Great American Poets Series: Robert Frost

MARY sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage
To meet him in the doorway with the news
And put him on his guard. “ Anna is back.” 
She pushed him outward with her through the door
And shut it after her...

-----
she resides at
http://futureofmypast.blogspot.com/

Mythic Landscapes Nov 10 2009

The Myth of Sisyphos:  eternally building and re-building the Three Gorges Dam. After completion, Sisyphos goes on the prepare for the Beijing Olympics. At completion, it's back to square one at Three Gorges, and so on and so on...
Sisyphos is the guy in red in the middle.

-----

Stella, the conductress on the Styx Subway, the subway in the Underworld and running to the Underworld...all Underworld production and materials.

Stella is the waning moon, also, and the goddess of the End of Oktoberfest:

Welcome

I would like to welcome Anita.
I just noticed her this morning.
I believed I welcomed everyone else.

I'm not sure, though. The pictures don't always show up;
this morning all the pictures were there, and things looked
different.
And - of course - I have totally forgotten how to look up friends
and learn something about them...

I shall have to do it tomorrow morning, because today I start a part-time job...
I drive to the asphalt Paranoid Archipelago of the spring
of 2008 - it was in one of the peace poems from then.
I remember it well as a mostly deserted mall with way to many
parking spaces, and asphalt crumbled like rogue waves upon
an urban shore...
and 2 check cashing stores!

Anyway, I welcome you to my library ( where I 'net from ), friends.

Mystery

Some things are just very mysterious to me. I remember when I started writing a poem a week for peace - fasting one day, too - and I never thought to be 127 weeks on; more than 2 years...2 years and 23 weeks to be precise. ( the link is on the right...that thing about "my other site" and "peace-weaving" or whatever conceit ruled me at the time.)

Sometimes the poems are mysterious, but become domesticated as time wears on, as if a wild lion raised in the belt of civilization becomes as docile as a fat tabby cat.
But sometimes they remain mysterious and wild, running like wild children who are lost from their mothers - or who are cast out from their villages - and are raised by a troop of ghazelles in the Tassili n'Ajjer desert in Algeria; awesome youth,  remote, untutored and unkempt, yet bearing all the lineaments of humanity - and overwhelming in their beauty.

This poem below still haunts me a year on.
There is a line: 

Then from a tangled thicket
I grasped a ring of lapis lazuli,
the joint of 2 bones, and pupil
of the brilliant eye, and was born...

It still makes me faint-headed; it is as if God let me perform the miracle of life, and from nothing came wonderful being...and - when I reflect - I realize that is true, and I did have a child: I am a father. Yet sometimes the creation and nurture of life strikes us as so mundane and pedestrian; we even give up the lives we consider superfluous; sometimes we think "father" or "mother" a really poor job description, and we pass on it for something better.
I never speak of abortion. But it requires the belief that the past and our grandsires do not stand behind us, pushing us, nor do those other beings of great power stand in front of us in our futures, pulling us, and that we are not in the eye of a Present Immediate of a vastly baroque and byzantine creation...so we stand squandering the magic, throwing away the baraka...

To grasp a ring and 2 bones, and thus to be the focus of the greatest mystery...life!
To be born!
Let me live, and let me be born to the ferocious mothers of the desert, coming to the rivulet to drink in the wasteland where an oasis is a singular olive tree. Let me live, and let the wilderness teach me, and let me learn nobility and honor East of your Eden.
Let me live with troops and pods and packs, then, if cities are not to be my home. Let me run naked, if I am not to be swaddled in mankind's cloth.
If your societies have degraded life, send me to the badlands, where every force alive strives to increase life and well-being in the face of great odds!

Let me crown the earth. Let me be happy to have been born, and let the earth be happy to have borne me.

CHRISTMAS 2008

The Trees

I used to be a tree,
and grew upon a hill;
I used to be arboreal
and deep roots immobile
I thought imprisoned me.
Then from a tangled thicket
I grasped a ring of lapis lazuli,
the joint of 2 bones, and pupil
of the brilliant eye, and was born
my parents most loved fruit
in a storm of heat at
the rising of the Pleiades.
Now...O, now, I see...
and I shall be
soon again a tree,
maenad queen of windswept hills;
pastor triumphant of animals
that flock the virginal
nativity's flash of light!

Existential HazMat Signs

From Drops Azul Anis S,  http://dropsazulaniss.blogspot.com/

Door signs...possibly from some OSHA ( Occupational Saftey and Health Administration )
catalog for existential hazards:

My Brother: A Reprise

Someone has asked me to re-run a piece on my brother...something about driving around with a case of beer or something, trying to evade a parole officer. It took a while to find it, but it was from a little over a year ago, in autumn...truly autumn is sad and funny. So here goes:

I went to visit my brother and give him some money. He needs ID. His PO (parole officer) has been after him to get his ID. He said it was something to do with his DNA test. "DNA test?", I said. "Why a DNA test?" I was wondering just how frivolous one can be with one's money.
"Anybody with a felony conviction gets a DNA test", he said. "Oh," I mused, wondering at the marvelous technology and the cesspool of the Justice system. One gets a lot of information and hands it over to creeps. His PO says that if he does not get his ID, then it will be a misdemeanor.
"Oh...," I decided to be willfully obtuse. "...perhaps they'll give you another DNA test for that." "Yeah," he laughed. It was debated whether he should bring it up to his PO, something like saying that he knew he needed another DNA test for failing to procure ID, producing a plastic specimen cup, brandishing it in her parole official face, and asking for a Playboy.

His PO was a good looking lady. I saw her once. Twice actually. Well, more like 11 times, if the truth be told. And that omits the glimpses in the rear view mirror. This all came about one afternoon earlier in the year, in the summer of 2007, when I had taken him to the store. He has no car and no driver's license ( a piece of ID). My job is to help, I guess. So as we were finishing getting the necessities, I asked whether he needed some beer. "Sure," he said. "That always comes in handy." He's not supposed to drink. Whether that is court mandated or comes from his history of hepatitis C, I do not know. I just know he does, and why make him walk to The Licker Locker after I go?
Furthermore, he lives, as it were, in the sights or cross hairs of three bars or liquor service restaurants. He is firmly triangulated and they have him cornered. So we got a 12-pack of suds. We checked out and took the groceries to the car, baking in the sun, where we put the bags in the back seat and the beer in the front seat, between us, in order to keep it cool when we drove, right in front of the A/C.

