“If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life. Even if you can't get together with that person.”

-Murakami

EPITAPH

"Now I'm not the brightest
knife in the drawer, but
I know a couple things
about this life: poverty
silence, impermanence
discipline and mystery

The world is not illusory, we are

From crimson thread to toe tag

If you are not disturbed
there is something seriously wrong with you, I'm sorry

And I know who I am
I'll be a voice
coming from nowhere,

inside--

be glad for me."

-Franz Wright

Our Converstion-Franz Wright

Pure gaze, you are lightning beyond the last trees
and you are the last trees’
past, branching
green lightning
of terminal brain branches
numened densely with summer’s
hunter color, as night comes on,
the ocean they conceal
gone berserk, wind still rising.
Pure seeing, dual vortex doors
to the blue fire where
sex is burned away, and all
is as it was and I am being offered
in your eyes, as in cupped hands,
the water of to never thirst again.
Again I turn away,
and the future comes, all at once
towering around me
on every side, and I am lost.
Pure looking, past pain
(this is promised):
we must have wed on poverty’s most hair-raising day
delighting, flashing risk, risk
unfailingly lighting the way,
anything possible
in that dissolving of seam
between minds,
no more golden time—
each step I took
the right step, words
came to me finally and finding the place
you had set for them,
once again
wrote themselves down.
Till true word’s anvil ring, and
solid tap of winged blind cane come,
I wish you
all the aloneness you hunger for.
That big kitchen table where you sit laughing
with friends, I see it happening.
And I wish that I could not be
so much with you
when I’m suddenly not; that
inwardly you might switch
time, to sleep
and winter while you went about
your life, until you woke up
well,
our conversation resumed.
Ceaseless blue lightning, this
love passing through me:
I know somehow it will go on
reaching you, reaching you
instantly
when I’m not in the way;
when it is no longer deflected
by all the dark bents, all
I tried to overcome but I could not—
so much light pulled off course
as it passed within reach, so much
lost, lost in me,
but no more.
Franz Wright

A Better Ressurection

I have no wit, I have no words, no tears;
My heart within me like a stone
Is numbed too much for hopes or fears;
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
A lift mine eyes, but dimmed with grief
No everlasting hills I see;
My life is like the falling leaf;
O Jesus, quicken me.

-Sylvia Plath

#Swaggernomore

The Cult of Individualism-Stefanie Krasnow, 13 December 2012

God died. The seas of metaphysics were limitless again. A new horizon of possibility opened for all beliefs and ideals. Values were re-evaluated, re-molded, re-constructed – and each new value was made in the image of its creator: the individual self.

We were “freed” to think whatever we want, say whatever we want and believe whatever we want – more or less, that is. What we got: apparent freedom, inalienable “individual” rights and in America, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Later came the prevalent I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude – with all its cool and edgy indifference. But I-don’t-give-a-fuck really means I-don’t-give-a-fuck-because-it-doesn’t-affect-me – this is the prevalent attitude of non-judgmentalism meets moral relativism. Sociologist Charles Smith found, after interviewing 230 young Americans, that the common response to standard moral questions (about rape, murder, theft) was one of bafflement. Young people lacked anything substantial to say about even extremely generic ethical questions. The default attitude was that moral choices are a matter of individual taste, where one’s morality is just a small piece of a carefully crafted individual self that one fashions at whim. “It’s personal,” many interviewees responded: “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say? Who am I to judge?”

When beliefs, aesthetic preferences and moral proclivities are all left to personal style, we have the hipster mentality, where nonchalant nihilism is cool. Indeed, the word “moral” itself is a dirty word amongst anyone outside the realm of conservatism. But the cult of individualism transcends politics: we are all in the cult. We’ve all had its invisible lens pulled over our eyes such that we perceive the world through a warped and myopic tunnel vision. Aiming to find and remove this lens is as futile as trying to bite your own teeth – for it is built into us.

