AUTHORITY

A vexed cop
arresting

ranting a page
rage to death

reporting
a text to sex us
sexing
our exquisiteness
our readings
our detritus
that seem

corrected corrections

justifying those
who
ne’er dare
but always
assume

going with
& flowing with

the rule
this way

brandishing their tool
never getting us
corrected

truly disconnected

who sum
times wriggle
knotting the noose
loose as a goose
in the spruce

LIKE GRIM WATER

Arranging five moles whose psychic style shrouds the Tao, probing their speech, how it executes sound, asking:

What idiom’s viable? What tone suggests implication? Which ear considers what’s said? Who’s snooping? Who’s got occasion?

Will this liberty fit this line? Or is the demise of the word the destruction of the world?

A docile sound, pounding yet passive.

Our enemy feels our actual condition. We know Its position: Over crimson sod where banners of fading apathy sag; like grim water weighing us down, It gallops away from the sky, sinking.

Vacuous controlling aims harmonize us with Its ever active fluid consistencies shaping our spiritual wave-forms, swaying the wind.

A swing [non-insistent] seams a true picture of power, while authorized bunting waves without any clout itself.

The same song swinging the maize ignites this jetting water’s fall, this metallic sound of stars exploding beyond the noise, and deliberate rule dominates the designed inequity of force in harmony with what riches can be won.

Phases do not probe the luminosity of desertion, subsisting for those petrified by their names to say nothing.

Force need not insist upon its function or activity.

New Year's Eve 2008 #3: Chapters 28-29

Reading from a rough draft of So It Seams...

BUT STILL

That
(quick) scan
of the inside horizon
nearing you

Feels your bones.

It won’t explain what It’s doing to your interior
membrane.

It leaves, assuming
It will define your breath for Itself.

You did nothing to It,
but still…

WHAT DAD MEANT

When dying (exiting his membrane twain tor and dale—that leveling fascia twining his primitive cock’s-crow—the sound of one revisiting jawbones lunging headfirst for the flipped coin that eviscerated him for having felt Its vibe) my father tells me to keep my “bone on til it rots.”

Awaiting havoc and mutiny, I mutely embody my wits with the dead torquing my trace, imposing their paucity, their fetish for the substance of re-collected recollections of re-collecting rational crypt impressions, tacitly proving our lethal ground, melting these seams into demonstrably deadly positions, hemming our mace for mêlée.

When I go native, I’ll let this kneading of peoples’ untilled entrails go, bequeathing that plunder to the lawnsmen—snuffling lucid aficionados of how the heart seems a leaking stalactite, which won’t do at 5:30 a.m.

So, I’ll attack what they love first, letting the time for battle flow. I’ll be like that home-bound virgin spreading her legs wide inviting them to something that just yesterday seemed so far out of reach.

If I flee like a squirrel when they come for me, they’ll never win. Yet if they scatter like squirrels when I come for them, I’ll still come out a head.

That’s what Dad meant…I think.

Adrienne Rich 1929-2012

Passing of a great poet.

New Year's Eve 2008 #2: Chapter 27

Reading a rough draft of Chapter 27 from So It Seams, which was then titled "Germ."

MATRIX

Muddied stars seeking beds
not of our own making, but
hern who brung us—

We cling to her arm
with no future, evaporating.

Unworried, Matrix smiles
wide through saloon doors
swinging open, a special delivery

Of that wine moving us like old dogs
on hot afternoons

Shaded, digging these dancing particles
coming and going, hewing
peculiar, lust-laden odysseys
amid the sun beam in our room
with the sound of clocks winding
down

A tic toc ending
to a day unwound,
yet alarming—

Wearing faces
that no longer conceal our oceans
but reveal them

ORGASM IS NOT A VERB

People seem unpeopled
feeling only aboutness
thoughts about themselves.

For example:
You’ll have a vagina so I’ll talk to you.
I’ll say, “orgasm is not a verb,”
and you’ll say I “need some technique.”

Then,
as postmodern American couples
(circa 1975)
were wont to do,
we’ll work at it (like fondu),
we really will, punching a time clock
for an hour every night
for months, decuntstructing your cliterature,
breaking down our psychosexual geography
how we actually feel about my penis
determining your sexual organism
(not orgasm), beyond its context—
seams a thang that t’aint titself too purty—

Nor’ll it bring this
bored he-dog much joy
‘cause I take my sex slow
and serious, seeing it
(verily, I might add)
as no laughing matter!

“Poor baby, I love you,”
I’ll whisper in your ear, then, dozing
off, hear you crying through my sleep,
which’ll make me cry
in my dream, knowing
we must love one another
or die; yet, we are

New Year's Eve 2008 #1: Reading So It Seams

This is a reading of chapters 24-26 of my novel, So It Seams, recorded on New Year's Eve 2008. The novel was still very much in progress, had a different title, and these chapters were rough drafts. But this evil monk persona seemed to me the best body for the voice to come from, if that makes any sense.

THE WORMS OF LANGUAGE (a love poem)

An unbodied tracelessness
twain being and
speech, where silent
language rests

Mystic slackers
spit words, obscuring
her presence with ink, apparent
octopi

Knowing
madness, freely
disintegrating the random
image of Love, rising

Alone—
without flags, only
the wind and their bearers—
with creative action
emptied of everything

Where a poem seeks a mind absenting itself from Its writing

Becoming that dark vacant matter revealing Its resurrection in words
that somehow embrace everything needed via some magic reversal—

While an insurrection opens your hole for the plug you crave

Forgetting comfort
that trap they set for you alone

Forsaking their pathos, lose
their logical advice,
try your patience
the way a thorn tries the rosebud
producing Its fragrance, animating

Creative prophets who live unattended
where the fires burn out

Yet this candle, elsewhere
flickers, lighting refuge—

The way a fine powder might
scatter over an old plate, knowing

What both worlds offer, seaming
a final, mute point of touch
when names feel

Erased by the worms of language

Ideology of the Germ in Blood Lotus #23

A piece of short fiction, "Ideology of the Germ," from from my forthcoming collection of short fiction called Trust Me (& Other Fictions), has just been published by Blood Lotus Journal. They also have an interview with BlazeVOX[books] publisher Geoffrey Gatza. Check it out:
http://www.bloodlotusjournal.com/2012/03/bl-23.html

Great stuff here from Marcus Wahlbring, Jay O. Yejide, Emily Yates and many more.

I SAID

As usual she can’t find any blood.

There was a big one there. I don’t know where it went.

She had the same problem last time.

This seems to happen a lot.
When you give blood?
No. Just with you.
I’m sorry.
I’m the one who’s sorry for not being able to bleed for you. Next time
I’ll lift weights to pump things up.

She smiles.

Did you drink any water before you came?
Nope.
Drink water before you come next time.
Hokey dokey. Will do.

Blood on her third strike.
It pulsates into her generalized horror
staining her median torpor
pooling on the floor
shaping a bio hazard.

Thanks, I said.

No problem.

She presses her gauze to the spot,
taping down her third bandage
surrounded by hair, still
smiling.

A NUGGET’S FUGUE

The wound plows
a cave, sinking

the fabulous pool of wealth
groping for white

Do you hear the sadness
in what you did
How it crumpled the form

singeing the bloom
off your palm’s resentment
How, like a nugget’s fugue,

it slid on moist pavement
the way a crutch slips

While stars like anthems
deep in your offense
forget me

A Reflection

I seam a visitor’s room
where a passing wakefulness goes—

a word sense of Romeo
Juliet feels in his name—
that sound working
for her, dripping
its essence on her inner
meanings, her
wherefore art thous,

becoming her trans
parent daily agendas torn open by happiness,
a purity of name-action
digging her well, knowing:

Water’s here somewhere, a shape—
some uncreated love unmet—becoming
the heart at the start, mirroring this well we face,

this jar of pouring stones, a reflection

heaping a mother vision that maintains Its echo
in the clench of her voice, her
sound burning an emptiness
more beautiful than life—

Obliterating It to create It—

This blind world squatting—
a beggar in the road,
a great soul hiding
this city of strangers, surrendering—

The fear-language of Its themes cracking open, float away

sorties clearing the tower of its priest—blooming
where stars rise, spinning every night—blown
by a bewildered god, kissing his flute—

Feeling notes that breathe this need, sweeping his floor
deaf to a silence that won’t break.

