THE WHEELING YEAR

Plunging into the proud once bold steel spokes of Wheeling
on a boast, leaving self-identified low-brow intellectuals
thick on their heels, disciples of mediaplex back home
to guzzle odd beers, to call forth warm meals,
shutter fashion clues and scatter candle wicks,
cascading ambitions, creeping years and shell-soaked
beltway snobberies if not outright fears
only the duty-stoked people of paper bountiful
& class swearing beautiful can celebrate or poke
without laughing out loud
(Must calibrate gross weight or reluctantly take a dive...),
to increase their distance from the nothingness crowd
lost to brutal calories and raw educations
that rarely matter. Sometimes freedom
of choice is just a cigar.

The boy scout giving good turn a bad name
squats two seats away from the shadow's flame. To this end
I am greeted by
icy gray broken asphalt gristle patched with frosted gray cloud cover,
stuff of gray twigged mountain peaks and frisky billboards, soaking up
mere strands the soot life left to the rights of man in sixty year exodus,
sealed in a book mapping tough cookie Norwegian painter Edvard Munch,
(recently purchased in Washington and also found in local library, with lime)
to his destiny of soul-watching inched in regional nee personal strife,
the contact spy, the imperfected feeling magus,
the mystic's eye bent to March Madness
and the gnat gusts of George Mason's run
smack past the heavily brokered UCONN largess
predicted here on this page at patriotic halftime
with the same breath as "Pop Mike, Pop Mike" fun
veers the seer from Connecticut Avenue to Main Street
invoking play by play off the curve, via broadband, the long hike,
the voice of God dead or alive voting one sorry syllable at a time
with these heavy feet, with these heavy heavy feet
chanting "Long live the Mountaineers!"

Early thoughts among leafless trees recall jobs lost on a dime,
mantles of black gold from ancient burial grounds that fed
the former veracity, stolen with a few strokes of ink and power
of law but that's sparing a crime, spoiling the climb (social)
more shame in responding to a coal miner's lament
however sublime. Ignorance is egregiously polled,
and tallied like a certain hour where uncertainty takes hold
but will never sop these wet K Street cement trucks
with an exchange value that will surpass the damage of
wasted years looking for evidence of American life elsewhere
among the stark solar systems and pigeonholes of our enemies.

This rambunctious exile with single wave of arms deal
might have dropped anchor in Cumberland, M-D
some many miles franker (with escalating gas prices) still to the east,
instead, in exit from the nation's capital in the land of Nod,
brave hardly but where art thou hididen in tattered cards,
revealing seven maybe eight convalescing spirits,
as thy wholesome West Virginia Left Bank energies
emerge among fading old mills and abandoned
century old cigar warehouses,
nail factories and one fairly new hockey arena
skimming along the once mighty Ohio River
banks and bards, shanks and shards
like some Indian giver (that old tale)
ignorant of industrial bed safeguards
perfectly, perfectly American...

and I too, have come to recapture Victorian Wheeling metaphor,
ripped from ancient headlines in the days of Zane and Fort Patrick Henry
speaking the spectacular language of oldest and largest—
magnificient suspension bridge still in use, American Legion Post #1
recalling the 1940s, the unvarnished glories of the Capitol Music Hall,
where thy current president—Bush II—delivered another Iraqi hoot
hosted by the Wheeling Chamber of Commerce such as it is,
(commerce by all indications is not the city's strong suit)
before whizzing past in the familiar ironclad motorcade
black to the gills, in tight with street throngs of mere dozens
confused but supportive of Orwellian nation-building doubletalk
(a mere handful of detractors showed up with predictable signs)
hurrying to greet proven Pittsburgh past any sad assassins
hiding in the vacant ruins of the stunted and the shade
just two short days after my own arrival,
recalling former feasts of this harsh Steeler Nation
now in fester.

Victory to explore this old house of Wheeling,
home of some thirty thousand souls nested in the airy hills
to examine the lost fortunes of free elections and free speech,
to score on the fading linebackers godwilling for minimum of one year,
axiom by axiom in a tutelege of the expatriate, I am after all, a city boy—
saith the tainted poet, painteth the awkward painter...
Drawing upon the strength of history wanting a chance,
success and sure loss of dead weight left in the District of Columbia
where special populations prove numbers are anything but...
(absence of voting rights, questioning the dance)

But just as the petty thief draws near,
there is visionary hope in new places, new perspectives, new choices.
Infrastructure—civic, civil, and yearning awaits.

