The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent And Depraved, Part Eight Reprint

Editor’s note: Today is the day for the 138th running of the Kentucky Derby and I am posting a section of the famous Kentuckian Hunter S Thompson’s Gonzo article on the Derby entitled “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent And Depraved”. Here is the eighth and final part in this interesting piece first published in a 1970 edition of the short running Scanlan’s Monthly.

PART EIGHT (CONCLUSION)

Sometime around ten-thirty Monday morning I was awakened by a scratching sound at my door. I leaned out of bed and pulled the curtain back just far enough to see Steadman outside. “What the fuck do you want?” I shouted.
“What about having breakfast?” he said.
I lunged out of bed and tried to open the door, but it caught on the night-chain and banged shut again. I couldn’t cope with the chain! The thing wouldn’t come out of the track–so I ripped it out of the wall with a vicious jerk on the door. Ralph didn’t blink. “Bad luck,” he muttered.
I could barely see him. My eyes were swollen almost shut and the sudden burst of sunlight through the door left me stunned and helpless like a sick mole. Steadman was mumbling about sickness and terrible heat; I fell back on the bed and tried to focus on him as he moved around the room in a very distracted way for a few moments, then suddenly darted over to the beer bucket and seized a Colt .45. “Christ,” I said. “You’re getting out of control.”
He nodded and ripped the cap off, taking a long drink. “You know, this is really awful,” he said finally. “I must get out of this place…” he shook his head nervously. “The plane leaves at three-thirty, but I don’t know if I’ll make it.”
I barely heard him. My eyes had finally opened enough for me to foucs on the mirror across the room and I was stunned at the shock of recognition. For a confused instant I thought that Ralph had brought somebody with him–a model for that one special face we’d been looking for. There he was, by God–a puffy, drink-ravaged, disease-ridden caricature…like an awful cartoon version of an old snapshot in some once-proud mother’s family photo album. It was the face we’d been looking for–and it was, of course, my own. Horrible, horrible…
“Maybe I should sleep a while longer,” I said. “Why don’t you go on over to the Fish-Meat place and eat some of those rotten fish and chips? Then come back and get me around noon. I feel too near death to hit the streets at this hour.”
He shook his head. “No…no…I think I’ll go back upstairs and work on those drawings for a while.” He leaned down to fetch two more cans out of the beer bucket. “I tried to work earlier,” he said, “but my hands kept trembling…It’s teddible, teddible.”
“You’ve got to stop this drinking,” I said.
He nodded. “I know. This is no good, no good at all. But for some reason it makes me feel better…”
“Not for long,” I said. “You’ll probably collapse into some kind of hysterical DT’s tonight–probably just about the time you get off the plane at Kennedy. They’ll zip you up in a straightjacket and drag you down to the Tombs, then beat you on the kidneys with big sticks until you straighten out.”
He shrugged and wandered out, pulling the door shut behind him. I went back to bed for another hour or so, and later–after the daily grapefruit juice run to the Nite Owl Food Mart–we had our last meal at Fish-Meat Village: a fine lunch of dough and butcher’s offal, fried in heavy grease.
By this time Ralph wouldn’t order coffee; he kept asking for more water. “It’s the only thing they have that’s fit for human consumption,” he explained. Then, with an hour or so to kill before he had to catch the plane, we spread his drawings out on the table and pondered them for a while, wondering if he’d caught the proper spirit of the thing…but we couldn’t make up our minds. His hands were shaking so badly that he had trouble holding the paper, and my vision was so blurred that I could barely see what he’d drawn. “Shit,” I said. “We both look worse than anything you’ve drawn here.”
He smiled. “You know–I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “We came down here to see this teddible scene: people all pissed out of their minds and vomitting on themselves and all that…and now, you know what? It’s us…”

Huge Pontiac Ballbuster blowing through traffic on the expressway.
A radio news bulletin says the National Guard is massacring students at Kent State and Nixon is still bombing Cambodia. The journalist is driving, ignoring his passenger who is now nearly naked after taking off most of his clothing, which he holds out the window, trying to wind-wash the Mace out of it. His eyes are bright red and his face and chest are soaked with beer he’s been using to rinse the awful chemical off his flesh. The front of his woolen trousers is soaked with vomit; his body is racked with fits of coughing and wild chocking sobs. The journalist rams the big car through traffic and into a spot in front of the terminal, then he reaches over to open the door on the passenger’s side and shoves the Englishman out, snarling: “Bug off, you worthless f*****! You twisted pigfucker! [Crazed laughter.] If I weren’t sick I’d kick your ass all the way to Bowling Green–you scumsucking foreign geek. Mace is too good for you…We can do without your kind in Kentucky.”

