I'm going to post a couple of things in response to the bongo lecture on the American landscape & ecology later, but one of the first things I did when I was thinking about the lecture was to look up the Michael McClure poem Alex read.Continue reading
FOR THE DEATH OF 100 WHALES
In April, 1954, TIME magazine described seventy-nine bored American G.I.s stationed at a NATO base in Iceland murdering a pod of one hundred killer whales. In a single morning the soldiers, armed with rifles, machine guns, and boats, rounded up and then shot the whales to death.
I read this poem at my first reading, in 1955.
Hung midsea
Like a boat mid-air
The liners boiled their pastures:
The liners of flesh,
The Arctic steamers
Brains the size of a teacup
Mouths the size of a door
The sleek wolves
Mowers and reapers of sea kine.
THE GIANT TADPOLES
(Meat their algae)
Lept
Like sheep or children.
Shot from the sea's bore.
Turned and twisted
(Goya!!)
Flung blood and sperm.
Incense.
Gnashed at their tails and brothers
Cursed Christ of mammals,
Snapped at the sun,
Ran for the Sea's floor.
Goya! Goya!
Oh Lawrence
No angels dance those bridges.
OH GUN! OH BOW!
There are no churches in the waves,
No holiness,
No passages or crossings
From the beasts' wet shore.
* * *
DISTURBED BY FREEDOM
MY HAND IS A GUN AND EACH FINGER
IS A BARREL
and my arm is growing searching reaching
like a DREAM and I don't know
what to shoot, surely not the robins who have flown
ALL
the way
BACK
from the mountains of Sonora over the desert
where I have driven amazed at the craggy
strangeness of raw beauty.
((THAT'S WHAT I AM ABOUT: BEAUTY.
--BEAUTY AND SENSE))
and these robins have alighted here
in these green meadows where sprinkled water
turning warm runs over the masses of pink blooms.
I CANNOT SHOOT THE SOUND OF THE TRAFFIC.
A hundred bullets
would not stop that bus and I
would not hurt the children
or the adolescents at the moving windows
with their pink mohawk haircuts
and their sexual cries
LIKE HUMAN MACAWS.
It is another day and another dollar.
I
WONDER
WHERE
I
AM
((ROAMING SO SWEETLY FROM FIELD
TO FIELD DIS-
TURBED BY MY FREEDOM!))
--AND LOOK AT THE DEEP SCRATCHES THAT MADMEN
make with their keys on the sleek red
lacquer of my car.
I taste coffee in my mouth.
MY MOUTH IS WHERE I AM LIVING TODAY
but I am lonely as a skinny
old white cat with blue eyes
and irregular jagged spots of gray and black
showing a tiger pattern.
I am a tyger, I am an owl. I am some ancient wisdom
taking its own pulse and listening:
BANG!
BANG!, goes my finger.
BANG! Lover, I wish
we had bought
the purplish polish for your
toe
nails!
* * *
NIRVANA ALSO DEPENDS ON THE TREASURES OF THE TATHAGATA.
YET DEATH IS NEVER A WHOLLY WELCOME GUEST.
SWIM MUSIC DARK GLOAMING THUNDER.
LISTENING SMOKE SHEET WRINKLE MORNING.
A blackened face with clouds of blue smoke from the forehead.
Russian wolfhound crunching the ribs of sheep.
An envelope filled with orchid seeds.
Bright green creatures.
Appearance of the Ghost of Love.
Chairs covered with moss.
Palm trees the size of bacteria.
The sexual thrill of darkened autos.
Ammonia.
Ammonites.
Pineapple.
Silver dollars in the stocking.
Pineapple.
Ammonites.
Ammonia.
The sexual thrill of darkened autos.
Palm trees the size of bacteria.
Chairs covered with moss.
Appearance of the Ghost of Love.
Bright green creatures.
An envelope filled with orchid seeds.
Russian wolfhound crunching the ribs of sheep.
A blackened face with clouds of blue smoke from the forehead.
LISTENING SMOKE SHEET WRINKLE MORNING.
SWIM MUSIC BARK GLOAMING THUNDER.
YET DEATH IS NEVER A WHOLLY WELCOME GUEST.
NIRVANA ALSO DEPENDS ON THE TREASURES OF THE TATHAGATA.
* * *
EACH BON MOT HAS COST ME A PURSE OF GOLD.
ERASE THE LINES OF THE NIGHT FROM THE COUCH OF THE DAY.
COOL TURQUOISE CRYSTAL FEATHER -- WOLF PROTON GYRE.
SCROLLED FERN SHADOW SPORE -- BREAST SALT MOON.
Wheel of the galaxy turning in tumbleweed.
