CHINESE LANTERNS AND OTHER READINGS

Excerpts:

1. MAKING OCCUPATION AND CALLING IT PEACE. Killing fewer and calling it progress. Rotating troops and calling it a withdrawal. Setting up new death squads and calling them allies. Lowering standards and calling it opening new opportunities. All of the above phenomena seem to be part of the current campaign by Washington in Iraq. There are fewer GI deaths in the country now because they don't leave the bases. >>>

2. THE TALIBAN CAN'T BE BEATEN. They've already taken over more than half the country and they are steadily advancing on the Capital. By next spring, there'll be fighting in the neighborhoods of Kabul, just like there is now in Baghdad. American troops will be barricaded in little Greenzones spread across the countryside. Karzai will be locked away in the Presidential Palace surrounded by American mercenaries. There'll be no more foolish talk about "democracy" and "women's rights". The air war will escalate causing more and more civilian casualties. Protests will break out in the cities and tribal leaders will call for an end to the occupation. >>>

3. I WILL NOT PAY MY INCOME TAX IF WE GO TO WAR WITH IRAN. I realize this is a desperate and perhaps futile gesture. But an attack on Iran -- which appears increasingly likely before the coming presidential election -- will unleash a regional conflict of catastrophic proportions. This war, and especially Iranian retaliatory strikes on American targets, will be used to silence domestic dissent and abolish what is left of our civil liberties. It will solidify the slow-motion coup d'état that has been under way since the 9/11 attacks. It could mean the death of the Republic. >>>

4. An internal CIA memorandum has been obtained by Venezuelan counterintelligence from the US Embassy in Caracas that reveals a very sinister - almost fantastical, were it not true - plan to destabilize Venezuela during the coming days. The plan, titled "OPERATION PLIERS" was authored by CIA Officer Michael Middleton Steere and was addressed to CIA Director General Michael Hayden in Washington. Steere is stationed at the US Embassy in Caracas under the guise of a Regional Affairs Officer. The internal memorandum, dated November 20, 2007, references the "Advances of the Final Stage of Operation Pliers", and confirms that the operation is coordinated by the team of Human Intelligence (HUMINT) in Venezuela. >>>

5. MORE THAN ONE IN 10 PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES GO HUNGRY, according to new official figures that suggest government food programs are falling short in the world's wealthiest country. More than 35 million people in a country of some 294 million went hungry last year, 390,000 more than in 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's latest Household Food Security report. Of the total, 12.63 million were children. Put another way, nearly one in five U.S. children either went without enough food during the course of the year or had food but could never take future meals for granted. >>>

6. Just days before 911 if you did a search on any web search engine like Yahoo search and looked for ‘’CONSPIRACY THEORY’’, you would get about 36,000 results or web sites devoted to exposing some form of government conspiracy. If you do the same search now you will get around 16,000,000 results. >>>

7. As I scour the blogosphere, I find almost no progressive voices discussing the dire economic realities of this moment. After all, it's much easier to bash Bush, obsess about clueless, corporately-owned candidates, or blog about green products, green shopping, green living, and all manner of green-wash. Meanwhile, I continue to ask: What have you done to prepare for a post-petroleum world? As the Terminal Triangle becomes ever-more cataclysmic, how will you acquire food, drinkable water, and healthcare for yourself and your loved ones? >>>

8. Realizing that they cannot liquidate their holdings, it appears that the Chinese are currently using their U.S. Treasury holdings as collateral for euro denominated purchases and long term infrastructure transactions. In other words, they may be "liquidating" their holdings as collateral and, in so doing, effectively migrating to non-dollar value without ever having to officially dump their current Treasury holdings. >>>

extra

a) Physalis alkekengi (Bladder-cherry, Chinese Lantern, Japanese-lantern, or Winter cherry; Japanese: hōzuki), is a relative of P. peruviana (Cape Gooseberry), easily identifiable by the larger, bright orange to red papery covering over its fruit, which resemble Chinese lanterns. It is native from southern Europe east across southern Asia to Japan. It is a herbaceous perennial plant growing to 40-60 cm tall, with spirally arranged leaves 6-12 cm long and 4-9 cm broad. The flowers are white, with a five-lobed corolla 10-15 mm across, with an inflated basal calyx which matures into the papery orange fruit covering, 4-5 cm long and broad. >>>

b) My instant boob job from 36A to 36DD - and the effect it had on men (and women) >>>

