Before The World

Before the world turned illiterate, and the country I live in went to war with everything, ostensibly to bring democracy, or liberate people, or some other narrative we all knew was false, but went along with it anyway, because those big overarching narratives feel better than the truth, & we all know how slippery the truth is, especially when it’s covered in oil, and blood,  and the ritual judgment of solemn faces give lies the gravitas of truth, and they do it in public, on TV, and that’s all anyone needs, a beefy simulacrum, like that word I’ve been hearing all my life, democracy, and freedom, those sacred shibboleths, ever since grade school, long before the era of mass shootings, when we rose to chant the pledge of allegiance, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. That time. The time before iPhones. Before Androids. Before YouTube and American Idol and the books were donated to nursing homes or boxed and put in the garage. And Walter Cronkite looked into a camera to say the president was dead. And David Foster Wallace hung himself from a beam on his back porch in Claremont, California. And Julian Assange was put in a cell at Belmarsh awaiting extradition to the United States. And hundreds of thousands of bookstores have closed. And high school graduates entering college can’t identify the subject of a sentence. And banning books has become a national pastime. And Fahrenheit 451 has become a reality. And a few keep going. Keep putting it out there. Though there is no “out there.” What is out there is still out there. But it’s a place of guns, not books.

Symbols Are Cymbals For The Drums Of War

Humans are funny about symbols. They go nuts for symbols. For flags and medals. Signs and banners. Chants and slogans. The dollar sign and swastika. Lingam and yin yang. Gorillas pound their chest. Homo sapiens pound the air with the rhetoric of war. Words can be squeezed, distorted, mishappen to produce the needed intoxicants, the meth and myth of exceptionalism. MSNBC anchor Brian Williams waxing rhapsodic for the Tomahawk missiles launched at Syria from the deck of U.S. Navy ships, exulting “I’m guided by the beauty of our missiles.”

Two years ago it was BLM signs everywhere taped to windows painted on walls and staked in the lawns of the affluent, all of it as vapid and bereft of true meaning as a bromide for selling pharmaceuticals on TV. Now it’s Ukraine flags bedecking the houses of the affluent in high tech west coast cities & elsewhere. Why the Ukraine? Where were the flags for Afghanistan when the U.S. abruptly pulled out leaving the people to the brutal retributions of jihadi extremists?

A photo of a smiling Mitch McConnell standing in front of a U.S. flag shaking hands with a solemn-faced Volodymyr Zelensky that appeared today in the New York Post gives you the full reality of the war in Ukraine and what it’s really about. In a word, profits. Humungous profits for arms manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. Humongous profits for the oil companies. Profits for Exxon Mobil and Shell have bloated already by the billions. Countries like Estonia and Lithuania that have relied heavily on Russia for energy now look to the U.S. market. The pipeline that carries Russian oil to Germany has been a longtime lifeline.  That umbilical is about to be snipped. Meanwhile, oil exports from the U.S. have surged. 

The Ukrainians are a tough people I can see it in their eyes the hard bright glitter of endurance even when they’re crying there’s no surrender in it. I see them on the news huddled in basements no electricity or running water weariness and fear on their faces, bombs blasting within range.

But is this iron-like endurance this inexhaustible stamina unique to the Ukrainians? It is not. I see it in the eyes of the Afghan refugees on their slog through eastern Europe the stubborn determination with which they endure the indignities of being stateless homeless rootless I see it in the refugees from Syria gingerly negotiating barbed wire with slow steady resoluteness I see it in the determination of a woman in a black robe dragging a tub of water to her camp in northern Yemen or the Madonna-like tenderness and concern in the face of a mother gazing at her 18-month-old child suffering from acute malnutrition what is the difference what is it that separates them from the refugees of Ukraine? Who is worthy and who is unworthy? And why?

It amazes me the stamina and courage of Ukraine to take on a giant military power like Russia. I thought Russia would be in control within a month. Stomp them into abject submission. The Ukrainians are tough. It’s easy to see how they’ve captured the imagination and sympathy of the U.S. and Europe. It also helps that they’re white and closely resemble the populations of Europe.

The core of the Ukrainian miliary in the Donbass region are the Azov battalions. The Azov battalions are a far-right neo-Nazi group associated with white supremacists. They use the  Wolfsangel insignia used by divisions of the Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht during WWII, including the notorious 2^nd SS “Das Reich” Panzer Division. The symbol – also known as the Wolf’s Hook or Doppelhaken - was inspired by medieval European wolf traps that consisted of a Z-shaped metal hook hung by a chain from a crescent-shaped metal bar. Medieval pagans believed the symbol – originally a Viking rune - possessed magical powers and could ward off wolves. It became a symbol of German liberty and was adopted as an emblem in various 15^th century peasant revolts, and was used again in the 17^th century by protestant Bohemian and Austrian nobles fighting against the authoritarian measures imposed by the Holy Roman Empire.

