CXV

 

In New York City there are great dragons that tunnel underground. Sometimes you can feel them rumbling as they move beneath your feet.

 

And aboveground, nothing’s very far, as the scarecrow flies…

 

Darius of Persia, so Herodotus reports, was set on invading Greece, but he died before he could put his plan into motion. So it fell to his successor, Xerxes, to carry the scheme forward. Xerxes gathered a council to advise him, among them his first cousin Mardonius, a true man of action, who, needless to say, favored the invasion. Beyond his drive for vengeance (a very long story indeed involving the kidnapping of princesses), Mardonius’ argument ran that “Europe was a very fair land and bore every sort of cultivated tree, was high in its fertility, and it was the Great King, alone of mortals, who deserved to own it.”

Counter arguments were made, but when it came down to bronze tacks, Mardonius tried to convince Xerxes that conquering Greece would be a cakewalk: “What should we fear? What gathering of vast numbers of their people? What power of their wealth? We know these peoples’ fighting; we know their power is mere weakness. We have subjugated their children who live in our territory, those who call themselves Ionians and Aeolians and Dorians. I myself have served against these men, under your father’s orders; I have driven as far as Macedonia and within an ace of Athens herself, and no one ventured to come against me to fight.”

But – and here’s the kicker – he then derides the Greeks’ tactics: “Yet, as I learn of it, the Greeks do fight, in the most ill-advised way – out of mere ignorance and stupidity. When they declare war on one another, they find the fairest and most level piece of ground and go down into it and fight, so that the conquerors come off with great losses – I say nothing at all of the defeated, for they are entirely blotted out. Yet surely they ought – being people who have the same tongue and use heralds and messengers – surely they ought to settle their differences by any means save fighting; and if, no mater what they must fight against one another, then they should find out the spot where each is most difficult to subdue and try the fight there…” [The History, David Grene, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 470]

 

Far later in the game, after Xerxes has retreated back across the Hellespont leaving Mardonius to, presumably, subdue the Peloponnese, and on the advent of the Persians’ final defeat at Plataea, a Persian soldier, aware of the coming debacle, unburdens himself to his Theban banquet partner: “’Because we have eaten at the same table and have shared the libation too, I would like to leave you with a record of what I think, so that you may be forewarned and take proper measures for your own safety. You see these Persians feasting here and the army we left encamped on the river? Of all these many, within a very short time indeed, you will see but few survivors.’ That was what the Persian said, and he cried bitterly. At this Thersander [the Theban] was very surprised and said to him, ‘Should you not tell this to Mardonius…?’ But the Persian answered, ‘Sir, what comes from God, no man can turn back. Even if what was said was credible, no one would believe it. Many of us Persians know all this, but we follow in the bondage of Necessity. This is the bitterest pain to human beings: to know much and control nothing.” [Ibid, p. 618]

 

No one’s ever met TED, but lord, how he talks! How vatic and emphatic!

 

The game today: ASP: always sharp practice.

And the substitution of grandiose for grand.

 

Don’t hang on, yang on.

Don’t hang in, hang yin.

 

Have my zombies call your vampires call your robots

 

A young woman passes Tarallucci wearing a teeshirt emblazoned:

HIGH

HEELS

HIGH

HOPES

She is wearing flats.

 

Prada People’s Problems

 

Patience can neither be rewarded nor disappointed. It is not a thing or an algorithm. Rather it is the persistence of intention without beginning, end or limit.

 

 

What is the relation between coherence and cohesion?

 

“You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her… wherever.” Quoth Donald Trump, referring to Megyn Kelly of Fox News, in response to her “hard questions,” after the Republican presidential candidates’ debate on September 7, 2015.

“He meant nose. Only a deviant would think anything else,” an unidentified Trump spokesperson told the New York Post.

Trump’s remark and its defense are old news to anyone reading this. But the puritanism that underpins both statements runs deep in the American grain and isn’t even close to being recognized, much less addressed.

It is the primal fear of the female that – since it cannot be “thought” – hangs us up, manifesting in a thousand indirect and pathogenic signs and symptoms, from anti-abortion laws, to lynching, homophobia, xenophobia, police terror, the all-invasive securitized state.

 

I have a Traum.

Traum on!

