Pathos

6-29-06 "Jesus Wept."



I hate that Biblical text. But it shows the despair the man felt at the massive injustice all about. And nothing changes in that respect. The futility of Martin Scorsese mumbling about Bob Dylan & some execrable past that never redeemed itself. The wars never stopped. And the singing could not drown out the bloodshed. What to do about this sorrow that gets so deep one cannot swim in it. Head for the shore. Because bodies of water always represent trouble. Head for land. For green earth where sun bathes the cold eyes & lips of man/woman. Because without love this art is just another two-bit death. And the bombs are just not good enough for you & me. These goddammed bombs going off day & night smashing hell into, not out of, strange countries with children: We are all children & have no time to grow up to be adults---that would take at least a million years. I guess you are not listening to me yet. You will. But first you have to be whipped into awareness. And my meager words cannot punish you as you must be punished in order to take the necessary actions for our salvation. It is not coming from God The Father Almighty Maker of Heaven & Earth. You can take that to the bank.

I see now that you will not learn until you have tasted Reality. YOU. I mean of course all you Utopians out there who dwell in The Alternative Universe of privilege & opulent excess. Words mean nothing to you though you get your entire living from them! They mean nothing to you. I describe. I'm not preaching. You are not convinced. Border's publishes literally thousands of novels every year praised by various friends of the author plus tens of thousands of other titles. That's what book store managers of whom I used to number myself call them----titles. I've read hundreds of them. In one ear out the other. Hurry up & get to the next poetry reading. See if you will be saved. Or, spend the night with the wife & watch a movie on VCR. Eat some popcorn or pretzels. Think it over. You are in the business. You have a good car & a house. And life insurance. And you bought a headstone so you are prepared for The Future. You are well spoken of. You have spent your years wisely rounding up & cultivating friends. Spreading the good news so that no one is left out. I'm convinced. You converted me with your magnanimous life. I believe you. You gave up everything to save the human race from its own narcissism. You did it. You convinced the human race to erase its entire supply of bombs & its poisonous emissions. You did something I previously believed was Impossible. You cured man of his death wish. Congratulations.


RLG Copyright 2006

Lady In A Soft Dress

6-29-06 Life In The Desert



This is reality. The always present moment. There is no other. The past & future are matters for speculation & have no existence. What is fiction? It is hypothesis. The easy life of the imagination. W.C. Williams & Pound argued about ego. America versus internationalism. These people got their rocks off making wild promulgations regarding art & greatness of mind & art. Every attempt at historicizing greatness in art is doomed to failure. 'My name is Ozymandias king of kings---look upon my works ye mighty & despair.' (Shelley) What remains is this priceless moment.


RLG Copyright 2006

The Prisoner Of Love

6-27-06 Love Is The One Incomparable

I am lost. So let me be your compass. The dead define us. And as a lost man meandering in the dark you can see me though I can't see you. Those people thousands of them who were alive yesterday & early this morning are dead---some of them young too young to die. They never lived to kiss and make love & quarrel & make up & hope & despair & experience the ecstasy of great art & music & nature---and then love again, more love. True love. I'm dead too. I'm dead because my true love disappeared without telling me where she was headed. We had already been separated. All of my true loves of the last 31 years. They were never free to love me. Alive on earth and not truly Free We never kissed the kiss of love. That is death. To be in love & not to kiss the kiss of true mutual love. What else is there? O sure, there is eating and walking & talking & looking. Smelling the flowers. Listening to love songs on the radio. There is that. Looking. One might be lucky & see one beautiful woman. Then she disappears. Of course there might be sex without love. That happened a long time ago. And it was no good. It was worse than celibacy because there was no mutual admiration, no tenderness.

And time flies and nobody ever reveals anything that leads to illumination. I am lost of my dearest warmest wittiest friends. How can that be? It does not seem possible on this earth. And I have no true lovers waiting in the wings that I know about. If this isn't incarceration what is? There is the exchange of the passing glance and once in a blue moon a true gaze. That has value. So does an occasional unexpected conversation, rarely. I watch the movies every night. It is surrogate love. Surrogate passion. It is also surrogate art. Killing time by having sexual intercourse with the magic celluloid. Might find one truly beautiful woman on the screen of the television set to get lost inside of. But even this almost never happens. The movies are ruthless. Another American psycho tale. That's all they show these days in the television movie department, or, hopelessly sugared-down bourgeoise family candy which is even worse. It furthers the delusion about the decadent life of narcissistic America. I'm trying here to describe Reality. Life is miserable for 90 percent of the people on Earth. Most people are faced with violence & scarcity every day. Do I dare waste a slice of bread or a cup of water knowing that thousands of people would fight to obtain these? I do not.

Death defines us. The dying of those poor helpless children & adults in those raging war zones about the world including the ghettoes of our very own sad & irresponsible country of violence that is encouraged at all levels by Dow Jones & the leading politicians not only but also university professors who live off the fat of the earth & pontificate while driving expensive cars & spend thousands of dollars on vacations & live it up---the dying of these millions over the last few years what can it mean to us who live & luxuriate? The Yuppies & irresponsible non-tax paying pigs who took over America consider it their duty to live high off the hog to be an example to others. An example of what? A big-spending giver of stupid useless extravagant Christmas presents. And of course ignore Education. This is no time to be sitting around mourning for the oppressed in Iraq & Afghanistan & Africa they say. We are the cream of the crop. We deserve to live like kings & queens. We are The Chosen People. America has been crowned by Jesus Christ to be the land of luxury & wealth. In the last 7 years Poverty has multiplied in America. Malnutrition has increased in the richest country in human history. Why? Because all the wealth has been slanted to millionaires billionaires & weapons-makers. Munitions suppliers have become obscenely rich off the criminal Bush-created war in Iraq. And Israel Is bombing the hell out of civilians in Palestine every day. These maniacs believe they have been selected by God to destroy anybody and anything that gets in the way of their insane bombers & tanks & endless ground weapons.

Each person's death diminishes me because I am involved in humankind wrote the 17th century poet & divine John Donne. How to love one human being every morning every afternoon & every night---even if one is alone. How to accomplish that. Create love even when The Beloved has been gone so long I can no longer see her in my imagination and when I am threatened by evil thoughts from a world of maniacs that is presently attempting to justify the genocide in Iraq that began with "Sanctions" that alone murdered close to 1 million Iraqis if not more and destroyed their water & food & hospitals & public school system. We will never get the correct estimate of the damage from The New York Times Newsweek or Time Magazine. I am trying to find a way at this very moment in cyberspace to connect with true love. I'm trying to shake off this death, the death her absence has wreaked on me in me. I'm trying to wake up my heart & my sweetest memories from the grave of my mind where they are buried deep. What else is art? And I mean every art. However off-subject it may appear. It has to bring back Life. Art is Resurrection of the dead. Or don't talk to me about it. I have a long way to go. And I am stuttering here in cyberspace. Fighting my ass off for one inch of coherence out of this morass of hell. Find me, Lost Lady of Love. Discover me in cyberspace.

RLG Copyright 2006

The Sleeping Man

6-26-06 The Question Of Origins



What is a Sleeping Man? And how does one become such? Good questions. Don't expect clear & definitive answers from me. I'm looking to you as the only map available to me. Or hadn't you noticed? No man has ever seen his own face. The mirror image? Now that is an entirely different kettle of fish. We walk through life you & I & we never ever gain the sights of our own faces as we meander. Never either hear the sound of our own voices except in the shape of an echo as that voice travels out of our lips & takes a long detour before reaching our ears. One advantage I have over you is I do feel whatever it is I feel as a total organism. Now this feeling includes the various sensations I experience based on past bodily experiences that I have kept alive with a memory system that you probably own also of your own bodily experiences. Well, how in the hell did I ever come to be The Sleeping Man? I have certainly been identified as other personages than this one. And in fact nobody has ever notified me that I'm the Rip Van Winckle of my era. Never heard so much as a whisper concerning my nocturnal gifts & my traumatic habits. Women never tell me what's in their minds of any moment for some reason. I assume it is because they need to be wooed into answering intimate queries. And I have no wooing skills. In fact I honestly believe the strongest wooing instinct I possess is to walk away from a woman the instant I note she is preoccupied with something other than herself & me. A very bright young woman told me that once. She said to me do you realize how strong you appear when you casually walk away after making a compliment---as opposed she was saying to waiting around in weak anticipation for instant rewards.

