I Hold Four Hydras II

I am aridity, I am the cracked and the dry
Have you no moisture?
Found you no well?
Hers is the water and the life and the glory

I scratch the seared earth until I
Have ten bloody fingertips
Found are the wet sands
Her power, the moon, hid before dawn

I, amid red sands fine
Have, feet worn grey and splayed
Found, upon the blasted heath
Her. And know no road to the city or the temple

I ache and sting and
Have
Found no dwelling place beyond my crystalline spheres
Her sight etched there ‘til all goes to dirt

I hold four hydras
Dead and limp
Reeking of all necrotic things


Special thanks to St. Matthew, Chiori Miyagawa, Mark Moffett, and, once again, Seattle University Housing And Residence Life

Books I Read Over Winter Break

Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut (re-read)
I wish I could be a Bokononist.

Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut (re-read)
Anyone who thinks that WWII was a just war should read this book.

Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut
Possibly the most wandering, tangent-filled, anti-novel I have ever read. Should have been a collection of short stories. At least half of the paragraphs had no direct relationship to the plot, and instead were personal anecdotes relating, often but not always, to the unsuccessful first attempt at the novel. Discussed free-will, the general terribleness of life, and how humans can live in such a pointless world (much the same as every other novel he has written but more explicit).

War Dances - Sherman Alexie
Alexie, again, describes the lives of half a dozen, mostly half-indian, men I would not want to be. With lives that are dumb and pathetic and semi-autobiographical. Like with Vonnegut, one has to be constantly wondering if what one is reading is fiction. David Shields would have a cow.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz
The story of a nerdy, morbidly obese, second-generation Dominican whom no one ever loves, except for a middle aged, married, part-time prostitute, sort-of. His life is brief, sort-of. and wondrous only if one considers the stories of his mother, sister and grandparents, which Diaz does at length. Oscar de Leon (Wao is a nickname) is born an american, lives to adulthood as an american, yet somehow dies a Dominican after realizing that he is doomed.
Moral of the story: the two best things for a man are to kiss a woman and be beaten to within an inch of his life.
The Tolkien references are the highlight of the story, especially his more obtuse ones from the Silmarillion. “Speak, friend, and enter” is definitely going on my dorm room door.
On a personal note: up until part III I felt a considerable kinship between myself and Oscar (I have the extra 200 pounds in my tongue instead of my waistline and the thousands of role-playing hours in Legos instead of D&D shit), but when he lost weight he ceased to make any sense as a character. Unlike his previous infatuations, I don’t have a ton of sympathy for his last love and I can’t tell if he was resigned to his doom or just being stupid. Also: he is a immigrant, I am not, this matters; I’m not sure why or how but it does.

The Lacuna - Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver does the Kingsolver thing to great effect. Her imagery is blatant but not ugly. Her use of multiple voices is without equal, thought not to the same effect as in The Poisonwood Bible.
It has been a very long time since I cried at the death of a character (I was dry-eyed at the end of The Road, For Whom The Bell Tolls, and Oscar Wao) and, despite my knowledge of its historical inevitability, I cried when Lev Trotsky died.
The story loses momentum after the aforementioned assassination but somehow manages to end in a manner fitting of its first pages.
I have never hated the 50s as much as I did when reading the last fourth of this novel, whatever their flaws, the hippies did the world a great service.

Ender’s Game - Orson Scott Card (re-read)
Good idea, bad writing. Card’s prose does not match his vision. The slang especially is annoying and unauthentic. His racial profiling is also aggravating, he assigns attributes to a race, comments on them, and then makes them central to his two dimensional minor characters. The protagonist, a white male, has three side-kicks, one ethnic, one female, one very short, his enemies are arrogant europeans that are bigger than him but not smarter. Could this be more cliche?

Night - Elie Wiesel
The best holocaust account I have read. Wiesel does not try make something good out of his experience, he is not trying to find redemption in it, he is simply bearing witness. Recording the reduction of a people, both physical and psychological.
I have read more horrific accounts but none that chronicle the process as well as this one, the practiced, expert annihilation. Night emphasized more than others that the goal was not enslavement, it was liquidation. The cruelty to the living is almost extraneous. That anyone escaped at all is astounding.