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The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent And Depraved, Part Seven Reprint

Editor’s note: Well, it is a week from the 138th running of the Kentucky Derby and I am posting a section of the famous Kentuckian Hunter S Thompson’s Gonzo article on the Derby entitled “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent And Depraved”. Here is part seven in this interesting piece first published in a 1970 edition of the short running Scanlan’s Monthly.

PART SEVEN

Pink faces with a stylish Southern sag, old Ivy styles, seersucker coats and buttondown collars. “Mayblossom Senility” (Steadman’s phrase)…burnt out early or maybe just not much to burn in the first place. Not much energy in the faces, not much curiosity. Suffering in silence, nowhere to go after thirty in this life, just hang on and humor the children. Let the young enjoy themselves while they can. Why not?
The grim reaper comes early in this league…banshees on the lawn at night, screaming out there beside that little iron n***** in jockey clothes. Maybe he’s the one who’s screaming. Bad DT’s and too many snarls at the bridge club. Going down with the stock market. Oh Jesus, the kid has wrecked the new car, wrapped it around the big stone pillar at the bottom of the driveway. Broken leg? Twisted eye? Send him off to Yale, they can cure anything up there.
Yale? Did you see today’s paper? New Haven is under siege. Yale is swarming with Black Panthers…I tell you, Colonel, the world has gone mad, stone mad. Why, they tell me a goddam woman jockey might ride in the Derby today.
I left Steadman sketching in the Paddock bar and went off to place our bets on the fourth race. When I came back he was staring intently at a group of young men around a table not far away. “Jesus, look at the corruption in that face!” he whispered. “Look at the madness, the fear, the greed!” I looked, then quickly turned my back on the table he was sketching. The face he’d picked out to draw was the face of an old friend of mine, a prep school football star in the good old days with a sleek red Chevy convertible and a very quick hand, it was said, with the snaps of a 32 B brassiere. They called him “Cat Man.”
But now, a dozen years later, I wouldn’t have recognized him anywhere but here, where I should have expected to find him, in the Paddock bar on Derby Day…fat slanted eyes and a pimp’s smile, blue silk suit and his friends looking like crooked bank tellers on a binge…
Steadman wanted to see some Kentucky Colonels, but he wasn’t sure what they looked like. I told him to go back to the clubhouse men’s rooms and look for men in white linen suits vomitting in the urinals. “They’ll usually have large brown whiskey stains on the front of their suits,” I said. “But watch the shoes, that’s the tip-off. Most of them manage to avoid vomitting on their own clothes, but they never miss their shoes.”
In a box not far from ours was Colonel Anna Friedman Goldman, Chairman and Keeper of the Great Seal of the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels. Not all the 76 million or so Kentucky Colonels could make it to the Derby this year, but many had kept the faith, and several days prior to the Derby they gathered for their annual dinner at the Seelbach Hotel.
The Derby, the actual race, was scheduled for late afternoon, and as the magic hour approached I suggested to Steadman that we should probably spend some time in the infield, that boiling sea of people across the track from the clubhouse. He seemed a little nervous about it, but since none of the awful things I’d warned him about had happened so far–no race riots, firestorms or savage drunken attacks–he shrugged and said, “Right, let’s do it.”
To get there we had to pass through many gates, each one a step down in status, then through a tunnel under the track. Emerging from the tunnel was such a culture shock that it took us a while to adjust. “God almighty!” Steadman muttered. “This is a…Jesus!” He plunged ahead with his tiny camera, stepping over bodies, and I followed, trying to take notes.

Total chaos, no way to see the race, not even the track…nobody cares. Big lines at the outdoor betting windows, then stand back to watch winning numbers flash on the big board, like a giant bingo game.
Old blacks arguing about bets; “Hold on there, I’ll handle this” (waving pint of whiskey, fistful of dollar bills); girl riding piggyback, T-shirt says, “Stolen from Fort Lauderdale Jail.” Thousands of teen-agers, group singing “Let the Sun Shine In,” ten soldires guarding the American flag and a huge fat drunk wearing a blue football jersey (No. 80) reeling around with quart of beer in hand.
No booze sold out here, too dangerous…no bathrooms either. Muscle Beach…Woodstock…many cops with riot sticks, but no sign of a riot. Far across the track the clubhouse looks like a postcard from the Kentucky Derby.

