AS GAUTAMA TENDS THE GARDEN

[A POST-DHARMA/BUM POEM[1]]

Thoughtless giving

Wordless conceiving

A fresh dressed ancient spins America, wandering

Sensing the Sufi

true sleep

Calling out

Vast wise spirit building,

Embellishing Earth with industriousness,

I’m something that’s nothing to you!

*

Inhabiting foothill huts

a friend says “see Yabyum”

floor bound cross-

legged pillow sitting

face to face

round each neck

swaying sighs

Nothing

Sacred rep

aerational Republicans

fuck four priests chanting

Yee-haa! Lightening Strikes the Pink Hole!

**

and tediously developed ideals

evolving gray corporate censorship

inform me my karma was

born to be where freedom’s

a belief

no one believes

and there ain’t no kicks

boys

something’s always made of Nothing

BLAH!

***

Illusions of Nothing manifest something

Nothing illusions something manifest of

Something manifests nothing of illusions

Jesus Christ

****

Stillness

Ululating with eyes closed, seeing power

*****

The campus eccentric imagines himself the only actual man there at the middle class programming institute for obscurity and homogeny, whose adherents find a moving expression of success in rows of white and pastel-colored homes with chemical lawns and cyber-realities everyone’s bathing in and feeling the same about:

*******

All this while Dharma Bums stalk their wilder-ness listening

finding ecstasy in the stars

searching for the Dark Secret

The origin of stagnant invisible shit civilization—realizing everyone has white ceramic toilets to take big dirty craps in like bears on the mountains

But it’s all washed away

and nobody says shit

or realizes they come from it and sea scum

They spend days washing their hands with soap they’d rather eat

********

And though I love America

I hate hunters

they slaughter alert beings

And for each victim, they’ll be reborn a thousand times

To re-suffer the ensuing horrors of being

lectured to by me, trapped

in rustic mountain taverns

cozy to parlor-puff scribes

but wretched to the Psalmists of pond and peak

Yet charming still to Armenian grocers

who sing Choke, Choke, you do not see how great Ah-mary-kah eez

And those well-meaning tongue-tied Baptists on a church binge forgetting to insert the contraception

They must be assholes

********

When they heard I didn’t kill animals

but only clumb mountains

swam in ponds

they dismissed me

a hopeless eccentric

a void perimeter stuffed with illusion

Where the milk is fine

but more cows feed

than people

Whenever a sparrow might hop along some veranda with wet feet

**********

And the secret of ascent is bop

vast hop empty-

skulls dancing

rock to stone not

dithering, awake

the mountain

***********

Praying all thoughtful things will quit fussing and jobbing and feel It

Serenity, madness, ecstasy

Beginning and ending

simultaneously

praying for all to be

just as bare

likewise loved, also

a growing flower and

see the eyes of All and

behind It composure and

exactitude

************

But we’re all sunk in shit, mules vexed by whatever system we choose to plow

*************

But we can’t fall off a mountain

**************

What’s it all mean

The plum is ripe

The Buddha’s in the Garden

***************

Cheer up slaves

horrify your despots

at home and abroad

Be Zen lunatic bards bopping old desert paths

****************

The whole thing’s a world adrift

A dharma bum refusing to consume

or work for his rights

Refrigerators, microwaves, I-pads, hair oils, deodorant and junk

Imprisoned in the privilege system

Produce, consume, work

Produce, consume, work

Automatically renewing everything every year

I call for a rucksack evolution

Billions of visions wandering Earth

heading for the mountains

rivers and seas to

see, pray, meditate

making children laugh

old men glad

young girls happy

old girls happier

Everything seams a Zen lunatic poem writing Its mind without reason

Being kind

and by startling acts of benign oddness

keep infecting everyone with dreams of undying autonomy

Go fucking viral

As Tathagata plays in the Garden

*****************

And there’s wisdom in Zen lunacy

Just walk down any suburban street and pass house after house after house on both sides with the lamp lights shining golden, and inside the little blue squares transmitting electronic clouds of information among minds

Every family glued to the spume of electromagnetic dust

no one talking

silence in the yards

Then dogs barking because you pass by on foot not wheels

The symbol being the symbol itself

seeming

Gautama tending the Garden

******************

The billions and billions of the One Eye

believe they’re not hurting anyone

hiding in there

the apparent I within that Eye

And I see myself in my world prowling suburbia

and Main Street

passing blue electronic-mirrored windows denoting false matrices

Alone, my thoughts seem the only thoughts not glued to the Master Switch

*******************

“Who played this cruel joke

on bloke after bloke,

packing like a rat,

across the desert flat?”

I’m telling you, a big police revolution’s coming

“Was it God got mad,

like the Indian cad,

who was only a giver,

crooked like the river?”

No! There’s going to be a rucksack evolution

“Gave you a garden,

let it all harden,

then comes the flood,

and the loss of your blood?”

Everything is possible

“Pray tell us good buddy,

and don’t make it muddy,

who played this trick

on Harry and Dick,

and why is so mean,

this eternal scene

just what’s the point,

of this whole joint?”

I am empty space—I am all things

I am

********************

One man practicing kindness in his wilder-ness seems worth every Temple his world pulls

*********************

I am emptiness

I see starshine in a puddle

I spit in the puddle

obliterating the star

and ask

“Is the star real?”

And scream safe from earshot of the Lunatic Bus

“I won’t come down again!

I’m a blank being ecstasized in the Infinite True Body!”

then I see the star’s re-appeared in the puddle

The Buddha’s in the Garden

***********************

Among the Dead, in the rich silent hush of the Pure Awakened Land

I realize I’m a bliss heir

and that the final sin, the worst, is righteousness

because there is only Silence, then

a silence so intense you can hear the blood roar in your ears

and louder than that the Unexplained Whine of Carbon-based Wisdom

The unsolved cry of Silence Itself

Reminding you of something you’ve long forgotten

the certain, definite Truth

The roaring silence of the Diamond

***********************

Deliver flower sermons to disappointed disciples

try taming the bull of mind essence

abandon It for Nothing

party with the neighborhood butcher

and next door car salesman

the murderers of dreamy Western philosophy

Then re-member your self

*************************

The Awakened who, leading

ants from her pantry with honey to her garden

speaking to them on hands and knees about new veins of Joy

Feed others

compassion’s the guide star

fighting is ugly

Beg! Be humble!

