Encouragements for Such as Shall Have Intention To Be Undertakers in the Planting

Conrad Reiff

2009-07-07T07:21:00.000-07:00

Conrad Reiff in the Journey to Pennsylvania, Summer, Historical Review of Berks County.

Baby

2009-06-12T06:32:00.000-07:00

Baby live on summer sein und werden is a fiction of 100 pages titled The Roundness of Bellyheart's Bearing. What's it like to wake up on the earth? Past finding out, start at the beginning. "My birth was as round as...." This is the condensed version.

Jerusalem Blake

2009-04-15T07:01:00.000-07:00

Jerusalem Blake, of the latest gigantico elimae, continues the ruminations of Rubino del Sur (del Mar! del Ser!) begun in his letter on The Last Days of Borges. If you want to read of Blake's Jerusalem or just look at the pictures, try here.

Invisible Giants, Pismiths

2009-04-06T08:09:00.000-07:00

The Invisible Giants now live on The Dream People.
They are cousins of the Pismiths on Dogmatika.

Jack

2009-03-20T04:44:00.001-07:00

Two pieces about the environment went live on Jack today,
A Spiritual Tour of the Grand Canyon and Taking Down the Elder.

Mountain Climbers

2009-03-19T06:36:00.000-07:00

"Mountain

Climbers

Storm

Spiritus Mundi

Earth Center"

There is a metaphor inside Yeats. We get him to open his mouth. Inside the metaphor we walk mind, the body of fairyland bubble pops. Inside earth, inside branching visions, the landscapes measure maps we do not know. Some interior, like Dante’s macro pic, is what we are.

Everybody wants to get there, to that culture-wide inwendigkeit and be spiritually aware.

Talk about extremophiles! The "BODY IS A FAIRYLAND...the sleek surface of the teeth is a multiplicity of fairy caverns ...the surface of the hand resembles an arid deltic plain...the surface of the tongue, the taste buds can be seen as a garden of beings serving to taste and to guide the macro-being. A skin pore magnified several thousand times is seen as a naturally irregular meat cave inhabited by bacteria" (Michael McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 145).

No camera measures these interiors so we rely on Dante to compare earth from his poor soul. Maybe we'll get Blake or Yeats to microscope the landscape in. Outside the compound fairyland: "Ego, Id, Oedipalism, Anima, replaced the fairy folk of the country in the confines of the city. Trolls, brownies, Leprechauns, pookas doff their country costumes for the abstractions of new folklore" (139). These horrors of the new folklore are the Bladder Wacks, Pismiths, Belchers, Orcs, Whopapops, Susans of the obese profane age: "sensual horror, pathos, sympathy, all conjoined in intellective adventure...the sensorium of Inferno has begun to constellate more imaginative and more real creatures and beings…The stairs become living movies...in Paradiso the eco-complexity becomes so intense with throngs and multitudes of the Divine that it flares into the feedback of an ultimate vision (142)."

Down to the Waist / Up to the Feet

But it is in the Infernal that the stairs of the ultimate vision go down. In part because the psyche giant profiles the greater, that is the human knowledge self-reflexed, self served. It eats the flesh as its reverse children eat Saturn. Let it pass. "Two travelers find the shaggy and gigantic Lucifer at the absolute centre of the Earth, embedded up to his waist in ice. The only way they can continue their journey is by climbing down his sides-there is plenty of hair to hold on by-and squeezing through the hole in the ice and so coming to his feet." They climb down its sides, "though it is down to his waist, it is up to his feet" (Inferno xxxiv, 70f: C. S. Lewis. The Discarded Image. 141-2).

Sometimes the stairs go up to where Saturn first ate in fear of his supplanting. Societies eat earth from ignorance and fear of doing. Eat the mountain, down a river, pour atmosphere in the sea. Movies predict that the giants of obesity, those manufactured imaginative bounds, will bulge the equator and force still more unseen metaversal flesh up into the belly of a whale. Scale a mile to an inch to compass worlds below. The epic world is closer to unseen than can be said. Munch down a mountain, pony up some sewage, drain an aquifer. It needs a depression deep enough to save. We have our counterparts in Homer. That pariah Noah is our bubble. This metaphor about a giant metaphor prepares reality.

