Stuff From July & August 2018

        The Last Morning In June 

I was looking for a book

like the one I’d just finished,

but they (whoever they were)

had rearranged things,

and all I could find

was a large, flat, white book;

I had no idea what it was,

so I was late for the buffet

and all the plates were gone;

the people just ahead of me took the last ones,

and the woman in the white server’s outfit

handed me some

porous cardboard paper plates,

but they wouldn’t do,

so she took them away

and I went to the drain

to wash a just-returned dirty dish,

but I was having trouble

getting some baked-on

cheese and pasta sauce from it,

and I figured that

all the food would be gone from the buffet

by the time I got to it,

so I said, ‘Fuck this dream. I’m getting up.’

And I did.

I opened my eyes,

had a good, long stretch,

climbed to my feet,

turned on the light,

donned my dressing gown,

and headed for the loo and the shower.

Everything was where it should be.

                  Cheesy Politics  

Not being an ideologically motivated vegan,

I sometimes buy a brand of sliced cheese called Yolo.

Havarti, Gouda, Emmental, Mozzarella.

It usually costs a bit less than Dairy Works.

This does present me with a values dilemma, though,

since Yolo is imported from Germany.

All those food kilometres!

Burning all those hydrocarbons

just to bring it to my local Pak’n Save.

I googled German dairying, though,

and learnt that since 2015

Germany has had the most stringent

animal welfare regulations

in the world,

and from what I can tell,

the New Zealand dairy industry

(it has become an industry, Wal)

seems to base its livestock-welfare practices

on the principle of sadism.

I can’t win on this one.

  

         Let Me Put You Wise: 

Children have enormous wisdom,

but puberty strips it away from most of us,

then after we acclimatise ourselves

to our urge-to-reproduce hormones

wisdom can start to return,

bit by bit,

in fits and starts,

for those of us

who let it

and don’t close it off,

until (if we don’t die)

in old age we approach

having the wisdom

that should have been obvious all along

when it’s already too late

to make effective use of it,

but part of that wisdom

is to know that this doesn’t matter.

(El diablo sabe más porque es viejo que porque es el diablo.)

      White People and Toilet Paper

I remember when I was seven or eight

reading a story about how a girl in western Virginia,

or some such Appalachian place,

when it was what they called the frontier,

had been captured in a raid by irate locals,

or Indians as they were then called,

whose land her people had stolen

and who had, in return,

munted all the rest of the colonising invaders

in the settlement where she’d been living.

The story then jumped ahead a few years

to when some colonising frontiersmen

had found her, thoroughly acculturated

and integrated with her adoptive people,

married and a mother,

and it told how she refused to be liberated

and returned to white civilisation in Virginia.

In my child’s mind I wondered,

knowing that Indians were savages

who lived in camps in the forest –

what the book called the wilderness –

without streets or other civilised amenities,

I wondered how she had been able to live

without toilet paper,

the idea that white people

didn’t have toilet paper

back in the seventeenth century

didn’t occur to my little head.

       A Reflection On Extinction 

I really shouldn’t watch video clips

that show me what’s going on in the world,

with real people and everything.

It makes me feel shame for being a human,

for being another member of their species,

due to the evil and cruelty, yes,

but even more,

I think,

due to the stupid.

                 Blowing Bubbles  

Y’know, when I was much younger,

university undergraduate age, and thereabouts,

I thought it was a worthy goal

to be able to mix, and fit in comfortably,

with any kind of social company,

upper class, middle class, or desperately poor,

bosses or workers,

urban, suburban, or rural,

ancestry from any continent or country

or ethnicity or mixture thereof,

educated or just-went-to-school,

artistically aware or just plain square.

I thought that this would give me

a richer life experience

and awareness of a more diverse range of perspectives,

than just, as people say in 2018,

staying inside my bubble,

so I tried to give it a go.

A half-century or so later

I have a somewhat different viewpoint.

A lifetime of experience

and the tardy, gradual growing of my self-awareness

have convinced me that

I’m unable to feel at ease mixing socially

with any kind of company at all.

I don’t even have a bubble.

       Snake Oil, Anyone?  

She dismissed all of science

with a dismissive sneer

as ‘male and Western’ –

being, as she was,

in the business of selling

unscientific therapies and remedies.

I wonder about the respect

that her blanket dismissal showed

to the more than one and a half million

Chinese woman scientists.

