Oak Springs Trail
musk of yerba santa,
rosemary and sage,
young yuccas erect
and sun-drenched
below spirals
of ochre-black hawk--
a single feather to fall,
my hand its candlestick,
wand of speckled flame.
lifting fingers high,
waxy with glistens,
i watch quill flicker
hot in july wind;
then release it to fly,
a soar on a wish
extinguishing us both
with glee.
=======================
Foothills off San Fernando Valley, 1990s
It's the Dicks Who Are Infected and Deranged
In this essay, I develop and compare two diametric
views. One says that staying silent in
the face of an empire’s evil infects and deranges you, while the other claims the
opposite, namely, that if you speak up, you will be infected. Plenty of polemics to follow!
Launchpad quote
To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement--Philip K. Dick
The above quote could mean various things. A common interpretation is that lust for
power is seductive and leads to debauchery.
In any case, the quote could be said to have a deeper meaning, one that calls
for acquiescence. Why fight the Empire, if
you will become “infected?” Infection implies
an unpleasant state or worse, such as being crippled or disfigured. Who wants that? When you add the hard-hitting “derangement”--a
disturbed, broken state of mind--the message becomes unequivocal.
The Dick View
By taking the quote out of whatever original context was provided
by the writer, I express how most of us confront and interact with it. Among the scattery, chattery blizzards of
social media, Dick’s meme-worthy statement has been left to wander; and from that
drifting perch of isolated prominence, it boldly proclaims: Avoid a fight with the empire on price
of your soul!
I will call this the Dick View. The people who follow it, then, are eponymous
Dicks.
Einstein isn’t a Dick, chooses to fight instead
Let’s compare the Dick view to something said by Albert
Einstein. When the great thinker left
Europe to escape fascism, he found himself appalled by a similar abomination in
the United States; namely, the undeniable, entrenched, intergenerational
scourge of vast, violent social and economic denigration, subjugation and
containment of Black people. That’s an
unwieldly sentence, for sure, and yet it hardly touches on the magnitude of
racism in the USA, a scourge whose history includes centuries of slavery going back
to 1619 [1].
In Einstein’s time, for instance, segregation was legal and ‘Jim
Crow’ laws effectively negated Black people’s fundamental rights. Lynching occurred with impunity. Bullying was the norm, such as common, public use
of the N-word. The fact that White
people shouldn’t even say the word today indicates the ongoing, unspoken sickness which festers in my country.
Liberated from Nazism in 1933, but then increasingly
fraught, Einstein wrote: “The more I feel an America, the more this situation pains
me. I can escape the feelings of
complicity in it only by speaking out.”
Einstein, then, isn’t a Dick. He joined the NAACP and in other various ways
engaged in candid, vocal criticism. During
a commencement speech at Lincoln University, he orated:
The separation of the races is not a disease of the colored people, but a disease of the white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it [2].
The Einstein View
We can extract from the above an obverse to the Dicks. I’ll call it the Einstein view: If you don’t fight imperial evil, your
silence infects and deranges you.
By “silence” I reference someone in Einstein’s position who, instead of speaking out to alleviate the “pain” from their “feelings of complicity,” chooses to say and do nothing. To just go along. The silent person, in this scenario, is fully aware that what they are seeing is egregious and atrocious. They recognize the malignity of it, but choose not to protest in any way. By 'someone like Einstein' I mean someone who is truthful and conscientious.
Such silence is itself a form of complicity. Moreover, as I argue below, it is the first
step in a gravitational pull of darkness, one which works to suck the slipping person, the ‘go-along,’ deeper into the support of imperial evil.
An example is “the separation of the races,” what Einstein calls “a disease of the white people.”
I argue, as well, that the Einstein view aligns with a theory of societal dynamics developed in this essay. In the summary section, I conclude that it is ethical and healthy to speak out. I also discuss what it means to protest effectively, even if, due to highly adverse circumstances, it must be more subtle than vocal.
