nada lo explica, nada lo justifica

We seem to have been a culture of pedophiles for quite a while, what with Epstein and Trump, Maxwell, Prince Andrew and Harvard faculty, unnamed billionaires and powerful business people, priests and ministers, and (no doubt) some rabbis and imams, as well as dads, uncles, and older brothers, not to mention moms and aunts and cousins all. The literature on abuse, trafficking, and horrific behavior is sobering and sickening.

One example:

A blistering report issued Wednesday describes decades of child sexual abuse in Rhode Island’s Catholic churches, documenting accusations against dozens of priests involving hundreds of victims.

The report from Peter F. Neronha, the state’s attorney general, also lays out repeated failures by the Diocese of Providence to remove priests or bring in law enforcement in response to accusations. Instead, investigators working for Mr. Neronha found, the diocese chose to handle reports of abuse internally, primarily by moving offending priests to new parishes.

The diocese transferred at least 30 accused priests to new jobs at least five times each, Mr. Neronha said in a news conference on Wednesday.

“So much hurt and harm could have been avoided” had the diocese removed the priests from their duties, he said. “Nothing explains it, nothing justifies it.” 

 

(Rhode Island Priests Abused Hundreds of Children Over Decades, Report Finds, By Jenna Russell March 4, 2026, Nytimes)

 No, nothing does explain nor justify what has become tendentious and horrendous and all too familiarly  happenstance. Who hasn’t had an ify uncle or creepy guy on the street you live?

Sexuality and sexual behavior now fit right in with every commercial advertisement on internet or tv.

These kids, it seems to go, are here for our pleasure. 

We become predatory and perverse.

Would that we had a sense of justice and decency to counter our greed and exploitation.

le sens n'est pas ce que vous croyez

 waddya mean your life is meaningless?

            it’s meaningless.

waddya mean by that?

            that it’s meaningless?

yeah, that it’s meaningless?

            that it has no meaning.

is that so?

            yeah, that’s so.

well, I have to get back to my life.

            is it meaningful?

yes, it is, meaningful.

            good for you!

and good for you as well.

            thank you!

even on its way out

The Mud Season

Patience darling,
it’s still too early
to trust the season
with that tenderness you hold
in your globed hands.

I can feel it, too—
the yearning to plant
your fingers in the warming earth
and release what’s so alive in you
into the scrum of all life.

But the ground’s still frozen 
beneath all this mud.
And winter, even on its way out,
will take with it anything
that opens too soon.

So hold your longing a little longer
in the sheltered care of your body,
like soft green starts 
on the windowsill of your heart,
seedlings from the tree
of good and evil.

–From book, The Wilderness That Bears Your Name, JAMES A. PEARSON

https://jamesapearson.com/the-mud-season-poem/

as callous as

 Best left without comment:

The United States is at war. Americans, at such a time, might expect their government to speak to them regularly and report on U.S. goals—and casualties—but so far, they have gotten little beyond prerecorded videos of the president and some sound bites from various officials. Even Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has held only a few briefings. 

 

Perhaps the Pentagon chief’s reluctance to speak to the press is just as well, because many Americans would be alarmed to realize that their sons and daughters in combat are being overseen by a person as callous as Pete Hegseth. 

 

This morning, the defense secretary gave a briefing on the war that quickly degenerated into Trumplike bombast. (Wisely, the Pentagon scheduled this at 8 a.m. eastern time, when most of the country is either sleeping or busy starting their day.) Hegseth apparently prefers to sound more like a Call of Duty player leading a raid than a sober and judicious secretary of defense: “Death and destruction from the sky all day,” he said, along with other empty phrases such as “We’re playing for keeps.” (As opposed to what, exactly?) 

 

Most reporters are now accustomed to Hegseth’s drama-laden antics. But even by the low standards he has set, he managed to shock many of them when he cynically used the deaths of U.S. military personnel to air his own grievances with the press. 

 

On Sunday morning (local time), an Iranian drone hit a makeshift operations center in Kuwait. The Pentagon says that six Americans are dead. Not only is this event a tragedy, but it also requires an explanation: The drone reportedly snuck through U.S. defenses without setting off any alerts, and struck a target that now seems to have been unduly vulnerable to aerial attack. 

 

The defense secretary, the man who is supposed to carry this news to the American public and mourn with them, instead whined about the unfairness of it all. “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it,” Hegseth told the reporters, military personnel, and civilians gathered this morning in the Pentagon. “The press only wants to make the president look bad, but try for once to report the reality. The terms of this war will be set by us at every step. As I said Monday, the mission is laser-focused.”  

