Mean

“Schick’s a mean bastard,” the boy thought when he saw him in the distance, walking in Seattle’s grey snow, down beside the tracks. Under the bridge’s thrumming perpetual shadow, the boy saw him step onto the steep concrete and stone embankment, and begin to climb. The boy melted. But then he scrambled to hide his food and empty his pockets of change. It was too late. Schick had seen him.

Schick announced his arrival by clouting the boy's face with a closed fist. The boy fell and stayed down. He felt the grit of concrete and loose gravel under his face, against his split swelling lip. Schick kicked the boy twice, once in the ass and once in the ribs. His voice was thin and grating, demanding money. The boy turned out his pockets as Schick stood over him. When he was done, two dollars and twenty cents in change lay at Schick’s feet.

Schick was not happy. He said “It’s not enough.” He kicked the boy again, once in the arm where it meets the shoulder, and in the gut, to the left of the navel. The boy curled there, his hands covering his head. Within the boy’s breath-stealing pain, shame vied with fear as he shat his pants. Schick scooped up the change and walked to the boy’s house, wedged between the embankment and the bridge above.  

The cardboard of the boy’s house gave way to Schick’s hands and feet. He lifted a blanket, wadded it and threw it down to the railroad tracks below.  The boy’s prized sleeping bag and scraps of his clothing went into a dank oily puddle in the darkness where great steel girders met concrete. A book of Whitman’s poetry flew from Schick’s hand, landing open to the snow, outside the bridge’s shadow. Schick found the boy's stash, a small metal can. He crushed it, pocketing a few dollars and a half smoked joint.

The boy’s breath mixed with tears. His face flushed and he made a high keening sound when Schick turned from the ruin of cardboard and cloth and said again, “It’s not enough.”

A chaos of kicks and blows left Schick’s boots damp with the boy’s blood. Bones broke. Screams rose in pitch then faded to whimpers. There came a silence deeper than the constancy of rushing machine noise above. The rage, the madness of Schick’s insufficiency was sated. 

Schick was tired. He paused for a moment to light the roach he’d found, taking a deep hit, and then another. As he exhaled the smoke, he pulled down his zipper and pissed over the boy’s still form. Yellow and red mixed, painting the concrete and loose gravel, running downward in thinning fingers.

In the morning they found Schick’s body first, head crushed against the steel track below. His boots were encrusted in black half dried blood, blood that had lubricated his fall. The boy’s body was not found until later in the day, when an observant police woman tried to find the precise place where Schick had fallen. From below the embankment’s edge she looked upward into the gloom and spied the crumpled still form of the boy.

“Father Abraham,” cried out Schick across the abyss. “send me a drop of water, for the fire burns without ending!” To his great surprise, he could see a glint falling from the higher radiance. Closer and faster it fell through the æther. Schick’s mouth agape, he felt a bead of water strike his tongue. Heaven’s dew met the infernal and passed to steam. He cried out, “It’s not enough!”

Above, in a place of seeing and knowing, of warm shade and cool light, a place where enough was enough, the boy smiled as he heard Schick’s cry, and again he pissed.

And the angels of God sang praises for the victory of the lamb.

---------
[This is a reworked version of a story I first published to this blog in 2008, and is part of a fiction series written out of the experience of being a homeless teen in Seattle.]

Extinctions, The Economy and American Politics - A Reading List

These are short works that can form a basis for discussion of real change. Remember, time is
running out.  Theory is Practice:


Anti-Systemic Movements
by Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein 1989/2011

This is a thoughtful, thought provoking and action inciting analysis of how our world works. "Peerless examination of the rise of social movements against the global capitalist system, conducted by the leading exponents of the “world systems” perspective."  


Twenty years of La Fabrique
- A free reading.

Since 1998 the editor Eric Hazan has published radical-left political works including masterstrokes like the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection and controversial titles like Houria Bouteldja’s Les Blancs, les Juifs et nous. In his two decades running La Fabrique, he has maintained an undimmed ambition for editorial independence, and his subversive power. 


