09-25-2011

It's been some time since I've written anything and I don't particularly know why.  The days are getting shorter now, but only moderately cooler.  I'm sitting here in my apartment alone, watching some Kurosawa epic about samurai warlords.  That's not quite true.  I'm listening to it; the Japanese language relaxes me, and occasionally, when I do look at the screen, the costumes and settings are also soothing.  But mostly I just listen.  Images are difficult to connect with.  Sounds are more understandable, and they seem to go deeper.  Alas, this film is full of men with gravelly voices; they bark about honour, about peace, about killing their enemies.  Occasionally, they laugh.  There is silliness.  The Japanese seem well realized.  Old cultures are like that, I suppose.  They can lean on their history.

Young cultures look ahead for validation.  The familiar patterns of desire and attachment are evident whether it be a single person, a small group or a whole country.  Why not?  Nothing done by humans is bereft of human assumptions.  Somehow this is overlooked in the final evaluations.  We trust in so much nonsense and wonder why things get out of hand.  These silver screen samurai know better.  In a single scene, they are variously exuberant, morose, severe and light hearted as the situation demands.  They adapt perfectly despite their rigidity, and perhaps even because of it.  Their clothing is chosen, manners are well defined; they're oriented to the world by a system which they've been conditioned to respond to with a great deal of trust.  Without the burden of endless, superficial, stylistic decisions, they can react more naturally to what comes.  Is their nonsense better than our nonsense?  No, but they seem to have embraced it as such, whereas we tend to believe in what we see.  They're talking strategy now, bowing gracefully to each other despite the evident tension.  There's a battle taking shape.  They know what's at stake and still they laugh.  It's all just what it is, though it could easily be something different, something more humane, without losing any of its effectiveness.  But goons are goons the world 'round.  Manners are just manners. 

And greed is just greed.  The trouble with ego trips is that the return ticket is a bastard to get.  These journeys are indistinct, uncertain.  You feel yourself moving, are encouraged to move, but nobody can say what the destination is.  You're expected, so you go ahead confidently.  So much is left behind, so much more taken on.  Wanting is so easy and maybe that's the tip off.  That feeling of permanence you can buy into, but never really trust.  It's always "one of these days" or "wait and see" as though seeing were believing and believing could be enough to justify a lifetime of deception.  There's no salesman on earth more effective and dangerous than the one in your head, and none more easily defeatable.  What can we do, really.  Live in accordance with ideals that make us feel valid, leave alone what we can, and handle with care what we can't.  Is that naive?  Plenty would say so.  Plenty more would say it's narcissism to be so concerned with your own life.  I don't think that's true, it's just true with some.  All you really need is to need less.  Less talk, less stuff, less input.  Less as a principle, as a starting point.  And then, finally, less of less.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Maybe.
Wait and see.

                  

Life Spent Is First Earned

Tonight, everything is perfect
And in the morning
It will be the same
Nothing ever changes
Though we say
That tomorrow, tomorrow
Comes after today

Breakfast, Lunch And Dinner

This morning came and my world
Was born like a heartbeat
All the little perfections
Reflected infinitely
Everywhere, altogether
Without knowledge, without need
Existing, prevailing 
As life will

There was murder
A cat in the garden, sleek, guilty
Unrepentant
There was benevolence
Old maples shading
The smallest of their kind
With strength and wisdom
And colossal silence

All of this and everything, happening
As sunlight broke my windows
And breezes took my words
Like quick angels 
Insects gathered my bones for a scaffold
Sparrows got my clothes
Foregoing reason, incapable of rhyme
Until only a mind was left behind
That least dependable item

Paid In Full

Empty liquor bottles
Huddled together on the dining room table
Stale relics of another Sunday  
That cloying bar-smell permeating the whole house
And as I wake to start my day
I find a local drunk
Passed out in my living room
She snores horribly, as I consider
Whether or not to throw her out
Between coffee sips, teeth grits
And deep breaths 
'You awful mistake,' I lean down and bless her,
'You cheap filth.' 

-Get out of my home.  I would kill you if I could.-

My eyes are gleaming, murderous
As I turn away from her 
To face the man responsible 
For all these years 
All these mornings
A grinning man 
A man like cancer, like a stain
I could so easily wipe away
If only she had the courage
To be alone
If only she had the courage 
To let me be her son  
And scrape this shame off our lives  

-You were never family, you worthless shell.  You were tolerated.- 

A Drop Of Want

Used to think
I could just exist
Somewhere maybe
Quiet and closed off

You know the place.

