|
Carlo Parcelli
I dreamt I was on redeye TV Hawking the diploma mill That forged my GED, How, once homeless at 33, After just three easy lessons I found gainful employment In the burgeoning field Of secular eschatology.
"The Gilded Index of Far-Reaching Ruin"
I: A Brief Course in Secular Eschatology
In this rift,
Among these books towering above me
The war between Heaven and Hell rages.
To some by their very substantiation,
Heaven and earth were unified.
“But they were wrong.”
The mind fractures and
Ancient fault lines are manifest,
The body and blood,
Dionysus, Orpheus, the Prophet and
The apocrypha of Alkan crushed by his Talmud.
Or like Charles-Valentin-- Gillespie, Parker and Charlie Christian,
The free masonry of be-bop, its
Insurmountable technical problems
Designed to damn the poser,
The Skull and Bones of flatted fifths.
Lord, I am the scourge of human engineering. Hear my taunt.
Mostly it’s a Te Deum to tedium,
But then the tree line lit up so close
We took mud and bone incoming.
And ever since some go in and out;
Some came back with a vestigial tail.
Some were taken up meek and treacly.
But most are bitter and abandoned.
And a very few angry and dogged.
Next to plastic jugs of mixed nuts, adrenal,
Diving from the strobe of a ceiling fan,
Regrouping at the rows of Mossbergs and BARs pointed heavenward,
Laying down cover,
Keeping the angels pinned down behind the cumulus
While I make my getaway.
High noon in the big box store
Scattered among the pixelations on the High Def TV
Sucked toward the white light beyond, thinking, Kyrie Eleison,
Will they have their way and pixelate me?
“Mam, my arm. Touch my arm! Please, mam, TOUCH ME!”
Carbatrol, depakote, klonopin, lampictal, risperdal,
Topamax, thorazine, lithium, tofranil, seroquel;
Ten miracle drugs
For every one miracle in the bible,
For every sustainable superstition.
Transubstantation works for loaves and fishes, bread and wine,
Snakes and sticks, even Lazarus;
When Christ deejayed and catered Canaan,
Did he collect dove droppings
For his nanobox off the copper roof
At the Roman Legion’s gymnasium and wedding hall,
Because, shit to sangria, that Nazarene kid has kept that party hopping?
Mary didn’t know squat about atomic physics,
But still she badgered the boy to rearrange atoms of well water,
So Sol and Mortie and the rest of the wedding guests could get loaded,
Sing and dance and fondle the first cousins of the Son of God.
“For what is desire?” asks Drexler but
‘An inappropriate atomic configuration in time,
The incommensurability of thought and action,’
Prompting the technological putsch to make force and desire conflate.
All along, Newton had 2060 in the Apocalyptic lottery.
I have 2048.
I had left off my plowing and
Was on my way to Pasteur’s Promised Southland Corp.
To buy low fat milk and honey just as Joel
And John Stuart Mill had foretold,
When the winning number
Came to me like any revelation, by headlight, algorithm, holocaust or
Like Saul on his ass and in the next instant,
On his ass,
Came to me in a Nagasaki migraine crowding out sense.
“Bruno was a man who believed in signs.”
And the sign at the Saint’s game had read Tipler 9:15
As if to say if god, then god’s instrument for the Apocalypse
Is enlightenment science--;
Funny too
To an enlightened few.
I slept in a lawn chair for three days and nights to buy
My Buckyfullerene 9000 NanoBox at Ovid’s House of Atomic Conversion.
It’s slow, arranging each atom like they were Alan Turing’s head lice,
But now I can fix my morning meth from the dirty diapers.
When did poets outreason the scientific Apocalypse
And cease poetry?
That measurement must be as precisely attainable,
Conflating with the end of the world.
God distracted let Newton be,
And all is blight.
And by calculating the Bekenstein Bound & Tipler’s Omega Point
Resurrection will occur between
10 to the minus 10 to the tenth seconds
And 10 to the minus 10 to the one hundred and twenty-third seconds
Before the Omega singularity, t=0, is reached.
Newton, who until recently was the franchise,
Has 2060 in the Apocalyptic lottery,
Or a bit later so as not to bring
“The sacred prophecies into discredit.”
When Lao Tse arrived at Zhongnan Hill,
St. Peter of Han Gu pass said “Sage, get off your ass
And cash in those 12 incarnations
So we can get hammered and purge 900 wasted years.”
The Second Coming isn’t the domain of science alone.
Dave Davidson in ‘The Great Pyramid, Its Divine Message’
Synchronizes his psyche
To the Apocalypse of August 1953.
Mihran Ask predicts “[B]etween April 16 and the 23rd, 1957,
Armeggedon will sweep the world;”
Piazzi Smyth says clean out your desk before 1960.
Still Skeeter moans ‘Why does the sun go on shining?’
Through her Billboard Top 100 year of 1963.
Her four-chart top ten mingling of adolescent angst and the Apocalypse,
An anthem to the infinite credulity of puppy love.
If Matthew says “not even the angels of heaven,
Nor the Son, but the Father alone" knows
So that the baffled ingénue sings
“I can’t understand. No, I can’t understand,
How life goes on the way it does,”
Why did The True Light Church of Christ predict Armageddon in 1970?
And Hal Lindsey the Rapture on Dec. 31, 1981?
Or Jehovah’s Witnesses call lights out
At least a dozen times in the last 100 years?
“The birds go on singing.”
Warbling in the Oresteian code of the nun fucking Father,
Tante Terry of Avila bogarting a bolt from Zeus.
As proof “the sea [still] rush[ed] to shore” e.g. Surfin’ Safari 1962,
So why did Gribbin and Plagemann with a modest advance
Write “The Jupiter Effect”
Without the pull to provide an earthly account
Or the gravitas to defend it?
Or Colin Deal pen “Christ Returns by 1988?”
Or Harold Camping’s belated "Are You Ready" calling on
The Lord to settle old scores by September 1994?
Or the millions of Christians who read
"88 Reasons Why the Rapture Is in [what else] 1988"
Yet “w[o]ke up in the morning [smelling the coffee]…wonder[ing],
Why everything[] [was] the same as it was,”
Where an unctuous old mendicant still gets the bum’s rush.
Why do their heart’s go on beating?
“Don't they know it's the end of the world?
It ended when [they] lost your love.”
Van Impe perched on Daniel and Revelation;
A cockatoo shouting fire in a crowded stadium church?
Jesus red-faced and reticent to return.
Sobol and his aliens like Moses piggyback Ouspensky sidesaddle
Leading humankind into the fourth dimension
With the curtain of stars collapsing behind them.
A squared version of Abbott’s claustrophobic sideways novel.
Or The Sacerdotal Knights of National Security in a marvel of projection
Reporting that "A space alien captured
At a UFO landing site in eastern Missouri [the Show Me State]
That cracked under interrogation by the CIA and”
Confessed in pretty good English “that an extraterrestrial army
Will attack Earth on November 2, 1997…
Stripping our Planet of every natural resource–…
Making slaves of every man, woman and child in the world!"
