Down to words (765)

Shreddings (1) 

 

Down to what?

Fragments-non Diels.

 

Business?

No deals. No cycles.

 

Non colossal striding.

Stridor’s coughing.

 

Feminine, first declension. 

A little Latin. 

No Greek. 

A dead language learned. 

A Latin wheel to learn it.

A fire now to burn it,

And fortune’s wheel.

 

And all heard from the ear,

All once read from old texts,

Having been spoken.

To be gone.

Se(x)ts.

 

The gender war to end genders.

 

No sitting on any alley.

Nor any pond.

No reflection necessary.

Nor natural language learned,

Naturally.

 

The beach of Algiers.

The sun.

 

Daddo’s game:

 

https://www.chop.edu/conditions-diseases/stridor-noisy-breathing

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Alexander_Diels

https://nypost.com/2021/02/27/why-bill-gates-is-now-the-us-biggest-farmland-owner/ 

Down to words (764)

Promised comment (101) 

 

A serious thinker has to work things out. I use verse to do that. It is shorter than prose. It suggests more with less. It is useful for thought. A philosopher tends to state things in principle and then lets his followers do deductive work. Generally, I do not think that works. It works better not to emphasize in principle statements. It is better to look at what is at issue. 

 

At issue is a simply clever notion if used wrong. If what is at issue is determined contextually, then it is not merely clever. Then it enables one to find the truth. Verse helps to establish context.

 

Here is an early one on a beginning:

 

Orchard work 

 

They began early with dawning sun

Warming their full leaved, rowed trees.

Somewhat later the heat would come

To tax their high energies,

Draining them, carrying loads below

The sweat of their tired faces.

The cooler’s water would flow 

To the sweat of their tired faces.

Then they would bow and slow

To fingers scored with scratches,

Fruit unsorted, unpacked,

Yet still to hold, after the ladders,

Legs to ache with each step to go 

Down their father’s old, careful path,

Each tree, known to their father,

Now watered, picked, known by the sons.

 

9/10/14

 

Analysis is much like the offering above or it is no good. Genuine analysis is quite difficult. “Dominion”  below shows what is no good:

 

Dominion

 

Gluteals straining,

They were still slaves,

Slaves of the sentence,

Its parts, participles,

As they talked.

Yes, they talked,

Leg-ironed above,

Spraying below them

Scattered broken bricks 

From the world’s conflict.

Yes, they talked,

As if to wet them,

Water and nitrogen

Streaming, as edit.

 

10/10/15

 

The world gets reduced to a pissing contest of words, or worse, a domination by them. One more thing: Nothing can stop one from being clever.

Down to verse (1828)

Macadam Alley CXXXVII

 

Pull down my vanity.

How start me

With what’s in front of me?

 

The key did play of relevance,

The poser’s footnote sex-pedalian,

Half hendeca, half again trifecta,

In hemistich

Their race be won.

The races lost.

Dead now, the once Pygmalion,

The old man loco now, no doubt,

Without his love.

Got snug with buggered DNA,

New logic, thus.

All got shipped off.

 

Once stuffed my Kools with ganjee.

Exams delayed for relevance,

Now that made sense, ya see,

That one had clout,

My mouth to flout,

My mind to rout.

I might get laid on that, O Pops,

I toked to that one made, O Pops.

 

Some hops for Cerberus,

Chesney’s dog Bocephus.

Silly country ful(k)d.

You might get that Old Man, Old Man.

Buggered can of a nation.

 

The little dead boy

Far out of town,

I got my social 

From that clown.

 

I mighta toked to anything

Those days.

 

Daddo’s game:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemistich

 

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ganja

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerberus

 

https://genius.com/Kenny-chesney-keg-in-the-closet-lyrics

 

Having already taught a multitude of Chesney-esque fools, Bloom wrote his Closing of the American Mind in 1987. Chesney reflects Bloom's genius in 1989. Bloom was brilliant.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#"Nihilism,_American_Style"

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_S._Fuld_Jr.