Symbols are strange. They have a tenuous relation to the actual world and – unlike an indexical sign in which signifier and signified are in firm correspondence – the symbol is arbitrary and must be learned. Hegel – who believed war was a positive moment wherein the state asserts itself as an individual, establishing its rights and interests and is a universal duty -  pointed out that a symbol is “a certain viewing with an essence and meaning that is more or less corresponding to the essence and meaning of the object it refers to; on the other hand, when it comes to the sign and its nature, the essence and the meaning of viewing and the ones of the object it refers to have nothing in common.” This means they occupy a part of the mind that is susceptible to building constructs divorced from the world of rock and iron and are wholly cerebral, but with an emotional charge. There’s a level of disconnection that is disturbing in its magnitude. It borders psychosis. It’s a realm of chimeras, ideologies and religions, priests & ritual sacrifice.

People have begun calling the conflict in Ukraine a proxy war with Russia. Proxy means substitute – having the authority to act on another’s behalf - but what happens when the substitute is instituted as a reality and assumes lethal autonomy? When symbols clash and the drums of war are furiously pounded? When Putin or Biden feel backed into a corner and release the kraken from the chains of sound judgment and the missiles on both sides blast from their holes and rise to their trajectories to wreak final destruction on a world drunk with flags?

The final symbol will be the mushroom cloud rising above what was once a habitable planet.

 

 

My Brochure

Here’s my brochure, the brochure I intended long ago, hors d’oeuvres making migrations quaint and nuclear across an expanse of choice, mute indications of mystical obfuscation answering deep howls of basement statuary, mutterings refrigerated by pulsations of ice, something hollow and equal to a loop in a dead man’s pupil, all of it on fire, all of it coming down in ash as flames of information rise to the sky, and all of it handily informational, like all good brochures. Please, come visit my islands, their beautiful shores and guano, their tremendous declensions and unstoppable mastication. Feel private in yourself. Explore the weird geology of my teacup, upended billons of minutes ago by an index finger, and presented to you with open combustion and a maniacal smile. Bathe in a waterfall of pure invention while ice skates nibble on your feet. All this and more will be yours once you arrive, where nothing exists without a little imagination, and the airfare is hypothetical, & the rooms are adorned in a soapy elocution.

Sentences Are Thickets

Sentences are thickets. We walk through them gazing at the various gestations, things that arise in the mind and begin to float on its energy, its continuous spurts and sports and spores and speculations, the wildfires of the millennium providing background for a gazillion unmoored thoughts, and one’s thinking gets tangled at the end of the dock, which wasn’t there at first, but now it’s there, extending into the lake the way a line in a Robert Duncan poem might extend into romanticism, and sets the mind free, its scales a fleeting shimmer as it glides into deeper water, and finds jewels and skirmishes, twists of papyrus in an ancient library, and thrives among the symbols. The drift of conversation. Voices echoing in a hall of marble. Pistachios on the ground.

I ask the unyielding Sentence that shows Itself forth in the language as I make it, writes Duncan. This morning I am dunked in Duncan. And find that each sentence that emerges from the power of words to draw more words to their side magnetically, so that an electromagnetic field becomes a self-propagating proposition proportional to the whimsy of a moment, and interacts with the charges and currents of invisible powers such as might exist in a supernal world, a world of metaphor, a world of pinafore and semaphore, and rushes out more words in a stand of reeds.

And so to read a work written by someone Duncan, Stein or Virginia Woolf, is to awaken their thought, pollinate their pistils, stigma, style and ovary, and the rapport flowers into meaning, into image and horse, the hiss of a snake the gloss of a rock. Whatever timber took seed at that time, the time of the writing, the occurrence of words on paper, or in air, or on air, the transmission turns incandescent and lights a room at the back of the mind, and a landscape at the window nibbles at the glass like the branch of a sumac. And the author appears at your table, a jester with bells, and sprinkles the tympanum with twists of syntax, tufts of thought on a stem of glass. 