Just a little spot
Not far
Beneath the safety
Of a greening horizon

Like a new heart.  Like joy.

Used to think
I was carrying it clean
In my otherwise
Empty pocket

Wrapped in waiting.

But now I see
My pleasant dream
Is a dream in need,
Imagining me

Too proud to refuse.

A raft, adrift

I make some sweeping generalizations here, I know.  It's a work of opinion.  Hopefully that's evident.


I've had a lot of time to listen this past year.  To myself, my friends, the news, the wind, the rumblings of change and inevitable transition.  I've been looking out for an opportunity to break into the next phase of whatever it is I'm involved with here.  The more I consider this progression as something natural in a material or outward sense, the less convinced I am of its validity as such.  What I've been doing is so much internal, the changes so personal, that tangible results are understandably absent, except perhaps in my appearance, attitude and writing.  My physical circumstances remain mostly unchanged simply because my focus isn't on changing them.  Nonetheless, the question of career ambition continues to hover; but it seems, when I really consider it, more a question of surviving in a material sense than undertaking any kind of pressing meaningful endeavor.  I have many such already and they keep me well satisfied, in my way.  It's like finding a perfect lover and being told there's no future with her because she has no name.  You're in love and content and paying the rent is just paying the rent, but somehow that's an invalid lifestyle because it's illegitimate in a technical sense.  It bears no seal, no credential to prove its worth.  Pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and for love of it has an air of misguided absurdity about it these days, and the reasons for this stigma are obvious.  You may be learning, but you aren't earning credit.

But don't get me wrong.  Academia is a fine path, so long as it's not just sophisticated hoop jumping masquerading as relevant, enriching study.  I wouldn't be the person I am without the teachers I've had and the earnestness of their efforts.  Good professors make good students because they have a genuine affection and talent for their subject and that process is a beautiful thing to be a part of.  It's also a fragile thing, dependent on a coincidence of conditions nobody can predict.  They can introduce you to a part of yourself through intellectual engagement, and set you on a course, but that course must be a personal one in line with your character and natural affinities.  It's given to you, not as a kind of tool, but as a guiding light; something spiritual as much as practical or profitable.  The interesting thing is what happens when you leave the grading paradigm behind.  You start grading yourself.  And far more comprehensively because you really want to understand the thing, as opposed to simply proving it to someone with the power of pass or fail over you.  Failing is not an option for someone who's in love with what they're doing simply because they're not doing it for anyone else.    

What I can't get over is the presumptuous nature of whole programs designed to turn open minds into efficient, technically capable instruments, with so little emphasis on whether the systems they're being trained to maintain are worth having at all.  It's this question again and again: what's education for really?  Job training or character development?  I love the creative advantages of critical thinking and the potential of the human mind to understand itself and its relationship to other minds and the physical universe, but I didn't develop that wonder in a classroom.  It's true I wouldn't have the skills necessary to pursue my intellectual interests without formal instruction, but that's not what's really at issue.  It's the spiritual blindness which occurs after taking a fundamentally selfish, exploitative and adversarial view of life because you were educated-that is, convinced, coerced, conned or forced by repetition, rote, rationalization or fear-to do so in order to make a living.  A living (life) which will mostly be comprised of working to pay for things you're not sure you really need (because you really don't).  So you're left with a kind of societal rift between the 'educated'-those who've completed their designated amount of classwork-, 'undergraduates'-those in the process of doing so-, and the 'unskilled', 'uneducated' or *gasp* 'dropouts'-those without the desire, ability or means of obtaining an institutional credential.  What's immediately implied in most people's minds at these divisions is the income associated with each, not an interest in the underlying motivations of those involved or the quality of the knowledge pursued and its humanitarian utility.  It isn't what you know, it's how much you know.  The size of your mountain, not the wisdom gained in climbing it.  Why?  Because it's understood, as a matter of normal course, that economic profit is the main purpose of academic engagement.  Why?  Because our culture measures worth in dollars and cents.  Why why why?  Because you're not supposed to listen to the wind, or the rumblings of transience, or yourself.  You're supposed to be busy.  You're supposed to be getting an education so you can be competitive and ultimately successful in some distant golden future.

