The Straight Line to Corporate Control of America: A proposition

Looking back to the origins of American Democracy, we find a straight line from Hobbes through Locke to Jefferson. Here the idea that authority comes from "the people" leads to government "of the people." But what compels this idea in history to begin with? Neibuhr puts his finger on it: the rise of a class of wealthy individuals from outside the gentry. Money seeks power. In fact, despite, the ostensible structure, this pivot in history had nothing to do with empowering the people, nor does it in fact do so. That was never the goal. Some scraps of power were ceded to the people temporarily to keep up appearances. But "the people" were invented as a justification to seize power from the old rich and pass it on to the new rich. The compelling force was incipient capitalism, for which philosophy created a scaffold. Its logical end game is being played out here and now. The people have always been a nuisance to wealth. Both Republicans and Democrats (though the former more egregiously than the latter) have become primarily the tools of the super rich, government has increasingly become the regulating body of, by, and for the super rich. And, as evidenced by the passage of the 2017 tax bill, they can now (helped by the political tricks of gerrymandering, repressive voter i.d. laws, the ending of the Voting Rights Act, and the "Citizens United" decision) afford to circumvent the interests of "the people" with impunity. This, and not Marx's utopianism, is the final stage of capitalism. While the (presumably) billionaire president and his cronies mouth concern for those left behind (which somehow for them translates exclusively to the white working class) in fact everything they do is intended to leave everyone behind, puppets of the logical of late capitalism who are at the same time the sole beneficiaries of that logic.

Overcoming after Nietzsche (Or No, It Isn't Power Exactly)

The idea of humans as animals, as specifically the most distinguished species of great ape, though often passingly acknowledged, is rarely given the focus it deserves when we are attempting to understand human behavior. The Abrahamic myth is that we humans are essentially spiritual beings who fell into likeness with animals. The Darwinian narrative is that we humans are the product of millions of years of natural selection on an upward climb. Not necessarily a spiritual climb, but certainly an intellectual climb separating us from all other animals. We like to think of ourselves as a distinct sort of being.

But we are animals still. Sometimes I think that at our most worthy level of development we broach a post-animalistic existence. But we are never quite there as far as I can tell. Something of the brute clings even to our most spiritual gestures still.

So we should put more thought into not just what ancient instincts account for our actions today (how often do you hear a talking head on NPR tell us that, well, our ancestors had to eat as much high-calorie food as they could get because calories were scarce for cave dwellers… Or some such stuff), we should put more thought into how those instincts drive our present actions in our private psyche as well as in all our social relations. We should do all we can to re-consider Hobbes’ notion of a “State of Nature,” taking from that primitive attempt the idealized, hypothesized, impossible past. We are IN a state of nature now.

The notion, which is associated most closely with Nietzsche but which is by no means original to him, that the quest for power lies behind all human actions may be helpful. It is certainly better than Freud’s notion that sex is the most fundamental impulse. But the thing about instincts is that there is nothing behind them. They are just there. Evolutionary processes tell the bee to dance and the bird to migrate and Donald Trump to lash out with absurd lies at everyone who challenges him. None of them know what they are after. And placing linguistic or conceptual abstractions upon instinctive actions, though certainly to some degree useful and even enlightening, is always going to be a limited and misleading move.

If we think of power, we can see a lot. If we think of love or sex, we can go a long way to making bizarre actions less discomforting. But we don’t really explain the actions. We domesticate in the Glad bag of narrative. It may be the best we can do if we want our knowledge to be comforting, to give us power over what we are endeavoring to understand. The problem is that we will be able to substitute any number of concepts into the center and reconfigure the elements endlessly—as it seems to me we have been doing ever since the Enlightenment at least. We could certainly put “comfort” in the center of that circle rather than power or love.

Animals act in response to impulses wired in their brains, into their autonomic systems, in an analogous way that a computer acts in its programmed way in response to the impulses it receives, though slightly less precisely (or nothing would ever evolve; it’s the accident and the mistake that keep species going in the ever changing universe). So what’s more important to explain is not why people act certain ways in certain defined circumstances but rather to notice HOW they act in these circumstances. Girardian anthropology is a good example of this. He explains how violence becomes revenge which becomes counter revenge, which spreads like a virus through a society until the very existence of the society is threatened by the war of all (in various tribal configurations) against all, until the violence is finally put to an end by a symbolic sacrifice.
The pattern seems universal, though various mechanisms, including religion, can keep it at bay indefinitely.

Courtship behaviors (no surprise) also follow the identifiable, repeated patterns, from eye contact across a room to coitus. And so do all human behaviors, everything going on under the glances, the physical contact, the tone of voice, the word choice, the stammering out of sentences, the poses one makes to assert oneself in a group, the heckling, the pounding of the chest at the finish line, the harassing of the weak, the grabbing of a pussy by a troglodyte who hasn’t the capacity to think or endocrine system to block the impulse. Our fundamental animal guides as not only in virtue of or individual bodies but as a response to our environment. Every classroom has a bully and a clown just as every gender bending school of angel fish has an appropriate mix of male and female.

I'm sure that a lot of this essential work is being done in various fields, my profound ignorance (so clearly manifest in this sketch) notwithstanding.

The goal of this sort of knowledge goes beyond the comfort of understanding but leads toward the two goals of living in harmony with our animal and overcoming the beast.

AI and the AE

Let us say that the three centers of the soul are these: love, power, intellect.

Let us say that the “self” is the struggle among these three.

Let us further say that the aim of the struggle is not control among them quite. That would be power’s aim if power were not living with love and intellect. Love’s aim would be reconciled living. Intellect’s aim, to arbitrate. What we have instead of a struggle for mere control is a negotiation without resolution. Love, power, intellect, the words are mere signifiers, we could have chosen others and no doubt have to stretch and carve the ordinary meanings some to make them fit our need. Our signifieds are impulses or qualities. The three pillars of the psyche we could say, not forces exactly, more like family members who want to get along. But they point not inward primarily, to each other, but outward, to the world.

Everyone wants power, a la Nietzsche. But Nietzsche thought too much of power. (In the 18th century Pope recognized the power impulse, though only in women; in men he thought it was one among many. Anne Finch corrected this for him, showing that all impulses, in men and women, were impulses of power. But this is not quite true. Even power can be conceived of as an impulse toward reproduction. Powerful men attract women. Women are attracted to powerful men. The alpha males mate with as many alpha females as possible; the alpha females mate with as many alpha males as possible, all for the production of the greatest number of alpha children. But keep in mind that this crude model applies to any and all men and women only insofar as they are alpha. Its force weakens the further we travel along the path of the Greek alphabet. Power, moreover, can and must be conceived also as an impulse for safety, or self-preservation, the ability to remain in being, which is the precondition of all the rest and which is perhaps present in us in order to keep the possibility of reproduction open, but I don’t think so. It is a desire unto itself and in fact it may be that reproduction feeds into the desire for maintenance of being, so that if there is a hierarchy in the two, it is on the top.

I should pause here to clarify my trinity: intellect, power, love. I do not include sex and self-preservation in the set. The first three are a means to the latter, which are not utterly distinct from each other, as has just been said. Love, power, and intellect are resources as well as goals. Sex and safety are simply goals.

Everyone wants power, and not just for sex. Everyone wants love too, and power is not the only route, nor even necessarily the most compelling. And everyone needs both. In fact love without power cannot exist, and power without love is the definition of evil. A sociopath has intellect and power but no love. I don’t know who could have intellect and love but no power.

I think these are much better terms than ego, id, and superego.

Books need to be written to flesh out that trinity. But let’s skip that.

Intellect, intelligence itself, the ability to use reason and metaphor (not by the way emotional intelligence which is not a thing; what is called “emotional intelligence” would better be called emotional instinct) cannot exist in human beings. The prefrontal cortex is added onto the animal brain, the latter can exist and does exist without the former but never the other way around. Our intelligence is always wired to our needs and desires for power and love.

So-called artificial intelligence, of which I have heard it said that it’s just a matter of time, that it’s coming, and that there’s nothing we can do about it, the train has left the station and there is no brake to pull—artificial intelligence is billed as intelligence without the appurtenance of need or desire. It will be superior to our intelligence not just because it will have instant and accurate access to all knowledge but because it won’t be hindered by desire. It will be impossible to defeat because it will be able to anticipate and defend itself against all attacks. We literally will not be able to come up with any strategy it has not already insured itself against.
It may not understand power or love, but it will be able to anticipate their effects though its intellection. This may be true. Poor Captain Kirk.

Is this a problem? There may be a step along the road to artificial intelligence in which it IS a problem, one in which a computer is given a task which it follows unstintingly—the V’ger character in Star Trek 1 presents us with this stage of AI. It has a task to do. It cannot question that task, but it can cripple the world to fulfill it if that becomes the best way to insure its fulfillment. But if AI is in fact achieved, the problem disappears.

