What about that old battlefield?

In chapter 27 of my 2014 novel, Smoke, we find a young American, Philip, and an old Frenchman, Mel, conversing as they approach a battlefield in Belgium, a place called Flanders Field. The year is 1937;  in the last week of World War I, Philip's father had died on that battlefield in 1918. Here's the scene:

Something about the spring air, the mists at the edges of the fields, the lush, lowland foliage, the shadowy light, lijdt het licht het donk’re licht, something was moving deeply inside of him. “Mel?”

       “Yes?”

       “How could this place have been a battlefield for a world war?”

       The old Frenchman cast his eyes on the passing landscape, and seemed to join Philip in this musing. He answered slowly, “War is a terrible thing, an ugly thing. I did not fight in the war; I had already served my military duty, long before the Archduke was assassinated in Sarajevo and the whole damn world flew apart, like shrapnel. But I had many friends who fought here, and back there, where we just came from in my France, back there at the Somme, the Marne, Amiens. Our soldiers drove the Germans back across their fortified lines, the Hindenberg line they called it. By summer of 1918 the Germans were in full retreat, although it took them a hell of a long time, and rivers of spilt blood, to admit it. And so it all ended here. Those trenches, over there in France, that had been held and occupied for two hellish years by both armies, those muddy hellholes were finally left behind, vacated, and afterward . . . filled up again with the soil of France and Flanders and Belgium, and green grass was planted where warfare had formerly blasted its way out of the dark human soul and the dark humus of lowland dirt and now we see that grass, trimmed, manicured and growing so tidily around those rows of white crosses out there, most of them with some soldier’s name carved on them, many just unknown, anonymous, and how could this have happened? You might as well ask how could. . . a grain of sand get stuck in an oyster? And how could that oyster, in retaliation against that rough, alien irritant, then generate a pearl—such a beautiful thing, lustrous and white—coming forth in response to a small, alien presence that had taken up unwelcomed residence inside the creature’s own domain? The answer, my friend, is floating in the sea, blowing in the wind, growing green and strong from soil that once ran red with men’s blood.”

But today, this Memorial Day, 2018, we honor not only the war dead of that First "Great War" of the 20th century. We honor all those who have given their "last full measure of devotion" to a nation that has always stood, and hopefully always will stand, for freedom and justice. 

Here's another phase of our 242-year national history with brave souls to ponder, Vietnam:

King of Soul

A Big Bangin' Good Time It Was!

 In the beginning Yahoweh banged out the big universe, E=mc², and while doing so he set aside one particular chunk of it to form the earth.

The earth was initially formless and void of life, and darkness occluded all the deep stuff that, really, when you get right down to it, had some great potentiality, but it needed a little help, and some serious diversity, so the impressively energetic activating Spirit Yahoweh began activating the elements and he was lol at the emergence of helium so he got into into mating the hydrogen with  oxygen and before you knew it Yahoweh was, like, skimming all over the surface of the waters.

Its true what’s been reported on both MSBNB and Foxxy that Yahoweh did in fact tame the electromagnetic energy that had begun banging around wildly: Let there be light, he said and guess what, yo, there it was: light. Things were brightening up.

And yo, check it out, y’all: wherever the light struck earth— Yahoveh called it day, and wherever the darkness prevailed on earth he called night. Nice little back and forth thing going on—in and out of the bright spot—from the very start. Some great possibilities here.

Now it just so happened that  the way the earth popped out—it had this little spinning action going on, which would in the long run make things really interesting for us homo sapiens later. And so the  revolving motion of the earth brought forth a very cool  morning-morphing-into-evening scenario.

Therefore, since it would be easier for us to see what was happening in the daytime part of this developing arrangement, we call that whole once-around-the-axis revolution a “day,” meaning, you know, the whole 24-hour deal. . . as in, another day in the life, eh? You trackin’ with me?

But hey! Creator was just getting started, y’all.

Yahoweh spoke: Let there be a, like, an atmosphere in the midst of the waters, and let it get intimately involved with the waters and separate some waters from other waters.