Sometimes these things seem as big as they are, and as old. Plutarch says in On the Face of the Moon that "the stars revolve fixed like 'radiant eyes'110 in the countenance of the universe, the sun in the heart's capacity transmits and disperses out of himself heat and light as if it were blood and breath, and earth and sea 'naturally' serve the cosmos to the ends that bowels and bladder do an animal. The moon, situate between sun and earth as the liver or another of the soft p95viscera111 is between heart and bowels, transmits hither the warmth from above and sends upwards the exhalations from our region, refining them in herself by a kind of concoction and purification.112 (Loeb Classical Library, XII, 1957). The little world thus has the same organs as the big. How's that for pathetic fallacy?

Working back, working around, come down to Noah/Jonah cast into the fish in order to save the ship lest everyone drown. Jonah in the belly is a grave. The Ship is the World! Before he's cast up on south beach Noah Meets the Wilderness. That's what we do. Throw the outcasts into space in modern terms, put on them our sins, tie their hands and drive them to the deep beyond. We must manufacture a spaceship, some horse or donkey, a mule from sin. Anything to carry them. Send our sins into space! They threw them overboard in the past, but did not throw Paul to save because he saved them all (Acts 27). Cases are never the same. He is salvation, not pariah. How to tell pariah from savior? "It is, rather, largely the result of work by people with...PhDs" says David Orr (c. 1990). Too soon to talk of shells cast off by *autodactylmorphs, part salesman, part dinosaur, part invention. How wonderfully we void wilderness. "Science has conquered nature," the product of natural forces. Co2 buried before the age began, in air and under sea in metaphor about a giant metaphor prepares reality.

Virgo!

2009-03-11T14:58:00.000-07:00

The pastor said Alpha and Omega if it had been in Hebrew would have been Kaph and Lamed. My wife rolled her eyes to say it would be aleph and tau. I took a nap. When I woke up Orion was over my head (I slept in my son's bed where he had designated the stars) and I began to think how much I liked kaph to lamed, except maybe that would be lamed to kaph, that is justice to justice. No more must the ox power of the aleph cavort in Borges' head.

I confronted her then with the perennial question. When would you say the universe was made, teased her with Aries since the new year is about to begin, but not with January. The Egyptians lived down in Taurus the bull. The Hebrew new year is September/October. What a give away! The universe was made in Virgo! Put it all on a woman to care for the birth. She oversees its birth and after that, she always seems to anyway, is there for the death, holds its hand, closes the eyelids, puts in the teeth, bathes the body, singing a little song between the bath and the body's end. We are all of us in good hands.

Taliesin (for Dave German)

2009-02-07T06:32:00.000-08:00

In Memory of Dave German / Match Point Tennis Club

The main account in remembering the dead is the mask we hang to honor them, the memory ledged on the heart. Three hundred had fallen of "bright Gwynedd's horde / Bright battalions with their blue bright swords." Among these warriors, of the three who "returned from the battle's rage," the singer recalled, "I who was bleeding to sing this song," is not numbered or named. Llyfr Taliesin, Book of Taliesin of the fourteenth century, pictures its memory in threes, the agony of war, the love of woman and the worship of God. Heroes are measured in epithets. No incident is completely described. Descriptions of battle heightened with fusion from true poems "kindle" eulogies of an oral history unknown. No source is given. This encourages the mask. It sounds like our lives when that editor of the Facsimile Text (1910), J. Gwenogbryn Evans, says none has suffered like the Taliesin, "hundreds of lines have been marred in transcription. Syllables, words, clauses, sentences, lines have been dropped, prefixes, endings, and catchwords repeated or substituted for the original phrasing." Of later celebrations, mysterious poems added to the elegies of 600 AD, poetic translations have a last word. Taliesin Poems (1982) wakes to news of Dave's passing with a change of mirth. "The Branch" must read, "When the Lord of all descended into death...then we were enabled to receive him."

Kimberlites

2009-02-01T06:58:00.000-08:00

Diamonds are forged many miles down, then, after formation, are carried to the surface by volcanic action and shot into formations called kimberlites by these high pressures. Lodged in this diamond pipe they are enabled to be found. Vannoccio Biringuccio thought gold mines a kind of kimberlite that took the shape of the roots of trees. In terms of the human forging of these, they are made of unspeakable memories like those of POW's and released prisoners, deep, deep things, but then we wake from sleep. This depth is sensed in the Book of Caermarthen and in those catalogues of the fallen, "whose grave is this, this one and this, ask me I know them," where the exile does not show his heart to one who asks, that is to "I and my frank round our cauldron."

