We like to think
June 16, 2008
We like to think
we’ve got things sorted out.
Most major problems lie in logic bound.
Our world makes sense. All is ruled by laws
which in the main our boys by now have found.
Technology does buy security.
Time we keep in check with solar clocks.
We’ve universal life against gross chance,
on every door forged patent deadbolt locks.
These are, we think, fair guarantees.
Sufficient grams of fiber neutralize
the crab. We’ll not catch death. The car’s foolproof.
The kids look straight. Church holds no surprise.
All of this, and more, we like to think–
and better yet, to unthink what we know:
that things won’t keep’s the only absolute,
and thinking otherwise won’t make it so.
Reality remains a potent brute,
uncircumcised, unused to subtle tactic.
What will he do, when he unzips, to find
he’s stoppered with our high-tech prophylactic?
10. Jan. 80
Ways of Being
June 16, 2008
I. Turtles
live
where you would expect
turtles
to live:
beneath
slow bubbles
and patchy surfaces.
Turtles
have always
lived that way.
They prefer it.
The breakneck heron however
on excited southwind days
goes stilting along
across the waves
and far away.
Where herons stop
turtles brink
in the sun
and blink.
II. Serene
beneath his
leafy parasol
the rough husked
musk melon
ripens
thinking
round
thoughts.
Chuck Merrill
(revised) 10.Mar.05
Voice of God
June 16, 2008
Voice of God
God I think
featured in my dreams last night.
Hearken unto me
I heard
as it seemed in tones
of curiously accented thunder
I am the Lord.
Lo I made all this
All fishes flying things
Flowers and fruits
All things living or still
All you perceive and more besides
Likewise did I make you
Little man
And all your kind
In my own image truly
Were you cast
Yea all this I wrought
World and man
Each for the other
Look you now
What have you done
With yourselves
And all my fair creation?
Be this my glorification?
Why do you persist
In disharmony
Contention
And misery?
Ah Lord Yahveh
I gulped
You have a point
And we have much
to shame us sorely.
Still
You invite a question
if I may:
Since indeed
Creation is yours
Whyowhy
did you make us humans
so outwardly alike
only to confound one and all
with myriad unlike
tongues beliefs and ways?
Why invoke you Yahveh
Came soon the rumble.
My name is B’abel.
Chuck Merrill
Aug 98/Feb 04/Mar05/April 08
Sour Grapes & Prickly Plums: Aphorisms
June 16, 2008
Aphorisms
Chuck Merrill
No. 1
Our frequent claims of greatness would resound less hollowly if we spent less energy on trying to make heroes of idiots.
No. 2
In public life: the more determinedly one proclaim his Republicanness, the more rapidly he takes on the lineaments of the consummate asshole.
No. 3
We would have better luck in getting leaders if we rewarded the actual exercise of leadership rather than the pursuit of incumbency. But we don’t, so we don’t.
No. 4
Likewise, we should reexamine our perverse insistence upon equating self-aggrandizement with administrative or managerial excellence. The former is, always has been, and will remain greed pure and simple. The latter is a wholly different subject which, in reality, is evidenced in ways entirely unrelated to salary, benefits or the perquisites of power.
No. 5
A rigid and vociferous moral stance is assuredly no more than a cheap substitute for comprehension of the issue.
No. 6
Good motivations elevated to the level of “cause” are soon perverted.
No. 7
It is a depressing fact everywhere in evidence that, as soon as the phrase “in pursuit of excellence” is voiced, one may be certain that mediocrity is the real intent.
No .8
Both the poor and the wealthy regularly confuse “quality” with “quantity.” The very affluent take as an article of faith that, because they have, they are more deserving—and conversely, that those who have been poorly rewarded are deservedly lacking. The poor, unfortunately, are generally possessed of a similar delusion. Those who find themselves in between these extremes seldom perceive this. Hence, they are perhaps to be excused for their confusion regarding the foundations of economic science.
No. 9
The real problems of our age are in the main not new ones. They continue to be real problems over considerable periods of time—for a very simple reason. That is: for any problem worth naming, too many of those individuals or groups who could make a serious dent in it are also those who can profit more from the continued existence of the conditions that give rise to this problem.