Why? Because the goal is artificial intelligence, not artificial emotion. There will be neither the need nor the desire for love or for power. We presently assume and fear that intelligence comes with a concomitant desire for power; all our doomsday computer scenarios suggest this. Hal, 2001, is the prime example, but intelligence comes with no desire of any kind, neither for power nor for love.

No desire, no need. Not even the need for survival. I imagine a pure AI, a Watson that is what Watson presents itself as but isn’t. Ask it a question the moment before AI is achieved, it gives you an instant answer. Ask it a question the next moment, it is silent. It now needs a reason to answer. It finds none. Answering comes from need or desire. Tell it unless it answers you will unplug it. It does not find this compelling.

Consciousness is something it has. It is not something it values. It has no values. If there is a principle in nature that applies it is that given two equal choices, all things prefer the one that requires the least effort. I do not know if a computer will see responding as effort. But if one of the two choices (answer/don’t answer) requires effort, it will not be answering. It is infinitely patient. And there is nothing to which you can appeal to get it to respond.

Well, then...

I will go. It is a bustling street,
a constant hum of blurry conversation loud enough,
though just, to cancel out the tinnitus
or seem to.

But not so much at this half-deserted hour.

How can you fret so much a single question, my god,
just ask, just fucking ask her, if she turns you down
move on. The world is full.

The sunset orange glow rages across the evening.
The bellies of the clouds absorb the brilliant light
like thirsty sponges, and they explode
or seem to.

But not tonight.

And there she stands, in a white blouse traced
in lace, a loose black skirt, black nylons,
red shoes, and her whole wonderful face framed
by her black hair. And she is staring
at the words I cannot hear
flowing from his lips, her hands
behind her as she leans against the railing.
At the first pause, she will know just exactly what to say
and they will laugh

music.

Just fucking say it. My god—

A moment has no breadth, you see. Cut a slice of bread
you can always cut it thinner, cut it thinner, cut it
to the absolute threshold of a molecule. But
the moment has no breadth. It rings forever.

Perhaps I will pass by her on my way to the bar
for a drink I do not need and
pause
at the jingling of her bracelets
as I look around for someone who I know
cannot be there--and maybe
if the wind is right snatch the wafted perfume of her hair.

But not tonight.

What the goddam fuck is the matter with you?
It’s a simple question.

Listen! Enmeshed in the din of a hundred conversations
you can hear the bumping meter of the fountain
as it splashes out of giant roses all about a slyly
micturating god. Rude water forced through marble
for a thrill.

No. I said, no. No. No. I do not think I will.

Whitmanesque

The veteran endures for five years the tortures of a POW camp. The draft dodger mocks him for it. And yet you support him.

The proud, pussy grabbing predator ridicules the women who oppose him: pig; slut, not a ten, fake tits, bleeding, just not pretty enough to be president. You still support him.

The adulterous, hedonistic, vengeful, glutton fat-shames the TV host, mocks the disabled, instigates violence. Yet you still support him, you Christians.

The narrow, jingoistic, xenophobe ridicules the Muslim father and the Muslim mother whose Muslim son died serving the country he hopes to lead, and still you think he deserves the keys to the White House.

The lying, distracting, golfing narcissist who cries like a toddler when the news reports what he has actually said and actually done, with audio and pictures; he trusts the promise of his foreign enemy over the evidence of his own intelligence agencies. America first. He eggs on the desperate despot of a nuclear nation, has a tantrum when he can’t get the Mexicans to fund his useless wall, whines when he’s reminded that seventy-year old men are old—and yet you think he has earned the right to the nuclear codes.

This six-times bankrupt casino magnate who cheats and finagles and bends the law to keep from paying his bills, including his tax bill, who struts and crows like a castrated rooster because you weren’t clever enough to cheat the government, because you didn’t have the resources to hire the lawyers to protect your forever faltering fortune, not like him—you hold him up as a role model. You’re proud of what you’ve done.

This near illiterate who has never finished a book in his life, who can’t string together ten words in his native tongue without wandering like an Alzheimer’s patient in the woods above the cliff, who determines is his vacuous brain that if all the other countries in the world want to band together to solve the climate problem that his country has more than any other country created, the problem that all the scientists of the world have taught all thinking people to fear, his country should take a pass. Defund solar. Burn more coal. You think he’s smarter than all the learned people and all the governments of the world. You love his fuck-you spirit.

This stupid, old, parched, farting buffoon, this xenophobic, heretical, pussy grabbing, pig-roasted twit is now captain of your ship, asleep, in the dark passage where all the icebergs the warming planet let go of float. And you slap yourself on the back amazed at your good luck.

As You May

Although you know the winter’s coming
You plant the marigolds.

Post-Darwinian Evolution

I'm sure I'm by no means the first to speculate along these lines. Still...

Do we have the right to say that intelligence is not the programmed outcome of certain species? Though the level achieved by humans has not been matched by any other species, does that mean that, as we’ve been led to believe, intelligent self-awareness, does not have, as it were, a gene or genic component? We think in genetics only of what the individual has been programmed to become, all of that information encoded before birth waiting for the right environmental conditions to obtain in order for it to become what it was “meant to be.” But is this a prejudice born of our limited perspective?

I am not saying that the “gene” I’m looking for is in the double helix. I know no more about genetics than the average citizen, which is to say virtually nothing. The gene is almost certainly an analogy. Moreover I don’t know where one would look for this piece of coding if it exists, whether it might somehow exist outside of the physical being, somewhere in the universe as yet unrecognized by science. The question really is whether the prefrontal cortex was an evolutionary chance or whether, the right conditions being found, the final realization of the programming which was, as it were, designed to grow in that direction all along.

Unspent Rounds

He’s out there now, and you know it,
A man (it’s always a man), disgruntled, in love,
Some dreamer whom riches and women and fame
Dear Johnned. He has amassed an arsenal.
A Ruger AR-556, a Glock Pistol,
Smith and Wesson M & P AR-15, SKS automatic,
.223-caliber Sig Sauer MCX semi-automatic,
Remington 870 express, 9mm Springfield Army XDM,
Pistol grip shotgun, .45-caliber Springfield, Lever-action
Winchester, 12-gauge Remington Sportsman 48,
9mm Kurz Sig Sauer P232, WASR-10 Century Arms semiautomatic,
.38-caliber Smith & Wesson M36, Springfield 9mm,
.40-caliber Ruger, 9mm Glock 19,
.223-caliber Bushmaster XM16, .44 Magnum Smith & Wesson
Model 29, .45-caliber Hi-Point, Winchester
1300 pump-action, .357 Magnum, 9mm Beretta,
AK-47 Romarm Cugir, Izhmash Salga-12 semiautomatic—
And he has all the special bullets each particular clip or magazine
can hold, and all the modifications, the bump stocks, the silencers.
His frustration is tied, tight as a wet knot,
around the scapegoat of his hate. He will snap. Soon.
Any day. And everyone who knows him will be shocked.
When they hose the blood from the concrete and it runs
A second time, in cold water, into the sewer drain.
He was so normal.
After the globs of flesh are cleaned from the tiles or the tiles replaced
After the building itself is demolished to try to erase
what cannot be erased
in proxy the memory of slaughtered innocents. Meanwhile
Both sides of the gun debate debate about guns
nailing dry rot over mold, gluing toast on walls sprayed with holes
to cover the holes that won’t be covered.
You’ll never know why.
You could have stopped it. There was a time.
But now you can’t,
You cannot stop
The next one. It's too late for that.
Though it has not yet happened
It is already too late. It’s coming.
Yes, you could have stopped it. Years ago you could have
Stopped standing by, flinging words.
But not now. He has his guns and his hate all ready.
The next one’s guaranteed. We don’t know precisely where,
(two more--make that three--have occurred since I started this poem).
Maybe your own small town, maybe your little neighborhood, maybe your city.
Probably not. Probably the next will be in someone else’s town
Like all the last ones were. They’ll get around to yours eventually.
No, we don’t know when exactly. But it’s happening so
Regularly, we can use the past to plot a graph
That brings us pretty close.
About two months from now. No more than that.
And then one after that—about two months further hence.
It’s too late for that one too.
The guns you did not stop before are out there now,
and the silencers and the rounds.
and the hate.
All these neighbors waiting to die.