On Gods

All primal human cultures assume the existence of higher powers, that is entities with our reasoning and decision-making capabilities, but without our animal characteristics, present within the world (god-like entities outside of the physical/chronological universe are a later invention [largely out of logical necessity], and will be considered separately). Although there is no direct evidence for the existence of such beings there are myriad phenomena attributed them and despite a long history of philosophical, academic atheism the vast majority of the world’s population continues to place great faith in them with no apparent ill-effects.
Religious and spiritual people are not, on average, any more or less happy with their lives than irreligious people. And although religious justifications have been given for many acts generally thought of as heinous and unjust (although actually just brutally self-serving) the irreligious have shown themselves to be just as capable of such atrocities (Hitler, Stalin and Mao are roughly on par with Cardinal Richelieu, Hernando Cortes and the Knights Templar). Thus a consideration of the existence of higher powers should refrain from calling upon consequential examples - no way of thought so essential can possibly result in a necessarily better life, for the truth, which is the ultimate subject here, is something a great many people are perfectly content without.
It must be noted that what is being dealt with here is probabilities. Religious texts may be considered but will not be given an authoritative status, for nothing nearly as specific as a name or physical attributes can be given to such higher powers. These will be hereafter referred to as gods - this term is used to simplicity’s sake, it is meant to imply nothing as to the sexuality or plurality of said being(s).
Assuming then that such gods exist, the question becomes what, if anything, can be said about them. The fundamental attribute of a god, found in all conceptions of them, is immortality. This shall serve as a premise or definition, rather than a point of discussion. Positing mortal spiritual entities would imply a whole field of study (celestial biology, chemistry, physics) that no one is in any position to study. It is also a matter of the burden of proof, death as we think of it is a peculiarly animalistic trait, for the rest of the universe, including some other forms of life, the distinction between the living and the non-living is not nearly so clear (a severed limb is dead immediately, a flower may be kept alive in water for days before it begins to wilt, all its life systems apparently intact and unless cut down or otherwise destroyed trees of certain species may live for millennia). Thus unless evidence is presented otherwise one must assume that gods do not live and die as we do and are thus immortal; immortal not in the sense of Tolkien’s Quendi but in the sense of the hydrogen molecule or mathematics.
Following from this, the immortality of gods, is the limited quantity of gods. Which is highly useful, as it contradicts the “god as universe” pantheist fallacy. If gods are defined as everything than the attributes of said gods are no different from that of everything, and referring to them as anything other than the universe personified is pointless. The tendency toward this in certain academic circles can be traced to a valid reaction against Indo-European anthropomorphism, but it is not the only escape from it. Therefore, as gods cannot be everywhere and everything, and are immortal, they must be of limited quantity. The arguments of panentheism would offer a logical counter to this, claiming that god is not everything, but everything is contained within god, this however, does not avoid the essential problem, which is a confusion of topic: in speaking of such “gods” one loses any cohesion to the concept. If such an entity which contained all the universe can be called a god, the beings within the world that have been thus-far discussed must be called something else (or vice-versa).
If gods, that is immortal entities possessing conceptual powers akin to that of a man, exist it seems highly unlikely that, given their utter separation form the mammal-primate line of development, they would bear any resemblance to men, even the imposition of human-like thought seems a pretension. Some of the oldest conceptions of gods admit this. The judaic YHWH - I am that I am - clearly defies any attempt at humanization and the later Christian idea of the trinity can, as Nietsche claimed, be said to have killed god. The original Latin and Chinese conceptions of gods were equally vague, prior to their interaction with the Greek and Indian cultures (respectively) neither even deigned to give their gods names and considered them more as immutable forces than as anthropomorphic entities.
In the development of theologies there seems to be a tendency to reduce gods to a simple force of goodness. By the classical era of Greek culture philosophers often spoke of god as a singular entity despite their polytheistic religion (a contradiction Socrates pointed out in the dialogue Euthyphro), by this time the old stories of Zeus’s philandering and Hera’s rivalry with Aphrodite and the like seemed to not have been taken very seriously (anyone trained in critical thinking could tear Helenic religion apart in a few sentences). The resulting religion, emphasizing cults and practical philosophies, eventually morphed over the course of the hellenistic era into a sort of Proto-Christianity. Christianity and later Islam continued this reduction that has been nearly completed by the more liberal contemporary faction of each. “God” has become a embodiment of whatever ideal the culture happens to possess and the scriptures themselves are moralistic enough to be twisted into nearly any message. There are two possible responses to this, one rejects the ethically monolithic basis of the reduction, the other points again to the potential alienness of gods and the unlikeliness that they would follow popular morality so closely.
Indo-European polytheistic spirituality (anthropomorphic or not) is based on a world of competing forces, both in the world around us, the sea contending with the land, and within us, desires for passion, wisdom and glory often seeming to pull in very different directions. In opposition to this monotheistic religions posit one supreme deity, usually either in a patron relationship - the god of the Hebrews, or as a universal force - the Christian god of love. Whether or not love is the ultimate force in the world is a matter for another discussion, but it must be admitted that there are other forces present contrary to love and some that seem to bear no relation to it what-so-ever. Which is how the Greeks and other polytheists would justify gods of love, wisdom, war, the earth, the sky and the sea; though despite its representational superiority to monotheism any sort of spirituality as an explanation of the world suffers from a lack of positive evidence, leading to the second argument against value-centric theism.
Popular religion has created a divinity that is fundamentally humanistic. The first concern of the deity(s) is humans, human concerns, and human morality. Given all that has been stated regarding the otherness of gods, especially relating to the earliest conceptions of them, this seems unlikely. The chances that the will of the supreme power of the universe would fit whatever value society currently holds most idealized are small.
Aside from post-hellenistic religious texts and modern theorizing (which essentially amounts to wishful thinking) there is no reason to believe that gods bear any more relation to us in their values than in their physical appearance. The total otherness of such deities baffles any real attempts to consider their attributes. Issues including their relation to time, human will (free or otherwise), and love presume such essentially human characteristics that the entire discussion is foolish. In short, immortal, bodiless entities may exist, or may not and there may be entirely psychological explanations for spiritualism. Any further development is blind assumption.