The institutionalized racism in the USA is the central case
study. It is not, however, the only grave
iniquity at the judgement table. The
arguments below apply more generally, mutatis mutandis, to various
scenarios of silence and protest in regard to Big Lie police-state
enforcement.
The Theory of Complicitous Gravitation (TCG)
Silence, as defined above, exerts a steady, magnetic effect. As well as indicating complicity, it tends to suck a person into a deceitful state that fractures the psyche. I call this phenomenon complicitous gravitation.
People who choose silence are prone to slip deeper into an empire’s
grip, impelled by dual inducements. In the final stage, obedience is maximal and the mind becomes infected and deranged. Hail, Caesar!
Dual inducements of TCG
Temptation and pain-avoidance combine to pull people deeper into partnership
with evil. In short, the carrot and the
stick.
1. The carrot is two-pronged: (a) a sense of relief that the system won’t
punish you for speaking out and (b) an admission ticket, namely, entry into the
bazaar of in-group opportunism.
The opportunity gained could be something relatively small,
such as a neighborhood summer job. Or it could be much more: a chance at government work, business deals or
power at the community, state or national level. For a woman, in-group status in the empire could
mean staying at home and being a housewife, joining the PTA, auxiliary social clubs,
and so on.
(Sexism is an invariable trait of imperialism. The original Big Lie, which every ‘good
citizen’ must accept as a loyalty test, is that the freedom and potential of over
half the human species must be hobbled for servitude toward the
other half).
By selling out and staying quiet, you get a chance
to find a place in the empire’s hierarchal ladder of power and wealth. There is also a sense of relief, because you
have chosen to conform and obey, and so the police state and the social attack
dogs won’t bear down on you (so you think ...).
2. The stick,
ironically, comes from your own mind. Staying
silent creates a certain kind of psychological pain, which I call core tension. It originates from the conscience, but other intrapsychic inputs as well.
The pain, this core tension, can increase to become unbearable. We humans tend to do what we can to get away
from pain, including the psych sort, such as guilt. But if you stay silent--if you don’t make the
choice that Einstein made to take the honest route--you
must deal with the misery that emanates from inside you another way: by suppressing it.
As the pain increases, due to your ongoing silence, suppression
gets harder and harder. In the end, to shut
down your own inner urgings--your heart, your conscience, your empathy, your
reason--drastic measures must come to the fore (the forebrain, one might say).
When this happens, suppression turns into repression: the construction of impassable psychic
walls between input centers of the mind. Your cognitive
filters fortify twisted modes of perception. They embody a preference for prejudice, steeped in confirmation bias.
This dark transformation, in which evil is then considered as good,
is akin to selling your soul to Mephistopheles--or his proxy, the empire.
Core Tension
When you stay silent in the face of evil, you begin to
experience a certain kind of pain. It is a conglomerate of negative valanced emotions and senses--guilt, confusion, stress,
uneasiness, revulsion and so on. Every person is different and not all of these thorny weights need be present.
Core tension is similar to what psychologists call cognitive
dissonance, but it specifically involves major issues in morality, that is, the ethical
standards and principles taught to us as children. An example is the Golden Rule, treat others
as you would be treated yourself. The
Golden Rule is a common sense expression of decency, dignity, equality, fairness
and balance.
Even if a person’s conscience is weak or nonexistent, they
can still feel core tension. To live as
if something is true when it is blatantly false--to embrace illogic as
logic--is jarring and disorienting. It
unleashes an awful, compelling counter-reaction. Your own mind tries to pull you back from the abyss.
Living in such fundamental contradiction can lead to chaos and anxiety. After all, if you let
go of reason as a standard for one critical component of reality, where and
when is it not expendable?
A Malevolent Metamorphosis
Imagine someone in Einstein’s situation, who is fleeing the Nazis, and who enters America and witnesses the country's inveterate racism for the first time. If such a person chooses silence, they are now within the outer perimeter of a perilous psychological pull, one that attempts to draw them through four stages of transformation:
1. Initial silence. Compartmentalize
and suppress core tension to deal with it later.
