BY JAN HAAG
RANTS, RAMBLES, POEMS & PORTRAITS IN PROGRESS
Why all in the shape of poetry? -- I like the finite look of short lines,
limited excursions. Bit maps! Straightfoward prose seems to me to demand
a story, and I have no story to tell, just some rambles, rants, portraits
and poems, odd bytes of the brain's activity turned into words, recorded
on paper, crypted in cyberspace.
Jan Haag
4-25-03
ALTERNATE TITLES
Rants, Rambles, Poems And Portraits
Rants, Rambles, Portraits And Poems
Portraits, Poems, Rants And Rambles
Poems, Portraits, Rambles And Rants
LAMENT II
#12
01-27/28/12-13-03
Let's face it,
I started out with a dream
Of fame and
fortune,
But another dream as well:
To think deeply.
To
divert fresh dew into
The river of unmatchable
Pleasure I found
in books.
Oh, I have friends enough,
Cyberspace buddies
Who've found me out
There in the void,
Who read and quote
me.
But that's not the fame
I was looking for, certainly
Not the fortune. I have not made
A penny a poem in a lifetime.
What I did find was a way
To hone my mind, spend my time,
A reason and enthusiasm
To follow many curious roads
Exotic
foot paths, trails,
Leading into the brush
Of my mind,
untrammeled,
Untamed off-shoots, side-shoots
Fairly frequently
a fortnight
Ahead of the pack, enjoying,
Like masturbation, a
solitary
Pleasure, neglected, frowned upon
By those of the
tenured path.
The world has got more cramped,
More
criminal, more owned
By the greed and possession mongers.
There's hardly a place left
For a wayward thought
But a
doorway pre-claimed
By the homeless. Scandal
Salaciousness
have their audience.
Thumping music and howling
Song share the
air with bells
And whistles, the tsunamis
Of traffic,
machinery, the caws
Of the million crows, the screeches
Of
seagulls, the mandatory
Preoccupation with coin counting
The
tabla rasa of the soul.
I used to blame the British,
Those colonizers. For a long time
I blamed them for the
ruination
Of the world, the siphoning off
Of difference, for
the murder
And enslavement of the races.
But then the blaze of
two planes
And two falling towers highlighted
The fuzz in our
own navel,
The stink of rotting morals,
The putrefaction at the
core.
Thus it was and ever shall be.
Times were not worse
before,
Nor were they any better.
Is this that much
sought after
Goal of life? To have the eyes
Pried open ever so
slowly, ever
So painfully to recognize that goodness,
Truth and
beauty, freedom and compassion
Are merely the placating words of
murderers,
Enslavers, that the lie is total in this world
And
in my own heart. Even my kitten Shiva
Is half malicious, blood
drawing, a tiger,
The other half soft-pawed and purring.
The
earth supports us and opens it jaws
Periodically to consume us or
blast us back
To our constituent molecules. Is that
The lesson?
Is that the goal of consciousness?
To learn that the division goes
right to the core?
Is the core. To learn, as Sadhus know,
That
there is nothing to do but sway
To the rhythm of the way
things are,
Will ever be, sit in contemplation
Of the spectacle,
enjoy the ephemeral view,
Dubious knowledge, dubiosity of hope
Dubiously conceived around dubitable thoughts
Dubitably executed.
Dubitancy of motive of
Dubitant leaders, dubitate followers,
Dubitating ethics, dubitatingly initiated.
Dubitation the result,
dubitative the future.
Dreams are gone, hopes are dead
Life goes
on, nothing changes,
Nothing remains the same.
I still can't
figure out why I go on
Entertaining myself at the concert,
The on-going-ness of life. It is still impossible
To believe that
life is as ornately simple
As it turns out to be: Like a murder
case
Requiring only motive, means, opportunity --
As fitting to
life as to death. What will be will be.
What is is. Chance plays with
dice.
Dice rule the world. To what end? --
You well may ask. To
the end of motion
And pattern, energy's release.
To have lived
so long,
written so much, to remain
unheard, humanity's anguished heart
is frozen like a ball.
Dubitatively
Forming duble by dublers. The dublet heart
Cries
against dubment, against duboisine,
Fate dubs each invisible.
Where will the anguish lead? Lay down
Your ploughshares,
sheath your sword,
Nothing happens, but what happens
Today.
