Nominus umbra
It’s only just a little thing;
you’ll barely see it there
along the route of the parade,
the worse for wear and tear.
Not much at all to look at,
hardly worth a second thought;
besides, how much could it be worth,
it being still un-bought?
It’s not much more than nothing;
just some dust that blurs the lens.
It knows nothing worth knowing,
and has unimportant friends.
Just blink, and you may miss it there –
a microscopic speck,
that in its sad, short time achieves
not more than you’d expect.
It’s only just a little thing,
a mere blip on the screen;
but every day is built upon
the moments in between.
26 DEC 2016
12.15.16
If Privacy is Power
If privacy is power,
then our public-facing selves
are palimpsests of who we are;
and that which we pretend to be
(that hides our truest form)
has more in common with a mist
than blood, muscle or bone.
If privacy is freedom,
then construction of our cells
begins the moment we arrive
and lasts throughout all time.
If privacy is sacred,
then our gods are merely dust;
and our Valhalla in the clouds?
Bankrupt and turned to rust.
If privacy is power,
guard your every waking thought,
and never show just what you know;
your shy, divergent secrets
are what make you worth recall.
There is no greater good that needs
to know it all, right now.
15 DEC 2016
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I Think Therefore
I think; therefore I am
whatever in here gives a damn
and whatever lays inside the lines
that separate me from my mind.
I think; therefore I am,
at least for that brief moment’s span
until I stop and think again
and I am not what I was then.
I think; therefore I am
what separates me, what great plan
lies beyond me? Who can say?
Not sure it matters, anyway.
I think; therefore I am:
What a self-important scam!
Long before that first idea,
there was something less, still me.
I think; therefore I am
whatever out there gives a damn
that I choose to shut up tight
and imagine gives out light.
12 DEC 2016
12.9.16
The Secret Undertown Ministry
“FROM THE DARKNESS, A VOICE SINGS OUT: I disagree, I disagree – I cannot understand at all; Which doesn’t mean I cannot understand it if I tried to understand it but I cannot stand to stand and understand it when it hurts to stand beneath it, when it falls and cannot stand under its power.”
So here’s a holiday offering for those who are interested in such things. In 1994, when I was 29 years old, I wrote a semi-autobiographical, cut-up, stream of consciousness novel called “The Secret Undertown Ministry” – much of it made up of pieces written for or around the Thursday night open poetry readings at Java Cabana Coffeehouse in Memphis. I originally distributed it to a number of close friends, but otherwise serialized portions of it to various blogs and other websites. It’s never been assembled in its complete form – UNTIL NOW. Anyway, for those who ARE interested, here’s a link to the novel in PDF form: http://www.radicaldruid.com/PDFs/TheSecretUndertownMinistry.pdf. Good luck!
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Americans Undecided for Apathy
THE FOLLOWING IS AN EXCERPT FROM A CAMPAIGN SPEECH WRITTEN BY GRAVITY PUSHMAN AND DELIVERED TO THE ‘AMERICANS UNDECIDED FOR APATHY’ RALLY HELD ON DECEMBER 12, 1994 IN CENTRAL PARK, NEW YORK. THE SPEECH WAS DELIVERED VIA AN ANONYMOUS TAPE VOICE BROADCAST OVER A REALISTIC (RADIO SHACK BRAND, A DIVISION OF THE TANDY CORPORATION, LOCATED SOMEWHERE IN TEXAS (one of the United States referred to in the next item), THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE, THE PLANET EARTH, THE SOLAR SYSTEM – the solar system: isn’t it really A solar system? Isn’t that like saying THE human race when there could in actuality be three or four dozen spread out over the cosmos like so much lox on a half a dozen day-old salt and onion bagels?, THE MILKY WAY (same comment), THE UNIVERSE (and again, and again) PUBLIC ADDRESS SYSTEM WHICH HAD A MAXIMUM PER CHANNEL WATT RATING OF 40 RMS. THE ATTENDING CROWD (EXCLUDING CURIOUS PASSERBY JOGGERS, MUGGERS, FILM CREW STAFF, DOCUMENTARIANS, TRASH COLLECTORS, RECYCLING NUTS, HORSEBACK POLICE, SEVERAL THOUSAND PIGEONS, A RANDOM WASP COLONY, TWO BUTTERFLIES, SIX POINT EIGHT BILLION DUST MITES, AND A DISCARDED WRAPPER FROM A PAYDAY CANDY BAR THAT HAD OVER THE COURSE OF ITS SHORT LIFE ACHIEVED SELF-SIMILARITY, NUMBERED EXACTLY THREE PEOPLE. ONE OF THEM WAS THE SOUND GUY.
