Troy-Albany Trance-Formations

I’ve been instructed to make it so, to make my volume Doom Sonnets for After the vEmpire a published reality. In any case, here’s my Introduction. 

Bring it on, I say, The End of the World As We Know It (aka “TEOTWAWKI”)!  Let’s have a par-tay.

I realize some people will spraaaaawk at me (in other words, spout some drivel to which I would say “May I repeat back to you what I hear you saying?  You’re saying ‘Spraaaaaaaaaawk Sprawk Sprawk Sprawk Sprawk’ (with appropriate finger-pointing, of course), “Sprawk Spraaaaaaaawk Spraaaaaaaawwwwwk!’  Does that sum it up?  Oh, I forgot the other part—‘You see these three fingers pointing back at me?  Because I’m not doing my work?  Well, you just ignore those asswipe, and focus on my beautiful distracting index finger.  I’m going to make you pay 3-card belief monte whether you like it or not, bub!  My beautiful index finger points at YOU because you’re only 1/3 of the jerk that I am.  So I’m pulling lazy rank on you, and you’re gonna get it!’  Yes, I think that about sums it up.  Don’t you?”

And yes, the anger does course through me.  There is outrage in these words.  A transformative outrage that is as much about the spraaaawker in me as it is in you and the Sarah (Lee?) Palins and Billy Kristols of this world.  They are another me, as are you.  Not in an arrogant sense, mind you, but in the Dean Radin sense that we are all entangled.

The word “Doom” in these pages is in part ironical in its usage.  Believe it or not, I’m really rather an optimist and quite hopeful about this odd moment in time.  My journey toward this place of bemused psychological embrace of this current era has been a convoluted one. 

Like many people, I have wrestled with various addictions.  One might say that in addition to some of the other terms bandied about for the American Empire™ such as “kyriarchy,” “pathocracy,” “thugocracy,” “kakistocracy” (government by the worst elements) and my own terms vEmpire and necronomy, that we live in an addictocracy.  The inmates have long run the asylum, and who better to stand as its emblem than Dick Cheney?  I mean, really!

On all sorts of websites I log into, there’s a lot of talk about how all these dark forces are scattering to the winds.  The Empire of Vampires (hence “vEmpire”) is suffering from an onslaught of sunlight, and cunts[1] in mid-cunting of some unsuspecting victims’ life energy, combust in the sun’s warm and golden rays.  I too am hopeful of this process of light hitting vampires full front continuing unabated.

But that means the vampire inside is also feeling it.  I have come to see my etheric self as a semi-permeable membrane, and when things are all right and running smoothly, very little gets attached.  I can let irritants go through me with ease.  Now, that doesn’t happen often, at least not without assistance.  I must tend to a spiritual practice that helps me to identify and release the toxins that hold me back, pin me on the mat with paralyzing rage or despair or the desire to not exist.  And I need to talk things through sometimes.  Yes, I do have a therapist.  And I do have a religion that pushes me onward, and deeper into surrender.  I wish to fully surrender into ecstasy and sexual potency.  But I still get stuck in powerless anger and suffering.  And some of that is supposed to happen, I realize.

Aren’t you feeling that way these days, at least off-and-on?  No?  Then for God Herself’s sake, put this book back!  These words will be LOST on your sorry ass!

But for those of you who empathize, who dream of a life where you can really be your true and naked self—even literally to the point of walking down to the corner shop in your birthday suit and not batting an eye—and who wish to affirm the authentic Self in each person, each animal, each object you encounter, you may still not want to look through the poems on these pages.  There is humor in them—check out Doom Sonnet #11 for starters.  And there are other poems in here that offer a strange celebration of this life. 

But there is a wistful recognition, my friends, that the world we grew up is no longer.  Whether you’re like me, a Generation X “post-Kennedy’ (by 3 months) birthday fellow who grew up listening to The Police, Styx, and Soft Cell, for example; or someone in their 30s today, who was more into EMF and Alanis Morisette in their high school days, or someone now into Snow Patrol, etc., you might be feeling a similar sort of nostalgia for 2008 already.  In my opinion, the road to hell in these now United In Name Only States o’Merica (UINOSM) was fully embraced with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.  Jimmy Carter’s tepid presidency seems to have been the end of something or other, alas something that is not much missed.  The rumblings for the Reagan “Party and After-Party of the UNIOSM” began long ago, probably way back during the corporatalitarian tantrums of the Gilded Age some 150 years ago.  But the composite Enlightenment-Iroquois Nation inspired experiment loosely labeled “America” was a model easily compromised.

