Busy Doing Nothing

Here I am working on another woodpile. You can't do any better than fresh air, exercise, clean living and no boss.

Chop that wood
Carry water
What's the sound of one hand clapping
Enlightenment, don't know what it is- Van Morrison, "Enlightenment"

Ever-vigilant Chutney attempts to get in the Holiday Spirit. Photo by Beth Bonanno

Mr. Cushing Wishes You All The Best For The Holidays Beth Bonanno photograph, December 10, 2009

Christmas In India
Rudyard Kipling, 1886

Dim dawn behind the tamarisks--the sky is saffron-yellow--
As the women in the village grind the corn,
And the parrots seek the river-side, each calling to his fellow
That the Day, the staring Eastern Day, is born.
Oh the white dust on the highway! Oh the stenches in the byway!
Oh the clammy fog that hovers over earth!
And at Home they're making merry 'neath the white and scarlet berry--
What part have India's exiles in their mirth?

Full day behind the tamarisks--the sky is blue and staring--
As the cattle crawl afield beneath the yoke,
And they bear One o'er the field-path, who is past all hope or caring,
To the ghat below the curling wreaths of smoke.
Call on Rama, going slowly, as ye bear a brother lowly--
Call on Rama--he may hear, perhaps, your voice!
With our hymn-books and our psalters we appeal to other altars,
And today we bid "good Christian men rejoice!"

High noon behind the tamarisks--the sun is hot above us--
As at Home the Christmas Day is breaking wan.
They will drink our healths at dinner--those who tell us how they love us,
And forget us till another year be gone!
Oh the toil that knows no breaking! Oh the heimweh, ceaseless, aching!
Oh the black dividing Sea and alien Plain!
Youth was cheap--wherefore we sold it. Gold was good--we hoped to hold it,
And to-day we know the fulness of our gain!

Grey dusk behind the tamarisks--the parrots fly together--
As the sun is sinking slowly over Home;
And his last ray seems to mock us shackled in a lifelong tether.
That drags us back howe'er so far we roam.
Hard her service, poor her payment--she in ancient, tattered raiment--
India, she the grim Stepmother of our kind.
If a year of life be lent her, if her temple's shrine we enter,
The door is shut--we may not look behind.

Black night behind the tamarisks--the owls begin their chorus--
As the conches from the temple scream and bray.
With the fruitless years behind us, and the hopeless years before us,
Let us honour, O my brothers, Christmas Day!
Call a truce, then, to our labours--let us feast with friends and
neighbours,
And be merry as the custom of our caste;
For if "faint and forced the laughter," and if sadness follow after,
We are richer by one mocking Christmas past.

[END]
*Heimweh-Ger. homesickness

This poem is commonly found online chock full of transcription errors, notably in the first stanza. "The staring Eastern Day" is inevitably presented incorrectly as "Easter Day." I have corrected these errors to the best of my ability based on the printed text in my library. This poem was originally published in Departmental Ditties and other Verses, 1886.

Quotes Of The Day

"One can, perhaps, place Kipling more satisfactorily than by juggling with the words 'verse' and 'poetry', if one describes him simply as a good bad poet. He is as a poet what Harriet Beecher Stowe was as a novelist. And the mere existence of work of this kind, which is perceived by generation after generation to be vulgar and yet goes on being read, tells one something about the age we live in."

"Although he had no direct connexion with any political party, Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists. He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality."

"Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally. This warped his political judgement, for the British ruling class were not what he imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like."

All from George Orwell's 1942 review of T.S. Eliot's A Choice of Kipling's Verse in the literary journal Horizon. This essentially (and a little surprisingly) sympathetic essay may be read HERE.


Final lines of Kipling's drinking song "The Young British Soldier" (from Barrack-Room Ballads 1892, 1896))

If your officer's dead and the sergeants look white,
Remember it's ruin to run from a fight:
So take open order, lie down, and sit tight,
And wait for supports like a soldier.
Wait, wait, wait like a soldier . . .

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!

Papaver Somniferum, John Bonanno photograph, 2009

Cushing In The Sun, Beth Bonanno photograph, 2009

"The road to Hell is paved with good intentions."-Karl Marx, Capital

I believe Marx saw the varied phenomena of do-gooders as futile manifestations of a guilt complex. Conservatives usually insist on a similar analysis, which, of course, is a kind of atheistic nihilism.

