A Dualist Myth for Science (and also, a swan)

Four and a half billion years ago, the Earth was churning. Heat saturated all particles, and they would wildly spin into each other, and push, and pull, and pass each other unaware, as the light bashed photons at electric fields that would not stick and the chaos formed and reformed into accidental rocks. Rock and stone, rock and stone, anywhere bouncing, and then water as rain froze all the undulant motion and spoke a direction from the clouds: Down! And so down it went, Down! to the bottom of cliffs and crevices that boulders had worn away, Down! until it mixed with the ubiquitous heat, and cooled it, Down! until something was full and there was an ocean.

But there were two kinds then. The other watched, and tried to stay in the air as the carbon effused throughout and tore through empty space. They perched between atmospheres and watched the confusion of the rock, and the decisiveness of the rain. And they watched as the rocks dissolved in the water and how the down-going water would spin them in eddies, spin them in strands into golden proteins. And they watched as the proteins held each other and spun still, silent crystals between them. And they watched as the proteins would come apart from each other and bubble into the infinite ocean, holding their crystals in the center. And they watched as the bubbles made machines of each other and the machines became weavers and looms, and watched as the looms set themselves as the iterative term in an equation, and wove a bounty into themselves iteration by iteration: automatic looms, on towards infinity.

And the watchers watched and crept in the air and vanished and appeared and could not be still, for billions of years after the rain had stopped the rocks. And the watchers were frantic and trying to hold on, but the wild oxygen and the austere nitrogen would slip by them as they tried to take hold of something. And trying and watching, searching and grabbing, they would vanish as quickly as they came. They could not stick.

And the machines crawled out of the sea and demanded that rock be solid, so it was. And they built their brains out of warp and shuttles, and each shift in the pattern they shifted the warp, and wove reflections. The water still called Down!, but they couldn’t obey and were swept upward in a rising mechanical tide, restless, automatically reaching for what they could not desire. And the watchers bit their lips and looked, for the looms had swept themselves into nests woven with patterns.

So the watchers nested there, where they would be received. And they could be still, and see that they saw, and could hold on. And the machines slowed with the breath of the watchers, and were still and living and lasted. And the watchers finally had direction and rest. And they set themselves on the rocks and cut huge spaces, cities in the stone, where they sat and spoke and saw and did.

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A Swan

When I die, make me a Swan in the stars, where I’ll float on the ripples of empty space and call to the shouts of light from the edges of the sky. And give me wings, great wings, stretching onward to infinity, so that I can gather everyone under them, everyone who cries and labors, who smiles and curtsies. Give my wings huge shoulders where everyone can rest their head, and long feathertips that can feel the long waterfall hair coming down, falling onto the shoulders and arms that would rest in my starred pool. And let my reach be infinite, that my wings can circle all the world in soft down, and shelter every one.

Because I am so small now, and I don’t want to choose.

After

Some days, I don’t believe
my life is a postscript.

Some days, I want you
to be the ocean I sail on.

My ringfinger is missing;
I can barely grasp.

李白 – 月下獨酌 – Li Bai – Under the moon, alone, drinking

月下獨酌	Under the moon, alone, drinking
花間一壺酒	Set between flowers, one jug of wine.
獨酌無相親	Alone, drinking, not seeing my brothers.
舉杯邀明月	Raise my cup, invite the shining moon.
對影成三人	Face my shadow, become three of us.
月既不解飲	The moon, though, isn’t loosed with drink;
影徒隨我身	my slinking shadow follows my own self.
暫伴月將影	A brief companion, the moon to the shadow:
行樂須及春	meandering happiness must reach its Spring.
我歌月徘徊	I sing, the moon falters and wobbles.
我舞影零亂	I dance, my shadow shivers in anarchy.
醒時同交歡	We come to, together, meet joyfully;
醉後各分散	drunk, fall back: each distinguished, each disperses.
永結無情遊	Eternally tied together without this love of wandering,
相期邈雲漢	I notice the shifting phase of a distant cloudy people.