[ 2006, Wheeling, WV }

EVIDENCE OF NEW YORK ALREADY

A form of rural perfection, Avondale
Estates, Georgia, hitching a ride to meet Ginsberg,
the Big Apple gizzard, it’s a scorcher, my balls sweaty,
hair down to my chin blondie, no Avondale mistakes,
no women to crack my halo or burn their bras,
hugging, sucking, tucking rugged red clay
construction sites bare to eyes without scruples,
New Worship cornerstone erections in latter days, oh thanking
nine heavens for seven elevens and the beliefs of Hippocrates,
and a beveled glass art-factory, original, vaginal, marginal cool
Georgia State Highway Patrol office, town of Avondale
protected from itself by gunpowder deterrents, thanking
God of Billions, the courtyard sports manger silver lining
flagpole, vacant of colored cloth, yet commands slaves
of the Texaco Star, guts holding down the fort,
stocks and bonds and spies, oh thanking
the Amoco Boy—our unwilted concern
while I beg to swallow cold fountain water kept
safe in your keeping—heard on the radio, the Heat God
killed eight suffering unair-conditioned zekes in the state
of the Cracker last week. Then I left the road one more
time before setting sail with my nearer to thee Eagle Scout thumb.
Left to get a Big Mac and dry fish sandwich. Left
me with fifteen cents and only 873 miles
to Manhattan where I hoped to share my book
of dead poems with a famous asshole.

[1983, Atlanta, GA ]

NOT YOUR FATHER'S NEW MATH

Part I. Memorizing Each Postulate By Morning
I am a panic of NONE.
I am a race of NONE.
I am a language of NONE.
I am a religion of NONE.
I am a law of NONE.
I am a God of NONE.

I am a panic of ONE.
I am a race of ONE.
I am a language of ONE.
I am a religion of ONE.
I am a law of ONE.
I am a God of ONE.

I am a panic of ALL.
I am a race of ALL.
I am a language of ALL.
I am a religion of ALL.
I am a law of ALL.
I am a God of ALL.

Part II. Crossing the Equator With Dirty Weapons
I am a panic of 40, sixty-four million, over thirteen billion served.
I am a race of 40, sixty-four million, over thirteen billion served.
I am a language of 40, sixty-four million, over thirteen billion served.
I am a religion of 40, sixty-four million, over thirteen billion served.
I am a law of 40, sixty-four million, over thirteen billion served.
I am a God of 40, sixty-four million, over thirteen billion served.

I am a product of HERE AND NOW.

[ 2007, Washington, DC ]

THE SITUATIONISTS AT LARGE

Originally published on November 12, 1997

I haven't been keeping up with these dudes since it became a book selling booth and then something's screwed up where I'm on the list twice (get everything twice) but can't respond or unsubscribe because of unexplained cosmic glitch. However, I decided to peek and see you getting mutilated by some humanoid. I can't say if I agree or disagree because I don't have the whole story but the hostility is acidic. I know, however, that you can take it and I'm sure you're just laughing on this.

Landry, I've thought about your newsgroup problem. How does this sound? Pick out what you find pertinent, disregarding the rest. Spud really doesn't monitor the newsgroup. It's automated. You signed up beaucoup months ago when you had another address. In order to UNSUBSCRIBE, you have to UNSUBSCRIBE with that same address. You get duplicates sometimes because I forward you stuff and the newsgroup forwards you the same stuff because you are still on the list. Your company E-mail server still accepts mail from your old address. Unsubscribe twice using both your current E-mail address and your former, then SUBSCRIBE afresh should you still be interested in receiving the list. Other than that I'm clueless. Yes, I am laughing, saddened by this sorry state of affairs, but laughing nevertheless. It's my only refuge.

I want to note that I believe that a lot of the people on this list or graduate students or something and am disappointed at the thin intellectual conversation spewing from their lip-fingers. How sad. I would love to get paid to spew. They don't know what they possess. Looks like academia is nothing more than a booksellers guild where they reshape sentences of sentences written about thinkers of the past. Who's doing the original thinking?

Not this crew. That is certain. I think I am wiggling towards the next wave of logic, but I can't get a word in edgewise. It's funny because I never mention g-o-d, but these people truly run for cover whenever I quote anything remotely Hebrew, even though I've tried to point out over and over again the wholesale ransacking and theft of the literature by Marx and Debord. Dead silence or the petty voice you quoted below is all these "great thinkers" can manage. Strange, I didn't receive that unsigned text. Maybe Spud has indeed axed me from the group.

Was Marx the highest point intellectual thought could attain? I keep waiting for the next thing, the next evolution on the food chain of an attempt to organize the human condition but I see only rehash rehash rehash. Art is rehashing cubism with slightly different variations. Literature is dancing around the macabre Faulkneresque trip into the dark side of family life with modern therapy heavy judgment thrown in. Music is nothing but push button computer masturbation.

Well, the "next" thing was Debord. Of this I am positive. A very good starting block for this clearinghouse of competing ideologies swarming around like angry hornets with an endless supply of stingers. However I seek not to clarify but to modify Debord, present a plan of action (or action by inaction) for which we stand. But of course these yahoos are too busy worshipping at the altar of Debord to ever "say" anything much less something of substance. It's the same numbing stagnation of thought they claim the spectacle creates and holds the world as hostage, that they practice. Duh, what a waste of fine godfodder, oops, I finally used the word.

