(4PM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)
“Love is the ultimate outlaw.
It just won’t adhere to any rules.
The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice.
Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet.
That would mean that security is out of the question.
The words “make” and “stay” become inappropriate.
My love for you has no strings attached.
I love you for free.”
– Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)
I don’t have much blog time this whole week, but the bats in the belfry keep making noise.
I haven’t seen, read, or heard very much News in the past week or so. Life interference. I continue as always to scan and skim, but at the current moment, I am lacking depth and information within the undercurrents. mea culpa. I should take my vitamins. I’m quite distracted, but I have the undercurrents rumbling like the draw of the sandbar, just look out for the undertoe.
Monday’s Democracy Now with Noam Chomsky is yet another bit I missed, entitled “The Center Cannot Hold: Rekindling the Radical Imagination”:
Well, it’s easy to ridicule the ways in which Joe Stack and others like him articulate their concerns, which are very genuine and real. But it’s far more appropriate to understand what lies behind their perceptions and actions, and particularly, to ask ourselves why the radical imagination is failing to offer them a constructive path, while the center is very visibly not holding. And those who have real grievances are indeed being mobilized, but mobilized in ways that pose no slight danger, to themselves and to the rest of us and to the world.
snip, skip ahead to the conclusion
Well, for the radical imagination to be rekindled and to lead the way out of this desert, what is needed is people who will work to sweep away the mists of carefully contrived illusion, reveal the stark reality, and also to be directly engaged in popular struggles that they sometimes help galvanize. So what is needed, in short, is the late Howard Zinn. Terrible loss. Well, there won’t be another Howard Zinn, but we can take to heart his praise for “the countless small actions of unknown people” that lie at the roots of the great moments of history, the countless Joe Stacks who are destroying themselves, and maybe the world, when they could be leading the way to a better future.
The reference…
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
~William Butler Yeats
Since I am so distant and unschooled, but always wish to know context, I went and found this about Yeats… interesting:
Yeats began writing “The Second Coming” in January 1919, in the wake of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. It was first published in November 1920 in The Dial and later appeared in his collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer, one of several works of the period that exemplify the rhetorical, occasionally haughty tone that readers today identify as characteristically Yeatsian. In 1922 Yeats became a senator for the newly formed Irish Free State. The following year he was honored with the Nobel Prize for literature. Ill health forced Yeats to leave the Irish senate in 1928. He devoted his remaining years to poetry and died in France in 1939. … Overall, “The Second Coming” has been well-received as one of the most evocative visionary lyric poems of the twentieth-century and widely praised for its technical excellence and extensive symbolic resonance.
Wandering. This is another one of my bouncing intuitive leap-frogging ADD essays that I expect mostly Andy S and a few dharmanauts to completely “get” while others just scratch their heads. It’s okay. There’s nothing to “get”, really.
Has anyone mentioned the ruling re the Miranda issue? hmmmm. Well, I’ll go read this NYT opinion piece about it…. in a sec. Absurdity abounds.
“Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian’s fault. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.” Catch 22, Joseph Heller
Oh, whoops, wrong paste. :-/
Washington — The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that suspects must explicitly tell police they want to be silent to invoke Miranda protections during criminal interrogations, a decision one dissenting justice said turns defendants’ rights “upside down.”
A right to remain silent and a right to a lawyer are the first of the Miranda rights warnings, which police recite to suspects during arrests and interrogations. But the justices said in a 5-4 decision that suspects must tell police they are going to remain silent to stop an interrogation, just as they must tell police that they want a lawyer.
I can barely stand to open my email News alerts and links anymore. It’s… some of these headlines are so absurd as to be comical. WTF?: News Alert: Effort to contain Gulf oil stalls with stuck saw. and then there’s Israel deports activists from Gaza-bound flotilla.
I tried to read banger’s excellent essay, I dropped some tips/rec’s, but I just can’t focus like that right now.
