Prevalent Use of Herbicides-Murderous Round-Up

Their quote:

"...selecting the best and most effective types of herbicides for use on dozens of invasive species..."

This reflects the fundamental ethical question: What is (the) good (for man)?

any use of best, or good or any other evaluative terms begs the question of what is the 'telos' of the good? What does it aim at?

In eras where metaphysical science still held sway, possible meanings of the highest good were still taken seriously; but in our 21st century anti-metaphysical culture, (actually it is 'nihilism' in the truest sense)---the terms 'good' and 'better' are employed in all spheres of life and research as here but under a complete forgetfulness and ignorance of God (the the 'telos' of the good). In this regime, it is as Nietzsche said a battle of promoting one system or ideology and calling it truth. Ignorance becomes the driver when one does not know where one is going on the road of life. A human life without a supereminent real object and telos which is not only not subjective, but hyper-objective, if you will since it itself is that which gives rise to any other entity or phenomenon being true, including the phenomenon which does the thinking. 

Second note: the other valued term here though more hidden is the term 'invasive'. In God's world what pray tell constitutes 'invasiveness'----how wide, how long must the identification of invasiveness be---what are the epistemic qualifications of 'invasiveness'. You see, it is the nature of these species being 'invasive' which constitutes the legitimacy of the spraying. It is a plant that should not be where it is (alongside the enormous highway banks)---It goes like this: " We must or can eliminate all invasive species because they are invasive. And this answers the first question---it is good that plants that grow along highways must be eradicated, because they do not belong there... Of course it is circular reasoning. Unless one makes the effort to grasp the 'Real' per se, or the form of the Good---that is, that which gives value and goodness to being---one is compelled to circular reasoning, anti-metaphysical (or simply ignorant forgetting) and one is compelled to dwell nihilistically, completely missing the essential truth and quality of life itself---which is the summum bonum, the capacity to live life abundantly and in the richest sense is the essential teaching of the Gospel. The only coherent ethics is an ethics of life through and through. It is not Being, or God,  per se, but Life itself that is offered in the mandate that disciples of Christ bear witness to this Life  through spreading the good news. 

Now the problem is What is to be done?

To take up arms and end this?

To attempt to reason or debate with the policy setters?

To protest or seek other political action?

Perhaps there is a philosophical course of action which is to quote Spinoza: Don't weep, don't laugh. Only Understand.

Nothing can be changed in the course of political action but human freedom consists in seeing, understanding, not steering or changing (do-gooding). Either to act or understand.

Actors do not understand and those who understand do not act. However, I know that the seeming philosophical aloofness is repugnant---so I abridge it as follows: First of all, understand, then having understood, one is under no compulsion to act, and yet, neither is one under a compulsion not to act. Seen philosophically, i.e. sub species eternitatis, the excessive conviction that one's understanding is of political import is mistaken...all things must pass (an must pass in the manner that they must pass). 

The Black Work

Chapter One: “Writer’s Hotel”
The narrator is the ‘boy in the bubble’---
The writer who lives in an electric wheelchair with plexiglass cover, which fits the size of his body. His sole passion is to write. For this reason he lives from hand-outs on the streets of Seattle. A street person living in a Ritz-Carlton wheelchair which he calls ‘the writer’s hotel’. He only needs to sneak away from the writer’s hotel when he needs a bath/shower at the Commodore Hotel every third night with money earned on the streets as a ‘handicapped person’ (which is a lot!)

The electric writer’s hotel was of course paid off with funds from the sale of a manuscript about the Writer’s Hotel which, of course, does not exist. So he had to create his own.

What was it about this transparent egg on the streets that called to him?

Chapter Two: Dr. Groff
Family Treatment Center mental health clinic ($$big bucks$$) where the writer had become a patient and ward of the state. The idea was to get “inside” and write a novel about madness. He meets up with a character who is “wild” but whose family and society will not accept as wild (the native self).” Diagnosed with a paranoid aggressive disorder. Treated with a wonder drug. Drug works…but character is alienated from their authentic existence. Must….get back.

