History

 History is not a pristine record of past events. It is the raw material out of which we construct the story we choose to be part of.

On Vaccine Mandates

 

The government’s authority to mandate vaccinations follows exactly the same logic as the government’s authority to set speed limits on public roads. You might say this is a matter of freedom, that you have a right to go as fast as you like. You might be willing to take on the personal risks of high speeds. You might even argue that going fast is not inherently criminal. It is, however, the government’s job to protect its citizens from all threats foreign and domestic. And exercising your “freedom,” your “right to go fast” puts not just you but everyone else on the road in obvious, mortal danger. For this reason very few people question the authority of the government to regulate such behavior on public roads. Vaccines are like speed limits. You may believe you have the right to decide whether you wish to take the risk of remaining unvaccinated. Refusing medicine is not an inherently criminal act. But your refusal puts not just yourself but everyone you come into contact with in obvious, mortal danger. The government therefore has the authority to tell you you must get the vaccine or stay out of pubic spaces. Businesses have the right to tell you you have to be vaccinated or stay out of their own private spaces. This is a public good. This is at the heart of the mission of good government, and is in fact included in the our government’s mission statement, the preamble to the Constitution, which includes the directive: “to promote the general welfare.”

Child of Tears

 

Hello, my father, I’m so glad to meet you
I will be with you the rest of your years
I am the child you called to the earth
I am your bucket of tears

the present you've opened before you are ready
a fugitive something you won’t understand
I’ll consume all your love, your wealth, and your wisdom,
your pearl of great price that you’ll lose in the end

I am the gate on the dark road to heaven
there is no other way there but this
these are the tears and this is the losing
and here in the darkness the way you will miss.

Training a dog to the leash

The Germans have that much right, I said. A new concept is just a string of old concepts mortared together. A rule is a long word. Any formula repeated word for word is essentially the same as a word with its semic string of syllables. The ten commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, any cliché or platitude you can pull out for the purpose of denying the particularity of the moment. This is a problem. All words are generalizations, all names imply and promote a continuity that exceeds the reality. I’ve sinned several times already in this paragraph. The only other option is not to use words at all, live like dogs and cattle. The fence around this pen cannot be surmounted or undermined or gotten around. And there is no gate.

Poetry cannot shed its last atom of optimism. Beckett knew this. All artists know this, though many are unaware that they do. It’s inherent in all forms, all language, all manifestations of art. It has to be. Even to eat is to have faith in the future, or hope, always at least a morsel of optimism. How could art escape this? I’m going to make this; I’m going to show it to you, ask you to read it, see it, hear it, eat it. It’s going to deny, try to destroy, the absolute uniqueness and unrepeatability of this unique and unrepeatable moment. (Nietzsche could not have been more wrong.)

To write—to create, even just to live with words, pictures, art—is to assent to the belief that there exists a key to unlock the gate of this pen that has no gate and therefore no lock. If I just say it right, you will gain the insight that makes sense, perhaps only just a little sense, of this senseless dream. What good could it possibly do to construct another fence inside the fence that has no gate? Is it a quest for the delusion of Wordsworth: that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened? If so, then delusion is better than truth. But who’s to say it’s not? To say it is or it’s not is to pretend to have jumped the unjumpable fence, is to join in the delusion.

Review of Thinking Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman structures the problem of thinking--of reacting and reflecting--in a productive way. That said, there's something in every chapter I have an issue with, often with the author making the same mistakes he's warning us against--i.e. not considering a broad enough context to answer a question. In fairness, he admits that no one is immune from the problems of slow thinking's aggressiveness/fast thinking's passiveness (not his terminology). So any failure is evidence that that is right, but that doesn't let him off the hook. I'm also not impressed with the epithet "lazy" for "slow thinking." That's a moral judgment and unfair--though rhetorically useful. Else where he calls the "slow thinking" self the "I," the self we claim as our true self. If so, we are in our essence lazy. That may be. But the fact that we don't exert effort when there seems to be no reward for the effort sufficient to the effort could be called prudent or cautious. The sweeping moral judgment of "lazy" is lazy.

 

The Herbicide Dilemma

 Imagine Monsanto had developed an herbicide (which, for all I know, they may have done) that was 100% effective in killing weeds but won't kill flowers or vegetables, as long as it is used properly. If misused it kills lots of things--grasses, trees and other vegetation, insects and animals, anything that gets in its way. It is a significant danger to microclimates and water supplies. And although it doesn't kill vegetables, it does poison them, so it can't be used on them or the food will become toxic to whatever eats it. Nonetheless, though powerful and deadly, it is safe to use in flower beds.

