Carlo Parcelli
Lucretius, you fool, Epicurus told me
‘A wise man does not write poetry’?
Eschatology
of Reason:
De Rerum
Natura
Prologue: Denatured Things
If only Roger Frugard could observe these tabloid tits!
Preening
above the Mounds and Mr. Goodbars.
Burst,
Proud Cyst!
Back in the day, when going under the knife
Still
meant something
Akin to murder, hair dressers led the assault.
And here
we are after Laplace transformations
With a ‘celestial mechanics’ of the bosom
With an entire
epistemology pruning
Toward a ‘determined idealization.’
A culture
sold on ‘euthanasia of the object.’
The denatured
thing.
The prohibitions
of Bruno and Blake;
Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Husserl,
So much stir
fry, ecological adipose.
Wave mechanics preserved
the acoustic
etymology of
Idealizations
idolized by idiots,
Framing Nature to rescue
The marketplace
from a litany
Of fatal
paradoxes:
“Physics does not create the world,
It simply
describes it.”
But with the Crash of ‘33
The description
died in the Ivory Tower of
Babble & as Bohr predicted,
Retreated
further into mathematics;
Into stone. Anchorites suckled on
Plastic mammary
sacks.
“[I]dealizing thinking conquers the infinity
Of the experiential
world.”
But under pressure to be both consistent and closed,
Positivisms
caved
Like so many
aluminum cans
And, as Ammons could only in part bring himself to admit,
Garbage is
What became of sensible cause.
Packaging for mathematical causalities
Husserl’s “unconditional again-and-again;”
Recycling time
to point of purchase.
Lying constitutes the default frequency
For
communication.
What is in our head
Is
the truest thing
We’ll
never see
Was the best Brentano could offer.
The Vedas of the Calculus
Traverse
the profoundest depths
We
find we didn’t want to know.
Sampling’s nostalgia for the edge of the world;
Attributing our attributes to no thing.
Father.
Can mortal sin be absolved in a nanosecond?
Since time went on the butcher’s block,
Endowed
with unforgiving efficacy
More immaterial than absolution’s most charitable unit of measure.
As
Adorno said: Lies have Nature’s ear
And
mass produce it.
A field of dead satyrs stripped of their pipes
Predates its replication by the buffalo
By just a matter of biblical weeks.
A shoreline
of dead centaurs bleeding from the ears
Predates its replication
By
whales by less than a biblical year.
Now,
after the hard lessons of the Galilean Flood,
The
bitter, shopworn bible has designs
On the tithings of reason.
“...[T]he subject of animal conduct
Can be treated
By the quantitative
methods
Of the physicists...”
Noah’s binary that Loeb invokes to re-enact
The genesis of
species extinction.
And the ‘universal’ application
Of management
systems
Being the legacy of F.W. Taylor,
Who suffered
from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
That single morphed virus
From
a good, patrician family
Infects every aspect of the marketplace,
Like AIDS from a French gigolo airline steward
Who had sex
with a single monkey
On a layover in Gabon.
That misprisioned,
contagious lunacy
That we now must call upon.
That superstition of iterated quantities.
Lying is the default
frequency
For communication in an epistemology
Of quantification.
Le Chaos: Jean-Fery Rebel, at odds
With the
Second Law,
Scored equations for a celestial mechanics
With entropic
parries of his baton,
The last time it was possible for music to scratch
The
glass ceiling
Of
the planetarium.
Think of lying as the cotton gin,
Refrigeration,
triple bypass surgery.
Newton, Descartes and Einstein as liars.
The lies
that, at the time, if not timeless
Seemed the cure.
Think of loss as intercontinental air travel,
Sonigrams,
text messaging,
Often done but ruined by nostalgia.
When did
the apparatus producing physical phenomena
Begin to
embody the characteristics of
“Intentional inexistence”?
The backlash effect of the medium on authenticity.
The tell-tale
corniness of media and material existence.
Only the sheer anality of wealth
Carried over
to quantification.
The folly of programming altruism when
Murder hums
To the gates
and switches.
Quantification recommending a selective, self-promoting
Charity whenever
it manages
To rape an ‘other’ into existence;
That old overdrive superiority of the rapist
That makes
science work.
Quantification
saves you the trouble;
Its virtue is its iterativeness.
So many accidents
sewn in this destiny;
So much fate story-boarded.
Coincidence at
the eye of every storm
Where the barometers of plague
Aren’t calibrated
to measure conspiracy.
History & motive managed into star studded cartoons.
Lying is the default
frequency
For communication in an epistemology
Of quantification.
By virtue of what my machines made me.
By virtue.
I
“Suppose that modernism is dead.
That [science] is rhetorical.
And that the rhetoric of quantification needs reexamination.
So what.”
Science does our forgetting.
“That is, as a scientific statement gets ever closer
To being accepted as fact, historical contingencies
Get progressively stripped away from its enunciation.”
Classification, our tool for forgetting.
“Formalization...in this case an infinitely more important jump
Than a simple ‘mise en forme.’
It is properly an innovation”
For which scientific imagination bears responsibility.
Science as an anecdotal record.
The palimpsest of experience.
After five centuries shrinking the speculative mind,
To the game theoretical mind.
Not Kant but Leibniz
Slave to every feint and furbelow
As though the encounter and
Its description were predestined,
Prefigured in eschatology,
Upending its moment in a grand adversarial extinction.
The result of “the naturalization of social classifications.”
Terror, not curiosity, spurred the assignment of cause.
Mortality not gawking at immortality.
Causal idealizations substituted for context
Ground apart the globe.
Their proponents engulfed by
The enormity of their precision.
To conclude Husserl:
“[Science] as science,
[For] serious, rigorous,
Indeed apodictically rigorous science---
The dream is over”
For the teleological fictions
Of a bowdlerized reality.
Over. And for whom, Citizen?
If awareness that the methodology
Is ‘bounded’ constitutes intent...
And that those limits are integral
For successful expression,
What electorate neglected the formulae by which
We might avoid basing
Our covenants
On the sociopathology of mathematics?
The pathology of certainty.
Are these incorrigibles the tack faith has taken
Directly into the currents obliterating itself?
The evangelical swine, smelling the sea swell,
Hysterical in their swill pens, shocked
By scripture’s godless denouement in science.
Shocked that its not them
Stained with the blood
of lambs.
To confirm with Casullo:
“The classic example of such a sense [of certainty]
Is the ‘notion’ of incorrigibility:
p is certain for S” blah, blah blah;
“[L]ead[ing] to [the]
unwelcome consequence[]
“[T]hat all mathematical knowledge is certain.”
Why would Medawar ask
“Is The Scientific Paper Fraudulent?”
The interrogative a form of inquiry
Before blank verse and dialogues
Were supplanted by the scientific report
Adopting the mathematics of the late 17th century
Whereupon Lakatos adds “The problem,
The conjecture which the experiment had to test,
Is hidden away. [And] the author boasts of an empty,
Virgin mind...Inductivist style, just like its
Deductivist twin...claiming objectivity, [while]
Foster[ing] a private guild language, atomis[ing]
Science, suffocat[ing] criticism,
Mak[ing] science authoritarian.”
“Authoritarian” in a time and from a refugee
Whose object cannot be missed.