::: ::: :::

[Picture: What-Did-You-Read? (a deity) by reading_is_dangerous]

EVIL CHAIRS

Liquid Paper man--
can't remember what it was
that was so wrong

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Return of the Liquid Paper Man by reading_is_dangerous]

THE SWAMP LION

it is silence or quicksand?

you cannot breathe
the pain is…
there is a mysterious pain that strikes the soul

you think,
“if it hurts, then it exists,” and there you go
the owner of a painful soul

painful and colorful

a swamp lion
that you’ve never heard about
is lurking

its eyes red
its claws ready

it usually feeds on swamp fish
but as it sees you, your neck
your colorful soul...

millions of years ago you learned

to recognize
the moves of a beast that's about to attack you

you turn around, you see the red eyes
there is the swamp lion

should you scream?
or talk?

try and calm down the lion?
or remain silent, with a smile

defiant

perhaps, what about singing a song?
okay, then, but what song?

if only you had one of those swamp fish to throw the lion
instead of that colorful, painful soul

but that would be useless anyway
because what the swamp lion really wants
isn't the swamp fish
but your soul
painful, colorful

::: ::: :::

Picture: Souls by reading_is_dangerous

THE USEFUL POEM

a poem as useful as a chair
like a fork
like a warm jacket
like tea when you need it

a poem like your heart
beating
beating

your blood is going up
your blood is going down

a poem as useful as the next body in your arms
like a crow that tells you what time it is
like a crow that reminds you of November
like a jam session when you need its freedom

I will miss you
I will sing for you in my dreams
I will cross imaginary rivers in hope of finding you

a useful poem one day
a useful poem I would write, but

the useful poem is a dangerous thing

::: ::: :::

[Picture: The kiss by reading_is_dangerous]

THE THEORY OF Dr BARABO

he brings an electric guitar to the beach
where he will stroke it to produce a rare phenomenon
incomprehensible beautiful wonderful

there he plays. The
ear hears no sound
because the instrument is not
connected to an electric current, but the guitarist is
connected to the underwater currents—their echoes inside us
never faded after we left the sea hundreds of million years ago

there he plays, and although the human ear doesn’t hear a sound,
the sea, a wave embraces the invisible shape of the music. An arm rises
from the sea, it is a wave of force,
and it is searching for a knife, a sword to split the world in two

“That’s only one theory,” explains Dr Barabo. “I have another one:
I believe this arm hopes to grab the most perfect, the most ephemeral
assembly of curves: the water woman.”

what does the musician has to say about this? Nothing
This one just keeps on playing the guitar

::: ::: :::

[Image: Seawater elemental par reading_is_dangerous]

Translated at the request of a friend, after a poem I posted here in French with a different drawing (Feb. 25, 2007).

GIANT CREATURES

it is chasing us: a giant sea scorpion!
so we jump out of the waters
to get out of its way
its mouth
its hunger

now are we on the beach; what’s to do?
we can’t breathe here!

luckily we have strange little fins
strong little arms already
that help us crawl back into the waters
once the giant sea scorpion is gone

that was three, four hundred million years ago

today the same arms
with the same bone structures—all these tiny pieces in the hand...
I am typing words to escape the same old giant sea scorpion
its giant mouth
its giant hunger

it is chasing me, us!
and we know its shape and smell because they never left our brain
our old,
our ancient brain,
there is so much stuff hidden in it...

it is frightening!
—It is frightening not!

I am just about to go and read the
Chronicle of the huge and mighty Gargantua.

