INTRODUCTION
+
HAAG'S BIO
33 POEMS ON THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD
for
THE 2001 POEMS
HISTORY II
#01
07-19/20-01
In the beginning was the blank page.
God's job was similar to
mine.
What to do?
Fill it up! And humans prefer
meaning.
Following upon original creation, my job is
a smidgen more difficult,
the pattern's
been set, rules
made. Fighting rules is the work of
fools. Am I a fool or God?
God's work, if it is what
surrounds us,
could
have been better conceived, constructed, better ruled.
Nobody disagrees with that: activists, passivists, organ
transplanters, geneticists, warriors, priests, widows,
grieving
mothers continually pray
for pattern alterations, rule
retraction, finality easements.
Every quark of everyone, Big Bang initiated,
is born God -- powerful,
without power,
a whizzing probability.
One has luck or lacks it.
No
rules are read, no pattern is pointed
out, no path chosen. "You're on
your own kid,"
with one big female and male -- usually --
who may be dumber than you. You
learn what you
learn, you do
what you do.
This frustration is called "living a life."
LOVE
#02
7-22/10-27-01
The single emphatic lesson life's taught me
about love: You
can't be yourself
and be loved.
Whether it be sex or
[Afriendship, half
of love is deception, fifty percent is
pretense: forced laughter, agreement, prevarication,
perversion,
a skewing yourself,
bottling, capping down your
effervescence, awareness, energy,
pretending innocence,
belief, devotion, compassion, unselfishness. Ha!
This is from
a woman's point-of-view.
Who can fathom
the vagaries, the
mysteries of a man's
mind, a creature who created for his
lust both virgin and hussy, not
someone for love,
but
for conquest, submission, subsumption, who'll take
the
love of any woman, twist it,
torment it, spit it out, laugh
at the fallen
hussy, rape the unfortunate, mouth
compassion, indignation,
and help, write checks, but
never question
the location of his penis on
any given
night
in any given womb, nor the capabilities
of his
heart for any thinkable or
unthinkable evil. Man is a veil
of intuition, mystery
preying on his mothers' species.
Yesterday, A.
Close's lecture, assured me 70,000
years
ago -- after the Torba explosion -- Homo
sapien --
and his
brothers -- died out, along with everything/everyone
else. There were left -- at most -- forty
females
capable of birthing modern man.
The Tao says:
From the
one came two, from two
came three, and from the three
came
the 10,000 things. As McKenna says:
Who fucks
who
constitutes the history of Homo sapien sapien.
KNOWLEDGE
#03
7-22/10-27-01
You know, it's sad to know it
will make no difference, even
if
I discover the
reasons for the existence of the
world.
History, and the history of knowledge is
so
tidied about that from time
immemorial, no one
without
credentials, the right friends, the opportune
place --
preferably already prominent in the world --
can say anything
that will be
listened to, that
might make a difference.
Once in a
millennium the human race celebrates an
Einstein,
but usually elites are deaf. Solutions
lie all
about,
scattered as broken eggs on the stones
The
high priest calls a sweeper to
dispose of them, pays no
attention
until served the
omelet by a
preening-clique-authenticated, suitably toadying chef.
But once in a while a noticeable,
large enough pile
of notes are
left about, blowing
in the wind. The sweeper
picks them
up, one of the ordained snatches them
up,
publishes them, receives kudos, attention.
Nobody is aware
of the original author, except the author.
FICTION
#04
7-22-01
Today, early, fiction arrived at my door.
Without preamble, the recorder bowed
out.
the creator stood
ready, pen poised, willing to snap up
all
eccentricities, stir the pot, serve up
a character, incident, plot. No longer
tethered by reality,
fiction could play, and enjoy, the game.
POLITICS
#05
7-23/10-17-01
O Devayani, dull-witted, dreary, dried up like
a prune,
desiccated, didactic, lacking in
lyric and bravado,
lacking in song, from a heart that
is songless. The
days stride by, and
you read about murder, a Western
amusement, the detective
story, Eastern as well, catching
the criminal.
Can you catch yourself, waylay you in
a
dark street, call the carabinieri,
have them cuff
and
coerce your soul, haul you in
for questioning? Where has
all your inspiration
gone? In the gloom of a
Seattle
summer, have
you lost your wit? Besides the
carabinieri
are busy -- shooting people in the streets of
Genoa,
people who disagree with the corporate
rich raping
our
planet, our lives, spoiling our food supply,
owning it! How inspired can you get
in a world, more
colonialized, more
owned by the
West than even the Brits
ever dared
dream. The Opium Wars drove the opium
importing Brits out of China. But
how inspired can
you get in a civilization where one
human can own 90
billion dollars (who
can even conceived such an amount?)
while others starve
daily. Write some lyrics, write
something from
inspiration, look at the trees which,
lasting
only the ghost of a summer,
drop their leaves.
Their blossoms have long since wept and
died. Human
greed is the opium of
the people. The Corporations help us
imbibe it daily,
with mothers' milk. They say it is
human nature, they encourage our avarice. O
Devayani,
dull-witted, dried up like a
prune, desiccated, didactic,
lacking lyrics, take up heroin. Sniff. Sing!
