The Breaking Time

Poems for Friday: Dirge Without Music

It's been a tragic two days. Once again we're reminded —twice— of the sheer damage one insane person can do. I'll say more on that later. But for now, this sums it up better than anything I can write.

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
e one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.

The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,

They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
s the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

Getting old

I saw Leonard Cohen in concert last night. It was everything I'd hoped for. He was by turns humble, powerful and devastatingly good. He performed an incredible array of songs, including easily the best renditions of "Everybody Knows" and "Who By Fire" that I've ever heard. Songs he had sang in his tenor days were adjusted perfectly to a harsher, older bass. After over three hours of nearly straight performance, he bounded off the stage. Leonard Cohen is seventy five years old. 

"Here," I thought, as I yelled and applauded along with the entire auditorium. "Here is a command lesson in aging well."

By all rights, Cohen should not be doing this. Seventy five years is a perfectly reasonable time to retire, according to the conventional wisdom (though, to be fair, Cohen tried). Age, at least with the way most industrialized societies figure it, takes place accordingly a set schedule. You have a rebellious, marketable adolescence followed by a productive adulthood, a retirement and then, as you age, a push to a nursing home or assisted living facility. This idea of old age is intimately tied to notions of productive efficiency: after your prime years, you are shunted off to the side. The End.

Or is it?

Poem for Halloween: Goblin Market

Please, if someone can find the artist on this, let me know

Yes, Halloween is a time for poetry (among many other wonderful things). Yesterday, I posted Edgar Allan Poe's classic The Raven with that in mind. But it's far from the only piece to perfectly capture the dire, otherworldly tone so essential to this day.

If Poe is all looming dread, Christina Rossetti's 1862 poem Goblin Market is simmering, immersive temptation, tied in with the perfect moment when one realizes that a story isn't playing by human rules.

It's a long piece by modern standards, and worth every lush word. Enjoy, and Happy Halloween.

MORNING and evening

Maids heard the goblins cry:

"Come buy our orchard fruits,

Come buy, come buy:

Apples and quinces,

Lemons and oranges,

Plump unpeck'd cherries,

Melons and raspberries,

Bloom-down-cheek'd peaches,

Swart-headed mulberries,

Wild free-born cranberries,

Crab-apples, dewberries,

Pine-apples, blackberries,

Apricots, strawberries; -

All ripe together

In summer weather, -

Morns that pass by,

Fair eves that fly;

Come buy, come buy:

Our grapes fresh from the vine,

Pomegranates full and fine,

Dates and sharp bullaces,

Rare pears and greengages,

Damsons and bilberries,

Taste them and try:

Currants and gooseberries,

Bright-fire-like barberries,

Figs to fill your mouth,

Citrons from the South,

Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;

Come buy, come buy."

Poems for Friday: The Raven

Gustav Dore's 1994 frontispiece for Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven"

Yes, Halloween approaches. Throughout the week, I've been thinking about the perfect poem for this Friday. What could possibly some up that feeling of otherworldly allure and horror that is the essence of the day? 

In the end, I couldn't find a single champion. Poets seem to be driven to try and capture that bone-rasp of a primal, fearful world that remains embedded in our souls. So you, dear readers, are getting a treat: one poem today and another tomorrow.

Halloween and poetry will always be closely tied together in my mind. As a child, my father sat my sister and I down on Halloween night and carefully extinguished all lights, save for a few candles. I never discovered how he always managed to time this annual ritual for the exact moment a storm began to howl, just off in the distance.

Carefully, he would go to the old bookshelf in the hall and select a single volume from the ancient row of Harvard Classics. His hands —large, calloused, extremely strong— would gracefully flip through the slightly yellowed pages. He would relax back in his chair and smile just so when he came to the words. Then, he began:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

`'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -

Only this, and nothing more.'

The Breaking Time's political primers

In a second, I'll get to why I'm putting up a political blogroll in this post.

But first, I'd like to take a moment to answer a question I've received more than once:

Yes, I'm a politics junkie. No, I don't expect you to be. Nor should you have to be to understand or play a role in making The Future (or whatever the hell we're calling it this week).

But you should pay attention to politics. Few things in life seem more boring and meaningless to your everyday existence until they emerge out of the shadows and really, truly, fuck you over. Or until you realize how nasty things would be if some long-dead manipulative bastards and idealists hadn't managed to actually wring something good out of the process once in awhile.