I had a dream – no, it was a nightmare. I dreamt that the only references I had to the 1970’s were from bad cultural definition films. I didn’t know about Watergate, the end of Vietnam, the bicentennial celebration, the assassination attempt by Manson’s children (and also by the Nation of Islam) on President Ford (who, by the way, was the only person in the history of the Executive Branch of the United States Government to serve in office, both as Vice President AND President – without being elected to either. Nixon appointed him when good old Spiro had to fly the coop, and then the man who played too many games for the University of Michigan without a helmet, whose forehead somehow resembled the front grill of a ’57 Buick Roadmaster, was sitting in the oval office – pardoning the man who made it all possible).
I was aware only that rock and roll died in 1972, hard rock, that is – Zeppelin IV, Purple’s Machine Head, Sabbath’s Paranoid – these were the tombstones on the blues rock of the sixties. Hendrix died in ’72. The guitar hero became mythology. 1971 and Marvin Gaye put out What’s Goin’ On and Let’s Get It On and then it began, the movies, you know. Trouble Man, Black Caesar, Superfly, Shaft, and on and on and on. Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, and Isaac Hayes, respectively. The stories weren’t even important, but the music, man, the music was right on. Yeah, and those expressions, like right on, what’s happening, fly, and on and on and on… remember, white man, if you want to learn to dance the dance, don’t learn your steps from Club MTV or John Travolta or a Billy Ray Cyrus Video – do yourself a favor and watch any selection of Soul Train episodes from 1975 to 1980. Or picture Muhammad Ali fighting, and not sounding a lot like Don Cornelius on helium (who can forget ‘float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, the great smell of Brut, and the punch of Ali?)
The seventies can be characterized by its prime time television – the variety show reigned supreme. Do you remember that these people had television shows – Mac Davis, Glen Campbell, Donnie & Marie Osmond, Sonny & Cher, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Tony Orlando & Dawn, the Captain & Tenielle, Flip Wilson. Not to mention the Jackson Five, the Harlem Globetrotters, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, and the whole Scooby Doo trip (which wasn’t really a cartoon at all, but a ridiculous sitcom). There used to be television shows about poor people, too – All in the Family, Good Times, What’s Happening, Sanford & Son, Barney Miller, Chico & the Man. It just figures that they were all comedies. And look what’s replaced them: the Cosby show, the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Married with Children, for Christ’s’ sake. The variety show was it, people, and the private detective-streetwise cop show – Mannix, Barnaby Jones, Cannon, Streets of San Francisco, Starsky and Hutch, SWAT, Columbo, McCloud, MacMillan and Wife (starring, of course, Rock Hudson and Susan St. James), Police Woman, etc., etc.
The Ramones first album came out in 1974. The Pistols ended in 1979. Post-punk emerged and then died (and how can something as undead as gothic vampire thrash ever die) in 1983, when Bauhaus split because they were becoming ‘popular’. Remember when punk meant trying to be an individual, before you could buy the hair color at a salon or the clothes at a chain store on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood? Here’s to Darby Crash, the lead singer of the Germs, the first person in Los Angeles to wear a Mohawk (which, my mother tells me, is something of a misnomer, because the Mohawks didn’t exactly wear their hair like that, but Mohawk is much easier to say fourteen times fast than Iroquois.