When the diamond tubes are forgot, and the sparking jewels depth, mining around descents brings them out. Look for anything and you will come upon the only thing pressing buds and stalks from an intent face. "Oh who is an ocean to bathe the worlds sores in?" It asks. The versions listed here were bound copies saved by my father when they occurred, put away with letters in the order given. He signed his name on the title pages!

-A Calendar of Poems / Encouragements for Such as Shall Have Intention to be Undertakers in the Planting of the New Found Land / Set Forth With Divers Reasons and Inducements. 1974.

-Restorations of the Golden Age in New World Discoveries. 1975. 144p.

-Twenty Photographs of the Risen Dead. 1982. 120 p.

-The Roundness of Bellyheart's Bearing, 1982. 97p. (condensed version)

-The Story That's Never Been Told. 1982.

-Songs of Ariel College, 1982. 47p.

-The Taliesin Poems, 1982. 80p.

-Native Texans. Some Medicinal, Social and Philosophic Contexts of the Plants of Texas and the Southwest.1984. 133p.

-A Poetical Reading of the Psalms of David. 1985. 196p.

-PL3:HSTBIS - Planet Three: Help Send This Book Into Space. 1986. 208p.

-Stories for Children. 1986. Elsie's Marley's Tale of Cats. 1988. A Whale Tale of Dolphy. 1994. The Adventures of People and Heater. 1995. Cloud Boy. 1995. The New Earth of Char Beamish. 1997.

-Chang Pomes. 1994.

-A Tulip Blooms From the Heart: Some Lives and Letters. 2004. 135p.

-The Way into the Flowering Heart. 2005, 203p.

A father is like a diamond pipe that stores a diamond. Formed from pressures 250 miles down it is delivered fine by fire. The personal thus connected with the giant forces and pressures we of earth reflect. Creation reifies material from abstraction. Memory goes back and down to touch the veins, Dante in the kimberlite, Milton orbiting, fallopian tubes of birth and death, windsprout collectives of life, veins above, with mitochondrial relation of individual to the collective below, a long legged fly that moves on silence.

Once pressure forms the diamond, lava places it above. Head down in the mining, one arm to hold the rope as a foot presses against the rim, roped to the surface, hung upside down in the vein, the other hand with a hammer chips the side. Communities built of kimberlites, families and tribes forged from earth are what kimberlites connect. As though one could with the word written / in earth's center in the matter of its making / as earth's heart was into pieces breaking / come into the body.

"Diamonds form at a depth greater than 93 miles (150 kilometers) beneath the earth's surface. After their formation, diamonds are carried to the surface of the earth by volcanic activity. As this molten mixture of magma (molten rock), minerals, rock fragments, and diamonds approaches the earth's surface it begins to form an underground structure (pipe) that is shaped like a champagne-flute."

Native Texans (1984)

2009-01-30T10:11:00.000-08:00

Alta Neibuhr was the first to say it should have been called A Philosopher Looks at Plants. She provided copies to her herbalists. That's when Brother Lynch wrote to her and said it humanized botany more than he could have dreamed. Dr. Blackstock said it read like a novel. Later an editor at TCU press said she had hoped it would have had more philosophy. The heirs of these folks, if they had any, could refer to various fictions about herbs and subscribe to Human B otany. Croton, equisitum, milkweed, mullein, pennyroyal and horehound appeared in native plant newsletters. It was perilous. The day the ms was typed a stranger at the door, who had read one in the Newsletter and had a book contract with Texas Monthly Press, wanted to know everything about native plants! The ms was enthusiastically greeted by two regional Texas presses and canceled.

Hedeoma was the way I wanted to memorialize Carroll Abbott, for the whole thing was due to him, and Henry Burlage and Alta and others. Saint Coop printed An Introduction from his soft spot for plants: "If you were to take one plant with your immortal soul into the afterlife, then Hedeoma (Hedeoma Drummondii) would meet Amaranth. Medina County is starting a Hedeoma Dude Ranch. Aristophanes wanted thyme planted on his grave, but if you can get yourself planted in some Hill Country field you can have the superior Hedeoma. Albertus Magus claims drowned bees can be revived by the fragrance of the inferior pennyroyal, M. Pulegium, and that if you rub it on the "belly of any beast it shall be with birth." The use of Hedeoma in this way would shortly make so many beekeepers and mothers of us all that we would soon be drowned in milk and honey."