Sell your
soul. What good is it
in a soulless world of rape,
disenchantment, profit, disillusion,
greed -- when the
200 own the world.
What will they own if you forego an
addiction to greed, if you return
to the forest,
scratch the earth with an unowned stick.
SHAME
#06
7-24-01
Thinking about shame this morning, what popped
into my head was clean Cleve's
silver spoon -- going
at it with cleanser and pad, he
chastising me
with, what I thought was,
disproportionate anger. Having almost never
cleaned silver,
how was I to know I
was "ruining its
value!"
"polishing away the silver." I thought
I was doing him a favor. An
odd, at best, example of shame.
Trivial, inconsequential, except
he
remained angry at me for years,
for that and similar infractions. But
think
of "democratic" America's shame: the coup
d'etat of a
stolen
election, soon overlooked, absorbed into history.
Think of the shame of a
world
where, full of riches, food, technology,
more than half
its
inhabitants starve -- tolerated as "the way
things are." Even the much
vaunted Jesus
of the Christians said: Spend your
money on me,
the poor will always be with you.
POLYANDRY
#07
7-24/10-27-01
Without research, still, I dare say, it
seems there could be
no more frank discussion
of polyandry, in
Thibet, than in
Notovitch's notes, kept while
approaching Leh. He remarks
on the health,
vigor, cheerfulness, delight of the women
of Ladak -- one
wonders if this comes from the fun
of fucking with her three to five
husbands (and
lovers) or the rich
protein of semen
entering her system
or -- maybe -- just being
treated with respect and having
say over
her own person, her own land,
her own family,
and no one having to worry about
over-population in a
high, remote, unknown (to
the Western world) land of scarce
resources. The ideal
population was, it appears, for
thousands of
years, 1,500,000 inhabitants for 1,200,000
square kilometers.
Thibetan men, in Notovitch's view,
are
puny. "Feeble"
is his word (the translator's word?). But
when a husband dies (usually, as in
America, younger
than his wife) or
is absent, his
place is offered to a
bachelor, widower
(husband's brothers and father are
already included
in her menage), an en passant,
Buddhist
traveler. Jealousy,
is all but unknown, and: "The Thibetan
is too cool-blooded to know love... a
flagrant
violation of established usage... love
would pass in
his
eyes as both selfish and unjustifiable."
Thibetans,
apparently, know only loving-kindness, generosity, and
a
singular lack of animosity. I
would of course,
like to
see another reference confirm Notovitch's
observation of
"feeble". Tibetan have always struck
me as kindly, equitable,
cheerful and
robust, at least
the monks. Perhaps, that
too, is semen
in the system, for the western world
would often like to say the
great monasteries were
full, not only of piety, but gay-ity.
Now, of course,
we have poverty, starvation,
pollution, rampant technology,
and the ruthless (raping)
Chinese to control
the population. These men are more robust.
PLAINNESS
#08
7-24-01
Reading a description of opulence -- or was
it just luxury? -- that a
book-character
lived in, my
soul gasped, cried out for the plain,
the unadorned, possessionlessness. It stopped short of
wishing to be
digambara -- but that's
what it really
wanted: to be sky clad! Enough is
enough! Yet all literature of the spirit
concerns itself -- probably
more than secular
literatures -- with kings
and queens, the high born, the
king
of heaven, queen of the gods, princes,
possessions, patrimonies,
as if nothing a
plain person could
give up matter a fig to a
God.
The big stories are about men
giving up their riches, their kingdoms,
their wenches, their
jewels, their heroics of war, blood AFTER
they've enjoyed them unto boredom, a substitute
death. It seems
spiritual literature is
even more about
getting and spending, war, lack of
peace,
repentance, but not restraint, about the political
life, and
who's worth speaking to
and who's not,
lineages -- who's worth being
related to and
who's not. It seems to me plainness
is what I want, and the
courage to
spend
my life (what's left of it) in
a cave, or walking Bharat, alone,
descended
of no one. Human life is
all too entertaining,
gossip too
much fun, expanding the hearts
of men to accommodate envy, envy for
the power and the riches of
the rich and
powerful. I know. I've played
that game.
Now send me out to sea in
a leaking boat, blind and deaf,
feeble, and alone
with my soul to practice my austerities.
TAO TE CHING
#09
7-27-01
Beginning with blank mind: If you have
it, you are silent. Te. Integrity.
Power. These large
words, leave my mind blank. I do
not think
like that. I wonder who
does. The world seems to be
retreating from me
as in a dizzying vortex as I
retreat from the world. We form a
double helix, insight's DNA,
an oscillating gyroscope
made of the
death of passion. I
walk the cold city streets of early
morning --
incomprehensible to me. Sex is
offered, not accepted.
As grime eats at the
once clean
North West streets, buildings, vistas cloud in
the gray,
sneeze-inducing air. Lush laburnum
gardens, though not
warm, create
beautiful bowers for the sleep
of the homeless. Art work is handily
distributed to hang cloak and bag
on when the
staring homeless are
awake -- and warm. I
-- too -- often -- long to become homeless. To
express my rage at "civilization," by
disappearing from civilization,
that which has become a horror, shocking,
I'm sure, to a Martian -- if there
were such. Given the beauty of
the
world, consider
the ugliness man has brought, inventing his
monstrous
tools, perverting the genes of nature.