2. Enduring silence. Turn
‘deal with it later’ into ‘deal with it much later.’ Long-term compartmentalization to continuously suppress core tension.
3. Semipermeable (Macbethian) silence.
Initiate the process of turning
suppression into repression. Bury your
core tension down in a place where you can never feel it. Mud turning to rock.
4. Orwellian silence. Complete the tragedy of the fractured mind. Look at reality 'through a glass darkly.' Evil is good and good is evil. Vocal support for the empire. At this stage, silence can be very loud.
Suppression, compartmentalization and repression. They can be part
of a healthy emotional management--or not.
It depends on how these mental tools are used and what structures
(cognitive filters or schemata) they help to arrange.
Nonetheless, when someone demands that
their own mind, through sheer stubborn force of will, twists itself into an ontological pretzel,
What is ‘Speaking up’?
There are many ways to
speak up, that is, to protest or fight back [3]. Someone of Einstein’s stature, assured a job
at a prestigious university, is relatively free to be vocal. Moreover, his
voice will generally be heard.
Many immigrants or citizens have no such cachet. They often need a job to support their
family. It might be very difficult for
them to directly protest, on risk of expulsion, vagrancy or jail.
All of us, though, have access to some means of protest. Some are subtle or clandestine, but they contribute to a certain sort of social momentum, one that roils the ‘peaceful’ surface. On Courage, A recent book by Angwin and Fields-Meyer
explores the idea of “collective stubbornness.” [4]
An example of subtle ‘speaking out” is the Black porters who,
while maintaining their job, sent encouraging messages through their body
language. And of course many people,
Black and others, joined informal or secret social groups to fight US segregation
(and before that, slavery). Church
membership is often a conduit to ‘good trouble,’ to employ the concept of John Lewis.
We aren’t all Einstein.
We won’t be invited to give a speech.
That doesn’t mean we must be silent.
We each have a choice: whether to
do something that is plausibly effective, something that honestly addresses the
concerns from both heart and mind; or to do nothing and thus enter the carrot-and-stick trap of complicitous gravitation.
A terrible price
The rest of this essay, at the risk of grandiosity, paints a hideous picture. I want to hammer home
the point that someone who twists their mind to the point where evil is seen as good is broken. They become both infected and
deranged. This 'invasion of the body snatchers' cements at stage four of TCG, when the mind flips to accept illogic as logic and
vice as virtue. To reach this point of the malevolent metamorphosis is
to go from loathing what you see in front of your very eyes to hailing it
with subservient ardor.
The magnitude is on par with that classic, sardonic tale, Andersen's "The Emperor’s New Clothes":
The emperor is clearly wearing no clothes. But, wait! Of course he is wearing clothes, the finest ones in the land! Long live the Emperor!
In terms of racism:
Black people are clearly being targeted by vicious, brutal, wicked racism. But, wait! Of course they are not. It is White people who are the victims here! Long live the Empire! Black people need to learn their place!
To twist oneself around, an Andersen-like flip, is to situate the mind within a wonderland of contradictions, an Oz of lies whose
purpose itself is absurd--to stymie and befuddle the ability to reason.
I am going to approach this disfigurement from a
number of angles, describing the convoluted hoops that a person inflicts on their psyche, when they accept the devil's bargain.
Fracture
Suppose someone comes to America, as Einstein did, new to the scene. Day after day, event after event, evidence of racism mounts. Suppose this person, contra Einstein, chooses to stay silent. How do they process the guilt and eventually twist their conception of the world around in reverse, to see brazen
wickedness as good, despite the outpour of daily cruelty?
