Thursday, May 26, 2011
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Ezra Pound's Proposition - Robert Hass
ROBERT HASS
Ezra Pound's Proposition
Beauty is sexuality, and sexuality
is the fertility of the earth and the fertility
Of the earth is economics. Though he is no recommendation
For poets on the subject of finance,
I thought of him in the thick heat
Of the Bangkok night. Not more than fourteen, she saunters up to you
Outside the Shangri-la Hotel
And says, in plausible English,
"How about a party, big guy?"
Here is more or less how it works:
The World Bank arranges the credit and the dam
Floods three hundred villages, and the villagers find their way
To the city where their daughters melt into the teeming streets,
And the dam’s great turbine, beautifully tooled
In Lund or Dresden or Detroit, financed
by Lazard Freres in Paris or the Morgan Bank in New York,
enabled by judicious gifts from Bechtel of San Francisco
or Halliburton in Houston to the local political elite,
Spun by the force of rushing water,
Have become hives of shimmering silver
And, down river, they throw that bluish throb of light
Across her cheekbones and her lovely skin.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Point Omega - Don DeLillo
following is a passage from Don DeLillo's 'Point Omega'
--
We sat out late, scotch for us both, bottle on the deck and stars in clusters. Elster watched the sky, everything that came before, he said, there to see and map and think about.
I asked him whether he'd been to Iraq. He needed to consider the question. I didn't want him to believe that I knew the answer and was asking the question in order to challenge the breadth of his experience. I didn't know the answer.
He said, "I hate violence. I fear the thought of it, won't watch violent movies, turn away from news reports on television that show dead or wounded people. I had a fight, I was a kid, I went into spasms," he said. "Violence freezes my blood.
He told me he had all-source clearance, or access to every sensitive sliver of military intelligence. I knew this wasn't true. It was in his voice and face, a bitter wistfulness and I understood of course that he was telling me things, true or not, only because I was here, we both were here, in isolation, drinking. I was his confidant by default, the young man entrusted with the details of his makeshift reality.
"I talked to them one day about war. Iraq is a whisper, I told them. These nuclear flirtations we've been having with this or that government. Little whispers," he said. "I'm telling you, this will change. Something's coming. But isn't this what we want? Isn't this the burden of consciousness? We're all played out. Matter wants to loose its self-consciousness. We're the mind and heart that matter has become. Time to close it all down. This is what drives us now."
He refilled his glass and passed me the bottle. I was enjoying this.
"We want to be the dead matter we used to be. We're the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter. When I was a student I looked for radical ideas. Scientists, theologians, I read the work of mystics through the centuries. I was a hungry mind, a pure mind. I filled notebooks with my versions of world philosophy. Look at us today. We keep inventing folk tales of the end. Animal diseases spreading, transmittable cancers. What else?"
"The climate," I said.
"The climate."
"The asteroid," I said.
"The asteroid, the meteorite. What else?"
"Famine, worldwide."
"Famine," he said. "What else?"
"Give me a minute."
"Never mind. Because this isn't interesting me. I have no use for this. We need to think beyond this."
I didn't want him to stop. We sat drinking quietly and I tried to think of further workable prospects for the end of human life on earth.
"I was a student. I ate lunch and studied. I studied the work of Teilhard de Chardin," he said. "He went to China, an outlaw priest, China Mongolia, digging for bones. I ate lunch on open books. I didn't need a tray. The trays were stacked at the beginning of the line in the school cafeteria. He said that human thought is alive, it circulates. And the sphere of collective human thought, this is approaching the final term, the last flare. There was a North American camel. Where is it now?"
I nearly said, In Saudi Arabia. Instead I passed the bottle back to him.
"You told them things. Were these policy-board meetings/ Who was there?" I said. "Cabinet-level people? Military people?"
"Whoever was there. That's who was there."
I liked this answer. It said everything. The more I thought about it, the clearer everything seemed.
He said, "Matter. All the stages, subatomic level to atoms to inorganic molecules. We expand, we fly outward, that's the nature of life ever since the cell. The cell was a revolution. Think of it. Protozoa, plants, insects, what else?"
"I don't know."
"Vertebrates."
"Vertebrates," I said.
"And the eventual shapings. The slither, crawl, biped, crouch, the conscious being, the self-conscious being. Brute matter becomes analytical human thought. Our beautiful complexity of mind."
He paused and drank and paused again.
"What are we?"
"I don't know."
"We're a crowd, a swarm. We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough. The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field."
--
I talked to Elster about an essay he’d written a few years earlier, called “Renditions.” It appeared in a scholarly journal and soon began to stir criticism from the left. This may have been his intention but all I could find in those pages was an implied challenge to figure out what the point was.
The first sentence was, “A government is a criminal enterprise.”
