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 I will be contacting you, Dennis.  Thanks for the "words of affirmation."

Recomendada

All James Thurber cartoons esp. currently this one: two people looking at a glassy- eyed maiden gathering flowers:  “She has the true Emily Dickinson spirit but she gets fed up sometimes.”  That’d be me… See “The Thurber Carnival” a truly great humor collection.

“Yellow and Pink” by another TNY great, William Stieg, who also created “Shrek.”  ( The original much better—and more gruesome—it grues on you.)  For the evolutionary establishment, a low blow from the children’s department; a telling parable of eternal significance.

Gary Chapman’s series on the 5 Love Languages, for thine convenience, the short list:

• Words of affirmation
• Quality time
• Receiving gifts
• Acts of service
• Physical touch  

Some of us are fortunate enough to have one person who does all 5 equally well—rare though that is—but the point is that love involves some measure of all five. 

Mark 1: 1-8

Reflecting on the old saw: “If you can’t please anyone else, you may as well please yourself.” (a corollary of the Gestalt prayer?)

Well, doesn’t that depend on who or what lives inside oneself?  Jesus’ parable of the man who tried to make himself moral is instructive negatively—he cleaned up his own act and cast one devil out, but never put anything in its place, so 7 devils, each worse than the first, came in and so all the reforming was only good for making the person 7x worse. ( I often tell a similar story to those trying to quit smoking—just quitting doesn’t always work unless something can come in and fill the needs once filled by nicotine—the “shark tranquilizer.”)

John is often remembered as a condemning prophet; but before he identified any broods of vipers, he offered something totally positive: Jesus; but not “Just Jesus” as some say but also/then the Holy Spirit.  Using Isaiah—and I’d add Joel et. al.—he stands in a long line of HS promises that start with Genesis 1.

Hence if we are true to magnitude of these gifts—on most days most of us are not hence our reputation as evil—then we are not here to please anyone but He/They Who live/s within us. Easy if we surrender, impossible if we don’t.  But if we do, the Psalms make sense: “What can man do to me?”

This of course changes nothing less than everything! And is an occasion for Pure Joy unless we drag along all our carnal past and current baggage.  Aye, there’s the rub!!!

Mea culpa de Nuevo!

Ah

How do I feel about people who do not understand my poetry? I understand them.  -Vera Pavlova

If all politics are local, are they also all personal?

What is different is the individual story.

It has been my contention and sole goal of this and my previous blog to point out that the building blocks of the world and even of the universe are individuals. Yea, persons and personality. Even Higgs’ Bozone has unique characteristics—we shall see.  Men make collections—of fossils, rocks, seashells (me) and of course of people—in order to avoid dealing with individuals, which is very messy and high maintenance most of the time—I will speak of the exceptions some other time.

 “Categorical Emperators” are  most often a series of  evasions, not as a reality—artificial to the core to satisfy our supposed pragmatisms, of which I spoke recently—most of which are in essence self-deception but serve a very ordinary human purpose. “The Individual Strikes Back” does it not?  It will not be still; nor rest…so many examples.

Incidentally, speaking of artificial intelligence: computers and electronic medical record systems are not servers or servants but “Masters in this Hall.”  If computers lived up to their hype, right out of the box it would be better, but as the old soul song goes: “You just keep me hangin’ on.”  It has taken the whole IT team months just to try to get, yea, this very laptop to behave!  And even this Word version keeps moving my cursor (a good name for it!) to different places in the text without my even touching the keyboard. We are not so far from “Hal” as we may have hoped.

A recent Dilbert cartoon has our antihero discovering the Higgs’ Boson at home in his very very short accelerator. The moment it appears it says, “BUILD AN ARK”. So Dilbert immediately shuts off the machine, saying, “Nothing but trouble.”

I’m not necessarily trying to make things clear—but I do want people to think about what they are doing—the poet you know is not always obscure for his own sake or for privacy issues:

The Vendee

The poet moves

To cover his heart with a dime.

The poet multiplies

But those who are not poets

Are turning up equally alone.

Pry up that stone

And you may be bitten by a terrible creature

But lift up an eye

And you may have been in starlight.