Faces of antelope staring from ice cream.
Watches ticking on the backs of turtles.
Tambourines tinkling in apple trees.
Flames full of creatures arising from the mouths of worms
Bearded men pondering in dreams.
Bees and moths darting on the fields of purple asters.
Odor of hummingbird mint crunched under boot heel.
Maya.
Spirit.
Matter.
River.
Creek.
River.
Matter.
Spirit.
Maya.
Odor of hummingbird mint crunched under boot heel.
Bees and moths darting on the fields of purple asters.
Bearded men pondering in dreams.
Flames full of creatures arising from the mouths of worms.
Tambourines tinkling in apple trees.
Watches ticking on the backs of turtles.
Faces of antelope staring from ice cream.
Wheel of the galaxy turning in tumbleweed.
SCROLLED FERN SHADOW SPORE -- BREAST SALT MOON.
COOL TURQUOISE CRYSTAL FEATHER -- WOLF PROTON GYRE.
ERASE THE LINES OF THE NIGHT FROM THE COUCH OF THE DAY.
EACH BON MOT HAS COST ME A PURSE OF GOLD.
LISTEN LAWRENCE
LISTEN, LAWRENCE, THERE ARE CERTAIN OF US
INTENSELY COMMITTED
TO
a
real
A REAL,
REVOLT! A REVOLT
that we only begin to
conceptualize as we
achieve it!
THE CONCEPTION
BEGINS SLOW
-- as we do it -- as we really do
it -- as we make the revolution
with our bodies -- our real BODIES!
OUR REAL BONES ARE NOT DIVISIBLE
from the bulks of our
brother and sister beings!
We're alarmed by the simultaneous extinction
and overcrowding of creatures:
WE
BELIEVE
that the universe of discourse
(of talk and habbit-patterned actions)
and the universe of politics
are equivalent!
THAT POLITICS IS DEAD
and
BIOLOGY
IS HERE!
We live near the shadow
AT THE NEAR EDGE OF THE SHADOW
((TOO NEAR!!))
of the extermination
of the diversity
of living beings. No need
to list their names
(Mountain Gorilla, Grizzly, Dune Tansy)
for it
is a too terrible
elegy to do so!
COMMUNISM,
CAPITALISM,
SOCIALISM,
will do
NOTHING,
NOTHING
to save the surge
of life -- the ten thousand
to the ten thousandth, vast,
Da Vincian molecule of which
ALL LIFE,
ALL LIFE
is a particle
*
LISTEN, BELIEVE
ME,
none of us can afford to luxuriate,
if we care about the presence of life.
The
whole scene
IS ALL ONE DIMENSIONAL!
MARCUSE was right!
because he saw there is
only one, one-dimensional, planet-wide civilization
and realpolitik.
Unfortunately
it is modeled on one of the most
perfect aspects of our nature: THE DESIRE
TO GROW, TO WASTE, TO BREED, TO BURN UP,
TO EAT, TO TOSS DOWN, TO TEAR UP, TO FINGER
AND TWIST, AND TEASE, AND MAKE ALL
THINGS TERRIBLE AND DIVINE,
AND GLORIOUS! And we have
succeeded TOO WELL,
TOO WELL!
We are the most complete successes
the world has ever known!
POLITICS
is
part
and particle
of this horrific success, success
which is -- in fact -- an explosion that has
ALREADY OCCURRED. We have charred
the surface of the earth leaving behind
buildings which are cinders from the blasts
of oceans of petrochemicals!
Look, books and papers are
the fossil fuel explosion of trees!
LISTEN, LAWRENCE, this
is the same old politics! ANY, ANY, ANY
POLITICS
is the POLITICS OF EXTINCTION!
*
IT IS TIME FOR PEOPLE TO COME OUT OF THE CLOSET
ALL RIGHT!
ALL RIGHT!
IT IS TIME FOR THEM
to come out of the closet --
OUT OF THE CLOSET OF POLITICS
and into the light of their flesh and bodies!
NOW
is
THE TIME
to learn to see
with the systemless system
--with the systemless system
like a Negative Capability --
of anarchist-mammal perception!
THAT'S BIOLOGY! Now is the time
to see that
it is our nature to be beautiful
and the destruction wrought by politics
is part of our beauty. Now we can learn
to see why it is our nature to go on with
this destructive politics. NOW WE CAN SAY:
LET'S STOP! LET'S STOP
THIS ENDLESS MURDER BY POLITICS!
LET
US
DO WHAT
WE CAN TO STOP
so very much useless pain!
It is our nature to overbreed and kill!
but our nature has endless dimensions! We
can choose among them -- we can reject,
we can reject the flowers of politics!
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