Zhuangzi – Autumn Rains

The time of autumn rains arrives. A hundred streams flood the Yellow River, flowing magnificently; between riverbanks and watery islands: a chasm divides, where one can’t distinguish an ox from a horse. And at this, the river lord laughs, beside himself with joy, for all beauty under heaven becomes exhausted within his own. He follows the current and goes east, arrives at the North Sea, faces east and peers, not seeing the water’s end. And at this, the river lord begins turning his face and eyes about, gazing towards the sea, and sighing says: A folk saying has it that He hears the Way a hundred times, and so he becomes such that nobody seems like himself. It names me. And moreover, my ear has tasted this: the belittling of Zhong Yi I’ve heard, and making light of Bo Yi’s rightness. First I didn’t believe them. Now, I have seen your tumbling limit! Oh, if I hadn’t arrived at your door: how dangerous! I’d have forever seen them laughing at me: every house of the great method.

Tao Te Ching / Dao De Jing – § 67

All under heaven, they say: my Way is great, but seems not so. It is only great because it seems not so. If it seemed so, long ago it would have thinned out.

I have three treasures; hold and protect them. 1 is love; 2 is conserving; 3 is not presuming to become the first under heaven. Love, thus you can be brave; conserving, thus you can be expansive; not presuming to become the first under heaven, thus you can enter your role as the father of the people.

Now—when they closet love and yet try to be brave, when they closet conserving and yet try to be expansive, when they closet coming after and yet try to come first—it has died.

Man, with love: by its means battles shall be won; by its means the citadel shall hold. Heaven will save him; by means of love will guard him.

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I’m not so sure why this text. But Chinese is amazing: visual ideographic etymology. It is so radically different from English. And I really like translating; maybe somebody should pay me.

Promises are for Liars

Part 1.5, given that the last post was on promises as well. Part 2 is coming, though I might not post it here. We’ll see.

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PROMISES ARE FOR LIARS
Because, you know,
Either you’re going
To do it or
You’re not.
Slight as light
Reflected from the stream
Onto the wavering
Willow leaves,
Eternal love
Doesn’t need
Eternity, see?
A cyclone of sand-
Hill cranes
Rises from the corn
Slathering the
Ephemeral work.
Let’s don’t worry.
Let’s don’t ask.
Our institutions
Are standing by.
But I keep thinking
How easy it is
To get lost in the sky
With nothing holy
To defend.

—James Galvin, “Promises Are for Liars” from X Poems. Copyright © 2003 by James Galvin. Reprinted without the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townshend, WA 98368-0271, coppercanyonpress.org, though I’d be perfectly willing to get it if anybody cared.

I was in class, I was listening to all the talk about a story I hadn’t read, and someone offered a story about their grandfather: how after grandma died he had a friend, and for 15 years he knew her, how he and this friend he knew would be with the grandkids at dinner, how after 15 years they would walk to their car and he’d still say: I will take her home, and then I will go home—For marriage is sacred.

But (so the story went) in never remarrying they gained something. Each time, they would see each other because they wanted to. I suppose this grandfather must have learned a lesson about eternity that most of us are just guessing at—after the first time, that is.

And this reminds me of another story, one told by Nietzsche: the human species was cruel to itself, delighted in cruelty, began exchanging cruelty (”let the forfeit/be nominated for an equal pound/of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken/in what part of your body pleaseth me.”)—substitution between flesh and thing, commodity fetishism (Derrida: a deferred substitution). All this pain became a mnemonic. The human species could—at last—remember. The human species could remember what they commanded, could enforce it, could obey, could expect to be obeyed, could patiently stretch the cord of a bow and arrow pointing to the future, could make promises.

Promises: so much blood, but what an exalted outcome! With a meaning so different from where it started! But as our story goes, with promises there comes an awful regularity: to will the future one must be able to predict it. To be made predictable: this has made us sick. All this subordination to the will of the community—we need anesthetic, we need sleep. Asceticism develops, turns against everything. It catches hold of our memory, of our promises, snatches them away from us, disembodies them, creates Truth. Truth: that to which we must give our bodies, promises risen so far above promising that the latter seems like puffs of smoke escaping from a carpet, ephemeral signals in a stream of wind promised on behalf of everything.

