A Website of the Radical Imagination
An editorial in Haaretz…
The fighting in Gaza must stop. Not tomorrow. Today.
All available resources must immediately be directed to stopping the unprecedented famine that is underway in that embattled sliver of land that has already seen unspeakable suffering. As bad as the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 was, the people and government of Israel must now recognize that today not just the country’s security but its legitimacy are at stake as never before.
View this post on Instagram
View this post on Instagram
I used drugs—marijuana, LSD and ecstasy—in the Sixties but I never thought of them as therapeutic. The author, Seth Lorinczi, and his new autobiographical book, Death Trip, A Post Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir, has opened my eyes as never before to the idea that psychedelics can help heal the trauma of the Holocaust. In Lorinczi’s telling of the story, psychedelics rescued him, psychological speaking, from the legacy of Fascism, World War II and the extermination of millions of Jews.
Brothers in the Beloved Community: The Friendship of Thich Nhat Hanh and Martin Luther King Jr. by Marc Andrus. Parallax Press (Berkeley, California). 207pps. $24.95
Lotus Girl: My Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and America by Helen Tworkov. St. Martin’s Essentials (New York). 325 pps.
Marc Andrus, an Episcopal bishop, and Helen Tworkov, the founder of Tricycle, the first Buddhist magazine in America, both begin their books with the same event. Andrus writes:
On June 12, 1963, many people around the world, including the president of the United States, opened their newspapers and looked with shock at a photograph of a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, seated cross-legged in a posture called the lotus position, engulfed in flame. Thich Quang Duc is composed and upright. The revered monk, in his mid-sixties, had been soaked in gasoline by a younger monk and had then struck a match to set himself on fire.
I found the first book of R. H. Blyth’s four volume set, Haiku, (originally published between 1949-1952) in a used book store on St. Mark’s Place. If haiku seems no more pertinent to you than, say, heraldry—one more subject about which even an informed person “need not be ashamed to know nothing”[1]—you may be mollified to hear I had an excuse to check Eastern Culture since I was Christmas shopping for a nephew who’s on his way to Japan this spring. The book’s cover—“Oriental brown simple rough peasant cloth”—got me to open “the Blyth Haiku bibles” (pace Allen Ginsberg, Allen Ginsberg). I fell in…
“Plop!”
To quote the last line of “the most famous haiku” with frog-and-pond as translated by Blyth—scholar-gypsy who brought the East to Beats and Salinger (see J.D.’s bow to Blyth in “Seymour, An Introduction”: “…haiku, but senryu, too…can be read with special satisfaction when R. H. Blyth was on them. Blyth is sometimes perilous, naturally, since he’s a highhanded old poem himself, but he’s also sublime.”)
Dedicated to him, whom I regard “as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things.”
We have a great deal of critical writing on Victorian novels—the grand products of George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, et. al.—but not as many accounts of how readers come to read these novels. In 1979, an entire cohort, especially of women, would have pounced on Jane Eyre after reading Sandra Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s fetchingly titled feminist study The Madwoman in the Attic. At that time, I was otherwise absorbed (incidentally, like the heroine of Jane Eyre) in reading classical German literature. But now, nearly half a century later, I am with Jane, struck by its power and beauty.
This is a chapter from Blyth’s first book, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics.[1]
…
From Aristotle down to Arnold it was considered that a great subject was necessary to the poet. Arnold says that the plot is everything. It is useless for the poet to
imagine that he has everything in his own power; that he can make an intrinsically inferior action equally delightful with a more excellent one by his treatment of it.
Wordsworth stands outside this tradition by instinct and by choice. He chooses the aged, the poor, the idiot, the vagrant, but does not endeavour to make them “delightful” at all.
Excerpted from Kirkup’s introduction to The Genius of Haiku: readings from R. H. Blyth on poetry, life and Zen. Published by the British Haiku Society.
I first became aware of the works of Blyth in 1952 or 1953, when I held the Gregory Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Leeds. It was also a time when I when I was discovering Chinese and Japanese poetry and philosophy, and reading books on Zen Buddhism that were beginning to proliferate in those days, and to have a certain influence on the Beat poets of America. whom I barely knew, though I had heard of Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and the City Lights poets. I was also reading the works of Daisetz Suzliki and Alan Watts, the gurus of the Beat Generation.
Spooning, our dog and cat doze in the sun.
Tails twitch and amber eyes close in the sun.
Here in Northeast Pennsylvania, we have entered that time of the year when yellow blossoms are coming to life on the forsythia and daffodils, and the dead limbs of trees are falling to the ground on the wind. It is one of the rites of spring that the flowers catch your eye, and the dead branches catch your feet.
The road to Lisburn serpentines through rolling Pennsylvanian farm land. At its near start, it anchors a capital bedroom community etched out of GI Bill housing built after the war, what a war. At its far end, there isn’t much but a firehouse serving charity bbq chicken in the summer and a rope swing stretching out over the Yellow Breeches, also best in summer. Green grasses bathed in the smell of clipped chlorophyll, young corn just breaking to sunlight, dips that drive you into the earth and then just as quickly rise up to give you the illusion of flight: to travel Lisburn Road is to experience freedom, the soul-freeing kind of freedom, where you scream in your head that it’s great to be alive. And you’re right.
Or, at least it used to be that way.
