The Brown Bird of Happiness

The Brown Bird of Happiness

I had one of those particularly vivid dreams where you know that ‘dreaming’ is just another facet of immensely meaningful reality, that magnificent toy of consciousness. When I woke I was all ashiver with laughing and delight.

 In my dream all the people had been looking for this wonderful blue bird who had done something heroic. I could make up a deed for you, but frankly I don’t remember what the deed was. Everyone was gossiping and ‘Have you heard-ing’ about the blue bird. “Have you seen it?” “No, but I know someone who said she saw it yesterday.” The dream was abuzz with chat and tidbits about the blue bird. We were all looking hither and looking yon for the blue bird.

 I came around a corner and there was a large bird slightly stuck in a big jar. Doing my best ‘taking a thorn from the paw of the lion’ routine, I gently unstuck this large bird from the jar. The bird had the jaunty top knot and very triangular beak of a cardinal, but he was a deep chocolate brown color instead of scarlet and was about ten times the size. As I gently cradled this big brown bird in my arms against my chest and smoothed his shiny feathers, I was struck with the sudden absurd and delicious knowledge that this was the hero bird that everyone had been searching for. His belly feathers were so soft, and ruffled in the warm breeze. He looked me mischievously in the eye. He wasn’t blue at all. He was the brown bird of happiness.

 Of course. I knew at once the breathtaking truth. Our ideas of happiness are quite rigidly conditioned. We are all searching diligently or frantically for versions of happiness, items of happiness, that are imposed upon us by the subtle tyranny of the past. Birds of happiness are blue, we are quite sure. This tyranny is distinctly insidious. It prevents what’s happening right under our noses from being happiness. Instead we have restless, inchoate longings for happinesses defined, not by our own present deft attention, but by other agents. Parents, friends, movies, books, religions, the patterns of our own past.

 The large brown bird nestled calmly in my arms. His feathers were very dry and rustled when I hugged him gently. Very gently because although he weighed quite a lot, he was startlingly light for his size.

 He had given me anew a present of the present, this brown bird of happiness. He had stirred and spurred me to dwell in a vivid immediacy. One could only stay alert because who knew? Happiness might turn out to be a brown bird, not blue. If one insisted on it being blue, one might miss happiness altogether.

 I was loath to give him up, my brown bird of happiness, but I had to let him go too. I couldn’t just trade blue for brown. This was the hardest part. He could always fly in my inner sky as a talisman, a reminder, but I couldn’t clutch on to him either.

 This morning, happiness might be the smooth white paper I’m writing on or the slightly grungy white wool socks that are keeping my feet warm. Or the whisper of my pencil lead across the paper. Perhaps the plush silver Burmese kitten, Frolic, who’s convinced that a ratty scrap of paper she found under my desk is a toy. Or the next bird of happiness I find might even be blue.

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4 Alligator . Imix . Turtle . East . tzol 121  09.30.05 fri

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the pro-peace world begins today with you

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Quit Smoking, Quit Religion, How To

Quit Smoking, Quit Religion, How To

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   Christians and other religious Zealots are like smokers and boomboxers, and, sadly, like the poor, they’ll probably always be with us. It’s when the Evangelicals took the fateful turn to Avengelicals in about 1980 that we should have gotten frightened, very frightened. It’s late now – I hope not too late.

     As someone who, in the upstairs bathroom, started smoking Parliament cigarettes pilfered from my Mother when I was twelve (tho I never smoked my Mother’s religion); as someone who smoked a pack a day, often Camel straights, for 30 years; as someone who went cold turkey seven days before my sister’s gala wedding with its parties and wines and champagnes, I’m here to bring you the good news that horrible and deadly addictions can be quit cold cold turkey, and after two weeks, 14 days, a fortnight of vigilance against the Insinuating Voice of the Inner Tempter, you are free and clear and living a more wholesome new life under a kind of cosmic Witness Protection Program. Nicotine and Religion and Heroin are three of the most addictive substances on Earth. They can be quit.

    And society can say, we’ve had enough of that crap. These new virulent Christians are exactly like smokers of yore who used to blow smoke in your face without a thought to your personal ecology. We have to speak out, stand up, and say, “What you do in the privacy of your own room is your own weird business, but I have the right to work and be governed without your, to me, soul-threatening, toxic christiotine tarring up my lungs. If that’s your poison, happy to it, but leave me and mine deeply alone.

    Trust me, I would one mile short of infinity rather be puttering around admiring the origami petals of the begonia – begonia begonia burning bright in the forest of my morning than riding the Steed of Wrath against the tediously ever-present overtly zealous Christians who like the mannersless Picts and Visigoths have invaded and befouled our simple, cheerful lives previously blissfully devoid of their Savior the Lord Jesus Christ, that occasionally insightful whippersnapper.

     There were three vials worth of Wrath that led to the launching of this anti-Crusade, this war against the once-insidious, now braying and blatant Zealotorism.

     Well, the first two were vials of Disbelief. The last turned the water of Incredulity into the wine of Wrath.

    Probably eight years ago – I don’t quantify time well – I was in our local Red Rock café  talking to a very nice middle-aged woman, Amy Turner, a Democrat, a person of deep thought and earned and practiced compassion. I knew she was a sincere Christian whose ‘faith’ informs and enfolds her heart and soul. Far be it from me, a jolly and happy heathen who dances at the Altar of Comedy to begrudge her her comforting and perhaps invigorating hallucinations. It’s all a smorgasbord. You eat squid tentacles. I don’t. You have a weekly slurp of your god’s blood. I don’t. No harm, no foul. So far, so jolly.

    “Amy, I need to ask you a question,” I say. We’re sitting at the big round table in the north corner of the café. Well, I know the likely answer to this question intellectually as you, dear reader, will think you do. But slow your thoughts down and perceive this slower, thicker, like blood or molasses, with heart-thought.

    “Amy, you know that I am generally good, that I actively act upon principle and honor in a daily way, imperfectly but earnestly. I need to know if I, your friend, must go, in your Christian view, to Hell because I will never take Jesus as my savior?”

      It was as horrible a 40 seconds as I’ve spent. Blood rose in her face. Then she went pale. A clammy sweat broke out on her face. She was unable to look at me. She said, “It is the single hardest thing about my Christian faith,” in a voice strangled quiet and of agony.