"The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere."-Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Marx saw the fallacy of globalism before almost anyone else. Unfortunately his solution (Global Communism confronting Global Capitalism) compounded the problem. Perhaps that was the plan all along. In this case the call to arms of one global movement for battle against another global movement presents little choice at all since the desired result, hidden in plain sight and occult to the many, is Globalism. Communism and Capitalism are irrelevant distractions.

"The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man, state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."-Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction

At the head of this entry, Cushing, my Boston Terrier is contemplating Marx. And so am I. Marx has been so demonized by the prevailing, recently triumphant, but rapidly declining Capitalist mode one can instantly marginalize himself by the mere admission of having perused and analyzed Marx' thinking and writing. As spiritually and functionally dead as Marxism in practice has proven itself to be, one may garner knowledge from the man Karl Marx. I have long stated that Capitalism and Communism are two sides of the same materialist coin. And this coin has been absolutely debased and its plated dross desperately attempts to simulate spiritual gold. On reading Karl's famous statement that religion 'is the opium of the people' in context, one is led by him to conclude that religion, in practice, in an oppressed world cannot provide true spirituality. (Whether Marx entertains the possibility that such a thing exists is glossed over.) This passage implies that only in a liberated world may one properly pursue what is the object of religion. I disagree, the object of religion must be attained to liberate the world; but this much repeated, truncated, and mangled quote simplifies in a most banal way Marx' essential argument: organized religion provides comfort in misery by indefinitely delaying a possibly fantastic and certainly untestable reward for the common man's endless struggles and serves the masters of the world in so doing. Opium and religion are both incredibly good at what they do to those who are susceptible. It is error to confound the goals of establishment religion and the longings of men and women for the sublime other.

A case in point:

"A Christian man is the most free lord of all and subject to none"-Martin Luther 1520

"And should the peasants prevail (which God forbid!), -- for all things are possible to God, and we know not but that he is preparing for the judgment day, which cannot be far distant, and may purpose to destroy, by means of the devil, all order and authority and throw the world into wild chaos, -- yet surely they who are found, sword in hand, shall perish in the wreck with clear consciences, leaving to the devil the kingdom of this world and receiving instead the eternal kingdom. For we are come upon such strange times that a prince may more easily win heaven by the shedding of blood than others by prayers."-Martin Luther, Against the Rioting Peasants, retitled by its publisher as Against The Murderous Thieving Hordes of Peasants, 1525

Luther admitted that the goals of his movement were now identical with the interests of those who possessed political power and that the peasants whom he had previously championed and had supported him, were shit out of luck. The peasants had the choice between Rome's Catholicism and the local nobles' Protestantism, both of which would screw them into the ground. It was a false dilemma, not even a modicum of freedom was an option for the masses, and the 'reformed' Protestant nobility of Germany killed at least a hundred thousand revolting peasants. Luther's freedom was only the freedom to be Lutheran instead of Catholic. Political freedom was out of the question.

"--People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower of corruption in Mallarme but the desirable life is revealed only to the poor of heart, the life of Homer's Phaeacians."-James Joyce, Ulysses

Coming Soon: Marx and Hegel! The Dialectic!

"The Very Last Thing You Will Ever See" -Beth Bonanno photograph of John Bonanno in character as Frater S.V.S.

Random Scribbles
(Or, Am I Now Channeling Larry King?)

