|
Carlo Parcelli
Teller said, "Miss Ulam, hold my calls.
“The work is going well,
From
Deconstructing the Demiurge: |
Chlorpyrifos--the End
of the world
is within us.
Eschatology of Reason, of Ratio.
"'Technology is our uniform,'" Juenger
"and those who wear it have a 'second and colder consciousness'
that has the 'capacity to view itself as an object.'"
"si natura negat, facit indignatio versum." Juvenal
Five centuries of carnage chums the wake of the 'Mathesis Universalis'.
Sea route to the Indies?
"empty, formal generality." Husserl
Descartes' 'Man' with a clock in his belly. The prosthetic
That relegates the metaphysical to the objet d'art.
Where logical positivism, the manacling of language,
Animates A.I.; von Neumann’s cancerous breath
Respiring dust and sand
As the legates of man.
The Rube Goldberg Ptolemy
of Doyne Farmer’s nonlinear market cosmography.
"Adapting the homogeneous to the radically heterogeneous." Elsasser
the idealization of the animate
"The mechanistic form, storage" ibid
for the "phenomenological concept (memory)."
"the infinite of an "immer wieder" or an "und so weiter,"… Derrida
"the very movement of mathematical idealization…"
Strong A.I.’s prophetic home
in mathematical palindromes.
Appliances issue in the ethical.
"Arithmetic… a sort of imaginative violence Henry Flynt
which remakes the phenomena into fixed unit things."
Hegel's audit of the double-entry bookkeeping of Fichte and Schelling.
Is 'global warming', for example,
An unintended consequence of
The 'idealization of the object'
Through instrumental and mathematical science?
When to declare the elusory, illusory?
All expression allusive; tropes aping a future.
We have the end within us toward which we evolve.
We have become what we are
By virtue of that which will end us.
Enlightenment's solipsism.
Empiricism’s end time.
BANG! In Moscow autumn topples its shadows.
BANG! The spattered heart of Mayakovsky
heaves then dries into a trove of catastrophe;
Meakopfsky, Meakopfsky, Meamaximakopfsky.
A ballistic's mnemonic.
Frames shudder sifting shattered heuristics
sliced into the meat red recesses:
the ruptured pneumatic from which
words plunge,
objects plunge,
Soul's sump, this burr of a building.
Parliament shelled to a museum piece;
shoveled remains; an ideology instantly carbon dated.
(The reservoir sugared, artificially colored and carbonated.)
Some who drowned, eddy
in front of the Lenin Museum;
an unemployed engineer translates for the American,
while a medical student from Burkina Faso,
fluent in Russian,
pounds his fist, hammer to the plank of his palm,
"You Russians have been defeated.
You're enslavement is now packaged as your freedom."
Last winter, the snow was the ash of rubles;
next spring, whose ash will be shoveled
from the furnace of the Metropol?
Whose corpse rummaged from Patriarch's Pond?
This spring too much air-time has been lavished on the starving;
too many print columns misspent on pensioners.
The Entrepreneur must be reassured
More than the mendicant --
Life before death!
The Demiurge resurrects reservoirs of flesh; merges with the Elements;
mediates thought and object.
Consciousness is phenomenologically constituted
To resist the 'thing in itself'.
The Great Vaudevillians - Planck, Einstein and Bohr,
Ehrenfest, de Broglie and Born,
Schroedinger and Dirac,
Heisenberg, Pauli and Kramers
Returned irony and not a little contempt to the study of Nature;
That "state of philosophical innocence" of one Schopenhauer
"who has not mastered" Kant,
"whatever else he may have studied…"
and "remains in the grip of [a] natural
and childish realism" even as he records the order,
the violence, "the idealization of observation and definition",
"the ambition of a 'mathesis universalis'"
that issued in the burlesque of quantum.
Through the "idealization of reality", "a form of poetry
That describes in terms of metaphors without providing
True explanations," according to Philander, S. George.
"The doctrine of Kant,…, that Schopenhauer
both the design of organised
and the conformity to law of unorganised nature
are only introduced
by our understanding, and therefore both belong
only to the phenomenon,
not to the thing in itself."
"Nor is it, to be sure, necessary that these hypothesis be true, Osiander
or even probable; but this one thing suffices,
namely, whether the calculations show
agreement with the observations."
"Suffer the little children come unto me."
The status of procreator accrues to the injection mold;
The castings blush hot pink.
Meakopfski, Meakopfski, Meamaximakopfski.
ADMIT ONE FREE
to inspect Mayakofsky's heart,
"a compressed fireball, far hotter than the sun,
containing everything observable in our universe."
And we and the universe in these cold, mathematically
Elegant yet 'interpersonal times' are One.
"Colossal though they may be,
stars and galaxies rank low
on the scale of complexity.
That's why it isn't presumptuous
to aspire to understand them"
to hold them to their naive simplicity.
At the core, without malice, was Niels Bohr: "I wished only
To emphasize that in these fields
[relativity and quantum]
the logical correlations can only be won
by a far-reaching renunciation
of the usual demands of visualization."
The usual demands of observation
through both quantum and relativity
have been abandoned "with the help
of abstract concepts of arithmetic and
geometry,…, to build up strictly
logical formalisms which allow the mastering
of the new domains of experience."
The optical gymnasium of the kinetiscope
Gained in popularity even as it misplaced
Arts suzerainty in discrete operations
Much as the perimeters of a canvass became a discretion.
Where is the poem
Written in the last half of the 20th century that
Didn't imply by content or cast,
Sense or no, that quantitative methods
Were inadequate vehicles for the
Exigencies of the 'soul(?)'?
Yet where is the poet
Who expresses "bitter discontent" with ubiquitous quantity? Goethe
Perseus?-- "one of Kant's favorite authors", but Gian Biagio Conti
"Whether the obscurity and intellectualism of
some contemporary poetic modes will win him
many new readers may be doubted."
"Very unlike a divine man would he be, Plato
who is unable to count one, two , three…"
at Plato's glance the gods progress to reason,
where once in theory, "Thea [was] goddess, Martin Heidegger &
related to Aletheia (translated as veritas), Gregory L. Ulmer
the unconcealment from out of which and
in which that which presences, presences."---
"And ora (the other root) "'signifies the respect,
honor and esteem we bestow.'"
But now, with Plato's accounting,
Eidos, the eidetic, the visual is
attributed to that which is not perceivable.
Heaven changed to heavens, in short
destined to become earth, earthling,
Like the mathematician who sees "a mathematical
Situation as a picture in his mind." The cognizable,
the knowable, the intelligible
and other bedlams.
And so the Romans to bring order, hegemony,
Introduced the 'discrete', "contemplatio" from
"templum", "a section carved out of the heavens"
and "temnein - to cut or divide."
