The Fallows of the Year

It's been a long day already, and it's only mid-afternoon.

I woke at five to the shrilling alarm in the dark. Shuffled to the kitchen to light off the coffeemaker, then to the toilet, then back into the kitchen to find provender for the ravenous maw of the small domestic predator that bosses us around the Little House. He's affectionate but a demanding master, the furry little bastard, and will let me know in no uncertain terms if his breakfast isn't served up quickly enough.

From there it was out and about Oregon all day. I had driven two hundred miles before noon, and that wasn't the end of my travels.Fortunately today I ended up at a site close enough to my house to take a detour to the local pub - the Lucky Labrador on North Killingsworth, no more than a long pint-bottle-toss from the Fire Direction Center, where I could have a pint and some peanuts and write up my field reports and, now, this post.

And that's many of my days; up early, off to work, home, dinner, bed. Desultory conversation with my Bride and the Girl (the Boy has entered the Dormant Phase of adolescence, where he will not speak unless 1) directly compelled, or 2) about some kind of gaming - he's at the extreme endmember of "videogamer", and if there was a way to make a living at playing Fallout outside of Seoul he'd be on it like a Republican on a tax cut.

Speaking of Republicans...

Actually, no. Fuck, no. Instead, let me start with this.

I've been thinking lately about this place. About how I wrote it off this time last year, about how I had decided that it was a ghost blog, and that I had nothing more to say here. And how I felt about that.

And I've concluded that I feel like shit about it.

I've written a lot here in this place. I've been slowly collecting the "battles" pieces into a Word document with the idle thought of possibly submitting it to a publisher and realized that I am up to almost 200,000 words (and I'm only up to Verdun, back in February of 2012!) I wrote some brilliant invective. I wrote some that I, rather vainly, consider some genuinely fine prose. Some pretty damn fine prose. Sometimes even containing some genuinely worthwhile thoughts.

And a lot of crap, of course.

But I thought about how I'd chosen to let this blog die like so many others and thought...no.

Goddamn it, no.

I'm a good writer. I have some more worthwhile thoughts and ideas and emotions to write in this place.

So I've decided to make a concerted effort to bring it to life again. There'll be more "battles" pieces, but only discussing events that entertain and amuse me rather than the famous ones that make the history books and the "decisive battles" compendia.

There is one thing that will probably not be here.

U.S. politics.

And there's a simple reason for that; there is nothing more to be said about U.S. politics that I haven't said over and over again. It is a worthless subject to discuss because there is no "discussion".

The "conservative" faction in the United States has given in entirely to cargo-cultism. There is no more remaining intellectual rigor or political throw-weight to movement conservatism. It has devolved completely into a sort of...well, here's what I wrote seven fucking years ago:

"...the modern GOP has become...a windsock for the gales of the unhinged reactionary Right..."What's mine is mine and what's yours is also mine."

You might be able to compromise with a ravening wolf over a pork chop. You cannot "compromise" with the Congressional GOP; there's just nothing there but a reptile brain full of hateful shit and hunger."

And that was seven fucking years ago. Since then the prion disease has engulfed the "conservative" brains. There's just nothing left there. It's all God, guns, gays, snowflake babies, tax cuts, and Islamophobia (now with 100% more racism!) all the way down. Trump isn't a symptom, he's part of the disease, and the third to two-fifths of the American public that are infected don't want to be cured.

And that's the problem.

No republic can survive that percentage of its citizens immune to reality and reason, committed to nonsensical idiocy like "trickle-down economics" and white pride.

No.

We are, instead, living in the final years of the American Republic. Like Rome, we will either preserve the trappings of republicanism as the workings are replaced with open oligarchy, or we will devolve into a low-grade sort of civil cold war. Watch the ridiculous charade now enacted in the capital, where the reality of a moronic Chief Executive whose behavior reflects what we knew of him before the creaky mechanisms of colonial oligarchy installed him as our First Citizen cannot be accepted by his "conservative" cult for fear that, once the nonsense of Ptolomaic geocentrism is exposed as the nonsense it is, the remainder of the edifice will not stand. That a criminally cretinous fool must be defended at all costs, because the costs of accepting the criminal reality and cretinous truth would destroy the cult just as the first broken tapu brought the entire Hawaiian religion down in a heap.

