Anacreon’s Place

from self the split is saved
what if I were to be
hornswoggled into that
wholly other
sensitive to the dynamics
when others are online.
the internet has become
our collective unconscious
enacted in fibres and silica.

I would have
thrown the shot put
farther if
I had done a shot
of jaeger before
the meet.

where did it all go?
tickets prawns
ancestors
consequences
her love
this ice cream
cone
snaking up
through steps of
air breathes Charleston
July

Music pulses day-night’s
touch of minds and tongues,
tracks we do not forget.
Athwart, astern, downstream
learn where I is the center,
sick to death of paroxysms of
gray wraiths and broken
timers.

The chevy breaks down
at the crossroads and hail
begins to crack on the windshield
as I walk to the service station.

He drives home in his Fiat and feels
the spirit of his music, crowned red
being, sitting beside him to his left,
the being whose form and focus,
whose incorporeal blood, is
given life by the precision hammerings
of each member of the band. His breath
frosts the window and stirs the
carburetor, makes the engine
roar.

Each music seeks a player, however
unlikely. The least likely, greatest
gods’ favor.

1.

broad thump bass

the theatre burns
next to the bakery

the power substation knocked
power out in three nearby towns,

plunging the love factory into darkness
which is its element.

2.

getting to that place
in the mind

the strings vibrate
four different ways

and he was disappointed that
I thought

the universe strokes
Jimi Hendrix’s guitar.

Dear Pink,

Hope you’re doing well. Like the rest of your fans, I can’t wait to hear the new album, as well as to catch your next tour. Both can’t come quickly enough. However, don’t take this as me wanting you to finish the album prematurely. I understand that lps, like fine wine, computer games, and great books, have to be given the right amount of time to gell and ferment in mixing and production after the initial heat of laying down tracks. I’m sure it will be awesome, like your previous four have been. Moving on.

What inspired me to write this is to tell you about something that’s going right in the world for a change. In the midst of all the dreck and horror of early 21st century Earth, where astonishing barbarity and cruelty exist alongside glimmers of hope, compassion, beauty, and nobility, we’re used to hearing about only depressing crud and titillating trivia for the morally insensate and near-terminally lobotomized from both mainstream media and the tabloids. It’s rare to get news about anything humanly or artistically significant, and you sure as s**t won’t get it from turning on the cathode ray tube addiction 97-channels-and-nothing-on device. To digress briefly - this is related trust me - when I was in College in the early nineties I had a good friend from Nizhni Novgorod in Russia. One evening we were sitting in the snack shop at Eastern Mennonite University (I think it was still College then) watching the news disinterestedly while talking about other things and we happened to get on the subject of the news media. He made the point that in the Soviet Union, even in the worst days of Soviet propaganda, you could still figure out what was really going on in the world because, once you learned to crack the officialspeak code, you could read between the lines pretty effectively. However, this was impossible in the United States, because the news media only ever talk about trivia, not even addressing issues of real import, so even if you can break through the propaganda overlay it doesn’t do you any good because there’s no real information under the doublespeak. So that insight became a valuable addition to my mental toolkit when watching the news. Digression over, many pardons.:)

The good thing I wanted to tell you about is in the world of art. There is an art gallery in the sleepy town of Staunton, Virginia called Kronos that has opened up within the last year. (Full disclosure: it is owned by close friends of mine who also publish my work in their magazine Samizdat, and provide a venue for me and many others to do poetry readings and dramatic presentations, as well as displaying many fine art pieces and having a ton of events like gigs by excellent bands locally, nationally, and even internationally, so I’m not remotely unbiased). Their website is www.artisdangerous.com. Their ethos is that art should be about the art itself, and not the retail value of the artwork - the profit that can be made from rolling over, say, a famous work that was purchased for $50 million for $75million for example. Or the pedigree of the artist - how many rich people or critics the artist has pandered to or how many fancy gallery shows are on their resume. Well, there are articles on the website that state their mission much more eloquently than I can here. The website itself has tons of art on display, as well as many articles and essays on various topics of art and political/social interest. I’m hoping you will check it out and just enjoy. It seems like the kind of place you might dig just from what I know of you from interviews and so forth.

