As The Crow Flys

'Nuff said.

Unrequited Life

Unrequited Life

I have come to realize
I have lived many lives.
Many lives within one.
Many lives in all.
One life outside all.
One Life that is All.

I have come to realize
I have performed many roles.
Many roles within one.
Many roles in all.
One role outside all.
One Role that is All.

I have come to realize
I have learned many lessons.
Many lessons within one.
Many lessons in all.
One lesson outside all.
One Lesson that is All.

I have come to realize
I have reasoned many lives.
Many reasons within one.
Many reasons in all.
One reason outside all.
One Reason that is All.

I have come to realize
I have loved many lives.
Many loves within one.
Many loves in all.
One love outside all.
One Love that is All.

One Life, One Role,
One Lesson, One Reason,
One Love.

You.

The Ultimate Outlier

The Ultimate Outlier

“The man who "called his shot" was, and is still, more than baseball.”

– Jason Perry –

One might think that all that can be said about Babe Ruth has been said. After all, it has been over 61 years since he died, over 74 years since he played his last game, over 82 years since he hit 60 home runs in one season, and over 95 years since he played his first major league game. But it is a testament to the uniqueness of this player that there is still new ways to look at what he accomplished. I will attempt to do just such a thing in this essay – discuss a new way of looking at the accomplishments of The Sultan of Swat. The author of the accompanying article had the chance to delve into new territory, but instead he rehashed widely known statistics, as if teaching an introductory course to people who had never heard of The Great Bambino. The statistics used in the article are common and commonly available. Any and every baseball fanatic knows their way around the usual bunch of statistics in this article: home runs, RBI per game, batting average, slugging average, on base percentage, at-bats per home run, runs per game and OPS. Anybody and everybody could have looked up these statistics freely from the very same source the author used: www.baseball-reference.com. Here was a chance, in 2007, with Barry Bonds chasing immortality and Hank Aaron, to look anew at the player who single-handedly changed the way baseball was played. His last name became an adjective, Ruthian, to describe the most incredible feats and achievements in any and all human endeavors. His name is universally recognized for excellence and is often used in terms like "The Babe Ruth of Ornithology" and "The Babe Ruth of Woodsmen". The Rajah of Rap was an outlier of outliers. Alone he skewed the mean of hundreds of players a season, and thousands over his career. Even when he's already been passed, as in Bonds chasing Aaron, he remains the one and only Home Run King. Let's take a look, and while we're at it, see how Bonds and Hammerin' Hank Aaron fare, as well.

Firstly, we will not take the entire career of The Colossus of Clout into consideration because his career can be divided into four distinct phases: his time as a pitcher and pinch hitter (1914-1917), the time when he first when into the outfield and revolutionized the game (1918-1926), the glory days of his career when more and more players followed his lead (1927-1933), and then the last part when he was merely human in a Ruthian league (1934-1935). It is true, as pointed out in the article, that in 1927 he out-homered every team in his league. What isn't mentioned is that he out-homered all but two teams in both leagues (the National League Saint Louis Cardinals hit 84 home runs and the Chicago Cubs hit 74 home runs to the Wazir of Wham's 60) But more importantly to my point, his teammate Larrupin' Lou Gehrig himself out-homered 7 of the total 16 teams of both leagues, and the Cubs Hack Wilson out-homered 4 of them. These two players were the first to follow The Terrible Titan into outlier status, and into modern baseball, and they did so in 1927. So that year is the official beginning of Ruthian baseball, as opposed to what is now known as The Deadball Era. In fact, in 1920 The Prodigious One out-homered every team in the American League except the rest of his Yankee team, and every team in the National League except Philadelphia. He commonly hit more home runs than most other teams during the first half of his career. So his feat of 1927 is not without precedence. To further solidify the point, Hack Wilson was known as the Little Babe Ruth and the National League Babe Ruth, and he set a record in 1930 that even The King of Crash couldn't touch – 191 RBI in a single season. That extreme deviation from the mean stands alone today, unlike most of The King of Swing's. 1927 marks the beginning point when the Maharajah of Mash no longer stood in a class by himself; he was being joined in his outlier status by other players.

Therefore, the second part of his career (1918-1926) is the subject of my statistical analysis, and the crux of how I think the accompanying article could have used statistics better. During these 9 years the Wali of Wallop was truly the outlier of outliers – he warped the normal distribution curve of more than 230 ballplayers per league per year all by himself. And he did it even though he was also a rotation pitcher as well as outfielder for the first two of those years.

A look at the data for that set of years notes 2 anomalies, 1922 & 1925, when The Big Bam did not put up his usual numbers. 1925 was the year of The Great Bellyache, when intestinal troubles aggravated by a profligate lifestyle sidelined The Bulky Monarch and he did not lead the league in anything except bellyaches. 1922 was a year he was beset by hangovers and injuries, yet he still led in Slugging Percentage, OPS and OPS+ in limited playing time. The players who led the league in homers those years, Ken Williams and Bob Meusel, did so with what was by far their highest seasonal home run total of their careers – in other words, not only were they outliers for the league and in baseball history up to that point, but those seasons were also outliers within their own careers even afterwards. As is always the case, only an outlier of outliers can begin to compare to His Eminence, and then in only a fragment of the whole. Let's take a new look at the data for The Kid of Crash, and then we'll go on to Bonds and The Hammer.

The method of comparison is simply arithmetic: the sets of data include the AL totals and averages, George Herman's totals and averages, and the totals and averages of the league minus Ruth. This compares the league with him against the league without him: The Circuit Smasher vs. the American Circuit (1918-1926).

The mean of home runs each batter hit is 1.6, yet The Bambino averages 38.6, and without him the league average batter would have a mean of only 0.6. He is the 1, yo! Adding him to the mix increased output by 133% – not up to 133% but an additional 133%! One man's accomplishment compared to the skilled efforts of 2165 players. In other words, adding The Man to the league added the equivalent of 2881 men. The numbers confirm what historians have been saying, The King of Clout at this time was bigger than the league – he transformed the game during this period like Prometheus of old, sweeping change in every direction.