By way of explanation, the sun shining on herbs in jars on a window ledge in Chicago, out of nothing became everything. Within a year of migration to the Texas hill country that fragrance produced a desire to grow herbs, compass the hills in their seasons, at that time well outside Austin, and affected with rock walls, pumpkins, retama, red bud, limestone, sheep, pot studios and screened porches, reading Edith Sitwell in robin migrations and the click of the equinox in hammocks under oleanders, under chinaberries, on roofs, a childhood from the hills of western Pennsylvania made it continuous if episodic.

Out of these herb jars came A Calendar of Poems and its counterpart, Restorations of the Golden Age, but the peaks of roofs were coming over hill tops, so after moving closer to the city, living in Hyde Park, I came one day upon the Experimental Drug and Herb Garden, four acres of herbs and medicinal plants fallen out of favor and cultivation with its proprietor, the College of Pharmacy. Amazed to discover this vestige of pharmacy's past by accident, and after much nay saying about the possibility, for the place was all but closed, Henry Burlage, Dean Emeritus, concocted an encounter with that present Dean to the effect that the place would remain open with himself as the Director; I was the horticulturalist. The joy of this venture lasted three years and involved all sorts of trials and encounters, but when friend Henry took his last trip to the ER the end was in sight. The property was deeded back to the U in trade for a new pharmacy building on campus. All these matters engaged the herb and native plant people, Carroll Abbott among them, who more or less founded the native plant movement in Texas, being an ex-politico, but who subsisted on native plant seeds and bluebonnets with his Texas Wildflower Newsletter. These were the days when Ladybird Johnson was active.

Further access to hill country land, explorations over the Edwards Plateau, visits with Carroll, walking up and down rivers and always growing plants, he had often solicited, hungry editor that he was, articles for the Newsletter. But who ever does what's in their own best interest? So these invitations fell fallow, but even after moving to Dallas to pursue something that would pay the way for a new medical career, they kept coming. Carroll by this time had contracted cancer, which he movingly wrote of in the Newsletter that I still read, but one night I dreamed of him in such a woebegone state, depressed, in the dark, ashen, that I couldn't stand it, and instantly started writing that first piece, Equisitum, followed by Croton and Prickly Poppy and a whole flood. He printed the first two in the last efforts of Newsletter. My whole intent and purpose was to make him laugh. From what he said it worked. So I finished writing this, called it Native Texans (1984) as a joke since these plants are universal.

The World's Body

2009-01-26T14:05:00.000-08:00

The World's Body

I lay in bed
trying to get my breath,
slept a long hour or two before dawn,
gradually I became aware my body had risen
slightly from its sleeping form. This felt good
so I didn't move, went in and out of sleep several times,
I could hear differently then, wheezing groans, coughs
and short breaths and sounds like long sonorous moans.
I was either asleep in this raised state hearing my flesh
cry out in pain, or awake hearing the world's sound,
loud early in night which had since calmed down.
It was like a train or a moan the world cried out,
a patient deep in pain this resonant thing
with a mellow groan and travail,
I heard it snoring
in some detail.
I conclude from this
a spiritual world exists,
that its spiritual body lacks sense,
and that something is terribly wrong
if it makes these sounds like an old folks
home. Back in flesh I didn't hear it again.

The spiritual did not come first,

but the natural, and after that the spiritual.
This text first appeared in elimae

A Poetical Reading of the Psalms of David (1985)

2009-01-26T14:04:00.001-08:00

A Poetical Reading of the Psalms of David was an accident when a literature class at Bishop College (Dallas) received the book late one semester. Students brought Bibles in place of the assigned text since it began with the ancients. After the early chapters of Genesis and Job, continuing to the Psalms, still waiting books, from Psalm 8 and 19 came the exploration of the peaks of messianic psalms, 2, 8, 16, 23, 24, 40, 41, etc. that stuck up from the textually landscaped valleys and plateaus of the surroundings below. It became a topography. Psalm 8 had an appeal from before the birth of our daughter, carried into the sun of the alleys of Austin in her first year, up and down singing, the vibrations that psalm made in her head from my chest induced sleep. That same psalm was an ally in an early semester at Bishop College in the first lit class composed of juniors and seniors who had put off taking it, and expecting to emerge unscathed, thought a new teacher might complicate their lives. After explaining that the psalms had initially been sung, chanting Psalm 8 antiphonally in full voice produced a counterpoint humming in return. It may be the encore was Psalm 23, but this was not the first temptation to chant at adversity.