Besides, there was nothing else really going on in this country – the seventies belonged to Elton John and David Bowie, on the two British polar extremes, and to all those sappy self-searching singer-songwriter guys (think of how bad it really was – imagine David Soul from Starsky and Hutch singing “Don’t Give Up on Us Baby” all over again – yetch!).
Apollo-Soyuz – the joint Soviet Union American space linking thing, man, that was something – somebody had it going on, ’cause they played “Why Can’t We Be Friends” over the space link and the whole world was listening. And the hostages in Iran, that was something else; but Saturday Night Fever came out in 1977, and in my personal opinion, it caused Elvis Presley to die of embarrassment. He was the only one wearing a white suit at the time, after all, and where do you think those moves came from? Do you think Vinnie Barbarino invented them? Yeah, right. Reality check, welcome back. Rock and roll was really over, you know. And by the way, take a look at Six-One-Six or Red Square (prime examples in Memphis, Tennessee of disco so vintage it’s retro) some night and tell me that the Disco Sucks movement really had an impact. Maurice White is sitting somewhere playing a kalimba in the moonlight laughing his ass off. The three most sampled bands in the history of rap – James Brown, Earth Wind & Fire, and War. I’ve seen all three. There ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby.
The movie version of Hair came out in 1977 or 1978 – I guess that was the first indication of how ridiculous a flashback to the sixties looked out of context. Don’t look now, but Scorpio’s in retrograde motion. Here we are, and Sun Yung Moon is in his seventh house; M & M’s have merged with Mars; love still drives a ’68 Plymouth Galaxie, and the media sells us our stars. This is the dawning of the age of Aquariums – we are living like goldfish looking out from behind the Plexiglas – our eyes bulged, our little flippers pushing us through water murky with our own shit. Let the sun shine, and skin cancer be damned!!!!
What ever happened to rock and roll singers that didn’t look like waifs, that sang with low voices? Did Robert Plant really have that much influence, or did the sensitive male step in to fill the gap between Otis Redding, Joe Cocker, Jim Morrison, and now the only things left – Lemmy Kilmeister, Glenn Danzig, and James Hetfield? Gimme a break, man. And I’ve got nothing against Pearl Jam or Stone Temple Pilots, but if you take Jim Morrison, subtract the acid and Bushmill’s and leather, and substitute Xanax and Thorazine and flannel, and what do you have – Eddie Vedder? I’m not sure.
Remember the campaign slogan for Carter-Mondale – Fritz and Grits? ‘Nuff said.
Fortunately, I woke up, and found out that I had actually lived through the seventies. I was wearing platform shoes and wide collars and all those obnoxious jackets and leisure suits and polyester nightmare designs the first time around – you can wear them again if you want to, but the seventies is something I’d like to try to forget, thank you very much. If you think I’m kidding, take a look at the best example of ’70’s culture in the ’90’s – Meatloaf, and laugh if you can. I remember when his FIRST album came out, and I hated it then, too. Remember, as I first said in August of 1994, I’m not funny, you’re not laughing, and that’s the way I like it. Thank you for coming out and pretending to support my campaign. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel like coming, so you’re there making complete assholes of yourselves without my immediate help. Have a nice day, and don’t kill anybody on my account. Thank you. Thanks for nothing.
Now, if I may close with something quite dear to my heart, I would like to play for you a recording made by a dear friend of mine, Homespun Gravity, with his band ‘The Undertown Minstrels.’ It is a song he wrote that pretty much sums it all up for me, as far as songs go, and it didn’t offend my mother all that much, so that should tell you pretty much where it stands as far as a rock and roll number; pretty much shit out of luck as an anthem for this, its own, or any generation. But nevertheless, it’s kind of catchy and makes you hum and tap your foot if you’re absolutely tone-deaf and have no sense of rhythm.