Your text above describes what Debord was howling against. He was aware of the rehash, and wanted to "revolutionize" everyday life, but I believe he failed rather miserably*, just as Jesus** did in his own revolutionary pose (although his effects are as well-documented as this modern messiah***), but GODSEAK on the other hand IS very much alive conducting his press upon the stage of HISTORICAL TIME, a very very very Debordian phrase that seems to have only one meaning for all that I can uncover: the spark that leads to the Len Bracken generation's own personal civil war. Debord was an athiest; Bracken confesses the same.

Civil war is the great god they worship. Capitalism the devil. Their own historical time, their own dirty war in the name of the zeroworker theory interlaced with an abrupt dismissal of all things proprietary, a ridiculous idea of course betrayed by their own hypocrisies. I say, like Zachariah, the great and terrible day is coming in nuclear spades but woe to those who would wish for its arrival, especially to those by whose hands it is accelerated. Of course I am dismissed as a mere fool and a preposterous godlover. It seems to me they actualize, accentuate, and love the Great and Terrible Lord of Theosplatz more than I do, but that's just my opinion, uncouth, unhip as it is. The mark of the beast. The fall of mercantilism. No copyrights. No work. Hot BOG & BOR topics****, but all these wankers can do is strut about in their task to mark me as declasse. They claim a desire to elevate the man without quality but when I present a self-portrait of that very man without quality they attack me with strange wordy affairs contrary to the schematic of universal understanding, and sink into the abyss, well-deserved victims of their own quality.

Aaah, the wonders of the intellect . . .

A few notes:
* in his exclusionary practices
** in his inclusionary practices
*** in this case I see Debord as Barrabas, and still no messiah on the horizon.
**** BOG (Book of Genesis), BOR (Book of Revelation)

GT

"I see pieces of men marching trying to take heaven by force . . ."
-Bob Dylan

SOMETHING I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION

Originally published on October 1, 1996

Hope you don't think that you have figured out the whole of my philosophical slant in these few paragraphs to have blitzed your eBox in recent days. The more I write the less I am confident any real communication can exist outside of fuzzy logic. A thousand pages later, and there is still room for clarification, redundancy be damned. However any aspiring philosophy must start from a foundation of concrete suppositions. The GT foundation rest solely upon a single concept. I am nothing in a crowd, and only something by the gift of God. The concept of God working through the individual rather than institutional flavoring is not unique to me, nor is it universally accepted, but I suspect I can certainly in the face of the de facto collective spirit of this contemporary age put a uniquely 21st century spin on this ancient wisdom, and shed some light on a problem which pits humanity not against itself but against the old demons of the past, and in a word, is sin. In an early poem (circa 1981 of mine) I accuse Lucifer as the author of time. All of nature's manifestations are both inspired and corrupted by the torque of time's perspective. We work finally within this framework of time, but we should suspect its motives.

Perhaps the best model I can use to relate what I mean when I unilaterally dismiss collectivism as the prime mover of spiritual and physical matter, and thus, an unrivaled conductor of truth is the marriage, or lover's problem. I suggest that no matter how close we want to become the mirror of our partner, or merge dissonance to create a more diversified whole, an irreparable separation is evidenced against us. While ancient teachers suggest that the two become one, this metaphor has rarely been illustrated in fact. History as failure in this regard has shown a bigotry against this unification of two into one. And if two cannot become one, how can dozens, thousands, millions, billions simply and without fracture? Thus my point. Even the individual is plagued and ultimately corrupted by opposing forces. One may argue this diversity strengthens the individual, and thus the whole of thousands can thus be strengthened by this diversity, I hold with the old proverb that a house divided cannot long stand. This approach say other, less insightful accusers, steers me into the traditionally conservative camp. I will not reject the label out of hand, but I hardly think anarchism the way I define it can be held up to the conservative light without displacing a few fundamental concepts of both.

My slant of personal responsibility leads to acceptance of a status quo. I am not talking about doing nothing to change the world in which we live, but I am talking about unholy alliances to the threat to personal autonomy. We are not born with natural or civil rights outside of the social contract. Too many folk presume on the basis on envy and tokenism that what Joe Blow possesses (however gained, and true, evil has laways lent a helping hand to so-called progress), Jim Jackoff is entitled to the same. The conspiracy of universal equality while a feel good aspiration is not played out in reality bytes either. None are free from the taint of evil, and yet we struggle for greener grass in precisely the same spirit that made the grass seem greener to begin with. Competition and greed. Nothing satisfies us when we know someone else has something that seems better than what we have. The marketdriven culture (just as Marxism predicts) is a vicious line of defense against human nature and natural forces from the outside. But the "clock" can never be turned back without catastrophe. This is human nature corrupted by greed and envy. Doublespeak and unmasked falsehood crowd into every arena stealing from the human spirit every good motive as time's own author extracts a token penalty for every semblence of progress. Confusion multiplies itself with human numbers. We do not argue good versus eveil. We argue me verus them. Confusion versus confusion. Good and evil.