Down to words (763)

Promised comment (100)

 

Few can see a corrosive mindset at the beginning. Those who do are not necessarily brilliant thinkers. Often they are just affected.  Most cannot see it until it is too late. Often the brilliant defend it, for they are the brains of it and have been protected until the end.

 

One of my ghosts was affected many years ago. He is not brilliant. He just witnessed it personally. Then he came to see that deconstructionism would take the power of the witness away from all of us. If it succeeds, we shall never see the old truth that what goes around, comes around. That is its end game.

Down to words (762)

Promised comment (99)

 

Mindsets are a funny business. A corporate board may have one. For example, the board does not make out-of-state investments. Perhaps that is acknowledged expressly. Or it only hires local people. Maybe that is admitted but not expressed. Other things the board may not acknowledge. It may not even be aware that it allows self-dealing. That may come to be pointed out by a consultant or a regulator who catches it. This may lead to change. The IRS may force change in a charity. Much recrimination may follow. 

 

The mindset I am talking about is seldom noted. If pointed out, it is often denied. A way of thinking may run deep and be generally unnoticed. It may be clothed in a kind of righteousness if a board is pressed.  All sorts of unwritten policies are found in college admittance, for example, and have been the subject of litigation.

 

With deconstructionism it is even more difficult. This is because deconstruction may build in objections to policy at many levels. Language can get stretched so that things are said to be the same that are not the same. We come down to the meaning of ‘is’ or ‘same’. Predication gets pummeled.

 

A warm-up follows.

 

SUNDAY, JUNE 09, 2019

Down to verse (1389)

A thorough death

As the group began to die,

To die from within,

Out came little paths,

From its surface thinned,

Cracks, little fissures within,

Demanding to be patched,

Rights of the small.

Then broader tracks,

As in a highway,

Then the tracks

Of the principals passed.

And principles did fall.

Down to words (761)

Promised comment (98)

 

The underlying mindset referred to herein is not a conspiracy. It is just a way of thinking. In it, the honor of the heroic narrative (Dakota or Greek) is useless. Courage, justice, beauty, the bulk of traditional notions that held peoples together are useless. They are being and have been unwound in order to bind us into something digital, in which there is to be no voice. Courage did not simply belong to the whites.  Nor did forked tongues. All have (had) voices.

 

Derrida’s white mythology is to remove the soul from the Dakota Stone-Boy as well as from us all.  We have had permissive societies before.  Traditional moralists have wrung their proper hands. But here their fight is not against the libertine. Nor is it against the communist.  Deconstructionism is quite different in its goal. We are to gain nothing like freedom from it.  Its goal is to make us like machines.

 

And, finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts-including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory-which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, gramme [written mark], or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed. (Of Grammatology, 1967, (p 9))

 

We have institutionalized a way of thinking: it protects the individual through a kind of negative narcissism that allows one to cast blame on others of a different class. We need never examine ourselves. Nothing like this is a theme of it: I was born with a raging thirst and a hunger to be free.  Anything like this is to be subsumed in class warfare.

 

Class warfare broadens. The whites are the first victims, cast as the first villains of it all. But many more villain-victims are to be generated, as virtue signaling varies from class to class. Women (sis, non sis, bulls(h)is) are now fighting over college athletics and who is a woman. Call it mindless. It seeks cybernetic mindlessness, right out of Derrida’s playbook.

 

The mindset cannot stop itself. It punishes all who try. You say it can stop.  I say it has already corrupted money and thought, institutionally. We ossify ourselves in the name of it.  We even toss our sexes away like the castrated priests of Galli. There is a reason why I started the verse with the thought of old money and medallions.

 

So I sit on Macadam Alley as far off Fed’s Broadway as I can.  With my small pair.  A poet of average heart, ghosts of greater hearts surrounding me, we fashion an epitaph of a wider grave.  No thanks to Larry M. 

