The Global Warming Fistacuffs

The right wing is apparently still on the rise, with its xenophobia, its nationalism, its ignorance and fear. This, like el Niño weather patterns, happens periodically. What makes complacency impossible this time is the planetary threat that looms in the setting with an urgency never understood before. That the alt-right can surprise no one. That its periodic recurrence of high-pitched rage has been given a boost by propagandist media and social networks means that its strength at this moment is particularly ominous. But in the normal course of things, it would subside. It would lead, again, to some catastrophic equivalent of the holocaust or Hiroshima and more compassionate alternatives would afterwards emerge. History does not repeat itself in the same way ever, but there are patterns of closing in and opening up just as there are patterns of boom and bust in a capitalist economy. But just as those economic patterns cannot persist forever, and that at some point that economy will fall of its own accumulated weight, and just as the universe cannot expand forever, these destructive patterns of right-wing fear and liberal recovery cannot endlessly repeat. At a certain point the squeezebox breaks. The threat this time, however, is not structural, it’s not the wearing out of the parts. It comes from the outside. Everything the right wing supports leads it to ignore the heating of the earth. It wants to hurry to accomplish as much as it can while it has the stage. Chaos is its friend. That liberal cause of species survival, which would seem to be a nuisance, even that can—by attacking it with the empty derision of made-up terms like "P.C."—even that can become an asset in the right-wing assault on compassion, decency, basic humanity. Global warming is now the mis-en-scene where our ultimately meaningless political battles take place. A sword fight in a burning building. And nothing will be done to put out the fire, and not because both sides are so intent on defeating the other that neither will call the fire department, but because one side won’t let the other call, blocks every move toward the phone, laughs “you can’t call until you defeat me, and by then it will be too late.”

Art Makes Everything Better

He said, "Women are the most beautiful thing in the world."

He said, "This is the most beautiful woman in the world,

and this is the greatest picture of the most beautiful woman. 

I could stare at it for seconds."

On (let's call it) Prayer...

We use pictures
because words can only take us so far
Music
because pictures can only take us so far
Silence
because sound can only take us so far...

Neither Arbitrary nor Absolute

This is where we live, between the arbitrary and the absolute. The colors we see are not the colors that are. But what we see does respond to the spectrum, which is real (though not a spectrum). Waves of energy exist at a range of frequency that we translate into color and these colors. (These waves may only exist as such from that narrow slice of being humans occupy with earth and the other planets and stars and all their animals, with all, that is, that is or would be sensible to us). These colors differ from person to person and their lines of division are drawn differently from culture to culture, but not so differently that we cannot translate "藍色" as "blue," though sometimes it's green. Better eyes would see better colors, more colors, infinite colors. Better ears hear all the nuance between G# and A (no, I take that back, not all the nuance, which is infinite, but more nuance). Every kilohertz could have a different name, every nanometer too. (But why the gross units of nanometer and kilohertz and not something finer?)

But that would not be useful.

What use does color have or sound? one may ask. The fundamental use of all the senses is survival--according to evolutionary theory. Other uses have developed since. A scientist said our senses are calibrated to what used to be useful. But they're used now for what gives us pleasure. Maybe they were always also for that. (But then maybe that is also useful--such gross terms when we want such fine meanings).

Okay. But all that stuff about sound and color, it's all merely the analogue. All language, all word boundaries fit the pattern, everything but numbers (but counting, applied numbers also fits the pattern). Governmental structure too. This is what the enlightenment toppled, the idea that there is a right governmental structure, echoing the one in Heaven, echoing the hierarchy of being. There are only those governmental structures that serve certain interests, that have certain uses, that respond to pressures of values and not those. And some that persist when serving what once was useful. Social structures, like seasonal lag, are never quite in sync with the time.

And values too are neither arbitrary nor absolute. This is the eternal flux and tension and failure of resolution.

Introduction to Poetry

An Introduction to Poetry: A complete online course

(That's a clickable link btw. Below is just a picture.)

The Freedom of a Sonnet

Freedom’s the movement of lines in a sonnet
Though every tenth syllable coughs up a rhyme
And every second has stress laid upon it
And if it’s done rightly it ends on a dime
After one hundred forty, on a coupleted line.
Predictable as sin, with its own mid-life crisis,
Spinning its happiness into regret
Like a wide-eyed zealot-for-god joining ISIS
Then coming to find they’re a murderous sect.
So we go through our lives eating breakfast at seven
And driving to work with the radio on
Then home come to supper, to bed at eleven--
Love, suffer and sweat through our little duration
And, inside that frame, make our peace with creation.