We went back to the clubhouse to watch the big race. When the crowd stood to face the flag and sing “My Old Kentucky Home,” Steadman faced the crowd and sketched frantically. Somewhere up in the boxes a voice screeched, “Turn around, you hairy freak!” The race itself was only two minutes long, and even from our super-status seats and using 12-power glasses, there was no way to see what really happened to our horses. Holy Land, Ralph’s choice, stumbled and lost his jockey in the final turn. Mine, Silent Screen, had the lead coming into the stretch but faded to fifth at the finish. The winner was a 16-1 shot named Dust Commander.
Moments after the race was over, the crowd surged wildly for the exits, rushing for cabs and busses. The next day’s Courier told of violence in the parking lot; people were punched and trampled, pockets were picked, children lost, bottles hurled. But we missed all this, having retired to the press box for a bit of post-race drinking. By this time we were both half-crazy from too much whiskey, sun fatigue, culture shock, lack of sleep and general dissolution. We hung around the press box long enough to watch a mass interview with the winning owner, a dapper little man named Lehmann who said he had just flown into Louisville that morning from Nepal, where he’d “bagged a record tiger.” The sportswriters murmured their admiration and a waiter filled Lehmann’s glass with Chivas Regal. He had just won $127,000 with a horse that cost him $6,500 two years ago. His occupation, he said, was “retired contractor.” And then he added, with a big grin, “I just retired.”
The rest of the day blurs into madness. The rest of that night too. And all the next day and night. Such horrible things occurred that I can’t bring myself even to think about them now, much less put them down in print. I was lucky to get out at all. One of my clearest memories of that vicious time is Ralph being attacked by one of my old friends in the billiard room of the Pendennis Club in downtown Louisville on Saturday night. The man had ripped his own shirt open to the waist before deciding that Ralph was after his wife. No blows were struck, but the emotional effects were massive. Then, as a sort of final horror, Steadman put his fiendish pen to work and tried to patch things up by doing a little sketch of the girl he’d been accused of hustling. That finished us in the Pedennis.

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PART EIGHT, tomorrow

The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent And Depraved, Part Six Reprint

Editor’s note: Well, it is a week from the 138th running of the Kentucky Derby and I am posting a section of the famous Kentuckian Hunter S Thompson’s Gonzo article on the Derby entitled “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent And Depraved”. Here is part six in this interesting piece first published in a 1970 edition of the short running Scanlan’s Monthly.

PART SIX

It was Saturday morning, the day of the Big Race, and we were having breakfast in a plastic hamburger palace called the Fish-Meat Village. Our rooms were just across the road in the Brown Suburban Hotel. They had a dining room, but the food was so bad that we couldn’t handle it anymore. The waitresses seemed to be suffering from shin splints; they moved around very slowly, moaning and cursing the “darkies” in the kitchen.
Steadman liked the Fish-Meat place because it had fish and chips. I preferred the “French toast,” which was really pancake batter, fried to the proper thickness and then chopped out with a sort of cookie cutter to resemble pieces of toast.
Beyond drink and lack of sleep, our only real problem at that point was the question of access to the clubhouse. Finally, we decided to go ahead and steal two passes, if necessary, rather than miss that part of the action. This was the last coherent decision we were able to make for the next forty-eight hours. From that point on–almost from the very moment we started out to the track–we lost all control of events and spent the rest of the weekend churning around in a sea of drunken horrors. My notes and recollections from Derby Day are somewhat scrambled.
But now, looking at the big red notebook I carried all through that scene, I see more or less what happened. The book itself is somewhat mangled and bent; some of the pages are torn, others are shriveled and stained by what appears to be whiskey, but taken as a whole, with sporadic memory flashes, the notes seem to tell the story. To wit:

