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Poem: Loop Track

 

Loop Track

 

purple

drapes ashen foothills,

as tandems of loops

of clovers of rows of cars

plod a slow conga, two by two,

headlights or reds,

vain under the rejected moon.

 

starts and stops,

snarls and sputters,

almost a chant, a curse,

at least from a distance,

this monotone of rubber,

cut now and then

by a shriek of treads.

 

alongside

this congestion of herds of cars

and, as well,

stacked in their little boxes,

dwell the citizens of fluorescence,

where the candles of technology

never burn down.

 

androids and apples,

televisions and monitors,

the people’s eyes cloy

hour after hour,

bending their spines

as if a wick in carnal wax

bore the weight.

 

and yet always in the end,

at least for now,

the spines get up and walk off

from the obsessive lies

of the addictive plastic.

 

such false crystal balls.

and yet,

 

what magic they bear,

rolling around all harried night

inside exhausted heads

to torment and titillate

brief, seduced dreams.

 

still,

 

no one wants to wake up again;

but dawn sounds the cattle call,

that bloodstream of metallic rivers,

drowsy no longer in the rising stress.

 

already

the skyscrapers have caught

the beauty and hope of this new morning

and swallowed it

into their intestinal pain.

 

 

=================================

Today is my brother's birthday.  He would've been 55 years old.

A Green Day song keeps going through my head.  It reminds me of his struggle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Soa3gO7tL-c

=========================================

Poem: Night Drive

 

Moonless Drive

 

candles

trawl midnight gloom,

carve lucence

out of onyx,

 

the world

a bowl of twin cones

surrounded

by shadowy fruit,

 

elusive

cornucopias

of mythic coils

nestled in folds,

 

while the finite wax

follows a path,

among the curves

of this great serpent,

 

winding and burning

burning and winding,

seeking a home

not devoured.

==========================================

Essay: Lessons From Who I Am

Lessons From Who I Am

 

As the world trends darker, driven by the rise of  fascism, a world already a vast misery for the many born under poverty and tyranny, where there is no respect for life, only coin and might, and, as well, with membership in the middle class no panacea against pain or woe, including the sufferance of stressful pressure to  stay financially afloat, at the cost of conformity to the norms of overlords, who have no qualms about stepping on the necks of others, I find myself reflecting on how I was able to live as an idealist for so long, as an adherent of the Good, a poet and thinker who believed humanity could rise out of darkness.  Strangely, as we descend toward what looks like WWIII, I still believe in the possibility, however unlikely, that humanity can overcome.  That I was gifted with this vision, this hope, when so many people are cast into abject toil and enforced fealty to corrupt, brutal leaders, with few options but to struggle to abide, is worthy of pause. 

First, I was born in the right socioeconomic class at the right time and place.  After WWII, the hope of democracy flooded the world, fueled by the defeat of Hitler.   The USA was only empire left standing.  Buoyed by national wealth and the ideals of equality and free speech, access to education became widespread.  Knowledge offers awareness, the impetus to confront injustice.  The 1960s brought the Civil Rights Movement and vociferous peace activism, galvanized by the atrocious Vietnam War.  The 1970s inaugurated the Women’s Movement, Earth Day, and critical  advances in the fight for gay rights.

Even in the wealthy, democratic empire, however, there was still plenty of poverty, oppression and classism.  A door of opportunity had been cracked open to advance the ethos of the nation--and, in consequence, the world.  But note full well:  the US caste system hadn’t been broken.  The White patriarchal structure had lost some ground, inch by inch, but only through brutal conflict.

I was born into this tumultuous scene in 1963, amid the ongoing social unrest.  A few months later, the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated.   In 1968, one of history’s greatest, most courageous advocates for human rights, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated as well.

These were the times that encapsullated me.  Full disclosure:  I am a White male, a member of that segment of society granted the most freedom to think and explore.  There’s no law that says White males get special privileges; but the officials and institutions that adjudicate the laws and social rules are steeped in prejudice. 