Here's a clarifying sidebar. The year,1982. Mid-summer. Midtown Atlanta. A few days before I had been approached by two strangelooking womenabout my own age just outside the Omniplex. I was 26. Teresa was defiantly overdressed in several layers of streetdrag wool skirting and sweater. I do not recall the other woman's appearance anymore because it was Teresa who gave me her phone number and the Moonie tract.

For the next two weeks we saw each other daily. I visited the Unification House in the quaint residential Little Five Points neighborhood. She came by the Howell House highrise apartment I was then sharing with my mother for tea and crackers. It was actually my mother's place, but I stayed with her for six weeks upon returning from Corpus Christi where I lived for twenty months prior. We traversed the city on foot for five or six hours every day, she in low keyed proselytizing mode, me in a gentle informative resistance.

On this particular day we crossed West Peachtree and turned down Peachtree Main along the infamous corner now revitalized but on this day was still marked by the Dunkin Doughnuts and just beyond, the Christian Science Reading Room. Teresa I knew already, was a product of the 1960s subcultural elite. I knew for instance that she had spent her adolescence in a nudist camp, and that background emerging from the fog of unbearable shame had driven her to the neurotic devices of concept-defying heavy clothing and long frizzy hair in which she hide her dark but very attractive facial lines. I knew she confessed great comforts in the teachings of the Moon organization even when she found them lacking, evident in a few details I will save for another time.

But on this day she was questioning me had I read the two or three theological booklets she had given to me a day earlier. These rather thin booklets were published in a very simplistic styling, oversized footprints, large typefaces, and hordes of colorful pictures. This literature literally reminded me of the kiddie biblestory volumes I had voraciously gobbled up as a child, only thinner. They were workbooks, with a quiz at the end. I had not read them. Confident I already knew all the answers I had simply put them aside meaning to take a half hour to skirt through the topics just to meet my obligations to Teresa, but at this point I hadn't. Besides I had loaned Teresa a thousand page theological tome called the URANTIA BOOK that had been given to me by a former lover a couple of years before. I never got it back, but of course after admitting that I had not read the booklets but I intended to do so, Teresa countered with predictable and similar remarks.

These confessions led me straight to the point I wanted to make to her. Everybody believes their own version of the truth is self-evident and required for everybody under the sun. "Oh but if you would just read these..." she countered. I again repeated the premise that all works claim the truth, and great works have great legions of followers. Nothing is proved right or wrong except in the minds of believers of this or that truth. Whatever Teresa might claim, Johnny Can't Read has a contradictory truth. Jimmy Can Read has another. Evereybody's running around in this crazy attempt to convince everybody else that they are wrong. Teresa smiled at this empasse. Just then we were rounding the corner. I spied the Christian Science Reading Room and asked her if she wanted to dip into there for a few minutes, cool off, rest our feet...

She acquiesced with a sweet okay. We strolled to the reading room. This was not a very large place, fitted into a space nestled in the vee between two major thoroughfares converging at roughly a thirty degree angle, but it was airconditioned and pleasant and waiting for us. I found a chair a few feet from the bulk of the library. Teresa sat in a chair on a perpendicular wall where she was soon approached by an old woman of the faith. They were soon engaged in conversation that barely rose above a whisper. I thought nothing of this, and heard only occasional snippets as I dug into a random book I had pulled. This was a libraaaaaaary after all. Bits and pieces of their chat floated over to me. I was surprised to learn Teresa had been born a third-generation Christian Scientist. Seemed this was a girl with quite a checkered past. They argued in ever polite tones. The woman persisted. Fifteen to twenty minutes into this routine I overheard the words good and evil, and some reference to the edenic tree of knowledge of good and evil.

That was when I spoke up. "Does not the tree of the knowledge inspire knowledge of the DIFFERENCE between good and evil? I inquire of the old woman who to this point had only nodded a respectful hello to me upon entering the room. "Yes, you can say that. Different translations render it a little bit differently, but you can read the CORRECT rendering in OUR books." I replied that I had to confess that I did not know the difference between good and evil. Fire immediately plunged into eyes. "Oh you certainly do, and if you do not, you can read it in our literature. You only have to READ it to understand," she growled. I countered again that men for thousands of years have argued over these things.

I am not sure what I said next but I drew upon current ecological and ecopolitical concerns or some matter such as this, to give a few examples of what I meant by my own confusion with this complex issue of good and evil. She flew into a unmistakable rage, "Oh you are just a troublemaker. You'd better leave. Right now I say. Just leave, and don't come back. I mean it. Don't come back!" I returned the book I still had in grip to its rightful place, and said not another word. Teresa was ushered out alongside me. As the glass door swung close, the pinchedface woman, probably in her late sixties, muttered the word troublemaker one more time just in case I had missed the point.