If I asked any woman even a beautiful & discerning one what it means that I am The Sleeping Man I would get no sensible reply. That I know ahead of time & since I am not looking for comic effects I refuse at least for the time being to play games with the ladies on this primordial question of my being. I may have been beaten into it by a series of tragic romances that slammed away at my psyche over the years. It is equally possible that I am merely following my genetic & historical destiny which is coded in my molecules and that thus my status has evolved to its present condition independent of anything I have done. The missed embrace of love thus has nothing to do with my now being The Sleeping Man or He Who Cohabits With The Nocturnal Woman. Don't ask me. I dream my dreams. After all I am The Man of Traumas. I write them down in my notebook. I run them by my Rotary Index Instant Analyzer. And I can't make heads or tails out of them. Once upon a time I visited a doctor who told me dreams are of no consequence. They are merely after-images of the mind's day laborings. No significance there whatsoever. He had extirpated his Freud & Jung & forwarded all his emails to the school of Cognitive Therapy. He loved drugs & advised the use of cocaine if one could afford it. And he believed that drug therapy had eliminated problems from the whole culture of "mental illness." Obviously he had never heard of The Sleeping Man. Though if he did he would summarily indicate a problem solvable by the swallowing of barbiturates or amphetamines. He was himself not a picture of glowing health. How shall the sick help the healthy and the ignorant give wisdom to the innocent?


RLG Copyright 2006

True Love Again

6-25-06 This Is It



In China you are only allowed to have one child per family. Poverty is discouraged as is greed. In America everybody is encouraged to indulge & produce & consume at maximum levels of over-efficiency. Dow Jones is God. And if you are so unlucky as to be born in the ghetto then you are left to deal drugs or rot. Unless you're a superstar. The smart ones discard their offspring & leave town. But it is illegal to kill your kids in America. So if you can't sneak them away in the trash America itself will do the job for you. They'll just deny you food & a warm room. That'll take care of business. Others they hit over the head with a Bible & mail to some outpost in Arizona or Utah or Wyoming or Texas or Florida. Walter Cronkheit never heard about it. The news didn't reach his offices. Barbara Walters was busy in bed with Henry Kissinger giving head. Dan Rather was in texas with his cowboy hat on riding herd over his potential biographers. And Tom Brokaw was at home writing another book of effusive saliva encomiating veterans of World War 3. He wasn't sure it was World war 3 he was writing about but he thought so & most people would agree. Thomas Jefferson on the other hand who bought with U.S. dollars for 15 million smackers The Louisiana Territory from Napoleon of France---Tom was said to have immigated to Paris where the light was better & the food and thought and women more promising.

The learned philosophers squabbled concerning meanings of obscure terms, phrases long out of use & dysfunctional from a dead & barbarian tongue. They all laughed at the ghosts in the laboratory that lit up the room with ancient excitement. Then they went back to their motel rooms showered & dried put on their duds & went home to mow the lawn, water the grass & eat supper with the family at a table that didn't look the same as before. A table is only a table, one thought sitting there-----but still, every time I sit is the first time in this posture of circumstances. The wife is not the same as the last time & the last time she was not the same as the time before. Ergo, I also must appear unique to other eyes each new moment that erases the one it succeeded. Fuck! What am I saying to myself? Did Beauty not walk past my table in the cafe 10 minutes ago when I sat alone innocently contemplating my fate in the eternal scheme of things-----innocent, that is to say, of gross motivations fuelled by the vulgar consumer society of profits & losses. Yes she did. Gladly. I saw happiness in her eyes for that one glistening moment. Washed the cobwebs out of my head. Planted a tiny seed of love in the pupils of my eyes. And that's funny. She dropped the love potion in my eyes. Went straight through my brain dropped down neat & clean. Hit the heart dead center. Knocked the cholesterol out of my arteries. This fine needle of love barely visible penetrated my whole system. Falling down through the whole complex. It travelled ala the capillaries. Landed in groin. Through the intestines & all the wayside channels. Neat & clean. Fire of life. Leaving no smudges. Bit through the opaque obfuscations of the interior. Put sharpness inside the lagging economy of the sexual. Ate the death out of the sleeping cells. In that simple singular act caused the quickening of the comatose life force. One minuscule droplet of love originating in her eyes & transferred to mine.

Thus it was called a fatal potion of irresistible magical powers in the majestic days of Gothic Medievalism. It was rumored to be an actual potion that the true lovers had swallowed that made them agents of irresistible & irrevocable Romantic Love. So omnipotent is the unadulterated gaze of true love when it is pure & mutual.


RLG Copyright 2006

The Mirror

8-24-06 Make Mine Glass



I don't like paper or plastic or liars. They all fit into the same bag. It's like an easy lay. Show me an easy lay & I'll show you a peck of trouble. No. Don't give me any phony items wrapped in cheap. I like pure glass. Finely spun. It expunges the premisses of all corruptors & would-be defilers of the good. When somebody tries to fuck me at the cash register that person is inviting hell into his or her life. It happened to me twice today. There are no accidents. And hell will find the cheaters. Weapons of mass destruction are meant to be dissolved. Whoever murders another human being has murdered himself or herself. This is an unequivocal truth. Every explosion from America in foreign lands will come back to haunt USA. There is no such thing as a good war. Every war is a malicious mission of munitions-mongers making untold sums of dirty money. There are no exceptions. Glass is pure. It is a perfect vehicle for truth & illumination. It is a vessel for the pure of heart. It is a symbol of true love.


RLG copyright 2006

First Day Of Summer

6-23-06 That Was Wednesday Just Past


The longest day of the year 21 June 2006. Isn't it funny?---The names keep their steady sameness but material reality gets more diluted every day. Earth keeps getting smaller & weaker. Lately it has lost its will to fight back against the encroachment by homo insapiens. Sperm & egg are insipid & essentially without fire. And water & air and ground are making a poor battle of it with the deadly human race as its major foe. Earth has no beef with wolves or lions or sharks or eagles or sparrows or rivers or lakes. These do not seek to overthrow the great Mother of being. It is the two-legged animal with the monstrous over-sized brain who is the source of all earth's troubles. What to do. How to stop this lethal species from overrunning & poisoning & then erasing earth with its monster weapons. Earth is presently collecting all its inner resources. Great natural calamities always give homo insapiens something to do to distract it from its missions of murder & polluting. The insapient one always calls these missions of mercy catastrophes or natural disasters. Floods earthquakes tornadoes volcanoes & hurricanes are blessings from Nature designed to redirect human purposes. But these have had little actual power at correcting man's mad rush for power & destruction. Ergo, obviously earth & sky are going to have to come up with a much stronger means of remedying human greed and violence. I wonder what it will be. I suspect it'll have to take the form of an overt collective organized plan.


RLG Copyright 2006

The Real Love

6-21-06 Let all the wars cease & men & women come to their senses.

'Greater love has no man than this: that a man lay down his life for his enemy.'

spoken by an Arabic character in an American movie in the 50's


RLG

Postmodernism, Part II

6-20-06 The American Writer & Creator After The Bomb


Much later I found out that according to my own calculations Postmodernism in American literature seemed to begin to happen exactly around the time of the splitting of the atom. Robert Creeley's poems began to appear in the middle 40's. His major book "For Love: Poems, 1950-1960" had completely abandoned rhyme. Yes, the atomic bomb blew rhyme & reason off the human palimpsest---literally, revolutionized the scale & mode of American literature. Abstract expressionism became the law of American painting. Abstract expressionists erased the representational figure and painted "The Unrepresentable"---expressed the Inexpressible: posthumous man on a posthumous planet. The Theater of the Absurd flourished at this same moment yielding Beckett's "Waiting For Godot" and "Endgame" expressions of absurd man in a nihilistic world that had been destroyed and vacated by the human. Postmodern man/woman had used up the cat's nine lives. What remains is a castrated language of memory fragments.