A second source of influence was my parents.  They were idealists, in their own way, my father a professor of philosophy (imagine being the child of such!), and my mother intensely religious, quite adamant about the palladium of God’s love.  

Idealism was the prettier side of my parents’ effect on me.  Like my country, it was stark and two-edged.  Both of them were self-absorbed.  My father was autistic and had no concern for social graces.  Barely abiding by the most basic etiquette, he’d wear the same dirty windbreaker, day in and day out, for months at a time, and would rarely shower.  Because he was a genius (and a White male) he could get away with this.  He earned a PhD at Cornell.  My mother, also brilliant and at Cornell, gave up her intellectual future for her husband and family, as women were expected to do.  In addition to the resentment this caused, she was not psychologically suited to raising children.  She was absent when she could be and, when present, expected to be the center of attention, while defining me and my siblings according to her needs. 

My childhood fed me idealism and intellectualism, but offered little training on becoming an adult.  My mother preferred a dependent, attentive child.  My father apparently expected me to find my way by listening to his lectures on Plato, dispensed every night at the dinner table.  As early as I can remember, these lectures dominated our time.  Rigorous table etiquette for children was enforced with corporeal punishment.  Neither parent offered direction of a practical nature, whether on job, family, partnership, or handling one’s own emotions.  Each in their own separate bubble, they divorced when I was 12.  What they shared in common was a clear distaste for parenting, or even this earthly world.  It seeped into me that my life should be dedicated to some sort of chivalrous quest, a noble journey to seek Love and Truth, detached from the vulgar routines of ordinary, carnal life.

Disposed toward introversion and even misanthropy, I found myself largely living inside my own head, where I created my own fictional worlds.  If I were an extrovert instead, I probably would’ve gained helpful knowledge about how to be social from my peers.  But I hid, largely out of fear, but also due to my propensities for introspection.  At age 16, I started writing poems, stories and, a bit later, novels.  Barely 18, I bumbled into college with almost no interpersonal skills and a sense that I needed to resist temptation.  I wouldn’t drink a single beer until I was 21.  I would have no sexual relations, beyond two or three dates, until much later.

This brings me to the third influence over my soul.  My own.  My choice. My struggle between light and dark.  

My parents had their ideals, but also a dark side, the same Jekyll-Hyde-ism as my country.  I wasn’t raised to be a practical person, to conform to social norms and ‘keep my head down.’  I was a creature of far-roaming ideas and fantastical stories.  I read a great number of books.  There was no internet to distract me.  I was baptized at age 16 and embraced the message of the gospel, which seemed noble and lofty.  Jesus, like Plato, spoke of a supernal reality, wiser and better than our own.  Throughout my 20s, while I floundered in and out of college, I volunteered on a crisis hotline, and rose to become one of its training coordinators.  On the phone, I emergency-counseled suicidal, addicted, depressed, beaten and otherwise tormented folks.  I found that I truly cared about others and I related this work to seeking the Good.

But when it came to personal interactions with other humans, I was deeply flawed and crippled.   My childhood had left me with a great deal of rage.  Neither parent had ever listened to what I wanted or even granted me attention, except according to their needs.  There was plenty of gaslighting.  Instead of being an abused child, I was ‘an angry, ungrateful child.’  (my country, I would learn later, was much like my parents, proclaiming itself a ‘city on the hill,’ even as it overthrew democratically elected leaders in other countries and replaced them with dictators to serve its own power).  I was a brutal bully to my siblings, who were already suffering in their own ways under our family dysfunction.   I got into a number of fist fights.  Starting in my teens, I collected knives and guns, and had dark fantasies of committing suicide--or, more often, killing and hurting others.  Fortunately, I never crossed that line.  My poetry and other writing served as a release valve for my hate and frustration.