Where conflicting data rapidly become rhetorical,
Matters of ‘opinion’, not ‘fact’ or ‘Science’;
Not worthy of discussion.
Since time confounds measurement, the method
Has made time a function of space.
Its increments incubating an ahistorical rationalism
Where the Nazi and the victim
Are conflated in the canards of Casti’s Prisoner’s Dilemma.
The objectivity of the method cannot recall in time,
Only in other backlit cubic hectares of space.
And methodological failure is not contrite.
The murdered must fend off deadly sentiments
By iterating with open wounds.
The harm generated by agents
Promising no suzerainty; sent packing;
Humiliated as if they had been mere human consorts.
Evil as soon as hindsight named them.
Cunning microbes.
The absurd projections experiment requires.
And to challenge these failures of
Fungibility, we got ecology instead.
How did a toxin engineered at Fort Detrick,
To kill an undetermined enemy,
And cryogenically sealed, end up
In the tissues of wild Manchurian dogs?
Einstein/Podolsky/Rosen? That’s a joke.
Define enemy and then, for fuck sake,
Read the first few stanzas and try again.
I0
Once Galileo determined
The earth moved about the sun.
The sun resolved to embrace
G.’s own discovery and poison him.
Ethically, that’s the way the academy
And the sun-block industry has left it.
Professional shade makers advertise, “We know the threat
From sunlight is here now; we created it.”
But, as Husserl found, it’s too late to assess blame,
Not only because its their neck,
But because it threatens the way they do scientia. “I may have
Flawed intelligence but not a flawed methodology.”
And if Galileo is not guilty,
How boorish that Niccolo, Ivy and Edward should be.
Naturally, the pay off for being right
Is wild dandelion
With boosted ranch dressing; all
Within sight of
extinction.
The final accolade, the collective finger pop
Of props from the
National Academy of Sciences,
And as quickly, the last inspiration,
An “AW FUCK,
DON’T PULL ON THAT, GELERTNER!”
Shock and panic.
A life’s work documented in 600
Half masticated
Cornish hens
And dozens of overturned chairs
Stored in security
cameras.
And Fame, finding
no claimant,
Cuts its price.
The president pardons Ted Kazinsky,
Then steams off
into outer space.
II
Euclid’s pinions proved no engine of incarnation;
“Renounced all
claims to foundational ontological purpose.”
Yet, the Calculus, mathematization, “the direct echo of which
One could
no longer claim to find in reality.”
Was, nonetheless, to be its evolutionary expression.
And Leibniz’s “devices
for making good estimates”
Gambled away the ontological power of Goethe’s ‘ding an sich’
And chartered that
substantial end time
And distilled a Platonic greed and perfect,
Blameless logic
for Mammon.
Only the Prologue survived..
There are no readers
to be enlightened.
No readers at all.
To most its just
like before.
But for those who road the tsunami,
Doppler had not
prepared,
And Jerusalem though it captured shards of the drama
Foamed and Rolled
its Eyes back up into its Head.
I000
Taking into account
The ratio of success
to failure
After 500 years of one dominant paradigm,
Impunity has steadily
accrued
To such remarks
As coolly watching Joubert
Replace the errors
Of the common folk
With the errors
Of the professional
class,
As Weyerhauser replaces
The ‘mighty oak’
With its mathematical substitute—
The loblolly pine.
Spam still alerts Sweeney
His hairline,
Not the tree line,
Will save the world
As best he can hope
To circumscribe
it.
Sans De Doctrina
Christiana,
Agonistes can be repaired
With no incentive
For true contrition enforced
Beyond the SEC,
Shareholders’ claims, and pity upon
The bewildered,
itinerant poor.
Evil has been amended
To the ossature of the creature,
In Harmonium poised
To dismiss the impracticable
As the run off
of
All that is holy.
Repetition is all that preserves
Culture over the prosthetic.
Sex over autopoeisis.
Bacteria over a few thousand carbon atoms
In a chemical bath.
Proof by Discours de la methode
That living tissue
Can Mach it self up;
Though woven anonymously
Can hum a tune every bit
As mechanical as
A Jacquard loom
Though borrowed 20 generations
til now.
Don’t you get it Rousseau
The ‘natural man’ is corvee
To Monsanto.
Violins cued? Rosy filter up?
Working class hero who
But for a Billboard bullet
Wastes a CEO.
“From Paumanok Starting I Fly like a Bird.”
Doubtful.
“[S]oar to sing the idea of all,
“[A]rctic songs,...”
songs of “Kanada in myself,
To Michigan then,/ To Wisconson, Iowa, Minnesota,”
“Ohio and Indiana”...”,
to Missouri and Kansas and Arkansas...,” et al
“[T]o sing their
songs, they are inimitable;”
Yet not a chirp from that species a-nesting in Wisconsin;
Nor a whistle,
mating call, regional squawk.
Not even chilling teardrops like Messeian
But ad hoc concordance
that studied
Fraud from back of a buckboard.
Warned with I said
“they (those songs) are inimitable.”
“My ornithology promotes the extinction
Of what never existed.
A Golden Age muscling out reality itself
For some jingle
of imagining I call ‘myself,’
And everything is disposed of me.”
But when the songs
are sung,
To death’s castanets,
The shudder of
night trees,
And all thoughts of force cease knowing
Day through their
night vision goggles.
Men far more dishonest than Whitman
Will, against all living things, in ways “inimitable” to him,
Keep themselves to remain his beneficiaries.
And the young Ginsburg,
By death born passed
regrets,
Mocked the Whitman
Of empty promises.
I0I
“[S]uch ages weave ye, as ye run,"
And in your wake churn some stink of ancient wrong,
“The deep with ships,” weightless scraps in outer space and
“Towns girded with walls,”augur
Continents buried under
megatons of racial prophylasis.
Such dreams arise from
the daily exercise of nightmares.
And “furrows cleave the earth” as sands
Scorched to furrows cleave.
A second Tiphys shall be there and new wars arise
And broad Achilles to
his shoe Maker
Shall have his credit
maxed out.
And what Europe had thought the Greeks had thought
Will have been retailed
to the colonials
Like ozone regards the
Euro to the dollar.
Then all things dreary shall be like to like. Engineered
“In the pens, shall play the ram within himself;
Now, without dye,
be robed in the soft flush of purple,
Now with tint of
yellow saffron
While clothed in natural scarlet graze the lambs,”
And the ram bewildered by his blood’s evolving,
Marvels as his
flock flies to its prey.
What knell awakens us to Eschatology?
Theology’s hammerless
bell?
Barely audible as a timekeeper’s metaphor where
God strains to be as wrathful
As chemical exchanges
in the atmosphere;
The endtime’s a Twinkie wrapper seeding
The eternity of
planned obsolescence.
A catacomb shucked out of air;
The gutted bull
of Notre Dame;
Writs and stipends to preserve old stones
Gossip immortality
among themselves.
Order by causal consequence
Isolated from “disturbing
secondary phenomena,”
From all social
consequence.
Sitting in on Feynman’s lectures
Where the
schizophrenic girl
Who gave me a chunk of her Milky Way,
Laced a dozen greasy ringlets of dandelion for infinity
And stuck
the diadem on my head,
Saying Sir, “two marvelous infinities she has offered to men,
Not to be
conceived but to be admired; no more.”