**************************

The world appears despite my ignorance

despite God, who emanates my ignorance

as the image itself, making

why sew, seamingly

significant

As Tathagata plays in the Garden

**************************

Dharma bums had springtime in their hearts when the blooms were girdling

and the birds dropped turds on surprised cats who wished to eat them

***************************

And the closer we got to real matter

rock, fire, wood and smoke

the more spiritual the world became

****************************

And it all ended in tears because those who were good remained in heaven

having been there from the beginning

A cosmic remnant not wishing for a personal god in all the impersonal matter

‘Look at the Void!

It seams ever stellar!’

***************************

The innumerable worlds of the Milky Way—just words

****************************

Are we all beat spirits

refusing to believe

nothing is nothing

that we’re born to lose

All

Our loved ones

and dear friends

One-by-One

And finally our Self

Only to see Death proved

O sad, kind flesh,

there is no answer,

only the limitations of Eternity

As Gautama tends the Garden

---

[1] A poetic response to The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. All quotes are from the novel.

SATURATED TROMBONE

Word like wound

            wound the metaphor

a strange attraction

            to ward the literal

Feeling the membrane sweat

from the inside

vibrating

Like this

            simile

of some black hole

            scattering ashes

As if blowing a saturated trombone

Alert the Offspring, Father’s

            mutating Mother’s recursive symmetries

an Arabesque that

Weaves patterns of

love

feeding

THE GOD OF THE MARTIANS

[re: Richard Brautigan]

Disdainful of hippies, you seemed Kafka’s queer cousin.

Knowing too much about your demons, you made peace with them, sharing the same world.

Feeling your romantic self the only self, shooting at the moon,

drunk on George Dickel, down a sloppy back road, you once threw a stone through a cop shop window, hoping to end up housed and fed, but got fined instead. 

It helped drive you mad, a little like that O. Henry story. Except for the big sky. You were in Montana.

Ferlinghetti, that old fuck, called you a child, like Emerson bemoaned Thoreau. You were more in tune with trout than Larry, who never got merry without revolution. A real man, he.

You dealt with them as long as you could, and then one day you just quit, feeling it odd how the plain things in life live on while life itself gets trickier.

After talking with Marcia, you felt like clay excavated from your garden.

As you looked out over the Pacific Ocean in your favorite chair, you decided to take a little target practice, using all your bullets but one to put a hole in everything she ever touched. 

The last was saved for your brain. She’d touched that, too. Everything touched it. Nothing would leave it alone. Not even the clouds.

When Robert found you a month later on the living room floor, the smell nearly drove him away. He wrenched the .44 Magnum from your stiff hand and found the brief note you left. It was under your right arm, spattered in brains and blood. 

Funny to the very end, it said: “Messy isn’t it?”

And the ocean breeze whistled through the holes in your house like laughter.

CHANT DIVINE SYRUP

Of humankind’s first a-spedience
and the flavored frowerin fop,
whose upliftin tenses invited disjoy
of Edenic fruits intraduh whorl,
until dys creetcha—
embittud—
displaced his in hern,
loosiniz perfik place: 

Chant divine syrup,
whose first taut elected dysgerm,
emergent from duh chemicals in ma mond—
a pathology:

Or,
if Turtle Island delights ya more
with its Niagara waters roar
quickened by this augur of po-rin spirit;
I here summon ye help in creatin disimpudent din

And you,
sacred resolve,
idealizin a candid wit,
indicatin Its self—
discernin; we at first
were here, potent wings out
spreadin squat gloomin astride

A pregnant chasm, in love.

What’s faint in me lot up,
What-air’s small heave high and protract;
that t’the size a this pozin task
I might assert me abidin trust,
exposin Nature’s totem to duh people
and fuck them.

PAUCITY

Few will sit here.
Most need liaisons 

To feel the precision and
the plethora

intensifying their diversity—
Some soap deodorizing clarity—

Cleansing every part of Its secret speech,
describing your lathering dance that

rinses away—
Revealing nothing.

TIME YOU WAS WEANED A THAT GUN-TOTIN, TOOTH-‘N’-CLAW TAMIN, LUSTY, SCREAMIN’ MEDDLIN NOVUS BALL-BUSTIN’ ORDO SECLORUM CALLED UNCLE SAM SLICK

A review of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, The Viking Press, New York, 1977

Richard Milhaus Nixon, molested by his father as a boy, having become perverse himself throughout his thought and actions, finds his career about to launch once he’s been brutally raped, anally, by a meme he identifies as Uncle Sam.

This sexual devastation seems a rite all future POTUSes must undergo at some point, a rite that instills in them the necessary presidential timber, according to Nixon, the predominant voice and viewpoint in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning.[i]

The fact is, though it was published 35 years ago, this novel may be just as relevant in this Presidential election year as it was when it was published. Americans still [as always, apparently] demand a masculine Christian capable of killing for God & Country. And they’ve been lucky lately, getting macho-man killers in spades: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, perhaps the Clintons, and, now definitely Obama.

