Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Redux for Nicole





The muse is his in minutes,
so the king faced a line, a bridge
and threw a thread,
a poem of rope, strong.
We pulled that thread along.

Getting ready to bless up
Sing of one love!
El of E, you and sea,
on D, eyes an' all
Muse I see all vibes.
ee oh, ee oh,
no good poor city jails.

Blues, unconditional music.
Positive goal minutes soaking
face past days past souls
a Reggae album so blessed oh . . .
an internally strong confident mountain.

A serendipitous foreshadow,
of love on the mountain.
Arrangements getting tighter
Raspberry heart vibrations,
Seen on the floor of the forest.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Love's Flower



I love such synchronicities,
They demonstrate love's power.
And prove we're just a bunch of bees,
Buzzing around love's flower.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

Dirty Processes




Oh to move our dirty processes,
to the moon or Mars or somewhere far from us,
And there mine gasses like Helium-three,
to supply our Earth with energy that's free.


Monday, June 27, 2016

Brexit




Would a re-referendum, put an end to the conundrum,
. . . of angry old Britons who claim,
That Sneferu was dumb when he said, "Khufu my son:
. . . Building bigger won't save you from pain."

The Scotch with their golf, can't add much to solve,
. . . this battle of old versus young.
"We're sold into slavery by racism and knavery -
. . . chattel of the British Union."

"Dramas of the past, today are recast,
. . . in matters of wit and good humor.
The plagues of the hour will not make us sour,
. . . if we keep stiff upper lips in amusement.

"The seeds of today are still on display,
. . . in bits of TV that are sinister.
Perhaps to redirect it, I mean the decision to go Brexit,
. . . I'm rerunning scenes from 'Yes Minister'."







Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Song of Paul - Octopus vulgaris





After the World Cup, our bandit curled up,
     perched atop his strand of pink coral.
Of all life on the reef, he stood tall in relief,
    Of course that octopus was Paul.

Perhaps an alien inhabited the brain,
     of our cephalopod bookie so damned,
Monoped shellfish claim octopoid hell-fish,
     Scam gamblers for dinners of clams.

Around a tank stood, beer lovers from the hood,
    a TV in the bar was playing.
They all knew it was Paul, the sage of football,
   Who swam in that salty aquarium.

Paul loosened an arm, and puckered a song:
     "They've upgraded my lodgings since winning.
Money's been made by visitors who've paid,
      Respect to my soccer ball singin'.
Without fuss and ado, I reach for the truth,
      I'll call this game in a minute!

A rush to the halls, for change to make calls
     In phone booths fumbling for dimes.
"Uruguay rusts, Dutch drown in Spanish dust",
    . . .  the sage old octopus chimed.

In a moment we learned, the market had turned,
    Paul the Octopus had hard wired.
"In my professional life, as a booky on ice,
     I never complained, or once whined.

“My tenured behest for a barkeeper's jest,
   His clients had lost to a pet.
Such was my karma, to excel at the dharma,
   Betting what's soft and what's wet.

"I constructed a temple, alas I’m kept single,
     Grant me a bit more space.
So I can straighten my tentacles while scraping off barnacles,
     from the walls of this glass carapace.

"A short time ago - salt time is so slow,
     To cement a cephalopod's fame.
I picked eleven winners, in return for my dinner
     And surpassed all fauna in name.

"You might say my intellect, broadcast my dinner bet,
    And affected the outcome I'd agree.
My achievements were mortal, all for some morsels,
    Of clams that died for my creed.

"I'll spin you tall tales, of sea monsters and whales,
    A bard with lore of the sea.
The list of my heroes, is long although feral,
    Indulge while I sing to you three."

Three brunettes had sauntered, towards the tank that Paul haunted,
     perched atop his pink coral remnant.
"How exquisitely formed!" one exclaimed so absorbed.
     "With eyes and and brains, he's brilliant!"

Paul overheard, so blushed pink at those words:
     "I practice the art of deep learning . . .
I'm glad you took notice, of my feats as a novice,
     when I selected the eight teams with discerning."

The beauty inferred, 'By what method, by what word?
     The thoughts this creature is sharing!
He knows to entrain, his thoughts to my brain,
     'And so bridges our species barrier!'

"I broadcast my thoughts, via neural onslaughts
     radio waves fine tuned to your brain.
When you stand near me, I swear you can hear me,
     And the tales I'm about to entrain . . .

"So enlighten with cheer, as you pull up your beer,
     with friends you just met at the bar.
Beauties listen closely, as I spell out a bit grossly,
     how cephalopods have progressed thus far . . .

"The history of AI, is nothing to my . . .
     abilities to boot up quickly.
Any subject you choose I'll learn and you'll lose,
  It's about octal programming.

"Nerves do fare better, in an environment that is wetter,
     I soaked up what was taught at the Center.
A squid whispered tips on a technique to read lips,
    Ecologists became my close mentors.

"The news of the Times, does no justice to brine,
     Citizens of the sea are exploited.
Editors of the Post now have to play host,
     To denizens of the deep re-anointed.

"On the phone through my glass, from TV and in class,
     they speak of my neural network.
But none can surpass, the reality of that task,
     seven victories at prophetic bet-work,
   
"English is no trick - Octo-lect makes you sick,
     You haven't the stomach to watch it.
It's a light show of tentacles - not one limb identical,
      You'll not unravel our Gorgon logic.