Should it be allowed on the market? 

Let's be clear, in case of deliberate misuse, accident, or negligence people will die, possibly a lot of people. If an unscrupulous gardener uses this on his tomatoes and sells them at a farmer's market, his customers will die. Not immediately of course. It may take a few years. Their deaths may be hard to trace to the bulging ripe tomatoes they bought at the farmers' market three years before. And in the case of accidental spillage or incorrect mixture, the ground water will be polluted, and people and animals will die and insects will die. The ground will become infertile--but just in patches and just for a while. 

Of course we can't guarantee everyone who buys this herbicide will use it properly. In fact we can guarantee that some won't. That's just how people are. Someone will spill it. Some will be tempted by the potential sale of ripe tomatoes. Some will neglect to read the directions thoroughly. If we market this product, people will die--that's a guarantee. There will be little pockets of corpses in various places where the product was misused. 

Let's add to the mix that nobody needs this product. It has its uses, but there are other ways to grow flowers. 

Should we ban the sale? Is it too dangerous? Or should we at least heavily regulate it to reduce the risk? Or should we just pop it on the shelves of Agway and Home Depot and your local garden center for anyone to buy at any time for any reason?

Now let's think about guns.

Just Verbing

I am going

to the store. I go

to the store nearly every Saturday. I went

to the store last Saturday even though I had gone

to the store on Friday; Sunday was

the day I would run out

of butter, so I went

again Saturday. I would have gone

on Sunday, but I had had

a headache the previous three Sundays and was

afraid that that would be

my new Sunday thing. I will go

again tomorrow, however, just to see. I will have gone

to the store before Church starts at eleven. This is

my story. I have been working

on it for ten minutes.  It is told.

I have spoken.

A Single Bird of Unknown Species

The blaze above black mountains
yellow, orange, hectic red
if it’s morning or if it’s evening
no one ever knew
 
such beauty wrapped
in so much sadness
until it hit them
there it was for everyone
yellow, orange, hectic red
the photographic aftermath
of a gargantuan explosion
bleeding above high mountains
ridgeblade black
 
who lacked insight to say
the sky is blue
the sky is the color of sky
morning, day, evening, night
the sky is drained of illusion
the cold and beautiful light revealed
morning and night and evening
and all the long and wakeful day
a single black-winged bird floats by
the sky is blue
or white
or grey

The Name Beneath the Title

 I will be 60 in 19 days.

I keep asking myself, am I learning yet?
A poem is what can be said in the space of a poem.
There is no difference between what is said
And how it is said. Every word change
Changes everything. But so does every reader every
Reading, even mine. Will I one day know what it was
I was exploring? I cannot control the poem.
This is what makes poetry like everything else: like life
Like growing old, like stars, like knowledge, like the structure of knowledge
That opens as it closes. Wisdom has a voice. And a space
Where there is no voice.
Any resting place is home.
Everybody needs a home.
A home does not need to be a place.
Everything is a prayer
If you want it to be, Father Martin.
When you look at the numbers you say ah!
When you look behind the numbers you say huh?
All religions were made by people to know the divine
And each for other reasons as well. And if they help
They help. And if they hurt, they hurt.
And they don’t always help. But they do always hurt.
That is how they are like everything else. Like poems and laws and tongues
And flame. You have to live with words. You have to live
Where no words are. If this is a poem
Great. And if this is not poem
Also great.
 

Just a Dumb Old Mountain

and yet those big brains of science, Einstein, Hawking, Kepler, Etcetera,
staring not at stars but at numbers
numbers on paper,
pushing them around like peas on a plate
calculate
with astonishing precision

in unreal units that make it imaginable
the stars’ distance, the universe’s edge—just numbers
nothing real at all
and yet the levers, the imaginary levers,
that move actual planets. So with words
I pretend to penetrate the mystery of all that numbers cannot touch
as if the problem were not simply inattention, lack of investment, the protraction of desire.

