drawer full of doors

in the waning day of the amnesia

we encountered the one who wanted to be stopped

and his voice was deep and his voice reminded us of something

that tickled the mind that tickled the throat

to a wanting to speak, near sobbing near laughing

as if our whole chest were a bottle of tears.

Will you come there with me to the home furnishing store

of the mind, will you join me, letting me brush a hand

against your lips as if by mistake though we know

if the phrase on purpose ever meant anything it meant that

where doors are piled on doors on top of each other

would you like to buy a door? and walk through it

to find me standing there waiting for the next word?

What Remains

Alexander indeed overran, with men and horses, some countries of the planet. But countries, and things of which countries are made, elements, planet itself, laws of planet and of men, have passed through this man as bread into his body, and become no longer bread, but body. So all this mammoth morsel has become Plato. He has clapped copyright on the world. But the mouthful proves too large. Boa constrictor has good will to eat it. But he is foiled. He fails abroad in the attempt and biting gets strangled. The bitten world holds the biter fast by his own teeth. There he perishes. Unconquered nature live on and forgets him. So it fares with all. So must it fare with Plato. No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains.

– RW Emerson “Plato, or the Philosopher”

Stick with a Cup, Cup With a Stick In It

the priciest signature on the document was Button Gwin

the sad benighted girl in Wisconsin wore a bon

the picture of the person Mickey hated dangled chestward in a lock

it it it

in the story the son who would not kill smelled something rot

the remnants of the indigenes sold a souvenir mocas

in a cloister for sick children a consumptive boy sang mat

in in in

As of an Industrial Strength Adhesive, Just Now Available in Stores

Richie says: I want to have an idea of a spool of thread

That has different faces of all my friends on it.

Lost, lost, Richie, I’m lost in the present. All I have are vague memories of the past, very few and inaccurate.

Jeannie said you made me your mystery girl, but I wasn’t mysterious to me.

I wish I was mysterious to me.

Lost, lost, Jeannie, I lost you, I lost the mystery, I lost the past. What are you gonna do?

Richie I’ve got to tell you, we lost touch, but if we hadn’t, I would have to tell you

If you you want to have that idea I think you’ve had it.

Jeannie, I should have said, if you want to be mysterious to yourself let me be mysterious to you, that’s how it works. But of course I didn’t know that then. I couldn’t.

Richie says: What if you imagine at the bottom of a closet, a diagonal cut of a rubber gorilla?

Made, like Jeannie, in Hong Kong? What about that? I have added a very personal element.

But he hadn’t. It was like ocean. It was like star. It was like a logical connective: and or or.

Maybe a bloody one or one that gets blood on the sentences it connects: XOR.

I say: I don’t want to call attention to things but

If attention comes to the things on its own, good.

Whee-whee-whee not squealing but groaning. The bus breaks on Lexington Avenue.

Me, Richie, Jeannie and the strangers. Each of the strangers looks at us and thinks

From the point of view of those three teenagers WE are the strangers.

And to our dead selves in the year a million billion we are we will be alive.

Philosophical Methods

1. Do your best to be open to what life has to teach you.
2. Be aware that you will make mistakes.
3. Resist urge to over-generalize because this can be a form of self-deception. EG it is not true that everybody who does their best to be open to what life has to teach them will go right — some will make terrible mistakes.
4. Be aware of self-deception, but as far as possible try to understand this as a matter of internal partial perceptions or unintegrated parts of self grabbing the mic too much. IE self-deception is not “from the devil” or an error to feel guilty about, although it’s not perfect and not ideal.
5. Be open to other people both in books and more importantly in real life. Make a real effort to take them as seriously as yourself. IOW resist us vs. them and team thinking in favor of a genuine effort to understand — both cognitively and emotionally imaginatively and practically.
6. Have a lively awareness of paradox and gaps — try to lean into and understand the un-understandable.
7. Be alert to a polyphony of modes of knowing. It’s not just books, it’s also practical skills, tradition, the arts of love and peace, imagination, story etc. etc. etc.

A Sweetheart: Boustrophedon Jones

There was a tiny ant larva like a grain of rice that hatched in one of the larva chambers in an ant colony under the outfield of a baseball field in Fort Lee, New Jersey and it had Divine God Consciousness, but it did not know it, cause it was just an ant larva, so Boustrophedon Jones as he was combing through that region of spacetime bought the field, excavated the whole ant colony with a WARN 85133 ProVantage 60″ Bucket Conversion, took it back to the field office, gave the ant larva the whole Avalokitesvara 11-head package, taught each of the heads 11 esoteric wisdoms and means of effective compassion (that means 11 EWs and 11 MECs per head, making a total of 242 skills) and it effloresced and effloresced some more, manifesting universes and Bhumi Fields some of which, due to recursion Boustrophedon Jones himself was born within and achieved the desire to help, which he expressed then and there that very day in sweetheart fashion with the divine god conscious ant larva.

This is just one of the stories about Boustrophedon Jones.

But if you caught him on a bad day he could be a real jerk.

But he seldom had a bad day, maybe one day in a century.

All the other days he was sweet as pistachio pie.

Why you gotta focus on the one bad day, friends?

That ant larva still is going strong!

And he hasn’t even yet had his metamorphosis!

Roob-A-Doob-Doob, Three Men in a Tube

-Who do you think they be?

-The Butch, uh

-Yup

-The Bach, uh

-Ya

-The Botch-a-ka-baka, All In A Tube Squeezed On ME!

-I think you got Mixed Up

-I know I got Mixed Up

-With What?

-Yes.

-With you?

-Yes.

-I don’t think that Botch-a-ka-baka is in the real thing.

-I don’t think it is Either!

-What do you think is the real thing?

-It is like that poem about “Scooby Dooby Doo”, but it is different.

-It is about that dog with the scabs?

-Ya. Scabba-Dabba-Da.

-I love that dog.

-But he has too many scabs.

-He has so many scabs if you want to count them you need…

(TOGETHER)

A SCABACUS!

THE END

The Laws of Thought and the Laws of Money

There are supposed to be three laws of thought, namely the principle of identity (a=a), the law of the excluded middle (a is p or a is not p: one or the other is true) and the principle of non-contradiction: it is never the case that a given thing is both p and not p at the same time and in the same respect.

These all are ways of thinking that make sense when applied to money.

Something worth a dollar is worth a dollar.

Something is either worth a dollar or not.

Nothing is both worth a dollar and not worth a dollar.

But they are not true in real life. Is a kiss worth a dollar or not worth a dollar? Well — simply asking the question shows you don’t quite know what a kiss is. Is something that is worth a kiss worth a kiss? Depends upon the kiss and what the something is, and who is kissing and who is being kissed. Nothing is both worth a kiss and not worth a kiss? Well that’s obviously false — so many things are both worth a kiss and not worth a kiss.

The thing that’s worth noting is once you get money on the brain the logic of money seems to force out considerations and values and things and aspects of life that can’t be measured in money. It starts to seem a bit precious or poetic or froo-froo to say that. But that’s just the force of so much money being spent and used to push people around. Actually it’s just true that money isn’t everything, and that the three “laws of thought” aren’t laws of thought at all. They are laws of a particular kind of thought, that a particular kind of person would like us to obey.

We don’t have to.