On the street again I immediately sensed what had just happened and inquired of Teresa, "Do you know what just happened?" She didn't know what I meant. "Do you remember what we were talking about just before we stepped inside?" Again she couldn't piece her memories together. I played it out for her. "We were trying to convince each other to read each other's books. I told you that everybody believed they already had the truth, IF ONLY OTHERS WOULD READ OUR BOOKS."

Teresa's face was beginning to show a glimmer of recognition, but I continued. "Then we step inside and you are barraged by yet another somebody who does exactly what I predicted. It's in THEIR book, THEIR truth, THEIR certainty that all life must bow..." Was this the stroke of God himself drawing us into the Christian Science Reading Room for an example of divine truth, I put to her as we strolled on toward downtown on this sweltering summer afternoon.

She finally burst into a rapt amazement, profoundly moved by my explantions, and was giddy that God had shown her a sign. Otherwise nothing would have occurred to her. No threads ever match up. Nothing is connected. An intellectual zombie I'm afraid is all so many of the most devoted folks on earth appear to be. Teresa didn't suffer a loss of faith with that event, but I was overwhelmed by the finger of God in this point blank proof of what I knew to be oh so true...

We are all fools in this game nobody can win.

OPEN LETTER TO A FRIEND

Sasha - yes, this is a very sad situation, the sheer inhumanity of men who claim to know better. And did you know who's committing this massive genocide in Darfur? It's Arab and Arab-influenced Muslims killing, starving, maiming black African Muslims in a sustained action of unobfuscated racism. Malcom X was dead wrong about Islam. No matter which way you slice the historical cake, Islam is the engine which drives Arab imperialism, supremacy and totalitarianism. And George W. Bush is in bed with these Arabs. That's what turns my stomach. America and her economy is being held hostage to Arabian petrol dollars. If the Saudis convert their billions of US DOLLARS into Euros, as I understand it has threatened to do, and as pesky Iran has already done, it could within days or mere weeks collapse, or most certainly severely thwack the US economy.

And what about Kosovo? Have you kept up with the recent news pouring out of there, of falsified reports, confessions of news agencies, et cetera? It seems America backed the wrong victims in that war too. Milosovic apparently wasn't as bad as we in the West thought, or was led to believe as he fought tooth & nail to stem the Islamic atrocities in that cobbled together hell, and was deemed to be spoiling the best laid plans of the Eurabian cartel, so he had to pay and pay big for his rebellion. Nearly ALL the world's hot spots feature aggressive Muslims tearing into old cultures, demolishing temples, whole peoples and instituting the horrendous sharia law, but the mainstream media, and our leaders tell us a different story. No more guilty than America, they say. The puzzle doesn't make sense when analyzing the stories THEY TELL US, but when the blinders and patronizations are stripped away, the puzzle suddenly appears as whole cloth.

There's something rotten, but it's not in Denmark this time, it's in that woeful caliphate-in-the-making...

And it's going to get far worse before it gets better because we are all being whipped and cowered by the mere hint of bootstraps and pursestrings...

Of course, I am merely stating my opinion based on the facts and the gravesites I have known, and I'm sticking with this opinion until I am convinced otherwise.

Moral equivalency is a crock, political correctness a false flag, and equality before the law a ridiculous sham. It's time we realized that the world is in deep trouble, and that there are far more dangerous people and gruesome ideologies ready to ruin your day as soon as they gain an edge, and whose own guilt has flooded the moon with more blood than meets the average eye, but I agree with you.

Sin is sin. God is God. And we'd better damn well take notice. However, I also believe in what is called reality on the ground. In my world, liberalism right out of the box is not a synonym of righteousness, but most certainly neither is the emblematic conservativism of those who tend to rest on laurels and bank the remainder. But each concept must rise and fall one idea at a time. So frankly, I have never considered myself a liberal, nor ever a conservative. It's actually rather funny to watch people try to presume my stripes just by looking at me, or hearing a position I have taken which conflicts, or agrees with their own. I am of course judged "obviously you are one of us" which quickly turns to "oh I knew it, you're on the other side" depending on the irstwhile persuasions of the person doing the pigeon-holing.

The truth of life is painful, but how does this long rant of Gabriel's complete the plea for compassion while sipping from the cup of realpolitik of your own blog entry, dear Sasha? I suppose I am merely prompting you for the proper reaction to that most obvious of questions:

How does one indeed change the world by healing all that ails others one sacrificed toy at a time? If I gave away or burned everything I have grown to cherish, and wandered the streets, alone, naked, hysterical, could I then convince you to do this as well? Should I choose to live simply, how simply should that be? Would any of this change the world when all the great songwriters of our generation have failed to accomplish this? What indeed are we really to do when we can't convince each other that we love them without asking them to follow us or some equally hazardous player into a ditch, a blind alley, or an extremely painful death, of which the words martyrdom or hero no longer apply?