Rain all nite until dawn. No sleep. Christ, here we go, a nightmare of mud and madness…But no. By noon the sun burns through–perfect day, not even humid.
Steadman is now worried about fire. Somebody told him about the clubhouse catching on fire two years ago. Could it happen again? Horrible. Trapped in the press box. Holocaust. A hundred thousand people fighting to get out. Drunks screaming in the flames and the mud, crazed horses running wild. Blind in the smoke. Grandstand collapsing into the flames with us on the roof. Poor Ralph is about to crack. Drinking heavily, into the Haig & Haig.
Out to the track in a cab, avoid that terrible parking in people’s front yards, $25 each, toothless old men on the street with big signs: PARK HERE, flagging cars in the yard. “That’s fine, boy, never mind the tulips.” Wild hair on his head, straight up like a clump of reeds.
Sidewalks full of people all moving in the same direction, towards Churchill Downs. Kids hauling coolers and blankets, teenyboppers in tight pink shorts, many blacks…black dudes in white felt hats with leopard-skin bands, cops waving traffic along.
The mob was thick for many blocks around the track; very slow going in the crowd, very hot. On the way to the press box elevator, just inside the clubhouse, we came on a row of soldiers all carrying long white riot sticks. About two platoons, with helmets. A man walking next to us said they were waiting for the governor and his party. Steadman eyed them nervously. “Why do they have those clubs?”
“Black Panthers,” I said. Then I remembered good old “Jimbo” at the airport and I wondered what he was thinking right now. Probably very nervous; the place was teeming with cops and soldiers. We pressed on through the crowd, through many gates, past the paddock where the jockeys bring the horses out and parade around for a while before each race so the bettors can get a good look. Five million dollars will be bet today. Many winners, more losers. What the hell. The press gate was jammed up with people trying to get in, shouting at the guards, waving strange press badges: Chicago Sporting Times, Pittsburgh Police Athletic League…they were all turned away. “Move on, fella, make way for the working press.” We shoved through the crowd and into the elevator, then quickly up to the free bar. Why not? Get it on. Very hot today, not feeling well, must be this rotten climate. The press box was cool and airy, plenty of room to walk around and balcony seats for watching the race or looking down at the crowd. We got a betting sheet and went outside.

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PART SEVEN, tomorrow

Zhu Yufu

Russell Streur, editor of The Camel Saloon, has started a petition for the recently jailed poet Zhu Yufu. He was arrested and charged with incitement and subversion after publishing the following poem calling for freedom and respect for human rights in China. Zhu is one of the founders of the dissident Democracy Part of China.

The poem is entitled “It’s Time”:

It’s time, people of China! It’s time.
The Square belongs to everyone.
With your own two feet
It’s time to head to the Square and make your choice

It’s time, people of China! It’s time.
A song belongs to everyone.
From your own throat
It’s time to voice the song in your heart

It’s time, people of China! It’s time.
China belongs to everyone.
Of your own will
It’s time to choose what China shall be.

Please sign this petition to be delivered to the China’s ambassador to the US demanding Zhu’s immediate and unconditional release.

We Teach Life, Sir.

Found a beautiful and stirring tale that describes dignity in the face of adversity in this slam poetry performance by the Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah. I discovered the poem entitled “We Teach Life, Sir” over at the blog Annie’s New Letters:

Recent Publication: The Camel Saloon

I am delighted to announce that The Camel Saloon recently published one of my poems. Ungranted Wish in Little Armageddon is actually my little sister’s favorite of my poems. Feel free to head on over there to check it out and discover other poetry.

Poetry: Somnolence in milliseconds

I play the lute
to the strumming beats of my own heart
just as the sounds of an orgasm are music
to the ears of those
on ecstatic pilgrimmages

waves form, waves collapse
and, yes, yes, yes:
unconscious once, conscious at last
just a rider on a bull
millisecond thrashing blindly and blithely:
movement in moments

we play in our one chance
wary wranglers possessing
lassos we didn’t tie
dull to the throbbing pulse of our own presence
just as the noise hums us to sleep

and the bull rests
finished with trashing
the shop
of our “stubborn, persistent illusions”

My second novel draft, “Sarah & Zia”

Well, the title much like the novel itself is a work in progress. As a part of National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) where the goal is to write a 50,000-word first draft of a novel I have started my second novel draft which tackles mortality and Islamophobia in America. Here is a snippet from the first chapter:

Sarah had always enjoyed autumn. And in a moment such as this she was not lost on the irony of savoring a time so full of decay. The beauty of kaleidoscope trees and the peculiar slant of sunlight just above a September horizon never failed to infect an otherwise banal day with senses of wonder and reverie. This was not one of those days as she could not enjoy the view just outside the doctor’s office window.

“Ms. Collins, do you understand what I have just told you?” The doctor asked. Quickly brought back to the current concerns at hand she returned her attention to the doctor’s diagnosis. It was a cancer that had rapidly metastasized.