Such a ‘180’ requires a triage system for every bit of information that flows into the brain or is generated by it. Bit by bit (double entendre intended), a person binds themself in a harness of internal censors. Maybe these censors are accessible at first, but after a while they trend liminal and finally fade into the dimmest of shadows. A penumbra within a penumbra. What's going on becomes alien to the ego, that is, the center of conscious awareness.
Despite their newfound invisibility, the internal censors go about the task of managing data and suppressing pain. Critical logic/affective centers--conscience, empathy, intuition and reason-- demand that the hiding, the silence, the cowardice, be rectified.
And yet, unless the silent person finally speaks out, the pain continues to accumulate, reacting not only to the existence but the growing power of the censors. Such increased core tension prompts more counterattack: more shadowy tricks and traps, more warrens of deceit, more machinery of devolvement.
To function under so much pressure, the silent person eventually becomes an
actor all the time, weighed down by a duplicity that becomes more automatic every day, geared to compartmentalize
and suppress--until, as far as the surface level knows, all is just fine, whether inside the mind or out in the world.
Dendritic ruts
In terms more scientific, repetitive behavior digs ruts in the neural network, the learning mechanism of the brain.. The more you hide, the deeper the dendritic ruts. This leads not only to entrenchment but deformation: cognitive filters twisted into convolutions to register illogic as logic.
The person who has fled so thoroughly has successfully repressed a huge chunk of who they are. Containment of such magnitude inflicts a state of psychic fracture, an enforced degradation of a once- truthful and conscientious person into a pawn of ignorance.
This ugly process is not like flipping a switch. To alter yourself so titanically requires a
campaign of ceaseless and enormous self-attack. Think tectonic forces so mighty that they compress mud into rock, a surface
where nothing gets through. What was once semipermeable is now impenetrable. Aspects of who you are get locked down, until they are no longer able to trouble the surface with what is good, honest and true.
Joy Dampening
Along with fracture, the transition to Orwellian silence
deadens the ability to feel a special sort of joy. This occurs because those parts of the mind
responsible for core tension can also elicit positive feelings--if they
are not beaten down and chained away in a dungeon.
There's a je ne sais quoi that comes from knowing and feeling that you are challenging darkness by an appeal to the light; that you are speaking out for justice. It can be exhilarating, a 'let's get up and dance' zest, or simply manifest as vertical contentment in the ocean of the mind, from bathyal to surface.
This is not some ecstatic religious mysticism. It is simply a person who admits racism is going on and chooses to fight it by fortifying the light of truth in their core. It is that simple to be a hero--and that hard.
To fight racism--or oppression in general--is also to gain a major benefit: resistance to the dismal social norms that focus on conformist facade. Imagine a self-worth that has nothing to do with how much money you have, what kind of car you drive, or what you look like in comparison to standards of pulchritude set by the beauty industry.
When you stand up for what's true in a world of lies, you are less likely to get sucked into commercial ploys--the mind-massage of corporate marketers who, funded by billions of dollars, actively work to break the populace into demographic sectors, various types of neurotic consumers, who are targeted by subliminal advertisements. Everyday, all the time, instead of striving to make us healthier and more ethical, the economic system hawks a petty lifestyle of sugary glitz and petty vanities [5]. Cheer up, have a soda!
In clinical terms, the person who finds value in themself because they are doing the right thing has an internal locus of control. The person who has buried their conscience, and the shame of their conformity, has an external locus of control. Buying hedonistic or vanity products and trophies helps bury deep-seated pain behind a socially accepted, shallow materialism.
An exultant accomplishment
A harmonious mind is an exultant accomplishment. Such a virtuous state honors the foyers, parlors and mezzanines of passion and thought. To be so introspective, to be fond of the voices of justice and art that you find in yourself, is utterly brave and compassionate. You become, in a way, your own soulmate [6].
Again, this is not some magic, mystical epiphany. All you have to do is what Einstein did--speak out against racism, and follow that energy where it takes you--into a good relationship with your conscience.