As we arrived at the parking lot by his abode, I turned the car in and noticed two ladies standing in the thoroughfare and talking. "Gosh," I said. "It's nice to see two ladies who aren't talking on cell phones." "Gadfrey," he said. "That's my PO!"
Now he said this with a bit of warmth, leading me to conclude that this was not an opportune crossing of paths. He threw his left arm over the 12 pack, trying to obscure its cover, a cover painted and inked with vibrantly cool propaganda, dancing bears, gushing mountain streams, and happy brewmeisters. "You don't want her to see the beer?" I asked.
"NO."
So I ducked down a side aisle and began cruising the parking lot, up and down, back and forth, just as I usually do when looking for a meter with time on it. Fortunately, the lot was just big enough that the ladies did not eventually decide that they needed to unlimber their MACE cannisters on us. They were both blonde. Well, who isn't these days? I mean, who of their age and in Port Desespoir. They were paradigmatic emblems of the femme d'affaires; no-nonsense women of the world. Certainly the one called " my PO " must be.

I kept trying to get a gander of her in the rear view. I couldn't approach too close. I had thoughts of dominatrices scowling at us. Crash...or Clunk actually...the 12 pack fell forward off the seat! "That ought to be fizzy enough." I said. My brother scrabbled the cube of liquid delight back onto the seat. "Why don't we drive by and pop one open and spray them?" I said. He laughed. Then the A/C quit. It had always been iffy. I usually did not use it. I think what happened is that the freon that was left decided it was time to join its brothers and sisters up, up, way up there in the Green Pastures of the Ozone Layer. So the beer was not only stirred and shaken, but it was now going to warm up. We drove on.

After a while, I began to wonder what happens to a 12 pack in critical condition. Would it eventually explode and take out half of downtown? Bullets of sweat began to form upon our troubled brows. Finally, the gab fest ended. The two blondes lionesses shook their manes, and each strode off as regally as Aiyesha, looking for men to enslave and yoke to their chariots. Slowly, we crept around a corner, watching the PO get into her car, fiddle with the seat belt, pick up a cell phone, then think better of it, and start the engine. Her red back ups glowed promisingly. I came up slowly, looked around, saw she had 1 hour left on her meter, and slid the 1991 Marquis into the spot as gracefully as a an admiral guiding the USS Forrestall into dry dock.
Actually, I think the Marquis has more "flight deck" than does the Forrestall. We slowly got out of the car. The coast was clear. I carried the loot to the front door of his building. It was a close call. Back to the present.

We talked about the weather. Since the weather is snafu, I asked whether he'd had any tornado warnings in Port Desespoir. "No," he said, adding "The power went out, though." He sat silently for a moment. "We had two, no, three tornado warnings," I said. " You had a power outage?" I asked, remembering the big outage of 2000 or whenever it was...already forgotten and the power grid is just slightly better than Baghdad's.
"Yeah. You know, when there's an outage, the first thing you think is 'Did I pay the bill?' "
I pondered. "Yeah." I said..." Same with a tornado..."
He waited and I wondered how I was going to finish this bit of nonsense.
"...you see the tornado and you wonder if it's the REPO tornado, you know, if you didn't pay the bills..."
He laughed. "Yeah. Gonna take you, your car, your furncher...gonna take your whole house! and repo 'em!"
"Like Oz...and dump your sorry ass just over the county line...good riddance."
We laughed. We talked a bit more. It was late, so I gave him some currency as well as the check I had delivered. He would not get to a bank until morning. I thought he might need money. He smelled strongly of beer and its by-products. We parted.
I did not cry. I did not cry because I had already cried. I had paid my crying forward, as the snappy phrase goes. It is Autumn and one expects to cry. Not as much as at Christmas, of course, because holidays are just made for crying and depression and fighting. In Autumn I regret the passing of time. I only yearn to hold on due to my mistakes, the loves I screwed up, the friends I messed with, the children I let down... If everything was perfect, I'd go right now.

Democrats Or Republicans?

It is too late to worry which party to vote for: the destruction has been done.

Wondering whether to vote D or R is like the inhabitants of Babylon wondering whether to use the debris of the recently destroyed Tower of Babel to build fences, or to ship it to the dump; it's small stuff - the big show already took place.

We should have wondered whether to live lives of honor, courage, righteousness; we should have wondered why we are not humble before God, but instead are arrogant in our familiarity with what we foolishly believe is the mind of God.

There is a future.
It is a good future.
It is a bright and wonderful future...but it is not for the generation of vipers.

Nostalgia Nov 7 2009

The three nephews came for a visit, Aloysius, Ayden, and Austin.

They had flown in on Lucky Airlines. I assume this airline originates in Vegas or some other pilgrims' sanctuary. If you recall, the last time I had dealings with the Gang of Three was subsequent to their posing as journalists in some country in which a color-coded revolution was taking place: somewhere west of Mandalay.

We had tea (courtesy The Grace Tea Co. of NY, NY.) and scones.
I told them I had just visited a Senior Housing development in Port Desespoir, looking for a place for my brother, Absalom, to live. (a lot of "A" names in this family!)
One place had large closets in the master bedroom, and to emphasize the fact, the interior designer had set up a little tableau of chairs and table set for tea, big enough for the society of any grandchild with pretensions to society. All very cozy and idyllic.
Something about the closet, though. Something...something...vaguely I was reminded of Freddie Krueger in one of his films. "Nightmare at the Plaza", or something like that.

Of course, my brother is dead set against moving. He has apparently accumulated enough kindred spirits on the Street Down by the Docks - that's its name: "The Street Down by the Docks" ! - to have set up an Algonquin Round Table of wits and good fellows, and he does not wish to leave them. Oh, he could still get public transport back, but it is the life blood of the streets - or the one street, to be exact - which draws him. He says that if he were to have to move, you may as well ring up the vicar, tip the deacon, polish up the skills of the belfry's change ringers, and mark x on May the 5th, for it would be a poison shirt upon his back, a toxic needle into the arm...a nail into his coffin, and he would soon be dead.
Having known him so long, I mentally checked my calendar, and saw the date was open...but I knew he spoke in jest. May the 5th was totally open, and would be a fabulous day for a funeral. I am sure that the people who attended would come back and regale me with long tales of the magnificence of the Church, the tear in the eye of the beadle, the flowers arrayed like the muted sobbing of clouds...

