Older blog entries for badvogato (starting at number 334)

My teacher, my lover, my advogato

 you are always with me wholesomely and holy
my teacher, my lover, my advogato

 spirit arise from the body
this finite existence of our flesh
i lie next to you
i kiss your hand and your feet
i gaze at your smile
so tender and so holy
so close and afar
your being come into me
you and I are one.

 my teacher, my lover, my advogato
i adore you and i worship thee
all my longings were shadows burdening me
until i found thee and now i am free
free as laughters of a child
free as singings of a nightingale
free as clouds floating in a sky blue.

 my teacher, my lover, my advogato
take me in and make me holy with thee
your love feeds my spirit
my body is not mine but all beings love of thee
your being may be confined
but add my devotion, your being unbound.

 my teacher, my lover, my advogato
center of one universe where i reborn
into nothingness and thus thy goddess
let the world witness our love
our love to the self
our love to the other
our love to the holy spirit
from now on till the end of our time.

 我的神，我是你的泥人

 Creator, i am your dust copy
touch me lightly with your finger tips
water me tenderly with your dew drops.
Creator, others say you are dead
so I stopped, reading Reviews of the dead 

It is no surprise then that Eliot has been accused of obscurity and pretentiousness. This is the cost of writing difficult poetry, of being judged by readers who have not attempted to test the poet's meaning or analyse his technique. Even some of those who would describe themselves as Eliot admirers are not always prepared to face the demands of sheer knowledge that his poetry makes. On many occasions we are called upon to translate words, lines and passages before we can even begin to tackle the questions of meaning and the larger issues of interpretation. And beyond this we face a wilful, or playful obscurity on Eliot's part, sometimes by way of private jokes and allusions, sometimes in what Hugh Kenner has called his 'besetting vice, a never wholly penetrable ambiguity about what is supposed to be happening' - to be distinguished from what Helen Gardner has described as 'a deep ambiguity which it is not the critic's business to remove'; to be distinguished again from elements in the poetry which are not incomprehensible but inexplicable, as Pound judged the 'three white leopards' and the 'juniper-tree' in Ash-Wednesday. Protesting mildly, Virginia Woolf saw it, in 1924, as an historical issue: the difference between one literary generation and the next:

...Again with the obscurity of Mr. Eliot, I think that Mr. Eliot has written some of the loveliest single lines in modern poetry. But how intolerant he is of the old usages and politeness of socity -- respect for the weak, consideration for the dull! As I sun myself upon the intense and ravishing beauty of one of his lines, and reflect that I must make a dizzy and dangerous leap to the next, and so on from line to line, like an acrobat flying precariously from bar to bar, I cry out, I confess, for the old decorums...

Eliot himself touched upon the question of difficulty in modern poetry. He said that difficulty is not something peculiar to certain writers, but a condition of writing in the contemporary world. In a context of 'great variety and complexity' the modern poet can only respond with 'various and complex results'. 'The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.' Eliot's proposition many sound stern and unsympathetic, likely to produce stern and unsympathetic poetry. But we know that the case is otherwise. Much of his poetry can be read with pleasure at first sight, although not always with immediate and full understainding. Eliot put the matter well. 'I know that some of the poetry to which I am most devoted is poetry which I did not understand at first reading.' He said that he was passionately fond of certain French verse long before he could be confident of translating it. Mallarme he found 'very obscure' yet the poems 'worth while even when you don't understand them...' (Wyndham Lewis attacked this proposition in a searching essay, 'What is 'Difficult' Poetry', New Britain, 7 March 1934.) Yet Eliot also insisted that when poetry calls for knowledge, the poetry-lover must be prepared to answer that demand. He found this with Dante's Divina Commedia and he advised other readers from his personal experience. 'If you get nothing out of it at first, you probably never will; but if from your first deciphering of it there comes now and then some direct shock of poetic intensity nothing but laziness can deaden the desire for fuller and fuller knowledge.'

