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Grendel's Laundry List: Readings for August 31
Special Ant Crabby Edition
Those to whom epiphany is done do evil in return.
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The error of “God”—vibrato within me like a universe supersaturated with dashboard Jesuses.
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It is a terrible thing to go through life without the consolation of an all-powerful religion under the aegis of an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent and personally-related rewarding/punishing Deity. Perhaps the only thing more terrible is for an intelligent uncoerced person to believe in such nonsense, and act upon those beliefs.
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There is no such thing as salvation. To stop looking for salvation is the first step into reality. Reality is pain.
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The soul is neither good nor bad. It is an essential animal part of all living things, and the souls of humans are not different in kind from those of animals, be they turtles or jaguars, or trees for that matter. It is not the supposed superiority of the human soul, but rather the superiority of the human forebrain and the fruits of the human hand, that make humans more responsible than animals for acting ethically.
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No corporation, society, bund, church, state, or Boy Scout troop for that matter has any hope of acting ethically. Only individuals can act ethically.
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That nature provides a vast Rorschach blotter cannot be denied, but it seems obvious that the natural teaching of nature is that humans are animals, and ought first to be good animals.
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Earth will control the numbers of its human parasites via novel and ancient diseases, famine and warfare. And oh yes, thirst.
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Not all Republicans are mealy-mouthed, dog-eating, cat-kicking, sister-jammin’, Raygun-sainting, Orange-County plutocrats. Of course those that aren’t tend to be waxring-sucking, pederastic, slaveholding, no-tipping, HumVee-hoggering, country-clubbing, lemonpeelbutt Enronistas. You can’t have everything I guess.
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The average human being and the average poet is constrained to discover his Self by working, sweat, toil, physical suffering, selective denial of comforts. Going straight for the godhead courts disaster.
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Identifying Christ with the Self as G.M. Hopkins does, endangers the perception of reality, an awareness which no human should try to escape so thoroughly.
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I encounter no sempiternal entity of Self in any man, but only a daily patchjob with a whole lot of spin, a work in progress, put back in committee each night.
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The subcommittees of the night gather near dawn, proclaiming The Constitution Du Jour.
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If I spot another of my ilk [ poets ], I suggest to him media of steel, stone, clay, landscape, concrete, anything but words. Humans are ill-prepared by Darwinian selection for the coils of alphabetical obsession.
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I would rather that my poems be not opiate but diuretic for the masses.
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Dana helped create and introduce me to a certain kind of poetic act, which i called Downloading or Core Dumping, and which results in poems we call Dense Imagery. One gets on paper every image one can from a limited moment of thought, writing as fast as possible, as much as memory allows. It is a complex 1/2000th exposure of huge states of mind. The poem product of such an act seldom allows or accepts severe revision or editing.
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Dense imagery erupts now in various authors as a natural expansion of the traditional role of we sweathogs - reunifying the fissiparous, centripetal, babelonic strivings of language. Give the publican his due, harvest the pot. Trickledown comes home at last. Trope will link the Incan heart of darkest Africa to Rossini's post-operatic salons of Peiping. To recatholicize the severed suckers of that lingual imago.
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The current explosion of knowledge and experiences tends to create ever more psychic islands, each complex with its own Darwinian subset of creatures. Poets must take the offensive, conflate ad lib with concatenation of images and metaphors, no surcease. Must pour off plasmatic dross from alembic infarcted only by exigencies of daily bread, not stoppered by artificial strictures on stem cells of psychic marrowbone, nor squelched even by surfactants, simethicone of the hyperdulian logics, oh Mary Mother of All forgive us our sins. Artifice unleashed. Dense Imagery. The traditionally unacceptable mode becomes the mode of necessity. It is but the current meter of Chaos, patiently waiting, not striving, for that precious future when poetastering dandies and the Grandees of Sinecure will spiel down some prole-comforting dripdrip, dripitydrip from microspigot of that hydrant we Water Authority have so resevoired and pressurized. Ours is a subversive creation. Resistance is futile. See the equation.
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Words, including the Word, are a kind of disease, a synaptic infection, psy-ops warfare in which one man takes on all others, an exquisite pleasure to be sure, like that peculiar to the tubercular in extremis appropriating the last of his oxygen for one last lay, the evilest of necessaries, a throttling of the purity of primitive communication ( Uriel barely suppressing his guffaw as Adam exits Eden concealing his supposed theft of language), a sublingual lozenge of hiv ever inviting karposianic errors, a synthetic parasite empowering the tongue and throat of the bedeviled as a God ( not, note, the superego as locus dei as some psychoanalytic theory would have it), a viral thief of the spiritual dna of the thin-skinned unicellular organism homo insapiens. The sane man maintains a healthy disbelief in the power of, the efficacy of, the spirituality of, the primacy of words. God save me from the Word.
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The current situation, in which a few Americans export their highest ideals of equality and representative government for all, while the remainder export creeds outworn, especially that gomboid hodgepodge of undead feudalism, that unvetted dollarist aliquot of the Dark Ages’ makeshift control on panaggression now called “global capitalism”, does not seem to be a situation capable of permitting, much less effecting, rapid delivery of universal justice and liberty.
So called "capitalism" and globalization appears to me hardly a single, directed, force but rather a holy frenzy, a jagannath of greed propelled amid chaos, whelping off demons as well as darlings. "Use them all up, let God sort out the paupers" appears to be the businessman's mantra. It may be that the majority of persons in the ranks of business do not accept the unethical S.O.P. nor lightly abide the evil results concomitant to even beneficial commerce, but the fact remains that commercial mores repeatedly reward true sociopaths with great power and wealth. I conclude that there is something fundamentally wrong with business theory and practice, wrong all over the globe, becoming more wrong as the size of businesses increase, etc. and that these errors concentrate wealth and power in persons most inimical to representative democracy.
Even the businessman manqué defends his "system", and all the wannabe wealthy stand on their received right to use and abuse, defraud under law their fellow person. Since most of them stand to be usees more so than users, this is no more than addictive gambling, except that its ideology will destroy democratic representation for everyone.
You (may) deplore the "gap between rich and poor". I do not deplore the plutocrats any the less; once that 'gap' develops, the few on the topside of it concentrate their considerable lucubrations towards institutionalizing their usually ill-gotten advantages, towards usurping democratic representation with a cacocracy of the wealthy, and particularly with those members of their own industry, a morally paradoxical behavior tolerated by most Americans.
The act of breeding into a finite world will eventually be recognized for what it is, a primary act of aggression, guaranteeing in utero that eventually sides will be chosen up, enemies created and demonized, weapons secured, etc.
How quickly immigrants go from being deprived third worlders to adopting the American standards--everyone of us a usufructuary of global airs, waters, minerals, etc. under the absurd rubric that paying cash for the products deteriorating those humanwide resources somehow relieves Americans of any other responsibilities for preserving them for the use of all.
Do you want to bite that bullet, the recognition that there is but one battle worldwide, not at base between religions, not between nations, nor between classes, but only between the self-appointed porcine masters of each territorial, resource and technologic demesne and the entire population of those with whom they refuse to justly share the fruits?
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Copyright 2003 by Eugene Zandler (aka Ant Crabby)
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