In America we had our own sad wise cracker---the brilliant teenage narrator of "Catcher In The Rye" Holden Caulfield. This magnificent creation of J.D. Salinger also heard the whispering in the kitchen. Mr. Caulfield was reporting from a mental asylum recent memories of life at private school and other remembrances of things recently past---our irreverent adolescent Proust who scribbled 'fuck you' on tombstones in the cemetery to express his outrage at mortality. The Terror underneath the veneer of the lying world reveals itself to Holden at every turn. And the redundant burst of laughter that blows over the surface of the world of J. D. Salinger is a gale of chilling giggles born inside the nausea of the guts which constitutes a microcosm of the world of "Irrational Man"---later the title of a book authored by William Barrett on the history and meaning of Existentialism in the modern world my favorite chapter of which is titled 'The Testimony Of Modern Art.' Carpe diem! Eat drink and make Mary for tomorrow we die. After "Catcher In The Rye" we have had many remembrances of things past in American literature & song & the movies.

Elvis Presley sang endlessly of lost love and the love he once had that he squandered. These songs of lost love and of never again love poured forth from the American cauldron of grief and desperation and madness. Patsy Cline fell out of the sky and died in an air plane crash at the age of 29 but before she perished she sang "Crazy" and more---more grief-soaked elegies. It is not that postmodernism took root. It is that the very finitude of man and woman the existentialists so often talked of had come down to earth and children and teenagers were struck by their own absolute contingency. Death lurked. Suicide beckoned. And Albert Camus answered: There is only one question in philosophy: whether or not to commit suicide. We were all held alive by a slender thread that could snap in an instant. One push of a button could detonate the big one and this act was forever over. And the whole race would perish. Francis Ford Coppola used "The Eve Of Destruction" to punctuate his Viet Nam War epic film "Apocalypse Now." Others sought comfort in Bing Crosby or Perry Como. And Karen Carpenter was always around to pour sweet wine on our bitter repast. There will always be a demand for candy bars, lollypops and ice cream cones in a world of lurking mass destruction, serial murders, and insane politicians. For every caustic Bob Dylan song and every realistic & poetic Joni Mitchell utterance comes a bevy of celebrators of flowing syrup & vanilla pudding.

But I have opened up a can of worms. There is no end to this. And I must get back to my central point. All the howling in the world of music & poetry (Allan Ginsberg one of the ablest poets of the whole generation wrote a much celebrated poem with that very title---"Howl") was accompanied by an opposite movement silent inward and directed downward ---minimalism carried the day. A paring down of the excess. A refusal to celebrate that which was killing us and stifling us. A refusal to affirm anything that was less than 100 percent verifiable. A scientific scepticism was present in the best artists of the age. And thus an austerity in the art. Robert Creeley's poems got literally smaller and smaller until they almost disappeared into the white page suggesting, among other things, the disappearance of man & that by which he is known: language, poetry, song. These poems seemed to want to escape the scrutiny of the world. They also became so diminutive they offered small targets for the mad bombers of the world. Creeley of course would escape the inessential. Picasso once said that after 1938 Anxiety was the Source of all his painting. Of course after the atomic bomb came the hydrogen bomb which further terrified the world. And then came the nuclear bomb and all of its consequent insanities. Now I wonder what great new genius will step forth finally to create the Anti-bomb of all anti-bombs. We are ready for it: The Return of the repressed lovers.




RLG Copyright 2006

Postmodernism: The Whispering In the Kitchen

6-20-06 And How Shall I Presume



For me Postmodernism began in 1946 when I was 8 years old in the kitchen of our farmhouse outside Waupun, Wisconsin when I heard my parents conversing with neighbors and relatives in the most haunting hushed tones concerning rumors of the invention of the atomic bomb and predicting The End of the World. The minister of our church JJB seemed happy. "Lord Jesus, come quickly" was his favorite prayer. I hated that prayer. JJB hated life and liberals. Of course he despised liberals. Liberals love life. JJB wanted to get this life over with so he could get started on the next one---the only one that mattered to him. He wanted life to be over with before I had ever kissed a girl let alone made love with one. Go to hell, JJB. A few of us still have our lives to live before you & God wipe us off the map & give us the maximum punishment-----Hell of course and forever for anybody so full of desire to be alive. What scared the hell into me in my family kitchen back there in 1946 was the sense of dread permeating that Silent room full of people with no radiant reply to the atomic bomb which could wipe out whole cities---even countries.

I knew nothing then of art or literature or of my future as a writer & a reader. All I "knew" at age 8 had been poured into my ears by my parents and by the right wing Protestant church at which my family worshipped---Heaven or Hell forever and no in between---And it's probably hell no matter what anybody says because if you die this instant and your soul is not saved by Jesus Christ you are finished for all eternity. No second chances in the beyond. I just got started. Only in 3rd grade. Some son of a bitches want to blow the whole place up. Truman says it's them. But that goddammed atomic bomb is on American soil manufactured in the USA. Reverend JJB is glad. It fulminates his rage to punish sin which he and his family are without. The rest of us though---we make up for his lack. "Lord Jesus, come quickly" he wheezes into the microphone at the pulpit. I feel sick in my stomach when I hear those miserly words coming from JJB during his long prayer. It lasts about twenty minutes. JJB's long prayers are full sized sermons in themselves wherein he is giving orders essentially to God which he has taken verbatim from the Bible. His prayer is a recitation of church doctrine & scriptural quotations telling the Almighty what He has decreed and exactly how things stand down here in the land of Soddam & Gomorrah. Get me outta here! Before this whole goddammed church blows to smithereens.



RLG Copyright 2006

The World Is A Palimpsest

6-20-06 Every Iota Of Matter Is Alive


I wake up. Look about the room. It is empty save for the stacks of my own compositions scattered not only thoughout the bedroom but lying rampant throughout my entire abode. Every room is piled with black words on white pages. These are all my sprawling offspring. Individual papers have a way of falling off the stack and meandering to the floor by some irresistible series of repulsions and attractions, some utterly electromagnetic event. I will find a particular poem or story or letter or essay (that I composed 10 or more years ago) lying out in the open on my kitchen floor decreeing to me an ineluctable message. There it sits in front of me a magical pattern---an electronic message, irresistible. And I tell you that magical piece of paper with my words etched into it appears there on the floor in my life as no mere happenstance but as a singular & symbolical manifestation: a universal statement from the world of so called "inanimate objects." Everything in the universe is endowed with meaning. What concerns me of course is everything that endows me with meaning. For indeed the world reads me as I peruse it. The empty cigarette wrapper on the sidewalk, the very lay of the concrete blocks on that sidewalk today, and the bent aluminum coca-cola can lying on its side in the parking lot---they interpret me as I study them & see the writing on the pavement & note my destiny in one moment of time in the universal mirror. Every iota of matter in the universe is scintillating with significance. I am the interpreter and purveyor of Meaning to a planet apparently lost in confused rage & the collected tumult & aggression of the terrified & the blindly striking out. The world is literally and incessantly overflowing with symbols that tell us who we are and where we are headed. How do we read and take the measure of these images & signs & metaphors that greet our every gaze & hearing? It is The Artist who gives meaning to the human enterprise in all its massive contradiction and ambiguity and paradox amid the wreck and joy of life. What a gargantuan task & game. No wonder people chase palm readers & astrologists & interpreters of the I Ching & tarot cards. The cosmos is loaded with riddles. And each human being contains the whole world in duplicate: the sum and substance of all the mysteries of the universe. How do I give my fellow Readers my irrevocable story so that it is impossible of being lost and incapable of leading them astray?