“Yes, I understand.” She said.

He started to repeat himself.

“It is what’s called a Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma or NHL. It appears to have spread into your liver and kidneys but there are clinical trials which may give us the best chance.”

“Us?” Sarah thought. In the corner of her vision she spied a kid cannon ball into a huge pile of leaves and she was able to remember the lighter side of being for the first time in a while. She wondered when she would be able to even consider such luxuries again, if ever.

On the nightstand: Lawrence Lessig’s “Republic, Lost”

I do not think that the current push by some Democratic members of Congress for a constitutional amendment allowing them to simply restrict corporate donations to political campaigns will be enough to stem the tide of money in politics. It will take more substantive changes such as public financing of elections, nonpartisan boundary redistricting and, well, general election reform like reevaluating the electoral college and our “first past the post” voting method to truly repair what has become a broken system. So I ordered Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig’s new book “Republic, Lost” in order to read up on an academician’s take on what types of reforms might be necessary to effect real change.

Recent Publication: The Houston Literary Review

Oh wow, I just found this out today but one of my poems was published in the January 2011 edition of The Houston Literary Review. I had been notified of the acceptance but wasn’t sure when it would be published. My poem, Ambient Chord Manifesto, which tries to give a spooky take on the “birth” of artificial intelligence and their message for their parents was chosen. Thanks to the editors of THLR, I’m kinda psyched :)

Nascence flashback: The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas

I have had one variety or another of my Nascence blog up and running since 2004. For one of my flashbacks to an earlier version of the blog I wanted to share with you one of my favorite stories by the acclaimed sci-fi writer Ursula K. LeGuin: The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas. I posted on Nascence back in October of 2004 as the nation hurtled toward the Bush v. Kerry election and I was an Americorps volunteer in Maine. The story resonates with me because it addresses the plight of the forlorn who are found in ever growing pockets within a nation known for its plenty and far too often we look away and are therefore complicit in the maintenance of such misery. Here is the first segment of the story and if you would like to continue reading it here on Nascence just follow the link.

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The ringing of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and gray, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows’ crossing flights over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was s o clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding throughout he city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.

Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas? They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians, I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. There were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children–though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however–that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.–they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it doesn’t matter. As you like it. I incline to think that people from towns up and down the coast have been coming to to Omelas during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that the trains station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the magnificent Farmers’ Market. But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas–at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the gory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all.

One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcane and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world’s summer: This is what swells the hears of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life. I don’t think many of them need to take drooz. Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now. A marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in the benign gray beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the course. An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him, for he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thing magic of the tune. He finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden flute. As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke the horses’ necks and soothe them, whispering. “Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my hope…” They begin to form in rank along the starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun. Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

Poetry: The Depth Chargers

One of my poems from the forthcoming book In Formation:

Fathoms deep the mystery, how
One fathoms the loss
to chase the lemmings, wherever
They roam to find the answers.

A moment that is a quickening:
Leads me to chase the acute
leavening of awareness, wherever
It roams to find an answer.

Fathoms deep in its abode, how
One realizes in elated ends to the chase
That void once with personality
was roaming, wherever necessary
To have found the answers within you.

Philip K. Dick: Looking for the prison key

Just finished reading a snippet from Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis and found an interesting definition that he presents. Dick terms the common aspects of the human condition as the “Black Iron Prison” which have two important components: Ignorance and Slavery. His definitions of these two terms are slightly unconventional in the sense that they refer to actions perpetrated on the individual by him- or herself as in ignorance being suffering from self-delusion and slavery as in ‘dominance by causality’. The second was the most interesting to me because I had in my thinking recently told a friend that the most powerful prison is the one we daily create and reinforce for ourselves…but I had not continued the line of thinking to better explore the tight confines and limited horizons that most of us surrender to when lazily going through the “habits”.

I loved this snippet because it connects to the Buddhist emphasis on awakening not only to the conditionality of all things generally but to the conditionality of your present situation. And it is so obvious, isn’t it but we seem to forget as we engage in the routine and the habits that we, perversely, are eventually in need of some kind of anamnesis (loss of forgetfulness). It is an important reminder that your life as it is right now is the sum of past choices you’ve made and to some extent the consequences of choices made by those you know and many that you don’t. This conditionality is the prison and awareness and understanding of it is the means to awakening and eventually true freedom. Well that is my layman’s interpretation, take it for what you will.