It was perseverance, rather than conscious choice, that led me on a path toward the Good.  I never lost enough self-control to commit a major crime or become a permanently selfish person, lost to the vice of manipulating others for my own sadistic urges.  Make no mistake, I did manipulate others.  I got in fights.  I did bad things, some quite wanton and cruel.  I have a lot of guilt to deal with.  Like grief, guilt never completely goes away, though it can be met respectfully, acknowledged and listened to in order to approach some inner rapprochement.   I thank my younger self.  I thank him, that flawed, tortured young man, not only for persevering to survive, but for finding ways to get relief through writing.

Stuck in an internal, personal war for most of my twenties, years of meditation finally led to an epiphany.  It was not a conscious act, but rather an arrow that erupted from somewhere inside my heart.  I sold or gave away the last of my weapons--or threw them into the ocean--and was accepted, after some intense preparation, into a PhD program with a full scholarship. 

The three forces I’ve outlined--country, family, choice-- vastly affected the course of my life. What this shows is that circumstance largely affects outcome.  This is the critical point I’ve been building toward in this essay.  We are not fated to suffer war as a society.  We are not determined by our natures to be unethical and immature.  A higher level of maturity is hard for us to imagine; for civilization has always been saddled by patriarchy and might-makes-right.  But we can be raised in healthy environments that enhance family dynamics.  Better dynamics, in turn, lead to improved emotional competence for us as individuals.

We can work toward a better system as a civilization.  It’s perfectly doable.

A spectrum of well-researched therapeutic techniques are available right now.  For thousands of years, these tools for higher awareness had not been invented.  Even today, however, most of us never get to access them.  It requires going to a therapist, which in our current culture is expensive and stigmatized.  Ironically, in our ‘man’s world,’  it is considered a sign of weakness to have the strength to face what you are feeling.

Another example:  the consumer marketing industry spends untold amounts of money every year actively attempting to cripple our mental health:  to make the US citizen insecure and envious, so that we buy more corporate products.  What if all that energy, instead, was invested to advance the collective consciousness toward a better ethos?

Since the beginning of civilization, we have always been subjugated to social systems that are primarily vehicles for power and greed.  If we escaped the trap of the patriarchate--if we escaped a pattern of social programming that I refer to as an "ignorance vortex" [1]--we could then ascend toward the Good. 

We almost made it.  Kamala Harris lost to fascist candidate Trump by a sliver of the popular vote.  A Black and Indian woman, who believes in human rights, was almost the most powerful person on the geopolitical global stage.  About half the population of the USA was ready to let go of 12,000 years of petty male warlordism.

I am impressed that humanity has started to develop advanced ethical systems. Democracy, human rights, equality. These are high tech ideational tools compared to the Hammurabic Code and the divine right of kings.  We have, as a species, taken some big strides toward escaping the ignorance vortex.

Indeed, it speaks to the power of conscience that we made it as far as we did.  As much as Evil exists in the triad of violence, hate and ignorance--the forces of fascism--the Good exists in a weave of love, fairness and reason.

 

=============

Footnote

(1)  https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2023/11/op-ed-trillions-of-happy-humans-its.html

============

Poem: Screen Time

 

Screen Time

 

nothing eerie

orchestrated the day

when such luminosity

did not exist.

 

lead and ink

scraped thoughts into position,

heavy

with marrow and blood.

 

we fixate now

on our new stylus,

as it smears our gaze

with a lurid lacquer,

 

and watch ourselves

without knowing

as we chase will-o’-wisps

toward dawn.

 

harnessed

by the ghost fabric

of such false life,

without insight or recognition,

 

we feed all that we can

into a pale future,

heartbeats on tap

for the motherboard.

 

 

=================================

Poem: Faces

 

Faces

 

when they move

liquid origami,

not so nude as glass.

thin-skinned secrets

tucked in ovals,

fanning out

from the big top of the nose.

 

when they perform

 

werewolves,

such medeas and mercurios,

swelling up supple, sexy in the chase

only to collapse

from brow to brow.