According to Nixon about halfway through the novel, which breathlessly covers the last three days of the Rosenbergs’ lives before they’re to be publicly executed in the electric chair in Times Square before a worldwide television audience, the reason Eisenhower was so great and had become President was that “he knew how to kill.” Nixon wondered if he could do the same. [258]

It seems that Nixon’s primary inner conflict about the Rosenbergs, according to the way Coover speaks him, is between pity and heroism and thoroughly delusional. Nixon comes across as a communist and fascist appeaser, in other words enthralled by the authoritarian position, where such folks as “premature anti-fascist[s]” thwart the patriotic war against the Phantom where “justice is entertainment.” [121]

The kind of person Nixon is shows itself in the dimensions of his existential world: “I felt caught up in some endless quest, a martyr to duty, but duty to what? My self perhaps, its creation and improvement, the need to show I had what it takes, that I deserved no matter what I got…” [298]

Are there any delusional would-be or actual killers among the current and former 2012 candidates? They seem to be aspiring killers for sure [Ron Paul excepted], if they don’t already have a few bodies strewn here and there throughout their past. We know even Obama killed Osama and other bad people [a few of them American citizens. At least the Rosenbergs had a “trial”].  Coover’s Nixon is definitely in this mode, with a strong possibility, which he hints at himself, of a body already somewhere in his past, buried like its repressed memory. He’s a confessed rapist and sexual mess. But he can’t help but wonder whether or not a Quaker, raised by Grandma Milhaus, could actually kill someone, especially decent, possibly even innocent people like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: “Could I kill, I wondered? If it came to that, could I kill? Not something easy like the Rosenbergs, but this crowd in here…if they got in my way…? Why not? Killing was as meaningless as anything else.” [345][ii]

In the act of the Rosenbergs’ heinous public slaughter, Nixon realizes a few things that, if enough regular folks understood, there would be no America, no USSR, no troubles. Consider Coover’s tense choices. It feels a bit odd that Nixon’s speaking the past tense, and yet the action feels as if it were presently happening. Also, Nixon rarely thinks at all about the future, and when he does it’s a distant future that will build monuments to him once he’s gone. I think this suggests that Coover’s Nixon has lost touch with the present tense—an American symptom resulting from being trapped inside a Disney/Bernays’ spectacle.[iii] In this sense, especially toward the end at the bottom of page 473, it’s implied that the reader, who is by extension/in-tension the people, could be insane [unless part of some unspoken intelligence that knows better]. It’s the situation that’s insane. And Nixon personifies the peoples’ systemic situation…the mode in which we’re all mere actors on a stage.

Throughout the novel one might read echoes of Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord’s spectacle, the psychogeography of Deleuze and Guattari, the self-reflexivity and metafictive qualities of Coover’s pomo contemporaries in the way Nixon’s poetic neurosis/delusion becomes the textual pathology that seams the American citizen’s dis-ease together forming society’s schizoid insanity.

Consider Chapter 18, “The National Poet Laureate[iv] Meditates on the Art of Revelation,” in which Nixon says: “Poetry is the art of subordinating facts to the imagination…fakery in allegiance to the truth…objectivity is Gnostic…as an ideal perhaps even immoral, that only through the frankly biased and distorting lens of art is any real grasp of the facts—not to mention Ultimate Truth—even remotely possible.” [320]

From here on the narrator grows increasingly schizoid until it becomes quite clear that The Burning Game is an Avant-Pop presentation of the schizoid American psyche, that the USA has evolved into a pop culture spectacle and something that’s perhaps as dangerous, if not more dangerous in light of its nuclear weapons, thinning greatly any margin of error, than Germany in the 1930s. The social Darwinism of “manifest destiny” ranks right up there with Hitler’s Aryan master race when it comes to its mythomaniacal hucksterism. Each carries the “white man’s burden” making a pathetic, tragic mess of things.

Nixon’s deepest insight: “…this is not happening to me alone, I thought desperately, or tried to think, as [Uncle Sam] pounded deeper and deeper, destroying everything, even my senses, my consciousness—but to the nation as well!” [532]

The people attain their exceptional American timber in the way they’re screwed. What goes around comes around. The people will, at some point, screw Uncle Sam the way Nixon did in Times Square [read the book!]. So, to say that Uncle Sam or Ike or any of the nation’s illustrious leaders were evil, “you might as well say that America itself was evil…that exemplary transcendence, through action and beauty, of the strong man’s wild streak, which…is what the West is all about,” [241] is an evil endeavor.

When Nixon discovers the truth about Uncle Sam: “You didn’t have to kill them! You just did it for fun! You’re a … a butcher! a beast! You’re no better than the Phantom!”, Uncle Sam replies: “It ain’t easy holdin’ a community together, order ain’t what comes natural, you know that, boy, and a lotta people gotta get killt tryin’ to pretend it is, that’s how the game is played.”

“’You’ve…you’ve changed,’ I [Nixon] said, my voice shaking. “You’re not the same as when I was a boy!” --- “You’re forty years old, son: time you was weaned!...you gotta love me like I really am: Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler, gun-totin’ hustler and tooth-‘n’-claw tamer of heathen wilderness, lusty and in everything a screamin’ meddler, novus ball-bustin’ ordo seclorum, that’s me, boy—and goodnight Mrs. Calabash to any damfool what gets in my way!”

Ever notice when someone tells you to grow up, get over it, [or that you’re delusional or in denial or suffering from a messiah complex] they’re really asking you to buy into their fantasy and play your part in it? We’re all guilty of it. This review’s guilty of it. We cycle between plaintiff and defendant depending on the situation. That’s what it seems being American is all about in Coover’s The Public Burning—the willingness to participate in the national fiction because it’s the path of least resistance, which makes it a true and courageous novel. Courageous because Coover put himself inside Nixon while Nixon was still alive. He let Nixon possess him the way Uncle Sam possessed Nixon. He shows that Nixon, an indefensible cad at the time, was a human being like the rest of us. Coover is Nixon. The reader is Nixon. I am Nixon. We cycle between demon and angel depending on the perceived situation [“we” being a subset of “everybody,” you might not be included. Only you would know.].

Finally, there’s a difference between childish and child-like. Is it childish or child-like to pray for everyone before going to bed at night? Is it childish or childlike to engage in Nixonian phantasy? When you’re Nixon, it’s childish. When you’re Coover, childlike.  The difference being one nauseates, the other thrills. And The Public Burning succeeds at both.

---

[i] I find Thomas R. Edwards’ 1977 New York Times review an interesting counterpoint to my own. The difference, I think, is what we hear and how we hear it. I believe Coover would find Edwards’ view problematic on several fronts. But I’m only guessing…

[ii] This foreshadows the illegal bombing of Cambodia, the carpet-bombing and war crimes in Vietnam. Elsewhere in the novel, Coover plants hints of the future Watergate and anti-war movement and protestors. One sees Nixon’s political psyche starting to bloom, able to trace it from its seedling status, abused sprout up to the current messy stink flower.