Only to have the integral ossify in the limitations
of the perceptual tools of the quantum.
Theory which once meant "the beholding
That watches over truth" is gone.
The millennium assails and
(as the thermodynamics of 'complexity' demands)
"that natural automaton, man"
has not yet displaced himself.
Sinew chafes in its binary boilerplate.
"Neurons are analog devices," declared Anderson (1983).
Even von Neumann thought that
automata mathematics should be continuous. Yet
"His first models of self-reproduction
were discrete."
A 'heavily redacted' defeat for 'techne'.
Order advances in its foil of chaos.
"The U.S. Air Force, [May 1, 1950] provides the first definition Evelyn Fox Keller
of system in modern technical usage;…"
"When Curtis LeMay, one of the leaders William Gibson
in the "scientific" management movement in the military,
became air force Chief of Staff in 1961,
the emphasis on quantitative measurement and the centralization of control…"
"In modern technical usage" not only was "the functioning
of the parts and their relation to one another []
governed by the whole." But fidelity to all
"'organisms' whether "animate, partly animate, or inanimate"
was maintained by a fictile vocabulary of "sensory components,
communication facilities, data analyzing devices, centers of judgement,
directors of action, and effectors, or executing agencies."
Metaphor machined as accomplished fact;
A buzz cut for every wing nut.
"Flip through [Descartes On Man] and confirm Lacan
that what Descartes is looking for in man
is a clock."
Abstraction is the spectrum of the idealization of matter.
"By its very nature the formalism
prohibits any possibility
of giving meaning to
'which photon is which.'"
Photon's machined, mathematical mutuality;
points in a great metathetical chain accreting 'humanity'.
Quarks can be red, green or blue.
What formal expression
Approximates history's contingency?
Hegemony's paradox apes quantum's orthodoxy:
"The West…. quite literally nowhere - Richard Drinnon
or everywhere, which [is] to say the same thing."
"For [blind] Homer's Greeks
and North American Tribal peoples alike,
the West
was the land
beyond,
the land of mystery,
of death and of life eternal.
…not a dark and bloody ground
to be "won.""
"If the West was at bottom
a form of society, as Turner contended,
then on our round earth,
winning the West amounted to
no less than winning the world."
"It could be…
only by ratio-…,
banishing mystery,
and negating or extirpating [the] other…
subject to the regimented reason [&]
self-evidence of middle class values."
But quantum is dead to metaphor.
Does not offer to sense.
The 'mystery' contained in the solution
denied by procedure.
"Oh, the RAND Corporation is the boon of the world; Malvina Reynolds
They think all day for a fee,
They sit and play games about going up in flames,
For counters they use you and me, Honey Bee,
For counters they use you and me."
And do you recall
The greatest of all,
Johnny von Neumann's bold scheme,
To dye the poles blue,
Heat up the globe,
And take 'Sunday drives' along
Denver's ocean view.
Some vatic few insist
That John Nash's equilibrium was
Dashed in his attempt to reconcile
Quantum with everyday’s experiment;
And attribute its remission to the
Restoration in his mind's eye
Of a single photon's Absolute Position.
Dem Brains, dem Brains…
"I am already a half-starving man,"
wrote Ramanujan to Hardy, "To
preserve my brains I want food
and this is now my first consideration."
As for 'formal proofs': "What I tell you is this:
Verify the results I give and if they agree with your results,
Got by treading on the groove
In which the present day mathematicians move,
you should at least grant that their may be some truths
in my fundamental basis."
“...[T]he poem must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and,
at all points, an energy-discharge.”
So Schroth's 'be-he-mouth' in a bathrobe, Olson
yawped , "Enough headlines, sloth & second cup's---
'O Poet! Get a Job!'"
Read Ransom's classified:
'Wanted: An Ontological Critic.'
And assumed the post to be Apocalyptic;
Not the ceremonial position,
gagged in an office removed
to the end of corrugated circuitry
in a building that stored an archive
delivered by artillery rounds.
“Some CIA-worshipping cold war tough-liberal professor...” Ed Sanders
A flame thrower IS a fire extinguisher, when the fire is just.
Indonesia, China, Vietnam...
"Water requires enormous numbers[?]"
his interviewer had said,
"where would history be
without its dead?"
And then, eyes on the nape of the world,
asked if our respondent was
"up to the task?"
"Lose sight of what you see;
yet confound the rabble. Do it empirically."
the end
result is "a class
of things
or of events ..." -----
to the extent
that their ontological status
becomes obscure
[T]heir character
as intellectual constructs
becomes apparent."
That's "how the 'true world' finally became a fable."
Ash for fire.
As "deconstructionist analysis shows. . .
any quest for principles
is a quest for the ultimate ontic referent."
An idealized core --
its atmosphere in absolute parallel;
Intolerant.
"No object 'is' unless it 'renders'
reason to the subject."
'Egoical', 'anthropomorphic', 'solipsistic';
"the logical principium proves to be
an epochal principle."
"the conclusion...
not concerned
with things themselves,
but with ... intellectually
constructed classes
which ... serve as the objects
of arguments."
The unknown a kernel within the known;
the man in the muon
revealed through "the legislative spontaneity of reason."
The way 'the Known' is organized;
Nature trimmed to symmetry;
asymptotes so rigorously unexploitable oblige
an arc too perfect for Nature.
"ENIAC computed the azimuth for ordnance."
"I aim for the stars but sometimes I hit London,"
sang NASA's Nazi, Werner Von Braun.
The resurrecting ligatures of the Fathomless Calvary of
Telephone Poles assembles out of the Unrealized.
O Gorgeous Smear, meakopfsky, meakopfsky, meamaximakopfsky
As though you discarded the heart's efficacy,
now proven to never have been a locus of courage;
a photon's position when its momentum is absolutely calculated.
The caliber and trajectory was sufficient to purchase a museum;
A fast frame tribute to pulses. The brain, displaced,
crystalized from the mind's career of physical evidence.
Of expressionist singularities.
Or plainly,
the museum is an edifice misplayed,
containing Mayakovky's brain
at the instant of the bullet's keening
where artifacts represent the tissue of the poet's atomized mind.
What was the ontic referent of von Neumann's cancer?
The tumors? The tests? His temerity?
Why wouldn't your "'ideas' die in [your] stead?"
Most of them, like Popper's, so dead. So already dead.
Despite the cunning to know that others; 'the other'; that I
Would not knowingly fry in your stead.
The luxury, sheer luxury, to be the world's smartest
Fool, and at age 53 die in your bed.
What was the ontic referent of von Neumann's cancer?
"I myself tend to give up determinism Max Born
in the atomic world," pledged Born.
A tumor as a tempest of atoms?
"…not "what is the state of the collision" but
"how probable is a given effect of a collision."