There’s the second story. Here’s a third, this time from Marx: labor enters its objects; each object needs a certain amount. We work over our objects until they are sold, and when they are sold, we are forgotten. The object holds what we cannot grasp: the power of our labor, abstracted, become value. But this value only becomes capital when it takes itself for the truth, when it demands its own logic of motion: “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”. The dead, the wills of the past, control the living—not even as some particularized will, but as the supreme abstraction of will itself, unmoored, abstracted, killed, floating above us as the God which gives all things Value.

What is a promise but a dead will, a will abstracted, looking over our shoulders with judgement? Shall I love as a vampire loves, desperately seeking life, only to devour what comes, finding no satisfaction? Or should I become short-sighted and impatient, forgetful and ornery, bathing in the present while the water upstream becomes a trickle, leaving for fuller rivers when there are rainclouds above? A thousand years of fighting, planting, and growing lay at the feet of this question. —And let’s be clear that the answer has nothing to do with moderation; nothing could be more absurd than a moderate promise.

There is making a promise, and there is keeping it. There is making your desires historical, and there is making them ahistorical. There is pointing a finger towards the future, and there is tracing an embalmed finger from the past. Each stands opposed to the other. Give one up? Perhaps promises are for liars.

Debt: Promises and Institutions

You think our debt problems are bad, look at Dubai. Whereas we have a whole complicated maze of bankruptcy laws and annoying debt collectors, Dubai has prisons and active fleeing.

Apparently, Dubai considers it somebody’s responsibility to do what they said they were going to do. In one sense, this should be a no-brainer; it’s the (ideological) foundation of all of our laws and economy: the idea of contract law.

As Nietzsche says (GM II): “Let’s position ourselves, by contrast, at the end of this immense process, in the place where the tree at last yields its fruit, where society and the morality of custom finally bring to light the end for which they were simply the means: then we find, as the ripest fruit on that tree, the sovereign individual, something which resembles only itself, which has broken loose again from the morality of custom, the autonomous individual beyond morality (for ‘autonomous’ and ‘moral’ are mutually exclusive terms), in short, the human being who possesses his own independent and enduring will, who is entitled to make promises—and in him a consciousness quivering in every muscle, proud of what has finally been achieved and has become a living embodiment in him, a real consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of completion for human beings generally.”

Sounds great. Though Nietzsche troubles the waters with his exposition of the bloody history behind it. But the idea of monetary debt illustrates the intersections of the personal with the social. Nietzsche recognizes that it is precisely the predictability of ourselves which causes us to be able to make promises and projections into the future. However, he fails to place this in the proper realm of social organization. In the case of an economic crisis, that predictability, those implicit social “laws,” break down. And that reveals that the supreme individualist ability to make promises, bind yourself in contracts, was never anything but a socially constructed regularity.

Which is my main point here: to the extent that the ability to make promises is related to our idea of truth—as logos and nomos—to this extent, we can see that truth itself (or rather our current version of it) is a social institution. Because we have abstracted human will and instituted it in contract law, we have promises, truth, and natural law. When these institutional abstractions fail, when promises cannot be kept because other promises cannot be kept because other promises cannot be kept—here we see that the entire idea of a promise is not merely that it will not but that it can not be broken; the entire idea of abstracted social institutions is not just that we should obey the law but that we will; that the prescriptive depends on the descriptive depends on the prescriptive, and that this is Natural Law.

There is a slippery slope in contracts and words and promises. The instant one is made, it demands everything, that everything be promised, regulated, regular. Here the supreme act of individualism, of choice, of will, cancels itself in a social abstracted institution where nobody promises everything to no one, and we must obey.