THE SOUND OF FUMBLING WITH A RECORD NEEDLE, A FEW OBNOXIOUS SCRATCHES, AND THEN A SLIGHT HISS. THE SONG BEGINS. LOW MUSIC BEGINS IN THE BACKGROUND, THE SOUND OF TWO GUITARS HOPELESSLY OUT OF TUNE ATTEMPTING TO FIND HARMONICS ON THE SEVENTH AND TWELFTH FRETS, RESPECTIVELY. WITH A SUDDEN LURCHING, WRETCHING CRASH, THE DRUMS AND BASS ATTEMPT TO JOIN IN TO PROPEL THE SONG AWAY FROM THE CRASH-LANDING IT APPEARS TO HAVE EMBARKED UPON. A VOICE, HOMESPUN’S VOICE, IS HEARD WHISPERING-MOANING-SINGING-SIGHING THE FOLLOWING:
No way home
World is in a spiral
I don’t know
Where I’ll be tomorrow
Still I go
’round the endless circuit
Look out below
Found the brake but I can’t work it
Out into the night I’m going
Where I can at least forget my name
and remember that there’s no one left to blame
buried in eternal shame
can’t tell the candle from the flame
and in the end it’s all the same.
No way in
World is just illusion
I don’t know
Can’t tell my dream from my delusion
Still I float
’round and round the axis
Look outside
I’m through the egg between the cracks, and
Out into the void I’m falling
Where I can at least forget my fate
and remember that there’s no debate
born before my time too late
can’t tell the mirror from the lake
and in the end there’s no mistake.
THE CROWD IS MESMERIZED; WELL, AT LEAST THE PIGEONS HAVE ATTEMPTED TO CONTROL THEIR BODILY FUNCTIONS LONG ENOUGH TO COMPLETE A SORT OF HELLISH CHORUS TO ACCOMPANY THE MUSIC, WHICH IS MUCH LOUDER NOW THAN IT WAS, THAN IT EVER SHOULD HAVE BEEN, AND (according to memorandum G-47-B18, City Department of Parks and Recreation, New York, New York, dated December 18, 1994 and signed by a Mr. Reginald Moss) LOUDER THAN IT WILL EVER BE AGAIN IF ANY MORAL CREATURE HAS ANYTHING TO SAY ABOUT IT. STILL, DESPITE ALL THE BAD PRESS FROM THOSE WHO CAN’T DO, CAN’T TEACH, CAN’T FAKE IT, CAN’T AFFORD TO RUN FOR PUBLIC OFFICE, AND SO THEREFORE ARE RELEGATED TO THE ROLE OF CRITICAL OBSERVERS, THE MUSIC GOES ON. Rock and roll can never die, as Neil Young once said. As the Rolling Stones have failed to prove.
No way out
World is locked inside a system
I don’t know
Can’t tell the maya from the wisdom
Still I try
’round the circle I keep turning
Look at me fly
While my wings are slowly burning
Out into the world I’m sliding
Where I can at least forget my pride
and remember that there’s no free ride
paid my fare somewhere outside
can’t tell the mountains from the tide
and in the end we all collide.
1994 from The Secret Undertown Ministry
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16. Philosophize Only By Accident
Despite what you may think, and what they themselves might to try to convince you, philosophers and other professional think-o-logists for thousands of years have tried to answer just a couple of basic questions.
These are often hard to recognize, certainly, being cloaked in more buzzwords than a Silicon Valley initial offering, and as hard to isolate free-hand as any number of radioactive isotopes, but honestly, the real questions are but a few.
The first is of course Who am I? – although only in the past five hundred years or so has it so explicitly selfish, directed inward in this way. More likely, the more modest (or merely more vaguely indirect) ancient philosophers queried, Who are We?, and then once having determined that “we” could passably be assumed to be of the human species (depending of course on how widely and in which directions you chose to cast that net of we, then some eventually got around to What is a Human? or to an even more intellectually divergent What Does It Mean to Be a Human?. At that point, the more esoteric then make the first leap into an almost magical absurdity, asking things like Why Are We Here? or Why Am I Here? or What is My or Our Purpose in Being? (if of course, the condition of being, specifically being human, is considered possible and to some degree achieved).