"Back in the day, before evolution held sway,
     there was an early implication of sex.
The birth of the mollusks, 'whatever' said Wallace,
     had Darwin most throughly perplexed.

"With my hectocotylus - think penis or stylus -
     I write verse for the octopus nation.
My limb number three, I could offer to thee,
     then grow another by self-generation.

"A professor last week - I overheard him in speech,"
     "said we're born of an alien race.
It doesn't make sense, our genome's so immense,
     Our proteins contend for first place.

"Of cephalopod suckers - think kisses that pucker -
     two-thousand does seem like a lot.
After counting eight limbs, it seems more a sin,
     To have science so tied in a knot.
"Before I commence mumbling, about cephalopod tumbling,
     I'll get on with some tales in cadence.
I promised thee three, about the life in the sea,
     I'll make them a bit X-rated."

"To remain in the sea, as a morsel that's tasty,
   seems contrary to becoming archival.
Before I recount, let me divulge from this mount,
    the art of octopus survival.

"As a species we're fed, from birth by the web,
     On knowledge of the sea that surround us.
We gather the facts, and use them to match hats,
    That masterfully do camouflage us.

"Our eyes surmise texture, and analyze the deep structure,
    Of coral and anemone blossoms.
We pinch up our surfaces, to rhyme like these verses,
   With the flora and fauna on the bottom.

"In brains versus brawn, the octopi have outrun,
    All reptiles, mammals and fishes,
Cephalopod three-hundred, like Spartans outnumbered,
     some have unfortunately gone missing.

"An Aussie-ringed cousin, who once learned to use poison,
     as a chemical line of defense.
A tidal pool dweller, with azure markings so stellar,
    Spelled 'don't touch' to the birds that had sense.

"Another technique, for eight legs on the slink,
     is an cloud of melanin that stings,
It balances the equation, to jet away in evasion,
     in hopes that a predator rethinks.

"We've given up hard homes, we never had bones,
     Our children trade up what they find.
An old cousin's shell, or a junk sandbox pail,
     Will house them just perfectly fine.

"When octopeds get large, they needn't go forage,
     when wandering around on safari.
They sit in disguise, with photo-luminescent dyes,
     our delectable flesh calamari.

"Once set up on top, of a coral outcrop,
     Color and texture to match.
When along swims some dinner, there's an octopus winner,
     and a crab to take up the hatch.

"Like humans we're soft, though not nearly so daft,
     We employ Musashi's strategy.
We reach out and tap, a shrimp on its back,
     So it swims right into our cavity.

"'Midst sharks and barracudas, in the dark sit like Buddha -
     in brain we're highly invested.
We co-ordinate eight arms, to avoid violence and harm -
     Our cerebellums have thoroughly been tested.

"On this topic of brains, let's now entertain,
     a mollusky tale of collusion.
How one eight legged scholar, untwisted a jar,
     and threw his lab in confusion.

"The phDs went home, this octopus would roam,
     invading tanks with profusion.
He swallowed snails, the fish in their pails,
     then retreated to conceal his intrusion.

"He pulled shut his cover, when night missions were over,
     then watched the blame-game begin.
'Who stole from our lab? Who robbed all the crabs?'
     The white coats were dismayed to their kin.

"A solution suggested, by a tech who just whispered,
     'Perhaps it's an eight-armed felon.'
But how could a morsel, of jelly corpuscles,
     navigate a dry floor with such talent?

"When we octopi escape, we become thin as a crepe,
    There isn't a void we can't wiggle free of.
An octal prisoner like a Marseillaise safe-picker,
    Picks locks with a paperclip key.

"Our man lowered himself down, suckers wound-round,
     the legs of tables and furniture.
He filled up his mantle, with seawater to make gentle,
     his crawl across the dry desert.

"Squirting a puddle, across which he scuttled,
     he climbed each aquarium in turn.
Raiding the mollusks, he downed them in solace,
     and by dawn returned to his berm.

"Back to our story, I hope you won't worry,
    that our hero dried up on a rug.
Not at all, I'll enthrall, with a tale that's not tall,
    This Octopus vulgaris got smug.

"The simplest of brains, displays intelligence in spades,
     a complex of Mensa chosen.
Survival on the reef is not easily achieved,
     with defenses of ink or poison.
"We octopi hide with genius inside,
     Camouflage is better than evasion.
Sun Tzu's strategy of war, is indeed at our core,
     Passed to the next octopoid generation.

"And now that your here, I'll play to your ears,
    And explain how we octopi do it.
No need for protection from this x-rated section,
    Deep down you already knew it.

"Using eight arms gives a lover great charms;
     We males use one arm . . . as a penis.
It's not even bony, or a fossil that's stony,
     Ideal for an octopus Venus.

The Colossus of Rhodes wasn't embarrassed to show,
    the rock that endowed him as God.
The statues on Delos, most definitely do tell us,
   of the thing that's so shaped like a rod.

Unlike a codfish, a cephalopod is steadfast,
     To give a baculum to his octopus Eve.
The tradition's to donate, a piece of the stone age,
    That rises from his tentacled weave.