[iii] Disney and propaganda; Edward Bernays 1, 2, 3, 4—Happiness Machines, The Engineering of Consent, There Is A Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed, and limousine liberalism [sic]; and spectacle, where in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: "All that was once directly lived has become mere representation." Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing." This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life." [Wikipedia, The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy DeBord].

[iv] The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953. Interestingly, there was no “poet laureate” from 1953-55. William Carlos Williams was appointed to serve from 1952-55, but had been investigated by the FBI for communist sympathies. He also refused to be fingerprinted or undergo other such indignities. Coover makes Nixon the de facto poet laureate for that time, which enables him to mock Faulkner by having Nixon sing his praises. The novel is stuffed with these kinds of pleasures.

HOME OF THE BRAVE

Jesus freaks, hallelujah

hands, sway in the breeze

believing they’re saved

But

they observe

without perception,

having misread Revelations 18

*

Jesus will rule without loathing

invited to act by the many-bladed mind of His Father

unmoved by the grass He’s mowing

**

These apes of “Christ”

[running their own experiments]

want a dis-ease they never believed in

to answer their trivial prayers

***

In the end,

they might fail to avert

the chilling fire

They never engaged,

lo[o]sing It in terror

terrified

FORCE

Phases do not probe.
 

The luminosity of desertion

subsists for those too petrified

by time

To say anything

about

Force not needing to

insist upon its function

or activity.

ETHICS

Some poets feel like parasitical mushrooms made of hallucinogens or poison, dependent on your point of view. They can pop up anywhere at any time in their black berets and avant-garde soldier uniforms, blood dripping from each of their punctuation marks, raping, killing, cooking and eating clueless [but not innocent] business majors who appear in their comp class because it’s a requirement, not just the cannibalism but the course itself. This requirement’s like Paula Deen taking Anthony Bourdain up her overextended arse. It’s all part of the program. So we must excuse them. Like Second Lieutenant William Calley and sergeants Wuterich and Bales, and the late great Gordon Kahl, we’re all just living out our missions the best we can. And don’t forget, it’s not easy being an avant-garde poet warrior in a financial world where everyone ignores you.

Remember, ambitious people have mothers who love them, too.

MONA LISA

On the veranda a child will croon
and the Earth listen, terrorized

And Heaven’s hoop will maintain the scourge
knowing nothing.

Therefore, dominate your enemies.

Look happy.

THESE DAYS [Composed 1-6-12]

You picked your guitar and sang like a farmer getting at something about jobs, but not quite, something about the walls and cages made by and for the People’s labor, rooms that left us broke and suffocated, but not as busted and choked (so they say) as we were before we built them and enclosed ourselves to borrow and consume.

“Neither a lender nor a borrower be” is a savage notion, but you didn’t write about Franklin, did you? You probably did. You wrote about everything and everyone. When you died you allegedly left a 400-page bibliography of your work. According to the Poetry Foundation, you were very productive.

Now we at least have, or recently had anyway, some dust in our throats for victuals to live on ‘til we croak on our feet numb with scrambled memories of booze-addled Saturday nights and sleepy Sabbath afternoons. And the town’s obits seldom run half the page.

Sixty minutes covers everything they want us to know. What they’re saying of your America they’re saying in a binary code that refuses to flip-flop, with the volken or masses or mob you so loved listening for their system’s inner child, as you once did, moved by its pulse not its diction, looking for the power.

They will not occupy their wilder-ness. That terrifies them. The wild is a scalping terr’rist Injun. Look Out!

These days our sense of time has removed us from the glimmering dawn of illuminated life amusing itself in meadows under vast heavens of falling, thoughtless rain. These days we’re marking voices that leave our tongues wagging and ears wriggling with nonsense and lies.

America before Columbus (did you write of him, too?) was a pond alive with minnows and perch, snappers and loons, reflecting a firmament astir with hawks and herons, surrounded by forest eyelashes occupied by Iroquois, a solid forehead roamed by Oglala Sioux and a chin carved of solid Cherokee.

Your problem became America’s problem, preferring Emerson to Muir or Thoreau, parlor over pond and peak.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Sandburg. They’ve found some rhyme in their reason thanks to your Lincoln, but we lost our freedom in the expediencies of gitter done and legalese. You were the humble, twanging Wagner of the Great Plains and kinda saw it coming cause you knew the city and such—

SOME SCHIZOID-ABSTRACT COSMIC CONSPIRACY THEORY IN 9 PARTS in BlazeVox Springish 2012

Publisher Geoffrey Gatza: "Presented here is a world-class issue of BlazeVOX12 featuring poetry, art, fiction, and an arresting work of creative non-fiction, written by authors from around globe. We are introducing a new section in the journal, Book Previews, which as the name describes it is a brief look at some of our new book titles. You will find work from Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Clayton Eshleman, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Ted Greenwald, Tom Clark and many others. This is truly a special issue of BlazeVOX. And if you are so moved, please take a tour of our online bookshop. We have 300 titles of weird little books available for sale. So hurray, now get reading!"

THE SAME SONG

This poem published at Full of Crow.

ENTROPIANS

Consumed by maggots,
they’re converting bullion
into timeless dung

Asserting a reverse alchemy
a death that won’t expire—

Like roads untaken
armies unattacked
cities unbombed
land unstained by blood—

They become useless in their scheme of things

Proving laws, like grammars
are descriptions that cannot innovate—

intuitions worth living for

MA[I]ZE

If I had a Republican mind, my pursuit of happiness couldn’t end. If I had a Democratic mind, I’d still be seeking justice. With a schizoid anarchic mind, I shut my eyes and see whatever I might adopt. Its biology will seam together a multiple choice question of something else evolving something that wasn’t there before. It’s power feels kind of sexy, an orgasmic catastrophe creating a need to make more people. Their potential unity, invited by the chasm in her flesh, will make them come. Flooding the cornfield, Old Muddy soils their southbound money. The corn had better be extra corny this year, or someone else’s gonna get it.

