touch and go

 If I were any

More depressed

Than I am

I’d be my own

Obituary written

On rice paper

Pretending to be

Haiku brushstroke

By deceased artist

america’s short story

They only wanted

To put out fire

Bullets put them out

when looking through an icon

If I wasn’t here, I’d be there

The dark spirituality of no frivilous concentration

eyes that see nothing other than stark sophiology

nothing clearer than transparent cosmism 

    

 Ekaterina Belova (Russian, b. 1988). Monk (2018, oil on canvas).

pissing contest with the wind

 every time a guy

on chopper barrels by

all I can think of is

a fat man in unkempt hair

farting in marble and wood

hallway trying to make

the toilet before his rear end

explodes in his half-ass down

dung-arees ten seconds

too late, his girlfriend

hoisting a bottle of cheer

tossing her hair 

where he ain’t -- (on

other hand, he might just be

a loud annoyingly sound)

some people have to loudly

let you know they’re passing by --

wheelies, horns, taunts, skid marks 

while the rest of us

wonder what we’ve done 

to be so unheard, so invisible

in the hardening shadows

 This morning in prison, poet Xavier Villaurrutia (1903--1950, Mexico):

Nocturne: Fear / Nocturno miedo

Everything lives at night in secret doubt:

silence and sound, place and time.

Asleep unmoving or sleepwalking awake,

nothing can be done for that secret dread.

And it's useless to close your eyes in the shadows,

to sink them in sleep so they’ll not keep seeing,

for in the hardening shadows, the cave of dreams,

the same nocturnal light will wake you again.

Then, with the shuffle of the suddenly woken,

aimlessly, pointlessly, you start walking.

Night spills its mysteries over you,

and something tells you that to die is to wake up.

In the shadows of a deserted street, on a wall,

in the deep purple mirror of loneliness, who

hasn’t seen himself on the way to or from some encounter,

and not felt the fear and wretchedness and fatal doubt?

The fear of being nothing but an empty body

that anybody -- I or anyone else -- could occupy,

and the wretchedness of watching yourself, alive,

and the doubt that it is -- it is not -- real.

(--poem by Xavier Villaurrutia, in The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, a bilingual anthology, edited by Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-Grossman, 2009)

We’d been talking about economics, migration, healthcare and insurance juggling, and how no real change will come because everyone thinks they will someday become rich.

One of the men said a group of them watched the final episodes of season five of “The Chosen.” 

“Grown men, prisoners,” he said, “cried.”

Nobody thinks the revolution is at hand. Nobody believes there’s much or anything to be done about inequity and authoritarianism. 

That’s when Villaurrutia came to the conversation.

Poets have an annoying habit of laying down their hand in a poker game while everyone is looking at them -- and, whether a winning or losing hand, riveting our attention. 

broken shards of promise

 Looking down corridors

Open office doors

Paper scraps on floor

No one there

Ghost building

Empty, desolate

Diogenes walks

His extinguished 

Lantern abandoned

There are no honest

Men or women there

A desolate congress

Dystopia is voted in

Celebration travels

Home with bloody knives

Outside building

Machine guns point

At empty square

No one comes

The people have

Gone to coast, to boats

Some reach for book

Words, words, where

Once truth was carried

Man from Somalia 

Says he’s going back

To homeland where cow’s

Milk is more reliable

Than American heart’s

Broken shards of promise

final etymological thought before the insensate

Cosmotheandric 

encorporation 

is incarnation

an anthropomorphic 

apotheosis of 

emergent reality

the embarrassment is overwhelming

 Minnesota buried assassinated lawgiver, her husband, their dog.

The governor was there for the grieving.

The president indicated he didn’t care.

"Why would I call him? I could call and say, ‘Hi, how you doing?’ The guy doesn’t have a clue," Trump said, referring to Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, who was the vice presidential contender facing off against Trump's ticket last year. "He’s a mess. So I could be nice and call, but why waste time?” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-says-wont-call-gov-tim-walz-minnesota-shootings-mess-rcna213432

I do. I care. Don’t you?