An observant reader will notice that this essay, like many platonic dialogues, established almost nothing that it did not presuppose. This was not its intent, but it is a perfectly acceptable result; divinity, like piety or justice, is a problem that defies explanation. All one can do is become familiar with the problem and use the lessons learned in more relevant circumstances.

The Hazards of Fish II

They are binding my hands
Thick cords of leather
And my feet
Around the binding is another rope, thrice-wound and strong, between my hands extended
And lashed to the harness of an ass
My feet as well
They yell curtly and the animals trot each forward
Each their end to me
Dragged through the dirt as the lines goes taut, one before the other
And then I am suspended
And my spine is separating
And the cord is cutting my wrists to the bone
And my stomach tears
And my intestines are in the dirt
And the ass does not stop, pale coils dragging behind
Passing them, my murderers, I see their faces
Mine each one
And the ass too I see is myself, pulling with all the strength of my body
And there are no bindings, I grip the rope my fingers clenched
For no man may be torn to pieces such that he himself is not party

Wishful Thinking

My sister asked me today that if I could have three wishes (as in from an all-powerful genie) what would they be, and then hinted that she had the prefect answer but wouldn’t tell me until I came up with three of my own. I said something about land, power, billions of dollars, a wife and immortality but I was surprised at my inability to put it concisely. I could think of several futures to aim toward but mixing goals would be pointless and I wasn’t sure which one I would actually wish for if I knew the wish would be granted. She had evidently thought about the question substantially more than I. Her first wish, she told me, would be to succeed at everything she tried, with this she could have any of the normal desires, wealth, power, love, but also virtually any superpower. Her other two wishes were less ingenious but her third does bear mention, she would wish to know ahead of time of her death and for it to be sudden.
The genius of her wish is that it concurrently avoids the traps of wishing for infinite wishes, which is often expressly forbidden, and the problem of shortsightedness. The man who wishes for power or wealth will find it difficult to maintain and quite possibly end up worse than before but the man who wishes for success in everything can have almost whatever he wants, as long as it is possible to attempt. A wish bound only by what can be attempted though, has some fascinating implications. A common wish is to be able to fly, yet no man can attempt to grow wings, some men however, have attempted to be another species (specifically referring to that one freak who tries to be as similar to a tiger as possible). Many people however, attempt to live forever (or rather to avoid death), and to stay young forever, and so immortality is here a possibility, if not an inevitability.
The issue that then emerges is what constitutes an attempt, how hard does one have to try for it to be considered a try? If one tries to get a job but this involves nothing more than perusing a few job search websites would one have to succeed? And can one consciously dictate one’s goals? Would the wish operate on stated attempts or mental patterns of thought, would you succeed at what you were trying to do or what you thought you were trying to do? And what if this is applied to the wish itself, what is one trying to do by wishing such a thing? And would success be nothing more than the wish being granted? People like the idea of limited wish granting because it gives them an opportunity to think about their priorities, to condense all of their wishful thinking into a few relatively simple requests. What one is trying to do by wishing for success in all things is to eliminate the possibility to failure, but the phrasing of the wish would not actually accomplish this. The critical term of the wish was “try” - one must try to succeed. So suppose one attempts to fly by launching oneself off a tall building. Having made an attempt, success would be assured, and so one would indeed fly, but only as long as one was trying. As soon as one became comfortable with it and started to consider other things one would cease to fly and begin to fall (the same occurs when driving on familiar roads, without thinking about it, without trying, one can find one’s way home). If the wish itself is acted upon by its granting however, this would not occur: by wishing for success in everything one is trying to avoid failure, and if one must succeed in avoiding failure one would not fall from the sky the moment they ceased to try to fly. There remains though, the issue of whether one can fail to do something one is not trying to do, and for some instances it would appear not. One cannot be said to have failed to run if one is sitting down, but conversely one can be said to have failed to graduate from high school without ever having made the least attempt to do so.
