Hamlet:Regret

He sat as one, as one alone, but with the many.

One among some rows of sunk sorrowed heads.

He set his own grief aside but only when he

Lifted dry sore eyes that turned and led

To a crumpled site. Mother, too, sat alone,
A creased and jagged black heaping pile
Like an unhewn, sphalerite onyx stone
That shed dark tears. For all the while

Father sat displayed, arrayed in gold,
Plated and protected, and also altared,
A warrior protecting a now ashen soul
Enshrined. Father and son could bear

No strain to such a sympathetic turn;
One too dead inside, the other ground so fine,
Insurance against the feasting worms
That, like talkers to the dead, like to dine.

Who defends, who acts, when the man of cloth
Rises up as expert and starts to spew
Sans brevity? Yet more of Larkin's moth-
Eaten brocade, a deadening world-view

That denies both life and destined death.
There is no deep down meaning if
Instead of celebrating life's real wealth,
We must hear from men who seem convinced

It is to be deferred as only judgment.
So he sat in grief. Even more in vain.
Only now as indecisive as if he then
Played the part of the vacillating Dane.

To rise up! To speak! To take a stand!
To convey in love what god's agent could not:
To celebrate the love of what once was the man.
He might relay in deed and memory just a jot,

Remembrances perhaps, some kind words.
He sat alone in grief and thought of what to say.
From the aperture he heard sweet songs of birds.
He never moved. He put his poisoned sword away.

A Glance Cast

Replete with electric love and filled with

Sensual charge, your stirring stare surges forth

Sharp power all through, heretofore missed

But now coursing into an infinite core

To where no time sits nor moves. And this,

Your gaze, regenerates a world, again alive,

As when receiving an enchanted spark that lifts

Embryonic growth. Then all unfurls and thrives

Like the special start creating true life that is,

And blooms in a thousand million kind of ways.

This, done quick, is what your giving glance gives.

And this, in abundance, is what your single look gave.

A flood of wine, it irrigates and runs a course.

In a corpus blast a universe inflates.

Red rivers rush from the central pumping source

And, in flux and flow, body begins to populate.

A burst within of blood and bone, the mingle and mix,

The thrust and bulge of veins like forest vines

In rhizomatous splendour sown from one look fixed;

All entwined, delicate, tendrilous and tined,

Lush and alive again. No mystery at

All. An atom eye, the creative causal kind,

Is what commenced a dilating heart

And vitalized till now a dormant mind

Once more. The eye or gaze? No need to ask if

One or all. For that gleaming glint is when

Those special things in tandem lithely lifts

A spirit that hopes to do it all again.

Freedom of Belief as Illusion: The Importance of Reasons for Believing

There is much talk in this country about belief.  It is often paired with the idea of freedom.  Freedom of belief has become a tenet we live by and cherish.  Belief is a fascinating part of human nature as it is the lever pulled by which everything else that has to do with behavior is placed in to motion. The moment someone even remotely resembling a fire chief enters your house unannounced to proclaim you have five minutes to get out because the house is about to collapse on your head, is the moment a belief must be welcomed. If you decide to believe him you will also act, presumably by getting out of your own house as fast as you can. Remember, these were mere words strung together by a complete stranger. I would venture that any reasonable person would act accordingly even if they had a priest, or Rabbi, or Imam, over for tea and this religious authority told them to sit tight as God would never allow this to happen. More than this, I would bet my life that any of these three men would act the same as you.  Nothing wakes us out of the slumber of what to really believe about the world when it has everything to do with self-preservation. This is a case of reality (as well as the probability in reality) forcing itself upon you without the benefit of freedom. However, as much as we say we cherish all belief, we are very often quick to decide for others they do not really believe what they do. This is a strange inversion to our idea of the freedom it contains. We do this when it has behavioural consequences we do not like.  This is when we forget a very important aspect of belief: for belief to actually work it must go a long way in objectively understanding how the world actually appears.

Take religious belief. If you are a fairly educated young man who truly believes  an omniscient creator of the universe has written—or at least dictated-- the penultimate book on the way the world should be, that young man will heed it completely. If this book is filled with lots of gibberish about this creator having enemies on earth you must believe this too. If there is even vague (it’s not that vague) talk of god hating these enemies so much so that it is his follower’s job to kill these enemies, this must also be acted upon. When a young man truly believes these things, it should not be a surprise when he, along with fellow believers, takes a petroleum-filled Jumbo 747 aircraft and use it as a bomb by flying it in to buildings.

