The Weird Times
CORRECTED VERSION Issue 2
My deep apologies to Richard Grossinger for mistakenly running an excerpt of a longer piece of his writing that I misidentified and should not have appeared on its own.
Please discard the earlier version of this newsletter issue and read this one.
Issue 2
May 25, 2020
In no world but a fallen one could such lands exist. – Herman Melville
During Pandemica, time floats, compresses, evaporates, is heavy, is weightless, is meaningless. Focusing on time, each moment, is meditation. Allows the mind to calm, disappear, become weightless, attentive through inattention.
The notion that time is a river implies it must begin and end. But for us the river is time, we will never see its beginning or its end.
***
Cocteau’s Orphée is our Muse in the land of Pandemica, his junkyard radio tuned to the musings of immeasurably distant unknown voices. Orpheus, the son of Calliope, herself the muse of epic poetry (let us hear her music now as well). Who his father was does not matter. Only that the poet tunes to the right frequency to hear and record the poems and instructions from outer space.
***
As Jack Spicer said, more or less, it’s the Martians.
Or Lorine Niedecker, listening always, condensing to the essence of the thing, ideation through the natural world:
We are what the seas
have made us
Longingly immense
the very veery
on the fence
***
Pandemic poetics in the air, everywhere
full-blown virus-inspired music.
***
“The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.”
— Gary Snyder, from the poem Riprap
***
All for freedom and for pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever
Everybody wants to rule the world
— Tears for Fears “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”
Listen to the song. Read the complete lyrics of this lovely pre-Pandemic chant from 1985.
***
David Wilk:
Disaster Relief and Martian Poetics
What is “Disaster Relief” in a disaster that stretches around the world?
Seen from above the emotional state of the world is likely to appear dark maroon, purple, or black. Relief in this context must be found in the simplest moments.
Today I saw a Cooper’s hawk fly over my head, land on the top of a telephone pole, where it perched, while looking for its next meal and posed for me to take a few poorly focused photos with my phone. It was a relief for me to try to focus, in this simple way, on something other than the news. Death and suffering suffuse our days. Heroes and villains. (Oh thank you Brian Wilson for the joy you have given me for almost sixty years.)
Which reminds me of how much music is a relief and a charm. Like the water I forget to drink enough of, necessary, sustaining.
And the poems that people send me almost every day - poetry is all around us now, walking, reading, sleeping, the poems abound. All around us. Why poems? Because they are the music and messages of the universe brought to us by mysterious means. Every day now I wonder if I will be blessed by a moment of madness where the mind turns off and the words come through. And some days it does happen. Mysterious, dark or sometimes cryptically unintelligible; I tune in to my universal radio regardless of what will come through it.
Mars is speaking to us daily and if you don’t believe in Martians, so what?
Their poems and songs are the tiny points of light in the night sky.
***
The Cure by Miggs Burroughs and Mark Yurkiw
***
Richard Grossinger:
From Coronavirus Notes: Supertexts and Subtexts
Metaphor runs so close to reality because there is no reality anymore. A provisional, placeholder reality has been amassing for a very long time. You could set it at the election of Donald Trump (followed by Trump equivalents globally). You could set it at the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, but then you would have to set it at Shock and Awe and après moi Saddam, but then you would have to set it at 9/11 and the first heart-strike of the Wahhabi Crusade. You could set it at the onset of Industrialization, the spread of feudalism, the fall of Greek civilization, pan-migrations out of Africa, or the retreat of the Pleistocene ice. I am being fanciful only to show that a clock set in motion by COVID-19 was long ticking. Trump was all too inevitable and invisible—invisible as U.S. president; otherwise, all too visible. His ascension proved that the distinction between metaphor and reality had finally broken.
I set the clock at the launching of the worldwide web, for that was the mechanism by which placeholders, surrogates, and proxies began replacing life, which was already under assault by the globalization of capital. All you need to know is that Elon Musk wants to put hardware into brains to link them to computers, and that that is considered progress.
So with COVID, we have only hit a threshold, not what’s on its other side. Civilization is frantically trying to restore itself, tie down as much it can, re-open for business: real estate, restaurants, salons, theaters, pro sports, parties. But these can’t be tied to prior benchmarks, and that’s not even the tip of the iceberg. A New World is inevasible, the good, the bad, and the ugly—ducklings all.
The launching of the web is what coronated the algorithm. It was allowed to wipe out whole neighborhoods of shops, even shopping centers, transferring to Amazon.com and its confederates the collection and distribution of all goods. Jeff Bezos has said that he would like to use the pathological concentration of wealth to colonize the Solar System. At that point, metaphor has replaced reality as fully as Trump has replaced constitutional governance.