This Is Not a Program
By Tiqqun 


Historical conflict no longer opposes two massive molar heaps, two classes—the exploited and the exploiters, the dominant and dominated, managers and workers—between which, in each individual case, it would be possible to differentiate. The front line no longer cuts through the middle of society; it now runs through each one of us... "
—from This Is Not a Program


Now
The Invisible Committee 2017

Now is the phantom chapter to the Invisible Committee's previous book, To Our Friends: a new critique from the anonymous collective that establishes their opposition to the world of capital and its law of labor, addresses current anti-terrorist rhetoric and the ferocious repression that comes with it, and clarifies the end of social democracy and the growing rumors of the need for a coming “civil war.” 


To Our Friends
The Invisible Committee 2015

A reflection on, and an extension of, the ideas laid out seven years ago in "The Coming Insurrection."

The Coming Insurrection
The Invisible Committee   2009


A call to arms by a group of French intellectuals that rejects leftist reform and aligns itself with younger, less formal means of resistance.  Perhaps the most widely read and seminal writing of resistance to appear in the last 30 years.

Eschatons and Extinction

.
.
How can we not think of extinction, and by that I mean not the inexorable movement of time across the field of ideas that we so prize, but rather physical extinctions, the actual end of humanity, as our children or our children’s children are murdered by the rising tide of our own wastes, our own hatreds?

Ask the question of yourselves, Christian peoples and scholars:  Where does extinction fit within your finely wrought theology?  Is my grandchild’s death some years hence, whether it be by drowning in some future storm, or of poisoning in some mad fit of hatred, a realisation of the eschaton?

How much beauty will be left unrevealed when our time is gone? How many dances left without steps,  how many scansions left rhyme-less, how many songs unsung and lines undrawn? Is this your eschaton, your end-time and fruition?

Angels Unaware

Angels are neither light nor shadow,

but traverse both.

They bear all the weight of the universe

but are lighter than a mote of hydrogen.

Angels take the shape of dragons,

wolves and primodial beasts,

yet they are also given to be a suckling's breast

and childlike laughter.

They are the earth and the stars

that rise above the night.

But we do not trod on angels

nor sleep beneath their wings.

Angels are but imaginaries.

They are as real and hard

as music,

or a frescoed wall,

or a footstep in the dark.

They are a bare passing

that sometimes,

just sometimes.

Bear Away

bear away

past the steel hard edge

of discontent and Muses lost.

bear away

past the itching and slicing poison

of unearned hope and geodesy drawn

to a sculpted land beneath a divine hand.

See there — the holy and high

who walk in feet amucked,

soaked in the tears and dander

of pierced eyes and tight stretched skins:

lampshades they are amaking

of gutted infidels or they that disagree.

bear a way

past that land of sure and certain hope

resurrected from the broken bones

and torn sinews of the innocent

that is to say “silent,” partners

in the discourse of Tweedledee

and Tweedledee dumb that defines

those fit for the divine hotplate

or not.

Look alive, my innocent

unborn to controversy

full of vigor and heart,

who sees not two, but one

one dance that is all in all

one moment that is neither history nor hope

but one, one.

But, my innocent

be deaf and be blind

mark not your chart or heart

with the land of the dying and dead

or difference dragons

of dimpled dicks and pussy wounds

that would, obdurate and mean,

encoil and grasp with broken scales.

bear a way, far away

I will not be there.

I have taken to that path

onto that map, a course from which

I cannot turn,

even turn to be not two

but one with you

my love, who is away.

Be away my love

away from this I see

gristled refuse of what could be

of mercy and one that in bleeding

did a new cup make

to drink with strangers and walk in hope

not of the sure, uncertain of certain

but with the dead

that they might alive be

and like me they might be

not angry nor forlorn

but full of songs,

unsung and new

And they might sing for you.