...the cortege...the drive to the cemetery...the inexplicable disappearance of the priest at the cemetery, as the mourners looked at each other with suspicion...the search for an appropriate person - whom all trusted and was, technically, neutral - to say a few words...
...perhaps our friend Linda might be imposed upon...we used her once when the rabbi disappeared at a wedding...she paints eyeballs on furniture for a living, and, by all accounts, is considered a most spiritual type of being...sort of a shaman, if you will...of course, this veering off from regular High Church rituals into what appears to be paganism will probably not be a good sign...

Back to the Senior Housing. I said to him that I thought we were cremating you and throwing the ashes under a bus. He laughed and said that if that were to happen, how could he have his motto engraved upon his tombstone? How, indeed? Then he asked whether I remembered his chosen epitaph.
I tried the one of W.C. Fields, but that was not it.
I tried Oliver Cromwell's, but - alas! - again not the correct inscripture.
By now he was becoming visibly upset, seeing as no one would get the epitaph correct, and he may end up with something as appalling as one of my poems upon his stone. He might have to endure yet a while to ensure that the motto - perhaps it was a limerick? - be properly handled.
I asked why he didn't just go out and buy a stone, have it engraved, proof it, and be done. Put it in the tub for the time being, and take one's ablutions at the bus terminal.
He did consider this for a short spell, deciding finally the floor joists where he lived would probably give way under the weight, dumping his possessions one inauspicious day into the tattoo parlor downstairs.

So, the boys A and I talked about nostalgia and the old days.
I have never been one big on the old days. I agree with Henry Ford: History is pure bunkum...but you have to be well schooled in it to catch out the other sharp fellow who's fixing to run a scam by you, even as we speak here!

I saw the movie Putney Swope for the very first time the other day. I was amazed. There is a lot that was dated; there was a lot that was stupid; but there was a lot that was totally Sorcerer's Apprentice, totally wizard, totally schoolboy amazing.

I saw an artefact from that time, and it was unalloyed with my other memories. Everything about the old days and goldie oldies is real taffy of memory, and for me hard to chew. But this was new sprung, and it blew me away.
It was something that I had ignored, not read a review about, not seen a trailer for. I had not read a book on the Sixties with heavy historical musings on the cinema of the times, the rise of black cinema, the meaning for our times, or any of that other blather we always hear...and immediately ignore.

It allowed me to see exactly what was what, reminded me exactly how I felt, how I laughed, how I cried, how I loved back then.

It was the proverbial "blast from the past".

It was the prize of innocence of our age. It showed me what we all really were; it was not a memory like furniture overlaid with eras of re-painted memories - like The Greatest Generation - until the paint becomes so thick it even obscures the outline of the furniture's wood.
It was a prize, and it was real.

Look for something similar.
Remember what we all once were, before the present age.
Look at our souls, and compare it to what we've become.

History that is stuck in the same groove, that repeats the same moral over and over, that overlays actions with an shellac integument of thoughtless words... such History is Bunk!

Comment On Gaza Nativity

My friend Ruth commented on the Gaza Nativity post.
It caused me to think more about it, and I recalled Yeat's The Second Coming:


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?



It's like watching a disaster movie - the world's longest disaster movie - unfold before our eyes, and you know what's going to happen, but the people on the screen cannot see what's coming until too late.
 
The falcon is the ways of war and violence, so well taught and studied in the 20th century; in this, the 21st century, the falcon cannot hear the falconer, and thus cannot obey: war and violence are on their own.
This is the basis for the common myth of the revolt of the machines, the basis for the Terminator films and many others: something man made which escapes his grasp, and he just does not know how to call it back.
 
War has now escaped out control.
We are always on the verge of putting more troops in, or pulling more troops out. Our days and nights are filled with wars and rumours of wars. In Israel, Martin Buber's Ich und Du ( I and Thou), has a grisly look of confrontation.The center of our morality cannot hold us in our appointed courses anymore, and things fall apart.
This indeed is Schumpeter's "creative destruction", the lapse into chaos pregnant with a second coming. Now I understand: the hour of the rough beast has come; having waited 20 centuries, this unkempt watcher is ready to pounce.

I believe that all religions descended from Abraham are on the anvil of history. The time of Faith is now.

Gaza Nativity Scene

Sent from my friend, Mr. Ayyub Khan of Pakistan.

For some reason, he was in Gaza earlier in the year, and he took some candids of various atrocities.

If we cannot solve this, we are doomed.

In Afghan Fields The Poppies Blow...

This morning in The Asia Times:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KK03Df04.html

US goofs the Afghan election
By M K Bhadrakumar

...It was one thing to be dismissive when the former director general of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), General Hamil Gul, alleged that American military aircraft were being used for drug trafficking in Afghanistan. It might also have been expedient to simply ignore the issue when well-informed Russian sources made media comments that US troops were doing roaring business in drug trafficking in Afghanistan running into hundreds of millions of dollars. But Khodaidad is a highly trained professional who knows what he is talking about.

The Indians know him, and so do the Russians. Khodaidad passed out from the prestigious Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun and was a product of the famous Fronze Military Academy in Moscow. He had a proven record in the communist government in Kabul as a highly decorated general; he led crack paratrooper brigades in the war in the early 1980s and he served as the army commander in the crucial Kunduz and Takhar frontline facing Ahmad Shah Massoud of the Northern Alliance. Britain, where he lived in exile for a decade, knows him too.

Therefore, when Khodaidad said on Sunday that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) contingents from the US, Britain and Canada are "taxing" the production of opium in the regions under their control, he carried a stern warning on behalf of Karazi. It is a simple, direct message: don't throw stones while sitting in a glass cage...

Gosh. We never suspected.

River Morning

The Oreology of Clouds.

The date stamp is wrong. It was 2008. Oreology is - I think - the study of mountains. I think I talked to Ruth once about how we here in the flatlands see the Hindu Kush and Shangri-La in the clouds amassed upon the horizon.

Autumn Morning

Passenger Seat High Tea

Here we are at Harsens Island, Michigan.

We are having high tea. The 3 nephews are somewhere, and will soon arrive in their cars. We are waiting for scones and jam.

Tail-gating is for football.

For the days of autumn, we circle the cars around, and have Passenger-seating: tea ( courtesy The Grace Tea Company, NY, NY. ), and sweets.

Autumn is so strange and mixes sweet and sour, hope and disappointment, life and death.
 I think this is how Orpheus spent his time before popping off to Hades to recapture Eurydice: it was in the Fall, and he sat looking around, remembering...