The last sentence was, “In future years, of course, men and women, in cubicles, wearing headphones, will listen to secret tapes of the administration’s crimes while others look at salvaged videotapes of caged men being subjected to severe physical pain and finally others, still others, behind closed doors, will ask pointed questions of flesh-and-blood individuals.”
What lay between these sentences was a study of the word rendition, with references to Middle English, Old French, Vulgar Latin and other sources and origins. Early on, Elster cited one of the meanings of rendering—a coat of plaster applied to a masonry surface. Form this he asked the reader to consider a walled enclosure in an unnamed country and a method of questioning, using what he called enhanced interrogation techniques, that was meant to induce a surrender (one of the meanings of rendition—a giving up or giving back) in the person being interrogated.
I didn’t read the piece at the time, knew nothing about it. If I had known, before I knew Elster, what would I have thought? Word origins and covert prisons. Old French, Obsolete French and torture by proxy. The essay concentrated on the word itself, earliest known use, changes in form and meaning, zero-grade forms, reduplicated forms, suffixed forms. There were footnotes like nested snakes. But no specific mention of black sites, third-party states or international treaties and conventions.
He compared the evolution of a word to that of organic matter.
He pointed out that words were not necessary to one’s experience of the true life.
Toward the end of the commentary he wrote about select current meanings of the word rendition—interpretation, translation, performance. Within those walls, somewhere, in seclusion, a drama is being enacted, old as human memory, he wrote, actors naked, chained, blindfolded, other actors with props of intimidation, the renderers, nameless and masked, dressed in black, and what ensues, he wrote, is a revenge play that reflects the mass will and interprets the shadowy need of an entire nation, ours.
I stood in a corner of the deck, out of the sun, and asked him about the essay. He waved it away, the entire subject. I asked him about the first and last sentences. They seem out of place in the larger context, I said, where crime and guilt don’t get mentioned. The incongruity is pretty striking.
“Meant to be.”
Meant to be. Okay. Meant to unsettle critics of the administration, I said, not the decision makers. Flat-out ironic.
He sat in an old reclining chair he’d found in the shed behind the house, a beach chair out of it element, and he opened one eye in lazy disdain, measuring the fool who states the obvious.
Okay. But what he thought of the charge that he’d dry to find mystery and romance in a word that was being used as an instrument of state security, a word redesigned to be synthetic, concealing the shameful subject it embraced.
But I didn’t ask this question. Instead I went inside and poured two glasses of ice water and came back out and sat in the chair alongside him. I wondered if he was right, that the country needed this, we needed it in our desperation, our dwindling, needed something, anything, whatever we could get, rendition, yes, then invasion.
He held the cold glass to the side of his face and said he was not surprised by the negative response. The surprise came later, when he was contacted by a former university colleague and invited to a private meeting at a research institute just outside Washington. He sat in a paneled room with several others including the deputy director of a strategic assessment team that did not exist in any set of official records. He didn’t mention the man’s name, either because this was the kind of sensitive detail that must remain within the walls of a paneled room or because he knew that the name would mean nothing to me. They told Elster that they were seeking an individual of his interdisciplinary range, a man of reputation who might freshen the dialogue, broaden the viewpoint. His time in government would follow, interrupting a series of lectures he was giving in Zurich on what he called the dream of extinction, and after two years and part of another here he was, again, in the desert.
There were no mornings or afternoons. It was one seamless day, every day, until the sun began to arc and fade, mountains emerging from their silhouettes. This is when we sat and watched in silence.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Words from Maine South
Driving south from Maine,
the hills simmering with color
as the leaves close their arms upon
their bodies.
_____________another year, another war
added to those already ongoing.
There is a list somewhere, but most
have lost count by now.
_____Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq,
random points on the map.
Military occupation in 145 countries.
The heart cannot count that high.
We're like the leaves. Its autumn.
We're cold, and tired and ready
for winter.
'Give me a threshold. if aliens
attacked us and poisoned every
river so it was unsafe to drink from,
if they put dioxin, a lethal carcinogen,
into every mothers breast milk...'
Aspen, oak and ash race as by one
giving up the ghost. The sky
blessedly clear after a morning's
hard rain. the earth spins.
'Would you fight back?
If the aliens put acid in the oceans,
if they killed 98% of all the friends
and neighbors you know, would you fight
back. If there was a resistance, would you
join?
If you can't or won't give a threshold,
even to yourself, why not?'
Is there some hope of making
a world of sense?
The earth spins by inertia at
this point.
Car after car go south, go north,
all day and night on I-95. What the
hurry is towards no one
has explained, though we've been
told, like dreams, not to question
what we see.
'In 1998, a report was published in Time
Magazine, backed by three main ecological institutions.
They stated that the Earth has lost one-third
of all its natural resources in the last 30 years.
A catastrophe not seen since the time
of the dinosaurs, and it will take millions
of years for the Earth to recover. The main
story of the day, the month, and that year
was not that somewhat dire and prophetic warning
but rather the romantic feats
of linguist Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office.'