The famous line is that you can’t go home again. That’s a lie, of course. You can always get there if you have Waze or Google Maps. If you look on one of those aps, Lisburn in all its glorious summer glow still lives. It’s just that Lisburn Road is gone: someone killed it with a rotary in the road’s rhythm.
Actually, two rotaries, one right after the other.
Before there was an airport in Philadelphia, planes used to land in Central Airport across the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey. Weber’s Hof Brau restaurant was at the airport. They had outdoor fights there, too.
My father loved to tell about how he was at the fights at the airport one night and every time this one dude got hit with a good shot, his cup would fly out and the ref would call a halt while his corner men retrieved the reluctant cup and gathered around their warrior to reinstall it.
My one experience as a ring announcer took place at outdoor fights, too, and there was an “incident,” shall we say, at that show, too.
Wesley Hogan’s felt appreciation of Tracy Chapman’s Grammy duet with Luke Combs (here) sent your editor back to another crossover move by the Man of Country, Morgan Wallen. I’m reposting the video of his duet with Lil Durk (along with a short comment on it below). Wallen’s & Durk’s mannish boys’ stance seems backward compared to Chapman’s and Combs’ progressive politesse. Yet the rougher guys’ vernacular — “I’d’ve stayed my ass at home” — brings home the less than colloquial lyrics — …”I’ll get a promotion…we’ll buy a bigger house and move to the suburbs” — that undercut (slightly) Chapman’s attempt to make a song of the people, by the people, for the people. You need to keep an ear out for how underdogs talk now if you mean to write to/for them. I’m glad Wes Hogan is out to make sure we don’t forget C’ and C’s award show turn, but Wallen’s & Durk’s forgotten collab belongs to a river of song that runs below all the Broadways in this world — deep beneath the attention of the gentility. B.D.
This chapter from Peter Linebaugh’s Stop Thief: The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance opens with aristos’ charming spin on the human right to rest. But Linebaugh isn’t one to go on in defense of laziness. Near the end of this short piece, he invokes bookish Reds who once insisted a “Communist is a mere bluffer, if he has not worked over in his consciousness the whole inheritance of human knowledge.”[1] Linebaugh has surely put in work on that score. The fact that his essay is a preface to the Korean edition of one of his earlier books stands as a tribute to his worldliness. Linebaugh goes wide in this chapter (as ever) though he begins in bed…
Of the aristocratic and stylish Mitford sisters, Jessica provides us with the Lazy Interpretation of Magna Carta beloved by sluggards everywhere. As a lovely communist (two of her sisters were fascists) she was disowned by her family and fell from the social peaks of English aristocracy to the Dickensian depths of the Rotherhithe docks in London in 1939. Unable to pay the rent she and her husband lived in fear of the process-server who they avoided by going in disguises which the process server soon came to recognize. “Esmond had a theory that it was illegal and in some way a violation of Magna Carta to serve process on people in bed.”[1] So they stayed in bed all day and then all night, and again all the next day, and all the next night under the covers, before deciding to immigrate to America. (Tom Paine, too, thought that independent America was a realization of Magna Carta).
…The depressed whore wakes up for her flight before dawn. Nothing ever good comes from waking up this early, she thinks: funerals, surgeries, insomnia, and work. She slept in her makeup because fuck putting it on so early. Still, it’s important to look hot at the airport: a space of surveillance, commerce, vague intrigue. You never know who’s watching you, always traveling under an assumed, or fragmentary, or nightmarish identity. In the Lyft she subtracts the cost of the ride from what she’ll be earning, also the friend looking after her cat, the work she could have gotten staying at home, the unquantifiable toll on her physical and mental health, and yet to remain still is never an option, not anymore, in this world in which stillness equals paralysis, inanition.
…She’s going to a mid-sized, charmless city in the Deep South. She’s looked up things to do in the time she’ll have off, which really isn’t much, just a long afternoon before her return flight, but she knows she won’t step foot outside the hotel for her almost two-day stay, she’ll be swallowed up by that cold, bright glare (the glare that afflicts schizo-amnesiac killers in a David Lynch movie) that never leaves you even when you close your eyes at night. But it doesn’t matter. After a certain point every place, like every client, is the same.
Macky Sall — Sénégal’s outgoing president (Inshallah) — has played one Trump card after another over the past year, as he’s tried to retain power. Sall got brazen about his contempt for his country’s democratic process a couple years ago when he started hinting broadly that he would run for a 3rd term, though that’s illegal under Sénégal’s Constitution which only allows a president two terms in office. He prepped for what he assumed would be his permanent ascendancy by defaming and jailing his main political opponent, a young firebrand named Ousmane Sonko who’s been exposing corruption among Sénégal’s political class for more than a decade.[1] When Sonko and his partisans refused to fade out quietly, Sall came out as a petty Big Man trashing the country’s (relatively) free press, unleashing violence against protestors and conflating democratic dissent with Islamist terror.
Originally published on February 14 at Notes from the Underground.
The Russian regime has finally extinguished the life of Alexei Navalny. Navalny was being held in a remote labour camp and, according to the prison authorities earlier today, died while taking a walk — like you do.
why do it in poetic form?
because in an infinite variety of ways
that reside in the breasts of all living souls
any solution to the Fascist trend in all states
pulses and grooves inside each of us
we hear the basic call of consciousness & conscience
