KILLING TIME...

...not as in -- time to kill

but time to kill time:

the death of time itself.

This morbid fascination

with the bleak & unnoted

passing of all that was & will never be

Along the lines of that

Heraclitian dictum: where one

never steps foot in the same stream twice

The immortal fluidity of being:

the ultimate ground of consciousness

dies thousands of times each day

& yet we fabricate a sense of continuity, of permanence

since the water springs from the same unifying source.

But it never stays motionless, is always impermanent

Eternally coursing into, through and beyond itself

Time is and we are:

the river of forgetfulness itself.

Study-day

little treelings

bouncing beyond

the glass barricade

suffocating me

in this feast of

banality

Watch as they 

orbit their

miniature

existences,

dependent on the 

eternal buoyancy

of the dreams

made of twigs

& freedom

Med-is-in...Poison

My face pressed against

-- the softest walls

the creamiest colour

of Earth

His skin --

Like med-is-in

to my furrowed brow

T'was like ev'rything would be alright

with the stars

that night

& the dreams

of clouded visions

dissolved into what the poet's needs-must:

becoming

His skin

like poison

to my solitude

Woe is he who dare not drink of this elixir:

arrows dipped in honey

sent aloft the wings of something unnameable

Angelic in its betrayal of the coarse

Luciferous in its lure of the in-fine-ite

I love him

My animal soul

A poema

Meanings can be hollowed

-- Like loves can be lost

Those pills that we swallowed

-- Ingested at what cost?

Bitter nights of loneliness

-- Upon our pillows – weep

Yet only in our lonesomeness

-- Our precious secrets keep

Their magic is ineffable

-- Though the poet needs-must tell

The charm of the incredible

-- & the beauty of banal

So walk with me a moment

-- Amongst these flimsy flowers

Amidst the fog of clemency

-- Towards the higher power

of words written for words sake

-- and the breath of the infinite

for there you will find sweet sand you can rake

-- in your garden, so so recondite

To the purveyors of time & space &

--Mediocrity.

And as thus, it should be

-- A secret to both you and me

Neither known

Nor unknown

Merely unthought.

Like the leaves of a tree

(yet to be seen).

notes from Thomas Szasz's 'Ideology & Insanity'

As I suggested some time ago [review of The Economics of Mental Health, by Rashi Fein, NY: Basic Books, (1958), AMA Archives of Psychiatry, I: 116-118, July, 1959], in the US mental hospitalisation serves a twofold socioeconomic function.  First by defining people in mental hospitals as unfit for work (& often preventing them from working even after their discharge), the mental health system serves to diminish out national pool of employment; large numbers of people are classified as mentally ill rather than as socially incompetent or unemployed.  Second, by creating a vast organisation of psychiatric hospitals and affiliated institutions, the mental health care system helps to provide employment; indeed, the number of psychiatric and parapsychiatric jobs thus created is staggering.  As a result, major cutbacks in the expenditures of mental health bureaucracy threaten the same kind of economic dislocation as do cutbacks in the expenditures of the defence establishment and are, perhaps, equally 'unthinkable'.


It seems to me, therefore, that contrary to the oft-repeated propoganda about the high cost of mental illness, we have a subtle economic stake in perpetuating, and even increasing, such 'illness'.  Faced as we are with overproduction and underemployment, we can evidently afford the 'cost' of caring for hundreds of thousands of 'mental patients' and their dependants.  But can we afford the 'cost' of not caring for them, and thus adding to the ranks of the unemployed not only the so-called mentally ill, but also the people who now 'treat' them and do 'research' on them?

Whatever the ostensible aims of community psychiatry may be, its actual operations are likely to be influenced by socio-economic and political considerations and facts such as i have discussed here.

22nd May

That the life of Man is but a dream has been sensed by many a one, and I too am never free of the feeling.  When i consider the restrictions that are placed on the active, inquiring energies of Man, when i see that all our efforts have no other result than to satisfy needs which in turn serve no purpose but to prolong our wretched existence, and then see that all our reassurance concerning the particular questions we probe is no more than a dreamy resignation, since all we are doing is to paint our prison walls with colourful figures and bright views--all of this...leaves me silent.  I withdraw into myself, and discover a world, albeit a notional world of dark desire rather than one of actuality and vital strength.  And everything swims before my senses, and I go my way in the world wearing the smile of the dreamer.


All our learned teachers and educators are agreed that children do not know why they want what they want; but no-one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.  And yet it seems palpably clear to me.


I gladly confess, since i know the reply you want to make, that they are the happiest who, like children, live for the present moment, drag their dolls around and dress and undress them, and watchfully steal by the drawer where Mama has locked away the cake, and, when at last they get their hands on what they want, devour it with their cheeks crammed full and cry, 'More!' -- They are happy creatures.  And those others, who give pompous titles to their beggarly pursuits and even to their passions, and chalk them up as vast enterprises for the good and well-being of mankind, they are too happy. --It is all very well for those who can be like that!  But he who humbly perceives where it is all leading, who sees how prettily the happy man makes an Eden of his garden, and how even the unhappy man goes willingly on his weary way, panting beneath his burden, and that all are equally interested in seeing the light of the sun for one minute more -- he indeed will be silent, and will create a world from within himself, and be happy because he is a man.  And then, confined as he may be, he nonetheless still preserves in his heart the sweet sensation of freedom, and the knowledge that he can quit this prison whenever he wishes.


...from 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Chairoscuro

Chairoscuro

means so much to me now

The coming of light

in contrast to darkness

Where both the light and the dark

are mutually interdependent.

