EARTH ~

I SAW PORCUPINE



I saw porcupine as soon as I pulled the truck into the meadow. There is nothing that moves on the earth like a porcupine. Imagine carrying a body of hollow pointed quills around everywhere all through your life. Porcupine stopped his ground when he saw the red truck. I got out and slowly walked to porcupine and porcupine reared up the quills and turned its back and slowly moved into the woods edge brush, then stopped and waited. Porcupine didn't leave, and neither did I. We were five feet from one another. His chiseled full brown face and patient eyes studied all parts of what was around him. I knelt near him awhile and waited awhile with him, there was something that made us both cautious. The truck was off and way over there. The sky was blue, the foliage still green approaching fall. Two days later I would hike my morning path and nearing the meadow wonder what had happened to porcupine, and there he was in the sunshine and large leaf ginger plants munching at his breakfast. I sat down in the sun myself and watched awhile. It was the best way to be.


[ BA ]

This was two weeks ago when I was cutting trees in the woodlot. Then one morning, hiking the woodlot path, I came across what is shown in the photograph below on the pathway, some yards away from where I last saw porcupine in the ginger plants. Just the tuft of his quilled tail and spine. Something had gotten to the old boy. Turned him over and penetrated the soft and unquilled belly. Maybe fisher cat, maybe coydog, maybe wild dog? Something. I brought what was left of my old friend home and pulled the quills, then set the bone life left up onto a tree branch, where it stays.

Porcupine climb trees and being wobbly shaped also fall out of trees. Often an open wound can be seen on their backs where they have fallen and been punctured by their own quills. I remember now porcupine had such a wound. I saw it when he jockeyed away from me on those short legs.

photos © bob arnold

EARTH ~

Jack Smith, The Destruction of Atlantis

Jack Smith



Flaming Creatures (entire film):
http://www.ubu.com/film/smith-jack_flaming.html

JUDITH MALINA ~

Judith Malina

Once In Vermont films © bob arnold
from the film "Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
by Mary Jordan (2007) 

WISDOM ~ 
(FDR / ELLSBERG)   

& MORE:

Common Dreams

18 October 2012

Defeat Romney, Without Illusions about Obama
    Advice to progressives in swing states, vote for reelection
       by Daniel Ellsberg

It is urgently important to prevent a Republican administration under Romney/Ryan from taking office in January 2013.

The election is now just weeks away, and I want to urge those whose values are generally in line with mine -- progressives, especially activists -- to make this goal one of your priorities during this period.

An activist colleague recently said to me: “I hear you’re supporting Obama.”

I was startled, and took offense. “Supporting Obama?  Me?!”

“I lose no opportunity publicly,” I told him angrily, to identify Obama as a tool of Wall Street, a man who’s decriminalized torture and is still complicit in it, a drone assassin, someone who’s launched an unconstitutional war, supports kidnapping and indefinite detention without trial, and has prosecuted more whistleblowers like myself than all previous presidents put together. “Would you call that support?”

My friend said, “But on Democracy Now you urged people in swing states to vote for him!  How could you say that?  I don’t live in a swing state, but I will not and could not vote for Obama under any circumstances.”

My answer was: a Romney/Ryan administration would be no better -- no different -- on any of the serious offenses I just mentioned or anything else, and it would be much worse, even catastrophically worse, on a number of other important issues: attacking Iran, Supreme Court appointments, the economy, women’s reproductive rights, health coverage, safety net, climate change, green energy, the environment.

I told him: “I don’t ‘support Obama.’ I oppose the current Republican Party.  This is not a contest between Barack Obama and a progressive candidate. The voters in a handful or a dozen close-fought swing states are going to determine whether Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are going to wield great political power for four, maybe eight years, or not.”

As Noam Chomsky said recently, “The Republican organization today is extremely dangerous, not just to this country, but to the world. It’s worth expending some effort to prevent their rise to power, without sowing illusions about the Democratic alternatives.”

