Saturday, April 17, 2021

brackish

Watched Frontline’s PBS “American Insurrection” following reporting written and directed by Richard Rowley of Pro Publica.

The threat, he concludes, is not going away.

Chilling and thought-stilling.

sicut eratosthenes in principio

 For now, there is stone

tiredness of the so-called 

world, its, my, premise, 


Just a weariness —

The cant, the can’t, the Kantian

Ought that needs never

haiku liberation assertion

 Poet prefers change

(She doesn’t like seventeen)

Non-numerical 


Free expression, as

Mind would have itself floating

Through formulation

Friday, April 16, 2021

the writer said wisdom is not what you think

It knows difference.


And this awareness is all 


(the) difference. There's




no teaching wisdom 


as long as sameness is our 


cultural blindness.

wahrheitgeschehen, where truth becomes conspicuous

Let us become artists. 

Looking to truth, looking to itself.

Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) writings on art renew the romantic paradigm in the philosophy of art for the twentieth century. Despite all his criticism of the idealist tradition, Heidegger insists with Schelling on art as a Wahrheitsgeschehen, a truth-event, that is, an occasion when truth becomes conspicuous. Still, Heidegger differs from his romantic precursor in that he does not elevate art to that height where it becomes the only access to truth. Rather, he allows for some few alternative events in which truth reveals itself as well. Nevertheless, Heidegger agrees with Schelling insofar as both thinkers place art as an “organon of truth” above the propositional correctness of science and, hence, some versions of philosophy.

(—p.173, In The German Aesthetic Tradition, by Kai Hammermeister, 2002)

 If God is ‘itself’...

Truth reveals itself, 

As.

Well

such an odd way to live

 Oh those lies.

And the liars.

I used to hear lying was wrong.

These days liars are proud politicians and powerful believers in lies and lying.

Isn’t that sum-thin’?

Thursday, April 15, 2021

et lux perpĂ©tua lĂșceat eis.

 If God is sanity, there is reason to understand why so many of us are disturbed. 

Yet, it is via this very disturbance that we return to the shape of our lives, having recognized dissonance and divertissement from an underlying harmony and regularity.

Have you an ear for it?

The melodic classical chants in the night?

Cloister semblance.

That resonance from inner portico walking to and from the sober celebration of what is true, right, and just.

Each passage a pilgrimage to the interior.

Step by shuffling step along one’s solitude.

Turning at edge of garden.

We end as we began.

In silence.

Sane, and

Sufficient.

Wednesday, April 14, 2021

take that insane delusion into silence

My money lives in a hollow in a tree half way up an abandoned trail on the other side of Bald Mountain in a rusted coffee tin alongside a st christopher medal where the child jesus is carried aloft enroute the remaining climb to summit where there is no money, no stocks, no checkbooks, no insurance, no overdraft, no dividends, and no payoff. 

Squirrels, I assume, have shredded the paper tender into nesting material for young offspring as they are taught the down-mountain route, the crossing of downhill road, arriving at hanging sunflower black oil seeds in front yard next to prayer flags and Peruvian brightly colored cross strung along thicket of downed cedar tree from old snowstorm.

I assist auditor reading numbers from spreadsheets with huge payrolls and big salaries, careful to be precise so as not to have to backtrack when bottom lines do not lineup. This exercise of trying to be helpful marks the irony of a seeming detachment and disregard for what might have been called when younger an attraction toward voluntary poverty. Why then do I not rejoice at the lines where individuals post 300, 500, 800 thousand dollars in gross wages alondside others posting 30, 40, 50 thousand in theirs?

One new year's eve day in early 1970's, walking with five colleagues from a child caring institution along a road in a county above new york city, talking about how one of the crowd had left the field to become a stock broker, I made what I thought was an obvious statement that "None of us will ever make more than $20,000 a year." Suddenly I was walking alone, everyone else having stopped in their tracks. One of them said, "Speak for yourself, Harry!" There was an intimation for me in the following silence that I was, in a very lonely sermon, indeed, only preaching an odd eclogue for myself.