My prayers for the speaker, her husband, their dog. The people of Minnesota. Their Governor.

Shame on that other guy. The guy with no class, no heart. No care but for his ego, his billfold, his arrogant cruelty.

nocturne

 Night

Sleeps

I keep

Watch

only a god can save us, poetically we dwell

Thinking about contemporary matters, it arises that something is coming to an end and something else is emerging. 

Whether what is ending or that which is emerging is beneficial or deleterious to our world, humanity, all life and cosmos itself -- is up for consideration and debate. 

One, I suspect, could hope. Or, abandoning hope (as Dante suggested we do entering hell) we could embrace something else. Let’s see what name we give that. 

SPIEGEL: Fine. Now the question naturally arises: Can the individual man in any way still influence this web of fateful circumstance? Or, indeed, can philosophy influence it? Or can both together influence it, insofar as philosophy guides the individual, or several individuals, to a determined action?

Heidegger: If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline.²⁷

SPIEGEL: Is there a correlation between your thinking and the emergence of this god? Is there here in your view a causal connection? Do you feel that we can bring a god forth by our thinking?

Heidegger: We can not bring him forth by our thinking. At best we can awaken a readiness to wait [for him].

SPIEGEL: But can we help?

Heidegger: The first help might be the readying of this readiness. It is not through man that the world can be what it is and how it is -- but also not without man. In my view, this goes together with the fact that what I call "Being" (that long traditional, highly ambiguous, now worn-out word) has need of man in order that its revelation, its appearance as truth, and its [various] forms may come to pass. The essence of technicity I see in what I call "pos-ure" (Ge-Sull), an often ridiculed and perhaps awkward expression.²⁸ To say that pos-ure holds sway means that man is posed, enjoined and challenged by a power that becomes manifest in the essence of technicity -- a power that man himself does not control. Thought asks no more than this: that it help us achieve this insight. Philosophy is at an end.   (--"Only a God Can Save Us": The Spiegel Interview (1966), with Martin Heidegger, published five days after his death in 1976 )

It is tempting to sit and mull what “Philosophy is at an end” might mean for Heidegger. So, I’ll take the temptation. 

“Thought”-- the capture of ideas and concepts, their uses and codification as law and rules for judicial precedent to be used as guide for human behavior and correction thereof -- might be considered the product of philosophy.

“Thinking” -- the looking at, seeing, and consideration of what is appearing -- is the poetic encounter with an emerging reality in either mind or matter, imagination or physical world, in such a way that embraces and encourages encorporation. 

("Encorporation" is an archaic form of "incorporation". It means to unite something into a whole, to include something as part of something larger, or to form something into a legal corporation. It is essentially an older spelling or usage of the word "incorporate”.)  

 

The prefix "en-" generally means "in," "into," or "cause to be." It can be used to transform nouns and adjectives into verbs, often indicating a state of being or a process of entering or being placed within something. For example, "encase" means to put something in a case, and "endanger" means to put something at risk.  (--AI) 

 

Let’s look further, asking with Heidegger -- What is called thinking? 

The 20th century’s great philosopher, Martin Heidegger, said: \"Most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking – not even yet, although the state of the world is becoming constantly more thought-provoking.\" (What is Called Thinking? p. 4)  For us, thinking is traditionally thought to be \"rationality\", \"reason\", \"judgement\”. Heidegger, somewhat provocatively, says: \"[M]an today is in flight from thinking.\" (Discourse on Thinking p. 45) 

 

Not only do we not think; human beings are actively avoiding thinking. For Heidegger, all the scientific work today, all the research and development, all the political machinations and posings, even contemporary philosophy, represents a flight from thinking. \"[P]art of this flight is that man will neither see nor admit it. Man today will even flatly deny this flight from thinking. He will assert the opposite. He will say – and quite rightly – that there were at no time such far-reaching plans, so many inquiries in so many areas, research carried on as passionately as today. Of course.\" (Discourse on Thinking 45) 

And 

\"The answer to the question \"What is called thinking?\" is, of course, a statement, but not a proposition that could be formed into a sentence with which the question can be put aside as settled…The question cannot be settled, now or ever…Thinking itself is a way. We respond to the way only by remaining underway.\" (Heidegger: What is Called Thinking?) 