It works the other way too, of course.  Non participants are degraded to the extent that their counterparts are lauded.  And sometimes the criticisms are valid.  A lot of people need to be kept on track, especially during adolescence and early adulthood.  The means of doing this are as varied as the cultures of the planet, but the end is the same: taking responsibility for oneself and one's role in the community.  It's a perfectly sensible and decent and natural thing to expect.  And, along with so many other natural things, it's been twisted and manipulated and mutilated by our delusional status quo.  We're born on probation, and until we live up to we're not really alive.  It's a game, and we want winners and only winners.  Not runners up, not the sick or frightened or those too disgusted to play.  We want the young and the beautiful and the strong and we want them to stay that way forever.  And if they begin to fade or become unhappy or stop doing what we need them to, we replace them with new winners.   And the losers?  Well, there's a place for them too of course.  Plenty of places actually.  And so long as they understand where they belong and stay there, we can forget their suffering or say it's their problem or condemn them as cowards when we're feeling low.  It's the information age after all.  Who has time to look around in the fast lane?  Adversarial systems make winners and losers, not God or Nature or anything else.  Animals that get killed and eaten by other animals aren't losing, they're being killed and eaten.  What we do is made up.  And if you buy in, don't be surprised when they sell you out.

Aegean

I've never been to Greece

But I think of it constantly

Its cracked marble and sand

And its native sons of noble lines
Who are destroying, with inherited pride

What their fathers killed to protect

Seeing little value in myth
Because gods can be replaced

So easily
And any fool can sail a ship
Without blessings and oracles
All the way and back again
Faster than Zeus can blink
In this age without limits or wisdom
When the blood of champions
Is the oil in the olive
And there are no more women to rescue
But I like to think they remember,   
When their meat is cooking
And the sky grows dark with hunger,
Just what a father can be
I like to think they're reminded
When a dust of ancient bones
Blows hard against their doors
And the sea booms and crashes
Like a horror in a maze,
Just what it means to be brave
And I wonder too 
When Helios ascends to show them
How his brothers lost the fight
That men look up and see him
As the enemy of night

Ryokan's Thief

I’ve always loved hearing
Stories of hard travel
From people who’ve scattered
Like ghosts across the earth
Whether fugitives or followers
It’s their journeys I’d rather judge
Knowing, somehow
That our differences are mostly circumstance
And that condemnation is misunderstanding
But to hear a man out
Humbly, in good faith
Is something far more essential
To the development of decency
Than adherence to laws
However exalted
And that, shown compassion
A guilty man’s face
Will betray him absolutely
Fearing, as he should
No worldly harm
But only what conscience can deliver
The gentle reminders
Of his buried other
That part more enamored of the hardships
And solitudes of life

Sabi

I am sick
With the poisons of my culture
And if I ever succumb
Or happen to become
A thing which serves it
Be a friend
And affect my end

Neon Rain

It's a stroll through the city
And it's toe to toe
With king kong billboards and vampire clerks
Roaming hungry for hidden money
That last twenty bucks you keep tucked behind your I.D.
Like a shield against final poverty
And you almost wish for the honest brutality
Of Old World thieves
The mug and stab
And leaving to die
In fog-dark alleys
And the bliss!
To look your killer in the eye
Feel the blade go in
Put up your fight
Spill your life
And stain red the guilty hand

Broken Windows

Some mornings, the bastards are already in your head
You sense them just before waking
Eroding whatever gentleness grew there in the night
And you know
That today, you'll have to fight hard
Just to keep a smile on your face
And your finger off the trigger
Because you understand
That the collective human spirit
Is so fragile right now
So thin and frightened
That the smallest pebble
Incautiously thrown
Could shatter the works
And maybe that's alright
And maybe that's your light
Beginning to dim
Like young love
Like a sunset
Like glass

The Streets You Remember

This is for her
Lessons, graces
And the way she changed me
One summer morning
When I tried to use words
Instead of wisdom
And how she looked away
Knowing better than I did
What yes could mean
And saving us both
With her perfect caution

This is how sunlight
Across a bathrobed body
To a sixteen year old boy
Feels like dying
The way I could feel then
Too much and too fast
And always that way with her
How even now
Years later
I can still feel lost
But never forgotten
In daylight dreams