 

Meanwhile, the Fed and its partner central banks fund a bankruptcy of us all: heart, mind, strength, money and soul.

 

Even the enlightened French are awash in conspiracies. These are unfathomable, but not entirely fake. They are narratives that hope against hope to prevail against an overriding trend to digitize us all. The trend is there. The narratives assign personal motives to it. 

 

There do not have to be any. There need be no conspiracies, although there is no doubt that certain persons (who may or may not be pedophiles) may benefit in the short term from the trend. Epstein uber alles? That is rather doubtful. For that is even better than where we are going.

 

In the US there is a narrative that is being used by the current ascending powers. It is the 1619 narrative. It will cease as the mindset proceeds. In France, there seems to be no such effective narrative. To their credit, the French seem concerned about maintaining a fact-based, democratic order. 

 

Vive la France. In the last days, I have turned to reading their press rather than ours.

 

Daddo’s game:

 

https://www.france24.com/en/france/20210220-stakes-are-high-as-qanon-conspiracy-phenomenon-emerges-in-france

 

https://mauberly.blogspot.com/2019/05/down-to-verse-1378.html

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project

https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/french-connections/20210226-understanding-laïcité-france-s-special-brand-of-state-secularism

Down to verse (1827)

Macadam Alley CXXXVI

 

Pull down my vanity.

How start me

With what’s in front of me?

 

The heroes, Pops,

A narrative of each

To ‘stablish them in reach.

Let their poesis sound,

A pagan nest abound 

Of them,

Down to a name,

Indefinite, yet precise to grasp,

A gem within a clasp,

Unnumbered.

Each singular.

Clasps, rings, 

Indefinitely mighty in their songs.

At worst,

They had their reservations.

May they live,

As voices walking ways,

To save them from some One.

Z kills them all.

The toon of Z, today,

Holds one more poet up,

Today to file her,

Then to kill her

And all days.

 

Daddo’s game:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zitkala-Sa

 

·       Zitkála-Šá. "Why I Am a Pagan." Atlantic Monthly, 1902.

Down to verse (1826)

Macadam Alley CXXXV

 

Pull down my vanity.

How start me

With what’s in front of me?

 

Foundations:

Damn it, old man,

For sure I am no singin’ bard. 

Nor am I lost steel, sure and hard,

To be as one young Laughlin would,

And yet he stayed,

Did bring much aid. 

 

What song would I bring

For some crusade to sing

That puts even the ballad

‘Yond the love of tongue?

 

All heroes dead,

We rise but corpses

Instead.

 

Daddo’s game:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Laughlin

Down to words (760)

Promised comment (97)

 

(My mother was a tailor, sewed my new blue jeans.)

 

The election blurred much of what is occurring as we proceed painfully down the road to the new cyber humanity of deconstructionism. The central irony is that we do not see what we are doing as we fashion our current political and other strategies.  These flow out of a mindset. They are irrelevant otherwise.

 

The underlying mindset produces the plan to forgive college debt. It diminishes and stratifies the working poor and the homeless, many of whom can barely read. One of my ghosts works with imprisoned murderers, drug dealers, and armed robbers, many of them lifers, who would score higher than these poor folk on standardized admission tests.   

 

The plan subsidizes the elite universities that cater elegant condiments for prep schoolers who advance place out of what used to be common learning (core curriculum) for all of us. Out of the required 120 to 130 hours to complete, as incoming freshmen, many are close to halfway finishing one of those feckless postmodern degrees. They have plenty of time to radicalize.

 

The university is a continuing staging ground for the postmodern revolution. It has been since the 70s.  The beginnings of the revolution coincide with the loss of manufacturing jobs in the country. On and on the unheard narrative might run. 

 

Our prisoners can read all about it. They are doing 50 years waiting for a boot hill box. It is uncollapsed time, worth the wait.