I am at a loss to resolve this mystery. But I am strapped to the deck of its shipwreck, and burned to the core by its consequences...

Yours in irreducible signs,

Gabriel

SELF FLATTERY AS SELF LOATHING

Originally published on October 4, 1996

OR ART WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE TAKEN OFF THE SHELF. This morning I awoke at 10 AM after channel tobogganing until the wee moments of early. Fifteen seconds into my new morning a power spike kills the fan and several scattered appliances around the house. Well, not killed, but put down for a sleep while men at work raid the street for quick fixes.

In the past thirty days this is the fourth major brownout. Hope it doesn't spread to the computer room as I write this. Timing is everything. Lucifer, the author of time. Speaking of Lucifer this morning I also pick up Blum's book, A HISTORY OF THE JEWS for the first time in weeks and was juiced by the page I'd bookmarked when last I read from it. But first, I didn't finish my Liberty Lobby piece the other day. Kevin Kreider is an old drinking pal, part of the Jack, Rob, Rich, Daryl, Dennis, Tim, Jim, Gabriel, BS routine at its most regular interval say from the Forestville warehouse era of 1992-1993. He & Rob Bussius (now married and serving Uncle Sam as a soldier stationed in Hawaii) have worked at Liberty about fifteen years between them. Young Kevin is Jewish, has writerly aspirations, and wife just had their first child. We call him Young Kevin because of his slight but handsome stature.

When I mentioned to Tim about the D'Sousa reference to Liberty I plunged into some speculation of Kevin's employment there, tossing out the line that no doubt he's a planted spy who reports back to the B'nai Br'ith Anti-Defamation League. I've been down there a few times with the two boys of Liberty, even unsuccessful applying for a job there myself at the insistence of Bussius, and reinforced by Avril Shipman, Tim's kindly mom, who gave me a contact name. They weren't hiring was the response I got over the phone. I dropped the chase, but it's a quaint friendly office located at Third and Independence, SE, right in the heart of Capitol Hill, so to speak. Jarred to realize that a barely concealed form of white supremacy was not only alive and kicking in this raging country, but, well, how damned really close I am to it, I begged the question then, and remain unchanged in my opinion, uh, why not? In the knowledge of all these other rather militant groups in opposition, any other opinion would be stupid...

A twisted question of personal purpose keeps me near and far on the issue of race to say anything on the topic. Silence nobody wins. While discussion is hushed up and immediately brands me a foul racist type, yes Lynn, from the south. Go figure, the lemmings.

Page 262 from AHOTJ: "It was the sages who let the devils into Judaism. The difficulty was, of course, despite the Bible's condemnation of sorcery, and despite the Judaic belief that all actions were willed by God alone, ruling out any kind of dualism...

"There were not many devils in the Bible, but they did exist: Mevet the death-god, Lilith the child-stealer (sometimes an owl), Reshev the plaugue-god, Dever, another sickness-god, Belial, a sort of devil-commander, satan, leader of the anti-God forces, Azazel, the scapegoat-god of the wilderness. So the invasion of Judaism by devils over the period of 150 BC to 300 AD had some prcedents. Needless to say, [High Priest] Hillel could understand devil language too. Devils varied greatly, though according to Issac of Acre, they all lacked thumbs. Some, like Satan and Belial, were formidable, serious...

"To comabt these devils, an army of angels came into existence. These too had biblical sanction in some cases. Angels like Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Metatron had special alphabets, derived from ancient cuneiform writing or obsolete Hebraic scripts, the letters often containing small circles which looked like eyes. These letters were put on amulets and other charms to magic away devils. Or they could be driven off by pronouncing special combination of letters. One such was the name of the devil in Aramaic, which was given as abra-cadabra...

"Letter combination magic, performed by using the secret names of God and the angels in special formulae, was known as 'Practical Kabbalah'. In theory only men of great sanctity could, let alone should, exercise this white magic. In practice, protective charms were mass produced and circulated freely in the ghetto. There was also black magic, invoked by manipulating the 'unholy names'. According to the Zohar, the sources of this forbidden magic were the leaves of the Tree of Knowledge in the Book of Genesis...

"The most stupendous piece of magic was the creation of a golem, an artificial man into which a ba'al shem, or Master of the Name, could breathe life by pronouncing one of the secret divine names according to a special formulae. The idea derives from the creation story of Adam, but the actual word occurs only once in the Bible, in a mysterious passage in the Psalms. However, Talmudic legends accumulated around the golem. Jeremiah was said to have made one. Another was made by Ben Sira. From the fifteenth to the seventeeth centuries the notion gathered force, so that the ability to make a golem was attributed to any many of outstanding sanctity and kabbalsitic knowledge. The golem was brought to life to perform a variety of tasks, including defending Jews from their gentile enemies. In theory, a golem came to life when God's secret name, with the letters arranged in the correct order, was put into its mouth; it was deactivated by reversing the the name. But a golem occasionally got out of hand and ran amok—thereby generating a new layer of terror-tales..."