The actual implications of never failing though, have more dire consequences than logical dilemma. Humans need adversity, without it our efforts have no meaning. We judge the value of an endeavor by how difficult its completion will be and by its risk of failure. If one knew that one could not fail, that all one had to do in order to insure success was try, some element of this challenge would be lost; one would never know doubt and would be solely dependent on oneself. The nastiest consequence of this would be in human interaction, specifically romantic human interaction. With this wish granted anyone one attempted to attract would be attracted, rejection would be impossible and other people would cease to have any value or significance.
The crucial point in all of this though, is the definition of “to try.” It can be validly argued that if one tries one must eventually succeed regardless, and that we only fail when we cease to try. There are of course extreme cases that would seem to contradict this - no matter how hard one tries to swim into the Mariana Trench one will fail. But as we are human a more intellectual definition of try is necessary. To try does not mean to approach in the most direct possible way, if faced with a tall fence a man will not press himself into it until it breaks but will attempt to climb over it. Thus to try to reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench men invented the deep-sea submarine; to truly try to do anything is to approach it in the most intelligent possible manner. If this is to be the case it must be shown that any time man has failed it has been because he has not truly tried.
In the field of warfare this is clearly true - few battles are fought to the last man, most often the losing side retreats or surrenders before they are destroyed, thus they stop trying to win before they are defeated. The few cases to the contrary, the Battle of St. Jacob’s, The Alamo, etc. (in which the defeated side refused to surrender and was massacred), would contradict this if a wider idea of success and failure is not adopted. In both cases the “defeated” were not trying to achieve victory in the normal sense, they were trying to have an effect on their enemy other than defeat, to deter them, to cause them to reconsider the cost of victory, and in both cases they were successful. And thus in trying they were successful.
In the various scientific fields this is generally the case as well, man did not discover flight in the years before he did from failure but from lack of a genuine attempt (Da Vinci never built his machine). The Romans had much the same technology as the 16th century Europeans, yet the latter discovered the heliocentric universe and the former did not. Motivation and compulsion are much more powerful forces in science and engineering than ability.
The field of politics offers the most difficult challenge to this theory. Men have been trying to invent a stable political structure for millennia and no one has ever succeeded, the rule of man has defied all attempts. It is possible for the theory to be maintained only if one sees the decay that infects a state in its middle and later years as a product of changing efforts, as the state begins to appear secure, men stop trying to secure it and begin to further their own personal aims (at times at its expense), and the state begins to collapse. The try-succeed idea then becomes continuous; constant trying is necessary for success. And success, once achieved, is easily lost. It almost appears that success is never actually possible, one can only approach it as a man pushing a bolder up a hill, unless constant pressure is exerted the bolder will begin to roll backwards. And even if the crest of the hill is reached the bolder is apt to roll down the other side, in keeping it at the summit the man has an even more difficult task to getting it there in the first place.
If then “to try” is as it has been here described the wish for success in all one tries would be no different than the normal course of life, and therefore quite foolish thing to wish of a genie. And even if it is not, and trying can be as simple as original intent, such a wish would make one prone to either sudden reversals of fortune (as one stopped paying attention) or success in ways one never intended (trying as underlying motivation) and regardless one’s treatment of and relations with other people (as other people and not as slaves) would undoubtedly suffer. If I am ever confronted with such an opportunity I think I’ll stick to wife, property and literary talent.

