WELCOME TO THE PYROCENE

(R.I.P. The Pacific Palisades)

Our Civilization began its Fatal
Metastasis
With the development of Fossil Capital
In the mid nineteenth century:
First Coal and Steam
Then Oil and Gasoline
And their inevitable Concomitants -
Cheap Food, Cheap Transport
Cheap Heating and Cooling
Cheap Things…and Plastic.
All reflected in
An Explosive growth of Population
Along with Urban, Suburban and Exurban Domestic
Commercial, Transport and Industrial Infrastructures.

Now:
It is the rampant development of
Combustible buildings and of
Civilizational fire sources –
Like lines carrying high voltage
Electricity, sparking mechanical equipment
Or Psychotic Arsonists
(And only occasionally Lightning)
At the Edge of fire prone natural environments
That turns Wildland Fires into Urban Fires.
That turns Wildland Fires into Destroyers
Of Neighborhoods, Suburbs and Cities -

Destroyers of Places that have lost their connection
To the Ancient Human Story
Through the relentless process of
Industrialization, hybridization, sedentarism
Homogenization, Commodification and Globalization.

While our homes Burn, or Flood
Or are Destroyed in Hurricanes
We are made vulnerable to Extinction.
Blame the Relentless Extraction of Cheap Energy.

Climate Change is a Secondary Symptom of
Our Civilizational Malaise - Not its Cause.

DESERT PROLOGUE FOR A WRITER

Our friend Heather
Is moving to Vegas.
She spent a couple of nights 
With us in Ojai
Before driving to Burbank

Where she boarded a flight
For Paradise, Nevada.
She has rented an Apartment
Close to the Strip
Sight unseen.

Heather and I
Are both fans of
Claire Vaye Watkins
Who teaches at U.C. Irvine
And lives in the Mojave Desert.

A few years ago CVW wrote 
A Futuristic Desert Epic
Called Gold Fame Citrus
Set in a schlerophytic and 
Fiery Los Angeles.

Her desert thrums
To a messianic beat:
A place of spiritual refuge
Where time is eternally filled
With the presence of the Now.  

Vegas projects this Divine Immanence.
Distantly shadowed by 
Lunar Crater volcanic field
It is a place Under a Volcano
Of Dissolution and Creativity.

Where once smoke and lava
Vented through over two hundred cones
Along the Reveille and Pancake ranges
Their vestigial whispers
Now batter the soul.

SHLOKA

The Sanskrit Bhagavad Gita
A poem of divine teachings
Is written in Shloka Meter
Or lines of eight syllables each.

It has oft occurred to me that
Shrinkage of means enhances meaning
Thus, Dear Reader, I choose to write
By the shores of Gitchee Gumee.

Vyasa the Compiler
Tells the story of Arjuna
Receiving Lord Krishna’s wisdom
On the eve of a Battle:

“Viewed by the Equanimous Eye
Success and failure are the same.
Grieve not for the Living or Dead
Dear One, neither will cease to be…”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Wrote his poem Hiawatha
In trochaic pentameter
Like the Gita, to be chanted!

COSMIC MONOCHROME

Of the Northwest-Wind, Keewaydin,
To the Islands of the Blessed,
To the Kingdom of Ponemah,
To the Land of the Hereafter!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

To journey up the switch-back grade
Half in moonlight and half in not
The evening star subtended
In crazy serendipity

Is to know a careening of
Our wild and watery planet
‘Midst the gyrations of the skies
In reversals of its dark night.

Now, Caught in those tight twists and turns
Flashing splashes of moonlight that
Recall all Life’s syncopations
Of good and evil, love and hate:

A vivid chiaroscuro
Of vast dichotomous reality
Laid bare at night or in full light
Ever thus and always will be.

AWFUL APOGEE

Our Brains are cleft in two
And, as we all know
It is the right hemisphere
That provides us with our creative insight

Leaving the left half of the brain
To do the grunt work:
Language, Math
Facts and Analysis.

