dalelans

[dalelans]

The seeker

What is the belief called where you believe in a god or gods or so-called spiritual realm (you are not an atheist or an agnostic), but you are unsure of which account is right, if any are. Probably they could all be better.

You are interested in learning which is right, because you want to know the truth about god. You dont want to be mistaken about god. If anything is hell on earth it is being mistaken about what is of god (what is good) and what is not.

You could be convinced, you could see, but you haven’t and you wont say you have until you have.

What is this belief called?

Eugene

[dalelans]

The profound weirdness of our predictament is often forgotten. The tragic comedy of these upright apes, struck by something like an angel with a sword.

[dalelans]

James 5:1-5

[In this time of tumult and despondence, it is important to remember how old and even sacred the radical ideal is. As a demonstration, I am going to do some translations of relevant passages of scripture. While the KJV is the pinnacle of English style, I went for a more modern tone. This declaration of holy class war is from James, the brother of Jesus ]

Now listen, billionaire! Weep for the misery that is coming for you. Your money has gone rotten, moths have eaten your clothes. Your money has blisters all over it. Your money testifies against you, and its disgusting blisters will jump to your skin and eat you, engulf you in fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look fucker! The wage slaves who have raised your stocks to heaven are unpaid and cry out against you. Their cries have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived in luxury and indulgence. You have fattened your own self for the day of slaughter.

[dalelans]

If youre reading this youre in hell. Put your phone away. Go look at a tree or a cloud or the moon until the anxiety subsides.

[dalelans]

If Jesus can’t come back to us just yet could we at least have a St Francis? could we at least have a St Julian?

[dalelans]

I feel alienated from the world lately, like the big boulder is just rolling away, and we are watching it, left behind, trying to understand what we just saw.

Eugene

[dalelans]

on demons 1

demonology is the science of evil. the science of what it is doing to this world and why it is doing it, and who is doing it. if you deny the existence of demons, consider how fucked up the world is. not entirely, but commonly. who or what keeps it that way? who stops the better angels of our nature from just winning? you can say its this or that -ism that you dont like but once you get all those ideas instantiated in all of those human minds driving human bodies who’s to say its not alive?

Eugene

[dalelans]

Food for thought at the precipice of 2025

So far as democracy becomes or remains Catholic and Christian, that democracy will remain democratic. In so far as it does not, it will become wildly and wickedly undemocratic. Its rich will riot with a brutal indifference far beyond the feeble feudalism which retains some shadow of responsibility or at least of patronage. Its wage-slaves will either sink into heathen slavery, or seek relief in theories that are destructive not merely in method but in aim; since they are but the negation of the human appetites of property and personality - GK Chesterton on America

[dalelans]

Christmas poem for the third awakening

’they wandered like sparks from a furnace hitherto contained, the furnace of the abnormal love of god’ -GKC

With a strange metal implement given to him by his father on some long past winter birthday, a man tries once again to start a fire. Fingers frozen, he fumbles the pieces until sparks shoot out and catch on the driest parts of the damp wood. Will the glow be sustained? Will it grow? Will it roar to life before the icy night falls and the dark creatures of the wood wake to prowl? Eugene

[dalelans]

The individual macromolecules composing my body are numberless. I vow to synthesize and degrade them all.

[dalelans]

Train poems

The train to New London

Blue boxcars, bright graffiti, orange and white. Common reeds, ten feet tall, topped with purplish straw panicles.  The old steel bridge groans as the train passes over a saltwater bay. A young woman says to her partner that she someday expects to be a mother.

I report the impressions that the light gives me. I have some kind of wild mirror in my mind,  Eyes resting in dug-out caves of bone. The one who carved them is trying to startle me out of my depression with a flock of birds. The one who renders these impressions has made the ocean still and golden in the late morning light. 

Small gods

As we break into the universe, plowing it like soil, Chewing it up with our valenced interpretations, Raising it to our eyes and then throwing it back over our shoulders,  We unearth all the small gods, like worms or weed seeds or beady black insects. We watch as they begin their work on our lives. Quickly they are magnified to immense proportions, Duplicated from mind to mind, like the image of a torch in a room of mirrors.  They attain omnipresence and willfulness and a sort of invisibility.  A part of them rises like vapor  to be seated in the pantheon. 

[dalelans]

their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth - kurt vonnegut

[dalelans]

Don’t just do something, stand there.

[dalelans]

Democracy 3

I am told to keep faith in a world that worships decay and misuse. Let us gather in empty lots where no flags fly, where no markets operate, and remember ourselves.

[dalelans]

democracy 2

How do we govern ourselves? How do we hold power to account? Go ahead and vote in the booth if it calms your nerves. Your real vote is your life. If you are a free person, you vote for the things that you buy, for the things that you do with your brief life, for the ideologies with which you structure your mind. If you cannot live without buying things that you resent, without spending your life in the service of evil or ugliness or banality, without yielding the narrative arc of your life to an unseen other, then you are a slave, and its time to set yourself free. Eugene

[dalelans]

livestock guardian dog your bark and your bite they comfort me.

[dalelans]

democracy

Someday we will have a democracy Where the needs of the land and its inhabitants are discussed frankly, without euphemism or equivocation.

We will debate with eachother about the real issues of our lives. We will teach and provide for eachother And the world will flourish With freedom and beauty As it did in Eden.

but today is not that day. Not here. I throw my sad bean into the rotten soup and pray. Weep America for what we have plundered and wasted.