Following that logic, he’s said to an interviewer what my friend heard me say to Amy Goodman: “If I were a person in a swing state, I’d vote against Romney/Ryan, which means voting for Obama because there is no other choice.”

The election is at this moment a toss-up.  That means this is one of the uncommon occasions when we progressives -- a small minority of the electorate -- could actually have a significant influence on the outcome of a national election, swinging it one way or the other.

The only way for progressives and Democrats to block Romney from office, at this date, is to persuade enough people in swing states to vote for Obama: not stay home, or vote for someone else.  And that has to include, in those states, progressives and disillusioned liberals who are at this moment inclined not to vote at all or to vote for a third-party candidate (because like me they’ve been not just disappointed but disgusted and enraged by much of what Obama has done in the last four years and will probably keep doing).

They have to be persuaded to vote, and to vote in a battleground state for Obama not anyone else, despite the terrible flaws of the less-bad candidate, the incumbent. That’s not easy.  As I see it, that’s precisely the “effort” Noam is referring to as worth expending right now to prevent the Republicans’ rise to power.  And it will take progressives -- some of you reading this, I hope -- to make that effort of persuasion effectively.

The traditional third-party mantra, “There’s no significant difference between the major parties” amounts to saying: “The Republicans are no worse, overall.”  And that’s absurd.  It constitutes shameless apologetics for the Republicans, however unintended.  It’s crazily divorced from present reality.

It will take someone these disheartened progressives and liberals will listen to.  Someone manifestly without illusions about the Democrats, someone who sees what they see when they look at the president these days: but who can also see through candidates Romney or Ryan on the split-screen, and keep their real, disastrous policies in focus.

It’s true that the differences between the major parties are not nearly as large as they and their candidates claim, let alone what we would want.  It’s even fair to use Gore Vidal’s metaphor that they form two wings (“two right wings” as some have put it) of a single party, the Property or Plutocracy Party, or as Justin Raimondo says, the War Party.

Still, the political reality is that there are two distinguishable wings, and one is reliably even worse than the other, currently much worse overall.  To be in denial or to act in neglect of that reality serves only the possibly imminent, yet presently avoidable, victory of the worse.

The traditional third-party mantra, “There’s no significant difference between the major parties” amounts to saying: “The Republicans are no worse, overall.”  And that’s absurd.  It constitutes shameless apologetics for the Republicans, however unintended.  It’s crazily divorced from present reality.

And it’s not at all harmless to be propagating that absurd falsehood.  It has the effect of encouraging progressives even in battleground states to refrain from voting or to vote in a close election for someone other than Obama, and more importantly, to influence others to act likewise.  That’s an effect that serves no one but the Republicans, and ultimately the 1%.

It’s not merely understandable, it’s entirely appropriate to be enraged at Barack Obama.  As I am.  He has often acted outrageously, not merely timidly or “disappointingly.”  If impeachment were politically imaginable on constitutional grounds, he’s earned it (like George W. Bush, and many of his predecessors!)  It is entirely human to want to punish him, not to “reward” him with another term or a vote that might be taken to express trust, hope or approval.

But rage is not generally conducive to clear thinking.  And it often gets worked out against innocent victims, as would be the case here domestically, if refusals to vote for him resulted in Romney’s taking key battleground states that decide the outcome of this election.

To punish Obama in this particular way, on Election Day -- by depriving him of votes in swing states and hence of office in favor of Romney and Ryan -- would punish most of all the poor and marginal in society, and workers and middle class as well: not only in the U.S. but worldwide in terms of the economy (I believe the Republicans could still convert this recession to a Great Depression), the environment and climate change. It could well lead to war with Iran (which Obama has been creditably resisting, against pressure from within his own party).  And it would spell, via Supreme Court appointments, the end of Roe v. Wade and of the occasional five to four decisions in favor of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

The reelection of Barack Obama, in itself, is not going to bring serious progressive change, end militarism and empire, or restore the Constitution and the rule of law.  That’s for us and the rest of the people to bring about after this election and in the rest of our lives -- through organizing, building movements and agitating.

