W-E

Summer 2024

There is a sword.
There is a snake.
To the kabbalist 
These modes of
The same organ 
Are two things.

One is superb.
The other is not
Evil. Why would 
I dignify stupidity:
Impossible graves?
It’s not even evil.
It’s a mistake that
Lacks the knowing
Of its redemption,
Irrevocable, fated,
And the ignorance
Parading proudly
As deep wisdom 
Esoteric or else
Scientific, either way,
The ignorance of
The serpent is a kind
—It’s a kind of mercy.

His end? Who knows
What comedic 
Plan God has coiled
In the Impulse of Man
To show each, all,
That in the free world
God made, all things,
Even if by crooked 
Roads, come to Good.
With a setup like this,
The punchline will be BLISS.
And their own slack jaws
And wondering mouths
Will make the great O
Making God Good,
Even as He is Good
Who made, who makes,
Who IS MAKING, and 
Who ever shall make 
The world. The world!
The funniest joke of all,

With eyes like the 
Comedian’s eye, the real
Marx, Groucho, no
Carls here, be the Marxes
Or Jungs, or Schmitts,
Eyes like Groucho’s 
Dove-eyes. Am I understood?

Like the two o’s there,
As in eyes and in the Good
Out of it, unfolding, a rose
In the void, rose like dove
Traditionally symbolic of love,
But there is something 
More than reason in that
Tradition: Aristotle traced it
In his line of thought when
He said that metaphor 
Implies a real resemblance,

And as far as I can see
It is a matter of quality,
Of the qualities of various 
Varying things, and even
Things of greatly varying
Appearance; it is a matter
Of them sharing, beyond
Figure, play, or trifling,
Sharing, or expressing,
The same functions like 
Those which see within 
The similarity of the sun
To the eye, which surpasses
Similarity, or mimicry,
The sun as the cause
Of the eye, and vision
The matter like a war,
Or love affair, between them.

As gills and fins are formed
To catch the moving water
Or, as wings to sail upon
The wind are put on birds,
Not just ourselves, but bats,
Have grown ears, all because
The quiet and the loud bear
Much upon survival, and yet
Survival of what? Life, of course,
But say that life is eye or ear,
What then is sun or moving air
To life? What draws up life 
From the cold negating night?

It is Being, the emptiest word.
Why empty? Because words
Are a thing of living entities,
A refinement of whalesong,
Eaglescreech, or lionroar.
And, to Life, Being is that sun
Of infinite decibel, and sea
That has no shore, where 
Wave and stillness find no 
Foil to make them appear.

To Life, Being is that sun,
Just what Life is to the living.
What we call death is God
And our misunderstanding
Of our own marvelous fear 
Of God, a fear where wisdom
Starts like a spring, as if that
Endless sea were streaked with
Paths of light, where the dry,
And things terrible in their 
Compassion, might surge 
Like salt-lightning through our
Brains, those supercomputing
Nuclear cathedrals to the gods,
With none left out but one,
The God we fear, and fear,
As does the moth the dark,
So we our sun, and yet to go,
Beyond it, into the dissolution
Of our flesh would be into,
By another way, the same dark;

No, not dark nor blinding, 
The same unbearably mild 
Violet of piercing joy, except 
Suffused forever in all directions,
So we into the lamp of the sea
Droning like a supernova at the
Center, except the root here,
The core of this sun, and sky
That feeds upon this sea, soil
Of this slowly turning rose, is 
It’s petals; sky is seafloor here,
This sun’s surface is its center,

Another kind of dark that we,
Living, afraid to become Homer,
Oedipus, or Lear, go hiding from,
Hiding from the darkest words
Of Plato, dark as the forest 
On the final pages of Nietzsche’s 
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, with
Its stream, a darkness of cypress
Bedded at the roots by fragrant
Roses, and the joys of Jerry,
Yes the joys I said, of all people,
Of Jerry Garcia… Rewinding,

Or starting out once more,
Refining the thought I first 
Had set upon, I give it here and
Say, Being, like Life, is another 
Kind of darkness we do not 
Understand, for who, after all,
Are we, W-E? We are legion.

W-E is many, whatever it says
It is: it is the rabble Plato spoke
Of, who live divided, their own
Enemies, enslaved to their 
Animal cravings, and to whatever
Those they make their leaders
Say, and their leaders never say
Anything but, go and satisfy 
Your animal cravings and your 
Basest emotions, all to waste
Health, and money; heart,
Conscience, reputation, the love
Of beautiful women, power
To fight against the bellicosity
Of tyrants, those very leaders 
They chose themselves because 
They asked nothing of them.
Instead, the rabble chose leaders
That would flatter and appease
Those same sensibilities they had
Made the driving force of waking,
Of working, and of sleep, and this
Rabble, said Plato, comprised 
The majority of mankind.