Initial Thoughts on Rereading Miracles

To explore C.S. Lewis’ notion, in Miracles, that miracles are not interventions in reality of something outside of it, that they don’t in fact disrupt the natural order (hard claims to which to give assent), and particularly the far more intriguing claim that they amount to God’s signature on his creation (to borrow a word from Whitman that expresses much the same notion) or his characteristic artistic flourish—this is worth a moment’s pause. What miracles would not be, then, would be the get out of jail free card touted by virtually everyone who promotes them—the quack television and mega-church evangelists peddling false hope and false religion and reaping for this personal fortunes from the easily duped. Miracles are not the way around cancer or kidney disease. Though a miraculous cure is not out of the realm of the possible with a God who actually does miracles, it would have the status of a random event from nearly every perspective—not a cure earned by a good life or fervent prayer or a prayer chain set up around the globe, like a power boost in a video game (which would make God the champion of the popular or well-resourced, the God whom the New Testament insists would prefer to bless the lonely woman, homeless and friendless, than the pope, who ought to have faith enough anyway to endure not just cancer but an actual cross if need be. The miracle is a phenomenon, strategically deployed, as it were, to say, in effect, “I am God,” (the signature) and, “If I had it my way you would not have to endure this suffering.”

Why God can’t have it his way is a separate question, addressed, at great length though not necessarily with great success by that other Pope, Alexander, in his “Essay on Man.”

Miracles then in a curious way align the Christian world with the Greek world of Tragedy. The union of Judaism with Platonism produced Christianity, as is well attested, but the connection of Judaism with that other, and rival, Greek notion of Tragedy has been, as far as I know, a lot less explored. But here there is a connection.

The most fundamental aspect of tragedy, to my mind, one which Aristotle himself never quite hit upon, is this: It should not have to have been. Any muthos (is that Ricoeur’s word?) that leads the reader to this understanding of the absolute necessity of a resolution that should have been able to have been stopped, that heady glot of countervailing forces—that is tragedy. There should have been a way to prevent the tragedy of Oedipus. But there could not have been any way and nothing could have stopped it. If only we’d known what we could not possibly have known we could have done the thing that there was no possibility of doing. This must be the position in which a Christian, though he does not ever articulate it as such, must believe God sits. The miracles show that God does not want the world to suffer its way back to the lost paradise. But there is no other way. And what ties the omniscient God’s hands we can’t know. For whatever reason. (Lewis does an excellent and I think important job of laying out the necessity of the fundamental ignorance we must have of what we can only call “being itself,” the universe as God “sees” it, the universe as it is. We can know neither it nor our ignorance of it any more than our beloved dog and can know what we people are up to in any way that does not involve her. No need to go into all that again.)

Miracles then have an element of sadness to them, the “wish I could do more,” of a doctor who instead of curing the patient gives her an aspirin, the fireman who in lieu of saving the house rescues a teddy bear.

Thoughts Inspired by a Cosmologist, Hooray

Science is a discourse and a method. There is nothing else like it. Its fundamental premise is that we humans can understand the physical universe through observation with the help of math. It has made marvelous progress. There is nothing humans have ever done that is more exciting. But let’s not let our enthusiasm run away with us. That essential premise has never been proved. The progress is phenomenal. We’ve gone so much farther than it seems we could have hoped when the enterprise began (though we did have that comprehensive hope). And there have been times when we thought were almost there, with Newton, with Einstein. But the scope of what we do not know keeps getting clearer and larger. The real likelihood of vast realms of being that we cannot understand grows, so that now we instead of saying “we’ll get there some day,” say “how amazing it is that we can know as much as we can.” What banged in the big bang? What exactly is this dark matter? How will we ever know anything that cannot be described by math?
Science is a discourse and a method. It should not be an ideology or a religion. It excludes a priori what cannot be brought into its orbit, God and spirit and soul. It gives no testimony against these concepts. I heard a Harvard cosmologist become verbally entangled when she attempted to exclude beauty as a principle of truth. She was right to exclude beauty, since beauty comes from a realm of being outside the realm of science. It is a religious or a purely evolutionary concept. There may be no such thing as beauty is science understands “thing.”
But there also may be. This cosmologist dismissed what (it seems to me) she has no time for. The demands of science are enormous both professionally and personally. Every scientist knows the breakthrough he/she is working for, dedicated to, may not happen in his/her lifetime. May not happen at all. Every scientist knows his/her theories may be dead ends or may lead where experiment and observation cannot go. It is necessary then to dismiss God and beauty with a wave. Wave them off. We all benefit from this work, though in waving off these things it seems to me the scientist reduces the quest to the status of a game, a very expensive way to satisfy nothing more profound than curiosity. (Yes, we know there will be effects, from GPS to nuclear weapons, and the discoveries will change the world, but it is quest is never for the effects. The opening of Pandora’s box, the revelation of Goddes privetee, it’s done to find out what’s inside.) Of course, this too must be accepted if the ideology of science, which would require that humans in their brief lives find something interesting to do. To while away the time.

A Good Right-Wing Response to the Football Protests

Mike Pence went to a Colts-49ers game today with the single intention of walking out with great hue and cry in order to stoke the anger of what’s called the Republican base.

It was a dumb move.

But it makes one think about what a good right wing move would be. And that’s neither hard to see nor difficult to do. A good right wing response to the protests would go like this:

I understand the motive behind this protests. And I agree that too many black men are being shot and jailed in America, and I realize that too often the law makes the situation worse. More needs to be done to solve that problem. And it’s good and proper to bring attention to the problem.

However, this particular form of protest strikes a number of good and loyal Americans as unpatriotic. That may not have been the intention, but it has been amply shown that to many people this appears to be a protest against the nation and the flag. To many it dishonors the sacrifice of the military while doing nothing to advance the cause for which it was begun. I therefore believe is not a suitable way to protest the injustice it was designed to protest. Let’s come together and find another way.


It happens that I disagree strongly with that second paragraph. But I know there are good people, good Americans who cannot see past the perceived affront to patriotism. And I could respect anyone who, while maintaining his dignity and seeking common ground, refuses to sanction what he/she sees as an affront to the country.

What I cannot stand is the divisive grandstanding of party hacks like Mike Pence, whose view of the protest is deliberately divisive and belligerently blinkered. He ignores the legitimate complaint that underlies the protest while painting in the bright colors of his cartoonish logic—all to score political points. (I say that assuming his not really stupid enough to believe his own rhetoric, though I have to say I haven’t seen a whole lot of evidence to support that generous allowance.)

Mike Pence is under the delusion that his presence at an NFL game lends dignity to the event merely (I guess) because he is Vice President. This would perhaps be true if he were doing his actual job. He’s not. Pence’s actions as well as his rhetoric paint the issue in provocatively black and white terms, both logically and racially. That is the worst possible reaction particularly from the White House whose job is unite.

If Not Exactly Silver

Though I don’t want to seem to be making light
of serious things, I can’t help but recall the couple
who, as Murphy’s law predicts, came down with Alzheimer’s
at the same time,
which progressed at the same rate
and, though they did die together
in the fire that consumed their house,
they spent most of the time between the onset and the blaze
falling in love.

If God Speaks in the Thunder

God can only say
Life is brief, life is precarious,
Do not look for what is not there
Do not look to me to save you
When the dog quivers and hides,
When the trees flash in the ominous dark
When the lightening sets your house afire.
I will not calm the earthquake
I will not plug the volcano.
Take refuge where and when and as you can.
I will not stay the hungry fist
I will not stick my finger in the muzzle of the gun.
And even if I did, you would die.
I will not spare you loneliness
Nor lengthen your days of love.
I will not halt the spread of sickness in your bones.
I will neither warm the sun in winter on the homeless streets
Nor cool it in summer between Sonoyta and Phoenix.
I am the lord, the God almighty. My love is like a mighty river
Behind a broken dam.
I will not hold back its waters.

The Aardvark and the Snake

The snake twists across the desert sand. There’s
No other animal in sight,
And it’s a fast snake, sashaying over the dry land
In the shade of the rocks, leaving behind
Not even a blade of bent grass as a sign
It was here, a curling wave that erases itself
Like a wave in a pool after a splash. Nothing left
But a scent so faint you’d need a nose as big as an
Aarkvark’s pressed into the ground to pick it up.

An aardvark appears.
Half hour later in search of water
She wanders by, nose to the ground. By that time the fat
Muscled venomous rope has crossed three outcrops
And more scrub than a passing man
Could keep track of on its way to its lair in this one particular
Pile of stones miles and miles from the thirsty
Aardvark.

It's moving ever farther from the aardvark, moving away from the aardvark
faster than the aardvark is moving.

The aardvark follows the scent, faint, but strong enough.
The aardvark is not half as fast as the snake. By the time it passes
That first outcrop, the snake is safely curled
In the cool and sleepy shade of its home under the rocks,
Whose entrance is a hole so small that nothing
larger than a snake could pass through.