The Well Wisher

You know
When people explain
How they'd like to die
It's somehow soothing
They get calm
Close their eyes
Sit back
And describe
In beautiful detail
Summer mornings
Or, more dramatically
Autumn evenings
Saying, if they could
They'd choose
Such serene contexts
To depart
Then, with a start
Uncomfortably adding
"Hypothetically"
As if you were taking notes
And not simply listening

Rabbit Hole Blues

On the nighttime stage
Vice becomes vision
Righteousness exhausts its appetite
And sanctity visits the flames
Our dreams are easy freedom
They flesh out the fight
Tracing bloody ultimatums
On the barren dust of a day

Visions can touch that deepest need
Where your dull identity stumbles
Humbled and small
And all sleek philosophies
Are stripped down for syllables
Embarrassed by silence
Shamed by unconscious strength
And denied the final word

Strong Winds

Behind my house
The old forest trail
Today, an escape route
Tomorrow, the way home

-

Three days of rain
And I mark no change
Is that my dog out there
Among the trees?

-

Yesterday's paper
Ignited my cynicism
And then, more usefully
My kindling

Patches Of Ground

This woodpile, illuminated
By a January moon
Shifts something in me
It feels like love
But far simpler

-

Six more inches
Fell overnight
Out my window, I imagine Kyoto
Its golden temple
Robed in white

-

All night, together
Lying in silence
The storm passing over
Our hidden shelter
Two warm bodies in the snow

The Unfree and The Outsider

As usual, our definitions must be clear:

Slave-a person who is the property of and wholly subject to another.

Unfree labour-a generic or collective term for those work relations, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will by the threat of destitution, detention, violence (including death), or other extreme hardship to themselves, or to members of their families.

Master-a person with the ability or power to use, control, or dispose of something.

Outsider-one who is isolated or detached from the activities or concerns of his or her own community.

There are many ways of explaining why these roles exist. The most obvious is by historical example, tracing the establishment and evolution of the institution of slavery through various eras and cultures. This is to understand slavery's importance to the stability and development of the various societies which have employed it. This is also to frame it academically as a bygone practice, something barbaric to be wondered at in our absurd, modern pseudo-enlightened style. Another way is to understand the master-slave dynamic as alive and well, functioning as an essential element in the maintenance of mainstream socio-economic reality. This I think is the more interesting approach, though my outlook is bound to be affected by my sympathies. I enjoy and appreciate history, but my responsibility, if I have any at all, is to live well and truly in my time and place and try to understand what a master is that a slave is not. And vice versa.

And so.

Human groups. Power accords to the capable so long as the weak are in agreement or under control. But the powerful, as Rousseau points out, are not, by virtue of their power, judicious. Might is might, not right. To exercise authority is to oppress, regardless of intention. There is no absolute freedom in society, only wider or narrower bounds. This seems a natural effect of communal living. Decisions must be made and restrictions put in place to ensure mutual gain and safety among members. All in a group would come to understand this in one way or another because it's a basic feature of human dynamics. Slavery, however, is not. It is an effect of imbalance, of social sickness and degeneration very much in line with the current state of affairs domestically and internationally. And equality? Equality is much written about, seldom discussed, and almost never practiced. Why? Because it will never cooperate with the kind of machinery we've been given. It can't. There are masters involved, richer and more powerful than ever. So powerful, in fact, that most of us never see them; like myths, they occupy an ethereal realm, sustained by the unwitting sacrifices of their subjects. A community can have equality; an empire never will. Communities need trust, cooperation and mutual concern; empires need slaves. And so we have them: the working poor, immigrant labourers, third world serfs and a great many of the so called "middle class". If slavery is submitting to the will of another to survive, then most now are enslaved; and though the chains be comfortable, they're no less binding.