   “You would watch me, your friend pog, be herded onto the Down Escalator (I could still summon a grim joke)?” She could not speak. She nodded.

     A few years later, there was Ben Davis, a Christian friend who actively studied and practiced local decency, though schizophrenically a convinced capitalist and a high-order of screw-the-peasants Republican. An economic and political pitbull and a personal Golden Retriever. At a point when we knew each other very well, I asked the dreaded Down Escalator Question. “I hate it, but I have to believe it,” he says, also stricken with dismay.

   I thought – oh the open-hearted pagan naiveté – in both cases that a living breathing friend would trump a doctrine. That they would say, ‘I believe and cleave to my Faith and eschew this clearly dumb garbage that would cast a friend who is good into the fiery pits for an eternity of conscious torment.’ That’s what I would have said. I would have ripped from the Book the stupid pages which damned my friend who was good. (Probably even my friend who was bad if nothing but the truth be told.) I still reel when I think of it – the horribleness of a spiritual addiction that would condemn your friend. That’s deeply ugly stuff. This is the nub, the hub, the rub – it is this willingness to choose a spiritual or political belief over a person that leads to all this collateral damage that litters the juggernaut swath of destruction that Christianity has scathed through history. I, real pog, was collateral damage to my two Christian friends, an unfortunate but necessary cost for an Idea. Ask your Christian friend the Fiery Pit/Eternal Conscious Torment Question. The horror the horror.

    I still don’t care if they hold their repugnant ideas in private – between or even among consenting adults, who really cares? How you beat upon your spiritual gonads is your business – just, please, get a room.

    I forgot – there are four tipping points. The first two are the cast-good-ole-pog-into-hellfires friends. Then a few months ago, I surfed upon a program on CNN. There was this poised, lively little seven-year-old girl, articulate, vivid. Her pleasant-looking, apparently un-horned, un-cloven hooved mother was home-schooling this child. The interviewer off-camera asked the little girl something like, “How did religion start in your life?” This marvelous child piped up in her little girl’s voice, “When I was three years old, I took the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal Savior and He saved me from Sin.”

   Sin? Sin? You were three years old. Sin?

    What sane person could poison the mind of a three-year-old child with the idea that they are sinful? What sane person could poison the mind of a three-year-old child with the idea that they are sinful?

    The 4th tipping point for me is Van Orden v. Perry condoning the garish Ten Commandments monument on public ground in the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Texas state capitol. The state should not support Christian granite,¹ nor paper, nor heads-of-pins monuments. It is not a Christian Nation – it’s all of ours, so the idea of democracy says.

     It’s hard to rile a pagan. We never got kicked out of the Inner Garden of Earthly Delights. Basically, we don’t want to be fussed and we don’t want to fuss you. But your Stupid, Belligerent Narrow-minded, Narrow-hearted God is Not the Lord, my God, and I’m sick of it now. How dare you tell gay people they can’t get married? How dare you tell a woman she must bear a child she can’t emotionally or financially cherish? How dare you support the Military Death Machine? The first big act of JC was to kick over the tables of the money changers and you applaud grotesque profits?

    One of the Founding fathers, John Adams suggested to Thomas Jefferson that he take the Christian Bible and a pair of scissors and cut out everything that was stupid, cruel, tribal, and insane. In what is known as the Jefferson Bible, a very few wise pages are left. Which should be embraced in the Eclectic Canon of Merry Good Sense smorgasbord of kind and wry thoughtfulness where we might all be nourished.

    As to the rabid stuff Thomas Jefferson left on the cutting room floor, dear Christians, please take your meds.

    Sweeter honey bee Christians vs the sting-everybody-to-death swarming Killer Bees Christians — consider that to do the right thing, the just thing, you might have to gainsay your very Faith. Which is, of course what Jesus did in his time. It don’t matter what a Book says, your father, your preacher, even if they say Jesus said it – you can’t join in or even stand by while a good person is kicked off the cliff into the Fiery Pits. It ain’t right. (And of course the Stupid Book got it wrong, and your father and the preacher. Horribly, the Universe forgives forever, but that’s another story for another campfire.) It can be a hard and lonely read, conscience, but what are we doing still lauding red-glaring rockets and bursting bombs in our national song? Ain’t right, it’s wrong. Suppose all the Books vanished for a decade (Books and sutras and all of the other fancy dress Clothes stored in the attic or the basement) – and we had to think for ourselves and couldn’t quote any bludgeoning verses?

    If I revere my Lord & Savior Chocolate Ice Cream, am I less saved than you? What universal law requires redemption to be solemn?

    At least if I fight with Ridicule, and believe me, brother, I will, at least you have a chance to tut-tut and berate the frivolous infidel or whatever feeble outcry you noisily raise against the Trumpet of my Ridiculously Righteous Wrath. Against bunkerbusting bombs, none of us rises again on the third day, pilgrim – Jesus neither. Think it through and through. Quit blowin’ your smelly holy smoke in my face; whatever you’re smoking makes you dangerous and cruel and paranoid. If you can’t go cold cold turkey, at least quit smoking on our parade.

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If you know an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of rage for justice, rage for peace material, please let me know at .. pogblog@yahoo.com

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¹ pict of Christian granite monument;

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10 Light . Ahau . Flower . South  tzol 120  09.29.05 thur

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the pro-peace world begins today with you

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Irony Saves the World from Rove et ilk

for amigosueño 

 

Irony Saves the World

 

Gingko Tree, part 1

 

     The gingko tree is an orphan from the past; I am an orphan from the future. Why did I make the terrible journey from the sunlit sane future back into this brutish and cynical past? It's a good question which I'll answerish for you in pages to come.

     Gingko trees are the last member of their ancient family, the last of their phylum, class, and species. Look at a gingko leaf sometime and you'll notice the ancient fan-shape with its veins radiating up and out from the bottom stem joint toward the upper edge of the leaf. A modern leaf like a maple leaf will have a river-system of veins, a central long river with tributaries branching out into the lobes of the leaf.