The reelection of Barack Obama, in itself, is not going to bring serious progressive change, end militarism and empire, or restore the Constitution and the rule of law.  That’s for us and the rest of the people to bring about after this election and in the rest of our lives -- through organizing, building movements and agitating.

In the eight to twelve close-fought states -- especially Florida, Ohio, and Virginia, but also Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin -- for any progressive to encourage fellow progressives and others in those states to vote for a third-party candidate is, I would say, to be complicit in facilitating the election of Romney and Ryan, with all its consequences.

To think of that as urging people in swing states to “vote their conscience” is, I believe, dangerously misleading advice. I would say to a progressive that if your conscience tells you on Election Day to vote for someone other than Obama in a battleground state, you need a second opinion. Your conscience is giving you bad counsel.

I often quote a line by Thoreau that had great impact for me: “Cast your whole vote: not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.”  He was referring, in that essay, to civil disobedience, or as he titled it himself, “Resistance to Civil Authority.”

It still means that to me. But this is a year when for people who think like me -- and who, unlike me, live in battleground states -- casting a strip of paper is also important. Using your whole influence this month to get others to do that, to best effect, is even more important.

That means for progressives in the next couple of weeks -- in addition to the rallies, demonstrations, petitions, lobbying (largely against policies or prospective policies of President Obama, including austerity budgeting next month), movement-building and civil disobedience that are needed all year round and every year -- using one’s voice and one’s e-mails and op-eds and social media to encourage citizens in swing states to vote against a Romney victory by voting for the only real alternative, Barack Obama.

Daniel Ellsberg was put on trial in 1973 for leaking the Pentagon Papers, but the case was dismissed after four months because of government misconduct. He is the author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.

EARTH ~

VARANASI



Early in the morning we crossed the ghat,

where fires were still smoldering,

and gazed, with our Western minds, into the Ganges.

A woman was standing in the river up to her waist;

she was lifting handfuls of water and spilling it

over her body, slowly and many times,

as if until there came some moment

of inner satisfaction between her own life and the river's.

Then she dipped a vessel she had brought with her

and carried it filled with water back across the ghat,

no doubt to refresh some shrine near where she lives,

for this is the holy city of Shiva, maker

of the world, and this is his river.

I can't say much more, except that it all happened

in silence and peaceful simplicity, and something that felt

like that bliss of a certainty and a life lived

in accordance with that certainty.

I must remember this, I thought, as we fly back

to America.

Pray God I remember this.


_______________________

Mary Oliver
A Thousand Mornings
(Penguin, 2012)

Mary Oliver with Maria Shriver

No, not every poem Mary Oliver publishes is grand, some are blah, just like some days are blah. Mary Oliver, of any of our poets, lives by and with and for the day. But I can tell you many — and many are women — seek her poetry, and for good reason. She is peerless with a pen at getting under, with gentle strokes, tragedy and a possible healing all at once. I watched how her poems worked bringing them into an all girl's school for twenty winters and my visits back then. Yes, "girls", because women are first girls and girls can be harmed, have been harmed, and also have been loved, can show love. They remain one of the true delights left on earth. Mary Oliver is a woman who has kept her girl, struggling with her and loving her all the way. Many books. Awards. Citations. Readings. Somehow she has been able to live quietly and produce good work on one more tip of America (Provincetown). May it continue.


Be warned — there are many blank pages in A Thousand Mornings. My guess is it isn't a poet or publisher padding a book, and more an insistence by the poet for ease, taking a breath, asking for some quiet. There is also a humility at work with the poet perhaps saying: I'll bow out here instead of offering one more poem so you can rest your eyes and self. 
Traveler take solace.



http://balisha-neverenoughtime.blogspot.com/search/label/Maria%20Shriver%20Interview%20With%20Mary%20Oliver

EARTH ~

all hands

(photo : sean proctor/nytimes)

It might not look like much, seen it hundreds of times, rolling out the tarp onto the infield during inclement weather, but I just love it that handwork is still being seen in this over technological and modernized and nearly crippled society.