Perhaps that number is too overwhelming to comprehend. The beauty of this Big Baby is that he causes ripples in the entire statistical fabric of the game. During this period Homeric Herman hit 1 home run every 14.9 plate appearances (PA), while the league without him took 130.8 PA to hit a homer. The difference The Sultan of Sweat made to the league is measured here at 8.77%, and applying that to the total players reveals The Slacker's achievements can be replaced by the simple addition of another 190 players.

Going down another level, The Big Babe clobbered 38.6 homers per season during this stretch, compared to the average player, pro-rated to synchronize PA, will eke out 4.4 home runs. George can replace 9 players, the entire lineup.

Still further, comparing OPS+, a statistic that normalizes players to the league and parks to try to get a player's true value, we set the league average at 100, while Herman holds out at 212 – roughly twice the threat of the average player to have a successful plate appearance. He's as good as two players at bat at the same time.

This ripple effect through the statistics is called Fractal Distribution. I just made that up. Oh yes, Bonds and Henry. They are but an afterthought after Dunne's Babe, but compare we must.

The Hammer's best 9 consecutive seasons are from 1956 to 1964. The mean of home runs hit is 4.0, and Aaron averages 36.2. Without Bad Henry the league average batter would have a mean of 3.9 homers. This means Aaron in the mix increased output by an additional 2.75%. Hank added the equivalent of 74 players to the league. During this period Hank hit 1 home run every 18.5 PA, while the league without him took 43.9 PA to hit 1 homer. The difference to the league Hank made here is measured at 1.74%. Applying that to the total players reveals the achievements of The Hammer can be replaced by the addition of 47 players. Going down another fractal level gives us stats of 38.2 home runs a season by Aaron, and the pro-rated average player hitting 11.75 homers. Hank can replace 3.25 players, or a bit more than a third of the lineup. One last iteration to OPS+, and Hank reaches 163 – roughly one and a half times the threat of the average player to have a successful at bat.

So we can see that while Aaron compares favorably close on an individual basis, the league around him had improved tremendously over 41 years.

Bonds best 9 consecutive years came during 1996-2004, 40 years later. The mean of home runs hit is 4.6, and Bonds averages 45.7. Without Bonds the league average batter would have a mean of 4.5 homers. This means with Bonds in the mix increased output by 1.57%. Bonds added the equivalent of 82 players to the league. During this period Bonds hit 1 home run every 13.5 PA, while the league without him took 37 PA to hit 1 homer. The difference to the league Bonds made here is measured at 1.09%. Applying that to the total players reveals the achievements of Bonds can be replaced by the addition of 57 players. Going down another fractal level gives us stats of 45.7 home runs a season by Bonds, and the pro-rated average player hitting 16.6 homers. Bonds can replace 2.75 players, or a bit less than a third of the lineup. The last level down is OPS+, and Bonds reaches 211 – almost catching The Big Bambino. So close, yet so far.

These and other statistics can be used as interpretive comparisons of data, which serves as a window of illustration on the impact outliers can have on the rest of the data. We can then consider how far the ripples can ripple through culture and time. That is the Beauty of numbers. The comparisons here clearly show one of these three extraordinary ballplayers is still an outlier among outliers. The King of Sluggers remains on his throne.

But Bonds has something to say. Bonds played in a Ruthian Game while The Wazir of Wham played in a human game. Consider the first statistic we investigated, home runs per player. We estimated there that adding The Big One to the mix was like adding 2881 players to the league. The number of players Bonds competed against had increased by 3041. So we have a correlation of that statistic: when more than 2881 players are added, along with 81 years, another Ruthian player emerges: Bonds. The fact remains that he did approach within 1 of his goal in OPS+, 211 to 212 – a statistic designed to find true offensive value. The fraction of a player less Bonds is would be noticeable over the course of a season, but in a single at bat, any random at bat, Bonds' performance has a greater than 99.5% chance of being Ruthian. This correlation is exactly the result predicted by the manipulation of the home runs per player statistic when tied to OPS+ as done in the above Fractal Distribution. Even still, The Yankee from Olympus was the one who set the conditions, and Bonds merely the statistic that filled them.

If this was Biology we could use this as an example of a single mutation that is so fit that it becomes dominant – like a colony of bacteria evolving an immunity to an antibiotic, but in this case the game of baseball evolving into a Ruthian Game. Unfortunately, therein lay the road to The Steroid Era, a foreseeable outcome, sociologically, to the evolving attempt to become The Hero, to be like George Herman “Babe” Ruth.

One last outlying stat: as I demonstrated within the essay, George Herman Ruth was also an outlier in number of nicknames attributed to one person. One last nickname (or two): Old Nigger Lips. That was one of the nicknames you didn't say to his face, but rather shouted from the anonymous gaggle of players in the opposing dugout – as the Chicago Cubs did in the 1932 World Series, prompting the legendary Called Shot home run to deepest center field. It didn't pay to get Tarzan mad (the nickname his teammates had for him).

I'm Late

I'm Late

A friend of mine had two strikes,

her game was on the line.

Another strike was pitched,

it wasn't what she liked,

but a swing she had to take,

so she swung that vodka bottle

with everything she had

and struck a little squibbler

skipping down the line,

and while the fielders charged

to interrupt her strike

she raised a drunken ruckus

storming down that line.

The throw across the diamond
tied her foot down to the bag

and crashing into safety

sent the sacker to the sand.

But now she found herself

alone at that first base bag

needing desperately to find a way

to make the next way station.

So she called upon her friend

over in the on-deck circle

to sacrifice and bunt her

quickly over to second.

So bunt I did,

and safe she is,

but now for you

I'm poor and late.

But don't you look

disapprovingly,

or call a strike on me,

'cause I'll tell you

to your face:

"Go fuck yourself!"

for me.