RIPENING

As I pace the city
planning to subvert
my enemy’s strategy,

mourning doves
sound tranquil,
as if

knowing I defend them,
they observe
every win

ripening

SOMETHING GRAVE

As an erotic poet wades through blood something grave fuses bombs resembling ova mesmerized by energies of language hearing and saying only what It needs taking possession of whatever we abandon seaming a tao into us.

A vulture, defending the road…

When angry, why not laugh?

A REVIEW OF MUMBO JUMBO BY ISHMAEL REED/SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION/1972 [REED]; 1996 [SCRIBNER PAPERBACK]

The trajectory of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo feels like “madness maddened,” as if it were written by a comedic African Ahab at war with the white whale.

It’s as monolithic as the monolith it attacks, seaming together the international and inter-racial strands of an inside-out subjective analysis of “Jes Grew” nationalism:

We decided that we would be their [Atonists] desecraters, that we would send their loot back to where it was stolen and await the rise of Shango, Shiva, and Quetzalcoatl… [89]

MJ lays out the paranoid gist of a secret “1000s” year-old racial holy war between Pantheist Pagans and Atonists, pitting Eros v. Thanatos in an attempt, via “mumbo jumbo,” to exorcise our secret societies of their ancestors’ “troubled spirits.”

This task, according to the novel, is so important because the private struggles among secret societies are at the very core of all warfare:

Moses learned the secrets of VooDoo from Jethro and taught them to his followers. H.P. Blavatsky concurs: “The fraternity of Free Masons was founded in Egypt and Moses communicated the secret teaching to Israelites, Jesus to the Apostles and thence it found its way to the Knights Templar.” 186

The aggressiveness of the Atonist White Man is the African Pantheist’s burden, which is made all the more difficult because “The White man will never admit his real references.” [194]

Certain Romantic, anti-Royalist Anglophiles may find the trotting out of the Osiris Myth old news and might even take exception to the way Reed’s narrator skewers Milton:

[Milton] foresaw the Bad News [Jes Grew] was going to bring to the world. John Milton, Atonist apologist extraordinary himself, saw the coming of the minor geek and sorcerer Jesus Christ as a way of ending the cult of Osiris and Isis forever. [171]

The narrator then quotes at length from “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” before pegging it:

And those “Timbrel’d Anthems dark” is the music that old Jethro played, the music of worshippers of those festivals where they had a ball. Boogieing. Expressing they selves. John Milton couldn’t stand that. Another Atonist; that’s why English professors like him, he’s like their amulet, keeping niggers out of their departments and stamping out Jes Grew before it invades their careers. It is interesting that he worked for Cromwell, a man who banned theater from England and was also a hero of Sigmund Freud. [171-2]

A feeling may persist among lovers of Milton, I count myself among them, who refuse to damn the man because Africa wasn’t on his radar in the mid-Seventeenth century. Anyone who’s read Paradise Lost knows Milton didn’t love Jehova/Yahweh or the Demiurge, nor did he proclaim him a god worthy of worship. In fact, one might suspect Milton’s Satan of speaking on behalf of Milton more than any other character. God was the King Milton rebelled against. But still, Milton aligned himself with Cromwell, etc.

Reed, a humorist who more than once in MJ made me think of Kurt Vonnegut, skewers that and all world views which can’t and won’t groove to the blues.

By satirizing “white” political-economy and culture and contrasting it against counter-institutions on the “black” side, Reed ends up satirizing the whole of human society: “What is the[ir] wound?...the knowledge in his heart that he is a … charlatan …” [132]

Readers looking for history will instead find both an historical artifact and present-day conflict that seems to be forever ongoing in our affairs as human beings.

Today we have the so-called “Tea Party” representing a spasm of the Atonist vision of the “African” Obama, for whom the term African-American feels oxymoronic. Jes Grew embodies everything Ayn Rand and her wounded, tea-bagged followers most fear—the pursuit of a life worth feeling.

When Mumbo Jumbo was published in 1973, “Jes Grew needed its words to tell its carriers what it was up to. Jes Grew was an influence which sought its text, and whenever it thought it knew the location of its words and Labanotations it headed in that direction.” [211]

Jes Grew seams a necessary, subconscious drifting toward the beautiful, a desired after but slippery unity orchestrated by the psychogeography of a collected, unconscious mind. It’s like the narrator says early on: “This is the country where something is successful in direct proportion to how it’s put over; how it’s gamed.”
[38]

Allowing for the uncanny is always a trick. Ironically, there’s an old Jewish proverb that goes: “When fearful, dance; when sad, sing.”

But the old Atonists forgot something: When angry, laugh. Life is play…

That’s mumbo jumbo.

BENEATH OUR GUILLOTINE

Tonight
we nap in anguish
fingering blood
beneath our guillotine

Slouching
over shabby filaments
of patois
we evolve
cloven hooves
that

Sabotage the bone of
a flower that will
devour

The lamb

Approaching a formlessness
not even the deepest spies
discern

Some plan
the wise might

Hatch

Against us

TO CLARIFY FURTHER

The membrane—
vibrating with kazoos
and patriotic marching
bands spilling over
Battle Hymn of the Republic—
reflects an impure light

On this bone—hung like a trophy—
on this skin erasing itself
slowly down under
where the glitter is,
where the road curves, spurting pansies
where you stomp them down
wearing goose-step moonboots

To wipe yourself away

It claims dominion
bribing us with courtesy
fusing Its opposition to our ferocity

As we police the vacant streets
looking for you.

It would seem you’ve purloined everything,
illegitimating, they say,
that which makes.

*

On this bone—hung like a trophy—
It claims dominion
As we police the vacant streets
Vibrating with kazoos
On this skin erasing agent
Looking for you
Legitimating, so they say,
Slowly beneath
That which makes
The glitter where
The road curves, spurting pansies
Reflecting an impure light
That you stomp down
Wearing goose-step moonboots.

A MITT ROMNEY POEM

Seduced,
you begin knocking
thoughtlessly
on a small hatch.

It’s unlocked.

Inside,
no one will guard your bag.

You’re on his bunk,
sailing for an unknown continent,
feeling the intense instability of your p(r)ose.