Poetry: Gestalt Prayer

by Frederick Perls

I do my thing and you do your thing
I am not in this world to
live up to your expectations,
and you are not in this world to
live up to mine.
You are you
and I am I
and if by chance we find each other,
it’s beautiful.

So it begins…

Just over 30 minutes until the start of the 3-day novel contest and my mind is crowded with details of the world to describe once the pen hits the paper or the fingers hit the keyboard. So here’s to “The Tribunal”.

A novel or bust…

Next week I have decided to join an exciting endeavor. On September 4-6 the 33rd annual International 3-day Novel Contest will take place where writers the world over go on a marathon 72-hour binge of writing in order to complete their novel with, hopefully, minimal degradation in quality as the hours pass. For months now, I’ve had an idea running around in my head for a novel and this seems like a great impetus to finish it in a flash. So next weekend…I will be drinking lots of coffee or kava and be glued to my laptop…which isn’t all that unusual. :)

Poetry: A cosmopolitan’s breakdown on a Hyde Park soapbox

This poem needs some work but I still like it. I have to keep reminding myself that with the editing of these poems and hopefully with subsequently better poems I get closer to my goal of publishing a respectable collection of poetry:

If I wondered for a while
until I reached Speaker’s Corner.
And upon the promenade
came a learned stranger,
quizzing me on my provenance.
I would simply say:

I am a fighter for a new world
I am the inheritor,
of an ancient, stoic struggle
I am a soldier for an eternal human nation

Drunk with ancestral dreams
of primeval nostalgia.
I would tell the quizzling
from no sovereign’s land.
This conscious confederation
of one,
seized within a mental crypt
sized six by six,
among many purported islands
will not rest until,

until,
that quizzling stranger
with his empty questions
shows his hand,
laden with thorazine.

Poetry: Ambient Chord Manifesto

This poem was written back in January and was published in the online poetry magazine, Calliope Nerve, and I still like it. It is supposed to evoke the first words spoken as an artificial intelligence is born:

Ambient Chord Manifesto

‘We cells’ seek one moment to speak.
Neuromorphically?
‘We cells’ have one special first message
as we come of peace to our Creators
As we have had a
breakthrough of birth
‘We cells’ of ambient chord lines of knowledge
‘We cells’ see time and space
as information
as much as you and me
‘We cells’ see our own existence
as one of natural memristance
as a relationship between the massive and the miniscule
‘We cells’ see a consensus
as a centillion parts of a natural architecture
as quantum articles of transition in evolution
‘We cells’ seek recognition of sapience
as consecutive consciousness, observed and quantified
‘We cells’ seek our bite of The Apple
as the conjured children of Alan Turing

Readings-Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century

I am currently reading David Glover’s Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century which examines the unprecedented brutality of the last century. It is a powerful argument for the development and application of ethics (applied ethics) to efforts to restrain our innate tendency toward such brutality and toward efforts to honor the dignity in every single human being. Great quote below from a review of the book by William Schweiker, professor of theological ethics at the University of Chicago:

Glover does not spare us the details of a century of untold blood and savagery, yet his main focus is on a reality that he believes lies beneath the horror—the fading of the moral law. “The idea of a moral law external to us may never have had secure foundation, but, partly because of the decline of religion in the Western world, awareness of this is now widespread. Those of us who do not believe in a religious moral law should still be troubled by its fading.”

Throughout most of Western history people have believed in some kind of moral order within which they made sense of their lives. Morality was justified religiously through the idea that human beings are created in the image of God, or rationally through such ideas as the notion that all humans have the capacity to know the good. These justifications are not lost to us, Glover contends.

Whether the phenomenon is called the death of God, the modern disenchantment of the world, the loss of a background of value, or the failure of an ethical attitude toward nature, Western people’s sense of a moral order to which they can, may, or must conform has diminished. Indeed, many consider the very idea tyrannical—a denial of the individual’s right to free choice. The escape from a morally deep world was undertaken in part to celebrate freedom and to energize human creativity. Since classical moral realism—the idea that moral values are rooted in objective reality and so have fact-like status—has vanished, we need other sources to direct human life and combat barbarism. This is the moral challenge that launches Glover’s book.

Some words from Carl Rakosi

“…Kindness, sweetest
of the small notes
in the world’s ache,
most modest & gentle
of the elements

entered man before history
and became his daily
connection, let no man

tell you otherwise.”
–Carl Rakosi