tell everyone just to remember their names

 Poem by William Stafford:

A Message from the Wanderer 

BY WILLIAM E. STAFFORD

Today outside your prison I stand

and rattle my walking stick: Prisoners, listen;

you have relatives outside. And there are

thousands of ways to escape.

Years ago I bent my skill to keep my

cell locked, had chains smuggled to me in pies,

and shouted my plans to jailers;

but always new plans occurred to me,

or the new heavy locks bent hinges off,

or some stupid jailer would forget

and leave the keys.

Inside, I dreamed of constellations—

those feeding creatures outlined by stars,

their skeletons a darkness between jewels,

heroes that exist only where they are not.

Thus freedom always came nibbling my thought,

just as—often, in light, on the open hills—

you can pass an antelope and not know

and look back, and then—even before you see—

there is something wrong about the grass.

And then you see.

That’s the way everything in the world is waiting.

Now—these few more words, and then I’m

gone: Tell everyone just to remember

their names, and remind others, later, when we

find each other. Tell the little ones

to cry and then go to sleep, curled up

where they can. And if any of us get lost,

if any of us cannot come all the way—

remember: there will come a time when

all we have said and all we have hoped

will be all right.

There will be that form in the grass.

Copyright Credit: William Stafford, “A Message from the Wanderer” from The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems. Copyright © 1998 

di algo que valga la pena escuchar

 christ hear us!

        I do

oh . . .

exhaling, exhuming

 buddhist friends

tell us breathe well

administration hacks

tell us go to hell

buddists will go

back to Texas

maga crowd

readies fires --

me -- i'm going

to take a nap

culture wars

wear me out

I take my beads

to bed

elsewhere, hate is

hard telling, hard hearing 

aghast, arriving

 All

Alone —

Doing

Nothing else,

Of itself

Begins

Twilight dawn

Just above

Newly fallen

Snow

han-shan

 What do I depend on?

Amidst a thousand clouds and ten
Thousand streams there lives
One ex-scholar.
By day wandering these green mountains;
At night coming home to sleep
Beneath a cliff.
Suddenly spring and fall have
Already passed by,
And no dust has piled up to disturb
This stillness.
Such happiness!
What do I depend on?
Here it’s as tranquil as autumn river water. 

—Han-shan 

noticing

 Cold

And snow

February

the limit against which

I don’t think I’ll move to Canada unless, for some obscure reason, I am forced to.

It’s how I feel about death. I won’t commit suicide, although I do study it. I look forward to my death, only because I will die, and the afterward of death remains a bit of an unknown, toward which realm, the unknown, my attention is attracted.

From The Guardian: 

 

Being and Time part 6: Death 

Simon Critchley, Mon 13 Jul 2009 09.30 EDT

As I said some 6 weeks ago, in my first blog on Heidegger, the basic idea in Being and Time is very simple: being is time and time is finite. For human beings, time comes to an end with our death. Therefore, if we want to understand what it means to be an authentic human being, then it is essential that we constantly project our lives onto the horizon of our death. This is what Heidegger famously calls "being-towards-death". If our being is finite, then an authentic human life can only be found by confronting finitude and trying to make a meaning out of the fact of our death. Heidegger subscribes to the ancient maxim that "to philosophise is to learn how to die". Mortality is that in relation to which we shape and fashion our selfhood. 

 

There are four rather formal criteria in Heidegger's conception of being-towards-death: it is non-relational, certain, indefinite and not to be outstripped. 

 

Firstly, death is non-relational in the sense in standing before death one has cut off all relations to others. Death cannot be experienced through the deaths of others, but only through my relation to my death. I will contest this criterion below. 

 

Secondly, it is certain that we are going to die. Although one might evade or run away from the fact, no one doubts that life comes to an end in death. 

 

Thirdly, death is indefinite in the sense that although death is certain, we do not know when it going to happen. Most people desire a long and full life, but we can never know when the grim reaper is going to knock at our door. 

 

Fourthly, to say that death is not to be outstripped (unüberholbar) simply means that death is pretty damned important. There's no way of trumping it and it outstrips all the possibilities that my power of free projection possesses. This is the idea behind Heidegger's famously paradoxically statement that death is the "possibility of impossibility". Death is that limit against which my potentiality-for- being (Seinkönnen) is to be measured. It is that essential impotence against which the potency of my freedom shatters itself. 

 

At the end of the introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger writes, "Higher than actuality stands possibility". Being and Time is a long hymn of praise to possibility and it finds its highest expression in being-towards-death. Heidegger makes a distinction between anticipation (Vorlaufen) and expectation or awaiting (Erwarten). His claim is that the awaiting of death still contains too much of the actual, where death would be the actualisation of possibility. Such would be a gloomy philosophy of morbidity. On the contrary, for Heidegger, anticipation does not passively await death, but mobilises mortality as the condition for free action in the world.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/13/heidegger-being-time 

 

Awaiting, yes, awaiting. 