Wii Bowling

I was snooping around senior housing in Port Desespoir today, looking for a place for my brother. At one place there was a Wii hooked up to a large TV, and some ancient numbers were Wii bowling.

I have never done or played Wii.

I don't think I'd like Wii bowling; it just doesn't have the Lebowski of real bowling balls and wooden alleys.

The real Big Lebowski.

pix: http://bragaparks.blogspot.com/2009/07/posters-polacos.html

A Taste of Flu:2

My daughter in Maryland received her H1N1 shot today.

The process took 5 hours, about evenly split between standing in line outside the hospital and queued up inside.

She has asthma, so she needed the injection. They took 2 patients at a time, so she went into the inoculation room with another lady. The other lady wanted an injection for some reason. The reason was not one of the approved reason for not using the vaccine nasally.

It turns out, they had exactly 1 shot left; exactly 1. Everything after that would be administered nasally.

So my daughter said, Ha! I have asthma!

and received her shot.

The other lady was a bit pissed.

We still have none here.

My daughter said that after standing in line outside for 2 hours, and watching the occasional medical helicoter land on the hospital, it all began to remind her of "The Fall of Saigon".

I don't know what happened to the people after her who needed the injection. I guess they had to return home.

Criminal Enterprises

An office in the Headquarters of Beagle Boys, Inc.
(I know; the Beagle Boys didn't wear stripes.)

pix: black and white dreams

Greek Mythology For Today:1

Winged Mercury chats up Athena in the snow.

pix: black and white dreams

The Curse Of Empires

Jumanji Game Board

The curse or bane, if you will, of empires is Reality.

Reality is the left upper-cut to the chin of Sargon, Caesar, and Hitler. In short, it is the world of facts which so quickly and elegantly derails the freight train of the imagination.

In effect, how do you run it?

Let me put this proposition forward:  A country which cannot control its own financial system in such a manner as to avoid widespread ruin and inequity is not a country that can run an empire.
The entire neo-conservative undertaking of American Empire was never, ever founded on ruminations about such homely things as: how shall we pay for it? Or, rather, when the question was put to the neo-cons, their answer was something along the order that it would pay for itself. In such a fashion they believed, for example, that our future client state of Iraq would reimburse us for our efforts through oil prices and profits.

As Max Lerner points out on the Nazi enterprise in 1941, if it were to be successful to a degree, it would face the terrible dilemma of mere existence after the wars were over, for the Nazi economy was based on war and the production of war material; the Nazi economy was an unreal economy, an economy of Mordor.

The stuff of childrens' minds, a Neverland of Empire! Glorious Jumanji of the present age!

The Unknown Option

Choppers in Afghanistan

The Asia Times
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KJ29Df01.html


Helicopter rumors refuse to die

By Ahmad Kawoosh

MAZAR-E-SHARIF - Persistent accounts of Western forces in Afghanistan using their helicopters to ferry Taliban fighters, strongly denied by the military, is feeding mistrust of the forces that are supposed to be bringing order to the country.

One such tale came from a soldier from the 209th Shahin Corps of the Afghan National Army, fighting against the growing insurgency in Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan. Over several months, he had taken part in several pitched battles against the armed opposition.

"Just when the police and army managed to surround the Taliban in a village of Qala-e-Zaal district, we saw helicopters land with support teams," he said. "They managed to rescue their friends from our encirclement, and even to inflict defeat on the Afghan National Army." ...

2 Big 2 Fail, (or be 4gotten)

The Secretary of the Treasury apparently telephones a set of big bankers every day.
I suppose the Fed Chairman does pretty much the same.

I do not believe they call my uncle Aloysius ( pronounced A loi' shus ) down at the Credit Union for updates.

To be too big to fail means we have reached a point where the distinction between State and Business has become so hazy as to disappear.

"Private Enterprise" is only an empty phrase when we speak of things which are so important, that we must spend tax money to rescue them...not just once...nor twice, but always! Too big to fail means "forever".
-----
note:
It is also Socialism, and it is National.
I do not mean, however, it is National Socialism.

A Taste of Flu

In my county, the supply of regular flu vaccine has run out, and there is pre-enrollment for the H1N1 - which is not quite yet available. However, as of today, pre-enrollment is temporarily suspended.

This is all from the Oakland County, Michgan, Health Department web site at a few minutes ago.

An interesting turn of events.
I remember getting a swine flu shot back in '76...
I wonder if this sense of genial frustration is what is experienced in Baghdad when the power goes out...

Ahh, if Gods wills...we get the flu. If not, we don't.
That's the spirit.

Is God Perfect?

God is as perfect as our lives are not.

Very often, God is the perfect refuge, the perfect home, the excellent self-sufficiency where we live without being prey to other men with ravenous appetites, nor subject to a world disdsainful of our weaknesses, a world ready to wash us away with tsunamis, or drop a mountain on our heads.

Very often God is the garden in the Persian carpet, the flowing streams of Eden.

Is God absolute perfection? Only as much as our lives are not.
The more things - good or bad - we say about God..............the more we open up our hearts of darkness for future generations to be appalled.

Atheism

I never really had the chance to be an atheist.
I tried to at University, but it was all rather as if I had joined the fraternity where they chug-a-lugged divinity at toga parties...so I never really had a shot at it.

I mean, when I tried to be an unbeliever, I always checked back to see how His Nibs was doing, whether my unbelief had broken His heart and gone zero at the bone. I realized that after some months, I hadn't telephoned, and He might be worrying. I got His check every month, so there was no need of funds. I took it and cashed it at the Bank of Rake's Progress, just down the way.

I couldn't get away. He tasked me then, and He tasks me now.
It was all very much like I were Captain Ahab, retired from the sea, and sitting quite comfortably in the local Nantucket pub, only to be cruelly fronted by the White Whale like some ghastly cetacean Ancient Mariner...his back porcupined with spikey harpoons...reminding me my life is not over...not by a long shot!

What would the story be...told from the perspective of Moby Dick? Does he feel sorrow for those profane and blasphemous rascals pursuing him in their cannibal whaling boats -  boats chased and fitted with dead whales' bones - and hearts filled with passion?
What does He feel for those who do not pursue with fire in their eyes?
I guess...
I guess He calls them Ishmael.

Homeland Security For Dummies

We have a system in place where we can safely board a passenger airplane, safe from terrorists and hijackers, but not safe from the pilot and co-pilot.
If there had been one of those metal security cockpit doors on the plane, and it had been locked, how would the rest of the flight crew gotten inside to awake the pilot?