     Along with pigeons and squirrels, gingkos are making an ironic comeback in modern Urbia. The gingkos keep me company in my quite vast loneliness. They remind me that even absent all daily company of chronoscient fellow dreamweavers, truth shimmers at dawn and whispers at <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />midnight. (I don't plan to flak you with too many unfamiliar words, but 'chronoscient' harks to 'time sailors' in welsh, the fire poets, the folk who saidsang the past and the future by many fires in many forests. We hear these songstories in our dreams, for few until much later were written down.) 'Ancient' is old time; chronoscient is my time, where I dwelled before I journeyed back back over the seas of time to this time, to your frightening brutish Turtle Island in the Great Eternal Sea. Did I come back so I could see thee here? You dared me then to journey back to the Time of Blood, said that I would not, said that I could not, said that I didn't dig or gig or grok you enough to go back down the telescope to the small end. Promised you would meet me there if I dared. Damn dare. Do I regret it?

     Perhaps I came back on a wind of longing in our unfathomable game which pinballs among times? Perhaps I am actually altruistic and hope to give courage to a few hearts beginning to dream of a more physically harmless and psychologically hazardous-for-grins world, a world which does come after The PearShaped Epoch? They call me Breddwyd  — you would say 'breath-wooed' for the sound, but here most folk say 'Brath-wid' and I answer to it.

     It is quite the feat fantastic to put back on the psychic armor needed in this barbed-wire world. The subsonic hostility here fairly bristles with offensiveness and defensiveness and humorlessness. Your delicious and ferocious mildness is a foreshadow of what will come when we 'humanes' begin again after The PearShaped End. But perhaps upon the subject of you, I am not objective because I know that for the last Really Big Pot, I've got your number and I win. I win so astonishingly much for my psychic coffers, that I can afford to be gracious in these little preliminary games, however galling the pesky and quite numberless present humiliations might be. It is the knowledge that I c.o.m.p.l.e.t.e.l.y snooker you in the end which gives me these acreages of patience.

     Whether my only original impulse was to find and three-up thee — Ha! Ha! See, I made it, amigosueño! — In the christly-long wait for you to appear in whatever guise you devised for this game, this mabolgamp, to divert myself from wondering whether you actually would show up before I expired of terminal boredom and local mindless-game tedium, I did get somewhat interested in the perils of the planetary natives, groaning under the yoke of truly horrible humorless religions and long boring wars. I see the bog and tangled jungle out of which we lemur our way to eventually get to our spangled chronoscient sea where hearts are free from the chains of religion and the pornography of greed. 

    In the age of gigantism, of dinosaurs, the Earth or y Daear (Dy-ear) uprose such vast energies that butterflies were the size of condors and condors blocked out the sun when over they flew. (Don't fuss thee, I'll clean up the chronoscient grammar if I send this to someone else than thee, mokha (welsh for pig as thou wilt recall). I am almost fluent in one of the dominant y Daear tongues, but have relapses when I've had as much cocoa to drink as I have now. I know I promised you I'd cut back on the cocoa before I left the future, but gollywhiz, taking away all my solaces when you were no where to be found yet — you can be a hard man, my porkchop.

     Anyway, in my researches, I found that there were cat-squirrel simian creatures, the lemurs, who, by being small and quick with twitching noses and stereo eyes, outwitted the crescendoing Great Extinction of the lumbering who lived on enormous fronds  The cat-squirrels kept our clever mammalian hopes cunning and alive through the Great Dark. The bio-history of bones has a big record but the psycho-history of hopes and fears and chuckles is quite invisible. The laughing ape. The laughing ape will win beyond the killer ape in the end. That's the thread I'm following through The PearShaped Finale. The ironic inherit the Earth. Y Daear. [“Laugh & the world laughs with you;Weep & you weep alone; For the brave old Earth has to borrow her mirth But has troubles enough of her own.” Wilcox].

     Why do the ironic win? Not because the worlds are just, but because everything else is so damn boring. Only irony remains forever puzzling. We love to do puzzles. And when the stakes are our very (secret) lives, that's interesting. Always interesting.

     There is, however, more irony abuse than any other dreaded abuse you can imagine. Most apes just don't get it. It's eel-slippery. Irony is the ultimate drug, but you can't fake it or take it or inject it or smoke it. You can sure bludgeon it tho. And most people do in these early days. Maxwell's leaden sledgehammer. Sometimes I cry out to the sky for relief — save me from this irony-deficient damn planet now please. But I wake up here again and lurch on. Diogenes spent his life searching for an honest man; I have spent my life looking for an ironic man. I found one. One. And then he just has to be horrible and cruel and pride-infested. Go figure. Everyone else drinks his damn koolaid. “Oh sweet adorable sexy James.” I am not in that way wholly blinded; only wholly irony besotted. Sweet, adorable — Ha! Ha! Ha! He is a monster, and he ebbs and flows like the tide; waxes and wanes like the moon. But when he's on, I am lost — babblingly, happily, drunk. When I'm not so wounded that I hide in the cold shadows of the forests licking my bleeding wounds; but he doesn't need to know about that. He accumulates large and petty triumphs. Until the last legerdesoul of course when he icarusly plummets into the sea of fire, but that secret's too sweet to reveal. He will not see it coming. That is sweet.     

 

//Mirth are us. Clowns rule.  Buffoons Arise. + 

 

ps. gin = silver in Chinese; ko = apricot;             

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gingko tree part 2

    Nobody really knows how the denizens of Y Daear got so irony deprived? You'll have to admit that the system of tiny tiny coiled patterns is ingenious. (Gluck-prints as our scientists call them instead of blueprints, but then we are no longer so publicly prissy and privately vulgar as the ancients. The trick is keeping such dna things damp — or allowing that they re-vivify when wetness re-occurs. They took a ten-thousands of years-old seed from an Earth pyramid and plopped it into some wet ground and presto, papyrus) You try to jam all that rabbit or giraffe or papyrus info into a couple of molecules and pull a rabbit or a giraffe out of that hat. You'd be mighty impressed with yourself, I bet. It is no wonder that the results go awry now and again. Too bad that a whole species became genetically susceptible to a variety of putridly virulent diseases: religiousism; patriotism; greedism; humorlessness.

     Now the question that Digrif, my ironist, and I are asked most in chronoscient times is how we pioneered the possibility of high (or low for that matter) hilarity with sensual adventures? It was not easy tho it was our gift to the future. I tell you these brutes back here are so damn serious so damn much of the time that it makes my brain ache. You try a little riff with these folks and they either go the Full-Kicked-Puppy, how could you be so mean; or they go Pursed Lips with silent but deafening disapproval as if they had smelled something flatulent; or they start ripping your face off with their mis-judgment of joining in the 'fun.' They don't get that there is actually an art to this like shooting an arrow at a target rather than spraying the room with machine-gun fire and laughing over the writhing and dying bodies as if you'd been clever. Even when they don't really intend to hurt, are not biting their lips in sarcastic, flesh-eating rage, they are tone-deaf and don't get that though irony is meant to appear to hurt, it’s supposed to be between more-or-less equals both of whom have tacitly agreed to take it.