In other words executive order NSC68
With a couple of ‘free trade’ pacts and little green men addended.
The believers seem to be saying “walk this way”
Meant as a gag if it is forced to meaning at all,
And still god won’t be shoved out of Being?
The Vortex of the Star of David cult of Luskville, Quebec and
The Temple Mount and Land of Israel Faithful Movement,
Or the Taiwanese cult out of Garland Texas
That predicted Christ would return on March 31,1998
And take them up in a UFO. That the Son of God would confirm his coming
In a thirty second soundbite over Channel 18 broadcast
On every TV in the world
Until Maggie Magdeline got wind that 18
Was the Playboy Channel and pulled the plug on
Jesus who by the way looked cutting edge
With his pipe and ascot easing into a stretch limo,
Beaming at Heff, Heff beaming back,
A playmate on each arm, one reading his palm:
“Jesus, that’s some puss hole. It means you’ll die young,
But you have a long afterlife.”
Why set a date? A discrete dollop of folly.
Why self-destruct in an afternoon?
Why not Barry McGuire an unspecified eve of destruction,
Or buy time with the long shadow of the Mayan calendar?
Why? Because the prophecy says,
“It ended when you said goodbye.”
When her lover who was her Father bid adieu;
Like myth after Enlightenment myth foretells,
The Second Coming,
Even reincarnated Hitler on a space ship from the planet Zeno, is canceled
By the voice of reason.
Yet, like their livestock, ‘the saved’ sense the end of the world
But not as R.E.M. knows it, the known world.
The world conforming to Enlightenment Reason
In which I frankly don’t feel fine.
History was already overbooked with second comings.
It’s the waiting that mimics vertigo,
Nausea, vomiting, the planet spinning.
After 40 years of
Wandering other people’s deserts, the oil companies
Have returned to Iraq
Over the scorched and mutilated bodies of millions;
Have returned for their bit part in the final dissolution;
John of Patmos without the happy ending.
Where enlightened imperialists burned at the stake
The world of indigenous heretics,
Made monads and ball bearings from their golden calves
Or forced conversion to capital.
If god, then god is clearly using corporate America
As a tool for the Apocalypse.
First the towers fell
And then their specter, international trade.
But for Babylon and Jericho, where’s that in scripture
With its strict building codes for arks and parapets?
No matter the lies crackle as my eyes
Raze their way across the front page.
While Moravec hedges that ‘the resurrection’ will occur
Before the machine CEOs finish devouring the Milky Way.
The preponderance of Nature is not conscious
Nor is it capital reflexive
So that the resurrection “is that exact replica of ourselves...
Simulated in the computer minds of the far future.”
We have come far enough
To define a man so reasonably
That a number may know him.
Nor does big oil stand in the way of itself,
Values its disfigurement precisely
In echoes and spikes
Using San Sebastians the way Bubba uses paper targets
Of Bin Laden.
Let’s not pitch our tent in the place of excrement
But in a shitty simulation.
Saviors enslaved to technological methods
Need to hear themselves talk. .
But is it really left to Strong A.I., the Omega Point,
And the Singularity to battle evil
With the mathematical vocabulary of a video arcade?
A contest between brute pillagers and
The venture capital Moses of obscure prototypes
And a future of cannibalizing prosthetics
With their exoskeleton’s currently of crude
Nevertheless able to preserve the Alaskan wilderness
In the confident resolve of ‘emulated’ space--
An oil painting in holograph?
Capital’s Millennarian conflict resolution
Where planets die in our stead.
The tablecloth jerked out,
The table setting tottering in place,
Not a drop of wine spilled for mere vanity.
There will be no struggle to the death
Between Exxon Mobil and Kurzweil Enterprises
On Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,
Just the usual uruboros and naked quivering goat
The planets future, a voyeur’s lump in the throat,
And Kurzweil grandstanding
Like a 4-H hayseed
With his goat Bekenstein Bound.
And with its Invisible Hand, Big Oil
Will shuck any sacrificial lamb
That gets black holed in its maw,
Buffed until the last nozzle whimpers.
In the shitter at the Trailways bus station I found
The head of John the Baptist
Wrapped in butcher paper
With a note attached in Aramaic:
“Fuck Salome. Ockham cut me.”
The low boy, the yellow songbird,
Who mines the high road.
Diogenes, Cerberus, Cassandra’s Canary,
Mercury Anti-Mathesis,
Should’ve stayed home.
He won’t get any play;
Not at the ‘TED’
Not if the winds have anything to say.
‘TED’ where “The Singularity Is Near”
Its hot breath causing monuments to swoon,
Causing icons to come down with the vapors,
Where a 2.2lb. computer
Will have 10 to the tenth more brain power
Than you and me and
Presumably more than all the geniuses,
That have pushed the world passed the brink.
T.E.D. where the stink of fear
Claims unblinking reason.
Where Methuselah stroking his long grey beard,
Skin barely tethered over raw skull, Aubrey de Gray,
So raised up by prophecy his hands form a kneeler for his frontal lobes,
Calculated a rationated prayer that fate
Doesn’t publicize its Fixx
Because, judging from his expression,
And the dermic film between O two & bone,
You can’t opt out of
His Sid Caesar/Carl Reiner bit of corvee immortality
Any other way.
Does anyone recall, with Mengele was it substance or form...?
The self-surrender to the glossolalia of objectivity
That comes with the prelacy.
Mere man halfway there
To denying our little commute to death;
To dismissing our fealty to the dark
To be spared a millennium of horror,
And “apple-picking.”
To postpone regret;
For whom it is “Delicious to lose everything.”
“O dark dark dark....”--- Postponed
While we bootstrap the species up
Another millennium,
A bitter alien fruit.
Of what hot fragments life glows
In the shrapnel of the scientist.
At T.E.D. “...[E]ven the dust [knows] its place.”
The inventor spirited away by his design. Dust to “smart dust,”
While Gell-Mann programs the Santa Fe Golem to roll’ em.
Kurzweil’s absolution of his sole humanitarian template, Wall Street.
“Wealth” “the gilded index of far-reaching ruin.”
A machine recursive licentiousness fed back to flesh.
The stale, iterative pattern of feedback,
The singularity, the taxonomial inbreeding,
An ad nauseam rhombus of ‘boids’ shamming a continuous form;
To Hell with addressing living paradigms.
With dead algorithms to moonshot the rhymes.
“[T]he ineffable wave of anemic romanticism and yearning for God
That... “the computer age” squirted out
“As an expression of its spiritual and artistic
Misgivings about itself.”
And how will the markets respond
On that Black Tuesday
When the Singularity cuts off the incubation of
The first born of the venture capitalists?
And between the blow and the smack
And Kurzweil’s mathematical models
How hard was the money apocalypse to predict.
