Enforcing Social Uniformity

Life Means Never Giving up on the Dance!

As in the desert,
A sand blows,
It's eastward wings carrying it's wonderous jewels
A lady, dancing no less, her face that of a thousand queens,

Drawing all those about into her deep cavern of mystery,
Her fiery presence both a blessing and a curse,
For there before you now stands the dancer of life.

No lines shall be cut, No rules shall be decided
A wind shall shape the gentle curves,
And water shall give it's shine
As the fire within glows brightly, herself a lady of time

Swords flash in the setting sun,
And veils twirl around her,
A commotion caused over her openess, her trueness

A woman, a woman, not to be free
Not to be opened, not to be seen
No, No, this is not how to be!
She shall not hidden, nor given as a bride
But open her soul, and hold out her pride

There is a dance, a dance to be free
I speak of this dance,
Because between you and me,
It's the dance of the ancients, and the dance of the new
Of the old and the young,
It's the dance of many a tongue,
For this is my dance, my chance to be free
And open and happy, and truely be me

-Jessica Millsaps

Those For Whom Appearances MUST Be Maintained

...and no one we can confess/talk to. If only "someone" understood.

The Postmodern Disassociative Socialist

...identification is, at its most radical, identification with the lost (or rejected) libidinal object? We BECOME (identify with) the OBJECT which we were deprived of, so that our subjective identity is a repository of the traces of our lost objects.

- Zizek, "Why is Wagner Worth Saving?"

This is a truly pluralistic moment in American poetry, one full of vitality as well as withdrawal. The palpable excitement in new poetry right now obviously answers a felt need, and provides its own brand of nourishment. The sheer inventiveness abounding is extraordinary. But this might not be the wrong occasion to pronounce the word “fashion.” Fashion is not in itself a negative force, but rather a perennial part of the vitality of culture. Fashion is the way that taste changes and then spreads, in a kind of swell or wave of admiration. The Waste Land was fashionable, and sideburns and Hemingway and war bonds and Sylvia Plath, and existentialism, and bell-bottoms. The danger in fashion is its lack of perspective, that it doesn’t always recognize the deep structure of whatever manners it is adopting. Almost by definition fashion also can gather thoughtless followers. Paul Hoover perceives the potential for this trouble in the preface to his anthology, Postmodern American Poetry: “The risk is that the avant-garde will become an institution with its own self protective rituals, powerless to trace or affect the curve of history.”

One can understand how dissociative poetry has become fashionable, celebrated, taught, and learned—it is a poetry equal to the speed and disruptions of culture. It responds to the postmodern situation with a joyful crookedness. And one can also see why poetics that assert sensible order (which, admittedly, can be predictable and reductive) have fallen a bit from fashion: after all, the pretense of order is, in some way, laughable. Art has to play, it has to break rules, to turn against its obligations, to be irresponsible, to recast convention. Some wildness is essential to its freedom. Yet every style has its shadowy limitation, its blind eye, its narcissistic cul-de-sac. There is a moment when a charming enactment of disorientation becomes an homage to dissociation. And there is a moment when the poetic pleasure of elusiveness commits itself, inadvertently, to triviality.

- Tony Hoagland, "Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment"

Crossing Boundaries? Or Walling Up the "Limbic" Crack/Stain that Represents the "Gaze" of "the Other"

Who Sets the Boundaries Within Which You Live Your Life?

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

- Robert Frost, "Mending Wall"

What would Cynical Love Look Like in its' Totality?

On Cynical Wisdom

Z-z-z-z... *startle*

Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken, neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate; but thou shalt be called Hephzibah and thy land Beulah: for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married.

Isaiah, 62:4

Anybody Got a Cigarette?

Absolute Dasein!
There is nothing outside the "meaningful" world of symbolism. For the most "truthful" thing one can say today is, "les non dupes errent!"