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Return of the giant sea scorpions by reading_is_dangerous]

Ms SOME KIND OF LOVE

golden basketballs,
fancy pressure cookers,
special burglar alarms,
the best computers…
all sorts of people gave her all sorts of gifts
and she never refused any one.

she said,
“I don’t really know anything about love,
but love really knows everything about me.”

yeah? Well, I gave her a great leather saddle,
a funny sou’wester hat,
and good Wellington boots.

it was about to rain,
we had a long way to go
and I wasn’t sure of the horses

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Herself by reading_is_dangerous]

THE SITTING UNIVERSE

I dug out the man in me,
but he grew back

so I dug up all the roots,
removing everything,
any plant part,
all the man,
but it grew back again

so I set it on fire. It was burning…
in the thin flame I recognized myself

then I waited
sitting in the ashes, meditating

patience!
patience!

like the hunter I waited
like the cat, the dog, the toad, the spider

I waited
sitting in the ashes, meditating on a formula attributed to Hermes Trimegistus
by Blaise Pascal,
“God is a sphere of which the center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.”

later (but what does later mean?) I saw that it was growing again
The man in me was growing again; I grew back, I reappeared: a phoenix.
They say this mythic bird can not stand anywhere, but at the center of the world.

thus I finally understood

::: ::: :::

[Picture: The sitting universe by reading_is_dangerous]

Translated from my original poem in French at the request of a friend. And here is the link for the wikipage on Hermes Trimegistus, the syncretism of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth.

HERE AS ELSEWHERE

here as elsewhere
nobody really knows what
the shepherd is thinking about,
and sometimes he doesn’t know either.

in Armenia lives a pleasant viper;
its venom in a few minutes can free you
from all your problems.

they call it gurza

::: ::: :::

[Picture: The She-Snake by reading_is_dangerous]

I wrote these few lines in French yesterday, and translated them at the request of a friend. The most difficult word to translate here was aimable: pleasant, kind, amiable.

The gurza is called a lebetine viper in English, or mountain viper, or coffin snake. I should add that I was thinking about the old Serpent myths as I wrote my little poem.

I ROW

A poem by Henri Michaud (my translation from the original French).

___

I ROW

I damned your forehead your belly your life
I damned the streets that your walk took
The things your hand took
I damned the inside of your dreams

I put a pond in your eye—it doesn’t see anymore
An insect in your ear—it doesn’t hear anymore
A sponge in your brain—it doesn’t understand anymore

I cooled you down in the soul of your body
I froze you in your deeper life
The air you breathe suffocates you
The air you breathe seems to come from a basement
Is air already breathed out
That was rejected by hyenas
The injure of this air nobody will breathe it

Your skin is all sweat
Your skin sweats the water of great fear
Your armpits let out a strong smell of crypt

Animals stop on your way
At night, dogs howl, their head turned up towards your house
You cannot flee
You won’t have as much as the strength of an ant at the tip of the foot
Your tiredness is a stump of lead in your body
Your tiredness stretches till the country of Nan
Your tiredness is unspeakable

Your mouth bites you
Your nails claw you
No longer yours is your wife
No longer yours is your brother
The sole of his foot is bitten by a furious snake

They drooled on your progeny
They drooled on the laughter of your little girl
They came drooling before your front house

The world moves away from you

I row
I row
I row against your life
I row
I multiply myself into countless rowers
To row more strongly against you

You fall in the vague
You are without breath
You tire even before the slightest effort

I row
I row
I row

You go drunk, tied to the tail of a mule
Drunkenness as an enormous umbrella that darkens the sky
And gathers the flies
Breathtaking drunkenness of the semi-circular canals
Badly understood beginning of hemiplegia
Drunkenness no longer leaves you
Makes you lean to the left
Makes you lean to the right
Puts you down on the rocky road
I row
I row
I row against your days

In the house of sufferings your enter

I row
I row
On a black headband your actions are written down
On the big white eye of a one-eyed horse rolls your future

I ROW

(1967)

::: ::: :::

[Picture: The president's horse by reading_is_dangerous]

THE SLICES OF HIM

one million blades are coming at him from within

he cannot run away or hide
so he decided he would greet the one million blades with a smile

the slices of him... maybe you could try...
with some crazy glue?