Yet its not enough that the masters of the universe
Pissed away his 401K,
He still drives his Beamer like he built it.
That Lieut. Col. Dale E. Duncan, who headed Operation Yellow Fruit,
The pre-cursor to Iran-contra with secret accounts in Swiss banks,
The only perp to do time for Reagan’s LIC, given 10, served two and a half
And received one million dollars a year for three years
From the Republican National Committee
Laundered through a Washington law firm
While North and Secord sweetened the slush.
Or that Frank Carlucci,
Roomed with Don Rumsfeld at Princeton,
Then HEW, CIA, DOD, NSC etc.
Chairman of the Carlyle Group
On the Boards of Westinghouse,
Kaman, Ashland and the Air Force financed
Rand Corporation etc.
And a card carrying member of the PNAC
First caught the attention of Vernon Walters
For bringing down the Goulart government
After they disposed of Lumumba in the Congo,
And raked Portugal,
The Colonel so enamored he jibed,
“You can take the dago out of the devil,
But you can’t take the devil out of the dago.”
Or that David Rockefeller, after playing Hedy Lamarr
In a skit at the Bohemian Grove in September of 1942
Sat down with Ernest O. Lawrence, General Electric and corporate America
And drew up the Cold War blueprint for the atomic bomb.
So what historiography? Rhodes with an unofficial copy
Of the transcript of a 1947 meeting,
Found nowhere in the makers “Making...”
Nor Rowan Gaither head of the Ford Foundation and Rand
Who brokered deals between science and capital;
The bomb and its marketing.
Or Cheney’s Energy Task Force in whose interest...
Or the PNAC’s corporate theater
Of war with a conscious nod
To the Book of Revelation;
The White Horse, “the conquerer,”
The Red Horse, Bruno’s disturber of others’ peace,
And The Black Horse
Whose rider demands
“[A] whole days wages for a measure of grain”
At the weigh station bread pitted against ethanol
Before the celestial signs and the brassy smithereens,
Hot the way the Souls Under The Altar made it
After the subjugation of the Philippines.
Pietro “thought grain was to eat.”
And the four horsemen “burnt a third of the grass and the trees.”
“A third of the sea became like the blood of a dead man.
A third of the fish perished...
A third of the rivers were made bitter
And many people died.”
And the Pale Horse symbolizes the conquest of pestilence and disease
“Ideas worth spreading”
As much the method in the sign as the sign in the method.
The end of time has settled nascent in design,
A dead world of competing utopias;
Competing, while the costs too high
To pretend to keep costs down?
Conflicting ‘Immortalities’ of Kurzweil and de Gray
Designed not to attract the widest audience
But the deepest pockets, venture capital, Microsoft, Citicorp, the Carlyle Group,
So, at long last,
The widest audience might see some benefit
From the masters’ mergers, patent and paternity suits
To determine custody over Peter’s sea
Of sweating, deaf, dumb and blind humanity...
Outside my library, heaven and hell, the block party is
Hopping to Otis Redding, Joe Turner and Mary Wells;
Doubtful they’ll get to Miles, Mingus or Coltrane,
Much less Ayler, Taylor, Braxton or Coleman.
“Man, you think too much.”
The evening laughs and shouts ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’
'Little Red Rooster',
“Put down that book, put on your shoes,
Come out in the street, motherfucker, and dance...”
To all appearances it should be de Gray
With a sandwich board that reads
‘THE END IS NEAR’
Though both he and Kurzweil generate enough ego
To move the world that way, to drive
A herd to flight hovering for a few nano-seconds
Between earth and air and then falling
Into the camera shot.
Technological Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate
So many we can’t recognize where
They begin and where they end enough to keep the body count.
Our western technological Apocalypse blurred by countless
Expeditions to Kabul and Baghdad;
Mogadishu and Tehran.
Or when Hofstadter calls the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game
“The Evolution of Cooperation,”
Its like from the mouth of some ‘bad seed’
With its “for some reason,..., your trade must be done in secret”
and “getting something for nothing is even more satisfying,”
Or Abu Ghraib against the imaginings of “you and an accomplice.”
Not so much “Does logic prevent cooperation?” as
Does logic have any function at all
Other than its customary brutal imposition?
Immunity for its operator,
A stunted sociopath bewildered by dissension.
Quite “All that he can be” and no more.
A quant “a motley crew of math wonks, computer scientists,
PhDs and electrical engineers...”
The perky Los Angeles oil exec who said,
“It took billions and billions of years to create this oil.
You can’t just walk away from that.”
As though ‘where’s your manners;
Mother Nature went to all this trouble. Here’s a bib.’
Numbers produce the faults in which lies incubate. Where
WITHOUT Usura
Without Usura no man hath a house in foreclosure
With walls of tar paper tacked over particle board
That vinyl might hide its face.
Without Usura
Hath no man a poster of Jessica Alba on his bathroom wall
Stratocasters and Les Pauls
Or Like a Virgin giveth its message,
A tiny gold halo orbiting her clit,
Without usura
Seeth no man John D. Rockefeller his heirs and his concubines
Nor is made to endure nor to live
Beyond subprime loans and toxic debt instruments, shorts,
Made to sell and sell quickly,
Computer modeling the weapon of choice.
Without usura,
Thy bread is no longer made of bleached rags
Is thy bread not dry as the paper it’s printed on.
Monsanto knew that with no mountain wheat, no strong flour,
The Sandinistas would have to eat paper
From the World Bank, beg seed from Cargill.
With usura the line evaporates
With usura there is no clear demarcation
And no man can find buyer for his ‘dwelling.’
Without usura the stone cutter
Would still be cutting Davids;
Without usura the Luddite would not have been hanged from his loom
With usura
Rayon comes to market
Oil bringeth no gain without usura
Usura is murrain, usura
Stabs the needle in the young girl’s arm
And stoppeth youth from knowing any fucking thing.
Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks came not by usura, nor Malcolm X;
Not by usura Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader.
Not by usura Mao, Ho, Fidel and Hugo.
Drexel Burnham Lambert and Ivan Boesky
Came by usura. Michael Milken by usura.
By usura David Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie;
Rockefeller Center and Carnegie Hall by usura,
The Mellon Foundation and the Gates Foundation by usura,
By usura Alexander, Aldrich and Morgan;
By usura Joseph Kennedy and Prescott Bush;
And Lehman Bros, AIG, FANNIE MAE & FREDDIE MAC by usura
Von Mises, Hayek, Popper, Rand, Friedman, Fisher,
Berlin, Bentham and Mill
Hailing cutthroats and shitmongers as angels came by usura;
John McCain, Charlie Black and Phil Gramm by usura;
Robertson, Hagee, Warren and Osteen by usura;
By usura Greenspan, Paulson and Kash’n’kari.
Without usura no Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz or Rumsfeld,
Nor was Barbara inseminated.