As the hollow man of TS Eliot, we are all golems, and the acronymics, ah ha! The soup is always spoiled by too few or too many cooks...

The question being, had I already read the page before bookmarking, or had I finished the previous page, bookmarked the next page as is usually my habit in this matter, or is all this only so much blarney, irrelevant to anything anybody anywhere needs to know? Just asking...

EAST TO WEST

Originally published on October 1, 1996

Hope you don't think that you have figured out the whole of my philosophical slant in these few paragraphs to have blitzed your eBox in recent days. The more I write the less I am confident any real communication can exist outside of fuzzy logic. A thousand pages later, and there is still room for clarification, redundancy be damned. However any aspiring philosophy must start from a foundation of concrete suppositions. The GT foundation rest solely upon a single concept. I am nothing in a crowd, and only something by the gift of God.

The concept of God working through the individual rather than institutional flavoring is not unique to me, nor is it universally accepted, but I suspect I can certainly in the face of the de facto collective spirit of this contemporary age put a uniquely 21st century spin on this ancient wisdom, and shed some light on a problem which pits humanity not against itself but against the old demons of the past, and in a word, is sin. In an early poem (circa 1981 of mine) I accuse Lucifer as the author of time. All of nature's manifestations are both inspired and corrupted by the torque of time's perspective. We work finally within this framework of time, but we should suspect its motives.

Perhaps the best model I can use to relate what I mean when I unilaterally dismiss collectivism as the prime mover of spiritual and physical matter, and thus, an unrivaled conductor of truth is the marriage, or lover's problem. I suggest that no matter how close we want to become the mirror of our partner, or merge dissonance to create a more diversified whole, an irreparable separation is evidenced against us. While ancient teachers suggest that the two become one, this metaphor has rarely been illustrated in fact. History as failure in this regard has shown a bigotry against this unification of two into one. And if two cannot become one, how can dozens, thousands, millions, billions simply and without fracture?

Thus my simple and undeniably old-fashioned point. Even the individual is perpetually plagued and ultimately corrupted by opposing forces. One may argue this diversity strengthens the individual, and thus the whole of thousands can thus be strengthened by this diversity, I hold with the old proverb that a house divided cannot long stand. This approach say other, less insightful accusers, steers me into the traditionally conservative camp. I will not reject the label out of hand, but I hardly think anarchism the way I define it can be held up to the conservative light without displacing a few fundamental concepts of both.

My slant of personal responsibility leads to acceptance of a status quo. I am not talking about doing nothing to change the world in which we live, but I am talking about unholy alliances to the threat to personal autonomy. We are not born with natural or civil rights outside of the social contract. Too many folk presume on the basis on envy and tokenism that what Joe Blow possesses (however gained, and true, evil has laways lent a helping hand to so-called progress), Jim Jackoff is entitled to the same.

The conspiracy of universal equality while a feel good aspiration is not played out in reality bytes either. None are free from the taint of evil, and yet we struggle for greener grass in precisely the same spirit that made the grass seem greener to begin with. Competition and greed. Nothing satisfies us when we know someone else has something that seems better than what we have. The marketdriven culture (just as Marxism predicts) is a vicious line of defense against human nature and natural forces from the outside.

But the "clock" can never be turned back without catastrophe. This is human nature corrupted by greed and envy. Doublespeak and unmasked falsehood crowd into every arena stealing from the human spirit every good motive as time's own author extracts a token penalty for every semblence of progress. Confusion multiplies itself with human numbers. We do not argue good versus eveil. We argue me verus them. Confusion versus confusion. Good and evil.

Here's a clarifying sidebar. The year,1982. Mid-summer. Midtown Atlanta. A few days before I had been approached by two strangelooking womenabout my own age just outside the Omniplex. I was 26. Teresa was defiantly overdressed in several layers of streetdrag wool skirting and sweater. I do not recall the other woman's appearance anymore because it was Teresa who gave me her phone number and the Moonie tract. For the next two weeks we saw each other daily. I visited the Unification House in the quaint residential Little Five Points neighborhood. She came by the Howell House highrise apartment I was then sharing with my mother for tea and crackers. It was actually my mother's place, but I stayed with her for six weeks upon returning from Corpus Christi where I lived for twenty months prior. We traversed the city on foot for five or six hours every day, she in low keyed proselytizing mode, me in a gentle informative resistance.

On this particular day we crossed West Peachtree and turned down Peachtree Main along the infamous corner now revitalized but on this day was still marked by the Dunkin Doughnuts and just beyond, the Christian Science Reading Room. Teresa I knew already, was a product of the 1960s subcultural elite. I knew for instance that she had spent her adolescence in a nudist camp, and that background emerging from the fog of unbearable shame had driven her to the neurotic devices of concept-defying heavy clothing and long frizzy hair in which she hide her dark but very attractive facial lines. I knew she confessed great comforts in the teachings of the Moon organization even when she found them lacking, evident in a few details I will save for another time.

