Sunday, October 28, 2007

Use & Abuse



USE & ABUSE

Allow,
Therefore, that in the

planetary scene
Your disaffected

flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy

bellies in parade, Proud
of such novelties of the
sublime, Such tink and
tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame,

whip from themselves A
jovial hullabaloo among
the spheres. This will
make widows wince. But
fictive things Wink as
they will. Wink most
when widows wince

Wallace Stevens




Indo-European: rep – to snatch, seize:
“rape,” “rapacious,” “rapid,” “rapt,”
“ravish,” “rapture” and stuff like that.

“Surreptitious as well as “reptile”
(from Latin: to creep) all in the family
values: etymological siblings.

I rape the children: me, village elder
— presbytering a kind of noetic
circumcision & cerebral clitorectomy
continuing institutionalized traditions
and industrial constraints of alma matrix,
forcing kidlets to do my bidness against
their natural born willy/nillies & double
forcing them to pretend to like it, too.

yes, Yes, YES, this IS what I want,
Sam, sock it to me: I wouldn’t be
doing it on my own, not knowing
what’s good for me: take my
attendance & attention
efficiency span.

Make me learn, damnit.
Show me the syllabus.

I would show them the cunning, if
not the uncanny, Liberal Art as
opposed to, as differentiated
from & not to be conflated,
collapsed & confused
with the liberal arts.

Built-in tacit violence bears us away:
full of soundless, furtive fury so
subliminal it looks like teen spirit,
like dedication & discipline & no
clothes line need demonstrate the
surreptitious secret school-daze
rapture going on all in the family
& mum’s the word: can’t be said
without demoralization round here
or anywhere: a cultural relativity:
relaying the relations relatively.

“Age is no better, hardly so well
qualified for an instructor as
youth, for it has not profited so
much as it has lost. One may almost
doubt if the wisest man has learned
anything of practical value by living.

Practically, the old have no very
important advice to give the young,
their own experience has been so
partial, and their lives have been
such miserable failures…” ( HD Thoreau )

Well, anyone can counter (refute, I’m sure)
this claim I’m making, just describing
(not a judgment: lord knows judgment
just generates resistance): the violence
of hire education; and proffer, proclaim,
profess an opinion of one’s own.
We can argue.

It’s no go-to-the-library, Google-it-up,
or ask-the-Davids kind of a deal, true?
Stunning, I hope, the accusation.
Diametrically if not diabolically
opposed to inertial status
quotidians & operating
assumptions sufficient
to put IT all in play,
maybe.

“What ME, raptor?
I’ll have to take issue
if you say that again!”

Bring it on, then. We can
improve my terms, I’m sure.
We can argue: how-it-is we
do what we do and get away
with it in this age of exponential
techno-logic & information
over-whelming lap-top
dancing.

Or what’s a college for?



(go ahead: pull my finger)


xxxooo, Epimenides the Elder Environ Mentalist
(“All myn are Environmental!”)

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
Wallace Stevens

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