Fidel is Fading

Fidel

Fidel, commenting on Obama (Reflexiones), says: “I am going over sayings and matters I’ve collected for over half a century. I had the rare privilege of observing these occurrences for all that time. I receive information and I think calmly about these occurrences. I do not hope to enjoy such a privilege in four years, when the first presidential term of Obama ends.”

Fidel is fading. I know there’s some out there that will seize on the opportunity to offer a postprogressive critique of his crimes, his iron glove, his olive garb—and they’re not wrong—…but I’m sad. There’s something in his inflexibility, in—let’s face it—his absurd arrow-line inflexibility, that’s valuable. Well it’s flexing, and we’re losing something. The arrow bends, and we spend our time designing bows that look like a Dr. Suess machine.

Fidel comes from the woods. Fidel believes in the woods. Possibly, even: Fidel believes he is still in the woods. The next one wears no uniform, he wears a suit. Surely, this is superficial, and may have nothing to do with how he looks to a Cuban—but what are we talking about but precisely superficiality, the cycles of a sign? One sign is replaced by another, the bombastic signature of Fidel falls off the foreheads it has signed and it’s replaced by spidery signatures, made by crawling pens.

Let’s not be so stupid as to say this is the death/defeat of communism. Communism—at least as an actually existing system out there—is constantly and continually changing, and will probably not go away any sooner than capitalism (now there’s a dialectic to leave behind…). But as Fidel fades, so also fades a certain relationship to communism and the whole kingdom-come project. The kingdom is not come anymore, is not coming, but is now, now, now: patchworked together out of provisionality, a cessura indefinitely and arythmically falling through to the next note.

With this new president our horizons are opening up: a welcome change from the last eight years of battening down the hatches. Hope springs eternal, as they say. So it does, but neither horizons nor hope are blanks without content. Ours has yet to be filled in; everything could change in a minute; but the outlines are there: this is to be a strange kind of neoprogressivism, where helping hands prop up the old systems and care for the sick and poor, where mixed races pull both halves together, where justice is apportioned justly to the just and unjust, where freedoms are scrawled over legal pads. So with all that, why should I be upset about Fidel? Isn’t he laying in his bed, a different product of the same kind of thinking, cheering our hopes and critiquing our means? Yes, but Fidel (at least as symbol) is nothing if he isn’t serious. To the extent that Obama is completely every-fiber-of-my-body-serious he is ridiculous. Because we’re not.

Fidel fades. We can’t reach him anymore. We don’t have that sort of access to our futurity. Everything is so sophisticated now, so exact; the farmer’s almanac that listed two weeks of warmth in the spring, an early frost, gives way to the weather report of 85% chance of rain the day after tomorrow. But let’s not make this a eulogy for the astrologers. History buries forever. But we can mourn, we can move on, we can learn, we can rethink, we can rebuild, we can repeat.

¡Viva Fidel! ¡Viva La Revolución!

Wedding Service for Country Joe and Robin

I found this in BAMN: Outlaw Manifestos & Ephemera, which is pretty much the best book ever. Seems the table has been set for a second course of weddings recently; some are hungry and some have just eaten. So I thought I’d post it.

Dear friends, the pastor would say,

you are gathered together to witness,

he would continue, a ceremony of holy matrimony.

What a beautiful dress

Doesn’t he look nice

Is she crying

It’s just because she’s happy

And what has this got do with Vietnam

and what city is it this time?

Khe San, Memphis, Hue, Panama

No, it is San Francisco

The Mission

A slum

And what are Protestants doing in this neighborhood?

No matter

The Lord spoke unto Abraham and said

ye shall have faith in my wisdom and ye shall

do my bidding, ye shall convert the Indians and Niggers and spics

He always uses ye not you; he’s not talking to us

Ye shall return to the spirit of the Sierra Maestra

and ye shall be ascetics and make the world cry

with electric music and sad and funny theatre

for ye are the blessed children and carry the seed

of the new, always new, hope and faith that this

world shall be and it shall be and it shall be

Boroch ataw adenoih elehanu meloch olum

Yatta, yatta, yatta rabbi cut out all that shit and tell us why we’re here

You’re here because you’re invited except for the crashers

and you have to sit through this part because if you

want to eat the food and drink the booze you have

to sit through this part. That’s the way it’s always been.