(--Pete Hegseth Treats Fallen American Soldiers as a PR Problem, from His use of the Iran-war dead to attack the media was disgraceful. by Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, March 4, 2026) 

non chiedere

 I will go live there

       where?

where no questions are asked

       where’s that?

you’ll never find it

       why not?

don’t ask

comes one comes the other

750 degrees on sunporch --

Ah, the promise!

(Oh, the long mudseason!)

integration, samadhi

 Something about 4AM

Evokes nocturnes in monastery

The stillness in side chapel

The clear sky as dawn bows

Stepping into deep kinhin

Hands shashou, heart fond

God nowhere

To be, found

move over you old bard

That TV host 

play-acting

secretary of defense/war:

“Death and destruction

from the skies

all day long”

God, ain’t he

just the best

poet you’ve heard?

at stake today

 Let’s get rid of poetry. Let’s get rid of philosophy. We have enough two minute advertisements to fill the gap of the absence of poetry and philosophy. There are enough guys sitting on a chair beside a table with flowers and a glass of water talking spiritual stuff. There are enough bra commercials that tout raised and firm breasts. There are enough erectile disfunction pills and treatments that promise to keep men hard long into their deepest fantasies. Who needs poetry and philosophy?

Who today would claim that he is equally at home in the essence of thinking and in the essence of poetry?

—Martin Heidegger, “Why Poets?” (206)

Is it true? Badiou states: “Since Nietzsche, all philosophers claim to be poets, they all envy poets, they are all wishful poets or approximate poets, or acknowledged poets, as we see with Heidegger, but also with Derrida or Lacoue-Labarthe” (Manifesto 70). This provocation is the least of it, because Badiou’s main thesis is even more disturbing: “I maintain that the Age of Poets is completed” (71); “the fundamental criticism of Heidegger can only be the following one: the Age of Poets is completed, it is also necessary to de-suture philosophy from its poetic condition” (74). Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe responds gently but in a somewhat panicky tone:

Should poetry cease to be of interest to philosophy? Must we—as a necessity or an imperative—sever the tie that for two centuries in Europe has united philosophy (or at least that philosophy that is astonished at its origin and anxious about its own possibility), and poetry (or at least that poetry that acknowledges a vocation toward thought and is also inhabited by an anxiety over its destination)? Must philosophy—by necessity or imperative—cease its longing for poetry, and conversely (for there is indeed reciprocity here), must poetry finally mourn every hope of proffering the true, and must it renounce?

We would not be asking such a question, or we would be asking it differently, if Alain Badiou had not recently situated it at the very center of what is at stake today in philosophizing—in the very possibility of philosophizing. (Heidegger 17)  

(--Alain Badiou’s Age of the Poets: The Desacralizing of the Poem in Volume 31 – Number 3 – May 2021, Alberto Moreiras) 

If our contemporary fantasy is only about how hard and long we can go into someone’s orifice, whether human or Middle East country, than we have little need for the thought and insight of poetry and philosophy. 

Even prose and poetry scuffle. "Perhaps [a different] Alain said it best for all who hold this view: True prose must be “poetry refused".”  (French: La prose est poésie refusée)

(note: Alain is the pseudonym of Émile-Auguste Chartier (born March 3, 1868, Mortagne, Fr.—died June 2, 1951, Le Vésinet, near Paris). He was a French philosopher whose work profoundly influenced several generations of readers. (cf.Britannica)

I refuse poetry. I also refuse prose. I furthermore avoid anyone proclaiming poetry or prose.

We are simple people. Talk to us like simple people. Tell us how to inject ourselves so as to lose 40-50 pounds. Show us how to do tai chi chair yoga so as to look like someone who deserves E.D. pills and grateful women and men. Remind us that we can cash in our longterm insurance policies to help make our current lives more spectacular.

Poetry only gives us something like this:

          "Dust of Snow” 

                    by Robert Frost

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

 Or, in prose: Damned crow shakes snow on back of my neck. Caw caw, cold!

I’m giving up poetry and prose.

I’m taking to my swirl chair by front window where I can watch cars and trucks, chickadee and cardinal go by. Where I can watch my life go by without considering thought or meaning; not the screams of war or the squeals of orgasm covered by last night’s cold snow; not the mute and mutant psyche of a nation free to check the stock market for their true love’s readout.