               Snapshot Us  

Our long and stumbling

series of tiny incremental changes

from being animals of the forests and fields

to palaeolithic hunters and gatherers

to the multifaceted, glittery, destructive,

cruelty-based mess that we have today

has been painfully uneven;

we’re now gathering the harvest

of our evolutionary mismatch

between intelligence and egotism:

We have the brains to construct

fabulous civilisations

and the vestigial sort of

primordial atavistic survival instincts

to destroy each other en masse.

We’re able to look at the stars and wonder,

but our brains have also evolved to focus

on our personal lives and self-absorption,

and most find it awkwardly difficult

to acknowledge our insignificance

in a universe of a size we’re unable to imagine,

let alone picture,

so over the millennia we’ve tried

to explain it all on a human scale,

preferring to create explanations

that put us in the centre

to just enjoying the wonder,

even though with a bit of uncowardly thought

it’s obvious that we’re not.

        Power & Culture 

We are supreme on this planet!

We don’t eat what we kill!

We don’t kill what we eat!

We’re victorious and glorious;

warriors deserving of dominion

over all life forever!

Aren’t we?

        European Spiritual Art 

She told me that when she was in Italy

one thing that struck her was

that there seemed to be

an architecturally significant church

on almost every city block,

and that some local Italians

approached her,

in her traditional long, Navajo plush dress,

full turquoise adornment,

and striking Navajo features

and asked her for spiritual advice.

She told me that she wondered

what all those churches are for

if they’d approach her with this;

“And I’m a fucking lawyer,” she added.

When I see images

of mediaeval or renaissance paintings

of saints and such

that purport to be spiritual,

what I usually see is depictions of people

whose faces seem to indicate

that they’re having digestive difficulties.

Maybe it’s those expensively gilded

circular things around their heads.

          The Wisdom of the Ancients  

I scoffed at his complicated woo-woo folderol,

and he said, ‘Who are you to question

the Wisdom of the Ancients?’

and I couldn’t help but snicker:

The Wisdom of the Ancients?

What about the stupidity of the Ancients?

Or the mediocrity of the Ancients?

Or the piss-taking of the Ancients?

Or the guesswork-and-bluffing of the Ancients?

The Ancients were, you know, people just like us,

and capable of the same bullshit as we are,

only the ones with wisdom

had less knowledge to work with

than wise people have now,

since wise people are also curious people,

and have always passed on new stuff that they’ve learnt

to the next generation of wise people,

while the stupid people,

being too stupid to know that they’re stupid,

and unable to distinguish wisdom from dog vomit,

just keep repeating the same old ancient shit.

             Elitism   

It seems to me that,

in recent years at least,

the word ‘elitism’

has increasingly become

a pejorative that people

with more or less

average mental ability

use to pass disparaging judgement

on people who are

significantly smarter than they are,

but who lack the good taste

to pretend that they’re not.

More Spiritual Stuff

          Context

It strikes me

that my conceptions

in regard to spiritual reality

would be totally irrelevant

if I were a politician

or an insulation installer,

but are at the nitty-gritty

of my bizarre pretensions

to be a superannuated

creator of verbal art.

                   Just Is, That’s All

Considering the enormity of the universe

and the absurdity of my unlikely and insignificant presence in it,

the experience of overwhelming pleasure

on the skin of my face and forearms

due to the late-summer-afternoon high-overcast sky

combining with a gentle breeze that ruffled my pelt

as we made our circuit of Claudelands Park

completely stunned me,

as if that mattered.

                   Funerals

I don’t do funerals.

I think they’re barbaric,

rites of some cult of the cadaver.

Once the life, the spirit, the energy,

the self

has left the body,

whatever’s left has no sanctity for me at all.

Sure, people like to remember love,

and dispose of corpses

in some sanitary and dignified way,

but the fervid need

to put the remains on an alter,

and sometimes visually drinking in its lifeless contours

before disposing of it

doesn’t suit my values at all.

It seems to me like worshipping an empty whisky bottle.

I can remember attending only three funerals:

My daddy’s, when I was nine,

was an open-casket affair.

It confused me deeply

and provoked troubled dreams for a long time afterward.

At my grandfather’s they at least kept the coffin closed,

but all the Hebrew chanting meant nothing to me.

The last one was for a neighbour at my mother’s condominium

one time when I was visiting her in Florida.

The casket was closed and they kept it short.

Lonely old people must die there often.

Then all the remaining oldies

retreated to another neighbour’s place for drinks.

I approved of that part.

                             My Will

I’ve always disliked the cult of the cadaver.