Of course, on the other hand, positive self-identity isn't what silence is about. Silence actively works to prevent a person from ever reaching such self-acceptance, or feeling the lovely passions and joys associated with ethics. Obedience is the goal. And the sacrifice of potential to flourish or even to survive. Whether the silent person is called to fight in a war or not, one thing is always offered up on a platter: when you bow down and align yourself with the empire's cruelties and oppressions, you sacrifice your psyche--your very soul.
Power Loss: a bias
against knowledge
To ‘know thyself’ brings knowledge--and knowledge is power. However, if you deny yourself such joy and related wisdom, you corrupt your ability to choose wisely; and your soul suffers a corresponding power loss.
In much wisdom is much grief, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.
Anti-intellectualism serves Ignorance (short for ‘ignorance-based
government’ [7]). No dictator benefits from
a person who seeks an accord of reason, conscience, empathy and justice. Donald
Trump infamously said, “I love the poorly educated.”
Ignorance needs Big Lies.
It needs citizens who are driven by passions that they themselves do no understand or even see, let alone know how to manage in a competent way. There is an underlying dark reason, related to hegemony, that professional therapy--which launches a healing, honest journey of awakening--is looked down on and seen as a stigma in American society.
Fear and hate are not necessarily bad. Their expression is part of being human [8]. They bring a powerful fuel that can be channeled into art, into exercise, into purposeful, intense activity. But when a dictator cultivates them to manipulate the masses, the end is not liberation and flourishing for the target audience; it is, rather, mind control and a corresponding loss of freedom.
Those who swallow a tyrant's demagoguery thereby assimilate themselves into a mobilized
mass. They become a unit in an orchestrated march of swarm behavior, in which the conductor's baton is insidious propaganda
and sophistic rhetoric.
Disrespect and Hate
The triad of self-inflicted curses--fracture, joy-dampening,
and power loss--conjoin into a searing accusation, which is the following: the choice of silence is a choice to hate
yourself.
The three curses are the result of a person basically telling their own heart to shut up. They turn a blind eye to reason, and choke out the light. Not an accident or aberration, this clamp down requires pugilistic persistence until,
crushed by the incessancy, a fire within withers to a wan candleflame and then snuffs out.
The goal is not only to annihilate the truth, but to replace it with an impostor: the forms, speeches and specious rationales of Ignorance. The better half of the mind protests against such absurdity, and so the person who chooses silence begins to hate their own conscience--and, as well, the other aspects of who they are that bring tension.
The silencer gets away with it, 'because they can.' They suppress until they repress. Sheer intractable will, ensconced in the bully pulpit, overlords 'reality.'
Some people arrest their disintegration and rise up, as if breaking out of bondage. Others, however, sink deeper into the fog of numbness, meeting a miserable destiny on the road they take to avoid it.
As I elaborate below, the silence of complicitous gravitation is anything but serene. It is not a place of healthy peace.
"Once more the Sith shall rule the galaxy and we shall have peace"
-- Star Wars III, Revenge of the Sith
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G92z8l5vxpQ
To censor and condemn your better half is a violent, procrustean process. You chop away at your daily awareness, cutting out any sign or sound of truth, so that a naked emperor who commits evil appears angelic in regalia.
If ego is the conscious part of a person, one could say ego-makes-right, which segues into the next section.
Tyrannizing Yourself
Fracture. Joy dampening. Power loss. Self-hate. These add up to yet another frightful revelation: to silence yourself is an act of tyranny. It is analogous to how a dictator beats down opposition and hammers a dark, unforgiving message into the minds of worshipful masses. A silenced person fractures their own being in a similar way. They put up inner walls which mirror the physical walls of a xenophobic nation. The inner walls 'keep out invaders' as harshly as penal codes establish segregation and apartheid.
A silenced person mirrors the dictator they obey, becoming a dictator over their own conscience. The dictator kicks the silenced person into line, the silence person kicks themself in the heart.
In the final stages of TCG, a silenced person commits something like an act of self-murder. They kill parts of themself, or try their best.