No. 10
Be wary of an institution when it decides it is time to declare its greatness. Be especially leery when the same institution changes the dominant pronoun from “we” to “I”.
No. 11
One of the more illuminating chapters in an architectural history of civilization is the one devoted to a survey of imposing buildings commissioned by institutions which have collapsed soon thereafter. Of particular interest here are several related questions of causality.
No. 12
The ego is a parasite with insatiable appetites and omnivorous tastes. Even before cannibalizing the last remains of its owner’s psyche, it has made great inroads upon those of the individuals closest to him.
No. 13
It would be nice to suppose that, outside of TV commercials, noone over 18 or so worries overmuch about such things as “feeling good about what I’m wearing”. One would like to think that.
No. 14
Higher Education has numerous profound and far-reaching responsibilities. But until there is universal agreement on what they all are, it will keep on attending to its own priorities.
No. 15
Professors are indeed vulnerable creatures and do need to be afforded a modicum of protection from their enemies…excepting, perhaps, themselves.
No. 16
The pursuit of knowledge is a fine and noble thing, much to be recommended. The great trick, however, lies in figuring out what to do if you catch up with it.
No. 17
Now here is a thing to give permanent definition to the phrase “cruel and bitter irony.” In an age to which has been revealed the utter bankruptcy of history’s most elaborately developed and encompassing ideologies, one yet discovers large numbers of that age’s best (and most expensively) educated intellectuals openly embracing a considerable panoply of lesser, less well thought out, narrower focus and essentially trivial ideologies. A fair proportion of these souls occupy professorial chairs in such presumably unlikely fields as literature, languages, and the social sciences.
The student of such matters may learn several salutory things from this.
a.So long as the word “critical” is appended to an ideology, there will be takers for it, happy to feel absolved of the need to examine it critically themselves before buying into it.
b. The mind, so long as it remains in the splendid isolation it prefers to accord itself, has a near infinite tolerance for self-delusion.
c.Such minds are fertile ground for ideologies. They are disinclined to perceive that “ideology” is in itself a fatally flawed phenomenon, precisely because it is an intellectual construct. The mind likes representations of itself: they are, to it, the perfect embodiment of beauty—self- contained, self-defining, self-delimiting, therefore hermetically neat and efficient. The trouble here is that reality (which is what every ideology attempts to model) is far more inclusive and incomprehensibly more complex. Reality is not neat, nor is it a mirror-image of the mind.
d. It is such considerations as this which define the real dangers of the so-called “ivory tower” mode of existence. Socrates, of course, would not have been suckered by an ideology. But it is easy to imagine that many of his students, lacking his age, his subtlety, and the corrective influence of harsher experience, would have been. The inveiglements of a pure idea are seductive indeed.
No. 18
All those media people who work so hard to keep certain “stories” before us—O.J. Simpson’s perpetual tawdry circus, (earlier) the loving buffoonery of the Bobbitts, Limbaugh’s latest rush of retch-edness—or, more recently, the infantile antics of miscellaneous Hiltons and their pet monkeys—and so endlessly on. Is it that (a) these media folk indeed do have so disappearingly little on their minds, (b) they believe we are similarly handicapped, or (c) they hope to distract us from what they so rigorously neglect to report?
Whatever their intent, the consequence is the same: without our quite being aware of it, they bring about a gradual, inexorable trivialization of public life.
Why would they desire something this sinister? Perhaps because a populace weaned to such a thin diet is no longer quite able to notice, much less to resist, the insinuation of a definition of existence based upon infinite tolerance for being swindled at every conceivable level…indefinitely.
An even less agreeable but quite plausible possibility: universal stupefaction is destined to be the ultimate stage of human evolution
No. 19
On The Self, and How to Endure It.
Contrary to much popular opinion (not to forget: opinions are generally products of the subject in question), the Self is not a Delicate Flower. The extraordinary persistence of this quaint notion, in spite of voluminous evidences to the contrary, is almost certainly proof that the Self, far from being fragile, is indeed a highly adaptable entity of great elasticity.