By working together those guys are talking together, working together, thinking together. They're pulling an idea.

They aren't waiting for some ATVs (god forbid if it comes to this) to strap onto either corner of the tarp and pull.

It's people stuff, while people in the stands watch, wait, and the rain falls. Or may soon.

Umpires wait, heads down.

All sorts of colors and caps and slacks and yanking, and mother nature runs the show.

Game 4 of the A.L.C.S., Yankees vs. Tigers at Comerica Park

 

 

 

EARTH ~

Sweetheart and I were sitting down for supper last night, in the living room, surrounded by the library of books, music, films and the woodstove, in other words — headquarters — when we heard the tell-tale rattling on the woodstove. The woodstove that normally never moves. The woodstove we lugged in here some years ago and some hundreds of pounds and has no reason to move, never mind rattle.


Sweetheart said she was feeling a trembling also under her feet. I wasn't, the meal was that good, but Sweetheart was raised in California and has experienced more than one or two earthquakes. Her feet know earthquakes and we were having an earthquake. New England boy me was still fixated that the woodstove was rattling.


It ain't supposed to do that, I was saying to myself. Isn't it something that it is.


The last time I remember an earthquake, nevermind in New England, was when we were up in the woodlot on a sunny autumn day cutting wood, although at that moment we were broken down and relaxed enjoying lunch. Probably crackers, cheese and an apple. Thermos of cold water. Sitting on a hillside and talking, when the same trembling came as a wave under us. Now what in the world was that? we asked one another instantaneously with our eyes.



And before that was decades earlier, in this same spot in the living room, even same hour of the year, autumn, and we were studding up all the rooms in the downstairs as we renovated the twice century house and with the studs only showing and no finished walls yet up we got to watch the block chimney sway before our eyes. There was a woodstove attached and that was swaying, too.


Oh and ah, Mother Earth. Talking. Shifting in her bed. Just as we do.


This morning at 4AM here comes the official report:


"The U.S. Geological Survey said the epicenter of the 4.0 magnitude quake was about 3 miles west of Hollis Center, Maine, and about 3 miles deep. That location is about 20 miles west of Portland.


The quake was felt in Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, including Boston, and as far south as Rhode Island and Connecticut."

photo © bob arnold

PUT INTO THE PIPE AND SMOKE ~

David Stockman on Mitt Romney and Bain:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/10/14/david-stockman-mitt-romney-and-the-bain-drain.html

EARTH ~

Ursula K. Le Guin

Photo by Wes Guderian

Ars Lunga


I sit here perpetually inventing new people
as if the population boom were not enough
and not enough terror and problems
God knows, But I know too,
that's the point. Never fear enough
to match delight, nor a deep enough abyss,
nor time enough, and there are always a few
stars missing.


I don't want a new heaven and new earth,
only the old ones.
Old sky, old dirt, new grass.
Nor life beyond the grave,
God help me, or I'll help myself
by living all these lives
nine at once or ninety
so that death finds me at all times
and on all sides exposed,
unfortressed, undefended,
inviolable, vulnerable, alive.





For the New House


May this house be full of kitchen smells
and shadows and toys and nests of mice
and roars of rage and waterfalls of tears
and deep sexual silences and sounds
of mysterious origin never explained
and troves and keepsakes and a lot of junk
and a flowing like a warm wind only slower
blowing the leaves of trees and books and the fish-years
of a child's life silvery flickering
quick, quick, in the slow incessant gust
that billows out the curtains for a moment
all those years from now, age.
May the sills and doorframes
be in blessing blest at every passing.
May the roof but not the rooms know rain.
May the windows know clearly
the branch and flower of the apple tree.
And may you be in this house
as the music is in the instrument.





Song for a Daughter


Mother of my granddaughter,
listen to my song:
A mother can't do right,
a daughter can't be wrong.