In the difference between what you leave alone

And your own stupid idea many times removed

The poet inserts a dime and says not to worry.

Dost off yor idea machine!!

From Notes from Underground:

“…who was it who first proclaimed that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because  being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his advantage in the good and nothing else; and we all know that not one man can, consciously, act against his own interests, consequently, so to say, through necessity, he would begin doing good?”

“Oh the babe!  Oh the pure innocent child!”

“What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, consciously , that is fully understanding their own interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, , compelled to this course by nobody and nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, willfully, struck out in another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness?”

One thinks of Anna and Vronsky. (Anna Karenina that is) 

The only practical thing one can say about pragmatism is that it’s impossible to practice. For one thing, curses often turn to blessings after sometimes a very long time, and vice versa.  To even begin to practice pragmatism one would have to see most of one’s future, as it actually will be. And that is only the first of many impossibilities.  So I think that I, not being God, can cease to pursue that path.  Does a child know what’s good for him or her? No, how could they?  Yet as “adults” (so called)  we calculate as if we knew; but we are so far from the truth of our condition that we launch out in the above directions simply by faith—faith with zero actual content, other than the determination to drag oneself—and as many others as possible, for “confirmation (social proof) into it. “Man wrapped up in self make very small package.” –attributed to Charles Chan—I think it helped him solve a mystery, anyway.

That’s interesting, I mean, about detectives’ modi operandi…they never use ideas and especially not ideals to solve mysteries; and if they pursue ideology, it is the way Freud did—as the Underground Man anticipates.  Philosophy is often forged to reflect our own inadequacies and insecurities—and all philosophy is in the broad definition of the word, reactionary. Every human idea is taken to its logical and emotional extremes, and finally abandoned in the deserts of human futility and unfruitfulness.  These phrases come to mind: “He’s shooting himself in his own foot.”  And “give a man enough rope and he’ll hang himself.”  Or as one of my friends from Wholistic once said after a lecture on “Neurolinguistic Programming”, “ a pound of hog manure in a 5 gallon bucket.” I take the latter to be a rustic saying that still should be comprehensible even to the most urbane…

"P. and Pubs"

The New Yorker  and  Poetry magazine:

I have, courtesy of my parents, a long time subscription to TNY.  But the relationship between TNY and myself goes back almost as far as high school, when I used to go the top room of the library where they stored the back issues, and read all the cartoons.  As Calvin and Hobbes were to my children, so were TNY cartoons to my youth.  I don’t know how much I learned from them; but the love of language therein displayed was a part of that exposure that has stayed with me. 

There was also an air of mystery and challenge in the cartoonery noted above—Obscure/NY references never offended me but made me wonder and of course with Google—I’m kind of glad I didn’t have it then—it does take the wonder out of my bread!—it’s all too easy to “extry extry read all about it!”

As to Poetry magazine, I requested that of my sister, who was actually editing a theatre magazine at the time; I had requested a subscription to her publication in order to see her editorials at least; but she felt it would be too arcane to me.  So, as I had perused a couple of issues of Poetry (hereafter known as “P”) given to my son Daniel also by my parents; and as I had been deep into writing poetry 30 years ago, it occurred to me that maybe it was time to give poetry another chance.  As one can see, it has already been a good resource even in the first issue—which is actually part of the centenary celebration of the longest running small magazine in American history.

What I have noticed is the following—most of the cartoons in TNY and most of their poems do not revolve around a political axis. One thing that separates political cartooning—and there is a bit in TNY—is that it thrives generally on put-downs, hence is not all that funny, and can be—leaving aside the occ. tribute theme-- more  irenic and frankly negative than anything else on the editorial pages. I have saved hundreds of cartoons over the years but very few are political and I can’t quote any.

 And I can quote a lot of ‘toons!

 If one is going to be generally funny, I feel that one has to go deeper, actually, than political statements.  In general, art based on political views—all the worse when they are openly partisan—has little lasting value and one does not go back to it spontaneously; contrariwise, look at skits like The Dead Parrot, The Cheese Shop, and “No One Expects the Spanish Inquisition” (or do they?) These can even parody religion and still appeal to a   huge swath of humanity regardless of politics or  ideology.

