I have been dabbling in poetry again, and not just haiku. Here's one I cobbled together, though I admit it is still rough. It shows I have been thinking of Ginsburg and Gary Snyder lately.
...
Pass the basket
& draw on your mothy pockets
with those anesthetized hands;
the cool gift of ungiving.
What gems & fruits
might feed our musicians,
our lost poets, our hoarse sidewalk prophets?
What fuels the awoken spirits
& the half-assed Buddhas, the part-time messiahs?
Judas & Jesus are looking for a cup of coffee outside the bar;
Tanto & the Ranger have been turned away from the Shelter,
walking the streets staying warm with a bottle of Wild Turkey;
Penelope sings for her love in the coffeeshop,
& Ulysses is lost from his crew in the Ponderosa pines.
The empty basket passes for the tithe
to the unbelievers, the pagans, the uncertain übermensch.
While Clark Kent spends his off hours
scratching bad poetry for Lois
who will never read it
because she is out to dinner with an internet-inspired bad date.
And the empty basket pays the bus fare, the gas money,
most of a train ticket back home.
The kids all dream of the Village,
the basket houses full of honest child faces
& the City becomes Montreal, Paris, Austin upon waking.
Through the day they walk on stilts, wear papier mâché masks, picket for Truth--
not knowing what Truth or whose Truth,
just the word like a crisp, Braeburn apple in hand--
& they hold out hats, upturned & empty.
So we pass the basket,
not for the beer or the cuppa,
not for the gas or the tickets,
not for the falafel or dogs,
not for the hotel room or the camping permit;
yearning for full moon silver coins
& the paper to scrawl out the ghosts tucked tightly in our pens and brushes.
...
Inspired, in part, by No Direction Home; also to those with only cars, hotel rooms, and parks to sleep on or in in Flagstaff. May creativity and godliness find multifarious forms and suprising manifestations of painful beauty.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Warming isn't cheap: Wild fires, climate change, and taxes
This is in reflection based on this article: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/06/20/501081/connecting-the-dots-how-climate-change-is-fueling-western-wildfires/
It is hot in Flagstaff these days. I'm not saying it is sweltering 90s and humid like I'm used to in the Midwest summers, or the 110s and 120s one might expect in Phoenix. I'm saying that like the rest of the West, we're experiencing global warming.
And it isn't cheap.
The raging wildfires in the American West are astonishing. They are the partial result of a dry winter and early loss of snow. The forests are drier than they ought to be and that great big western sky is pretty cloudless, though you may get billowing smoke in certain regions. And even when the storms do come, the parched forests are going to be less able to manage lightning strikes, flitting embers, and stray anthropogenic sparks. But what we're seeing is, in some startling ways, horribly anthropogenic. We are turning up the thermostat.
So we're sending out courageous firefighters, recruiting more planes, and evacuating more communities in order to save lives and protect habitats. Unfortunately, we are also protecting old habits. Month after month, year after year we're seeing hotter and drier weather (in the West, while other regions like Minnesota are experiencing deluges, http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/06/20/503301/hell-and-high-water-as-record-sw-wildfires-rage-duluth-is-deluged/) that ultimately comes out of our pockets.
What do I mean? Well, those firefighters are government employees, funded through taxpayer dollars, and the necessity to pull in more planes and other equipment shows how ill-prepared this system of protection is for climate change. (This in the context of a conservative stance of shrinking government and a liberal politics that seems to stand on sand rather than soil and bedrock.) So these stopgap measures are going to hit government pocketbooks hard, and the state governments as well as the federal are seeing more moths that dollars.
I have plenty of reasons to ride a bike rather than drive (which, I admit, has been a failing of late), to avoid petrochemical-intensive foods (commercial meat, non-regional produce, and highly processed food products), and aim for other lifestyle changes to reduce personal carbon emissions. Even on the personal and communal scales, we are going to have difficulty buffering ourselves against these radical ecological changes. For those who don't know--and I recognize that for some this is threadbare and even trite--we get the word ecology and economics from the same Greek root: eikōs, or "home." What we don't pay for now in terms of efficiency, industrial paradigmatic shift, and cultural transformation--with the final goal of a sustainable culture, politics, and biosphere--we are already being forced to afford through emergency services, amelioration, and adaptation/maladaptation. We're paying for climate change right now, not in five or ten or fifty years, but right now.