 

A libertarian is a narcissistic anarchist

 

Don’t be fooled by scale

 

Let the freight carry the freight

 

Hot is the new warm

 

Bridle that lust: slap a saddle and stirrups on it and giddyap! off you go.

 

Capitulism mon amour

 

Once more unto the freakin’ breach…

            Henry the huh?

 

There is the wind that moves in the branches, the same wind that ripples the still lake. What of the wind inside you?

 

Once upon a time, in the Land of Okeydokia…

 

Must “necessity” trigger narrative? Or, put another way, can “necessity” be satisfied by means other than narrative? For does not every narrative give rise to a thousand “necessities” that can then only be assuaged by more frequent and higher doses of narrative?

 

Capitalism, along with our ten thousand other isms, is a conceptual build-out on a fundamental human anxiety response to the uncertainty and difficulty of life and the suffering associated with death.

Are there other ways we can respond, even, and perhaps especially in this historical moment, to so deep and urgent an anxiety? Is it possible to construct (create) less, explain less, allow more space for an undivided appreciation of materializing and spiritualizing forces at work – a continuous actualization which neither requires a beginning or an end? Is it possible to cultivate an understanding of the animating and receiving dynamic in ourselves and the world, an understanding which, in short, is not so much concerned with defining states, as with clarifying them?

We writers have taken on the role of a narrative priesthood. So we may well inquire into the function of “our” narratives, and narrative itself, in structuring thought and generating structures, both social and physical. Socialism may arrive on a bicycle, but, like Capitalism, Christianity or Buddhism, it rides the magic carpet of narrative.

 

In such a moment, even disruption is disrupted, one finds discontinuity even within the discontinuity, incoherence within incoherence. On the streets sitting-down spots and byways, promiscuous displays of dysfunctionality, and just down the block, or at the next table over, promiscuous displays of robot-like serviceability.

 

How many Poland Springs bottles filled with piss wake up in the gutters of NYC each morning? Do they wonder how they got here?

Ah, these pigs – they take everything for grunted

 

 

Certainly, one can mainline various species of qi via love, lust, anger, drugs, drama, and the whole panoply of adrenaline-arousing practices. But one can also give and receive qi in a less concentrated but also less disruptive form by tuning into that which is in continuous actualization, both within one’s body and the world.

 

I was a Baal Shem Tov for the KGB

 

One of the reasons the West has such difficulty evolving new social forms – wrenching itself from shock to spasmodic movement to stasis to shock – is that it insists on thinking categorically: in creating distinctions that are more or less immutable and that form the matrix of a narrative that both problematizes and seeks to explicate the mysteries of existence.

We will, in a crisis, or under pressure of circumstances, exchange old categories for new ones (q.v. the often agonizing metamorphoses recounted in Ovid, pantheism for monotheism, feudalism for capitalism, social democracy for fascism, faith for reason, slavery for labor unions and voluntary debt, racism for tolerance, calisthenics for yoga), but we have not yet been able to invent our way out of a categorical mode of thought, nor imagine forsaking categories as our dominant technique for structuring reality. Consequently, one heroically thinks oneself outside the box, only to find oneself in another box one must labor heroically to think outside of. Private property’s greatest appeal may, ultimately, be that it insures that at least we can own the box we’re trapped in.

The closest we get to evolution, then, is repetition and, frequently only in extreme circumstances, variation.

An appreciation of the functional limitation of the categorical mode of thought, constituting as it does in itself a kind of mental prison, may help reveal why, for example, our culture is obsessed both with prisons, and with freedom. It may also illuminate the conceptual precondition that allows the things we consider to be social evils to persist, and to even develop more virulent and perverse manifestations, despite our attempts at moral and legal suppression.

 

Got my logos workin’ but it just don’t work on thou – I mean dao

 

Turn left at Wal-Mart

 

Platonic solidarity forever

 

I was a Platonic Solid for the FBI

 

Tax the guilty!

 

Let them eat apps.

 

Hypotaxis, mon amour;

Jim Crow in the Animal Farm of Grammar.

 

On the other foot, parataxis strikes deep.

Even gods and demons fear the sequence of four unwinding, chain-linking or strung-together words.

 

I dreamed I saw Dad in mom’s Freudian slip

 

 

A pair of praxes walk into a bar…

 

There is a logos in Spanish Harlem…

 

And The Velveteen Logic: it becomes more lovable, more filled with spirit resonance the more threadbare it becomes.