n’autre (no other)

I feel, lately, I have nothing to say. 

“Negation is a refusal of existence. By means of it a being (or a way of being) is posited, then thrown back to nothingness.” (--p.11, Being and Nothingness, Jean Paul Sartre)

...

Consciousness moreover can not produce a negation except in the form of consciousness of negation. No category can "inhabit" consciousness and reside there in the manner of a thing.

The not, as an abrupt intuitive discovery, appears as consciousness (of being), consciousness of the not.  

In a word, if being is everywhere, it is not only Nothingness which, as Bergson maintains, is inconceivable; for negation will never be derived from being. The necessary condition for our saying not is that non-being be a perpetual presence in us and outside of us, that nothingness haunt being.   (p.11 ibid)

 I dwell in a haunted house of appearances and disappearances.

An hour was lost in the middle of night just gone by.

And the current war?

March 5 - Scores of people have been killed across the Middle East since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on February 28, with Gulf ​states that host U.S. military bases and personnel as well as Lebanon ‌quickly drawn into the conflict.

Here are the death tolls from the war as reported by countries as of March 5, the sixth day of the war. Reuters has not independently verified ​these deaths.

The Reuters Iran Briefing newsletter keeps you informed with the latest developments and analysis of the Iran war. Sign up here.

IRAN At least 1,230 people killed, including 175 schoolgirls and staff killed ​in a missile strike on a primary school in Minab in ⁠the country's south on the war's first day, according to the non-profit humanitarian ​group Iranian Red Crescent Society. It was unclear if the overall death toll included ​Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps military casualties. 

 

ISRAEL Ten civilians killed, including nine people in an Iranian missile strike on Beit Shemesh near Jerusalem on March 1, according to Israel's ambulance service Magen David ​Adom. The Israel Defense Forces has not reported any military casualties. 

 

LEBANON At least 77 ​people killed in Israeli strikes, according to Lebanon's health ministry. 

 

BAHRAIN One person killed after fire broke out ‌in ⁠Bahrain's Salman Industrial City following missile interception, according to the interior ministry. 

 

KUWAIT Three people, including two Kuwaiti soldiers, killed in Iranian attacks on the country, according to Kuwait's health and foreign ministries. 

 

OMAN One person killed after a projectile hit the Marshall Islands–flagged product ​tanker MKD VYOM off ​the coast of ⁠Muscat. 

 

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Three people killed, according to UAE's defense ministry. 

 

U.S. MILITARY Six U.S. service members were killed in a strike on a ​facility in Kuwait, according to U.S. Central Command. 

 

SYRIA Four people were ​killed when ⁠an Iranian missile struck a building in the southern Syrian city of Sweida on Saturday, state news agency SANA said. 

 

• IRAQ At least 13 people were killed, according to ⁠Iraqi ​health authorities, including 11 militiamen, one army soldier and ​one civilian, based on health registration figures.

Compiled by Jonathan Allen, Jana Choukeir, Menna Alaa El Din, Maayan ​Lubell, Pesha Magid and Ahmed Rasheed; Editing by Don Durfee, Cynthia Osterman, Aidan Lewis

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-people-have-been-killed-us-israel-war-iran-2026-03-03/

These are some instances of refusing existence. The minds of two men at censorious play. 

As much as my evaluating and calculating mind might urge the non-existence of Netanyahu, Trump, Putin, and Mohammed bin Salman, and the reconstitution and re-existence of Jamal Ahmad Hamza Khashoggi along with the return of the above referenced de-existence of the war-dead, there seems to be no current physical or spiritual mechanism to reliably effectuate such miraculous apparition.

No one has found the lines of communication once operated by Edgar Cayce and Jesus of Nazareth. Our sick and dead remain sick and dead (as far as we know) for now.

And, up in the Russia Ukraine sorrowful fiasco?

AI Overview

Estimates for the Russia-Ukraine war show significantly higher Russian casualties, with sources like CSIS suggesting Russia has around 1.2 million total casualties (killed, wounded, missing) and 275,000-325,000 killed, compared to Ukraine's 500,000-600,000 total casualties and 100,000-140,000 fatalities; this translates roughly to a 2:1 or 2.5:1 casualty ratio favoring Ukraine, though figures vary, and both nations keep precise data secret, with battlefield losses for Russia estimated at roughly double Ukraine's. 

Key Casualty Estimates (as of early 2026):

Russia: ~1.2 million total casualties (killed, wounded, missing), with ~325,000 killed. 

Ukraine: ~500,000-600,000 total casualties (killed, wounded, missing), with ~100,000-140,000 killed. 

Ratio & Context:

Ratio: Russian battlefield losses are often cited as roughly double Ukraine's, around a 2:1 or 2.5:1 ratio. 

Scale: Russia's losses are staggering compared to major conflicts since WWII, exceeding its losses in all previous wars combined, according to CSIS. 

Data Challenges: Both sides protect their military data, so figures come from intelligence estimates, independent analysis (like CSIS), and open-source investigations. 

In essence, while exact numbers are elusive, reports consistently indicate Russia is suffering disproportionately higher casualties in the conflict. 

 Also see CSIS, Center For Strategic and International Studies, "Russia’s Grinding War in Ukraine”.

I used to think Sartre’s book Being and Nothingness too large and too difficult to navigate, preferring (oddly) Heidegger’s Being and Time for casual reading in my Audible library. I’ve long enjoyed Sartre’s Huis Clos (No Exit) with its “Hell is other people” vibration. Over the years, for those who suspect a cynic’s dépêcher message of misanthropic scorn, I’ve adopted a semantic somersault that posits there are no “other” people and hence no hell. 

The n’autre (no other) realization throws all of existence and negation into a new kettle of fish that gurgles on low heat filling kitchen with a new fragrence the ghosts of Sartre and Heidegger take in with their French wine and German beer.

We are killing ourselves. Tell that to Netanyahu, Trump, Putin, and bin Salman. They won’t understand it, They’re counting the money coming through their doors, human life be damned.

They have no consciousness of the not.

And the rest of us? What are we conscious of?

What haunts us?

What haunts you . . .

My friends?

an eremite, the desert, absorption

 Ignore me

I shuffle by

I finish

Nobody’s Girl

The grief

Posthumous 

Raw ambiguity 

The cost, wrenching

Money money poison 

She is alive on last page

But reader knows

Nihil obstat death

In my deep dark basement

I want to slit throats 

Climb stairs

Walk away

Sit on harbor bench

No moorings, gull 

On piling, just dawning

The impossibility of this

Existence, the ambiguity

Of suicide, whose hand

Whose mind are you out of

Who manipulates the narrative?

A cynic looks, not at anything 

Other than despair, the sadness

The long unselfing, the critical

Relentless disappearance

No happy ending, just perpetrators 

Snug in their insouciant arrogance

Ticker tape smug, the sadness  drips

Through veins, a blur of uncaring

Blindness, a gouging darkness —

An end of night office

Monks absorb world’s sin

Leave sanctuary with her in heart

New and now silent psalm tone

Walks within her each raindrop

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 iffy 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.