Rolling Thunder in The Ukraine

Rolling Thunder in The Ukraine

I had forgotten I wrote this. It was printed in the New Haven Register in April, 1986

The thunder rolls; the rain falls. The radioactive cloud is up there somewhere -- I wonder if it has reached this far yet? Is each sparkling raindrop tainted with invisible poison? The water of life that falls from the sky; that flows in little rivulets in the backyard. that splashes in driveway puddles and rings against the metal of the car. The rain that nourishes the lawn and the shade trees; that splatters about the roof and walls of the house.

The thunder rolls; my dog whines to go out before it gets real bad. Not this time, dog. This time we wait until it is all over -- and the sun has dried the ground.

Of course, they tell us not to worry, there is only a little radiation left in that swiftly dispersing plume from Chernobyl. But I wonder: will this become commonplace by the time my hair is gray? Will there be another plume in time for Halloween? And one for Christmas too?

The thunder rolls; but the worst is yet to come. We all knew the dangers. We all knew the horror. We all knew it could happen. We all know it can be worse.

We are told the odds are in our favor; but then, we all know Murphy's Law. Even the luckiest gambler rolls snake-eyes once in a while.

On 26 April 1986 01:23:45 a.m. (UTC+3) reactor number four at the Chernobyl plant, near Pripyat in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, exploded. Further explosions and the resulting fire sent a plume of highly radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area. Four hundred times more fallout was released than had been by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

In Praise of Madness

re-posted from Scotland's independent Sunday Herald
http://www.sundayherald.com/oped/opinion/display.var.2529303.0.in_paise_of_madness.php

In Praise of Madness

Most creative people are a little bit crazy. So isn’t it time we ditched those conformist ideas about mental health? Essay of the week by John Burnside

TOWARDS THE end of 1963, during one of those periodic controversies about "smut" that characterised the age, the writer Kenneth Tynan composed a rather odd letter of complaint to The Times. "Dear Sir," it began. "I hope I am not a prude, but I feel compelled to lodge a protest against the recent outbreak of violence and sexuality in dreams. Many of my friends have been as shocked and sickened as I have by the filth that is poured out nightly as soon as our eyes are closed. It is certainly not my idea of home entertainment'."

The letter was a spoof, of course; yet it made an important point about the nature of the imagination and mental health. For as long as anyone could remember, public notions of sanity - both individual and social - had been predicated on the denial of the "darker" and more unruly elements of the psyche and, in spite of Freud and Jung, in spite of two world wars, in spite of the Surrealists' championing of artful transgression and amour fou, most people in the 1960s accepted a crude and flimsy notion of mental health that depended, principally, upon the suppression of the dreaming self.

To be sane was to be almost devoid of sensuality; the creative imagination had been exchanged for a "rationality" that takes as its starting point the absurd premise that everything, from the mind to the cosmos, is more or less mechanical; the mad were dangerously sick and so unlike the sane as to form a distinct and separate species. Like everything around it, the brain was a little machine to be maintained and mended with whatever tools were in fashion, from talking cures and cold showers to numbing drug regimes and ECT. The imagination, the dreaming self, the inner wild of soul that the word psyche had once signified - all this was reduced to the "subconscious" and written off as an anomaly, a mild nuisance, like the slight knocking in an otherwise functional car engine.

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Tynan wrote his letter - which went on to talk about "disgraceful scenes of perversity and bestiality" - almost 50 years ago and, in the intervening years, Freud's ideas have become part of society's background noise (acknowledged, bowdlerised and finally ignored, as is common practice in a self-designated "liberal" society), yet we still have only the crudest of notions of mental health and we exist within a narrow social order that stifles the imagination and limits the potential of the majority of its citizens. No matter what kind of gloss we put on it, those who challenge the accepted norms are "eccentric" or "ill" ("I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," says Allen Ginsberg, in Howl - arguing that, when public life is so ugly, so conformist and so unjust, the sensitive mind is almost obliged to suffer) while those who uphold them, even while perpetrating the most insane acts, are normal. Yet, as a former mental patient myself, I am convinced that most madness is a search for order, and it is all too obvious that the order society offers is embarrassingly rudimentary, a system of taboos and diversions designed to limit - or to render prurient and so cheapen - any manifestation of the spontaneous, imaginative, soulful state that I would like to call "wild mind".

This condition is not anti-rational, as some would claim; instead, it opposes the narrow rationalism of those who have still to learn that one of the highest achievements of the rational mind is to see the limits of its own logic. As Wittgenstein says, in the concluding pages of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical." At this point, poetry, art and the imagination go to work, where logic left off.

It would be easy to say that we have always been as crude in our thinking about the well-balanced mind as we are now - but it would also be wrong. The Athenians, for example, were well aware that sanity depends as much on the acknowledgment, and ritual enacting, of the irrational as it does on logic and common sense. They created set times and spaces where the mysteries of the wild mind were celebrated with total abandon. As much as they prized public debate and the exercise of reason, they also honoured myth and dream, intuition and the kind of radical guesswork that can sometimes arise from drunken, desperate or trance-like conditions. Similarly, and not only in ancient times, societies have arisen in which day-to-day survival and the preservation of social mores has not only coexisted with, but depended upon, the "irrational" dream life of one or more of the group's members. In shaman communities, for example, a likely individual is singled out at any early age and subjected to a training in induced craziness (fasts, solitary wanderings, the use of powerful hallucinogens) that, to outsiders, would seem perverse, or even cruel, but is regarded by the entire group as essential to its continued success.