The two destinations of knowing

I want to say that there are two ways by which we determine that x is true. The first, and least often followed, is logic: the truth emerges as a conclusion to an inevitable logical sequence. Scientific knowledge, when it is itself, is of this form as much as philosophy is. The other is what T.S. Eliot refers to when he says, "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." It is the knowledge of feeling at home. It's full of dangers and misinterpretations. But it is essential.

The Conditions Are Not Neutral

After proving, despite themselves, that the winner of the Tour de France is the racer best suited to the conditions, and in an effort to dismiss the use of technology as long as everyone has access to it equally, the commentator says, "Les cyclistes les plus forts et les plus rapides remporteront toujours la compétition."

Take that in. He's just proven that his conclusion--reached after ample presentation of the evidence--is NOT true. And he punctuates his analysis with "the best man always wins."

There is no "best man." There is only "the best under these conditions." The Tour de France does NOT reveal the best cyclist in the world. It reveals the winner of the Tour de France. That's all. You can't generalize. At least you can't reach any absolute statement about the best. The best does not exist. There are no neutral conditions.

Why does this matter? There are no neutral conditions, period. For anything. Humans spend their lives trying to figure out where they fit in, how high in some pecking order they exist--sports, work, family, hobbies, church, social club--always confusing the essentially made-upness of these orders with some natural order, a great chain of being, that will give them their true and absolute value.

There's no accurate measure out there, none conceivable. Change the arbitrary rules of the game and you change the winner.

There is no activity or aesthetic that can judge you the greatest in the world. Or the most incompetent.

Thoughts Prayers and Ink

More guns equals more gun violence. A friend if mine told me I needed to say that again. There it is.

Words have proven as useless against gun violence as thoughts and prayers. Somehow the words that prevent action seem to work better. But I don't think they do. All words are pro forma at this point.

Persistence of Vision

A movie, a series of still pictures
presented too fast for the brain
to process. It cannot be convinced
despite knowing
what it seizes is not movement
but the illusion of movement.

I did some painting yesterday. Now
I’m ignoring specs of primer
on my glasses to see the page
to write the poem. Still

everything is clear.

I know

who I am,

what it means,

why I’m here.

Trying again, with words this time...

Every grammar teacher eventually figures out that no matter how you explain any concept in language, from part of speech to spelling to comma usage, you will be confronted by some accepted usage that your explanation cannot explain. Language being what it is—an organically human construct whose evolution no amount of effort can control—that things would be this way, though certainly a challenge, is not surprising. But this only mildly disturbing insight into language turns out to be true of everything try to put a handle on. It’s not that we haven’t understood evolution of physics or math or climate change pretty well. And we have marvelously useful ways of understanding psychology, economics, sociology, political science. Still, we always eventually come to the place where we cannot fit our handle or make a new handle that would not require destroying the entire system or structure of understanding that this knowledge is founded on. The problem cannot be overcome, but it can be acknowledged. It’s the problem of using language to understand the world. It’s the problem of the way language understands the world. And that is certainly an effect of the structure of the human brain, which is an effect of the way it evolved and what it evolved to do, which was not primarily to understand the universe. (I say “not primarily” because I am not convinced that understanding the universe is not, to say it tendentiously, why evolution itself was invented.)

If the goal is understanding, and if understanding is understood in the philosophical sense, the discursive sense, without emotional, intuitive or spiritual sense, in the way that we understand a math problem, in the logic of the pieces, in the way computer can be trained to write code without any possible interference by love or beauty or desire but concerned merely with efficiency and accuracy, then the procedure is always the same: to identify the pieces, to construct (changing metaphors) concepts that pen in each discrete piece and, monitoring, describe the interactions among the pieces. Great progress was made in evolution, and then came the platypus.

Thinking of spirituality or fiction or poetry or music or any of the arts (including those not yet created or defined) or emotion (in the Romantic sense) or any of the experiences of the body as forms of knowledge, paths to understanding, helps but by no means solves the problem. Each of these is also a thing toward which understanding is directed. And each leaves us finally unsatisfied.

Today the President

Today the president pronounced another good woman too ugly to fuck.
Today he buddied up to another world-class tyrant.
He lied his way through cake today.

