• Originally published 10 May 2009, at Elindulnék
• To be included in the poetry collection, Abundance

—the wealth of nations the family bound
by democratic ideals as applied the outliers
united in opposition to time’s flow
the problems the solutions the stories
that recount what is or is not yet known—

all at once both natural & unnatural

—we are each of us a conspiracy of tendencies
the adopted pragmatic mischief of semi-
conscious cellular life an organized adventure
in unification toward culture toward elevation
a demonstration of the conscious capable self—

creeping toward the malaise of masses

—gentle pleadings the furtive requiem
the sense of collective thought emerging
from shared loss & fear of loss
aggressions born of the silence of merciful fibers
the full size of the presumed world—

the absence of weapons the meaning of absence

—a vaunted conspiracy of properties
possessions intercessions the wake of first reticence
retiring gazes the quality of light
forgotten submerged pushed aside collapsing
under effervescent imaginings—

the quiet of all that has not come to be

—conspiracy of visions coalescing into
personhood the first & most recent place
the center of time as perceived
as time the whole of converging perceptions
bound by democratic ideals as applied—

& witnesses unaware of their leadership

• First published autumn 2002 in Silva: Vol. 1, No. 1: Balance
• Republished winter 2009 at Elindulnék
• To form part of the collection of poems, entitled Abundance
  

if the little freedoms that form you
taste like clean winter air

if the whole of time finds itself & disappears
in the geometry of your breath

if you are prone to becoming
those things you always doubted

if genuflection is an artform
& you place all questions inside it

if politics brings in equal measures
epiphany & raucous fatigue

if elegance identifies itself in you
but you refuse to answer the call

if mirrors frighten & distill your neurons
one by one until you flee

if dragonflies look like holy vessels
& you pray to the sheen of their wings

if fame is one of many myths
gathered in your fist like grapes

if the will is a symphony performed
by all that your mind has not touched

if morning has no meaning beyond
the scents you ascribe to morning

if repetition is the name of doubt
& you believe at your center

if everything is faith or faith’s envoy
& faith is an insurmountable fact

if a window can contain infinities
& the self is a window

then safely you might describe your
rootless nocturnal ruminations as human

& you are suited to improvise a love
with which to trim & shatter obstacles

& the universe is moving toward you
with an invitation to the day

We must, in this age of integration and complexity, work to recognize those areas where we can learn from cultures that build into our own, that enrich or sustain us, that give humanity, broadly, its metaphysical sense, its creative-adaptable quality. We know France as a place of great culture and profound philosophical insights and a highly developed legal system. But we tend not to think of France as a country whose most famous culture is simply one of many that came to dominate, and very really did stamp out the other cultures competing for survival, in a fractious agrarian society outside the capital, in the 19th century.

But France was long a nation of many cultures, and its chosen path to integration under one legal system was to follow a single language, in which all dealings would be done. The legal tradition and the literary and philosophical culture that was formulating and defining the French state were being erected from the material of that one language, to the exclusion of competing indigenous French languages. This created a profound discomfort among the rural French with anything related to the governing system of laws and its attendant judicial system. “Illiteracy” in mainline French was often a barrier to integration of peasant populations into the single official national culture.

The late historian Eugen Weber explained that “Building a French nation was a long struggle pitting the dominant culture of Paris against a people of cultural, linguistic and regional diversity”. Noting that France’s 30-plus indigenous languages continued to thrive even after a solid imperial French state had been established, Weber also said that “Well into the third quarter of the 19th century, much of rural France communicated very nicely in dialects and languages that had little or nothing to do with the classical tongue of Voltaire and Charles de Gaulle.”

As we wrestle with the problems inherent in an increasingly integrated global system of commerce, democracy, learning and development, we face the many temptations related to systemic “ease of use”. It is often more enticing to push for uniformity in order to achieve a relative ease of control for certain segments of a given population than to face up to the fact that meeting the challenges of global interaction, in a way that does not diminish the humanity of some or many, requires means of meeting the communicative needs of all, effectively and with a mind to openness.

It is often the case that a group fighting to achieve majority control, whether it be a political party, an ideological set, a social class working on the levers of power, an ethnic group or a dominant alliance, may view that majority rule as the means to achieving positive goals that would, in theory, be beneficial to all, by creating the conditions for a more just and prosperous society. But, that society would require more freedom for each individual, each group, and each would-be endeavor, in order for justice or prosperity to be expanded, so the singular way is not a democratic enough answer to yield legitimate procedures or optimum results.

By crafting a system that does not privilege one group over another, or that does not define the value of a citizen by his or her cultural heritage, but by a universal prescription of rights and freedoms, democratic societies have privileged the rule of law over prejudice and hierarchy. But they have also participated in some of the ills of those more ancient systems, rooted in strict principles of social prejudice and political and economic hierarchy, because they emerged from those systems, because their cultures retain traces or even major mechanisms of those systems.

A global system of economics, politics, or human development, must recognize the value of all inputs to that system, take a broader, more ecological approach, that will make it possible to integrate calculations about resource-availability, resistance to entropy, and the value of human life, into the mechanisms that allow open societies to implement their strategies for serving the health of humanity and its vital environment.