"We'll often be urged, when out on a splurge,
     Take it off to donate as a flower!
She takes it right home to nurture with foam,
     and impregnate with cephalopoid power.

"The octopus bed, suddenly turns red,
     Exodermus and suckers all match.
A Pacific Striped Venus, takes hold what's keenest,
     in hopes of some offspring she'll catch.

"One kiss beak to beak, a shudder and squeak,
     a great tangle of limbs get inspected.
The octopoid liturgy gets mumbled in synergy,
     DNA gets suddenly injected.

A painful admission, about cephalopoid emission,
     We bonding with Octopussy but once.
A sad truth to divulge, is that once we find love,
    We dry up and die like a dunce.
 
The secret to living, for an octopus that's winning,
   Never provide him a dame.
A octopus bookie who successfully avoids nooky,
    Will live long and make poetry fame.



This is part II of 'Song of Paul', for Part I go here.


Thursday, April 14, 2016

"In Service of Who?"

Lately I've been closing the draft on my gas kiln - choking it.

Heavy reduction. Starving it of oxygen. Almost all pleasant looking 'art' pottery is fired in reduction, but I've been carbon-trapping, reducing so much that carbon builds up inside the glaze itself, turning it a deep black.

I recently submitted a number of my figure drawn boxes to this treatment . . . the drawings previously were of mendicants, meditators in Buddha positions or some similar pose. . . but when heavily blackened and darkened by such a fire they became transformed.

One remains hopeful . . . I call one 'Job'. The affliction is from outside.

The other has the affliction boiling within. I call this one 'In Service of Who?".

The notion of an anti-Christ, or anti-Buddha, floats large in the world today. We live in a nation at war with its people.

So yes . . dark times are upon us.







Saturday, March 26, 2016

Preparing to Fire




Spent today cleaning up glaze that splattered everywhere. I've calcined many clay ingredients, this should allow some glazes to remain thicker without crawling. The downside of calcining is that glaze spills turn to a dust that is very toxic. So I clean up with a lot of mopping, water and sponges.

Yesterday I finished loading the kiln. A few of the glazes inside are still drying, soda ash crystals migrating slowly to the surface. I shut the kiln door, and every so often took a break from my work to peek in.

I'll probably light burners Monday evening, and fire on Tuesday the 29th. It's Mars' day, a day for warrior spirit.

My pre-firing mind turns archaic. I consult the I Ching, analyze phases of the moon, positions of planets. This is what farmers do, when so much energy is invested in a project, when there's uncertainty about the future. You rely on older modes of thought.

The I Ching gave me this concept to mull over:

"The things most apparent, those above and in front, are embodied by the upper trigram Chi'en (Heaven), which is transforming into Li (Fire). As part of this process, strength and creativity are giving way to brightness and warmth."

I turn to the moon. Many scientifically minded people will say that this matters not a whit, that the moon's gyrations have nothing at all to do with life on earth or the timing of men's affairs, and to this I say, "If you are scientific, then how could you possibly ignore the moon, which is so massive, moves all the oceans on the planet up and down every day, times nature's blossoms, fruiting and birthing, so why shouldn't an artist in any medium listen to lunar rhythms?"

The gravity of moon and planets has greater effect than any additions of fuel or energy. No farmer with argue with this. We are now in the third day of a waning gibbous moon. This means the moon is diminishing in size, rising later each evening.

I am planning to carbon trap most of my shino glazes. This means I'm inviting forces of darkness, of heavy reduction, of back flow, and retrograde into the kiln. A gibbous moon could be ideal. However the forces of decrease might be too strong at the start of the wane, so I've decided to either light up halfway into this phase, but before diminution into a daytime crescent.

The planets offer a similar story. The shadows of Jovian moons Io and Europa cross Jupiter simultaneously on Tuesday March 29th at 7:00-8:24 UT.

Io was a priestess of Hera, who slighted the goddess by submitting to the favors of Zeus. She was sent to wander in the form of a heifer, far and wide. Hera sent a gadfly to sting Io continuously, driving her to cross the world without rest. Io eventually crosses the Propontis, the isthmus between the Sea of Marmara, literally 'Sea of Marble", and the Black Sea.

Marble Shino creamy, but when carbon trapped turns black.

I'm flirting with decrease, with downward slope. Io lives in the underworld as a mythic beast for a time, eventually Zeus makes her whole. She bears his children. I'll make my preparations, be aware of the forces at work, but in the end, I'll go when my dreams tell me to. I always wait for confirmation.

The moon Europa also crosses Jupiter that day. Europa was the mother of King Minos, the progenitor of Cretan culture, rich in art and pottery. Europa like Io, was also abducted by Zeus. By carbon trapping I am in essence taking a conventional fire, and eloping with it to the underworld, abducting a clear flame to a dark realm. This has dangers.

This is also positive, for kilns are far older than the forge. Metal arts, bronze age weaponry in particular, converted worship from agricultural Goddesses, to warlike Gods, from Artemis's Moon, to Apollo, Aires and the Sun. The Oracle at Delphi was overrun by patriarchs from Athens. Ancient Greece converted from Muses to Zeus.

So it will be nice to see the girls again, crossing in front of Jove.