RLG Copyright 2006

The Sublime & The Vulgar

6-19-06 Introductory Words: My Own Thought Experiment


Is there an art that is not sublime? What is sublimation? It is the use of mental & sexual energy for the production of works of the imagination that we call art. Sublimation is constituted by the refining of physical urges into mental fantasies & esthetic projects. On the larger level all of the world of man-made objects are products of sublimation. Brooms and clocks and pitch forks or silver ware and items of clothing. But also cities are objects of sublimation. They are imagined quantities. Sublimation consists in the conversion of what was formerly sexual desire or the instincts of the body into higher forms of creation and invention that benefit society as for instance the complete matrix of the urban world.

It has been said that the movement in arts & letters known as Modernism is constituted nost especially and singularly by the phenomenon of Sublimation. This is its crowning aspect. This distinguishes Modernism from what came before it Romanticism and what comes after Postmodernism. What occurred in Postmodernism is a running together of Modernism (sublimation) and the popular culture. No longer does the pure form of Sublimation hold sway over English departments for example as it once did. Now other lower vulgar forms of esthetic expression have broken into the stream of the formerly pure waters of Modernism that is evident in such masters as Wallace Stevens & T.S. Eliot & James Joyce. And the two forms of expression---the Sublime & the vulgar---bleed into eachother in the works of literature that have gained importance in the last 25 to fifty years. However, Modernism is also kept alive in works that retain this character of essential sublimation. The whole anti-realist school of literature which is a mixed bag of writers unable for me to summarize here seems to me at first glance to be part of the school of the sublime in literature. Whereas popular culture of the day has always been on the front burner of American letters and the novel & has thousands of practitioners in every major field of art. Let me get back to you to clarify these very hazy & perfunctory remarks.



RLG Copyright 2006

The Postmodern Dilemma

6-19-06 Looking for Substance in Hollywood



How can I convince you? The movies use force & velocity to suck in ticket buyers. Lots of the 18-24 yr olds buy the madness of ferocious car chases and automatic weapons displays & romantic kidnappings and mass murders. Serial perverts roam the air waves & the highways. And the key is not to catch the bad asses until the final minute of the movie after all the carnage has been commited and the torture has proceeded without relief. This is offered as Art by Hollywood producers. Or some damned phony terrorist flick insinuating Arab or Muslim influences. When are we going to get something approaching Accuracy in the realm of Hollywood? Who is going be the first director and producer to reveal the real story in the Middle East without bowing the knee to USA Israel Or UK? Presently we have no producers or directors in Hollywood that dare call Israel's bluff concerning its Gestapo State tactics regarding the Palestinians much of whose land Israel has stolen at gunpoint & by bombing as at the same time it killed or forced into exile millions of legitimate Palestinian home owners and citizens from 1948 to this very day. Where is Oliver Stone the great liberal on this question? Answer: probably sitting in some air-condtioned living room chewing the fat with The Pro Israel Lobby we have heard so much about recently. What are we getting from Hollywood now? Nothing but knee-jerk movies with no intellectual or political content worthy of intelligent and inquisitive and romantic realist movie goers. Nothing in the realm of love that deserves our attention and nothing in the realm of the mind or in the political arena. What we are getting is endless violent snuff films & tapioca pudding sentimental trash flicks. Soft & stupid or hard & stupid. But no courage and no illumination & no cosmic comedy or tragedy.


RLG Copyright 2006

To Inhabit A Work Of Art

6-17-06 I Need Change Of Worlds To Be Alive



A reason I often find movies so compelling is my hunger literally to inhabit a brand new world. I've lived in this zone now for more than 20 years so my eyes and ears and nose are seldom surprised by the place-----only rarely when I see a truly beautiful woman. That can rock me back on my heels & strike a blow to my interior. But it almost never happens. I read an authentic story or see an undissimulating movie & I'm instantly transported to a new place. New streets, new houses, buses, cars---and a complete field of entirely new women, faces, persons. Without novelty you're dead-----at least I am. No wonder all those marriages go to hell. They die of boredom---the repetition becomes deadly. Movies have become for me an easier read than books. Zingo. Push the button. We're on! And if it's no good bring it straight back to the store & get a new one until you find a true Winner. A truly good movie instantly takes me out of my skull boredom into its enchanted world. It inhabits me as surely as I inhabit it---the true work of art. Here I must say programmed television is a fraud and a disaster. Almost never a genuinely novel movie or program. This is a wasteland of gutless cliches with mindless anemic sit coms & other shallow shows. The great Dutch-German philosopher Schopenhauer once wrote, 'the locus of the Will is in the genitals.' And if this is so there are no balls and there is no vagina in American industrial t.v. And cable television is also a vast empire of mediocrity.

I love Place in the movies. Can't explain why. I love those long highways or city streets. I love that fact & also the power of the metaphor. The long long long boulevard stretching all the way across say the city of angels-----or, some country road just any place that goes on & on to the very end of the camera shot. An endless seemingly straight line. Yes-----infinity, I suppose. Endless Life. Immortality. That sensation of going on forever I feel watching the car traverse the terrain with its man & woman inside headed out to Eternity. I note this often even in mediocre films----as if this is a universal theme & backdrop universally shared by minds great & small, by both the brilliant genius and the common plodder. The long Road---the infinite Journey always grabs me, as, it occurs to me, few others watching the same movie even note it they are so busy plotting. It's been said (by John Gardner) there are only two genuine stories in all of literature. A man goes on a journey. Or, a stranger comes to town. That's all she wrote in the department of tales. To me these two in fact look like parts of the same one taking the obverse shape of eachother. Maybe this is the very thing that makes such an indelible imprint on my psyche the minute I see the street the boulevard or the country road and its travellers. I feel the force of the Archetypal Occasion: Man (me) is going on the Journey of his one and only Life. And then what happens?


RLG Copyright 2006

The Wars Concerning The Da Vinci Code

6-17-06 Skulduggery In High Places


In the July, 2006 issue of "Vanity Fair" now on news stands Seth Mnoonkin ("The Da Vinci Wars: More Rip-Off Charges Against The Da Vinci Code") summarizes plagiarism charges against Dan Brown alleged author of "The Da Vinci Code" as these charges have so far played out in the courts and as they indeed appear to be in actuality. According to this report & others I have noticed Dan Brown owes Lewis Perdue an enormous sum of money for outright theft of his ideas first published in Perdue's novel ("Daughter Of God"). Mr. Brown has clearly improved Perdue's fundamental story by streamlining the writing and blocking it out in very professional fashion. But from all indications the Story was stolen from Lewis Perdue who is presently completely bankrupt from court proceedings where he was ill served by all parties. Perdue certainly merits a decent percentage of Dan Brown's earnings from the book the way it looks from here. This case definitely belongs in The Supreme Court. And Lewis Perdue deserves the best attorney America can offer. Or is it France?