And so Yahoweh breathed out this very expansive atmosphere, which retained some waters as hanging together and staying in the flow, while other waters drifted on up into the troposphere to do their rarified atmospheric thing. You can’t keep a good molecule down, and they’re gettin’ high just thinking about it.

Anyway, Yahoveh knew that, on down the road, folks would gaze up into that airy firmament and be inspired by the amazing expanse of it, so he gave it an impressive name: heaven. Meanwhile, back at  what would later become the ranch, that revolving day/night configuration was shifting into second gear. Therefore, by ’n by the second day was just as incredible as the first had been, if not more-so.

Yahoweh spoke: Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear. And hey! It was good! Pangaea, baby, that’s what I’m talking about!

Yahoweh called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the waters he called seas, and he saw that it was good.

It’s all good!

Pickin’ up steam, Yahoweh kept a-goin’. Let the earth sprout vegetation, he declared. We’ll be needin’ some flora for these folks, y’all:  plants yielding their seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit with their stamens and carpels and fruit chromosomes and stranded DNA embedded in their seeds; and so on and so on.

And so on Pangaea was brought forth vegetation, plants yielding their genetic progeny

and trees bearing seeds with tree-deoxyribonucleic coding so that all subsequent tree-cells would get the message that God had spoke and he said it was good, y’all!  Propogate!

Meanwhile, down at the axis, that earth just kept spinnin’ along and there was evening and there was morning, a third day.

Then Yahoweh said, Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and even years!

And let them lights light up the earth. And it was so.

And within all this arrangement, Yehoweh set up two special lights: the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night.

That lesser  light is the one by which Tony Bennett or some ole crooner croons the tune: when the moon’s in your eye like a big pizza pie—that’s amoré!

Oh, and btw, while Yehoweh was doing all this, he also, like, got a creative handle on all them whizzing chunks of big bang detritus that were barreling through space and he, like, made the stars, maybe as an afterthought, I dunno.

He did very generously open up the heavens so that later organismic developmentals (see trailer) would get a little light on the subject, and make adjustments in their routine for the night phase because nights would be a cool change-of-pace from the day-to-day routine, because we could look up at the stars and be inspired by them and make up stories about Orion and the BiG Dipper and the Big Bang and whatnot.

There was evening and there was morning and that’s the way it is, fourth day, hey hey hey! Stay tuned for a fabulous 3-day weekend!

Glass Chimera

The Deep

As we grow older in this world, we gain a deeper understanding of  what is going on here. But it can be discouraging. In many ways, what we find is not pretty, and it makes no sense.

The disconnect between the way the world is and the way we think it should be becomes an existential crisis for those of us who are sensitive to such issues.

Attached to this dilemma we find a long historical trail of people attempting to deal with the problem. Along that path we find tragedy, depression, pathos, melancholia, despair, existential crisis, schizophrenia and a myriad of other assorted travesties.

But there’s a favorable output that sometimes arises through this conundrum. It’s called art.

And music, and literature.

I’ll not get into the specifics of it; but we discern, threaded through our long, strung-out history, an overwhelming human opus of emotional and soulful profundity. It  has been woven through the sad, dysfunctional and tragic tapestry of our apocryphal struggle for meaning. It has been sounded forth and sculpted continuously even as our very survival is perpetually  called into question.

The depth of this existential crisis is expressed by the poet when he desperately cried out:

“O my God, my soul is in despair within me;

therefore I remember you from the land of the Jordan,

and the peaks of Hermon, from Mount Mizar.

Deep calls unto deep at the sound of your waterfalls;

all your breakers and your waves have rolled over me.”

From the mountaintops of human awareness, and from the turbulence of many wanderous shore epiphanies, we homo sapiens somehow manage to  bring forth as offerings a cornucopia of creative endeavors; they are birthed in desperation, and they are often borne in desperate attempts to somehow attain hope.