There are pots in the kiln that won't carbon trap at all. It is possible to seal off effects from the carbon environment, or on the contrary, invite the carbon in. This is possible by zone, and by individual pot. One may devise a clay body that will seal itself off from carbon, or a glaze. One can use soda ash which migrates when wet to the surface as crystals, and melts, sealing carbon in, or out, depending on how you use it. I divide the kiln into zones, provide some places where oxidation can occur, and control where the smokey flame goes.

These are the moments when months of drudgery turn to magic. I ready my supply of kambucha. It's a marathon. I plan to cool down after the firing, and hold at around 1900 to promote crystal growth in my glazes. Add another four hours to a ten hour firing.

Glaze firings occur during a conceptual night, with visibility almost zero, a route flown over a fogbound mountain ranges, high in the sky, or low over craggy peaks, screaming fast, or slow almost at stall speed. It may be light and brief, or ponderous and long in duration, rich with fuel, or lean with lots of air. The view is minimal due to the weather, a tiny glimpse of red or yellow suns through two tiny spies.

Yes there's a temperature gauge, and a measure of how things are proceeding indoors. The journey of a pot is metaphoric of a psychic transformation. It's not ceramics that are being worked on, but the soul.

There are many philosophies about the making of pots, and one could say these may be extended to any art, and even to life. One is a safe course, making sure your hard work ends up acceptable to others by adopting a process that is defined, repeatable and exact. To quote Mel Jacobsen, a talented potter from Minnesota . . "If you have total control of your reduction schedule, color can be the same firing after firing. Any potter should try for 100%, perfect firings every time.  . . . no rejected pots."

Another approach thrusts the pots before forces of nature. There will be a lot of rejects, but you may find a door that leads someplace exciting.

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Back Formation and our Latin Heritage



"Back Formation" is a grammatical term for describing the linguistic process of shortening and simplification caused by dropping a suffix. Burgle evolved subsequent to burglar and statistic formed after the field of study, statistics. A 'pea' is a shortened version of an older original, in this case 'pease' which was not plural, and meant 'a pea', but now means many 'peas'.

I remember a friend, a salesman who made comic attempts to repair damage caused by back formation. One of his favorite expressions was "It's not rocket scientry", in lieu of "It's not rocket science".

He also took liberties with the middle of words - "That's mathically unproven," instead of, "mathematically unproven." The word science dates from the 1300's and scientific, from 1589. Scientry is not a word at all but I wish it was. I love it.

My boeuf about Latin cognates is this: 

The Romans, via the French and Norman invaders of England, brought a Latin lexicon to English. Latinate roots, sprang from a military regularity of conjugation and syntax, and offered an ability to conjugate all variety of meanings.

Latin was designed like an all purpose tool-kit, an engineer's language, broadly covering such concepts as inside and outside (introvert and extrovert), or before and after (predict and postprandial). It's precise, superb at description.

It's a bridge builder's language developed as a kind of verbal math. The regulation of distant territories, the supply of far-flung armies and the construction of aqueducts and coliseums across the civilized world arose because of the precision of Latin as a language for dispensing military orders.

English inherits two major systems of expression. Latin, which excels at matters of business and government, for example liberty, and the older Anglo-Saxon cognates for poetic expression, for example freedom. These pairs are throughout English, inebriated vs. drunk, tolerate vs. stand.

Notice how in the last example tolerate is quite specific, whereas stand has a huge variety of meanings. The Germanic and Anglo-Saxon roots give English it's power.

"Hasten to the point would you!" I can hear my friends now. What do Latin cognates have to do with back formation?

Latin derived words are are built up of parts, often three or more. But language naturally does not tolerate pointless complexity. Some of those parts need to be dropped, over time. Back formation is the natural process by which English speakers often omit the front, middle or back portions of their words. One could say Latin syntax is ritualistic, a bit like Sanskrit, logical, and repetitive. In a ritual things are added or subtraced at the back, front, or middle. They subtract the same way.

-:-

Onto Celtic and Saxon roots of English poured a new vocabulary, in full force with William the Conqueror. At that magic moment, England inherited the power of Latin, as a language of Empire, through a Gallic filter. The new words conquered, literally:

     con·quer  (kngkr)
     v. con·quered, con·quer·ing, con·quers
     1. To defeat or subdue by force, especially by force of arms.
     2. To gain or secure control of by or as if by force of arms: scientists battling to conquer disease; 
     a singer who conquered the operatic world.
     3. To overcome or surmount by physical, mental, or moral force: I finally conquered my fear of heights. 
     [Middle English conqueren, from Old French conquerre, from Vulgar Latin *conquaerere,
     from Latin conqurere, to procure : com-, intensive pref.; see com- + quaerere, to seek.]

We may have lost the expressive power of Old English, but gained the power to dominate, to control, and to organize.

France and England reacted differently to injections of foreign linguistic power. The French standardized - beginning in the seventeenth century the Académie Française unified, codified, and deciding what was French and what was not. French has gone the way of Latin, dying from too much regularity, and planning.

Perhaps because of the organization imposed by William, the English subconscious became hungry for expressive power that got lost.

British upper classes held onto their irregular verbs, and used them as badges of birthright, and prestige. Language evolved a caste-system unto itself. Scotsmen returned from the Indian colonies, uttering new words like 'curry', 'thug' and 'pyjama'. The empire dispatched them back to their crass speaking realms with a curled upper lip. A similar division divided Cockney London from West End. The Scottish wag morphed into the badge of a servant engineer.