Alla salute! Saluti a tutti i miei fratelli e sorelle!

melting snow drips from eaves to fresh unsounding snow below

 there’s an argument 

about God’s silence

it goes

he has nothing to say

another view

is different

she has taken

a vow of silence

God, either way,

is not heard from

is the gap everyone

feels, a bardo, between --

we humans continuing to 

pray, listening for God’’s 

voice, hearing only absence

and savvy ventriloquists

what did you say

 One day a year

Americans can practice

Democracy, one day

Vote, they tell us

One day a year — as if 

Such silliness is enough

sorcery in a white house

 I don’t want to hear that

this place is an illusion

that we’re all One in God

Although six Americans

and hundreds of Iranians

simply disappeared this week

Don’t give me The Disappearance

of the Universe treatment where ego

goes and illusory separation flees --

seems way too odd that God

has nothing to do with what is here

when God is what is here itself

seems war and other murderous tricks 

are what ego does best, a magician’s

wand wiping out what ego says must go

for the numb among us

 Look at yourself

Now look up

Any bombs falling?

Drop your politics

Your ideology —

Feel life

Whether Gaza, Ukraine

Iran,  for God’s sake, for

Life’s sake, feel something

this sickness comes on suddenly

 Sunlight

Fills bed

No bombs fall here

Maine 

Is exempt

For now from blasts

There

Is a fool in 

White House with missiles

Americans

With MAGA hats

[Cough, cough, wheeze, spit]

in lieu of

 It’s true

He can do

Whatever he wants

It’s amazing

Isn’t it,  the

Criminality

The massacre

Of school girls

True to his style

the flaw that faces us

war brings death and destruction

school children, citizens, soldiers

bleed out and scream, the despair

of someone's cri de coeur -- war

is no answer to no sane question --

unnecessary decision by flawed

mind and unstable character

punishing everybody

chaos of compassion

 zen buddhists chant heart sutra

virginia roberts giuffre’s book is 

read over cloud library -- this

sitting, this chant, for her, for 

the men and women who used 

her, for the rest of us who cannot

remember what justice and decency

could be in human life -- I dedicate

this practice, to save all beings,

to offer a measure of sorrowful hope,

to drown in the chaos of compassion

mechanizing insanity

 I still don’t know

How killing and murdering

With war benefits anyone

It takes a very particular

Delusion to calculate such

Death and destruction

turn around or turnabout

 I don't think the president is a pedophile. It's none of my business. And if he is, I was brought up Catholic and understand the theology of the sacrament of reconciliation or plenary indulgences.

Nor am I in law enforcement, nor a member of the Bar where I am duty bound to be concerned with justice and crime. 

No, I'm just a zen fool who looks at things trying to see what they really are. When I look at the president I have trouble focusing. Must be the cataracts.

It takes a lot not to judge and condemn. Like the US Congress, it takes a lot to avert gaze and phone for dollars so as to win reelection returning to power so as to avert gaze for another few years.

Some say it is a collapse of morality and ethics. Some say it is a cultural collapse and failure of credible leadership.

Not me.

I think it is something altogether different.

I think it is the deficiency of the mental structure of consciousness we've carried now for almost three thousand years. 

That and sports betting, TikTok, and substack.

We've grown to believe our opinion matters.

Someone thinks war will be beneficial. Someone thinks botoxing lips, cheeks, and forehead will be stylish. Someone thinks twenty billion dollars is not enough to retire on. Someone thinks killing their wife or husband would be good to do before the Ides of March.

I have no opinions. That's my opinion, i.e. "a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge."

But if the president were a pedophile, that would matter to the American people. If it doesn't matter to them, then he is not a pedophile. (I failed logic in school.)

It is good form to proclaim one loves their country. As a Buddhist I understand that form is emptiness, and vice versa. ("Versa" in Latin means to "turn around or turnabout.") Emptiness is also form.

It often seems so much of our posturing and proclaiming is empty and without substance, mere propaganda and pretense. Like saying we're a good Christian nation and tossing Jesus into the Schuylkill River, hands tied, feet in cement bucket.

Preachers make millions on televised broadcasts and priests continue to hide their faces in shame over their crimes. Politicians pretend to be deacons of the gospel and federal border patrol are finally permitted to beat the hell out of minorities and immigrants like they've wanted to do since grade school.

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will be murdered again. (We've changed the liturgy in America.)

