The Fire which can never be put out;
the water which can never be cleaned…
What would it cost to have a revolving, traveling,
THEATER OF THE NEW go around and around
the Wallowas and show this film, and others like it,
(ARID LANDS, IF YOU LOVE THIS PLANET), at
every Library, every School, in every Grange, around
from Hanford, around the Imnaha and the Snake,
over McCall to Twin Falls, down the Salmon and
Lewiston and back down the great Columbia? And
do so, over and over again, until people finally,
unequivocally, say “no?” Say “no” to Plutonium,
the element of Hell. It took but 5 kilograms for
Oppenheimer’s bomb to level NAGASAKI.
The reactor with the graphite core Enrico Fermi
designed is still there. Yet it takes but one microgram
– 1,000,000 of a gram, free in the atmosphere
and entering the lungs — to kill a human being.
Call this science? “I am become death, the
destroyer of worlds.” This is the legacy which
surrounds the magnificent heart-center jewel
of the Wallowas, “Great Land of Winding Waters,’
threatened now, on all its sides.
How confused the ways
we wander once truth is lost,
How unnecessary the wars,
how meaningless, the waste.
We shape the world and the world shapes us.
I shudder in fear at this inversion of meaning,
of culture, when we no longer serve anything
outside of ourselves, but use all that we touch
to serve ourselves instead. The Muse looks down
on this abuse of talent, where the next great
performance becomes merely the next opportunity
for self-promotion. That is why the sound of even
the greatest violin cracks before getting off the
stage, playing merely to ourselves, alone, in halls
surrounded by mirrors, always without echo,
without meaning. So we mine the great aquifers
of our collective cultural past, that is:—until
the sparkling streams of youth go dry.
THE CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE “How does Time
measure the Divine,” asked the Sun.
And the Moon said, “In rounds of 4,
circling around 3’s.”
We shape the world and the world shapes us.
Too small and too big at the same time?
How is it possible?
Too small cannot reach the largest relevant
whole; too big crushes the smallest.
See the noble Ponderosa. Big Enough to
have a representative voice in the forest;
Small enough to self-create the ground
of its primary needs.
TWEET NO. 1650
#FB is to the Web what Devil’s rope is to
the open Prairie: Pronghorns run straight
into the same sharp wire that keeps
cattle fat & happy.
We shape the world and the world shapes us.
Poetry giveth, and Poetry taketh away.
The Muse will no have more of this “hero
with a gun,” the hero as killer, will have no
more of Aristotle’s now empty sounding
assertion that ethical excellence and courage
can only be demonstrated on the battlefield.
No. The hero has become the one rarely seen,
sitting alone next to a pond in New England,
meditating on the ending of the slavery of
the Mind, of Nature, of one’s fellow Man. Or
one who walks in protest to make salt at the
sea in nothing but a loincloth and sandals, and
brings an entire Empire to its knees. Or the one
who transcends the racial violence of an Alabama
to be the voice of conscience for the whole world
that ends the brutal genocide of the American
Conflict in Vietnam. I say to you: that is the new
spirit of Poetry, of the new hero, of and for
our time.
AGAINST THE MTV-IZATION OF SOUND
The eye that stares,
blinds the ear;
The ear that must have image,
blinds the mind.
[Since about 1984, when MTV and music videos
came to dominate the popular commercial music scene,
I’ve always been suspicious of the rise of the added stream
of imagesto promote “songs,” or “tracks.”
We live in visual dominant — not visually literate — times,
meaning basically that are brains are knocked around
at random by a constant flood of trash.
This is bad enough for the extremely important, and powerful
as a formative force in our perception, visual environment.
But when it comes to sound and music, it is even
worse, in the sense of having a profound yet tacet
degenerative, arbitrarily limiting effect. If the natural
drama of the physical performance of music — one
of the most intricate and subtle of ballets — is not
enough, then I would say, something is very, very
wrong. Why? Well, must could be said, but just
let me say here, that it quicly becomes a cover
for the inner weakness of both the music
and the performer. It is not the stuff of a
new creative tradition, in my view, but just more
corporate corruption of culture.]
#StrangeLoops Religion now not only doesn’t
help us lead a religious life—one free of conflict,
in resonance w/ the divine; it prevents it.
We shape the world and the world shapes us.
Put good people in bad systems, and the
people become bad. Bad systems can’t and
don’t change themselves. Only people can,
and only—and this is crucial—before
they have become bad.
SEEING NATURAL LIMIT?
In extremes is clarity. In exceptions,
the new rule. In excess, the contradiction
that portends collapse.
CONTROL & ILLUSION
The urge to control begins with the
illusion of separateness and independence;
it ends with contradiction and collapse.
The privatization of Necessity?