I'm for the power and innuendo of the street. Bring on the life of the word! Put me on the ground where a new lingo is evolving.

And so England's class strata, defined itself with the difficulty of spoken English, and injections of new vocabulary into a new street vernacular. Ports of entry for vocabulary were through the lower classes. New expressions flooded English Central from India, the Americas, Australia, and were shared on the streets of every foreign colony. England's upper crust assumed a select few of these expressions, but to this day reject many commonly accepted figures of speech.

In theory, a new word is English if a) it is pronounceable, and b) it has been used a number of times in English speech. If it bears the stamp of Latin logic, or has been formed by an organic linguistic process, it has an upper hand.  Isn't it true that any new English word has the upper hand?

Meanwhile French is slowly dying as a language, at least in France. The Académie Française is fighting back, by trimming the dictionary!

For centuries the Academy approved or rejected vernacular changes to French. Writers beginning with the Encyclopedists, defined what is French. As a result, spoken French retains little of the imported richness from French colonies in Africa and the Americas. The classic French dictionary, dies of malnutrition.

True, the brevity of French made it a wonderful vehicle for philosophers, thinkers, and existential poetry. But the starved vocabulary does quadruple or quintuple duty due to an overall paucity of word count, and thus excels at expressing abstract concepts. Slang combining existing 'legal' French words grows like weeds. The average French word has more dictionary meanings by far, than the average word English, but less words by far.

So, whether my friend was aware of his role in this process of converting common argot into new expressions, 'rocket scientry', since 1990, is emerging as an alternative way of saying 'rocket science', though he may have been joking, or pleading the scientrist's amendment.


Thoughts on 'Grassness' and Consciousness




 The Westerner defines life forms, in fact everything, with a materialist's boundaries and categories. A human being, a buffalo, a blade of grass. Books about nature display this preconception, the object of fascination, isolated on a white page. Horses, fish, or birds of the Andes, we regard them as defined iconoclastic entities, without reference to the world around them. We see stars separate from planets. Man separate from nature.

The Vedanta is ahead of us on this. Those ancient thinkers recognized no distinctions between the grazing bovid and the grass it ate. A cow was 'grassness', or the essence of grass. Grass included cows, and cows were grass. So humanity inhabits a film of life on this planet. We live as part of it. Bacteria and parasites live within us. The deer is the forest and we are the earth.

Could the subjective experience of intelligence, and sub-conscious forms of intelligence simply be ineffable cross products of material circumstances, for whose purposes our bodies have evolved? Look inside the brain, where there is seems to be little but nerves, flesh, and channels filled with fluid. Yet we intercept nervous impulses, and they do not explain themselves, or their contents. The act of searching for what is conscious is a lost quest, as difficult as locating an electron or computing the exact trajectory of a particular photon. The experimenter intervenes and destroys the experiment.

Other beings might see time much in the same way we look at a landscape. As earthlings we are possessed of three dimensions, aware conceptually of a fourth, time, which is not visible but is for our purposes, measurable. Surely there must exist life forms that directly perceive four, five or six dimensions with a kind of sight, and understand some final dimensionality, as a kind of fiction, much in the same way as we understand time.

We see space (1,2,3 dimensions), we think time (a 4th), but we feel conscious (the 5th)?

Or perhaps intelligence inhabits that fifth dimension, and the subjective self-awareness that intelligence has of itself, i.e. consciousness, could inhabit the 6th?

Asking 'where is consciousness?' is somewhat like looking for time within the three dimensional measurements of a cup of coffee. One may only perceive a cooling liquid if one admits time as a 4th dimension of study.

A 5th dimensional entity similarly cannot be measured by a 4 dimensional space. It can sit there, just as we in our 3 dimensions can park ourselves on a 2 dimensional carpet. Have we been looking for self-awareness in all the wrong places? Is consciousness, rather than a 'substance' which we can't see, is instead a dimension, from which other beings in turn see us?

Cause and effect? . . . Cause and effect are a temporal 'patch' over an eye that cannot see.

The notion of cause is a vestigial necessity for thinking about time, whilst being unable to see it. If consciousness is yet another dimension, then looking for it within 4 dimensions is as fruitless as looking for time within 3.

Suppose consciousness were everywhere and not contained within a 3 or 4 dimensional space-time continuum. It could be bound up within a 5th dimension. Once there, it might perceive us with the same clarity that we perceive a print on a museum wall.

The human mind/brain has no lock on consciousness. Water is conscious. Fire is conscious. Stones are conscious, and so is air. It all exhibits behaviors of consciousness. Infinite detail. Infinite complexity. Fire processes energy. Fire sorts out an infinite number of inputs and produces a result, computes a path, allocates resources etc. Water also. An ecosystem. An atmosphere.

We speak of 'light' from people who are uniquely intelligent A 'star'. But what of actual stars? The universe is a massive computer of possibilities, computing more conscious activity in just one bit of solar surface than all human life on earth.

Such a claim begs for clarification. What is consciousness? Isn't that the question we've been asking all along? Aren't we investigating where it occurs, how it occurs, what creates it, what are its thresholds, its behaviors, its realms?