I have no claim whatever
on amnesty from you;
nor will she forgive you
for anything you do.


So are we knit together
by force of opposites,
the daughter that unravels
the skein the mother knits.


One must be divided
so that one be whole,
and this is the duplicity
alleged of woman's soul.


To be that heavy mother
who weighs in every thing
is to be the daughter
whose footstep is the Spring.


Granddaughter of my mother,
listen to my song:
Nothing you do will ever be right,
nothing you do is wrong.





Infinitive


We make too much history.


With or without us
there will be the silence
and the rocks and the far shining.


But what we need to be
is, oh, the small talk of swallows
in evening over
dull water under willows.


To be we need to know the river
holds the salmon and the ocean
holds the whales as lightly
as the body holds the soul
in the present tense, in the present tense.





Stammersong


Let

let me

let me be

Set

set me

set me free



Own

only

only soul

Lone

lonely

lonely whole



Sigh

silence

silencing

I

island

and I'll sing

_____________________________

Ursula K. Le Guin

from Finding My Elegy

new and selected poems

Houghton Mifflin, 2012

POETRY ~

Almost 100 years ago William Carlos Williams said aloud, "A bad poem is full of English literature".



And these days, Poetry Magazine (Chicago) continues to produce a quite usual English literature. They are capable of publishing many fine poets, but it is all presented through a narrow sieve, despite their riches and funding.


Most recently comes The Open Door (which it isn't), edited by Don Share and Christian Wiman. It is showcased as "100 poems, 100 years of Poetry Magazine". Basil Bunting to Jack Spicer, not bad. Gwendolyn Brooks to Lorine Niedecker, yeah! One poem each. Quenched. Severe. Static. So what. But certainly not terrible. Statuesque in a small way. Little juice.



It's embarrassing how badly made the contributors' notes can be, and this from the Poetry Foundation gods:


Lorine Niedecker: "Although her long correspondence with Louis Zukofsky, who frequently published her poems in his journal, Origins, brought her some critical notice. . ."

Niedecker had a correspondence with Zukofsky, but in this case it is Cid Corman that is being referred to here, and it isn't "Origins" as every poet knows, but Cid's magazine and press Origin.



Cid Corman: "The first two volumes of his selected poems, Of (1990) contain nearly 1,500 poems. Corman spent many years in Japan."

Of is not Cid Corman's selected poems, but three published volumes (of a proposed five volumes) of original poems, many unpublished until these glorious handmade volumes appeared. Cid's selected poems is The Next One Thousand Years, edited by Ce Rosenow and Bob Arnold (Longhouse), one of many to come of this poet's selected poems from a vast field of poetry.

Cid didn't spend many years in Japan — he lived decades in Japan, with his Japanese wife Shizumi, in a very modest abode in Kyoto where he translated many of the finest Japanese poets and poems ever seen. That's all.



How in the world are we to support already little known, or at the very least quiet, backwater poets, when they are misrepresented this way?




From "Cahoots"
by Cid Corman



There wasnt space
for two to pass
at one moment


and that moment
at Potniae.
Fate had spoken


And Fate followed
through at the cost
of the Other.


It takes a life
time's blindness to
see one's father.


. . .


The way one
wood-dove—buzz
buzz—follows


another—
the slow low
repeat—the


twang of an
arrow—the
way she to


whom I smile
returns the
smile: the way.


. . .


To come out
after a
long day's work


into snow—
the latest
version of


nothingness
and all so
light and crisp—


as if we're
the candles
on the cake.


February 1983

THE 1% ~

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/no-more-industrial-revolutions/?

nytimes

EARTHWARD ~

                   
                   
                   
                   
               

Felix Baumgartner later told a press conference: "When I was standing there on top of the world, you become so humble, you don't think about breaking records." He admitted all he could think about was getting back alive, but added: "Sometimes you have to go up really high to see how small you are." 