 

\"Just as it is with bats’ eyes in respect of daylight, so it is with our mental vision in respect of those things which are by nature most apparent.\" Aristotle (Metaphysics Ch. I, Bk 2, 993b)

 \"The conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience.\" Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, A 158, B 197)

(--freom Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking? (Philosophical Archive)

Somewhat akin to Lao Tzu’s Tao-te-Ching (The Way and its Power), “Thinking itself is a way.”  

And there’s a backdoor to Heidegger’s words for me. And that is his use of the word “itself.”

Here’s my re-accentuation: Thinking “Itself” is a way. “Itself” is, for me, what has traditionally been called “God.” Hence, according to Heideggerian emphasis, “The question cannot be settled, now or ever.”

The “Itself,” or whatever is considered to be “Itself, ” is infinite, eternal, and omnipresent. In popular parlance -- there’s no end to it, who knows where it begins?

When we “think” -- if we were to begin to think -- we would begin to encorporate that which is beyond capability of being encapsulated in thought. It would entail encorporation of Being and Becoming, One’s body and one’s body, wayfaring underway, journeying with no known destination.

This is referred to as poetic thinking.

Martin Heidegger begins his lecture ‘… Poetically Man Dwells …’ by denying poetry is a marginal practice whose imaginings are ‘mere fancies and illusions’. ‘[T]he poetic’, he states, is not ‘merely an ornament and bonus added on to dwelling’. On the contrary, Heidegger boldly claims that poetry is the source of all human dwelling on earth: ‘[…] poetry first causes dwelling to be dwelling. Poetry is what really lets us dwell.’  (--Poetic measures of architecture: Martin Heidegger’s ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 September 2014)

Poetry really lets us dwell. It assists allowing thinking into being (Being). That which is being created assists that which is coming-to-be and that which is there (DaSein) to dwell, as one, where, how, and when they are where, how, and when they are.

What is poetic thinking?

I define poetic thinking as the transforming power in the interaction of the form of life and the form of language that acts when a subject constitutes itself in a creative and dialogical way, transforming the ways we feel and think, in short: the way we perceive the world.Against the backdrop of the anthropological question, that is, what does it mean to be human?, in the German tradition of philosophical and historical anthropology, poetic thinking builds on two approaches:

a) Thinking language: that is my translation of the German Sprachdenken or the French pensée du langage. The fact that English does not normally allow for this transitive use of the verb ‘to think’ is already indicating a conceptual problem: we are lacking concepts to think the functioning of language – I want to stress that thinking is done in language. Thinking language has the fundamental belief that language has a cognitive value; it is, as Wilhelm von Humboldt formulated, ’the labour of the mind’, die Arbeit des Geistes. In order to make the world our conscious world (which is often the definition of the human world), we need language. Languages are worldviews, Weltansichten – again Humboldt. 

Society is organised in the medium of language, all social relations, including with ourselves. Human life is inconceivable without language. Language is meaning-making and meaning is not exclusively within the sign but in what Henri Meschonnic calls rhythm or the continuousness of language – language patterning and sound are an important aspect of language that needs to be taken into account in our meaning-making processes. We have to think in terms of a serial semantics and of a language-body continuity.

b) Dialogical thinking: by this, I refer to a predominantly German-Jewish tradition, in my view best developed in Martin Buber’s dialogical principle. This is based on the I-You-relationship which – rarely – happens in a moment of encounter, unfolding a sphere of the in-between, in which the subject does not perceive the other as an object but merging with the other in the sphere of a subject-subject-relationship. This is opposed to the everyday I-It-relationship when we deal with the world as outer objects. However, it is particularly the dialogical I-You moments which are fundamental for our being in the world. 

https://maailmakeeled.ut.ee/et/apt/poetic-thinking-definition#:~:text=I%20define%20poetic%20thinking%20as,way%20we%20perceive%20the%20world.  