A malignancy in "the motion of particles
follows probability laws
but the probability itself, [the tumor]
propagates according to laws of causality[?]"
The disease which constellated von Neumann's body
Maps well with other malignancies of quantity--- Game Theory,
Communications, Systems Analysis, Operations Research,
Cybernetics, Information Theory, Cantorian Set Theory,
Nonlinear Systems, General System Theory,
Computer Programming, Fractal Geometry, Chaos Theory, Statistics -
Yet much as his disease could be adapted to these,
It stood, noncommutative, outside the body of formal knowledge.
Thus quantity makes the Body - Soul
So that science may manage this simpler whole.
And iterativeness flourishes only in commutativity,
amplification of variables obliged within a genre of event.
Vivisection, Algorithms or Integral Calculus, depending
On the killer's constitution, come before, after
and during questioning of the soul has been addressed
as a threat to economic and political wantonness.
A system is a bundle of generalized assumptions;
quantification is color coding.
Thus, tumors that originate with quantity,
map well with economic malignancies such as
Capital formation, stocks to earnings ratios,
Structural adjustment loans.
Trajectories so ubiquitous trail their own truth.
Sins so pervasive eruct their own church.
The experiment is held in relief
And the more bluff the relief
The more efficacious the experiment.
The more discrete, the more shadows constitute
The resurrecting ligatures with the earth reeling below
- a cataract of data.
Brennan exposes Casti's canard, Joe Brennan
That C.P. Snow would host a dinner party on the 'Two Cultures',
without an artist or two among the guests.
"Whatever tries to overstep the limits set us is dishonest! Musil
Mysticism is just as dishonest as the delusion
That Nature can be reduced to a mathematical formula."
"Anyone who behaves rationally Adorno
believes in ratio
just as the irrational person
believes in dogma."
For example, Tipler, unfortunate Druid; his doctrine of Immortality
already yielding to the doctrine of observational contingencies that
have dissolved the Omega Point.
Zukofsky's Bottom would say:
Are not the eyes our ancestral home?
Isn't all that has transpired buried there?
Isn't it nec-
romancy to date the occipital ridge?
To bed down with the bones?
Romance from the neck up.
What splattering of the fundament
Tomorrow will be our paradise?
"Reason finds its specific content Adorno
in the critique of what falls
within and aligns itself with
these categories." "…a number of assumptions Charles Paul
prevalent in Jussieu's day
underlay his belief
in the perfect congruence
between his nomenclature
and the essence of Nature's laws:
Fixity of species…;
The Cartesian correspondence of truth…;
And a peculiar distinction between
primary and secondary qualities…."
How Hegel accounts for the "double entry bookkeeping"
Of Fichte and Schelling where "[t]he predicate may be subjectivity
Or objectivity, or again
Magnetism, electricity, and so on,
Contraction or expansion…
With a circle of reciprocities of this sort
It is impossible to make out the real fact in question[,]"
"[S]urrounded by phenomena conceived Flynt
as enduring and changeless (and discrete)."
"[T]he bootstrap process of modeling organisms and machines…" Keller
has taken us beyond the stars!
Wiener chirped that a man could be strained through a telegraph wire,
"conceptually",
while, allowing for Aeolus, sparrow droppings affirm
their covenant with gravity.
When you model, you favor the machine.
But "[f]or quantity to be felt to be a reliable property, Flynt
one must be surrounded by phenomena conceived
as enduring and changeless (and discrete)."
Machined to metatheticality; the beads of lubricant,
A mist among the bearings anonymous in the wheel--
Heat loss the poet warms himself by.
Mayakofsky, what a torment to have escaped
Only to be dressed like Florentine lumber,
anima for every object.
At the hands of futurist art, a museum;
though as tongue and groove your torment is merely purgatorial.
A series of well placed charges could wrest for you
that eternal rest,
which discounts the conservation of energy and memory's entropic hiss.
But for now your remains are on exhibit. Three rubles.
You have been resuscitated, but indeed, they did not give you an artificial heart.
No mummy's wrap, but the rites of saboteurs
Who set the charge to you that makes you whole.
And indeed, your reincarnation must be priceless,
because we are alone with you; two strangers
who bring their strangeness with us
to your blasted deathbed with the photograph.
In the foreground, scraps of people,
And left rear a scrap heap. The scraps say: "Remember us,
for this is the way we were regarded by Vladimir himself."
Mankind has gobbled his way out of his animal hide,
So you whisper, "History is best studied as omen";
Like that afternoon in Moscow when you knit my brow,
Bit off the knot, dropped the needle into my hand,
And marched off to harvest yourself with
The roseate clouds of Heraclitus
Slipping the azure of Parmenides.
I redesign your museum from 'storage'
And the result is an awakening of catastrophe.
*****************************************************
"facts: [t]he strident hackers miss no chance to A.R. Ammons
dramatize, hurt, fairly or unfairly, for they"
test your emptiness, Ammons. Clawing at the chain
link perimeter their verbal eructations volleying
with ICBM's: Armed to the tongue, their folly
embarrasses you: As your eyes scuttle passed the prone,
scruffy, cuffed "loud boys", you concoct an indifference
deafening as a payload: it's their rancor,
utterly removed from your "moody Abundance'"
that rankles, fixed with horror upon El Playon:
Megiddo, the plain rhymes at heart with Armageddon:
Protocols of science dictate the protocols of your
"poem that goes dumb: holds tears: the line,
the fire line, where passion and control waver
for the field" is a filigree drawn by the luxury
of a two hundred megaton yield: all your "resolution[s]"
are prophylactic: balance that ensures there's nothing
in the balance: a field that invokes Field Theory:
a conscious appeal to force: the reasonableness
of the armature that repeats the weld precisely:
on the money, or truncheon, on the nose:
precisely, for the epistemology goes "no famine has ever Amartya Sen
occurred in a democracy" followed authoritatively by
"So far no one has produced an example to refute him." Joshua Murachik
Which simply reminds one of Edward Bernays, 'Who controls
the means of production' of 'ideas': in this instance the Nobel Prize,
Knopf, The American Enterprise Institute and the Washington Post:
Mud slides bare the outcroppings of radioactive tailings and the
victims who had resisted the Democracies of Famine:
bandits with printed matter hide their faces in syndication:
the Times held over noses to snuff the odor of rotting corpses:
those who are at first inebriate with the carnage: those for whom
it is not enough to ‘develop’, to engineer scarcity; issue edicts,
rationally so wrongly predict, but they must provoke the dying
with their 'ideas': challenge the starving to defend the integrity
of their dying: those who call Chicago a School: Call the World a Bank:
Those who disinfect: “The ‘starvation set’ S(i) of endowment Amartya Sen
vectors consists of those commodity vectors z
such that he cannot meet his food requirements through exchange,
starting from z...” The campesino held without charge: beaten:
flayed: Turned on a spit: returned to his family
to find them, wife, children, infant and grandmother
bound to their chairs, decapitated: their
heads set upon the table like bowls
resting in their hands: and upon the shanty
wall an icon of Christ next to a photo of
Kennedy, the spiritual author of
ORDEN, the Mano Blanco, and ANSESAL.
