Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Existing in New York City: Attempting to Overcome the Human Death Wish

Foto by tgw, "Roof Shot," New York City, November 2012
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Obama (Republican posing as a Democrat) Throws Seniors Under the Bus by Compromising With John Bonehead by Cutting Social Security Payments: Barry Obama breaks yet another campaign promise by compromising with the Republican idiot John Bonehead and agreeing to cut Social Security payments in a backwards-thinking move that means the older one gets, the lower his or her Social Security payments will get.  Only an idiot would agree to such a cruel deal; therefore, Obama and Bonehead both are idiots.  How much you bet Obama does nothing about any gun law reforms either?  How phony was his Newtown crying jag and his phony speeches about that society-gone-wild matter?  The lesser of two evils is proving to be more evil than the other evil.  What a two-faced corporate puppet jerk Obama is proving to be.
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Say Goodbye to: Jake Adam York:
Diphthong

Night's air tightens slowly, afternoon's
heat thinning with honeysuckle --
millions of trumpets of sun
dimmed and cool, quieting down.
The console hums through signoff,
through anthem. Then its silence gathers
elsewheres from the dark, voices
bent off blackbird chill
as city glow on approaching storm:
Buenosnoches -- so fast to travel so far
with its syllable freight, electric
as new constellations on moonless nights --
so strange and difficult to find
once the disc has risen, its face
a wide, unfinished vowel
that casts its drawl on everything.
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Today's Top Irony (from the Hypocrites) 
The HSBC...weren't they originally a Hongkong bank?... was caught laundering Colombian and Mexican drug cartel money (cartels that have murdered upwards of 50,000 in Mexico alone) and also handling monies for terrorist organizations--obviously bankers who are as crooked and ruthless as the most despicable Mafia bosses--and yet they were simply fined a pocketful of chicken feed for wrongdoings, wrongdoings worse than the petty "terrorist" associations that have gotten individual citizens sent to Guantanamo for a life of constant torture and military abuse, most of whom are really not guilty of anything except being Muslim and under suspect by our many spy agencies, especially the despicable CIA.  Obama's Justice (Hah!) Dept. says HSBC is too big to prosecute.  This reminds me of the BCCI scandal of several years back.  We are such hypocrites!  Two-faced monkeys.  Why would anyone not immediately take their money and savings out an HSBC bank?  We the People of the USA are some of the stupidest and most ignorant puppets in the world.  You don't read this on any of the pundit blogs, do you?
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If the Mayans Were Right
According to the doomsayers, the Mayans believed the end of the world would happen when the earth would be sucked out of the sun, or somesuch heathen bullshit like that.  The Mayans were correct in one aspect of their superstitious beliefs, the Sun is our true God.  Without the Sun we are doomed; human salvation is in the Sun and not in fossil fuels.


What scares me about my fellow humans is this innate death wish they have as a society.  I suppose in the Jungian sense, we want the whole planet to die when we die.  I recall as a young skeptic during the Reagan red-telephone years, I was hoping that idiot second-rate actor president would go ahead and start a nuclear holocaust---maybe under the influence of his second-rate actress wife and the soothsayer Jeanne Dixon, all of 'em phonies.   At the time, I had had a premonition that I was soon to die...in of all places, Cuba...and I felt if I was due to die, why not take the whole human race with me?  The big red glow on the horizon.  Of course, Reagan being a phony and the heads of the Soviet Union being phonies, too, didn't pick up the red phone and push the red button to start that nuclear holocaust and I and my fellow human beings survived---except for millions upon millions of us who died naturally or in catastrophes along the way--to live another giant-size fistful of decades.

It's sometimes fun for me to go back and consider how many times I've ducked death.  I've lived through several bad car wrecks.  I've lived through an apartment building fire.  I've been hit twice by a Cadillac and a pick-up truck on the streets of New York City.  I just missed getting hit with a butcher knife thrown at me by a piss-off girlfriend.  And just 10 months ago, I just barely survived a heart attack (the ER folks at Bellevue Hospital told me that if I'd'a been one more hour getting there I'd'a probably been DOA).  "Hey, Reaper," I cried, "Ya missed me!"

I can remember as a dumbass college student going out into lightning storms and defying the Christian God!  "Here I am, Yahweh, strike me down if you're real!"  Of course, I wasn't that dumb that I believed there actually was a Christian God who was going to strike me down with a bolt of lightning.  Besides, I knew enough Greek mythology to know it was Zeus who struck people down with lightning bolts and in spite of Edith Hamilton's intriguing writing, I knew Zeus was a figment of the ancient Greek imagination.