Are we appalled by this kind of act? Of course we are. It is against every fiber of our ethical intuition. This ethical intuition, I would also argue, precedes even the authority of some books. We also know intuitively it does not bring about a better world for everyone. We tacitly or otherwise know this is wrong and wrong for all the wrong reasons. But what has this young man done in relation to what he believes about the world? For one, according to his belief, he has done his family a great service. According to the book he reads as his world view, it is very difficult to get into paradise after death but with his one act, he has now given his family and himself a direct ticket to heaven. Not a bad deal on the face of things. He has assured them eternal nirvana after death. He has also done the world a great service. Sure, he killed innocent people but these were the enemies of god, after all. 

He has actually improved on the world.  He has also pleased the creator of this world. In this sense, according to his belief, someone who flies a plane into a building for god must be seen as a very altruistic person. Of course, this is obscene. He has not made the world a better place. This, coupled with the real fact that his reasons are highly unlikely, pushes the obscenity to the dangerous. If this sounds shocking I only say it to highlight the point that there is rarely a person out there acting like some Austin Powers villain hoping to finally spread evil around the world. Even the most ridiculous claims purport to actually benefit the world. This again should further highlight how important beliefs really are in the world. But we are most likely agreed that if our goal is to build a better world, holding such absurd beliefs is not the way to go about it.

Why is the above so insane? For one we just know it’s wrong to kill innocent people for utterly terrible reasons. But because we are so adamant about holding on to our freedom of beliefs, even our irrational ones, we decide that this could not possibly be what they believed. And this is even though these young men and those like him are constantly telling us these are the beliefs he holds. So we come up with other plausible reasons as if they acted for political reasons or that they were brainwashed. We decide to differentiate beliefs based on what the behavioural outcomes are despite the fact that they may both be logically insane. As an example, I once watched an episode of Bill O’Reilly’s news show. He was interviewing an author who was known for his strong religious criticism. In a moment of uncharacteristic clarity, Bill O’Reilly made the point that to kill innocent people in the World Trade Center in the hopes of receiving paradise after death was just plain crazy. It’s a crazy belief to own. When the author reminded the catholic O’Reilly it was no more implausible than a cracker turning into the body of a man, O’Reilly protested that at least the latter did no one harm. It was pointed out by the author that this was just due to the behavioural outcomes, but, alas, O’Reilly either didn’t seem to understand this point or he decided he didn’t want his own beliefs challenged.

This is interesting because here we can say the young men truly believed because they acted upon it.  After all, we also base the strength of a belief claim on how it is acted upon. I believe strongly in curing cancer. I then give money to cancer foundations. It’s then believed I mean what I say. Shouldn’t we who champion freedom of belief be impressed with such strength of conviction that those who hold it also act on it?  According to O’Reilly it was just fine to believe in transubstantiation as long as it did not have negative outcomes. I suppose this is innocent enough. But as far as interpreting the world correctly (aside from behavioural consequences) believing martyrdom gets you eternal paradise stands in the same relation to the idea that a cracker turns into a man.  As we know, the belief does not end there. We can take any notion of action out of the equation and see these two beliefs baldly in similar light. Two competing claims are set side by side. But we only make a value judgment on their truth value based on whether one is acted upon or whether one is just held within the closed bosom of private belief. However, the warm embrace of privacy does not make something true.

It’s worth noting that partaking in this cracker will itself also result in paradise. It might be as equally worthy to note that many Jews did lose their lives at many points in history simply for being accused of “host desecration.” The belief was so strongly believed that action was taken in defense of it. The belief was so strongly held that it inspired action in the form of anyone defaming the belief would be set on fire in the town square. The only reason this does not happen anymore is not because we have looked closer in to the reliability of the belief but rather we have tempered our actions by not taking it so seriously. O’Reilly’s comments are a good example of this very thing.