As well, by going through the four stages of malevolent metamorphosis, they erect a façade of justice.
The situation calls to mind a quote from Macbeth:
Stars, hide your fires,
Let not light see my black and deep desires.
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.
Macbeth intends to murder the king and take his place, but he doesn’t want his intentions revealed. There is, however, a deeper symbolism. The separation of the eye and the hand could be seen to represent parts of mind. The eye, a surrogate for the conscience, sees that the hand has dark intent, but pretends all is good (‘nothing to see here’) and so “winks” in sly arrangement.
Neither of the two parts of the mind--the eye or the hand--are a person’s legitimate conscience. That honest voice, the ‘better angel,’ has been buried and damned. The fake conscience, the ‘eye,' participates in a pretense that everything is okay and good. Nothing evil to see here, even when the hand takes up the knife and stabs away.
The implication of this allegory: a silenced person is like Macbeth in that they plan to kill the 'king'--which is their own better half--and replace it with darkness.
Complicitous gravitation, however, goes further than Macbeth. Macbeth, speaking aside in the quote, is still aware of his evil behavior and intent. His mental trick--setting up a biased inner arbiter to condone his evil deed--is like stage three of TCG, in which compartmentalization is beginning to fracture the mind and create a surrogate for conscience.
In stage four of TCG, a person does not whisper to themself like Macbeth does in the play. At this stage, a person is incapable of vocal expression on their dark deeds. They no longer urge for the stars to 'hide their fires.' The stars have already been snuffed and the person has forgotten they were ever there.
At the final end, down in the abyss, the Macbethian has been replaced by the Orwellian.
An Inner Dracula
There is another aspect of silence that I want to touch on
briefly, a sort of internalized Dracula. The
fracturing of the mind, in addition to jailing conscience and reason,
demands new and prejudiced ways to process information. Some part of the subconscious has to
make this work--to keep the silenced person silent. For this laborious lie, the illusion of peace on the surface, the subconscious exacts its pound of cerebral flesh.
A lot of brain fuel is needed to run a shadow machinery of seamless falsity, fuel that could have gone to noble pursuits and hale flourishing. Instead of being ethical, the silenced person yields control to an eminence grise, an undermind warden that regulates what happens on the surface: what the ego thinks, feels and perceives.
The ego is on board with this, condoning and facilitating its own 'comfortably numb' state. At every stage, one through four, the silenced person goes along with the change.
In Sum
A person who chooses silence tends to become infected and deranged. Just 'going along' with the imperial system exerts a constant carrot-and-stick effect, which grows stronger and pushes for total assimilation of self into ignorant obeisance.
Our understanding of the human brain, circa early 21st century, is
young. But we have learned that our cerebral organ has various centers and, furthermore, that they communicate and coordinate. Our neural network has such plasticity that it
can, if called, create two or more personalities, ‘alters,’
as with multiple personality disorder. If neurobiological links between
parts of the brain are physically cut, such as the corpus callosum, the parts can act
independently. As well, dreams show that our brain will create worlds and people around the ‘I’ (our self-identity, what we see as
who we are). There is as well the straightforward yet brilliant ability of actors to appear to be someone they are not (and, sometimes, to 'get lost' in their role, even in dangerous ways).
It is not an unfounded leap, then, to assert that when we
choose silence, as defined in this essay, we initiate a gigantic disruptive process, one that is not only disordered but malevolent, with transmutable effects on who and what we are. A person silent in the face of evil commits a Macbethian murder, one they deny, which leads them down into an Orwellian fracture. The result is perhaps irreversible.
On the other hand, we humans can seek a non-silent and honest relationship with the mansions of our mind. We can channel 'dark emotions' in healthy ways for ethical purposes, which results in meaning and catharsis [9].