A man walks in now. The sound
he no longer listens to, machines,
have stopped humming in his brain.
He's left them instead for rain
and tubas. "There are some facts that
are, to be blunt, more useful
and more telling, and more beyond debate
than others. If all debate begins
by halving the concerns of your
fellow human being, how long
until we get an honest look at
how bad things really are?"
Out on the ocean, sunlight shines
like rain into Squeeker Cove and all
points south on that island. enough
light to loosen the last hard bits
left in the heart.
The world spins by inertia now.
If there were a song, your
beloved would take you down
to the river, as they bathed your head
and sang it to you. Your eyes
might then make a world of sense
from the broken glass we remake with each sunrise.
If the task of seeing is too hard,
do not close your eyes for a moment.
Do not look away, for your eyes have seen
what they have seen, the heart will
feel its own blind way to meaning.
Largest oil spill in US history
destroys massive colonies of pelicans
and cormorants and sea turtles
and bass and marlin. Wetlands
systems put under severe strain
with possible collapse immanent for
crab, shrimp and catfish populations.
Reports say the amount spewed into
The Gulf of Mexico roughly equivalent
to the total spilled every 7 years
for the last half century
into the Niger delta and its
rivers and tributaries and villages from
oil extracted, headed to the global north.
Is there some hope of making
a world of sense?
'From the year 1980 to the year 2003, the
most populous prisons on the planet grew
in size and density. Caged in small rooms, those
being held are most often poor and are disproportionately
black and red and brown and yellow, and, since
the beginning of the decade of the 1980s, the number
of inmates has increased 300%, while the population
at large has increased 30%. This increase was recently
sighted as possibly erasing all gains made by the Civil
Rights Movement, now 2 generations past.'
Outside the bus station, two people get on a bus.
they are old for the journey, and they feel it, but try not
to let the feeling show. Their children laugh with them
and kiss and hug them from the platform. When they
board the bus, the woman's cheeks are trying to hold back
tears of joy, tears of sorrow, as the confusion of being
the ones now leaving sets in. The children sit in a car,
as the rain falls, and flash the headlights as the parents
wave from the bus.
This is for you, whomever
listened for an extra moment
while the heart was tender.
Who tried hard to understand
even when it seemed pointless.
This is for you, when you found
the words for that moment
and no other, when you shaked
off the songs of sorrow and talked
of cooking cornbread instead.
This for you, when you held
a stranger in your arms
and didn't ask what it meant
or for how long, or under what terms.
This for you, may your heart go strong
and listening into the glimmering.
--
editorial note: some of the formatting got flattened in blogger. underscores are present here where tabs would normally be.
the hills simmering with color
as the leaves close their arms upon
their bodies.
_____________another year, another war
added to those already ongoing.
There is a list somewhere, but most
have lost count by now.
_____Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq,
random points on the map.
Military occupation in 145 countries.
The heart cannot count that high.
We're like the leaves. Its autumn.
We're cold, and tired and ready
for winter.
'Give me a threshold. if aliens
attacked us and poisoned every
river so it was unsafe to drink from,
if they put dioxin, a lethal carcinogen,
into every mothers breast milk...'
Aspen, oak and ash race as by one
giving up the ghost. The sky
blessedly clear after a morning's
hard rain. the earth spins.
'Would you fight back?
If the aliens put acid in the oceans,
if they killed 98% of all the friends
and neighbors you know, would you fight
back. If there was a resistance, would you
join?
If you can't or won't give a threshold,
even to yourself, why not?'
Is there some hope of making
a world of sense?
The earth spins by inertia at
this point.
Car after car go south, go north,
all day and night on I-95. What the
hurry is towards no one
has explained, though we've been
told, like dreams, not to question
what we see.
'In 1998, a report was published in Time
Magazine, backed by three main ecological institutions.
They stated that the Earth has lost one-third
of all its natural resources in the last 30 years.
A catastrophe not seen since the time
of the dinosaurs, and it will take millions
of years for the Earth to recover. The main
story of the day, the month, and that year
was not that somewhat dire and prophetic warning
but rather the romantic feats
of linguist Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office.'
A man walks in now. The sound
he no longer listens to, machines,
have stopped humming in his brain.
He's left them instead for rain
and tubas. "There are some facts that
are, to be blunt, more useful
and more telling, and more beyond debate
than others. If all debate begins
by halving the concerns of your
fellow human being, how long
until we get an honest look at
how bad things really are?"
Out on the ocean, sunlight shines
like rain into Squeeker Cove and all
points south on that island. enough
light to loosen the last hard bits
left in the heart.
The world spins by inertia now.
If there were a song, your
beloved would take you down
to the river, as they bathed your head
and sang it to you. Your eyes
might then make a world of sense
from the broken glass we remake with each sunrise.
If the task of seeing is too hard,
do not close your eyes for a moment.