All day now you’ve been playing with that bruised banana in your pocket
(the one no one will guard
[poking it with your pointer
{hoping to pull it closer}]),
if you could only...

All the other girls are laughing because Mitt asked you where you got that pretty boy.

One of them’s wearing a pirate’s outfit, fingering the tip of her dagger.

The undressed gentlemen are coming together as the hair flies.

O captain, my captain! We’re at the juncture!

Sobbing, you flee to your bed because he pled you to cuddle.

He didn’t mean it…will by no means re-member.

And your family’ll never know
what.

You can’t forget.

It was only a prank.

I’M PREGNABLE

My lady’s come;
her deity, go[o]d.

I’m mortified, however.

She’s touched. I’m pregnable.

And so It seams, perhaps.

A LOST NATION

They shift
using a swiss
cheese hummer for
cover

Yesterday, they were amused
something Abdullah’s mother said
something about the way he shovels his cous cous
or was it how Uncle Ahmed’s olive oil made him fart
[ass up]
at afternoon prayer

But today
Nasrallah’s son detonated an IED
killing Joe from Denver
and Cindy from Pittsburgh

I thought about how we, too, laughed yesterday
something about Cindy’s son Moses crapping his pants on Space Mountain

They move, again
my M-60 of phallic steel—
twisted & oily,
smelling metallic—
death, rattling in my arms,
streams of uranium lead
spewing from the eye of my cock—

A skinless corpse boiling
tomorrow its depleted meal
a phosphate memory whose vessel
collapsed

*

Rage might relapse into pleasure,
provocation into bliss

But a lost nation will never recover
its dead, or revisit

MRS. RICHARDSON

Thought eccentric by locals
—she wore white—
her Reluctance—
Or, later in life,
To leave her room.

She was troubled
By the "deepening
Menace"—
Death—
Of those too close.

And these words—
Tearful—
Of friends—
Gone sleeping
The “churchyard sleep—“
The sad hour of evening—
Once a time for study—
The words have gone to rest,
And the book, open—
The scholar—alone—
Producing tears,
Poems she can’t wipe away;
Nor would she if she could—
They feel her only tribute:

“Home is so far from home”—here
This "funeral in the brain"—
This failure of life’s hunger—
Death’s teleology—
Demising itself—
A rotted space—
Twain murder and suicide—

She knew her mind as spirit
Yet tangible, a place to go
And much of her life—
The best of it, perhaps—
Was lived there—

The "undiscovered continent"
Of the spirit’s landscape—
Embellished by nature,
Not words—
Where one resides with
One's other selves:

“Me from Myself—
To banish—but since myself
—Assault Me—
Have I peace
Subduing
Mind—except
By quitting me—
From Me.”

If Emily Dickinson
Were living
Today, I'd propose—
In wedded bliss
We'd spend our lives
At home—alone—
Together—in our flanking rooms,
with a wee hole in the wall
for conversation—
Etc.

DISOBEDIENCE

The sea’s too candid

Its contagious
incessant
nagging for attention

Wishing
to move
topologies
the way the
wave flows
will fail then
succeed

*

Seek higher ground

I am father of the Sea
&
You are Its mother

Our child grows
away from us

We age and sink,
would surge and
flutter, but sudden
death will not

Obey us

LETHAL GROUND

The Dead torque our record
inflicting their poverty

__

Their sexual gist
a recollection imprinted
upon us, their

__

Cerebral tombs, a
tacit melting of
our beams

__

Proving lethal ground, our
site for combat

WHAT’S GOOD?

Waking up with the dog and cat curled around my legs.
Frankie giving me the slow blink and putting his paw on my face.
His nose dripping onto my lips.
Purring. Buddha trying to rub the sleep from his eyes
scooting up the mattress on his belly for some
morning love.
He must get his belly rubbed. Yes,
he must. He is a good boy. Mr. Sleepy Head,
where’s that kitty? Where’s your brudder?
Taking that first shit after the first cup of coffee.
That daybreak buzz.
Watching Phish on New Year’s Eve with Jared and Mollie and her sister-wives:
Lucy Lu, Magda, Francine and, yes, now Beatrice, who happily vomits without burping every time she sees me.
Wherever they live.
Dylan cheerfully glued to every move I make, never saying a word, jabbering nonsense like now, Dylan just as articulate with his face,
saying it all.
My mother beginning a sentence with “This idea…”
My sister and nieces living in Kentucky.
The first day of spring in the Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge.
Writing a poem first thing every morning as I embark on this year of…
Moving along.
Your reading this.
Among other things…
Etc.

TO LIVE

I see my clatter
hear my look
oil my gun
savor my sense
discern my awareness
muddle my margins
synchronize my speech
in-vent my creations

I'm turning out, becoming
shards of myself
burst by some counter-invasionary force
whose Mother prayed
for It, also

But don’t feel too bad
if I had the first shot
it would’ve been It, not me
seeing Its sound
hearing Its face
touching Its odor
tasting Its feeling
intuiting Its ignorance
disorganizing Its borders
baffling Its tongue
imagining Its unmaking

Him or Her

As if by chance
one goes first
one after the other
to live

BO[R]N[E]

Earth’s unbo[r]n[e] opinion
hallucinates

sparkling serenely

sprouting with glee
producing

Word animality

Tense dense
vigorous amusements

Assessing

Persons
who buy their dreams

Afflicting tabloids with ruin

Pulverizing human joints into dust

*

Ash heaps smoldering
with refugees

Housing unnoticed flames
blazing

Warfare
being a Tao of ambiguous deception

*

Maybe us
and/or
them

From Grand Island and/or Dubuque

Phoning home
we look like ants

As we must

THE SEAM WHERE THE BOMB IS PLANTED

REVIEW OF AVANT-POP: FICTION FOR A DAYDREAM NATION, edited by Larry McCaffery, Black Ice Books, 1993

A related review's at Reconfigurations.

Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation has become something of an underground, countercultural icon since its publication nearly 20 years ago. It’s become so because of its intense focus on identity politics and disobedience.

The term “avant-pop” refers to artists’ appropriation of pop culture icons, trademarks and logos. These writers suck them from the media membrane and digest them into necessarily re-contextualized characterizations that inevitably “disrupt the aesthetics” of the culture at large.