Transfixed Francis of Assisi, impoverished Benedict Joseph Labre, and besotted Taneda Santoka -- all paupers, mendicants, wanderers -- were forebears. For them, prayer, poetry, and befuddled idiorhythmics were their temperment and fate. Outcast saints for the spes publica outcasts in our Divina Comedia communities of imagination.

An elderly friar I've know a long time once proclaimed, as if in ecstatic revelation, that "We are a monied economy and society." For him, this proclamation changed everything. I waited for him to say something else. He retreated into silence, stumbling through his insight for the next forty years.

Since central bankers can’t define money anymore, they now have one job: to convince you they still know what they’re doing, so you don’t panic, and so the financial aristocracy hangs onto the legacy system that underpins their ever-growing wealth and assets. Their remaining weaponry is a combination of insincere optimism and linguistic alchemy. As Ryan Gosling’s character in the Big Short says, “Wall Street loves to use confusing terms to make you think only they can do what they do. Or even better, for you to just leave them the f*ck alone.” This applies heavily to central bankers too. It disguises their many failures and shows they achieve stability by complexity. Those who have tried to expose the tomfoolery to the masses have had to endure a life of media solitude. Take Jeff Snider, an expert in the deep dark areas of finance. He tells us, quite simply, that most of what central bankers say does not reflect reality. Yet the mainstream press has no interest in publishing any of his work.

The longer they keep up this deception, then the more people will become aware, increasing the chance of a coordinated uprising. The problem is that it’s never happened before, ever. A nation of angry citizens reacts accordingly. Back in 1860, automotive pioneer Henry Ford said, “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”Though it rhymes and does not repeat, history shows us a financial revolution remains a pipe dream.

(--in When the U.S. Dollar Collapses, the Majority Will Back the Elite’s New Currency, Not Crypto, in.ConcodaApril 2021)

Monks chant as bells toll in French cloister. What do they pray for? Perhaps they pray for what everyone, whether they pray or not, is longing to find, namely, a way through.

Through what? You name it. Just a way through. To what? You name it. Just whatever it is that provides sanity and safety and sincere encounter with what we desire most.

And what do we desire most?

I don't know -- and, so, cannot say.

But if I did know -- just to play this out -- if I did, by some extraordinary delusion of prescience, know -- Ha! -- I'd take that insane delusion into silence, and, apophatically aphasic, would not be able to, thus, could not, say.

 ...   ...   ...


 Haiku

         (per la mia famiglia

 

the begger 

                   hands out

what is uncertain, 

                   looking --

what is it 

                   we hold


            (wfh/14april21) 

Tuesday, April 13, 2021

our tuesday evening conversation

                                                      Sabbaths III

 


As timely as a river


God's timeless life passes

Into this world. It passes

Through bodies, giving life,

And past them, giving death.

The secret fish leaps up

Into the light and is

Again darkened. The sun

Comes from the dark, it lights

The always passing river,

Shines on the great-branched tree,

And goes. Longing and dark,

We are completely filled

With breath of love, in us

Forever incomplete.

 



~ Wendell Berry ~

 

(Given)

what happens after death

Before 'I' dies
everything is me.

As 'I' dies
everything is you.

After 'I' dies
everything is not we --

everything is
as it is, itself

if you say it, it appears

Hermit walks 

                        alone

Everyday listening 

                        to this —

God is speaking 

                        void

Monday, April 12, 2021

from zafu to sink

Last night’s practice, 

                                  Tom

Called it kitchentaza, 

                                  wry

Dish wash dharma 

                                  tales

doris’ shikantaza

                 (a haiku after her Basho insight)


All things sit and 

                             gaze,

“What is this? What is this?” 

                             Seed

Emerges; 

                             Itself

if

                 (a haiku seeking new conditional)

If you are black, if

You drive, if stopped by police —

If fear and harm stare...

Sunday, April 11, 2021

haiku

           (pour petite fleur and jardinier)

lighting candle, now

fifty years 'life-together' --

this nuptial lointain