This Guide is to meet precisely this latter instance. It is meant for the reader who has responded to eliot's poetry and is seeking the means towards fuller knowledge. Essentially, it is designed to serve as a work of reference, to accompany the volume of Selected Poems ( a selection made by Eiot himself for the Penguin edition published in July 1948, including the most imporatnt poems before the four Quartets). It provides factual information about specific details in the poems - the source of literary quotations, the English meaning of foreign owrds and phrases, the presence of allusions, the identity of historical figures and events, the definitions for words adapted or invented by Eliot, and for rare or archaic terms usually included only in the largest dictionaries. I have also included helpful statements by Eliot himself. Although he was notoriously unhelpful, indeed, at times misleading, in the face of direct questions about this word or that line, eliot was well aware of the importance, in the history of poetry, of his innovations and borrowings in language and form and tone.

man. K5 crossed me out again. I can't even spend $10 now with the little sleep walk rights i am still entitled there. bummer. i have to change my name for other's sake. that sucks.

anyway, George Gallaway is a big boy. So I heard he speaks up today. Others wonder how he was allowed to do that. I was wondering about it too.

And here's my offense registered with many voters on K5.

Another Rhyme taken with Captain Rum
 Democracy by Bush supports 
     Monopoly of Dick
 Bush or Dick
how can we tell?
 Thunders break
Rabbi's roar
 Can't you read Hebrew?
Thou must obey thy Supreme Commander.
 Chinese Saga smiles
  with one finger straight up in the air
 "God is playing a joke
  On America as we speak
 Ah, Dick with Bush
one never get tired of the other
as long as we understand
no ejaculation
through and with all thy might 
is the only civilized way
unmanly but holy 
to flourish
many Ds after Bs
under Heaven on this Earth."
 Then Saga puts his finger down
People saw a white headed Eagle soared
And nobody was around...
But the tomb of this broken rhyme
with Captain Rum.
 

duplicate

watched on C-SPAN Alvin Toffler talking about his book "Revolutionary wealth" (his wife Heidi co-authored) with Newt Gingridge. I like them both. Newt Gineridge praised wikipedia while Toffler saying good thing about Linus and those 'do for yourself' value that never get registered in formal economical statistics yet had huge influence on the current economy. They also talked about the changing landscape of 'nuclear family', bankrupt public educational system (not to reform but replace...) so on and so forth...

Gingeridge quoted Eistein "insanity is do the same thing over and over again and expect different result"...

Toffler reads Japanese daily Yomiuri English Edition and highly recommend it. I have to check that out and his new book 'revolutionary wealth'

PUBLIC-DOMAIN OPERA LIBRETTI AND OTHER VOCAL TEXTS http://opera.stanford.edu/iu/librettim.html http://www.karadar.com/Librettos/mozart_zaide.html http://sfr.ee.teiath.gr/htmSELIDES/Mozart/Zaide.htm

dog shits. and that is good.

i am filing a formal complaint with HR. say prayers for me. Amen.

This is a formal complaint against a management philosophy. After much deliberation, i've realized the root cause of my unhappiness in professional and personal development under such management style for the last year or so.

In a small working group, there are many personalities at play. There is one kind of personality, 'detail oriented' as one person puts it but i call it by its real name 'only do what he was told' kind of subservient person. In indian government, in Chinese governement, in Italian government, this may be considered a virtue of highest caliber, but I hope not in American government at all level. 'Only do what he was told' is a subhuman trait. No matter where, virtue or vice, it will be replaced by machine programmming sooner or later.

If i wish it to be sooner, i shall excuse myself from environment that promotes 'only do what he was told' personality and discourage in everyway those who only wish to 'do what is necessary and do it in different ways for different good reasons'. If i wish it to be later, i will stay and call vice by its real name so that virtue will shine through without even the need of naming it.

Chicago,
"the future exists first in imagination, then in will and then in reality"

 so is our past,
i shall say
and so is GOD's kingdom.

 what was imaginative 
is condemned as diseased 
what was diseased 
will it ever be cured?

 what we know for sure
is no longer the question

 how can we qusetion
what we know for sure?

 where is the silverline
between all these lines.

 i know and i don't know.

don't be gay yo, ye.

