Joe,
Wow. Your A Feral Dog Howls in Harvard Yard is so well said. And to think
that all this ignominy is not the name of the rose, but the name of the
four horsemen of the Apocalypse, now mounted and strapping their steeds
on with greater and greater urgency. This refusal of reality implies
the end of much human life, and right quick. We, you and me, I presume,
are required while living to attend to a logarithmically increasing
number of wakes. How's that for some kind of terminal future, expressed
as bullshit intellectual newspeak?
I can still get a chill from this, though:
The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.
So it goes.
-- From Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.
Some years ago, I knew and sat and talked and drank on a regular basis with an Austrian Princess who had arrived at the train station in Dresden, just as the first phosphorous was falling from the sky. She was a young woman, then, and would later marry an American man responsible for arranging the sale of the bulk of land to Walt Disney for his Florida thing. She told me of seeing people airborne in the wind of the Dresden firestorm, alive and "flailing", and then just bursting into flames in mid-rotation.
What is that? What does that look like? How must it have felt to be thus immolated, or to be privy to the odor of that place then? On account of such, it is related the pilots and crew in subsequent bomber waves puked in revulsion. She is passed away now, but then it was time for me to make us another round of scratch whiskey sours, from the juice of fresh temple oranges from one of their groves, absurdly delicious. She knew what the sun looks like as "an angry little pin head". She also had kept, from all "those" times, a copy of "Rassenkunde des Deutschen Volkes" (Racial Science of the German People), just a little manual, you know, just so you'd know what the Jews looked like, just so you'd know which people it was OK to hate and shun and harm without the slightest regard.
The part that really gets me, though, is the "so it goes" thing. I lived some years in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and got to know a good number of "veteranos", a generation more or less older than me. You know, like Chosun Reservoir dudes, or Bataan Death March dudes, or Iwo Jima dudes, or code talkin' Dineh (Navajo) dudes, etc. Being still alive after all these "experiences", these guys had come to the "so it goes" sort of outlook for whatever given current spate of human tragedy, only what they say ("said" for some of these men: they are goin' fast), being Spanish speakers, is a la machina, i.e. with machine-like regularity and predictability. So, another set of my people who have seen things and known things that I will be forever left to try to imagine, had condensed it to a la machina. I must say, though, that over all these years I remain most impressed with their hatred of the "N's" (slur abbreviated), whether black, yellow, or "wading in the sand".
I can't set myself up as a "paragon of animals" witness to the preceeding "parables". I have played the role of bigot and showed my mettle in that role, most notably as an author of various computer scheduling algorithms to sortie sky-death over yellow-skinned people in Cambodia. Which means that in a naming function at least I am as complicit as 8th Air Force for Dresden or Air Marshall Tedder for Hamburg or Pol Pot for the killing fields, or name your entre in our collective worm Oroborus. But there are those who work position beyond complicity and into the house of maximum gain: "They will do anything to materialize their every wish", saith Bob Marley, and the effecting of "their" wishes is founded in the teaching to others of hatred for one's self and one's fellow man. As we move into this new terminal future, we will only find ourselves squatting, thirsty, tired and hungry, with those we were taught to hate, which means ourselves and the rest of the world's down-trodden. "They" will have positioned themselves beyond touch or harm or need or want or effective reproach or punishment. "We" will suffer, for what we have "learned", all the outrages that attend to mass die-off, and it will all be totally without even the slightest meaningful blow having ever been delivered against "them".
Sorry.
As for myself, though, I am happy to be alive for what would best be called time remaining. I maybe wouldn't have such a jaundiced take on things if maybe I were chillin' in some islands or beaches. Oh, well, someday soon, if the honeybees come back. For now, it is fitting most things appear as memento mori.
Rob
------
Rob,
Absolutely beautiful, man.
Absolutely beautiful.
One of those slices of the current American mind that goes unrecorded.
But not here.
In art and labor,
Joe