TIN ANGEL ~

__________________________________


Tin Angel
by Bob Dylan


It was late last night when the boss came home
To a deserted mansion and a desolate throne
Servant said: “Boss, the lady’s gone
She left this morning just ‘fore dawn.”


 “You got something to tell me, tell it to me, man
Come to the point as straight as you can”
“Old Henry Lee, chief of the clan
Came riding through the woods and took her by the hand”

 
The boss he lay back flat on his bed
He cursed the heat and he clutched his head
He pondered the future of his fate
To wait another day would be far too late

 
“Go fetch me my coat and my tie
And the cheapest labour that money can buy
Saddle me up my buckskin mare
If you see me go by, put up a prayer” 

 
Well, they rode all night, and they rode all day
Eastward, long down the broad highway
His spirit was tired and his vision was bent
His men deserted him and onward he went


He came to a place where the light was dull
His forehead pounding in his skull
Heavy heart was racked with pain
Insomnia raging in his brain

 
Well, he threw down his helmet and his cross-handled sword
He renounced his faith, he denied his lord
Crawled on his belly, put his ear to the wall
One way or another put an end to it all

 
He leaned down, cut the electric wire
Stared into the flames and he snorted the fire
Peered through the darkness, caught a glimpse of the two
It was hard to tell for certain who was who

 
He lowered himself down on a golden chain
His nerves were quaking in every vein
His knuckles were bloody, he sucked in the air
He ran his fingers through his greasy hair

 
They looked at each other and their glasses clinked
One single unit, inseparably linked
“Got a strange premonition there’s a man close by” 
“Don’t worry about him, he wouldn’t harm a fly” 

 
From behind the curtain, the boss he crossed the floor
He moved his feet and he bolted the door
Shadows hiding the lines in his face
With all the nobility of an ancient race

 
She turned, she was startled with a look of surprise
With a hatred that could hit the skies
“You’re a reckless fool, I could see it in your eyes
To come this way was by no means wise” 

 
“Get up, stand up, you greedy-lipped wench
And cover your face or suffer the consequence
You are making my heart feel sick
Put your clothes back on, double-quick” 

 
“Silly boy, you think me a saint
I’ll listen no more to your words of complaint
You’ve given me nothing but the sweetest lies
Now hold your tongue and feed your eyes” 

 
“I’d have given you the stars and the planets, too
But what good would these things do you?
Bow the heart if not the knee
Or never again this world you’ll see”

 
“Oh, please let not your heart be cold
This man is dearer to me than gold” 
“Oh, my dear, you must be blind
He’s a gutless ape with a worthless mind” 

 
“You’ve had your way too long with me
Now it’s me who’ll determine how things shall be” 
“Try to escape,” he cussed and cursed
‘You’ll have to try to get past me first” 

 
“Do not let your passion rule
You think my heart the heart of a fool
And you, sir, you can not deny
You made a monkey of me, what and for why?” 

 
“I’ll have no more of this insulting chat
The devil can have you, I’ll see to that
Look sharp or step aside
Or in the cradle you’ll wish you’d died” 

 
The gun went boom and the shot rang clear
First bullet grazed his ear
Second ball went right straight in
And he bent in the middle like a twisted pin

 
He crawled to the corner and he lowered his head
He gripped the chair and he grabbed the bed
It would take more than needle and thread
Bleeding from the mouth, he’s as good as dead

 
“You shot my husband down, you fiend”
“Husband? What husband? What the hell do you mean?
He was a man of strife, a man of sin
I cut him down and threw him to the wind” 

 
This she said with angry breath
“You too shall meet the lord of death
It was I who brought your soul to life” 
Then she raised her robe and she drew out a knife

 
His face was hard and caked with sweat
His arms ached and his hands were wet
“You’re a murderous queen and a bloody wife
If you don’t mind, I’ll have the knife” 

 
“We’re two of a kind and our blood runs hot
But we’re no way similar in body or thought
All husbands are good men, as all wives know” 
Then she pierced him to the heart and his blood did flow