Nevertheless, Iain McGilchrist
Considered it Necessary
To write 462 pages
Of densely packed text

And over 100 pages
Of even denser text
In an even smaller font size
Of Notes and Bibliography

On. Exactly. This.
An Achievement
Not of Redundancy
But of critical Pertinence.

He establishes, Once and for All
The insidious work of
The Sinister side of the Brain
In its usurpation of the Dexter.

The Right hemisphere of the Brain
The Creative, Holistic side
Should Rightfully be Served
By its Servant, the Left hemisphere.

But in his telling, The Master - The Dexter
Has been subverted by its Emissary -
- The Sinister - in a Process which he links
With the rise of Modernity.

Scientism in The West
Begun with Galileo, quickly metastasized
Into the Rape of the Planet reflecting
The insurgency within our Bicameral Brains.

Now, this Advance of Technology
At the Expense of our Humanity
Is fully realized
In its Awful Apogee: The Development of AI.

The Master and his Emissary, Iain McGilchrist

OBSIDIAN

Begin to write Shortstacks
And Life will give you words.
So it was:
On a road trip to Northern California

Where the phenomena experienced
Are here manifested
In simple strings of words which may
Resonate when read or spoken.

Double Smash Burgers (lettuce wrapped)
At Third Window Brewing Company.
A King Tide early the next morning
Flooding Santa Barbara’s City Beaches.

A detour to Mission San Miguel Arcángel 
Built at the very end of the 18th century
By the indigenous Salinen people;
Soon to become their Death Camp.

Today, the surviving buildings exude
A profound pathos:
The thick, white-washed adobe, oak vigas
And mission tile still strangely compelling.

Entering San Francisco at Twilight:
A full moon hovering over
A Milk-white, Lunar-washed urbanscape
In the rattling energy of rush hour.

In the morning, a viewing of
An SFMOMA Installation by Kara E-Walker
Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)
A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler.

Like this work, The Road Trip is also
A mechanism for sympathetic magic
And for probing 
The liminal spaces

Between human and machine
Future and past
Living and dead
Cynicism and wonder.

At Hopland we began the crossing
Of the Mayacamas Mountains
On a two-lane Blacktop
Threaded between crag and precipice:

To arrive at Lakeport
A once-upon-a-time Resort Town
Harboring an Ojai-sized community
On the western shore of Clearlake.

From the East facing windows
Of a beautiful mid-century house
Mount Konocti appeared across the Lake
Rising from its volcanic bed of Obsidian.

It was from material found at this site
That Walker set her figures in a Garden
Of Obsidian – a black glass said
To heal emotional trauma from the Past…

THE WINDS OF CHANGE

Thy wars brought nothing about;
Thy Lovers were all untrue.
‘Tis well an Old Age is out,
And time to begin a New. 

John Dryden

Amidst the Chaparral
The Santa Ana winds arrived
Before dawn, sweeping westward
Across the tinder dry land…

Heralding the election
Of a new President
After the Crumbling
And Humbling of the Old.

By mid-afternoon a Blaze 
Had begun on South Mountain
Destroying all before it
As it Headed across the Hills. 

Dryden was writing
Of the Seventeenth Century -
An Age of Fixity and Fearful symmetry.
Its End summoning…

A Time of Contingency and Flux
Of the Unknown:
The Good, the Bad
And the Ugly.

In the loosening 
Of the Bonds of Propriety
There may again Emerge
An Unimagined Era:

A Restoration
Of the World beyond
The dying husk of Empire -
The Realm of Spirit.

The winds abated.
The Fire contained.
South Mountain scorched.
Its Earth enriched by Ashes.

SOFTLY, SOFTLY

An Ad in the Babylon Bee:
Surviving the Apocalypse 
- from AI to Zombies.
Money back Guarantee!

Implicit in this Abcedarian list are:
The Atom Bomb, Weather Terrorism
Plague, Capitalism
And the U.S. Military Industrial Complex…

There is no Surviving
No Thriving
Under the Conniving of
The Oligarchs. 