Reminds me of the earliest dawn

as we left

the incarcerating womb of eternity

leaving the unknown

the unthought

behind in emptiness

Yasmin Levy -- So So Wonderful

Disjecta membra

...all these disjecta membra --

-- scattered fragments

of my opus apotheosis --

-- the apex of my own

strange fruit,

feel like Horace's:

'limbs of a dismembered poet'

& yet i write them down

where time doth crown

the meteoric rise of this:

conscious subjectivity

Klymax: Meeting in the Ladies Room...classic!!

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Prayer Before Birth -- Louis MacNeice

I am not yet born; O hear me. Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the club-footed ghoul come near me. I am not yet born, console me. I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me, with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me, on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me. I am not yet born; provide me With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to  talk to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me. I am not yet born; forgive me For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me, my treason engendered by traitors beyond me, my life when they murder by means of my hands, my death when they live me. I am not yet born; rehearse me In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white waves call me to folly and the desert calls me to doom and the beggar refuses my gift and my  children curse me. I am not yet born; O hear me, Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God come near me. I am not yet born; O fill me With strength against those who would freeze my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton, would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with one face, a thing, and against all those who would dissipate my entirety, would blow me like thistledown hither and thither or hither and thither  like water held in the hands would spill me. Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me. Otherwise kill me.

Illustrations Vol I (Captioning from Schelling's 'Philosophy of Art' (1859)

Art is not only essentially at one with the highest philosophy; it is “the repetition of that same philosophy in the highest potenceReflexive self-consciousness does not occupy the same privileged position as it does for Hegel since all things are, understood within the absolute, finally oneWhile Reason is the “full expression of absolute identity as such, only art can express or represent the synthesis of knowledge and action, of that which is known in thought with that which can take on form in the world. It is in art that the “real” becomes “truly similar to and equal to its own idea…Schelling’s “potences” are “universal forms recurring in the same way in all objects.”Even the inorganic contains the organic principle subordinated within itself.”“Schelling then sees the history of art not as a history of progress but as a series of variously emphasized relations of the real to the ideal…relations that are in the final analysis the same, when produced to the level of the absolute”

“preoccupation with the problem of how a particular work of art comes to be, how “individual beautiful things can issue from universal and absolute beauty…this…is…the particular version, for aesthetics, of the general question of philosophy as a whole, “namely, to understand the manifestation of the ideas through particular things

Art is a…positive act; it is the objectification of the spirit of nature that is within human beings, and is analogous to nature’s own generation of phenomena with “consistency of form and regularity”

Like natural things, art is as “emanation of the absolute”; Schelling’s word Ausfluss, implies an active, vital process of coming into being

The archetypes of all things are absolutely beautiful, and the universe as a whole is the absolute artwork of… “the source of all beauty”.

Art is the medium of our insight into the noumenal essence, “the real representation of the forms of things as they are in themselves.’

“At one point he remarks that beauty emerges “automatically” with the “removal of that which does not belong to the essence”.

The activity of the artist would then consist in stripping away…”the veil from the hidden beauty of the world,” a world otherwise obscured and distorted by “particular facts.

This explanation seems to lead to an idea of the artist as one possessed with superior vision, and to a strong distinction between individual human beings in the world. It is not pursued.”
Where philosophy requires self-consciousness at the ideal level, art appears in an unconscious act in the real world.”

“For Schelling, Greek mythology represents the “highest archetype of the poetic world” Here, the “synthesis of the absolute with limitation” that is the “mystery of all life” is most fully and completely carried out.

The Greek gods, understood collectively, are an organic whole: “all possibilities within the realm of ideas as constructed by philosophy are completely exhausted in Greek mythology” Here the reigning mode is the symbolic, so that the particular is at all times also the universal…true mythology comes from a “common formative impulse”

Homer recites a poem that is already there in every sense except the empirical.”
“…the modern world…is founded in divisive individuality and in the “irrational”. 

his predicament is frequently celebrated…as the only world worth having, one out of which authentic wholeness must be achieved and earned.

But Schelling’s account is reluctant to celebrate this felix culpa of the modern condition.”
“Schelling diagnoses the modern condition as founded in nothing less than the “invention” of history.”

“for [the Greeks]…time was not critical, since the infinite was already in the world with them, as nature…Nature is no longer sufficient in itself, but becomes a “mystery,” an allegorical form needing to be deciphered.

Mythology (by which Schelling means the body of ideas and practices holding together a culture) no longer creates religion, as it did for the Greeks, but must somehow emerge from it.”

“Schelling’s term for the definitive syndrome of the modern condition is…”estrangement,”…self-projection through alienation that is the beginning of mature self-consciousness…Being human in a human culture involves experiencing and utilizing estrangement.”

“Questions about individual genius are misleading since what genius depends upon is not the individual”

“Schelling is committed to the eternal identity of all art (and history) at the level of the absolute. At this level, and only at this level, history reveals “the essential and inner unity of all works of art,” whose works are the product of “the same spirit, a spirit that even in the antithesis of ancient and modern art is merely showing us two faces”. From this perspective there is no time and thus no history, since “all time is merely the difference between possibility and actuality, and all manifested actuality is only the dismantling of that identity in which everything is simultaneous.”

a found poem

I looked you in the eye

that ever-longing look

locked into eternal bliss

-- not the bliss of a gynmastic conversation

but the bliss of an ever-lasting memory

Your thoughtful face embraces

the calm of my deeper being

Its not what you wear

-- its what's in your heart

; sad boy blue

stripes of transgression

in a fusion of isolation

you are my honesty imbued

with the bitter taste of bad breath

yet you breath thru me still

like a winter's breeze

in the cold world 

basking in sunlight