The great myth of our time is the heroic pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps tale of His Majesty the Autonomous Self (and how convenient is it that this selfsame trope is the foundational myth capitalism needs most for its continued political survival). But this myth needs no creeds to perpetuate its dominance, for it is woven into the very fiber of our being.

We were all inculcated into the cult of individualism – by our families, who tell us we are special; by the vision of the American Dream; by schools, who demand that we specify fields; by advertising which compels us to carve out who we are by consuming certain commodities; by capitalism which teaches us that to succeed is to win in a competition of yourself against all others; and by the ever-growing new-age and pop psychology œuvre which tells us to create our own realities…

But if everyone were to believe themselves as the center of their own universe in which they create their own world, values and all meaning – civilization would quickly deteriorate into solipsism, narcissism, megalomania and/or collective insanity. So it comes as no surprise that “we” are in decline – for what is really wrong with the united “us”? There is no “we,” no “us,” just me, myself and I. This nation is not a unified whole but a cacophony of atoms, each spinning alone to their own idiosyncratic rhythm – and frequently colliding. The Declaration’s axioms are relinquishing their sacred aura, for the glue that holds us together is… well, it isn’t there.

The marriage of this egoism to rationality – the hubris that comes with our self-awarded status as the sole “rational animal” – this may be the fatal flaw of Western civilization, we just don’t know it yet… or do we?

With discoveries in neuroscience that expose us as primarily social beings, the ecological crisis which demands global cooperation in spite of differences, and amidst the peril of capitalism, which reveals the limits of a “survival of the fittest” social philosophy – the fabric of who-we-thought-we-were is being unravelled. It is like waking up from a long hallucination… disorienting, frightening, yet epiphanic… for what we are facing is nothing other than an identity crisis, one that forces us to create a new account of what it is to be human.

It’s uncomfortable to go against the grain of a totalizing and pervasive culture that reinforces a dog-eat-dog conception of human nature. It’s frightening to reconsider who you are in the midst of realizing that what you were taught all along was a lie – a myth exposed as a myth. But this is just what Buddhists have been saying for thousands of years, that the notion of a “separate self” is an illusion, and a dangerous one against which we must constantly exercise vigilance in order to correct this misperception and not forfeit our potential as beings capable of empathy and conscience.

Our concept of the individual self was born in the context of the 18th Century, at least, and it is reaching the end of its course. What is the new paradigm of human nature that is emerging in response to the world as it is in 2012 and 2013? Should we continue to carry the curse of unchecked individualism, it will be our undoing.

Princess Spiderman

Three poems by Alessandra Lynch

mademoiselles d’avignon

The one we look at as the one cursed

hangs her orange beast-face, a block for a breast



angular, vacant might-be eyes or maybe some shape

screwed to fit the composition of the idea, the abstraction,

the thing,

a smile or simply a slit through which you can draw

your ticket and enter the gate

(I’m afraid, sir, you’ll find only paint)



. . . he was using the vague semblance of women

to turn the century

crude nudes, meat too pink, too undercooked

to eat or flay or were they pre-flayed, tenderized

women dressing their hair, corkscrewed eyes

in the mirror, part-skin, part-stone

oh, but look at those tones!

—fit for the tomb—

a box with limited shadow

so there was limited light

around them





in another country



in another country the women are fed and fed by their men till dull

their bellies dragging from room to room

unceasingly fed lest they burn a little off lest they thin out

their perfect skin obscene as the moon-beyond-full lopsided wheezing

what are they doing growing enormous losing their chins nothing to keep

up no stiff lip mouths swallowed by their own flesh then eyes then nose

then

can’t smell his approach again





limp river: a dance



limp river she was stretched among men

& their bend their garbled hands stretched her

from stone to stone ribboned her around

the heron’s leg propped her

head on a stabbing rock

thrust fistfuls of minnows through her veins

& when they wrung her flesh

to drips the bank weakly bled

the deer stood around

in stiff registry

the audience clapped

Starbucks dances #zombiemacaroni

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