Content yourself with your
Contentable life, wishing, striving
Produces nothing, there is no content
Tomorrow. The dubster plays
us all
Dubul what we are, Dubya is what
We will be given a
dubylle chance.
I'm not what I wanted to be. I'm not
What I
seem. I am what I am
And finally may be
Content to be.
PROFIT & LOSS
#74
04-10-03
Most of the things I try to think about are
unthinkable
conundrums.
Like when and why did this warfare among humans
start?
Why?
Why is it that we are born into a world where the best
thing
we can do is try to undo, nullify, rectify what has been
done by those who have gone before: governments (all
corrupt)
monarchs (all corrupt), the unfairness, the starvation, the
slavery
imposed upon people by their own species, tribe,
country, town,
company?
Was there ever a time when we were fair with each other,
gentle, kind?
Oh yes, daily, often in your life and mine.
Why does
this not translate into larger collections of beings being
humane, one
to another.
How many times do we need proof to believe that there is
plenty of food
in this world, so that no one need starve, and already
too many goods,
so no one need do without their gewgaws. The problem is
they
are owned, the food and the goods, by people
who. having too
much, don't eat the food or use the goods.
They'd rather have food
stored (awaiting a good price) then let
starving people eat?
Who
must profit by every dollar sweated off the backs of employees
in
societies poorer than we are, lest their profits fall below the
maintenance
level of Their Life Style.
If Bill Gates is worth 60 billion dollars
( that's the most
recent figure I've heard --
down from 90 billion a few years ago) than
it seems
self evident that he has overcharged the public
to the tune
of at least 59 billion.
Imagine a world where everyone had complete
computer
access for pennies a year, as if the computer were
simply
an extension of the human brain.
It could be thus. BG could give
everyone in the world
his software now and still live like a king far
beyond his death.
But that's not the point. Profit! is the point. Pointless
profit,
power, enslavement, anxiety, stress for and envy from the human
race,
let it spend its time on earth scrabbling for food and hating one
another.
I say nothing new, my mind races around like the serpent
who
swallowed its tail and gave rise to comprehension of the benzene
ring.
And in conclusion:
Why are you so unhappy, my dear, you
have enough to eat,
a fabulous place to live, enough to do whatever you
wish,
having, years since, got rid
of grandiose dreams, desires.
Why are you not jumping up and down with delight -- daily?
JUST BAG IT
#75
04-13/15-03
Maybe it is time to just bag it.
I stand here at the very edge,
the
periphery, alone, looking
over a landscape strewn with
our
civilization, gone, not with
with wind, but with the mad
power
drive of a Cheney or two.
Why? one asks bewildered. Doesn't
he
have enough money to eat and a
place to sleep, a place to wake where
the birds sing? Where the sun creeps
along the wall making shadow
clones
of the leaves' brightness. I have
little money and no power
and I miss neither. How can Cheney
keep feeling so
insufficient, so
deprived that he must conquer
the world, destroy
civilization, set
up a new one, create new laws
to bind everyone
to doing
his will rather than
their own. Why? Thursday
they
looted the Iraqi Museum -- treasure
house of some of our oldest
bits of
civilization. They brought in wheel
barrows and boxes, carts
and intention
and took away 4,000 year old cuneiform
tablets, stole
gold and stone and no
one -- not the U.S., who had been asked
to protect the museum
-- there to stop
them. Hauled away our very beginnings,
some into
oblivion and some, no
doubt, onto the market where, Cheney,
when he
finally feels he has enough
to be curious about other
things,
will probably buy them as perks
belonging to his
dictatorship of
the world. Status symbols. They
will be even rarer
by then. For,
does anyone know who took them
and destroyed the
museums records?
Or maybe we'll find that Cheney
has an antique
business on the side,
stores dealing in ancient artifacts,
the
value of which, beyond his
singular monetary vision, he
cannot
conceive. But then again, perhaps
he is right, and it is
time to just
bag it, give up on our civilization,
cluster bomb it
all to smithereens.
I stand alone at the periphery, watching
the devastation. He
stands closer,
causing it, planning his next war.
II
Which leads again to my second speculation
on dark
matter and that inborn untreatable
genetic defect, that male desire to
make war.
We have a few hints in a few places of non-
warring
civilizations, a matriarch or two,
lands of peacefulness, pleasure.