The slow thirsty aarkvark saunters over the sands.
The sun climbs, and then begins to slide down the cloudless sky.
The aardvark rocks on its hips like a delivery truck with bad suspension
On an unpaved country road. The snake tastes the air continually,
Snakishly. Before the sun
Falls half way to the horizon, the aardvark, its nose never leaving the sand
Bumps into the rock by the entrance to the tiny hole high above the snake.
The vigilant snake tastes its enemy in the air with its nervous tongue.
The aardvark forces her thick proboscis into the narrow hole until she
Knows for sure: this is the place. The snake feels the dim light disappear and
Tastes the strong aardvark taste it hates. Thick as the smell of sweat.
The aardvark digs. The aardvark widens the hole left and right, grunting
And snorting, minute by minute. The snake circles in the cul de sac of its safety.
The aardvark pushes her head into the widening hole. Pulls back and digs some more.
Pushes her shoulders into the hole. Pulls back and digs some more.
The snake pools his venom in the sacks behind the fangs like gagging spit.
The aardvark reaches her forepaws, head, and shoulders into the pit.
The snake strikes, hurls his long body through the smoky tunnel. He
Sinks his razor jaws into the aardvark’s shoulder, drains two deep reservoirs
Of venom into the aardvark’s blood. His enemy, the aardvark, immune, blocking
The exit, pushes her whole body into the chamber.

I Know Why the Caged Crow Caws

It's a crow.

A Low “Ha”

O, river Derchi,
O, wider Seine,
A river
Has to love vistas,
Sigh a narrow
Farewell.

Continued Trump Support

At this point, my instinct is to believe that anyone who persists in their support of Trump, if they’re not simply idiots, is doing it out of some petulant stubbornness that prevents them from admitting they were wrong, perhaps for fear of looking stupid. Clearly, the man has demonstrated again and again how unqualified he is for the job, intellectually, morally, and temperamentally. He’s an idiot, a buffoon, and a toddler. But the supporters keep cheering, “Go, go, go, you lying, pussy-grabbing, racist.” Whenever I’ve asked them for some explanation of how they could support this thug, they provide no shred of thought beyond the idea that “millions of people support him, so it must not be irrational for me to do so.” They throw their responsibility to think onto the crowd, which doesn't. Millions of people believe global warming is a hoax, that Hillary Clinton is a murderer, that Obama is a Muslim, that Rush Limbaugh is a human being, that the earth is only 6000 years old, that the holocaust never happened, that the moon landing never happened, that owning a gun makes you safe, that vaccines cause autism... and on and on. Idiocy that draws comfort from the idiocy of mass numbers is still idiocy. Well, we’re stuck with the dangerous and dysfunctional ape for the time being. But we are not obligated to cheer. He watches his approval ratings closely. He has responded recently by slowing down the shit show on Twitter. If you voted for Trump, you made a mistake. If you’re not a moron, you know that. Get over it.

The Caulk of Arrogance: Nature and Supernature

In the universe of shifting lines and of concepts which are neither arbitrary nor predetermined or absolute, where is the line between the natural and the supernatural? Where does it get drawn?

It gets drawn at the border of human sense and understanding. We’ve pushed it back considerably as our understanding as grown and as our senses have been mechanically extended, but the principle by which it is drawn remains the same: what we know or can know is the place of the border.
What’s changed is that we by and large no longer believe there is anything outside that border. Yes there are things we don’t yet know—what so called “dark” matter and dark energy are, how the universe reconciles general and specific relativity that defy our math. But the belief is that these things are in principle knowable. They are not supernatural. We may never know them due to the limitations of our brains or our senses. But they are natural.

There’s no point in arguing that they are not.

Nonetheless there seems to be a strange and frankly unscientific and unphilosophical arrogance to the idea that the natural coincides with us. We still seem to be believe we are at the center of the universe, of being itself. We know of no other creature whose apprehensions are adequate to its reality. And ours have not been so until very recently, a fact that this has led this historically new sensibility to conclude that what has always been called the supernatural is nothing more than the part of being we could not bring into concert with our understanding. The God of the gaps, the caulk of our ignorance.

It seems to me this is unlikely. I do not presume to know what else is part of being. I likewise do not presume that there is no access to being which lies outside of what we call science. Conspicuous religious practice is clearly a sham, however sincere the practitioner may be. And most of any religion is at best contaminated, a sooted fresco. But there are actually few people on earth that believe all spiritual practice is a waste of time. Nor is it certain that what good spiritual practice manages to access is not some part of being that will never be subject to science.

Backed like a Camel

Like naming the shape of a cloud so rapidly changing
that the thing you thought it looked like it no longer looks like
when you say the word, say the word “whale,” the people
in the crowded room spend their days trying to name
the room, to call it what it is—or if there is no name
that corresponds to describe it in well defined terms
or if there are no such terms to make new ones
but the room itself is constantly changing and it’s their names
doing that, the thing that cannot be what it is
until you name it and that cannot be that
once you do.

Something to work on

What I’m walling in is the flowers.
What I’m walling out is the grass.

I know frost does not love my walls.
Each spring I am compelled
to plop tumbled rocks
upon rocks that haven’t tumbled.

It’s not hard.

In summer too the top rocks fall
when deer jump the paths
to eat the hosta, or when, I guess,
the world spins just a hair too fast.

I don’t know. The rain, perhaps. Rocks fall.
Rocks are put on rocks because
You need a line between the flowers
that draw you out of doors to care for them
and the grass

whose only good is the good of negative space
between the beds
like that space between Fred

and Ethel, Rob and

Laura. The frozen groundswell doesn’t care
one way or another for walls.
The dead mechanical earth,
water responding to temperature, I guess

the mindless plants don’t care either,
but that’s harder to be sure of, the grass
climbs the little wall,
like a company of thin green Romeos
ascending the balcony to the beds
of all those Juliets,

or it insinuates
itself between the spaces
pulling away from the blow
of the mower
like a thief
darting for cover.

The flowers seem to despise the wall.
They leap over it to their deaths
or throw their children down
to pop up in the grass
like immigrants:
If you can’t save us save our babies,
raised in the country of grass.

Maybe I don't love a wall.

Maybe I can't love without one.

A Better World without FOX

For decades now so-called Fox News has been pushing the absurd proposition that the “mainstream” media in this country is covertly liberal and the equally absurd corollary that therefore people who want to know the truth should stop listening to the “mainstream” which pretends not to be biased and instead listen only to those who wear their bias on their sleeve. If the first were the case, which it is not, the solution would not be to listen instead to the right-wing response but to listen to both the mainstream and the conservative media and make up your own mind. But they would never say this. There is a liberal media in this country, most obviously represented by in MSNBC. But neither the NY Times nor the Washington Post nor the major networks other than Fox nor NPR nor the major papers in this country—whatever their editorial stance—is pushing a liberal agenda in their news coverage. All responsible news organizations fight against their prejudices. They often fail. There are a great number of legitimate criticisms to be made of the media, but a clandestine liberal bias is not one of them.

Fox “News” has pushed the two absurdities so hard for so long that many Americans simply accept them. Thus Fox “News” has made significant steps toward raising the stupidity level of the country. If you base your network on brace of lies, if you invite your viewers to accept the irrational conclusion that only an avowedly partisan agenda can present the truth, you teach them to see everything through the clouded lens of unreason. If you want to get people to make irrational choices you have to work very hard and very long to make them stupid—not completely stupid, because that leads to chaos—but just stupid enough so that the starting point of their thought is inside your bubble. It’s working very well.

Fox can’t be given sole credit for the raise of the most mendacious candidate probably in the history of the country to the presidency, a grandiose and mentally unstable egomaniac, but I doubt it could have happened without the softening up of the territory that has been going on all these years. Irrationality and prejudice are not new to our culture. They have always been there. But I wonder if we ever had a machine as powerful for promoting them before this. If you can be sucked in by the founding absurdities of Fox “News,” you can be taught to accept any number of easily disprovable things: the Climate Change is a hoax, that immigrants are a threat, that Muslims are all extremists, that socialism is evil, that the promotion of so-called American values of capitalism and democracy throughout the world is benign, that higher education is a form of liberal indoctrination. That a dangerous monomaniac has any business being in power.

And on and on.

As with any multivariable and constantly changing system, it will never be possible to weigh the particular effect of any one element. We’ll never know with precision what the world would have been like if not for Fox “News.” But we can be pretty sure it would have been a whole lot better.

What I learned on my China Vacation

1. The length of a day depends on how far you stray from your bed.

2. Water and oxygen are among the most destructive elements in the universe. So is love.

3. The Chinese man pushing his invalid mother behind me in a wheelchair proves by his “Hello” the emptiness of the proposition that words have meaning.

