No-name progress I.

Is there a Green Party? and
The famous blue Three Point Plan.

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The guy on the left was already well on the way down and out when the photograph was taken in 2010. A-and, truth be told, this here 'one-plus-three-point' plan is most likely a foregone conclusion too - a shell game with the pea being a miracle. His friend gives 'im a telephone, boughten not bespoke, paid-for. It is not a perfect transaction but he is trying to be kind. What he don't didn't, doesn't, can't, won't see is the reason it was ever got rid of - simply that it (almost) never rang. Now it (almost) never rings. Nothing is changed. As the denominator comes closer and closer to (almost) never it's a cusp and out pop limits and calculus and all the sweet (predictable) music of the revolving spheres. But I am one who looks at the crescent moon to see if she still holds water cupped in her hands. Beyond limits is Heisenberg's uncertainty around position and momentum which brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to ... the far more satisfying quantum conclusion that either the universe is ... or is not, never was. ... A way a lone a last a loved a long the Einstein sez "God don't play dice," but it seems to me like ... if He was He might.   Green Party: Round 1: (March 2) Go out to hear Elizabeth May and she sure seems to be telling the truth. Decide to follow it up. (March 7.) Leave a message for the one person I remember from the last time I tried it on with the Greens in this riding. Find a website with an email address and send one. Leave a message on the main Green Party site. Nadinha! Zilch! Round 2: (March 20.) Remember that Charlie Halpern was once kind. Leave a message on his site; he responds immediately and forwards the question; the person I was thinking of answers and promises to include me in the next riding meeting. (March 23.)   Three Point Plan: 1) TSP / Trinity St. Paul's: (March 22.) Visit TSB for Sunday service and meet Bob Fugere who promises to inform me of their next monthly meeting. (March 26.) He follows up with a gracious email explaining that the meeting hasn't been scheduled yet and he will tell me when it is. 2) Beaches United: I am blocked on this somehow. I keep formulating plans to go over, or telephone, or email - and then just don't do it. An open item then. 3) UofT: The divestment appears to be in the hands of 350 - a project on the go since 2013. Two hundred and eighty seven pages of 'Brief' and growing. (March 24.) Go to their scheduled weekly meeting. It is evident that their focus is raising money. Someone promises to send me the minutes. (March 26.) The lovely young Executive Assistant follows through, not with the minutes but with membership on the list. (March 28.) Go along to the Green Show. A bust. If there is a less gracious way to accomplish anything you'll find it first in Toronto. The 350 guy gives me the brush off. At least I manage to get rid of a big bag of e-waste. (March 30.) Sure enough, there is list email - interesting stuff too it is. [TO BE CONTINUED ...]

Emily is 12 years old. Sharie is her mother. Emily has been competing in beauty pagents since she was 4 years old. The photographs come from a recent NYT article based in turn on the latest project of Ilana Panich-Linsman (unfortunately the site does not work very well, for me at least).

Correctitude: It's not all bad. To begin meetings with a salute to the 'First Nations' is a good reminder that this is all, always has been, stolen land. As long as one is also mindful of corrupt band councils, and aware of large mammal extinctions before the coming of the 'white man' and so on. Or ... Laerte, a transsexual (with a double 'ss'), Patrick White, Rimbaud (from an era when sexual activity was determined by anal inspection carried out by licensed professionals). Re-reading Patrick White: 'Riders in the Chariot' (1961), 'The Solid Mandala' (1966), and 'A Fringe of Leaves' (1976). So many occasions when his words seem to be coming straight through the aether. No mistake that a number of deep friendships develop during the brief weeks reading 'Riders' at MUN so many years ago. (Of course we imagine ourselves a skein of Zaddiks - mensch being beyond our grasp.) And yet, also replete with pettiness - eloquent AND petty.   :-) I'll actually exist? You will.                                       I exist? You Exist. It's not just some kind of illusion? No. It's not that. I'm really going to turn into                                       Wow! I feel much better.    If I'd known I'd have a woman? You are.                                                 So you say.                     switched years ago. The machine didn't exist back then.   Alan Rusbridger's Guardian initiative has hit a few wrinkles. Notably financial links from the purveyors of fossil fuel into The Guardian's own coffers. What is evident now is that he really is playing by ear. And likely (also) hoping for a miracle. This is good. On the other hand, he is playing so openly and so transparently that this ... confusion (let's call it) comes off positively. It mirrors almost perfectly the ambiguous complicity around this issue in the heart of everyman. What he needs now is some small victory: possibly convincing his own colleagues - in the Guardian Media Group (GMG) & Scott Trust - to divest; or a softer target such as the Anglican Church; something - even a huge jump in the petition signers, from 140,000 to millions could conceivably turn the tide. Keeping in mind that this is the third-last stanza out of twenty five, four lines out of a hundred. Taken from Le Bateau Ivre, 1883, and an English translation by Oliver Bernard, 1962. Of course it's well worth going to the library and having a look at Samuel Beckett's translation (which is not available anywhere on-line that I can find).

Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleuré! Les Aubes sont navrantes. Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer: L'âcre amour m'a gonflé de torpeurs enivrantes. O que ma quille éclate! O que j'aille à la mer!

But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter: Sharp love has swollen me up with heady langours. O let my keel split! O let me sink to the bottom!

She's having a ball. Who could object? And yet these images and the story (or the parts of the story that are not told) disturb, upset, sadden; and the wondering about this girl, her mother, and the photographer, just carries on ... Chris Hedges fulminates about violence to women, pornography, prostitution. What do you call whatever it is that is happening to Emily then?

 
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22nd reprise.

aka    About as well as they treat each other.

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FIRST Bar None Award goes to Murray Minchin and ALL of the good citizens of Kitimat: SECOND Bar None Award goes to Greenpeace: There are some ugly rumours about Greenpeace/police negotiations during the Huntsville portion of the 2010 G20 meetings, very ugly, and from credible people too, BUT Greenpeace is about the only group which even approximately confronts the real eco-terrorists on the scene. So this fat & useless old fuck is standing up here and applauding. Good on 'em! Nouveau rapport du GIEC. New report from IPCC. On the editorial cartoon front tOad is eloquent as usual, and Erik Allie - so they get first prizes. Honourable mentions: Unrelated but too good to pass up: One day before the Greenpeace action and half a world away in Lynchburg Virginia: The railroad is CSX Transportation. As usual, their website stresses that they are "the safest, most progressive North American railroad" and yes, they have lines in Quebec and Ontario. None of the news stories are telling me whose oil they were carrying or exactly where it was going beyond Yorktown. Antonin Artaud: 'Van Gogh le suicidé de la société' [Van Gogh, The Man Suicided by Society], Paris, 1947. He died a year later (aged 51). What would you call it? 'Hard-core'? But what is it exactly? A brutally anorexic young woman having her perfectly hairless pudenda massaged by an apparently aroused masseuse. She keeps her eyes closed (absorbed in the sensations no doubt) and then suddenly opens them, twice - I guess that's supposed to represent moments of orgasm. A footnote: "Bird lives!" 'Ζει!' Zi! [He] Lives! (referring to Grigoris Lambrakis). "W.A.S.T.E. We Await Silent Tristero's Empire." Morituri te salutamus! Such grafitti can (easily) be viewed as hopeful, even faithful (as well as cute). Maybe they are collective transcendental conceits - can you say that? Comparable to the Bahá'í notion that 'peace is inevitable'. I happen to be neither hopeful nor faithful, however, my channels are still open - consciousness has been raised albeit negatively. The hands are placed on the wall and, leaning forward ... unsteady, staggery (in the scuppers with the staggers and jags) one reads the writing on the wall of the pisser: Harmonic Convergence: Mankind's second chance. It is writ large, somewhere: "In the cusp of converging ages, one blinding, holy moment of transcendence ... shall transform the Zeitgeist with perfect synchronicity, into the pure, ineffable expression of indivisible ... oneness."   [Kidding.]

 
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Mere anarchy is loosed?

Today is WORLD DO NOTHING DAY - worthy of red letters to be sure.

