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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