::: ::: :::

[Picture: The enemy army by reading_is_dangerous]

THERE IS STILL HOPE

there is less and less of me left,
but there is still hope--
in every curve of every letter there is hope.

I knew a man who made a list of his favorite,
most useful 2600 words,
then gave each word a letter and a number such as
B89 or L32 or W0
and after he memorized his whole new coding system
he began writing strange poetry.

another man I know,
an enthusiastic molecular biologist,
he cloned the gene that makes a hot pepper hot
and inserted it in a tomato

he’s now working on the same,
for the chicken,
the wings

preliminary tests went wrong,
he said,
“the poor chickens’ eyes,
and their insides too: it was awful, ” but he remains hopeful.

now I have an idea of my own,
something like the opposite of the Blackwater mercenaries: Old fashion cops

my company will provide your city with experienced officers
equipped with a good looking uniform and shoes,
a stick,
a flashlight,
a walkie-talkie,
a smile,
and good judgment. Nothing else,
and they’ll go on night walks too.

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Organic hope by reading_is_dangerous]

THE LEMON MERINGUE

I could not write a poem tonight, but here is a lemon meringue; please accept it, although I should warn you that it used to be a star, a large ball in outer space that was composed of gases and produced light, and it probably had an electrical charge, you know the astronomers do not usually talk about it, but most of them assume that celestial bodies are electrically neutral, yet they are theories that say otherwise, that the Sun works on electricity, do not laugh, well, you can laugh, yes, because it is funny, but this theory, it could explain such oddities as the temperature at the surface of the sun being higher than the temperature at the center of the star, but if you asked me how they measure those temperatures I would have to take a guess. Maybe they point a thermometer at the sun disk’s edge, then straight at its center, so they can compare the two measures, that is how I would try it at first anyway, by the way, the other day there was a television program about the sun, and every time it was shown, the star, that large ball, the film’s director had added the sound of a raging fire, and I thought that was ridiculous, instead I would have preferred some nice music, maybe El Amor Brujo of Manuel de Falla, in English that music is known as Love, the Magician, it is beautiful and there is a famous excerpt called The ritual fire dance, and I wish I could play it for you on the mouth harp, ha! ha! ha!

I imagined myself in the shape of an intelligent or semi-intelligent, self-conscious or semi-self-conscious gas inside one of any large ball in outer space, you know, and up there I am listening to the whole universe, and I hear Tolstoy when he says, “Stop what you are doing and look at the world,” and I do it, and the result is that I’m not a sun anymore, hmm, that’s when I turn into a lemon meringue on the table right here, see, that’s me, I am a semi-intelligent, semi-self-conscious semi-flat super sweet mixture of the white of eggs and sugar baked until crisp and used e.g. as a covering over sweet pies, and will you eat it/me?

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Recipe by reading_is_dangerous]

NOVEMBER HAIKU

the yellow leaves
look at the sky gray with rain—
it’s time to go

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Loxodro, god of the falling leaves by reading_is_dangerous]

PLAYFUL BIRDS

I remember a game of my early childhood.

I would put my hand on the table,
and then my brother would put his hand on top of mine,
and then I would put my second hand on top of his,
and then he would put his second hand on top of mine,
and then I would free my first hand,
and put it on top of my brother’s second hand,
and he would do the same,
and the game would go on like this for a while, faster and faster,
until our hands would fly up in the air like birds.

how do you call it, that game?

::: ::: :::

[Picture : Layers of thoughts by reading_is_dangerous]

I INHABIT THE LIGHT

“I inhabit the light,” Henri Michaud wrote in his poem, Towards Completeness. It begins with these words I translated from the original in French, for you:

You receive
you receive
you have the delight of receiving
of secretly, endlessly
receiving the Impalpable

BIRTHDAY OF THE UNLIMITED

Another World accepts me
agrees to me
absorbs me
forgives me

Armistice of passions
Layers of light
underground-ly
sovereign-ly

The emanation of existence
the expansion of existence
the promontory, the fury of existence

I stand at the coming of bliss
The instant is more than the being
The being is more than the beings
and all beings are infinite

Mobile time
of many levels
ascending, panoramic

An invisible vehicle carries me away

… (1967)