These people would rather burn the republic down than hand over power, and that in itself is what destroys republics.

I cannot stop that. I cannot change it. I see no point in being the Shirer of the Fall of the American Experiment. I may touch on things from time to time, but I cannot imagine what earthly good it would do to repeat and repeat and endless string of posts that amount to a rewording of "WASF if the GOP is not destroyed!!!"

So I'll resume the one-sided conversation here. I'll talk about home and work, life and love, my home in the Pacific Northwest and other places I love or have come to love. There will be battles, and there may be poetry. There will likely be random posts where I talk about nothing but what amuses me.

But there will be, once again, posts.

Long-form blogging may well be dead but, goddamn it, it's not going to die here, not now, not in the fallows of 2019.

I sit. And I listen.

When I return to California,
to my life with its many engines—I find myself changed,
the city somehow muted, frenetic and fully charged with living, yes,
but still, when gifted with this silence, motions have more
of a dance to them, like fish in schools of hunger, once
flashing in sunlight, now turning in shadow.

~ Brian Turner, Phantom Noise

The Last Evening

And night and distant rumbling; now the army's
carrier-train was moving out, to war.
He looked up from the harpsichord, and as
he went on playing, he looked across at her

almost as one might gaze into a mirror:
so deeply was her every feature filled
with his young features, which bore his pain and were
more beautiful and seductive with each sound.

Then, suddenly, the image broke apart.
She stood, as though distracted, near the window
and felt the violent drum-beats of her heart.

His playing stopped. From outside, a fresh wind blew.
And strangely alien on the mirror-table
stood the black shako with its ivory skull.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

September 1, 2012

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

~ W.H. Auden (September 1, 1939)

Last thoughts after Memorial Day...

Pace my friend Linda, I believe that the anti-war poem is a relatively recent addition to the thread of human song.

But it may well be the most sorrowful, deepest, the most grave song we will ever sing."So I Was a Coffin"

by Gerardo Mena

—For Corporal Kyle Powell, died in my arms, 04 November 2006

They said you are a spear. So I was a spear.

I walked around Iraq upright and tall, but the wind blew and I began to lean. I leaned into a man, who leaned into a child, who leaned into a city. I walked back to them and neatly presented a city of bodies packaged in rows. They said no. You are a bad spear.

They said you are a flag. So I was a flag.

I climbed to the highest building, in the city that had no bodies, and I smiled and waved as hard as I could. I waved too hard and I caught fire and I burned down the city, but it had no bodies. They said no. You are a bad flag.

They said you are a bandage. So I was a bandage.

I jumped on Kyle's chest and wrapped my lace arms together around his torso and pressed my head to his ribcage and listened to his heartbeat. Then I was full, so I let go and wrung myself out.

And I jumped on Kyle's chest and wrapped my lace arms together around his torso and pressed my head to his ribcage and listened to his heartbeat. Then I was full, so I let go and wrung myself out.

And I jumped on Kyle's chest and wrapped my lace arms together around his torso and pressed my head to his ribcage but there was no heartbeat. They said no. You are a bad bandage.

They said you are a coffin. So I was.

I found a man. They said he died bravely, or he will. I encompassed him in my finished wood, and I shut my lid around us. As they lowered us into the ground he made no sound because he had no eyes and could not cry. As I buried us in dirt we held our breaths together and they said, yes. You are a good coffin.

(h/t to the Rude One for this beautiful, grievous poem)

What Dreams May Come

from Brian Turner's wonderful "Phantom Noise":

Illumination Rounds

Will the girl find a bed among stones?
Will the fighter find a trench?
-Saadi YoussefParachute flares drift in the burn time
of dream, their canopies deployed
in the sky over our bed. My lover

sleeps as Iraqi translators shuffle
in through the doorway- visiting
as loved ones might visit a hospital room,
ill at ease, each of them holding
their sawn-off heads in hand.