I propose a law that states either the pilot or co-pilot must be awake at any time.

(Was one of the Heene children aboard that plane ?!)

Symbols

I realized how difficult it is to talk about symbols when I read a blog wherein was said:
http://pmulder.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html

" ...explains the use of the emotional symbols   :-),  ;-)  ... "

where the author is talking about happy-faces-in-type as symbolic of emotional states.

I think "symbol" should be a carrier of meaning. A happy face doesn't "mean" anything necessarily; it is a representation or mimicry.

Happy faces are "billboards", "stand-ins", or "typesetters' puns". To call them "symbols" really messes things up.

Res Novae Interruptae

Or "Revolution Interrupted".

From PoliticFact.com:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/22/barack-obama/obama-roosevelt-socialist-communist/

The president was accused of being "a socialist, not a Democrat." His plan was described as "undisguised state socialism." One critic, who controlled some powerful media outlets, suggested that communists had infiltrated the president's administration.

...

• "Roosevelt is a socialist, not a Democrat," declared Republican Rep. Robert Rich of Pennsylvania during a debate on the House floor on July 23, 1935. That remark came after Republicans hinted they were considering a move to impeach Roosevelt, according to the New York Times.


• "The New Deal is now undisguised state socialism, declared Senator Simeon D. Fess (R-Ohio) today as he pictured President Roosevelt as the New Deal's leading socialist," reported the Chicago Daily Tribune on Aug. 7, 1934. "The president's recent statements," Fess said, "remove any doubt of his policy of state socialism, which necessitates increased activities of the government in either ownership or operation of industry, or both."

• "The Russian newspapers during the last election [1932] published the photograph of Franklin D. Roosevelt over the caption, 'The first communistic President of the United States,'" said Sen. Thomas Schall, a Republican from Minnesota. "Evidently the Russian newspapers had knowledge concerning the ultimate intent of the President, which had been carefully withheld from the voters in this country. In fact, the voters of the United States were meticulously misled as to such intentions." We found Schall's comments in the book, All But the People: Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Critics, 1933-1939.

The critic who controlled media outlets was William Randolph Hearst:

"On September 6, Hearst newspapers began a prolonged assault on the administration. The New York American published a front-page editorial titled, 'The Radical Brand on the New Deal.' It charged that radical and communist leaders had already given their approval to support Roosevelt against Landon. During the next two weeks Hearst editors trumpeted these recurring themes: that communists had infiltrated the New Deal; that communism was un-American and undemocratic; that 'America can only judge Mr. Roosevelt and his administration by the strange silence that has prevailed in official quarters.'"

That was as much as Roosevelt was willing to take. The White House issued a statement that mentioned "a certain notorious newspaper owner," and rebutted the accusations. The statement concluded, "The American people will not permit their attention to be diverted from real issues to fake issues which no patriotic, honorable, decent citizen would purposefully inject into American affairs."

It is the same fight.
There will be no new World War II to interrupt it...at least, none that we are aware of yet.
So these issues will be fought out.

It is the same fight.
That's why I have started reading columnists and commentators from that era, in order to gain insights free from my own personal involvement. To most of us, those people of 70 years ago are as remote as Noah.

We are in the midst of something vastly complex. Some of us can see only what the Wall Street Journal tells them to see, some see politics, some see ecological issues...
It is all these.

It's like we were an Afghan wedding party, dancing, smiling, and we are just about to shoot our rifles into the air to celebrate...

Shah On A Prayer Rug

Revolutions are usually captured by a new despot who fought against the previous despot. The freedoms Iran should have experienced after Khomeini never materialized, disappeared down the sink of clerical despotism.

What is the position of Khameini in Iran?

He is nothing more than the old Shah on a prayer rug.

Paradox & Irony & Contradiction In Christianity, Islam, and Judaism

The Tower of Babel

Arrogance is the absence of Irony.
Humility is the acceptance of Irony.

A Tale of Irony: The Tower of Babel
When mankind wished to build a tower to reach the heavens where God was, their project was thrown down, their unity was destroyed forever, and they were driven out on the face of the eareth, speaking in mutually incomprehensible tongues.

Arrogance could not conceive...
Arrogant hearts could not believe that they were not God's equals, and that they were not worthy of a place in heaven, and that they would not succeed.
Irony: instead of great success, there is abject failure.
Irony: the overturning of events; good becomes bad, the sweet goes sour, the joy becomes tears, the gold becomes a gilded cage...

So far, the 21st century has been our century of Irony: our sense of inviolable security turned to fears, military arrogance turned to desperate struggle, the greatest economy in the world falling into ruin...

The Abrahamic religions are filled with paradox, irony, and contradiction.
We have hitherto seen this as (1) a proof to unbelievers of the falsity of religion, or (2) a mystery to believers, or (3) an embarrasment best ignored.
Assuming the religious geniuses were not fools, and were up to something a bit more interesting than spouting nonsense, what was the point?
The point is not that life is rich and complex; we know it already. I do not need Jesus, Moses, nor the Prophet to inform me of that.
The point is not that life is inherently irrational, illogical, and chaotic.
For there is no point.
If we are dealing with conscious beings who propound these religions, and these beings speak in paradox, irony, and contradiction, it must be very obvious that if there were a "point", there would very soon be an antithetical or ironical "point":  if you love peace, prepare for war;  point "peace", antithesis "war".

We wonder about paradox, irony, and contradiction when we withdraw from the run of events and begin discoursing about the way things are; are they irrational, are they chaotic, are there any lawlike rules? We wonder when we finish the race, when we are out of the running:  ekdromema  and are sitting on the sidelines, talking about the race afterwards.

The genius of religion tells us that we are always in the running: endromema.
The ideals of religion are impossible to us so that we may never attain them, at least to our way of thinking. The race of religious ideals is the perfect Achilles and Tortoise race, where Achilles will never catch up to the tortoise with a head start.
Achilles and the Tortoise is one of Zeno's Paradoxes.

The point is:
Religion is living life as a process.
We are always writing and re-writing the screenplay, making it better and better and tighter and tighter, for that time when the Director calls for it.
When we are called for our screenplay to take over the direction of this film, it has to be "good", and good enough to deal with future paradoxes and ironies.
If our script is bad, heaven help the future, for we here on earth are busy sowing the wind, leaving it to our children to reap the whirlwind.
-----
-----
(for a brief outside discussion on religious contradiction and its discontents, see here: http://sidschwab.blogspot.com/2009/10/namaste.html )

Good

I don't believe in such things as Absolute Truth, nor Absolute Good.
If you wish to turn them into super-duper name tags for the Divine One, go right ahead.