Such flights went through various levels of metaphor in the psalm. Eventually learning to teach, to prepare ahead of time, to write essays to base the class on, it was not a stretch to continue this at home at three AM when the books arrived, which resulted in about three months or so in a manuscript of a Poetical Reading of the Psalms of David (1985), as poems and not theology, more poetical research. This was finished the day before Aeyrie was born and made available in proof. Those classes produced Between the Bath and the Body's End: Socrates Breaks the Decorum of Death, investigations of a "Shakespearean" Psalm 46, the Season of Hector's Demise and others. Some of A Poetical Reading saw circulation. When Mystical Quarterly rejected a take, one of their referees, Elémire Zolla, had it translated into Italian and published in his Rome journal, Conosceza religiosa (1983). Psalm 1 later occurred as "New Species" (533) in Epiphany (Fall, 1987). A second attempt proposing Psalms 8 and 16 as book ends went to MQ and was accepted, but when the editor wrote after a yearand a half to say it had been accepted he had also to say with the acceptance that the magazine would fold so it would not appear. Publisher Peter Lang offered to do it whole, but wanted a $1500 subvention. After that it was put under the tutelage of Maimonides.

2009-01-26T14:03:00.001-08:00

Yeats
.When.......Butler
Yeats.................his...

.....lesson....................learned
.he...................sank.
Into...........the
cider churn.

Will
.......he..............spin.......
.........out?.............................That’s...............
the............................................matter.......
......even............................................old......................
...men............................................hope..................
..and..........................................dream,...............
the........................................cider................
...hard..................................the.......................
old............................bald...............
pate .....................inebriates........
......guests..............but.....................It

..............cold......the........................was

........................plate...........................written..

..................Matter......poured.............once in stone

...........conforms.......to cup..............."horseman.

........its circles...........now..................pass, cast

....gestic......................ulate, .............a cold eye
there............................is...................on death,
unwept...............................one............none come..
lesson......................................learned.........again.".........

though.............................................all.....................................
the......................................................monde............................
Eire.........................................................turn.........................

Yeats wanted his last poem, "Under Ben Bulben," first in his next publication from the grave, says R. F. Foster in his W. B. Yeats: A Life (Oxford, 2003). But Yeats died in France in ’39 and had to wait nine years for the body to be delivered to Drumcliff Churchyard in Ireland for that imagined printing. To Yeats, “all that followed Ben Bulben would therefore be spoken from the grave.”

This text first appeared in elimae.

Bobby Votes!

2008-10-28T14:33:00.000-07:00

Bobbyclick pic to biggy

Demonots

2008-10-02T08:12:00.001-07:00

Demonots

They are called Superstition dEmoNots from thRee

Rules of order in the philosopher HEgel, a dialectic

Known as the Golden SupErstitions, but in reverse.

Their third order is at the top, called Man Who Is,

But hypothetically, for demonots do not believe

In Such a being. The closest expl anation they give iS,

Is Is, Is ? Which is to say, Is, Is not. They believe in

Not Being. Since dEmonots disbelieve the third order

They substitute it with the SEcond, Man Who Is Not.

This man sayS, Was, Is, to deLve tHe metaphysic.

Second order initIates engage the science of nem-

Esis. They conceive the Piscean bully a savior, the

Aquarian TYrant a brother, the ScorpioN iconocLast a disciple,

the LeonIan recluse a stAr. It shows ironic self-AwareneSS.
A spider Caught in a web, prevented by itself From

Being itself, they Achieve a brotherhood of the im-

Perfect. TheY are not what others think theM.

They arE not what they're Supposed to be.

They are not wHat th ey think themselves.

In Topsy - turvy, Not Man Who Is, of the First Order, a

Demonot unDerclass, Took the second and substituted

Itself. This Not-Man Concocted a PretEnD OrDer that

Said since the Second Thought itself unworthy, it must

Be For Who Would know be tter? So the First Substituted

ItseLf for the Second and Pretended to Be the Third.

The flag upside down is a signal of distress.
Please view in Mozilla Firefox
This text first appeared in elimae

Under Ben Bulben

2008-03-25T07:45:00.000-07:00

There are two "versions " of Yeat's afterlife in this poem about his poem, a homage and a love, two shapes of one. We who have visited Wordsworth and Sterne and Swift stand with arms behind our backs HERE .

HERE is another look. Does the gyre run on? You have faith for that? Whether Yeats lived more than one, its simulacrums were virtuous or its cartoons, if you want another life you need a son.