FUR COBRA

In the blue morning
my mother with Buddha spoons!
Fur cobra, sleeping.

A WHIM FOLLOWED

progress made
unwittingly
induced, no
but deduced away

a whim followed
except for the rule
containing it

NECESSITY

a sister clubs the laptop riot
for fifty bucks
green water invades the lake
walking

where screams silence a future history,
ignoring the guilt of freedom lovers
who lack the mechanisms
for bliss, untouched

by the unborn child they slowly unroll their crumpled unnamable sleep

avoiding the flight of dinosaurs,
bored who become dragons

before dying at the feet of angels
electrifying

flowers that give wing to Pegasus perceiving
the circus of the sky beyond

reach
of terrestrial arms, the bleeding cosmos washing
those feet that are

SCREAMIN’ JAY HAWKINS

Under cloudy skies
blissfully gazing
through the crossroads
to an other time,
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
put a spell on
my car, driven teary-eyed,
aching
to reveal Itself,
beautifully.

WHO HAS NOW

In the end it will not matter much who has what,
or why we have it, or why we got it at all.
What will matter is who has how to make things new.

Earth will birth New Earth, birthing new integration—
a unity that will, someday, decompose and fall.
At the start it will not matter much who has what.

People will find ourselves, free of resignation
despite our urge to build ourselves our new Great Wall.
What will matter is who has now to make things new.

What seams isn’t based on remnant imagination,
but the will to move on despite the cosmic stall.
In the end it will not matter much who has what.

The beginning will begin new speculation,
and new men, we’ll find ourselves making the same call.
What will matter is who has how to make things new.

But men, if we’re men, will defy our damnation,
and run amok without history to recall.
At the start it will not matter much who has what,
what will matter is who has now to make things new.

"Generation Breakdown" at Reconfigurations

"But now it seems we’re entering a post-pop culture phase where traditional consumers and media may be collapsing, where large feedback loops are breaking apart and re-joining in to more but smaller feedback loops with greater potential, matching revolution with evolution so chaos can spar with entropy. The so-called 'younger' writers’ works make sense to me in this context. If external reality does not function, move inward." Read more...

Krunga In Atticus Review

Katrina Gray: "Right now I want to talk about 'Krunga.' Chuck Richardson’s short story reminds me a lot of my primal birthing experience—all the fluids and sounds and friction and urges and small necessary actions. The knowing, or unknowing, of a self. The pulling of something deep in our DNA. If a text could illustrate the core of physical human-ness without being a series of grunts, this would be it."

Also, check out Katrina's introduction to this week's issue of Atticus Review, which is about her natural child birth and what she did with her placenta. Amazing.

Photo by Mariano

Uncle Bill's Thanksgiving Prayer, 1986

To be a little more precise...

"The trouble with too much contemporary American literature is it seems to be dominated by a certain naive bourgeois cultural 'whiteness,' an unconscious manifestation of Ishmael Reed's Atonist/Wallflower political-economic system and Robert Coover's Uncle Sam/Phantom in The Burning Game..."

That quote from the previous blog post needs clarification. No one's criticized me for it yet, but if they had they'd been right. Let me be more precise by defining "contemporary American literature" as the Poetry Foundation and big corporate publishers who require you to have an agent, etc.

This conversation among Kent Johnson, John Bloomberg-Rissmann and others articulates exactly what I meant to say, and since I can't say it better, here's the link, and the author Johannes' opening remarks [the revealing conversation follows the question]:

*****

http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=2178.

“Free (Market) Verse”: Steve Evans on the Poetry Foundation and Conservative Politics/Aestheticsby Johannes on Nov.17, 2011, under Uncategorized

One commentor to another post made a link to this piece by Steve Evans.

Excerpt:If there was no trace in the magazine’s cartoon gallery of a cohort of midwestern white guys with business backgrounds aspiring to write instantly “accessible” poems about authentic American life for the amusement and improvement of semi-literate “regular” folks, that’s because it would take a presidency as benighted and hokey as that of George W. Bush to bring such a group to prominence. Through men like Dana Gioia, John Barr, and Ted Kooser, Karl Rove’s battle-tested blend of unapologetic economic elitism and reactionary cultural populism is now being marketed in the far-off reaches of the poetry world. A curiously timed gift from a pharmaceutical heir who, before slipping into four decades of crippling depression, had submitted a pseudonymous item or two to Chicago’s Poetry magazine, which politely rejected them, has bankrolled the unlikely effort.

Thoughts?

*****

Thanks to Johannes for posting this at Montevidayo and Kent Johnson for sharing it with me.

Philip K. Dick & Occupy Wall Street

I think we're heading toward civil war. I think the richest one percent can now afford to pay 50 percent to wipe out the other 50 percent. So much for the 99 percent. Divide and conquer.

I don't know who will "win," which is to say survive in greater numbers. The coming election is going to exacerbate things the way the 1968 election did, but much much worse. I think both conventions next summer will make Chicago 68 seem small. I expect clashes between right wing and left wing protesters, defections among police and military...a complete unraveling.

What happens then is anyone's guess, but here's some ideas from Philip K. Dick's Tractates: Cryptica Scriptura:

41. The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one.
42. To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies.
43. Against the Empire is posed the living information, the plasmate or physician, which we know as the Holy Spirit or Christ discorporate. These are the two principles, the dark [the Empire] and the light [the plasmate]. In the end, Mind will give victory to the latter. Each of us will die or survive according to which he aligns himself and his efforts with. Each of us contains a component of each. Eventually one or the other component will triumph in each human. Zoroaster knew this, because the Wise Mind informed him. He was the first savior. Four have lived in all. A fifth is about to be born, who will differ from the others: he will rule and he will judge us.

Dick goes on to say that "information will save us. This is the saving gnosis which the Gnostics sought." He also says the Empire has killed each of the previous homoplasmates, but "the next one will kill the Empire by phagocytosis."

Think of phagocytosis, perhaps, in terms of interdimensional "staining" and mindful holographs...memes/information that when perceived go viral in the form of fractals, eliminating forces of entropy to maintain the necessary disequilibria via feedback loops to keep the perceiving hologram alive and/or animated. One's channel or frequency of sentience is determined by one's situated permanence in relation to time...

From Wikipedia: "Phagocytosis...is involved...in the immune system, it is a major mechanism used to remove pathogens and cell debris. Bacteria, dead tissue cells, and small mineral particles are all examples of objects that may be phagocytosed.The process...in multicellular animals...has been adapted to eliminate debris and pathogens."

What are the recursive symmetries of phagocytosis in this narrative scale of things, where "occupy" seems to have gained a life of its own?

The trouble with too much contemporary American literature is it seems to be dominated by a certain naive bourgeois cultural "whiteness," an unconscious manifestation of Ishmael Reed's Atonist/Wallflower political-economic system and Robert Coover's Uncle Sam in The Burning Game...

When push comes to shove, I believe most people will probably fall back on their knee-jerk ethnocentric view of civilization, which is closer to Newt Gingrich's preferences than my vision of a kind of social anarchy occurring post-psycho-phagocytosis as a primary effect on cultural consciousness.

Order is entropy, equilibrium and death. Life is a self-sustaining disequilibria dependent on feedback loops of information. It involves chaos and fractals, which is time staining the eternal...

Personally, I'm on the side of boogie woogie. Occupy your space, be yourself, have fun. And do not cooperate with any authoritarian attitude. Just say no to the drug of corporate acceptability.