And I want to be positive. I want to spin something exciting and beautiful and visionary out of all of this. Maybe another day. Now, I think we need to take a look at what is in front of us: short, dry winters; premature springs; dry and bipolar summers; and the perturbations of millenia-old growing seasons. I'd like to say a petition or a presidency can do it, but it demands some radical challenges to the legitimacy of the contemporary American politics, not just in rhetoric and subject, but in involvement and demands.
Douglas Adams remarked, "I love deadlines. I love the sound they make as the go by." Well, we seem to be hearing plenty of those and they're not for publishing stories or books. We have already spent our stipends and now are running on cigarettes and coffee and ramen noodles. If we don't get to some serious work soon, I think we'll just be down to the cigarettes. Or maybe we'll stick with the ramen, instead.
It is hot in Flagstaff these days. I'm not saying it is sweltering 90s and humid like I'm used to in the Midwest summers, or the 110s and 120s one might expect in Phoenix. I'm saying that like the rest of the West, we're experiencing global warming.
And it isn't cheap.
The raging wildfires in the American West are astonishing. They are the partial result of a dry winter and early loss of snow. The forests are drier than they ought to be and that great big western sky is pretty cloudless, though you may get billowing smoke in certain regions. And even when the storms do come, the parched forests are going to be less able to manage lightning strikes, flitting embers, and stray anthropogenic sparks. But what we're seeing is, in some startling ways, horribly anthropogenic. We are turning up the thermostat.
So we're sending out courageous firefighters, recruiting more planes, and evacuating more communities in order to save lives and protect habitats. Unfortunately, we are also protecting old habits. Month after month, year after year we're seeing hotter and drier weather (in the West, while other regions like Minnesota are experiencing deluges, http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/06/20/503301/hell-and-high-water-as-record-sw-wildfires-rage-duluth-is-deluged/) that ultimately comes out of our pockets.
What do I mean? Well, those firefighters are government employees, funded through taxpayer dollars, and the necessity to pull in more planes and other equipment shows how ill-prepared this system of protection is for climate change. (This in the context of a conservative stance of shrinking government and a liberal politics that seems to stand on sand rather than soil and bedrock.) So these stopgap measures are going to hit government pocketbooks hard, and the state governments as well as the federal are seeing more moths that dollars.
I have plenty of reasons to ride a bike rather than drive (which, I admit, has been a failing of late), to avoid petrochemical-intensive foods (commercial meat, non-regional produce, and highly processed food products), and aim for other lifestyle changes to reduce personal carbon emissions. Even on the personal and communal scales, we are going to have difficulty buffering ourselves against these radical ecological changes. For those who don't know--and I recognize that for some this is threadbare and even trite--we get the word ecology and economics from the same Greek root: eikōs, or "home." What we don't pay for now in terms of efficiency, industrial paradigmatic shift, and cultural transformation--with the final goal of a sustainable culture, politics, and biosphere--we are already being forced to afford through emergency services, amelioration, and adaptation/maladaptation. We're paying for climate change right now, not in five or ten or fifty years, but right now.
And I want to be positive. I want to spin something exciting and beautiful and visionary out of all of this. Maybe another day. Now, I think we need to take a look at what is in front of us: short, dry winters; premature springs; dry and bipolar summers; and the perturbations of millenia-old growing seasons. I'd like to say a petition or a presidency can do it, but it demands some radical challenges to the legitimacy of the contemporary American politics, not just in rhetoric and subject, but in involvement and demands.
Douglas Adams remarked, "I love deadlines. I love the sound they make as the go by." Well, we seem to be hearing plenty of those and they're not for publishing stories or books. We have already spent our stipends and now are running on cigarettes and coffee and ramen noodles. If we don't get to some serious work soon, I think we'll just be down to the cigarettes. Or maybe we'll stick with the ramen, instead.
