The transition… to the museum was a magico-religious transmutation: object turned into icon. This idolatry began in the Renaissance and from the eighteenth century on, has been one of the real religions of the west (the other being politics) – Octavio Paz
In the mid-west
Where the summer
Is hot and humid
And insects
Fly up your nose
The religion of arts, like the religion of politics, was born out of the ruins of Christianity. Art inherited from the old religion the power of consecrating things… Politics or more precisely, Revolution – co-opted the other function of religion: changing human beings and society – Octavio Paz
On the plains
The rain comes
Not from Spain
But from the ruins
Hungry hooves
Thunder
The demands language provokes are more categorical then the replies that onecan furnish with it – Albert Camus
Is it time to go
Is it time to be
Somewhere else
Without any appointment
And nothing scheduled
And no reservation made
Make
But its in the blood
It’s what a nomad does
Can’t sit still
Can’t wait and
Watch the grass grow
Can’t wait for any bedsores
To appear
Can’t wait for what awaits!
And it all lies beyond the horizon
All men and all women ever having been, being in living are certainly feeling something in them about going on living. Each one of them certainly some times is going on being in living doing something and then is going on being in living doing some other thing – Gertrude Stein
What does it take to become your
Spokesperson
Certainly it doesn’t require any
Expertise
As it shall be decided what is
To be said
A self-appointed spokesperson
Is one of many spokespeople
When there is no authority
To appoint just one
And yet regardless of how
Many there are
There is always a unity
To the message
Deviance is self-destructive
Sometimes all it takes
Is a lot of arrogance
And a disregard for the
Possibility of truth
Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation. As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would not venture to talk all – so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all; the truest respect you can pay to the reader is understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself – Laurence Sterne
There is a relationship between ‘dial-a-porn’ and Taco Bell, but I don’t wish to go into it here.
We are all Marxists in one way or another, just as sometimes, unwittingly; we are Neoplatonists, Stoics, Kantians, Darwinists – Octavia Paz
American being has come
To be a being living in old age
Near the end of its being living
Bitter of its failings
Blind to its obsessions
And nostalgic for imagined
Past glories
The French poem is wrong: to travel is not “to die a little,” but to practice the art of saying good-bye so that, our burden, that much lighter, we man leanr to receive. Detachments are apprenticeships – Paz
Post-modernism is modernism’s self-critique
If one can still believe in dialectics
Human beings do not have a future in the collectivism of bureaucratic states or in the mass society created by capitalism – Octavia Paz
Blue State philosophy applies – states should be run like businesses. No one proposes that business be run like state agencies – its not a two-way street – all government agencies are expected to pay their own way – it part of the ideology – through usage fees (we shall overlook for the moment what we can not see) – and who can pay the most gets the best of government’s services. And it’s scary because government is capable of creating scarcity and necessity which private enterprise only dreams about – but that is ok because it’s not an integral part of the ideology. The powerful like it. Big business likes it. It’s very Puritanical – God rewards his stewards with material wealth – It’s only natural, its very carnal – the good should be rewarded and the bad punished – a part of the grand plan – it’s only God’s meritocracy in action – or maybe it is only self-justification – of why some should have and others be denied. Power does not need self-justification but it has a preference not to be seen as evil as a rule, unless that becomes a necessity – and lets hope that it doesn’t come to that. But if a tyrant should arise and presume to make the same choices of who is good and who is not, everyone would scream – but they do now – the government is trying to take our guns! I like Jefferson’s solution better – a revolution every twenty years (if only we could keep the intellectuals out of it).
Happiness was a faith that we proclaimed, insolently. We needed, quite the opposite, to be delivered a bit from our greed, to be torn, in fact, from our happy barbarity – Camus
By naming what he felt and thought, the poet does not transmit his our her original ideas and sensations, but presents form and figures that are rhythmic combinations in which sound is inseparable from sense. These forms and figures, these poems, are artificial objects, cubes or spheres of echoes, and resonances, that produce sensation and ideas – sensations similar but not identical to hose of the original experience. The poem is the metaphor of what the poet felt and though – Paz
First Nick than Ranger Rick
Who was sent to benefit from Des Moines
Just returned after two days training
He seemed relieved to be back
Return to the routine of regular rounds
Said Nick, to this place but they
Yell at me if I work on my time off
That Nick says Ranger Rick
Sure is a hard worker
And he marked my site placard
With his big felt tip pen
Nick had stopped to pick up
The trash scattered by the raccoons
It was his day off – busman’s holiday
I exclaimed – the term was new to him
To some it is an astonishing thing that anyone can be doing anything so that someone can be paying them something for that thing. To some it is not at all an astonishing thing that some one is knowing how to be doing something that someone is paying that one something for doing that thing – Gertrude Stein
They get caught under
Your eyelids
They fly up your nose
And if you open your
Mouth down they go
But it’s a relief that
They don’t bite
And Then I am reminded
That they breed
In horseshit
With these poems made up of mere sounds, we totally rejected the language corrupted and rendered unusable by journalism – Hugo Ball
Like dorm roommates get
Their cycles in synch
Women talk to get their
Lives in social synch
With each other, whereas
Men maintain their silence
In order to hone their
Competitive advantage
Two obstacles stand in the way of elaboration of a new idea of society. The first is the identification of social progress with industrial development…. The other danger… lies in conceiving of the new society as a geometric construction: utopia – Paz
The gods on the other hand… voice stars, rivers, mountains, horses, insects, dragons. For them to speak is to create; their speech is productive… When the gods speak they produce; when humans speak, they relate – Paz
Into and out of
The present
With a blur
Of soft focus
It’s anathema
Of the cinema
It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilate everything to itself, as proper nourishment; and from the first moment of your begetting of it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand. This is of great use – Laurence Sterne
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