Conducted over many years, this training prepares the shaman for exhausting and sometimes life-threatening journeys in the unknown that are nothing less than fits of madness, deliberately induced in order to gain entry to a very real and often terrifying dream world in which valuable insights can be won and carried back for the benefit of all. Yet, while the shaman's sojourn in that realm appears to be a solitary one, he is never quite alone. In the Sámi tradition, for example, the chosen individual was sent out into the otherworld by a band of male drummers and then, when the vision had been achieved, he was "sung back" by the women of the clan or group, thus ensuring the participation of the entire community in the ritual journey. The shaman himself would have been selected for qualities that best fitted him to his work - qualities like sensitivity and dreaminess that we tend to play down, especially in males - but everyone acknowledged, and participated in, the voyage into the unspeakable. Like the Greeks, shaman societies understood that, as important as reason and practical knowledge may be, we only live fully if we include in our lives what Shakespeare refers to as "more than cool reason ever comprehends". We would do well to learn from their example.

The sad fact, however, is that we live in a society that summarily dismisses the irrational and so finds itself embarrassed by the mad, the shamanic and the visionary - a position that immediately reveals itself as absurd when we realise that many of the things we most value, or say we value - art and poetry, for example - have so often been produced by men and women who spent their entire lives on the very brink of shamanic madness. Occasionally that proximity has even been deliberately engineered: the poet Rimbaud called it a "systematic derangement of all the senses", and practised it as science, the Surrealists honoured the mad, the sexually deviant and those who had fallen under the spell of amour fou as exemplars of pure imagination, while the image of the drunken or drug-crazed artist has become a cliché that only serves to obscure deeper questions, not only about the relationship between creativity and the irrational, but also about the poverty of a social order in which any active disagreement or deviance from the crudely "rational" norm is scrupulously punished (or "treated").

TS Szasz expressed this idea best, years ago, in his 1958 essay Psychiatry, Ethics And Criminal Law: "The question may now be raised as to what are the differences, if any, between social nonconformity (or deviation) and mental illness. Leaving technical psychiatric considerations aside for the moment, I shall argue that the difference between these two notions - as expressed for example by the statements "he is wrong" and "he is mentally ill" - does not necessarily lie in any observable facts to which they point, but may consist only of a difference in our attitudes toward our subject. If we take him seriously, consider him to have human rights and dignities, and look upon him as more or less our equal - we then speak of disagreements, deviations, fights, crimes, perhaps even of treason. Should we feel, however, that we cannot communicate with him, that he is somehow "basically" different from us, we shall then be inclined to consider him no longer as an equal but rather as an inferior person; and then we speak of him as being crazy, mentally ill, insane, psychotic, immature, and so forth."

This is still the case. Anyone who has ever been in a mental hospital knows that, to be considered well, he must construct a narrative that the outside world can take seriously - and to do so, he must discard his own dreams and visions, no matter how vivid, diagnostically accurate or even just plain beautiful they might be. Why? Because our idea of what constitutes madness, whether in the asylum, or buried deep within our own social personae, is symptomatic of a system built on a near-total rejection of the wild mind.

"There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers," says William Godwin. "We must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness."

But for us, imagination has been subjugated to mere aspiration: we follow the dream that we are told is ours, and so end up either winning or losing those far from obscure objects of desire that admen prescribe: the look, the product, the lifestyle. In school, children are taught to be "imaginative" after an accepted model and, even then, they are given to understand that poetry and mental fight don't really matter that much anyway - with the result that, when those children grow up, they feel ashamed of their secret imaginings and flights of fancy, and inadequate if they cannot replace private and highly individual dream-lives with internalised product placements and pre-packaged corporate twitter.

Eventually, the time comes, for at least a quarter of us, when the only road back to real sanity - that is, to a condition of wild mind, in which the rational and the irrational achieve some kind of symbiotic balance - is to drop everything and go stark raving bonkers. It is saddening, then, to see that the main concern of society at large is to ensure that the "mental patient" - whose confused shamanic wanderings say more about a wider malaise than his or her own - is hauled back to normality unchanged and unheeded, ready to be a productive member of the group once more.

Now, it is not my intention to glamorise madness, and this essay is not a special plea for the anti-psychiatry lobby: I have been a lunatic myself and I readily admit that, during my strangest days, the idea of sitting in a room with RD Laing pretending everything was hunk-dory would have sent me running for the hills. I am happy to confess that there have been times in my life when I derived real support - interim, emergency support - from anti-psychotic drugs like chlorpromazine and I would be the last person in the world to deny a clinically depressed or manic patient his or her medication in time of need. Yet, like anyone else who has ever been "in the bin", I long for a society that cares enough about its maddened citizens to offer them true and honourable asylum - which is to say, imaginative and restful space for reflection and healing - and I also want to offer a few words in praise of madness, because madness has the potential to be both creative and diagnostic, to pose new ways of thinking and being and to expose the weaknesses of a society predicated on a simplistic and unworkable view of order and rationality. The mad are dreamers and dreams are the means by which the mind resolves conflicts, balances the books, finds new ways of moving forward and goes back to retrieve the precious things it has forgotten - in other words, the means by which a continuing, provisional and richly heuristic order is created. Occasionally, those mad dreams are smutty, grotesque or violent; at times, they are extraordinarily beautiful; yet they always contain a truth that would otherwise be hidden, and we should do all we can to allow that truth be heard.

In practical terms, this means letting the mad speak on their own terms - and listening to them - rather than obliging them to provide the prescribed narrative of the "cured". It also means responding to the diagnostic evidence of social disorder that madness offers. In Argentina, a project called Radio La Colifata ("Radio Loony") has been running for over a decade now, providing mental patients at the Borda Psychiatric Hospital with a radio programme in which everyone, from the short-term patient to a long-term inmate who describes himself as The King of Paranoia, is able to speak freely, offering flights of fancy, self-mockery and dream narratives, as well as personal stories, songs and political insights. This programme is now very popular on "the outside", and is syndicated with a number of commercial channels. "The people outside do not know what goes on inside this place," one of the patients has commented. "They think this is just a repository for crazies. But we are not crazy. I think part of the reason this programme is so popular is that when people hear us on the radio they hear something familiar inside their own heads."