We now live in a world where we can mostly afford to have beliefs without worrying about consequences simply because we do not take them as seriously. This includes believing a witch put the evil eye on you or that certain stars are aligned in a way that will prove you will find your true love. As long as the downtrodden hobo on the corner only claims it and nothing else, we smile politely that he believes aliens are sending transmissions through his hair follicles. We walk away from him. These are in fact benign. Of course, we also don’t clean up our tramp and invite him to Thanksgiving so he can pontificate further on these pesky aliens. This appears to be freedom belief in a sense, I suppose. It is certainly not respect for them.  But imagine the first time a man refuses cancer treatment because he claims Saturn is not in retrograde with Neptune. His behavior has put his belief, the very same belief he might have had before his decision, in to new light. But the belief has not changed. What would have changed is his behavior which, in principle anyway, should only serve to strengthen an outsider’s notion that he really believes it. But we only question the sanity of his action. We leave the belief alone.

As an example of how we can partition our views on belief and whether they have real world consequences or not, ponder a silly scenario:

Imagine you are at a party, a festive get together where everyone is having a good time. You are a little self-conscious as you don’t know many people but you are willing to mingle and hope to make friends. You walk in to a room of nice people chatting and you see an empty chair so you decide to take it and hope to instill yourself into the conversation. Before you can sit down you are politely told that the lone empty chair is actually occupied by somebody’s invisible friend, Jimmy. Of course, this might sound crazy but for the fact that everyone in the room seems to agree with this so you acquiesce. You may take part in the illusion as you are there to make friends.  Besides, you are slightly embarrassed, but not put out completely, by standing next to an empty chair presumably taken up by an invisible entity. No skin off your nose.

But imagine the same scenario if you ran into the room with your injured child who needed a seat right away. If you were told even politely that the seat was taken by Jimmy, it seems a good bet your reaction would not be awkward politeness. You more than likely will have decided it is not true. You will have plopped your kid down whether Jimmy likes it or not. But here is where a certain fancy pirouette of belief is executed. It will more than likely then be mentioned that Jimmy understood the importance of giving up the seat and got up accordingly. We had an invisible entity taking up a chair and before we know it, he also knows the importance of etiquette. Invisible Jimmy's attributes have now been compounded. This is a good example of a false belief begetting another belief. One might be tempted to compare this to how lying leads to other lies. If this were the beginning of a religion it would not be too long before competing claims were made over Jimmy. More than this, it might not be long before wars are started over him. May be with time his body will turn in to something edible.

This is the cognitive dissonance of belief. One might argue that it is perfectly fine to partition our views on belief this way. However, my argument is that as long as we allow anyone to believe what they want without real world proof to back it up, we also make it difficult to criticize those beliefs that are acted upon with negative consequences (Imagine me arguing that Jimmy did not get up quick enough or that he was rude many times after this scenario). Therefore it is often argued, especially by the more liberally minded, that it is not religious beliefs that fanatics act upon. By denying this—and I will remind again, they are telling us what they believe---we get no closer to understanding real motives.

Freedom is a good thing. We want people to believe what they want to  believe. More to the point, we do not want to put constraints on it. But this only becomes true in a legal sense. We also demand some proof for reasons why they believe what they do. Freedom of belief that has no real world consequences essentially just means we do not jail people for holding stupid views.

Am I free to believe Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president?  Am I free to deny it? I am but I’m also at the mercy of not being invited back to the table of Civil War discussions. I am free to be laughed at. At the same time I am not necessarily free to believe it. I am actually a slave to historical documentation. I am bound by proof. I am shackled to truths in the world.

Much importance has been put on the idea of a person’s subjective views. Everyone, we think, can have their own private beliefs. We in America live in a country where we rightly do not want to put Orwellian limits on what a person believes. However, we must remember that, like a good deal of the aspects of freedom, this comes with responsibilities. The conundrum of the responsibility of the freedom of belief is that we are mostly responsible in realizing we don’t really have it. There is a world out there that works a certain way whether we agree with it or not. If your belief does not take this into consideration you are in danger of being very wrong. We can trace this back to an evolutionary standpoint. Believe that you can keep walking beyond the cliff side you find yourself at and you will find reality elicit a rude awakening upon you. No matter your views on gravity, it will have put real world constraints on you.

The danger of a skewed freedom of belief is when we allow everyone to have their own view at the expense of objective proof. Though many of these may be benign they still, by my view, can give cover to those that are much more dangerous.  The important thing to do is a hard one and one that goes against each individual will. That is the desire to believe things based on wishful thinking rather than the real. Many might see this as a kind of fatalism but it does not mean we cannot change things. On the contrary, seeing and believing things rightly should give us clarity and, therefore, allow us more power to change things for the better. We can still make a difference in the world. This is not restricting.  This can set us free.

