Sunday Afternoon

Thoughts reading Wordsworth and Ferlinghetti in early April Spring

Can sweet taste change us? Some poems of Wordsworth help. This is one of my favorites.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Then Ferlinghetti has this poem I like

Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames] (2007)

I am signaling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words....

I do know my reading in Literature and Philosophy has been me with a candle in a cavern painfully aiming towards what poor eyesight but extraordinary intuition designates as exit into the outside of my interior cave. All I have read since learning how has been the quest out. Has it changed me? Guardedly I grant yes inspiration has been had and in the labyrinths of Minos the authors have been my slender thread from depths profound and dangerous. However my Ego is always behind the steering of the vehicle shouting Yes and No uncaring about anything but navigation by these slender threads. Art the overall strategy of exit. The art of living first and either creative or pecuniary work product second. Limited freedom pointed to the primary aim of higher freedom. And unsurprisingly come Covid I was unexpectedly vindicated by my little Yes and Big No. Shrinking my limited little dollarless world to a few blocks did not bother me. No money no cry. I watched and took notes and write commentary to stay sane enough to laugh at the theater of Cruelty. This is an Artaudian moment in the world for Beckett aimed at something else than Artaud.

Artaud draws an unthinkable analogy, sifting through a history of fatal contagions we label as “the plague” and arriving at the eponymous observation that it is here, in the plague’s own ambiguous method of appearance and reappearance, of individual bodily invasion, and of societal terror and collapse, that we may find theatre’s own raison d’être. The plague destroys all that enslaves man in his daily shackles of norms, rules, and constructed realities, all that deprives him of the essential truths found within. Theatre, so Artaud, should act as just this purgatory power, this moment of societal dissolution which allows its witnesses to come face to face with a plane of being otherwise always locked away behind the thick iron curtains of what Artaud calls a society that is unknowingly killing itself. https://parisinstitute.org/antonin-artauds-the-theatre-and-the-plague-a-film-by-wolfgang-pannek/

I expected worse by now two years ago and daily grasp by the information I peruse that in being right I was quite wrong about the worse. What I see arriving suddenly though 2023 is acceleration. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/

Worst is variable over time. In the fulness of time after mandatory injections, lockdowns, and economic sabotage and not one moment later the clock strikes and quickly trapped by civilizational curfew in the endless jam of traffic in gridlock in all directions risking arrest and imprisonment as the commute of one hour travel to home instantly is quite dangerous due to the vigilance of Argus Operating System and surveillance everywhere in January 2024. With a whimper the best in the West suicides https://archive.org/details/james-burnham-suicide-of-the-west_202008/page/n1/mode/2up and survivors wait to see what follows from the derailment and toxic burning.

On Substack we read of the intricate construction of the Con of Covid-19 and we read of medical consequences escalating. I smile thinly. Americans much more upset in public by the indictment of Trump over a peccadillo than the continual Tyranny taking us to war abroad as it wages revolution at home. I look back in wonder as I turn 66. An educated guess of mine is the detour to this present world was Woodrow Wilson. World War 1 and all that. The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I was about 40 million: estimates range from around 15 to 22 million deaths and about 23 million wounded military personnel, ranking it among the deadliest conflicts in human history. The total number of deaths includes from 9 to 11 million military personnel. The civilian death toll was about 6 to 13 million. The Triple Entente lost about 6 million military personnel while the Central Powers lost about 4 million. At least 2 million died from diseases and 6 million went missing, presumed dead.

This 1919 moment then saw the American Century and now the replacement rising Hegemon is China. The Chinese Century coming is Transhuman. And here again a grim irony unfolds with Henry Adams writing on the American mind in the Dynamo and the Virgin: The Virgin became his symbol for Christian tradition and, equated by Adams as the Roman mythological Venus, the female force in general. Looking to the future, he wondered if the god of technology, the dynamo's apotheosis, was on the verge of replacing, as he put it, the Church and the Cross.

China was not forseen in 1900. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3215286/chinese-team-behind-extreme-animal-gene-experiment-says-it-may-lead-super-soldiers-who-survive

https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity