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.