Terrify authoritarians with your freedom and celebrate chaos and rejoice at the uncertainty of it all. It will mean you're alive...

10 Simple Demands

The challenge of the moment for the Occupy Wall Street protesters seems to be articulating what it is they want, exactly. Since the Internet’s a virtual suggestion box of nearly infinite capacity, consider these the 10 reforms I think would have the most profound effect on improving the way America goes about its business. I’m sure I’ll see some of you at a protest soon.

The demands:

1. Overturn Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the 1886 Supreme Court decision that allegedly establishes corporations as legal persons. Corporatism isn’t capitalism. It’s more fascist than democratic. And corps definitely aren’t “human.” If they were they’d be diagnosed psychopaths.
2. Overturn all laws, rulings, etc. & et al, that equate the spending of money with free speech.
3. Education, Health Care and basic welfare like food, shelter and clothing are fundamental human rights in the 21st century. Minimal levels of these things must be made available free to all. You want more, work for it. We’ve evolved to a point where that degree of humanity’s necessary…global warming, 7 billion people and counting…Make it happen, or else…
4. End the corporate empire and bring home all the troops from all the bases all over the world and use them to defend our well-being against the various forms of malfeasance perpetrated by global corporate anarchists, primarily ecocide, global warming and nefarious forms of trafficking, as in labor, capital, humans, drugs and guns, etc. & et al.
5. A jubilee on student loans and mortgages.
6. Energy independence in 10 years or bust. That means a solar panel on every building in America. Decrease our dependence on the grid.
7. Scrap all free trade agreements, or at least strip them of all NAFTA Chapter 11 qualities.
8. Break up the biggest, most criminal banks. Adopt a nationwide system of credit unions that governs capital from the local level up to the global, rather than the other way around.
9. Break up Wall Street and rebuild it according to what kind of markets are OK for that kind of speculation, like sports, entertainment, technology, etc., where the competition is clear and exciting and, indeed, just a game.
10. Ban all private money from politics. Elections are financed by taxpayers only and will adhere to strict rules of fairness and truth. Violators will be banned from holding public office or doing business with government, or having any kind of public influence for a time as determined by a judge.

And that’s just a start. I think I wrote at least one column on each of those subjects back in the Bush years. Nobody but my friends Pat and Jared listened back then. Maybe a few more are agreeing with me now. I’m glad. It’s about time. I’m almost hopeful something cool might happen…

See you in the streets.

Artful Rebellion:

The alchemy of tantric-fusion* in 21st Century America

Today we’re going through a transitional phase in human experience where people are less conscious of traditional forms of grammar in their daily routines. That’s because we aren’t as involved with formal reading and writing as we used to be. Listening, speaking and even, of late, recording/viewing has taken precedence. It’s akin to what happened when photography overtook portraiture at the end of the nineteenth century and the way Guttenberg marked the end of oral culture. The difference is the rate at which the change is occurring.

With the advent of Twitter and texting, the evolution of reading-writing language has accelerated in unprecedented ways in an effort to reflect the new media technologies shaping a new form of awareness. Grammars, the ways we describe these new rules of language, are changing at such a rate we can actually observe their evolution and interact with and evolve with them.

The increasing interactivity of media is decreasing the centralization of power, which now evolves too slowly in its administrative dimension to adequately keep up with everything that’s going on. Evolution seams a public-private cooperative affair. Our political-economic systems and cultures may be going through a process of natural de-selection.

Aren’t we forever and always facing extinction? In the end, doesn’t everything succumb to entropy?

The death spasms of authoritarian, which is to say hierarchical political-economies [or the grammars of power] are, unfortunately, too often violent. This conflict between old and new cultures reflects a shift in emphasis away from selfishness and competitive disintegration to a cooperative identity with a “tribal base,” according to Marshall McLuhan, whose work seems to be having something of a revival since its marginalization in the 1980s and 90s. The danger of a tribe-based society, of course, is genocide, where the extermination of weaker tribes is believed integral to the dominant tribe’s security and status. That’s a greed- and fear-oriented evolution and we need to do better than that by being more mindful of our behavior.

In light of this virtually emergent neo-tribalism it might be important to note how much art has in common with shamanism and the way each helps people become more conscious of what they’re doing. Both involve strict ways of freely going about one’s craft, innovating means of becoming the reflection of shifting shapes and changing appearances in an otherwise empty space. I’m thinking in terms of Kurt Vonnegut as a witch doctor…

Perhaps, today’s most relevant art merges private with public knowledge to reveal an evolving psychogeographic system of gist and flow where sentient entities are seduced by their perceived milieux into choosing to believe in their perceptions of what their environments are doing. Maybe art reflects the movement of a public/private mind making love to its surroundings.

But what happens when something new emerges into that environment? How is it incorporated? How is that apparent corporation reflected? How does that reflection appear to a third party? Imagine the art that third party, the next to emerge on the scene, could do? What could it mean to make art that isn’t conceived by you, but still seems to appear only through you? Might that make the artist more than himself? Could self-transcendence happen as a result of his method? What does it feel like going beyond perception? Is it pure vibration? Are there ways of applying language/matter to relay that feeling? Is purity even possible?

I’d like to make three assertions vis-à-vis what I’ll call tantric-fusion art:

1. The desire for significance seams together the pulsating intertext of innovations at the core of any theoretically sufficient art.
2. That artistic invention applies form and content to humankind’s apocalyptic mental existence seems an effect of the artist’s craft.
3. The necessity of art speaks to the otherwise absent meaning—the neverness of truth.

Tantric-fusion art seams reflection to actual feeling throughout the work[s], signifying a specific logical flaw unique to the particular situation as it morphs and evolves through its human cycles.

It’s this flaw that seems the thrill of disequilibria to which one’s response feels automatic.

In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes writes of tmesis as being “…the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives.” He continues, suggesting “the layering of significance” is “an introduction to what will never be written.”

It might also be said the very rhythm of what’s perceived and not perceived creates the pleasure of great art, where the layering of significance is an introduction to an artistic move that will never be made.

It is this everness of never that fills the streets with souls rebelling against uncreative, nay-saying ugliness.

We, too, have a say in what’s beautiful and not.

MIND & POLITICAL-ECONOMY

Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who was also a psychoanalyst, lived in the United States and became known as “the Father of Public Relations.”

Horrified by the atrocities of WWII, particularly the Holocaust, he had an idea of civilization where the common man’s perilous sex drive would be fed and exploited by a corporate elite for its own private economic benefit. To get the full grasp of what Bernays wrought on American culture, watch Adam Curtis’ “The Century of the Self,” a BBC documentary.

But the down and dirty of it is he was the mastermind whose methods produced the spectacle the Situationists rebelled against in the late 60s early 70s, and that seemed to somehow manifest Deleuze and Guattari’s “Body without Organs,” a somewhat older species than Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” but not quite as old as Pierre Tielhard de Chardin’s noosphere. Bernays’ idea was to basically engage in a policy of mass brainwashing as a means to prevent another Holocaust. Centralize power and unite the nation via mass media, but instead of doing it for evil purposes, like the Nazis, do so for good reasons, like making money and opening up the planet for business. And rather than working for just one party, open up the methodology to the entire business class of entrepreneurs with American know-how.

Family, work, consumption would replace race, slavery, genocide. Almost 70 years later and we’re trying to expand the definition of family, put work in the proper perspective and consume less to prevent a resurgence of nationalism and racism, the further acceleration of wage slavery, and the aiding and abetting of suicidal ecocide in the guise of delusional sky god religions. We’ve replaced “colonial” with “corporate” to little advantage.

Some might address this situation by making art that has the same aim as the best journalism, which is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. If it’s true that artists are “the antennae of the race,” as Ezra Pound suggested, and they feel the need to rebel against the humiliations of wage slavery and environmental degradation, etc. & et al, maybe there’s a very deep reason the present situation is no longer tolerable for anyone with an ear or eye or heart for what we bugs are saying. There’s a difference between good and evil that’s self-evident to anyone who’s experienced it.

