CXIII

 

Pygmalion, Galatea and Fred: un ménage à wha?

 

Crumb brûlé

 

In bourgeois society, the family attempts to replace culture and assert itself as both the divine and demonic principle. The only escape, seemingly, is into a signifying system based on material things – as many as possible – and on astral projections. One never, for a moment, puts one’s foot upon the actual earth.

Wherefore, in our global (blobal?), spectacular culture, the spontaneous is regarded as just another vanity.

 

God gave Noah the rainbow sign…

 

Fireworks. Waterworks. O god of elements and opposites, where is thy reconciliation?

 

Zeus as the “opener” for Yahweh

 

In our thought, however, we do not find vice and virtue locked in a battle to the finish, but rather two linked and dynamically interacting virtues (or potentiations).

 

Hope is a many-feathered thing wrote Dickenson, but crossed it out

 

Helas, Hellas!

 

Oh, I’m a great success… at breathing

 

Like many clever but unintelligent people, he was very adept at ritual…

 

One might say that the natural when fully understood, gates seamlessly into the “supernatural.” But isn’t that another way of saying, to paraphrase Clausewitz, that the supernatural is the natural carried on by other means?

 

The city is chock-a-block with sleek little corporate robots flashing gold cards and smashed iPhone screens. How many in the world entire, a billion?

 

Two lepta shy of a drachma

 

You are struck, again and again, looking at old paintings, say Memling’s portraits, by how much more engaged, intelligent and spiritually alive his subjects appear by comparison with the faces around you today.

Is it possible that Memling only chose subjects possessing rare qualities? Or did he project them onto and into them?

 

The world collapsing looks better on a screen. Preferably a smashed iPhone screen.

 

The iPhone, or other smart device, being the currently prevalent way of abstracting out of one’s surroundings and one’s company and, ultimately dispersing one’s self

 

Do three street dogs constitute a mange à trois?

 

The Strange Case of the Novelist Who Seceded from Story

 

A person uploading to iCloudius, could never write I, Claudius

 

What is the form and nature of your internal structure?

 

Have a coherent day!

 

 

Port Authority Busk Terminal

 

Don’t take “no” for an anthem

 

Filial piety (in the face)

 

A story is an accounting system

With ever-shifting digits, decimal points and a bottom line that keeps jumping to the top

 

Ah, the very idea of Posterity

 

The Robotix of Everyday Life

 

The association of the word, with or without a capital “w,” with Creation, with Genesis, is gratuitous, and worse: it immediately posits a self-annihilating word. Separation via the Word gets you in trouble from the get-go and leads algorithmically to a damned or blessed End. Better to “forget” beginnings in order to process.

 

If you build castles in Spain, in time, real stones fall on your head

 

The created Word – the Word of Genesis, of a single God, single Word, is automatically, hopelessly violent. It is a rupture. Need it be so? Cannot the word take its place in the mix, among the ten thousand extants? The word no longer split between sacred and profane, divine and earthly – no longer at a perfected remove. What sort of poetry might pass through us then?

 

You don’t need to create. The tides of life flow through you. One simply tries not to impede them.

 

Maoism was a hideous mashup of Eastern and Western ideologies, like Stalinism before it and Kampuchean “Democracy” afterward, truly a diabolical disunion, a catastrophic reductio, a dead-simple incoherence. It is worth noting that these experiments in Frankenpolitics tended, at least in the first two cases toward the underlying default authority figures of Emperor and Tsar.

Yet such vast and atrocious mechanisms of thought and action were only the foothills of globalization – truly the toxic and possibly world-finishing hamburger, the cheap and tasty death of, and by, a thousand cows – a vehicle for all sorts of pernicious biological and social microorganisms.

Fries with that?

 

The fries next time

 

Dept. of the Fence

The Fence industries

The best of Fence…

O, Fence!

 

Something there is that loves AWOL

 

July 9, 2015, a few days from being a half century since your first trip to Europe, having just turned 15: the summer of “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,” of actual English castles, the revelation of Paris: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

One morning, amid the informal market on the sidewalk outside les Galeries Lafayette, a street salesman was demonstrating a magical device for slicing and dicing vegetables (the box listed râper among its functions, your intro into the world of faux amis).

Fascinated and obsessed by the device, you prevailed upon your reluctant mother to buy one. For many years after, it sat, used perhaps once, on a shelf beneath the kitchen sink, the cardboard box slowly decomposing, the aqua-blue plastic turning greenish-brown and the blades rusting. The little machine vanished in the great cleaning-out after your mother’s death.

Today, roughly a fortnight shy of the fiftieth anniversary of its purchase, the name comes to your mind: Robo-Coup. So of the moment. So deeply now.

 

 

One thing sleds to another

 

Have sympathy for the young (who still live within you)

 

And yes, to set a new flag fluttering above so many public haunts, even to the SC statehouse, denuded of its stars ‘n’ bars: Remember Our MIW/POA’s: our Missing in War and Prisoners of Action

 

From an ongoing correspondence, with a friend, Greek by birth, but many years an American, written the week before the Greek parliament approved the “austerity” measures that would allow the country to continue receiving loans from the European Bank, et al:

Dear A. – thank you for your latest report from the front.