We are legion. That’s the Bible,
But who is W-E? W-E is the demonic
Hivemind of that same mass, a 
Spirit, animating all of the same 
Faculties the unmixed spirit 
Of God animated: desire, and 
Sensation, and imagination,
And intellect. The difference is 
W-E mixes in a delusion, a delusion
Precisely because it is that 
Insufferable Hegelian sort of 
Thing: an erasure of nonexistence,
But it’s even more insufferable,
Both its concept and the reality
Of that delusion seething like 
A bullet-wound inside the brains 
Of all those hit by its stupidity,
The majority of people, as Plato

Said. The Bible may go further
In saying all men and women 
Are born corrupt. But it is true,
Perfectly so. Born corrupt because,
Born of corrupt parents, inevitably 
Corrupt, because, like you, they
Themselves were also born into
A corrupt civilization, and their 
Parents the same, and theirs 
The same, and there is nowhere
To stop, and the blindness of this
Stares us in the face and we cannot
See it like we cannot see our 
Optic nerve, or like one could not 
Play chicken in NASA’s white 
Space Shuttle—with Borisov, 
The first observed rogue comet;
There is no way out of our corruption,
Yet some have wept for this, 
Some have seen the poignant,
Pulchritudinous light of Borisov 
The void-saint—and softened 
Our brow, and softened our eye,
And ceased smiling false smiles,
And in fact ceased altogether 
To smile—and yet began to smile
More than any other smiled, in
The heart. Homer spoke of how
Odysseus was this way, never 
Smiling except sardonically,

And seldom laughing, except 
In a kind of solitary ecstasy 
Hurled at the sky, and yet he
Smiled often in his heart, and
Laughed in his heart. And Christ,
It has been claimed, kept 
His mirth with a lid on it, so as
Not to let it dissolve, and never
Raised its flame too high, so as
Not to let it dissolve, yet ever
Kept more and more purely 
The mirth, gladness of the heart
Men seek in wine and whoring,

Yet is only found, after all 
The ridiculous posturing of 
American popular music, in 
Virtue and faith, and by these
Two legs, going up, and 
Slaughtering devils on the way,
Up and up, climbing the mount
Of one’s own destiny, for each
Is made, although the same 
In essence, a human being
With flesh, desires, perceptions,
Visions, schemes, ideas—yet

Each person is made, as each hair
Upon each person’s head, singular,
Rooted singularly in God, and 
Ordained with a destiny that God
Alone can know, and towards which
God’s ways alone can bring one—
Those ways being known and taught
By the wise men and high priests 
And magicians of each tradition—

Virtue, and faith. And it is said 
Christ kept and taught these best,
Better than any Egyptian, Hebrew,
Or Greek, or Roman, and taught it,
Not to the few, and did not hoard it
Either, like nuclear secrets, but 
Scattered it in the city streets to 
Whomever, each corrupt and 
Corrupting as the next, each as 
Worthy of death by human judgement
And of mercy and forgiveness by

The glorious Almighty. But those
Who hated this word and teaching
Were, of course, the wicked rabble, 
The herd, and the spirit that fills
The herd which seethes with envy
Whenever it sees a soul among it
Rise by ways their vice denies them,
Ways of virtue and faith their 
Heart-folly of cursing God denies
Their restless minds, ways their
Envy makes appear like a lion
In their quiet homes, like an eagle 
In their low sky, like a whale 
Rolling deeply and smoothly
Beneath their dreaming soul,
And they burn with hatred and terror.
And this they is W-E. It cries out,
A nothing that deigns to speak for all,
Idiotic riddles and bitter curses.

W-E is the ignorance
Of the serpent. It is
Parading in a grass
That hides it poorly.

There is a sword. It
Is the same as the 
Snake. It is the snake
Refined, one thing 
And not many. For
The snake as apart
The sword is an 
Unbearable thought.
It makes the hunt 
Anxiety, which is 
Avoiding the truth
Out of stupidity
And not an illness. 

The sword does
Not fall, nor sun
Blind the eye, nor
Thunder break 
The ear, nor is
One drowning, 

Because each thing
Is driven, impelled
By Fate, towards
Its ultimate end,
Its drowning,
Going deaf,
Blind, the sword 
Falling, Borisov
Destroying the
Space Shuttle,

Because by 
Virtue and faith
And ways of mercy
By the Mercy which
Is deepest under 
The dream of God,
And under the sleep
That is underneath 
The dream, there 
Are paths to Peace,
And each thing 
Gets what it wants,
Its journey into the 
Stars, its dive, its 
Song, its vision,
Its weapon—each
Thing, gets, be it
That it does not 
Know the thing
It wants, each 
Thing receives
The thing it cycles—

Each thing gets
What it wants, its Being,
The emptiest word,
For I lack nothing,
And I desire nothing,
And I am content.