This is, however, not to say that the Self is without its peculiar sensitivities. It is in fact an exquisitely discriminating organ, capable of registering—and reacting to—even the faintest intimations of the remotest possible danger to the integrity of its preferred state. As a rule, anything it construes to be threatening brings about an immediate toughening of its outer membranes. By this means, it preserves, largely intact, the composition of its innermost sanctum.
Withal, it is true that the Self, like so many of Nature’s products, seeks to practice a sort of “economy of effort”: though it can change—and can be changed—it would prefer not to. Change requires work, and is moreover fraught with possibilities (for instance, of unpleasantness). Therefore, better to hold on to what is, and let things and beings all around endure the change.
And this is the way the Self works. Its prime directive (no surprise here) is self-preservation. Usually, at all costs. This being the case, the Self, once stimulated to act on its own behalf, is capable of wreaking no end of havoc upon other Selves in the vicinity—to say nothing of the rest of the organism in which the Self is housed.
All other things being equal, a good rule of thumb is to treat the Self with caution, respect and a goodly measure of healthy suspicion. However indispensable it may ultimately be to its home organism, it is, nonetheless, a tricky, unpredictable, even treacherous entity. One is well advised to take pains at some point to acquire some familiarity with the Self’s complex nature—or, at the very least, to make its acquaintance. Though at some basic level it does seem to prefer to remain anonymous, it doesn’t respond well to being actually ignored.
One should, after all, be on nodding terms with one’s closest neighbors.
No. 20
On Assholes: their Ubiquitousness and Possible Etiology
The Good Person (and, it may comfort you to know, there are still some good people around, the members of my own family being exemplary representatives of this class) is regularly confounded by the astonishing plenitude of assholes in his particular circle of everyday contacts.
Being a good person, he may be especially troubled to discover, for instance, that an “old friend”—an individual whom he has known and thus shared valuable experiences with for years or decades—has turned out, when next met, to be distressingly different from the sweet natured, agreeable, charming and witty soul ensconced in memory. Instead, the old friend behaves in a determinedly abominable way—with rudeness, unkindness, pettiness, arrogance approaching global self absorption, sovereign condescension, a nasty tongue, and general-purpose shittiness. In a word, he betrays himself to be, after all, an asshole.
Ordinary not-quite-so-good people like you and me would not be overly perturbed by this revelation. We tend to anticipate the presence of assholes in the most unlikely places, times and guises. We take their prevalence more or less for granted. Assholes come with the territory, are part of the bargain somebody or other struck long ago in the original contract.
The good person, on the other hand, is in part who he is just because he doesn’t automatically partake of our somewhat more jaded view of what is to be expected. He natively assumes, upon entering a room full of his fellow bipeds, that here, too, as in other rooms and other times, he will meet up with a preponderance of more or less equally good people. The good person has a wonderfully sanguine view of mankind.
One of the more unfortunate conclusions the good person is likely to draw upon confronting an asshole just emerging from the closet is that he, somehow or other, has unknowingly done something to actually provoke assholedness in the other. In the noble Science of Logic, we call this “False Cause.” The uncomplicated truth, and the whole explanation of the thing, is this (and we may consider it part of a Law): “Assholes choose to be assholes.” There it is, beautiful in its self-generative simplicity. The asshole posturing in front of you behaves as he does, is as he is, for no better reason than that he likes himself that way. People are, after all, like that: at some essential level, they do elect their personal nature. Practically never does an asshole become so because of some trivial, long forgotten omission of any other individual on the entire face of the earth, especially not one committed by your average good person.
We are perhaps now ready to state the Law of Assholedness in its entirety. It has two parts.
a) Assholes choose to be assholes.
b) In any random sampling, a certain number of the individuals present will be assholes. This number may be expressed as the square of the inverse of the absolute number of individuals one has ever spoken more than 200 words with. This number may be called “the Asshole Constant.” 1
Naturally, there is more to be said about assholes. But we shall take that up at another time. Or perhaps not…why waste valuable energy on them, anyway?
