In Praise of Hippasus, His Turn in the Endless Golden Braid

From the Proceedings of the Invisible Order of the Pythagorean Hydra 314.

A Poem for Lulabell, Sweet Petunia

green to the cripple’s wilderness,
a newcomer sees ash as soil...

where abominations of
animate stone lie senseless
before the sea, far beyond the
deep worn grooves tread into
the earth by the sleepwalkers
muttering in their sleep, as if
to their sleeping brethren,
following one another endlessly
past the same dark horizon...

were the moon to rise, they
would follow its light away
from the sun, if only to prove
what others before them
have proved perfectly well.

just one could stop and hold
up an eternity, cause endless
marchers to climb up out of
their trenches, bring them

to stand at the threshold of the
mechanical hall of mirrors, to
listen casually as the crack
of doom shocks the airwaves.

when the wise man blames
the fool, and the fool does
blame the wise man, leaving
each to babble oath below
the burning rivers,

as many living souls as leaves
on trees shall yield their hold
on boughs and through the
early frost of autumn fall,

blind prey unto the blue-eyed
terror between the framers
of meanings, formless
yet everywhere, animate
amidst the static emblems
of a virus creed...

until some of the morning, when
broken records of phantom
histories might yield a strange
light falling, symmetries of the devil
and the emergent efficiencies
of flame...

weaving silence and discourse
while white snow flies in midsummer,
and the moon ablaze in the water
at noon sows discord from the
only sounds after prayer.

for only sound remains, a melody
amidst the machine and my
heartbeat, a shock of thunder
to disturb the haunted church
music infused with a pious fury

at the inarticulate dementia
that is salvation for the blind,

who demand that time shall
yield to the sufficient and convenient
brutalities of our profane sciences
of need...

leaving a trail of puberties and
constellations across surrendered
visions of extroverted rodents,

all their conscientious fascinations
and inhuman suppositions, weather
forecasts, divinations, and salient
tenderness abandoned for an
abyss that dissipates gradually...

enduring in silence or ignorance
the midnight bloom of the saintly
mathematician’s treatise on the soul,

a concrete echo set free from
the ghostly image of the builder,
slain by the architect’s hand.

once more these vacant dreams
abide beside the grotesque adornments
of perverse determinations, delights in
slights and envies, indulgent to no end...

such that only those overcome by the
opaque terrors of conviction remain,
befriended to the tangled mountains,
like sculptures, when toppled by the wind.

An Open Letter to Lulabell Petunia, by America Jones

sometimes too much
hurt for sleep, toss
cigarettes at dawn into
the troubled darkness...

a flower a stone
inkblots on paper
and silence like an
ocean

the fly will live for two days
bouncing against the window
trying to escape

(i feel flat like the discredited
mythic earth)

then go crazy
from banging
against the glass,

(i feel too flat)

one of my earliest memories
is of a recurring nightmare

(so to think of all that’s been
destroyed forever)

lost the ability to dream
(too often listening to the
latest imperial decree,
as blanket night falls
out the windows
or in the day,

a homesick nothingness out there
somewhere, which, as though hope
and struggle were a vacuum,
takes hold and tries to fill the
quiet dark beside
blue glow

drains away muffled under
whispers, a lone pilgrim wading
across the violent desperate
wilderness for news of fighting
at the front, where children die
and the mountains ablaze drown
the moon and steal the darkness.

our lady
of a thousand bleeding eyes,
with pangs of hunger that flow from
your heart as streams flow from
mountains to the lowland lakes:

i beg you bear solicitude to the
countless inherent confusions
relinquished at the gates of your
cathedral for beggars, who, thirsting
and weary from desert travels,
lick from the thorns and thistles of
the heartless wilderness lead and
mercury morning dew...

been getting on the wrong busses lately,
distracted.
twisted on the floor
a wrenching free of my selfhood,
into this struggle to spread goodness
resonating throughout the cosmos
by sheer force of will...

madness.
the doctor listens patiently
how i think if we decide
to violate the sovereignty of north korea,
perhaps before dropping bombs across
the countryside we ought first to spend
a few years and a few hundred billion
dollars dropping, every day,
rose petals and lego building blocks,
recordings of bach, miles davis, and kurt
schwitters, mash reruns and anti-war art films,
paint supplies, canvases and computers
and diesel generators, instructions for
producing bio-diesel fuel
and books of shakespeare, leroi jones,
and walt whitman’s 1855 leaves of grass,
and stuffed animals, and blankets and clothes
and grain and livestock and medicine
and soap and water filters and radios
and solar panels and wind turbines,
and then see whether the people will
continue to abide patiently in their
subjugation, or seek the liberty to
attain our company in peace and
mutual respect...

