Thursday, April 6, 2023

Its Doomed but Not Undangerous Hound Complacency

Miles 24 to 26 the best two miles of the thoroughly excellent 36 mile Waterloo-Pinckney Trail, we hiked through it Tuesday, peepers and redwing blackbirds and sand hill cranes screaming!


I do not regret not bringing paint and canvases. Brought Cărtărescu and Proust and Ballard and McCarthy and not working and it doesn't bother me that it doesn't bother me it's not working. L and I hike in morning and early afternoon then she paints while I disc, write, then C and R come over for dinner and laughs and yap 

Program note: my son-in-law (who I love but much more importantly like)'s first name starts with I and while the gag is funny for at least a few seconds I need an alternative and since I dropped the secret code names for L (wife) and C (daughter) I need a letter for I instead of I so I hereby declare that I is henceforth R, the first letter of his last name

R (and C) doomier than me re: our dystopian future: R and I sit on the back porch after dinner sampling various tokes and yapping, he understands how the world works and for whom, we laugh. I promised I wouldn't say more here, but he (and C) know the score. We (me and C and R) shock L with our doominess, our certainly our shitty species will destroy the human world in C and R's lifetime. That trees will survive us (R has the same tree-philia that I do). I link-fished to send him some of these and some stuff not here, they are below this photo from the porch where they were caught, I (not R) share them with you





"There is no longer any question that the United States is waging a New Cold War, not simply on Russia (via NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine), but also on China, which Washington has now defined as its number one security threat."
The wonderful death of a state
Clarence Thomas and the billionaire
The Return of the Non-stop Trump News Cycle
Resisting the backlashFine metaphor abounds
Mthrfckng Obama's candidate LOST!
New Chicago mayor now mthrfckng professional Democrats ENEMY NUMBER ONE!
Capitalism is a values-decoding machine
Neo-liberalism in a coma
Materialism and the crisis of Marxism
Trump Derangment Syndrome as Democratic strategy returns
Did the FBI kill MLK - I'm going with yes
NPR Absolutely Is US State Propaganda
Going For the Bronze; or, Now the Deluge
Maggie's weeklyFRESH HELL{ feuilleton }'s weekly
Of course the bees humans are driving to extinction are sentient
Avedon Carol's occasional linksKausalsatze
Letter from an English Department on the Brink
Kathy Acker on the American novel
Mike's dailyEclectic Playlist Series 10.03
The Search of Lost Time: the science of the perfect second
The mind-bending fiction of Mircea Cărtărescu





TO BE WORN OPENLY AT THE WRIST, OR AT THE CHEST AND HIDDEN

Carl Phillips

If I believed in a god, he would be a sea god, like the sea
in its predictability—now approach, now recede—beneath
such a god I would not mind, I think, being the shore, say of the sea
what you will, it’s the shore that endures the routine loss
without which what strategies would there be for softening
the hollowness that any victory, give it time, comes with,
how curb the risk of arrogance, with its doomed but
not undangerous hound, complacency?
... I made this for you—
put it on. I know it’s not going to matter whether the decisions
I made were the ones eventually I even meant to make, or
should have, or should have thought maybe more than
twice about. What’s history anyway, except—according to
the latest mouth saying so—just what happened: I flourished
undramatically, to no apparent purpose, like pretty much
everyone. The sea dragged the shore; the shore suffered the sea.

3 comments:

  1. 1/thanks for clarifying the initials - although i did enjoy the code names before

    2/given the doominess consensus you report, i guess you're not anticipating grandkids - who knows if it's good or bad?

    3/as lawrence berra could have said, you never know when something surprising might happen - today's small children face an unknowable future - my own opinion is that the oreskes and conway scenario presented in "the collapse of western civilization" seems plausible and is, in a sense, a fortunate outcome, although getting there would be "a bumpy ride" - to put it extremely mildly

    4/this holy week i am attending several masses by youtube - and have borrowed from my public library an ecopy of episcopal priestess cynthia bourgeault's book The Corner of Fourth and Nondual

    "The title was inspired by Thomas Merton's moment of revelation 'at the corner of Fourth and Walnut' in his celebrated essay 'A Member of the Human Race'. Cynthia Bourgeault--internationally renowned retreat leader, and a practitioner and teacher of centering prayer--describes the foundations of her theology: a cosmological seeing with the eye of the heart, and classic Benedictine daily rule informed and enlightened by wisdom from the Asian traditions. She explains the influence of the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Teilhard de Chardin, Boehme, Barnhart, Keating, and Gurdjieff, among others in a philosophy built on the cornerstones of the Incarnation and the Paschal Mystery, tied by the Trinity as a cosmogonic principle, the fundamental generative mechanism through which all things came into being."

    5/with regard to the fundamental generative mechanism through which all things came into being, i definitely concur with 19th century experimental psychophysiologist gustav fechner that "the greatest of all miracles is that anything exists at all"

    6/the incarnation story as 'vicarious atonement', including the crucifixion and resurrection, to me seems an unlikely story with unwholesome consequences - huston smith quoted a zen perspective - 'no one else can go to the bathroom for you'


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    1. 1/cynthia bourgeault says, "...once Adam and Eve have dropped out of the equation...you are hard up against the question 'What is being atoned for? And why?' " she find the theological views of jacob boehme and pierre teilhard de chardin provide answers which satisfy her desire for "a unified Christian cosmovision that is vast enough to span the eons and tender enough to hold Jesus Christ at its center"

      i guess my mileage may vary

      may peace be with her, and also with me, and with anyone who may happen to read these words

      2/coincidentally, perhaps, over the weekend i watched on netflix

      The Elephant Whisperers won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short at the 95th Academy Awards. It is a 41-minute short documentary that explores the bond between Raghu, an orphaned baby elephant, and his caretakers - a mahout couple named Bomman and Bellie - who devote their lives to protect him from poachers and raise him. It is the first Indian documentary and one of only two Indian productions to win an Oscar.

      these kind and generous indigenous people worship an elephant-headed god, ganesha

      https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganesha

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  2. The lichen-edge of the tree just-slightly-off-center in the picture makes the path being walked appear to pose the peril of an 800-foot drop! I keep explaining this to my Limbic App but the pic gives me vertigo anyway.

    Re: MLK being done by crypto-colored-JEH's FBI: these "leaks" generally tend to spill out in suddenly-thicker streams when the last of the important co-conspirators have died, in 30-to-50 year intervals. We got the Gulf of Tonkin "revelation" and the MLK "leak" BUT the JFK/ RFK revelations, I fear, along with the common-sense explanations for 9/11, won't come in our lifetimes... because those techniques were too technical and are still useful and, anyway, the (international octopus of the) CIA appears to outrank the FBI. Maybe we'll get some common sense confirmation on (super mole) Castro...?

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