Wednesday 24 April 2019

This is our future


We are at risk of suffering from plans that others make without our knowing. Our future is our past and we begin at the beginning of the patriarchal system.

Anthropologists point to the rise of male dominance with large and populous agricultural states organized in terms of classes.

Survival depended on ownership and position. Maintaining good relationships with others, relying on cooperation might have been important for those on the bottom rung of the social ladder, but the higher your position and the more wealth you had separated you from the need to be considerate, to care about others beneath your position.

Marriage was not about eros, it was about joining two wealthy families together for status. Daughters were a bargaining chip in the wedding of two families. Children were chattels. Wives were forced to keep themselves, their children, their husbands, away from anything that might threaten their reputation, even though they couldn’t control the mouths of gossips.

Daughters could not marry into "good" families if their reputation was stained in any way regardless of whether it was their fault. Proving the truth would be difficult against the words of those who had influence. Intellectual exploration was harnessed, imprisoned. Answering the call of love with your body led to social isolation. Every thought act and utterance becomes a political outcome while the feelings that guide and give us joy become a potential threat.

Just how much control do we have over fate, desire and happiness, in a society obsessed with appearances, where gossips are brutal in the city of class and fashion.

War, structural violence, wealth, money and education are all weapons in the struggle for supremacy. The president of the most powerful country on the planet can behave like an idiot because those who challenge his position will be punished by all who aspire to climb the ladder. There is no shortage of those willing to torture the challenger of group think.

Eventually we all learn how to grovel at the feet of a despicable system. The winners become more shallow, more heinous, more ridiculous, because the system cannot see how it protects itself, the system casts out the original thinkers and the people who look and sound different.

Although we think we live in a democracy and feel responsible to vote for a healthy planet, there are other influences that keep us tucked inside self interest.

The professional classes may not vote for equality and fairness because their interests are linked to their own group.

Then there is the group given privilege but who have been forgotten, dismissed, marginalized. They are angry, bitter and potentially violent as their rage bubbles out. These are young men who have learned how society expects to be "a man".

Patriarchy is not about men, says an article in Psychology Today. It is about the ownership and domestication of women and their sexuality. To keep women out of the public domain they must deny and ridicule everything they like, they say, they believe and achieve. Communities which women mostly build through volunteering and their work must be ignored. Real politics must be lampooned and any "progress" in human society must be destroyed, including compassion and love.

The threat to our healthcare system, our education, our justice and search for peace, acknowledgement of LGBTQ rights, may look like separate issues but they are all connected.

As social organization becomes more aware and effective it becomes a threat to the hierarchy. Wars are organized to crush the exuberance of young men and women who are re-thinking a new kind of society. White Supremacy movement is set up to make young men feel oppressed by the changing narrative of inclusion and to cut the interrogation of capitalist exploitation of masculinity - which does oppress men and women. Right wing parties seek to undo the emancipation of men and women to keep them working for the factory that crushes the human spirit. Women who have achieved status by their writing and work are met with death threats.

Environmentalism takes authority away from the market and into the conscience of the people. The human conscience that cares for all sentient life on this planet is the only thing that can save us.


Monday 22 April 2019

Song of Praise

iv.


O garden of mosses and wave petunias
flaunty japonica in brilliant auras

O wooden bench on painted deck
occasional fleck of a resettled petal

O gardener checking tomatoes in pots
digging up lots for next year’s crops

O sunless day in September before the turning
red burning of green leaves

O socks and shoes and fleeting epochs
hydrangea bushes and bird-feather blues

everything everything O so morning
the unnamed tree with its rabbit ears

the cedars, the grasses, the finger marked glasses,
the rusty shears and later years

the melted candle on window sill
O happy pill and polymer painted palisade fractal.

(from Infinite Power, Eskasis 2016)


Friday 19 April 2019

The Limitations of Thuggery




Many ordinary folks say what the world needs now are smart leaders with conscience and intelligence. However the recent elections point to an irrational hatred of women who are good leaders.

Is this a natural phenomenon or are there well funded campaigns helping to promote hate, eager to disparage women and encourage idiotic slander that has no bearing in the reality of world economic pressures.

An article in The Walrus written by Ira Wells, listed right wing leaders opinions which are nothing more than ad hominem hate without references. Here is a sample of attacks on Kathryn Wynne. "Our devouring mother" and "the most dangerous woman in Canada". Wynne "despises our Western Judeo-Christian culture ... she's an obedient little girl" when it comes to Islam. And "she ought to be in a jail cell for alleged party corruption."

These are not anonymous trolls. They are quotes attributed to known representatives of media and political groups.

Serious discourse in things that matter to the people of a nation should argue the facts, not slander the people.