I say this. . . The subjective "I" that is 'thinking'. . . . it's all real yes, but that's the only thing that is real. No other realities may be confirmed. The tags 'conscious', 'self-aware, or 'intelligent', may now be filed as endorsements by a lower set of vectors, that are aligning votes behind a power they cannot comprehend.

In other words language creates expression for quantities it does not fully understand to begin with. The word 'consciousness' is really only a sign, for an abstraction like 'God' or 'matter' or 'energy', useful only so far as we make them so.

The abstraction "God" has been useful to mankind, even though most in the current generation of scientists contend that the gods are dead, surprisingly the father of archetypal psychology would argue that they are more alive than ever. The most fundamental of man's technologies evolved when the prevalent paradigm of humanity was God fearing. Science was not even born. I'm making the point that paradigms of thought, whether dominated by gods or science, are complexes of behaviors, not self-evident truths.

Science, as the complete evolution of materialism, demands a return in practices and technologies that are useful for our survival. Viewed in this way the paradigm of science may be viewed as a set of conclusions from a thought process. Yet our science is hopelessly locked to the hip of materialistic assumptions. So we are unable to 'divine' higher concepts from our simplistic conceptions of matter and consciousness.

"Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts, not an everlasting truth in itself." C.G. Jung

Feed it




Letters, lines, verses, pages,
In fetters we try to learn in stages.
Play on strings, feed the crow,
Tell you things you need to know.

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

A Petal Fell




perhaps a petal fell
from a flower, to a well,
and floated there boat adrift,
a silent merely listening gift
has the water taken,
the color of some tea awakened?
ladies feel what Hades yields
the reality of a pachyderm,
or kraken attacking rationalism,
mite-sized product of mathematics
improved methods for observing antics.
the world thinks I like this cat
the dog it waits for dinner scraps
I'm supposed to feed it true,
then to walk it, with who?
the last un-dead dude on earth
how can you not be tripping birth.
inspire a brother, kick zombie ass
and try to tire your brain alas.
a brother needs no motivation
to amp up and protest this nation.

Phonetic Key to Love





I'm serious. She writes:
"Sculptures, I see you all, but your ease.
  I see your LP, your record,
  As a call to your sword."

"Or as sculptures I see, you're a tourist.
 Imagine that I'm a genie who's come."
 I see you M, or I see you N.
 I'll see you in six, see acts sexual.
 Thanks to you all!

Concrete, yes, I see on Crete, romance,
And her old man's Cretan understanding.
You and her stand under, you and her,
"Companion, do you see MP anyone?"

Giving jives are sinful, merciful.
What could please, what completes,
As I am Siamese, come see I'm a symbol,
An opportunity, to top your pint.

My Mother and my other,
Brother we are there.
Father, I have other Sisters as I stir
Investigating you, we are the gate.
You envy, observe my b's or v's
Enervated that we never ate.


Friday, February 5, 2016

A Beam of Light




From a lost dim star, beyond Sirius,
Some photons made their way to us
Waving hot, though cursed.
As centuries ticked by on Earth,
How many departed, in what record?
Of loves departed Orion's sword.
A hundred-thousand light year song
A galaxy across, stars played along,
Gathering news with waves of force,
Gravity bending, flew on course.
Cro-Magnon with flint tools bored,
Across heaven's expanse of space they soared
Pressed on, they must,
Brothers, sisters dead by specks of dust
Collisions to barely warm a comet's ear,
Made precious by light in just one year.
More lost than sand in deserts girt,
Of earth and Mars, that snow and dirt.
When light dies, oh how matter hurts.
Asteroid belts gunned down platoons,
And patrolled the solar system round.
Lepton corpses gathered in orbits muted,
Rather unnoticed by electrons recruited.
Survivors wander'd earthward lost in haze,
Ionic confusion to end their days.
Drowned by atmospheric streams,
Some hit my eye, my cornea dreams,
Outside cold, from star streams hot,
Photonic time was running out.
Yet at the cataract a few occluded,
Rushed the aqueous sea secluded
Past Cerberus, Iris, briefly crossed,
Those hit pigment flourished lost
Crossed vitreous, cracked by age,
Most killed, few paid a final wage.
A dozen or two made right of way,
Searching to disembark in quay
Or beach safely, a retinal landing,
How light works is understanding,
I've lost you star, you are gone,
I saw the gleam of one photon,
For an instant, pivot die,
And knew just then, we shined.


Thursday, February 4, 2016

Delving




Delving into philosophical questions,
‘Did Paul guess? How?
What were his chances?
1/256 or 1/2^8, five or twelve, 
into numbers we’ll delve.

2 to the eighth,
now Schrödinger's cat.
Quantum Theory and all that,
How did a mollusk, forced into solace,
Understand the waveform collapse.

Particles of light, infinitesimal yet bright,
Paul not at all.
Suppose it was planned,
A soccer ball playing the field,
rigged by dreams.


Dark





This piece was a gift from your father.
It was lost during your tour of the galaxy,
and was stolen by that woman
you envied, yet whom you learned from.
You're just jelly in the sea,
you grew but stopped glowing.
Your body will be devoured,
or you will be in Orion
before I ring the bell.