Friday, June 8, 2012
Counters and Alternatives: Jokes and Wisdom
All my friends have like
ideas, half-joking; we're
elder, fools, shamans.
...
I am in a quiet, reflective place. Somewhere between Rochester, Minnesota and my departure for Flagstaff from Lincoln, Nebraska, I came down with a cold. It hushed my voice and dampened my head, but my mind is heavy with magic stories, dream places, the afterthoughts of part-time strangers. I have read through the first 100 issues of Hellblazer (many of which are reread)--the comic of working class sorcerer John Constantine--and am finally jumping into Vurt by Jeff Noon--a drug-addled British cyberpunk Manchester dreamscape. During my travels I listened to Jennifer Eagan's A Visit From the Goon Squad (on Flagstaff to Independence, Kansas) and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; both of which practice a multiple-perspective, sometimes schizotypal examination of an event, a person, a family, a life. I am struck with a deep appreciation for narrative histories, even of the fictionalized sort. These multi-faceted tellings, these textured explorations of experience, of reality, always seem rooted in a magic of the moment, an understanding that language is brilliant when it points to its failure to share that which is its goal.
In my mind rested but restive mind, these connections are clearer than I will make them. I am entertaining the possibility of Tarot cards. I am intrigued by them in at least two clear ways. First, the tradition of the Tarot represents a way of evaluating and taking in the world that I appreciate even in my inability to understand. Tarot, like alchemy and the I Ching and other alternative wisdom traditions, relates some sort of synchronicity, reflectivity, and/or intertwining of the self with the greater structure, being, and/or perception of the world. Though the logic--a term I use loosely and anachronistically--remains elusive and unclear, the axiom that we are in and of the world is deeply satisfying to me. If in the process of making one's experience more understandable, one also comes to appreciate the world in a novel way, even if it is only through articulating uncertainty and strangeness, then I am captivated. (Note: I am not interested in divination or predictive uses of Tarot; divination, though it has a long tradition, strikes me as a misapprehension of such practices except under specific circumstances.)
Second, Tarot provides a counter-structure to knowledge and knowing compared to the one with which I am "comfortable." The rhetoric(s) of "capitalism" and "democracy"--by which I mean very specific, politically and temporally situated concepts--are deeply troubling. Capitalism has the troubling ability to claim counter-narratives and commodify them. Democracy has been used to validate and valorize the use of violence and the appropriation of public funds for militaristic ends. Theory and practice that go beyond and counter to such stifling structures of knowing are of crucial significance. Despite that, I think it is important to consider how such work may still allow space for hegemonic politics; with that in mind, capitalism and a disempowered democracy can continue to infiltrate such important work.
What strikes me as so important here is that an empowering counter-rhetoric around identity, political economy, spiritual and applied ecology is possible through working with both of these "intrigues" simultaneously. If we are to either deepen or contradict practical, praxical economy and politics, we have the challenge of thinking beyond the boundaries with which we are comfortable. I am not interested in rehabilitating sick institutions or ameliorating their impacts, though I think that those will be intermediate outcomes of such work; rather, I am interested in fostering (also read as "planting," "tending," "preparing") replacement institutions and clearing ("opening up," "contesting," "developing") the space in which such [counter]institutions can dwell. If these are to be both powerful and relatable--something we both want and can do--then they must be rooted in a deeper relationship of the human person to the world. This human person is porous in environmental, social, psychological, intellectual, spiritual, and--in the spirit of these alternative wisdom traditions--cosmic ways.
