Jeremiad

Just back from Barcelona, living the good life for a while. How many more years will that be possible? Not that I think that life will be "bad" per se, but it's difficult to be entirely optimistic. And this kind of week long city break using cheap airlines is almost certainly in its final days. I read Derrick Jensen's A Language Older Than Words while away, which is a truly great book - and I'm now started on Book 1 of his new Endgame opus. Dig the pic? I do, it accompanies a new interview with Kurt Vonnegut in the latest Rolling Stone in which he adds his voice to the peak oil debate "What's going to happen is, very soon, we're going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum". You can read some of the piece "Vonnegut's Apocalypse" online. Squeezed out another maudlin poem "Jagged Mountain" while away, you can read it over at Rubedo.

Poodle wars

Just caught up with the latest Kunstler blast on the Middle East (bylined 'Notes of a "Zionist Poodle"' on his blog I note with amusement). Still pretty ranty, but at least he's reached out past the doomed to never be resolved jew/arab liberal frat-riot to try and give some larger perspective. Back on the offensive against 9/11 conspiracy nuts too- now I wanna see Heinberg vs Kunstler in debate on Israel, followed by shirts off Ruppert and Kunstler in a pissed wrestle on the floor - that should add a frisson to Peak Moment Television, I can't wait to see Janaia Donaldson's face as she goes "boys!boys!" -while secretly enjoying man flesh in full on testosterone action.

I cannot claim possession of the rain

I had plans we never spoke of
Which evaporate now
Off the flat plain of the future
To condense elsewhere
For someone else
Some others else
To rain on their parades
Or saturate their deserts with love
And perhaps some of this precipitation
Will fall again for me
Or fall again for her.

I cannot claim possession of the rain
Nor forecast the weather
Or foretell the future
Tell dry spells from wet
It is a mystery to me
Why the clouds come and go.

I write my name
In the mist on the window
And peer through the letters
To perceive
What is written outside
I trace a heart
In a separate pane
And watch it bleed
Down to the frame

Such is the way that pedestals are made

Such is the way that pedestals are made
And women raised upon them
So our minds carve them from themselves
Sometimes to find a finer model
Than their art alone would allow
A realisation of all they could be.
Sometimes to make a fiction
That’s serves neither party well
A transactional device
That hides the truth of both
A mode of exchange
Become all that is exchanged.

And yet that line of your cheek
Is a slice into marble
This line of your neck
Is divine where it meets the shoulder
If it’s not the depths of heaven
That darken your eyes so
What seeds of obsidian
Did god plant there instead?

Good Bye Arthur Lee

This is the only thing that I am sure of
And that's all that lives is gonna die
And there'll always be some people here to wonder why
And for every happy hello, there will be good-bye


Another psychedelic commando bites the dust. Sad as it is, you get the feeling that for all its troubles Arthur Lee’s life was more satisfied than Syd Barrett’s.

I’m pleased that I got to see him in 2002 (or was it 2003) in Leicester doing Forever Changes and more long in to the night, enjoying it as much on stage as we the audience were.

I-man satta at the mountain top Watching Babylon burning red hot, red hot

One night a feast was held in the palace, and there came a man and prostrated himself before the prince, and all the feasters looked upon him; and they saw that one of his eyes was out and that the empty socket bled. And the prince inquired of him, “What has befallen you?” And the man replied, “O prince, I am by profession a thief, and this night, because there was no moon, I went to rob the money-changer's shop, and as I climbed in through the window I made a mistake and entered the weaver's shop, and in the dark I ran into the weaver's loom and my eye was plucked out. And now, O prince, I ask for justice upon the weaver.” Then the prince sent for the weaver and he came, and it was decreed that one of his eyes should be plucked out. “O prince,” said the weaver, “the decree is just. It is right that one of my eyes be taken. And yet, alas! both are necessary to me in order that I may see the two sides of the cloth that I weave. But I have a neighbour, a cobbler, who has also two eyes, and in his trade both eyes are not necessary.” Then the prince sent for the cobbler. And he came. And they took out one of the cobbler's two eyes. And justice was satisfied.

“War” from The Madman; His Parables and Poems (A.A. Knopf, 1918) by Kahlil Gibran.


Without comment or critique, here are words and image from two Lebanese artists in these dangerous times. This post is mirrored at Rubedo.


IMAGE: after 19 says i started to cry (2006) by Mazen Kerbaj taken from his Kerblog entry for Sunday July 30th 2006.