Greeks spoke of hubris, Chinese spoke
of integrity. Lao
Tzu sounds good, lofty, sonorous, but does
he
apply? As five billion humans become
refugees fleeing from the ghost-cities of
civilization, will he
find us food? Will we want it?
1980
#10
7-28-01
Describing when copper pipe with lead solder
were last used in Seattle homes,
I read "1980"
and was glad I lived in a
brand new building,
thinking 1980 not far
behind. Later in the morning, I
questioned what had
I been doing in 1980. Mt. Saint
Helens exploded, I went to China.
Before
that, the walk up and down
the central mall
of Boulder, with my
monster of a
new boss, enjoying the Hari Krishna with
their bells and
chant, a preface
of things to
come. The female boss's greed, contempt and
jealousy forecasting the nation's direction, those dancing
in orange,
forecasting my future and,
as the water
for my coffee boiled, I realized
that
was twenty years ago. Then I was
ensorcelled by the
extraordinariness that I
could remember that,
that well, so long ago, so
clear
and, for a moment, thought the brain
really wasn't getting
forgetful. Back and
forth, a soft
ping-pong, the brain began to game. I
remembered my Uncle Fred, who was wise,
remarking to my remark, when I
was
about forty,
how the years were foreshortening. He said
that later on
the centuries would do
the same dance -- get shorter and
shorter. B.C.
would get closer. And it has. The
millennium rolled by, decades seem
like days.
And they are. Unless it's thousands,
it seems trivial.
65 million years ago in the Chicxulub
Extinction the dinosaurs
disappeared. In the Toba
Extinction, humans all but disappeared. I
tap the
NET's
search button. 75,000?! -- I can almost
remember that! Between
1980 and now isn't even
a puff of smoke. Yet! Look
at the 10,000
things that happened between then and now.
The lights flicker, lightly
dizzy, I remember
the Tibetan monastery. But what do
I remember?
Red-cheeked,
smiling faces of orange-and-maroon-clad monks squeezing past
on the dark and dirty stone stairs
going back into sunshine after
gaining
permission to spend
my twenty-five dollars to take the Kalachakra.
Bewildered, in a fog, depressed, having already
meditated three months
too long in
Korean kyol che,
why would I be here? The booming
bray of the long horns, the scimitar
sweep of the high hats, monsoons
pouring over people
beyond the open doorway, the crowds on
the
steps, passionate, absorbed, drinking sweet chai
with my back against the back
wall, the diarrhea.
Even the Brahmins rules of caste begin
to
seem sensible. I can almost discern
when and how they were made,
as I find
I want to eat alone and only
food cooked by my own hand. I
want
silence and ceremony. Enough of
the chatter and
problems of people. I
begin to think
the Brahmins faced the same situation we
face today,
the pollution of our
food, the greed
the crowding and they divided
themselves off --
just for sanity, serenity. And a person
alone is a
challenge to the
multitudes -- Ah, he
has no friends. So we must be
friendly. The Brahmin makes another rule -- he
can be polluted even
by a
person's stare. Another
ceremony to purify himself from the
crowding.
According to modern community, this is bad.
But it is
coming. The pollution
of every molecule
of the exhaust-fume-air, of food,
the cacophony
of daily life, the touch of grime,
the seeing of the ugliness man
has made
of
the world. I make my rules too.
Twenty-one years skips through my
brain as
fast as a ricocheting bullet. Nothing
happened. Everything
happened.
It's gone. Two thirds of a century.
THE GUTS
#11
8-01-01
V brings up the unified field theory
and, after my usual showing
off,
"I've heard it,
I know it, I can name its components.
I've read much about it I don't
understand and a little that I
did, etc." It,
that conversation, and the GUTS remain in
my mind for days, burrowing there, throwing
up illuminating,
evocative rays, shimmerings, glimmerings.
Finally I marry
its
insubstantial image to the flittering, skittering,
almost
invisible image of my own problem
-- or solution? Lately -- in the
last
few years -- more
and more frequently I get vivid glimpses
of what I know: world-things, people-things, me-things:
images, laser-vivid, evocative as Proust's cookie,
but unlike
Proust's
cookie or the GUTS, all these stunning,
fabulous,
be-jeweled, worth-preserving image never hang together,
nor do they
come in a
worth-remembering sequence.
They explode randomly --
like reality -- into my
brain, and, like fireworks, last for
moments
-- some linger as cascading sparks -- then
fade, leaving
glitterless
trash, winged snowflakes, falling from the sky.
I asked: What am I really waiting
for? For all that master scatter
of poignant, powerful
images
to explode into a unified field?
some suddenly-manifesting,
self-cohesive density? -- or a spider-strong
thread to hang them all
on?
to find my
own great novel suddenly written? my own
remembrance of things past made manifest? my
history of the
world recorded? a
Big Bang reversal?
my ten thousand things reduced
to one?
Is that? -- would that be? -- enlightenment? Or
just
#1 on the best-seller list?
Can particles, components,
spin their own gravity, their own glue?