There's no mistaking the new hierarchy in this country. The cabinet is the College of Cardinals. The Pont-Neuf is the president. The Supreme Court are the inquisitors. And we, (God help us), are the mindless and stupid who hold on to the belief that the current president is the savior-in-chief who has buttonholed the ear of the Almighty Creator, unceasingly trying to convince the Sublime Presence that naming rights now belong to the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the soon-to-be new Cathedral of Ballroom Tech and Triumph.

I am a simple monk.

I eat, sleep, and walk mindfully.

I have no opinions, make no judgments, and only lie when I write the first two phrases of this sentence.

I do not ask for forgiveness.

I look forward to being condemned to perdition.

I don't expect I will be seeing you there.

So, good luck!

And thanks for tinning such tasty sardines.

scene

 I’m not stupid

       You’re not?

I know you're lying

       You do?

You're a pedophile

       I am?

And I don’t care

       You don’t?

No, I don’t 

       Why not?

You're my saviour

       You think so?

Touch me bless me

        (See, how easy?)

…   …   …

[Announcer: if this had been a real dialogue

You would have been instructed to give up

All principles and worship pedophilia, 

All its perversions, and all its perverts.]

casus belli

 War is

The pedophile’s way

Of saying

“So what

If I raped and abused

That child”

Stand back

The adults are showing

You what power means

morning travels

 Walking through the mythic structure of consciousness

We enter a large monastery, a temple where we meditate

Study the four bodhisattva vows, converse about bees

In the mental structure we are in prison Friday morning

Wondering if we will get to Sherman Alexie poem (we

don’t), some final words about integral structure and Ramadan 

where a former student checks me in

 At lab today five

Large vials of blood taken —

Exsanguination

show and tell

So much about the Epstein Files and Donald Trump.

Things appear. If I’ve learned anything teaching philosophy over the years is that if something is there it will ultimately appear. 

I have no doubt truth, as they say, will out. 

Yes we grow impatient, doubtful, even cynical. 

But some FBI agent, some DOJ staff person, some personal lawyer, some family member, some victim, or someone else belittled by the abuser will spill the beans, leak what has been hidden, and exercise their troubled conscience. 

So, too, here. 

He won’t get away.

Time will tell.

We’ll be listening

here's a responsibility

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) once wrote, "Better the world should perish

than I or any other human being should believe a lie."

Let's hope the world doesn't perish.

I know we're tempted, but...

Don't believe what is not true.

of deceiving someone in me

Something from E. M. Cioran, (1911-1995) 

     2

If disgust for the world conferred sanctity of itself, I fail to see how I could

avoid canonization.

                                        #

No one has lived so close to his skeleton as I have lived to mine: from

which results an endless dialogue and certain truths which I manage neither

to accept nor to reject.

                                        #

It is easier to get on with vices than with virtues. The vices, accommodating

by nature, help each other, are full of mutual indulgence, whereas the

jealous virtues combat and annihilate each other, showing in everything

their incompatibility and their intolerance.

                                        #

It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should

avoid simulacra and even “realities;” you should take up a position external

to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live,

according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a “solitary elephant.”I forgive X everything because of his obsolete smile.

                                        

                                        #

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

Only what you hide is profound, is true. Whence the power of base feelings.

                                        #

Ama nesari [sic], says the Imitation of Christ. Love to be unknown. We are

happy with ourselves and with the world only when we conform to this

precept.

                                        #

The intrinsic value of a book does not depend on the importance of its

subject (else the theologians would prevail, and mightily), but on the

manner of approaching the accidental and the insignificant, of mastering the

infinitesimal. The essential has never required the least talent.

                                        #

The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of

belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity …

                                        #

Negation never proceeds from reasoning but from something much more

obscure and old. Arguments come afterward, to justify and sustain it. Every

no rises out of the blood.

                                        #

 With the help of the erosion of memory, to recall the first initiatives of

matter and the risk of life which followed from them …Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

                                        #

There are nights that the most ingenious torturers could not have invented.

We emerge from them in pieces, stupid, dazed, with neither memories nor

anticipations, and without even knowing who we are. And it is then that the

day seems useless, light pernicious, even more oppressive than the darkness.

(--from The Trouble With Being Born, by E. M. Cioran, 1973, trans 1976) 

"[F]rom something much more obscure and old. ... Every no rises out of the blood."

The complications we encounter in interactions with difficult persons, ourselves or others, introduce wariness and remembrance of past traumas.

So it goes.