What should we do?

I was thinking of a scrap book. Little pieces found here and there, and then BW and AW can discuss them in each entry.

And of another L’Aube, and to look at the one from Friday morning.

What if we went back to the nostalgia sonnets?

What if we tried to do a poem of energy work? How would that go? Should be into the mystic while writing. How to go into the mystic via poetry? Seems critical for the project.

What about something with Regina Olsen and Soren Kierkegaard? And we could link it to that hilarious advert we made back in the day. But this time we’ll be more serious and we’ll try to weave the little bit of Fear and Trembling we’ve digested into it. We’ll read that last excerpt from the anthology. Someday we will try again to read the whole book, but it’s one where we read like more than half and we realize our minds have glazed over too much and we don’t know what’s going on or why. This seems to be our normal reaction to his oeuvre. It’s good, but then our brains can’t quite remember to pay attention and then we notice we hadn’t paid attention and then we’re all alone sixty percent of the way into the book, which was supposed to be a conversation between reader and writer.

For the scrap book, we start with the loom chapter from Moby Dick, and we think about political evil in this moment, like take pieces from that NY Times interview with the Heritage president, and also Lydia’s comment about suffering, and also this moment of Trump getting along with Obama and the question of is that all it will take for the US to continue with democracy? If Donald Trump can feel secure in that club of democratically elected presidents? I don’t know. Weird times. We’re stuck because we don’t understand exactly how evil this election result was. It seems like an evil choice, but time will tell, and the question of evil is confusing when we’re just talking about adjusting political boundaries, rather than what actual actions take place within the boundaries. It’s an interesting question, but so painful and lonely and boring, and also we don’t know how to approach, from what angle, we’re flustered, to tell the God’s Truth. Also the relationship between secularism and evil versus religiosity and evil is vexing us.

Humans have opinions; only the God knows.

We would like a project. But the Knight of Faith feels stalled. Maybe we should gather the pieces together and start weaving it into a full book. But maybe a little more Kierkegaard needs to be fathomed first.

And then there’s Walt Whitman and a poetry for the USA for now. Also Melville’s Civil War poems. Maybe an anthology of poems about democracy, and we can add some of ours and make some new ones.

But what to do right now? What ever happened to manufacturing Pure Love? How do we sell Pure Love in a way that is not corrupt? In a sense, if you make money as an artist and your art is true, you already sell Pure Love for a living. But everyone thinks their art is true and everyone would like money, so the matter becomes rather hazy and you get messes like how they wrecked the lawn steps in front of the museum, and replaced them with unpleasant weeds and gravel and so now no one can sunbathe there or otherwise enjoy the steps in front of this public good, which I imagine our tax dollars all give some meaningful fraction of a cent too on the regular; and now!, this big rusty bunch of scrap metal welded together at random, passed off (from one fool to a committee of fools) as “art”, and plopped down in what used to be a nice lawn and is now iffy gravel lands with weeds encroaching on a couple sorry wooden benches. What’s going to happen? I will tell you: Someone is going to get tetanus, or at least their head cleaved, and NO ONE is going to grow in their inner communion with Truth = Beauty = Goodness = Fair Play < Love. No one! Because it's not beautiful to weld together pieces of rusty metal into a random lump with jagged edges and beams sticking out this way and that, and force such wasted efforts onto public spaces with emperor's new clothes suggestions of it being "art". But we digress. Anyway, whatever happened to the Pure Love sales game? We could use some ready cash around here. In case we need to go to Spain or something. In any case, Skullvalley after Whistletown can remain at Somewhere Sometime Wall Street -- the temporal-vagueness alone keeps us safe. Why also the spacial vagueness? How does that even make sense? And when was the last time we were in Wall Street? And how can one get there now that they've dismantled the Fulton-to-Fulton Ferry? But this is all by the by. The point is we should be doing something, but what? How many people are busily doing things that actually shouldn't be done, that would be better left undone? Look at traditional cheap-starch-fat-sugar-drowned-in-artificial-additives fast food and junk food industries: entire industries dedicated to creating a product that should not be created; still-thriving, and also (economic bonus?) still helping keep hospitals and dialysis centers around the world occupied. And then here we are with the only truly worthwhile product ever, and we can't even turn a dime. It makes one think; or at least feel like a thought would be appropriate, if only our minds could extend beyond this sad-sack torpor. Maybe we could resurrect Ray Croc and put his all-American can-do pep and business-genius to better use this time around. What should we do? And in what order? Well, everything depends upon going into the mystic, so let's try to reach for projects and moments that bend us that way. Author: Bartleby Willard Editor: Amble Whistletown Copyright: Andy Watson Oh, but remember our funny line from when we first saw how the Brooklyn Museum had replaced those charming floating lawns with dull gravel and itchy chaos: "They listened to some fool. Story of human history." That was so funny; but now they've revenged themselves on us by adding that strange Ode to Tetanus, And Related Agonies sculpture, and also by electing Donald Trump, but this time with an administration that seems much less likely to tell him he can't do xyz because we live in a happy healthy democracy, not another cruel and boring autocracy. You might say that these were not the same fools, but we don't count humans as beginning here and ending there, we count them all as flows of matter and mind, and we see foolish flows as foolish flows. And these rivers of folly flowing and chugging and gurgling and glugging and chafing at and splashing insolently out of their banks: All the same: living in and through and for human ideas and feelings, rather than in and through and for the Love that alone Is. But this all by the by. Oh, But this all by the by needs to go in the scrap book along with Wie dem auch sei Watch out!, they'll be no mystery left to our oeuvre. Let it ride, if our oeuvre can't giggle and sparkle beyond our influences, it's not worth bothering with anyway. Wie dem auch sei!* *[Be that as it may!]