Thursday, November 19, 2015

Four Thousand Years Later: Same Flowers, Same Bees



  • I want to talk about work. I can't.
  • I sorta wanna talk about Ted Cruz challenging Barack Obama to a fist fight, how it's motherfucking brilliant in Cruz's play to his base, and I need fight off my ancient urges to mock Ted Cruz's base of morons (which I'm able to do by thinking of Hillary Clinton and her most ardent moron supporters), so I won't.
  • I don't want to talk about motherfucking Hillary Clinton, who, after waiting for days for her focus group handlers to give her the most politically advantageous thing to say about right-wing demagoguery and cowardice on Syrian refugees, finally said something she thought most politically advantageous about it. But I did.
  • I want to talk about my utter surrender to the inevitability of rule by assholes, but I do that daily.
  • Seeso, here we have people who are into decapitation and burning people alive or opening fire at a restaurant as against people who are attempting to put the whole world under surveillance, assassinate you with a drone strike, and arrange systematically the world economy into a hierarchy with themselves at the top
  • I need to talk about why if I've surrendered to the inevitability of rule by assholes I still need to daily bark about it, so I won't. Today. Though I just did.
  • I want to talk about what I can't even mention.
  • I want to talk about the point of building an audience - thank you for reading, btw, I don't say it often enough - to tell them not only what I won't write about but to not tell them what I won't write about.
  • I really want to bleggalgaze - as in, what the fuck am I trying to do here beyond screaming LOOK AT ME! AND TELL ME I'M BRILLIANT! - so I won't. Here. Now. Though I just did.
  • I want to talk about the motives animating my daydreams of shutting the fuck up, but                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   and how it's a fucking trope for everything in my life, though I just did.
  • Though all that I want to write about and can't, don't, and won't, diminishes what I will write about.
  • Another heartbreakingly beautiful Tom Clark post on the clusterfuck,
  • The heresy of technological choice.
  • Perspective.
  • This week in water.
  • Five G.C. Waldrep poems, including one from Snow Hill MD (which is not in Garrett County but that shithouse of an Eastern Shore). 
  • Between two rivers.
  • O! Olive now named O!ive. I want to write about O!ive, but I'll just post the occasional photo.
  • Reminder:






BEES OF ELEUSIS

Franz Wright

The ingredients gathered, a few small red tufts of the dream spoor per sheaf of Demeter’s blonde wheat, reaped in mourning, in silence, ground up with the pollen and mixed into white wine and honey. These stored forms of light taken under the ground. Taken by mouth. First those who by birth hold in secret the word; then placed on the tongues of the new ones, into whose ears it is meant to be whispered. Word murdered, forgotten so long ago, placed as a kiss on the lips of the soon-to-be-no-longer breathing who mean to enter death with open eyes, with mouths saying Death, what death? We have no word for it in our country where the bride of a brighter oblivion reigns. Not the purple-haired god but the child queen, the raped girl, come back from the dead hand in hand with the child she conceived there, returned in a resurrected virginity, wind through green wheat. Present-day site of a minor refinery in Christ. Although by the tenth generation already the children of light (“in their dark garments”) had trampled and smashed and generally raped the two thousand years of this precinct and its holy meal, intolerable mirror. Men who’d designed and bowed down to a law derived from the sayings of one who appeared here to say that the law is abolished, it is too late, all that is over with. Men who bungled their way through the next eighteen centuries before finally descending into the earth themselves, and what they found there they used, and we thank you for destroying the destroyers of the world. And here at the end this is as good as any other entrance to the underplace, journey of the fallen leaf back to the branch, to the bees of Eleusis among olive blossoms, untroubled among crimson wildflowers. Four thousand years later: same flowers, same bees.




3 comments:

  1. You're BRILLIANT! There. Said it. Yelled it, even. Happy? Didn't think so. What next?

    And, as ever, mucho thanks for the link!! I keep doing it for some reason. More than 2 years now. Guess I think it might be important to somebody.

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  2. I enjoy reading and seeing (I like to think of it was 'Witnessing') what you do. And, it is tough to Do It from the Place Of Witless Employ™.

    In 1979, in another job life, I once called Lucien Conien at DEA (look him up; take a barf bag with you), and asked: What, about 800 people in the CIA's Operations directorate got pink-slipped, and they all came to Operations at DEA? (Lou had spent his entire adult life in the intelligence game. "Hey, look; these guys have to eat," he replied.)

    In that same vein - Think about all the subcontractors who developed those nifty applications Mr Snowden mentions -- to Hoover up (man, the irony in that phrase), sift and manipulate large amounts of data? Well those Guys have to eat, too -- and they found there are other customers for those same tools in the, uh, business environment.

    For, you know, security. Just not yours. Second Amendment? Ha ha; no.

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  3. Thanks, both of you, for the Kind.

    ReplyDelete