By usura Wall Street, American Express and Citicorp,
The Dow, The Federal Reserve and two World Wars.
By usura Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq;
McNamara, Kissinger, Johnson and Nixon;
Morgan Stanley, Washington Mutual, Wachovia by usura;
9/11 by usura.
By usura the Savings and Loan scandal, the Tech Stock Bubble, the Mortgage Crisis.
Miami, Washington, New York and Chicago by usura.
With usura futures are bundled like ghost wheat,
Grain rots in the servers
In the digital silos of Dubai, London and Hong Kong.
Without usura the present is not splintered into futures.
Without usura hath no country a need of a standing army of three million
Nor billions of Simons rubber necking the train wreck only
To be crushed on the weal to Calvary.
Without usura nature need not put on its game theoretical face
To show mathematical proof by crushing
The world back to uninhabitable composure.
With usura Katrina, floods, drought, fire and pestilence.
With usura the revelers and their Revelation.
With usura the filth of existence outstrips language.
Usura rusteth chassis,
It hurls 3 million into the gutter.
It gnaweth at the caissons and cables
Contemptuous of Big Muddy.
Machines learneth to stunt Nature into patterns;
Usura slayeth the child in the streets;
Usura slayeth the child in her bed;
Usura slayeth the child in the field;
Usura slayeth the child in her school.
It stayeth the young man’s courting
Bringing a gelding to bed;
It lyeth between the young bride and the amputee
CONTRA NATURAM
They have bought whores for the World Bank Conference.
Corpses are set to banking
At the behest of usura.
“O dark dark dark”. They all no longer go into the dark,”
But the epimutations, intracellular junk, cell senescence
Die in their stead;
“Are consigned to the interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,”
Not the captains of industry, the merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers...
Whose extracellular crosslinks and mitochondrial mutations are mended
Denying the oppressed their morning blessing.
They “weep for it already,”
“Quick gains,” “excess and arrogance”
And Kurzweil sits on the Army Science Advisory Group,
Where speed kills at 10 to the tenth brain power;
“[A] novel form of kevlar with silica nano-particles
Suspended in polyethylene glycol;”
The Predator and micro-UAVs the size of birds,
The size of bees, dust to “smart dust”.
“Accelerating transformative ideas”
A battalion built by I-Robot fitted with swarm intelligence or
A 100kg supersonic combat drone with the destructive capability of a fighter jet,
Billions produced in a nano-factory in a few months
Several targeting every person...Genocide easy and cheap
In the hands of de Gray’s immortal shits.
Nano-forces so massively distributed
Only nano can effectively retaliate.
Gene Ray’s nuclear wars were waged
First on cocktail napkins then A.I.
And the underlying state of the nation is
Still a stick with a nail in it.
Von Neumann and Morgenstern worked
From mutual misunderstanding.
Gaither, the wraith about the atom.
There’s a high comes with every act of creation,
And a cadre of drunks behind every game of mutual destruction.
So the Kurzweil Cyber Poet incorporates a twelve step program
In its instruction module;
Mechanical glimpses strobed into the Utopian vision.
“Scattered sandals
a call back to myself,
so hollow I would echo.”
‘A searching and fearless moral inventory’
“Beams of the dawn at the angel
With a calm, silent sea
With a hundred times we write,
With a chance we can open up
A steady rhythm in his face”
Pattern recognition of celestial beings
From ungrammatical chaos;
One cannot wait
For the Singularity to read
The impacted Cyber Poet’s
Ode to Irritability,
A simulated diet of red meat and post-Hellenic pederasty
With dusty feedback from a bleeding anus.
The ahistorical and artless moral canards
Like when the band at the benefit for the women’s shelter
Played ‘Hey Joe.’
“American women were used on the MI block
In the same way that Major DiNenna spoke of dogs—
As force multipliers.”
With violence, the Game is always love gone bad:
“The maximum deterrence you can have
Is the ability to kill all of your enemies
And destroy everything they care about.”
In short, the western scientific protocol toward Nature.
The young women, stripped of context, bruised lips their hips swaying to,
“Hey Joe. I hear you shot your old lady down.”
Merely reason’s blind rage demonstrating the accuracy of its optical reader.
Kurzweil “waking up” the universe,
Poking at the cosmos with his enormous computer
And then dislodging it
To bob in the aether.
The movie trailer snarled
“On July 11th will the forces of darkness conquer humanity?”
Too late.
Just look to your medium,
These Wall Street demi-urges re-engineering both the race
And the oracular track of interstellar space.
Or RAND “unable to quantify human behavior...
“Ignore[d] or underrate[d] its significance” in ‘body counts,’
The poet’s ‘Tale of the Tribe’ in a nutsack.
An epistemology that urged the annihilation of language
And which not surprisingly failed in South-east Asia.
Not mathematics used as agitprop
Failing language’s gross caricature of quantum;
But the campaign for a pure positivism articulated only in numbers.
“Common sense and mathematical logic”
With their “own particular procedures inextricably” garbled.
“This is the region that physics grows,”
Where metaphor is dead to quantum,
A glimpse at the dark side, the abandonment,
For a wave and a particle is both awake and asleep,
Both Bloom and Earwicker,
A trancelike eigenstate spewing its own abortions.
A new solipsism transubstantiated in human discretions,
“[U]nexamined criteria [that] had doomed the project from the start.”
The ‘genius’ exec who first said,
“Maybe they’re right, the freaks that point out
How the developing world ‘lives’
Should be
Our point of reference and visual template
For divesting the middle class.”
The self-organizing shoppers and their swarm intelligence.
Every where the perfect commercial simulation
Of happiness
That you cannot retell from the reel thing,
So retrograde is the desire for strong A.I.
And when opportunity knocks say sweetly
“Come in” and then
Knock opportunity upside the head
And THEN just try and piss out the shine of the media;
The syphilitic bonfire of the inanities.
For example a vignette called a Brief Exchange between
Antonio Gramsci and Rush Limbaugh---
Did Vernon Walters really call Frank Carlucci a ‘dago’?
Probably and often. I haven’t had anyone attempt to refute it.
Right here and now, I refute it.
What’s your source?
I don’t need a source. It’s patently absurd.
Well, many people feel you’re patently absurd.
But I’m here to tell your listeners that you’re still very much real.
So you’re stating for the record that the Walters’ slur is real.
No, I’m simply demonstrating that, ipso facto, the absurd,
E.g. your self, can be real.
I don’t allow insults on my show.
Really? But that’s why I’m here.
Well, then you should have made
That plain to my producer before you agreed to come on.
Then you should fire your producer.
Because he let you on?
No. Because you’re an insult to my intelligence.
And we all know how you feel about insults on your show.
History to make shapes for shades;
White sheets and magnetic resonance.