But my love

do bear away

away from conceits and defeats

from thoise ancient difference dragons

that still hold in three pronged claws

the hearts of those who see

a cup, now a lie

but that once did

free and tear away

those things done and undone

but that us do now lead

to an ordinary decay.

But, bear a way

away from this

away from here

away from any measurement

that makes two of one,

and not just one

bear a way

to something new

that I and we

cannot see.

Odd number,

this mark of three

that would chain

me and many

and you,

you my love.

So my love

do bear away

from those ranks,

rank upon rank

of Saints and soldiers

of martyrs and virgins held

conscripted and confined

to arms unarmed and yet still

an Army of ghosts

that marches

to an odd beat of threes.

Please my love, flee

stay clear of the land

of twos and threes

of the flowered graves

of diversity and

grave monstrances

where one is confined

and glass walls contain

bread so thin as to near

disappear.

So my love

as yet unafeared and unafraid

in all fear please do,

not stay but bear away,

away.


[for Noah]

Light

What kind of light?

What kind of light
can you hold in your hand?
Does it sparkle, coruscating
minute stars
it's hard to decide
whether God is are you

Virginity Lost

"not to irksome toil, but to delight." 

Book 9, line 242

"Wherein lies th'offense, that man should thus attain to know?" 

Book 9, lines 725-6, "Paradise Lost," - John Milton,  

40 years  ago

I lost my virginity.

I can't say that I tried very hard to find it.

It wasn't especially important to me.

In fact, I thought I'd be better off without it.

A few times I went away on vacation,

I hoped that I would lose it,

and my virginity would stay behind,

lost in the Adirondacks,

or near some Canadian lake.

But, it didn't work that way

I lost it locally

with a girl who lived

just down the lane from me

whose virginity had long disappeared.

She was very pretty,

and she was happy to see me

I was entirely too serious

a scholar where scholars were disdained

I ran track, the school played football.

I don't know why she liked me

she had broken up a month or two before

with a football player, half again my weight

perhaps she simply didn't want to be crushed

or maybe it was the way I said thank you.

So, it got away from me

lost, somewhere in her parent's house

by her bed, or perhaps on the floor

perhaps my virginity had met hers

and they were off gallivanting.

Adumbration

When her husband’s cancer began to cause him pain, she began to notice things, new thing, odd things around the apartment. At first it was just the sound of clawed pads tracing paths through the walls of their section-8 high-rise, but, as her husband’s illness progressed, the demons became bolder.

Soon the sight of a slit eye opening from within the tracery of the bedroom wallpaper became commonplace. With each day of her husband’s sickness they grew stronger. Soon snouts were visible. Sometimes late at night, when they were strongest, a hand like paw would emerge from the ceiling over their bed, groping through the air like a blind man searching for his cane.

When the priest came to the house he seemed more concerned with the way the doctors treated her husband, than with the demons that were now half revealed in the walls and ceiling of the apartment. He read through pill labels, and nursing notes, and then spoke with her husband. When she complained, her husband spoke in quick English words that she did not understand. Only then did the priest seem to notice the infestation that surrounded them.

He came again few days later. Again he looked at the doctor’s pills, and the read the chart left by the visiting nurses. Again he seemed reluctant to see the enemies in their house, but before he left, he went from room to room sprinkling the walls with holy water and chanting psalms and prayers.

All but one of the demons fled from the holy water and prayers. But the priest forgot to sprinkle her husband, and the demon that ate his bowels continued to feast through the night. Two days later, when her husband died, she saw the creature emerge, fat and happy, coated in his blood.

At the funeral mass she was angry. The priest did not seem at all embarrassed by his oversight.

Jot, dots, iotas: a farce in four parts

i.
when I stopped covering the pages
with word after word of god talk
and my own mumbling allegiance
to someone or something that did not fit
on the space of a page or two or 10.

Or rather, in the space of a page or two or 10
the stink of a corpse was so great
as could not be contained in black marks
on the plain page.