I Hold Four Hydras

I the crippled satyr
Have left cloven hoof prints in the garden and
Found the child entombed
Her fetal bones soft in her bejeweled casket

I fail and call
Have the oak in her mourning
Found refuge from deathly Saturn
Her limbs barred before the gale

I move not and
Have never a fear
Found though she is
Her door is shut

I sleep in the sun on my bed in my room and I
Have a dream that high though the peak rose I reached its summit and
Found dead men
Her face in the moonlight, too far from the shore

I hold four hydras
Here in my hands
And they bite and they tear and I cannot let them go

special thanks to John Darnielle and Seattle University Housing And Residence Life

Pedestrianism as System Revolt

When I am walking late at night, and by that I mean early in the morning, I do not use the side-walks. Instead I walk in the left lane; it’s safe enough, even if I failed to see a car behind me I would certainly hear it, that hour is the quietest time of the day. Walking thus the street appears differently, we are so accustomed to seeing the road from the side that to view it from the middle, and not through a window (which is to not see it at all) is an odd experience. One almost feels as though in the middle of the road, one almost feels as though in the middle of The Road. As if with pistol, rusted shopping cart and the last god in your care, you should be paying better attention to your surroundings that you ever have in your life.
I have said before that one does not know a road until one has walked it, so much is missed going 35 miles per hour. And so in the normal course of things one never knows the road, only the side of it. When driving one does not think in terms of land - elevation, terrain, exposure - one thinks in terms of traffic lights and stop signs and a double yellow line. Travel is reduced down to a grid, observation at the mercy of momentum.
I have read that the human body withstands collision quite well up to around twenty miles per hour - the upward limit of the unaided man. Past that speed our bodies break in exponentially gruesome ways. We are not built for faster travel; normal, accepted life should not require a harness.
One comes to understand, walking at night, the alienness of our roads, that we are not built for them, because they were not built for us. They were built for oil and steel and the madness of industry. And by their form the structure of our world is dictated. Here the urban is totally victorious, the rural - self-sufficient and traditional - has no place. The horse, requiring no mechanic for its maintenance and no international commerce and industrial infrastructure for its feed, is too slow and too dirty (leaving its feces in a heap on the pavement instead of in particles in the air). The serfs too have no place, those who cannot afford a car cannot function in this system, theirs is not a plight, they simply do not exist, they function in another system, oceans and seas away from their lords.
And so at night, when I cannot see headlights behind or front, I walk on a road not made for me. I jaywalk with impunity, ignore stop signs, laugh at navigational aids (road turn reflectors passing at ten second intervals) and try to teach myself what it should feel like to walk the straight path on a curving earth.