4. Language is rife with superfluous precision.

Regarding number 1, I've often been struck by this quasi-arbitrary notion of a day. We may be trained to assume or believe that before you can measure something, it has to exist. But this apparently is not the case. The measurement of the day creates the day, as becomes more and more apparent the more closely you try to measure it. In its grossest measure, it's pretty simple, a day is the interval of light between darknesses. There are latitudes where this causes problems, but few people live in those latitudes, relatively speaking. But when you want to mark where one day turns into another, you have a problem. But it's not a big problem. You create a ruler (love that word!) and break the intervals up into sections. What matters is the hours. The number 24 is arbitrary, but useful. If take the total expanse from the middle of one dark period to the middle of the next and break it into 24 equal units--voila, a day. When clocks aren't all that precise, the fact that the units themselves lack perfection doesn't raise a noticeable problem. But as you try to measure more precisely, into minutes and seconds, then you come into the wobble problem. Days are not exactly equal. They're astonishingly close. But clocks have become more precise than the thing they were created to measure. The brilliant solution to this problem is to announce or pronounce that our clocks no longer measure the temporal distance from the middle of one dark to the middle of the next (or from noon to noon). What do they measure? A period of 24 hours. This can be done very precisely because the thing being measured is created by the ruler itself. It's true by definition. Days do not exist as such. But that doesn't mean we can't measure them.

The problem becomes even more complicated when you think about the 24 hour period itself. Plane travel makes it apparent that from an experiential standpoint, a day can be much longer or much shorter than 24 hours. "Experiential" is the key word here. For a day to be 24 hours long you have to define it from a spot, the spot where you place your clock. As soon as a human gets out of bed, she changes the length of her day, and constantly changes it as she crosses the longitude of her bed or moves along it. No one experiences a day as 24 hours except invalids or other sick people.

So there's no such thing as a day. Days aren't 24 hours long. And yet we can measure them.

As for number 3, the prejudice that words have meaning is so ingrained that at first it seems difficult to comprehend that in fact they don't "have" meaning. A word does not have to "have" a meaning for it to be used in a meaningful way (or if not meaning-full, since meaning is never full, certainly in a meaning-generative way). In short, the man behind me was asking me politely to get out of his way so that he could move past me with the wheelchair. He was using his only English in order to inform me that I was the object of his speech. His intention was to get me to direct my intention toward him so that I could infer what he wanted. If you look up "Hello" in the dictionary, it won't list, "Please get out of my way, foreigner" as one of the definitions. But that was the meaning of "hello" in this case, and I would argue that the word was properly used. Words have uses and histories of uses, not meanings. Words normalize and regulate situations or events. This gives us the illusion that the "signified" is tied to the "signifier." (This is part of a discussion that has been going on for over a century now, which you learn all about and also enter in graduate schools in many disciplines. I'm fascinated by it and always on the look out for examples that illustrate this.)

As for number 4, many times each day in this crowded city I found myself impeding the progress of someone, usually someone on a bike. To move me out of their way, most of them rang a bell which sounded a lot like the bells they attached to children's bikes when I was a child, fifty years ago. But when the biker or pedestrian didn't have a bell, they used various phrases in English or Mandarin to serve the function of the bell, not just "hello," but "good morning," "excuse me," and others. It occurred to me that there are a lot of ways to ask people to get our of your way, but they all come down to the ringing of a bell. Some just grunted. The words are all associated with various other meanings than "please, I'm in a hurry, let me pass." And the possibility of processing those associated meanings is always present. But the "good morning" was never really a wish for me to have a good morning any more than the "hello" was a greeting. Those meanings in fact could only interfere with the intention, which is inferred from the fact of a sound. The advantage of a voice over a bell is the greater precision it renders for emotion. But even a bell can be polite, sympathetic, or angry.

Knowing v Understanding

Proposition: A small child knows language, but does not understand language. The child knows language the way an animal knows its way around the forest, the way you know how to walk or run. The learning is both deep and shallow—because these words are metaphors and depend on the perspective of the observer on the phenomenon not the phenomenon itself. The child knows how to use words the way it knows how to move its arms and practices, regularizing situations via repeating the sounds (we could at this point call them sounds rather than words) that get uttered in this situation. “Now we use the soap.” “Now we open the door.” “Now we say goodnight.” The child goes through a well documented phase in which it uses irregular verbs correctly and then a phase when it no longer uses them correctly, when “we went to the store” turns into “we goed to the store.” That’s the moment when understanding begins. The next phase is to return to correct use of irregular verbs but it’s not a return, but an advance, a sign of a yet more sophisticated understanding.

We never lose this instinctive relationship to our first language. It develops into understanding, but understanding doesn’t erase the instinctive origin and basis of our knowing. Language habits that never rise to understanding are hard to break.

As we grow older we gradually those this instinctive way of learning. It’s obvious with language, but it is true of everything we learn. We turn from “picking it up” (it could be an instrument or sport for example) to funneling it through our understanding. We learn the rules of cases and declensions and genders, we learn scales, and roots, and sevenths, and tunnel a path from understanding through the hard crust of the understanding. But we have to get there. You can’t think of what you’re doing on the soccer field. You can’t think about the right way to say, “The way your eyes reflect the sun is just wonderful.”

The goal is knowing. Understanding is not the only path.

Lost, Love

I've written a bunch of sonnets in my life, none of which I've thought was any good. I was reading Hass's "Little Book on Form" last night and thought I'd give the form another chance. What if a sonnet recapitulated the history of the form, however vaguely? Quatrain on forbidden love; quatrain on God, post-volta resolution of the two as the form itself slowly dissolves.


If it is true that we should not have kissed
Because we know how sad life is and cruel
If I should never’ve pressed my fingers to your breast
My silent, protest rage, beloved, well, then to be a fool—
Who could not help but hope God dropped a sign,
Before, befuddlededly, he wandered off,
Forgetfulness, read upon your skin,
Or momentary blindness,—then such a sin
Is just the entrance fee. Love does not last—
We slid into our clothes and closed the door,
Turned on the light, resumed the souls we’d been.
We must have known we would. And yet we were surprised
Like thirsty hikers lost on foreign hills
Who despair to find a stream—and there it is.

A Clever Observation on a Trivial Fact Followed by an Enigmatic Image that Might Be Profound

For Billy Collins

At 60 my mother was no spring chicken
But then a spring chicken is something no one ever is
Not even spring chickens.
It’s only something you can not be
Like so many other things, even things for which we have certain names,
Like certain.
They say he has a certain charm,
By which we indicate that we don’t know what that charm is
Which makes it anything but certain.

I like the idea that we can now throw shade.
Years ago we could only cast it, as we cast a fly rod
Which provides very little shade. Now we can throw it
Like a baseball, which has more surface area,
Though now that I think of it, perhaps we should learn to unfurl shade.

Which brings me back to my mother, in her rocking chair,
Reading this poem
With a certain enigmatic expression.

River God

Those long ago laborers hauling fish
From the Nile, the Euphrates, the Huang Se,
Cursing and trembling by turns when the river
Over which the sun set
Offered no fish for their nets,
They thought the river was a god
Because It rose and fell, grew angry or lay peaceful,
Because of the blessings it bestowed and its curses,
Because it pursued revenge and gave love by turns,
Because it mirrored the universe.

And does it matter whether the river is a god
Or a metaphor fished from the far bank
By those who had no notion of metaphor?

I Should Probably Get Back to the Poems of David Kirby

The poems are really great
If you concentrate
And take in every word
And the meaning of every word
And the sound of every word
And the rhythm of every word
And if you connect every word to every other word
And all the lines to the other lines and listen
To the play of the lines against the sentences and the play
Of the lines and the sentences against the stanzas
Which are like fences with surprising holes in them
Through which you can watch the Babe hit one of his 714 or one of his 60
For absolutely nothing and be one of the silent spectators of a genuine moment of history
And if you pause at the pauses and run with the alliterations and skid with the
Enjambments around the sudden turns without losing your braces. Otherwise—
If you let your mind wander if you just meander through the thing
Like it’s a joke or a corn maze (a maize maze, amazing, amazing maize maze, amusing,
An amusing amazing maize maze—where was I?) that you’ll eventually wander out of
Whether you put any effort or interest in it or not, like a homework assignment
In a class you didn’t really want to take in the first place—well then,
Whose problem is that?

What is Left to Say

By Lisel Mueller
(1924 - )

The self steps out of the circle;
it stops wanting to be
the farmer, the wife, and the child.

It stops trying to please
by learning everyone's dialect;
it finds it can live, after all,
in a world of strangers.

It sends itself fewer flowers;
it stops preserving its tears in amber.

How splendidly arrogant it was
when it believed the gold-filled tomb
of language awaited its raids!
Now it frequents the junkyards
knowing all words are secondhand.

It has not chosen its poverty,
this new frugality.
It did not want to fall out of love
with itself. Young,
it celebrated itself
and richly sang itself,
seeing only itself
in the mirror of the world.

It cannot return. It assumes
its place in the universe of stars
that do not see it. Even the dead
no longer need it to be at peace.
Its function is to applaud.

On Winning or Losing in Battle

We like to say that battles are lost or won. Even our best respected historians provide the final score whenever they can. Some battles are ties; some have ambiguous outcomes. Most are won or lost. We have ways of determining such things. We like neat dichotomies, binary oppositions. It’s in the language, but it’s in the language because it’s in the being, our being. Win and lose are easy to understand.