     Irony and sexualness are advanced alchemy. Sexualness is in objective fact so grunting and preposterous that people have developed saccharine-blinding or lust-blinding masks to cover their actual lumpy splotched nakedness. The hormones give a blessed ignorance to the occasion in which the inherent appalling embarrassment is cloaked with fervor until satedness averts the eyes from the previous throbbing desiree. The various hormonal hallucinogens on this planet are rampant and recklessly indulged in.

     Digrif means 'funny,' 'comic' in welsh and he is that indeed. Though if I had to nickname him, I'd go for 'Saharo.' If in Earth terms being sentimental (e.g. Hitler loved his dog.) is called by the Brits, an island people near the Welsh, “wet,” my ironist Digrif is Saharan. The Sahara is a sand sea in the grand continent of Africa. Great waves of golden sand break past the horizon. It is an octessence of dry. Now my tactic in advanced irony includes an occasional token of truthful and overt affection, not very wet, I think, but a break in the routine of merry or furious or lazy or imperious insult. Not our Digrif. No chink in his armor. Saharan of merciless dry. I don't mean to suggest that he speaks aloud every pain he might inflict. He doesn't. (As if it isn't writ all neon for anyone with the slightest second sight.) He pulls a punch now and again. One notices. But sweetness? Never. I expect the Sahara to roll around to become a sea with ships and gulls and penguins before he relents and says something soft. One would occasionally like to curl up in his lap and purr for a catnap without having to be perpetually on guard.

      The planet is harsh in a different and hurtful way. Only irony can transform violence into (even brutal) harmlessness. It is how the planet must evolve so we can still use the violent muscles and lash out, without harm. There is no limit to the weapons irony may use and it can hurt like hell actually, but the point between ironists is the almost-harm. A bullseye is a miss; the arrowpoint should be exactly at the edge of the bullseye and the next ring — showing that one could have really ficking hurt, but just didn't. That's how it's supposed to work. Otherwise it's not playing, it's just being a jackass.

     Of course between experienced, beloved ironists, the bullseye gets smaller and the blow is nearer the center of the dreaded pain or truth.

     Murder is nowhere as deadly really as seriousness is. The pompous, the pious, and the patriots are all terrifying in their claims to the one true way and word.

   In the GreatTimeOcean, luckily clowns rule, clownily luck rules, and there are indeed few rules at all except that if by some horror you relapse into serious or religion or patriotism, people pour itching powder all over you and leave you in the stocks over the weekend while they go eat bbq and dance a lot.

 

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If you know an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of rage for justice, rage for peace material, please let me know at .. pogblog@yahoo.com
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Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

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9 Rainstorm . Cauac . Redbird. West  tzol  119  09.28.05 wed

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the fiercely pro-peace world

begins today with you

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An Outlaw After Midnight .. the pain of pacifism

An Outlaw After <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Midnight

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    I think of the other outlaws after midnight and what we pay and what we owe and how down and dirty is it going to get. Almost all my ties are cut now. I own nothing but rage. I have you, my darling, in my mind like an ember-coal under a dove-grey silt of ash – I have but to blow on the thought of you and the lava of you in my heart is re-revealed. But the rest, like Dante’s 10th circle of Hell, is cold or colder or coldest. Hate is not hot in the end.

    They say love solves everything. I have not noticed that to be so. It is hard to know which is more gigantic in these Present Menaces, their gigantic Greed or their gigantic Stupidity? If you know, please tell me. I long for something known.

   “Why are you an outlaw, Miss,” asked a young journalist named John Plume, who wished he dared to bear that unflinching look into the darkness of their hearts, but wanted to hear the blindness secondhand. I remember the color of strawberries. I remember the celadon color of your eyes struck with a shaft of sun, the color inside the curl of a breaking wave. I see so clearly now that the sight of their other-than-human not placable, not relenting obscene bastard midas meanness drove me blind.

      “I went blind, Mr. Plume,” I said not unkindly because he was so earnest and not bereft of hopes, even high ones – he reminded me of myself once upon a time – “I went blind, Mr. Plume at first only on Mondays and Thursdays, because the ratbreath bastards became so brazen and so gruelingly cruel and my brothers and my sisters were still bamboozled by their skillful gigantic Deceits. One day my right eye just burst into tears of blood from watching their Lies in full color on CNN. A friend of mine said, ‘Ye gods, Belle Z. Babe, your right eye is weeping tears of blood.’ I smeared my hand across my wet cheek and saw that it was so. ‘I’m not so surprised really,’ I said to him. ‘Why is your right eye not weeping tears of blood?’

   “I cannot believe that we just go to sleep at night and let day after day pile up like corpses along side the highway of history while these bastards loot and steal right out from under our noses and we do not whimper, not even like a kicked dog. Where in the hell, Obol, amigo de mi corazón, is our dignity and our sacred honor? Such sheepery and lemminghood disgust me about ourselves. They don’t even have to bestir themselves to defeat us. They must be putting saltpeter in the junk food. Are we tamed by aspartame?”

    Mr. Plume looked at me bemused. This was an hour when my fractured vision, which was like looking through shards of broken glass, had some light not only darkness. I saw him begin to see.

    After midnight us outlaws devise and revise. How do we move the Titanic an inch away from the iceberg that is looming in our sweet comrades’ dark while they don’t or refuse to know? A militant pacifist, I only get keen words in a noisy world. If you begin to see, begin to do small disobedient acts. Stealthy subversions. Our planet should be tended not plundered. I sharpen the guillotine words on our behalves.

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If you know an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of rage for justice, rage for peace material, please let me know at .. pogblog@yahoo.com

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Flint . Edznab . Knife . North  tzol 118  09.27.05  tues

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the pro-peace world begins today with you
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Education & Electric Perception Outwit War

Education & Electric Perception Outwit War

   

    When you look back from Y3000, it’s clear that what saved us from war, from state-sanctioned human sacrifice, was, as it is in Y3000, art and perception, an electric perception. Art-thirst replaces blood-thirst. Seeing art, doing art. And when we let loose all that art on the Planet, it shines pearlescent all the way to the FarStars.