 

Daddo’s game:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Rising_Sun

Down to words (759)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-great-student-loan-scam-11612915210?mod=theme_opinioncommentaryribbon

Down to verse (1825)

Macadam Alley CXXXIV

 

Pull down my vanity.

How start me

With what’s in front of me?

 

(I rave before a small enclave.)

 

Out went the childhood toons,

The puppet shows.

Their classes found one word from them,

Halved the sixer,

Used it for their inquiries,

Became their self-same Siris.

The tone was high.

The eyes afar

All drunk on one, 

One ‘relevance’.

 

The buildings all came down

On relevance,

Administrators,

Like the gubna mayors 

Feckless, sackless, ladies.

No hackles for the simplest tackle,

NFL done dropped its head,

Done broke its neck.

Done plain forgot its

3^rd grade fundamental.

(Ah yes, all done,

The schools abolished,

Milling children are all gone,

Coaches none, no cleats to polish.

Athlete fellows all were banned.)

Snot time raged, o’er relevance,

It was the first step in their line,

Not current race, 

Back bus to it,

Its special sign to ride

And sing ‘til flat.

(Friend Lloyd, hip, 

His half-breed son remain.

Remember some refrains.

The rest got shipped.)

 

I need no Fight Club now.

I hear no right notes now.

Monotonic clicks, one type,

Might I call on cadence

Of no tone?

What radiance throned?

To what spirit, pipe?

Cadence of what moan to yearn?

How pray I to Felicity

When all the temples burned?

 

(I rave before a small enclave.)

Down to verse (1824)

Macadam Alley  CXXXIII

 

Ok, Pops. Too much. What such?

I circle back.

 

The Lit departments started this,

At least were there when it began.

Weary of Freud, heaven, 

To Murgatroyd

They went stage left,

Big pompous, paper, cartoon cats,

Found, for a time, their comedy

In the texts of wacky Jackie D.

And that was that.

 

The Blooms,

The Arrowsmiths.

Their shots of arrows

Who cares where?

Poor Fenimore,

They X’d him from above,

Looped his coopers, 

His barrels fashioned

For their clowns,

Their rodeo in rounds,

Their fallen hides to hide,

Abide their woes of foes,

Eight sec bull rides.

Such short conceptions.

From stage above they came

As critics.

Ex machina,

As lowered Gods,

Now quick to kill us all.

 

Damn the lot of them,

Obnoxious popups,

Falldowns,

Little pricks of wasted taste,

Longfellowed Bumpowathas,

Fiedler’s dunces, ponces

Dancing in sunned resonance.

 

Never mind to pay a sense

To old Zane Grey.

N’er more L’ Amour,

N’er resonance in Comstock Lode.

 

The lot of them

Be damned.

The Brit would say

To them ‘you lot’.

What not?

Why not?

They do what with what?

What not?

Abbotts, Costellos, 

Based of what not?

Who’s on last with them?

 

Daddo’s game:

 

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/heavens-to-murgatroyd.html

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_(profession)

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zane_Grey

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_L%27Amour

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_and_Costello

 

Others cited previously.

Down to verse (1823)

Macadam Alley CXXXII

 

Pull down my vanity.

How start me

With what’s in front of me?

 

To find those globes of Emerson,

I circle out, I walk about.

Perambulate,

To rate the air by number.

What is the temp 

Of high speed ether?

 

I do not know the analects

Of this new dialect.

 

What is this Perigord

To which I walk?

What is the patter or the talk?

Strange Cinzano

That she pours me,

Liquid wit, tis none of it,

No longer dry, wit died.

I sit at table,

Hear no neighbor’s fable.

I sit, her dumbwaiter,

Move her notions

She terse, 

Reversed, I servant.

Language neither low nor high.

My word she does abate to flat, 

Lest wrong pronoun I should tap.

At ‘fat’ my wireless shuts.

She cuts into my VPN at ‘sluts’.