But always
marching along, come men with the trumpets
and the axes, making exercise out of it, or
a religion, Ah the
camaraderie of it all -- to be in
the trenches blasting the skulls off
babies.
The breathless fights, where the pilots end up
envying the
smart bombs, free and outside
the womb of the plane, aimed at infinity
through that building, exploding it into
fragmentary bits of
the big bang. It's in
the blood. It just is! War is man's
noblest
game. They used to have the guts to just
say it. Now they
pettifog it, but not our
Cheney. If we get his tapes during the
trial
we'll probably find that he was very clear
about what he was
doing -- the greatness
of empire, even if it means enslaving
the world, perhaps especially if it means
enslaving the world.
His other choice.
Well, having driven us mad enough,
we could all
become suicide bombers
leave him to enjoy his spoils on a
blank and
spoiled earth. But I'm not
lonely, perhaps he wouldn't be
either.
"Just bag it, boys, throw it in the wheel-
barrow, pack it
on the mule, walk this
treasure out of here. Meaningless to me,
we
can probably sell it to help finance
the oil. [How quickly he'll forget
there's
no one else alive.] Hell," he'll keep on
yelling, "maybe
we'll drink the oil
from the ancient cups of gold.
Just bag
it."
I LIVE
#79
04-19-03
I live in an Ivory Tower,
but the view from here is
extraordinary.
Everything, national security, patriot act,
axis
of evil, is being set up, installed
on a permanent basis.
What
do you think can possibly happen after
a regime change election in
America 2004,
Pull out of Iraq? return the oil? apologize
to
Afghanistan? take away the armaments boys
guaranteed dole?
discharge Halliburton? Bechtel?
Is there going to be a regime
change? Will Jeb
Bush, his Floridians, and the Supreme
(Republican)
Court allow it? How are they going to manipulated,
and
propagandize the election this time to attain
their ruthless
goals?
There are two problems.
The second one is:
Who? Who in our supposedly
Constitutional run
America can we turn to to impeach the
Bush,
refuse more pre-emptive wars, when the
Congress itself, both
houses, is strangled
by the manipulation and propaganda
of Bush and
his Gang of 4
already multiplying out to
8, 16, 32.
Who'sgoing to interfere with the "AmericanDream"
of, into
perpetuity, being the only super power
anywhere in the world, keeping
the earth at
perpetual war, so we can exercise pertual
dominance
and pump up all the oil,
siphoning the profits into the
pockets of
the 200.
Why have we heard no one speak of
after the election.
As if, even if the
Democrats win, how can they NOW
alter America's
course toward
Hitler's dream of
Ayran dominance.
The present
is a total loss
Is anyone thinking of the future?
The Project for a
New American Century
author's of course are hard at work,
but we, us, the protesters who have seen
who see the horror of
their vision.
How are they going to stop the
inertia toward
dictatorship,
totalitarianism, whether they win the 2004
election,
or lose it.
Is there any path back? And if not, what is the
alternate (to
total, endless war) path forward?
Who's thinking about this, Kerry?
Dean? certainly not the
turncoat Liberman,
enemy combatants, striped of civil rights
and non-combatant
enemies
The insanity of billions in taxes cuts
as we plunge
trillions into debt
into the total ruination of our economy
with
rising tides of unemployed,
people living in the street.
How do
we undo these precedents?
Is the only answer to Impeach
Bush
NOW!
I could see the Iraq war miles off, troops in the
gulf
mad justifications of weapons of mass destruction
facist talk
by the Pres,
and no one paying any attention
This Iraq war was
planned! more than a decade ago,
once the wheels started to turn,
no
one was going to stop them,
not the UN, France, Germany, Russia,
not
reason or clear motive, or even guilt.
Secret incarcerations,
illegal detentions, plots
carried out in subterranean ways.
MAYBE
#80
04-19-03
it is meant to be like it is and we humans
should give up our puny
efforts to interfere.
Geology is an instructive subject
-- quite
new, and it now tells me
that Paleozoic time, 570 to 200 million years
ago,
"...ended with the extinction of at least 90%
of all the
animals on earth during late
Permian time."* (255 million years
ago.)
And again, Mesozoic time, began 245 million
years ago
"...ended 65 million years ago,
when another catastrophic extinction
wiped out
about 65 percent of the world's animals..."**
including
the dinosaurs.
That first 90% makes me think of the 90%
extinctions
of the population of the Americas that the
European
invasion by sword and by smallpox caused.