You catch a hearing of that struggle to which I allude, in this music, composed in Spain in 1939 by Jaoquin Rodrigo:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9RS4biqyAc 

You can catch a glimpse of it in Picasso’s mural, composed in Spain in 1937, after the Luftwaffe bombing of Guernica:

 

But in my exploration of these matters, the most profound expression of the pathos curse is manifested in the life of one person who, by his laborious struggle, imparted the purest and most enduring message of love ever etched upon the parchment of human history; but his great gift was rejected through our judgmental travesty: a sentence of crucifixion.

Yet out of that most extreme humiliation there arose an even greater opus of creative, persistent love : resurrection.

If you can even believe it.


Smoke

To Do or Not to Do!

 That is the question, and so here spurts forth a contemporary quandary, purloine'd from the great classic tragic drama,  Hambiskit, by Mr. William Shakyerbootie:

Herein we heareth the soliloquy of yonder young prince Hambiskit, being uttered in the midst of his worst internetual crisis:

 

To do or not to do: Is that the question?

Whether ’tis nobler in this world to suffer

the slings and arrows of superfluous wwweb buffoonery,

or to sling comments against a viral flood of manipulators

and by opposing outsmart them.

To o’ercome, or to consume more and more?

and by consuming then regurgitate

the spewings of those faceless data-freaks

that the Web is heir to: ’tis a comment

boldly to be keyed.

Just sayin’.

To excel, or to consume?

to consume—perchance to daydream: aye, there’s the flub!

For in that slumber of couch-potato’d mess, what dreams may come?

when we have sluffed off the ancient laborious toil

that flesh was heir to!

Just sayin’.

Yeah, such pathoggery will surely add us pounds; there’s the rub:

there’s the lethergy

that makes such heavy weight of this long life.

For who, tell me who? will now bear the quips and scorns of time—

the hackers’ throng, the elites’ manipul’ry,

the publicized pangs of transgended sex, the laws’ demise,

the insolence of leftists and the the lumps of alt-right grumps. 

 Our attention to such useless compost daily piles up

while we ourselves with regularity do our deposits drop

from every bare bottom?

Pshaw!

Who, I ask you, who would such far-fetched feces bear?

—to groan and complain in this our cushy couchist pod

until the dread of whatever the hell’s after death—

that unsolicited’d app from whose click no traveller returns—

it wipes our will

and makes us  bear those charmin’ ills we have,

rather than fly to other charms we know not of.

Thus, consciousness makes cowards of us all, y’all,

and so the human hue of resolution

is slicked o’er with the clown'ed cast of infotainment.

Then enterprises of great pith and content,

by mere wasting of time, our  essential issues get sucked away,

and so we so thoughtlessly delete

the path of action.

To do or not to do, I tell ya, Ophelia Bodelia,

That is the question!

Just sayin’.

 

King of Soul

The Prescience and Presumption of Karl Marx

If you take the time to read Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, you may be surprised at how accurate is their assessment of the 19th century industrializing world.

Before Marx and Engels were born, back in the last quarter of the 18th-century, the world witnessed two major revolutions, the American one in 1776. and the French version in 1789.

These two major historical uprisings evolved very differently, although they had both originated conceptually with the Enlightenment ideas of Liberty, Equality and Justice.

Here in the USA, all we had to do was eject King George III and his soldiers. We sent them packin’ back to the old country, England. Then we had what appeared  to be a virgin continent 4000 miles wide populated by indigenous tribes who had not yet been industrially developed.

In France it was a very different story. The newfound revolutionaries, after decapitating old monarchs and killing off their privileged network of landed royalty, still found their mob-enforced movement dragged down by a thousand-year-old heavy baggage of entrenched, fortified autocratic economy.

I can simplify an explanation the difference between the American and French Revolutions for you this way:

In France, the whole revolutionary process got a lot bloodier, more vicious, and it took a hell of a lot longer time to play out.