Telling the truth about evil does not usher in a monolithic existence of ‘woe and grief.’ The benefits that come from such candor includes self-knowledge, self-awareness, and self-care, which in turn can enliven joy and contentment. 'Looking in the mirror,' while painful as part of an heroic journey, results in a proportionate and priceless merriment, including a loving relationship with yourself and ultimately others as well.
Finally, I want to underscore that 'speaking out' does not require giving a speech at a podium. You can ‘speak out’ in many ways, and in so doing take the path of Good, which stands noble in polar contrast to the path that shuts down your own heart and buries you in Ignorance.
I’ll end with a koan-ish quote:
In art and dream, may you proceed with abandon. In life, may your proceed with balance and stealth -- Patti Smith
===========================
Footnotes
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project
2. Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, p.379
3. "Sustenance and Darkness," section III
https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2026/05/essay-sustenance-and-darkness.html
4. On Courage: how to be a dissident in an age of fear
https://www.acappellabooks.com/pages/books/393158/ami-fields-meyer-julia-angwin-ami-fields-meyer-julia-angwin/on-courage-how-to-be-a-dissident-in-an-age-of-fear
5. The 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/100-simple-secrets-of-happy-people-the-david-niven?variant=32116414185506
6. "Sustenance and Darkness," section III
7. "The Apotheosis Problem"
https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2025/09/essay-apotheosis-problem.html
8. "On Hate."
https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2025/10/essay-on-hate.html
9. "On Hate." See the footnote references to NYT articles on this.
================================================
8/27 ... working on cosmetic and clarifying edits, as well as expanding on some key points
8/25 more edits, especially last few sections
8/24 ... eds into the night ... tired ... probably 'readable' now, but it feels like a compositional eviathan, makes me dizzy to try and bring it all together .... needs edits.
8/21-23/26 ... Continuous, labored edits but it still needs work. I'll try to keep improving it. But I am old and my mind is hazy and tired.
Born in '63, made it to 63. Never would have thought. I am grateful to the forces of fate.
Do we dwell in self-delusion as a culture? Yes. Must we always? No. Ten thousand years in the future, or a million, the inhabits of Earth might look back at us in appalled shock at our self-centered myopia. After all, why should a mere 5000 years of 'civilized' history determine everything we think and believe about the capability of a collective consciousness that can evolve indefinitely through the long stretch of universal life?
Possessed
the haunt came over me,
what a frisson of emptiness.
shards of hope tinkling off.
there would be no aftermath.
no this or that.
loves, paths, myths, cares,
how my flesh took up space,
they all became a strand of time,
playable like a bent piano.
black and white,
spread and tender,
winding off
on a balustrade from Dr. Suess.
a clef so perilous and wise
i would never figure it out,
or escape.
==================================
This poem was published in Rufous City Review in 2011. Actually, according to my records, I published two poems titled "Possessed." But I can't find the other, and my poor record keeping doesn't say where it was published.
I am republishing more of my older poems on this blog, because I feel my future is uncertain, largely due to the death of US democracy. I'm an old man. Grief is painful. So is incarceration.
I hope my poems can be of worth, in some positive way, to others. They have provided me with catharsis and sublimation as I rage at the stupidity of human conformity and its horrific effects. They have helped me to develop both worldview and philosophy. In the depths of despair, I have the ongoing cry of the poems, their salvation.
Rogue
this aching planet,
a handful of healers cry
daily
over its burning, excavated ribs,
where no wild things come.
crowds scurry in packed cities
amid obvious evil,
but only a few raise their heads.
one brave women
watches a wall of smiles
freeze-dry her pleas,
swallow them into cold throats
stainless as upscale refrigerators.
some teenagers
rage against the blood money of empire,
yet the streets ignore, ignore, ignore,
or laugh and hurl scorn
or ignore, ignore, ignore …
a few college students
call those who bow down locust and ants,
call the middle class pharisees,
call the rich posh swine
who soil pearls.
a sliver of authors, journalists, casters, artists and
professors
make a calm case,
but no truth of any kind does anything
to steer the march of the scuttlers,
or impede the swarm.