Do not look away, for your eyes have seen
what they have seen, the heart will
feel its own blind way to meaning.
Largest oil spill in US history
destroys massive colonies of pelicans
and cormorants and sea turtles
and bass and marlin. Wetlands
systems put under severe strain
with possible collapse immanent for
crab, shrimp and catfish populations.
Reports say the amount spewed into
The Gulf of Mexico roughly equivalent
to the total spilled every 7 years
for the last half century
into the Niger delta and its
rivers and tributaries and villages from
oil extracted, headed to the global north.
Is there some hope of making
a world of sense?
'From the year 1980 to the year 2003, the
most populous prisons on the planet grew
in size and density. Caged in small rooms, those
being held are most often poor and are disproportionately
black and red and brown and yellow, and, since
the beginning of the decade of the 1980s, the number
of inmates has increased 300%, while the population
at large has increased 30%. This increase was recently
sighted as possibly erasing all gains made by the Civil
Rights Movement, now 2 generations past.'
Outside the bus station, two people get on a bus.
they are old for the journey, and they feel it, but try not
to let the feeling show. Their children laugh with them
and kiss and hug them from the platform. When they
board the bus, the woman's cheeks are trying to hold back
tears of joy, tears of sorrow, as the confusion of being
the ones now leaving sets in. The children sit in a car,
as the rain falls, and flash the headlights as the parents
wave from the bus.
This is for you, whomever
listened for an extra moment
while the heart was tender.
Who tried hard to understand
even when it seemed pointless.
This is for you, when you found
the words for that moment
and no other, when you shaked
off the songs of sorrow and talked
of cooking cornbread instead.
This for you, when you held
a stranger in your arms
and didn't ask what it meant
or for how long, or under what terms.
This for you, may your heart go strong
and listening into the glimmering.
--
editorial note: some of the formatting got flattened in blogger. underscores are present here where tabs would normally be.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
A Long Conversation - Adrienne Rich
A Long Conversation
–warm bloom of blood in the child's arterial tree
could you forget? do you
remember? not to
know you were cold? Altercations
from the porches color still high in your cheeks
the leap for the catch
the game getting wilder as the lights come on
catching your death it was said
something you couldn't see ahead, you couldn't see
a long conversation
between persistence and impatience
between the bench of forced confessions
hip from groin swiveled
apart
young tongues torn in the webbing
the order of the cities
founded on disorder
and intimate resistance
desire exposed and shameless
as the flags go by
Sometimes looking backward
into this future, straining
neck and eyes I'll meet your shadow
with its enormous eyes
you who will want to know
what this was all about
Maybe this is the beginning of madness
Maybe it's your conscience...
as you, straining neck and eyes
gaze forward into this past:
what did it mean to you?
to receive "full human rights"
or the blue aperture of hope?
Mrs. Bartender, will you tell us dear
who came in when the nights were
cold and drear and who sat where
well helmeted and who
was showing off his greasy hair
Mrs. Bartender tell me quickly
who spoke thickly or not at all
how you decided what you'd abide
what was proud and thus allowed
how you knew what to do
with all the city threw at you
Mrs. Bartender tell me true
we've been keeping an eye on you
and this could be a long conversation
we could have a long accommodation
On the oilcloth of a certain table, in the motel room of a certain time and country, a white plastic saucer of cheese and hard salami, winter radishes, cold cuts, a chunk of bread, a bottle of red wine, another of water proclaimed drinkable. Someone has brought pills for the infection that is ransacking this region. Someone else came to clean birds salvaged from the oil spill. Here we eat, drink from thick tumblers, try to pierce this thicket with mere words.
Like a little cell. Let's not aggrandize ourselves, we are not a little cell, but we are like a little cell.
Music arrives, searching for us. What hope or memory without it. Whatever we may think. After so many words.
A long conversation
pierced, jammed, scratched out:
bans, preventative detention, broken mouths
and on the scarred bench sequestered
a human creature with bloody wings
its private parts
reamed
A hundred and fifty years. In 1848, a pamphlet was published, one of many but the longest-read. One chapter in the long book of memories and expectations. A chapter described to us as evil; if not evil, out-of-date, naïve and mildewed. Even the book they say is out of print, lacking popular demand.
So we have to find out what in fact that manifesto said. Evil we can judge. Mildew doesn't worry us. We don't want to be more naïve or out-of-date than necessary. Some old books are probably more useful than others.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society...it creates a world after its own image.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class developed–a class of laborers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
–Can we say if or how we find this true in our lives today?
She stands before us as if we are a class, in school, but we are long out of school. Still, there's that way she has of holding the book in her hands, as if she knew it contained the answer to her question.
Someone: –Technology's changing the most ordinary forms of human contact–who can't see that, in their own life?
–But technology is nothing but a means.
–Someone, i say, makes a killing off war. You: –I've been telling you, that's the engine driving the free market. not information, militarization. Arsenals spawning wealth.
