going ever farther “out” but never straying from its roots.

Jazz has spread across the world. Go anywhere: go to Japan. you’ll find jazz. Go to Europe, go to Thailand, go to California. Jazz is everywhere you go.

To go back to the original question: what is a jazz musician? It is a musician dedicated to long hours of practice and study. Jazz is difficult to master. It requires intellectual exertion and physical strength. At the heart of all this mighty effort is the thing that keeps jazz active: love. Ask anyone involved in jazz music and you’ll find this passionate heart beating with every breath. We love jazz as passionately as we love anything at all. We are a lot like priests of a universal religion.

I was just a child when I was first embraced by jazz. I was twelve and playing trumpet when I acquired two LPs. I had The Birth Of The Cool, by Miles Davis, and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Blakey’s drums are signature: chotta chotta boom boom, and the oceanic wash of his color cymbal as he holds the time in his limbs. What a band! Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan, Jimmie Meritt, Wynton Kelly. Wow!

A musician who is devoted to jazz can expect a hard road. Jazz becomes commercially viable by way of dilution. The less “real” jazz is in it, the more money it makes. This requires wrenching choices in the lives of musicians.

Not everyone is Stan Getz. He got lucky and…he was white. He landed a hit tune, a bossa nova, and he made a ton of money. But Getz was a very fine jazz player. Getz played his jazz at all of his gigs, pausing only to render his hit Brazilian tune for the audience. One could say that “he sold out but gave all his profits to jazz.” No harm for Stan Getz: only respect.

The only thing easy about jazz is the word “play”. That’s what jazz is. A game to be played, a musical puzzle that needs resolution, figuring out how it works, why it works and when it works. Ask any jazz player how much fun it is to play with one’s peers. It is FUN! Nothing beats playing with others whose abilities are matched to one’s own. Or better, yet, playing with more advanced musicians in order to learn from mentors. Jazz is love, fun, blues, bossa, soulful, adventurous, mystical and profound.

About Arthur Rosch

Arthur also has writing credits in Exquisite Corpse, Shutterbug, eDigital, and Cat Fancy Magazine. He has written five novels, a memoir and a large collection of poetry. His autobiographical novel, Confessions Of An Honest Man won the Honorable Mention award from Writer’s Digest in 2016.

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Mind Fields: This Is How I Think

Posted: March 17, 2025 | Author: artrosch | Filed under: essays, Mental Health, Mind Fields, Opinion, Self-Help | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Mind Fields, Writing to be Read | 1 Comment

I have a bit of a crush on a woman. It’s harmless. I don’t plan to do anything about this crush. I have everything I need. We are colleagues in a psychotherapy group and some strange osmosis took place. We connected briefly. We shared one another’s status vis a vis relationships. Neither of us is “available”. For about a week I convinced myself that she was thinking about me. I sent a couple of emails that I now regret sending. I had the conceit that she was as enmeshed with me as I was enmeshed with her. I now ask myself this question: what made me think that I was important in this woman’s life?

I look at my own grandiosity. I thought it was banished from my psyche, but…uh oh…here it is again in a new form. Self-importance is not attractive. There are NO important people. Anywhere. If you think otherwise you haven’t grasped the sheer SCALE of existence. Consciousness is important because that’s what everything IS. The relative importance of a human being within the structure of consciousness is a passing conceit.

The grandeur, wisdom and compassion of the Highest Power is far far beyond our grasp. It is utterly inclusive and envelopes everything in the physical world, the soul world, the spirit world, in all the worlds. I use the word “world” as a metaphor for certain structures in the Realm of Everything. If this is a difficult concept, just imagine an onion made from layers of thought. The core of this onion resembles a stellar object, such as a Black hole. This Realm subsumes the Permanent and the Impermanent as complimentary aspects of The One Truth….or whatever you want to call it.

It’s refreshing to drop this facade of self-importance. I’ve got an ego. It’s pretty tattered and irrelevant at this point but it still holds sway in my psyche. I want to be admired, respected, loved, and I want, especially, to be understood. I also want to have the resources to return this regard with affection. I have not always been a warm person. This is an ability to connect with people in a way that is safe for everyone. Let’s just say that I’m getting there.

I have too much invested in my appearance. I’m in love with my own face. That isn’t always a bad thing. I am confident in my identity but I still have psychological problems. I hope to minimize my propensity for delusions, obsessions and over-excitement. I simply accept my problems as integral to my life’s narrative.

I can’t put it more succinctly than this: today I hope to be less ignorant and stupid than I was yesterday.