And I thought how hard it must have been in New York City in 1863
when the yellow newspapers used the poor
who couldn’t pay their way out of war
as matches for lighting buildings, black babies,
Lincoln supporters, and the draft board ablaze.

Over in Pennsylvania they’d just interred the last of the Gettysburg dead.

On Broadway and in Union Square they scared up Lincoln-hating mobs
whose coffee was cut with sawdust whose sugar was half sand
who were informed as to how if they let themselves be dragged into Lincoln’s war
big strong stolen slaves, menacing and beautiful, would steal their jobs (though few actually had jobs),
seduce their wives, and rape their daughters.

With no one there to stop them,
inflamed mobs consumed four days in murderous riot,
transportation lines,
freed men,
the buildings where they lived.

Time Out

Time goes mainly forward—yes—but not as an arrow goes, slowing at a consistent rate of -9.81 m/s2.

You don’t have to go fast or rise a meaningful distance from the earth’s core or read Einstein to realize time has no zero degree, no absolute rate of passage.

I’d say it’s like money that way, eternally measurable against goods or currencies but never for a moment having any stable value outside of the specific transaction that activates it. I’d say that, but in fact, time is not just like money. It’s like everything. And I like the analogy to words better.

When you put meat in the fridge, you’re slowing time.

When you reread the sentence that boggled you, you’re reliving time.

When you sprint to get there you’re speeding time.

When you skim to get the meaning you’re folding time or poking holes in it like the lid of a jar to put fireflies in on a tepid night in early July.

When you drive past all the homes you used to live in or the house of the girlfriend where you once were welcome you’re going back in time. When you call her just to say hello at two a.m. years after you blew out by mutual agreement and with what you thought was mutual sadness your love’s brief candle you’re erasing time.

When you try to use words to name the things time does you’re stopping time.

When you think you’ve finally said it you’re betraying time.

Let's Try Again about Guns

Let’s substitute anaconda for gun. Let’s put an anaconda in your house. Put it in a cage if you like or a box. If it stays in the box, you’re fine. But it might get out. It might get our and roam around your house for a long time before you notice. You might forget about the anaconda, and it might roam around your house for years. You may never see it. It may never eat you. It may never eat any of your friends or your family or anyone you don’t want eaten. But you would be safer if the anaconda were not in your house. Now it’s possible that at some point someone will break into your house and come face to face with the anaconda. It’s possible the anaconda will chase him away or eat him. And for those few moments, we can say you were better off having the anaconda in your house. It actually made you safer to have the anaconda in your house. But for all of the rest of the time, you’re much less safe having that anaconda there. You never know when it might attack. And the thing about the intruder is that most of us will never have to face that situation. And most of the time for the few of us who may be in that situation, the anaconda will not be there. It’ll be sleeping in the basement. Or it’ll slither around and never go near the intruder. Or it’ll show up at just the right moment but eat you and leave the intruder to go about his merry way. This is a surprisingly apt analogy for a gun. A gun may for a moment or two of your long life be just the thing you want. But that moment will probably never actually happen. And in all the other moments of your long life it will constitute a real danger. The moment you buy a gun you become less safe. And as long as you have a gun the most significant thing you can do to make yourself safer is to get rid of the gun. And no matter how you twist examples or cite tightly focused examples, you can’t change that. It’s a simple, demonstrable fact.

The Bugs and Balloons of Childhood--Oh, that awful windshield

Do you remember 30 or 40 years ago, you’d go on a long drive in the summer as evening came on and by the time you go to your destination your windshield was so covered with bugs you wonder how you saw through it. And if you tried to use the wipers, they’d just smear all over the surface and make things worse. On a bad night you had to pull into a gas station just to clean them off.
And do you ever wonder why that doesn’t happen anymore?

It’s not just global warming—that’s bad enough—but also the lack of biodiversity on the planet. Monocultures. Razing forests and ploughing up plains for crops. It’s killing the insects. And that’s why there are so many birds than you remember. People born in the last twenty or thirty years think this silence is normal. It’s becoming normal, this silent spring. But the skies used to be full of birds and the air with their songs. Now you hardly see or hear them.

And the lack of food and territory is killing a lot more than bugs and birds. One million species are threatened with extinction at this very moment. Humans aren’t. Humans are thriving. We’re the ones pushing out all those other species. But in the long run—we too are a threatened species. We need the bugs as much as the birds do. And we need the birds too, for both practical and spiritual reasons.