    The following fable, Gwatwareg, is as close as I can get in words to showing you the thinking of & the feeling of the integration of lucid waking with lucid dreaming — the rhapsody, the woven song of day and dream, electric perception. Education and fate, ole sly Fat E, brought me this present, this man made of night.  

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Gwatwareg

 

    Falling heels over head for Gwatwareg was dumb and dangerous. Like taking a shine to plutonium. Too hot and pitilessly radiant for my soul to survive. I knew that coming doom with a Damascus-sword-keen clarity. A knowledge which slowed my plummet not one whit. The splat was going to be inevitable and gut-strewn; one could only hope to prolong the oh-I-understand-why-Leda-submitted freefall.

     By the way, the legendary Damascus-steel alloy contained glass and other now-mystery elements, and it is said that a true <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Damascus sword edge can cut even an evanescent waft of silk cloth in half before it can fall to the ground.

    In the worlds of dark matter, my lucifer, Gwatwareg has invented, displays, inhabits a force après-magnetism — an exotic, erotic field within which I was transfixed. If holomusic were a fountain upon which one magic-carpetily floated, it felt like that, the force of him – symphonically buoyant.

    It’s like in the ocean, all waves are attached to the whole sea, the mighty wave at Mavericks and the ripple in a fjord near the Artic Circle. Gwatwareg’s humor was an ocean like that with many moods and many beaches all at once. Perhaps I didn’t submit so much as I was immersed? Does a fish submit to the sea?

    All the flame in a forest fire, if you were within it, not the pain but the vermilion motion: In a vast forest of maples in the Spring, before the white man poisonously came, the sweet rising of all that sap: Gwatwareg was irresistible. It was more like photosynthesis than like magnetism, his alchemy: there was an exchange of sunlight for apples or buttered corn. He was a devil, the devil, and I denied him nothing. My soul was the least of it; the origami of my soul was the least of it.

    When the most ancient amoeba in an unbroken chain through all those aeons of midnights became me, I gave him all that evolution; that resolution; that luck.

    Under the ocean, in the rivers too there are at least three million, seven hundred & forty-three thousand pearls gleaming snugly in the odd gluck of oysters and all that pearl light is what illuminated the first night we made love after all the centuries of implacable rutting. He wanted a kind of terrible truth from you before you caught a unicorn-glimpse of his actual strange honor.

    He seemed made of darkness, of night, but then he moved and you saw he was a panther. He was feline. The droit de seigneur. The languor, the outright imperial laziness. Obsidian, the color of panthers, his humor never missed the perfect quick attack. Falling heels over head for Gwatwareg was dumb and dangerous, but I never had a choice.

 

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See gwatwareg & Leda & droit de seigneur & après-magnetism below

& Check pogblog’s Glossary for other brave & nefarious words.

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If you know an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of rage for justice, rage for peace material, please let me know at .. pogblog@yahoo.com
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copyright pogblog 2005 all rights reserved
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gwatwareg means irony in Welsh;
droit de seigneur means ‘the right of the king’ & refers to the right of the king to have the wedding-night virginity of any vassal’s wife or of any slave girl any night.
après-magnetism means after-magnetism or post-magnetism;
 
In the sentence fragment above,  “…one could only hope to prolong the oh-I-understand-why-Leda-submitted freefall,” Leda was a maiden in Greek story who was ravished by Zeus in the guise of a great swan most memorably immortalized in one of Yeats’ most famous poems, Leda & the Swan: 

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
                                        Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

William Butler Yeats

The Burning Child .. Quantum Schools .. pro-peace rally

The Burning Child .. Quantum Schools

.. pro-peace rally .. pied beauty

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part 3

    On the 1081st day in a row that I’ve been out with my Teach Peace sign – going to the post office, the cocoa shop, walking down Castro, the one main street in Mountain View CA USofA Inc – on the 1081st day, I went to a huge pro-peace march ending in Jefferson Square Park, Turk & Gough, in Frisco. It was an halcyon day – a day so sweet that the kingfisher can make her nest upon the swelling bosom of the sea. Blue, zephyric.  I was wearing my Militant Pacifist t-shirt, the very first one in the whole world. Many comments on its coolness. (I do get irked that pacifism need have anything to so with being nice, per se. I don’t want death nor mutilation. Niceness is style points for people who prefer hall mark cards. Militant Pacifist: I’m fierce about not killing people.)

    I’ve told you the totemic story for me about the astronaut who was asked what it was like looking back at earth from space. He said, “When I looked back at our planet earth from space what struck me is that there aren’t any lines on it.” Of course! we have internalized the non-existent lines. How striking indeed to realize, to grok that there aren’t any lines on it. I became global in that single sentence.

    What struck me about this September.24 pro-peace march was the pied beauty of all the people. You’ll recall Gerard Manley’s poem, Pied Beauty, “Glory be to God for dappled things … .” Each person and the whole crowd was pied, splotched, lovelily lumpy. Few people dress up for a pro-peace march. Now, they probably attire themselves very superstitiously and carefully, but it ain’t tuxedo time. People are adamantly comfortable. They are so loveably, splotchily human and humane that you find yourself besotted with the human race again. After news & news of KarlDickGeorgeDonaldCondi, you think the human race must be exterminated to prevent infestation of the galaxy, so foul are these folk in their damnable greed. But at the March, you see all the people of good will, aghast at what our beloved country has doriangrayily become.

    The mix of ages and types and spikiness of hair and baldness of head and bared midriffs and Hawaiian of shirt if not billboard of t-shirt is touching.

    The sign that percussed my zeitgeist was College not Combat. The Education Industrial Complex is my dream: the real defense of  the future is more fabulous education and continuing education for your citizens. This is an urgent priority. The $820,000 per MINUTE that we spend on the Military industrial Complex, the additional $200,000 per MINUTE we spend on the continued rubble and trouble in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Iraq could be invested in Quantum Schools (see below) which would catapult America back into the future. We are a dinosaur surparanoidally bellowing forth insanely unnecessary weapons systems Add another $14,000 per minute on the fantasy Missile Nonsense System aka Star Wars. We are a lumbering and lumbered dinosaur – we just don’t know it yet. We were sinking fast into 3rd World Countrydom way before Katrina.

