Untitled

.
My first kiss was this:
Dress rehersal, business.
"I don't know how to tell you this,
but I never have been kissed."

My first kiss was this:
Professional, meaningless.
"Everyday in the mirror,
I worry as the time grows nearer."

My first kiss was this:
A rental contract on my lips!
"And yet he doesn't rent my fears,
This character from yonder years..."


My first kiss was this...

this...

this...

now.



Who is this?
And who am I?
How do I
dare divide?

I have breathed into him
And yet my lungs exhale his sigh...

So very young to come to this,
This wisdom of my given-ness...

This choosing versus driven-ness.

(c) 2006

posted by Headless-in-GR @ 3/30/2006 09:53:00 PM | (0) comments

Rio De Los Suenos

Thing #1: One of the best parts about eating real Mexican breakfast tacos in the morning is the nice corn tortilla flavored burps/hiccups that greet you throughout the remainder of the day.

Thing #2: I had a weird dream last night that I will relate:

I'm on a bus going somewhere at night. The stars are beautiful and peaceful fields lay outside the windows. My fellow passangers are students from school and others that I don't know. I'm sitting on the left side, somewhere in the middle, looking out the right side's windows. Slowly, the moon begins to rise - first that tiny little sliver, then more and more... "Dear God!" The moon, like an enormous, terrible giant awaken from slumber, is growing on the horizon in gigantic proportions! Terror ripples through the bus - even through me - the awful cratered face is filling the entire horizon! People are screaming.

I'm thinking as fast as I can.

"Clearly the moon has changed positions in relation to the earth. Or perhaps it is the other way around. The speed in which it changed is alarming. It's lucky we're not near the ocean...we're not, are we? People on the beaches or near them should evacuate. The question of the location of the sun (or should I say the earth in relation to the sun) is perhaps the most frightening unknown. If that position has changed, it is likely that we are further from the sun, because if it were the sun's gravity pulling us, it would also pull the moon. That's mean that we are off course because something else has moved the earth. What else could move a planet? All these people think it's the END TIMES and perhaps it is, but there's nothing much to be done about that. If it is, it just is. If it's not, then we'll have to start thinking about how to make a go of it now. Unfortunately, there's still too many unknowns..."

Cut to next scene...

I am in a village at night. The moon, like a horrible weight, presses down on us from the sky. It seems so close and has yet to completely pass the horizon. I actually fear that the remaining part of the moon will nick the Earth. People are running everywhere. In front of me stands a beautiful white wooden chapel with a traditional steeple. It's dark inside. Several people have run up the stairs and are pounding on the locked doors. They're screaming to get in. I stand unmoved by my terror or the terror around me. My mind is whirling to make sense of it. The moon has now turned to a human skull. Panic and terror...and yet I know it's a sham. This isn't real. Someone is playing tricks on us. This is Orwell's war. We're confusing fiction and fact. I know it. But as I watch the frantic, terror stricken masses, I have an overwhelming sense that my lone voice will drown amidst these screams and weeping.

I sit on an overturned bucket. Fleeing, panic driven people tear pass me at random intervels. Softly I whisper, "Don't be afraid little flock for the Father is pleased to give you his Kingdom."

I watch and wait.

posted by Headless-in-GR @ 3/26/2006 11:53:00 AM | (0) comments

Imagine All The People...

living life in peace...

"...in the course of my habitual dipping into and out of what passes in American culture for Culture, it felt as if my nose were being rubbed in something. Something unpleasant. I kept finding things that purported to be cultural commentary, social commentary, high cinematic art, or even theology while being, to my eyes at least, something very different and very much less than what we had a right to expect...I had to ask myself, were these things out there on every car radio and on every beach-reading lap all just independently hopelessly mediocre, or were they part of what might be called a Mind? The new American Mind. The numbing (if not dumbing) Middle Mind?...

I concluded that in fact they did have something in common, a shared DNA of some kind...I asked what the Middle Mind wanted? What was its reason for being? My conclusion was: it didn't want us to think...no thought from any quarter that is a threat to business as usual...

...[T]he Middle Mind's version of thought is indistinguishable from not-thought, from what we should call mere product. The Middle Mind is in the business of producing 'content' while semeing to provide an authentic culture...