My soapbox of course is that there should be more venues like this in the arts - visual arts, music, poetry, whatever- where the art itself is paramount and all the corporate bulls**t and social posturing are blessedly absent. I’m trying to tell everyone I can about my friends at Kronos for hope that the meme will get out and inspire others to do the same, as well as of course to check out Kronos.

Sorry so long-winded. I hope you get a chance to check out and enjoy the website. I can’t wait to hear your next musical effort.

Best,

Anacreon

Another colonial tide onrushing, counterculturing
the broken dong men fighting with cats and dogs
reigning from velvet thrones, and helicopters -yes
swirling, swirling through the smoke of invective as
failed peacekeepers rush to shove their manshoodies
around the necks necklacewise of dire, sere, rebels
scraping themselves with potsherds in admirable imitation
of the chest thumping of idiots worldwide.

From the window I saw you
and your son on a blanket beside
the beech tree, reading in the
June warmth and I could not
remember his name - thank God
he’s not mine was my first thought -
and I plumbed the cranial recesses
while making a sandwich as strangers
and friends processed through the house,
and your son, we’ll call him Jason
came back in riding his tricycycle
on the hardwood floor into the dining
room. And I figured you would be mad
at him but maybe I should let him, indulgent
old-uncle like. He may turn out to be
an astronomer, or a rock star.

Another way of saying “binary thinking” is “dualistic thinking.” It’s become something of a cliche in postmodernity to decry “western dualism,” so I’m going to avoid the phrase to stave off my own boredom and perhaps make a more trenchant point.

I’ve noticed that North Americans are terrible about seeing things in (cliche again) “black” and “white”, good or bad, this or that. To some extent, just to use ordinary conversational english you have to employ antonyms but that’s not what I’m talking about. Somehow for Northams (I’m not going to use the term Americans b/c of course that includes our friends in Canada and Latin America, and I’m not talking about them in this critique, mainly because I have little knowledge of whether they tend to see things the same way, but I suspect not…) we hypostatize all of our dualisms into Manichean cosmological struggles. So you’re left wing or right wing, “saved” or “unsaved,” skinny or fat, whatever.

You know, at one point in my life, in a more spiritually and philisophically conservative headspace than I am in now, I was told that the critique of dualistic thinking is actually an evil -even diabolical - deception to get people to reject the most fundamental tenet of morality - a deed is either good or evil. It can’t be both, and it can’t be something else entirely. There was a sense that, if you began to question the fundamental binaryness of morality, you were approaching a “slippery slope” whose end was antinomianism (no moral law at all) and moral and ethical anarchy - the damnation of the individual and the shipwreck of society. Even profound thinkers such as C.S. Lewis (in his Space Trilogy for example) fall into this thinking.

I won’t deny that antinomianism has its dangers, but there is more to life than 0 or 1, this or that. We are not faced with just two choices in life, but a myriad of choices with consequences. Really making sound moral and ethical decisions is an exploration of a rich landscape. In that scape are fascinating characters, places, treasures, and some monsters. (Okay I played too much d&d growing up…)

Rather than the binary this or that approach, I suggest we try at least experimentally to think of moral life as an experience of choice and relationship within a rich matrix of possibilty and consequence. (Yes I used the m word, but the Matrix trilogy actually does deal with some of these very same philosophical concepts.) As this meme expands into other areas of our awareness, we may find ourselves not consigning others to one of two categories, and may have much richer emotional lives because it. We may find - I believe Kierkegaard said it - that life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.

bin ich in Mitte einer grossen Entscheidung…
kannst du in sie einsehen? fuer mich verstehen,
die niveaux kapieren?

es jauchzet der Fruehling
in der Hoellenloch eines Greises verdorrener Glut
allmaehlich kriechen die Einsichten
ueber mich, oder vom Innen?
wer weiss?

und damit soll ich beginnen

the new comes faster than dawnlight shimmers
at, will the basting dusk wither a flat container of
grace? Mud is king, aardvarks (afrikaans for
earth pigs) rule; fragment of molar is left, speck of
alabaster dust on the floor of a desert rift.
This is what they bequeath, the less
than two thousand human individuals
whose physical remains are the entire
panoply of our knowledge of prehistoric
hominid taxonomy.