     The only tonic which could shapeshift us into lemur-litheness for the collaborative and nifty future is a massive transfusion of social plasma or money into the education system. This is an investment which would explode our contributions for the future.

    Every person has the human right to not just education, but a fabulous education.

    More upon which anon. I think I am going to crash from a dappled exhaustion – so inspired tho by all of you who got yourselves there to Jefferson Square Park on September 24 2005.  

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The Burning Child .. Quantum Schools
(1) draft 1
 
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Bucky Fuller
 
   We cannot fix where we are. We cannot fix the gordian snarl we’re in. We must take the small but distinct quantum step to the Sane Fruitful Vision where we act in the gloryful, gleeful, liberating light of the fact of The Burning Child.
    Once you see that, as every bush burns, every child burns in the forests of delight, you will be honor-bound, duty-bound, future-bound to make complete superb K-College education an emergency Manhattan-Project national priority beginning today.
    The once-stolen treasure of children who blossom, not stunted, whose education is subsidized at $14,000 per minute + $200,000 per minute + $820,000 per minute – the treasure once stolen for death-dealing instead of life-dealing now fuels armies of carpenters and artists who build schools, schools that look like the vatican, the cathedral-care taken, the whimsical gargoyles, the sistine chapels cafeterias. Your learning, burning child, is sacred to we.
 
What can’t you tell about a society by what its schools look like? We got enough to lay off taxing you so you can have a 2nd mansion and a 3rd Hummer — and the school buildings completely suck? Is this what we want to say about ourselves? Shame.
 
   We should have a Manhattan Project of building and equipping the next quantum level of schools. Quantum schools. In 10 years all national schools should be splendid. We should be exporting school technology, not weapons technology. Our national security utterly depends on this urgently expanded education technology – most of which is wetware obviously. We will need to integrate lucid waking with lucid dreaming to make use of the full range of humane experience and resource.  
   We do not need one single new weapons system. The weapons we have now are sufficiently plentiful and sufficiently hideous that we can declare a moratorium until 2029 on any consideration of new weapons. It’s not like even in the dungeons of their sick and sickening fear-ridden imaginations the Death-Dealers can conjure up some opposing power fiendishly devising weapons that will unman us. We are the Boogie Man. Claro que si, so shuddup Weapons Mongers.
    So the new Manhattan Project, the Fierce Education Project, “It’s the Education, stupid!” starts fomenting education by in 3 years establishing South Korean-grade broadband – wi-fi – not wire the whole country, but unwire the whole country, every hamlet, every alley, every valley immediately.
   Hello, Mars to Earth, it is a scandal, the USofA Inc is a 3rd world communications-capacity country. We’re losing the race that matters. We’re running the last century’s race. Just like we needed the electrification of America, we need the wi-fi-ification of America. Don’t blather on about how the government can’t do things well. Piffle. It can do lots of things well. It built the InterState Highway System. It built the fxxxxxg atomic bomb in two blinks. Now we want to explode brains-&-hearts wide open and bring aesthetic and invention power to an intense and playful, sustainable crescendo of lambent planetary lights — northern, eastern, western, southern lights.
    The nation must invest in a giga-light 14” titanium metal-hinged laptop for each citizen to go with the continental wi-fi. This would cost about 150 billion dollars max, roughly ¼ of the 2006 projected military budget. If  America is to survive, least of all thrive, this is the first investment to make because the Future Fierce School is mainly mobile, the world is your school, and you plug in anywhere. (The nano-cyber-enhancer is implanted and telepathic, but that’s a few warp-miles down the star road.)
   
    The glorious schools we will build or restore have a 90% social function so people don’t lose total flesh touch. Presently we in the USofA Inc are the atavistic fight-or-flight old-Reptile-brain-stem equivalent in the rampanting symphonikizing noosphere, the world brain-soul.
    Every hour we spend in the fear-based theo-milito-think, we are losing ground.
 
Notes:
(1) We will need to invest in a buy-out of the military-industrial complex and a retraining of those personnel for a constructive rather than a destructive mind-set. This will be fabulously expensive, but it’s as cheap now as it will ever be.
 
We will be responsible for the promises made to the present military personnel and veterans. They are, however, as out-of-date as buggywhip manufacturers and the sooner we quantum-step past our old-rut-thinking the sooner we begin to blossom in the new world now being pioneered by others.
 
(2) $14,000 per minute (cost of the fantasy Missile CrackPot Scheme aka Star Wars) + $200,000 per minute (cost of Iraq quagsand) + $820,000 per minute (partial annual military budget, not including most veteran costs); 
 
(3) We have to keep our eye on the 3000/435,000 (9-11 vs annual tobacco-related deaths) prize – so-called terrorism, as revolting as it is, is a blip in the dangers the country actually faces. The obscene and absurd skewing of resources to this false Bogeyman is crippling our future, retarding our children.
 
This is draft 1 of The Burning Child – Quantum Schools.
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If you know an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of rage for justice, rage for peace material, please let me know: pogblog@yahoo.com
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Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.
copyright pogblog 2005 all rights reserved
Please send pogblog’s link to your friends:
http://pogblog.myblogsite.com
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pro-peace, not anti-war

pro-peace, not anti-war

 

   It's the eve of the Big September 24 Peace March in Frisco. (I know they're supposed to hate being called Frisco, but that's just obdurate — Frisco is so cool, & after  32 years of living 40 miles south of that misty and mysterious city, I'm bloody gonna call it Frisco.)

   A few days ago I thought, Well, we should dub ourselves pro-peace rather than anti-war. This better obeys the powerful but slightly tweaky notion of what in hypnosis is called an embedded command. Stick with this because it is important in all your life. Once you see through the psycho-lingual trick, you'll grok it forever.

   If I say “Don't fall off the ladder!” — it's called an embedded command TO fall off the ladder. Because in order to comprehend the words themselves, you have to (unconsciously) imagine yourself falling off the ladder. The really helpful exhortation is “Hang onto the ladder!” or some such version which requires your brain to process actually hanging onto the ladder.

     The other subtlety of this is that you cannot do a negative. You cannot stop smoking. You do something else instead. You start breathing freely. You observe the sunset after dinner instead of smoking, or whatever. 

   (Larry King always goes to a break saying, “Don't go away.” I always shout at the screen, “Embedded command!” Charlie Rose & others say, “Stay with us.”)