The Dead Sea

Mudcaked,  head to toe, covered and cracked,
Beneath the level of seas with less salty brine,
We cover skin and suits from out of muddy vats
While beyond the saltiest one we spy

The lilac hills of Moab. And here, where
The sun shines far and hard but never close,
I hear a voice or two from Lancashire;
Same yet paler people than our eastern hosts. 

Pale legs as white as the nucleus of the sun,
Orthodox Jews, father, mother, little girl,
Whose strange northern voices, stand among
Us on this small shore, the other side of the world. 
.

And this sea, dead, alive only in a glazed shine.
Where nary a boat is ever detected,
Nor no fish below on which to dine,
Stirs only with clouds so vaguely reflected. 

The pasty-thighed wife is in her one piece 
Costume. Above this, her wide brimmed hat
Covers a modest head.  God’s law is appeased.
Among the salt and shine all is fine except that

Her mud stained costume does not do the same.
For in her nether region semitic, wiry, thin
Curls, a grove amid the desert, entwine a leg untamed 
Like the asp round the tree that sent the world to sin.

A small brown bushel of her pubic hair
Peek-a-boos from without and I feign to ask
If her god, unlike me, will overlook down there.
But no answer will come from beyond the vast

Wide waste of time. My thoughts are mere
Reflections like the glass of the salty sea
Whose mirrored surface gleams bright and as clear,
While under the deep is deeper uncertainty.

My uncovered dome resists the heat of
The sun. I am now buoyed by water as I cast
Off desert mud as it falls in brown clumps.
My feet pierce the surface like pale sails on masts.

The tear of one sail is the sharp cut between toes,
The result of new sandals, now forgotten pain.
But the salt-sting leaves me in the throes
of chemistry. Here is remembrance again.

There the purple hills speak to another space

Where the King of Moab, the old coot,
Has neither the time nor will to waste
On frail floating enemies with one wounded foot.

Modern Sisyphus

Sid's fuss was he walked and plodded and walked

At a forty-five degree

Angle (if, in geometrical talk,

you were inclined). His knees heaved heavily    

Like two brains weary of the skin they’re in

And, needing much required rest,    

Aspired to be on level ground again.

Both bone and mind worked hard to do their best.

The central source, the one inside his skull,

Like the popliteal joints, also

Throbbed as he pushed thoughts up a cerebral hill.

Ideas on high and laboured, he feared, roll

Right back down again. So life of mind he deemed

An everlasting upward push                                       

Where thought was naught for naught and all seemed

Worthless. Interruption was a singing thrush

In a garden. Lush vegetation grew in spurts.

Between leaves a porcelain god

Sat smiling. A spinning pinwheel (to scare off birds?)

Pierced the ground of this strange slope of sod.

The bloated god in the garden was not winking.

Here the illusion felt firm.

As the slippery slow sun began sinking,

The wheel simply danced shadows on his face as it turned.

This sight caused a rolling but without the care

Though the thought failed to waiver.

His mind let it roll and fall everywhere

And Sid self-promised, on a slant, to love the labour.

Amor et Mulsum

I raise a wine combed glass to a dangerous height

And she takes a resolute but careless bite

Of her bread with brie and drip-laced honey.

I hold it heaven-high so as to toast the sight

Of her black nightshade eyes and the sunny

Wave of each yellow tress and her funny

Ways that belie indifference and doubt

In a smile that first did sit me down and won me.

The swirling wine cleaves to sides and dances about,

Around the inside of the glass and some without.

It heaves with a swing to the rim of the tip

And drips much like the same sweet honey from out

Of coy, supercilious and smirking lips.

I resign to take yet another small sip.

Instead hand and glass like a hammer roars down

Once more, and again, and again, in vertical rips

That fall, explode on, a crash of a crown.

There red wine blood and sweet amber all round

Mingles and merges.  The deed did send

(At last) her lips toward mine. A lifeless head abounds

In a sweet and dry brine. I did kill her then.

No need to sit and wonder could I do it again.

For the very act, seemingly, dared to decree

That with strange mix of sweet and sour, I did bend

Her will toward mine. As far as I might care to see,

I procured that honey from a miserly bee.

On passion's whim, either wrong or right,

I doused with wine the sweet sting that stung me.