Once the flow of water is in corporate hands,
the damming of Freedom cannot be much
further down stream.
The privatization of Necessity?
Once the flow of information is in corporate hands,
the damming of Freedom can’t be much
further down stream.
Network resonance? Hubs, centers, nodes,
amplifying, lifting up Meaning’s signal far above
the baseline of deception, of noise, of trash.
We shape the world and the world shapes us.
Present Nation States are essentially contradictions, both
in terms of limit, and in terms of scale. They are “too small”
to be effective members of an urgently needed new system
of world governance—a kind of United States of Planet Earth—
free of the ravages of empire, and the arbitrary violence
of anarchy. At the same time, they are “too big” to allow
the natural, self-organizing intelligence of local
self-governance to really flower at the bioregional level.
Both the Information and New Energy Revolutions strain
against these walls of contradictions imposed by current
outmoded modes of governance, and do so in fascinating
and remarkable ways. On the one hand, we have the rise
of universal digital media evolving as a living web of
intelligence which can only function effectively without
borders. On the other hand, we have the complementary
decentralized nature of renewables which defies the
mega-mindset of (too) big government. What has been
said about government here applies equally well to
economies. That is because the centralization of
corporate wealth necessitates a parallel centralization
of military power in order to both generate and to hold
onto this wealth. Indeed, corporate wealth and military
power have become the two jaws of vise now screwing
down on this great revolutionary promise, as they at
the same time with a perfected Hollywood élan project
the image of promotion and protection. What this kind
of brutish-brain view of the world fails to see, however,
is that the ideas of Freedom and Democracy are not
subject to this kind of attempted control by force,
while at the same time the twin revolutions of
information and new energy in a natural, organic way,
are both based on and greatly support these very
same two essential ideas of our time, Freedom
and Democracy.
Trust is . . . the clear, pure water I drink from a mountain
spring, without doubt, without hesitation;
Trust is . . . the house built around a deeply rooted tree,
the bedstead still standing on unhewn granite, unmoved,
as the pilgrim returns;
Trust is . . . the rope between two climbers, the double
anchor of friendship we know will hold the falls that are
sure to come;
(0) To kill, either to “pull the trigger,” or to
give the order to do so, always means that
you must also kill—perhaps irreversibly—the
best and most essential part of yourself;
(1) Bullets always make more enemies than
they kill;
(2) Generals always tell you very convincingly
they need more of something—more men, more
bombs, more missiles. What they don’t tell you,
however, is what they need most:—more war;
(3) See the fundamental asymmetry: Trust, like
a great and noble fir tree, takes years, perhaps
even centuries, to grow; Yet it takes only an instant
to cut down and destroy. Torture once, and you are
for the whole of the world, always a torturer;
(4) Standing armies, because they must have a
constant, steady supply of conflict in order to
justify their existence, are the second greatest
threat to a republic. The first, or primary threat
is the paid, mercenary force. (Notice that a paid,
professional military is but a preliminary step to
the former, and will of necessity become the new
status quo in any society where a growing majority
is opposed to war as a matter of moral principle.)
This kind of elite praetorian guard is a sure and
unambiguous sign of an approaching failure of
democracy, because a mercenary force is by
definition answerable to no one, no one, that is,
except, of course, the ‘devil’s banker;’
(5) Once the ever-expanding circle of ethical
awareness reaches unity, or identity, with the
whole of the spiritual circumference of planet
Earth, then it will seem self-evident that it is
now a question of non-violence, or non-existence.
This is simply because of the destructive potential
of current weapons technologies. In other words,
as is generally already the case in Europe, the use
of force as a means of conflict resolution will not
be seen as a viable alternative. Enlightened
governments will therefore necessarily, in a way
that strongly and synergistically parallels and
complements their commitment to the Information
and New Energy revolutions, move naturally to
become an essential part of this great rising
wave of ethical awareness and responsibility.
Powerful expression in the Arts is channeled
by invisible, yet equally powerful, natural limits.
The mystery of limit is that we never see it, and
yet it guides every step of Creativity’s dance.
Who has not marvelled at the clear sound of
rushing mountain water? And yet the rocks
that bind together the movement remain silently
in the background, ever-more polished,
ever-more serene.
When you first enter the backcountry, a mountain is a mountain,
a lake a lake, and a tree a tree. But then something may happen,
perhaps after crossing a pass, or climbing an especially difficult
ridge or peak. Suddenly, a mountain is no longer a mountain, a
lake no longer a lake, and a tree no longer a tree. What we might
call home—being rooted in a world of culture which is itself rooted
and inseparable from the natural world in which it rests—is the
center where we bring the circle round. Then, the mountain is
once again a mountain, a lake once again a lake, and a tree once
again a tree. Beautiful is the circle.