Kant’s ‘ding’ the Unknowable becomes
With science the undesirable,
With technology the trivial
With positivism the poetical,
With common sense the erroneous,
With religion ‘the other,’
With capital the enemy,
And with quantum a glimpse at mathematical denouement.
A glimpse into how deep the failure abides.
Is global climate change, for example,
An unintended consequence
Of the idealization of the object
Through instrumented and mathematical reason.
The final solution at the heart
Of the fanciful enemy of fascism,
Fictional assassin of the Corporate State.
For Newton, in Revelations, history
Was “an a priori pattern of interpretation,”
“Put in some physical facts [and]
Follow the rules for obtaining the needed results...”
That this method, this ineluctable rigor, foreshadowed
The inexorable accelerating rush to the end time.
Mistook an Apocalypse for the rightful, rigorous,
Mortal object of his prophecy.
Or that faith could not endow its own burgeoning
Agrarian insignificance with this one mere insight,
Not even for the solace or ‘greening’ of the flock.
Could not contrive that Newton’s Principia made
Overture to the plagues
That John and Daniel foretold.
Nor virgin Isaac for all his methodical prophecy,
Neither Bacon nor Amos,
Felt conception stir.
What else “in the place of the anointed One”?
The immeasurable parallax of Galileo and Bruno,
Newton and Descartes
That the malice of Church power
Could have transformed nature
But for lack of nerve to admit that
That was lights out.
To have the prophecy, the book,
To have an historic rivalry incarnate
Yet to have missed the instrument for the end time.
How more prescient Newton would have been
To set his Lamb upon his Lion?
And the signs! Saul struck from his horse by Fat Man;
The virgin birthings of von Neumann self-reproducing automata;
The Rapture and Tipler’s Physics of Immortality;
Methusaleh de Gray’s Engineered Negligible Senescence.
Yet all the cues and clues bungled for resurrection;
For weakness and fear of death.
But now amused by science, none fear death,
Argonauts on life support having
Shed their yolk sac.
Hegel sneered at D’Alembert’s intermediate states,
The quantitative infinite merely a calculus of iterative operations,
An insensate ethics of imaginary numbers,
Thus ‘ideal,’ a quantitative infinite exhausting its utility,
That like the internal combustion engine or aerosols
Could do no wrong
For only so long,
Cubism and calculus
The abandonment of Kant’s intuition of a chair
For the utility of dicing
The progress of its iterative parts,
“A steady rhythm in his face.”
The need for antennae has been reduced
To welters of blither from Manhattan to Queens
Or SETI to deep space.
And “[b]ased on experiences with Earth,
The environment of a planet
Can be altered deliberately.”
Only a blind patrimony would conceive terraforming Mars
After laying earth to waste.
So, what adieu?
We all depart together
Flushed out by our desires.
Out of the Garden
And onto the savannah
Longing to find the apple
Under the rind of the banana.
Poussin, Velasquez,
Bosch, Botticelli,
Donatello & Durer, Uccelo & Grien,
All portray John as patient stenographer.
We’ve got 7 years to turn it around says the IPCC; so
‘HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Goonight Bill, Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta...’
And John exiled, fearful that his impotence may be
The measure of his god’s;
Self-medicates, hears voices, talks to himself;
Instead of trusting his message, the endgame artist
Fears that among the sell off
“[T]hose that are last”
Shall receive their welfare check
Right to the neck.
Yet where are the Romans today?--
The Vatican.
As Antonin Scalia might say
At a Knights of Columbus communion breakfast or
Tony Soprano and his crew pummeling
Some Hebrew motel owner in Newark—
“You’re looking at ‘em;”
Another empire as broken and dysfunctional as polar ice;
Manhattan Island an iceberg of the Mortgage Crisis;
In foreclosure, a contract pending for $24.00 in beads
If Chase can make the loan.
Melting into the chilly dark sea of the dispossessed,
Pitchforks shit, 90,000 semi-automatic weapons,
Gathering at the expiry of ropes, one hopes.
Exchange defeated and rank as Iceland overrun with marigolds.
It all hinged not on knowing the end time was coming
But on the epistemological need to record a purpose, telos, for
The agency of its coming
Like the future’s a land platte in four dimensions.
The double bind;
“I love you boy,” coos the Madonna
Then turns and sings
ALL praises to the Father.
We are within reason where we cannot both dwell and live,
As the continents are crimped
In our Gondwanaland of greed;
The prophecy bled out regardless of Revelation;
The bible and its prophecies played no part
In that Apocalypse, Daniel and John, divorced from every millennial
Christian carny barker with a bad rug;
Every dust bowl, Gideon thumping fraud
His serpent’s tongue tasting at the microphone,
That instrument of William Shockley, as Malcolm said, the devil himself;
Every blasphemous appeal to Mammon
In the name of god
Every sin and the pain of sin
A pollutant guttering into its own inane septic,
Gratefully god goes out with the beings it confounded,
Shuttered in the permanent darkness of our agency.
Hegel’s Essence where the resolution of paradoxes
Contrives a “whole” as “a self-sufficient system;”
A self-replicating science of profane imaginings;
A feedback loop of quandaries without a growth matrix;
The whole enterprise was just as addled as it appeared,
Walking hand in hand with the anti-Christ into the 21st Century,
Joel Osteen riding in the anti-Christ’s El Dorado convertible to
To fabricate Christ’s unlikely franchise of golden parachutes,
The idol of consumption’s raw agency in the end time
Much less his ignorance of the formal intolerances
That reveal his true calling.
Not that mathematical formalisms have made theology obsolete
Nor have their terrors bred compatible beliefs;
But have experimented out the spontaneity of
Snake handling, speaking in tongues.
“The bestiality of self-preserving reason expels
The spirit from the species that worships it.”
If enlightenment science performed the Last Rites
Over hundreds of languages
Why should it give a shit about some addled hillbilly’s
Garbled linguistic bridge to nowhere?
The sciences not once achieved
Any “given encounters with particular objects.”
The ding an sich is our epistemological sasquatch;
And from Kant, “our crudest and most basic perceptions”
Had become infused with its judgmental norms,
“As the Phenomenology showed” “without Kant’s pure intuitions;”
Normative even for its creators;
That’s the enlightenment bang, the exclusion;
Epistemological and imperialist apartheid.
Mere cobblers of a normative ‘whole’
No longer their nature;
Death from fossil fuel refined
To an engine for the resurrection of the end time.
The whole’s gimp, promising utopia while
Pimping the past
As the next best do over tart
Until then.
In the end, only the one true eschatology matters.
The sudsy heaven of suffocation.
The soapy foam squeezing out the open front loader.
Patmos is an island. John in exile.
Manhattan’s an island and capital’s in exile.
Quick, Vladimir Ilyich, more rope;
Better, let them imagine their own hemp
The numbers multiply
With their technological fantasies,
Their googol and nano;
Toddler’s phonemes to confirm the neoteny of
$600,000,000,000,000,000 in worthless hedge fund derivatives;
Like the Twin Towers,
Romulus and Remus,
Trust fund babies born of Mars and Mercury,
Their island crawling into the Sound.