The Persistence of Illusions

Does every moment in time already exist?

Can an eager eye spy all of space

Before us as the distant void it is?

I walk with illusory sight at a pace  

Through a world I think is yet to be.

This same eye in succession blinks

And the world unfolds itself fragmentarily.

With blinking rapidity the eye it thinks

Time and space are bits of demarcated frames

Like reels in mechanical rewinding,

Not seeing each and every moment as the same,

One swell, a universal expanding.

I am in the world like my sight is in

My eye.  And it is the other “I” that inclines

To conceive himself the creator within,
The prime mover that birth the signs

And wonders and every thought that

Arises. There is in turn felt a “me” within

Spied by an inner eye, a searcher enrapt,

Not creator, but hunter for a ‘him.”

Thinker and thought, time and space are same.
And like the light upon the water that gleans,

So dance many lively charges atop the brain,

Sparking persistence of things that seemingly seem.

The Chinese Gardener

Just another early morning walk past

Suburban yawning houses

       No different than the morning last.

   Each house with sleepy pride announces

At their feet sit pretty Jersey gardens.

     And the mindless clod trods through

One with a thousand beg your pardons.

       With western plod he traipses into

Some eastern loves and old enchantments

        With crowns of cabbage tops and rows

Of reddish roses. A dream, he thinks,

   That's ushered in by oriental blows

    Of wind which brushes leaves and slips

Over ringlet stalks like wedding bands

         Over blushing, rosy finger tips.

     Amid the cultivated patch stands

      The wordless cultivator. Child sized,

    She is sleek in black to the teeth.

  A conical hat, bamboo-leaved and wide,

Shades the gaze of exotic eyes underneath

That fail to look or heed his remorse.

    She stoops to dig with ungrowing glee.

  And a stab of the earth with delicate force

          Sows this garden of deeper mystery.

His mind digs with a thousand if's and so’s

    As the morning continues a silent call.

    She digs, aloof, heedless, with a garden hoe.

 Death plants seeds at less than five feet tall.

      A sedge wide hat that's fixed to a point

Where seed-love growth anticipates birth.       

         Yet rich brown soil is balm to anoint

     The many beds of subterraneal earth.

Morning on Masada

On my visit to Israel I made a pilgrimage to Masada. Not quite Chaucer-like, it was on a bus through the desert but with no less a diverse group of folks from round the world. We were led intelligently by a wonderful little sage, our guide, Uri, who tirelessly kept our curiosity at the ready with his wonderful explanations of practically every crevice in every mountainside as the bus roared through the Judean Desert. And there is plenty of desert. It may seem trite to say also plenty of history. It stretches as long as the rocky, arid landscape. How lucky are we that sages of days of yore hid their papaya manuscripts within the cavities of the very mountains we spied from our bus window? I think, plenty. Thank goodness for all these scribes. I thought of this whilst on the journey toward our ultimate destination, a place alive thanks to the remembrance of history: Masada. For those possibly familiar with the name—and may be even the film of the same name---but not so much a geographical grasp, Masada is a large, mountain plateau in the eastern part of the country standing at the lip of the Judean Desert. It is the very desert we traveled. It is also along the Dead Sea, just a stones throw away. And stones do abound. If you’ve ever wondered why, in that ‘good’ book, stones are often a prescriptive tool for sponsored assassination, go to the desert. Stones are aplenty.

Our destination, our large “stone,” Masada, reaches skyward about 1300 feet above the Dead Sea where the peak of the mountain does in fact plateau flat like a mesa. It’s a very large, stony tabletop. Mercifully, tourists like us could be lifted to the top mechanically thereby saving the body from an excruciating hike up the side of the mountain on foot which, too, can be done. One can hike either side of the mountain. On my visit one of my fellow pilgrims, the young strapping lad of the group, forewent the cable car and bravely hiked the side. When eventually reunited with the rest of us at the top his face bore such a deep, anguished red as to look to my eyes like a soft black.  His own eyes were like slightly lit pieces of coal. I don’t know if I ever saw in those embers such exhaustion. At least, I think so.  This, too, is hazy as the sun altered my vision and brain.  Everything seemed a hot, white electric buzz. Yes. There is no hiding from it. Make this pilgrimage in the summer in any form and you are doing it under a hot white sun that is equally blistering and unforgiving. Masada, it has been pointed out as a prescriptive more than once, should only really feasibly be done in the morning. Any later would be excruciating. This point will make the history all the more incomprehensible.