================================
8/17... changed a word
8/16/26 ... eds off and on all day
It looks like this is a version of "Rogue Ants" (2023), which itself is a version of a draft I wrote long ago. Probably I wrote this poem and Rogue Ants off that draft. Most of the poems on this blog are re-works of old drafts, thousands of them. It connects me with the me who wrote the poems, a historic sense of continuity and meaning.
====
Jesus says, "In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you ... "
Such an ethic is demanding. Few of us live up to it. But the problem with adherents of the modern right is not just that they don’t live up to it; the issue is that they detest it. To treat the foreigner residing among us as well as we treat our native-born is derided as suicidal empathy. The Trump administration glorifies cruelty toward the immigrant, the stranger, the weak and the poor. It takes money from Medicaid to cut taxes for the rich. It threatens the destruction of whole civilizations. The modern right is built on the logic of tribute and dominance.
====
Ezra Klein, Christopher Nolan's Trojan Horse
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/opinion/christopher-nolan-odyssey-elon-musk.html
The poems don't like you and they especially don't like me. "What are you doing," they ask, "pretending to hear?"
Inventor Reflects
the higher you go, the less you breathe,
and the more beautiful the air.
a why beyond dirt and sweat,
peace mulled by floatation,
reclusive as Lao Tzu’s clouds.
nerve endings took eons
to sprout out of bacteria and perceive this.
more quickly we ruined our awe
by inventing flight.
we praise no god now,
only mechanical wings.
whether brilliant or damned,
only the angels we replaced could say.
too many tricks
have been played on our ideals.
too much thimblerigging
between judges and thieves
knotted in warrens
in the switchbacks of the metropolis.
we weren’t created
to see where we’ll go,
only to get there lost.
to suffer chains of puzzles
in doglegs of whys.
the gods need us
to unfurl like opium rings,
waft from their fickle rush.
if you invent something
it’s just the gods
using you as a mirror.
you’ll be dropped
and then no more insight,
just a brief ritual of shatters:
the giving of yourself
to the glow.
==========================================
Icarus theme...
This poem was originally published in Samizdat in
2013. I have started re-publishing poems
on this blog, as well as adding the new ones. A big part of it is the
end of the USA as I knew it, and my concern that I will be incarcerated. I am, too, in my 60s, and could die of
natural causes, exacerbated by grief and anxiety at the loss of the democracy
and freedom I knew all my life.
===
All I was asking people to do was to consider a new point of view: what if 5,000 years, the approximate age of human civilization, was not a lot of time? What if it were a mere blip in the consideration of where and how civilization can go, how it could evolve, given that the universe will continue to unfold for billions of years?
Just by changing their point of view in that way, even for a second, many people found new hope and purchase in their own identity. They became an expression in something vast, something that listened and watched their every behavior for clues on what could happen far into an utterly magical future.
What is clear is this: the mental aspect of the Universe is just starting to Bloom; and each person is a part of that, especially if they have the courage to be aware.
Ayestasya Ulswofe, Petal of the Passionance,
Blue Butterfly Green Spider Coven
===
This derives from the characters and philosophy presented in my unpublished novel, A Future of Angels
====
I remember, too, the stories of older women who marched on August 9, who reminded younger activists that many of them had taken to the streets over the objections of their husbands and fellow male comrades. They explained that at the time they did not have the language to explain how race, class and gender intersected; they just knew how sexism felt in their bodies.
By the time we were marching for a new set of rights, they had gifted us the language and analysis to describe how race, class and gender shaped women’s experiences. Their stories also showed us that sexism did not sit neatly outside the struggle against apartheid: women could stand alongside men in a liberation movement while still having to fight for equality with those same men.
“Women’s Day in South Africa turns 70 with equality still
out of reach”-- Sisonke Msimang
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/8/9/womens-day-in-south-africa-turns-70-with-equality-still-out-of-reach
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