So why the haiku? Well, it is derived from a few text messages I sent to my friend Sam Bradley. It seems that all of my friends expect free drinks now that I work at a wine bar, though they only expect in "half-joking" ways. What does this mean? Well, I identify three roles (though there are many more, and synonymous names for these three) in which wisdom and jest are intertwined: the elder, the fool, and the shaman. The elder may chide and condescend, but offers pearls of guidance and truth that the jokes and stories may allow to stick. In oral traditions, the elder (sometimes maternal, sometimes paternal, sometimes both) is the primary individual(s) responsible for passing along stories and histories that communicate personal identity. The fool (when well articulated and not simply the ridiculous or obscene) provides a mirror through which we might see the self or society (as individual; the society: an everyman; the outcast: drunkard; the authority: royalty or the Church; and so on) in insightful ways. It is by providing a foil of the norm, appropriate, or normative that we can see the truth of who and what we are. (This is highlighted by how the fool and the shaman are sometimes analogous in certain cultures, such as some northeastern First Peoples of North America/Turtle Island, though I am not able to be more specific.) And third, though not finally, is the shaman who provides an intermediary between human, ecological, and spiritual worlds. (Note: These are definitely overlapping and co-constitutive categories for many if not most cultures; how they exist as such, though requires specific and sympathetic analysis.) The shaman demonstrates knowledge in counterintuitive ways to the cultural norm, though such practice is validated by the in-betweenness that such roles explore. Plants', animals', and places' spiritual significance may be identified through medicinal use or magical qualities. Shamans provide insight into the experiences of spirits, places, animals, and plants that support the well-being of the community even if the reasons did not fit with the understanding of the community, such as by "listening" to waterways and precipitation or--as Aldo Leopold puts it--"thinking like a mountain" to appreciate the relationship between wolves, mule-deer, and the mountains.
If I want to take these roles and insights seriously, it means stepping beyond normative behavior. It means exploring and dwelling in the in-betweenness where the shaman finds tense, dynamic, and insightful home. I think of Slavoj Zizec, whose uncouth enthusiasm and diction makes him a sort of jester in the court of political theory, in the theatre of theory, as it were. He crosses the edges of the socio-cultural norm (where trash and human waste go, the analysis of gender and perversion in film, the demarcation of imagination in the political) to show us the rather narrow limits of our society, politics, and psychology. I work hard to appreciate the wisdom that I do not understand from others, but the practice of it strikes me as absurd or nonsensical. It is important to me to break such habits and I know of no clearer way than to practice counter-habits.
...
And as an afterthought, I plan on writing for this specifically (reflections, essays, poetry, etc.) at least once a week.
ideas, half-joking; we're
elder, fools, shamans.
...
I am in a quiet, reflective place. Somewhere between Rochester, Minnesota and my departure for Flagstaff from Lincoln, Nebraska, I came down with a cold. It hushed my voice and dampened my head, but my mind is heavy with magic stories, dream places, the afterthoughts of part-time strangers. I have read through the first 100 issues of Hellblazer (many of which are reread)--the comic of working class sorcerer John Constantine--and am finally jumping into Vurt by Jeff Noon--a drug-addled British cyberpunk Manchester dreamscape. During my travels I listened to Jennifer Eagan's A Visit From the Goon Squad (on Flagstaff to Independence, Kansas) and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; both of which practice a multiple-perspective, sometimes schizotypal examination of an event, a person, a family, a life. I am struck with a deep appreciation for narrative histories, even of the fictionalized sort. These multi-faceted tellings, these textured explorations of experience, of reality, always seem rooted in a magic of the moment, an understanding that language is brilliant when it points to its failure to share that which is its goal.
In my mind rested but restive mind, these connections are clearer than I will make them. I am entertaining the possibility of Tarot cards. I am intrigued by them in at least two clear ways. First, the tradition of the Tarot represents a way of evaluating and taking in the world that I appreciate even in my inability to understand. Tarot, like alchemy and the I Ching and other alternative wisdom traditions, relates some sort of synchronicity, reflectivity, and/or intertwining of the self with the greater structure, being, and/or perception of the world. Though the logic--a term I use loosely and anachronistically--remains elusive and unclear, the axiom that we are in and of the world is deeply satisfying to me. If in the process of making one's experience more understandable, one also comes to appreciate the world in a novel way, even if it is only through articulating uncertainty and strangeness, then I am captivated. (Note: I am not interested in divination or predictive uses of Tarot; divination, though it has a long tradition, strikes me as a misapprehension of such practices except under specific circumstances.)