THE TAO TE CHING
1/38
#12
7-23-01
I wonder if I'm up for this,
I have Mair, Wing, Feng and
English
before me,
each using a different word for Te:
Mair =
Integrity, Wing = Power, Feng/
English = Good(ness) F/E is graceful,
poetic, the translation
I owned in the past; Mair
is
claiming new ground opened up by
the Ma-Wang-Tui manuscripts of silk,
but
he's no poet;
Wing is a friend of mine,
caught up in the
modern world, she
has fine footnotes. I respond very
little to
grandiose
statements and progressions, unclear if I am
simply
to observe such phenomena in myself,
to try to emulate them or
give up in
despair. Why do I read the Tao
Te Ching? I
have read it many
times before and can hang on
to it no
better
this time than the last. Perhaps
its only content is: it is as
elusive as life
itself. I thought
I caught one
thing to disagree with, that the
fruit
is more worthwhile than the flower, but
then R.L. Wing
uses substantial
and veneer. Can
I imagine night blooming Cerius as "veneer"?
THE TAO TE CHING
2/39
#13
7-23-01
Translators Mair, Grigg, Wing,, Mitchell, Chen, Kaufman,
Kohn and
LaFargue, Feng and English
work The One.
This chapter doesn't exist
in the Guodian.
My mind remains blank, except, I remember
I am
a daffodil growing from
soil, earth, dung.
My roots, though I do
not understand
how, support me. I am stone. I
do not tinkle
like jade. Each
translator captures only
his own image, beats his own drum.
THE TAO TE CHING
3/41
#14
7-23-01
I resist the Tao's big fuzzy abstractions.
They mean very little to
me.
I remember: "To
make the concrete abstract is the essence
of evil." I now have 13 translations
from the library. Is
there one
that speaks to
me? It may just be that Chinese
philosophy, like Christian philosophy, makes me feel
bad --
both sick and like an
evil doer. Hindu
philosophy fills me with
joy. I agree
with the one and find it, for
the better of my
happiness, to
avoid the other
two. Vedic chant fills my heart with
bliss, while Christianity's glorious masses -- musical, religious,
people -- fill my soul with a
feeling of penury,
despair, and
a need to dodge guilt.
Who are my translators now? Chen, Feng
and English and Lippe, Grigg, Hendricks,
Hendricks, Kaufman, Kohn
and Lafargue, Kwok, Palmer and Ramsay, Lau
and Allan, Le Guin and Seaton, Mair,
Mitchell, Wing and a little
Salomon
on early Buddhist
manuscripts, thrown in. Another of my
teachers,
Boltz, appears more than once in the
context of the
Tao Te Ching.
It's amazing how
many world-class scholars,
musicians, adepts I have
encountered along my Way. Dran once
said:
Even if I turned out to
be an unsuccessful
writer,
writing has given me a superb
life. Since I was old enough to
think, however, it has struck me
as odd that
we put such
disingenuous faith in old
books: Tao Te Ching c 300 b.
c.e., Bible c. 300 c.
e., Koran, c.
600?? c.e., (a 90% reiteration of
the Christian Bible) Ancient
Buddhist Scrolls c.
100 c.e., Vedas -- the oral
tradition goes way
back, but manuscripts are no older than --
it is not to be
found, no
date, palm-leaf books disintegrate fast in
the many
century's
monsoons c.e., when at least two
millennium of compelling intuition, thought, creation,
writing,
research has gone on since then
and goes on
today,
greater, perhaps in its power and
insight, than anything the big
boys of
early humanity ever thought of in
b.c.e.,
and yet we
worship, we gloss and
interpret, extract every morsel of meaning that
might have been meant
or not
meant from these
old tomes. My contention: take almost any
manuscript, pore over it enough, gloss it
enough, interpret it
enough and it
too will contain
the world's wisdom -- especially if
you give
it a tribal aetiology or hype it
as
post-computer-age-super-think. Rumi, in my opinion,
1300 c.e.,
is
more worth study than the whole
previous or coming lot, but that's
because
he (right here slipped in a
momentary vision of
the
crossroads at Hyampom) sees the world
I long to see, the sublime
entwined
with the mundane. Well, it gives
the scholars something
to do. Though I often appreciate tradition,
I cannot be a
traditionalist and be
a poet, a creator, I can
only tell you
my vision, I learn what I can
and express what I express i.e.
a brand new synthesis of a
brand new person
with unique
capacity, experience, insight. What the
ancestors were doing 10,
20 or 60
thousand b.c.e. I don't
know. Why do
I cut up bits of
prose into
poetic pieces? Because it affords form, a
terminus? 'Though I often
lose my
way, 'though I
often wonder at what I do and
why,
just working on my soul seems
to have been enough of a
job for me
without partner, children or social context. My
Tao is art,
writing, poetry, painting, pattern --
structures I can build,
elaborate, destroy
on my own --
"I vant to be alone" -- with my computer
JIM MACHIN
#15
08-16-01
I only knew the top of his
head, noted his pleasant presence as
I
cared for
the plants in my windows, his patience,
his
quietude. He enjoyed the dappled sunlight,
the beauty of the Minor
trees,
blue hydrangeas, red
geraniums, his friends, coffee, and
the lobelia
overhead. Meditation gets easier as the years
advance, quietude delights, silence satisfies. It
seems God
liked
him a lot, led him gently away,
left remembrance of him in
the golden
air of the summer garden. Ninety-five
is a good
age to leave the earth -- at peace.