Throwing off mooring-lines and dock-lines -- let’s listen for the word coming to sound -- let’s be underway! 

damn

 ChatGPT on current “big bill” legislation.

https://substack.com/@callingintocreation/note/c-123010527?r=26uu5u&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

inter alia

There it is

Dawn bird call

Vox Dei

Anima mea

listen closer

 I’m sitting down

To rest

My heart is sad

And tired

Congress, Supreme 

Court, president

Dark skies

Worrisome future

It is feast of

Sacred Heart 

(Is  it  still

Beating?)

to overcome every obstacle

Antonio Gramsci popularized it, “but it seems Romain Rolland, the French writer who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1915, actually said it first.” i.e. “Pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will.” 

 "You must realize that I am far from feeling beaten…it seems to me that… a man out to be deeply convinced that the source of his own moral force is in himself — his very energy and will, the iron coherence of ends and means — that he never falls into those vulgar, banal moods, pessimism and optimism. My own state of mind synthesises these two feelings and transcends them: my mind is pessimistic, but my will is optimistic. Whatever the situation, I imagine the worst that could happen in order to summon up all my reserves and will power to overcome every obstacle.” 

(--Antonio Gramsci, also cf a Letter from Prison, December 1929)

In prison this morning, without mentioning either Rolland or Gramsci, the conversation centered on the origin of one’s moral source.

Native man told story of man lingering at door of death, friend of family, and the concern two close people had about costs and responsibility. He said it was unsettling to hear their focus while the man was needing to finish his journey with care and respect and dignity.

So he prayed. He spoke to the Creator for wisdom to represent the gratitude needed to convey to the family members their proper task at this time. He sent a long thought following his time of prayer. They thanked him. 

Earlier, man from Somalia spoke about Yoga Nidra.

Yoga nidra, also known as ‘yogic sleep’, is a simplified form of an ancient tantric relaxation technique. The most general description of the practice is that it combines guided mental imagery with a specific yoga posture called Shavasana (or “corpse pose”).  (--from The Origin and Clinical Relevance of Yoga Nidra)

We read David Whyte’s poem “The Old Interior’s Angel” and spent some time on the lines --

Finally, facing defeat

and about to go back

the way I came

to meet the others.

 Prison is not easy. 

The task of co-existing with so many different men and so many demanding situations. Sometimes just to describe the alleyways and thoroughfares of daily travels (travails?) in a maximum security setting is an invitation to see through the pettifog and performance presented and an opportunity to see one’s way clear to navigate another day.

Native man says “The blessing isn’t what you ask for, it’s what you’re grateful for.”

And then, in final circle, the thought: What I am is this moment creating (Itself) through this person, this moment.

The Itself (The Creator) is creating through each person each moment as we open ourselves to the creation with gratitude.

We say goodbye.

We walk back to housing, walk out through clanking doors to front lobby out into walkway down to parking lot. 

Next week is Independence Day.

We wish one another the grace of such a prospect.

To move through into genuine and liberating interdependence.

genug

 Perhaps

A loving heart

Is enough

If love doesnt

Die, then it

Is enough

without bitterness

 I used to be naive

used to think there

were good guys 

and bad guys

now I suspect

I was wrong

there are no

good guys

we’re all

compromised

would do the 

necessary to 

avoid the inevitable --

lie, cheat, coverup

tell me I’m wrong

you’ve not capitulated

don’t worry, I won’t

ask for details, just don’t

pretend angelic innocence

it doesn’t fit, won’t fly

now that we’re clear

i've a proposition, let's

make a deal -- you 

and me -- 

here’s the deal --the next 

time the ill-begotten

comes calling, we’ll 

not answer, not again

but suffer the pain

of what has gone by

remembering, without

bitterness, who we are

over honeysuckle flowers

 Poetry helps.