 

the craft of a wrinkle

strains at the leash.

the tug of a tiny vein.

a blush of eyelid.

 

when they talk

 

chins reel

from the muddlesome task of words,

which stumble, even when true.

curves scrunch into safety nets,

desperate weaves of rotes and vogues

which parachute when pushed,

down into seas of what-abouts and thens,

never quite able to float where they land,

or go deeper,

or rise up again.

 

 

===================

11/30 ... a few mods

11/29/24 ... a few mods 

Light or Dark

 "The true war is waged in the hearts of all living things, against our own natures, light or dark.  That is what shapes and binds this galaxy, not these creations of man." -- Kreia, KOTOR 2

The World Staggers

 The globe staggers as the strongest country, previously the strongest democracy in the world, flips to fascism and probably, given Trump's apparent preferences, a totalitarian state in the style of Hitler.  

This is a colossal, defining moment for all of human civilization--forever.  And yet, however, that forever is likely to be short.  

The instability and massive ego of our new dictator, a malignant narcissist, tends toward ceaseless spin and reckless vice, which is likely to spark sporadic travails, scourges and, yes, wars, such as Putin expanding into Poland.  And China going into Taiwan.   

General mayhem and chaos.  Power-grabs everwhere because the global police force led by the US is gone.  World War Three is likely and with it nuclear launch.

Trump, himself, our new dictator here in the USA is mainly interested in being worshipped, so perhaps he will not invade Mexico or Canada or seize Greenland (he has expressed interest in 'buying' it).  

Maybe this evil man is content to destroy the greatness of the USA and shrink it down to a theater of one:  A golden T, akin to the golden Calf of Baal,  constantly in the spotlight, with severe punishment for those who dare to challenge his authority and total control.  

In a sense, all Americans will soon live in the equivalent of a very abusive, violent household, where the police and military will be the abuser's fists.  And the abuser's voice will grate our ears, demeaning us along with the very fabric of country and culture, a suffusion of sickness from every angle of the media kingdom the dictator now controls.

A little segue.  I am grading papers, and may not write poems for a while.  (indeed, this may be my last semester ever grading papers, because the university has not as of yet offered me any classes next year).  But it isn't just about having no time due to grading--

I stagger.  The whole world staggers.  We knew the power of demagoguery.  Of hate and fear when wielded as psychological tools to turn masses of human beings into ignorant hordes.  But Trump, being so odious and disgusting, so generally awful, many of us, perhaps, still clung to some hope that the US citizen wouldn't be that gullible, so hate-bound,  and straight-up self-destructive.  So obsessed by the need to maintain the racism and sexim inveterate and essential to the US "caste system" (Wilkerson).

But no.  

And so ... 

Behold the Idiocy.  Behold the Darkness in the human soul. ugly and bared on full naked display.  The Orwellian gambit.  Hate is Love.  War is Peace.  Slavery is Freedom.  Let me add, Ignorance is Wisdom.

It likely now damns us, our concession to worship a man so vile and disgusting that political satirists lament he is impossible to caricature.  He is a living caricature.  A walking extreme of everything vicious and rotten with vanity and greed. 

Can those of us who resist survive? Can we choose the Light?  Lincoln talked of "better angels."   Will you surrender yours?  Will I mine?  

How will we find a way to preserve our own inner Light?  To keep love and compassion in our core, as Trump's henchman, Stephen Miller, beings the construction of the 'camps' that he has vowed to build across the country?  How will we keep our souls as immigrants and others--potentially people like me, seen as political enemies--are put in those camps?

There has to be a way, even in hell, to not bow down to to devil.  