I'm also not talking about politics at the theoretical level: that's important, but plenty of futurists and intellectuals try to unravel it. I'm talking about politics at the "I fucked you proper to get my bill through" level; you know, the one that matters most and the one that often gets the shortest shrift.

Yes, it is messy. Extremely so. Is it a circus? Three-ring. A cesspit? Sure, but show me an era of civility and pure, rational decision-making in politics, and I'll show you a myth.

Politics is the method by which massive groups of a social species work out who wields power, over what and how they do it. Of course it's extremely ugly. The fact that it doesn't descend into bloodbath, everywhere, on an everyday basis is a miracle.

People on all sides love the idea of an engaged citizenry; it's refreshing to think that if only we and our friends could truly get into the political process, it would change things.

The dirty secret is that many parts of the political process are more open to scrutiny now than at few times before (though they could, and should, be far more open still) but that most people don't care. Love of an engaged citizenry usually dies in the fifth hour of a city council meeting. Reveal to said budding activist that they will have to sit through at least six more such sessions before they can get a damn thing done and odds are they will run screaming from the room. I can't blame them.

The good news is that our online age does make it more possible than ever to quickly take in much of the basic gist of what's going on, at the national, regional or local level. 

Below is how I get a lot of my information and viewpoints about the lurid struggles that shape our world. Below are writers who manage the difficult task of keeping it readable, succinct and even funny. For those of you who may not share my enthusiasm, but still want to follow the struggles shaping your lives, this is a good place to start. 

I've tried to include those from most ideological stripes (labeled for your convenience), as well as those who simply do damn good analysis. Feel free to suggest others. I don't claim for this list to be complete. It doesn't include those who write about politics rarely or at the grand level, even if they do so brilliantly. I've intentionally tried to limit this to those who eat, sleep and breathe the stuff. 

So, without further ado.

Curious search: Utopia

It means "nowhere," you know.

Flier from Utopia rave, 1991

A still from Cao Fei's Whose Utopia?

Kris Kuksi's Imminent Utopia

Advertisement for Gilbert & Sullivan's Utopia, Limited, 1893

Zappa, of course, needs no introduction.

The Granddaddy of them all, Thomas More's Utopia, 1516

Poems for Friday Saturday: Evil

Yes, this post should have gone up on Friday. Yes, it is now Saturday. I've been extremely busy (even more than usual) with work lately, so I'll have to apologize to all of you for the haphazard posting lately.

Here's Rimbaud, brilliant decadent that he was, seeing the evil of church and king weighing down upon the world. I'm fond of this poem, and it hits hard. 

But it's interesting that Rimbaud notes that "nature" meant the slain to smile. Nature's a bitch of an interesting concept, being a human category for "big shit that takes place outside our control but which we can fuck up when we feel like it." 

Especially in the 19th century, it often took the traditional spot of God in the secular mind. Hence you'd hear: nature wants this, natural laws indicate that, to do so would be unnatural. People love to invoke something larger and vaguer than themselves to settle tricky, insoluble arguments, whatever their creed. Next time you hear someone chatter off that "the laws of the market suggest" or "this group of people will naturally..." keep that in mind.

Of course, one can certainly make the argument that machine guns, mass slaughter and greedy religious institutions are just as natural as rural serenity. But whether as god or devil, we seem to like to see nature as something apart from ourselves.

Without further rambling, the poem:

While the red-stained mouths of machine guns ring

Across the infinite expanse of day; 

While red or green, before their posturing King, 

The massed battalions break and melt away; 

And while a monstrous frenzy runs a course

That makes of a thousand men a smoking pile- 

Poor fools! - dead, in summer, in the grass, 

On Nature's breast, who meant these men to smile; 

There is a God, who smiles upon us through

The gleam of gold, the incense-laden air, 

Who drowses in a cloud of murmured prayer, 

And only wakes when weeping mothers bow

Themselves in anguish, wrapped in old black shawls- 

And their last small coin into his coffer falls. 

The Rundown: First amendment threats, robot killers, and burning bunnies (for fuel)

* FBI arrests man for reporting on police movements at G20 summit Elliot Madison was arrested for reporting on police movement and helping protesters coordinate their actions at the G20 summit. You need to pay attention this, ASAP. Madison was relaying the publicly observed and reported actions of police. If that's illegal, then every journalist in this country, myself included, should be in jail. He also helped to coordinate protesters nonviolently voicing their grievances with political and economic leaders. 

Both of those activities are absolutely essential to a free society, regardless of what political viewpoint is using them. Madison's arrest is in clear violation of the First Amendment to our Constitution and to any meaningful idea of free speech. 

(Thanks to The Grumpy Owl for the links)

* We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassins patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future.

* CIA invests in social media monitoring firm An agency with a spotty (to put it charitably) history of respecting civil liberties and legal limits invests in a surveillance program to keep an eye on new media. Yeah, that's going to turn out well.

* Bodies of thousands of bunnies used to power Swedish heating plant Yes, you read that right. No, I'm not making this up. The Swedes have to cull thousands of rabbits to prevent overpopulation. So they figured they might as well use the damn things for fuel.

Of course, this does open up the most cinematically villainous power source ever: burning cute, fluffy animals as fuel. The mind boggles.

* A catalog of willful human ignorance Photographs of the contents of the stomachs of albatross chicks. In a wildlife sanctuary. Wrenching stuff.

---

And there you have it, ladies and gents. What this points to is clear. Just after tomorrow, a spaceship filled with plucky adventurers will land on our planet's surface. They will see our species, residing in mobile hell-fortresses circled by tireless killer robot drones and rings of dead birds, their stomachs stuffed with plastic. After a suspenseful quest, they will find the bowels of these machines powered by a constant stream of cute, innocent-looking animals; with the occasional dissident tossed into the furnace for good measure.

Such a monstrous race of tyrants, they will conclude, must be stopped. 

Dark Ocean, Black Dragons, and the League of Blood

League of Blood members awaiting trial for the assassination of two Japanese business leaders, 1932

The title of this post sounds like that of a bad fantasy or pulp novel. It's not. The Dark Ocean Society, the Black Dragon Society and, yes, the League of Blood were all quite real. They were secret societies formed by Japanese nationalists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Well-connected (and often backed by) the Japanese secret service, they hounded out information, spread propaganda, raised guerilla armies and assassinated perceived foes foreign and domestic, all in the name of building their country into a world power.

Naturally, this gives Japan the undisputed win in awesome, ominous secret society names. Granted, there were a number of other secret societies (e.g. the Mountain of Sweat and Cherry Blossom societies) that didn't sound nearly as impressive, but those seem to have had a lesser impact. As any supervillain can tell you, terrifying name equals effectiveness. Really. Nor did Japanese intelligence stop there, they actually had a branch named (roughly) the Thought Police.

Of course, we can chuckle now at the seeming romantic old-school skullduggery of these groups. But they were, in their time, dangerous and disturbingly effective. 

Unlike many intelligence agencies at the time, which were tightly controlled by their central governments, the Kempeitai chose to use these secret societies, to use a modern term, as a platform. The government maintained just enough control to coordinate strategy and gather information, but trusted the zealously motivated groups to mostly act on their own. This saved them considerable resources and also made their operations very difficult to infiltrate; even if a rival spy network got someone inside, they'd have no idea what most of the secret societies were up to.

How well did it work? Well Japan quickly went from feudal backwater to industrial power, devastated Russia's military, controlled a large piece of China for about 50 years and pulled off a brutal surprise attack against the U.S.

Of course, the strategy also backfired, as the later generations of the secret societies proved so fanatical that they turned back in on the government itself. The 1930s in Japan were marked by a series of "incidents," with secret society-backed assassinations of officials and attempted coup d'etats by the bucket-load. That same fanaticism also blinded much later Japanese intelligence work, playing a major role in the country's WWII defeat.

Nonetheless, the oft-neglected role of these would-be pulp villains is a reminder that secret societies throughout history are more than just the fixations of the paranoid or an attempt to add grandeur to mundane activities. 

The Sons of Liberty were a secret society at one time, as were the Viet Minh and the Bolsheviks. Conspiracy theories aside, Freemason lodges did play an important role in tearing down the remnants of the feudal order. The list goes on, from ancient history up to the present day. 

Humans are social animals. On top of that, we love ritual and knowing things that others do not. The only thing separating an alternative culture from a secret society is more publicity and less drive. 

Both spring up at a feverish pace during Breaking Times, as people try to figure out something that will work where the status quo fails. We can laugh at the pomposity all we want, but in true pulp fashion, we haven't heard the last of them.

Hilarity for Friday: The Golden Age of Ballooning

Sorry, readers, but there won't be any poem today due to the work load I'm grappling with. However, as balloons have been in the news lately, and Monty Python just celebrated their 40th anniversary, I figure it's an appropriate time to bring back this classic piece of hilarity. Enjoy.