I go through my affairs and I wonder if anyone can truly go through their affairs and as I'm sitting there with what few parcels remain to me and I wonder which way I'll plunge or fall or maybe sink, whether or not I have any control over the thing, which is under my skin. And what 'is' control, and why? Parcel's memories and shame, inventoried with complex taxonomies and uncertainty like wind captured in a cave.
”It has been found again!
WHAT?
Eternity.
It is the sea mingled with the sun."
Ah, Evolution-Science-Paxil! Everything is taken from the past. For the body and the soul, - the last sacrament, - we have Medicine and Philosophy, household remedies and folk songs rearranged. And reality television broadband entertainments, and games that kings forbid! Geography, Cosmography, Mechanics, Chemistry!
Science of Moral Rectitude, the new nobility! Progress. The world moves!... And why shouldn't it?
We have visions of numbers. We are moving toward the Spirit. What I say is oracular and absolutely right. I understand, and since I cannot express myself except in pagan terms, I would rather keep quiet.
Pagan blood returns! The Spirit is at hand, why does Tom Cruise, The Anointed Christ not help me, and grant my soul nobility and freedom. Ah! but the Gospel belongs to the past! The Gospel! The Gospel.
Æolia Revisited.
I
The sunbeams flash through nano-leaves
and illuminates the dusty air,
a magick trick, pulling
a thousand particles out of nothing
and the air is thick with old smoke
and old conversations hang heavy
in sudden solid silence;
II
It was only briefly mentioned
but a few words briefly touching
on eschatology
and the length of these days,
but it was enough to drag
old arguments out like relics
III
Because in the end we're
just playing Athens and Sparta
and we all just dance this awkward
flitting dance of talk and Grey Goose
windy indolent, passive hatred
and thought and smoke
and the world will end in fire
and we will end in fire
and who but the wisest hermit
the most stunning whore
could tear us away from this mad hunt
and set us to work?
IV
I built a fireplace with old bricks
outside that cave,
a barbeque set deep in the earth
and burnt there,
my unregenerate mind,
meats and rare woods;
alas, that I had not washed
my hands; they were cracked
and red dust turned that holy unction
to mud.
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Comments: 10
but a few words briefly touching on eschatology and the length of these days,
but it was enough to drag old arguments out like relics"). Ofcourse, eschatology brings to mind the Christian notion of how things will end up in the "last days" when Christ returns. And the references in the poem to: illumination, touching,
smoke, fire washed hands, red dust and holy unction, make one think the poem is a wrestling with what the narrator had heard in that discussion, and a need for some kind of apologetic for his own credo. What we get, however, is a pretty dark decree at the end. It is the poetical chill and bald, aching sentient shudder of self-examination and sentence.
Bold solo hunters and gatherers require no caves, especially when they are looking for bardic insights beyond facile Nietzchean like dichotomies as Apollonian or Dionysian, Hellenic or Lacedemonian, where the lucidity is derived not from the proof of the top shelf vodka so much as from the notion that one can move forward at all, we are not condemned to Camus´Sisiphean tasks forever. Herein lies the hopeful and disturbing paradox of pre Simulationism, we can repeat the past in infinite variation but still come back to aesthetic efflorescence versus determined will. And I know you, Will, are determined to show us the insufficiency and the glory throughout, even if you end up, like Dick Morris, with the wisest whore and the most stunning hermit, both biting you where it hurts most.
Meanwhile Mechanicus, in constant pain, is building simulations within the simulation. Some accounts say that Pilate washed his hands in the sunlight, as well as water. Abraham suckled himself in a cave, on his thumb, discovering mathematics, and was willing to sacrifice Isaac, but that was on a hilltop. Pagan only marks where the new culture of pious oblivion, though Peter denies it, didn't quite reach, in rings around the cities. A few remained in touch with the operating system, until the ab-end came near, and here we are, re-engaging. Hence this dump, an x-bit encryption?
As Tron said, isn't it nice to find you way back to a pure source! Oh, yes, Sexton. They have ladders that will reach higher, but no one will climb them.
Now I´m going to have to go and find my Anne Sexton collection. Probably in my medicine cabinet, where I keep all my hardcore pharmaceuticals locked up.
and brew the language of the burial rites, waiting to be reborn into new questions that only offer answers in foreign vocabularies, hoping to whisper sweet newness in your ear, that can magically conjure up worlds never seen yet by the barricaded pain. This is one of your most incisive pieces, Will...nice.