Painting: “Cliffs and Sailboats at Pourville” by Claude Monet (1882) 

GIFT

by Czeslaw Milosz

A day so happy.

Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.

Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.

There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.

I knew no one worth my envying him.

Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.

To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.

In my body I felt no pain.

When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

 

-- Czesław Miłosz, Berkeley 1971, translated by the poet

it is found where it is

Help

is

on

the way

aperçu

 I am listening to novel 1984 in French.

It goes on and on during nap

In a dream therein i am on floor outside door in someone’s apartment listening to novel in French. Door is ajar. I’m unsure who it is inside, it is a woman, and I’m thinking she’ll be intrigued someone outside her door is listening to novel in French.

I might be in a meditation hall. I turn over and straighten out zabuton, zafu, blanket, a tee shirt. When my back is turned the person inside tosses out crumpled bag of what might be pretzels. I think this a good omen. I never get to see who she is. 

I awake. I am in chapter five. I find the novel in French as I listen to it in French. They are two different translations from English. I follow along.

i too wanted to fight

 I write to senators King and Collins:

Frustration and disgust.

Surely you and Sen Collins [Sen King] see the insanity of policy and person of Oval Office re immigration, ICE, blatant disregard for law and rights of individuals.

I cannot believe that there is nothing you can do to counter such disregard, cruelty, and lawlessness.

This, as well as his erratic behavior and unseemly communications. He disgraces the office and the country.

I appeal to you and your senate colleagues to stop him now.

Please! 

But there’s no poetry in slovenly moral unseemliness. 

It’s not the same as Tibet, yet:

Betrayal

 

My father died

defending our home,

our village, our country.

I too wanted to fight.

But we are Buddhist.

People say we should be

Peaceful and Non-Violent.

So I forgive our enemy.

But sometimes I feel

I betrayed my father.

(--Tenzin Tsundue) 

My father was an Eisenhower/Nixon republican (1953-1961). Nixon might have been a little creepy, but he was no full blown reprobate as is occurring now.

"People say we should be / Peaceful and Non-Violent” -- but the forces of abstruse contemporary governance are pushing the limits of responding to frustration with civility.

The Dalai Lama is turning 90 on 6july. He remains talisman and icon to Tibetans and the world. As long a life as you need, friend! As long as your spiritual name 'Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso'! God knows we are better for your being here among us.

I think of forgiving the current occupant of the White House, but a sour taste appears in my mouth and psyche. So I’ll practice further. 

There’s no poetry in punching someone in the face. There’s no good rhyme for orange. 

This president says that all presidents before him were dumb.

If I did write a poem about him I’d write:

since you arrived

I feel stupider

for not knowing

how dogs recognize

a good man from bad

But there are no paeans for dreaded non-enthusiastiasm, nor for figures whose ankles are caked with muck and mire, whose hearts and lives do not inspire, whose character is devoid of a single shred of wise inquiry or benevolent desire.

(If I shut up now, do I get credit for getting off the bus before arriving at my ticketed destination?)

broken trust

 Goons rush in

Bounty hunters

In masks

Soon,

Soon 

the backlash

One deranged

Man full of

Delusion

Half the

Country

Insane for him

her no-nonsense compassion

 David Whyte and the old woman show up.

Photo: © David Whyte

The Old Interior Angel

 

Young, male and

immortal as I was,

I stopped at the first sight

of that broken bridge.

 

The taut cables snapped

and the bridge planks

concertina-ed

into a crazy jumble

over the drop,

four hundred feet

to the craggy

stream.

 

I sat and watched

the wind shiver

on the broken planks,

as if by looking hard

and long enough,

the life-line

might spontaneously

repair itself,

-but watched in vain.

 

An hour I sat

in silence,

checking each

involuntary movement

of the body toward

that trembling

bridge

with a fearful mind,

and an emphatic

shake of the head.