It's true we're not property. It's true we have certain options open to us as citizens of a country more or less tolerant of diversity. A man cannot be shackled to a workstation for refusing to obey his employer. He almost certainly will, however, be obliged to borrow thousands from either the government or the bank in order to secure the credential which grants him - perhaps - a living wage. Not witnessing the extravagance of the master class, he assumes there isn't one, and feels lucky for his three meals a day. Emerging from the classroom, he faces a mountain of debt and subsequently must submit to whatever opportunities are available. This is deliberate. High tuition ensures that those who can't afford, or are in opposition to, for-profit educational insitutions are denied professional advancement - regardless of ability - and kept under thumb, while those who graduate are conditioned to obedience by obligation of repayment. This is fundamentally in conflict with several of our cultural assumptions, most notably that we value education as a right and not a privilege. Again, stratification is reinforced by those who benefit from it. If we're buying education, they're selling degrees. If we're buying rebellion, they're selling t-shirts. If we're not buying, they're selling us reasons to. Millions of dollars a year - which could be used to alleviate poverty - go into ad campaigns designed to generate the atmosphere of inadequacy necessary to keep us spending and, therefore, in check. Material greed is fear in service to comfort bolstered by insecurity, and it's something which is encouraged in all grossly imbalanced societies.

Tell a slave he's a master and he will labour in earnest to his final day. Sell him his chains and he'll think he owns them. Give him a taste of power and he'll bear through all indignity. Symbols are key here. The elevation in symbolic importance of elaborate and expensive possessions by the master class serves the twin purposes of increasing debt load and reinforcing the illusions of freedom and success among their servant populations. Add to this the sacred myth of the nuclear family and the Christian handicaps of sin and guilt and you get slaves who feel their suffering is deserved and so accept their role in the game, and the game itself, as more or less natural phenomena. Understanding just enough to perform, they're given just enough rope to hang themselves. In all relationships, there is exchange. Equality supposes each member to be entitled to no more or less than any other member by right. Capitalism supposes there will never be equality and embraces the master-slave paradigm as its de facto foundation. Common humanity must be a distant secondary, a kind of fluffy abstraction, to a mind which can accept the validity of exploitation of people for profit.

When dissent becomes fashion, revolution becomes trivial and the conscientious outsider a person to be ridiculed and pitied. It must be this way for those in power to keep it. Everyone must play the game or the game breaks down. And so we hear words like "patriot" thrown around, and wonder what to make of it. Surely the notion of patriotism must be relegated to the history books. What could it mean today? Just this: do as your leaders command. Close ranks. Defend. Against what threat, we ask, and the reply is more or less "unconventionalism". That which does not serve convention. That which does not serve. Viewed with suspicion, a non participant is emptied of identity and filled up with whatever ghosts are currently haunting the master class. Terrorist, communist, sexual deviant, immoral atheist. He is any and all of these because he hasn't asserted his place in the game and so casts doubt on its validity. He's the master of himself. He does not serve, and so makes his way alone. There are naturally few of these people, and their importance has been lost to us by incessant vilification. Their true role is to mirror what the rest of us can't see in ourselves. They're people who've chosen not to accept responsibility for their social inheritance. People who are unable to accept it. Classically, the mountain hermit. More currently, the hippie or "alternative" person. Regardless of labels, one thing is clear. They help define the true nature of the societies which create them.

But these roles are not mutually exclusive. A member of the master class may become an outsider as surely as one of the unfree sector may eventually become a master. It's a unique feature of our culture that this is possible, even common. Allowances are made to avoid tyranny. But these tolerances are surface, aesthetic. A change of outfit, generally speaking. There must be slaves. If not from within, then imported. And the masters are as they've always been, busy convincing themselves of their specialness, their inviolable right to be above and beyond the rest of humanity. The outsider has more in common with the master than the unfree, but is more liberated, more actually free. The master atop his human powder keg feels exalted, but the inevitable explosion and chaos will destroy him completely. In the meantime, he must soothe it. The outsider can watch this show from a safe distance and feel a part of himself in it. A part left behind. Solutions have been brought forward to the problem of masters and slaves. The old overt styles of slavery have been abolished with great sentiments of righteousness, but the practice itself remains strong as ever and will continue so long as equality remains merely an idea and profit the ultimate goal.

The Basement Bar

Families.

I am a son of many fathers.
Literary, Musical, Metaphorical and Step

And of course, the bio-illogical actual. The face I can see.
The man I am and never will be.

Old disagreements of opinion seem trivial beside our consistencies.
Our English features, our privateness.
He understands me, pretends he doesn't.
I don't call for occasions anymore; he takes the hint.
Easy neglect and small regrets.
It doesn't seem to matter in the wake of our history. Approaching his senior stage now, I wonder how best to reconnect, or if it's even possible. Or required. Affection in deference to convention seems beneath us both. Stubborn bastards need walls up.

Maybe next year, pops.