Humans are so hung up on death.  Philip Wylie said we die in order to have sex.  If we didn't die, there'd be no need to procreate.  So we have all kinds of sex one way or another--even nuns and priests have sex--even eunuchs probably have some kind of abnormal sex--even the Pope probably masturbates, don't you think?  Can you imagine the Queen of England masturbating?  Certainly all her offspring are sex maniacs---remember Prince Philip doing the double-backed beast with Camilla Parker Bowles out in that muddy field?  Can you imagine Prince Harry having sex in his authentic Nazi uniform?  So we have sex up until it's our time, when the Reaper's blade starts hacking at us, oops, slicing off our sexuality in a near miss at sending us to the hereafter.

Sex gives us life.  And life eventually gives us death.  In between all sorts of snake-oil salesmen (pharmaceutical company sales reps and Yahoo preachers, priests, rabbis, shamen, ayatollahs) are peddling eternal life to us, for a price.  Have you noticed how you can't get eternal life free of charge? This has brought me to the conclusion that though the Sun is our actual God, MONEY is our earthly or real God.

So, folks, get ready.  Doomsday is coming...December 21st, which is not the original Mayan "end of the world" date...the original one was back in a May of some long-ago year.  Such bullshit, but there are those Yahoos who truly believe that on December 21st the earth will be sucked out of the sun.

We're all heathens, you see.  Superstitious heathens.  Our gods are heathen.  Brutal bastards, too, who strike people dead for a lot of stupid reasons, like men shooting their seeds on the ground rather than into the wombs of original-sinning women.  I mean, without a flock of scare-dy-cat sheep-like humans, wherefore art thou Jesus? Buddha? Yahweh? Zoroaster? Moloch? Saturn? Zeus? Hera? Medusa?


I love art like the above: Peter Bruegel's "Tower of Babel."  And all is babbling to me, a writer of words, a babbler deluxe.  Doomsday art.


Or Bosch's "Last Judgment."  What brilliant conceptualizing in an old world full of superstitions.

From Jacob Boehme: “What kind of spiritual triumph it was I can neither write nor speak; it can only be compared with that where life is born in the midst of death, and is like the resurrection of the dead.”

Sister Rosetta Thorpe: I once, when I was a child and could believe anything, heard Sister Rosetta Thorpe preach at a South Dallas Church of God that while she was in East Texas, she had seen a woman over there who had had her head cut clean off her body and then in a miracle service,  God had set that severed head back on that woman's body and lo and behold that woman came back to life to praise the glory of God.

I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day

 
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.

With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see 
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves, but worse. 

How I would love to be a writer of dead letters...though in retrospect, perhaps that's just what I am.
My brother who faced death several times before the Reaper finally nailed him to his final cross, loved Gerard Manley Hopkins and I've heard him quote the above poem many a dark night while his "Selfyeast of spirit" soured the dough of the natural, his quivering voice seeking out the lost as he experienced their scourge..."their sweating selves, but worse."

As I sit in the early morning darkness in the artificial light of my 60-watt-bulb lamp and type on my biography of my brother, I wonder what it's like to suffer from being both deaf and blind like he ended up.  Blindness is the ultimate darkness.

Another One for My Brother: 

The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less

 
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less;  
The times are winter, watch, a world undone:  
They waste, they wither worse; they as they run  
Or bring more or more blazon man's distress.  
And I not help. Nor word now of success:       
All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one—  
Work which to see scarce so much as begun  
Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness.  
  
Or what is else? There is your world within.  
There rid the dragons, root out there the sin.   
Your will is law in that small commonweal...

There's a beauty to that droll verse that so reminds me of my blind and deaf brother.  Strange how my brother never admitted he was blind or deaf when he was around you in his final days.

It is very difficult to write about your brother...especially now that he has gone.


From the Moravian Hymnal: 

With the singing of that hymn, I loll abed with Hilda Doolittle who was brought up in the Moravian church.

Evening

The light passes
from ridge to ridge,
from flower to flower—
the hepaticas, wide-spread
under the light
grow faint—
the petals reach inward,
the blue tips bend
toward the bluer heart
and the flowers are lost.

The cornel-buds are still white,
but shadows dart
from the cornel-roots—
black creeps from root to root,
each leaf
cuts another leaf on the grass,
shadow seeks shadow,
then both leaf
and leaf-shadow are lost.

























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