At Trinity Fermi couldn’t coax by wager or reckoning
The bomb to burn off the atmosphere,
So now “its time, its time”
To give CERN a turn
And let’s leave the end of the world to the professionals,
Watch as hurricane chasers get one of Mill’s
Holstein cows right across their windshield.
Wall Street cupidity manifest in ecological meltdown.
Greenspan bowed and stupid as an ancient baby
Smacked by mama for shitting his nappies;
The skeptical being sold spectacle
Better than the jaded truth.
What old cutthroat wouldn’t miss Ayn Rand’s
Exponentials of greed and contempt?
Of her infantilized desire; thumb sucking direct
To sucking boardroom cock,
The suborned research of ritual disbelief.
The polar icecaps, metaphor wrapped in an enigma
Wrapped in the swaddling clothes of an aging kleptocrat..
Fermi’s CERN black hole quick fix
Hand me the mullein, Flash, and
And rue the day the assholes modeled the world away
The reckoned, the too late day
To bulldoze the scalp of the god of war
Under a Christian D’Or—a martyr of gold.
The canard that reason constitutes a moral weapon--
The limbs that pick axed the uranium
Used in the bombs dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from Congolese mines,
Limbs hacked off to clear the way
For liberal traditions of corporate corvee,
The Dornberger, von Braun, SAC, NASA, CIA, Peenemunde Way
In hindsight terra-forming Mars.
Their iterated symbols approximate life
Even as their methods do not.
“Nothing but an indefatigably reified consciousness will believe…
That it possesses photographs of objectivity.”
“The computer…the bankruptcy petition of consciousness
[R]eality not given visually, but functionally,
An abstraction in itself.”
Their swine could bellwether hurricanes
So the Cypriots butchered the messenger
Reasoning with censorious eyes
A smoking spleen of
Early Doppler
As though through bile and feces,
As functional as a Bauhaus church,
God telegraphs his punches.
“[T]he self-maiming of reason,
The mutilation reason inflicted upon itself
As a rite of initiation
Into its own scientific character.”
We all share the one true eschatology.
The repeal of Glass-Steagall
And a long and sainted tradition of theft
Only accelerates the denouement;
Inclines the bible thumpers
To trust Yankee collection plates.
And if that’s no bear going through your garbage,
It’s the FBI.
The widening eschatology,
The falconer cannot hear the falcon-- never could, Henry,
Always measuring then presuming, measurement then presumption,
No matter how many times the bird
Lay bare its nature to that deaf and dumb being
Bound below.
“Surely some revelation is at hand;” Yeats cries
“Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”
A Spiritus Mundi no doubt, but one of sand
Gilded like the head of man
And the body of a coin operated vending machine,
One eyed like the son, Gaia’s boy,
The “blank and pitiless” stare
The rash eye hot-wired directly into the pre-frontal cortex.
A face that only a Tartarus mother could love.
And Hermes, always Hermes Triple Threat,
Messenger god, god of commerce, god of thieves.
Christ, a well-meaning shlub, a Faigelah awkward as Godzilla
Trashed the Hebrew Stock Exchange, cracked heads,
And managed in the end to surround himself with thieves.
But Christ was McLuhan, melt in your mouth obscure at the message,
Came along before radio and the transistor,
When your daddy took you behind the temple
And warned you you couldn’t make no living
At the Word;
When the frustration, the heat, the caves
And the stale handouts spoke to the ascetic,
So pre-occupied with hunger that your hallucinations
Weren’t filled with private jets
Or vast churches with stadium seating and jumbotrons
Except in those most incandescent herniations of desire.
Those great ek velt reversals signifying loss
Of all spiritual functions,
Like the burger Nostradamus, an Apothecary strung out on his own amalgams.
Those bronzed oracles conjured in famines,
Cargo cults made incarnate
Filled with manna for Christ, not from him,
And like manna, just a snack to take the edge off waiting.
Eschatology is ominous and has taken up redemption.
And terraforming Mars is how the rich think of the Rapture
Though, the distribution of wealth notwithstanding,
Its but a trifle more secure
Than going milk carton in the Wal Mart,
Or our current Schumpeterian gale of monumental destruction.
A sub-eschatology populated by a convention
Of morally diseased beings.
Greenspan and machines---equally plead Candide? Really?
To mistake the drivel of Ayn Rand for the world;
To mistake it for Shakespeare, Dante, Dostoyevsky and Joyce
The Tiresian Marx reborn among
The Friedman, Hayek, von Mises market scum:
Where a credit economy chisels the future
On headstones of debt.
And credit will generate more violent seasons… ‘the widening gyre’
More progressively violent…more frequent.
Scientific eschatology lacks the entertainment value
Of Christian eschatology, but not the entertainment dollar.
It lacks the panache of raw, naked grinding greed,
But it’s serious business.
For only through the googol has greed
Come to approximate it’s own eschatology
While John’s cloudy thoughts on climate change are unforgivable.
Like Marx loosing two of three cords of his eschatological noose
So as to commute his bootstrap for hanging,
Embracing the strand that hangs the whole trinity;
Got the decorative right,
But keyed too much to the accelerant.
Leaving Kurzweil and Tipler to sing,
“O death, where is your sting?”
But Bill Doyle has punked the eggheads
With their own glide:
Before he died he said,
“My only regret is that I didn’t kill more.”
Strategic hamlets and free fire zones—
“If they weren’t supposed to be in an area,
We shot them.”
Punked egghead logic,
Punked egghead morals,
Punked egghead laws.
The common man held to a higher proximity,
No more rueful than a Fermi or a Teller,
A Barry McCaffrey or a Tommy Franks;
With no bomb or command;
Just a schmo from Springfield, MO
Whistling Dixie up and down the ranks,
Unwitting heir to the confederacy
Of al-Basri to the Basra road.
The lost cause that plunders its destiny through each advance.
“Blake's universe…
Ruined the moment his demiurge forces a single choice”
As Tiphys cut stern from shore
And particle accelerators ignite deposits
In the mud walls of the poor
Blake’s universe… infinite in possibility and variety
What Bruno staked,
Incorrigible Nature the age of discovery
Set sail to destroy,
To destroy any that would trip its junkie prognosis.
“A self-contemplating shadow,
In enormous labors occupied.”
Working on the horrors of
The Higgs boson;
Strange matter as though its wandering fugue
Hasn’t been alien enough, alien enough to
Absorb yet shed no light on the corpses at my doorstep.
And the wind blew down from the North at 50 miles per hour,
And an hour later back 50 mph from the South again.
The weather is a wash without a mean--
All the howling and roiling in blessed Blake’s Urizen.
And William Doyle returned home on the shoulders of
Two eschatologies that had preserved
Him from an association with sense
And beggared a third to reconstitute him in a machine.