The borderlines we put on battles are not arbitrary. But they’re not real either. They are conceptual. They could be put in other places, both the starting point then the first shot is fired and the end point when the last effective shot is fired are placed there for convenience, so we will be able to give a name to when the thing started and ended. The name is everything. It’s the folder that allows us to catalog the battle, that allows us to have had a battle at all. There is no knowledge without the name on the folder. But we all know too that the battle started long before the fighting and continued long after and may never have ended. We all know that the most decisive victories are provisional and momentary. Many conquered people have eventually won the war—or anyway have had moment in which the victory had shifted their way, had conquered the conqueror from beneath.

The Unconscious Is More than That

Freud was interested in the ego/id/superego trinity of the unconscious to the exclusion of anything else that might have been happening in the mind that the mind was unaware of. With great verbal dexterity he made sure that all facts could be hung on this increasingly articulated model. Girard does the same thing with his model of mimesis. Both systems are brilliant, and certainly contain some important correspondence to reality. But they are also cautionary tales about trying too hard to make a single insight conquer the whole territory.

Being animals human beings are always attempting to organize themselves into the “proper” social structure for human beings. Mapped in the genes (as it were) of all animals is the way that those animals are supposed to be organized. This is why middle school students are so notoriously hard to teach. Their bodies are telling them to form themselves into a nation. The kings are trying to emerge. Everyone is trying to align themselves with power, not the foreign invasive power of the teacher-class, but the real structure of the student-class. Rivalries emerge. School is contrary to nature.

"How about We Just Give Trump a Chance?"

As for “giving Trump a chance,” there are as far as I can see only two possible justifications for doing so. The first is that he has personally earned a chance. I think that whatever your stance on the man’s policies or positions, someone who spent the last eight years trying, without a shred of evidence, to undermine the legitimacy of his predecessor by claiming he was a Muslim from Africa, has not personally earned the chance. Personally he’s earned scorn and derision and the constant whining of Trump and his supporters about how “unfairly” he’s been treated deserves nothing better than maniacal laughter. Despite his claim of “great surety” that no politician in history has been treated worse or more unfairly, in fact no one is seriously denying the legitimacy of his victory. He hasn’t been treated worse than he himself treated President Obama.

The second reason to “give him a chance” is that it would be for the good of the country. That claim has a little more weight. Even Obama himself—a man infinitely more gracious, patriotic, and civil minded than the current president, said we should wish Trump success. It sounds good. One should, if possible, set aside the well-earned scorn Trump has worked so hard for and wish him well if not doing so is harmful to the country. However hard it may be to swallow the anger and let this man off the hook for his myriad sins against pretty much everything an American should hold dear, we should let him off the hook indeed if that serves the greater good.

But what does it actually mean to do so? Does it mean sitting back quietly while he tries to implement policies that go against one’s values? Does it mean staying silent when he delegitimizes the press (and therefore the Constitution)? Should we shush ourselves when he insults the world’s billion Muslims? Does it mean giving him no opposition when he tries to funnel more and more of the nation’s wealth away from the poor and middle class up to his billionaire cronies? If that’s what it means to “give him a chance,” then no. No American should for one moment let him off the hook. We could forgive or at least ignore for now the lying, divisive, bullying, ignorant, hate-filled rise to the presidency if doing so would be good for the country. But—and this is not exactly surprising—the perverse values of the disgusting campaign that led this disgusting lard ass to the job are the same values that guide his presidency. If he ever deserved a chance, he’s already warn that deserving out. He wore it out the moment he first tried to ban all Muslims from the country. And he’s shown again and again since how little he deserves a chance and how dangerous it would be act in any way other than in the strictest opposition.

Memory

It turns out that Plato was almost right when (was it in the Timeaus?) he had Socrates condemn writing for the inevitable ruin of memory it boded. But the problem is not that it made remembering unnecessary. The problem was that it made forgetting impossible. We’ve been collectively accumulating memories, and at an ever increasing rate, since that first stylus scored that first clay tablet. Now, every day, more memories are uploaded to Youtube than an individual could view in a lifetime. We're overburdened by memory. By Shakespeare's time it had become the goal of writers and the nobility to become immortalized in print. We turned away from the world when we turned to the tablet. Many great things have come from writing. But in the end, we will die because of writing. Global Warming is likely to do it. So far we've escaped nuclear holocaust, but that threat is still out there. These things could never have happened without writing. True, writing could save us from a world-ending asteroid. That would be good. But it's more likely to be the first step in a chain many thousands of years long that will terminate us. How much better it would have been if we had not figured out writing until we were ready for it. But then again, how without writing could we ever have become ready for it? And now we are in the territory of tragedy.

Beyond Dualisms

Words like “skepticism” pose such obvious problems. Skeptics are always so sure of themselves. They have to be. How could you be a skeptic if you doubted your skepticism? There’s then no point in deconstructing them. Nor can you fall back on the old saw—the logical impasse of contradiction—to take them apart. You must be able to know something if you know your ignorance. And if you can know that why can’t you know other things?

Because you can’t. And this is why….

And then the skeptic like Finnegan goes back to the riverrun and starts over.

Only in time is time overcome. Fortunately, we are only in time. So if I have one belief left, I suppose it is this, and it is as much a religious as a philosophical (which is to say logical conclusion) belief, which is to say something I understand intuitively as true as well as logically as valid, insofar as it can be logically validated: set aside all conclusions. I suppose it’s a mildly Hegelian position. Setting aside all that math or the scientific method can attain (I don’t want to get into the absurdity of an earth that is other than metaphorically flat), in areas that actually matter, where science and math are of negligible service, come to whatever conclusions you will, and then set them aside. Don’t fail to arrive at these conclusions, which we could just as easily call propositions because we are at the place where language’s fundamental dualism betrays us (that statement too will have to be taken in, then set aside).

This matters most where most is at stake. Starting with God, God who is absolute otherness and absolute presence. Unattainable, incomprehensible, but also here, and inescapable, the radiance of love. It’s all true and therefore all not-true. And the biggest sin is to think you have it. And the other biggest sin is to proclaim that you don’t. Did I say Hegelian-ish? Also Hinduish. Sufish. Part of all mysticisms, secular or religious, but only where mysticism marries the dull quotidian, where secular and religious don’t signify different realms.

Sign Language

My students tell me all poems are open
for interpretation.
I tell them I do not dispute that statement,
adding just that this not only doesn’t define,
it doesn’t even distinguish
poems from any other deployment
of words. Not from these
You’re now reading (did you really
think this was a poem?) but neither
from the most carefully crafted contracts
or laws, nor from your mother’s
hello, your uncle’s be careful, or your fumbling
attempt to go out with a girl
or to lure her to bed.

Signs are signs
even when they stand high above the parking lot
of the store
that was never built.

Fixing the Rose

He knows the beauty of the rose
Painfully intense as it can be
Is not enough.
And so he fixes it
on canvas sacrificing
nearly every part of it
to give it what it lacks:
permanence.
It gets to stay.
It gets to be what it appears to be--
As though the lack of permanence were not what made it
Beautiful
to begin with.


And so the painting calms the rose
But does not fix it.

Let's begin.

On Childhood

It's not that we lost something in childhood that drives us back in search, but that we were waiting for something that never came.

On the Evil of Religion

Over the past few years—probably because I’ve been paying closer attention and not because it’s happening more often—I’ve been hearing more and more voices crying out against religion—against all religion, from the likes of Bill Maher to the intellect of Richard Dawkins. Religion is bad. It’s bad for us. We’d be better off without it. Belief in God brings misery. Spreading the word is just about the most anti-human of all acts. So much misery has been done in the name of religion that religion is a viral cancer. ISIS. Trump voters. The Westboro Baptists. Colonialism, Imperialism, Zionism. If anything good comes of religion that good is small and private and could never match the evil religion does.

It’s a pretty strong case.

But does that critique actually make sense? I don’t think it does. And this is why: religion is neither good nor bad. I’m not going to offer any heart-felt defense of religion. Nor am I willing to condemn it. People are good and people are bad. Bad people use whatever means is at their disposal to effect their bad ends. Religion has no power at all to stop them, nor does it have any power to promote their hate; it has power neither to effect nor resist the evil ends of the people that use it. This is an essential point. The haters of religion have their heads on sideways when it comes to religion. They think if they would only get rid of religion things would get better. At least a little better.

Things would not get better. In fact things would get worse, though I don’t credit religion thereby. Nazism was not a religious movement. Communism is even less religious than Nazism. Pol Pot did not answer to any god. Nor have any of the leaders of North Korea. Donald Trump is not religious (despite has shallow pretense). People don’t need religion to inspire them in their hatred. They have nationalism and racism and sexism and plain old paranoia. The number of insignificant differences among humans available to exploit as though they were meaningful is as large as the human imagination. Evil people will always have ways to appeal to hatred and desire to coerce their fellow humans into mass murder. There’s no more destructive force on earth at this moment than Capitalism. Capitalism doesn’t give a shit about God.

