Saturday, May 4, 2013

Will the Truth Please Stand Up! Now Let's Give it Up For Truth




The willows are leafing. Redbuds abound. The narrow covered stage at the edge of the lake has plenty of room for posting the results of the bass weigh-in. The contestants will be gathered in the shade of the pavilion while on the four big grills meat is sizzling. It will be noisy as they await the postings, tellling fish stories. But at the moment there is only me and a few cawing crows and the rustling of the wind in the bare treetops. They will be popping the top on a Bud Lite that they will have fished from an ice filled  cattle trough filled. Flags will be flapping in the air. Hush they are starting the weighing. Someone is poised with chalk in hand to begin the posting as they read off the teams’ name and the weights – total weight for threee bass and the weight of the biggest. The last of the boats would have just stagged in before the klaxxon had sounded. I don’t have a map. I stop in town at a book store and pick up an atlas and a campground directory. I’m sitting at Joe Muggs drinking coffee and looking at the atlas trying to figure out how to get onto route 15.

40% of the locally produced TV newshole consists of sports, weather and traffic conditions. There are fewer full time journalists today than there was a half century ago. For every journalist there are four public relations employees. Journalist should not be good employees. That would have been a problem but for the fact that they always someone to be hired who is. That is the contradiction that has destroyed the profession. Do we really need anyone to pass along the ‘truth’ as it was told to them?

It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, she [Justice Sandra Day O’Connor] said, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings – Nina Totenberg

In the dictionary of national security, dissent and subversion are synonyms. Opponents of the war on terror are not just helping terrorists
but may be terrorists themselves.  There is a very thin line between protesting and being a terrorist. If you pay for police protection and obtain the proper permits your’re a good guy. If not, you’re one of the bad guys. That is what so much upset the Tea Baggers with the Occupieers, they were not playing by the rules. The State of Oregon defines terrorism as an act “by at least one of its participants” to disrupt “commerce or the transportation systems”  - In otherwords marching without a [self paid for] police escort. Only the rich can afford to protest and why would they want too anyway?

The erosion of stultifying comfort – Jean Genet

And like all other voices my own is fake,
And while the reader may guess as much,
He can never know what tricks it employs

And now all I’ve written before seems false
A profound original work of art
Is always an assault.
In attempting to change our sensibilities,
In altering our visions it does violence to our habits

As so great a sorrow it can only express,
As it sometimes hides from itself, in its opposite.
As if the sound of the utmost mirth
And exultation can do away with
Pain and cauterize its cause
And when you’re you, you feel safe you go to sleep

But he felt within himself
The presence of his own femininity,
Sometimes contained in a chickadee’s egg,
The size of a pale blue or pink sugared almond,
But sometimes brimming over
To flood his entire body with its milk

And is it a privilege of my present age
Or the misfortune of my whole life
That I always see myself from behind,
When in fact I’ve always had my back to the wall

[He] had never seen the sea.
Everyone  who contributed a drop of water
Had tried to describe it to him…
First of all he was told that it was blue

All those who walk for days and nights,
Staffs in hand, are waiting for the moment
When they can squat down

Every revolution will deteriorate,
Will capitulate before
The erosion of stultifying comfort

At last sunshine – the first in a long while, but it is also getting colder. The sun makes the snow glisten.  It looks crunchy – it should go crunch crunch when trod upon. The dog and I both need showers, but its too cold to even contemplate that right now. With my left arm pointing at the rising sun and by right towards where it will sit,  my nose is pointing to the south. Even-handed – fair and impartial in treatment or judgment. The coffee is brewing – it came in a fancy package.  It is flavored. Now I know why it was so cheep - $3.99 a pound and not worth even that small amount. Always ask yourself, why is it so cheep? But being expensive is not equivalent to being good either. For best value buy at just below market value. And what is the market value anyway?

For pain and violence to be sublime, they must not be real

Conservatives desire a ruling class worthy of their admiration – one that pursues profits at someone else’s expense and thinks freely without disturbing the balance of power

My only neighbor has gone
You’re a good Missourian
I don’t know about the
            Good part, I say
I gather you’re not from
            Around here
And I am right, he’s Canadian
            He says
Wanted to know the nearest
            Campground with electrics
None here for another month
They take them out – saves
            Damage during winter
                        flooding
I’m glad it has stopped
                        Raining
            The sun has come out
The electric sites pack ‘em in
            While the rest of the
            Campground stays empty
            The man in the van had said
Everyone wants for more energy
            Technology that you can trust
            Anything can be made
                        To plug in
They call it a utility
Meanwhile my microwave is
            Out – God I miss it
                         So very very much
It’s such a hazzle to just warm up
            A single cup of coffee
The man in a van with a ladder
            On top came by.
He marks in Day-Glo orange
            Where the utility lines
                        Lie buried
It only takes a day to put
            The eclectics back in
                        He says
I’m tired of the cold and the wet
            I want the power back on
I drink wine in front of the campfire
And listen to the screech owls
            In the trees and some coyotes
                        Calling  in the dark
If the electrics were working
            I could be looking at
                        A big-screen TV