This is all such soul sapping stuff. It can drown you but there are ways… in the ocean, you dive under the wave…. under, then wait, swim out some, then surface. Breathe.
In my snail mail yesterday I got yet another letter from ACLU, asking for my donations, which is fine but I wish I could, but oh well… anyway, this time the mailer included a small (maybe 3″ x 5″) booklet, the Constitution. Pocket size.
Maybe that’s what we should do. Create some pocket sized manuals… for “radicals”… and refugees. Essentials. What to take. What to know. You think I’m kidding? I am not.
The old woman learns that Catch-22 gives soldiers the right to do anything that the citizens cannot stop them from doing. The soldiers are justified in their unjust actions simply because they have the power. Yossarian realizes that Catch-22 does not exist, but it makes no difference. What does matter is that everyone thinks it exists, and this belief gives Catch-22 the power to repress the believers.
…
All The Rules will change.
Sea change.
My love for you has no strings attached.
I love you for free.
When we finally learn to Love.
… crossposted to Wild Wild Left
22 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
life’s like an hourglass glued to the table…….
…especially during these rough days.
…we need community and collective struggle. When that happens we won’t be down about the things you mention.
The most dramatic poverty we face in our culture is our lack of connection to family, clan, community, locality. Not that these are required–rather, these are downgraded as values in our culture. The most important thing for me to do is “to be successful.” Nowhere is there the idea that “we” should be successful. Maybe family or more specifically children who often bear the brunt of parental focus (“I live only for my children”). Why just your children? What about other children?–we don’t live isolated lives. If we don’t nurture the collective spaces we end up with what we have today that you don’t want to look at. By the way, I think your reaction is healthy–it isn’t healthy to feel as if someone took a baseball bat to your midsection like like I felt/feel from the current and ongoing oil disaster and the reactions to it by our insane society.
My reaction? I’m getting serious now. I want to challenge everyone–the spill was kind of a last straw for me. My life, other than trying to sustain my little life with as little resources as possible and being there for my kids is to focus on collective enterprises. Otherwise I would just paint and live in my own world–it’s easy for me to do that since I never came down from the sixties and am still permanently stoned.
We need each other particularly when we feel bad. The most revolutionary thing we can do in this particular historical moment is to build community every place we can. Maybe we can’t do it here–maybe cyberspace is too phony. We need to think about it don’t you think?
Understand! Sometimes one’s head just spins — lands on this issue — bounces to another, etc. until you almost feel “looped” from it all.
Saw stuck in the riser? Saw should be stuck in Hayward’s dupa! Unreal, nothing but screw ups by BP. 43 days now! They’d rather destroy all the “life” than to call in the experts!
Author
ooh, thunderstorm headed this way, Ill probably shut down for a while…
These past few weeks have seemed like there is an acceleration going regarding the boundaries of individual consciousness and that of the wider sphere; planet-wise.
I know I am not alone in feeling particularly saddened and connected to the turmoil happening in many places.
Perhaps the Gulf Disaster is triggering for Americans a needed connection to the powerlessness that many around the world feel with much more regularity than those in the USA do.
…”We are moving. We are going forward.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin…
this set of waves rolling in on us. As a child I used to love the big sets as I dove under them to surface for the next. I could however when I tired of them ride one in or allow myself to sink into the white rolling churning at the tip and be washed ashore. There is no place for getting some air, no respite, just just waves of accumulating madness and fury coming ashore with fire and oil. Higher ground is gone too as the court has all the seats and we are left to deal with the heavies they are creating and nourishing.
Riding it out seems all we can do and when were thrown on the beach with the tarballs, chemicals, debis from flotillas and the plastic acres we are washed up with. Junk shot golf balls and deck chairs of mass destruction, along with drones needed to kill the Mexicans in AZ, are weaving an unbelievable and truly incomprehensible picture. I just want to wash up on a beach where I can lay for a while and maybe stay and build a hut with some chickens maybe form a community that can figure out how to salvage enough to start anew.