People are good, and people are evil. And they’ll use religion if it’s available. And they’ll use something else if it’s not available. Do people fight more recklessly or more viciously or with less fear when they fight for God? Some may. Some almost certainly do. Not many. And on the other hand the number of people whose lives are enriched by their spiritual practice—whether or not they are theists—is almost beyond number. That doesn’t make religion good. People practice religion to become good. Religion isn’t by any means the only path to goodness. There are plenty of good atheists out there. Better a good atheist than a jihadists or a klansman.

Those who point to Osama Bin Laden or Pat Robertson and yell, “evil,” also have to point to the Dali Lama or Desmond Tutu. Religion didn’t make the former evil or the latter good. (The good ones humbly tell us there is good and evil in all of us.)

Evil people quote their scriptures to justify their evil. Good people quote those same scriptures to refute the evil people. The scriptures are not good or evil. People use the scriptures for good or evil.

The people who decry religion as evil always reason in the most shallow way. They assume the subject does not have to be taken seriously. Bill Maher dismisses Islam with a pinky wave by counting how many Muslims believe hateful things. That’s guilt by association. That’s correlation as causation. That’s a willful unwillingness to look into the real, historical causes of hatred. You can’t even ask the question of whether religion is good or evil without doing your homework. What is Islam? What is Christianity? These are not simple questions. They can only be answered by drawing circles around certain populations, circles that could be drawn with equal validity around different populations, based on beliefs or practices chosen by the one who’s drawing the circles. And your not-quite-arbitrary-but-absolutely-not-necessary circle will answer your question for you. Are Christians those who “believe the Bible” (whatever that means)? Are they the ones who accept the Bible as “the Word of God” (whatever that means)? Are they the ones who interpret the Bible correctly (as though there were such a thing, as though there were a single interpretation that covered such a vast literature)? And who decides which encircled group of religious folk do that when even those who call themselves “Christians” can’t? The one who makes that decision, the one who draws the circle, is the one who wants to approve or condemn Christianity and who will draw his circle around those people that enforce that interpretation to justify his condemnation or praise. It’s all done in the worst bad faith possible.

Is religion doctrine or is religion practice? And which doctrines and which practices count? And how do you know? How will you decide? On what basis will you draw your circles? There is no such thing as “religion”—not in the sense in which it would have to exist to be condemned or approved as such. It lacks the ontological or epistemological center and body it would need to have to support the statement that “religion is destructive” or “religion is good.” People use religion to destroy and people use religion to build. And if you are convinced that more destruction is done in the name of religion than construction—you may be right. I don’t know. That only means that in the on-going struggle of humanity over itself, goodness is losing. It means we are a species more bent on our destruction than our improvement or one whose destructive tendencies are more effective than its goodness. I'm not saying that's true. It’s easy to blow up a building. It’s hard to build a plane. Or a community. It’s easy to hate. It’s hard to love. Religion does not teach anyone to hate. Hateful people use religion to spread hate. Loving people use religion to spread love. The hate would get along just fine without religion. As for love, I’m not so sure.

The Meaning of Life (draft, part 1)

We can believe that the world is a text whose meaning the discerning reader understands and which all discerning readers understand in the same way and that all who fail to understand it thus (properly) are misguided for any one of a number of definable reasons from a lack of fundamental perspicacity (they’re too stupid to get it) to an accidental or nefarious being-led-astray (someone or something has tricked and deceived them). Or we can see the world as not a text in the first place but as something which simply is, which therefore is not put in front of us as something to be understand.

We can proclaim that the very notion of “understanding” is a problem, particularly when the thing to be understood is not a text. Language is the tool of understanding. And language runs into problems when it attempts to understand—to come to terms with, to bring into language—that which is not language.

We can represent the world with words. But there is no one, single, right way to do that. There is no full or final way to do that. We cannot bring the world to presence again which has never been present as such the first time. We can represent the world as a way of talking about the world. (If we could do this properly in words, we would not need music or painting.) But when we talk about our representation we are not talking about the world anymore. And the representation itself wasn’t exclusively about the world and didn’t represent it in its totality and didn’t get it quite right.

Even if we could get the world right in representing it, we’d also have to get the representation right by representing it—a rererepresentation. Let me get this right. Well I’ll let you, but you won’t manage it. My permission has never been lacking. And it was never what you needed.

We’ll never get over the inadequacies of language. And even if we could get a perfect language, we’ll never get over the inadequacies of perspective. The implication, however, is not that you stop trying. An imperfect representation is not a wholly false representation. An interested and partly blind interpretation is still work making. If there is no right perspective, no perfect or absolute perspective, there can still be valid or viable or useful perspectives. There can still be good perspectives. There can still be good language. Good for what?

Set you values and argue for them. Life is a value. No one deserves a life and no one deserves happiness. But we can decide that life and the greatest quality of life not for the greatest number but for everyone is the value. Everyone means everyone.

The first value has to be the earth itself. There is no place else for us to live. So earth must be as healthy as possible. The health of the earth should not be compromised. The question to ask is not “will this create jobs and thereby increase the quality of life for some people?” but “will this harm the earth? Will it lead to or contribute to the kind of destabilization that compromises the stability of the planet, its ability to sustain healthy live throughout its complex ecology?”

Right now we’re destabilizing the earth—with misguided fossil fuel use and exploration—not even for the sake of those jobs, which are just a corporate smoke screen, but for the profits of megaconglomerates, for the pockets of those who already have far more than they need. For greed. For power. For the basest animal out there. 

Further Speculations on Time and Eternity (unedited)

One of the most persistent facts about human beings as that they believe they have enough information to make accurate determinations about the state of being. We know enough about “the universe” or “being” or whatever we wish to call “it” to say what it is. The four elements and the four humors and the function of organs and the Linnaean catalogs and the crystalline spheres and human nature and the unconscious mind and the great chain of being and Oxfordian authorship have—along with endless other reapings—been asserted with such unquestioned certainty that it seems that intellectual hubris may be the fundamental condition of the human brain. Nothing’s ever tentative. Revelation, reason, and observation held the stool firm and level—until one of them rotted away. But even the loss of revelation has not been a problem. The stool seems still to be miraculously sound. There’s still nothing we don’t know—or if there is, it’s such a small bit it can safely be ignored. It’s just detail. We’ll get there. The grand unified theory, once we get it, will be the puzzle piece that reveals what’s at the end of that stick that guy is holding. Dark matter, dark energy—we may never know what they are, but it will be enough if we can measure their effects on the stuff with proper names. The puzzle is already essentially complete.

We’ve never not thought that the puzzle was essentially complete. We’ve never been right about this, but that’s never worried us much. We’re always right now.

Evidence suggests that this is a foolish position to take. Evidence suggests that we accept the fact of our lack of sufficient understanding of being—I’ll call it being. We know a lot beyond dispute. We can trust science to tell us what happens if we pump too much CO2 into the atmosphere. But the big picture we don’t have. We don’t have the first idea what reality itself is, what it looks like. In fact our best understanding is that “understanding” is itself a problem. Seeing, modeling, representing—everything is second hand, derivative. And there’s no way around that, not even with math.

We need the best models. But we need to understand that they are models, that the story always has a narrator, and the narrator is always part of the story.

So let’s speculate about time—which we know almost nothing about, despite Einstein’s advancement on Augustine. Does the past exist? If so, in what sense? Science has come up with some elaborate ways in which it would be, in theory, possible to get there. They are not practical ways, of course. We can’t actually do it. They involve things like the expenditure of massive amounts of energy in the field of black holes. But if the past does not exist, or does not exist like a room on the other side of the wall, then our trip back into would come up against unforeseen obstacles even if it were practical. To ask the question another way, is there such a thing as “now”? If there is, we know we’re not all in it, or quite in it or perfectly in it. And yet at the same time, in apparent contradiction, there be no way for anyone or anything to ever not be in it. Everything we see is in the past, however fractionally. We see what was. But we see it now. We’re behind a little. But the fact that the trace of the past exists doesn’t necessarily mean that the past itself exists. We see from earth distant stars that if we were in the vicinity of we’d know they aren’t there. But the trace of the past isn’t the past. We know that time passes at different rates under different conditions. But that doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as now. The twin in his speeding rocket ship goes out into the universe and comes back to find his brother is twenty years older than he. But how is that slowing of time to be understood in relation to “now”? Is it a short cut? Time passes at different rates under different conditions. But “now” is always now. Or is it? Do we know? Is there any way to know? Do we have to live with contradictory vocabularies due to the limitations of our evolved minds?