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Translation by reading_is_dangerous] (this summer)

BIG WHITE BIRDS FLYING IN A ROW

earlier this year
the photo camera I received as a gift,
the Lumix,
it was still mine,
and of course I brought it with me when I went to the circus.

there is an old circus in Yerevan.
It survived the collapse of the Soviet Union
It survived the war that followed, the black years
It survived the “transition” as they call it
It survived also the recent “rebuilding” process
The circus even survived the cell phones
and all the new trends that keep the little children busy

during all these years that I’ve been living here (nine)
I promised myself I would never go to the circus
because, I used to say, I don’t like it

It would make me sad, I thought, to see
the old clowns in their old circus costumes
the old circus poodles running around, and jumping
the old circus pony, tired, pulling a circus cart with the poodles in it,
the old circus capuchin, sitting among the poodles
the old circus elephant

what do you dream about, old circus elephant?
about an ancient temple in the jungle?
about a herd of elephants crossing the road?
about village people with their chains or tree trunks?
about a young master feeding you?
about colorful birds?

“Hold it,” the old circus elephant said,
“Every night I see big white birds flying in a row
a few meters above the gray waters of the sea.
They come to feed, pelicans!
and as I watch them,
I feel a light, a warm light; it rains on me, the light.”

“What then?” I asked her.

“Nothing. I just wake up,” she said,
taking a single peanut from my hand.

it was fun at the circus. There were three llamas,
and a beautiful Ukrainian girl acrobat,
and many,
many smart ass monkeys.

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Leopards in the forest by reading_is_dangerous]

MAN WITH A CROW

Here is an update on my malfunctioning computer’s situation. First of all, it’s a Tecra 8100, not a “Tecron” as I wrote mistakenly in a previous post. It’s six or seven years old, and not worth much, but it’s the only one I have and I could not afford to replace it. What happened? Two days ago, I accidentally visited some funny website, then my machine froze, and it wouldn’t start up again, but I now believe this has nothing to do with the website in question. Anyway, searching on the web I found posts written a few years ago by owners of a Tecra 8100:

“This machine started locking up randomly and even during boot up - then quit booting at all. When powering on, I hear the hard drive activate and a fan like sound running, but nothing else including a blank screen.”

That is an exact description of what I experienced. Other people wrote more of the same, then there was this post:

“i had the same problem before with my tecra 8100, i resolve it by adding a paper or a silicon to the clam to push the ground wire of the lcd making sure that it touches the frame or body..... due to the flipping of the lcd, the ground wire gets pulled loosing contact to the body or frame......”

Just a piece of paper? I tried it and it worked out right away, on the very first attempt. Great! Thus I was able to boot the computer at last... Unfortunately the system still freezes randomly; during the start up process or anytime after, a few minutes, half an hour, when I am computer-finger-painting or when I write... It does makes my blogging life a little bit difficult!

So what’s next? Well, I am back to searching the web…

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Man with a crow by reading_is_dangerous]

WHERE DO WE GO?

where do we go
when the world doesn’t want us anymore

where do we stay
what roof
what bed

who gets to sleep with whom
you, me

when was the last time you took a shower

it’s time to eat.
Sit next to me

what’s this?
Porridge, hmm.

sweet.

one day I stole honey right from the hives

they were abandoned, the hives
you see there was a war.

in the forest we found wild green onions
with the honey it was good
believe it or not!

ok,
where do we go once the
planet doesn’t want us... any longer

To what land?

ok, I’m going to stay here a little bit more
With you,
pretty you.

you cook, remember?
I go get some wood.

It’ll be cold tonight.

::: ::: :::

[Picture: My computer is very broken by reading_is_dangerous]

SOMETHING HAPPENED

something happened
after I visited a strange page on the internet, memino.com (don't go!)

now my computer won't boot.
I've tried all the key combinations I could think of
with the result that it will boot if I press ctrl + alt + any letter,
but only once for each letter -- and then it doesn't boot anyway --
the process stops midway.

sometimes a message appears on screen: BAD CHECK SUM (CMOS)
and I've googled it,
but the "help" bits I found didn't help me.