So since the ‘experts’, sycophants, as part of the ballet of reason,
in the morning, pull on one prosthesis at a time, their research grants;
we inexpert humbly remind the reader of the starving Luddites and the Irish Potato Famine
and democracy’s structural adjustments to accelerate the dessication of LDCs
designed as though French, English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese
resulted simply as the success of advertising Berlitz in the ‘former’ colonies.
Leveraged famine; famine by embargo; famine by bombing infrastructure;
famine by armed proxy and military intervention; political destabilization;
assassination, simple murder; burning and biological warfare on flora and fauna;
crops and herds, indigenous and domestic;
or just Madison Avenues cardinal inducements to those first timers
to the living death masks , the grinning photons of Mammon.
Or let's split hairs, it is a constitutional monarchy
We add to our catalogue of tyrannies.
Or China tops that democracy, India, in the long march
To eliminate starvation according to this same Amartya Sen.
Which the Post precipitates to mere editorial lies again.
John Wesley Powell reports," The merit of Columbus
Was his faith in science."
Even lost, Columbus sailed the seas he knew.
"Our Lord pleasing, Columbus
I will carry off six of them
at my departure to Your Highnesses…"
though legally with the Admiral's act of possession,
the Tainos became Spanish subjects
and in theory could not be enslaved.
Reason opposed to itself.
Science negotiates method from experience.
"The great merit of models,…, is that they force E.O. Wilson
investigators to provide unambiguous definitions of units,
such as atoms and genes, as well as processes,
such as movement and change."
"Its dignity depends upon its repeatability." Gadamer
"We put in some physical facts, Brian L. Silver
follow the rules for obtaining the
needed results, and almost
always get what we want.
The comparison between the theoretical
Results and experiment is rarely disappointing."
"In this sense, Columbus' voyage was scientific."
"Wir mussen wissen. Wir werden wissen,"
As David Hilbert has enlightened us.
"Experience ("surrounded by phenomena conceived Hilbert & Flynt
as enduring and changeless (and discrete.)")
by its very nature abolishes history."
And mapping circumscribes "the theory
Of experience…related teleologically to
The truth that is derived from it…"
"…to begin with David Bohm
traditional Cartesian notions of order
and then try to impose the dynamics
of quantum theory on this order
by using the algorithm of 'quantisation.'"
"The sense of the question is its direction."
So Pere Cardenal beware
Of such conceits as
"the star could not see its beauty
except through us.
Born in the fire of it
And cooled down so as to be able to see."
As the Hubble has shown, it reflects
a little less than a conquistocrats anthropic taxonomy.
Kepler said: "God (like the Tainos) has waited 6000 years
for an observer."
And then God turned to Pico:
"Be constrained by no limit,
in accordance with thy own free will."
A teleology rumored to have ironically evaporated the Holy Spirit
and dusted piety away. "[N]ot free will in the trivial sense," announces Wilson,
distancing himself from his own appetitions, smuggling in Reason,
…[N]ot "the ability to choose
one's thoughts and behavior free of the will of others
and the rest of the world all around. I mean
instead, freedom from the constraints
imposed by the physiochemical states
of one's own body and mind."
"We are mechanisms, mechanisms with very elaborate purposes… Dennett
and with [No] original intrinsic intentionality. The intentionality
that gets ascribed to complex intentional systems
is all there is." …"[I]mposed by physiochemical states…"
("by which we are not to understand a reality, Brentano
or an immanent objectivity.")
Because the subject, to know the object, operates teleologically.
The history of Hilbert's, "We must know. We will know."
Since will has its ration in power;
Wilson's "if we mean by progress
the advance toward a preset goal,…
Then evolution by natural selection,…, is not progress."
But then if we mean "evolutionary progress."
The goal now being 'evolution', presuming that its
Progress also includes its study, and the study and its subject
Are "evolutionary." And most certainly this is its Telos.
As when Dennett dismisses; (the same Dennett of "elaborate purposes")
dismisses "the Cartesian theater,"
"The executive ego,"
But the ego sledged is still a wall
Requiring the interrogatives of "interlacing patterns of neural activity."
As each "squared stone" once "fronted the wall." David Jones
From the cheap seats, 'neural' improv
Still soars under Yorick's proscenium.
But, like Columbus, the legalist glossomorphism hurtles;
"What precisely is this superorganism,
This strange creature called culture" Wilson mulls?
"To anthropologists, who have analyzed thousands of examples,
should go the privilege of response."
So "the ungenerous are unrestrained performers of the energies of nature;” Blake
And "pity has become a trade, and generosity a science
That men get rich by."
With no regard for 'cultures' that have mercifully avoided anthropology.
Or the blood debt owed to 'analyze' the analyzers,
(the pleonasm of Pico's economy)
in order to demonstrate that analysis itself
Is merely the technique for realizing your own particular a posteriori.
The utter ascendancy of matter, epistemologically,
Alters nothing for "the rest of the world all around."
The resistance dissipated in official taxonomies
Is nonetheless coordinate through Nature and man's better nature;
Seoul, Caracas, Jakarta, Seattle;
Material Telos is the Fortuna of this mechanistic universe.
The final solution that more sophisticated methods
Of quantification will not forestall.
"Do we wish to change these numbers? E .O. Wilson
I think not, at least not as primary goal."
Beginning with "Scores for heritability in IQ
and measurable personality traits in white Americans,
a segment…"
“thus judgment days from a simple metaphor inherited from
measuring the energy of gasses under pressure."
"Bear in mind ibid
that the original Enlightenment died
within philosophy
but not within science."
And "[s]ystematic logico-deductive thought" must
"discipline the old ways of thought but…never abandon them…"
The fighter pilot, who believes that god
Created the world 6000 years ago,
Battles the blasphemies of his machine.
In the immutability of matter all murderous abeyance.
"Social scientists addressing such issues ibid
start at the level of conventional analysis.
Bring order to facts,
Quantifying them
In tables and graphs,
And statistical interpretations."
"[F]ortified with mathematical models;" ibid
"[G]arlanded annually" with a Nobel Prize; ibid
"[R]ewarded with power in business and government;" ibid
So "The enterprise within the social sciences best poised ibid
To bridge the gap to the natural sciences,
The one that most resembles them in style and self-confidence
Is economics."
"[A]ll the "physical laws of production" Hayek
which we meet, e.g. in economics,
are not physical laws
in the sense of the physical sciences
but people's belief about what they can do."
