11.24.06
Posted in Personal at 10:51 pm by Moody
Smoke a cigarette as the evening’s last sunlight dies behind the silencing veil of weightless white clouds turned dark orange, goldenrod, light coral and indian red, slate blue and orchid…. Smoke a cigarette as the air chills and the street lights come on. Cars light up along the freeway in glowing red and shining white; cars, — dark shapes between alien words of light, indecipherable and blurred. Cars as a metaphor for my thought. Far above, there appear the first of the few stars visible here, far above, far removed, distant — but like relatives still close as blood. Smoke a cigarette; inhale the killing carcinogens, exhale the dying dreams.
And the drift net of my concern, my grasping care for my life, catches on the heights of the city’s boxlike structures and all its poles and towering forms, like the words catch in my throat even now.
It is the season again for me to wonder why: “Why on earth do I go on?” And although I have answers — varied and sundry — it all feels somehow sadly like a collection of dryly pragmatic excuses to my own heart. Crush out the cigarette. Watch the last feeble stream of smoke drift into nothingness, or a haze of pointlessness (as it were; and what’s the difference?). I am here, now, and it is another day. And it is the season for me to wonder why. I wonder why.
Disparate images: all the jetsam of longing and flotsam of hope gathering itself together on an endless strand of an otherwise empty beach… while Sigur Rós’s ( ) — “Untitled 4″, currently — plays in my headphones. What am I telling myself? What is it I hear?
My mind keeps going back to the interview with Robert Pirsig I recently read. He’s 78 years old, now, almost twice my age, and yet I feel closer to his age than to half of my own. Bookstores still place Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila in the “New Age” section rather than the philosophy section. That book — along with Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow — changed my life, or the way I think about my life. But at the age of 40 years, I have to wonder what the change mattered, what it meant if I make it current and ask what it means now. I am not a contented person. I am not a “happy” person. I am not satisfied. Nor do I believe I ever will be any of those things. What I found in ZMM was not an answer but a deep, abiding, permanent question that Lila did not seek to answer but only compounded. I gather from the interview with Pirsig that he is still working on it for himself, but I am perhaps projecting a bit (for the fact is that I don’t really know). And I have to admit that Pirsig’s path is not mine after all, however similar it may appear to be, …which is for the best, of course, because I can learn more from the quality of our differences, you know?
I tried reading the 30,000 page menu at the metaphysics restaurant and found nothing in the end (which, as Pirsig points out, is what they serve there). But unlike Pirsig, I did not find myself asking the question, “Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What’s the motive?” The answer is simply that there was no motive, and it’s too bad for those people who feel unhappy about that. All we have are our own motives as we find them, and they exist beyond physics (qua the physical universe) even as they emerge from and depend, in the end, on them (so far as we can know or rationally assert); i.e., there is no way to know or experience them apart from what we, as human beings, who are a (by-?) product of the physical universe, know and experience as the universe. So-called “metaphysical” ideas are, themselves, merely part of the physical world like any other thoughts. Putting it in entirely other language: with regard to so-called “metaphysics”, there is nothing to transcend and nothing to transcend in-to. To quote Pirsig again, “The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there”. That really rather says it all.
So, here I am. Darkness has settled over this side of the planet and the sun, existing as it does in the sky of some other country, is for me but a remembered thing I expect to see again. An old French comedy, Marquet and Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (Les Vacances Monsieur Hulot, 1953), plays on the television. My lover is sleeping. The heat of the room is impersonally palpating my skin and my ears feel damp, nestled in my headphones, as “Untitled 9 A” plays sweetly, sadly, beautifully…. I am not sure what I am doing. I light another cigarette. It’s the weekend, and I have time left in my life to figure things out, for whatever that’s worth. But I am also fairly sure that I shall feel again like I know what’s it all about, when I am in the middle of an extended embrace and loving eyes are fixed on mine, all acceptance and empathy, and love slays that noisome portion of my mind once more… (though, that is not why I go on).
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11.18.06
Posted in Ethics, Politics, Religion/Spirituality, Reproductive Rights, Sexuality at 1:42 am by Moody
It gets me every time: some fool spouting off — in a more or less straighforward manner — about how sexuality and its myriad expressions must be controlled. As PZ Myers reports, Bush “is appointing a certifiable kook to run the federal program that oversees family planning and reproductive health”. This particular cert-k is one Dr. Eric Keroack, an anti-choice, anti-sex bug who has now been appointed by Bush “to oversee Title X funding—the only federal program devoted entirely to family planning and reproductive health”.