MAYA
#16
8-17/18-01
I gave up on Tao Te Ching --
too much abstract advice for weak/
strong, noble/humble
increase/decrease, action/nonaction. Who
could utilize
such advice to choose breakfast, make
coffee,
decide which bus, what walk, invent
software, censor the
terror of aloneness in the anxiety-driven human-gathering
we
mistake for civilization. Now I study
the Maya. Cerros, Palenque,
Tikal, Teotihuacan,
the Aztecs -- civilizations
so exuberant,
flamboyant, talented, awesome in architecture,
art, literature,
blood, that one would think
our Frankenstein-God would have stopped
there.
Enough of creation!
Today Maya-spirit -- creatures of
feeling, superlative invention,
despair -- is gone. I cannot
sleep. Nor
rid my mind of pierced penises,
snatched hearts,
pierced
tongues, human-made mountains, pristine, white, sun-toned,
sensuous
fabrics' beauty, terrors of jungle and jaguar,
vibrancy of royal ceramics, art higher
than our Leonardo
or
Warhol, their buildings grander, more abstract
than the Tao. Lost
in jungleness, was
their stupendous work-ethic, like ours, an escape
from imperious Gods,
was there no one to help
defy
the terrifying shadows. Apparently the people decided
on Kingship,
built vast domains, triumphed,
then withdrew support,
trust,
returned to the land to farm,
as Pol Pot obliged the Cambodians to
do. Maya assuaged their fears by
making human life
more
horrifying than anything met in nature.
How can one go on after
civilizations
so colossal? Perhaps they thanked Gods
for the
mean-little-gold-grabbing
Spanish come to help them die.
Perhaps
they had done enough, had done it
all, had begun their
retreat before
their civilization, supervised
by the Spanish,
aided by Spanish diseases,
dissolved. Remember! Their supreme
victor's prize was
often death, the spurting of blood
from the
heart
for the delectation of Gods. Even with
our
eco-terrorism, bombs, starvation-enslavement of the world's
people,
our privatization of food, our
soon-to-begin-manufacture of human
beings, still, we have light-years to match
Maya hubris, Maya grandeur.
TAO TE CHING 2
#17
08-19-01
I keep slogging slowly along the Tao.
For words that propose you do
nothing, it is
too full of injunctions, instructions. If one
occupied one's mind with it, its sayings,
advice, wisdom, one
would not have
time to live,
nor to write, nor to think. Best
to go out and breathe the light
blue air, pick the
blackberries, gaze
on the multi-windowed,
tall buildings, admire
Seattle for planting so
many trees, lead tours of the library,
eat ice-cream, read a mystery, snuggled
down into sleep.
Invent one more poem in the morning.
EXPERIENCE
#18
08-19-01
Experience is the oddest thing. I see
a picture of bare feet descending
a spiral stone
staircase and I am returned to Conques,
the
monastery behind the ancient abbey with
the stone coffins, thinking
experience is
as ephemeral as
are musical notes -- they sound and
are
gone. Each moment is -- and is gone.
Experience, more
ephemeral than the wind,
ruffles the mind,
touches the senses, the
body -- is gone.
Teasing, kissing, almost unperceived in a
headlong
dash with time, through the day's
moments seen in
peripheral vision, smelt as intensely as lilies.
Moments rise,
receed, pluck my heart. Poignancy
rules -- but no longer than a
moment, no longer
than experience, come, and gone to memory.
CULTIVATE DESIRE
#19
08-25/10-16-01
On earth in the moonlight, what still
fascinates me is Angkor Wat,
Nokhor,
Ongcor, and hundreds
of similar wats conjured from
Cambodia's plain
near Tonli Sap, the largest structures on
our
planet save for the gigantic
snake of the
Chinese Wall made into a
concatenation across
the mountains and valleys of the landscape
of the Middle Kingdom by Chin
Huang De. But
Buddhist, Hindu,
built by Khmer Kings in
renunciation of this paltry world the
might
of Angkor -- even in the Chinese-like
square-meters, bare
rock
description by (discoverer for the Western world)
Mouhot,
the power of desire bleeds through.
Buddha found the answer was
desirelessness.
Then proceeded for
fifty years to preach and
teach, travel;
in his name were built a plethora
of the
grandest structures of earth,
with brain-washed, unpaid
labor,
slave labor. His desires fulfilled, he
died. Along came
Capitalism, declaring we'll enslave
you, but we will pay you,
and
so built,
this time, not so wide as high,
some of the highest
structures the world
could conceive, preaching desire. Cultivate
desire.
To be alive,
in the definition of Christian-Capitalism,
is to
have desire, gluttony, greed. Like the Buddhu
and the
Hindu subsisting on austerities
in the woods,
desirelessness, in
the 21st Century world just
doesn't cut the mustard. Desire is
all.
After desire is death. Construct your
own reality, whether
you build Ongcor with stone or imagination
is immaterial.
There is nothing more to
life than the living of it.
There is
nothing
but what happens at the center of
things. Dance Shiva.
