Poetasters, philosophasters, Tartufferie & general paresis.
Postscript: The death of 'The Movement' by correctitude.
[Up, Down]Postscript: The death of 'The Movement' by correctitude.
| No less and no more than Freddie Nietzsche himself playing silly buggers; or myself. Or could it be callous disinterest? Incomprehension & misunderstanding? There are so many ways to go wrong, to get it wrong gentle reader and I can't find much of a way through them though I've tried. 'Akrasia' (The state of mind in which one acts against one's better judgement; weakness of will, ‘incontinence’.) sez one'a the pundits over at The Guardian.  You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth. Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are driven of fierce winds, yet are they turned about with a very small helm.    "It doesn't mean that much to me to mean that much to you," (says Neil Young, the wanker!).ignominy: in- not + nōmen name - so literally 'without name' (echoes of Nobodaddy); obloquy: ob- against + loqu-ī to speak; calumny: straight Latin - false and malicious misrepresentation of the words or actions of others; also pariah (paṛaiyan, paṛaiyar), shunning, and outcast. Interesting that 'gnomon' comes from a different root - Greek for 'know' not Latin for 'name' although the etymology is confusing, unclear, as if the roots of 'know' are so old as to be almost lost, obscure.  Got the cold shoulders. Got the silent treatment. Even got the bum's rush. 'Magine 'At!Got the Kenosha Kid. Got the Hokey Pokey. Got the Shuffle Demons. Waltzing on Air. Got the Tennessee Waltz. Shit from shinola. Only left the apartment on Earth Day to trek across town for cheap coffee grounds at the No-Frills. So.   I wish I could disappear gentle reader, vanish and re-emerge as the porteiro in some run-down termas in Mangaratiba or Chuí.The woman over at Compassionate waziz, Julie Johnston, has apparently ... retired. Ah! When Chris Hedges talks about it he says: Friedrich Nietzsche in “Beyond Good and Evil” holds that only a few people have the fortitude to look in times of distress into what he calls the molten pit of human reality. Most studiously ignore the pit. Artists and philosophers, for Nietzsche, are consumed, however, by an insatiable curiosity, a quest for truth and desire for meaning. They venture down into the bowels of the molten pit. They get as close as they can before the flames and heat drive them back. This intellectual and moral honesty, Nietzsche wrote, comes with a cost. Those singed by the fire of reality become “burnt children,” he wrote, eternal orphans in empires of illusion.But the only mention of 'burnt children' I can find in Nietzsche is: Perhaps there even exists an order of rank among these burnt children, these born artists who can find the enjoyment of life only in the intention of falsifying its image (as it were, in a longwinded revenge on life): the degree to which life has been spoiled for them might be inferred from the degree to which they wish to see its image falsified, thinned down, transcendentalized, deified - the homines religiosi might be included among artists, as their highest rank.  I can't help wondering (and not for the first time) if Hedges is one of those homines religiosi our fine feathered Fred is on about? Friedrich Nietzsche & Arthur Rimbaud - some common elements in their life stories.   I will tell you a little about the people in this photograph. Loyola Pomeroy was a fisherman in Great Paradise and one of the keepers of the Marticot lighthouse. They were two brothers, Loyola (Lol) and Albert who married two sisters, Bridgett and Carmel, and all of them kept the light as their mothers and fathers had done before (but that's another story). When I knew them they had taken the "shiftin' money" and so had to humbly ask the government's permission to come back to Paradise and live in their own houses for the duration of fishing season - because the government "growth centres" weren't really growing much except broken men and everyone knew it. Lol showed me how one man could get a drum of gas up out of a skiff and up onto the wharf at low tide by himself. He could also pick up a drum of gas and walk with it - without his arms going all the way around. He showed me how to "run new bearings" into a make-or-break engine without taking it up out of the boat. He taught me the rudiments of splitting cod - an essential skill. Lol fished lobster in the spring of the year and he was renowned for being able to stack an unbelievable number of lobster pots onto his punt on opening day, a huge pile. He would chug out of harbour, top heavy and wavering, with a proud smile that seemed to go twice around his face. One year he had his young son with him and, when they hit open water outside the harbour he caught a bad wave and it all tipped over. The water was freezing. He managed to push his son up onto the hull and hold him there - one hand on the keel and one on his son - but he could not get out of the water himself. When they found them Lol was dead. His son lived. Quite a legacy. The man in the middle was Alton, my father. Look how he puts his hands on their shoulders. Look at the size of those hands. See his smile. The woman was Elizabeth Anetta. See the eager vitality in her face. She quit smoking when she found herself pregnant with me - not so common in 1945 as it is now. She believed that carnal love touches the eternal (a crazy idea) and I must've picked it up from her somehow. The young fellow in front is my nephew. Up in Fort Mac these days makin' money. Still there even after all the recent layoffs. He has grown up to be quite tall, so that when he assumes Charlie Daniel's posture (below) it is particularly comical.  