 
 His knees went limp and he reached for the door
His tomb was sealed, he slid to the floor
He whispered in her ear: “This is all your fault
My fighting days have come to a halt”

 
She touched his lips and kissed his cheek
He tried to speak but his breath was weak
“You died for me, now I’ll die for you” 
She put the blade to her heart and she ran it through

 
All three lovers together in a heap
Thrown into the grave, forever to sleep
Funeral torches blazed away
Through the towns and the villages all night and all day

photo: sam jones/rolling stone 

EARTH ~

"THOMAS TRAHERNE (1637-74) was the son of a shopmaker in Hereford. It has been supposed that he and his younger brother Philip were orphaned at an early age and brought up, in part, by a wealthy innkeeper named Philip Traherne, who was twice mayor of Hereford and who may have been their uncle. Both boys received a good education, and Thomas graduated from Brasenose College, Oxford, in October 1656. In the following year he was appointed rector of Credenhill, Herefordshire, but probably did not take up residence there until 1664. He was ordained in 1660 and took his MA from Oxford in 1661. At Credenhill he is likely to have joined the religious circle at nearby Kingston centering on Susanna Hopton, for whom he may have written his meditations now known as the Centuries. In 1669 he took his B.D. at Brasenose and became chaplain to the Lord Keeper Sir Orlando Bridgeman, in whose household at London and Teddington he spent the rest of his life. many of Traherne's works, including the Centuries, remained undiscovered until the end of the nineteenth century. During his lifetime, however, he published Roman Forgeries (1673), which exposes the falsifying of ecclesiastical documents by the Church of Rome, and prepared Christian Ethics (1675) for the press. At the time of his death he was at work on a vast encyclopedic project called Commentaries of Heaven, which was intended to show 'ALL THINGS. . .to be Objects of Happiness'. The long-lost manuscript of this unfinished work was recovered in 1967 and identified in 1982. But his major achievements remain the Centuries, the poems and the Thanksgivings, which reveal him as among the first English writers to respond imaginatively to new ideas about infinite space. The boundless potentiality of the human mind and spirit is his recurrent theme, as is the need for adult man to regain the wonder and simplicity of the child."


(Penguin Books, 1991)




The Apprehension
_______________


If this I did not every moment see,

And  if my thoughts did stray

At any time, or idly play,

And fix on other objects, yet

This apprehension set

In me

Was all my whole felicity.

A MAN TO REMEMBER* ~

President Barack Obama October 2012

Nothing is feeling right right about now. Do you feel it like I do?


And at the same time, doors are opening and closing. Cars are starting and moving. Work is there to do and millions are doing it. The foliage is changing in Vermont but not quite with the brilliance I remember as a boy, but that could just be the boy. We can't get everything we once had. Nobody can, not even the filthy rich, try as they might.


Last night Joe Biden did okay during the Vice Presidential debate and so did Representative Paul Ryan. One is a senior politician with all the tricks of his trade on display — half of it crippled by bluster — the other is the new sharpie with all the so-called "facts" as a salesman selling us a line of goods manufactured for his CEO bosses. In my own personal life the past year I've dealt with sheriff deputies and other lawmen who individually act exactly this same way: polite, efficient and as legal assassins, alongside one or maybe two old-style lawmen, much like Joe Biden, filled with old-school charm, bluster, and fighting in a paper bag going out of style. That style has values. And values, good people, are disappearing right before our eyes.


So is a President Barack Obama. He's now left the campaign trail to "study" for a few days before the second Presidential debate. Gone to "study" what? More facts and figures? How to develop and deliver "zingers"? Gone to study how to talk to the American people? Isn't this the same fellow who already wowed the country and the world with a speech on racism? Who went to Europe and attracted millions even before he spoke, and then he spoke and it reverberated around the world? Who rose from a single mother and a phantom father — one white, one black — and took in along his rise some fools and some angels and some hardcore truths and values and put them to work? Who isn't afraid to make mistakes along the way: mistakes get you places as long as you know them as mistakes and repair them with your own hands. Isn't this the same fellow who killed Osama bin Laden for the revenge seekers? Ended the war in Iraq that should have never been a war, and the same in Afghanistan? Dropped drones on the bad guys instead of threatening nuclear war with everyone, and yes some very good people died along the way. Good people die each and every day now. It's what we've made for ourselves.