What has he got to be contrite about?
To Doyle they we’re all smaller;
They were all beautiful
Feeding on the marbled flesh of their betters,
Hacked, hefted, inspected, disemboweled
By Nature herself.
Bones for spoons, skulls for bowls
Adapted from the apes
With campfires burning on the opposite hillside.
Minksy and his meat machine proved so wrong,
A census showed no one had ever cared.
Numbers’ sainted innocence intact from disuse.
Humming like cicadas with extra-ordinary contentment
As though some accommodation with
Extinction had been reached.
No amplification to trick you in medias res
Of Morrison’s pubescent eschatology.
No challenge to challenge.
Back in Springfield, MO,
Doyle watched death come and go,
Tidied up. Walked the rusted Fridgidaire curbside.
Waited. Nodded to the querulous neighbor with the pit bull,
Made a furtive purchase from
The speed and weed man with the tunnel rat tick.
Shared buffalo wings and a last beer
With the old pedophile tank mechanic,
The one prepared to either to launch or defend against Armegeddon,
Bill didn’t know which, with his Desert Eagle, BAR, a Kel-Tec semiautomatic,
500 rounds and a loaf of C-4 in the trunk and wheel well of his car.
Vets in love. Quaint tales of old earthly fetters.
Moanings from the capitalist dystopia,
On earth as unimaginable as it would be in heaven.
Our forgotten specimens of Social Darwinism?
Those rhetorical ‘so whats’ to eat or be eaten,
Bellies without settees, summer homes, portfolios, and rocket fuel:
Disappointing the avatars of you can’t have too many things.
Living well being revenge on exactly whom?
Millenniums squandered on the modulations of the thing itself.
From promise of the bread box to the nano-box;
From one to any.
There is “nothing foreign to us which may not become our own.”
Or the relation of observer to the observed is “the nonsensical
Position that humanity is outside of nature.”
The elided Bruno where “there is nothing of our own
Which may not become foreign to us.”
Outside itself such that
Even quantum’s case couldn’t have a go at it
Without utter ridicule from the NAS.
So who is surprised that momentum has grown for New Age,
Kabbalah, Millennarians.
What’s the difference?
Large numbers and hope. “It dawned on them
In nature no two things are alike…” said Ray Anderson,
Founder and chairman of Atlanta, GA-based Interface.
“Armed with that observation,
The company designed a carpet called Entropy,
[Tessellation Row,]
…[I]nstalled using random tile patterns.”
Thus, making a foundling of ‘randomness’ by ‘observation’
And of time by ignoring the role of function
In the random.
And these are the dopes
That by the seas that they founder
Escaped Mao’s rope.
But please we need not reprise the aquarium scatology we breathe.
But focus failure as does Gould
On the “Scientists [who] then and now
Have recognized that their profession is defined
By its distinctive models of inquiry,”
Its method?
While from Bachelard---“in science, any discourse on method
Can only be provisional.” For, “ a new experiment
[“changing perceptions of empirical truth”]
May lead to a fundamental change…”
Too much method for sense,
And too much sense for method.
So that Mazlish, and you’ll love this Doyle,
Asks whether the U.S. Invasion of Southeast Asia,
The Vietnam War “was a civil war,
An extension of Soviet power, of Chinese power”
And suggests no more; no Dien Bien Phu, no Tonkin, no Uncle Slimey,
Only “a provisional agreement on the facts.”
That terrifying and pathetic moment when Greenspan
In apologia confessed to being a life long dupe
Of market mystics.
That for decades, the Fed had cocktails with the Easter Bunny,
Madam Blavatsky and Nostradamus
And made a boast of every hypothetical thing,
A metric of belief that still crawls through time
Boosting at the nib of the moral immunity of mathematical consent.
I give you my sea, Mao, in which celebrity bathes
And is nourished.
Where the currents are warmed and cooled by capital;
Where the solution is buoyant but unpotable without
Its girding sea of provincial theory.
Our economics follows our physics into the indenture of large numbers.
Temperatures and pressures we do not exist at
Right here carrying on at our side.
A whole ‘whatever discretion’ that
Would find fault with some of your assumptions
If it knew you existed,
As somehow you know it does.
So you did your betters a solid, Doyle,
Butchering those women and children,
50 caliber vivisections of
Peasant farmers, cane and water buffalo,
And you too, Greene, camels and goatherds
Bloodied in your all-volunteer coin of the realm
Operated rifle.
And what can we do
Once we’ve legitimized you in our episteme,
But beatify you as a negative result
Or imaginary number.
A spike in the data because there are troughs and
With guns and tanks,
Rolling Thunder and MACV, we’re prepared for data,
Even novelized it in little programs,
Into numbers and signs, making what happened predicated on
What we predicted would happen,
Licensed by quantum and subatomic theory
Such that the hagiographers of Gods and Messiahs would blush.
What else could we be but liars
Who ought to know where darling Doyle meets our recoil.
Numbers provided no one moral immunity
In the mathesis of Leibnitz and Descartes?
That the quick advance of mathematics and the physical sciences
Was a way to exhaust contrition through
The fragmentation of the act of murder,
So that being mathematical is never having to say you’re sorry.
Being digital. Being mechanical. Being discrete.
Drones employing drones to assemble drones,
With the mystifying not yet driven from the first cause
And the nostalgic conventions from Geneva.
An eye to pry the will’s object free to kill
Teased sui generis from cranky restricting morality,
The cleric and the astronomer
Are free to share symposia but never epistemology,
Political palliatives not withstanding.
Honor, my ass!
Even when it’s clear you are a sorry son of a bitch
Remorse remains an optional project for Doyle and Green,
Or the five backwater hayseeds from Blackwater to
Truman and Groves, Rumsfeld and Cheney –
Hitmen for Von Neumann, Turing
Minsky and Kurzweil—
And all the miracle drugs, dragons teeth and fishes and loaves
Mere prelude to artificial intelligence
Self-reproducing automata
Where the wires, the connect is cut and
Being slides out of its cocoon of pain and desire
Into the shitless, fuckless world
Of mathematical elegance.
Tonkin, the elite lie, begat
My Lai, the serf’s lie
And the serf’s lie relies
On the desire for numbers out of MACV or CENTCOM.
The mathematical expression that smells like victory.
You can’t hang the what, the numbers,
Without sounding daft.
And if the algorithms were drafted in good faith,
There’s blood but…
Doyle, Ball,
Heard, Liberty, Slatten, Slough.
They’re stuck to their stories, tracers and daisy cutters for rudders,
Humanity’s knockoffs gone giddy lying to themselves.
The evangelical cripples that America puts in the field
In their kevlar ghost shirts
That technically work, worn over what their god and country
Say they must forsake
What will become of those bodies
When combat robots replace human beings
Fighter pilots canned while still over Afghanistan as
Drones fly the missions to a man?