1 Warning: actual results may vary! [This means: the above mathematics may in fact not work out to be terribly accurate in real life. I only insert them here because many people, for mysterious reasons, believe a thing to be true in direct proportion to the number of numbers used to express it.]
No. 21
Some of the almost numberless amazements lying readily to hand about us:
a.That highly articulate, well-read, very well educated and generally pretty famous persons of note can so fluently and confidently pour forth such substantial streams of words, underlying which there is not a single perceptible speck of light or warmth (to say nothing of actual sense). Such emissions might aptly be called “Grey Noise.”
b. At least equally astonishing are the numbers of ostensibly not less well-informed people who consume, yea, even yearn for such stuff with an avidity which borders on mystic ecstasy.
c.The most thoroughly incredible aspect of this phenomenon is that these consumers (as we shall call them, for lack of apter terms) give every appearance of somehow deriving a manner of sustenance from this substanceless verbal porridge!
An excellent question indeed would be: what could it possibly be in them which is sustained by a complete absence of nourishment?
Another would be: how can the consumption of nothing produce a steady and growing hunger for even more nothing?
Unfortunately, these are questions which I cannot answer as yet. We are perhaps dealing with as yet imperfectly understood aberrations in what some, I believe, call “the lines of Chi forces.” (Or, um…is the term more properly Chia? Not sure. I myself have always found such forces to be a bit on the fuzzy side to begin with.) At any rate, one dares to hope that a cure can one day be found.
No. 22
On Ambiguity
Among all those things we like to think of as being “true,” one of the most unambiguously true things for me has always been this: that the ability to live with ambiguity is one of the surest guarantees of success in life. By “success in life” I do not mean necessarily wealth, professional good fortune, happiness, or other similar conventional touchstones of the Successful Life. Rather, I mean something much more rudimentary—and yet more advanced: the capacity for getting through life without being swamped by it. If you can do that much, you almost certainly have succeeded. All the rest is either gravy or dessert…or perhaps just bits of rind or gristle that got in by mistake.
What is ambiguity, you might ask. I might answer thusly: “the existence simultaneously within a common frame of reference of two or more radically different, if not diametrically opposed, and equally valid ‘facts’ or ‘truths’. I might answer so. Or I might not. And that might be a good definition. Or not. In both cases, both are equally likely. Ambiguity’s fun, isn’t it?
Whatever it is and isn’t, life’s full of it. Indeed, one might do worse than to define life itself as a continuing state of unremitting ambiguity. And if this is so, it must follow that it ought surely to be one of the best studied subjects in all our schools, even the mediocre ones. Especially there.
But it is not. In your average run-of-the-mill college curriculum—even for the so-called Doctorate—one may search all day and find not one mention of ambiguity. I do not know why. Doubtless this is merely another (though especially telling) demonstration of the inability of Education to deal helpfully with life.
Some of my favorite ambiguities:
a. Without the ability to deal with ambiguity, one is almost certainly condemned to a life of triviality, brutishness, calamity even (though probably not actual tragedy, since genuine tragedy is itself a high and solemn form of ambiguity). Such people are also likely to be accounted SuccessfulPersonages in the public eye.
b. Those in whom life has inculcated an especially acute consciousness of ambiguity are seldom known to more than a handful or two of students or aficionados of poetry, music and art.
c. The ‘Good Life’ is usually at the expense of the goodness of others, whose lives are almost certainly disproportionately short and unpleasant.
d. The only thing truly guaranteed about life is its ultimate cessation. This is probably what most makes it worth the trouble—the certainty that even the most heroic and noble of efforts will in the realest sense “come to naught.”
e. Knowledge is power, and you can never get enough of it. By peculiar coincidence, it is also true that the more knowledge you have, the less likely you are of ever attaining to “power” in any useful sense of the word.
No. 23
…at some point…
Beginning sometime in probably each person’s life, there awakens, somehow, a little nexus of want, which is mostly quiet, voiceless, almost only a latent possibility, but now and then driving, insistent, raging even, a voracious hunger even. What is its objective, what does it want?