Another woman: –But surely then patriarchal nationalism is the key?
He comes in late, as usual he's been listening to sounds outside, the tide scarping the stones, the voices in nearby cottages, the way he used to listen at the beach, as a child. He doesn't speak like a teacher, more like a journalist come back from war to report to us. –It isn't nations anymore, look at the civil wars in all the cities. Is their a proletariat that can act effectively on this collusion, between the state and the armed and murderous splinter groups roaming at large? How could all these private arsenals exist without the export of increasingly sophisticated arms approved by the metropolitan bourgeoisie?
Now someone gets up and leaves, cloud-faced: -_I can't stand that kind of language. I still care about poetry.
All kinds of language fly into poetry, like it or not, or even if you're only
as we were trying
to keep an eye
on the weapons on the street
and under the street
Just here, our friend L.: bony, nerve-driven, closeted, working as a nurse when he can't get teaching jobs. Jew from a dynasty of converts, philosopher trained as an engineer, he can't fit in where his brilliant and privileged childhood pointed him. He too is losing patience: What is the use of studying philosophy, if all that it does is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic etc. and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends?
You see, I know that it's difficult to think well about "certainty," "probability," perception, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life and other people's lives. And thinking about these things is NOT THRILLING, but often downright nasty. And when it's nasty then it's MOST important.
His high-pitched voice with its, darker hoarser undertone.
At least he didn't walk out, he stayed, long fingers drumming.
So now your pale dark face thrown up
into pre-rain silver light your white shirt takes
on the hurl and flutter of gulls' wings
over your dark leggings their leathery legs
flash past your hurling arm one hand
snatching crusts from the bowl another hand holds close
You, barefoot on that narrow strand
with the iceplant edges and the long spindly pier
you just as the rain starts leaping into the bay
in your cloud of black, bronze and silvering hair
Later by the window on a fast-gathering winter evening
my eyes on the page then catch your face your breasts that light
....small tradespeople,
shopkeepers, retired tradesmen, handicraftsmen and peasants–
all these sink gradually into the proletariat
diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which
modern industry is carried on, and is swamped in the
competition with the large capitalists
skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production.
from all classes of the population...
pelicans and cormorants stumbling up the bay
the last gash of light abruptly bandaged in darkness
1799, Coleridge to Wordsworth: I wish
you would write a poem
addressed to those who, in consequence
of the complete failure of the French Revolution
have thrown up all hopes
of the amelioration of mankind
and are sinking into an almost epicurean
selfishness, disguising the same
under the soft titles of domestic attachment
and contempt for visionary philosophes
A generation later, revolutions scorching Europe:
the visionaries having survived despite
rumors of complete failure
the words have barely begun to match the desire
when the cold fog blows back in
organized and disordering
muffling words and faces
Your lashes, visionary! screening
in sudden rushes this
shocked, abraded crystal
I can imagine a sentence that might someday end with the word, love. Like the one written by that asthmatic young man, which begins, At the risk of appearing ridiculous...It would have to contain loses, resiliences, histories faced; it would have to contain a face–his yours hers mine–by which I could do well, embracing it like water in my hands, because by then we could be sure that "doing well" by one, or some, was immiserating nobody: A true sentence, then, for greeting the newborn. (–someplace else. In our hopes.)
But where ordinary collective affections carry a price (Swamped, or accounted worthless) I'm one of those driven seabirds stamping oil-distempered waters maimed "by natural causes."
The music pirated from somewhere else: Catalan songs reaching us after fifty years. Old nuevos conciones, after twenty years? In them, something about the sweetness of life, the memory of traditions of mercy, struggles for justice. A long throat, casting memory forward.
"it's the layers of history
we have to choose, along
with our own practice: what must be tried again
over and over and
what must not be repeated
and at what depths which layer
will meet others"
the words barely begin
to match the desire
and the mouth crammed with dollars doesn't testify
...the eye has become a human eye
when its object has become a human, social object
BRECHT BECOMES GERMAN ICON ANEW
FORGIVEN MARXIST IDEAS
...the Arts, you know–they're Jews, they're left-wing,
in other words, stay away...
So, Bo Kunstelaar, tell us true
how you still do what you do
your old theories forgiven
–the public understands
it was one thing then but now is now
and everyone says your lungs are bad
and your liver very sad
and the force of your imagination
has no present destination
though subversive has a certain charm
and art can really do no harm
but still they say you get up and go
every morning to the studio
is it still a thrill?
or an act of will?
Mr. Kunstelaar.