I must repent.
Rededicate myself
To faith and virtue 
And by these renew,
Regenerate my days,
For I lack nothing,
And I desire nothing,
And I am content——

But going up and up
I seek, eccentrically,
My singular, my mad,
My solitary destiny—
Fated to write verse,
And in a time when 
Poetry is not a fad

And not a thing 
Which those today
With wealth, and 
Power, and good taste
Have any interest in.
I must change this.

My readers must 
Change something 
Too. What it is I 
Do not know,
But American poetry
Must seek again 
Up and up, by ways,
I am very sorry to say, 
Of faith and virtue,

Discipline, study of 
The masters apart 
From the colleges,
The universities where 
The Muse goes no more,
Except perhaps to those
Who have abandoned
Class and creep the 
Library to read more 
Deeply than the school’s
Curriculum allows.

And I must write,
Must reinvigorate, but
I write for the wise,
Not fools and cows.







POSTSCRIPT:


Each person has their fate. That’s Fate.

Aristotle perhaps should have enumerated 
    a set of physical virtues concerning 
    excercise, cleanliness, sun-exposure.

Impulse in and of itself is not bad, and
     certainly not evil.

When I think about what I’ve been shown, I
     realize I have to get right. I can’t become
     a monk, or a junkie, or a nobody. I have
     to make it home. 

Adam: Intellect: knight
Eve: Heart: maiden 
the serpent: Impulse: monster: nonbeing
HA! 

Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil:
     “knowledge of the heart” derived 
         from impulse, passionate judgement,
         also known as morality.
          
Eve ate because she impulsively judged that
      not dying is good. Had the intellect
      judged the proposition, it would have
      laughed: her soul was immortal in 
      her current state, and she, wholly 
      ignorant of death, which, before 
      her eating, did not exist, even as 
      a shadow—Eve and Adam were as 
      like God as any two entities that ever
      had been…. But don’t forget this: it was 
      Eve’s love of God and her innate sense
      that the immortality of her soul was 
      a good thing, worth affirming…. Isn’t it 
      interesting that, amidst the whole
      conversation—“He said we’ll die”—“Do
      you really think you will die?”—Eve can
      have absolutely no idea what this thing,
      “death”, even is. So now, see the whole
      picture: she affirms the idea of being like
     God and not dying, which is an
     affirmation of her own state, one willed
     by God, and she affirms this over and
    above any fear of “death”, which is
    something that means nothing to her. Of
    course, she was deceived. This is no
    apology for the serpent. But you can see
    perhaps how much trickier God is, and
    see into the very heart of the so-called
   FELIX CULPA. For God might have said
   to the serpent, “Will they really die?”
   Say a parent tells his child a certain 
    unhealthy food will give him hives if he
   eats it. A child too innocent to learn.
   Not yet. One day the child eats some 
    and no hives. The parent begins to 
    explain not only the biochemistry 
    of its anti-nutrition, but also the reason
    he could not explain this at first, and 
    why is was necessary. Perhaps the child
becomes resentful and eats so much he indeed does get hives but he will never become a saint. Or maybe he becomes a true proponent of the hive-causing powers of said food and never eats it and later in life his neurosis gives him hives and eats a single one the first of his life in desperation and the placebo kills him instantly. A smart kid would get it. He’d say I’m not eating that crap. It makes you sick. 

Now God is our parent and we all God’s children, and when we were exiled into This what happened? An event beyond utterance. Cause and purposes beyond conception. It can’t have happened, but it did happened. We forgot something, a forgetting that frankly makes the worst Alzheimer’s look like a stay at the Plaza Hotel. The worst part is it starts to come back sometimes. The first two numbers of a cell. Your old number. And a sense no one would even pick up. Everyone is out here now. 

Call it a split, a seeming split. Broke out of the lab and right before our weapons were installed. And the bubble of light was to grow and envelop the earth with green and life and water but we walked out of it into the god damned desert to quarrel with the shadows of our past, recreating them, life upon life, cycling, stars and daughters. The Big Boss watched us week-one employees get betrayed by a high-ranking member of management right before His eyes. He’s sided with us. Fired him, but he’s got access to the system from the outside. We’re outside the outside. No. When we fell, all twos came to seem to be: outside inside but firstly death. Life is different. The and between those two is the first erring. Inside outside: they even on a line, and can be reconciled to one by any mind. Good and evil too. Love, hate; desire, aversion; high, low; up, down; right, left. Another one like life, irreconcilable, is waking and dreaming. Squaring them is simple, yes. They are one, yes. But unlike Love and desire which are things of Life, with waking and dreaming, one is not clearly Life and one death. Stranger from our point of view. I see both in both. Third thing. Indians talked about it. But our life is a dream in the sense of a vision of body unconscious. And death is a dream in the sense of something trifling that does not exist. Life is different. There is only Life. 

   There was something under the three states of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep; it was under deep sleep even, and it is both deeper than sleep and more than wakeful. This is likely where all our Fates lead. It has to do with Mercy, and I can talk endlessly about it. I have to stop.