Historically, and put rather too simply, Masada was to be the final destination for contumacious Israelites on the run. Rather than fleeing this same seeming unceasing sun they moved closer to it in order to escape the equally sweltering oppression of Roman persecution and rule. And it was this large, flat, dusty expanse which became both settlement and fortification for rebellious Israelites demanding emancipation from on high. The Romans of course, having none of this, lay siege spending their time at the foot of the mountain devising ways to penetrate the mountain, or at least hoping to wait them out. I recall Uri explaining how a bridge was built by the Romans through the use of those Israelite slaves with nary the luck to have escaped. This bit of engineering was implemented in hopes of, as it were, bridging the gap between them, the Romans, and their target. That target, of course, being the new inhabitants of the top of that plateau. It is a story that emanates and still rings loudly. If you are there walking the terrain it rings louder still.

Anyone at the top of this plateau today worries about nothing less than staying hydrated or keeping dust from a camera lens. He also does not have Centurions waiting to shackle at the bottom of the rock.  We are free to roam what was once the existence of a small society. As you do mingle in and out of each room or crevice, you get the feeling of a kind of ‘tough comfort’ domesticity. The place, naturally, is only a pale, wind driven ghost of itself, but with enough imagination one can still place hewn brick and mortar, and colour in to it. It may be much like knowing the Parthenon only as we can know it today, as a skeletal but beautiful ruin. However, when a clever graphics expert ably recreates it in all its former glory, we then see the vivid impact of the original and so different than the ruin we know and love.

There are, for example, the baths, now bereft of any water, with the small columns still rigidly rising out of the dusty bottom. These columns presumably would hold tiles where the bathers could sit above the steam coming from the water below. With the tiles since gone, the columns are exposed. They still hold their rounded features with a flat top though time has reduced these tops to unequal sizes resembling often used erasers at the end of pencils. There are the small dusty rooms, proof of domesticity, some of which still carry proof of breathtaking design. In a few you will find the beautiful and complicated remnants of a mosaic pattern in the floor and walls. It is enough to make one smile to think that among all the practicality that comes with desperation, these inhabitants still found the need to decorate for the sake of aesthetics. One must constantly pass through small arch top passage ways to get to these enclosed rooms which, in my own emotional appeal, added an almost ‘sacred’ element to every entrance and exit.

Outside in the open air, one finds walls and mazes that lead to steps and brings one to all different aspects and levels of the plateau.  It was out here that Uri, beads of sweat dotting his sweet bald pate, explained in proud, almost nationalistic explanations, how the Israeli’s bravely and single-mindedly defied the Romans. They not only demanded freedom, we now know they would rather have not lived than to be bound by others than themselves. Uri described all this in is more than charming Israeli accent as we all stood just over a slightly vaster than usual smooth decline that led to a lower level of the mountain.  It was this scene that turned Uri’s description of the bravery and single-mindedness of defying the Romans to the more practical need of collecting water. He described how they would make the small trek down this particular decline of the mountain in order to collect the so very necessary rain water caught within one of the very ingenious aqueducts. Upon describing this, I could not help but notice that the trek down the mountain toward the all-important water system brought one dangerously close to where a portion of the Roman army purported to have staked them out. This captured my curiosity. I asked in the simplest way possible of Uri, who exactly owned the arduous task of fetching and bringing this water to the rest of the community? With not a hint of irony Uri turned to me and in that same accent that transfixed me to every syllable, and said so very matter of factly, “Their slaves.”

Is 73 A.D. just too far in the distant past to create a causal argument they did good with their sacrifice? Can we say it made a palpable difference today? Because of this distance, I believe, it is too hard to tell. I hope this does not make me sound nihilistic in my approach toward doing anything in hopes of affecting the future. Could what I do today affect circumstances fifty years from now? I think it’s safe to say it is a possibility. But, what of 5,000 years from now? The prospects become as vague and hazy as the heated Judean dessert. But, they did make history. Of course they did as we still talk about them today. And this is an extension of learning. We are learning through history.  We’re still visiting their chalky and arenose ghost town at the top of a mountain. What is left is a weather worn former community and ghosts of history.

