On moving things from one place to another May 7, 2006

Work on the book which led me to start blogging as a 'yak-shaving' activity, stalled halfway; I wasn't feeling connected to where I was writing it from. Essays tending to lack narrative constraint due to overambition, containing not quite enough and also too much. As i had a bit of poetry going on already, i thought i'd try to translate one. No-one has time to read work of serious length, attention is parcelled into smaller packages, even a few thousand words will probably be a chore. So this is bite-size sub-philosophy.

On Moving Things from One Place to Another

One enjoys a taste for other peoples' tastes,
tastes for things one might otherwise have never
realised existed. The other reasons to gather here
are more pragmatic; this is how energy is distributed.

You and I live in a machine for living in; space
divides us as much as it unites us; fair
in your distribution, water and waste
flowing through one place, data and energy
undivided until needed. If to be fair
is to leave an unsatisfactory compromise,
please do not be fair with me.

The sheltered citizens of this mind city
are distantly crowded about one another,
taught an infrastructure that provides
us with a necessary means to a null entity.
Given what we have, look how we have optimised
each center core; dull plenty, a pace of growth
frankly cancerous, massive size, great speed and mobility.

The city we get to build together is built
from an old machine, previously complete,
made when we were less able to communicate.
Mobility loosens our bonds to our labour
and to our relations; we are transported
into a new condition. I move towards
what my life wants, or move it towards me.
We can help each other to work best; to share
is to move things from one place to another.

As we become bigger and better, we find better
ways to get more things that we want near to us,
get the things we don't want to get away from us.
You and i can get by in the balance, each
compromise on what to endure; with more of us
in one place, the balance is harder to locate.
The spaces that we create together can be filled
or not-filled on a completely collective basis.

The arteries of public space are clogged,
as they say in Connecticut. I can't get to
where i'm going without a vehicle. I'd like to
get there with quite a few other people. I would volunteer
to move less, pay a lot more for what is brought to me,
in return for being able to connect for less effort;
shorten the circuit.

A Short Letter to Henry David Thoreau April 27, 2006

P was so kind as to send me the collected poetry of W.H. Auden (less the few poems that he repudiated as being insincere, later in life) for a birthday present. I find it grippingly readable and sometimes very affecting, and bearing a lot of resemblance to the sort of thing i'd like to be able to do:

Sometimes we see astonishingly clearly,
The out-there-when we are already in,
Now that is not what we are here-for really.

All its to-do is bound to reoccur;
is nothing there-fore that we need to say;
How then to make its compromise refer

To what could not be otherwise instead,
And has its being as its own to-be,
The once-for-all that is not seen or said?

Under the influence of Auden, I wrote a reasonably long poetic letter to Thoreau. I could bang on at it for a while longer, but sometimes it's better just to finish these things and send them. Perhaps i'll one day reach some optimistic conclusions.

A Short Letter to Henry David Thoreau

A sensible measured decision
becomes an inviolable standard;
It's not clear from the documentation
how to get out when one's stranded.

Somhow you avoided becoming branded
a cynical tout of subversion;
today not even the naive are candid;
the canon of public speech has become recursion.

Never a big fan of the establishment,
you called for "Civil Disobedience"
and tax refusal; "Government
is at best but an expedient".

"What is it but a tradition,
though a recent one, endeavoring to
transmit itself unimpaired to posterity,
but each instant losing some of its integrity?"

I don't think that much of your poetry,
to be honest, but I hear this piece
helped inspire Mahatma Gandhi
to 'Satyagraha'; resist in peace,

work hard, seek equal representation;
"Law will never make men free;"
you dictated, "it is men
who have got to make the law free,"

"That government is best which governs not at all",
doesn't bankroll the new downtowns,
bunker its embassies, respond to heaven's call
or declare war on abstract nouns.

We investigate the space around
us, looking for the world, for all
that are unsatisfied with what we've found;
unable correctly to make or hear the call.

We are vulnerable in numbers,
it takes practise to stay of sound
mind, and our effort to share endangers
the profit to be found in rallying round.

Lewis Mumford saw a lot coming;
he thought that Marx had it all figured
out, saw the structure's future becoming,
the tend to collectivisation that he triggered.

He says that at each shift, a successor machine
helps a system that's not of its essence
to prosper; to automate mental routine,
to oppress people and to compel acquiescence.

I hear often, "the best lack all conviction,
while the worst are full of passionate
intensity"; our laws have become science fiction,
the sum of our customs extortionate.

Most people scurry and scrap, a few become fat
off the land; the rest suffer retaliatory eviction
from public space; cut out of a silly spat
that is quite indifferent to ex-urban dereliction,

Suburban isolation, post-industrial flatlining,
collapsing infrastructure, tit-for-tat
planning; oh, please forgive me for whining;
if we can fix this, if only we can see that.

One may still visit Walden Pond; your shack
is painfully reconstructed; a fence
keeps the wanderer on a predefined track,
within two hundred yards the suburbs start to condense.

"Let everyone make known what kind of government
would command their respect,
and that will be one step toward obtaining it."
Sir, with the greatest of my respect,

I am your servant.