In much the same way, the "imagination" is made available to us through the Middle Mind, thus assuring that [our own] imagination will remain unavailable. My fundamental thesis is this: the imagination has a social function that requires two things, critique and reinvention. The imagination is inherently destabilizing. When we accept the Middle Mind as our culture (or, worse yet, when we demand it as consumers), we are not merely being stupid or unsophisticated or "low-brow." We are vigorously conspiring against ourselves. We murder our own capacity for critique and invention..."

White, Curtis. The Middle Mind, HarperCollins, New York: 2003.


I'm not sure how Mr. White's book was received. I could tell by the introduction that he camps out with the politically liberal crowd in the US, so I'm certain that he took a beating, as it appears this book will touch on politics, and anything that touches politics these days - left or right - takes a beating.

Anyway, I put it up here because I'm am generally distressed by the cheap and shallow world that passes me day in and day out. Not that there aren't points of light. Not that the "good ol' days" were better (but maybe they were). I simply think that we've been placated by cheap pleasures to the extent that we no longer recognize rich, deep lives of nobel struggle, and what disgusts me more is that we wile away our time philosophizing about bubble gum and lollipops and honestly think we are intellectual. It is, as Mr. White claims, as if our culture defines the important issues and whips us up into an emotional frenzy so that we can consume and entertain with endless ping-pong matches of radio talk show soundbites.

And dare one suggest that we end the ping-pong match, there arises a cry to parallel one heard in Ramah...

"...weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more."

See how we love our mindless distractions,
Old-shoe stability,
And endless attractions.

Light not on us, thou Unholy Muse,
Thou fiend - so we've labeled -
We resist this abuse!

Farewell to minds, as well as to Arms,
Scarlet red Letter day,
Monkey blood charm...

Cooling this cauldron - the human fight,
Not cowed but forgotten
In gluttoness night.

posted by Headless-in-GR @ 3/19/2006 02:09:00 PM | (0) comments

Training For The Whims

"We believe in you, Miss Kohn," said Wimsey, solemnly, "as devoutly as in the second law of thermodynamics."

"What are you getting at?" said Mr. Simons, suspiciously.

"The second law of thermodynamics," explained Wimsey, helpfully, "which holds the universe in its path, and without which time would run backwards like a cinema film wound the wrong way... I assure you that I know no more impressive way of affirming my entire belief in your absolute integrity." He grinned. "What I like about your evidence, Miss Kohn, is that it adds the final touch of utter and impenetrable obscurity to the problem... It reduces it to the complete quintesence of incomprehensible nonsense. Therefore, by the second law of thermodynamics, which lays down that we are hourly and momently progressing to a state of more and more randomness, we receive positive assurance that we are moving happily and securely in the right direction."

(Later, Miss Kohn speaks to Lord Peter...)

"That policeman doesn't believe a word I've been saying," she whispered anxiously, "but you do, don't you?"

"I do," replied Wimsey. "But you see, I can believe a thing without understanding it. It's all a matter of training."

~Dorothy Sayers, Have His Carcase, 1932.

posted by Headless-in-GR @ 3/11/2006 02:38:00 PM | (0) comments

Another Whim

The following selection is taken from a scene in Unnatural Death, a Lord Peter Wimsey novel, whom I have previously written about here with useful links and such. The situation is thus:

Lord Peter and his friend Inspector Parker are discussing an ingenious arrangement (which I will keep vague for those who may read it someday) created by Peter in which single women - unmarried, widowed, divorced - are finding useful work and adequate pay. The time period is the late 1920's in Great Britain. Lord Peter speaks first.

"One of these days they will put up a statue to me, with an inscription:

'To the Man who Made
Thousands of Superfluous Women Happy
without Injury to their Modesty
or Exertion to Himself.'"

"I wish you wouldn't talk so much," complained [Inspector Parker]. "Are you turning philanthropist in your old age?"

"No - no," said Wimsey, rather hurriedly hailing a taxi. "Tell you more later. Little private pogrom of my own - Insurance against the Socialist Revolution - when it comes. 'What did you do with your great wealth, comrade?' 'I bought First Editions.' 'Aristocrat! a la lanterne!' 'Stay, spare me! I took proceedings against 500 money lenders who oppressed the workers.' 'Citizen, you have done well. We will spare your life. You shall be promoted to cleaning out the sewers.' Voila! We must move with the times. Citizen taxi-driver, take me to the British Museum. I am going to collate a 12th century manuscript of Tristan, while the old order lasts."

~Dorothy Sayers, Unnatural Death, 1927.

posted by Headless-in-GR @ 3/04/2006 12:43:00 PM | (0) comments