–After so long to be asked an opinion, most of that time opinion's unwelcome,
but opinion anyway was never art. Along the way I was dropped by some, others could say I had dropped them. I tried to make in my studio what I could not make outside it. To even have a studio, or a separate room to sleep in was a point in fact. In case you missed the point: I come from hard-carriers, lint-pickers, people who hauled cables through half-dug tunnels. Their bodies created the possibility of my existence. I come from the kind of family where loss means not just grief but utter ruin–Adults and children forced into prostitution, orphanages, juvenile prisons, emigration–never to meet again. I wanted to show those lives designated insignificant as beauty, terror. They were significant to me and what they had endured terrified me. I knew such a life could have been my own, I also knew they had saved me from it.
–I tried to show all this, and as well to make an art as impersonal as it demanded.
–I have no theories. I don't know what I am being forgiven. I am my art.
I make it from my body and the bodies that produced mine. I am still trying to find the pictorial language for this anger and fear rotating on an axle of love. If I get up and go to the studio–it's there I find the company I need to go on working.
"This is for you
this little song
without much style
because your smile
fell like a red leaf
through my tears
in those fogbound years
when without ado
you gave me a bundle of fuel to burn
when my body was utterly cold
This is for you
who would not applaud
when with a kick to the breast or groin
they dragged us into the van
when flushed faces cheered
at our disgrace
or looked away this is
for you who stayed
to see us through
delivered our bail and disappeared
This little song
without much style
may it find you
somewhere well."
In the dark windowglass
a blurred face
–is it still mine?
Who out there hoped to change me–
what out there has tried?
What sways and presses against the pane
what can't I see beyond or through–
charred, crumpled, ever-changing human language
is that still you?
1997-98
--
a few comments on the poem, which I feel are personal and unnecessary, this poem reached me at a point when more than anything I needed to be gently shaken out of some of the broader confusions of society I offer it in the same vein, in the hopes that you, who are reading this, find resonances within it and yourself.
--
a few comments on the poem, which I feel are personal and unnecessary, this poem reached me at a point when more than anything I needed to be gently shaken out of some of the broader confusions of society I offer it in the same vein, in the hopes that you, who are reading this, find resonances within it and yourself.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Corpses and Corpses
--I wrote the following in New Orleans, surrounded by what I saw, and still see, as a general apathy of 'the general public' towards the destruction of people, peoples and the environment. The numbness and motivation towards all three I feel are entwined and inseparable. The opening quote is meant not as a means of identifying with the deity, but rather to acknowledge that if there are limits that exist within the human consciousness and ability to discern what would truly be healthy & sustainable, for an individual, for a culture or for a species, that this limit could, in this instance, very well be termed God.
Corpses and Corpses
"And if despite this you do not heed Me and you come in encounter
against Me, I will come against you in wrathful encounter and I on My
part will chastise you sevenfold for your offenses. And you shall eat
the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters you shall eat.
And I will destroy your cult-places and cut off your incense stands,
and I will put your corpses on top of the corpses of your fetishes and
I will loathe you."
~Leviticus 26:26
How else do clocks keep time these days?
A shade of obsidian dropped over black silk,
with a car and a half for every soul here
the stratosphere is asking, "Why do you hate me?"
The icebergs are asking, "What wrong did we do?"
And we, the full time citizenry,
hop planes to discover the new inside us,
and back-up files to a second drive.
The math has been worked out
and grass will outlive us.
Meanwhile the dams provide the water to keep
the lights in casinos running and the rice villagers
underwater.
Our breath clogged from junk
still has a little room to breathe.
Six of the morning skies will still bless us,
after that, the seventh will loathe us.
A sky not sky emptying its contempt on us.
A desert growing larger each afternoon.
A swamp that shone like four beads of sweat
on Brahma's brow, dumping its millennial silt into the sea.
Are not half the world's things enough?
The children playing in the sand
are playing with guns and people's heads.
The elders spoon another tin
of cat food to get them to their next fix.
The derelict who speaks to himself,
had no choice
and has none now.
The smart sit unsurprised
and wrap themselves in kimonos and red wine.
We only see our reflection
as it bounces back towards us,
imagination travels sideways
wearing a green coat
only the quiet can hear.
To get the texture of it, hold soil in your hand
as you move a plant to a larger pot.
Rinse basmati with your fingers
and watch the starch cloud
swirl down the sink.
To gaze into the cells of prisons
is to be reminded of the darkness of humans,
like a tour of Auschwitz that never ends
and never ends.
A sheet over a detainee's head,
is an inescapable ten pound halo
screwed into each of our skulls.
We never ask if we can lessen
the load of our fellow travelers.
Only rarely
our hands outward to catch a fellow citizen.
One day I went with Atilio to the scrap yard
to add piles to the pile for beer.
What I saw there shook something loose.
A hundred foot high pile of ready-to-be-shredded
human dreams. Machines doing the slaving,
and four people saying we weren't adding junk
to the junk correctly. This is not metaphor.
This is watching money chew through bone.
This is watching machines drink pints of blood.
The bit that was left over from that scrap run,
enough to pan into six flakes for booze,
knowing the heavens over our head ready
and the storm just off the coast.