The principal job of any intelligence agency is not to gather intelligence. It is rather to make everyone too ignorant and too stupid to ask the right questions and to foment the disturbances that make it too difficult and too painful to be intelligent. It must create muddy water.
The NFL draft should be replaced by an auction system. Each team would have a fixed amount with which too bid for all the players who make themselves eligible. The money spent would go into a pot which is then used to pay the initial one year contract of the players reflecting the amount bid. (Pay beyond that point could not be negotiated until the first season was complete. Unbid upon players become free agents.) I think it would be much more exciting, require more skill, and provide more interest than the boring thing they do now.
I would like to write a book listing all the popular dances of the last hundred years. Included in this encyclopedia would be descriptions of the dance, the localities in which the dance originated, photographs, and lore.
I need to write a long article about Japanese Knotweed (Polygonum cuspidatum). I admire its tenaciousness.
Where have all the whippersnappers gone?
Corporate capitalism's goal is to create a virtual state of anarchy for itself so that its most powerful entities can roam the earth unchallenged. Corporate capitalism works to create exactly the opposite environment for individuals who are not in their club: repressive laws by many layers of authority, and assorted modes of taxation by those layers, confusion and fear of the policing entities that enforce those practices.
The greatest parasites on society have convinced themselves that they are the driving engines of it, and in so doing, have convinced those on whom they feed that the weakness they feel is their own fault or the fault of innocent scapegoats.
How long has it been since you were as happy as a shithouse spider?
Any magickal system, impeccably performed, is effective.
Are people whose names indicate a quality, e.g. 'Goode' or 'Goodman' any better than those whose names indicate something else, Mr. Wolfe?
If you have a large fixed interest debt, then big time inflation is good for you. You get to pay off all those dollars with much cheaper ones. You can be assured that as long as the banks are controlling the government (Hello Mr. Geithner, Mr. Paulson , Mr. Bernanke etc.) pay will fall, credit will be tight (unless you are a favored bank), and, inflation will be moderate. But, they can only keep the plates spinning for so long.
How can stock prices stay so (relatively) high? Is TARP money being used to prop up the market? It wouldn't take much in the low volume game we see on Wall Street now.
Prediction: By next year the UN will begin to take over countries designated "failed states".

"Half An Hour"-C.P. Cavafy

I never had you, nor will I ever have you
I suppose. A few words, an approach
as in the bar yesterday, and nothing more.
It is, undeniably, a pity. But we who serve Art
sometimes with intensity of mind, and of course only
for a short while, we create pleasure
which almost seems real.
So in the bar the day before yesterday -- the merciful alcohol
was also helping much --
I had a perfectly erotic half-hour.
And it seems to me that you understood,
and stayed somewhat longer on purpose.
This was very necessary. Because
for all the imagination and the wizard alcohol,
I needed to see your lips as well,
I needed to have your body close.

"Chloë the Flying Cat" Early 1990's photograph by Beth Bonanno

Chloë was an extremely slight and very furry cat with a tiny head. My former wife gave her to me after some unspecified outrage she had committed in her house. She (the cat) loved it when I tossed her in the air and caught her. Eventually I began to fling her up in the air higher and higher. I used to sing the Jackie Wilson song about that to her. Her light weight and fluffy long fur allowed her to glide like a flying squirrel back down to me. She was a sweet but very dimwitted cat and this was her only talent. She also exceeded in catching me by surprise when she had kittens at an absurdly young age before I could arrange to have her ovaries removed. (One night she ripped out a hole in the bottom of my box spring and gave birth inside it while I slept.) She was never harmed by her aerial antics and she died of old age, her flying days well behind her.
This picture is cropped from an old print. Some dirt was retouched out of the sky but the cat is really up there.


Higher and Higher

Your love, lifting me higher
Than I've ever been lifted before
So keep it it up
Quench my desire
And I'll be at your side, forever more

You know your love (your love keeps lifting me)
Keep on lifting (love keeps lifting me)
Higher (lifting me)
Higher and higher (higher)
I said your love (your love keeps lifting me)
Keep on (love keeps lifting me)
Lifting me (lifting me)
Higher and higher (higher)

Now once I was down hearted
Disappointment was my closest friend
But then you came and it soon departed
And you know he never
Showed his face again

That's why
You know your love (your love keeps lifting me)
Keep on lifting (love keeps lifting me)
Higher (lifting me)
Higher and higher (higher)
I said your love (your love keeps lifting me)
Keep on (love keeps lifting me)
Lifting me (lifting me)
Higher and higher (higher)

[Instrumental Interlude]

I'm so glad, I've finally found you
Yes, that one, in a million girl
And now with my loving arms around you
Honey, I can stand up and face the world

You know your love (your love keeps lifting me)
Keep on lifting (love keeps lifting me)
Higher (lifting me)
Higher and higher (higher)
I said your love (your love keeps lifting me)
Keep on (love keeps lifting me)
Lifting me (lifting me)
Higher and higher (higher)

Now sock it me

Lyrics: First claimed by Gary Jackson and Carl Smith
later, Billy Davis and Raynard Miner of Motown claimed Jackson and Smith stole it from a briefcase there and successfully sued them for damages.