Remarveling

All coffee must now have cardamom.

All kisses, watermelon traces.

All wisdom, a touch of the marvelous.

All night-running, the gaze of the owl.

All daydreams must be touched by lavender

And ringed by willows.

All thoughts must be leapt over by frogs.

All tears, buoyed by the ocean.

All memories must contain morning mist

And songbird calls.

All handshakes, a trace of quartz.

All stairway steps, the glint of rubies.

A Guy in His Living Room Watches Tucker Carlson

 

Here they come

Women and children marching

Down the dusty road

Fleeing one oblivion

For another

Riding on the tops of trains

Or inside boxcars

Camped out at a border

Waiting

Dislodged from history

Like tree branches broken off

And found on

The river’s edge

No climate-failed crops

No AK-47 Made In USA

No ballot box mishap

Or ambitious general Trained in Georgia

Or coke sniffed in Manhattan

"I'm the king of the world"

None of the Marine invasions Stacked up in the 20th C.

Like a teetering tower of grenades

Is why this is happening

We are agents of history

We forge the new reality

Though the consequences Are not ours

After each of our gestures

Of Odyssean will

Of commerce

The line of history is cut

We are beyond

The dynamic of return

This we deliver to them

For them to endure and grow stronger

It is like a gift in that way

To be more like us

We will turn them away when they arrive

Thirsty and worn by the elements

Each historical moment

Appears in the field of time

As a firefly appears in the night

Glowing and disappearing

Unbound and gone

Snapshot from Ending the 500-year Bender: Stop Lithium Americas at Thatcher Pass, Nevada

The March 5, 2021 VICE article about the ongoing land occupation of Thacker Pass, Nevada, coordinated by

Max Wilbert

and

Will Falk

, to prevent construction of an 18,000 acre lithium mine provides some good information on the situation. However, it is remarkable that the author takes as a given that the US must maintain car culture and continue to use energy at at least current levels moving forward. At the end of the article, the author admits that perhaps the best to hope for harvesting lithium for electric car batteries is to use a mining method that does not pollute as much water as the "brining" method currently planned.

This is absolutely NOT the lesson we must be taking from this moment of convergent crises in the Anthropocene. What climate instability, species extirpation, COVID 19, plummeting birdsong and collapsing coral reefs are telling us – indeed, are screaming at us - is NOT that we must identify some Hail Mary technical fix in order to maintain this bewildering system of infinite industrial production to thereby perpetuate our mastication of the natural world. Of course not.

What the Earth - which includes all of us humans physically and psychically pummeled by this state affairs - is HOWLING at us is that NOW is the hour to DE-grow, retreat and come back home after our 500-year long bender of plunder. To sleep it off and wake to the people locally around us of all backgrounds and to the other-than-human world still singing, calling, spinning, running, swimming, diving, blooming, blossoming, whirring, flying, leaping, charging, changing color, changing shape, projecting light, projecting pheromones across space, bouncing sonar through the night and through the endless oceans for balletic navigation.

THIS is the chance to end 500 years of drunken rage and plunder and return to a way of living that served us for hundreds of thousands of years: Living as one verse in a great poem being written by all of the Earth and the heavens every day, every minute, every second. Right now, right now, right now.

Music Monopolies & Crappy Music

 "Three major record labels produce two-thirds of all music consumed in America. They are the most powerful buyer of music and talent, and they use that power to prioritize a handful of mega-stars and pop hits. They pitch music into massive radio conglomerates and streaming platforms that control how music is consumed, and they collect an ever-growing share of industry revenue." (Ron Knox, Wired) This is part of the explanation for the uncreative lyrics, copycat/bland melodies, the ubiquity of the pseudo-dramatically rendered I/IV/VI/V chord progression, and the overproduction/unimaginative arrangements which dominate the Top 20 in 2021 and the Country charts. I listen primarily to new music. However, none of it is found in the US Top 20 or Country charts, even as I do check in on them now and then. For Universal, Sonny and Warner, it's not about quality. It's about sales, quite obviously and inevitably. Music corporations are ruled by the same "logic of the market" as any other corporation.

Jeff Bezos: Greed the Size of the Amazon

Jeff Bezos has made $7 million per hour since the beginning of the pandemic. The primary reason for this is *not* that he is greedy; though he is greedy. The primary reason for this is that Jeff Bezos is operating within a social system that respects, rewards, admires, idolizes, fetishizes and worships people who are greedy-to-the-point-of-being-insane. For all of us, *psychologically,* it is our misfortune to be born into this idiotic and self-destructive culture. For many of us, it is additionally debilitating in terms of our *safety, health, and most basic material well being*... And it's dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb. George Washington: silly. Henry Ford: silly. Trump: silly. Bill Gates: silly. Walt Disney, PT Barnum, Randolph Hearst, Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, Nicolas Cage and his 32 houses: silly. Foolish. Absurd.

They won "a game" predicated upon a system of rewards that is the exact opposite of what is historically found in healthy and sustainable cultures. Could there be a more dubious accomplishment? The most cursory survey of history, archaeology or anthropology reveals that cultures which reward avarice and the destruction of nature create great misery and fail catastrophically. We may look at the city where I live. Compare the American culture of the hustle that’s been imposed onto what is now called "Chicago" with the cultures and values of the people who lived here for 10,000 years preceding the arrival of the French and British. It is quite revealing. And it reveals Jeff Bezos to merely be enough of an asshole to take advantage of perhaps the most demented system of values ever assembled within a culture.

One Role of Art: Ayn Rand's Broken Clock Moment

“Art is the essential medium for the communication of a moral ideal.” The hapless Ayn Rand got virtually nothing right in her life as a philosopher. But she was canny and she got that much right. We live in an age where many people pursue art that is devoid of an ethical message or impulse and where many who do have a moral message to share do not engage in the creation of art as their mode of expression. Art does not *have* to be anything: It is free imaginative expression which utilizes craft. However, for those of us who recognize that the belief system underpinning our current reality is in the process of delivering us to the gates of Hell, we must recognize that story-song-image-verse-movement-drama are beautiful and resonant ways to offer up alternative visions.

The imaginative tales that we spin end up forming the webs of our cultures. Though her empathy was broken, Ayn Rand recognized this reality and she very shrewdly wrote fiction as a way to communicate her ideas. In no way do I recommend that we approach art as Ayn Rand did -- as a way to extol the virtues of extreme hierarchy and selfishness and as thinly veiled libertarian propaganda. However, the multi-generational project of social and existential transformation with which we are burdened or gifted requires that we be open to all forms of expression moving forward. A society's myths/stories define it. These old American myths have run their course. New... or very *old* stories are waiting to be heard...

The Other-Than-Human World Is Still Singing, Calling…

 The other-than-human world is still singing, calling, spinning, running, swimming, diving, blooming, blossoming, whirring, flying, leaping, charging, changing color, changing shape, projecting light, projecting pheromones across space, bouncing sonar through the night and through the endless oceans for balletic navigation.