   IF we say 'anti-war' instead of 'pro-peace' in this micro-embedded command, we are requiring people to imagine the war. IF we say pro-peace, they have to imagine something about peace to even comprehend the words.

..

   I have put Compulsory Cannibalism here because it's such a darn good piece of cherry pie idea. And I put the Grave of Known Soldier #1999 here too because this afternoon at the weekly major intersection mini-peace demo, one of our folks had taped 1913 on the street light pole. And I had written #1999 when we still had 145 dead kids to go. Now we only have 86 kids to collateralize. 86 families to shatter. Of course who cares about the Iraqi dead and their ruined mothers — they aren't Americans.   We could still save #1999 — who should haunt us all.   

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Compulsory Cannibalism

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   Compulsory cannibalism: if you had to eat everyone you killed, war would end damn fast,” said Abbie Hoffman.

 

Another sign at the 03.15.03 SF Rally: Mirth on Earth. Power to the Peaceful is a perennial favorite of mine. This sublime guy with an huge pink wig had a beautifully lettered sign saying, If you don’t choose peace over war, aliens will land in my wig. A sign like that makes humanssooftenunkind worth saving after all. Jonathan Schell talks about the ‘unredeemably stupid fatality’ that leads to war. On 11.29.02, I was talking to a guy about how ‘Mr. Bush & Mr. Hussein won’t get any dust on their shoes.’ He said that if like George Washington they were required to be out there themselves, then he would listen to them. I said, “Why aren’t we called pro-peace?”

 

I wrote then a little piece called Dead is Dead. On 9.13.02. Before I had made my teach peace sign on 10.09.02.

    Reading in the New Yorker about the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />World Trade Center, our rage & disbelief: The ‘How could this act of brutal madness,’ the ‘Who could do, could conceive such a thing? seem obvious and emotionally rational. ‘The enormity of the act.’ The dazed, bereft people holding cheerful snapshots of the lost. Yes it was an irredeemably evil act. Yet we never as Americans imagine or connect that the vaporized souls in Hiroshima or Nagasaki or the dozens of wooden Japanese cities we firebombed were also someone’s sweetheart or son or sister. We have already proved ourselves terrorists, or deliberate killers of civilians, with weapons of mass destruction. Ye gods we ought to be humble. Instead we escalate in arrogance and sanctimonious patriotism.

     Dead is dead. Whatever fancy justification we prettify it up with, we vaporized over 200,000 civilians, and it doesn’t disturb our sleep. We had our reasons.

     They have their reasons.

     Until there are no reasons we can bear, we will not be actually human yet.    

 

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    Our local Peace Group, Mountain View Voices for Peace, is already planning a solemn March for after Death #2000. (If you haven’t had a chance to read Grave of the Known Soldier #1999, I have it here below for you. It’ll break your heart. I keep thinking we could still save this kid #1999 – he wouldn’t have to die.

     MVVP has members meet at the intersection of El Camino & Castro every Friday from 6p-7p, the height of the commute, with pro-peace signs and waving. (This is a major local intersection.) You could start such a group in your town if you haven’t yet. You can get more info and ask questions here. Or you can be an individual loon like me and go out a little every day with something like a teach peace sign as you go about your business to the post office or the library. See details on that here. (It’s only the first two excruciating forays you have to get past and then you feel foolish without your sign! I’ve been out 1076 days in a row now. It isn’t about me, or you – it’s about that one little girl or boy who sees a person willing to appear absurd to some for the sake of peace and harmlessness and that kid will grow up to be the next Martin or Mohandas. If I don’t have my sign, that kid may not see it. The butterfly’s wings will not start a storm of peace.)

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To me this isn't only about Ken or Casey or Roberto or Rachel  — it's about Juan Smith #1999 — is there ANY way we can save that kid? </strong>

 

“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Iraq for a mistake?”²

 

 

The Grave of the Known Soldier..Save Juan Smith #1999

 

What do we know about Sgt. Juan Smith who is doomed to die on Tuesday November 22 2005? 

 

Why does it bother me particularly that he is a huge fan of the fey  movie Spinal Tap, a celebration if there ever was one of harmlessness? Perhaps because it is unexpected that a 26 year-old has such quirky taste. I like that in him.

 

Well, he'll be 26 when he is shot in the head. The left side of his head. His brains will splatter onto soldier Raymond Callahan, his second best friend, a 22-year-old from Alabama whose mother, Joyce Callahan, voted for George Bush in  2000, but will never vote Republican again. Mrs. Smith, Juan's mother, dwells in a twilight of sadness.

 

Juan Smith's birthday is on November 8, so he is 25 now as we watch in August, waiting for him to die. Just turned 26 when he dies. He is a Scorpio with Pisces rising. Brave, dreamy, very very smart about the conscious world of day and of tanks, RPGs and rubble, and of the unconscious world, which runs the whole shebang in Iraqi, but which is never spoken of. 

 

Juan Smith does not have to die. He does not have to be #1999. We could stop it at once. Someone will be the last man's name on a stark white cross. The last man on The List. Maybe it could stop at # 1888? Mr. Bush could see that piling up more dead in flag-draped coffins we are not allowed to view will not make the war end better. It is going to end badly. We know that. Nothing will keep the insurgents from blowing up American soldiers for the next 300 years. Cheap explosives. Countless idealistic young men, sold, like ours, a bill of goods.

 

There will be some morning when The Lizard Leaders lie no more. Because nobody's buying their snake oil — well, lizard oil, I guess.

 

Damnit, Juan, I don't know what to do to save you. I do not know what to do. We talk now a little. I'm psychic. I've seen his death. He's seen me seeing it. He's imploring me to turn back time before it is reached so he can go home, marry the very pretty — not beautiful, but very pretty, Felicia, buy the blue pick-up truck his cousin could sell him in the first week of December if he could only live that long. Their first child would be named Joseph.

 

Is it Baquba? Taji? Al Asad? Abd Allah? I cannot read the address of the bullet yet. He has written the name of Felicia inside his helmet with a Sharpie. Felicia es mi ángel. He drew a heart above and one below.

 

Felicia keeps his tooled cowboy boots by her bed, waiting for his return. Which does not happen because we did not pour into the streets soon enough. We lamented, but did not act. As if our being embarrassed or discomfited was more unbearable than the death of #1999.

