I get tired of hope;
Smile: clenching my lips split,
Chapped cynicism drips.
A lemon squeezed — face screws against reality,
Obdurate, turning bitter.
Rice jar of positive intention molders sooner than the next.

Do you have enough energy to make hope real?
My back broke heaving the thick clay out of the river to keep my flow,
But on the bank it runs back down in the rain.

"But what shall I do?"
Pleading, I ask the deaf beyond.
And you may ask, "To which "beyond" I address?"
This one, with few eyes — a vestige of a once fervent platform.
The nothing that is my own silent speaking.

And with these thoughts in the dusty corner of forget, I hope to forge something that may endure beyond my waste. A straggly sentence without the pretense of enjambment and too forward for polite company; an aside screaming my intent — too "on the nose" and badly written.

28 September 2011

This morning, in the rain, your death pulled my sinus dry though no tears to shed as a slow mourning dries the emotion of loss - evaporating - it just crumbles... dust to collect against the empty memories left unswept. My most detailed memory of you is when I was six; a background to times deemed banal. You have diminished like your mind wrung dry, a prelude to my inevitable demise. But isn't it always about the self - truly detached from an earlier generation the unmoored roots of aging.

Crow

I heard a crow in the late summer coolness
A dry resonance under the thick clouds
A dim reminder of the heat we wore thick for too long
A dim day which follows an evening whose taste bitters on the tongue
What is it that I hope for wringing my hands raw?

Optimization is always short sighted

Televisions overlap in disparate discourse
"What is the point of this projected purpose?"
The evening light fading as the humidity slackens a rope not yet let loose
We crouch inside from the heat or is it the mosquitoes laying siege to our indefensible positions Clouds mill in the sky
They say it shall rain this evening on the heels of pressure from the arid south

Storm (06.08.2011)

The storm finally rolled in after days of heat.
"Its been building for a while now", the old work man says with a squint.
- one system to replace another.
Carpal tunneled desires digging in our rank soil
- you can find anything you desire with a click
"At least the power didn't go out - last time I nearly fried my motherboard
and missed out the evening's trending topics."
The heat, seething desire, finally broke open.
- a storm of intensity shaking frustration loose like a stiff rag
- that desire to get out and connect like a cheap clique drives my slowly mined focus
and lost
the digging begins.

The beach [an homage to Pound's Lygdamus] (06.08.2011)

We all saw you, Lygdamus,
eying the plebeians, regardless of age,
from your smug expression atop the life guard seat,
neglecting your duties,
oblivious to those thrashing bodies becoming stiff with panic.

I, too, must confess:
my gaze did waver
over the ample busts of Venus' daughters
in two tone bikinis and stomachs
Praxiteles spent a lifetime attempting to chisel.

Though Polemarchus was unimpressed
after all he said:
"It is the hidden allure which pulls me",
as he proceeded to wade into the bitter lake with his sandals and heavy formal toga.

Though not at gymnasium, I nonetheless found myself shirtless
with Apollo's envy darkening my skin
- though the foul balm kept it
from becoming the color of contempt.

Lygdamus, who are you to give us the evil eye, as our desires were left covered over in privacy? Though that placid red head, with skin to make any marble cutter weep, which had made herself a sandy couch, tiny lyres up to her ears, was indeed unescorted, but we felt she may have been enjoying her singular solitude among the chaos rivaling the agora.

Because even you, Lygdamus, must agree, no matter what might have transpired, we would have left at some point with desires unfulfilled. We just decided to enjoy the catchable discus and our own company - an isolated coterie among others, just enjoying the heat from Hades' door left open by Persephone's hurried departure.

Constraints

The constraint of becoming which both limits and encourages our transition from this banal state of awareness and predicates the next awareness threshold which is the liminal set that maps itself over the emergent phenomena of moment - the gazes we lay at the alter of pure oblivion - desire running like a vein across the social granite - the root finding its shoot through that dense core...