If art’s truly rebellious, it is so because it reveals a sense of “we are” in a way that isn’t at all proud or falsely humble, but on fire with a need to improve, to reject ugliness and strive after the beautiful.

A revolution, if it were real, might re-cognize beauty as a means of making reality, not as an end in itself. I write, we rebel…to unify and make beautiful what increasingly disintegrates into ugliness.

But fine aspirations deflate behind the masks of their organizations, habits of speech and their evident realization, leaving behind the emptied husks of institutions, conformist discourse and perceived success the way a snake slithers from its skin.

The nihilist wants to clear this debris away so a fresh garden might grow in its place. The nihilist dreams of the day something can be built, when, for a while, people drop their usual intentions for moving and acting, their means of relating, their doings re: toil and relaxation, and feel the pull of the contextualizing topography’s odd magnetism and the actual encounters that might occur there.

Tantric-fusion art involves letting go of one’s self while fully understanding the range of possible behaviors in the responding environment, which seems the very limit of what both mentally attracts and physically repels us. This method might be compared or contrasted to Deleuze and Guatarri’s “Theory of the Derive,” but I’m no expert.

The aim is to transmutate the idiomatic substance of art via the alchemy of tantric-fusion into a new sanity that allows for a more concentrated participation in the world soul’s vitality and experience.

Tantric-fusion plays art in the heart of all primal cultures, springing from the well of life.

etc.

*Tantra’s Sanskrit for "loom” and “warp;" the mixing of two root words that means the stretching, extension or expansion of liberation into enlightenment. It’s a vision with heart that embraces everything with cosmic consciousness. Fusion indicates tantra’s effect on multiple entities that fuse or unite, forming the seams of beautiful minds weaving strands of beautifully networked social minds suturing a beautiful planetary mind stitching itself into a beautifully weaving universal consciousness. Tantric-fusion represents the apparent particle/wavelength duality in quantum physics. Ocean is water, but water is not sea. Art seems the natural effect or response to a perceived tantric fusion stimulus. It’s the activity in which beauty can happen.

Revolutionize the Boot Stamping News Media!

[Note: It’s from watching supposedly liberal shows on MSNBC and observing how, as part of the spectacle, they try to make sense of and commodify what’s happening with the Occupy Wall Street crowd that I’ve come to the sad realization they don’t get what’s happening, that people are beginning to wake up to the fact fundamental systemic change is necessary. This is one example of what I’m talking about. This type of pro-corporate re-framing and de-contextualization of issues prompted me to re-post this rant from seven years ago, which first appeared in Dissident Voice.]

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four


Bob Dylan’s right. The pump don’t work cause the vandals took the handle. That was 40 years ago, but it’s still a contemporary analogy. The "pump" is democracy, the "vandals" are corporations, and "handle," of course, is the free press.

Robert Kane Pappas, director of Orwell Rolls in His Grave, could have used that metaphor in his documentary, if he wished, but didn’t need to. Instead, by mapping how the mainstream news media distort reality by projecting what’s important to their corporate owners, Pappas reveals that American culture has become a world of Orwellian doublespeak in which Big Brother is the political-corporate elite.

But alas, as these first two paragraphs show, the crisis these United States now face is the latest version of the malevolence that has plagued humankind throughout the ages, but most hideously during the last century. Those opposing it struggle against bureaucracy, centralization, privatization, incorporation, colonialism, consumption, hero worship, stupidity, bigotry, anti-intellectualism, bullying, blind emotion, obscene spectacle, nationalism, ubiquitous vanity, greed, the psychopathy of totalitarianism and the neuroses of slavery, wages paid or not. And finally, they—we—struggle against our own goddamned hubris.

We’re now under siege by an enemy from within: "patriotic" right-wing Americans, about 99 percent white, who celebrate all of the above. You know them as the folks who exercise their right to consume without giving anything back to the earth because they’re rugged individuals, who experience road rage while driving monster trucks, revere strength and respect aggression, who value security ahead of freedom, cheer on wars as long as they have the advantage, and masturbate to Hip Hop videos once their "loved" ones have gone to bed. They’re NASCAR and football and hockey fans who vote Republican and identify with the manipulation of speed and the necessity of collision as rudiments of their rough and tumble daily lives, while lacking any sense of the "big picture," opting instead for a literal faith in a Jesus they know nothing about and some dreamy concept of their imminent rapture before the looming apocalypse. These are the ingrates running America against the backdrop of an ever-increasing morbidity rate within the planet’s ecosystem that’s being catalyzed by humankind’s lizard brain impulses toward greed, power and gluttony.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot, there’s also the geo-political realities of peak oil brewing beneath the veneer of the corporate sponsored spectacle called "prime time." There’s a big die-off underway, but it has no entertainment value. It can’t be consumed because it’s consuming us.

The question is: How did America take this insanely selfish hard right turn?

ORWELL

In George Orwell’s time as a writer (1930-50), the global enemy was fascism, particularly Nazism. A world war was waged, and the side that was defending itself won. An aftershock of this war was the emergence of the postmodern military-industrial complex. The premier newsman of the day was Edward R. Murrow.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s 1949 novel, strips naked the duplicity of a meddling, bureaucratized state symbolized by "Big Brother," which has invented "newspeak," a form of language intended to obscure truth. A year later, in "Politics and the English Language," Orwell directly links the corruption of language to authoritarianism. Of course, there’s nothing new under the sun. Confucius, when asked what his first official act would be if he were made emperor of China, answered: "Rectify the language."

Orwell was intellectually and morally offended when confronted with totalitarianism in the form of Stalinist Russia, which he dramatized in his most popular novel among Americans, Animal Farm. But he was also a soldier against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, and was wounded by communists during a power struggle among the antifascist opposition groups. So, yes, his antipathy for communism was personal and well documented. But he had been allied with them in the initial fight against fascism.

According to the New York Times’ original review of Nineteen Eighty-Four, British socialism annoyed Orwell, which the reviewer, not Orwell, described as a "drab gray pall" that had been cast over post-war Britain. It wasn’t the years of bombing, of course, that had caused the malaise, but the political-economic system! The U.K. was rebuilding its war-ravaged cities, and its government took a socialist approach because its shell-shocked, grief-stricken citizenry needed help, and lacked the energy and preternatural desire to be "bastions of freedom," as they had, as people, given up on colonialism. U.S. cities, however, due to their geographical isolation from the rest of the world (with more tombs and monuments, broken hearts, single women, and men with missing limbs and shattered minds being their only palpable testimony to the war that had just occurred), and allegedly having long rebounded from the Great Depression thanks to the "socialist" policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the refined petroleum-, chemical- and nuclear-based military-industrial machine that emerged during the war effort, were booming. Though some "experts" were predicting a return to the Depression as a perverse peace dividend, and so promoted the need to maintain FDR’s social programs, most saw the way to keep going was to keep growing, which meant producing and consuming ever greater quantities of a limited variety of products derived from limited, non-renewable resources. Consumption became patriotic as it drove the defense industry during an arms race with the Godless communists.

The Soviet Union was the needed external enemy of the capitalist west, so federal budgets remained on a wartime footing and strategies for dismantling the New Deal began among the nation’s hawks behind closed doors. To them, the New Deal was socialism, of course, and social-ism was one step away from communism. They worshipped individual-ism, and found the concept of social Darwinism to be self-evident. Privatization, predation, colonialism and empire, thus, were natural, universal urges of all men and shouldn’t be tampered with, despite all the evidence to the contrary among our closest allies. Again, America’s detachment from the rest of the world was the source of its increasingly pathological desire for the "good life."

Though the Times’ 1949 review is favorable, it’s too quick to point out socialism as the primary source of Orwell’s frustration with the British political-economic system’s constitutional monarchy bolstered by socialized industry. Simply put, the American review emphasized that part of the novel which the reviewer perceived as bolstering the cause of capitalism against the godless commies, in other words, confirmed "his" worldview, rather than looking at it as the way such a system works regardless of the ism it claims to be adhering to.