I won't even go into how Barack Obama's leadership saved a country financially broke, didn't jail the thieves, attempted to put them back into the service for their country only to watch them piss on him now from great heights, this almost zen master from Harvard robes and Chicago street life we have.


Racism. Color. Prejudice. Non-communication is what is killing us. Always has. We haven't learned our P's and Q's. A black man rising in America beyond civil rights is what Barack Obama is, quite a phenomenon. He came with a thrill, a bounce to his step, he galvanized the children and the children in adults, and even the grown ups believed in him. He won past the old guard of stale heroism built on violence and glory and revealed a better heroism built on every day existence of mutual respect, black and white mixing it up like a terrific R & B song, and naively and truly wanting to get down and dirty and work with the opposition who already since Sunday let it be known they wanted nothing in the world to do with him. Have you ever been up against these guys? and I can tell you it's almost always guys, and it's not that they are entirely wrong, some have a very good head on their shoulders and can likewise work with their hands, but they're mainly closed down to their chief habits. They do make the trains run. But the train rails were made by dreamers, inventors, explorers, madmen, chance-takers, leaders, and this is what has scared Washington DC rulers from the time Barack Obama hit town. He's a rail man. He should have thrown a good bunch of them into jail. Instead he forgave them. Instead he revealed them. Instead he asked them to play-ball, the all-American past time and middle ground, and they told him to go fuck himself.


For four years we have watched a very good family man, husband, young heart and champion, make strides and become ruined. Right before our eyes. The black pride and intelligence that guided him, may be the same ingredient that brings him down. Since he came out of nowhere and rose to a personal and public greatness, we expect him to provide and grow greater still. Mostso because he is black, was virtually unknown, skinny, packed with power and glory. There's no time not to show up to a debate. There's no time to have this pride and glory stuff get in the way. There's no time not to act with almost a vengeance because we are frustrated and mad as hell, why isn't he? The savior we've made with really very little help of our own isn't performing the way we wanted — so left and right, both sides of the aisle, we're going to react against him! Unbelievable. The voters are leaving Barack Obama in droves from the carefully nurtured and crafted center (the playing field), that he made piece by piece, because of a combined hot atom mixture of he not performing for us when we wanted. When it counted. And he knows it. And we know it. It's all part of putting down those rails in the wilderness and not knowing what is around the next bend and he's ready to do it, and we're suddenly not so sure. We just may resort to the carpetbagger, the salesmen, the slick conman (and he makes a great speech but remains a sleaze bag and conman, Bill Clinton), the CEO empty-suited who will get just enough done for the middle class, status quo, while the unknowns, mysterious and poor die.


Barack Obama blew it big-time for the world in one debate. I thought he performed just fine with Q & A, but he didn't come down off his pedestal far enough so the smug, the hurt, the ruinous, and his slip was showing. Lenny Bruce would have shrugged it off with a "That? You mean that? Oh don't worry about that" and got it all revived within seconds on an athlete's pivot foot and steered the train back onto its rails. Barack Obama's hard-earned, uphill battle achievements in many of the swing states was once upon a time (as soon as last September) built on slow momentum and belief, assisted by millions of workers who all still have a little bit of dream in them, going against a 'screw-these-dreams let's get down to basics' opponent. It's all about money not dreams. It's all about slick not substance. It's all about a populace rising out of its junk food and junk cultured diet and crying toward and into a wilderness, where rails have gone.



[BA, Oct 12, '12]

Obamacare/Clancy Sigal

Matt Taibbi : vp debate

 

photo: nytimes

*I'd liked him to stay where he is for the rest of my life