Second, Tarot provides a counter-structure to knowledge and knowing compared to the one with which I am "comfortable." The rhetoric(s) of "capitalism" and "democracy"--by which I mean very specific, politically and temporally situated concepts--are deeply troubling. Capitalism has the troubling ability to claim counter-narratives and commodify them. Democracy has been used to validate and valorize the use of violence and the appropriation of public funds for militaristic ends. Theory and practice that go beyond and counter to such stifling structures of knowing are of crucial significance. Despite that, I think it is important to consider how such work may still allow space for hegemonic politics; with that in mind, capitalism and a disempowered democracy can continue to infiltrate such important work.
What strikes me as so important here is that an empowering counter-rhetoric around identity, political economy, spiritual and applied ecology is possible through working with both of these "intrigues" simultaneously. If we are to either deepen or contradict practical, praxical economy and politics, we have the challenge of thinking beyond the boundaries with which we are comfortable. I am not interested in rehabilitating sick institutions or ameliorating their impacts, though I think that those will be intermediate outcomes of such work; rather, I am interested in fostering (also read as "planting," "tending," "preparing") replacement institutions and clearing ("opening up," "contesting," "developing") the space in which such [counter]institutions can dwell. If these are to be both powerful and relatable--something we both want and can do--then they must be rooted in a deeper relationship of the human person to the world. This human person is porous in environmental, social, psychological, intellectual, spiritual, and--in the spirit of these alternative wisdom traditions--cosmic ways.
So why the haiku? Well, it is derived from a few text messages I sent to my friend Sam Bradley. It seems that all of my friends expect free drinks now that I work at a wine bar, though they only expect in "half-joking" ways. What does this mean? Well, I identify three roles (though there are many more, and synonymous names for these three) in which wisdom and jest are intertwined: the elder, the fool, and the shaman. The elder may chide and condescend, but offers pearls of guidance and truth that the jokes and stories may allow to stick. In oral traditions, the elder (sometimes maternal, sometimes paternal, sometimes both) is the primary individual(s) responsible for passing along stories and histories that communicate personal identity. The fool (when well articulated and not simply the ridiculous or obscene) provides a mirror through which we might see the self or society (as individual; the society: an everyman; the outcast: drunkard; the authority: royalty or the Church; and so on) in insightful ways. It is by providing a foil of the norm, appropriate, or normative that we can see the truth of who and what we are. (This is highlighted by how the fool and the shaman are sometimes analogous in certain cultures, such as some northeastern First Peoples of North America/Turtle Island, though I am not able to be more specific.) And third, though not finally, is the shaman who provides an intermediary between human, ecological, and spiritual worlds. (Note: These are definitely overlapping and co-constitutive categories for many if not most cultures; how they exist as such, though requires specific and sympathetic analysis.) The shaman demonstrates knowledge in counterintuitive ways to the cultural norm, though such practice is validated by the in-betweenness that such roles explore. Plants', animals', and places' spiritual significance may be identified through medicinal use or magical qualities. Shamans provide insight into the experiences of spirits, places, animals, and plants that support the well-being of the community even if the reasons did not fit with the understanding of the community, such as by "listening" to waterways and precipitation or--as Aldo Leopold puts it--"thinking like a mountain" to appreciate the relationship between wolves, mule-deer, and the mountains.
If I want to take these roles and insights seriously, it means stepping beyond normative behavior. It means exploring and dwelling in the in-betweenness where the shaman finds tense, dynamic, and insightful home. I think of Slavoj Zizec, whose uncouth enthusiasm and diction makes him a sort of jester in the court of political theory, in the theatre of theory, as it were. He crosses the edges of the socio-cultural norm (where trash and human waste go, the analysis of gender and perversion in film, the demarcation of imagination in the political) to show us the rather narrow limits of our society, politics, and psychology. I work hard to appreciate the wisdom that I do not understand from others, but the practice of it strikes me as absurd or nonsensical. It is important to me to break such habits and I know of no clearer way than to practice counter-habits.
...
And as an afterthought, I plan on writing for this specifically (reflections, essays, poetry, etc.) at least once a week.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