What will become of the brig, hard labor
Much less the firing squad and the hanging tree
When the high school dropout, the felon, the illiterate,
The no account college grad,
A generation from the factory and two from the farm
Can no longer avoid Shakespeare and the calculus by
Vaporizing some other country’s barefoot birthright?
Once he neither learned to read nor die by the light of the world,
That suspended glimmer behind his eyes
May illumine the inside of his skull
To step up and kill those
That propagated the City on a Hill.
“And that was the revolution…
As soon as they named it.”
So there it “is lying in the street…pick it up.”
And the breast thumping drunken drones declaim
What warriors? What warrior kings?
At a memorabilia show for $35.00 a pop,
None other than the son of the shah’s bag man,
The porcine personage of Norman Schwarzkopf
Signs 8x10s next to Ernie Banks.
To exclude Bill Doyle and Bill Calley and Ernie Medina, Ball and Heard
But pitch hagiographies of Kissinger, McNamara, and Cheney.
I mean, cut the bullshit.
I know you know nothing,
Don’t have a fucking scrap of useful intel.
But with this poem I water board you,
Torment with bewildering animus
All things American.
You’d have to kill me to stay my hand.
That’s what the world feels
When the U.S. comes knocking, comes sniffing around
Some menstrual field of sweet Somali crude or
Congolese coltan.
The apocalyptic torments of Hell,
Eyes hissing under an incandescent poker,
Noses lopped off followed by desperate adrenal sucking.
Ears torn from their foundations.
Hands scalded. Tongues ripped out.
Yet the evil that would forfeit the senses has
Become the telos of physical theory.
Quantum cannot be explained in terms of discontinuous processes.
Like hearing every other note of Brahms’ piano sonata
Evokes Schoenberg in Little Pieces,
Opus 19 has, for those marooned there, urgent appeal.
But in quantum the abscesses never heal,
Its not to the exclusion of the senses that quantum survives,
But their overwhelming,
Like Philoctetes on Lemnos.
What if I told you that every word Adorno and Horkheimer wrote was true
But that none of it mattered?
Multiply that by a googol and you have quantum and the senses,
All the experience that evolved, your eyes and ears,
Taste, smell and touch don’t matter,
Making possible the eventual suzerainty of automata.
Would it then be unfair to call
Enlightenment Science an open sore
On the heal of a broken down gullible Etruscan hero
When the Occident fancies his tormentor,
The cut and cunning liar Odysseus
And his dipped and deluded countryman Achilles?
Not by usura Philoctetes but
You can sure as shit imagine Odysseus on the take.
Experiment is failed experience.
Ontology’s gone out of constructs of the physical world
And the omnipotent experimenter is nothing more
Than a sand bar silted up with reactionary metaphor.
“Both in the calculus and in quantum physics,
The description problems were interesting
Primarily because they were highly non-trivial.”
But still after Einstein the poets write
As though Mrs. Clarke and Mrs. Leibniz
Pass letters in the womb.
And something wonderful and hellish is about to be born
But the poets are too protestant to name it.
No agent; no first cause.
Nature cooks the books until they Fibonacci numbers.
Hadrons can giddy up.
They just can’t giddy up and collect their Nobels
Or, for the moment, do little coronation walks for the doyens at CERN.
And if man will be whatever von Neumann or
Kurzweil want him to be
Of what concern is Nature?
Experiment is failed experience.
Brain imaging is not the brain.
And Baysian belief networks do not ‘experience’ a fucking thing,
Nor the tabula rasa of neural nets with their
Pattern recognition fink features.
And do tell, Ray. How do random diploid evolutionary algorithms fuck?
And, no, Kurzweil, human designers do directly
Program solutions
Because they determine the parameters.
And if its not “ponderous” its not evolution,
The facile borrowing of vocabulary
From other taxonomies notwithstanding.
Besides genetic algorithms are fast computations
Ciphering highly refined rules
Used to fuck up the world by distorting its “real problems.”
And ipso facto with no nod to ACE and the 1802
But “the subtle probabilistic rules”
That Markov chains abacus into being
“Of which human experts are not necessarily aware”
Are imaging, and any more is imagining.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
And Kant didn’t have to say
What you perceive is NOT the chair;
Implicitly what you see is not…
Unlike the ancient mariner paddling about
The drunk tank in his laceless Florscheims,
Nature doesn’t tramp around with its fly open.
And the “ponderous” remains until you change the entire context,
Reich the entire ontology.
In the west, the political always trails the scientific,
Content emptied in discrete dollops
The kind nano-diamonds datafied evidence;
The ineluctable march to man-made extinction.
From the brink of the Apocalypse,
Out of the grasp of the fashionably disheveled, $500.00 bed head,
Empty entrepreneurial thinking
Of the sciences, how the fuck
Do we get back there?
The infinite tedium of teasing each fullerene
Into the red hot crucible,
Just to give a sense, a nano–puff of the corruption.
How intentionally non-commutative technology is;
The trade offs; the great leaps
All bargained into ontological ravel.
The news is bad.
Those who have done the math
Can’t bear to tell you,
For fear you’ll pick cake over chemistry.
As the Jacobin judge ruled
“The Republic needs neither scientists nor chemists;
The course of justice cannot be delayed.”
Echoed of necessity by the Red Khmer
After the French sacked Marat and resurrected Lavoisier;
Miming the Thai in 1432, France 400 hundred years later,
Sacked the bread and wine of Angor Wat.
There is so little variety. So much of myself is useless repetition,
The iteration of matter diced and cubed.
A known quantity, digitally appraised,
Half of me is remote enough by repetition
To scald the other half to death,
And apply this principle to the streets.
Thus, the engineers psyche.
Little Johnny has a Spiderman nano-box he totes to school.
The Ovid Deluxe, anyfuckingthing will serve as fuel
The tyke’s choices are infinite when it comes to transformative matter.
After all mere fistfuls of dirt will do.
But, sans Bruno and Sunday School,
The infinite gives way to more familiar desires
And Johnny, after setting the middle school on fire,
Nano-boxes a Happy Meal,
From the spiky sinus of a unicorn,
His Visa recording each transformation
Fungible, bit, body, bushel, the metamorphosis is all that matters;
Shortly, I am told, first folios will sizzle to Kobe beef.
To each his tower and
To each the Babeling of his belief.
Such is the pox of the imperialist
That if his eyes fall upon the Machiguenga
The Machiguenga already no longer exist.
The West is the adventure to end all El Dorados.
The Enlightenment is the light to perturb all light.
The scientific method is the method to end all methods.
And what better note on which to end it all
Than through the optical sensors, the personal ‘I,’
The war cry of the keening plates of our mechanical progeny
Going viral throughout the universe?
Other installments of "Deconstructing the Demiurge"
"Crimes of Passion"
and
selections from:
Eschatology of Reason:
and
I. A Brief Course in Secular Eschatology
The poet's comments on his growing poem:
|