RLG Copyright 2006

Hooking Up

6-15-06 I'm In Elementary School Again



Hooking up. What does that mean? I saw the phrase in a book written by the maverick chronicler Tom Wolfe. Wolfe went around to some colleges interviewing co-eds concerning sexuality and other intimate matters going on in the university. Like me he was curious. He didn't know the lingo of university students any more. And he probably still doesn't. I know what he means. I see these lovely women and they seem friendly. But what does that mean? It means nothing other than itself to start with of course. What are our possibilities? We have an age differential to begin with. This needs an instant evaluation. I need to know where a specific woman stands on this question. That can really open up the windows and doors. And what is first base? I'm serious. Is first base a conversation with a woman or is it a minimum of one date? Or does it mean at the very least a major kiss? I was thinking it must be at least a kiss. Today I noticed a woman who has been living in the back of my consciousness for a long time. All of a sudden there she is and all my silent vows for celibacy evaporate. Of course I have no formal vows of celibacy. Sometimes I just put women out of my mind---when nothing is happening physically & actually between us. When I get excited by a woman my brain goes immediately into overdrive. It tells me I need a plan and right now. I hate it when my brain does that. But I believe my brain is absolutely right on this. That's what this getting to first base is all about. I am putting it out here on the white page to honestly give myself some room. That's what my brain told me to do. And I might get some help if the right woman looks at it. Plus, If I see the words on the page myself I might do something to end this void. And this is true. I need encouragement from the ladies. No doubt about that. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in the middle of a supermarket and I'm starving simply because I don't know the rules for engagement with the opposite sex. Ever hear that phrase before? It was popular before the sexual revolution. I don't want to make light of this. This is no joke. Reminds me of a reporter asking the great former Governor of Illinois Adlai Stevenson how it felt to lose the Presidency a second time to Eisenhower. Stevenson said, "I'm too old to cry, but it hurts too much to laugh.' The reporter then asked him what he would do now. And Stevenson gave this memorable reply: "I'm going to sit in the shade with a glass of wine and watch the dancers." Well, that is a great answer and a kind of verbal victory, almost a tonic, but it is not on my agenda for the summer of '06.

So, I see the lovely lady and I must say truthfully I am aroused on this beautiful late spring day. And all I need is a little encouragement. How do we end this stalemate? How do we get to first base? It takes two to tango, a woman once told me. After all she is part of this operation, I hope. She is part of this operation---how do I get her involved? How do we get moving in the same direction? Yes, that's it---walking together in the same direction. I'm thinking summer is almost here. Movies. Warm summer nights. Summer is the best time for Love.




RLG Copyright 2006

The Last Time I Saw Love

6-14-06 Wednesday Evening



The last time I saw love. That's a good title. For my next novel. Which I am working on this very minute. Parts of this will no doubt be in my master copy. She had lovely skin and her hair was very long & soft & fluffy and feminine & shampooed. She was walking in the parking lot at 7-Eleven and I could see immediately she looked cleaner than anybody else within ten miles. Clean and beautiful eyes. She was chewing on something small because her teeth seemed to be nibbling. And I walked up to her I wanted to kiss her at that moment but this was only our third brief conversation in public. I said to her what are you chewing on? And she said tic-tacs. I think she said that. I didn't hear it exactly I was thinking of her eyes & lips but that's what it must've been. Then instead of saying what was really on my mind which was going to bed with her that night she began walking to the bus stop. It is not easy to break out of any patterns in the game of love. I mean by that the habit of making irrelevant conversation about school & books or nature or the this and that of social events. But I haven't had any conversations whatsoever about anything in a few months.

I guess then this is it. My life my career and also my wife & family---until The Real Thing comes along. As it says in some song whose singer escapes me at the moment. Don't know the rest of the song. I do know this. She was beautiful and from Asheville, North Carolina. I just mailed some poems to Asheville. It felt romantic. And that I've decided is the best way to feel when you mail out a manuscript. I am a businessman when it comes to writing. This is what I do with authority: write. But it is also an immense & complicated game. In the very largest and most generous sense of that term. I didn't kiss that beautiful sensuous woman that morning in the parking lot at 7-Eleven. Nor did I kiss her any of the other times we met all of a sudden on campus mainly---not a very comnfortable place for the first kiss. But as players say after the game---I had my opportunities. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Did I ever blow every one of them. And now I'm here at this screen speaking in cyberspace to the world telling the story of my life.

How will I ever get true love back in my life? That is my major question and the central theme of every word I write. Somehow this Confession in its own digressive way will tell what I believe will turn out to be an Astounding Story. It's a tough row to hoe. Because I got myself isolated over a period of twenty-five years from all of women and society. And I have not given a public reading of my work in a long time aside from individual pieces---and even that rarely. OK. I'm just putting this down in front of me. Laying my task on my plate for you to see ahead of time or in the middle of things. Because this is a Novel you are reading. It is autobiographical. And it is true, mainly. I do stretch the truth once in a while. I make up things. Anybody who doesn't is a bore. But I do not lie or defame. Which is a more malicious program. I entertain you. But that entertainment is at least half pain and nightmare and pathos & tragedy. Like I said the other night I've been fighting Nietzsche since 1967 when I first began to read him. And it looks like he's here to stay. That does not mean the end of true love or romance or sexual pleasure between woman & me. It better not. What it does mean is I have no control over outcomes any more than you do. I do hope to recover that grand sense of comedy that for many years was the fuel of my very life. But for many years now it has left me out in the cold. I don't know what came first the unrequited love or the loss of the humor. It seems to me love and comedy sleep in the same bed and eat at the same table. They even take a bath together. They laugh at the same jokes. I like that part. And they are quick to forgive eachother for little slights and mistakes. Love is forgiveness---with Pleasure.


RLG Copyright 2006

Searching For Sex

6-14-06 Left This Place To Die



I left this place to die. Searching for sex & love in the desert. Lonely rich intelligent women with independence of mind. Women of tenderness & emotional strength. Not ruined by history. Not uninfluenced by it either. Looking for sexual intimacy in the beautiful arid hot desert here in lonely Southern California with its one million beautiful females of all ages and sizes. Truly educated to bone conditions of the twenty first century. And the massive injuries being done to our fellows every moment of each day. It's hard to stay conscious in this festival of lies & pain & sexual intrigue. Everybody looks like they just walked out of the shower but got hit by a misguided missile on the way to the parking lot. How come the parking lots are so full? What's there? What source of fascination? Why is everybody walking in the parking lot and gawking about as if they are seeking something scheduled to appear here & now like The Second Coming? Do you ever get answers to your questions? I don't.

It's hard to crack this case. Because it refuses to identify itself as a riddle. Business as usual say all the commentators. We have a dilemma. There is never any new information. And the newspapers are nothing but endless veils of rumor. It doesn't make any difference which paper. It's all distraction. The bottom line is the weather won't deceive you. Everybody else will. Don't ever trust people for recipes of health. They have ulterior motives. Staying out of the mix. There is no use investigating the why of things. Stick to the physical sciences. Describe only measurable physical quantities. And make no demands on persons. That's Love in the 21st century. Trust yourself. That's all you got going out of the gate. The sun won't let you down. Neither will the nocturnal realm. Day and night are both good solid things you can depend on in a world of unpredictability and ego-motivated behavior. I never go to parties any more. Although I broke the rule this past New Year's & went to two. Food was good & I had a conversation with the party-giver's mother that was fairly interesting. And ate my stomach out from under me at the other one.

I didn't get laid either time. Nor did I note an opportunity for the same. Though there was one lovely woman who walked into the kitchen when I was standing there. She reminded me of Wendy. However, she didn't stick around. Next thing I looked up & she was standing next to some guy who pretended he was her husband in the living room. So I headed for the exit. Thus began the year 2006 in Venice, California where I was staying at the time. There was a football game for the college national championship between USC & Texas on the 4th. I blew the whole deal. I'm usually careful but I let Frank fool me. He offered me a radio to follow the progress of the game which SC shouldve won hands down. But I suppose because I was so lazy SC followed suit and gave Texas the game. That damned radio should have never left the house. Frank has no loyalties such as I do. Then I read a poem with Linda at Spondi's. On Dudley near The Boardwalk in Venice. Half the crowd at the reading had already vamoosed because Linda & I got there late. It didn't matter. They were dead before they got there. Everybody's dead. Their luck is they have no idea of their status. Think they're really fulfilling their destiny with Uncle Sam & God and all that invisible crap. It doesn't make any diffeence. That's what I mean by dead.