There is an implicit story in the photograph as well. When I went out to Paradise in the late 60s, know-nothing kid from Toronto with a beautiful young woman companion - Harold Horwood called us the 'Paradise Hippies' when he wrote about it in The Telegram - mom and dad hired a float plane to come and see first-hand what we were up to. And found it good. Yeah. That was their way - see first-hand - and there's a lot to be said about that ... maybe later. Postscript: THE DEATH OF THE MOVEMENT BY CORRECTITUDE. You may already be aware of the 'Keep it in the Ground' campaign spearheaded by The Guardian. The development of this campaign is documented in a remarkably frank series of podcasts (six so far). The latest initiative is to promote a video to 'go viral' - and the first try came on-line on April 30th: Dear Bill Gates, Please help us to Keep it in the Ground. Now (after 24 hours) it is pushing 50,000 hits - too soon to say if it will really take off. If it did it might actually reach Bill Gates.  I find the campaign fascinating because Alan Rusbridger and The Guardian are playing it straight. If you listen to the podcasts (above) you will see the birth of a campaign: bumbling, bungling, warts and all.It began when Rusbridger met Bill McKibben late last year as they were both about to be awarded 'Right Livlihood' awards, and finally hit the front page of the Guardian in March; and although McKibben has not (as yet and as far as I can see) supplied much substantive support, his '350.org' logo appears on some of the Guardian pages endorsing the campaign. I may be quite a cynic but the thing has captured my imagination and I have done what I can (which is not much to be sure) to make it known about in Toronto (as mentioned in the last few posts here). So yesterday, as I just so happened to be on-line when Alan Rusbridger's email with the video link arrived, I immediately passed on the news to the Toronto 350 mailing list (something on the order of 100 email addresses). It wasn't long before the 'President' of 350 Toronto whacked my peepee: Please don't use the members' list for posting things like this. The members list is for important announcements that relate directly to the whole group. This isn't the kind of thing we want to fill our people's inboxes with — especially without explanation. People will either think it's spam (especially with an moralistic and imposing subject line like that), or might have seen it before from other sources. [sic]Judge for yourself how imposing and moralistic it was. The entire message was, "Please look at this and pass it on, it's the right thing to do!" with the URL of the video. Oatmeal is moralistic? Who knew? This is not the first (or even the second or third) time I have been stopped cold by Toronto 350 on bullshit correctitude issues. The last time was when I suggested making a Chinese Dragon in the form of a black tar-sand pipeline. The only reaction was for someone to inform me that 'Chinese Dragon' is not an inclusive term and that some people might feel 'unsafe' in places where such phrases were spoken openly (this from the so-called 'Director of Outreach'); and the chairman of the meeting (the 'President' already mentioned) refused to include the suggestion in the minutes. And that was the end of that (!). Not a pretty question but ... I have to ask: WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?! (Thanks to Bill Maher.) For someone firmly embedded in an agnostic/atheist landscape - even a fat old whoremonger like me - it is hard to live down early exposure to the KJV. This empty space now resonates with Lot's story of Sodom (and the very comparable 'Everyone Knows What A Dragon Looks Like'). And one can't help but wish that any of them had heard and understood Matthew's "go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone". What to do? Good question. Best idea is to get (ta fuck) outa this uptight town somehow but ... I don't have the money for that anymore gentle reader ... nor any objective, nor any invitations. Oh my. I'll come back to this issue in a week or so when I've cooled down.   A-and here's an interesting 75 cent word for y'all (picked up this week in Coetzee's 'Waiting for the Barbarians') - maieutic: Pertaining to intellectual midwifery, i.e. to the Socratic process of assisting a person to bring out into clear consciousness conceptions previously latent in his or her mind. (OED) And anyone with experience of midwifery knows it's a messy business. The 'come-back-to-this-issue', the carry-on (carrion?) is here.    Fact is, you just never know:After some months of apparently increasing indifference my sweet beloved sends a bunch of photographs and pretty soon I'm hummin' Manu Chao "Só têm que ser homens" and dreaming of better days - and then she wants pictures from me and I don't have any but I snap a few selfies on the cell phone and figgure out how to get them over onto the computer and then here. Ain't love strange. Ignominy nothin' !!  Did I tell you I love you I love you. Did I tell you I love you I love you. today? No. today? No. I adore men with Alzheimer's. Unfortunately it's not all funny: Sex, Dementia and a Husband on Trial at Age 78 (in the NYT a few weeks ago). |
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