It seems to me that once the life energy leaves a body

that body ceases to be the person –

or dog or cat or cockatoo –

who used to inhabit it

and becomes a thing to be utilised if possible and then disposed of.

Funerals also leave me cold for many reasons,

not the least of which is the voluminous amounts of bullshit

that always seems to accompany them.

Since I have both property and progeny

I also have a will.

What’s important to me about the will –

I mean, how complicated is it to split

whatever’s left 50-50 between my daughters? –

are my instructions for the post-mortem

arrangements.

I’m too old for most of my organs to be useful for transplant,

so I’ve bequeathed my body

to the University of Auckland School of Medicine

to use for instructional purposes.

This also removes the liability

for cremation costs from my estate.

In order to be true to my principles –

and also to save my daughters some money –

my will also stipulates, and I quote,

“I wish no funeral or other formal memorial service be held.”

This doesn’t prevent any of the people who knew me

from using my demise as an excuse

to get together and drink heaps of grog, though.

                          The Flu

The news bulletins seemed so strange to me.

I’d really like to get

H1N1, y’know?

– although not as much

as the plain old seasonal flu,

because swine flu’s symptoms

are milder.

I’ve always enjoyed

having the flu,

ever since I was little.

I like having a few days

to a week or so

of lying in bed

all day

without guilt or restlessness.

I like the luxuriously fatigued feeling in my muscles.

Most of all, however,

I love the fabulous fever dreams

of flying

or bouncing lightly

through a reality far removed from my own.

When I die I want it to be from the flu.

I want to float peacefully off to sleep,

shedding all discomfort and pain,

and whilst soaring through a dream

of spiritual reality,

escape and never come back to Earth.

             Humanists, My Arse

The Yale University Undergraduate

Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics Club

signed a letter opposing a guest lecture

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali,

a human-rights and women’s-rights activist

who gets up various Islamic organisations’ collective noses

to the extent that the many threats on her life,

and the murder of her former colleague,

have resulted in her needing constant bodyguard protection.

They said that the reason for this letter

was that they did not believe that she,

“represents the totality of the ex-Muslim experience.”

What horseshit! Nobody does. Nobody could.

She has a voice that educated people need to hear,

whether it offends them or not –

or in this case, most probably, threatens them.

I have little doubt that it was fear

of violent Islamic backlash

that intimidated this club

into this hypocrisy.

I watched a video of her speech,

and the subsequent Q&A session,

and I disagreed with a reasonable amount of what she said,

especially things emanating

from her blinkered admiration of the USA,

but she also made some intriguing points

about Islam’s relationship

with various types of Muslims

that I thought were more than worthy of discussion

by elite undergraduate

atheists, humanists, and agnostics,

including ex-Muslims.

        The Obvious

This moment,

although incorporating

and having been conditioned

by all that’s gone before,

is still all that is.

                        Wonder and Imagination

The Bible is indeed an impressive work of the imagination

of Bronze Age drylands pastoralists

as they sought to amaze their mates

with wondrous tales around the campfire.

The evidence is clear that

some species of dinosaurs

developed and flourished

for fifteen million years or more

before extinction,

and that our species,

which appeared more than ninety million years later,

has been around for only about a million years –

with new discoveries continually

bumping our knowledge of the time

of the first biologically modern humans around a bit.

The realities that science unfolds

reveal a world more wondrous

than those illiterate, long-ago herders

could have ever imagined,

and it’s the people who cling to those biblical campfire tales

as if they were unalterably true

who have little or no imagination,

being disgraces to their distant predecessors.

                             Obituary

Somebody – her name escapes me at the moment

– died yesterday.

She wasn’t exactly famous,

depending on what definition of famous is operative here,

but a bunch of people knew her,

and even more used to know her,

when she was younger.

She’d touched the lives of many;

not millions, but many.

Each of them is important, of course,

just as important as she was,

just as important as you,

just as important as the wife of a motorcycle mechanic

in the village of Troitskoye in Russian Siberia.

They’ve all touched the lives of others in some way,

often for the better, most of them,

just as you have,

but sometimes for the worse.

This interconnectedness of affect isn’t limitless, though,

and over generations,

and centuries,

and millennia,

and aeons

will become diluted to an almost homeopathic extent,

fading from immediate relative insignificance

to eventual undetectable oblivion.

Ripe plums, however, taste good.

Moment by Moment

Death, apparently,

doesn’t want me

for the moment,

no matter what I want,

but even so,

I stumble on

without it.