Dance. The moon went
from half to full, and back
to half again
and down tumbled the World Trade Towers.
DIVERSITY
#20
10-13-01
I
Ancient and alone, the decision will happen
sooner or later, to give
up,
live in chaos,
go with the flow. Perhaps Diamond's
important
contribution, and he didn't even emphasize it:
but
only in diversity is strength,
a billion automatons
will be erased
by an automaton virus.
only in the muck and the mess,
the
whirlwind of life creating life
and death, is
continuity to be had,
the going on,
up, down, charm, endless circular earth patterns,
the inventions of heaven, more planets,
more genes, more
more
more more and, in your case,
Ms. Devayani, more papers to drown
in,
more tides of written words creeping
up your legs,
to your
knees, to your vulva, into
the crinkled bowl of your navel, across
the Gangetic plain of your stomach,
up the slope
of your
breasts, dangling free, clutching hard-handed
at your throat,
making you gag, into
your ears, the tides and tides
and tides
and
tides of paper filled with poems, poem
filled papers,
cyberspace filled with poems, as
if cyberspace were your eyes and
ears, the ends
of your fingertips tappity-tap-taping, trying to
outdo
god in your profligacy, reckless
prodigality spent
unto eternity. Words go on describing,
this
world, worlds
in your heart, your liver, your chest,
your
knees, the keenness of your eyes,
words, radiant words, follow the
evening
crows, blue, black
into the wind, into the flamboyant
sky.
II
And each one different, each a native
grass
to be cultivated into cereal,
each word is
surrounded by its
nutritious carapace, each word
the same, each word unique in its
setting. As chaotic as the world.
Shred a dictionary
come up
fresh. Begin again to assemble
words into sentences. Each sentence
unique, different --
as before the creation.
Molecules are
identical, words are different and
vice versa. It's the setting,
that matters,
the place in the code, where
helical twists dance
and sport, play melodies of celestial origin
III
But you needn't keep track. It will
track itself. Endure the Chaos.
Continue.
Let those who
come after organize. Let bureaucrats do
their
work. Let the poets do theirs.
INQUIRY
#21
10-16/17-01
How many molecules in 6,000 pulverized bodies?
How many sips can a
mosquito
take from a
human before it is drained of
blood?
Someone can answer those questions, not I.
Someone can
answer those questions, have
done, will do.
Flames shoot through my
mind, die,
like any fire. Carved on Venetian ramparts
in Heraklion, Crete: "I
hope for nothing
I fear nothing.
I am free." Buddha's admonition, death's invitation.
MAPPING GAIA
#22
10-18-01
COMING SOON
ARCHITECTURE
#23
10-23-01
Ninety percent of knowledge
is writing it in
code to make
it
incomprehensible to others, strangers.
It's the priest
instinct
in us, the abracadabra
instinct. It's too simple
to
say, I build
it this way because
I like it this
way.
CHANGING MOODS
#24
10-29-01
What an adventure it has been,
the sorrow and the pain,
like wedges,
winches and whirligigs,
bestirred to move beyond the moment
-- it's in
the plan.
What an adventure it has been,
all the motion and
commotion,
to win to lose what's forgot
by day's end for
tomorrow
-- it's in the plan.
What an adventure it has
been,
never pausing, never savoring until,
too tired to rise at
dawn,
the drug-warmth of the bed makes you smile,
-- it's in the
plan.
Could it have been simpler?
O yes, O yes!
But the pain,
the sorrow, the mood
swing into joy,
what else can you offer an old
woman
-- in such an adventurous plan?
CLEVE, THE GREAT GOD LESHIKAR II
#25
10-30-01
This odd and pervasive sense
lately
that what was my life
has
become history...
Yesterday, e-mail from Roz::
"Farewell
GGCL"
The GGL is no more.
Gone into thinnest
air. I tried to go
on
reading. It's what he would
have
certainly done --
behind his mountain of dirty
clothes
and
precious books, Sung, Tang,
celadon, exquisite things.
In about
forty-three years, I
don't
remember him telling me one
personal
fact, only
a grin now and then
to
acknowledge some subsurface
subsidence, sentiment.
He had many oughts
but no personal drama,
no
grasping after love.
He, his own definition,
was
a
friend. "Friends last longer than
lovers," he
said,
and he was right. But
then
he left. Now almost all
of
my loves
have gone. Men die quicker
than
women. It's true.
Into thin --
the humid air
of Seattle. He never got
back
here -- to live, though that
was the long
dream of his
life, waiting
for
forty years deep in the
heart of
Texas
for Mrs. Wheeler, his mom,
to
die. Storming and
shouting, prodding,
she lived on
and so did he. Independent,
no
children, but adopting everyone, every
thing in sight.
There's
a blankness there now
like
history. What does it have
to do
with
me. The span of a
human
life completed is like
chaff,
leaving raw grains
behind, it blows in the
wind,
the
breeze of years, scudding
away to death.
WHAT'S IT
#26
10-30-01
What's it all for, cramming my head full of knowledge,
drinking it in to
slake a desert thirst -- to fend off this life?
to prepare for the
next?
The alternative?
Lie down and die.
WAIT
#27
11-01-01
Wait a few generations,
their greed will do them in.
