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So:
the wise men speak, of the nations assembled.
The chimpanzees rattle at their cages – Dooms are spoken: not by
those who pray in the Heartland, not by stout Hearts who speak their prayer,
but Men of the Numbered Knowledge: the Language that Man invented: his
false speaking Robot.
Heathens!
And they speak! Do they dare to Speak the Doom that only we, the Elect,
the Elect to know the Book, the Elect to Tell – do they dare? It
is Our Task to Speak the Doom!
They say they know these things.
The skies will heat.
The seas will rise.
If –
If we –
If we don’t –
Oh don’t, oh don’t. For the seas will come and cleanse the
Earth of Sin! We, we Godly in the Heartland of God’s Chosen Nation,
will be spared the seas’ o’erlapping – and our windswept
November plains soon, oh soon, to become a New Eden.
• • •
If –
If we –
If we don’t –
We are weak. Oh, look in the forest witch’s mirror, see the Doom
that will come to pass, if the courage of Men fail. Oh, we are weak! What
of this paragon of animals, now – more than ever! – infinite
of faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in apprehension
– truly! – how like a god!
Has this rough beast, this quintessence of dust, lost his noble reason?
Is Hamlet’s mind o’erthrown?
Our hands, capable of grasping – our neurons, capable of seizing
– ten millennia of accumulated civilization. We fly, we dive, we
float, we escape, we transcend. We make the arch, the temple, the palace,
the cathedral, the David, the David, the David, the engine, the rocket,
the microchip, the internet. And the Lord helps those that help themselves.
• • •
Were I a Man of God, I should say: the one-past Christmas
Day Tsunami, and Katrina, were Divine Portents of God’s Wrath. And
lo, for this is a Christian nation: ‘tis Not a Smiting of the Muslim
in his most populous lands, nor a Cruel Baptism for a Lustful City: but
a foretaste of God’s Wrath for his Most Blessed Nation’s wallowing
in the Deadly Sins of Greed and Sloth.
But I am not a Man of God.
Haven’t done the paperwork. Not a licensed practitioner.
Were I a pagan, a Blakean, I would say that Poseidon, Gaia, Enitharmon
is enraged. Enraged by Minos’s love of holy strength, enraged by
Urizen’s enslavement of Los. But I am no pagan, I am no Blakean.
I’m just the guy that reads the paper.
There are a lot of silly things in the paper. Like John
Tierney’s science and society blog in the New York Times,
which blithely weighs the pros and cons of the Arctic melt like a gallows
humorist. As if the Arctic’s temperature rise is an isolated phenomenon.
John Tierney is not a serious man. But John Tierney gets paid to write
for the New York Times. Therefore you should listen to him.
I used to read a lot of poetry, too. Back before I had to work. One time
I read
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. –Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn.
- William Wordsworth
The world is too much with us.
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn.
Glimpses that would make me less forlorn.
Forlorn!
the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
For I have heard old Triton, ancient Aquaman, blow his wreathéd
horn. It is a call to arms in the embouchure.
If the waters come, they will come through South Florida and Louisiana
and New York, London and Venice and Bangladesh, onwards, the multitudes
hemorrhaging outward from the lowlands: the richest real estate on Earth,
and the poorest. New York, and the swamp of Washington?abandoned, the
buried garbage and the grease of the subway and the acid of batteries
leeching into the fetid waters where the fish eat and die.
Monday, February 5, 2007—Boats
ferried supplies to desperate residents of Indonesia’s flood-stricken
capital on Sunday as rivers burst their banks following days of rain.
At least 25 people have been killed and almost 340,000 forced from their
homes, officials said.
Storm waters that inundated scores of residential areas and shopping
districts late last week were still almost 10 feet deep in places on
Monday, according to witnesses and Anwar Arifin, an official with Jakarta’s
flood information center.
“As of today, 75 percent of Jakarta remains flooded,” Arifin
said. The death toll from flooding in the capital had reached 25 on
Monday, he added, most by drowning or electrocution.
Jakarta’s heavily criticized governor said he could not be held
responsible for the worst floods to hit the city of 12 million in living
memory, saying they were a natural phenomenon.
William Carlos Williams, in Paterson:
Listen! --
The pouring water!
The dogs and trees
conspire to invent
a world—gone!
Bow, wow! A departing car scatters gravel as it
picks up speed!
Outworn! Le pauvre petit ministre
did his best, they cry,
but though he sweat for all his worth
no poet has come .
Bow, wow! Bow, wow!
………………... No
poet has come, no poet has come.
Listen!
Beautiful thing
--the whole city doomed! And
the flames towering .
Listen!
float wrack, float words, snaring the
Seeds .
I warn you, the sea is not our home.
the sea is not our home
The sea is not our home .
--though seeds float in with the scum
and wrack . among brown fronds
and limp starfish .
Listen!
The sea is not our home .
. . not our home! It is NOT
our home.
They would drive us into
the sea!
They would drive the sea into us.
The sea is not our home.
[B]
DAVID SCHNEIDER |
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