Poor Toshiba Tecron 8100!
It might never work again.

]I won't be able to blog again until... I don't know.

===
so I must say goodbye for now.
Be well,
my friends.

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Where? When? by reading_is_dangerous]

DRAGON IN THE WALL

your wall is a dragon.

A dragon is a wall

the magical creature used to live in a river or
under a mountain or
on a cloud,
but today it lives in your wall

you find it,
you kill it,
you eat it,
then you can grow yourself wings
and take off

She is there, up there,
and waiting for you: Isis

She gives you Her Gift,
then you come back home, changed

the resurrected dragon is again in the wall,
and strong,
and beautiful,
and waiting for the next time, the next step

::: ::: :::

[Picture: The Gift by reading_is_dangerous]

I SPEAK TO THE WALLS

I’ll do without the grass
without the campfire
without the red sky
without the old man with his Phrygian cap

I’ll do without the gray clouds of the end of the day
without the horns of the bow
without the young man in his white shirt
without his questions

I’ll do without my tongue
without the devil himself
without the numerous flowers and their names
without the ancient songs

I’ll do with the walls
with the armchair
with the industrial carpet
with the computer

I speak to the walls, yes
to the television (it doesn’t matter it’s turned on or not)
to the paintings I speak
with them, with the mouth harp

I’ll be the home shaman if you need one.

center, circle, round;
I see them where you don’t, when you can’t

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Vision by reading_is_dangerous]

PLANE TICKETS, US POLITICS, FOLK DANCE

Here in Armenia, they used to tell you the price for a plane ticket in US dollars. You’d change that much into the local currency, the Armenian dram, then purchase your ticket. Since November 1st, 2007, prices are set in euros. I heard that all the airline companies in Russia and Georgia do the same.

As Paul Craig Roberts wrote, “There is abundant evidence that the loss of confidence in the dollar is underway.” (Hegemony’s cost, Nov. 2, ICH) And he added, “When it is complete, the US will no longer be a superpower.”

Meanwhile, as PCR stated again, “The US government has to rely on foreigners to lend it money for its annual expenditures. Washington’s two biggest bankers are China and Japan...” In my opinion, that means the government of China and Japan are guilty of supporting the US occupation in Iraq, and there is a genocide on the way over there.

They spoke about the cost of the war today on CNN, saying it was about $560 billion dollar. But it’s been said before, and PCR wrote it too, that the war “has run up a one trillion dollar price tag.” What saddens me is that a trillion dollar spent on war actually costs more than just a trillion dollar, because of what you destroy with that trillion dollar. Better simply burn it, if you will, but imagine the results of investing one trillion dollar in, let’s say, folk dance The health and the cultural benefits would be tremendous, and the impact on the economy too. “The war on terror is a hoax,” writes PCR. I believe so!

In other news, my favorite Democratic presidential candidate, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich is going up in the polls, or so they say. He was second in a straw poll last week, in California. There was Clinton on CNN earlier. As usual, as she spoke the sound was muted, and the CNN people were telling us what she was saying, something useless about Obama, if I remember that right.

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Round by reading_is_dangerous]

On November 2, the greatest 20th-century choreographer of folk dance, Igor Alexandrovic Moiseyev passed away at 101. He was the father of the Theatre of Folk Art, and his work was especially admired “for the balance that it maintained between authentic folk dance and theatrical effectiveness.” (Encyclopædia Britannica). What I saw on Russian TV last night was amazing.

WELL, FIGHTING?

light is a wave,
there is a music of light

flowers in a field,
it’s a symphony

flowers at home,
it’s chamber music

light is a wave,
we are beings of light

we are a wave, one wave
one song, all of us.

“if you love you are of God,” Dostoevsky wrote
in The Brothers Karamazov

I have many questions:
What to love, who to love, how to love…

love your enemy,
of course. Without fear

give yourself to the hungry tiger
when it comes.

well,
fighting?