I haven't seen Da Vinci Code yet. I am still too blase to walk over to the cinema & watch it alone. I saw this lovely babe standing in front of me at Starbucks this a.m. Perfect size for me. I could lean over and kiss her. My lips almost touched the top of her head. She was having a conversation with a couple who came to talk to her while she was standing in line. Honey face. Saw Erika at Borders yesterday but she is very stuck up lately. Erika Leishman who also is extremely attractive short of stature but for some reason seems to have a hostile attitude toward me. So I ease back on my heels. I'm not eager to invite any woman's hostility---who knows she may not even realize she's sending me negative signals. Not everything is as obvious as it sometimes appears to be. Appearances are deceiving. Truly they are. In any event, this lady this morning was so busy talking with her friends we didn't say anything to eachother. I had my career on my mind. Not sex that's for sure. Too lonely to get anything going with a new woman. So lonely I have no modus operandi. No means of coping with women in the rough. Almost never see one that feels really appropriate. A woman I can be myself with & she can be herself with me. Now that would be something.


RLG Copyright 2006

The Bush-Cheney Scandal

6-13-06 Lying Is Good---It's in The Bible


Well of course it's in the Bible. And, remember, the assholes lying there always pay. Witness the story of Annanias & Sapphira. But the current crop of frauds in The White House have actually murdered several hundred thousand human beings---some of them deluded American boys & girls & even a few women & men---but most of them civilians from the very native country Bush would impose his Fascist democracy upon at the point of American Weapons Of Mass Destruction. These dead Iraqis just happened to be living in a country disdained by Bush & Cheney & their billionaire cronies who presently actually believe they own America. I don't agree with them. I do not believe these semi-literate Greed freaks own the USA. I believe America is owned by its 285 million citizens-----or, more accurately, it is truly owned by those few of us who actually care enough to find out the facts about The Democratic Process & the Constitution on which this country is based. Most of us seem to be pretty much dead in the head from all the pollutions & the polluted opinions that get slammed across our craniums 24-7-365. I say it is time to say No to these right-wing profiteers & Irresponsibles who have set up this phony rotten war in Iraq so their cronies can roll in corrupt blood money as Halliburton is doing & all the other munitions corporations who are sick with obese profits from Bush Cheney Rumsfeld & Rove's irrational war against Arabs & Muslims & indeed the rest of the world who refuse to fall in line and buy the lies that are being manufactured by Karl Rove & the rest of the Gestapo.


What is occurring even as I write is the Wising Up before our eyes & ears of the Whole World inch by inch day by day. The World of human beings is slowly getting hip to the disaster of Bush & his henchmen as world failures. Bush has succeeded in creating an International Enemy for his regime. This Enemy is all democratically inclined persons throughout the earth who refuse to be intimidated by the Bush Doctrine of bow the knee to Imperial USA or we cut off ties with you. THEY are cutting off ties with USA. China & Japan presently OWN the USA---not Ken Lay & his hostile Wall Street comrades who will soon be behind bars. We are the largest debtor nation in human history. And our economy is essentially bonkers today. Many Democrats in the Senate gave Bush the power to declare preemptive War in Iraq, including to his eternal cowardly shame John Kerry-----who during the election campaign refused to take up the cudgels in his own defense as a noble warrior in Viet Nam who later honestly & painstakingly discovered the war was a fraud & an injustice and a murderous miscarriage of justice to the peoples of Asia-----this Mr. Kerry these years later voted to give Bush the powers to declare preemptive war in Iraq. What a kick in the face to Democracy that was & is. And during his campaign for President Kerry indeed offered no plan to withdraw from this most criminal war against Iraqi civilians. There were no Arab or Muslim Terrorists in Iraq until Bush's troops arrived. There was no carnage in Iraq before Bush's troops arrived. Saddam never had a good word to say for Al Qaeda as Saddam is essentially non-religious. But Bush counted on the stupidity of the American electorate to wage this malicious & illegal war. As Bush counted on the stupidity of American citizens to accept his hand-over of the Treasury Department to his billionaire cronies Ken Lay & Associates from Wall Street in handing out multi-billion dollar tax cuts for Billionaires & millionaires many of whom declared they did not need the money.

Question: Is anybody alive in America? It has taken Sleeping Americans several years to Wake Up to the fact they have been had again by a mendacious Administration which specializes in inventing lies to discredit truth tellers and innocent civilians such as the citizens of Baghdad who are bearing the brunt of Bush's Immoralism and his mania for violent Solutions to human problems. A murderous and unending and utterly Failing war is raging on in Iraq destroying almost entirely civilians every day of the week. Once in a while the dead press uses the phrase "thought to be Insurgents" but it is clear that 90 percent of the dead are not Insurgents but local 'people'----Families in the great city of Baghdad. And GW Bush has Outraged the entire Muslim & Arab & Human world by his insane tactics that even at this moment remain to be contested in The Congress of The USA. We need an entire New Congress. The present Congress with few Exceptions is morally bankrupt & have sold out to the military propaganda of Spend & Kill. We need new Bringers of Light!

What is the cost of this war? Three weeks ago Mark Shield said on PBS news that according to The Congressional Record we have spent 439 billion dollars on Iraq so far. And this is the conservative estimate before a pending Congressional vote which proposed we dump another stupendous wad of murderous cash into a project of unending death to little Muslims & Arabs who have had their foundations & security ripped to shreds by Bush I, Clinton, & now Bush II-----making Saddam Hussein's crimes look petty in comparison. Citizens could walk in the streets during Saddam's rule. They had water to drink & food to eat & their economy was in good shape. Bush Clinton & now The Other Bush have made fools of American Democracy. And they have embarrassed & betrayed you & me---every human citizen and sensitive & intelligent being on this earth not to mention sold out this potential Democracy of citizens & equals. We are ripe for a true Democratic Revolution---one which places the education of American citizens first on The National Agenda. And we put off the table the launching of monstrous corporate wars against foreign peoples & territories for the explicit purpose of establishing American hegemony in countries that have no adequate defense to protect thenselves against the imperial madness of America when it is under the rule of such irrationality as that revealed in the amateurish behavior of GW Bush II on The World Stage that makes his father former President Bush seem an amiable leader of generosity fair play & vision by comparison.


RLG Copyright 2006

My Tussles With Nietzsche

6-12-06 The Superman & The Tragedy Industry



Whenever I go back to read Nietzsche I am refreshed in some fundamental way. Yet I am beginning to see Nietzsche represents something dangerous to me---something powerful but more restraining than liberating. It is his embracing of the tragic mode of life that I find impossible to concede. Life is tragic. No doubt about that. All one has to do is look about one. But I note it staring me in the face in the mirror without remission. That is what I find reprehensible & repulsive in Nietzsche. That his philosophy is mine not by choice but by superimposition. It is as though I have no say in the matter of my own philosophy. I declare myself a compassionate romanticist of the realist order looking to the comic mode as the most promising form of expression. Yet, every morning I wake alone one more time. And I feel the wrongness of my own life. As though I have been waking up in hell for 25 consecutive years. I step out the door and am amazed that at that moment tragedy falls off my back & the radiance of the day greets me. I am never miserable of an average day. I see about me all the symbols and symptoms of hope and pleasure & fulfillment. I am human and among human beings---notably, women. Yet, that seems to be the sum and substance. Nothing ever happens. Nothing. This witty brilliant man full of ideas & life continues to exist completely in isolation. And thus my works accumulate. And the human race murders itself and pillages as it always has done---gets born & gets sick & dies---and I am none the wiser for it. The women fall off my fingers like rain drops. They smile they say pleasant things. Once in a blue moon they are so beautiful I can barely breathe as that lovely maiden at Borders Books just one hour ago reading Tacitus in a chair not far from mine. Unequivocally beautiful & graceful.

What does Nietzsche have to do with any of this? Only this. Whenever I read Nietzsche I think to myself this guy saw farther into human being than any of his contemporaries or any of mine. Yet I despise the tragic knowledge he discovered & espouses. It is boring not only but it is incessantly full of pain. But goddammit, it reads like the map of my life. I get in front of The White Page and am resolved to tell the truth with wit & authority and irresistibility. This will be so true & radiant & harmonious & whole that no reader will be able to turn away from it. Every reader will be magnetized & astonished & illuminated. But whatever my subject before I have reached the end I have been dragged down onto the turf by death & the tragic muse has made a fool of me once more. I cannot seemingly do anything about it. This damned impulse to sing the songs of suffering & sorrow that I so despise in others. It flows out of my pen into my notebooks. Every love I have ever tasted seems to mock my intentions. And I am talking about true love---not some fantasy crap of troubadour poets.