Newspeak, modeled on the rising jargon of the U.K.’s bureaucratic establishment, intended to make sure "there will be no tools for thinking outside the concepts provided by the state," which is controlled by a single party whose membership comprises a small minority of the population. The party’s leadership, of course, is the only "free" segment of society. The masses are slaves of conformity, producing and consuming with no concept of what they’re really doing. The "proles," as Orwell calls them, are led into materialistic wantonness for Big Brother’s benefit. The party leadership, of course, lead "chaste" lives enforced by the "Anti-Sex League." "Thought Police" monitor the most intimate details of party members’ lives using high tech surveillance. What was private is now public. They are free of secrets, existing in non-celebrity fish bowls.

By focusing on a minor figure within the ruling party, a man whose job it is to expunge historical facts from the record that subvert the politically expedient "truth" of the moment, Orwell brilliantly constructs the legalese and methods of what the party has deemed "thought crimes," its devious political-economy and celebration of the Hobbesian worldview of nature being a state of eternal warfare, where life is short, brutish and simple (if you’re weak). The ruling party’s number one purpose, therefore, is to crush any meaningful or true concept of individual identity. By doing so, disorder ends and everything runs efficiently—a well-oiled machine. Say what you will, but your favorite show is always there for you when you need it, just like Mussolini made the trains run on time.

Indeed, power and the desire for order and efficiency lead to the usurpation of humankind’s higher ideals. Absolutely. And which is the most "powerful" nation in the world with the most puffed-up, unrealistic vision of itself and its role in the universe? Simply put, which nation’s citizens are fondest of chanting "We’re number one!" and "U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!?"

Hint: It’s not Canada.

ROLLS

When Dylan wrote the lyrics to Subterranean Homesick Blues between 1963 and 1965, most Americans, himself and his fans particularly, had been deeply affected by global events since 1962.

First was the threat of nuclear annihilation that had been brought home by the Cuban missile crisis, which was nearing its third anniversary. Next was the looming second anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Third was the murder of civil rights activists and church bombings in the South, especially Mississippi and Alabama, which had put the nation on edge. Fourth was America’s growing entanglement in the Vietnam War, thanks to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution concocted by the Johnson administration and authorized by Congress over the previous summer. Fifth was a sea change in American popular culture. Gone were the days of Fabian, Pat Boone and Frankie Avalon. Elvis was starting to make B-movies for the colonel. Rock-n-Roll was becoming more a British art form than American—with one major exception—as America’s stature and popularity suffered around the world. Fear ruled the day, and one had to be a sworn anti-communist to get anywhere in politics, business or the arts. Those people who were sensitive to the above issues and celebrated the fact the world was entering an era of great upheaval, unlike most Americans who just wanted all the crap to stop, were subjected to blacklisting and worse. The military-industrial complex was having its way with the federal budget, treating Congress like a cheap date, and quickly incorporating itself as a political-economic necessity for the nation’s survival. America’s top journalist was Walter Cronkite, who was branded "the most trusted man in America." And what was good for General Motors was good for all of us.

Dylan, like Jack Kerouac a decade before, was rebelling against the closing of the American road; and, like Thoreau ten decades before that, he was raging against the loss of the commons. Dylan was, like America itself, at a transitional moment, on the cusp of either being shackled and caged by the political-economic culture, or escaping from it. The bridge back was gone. New bridges needed building, and a powerful counterculture was born.

In the program of his 1964 Halloween Concert, Dylan had written a message, "Advice for Geraldine on her Miscellaneous Birthday," which open with these caustic commandments and critical response: "stay in line. stay in step. People are afraid of someone who is not in step with them. it makes them look foolish t' themselves for being in step. it might even cross their minds that they themselves are in the wrong step."

Indeed, the times were changing, but few realized just how much, or understood what the changes really were.

The 1970s saw Watergate, the fall of Saigon, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, oil embargoes, deep recession and the huge growth of cable television and the large corporations that profited from it. There was also disco. The decade pretty much sucked.

Suffering from a nationwide malaise, the discontented proles elected Ronald Reagan president, and a new day dawned in America. Especially for the military-industrial complex, which began transforming itself into a postmodern military-petroleum complex, cheered on by a news media that it began buying up in huge chunks.

Most were proud to be an American, where at least they "knew" they were "free." One of the most popular bumper stickers of the decade was, ironically, "I owe, I owe, So off to work I go." Good Americans were not allowed to view themselves as wage slaves, being imbued with Anglo-Puritan values no matter their race, ethnicity or gender. America was allegedly a classless society because anyone could rise to the top and acquire privileges. The separation between rich and poor began expanding, and the corporate media succeeded in getting the masses to not only go along, but cheer the advancements of the upper class. Everyone dreamed of living a lifestyle of the rich and famous, where they would be on TV every day.

Somewhere along the line, these poor, uneducated fools—most of us suckers (we’re born again every minute)—got totally ripped off.

IN HIS GRAVE

Today, a full two decades beyond Orwell’s prophesied year, 1984, we have a war on two abstract nouns—terrorism and evil. We have a corporate government that was able to write and pass a law (the PATRIOT Act), several hundred pages long, allegedly in a matter of days, that the "legislators" never read. It essentially weakened the rights of human beings and increased government power, which is essentially privatized. No child is being left behind and Bill O’Reilly is the nation’s top TV news personality, running a "no spin zone" for cognitively dissonant Neanderthals.

In Orwell Rolls in His Grave, Pappas has provocative answers to questions most people will never hear directed to the corporate news media: Are Americans pathologically detached from reality thanks to corporate manipulation and censorship of news? Isn’t it ironic that in an era when there are more news sources than ever before, regular folks are less and even misinformed because the "news" is owned and operated by fewer and fewer corporate persons with ever more convergent viewpoints?

"We falsely think of our country as a democracy when it has evolved into a mediacracy—where a media that is supposed to check political abuse is part of the political abuse," says Danny Schecter, an author and filmmaker whose latest project is Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception: How the Media Failed to Cover the War on Iraq, one of the documentary’s many talking heads.

Another, Mark Crispin Miller, a media professor at New York University, describes how the corporate media now vie with the government for control over our lives: "They are not a healthy counterweight to government. Goebbels said that what you want in a media system—he meant the Nazi media system—Is to present the ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity."

This practice results in a revolving door between private profiteering and "public service" among the political-economic elite, which is simply accepted as a fact of life among most of the exploited majority, who are dreaming that some day they or their descendants will join the privileged class.

In one of this outstanding film’s truly funny moments, liberal culture critic Michael Moore is delivering an impassioned speech to an unseen, but sympathetic audience. Waving his arms in the air, his face flush with frustration as he imagines what people 100 years hence will think of us while studying the records we’ve left behind, shouts: "The top 1 percent that controls the top 90 percent of the wealth have two major political parties doing their bidding for them, and the other 99 percent have NO political party representing them and NO representation in Congress and yet that 99 percent ran around saying, `we’re free, we’re free, we live in a democracy.’ Ooh, we’re gonna look like assholes."

According to Charles Lewis, director of the Center for Public Integrity, and author of The Buying of the President 2004: Who’s Really Bankrolling Bush and his Democratic Challengers—and What They Expect in Return: "People sense, I think, that the financial elites and the political elites have become one in the same and that the people themselves have no voice in Washington, or in their state capitols, that they are somehow being left behind—The gate keepers of the truth are not the reporters, they are the owners and the lackey editors who work for the owners and they’ll decide what flies and what works and what pays the freight in terms of advertising and the numbers."

"To remove controversy from story selection," says Robert McChesney, "there becomes a tremendous reliance on official sources. It means those people in power, political power or business power are the sort of assignment editors. What they want to talk about becomes news. If they agree they don’t want to debate something—like the CIA—it’s virtually impossible to introduce it as a story. The media companies are extremely successful because they actually control the means by which the public can learn about debates. Exxon would love to own the media, or Philip Morris, so any debate over cigarettes has to go through them."