Lives

Tragic: the lives we pull behind, limp like logs.
Bleary-eyed: the beer eases a tight tongue.
Relax - into substance like a rolling tumult;
a groove cut across our lives.

Always out on the corner - this partially self-imposed/ learned behavior
Surrounded by deafening clamor - the silence of being alone
... but to learn to encompass this silence or at least to wrap it round like a warm blanket, settling the chill... this too is a medium for creation - riding the fervor, but only as observer

But then I saw this world everywhere, opened up across the tree line; moments disjoint and out of the haze figures of struggled lives clumsily coalescing into brief conflagrations. The period uniforms seriously worn though too unworn to suspend belief. Crowds garthered at the flagged rope... and then I pin brief faces as strategic cities on the crowded map: the thin faced, delicate cheek-boned, Chanel knockoffs, shoulder-length black hair, porcelain skin and loop pierced lip - punk chic; or the Northface fleece, camera, Lowe Alpine bag, and a prominate nose which elegantly flows from the brow, and dirty blond hair with a placid mouth; or the red brunette in the flannel dress, lips brilliant red.
- always on the lookout for that silent node to heap all my unrequited expectations

... the smile that follows in a held moment as he leaves the table for two. Her eyes then find elsewhere to focus as the moment fades with her smile.

... and then there are always those which you have engaged but only remember you in a given context...

Re: Religion

Are not all religions based on some specific means by which the human species regulate and control themselves - to "pull oneself up by the bootstraps"? And it becomes a barrier to seeing the world as dumb emergence (dumb here should be understood as appealing to its unconscious randomness). But it should be noted that "religion" once worked at the level of society (the king as instantiated god-head) and later (though necessarily coexisting such as Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens) at the individuated subject (one's personal struggle, or one's salvation). 

If the emergence of a technology of control evolves coextensively with societal evolution (the collective becoming-human), then there exists some moment (y) that is contingent on some moment (x) where f(x) is defined as a partial mapping from (x) to (y). B is a set that contains (y) and f(x) is the smallest possible union of the set A and the set B. B containing a bijection of what could be objectively reasoned as an alpha group structure vs a collective non-hierachical structure.

 Despite that religion is defined here as some "control mechanism" does not imply that "religion", which is the techne of "god", is necessarily negative. Since, is not food or treats a means by which we control dogs; and that control we assert produced an animal which is well tempered for a variety of human uses? Instead, it opens up the larger set of possible roles for the expression of being-human - explicitly, religions are both potentially positive and negative forces; the set of positive forces (P) is equinumerous to (Q) as (Q) is ~(P) assuming symmetry between positive and negative forces so that for every potential force (r) there is an inverse of (r) which is (s) where t(r,s) = 0 since t = (r+ s) and s = -(r). Though a specific culture may be more predisposed to certain tendencies, it does not necessarily follow that there is only one "pure" dominate strategy for the application or production of a religion. Anecdotally, it seems more likely that monotheism has this tendency to extreme violence and other virulent methods of cultural control and production. This does not imply that a "pantheistic monotheism" like Hinduism is thereby better - i.e. the cast system and religious violence that the government is partially tacit in "tolerating". It is important to explicate that "religion" seems to have consistent structures (note that consistency merely indicates there is at least some limited form of comparable, abstracted, or higher-level interpretation that can coherently be mapped onto each religion's domain of meaning). Take the rise of "monotheism"; it was contingent on the "need" to transcend the jaded and increasingly diluted pantheism of Hellenism (possibly due to the over acceptance of "foreign" gods and the rising awareness of the logically weak explanation of natural forces as produced by a multitude of vagrant gods). This may not be a strong root to tie the randomness of its acceptance by Rome as a state religion, but there must have been some, if not a legion, of reasons Hellenistic pantheism stopped being fertile soil for the continued production of culture, and specifically, a techne of being religious (defined as a rubric for the structuring and thereby the understanding of the world). Monotheism is just the next logical step in a series of potential understandings of the world and ourselves - in this case, as an individual intimately connected to a single transcendence - a single authority for the production of culture. And it must be noted, the ascendance of monotheism was a long time coming (now think how long various earlier forms must have endured); the moment where monotheism becomes the dominate religion (and/or world-view) was when it had reached some critical mass within a given culture and this tertiary (where primary is defined as the set of all coherent practices at a given time, and secondary, the set of dominate practices) culture was subsequently appropriated. The moment when the members of the union of the set of dominate practices (A) is greater than the disjoint of (A, B), defined as g(A n B) = Y, where the set (B) is the coherent set of minor practices (coherent, meaning logically falling within a domain of practices which are produced by a significantly large enough collective of people who would consider these practices to be part of the same domain, and since this criterion is contingent on the subject's heterophenomenological perspective there is some margin of error; however, the precision of which may be generally unattainable or inherently unstable). This union, defined as h(A,B) = {A U B} = Z, (Z) is then a subset of (A) and j(Z, B) or {Z n B} = W, is defined as the practices in (B) heretical to the practices in (Z); thereby, (B) either becomes a proper subset of (Z) so that (B) is fully contained in (Z) or (B) becomes a threat to the cohesion or stability of the dominate practices (A). A dominate culture comprised of coherent practices are defined as being stably propagated through multiple generations (i.e. the Catholic efficiency and bureaucracy of the late Roman state and the Catholic control of the dogma through which they lend authorship - the Bible is not a stable text, the pages may stay the same - the content the same but the concepts produced and followed is continually constructed by the church, whether a specific pastor's "reading" or the "party-line").