Like walking, like the monks from Texas to DC, we await while doing what we are doing. I await walking with each other step realizing walking.

I await

Michel de Montaigne wrote an essay titled “That To Philosophise Is To Learn How To Die” which begins:

CICERO saith, that to Philosophise is no other thing than for a man to prepare himself to death: which is the reason that study and contemplation doth in some sort withdraw our soul from us, and severally employ it from the body, which is a kind of apprenticeship and resemblance of death; or else it is, that all the wisdom and discourse of the world, doth in the end resolve upon this point, to teach us not to fear to die. 

 

Yeah, death is pretty damned important.

I anticipate it.

I look forward to it.

More than that, really.

I look at it. 

Through it.

As it is.

there will be singing and dancing ymca

 God awaits his majesty

Hasn’t had an equal like him ever

God sips tea and waits

For his American majesty to arrive

God is delighted to have someone

To bow down to and worship at last

αν δεν έχεις τίποτα καλό να πεις

Jesus was asked about Donald Trump

Jesus didn’t say a word

Asked if he heard the question 

Jesus didn’t say a word

til death, do u.s. a-part

 One day

Soon

There will

Be justice

some enchanted memory

 I’m thinking of my death

It might have happened already

So maybe I’m remembering my death

Do we remember the future

This existence is so strange

You imagine you are reading words

america from seen to blindly seeing

 Racism is where inadequacy goes to fester and die

We can smell the degraded flesh and the rotting spirit —

Do not accept their great lie, not again

not that far from

Most times our typical news sources are inadequate. Our spirits are sacrificed to the egos and lustful greed of deficient human beings who have control over us.

We need, at times, an insight into core wisdom of efficient wisdom to buoy our spirits. 

When the Tao is lost, there is goodness. 

When goodness is lost, there is morality. 

When morality is lost, there is ritual. 

Ritual is the husk of true faith, 

the beginning of chaos.

(--from ch.38)

Ordinary men hate solitude. 

But the Master makes use of it, 

embracing his aloneness, realizing 

he is one with the whole universe.

(--from ch.42) 

The Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu

Translated by Stephen Mitchell, 1988 

https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html

Just because obsessive irrational greed-lust grabs for billions and billions of chump-change coin and bribes to stuff into your underwear drawer, there is no correlation with well-being or genuine affection looping back against diseased character.

You are not loved, not when imposition and demand for love is your every ruse masked as power. That’s abuse, not real love. You might be granted an admiring fear from sycophants and hangers-on, but don’t misinterpret their fawning and obsequious attention -- you are an object of derision and sniggering behind your back. (I’d best be careful. I might fall into genuine sympathy and longing to rehabilitate the scoundrel on one of my better days.)

These days I seem to fall into aloneness. Not out of accomplishment, but de-complishment, a failed and incomplete attempt to recognize and complete a more fulsome achievement.

I see and (seemingly) understand the characterological makeup and disorder of his supreme Egoish Apotheosis, the current occupant of the Gilded Office. 

Richard Hugo, in his poem "The Villager" reminds me:

Love him

for what you might have become

and love him for what you are, not that far

                    from him.  We are never that far.

And I am sobered. 

I don’t think I love him. Which realization, sobers.

He ritualizes his unhappiness and craving for attention, every week, every day, every social media post.

Ritual is the husk of true faith, 

the beginning of chaos. (Tao de Ching, ibid)

There arises out of dark and sinister corners of our American shadows a curiosity as to how it is some contract hasn’t been levied against his unpredictable and destabilizing effect on domestic and world stage --  but, God help us -- no, not again, not 1963, not 1968, not again. The uselessness of assassination as some curative to ideological non-preference is profoundly demented. No! Let him live. Let him have a chance to redeem and/or pay for his unhealthy psyche. No more martyrs. No more delusional belief that violence has any real benefit other than to glorify both violence and delusion, of which we have our fill.

So, we live with pain. We see brothers and sisters violently accosted, torn from their cars, work-places, families, and homes, beaten, taken to warehouse detention, shipped out of state, out of country, out of any sense of caring belonging.

The ideologues in power are miserable people.

This misery is our current fate. No amount of sequestering from the reporting and news will change the facts of what this regime has promulgated and inflicted on the populace. (Besides, the felt anguish, like bits of sub-atomic matter, squeezes through everything, arriving at our souls, penetrating even our most deflective intentions.)

I’ve taken to prayer.

Silent sitting.

Wordless gazing.

Implorative wording on blank spaces to try to find out where I am, who I am, how to be of any healing assistance during this ruinous time. Only to fail, and again fail. 

If prayer is attention, then, I am learning to pray.

If attention is communal, I attend, obliquely, such a community.

If community is salvific, thank you for including me -- even as I dwell in the aloneness of the whole -- universe.

We are

within this

(This) 

together

cold

 Shute 

Frozen water

Toboggans,

February