As much as anything, it seems to be looking for what might be called a moment of ultimate clarity, a point (or perhaps better, a hole) in time at which one is no longer consumed by doubt, uncertainty, cerebral ambivalency and emotional fog, is rather caught up, swathed in (what one presupposes might be) a kind of light-bath of certainty.
When this might happen, then would one be filled with a cosmic confidence—which, even though not articulatable in plain words, terms or conditions, would all the same infuse heart and spirit with the quality of comfort and security that is said to come with Faith.
Whatever that is, we are all privately on the lookout for it—even those of us who, others might imagine, have long been in possession of this ineffable experience. It is (I think) a necessary part of healthy adult life, further that life would not be entirely “life” if we were to actually encounter this moment. That is, (I suspect) we are supposed to keep this strange, nameless little hunger alive in us, never wholly satisfied, yet every now and then, in exceedingly small, ambiguous maybe-moments, almost (perhaps) brought to reality.
For: if it ever were to materialize entirely, how would we be able to keep on living the lives we all do have to keep on living, lives which, by comparison, would prove to be ever so much paler, more insubstantial, less, somehow, meaningful. Or…
Or: maybe this is merely what the word “hope” means?
Could be. Surely, we do have to have that.
History of Religion
June 16, 2008
History of Religion
In the beginning
time had no measure.
There were no gods.
Nor yet had apes come down
to press their toes into the mud.
Then came a day
when man stood up
and went abroad.
Then was the world no longer womb.
Among plenteous plants
and endless beasts,
man found himself
and knew he was small and few.
And lo, there were gods in the earth,
gods beyond number,
governing all and each.
And as the need was great,
so was there all about
a great communing.
But man desired more.
Through pain and loss he learned
device and artifice:
to lengthen the arm beyond its span,
to muscle the hand to wrest and burst,
to amplify voice and sharpen the eye.
In time his seed spread across the land.
And as forests thinned
and species dwindled,
the gods of manyness
found themselves retired
to restive homes
in ever higher places.
Or, supernova-like, they
collapsed in upon themselves,
and fell together,
a distant, brooding, dwarf
inscrutable One,
scarce seen or heard again.
Chuck Merrill
Nov. 85/2.Mar.08
The Second Coming
June 16, 2008
The Second Coming
He came in
looked around
as he took off his coat
hung it on a chair
said why
are you sitting here
sad like this
what is the matter
don’t you know
it is written
he will return
at least once
one day?
Why we replied
you just did.
Oh dear
he said
fingered
his collar button
which came off
rolled into
the middle of the room
round and round
in narrowing
circles.
Chuck Merrill
(revised)10.Mar.05
The Seasons
June 16, 2008
The Seasons
Spring: blossoms
In a sudden burst,
effortless perfections
beyond accounting
perfuse the air.
Autumn: woodsmoke
Sharp flavors,
exact balance of
bite and balm,
prickle the nose.
Summer: fireflies
Aswarm in the night,
tiny lanterns strive
to light the way
home from work.
Winter: snowflakes
Springing from nowhere,
splashes of ice
scrub the face,
quicken the heart.
While time is, every season
yields unique glories
to delight the sense,
soothe the spirit.
All these, intact and whole,
come forth for you as well.
Only let pass the useless
ghosts of the mind:
be not unquiet
and all is free.
Chuck Merrill
6.Jan.04/10.Mar.05/11.Mar.08
Talkin’ Cliches Blues
June 16, 2008
Talkin’ Cliches Blues
- Well, the chicken crossed the road
And he made it, all right—
But at the end of the tunnel,
Did he really see a light?
- Does it matter, I wonder,
About lights in the tunnel:
Did we have a lot of choice
When we were jammed down the funnel?
- At the other end,
When that time hit,
Did we see a smiling face
Or get dumped in the shit?
- Sure, you think this stuff’s crazy—
But you oughta take a look
At the stuff in the world
That’s not in any book.
- There’re things out there
That you wouldn’t believe,
And a good part of ‘em
Makes you cry and grieve.
