The night, its graceless solitude

Muffles the hills, quietens the peaks.  

Cold lies on the desert

a comforter that kills.

Animals take to holes

entered through cactus hollows

lined with needles and spider silk

a welcome refuge from dark air

and the wet noses of coyotes. 

Only fire will suffice

keep at bay the black

midnight nothingness 

make animals mind

with fear and revery. 

winter

"And I dread winter because it's so cozy."

                       --Rimbaud

It's very cold now.  I'm not so sure if it's that I hate the cold, or that the cold frightens me.  When I was young I loved winter.  I loved the bracing icy creep through your clothes into your bones. Now, as an old man, it makes my bones stiff. 

When you're old your core fights at the creepy cold, like an old cornered dog wheels and charges something younger, stronger, gaining fast; angry at being bothered; scared as hell that it sees your weakness.  

Only one thing to do: dig in deep.  Lay in the winter produce (roots mostly), pile high the quilts, and warm one's self by the fire of the digital cable.  Oh, and lots of wine.  

Soon it will be spring.  Then warmth will gradually return, wake everything up, rouse us heavy sleepers.  But it's only a brief respite.  Any more, the cold grows, taking what's warm and making it inert.  Longer and longer; the warmth shorter and shorter. It cannot be that long before cold will out, and take all the world.  

The view above is from my front porch at dusk.

America is a police state

We live in a police state.  Recently, I was returning home from a road trip.  I was driving down the interstate when I saw a cop coming up fast behind me, lights ablaze.  He pulled me over and made me get out of my car.  What was my crime?  He said he pulled me over for "riding in the left lane".  Riding in the left lane? What's that? Well, he told me that it was illegal to drive in the left lane of a four lane interstate unless I was passing.  

I have never heard of such a law in my state.  He did not give me a ticket.  He just wanted to pull me over and look at what I had and see if he could come up with an excuse to search my car.  He just wanted to harass me.  

He let me go when he saw that I was slim pickings.  Although I looked like some sort of alternative lifestyle-lovin' Grateful Dead listening heathen (you know, the type he might have been able to roust a joint off of), turned out I was just a boring middle-aged geek.  

Deal is, if he had wanted to he could have made me pull out all my stuff and then look through it.  He could have taken any cash I had and impounded it and made me prove in court that it was not the proceeds of a drug deal before I could get it back (before I could use my money--my fucking money!).  He could have done anything he wanted to do, and gotten away with it, because he's the Regulator who works for the Oligarchs who run this misbegotten vomit-chunk of a country. 

Don't think for a minute that you live in a free country, buster.  The powers that be have you locked down.  You are owned, you are a serf tied to a feudal lord--a bank--and circumscribed in everything you do by a sheriff.  You have the freedom to obey.  Please feel free to worship at the altar of American individualism--bring those credit cards--while taking great care not to make too much of a stir.  

The State tells you what you can or cannot do in the privacy of your own home, whom you can and cannot marry, what you and your doctor can decide about your healthcare. Buy cigarettes that kill you while enriching multinational companies?  Fine.  Smoke cannabis you grew in your backyard? Uh, we gotta problem with that, buddy.  

You are being watched.  They listen to your phone calls, and profile you as you drive down the street.  Step too far out of line and there will be trouble.  

The problem with real freedom is that it requires tolerance of a good deal of chaos, and people just don't like chaos.  If you had real freedom, you'd have people saying what they really think, marrying whomever they want to marry, behaving in ways that make "good people" uncomfortable.  Freedom (chaos) makes people anxious, and the herd hates nothing so much as anxiety.  Better to forgo freedom in exchange for order, and let the State hire a bunch of Regulators to keep us all in line.  

There used to be a bumper sticker that said "America, Love It Or Leave It".  My dream is to leave it.   

Funny

Religion is such a funny thing.  By accident of history what was once a small Jewish cult came to conquer the world.  We could just as easily be worshiping Baal, or Zeus, or some serpent deity.  And don't think the holier-than-thou serpent deity people would not be just as smug, and arrogant, and odd (all gathering in herds to celebrate individualism and pray for the poor souls who turn away from the great serpent god and so who will rot in hell forever) as any of these little baby Jesus people are.  God save me from monotheists, especially the white ones who drive giant trucks and sup at the Apple bee's (they actually seem to have power).   Lord deliver me from the mewling hordes and the Hummers in which they transport themselves. 

Why must our culture have at its base a proud anti-intellectualism?  One supposes that fear of critical thinking is a cultural state of nature--a default position for any culture in a complex world--but how can America hold itself up as some sort of moral exemplar when we are one of the cultures that is most antithetical to freedom and liberty.  We are a police state, where you are free to follow all the rules by which we circumscribe your behavior. You are free to spend yourself into debt. You are free to worship little baby Jesus and the American flag.  And there your freedom ends.  

Here's a hint: you don't measure liberty by how many people you can get to go along with the same world view, you measure it by how many people who don't follow the dominant world view you are able to tolerate.  America: not much liberty.  

Oh, but I started off talking about religion.  Well, little baby Jesus.  

Funny, just not ha-ha funny. 

Clairwil

The lovely Clairwil stopped by for a chat and hammock swing in second life.  Clairwil is an artist of incredible depth and frightening creativity.  Creator of House of Debauch Comic; playwright; photographer; web designer; and collector of old bones.  Gothic has become trite, an affectation kids pick up at the mall, but Clairwil came from ancient black German woods, where wolves dine on children, and only a pig in a house of brick can survive the night.  