In 2001
began the rape of the American's
freedom.
Capitalism trumps
Democracy.
Lawmakers, Republican,
voted down the right of free
speech,
the right to tax the rich.
They took away civil
rights
and human rights.
Sold anthrax to Saddam,
terrorist
training to Afghanistan,
munitions wherever possible,
coercion
wherever necessary.
Having superseded the electoral process
by
fraud and, backed by the great court,
the little man who was
president
refused to look into his own
war chest to find that
biological
warfare came from home.
Someone just helping out
--
carrying out the pres's predictions.
Can't be prosecuted,
because
he's one of the good old boys.
So if Osama didn't do
it, Saddam did.
We don't have to look forward to a
world
government. We have one. Its called
the WTO, the IMF,
the WB, terrorism,
capitalism, the rich, the people
who already
own the world.
It's just tiresome to have to keep
everyone
else in jail.
Besides,
it cuts down on the customers
for the
ubiquitous trash
the have-nots of the world are supposed
to
crave and buy.
And they do.
But
wait a few
generations,
their greed will do them in.
Not being able to
resist selling arms
to their enemies -- "business
is business"
-- nor the powers --
the extraordinary powers --
that
undeclared war makes
possible, the freedoms
it allows the
Republicans [the rich]
to usurped from the people,
the curfews,
restrictions and repressive
laws it calls for
to keep the
people in line
buying the trash of capitalism.
Long lines.
Don't forget to shop! even
when the bombs are falling.
The
Red Cross director, good or bad,
who makes 450,000 annually
of
the dollars donated for relief
from famine, disaster,
planes
knocking down tall buildings.
Note the quarrels that go
on
among the paid staff of the charities,
the well-paid staff,
who sit in comfort
trying to figure out what is "fair"
for the
people in the streets
who've lost their homes, their
jobs,
their parents, their friends,
Yeah, exactly what is
fair?
It's certainly fair to sit in the towers
that are left,
in the comforts
of capitalism, and maintain their
high-paid
jobs, trying to figure
out what is fair for the losers
of this
world.
Wouldn't want to be too fair.
Wait a few
generations.
Their greed will do them in.
Screw the
environment.
Screw the poor.
Screw the sharing of
food.
Screw the food itself.
Alter it!
So someone can
make
money in the process!
Jail everyone,
let out the
contracts,
preferably to the rich.
Control the
consumers.
MAKE them buy the trash
of capitalism, store the
toxic
wastes, turn a blind eye
while agents take
their
secret share
of the "war on drugs."
Wait a few
generations.
Mother nature will shrug.
One more species bites
the dust.
Farewell Homo sapien.
As it turned
out,
rampant greed,
wasn't even that much fun.
They got
lonely with no one to rule,
no one to buy their trash,
no one
to envy their life-style,
no customers.
Having, themselves, to
eat
the GMO food they produced.
Mother nature -- if she is
compassionate --
will shrug before we come up
with two heads,
faulty lungs,
mutating ourselves into the next
chapter of
evolution.
She'll breathe a sign of relief
when the greens
begin to grow again,
and the animals are let out
of the
cages.
When food is free, and the next mutations
have nothing
better to do
than watch the sun set
and the sun rise
and
Homo sapiens
are all buried under
their sacred
mounds.
Our intentions aren't bad,
they're just insane
--
like crazy, prolific nature,
who let us loose
in the
first place.
In any country but America
it's called a coup d'etat.
AUTUMN
#28
11-3/4-01
Reflected sunlight at 9:06 a.m.,
the autumn is not so
gloomy,
great thoughts, grand visions
illuminate my
mind,
but I tire early
and fritter
away my
days.
I watch the kingdom crumble -- considering
what
Angkorians must have felt of old
or the residents of Vijayanagar.
It's hard to connect what I hear
to anything happening
to
me. For this
is a peaceful
autumn,
cerise,
gold.
As the coup d'etat goes on,
we're
encouraged, daily, to lead our lives:
buy, spend as if
nothing at all
were happening,
neither bombs
in
Afghanistan,
nor anthrax,
nor threats
to
bridges
nor
the loss of 450,000 jobs, nor the enrichment of
the rich,
not the firemen fighting the NYPD for the right
to
retrieves bodies of their brothers.
400 firemen died along with
the 5,000, were buried
beneath the debris
at ground
zero
along with
the silver
and gold
in
storage
vaults below the World Trade Towers,
limousines, documents; 70
feet down
the spaces descend obese with billions of
dollars
worth of world trade
knowledge and what was
once thought
necessary.
Nothing changes, how do you win a war
that
has no enemy -- except ourselves
except
ourselves
ourselves
ourselves
selves
with appetites,
thoughts visions, desires
unhindered by conscience, pity.
I
have long thought I would
like be to around for the
demise of
the Western
World. Who knew it
would be this
year?
Or that the autumn in cerise and gold
would be so
beautiful, full of
birds flying, scarlet leaves
falling, mild
weather, wind,
welcome rains, surprises,
and
visions,
reflected
light,
sun.
DEAD MUSE
#29
11-04-01
O Devayani, I fear my muse is dead,
died o'Thursday
or any
other day of the challenging week,
died of caffeine
deprivation.
