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September
2007
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Copyright © 2006 "Giving well is the best revenge."
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Blütenstaub 2007
All religions are humbling. Few are humbling enough. (Are you willing to count the deaths caused by your religion?)
Brief Checklist for a Fulfilling Life:
Finnigan's Law: Meaning varies inversely with electromagnetic frequency.
Now all is screenwriting.
For cities geography is destiny.
To be an American (unlike being English or French or
whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one, since we have
always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.
Some work best in the noise of the marketplace. Some don't.
That we are trapped in this mode of consciousness is of as little concern to them as it concerns us that dogs are trapped in doggishness.
A reminder for really slow learners: The Bell Curve applies as much to printed matter as it does to painted, declaimed, and danced matter, or for that matter to any matter at all. The right-hand one-hundredth of a percent is simpliy, always one in a thousand.
Latter-day famulists mock organized religions, unaware that in their novels, poems, plays, and screenplays they are indulging exactly the same compulsion to validate that laid the foundations of that which they mock.
Among ways to waste time, nudging dinosaurs looms large.
That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of
frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our
frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary
human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we
should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of
us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
If it takes this long for me to figure out a few of my tiny but terrible mistakes, how long does it take greater entities to figure out theirs?
Which is better--to be one flower or to be aware of 10,000?
Writing, like sculpting, is a matter of removal. The page appears blank only to the onlooker. To the writer the blank page is filled with all available words. Writing consists in removing the words that are unnecessary.
The I-dunno Elegy
The greatest male teacher? Shakespeare. Not just because of what he created (others have done as well) but also because he did what he could and then shut up.
The Book of Ours
As you breathe, so shall you think.
I sail a sea without water,
Every age tends to view its own finely re-worked amoric detritus as great art.
The slowness of the migration from sea to land means you spend a lot of time in shallow water. Which is where we are now.
Call it a state of simultaneity. But don't even try to describe it.
Of the artists, pity writers most. Their medium is so much the more treacherous.
The Path of Mystery Revisited: Not within, or without. Not up, or down. Sideways, rather (so to speak).
We love to imprison because such behavior bolsters our illusion that rehabilitation of ourselves is both possible and necessary. Similarly with capital punishment and self-aggrandizement: We are such terrific and powerful creatures, we think, that our misbehavior (when it occurs) can be so bad that it requires negation and even erasure.
As a species, concerning what's next, we are like children who know nothing of sex. Even for the wholly ignorant, puberty can't be rushed.
Though we posit greater wisdom in the unseen and the unknown, the hardy explorer finds always expanding layers of incomprehension.
The less I know, the more I write. The more I know, the less I write.
Which is more improbable--disappearing people or appearing universes?
Purity, like humility, piety, and wisdom, is possible in this world but only among those who don't know they have it.
Those who see see vastly more than can even be imagine by those who don't see. The non-seers naturally--and when pushed, violently--deny the reality of what the seers see.
It would be difficult to overestimate the quantity and quality of the nurturance Houston has given me.
Those not ready cannot see, or seeing, turn away quickly. Consider Mann, who chose temporal glory and tattered soul over self-knowledge.
This unsized thickless fabric like all fabrics has rips dimples and wrinkles but mostly its smooth and billows nicely the various cosmic and acosmic breezes winds and gales.
See the insect walking the surface of the ponds? You'llre doubly deluded if you think we know more about our world than she does about hers.
What vistas sircular language's parapets offer! Forget only at great risk that they're all inward-facing.
Among artists only novelists are priased for both sharing and communicating our confusion.
The journey is from the unknown to the known, and not as is generally thought the other way around.
Maybe they understand us as poorly as we understand them. We think they want and need worshipful adoration and expressions of gratitude and humility. They think we want and need suffering, pain, and untimely death.
The brink of destruction and the brink of salvation share a number of qualities, not the least important being that both locales are non-existent. In this universe you pretty much have to rely on the brink of luck and the brink of muddling-through.
Against reason and against appearance the great reality, simple as it is baffling, lies beneath human experience: Nothing is lost.
We're not blind, only blindered. Not deaf, only deafened. Not numb, only benumbed.
Language speaks us.
False offerings to false gods are topical, local anesthesias which are dangerous (distorting, fraudulent) only when they become general and habitual.
In drought flowers bloom less and then distorted. Trees grow stunted. Clouds thin out. Birds fall from the sky. Rivers flow weak. Life lunges forward as best it can, driven as always by unquestioned certitude and undamped pride.
Novelists and cosmologist have much in common. The biggest difference: novelists imagine too much and cosmologists too little.
The law of multiple variants: Discrete phenomena multiply to infinite variability.
We have named everything properly except ourselves.
The only thing more powerful than wrong thinking is right thinking. Even in a culture that submerges the children in wrong thinking from birth.
All trees are noble, but the one with the most to teach us, because its fraught life most closely parallels our own, is the lowly mesquite.
The tragedy of popular religion has been to mistake the messenger for the message.
Pain and loss being intolerable, concoct whatever story you need to get through. Just don't hawk it as universal truth.
Our vaunted freedom? The shackles have shackles.
Animals perceive sound when we speak; only with training can some animals respond rudimentarily to our language. What analagous perceptions do we dumbly experience and ignore because we have no hint about what those events mean in their larger and wholly different contexts of other unguessed-at consciousnesses?
Oneirotropes want investigating.
Create or choose any myth. Cherish, adore, follow, defend, spread it. Tragedy, pain, and suffering come only if your forget, and cause others to forget, that every myth is a windowless, doorless room that shuts out far, far more than it encloses.
Beware of art--or science, philosophy, religion, politics--that cosies up to the known world and keeps its fraught nights and troubled sleep secret.
The pride of presidents--like the depravity of Hitler or the greed of Gates--is nothing compared to that of angels. We easily see and live with human pride, depravity, and greed, but mostly can only infer that of angels.
Rebirth, like birth, has its own term and timing and afterbirth.
Be careful not to mistake the echo for the song, nor the singer for the act of singing, which, remember, raises the hopes of some universes and the hackles of others.
Human activity mocks a greater order. Art mocks it less, great art being that activity which mocks it least.
Story concoction: metaphysical reading readiness by another name.
Having invented the wheel a long time ago, we, wholy put off by its simple perfection, discarded it and set out to find something better.
The swimming pool is not lined with ladders, but, though few in number, they do exists, and in handy places.
There are those who seek an outer path, and those who seek the inner. Both are--or can be--paths of goodness. The one comforts, stimulates, finds ways around pain, but is finally finite, a cul de sac that seduces many with countless small and false infinities. The Other? Neither balm nor bane, no matter how many rickety signposts your fellows erect, the other, beckoning from a most distant shore, is the path of infinite patience.
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"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." --Oscar Wilde.
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2006 Texas Chapbook Press
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