Wordless, they wait for me
to dress in my desert fatigues,
my aid pouch with painkillers

of little help in sewing the larynx back,
though I try anyway, suture by suture.

-----------

She finds me at 3am shoveling
the grassy turf in our backyard, digging
three feet by six, determined to dig deep.
We need to help them, if only with a coffin.I say, and if she could love me enough
to trust me, to not cover her mouth
in shock or recognition, her hair lit up
in moonlight; if she could shovel
beside me, straining with the weight
each blade lifts in its gunmetal sheen,
then she'd begin to see them - the war dead -
how they stand under the lime trees and ash,
papyrus and stone in their hands.She stares at these blurry figures
in silhouette, the very young and very old
among them, and with a gentle hand
stays the shovel I hold, to say -
We should invite them into our home.
We should learn their names, their history.
We should know these people
we bury in the earth.

An Old Song

In the blossom-land Japan
Somewhere, thus an old song ran:Said a warrior to a smith,
"Hammer me a sword forthwith.
Make the blade
Light as wind on water laid;
Make it long
As wheat at harvest song,
Supple, swift
As a snake, without rift,
Full of lightnings, thousand-eyed!
Smooth as silken cloth & thin
As the web that spiders spin,
And merciless as pain & cold."

"On the hilt what shall be told?"

"On the sword's hilt, my good man,"
Said the warrior of Japan,
"Trace for me
A running lake, a flock of sheep,
And one who sings her child to sleep."Yehoash (Solomon Bloomgarden)

The Old Lie

A cyberpal - I'm not going to link to her, since she enjoys her privacy a bit, but she knows who she is - is a fine poet as well as a mom (and her little girl is where I hope our little girl is in another year). Every Monday she blogs a poem that speaks to her in a certain way. Today it was a war poem by David Hernandez, a striking and strange poem, but one that I couldn't really access. I think the imagery was almost too strong, the setting too odd for me. (But note to L: I can respect the hell out of a poet who can link Wile E. Coyote and the Four Noble Truths). Good poet, not the right poem for me.

[I should note that in her post she asks: "Is there really any other kind of war poem (than the anti-war poetry of Owen & Co.)? I'm not sure." And in reply I'd argue that the anti-war poem is an absolute latecomer, a PURELY 20th and 21st Century peculiarity dwarfed by the monstrous edifice of battle hymns and paens to slaughter. "Pro-war" poetry probably started with Paleolithic campfire chest-beating, graduated to Homer, migrated through viking sagas and medieval chansons de geste to the apalling Classical bombast of the Eighteeenth Century and the Victorian middle class rubbish of the Nineteenth. There actually is some patriotic drum-beating poetry from the Great War, but 99.9% of it is so utterly awful that no one even teaches it anymore. Here's an example of the sort of WW1 "fallen warrior" poetry that manages to scent the hideous trench slaughter with patriotic rose-water. Gaah. And for modern "pro-war" poetry, I direct you to freakin' country music. If you can listen to "Iraq and Roll" without vomiting a little in the back of your mouth, you a sterner man or woman than I am.]

Sorry. Back to the topic.

I think of war and I think of anger, fear and boredom, and the smells of dust, heat, shit, blood and wet cloth. The writers who capture this for me are still the horror-poets of the First World War: Owens and Sassoon. Remarque's prose is to stilted and Nineteenth Century to reach out to me. Brooke is too romantic, Graves too verbose. So who - if not Mr. Fernandez - would I consider a "war poet" for OUR time?I know I've talked about this guy before, but: I would like to direct you to Mr. Brian Turner. His stuff isn't perfect. There's a little "high school lit mag" to some of it. But when he hits, he hits like a fucking 8-inch HE round. So while I'm not trying to compete for Monday poems, L, really! this is a one-off - just for Memorial Day, here's Brian Turner from "Here, Bullet":

