Thursday, September 23, 2004

From a speech delivered 8-20-04 by Bo in one of his alternate personas.   Growing Older   I am growing older.  Not necessarily wiser.  Nathan asked me to channel Walt Whitman for this videotaping of poets who are expressing their hopes for the future of the U.S.   I did that.   Like this:   You are drunk with unearned privilege, country, and i am not evacuating your inebriate form to the recovery room, the......... my words swarm you, every one an ant,  a tardive ant on your every cell, on each platted mite of your skin organ. Formication.  This poem your formicary.  Do they itch ? You have not enough nails to scratch them all.  You are subverted. There is no anti-pruretic for you. No papal blessing. No apostolic creed, no calamine of lies, no religion, no nationalism, no armoire of ideologies, nor no apathy yet invented can save you from my words. Itch you shall. Itch you Are.   And so on.  Then i set this effort at poetry aside.   I am a lifetime resident of this country. And a poet. But i do not come today to speak as a poet; i do not come to wax wroth, to skewer the manifold errors of our society or to raise you up by the engine of hopeful words.  I come rather to address the future, to speak of the practical and the possible, and that is a task for prose. Dry prose.  Dry words.  The sane man maintains a healthy disbelief in the power of, the efficacy of, the spirituality of, the primacy of words.   I do not have children; that does Not mean that i do not have an intense need to pass on something from my success and my failure, something for the future generations. I have not now given myself over to belief in any ideology, any party, any method, any great individual, any overweening pattern of history, any force or any act of Nature – outside of that which lies within myself. Having so given myself over to such beliefs in past, i have learned that the process of belief is faulty in and of itself. I have learned that one's belief should not exceed the force of action to be found within oneself. May that force within me be sufficient; and if it is not, may the best force within yourself be sufficient. What i say here is the fruit of one man's experience, and no more defensible as "truth" or as "justice" than a will o' the wisp. I ask you, do not subject yourselves to the error of "believing" or "disbelieving" what i am about to say.   Nor to the error of believing what you yourself say. Simply act in the best interest of others, of all the other life that you can possibly comprehend, and then the future of this country, the positive change of this country, will be assured, regardless of method, regardless of who is in charge, regardless of intervening failures.     May we insist that every person have access to a small, adequate, healthy family group, recognizing that such families cannot be based alone on the accident of inheritance, of genetic similarity, of common household. Every person must have a place to belong.   May we share fairly the wealth of our continent and of the globe, accepting full well that this means we must share out the poverty as well. Let no one live in luxury until the least are safely fed, housed, educated. May we disassemble the corporate media monopolies, and restrict the size of all organizations of communication to the least size of their survival.     May we teach ourselves to forego the false luxury of Deity. History has shown that all deities are man-made, in that every one of them has proved to embody and project the worst of man as well as his occasional better aspects.   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.   Why do we need a god anyway?  to reward us ?  to punish us? Surely the lassitude of the American public will be punished by ordinary results of reality, no penalizing God needed.     May we teach all persons the history of mind, the archetypes within themselves, so that we are not forever surprised at the external outbreaks as leaders and citizens revisit our cataclysmic past, and project old disaster into the present.   May every person obtain mental health through some physical work, through the hand crafting of personal tools from simple materials, and through constant access to physical touch. May we eliminate our American unspoken class of untouchables upon whose suffering depend the fondest excesses of pride and privilege.   May we root up like shoots of sumac the inevitable failure of heroism; may we start by accepting first and always not the possible herohood of persons, but the assured failure of each of us, and thereby have rock under our feet, and not quicksand. Let us pretend no heros and study no lineages of supposed nobility.     May we entomb any and all religions within the encasement of a Chernobyl, so that their ongoing pathologies do not corrupt any further the practice of our practical politics.   It is not by bombardment, but under guise of business and by breeding, bolstered by the bonafide bombast of religions, that most warfare is carried on in this world. The outbreaks of armed hostilities are but the visible buboes of the underlying infection.   May we give up our foolish belief in the goodness of organizations. No corporation, society, bund, church, state, or Boy Scout troop for that matter has any hope of acting ethically. Only individuals can act ethically.   May we starve out our Dept. of War until it is forced to give up the vile imperialism it enforces around the globe.     May we have the strength and steady purpose to reform that antiquarian document of legal fictions known as the Constitution. And to keep rewriting it as required by exigencies of our own days. Do we want to continue to run 21st Century law as if on the engine of a James Watt,  as if on the curiosity of an Alexander Bell?     May we punish greed and thievery wherever found, starting with perpetrators of the biggest crimes first, since theft is the one motivation common to every criminal and psychotic enterprise bedeviling the country. Theft is an ebola virus, there is no such thing as a small taking, the error of it blooms and floresces through every person.  "Pass it on" the most common mantra we have, if unspoken.     May we agree to reduce our population numbers until such time as science demonstrates the true and limited capacity of the planet to carry the burden of the one animal species which destroys all its natural predators. The act of breeding into a finite world will eventually be recognized for what it is, a primary act of competition, of aggression, guaranteeing in utero that eventually sides will be chosen up, enemies created and demonized, weapons secured, etc.     May we return to all places in Nature the natural vigor which our ancestors found there, using whatever science and resources are required. At the very least, may this country return to exacting no more than its ordinary share of resources from the common resources of the world.   May we base our political assumptions firstly not on the rights of individuals, but on their duties; may we insist that all men share an overriding social compact.     May we deconstruct the error of nationalism in all countries.   May we estop the gross crimes and excesses of corporations, hammer to pieces the corporate shield laws, and develop means to insure that sociopaths can no longer find their sure means to vicious power by means of corporate executive suite.  May we no longer allow these insane persons to play their zero sum games with our economy.   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 share the fruits?   Who then appointed you satrap, America?  Who gave you sway, American ? Who made you liege lord of the globe ? By what grace and purpled mountain do you claim yourself master of mankind ? By dint of consuming what porkrind have you ascended to dominance ? Give it up. You did not inherit, America, you are not appointed. You are not even the first violin, giving out 440 cycles on the A note. You are flotsam in the Johnstown flood; stop making religion of your temporary float, of your beatified survival of the moment;  you can and will submerge if you do not change.     Americans, when you view the outline of this country, when you imagine the fictive boundary of your own state, do Not think of that circumference as the lip of a funnel, do not think of yourself as mere gasoline poured through that funnel. This country is not a place to be trod, a thing to be owned in parts, it is not a collection of owners lassoed en masse by the line of their border. Not a place. Not a thing. Not a group nor even just the useful fiction of a group-think. No. This country is but one of many funnels floating freely through the void; and you, citizen, if you are but cosmic debris, orts of fuel sucked by accident, not by your own forethought, past the lip, through the venturi of this funnel. You are not here of your own accord. God did not favor you, crumb. You did not favor yourself. Accept your passage; do some work along the way. You favor with a will the crumb next to you, for it is not the nature of funnels to segregate, remove, exalt one over the other. You are just passing through; how you entered the tubular agitation, exactly that is how you will leave it, a slippery molecule in a fume. To imagine yourself otherwise is the great American fantasy.   End. 11:17:38 PM    comment []