Tag: Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses

That’s Rimbaud, Arthur (or is it Artur? I dunno) Rimbaud.

I read some of his poems and they were good, and I found him through reading about Ginsberg and Kerouac, Burroughs and how they liked Rimbaud during one or the other of their wild chapters of life.

Then I read a biography of Rimbaud that I don’t remember much from, though I liked it, his crowd reminded me of the backward children I hung out with in the Midwest in my salad days.  He came to Paris in 1871 during the aftermath, I think, of the Battle of Paris (about which I know very little, except that he was on the side of the insurrectionists).

He buddied up with Verlaine, another poet, and they scandalized the already terrorized Paris with their crazy living, woo woo.  After splitting with Verlaine, Rimbaud continued his crazy ways.

He didn’t write poetry for long — he ended up a merchant travelling all over the place, didn’t make much of a success of it.

Punching through

fabrics of official

culture.

Snip snip

won’t do.

Reweaves too quick for that.

***

The incessant

Boo! Boo!

becomes annoying.

Lies lies

so thin.

It can’t get louder so it gets thin.

***

Cocksucker, or

some other

shocking society word.

Pish tosh

too slow.

Doesn’t begin to approach the foe.

I won’t kid you.

Or maybe I will.  Who knows what I’ll do.  Ha!

Arizona just passed a law that is an unjust law.

But Arizona isn’t the only place this is happening.

Migrants living here who aren’t citizens are not the only ones suffering.

We suffer too.

It is the same suffering, there is no separation.

That’s what solidarity is.  Always has been.  Always will be.

Yeah, I know, it’s hilarious to speak of “voices” in a “fight” when we are at this moment witnessing the kabuki kongress and the other bozo-bloated branches of government.

Yesterday, as rossl recounts in this excellent essay, we find there were around, oh, 1,500-2,000 teabaggers and up to 10,000 antiwar demonstrators.

Well it is good that folks are yelling louder.

But today, yes, it is delicious irony that on a day where we’ve never felt more like failures as Americans, hundreds of thousands of our fellow human beings marched in Washington just for the chance to make it so that they (or their mother, or their father, or their children or their friends or their … ) could have the rights and privileges of citizenship.

Here’s a recent report from their website:

raylab:

Ok, that’s it from us here. It’s been an amazing, beautiful and historic day here in Washington, DC. But, I want to remind everybody, this is just the beginning. Now the real work to pass immigration reform starts. We were 500,000 strong for the cause today and we should carry that strength and power with us as we move forward. Tomorrow, call your Senator at 866-877-5552 and tell them you want immigration reform now. We can win this, but we need every voice in the fight.

What I have learned from the HCR national debate is that my own supposed allies, Democrats, are willing to throw out human rights and human dignity as negotiating tools without even fucking using them.  That steams me.

The liberal white blogosphere, I have also come to learn, is not going to consistently cover this aspect of the upcoming immigration debate.

Buhdy spoke the other day about negotiation.

Fool me once.

I’m not watching C-SPAN or following live blogs of corrupted government officials voting for legislation that utterly devalues our most precious American values, the values that the demonstrators today feel strongly enough about to want to be citizens, even with all the problems in our country.

I’m watching folks 500,000 strong.  The media may not pay any attention to them and the white liberal blogs may see them only as a political calculation instead of as brothers and sisters.

I don’t have much of a voice tonight.  But I’m enough of a loudmouth to fake it when necessary.

Si Se Puede!

We lost on HCR.  Plain and simple.  The only mistake is to think the bill couldn’t have been worse.  We could have co-ops and triggers, you know.

But I don’t really care.  Political loss is no stranger to the left here in the US of A.

This weekend, I will witness what we won, only one of the jewel treasures won for ALL Americans from the left.

People whose only wish is to become citizens of the United States of America will be gathering in Washington D.C. on March 21.

And their idea of the spirit of being American is not of Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, not of Anita Bryant or John Wayne or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Mr. Roberts.

Their inspiration is Harvey Milk and gay liberation.

It is now a fact that Harvey Milk was a great gay American, and the American story of the continuing fight for liberation by GLBT citizens is so firmly planted in our culture that immigration groups can use this American struggle as an inspiration that embodies the best and highest values of our society.

To me, that is a win.

From the Dream Act Portal:

March 15 marks the beginning of the United We Dream Network’s “National Coming Out of the Shadows Week.” This campaign draws inspiration from the struggle for equal rights by the gay and lesbian community. On the homepage of dreamactivist.org, the online hub for the United we Dream Network, the following quote from famed activist Harvey Milk is prominently displayed to encourage undocumented students to disclosure their status to advocate for equal rights and the passage of the Dream Act:

Brothers and Sisters, you must come out! come out to your parents, come out to your friends, if indeed they are your friends, come out to your neighbors, come out to your fellow workers. Once and for all, let’s break down the myth and destroy the lies and distortions. For your sake, for their sake. For the sake of all the youngsters who’ve been scared by the votes from Dade to Eugene. On the Statue of Liberty it says “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.” In the Declaration of Independence it is written, “All men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights.” For Mr. Briggs and Mrs. Bryant and all the bigots out there, no matter how hard you try, you can never erase those words from the Declaration of Independence! No matter how hard you try you can never chip those words from the base of the Statue of Liberty! That is where America is!