We will all be swept away
In a kind of Apocalypse;
The kind you barely notice
Until you do. 

This Life just comes to us…
Why should Our Extinction
Not arrive in the same 
Imperceptible manner?

LITE RELIEF

From the Home of Lite Beer
‘Tis the season of Nazi (Lite)
Versus Commie (Lite)
Putatively
Right against Left. 

Duopoly, blah, blah, blah.
The real deal
Says Iain McGilchrist
Is Feeling Beings
Vs. Thinking Beings.

Also Sprach Nietzsche:
‘Thoughts are the shadows
Of our feelings, always darker
Emptier, simpler…’
(Affect vs. Cognition).

Iain Mc G. again:
‘I think, therefore I am’
Less true than
I feel, therefore I am. 
Awareness is subcortical…

SKY BOWL

A friend described the topography
Of our backyard
As a Sky Bowl -
Filled with the often Brilliant 

Light Of Ojai
Flooding a space circumscribed
By a shallow canyon
The austere plane of the house

And beyond
The Topatopa foothills
Then the spalled face
Of the range itself.

There is a clarity to this light
Reflected in a dark lap pool
Or Swallowed by the dense greens
Of gnarled oaks;

But mostly
Promiscuously slathered
So that it rains down from the sky
To fill the Bowl in great Torrents.

This may not be Ladakh
Where, Andrew Harvey writes
’Autumn is coming
I smell it in the air…

Each day
You wake to a different
Colder, purer blue’
But in this Sky Bowl

Where no prayer flags
Flap in the breeze
One can still drown
In Heaven’s foreshadowing.

A Journey in Ladakh, 1983

WAMPUM BELT

Language is the money
Of Thought
Its means of exchange -
The Wampum Belt
Of ‘Exaptations’.

I have gone through Life
Without this word:
Without a short cut
To the idea of
alternative uses.

It is a concept that
Is front and center
In our way of dealing with world:
The search for hitherto
Unseen adaptations.

And so it is
That all is revealed
In a never ending
Cavalcade of
Lapidary lexical epiphanies

Until, close to death
We are but middens:
Mounds of shells
Vacant of meaning, suffering
The process of Deflation.

ROCKET MAN

From the moment of our Birth
Our Daimon
Is our Guiding Spirit…
Yet still we seek a Greater God.

Enter Elon
Who so perfectly represents
The expectations of our Age:
Its Zeitgeist.

In a World
Shaped by Technology
He may be indispensable to
The Great Chain of Being

For his capacious consciousness
Has reified the Future
Making an objective Reality
Of its ephemeral Existence.

While He embraces
The curvature of the Earth
And its alluring carapace of orbital gravity
(In which he embeds Starlink for all)

Our Homely Daimon
Is Bereft:
Stoically awaiting our Death
And reunion with its Greater God.

SQUAWK

The pale grey sky
Is polka-dotted
With Rags of black cloud
Back lit and smudged.

Imagine a stone City
Bathed in this morning light
A rosy-fingered dawn
Playing amidst its battlements.

Trumpets sound brash within
These lithic canyons;
The sirens of
Emergency vehicles…

Or is it the squawking of Crows
On power lines or Errant
Owls hooting on their
Winged escape from the day?

And are those battlements
The rocky defiles
That rise up against
This gathering morn?

POOR OLD DAD

Jung had profound
Sympathy for his father:
A pastor at the
Swiss Reform Church
In the village of his birth.

All at once
After his confirmation
At age fifteen
He realized the vacuousness
Of his father’s profession.

His poor old Dad
Promoting a religion
Based on Faith not
The Existential Experience
Of God and His Grace.

Jung understood God
As the ego of an infinite Universe
And his own molecular identity
As the ego of his
Psychic and Physical Being...

Poor old Dad
Suffering
What all Fathers’ fear:
The Judgement
Of their children.

YOU ASK: HOW AM I DOING?