A few years after the revolting peasants decapitated Louis XVI and his queen Marie Antoinette, Napolean came along, took charge of the debilitated French state and rearranged everything. Later, after he went down, France  was in disarray for the next century, trapped in a revolving door of revolutionary fervor, anarchy, stubborn monarchists and a world that was changing faster than you can say “modernizing industry.”

Into this cauldron of overheating European political and mechanizing discontent, Karl Marx was born in 1818.

Although the young communist was of German birth, his entrance to this world came in Trier, a town very near the French border.

Karl was a very smart guy. During the time of his educated, idealistic youth, he noticed and publicly identified many trends of modernizing industry and economics that were rapidly industrializing Europe and  eventually the entire world. Things were changing faster than a speeding locomotive.

Within all those changes, Marx identified a new socio-economic class that was establishing itself as the new people in-charge, after the fall of the French monarchy (the first of many monarchies that would be destroyed in coming years). This new, rising class of merchants, managers and craftsmen he called the “bourgeoisie.”

In his eerily prescient analysis of that emerging upper-middle class, Marx also hit on a description of  what we would later call ‘globalization,” Marx wrote:

“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvements of all instruments of production, (and) by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws (sucks) all-- even the most barbarian-- nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its (the bourgeois') commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, (and) with which it forces ‘the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois  mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”

During the turbulent 1840’s, Marx labored with his associate Friedrich Engels to describe and evaluate these historical changes. Together they devised a fix for the world's problem of a new bourgeois upper-class cruelly exploiting proletarian workers. Thus the Communist Manifesto developed. In 1848, they published the first version of their hot-off-the-press world-changing document. Here’s one part of their assessment of a rapidly industrializing 18th-century Europe:

“Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.”

Marx and Engels identified the disruptive attributes of a new, capitalizing economic steamroller of modern industrialization. They foresaw its accompanying alienation, which would, it seemed, forever confound the proletarian working classes  in Europe, Russia and eventually every nation in the world. In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels wrote:

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. . . Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

The dynamic theorizing duo, Marx and Engels, had figured out that very disruptive bourgeois-imposed changes were in store for humanity. Little did they realize that the revolutionary, ostensibly corrective measures they would soon be positing would be ultimately just as disruptive, if not more-so, than the maelstrom of rapidly escalating industrialism that was fast overtaking 19th-century Europe.

Marx and Engels went on to concoct an elaborate prescription to fix the world and thus deliver us from the ravages of modern capitalism and its dehumanizing industrialization.

If you look at the implementation of their communist doctrine as it has evolved in the last  century and a half, you may be dismayed at how brutally the zealous proponents of Marxist communism (Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot et al) screwed up the original idealized vision for world communism.

Which goes to show that the best-laid plans of mice and men are generally worked out in programs and institutions very different from their original visions and versions.

Later, when Socialists came along, attempting to reconcile the old System of autocratic Europe with a perpetually revolutionizing Communist big-fix, Marx pooh-poohed the wimpish compromisers, remarking . . .

“. . . Socialism, however, (does not) understand the (necessary) abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be effected only by a revolution.”

So here’s my question for Karl and Fred:

Hey, since you did identify  the extremely disruptive, debilitating bourgeois rearrangement of a capitalist, 19th-century world,   would your proposed communist remedy  be less disruptive and crippling than the total, ongoing revolution that a communist fix would require? 

I think not.

Furthermore, if subsequent history is any indicator, the changes in human activity that would be necessary to manifest a communist society as idealized by Marx and Engels—such changes would require constant correction, and therefore perpetual revolution.

Doesn’t sound very beneficial, from a human standpoint.

Furthermore, this writer would suggest:

Since your theorized systems for world improvement dictate that the revolutionizing proletariat must cast aside their “opiate” of religion, and thus deny the presence and power of “God” . . .

it would seem that many of the simpleminded 21st-century religious proletariat workers out there in flyover country or Manchester or Italy or wherever—they might rise up and reject the technocratic decrees of their elitist deep-state Marx-inspired EU overlords.

I know you wanta write them present-day uncooperative proles off as "alt-right" and reactionary, but it seems to me they are the same "proletarian" workers that Marx and Engels thought they had identified as the future vanguard of true communism.