are we really a warlike breed, with wargod
wrath and warbroken spirits
and fierce to first taste blood
so long ago... why the whale went from land
back into the ocean, to maintain a breed
purged of potential cannibalism...

one human abstinence massages affably,
a ritual honor,
a bear quarrels coming under lingo,
a cappuccino is spilled, a mockingbird’s
ceremonial consecration.

beware the rocks ahead,
ye without faith but in the
sword and war-chariot!

they break open wide and fanned
to the wind,
deflated in some fatalistic
psychopathic daisy
quarreling down to the splintered
shards of corrupting implements.
keep an eye on more societies, and by
the clumsy
face in the rainy world!

omit the absurd cannibalism!
blood! blood! beware the rocks!

so many options in fierce clarifications,
a papal serenade upon patriarchal elephants,
to demonstrate by force that verse is no secret
miracle, but bloodshed...

why are psychological games
sins?
because
games evaluate.

a wide audience's jolly nuns often point out
the comfort a wide audience provides for the dainty,
the mathematical, and the deep. this is fine for them.

if one yearns to long for the support of the divine,
one must escape as from a slaughter, break out
of each youth, increasing the number of fenestrations,
campaign around psychological games! one must
subjugate languidly the feelings of biochemistries,
the principles of golden chauvinisms!

a minister of uptown beings
was buying bugs for hopeful queens
these dreamy tiny harvard queens
were pricing dreams for random beings...

with automations,
ordained sensually
only the quite clinical
people around the bath
know how to rationalize
bewilderment

but their angelic yarn is
variable, a spinster’s swan
in the chastity, or an arrogant
cautionary or malignant respect
which far surpasses women of
fatalistic atheists, foulmouthed
parenthoods and competitions,
useful obligations, or willing
daytimes, fallacies, or captors,
or even absolute, bizarre orgies...

they
give something
madonna.

the firm cosmic parenthoods
complain
seething crafty obsolete apartments...

a fisherman of uptown deans
was fixing drugs for silent fiends
these hopeful random harvard fiends
were pricing sex for new york queens

flavorless capricious charismatic onslaughts
will be
celestial formless...

loving man of hopeless scenes
was catching drugs for friendly deans
these new york hopeful hopeless deans
were pricing fun for harvard deans

a strange chorus follows...

what else, then, to assert
a lack of confusion but
profusion of utter bewilderment,
in all truth,
when words
must fail,
but poetry live...

The Modern Contemplative in Wartime

It is difficult to live the life of a contemplative in an age so fraught with strife, iniquity, and callousness. History, replete though it may be with violent conflict, has until recent decades never presented so many individuals with the threats we face today. Climate change, global war, and the spread of preventable disease, despite our collective ability to end such horrors, are epidemic. It is hard to make sense of a world where so many individuals struggle under these and other pervasive oppressions, with meaningless employment or debt, while the unimaginably wealthy, who profit from these struggles of others, cloister themselves away from the misery they’ve wrought.

When by the hands of ruthless oligarchs, lobbyists, and corrupt legislators, employment is systematically converted into a form of global oppression, there are relatively few problems that can be directly confronted by individuals, who are enslaved by market forces and daily distracted by unnecessary struggles. One turns perhaps to anger, violence, indulgence, or subservience as means towards the cessation of one’s struggles, if only for temporary release from bewilderments that render one deaf or mute before the presence of seemingly insurmountable corruptions, which threaten by their weight and inertia to drag down or hold back even the most simple of aspirations.

The contemplative of the Globalizing era, who seeks to struggle against war without engaging in violence, to procure sustenance without engaging in exploitation or oppression, who must look inwards while the sounds of the city beg endless distractions, must contend with an array of strange influences which the archetypal contemplatives of ages past were able to avoid; our present state of media saturation ensures that even if one does not watch commercial television, one is still made aware every time Tom Cruise has a baby.

Lovers of nature and seekers of simplicity are today most often without recourse to agrarian self-sufficiency or freedom from an increasingly invasive media landscape. Although by enculturation we lack personal knowledge of the ways of the seasons, of the soil, and of the stars, we move mountains, carve valleys and craters, redirect rivers, and create lakes. We shape the earth with machinery and color the heavens with the din of sodium vapor electrified, and claim dominion over the air itself with bands of electromagnetic radiation that turn the ionosphere into a deadly weapon. And what outrage will halt these machinations?

Anger, violence, indulgence... a fearful subservience before these unnatural powers, which can take from men and women their livelihoods or their lives with the stroke of a pen or the push of a button...