There is Good. There is Bad.
It is quite obvious.
And it is obvious that Good promotes life, love and well-being.

Our problem is not that we cannot see the difference between Good and Bad: our problem is we are too weak to make the proper choice. We have been tutored too long in the ways of weakness.

To emulate the lilies of the field is strength.
To hoard and covet is the weakness of the incomplete.

Koan Of Christianity

Since the only sin in sexual mores espressly condemned in the New Testament is adultery - moicheia - and the divorce rate in the US is at least 50%, it raises questions.

The remnants of Jesus' life we have portray not strictly ideals to be achieved, but ideals impossible to achieve - unless (1) you become superhuman, or (2) you realize that the goal is defined by your consciousness and maintained by your consciousness and supported by your belief and conscious striving.

Once we realize perfection is impossible, we shall have arrived, if and only if we have striven to be where we aren't.
If we have not strived to be good, when we realize absolute perfection is impossible, we will fall away into the old refuse of the earth.
If we have strived to be good, and we attain absolute perfection, we shall be insane.
If we have strived to be good, we realize that perfection is not possible to attain, but is a ceaseless striving: in effect, our good consciousness creates that which is not realizable on the earth: absolute perfection.

Good consciousness is built on good teachings and good actions, no politics, no coercion; no persuasion and no threats. Every bad idea, every vile impulse, everything we can think of doing - even if we have not done it - interferes with our creation of good reality.

This is what Jesus meant by sinning in the heart; if you lust after a woman in your heart, it is the same as adultery.
The lust is not a one time sin; it is an ongoing bad consciousness and weakness; it is born, grows, and lives on through time. It is the tendency to be weak which is ongoing. Averting the sin is nothing compared to destroying the long and involved process of weakness and deceit that leads up to the sin.

What we have gotten used to calling "sin" is nothing but an overt act in a long history of covert fear and loathing. Sin flashes out like a nova; the nova galaxy had been there for millions of years, but remained unnoticed until it lighted up.
We sit up and take notice.
But it is the long process, the history of each individual life that is sinful, not the separate and discrete "sins" which we can notice.

Giorgio De Chirico Gets A Flat

ZombieLand

I was reading some entries earlier in the year of some blogs I have marked down to follow, and I came across an interesting description of cable TV:

http://sidschwab.blogspot.com/2009/06/cutting-back.html
Thursday, June 11, 2009

Cutting Back

...knowing isn't required. Just spouting, taking a predictable position, playing their role, over and over, enlightening no one, adding nothing new...

So, we are all pretty much aware of it, but we do prefer the same brand of delusion, and hate is a much better waker-upper than coffeee, so what the heck?

There is a new Zombie movie out: Zombieland. The trailers for it look terrible, but that's not the point. Zombies and Vampires are so much in our popular art, they form their own genre. Our entertainment depends heavily on the Un-Dead. They are in our minds, in our imagery.
Is the iconography of the Vampire and the Zombie more prevalent than that of God?

I think we imagine ourselves as supremely powerful, supremely extraordinary,... and supremely damned.

 

The Point Of Still Being A Marxist Today

..."The point of still being a Marxist today," Prof. Panitch says, is to think ambitiously, "to recover the spirit of the revolution." Karl Marx, a freshman of 19 at the University of Berlin as his brain began to explode with ideas, sent his father a letter. "There are moments in one's life that represent the limit of a period and at the same time point clearly in a new direction," the young genius wrote. "Every change is partly a swansong, partly an overture to a new epic that is trying to find a form in brilliant colours that are not yet distinct." Surely one can be forgiven for seeing a little pink in the sky.

The Globe & Mail

The 18th Brumaire of Barack Obama
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/the-18th-brumaire-of-barack-obama/article1181115/

It's Not 2012...It's 2011 !!!!

If Mr. Obama cannot galvanize the troops to secure a Congressional majority in the House and Senate in the 2010 elections, this is what will happen:

1) his administration will become more and more ineffective;
2) Republicans will be re-elected in 2012;
3) Republicans will reduce spending, having run on a platform of fiscal responsibility.

However, a country with 9.8% official unemployment - double it for mistakes and underemployment - is not a country truly spending like a drunken sailor.
It may be spending like a drunken sailor when it bails out irresponsible banks, it may be inebriated when it lurches around looking for wars and more military bases, but when it comes to the day to day taking care of business, taking care of the people, it is not seriously over-extended.

Our capacity utilization is less than 68%, so we are not running full out.

The deficit actually should be greater...
Inaction will not wave its magic wand.
We have no prospects - drat! - of a war to the end, as we did in the 1940's.
The rest of the world will not destroy itself, leaving it to us to re-build them.

When the Republicans come back to "straighten things out" by their ideas of fiscal responsibility, remember Phil Gramm, remember the Bush years deficits, remember the Titanic - because it will be the beginning of the end.

Hillsdale Day: October 15

(The memorial day was to have been April 30, the anniversary of Lissa Roche's suicide, but there was a conflict. It is interesting to note that Glenn Beck seems to have a student from Hillsdale, briefly, but there is too much hidden about that part of his life.)

Modern Conservatism betrayed its true nature to view at the incident at Hillsdale College, Michigan, where in 1999, Lissa Roche killed herself.

She had been carrying on a 19 year affair with her father-in-law, George Roche III, the president of Hillsdale College.

...As one of his first acts as president, Roche brought in conservative author and icon Russell Kirk to teach at Hillsdale, but more importantly to give the world notice that Hillsdale was serious about being conservative. If Roche had been as serious about thinking as he was about fund-raising and public relations, he might have noticed that Kirk’s book The Conservative Mind, specifically the chapters on Edmund Burke and John Adams, had some significant things to say about the relationship between reason and appetite, lessons that would have increasing relevance to Hillsdale College under George III’s increasingly autocratic leadership. That meant that Kirk also had something to say about the two strains within conservatism—the libertarian and the traditional—which appetite and reason represented...

George Roche III was great, because he was a great fund raiser for the Conservative causes. He was lionized by Conservatives.
However, you cannot keep up a 19 year affair without people becoming aware. In particular, you cannot commit so heinous an offence as George Roche did, year after year, without people becoming aware of it, yet to frightened to mention it.
Money was God, and the Republican Party had only One God. They looked the other way.