The apparent bee in the bonnet of this mad-as-a-hatter doctor is oxytocin, a chemical that is
released during positive social interaction, massage, hugs, “trust” encounters, and sexual intercourse. “It promotes bonding by reducing fear and anxiety in social settings, increasing trust and trustworthiness, reducing stress and pain, and decreasing social aggression,” he said.
The erstwhile doctor claims, in a nutshell, that pretty much only monogamous, married couples are safe from depleting oxytocin levels to the point where they “diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual”. Never mind that his science is flawed — insofar as it is laughably nonexistent — what is clear is that this idiot has an agenda that is plainly at odds with the position for which he has been appointed. Prof. Myers has already more than adequately laid into the unsoundness of Keroack’s vapid arguments, effectively razing them. What I want to say here has to do with the ethical issues.
Again and again, thanks to the BushCo Pro-Faith Initiative®, we have seen these unsavory religious types of people slipped into positions of governmental authority. Like breeds like. Whether it’s ID/creationism or anti-choice/anti-sex proponents we’re talking about, what remains constant is the religious — specifically, or especially, the evangelical and fundamentalist varieties — bent. Bush keeps trying to ensure that his legacy is a (rather narrowly defined) religious one. Does that not seem problematic in light of the ostensibly non-religious nature of the U.S. government? And isn’t it even more problematic, where the sex lives of human beings are concerned, when such a pinheaded “pro-abstinence” evangelizer who sides with the religious right, is placed in charge of family planning and reproductive health — when it has been shown that “abstinence-only” and similarly unrealistic programs don’t even work?
And Keroack is the medical director of an anti-choice “crisis pregnancy center”, A Woman’s Concern, for crying out loud.
It’s easy to understand: appointing Eric Keroack into any position of authority is a mistake, but appointing him to oversee Title X funding is downright unethical, tantamount to appointing a zealous and hinky furrier as “caretaker for America’s furry animals”. He is simply not fit for the position, in the same way that Bush is not fit to be the POTUS. But of course it’s obvious that Keroack is exactly right for the job so far as Bush is concerned. The doctor oozes that brand of underhanded moralism injected so well by Bush and his religious backers into the mainstream of American politics. He pretends to be an actual scientist when in reality he’s a prude in disguise, a mostly-undercover prig with some power and authority. (Cripes! — but Bush has promoted a lot of them!) And it’s all, in the end, in the name and to the glory of some crushingly dense form of repressive morality, the “necessity” of which is endlessly touted to high heaven (as it were) by a bunch of sexually repressed (undeveloped? malformed? immature?), power-hungry, god-deluded herd animals with a perverse “Father”/penis fixation and ugly self-esteem issues… to mention but a few of their common, uncouth traits.
Understand that it is not healthy, responsible sexual activity that Keroack and his ilk are promoting. Sex for sex’s sake is unwholesome in their book, a hedonistic and sinful flight from what they perceive as the “real purpose” of sex. What they are promoting is the idea that sex ought only to exist for “married couples” who share in “God’s plan”, which, so far as I can tell, involves procreating for the sole purpose of increasing the numbers of people just like them: anti-science, anti-evolution, anti-choice, pro-war, pro-death-penalty, pro-grammed, and “Christian”. And although I don’t doubt that some among them would disagree with my list to some degree or on some point, I assert that they are nonetheless subservient to the heirarchy of those powers who promote them all.
So, you see, the real bee in the bonnet of this mad-as-a-hatter doctor is not oxytocin, it’s the freedom to have sex with whomever you’d like to have sex with (assuming a mature, consensual experience) that vexes him and irritates his moral compass. So just who the hell is he to have authority over such an issue? He’s certainly not the person any sane, rational person would appoint to oversee Title X funding:
The Title X program is the only Federal program devoted solely to the provision of family planning and reproductive health care. The program is designed to provide access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them with priority given to low-income persons. A broad range of effective and acceptable family planning methods and related preventive health services are available on a voluntary and confidential basis. In addition to contraceptive services and related counseling, Title X supported clinics also provide a number of preventive health services such as: patient education and counseling; breast and pelvic examinations; cervical cancer, STD and HIV screenings; and pregnancy diagnosis and counseling. For many clients, Title X clinics provide the only continuing source of health care and health education.
Do you see? The man will, without a doubt, do his damnedest to subvert and undercut efforts to educate and inform, without a religio-moral bias, those who seek out the answers to their questions about sex-related matters from Title X clinics, and by doing so he will cause unconscionable harm to countless individuals who depend on the assistance of educated professionals — people working for the seekers’ benefit without some agenda that transcends any seeker’s needs as an individual human being.