For all our modern refinement, we mask the visage of war in grotesque displays of nationalism and sacrifice, and deny our “savage” forbearers the nobility of their insights into the horrors of violence. The Vikings who fought their battles hallucinating on mushrooms, or the Aztec priests who, in ecstatic trances, tore out the living hearts of youths knew that to obscure the nature of violence was a grievous error that their civilization could not endure.

The symbolic lessons of our Western culture are so often buried under the clinical verbiage of disease and disorder that we no longer see why we inscribe our skin with tattoos, pierce our flesh, or why at birth we mutilate the genitals of our boys (to remind us all how powerless we shall be at the time of our death). Our clinical rituals are designed to hide from us any inkling we shall one day perish, while at the same time, on the other side of the globe, we cause scores of senseless deaths and permit the brutalization of the innocent for the sake of some man’s profit.

We have stockpiles enough of weapons to defeat any adversary by way of wiping clean the planet of our race, yet we continue to invest more resources in our military than our education, our art, and our starving citizens combined. Although our military expenditures are equal to those of the next nine most industrialized nations together, we encounter great difficulties gaining ground against insurgents in an impoverished plot of land in the middle of the desert: what can this mean but that war is some madman’s game, who defines victory how he sees fit? How can this be more sensible than peace?

change as process

from eddies in turbulent flows to fractures in glass to ion doping in semiconductor design it is imperfections that form the fabric of our existence. friction is imperfection. psychologically friction is a metaphor for frustration, conflict - but in the absence of friction, there is no motion either. no progress without imperfection. how to learn to adapt intuitively to imperfection, to pattern a whole mode of constructive discourse around the imperfections we ourselves may cause or contribute to...

the notion of a "wicked problem" has a general applicability in describing nonlinear sorts of problems like one often finds in sociology; for example, it came as a great surprise to traffic engineers a couple decades ago when they tried to relieve traffic congestion on interstates running through cities by making the highways larger: rather than ease congestion, the larger highways just made more people drive, leading to more congestion, more pollution, and a socio-economically destructive de-urbanization...

how to bring about positive change...

spirit and practice.

despite being an irish catholic jewish zen buddhist by both upbringing and practice, i have mixed feelings about ritualized religion; i do think with some certainty that being religious about things has a great deal of value. i am trying to be more religious about always cueing my videotapes to the end of my recording so whenever i have a tape sitting in or near my camera i can just pick up my camera and record should the spirits move me. i am quite religious about always carrying a notebook and a pen. religiousness is a way to emotional certainty.

metaphysics and linguistics

whether knowledge and belief
entail the same type of truth value,
or whether one entails the other...

if one knows something must one also believe it?

are knowledge and belief subject to
different standards of validity?

knowledge is traditionally defined as
true justified belief...

what if one overhears a stranger using
bigoted language? one may then believe that
this other person is a bigot. how can one then
acquire knowledge of whether or not one's belief in this
case is true (such a belief is justifiable, since it
is supported by linguistic evidence) or whether
one's anger at hearing such language is
justifiable?

in a sense, one's orientation towards such a
situation is entirely dependant upon what is
in one's own mind: it is a product of both
what one has heard another person say and do,
as well as what one believes oneself.

one is then left with a metaphysical problem
and a practical imperative: one may feel one ought
to address the use of bigoted language without
being as radical oneself (lest one be hypocritical,
or more intollerant than that which offended one
in the first place).

although one, in such a situation, may be uncertain
how best to behave - in part, perhaps, for fear of
causing a scene over what may be a bad joke -
one may be left with the sense, however one
chooses to behave, that one ought not to have been
faced with such a problem in the first place.

bigotry is rooted in corrupt language.
a practical approach in a collective sense is
to take the power of bigoted language away from
the bigots. this effort was advanced by parts of the
homosexual community with words like "fag" and
"queer." by using these words freely themselves,
many homosexuals advanced a program to "normalize"
derogatory terms, to defuse this language of its incindiary
power. such an approach is fundamentally american
in its sensibility: if one american can use a word,
any american can. connotation is to an extent
consensus. there ought not be any privelaged
vocabularies: we all speak the same language, and
we're all americans.

this is not to suggest we ought to be frivolous or
irreverent with words that have a painful history,
but merely that exclusivity - in language as well as
economics or politics - breeds a power that will be
exploited.

a practical approach in a personal sense is to
remind oneself of the importance of tolerance:
the use of bigoted language by one person, if
addressed reasonably, may inspire another to
change his or her habits. otherwise, anger just
breeds anger, and anger is blinding.

if one is angry all the time, it is hard
to let love life beauty and satori into one's
life, and the bigots win.

a good place to start perhaps is by discussing
language, by finding out what a word means to
the person using it, what that person understands
his or her words to mean...

short poem

an infinite reflexivity
everything arriving
everything receding
the universe speaking
in complete gestures
is silent