Chapter Three: The Volunteer in the Clinic
Big money potential for Dr. Groff, outlaw psychologist, mail order Ph.D.
Powerful, dominant blonde. Three main sources of money:
1. Welfare
2. Private cash- she is very charismatic (theatrical), financial grants (from persuasion): her lover.
3. Clients’ work- McDonald’s, car wash, office cleaning, etc…
“Lieutenant”: Dr. Groff’s passionate daughter.

Chapter Four: Group Therapy (other characters)
The beautiful cocaine addict, borderline personality who snorted up $100,000 of government money whish she won in an incident where a municipal bus rolled over her foot on First and Pike, near the market.

The writer in group therapy, 9 others, volunteer staff from the University.

Chapter Five: Patient X. (hero)
Writer falls in love with the lieutenant, quits taking meds. Escapes the clinic and begins life on the streets in the Writer’s Hotel.

Chapter Six: The Writer’s Work: “The Mad Factory”
A system governed by the truly mad where “sane” people are forced to conform with mad protocols in order to win affection…final scenes of the writer sending out his maunuscript---will he remain on the streets any longer?

Saturday december 13, 2007

Suicidal impulses and urges: "Smash that fucking car into the tree and end it all you petty bastard," so the voice commands and other people are simply 'motherfucking losers'.

The pimple bursts and frees the insect in my consciousness. Endless tick-tocking of bullshit thoughts, man, get it over with!
Fits of overwhelming self-despair then finally slamming the G-D steering wheel 95mph + passing cars on 22 West in the ice and snow.

Obsessing, crunching thoughts 24/7--omnivorous feasts, gremlins multiply in factors of ten. Feelin the thoughts isn't bad enough---beneath this you hear the futile roar and munching, feeling desperate, claustrophobic and caged.

Give me a target to hate so I can dispel my demons!

Endless futility---the human race--- pathetic enterprise full of waste.

"Try to be good, try to be nice," stupid fairy voices.

"No one understands this void, a lake of tears, stupid petty worldly concerns of everyday life and metaphysical unease.

Hero worship---Nick Drake.

An attempt to grasp some flake of something real in all of this fleeting insubstantiality.

Ghosts haunt these fields everyday
stones' heft and bulk but all is floating
without anchor---a spectral wasteheap.

My only companions: inspired poets, madmen and suicides...

"Give me a second face
give me a second race
I've fallen far down
from the people I've known...
I just need your star for the day..."
Nick Drake sings.

This is true---!
Pale figures mutter words to cross the veil
the world's ghastly bridge
dimly seen, lightly heard
barely touched in chunks of wool and caps and gloves.

"So make your way down to the sea,
Something has taken you so far ways from me."
Drake sweetly intones.

Can I buy magic amulets to waken my first face?
Can dry fingers of night pat my rainy freckles
when voyagers wake the legions of dust?

Day does not give way into night
nor night to morning---only monotony
yet words take once more to wing as
spectral wraiths,
wanderers greyer than death raptapping gates of answers
past ages and walls
into th great unknown,
drowning, flooding, gushing me
in echo.

Though ash is my beginning and
dust my end
I am caught in limitless colored corridors
in which my footsteps wend amazed...

Christmas Spirit

Christmas continues to have spiritual significance, even if Jesus was born in July! I personally feel chastised by the season when my Scroogelike tendencies emerge, it keeps me on my toes and that is good! A lot of guilt, perhaps I can blame it on the catholic church, but then again I need to own up to my own guilt trips. It's not that I am not onto it when say my mother exquisitely delivers a guilt trip and it takes me several days to realize what I have digested!

An early philosopher (Anaximander) wrote that human beings are profoundly guilty---it is as if time itself were jealous of the fact that man slipped himself or herself into existence even albeit for a paltry 70 years.

I am involved in a massive struggle even now to become myself. Or perhaps to 'let it be' and realize that I cannot not be myself, just as nature must unfold in a beautiful harmony.

Scattered thoughts...Ah, but more accurately reflecting my state of mind. 2007 a challenging year, there are no quick fixes and it seems harder to get a 'free pass' for anything.

