Wednesday, October 22
further old notebook things
there is not going to be a perfect answer
there will not be perfect moments*
you will not achieve stasis 'til the
universe itself has ceased
its chain of motion, string of
explosions, the muffled thud of
vacuum being repeatedly abhorred
until white noise has claimed
the heavens and
all the spheres play is static.
* there will be moments so perfect
that eternity burns holes in causality
sunspots on your jaded retina
you will plummet standing motionless
into places shaped like hope
and absolute knowledge
the words, the wine,
the shutter shaped eternity before you come
escape the place behind your
tongue like torn
the static in the sheets a thousand
miles high don't let it slide
it's here and gone, but zeno
wasn't so far wrong
between here and there, in this place
there's infinity.
a prediction of sorts:
americans will continue seeming
viciously ignorant of the world beyond their borders;
many will succumb to the mind numbing rhetoric of a
president who declaims that
free nations do not build weapons of mass destruction.
the majority of people,
the majority of the time,
will be wrong about
matters of public policy,
philosophy, good taste,
morality, and religion
while remaining, in most
of their actions
fairly decent human beings.
this is something of a miracle
and it is a damn shame
that it is seldom focused
the way that bigotry, stupidity,
and ignorance so effectively are;
although it probably still accounts
for the continuing survival of what,
on better days, we call civilization.
The abbot Antony said, 'Who sits in solitude and is quiet hath escaped from three wars: hearing, speaking, seeing: yet against one thing shall he continually battle: that is, his own heart.'
They were all crazy. They hated life and longed to escape it, they lived alone in huts in the desert and competed with one another in self-inflicted misery, they despised everything good in life, or despised themselves for failing to despise it - wine, women, song and sleep. But once in a while they said something that makes sense.