Of course, corporate lackeys inside government—like FCC Chairman Michael Powell, a Republican and son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, and another Republican FCC commissioner, Kathleen Abernathy, whose Congressional testimony footage Pappas uses brilliantly—are ensuring such corporations as General Electric, which owns NBC, and media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, not only have the right to invest in mass media, but also to expand their ownership and control over public communication without any oversight.

Powell, a clueless beneficiary of nepotism, patronage and phony political affirmative action, tells a committee on Capitol Hill that he has "no idea who is celebrating our decision [regarding the further deregulation of media concentration rules]."

Abernathy was even more insane or disingenuous, whichever you prefer: "What you have to balance is the first amendment rights of the licensees [media corporations] against the rights of the public to have diversity, localism and competition."

Of course, the feelings of corporations as living, breathing legal persons, must be considered. Balancing the "right" of the rich to make an obscene profit from others with the poor’s right to survive according to their own means is only humane, right?

At the FCC’s public announcement of further media deregulation last June, Pappas captures what is perhaps Orwell’s most poignant moment, Democratic commissioner Michael Copps’ dissenting opinion:

"Today the FCC empowers America’s media elite with unacceptable levels of influence over the ideas and information upon which our society and democracy depend.... I see centralization [on further media concentration], not localism. I see uniformity, not diversity. I see monopoly and oligopoly, not competition."

During an interview, Pappas said he was drawn to Orwell for two basic reasons: the first being the way the latest news story, both in 1984 and the present situation, flushes the item preceding it down a memory hole; and the second, of course, being the abuse of language.

By using officially sanctioned "experts" and hiring the most marketable "moderator," corporations are controlling our nation’s public discussion, according to Pappas. Corporations are playing smoke and mirrors with their imagined target audiences, focusing their attention briefly on one product and then another, then more snippets of infotainment until the targeted audience is totally mesmerized and self-deluded. Despite their technical ability to do so brilliantly, corporate journalists (i.e. wage slaves) never connect any dots, as to do so would prove their insanity and unmarketability as "conspiracy theorists."

Pappas monitored corporate journalism, analyzing it closely over an extended period of time while researching the film, and became increasingly alarmed by the current shape and course of America’s ever-changing democracy:

"Watching the news over the last several years more carefully, I realized that complicated stories or concepts are boiled down to short `tag lines’ so the public's understanding of it is diminished. This euphemistic use of language turns everything into either a two-word marketing phrase, something is named the opposite of what it means. By lying first, or misnaming something first, you can define how people think about it, and quite strikingly.

"It’s so ubiquitous—the mass news media, and the mass media in general—that the public consciousness really is affected. It influences the way people look at things; it’s incredible how confused they are. The general public only hears around the edges of stories. They have the collective ability to remember what happened six months ago, but the ability to make any kind of connections seems to be diminished.

"When watching TV news, you notice there are polls for everything. We hear about these things called focus groups. The way they sell us anything—which car we’re going to buy, what cereal we eat—the same exact techniques are used for politics, and for grouping the population very specifically, like you’re trying to sell them something. You massage it with the right words and focus-group those words. You can see how dangerous that is when it’s purposely used to manipulate a population."

In Orwell, Pappas shows how he came to this conclusion, interviewing industry insiders and scholars, and interspersing their running commentary with documentary footage focusing on the complicity of the corporate media with a government that’s doing their bidding.

"People don’t understand how overwhelmingly important that point is," he said.

In the film, Pappas shows a cross-ownership chart of media, and how five or six corporations own literally everything. The mass media is an oligopoly and its strongest players are trying to monopolize the market, which it already is in far too many cities and towns across America.
Media corporations feel that the public airwaves are up for sale, just like everything else.
When are we, the flesh and blood human beings of America and the world, going to say enough is enough?

Gimme Back My Handle

We need to revolutionize the boot stamping corporate news media before anything else can be accomplished. After all, the role of the news media is to educate people so they can behave as responsible citizens in a functioning democracy.

Just ask Rep. Bernie Sanders, Independent-Vermont and author of Outsider in the House, who ominously tells the camera that we "have reached the stage in American politics where the issue is not a debate over ideas. The issue is whether ideas at all matter."

In most corporate newsrooms, those who think ideas are important are an increasingly marginalized minority. They are being driven out of their jobs by their corporate employers’ pursuit of ever-higher profit margins.

A personal anecdote: I used to be a reporter/columnist for a small town, corporate-owned newspaper. I was very outspoken and my skeptical eye toward those in power infected some of my co-workers. For a short while, we did a good job covering issues like racism, nepotism and other forms of public corruption. Circulation began rising, but alas, the business community rebelled. Increased circulation means nothing if your pool of targeted advertisers won’t do business with you. So, being a corporation, and bound by law to turn a profit for shareholders, the newspaper must change its editorial content to please the chamber of commerce.

Employees who want to investigate injustice are told to shut up or go away. Some choice. Unfortunately, there are hundreds if not thousands of unpaid journalists out here who are just like me.

As I noted earlier, the tradition that Orwell Rolls in His Grave adheres to is one that rebels against the elimination of other possibilities and better alternatives, which rages against the mechanical privatization and development of an Earth commonly owned by all of its inhabitants—from the tiniest microbe to Gaia herself.

The counterculture that was launched by the Beats and the events of the 1960s is due for resurrection. We’ve spent our three days in Hell staring down the Beast, and have survived to bear witness to it.

Our season is arriving.

ONTOLOGY OF VOICE?

I don't think of my synapse metaphor as dis-embodied any more than the electric signal between neurons [in the synapse] has escaped the neurological system, or has escaped my body, but rather in terms of spandrels, which is a cognate term between evolution and architecture, a branching off that's still attached, signifying an evolving complexity that produces arbitrary forms which seem to serve no purpose in the overall systemic structure of its native environment....analogous to the human mind being a byproduct of evolutionary forces that seam a “spandrel” which seems to be evolving the means of linking up with other “spandrels,” finding a way to make themselves functional within the overall life system, which somehow becomes dependent on spandrels seaming spandrels at a particular point in imagined time. …the struggle is to overcome the babel...

SMOKE ON KINDLE!

My first novel, Smoke, has joined my second novel, So It Seams, on Amazon's Kindle. I may need to get one of these doohickeys before long...

Roy Buchanan, Roy's Bluz (Live 1976), Austin

I first heard of Roy Buchanan from my late friend, Kevin Henning, back in the mid-1980s. We spent hours listening to Buchanan play through the Peavy speakers in his basement. I've never heard anyone play guitar like this, and I'm always surprised by how few younger musicians have ever even heard of him. Buchanan should go viral among guitar players, in my opinion.

Also, check out "The Messiah Will Come Again." I flashback to driving along the Niagara Escarpment one afternoon in the 1980s...this on with snow blowing over the road. It would make a great soundtrack for a film...a sci-fi spaghetti western, perhaps.

THE 10 LEVELS OF OOPS: THE ROLE OF ERROR IN THE UNCERTAIN AESTHETIC

An anxiety arising from constant uncertainty seems to be an intrinsic element in the emotional tide of people these days. Therefore, it seems to me, an artist might try to make an aesthetic of uncertainty as a way of inoculating one’s psyche against it, much like the way a vaccine works. If one can begin seeing the beauty and even humor in knowing you don’t actually know what’s going on, the anxiety slides away. If anything, that’s been a big part of my fiction: An attempt to play with the fire that seems both solid and vaporous.

If I must be Mr. Jones, I don’t want to lose my sense of humor about it.