"All this stands most clearly in…economics." ibid
"The very type of the engineer ibid
with his characteristic outlook,
ambitions, and limitations was here
[at the Ecole Polytechnique] created.
That synthetic spirit which would not recognize sense
In anything that had not been deliberately constructed,
That love of organization that springs from the twin sources
Of military and engineering practices,
The aesthetic predilection for everything that had been consciously constructed
Over anything that had "just grown,"
Was a strong new element which was added to-
And in the course of time even began to replace-
The revolutionary ardor of the young polytechnicians."
"The emphasis on rigor. Analysts heartily agree Wilson
with Paul Samuelson, one of the most influential
economists of the twentieth century,
that "economics focuses on concepts
that actually can be measured.""
"[T]he objects of economic activity Hayek
cannot be defined in objective terms." "And
it is probably no exaggeration to say ibid
that every important advance in economic theory
during the last hundred years was a further step
in the consistent application of subjectivism."
"Rigor is what Littlewood and I call gas," quipped Hardy; quantums of
action insinuated into every crevice greater than the molecular mass.
But both Wilson and Hayek while borrowing a Brownian vocabulary
miss the aerosol of venality
that a world with history
has come to associate with economics.
And though Hayek might consider Wilson's scientism a frustrating affront
And Wilson's appeal to the power of "business and politics"
is prepped in the manageable epistemologies of the sciences,
both operate a moral mechanics as rigid as the Ecoles' engineer,
where the 'transcendental' in a mantel of numbers
Can only be annunciated as a business transaction,
as though Artemis would strip to a room full of Acteons.
A history strutting its scientistic syntax
Absolves the sciences of history.
Powered by the Parmenidean idee fixe and Heraclitian alibis;
Eternal yet contingent;
Twin addictions no integrity can endure.
A cold fusion of advantage denied intent.
Scientific progress, testified Evans Pugh, is certainly not
of a “higher character than moral and religious advancement.
It only stands in such relation to these as does the engine
Upon the railroad to the human freight
Which it hurls along the iron track.”
“Derailments did not enter into this design Charles E. Rosenburg
And the destination was never in doubt.
Against the Transcendentalist:
Emerson; "…things are in the saddle
And ride mankind."
And Thoreau: "We do not ride upon the railroad;
it rides upon us."
“The language machine takes language into its management, Heidegger
and thus [the language machine] masters the essence of the human being.”
Engineers tamping an aethereal road bed,
Bounce signals off motes in the upper atmosphere;
dust to Dust to dust.
"Science"…"in its progress illusions are dispelled and certitudes remain." J.W. Powell
Was it La Mancha that swore Cuba the mainland?
Who tortured Caribs to get to the Khan?
"The new world was the trophy of science," rumbles Powell.
By the scientific method Columbus destroyed which Indus?
"Perhaps he was already penetrated with the notion Henry Vignaud
that the world was smaller than it was thought to be,
when he came across Alfragan's text, which, apparently,
gave a scientific basis to his opinion."
A "globe smaller by 3,000,000 metres than Ptolemy."
"10,000,000 metres less than the actual dimensions of the globe."
Columbus, "who believed blindly in the Scriptures,
Took quite literally [the] text of Esdras, and inferred from it that,
If the solid parts of the earth occupied six-sevenths of the whole…"
A third author, Marinus of Tyre, supplied him with [meridian and degree]
The necessary elements for giving his system
a rational and scientific appearance."
"[I]llusions are dispelled and certitude remains." J.W. Powell
Manufacturing processes involving precipitation,
e.g. Seaborg's cooking out of Np239.--
"A speck of matter God had not welcomed at creation."
Molecular robots announce the Earthly Paradise.
Amino acids, proteins, even, atoms not occurring in nature
expand the mechanism of charity.
Machines council patience
To the suffering organism accreting in Seoul, Caracas, Jakarta, Seattle,
Quito,…"
Robots will feed the hungry
On their own waste.
The engineer has become the Tycoon Samaritan,
charity without sacrifice; miscalculation without risk.
The Jacquard Loom and the Babbage Engine
will police our bloodstream
bringing order and health.
The Scanning Tunneling Microscope accomplishes with atoms
what has met with resistance from
sentient discretions.
Nanorobots, synthetic viruses, stumping the bloodstream
selling the program to individual platelets.
The Utopian possibility to erect a contentment from within
by adjusting sensations of abundance to actual conditions.
The demonstrators herded into the stadium;
ground between a mechanistic universe
And its Material Telos. The hagiography of industrial utopias
found wanting.
Heraclitean Theory over a Parmenidean Syntax.
The Intravenous Garden. The problem as Wilson iterates it--
"The original Enlightenment died within philosophy
but not within science."
Mathematical tailings in the collisions of high energy physics;
Cold couplings, the superposition of nature by experiment;
A trope; a final solution for nature's diminutive, the environment.
"Clearly, the Cartesian Method fails;" Elsasser
Analyzing complex systems by dicing them
into "smaller and simpler components";
assuming discretion; threading them mentally.
"this identification of a phenomenological concept (memory) ibid
with its special, mechanistic form, storage, is
the point at which the mechanistic-reductionist interpretation
of organic life is most readily attacked and
can be laid open to an epistemological critique."
On the tarmac at 200 yards; body bags or sacks of wheat?
Markets make distinctions when they feed their dead.
How shall we tag you? Madison Avenue, machine, or mass grave.
"…[t]he detailed application of a quantitative information measure ibid
to the radically heterogeneous material of biology
would lead to enormous technical difficulties."
Or "no two brain states are ever alike", a condition
Elsasser calls "freedom".
While kilotons of supersonic crumbs are aimed at the starving,
manacled to the Onanism of western consumption.
"The hardest thing McCulloch
to match is man's storage of bits…Yet
"There is no indication [in the organism] Elsasser
concerning any mechanism which stores
(inscribes) the requisite information."
Yet "we have come far enough McCulloch
to define a number so realistically
that a man may know it,
And a man so logically that he
May know a number."
"a second, colder consciousness;" Juenger
"the flesh we consecrate can never win." McCulloch
Where flunkies posit "Let our ideas die in our stead?"
And Kuhn sees that "though he is not a naive
Falsificationist, Sir Karl, may…be treated as one."
An Epistemological Candide?
"There is no method only questions." Popper
But Sir Karl as though underwriting Cortez
Or stacked in airborne command above My Lai,
Confesses that, "Although Popper is not a murderer,
He may, I suggest, be treated as one."
Fair Enough!
As Jennings says, "[A] murderer is not just a person
Who was present when another person died."
The self-regulating feedback of 'unfettered markets' and the 'scientific method'
And the blood rituals assigned the priests of the press.