And burst the chains of QED.
Or Dirac “I cannot neglect infinities in this arbitrary way.”
Or rat out
Brower’s canard of the observer
‘Supplementing’ the observed
Without disturbing
‘secondary phenomena.’
As holism in ecology refers to a set of hierarchies.
The
approach to a phenomenon,
Not ever the casteless non-adjectival community.
Where
is the critique of the ‘idealization of mathematics’
and “the interpretation of these idealizations as objective being?”
Happily,
this late, it is effected no where,
Because just as a barren hillside
Finds
recent expression as the valley floor,
So are the sympathies for the present catastrophe.
II0
Ignore the thin conceit of bees
When
taking the rudder from Mandeville,
The helmsman drunk at the buzzing oar
Anoints
the voyage with unconscious depravity.
A cybernaut of perpetual motion
Where
no rudder breaks the reverie.
Yet their sleek machines sound coarse;
Information
theory, cybernetics, systems analysis,
Advertizing, public relations,
Operations research and computer science.
Public Vices, Private Gain.
“Such were
the Blessings of that State;
Their Crimes conspired to make 'em Great;...”
“...Every
Part was full of Vice,
So entire the Mass seemed a Paradice;
Flatter'd in Peace, and fear'd in Wars
They were th'Object of envious Foreigners,
And lavish of their Wealth and Lives,
Their currency the Ballance of all other Hives...
And Vertue, who with Politicks
Had exchanged a Thousand cunning Tricks,
Was, by their happy Influence,
Made broth from Vice: And ever since
[Convinced] the worst of all the Multitude
Did something for the
common Good.”
Luxury Employ'd a Million of the Poor,
While NAFTA ignored 100 million more
And odious Pride yet other
Millions Production outsourced to the foreigner.
Money first embraced one world
That labor might follow.
Oh, thou, tangled in meter,
Did you miss that, Fuck?
Empires exhumed and stacked like concrete.
So what if Envy itself, and
Vanity Were Ministers of Industry;
Their darling Folly, Fickleness
In Diet,
Furniture, and Dress,
That strange,
ridic'lous Vice, was made
The very Wheel, that turn'd the Trade.
Their
Laws and Cloaths were equally
Objects of Mutability;
Such ruled the bellies of those who stitched
Or did not succeed by midday that morning’s kitch.
Worse for all intent to endure
Was abandoned at the bureau drawer.
For every Vice that requires a Trade
There’s a hundred Vices that are by terror paid.
And for what seemed well done for a Time,
Has balloxed the world
with a fresh litany of Crimes.
“Yet Merc'ry smiles at My Impudence;
And Others call it want of Sence;”
The final conflict in flickering fables
About men and money;
Not man larger
than newspaper type
Morality plays played out by 1932.
Now its no amount of money
Less
than an astronomical parody of zeroes.
So large the bible couldn’t contour them
To her own enormities.
The bond between scientific method
And its departure that it failed to contemplate.
The genesis of
an agent.
Did you think the end would be left
To something as
subjective as sin?
That it would involve faith
And the exhilaration
of the unexplained?
No, what Kyoto establishes is that
Extinctions are
pedestrian enough without god.
The Garden, a viper’s
pit
Where a second coming would be a mere retrofit.
Why surprised
That such a freak of Nature
Would turn to its disposal?
All you anthro-apologists,
You filthy cunnu-linguists,
Come out from between diversity.
The jig was up
Long before wax cylinders
Trapped going up in smoke the incense of its creation.
The best lineage assured us that Nature
When she had her passions baptized by reason
Would mete out consequence for ignorance.
Justice in visible signs and objects,
Read in blood
For failure of intellect.
But reason, that “special case of blind faith,”
The cause that surrenders all effect,
Made a guerilla of menses.
“Universally” “binding standards of knowledge”...
“The belief [that] propelled the Muslim conquests;
“...accompanied the crusaders into their bloody battles;
“...[G]uided the discoverers of new continents;
“...[L]ubricated the guillotine
and...
Now provides fuel for the endless
debates
Of libertarian and/or Marxist defenders of
Science
, Freedom and Dignity”
With a velocity headier than any conceivable destination.
Nature slaps away the mailed hand
Of our knights in shining kevlar; tortoises
With detached retinas, hunkered behind a
Repository of sand-bagged hours,
Spilled among the cracked vile of their cycle
Waiting to squeeze off rounds of steel into an iron age.
They die in a QED infinity like the computer generated
Motherless fucks in imperialism’s endless Santayana retakes.
But in the original once the danger was sown
Jason returned a symbolic stone
And retreated unharmed.
If you smear an election
Of an occupied people
With the media’s immaculate enchantment
And a borrowed ritual stink,
Terror will be all around;
As palpable an olfactory
As billions of cubic meters of natural gas.
So the marines hoist scrap made from the first world,
The tortoise shield. The mappemunde.
And scrap themselves to the underworld.
Their ceremonial quantities of dead...
Blood libations to the periodic table.
Their blind faith needing
A detached retina
That visualizes for them in the dark.
Ignorance as bland
As the energy required to produce a pound of beef
For the Homeland;
KBR SUVs
Sailing a few meters above a sea
Of oil.
With an unrequited projection of power.
Its easy to believe anything
When a high school dropout,
Who fucked Sally Sue without a condom,
And bullied the homuncular engineer,
Can call in airborne’s vengeful machines,
Like it was the Second Coming;
Like it was an extra-large pizza with ‘everything’.
III
“Whorf! Hands behind your head!”
We’ve repositioned our satellites
To chew up the Bedoin with our eighty-eights.
In confinement you must repeat
Our myriad euphemisms for Freedom---oil, natural gas, titanium,
manganese
Our myriad euphemisms for oil---
Democracy, God, Liberty, Country, Patriotism,
NASCAR, GM, Love, Faith, Black Gold,
Gusher, Free Market, Progress, Texas Tea,
Free Speech, Free Press, Freedom, Technology et al
Sonar to our fathoms of terror.
Leagues down, frenzied by a crack in the earth’s crust;
Adapted to the sulphurs
That we swore were first man’s bondage.
What epistemology?
What ‘way we know’ dumped us here
Where the words
Can’t be parsed to attach us?
Sure we assembly lined the electronic bone saw
In sequence with the Bouncing Betty.
But who knew, Anthony Flew, that
‘Objectivity’ is the locus of the imaginary,
The rock that shelters a ‘free press’
Over which the day’s shadows crawl.
The object is the canard of the ‘objective,’
A chemical abidance,
Arithmetic’s Object Collection metaphor.
And the canard of the ‘objective’is
Due to the expediency of experience.
Destroyed was Fallujah by that method, and also Hue;
By cowardice, expediency and lies renamed
Freedom, Faith and Technology.
Faith and anointing oil,
A species rapidly absorbed
Into the epistemology of Christianity.
“Differences in convictions...are not
Themselves occasioned by differences
In modes of speech.”
So Kuhn, hands behind your head.
We won’t tolerate your glib,
Moralistic World Court feints
Any more than we want to hear about
Biological diversity
Much less the squared circles
Of Fibonacci or Locke.