For
Wizards, Hermeticists
And Seers
Like Helena Blavatsky

Rudolph Steiner
Alice Bailey and others
Whose minds are suffused
With Spirit

The Totalizing
History of the Universe
Is an open book:
The Akasha Chronicle.

It Records, so they tell
Every mark ever made
On the Existential Soul
Since the beginning of time.

It is Ruthless
In its Omniscience
So yesterday, today
And tomorrow counts

Everywhere and Always
Through all Eternity.
It is Retributive:
For it is The Book of Judgement.

RED TILT

4.5 billion years ago
The planet Theia
Collided with Earth
And knocked it off kilter.

Debris was buried deep 
Within the Earth’s mantle
While remnant chunks
Coalesced into our Moon.

Earth, now enfolded within
A vaporous atmosphere
Is subject to seasons
As our planet’s elliptical orbit

Changes the angle of 
Solar radiation
Relative to its 
Tilted axis.

In Summer’s Heat
The Great Swathes of
Chaparral that thrive in
California’s temperate latitudes

Oxidize accordingly.
Now, in the early Fall
They are Gloriously 
Glowingly, Quiescent.

ZOMBIE BRAINS

Human Intelligence
Finds itself in a state of 
Metaphysical eclipse:
It attempts to explain flow
By studying the static.

To explain life
By studying the non-living
Consciousness
By the Unconscious
And Morality
By the Amoral.

Trained to expect only
The elementary urges of 
Human nature:
Freud’s Pleasure
Nietzsche’s Will to Power
Or Marx’s Materialism

Most of us have abandoned
Intuition
The truths of spiritual life:
The Fundamental and
Universal impulses
Of Life itself.

Reference:
Meditation on the Eighteenth
Major Arcanum of the Tarot
Valentin Tomberg, 1985

ALL SHE WROTE

Space/Time, Gravity, Energy and Matter
Is all She wrote -
It’s enough.
The Sum of Creation.

Human solipsism is
Breathtaking.
But enough about you and me:
Last night there was a rocket in the sky.

When arriving back on our hill
I saw a bright light approaching
From the west
In the moonless night.

As it slid by
Its fiery tail appeared:
Elon Musk’s Space X rocket
On its way to launch a spy satellite.

This was a busy night
In our neck of the woods;
A scheduled power outage
Helped Reveal the Heavens -

The little patch we see of them.
But mostly we (you and me again) obsess
About what’s beneath our feet:
Planet Earth.

Parochialism.
Our stories, our specialness
How the Creator sent his special envoy
(His son, no less) to sort Us out

Us, a new born consciousness
Amidst a vast and ancient creation:
Presumptuous and
Lacking in all humility…

Throwing our toys at the empyrean
Expecting the heavens to open
In obeisant veneration
Of our gifts.

Our solipsism is
Breathtaking.
But enough about you and me:
We’re Slaves to our Demons, Actually.

DEVIL WORSHIP

We are being consumed by
Twin creatures of our Imaginations -
Either grotesquely inflamed by
Chimerical fears or gross infatuation.

The Mexican Quetzalcoatl
Is an example of this:
A Demon created and
Worshipped collectively.

As creatures of the Imagination
They are Illusory
But only the Intrepid
May Confront them

For they are possessed
With the power to Benefit
Or Harm those who
Worship them:

Armed with Fortitude
Fearlessness and
The power of skepticism
They may yet be Vanquished.

In this Heinous Season
Of Devil Making
Combating these unhappy
Aberrations is Holy work!

HANGING MAN in the LAND of NOD

We are plants in our time of sleep
Inhabiting a vegetive state:
Spared both Animality and Humanity
It is then that we suffer our organic fate.

Deeply sensile
But fast asleep
Wherein gravitation reverses:
Our heads become our feet.

Skull full fathoms deep
While in the Land of Nod
Feet forward, our upended bodies
Are pulled ever closer to their God.

Hanging Man upside down
Trapped in the gravity of this mortal coil
His feet ever reaching toward
Heaven’s fertile soil…

Fully willing to sprout
Quite ready to flower
Finally planted
Under heaven’s high bower.