This, in a nutshell, is the true significance of madness: it is, in so many ways, a communal matter. Crazy people are the wild mind's response to a society whose order is either too weak or too rigid to offer a fulfilled life and, as such, they are diagnosticians of social ills, from neglect and abuse - and such narratives often emerge on Radio La Colifata - to the spiritual poverty to which those outside the asylum walls too willingly surrender.

Sometimes, the mad point up flaws in the social order by opposition, countering the arid, the repressed and the second-rate with lunatic dreams, flagrant sensuality and epic tales of adventure and battle; sometimes, they echo the crimes and excesses of the group in ways that leave us troubled enough to demand change. Either way, the mad are valuable. We should listen to what they say, stop trying to cure them, offer them the healing spaces of true asylum rather than mental institutions or so-called "care in the community" - and, occasionally, when the moon is full and high in the sky, remind ourselves that we are all a little wilder, and a good deal more imaginative, than we have been taught to believe.

John Burnside is an author and poet. His latest collection, The Hunt In The Forest, is published by Jonathan Cape, £10

42nd Street

42nd Street

Hustle.
Everything a hustle.
Everybody a hustle.
Too many bodies
carrying personal armories.

Too many glares.
Too many stares.
The crowd is alive.
Every sound, a jive.
On it's face,
every moment, a race,
save he
and me.

He
Tall, gaunt,
dragged and bedraggled,
old and bearded,
dirty and sad,
carrying a small sign
with only three letters,
itself just a syllable
of a word
multi-syllabic:
Vet.

He
stoops to pick
a dogend,
a cigarette butt,
and looks around,
still ashamed.

Me
Leave my perch
against a wall
and walk up
with a smile,
reaching in my pocket
for one
hand-rolled cigarette,
and hand it to him.

He
Hesitation.
Then a smile,
accepting,
a wider smile
reaches his eyes.

Me
a smile
a shrug:
a wordless
sorry,
I have no more
to give.

He
nods
a wordless
it's OK,
thank you.

Me
a hand gesture:
Peace

He
sadness
reaches his eyes.

We
part,
lost again
in the crowd.

Us No More

Us No More

She sits
forlorn, fearful, frail,
looking at me
uncomprehendingly.

Her eyes speak
in tears
that do not flow
that do not show
that do not know
but still
they drown my heart.

How can you leave?
says one unseen
tear.

Why can't we
be happy
together?
pleads an ethereal
tear.

What did I
do wrong?
asks another phantom
tear.

What happened
to our
love?
crys yet another
ghost of a
tear.

I'm scared!
weeps a waterfall
of haunting tears
that never fall
in the eternal
despairing
moment
before I turn away
to hide

my
tears.

Re-posted from "Dissident Voice" a newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice

Indigenius Socialism for the 21st Century

by Stewart Steinhauer / August 1st, 2009

Mother Earth Circling Grandmothers: Women’s relationship roles, revolving around motherhood, are the key to understanding Indigenius Socialism. Photo: Stewart Steinhauer

KUTENAI TERRITORY, TURTLE ISLAND — First thing’s first: “Indigenius” is not a typo in the headline; it’s an example of the syncretic nature of the Cree language. Cree uses building blocks called morphemes; the genius of the Cree language is that speakers creatively jam morphemes together to create new, more accurate words, with two focuses: humour and poetry. And it’s an action, not mulled over in quiet deliberation, but spit out in the heat of the moment. Language as performance art.

Ready?

By the the beginning of the 21st century—after the imagined end of history, and much to Euro-origin intellectuals’ surprise—a call for socialism in the 21st century arose in Latin America, first among Mayan Zapatistas and then spreading southwards across the remainder of Turtle Island.

Socialism for the 21st century became Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s electoral battle cry, where, in spite of the complete and absolute opposition of the privately owned public media, he won election after election on the promise to redistribute oil revenues to the 60 per cent of the Venezuelan population that was desperately poor. Following Chavez’s program of Catholic liberation theology mixed with a smattering of Marx and topped off with hefty doses of pragmatic state capitalism, nation states across the southern continent tilted Left, with the notable exception of Colombia—after Israel, the largest recipient of US military aid in the world.

Like Evo Morales and the Bolivian Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), Indigenous-led social movements throughout Latin America are openly anti-capitalist, because capitalism as a system of political economy means ongoing genocide for Indigenous Peoples and perpetual ecocide for the non-human portion of the Mother Earth Super-Being, of which humans are a part. (See CIBC and Me, Part IV for details.) Coming from a deep history of harmonious relations with Mother Earth, and having already spent millennia in systems of political economy based on simple egalitarian sharing, Indigenous Peoples have something to say about what a potential future steady state global system of political economy could look like.

The first thing I have to point to is the European model of industrial development. It doesn’t work for a multiplicity of reasons, and negates Marx’s theoretical explanation of how capitalism would automatically create a human society filled with workers who will, some day, transform capitalism into a socialist society. From an Indigenous perspective, the Euro-origin industrial model arises from a psychological pitting of human against nature, manufacturing an ideological division that does not exist in Indigenous reality. Further, it posits that something called “scarcity” exists, and that technological development is necessary to better this supposedly natural state of scarcity. Within this imagined dichotomy, nature is wild and humans are civilized; humans living in a state of nature are wild, and therefore not real humans. The real humans live in a state of technologically ameliorated scarcity, assembling vehicles for Ford, GM and Chrysler, with two mortgages and four credit cards. So much for Marx.

From the Indigenous-to-Turtle Island point of view, there is no dichotomy between wild and civilized. There is no such thing as wilderness. When Europeans arrived on Turtle Island they saw wilderness, while Indigenous Peoples saw the space as fully inhabited by culturally developed humans who were living in an active relationship with Mother Earth. Land that was fully, ethically, sustainably inhabited by Indigenous Peoples was seen by Europeans as undeveloped. John Locke’s labour theory of value claims that an Indian’s land is not worth one-thousandth of what the same acre of land would be worth were it located in England. Several hundred years after Locke’s writings, agricultural researchers are suggesting that, if all factors from the global industrial base are included, free-ranging a 60,000,000-head herd of buffalo is most likely the best agricultural use of the High Plains region of North America—exactly the use it was being put to prior to the introduction of Europe’s industrial development model.