We are war criminals

We are a nation of war criminals.  Each and every one of us.  We have tolerated--nee, celebrated--the formal use of sadism in advancing what we childishly presume to be our nation's interest.  We have allowed human beings to be placed in jails and prisons and torture chambers, with no recourse for appeal to law or justice.  We have permitted those who act in our names to torture fellow human beings and deprive them of even the most basic human rights.  And yet it is we who become self-righteous when other countries raise these issues with us.  We say "we are America, and because America is, per se, a good and holy place--right?--then anything America does is good and just and holy".  What a lot of idiots we all are, what a bunch of louts and dolts.  If there really is any sort of divine being, then we should be very, very frightened, because the final justice that awaits all of us when judgment time finally comes will make the brutality we choose to inflict on others seem like mere child's play ('As flies to wanton boys....').  God will have sport with us, and then have more sport with us (the Eternal Recurrence) and we'll hate it, for the rest of eternity.

Television

Television is one of several addictions, but perhaps the dearest one of all.  Television is to baby fatt what fire was to inchoate man: a place to lose one's self in revery.  Baby fatt like fire.  Real good.  Bachelard understood the psychodynamics of fire, understood that the imagining consciousness is fire that produces poetry (warmth and light) from language (kindling).  Fire transforms the world--from one thing into another--as imagination transforms language, from words (basically, a mechanism for counting) to revery.  

In yesterday's Times there was a review of a new biography of Hopkins.  Apparently not a very good biography, which is too bad because I would surely love to read a good one.  Then again, the problem with any attempt at biography of Hopkins might be that so much of his life was lived on the interior that no "other" could ever document it in any adequate sort of way.  The nice part of the review was its quote of Hopkins: 

                   

                          birds build--but not I build; no, but strain,

              Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.

              Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

All the biography one really needs.  And lord aren't my roots dry too. 

Downtown Ravello

Late afternoon in Ravello.  The tourists are clearing out, and the piazza fills with couples and kids.  One sits at a cafe, drinking the house wine, feeling the warmth of the sun radiate off the white stone.  It's still too early for dinner.  Maybe a stroll.  Then dinner.  Then another stroll.  Finally, bed.  

Interesting thing about christians

Interesting thing about christians: they control the world and yet their entire faith is built upon perpetuating their sense of persecution.  Their faith arose as a Jewish sect that was being suppressed by the Romans, and then they became the Romans, yet never internalized the fact that they were now in charge.  Their Savior taught peace and reconciliation, but they practice oppression and confrontation.  Where the Nazarene preached love, they preach hate.  All with no sense whatsoever of irony, no awareness of their own bad faith.  Too bad the Romans were unsuccessful in snuffing them out.

Watch your back

Watch your back around christians.  They're mean, vicious creatures who feed their hate of "the other" with paranoia.  They lie and cheat and pity you the whole time they're stabbing you in the back.  They feed at troughs of cream gravy and corn syrup. They drive giant cars and laugh at those who walk or bicycle.  They believe themselves to be morally superior even as they destroy the planet.  They hate you.  They hate baby fatt.  Their faith is hollow at its core, and deep within themselves they sense this, and so they strike out at everyone around them with judgmentalism.  They are the greatest force of evil in the world. 

Twin Pillars of Death

Christianity and capitalism are the twin pillars of much of the evil in the world today.  Even those things that are evil that are not directly related to Christianity or capitalism (e.g., communism, Islam) are a reaction to Christianity and capitalism.  Middle eastern monotheism (start with Judaism but take out all the hard parts), and avarice made philosophy, now that's a formula for the better of humanity if ever there was.  Amerika the bright and shining lie is what happens when you mix the two:  the obese masses making just enough working at Walmart to buy their corn and grease products at Walmart, up until, that is, their obesity finally lands them in the hospital, then too bad, no benefits, while the elite send their personal shoppers to Neiman's, and the wannabes crawl the mall dreaming of third world pedicures and enough "stuff" to fill even a McMansion's closets.  The madding herd.  The subjugation of differences and individuality.  Mere consumption glorified and made holy: now called Christianity and capitalism.  

Sunday Morning

"...brings the dawn in...."  There is a God: his name is Chaos.  He is the reason our lives come undone, pull apart at the seams.  

America the Problem

• We're a nation of hucksters and whores, of used car salesmen and thieves who always have a shoeshine and a smile.  We love liars and charlatans.  It was inevitable that a nation peopled with the refuse of other nations would come to worship mediocrity.  We live on corn syrup and fake cheese.  Everywhere I go I see the fatted masses waddling around in their sweats and flip flops, engorging themselves while thinking themselves holy, entitled.  We deserve all the misery that awaits us.  

baby fatt

One day baby fatt went for a walk.  Walking was his body in motion. Stasis not in darkness but on an animal trail, sylvan secret and lush.  Conscience interrupted, made still his creeping hand. Then he awoke: socialism is the only political solution, everything else is profit through war.  God is his writing awful, something to distribute in 101 in memograph: here's how to be trite. 

The problem with night and politics.

Utterly maudlin.  Too stupid to say.  The worst of Romanticism, the idiocy of the modern age.  God gives us torture, and sentiment.  And idiots like me affirm and worship it. 

baby fatt so loved the world

he gave himself each day.  entertaining was hard, but one must toil as god wills, and so baby fatt so toiled in the fields and ditches of the city, that he became inebriated with the love of flesh, entranced by solitude.  sacrifice be damned, the true way is the way of all flesh.  media as smoke, stupefaction.  rimbaud: "we are slaves, let us not curse life."