There is a specter haunting the world

And it’s not Phil

and hammers and sickles castrated our parents, the good ones anyway

Eisenhower and Krushscev buried together

in Disneyland or Outer Space

and we have come back to the heritage of Moses

stuttering, stammering poor kike, diddled by

Egyptian chicks, and fed with the affluence

of slavery and one day like the good hippie

he was he said Feh, which was the old way to say Fuck it

and he said to his people let’s split and sure enough

on the way to the rural commune some Ingmar Bergman character

jumps out of a burning shrub of marijuana and says

I’m God buddy and you listen to me

And the sons of Moses listened and the preyed and

by the large they were peaceful but their music

got behind and they got righteous and full of pity for the Dead and they kill

Arabs and burn villages just like Americans,

just like Germans, just like Christians and Muslims

But enough of foreign religion

Mah Fellah Americans, says the Great Potato, we are

gathered here today for the purpose of national unity

The bride and groom grow edgy,

the audience murmurs,

What the fuck is he doing here

He’s everywhere

and we shall overcome for there’s an old American saying

oh no

When the going gets tough, the tough get going,

Get him out of here, this is a church

And just as our ancestors persevered in the past against

our deadly enemies, the Injuns, the Mescans and the Nigrahs

so too will we persevere against the comomists, the hippies

the kikes and all the other great unbelievers who menace our

precious civilization

And in our ears the Great Society responds with applause

led by George Meany

but George is alone

the applause is canned

the TV camera supers behind the face of the Great Potato

and it reveals

an electric razor and an oil well

and a painter taking a photograph and pasting it on his canvas

And there is a thin blue line of cops between the barbarians & Harlem

There is a specter haunting us today

And we don’t know what it is

My children join hands

At last say the parents

By virtue of the power invested in me

Who the hell would invest in him

and by the laws of Moses and of Jesus and of The Buddha

of the holy ghost and the millions of other ghosts who don’t give a damn

In Hanoi it is one day later, in Cuba it is 6 o’clock

and the workers come back from the cane field

We don’t know it but they are looking at our ceremony

They are saying

Stay as you are Country Joe

Stay as you are Robin

Do not fall prey to the temptations of the Great Potato

Stay with Moses, stay with Fidel, stay with Che

And the ghost of Che lurks in the church and his

death wail booms from the mighty Fenders

Don’t forget me

And the ghost of Malcolm stands guard against the blue eyed devils

and the burning monk takes the uncollected garbage with him

in a purification of the holy

And it is we who are holy

By the laws of all who were holy and who have invested this power in us to join and to cry and to make each hatred a deepening of love

Under the Laws of Moses, Jesus, Mohamed and Ho Chi Minh

Under the Laws of Ginsberg, O’Casey and Mayakovsky

How about the laws of California

How about the lynch law

How about the Geneva convention

How about Pacem en Terris

How about kissing my ass, says the Great Potato

Again he sneaks in

and his friends hover over him, shaking giant Bar B cued ribs,

clutching their genitals in their pistol pockets

Begone says Moses

Beat it says Jesus

Que se vayan, says Fidel

And the ghost of the Che and Malcolm and the burning monk

surround them, and give them a powerful revolutionary hex

and for a brief instant there was light and the specter

hovered in the sky and became a rainbow

and the guns were turned into plowshares in Israel

and into electric guitars in the Great Society

And they joined together in bodies and with the sound

in their heads, like millions of fish in the great ocean

and the audience pushed onto the stage and the stage became

the tabernacle and the power was invested in all of them

and it was all of them who shouted

Country Joe, Robin, and all the friends in Vietnam and Cuba and

Texas and the Mafia

Lay down, and they all lay down, and the couple stood alone, still

alone, but the friends were near, each time nearer

They carried their burden, alone, together, and they took each others’

hands, just as they would do in the unholy temples

And the Most Reverend Bishop Mackerel said “May the Lord bless you

by giving you children” and the audience didn’t laugh

For the time had come when the laughter became serious, the moment,

the instant at which the laws of God, of the Great Potato and the

State of California were to come together for the most sacred of rituals

which would be reported in tomorrow’s paper and would include

details about where the bride bought her dress

That Moment has come

That Moment has gone

Relax, said the minister,

because we are where it is at.