Kant tried to staunch the ‘true alchemy’,
“[T]he naive objectivism
[That] has marked the philosophy
Of the whole modern period.”
But to hell with that monastic head banging.
All we want is a precis of Nature
As legal counsel for Imperialist War.
No one knows what it portends
That even now technological society
Is in its ‘granularity’ a ‘terra incognita.’
Yet, to know who one embraces...
That numbers need not be associative
So that the systems require elaborate metaphor.
Humping ordnance in the dark
To molt time to its isomorph.
Reason ex cathedra.
To build a system where the offspring
Of the murdered are
No longer concerned about how they died,
Rows of crosses bartering immortality
Into rows of little, toney shops.
To acknowledge that this error,
Commutability without context,
Is an error of novelty, and of some consequence,
And its surd mystery of evil.
To acknowledge that the universe of matter
Is provisioned with self-delusion,
Entity imagining metaphors,
And the self-interest of the speaker;
And that “the belief that America
Is the moral leader of the world
Through modernization
Still sustains
Even the most banal
And ruthless of our managers,”
Rumsfeld or Cheney,
Kissinger or McNamara,
Archived
by being.
Unlike Villon with his “Princes...
Destined all to die”
When chimps are raised up high,
Better to credit legislative consequence.
Though
they be “but living clay”
More
yearning their wind to blow us all away.
And “as our liberal horizons fade
In the winter of nihilism,
And as the dominant among us
See themselves
Within no horizon
Except their own creating of the world.”
“[T]he pure will to technology
(Whether personal or public)
More and more gives
Sole content to that creating.”
“‘The End of Ideology’;
The closing down of all thinking
Which transcends calculation.”
Husserl’s ‘subject’ burned off like ozone.
The sum of all hope---
That the roaches will evolve.
“It might seem, then,
Since
we are destined so to be,
We might also be the people
Best
able to comprehend
What it is to be so”
In
“this new-found land
Which is so obviously a “terra incognita.”
More
EC in the Gulf in 90 days
Than DoD put in Europe in 40 years.
“The
very substance of our existing,...
Stands as a barrier
To
any thinking
Which might be able to comprehend technique
From
beyond its own dynamism.”
An infrastructure then can only
Signify
permanent hegemony.
In such sheer quantity
The
‘object’ emerges
To confirm expediency.
Nature never cracks under interrogation.
Pistol whipped,
her genitalia fried,
She lies to confirm experiment’s intel;
Sets up their
extinction.
Hot wires
strung across her quim,
She has never sold out a lover
And on the
cold concrete beaten and torn
Given birth to armies of futility.
Raped, Nature
holds her antagonist close,
Pants the secrets, the codes into his ear
As though
entropy had fallen for the dazzling weave
Of the communications engineer.
Nature never
cracks under interrogation.
As it rips out his jugular liked boiled meat from a chicken bone
or
Thrown from
a helicopter
Snatches her tormentor over the side like a valise full
Of ‘for her eyes only’
To secrete him under the sea.
I000
“Boake Carter was unschooled
And knew
practically nothing in depth.”
But he was on the radio observed Edward Bernays.
Set on humiliating medieval teleology
“With
its substantial forms...”
Stifling the fungibility of matter,
“Preventing men
From observing and understanding
The world as it is”
Shorn of its perspectival manifolds.
“Engraved stationery,” a Turing Machine
Where
“nine different letters needed
Only blanks filled in
To
answer his fans.”
Paradise
is a mantle of flame.
What Archangel will braise the backs of bombardiers
With
jellied gasoline?
Clark
bombed the Serbs
And their mines of rare earth
Back to where the liberal environmental establishment,
For
the sake of its centerpiece initiative, declined
To
certify the world was safe from them.
So off to the auction block;
Sold
to companies where Clark serves on the board.
Fuck me, Lord; but is this the catechism of life?
“Reflection on the praxis of knowledge...
Similar to the reflection carried out by one
Who works in any other practical sphere of interest,
The kind...expressed in the general propositions of a technology.”
A technological mathesis universalis.
Convinced by the bedside manner of a Turing Machine,
That existence for its manufacture should be traded clean.
“[F]rom mechanical analogy to mathematical analogy.”
At Goettingen, in 1923, the mathematicians
Beat Nature like a recalcitrant whore.
Von Neumann’s discretion based on games of strategy—
“Roulette, chess, baccarat, black jack, bridge...”
Gambled away the planet on
“The principle problem of classical economics:
How is the absolutely selfish ‘homo economicus’
Going to act
Under given external circumstances.”
Tacitus said, “they make a slaughter and call it peace.”
Japanese radio transmissions decoded,
“And
other sources that the Japanese
Were already seeking surrender.”
Eisenhower and Leahy opposed the attack
And
command denied its necessity,
But “the air services interwar bid for independence from the army.”
Dresden,
Tokyo, napalm, LeMay.
Cut to a pressurized cockpit
Rolling thunder 40,000 feet above the Mekong.
Plus a crucial distinction in weaponry;
A-bomb Radiation, WMD was too subtle,
Too
closely held by Groves and Strauss,
Von Neumann and Byrnes,
To effect an inter-service rivalry.
And thus it seemed doubtful to Borel
That the natural evolution of a game
Will approximate the impracticable solution
Of a system of equations that completely describes the game,
“And, anyway, if it happened,
It is almost certain that”
That particular game would be abandoned.
As Von Neumann’s self-reproducing automata
Retreat from earth to colonize the stars.
Or Robert McNamara, “killing or seriously injuring 1000
Noncombatants a week while trying to pound a tiny
Backward nation into submission
On an issue whose merits are hotly disputed...”
Eschewing the kill ratios and the theoretical projections.
Yet, eschatology finds defeated systems of equations
Employed as complete descriptions, and again
Iraq gamed for oil, desperate for the fungibility
To deny liability for ignoring Bohr’s visualization of phenomena.
It was Von Neumann who “removed the distinction
Between primary factors and outputs.”
Once you conceive of the universe as one big ego,
The game gives you no choice
But to take it where its leads you.
“And, anyway, if it happened for a particular game,
It is almost certain that the game would be abandoned...”
But if it happened for war gaming,
Gaming would be abandoned.
So doesn’t “Ontology, as the science of everything,”
Make a stronger claim than natural science?
Mussen wir die ganze Sprache durchpflugen?
In a universe of the monsters “of rigour and precision,”
With “relations to experience more obscure than ever,”
Do we exist without the ‘dignity of self-evidence’?”
How can “human subjectivity constitute the whole world?”
“Constitute it as intentional formation...”
When
“only a partial formation...”
Comprises “the intentionally accomplishing subjectivity.”
After
Kant, how can western subjectivity
Rule the world?
“Fraser says that it is very hard to discover the error in magic”
Such
as Von Neumann’s work in quantum mechanics:
“No measuring instruments...specified
For
the great majority of observables
And where specification is possible
It
becomes necessary to modify
Well known and unrefuted laws in an arbitrary way.”
An incantation
for rain
Sooner or later appears efficacious.
From Bohr’s dignified visualization
To Von Neumann’s
simulation onward to ‘primitive thought.’