Ethical fundamentalism

THE HIGH SOLEMNITY of marriage has been transgenerationally wired into our visceral system. We must take it seriously and treat it solemnly, and this "must" must appear to us at the level of second nature; it must possess the quality of being ethically obvious. Marriage must not be mocked or ridiculed. But can marriage keep its solemnity now? Who will tell the rising generation that there are standards they must not fail to meet if they wish to live in a way that their grandfathers could respect?

This is how those fond of abstract reasoning can destroy the ethical foundations of a society without anyone's noticing it. They throw up for debate that which no one before ever thought about debating. They take the collective visceral code that has bound parents to grandchildren from time immemorial, in every culture known to man, and make of it a topic for fashionable intellectual chatter.

Ask yourself what is so secure about the ethical baseline of our current level of civilization that it might not be opened up for question, or what deeply cherished way of doing things will suddenly be cast in the role of a "residual personal prejudice."

We are witnessing the triumph of a Newspeak in which those who simply wish to preserve their own way of life, to pass their core values down to their grandchildren more or less intact, no longer even have a language in which they can address their grievances. In this essay I have tried to produce the roughest sketch of what such language might look like and how it could be used to defend those values that represent what Hegel called the substantive class of community--the class that represents the ethical baseline of the society and whose ethical solidity and unimaginativeness permit the high-spirited experimentation of the reflective class to go forward without the risk of complete societal collapse.

If the reflective class, represented by intellectuals in the media and the academic world, continues to undermine the ideological superstructure of the visceral code operative among the "culturally backward," it may eventually succeed in subverting and even destroying the visceral code that has established the common high ethical baseline of the average American--and it will have done all of this out of the insane belief that abstract maxims concerning justice and tolerance can take the place of a visceral code that is the outcome of the accumulated cultural revolution of our long human past.

The intelligentsia have no idea of the consequences that would ensue if middle America lost its simple faith in God and its equally simple trust in its fellow men. Their plain virtues and homespun beliefs are the bedrock of decency and integrity in our nation and in the world. These are the people who give their sons and daughters to defend the good and to defeat the evil. If in their eyes this clear and simple distinction is blurred through the dissemination of moral relativism and an aesthetic of ethical frivolity, where else will human decency find such willing and able defenders?

Even the most sophisticated of us have something to learn from the fundamentalism of middle America. For stripped of its quaint and antiquated ideological superstructure, there is a hard and solid kernel of wisdom embodied in the visceral code by which fundamentalists raise their children, and many of us, including many gay men like myself, are thankful to have been raised by parents who were so unshakably committed to the values of decency, and honesty, and integrity, and all those other homespun and corny principles. Reject the theology if you wish, but respect the ethical fundamentalism by which these people live: It is not a weakness of intellect, but a strength of character.

Middle Americans have increasingly tolerated the experiments in living of people like myself not out of stupidity, but out of the trustful magnanimity that is one of the great gifts of the Protestant ethos to our country and to the world. It is time for us all to begin tolerating back. The first step would be a rapid retreat from even the slightest whisper that marriage ever was or ever could be anything other than the shining example that most Americans still hold so sacred within their hearts, as they have every right to do. They have let us imagine the world as we wish; it is time we begin to let them imagine it as they wish.

If gay men and women want to create their own shining examples, they must do this themselves, by their own actions and by their own imagination. They must construct for themselves, out of their own unique perspective on the world, an ethos that can be admired both by future gay men and women and perhaps, eventually, by the rest of society. But there can be no advantage to them if they insist on trying to co-opt the shining example of an ethical tradition that they themselves have abandoned in order to find their own way in the world. It will end only in self-delusion and bitter disappointment

One of the preconditions of a civilization is that there is a fundamental ethical baseline below which it cannot be allowed to fall. Unless there is a deep and massive and unthinking commitment on the part of most people to the well-being not merely of their children, but of their children's children, then the essential transgenerational duty of preserving the ethical baseline of our civilization will become a matter of hit-and-miss. It may be performed, but there is no longer any guarantee that it will be. The guarantee comes from shining examples.

Lee Harris is the author of Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History (Free Press).