Lissa Roche went out to the gazebo, a central place at Hillsdale, and killed herself.

The entire story is
Death at the Gazebo:Conservatism In Extremis at Hillsdale College
by E. Michael Jones
(note November 24 2011:  http://www.culturewars.com/CultureWars/2000/January/hillsdale.html 
is the location.)

I am not aware where it is available at the present time.
However, its importance is inversely proportional to the oblivion which modern society and media have banished it.

And this Conservative society loved Ayn Rand.
Just as the predators love her today.
Remember that Alan Greenspan was one of her foremost followers, and one of her main sources of economic information.

How the Servant Became a Predator: Finance’s Five Fatal Flaws

 by Bill Black

 http://www.nextnewdeal.net/how-servant-became-predator-finances-five-fatal-flaws

...As financial sector elites became obscenely wealthy through predation and fraud, their psychological incentives to embrace unhealthy, anti-democratic Social Darwinism surged. While they were, by any objective measure, the worst elements of the public, their sycophants in the media and the recipients of their political and charitable contributions worshiped them as heroic. Finance CEOs adopted and spread the myth that they were smarter, harder working, and more innovative than the rest of us. They repeated the story of how they rose to the top entirely through their own brilliance and willingness to embrace risk. All of their employees weren’t simply above average, they told us, but exceptional. They hated collectivism and adored Ayn Rand.

Things To Come

There was a piece in the Times about an airline pilot who was not laid-off, but was reduced in rank to first lieutenant in charge of making "blip......blip" pingy type noises for the sonar machine. Anyway, he now made 1/2 of his previous salary. He now pulled in $34,000 per annum, making less than his wife, who teaches grade school.

Pretty soon, Ohio and North Carolina will be vying with each other not to claim to be the birthplace of Aviation.

So I viewed Things To Come yesterday. Based on H.G.Wells' The Shape of Things to Come, it was produced in 1935 (I think) and directed by Alex Korda.

The Decline of the West notion involves a war starting in 1940 and dragging on until 1966 or so.

-This forecast of the future was based on World War I, where armies remained locked in trench warfare, continously dieing, yet not gaining anything for their blood.

Wells and his adaptors could not know that the War foreseen by them - World War II - would end in total victory for one side.

Of course, it needn't have. The Manhattan Project was anything but a sure thing. If Oppenheimer and General Groves had taken the wrong turn - perhaps following Teller's research on the fusion bomb - there may not have been a bomb in 1945.

What if WW II had dragged on another three years? That would only be 9 years for the Brits, and we have wars nowadays much longer.
What if the Reich had developed their own Fetter Bube ( Fat Boy ) and the Allies and the Reich started blasting atomically?
Where would we be today?

Raymond Massey arrives on the scene of an England ruled by local warlords, much like Afghanistan. Massey is John Cabal, and he is a member now of the United Airmen who have formed Wings Over The World - a group of technicians and specialists and scientists devoted to peace, and having set up their own supra-national group to bring real peace to the world.

- In the 1930's it was still possible to see Science as a real liberator. This was before Science became totally part of the mechanism of war. It was a simpler age - a Hugo Gernsbackian age where plucky boys could make their own laser guns from parts left over from their crystal set receiver.
_______________________________________________

This is where we end that narrative. The rest of the film has its own vision of man's place in the future and man's soul, but I shall leave it for another time.
Right now, I am more interested in the late 1930's. The Depressed economy had not returned to health by the late 1930's; many truly revolutionary things waited until 1935 to start: such as Social Security - which everyone was forced to be a part of - and many parts of the New Deal were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court by 1936. Things were getting better, but slowly.
World War II did not so much end the Depression.
It was a clear victory with the total destruction of the other side's ability to make war that ended the Depression; it was the large scale destruction of Europe that ended the Depression. At this point, there was only the US and the USSR, allies for a bit longer.
The war itself liberated the returning veterans into college and good jobs. The re-building of Europe and the rest of the world let American manufacturing and Industry explode into new heights of growth. There was so much to do that Labor and Management co-existed...they were too busy going to the bank to fight anymore.

Whatever economic re-organization that America was due to undergo in the late 1930's and the 1940's, as the gap between the haves and the have-nots widened, did not occur because of the war. Back in the day, some said that we essentially leap-frogged over social revolution due to the war, because those very GI benefits provided so much for the Middle Class: education for oneself and one's children, help on mortgages, and common bonds of shared emotional experience between man and woman that cut across classes.
These civil bonds were unhealthily strengthened by a Cold War extension of WW II, during which Ideological hysteria was set free: blacklists and McCarthyism.

The blessings have been squandered.
Since the end of the Vietnam war, we have:
1) blundered around looking for war;
2) apparently lost the ability to hold a country once invaded;
3) lost political vision;
4) lost our Manufacturing and Industrial pre-eminence;
5) since 1980 or so, unlinked Government Spending from Ability to Pay, living in a fool's paradise - totally deceived by the faerie lights of our own Myths.

The great things we've done, we don't even recognize them.
One of the greatest Moral and Spiritual achievements of the human race was the refusal of the US and the USSR to use nuclear weapons, instead slowly and laboriously to find their way through a maze of distrust to a world where we could have totally disarmed. (Of course, we did not have the pluck to go all the way, yet.)
There should be an international holiday. There is not.
Let the Nobel Committe and pick out all the negotiators involved, American and Soviet, and issue a belated and partially posthumous Peace Prize to them all.
Their names and pictures should right now be inspiring children in their schools.
No such thing.

Starting September 24, there were sit-ins and occupations  in the California University system by students disaffected from the present social set-up, who see the future as having been destroyed by our greed and stupidity.
Radicalism still breathes.
We are back before World War II, looking at the discords and failures of our system, and wondering what we shall do.

Too Big To Fail

definition:
too big to administer privately, hence requiring government participation.

To be too big to fail is Socialism and Communism. Period.
The only thing in the State which needs to endure is the State itself.
The State alone may be too big to fail, but not private institutions.
To be too big to fail is to be part of the State.

Communiqué From An Absent Future

UC Berkeley Walkout September 24 2009

...For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they never do). Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities. Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords. We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved. We shepherd our emptiness from place to place...

from
we want everything
http://wewanteverything.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/communique-from-an-absent-future/

The End Of Days

End of Days and Rapture-think is a cop-out by exhausted Christian wanna-bees who don't have the pluck nor the gumption to see things through: they got to sit down and call their butler, God, to take care of things!