I am grateful for simply being allowed to play in the game! To get a 'glimpse' of it all. Of all things beauty fascinates me most. I see great beauty in rabbits (and in E.C.). In all of this lifetime I am grateful for having been able to perceive this but even more to drink richly such sensual poetry over the past years of my life, but especially since early September.

I was once warned by a wise man (George Dolnikowski) not to be consumed by the fire. He was referring to the moth and the flame in Pushkin's tragic life. To be consumed by one's art, and especially one's poetry. However, I dismissed the admonition in wreckless pride---of course I wanted to be consumed.

And now, I stand like a fallen tattered, smoking heap of quandary.

Wake of the Flood

For beauty in music, in my book, Stella Blue takes the cake. The lyric is romantic perfection:

All the years combine,
they melt into a dream,
A broken angel sings from a guitar.
In the end theres just a song comes cryin up the night
Thru all the broken dreams and vanished years.
Stella blue.
Stella blue.

When all the cards are down, there's nothing left to see,
Theres just the pavement left and broken dreams.
In the end there's still that song comes cryin' like the wind.
Down every lonely street that's ever been.
Stella blue. Stella blue..

I've stayed in every blue-light cheap hotel,
can't win for trying.
Dust off those rusty strings just one more time,
Gonna make them shine, shine.

It all rolls into one and nothing comes for free,
There's nothing you can hold for very long.
And when you hear that song come crying like the wind,
It seems like all this life was just a dream.
Stella blue. Stella blue.

March 9, 2003
Portage, PA

The snow flurries are blown up and down on every wind. At times they are horizontal across my window. I hear the wind speaking. It brings me great calm, even as though I were in prayer. Silence is magnificent!

Glenn Gould plays Bach’s Goldberg Variations---my favorite is the first variation---it seems delicate and sweet. Once, as a joke, I conceived of “The Goobersville Variations” at type of modern American equivalent---starting, of course, with the Andy Griffith theme song.

Surely I must be mad! Or at least seem ‘mad’ to a great number of people. Oh well. All I seem to want to do is to…to write and to describe in exquisite detail every minute reflection, to savour the luxury of consciousness.

Life lived in the realm of the ‘ordinary’ [the author is not talking about people in a derogatory manner here, as if to say ‘ordinary’ ergo ‘commonplace’ but rather ‘ordinary’ as in a state of muffled, distracted consciousness (ed.)] ---I repeat, life without the ‘more abundance’, everyday ritual, everyday fashion, so pathetically shallow and dilute, even more, a waste of human energy. I am making a moral judgment here! If I am able to luxuriate in the pondering of solitary snowflakes and the precise manner of Gould’s hammer attack---in either case it illuminates a keen vigilance for the passing of time. But if I refuse to do this, all in the name of “my children,” the ringing cellphone, the apparent need to improve society or humanity, then I am of all men most ordinary.

Personally speaking I have taken the Mary’s role and these others are Marthas, active, trying to help, do gooders, but they miss the Lord’s Presence! Ordinary.

I am looking for neither an accolade nor a pat on the back, there is advantage and ample reward for my useless pastime. The wages earned is indeed the joy of the consciousness of reflection. In the end this may simply be a “box of rain” or a dusty manuscript, the nth in a series I suspect will follow me to death.

No, if this is madness, it is madness I prefer. Or if this be drunkenness---as I light another stick of incense and flip the record---then it is sobriety I forswear. How all of this struck me with such great intensity on my youth. If you were to consult my poetic works to find revelry mostly in high spirits at high altitudes, in mind altering states of passion or religion or breathtaking monuments of nature and art, you would discover my dominant with its attendant crash.

So what is it today that fascinates? The very antithesis of action---pure ennui---would that I might slow time even further to elaborate upon this afternoon and in a delicate manner expose its sensuous passing. To rid my prose of exclamation save for innermost refinement---as, for example, I see in the jagged branch that chops up and down amidst the play of the telephone lines. There is a humming in my head but it is not unpleasant, except when it rises to a ringing in my ears, as though submerged in a pool, must be the coffee.