The antediluvian flood retrieves the hull of the ark
Through ‘transcendental
reduction.’
But “Was will Er denn mit der ungeheuren Zeit al anfangen?”
The epoch of gossip;
The epoch
of the hall of records;
And now the epoch of mathematical hearsay,
“[A] science of the forms of meaning
‘Of
the something’ in general...
Constructed in pure thought,
And
in empty formal generality.”
Dumb,
inured to Planck’s constant
And 10 dimensions,
A manifold
fetches,
Its
tongue thrust between the slats of mathematical discretion;
Drags away in its maw,
The
nave of St. Denis.
Nano-structures’ chemical fizz,
Poisoning
their patrimony;
A Little Big Horn of nature
To hold off extinction.
Size conjoined to drop
A clot of rotting corpses
Collecting on the storm drain;
The one nailed like a star against the bars
Looks amused,
But its not you.
“Come back when I crest,
And stand right there,” says the Mighty Mississipp.
Mathematics must be, initially,
About its own truth;
Not ontology.
“The principle instruments induction and analogy”
Crawling the kingdom.
Arrogant, gaming the planet.
Ignorant of the mermaid
Resolved by observation
And the mathematical mermaid of quanta,
Wave/particle, one the other’s antonym
Where no sense is repeated time and again.
Take the symposium
of Gross and Levitt,
Petulant, arm pits puddling in polyester shirts
Alerting the world
to its extinction.
Passing out pink slips to entire phyla.
What Voss called “the precociousness of the Germans;”
“The childlike
old man.”
As though some huckster God, three time loser,
Tossed them the
keys to the kingdom, his El Dorado,
And said “you know the routine”---
For the West the
only Ontology
That will leave the Buddha state
Is extinction.
None for sake of quantum paradox
Dare call it senseless.
Its all quite great chain to each and
Every buffoon in
the room.
“[T]he possibility of major global warming,
The ozone “hole,”
species impoverishment,
Overpopulation and its consequences—are issues
That would be unknown and unknowable
But for the ‘accomplishments’
of professional science;”
Making John Mandeville come alive,
And all that metaphysical
drivel
About observation altering reality sound true.
Someone in the
audience laughs
At the word ‘accomplishments.’
Coal? Fossil fuel?
Nuclear?
It’s the incumbency’s little ontologies,
Gaming existence,
That can’t tell
what they kill
Until its unidentifiable as what it was.
Who knew, though
the hype was Thomas More,
The reality was Mandeville’s sideshow.
Who knew that a four eyed frog would be unknown and unknowable
But for the ‘accomplishments’
of professional science.”
When it comes to Utopia
“Better to throw off
the burden of proof
And continue to ‘owe’ it.”
“The belief that the
imagination [can] accomplish in one stroke
What the selection operating
through the long nights
Accomplished once and uniquely...
An illusion.”
“...[A]n illusion engendered by reason.”
“[T]he idea of free variation”
sans contradiction.
The desire for a system
Both consistent and closed.
That engineer lies with the river;
Oh, the temptation to
fail.
The revenge motive in modern physics?
Not Hiroshima, but Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
“[T]hat game would be
abandoned.”
The startling applications of
One’s success at
negation;
“The exclusiveness
With which the
total world-view of modern man,
In the second half of the nineteenth century,
Let itself be determined
by the sciences
And be blinded by the ‘prosperity’ they produced...”
With relativity
and quanta
So that Newton’s reality was ‘only truest’ until Planck.
That old positivist
conjuring
Is just a sweet passive joy.
An augury that
can’t lose
Because it can’t win.
Each error in no way dissuades
The fundamental pursuit
From again
using the method that erred.
The “free variation” of reason being a singularity.
Joe Campbell;
a big sappy tragic Palooka.
“Identifying one’s own gods
With the gods of
other peoples.
One convinces oneself
that the names
Have the same meaning.”
A mathematical
product.
“And so the chorus points to a secret law.”
And ‘we have to try to predict and guide development.’”
Form before fact.
Calculation as prophecy.
Dr. Bohr, note how Feynman saw in 1959
That nano-machines could direct chemical synthesis
Missing only a brave new world of random universal toxicity.
The mathesis universalis:
As though
historicity hence
Would have no greater premium to place on conformity.
The ontology and
epistemology of reduction:
“A system...reducible to its parts” &
“[T]hat knowledge
of the parts of a system
Gives knowledge of the whole system...”
Basic constituents
that are discrete and atomistic
With the same basic mechanical processes.
With judgement
reserved for the priesthood.
“Will we develop monster technologies
Before cage technologies,...”
Who would launch the locomotive
Before the Celestials
laid the track?
But that’s The Method’s ontology.
By induction, each
highway pit stop, a universal expression
Of Locke’s probity
Until in the salts and bacteria,
The elegance of
the matter,
The initial impulse is forgotten.
The superiority
of Locke’s use
Confirmed in the transformations to what’s
Standing, neon-lit,
with indoor plumbing before you now;
XXX Satellite; air conditioned; pool; condoms in the can.
The rest stop is
part of the better life,
On the way to a better life, and a job in Pasadena.
I00I
O the great power of incumbency;
Hoarding disaster.
Jury-rigging the unified field.
At the mirror
Hanging the stars
Over the flesh;
The paralytic bits of
progress
Issuing in chorus
Shaping principles.
Water seeking the lowest level
Doesn’t mean its
trying to stay out of the way.
To nickname its mechanical uses
As the Way to Power,
And to relegate Tao to management seminars.
Joyce’s gossip flint flaked myth.
By babbling brooked
stone.
Naturally there is no uncut block
And what kind of hod is your navel?
By working, utility has a lock
On the way
the world works.
Even as the way the world is said to ‘work,’
Is not the
way the world is known to be.
“[T]he faith that the suitable naming of things
Will suspend the enmity between them and man.”
A trope so
immense;
So early catalogued;
It may now be destiny.
Tiphys triggered extinction and Homers
Hired scribes to sit down and dry dock the epics.
Gasping fish ghosted
Odysseus’s autobiography.
“...[W]hat is one supposed to write
For a people that
is indifferent to
To the grandest of all poems?” Voss mewed.
Until the Ezralite answers, “Lie quiet Divas.” And whose Sordello?
Has the world always
been
The way it now
threatens to become
When the Enlightenment waited 400 years
For such simple
distinctions of persona?
The membranes of stars
Filled with gases that pop
And pin-wheel into
radio.
The geodesy in libraries.
If the stars had been Homers’
When London factories
and homes
Burned coal,
What theoretical
gossip would account
For the celestials’ eclipse?
The stars became
countrified
Through an arbitrary
sequence of philological interpretations.
And even without Gross and Levitt’s tool box tutelage,
All of London knew
why.
Still history is mortared with interpretative error.
Ontologies with
their conflicting claims
Of eternal utility
Customarily pictured as roaring bonfires
On a starlit
beach,
Beacons as cold as home
Through a
sextant.
Another set
of omens.
A method beginning in matter;
Carefully
harvested complexity.
“What you do when you do science
Is not simulate
observational variance
But to build experimental environments
In
which you can strip off
As many of the interacting factors as possible
And study them one by one.”
But
what you have in naturally occurring environments
Is seen by positivism as more cumbersome than experiment.