Where did my comic impulse flee to and how can I recover it? Ditto my once happy social gifts which brought guests flowing in my direction. These were never low-grade poets I now recollect. They were my friends or often became them swiftly. Teaching mates or school mates or employment mates, there was always abundant laughter & endless wit. No matter where I sojourned. Even at such a low-paying job as B. Dalton Bookshop where I worked after receiving an M.A. in literature & after teaching at the university. I was treated like the manager of the house and made minimum wage essentially. But Diane Moore & John Pace & I had an hilarious time playing at work. Now for the last 25 years it would seem the hilarity of life has been sucked out of my very psyche and I cannot even find a human being of any night---not one woman of remotely equal status. Not one! And my works lie scattered about my rooms unpublished & unappreciated. And the few times I have sent them out at least recently they are met with stupid opaque silences. Never anything remotely intelligent in response. People are obviously out of sorts. And there is no equitable system of justice at work guaranteeing equality of treatment in the realm of Writing. We are presently living under a totalitarian state posturing as "democracy.' And this includes the self-proclaimed liberal organizations at least as much as the right wingers. I found that out when I worked for Gray Davis against his recall by the reactionaries. There was no harmony or joy or humor in the place I volunteered my services---just an old dead pecking order where the in-people lord it over the out-people with no regard whatsoever as to intellectual qualifications or maturity or vision. What are we going to do---continue to fall to pieces? Or are we going to reorganize the Self & the institutions from which we derive those selves? Nietzsche had an interesting answer to this kind of question. His answer was: Amor Fati. Love of one's fate. That to Nietzsche was the ultimate attitude---the only satisfactory heroic response: to wish nothing other than it is. But I have yet to arrive at this ultimate sanctuary of fatal calm. There is something within me that says we have a greater destiny than resignation.

You know what else gets me about Nietzsche? He never got any women. Did he even care? I never hear any extended treatment of women and sex in his writings. The man was obsessed with ideas. Where in the hell can ideas ever take us? Well, I see I already said it. Yet the most beautiful woman I have ever known just lit up like a Christmas tree the first time I mentioned Nietzsche to her. And it's true. Nietzsche is a transforming figure. He does light us up with his very name. For he stands above it all. His beautiful tragic life somehow justifies true thinking & authentic philosophizing and giving a damn about anything at all. He wasn't afraid. And yes, he was probably right when he said that dangerousness is an essential element in anything that deserves to be called Art or Philosphy. This is what he meant by the Dionysian aspect of the psyche and the work of art. It cannot be avoided according to him without one making a retreat from reality and wholeness & radiance. No wonder I find this philosopher and original thinker so hard to shake. He made that beautiful woman laugh and give me that one and only look of true love.


RLG Copyright 2006

'A History Of Violence' (2005)

6-11-06 The Movie with Maria Bello & Viggo Mortensen


A rather hypnotic telling of the continuous 24-7-365 American Nightmare. A very erotic movie in spite of the violence some of which occurs on behalf of The Good Guys-----you & me. There is a sex scene in this movie that is compelling with Viggo going down on his wife (Maria) in a beautiful sexual seduction initiated by Bello. There is also another ferocious sexual episode with Viggo chasing Maria up the stairs & grabbing her & subduing her in a completely voracious act of possession and as it were a written statement of marital commitment past all the norms of mediocre matrimony. This is an edgy movie. And maybe it's still too nice. After all it gives us what we want so pantingly but have yet to get: the Happy Ending. But, by God, for better or worse you will find this movie watchable. You want to know what happens next. And we love the characters. When it's finally over you want just a little more of it. At least I did. This is Art not morality. And I love that final family scene at the kitchen table. I love every detail of that scene from daughter getting the plate to serve surprising late-arriving Viggo to every single item on the table. "The Last Supper?" HAH! The First Supper in quite some time!




RLG Copyright 2006

The Authentic Art

6-10-06 The Unpremeditated Act



It is not all those clever words arranged so neatly on The White Page. That is not the ultimate art. This is. My blind beautiful nonchalant slipping out of bed every morning. And then walking to the bathroom to draw a tub full of hot water. Go to the kitchen and get a cup of hot Vitamin C mixture and take that back to my bathtub. Put Joni Mitchell on my radio cassettte. Add some cold water to make my bath water bearably warm. I am set for my first major act of the day. And I tell you this is the purest Art. I know the other examples. Or many of them. I know the international lie posturing as art and being bought & sold as art. And being propagated so at the great & tiny universities where all the knee-jerk penny ante intellectuals hold forth and feed their pupils the same old crap generation after generation-----wrapped in death. It is horse crap. Art is the primordial act of the body. The most perfect primordial act of the body. Not just any old stupid bourgeoise habitual moronic posture. O No. It is the sacred act of love that only the truly honed body can perform to perfection. It might turn out to be a song. But never 50 songs in a row. Because all the song books & the other books are full of lies when it comes to Art. They tell you you need 95 percent garbage in your book to make sure the traces of gold can be distinguished from the crap. That's what the editors & professors say.

I had to kiss Nietzsche good bye as my chief counsellor. Nietzsche was great for Nietzsche but he's no good (that is to say no complete good) for anybody who came after. This is a new generation. Shakespeare & Sophocles are of no major or immediate use to you & me except as digression. Freud is cute but dead. And believe you me once you have done with the beauty of all the theories you know what I mean. It can't pull you through life. Because that beauty is dead in the water. Gone. Nietzsche was the greatest of his era. And still a marvellous entertainer. But it is too late to hide ourselves in the past. He was so far ahead of his time that even today most people don't understand him. But he is past save for all those fools who refused to encounter him in their first education. Here's what put me off concerning Nietzsche. He turned his back on women. He buried himself inside the volcano of history. And history is deadly as Nietzsche knew & proclaimed. But he served Dionysus. I agree in one sense it makes no difference how you get there---to the end of your particular journey. And Nietzsche insisted we follow the one and only heroic path of tragedy. There is no other heroic path. Everything else for Nietzsche is cowardice not only but out & out delusion. The very idea that you can live a life of comfortable family lies and fake dignity & go about your daily tasks with this totally unexamined "philosophy of life" this shallow counterfeit system of custom-worship and idolatrizing of your children-----you see what I mean. This is a form of self-damnation because it leaves out the whole world while replacing it with the cozy habits & comfortable lies of the Western family.

So like G.B. Shaw I saw the folly of the sentimentalization of the family---the lies that had women chasing men to become the authors of children. That was enough. No further tests of nobility or honor were required. Because the society had been so dragged down to the lowest common denominator of "family" that honor and dignity were impossible concepts that you only pulled out of the rag and bone shop of your memory on Memorial Day & 4th of July or the day your son or daughter was inducted into the U.S. Army to go off and murder some fake enemies some place in the world where America had yet to penetrate with its imperial system. You see what I mean? To murder other families just like yours only holding opposite customs with different names for their gods & devils. Then of course mothers and fathers mouthed the superficial words that all clients of fear & intimidation mouth: "honor" & "sacrifice" & "glory" & "sacred" and all the buzz words of flaming patriots everywhere. Dr. Johnson, the ultra conservative British Tory, was accurate when he said: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." But I say there is a greater refuge that precedes it. And that is the blind worship of the customs of the family that take priority to all other loyalties in the world including one's devotion to the truth---and I mean here the objective facts of all situations without regard to personal interest. Wars cease once we have that true regard for truth. Then you will examine the Palestinian situation in The Middle East in a true light rather than through the ugly prejudicial eyes of a bigot who believes he has special privileges because of his race. This holds true for every family situation without exception. There is only one undissimulating family-----The Whole Human Race. And there can be no special privileges handed out to members of particular families because they happen to declare themselves specially selected (by God) members of The Chosen Race---any chosen race. No individual family is exempt from The Law: One Family. As Hegel once wrote: The Rational is Real, The Real is Rational. We have yet to come to understand that. This business of one human race with its many members of numerous dispositions---one law holds us all together. So this world has no place for a Race State such as Israel presently is---nor its opposite. Democracy invites every tribe and religion to its table with absolutely equal rights.