Giving Your Love to Passing Things

What are you saving it for

if you can’t give it to the snow now
turning your backyard into a postcard,
or to the dog who can no longer negotiate
the stairs in either direction? She’s heavy
on your aging arms, a good sixty pounds,
she farts every time you pick her up,
squeezing her warm belly close to your chest
for easy lugging; the first time you did it
she squirmed like what the fuck are you up to?
I’m not one of those goddamn lapdogs,
I keep my four on the floor at all times, moron,
but now when it’s time for a meal and for bed
she comes looking for you, clicking her toenails
along the floor, leading you where you have to go.
She stands at attention like a soldier at the bottom of the stairs
or like someone who has already climbed into the cab
and announced her destination. Tomorrow she’ll ride
one last time to the veterinary clinic.
and you’ll sign forms and they’ll fill her veins
with sodium barbital and some frothy white shit
to stop your heart. She’ll collapse in your arms
with the same what the fuck expression she used
when you first picked her up. You’ll put her down.
Meanwhile at home the snow is falling everywhere
on the garden and the trees, on the house and on the cars,
on the crib where you keep the firewood, on the trailer,
and the wellhead, a frothy whiteness erasing
her footprints forever on the frozen grass.

The Sky Tonight

It’s a water balloon you squeeze
It’s coloring outside of the lines
It’s the assurance of music
The push to prove
The rules won’t hold.
 
Like anything.
 
It’s the cold hard empty fact
Against the made-up musts
That soften, enflame, and fill it.
 
It’s the vacuum of the isolated word
It’s the lack of the vacuum.
It’s holding on. It’s letting go
In awesome, awful, autumn wonder.
It’s the coloring of leaves
The lingering lightning’s
Silent thunder.

 

What Dreams Don't Know

 That the goal of life from life's point of view 

is to get everyone on earth to envy you.

That the problem of evil is overcome

when you realize the need of compassion. 

The volumes that need to be written on this title and these verses bring to mind St. John of the Cross, whose only volume (as far as I know), The Ascent of Mount Carmel, includes The Dark Night of the Soul, which is a gloss on a poem of his own composition, which then serves as a mnemonic for the exegesis. The formula is brilliant. Why is it not used more often? 

I doubt the day will ever come when I can put down the reflections that created these or the development that comes from these--with all their hedges and qualifications. But just a couple notes then: Freud was not the first to posit that dreams know more about us than wakefulness, that the unconscious is truer than the conscious mind. It's like believing that children and animals are closer to God than nuns and priests or any adult however devout. But as the other verse says,

I am not who I am

when I am naked

unless I am naked

right now

and I'm not. 

Moments are layers of the past and trajectories for the future piled on the now. But there is only now. If the past exists, it exists now. If love exists, it exists now, in actual acts of feelings being expressed. Do I love you when you are not in my thoughts? Do I see you when my eyes are closed? Or is my belief that I do just persistence of motion? If I sing "I will always love you and I always have loved you" I mean that at every opportunity, at every moment when it mattered I did, when it will be I pledge to (and yet I have failed and will fail). It doesn't cover the moment I'm charging down the field with all my concentration on getting getting the ball past the defender into the net, though the past and the pledge may figure in their way. 

For the first couplet, a short cut, Girard. But so much needs to be added.

For the second, the way around the first, because the goal of arousing universal envy is so obviously self-defeating it's laughable.  

The Golden Potty Mouth

                  A Limerepic

There once was a boy from Manhattan
With a gold-plated potty he shat in.
He’d poop out a tweet
And he’d tweet and re-tweet
Till America flushed and was gladdened.

Yes, I said of this boy from Manhattan
(With the gold-plated potty he shat in):
He pooped out a word,
The miserable turd,
And flushed himself out of Manhattan. 

And up wafted in Mar-Florid-A-Lago
This poop-stained, moronic farrago
This blustering victim
(His enemies kicked him)
Reeking of cheese and bravado. 

But Florida just didn't want him
They hired an airplane to taunt him
They tried to evict him
(His enemies kicked him)
So he hopped in his cart and went golfin'.

"Maybe I should to go Scotland" he thought
"In Scotland I could go golfin' a lot!
They'll love my commode
I will poop till I'm old."
But in Scotland they said "you can rot."

By then the sun had arisen.
For some reason the boy thought of prison.
"Oh, where can I go
With my golden commode
Somewhere where democracy isn't?"

Then he thought of his lover named Kim.
But Kim had had all of him
He ever would want
In a posh restaurant
Over Big Macs and Kimchi and gin. 

"Of course" he said, farting, "there's Putin.
Putin has always for me been a-rooting.
My lips I'll repair
To that warm derriere.
My potty and I 
Will find a home there.
And they said I was wrong to love Putin!"

There came from Manhattan a chump.