And
the chasm is flooded with
The
deficit of Tiphys.
The inevitable has its metaphor and denouement in consumption;
In
Mercury; in Hermes;
In thievery and luxury.
Fulfilling ancient predictions in compelling magnitude.
Long
forgotten opprobriums,
And
the roots of conflict
Were subtly dispatched
By
methodology. Heinrich Scholz wrote:
“[Aristotelianism] (cock sure) perished as a result of its positivism.”
So
that positivism, shaken by the fate of the Greek,
Set
out to assure its authority
In conquest, mathematization, quantification
So
destructive as to earn imperial fiat.
Utile
by the perishing of parts.
While
Goethe and Wordsworth shrank
To
Adamses of overwrought edens
Against Ockham’s Bauhaus of Newton & Galileo.
The
clean lines of a table leg to work the world down to.
Homer became less plausible than the daytime soaps:
“...No
sweet sleep fell on her lids til he
Had
finished his story.”
You mean to tell me
That
a Machiavellian like Odysseus,
Oral tradition or no,
Recounted
for Penelope, Circe’s fellatio?
Another rosy-fingered dawn
With a store of Eve’s red delicious
in the hold.
The aroma of apples were fruit enough for John Mandeville’s others.
It was understood that intentionality circumscribed a breach.
Like Oppenheimer later,
Waiting for the weather to
clear
Or an increase in the Weather Service’s budget
So they could blast flashing from the model’s manifolds.
Since sail, something was uncharacteristic
about Jason’s quarantine.
The catch was big enough to franchise.
“Goethe came and shook my hand
And thanked me for such a Homer.”
Jason put up his nets;
Took up the lyre.
Tiphys drilled his sea legs behind
the war college.
So much ox blood on our swords and
So many puddings on our plates,
We forgot who to sacrifice to.
When Hermes proposed commerce,
To brutes like us it seemed a most commodious sin.
The copy read “Back to the Garden
by Barter.”
After just one voyage there was
The scent of apple blossoms on Sardinia
and
The whores smelled just like home.
And quietly, yet profoundly the sea’s sandy bottom
Dried up at its antipode.
And the sand ran to remember
To forget the water clock..
I0I0
No destination but buttermilk
From the
teat of labor!
Where’s the evil in that?
The tide came in and we slipped off
At its beckoning
Insistent waves like the crowds
That won’t take
‘No’
From a modest, unassuming fly boy hero.
We slipped off
onto the mosh pit sea.
The ‘other’ was
about to undergo a change.
Jason had that old time religion
But several of
us brought our stores
And soon it seemed
The machine of
God had worn out its bearings,
So that the ‘semblance of absolute truth,
Seemed nothing but the’ verses of absolute bores.
We masked our terror
In tonics,
One of us being an apothecary;
A drug dealer christened
Elixir.
So Tiphys, helmsman and deckhand,
And Jason the captain
howling,
Aren’t to blame
For the screeching
halt of our world,
Or that dried out peel, the Argos
That carried shrunken
apples, augmented bodies
And pharmaceuticals to other shores;
Worse than a malady seeking a host.
The sextant won’t
give bearings
For the ontology of all things,
Nor the waves tarmac,
Where everything
lost sets down.
Who knew the place may be wrong and
We in that place
a poison.
We had to shit so
The intelligence was ignored,
It’s miraculous
that Tiphys was tipped off
To the end of the world.
For Descartes its defects have to play out
On the Southeast Asian
Peninsula
Or endlessly rock the cradle of civilization.
And its addictions must
be denied
So gamed ‘truth’ can land
With the thud of gravity
Within our range of senses.
“The punishment they inflicted on non-human nature,
They had
first inflicted on themselves.”
The Vienna Circle wiped out myth with a
“final assignment
of predicates”
But the laws of nature morphed
And method became the aether of eternity;
The lynchpin
of error.
And error
accounting for progress;
The only thing outside the bubble.
The narrative of a utopia of prosthetics.
So we arrive at
truth too late to rule out
Osiander’s eschatology
of objectlessness
As just a scare tactic.
And who can say he was wrong
When Melanchthon
thought man would misplace
His talc for misery
If the Canon appropriated the Sun.
Or Bruno’s fuming
his way to the stars
At the camp followers who plot starlight’s alien visitations.
Those who “found out how to disturb the peace of others, [anthropology]
To profane the guardian spirits of their countries, [evangelism]
To mix what prudent nature separated, [genetics]
To redouble men’s wants by commerce, [transnational corporations
& advertising]
To add the vices of one people to another, [pornography and drugs]
To propagate new follies by force [invasion]
And set up unheard of lunacies where they did not exist before,
[American culture]
and finally to give out the stronger as the wiser. [Engineering,
Science & the Military-industrial complex]
They have shown men new ways, new instruments, and new arts by which
to tyrannize over and assassinate one another. [strategic hamlets, semtex,
sarin gas, psychological torture, magnetic pulse, nuclear weapons]
Thanks to such deeds, a time will come when the other peoples,
Having learned from the injuries they suffered,
Will know how and will be able, as circumstances change,
To pay back us, in similar forms or worse ones,
The consequence of these pernicious inventions.”[9/11]
Nor to mount to the heavens,
Pass through the outermost circle of the stars,
And leave the convex firmament behind
For
a toll.
Has that much been lost to the imagination
That
throw weight is the way Bruno
Will finally be vindicated?
TV trays at La Cena de le Ceneri?
Do you believe ‘a savage dies because of error?’
Because Wall
Street’s vaccine was
Not available to him.
“Frazier
is much more savage than...his savages,
For they are not as far removed from the understanding of a spiritual
matter,”
As a spiritual
matter.
The ‘dignity of self-evidence’,
A design
flaw ironed out by Leibniz just in time for Auschwitz.
If science was to be dissuaded, it was there,
At little armageddon
where the ‘greater’ ontology
Could have refused to pick up again,
Where filthy, squat in the rubble with
Those that like Diogenes
tried to back
Out of their original skin.
To rub off what had been
ordained,
Ordinalia.
Confess their mistake
and
Brush off the ashes of Alexander the Great,
Who proved to be light
as a feather.
Yes, a feather.
An object lesson
Concerning the stated
difficulty of secession.
Blowback from one whom
We imagine would exude
enormous thrust.
And during the battle, Sinope, hiding in the rafters,
Got covered in the shit
of hysterical birds.
Rich in nutrients
It sustained him throughout the entire war.
“Better than Patria,”
he sqawked.
“And tastier than Jesu.
I possess
the strength of a hundred Alexandrews.”
While the Great One ended up looking like
A ragged
squeeze box wheezing with fever,
That less
than an ant could drag to the pyre.
The Small One said, “Guano! I’m too big for my tunic,
And my tunic
was my Big Top.
I can scratch and rub myself to swell into an ICBM but
I can’t back into Tiphys’ bones
Until we
fight foreign wars to lose.”
No reply
from the weary troops.
“Alexandrew’s dead.
Where the fuck is my tub?”
All from a book so designed
That Alexander
is mentioned just twice,
And Diogenes not at all.
Even now technological society
Is in detail a terra incognita.
So Nitze and Rickover,
Jacta
est alia.