How would a premiere of Ontario "devour" a nation and what did she do that would make her dangerous? What did she say that proves she despises Western Judeo-Christian culture? How did she corrupt the party? And more importantly what are the intentions of those who are called on to make political comments but choose slander instead.

BBC.com reported on the election of the UCP in Alberta that thousands of jobs were lost following the global oil price crash in 2014-15. Yet in spite of the crash in oil prices, the mantra for politicians has been build oil pipelines. Mr Kenney, (the UCP leader) campaigned as a champion of the oil sector, promising to fund a "war room" to defend Canada's energy resources at home and abroad.

Along with the hatred expressed towards women regardless of what they achieve, it appears that many will rally around the loudest mouth that promises to bully the nation into shape. The details are not important, intelligence and civil society are dismissed for the sake of a brief expression of mythological power.

How can voters fall for such vacuous displays?

How can we teach our daughters to save their mental health when our society continually chooses thuggery over reason and responsible leadership? How can we prepare them for the onslaught of abuse that has nothing to do their personal abilities or achievement and everything to do with hate?

Whenever societies begin to progress for the greater good, violence and hatred are weapons designed to appear as grassroots trends that destroy the progress and civil society.

I can hear the designers laughing at us.

Thursday 18 April 2019

Even the Prophets Are Human

O blessed Lovelock, son of Gaia
even with all your science and vocabulary
you failed to wake us up until it was too late.

Global warming is irreversible and all we can do
is wait for the terrible thing to happen
the desertification of Europe, the sinking of London
the famine, the epidemic and the mass migration
of hope.

What can we do if there is nothing we can do
if earth’s reflective organ is too vain
if our power turned too much to outward aggression
punishes the inward nurture of the most delicate
new green shoots emerging above the soil?

Now we shall weep and weep as those great
sky penetrating towers fall
and we perish under their mute walls.

Such a prophecy is not new
there have been others who knew
by the way the warriors went to battle
thrusting their swords into Gaia’s children
that we would not last long
yet we believed linear logic was our sword
of immortality.

And since you are our most recent prophet
why don’t we blame you for not doing
what never worked anyway

—shaking us out of our delusions.

(from Infinite Power, Ekstasis 2016)

Tuesday 16 April 2019

What Does It Cost?

what does it cost
to not be wounded
to not admit wounds
to be stoic in mind and flesh
to have dry eyes
to be a ballerina in pain
to be a poet trying
with every inhalation
not to die

the cost is easy to figure
not with math or list
the cost is tomorrow

and all its rude honesty.

Monday 15 April 2019

Hope

There is no hope for the war correspondent
cover painting by Paul Grignon
who has seen neighbour killing neighbour
who has watched the marks of civil society
sink lower – the niceties of good manners
disappearing for convenience and freedom.

There is no hope for the prime minister
who must protect people against the unnamed
who controls and who will dispose of him
when he’s no longer useful.

There is no hope for the system
after it has finished manufacturing
its product.

There is no hope for the woman
who grooms her family for success
believing it will make them happy.

There is no hope for the teacher
who parses out knowledge on schedule
for the sake of progress.

There is no hope for the writer
who seeks to crush all the lies
breeding on the pages of our minds.

There is still hope for the souls
who have found fresh air and delicate
weeds among vegetables
uncertain that they can save the day
with their humble gardening
digging for earth’s mysteries that will feed them
until they wake no more
in the body they have been granted.







Friday 12 April 2019

The Patterning Instinct

"As I describe in The Patterning Instinct, in this case the underlying disease is one of separation: separation of mind from body, separation from each other, and separation from nature. 

It’s our view of humans as essentially disconnected, begun in agrarian civilizations, exacerbated with the Scientific Revolution, and institutionalized by global capitalism, that has set us on this current path either to collapse or TechnoSplit." 

Sunday 7 April 2019

Old Man in the Corner


In the dark corner of the bar 
an old man crumpled in his seat
can barely lift his glass
—each pint gets heavier
each day takes more to numb the pain.

He has given up trying to understand the source
of his grief, the reason for his expulsion
from a place, like joy, peace, or belonging.
He knows like blood coursing through his veins 
he was robbed.
Of what? His manliness? His hope?
His tribe. He has lost his tribe.
He has lost his job. And someone
has to pay.

Yes he knows about NAFTA
and the jobs that went to India
and the slick talkers in suits
cutting him loose from the plant
and he knows like the knife
in his stomach that they can’t
be hurt, can’t be touched
by anything he does.

And he can’t tell his buddies
they have cut off his balls.

So when he screams
get rid of all the others,
he means those who are not like him
and throughout his years
of becoming a man
he has become the foreigner

to his own heart.

(Infinite Power, Janet Vickers. Ekstasis 2016)

What's Happening Here

Apart from a war that kills innocent children,  my nervous system feels as though this is another war against life and living. This has been...