And the name of the chump was Trump.
He was so full shit
that to get rid of it
On America Trump took a dump.

Georgios Was onto Something

 

The three propositions of Georgios:

·         Nothing exists;

·         if anything exists, it cannot be known;

·         if it can be known, it cannot be communicated.

Georgios was onto something. But so was Plato.

Plato was onto something regarding form, but he was wrong to believe that forms exist, that they exist as forms and not merely as concepts.

But what was Georgios onto? 

Language is a tool analogous to the senses themselves as the cave is analogous to the world and the world to the forms. But there are no forms. They exist as concepts but have no extension in being, neither here nor there. There is no there. The senses are tools. The are not windows. We do not see the world itself. “The world itself” is a concept without extension in being. We see as. We don’t see it. We don’t hear it. If we had other tools we’d perceive other things or we’d perceive the same things differently. This is the fundamental point. We see because our eyes respond to light. And because they respond to light in the way that the respond to light. Other lenses would respond in other ways. There may be lenses that could hear light or taste or to things to light we cannot imagine. There are creatures to who not respond to light in anyway at all. They don’t know it “exists.” I’m not saying that light exists. I’m saying that from the perspective of a human something exists that manifests to the machinery of our bodies as light, usually accompanied by heat, though there are conceivable or rather it is conceivable that there are bodies for whom heat and light never coincide or coincide more intricately. We perceive heat with our skin, light with our eyes. Imagine an organ the perceives both, that runs away from the danger of heat when and only when their eyes hurt. Our sense organs construct a world for us to occupy.

Does objective reality exist? We have no way of knowing but also no reason to think it does as such. We can say that God sees the world as it really is. I don’t think God could make sense of that sentence. What does heat look like? What does green taste like? What is the sound of cabbage?

It doesn’t matter. We posit, rightly, properly, an objective world, a world that would still exist if we did not occupy it. We know there’s no such thing. Existence would still be if we were not part of it. But the world we posit as objective reality would not exist if we were not in. The objective world is what is available to all humans with intact senses and expressible to all humans with intact brains. It is the thing we posit that we can all agree upon. That rocks are hard. That the sun is hot. (I use any illustration with reserve.)

Our language uses our perceptions and our bodies to image a more complex reality than our senses alone would do. There is the world as our senses perceive it and as our reasoning minds construct it from sense data. But then there is language that forms what we take in and what we project into less certain versions or visions of the world. This is where it gets tricky. And it gets tricky because there are many more ways to configure the world this way and no final way.

We could say our desire is another sense. When we perceive via desire, we perceive beauty. We perceive beauty via the sense of desire. Fear is another desire. Fear sees danger. As our five other senses can deceive us with optical illusions and jalapenos, so our other senses, call them our emotional senses can deceive us.

Organized this way all that comes to us comes to our senses. And language helps us make sense of our senses. And beauty has the same existence as, red or b-flat. What Galileo called a secondary quality. But we don’t usually organize perceptions this way. We don’t have to. Reality exerts no pressure that requires our minds to think this way. Our minds are not water to gravity that has to follow a certain path down the mountain.

Language is a tool that posits the general, the ideal, the logos. A useful way to measure being. Justice doesn’t have to exist any more than “mile” has to exist for it to be a useful concept. And we can make reasonable arguments based on statistical analysis of who the greatest hitter was in the history of baseball even though the stats don’t measure from year to year or even day to day or moment to moment the same thing. (By the way, it was Babe Ruth.) The general does not exist. Every moment is unique and unrepeatable. But the ruler is helpful. It is necessary. It is good, if well used.

Jesus was perhaps the first to see this. Perhaps it was a pre-Socratic whom I’ve not read. The distinction between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law is everything. The spirit is understood as love. The spirit is open to the moment. Creeds and schools eternally in abeyance.

Which brings me back to Georgios. Georgios turns out to have been wrong that nothing exists but right that what exists cannot be known. But wrong to suggest that the fact that what exists cannot be known is of any consequence whatsoever. What exists can be known insofar as it impinges on the human machine, on its senses. A version of existence or being can be conceived. Scientific conclusions can be trusted to represent what we can call the objective correlative of human subjectivity. It can be trusted, it must be followed. Georgios was right that reality as such cannot be communicated. But the human experience of being as it impinges on use can be communicated. We can measure the length of a piece of string even though a piece of string has no absolute length. It has a length whenever we want to use it, in whatever situation we need for it to have a length.