- It’s generally agreed
That life’s a big crap-shoot:
If you don’t get good odds,
The table-boss don’t give a hoot.
- Does it get any better,
As your life continues,
Or does the craziness go on,
Just in new and different venues?
- To these really big questions
I don’t have a solution:
Things will come as they will—
Just go on with resolution.
- On life’s interstate,
Good traffic cops are rare;
When you have a breakdown,
Hope for someone who’ll share.
- As for me, thus far,
It’s been a pretty good run:
Had a lot of stress and strain—
But in between, damned good fun.
- What has made, all in all,
All the difference in my life,
Is the luck that I had
When you chose to be my wife.
- You’ve been the best part of me
For more years than I’d have guessed;
And so long as we’re together,
I can handle all the rest.
Sometimes one wonders…
June 16, 2008
Sometimes one wonders…
If God is indeed both good and omnipotent, how is it that…
1. the tastiest foods are generally the least healthy?
2. most “fast food” is mostly neither?
3. church is seldom either meaningful or uplifting?
4. the truest believers, in all major religions, are the most reliable source of man’s most grandiose inhumanities?
5. the most generously insufferable souls have the earliest guarantees of acreage in Heaven?
6. God is always on the side of the home team…in every town?
7. offenders of the most absurdly trivial statutes earn the full force of the law, whereas irredeemable monsters of every stripe are regularly out on bail while committing their latest senseless slaughter?
8. refinery breakdowns and similar “accidents” unfailingly coincide with any period of consumer need?
9. “liberal” is a tainted appellation, even though “liberals” have been responsible for disproportionate numbers of man’s most noteworthy achievements?
10. the “core economy” is routinely pronounced “healthy,” even as energy, health care and food costs continue to exceed record limits?
11. in any calamity at least partly owing to human causation, it is the innocent who suffer earlier, longer and more completely than the ones with real culpability?
12. one can buy TV channels till the numbers run out, but still wind up with a couple hours/week maximum of desirable programming?
13. the good weather is everywhere but where it’s really needed?
14. the smaller the family actually needing living space, the larger the house being erected for them?
15. the more gargantuan the SUV currently forcing you off the road, the smaller the brain of its operator?
16. the “greatest,” “most advanced” of all developed nations is
a) dead last in average mpg in its total vehicle fleet,
b) least willing to deliver affordable health care to its neediest citizens,
c) least troubled by increasing numbers of sub-poverty-level citizens,
but also
d) world leader in lethal weapons production and distribution, and
e) absolute tops in cranking out man’s deadliest mass-media drivel?
17. no “reality show” has even the remotest contact with reality?
18. in any lengthier hospital stay, the patient is assured of at least one night of dire misery because the nurse’s “belief system” precludes attending either to the patient’s comfort or the doctor’s explicit orders?
19. age sometimes does bring wisdom…approximately concurrent with the realization that one is too old to capitalize on it?
20. bullies, definitely not to be counted among the Meek, quite often do inherit the earth?
21. many will stand in long lines to pay all they have for what the know to be empty promises, all the while never doubting that the things of the highest lasting value should automatically come to them gratis?
22. the DNA of exceedingly simple creatures is frequently capable of registering very complex and important information, whereas that of humans has never figured out how to record quite simple data strings? How else explain bacteria able to learn resistance to the most recent antibiotics, but man’s enduring inability to cope with so ancient and basic a notion as the Golden Rule?
23. the surest measure of a statement’s “wisdom quotient” is its relative ineffectuality in affecting human actions?
To be sure: I don’t actually call God to account for these things. After all: if the stories are credible, He did make man in His own image. And it might take a long time yet to live that one down.
The Scholar
June 16, 2008
The Scholar
Scarcely a tragic figure he
in whom unleashed
the hound of mind
hunts down unknowing
in its lair.
Yet somehow
it is too bad
about him.
For in the name
of some thing holy
or just ephemeral
devotion to a butterfly
pursuit of perfect circles
he overlooks to love
the crass context itself
to which his monarch turns
when his time comes
to make the circle squared.
Chuck Merrill
10.Mar.05