I urge you to write to your elected representatives and tell them that Dr. Eric Keroack is not merely a bad choice, he is a completely and irrefutably unethical choice for overseeing Title X funding. Also:
The public can file a complaint against him with the American Board of Obsetrics/Gynecology, where he is certified, and the Massachusetts Board of Medicine, where he is licensed. You can reach each at: http://www.abog.org/about/contact.html http://www.massmedboard.org/consumer/complaint.shtm
Thanks to Talk To Action for the two above quoted links.
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11.16.06
Posted in Personal at 9:57 am by Moody
You walk into the watershed moment all rainbow by moonlight and plastique by dawn, coronal diadem verses leaping plosively from each uncut jewel and its refractive properties. An alliterative splurge surging westward through the brow, proudly saying, “Fear’s feckless feint frames the fantastic failure of fatalistic misfortune! I am free now forever!” And so you, my Captain, are to the heaving and sparkling prow what the wind-pregnant sail is to the foaming waves or as the cyclopean lighthouse is to the Hydrobatidae of the Straight of Messina. And in the spiralling curls of your amber scented ebony locks — decorated with a thousand drops of life-giving water, resplendant in those locks’ embrace — is the history of the ocean and its love for the moon, your ur-cu sister in blood. And in your eyes is the light of the black sun, shone as from a movie projector. And in your mouth is a scorpion bearing her young through a ring of scarlet fire sweet as pomegranate seeds. And your heart is the furnace of love. So it is you have sailed on through three decades, a myth made of mercury and ash in an earthenware skin glazed by the sugar sweat of stars….
This morning as you lay sleeping, I gazed upon you with the accumulated interest of our times together and I sighed. How it is you came to be here, now, is a tale-and-a-half not to be told out of school. What I know of you is both a blessing and a burden, and, inititiated as I am in your mysteries, all the more reason for me to love you as you are, for who you are and how you are. It is my contention that we have only just embarked on the real voyage of our lives. What came before served to teach us who we are, or were, or could be, — though never the three at one time, or so it seems to me.
Perhaps today marks for you the end of a thirty years’ war; perhaps the treaty you shall sign with your life will mark a new era with whole new freedoms.
Perhaps it’s like I said only yesterday: “Life is like a bargain show in Las Vegas. It’s all in the sequins of events”.
No matter.
Today is your birthday and I am grateful, grateful, grateful for your being here. I’ve all the hope in the world that it will be a good day in the same way that our evening at Mimi’s Café was a good time. You deserve no less — ever. And, too, it is my sincerest wish that every birthday to come will in some wise be better than the previous one.
So, happy birthday, Kisha, my love, my heart, my life. Happy birthday.
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Posted in Music at 7:45 am by Moody
Joanna Newsom: Ys
![[image]](http://verywide.net/blog/wp-content/images/misc_others/jnewsom-ys.jpg "Joanna Newsom: Ys")
Okay, let me put it simply: buy this album, because it is, perhaps, the one album you need to buy this year. I know, I know… I know what some of you are thinking, and I understand. Her previous album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, though often glowingly reviewed, was made for eclectic tastes; pop accessibility was not its selling point, its genuinely quirky and innocent beauty was. Joanna Newsom is, after all, a beautifully eccentric denizen of Faerie, and her brand of folk music is never less than enchanting. When Kisha and I saw her at the Troubadour as an opening act — we went to see her and not the headliner — we were blown away by her sheer talent, but we both understood that many people would not be able to get past her singing style no matter how much they appreciated her words and harp. A shame, that last bit.
But the songs on Ys are not only more accessible. Joanna Newsom has expanded her vocal range and her music exponentially, managing to create on this new work a level of intimacy epic in its range. She has added strings, horns, backing vocals, and other instrumentation, using them judiciously and precisely, in much the same way as Fiona Apple did on the pre-release version of Extraordinary Machine. Vocally, there are complimentary comparisons to Björk’s voice on Vespertine, though they are positively distinct. Lyrically, her poetry has matured and developed in step with her voice’s ability to express it. Her themes are magically intricate tapestries, filled with heady and fresh breezes, touching realms enigmatic and crystal clear by turns, sweet and poignant, filled with sad systole and joyful diastole in the tradition of high literature. She manages to make you feel as if you are sharing in a secret moment, but that moment is the world itself.
Named after the mythical city built by a king for his daughter and drowned beneath the sea, Ys comprises five long tracks — four of which are over 9 minutes long (the fifth track is over 7 minutes) — that pass, alas, too quickly. They are each epic in scope, yet they seem to fly by as quickly as a joyful, meaningful holiday filled with merry meetings, a long dinner with wine and dessert, and great conversations that slowly fade as such conversations do. In other words, at just over fifty-five minutes long, Ys is a treasure for the heart.