One of the key elements, it seems to me, in dealing with this uncertainty-driven anxiety is to examine the errors we’re all constantly making. To begin this examination, I’ve come up with 10 levels of oops:

1. Premeditated with a good, yet surprising result.
2. Premeditated with a surprisingly bad result.
3. Intentional, but not premeditated with a good result.
4. Intentional, but not premeditated with a bad result.
5. Happily unintentional, resulting from a conscious reflex [one’s aware of it as it happens].
6. Sadly unintentional, resulting from a conscious reflex.
7. Happily unintentional, resulting from an unconscious reflex [one’s unconscious of it as it happens].
8. Sadly unintentional, resulting from an unconscious reflex, yet totally unaware that anything’s happened.
9. The oblivious, resulting from an unconscious reflex action to unconsciously perceived stimuli.
10. The nonplussed/uncertain, resulting from a chaotic mishmash of conscious and unconscious, premeditation and reflex.

It seems to me that the last is the most common, but that’s what I’m most aware of as a conscious human being. When you think about it, number nine greatly outnumbers number 10, perhaps by the same ratio as the numbers differentiating conscious from unconscious actions. It also seems to me one might try this as a loose framework for writing comedies of errors, something I’ve been experimenting with a little, but not too much…yet.

Please comment if you’re so inclined. None of this is set in stone and I just wrote it down longhand off the top of my head this morning while defragging.

Anyway…what do you think?

TALKING WITH JARED: insight incite in-sight in cite

Me to Jared Schickling
6/9/10

I never really understood fully what So It Seams is "about" until the last 48-72 hours. Cleaning out the verb “to be,” alternative use of quotation marks that constantly bring into question the reality/actuality of other named realities, etc., has led me to the clearer message/vision my subconscious mind was writing all along. Typed below are a few things I've written down longhand that I think may be "necessary" to a more pleasurable reading today as opposed to tomorrow...

Please indulge this because I don't intend to discuss this book or Smoke much more after this. I'm taking a very lengthy hiatus from writing. I feel like being very quiet and returning to Nature. I'm also sending this to myself, saving it in my "one of those" file...

Anyway...

If, in some magical year I find myself working adequately on three different levels, each dimension comprising four parts, dimensions vertically and aspects horizontally arranged, yet visible diagonally in multiple directions and patterns with possibly everything seaming itself to potentially perceivable actualities, I would make these things—my word-beings—visible as phase space trajectories careening through and across and over and under and between and among my various event horizons...which I call "texts." The "reader" then functions as their black hole...the writer-text's death/birth...gateway to life...another mind. The page is a membrane of the black hole that is you, reading...

You are me living that situation, and I am you living this one, meaning the apparently private verbness of existing.

Heaven might be in black and white, a geometric humanity in Nature, approaching the fog under the chaos of striated angelic limbs...a moist vague distance inviting...whereas Hell might seem the essence of feeling stuck in this geometry, worshipped for your absence of motion, your frozen solidity where everything seems logically lit from below; also lacking sine, cosine and tangent...no ships on the horizon.

SIS is another world, an alternate-adjacent universe sharing a membrane with what we perceive as their universe or world. Its existence is downstream from its bifurcation from this apparent world [hence the odd use of quotation marks and italics]. It's a time and place in which, at least, some "humans" are beginning to evolve in a direction shared more with bonobos than chimpanzees. What is absent from their "sex" is "human" emotion...the word-beings are chimps crossing over or going under to the more beautiful essence of their inner bonobo. Its world emerged or bloomed from Smoke.

The fundamental aesthetic, its underlying principle, seems uncertainty; and a kind of polisexuality or pansexuality promising a different kind of certitude.

Jared Schickling to me
6/9/10

OK, I'll indulge it, now. First thought best thought, as you say.

First, the thing recognizable as "for us tomorrow" is, to certain ones, today's pleasure.

What you write here is readable, successfully rendered, in SIS, as well as in Smoke. The intentions of your novels are not opaque. For the interested reader of your novels it's less issues of "getting it" than....

"If, in some magical year I find myself working adequately on three different levels, each dimension comprising four parts, dimensions vertically and aspects horizontally arranged, yet visible diagonally in multiple directions and patterns with possibly everything seaming itself to potentially perceivable actualities, I would make these things—my word-beings—visible as phase space trajectories careening through and across and over and under and between and among my various event horizons...which I call 'texts.'"

I hear context, structure, situation, frames, angles of perception, and any number of these occurring as the singularity or plurality of any other singularity or plurality. Relations and constitutions. The flux of that.

"Heaven might be in black and white, a geometric humanity in Nature, approaching the fog under the chaos of striated angelic limbs...a moist vague distance inviting...whereas Hell might seem the essence of feeling stuck in this geometry, worshipped for your absence of motion, your frozen solidity where everything seems logically lit from below; also lacking sine, cosine and tangent...no ships on the horizon."

"Logically lit from below" : "the earth is my body, my head's in the stars " (Maude to Harold)

The structural aspect of being—and the structure of collapsing and reforming and collapsing, too—alongside, complicit with, the experiential. We are certainly in sight of romance (the romantic imagination not the pretty thing we think—shadows, nightmares, Coleridge's hacking cough, Ruskin's Scandinavian Grotesque) when talking "essence."

"The 'reader' then functions as their black hole...the writer-text's death/birth...gateway to life...another mind. The page is a membrane of the black hole that is you, reading..."

Your texts invite and depend upon our participation. The idea is not new, of course. Your terms and way of describing the process, degrees determined by the context(s) in which the terms appear, are, perhaps. If this is true, then how are we talking more than aesthetics, at least in terms of the text to be written on the page? (No derision; perhaps aesthetics deserves more than we're prone to allow it.) More broadly, are we talking about the death of the text—an unheard of idea—dissolving the boundaries between text and reader and world (and for the hell of it, author) BACK into a space in which each actually involves and looks to the other in order that....

What I'm suggesting is that you describe, insightfully, in addition to your own concerns in your writing and reading, my own. And, as the above suggests, I'm inclined to see that description giving something not new. The structure of the thought seems almost ancient. It's the lyrical interference—not the lyric I, but lyrical interference—the lushness of your sentences, some have said, and I'd add, the particularity of your terms—that somehow recasts the old terms in ways that seem accurate and useful. If this is true, then I'm curious to know where you go from there. For me, this rather obviously turns into a question of song—a catch-all category for such phenomena as myth—more than what is it, why does it persist? How, more precisely? (perhaps you've already described it! Elliptical poetics—not mere solipsism) It's not a human failing as much as it's human being. Why and how are stories still so freakin necessary? This seams a reflection of your heaven-hell question (I'm calling it a question)

Chuck Richardson to Jared
6/10/10

You got it. And where do I take it from here? The very first sentence of Objective 13: The Panspermian Apocalypse:

“I am the Messiah...”

The rest will be a deconstruction of a messiah complex to an absolutely absurd level. I'm going to be totally fucking serious. The more serious I am, the funnier it will be. And in the end, the reader will have laughed his or her way through a cosmic journey and say, you know what, "he" just might be the Messiah, but then again there's no "he," no "Messiah," and that's the messianic energy...in other words the text sets you free...laughtrature as Federman said...i don't give a damn about originality per se so much as trust it, know it will come out in the due course of things. the process one might concentrate on hardest is how to stay out of the way and not worry about saying anything yourself.

I'm relieved you get it. Anyway...

Jared Schickling to me
6/10/10

I think you're right on in the process, your closing remark. I think the "originality" does come out, on its own. Without revisiting the reasons for saying so, the terms in which you house the old ideas make for new terms. Specifically, I see the relegation of all to word-beings and texts as a dehumanizing practice – while the life prioritized and artistically discovered / rendered in the nonhuman (speaking animals, shapeshifting rocks, unpronouncable rivers, interstellar gases) revises our understanding of the "human" via the fact of the text(s), bringing the whole thing full-circle. Something like that.

It would be absurd. (in Harold and Maude, they use the word "absurd" twice in the first twenty minutes; saw it the other night, so can't help myself)

The way you describe Messiah sounds like Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Which, I think, is the "upward" way of dehumanizing. You either see through to "god is dead," or you wind up a Nazi, or squeaky clean in the Clearing's dasein. Forms of its truth's risk.