==========================================

It's My Father's Birthday: "Keep Your Goodness"

 

Today is my father’s birthday.  Kit would’ve been 91.  He died in May last year at the age of 89.  As my grief continues, a process of remembrance across decades of philosophical discussions, as well as our time analyzing countless games of chess together, browsing through bookstores, eating at a range of restaurants, going to movies, taking hikes, and so much more, the whole odyssey of joys and pains that family share, and too the simple habits and routines that fondly demarcate individual quirks and preferences, I am feeling considerable relief that he did not live to witness what just happened to our country:  the election of a fascist to the office of the president, an egomaniacal man without conscience, who will do whatever it takes to become a full-fledged dictator and destroy the Constitution which founded the United States in liberty and human rights.

My father was a strong advocate of democracy and a foe of fascism.  He spent the last few decades of his life working on a book that not only laid a foundation of philosophical arguments for the importance of what he considered the only decent form of government, but which in addition developed an outline for its most ethical and effective expression [1].   One could quibble about specifics, whether Kit was right about this or that, but there’s no doubt that he took up the call of Enlightenment values.  The dignity of humanism.  It is a hopeful perspective, one that ennobles and frames the human condition as a stimulus for great and beautiful deeds.

One cornerstone of a humanist ethic is the idea that we can elevate each other, moving forward together, to sculpt better a world, by championing our unique human ability to reason.

Fascism, conversely, champions ignorance.  It blares the cultish call of a charismatic dictator, whose aura of might strives for two things:  (A) to dominate and direct the minds of about one third of the citizenry (this seems to be the average, on historical analysis) through a zealous rhetoric of divisive propaganda, and (B) to wield the resultant obedient herd as a weapon to menace and bully the dismayed and disorganized majority.

The championing of a cult versus the championing of reason.  These are the two paths.  Deceit or truth.

It’s a well-worn platitude that one’s character is an expression of one’s soul, manifesting in behavior that shapes the environment.  The person is known by their deeds.  Metaphorically, the tree is known by its fruit.  As it stands, the American people have chosen the tree of fascism.  In the USA, this is to submit to the superiority of the White male, and the inferiority of all others.

Isabel Wilkerson, in her book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, argues that the USA has always had a caste system, similar in some ways to India’s caste system.  She discusses how Martin Luther King, Jr., after arrival in India in 1959 and while receiving accolades, was shocked to hear himself described as a member of the “Untouchable class” of America.  At first offended, King accepted the label upon reflection.

So, here we are.  Embracing our traditions of racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ and similar embedded otherisms.

Humanity could go on forever being ignorant and fanatic, locked in oppressive hierarchies, except for one thing:  the weapons we have evolved over millennia of war are now capable of annihilating civilization itself.

If not for this fact, we could go on being prisoners of our own ignorance and the dark karma it generates.  We could simply continue the cycle:  to fight and war and fear and butcher and slaughter and enslave and hate from our various hilltops, marked with our little flags of prejudice, always seeing the other sides as less human, more stupid, more sinful, more animal or even as insect, as when a scapegoat group is referred to as "cockroaches."  

One might say, we deserve an eternal fate, similar to crabs in a bucket, always pulling each other down.  And yet the children are innocent.  And very many adults desperately want change, and they do their best to be good and kind, not just to people of their own skin color, but to everyone.  And yet the innocent cannot stop the demagogic kings who control the police and the military and who can impoverish, jail or otherwise torment anyone they choose.  

Hitlerian propaganda, such as the Elders of Zion, saw the Jews as cannibals who fed on infants during Satanic rituals.  Recently, in a case dubbed “Pizzagate,” a man fired a rifle inside a pizza shop because he believed the shop hosted satanic pedophile rituals performed by Democrats:

 

“The unfounded "Pizzagate" Internet rumor at the center of this case accused the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria of being the home of a Satanic child sex abuse ring involving top Democrats such as Hillary Clinton. "Speculation and fabrications tied to the bizarre conspiracy theory have been relentlessly circulated by politically motivated fringe sites," as The Two-Way has reported.”  (NPR.org)

 

This level of ignorant violence and cruelty has an ancient history.  Long ago, humans proved their susceptibility to superstition, so much that we have stained our history with many battles, atrocities and oppressions of the utmost horrible nature due to the darkest, most irrational reactions of fear, outrage and hate.  