A carpe diem spirit works throughout Avant-Pop, jostling the groggy Western reader awake to live a more conscious life.

The very first piece in the anthology, “Blessed,” by Stephen Wright, a pornographic dramatization of the four Gospels in a campy over-the-top suburban freak show, seems selected by McCaffery to invite comparisons of his “gallery” to shows featuring work by artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.

Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” perhaps the most famous and controversial work of art at the time, alluded to contemporary culture’s degradation of Christian iconography [according to Serrano]. And Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait with a bullwhip implanted in his anus made him the most popular whipping boy of the excessively homosocial Christian right.

The main thrust of all this seems to me various forms of naughty discontent, which then gel into a horrifying can of delightfully writhing, open-ended worms. McCaffery writes in his fictive introduction, “Tsunami,” that Avant-Pop is no exhibit of “bland workshop bore-ons,” but intense morsels of artistic interference intended “to rescue the badly nourished creative imaginations” of a daydreaming American public.

William T. Vollmann’s “San Diego, California, U.S.A. (1988)” best embodies this aesthetic. What makes Vollmann’s piece so striking is its placement of nature, not sexuality, which is to say gender-based personality, at the center of the narrative. Nature, not a human individual’s libido, defines character. The fact one is an Earthling trumps race, class and/or gender. Looked at from the standpoint of genetics, the fact seems as irrefutable as it does amoral: We are primarily Earthlings.

When the narrator says “I saw a girl naked outside a house and said: You’re too glowing to find meaning in but I can find meaning around you. –I heard my own voice,” a fluid mind becomes self-conscious—I’m naked!—by hearing itself over Nature…by becoming sentient.

Vollmann’s technique and style, like Nature’s, is so subtle and graceful it’s nearly invisible. At the end of “San Diego…,” when the narrator realizes he “became something more evil and more good….[and]…Now that it is over, I can say that I was happy,” the reader also realizes that everything seems imbued with a mind, haunted both by consciousness and unconsciousness, navigating the seam/membrane of the text by using what’s speakable and perceivable, that is audible and visible, as landmarks and touch-stones for whatever’s disappearing.

In “Politics,” Kathy Acker forces the reader to participate and perform and play with the text by largely absenting punctuation, only using periods to terminate sentences that quantify and equate life and death with money. For the most part, Acker’s disappeared punctuation might represent the stubbornness of inadequate identity: “…you get fed it from birth and can’t get away except by severe disruption…”

Richard Meltzer, one of the earliest practitioners of flash fiction, has three short-shorts here that display a meticulously styled, plain-spoken vernacular voice. And Meltzer’s textually justified cruelty and aggressiveness are as hilarious as they are heartfelt—

…weep in goddamn awe at the notion of YOU as essential principle, as the essential principle, every bit as basic as Thales’s water, Anaximenes’ air, Pythagoras’s number…

—and honest as well:

As gents who when we write (dine)(play) get at least something on our collars, faces, souls, we rise to the chore of showing ‘em how it is done…

Life dulls conscience, ignoring it until those rare times it’s actually needed for its own sake, a condition the writers present here as acutely felt. Each fiction conveys something of the way life feels under the skin of the speaking voice, the way It feels seaming Itself together with words, trying to imagine how It sounds inside the bodies of others.

As one of their beloved forefathers, the Marquis de Sade, writes at the very start of his voluptuous and impeccable Justine:

Will it not be felt that Virtue, however beautiful, becomes the worst of all attitudes when it is found too feeble to contend with Vice, and that, in an entirely corrupted age, the safest course is to follow along after the others?

He goes on to suggest wherever there’s evil some good is born, which is to say, as he does for the rest of the novel, wherever there’s some good evil is born.

And this seems the seam where the bomb is planted, so I’ll slip away…

ABBEY’S “HONEST NOVEL” FEELS CATHARTIC IN CLAUSTROPHOBIC TIMES

A Review of Edward Abbey’s The Fool’s Progress: An Honest Novel, Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1988 [Avon Books edition, 1990].

What do we want most to dwell near to?
Thoreau, “Solitude”


Not everyone wants or needs the same things, even though corporations would find their lives [sic] much simpler if we did.

The fact is we all want something particular to ourselves, as we alone experience our lives from beneath our skin. Our desires might take the forms of fingerprints for our souls if the opportunity then ability to produce such intended content were common, but it isn’t. Being free, however, gives one the right to find that out for one’s self by trying.

Only rarely, in certain works of art, do we humans find anything at all resembling the complex, peculiar beauty of a singular human life lived and experienced as in Edward Abbey’s The Fool’s Progress: An Honest Novel—a fictionalized autobiographical fingerprint of the man’s “soul;” whatever that actually is, it will live on for as long as there are readers feral enough to experience it.

Abbey’s novel puts us through the mincing of a much ignored American-type male, the last generation of a self-reliant breed of lower class homo macho Americanus not mythologized by the likes of “John Wayne,” “Dan’l Boone” & “Davey Crocket.” Abbey’s Henry Lightcap ain’t none of those guys, but the real deal without any pink slime injected for mass consumption by obese, useless proles accustomed to wallowing in their own psychic hamburger of mythical shit, those “fat guys in distress” Henry would save from time-to-time in the non-myth wilderness of the Desert Southwest [Abbey almost had me there, being a fat slob and all myself]. Henry was an erudite mountaineer who loved life almost to idiocy, thus the “fool” of the title and that most confounding of all Americans—the wise redneck.

The whole country’s become a giant CAFO, a hootenanny for the moneychangers. Before there were too many people, you could take to the hills and make your own life…you could “go west,” “go home” or just go. Now we live in an eco-hell eerily akin to that eternal Christian heaven where our eyes are glued open to God and we’re permanently awake or plugged in, permanently producing and consuming profitable holograms, except in our case it ain’t eternal cause we’re slowly killed off as we lose our ability to consume efficiently. When one can no longer eat, one becomes irrelevant. It’s as Henry the narrator waxes romantic early on about the ability to escape “20th century man”: “A world without open country would be a universal jail.” [105] A man needs to learn his limitations for himself. They’re one of those sets of things that can’t be taught. He needs to be able to close his eyes once in a while to the limits others might place upon him, and just go.

