 |
Our experience on this planet,
the tail-end of which we call "history," is the result of endless random
humblings and consistent amnesia about them. Time passes, we get uppity, here comes
another one. Viz. now. |
 |
The death throes of dinosaurs
are awful to see, dangerous to those caught by flailing tails and pounding feet, and like
all doomed grandeur rending sad. They rule and rule but the world at last says to them as
it does to all incapable of learning, "No." |
 |
We tire because the
self-consciousness available to us is intermittent, like catching a glimpse of something
wonderful out of the corner of your eye. The search of restless vision is exhausting. |
 |
Likely theys watch our throes
knowing even less well than we our true needs. |
 |
Art, like us, is only an
outward and visible sign of unspeakable truth. |
 |
What are we to do with
Wednesday,
its tiny eyes, protruding ears,
and faulty memory, its wee dick,
bulbous breasts and ever-wet clit? |
 |
The unspeakable turns out to
be just that. And the speakable? At best, wishful thinking. |
 |
At best we skip stones across
a surface of that which is. |
 |
If the six billion eddies in
the Niagara River above the falls could speak, what a cacophony of self-centered stories
they would tell. |
 |
Monolingual writers are like
tone-deaf composers. Which is why American literature tends to the stuffy. |
 |
We walk the island of
language, thinking it a continent, a universe, naively unaware of the lack of sea
perceptions and thus words. |
 |
We're here to explore all
possibilities, including that of not exploring all possibilities. |
 |
Corporate green on the right
(more! more!) is matched by intellectual greed on the left (more! more!), artistic greed
in the muddle, scientific gree on the surface, pious greed in the murkiest depths. |
 |
We pace, stride, swagger,
skulk, sulk, race, loiter, tarry, falter, plotz, dance, trip, stumble, tumble, waltz, but
mostly simply walk away ours days in this head prison unaware that the gates are open, the
windows unbarred, and the aren (such as he is) practices non-interference. |
 |
The biggest, the riches, the
most powerful ever, we cannot bear to see how bad our art, how callow our politics, show
shallow and short-lived our "greatness." We gained a continent and then a world.
Instead of treasuring, we raped them both. |
 |
All cities of this era are
imitations of manhattan, most quite pale. |
 |
In addition to its obvious
qualities, internal emigration involves psychic withdrawal from the played-out creative
coal-face of the culture. |
 |
Of the remaining mysteries,
one of the greatest is this: How do you listen to Gesualdo without getting dizzy? |
 |
As generals re-fight the last
war, novelists re-live the lives of the previous generation of "men" of letters. |
 |
Great art is LSD, lesser art,
marijuana. |
|
The false idolatry of the
earth. All that matters is fouling or not fouling the nest and leaving it worse or better
than you found it. |
 |
We bother to create
situations, civilizations, where we can busy ourselves with what it pleases us to call
matters of moment--wars, symphonies, sciences, revelations, and the like. |
 |
Religion is an attempt to put
the apple of self-awareness back on the tree of animal consciousness. |
 |
What if we are here not to
wake but to dream, waking only to enrich the dreams, if we so learn. |
 |
Homo saltans. Most can no more
get what we're on about than Neanderthal could grasp the meaning of Cro-Magnon's newly
inflected grunts. |
 |
Das Ewig-Männliche zieht uns
auch hinan. |
 |
The scientist is no less
trapped in illusion than is the religionist. |
 |
Linear thought produces all
manner of eschatologies, from orthodox Christianity to the Big Bang theory to
thermodynamics to musics. |
 |
Not "I see" but
"I am given to see." Which does not mean a god granted seeing or a vision.
Seeing results only from an oalingment which allowes me, blinded before, to see. In a time
and place where I wasy, vision, previously blocked, became possible. To speak of
intelligence, much less genius, in such a situation is wholly misguided. |
 |
The laws of metaphysics are as
dimly and inaccurately reflected in the so-called holy books as the laws of physics are in
the textbooks and journals. |
 |
A clue: The objective
discontinuity (we sleep repeatedly and regularly) versus the subjective continuity (we
connect today's waking to yesterday's as if the eight-hour interruption didn't happen). |
 |
Correction: Almost
all is vanity. The trickiness comes in figuring out which part isn't. |
 |
It is as if by rejecting what
Freud got right and ingesting chemicals we think we can will tyrant ego and quagmire id
out of existence notwithstanding hills of loot and mountains of dead. |
 |
Religionists with their empty,
hollow temples had best avoid thinking about how a an asexual, atheist old scrooge of an
Anglo-German stepped so handily across the abyss of theism to the very place where no gods
live and harvested seventy minutes of almost ineffable musical irony. |