But on this day she was questioning me had I read the two or three theological booklets she had given to me a day earlier. These rather thin booklets were published in a very simplistic styling, oversized footprints, large typefaces, and hordes of colorful pictures. This literature literally reminded me of the kiddie biblestory volumes I had voraciously gobbled up as a child, only thinner. They were workbooks, with a quiz at the end. I had not read them. Confident I already knew all the answers I had simply put them aside meaning to take a half hour to skirt through the topics just to meet my obligations to Teresa, but at this point I hadn't. Besides I had loaned Teresa a thousand page theological tome called the URANTIA BOOK that had been given to me by a former lover a couple of years before. I never got it back, but of course after admitting that I had not read the booklets but I intended to do so, Teresa countered with predictable and similar remarks.

These confessions led me straight to the point I wanted to make to her. Everybody believes their own version of the truth is self-evident and required for everybody under the sun. "Oh but if you would just read these..." she countered. I again repeated the premise that all works claim the truth, and great works have great legions of followers. Nothing is proved right or wrong except in the minds of believers of this or that truth. Whatever Teresa might claim, Johnny Can't Read has a contradictory truth. Jimmy Can Read has another. Evereybody's running around in this crazy attempt to convince everybody else that they are wrong. Teresa smiled at this empasse. Just then we were rounding the corner. I spied the Christian Science Reading Room and asked her if she wanted to dip into there for a few minutes, cool off, rest our feet...

She acquiesced with a sweet okay. We strolled to the reading room. This was not a very large place, fitted into a space nestled in the vee between two major thoroughfares converging at roughly a thirty degree angle, but it was airconditioned and pleasant and waiting for us. I found a chair a few feet from the bulk of the library. Teresa sat in a chair on a perpendicular wall where she was soon approached by an old woman of the faith. They were soon engaged in conversation that barely rose above a whisper. I thought nothing of this, and heard only occasional snippets as I dug into a random book I had pulled. This was a libraaaaaaary after all. Bits and pieces of their chat floated over to me. I was surprised to learn Teresa had been born a third-generation Christian Scientist.

Seemed this was a girl with quite a checkered past. They argued in ever polite tones. The woman persisted. Fifteen to twenty minutes into this routine I overheard the words good and evil, and some reference to the edenic tree of knowledge of good and evil. That was when I spoke up. "Does not the tree of the knowledge inspire knowledge of the DIFFERENCE between good and evil? I inquire of the old woman who to this point had only nodded a respectful hello to me upon entering the room. "Yes, you can say that. Different translations render it a little bit differently, but you can read the CORRECT rendering in OUR books." I replied that I had to confess that I did not know the difference between good and evil. Fire immediately plunged into eyes. "Oh you certainly do, and if you do not, you can read it in our literature. You only have to READ it to understand," she growled.

I countered again that men for thousands of years have argued over these things. I am not sure what I said next but I drew upon current ecological and ecopolitical concerns or some matter such as this, to give a few examples of what I meant by my own confusion with this complex issue of good and evil. She flew into a unmistakable rage, "Oh you are just a troublemaker. You'd better leave. Right now I say. Just leave, and don't come back. I mean it. Don't come back!" I returned the book I still had in grip to its rightful place, and said not another word. Teresa was ushered out alongside me. As the glass door swung close, the pinchedface woman, probably in her late sixties, muttered the word troublemaker one more time just in case I had missed the point.

On the street again I immediately sensed what had just happened and inquired of Teresa, "Do you know what just happened?" She didn't know what I meant. "Do you remember what we were talking about just before we stepped inside?" Again she couldn't piece her memories together. I played it out for her. "We were trying to convince each other to read each other's books. I told you that everybody believed they already had the truth, IF ONLY OTHERS WOULD READ OUR BOOKS."

Teresa's face was beginning to show a glimmer of recognition, but I continued. "Then we step inside and you are barraged by yet another somebody who does exactly what I predicted. It's in THEIR book, THEIR truth, THEIR certainty that all life must bow..." Was this the stroke of God himself drawing us into the Christian Science Reading Room for an example of divine truth, I put to her as we strolled on toward downtown on this sweltering summer afternoon. She finally burst into a rapt amazement, profoundly moved by my explantions, and was giddy that God had shown her a sign. Otherwise nothing would have occurred to her. No threads ever match up. Nothing is connected. An intellectual zombie I'm afraid is all so many of the most devoted folks on earth appear to be. Teresa didn't suffer a loss of faith with that event, but I was overwhelmed by the finger of God in this point blank proof of what I knew to be oh so true...

We are all tools in this game nobody can win.

GT