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Circle by reading_is_dangerous]

VOLCANOES, ONIONS, HARP

We could have chosen to be ants. Pepper ants. Did you know that pepper ants just love onions? They grow tiny onions at home, in their tunnels, galleries, in their dreams too. There is nothing to stop a pepper ant once it has decided to eat an onion, big or small.

I could have been one pepper ant’s antenna, and you the other one. A tooth. An onion tooth. One day, I sliced an onion for a pizza, but inside the round white vegetable, underneath the many skin layers, there was a tooth. I wonder how it got there, who chose to be that tooth, in there, in that onion, what did it mean, etc.

It could have been Xim the Leprechaun fooling around, you know. Dropping a tooth. Oh! You don’t have to read all this what I am writing. I am trying to get away from myself, and I use words, you see? I wish I could really come up with an almost senseless sentence, as if I were a complete computer that knew all the words in the universe, in all languages, and my job was too mix them in a random fashion, for no reason, until the end of times.

“Time doesn’t end,” I hear myself say. I can be so funny. You asked me if I’m still playing the Jew’s harp. What do you think?

By the way, I now sell active volcanoes, fully insured. If I ever get wealthy, I’ll build a road made of only flowers, from here to there. To where? Ha! ha!

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Fresh onions by reading_is_dangerous]

WE CHOOSE

We choose our face.

Before birth, and we could explain our decision for every detail, the shape of the eyebrows, the way the lips close, the almond of the eye, the shade of the skin, the nose, a mountain or a little basket, an apple of a nose, a bottle of a nose, a chocolate button rond marble of a nose, etc.

Of course, we choose the body too. The gender, the height, the weight at all ages, the talents, the strength, the weaknesses, the favorite diseases, the death. We choose every thing before birth. Even the pain, the hardship, the tears, the fears, the madness, the words.

Every word we say, we choose before birth. Every breath. We choose.

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[Picture: Smile by reading_is_dangerous]

READING

Here is a passage from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Book I, Chapter Five:

It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also.

In the realist, the miracles springs from faith. Taken literally, these words would inspire me to develop a novel based on a character such as a realist, an atheist or more exactly a pantheist, whose faith in the unity of the world, the one body of the universe as I call it, would put him on the way to a miracle, but it would be a difficult road, of course, one made of sacrifice and test. This reminds me of Stalker, the film by Andrei Tarkovsky, in which the hero, who is more of a path finder than a stalker, guides two men across a dangerous “zone” and to a room where one’s wishes come true. “One has to have faith,” the hero says. But faith in what? If you have faith in yourself, can you accomplish a miracle? What is a miracle? The above passage, from The Brothers Karamazov, continues,

As soon as he [Alyosha] reflected seriously he was convinced of the existence of God and immortality, and at once he instinctively said to himself: "I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no compromise."

Now I’d like to ask Dostoevsky, “What immortality are you talking about?” The immortality of what? Of me? What is so great about “me” that it should receive the gift of immortality from the hands of God, and what god are we talking about? A self-conscious god?

(continued) In the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth.

It never was heaven on earth, except in our creation myths, before Yahweh kicked out Adam and Eve from Eden. It’s getting late to set up heaven on earth. The world could be destroyed any minute thanks to the bomb makers, and our so-called leaders, and the obedient military men, and the Armageddonites! Maybe humans will simply end up eating each other in a dead world as somebody else imagined in a novel published recently. See Civilization Ends with a Shutdown of Human Concern. Are We There Already? by George Monbiot :

A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small Is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world.

Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot.

“…the schedules,” Monbiot writes, “are crammed with shows urging us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more…” That is true here in Armenia ; the current government and the “opposition” parties all want more roads, more power plants, more of everything except more biodiversity, more trees, more clean air, etc. What about you? What do you really want? What do you really do to get what you really want? Let’s go back to the Karamazov Brothers, Book II, Chapter Two:

Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself.

How not to think of G.W. Bush? Our (big) brother in lies…

(continued) The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offence, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill- he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offence, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness.

…that is more easily offended than any other. My thoughts are dragged to a certain country... But don’t we all feel pleasure in taking offense? Yes? No? Why?

