Like ants they scurry, hurry
From task to thorax breaking task
For the greater grander project yet
The deified monument defined
Mote by time defying mote
Broken from ancient boulders
Classic sculpture, castle stones
And the crack gravel of modernity
See, king of kings, see
Your wind-swept sands still seething
With white-golden glimmering fires
Foot flesh searing that we dance
Hear, ear-lending citizens
Together fear and set ourselves
Upon the unfriendly formica
As we make ourselves master this yard
Our queen, who grants to us liberty,
Shines a light upon the world
Invites us all to the sumptuous banquet
Of freedom, prosperity, and justice
Brigands boast not here
Else the righteous sword dispatch your ear
Whilst we in fertile gardens play
Sole recipients of sunly ray
Be not nautical aerial aetherial
Venture not vertical
To heights and depths unmanned
To space outside our plan
For we’ll know, we always do
Your infamy, your treachery
Against the mother, against your birth
Against the father, your nation’s earth
Forgive me and forget me
You aim to touch the sky
Above us high, stay one
Stay one with us of dirt
One day your wax will burn away
One day you’ll plummet straight
Shooting cross the aether flame
Your doom marks us all, omen
The blame will not be shared then
But ‘scaped by us, you goat
Bray boastful still you will
As we ‘dorn a pike your head
We are not totem brothers
Matched in sin and patricidal shame
Nay, yours is the hubris
Yours is the great cosmic wrong
Can you blame the scorned?
Who toil and drudge
That your roads are clean
And your autos pristine
Thanklessness ever exceeding
The dreams they dreamt as children
Now but rudely mocked
In pale-screened imitations
Is this not a tale told in common
The king with his people
As greedy, better men despoil
The roguish baron’s play
But now the ancient pact is broken
And Rome’s sword buried deep within her guts
What a rich and luscious heritage
So nutrient filled
So quenching to the thirst
Autohemabibology, the new science of self-consumption
Still they doubt us, those family men
From the caves to the plains
Under the banners of the fathers
And so new cities made
When the binding twine was still soft
Stretched sinews and pig guts
Fat burning words divining
By the rites we came to know
Gods, heroes, men design
Names for stories told by fire
That promethean gift and curse
By which the world will rise and burn
To survive we must dig
Dig deeper, ‘neath the blood and the guts
‘Neath the bones and the catacombs
‘Neath the fossils of fearsome myths
Dig deeper and hide
Dig deeper where the devils reside
And take up refuge there
At least we’ve earned our share
Though they no trumpets blare
No pearly gates, no virtues rare
But the vulgar common mass
Rapt caged in tarnished brass
As this will be to us to keep
As this will be, so as I speak
Pretense no truer ever else
And this will end authentic selves
So let us build our castles, mote by mote
The days at least by this be kept
And when the dusk long shadows turn
Let our brutal tales, under rug be swept
16.6.11
12.6.11
Love (in the Positive)
Pivoting from the previous post, as soon as I dismiss the romantic notion, I'm bound to restore it. For however much I try to rid myself the sentimental baggage, I seek Love. The Love those romantics connote as completion, a fulfillment of the desire that cries out from the ever clichéd depths of my soul.
But alongside this desire, still at the core of my being, sits a doubt, hard and unmoving. My doubt says that this Love is fairy-tale claptrap, impossible to me and falsely indulged by others. Like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or the search for the philosopher's stone—only myth and legend pretense there truth here. And I, meanwhile, in relationship after relationship, push the Sisyphean stone hillside up only to watch it fall down again, again, and again.
Yet, if there's one dynamic I've essayed to invest in myself (and share with the world), it's the splendor of myth and legend. The more beautifully outrageous a story, I've trained my ears to hear its greater hold on truth. The more boring and banal an event, the more it's like to be deaf to a memory blessed with finite capacity. Thus, for this Don Quixote, the very impossibility of Love becomes its plausibility and, in fact, necessity.
But this necessity suggests overdetermination. Who is the hero who doesn't get his girl? The scope for play and freedom which is at the very heart of making Love is constricted, bound without a safe word.