With arrangements by Van Dyke Parks, engineering by Steve Albini, and production by Jim O’Rourke, you might think that the album would be more a product of their concerted efforts than her’s. But a first listen will dispell that idea. Their talents have served rather than subsumed Joanna’s work, allowing Ys to remain wholly her own. Which leads to this bold statement: Joanna Newsom’s Ys is worthy of more than a Grammy; it is worthy of becoming one of those works that remains on “Top” lists for decades to come, worthy of being referenced as a watershed moment in music history, worthy of taking its place among the stars whose work has periodically redefined for the better the artistic heights music might attain to.
Buy Joanna Newsom’s Ys and cherish it forever.
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11.04.06
Posted in Society and Culture, The Animal Kingdom at 8:26 pm by Moody
It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind. And yet entirely befitting of an animal with such a highly developed sensibility, a deep-rooted sense of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, the elephant is not going out quietly. It is not leaving without making some kind of statement, one to which scientists from a variety of disciplines, including human psychology, are now beginning to pay close attention.
It is a devastating read, Charles Siebert’s “An Elephant Crackup?“, but it is an important and needed read. And not only because of what it says about the plight of the world’s elephant population today. The stunning, inherent revelation is impossible to miss: there is a distinct parallel with the plight of African-Americans, especially African-Americans in their early thirties and younger, of Africans in war-torn countries such as Sudan, Uganda, and Rwanda, and of other peoples the world over.
What we have done and are continuing to do to the elephants is leading to irreversible systemic damage to their culture. It is a perfect reflection of what we are doing to each other, to ourselves. But what the elephants are teaching us, in particular, is that animal species other than our own have psychological lives that parallel and are quite similar to ours. To some people this will not be a surprise. Certainly, many people are aware that it is no case of anthropomorphism when they recognize in their cat, dog, or bird companions some distinct, recognizable emotion that requires no translation. It is easy enough to extend such an understanding to “undomesticated” animals, and the evidence is readily available to support it. But for the majority of us it seems that this is still remarkable news.
We have built up a number of psychological walls between what is demonstrable fact — that many non-human animal species have psychologically rich and complex lives — and that which perpetuates our singular insularity in a sea of so many other species, where we can imagine that we alone are capable of complex thought and self-reflection. We want those barriers against such recognition to remain unbreached because without them we’d have a much harder time exploiting and, more often than not, murdering countless numbers of those “others”. Although it should be fairly clear that we’re capable of coming up with new excuses when our old excuses fail us, and that even without real excuses we are still capable — indeed, willing — to exploit and to murder. This topic has been treated at greater length, and more eloquently, by others (see: Carol Adams, Umberto Eco, Albert Camus, etc.), so I’ll leave it here.
[The elephants] have no future without us. The question we are now forced to grapple with is whether we would mind a future without them, among the more mindful creatures on this earth and, in many ways, the most devoted. Indeed, the manner of the elephants’ continued keeping, their restoration and conservation, both in civil confines and what’s left of wild ones, is now drawing the attention of everyone from naturalists to neuroscientists. Too much about elephants, in the end — their desires and devotions, their vulnerability and tremendous resilience — reminds us of ourselves to dismiss out of hand this revolt they’re currently staging against their own dismissal. And while our concern may ultimately be rooted in that most human of impulses — the preservation of our own self-image — the great paradox about this particular moment in our history with elephants is that saving them will require finally getting past ourselves; it will demand the ultimate act of deep, interspecies empathy.
We are in a time and age that knows more pain and suffering — viewed on a global scale — than virtually any other known to historical records. The deaths from the conflicts in Rwanda, Darfur and Iraq and many other places flow into the deaths caused by starvation, malnutrition, AIDS and other diseases. So many lives displaced, so many lives bound by poverty to perpetual ruin; more names than could be written in a lifetime. In this time of suffering the elephants are showing us something important. Our two tribes are in crisis, though their crisis is perpetuated by ours. How we respond to the crisis of the elephants, and what we think about the response, will reflect, in the end, how we respond to our own. How we respond, and what we think, will illustrate our capacity for understanding the lives of “others”, and it will cause us to consciously bear the responsibility — one that has never been passed off, even in our supposed unconsciousness, without consequence — of our actions. In the end, how we treat “others”, whether human or non-human, is how we treat ourselves, for they are us and we are them in a world that is but one.
. . . . . . . .
It was fortuitous that, the day before reading the NY Times article, Kisha had me listen to an interview with rapper Killer Mike on the October 6th podcast of The Sound of Young America. In it, he discusses the crack cocaine epidemic that devastated countless black families, what life is about for gang members, and the cost of an endemically broken social order, all in terms of his personal history and experience. I recommend that you take the time to listen to it as well. (It is available via iTunes subscription or as an MP3 at the SYA site.)
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