Maybe we are
just one more bit of ammunition in
nature's arsenal of extinction. Our
record is pretty good,
even just for this and the past century,
6,000,000 Jews,
9,000,000 in the India/Pakistan separation as well as
9,000,000
women in the witchcraft purges, 1,000,000 in Rwanda, 2,
000,000
in Cambodia, to say nothing of the creations of the
conditions
which allowed us to wipe out 25,000,000 via the bubonic
plague,
the colonizations that dealt with the 1,000,000 original
aboriginies
inhabitants
of Australia, the millions of original inhabitants of
Africa,
to say nothing of the 90% of the New World population
that was killed by mass
murder and disease.
I
could dig up another 100 statistics of mass killings,
via
sword and disease -- maybe 170,000,000 total:
62,000,000 by the
Soviets,
36,000,000 by China,
21,000,000 total by the Nazis.
One
wonders how
many
millions the U.S.A. has killed in its struggle to Democratize the World.
But perhaps all of these are simply nature's manifestation
of
earthquake and volcano within the human spirit.
There we are,
possessed of awesome demons,
that send us on murderous rampages
year after year after year.
If so,
what's to be done?
Sit
back and enjoy the spectacle?
Maybe this is the answer to my
poignancy
expressed in Cosmologies.
We are here, we watch
these events of time-lengths
perceivable by us, and weep and weep,
while we can ignore the inchy creep
of continents one upon
another,
the mass extinctions of long ago.
Who are we to think
we
can -- or even should --
prevent the death of species here at this time
in this place.
A bit of hubris I would say,
instead of looking
directly at what we do,
how we behave, notice our
instrumentality
in
the hands of nature
to effect what she has always
done,
will always do.
*Northwest Exposures, David Alt and Donald Hyndman,
p. 48
**Ibid, p. 51
THE FUTURE OF LIFE
#129
11-29/12-02-03
Why is it that man cannot think in multitudes?
I begin reading The
Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson.
Knowing I will love it! First
and foremost
because he has used Isabella Kirkland's painting
of
which I, most accidentally, wildly and passionately
possess a small,
exquisite copy --
have for years, before the time, even,
when
it appeared on the cover of an
"earth" or "nature" magazine.
Why do people clutch this
particular painting to their bosoms?
It illustrates the Endangered and Extinct Species
on this earth.
And it is beautiful!
In the nineteen-seventies, I believe,
when there was an exhibit of Women Painters
(through the ages, the
first of its kind)
at the Los Angeles County Museum.
In it
there were several paintings by
a woman, I believe, named Rachel.
They were the most beautiful, exquisite and detailed
still-lifes,
mostly of flowers, I had ever seen.
But there was not even a post
card to buy.
Since then I have craved
to have as a companion to
my life
to own, in my place of habitation,
a still-life equal to
the beauty of Rachel's.
One day, visiting California, climbing into
my friend
Craig's van in Sausalito, there on the back
seat lay a very small
picture of the most
exquisite still life (equal to Rachel's) I had
ever seen.
I said: "What's this?"
He said "A reject. Have it if
you like."
I clutched it to my bosom,
where it stuck to my
heart.
Craig prints on the computer, in color, exquisite
reproductions of art.
The best I've ever seen.
And he
has a bad memory,
almost as bad as my own.
He didn't, just off
hand, remember the artist's name.
So, from time to time, I heard her
name and forgot it.
But here I see Wilson's use -- the book has been
given to me
by a departing-for-the-woods-friend -- and I will, I
know,
now know Isabella's name forever --
as long as my own
particular mind lasts.
Wilson begins by calling Thoreau an
artist, defining
(with my own definition)
what at artist is, a
definition I will quote on the
opening page of my website.
Then he begins to define
generations, using the father-son
routine of well-known lads of the
arts and sciences
and leaving out the rest of humanity, as if --
because he happened to know about them --
the one's he knows were
important and the ten million others,
who lived and died and thought
and wrote and painted
and suffered and rejoiced and died, were not
worth mentioning.
I bet there have been a million Thoreau's -- of
his thought, and life style,
his ability to write -- dotted here and
there over the earth
both before and after T's habitation at Walden
Pond.
Why does "history" offend me so?
Would I be so
offended if I were actually there in its annals?