Apparently they have something else in mind than technocrat-generated statism, maybe just a "leave us alone" revolution.

King of Soul

Life's a Beach!

Let us wander; what say we amble down to yonder coast?

’Tis there we’ll stroll the strand; explore a frothy edge, where wonder rolls up on the shores of familiarity.

Hey, Life’s a beach!

When we’ve walked as far as landward ambling will allow, we find  ourselves at the end of what we know.

There we gaze out upon the horizons of what we do not know.

If you take a right turn at that juncture and keep going, you’ll enter the realm of belief, or faith. Here’s what it looks like, because your eyes are blinded by the end of it:

If you take a left turn there and continue, you’ll happen upon the tree of knowledge. Let your eye follow its structure, but the end of it is somewhere out of your view.

Analyzing and Believing are two different paths; whichever you choose as your predominant life strategy—that choice will take you to the destination that is appropriate to your choice.

You may make a deposit in the dilemma of data.

Or you may find yourself reflecting eternity.

Selah and Serendipity to ya!  Zippity do dah too.

King of Soul

The killing of God

Just because the potentates of old Europe wrangled the Bible away from its Hebrew roots and turned it into dead religion doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist.

God did, after all, create humans with a free will. We are not programmed bots. Just because we homo sapiens screwed it up over the course of a few thousand years doesn’t mean that God wasn’t in the midst of it all somewhere, trying to break through our cerebral density, carnal shenanigans and political bullshit.

Actually, God did break through. But look what we did to him.

In the Middle Eastern crossroads where our wayward cruelties had taken advantage of 1st-century Empire-building power politics to nail him, a stake was driven in the ground. It turned out to be a bloody mess and a sacrifice of universal proportions.

So, as the centuries rolled by, the movers and the shakers among us took that bloody sacrifice and ran with it, transformed it into a first-class religious system that rolled on through time and continent like a runaway ox-cart on a roman road. A thousand years later, we’d manhandled that pivotal sacrifice into high-powered religion, through which men and women worldwide were either convinced or manipulated (depending upon your interpretation of it) into the mysteries of practiced religion.

Long about 1500 ad dominum, a few upstart readers who were paying attention to the original scripts started to figure out that something had gone wrong somewhere along the line.

So they raised some issues. Well, long story short, all hell broke loose.

That great institutional juggernaut that had rolled down through a millennium of pox humana religiosity suddenly was under attack from men who were trying to get to the bottom of it all, which is to say . . . trying to get through all that institutional religiosity to . . . the truth.

The truth? What is truth?

Haha glad you asked.

This little question became a matter of serious debate.

Now that the snake was out of the bag, everybody and their brother was trying to figure out what the truth really was and how it should be used to improve the human condition. People like Rousseau, Hegel, Engels and Marx, Lenin and several other notorious bastards.

As the movement to replace God with human wisdom and government gathered steam, human history heated up quite a bit. And the conflagration of it increased exponentially because this historic development just happened to coincide with the 19th-century Industrial Revolution. So we had a lot more fire power to implement all the big changes that needed to happen in order to get mankind delivered from the great religious debacle that had held us in bondage for so long.

Some guys in Prussia figured out that, since the great juggernaut institution of religion had been exposed to be the manipulative Oz-like empire that it was, the immediate conclusion was that not only had we killed religion, but we humans had managed to finally kill God! Voltaire, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche made this point perfectly clear.

Several bloody revolutions and a couple of world wars later, we are in the process now of finally getting our ducks in a row and ourselves straightened out, now that we’ve finally gotten God out of the way.

Even though we had already killed him one time before, but that’s another story.

Actually, it’s The Story.

His-story.

You can’t kill it, because that death-sentence strategy has already been implemented several times, yet without conclusive results.

We humanos insist on perpetually resurrecting that Story. We just can’t get enough of the un-killable presence among us. It refuses to stay dead. Might be worth looking into.

 

King of Soul