SPOILER ALERT:

And eventually, being mortal, he wears out, slows down, grows sick and dies, perhaps without ever realizing it, while heading home, and then just keeps going. The cop who questions Henry at the end, the fact that he’s kind [and so is everyone else after that, giving him food and drink, willingly sustaining him] suggests that Henry and his dog died beside the flooding creek, or maybe even inside their truck, but didn’t know it. A different level of consciousness begins projecting the text’s reality that keeps it moving forward on its inertia, as if death itself were not an equal and/or opposite reaction to its desire to dwell nearest to home, the Earth itself, an ideal that Henry always wanted and managed to heroically live up to.

This novel is shamelessly sentimental, but so beautiful and seamless that the sentimentality is a necessary device in the very nature and process—the autopoietic unfolding—of Abbey’s text, which serves as a distraction from our inadequacies that is the essential spiritual spark to the human imagination—that which is essential to human being. And with that sentimentality comes a sharpened sword against the corporate machine, that which would deny everything that the novel, that Henry Lightcap, that Edward Abbey does.

Henry sees it clearly, crossing America with his dying dog in his dying truck with terminal pancreatic cancer consuming him from the inside out, each being tinkered with in their own way just to keep going, just wanting to see home, knowing full well:

"…the America of my boyhood and youth it’s been blasted, obliterated, buried beneath the new America of black gummy asphalt and tinted glass and brushed sleek cool aluminum. What Edmund Wilson called, with prescient despair, 'The United States of Hiroshima.'” [211]

Even so, Henry Lightcap [Abbey] still feels smitten with existence: “[wanting] to weep. Not for sorrow, not for joy, but for the incomprehensible wonder of our brief lives beneath the oceanic sky.” [301] Henry seemed to view the human world as a distracted distraction, something to be dealt with and seldom enjoyed, and when it is enjoyed it always ends in sorrow as the fiddler must be paid. The cost of such complexities was not worth the profit made, at least not to Henry, for whom the word “Mountain…the simple easy bi-syllabic denotative, sen[t] a little pang of nostalgia through [his] central nervous system: homesick—[he was] sick for home.” [344]

What’s particularly heartbreaking, heroic, romantic and ultimately cathartic about The Fool’s Progress is how terribly long it actually takes to die because we want to live so much. And what’s outrageous is how corporate America helps death along with every step we [ie: Henry] take, killing us off one-by-one, step-by-step as the business of American business grinds on and on and on, etc. Death by corporation is slow.

The truck’s demise, the dog’s collapse, Henry’s altered projection, each is its own tragedy as each struggles heroically, to put things mildly. The tragedy of the truck’s death [as a literary device its dimensions were those of a word-being, so I include it as a character and thus capable of “dying”] is the end of tinkerability. The dog’s tragedy is the casualty of companionship. Henry’s death seems the death of an American aspect worth loving, something to be patriotic over [as opposed to nationalistic or greedy about]. How many Americans are left who are self-reliant like Henry, and how many of those can discuss Heidegger and Nietzsche? How many 50-year-olds will you hear honestly declaim: “I don’t believe in doing work I don’t want to do in order to live the way I don’t want to live.” [17] It seems with every generation they comprise an ever smaller portion of the population.

In Gender, the questionable Ivan Illich writes: "An industrial society cannot exist unless it imposes certain unisex assumptions: the assumptions that both sexes are made for the same work, perceive the same reality, and have, with some minor cosmetic variations, the same needs." [9]

Such a program proves fatal to much of the American way of life. Americans of the Tea Party stripe recognize this, but can’t put their finger on it. They don’t even know who Nietzsche and Heidegger are, and can’t or won’t imagine they’re being horn swogled. They want to live like their parents did, but the world won’t let them. In fact, the world says their parents lived bad lives. They have more in common with the people they kill overseas than the folks who command them, but they can’t see it.

When they were kids, growing up didn’t seem so much an “economic” process as a spiritual one where a person would become responsible for their behaviors which were then incorporated into their livelihoods or the way they did business. Now, adulthood is merely “I owe, I owe, so off to work I go.” Only wage slaves need apply.

According to these corporatus americani, those of us who aren’t rich are broke because we’re inferior. But in Henry Lightcap’s case, at least he was self-reliant. He not only accepted personal responsibility, he was addicted to it. He couldn’t have shook it if he wanted to. Henry had his weaknesses…they were legion, and they were glorious.

Too much of our daily lives has been stripped of dignity and depth. Way back in 1975 Henry, on a visit home to West Virginia, noticed things were getting crowded around the old homestead. His older brother, Will, asked Henry what he was hopeful about, and Henry said, “A fast, efficient and painless plague. Desertification…I don’t know, Will. But something better happen soon.”

It didn’t. It hasn’t. It won’t. But when something akin to that does happen, it will be very painful, and pain’s something Henry knew all about. He understood that changing human nature meant mutilating human beings. He also knew that the America of the 1980s, and even more so the America today, was doing just that: attempting to change human nature so it would fit neatly into a proper set of target markets. Henry resisted this with everything he had. He was only one man, however, so:

"Henry felt that by contributing nothing to the annual Gross National Product he was thereby subtracting even less from what was left of the Net National Heritage. He himself would carry out a private one-man revolution in the belly of the beast. Freedom begins between the ears. The Good Life starts where servitude ends. In a nation of sheep one brave man is a majority…

"Theory. There was a flaw in the program. The program did not appeal to women, especially married women, especially those married women married to Henry Lightcap." [329-30]

My theory: Art like life will kill you, but until it does it will only make you stronger. Henry Lightcap was one of those rare philosophers for whom words meant something. Like Thoreau, he lived alone [with his dog] by his words, and died alone [with his dog] by them too.

But he wasn’t lonely, just solitaire.

WORKS CITED

Illich, Ivan. Gender, Heydey Books, Berkeley, CA, 1982.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, Quality Paperback Book Club, 1997.