Jack

2008-02-03T12:00:00.000-08:00

Elsie Marley the Cat, which could have been written by Lasty, is live now at Jack.

Old Hereford Cemetery

2008-01-10T15:01:00.000-08:00

Henry S. Mack. Old Hereford Mennonite Cemetery. Record of Tombstone Inscriptions: Old Mennonite Cemetery of the Hereford Congregation of Mennonites. Bally, Berks County, PA, 1934. In progress here

Pushcart

2007-11-28T17:11:00.000-08:00

"Herbal Cures of Orc Tongue" nominated by Ghoti Mag.

Theory of Paragory

2007-11-16T13:37:00.000-08:00

Paragory joins a known to an un,
what we're doing in biology,
splicing one gene after another,
not just for effect,
but to create some good,
union of the disparate,
opposites, unlikes,
not random matched,
part of a solution,
emergence out of work,
not the goal , the result.
The good of paragory
is insight to either part.

Beulah

2007-11-12T14:08:00.000-08:00

We came to Beulah Bula-bula land, the East Bluff stared down at the sea. Call it the bay. We left early that day, yesterday, to make up for the lost hour. That tells you how things are. We arrived two hours early. The lower altitude sea air, rough resurfaced courts suggest a clay court style, an approach that takes the opponent off with top spin as sweat pours down and it is only 60 degrees. This is not my last trip as you see. I have been to the mountain.

Flight

2007-11-01T07:54:00.000-07:00

I want to account the history of living beings and natural life, the qualities of the elements I see symbolically everywhere. Jimmy is an artist too, I saw his portraits of himself stuck in the ground mire of being, as if he doesn't know the difference between that and air. The water must cleanse him. He will say you don't have to read it. I reply you cannot fly and be mired. I want to fly toward the sun and be consumed.

White Mountain Deep

2007-10-31T18:07:00.000-07:00

It might be the sky but it might be the wind, leaving the tent at night in the cold and then not for long. You don't get up or have to to hear the coyotes.

They are howling in the range of cross riffs and minor notes. But the stars are interminable. I wade through the night like it's chest deep. Turn, restless, turn again. Left side, right side, back, hope to get escape with dreams, wake minutes later, there is no watch, but if you can get beneath it all, like the covers, the sleeping bag, the red Hudson's Bay blanket, the shirts over feet frozen at the bottom of the tent, then the wind can dance its pile drives, strokes of mountains leeward and that can be the dream.

The wind shakes the tent, shakes the aspen high up, descends. I wait to be lifted off the ground, figure to figure out something in the event, but then it blows off, new meaning to zephyr, Hermes, blow wind, crack, new meaning to the wind of Pentecost shaking the house. It shakes the mountain now, the elk feel it, don't cry, or can't be heard. The wind extinguishes everything but itself. I know the power of fire and flood, but air is not benign. It blows the elk, coyotes and bear to shelter. It doesn't blow the stars. Under the tree I play them back on the closed eye screen. They are bright now. Orion rises late in fall. I count on it to bring the dawn, figure it is maybe three AM, which gives hope with an air mattress and a foot warming wife who accepts them into her thighs.

What does the foot that gets to Nirvana say to the one behind?
"Just one more step."
What does the foot in Nirvana say to the one behind?
"There's no pain hereafter."
What does the cold foot say to the hot?
"Remember me."

What does the hand say to the foot when the cold foot hotfoots it into the warmth?
This goes on through the middle of the night. The stars, red Antares stares at the mountain. The meadow to be alive in gold is dark. All is light. All is bright. The shadows of dawn, the chow's ears, the smoke of the fire, coyote song, elk breaking notes over their knees for the fire of dry aspen, even the lonely men in their pickups who patrol the back forest where we have gone to escape the pipe lines and blasting, are asleep. They can't see an elk in the wood but our boys track them, manage not to get gored by the climacteric of want. The want. The eye patch. The meaning of cold. The burned savage trunklessness that lies fallen from fires a decade ago.

Connect and Disconnect

2007-10-08T07:50:00.000-07:00

Silence of the disconnect. They used to say turn on, tune in. Pierced by the piercing of streets, days strayed, slept in this tune. Tuned in to what? The instant thought that says look, the handheld array. Then comes the boom, a wreck of tons of steel. Cars collide inept. Silence is not quiet. There are two. The one above the boom and the one within the thoughts that deafen. Then there is a silence that makes three.