From an Indigenous point of view, a logical recommendation for socialism for the 21st century is a complete redesign of humanity’s global industrial base. The redesigned industrial base has to abandon both the myth of scarcity and the myth of wilderness, while embracing the reality that humans actually are an integral part of an enormous Super-Being, whom Indigenous folks have long known as Mother Earth.

A quick dash back to reality for a moment: we humans aren’t going to voluntarily undertake a task of that magnitude while we are in our current antisocial state of mind. It’s easy to point to the global problems facing humanity and say that our self-induced trauma has shaped us to be the species we are now. The challenging part is imagining the way forward from here.

This brings my imagination to the crucial place: the crux of the matter; the originating point. The human vagina. Not being personally endowed with one, and certainly subject to the same forces noted by psychological studies concluding that a man’s imagination goes there at least once every 10 seconds, I realize I’m fair game for criticism.

However, as a once-popular song might have said had it been penned by an Indigenous lyricist, the vagina bone is connected to the stomach bone, and the stomach bone is connected to the heart bone. In an odd way, that just about sums up gender relationships while being anatomically correct, energetically speaking. Indigenous socialism arises from the relationship between mother and child, the first social relationship we humans experience. Looking into the structure of the social institution of Indigenous motherhood, prior to the cataclysmic assault staged by Christian missionaries hell-bent on their civilizing mission, I see some noteworthy features.

Connecting the heart bone to the head bone, I see the common thread of Indigenius Socialism expressed through a particular aspect of human sexuality. Modern medical researchers call it oxytocin, but you don’t have to name it to know it. Human females experience an inter-human bonding, or a primary socialism, during sexual arousal, sexual activity, sexual orgasm(s!), child birth, breast feeding, communal food preparation, communal feasting, and communal socializing in general, when the mood is non-violent. From the very specific Indigenous point of view found on the High Plains, where all those buffalos were roaming among the playful deer and antelope, pre-Christianized human societies practised a non-hierarchical matrifocal social form, where women’s relationships established the social norms. Men had roles, too, and I’ll get to that in time, but women’s relationship roles, revolving around motherhood, are the key to understanding Indigenius Socialism and the foundation of what I am proposing here as Syncretic Indigenius Socialismo.

In the human brain, there is a formation medical researchers call the limbic node; it is croissant-shaped, with one end arching around to almost touch the other. Almost, but not quite. Electricity-based human nerve impulses can jump the gap; stimulation on either end causes excitation on the other end. Oral receptors are at one end of the limbic node and genital receptors are at the other end of the limbic node.

Those crazy medical researchers! Their studies show that in societies with higher emphasis on general brain development, there is a corresponding higher level of oral-genital sexual activity. French and Cree societies both fit into the higher-brain development category and I’ll gamble a wager on the origin of the Metis Nation from the shared preference for oral sex. Is the Metis infinity symbol really just a clever play on a sideways 69?

The head bone is connected to the vagina bone, as many intelligent people know, and you don’t have to be able to articulate the mechanics of it all to get it. In pre-Christian Cree society, adventures in sexuality were separated from pregnancy by well understood and widely practised plant-based and practice-based birth control. You could have your cake and eat it, too. Women were free to choose when, where, and with whom they would conceive a child. Women chose to have children spaced about four years apart—two or three at most—in a lifetime and had children in age cohorts within their own circle of age cohort sister-cousins. Children grew up with an age cohort of cousins, without the burden of having immediate older or younger siblings and with the benefit of being born into a circle of similarly aged playmate relatives.

Women often chose to have a first child around the age of 16, when their mothers were about 32, their grandmothers were about 48, their great-grandmothers were about 64, and their great-great grandmothers were about 80. It was not uncommon for women to live to 100 years, so up to six generations of mothers could be present in an extended family, with the newborn infant representing the seventh generation. This meant that every new mother was surrounded by a depth of experience in the fine arts of Indigenous Socialism. She was certainly never on her own, without support, trying to care for several, or even a dozen or more children, all her own, often on her own, as was the European standard at that same time in history.

Out of this foundational matrix arose the basic form of Indigenous Socialism. By choosing fathers from across the bio-region, extended family villages were cross-linked with many other extended family villages, in an intricate web that formed the regional and national governance systems. It was literally all in the family. The genius of Indigenous Socialism was that it did not extend from an avant-garde of intellectuals as a theory imposed imperfectly, top down, on a mass population, but instead was an organic product of a matrifocal society. When Fredrick Engels travelled to upper New York State to see for himself Haudenosaunee society in action, he marvelled at how a territorially large and heavily populated region could self-manage without elected officials, judges, police or prisons.

Like technological development, the organization of daily affairs in human society was founded on a completely different paradigm. Men did have roles, but women’s expectations of men were adjusted to account for men’s inherent weaknesses, most notably a propensity towards violence and a severe shortage of oxytocin. The poor dears could only get a blast of the primal socialist juice during orgasm; all the more reason to assist them in attaining as many as possible during a lifetime. Along with frequent orgasms, ceremonial activities also played an important part in reducing the potential stressor on a socialist system caused by an overabundance of testosterone—for instance, the sweatlodge. This wasn’t just an Indigenous introduction; Scandanavian societies, too, recognized the social benefits of immersing men in energy-sapping hot steamy environments for prolonged periods of time.

The Indigenius twist was an emphasis on the latent altruistic nature possibly underlying male humans’ obvious violent nature, as a remedy to the anti-social behaviours otherwise all too dominant. Protocol rituals in a simple sweatlodge ceremony remind and reinforce the necessary immersion of humans in the natural world; many times I’ve heard Elders leading sweatlodge ceremonies ritually comment on how we humans must humble ourselves and crawl on our hands and knees into the lodge, re-entering the womb of Mother Earth. During normal sweatlodge proceedings, water, earth, wind and fire are acknowledged with gratitude, from the perspective of the human family, while reminding us of our survival-based obligations to the circle of natural forces we have emerged from. The combination of intense heat, complete darkness and an extraordinary soundscape often moves participants out of day-to-day mundane realities and into the immediacy of relationship with Mother Earth. Everyone simultaneously has a unique experience and a deeply bonding common experience. Real socialism.