And is our government doing anything? Yes it is. Under Trump it is making it easier and easier to build coal burning power plants and drill for more and more oil—even though if we burn the stores we already have we’ll pass the threshold for viable life on this planet. And it’s making it easier for agricultural interests to convert more and more of the land to food production. Three cheers for the economy, Watch it expand like a big red balloon—bigger and bigger, with laughter and cheers. Like the balloons of childhood.

Donald Trump, King of the Playground Taunt

One of Trump’s most effective strategies is one so beneath the dignity of an adult—let alone of a president—that any fifth grader of normal intelligence can see through it. It’s so base and indeed so comically stupid, so down-in-the-mud, that no serious rival candidate from either party has been willing to confront it for fear of looking as bully-little-boyish as Trump. They won’t stick their fingers up their nose to mock how childish Trump is for constantly sticking his finger up his nose. But, in a sad, sad comment on the level of American discourse, this deplorable, pathetic, playground strategy of name calling really does rally the base. Crooked Hillary and Low-Energy Jeb, and now Sleepy Joe. It’s not even clever. But it probably works all the better in that it doesn’t require any thought on the part of the hurler or the laugher.

Ignoring the practice hasn’t worked. Taking the high road hasn’t worked. Fuck it, then. It’s time to confront it. No, reasonable opponents should not dream up cute epithets for the orange turdman. It should be confronted as a practice, in a speech and in ads that directly call him out, thus, “Like any small-minded bully on any playground in America, Donald J. Trump is fond of calling his opponents names. The man who rises from bed at noon, wastes half the day in ‘executive time’ and the other half watching propaganda TV calls Joe Biden ‘sleepy,’ and Jeb Bush ‘low-energy.' The man who has been investigated, sued, or indicted repeatedly by the state of New York and agencies of the federal government for such crimes as running a phony university, cheating creditors, stealing from his own charity foundation and sexually assaulting women calls Hillary Clinton ‘crooked.’ The man who lies so routinely about matters big and small, from the size of his inauguration crowd to the Muslims he saw dancing at the fall of the Twin Towers calls Ted Cruz, ‘lyin'’…” It turns out that in his withered imagination, this lying, crooked, lazy, stupid man can’t even come up with an insult that doesn’t apply more aptly to himself.

This is the naked fact about this dirty, bloated, burger-sucking fool. He doesn’t have the intelligence to run a bath let alone a nation. And he’s not even smart enough to know it. He rallies angry people by insults and fear and threats of violence. He prefers smugness to thoughtfulness because it’s all he’s capable of and because, sadly, it works. But it may work less well, it may even stop working altogether, if his tricks are exposed and if he’s forced to answer intelligent questions with reason—something he’s fundamentally incapable of doing because when he was young enough to learn how, his wealth and his privilege made it unnecessary for him to do so. He's been insulated from thinking his whole life,  and he can’t do it. He can’t think; he can’t learn how to think. He can’t even recognize it when others do it right under his nose. When he’s confronted with a thought supported by evidence or reason he calls it “stupid” and does a happy dance and tells everyone he’s won.

Poetry Today

Poems no longer tell us anything.
They place before us things that only exist because of words.
Things nonetheless real—more real than anything, keys
That stab at the insubstantial air and turning unlock it.

Sentencing

Because sentences impose an order on our perceptions that does not exist in our perceptions.
The sentence cannot imitate experience. It codes it for the intellect in a way both false and necessary.
To understand is therefore to fail to understand. Understanding something other than what we are attempting to understanding. Translation into a language with no overlap in structure.
The sound of the heating system crossed onto the sound of cars charging up and down the highway so that you cannot tell which one generates any particular molecule of sound.

And They Sang God Bless America

by Ted Lucy

They came here uninvited. Set up settlements. Brought slaves.
They called the residents of these shores savages
To justify stealing their land.
With their false tongues and their diseases they killed nine savages
Of every ten. There was plenty of land.
Behind the banner of their bible they filled it.
Cram the children of their slaves into prisons and jails
Cram the children of their native population onto small scraps of land
Blame them for their troubles. For talking up. For talking back.
Demanding rights. And they sing
God Bless America
From shore to shining shore. They sing
God Bless America
As they curse and blame their troubles on the men
I made gay.
They don’t care about the women much.
The men they strap to trees like honored sacrifices, and they sing
God Bless America
When they should beg
God forgive us for we have sinned.
We always knew, we always should have known
The bible we used as a tool to conquer these lands
The bible we used as a tool to leverage its wealth
The bible we used as a tool to rid ourselves of a native nuisance
The bible we used as a tool to catch and harness and drag the citizens of Africa
Over the sea of Columbus like cattle and spit at like angry dogs
The bible we used to name this place the shining city on a hill
Warned us. Named us.
The bible we converted into plowshares and guns
Instead of reading it--
May one not be pardoned?--
It told us not to sing.