 

Finally, facing defeat

and about to go back

the way I came

to meet the others.

 

Three days round

by another pass.

 

Enter the old mountain woman

with her stooped gait,

her dark clothes

and her dung basket

clasped to her back.

 

Small feet shuffling

for the precious

gold-brown

fuel for cooking food.

 

Intent on the ground

she glimpsed my feet

and looking up

said “Namaste”

“I greet the God in you”

the last syllable

held like a song.

 

I inclined my head

and clasped my hands

to reply, but

before I could look up,

she turned her lined face

and went straight across

that shivering chaos

of wood

and broken steel

in one movement.

 

One day the hero

sits down,

afraid to take

another step,

and the old interior angel

limps slowly in

with her no-nonsense

compassion

and her old secret

and goes ahead.

 

“Namaste”

you say

and follow.

-from River Flow: New & Selected Poems, originally published in Fire in the Earth

The question is not whether there is a God.

The question is God.

And when we look, and when we ask --

There 

there is 

God. 

quia per sancta cruca tua mundum redemisti

 Theologians say

You cannot talk

About the cross

Without talking

About 

Resurrection 

(Why a corpus 

On the cross?)

The horror

Of cruelty

Death and

Resurrection 

Are one thing (hint)

One resonance

No one

Without other

No other

Only one

Infinitely diverse

Different

(Unseeing this

Unknowing this)

Is opening

Prayer, opening

To nothing other

Nothing at all

Each reality merely

Itself

And itself

Whole

(and yet, no

Grasping this)

Only (“per”

Through)

not once

 I have never

written a poem

do you hear me?

Have you ever

written a poem?

Didn’t you hear me --

I have never written a poem

then, its settled

what is?

What is settled?

You have never

Written a poem

Thanks for stopping 

Bye

choirs, team sports, conversations, plank fence

 two grackles 

on white fence

at prison farm

watch Oso negro

pickup truck turn

out of parking lot

after conversation

about confidence,

skill, deconstruction,

Puddles Pity Party

Leonard Cohen -- 

Golden Retriever 

chewing on iron 

barbell, happily

wriggly -- meanwhile

on fence, "from modern 

Latin Gracula, from

 Latin graculus 

‘jackdaw’”-- ah,

inquisitiveness

through dooms of love

when my father died

fifty years ago today

we found half-full

pint bottles of whiskey

in chest of drawers 

with socks, handkerchiefs,

teeshirts and shorts --

in his 20s when The

Depression began,

Defense non-combat

boatyard through WWII

furniture salesman at 

A.H.Stiehl’s in NYC

a good man with empty

bottles who also visited poor 

families in parish with

St Vincent de Paul brothers

when they needed help

never speaking of it at home

drinking was quiet and 

familial those days, cocktails

at lunch, beers at night (maybe

one as he shaved before work)

the delicatessen and market

would send this ten year old

home with quarts of Rheingold 

and Shaeffer in brown bag

back up from 20th avenue --

it was the fifties, Camel

cigarettes and Brooklyn Eagle

bag of potatoes, peas and carrots

Dodgers still at Ebbet’s Field

my come-to-Jesus awakening

that my father loved me

sitting at school desk upstate NY

deciding it was so between Greek

and Latin exercises -- deciding?

life for him was grid of concrete

and asphalt, his nostalgia for green

a feared intruder (why that phrase?)

had entered the house, I sat

on front porch under tree shade

he lay dead in small room, heart

just gave out, asking his wife

to take off his shoes, still, gone

collapsing in kitchen, crawled

I drove down West Side Highway

through Battery Tunnel under

Twin Towers to sit on bed with him

still, gone, before body released

taken to funeral home blocks away

house now empty, room empty,

pint bottles empty, prayer as well

solitude

 how did it get so late --

nothing moves

climb stairs, turn off light 

corpus christi

If I were to talk 

about the body of christ

first I'd touch your hand