The genius of Indigenous ceremony is that it intentionally creates a psychological space where Indigenius Socialism can come to life, rewarding co-operation, voluntary sharing and spontaneous acts of kindness, while penalizing greed, selfishness and violence. These actions are easy for women, but hard for men—that damn testosterone! Within the ceremonial space, Indigenous women have figured out a method, over millennia, for engaging men, by using the same tactics used with young children. Useful roles are identified and social prestige is offered, while steady, firm Elder female hands quietly steer the ceremonial proceedings from a discreet position in the background.

I realize that we seem to be a long way away from the way of life that Rosa Luxemburg called primitive communism; she was just looking at what Marxists call the mode of production and she didn’t mean the mode of reproduction of the reserve army of labour. A syncretic Indigenius Socialism for the 21st century has to account, in practice, for both the mode of production and the mode of reproduction and does so by putting the mode of reproduction where it belongs: first. You can’t build a socialist future among antisocial human beings; the 20th century is a fine illustration of that point.

Becoming pregnant, being pregnant, giving birth, nurturing a new life: here’s where we can see the transcendence of the notions of wilderness and scarcity. Mother Earth is not wild, nor is She short on essential items for Her existence. The same is potentially true for every human mother; the keys are sharing and co-operation. Exactly what a global human society would look like following those two simple concepts is not for me to say, but I can predict something.

Indigenius Socialism will be built by women, for humanity, utilizing everything now in existence, to rise above the barbarism of the present moment. We men can choose to be women’s assistants in this project; it could be an ecstatic experience. Imagine global human population plummeting in a women-led movement, while orgasms per lifetime are skyrocketing. Perhaps the Metis Nation is a signpost to the future: Indigenous Peoples will be Peoples indigenous to Mother Earth—one race, diverse, living locally while thinking globally, wickedly intelligent, one more species among many worth saving from extinction. There is a window of opportunity now, but, if we humans don’t take it, we will just create another one soon. We will eventually choose socialism over barbarism; our Mother told us to.

First published at The Dominion.

Practical Sigil Magick (Old School)

Practical Sigil Magic[1]

The Day I Stole The Chariot Of The Sun

The Day I Stole The Chariot Of The Sun

The Day I Stole The Chariot Of The Sun


Prologue:
Blank page,
no need to write,
tho' now I do,
because I want.

So I give my sturdy steed a treat
and climb aboard my fleet chariot
to ride thru' the day like a wild spirit.

Storm brewing, days in coming,
no moon and full sun,
eagle and turkey,
black cat and black dog,
and crows,
all wish me well.

Old places to visit,
islands no longer,
under the sun,
shelter,
the Church of the Holy Cross is locked,
lost,
so onward to a place of crossroads,
as Godzilla rains the megapolis,
wind and rain dance in abandon,
revealing magick arches
into Oncenever Lands.

The old chariot runs hot,
any mile can be the last,
spurred on by the song yet sung,
watching the veins in the rock,
bolden into arteries, I knew,
this was the right road,
to gather speed,
jump The Wall or hit it . . .
one Final Time,
in the longest dusk in a very long time.

Frankincense and myrrh scent the storm,
delighting the dancing weather spirits
into a dark and windy frenzy,
that ended with a giggle,
all was peace and calm . . .
for a mile before they stirred again,
and then to calm once more,
past trolls and dragons,
crow battling hawk,
turkey lost in music,
and heron flying proud,
all onward to a place of crossroads.

The first one hundred miles,
came to a quiet end,
under the omen of the
sign of the fish,
finally,
a stop to rest,
to stretche the ache,
and cast the stones to read
the Moment
being writ.

Such a clear communication,
in the silence of stone,
is a blessing to carry on,
the road once again is driven,
now,
under a blue star and purple heart,
until the star becomes gold,
and all the luster becomes a lust
that ends androgynous,
as Janus mops the floor,
while Quan Yin counts change,
clouded over under dusk,
and dusk, and dusk,
a longer dusk there never was, once.

But then it ends,
and darkness falls.

Darkness Falls
(by Ameenie Shaevitz)

Darkness falls within my eyes
Fear without the cries
Look within the darkest days
Trying to see
Wishing and hoping the sun to beat within
See light within the sun
Darkness falls within my heart
Beating within the darkness
Darkness falls

The sky falls,
and kisses me,
and we dance,
in the Universal All
raining laughter and music,
as the winds of change,
blow shadows,
until the rain turns black,
and the storm billows dark,
as the clouds come passionately alive,
as the second one hundred miles,
ends with a hint,
of seasons long in coming,
how far off, I wonder,
as the wind howls in northerly bluffs,
toward the moon that is not there,
and the sun that is not here.

Stop.
Last stop before the end,
time to help a newfound friend,
but time times on,
and a cold rain blows in,
that further tightens,
the harlequin's hat,
as the questing pauses,
for apples and raisins,
but the journey continues,
at a humbler pace,
and in the interlude, a wonder,
must it be fun,
to ride the road,
with cardboard plates,
that plead a "THNK U",
marked with a sharpie?
Ah, yes, it must be fun,
as the night turns round to morning,
tomorrow,
but what spiraling lost,
while thoughts explore,
the boundaries of All,
and realize how small,
All can Be.

Lessons in humility,
play discordant rhapsodies,
that is welcome as can be,
yet ever on for the Moment,
ever on,
until the chariot rides the starting line,
and the charioteer,
becomes only nobody,
sitting outside a crazy eatery,
by the tracks,
at a crossroads,
under a moonless moon,
in the middle of Everynowhere Land.