Almeria



A solution came,
Watched by fire, I held my tongue.
What kind of pen is this?
Raisin Bran means Raven or Bran,
a clever boy plays a soldier’s tune

It’s a battle or a dream
This language given here
Come magical refrain, come on, come!
See Almeria, the bridge.
Soldier, you’re the trouble I needed to hear.




El Corazón de la Frambuesa




Mi amor,

Entender cómo., ni por qué,
valentines aparecen.
   en los pisos de los edificios
   o en el corazón de rubí, bayas.

Estas son señales solamente,
   sientes lo que estoy sintiendo.

Mirar hacia arriba, mira hacia abajo,
  en todas las direcciones
    encontrará pruebas,
    como si, 
de todos modos no creer.

Entienda esto
y que entiende
el universo que nos une
           nos guste,
           o no.

Te digo esto,
    no porque no sea así,
    pero porque.

Ellos son.
Nosotros somos.
Es.

Sunday, January 31, 2016

Frozen Words





How to phrase, what's not out loud
These words are made by water clouds.
Direct to your heart, center my life,
Letters carry weight, or try.
Words alone will swamp you,
A hunted seal, you could drown.
I'm not the orca, circling
Or a convent of hooded hashishins.
I am the raft that keeps you above water.
Losing you would come around.
So melt frozen love, I am patient,
For rays to turn ice, into ocean.
And bring you to your senses.
I'll warm the level of your sea,
And flood your city to its knees,
And when you see the water rising
Please do call and advise me.

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Number and Rhyme




Nine years passed, we all grew old,
Tears don't last, and neither will gold.
When all is said and gone and done,
Intent is the only song that won.

Enough of this rhyming poetry,
I'm tired of what I hear.
It's time instead I wrote for my eye,
And not compose for my ear.

Every story in words has a particular smell,
Of a plane in the dirt, or a liar from Hell.

To thee on shores of Lake Ontario,
I'd like to see more of your tail yo!

Ancient sword and white napkin sabrage,
De-corks champagne of a by gone age.

The duty of rhyme is for beauty that shines,
The intent of prose? The rhythm of growth.

Romulus seduced a lupine strumpet
Love induced by divine trumpets.
Supine cantua amused a wench.
Remus confused by bovine French.

The nerve of a vampiric satire, 
Babelicious curves which will not tire.
Fake fangs and fights in mud,
Slake my thirst with flights of blood.

Twins, our shoes live separate lives,
They win and lose as husbands and wives.

If Donald Trump should heed the call,
to lie and pee beside his wall,
I’d hate to miss the sound and fury,
Of the Rio Grande filled up with urine!

If I can't write a rhyme, I'll have to just drop you,
With a name set in time of a gal who out talks you.

Tantric experiments in symmetry,
Make limbic merriment, naturally.

Truth's in fabric of shitty media,
Put some tooth in what Kubrick feeds ya.

Hide the truth in plain sight,
prop it up for all to see.
Let it fly like a child's kite,
then you call it conspiracy.

When poetry of youth is gone,
 . . . adultery hears truth in song.

Icarus fell, on wings of wax,
Gold as well, before April tax.

Mathematics of meter and rhyme,
Makes asthmatic all cheaters of time.
Equations with numbers our deeds are encumbered,
By meanings that feed us yet die.

Yogi Yoshi graced my door,
Feet upraised, hair on floor.

'Tis not a perversion to say kundalini,
Made inversions in Santorini!

Thasos Mykonos Santorini,
Yogi Yoshi in a bikini!

Yogi Yoshi in Mykonos town,
Taking poses upside down.

Octopi are free-floating, an achievement worth noting
     Not jellies for crustaceans in hiding.
Forsaken their shells, for intelligence from hell,
     and mastered the art of beguiling.

A residency in poetry would makes tenancy a dependency.
The menacings of sharks at sea brings harmony to the ocean tree.

She's loaded, lit, pilots retiring,
Weather well-boded, and fit for a firing!

Some night when we're feeling fine
After a rich meal we've taken with wine . .
Tell me some tales of gals with young males,
And afterwards I'll tell you mine.

Natasha got married on a tour of the bay,
To a boy who spoke Russian as well as Anglais.
There were artists and critics and writers of reviews
Salmon and shrimp and fancy hairdo's.

A sentence does time, to restore justice of rhyme,

An equation is persuasion: "Take an eon, on vacation."

When I know all Gnossiennes,
. . . Then I'll go 'homme parisien'.
Just a bloke, with poetry,
. . . who plays the notes of Eric Satie . . . .

The alignment's right for sexy poems,
Sized on sight by respectable tomes,
What's struck down, when once on the town,
Is permission to romp as we roam.

Kerbel Space employs fanatics,
to confuse the pace of mathematics.
Cerebral 'g' is same on Earth,
begins the game of denying birth.

Adjust the day with poetry,
Wait to play some Eric Satie . . . .

The gamble's up, minutes are down
Our fables fucked up, the climate's not sound.

Bitcoins say that Gold is dead,
Goldbugs see a craze ahead.

"Don't fly too close!" old Dedalus said,
"You'll die like most in the cold sea like lead."

A dragon speaks with forked tongue,
Sagan will teach that you've been stung,
Musk was read into what went down,
And now he hides like a Martian clown.

Though Natalie writes some poetry,
She knows she's not seen eternity.