And Country Joe and Robin’s hands began to sweat as any hands

held together would sweat and the Minister now told Country Joe that if he wanted

he could kiss the bride

and the audience peeked to see if they blushed

and some thought they did and some said they didn’t

And the Great Potato was frying in lard

And Malcolm said these were good blue eyed devils

and he would protect them when the time came

and ghost of the Great Che shouted that They Would Triumph

And the ceremony came to an end as the Minister pronounced the lovely couple

He said I hereby pronounce you and he pronounced them Country Joe

and Robin

and ye shall remain Country Joe and Robin

and today we feel your love and you must feel ours

For you are now locked together in holiness, give or take the matrimony

for as long as you want to be

and May you groove with the great guru

and may your children be Great Fish, and birds, and beautiful

Country Folk

And now the Great Ring bearer comes forth

bearing the Ring of the Niebelomin, and

the Carousel ring—and the ring of truth

and the ring of love

And the best man and the bride’s father

fumble and hands touch and another part of

the ancient ritual is completed

All that remains is the blood of Christ,

dry for a thousand nine hundred odd years.

And bottled by Mogen David. Drink he said

and together they drank. And none else shall

drink from that glass.

(They stomp on the glass).

Robin do you yattayatta take Joe, more or

less the way he is, for more or less forever.

And do you Country Joe yatta blah yatta

take Robin the way she is.

Yeah, said the groom.

Go in peace.

Six Seas

So, I wrote this on the train from Granada, and I figured I’d better post it before I leave Europe. Though I’m not sure the UK really counts as Europe anyway. I’m totally out of practice writing. This is the only thing produced this trip, other than a plethora of memories, of course. But I should write more.

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I heard the revolution would come as a war elephant, a wrinkled giant, ambling like an earthquake, shaking out fiery tears that light the way.

I heard the revolution would come as a kiss, as fingers passing each other up arms, holding what sight says is your own.

I heard the revolution would come as a whisper in the corn, a sunshine ripple moving outward.

Let it come as it will, and let it be beautiful; but let it come.

I’ve dressed as a soldier and waited at the depot, but of the train I saw only a rumor in the distance.

We are six seas of people, washed with a morphine sponge; a tear-tide of troubles traded to a pillow god. We are a march to mother, who absolves us from ourselves and carries each back to their shoebox bed: she shields us with the body of her tales. Where is the crumbling bedside edge?

Six seas of people, dusted with sixty thousand years of penitent patience, choking the air between us. What wind can clear away so much dust?

I’ve cried in the blue corner, waiting alone while shadows of snowflakes dance down the walls and crumble on the sidewalk. A thousand hands have brushed my back in passing,—and moved on: carried by a tide spun by the crab moon, who clicks his claws like castanets and dances in the desert dust between the oasis of each.

Well, if we are to be so far in the desert, then give me an army of camels, to speak with every pool and carry our burdens in a humped back. If we are to be a crab tide of thirst in a salt sea, then call the turtle who carried us here; and we’ll get on his back as he swims through starry waters to where it is whispered and called and spoken. Where the choked-up waters become a fountain playing in the sun, and the earth calls us to our second happiness.

I’m waiting to wake up and see what the swallows have made out of the old adobe, while we were weaving cobweb dusty dreams, and sealing our eyes with sleep. I am sure that it is beautiful, and full of all the colors borrowed away since we were children.

Let me find six tides together in that new adobe, and we’ll sing six shouts under a ceiling so high the stars come in at night. And when night finally finds us, let those stars shine brighter; as though the burden of another orbit has become full and happy.