Kepler ex telos again,
"All things were made for man."
And man for gods or automata,
All because Nadeau ignores his own conclusion,
That, like gods, computer systems "are culturally derived
Ideological commitments and beliefs."
The Enlightenment Argos was launched from Palos
Where the age of discovery and the age of technology conflate
Encoded with the spirit of the Reconquista and
Its literature of intolerance, sentiment and hate.
Colon became Tiphys, helmsman of the flagship Santa Maria,
"overstepping what is given by nature."
Sauer indexed the itinerary of famine and disease;
The result of the computational trope of the atemporal
Empiricism required to halt a Turing series.
Even lost, the Admiral sailed the sea he knew.
Eight days out and the compasses knocked loose the Immutable Star.
Technology's moral ballast became
The unquestionable objectivity
Of scientific discovery.
As the genocide of Columbus consecrated
The eugenics of Davenport.
“Cutting out physical pain from punishment Charles Davenport
Is the invention of the sentimentalist
not of the student of physiology
And of Nature’s laws.”
“...legislative enactments, and...moral fervor based chiefly Raymond Pearl
Upon pre-Mendelian genetics, as out worn and useless
As the rind of yesterday’s mellon.”
“A mingled mess of ill-grounded and uncritical sociology,
Economics, anthropology and politics,
Full of emotional appeals to class and race prejudice,
Solemnly put forth by science.”
“...intellectual and emotional traits as discrete entities.”
Suffused with this lie
Empirical empires, pull the wings off their spirit,
mutate to compensate, and peak as their objects die,
Consumed in grasping an azimuth of unarticulated desire.
Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay, “we have only had one test.
It was not under fully operational
conditions, we fired one
Polaris out in the Pacific
with a warhead on it.
It was not truly operational.
It was modified to some extent for the test.”
And yesterday high over that same Pacific,
with the same “facticity of accuracy”, SDI..
Viruses serve a computational metaphor.
Logical Positivism into Strong A.I.
Not sufficient pockets of “cold dark matter”
Then neutrinos account for universal gravity.
Or “a natural trajectory...as an institutionalized pattern of Rosenberg
predominantly incremental technological change involving, centrally,
a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“...a substantial bias that remains unknown to the owner.” Kosta Tsipis
And the machines, the mathematics, their products
Appropriate Theory’s Speech;
the more Reason to discredit what it has to teach.
Sciences rugged hermeticism, calculated detachment, explorer’s naivete,
allowing no countervailing language to technological vulgarity.
“Uncorrected gravitational field anomalies,
errors in the model of the terminal atmosphere,
magnetic drift due to unknown electronic charge in the reentry vehicle—
and anything else that has not been thought about.”
The discretion, the idealization of the object, insulates variables;
The system that fronts for the whole.
“We can never know
what degrees of accuracy
would be achieved in the real world[,]” James Schlesinger intoned,
pining for the appropriations to feed his Apocalypse;
His fingertips collapsed in a spire.
His eyes rotated upward like a tail gunner
Toward the row of committee members.
Covenants with scientific idealization exact
constraints on simple Armageddon.
But a tourniquet of world caressing snake
Suffuses the body of the Wake.
The perpetual emerald boas of a wading pool
recollect Noah beached on Mount Arawat.
The machines, their products, their entire praxis
Appropriates theory’s speech;
its rugged hermeticism, calculated detachment, explorer’s naivete,
leaving no countervailing language to technological vulgarity.
The money changers’ electronic temples
Accelerated beyond moral accounting;
“the impeccable logic of shipping toxic waste Lawrence Saunders
to less developed countries.”
The theocratic control of robotic fantasies;
“man-made systems to mimic one of
the most fundamental processes in nature,”--- evolution,
classical Darwinism retrofitted in every creature;
and every creature can be refined in solution.
the fungible positivism of iteratively generated reality;
The echosystem.
Like iced “O-rings”,
Feynman repeatedly materializing through
a warp in the Los Alamos security fence.
Fermi’s chits into the nuclear storm,
combining computation, wager and celebratory confetti.
Slotin’s “tickling the dragon’s tail. ”
Hide and seek with the graduate students in the cyclotron.
That sense of play
That a good physicist
Brings to doomsday.
Edward Young was “Born into an age
More curious than devout.”
Pope’s voice rang out, “Learn, ye dunces!
Not to scorn your god!”
But Desaguliers combining lust with boozy praise,
“Nature compell’d, [Newton’s] piercing mind obeys
And gladly shows him her secret ways;
‘Gainst mathematics she has no Defense.
And yields t’experimental consequence.”
An specimen of the inferior poetic sequence that
thumps forth from the dye of quantitative experience.
How the muse is consumed in its liaisons with science
By unconsummated nuptial, an extraneous alliance.
But why unlike sage Lucretius must at present verse rebel
As though techne’s largesse is a pinata stuffed with Hell.
A plot hatched by Forcas to send trinkets and sweets
Streaming from the fractured shape that existence completes.
A glance at Wall Street confirms the rumor
That processed meat is the consumer.
Madison Avenue advances famine,
Conflating the wastelines of Thanatos and Mammon.
Turn the other cheek
To Shoot heroine chique.
A passion to improve upon the candle power of the wick
Is not the passion that observed a thousand tropes for dick.
One from desire breaks down the door;
The other extols flesh as floppy metaphor.
A fuck may occur in cyberspace,
When the epitaphs of silicon obsessions
Are runneled into every face.
So lie quiet Pope, god teased from nature thrives.
The true cross is multiplied as spent fuel rods,
And at Hiroshima, Newton was reborn the misanthrope.
And just today, “Do not breath the air,” the weather service hopes.
“In 1956 clothing made from parachute material
Began to appear in Tibet,”
The result of clandestine CIA airdrops;
In Lhasa petroleum discovered in parkas,
Ray Cline seeding the region for cultural anthropologists.
Tibetanism established in 1200 A.D.
Was then up against the ‘Red’ permutation called the Han;
The original Chinese standardizers, regulating weights and measures;
Reducing axles to the formality of pixels.
Technicians and ideologues of Quantity.
And capital, with the same intentions as Communist rule though
“wrenching for Tibetan society” with its “economic development ,
industrial production, even the introduction of money”,
senses ideals that are contra naturam,
since the idealized predator has gauged every creature.
Yet was Lamaism a reaction to a world
That by 1200 A.D. (note the western measure)
had become too scientifically inclined
for the aetherially authoritarian sect?
The bond between experiment and the material
against an austere luxury reserved for an elite constituency.
And weighed by capital, reaction to a threat to authoritarian rule
Is always promoted as a desire for freedom.
Yet neither guttural chanting or recruitment from the Ivy
League can top the extinction of the individual by quantity.