My sense is that whatever the nature of the “Greek” character, tribally inherited – the “combina” as you mentioned – and brought forward into globalization, that what is going on is a version of the old saying about the holocaust, “first they came for the Communists, then the came for the homosexuals…” etc.

Who and what gods, Olympian or otherwise, and particularly not Yahweh, made the Germans responsible for enforcing “responsibility”?

The Greeks are mad in their own way, just as every culture, tribe or nation is. But globalization is madness beyond madness – and the notion of seven billion people under the dictatorship of the market, one’s children and grandchildren endlessly in debt for the “irresponsible” borrowing of their parents and grandparents seems like the definition of sociopathology itself.

It is the concept of debt itself that must be questioned.

Beyond any fault that may, justifiably or not, be laid at the feet of the Greeks, what I think is taking place is a historical first: the transformation of a newly “first-world” country into a total colony of the banks. If they succeed in imposing these terms on Greece, then this mode of economic coercion has a good chance of becoming a global model.

The first way to break national sovereignty is to get rid of their money and substitute your money – in this case, “Europe’s “money. In the old days when, say, France conquered a country, say Mozambique, they made them use French money and forced them to take loans from French banks that had to be repaid in French currency. It amounted to economic rather than chattel enslavement. There’s plenty of fucked up things about Haiti, but that’s the story with them too – they were wrong-footed economically from the get-go.

Of course the Greeks fell for the Euro hustle and what they thought was fast, cheap sexy modernity, so did the Irish, Italians, Spanish and everyone else including the millions of Americans who really couldn’t remotely afford the MacMansions they bought and ended up sleeping in their soon-to-be repossessed cars in 2008.

To me, most of all, it isn’t so much the terms of the bailout as who sets the terms. There’s an old saying: if you owe $1,000 you’re in hock to the bank. If you owe a billion dollars, you own the bank.

How many hedge funds, “American,” “English,” and otherwise – but all really just global pirates – are going to pop their Cristal corks while the Greeks are getting sheared? There are dragon’s teeth being sown here. When a people are humiliated economically or militarily, the kids are the first victims. But then the kids grow up, and they’re really pissed off.

Not to be dramatic here, but Greece could strike a blow for human dignity and against globalization by saying “Basta.” The capitulation to the troika’s terms only forestalls the moment of reckoning when some really big economy, not too big to fail, but too big to bail goes under. The only problem the Greeks really have, as I see it, is imagining they are weak. They could change the game, but it looks like the government is caving in despite the mandate to say “Oxi.”

Please keep me posted on the situation on the ground.

xoxox, E.

 

Selfie-stock: an endless festival of peace, love and narcissism

 

The presumptive end of the world was attended by enormous cheering. Imagine the shock of discovery: the world can end and begin over and over again. Hold our applause?

 

Calmin’ humanity

 

Beware of geeks bearing gifts

 

The look, the feel, the fabric of our lies

 

Greek crisis/

Surrender fiscal sovereignty in return for bailout, Merkel tells Tsipras

So runs the Guardian headline on July 12, 2015

 

Ah, where is Themistocles when you need him?

 

In which case, what else to do at times like but dance?

As, helter skelter, the fig leaves blow away

 

Surrender [fiscal sovereignty], Dorothy

Don’t make me get my flying monkeys…

 

When the days blend into one

 

Don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that ding

 

I was a vanity metric for the FBI

 

The question, it seems, is less one of reliving, versus forgetting, the past, as of integrating it into the present.

 

Good story gone bad

 

What “goes bad” first, ourselves, or our stories?

 

How does one refer to robots collectively: a flock, a pod, a pride, a gaggle, a murder, a murmur, a school?

 

So many cops, so little crime

 

The more rules, the more chaos

 

The Museum of Casual Mystery

 

The One Sand Future King

 

The Case of the Meretricious Metrix

 

Four Marines are killed in Tennessee by a purported Islamic radical. Says the Daily News headline: JIHAD IN AMERICA: ROAD TO SLAUGHTER [starring Hope, Crosby and Lamour?]

Within the vast columns of verbiage beneath the sensational pics, this keeper: “I wouldn’t get caught up in monikers, if it’s domestic or not,” said U.S. Attorney General Bill Killian. “It’s a terrorism investigation…at an intense and higher level than a normal investigation.”

 

The Right is wrong, but the Left has its knickers in a twist.

 

First Pluto, too small to account for Neptune’s wobble, yet “discovered” because of it.

So, Planet Goofy must be out there somewhere, just past the edge of darkness, lurking…

Fuzzy-wuzzy wuz a Planet

            Whirling thru the sky…

 

Yanqui go Om

 

The great Western attempt to separate yin and yang has, as they say in the Kung Fu movies, “failed utterly.”

 

Epoch fail

 

The dumb and relentless have greater success than the smart and fitful

 

To be yang, gifted and…

 

Don’t get caught up in monikers…

 

High tea, no sympathy