A lazy Christian is no Christian at all. Clean up your own mess. Get the world back on track, morally, physically, environmentally, spiritually...then see what happens.

Miracles And Prayer

I expect miracles, too.
I suppose I could go as far as to say that I believe in miracles.

Why?
Well, the nice things about miracles is that they are by defintion out of the ordinary and supernatural, and - to my little mind - are therefore beyond reasoning about them.
So I am relieved from arguing about miracles: they're miracles! They're Miraculous! They transcend Reason!

For the most part, if you find yourself in a mess and you turn to prayer, it's already too late.

There may be a miracle. They do happen. But, for the most part, you have certain bodily parts in the wringer, or you are backing into the buzz saw, or the lawnmower man is waiting for you to come out of the house.

Prayer is the road map for the rest of your life.
If you see it as an invitation to a miracle, God usually passes. He doesn't even send His regrets.
But once you have blundered your way into your own private hell, turning to God is learning to get the heck out of Hades. Prayer is the road map.
If you use prayer as a tool, you will be disappointed.
If you use it as your invitation to some completely different, you have taken that proverbial small step at the beginning of 1,000 miles.

Pedophilia?

Justin Bieber

America's approach to Pedophilia:

Family takes pictures in the tub; Wal-Mart calls cops; kids taken away for a month; lives turned ujpside down.

Ready for the rest?

This morning, some ephebe named Justin Bieber is singing and bouncing on The Today Show.
The camera catches a coy little crotch grab.
Isn't that cute.
Shall we have Wal-Mart calls the cops on the entire nation now?

Pedophilia is only wrong when it's private.
When it's public, we have added the safeguards that it must be a commercial venture, such as selling records, and it is O.K.
Justin is a bit older, maybe 15. Perhaps then it's O.K.? Why is it acceptable for a 15 year old to grab his crotch on national TV?
I might be completely nuts, but I seem to think a crotch grab is an invitation, not a warning; an enticement, not an admonition; and it is such to ALL who see it!

Boys and girls, Justin and Jon Benet...we go to crazy extremes...because we know we cannot control ourselves and our desires and our lusts. It's hard to spot our duplicity, but now and then it pops right into our faces...
We use accusations of sex with underage children to condemn, then we kick back and admire underage children in sensuous poses...
and give them money...
and give them adulation...
and act like Humbert Humbert panting after his Lolitas of all genders.

A Philosophical Examination of "Believe In..."

By J. G. Ballard, 1984

What I Believe


I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.

I believe in the forgotten runways of Wake Island, pointing towards the Pacifics of our imaginations.

I believe in the mysterious beauty of Margaret Thatcher, in the arch of her nostrils and the sheen on her lower lip; in the melancholy of wounded Argentine conscripts; in the haunted smiles of filling station personnel; in my dream of Margaret Thatcher caressed by that young Argentine soldier in a forgotten motel watched by a tubercular filling station attendant.

I believe in the beauty of all women, in the treachery of their imaginations, so close to my heart; in the junction of their disenchanted bodies with the enchanted chromium rails of supermarket counters; in their warm tolerance of my perversions.
....

Google up the rest of it, if you wish

Rumors And Scuttlebutt

I heard that the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to Obama, because Kenya has never had a recipient!!

Or, rather, if you wish to be picky about it, Kenya has never had a recipient since Wangari Maathai in 2004. She is a lady. He is a man. It was because Kenya has never had a male recipient of the Peace prize that the Committee awarded it to Obama! Whew!

And the Huffington Post - as Left as they come - says that Africa hails it as a win for Africa!! Ah-ha!

Museum Of Moving Objects

Exquisite composition of stationary bike with...stationary books? They aren't actually books, but DVDs and CDs and VCR tapes, but still I love the...what? irony?...everything that is quick and moving and gosh-amighty-hair-in-the-wind is suddenly sedentary, stationary, and subdued. Instead of a meeting of the minds or a clashing of the cycles, we have withdrawn to Sunday tea with treacle.
Yet inside our hushed Sunday sitting rooms, where tea and cakes abound, our madness is barely kept covered...boiling in Boschian tea pots, rattling the tops, throwing off the quilted tea cozies! we jump through the windows and run as naked as rain-forest foragers! jumping into poison sumac patches, rolling to the lake!

It used to be

I was so free...

as the whiskery thing on a time-

piece...
or the eye-numbing teller on
a
digital
stop-
watch.

that races
through its paces
like sixty!
to
a
minute!
But, wait!
one sweeps in numb circles;
other's battery goes dead;
like butterflies
pinned
upon
poster board
science fairs!


pix: faith in honest doubt (  http://danceswithanxiety.blogspot.com/  )

And Now For Something Completely Indifferent...

In the NYT, front page, top, right, there is the column we always expected:  in Health Care, the Lobbyists and Monied Interests are winning.

Long story, short...

That is why nothing will change....short of major economic collapse, short of demonstrations and riots, short of revolutions and upheavals...nothing will change in Washington, D.C.; nothing will change in the adamantine hearts of this generation.

If we have a penny, we shall not give you a mite. If we have a dollar, we shall not give up a penny. If we have a million, we shall not give up a thousand to lighten your burden, and to ensure peace and social discord.
We spit in the Face of God and His Mother - "He casts the mighty from their thrones, and raises the lowly".

We are on borrowed time.
I don't use literary devices or tropes when I say that I have seen myself as Ausonius, writing poetry in the cold of the autumn of the Roman Empire. I know I write for the future, a different future where this generation is a sad and miserable memory.

"I am Ausonius, Decimius Ausonius - grammarian, rhetorician, soldier, poet, and confidant of emperors - and I stand in Gallia. I am at my place in Burdigala, and I feel the cold wind of Fall blowing from Alemania upon my leathery cheek."

The Duke Of Omnium

...is a character in Anthony Trollope's The Pallisers. The story centers on Glencora and Plantagenet Palliser. Lady Glencora has a cousin, Alice Vavasor, who holds strong views on politics. She speaks of supporting the secret ballot, something Plantagenet - an up and coming star in the Liberal party - is not yet radical enough to support.

Alice is a Liberal, recently changed nomenclature from Whig.

I respect Liberals and Conservatives.
I dislike Right-wingers and Left-wingers.

Liberals and Conservatives have true differences of opinion and theory. Wingers are alike in their madness.