Restless, fitless cat naps,
under a bluing sky,
all the more wondrous for the blanket of clouds,
and fitless, restless winds,
and rain,
that finally vanish,
as a new sun grays the sky,
to start the day, to start all over,
at the same starting line.

The day begins washed out,
and deflated,
the stones cast and speak,
warn of lack and danger,
as doubts creep up,
in darker shades of gray,
in a day,
that begins to sway,
in a very different way,
so bleak the hope,
once bright as noon,
now blackened to ash,
in the gray no-sun,
of Neverwill Land.

Ah, but,
humility and love,
remembered from the night,
become trust and confidence,
and muddy, rainy smiles,
walking thru' like the birthday boy,
and reality became a dream,
on the day of the longest dusk,
on the day I stole the Chariot
of the Sun.


Epilogue:
Need to write
one more time,
going home
the long way,
by going home
and
changing homes.
Nay, pray tell,
sir,
'tis more than that!
Aye, a change of life,
a change of goal,
on changing paths,
in Alwayswas Land.

Friend or Foe?

Friend or Foe?

The stark, dark chasm
beneath the shadows
of urban streets,
quietly insatiable,
is the entrance
to the pits of hell,
cancerous rot,
ever-growing, spreading filth
poisoning paradise
in the mortal struggle
between
good and evil.

Now listen hard
and listen good:
go to the city,
the city upon a hill,
walk the night,
walk the streets
from wall to wall
to wall to wall
to wall,
then go to
any wooded glen
and sit a while.

Then tell me,
tell me true,
good or evil,
which side are you?

On Command

On Command


I raise my middle finger
to you,
va f'anculo!
Whatever it is
it is time for a piss
on ants like you
who race and rant
with threats to spank
if I don't obey
and do it your way.
But that'll be the day
I write a poem
on command
. . .
oops

Abinitio

Abinitio


In the beginning,
abinitio, la bella vita.

We always come back
around to the place
no longer waiting for us,
no longer open to us,
no longer wanting us.

Abinitio, in the beginning,
the good life did not know
how bad it was.

Abinitio per sempre,
knowledge
was not yet born.

La vita e' bella
non ancora nato.

Me

For those who asked:

(photo: Alex Brennan)

(photo: TJ LaFollette)

(photo: Paul Gandy)

(photo: Abbey Scott)

(photo-art: Me, "Crow Moon", Self Portrait)

(photo: me, 05/2010)

Bringing It Down

"We have been too kind to those
who are killing the planet.
We have been inexcusably,
unforgivably,
insanely
kind."

- Derrick Jensen -

The following re-posted from Aquila ka Hecate blog http://aquilakahecate.blogspot.com/2009/06/pagan-values-bringing-it-down.html

Pagan Values - Bringing It Down

What has become of the generation who fomented the Soweto Uprising?

On this day in 1976, I was attending a (Whites-only) school in Rhodesia,as it was then. I barely heard about the trouble, when the rancid pus burst upon the streets of Soweto. I was 16 and in my final year of school- taking 'M'levels in Physics, Mathematics and Biology. I was completely unaware that elsewhere, children of my age had had a gutsful of the Apartheid bag of tricks, the latest issuing of which was a commandment that all Black pupils in South Africa would now be forced to have their education administered to them in Afrikaans.

I hope that, had I been in the same situation they were, I too would have rioted on the streets of Soweto. The person I am now certainly would have - I'm not so sure about the person I was then(with whom I unaccountably seem to share some memories).

I salute the spirit of those youth, even as I look around me today, and wonder where they've all gone.

For the survivors must be about my age- a little older, perhaps, or a little younger - and I wonder how they've grown, and why they're so invisible right now.

Maybe some are in the halls of government, or legislature, or the professions. Good for them - although in the case of many of our politicians, I have to ask if they've mislaid their sense of humanity in favour of overwhelming greed.

For the materialist paradigm seems to have enveloped this land, since 1994, when all was bright with hope and tender with compassion and unity.

The toxic waste land around the corner from where I live - a closed dump - has been slated to become a 'development golf course', of all ludicrous things. I'm so sorry, but I just don't see golf courses, development or otherwise, in anybody's future on this Earth.The reasons are left as an exercise for the reader.

In a similar way, I am less than hopeful for my countrymen and women when a huge ponzi scheme nets reactions ranging from "the investors deserved it" to "you're just jealous because you can't build your own empire". I'm sorry again, but empire building is hardly a calling which should be admired in this world.

Resting from an hours-long bout of programming yesterday, my eyes alighted on the edge of the monitor. And there I saw, chasing up and down the black frame, green and blue double helices of wondrous aspect. My soul connected to the worlds-between in that moment, and I was swept away with sorrow for our failing structures. Yes, sorrow.

We think we're not only the pinnacle of evolution so far, but in the process of further and better upward movement. We believe that somehow, someone will know what to do to make all this dismal failure of a culture come out all right. Somebody knows what's going on, and we will fix it with our superior ingenuity.

No, we won't.

Not least because- despite the conspiracy theorists desperately positing the existence of people-who-know, and therefore people-who-control, nobody knows what's going on, how we got here, and how we, let alone the rest of the living earth, will survive.

New Age sweetness and light be damned. We're falling, fast. Accelerating as we drag every other life form over the edge with us. Which is why some of us have come to the conclusion that the only solution is dissolution. Civilisation must be dismantled - this lethal combination of hubris-ridden humanity embedded in a culture which sees the earth as a vast resource pool has to be destroyed, before (and this is what I'm working towards) it destroys the very fabric of Life on this planet.

In my view, this is a very important, and still under-represented, Pagan Value. The realisation that we fucked up and the very best we can hope to do now, for the sake of the All, is to put on our Destoyers hats, call on Hecate and Kali, and in divine representation of them, Take The Bloody Machine Apart.

Will you give some thought to joining us? Together, indeed, we can do more. You are each and every one of you - collectively and singularly God - desperately needed.