08.16.05/ 98 days/ 141,120 minutes until the Death of Juan Smith #1999

09.18.05/ 64 days/ 92,160 minutes until the Death of Juan Smith #1999

09.24.05/59 days/84,960 minutes until the Death of Juan Smith #1999

 ∞∙∞∙∙∞∙∞∙∞∙∙∞∙∞∙∞∙∙∞∙∞∙∞∙∙∞∙

Today, 08.15.05,  we're at 1852 American soldiers dead. To me this isn't only about Ken or Casey or Roberto or Rachel  it's about Juan Smith #1999is there ANY way we can save that kid?¹ Today September 18, we’re at 1900 American soldiers dead.  

 

Is there ANY way we can save Juan Smith #1999 using the energy and the smarts of people like you and Cindy and me and any darnbody at all?

 

“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Iraq for a mistake?”²

 

I actually asked myself when I woke up this very morning, “Would I sleep with Karl Rove if it would stop the war today?” I have to tell you it was a sobering question which I could not answer at once. You cannot possibly imagine how much I despise slitherer Karl Rove and how much stealthy evil he has done malice aforethought. But now after a few hours of thought, clearly yes, to stop the senseless death of another kid, I'd even do that.)

 

As I write this mid-August, 1852 American soldiers (sons daughters fathers mothers individual unrepeatable lives) have died in the quagQuicksands of Iraq. [Now on September 18, we have 1900 dead. Only 99 dead to wake up.

 

Can we possibly pull our ingenuities and resources together and save Juan Smith destined to be #1999?

 

That would give us 146 dead to wake up, write our Congress people, write Letters to the Editors. Save Juan Smith #1999. Or does the count drone on and we sit baffled, lamenting?

 

Save Juan Smith #1999.

 

pogblog

 

ps. Please send this Save #1999 link to your friends.

http://pogblog.myblogsite.com/blog/_archives/2005/8/15/1140249.html

 

All the contact info for House & Senate is at afterdowningstreet. Get on their emailing list for Actions. It is beautifully and heartfeltedly organized. http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/

 

² adapted from John Kerry’s 1971 speech before Congress; 

 

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If you know an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of rage for justice, rage for peace material, please let me know: pogblog@yahoo.com

………….<^>……………..

Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

copyright pogblog 2005 all rights reserved

Please send pogblog’s link to your friends:

http://pogblog.myblogsite.com

6 Dog . Oc . Wolf. North . tzol 110  09.19.05 mon

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Justice & Education .. the Most Important Fable

Note: This deceptively simple fable is what I paid my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor for. Learning the answer to the question of Whether we can have a just world – not whether we will have a just world —  is one of the big questions of history, & I  could only answer it with my sinew and blood .. ..

Justice 

Justice is a bell. Justice is a mocking bird who rehearses song at <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />midnight in belief in dawn. Justice is heartbeat. Justice is blood. The essential real deal. Joy and purpose.

The first paper I wrote in college was “What is Justice?” I never guessed I would spend or pay my life and my very teeth to answer that question.

Somewhere in the Pleistocene of my twenties, a stone-tablets question appeared to me with an eerie and wistful persistence: Can we have a just world? Can we really ever have a just world or will the elite, mainly white, always have to have a filthy little secret, a permanently under-educated class, mainly non-white, to get the grotty jobs done?

I believed that education is the highest value and riches. Education was my mansion, my bullion. I lived a life of astonishing – thunderstruck — vividness because education opened my mind, my heart, stuck my fingers in the socket of the universe. Raw joy. Wild joy. Delicious joy.

A human right, I thought, this simple untarnishing joy. A self-evident human right. The key to this joy, the necessity to this joy, its breadth, delicacy, and leopard strength, is education.

So, I asked, could a person have the best possible liberal arts (tolerance, then appreciation for individual differences) education and do one of the non-glam jobs? Or, again, would we have to have this unspoken-of-class to wash our windows and collect our garbage?

I’d been a high school English teacher for ten years when this question appeared like Excalibur in the stone. Could there be a just world?

As the universe unscrolled for me the layers of this question, I wondered who I could ‘study’ to the True Answer? Eventually I knew it was true that I could only know the sinew and blood of the answer if I studied myself.

I could not go into the dear Peace Corps or Vista for two years and then back again after this useful dabble to the luxurious enclaves of academe or corporate, the gated worlds of group health plans and pensions.

Was education sufficient? Was it the highest value? Could I demand the inalienable right to a splendid education for every human being on Earth?

Well, twenty-one years as a self-employed window washer later, like the Ancient Mariner, I can hold you, hapless Wedding Guest, with glittering eye and say, adamantine and emerald, “Yes. Education is the Grail, does suffice, is armor, is amour, is hope, does not rust.”

Every hour of all those days was made more lively and tender and delectable because of the mirth, courage, insight, and wonder that education offers.

There is no smidgen of a question that education guarded me in dark nights and brought holy mockingbird song to my dawns.

I bought the answer to this great question, the Justice question, with the hours of my life. If I had it to do all over again, I was asked recently by a handsome rich Canadian who had drunk six martinis and was eating pistachios, would I do it over again? Lose my teeth, not go to the doctor for twenty-six years, face this pensionless old age?

I considered his question soberly. “To have earned in my flesh the burning answer to one of the great questions of our new millennium, it was worth my life. I can say ringingly to my species that every single human being’s life time is just as valuable to herself or himself as any other human being’s. That tolerance, then appreciation for individual differences is the daily lesson and the ‘point.’

Education can make the life hours even more fun and more searingly interesting. Curiosity is tasty. You don’t have to ‘follow your bliss’ for money.

Of course it’s absurd and obscene that the poor and the self-employed have no health insurance. Of course eventually we have to figure out how to share around the grotty jobs. Of course poverty utterly sucks. Of course I’d rather have a car with air conditioning.

If I hadn’t been so distilledly educated, I probably wouldn’t be besotted with the etymology of words and wouldn’t have known that ‘frolic’ means ‘swift gladness’ or that ‘rhapsody’ means ‘woven song.’

Justice is a bell. Justice is a mocking bird who rehearses song at midnight in belief in dawn. Justice is heartbeat. Justice is blood. The essential real deal. Joy and purpose.

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10 Jaguar . Ix . Ocelot . Panther . North . tzol 114 . 09.23.05 fri

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the pro-peace world begins today with you

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