Dererum

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.