Chuck Richardson to Jared
6/11/10

you're right, though i prefer the term "inhumanize" or “transhuman” [in Robinson Jeffers’ sense] over "dehumanize." for some goddamned reason i have a need to overturn or underturn or just downright confuse the "common" "human" definitions for "human." To "de-humanize" seems to carry too much ugly baggage. Whereas "transhumanize" seems a more accurate description of the self situated where ever. Nothing original in this. Jeffers and Gary Snyder are where I first came across this "etymology" or whatever, somewhere in that neighborhood. It's not so much about humiliating homo sapiens sapiens as reminding him-her s/he's not the center of the universe so much as a symptom of it...in that we think and make things we are symptoms of God...As in Rumi, perhaps, It's mind seaming its mind minding Its seams sensing Itself as "I," him, her, me, you, us, It...swirling into perceivably Arabesque patterns displaying recursive symmetries across scale, not only making language possible but necessary, essential...part of the divine vibration that makes us feel something. And before Jeffers and Snyder I think Thoreau and Melville and Homer knew it, too. i think it's very "greek," pre-socratic. heraclitus. fire and numbers...mayan, shinto...egyptian, etc. & et al. [not of indo-european origin]...

you're right in part about zarathustra. i finally got through it all and the only way i could was deciding to laugh at nietzsche, or maybe with him, i'm still conflicted over that. it truly is quite "aryan" and i can see how his greedy idiot sister and Nazis abused it. it must be read as satire, as must Sade, or one falls into a pit of revulsion re: the "author." at least i do. the better the author the more i want to kick the shit out of him or her, as the case may be. i feel the same derision toward thus spake as i did atlas shrugged when i read that 25 years ago...

re: Objective 13's "I am the messiah," think of ignatius reilly on steroids with cancer, three stooges pornography for the chirren, a queer teddy roosevelt driving home the great white empire...all of them echoing Quixote on a "dead souls" mission across time and space...episodic pointilism...minimalism...connect-the-dot quasi-neo-naturalism, where the sounds of sentences in a paragraph seem like unseen birds calling in the forest...

what do i fucking know? i only have a bachelor's degree from a public university. i work in a group home. i live in lockport. my name is chuck...

Jared Schickling to me
6/11/10

THE BIG QUESTION

There’s a mouse living @
home behind the dials, inside our stove
Because the stovetop’s where we keep
leftover bacon grease

SOUL SUCKING HEADPHONE

But me modifier poorly no
uns, enduring this
Voice in my ear
both ears, no credit

MEASURED PROGRESS

For getting the right answer
the wrong way, they’re 6th graders
It’s much easier to find idiots among poets than
Idiots

Jared Schickling to me
6/12/10

lest you assume the worst about the poem forwarded, i started a new job recently, at Measured Progress, scoring 6th grade tests from Massachusetts.

Chuck Richardson to Jared
6/13/10

No. Not assuming anything. I like them. They make quick points. Great starters for good conversations. You make enough of them you can organize them into a big picture. In fact, I think it's very important to be able to just come right out and say it the way sixth graders can, getting it right the wrong way. These tiny pieces each have much to say, and if poetry is to have any "social" value today I think it has to fit into the openings of whatever's left...something quickly consumed giving the consumer a dose of profundity in their otherwise harried life...And that's not a put down. I'd love it if my best sentences appeared on the sides of buses and trains around the world, and people without thinking about it read them and began thinking a certain way...judo against the corporate structure...make the system of signs consume something that purges it of its bathwater, bucket by bucket, pail by pale, impaling itself, etc., as millions of people say to themselves "I am the messiah."

No, good work. And I'm glad you've got some income.

I'm very much looking forward to my road trip to Maine this summer. I've begun mapping it out and it's one of the main drives I've always planned on taking [sic]...along Lake Ontario to St. Lawrence River over to Vermont across northern Vermont along Quebec border to Maine then through the heart of the state southeastward. No tolls, no highways, 608 miles, 13-14 hours drive time. I plan to drive about four hours a day then stop at a bed & breakfast and relax and explore. Then when I get to your place I'll do the "The Maine Woods" thing, pretend I'm Thoreau, heal wounded moose, grieve life on Ktaadn, etc. & et al., and see you guys a bit, too. But no, this IS the vacation I wanted...that I need, a seam of necessity...

The deep contradiction of someone like me with my beliefs taking a "road trip" while the Gulf of Mexico gradually transmogrifies into a tar pit is not lost on me, nor is the fact I gain great pleasure from anticipating my gleeful participation in the ongoing ecocide, perversely toying with that which I'm killing...all so I can fucking write better before I die and become nothing again...big deal, eh?

It seems being alive is perverse, a required perversion...being truly conscious is knowing one's self a pervert, that is a perverter of what was into what is and might well be some day...

Final thought: Most Americans are not smarter than a fifth grader, but you're grading sixth graders. You must be pretty smart, relatively speaking...;)

Ron Paul, Libertarianism & Corporate Personhood

My friend, the "Renaissance Man*" Mike Bermel Jr., told me at his high school graduation party last weekend that I had "lied" to him about Ron Paul because I said Ron Paul was a corporate libertarian, which meant he wasn't really a populist since a corporate libertarian works against the liberties of flesh and blood persons. In other words, Ayn Rand-fan Ron Paul wasn't the kind of populist libertarian Mike thought he was in my opinion. I re-iterated this position, but Mike remained skeptical, so I decided to look up, once again, Paul's position on corporations.

Here's an excerpt from my e-mail to Mike today:

"In case you haven't done it yet, I've done it for you. I Googled 'ron paul corporate personhood,' and this is what came up:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1264&bih=702&q=ron+paul+corporate+personhood&aq=4&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=ron+paul+corpor

"If he's against corporate personhood, why the silence? What game is Ron Paul playing?

"I figure if I simply ask questions, it will be hard for you to accuse me of lying...which is a redundancy ignorant of the writer's paradox: 'all writers are liars; I am a writer.' The moment one speaks, one lies. Some Buddhists consider all language profane. Remember the Buddha's "Flower Sermon." That's why it's almost impossible to speak sufficiently when discussing politics, which is a charade of lies. All serious conversation must, therefore, be blatantly abstract, which is to say intellected [sic] fantasy...and to the actual point from something real, which is to say adequately mental [reality and actuality are two different things, reality being of one's mind and actuality being of things in themselves; reality, therefore, is always an opinionated clusterfuck of conspiratorial fictions manifesting themselves in the political-economy, aesthetics, etc. & et al]. The best we can do these days is 'keep our eyes wide as the chance won't come again...'"

Nonetheless, the question remains: Does Ron Paul Value the Freedoms of Flesh & Blood Humans More Than The Liberties of Corporations? What's the answer?

I'm not sure.

*Mike Jr. played saxophone, drums and guitar with his Dad's band, The Frame, Saturday, as well as performed lead vocals on a Tragically Hip tune whose title I forget [about cleaning an orca tank at Marineland]. He's going to college to study computers. He's fascinated by physics. Loves literature. Is leaning toward Buddhism. Seems spiritually and philosophically inclined...outgoing and very, very curious. The list goes on...

So It Seams on Kindle

Geoffrey Gatza, publisher of BlazeVox[books], made the exciting announcement today that 30 BlazeVox titles are now available on Kindle, with many more going up soon. He also said titles will be appearing soon on iTunes, whatever that is...

Among the titles offered: First Baby Poems by Anne Waldman, Slaves to Do These Things by Amy King, To Be Sung by Michael Kelleher, The Carcasses: A Fable by Raymond Federman, Secrets of My Prision House by Geoffrey Gatza, For the Ordinary Artist Short Reviews, Occasional Pieces and More by Bill Berkson.

And oh yeah, So It Seams is one of the 30 titles. You can get it here.