Is it only sour
grapes? Or is it the missing of the sweetness
of all other grapes
except the limited, limiting, small
crop of historical figures,
studied and restudied and restudied
as if there were no other grapes,
champagne grapes to be known.
The known ones, often mediocre, often
outmoded,
are almost never discarded
even when proved wrong or
obnoxious.
Even when, occasionally, it is shown that some other
obscure
figure did it first or better or more beautifully or more
lastingly,
history is remains a set, almost static, a rote recital,
of a certain
number of events and inventions that a very small
coterie of people created and wrote down in their personal diary and
others were forced to or willing to call history.
Very exclusive,
excluding almost everyone else in the world,
seldom welcoming or
embracing other geniuses than their
own. As if billions of lives
could be summed up by the single
citing of the achievements of
one.
Now, I must read a bit more, and see,
after he's
done placing himself on the knee of
Julian Huxley and thus
unmistakably in the line of history,
how he gets to talking about the
future
of life -- which surely, if there ever was one,
is/was a
multitudinous affair.
In the meantime, I will try to pay homage
to the millions of
Thoreaus, before and after the 19th Century
who lived elsewhere than on this scrape of Massachusetts land
beggared from the Indians --
all of whom were Thoreaus, observing,
noting, for thousands of years.
II
Yet one might say
I am obsessed with obtaining my place in history.
But I do not want
to play their game their way.
It is not that I want their -- those in
history's -- company.
I just want the "readership".
I don't want
to hawk my wares, I don't want to plant myself
squarely within their
findings on human life.
I do believe that everyone,
though they
are often discouraged,
and may not be very good at it,
has
something unique to say about living.
But almost everyone else's
thoughts
get lost by the ownership of the small coterie
who
write and fight their way into history.
III
Well,
naturally, by the time I get to page xxi,
I am proved wrong and
skee-wah,
a jumper-to-conclusions, a not-willing-to-listen-
to-the-other-guy (except under duress and after
I have expressed
my own limited opinions),
a prototype of jealousy that T is famous
and I am dumb...
Well he's not, just read his motivation as
quoted
by Wilson on pages xx and xxi -- what else are they
but
my own? He just did it first and better,
or maybe not better -- he
just got famous for it
and I am still obscure up here in my
eyrie-nunnery --
working away on the same: What the hell is it?
--
this life stuff!!!!! This minute by minute and
galloping by
generations stuff!
It never seems to get any place,
it
goes round and round, and each
round different? Civilizations come
washing up
on shore, not better, not worse, just different --
with all the little creepy/crawlies that are the passion of
Wilson,
and all the crows and birds of Thorough! -- as
W is at pains to tell
us he pronounced his name.
Once again, it's my
all-but-seventy-years-battle
with innovation and tradition.
How I love beyond imagining the fanatically traditionsl,
classical
purity of Swapanji's drumming.
At the same time, how I love,
in my own art, not to follow anyone who has gone
before, to
experiment night and day, poem by poem,
silly and profound, trying,
always, to peer into what
comes my way day by day. And trying to
glue it together
with what I KNOW. To answer the riddles of
Thoreau
and my own.
Always ending up envying those first
humans who began
to make, not only fire and dinner, but who began
language,
began weaving, began writing, began tasting the plants
around them, even envying those who began killing
the other
animals to swallow their flesh.
Ah, to start with a clean slate!
Not to be taught all that nonsense
which I have now lived
long enough
to discover in a discouragingly great number
of
cases are opinions, not facts,
simply the opinions (no better than
my own)
of others. The classical example I can cite in 2003,
is
the now forty year old example of geography
-- in 1963 the
geographers of the world,
gathered together in San Francisco and
finally began to believe
in plate tectonics, the perpetual movement
of the continents of the earth.
(And even this is questioned again by
some today)
But imagine all the nonsense that was taught to us,
me included, prior to 1963 and is still in cited history.
Historical People
become famous even for being wrong,
while
the ten billion others, live and die
in silence.
"The silence
after a lifetime of talking and the silence
after a lifetimes of
silence is the same silence," says my favorite, Nisargadatta,
(who I
recently learned must have been known to Gandhi, as
N's recorder,
Maurice Frydman, for awhile lived as G's disciple).
So, for my
envious soul, cheer up!
We all end eventually in the grand hall
of
Silence
-- which is what you liked, a lot, and a lot of, all along,
Copyright © 2003 Jan Haag
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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BY JAN HAAG
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