It is hard to get rid of Nietzsche if you are a serious person who has ever considered his ideas. It is hard because our society is so loaded yet with the very same ills that brought Nietzsche to many of his conclusions. In other words the romantic or comic or eudaemonistic view of history is a difficult one to dispel from our thinking because tragedy just doesn't taste good to us comfortable relatively unreflective Western hedonists hiding behind the flag of one convenient religion or political party or another for the most part. We are all stuck on The Happy Ending. It just seems like the only "decent" thing we dare teach our children. Your children ask you what happens to people when they die and you must give them an answer that you feel is positive because isn't that what Dr. Spock said or the latest Wisdom Teacher. And so on. But of course the answer is no. You don't have to lie to your children about the difficult questions. You can tell them the truth as far as you know it. Which for me often is 'I don't know.' And I believe this is so for most people much of the time. I do not know the answer to your question. I promise you I shall try to find the correct answer if there ever be such. In the meantime let's be relaxed and consider the evidence together as one immense human family. Let's pool our efforts and share all the profits-----All the prophets!


RLG Copyright 2006

Joni Mitchell

6-8-06 The Elegant Blonde With The Face & The Legs


So sad that this morning I woke up inside the very bowels of Hell surrounded by the screaming lies of all the pretenders out there "doing the work of the human race." Yes---doing the deadly work of destruction which they call satisfying & important & part of the machine of feel-good gossip that oils the engine of prevarication that is running the world. A broken world of pretenders & liars & braggarts out there. And it makes no difference what party they belong to or what church they attend or the name of their God. They are so full of deceit it has eaten into the fabric of their souls also. Hell is a constant tissue of lies & delusions masquerading as truth & normality so that the authentic woman and man feel constantly on the fringe. For there is no life-giving reality left in the social amalgam. The world of belles lettres is so full of corruption it is hard some days to raise the pen of candor and Imagination because the stock brokers & the whoring politicians are pushing all the buttons. And the people I once looked to for honesty & whom even today by reflex I still look to are so full of self-satisfaction and blind damning self-importance they are incapable of examining their own state of being. It is not even a vague possibility. They all live in the air-conditioned Utopia that is the great International University which affords succor to "artists" & "scholars." This is such a tightly packed can of worms that it cannot be unsealed to anybody's lasting use or strength. Note: The principle underlying & supporting all conspiracies is their absolute unprovability.

Thus these insane mornings lately of intolerable loneliness---even hateful loneliness. And yet I have no woman I can call to my bed and my table & sofa. The few women I now vaguely "know" i.e. occasionally converse with are almost like phantoms to me. So distant that I have no contact with them outside the cafe. And I mean we have no Liveliness---no stretch & flexibility in our exchanges. This is not blaming anybody. It is describing factual conditions. But surely this is part & parcel of the program that needs to be busted into pieces so that we can all begin with fresh hearts The Game Of Love. For let's face it-----it's all a game. That is no insult. Better than taking everything so damned seriously. I am tired of the dyed-in-cement school of locked-in-hell determinism that seems to hold so many women & men inside unpromising marriages. Whether these are contractual marriages or merely for-all-practical-purposes "marriages" (partners glued together by habit not genuine affection)--what difference does it make if you are not free? And here I sit reading another unnecessary book about Elvis Presley loaded with high-sounding feelings and lofty expressions but in actuality merely spewing some more words and not giving the reader any balm. I note this even in the best books I have perused in the last few years. When I'm finished and have let the matter rest for a month or three nothing in my life has changed even an iota. Another utopian who has access to a publisher has let fly one more Thought Experiment upon the world & occasionally people begin to opinions as they have concerning "The Da Vinci Code."

Is this piece of provocation by Dan Brown sanguine? It is the latest exemplum of the public rage and appetite for fast food literature. It is painless. True knowledge costs effort & pain to acquire. Is "Da Vinci Code" actually transforming men & women into new awakened persons? Au Contraire. The whole world of propaganda obviously has been injected with another booster shot of adulterated b.s. And who is the cynic in all this? Not I. It is those who continue to spew & receive this unending flow of bogus "art" & "science" under the guise of Wisdom Literature 24-7-365. We need a new and absolute Renaissance. That means an unending one. The only true enlightenment & nirvana is ongoing. This also means nobody can do anything for anybody else until there is a Waking Up of The Self. All the cheap sex in the world is dead time until that awakening occurs. All the self-satisfied paychecks and the gibberish art. If it strikes no fire in individual persons in some unequivocal manner---it is not merely superfluous. It is poison & debris & a glut on you & me and this sentient earth that is screaming to you & to me to quit this torture & murder & rape of itself, Earth. Joni Mitchell asks the question of us: what are we going to do about this continuous slaughter of innocents across America & Iraq & that has unhinged American politicians & superjocks & the rock & rollers & movie stars & the owners---in short, the maniacal millionaires & billionaires that are turning this whole process once intended to be life into a funeral ceremony at the same moment they utter more cute cliches about their next unnecessary (luxury item) movie or ballgame or rock concert or book or lecture or sermon or war.


RLG Copyright 2006

Hollywood Hype

6-6-06 Let Them Eat Stones


It's time for the super rich to pay their dues. Starting at the top of the shit heap. Bush Cheney & their glamor boys who got all the tax write-offs while they stuffed all four pockets with dough they don't need and can't even use. Tom Cruise is a jerk. Just ask him. HE says that, not me. And his old lady got her reputation reading gossip columns while drinking the morning coffee. Let's even out The Loot. Make sure the folks at the bottom get the good stuff. The best food water clothing places of rest & education. The latter is the Big One. And here I leave my shoes at the door. The Great National Death Wish is a difficult foe for us who would enlighten those at The Yawning Abyss. I have no answers to those who despise education and the opportunity for Knowledge. That obviously includes most people in the USA. How many persons in the USA in the last 5 months have checked at least one book out of a public or private Library? How many persons in the USA this year have read at least one book that is not the Bible or other religious propaganda? It doesn't have to be a book, obviously. You can have books put into audio or video cassettes. Or you may be read-to by someone. The point is to receive knowledge in any and every form you can. If you have no hunger for true knowledge then you are sick. This a SICK nation that has been engaging in combat in foreign lands non-stop since the end of WWII. Yet the zombies who live here resemble nothing so much as a huge bunch of untethered robots hooked to Moloch's artificial teats. IGNORANCE is the crime behind POVERTY & DISEASE. Yet I see students blindly following professors down Blind Man's Bluff Alley accepting the same old platitudes because they issue forth from PH.D. We are in a NATIONAL SUICIDE STATE that sells poison around the clock in "respectable" grocery stores and 7-Elevens. Does anybody care OUT THERE in CYBERSPACE?

RLG Copyright 2006

Lady In Waiting

6-3-06 The Story of True Love

Hell is loaded with false
commercials. A veneer of
cosmetically engineered smiles.
Everything is wrapped &
coated over to deter the
senses from true knowledge.
Even the cars lie: they were
composed by men after all &
they have people inside them
that tell a different story from
that of the calm smooth metallic
epidermis of shining gods.
The people spat on the goddess
& poured more concrete for
sidewalks & cemeteries &
parking lots for the next batch
of stores & malls & morons.
Everybody was preparing for
The War---The Big One that
would eviscerate The Whole
World & bring this mess of
sprawling protoplasm to heel
once and for all. In the meantime
The Princess of Beauty slept in
glass every night dreaming of
her True Love in his bunk alone
by the smiling sea.

RLG Copyright 2006