Friday, May 6, 2016

An Imperfect Map Will Have to Do




  • This morning. Name that Star Trek allusion, Chekov.
  • Americans hate BOTH Trump and Hillary in record numbers! (h/t Hamster)
  • Earthgirl and I love BOTH Hamster and Landru, wonderful to have dinner with them last night.
  • RIP Sasha (the first digital friend named Sasha, not Mr Alarum). I've told this story before but... Sasha and I, back in the mid 00s, both contributed to a team blog called Best of the Blogs for a year or two then both of us quit. I wasn't going to mention it until out of curiosity I went to see what it looks like today, and I think it's gone.
  • If only here.
  • Where there's smoke.
  • Episodic trajectory. The Columbine school massacre, which took place some years before, might have carried a more uncanny message, because it spoke of daily life, of American normality, of the normality of a humanity that has lost all relation with what used to be human and that stumbles along looking for some impossible reassurance, in search of a substitute for emotions which it no longer knows.
  • The Architecture of Crisis.
  • The Dawn of the Chtulhucene.




 
  • Thrash: Trump, Hillary, the women's card.
  • Again, I think Trump has a puncher's chance because Hillary: This is true, also, because Clinton is an incompetent executive and campaigner. She damn near lost the nomination to a socialist. She did lose in ’08 when she had everything going for her. She promotes cronyism, her entire campaign is, “No, we can’t, don’t be a child, you can’t have anything good,” and her instincts are terrible. Clinton’s campaign premise will be, “I have ovaries and he’s crazy.
  • Also from the ▲ (Trump's) is a strong critique, because it is true. America’s elites are corrupt incompetents whose only skill is funneling more money to rich people. They have lost multiple wars, bungled terrorism, and completely fucked up the economy for ordinary people. Guess who's the poster child of those elites.
  • Motherfucking Democrats are motherfucking lame.
  • If Trump is McGovern, who is Hillary?
  • Motherfucking Democrats are motherfucking lame.
  • America's new theme song.
  • NEW ASHBERY INTERVIEW!
  • Today's poem h/t synthetic zero.







A MAP TO THE NEXT WORLD

Joy Harjo

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for
those who would climb through the hole in the sky.

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged
from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.

For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It
must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it
was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.

Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the
altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our
children while we sleep.

Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born
there of nuclear anger.

Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to
disappear.

We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to
them by their personal names.

Once we knew everything in this lush promise.

What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the
map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leav-
ing a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.

An imperfect map will have to do, little one.

The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s
small death as he longs to know himself in another.

There is no exit.

The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a
spiral on the road of knowledge.

You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking
from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh
deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.

They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.

And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world
there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.

You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song
she is singing.

Fresh courage glimmers from planets.

And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you
will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.

When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they
entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.

You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.

A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the
destruction.

Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our
tribal grounds.

We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was
once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.



2 comments:

  1. Wow! A Mekons plug. Thanks. It's always the right time to remember Mekons.

    You scare me when you talk about 'puncher's chance'. Mainly because when you're right, you're right.

    Good article in today's NYTimes about 4 toddlers with guns, too.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is probably wrong; but, following this encounter, were the words NO KILL I etched into your tabletop in some way?

    ReplyDelete