I’m editing old field notes. It has put me in a reminiscing mood. I look around and check out the faces about me in the coffee shop.  I don’t recognize anyone here. It is a holiday weekend. Many have left town. A trip to the mountains, perhaps or a visit with the family. Maybe they have just stayed at home to relish their solitude. I’m thinking about Colorado. I’m thinking about how infrequently I think about Colorado; or Seattle of Fort Worth for that matter. I’m thinking about Sloatsburg NY on a Saturday night. In nearby Plattsburgh I had my first Singapore Sling and a short fling. I graduated to Single Malt Scotch after winning in a lottery in San Diego a bottle of Glenfiddish. In San Francisco there are many wine tastings that can be attended. Now I consume microbrews; first developing a taste of the malts then for the hops. One could write an entire memoir around alcohol. But I’m not going to, not right now anyway. I’m going back to editing my notes – transcribing them from these notebooks into an e-text. Why didn’t God dictate the Bible electronically? And why didn’t he do it in braille? And if he transcribed it in Aramaic why don’t good Christians learn that tongue like good Muslims learn Arabic? 

Cornhuskers
Fields of grain
Fields with cranes
Toogle toogle
            Resident bugles
Winged brass
            Ensembles
Assemble

The first question of art is: what do I do with all this white space? The second and more important question is: what do I not do to this white space?

Light up prairie night
Thunder the only sound
            That matters
Blow wind blow
            Make the tall grass
Waiver, believe
            There is nothing to fear

In philosophy, votes do not count

If everyone had a million
            If I had a million
In their (my) pockets
A workingman’s beer
            Would cost him as much
A million for me and
            A million for you
See what we’ve  all missed
            All of these years
But none the richer
Sitting here  sad and glum
            Sheltering my million
                        Dollar beer
            Looking like a couple of
                        Million bucks

The truth states that which we cannot not know

The world’s notorious indifference – Virginia Woolf

And she would not say of him,
She would not say of herself,
I am this, I am that

As the current answers won’t do,
One has to grope for answers;
And the process of discarding the old,
When one is by no means certain
What to put in their place, is a sad one

And the supreme mystery…
Was simply this:
Here is one room,
There an another.
Did religion solve that,
Or love?

Already I no longer cry with conviction.
Chaos, details return.
I am no longer amazed
By names written over shop windows.
I do not feel, why human?
Why catch trains?
The sequence returns;
One thing leads to another –
The usual order

All is merged in one turning wheel
Of single sound.
All separate sounds –
Wheels, bells, the cries of drunkards, of merry makers –
Are churned into one sound,
Steel blue, circular

Anyone moderately familiar
With the rigors of composition
Will not need to be told the story in detail:
How he wrote and it seemed good;
Read and it seemed vile;
Correct and tore up; cut out; put in;
Was in ecstasy’ in despair;
Had his good nights and bad mornings;
Snatched at ideas and lost them;
Saw his boat plain before him
And it vanished;
Acted his people’s parts as he ate;
Mouthed them as he walked;
Now cried; now laughed;
Vacillated between this style and that;
Now preferred the heroic and pompous;
Next the plain and simple;
And could not decide whether
He was the divinest genius
Or the greatest fool in the world

And these long histories in many volumes –
Surely someone was now beginning
At the beginning in order to understand
The Holy Roman Empire, as one must

And moving to the table
Where her husband sat reading
She lent her chin in her hands
And thought of the peasants,
Of suffering,
Of her own beauty,
Of the inevitable compromise,
And how she would write it down

Accentuating all these difficulties
And making them harder to bare
Is the world’s notorious indifference.
It does not ask people to write
Poems and novels and histories;
It does not need them...
Naturally it will not pay for,
What it does not want

Death has replaced sex as our principal taboo. Anything (everything) to preserve our happiness (our will to consume)

There is always a desire for the omnipotence of the True. There lies the lot of Evil. Evil is the will to name at any price – Alain Badiou – Infinite thought: truth and the return of philosophy, 2006 p66

IN HONOR OF ARBOR DAY IN NEBRASKA  - A clump of trees some roadside daffodils – another abandoned homestead. Someone put their live’s work into this. Someone grew gray here. Children once played in their shade. Trees follow the plough it was said. And to some extend it was  true. And soon even this evidence will disapear. Not even the Buffalo were forever. The only thing that is forever is learning not to regret.

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