Uri’s explanation about slaves fetching the water reminded me that even a King resided on that mountain. It also reminded me of philosopher Walter Benjamin’s notion that what drives revolt and the need for progress is not “dreams of liberated grandchildren” but rather “memories of enslaved ancestors.” It might be important to remember even this enslavement was by degrees. The great equalizer is that Israeli king and Israeli servant alike, their Roman oppressors, and the leader of that army, are now mere spectres. They do not walk the rocky grounds and earthy rooms of Masada. No. They just flitter in our imagination as we attempt to cover them in bones and sinew, and imagine the workings of iron age brains, as we try to place them in that setting of rocky ground and earthy rooms, the same ones that, no matter how weathered with time and wind, outlasted them. But, not in our minds.

Geography of Love

Allow me please to get lost in your hair. 
I promise you won’t even know I am there 

Lest you think you might like to play coy, 
Then I’ll swing from a strand like a casual toy. 

If you can, don’t let me get lost in your eyes. 
Or I’ll lock myself in while the land around lies. 

Held captive, I might not get where I want 
And the lay of the land will tease at and taunt. 

For I must scale in time those highest of peaks 
Where panting breaths sound a yodeling speech. 

From there I’ll come down the mountains with care 
Where the stretches of heath lay boundless and bare. 

I’ll stay for a while on the flattened expanse 
Where softer breaths swirl in much plainer dance. 

God! Give me consent to your yawning thighs 
Where I’ll open that cave with lurid-like sighs. 

Then let me please go where no one does pass. 
With tongue, like a blade, I’ll mow down the grass. 

The permission you give to enter your lair 
Is heavenly sent and utterly fair. 

Some say this is like a descension to hell. 
The riddle though is if I walked or I fell. 

Yet if this is the way, I haven’t been told 
And all I can say is I’ve mapped my own road. 

Origen's Vision

Last night I dreamt all the world

Was put aright in a

Glorious restoration like

Oregin’s famous vision.

Even Mephistopheles and

His minions were invited back.

Creatures, no longer great,

No longer small, convened in a

Consortium of a

Celebrated congregation,

A magnificent mass

Of all that was and what

Came to be. We easily loosed

The tangled tree of

Knowledge and guiltlessly ate from

The apple where the seed

Took root in each and multiplied

In a cultivated

Consortium of sanctified

Truth and goodness. We saw

Ourselves in each and each

In ourselves. Old earthly habits

We shed and in that place

New plumes of purer kindness and

Clearer understanding

Bloomed. We saw cause and effect as

Mother and child while we

Became birther and birthed to our

Own living, pregnant thoughts.

Eyes in infinite number beamed

Forth in enveloping

Wonder till we pierced the wall of

The universe and saw

Without shock what lay on the other

Side. All this was the final

Restitution; mysteries

Gift. We all stood on heavenly

Clouds. Yet I was distracted.

Among histories horde I stood.

I stood shoulders with him;

The devil himself. In a kind

Of a mechanical

Mastication he chewed his gum.

He chomped, he champed, he chawed.

A  distraction dirge of din. His

Jaw of corruption pierced

My vine. I seethed in silent anger.

I wanted to throttle him.

Hide Under My Mustache, Poor Horse: Nietzsche in Turin

'Hide under my mustache, poor horse!

Only I comprehend the state we're in!

Insensitivity of the world runs a course

And overtakes us here on this street of Turin!' 

And so this superman, with looping, aching arms,
Wrapped the nag’s neck in sympathetic choke.
Though equine embrace made no less calm,
Clasped hands, trembling tight, made a loving yoke

That laboured to shield the beast from his flog of dread.
Man and beast, there, held tight to no common vanity.
The Flogger of the man, in his lost mind, stayed dead.
Nature, in blind ambition, straight stripped his sanity.

So, like the clasp come undone from slippery skin
And takes leave of a wrist, snaking around,
Did the man let loose his fingered grasp and, in
Tragic heap, fell straight to the ground.

That good little lamb that frolics happily upon
The globe round top of the green grass lea
In stainless splendour, is in turn the same one
Who, with innocent eye, cannot spy the company

He keeps. Behind that eye the subtle worm
In insidious routes but no true endeavour,
Bores through the skull in parasitic turns.
And the innocent eye is shut forever.

We climb the hill, we crave to be on high.
But the taut tight rope over the abyss frays
And in eternal echoes we hear the sighs.
Angel arms slip from our necks and we fall away.