But the addiction? Where did that come
from?
Shooting with needles?
Not I! Not I! Why doesn't the
brain
do its own work?
Because the heart is deprived and
dead! You
said: It died
o'Tuesday or some other day of last
week, stopped functioning, exhaled.
Gone, as surely as the
Saracens from history,
my muse left
on a Crusade to wander on
its own,
left my mind -- hollowed.
MOOD
#30
11-09/16/18-01
I'd call this a mind mood or
a mood of the mind, but
I dislike
both
phrases as I dislike being in thrall
to the moods of my
mind: clouded, stagnant,
inert, dense, as if the fabric
of a
basketball,
plastic, lined it all the way through.
Benighted,
dim, nothing to think about think
about nothing. As if my forehead,
from temple to
temple, is being squeezed to a point.
The
pointless errors of the body accumulate
into cascades of irritation,
itchings, twitchings,
fiery nerves, all
the cells behaving like
the jittery switchings
of strings. Deep down inside the
particles,
the endless inside strings of things
so small one
cannot see or imagine, are gyrating endlessly,
each with its
own pattern. The membranes
grow thin with age, the skin,
the
nerves wear
out, stomach decides to be always sour.
The
strings' gyrations are felt excruciatingly shallow,
more as the
surface of life.
There is no
depth. I feel the urge to shut
up, say no more. But each day
comes. The sensational head
grows denser.
Unrelaxed desire strains
at the reins, mind bewails
the inability
to transfer nothingness into nothingness. Five
years
ago today I started my website.
Being able to
contact
everyone in the world and still
have nothing to say, makes me want
to run screaming through the streets.
And always there
is the
urge to return to bed
go to ground. Sleep -- to just not
be
here, to not think about
this, or even
that, to forego all moods of mind.
INDICTMENT
#31
12-20/21-01
So long as men are allowed to
separate themselves from the human
race,
so long as
they cannot be held responsible by
women
and children, so long as they make
male religion, so long
as they
make male politics,
so long as they make male war,
so long as they bog themselves down
in feelingless,
emotionless activities that hide
awareness of the
pain they cause,
so long as they
refuse to see the results of their
torture and
greed, to hear the
anguished cries they
bring forth, smell the
fear they engender
in the gentle and chaste, taste the
bitter
blood they spill of their
own and their
neighbors, touch the
wounds they gouge in
other's hearts, just so long, shall the
world not know peace, and men
be condemned to
live beyond the pale of silenced dreams.
SOLSTICE II
#32
12-21-01
The poetry year, 2001, opened with occupying
a new place. Yesterday I
began
to pack to,
move again -- now into an eyrie, an
authentic aerie careening, kiting into the sky
above Seattle,
where, when I look
out, there is
nothing but sky: blue, grey,
clouds, wind.
Already, I begin to hear hurricanes stirring
in
my soul, dust devils, tornadoes,
penetrating the source
of the
rain? Is it my last
desperate, crab-wise, knight-like move across
this queer,
Quasimodo, chessboard of quarky-quasar life? Well,
we'll see. Here
it's the solstice. Happy Solstice! Merry
New
Year, 2002 sloshes in, sidles up, slippery,
gloomy, slimy
to... Birth? Rebirth? Journey? It
begins. And Death?
Well, set
that aside for now. Get
on with probing the caffeinenated,
itching, traumatized
brain, the anti-histamined body. Search your
soul for the
last 10,000 things/words to say/write.
2001 burst, closed, crumbled, flamed at 9/11.
Since then it has
gasped, grasped
at chimerical straws
to reopen. Just yesterday,
one day before
Solstice, announcement was made that the fires
have burnt out. O Shuttered Heart,
perhaps there is
as the flames, the smoke die down,
one last hope, a few more poems
may dribble out. Clasping Virgil's
hand,
let's walk Dante-like
through this diurnal, quotidian
inferno. Shall we,
Guelph or Ghibelline, black or white, pray
for the
assassination of Mickey Mouse?
Shall I love
Beatrice or Bill?
Shall I pray for
the trees to rebud after the deluge
of winter?
Shall I close my
heart and open
my wings, fly round my eyrie? Or
fold the feathered things, spinnaker by spirochete,
and
plummet, a siren, screaming to
the ground? Just
one more mere
sound of stress in
the siren-riding, fast-closing night skewed by
events
not anticipated by Australopithecus or Lucy,
Margaret or
Jane.
Open my spiracle, let out the light!
SERGIO
#33
12-21-01
Sergio, talking about Le Corbusier, when he could
be talking about
Barragan -- Why? Why
talk about less
than the light? It was his
glasses
I noticed first, rimless, almost unnoticeable,
sweet-faced,
mobile-lipped, a strange brain twisting up
out of
Patagonia
shimmering with insight. Why talk about less
than
the light? Doing good works, having
lived a life of amazing exile
and privilege, sitting
in his office of sunshine, showing me
brochures of his work devoted to helping --
the theory and
practice of Western
Architectural Tradition falling
away into the
Andes' misted crevasses. His
students help build round the world
--
Mexico,
Montana, India, Washington -- practical structures,
many-styled,
multi-use, Sergio's abstract
lectures becoming concrete, touchable, cradling the light.