Do not be so ashamed of yourself, for that is at the root of it all.

I remember these words by Joseph Campbell about an hypothesis by Freud:

Sigmund Freud delivered a shock to many of this admirers when he proposed in his last major work, Moses and Monotheism, that Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian noble-specifically, of the household of the heretic pharaoh Ikhnaton, who reigned 1377-1358 B.C.-and that in the years directly following this pharaoh’s death, which had entailed the collapse both of this court and of his cult of monotheism, Moses departed from Egypt with a company of Semitic settlers in the Delta, upon whom he strove to impress Ikhnaton’s monotheistic belief. However, in the desert these people, who oppressed by his disciplines, slew him, and his place of leadership was taken by the Midianite priest of an Arabian volcano god, Yahweh. Yet his memory and teaching (in Freud’s words) “continued to work in the background, until it slowly gained more and more power over the mind of the people and at last succeeded in transforming the god Yahweh into the Mosaic God, and in waking to a new life the religion that Moses has instituted centuries before but which had subsequently been forsaken.”

Freud’s theory has, of course, been attacked from every side, both with learning and without. However, according to his own by no means unlearned view, it furnishes the only plausible psychological explanation of the peculiarly compulsive character of biblical belief, whish is in striking contrast to the relaxed, poetic, and even playful approaches to mythology of the Greeks of the same period. Biblical religion, according to Freud, has the character of a neurosis, where a screen of mythic figurations hides a repressed conviction of guilt, which, it is felt, must be atoned, and yet cannot be consciously faced. The screening myths are there to hide, not to reveal, a truth. (Occidental Mythology, 1964)

The truth on a murder, now that’s interesting stuff! In Book II, Chapter III of The Brothers Karamazov, I read,

…the elder had already noticed in the crowd two glowing eyes fixed upon him. An exhausted, consumptive-looking, though young peasant woman was gazing at him in silence. Her eyes besought him, but she seemed afraid to approach.

"What is it, my child?"

"Absolve my soul, Father," she articulated softly, and slowly sank on her knees and bowed down at his feet. "I have sinned, Father. I am afraid of my sin."

The elder sat down on the lower step. The woman crept closer to him, still on her knees.

"I am a widow these three years," she began in a half-whisper, with a sort of shudder. "I had a hard life with my husband. He was an old man. He used to beat me cruelly. He lay ill; I thought looking at him, if he were to get well, if he were to get up again, what then? And then the thought came to me-"

"Stay!" said the elder, and he put his ear close to her lips.

The woman went on in a low whisper, so that it was almost impossible to catch anything.
She had soon done.

What did the elder tell this poor woman?

There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God? Think only of repentance, continual repentance, but dismiss fear altogether. Believe that God loves you as you cannot conceive; that He loves you with your sin, in your sin. It has been said of old that over one repentant sinner there is more joy in heaven than over ten righteous men. Go, and fear not. Be not bitter against men. Be not angry if you are wronged. Forgive the dead man in your heart what wrong he did you. Be reconciled with him in truth. If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love.

There is no sin, and all things are saved by love. Good! But what is love?

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[Picture: Reading by reading_is_dangerous]

I’ll put up Amazon links to the books mentionned in this post, if anyone is interested.

THE RABBIT

I never had or used an electric typewriter, but this morning in a dream I was typing on one electric typewriter, and I was enjoying it, and that is already great all by itself. As long as you can dream... Being a human being is an amazing experience, although it would be hard for me to compare with, let’s say, being a rabbit on Halloween, when the pumpkins are smiling and witches are flying all across the so-cold Sky.

I wrote a poem in my dream, but I just forgot what it was about. Perhaps it was about something that seemed important, but which wasn’t, or it could have been about something that seemed unimportant, but which was. The importance or unimportance of everything escapes me in the end.

I wonder if I’ll ever remember what I wrote this morning in my dream. If it was important, if it still is important, if it will remain important, it might come back. Maybe it’ll come back only if it wasn’t important. Perhaps it won’t come back, and perhaps that’s important that it won’t, or maybe not.

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[Picture : The Rabbit by reading_is_dangerous]