And Cicero introduced ‘individuum’
As
a translation for ‘atomon.’
When it is thought, it becomes mortal.
And Odyssean Bayes, that old idealism that
Assumes
we can assume
At
the discretion of the individual.
No man, “in the least constrained
As
to the confirmational significance
Attached
to any given piece of evidence;”
What Reichenbach called “psychology”
Where
in Popper the probability of novelty is high,
And
in Lakatos the probability of novelty is low.
Where mathematics knocks the flashing
That butterflies
the engineers’ die.
“For in mathematical praxis
We attain
what is denied in empirical praxis:”
“Ideal shapes in absolute identity” or Virtue, &
Justification
against the infidel.
Bayes hand out like Adam pr(p/q)=pr(p&q) pr(q).
Every theoretical
approach has its Genesis,
Its Big Bang, its prior probability.
Its zero that somehow subsequent theory obviates.
“But the
atom has been split
And the integrity of the individual undermined...”
Within “the tutelary expertise of the modern state.”
“The atom
staat...the final technocracy...
The reification of the machine.”
With fads as constant reminders of our mortality.
“Its’
hot.”---
Until its not,
Them Madison
Avenue morticians explained.
Properties
qua property.
A godhead
with legions “of absolutely identical
And methodically, univocally, determinable qualities.”
Idealizations
carried out “in univocal determinateness [and]
The pure idealities that correspond to them.”
Da Vinci’s
“evil nature of man”
Obscured by the idealizations of the angels of production.
The simpler
shapes to which western man conforms
And just enough precision to ape some process in nature.
“Empty
formal generality”
By virtue of its hidden transformation;
Its chowder of living protein.
That progress is a way of refinancing intellectual debt.
The situation so absurd
That epistemologically there was a genesis of the dugong.
The mermaid, woman and fish;
“Wave-particle” or Minkowki’s “space-time” and
“mathematical calculations and predictions, much like those
Generated by the” mermaid
Before Europeans discovered the dugong.
That illusion borne in the timelessness
Of the conversion;
A quantum of the quality of data;
And the compost of data from
Which
the terms and conditions
Of life and death are derived gli umidi.
Therefore,
except for whale-like ejaculations,
“They
shot not the nursing mermaid for sport or meat.”
Our great discoverers, pantaloons pooled at there ankles,
Jacking
off at the sight of marine mammals
Speaks to the ingenuity of the Knights of Columbus.
Oddly Chico, counting as “pair a ducks”
Or Wittgenstein’s rabbit just ducky.
So
“What’s more confident than water
That
makes way for Diogenes’ who bathes in his roof?”
Its calculation and spirit of compromise?
“Hence...coincidence
must be produced by some cause,
And”, after the illusion has been performed,
“A cause can be assigned.”
For among philosophers,
The poorest hygiene
Went to The Dog.
All this shit about being ill-equipped;
About methods lost;
Alternatives extinct
Don’t matter at all.
‘Solutions’
is idiomatic of properties
And we got properties and their flacks.
No short pants German Boy Scout’s
Going to yodel back the original ontology
From a bluff in the Black Forest;
Not even if the text bleeds from his pours
In the last language
That refuses to medicate its last mendicant.
Not now that the physicist has been miked
And directed to the applause sign and
And begun to shift and squeak in his leather chair,
Gurgling ex cathedra on ‘scientific progress’,
Calmly picking apart alarms by straw men,
As though he was still en route from the forest floor.
That nervous chuckle of detached sobriety,
Folding his hands and sneaking a whiff
Of his wet and shining knuckles on camera,
Longing gesture to his salt origins
Ruled in as Cartesian signs,
The aroma nearly brings a tear
Behind
his flounder’s mask
With its wrinkled focused brow.
Taken back, and aback.
Now, let’s hear the fizz of your planetary bromide.
Experiment drowned
Parmenides in the Heraclitus.
Change accommodated permanence badly.
Medicine selling futures to immortality.
The music of the spheres
In the swing time of entropy;
Pythagoras in Formalist Mathematics;
God to Biology;
Bach to Berio;
Until Tiphys the imperial slaver,
Bobbed
up under the antipodes
Registering as both particle and
wave;
As observational mermaid.
Not
a conceit but a compression.
A way of teasing out
The wreckage of epistemology
By
amplification
Rather than forensics.
Godless
Irresolution. Sonar
That
bursts the ear drums of whales
That The Method, bless its progressive heart, did not detect,
Ergo was not at fault.
I0II
Why doesn’t the Sierra Club
Burn down the National Academy of Sciences?
Why doesn’t Human Rights Watch
Set fire to MIT?
The nearer a unified field
The larger the deficit.
The further the exploration;
The closer the apocalypse.
The larger the number,
The leaner the constituency.
The keener the mathematical experience,
The fuzzier ordinary experience.
“[T]he formalism does not permit
A well defined classical state.”
But if you are dead set on continuing,
It has been arranged.
“Currently humans consume
20% more natural resources
Than the earth can produce.”
But “Except [for] the success of theory
In ontic scientific
explanation”
“There is no reason at all
To think
Anything occurrent”
Should live forever.
And naturally,
entropy doesn’t merit
The old moral feasance
That dances in
Dante’s eternity.
Science parked all that scrap
Anthropomorphism
in heaven
While trying to smelt the keys into gold.
The computer wags at MIT said,
When
language is just out of reach of its object,
Art flourishes.
But the condition of numbers
Is
that an anomaly
Cannot determine its ontology.
Therefore
the solution
To language’s deficit simply awaits computation.
The
rain slicks hung in the foyer
Over the radiators.
There
was a war on.
There was beer and Friday evening melodramas
And serialized salvation.
The black Buick beating the train to the crossing.
The handsome
hero outrunning the explosion’s fireball.
The small group of maverick clinicians
Discovering the vaccine in the nick of time.
The locomotive’s brakes squealing down the ratios of Zeno
To stop at
microscopic tolerances from the School Bus.
The disgraced airmen finding redemption in pulling his craft up
At the very
crown of the earth’s atmosphere.
Movies that, in the context of HUAC,
Were more
satisfying, more easily democratized than Shakespeare.
A replica of Time stood impassive
In a glass case at the end of the hall.
Fags and cokes were free
Except to the enlisted men.
The perimeter was guarded by the inferior races
Who
were plucked and used in experiment.
Yet, after billions in other people’s cash, comprehensive testing,
And close analysis of millions of screams
There remained the narrowest seam between,
The deer in the headlights and its model.
A span of pearly atoms
That only the clinicians purest angstroms could detect.
Enough that, though statistically
The response of the naked eye was a wash,
Soon after, the respondent developed a fever,
Lesions and a wracking cough
Never seen in pure melodrama before.
Failure prompted central command
To recoup its losses and pay a dividend by
Declaring it pure artifice,
Just out of reach of its object,
And
rushed it into production.
And like art, its effect upon the user was subjective
For
heretofore no one credited ‘language’,
Except perhaps Homer, Joyce and Shakespeare
With
making the respondent feverish
And bleed from his ears.
Methought it shamefull he had no volume of Donne,
Yet
a full half dozen of O’Hara
And
another five of Berryman.