Need another note book

Gleaming
Trite tirade
Glistens
Gossamer beads of insight
String distant sprouts
Of meaning

And like the breaking sun
Sober clouds of afterthought
On winds of cold reason
Spread
A broad chasm
Between what was once
One congruent continent of meaning

Riffing on cheap, diluted "insight" - Tangled thoughts on the first early spring, warm day

Pure intensity zones
The world that lasts alone
Serenity which has lost its home

Empty like twilight
Trees black against blue star light
Cerulean dreams punctuated by cloud night

Despite what it seems
It is never what it means

This semiotic machine
Hole from whence we lost

This liar of hope to transpire
Into a world to inspire
That insatiable desire - to transcend
This semiotic mire

This intensity plateau
We cannot know

From whence we come
Nor the hope we come home
To the god in heaven
Or the satan to end him

"Won't you come with me?"

Lost in a story
Of that which bore me
Into this skin and pain

Which sprouted the growth
Of that never ending hope
Of empty void
Of ending in suns
Of becoming undone
The set of all ascending

Pure intensity zones
That lurking fire
Of angelic desire
That semiotic machine
Put between you and me

I had to clean that table because it was too dirty to use. The places you use, while being used, are cleaner than the rest of the table which is covered by: Beer Beer Beer Dust Dust Dust Beer Beer Beer, a message we all intimate.

Pure intensity zone
Transcendent meme
Without a message to intervene
Between the oneness of being
Pure intensity

Pretty soon our conversations will be indexed by the footnotes we use, and, projected onto our irises, displays of the comments and quotes we choose to transcribe our desires. We will be fully subsumed by the semiotic machine (which we mutually produce), the entering of a singular machine or a production of a stable universe that melds two worlds at the seam where they become pure energy. Stability is a return to the void - to become the seed for the next expansion which will occur at some minimum point of instability. We end this by creation.

Incantation under a bland tirade

What subsumes you
That drive that consumes you
The urge that pulls you through
Caverns of intensity

The dislinking of continuous moment:
"Take an experience; find that intense moment and set its magnitude of intensity equinumerous the natural numbers. Isn't this what we have done with the refinement of input flows. We have purified instant consumptive gratification (this includes 'Media', mind you); it is not exactly like refined chemical euphoria, but it sure keeps us digging."