Lamaism was surrounded by enemies,
The Han, the Communists, Nehru, the CIA
and their own reactionary impurity
that they ceaselessly swatted with prayer.
The CIA flew some 500 Tibetans to Peterson Air Field
Six miles from Colorado Springs.
There they were transported by buses with blacked out windows,
Tinted windshields, to Camp Hale
Near the town of Leadville.
Camp Hale was a measurable metaphor for Tibet.
Five hundred miles southwest of Denver,
Hale was situated at an altitude over 10,000 feet.
The Tibetans were never told where they were.
The altitude, the climate, the terrain; to the CIA
All pointed to the least number of environmental anomalies
To disorient the Tibetans when they returned to thwart the Chinese.
But “[H]ow do we copy a proof?–Not e.g. by taking measurements of it.” Wittgenstein
The U.S. trainers, their weapons, their language, their food,
became the anomalies; variables as significant and destructive as altitude.
Greater than the anomalies of the Han where for centuries
familiarity had involved projections that evolved into contempt.
Whereas both U.S. Intelligence and the Tibetans
when gauging one another had only the Han, the PLA, for common referent.
Does this in any way negate the possibility of a U.S. altruistic goal?
Here the blackened bus windows, voided mirrors, provide a complex symbol.
No American citizen could see in; no Tibetan rebel could see out.
A micro/macro economy of scale maintained for the operations entire route.
The CIA, of course, was forbidden to operate on U.S. soil
and empty rumor would not serve, so they
planted a story of “atomic tests” in the Denver Post.
The Tibetans were treated as combat specimens
not to be contaminated by an American ontology.
Lab animals to be trained; and later their training minutely assessed.
The only bond, those of comrades in arms.
Military guards as well
as Tibetan trainees at Camp Hale
were under orders to shoot to kill
any unauthorized personnel...
On the 20th anniversary of the Day of Infamy, December 7th, 1961,
The Army held 47 Americans at Peterson Air Field at the point of a gun.
Drifting snow and icy roads had delayed a convoy of Tibetan
guerrillas from Camp Hale. Instead of in the cloak of night
they had arrived “at dawn’s early light.”
And the hostages dulled by the gospel of their
patriotism suffered a shock at the sight
of the aliens.
The Colorado Springs Gazette
published the story that pointed to the CIA’s crimes,
but personal intercession by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara
kept it out of the Times.
McNamara, and Kennedy’s man Galbraith briefed by Richard Bissell,
The bean counters, the economists that fail to account for the sensuality of war.
Other living beings shaped into an embrasure
to sight death; to ogle the bore of the gun barrel.
Even superposition of an anthropological grid
couldn’t redeem the Tibetans, or the Meo or the Meung
The West’s best mortar is still that paste in your pants
when you stare up the skirts of a gun.
Going native on the killing floor
is not covered in the manual for the Corps.
For all their indigenous this and indigenous that,
They reserve their patriotic palate’s for the cow,
And with the jungle quit the beetle and the rat.
Technology is their only omnivore.
For the Tibetans their beef with the Han is their beef with the West
A reaction to the imposition of a measure.
There is culture in quantity, and quantity in culture;
But to the Han and the West quantities represent universals;
predicting outcomes by the collection of data;
and for McNamara the revelation of data in number.
(The fifth force was a mountain, an aquifer, simple density;
anything but a universal;) the propensity to demonstrate eternity
in every set of calculations found its apotheosis in McNamara
and the application of formal systems to modern warfare.
McNamara called in when a mere undersecretary wouldn’t do.
The New York Times has influence, not like some rag in Colorado.
Rank, hierarchy, another fabric raised to the reduction of a universal by the West.
A chain of command, the great chain of wringing with the statistical twist
of that rag of pharmaceuticals, the double helix;
Each ply of Heaven enclosed by a set of discrete properties,
so that failure on the scale of McNamara’s can lead to a system’s rapid ascendency,
becoming the central paradigm for interpreting the world.
Fabrics when calibrated by markets can classify slaves and potentates.
Academics in their polyester shirts brief the Director in his silks
who reminisces about the risks taken in parachutes by comrades in the OSS,
with that assured oblivion as when an appendage of Nature breaks off in the hand,
And the analyst packs off the specimen to the lab.
The CIA did not intend to make a fashion statement in Tibet;
and to their skilled eye no measurable effect could have endured
from cutting patterns from polyester remnants.
Like Barzani in Turkey and Iraq, Washington
had never intended that the Khampa
more than harass the People’s Republic of China.
An intelligence “bonanza” none the less.
And what of those who formed the bond
of comrade in arms?
As Patroclus dozed in Achilles
embrace. So Felix Rodriquez,
Che’s Rolex ‘ticking’ in his ear,
cuddles with Luis Posada Carriles.
“do we but supervise the world/death David Jones
being dead ourselves
long since?”
To stumble upon the re-invention of the Logos
in some commercial technology; a progress that infers
the incubation of the voice of god in transistors or semiconductors;
mediums of amplification skewed to beams;
the remains of suns ricocheted off the moon
as wireless Aerial croons,
and a public that absorbs its history
the way a boulemic absorbs food then swoons.
Our homes are an assortment of genesis
Without the omnipotence to redeem the consequence.
An appetite in flight to interstellar no where;
A pontoon imagined across a projected void.
Ordnance of disease lobbed
“behind the living fences of the small localities” David Jones
“whose organisms withered with the old economies.” ibid
The absence of ‘cold dark matter’ percolates
all the way down to the morning paper.
George Jacoby says, “Hubble’s distance measurement cannot be questioned.”
<big bang, zero points, cepheids>
But if reduction reveals that all systems are chaotic,
that future behavior depends on the accuracy of the systems initial state,
Whether “dynamically evolving systems,
Or mathematical simulations of such physical systems,
Or just mathematical models studied for their own sake.”
The data confirms the latter,
Hubble raked the ‘Universe’
and found little dark matter.
What is theory’s historicity?
How does a mountain become a crushing anomaly?
Penrose says, “Consciousness [is]
A genuine scientifically describable phenomena.”
Retrieved in the shadow [epistemology (of the metaphysics of law)]:
the quantum superposition lopped off by a state vector reduction,
“conflat[ing] reality with lawfulness,”
Which to Feyerabend “means
Defining it in an arbitrary manner.”
the epistemic bias toward respiring the artificial intelligence machine.
An endless assembly line of ‘mechanical men’
with Moravec talking life into them.
Language precisely Feyerabend’s “shadow”, and what Mach “means
[by] statements that imply ahistorical regularities [being] idealizations...
‘Instruments’, not descriptions of reality.”
“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, Einstein
They are not certain,
and as far as they are certain,
They do not refer to reality.”
Immutability stamped from historical projection.
“The one-sidedness
Of the scientific idealisation
Of experience.”
