on holiness

Warning: I'm about to go all sentimental or something. If you are squeamish, avert your eyes.


A few days ago, my friend Yael posted a humorous YouTube of meowing little kitty cats waiting to be fed. When they finally got served, things got real quiet....just deep, involved munching. That video has stuck with me. When those kitties were chewing and chewing, it seemed to me that all was, for a few moments, right with the world. A form of holiness seemed to hover over their little heads, and over my own soul.

This got me thinking about other forms of holiness. Besides those traditional kinds involved with ritual and religion. About what happens, occasionally, outside cathedrals, temples, and mosques. What happens simply and spontaneously out yonder, in the “mundane” world.

Simple things. Simple actions. Simple observations.

A mother or father preparing a meal. A mother or father teaching a child to tie shoes, or fly a kite. A husband or wife, in a moment of suspended time and suspended normality, glances at the beloved and senses an aura of precious individuality. A flower found blooming unexpectedly in late spring, just because it's there. The sound of rain in a summer's early morning. That rumor of autumn caught in August air. The wind through pines boughs before frost in November. The silence of snow, telling us the past and future are one. A friend sensing the need of another, though time and space intervene.


And little kitties filling their little bellies.

quantum rant

I used to get freaked out in a fun way over all that spooky-weird quantum mechanics stuff. Of course, one really needs to understand blackboard gibberish, needs to have been born with a mind hyper-flexing with math to properly fathom quantum mechanics. But not knowing stuff has never stopped me before from spouting off about stuff.

I think things have gone too far with quantum mechanics. It's a door that should not have even been opened. “That contradicts human curiosity and the compulsion to go wherever we go!” says probably everyone. I never pay much attention to “everyone,” anyway. So, I'm gonna rattle off my thoughts about this junk.

Some groovy practical things have come from exploring quantum theory (I can't think of any right now, but I'm sure there must be some nifty things). But at what cost? – parallel universes, string theories, the multiverse, zombie cats in boxes, vortexing brain tubules, freakin' wave-functions collapsing, photons giggling at us during their long-distance tangos...all kinds of wild shit. Guys and dolls in fancy universities are straining hard to make Einstein's General Theory of Relativity play nice with quarks and sub-quarks. That giant underground collider contraption in Europe sends pieces of reality zooming around and smashing (something tells me those physicists get off on the ultra-violence).

Some doors should remain closed. Because opening them turns us into quivering idiots.

It should be apparent to sentient beings that Quantum World is not Human World. Our brains ain't built for that. And what's on the other side of black holes has no bearing on our lives. Alice taught us that the Looking-Glass world is too damn freakish. The quantum world is where we stop and...whatever...is its own concern. We keep trying to punch holes into reality. To flush a god out into the open. We're so silly! The Big Bang? Who cares? Much better to leave some darkness intact. Darkness is where the mysteries live that allow us to make art. A good poem is worth more to the human spirit than a sack full of ancient cosmic radiation.

What's the motivation for funding research into all this exotic stuff? So technologies will be developed and turned into products for corporations. "4D television sets coming soon. Place your advance order!" So CEOs can build Taj Mahals on all five of their vacation homes.

Just because we don't know something doesn't mean we should. Hell...no one has a clue what consciousness is in the first place. And we're gonna use consciousness to figure out a theory of everything? Talk about the cart before the horse! “But maybe we'll finally understand what consciousness is when we break through the last quantum door or pull hard enough on 11th-dimensional strings.” And maybe pigs will build submarines and have fun zooming around under the ocean.

All I'm saying is this: we've seen enough to know that reality at the depth of quantum particles behaves in a way too bizarre for explanation...for understanding. We are pieces of reality. But reality itself will not allow pieces to see the overall image of the puzzle. That's my assertion, and it is fun to make it.

how I read Ezra Pound

How do you read him? Or do you read him? Yes, he turned into a fascist fruitcake. Yes, his CANTOS are mostly thick with gobbledegook. Or maybe not. I'm really too uneducated and too un-worldly to know for sure. Perhaps academics can penetrate just what the hell he was on about through all that stuff.

I don't look for sense in Pound's poems. I don't care what the poem is about. My sensibility doesn't work like that. The very idea of trying to understand the references or the meaning of a Pound poem has no purchase on my brain. I don't care! I don't want to know. I don't want to think when I read a Pound poem or any poem. I want to experience. I want to be entertained. I want to be zapped into another realm of being. A form of transcendence. And for me, no one provides that kind of experience like Ezra Pound.

Oh, there have been other great poets, from all eras. Many of them, like Keats, find a way into my soul. Many provide moments of transport. Even some contemporary poets are good enough to be entertaining, instead of profound and artsy. “Entertaining” – to attain entrance. That's how I would break it down. When a poem allows you to slip into another dimension. An aesthetic moment of stunning, soul-leaping quality.

As far as I'm concerned, no one has ever come close to Pound's flawless cadence, to his images that spiral into vortices of pure beauty.

