Your Are a True Hero. No, I'm Not! That is for Us to Decide, the President Said

the P

Paul is to join me for a beer at four. It was already now close to that time. I was talking with Joe and during a pause in our conversation someone to my left said something. I looked around. It was Paul. He was already will into his pint – half full or half empty? – it wasn’t for me to say. He has said something about my choice in beers. I was having the beer of the day. He had previously told me how much he disliked this beer. It’s good to have preferences. Some people will only drink Bud Lite. I drink the beer of the day, unless of course, I choose not to. I introduce him to Joe. Joe this is my nephew Paul. They shook hands. Paul said “Paul” and Joe said “Joe”. I didn’t notice you come in, I said. That’s ok, he replied, I didn’t want to interrupt you. Then Rick cames in and procees to talk about John Berryman after noticing that I was reading his “Love and Fame”. That the one with the autobiographical poems, he asked? Rick and I discusse suicide – Berryman jumped off of a bridge, he said. And Crane off a ship, I replied. Weldon Kees supposedly jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and Rick expressed his horror of dying by drowning . What a horrible way to go. Well, I said, there is usually no way of rescending your option once exercised and usually you die from the fall or from hypothermia and not drowning. Just make sure to jump from a high enough place or into very cold water. Rick turned and left as quickly as he had appeared. I turned to Paul and apologized to him for not introducing him but, I told him, it had been deliberate. I gathered as much after listening to him for thirty seconds, Paul replied. You don’t have a conversation with Rick you listen to him harangue. He’s receptive to being told to shut-up but as a stranger you don’t know this. It is not a wise move to tell a stranger who is ranting at you in a bar to shut up. And if he follows you when you try to leave will it might have been the smart thing to do in have spent a few moments listening to him. It is bliss to emerge yourself totally in to a role. But most of us have to come up for air once in a while.

The greatest reward comes when a man, in so deceiving others, manages at the same time to deceive himself, for in such a case he spares himself shame, which is a painful experience and hypocrisy, which is a hideous vice – Machado De Assis - Epitaph of a small winner, 1952 p71

Procedure: an ostensibly fair process for being unfair. All institutional decisions are based on political expediency (a weighing of the variouis power interests) and a process or a set of rules lends that process the appearance of fairness, but in fact inequity is built into both the rules and the language we use to describe the rules.

It was not Napoleon who found the idea, but the idea that formed Napoleon – Oswald Spangler – The Decline of the West, 1965 p81

Energizer bunny – keeps on
       Giving
Fame only has value if
You don’t have to earn it
And have no one
        To be grateful to
It only has worth if
It’s fortuitous and frivolous
         Otherwise it is called
         Infamy

Nowadays flattery is thought of as disreputable, but only by people who are more concerned about words than about things themselves – Erasmus –In Praise of Folly p170

Success is a sense of how well ideological promises have been accomplished.

Consider how childishly men talk, how frivolously they act when they have decided to indulge in the pleasure to be found in women – Erasmus –In Praise of Folly p30

Naivety is to believe that reality should flow from out of the pronounced ideology

Napoleon’s great plan time and against came to grief in petty details – Oswald Spangler – The Decline of the West, 1965 p82

Sun dog
Sea monkey
Star fish
Earth worm


Celestial solitude
Lunar insertion
Galactic expansion
Deep-sea venture



Lost horizons

Lost in space

Missing and persumed
        Dead

Politics are as dead as the culture / they supported! / Politics are theories regarding the speculated / laws of power – their applications / have never touched men except in shapes / of repression – Michael McClure – Star poems, 1970 p94

Language always falls short when we are cynical of our own ideology or of any ideology for that matter – for only for true believers do words have honesty

The project that is central… to all true-modernists: to try to fathom the nature of “the modern” – Susan Sontag – Where the Stress Falls, 2001 p76

Without restraints order would remain but it would unlikely be the preferred order

I feel myself driven towards an end that I do not know – as soon as I shall have reached it, as soon as I shall become unnecessary, an atom will suffice to shatter me. Till then, not all the forces of mankind can do anything against me – Napoleon

Privileged youth like
      An only Chinese son
Talk of touring the great
      Waterfalls – the Andes
      And Venezuela
Mothers begging them
      Take their daughters back
      To America, they just
            Laughed
Christian missionaries from
       The suburbs of Wichita
       The best of the best
Not necessarily the brightest
        Of the brightest

I had paid him well, perhaps too well… For, after all, he had not thought about a reward or about the virtue of his act, he had merely yielded to a natural impulse, to his temperament, to the habits of his trade. One way or the other there was really no personal merit in his act. He had been merely an instrument of Providence. This though made me miserable. I called myself wasteful. – Machado De Assis - Epitaph of a small winner, 1952 p67

All that is really valued has no price yet everything has its price

The less cause they have to remain in this life, the more they want to stay alive – so little are they touched by the tedium of life – Erasmus –In Praise of Folly p48