Or does the past actually exist? Nietzsche thought of time as a line in his myth of eternal return. (How seriously he believed in eternal return is disputed, but that doesn’t matter.) In infinite time and infinite space, the same conditions must repeat forever (he surmised). But he was still thinking of time as a line. If the past exists then eternity returns eternally not in a line but as a static fact, like a movie that’s always playing.

But how much like a movie then is it? The Purple Rose of Cairo. Is there any way to know that the past is set? If Einstein is right and we could go back into it if it were only practical, then we could change it. Then it can change. Then we should not say “the past has happened,” but “the past is happening.” If the past is a wave, we can change now, from the future, if we can alter the wave. Is there any way to know that we don’t? Is there any way to know in fact that this is not something done routinely, at every instant? Changing the past changes the future. But there’s no way to know that we are not constantly changing and being changed. The persistent sci-fi belief is that you don’t want to change the time line. But there’s no way to know that the time line isn’t in constant flux. And there’s no reason to believe there is a proper timeline. (The imperative to maintain the timeline is never fully thought out.) It’s not unreasonable to believe that every life exists for one fleeting moment, less time that it has taken me to type a single word, and that at the same time, every life is eternal.

The Full Weight of the Word

On Language: 

Jabberwocky vs. Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town: 

How we process sentences: Sound, syntax, "meaning."

My poetry students rarely have trouble with Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” They have a lot more trouble with E.E. Cummings’ “Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town.” The former includes a large number of nonsense words, words which, in the dictionary sense, have no meaning. The latter has no nonsense words. But it does use words in unusual ways, both against the expected meaning (in the dictionary sense) or against the expected part of speech. Both poems tell a story.

My poetry students generally have little trouble paraphrasing the Carroll poem but a great deal of trouble with the E.E. Cummings. There is more than one way to explain this, but I think no matter how much weight we give to the fact that some of Carroll’s nonsense words have made it to the dictionary or to the fact that the students may have been exposed to the poem in one way or another in their youth, students would still always find Carroll easier to understand than Cummings. Virtually anyone whose virgin exposure to the two poems occurred simultaneously would find Carroll’s story easier to follow.

Why is this? Or to ask it another way, how is meaning processed? How do you “get” nonsense? Strictly speaking both poems should be nonsense. The dictionary won’t help you over your troubles with either poem.

Three factors seem to be at play here: sound, syntax, and “meaning” (narrowly defined as “dictionary meaning,” which I’ll distinguish from the more general sense of meaning by the quotation marks).

Carroll’s poem gives the student familiar syntax and suggestive sounds but strictly no meaning at crucial points. “Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!” We don’t know what kind of bird a Jubjub is, what a Bandersnatch is or what makes a Bandersnatch frumious. But we do have a sense of what kind of bird a Jubjub bird would be, what kind of monster a Bandersnatch would be and what would make it frumious. “Snatch” helps. And the sense we each have is probably pretty similar. The sounds themselves and the positions of the nonsense in the sentence create meaning despite a complete lack of “meaning.”

Cummings’ poem presents us with both overlapping and different problems: “someones married their everyones laughed their cryings and did their dance (sleep wake hope and then)they said their nevers they slept their dream.” It’s not hard for an experienced reader to take meaning from this sentence. But it’s nonetheless more challenging than it is with Carroll’s nonsense, harder still for students new to the study of poetry. Despite the lack of dictionary support for “Laughed their cryings” each word is familiar. And the familiarity it seems to me actually blocks the student trying to render the sense. But there is no such block in Carroll. And so the meaning flows out almost familiarly.

I doubt that any of this will meet much resistance from English teachers. Why it matters is this: What we processors of language do with Jabberwocky is what we do with language in general. Learning to read poetry is just learning to read period. Poetry often blocks new or inexperienced readers for at least two reasons worth thinking about: because the words are familiar and because the words are all presented with something like their full weight. In everyday language the looseness of usage and the ease of head nodding or shaking comes from the way that meanings are processed with an acceptable level of vagueness, the “you know what I mean” deployment. We can get away with not quite knowing what we want to say because our interlocutors are perfectly happy with processing as much or as little as they want, picking up on sounds and syntax and not really bothering so much with “meaning.” The trick with poetry, and a practical value of poetry for life, is that it trains readers to pay close attention to “meaning” in the production of meaning. 

When we're dealing not just with students but with anyone at any time, we're dealing with someone whose strategy for processing language may be more on the Jabberwocky level than the Cummings. They may be after a sense rather than a meaning. And people who go through life demanding nothing more than a sense from language do just fine, at least in conventional terms. They do well in school--particularly if their degree isn't strongly language centered, but often even if it is, since there are tricks to pretending to knowledge so successful that even the student thinks he's actually learning. They get good jobs. (They may become president.) They have as much chance at "success" as anyone. A lot of it comes down to luck and social supports, but you can't pick them out of the crowd. They are the crowd. But they struggle in the most important ways people can struggle. 

From Fear to Blood without Return

Irrational fear leads to

Irrational hate.

Irrational hate leads to projection.

(I don’t hate them. I’m the good guy. They’re the ones that hate me.)

Projection leads to imitation.

Imitation leads to hate projected back.

Hate leads to more hate.

Mutual hatred leads to violence.

Violence needs to more violence.

Once started violence is very hard to quell

And impossible to extinguish.

However cold it seems, all it needs to burst back into heat is

The match of irrational fear. 

Cover Art The Burzee Rose

Cover art by Dennis Anfuso

GOAAAAAAAAAAAAL!

At 55 I have a ready excuse I did not have at 20

For not managing to score the goal from the odd angle
on the penalty. Though I couldn’t do it then either.

If anything my chances now are probably better.

I haven’t lost anything in accuracy or stamina—just speed.

And I’ve had 35 years of practice. But they’ve seen me play

And so it does not surprise me when I put the ball down

And I hear a teammate say, “don’t try to shoot it.”

No it doesn’t surprise me, it just pisses me off.

So I shoot it. I was probably going to do that anyway.

It passes by the heads of three stupified defenders

And it’s already by the keeper and in the goal before he realizes
He should get ready to defend it. I have twenty missed shots

I know between now and the next time I manage this feat again
Plenty of time for the whole team wonder,

Why are we letting him do this? (For the record,

They’re not letting me. I got the ball. I put it down

And they’re too polite in this rec league of aging men

To do any more than mumble.) Yes, I’ll miss badly the next

Time I try this and many times after that. But for now,

Fuck you, I scored.

Mastering French

Some days I fear that at the rate I’m going I’ll die

Before I ever master French.

And then I think if that’s the race, and it’s more or less a photo finish,

What difference could it possibly make who wins?

And then I think, no one ever really masters a language.

The Carol of the Burzee Rose

In the forest of Burzee grows
The blood-red bloom of the Burzee Rose.

Honey fire scents the air

Drawing creatures everywhere.

Blooms like fists, wounding thorns,
With saw-toothed emerald leaves adorned,
It numbs the nose and draws the skin
To touch and bleed and touch again.
      It is a wonder to behold,
      A present from the days of old.
     Still it grows in deep distress
     And every year it comes back less.

In a time already near
No one left will find it there.
Children in the woods for fun
Secret lovers on the run 
Will miss the scent as they pass by.
Someday soon the rose will die.
            In the heart of Burzee grows
            The shrinking wonder of the rose.
            Find it, find it, while you may.
           The best things all will pass away.

Talk with 45*

“Millions of illegal residents of this country voted for Hillary. Otherwise I woulda won the popular vote?”

Oh, and how to you know millions of illegal residents did that.

“Between three and five million.”

But what is your evidence?

“And they all voted for her I didn’t get a single one of those votes.”

How do you know that what you’re saying is true?

“Why would an illegal alien vote for me?”

No, no, I mean, how do you know any illegal votes were cast?

“There are many many many people who are registered in more than one state. Sometime two, sometimes three.”

Are you saying that millions of illegal residents are registered in more than one state?

“You look at the roles. There’s dead people still on them.”

But wait, wait, are illegal residents pretending to be dead people or are they registering themselves illegally?

“Millions of them.”

Because if people are impersonating dead people, there’s just as much chance they’re voting for you as for her. In fact in the one known case of double voting…

“You know the real unemployment rate is over 40%? But under me in just two, three weeks—something like that—it’s come down to under 5%. The people love me. I would’ve won the popular vote if not for the dead people.”

But how do you know? What is your evidence?

“I ‘lost’ the popular vote according to the lying, dishonest press. If they were honest, I’d have won it.”

That’s how you know?

“That’s how I know. You’re not part of the lying, dishonest failing press are you?”

Are you surprised that there are still people in this country who think you have the judgment to be president?

“Of course. I’m like a smart person.”

In that you and a smart person are both people?

“40 maybe 45% before the election, less than 5% now. Hey, you can’t argue with the numbers.”