Of course, those questions are more or less satisfactorily answered, schools of philosophies founded, conquerors, dictators, and other world leaders inspired (or made dejected), courses of history irreversibly altered, cultures steered, and young minds melded or melted, either positively or negatively depending on whose side of the causal font you’re drinking from.
When I was 13 or 14, my dad become involved with an organization out of Waco, TX called the Success Motivation Institute. Its founder, Paul J. Meyer, said all kinds of things like “If you are not making the progress you feel you should be making, or that you are capable of making, it is simply because your goals are not clearly defined.” Phrases like “crystallize your thinking” and “you need a POA [Plan of Action]” became commonplace around my house. Of course, because I was an obvious underachiever not living up to my potential, I was required to listen and read along with hours of self-help instruction: Blueprint for Success, The Dynamics of Personal Leadership, and so on. My father, born in Toledo, OH, the same place where Normal Vincent Peale cut his journalistic teeth on the Toledo Blade was of course intoxicated by this stuff. He already had a library full of Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Oz Mandino and others. There was nothing that a PMA [Positive Mental Attitude] couldn’t fix. At one point, he became an SMI Distributor (and mind you, this was WAY before Tony Robbins started doing his thing). We nearly moved to Waco before I started high school to facilitate greater growth. Fortunately, my dad made a trip there in the summer of 1978, was not all that impressed with Waco, and continued onward to Phoenix to visit with his aunt Alice. After experiencing the dread, dead heat of August in Phoenix, he wisely sojourned further west to California, where he answered an advertisement from a San Diego firm who didn’t need anyone for that office, but were looking for a General Manager for their Long Beach location. And so, in the summer of 1979, we moved to Torrance, California (for that perfect balance of great schools, marine layer-induced sunny calmness, and reasonable real estate in near proximity to Long Beach).
I mention this because a key phrase in the Blueprint series was the “will to meaning”. When I later read Nietzsche I immediately recognized the idea. Meyer suggested that harnessing this “will to meaning” was all you really needed to get yourself and your life in gear – that it was the difference between a shining knight of industry standing proudly atop the sprawling corpses of the competition, and the grubby, friendless poet dying of starvation in a ghetto sublet.
What philosophers of the greater order attempt to convince you is NOT to answer the initial identifying questions of who you or we are. No, the great grey matter shysters go one further. They insist that the most important question is not who we are, but why it matters and why anyone really should give a damn (except of course to buy their books and attend their lectures).
I wonder, however. If you answer the first question (i.e., Who am I?) you’ve already assumed there is an answer to this higher question. Perhaps, as Jean-Paul Sartre suggests, existence really DOES precede essence. It’s not really a chicken and egg dilemma, where potentiality must and always precedes actuality (unless of course, some divine energy simply poofed a chicken out of midair, fully grown and ready to produce eggs). But it is a dilemma – because you can in fact spend your entire life trying to figure out who you are. They call it “finding yourself”, but it’s really more about making it up as you go along, isn’t it?
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Like Nothing
There’s no thing quite like Nothing;
and so much of it around.
It fills the nooks and crannies
and absorbs the smallest sounds,
obsessed with taking over
and with being something more.
It wants to be the ocean’s deep,
the shallows, and the shore.
There is no thing like Nothing;
how can anything compare?
It’s hard to feel superior
to something not quite there,
that whispers from the shadows,
or drops such subtle hints
that seem to come from nowhere
in our own experience.
There’s nothing beyond Nothing,
except in let’s pretend.
No yesterday, tomorrow,
or up just around the bend;
yet we would cast in concrete
or immortalize in stone,
build monuments to Nothing
just to decorate our homes.
There’s no thing quite like Nothing –
and yet most of us believe
in some illusion we imagine
out there to achieve;
and once it is completed,
this vast Nothing, great and wide,
what will be left for us to do?
More Nothing, ’til we die.
06 DEC 2016
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