At the Bookstore

I met a young man in a bookstore
I was there to begin my new book tour.
He asked me my name.
He was glad that I came.
Did I find what I came there to look for?

Universal Healthcare--Really?

Life offers us practically unlimited options, but very limited opportunity to experience them. The constraint of a single life is the greatest impediment. There’s nothing we can do about that. We can’t live the single life and the married life. We can’t have no children and few children and many. We can’t devote our lives to literature and be a marine biologist and priest and an atheist. We can’t spend our lives devoted to a single driving passion and deep our toes in everything.

On top of that we have everywhere forces compelling us to limit our already-too-limited options and our already-too-limiting experiences even further. Social approval is one, religion (or any quasi-religious ideology) is another, law is another. Why do we hate slavery so much? Slavery contracts a human’s options to the point approaching zero. But it is only the most severe instance of the same thing that effects and constrains all our lives. It is to life what prostitution is to marriage. It makes disturbingly bald the situation in which everyone already lives.

But law does not have only to constrain. This is why I am in favor of universal, single-payer healthcare. Not only do people without means suffer and die when they can’t become part of the healthcare system, but many others are compelled to limit their lives in unnecessary ways in an all-too-constraining culture (and in one that calls itself “the land of the free”). People get jobs they don’t want, keep jobs they can’t stand, stick to places they don’t want to be because they fear the danger of going without healthcare. We must be clear: healthcare is in industry that shackles everyone. It shackles a few people to the place they are happy to be. No doubt there were a few slaves who, apart from being called slaves, were relatively content with their lot. But where private industry controls any part of access to healthcare, we are all victims. Happy slaves are unenlightened victims.

Recent Political Debates: The Take Away

It has become abundantly clear that neither reason nor evidence will change anyone's political support. You can tear down their reasons, you won't change their mind. They'll just find new reasons. You can tear down the new reasons. They'll just stop listening to you, and then, in a little while, they'll forget what you said revert to their old reasons. This is true of both sides (it's why we think there are only two sides). Whatever your stance, you'll glom onto whatever events seem to qualify as evidence, and you'll investigate them only in so far as their integrity as evidence allows--like any climate denier who says "Well, it's cold today in Chicago," confusing climate with weather, which is something that has been pointed out to him numerous times but which he can't quite hold onto the next time it is cold in Chicago. You'll take in whatever feels like evidence and ignore whatever feels like counter evidence. You can't argue anyone away from his position.

What can you do?

You can move the discussion to a ground in which they have no stake, a ground where their defenses are down, where their nonpolitical hearts agree with yours. You can talk about why they believe what they believe. What are the mechanisms of belief? Everyone in his heart wants just to believe he is right but actually to be right. If the basis of their beliefs is not reason and if political affiliations are not based on evidence, where do they come from?

Two important theories explain it: the first is laid out in Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. The other is provided by Rene Girard in The Scapegoat. For a good overview of the first, you can go here: . For the second here: and here

Accordingly, our beliefs are based overwhelmingly on our social groups, those with whom we wish to identify. Very little choice is involved. We are fundamentally mimetic creatures. The same phenomenon that makes us laugh when the crowd laughs more than when the joke is funny and makes us yawn when the leader yawns more than when we are tired makes us believe what our people believe more than what the facts dictate. We think overwhelmingly with our fast brains--which is to say with our automatic brains, the ones that say "danger, run," before ever stopping to see if the danger is real. We are mimetic creatures. We are also lazy and fearful creatures. It takes a great deal of effort to engage the slow brain, and there is a great deal at stake if we do. It may lead us away from our tribe, where we feel safe, where we feel we belong. It may lead us into uncertainty and loneliness.

But that is the task of life. And this is what you may convince the other of. This is the ground of debate. The rest is noise that elevates to violence that will need a sacrifice to quell it.