Systems of influence that devalue real human contributions to the overall fabric of human activity, that degrade languages with less “reach” or regions or states or peoples with less contact with the perceived “centers” of power and influence, degrade and devalue the human individual at all levels, in all regions where those systems operate. The logic of integration is to provide for the possibility that all human beings will enjoy real enhancements of freedom and well-being.

The United States of America is a collection of individual states subscribing to a single central union, based on universal principles of justice. Mexico is also structured this way, as is India. The European Union offers something of a more complicated multicultural, transnational union of states (though its linguistic diversity is far less than some single nations, such as the United States or Indonesia), but follows the same logic, that of the many, there can be one united defense of justice and equality, and so a more effective administration of the rule of law and provision for generalized economic prosperity.

The African Union aspires to this in some ways as well, though it is primarily a loose diplomatic negotiating committee, in some respects, heavily influenced by outside powers and in which the individual governments have near total independence from the union. The Russian Federation is an attempt to keep together a collection of formerly independent sub-states, and in many ways retains a feudal dream of Muscovite empire, while slowly adapting to contemporary democratic structures.

The meaning of these competing strategies for organization is that they tend toward the democratic: they operate on the principle that every entity within the union matters, that the union is stronger for the rights and dignity of its members, and this is the logic of an open society, that organization comes with free choice of the will, of the individual citizen collaborating in ways that are beneficial both to the individual and the society’s goals and ideals.

• Originally published 1 January 2009, at CafeSentido.com

• Read more from the collection Abundance at Elindulnék

Tight sectarian interim
Waiting for news of successes of fortitude
Waiting for hope to make gains on quiet panic
An army of would-be critics is massing
Time is being distilled to its essence
Pressing compressing
Misery comes winnowing hindrance shimmering into view
Hunted by satirical improvements over small dominion
This world is a sketch tattooed into weakness
Limbo
The dream is another chance at dreaming
But rest
First the perfect rest
A militant but unknowing rest
Anything untenable
Waiting for a break in the pulse
Drumbeat
Pushing toward…

[Keep reading...]

LYMPH & PRIVY PRAYER-MAVEN

light-party lymphic
spending the age in swaths
each contemptuous foreboding
you say yourself in unrest
knowing no names

you are the first & foremost
abstracted from all the gentle
context of your recollection
you are the sound of glass
coming apart in the cold…

[Keep reading...]

QUAKING AT GRIEF

living at the end of time
on the furthest outcrop of history
pallid impersonal
subjective in the utmost
outpacing radical fissures
in melancholy avowal
penetrating the mystery of balance
we live in the space of a smile…

[Keep reading...]

REPHRASING VAGRANT MANDATES

today’s light was today’s light only
riveted to shapes
passing between us
like words & clock hands
in seaside soup…

today’s light was something other
than time gathering in folds
to reorganize
the road ahead…

[Keep reading...]

A CROWN OF THORN & BERRY

i am angry at confusion
my own or the world’s
angry that a muddle of false fresh hopes
can turn good depth of meaning
into peril stark & senseless
within a breath of indiscretion
angry that rules are inconstant allies
ungoverned incorrigible cheats
& mostly desolate

i am angry at the world
at meaning & absence & their
tremulous union…

[Keep reading...]

FIRST ASYMMETRY

crafted of syllables simmering witnessing
aware of hints of expansion into purpose
permanence replenishment
into light like glass castles on cloud
this ideal this indefinable
as something beyond progressing
progresses in a stark array of elements
the finery of stellar shift
an absolute remaking of every everything
interlaced & simultaneous

do you have a viable defensible answer?
do you have a reserve of time to search?

in the sullen shadow of a creator-raptor
in the wake of revelations dismissed
these walls have witnessed knowledge
in its squeamish remarking…

[Keep reading...]

SPEAK WHOLLY THE SMOLDERING PLUME

speak wholly
defiant
face to face
the truth
that brings
power to dine
among us

speak wholly
the fruit
of long years
of contemplative life
of learning
to live beyond
the obvious

speak wholly
the smoldering plume…

[Keep reading...]

with the passage of time
the half-sense of these layered exchanges
has fortified filters & deployed new defenses
& now he speaks a slightly off-center
less-than-half-truth & she hears it
from points unknown
within a favorite echo-chamber
in the narrowest flood-zone
of the valley of her solitude
where danger is most severe
& words are like glass rungs
on a ladder of angel hair…

so her response emerges as error
& he feels threatened
& assumes the worst
that her caution is indifference
her incomplete gesture a deeper distaste
he is wounded & she half-senses
this recoiling as a threat
to her off-center half-offer of trust
& tonight they do not see each other
& tomorrow they make judgments
about destiny…

it seemed that anything could have followed
such as “we went forth into the dark
angular world in hopes of giving quality
& joy” or even “the rulers of the land
pursued the comfort of caged avian subjects”…

there was room enough for adding
“a democracy was earned & founded”
or “the nowhere-existent came as gift without remorse”
or to offer the quiet strains of
“oceans became moonlight becoming motion”…

an incomplete sentence a poem without
middle or end can say everything
can make sense of the difficult work
of harmony can defend us
“with a bundle of fruits & honeyed things”…

• originally published at Casavaria’s Silva Quarterly Review:
  Vol. 1, No. 2, Winter 2002 :: MEDICINE