A little smile, a little music, while the fire
eats human limbs two handed.
An embrace we hold against the rising waters.
Corpses and Corpses
"And if despite this you do not heed Me and you come in encounter
against Me, I will come against you in wrathful encounter and I on My
part will chastise you sevenfold for your offenses. And you shall eat
the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters you shall eat.
And I will destroy your cult-places and cut off your incense stands,
and I will put your corpses on top of the corpses of your fetishes and
I will loathe you."
~Leviticus 26:26
How else do clocks keep time these days?
A shade of obsidian dropped over black silk,
with a car and a half for every soul here
the stratosphere is asking, "Why do you hate me?"
The icebergs are asking, "What wrong did we do?"
And we, the full time citizenry,
hop planes to discover the new inside us,
and back-up files to a second drive.
The math has been worked out
and grass will outlive us.
Meanwhile the dams provide the water to keep
the lights in casinos running and the rice villagers
underwater.
Our breath clogged from junk
still has a little room to breathe.
Six of the morning skies will still bless us,
after that, the seventh will loathe us.
A sky not sky emptying its contempt on us.
A desert growing larger each afternoon.
A swamp that shone like four beads of sweat
on Brahma's brow, dumping its millennial silt into the sea.
Are not half the world's things enough?
The children playing in the sand
are playing with guns and people's heads.
The elders spoon another tin
of cat food to get them to their next fix.
The derelict who speaks to himself,
had no choice
and has none now.
The smart sit unsurprised
and wrap themselves in kimonos and red wine.
We only see our reflection
as it bounces back towards us,
imagination travels sideways
wearing a green coat
only the quiet can hear.
To get the texture of it, hold soil in your hand
as you move a plant to a larger pot.
Rinse basmati with your fingers
and watch the starch cloud
swirl down the sink.
To gaze into the cells of prisons
is to be reminded of the darkness of humans,
like a tour of Auschwitz that never ends
and never ends.
A sheet over a detainee's head,
is an inescapable ten pound halo
screwed into each of our skulls.
We never ask if we can lessen
the load of our fellow travelers.
Only rarely
our hands outward to catch a fellow citizen.
One day I went with Atilio to the scrap yard
to add piles to the pile for beer.
What I saw there shook something loose.
A hundred foot high pile of ready-to-be-shredded
human dreams. Machines doing the slaving,
and four people saying we weren't adding junk
to the junk correctly. This is not metaphor.
This is watching money chew through bone.
This is watching machines drink pints of blood.
The bit that was left over from that scrap run,
enough to pan into six flakes for booze,
knowing the heavens over our head ready
and the storm just off the coast.
A little smile, a little music, while the fire
eats human limbs two handed.
An embrace we hold against the rising waters.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Derrick Jensen - from The Culture of Make Believe (not for the faint of heart)
It really isn't possible to talk about hate without talking about children as objects of hatred. I know that age isn't a protected class under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, but bear with me.
Each year an estimated 20,000 Mexican children disappear, many for use as mules, to transport drugs inside their bodies, others taken for the harvest of their organs, to be transplanted into children in the United States. This is according to a study performed by the Institute for Law Research at the Autonomous National University of Mexico and presented at a conference on "International Traffic in Children."
Worldwide, entire economies have been founded specifically on the sexual trade in children. One hundred to eight hundred thousand Thai girls and boys work as prostitutes (A brochure distributed in England advertising a Thai resort reads, "If you can suck it, use it, eat it, feel it, taste it, abuse it or see it, then it's available in this resort that truly never sleeps"). Nearly all of them are enslaved or indentured. A good portion have received death sentences from HIV. There are 1.5 to 2 million child prostitutes in India (those in Bombay, for example, are often held in cages; fifty cents buys half an hour of of sex with a twelve-year-old.) Five hundred thousand child prostitutes work in Brazil (a child of thirty-five pounds is considered a prime size in many mining towns). There are 200,000 child prostitutes in or from Nepal (most of these girls are kidnapped, sold for between forty and a thousand dollars, "broken in" through a process of rapes and beatings, and then rented out up to thirty-five times a night for one to two dollars per man). Between 100,000 and 300,000 children work the sex trade in the United States (one study of U.S. survivors of prostitution found that 78 percent were victims of rape by pimps and buyers an average of forty-nine times per year; 84 percent were the victims of aggravated assault; 49 percent had been kidnapped and transported across state lines; 53 percent were victims of sexual abuse and torture; and 27 percent had been mutilated). On average, a child prostitute serves more than 2,000 men per year. At least a million new girls per year are forced into prostitution.
Kids are not, of course, injured only through sexual exploitation. A half-million children die every year from starvation or other direct results of so-called debt payment from Third World countries--from the colonies--to those countries which lend them money while holding their resources and infrastructures as collateral--colonialism in the twenty-first century--and eleven million children die annually from easily treatable diseases. This latter has been called by the World Health Organization director-general 'a silent genocide.'
