CXXI
At which great joints of meat
Each pie served in its own kosmic dilemma
Townie sister
Brother gown
Borders without borders
Ham of God
More so than most folk like to think: we are microbe-managed
Twelve Caesars walk into a bar…
Putting the eros back in erosion
I was a nearsighted cannoneer for the FBI
From: Hello justrob2…
Subject line: A Sexy Greek in your area wants to…
I swear I begin to see little or nothing in audible words,
All merges toward the presentation of the unspoken meanings of the earth,
Toward him who sings the songs of the body and the truths of the earth,
Toward him who makes dictionaries of words that print cannot touch…
[from Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Book XVI, “A Song of the Rolling Earth”]
“There’s a number of pieces of evidence that essentially pushed us off the cliff to say we’re investigating this as a terrorist event.” Said David Bowdich, head of the FBI Los Angeles office. [“She wrote of love for ISIS, then killed 14, by Larry McShane, New York Daily News, December 5, 2015, p. 4]
“Digital media should lead us to motivation, which should lead us to human intelligence.” Bowdich again, on the cellphones, thumb drives and computers owned by the late “terrorist” couple Tasfeen Malik and Syed Farook. [Ibid].
McShane writes: “Farook and Malik were killed in a fusillade of police gunfire during a firefight just four hours after the attack. The two sides swapped more than 400 bullets…” [Ibid].
A front page editorial takes up the three right hand columns of the New York Times: “The Gun Epidemic.” As though a microbe. As though a dis-ease.
Epi: upon; Demos: the people.
As distinct from Endemic: among one’s people, at home, native
And then, there’s the great god Pan.
The best of the earth cannot be told anyhow, all or any is best,
It is not what you anticipated, it is cheaper, easier, nearer,
Things are not dismiss’d from the places they held before,
The earth is just as positive and direct as it was before,
Facts, religions, improvements, politics, trades, are as real as before,
But the soul is also real, it too is positive and direct,
No reasoning, no proof has established it,
Undeniable growth has establish’d it.
[from Whitman, “Song…Earth”]
The process of the extraordinary becoming ordinary
Across four columns of the 12/6/15 Times, a photo of yellow police tape stretched horizontally across the frame, and in the background across what seems an endless parking lot, or vacant land, an odd vast and banal mostly horizontal building with a dome. And the caption: “The Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, Calif. the site of a deadly shooting rampage [on Wednesday], remained a crime scene on Saturday.”
Still!?
“’Everyone started running,’ said Christian Nwadike, 62, a health inspector who hid in a bathroom as the building shook with each rifle shot.” [“As Bullets Flew, Urgent Prayers And Pure Panic,” NYT, 12/6/15, A1:4]
Can a building shake from rifle shots? But what about what moves within the earth itself, since in San Bernardino, everyone’s at fault.
Same day, same front page, one column to the right.
Headline: RAMPAGE HAS U.S. THINKING HOW TO STOP ATTACKS
Subhead: DANGER OF ‘D.I.Y. JIHAD’
Home Depot or Bust
Caliphornia dreamin here I come
Bowers
Flowers
Sunkissed miss
is as good as a mile
Now believe me when I tell you that my song is really true
I want everyone to listen and believe
It’s about some little people from a long time ago
And all the things the neighbors didn’t know
Early in the morning
Daddy Dinky went to work
Selling lamps & chairs to San Ber’dino squares
And I still remember Mama with her apron and her pad
Feeding all the boys at Ed’s Café…
Ronnie saves his numies on a window in his room
(A marvel to be seen: dysentery green)
While Kenny & his buddies had a game out in the back:
LET’S MAKE THE WATER TURN BLACK…
Ronnie’s in the Army now & Kenny’s taking pills
Oh! How they yearn to see a bomber burn!
Color flashing, thunder crashing, dynamite machine!
(Wait till the fire turns green… wait till the fire turns green)
WAIT TILL THE FIRE TURNS GREEN!
Chanté Zappa kan ya makan
Now you go through Saint Louie
Joplin, Missouri,
Oklahoma City looks o so pretty.
You’ll see Amarillo,
Gallup, New Mexico,
Flagstaff, Arizona.
Don’t forget Winona,
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino.
Won’t you get hip to this timely tip:
When you make that California trip
Get your kicks on Route Sixty-Six.
Sang Nat King Cole and The Stones, in The Day
And then there are the B-52’s, “Slow and Rusted, But Still Flying” to which The Times devotes nearly two pages:
“The B-52 is an Air Force Plane that refuses to die. Originally slated for retirement generations ago, it continues to be deployed in conflict after conflict. It dropped the first hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Islands in 1956, and it laser-guided bombs in Afghanistan in 2006. It has outlived its replacement. And its replacement’s replacement.
“Air Force commanders are now urging the Pentagon to deploy B-52s in Syria.
“’We’re ready, we’re hungry, we’re eager to be in the fight,’ said Col. Kristin Goodwin, who commands the Second Bomb Wing at Barksdale Air Force Base, where about half of the bombers are based.
“Now in its 60th year of active service, the bomber is slow, primitive and weighed down by an infamy lingering from the carpet bombing of Vietnam in the 1960s. But 76 B-52s still make up the bulk of the United States’ long range bomber fleet, and they are not retiring any time soon…”
I’ve got a car, it’s as big as a wail, and it’s about to set sail
So come on, and bring your jukebox monkey
“When the first of the top-secret jets rolled off the assembly line in 1954, the Air Force’s chief of staff proudly called it ‘the thing that’s going to keep that Red fellow in his place.’”
And everywhere the erasure of the lines that trace us back to Apelles:
The two fat lines of the twin towers
The invisible line between, say, Iraq and Syria
And the West, no longer inscribing, no longer the apex, the stylus that grooves the world. It’s a CD, now O best beloveds – skipping over damaged area…
Would prefer not to…
Yes, Cuneiform
And Krak des Chevaliers