Robert Pirsig in Lila, his follow-up to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance observed that it was actually the Haudenosaunee vision of a working governance structure that attracted thousands of immigrants here, whether they knew it or not.  The natives of these shores were still in touch with aspects of human nature that have been only partially buried in our psyches by the coarse and papered-over attempts at socializing and breaking us into smaller and fractured pictures of our true Selves, to make us “fit” to live in urban/suburban infernos.  Deep in the way-back machine of our DNA, we all have memories of living close to the land.  While that wasn’t always easy, we had some deeper satisfactions of feeling held in divine hands as evidenced by nature’s gifts.  The natives here stirred those remembrances, but as always with vEmpire, these ideas and longings must be squelched so that …. Well, “we must make steady progress, progress, progressprogressspraaaaaaaawk-ress” and you get the picture.

The thugs of our kakistocracy wear a lot of different plumages.  You will see some evidenced in the Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets herein, as well as in some of the remaining poems that fill the rest of this little volume.  We all probably know someone who is a local version of Glenn Beck.  Heck, here in Troy, New York[2], we have an administration filled with whackos!  And just like with those “magnificent men in their flying machines,” we enjoy watching the clowns in their cars galumphing about “so serious” as they careen about with their chins jutting out leading man style, and telling the rest of us where to get off.

Some would sit up alarmed that people such as this hold public office.  Has it not always been thus, however?  There have always been the obstreperous and the pathocratic.  The Algonquins had a words for this sort of person:  “windigo” which loosely translates to either “vampire” or “cannibal.”  It gets to be difficult sometimes to pick out those who are pushing evil policies from those who serve as the useful idiots, the minions who whore themselves out so cheaply and completely.  And yes, there clearly is danger afoot, though … it feels quite a bit Disney if you ask me.  The malevolence has a decided “Captain Hook” feel.  And having been cast in a production of Peter Pan myself, I can say that it’s a fun part to play!

I do get a kick out of their insanity, much in the same way my mother and her brothers would enjoy telling stories about their drunk dad, and my grandfather Cliff Maxson.  He was an abusive, belligerent drunk, filled with all sorts of hate and biliousness, and yet also a wounded fellow who had seen quite a load of disappointment.  And Grandpa Cliff was a terror to his children and to his wife.  Near the end of his life, he got so violent with my Grandmother, that my uncles had to get involved.  The man got so apoplectic with rage, he gave himself a stroke. 

Devils Lake, North Dakota did not rearrange itself to suit the town drunk.  Likewise, as Franklin Schaeffer observed on the Rachel Maddow show, we don’t rearrange ourselves to suit the village idiots.  Having said that, even though I try not to coddle weakness, I do see that it’s not up to me to cast the Spraaaawkers to the side.  Just as I went through and continue to undergo transformations, people can and do slowly wake up to their addictive insanities, and start to ask the really important question: 

What sort of life do I want for myself and my relatives and loved ones to lead, anyway?

So, these doom sonnets are as much about an end as they are a beginning.  In these 14 line ABAB-CDCD-EFEF-GG and ABBA-ABBA-CDE-CDE poems, you will find a number of difficult observations as well as some bemusement and some genuine dreaming for a better life for us all. 

Hopefully some of you will be inspired to take action or to write your own post-Doom sonnets or plays or filmscripts or youtube videos or what have you. 

I feel a glorious new world is near.  There will be labor pangs however.  It won’t be an easy birth, not that this sort of thing is ever easy.  Let us pray that nature brings us through it all with as little difficulty as possible.

 

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[1] I know some people will find this language offensive.  But rest assured in “Frostwolf-ese” the c-word has a different meaning than the more common parlance.  Those who know me get sick of this, but I use the “c-word” in a way that is more like the British usage, though it’s also a mite different.  Through the processes of onomatopoeia and synecdoche, (q.v.), I like to use this analogy:  cunt is to vampire as grunt is to peon.  I’m sure educated people will understand the syllogism, even if they find it a mite disconcerting.

[2] My partner Joseph Dalton & I have a little joke about our three Hudson-Mohawk Valley cities thus:  “Albany is ugly, Troy is half-assed, and Schenectady is corrupt.”  Those of you who live here, might smile wryly with this pithy sentiment.