Saturday, July 23, 2011

imagine the very first marriage a girl and boy trembling with some inchoate need for ceremony a desire for witness

I caught myself writing like I promised myself I wouldn't, like I don't want to and probably can't anymore. There's lots of provocative thoughts in the links and their comments below. I'm still synthesizing them; thank you sincerely for making me think, but holyfuck, looking in tablet I'm reminded it's best to sometimes do it off-blog. Not that I'll ever find answers there, just inchoate incoherence always.

But my daughter will be twenty-seven in 2020. Tell me, should we assume nine more years of Corporate's serbianizing of America? Tell me, what are Corporate's real issues and what idiot-like-me chum am I fed in the run-up to that election? Is everything the same, just worse, progressed inexorably along the teleological trajectory you foresee today? Resistance? Who to what and how?

She'll be thirty-nine in 2032. Tell me.















THE FIRST MARRIAGE

Peter Meinke

imagine the very first marriage a girl
and boy trembling with some inchoate
need for ceremony a desire for witness:
inventing formality like a wheel or a hoe

in a lost language in a clearing too far from here
a prophet or a prophetess intoned to the lovers
who knelt with their hearts cresting
like the unnamed ocean thinking This is true

thinking they will never be alone again
though planets slip their tracks and fish
desert the sea repeating those magic sounds
meaning I do on this stone below
this tree before these friends yes in body
and word my darkdream my sunsong yes I do I do



12 comments:

  1. If you thought the last election was The Most Important Election Of Your Lifetime, imagine how importantly important the importance of being important will be in 2032. Of course, NATO might be bombing us by then to save Canada.

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  2. Perhaps another question is who will Corporate scapegoat on its way to turning cultural disagreements into reasons to increase police budgets?

    How does that impact your daughter (or my son, who will 24 that same year)?

    Their choices may be too simple: sign on to the apparatus, or be eaten by it.

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  3. Adding - and I'm stealing from what I anticipate the follow-up to this post - we are doing all we can to insure Planet's success within Corporate: it's the agreement I made when I married Earthgirl, one I'm honoring now.

    She's going to an elite credentialing factory. She has an amazing in at Corporate via blood (and blood, but not me, not for noble reasons, have used it) if she wants to use it. (Oh, the things I *don't* write about here.) She's kind and smart and sweet now. I like to think she'll be kind and sweet (I know she'll still be smart) in 2020, in or out of Corporate.

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  4. oh hell, that bit on Elizabeth Warren... they continue to try to paint her as a heroic protector of consumers.

    consumers of reinsurance, maybe! or consumers of corporations!

    the sky is yellow and the sun is blue!

    *******

    were I a parent I'd be encouraging my child to learn self-sufficiency before anything else, and I mean anything else. self-sufficiency is liberating as a perspective, it leaves one less prone to freaking out at a collapsing economy. I'd also encourage my child to not see "job" or "career" as central in any way other than finding some fulfillment, existentially, from whatever line of work the child chooses. existential fulfillment, personal wholeness... not big money or prestige, which is where most collegiate kids aim, which is where I was taught to aim and where I did aim.

    careerists seem the most stressed out by the present collapse, they're either trying desperately to build a bigger portfolio/nest egg/whatever, or freaking out about that building. seems to me counterproductive and very contrary to the way things are flowing right now.

    if I loved peas, but peas suddenly disappeared from the earth, I'd learn to love something else edible rather than complaining and freaking about the disappearance of peas.

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  5. BDR,

    My oldest wants to be a physician. It's as noble a calling as I can imagine.

    There's no way to get him to that goal without encouraging and supporting him in his efforts to excel in public schools I rather routinely despise, because we're never going to have the money to buy him access.

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  6. I love your questions! I'm with Randal. Have you ever seriously considered the Pentagon's most fundamental premise? What do we actually need a 50-years-war plan for? What foreign enemy could possibly arise to meet the combined force of the U.S. army, navy, marines, air force and coast guard? And where is the bestest mostest richest place with the most docile dumbed-down easily distracted authority worshiping population to rape and plunder? Your excellent questions are being mind-expandingly addressed here: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/

    Bookmark, read (even without comprehension at first) and most of all KEEP THINKING. We'll all get there together.

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  7. Jack --

    There is some chance that as collapse furthers, grey market educational opportunities will arise and some return to the old style of "professional" learning -- apprenticeship -- will be available.

    I wouldn't plan a life around that "some chance," but at the same time, I would not be surprised to see it happen. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who finds the present medical model unsustainable post-crisis, and I'm pretty sure that some of the people who agree with me have medical doctor training and might be willing to help a younger person learn medicine. Thinking of things only in the present American model is constraining; our medical model is overtechnological and highly artificial and much too dependent on expensive "tests" which often are nothing more than fee generators. I have talked to MDs who agree with me on this. I'm not convinced the present model will outlast the collapse.

    I'd be happy to help a young person learn The Law in an informal setting... ABA be damned!

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  8. @Frances Madeson That enemy is the combined force of the Christers, the Birchers, and the Randians.

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  9. Take a walk in the woods and think about Thoreau, would you? Or whatever the fuck it is you think about in those increasingly infrequent moments when you (who are worthy) aren't thinking about the fucking apocalypse that you can't fucking control but can't fucking stop yourself from yammering about predictively and unchangingly.

    And there's medication for that last part, you know. I give it to Bam-Bam every fucking day.

    Love.

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  10. Would I?

    Mithridatism, a word I was serendipitously reminded of this past week, tomorrow, maybe.

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  11. Yeah, that's a good word. Meanwhile, do something really radical--invite your auto mechanic, plumber, housemaid, whomever to dinner. Build the actual bonds and see how fast those taxonomies of Christers, Birchers and Randians fall away. They don't hold up, unless we prop them us with our own prejudices. And there's nothing to be afraid of from having a conversation and a meal to find that out for yourself.

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  12. Worrying Randians is like worrying Lilliputians.

    The guys making policy and benefiting from it don't care what ideology middle management uses to justify its participation in the machinery of control.

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