 

The Seductions Of The Road

I’ve developed a fascination for RVs, don’t know why, it happened mysteriously, like a new feeling crawled into me and spread its wings and I began to muse upon the coziness implicit in these creations, a space small enough to pull behind you on the highway but with enough room for a bed and a table and refrigerator and even a bathroom with a toilet, sink and shower. A mobile home. Unattached to any property and the taxes and woes and fussy neighbors that go with that. You see a lot of RVs these days, most of them rundown, dilapidated and sad as a grey day in Ireland. For some the road isn't a choice. It's not a lark or retirement dream. It's a brutal reality. That said, I don't want to editorialize or sentimentalize the gypsy existence thrust on the unfortunate. My fantasy is a different kind of narrative making its highways in my brain. That's what makes it a fantasy. It's a strangely precarious flirtation with the unrooted and nomadic. What a wonderfully joyous feeling that must be to go places change the scenery change the reference points and people change the markets and main streets and stores and still have what feels very much like a home. Sweet. Could be this fascination has emerged from what are very stressful times, or age, getting on in years without any real future, things to strive for, ambitions to feed, careers to pursue, and so on. That world is no longer pertinent. What is relevant now is gently fading into the sunset, learning how to let go of things, not material things, but things like, I don’t know, hard to put into words the deeper feelings, those currents are tricky and strange, but those closer relations, they begin to fade because people die, and that community shrinks, and then you’re left feeling marooned in a time and a place that you cease to understand, the technology is dizzyingly complex, and the people don’t share quite the same values. That’s when being in movement begins its seductions. You turn into a tumbleweed. And it's the simpler pleasures in life, good food, a warm bed, a place to sit and read a book become paramount. It’s a nice fantasy to occupy. And realizable. Tangible as common sage. And so I shepherd those feelings and nurture them with floor plans and maps and the exodus of age.

  

The Kingly Ostrich Outboard Motor Society

Relax when you’re dealing with a petulant dot, advises the kingly ostrich outboard motor society. Whirls of water will not make you pacific. Some people are more doctrinaire and protozoan than others, and you don’t need to take a fingerprint for a personality. Look for other ways to express your inner plumbing. Learn to enjoy your cranium. Look for ways to express your credentials. For example, when you sit down to stew and your hair is made of glass, do you really want to learn Portuguese, or is this another passing fancy, like the time you crushed a grape and assumed the life of John Keats? Maybe you should grab another table and connect an idea to the top of your head. Good communication begins with a detour. Open your mind and let the sugar loose to reclaim a piece of the pagoda. Select some variables. Apply your face to a towel. Objects require our attention. The hammer needs to be used for its thingness to be noticed. Otherwise, everything just sits in the toolbox while the seagulls remind us of loneliness, and tripods & thatch.

I Dwell In A Wallow Kitchen

I dwell in a wallow kitchen. I blow blue to build green. My extension is a windy shawl. I’m hip to the food of ecstasy. Kindness is a hope lake.

Here we are. We are here. Here are we. Are we here? We are hair. We are heretic. We are hermetic. And a wad and a wade and a weather and a kick.

The spade is a shore rinse. The climate in shambles congratulates the ivy. A frantic glass chicken pecks at a peccadillo. Redemption fizzles hard. The lung window has no stomach for squalls. And is therefore pink.

I hide my support from wandering. A similar cosmos shatters into agenda. Polynesia favors rent over grandiosity. And so chrome rubs shoulders with paper, finds grace in remembrance, coconuts in trees.

My tie is a tamarind fleece knot, and a pilgrimage for my fingers. Foam suggests flambé, does it not? This is an ink toting craze, a fermentation of thought, a testament to writing technology in the guise of a rosy-faced lovebird. There’s a man on the ceiling. I think it might be me.

What can I tell you concerning the awesome middle of initiative, the mud bordering the foliage of a terrible need to stop beginning to begin and begins to begin beginning, and leads to mountains and imports and apprenticeships? Cats are complicated creatures. But so are swans and clocks and honeybees. The bolus of sweet nerves eating the sunset of a western sky saunters toward the jelly of existence. The antenna hammers the sky with ants. Seaweed flaunts the shores of Louisiana as a bearded chin slips through its clouds singing Hallelujah. And everyone dances.

I have my diving board pay and I’m feeling pleasantly immoderate, like the puzzling side of a whale. I tap my clothes for luck. The sequelae go off fetching lipstick. The king’s head is liquid. But the realm is unimpeachably unilateral, and blinks with disaster. I see redemption in sticks.

Thinking is outmaneuvered by art. Glass, constellated by rain, induces trickle. The diamond canaries of autumn overflow the crumpled ground of night. Panaceas ooze mutation. Adaptation becomes angular and tubed. The membrane of a thoughtless leg goes cotton. What is it, this vocabulary? Is it a voice, a vestibule, or a sit-com? It is this. It is voluble, yet silent. The olfactory of recuperation, which is cousin to the apple, and cannot be expressed in words.