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I learned about the word 'mere' from Pierre Trudeau's 'mere tribalism' speech. A comparable kind of endearing arrogance can be found in one of Brian Mulrooney's stump speeches: "We are adjusting our perceptions." Also considered calling this "Gravity, entropy, is kickin' in," but mere won. It is a yin/yang kind of anarchy I am thinkin' of: one axis engineered by H. grædum & 'The Davos Class' and executed by Black Bloc, Anonymous, Occupy; another in personal moral turpitude - turpytude? - and economic incontinence (since everything human could be said to ultimately boil down to individuals and their various personal decision matrices); and the whole physical/chemical/gravitational cosmos ... many axes, even up to Higgs Boson [Higgs' Boson?] - visions of a new Jacob's ladder. But closer to home and quite recently there's Obama's SOTU speech: No disrespect is intended here to Cory Remsburg. That he has been so cynically used does not discredit him though it is disturbing. Looking closely at the symbolism and hysterical responding applause it becomes even more disturbing. "But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact." [Applause.] "And when our children's children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say yes, we did." [Applause.] So says Barack Obama in a 30 second slot in the (forgettable) just-before-the-middle assigned to the issue, even less than a mere 1% of his 2014 State of the Union speech. Oh, really Barack? Will we be able to say that? Really? You sound like Bill Clinton talking about the Rwanda genocide. How long has it taken for so called externalities to become even marginally, peripherally, considered by economists? I remember first hearing of it from E.F. Schumacher in the early 70's. 40+ years and the penny has still not properly dropped. I will deal with William Nordhaus on this subject later on when I have finished his most recent book 'The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World'. How long will it take for the (resulting) environmental apocalypse to register with the U.S. State Department? They don’t even raise the possibility that the Keystone pipeline should be stopped in order to keep a lid on the total amount of unconventional fossil fuels burned around the world. Doh? Erm? Wha? On the other hand, 'big green' Natural Resources Defense Council NRDC thinks our Barack did one heck of a wonn'erful job: Obama Reaffirms Commitment to Climate Action in State of the Union.   Those more cynical than Obama by orders of magnitude can read the writing on the wall - or can see the Looney-Tunes Road Runner plot unfolding. The real state of affairs is more like this: Times are tough when the cartoonists don't even get it. Must be the cold winter huh? And rock stars not really 'where it's at' either: Bud the Spud he ain't. Out on the highway in his ethanol car, proselytizing agri-business and building diamond mines. OK ... it's a life. Maybe the last good rock star politician was wazzername's ex ... Sonny something ... Sonny Bono was it? (Sonny & Cher, you remember.) Times were simpler back then eh? Who knew we'd be facing extinction?                                                                                         William Butler Yeats - The Second Coming Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? O Segundo Advento Girando e girando em voltas mais amplas O falcão não pode ouvir o falcoeiro; As coisas se desfazem; não se mantém o centro; Pura anarquia espalha-se mundo adentro, A maré obscurecida de sangue se espalha, e em todo lugar A cerimônia da inocência é afogada; Aos melhores falta toda convicção, e os piores Estão cheios de intensidade apaixonada. Certamente alguma revelação está próxima; Certamente o Segundo Advento está próximo. O Segundo Advento! Mal proferidas estas palavras Quando uma vasta imagem vinda do Spiritus Mundi Ofusca minha visão: nalgum lugar, nas areias do deserto Uma forma com corpo de leão e cabeça de homem, Um olhar fixo e impiedoso como o sol Está movendo as lentas coxas, enquanto sobre ela Oscilam sombras de pássaros do deserto indignados. A escuridão cai novamente; mas agora sei Que vinte séculos dum sono profundo Irromperam-se em pesadelo por um berço oscilante. E a besta fera, sua hora enfim chegada, Se arrasta até Belém para nascer? 1919   With possible analogues at the white end of Pynchon's rainbow: Blicero, Weissmann ... Oh! I know it's sophomoric fer gawd'sake! Still, it was one of the first poems I thought I understood. So. I lived for a while right across the street from this rock. Thanks to Brent & Peter for the photo. The text is a quote from a poem 'Life's Mirror' by Madeline S Bridges/Mary Ainge De Vere (1844-1920). Treacle & nonsense - the Golden Rule doesn't work like that, it's not that kind of prescription. We must love one another or die. W.H. Auden, 'September 1, 1939'. There is an empirical measure of love - time spent. My friend Georges used to call it 'human coin'. Combine this with Pierre Reverdy's aphorism: "There is no love, there are only proofs of love;" and a 'general theory' begins to emerge from the murk.   :-) As well, if you are inclined not to throw the baby out with the bath, there are (oblique but tantalizing) clues in Christian scripture not requiring any kind of faith or belief to appreciate; just a few examples: Matthew 18: Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother. First Corinthians 13: For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. A-and obscure messages about The Good Samaritan from Ivan Illich ... and so on ...   Comics for the 10's: First I understood that each one has an opinion. Then I invented the Internet. The reference to gravity at the top: ... I noticed my electric watch losing time over the last six months or so, and then a few days ago it stopped. For $6.90 a kind man (with pen knife expertise) in a little jewellery shop put a new battery in. The hard drive on this laptop is exhibiting analagous slowdown and making noises. I know it's only a matter of time - but there is no money left for a new laptop. A-and anyway, this computer/Internet thing that I have been at, man and boy, for almost fifty years is wearing thin. It is a salutary zen exercise to know it may stop at any moment with no warning. One of the very last things Vince said to me was to remember me telling him, many years ago, that computers catch on because they give you their entire attention (however meagre) whenever and for as long as you want it. As direct intercourse of any kind between humans becomes more and more problematic ... well, you catch my drift eh? Mere anarchy? Is that a bad thing? Time for this moth to crawl out of its chrysalis perhaps. Who knows what that may entail? Let's go out with a listen to the Incredible String Band and Cousin Caterpillar. Murray and I were backstage at Place des Arts that night. Be well gentle reader.

 
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