However, the overdetermination often works the other way when held alongside personal experience of Love lost and found—the first Love, the experience and expectation that haunts us for the remainder of the Loves we find. It also provides the template for the heartbreak that we know now to be inevitable, a heartbreak whose resonance echoes through every facet of our being as we are ever always stitching the scattered pieces of life back into some vaguely coherent whole.
The failure of the first Love is the original sin of Love. It is the primordial falling out that both is and is not your fault. It is, as what relationship isn't? And it isn't to the reality that you can only take so much responsibility for the past, for it's difficult to truly sin in ignorance (as Plato suggests and Kierkegaard contests).
Original sin likewise, what responsibility can we reasonably take for the actions of our archetypal ancestors? On the other hand, who hasn't found that moment of self-awareness that Desire and Care are more often than not in conflict. So ended the innocence of childhood. For this lesson was only learned when fulfilling your Desire caused pain to someone you Cared for.
Two keys stand out in this analogy: Humility and Redemption.
For what is self-awareness in the [repetitious] failure of first Love but the humble knowledge that your Care for your Lover is always at risk to fall to your Desire for yourself. This humble doubt lodges itself in the heart, whether as a seed or as a nightmare, but there now it stares, confronts, and questions you.
As a nightmare, I need not elaborate on the psychologies of repression.
As a seed, it promises the path of redemption: the time when Care triumphs over Desire, if not decisively, at least certainly through all the daily battles that define life.
To George Herbert, and the humility with which we must approach Love after all our little infamies:
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack'd any thing.
A guest, I answer'd, worth to be here:
Love said, you shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
But alongside this desire, still at the core of my being, sits a doubt, hard and unmoving. My doubt says that this Love is fairy-tale claptrap, impossible to me and falsely indulged by others. Like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or the search for the philosopher's stone—only myth and legend pretense there truth here. And I, meanwhile, in relationship after relationship, push the Sisyphean stone hillside up only to watch it fall down again, again, and again.
Yet, if there's one dynamic I've essayed to invest in myself (and share with the world), it's the splendor of myth and legend. The more beautifully outrageous a story, I've trained my ears to hear its greater hold on truth. The more boring and banal an event, the more it's like to be deaf to a memory blessed with finite capacity. Thus, for this Don Quixote, the very impossibility of Love becomes its plausibility and, in fact, necessity.
But this necessity suggests overdetermination. Who is the hero who doesn't get his girl? The scope for play and freedom which is at the very heart of making Love is constricted, bound without a safe word.
However, the overdetermination often works the other way when held alongside personal experience of Love lost and found—the first Love, the experience and expectation that haunts us for the remainder of the Loves we find. It also provides the template for the heartbreak that we know now to be inevitable, a heartbreak whose resonance echoes through every facet of our being as we are ever always stitching the scattered pieces of life back into some vaguely coherent whole.
The failure of the first Love is the original sin of Love. It is the primordial falling out that both is and is not your fault. It is, as what relationship isn't? And it isn't to the reality that you can only take so much responsibility for the past, for it's difficult to truly sin in ignorance (as Plato suggests and Kierkegaard contests).
Original sin likewise, what responsibility can we reasonably take for the actions of our archetypal ancestors? On the other hand, who hasn't found that moment of self-awareness that Desire and Care are more often than not in conflict. So ended the innocence of childhood. For this lesson was only learned when fulfilling your Desire caused pain to someone you Cared for.
Two keys stand out in this analogy: Humility and Redemption.
For what is self-awareness in the [repetitious] failure of first Love but the humble knowledge that your Care for your Lover is always at risk to fall to your Desire for yourself. This humble doubt lodges itself in the heart, whether as a seed or as a nightmare, but there now it stares, confronts, and questions you.
As a nightmare, I need not elaborate on the psychologies of repression.
As a seed, it promises the path of redemption: the time when Care triumphs over Desire, if not decisively, at least certainly through all the daily battles that define life.
To George Herbert, and the humility with which we must approach Love after all our little infamies:
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack'd any thing.
A guest, I answer'd, worth to be here:
Love said, you shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
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