Thousands of movies were in the can
But the picture of consciousness had been wrong.
“Understanding itself is a state which is the source of the correct
use.”
But with Descartes “every finite existence
Except the human mind”—consciousness—
“Is a mere machine, which men,...
Can manipulate without scruples.”
Better Adams than god had made.
“Not as essentially corrupt but as having the duty to create...”
Present to the ubiquity of
‘creation’ as corruption itself;
A prelapsarian trope “[i.e. to understand nature scientifically]”
Was again “to call creatures by their true names.”
“...[W]hen men act as to transform their environment...”
Nature binds them
To what they never intended to do.
Again mitigation only man
Is prepared to afford himself;
How utterly base is consciousness.
“The fact that the West has never been...committed
To...the maintenance and preservation
of the world around him...”
Except in formaldehyde.
But for now the
rubble remains there in the darkness.
That’s how it embodies the deficit;
Closes the deficit
To a whisper
But runs up against
The tolerances of Zeno
Squealing like bad bearings.
The metaphors hum a frictionless and perpetual motion,
But that’s wrong.
The comedians get serious and joke
About the pratfall we will take
But don’t know when it will come.
Lousy alarums.
The duck and cover of the daily news.
This could go on forever,
One, two steps ahead of disaster,
Plenty of drama
And serial salvations.
Beating the train to the crossing.
Outrunning the explosion’s fireball.
Discovering the vaccine in the nick of time.
Pulling the craft up
At the crown of the earth’s atmosphere.
So where’s the adrenaline
In driving the hydrogen car
To the paperless office
But for watching the movie on plasma TV?
“In the field of utopia...
Better to throw off the burden
of proof
And continue to ‘owe’ it.”
Abandon the claim as its productions
Prove murderous in all but intent.
To name the objects of their creation
Was
the scriptural moment for the scientists.
A test of their descriptive powers
(The quark, The Super, the ENIAC, the Internet)
Without the constraints of causal narrative.
Consoled by the kulturnamen of advertisers and poets
Against Osiander’s eschatology of elimination.
“[T]o every T in the latter there corresponds a T in the former.”
To proceed without either
Is to be run off the road
By jealous spirits;
To live as though the internal and the external
Are categorically the different.
The naturalists confirmed that discovery
Need not be ‘a bringing into being,’
Tiny bangs of existens.
Tagging nature like a morgue
As the toom ark to Mars counts down.
Or that there exists a false distinction
That
we will call “either side of emptiness;”
Rejecting
Wittgenstein’s “evolutionary hypothesis,”
Laws “by means of the schema of a religious ceremony”
The reductionists
became our scholasts.
“The concept of perspicuous representation” is power.
It controls
the shape of our representation,
“The way we [can] see things.”
“A ‘World View’...typical of our time.”
The experimenter’s
paper mastiff.
Batons of findings raining down
On shivering, anxious hoi poloi.
Descartes, hanging on Aquinas,
Standing on Aristotle’s hem,
Expose the crude phalli of David and Goliath,
As semitic folk art and anecdote,
While marble Davids after marble Davids contend with marble Davids
Laying depth charges with their Nobels.
Don’t run on, disappointed that mortals have made another capture.
As much as formalization is amnesiac,
As much as it crosses over,
As much as it trolls for irreducibles,
There is still entropy.
Inspectors rush from vessel to vessel,
Hold to hold,
Canister to canister
To award the old ontology;
To detect the old allatonce
Out there sizzling in the past
While half the cosmos sits in dry
dock.
Who walks into the open manhole with Negative Dialectics?
Yet how many have stared out
From the sewer of their being
With Von Neumann and Morgenstern.
We don’t know the sages
Who do schtick neck high in
our own blood?
The first third of Dante should
have been utterly rejected by now
In the Utopia of Espresso Makers.
The theoretical engines are little held to account.
The defiant impulses
that consumed the planet
To form the liberty of observation, are little held to account.
Where god intended all,
Descartes, being better than god,
Intended only the good
Raising up his corpus
of failure.
So many dead, they back up and mill in camps
And become objects of
exploitation.
Hang on the fences like scraps of plastic and become incomes.
II00
------, Sage of Commerce.
Despite
the gags and corny dialogue, sages
Are industrious ontologists;
Even the naturals; and this is too much heft.
But if you rest your head
On
a bag of Alexander’s feathers
That’s Morpheus editing CNN in your head with
Total authorized access to the archives.
Those bars of music
Sound is blown against.
Where there used to be homage,
Now nostalgia..
When the mastiff did not glance
At tomorrow’s absolute tribute,
Perfect to hear
Those scraps that jitter bug into the fence.
The music of the spheres
In the swingtime of entropy;
Tiphys splitting the antipodes
As both particle and wave.
Not a conceit but a compression.
A way of teasing out
The wreckage of epistemology
By amplification
Rather than forensics. Sonar
That bursts the ear drums of whales
That The Method cannot find.
The nearer a unified field
The larger the deficit.
The further the exploration;
The closer the apocalypse.
But if you are dead set on it,
It has been arranged.
“Except [for] the success of theory
In ontic scientific
explanation”
“There is no reason at all
To think
Anything occurrent”
Will live forever.
The computer wags at MIT used to say,
When
language was just out of reach of its object,
Art flourished.
But the laxative of numbers
Is all coming back to me now,
And though I hate
Even god can’t assign me an arsenal.
Hell won’t read us its intent.
Since electricity powerlessness is silence, peace.
No appeals. Just back
to every insects
Evolutionary power pack.
So we can hear the ontology.
Sense it.
The horror of salvation.
There’s been a jester’s calvary
Made of the whole.
A discipleship that fails to understand
That the negation
is not selective.
You’re a vein and it’s a slash
Across you,
That when done right is a single cello’s tock.
Don’t make powerlessness
a misdemeanor
By imagining you’re in the aura of Penderecki
Keeping your neighbors
up all night
With cries from Auschwitz.
Go quietly.
Crawl into the
roadway.
With the half of your face left retaining
Those average good
looks,
Catch the headlights
That are glancing
off into the jungle
To avoid you.
Be happy in the
ravine with the others.
Sing for those of your species you nourish.
Don’t ask them.
They will tell you what to sing from
Their litany of things.
Which raw material is possessed of which properties.
You don’t have to ask
them
For them to sell you what to sing.
The apocalypse is reflexive.
No change
in method is needed for its denouement.
The check on his sneakers made him a marked man.
And it was his
logos
Belly up where
the rubber meets the road,
The police said a victim of a rival gang.
But his head looked popped by an enormous thumb.
Half the household wants to move.
The other half feels it has finally arrived.
When the exception’s right
It improves the rule.
Is that Popper’s happy anecdote?
Face down on the macadamy where Mercury
Circles Troy displaying his most durable commodities.
II0I
Tutankhamen awoke to Ra reaching
Through a ragged dentation of battered stone.
No bath drawn, no shit pot, no oils.
No servants, no taster, no pressed robes,
The pomegranate and apricots spoiled.
No room service, no door man, no concierge.
No chauffeur much less a fleet of ships.
Had the cosmos overslept?
No. All his treasures had been stolen
And if Tut wanted to see ’em
He’d have to hop the subway
To the Metropolitan Museum.
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