I stopped, and I am not sure why.
I am not sure where all the words came from
that spoke of the gods, of him or her
or some genderless divine.

But I did stop,
and left the page blank
and the world has not changed
even though the little black dots

Are still in the pen.
Is this where God abides,
in unspent ink
a whole will now know


ii.
a book, its spine broken
its page spread
like the legs of a blessed virgin
waiting for the impregnating pen
and hence the birth
of another bawling god

theologicians find
in every tome
some assay of the divine
for the metaphysicians
to stretch and mold
And a wellcure of every infirmity

healing the letters
on an endless page
fraught with broken letters
and broken code
Code dissolving
into the acid of history

code emerging as Mecca
and Babylon and Bethlehem
and the Indus spit out poems
and thoughtless declarations
leaving the floors awash
in the broken waters
of pregnant misthoughts
and gravid conceits

Waiting for the impregnating pen
and hence the birth
of another bawling god
a book, a broken spine
pages spread
if we do not need gods or god
why did we invent them?



iii.
Mecca and Babylon and Bethlehem
ancient cities of haraging Gods
must stand askance of Jerusalem
where gods die but then live
undisturbed by the blood
shed in their honor
by wild eyed believers
and scheming kings

How was it that Constantinople burned
because their God was insufficient
even though their temple was great
unrivaled in the West
it had too many pictures
and shone with too much gold
why did Constantinople burn?
why did it burn twice?

But does the God of Constantinople
owe allegiance to Jerusalem
or is it Mecca
that breathes this God to life
does it matter
does it matter at all
from what allegiance or denial
does come a God
or whence from some God does flee
burning heels that betray

When we do not believe
do the gods puff up and war
upon us in our apostasy
or is there only silence
that may be the hush of the betrayed
or not, or not.


iv.
Mecca, Babylon and Bethlehem
and even now Jerusalem
are awash in new blood
but, no God bleeds
that is something of our imaginary
but the blood is real
and most often it belongs to innocents
to have met bombs and missiles
guns and gas
that have taken the place
of divine brutalities

If the gods do not speak
except in the minds of stupid children
and willful freaks
to give life to a new divine comedy
an economy of death
or new life that looks to death

Testimony

There was a time when “one” did not imply “zero.”   I’ve tried to imagine life without zeroes, a world of absolute presences and no possibility of absence. Imagine a world of gods without question, of angels that do not leave like dreams and demons that do not hide in the shadows. Of all that is sure and certain, not in hope of resurrection, but simply being.

The Babylonians, Chinese, and Mayans all invented something akin to the zero at various times in history, but it took Buddha to say “There is nothing” and close his index finger and thumb to make a zero. Did he mean to kill the gods?

Bataille tells us that most of what we do is a diversion from the zero, an insistence upon action that will save me from the zero. Can I, sitting here with pen in hand, deny the need for action, for activity, for words to save me from nothing?

Jacob answered the phone. The caller identified herself as God, and sought Jacob’s opinion: Was it true that she had died? If so, she wanted to know, would it have an effect on her time-share booking? She was looking forward to a little time off.

Jacob pondered all these questions in his heart. He looked to the phone and said “ah-nate-sa’ (which means “there is nothing”),

It would be clever to say that Jacob later suffered some nasty denouement for this offense, that God in her anger found a way to punish Jacob, but the truth is, nothing happened, zero.

Valéry

If I share anything with Valéry, it is an unfailing return to the divine, even as we despise God. There is something desirous about complete self reference, even as we can refer only to the outside, only to that which is beyond our self.

Any words that we adopt to explicate the interior fall out of us like dusty bricks.  We may place them one upon another, thinking that we are creating a temple of the self, but this is only delusion. What we create is a temple to the self, and this is a different matter. As much as we want to speak of the interior, it is impossible. If we are truly self-referential, we fall into a silence that is madness, or perhaps death.