When you lay upon your roof at night and hear the roar, see the aura of lights, it sounds like a savage celebration just far enough away. You know the two states, yourself on the roof and the maelstrom below. Descend and you will not remember the one you left. Boom, the two are one, the roof disappears. The disconnect makes separate states appear only from afar, separate from the flare. It is Las Vegas, Vanity Fair vs Solitude, Silent Thought. Thoughts are noisy enough as it is. Drown them without noise.

The two states are like the soul come to communion, come with cares, sounds, thoughts, at the best, the highest part of the connect, dreams, plans, intentions, not that the worst are left, they come too but why give place to them, they're the same as hopes and fears. This is the state of the connect.

Only disconnect! Disconnect from sound and dreaming, wondering, staring, surely by now the cell is off, Ipod still. While Beethoven is playing his Opus in A and VanGogh tramping down daisies in a blue field with a yellow sky, disconnect. While the UN is streaming live video, forests are burning, ER's are teeming, what's in front of your eyes? They are closed. The ears cannot hear. You forget yourself.

"Into the Wild" : Review of the Parent-Child Crisis

2007-10-01T15:52:00.000-07:00

In Into the Wild director Penn has a moment occur before our eyes as the boy's eyes in death cut to an imaginative reunion with his father and mother with the imagined query "whether if this reunion happened would they see the same thing I do (as he dies)?" This is all ironic, since Penn shows that the boy poisoned himself from ignorance and weakness because he couldn't cure a moose he had killed, these together cause his dementia.

Ignorance and weakness describe the young, which is all the more ironic since the body was discovered in the middle of August by moose hunters, adults who knew what they were doing, two weeks after the boy died. Keeping the boy alive is a history of parenting, it is being in the right place at the right time. He was not. Penn says in his interview that this victim of himself had reached the wisdom of middle age, that is, the level of Sean Penn one supposes, but it is all talk that he learned that happiness is sharing with another person. Learning is changed behaviour. He didn't learn it. These are just words, no realization of being. He died alone.

To make us feel better about it, that all is not sacrifice and depravation, the film is also about twirling: the boy raises his arms at least four times, twice on top of the bus. It looks like a substitute for praise. He is worshipping the universe? Con trails show in the sky, again and again, his answer to "prayer?" But the repeated images of the gold wristwatch on his arm are saying, "I may be a hippie, but I'm holding on to my watch." Time and material are not wisdom. Wisdom is knowing you don't know. Who said that?

In this romance he wants to cross the creek to go home again, but it has become a river that traps him "in the wold"(Anglo-Saxon). Survival instincts need health and strength, prudence and a care for detail not the high skepticism of Hollywood. So many are blamed for our misery. Why not blame yourself? "No," the class said, "it was my dad."

Maelstroms come with a context and change of scene, these children found dead in their rooms at night OD'd, boys siphoning gasoline with a vacuum cleaner who receive third degree burns over 40% of their bodies, rear ending cars in front of them in the right hand lane when they check their cell phones. The noise in their heads, the bottom-deafening depth charges that steal their consciousness as they turn from those who love them, deadly rejection for the gifts given don't have silence, but noise. It is media generated. One goes to China, buys a dress, is kidnapped through a door in the dressing room and has her kidney stolen. It is the noise. They are unaware, ignorant and weak.

Another drives downtown with a friend, listening to Itunes from the garden of Eden on the box. All is one. We are safe. Two "immigrants" approach at a light, guns drawn, pistol whip them. These are the true events happening around the boy I protect. Med techs inoculate for bacterial meningitis from shared spit, but not for late night texts in bed, vid games, emails and photos of the flesh. Listen to baseball a radio or read, but make your bed offline, silent.

Here is a postscript on parenting. We have pretended we didn't know how. But we do. Compare it to a neighbor who runs a limo company and fills your parking lot with his overflow. Your lot is not posted. It has never been. One wants to operate on a neighborly basis. So go over to communicate this, but met with calumny, put up signs real fast, contract a towing company and see to it cars get towed. Guess what? They don't park there anymore. That's respect. The way to demand respect for boundaries works in the real world and in families. Idiots run the psychology department. They are afraid you will “alienate” your children but only because if they are injured and die the psychology department gets more money. Stand up. If the children don't like it they can let you know. You can be tested. After all, mortgage rates won't rise. You can make thousands, millions on your home so don't hold back. Buy now, save later means die now pay later.