This is not counting the children who are simply beaten. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, in 1993, 614,000 American children were physically abused, 300,000 were sexually abused, 532,000 were emotionally abused, 507,000 were physically neglected, and 585,000 were emotionally neglected. 565,000 of these children were killed or seriously injured. That's just in the United States.
So here's the question: Do all these numbers--or, more precisely, the reality behind these numbers--imply that we hate children? Perhaps the answer would be more evident if we simply invert the question: "Do we value children?"
The answer, of course, is yes. One to two dollars per fuck, unless we happen to be in the Philippines, in which case it will cost us six dollars to have sex with a six-year-old.
So let me put the question another way: Was slavery in the United States based on hatred of the Africans, or was it based on economics? Is hate even the right word?
The problem we have in answering (or even asking) these questions comes from the fact that hatred, felt long enough and deeply enough, no longer feels like hatred. It feels like economics, or religion, or tradition, or simply the way things are. Rape is not a hate crime because our hatred of women is transparent. Child prostitution is not a hate crime for the same reason that beating a child is not a hate crime, because our hatred of children is transparent. The economic murder of children (or creating the economic conditions for their slavery as prostitutes) is not a hate crime because we've held this hatred long enough to enshrine it into our macroeconomic policies.
If we did not hate children, we would not cause or even allow them to be destroyed by any of these means. And if we do not love even our children, what, precisely, can we truly say we love?
Each year an estimated 20,000 Mexican children disappear, many for use as mules, to transport drugs inside their bodies, others taken for the harvest of their organs, to be transplanted into children in the United States. This is according to a study performed by the Institute for Law Research at the Autonomous National University of Mexico and presented at a conference on "International Traffic in Children."
Worldwide, entire economies have been founded specifically on the sexual trade in children. One hundred to eight hundred thousand Thai girls and boys work as prostitutes (A brochure distributed in England advertising a Thai resort reads, "If you can suck it, use it, eat it, feel it, taste it, abuse it or see it, then it's available in this resort that truly never sleeps"). Nearly all of them are enslaved or indentured. A good portion have received death sentences from HIV. There are 1.5 to 2 million child prostitutes in India (those in Bombay, for example, are often held in cages; fifty cents buys half an hour of of sex with a twelve-year-old.) Five hundred thousand child prostitutes work in Brazil (a child of thirty-five pounds is considered a prime size in many mining towns). There are 200,000 child prostitutes in or from Nepal (most of these girls are kidnapped, sold for between forty and a thousand dollars, "broken in" through a process of rapes and beatings, and then rented out up to thirty-five times a night for one to two dollars per man). Between 100,000 and 300,000 children work the sex trade in the United States (one study of U.S. survivors of prostitution found that 78 percent were victims of rape by pimps and buyers an average of forty-nine times per year; 84 percent were the victims of aggravated assault; 49 percent had been kidnapped and transported across state lines; 53 percent were victims of sexual abuse and torture; and 27 percent had been mutilated). On average, a child prostitute serves more than 2,000 men per year. At least a million new girls per year are forced into prostitution.
Kids are not, of course, injured only through sexual exploitation. A half-million children die every year from starvation or other direct results of so-called debt payment from Third World countries--from the colonies--to those countries which lend them money while holding their resources and infrastructures as collateral--colonialism in the twenty-first century--and eleven million children die annually from easily treatable diseases. This latter has been called by the World Health Organization director-general 'a silent genocide.'
This is not counting the children who are simply beaten. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, in 1993, 614,000 American children were physically abused, 300,000 were sexually abused, 532,000 were emotionally abused, 507,000 were physically neglected, and 585,000 were emotionally neglected. 565,000 of these children were killed or seriously injured. That's just in the United States.
So here's the question: Do all these numbers--or, more precisely, the reality behind these numbers--imply that we hate children? Perhaps the answer would be more evident if we simply invert the question: "Do we value children?"
The answer, of course, is yes. One to two dollars per fuck, unless we happen to be in the Philippines, in which case it will cost us six dollars to have sex with a six-year-old.
So let me put the question another way: Was slavery in the United States based on hatred of the Africans, or was it based on economics? Is hate even the right word?
The problem we have in answering (or even asking) these questions comes from the fact that hatred, felt long enough and deeply enough, no longer feels like hatred. It feels like economics, or religion, or tradition, or simply the way things are. Rape is not a hate crime because our hatred of women is transparent. Child prostitution is not a hate crime for the same reason that beating a child is not a hate crime, because our hatred of children is transparent. The economic murder of children (or creating the economic conditions for their slavery as prostitutes) is not a hate crime because we've held this hatred long enough to enshrine it into our macroeconomic policies.
If we did not hate children, we would not cause or even allow them to be destroyed by any of these means. And if we do not love even our children, what, precisely, can we truly say we love?
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