Thursday, January 30, 2020

Journal Entry from 1/13/20



@ Battlecat, Monday, Democracy Now! on the radio: J.P. Morgan-Chase lends millions to oil/gas companies to build pipeline in Minnesota across Native farmland, and as wildfire continues to rage in Australia, global warming. Armed aggressors meet peaceful protesters on the plain. “When nothing is done, nothing is left undone,” but irreligious, amoral, and warlike entities continue to proliferate out of fear, anger, and hatred, believing perhaps in transhumanism – that through technology somehow one might live forever in this existence, or that loyalty to the establishment power-elite minority might grant access to comfort, favor, and luxury, or that this is a ‘sick, sad world’ or alternately a world whose abundance is eternally exploitable to those with gumption to extract its black, tarry bounty for firing up the rattling engine that foreshadows massacre, and somehow one will remain untargeted by dualistic forces abalance.  It’s starting to rain. Aramark comes to collect dirty towels, replace with clean ones.  A PT-91 Twardy rumbles down the main landing strip to a vision of unusurpable peace.  A regular menace to society, a Great Pyrenees German Shepherd hybrid eating sticks for ruffage while his owner smokes fags for sustenance. A Mexican with a green Skoal cap marches in, moving quickly, slowly dying to the tune of factory farm combines. There’s the notion that the industrious will has the ability to overpower obstacles or sneak by in camouflage.  Deer moving in shadows of night move stealthily, munch grass, are unobtrusive, a gunshot rings out, but the buck is dead before it’s startled. Meat for a month plus blanket. Split logs for a day, a month of heat and fuel for baking. Simplicity. Boredom seems to be a major obstacle for many, maybe two months for marijuana. Ideas flower. Many mundane tasks are made more manageable, enjoyable even. Many more creative, fearless, and hyperactive publish, produce, and compose; lecture, climb mountains, and scale walls. Across the street from the lumberyard where contractors collect materials collected from the forest, straightened, smoothed, and treated, ready for erection.  Imagining the hotness of now homeless nymphs, now psychotic Jennifer’s who can’t escape black mold, the aging process.  “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” (“The Dark Knight”) especially where beauty is connected to conceit, that is, how one sees oneself in the mirror or abstractly in society amongst pretty peers one happens to like seeing oneself around. Lesbians exit, one more androgynous than the next, more mannish, into a Subaru, love makes the machine come and go. On the parkway, in the backseat, two children lick each other’s lips, nipples, and labia, age not directly related to maturity with refusal to ‘grow-up’ because who would want to ‘become accustomed to’ the world as it is presented to us? With every daily worst-case-scenario broadcast on the news agoraphobics eternally justified by anchors become Anchoritic, stay close to home, hardly ever go out, worship the cat-headed goddess of crafting, biscuit eucharist, body transubstantiated fat, antennae steeple, private chapel.  It’s not that society has become godless, but that the Pantheon has multiplied, every logo a graven image, every materialist’s list of materials ever expanded, every obscure belief has its own faith, and every faith has its deities, rituals, and artifacts of a specific sense of superiority.  @ Westville, super-church of Oprah on TV, a sold-out stadium full of believers in the motivational force that encourages those of the super-congregation to get up off their seats to dance and jump in place in order to feel the transference of energy, dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins secreted that express the general connectedness of all things as professed by The Secret!

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Spinoza Poems


Las traslucias manos del judio
Labran en la penumbra los cristales
Y la tarde que muere es miedo y frio.
(Las tardes a las tardes son iguales.)
Las manos y el espacio de jacinto
Que palidece enel confin del Ghetto
Casi no existen para el hombre quieto
Que esta sonando un claro laberinto.
No lo turba la fama, ese reflejo
De suenos en al sueeno de otro espejo
Y el temeroso amor de las doncellas.
Libre de la metaphor a y del mito,
Labra un arduo o cristal: el infinito
Mapa de Aquel que es todas sus estrellas.

“Spinoza.” Borges

The Jew’s hands, translucent in the dusk,
Polish the lenses time and again.
The dying afternoon is fear, is
cold, and all afternoons are the same.
The hands and the hyacinth – blue air
That whitens at the ghetto edges
Do not quite exist for this silent
Man who conjures up a clear labyrinth,
Undisturbed by fame – that reflection
Of dreams in the dreams of another
Mirror – or by maidens’ timid love.
Free of metaphor and myth, he grinds
A stubborn crystal: the infinite
Map of the one who is all His stars.

Translated by Richard Howard & Cesar Rennert

A haze of gold, the Occident lights up
The window.  Now, the assiduous manuscript
Is waiting, weighed down with the infinite.
Someone is building God in a dark cup.
A man engenders God. He is a Jew
With saddened eyes and lemon-colored skin;
Time carries him the way a leaf, dropped in
A river, is borne off by waters to
Its end. No matter. The magician moved
Carves out his God with fine geometry;
From his disease, from nothing, he’s begun
To construct God, using the word. Noone
Is granted such prodigious love as he:
The love that has no hope of being loved.

“Baruch Spinoza”
Translated by Willis Barnstone

One
basic
truth can
be used as
a foundation for
a mountain of lies,
and if we dig down deep
enough in the mountain of lies,
and bring out that truth, to set it
on top of the mountain of lies; the entire
mountain of lies will crumble under the weight of
that one truth, and there is nothing more devastating to a
structure of lies than the revelation of the truth upon which
the structure of lies was built, because the shockwaves of
the revelation of the truth reverberate, and continue to
reverberate throughout the Earth for generations to
follow, awakening even those
people who had no
desire to be
awakened
to the
truth.
Delamer Duverus