Super Moon Falls

For You

Chaplin, "Monsieur Verdoux"

Self Portrait with Philosopher's Stone and Cane

"Lead the mind, as by a hand, to the contemplation of invisible realities."
---Basil of Caesarea

Happy 4th

White Supremacists Block Busloads of Children and Women Arriving at Detention Center to Start Deportation Process in California

"It will confirm me bold; the child o'th'Court.
Let blushes dwell i'th'country."
Thomas Middleton, The Revenger's Tragedy, Act 1, Scene 3.

The Damned

"A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this."

                  R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.

Siena

Urbs Senarum in Etruria admodum nobilis est, et agrum late patentem possidet.
--- Pope Pius II, Commentaries.

No Kidding

Plus de Miracle

The small but abiding shock 
of apprehending bodies 
dispense with agency.

Children speak love
without prompting.

Birds sing at three hands
past the witching hour.

Marvels of otherwise
unremarkable days.

Bodies

   
"Daily habit makes one forget that one has a body that is equally subject to all the laws of destruction in the physical world as is a piece of wood that we saw or cut in pieces, and that the body moves in accordance with the same laws as any other physical machine constructed by human beings. --Only on certain occasions do we become sharply aware that our body is a physical object which can be destroyed--and then we are frightened at ourselves, suddenly feeling that we supposed ourselves to be something we are not, and that instead we are something that we fear to be."

                                          ---- Karl Philipp Moritz, Anton Reiser, Part Three.   

"For You"

Satire

"The best are convicted as the worst strut with impunity."




Under scolding heaven
handless men kill.
Mars seduced the God
he cuckolded, then
placed his divine consort
in southern California.
The Goddess, heels grown high,
inspires play which
seduces doe-eyed mortals
to His terrible craft.

Diagnosis

     "The disease of reason is that reason was born from man's urge to dominate nature, and the 'recovery' depends on insight into the nature of the original disease, not on a cure of the latest symptoms. The true critique of reason will necessarily uncover the deepest layers of civilization and explore its earliest history. From the time when reason became the instrument for domination for human and extra-human nature by man---that is to say, from its very beginnings---it has been frustrated in its own intention of discovering the truth. This is due to the very fact that it made nature a mere object, and that it failed to discover the trace of itself in such objectivization, in the concepts of matter and things not less than in those of gods and spirit. One might say that the collective madness that ranges today, from the concentration camps to the seemingly most harmless mass-culture reactions, was already present in germ in primitive objectivization, in the first man's calculating contemplation of the world as a prey. Paranoia, the madness that builds logically constructed theories of persecution, is not merely a parody of reason, but is somehow present in any form of reason that consists in the mere pursuit of aims."

                    ------Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, (176; ch. V).

Venerie

A name for the air and nothing more

Spleen 68

The cock silent as lace and slow rain,
parce que personne sacks empty palaces.

Communard bones shook en rage
as students above ground
called their tombs la plage.

Banks where pretty women
smiled wide as boulevards,
singing slogans,
their eyes on young men who,
cent ans avant, buried reds sous les pavés.

Realists effaced the possible
avec Lacan flooded lacunae.

Entering the palace,
cocks, loud as ever,
crow.
               
                  In every intime non
                    grave reds heard
                         Foucault.

To Me

Atropos

             I
Above
crisp sails swell full cheek.

In white cloth,
                               bright as scant cloud
                               crossing Sun,
I pace the deck.

          II
Run blind
 threadless youth,
        heels break in time.

Hooked by form's lure,
she cuts livelier lines.

Spring Forward

Spring Fog, Black Bird at Margin