A whole literature may be written on this. I will touch on just a few concerns. You can add other metastases.
When monetization of value replaces freedom, spiritual freedom, and meaningfulness, the West has fallen under a Soviet-style lockdown far more deadly and devious than the Soviet Union or a coronavirus. There is no need for militarization; the people have enslaved themselves, including with their own Second-Amendment-guaranteed assault rifles. The prison is the mind; its bars include the notion that fun is quantifiable and that restoring the flow of goods means restoring happiness and normality.
What was happening was not normal; it was a honey-coated placeholder for a deepening cultural, tribal, and climatological abyss.
When those in brick-and-mortar prisons or under the mirage of empathic care in nursing homes or in poor, crowded neighborhoods or failed states are sacrificed to the beast in hope of herd immunity (another algorithm), then everyone else is gathered under the same metaphor and sacrificed to a greater beast: capitalization to a level of blasphemy by any religious or social standard, based on worship of the material world as a jealous monotheistic God. You come out of one lockdown into another if you believe that happiness is commodities or quality experiences, that freedom must be at the expense of someone else’s impoverishment and marginalization (i.e., holding on to one’s birth luck with a death grip, the ultimate Trumpian trope), and that restoration of a lost world is the ideal outcome.
Fear to the point of civil disobedience of what might come out of this in the way of a “cure” or a vaccine should not be seen as anti-vax delirium qua delusion, or distrust of well-intentioned scientists or doctors, but as a fear that the metaphor has already replaced reality—the state having been lost and being performed in absentia by an ersatz gulag—and, if not from Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, then someone else’s 20-gigabits-per-second or genome-altering RNA-strand promise. We want to respect real witchcraft and real science, and we don’t want to go back to the muddled magic that preceded Newton and Darwin, but what we are being fed, alongside solid information and medical models, is such a conflation of political, religious, and even ontological distortions that we can no longer tell differences, nor are we meant to. Even those perpetrating the chaos are not meant to; they would rather die of the virus. It is that much of a muddle.
COVID-19, or whatever it calls itself outside our system (and everything names itself in some fashion, even a stone), squarely confronts an accrued absence of meaning and value going back however far you want to take it, and frames it through its own non-metaphorical language to us in a way that strips our metaphors bare, but there are so many and they are so in one another’s strings that, even naked, they camouflage.
By any measure—economic, epidemiological, or post-Plutonian astrological—try to sight where we are. Then tell the rest of us. (May 20, 2020)
***
Notes and News: Dust and Mist
Complete corruption of government:
The CDC is “combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever had the virus,” Atlantic Magazine reports. “The upshot is that the government’s disease-fighting agency is overstating the country’s ability to test people who are sick with COVID-19. … This is not merely a technical error. States have set quantitative guidelines for reopening their economies based on these flawed data points. … The widespread use of the practice means that it remains difficult to know exactly how much the country’s ability to test people who are actively sick with COVID-19 has improved."
***
QAnon, another form of virus:
“Where we go one, we go all,” said Jo Rea Perkins in a now-deleted video she posted to her Twitter account on Tuesday night, May 19th, the night she won the GOP nomination for US Senate in Oregon. “I stand with President Trump. I stand with Q and the team. Thank you Anons, and thank you patriots. And together, we can save our republic.”
Introduction to the dangerous Q (Atlantic Magazine)
***
Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa - Gaslit Nation Podcast – especially good to listen to their interview with Tori Amos about her new book Resistance. They talk about grief, politics, the power of women to change the world, and Tori talks at length about her Muse and how songs are written. Listen to this podcast episode and you will want to read all of the books these exceptional women have written.
Link to Tori Amos website.
Atlantic Magazine – “Putin is Well on His Way to Stealing the Next Election: RIP Democracy” – you must read this article.
The Conversation: Corona Virus is a Sliding Door Moment
StatNews: Corona Virus hijacks cells in a completely new way
within three days of infection, the virus induces cells’ call-for-reinforcement genes to produce cytokines. But it blocks their call-to-arms genes — the interferons that dampen the virus’ replication.
The result is essentially no brakes on the virus’s replication, but a storm of inflammatory molecules in the lungs, …. a “unique” and “aberrant” consequence of how SARS-CoV-2 manipulates the genome of its target
Jill Lepore – Who Killed Truth?
An upcoming celebration with Jerry Rothenberg for the British poet and critic Eric Mottram
Curt Smith from Tears for Fears and his daughter Diva sing “Mad World” - sheer joy.