AB Negative (The Surgeon’s Poem)

Thalia Fields lies under a grey ceiling of clouds,
just under the turbulence, with anesthetics
dripping from an IV into her arm,
and the flight surgeon says The shrapnel
cauterized as it traveled through her
here, breaking this rib as it entered,
burning a hole through the left lung
to finish in her back, and all of this
she doesn’t hear, except perhaps as music—
that faraway music of people’s voices
when they speak gently and with care,
a comfort to her on a stretcher
in a flying hospital en route to Landstuhl,
just under the rain at midnight, and Thalia
drifts in and out of consciousness
as a nurse dabs her lips with a moist towel,
her palm on Thalia’s forehead, her vitals
slipping some, as burned flesh gives way
to the heat of the blood, the tunnels within
opening to fill her, just enough blood
to cough up and drown in; Thalia
sees the shadows of people working
to save her, but she cannot feel their hands,
cannot hear them any longer,
and when she closes her eyes
the most beautiful colors rise in darkness,
tangerine washing into Russian blue,
with the droning engine humming on
in a dragonfly’s wings, island palms
painting the sky an impossible hue
with their thick brushes dripping green…
a way of dealing with the fact
that Thalia Fields is gone, long gone,
about as far from Mississippi
as she can get, ten thousand feet above Iraq
with a blanket draped over her body
and an exhausted surgeon in tears,
his bloodied hands on her chest, his head
sunk down, the nurse guiding him
to a nearby seat and holding him as he cries,
though no one hears it, because nothing can be heard
where pilots fly in blackout, the plane
like a shadow guiding the rain, here
in the droning engines of midnight.

Quondam pulvus et umbra sumus

We were once dust and shadows.

Another year. Six, now, since that morning we woke up and it seemed like the world changed.

But it didn't. And six long years later it feels like sixty, or six hundred. The pain and hot, bright anger of that morning has twisted into a gray numbness. The small days of our lives since then have muted the emotions, the lies and arrogance of our "leaders" have deflected the anger and turned our suffering into suffering for others while the guilty have fled and evaded punishment. In our rage and revenge we have become like that we hated, and have grown prematurely weary in fighting what we don't understand, even in our fighting against ourselves.

I wish we could go back to that sunny September morning and change who we became, change who "lead" us into this dismal confusion. But I can't. And now whenever this day comes around I feel old, and tired, and wish the day be done.

"...in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori."
Wilfred Owen
--
I have to add...I'm getting very tired of writing these posts every 9/11. Every year that goes by the event seems more distant, sadder, just emblematic of a hideous waste and a sickness. How do you feel about this day?

The Old Lie

I really didn't want to do a political post today: just ducked in quickly for lunch and reading my blogs jumped into this discussion over on Intel Dump.

Worth reading for the analysis of what a lying, skeevy POS our current "Chief of State" is, but what really made me rage at the innocent screen was the thought that more of my Army brothers and sisters will die or be maimed because this slimy patrician scumbag needs to keep his "legacy" intact. If there is a Hell, I can only hope that he will be reserved the hottest lava pool, there to be tortured by sadistic demons who laugh at his pitifully inadequate "legacy". It got me thinking of the last truly pointless, seemingly endless war that dragged on despite the horror and loathing of those on all sides. Hence the below:

Republican Base Details

(apologies to Siegfried Sasson)

If I were Bush, and short of mental breadth,

I’d aim my scarlet Kagans at the Base,

And speed glum heroes into the "surge" to death.

You’d see me with my smug patrician face,

Petulant and smirking at the AEI,

Reading the Roll of Honour. ‘As the decider,’

I’d say—‘I must be steadfast, fear not that others die;

Yes, and Dick says we can't lose to Al Qaeda.’

And as the fight goes on and on, and youth stone dead,

I’d toddle safely home and dream of war in bed.