I'm not going to provide any excerpts of Pound's poetry here. For one thing, I can't be bothered. And I think it's better that I don't. For those open to reading him, I prefer that you discover those special moments on your own. Yeah, you'll have to wade through a swamp of junk. But when the poem opens onto those splendid lines, the skies part, the stars tremble...and the gods reclining just out of our view are glad they made a world.

SPIRITS (a song by the Gothic Rangers)

Butterfly and Chinese wisteria flowers by Xü Xi

Sentience rides in a chariot reined by an illusionist.
Something within decides before you've thought of it.
Everything in the body movin' like a fugue of Bach.
Every nerve in the brain pushin' toward the crunch.
Every memory like a ghost from Pandora's trunk.
Ennui, sweet ennui, won't you bring a melancholy funk?

I dream about floods, nonplussed, how'll I brook that enigma?
I wake up to consciousness of being swallowed like Jonah.
When the crisis leads to all of your cards being trumped,
and you think you hear faint calls from the shell of a conch,
it is way past time for a subtle thirteenth month.
Ennui, sweet ennui, won't you bring a bittersweet pungency?

Spirits moving in the mist of morning
like Japanese blossoms a-floating,
like strange laughter in the wind chimes,
like a waterfall singin' old rhymes.

Spirits moving in between the seasons
like the origami art of creasing,
like oblique flight of black butterflies,
like the shadow's edge holds a hundred sighs.

Spirits, spirits, I will no longer turn my back on you.
Spirits, spirits, I'll wade in your waters that are dark and cool.

The dead shall be spoken to in cadential conversation.
The days shall be slant like the poems of Emily Dickinson.
I'll walk the Street of Crocodiles, listen to Schubert.
I'll fall in love however I wish, even flagrantly tendered.
I will gaze at the stars and think about all mortal creatures.
Ennui, sweet ennui, won't you be my tearful teacher?

Spirits moving in twilight of evening,
in the plumage of a peacock's preening,
in the rhythm of two lovers dancing,
in the eyes of that girl reading tea leaves.

Spirits, spirits, I will no longer turn my back on you.
Spirits, spirits, I'll wade in your waters that are dark and cool.


words & music by Robert T Buck



Tim & Robin

she turns me into words

Of splendors that hang
too far to touch, yet glow
in unformed thought...

of vague shapes at night
when the moon is overhead,
when like a pauper ghost it begs
words to fill its cratered depths,
words of golden coinage
from my minting tongue...

of all uncertain things
congealing round a grain,
to an iridescent pearling,
into an uncoiled time...

of what they mean I'll speak in lines

that flow with coward's courage.

It's that changing into words of things
made from fog and drunken clouds...
making something out of echoes
bouncing off of mirrored surface...

What great power you wield that pulls
substance from my vapored brain!

Yes, my words fall and tumble, turning
round the spiraled poles that sing
of northern snows and southern suns.
Coming through a foam of nothing,
dancing through my blood, those words!

Some break upon the page and fail.
Some make a line a thing to read.

I catch a glimpse of colored feelings,
then in stealth I reach to pillage
phrases guarded by stern angels,
phrases made from jeweled pieces.

Pieces of your hold on me,
pieces made of clay and magic,
glued together into verses,
shaped into a form of beauty,
made from what I am – language.


As lilies lean and time is bent
toward the West and evening light,
I turn instead to think of East
and feel me changing into worth.

START WEARING PURPLE

an emigration poem

HARD EYES


Our hummingbirds have returned
to the bright leaves of Quetzaltenango
and whisper direful tales
of a dread shape in El Norte.

Other nervous gods
pace in the temple mist,
keeping watch over maidens cooling
calloused feet in the jungle brook.

Jaguar speaks at night
in low tones that drift
through pink adobe walls
and stir our dreaming hearts:

“Arm yourselves with love for all beings,
even for the furious ants
that stream amid the rubber trees.
Arm yourselves with love,
even for that thing with hard eyes
shambling up yonder in El Norte.

Awake with innocence;
awake into frog-song;
awake with no ambivalence.

Light the cooking fire
and pack a few belongings.
El Norte is waiting
for you, my little jaguars.

Remember as you travel
into dark imprecations:

the spirit of the Jaguar
will soften those hard eyes;

the justice of the Jaguar
will melt its bloody coin;

the anarchy of the Jaguar
will intoxicate its masses.


Remember my words
and trust they will flow,
wet with magic,
into the arms and legs
of some righteous gringos.

Trust they will fall
and wash away the border,
like those spells of old priests
brought rain and new worlds.

Only for a brittle day
shall that thing in El Norte
suck out the wits of gringos.

His catastrophe is coming. That thing with hard eyes
shall be undone by compassion. My great purse
of bones I shall rend and spill out its power
of mushrooms and weeping ghosts.

Only Jaguar Law
shall not be broken,
my rule of awful celebration.

Only Jaguar Law
is as strong as obsidian
and will not shatter
in the jaws of hatred.

And my Dance of Life will amaze those hard eyes.

And my Chaos of Life will confuse the hard eyes
of that thing standing now in El Norte.”