I leave anew with virtue.

At least I get away with ‘her’.

For now.

I say ‘come on’, 

May say not ‘Man’.

I am no fearless leader.

What hath God wrought for me

Who cannot use his words?

I make my tender tracks,

Feared syntax goes before my eyes.

 

Daddo’s game:

 

Emerson used ‘globes’ for eyes.

Down to words (758)

Promised comment (96) 

 

The verse uses ‘dialect’ loosely. Same with ‘analect’.  Deconstructionism is philosophy at its worst. It takes most everything out of context. It aims to do that.  It aims to take away traditional talking.

 

In higher heights of pedantry it hears your speech and imputes a meaning independently of what you mean.  Sartre beat its position before it was written. So did Wittgenstein, so did J.L. Austin. But it was written anyway so as to do violence to the spoken word. 

 

It does it. We do it, now that we have begun to think like it. Many now think that a written, unnamed, mailed vote is the same as a vote with a voiced, sworn identity.  Your politics is irrelevant here as this deconstructive truth is established.

 

It would be a joke, but it has little humor and less as time goes on. After you have endured its slings and arrows, you will have little occasion for laughing once it develops strict protocols for reviewing laughter. Your life will become like part of a recorded audience to a bad Mister Ed. 

 

Your risible man is to become your invisible man.

Daddo's game:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Ed

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/risible

Down to verse (1822)

Macadam Alley CXXXI

 

Pull down my vanity.

How start me

With what’s in front of me?

 

I circle back upon myself.

I once did say:

I never see them

At the close of day,

Or other part, 

Coming with any sort of face

That I would know.

Those that I know

Come from my neighborhood,

Walk it from within,

Know its parks and paths.

For they live down street

And have no call,

As the new ones do,

To shutter pictures,

Map me,

Clutter up my way.

But now I see them all about.

 

I circle back upon myself.

I once did say:

But now, by these,

I am to be wrought,

Nascent ways that force me

Out of every song I hum

To pay them tribute,

Watching all I do,

Knowing my shops, 

Wayward stops

And little places.

Yea, these new ones,

They leave me worn,

In their indifference, broad,

Their needs not yet born.

 

But now I say:

I am now wrought.

I circle back.

Their needs are born today.

 

Their long indifference

(Says my Yeats)

Casts my heart away from good,

Into an empty fear

That gnaws away my little place

And runs it underfoot.

Their long indifference

Hints a word

That is not mine

Nor rhyme of mine.

It is unheard,

Yet has me warned 

To wait…,

Until its need is born. 

 

The time is full

And now I say:

Their needs are born today.

 

Daddo’s game:

 

Cf. post 6/16/19, written in 2016 as a foreshadowing. The new dialect had been emerging for some years, even at that point. Fed’s Broadway begins on  6/25/19.

 

https://mauberly.blogspot.com/2019/06/down-to-verse-1396.html

Down to verse (1821)

Macadam Alley CXXX

 

Pull down my vanity.

How start me

With what’s in front of me?

 

My eye espies

The highs of poesy,

Where once a soul was geared

To stars alight.

But these do fade.

Now times I come to fear

The deadening lies

That tie us off

From all its veins.

 

But there is more

On this new foreign shore

Where I have always been

This last 100 years.

How can I be deposed, 

Much less write verse,

How can I answer this:

How did you come to be

To meet,

How did you come to see

Or greet,

Or hear the plainant?

 

I do not know the analects

Of this new dialect,

I cannot even order one café.

My eyes, they do not meet

As I did meet those on the street

One hundred years ago.

Do papers, mine, 

Mean now this time

The same as they once did?

I came to find the mind of Idaho,

I find no mind for take out or to go.

I do not find a counsel

Cross the table.

 

Daddo’s game :

Again, Pound was born in Idaho. I floated back from the Moluccas to the home of the Daft American.  In 1920 or so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analects 

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plainant