Part of that is because these skits’ subject is human nature, not human ideas—and it is often the ideas we come up with that are parodied as being unworthy of the persons, and hence the people become sympathetic in and of themselves. When we make idiots of ourselves we are actually more sympathetic, realistic, and kind to ourselves and others than when we make a pretense of being perfect and—God forbid—perfectly right—which is probably the most unfunny thing we can do to ourselves. And striving for mere ideological purity is the state of mind and judgment most unfair to ourselves, as we set up goals that we can never reach.  This makes up a large portion of American Malaise and the polarization which most people abhor verbally, but are addicted to and just can’t stop. Much of this is driven by polemic pieces, which are not unlike a shot of whiskey to an alcoholic—“Just one can’t hurt!”

P seems to be pretty nonpartisan so far—and much more open to spiritual themes. But one would be hard-pressed to find a magazine so professionally and tastefully done. In contrast  most other magazines look  rather garish by comparison. I suppose that that is due in part to their partisanship to poetry!!!  The few ads in the back are all in black and white and very low key.

It is really no wonder, in retrospect, that I once fled to poetry, and may again. And I observe that Ste. Google will still not help you to understand the poem, in essence, any more than Big Blue could. Poetry is not usually a neat equation, though it may be a preposterous one.

Thus I find that it is still very much of a refuge and respite; which is what it always has been; but though a lot of it is entertaining—and funny, yes!—it is at its best a multilayered effort that to the world looks ambivalent at best, and hostile to civilization, principalities, and powers at worst; hence often the first to be outlawed. (C.f. Garcia Lorca—whose poetry could be political—but there was so much more.

“Upon the point of a pin is my heart twisting.”  I know.      –Lorca, “He Died at Dawn”

EXODUST

I always thought that this would make a great name for a band--instead of "Kansas," say. (Much of the artistic talent of the 70's and beyond was thinking of cool and mysterious names for bands that never formed--sometimes those who did, well, "Strawberry Alarm Clock" speaks for itself, alas.)

But speaking of Kansas, there is no band by the above name that comes up on Bing--but "The Exodusters" were real people--African Americans who actually moved en masse to Kansas in 1879 to towns such as Nicodemus (now pop. 20) to get away from the increased persecution on the part of postbellum southerners and terrorist groups (Krazy Klansters). They felt, according to Wikipedia, that Kansas was more progressive and tolerant than most states; altho this did not prevent the Kansas Paranoia due to outbreaks of Yellow Fever, blamed on the immigrants, which brought this movement to a screeching halt.  Of interest to me is that they were especially shunned in large cities. Mexicans in Iowa today are more than welcomed in small towns, some of whom depend on immigrants for their very survival...also that it is the state including the much feared feds, more then the locals who "crack down" on immigrants. 

Mendota and DePue are towns that have welcomed Mexican workers and I have worked with  many uncocumented familes--which is why I am for total unqualified amnesty and allowing the criminal justice system to work equally for them and us, regardless of origin.  The exodus of Mexicans out of Mexico is one of the biggest blessings this country could have, and only paranoia and the promotion of one's own (dying) culture and people groups has caused an increasing number of people--whole towns worth-- to go back to Mexico. But in Mendota we are up from 15% to 25% and still going strong, largely because the old guard is going and gone, and the acceptance level has continued to go up.

Many immigrants are getting horrible and very limited medical care in spite of their hard work.  In Mendota we have Community Health Partnership which can get labs but not medications, x-rays, or surgery hence no screenings at all for colon cancer, just as one example. Take an aspirin, we say=(

We would be more than paid back if we would open our doors even just a little wider--or do we want 2nd generation Mexicans to remember the rest of us as holding back essential care? We in Mendota have been more than blessed by 2nd generation immigrants, some of whom have gone on to be school teachers and superintendents and librarians and hospital board member--and I'm talking about just one familia!

And may I add, por lo general: "How can you say you love God, who you have not seen, if you do not love your brother who you have seen?"  (That's for my familia too--and mea culpa for my many failures in this regard)