Words fall to earth, seeds push up fruit,
The writer gives birth, or hides like a newt.

What heavenly yearning was sent,
All that poetry on Earth had meant.



Thursday, January 14, 2016

Song of 81 Poems - XXXVIII




Truth chants for thee.

I understand your absent wife.
   made choices, enslaved by gulag hands,

I feel her doom, obsessed,
   a happy sense stops me
      I go to where dead skulls appear,
And think.

Queen Daughter, started to capture on canvas,
   pictures above thought,
   And the freedom to paint.

Rigel drugged my brain!
  We might ask for their moons,
   So we might hear picture originals.

Start to discover music,
   A share in pride would someday impose
      a rigid problem.
   Space offers every bitter advantage.

Avoid his enormous snake-eating head!
   Bold father, this garb must stink.
      Suffer or paint, forever sanely.
         Impulsively, sits on beauty balanced.
            We  know our sun God.
   So sculpt him blind.

Fly over an unknown kindness.
  We still believe in sky,
In the dark chocolate howl.

Chat, dress nude, intimately,
   try a life-like vintage body,

Partly green, cooking is better,
   As children grip society.
      Mom's hard character never loses.
   Sense in our red passion my art river.

He and she are chanting face to body.
   They want to see on Crete,
      shamanic psychedelic passion.
         "Chant" she would say,
   "I'll believe when smoke calls."

Stay in the experiment.
Did you die?



Song of 81 Poems:

  1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36
37 38 
39 40 41 42 43 44 45
46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54
55 56 57 58 59 60 61
 62 63
64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72
73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81


Tuesday, January 12, 2016

What IS love?




One might ask, do the reasons for loving even matter?

What are the causes of love?

Where is love? And is the direction of our love real, or just an illusion?

Shouldn't love be something that we do without reason?

Does love go somewhere like the soul or spirit after death? Or does it rot within our perishable bodies? What happens to a love that perishes?

Is love that I feel even mine to begin with?

If love is without reason, cause, locus or direction, birth or death, object, or even subject . . . . then what is it?

Might there be equations that define love? A differential of loving, an integral of attraction?

Possibly yes. But they will only approximate, the behaviors of love just as physics attempts to model the behavior of matter and energy. Light and matter are not the equations that describe them.

Love, like gravity and light, seems to hold some universal quality. Is love like dark matter, that= invisible stuff holding galaxies together? If love is heavy or light, is love governed by gravity?

Love might simply be our animal perception of one of the binding forces that hold the universe together. Love has been called an emotion. Emotions are the study of psychology. Yet in that universe, the science is also inadequate, the psychologist all the names and labels he throws at human conditions, simply mask his lack of understanding.

Like the physicist's model for gravity, or the strong or weak forces of nuclear attraction, love may simply be an emotional model for defining ineffable forces that are much greater than any of us. Yet physics fails, to explain love. The corollary breaks down, dissolves into a myriad differential equations, each without a pulse of life.

We do not know where it comes from, or where it goes when we are done loving. We know it is everywhere, yet we seek it. Love seems to act as an incentive and a reward, but also as punishment, but performs inconsistently at both. Economics won't explain love.

Love can come from anyone anywhere and be directed at anyone, anywhere. While it may be said love is blind, lovers feel gifted by second sight. Does love obey the laws of optics?

We know it cannot be found and yet when it is inside us we know it is there, stronger than we know who we are. The laws of physics of conservation of energy can't explain love.

Love can be empowering, enervating, debilitating, enriching, denigrating, or even fatal. Love can be destructive or creative. Cosmology and astrology can't possibly deal with love's complexity. Yet love always seems true to its own laws.

So what are those laws? Are there any?

I love this or that, this place, that river, this woman, that man, this child, . . .

We do not create it, nor can we. We do not destroy it. Nor can we. We give it to those who have it, and to those who don't. We ourselves may not have it, yet it is possible to give to one who has plenty.

Love may seem similar to water in a glass, in our bodies, or the sea. Sometimes you get a little dose and know it won't last. Yet it is still water. You can horde it, you can waste it you, but it won't be destroyed. You can transform, it break it down, yet it returns, as water.

You can drown in it or die from lack of it.

It can power the world.

Yet if you horde water it will go flat. Sunlight may not be captured, but the energy of sunlight can be. Where does the sunlight go after it's energy has been captured? Physicists have answers to these questions, but about love, they do not.

Love may transform the behavior of water, this has been shown scientifically, but the simile breaks down again. Love and water are not the same.

Yet how we treat that water seems to me to be the nature of love. How do we treat the air? Do we show grattitude for sunlight?

All people cherish love, the thirsty and fallible cherish water in a desert. Yet water seems everywhere except where needed most. If only we could all stay nourished by it forever.

Religions promise oceans of unconditional love. Global warming promises too much water - the icecaps will melt. Can there be an excess of love?

When love becomes doctrine, we lose it. The worst acts of violence, are often conducted in the names of creeds that preach love. 

Love moves freely, independently and in ways superior to all life. It can flee or reappear anywhere, anytime.

Some would say managing love is about managing expectations. Know your love. Don't expect it all the time.

Love seems to demand terms, to flow where and when it wants. 

Know love when it comes your way. Recognize it. Pass it on.


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