Approximately 3.2 million undocumented immigrant children and young adults live in the shadows. It has been almost ten years since Congress promised them the American Dream. The wait has become increasingly insufferable.

So we lost, didn’t we.

Sure, there’s no HCR bill signed yet, but we know the game has been fixed and we’ve been sucker punched.

Bad enough to get screwed by the Republicans for so many years.  It’s irritating, very irritating to get screwed by who we thought were our fellow Democrats.

So this is being a US citizen in the year Twenty-Ten.

Huh.

Even trying to be informed seems an impossible task, much less changing everything.

And to make it even more surreal, the very institutions, the members of which are riding a  high tide of obscene wealth and power, are also crumbling as I type this.

It’s chaotic!

So I look at these kids, these four kids who have wallked what they call the “Trail of Dreams.”

These are four undocumented kids who are demonstrating how they are coming out of the shadows (you know, those shadows that 12 million of our brothers and sisters live in, over 2 million of them children).

These are their names and a little P.R. information about them for the Trail of Dreams website.  First a joint statement by the four:

We are four students from Florida – Felipe Matos, Gaby Pacheco, Carlos Roa, and Juan Rodriguez – who were brought to the United States by our families when we were young. This is the only country we have known as home. We have the same hopes and dreams as other young people, and have worked hard to excel in school and contribute to our communities. But because of our immigration status, we’ve spent our childhoods in fear and hiding, unable to achieve our full potential. We walk in order to share our stories and to call on our leaders to fix the system that forces people like us into the shadows, stripping us of the opportunity to participate meaningfully in society.

We say that if we don’t do A, then B will happen.

That is a mindset, a very powerful mindset conditioned on the notion that what is here now isn’t here yet.

Operative word here being “conditioned.”

So we hear and even say ourselves … “oh, if we don’t fix healthcare legislation before it is passed into law, our brothers and sisters will suffer.”

When the reality is that our brothers and sisters are suffering right now, not in some hazy future time.

Now making the transition to present tense can often cause extreme grumpiness, so I will just make note of that for informational purposes.

When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way …

This isn’t really about being a visionary, even though I am a visionary.  I’m not claiming to be an impressive or gifted visionary, just that I have visions.  Honest.  No bigee.

I’ve been both writing and talking about a level of politics I’ve never had the stomach for, power politics.  Well I don’t even know if that label is correct.

And this ties in somehow with jeffroby’s Full Court Press.

I’m reading Art of War (among sci-f (Octavia Butler), horror (Poppy Brite) and romance (Maeve Binchy) novels) and I now see my proficiency in that kind of disciplined and strategic thinking is sorely lacking.  So I get sarcastic which makes me embarrassed because I really feel serious about it but I’m not in much understanding about it so I cover that with sarcasm.  And so on.

Enemies.

Opposition does not always result in enmity.  But sometimes it does.

All I have to say about that is:

Nothing is permanent.

So all I got at this point is I’m nice.

Ok, see now I want to be sarcastic again but I’ll try to resist that impulse.

What I want for the New Year is to find a way to engage in opposition openly and honestly and a forum in which to do so.

Thus far Docudharma seems to fit the bill for me — though I make no predictions on if I am right or wrong about this.

Not that I feel I can be totally honest and open here.  After all, in this new Millennium, we have no privacy.  That inhibits me.  I’d imagine the younger folks now aren’t as inhibited because they grew up with it and found new ways to gain privacy that I haven’t yet grokked from them.

Anyway.

Thus far my whole repertoire in fighting and opposition is impulse and emotion.

Now please don’t mistake me, impulse and emotion have gotten me far!

So the one thing reading Sun Tzu’s The Art of War did for me was to reveal very plainly there are other ways to fight effectively, other resources I can develop within myself to either avoid enmity completely or, if that is impossible, to deal with it swiftly and not let it linger.

Not that I know how to do any of that.

But the book was good, I think, in illuminating that reality.

I didn’t read it in the usual way.  First, I got an abridged version, translated by Thomas Cleary (not abridged Sun Tzu root text, but abridged commentary).  I did not read it in consecutive pages but opened pages randomly in the form of an I-Ching coin toss.

Inevitably it would draw me in and I’d read a few pages.

In conclusion, I’d recommend reading this book and other ancient texts which have stood the test of time over the centuries — they’re so easily gotten from the intertron these days.  Folks like Winter Rabbit, Robyn, Buhdydharma, Meteor Blades, and more have experienced and practiced some of these ancient techniques, adapting them to their own individuality and the times we are living in.  So I recommend paying attention to that kind of writing when it appears as well.

Happy New Year.