And yet these sorts of irrational reactions are a perverse mana-from-heaven to the mentally deluded men who sit atop thrones and proclaim themselves gods.  Such weaknesses--the exploits in the human mind-- are the reins they tug to steer the herd, to determine where it goes and grazes; and where it tramples.

It was a truly fantastic, beautiful moment in history, only hundreds of years ago, when a few countries began to break out of tyrany to advance democracy.  This change led to hundred of years of slowly improving conditions here in America.  An increase in fairness and equality. In the quality and dignity of our lives. 

Slavery was made illegal.  Black men gained the right to vote.  And then all women, too.  In 2015, gay marriage became legal, something I never thought I would celebrate in my lifetime.

But it is all crumbling away.  All America’s ethical advances are sliding down the slope of a sandtrap, which is the widening maw of fascism.  Once again, a disgusting, macho dictator with no conscience will lead us into a dark place of White male superiority in counterpoint to the inferiority of everyone else, with corresponding privileges or privations, powers or degradations, elevations or segregations.

Was my father, Kit, wrong to think that we could rise up above this evil?  No, he was not.  Democracy has been shown to be a plausible route.  After WWII, Hitler and other fascists were defeated.  Before that, the armies that defended slavery were overcome during the Civil War.  Despite frequent falls and failures, somehow in its broken, brutal journey the USA has managed to stumble toward the Light.

So, again, no, Kit was not wrong to champion democracy.  

Consider, too, the effect of our own individual choices, yours and mine, on our own souls.

I believe that every one of us who harbors a conscience--a sensitivity and reactivity to good and evil--is being watched by some part of their own mind, an internal judge capable of meting out sizeable sentences, whatever their mysterious nature and innermost effect might be.  Our own internal judge is immune to the denials, masks, deflections and even the self-loathing we erect to hide from the truth.  Even if we shut away the internal judge forever, still, it watches from the subconscious, and troubles the currents below the surface on which the completeness and quality of life depends. 

Whatever happens to humanity, even ultimate doom, I believe that somewhere, somehow, someone is watching us, aside from our own internal judgement.  Maybe it is aliens, though I don’t think so.  Maybe it is the Universe, whatever that means.  Or maybe it is Angels, as I like to call them.

Of course, we also watch each other and feel each others' gaze.  This fellow assessment can exert a pressure to conform.  But we are also drawn to honor the good people in our lives by acting in accord with their conscience and our own.  The alternative is to disappoint those we admire and to shame ourselves by bowing down to evil and its big lies.

My father’s last words to me were, “Keep your Goodness.” 

Thank you Kit, for your courageous philosophy.  We humans have wings that want to spread, to fly, even if it is only through the heavens of our own mind. 

 

==========================================

 

 

11/12 ... eds throughout the day

11/11 ... This is going to need editing, but I wanted to publish it on the actual birthday of my father.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Noise

 

Noise

 

cannot be silent

in the way of a lake.

we clamor, bustle and complain.

 

no hint of the sonata of a loon,

a cricket croon,

or the ancient fugue of coyotes.

 

our lampposts blare all night.

 don’t have it in us to succor the quiet.

our very attitudes 

belch with the bravado of leafblowers,

tirades that richochet off each other,

ostentatious in their obstreperous.

 

collective and multiplicative.

 

it’s the antithesis of the humble.

the air strains

to host so much noise.

even so, we keep on trying,

upping the density of the hoopla 

& rackety-clackety.

 

it’s the reverse of majesty.

each of us an endless whoop,

not so still against the woods--

competing decibels and verbals.

 

all other life around us,

those nuisances and pieces,

 if they dare to be seen,

 had better learn to listen,

to be meek and harnessed,

to reply.

 

 

====================

11/30/24 ... mods

11/11/24 ... mods