The Price for this is Right:It's Free

If you’ve never heard of Jaron Lanier, I would highly recommend a contemplative read.  He has some very interesting takes on the internet generally and social sites in particular.  We are all users of the internet generally and it should be as clear as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie peering at you in all their glossiness from a supermarket checkout line, we are all users of social sites particularly.

As it stands right now, anyone who is the least bit creative in the 21st century is standing on a knife edge, a sharp and decisive conundrum: How to make money?  I will not bombard with trite clichés like, ‘money makes the world go round,’ but let’s face a reality, it does in fact at least keep societies gears turning.  This, for me, is a bit of an irony.  For many years now I eschewed the very idea of material gain as so much wasted fuel and a real drain on integrity.  I say this especially as an artist.  But for the love of Vishnu, I wonder is it possible to make a little bit of the green stuff?  My worry now, however, much like Lanier’s, is how do we expect anyone to even eke out a living in this our gadget filled, electronic age?  As another writer has said, “the internet is both midwife and executioner.”  It has sprung a plethora of a well-spring of creativity but everyone expects to bathe for free.   The internet can give new birth to a creative idea but will die upon its arrival as a ‘product.’   I am just as guilty of this.  

Indulge me in a short story.

The other day I found that a favourite writer of mine had decided to sell an e-book.  He dealt with the inevitable minor controversy that it was not an e-book at all but in fact just an essay.  The price should have been an indication.  This 9,000 word small body of work cost a mere $1.99 on Amazon.  I like him, I like his ideas, and I liked the price, so I bought it (I also downloaded the necessary Kindle for PC’s.   For free, I hope!).  I figured at that price it was essentially the same as a potentially bad cup of coffee so I justified it rather handily.  I downloaded this writer’s essay and read it in a sitting.  It was interesting and thought-provoking.  Some of it I whole heartedly agreed with and much of it I did not.  The problem was that as I found myself wrestling with those ideas I disagreed with in my head, I found that much like an uninvited party guest, the thought that maybe I wasted my money kept popping in like a messy drunk.  But, why did I think this way?  

When I delved deeper I realized I was becoming accustomed to getting things for free.  I was ashamed.  I realized I could have waited until it made the rounds certainly as time wore down and his sales for it waned.  Yet I remembered I had skillfully talked myself into it by the paltry price of the download.  Is it wrong for this writer, a great thinker actually, to give himself away for nothing?  He does this already with a blog.  He has a right to make money, I believe.  If anything, I do hope this illustrates how at least publishing is shifting beneath our feet.  The man (me) who used to decry the need to make money is now fretting over how some businesses like publishers might make a profit!  Such is the strange dichotomies of the internet.

The other frightening thing is how it promotes mediocrity.  Much like an ‘American Idol’ kind of hyper-democracy pushing the banal, the internet can do the same in more convoluted ways.  I have seen great writers (and I mean very talented people) write for a magazine and placed on these very prominent magazines websites only to be buried within everything else in that magazine.  These writers can be hard to find.  But the minute a less than talented writer’s work finds its way as a link on a prominent blog, he makes it around the world as quick as sound travels.  This, as someone put it, may have a lot to do with “the ratio of signals to noise.”  It does, however, make me feel better as when I place a poem or some such piece of work on here.   

If someone simultaneously claims in a ‘comment’ they saw Britney Spears pumping gas, they get a thousand ‘likes’.  If it is a thousand, it is exactly one thousand more than I receive. Imagine if either of these had to be a money maker.  I would be broke.  A celebrity "sighter" would not.  Am I bitter?  No.  Am I lying?  Yes.

It just now seems that America has become a weird place. With an unemployment rate of over 9%, its inhabitants appear to be content to place things—sometimes someone else’s stuff—on social network sites in hopes of getting a “thumbs up.”  We want to have sensitive egos stroked over creating a society where everyone can share in a marketable way that (hopefully) everyone can flourish.  

Whether we like it or not, we still need cash to buy things.  You know this already.  I mean in the sense that Adam Smith explained it as a market that was circular.   I guess I have to do my part by not expecting everyone within the frame of this little unblinking window that now peers in front of me is for free.   Yet somehow, and for some clear reason I still fail to bring into view, I continue to place things on Facebook for free in a quixotic attempt at a little love.  Sad.