The object hanged and klieged from above,
angstroms injected into every involvement.
But as the light moves, the object moves,
“...the magnitude met with only in the apprehension.” Kant
one movement indistinguishable from the next,
“...appearance as unity is a quantum.” ibid
the headlights and the fog lights
of differential equations... toward an archetypal klieg;
both bang and bust.
Simultaneously true and false.
“All purely mathematical theories are of the sort [a system Anatol Rapoport
Of theorems built up
From a set of postulates]
And, as such are practically
Immune from criticism.”
The insubstantiality and moral transparency of numbers;
To transcend the word, all flesh and bone.
...”this sudden appearance of words...
Would require a justification...but none is
Or could be given....since the procedure
[in Principia Mathematica] is illicit.”
In the beginning was a singularity,
An antiseptic contagion of forces purging words.
“The main task of the logician Frege
Consists in the liberation from language.”
Yet language, that fossil of evolution, persists everywhere,
Though our science insists that everything must be reduced
To its particle if there is to be universal joy and suffrage on earth.
However, the conquest of the stars has become a necessary insurance policy
In case the great discrete trajectories of our myriad technologies,
Chew up the gears of the atmosphere,
Or fail to synchronize in the statistically ordained moments of our historical destiny.
Validation in abandonment?
Will the Second Coming play to an empty house?
Waste Management Corporation
has proposed
a garbage belt in space;
a zone like the rings of Saturn
where discarded, the world’s waste
moons for its feckless source
and moved by the majesty,
the gravity of this
Orbiting dump
people strap on infrared scopes,
Observe consumption’s virtual reality
Coursing above the upper atmosphere
An aurora
of phlegms,
rheums and bile,
A flying sewer.
And like their ancestors
Who read
Their tabloid
In the stars
people scan the refuse
For the serial # of that high resolution T.V.,
Police scanner,
or engine block;
By bloodstain,
Cigarette burn,
bite mark;
Reconnect with that bed sheet,
Pizza crust,
or scrap of rug;
Or gawk at titanic strokes of fecal matter,
Fields of shattered glass;
galaxies of tumbling hard drives, main frames, and modems
Or the heavens mulched
With rotting books;
worn tires
Wobbling on the rim of
Angular momentum;
an apple haunting its core
Hurtling in this desertified museum
At Mach 4.
Bundled strata of newsprint
With HEADLINES
Beaming back
the misanthropy
Of nationalist movements led
By poor brown and black,
their lapsarian descent
Upon nationalizing a bank
Or chemical plant,
in the minds of readers
Devolving to oxen
Whose dung
pauses in the field;
No match for advertizer’s droppings
Gobbled up
by managing editors,
Their collective intelligence
The revolution
of buccality;
Offspring of Fortune’s fuck,
Their “altruism”
the turd of exploitation;
Immune as numbers;
Their canon
The feculence of demagogues
hurtling in a belt of
Berettas,
Armalites,
& Galils;
Makarovs,
Mausers,
& M-40s;
Dragons,
Cobras,
& Bofor Bantams;
Sams,
Patriots,
Grails,
& Blowpipes,
Hurtling in a synod
Of spent ordnance,
land mines,
Severed limbs,
Cosmic aerosols of bone and blood
an ammo belt in a frozen grin;
A strip of knuckles,
A finger dangling from
the firing pin.
A mass grave spun into space;
Eliot’s Thames bridge
suspended between night’s pylons
Pound’s kinema
Of “broken statues”
and “battered books”,
Reduced to a celestial drive-in
Of histrionic carnage.
Olson’s tansy,
Crane’s bridge
Eructed into heaven.
And Ginsberg chants his Plutonium Ode
From the shoulder
of Whitman’s positivist road.
And a banner
Unfurled in the attic
Of earth’s upper atmosphere,
“Science Discovers–
Technology Makes–
Man Conforms”,
the prophetic shibboleth of the 1933
Chicago World’s Fair.
And beneath a white tipped sleet of girders
Twenty miles up
Studded with sheet rock,
styrofoam,
Broken glass,
Aluminum cans,
eviscerated rats,
Beneath the blizzard of disposable diapers,
Coronas of surgical waste,
halos of PCBs
Print-outs of subversives,
Aerosol cans,
fiberglass insulation,
And meteor showers of alkaline batteries;
Beneath it all,
and for the delight of all to see,
forming the inner ring,
Spent fuel rods
Bundled like yarrow sticks
hurled by fortune
Into the upper atmosphere,
Uroboros gulping its tail
this nimbus, this closure;
The way that is
Advertised as the way
is too narrow
For the engorged snake;
Chokes too soon
on the money bone
for von Neumann probes
To evangelize the stars;
too soon for the tabloid exposee,
BEHIND BARS—
ON MARS!!!
M.I.T. graduates another 600 engineers,
while below this nascent mortuary,
Below this buccalic ballet,
Below where intention
and history have drifted
to the antipodes;
precipitate poles, slag
washed from the mathematization of the goal;
Below on its gravitational spit
the orbits of
fissionable material
Decay.
Once through the Pillar of Hercules
the ship began to behave like a wave,
A scythe
of light,
A tsunami for the
end of the world.
Boiled over the globe
Crashed against
A series of breaks,
At Ypres,
Vienna,
Copenhagen,
Nordhausen,
Hiroshima,
Bhopal,
writhing in its Baconian trousers,
Seat split;
How would you expect
suspenders to hang on a snake?
the enlightenment like
an eel in a sump
Moistened by “interpretations” that are
“Instrumental in constituting the field”,
the rite of access
By which the whole is lost,
and the cost per unit
carries the surcharge of
everything else;
a tax levied by the accidental
that will not be modelled.
Not by the bait and switch
Of gate and switch;
not by Chaos in a teapot;
Not by nonlinearity’s dissipating party favors;
Not by the Fuzzy Set:
not by gene material spliced into a three-piece suit.
Dawn is Uroboros shunting its skin;
Waves are the filigree of Uroboros breathing.
Ships behave the waves.
Uroboros is closed and not closed;
Eyes are in and out of being.
Techne was to fire closure.
When the kid drinks, to catch the water,
He scatters his reflection.
When he washes, he clots his eyes.
He cracks the water
Into the commutative and the noncommutative;
telos to cross and cross,
To stitch back the seas,
so that the non-commutative sounds cryptic
And the eye’s shrapnel is inoperable.
Hey, Preach’! The scientist has beat your end time.
|
"Crimes of Passion"
"Work in Regress"
"Onionrings: Adding machines_Crisco"
"Collateral Damage, or The Death of Classics in America"
"How Dead Industrialists Dance, or Swing Time"
"Tale of the Tribe"
The poet's comments on his growing poem:
"Is Everyday Language Sufficient to Embody Everyday Experience?"