Aliens

It is more likely that aliens are future projections of ourselves than intelligent beings from another planet. This is not to imply that there are not intelligent forms elsewhere but only to say that the distances and physics make projections of ourselves as likely - so it follows that we were never nor will ever be visited. Really, what other species would fuck around with other lifeforms just for amusement? Or could it be something more psychologically mundane, a touchy relative perhaps?

It's hidden, I tell you! It's hidden and meaningful...

This hiddenness which lays beyond me like a curtained window breathes depth through all manifestations of being world. The tree - just so - excreting oxygen and pulling mineral by mineral from the replenishing soil. This reflection of being is dumb meaning, assigned to mute things which exist comfortably within themselves. But there is nonetheless not specific "themselves" but collective movements and risings, culminations, transformations. The tree and sulfur light, sidewalk and invasive grass finding a place from these solid impositions. This is becoming...

All it is...

All it is...
Just enough, just enough
The breath opens in and out - little effort
Just enough, just enough
Legs loosen, tense toes uncurl
Buttocks tightens - then
Dissipates along the thighs, lower back, abdomen
The tension opens in becoming stable
Just enough, just enough
Shoulders loosen, arms lay weight on wrists
Wrists to knees in reciprocity
Just enough, just enough
Brow smooths, tongue and jaw open, slack - but
Just enough, just enough
Living, wanting just enough and no more
Holding on just enough
A delicate moment expanding
And the moment it is seized
It collapses into thought

Months of silence never brought insight...

What is one to say after drilling furiously out from the semblance of self awareness, and clamoring mad against the walls built to keep the reflected self out, only to see it kept in?

I write on abandon walls and wonder, "Who may contemplate my misspelled meanings?".

One must not chase after ideas like squirrels.
One cannot itemize or schedule time for thought.
But be open, aware, as on a walk, of the idea at the periphery.
Approach with sure-footedness and slow care lest it, being startled, become lost up the tree of forget.
But not all ideas come to us stray as cats to warm in our garages.
These must be tracked with skill, stalked over miles of brier thoughts.
These are the most difficult and delicate for they may vanish into incomprehensibility.

To be a seeker where nothing is sought. In all states, through all existences, there are "meaningful becomings". Meaningful in the fulfillingness or the transcendent engagement with the world, but must there be blockages? And why these vacant terms with their syllabic weight - over compensating length? ...the plaqued veins of a sedentary, over-starched life...

Must there be "ideal" paths? Can one find deep contentitude within a "becoming-junky" or a "becoming-self-indulged sociopath"? There must be groupings which cross over and allow "becomings-transcendent"... All paths seem to be interconnected at some point. But where is the set which contains the overlap, the openings which allow for that access, which must necessarily be shifting, opening and closing, always displacing. But inevitably each has their plateau of consistency - the demographic mire which continually appropriates the heterogeneous "becoming-individual".

Faces, faces
tied up
stretched over
the faux marbled table.

"...and these seeds of thought were so promising!"
"My, it has taken over your garden, 'Lizabeth! Are those your roses?"
"..."

Isolation

The isolation of higher order consciousness: that oppressive darkness which gathers at the moonless night of being alone; that void which endless channel surfing or media consumption does not ever quite fill. Until at the point of over indulgence, exhaustion from the tiredness of desperation brings sleep. When all woven narratives begin and end with the self; this pervasive kanker-like sore, which despite the greatest care, gets torn open making chewing more a formality than an accomplishable task. The knowledge that this state of being is mutually produced externally and internally is only a temporary balm; as one may pretentiously qualify as equiprimordial. This hyper-sensitive awareness sees fuel for its self propagation in all encounters; each of these likely situations only serve to further distance the isolated from the various external relational worlds, such as: the "full" knowledge that one is invited to social occasions more as a kind of selfless pity than true interpersonal attachment - of course the whole conundrum is that both parties must necessarily be unaware of this process but the isolated would invariably see the "true" motive were there may not be any. Spiraling into ones self is ever present, and without the ability to balance on that precipice, the tumble is perpetually self generating... a little like the precipice of consciousness on our larger narrative arc of becoming-human.